by Leif Enger
Inside, Roxanna was stirring up bread, her latest hothouse blooms in a tin vase on the table, soup asteam in a pan just as though we were a family not perched at the edge of great loss. Even Swede seemed to have reached some sort of harbor. She sat in her room above the blizzard, fomenting joy for Sunny and his wife now that they’d obliterated the entrance to their secret valley, as well as about half that rotten posse.
The wind blew through a second night, stratifying snowbanks and encumbering roads. Then it wore out. The house fell quiet. After breakfast the others went out to shovel—I was no good for it, but Dad said someone had to stay by the phone. I did so all morning but Andreeson did not call. The afternoon idled along. I read Last of the Mohicans twice through—Classics Illustrated—then got out Roxanna’s scrapbook and revisited Jonas Work’s obit. None of this warded off agitation. None of it kept bad pictures away: pictures of Davy drawn and freezing, of snow sifting through the unchinked shack. Concentrate as I might on Hawkeye and Uncas, Jape Waltzer’s tale of the cannibal pirate kept telling itself to my brain. Starring Jape, of course—it was a part written exactly for him, with his fetching confidence and lunatic glint. Like the pirate, you could imagine Jape Waltzer winning even when he lost.
This time the county plows reached us by late afternoon. Hearing nothing from Andreeson Dad called his motel in Rathton. The owner, also desk clerk, took a message. His annoyance was audible in Roxanna’s kitchen. He told Dad the federal man paid his bill readily enough but was a great deal of trouble. Sometimes he left for days, returning to his room in the small hours. It disturbed the neighbors. And always the phone calls—federal men received many phone calls and there was no telling when. The owner told Dad he was a businessman, not a secretary. From the office he had to pull on his coat and boots and go down five doors to Mr. Andreeson’s room; the messages were piling up; it was too cold for this.
“When did he leave?” Dad asked.
Suspending complaint the owner thought this over. Early the previous day he’d taken a call from one Mr. Robinson. He was in Amidon, at the cafe. Andreeson was glad for the message—had, in fact, the owner grouchily acknowledged, tipped him a two-dollar bill for its delivery. Not long afterward, the motel lot already turning humpy with drifts, the owner had watched Andreeson’s tan Mercury creeping away through the wind.
Dad hung up the phone. He stood to the window and looked west. The snow lay hard and clean-shaven and the broken hills rose up out of it—I don’t guess you could find more inhospitable geography. But the wind had stopped and the cold sun put such an edge on hills and barn they might’ve been razored from a magazine.
“Rube,” he said, “that Andreeson’s a smart fellow, but he doesn’t know one thing about winter in North Dakota.”
A thought dropped from nowhere, like a big snake.
Dad plucked his coat off the hook, heading to the trailer. I plucked mine to follow, then nearly sat down. My legs trembled, hips and kneecaps loose as dominoes.
“Something the matter?” Dad inquired.
“Yes sir.” I didn’t want to say it—the thought. Yet it coiled around me, irresistible. It squeezed, and I yielded. “Mr. Andreeson’s in bad trouble.”
He looked at me, and I at his shoes.
“What is it, Reuben?”
But the snake had me so hard I could barely speak. I sagged to the floor to shiver. What I saw was Waltzer, telling of his first sight of Davy in the Amidon cafe. I saw Andreeson, encouraged—only days ago—having shown Davy’s picture to the right man at last. Then Waltzer again, from my final visit: comfortable, talking easily, refusing all concern at my insistence that Andreeson was drawing near.
“Reuben,” Dad said.
It was too much to manage all at once, so I only replied, “His name isn’t Robinson, it’s Jape Waltzer—and he’s with Davy—and he’s going to kill Mr. Andreeson.”
The Ledger of Our Decisions
SO I TURNED AT LAST. SO I BETRAYED MY BROTHER. BEFORE DAYLIGHT NEXT morning we assembled horseback at Lonnie Ford’s ranch. I say we. The party included Mr. Ford; the young county sheriff Mike Lanz; a federal investigator, Harper Juval, who’d driven in from Bismarck; and three ad hoc local deputies. The deputies were skittish, pleased at this chance to saddle up with scabbarded Winchesters and go hunting fugitives in the snow. Mr. Juval looked them over without expression. Two hours earlier a rancher had found Andreeson’s Mercury parked empty on a county road—actually blocking the road, snow to its fenders. As the hilltops pinked it was briefly argued whether I had any business going.
“What are you, boy? About nine?” This was Mr. Juval.
“Eleven, sir.”
“He’s the only one of us who’s made the trip, Harper,” said Lonnie Ford. “At least he can tell us if we’re going right.”
Of course I’d never made the trip in daylight, so my usefulness was suspect in any case. Juval examined me with distaste. “Mr. Land,” he said to Dad, “it’s your call. You comfortable with your boy going?”
