Sabina Graves - Animal girl

Blackjack clung like a beachside fishing village to the ash gray desert that sprawled as far as the eye could see toward the craggy-hewn peaks of the Kingston Range, a motley collection of sun-parched ridges in the southern end of the California Sierras. To the north lay the natural furnace of Death Valley; less than a hundred miles beyond the mountains, Las Vegas nestled like a multicolored jewel in the parched wilderness of the Mojave. It was almost mid-day, and today, like every other day of the year, most activity had ground tediously to a standstill so that men and machines could be replenished. A dozen or so of the men huddled under the tin roof of the open-ended maintenance shed, talking quietly so as not to exert themselves in the scorching heat, waiting for the signal to shuffle back over the powdery wastes and return to their jobs on the oil derricks. Blackjack had a long, if not glorious, history as a mining town. First as a base camp for fruitless gold hunts in the killer mountains, later as a home for borax miners, and now, though mostly in ruin except for a few unpainted cabins that were still inhabitable, as the temporary hometown for nearly twenty "roughnecks" and whatever families they possessed. Blackjack had been invaded seven months ago by Benny Terrell and his ragged crew of fortune hunters, in search of an elusive reservoir of crude oil that might or might not exist, in hopes of a fortune that might or might not fall into their hands. And all of them, including Jamie Olsen, working for wages that seemed as elusive as this tricky oil field they were searching for.

Sarah Olsen, Jamie's twenty year old wife of three months, sat alone and sullen on the shaky front porch of their tiny two room shack, her rocking chair carefully positioned so that the runners did not cause any weight to be placed upon the dozen or so completely rotted planks in the porch's unpainted floor. She rocked slowly and gently in the midday heat so as not to use up too much precious strength there was still dinner to cook, if you could call boiled potatoes and pork belly a dinner, and dishes to wash and Jamie's one decent work-shirt to be hand scrubbed and hung on the line stretched across the porch to dry in less than a half hour in the desert's hot waterless breeze. Sometimes she felt that the desert's furnace-hot wind was drying her out much the same way, draining her whole young body of its very youthfulness just as it sucked the moisture from a dripping-wet shirt in twenty minutes or so.

Scanning the black on white type of the newspaper old Mr. Parker brought her from his supply run into the city, Sarah brushed her blonde hair from her eyes and wiped her forehead instinctively. "Instinctively" because out here in the desert there was really no need for that; perspiration evaporated as fast as it beaded up on your skin in this zero humidity heat. All morning long she had carefully gone down the long, finely-printed columns, x-ing them off one by one, narrowing her hopes for any escape from this perpetual furnace she was trapped in as surely as a sinner is trapped in purgatory. One by one, each tiny inked-in "X" snuffing a little more of the flicker of hope that ached in her breast, Sarah Marie Olsen had eliminated her methods of escape and her chances for another life outside this hell hole that only a money-maddened wildcatter with a cooked brain could call a town.

And now there was just one chance left. There could be no turning back if she managed to make it this once, Jamie was no man to be trifled with! She knew only too well that he would beat her until she wouldn't be able to run away again if he caught her or if she had to turn back. Mr. Parker was taking his life in his hands in agreeing to drive her into town, but maybe he figured at his age there wasn't really much to live for anyway. Sarah looked, eyes squinting in the blazing California desert sun, to see if the office shack was empty. It was! In that little clapboard hut was the camp's only telephone, her one link with the outside world that magic place with flowers and cool showers and running water and people who could laugh and not talk only of elusive oil strikes that would never come and towns and cars and sounds and smells. Out there was everything that she had left behind when she somehow fell in love with Jamie Olsen, everything she had thrown away when she stupidly agreed to come with him on this fool's mission on the backside of nowhere.

She glanced down the rutted dirt street that connected all the crumbling shacks, the ones in use and the ones too far gone for even the likes of these people to live in. The men had piled onto the flatbed and gone back to the drilling site; and the women, the few that were still here, were all resting or napping inside out of the mind-numbing heat. This was it, now or never! Sarah got up and moved slowly toward the open door of the office shack, angling toward the tin-roofed food storage building first in case someone spotted her.

She rechecked the number she had scribbled on the inside of an empty cigarette package and waited for the operator to answer somewhere south toward the highway and the cities of the real world. This was the moment she had dreamed of, walked the floor over, for weeks on end. If the voice on the end of that line held out the slightest hope for her, she would be out of this hell on earth within twenty four hours and she would never look back!

It wasn't so long ago really, but all that seemed to have been in another world to Sarah now, another life somewhere that she had lived through and was now ended, no more a part of her life now than night was a part of day, or one day a part of the one before. That was over, gone, past, and nothing counted any longer save the present. And each day that she lived now was one more to make up for the miserable ones that came before.

Sarah was truly happy now, she was finally doing something wild and exciting, just like all her girlish daydreams when she was in high school back in Utah, dreaming of a life somewhere filled with reckless deeds and adventure, instead of endless piles of dirty dishes and a smelly man's socks draped over the shower curtain. Ever since her first trip to the zoo as a kid, she had always had a special spot in her heart for animals, all kinds of animals, so when she spotted that ad in the classified section that blistering hot afternoon a month ago, it was only natural that she give it a try at least. Mr. Hawkins her boss now, said that it was her girlish enthusiasm and sincerity that landed it for her, but whatever it was, she was grateful. It had called for, simply, an "attractive young girl who loves animals for assistant's job with traveling zoo and animal show. See the American and Canadian west and get paid for it!" And now the job was hers, special assistant to Mr. Henry Hawkins at a hundred and fifty a week, all expenses paid. It was like a dream come true; Sarah was fearful of waking up and finding herself back in Blackjack with all those coarse, uninteresting people, listening to them talk of bits and derricks and barrels of oil until she died of old age, penniless and still stuck in that God-forsaken hole in the Mojave Desert.

But it was indeed all real, not something she had fantasized out of sheer desperation. She had gone to see Mr. Hawkins, riding into town with Mr. Parker when he went to get the mail and supplies, and she never went back, not even to get her clothes. Mr. Hawkins hired her on the spot, and she swore old Mr. Parker to secrecy, as no one had seen them leave together. Her new boss seemed quite concerned about her marriage difficulties, and he even offered her an advance on her first week's salary so that she could buy a few new clothes and not have to spend another second with that coarse slug of a husband back in Blackjack.