Hearing Footsteps



Lament was dark. In Lament, the sun was gone. The little town's roads were abandoned for indoor fireplaces and the Sunday night television of aliens, three-fingered cartoon characters and courtroom melodramas.

Thirty-years ago, it would have been an hour of Ed Sullivan's talking hand puppets and plate-spinning acrobats; followed by the Sunday Night Movie, the weekly movie that had always been sponsored by the copper mine conglomerate. The program's opening scenes had been a synchronized aria of blasting symphonic music, dust, flying rock, and an aerial view of the capacious concentric rings that compromised the mine's huge open pit. Each Sunday night, and each Sunday Night Movie, had celebrated the huge crater's rein-free reign that is still above Utah's Lament.

The little red car crunched over the snow on the street where the Duredts had lived and watched the Sunday Night Movie. The same streetlights still hung from the same old cracked telephone poles at each block, on each corner, along the snow-covered, oil-covered, gravel roads. The irrigation ditches sat still, frozen and patient, waiting for the spring of thawing snow. The sky was a flat, smoked-glass plate, shattered at the edges by the snow-white peaks of the mountains that rimmed the valley. The snow held all sound close to the ground and a crisp mist hung in the branches of the leafless trees. At the old dark Duredt house, a sliver of smoke slipped into the gray sky from the red brick chimney that dissected the shingled triangle at the gable.

The red car stopped in front of the dreary Duredt home. One of the four doors opened, a tall figure stepped out onto the ice. It picked its way to the mahogany door with a tongue for a latch. The figure raised an arm, and the red car slowly pulled around to the back of the house, where Lamentations had always kept the doors locked. A second figure that was larger, but shorter, walked around the house with a big beast at its heel. Six heavy feet crunched through the cap of frozen snow with each step taken. The old mahogany door's tongue clicked and the two big forms filled the door and blocked the flickering light from escaping into the night. The beast waited, then heeled.