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Mostly because Pierce’s father, Barnable (“Barney”) Oxenbay was a money guy who enjoyed dispatching couriers and attorneys, he preferred to get things done with abrupt efficiency. And so it was that Pierce, his best slacks still damp from the thunderstorm that drenched the Balboa High School graduation ceremony, was on his way to Aeropuerto Internacional de Tocumen first thing the next morning.
The sun was just coming up and the deejay on the radio was alternating between Lucho Azcarraga and Santana’s Abraxas as the Mercedes searched for the airport through pink-gray strips of ground fog. There was only enough light to make out the ghostly silhouettes of hundreds of day laborers who were waiting alongside the highway for rides into Panama City. So surreal, Pierce thought, like an unwanted tour of the netherworld. He listened to Samba Pa Ti and felt as though his spirit was being swallowed by his shoes.
He flew Braniff to Miami and then Continental to Denver, arriving in mid afternoon. The dry air in Denver felt like nothing after the woolen humidity of the tropics. By the time he reached Golden his nose was already bleeding and the mile high altitude made him light-headed.
He was there to visit the Colorado School of Mines. Home of the fightin’ “Orediggers.” They didn’t have a tennis team but he was told that shouldn’t deter him. This was the best place on earth to come if you wanted to learn just how to dig up money, or make it squirt out of the ground.
“Helluva’ deal,” his dad assured him.
There was an Arby’s around the corner from the motel. A busboy, noticing the string of bloody napkins, asked if he needed a doctor.
It amazed Pierce that he was so swiftly already a world away from the tempest on the field in Balboa, where, a mere 30 hours ago, he had gotten one last look at Meg as she clasped a soaked mortarboard to her head to keep it from blowing away. He’d caught her eyes and then held his palm up as if to ask, ‘what can you do?’ She responded with a smile, and the same gesture. He smiled back, though his heart was sinking.
On his first morning in Golden he awoke up to something he’d never seen before. A blanket of snow. It was the third of June. In his journal that day he wrote that maybe life was meant to be a painful miracle.
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