Dad wanted to go himself, but Juval had nixed that the night before.
“He’s up to it,” Dad said. “I’m taking you at your word, now”; for Juval had promised that Davy would be taken quietly and without violence.
Juval nodded. Dad looked at me. I saw he was counting on me to see them quickly to the cabin. He wanted it over with—Davy safe, Andreeson alive. Perhaps he also believed that with Davy’s little brother close by, the lawmen would be less apt to shoot.
“Let’s go then,” Juval said, while Lonnie Ford boosted me onto a shaggy bay mare. I remember Dad, standing in the awakening barnyard, clapping softly to keep the blood in his fingers.
We rode single file into the hills, heading for what Mr. Ford supposed from my description to be an old line cabin that had belonged to his ranch long before. It lay an indeterminate distance west in a valley fertile enough to offer some small pasture yet remote enough that no cattle had grazed there in a generation. Also the pasture had cracked open to lignite in the late thirties and caught fire, which had a bewildering effect on livestock; for all Mr. Ford knew, it was burning to this day.
So I felt we were heading the right direction, though you may imagine what little comfort it gave me.
Probably it won’t surprise you that Swede took all this badly. That I’d kept Davy a secret from her she judged the deepest kind of lie; that I’d revealed him didn’t expunge the sin but compounded it. I was both liar and traitor. I was an apostate. Before gaining forgiveness I was to endure any number of historical comparisons, and not just with standard traitors like Judas and Brutus and Benedict Arnold. These were a fine start but hardly enough for Swede, who remembered off the top of her head that it was little brother Ramón who’d betrayed the great bandido Joaquín Murieta, whose bottled head still exists in a certain tavern in Texas; you could go in this very day and pay a dollar to lift a dark curtain and see it. She knew of others, too. Any hopes I had of her rage being softened by my obvious misery proved groundless. She heard me out, then went upstairs to fling a tantrum unequaled in her history. I heard papers flying, weeping mixed with various wordless growls, and the sound of a pillow being kicked with tremendous gusto. That last, I knew, was me.
It was a longer ride than I remembered. We rode up into timbered breaks that felt familiar and along ridges of scrub pine and juniper where it seemed I’d never been. Wind had so driven the snow that in places a laden horse could walk atop it leaving only shallow tracks; but mostly they sank to their knees, shod hooves tossing up traces of sand or scoria or fine-needled ferns. There was time to roll all manner of films in my head. Bad endings prevailed. In order of riding I came second, after Mr. Ford and before Mr. Juval, the three deputies strung out behind.
After a time we descended a long even slope where there was room for Mr. Juval to come abreast of me. He was on a bright palomino Mr. Ford had been loath to saddle; I believe, in fact, that Juval paid extra for the palomino, and indeed he looked good on the animal as they came
alongside.
“We going the right way then?” he asked. I feared his attention. Miserably I admitted to having no idea.
He rode at my side awhile without comment. He was older than Dad, wore a shortbrim cowboy hat, and had a clipped white beard and a web of wrinkles under his eyes. He sat straightbacked on the palomino, floating easily above the horse as it slugged through the snow.
“I consider Martin Andreeson a friend,” he said, after a time.
I nodded.
“You don’t, I guess.”
“No, sir.”
We were riding through a fairly open valley I might have recognized. But the wind had erased any tracks; we could’ve been the first people through in years.
“Well,” he said, “I suppose you feel like a Hall of Fame turncoat just now. Taking us to your brother.”
“Yes sir, I do.” Why did Mr. Juval want to talk about it? He knew how I felt. Arriving late, he’d stayed up much of the night talking to Dad—they’d called me down in the wee hours so Juval could ask me particulars. What weapons I’d seen in the cabin. What stocks of ammunition and food. At his request I drew a layout of the place showing windows, door, stove and chimney. He wondered whether I’d got a peek at Sara’s quarters. He said the more I could tell him, the better things would be for Davy; he said this four or five times.
“You wish you’d kept quiet?” he asked.
“Davy’s not the problem for your friend Andreeson,” I told him. “It’s Jape Waltzer.”
“So you mentioned.”
Last night Mr. Juval had seemed, if not entirely in our corner, at least leaning toward it. When I’d told him about Waltzer—his crazy mind, his ambivalence about Andreeson’s proximity, even Waltzer’s own characterization of himself as a wolf to Davy’s squirrel—Mr. Juval had listened with evident interest. He’d made notes on a yellow pad as though each detail confirmed this Waltzer as a long-sought badman it would be an honor to catch. He’d said yes, yes.
Now he seemed much less accommodating.
Anxious for reassurance I took an ingratiating tone. “Mr. Juval, what’s Jape Waltzer wanted for? What did he do?”
The slope had leveled off and his palomino was edging restlessly ahead. Juval reined back long enough to give me a look I’ve never forgotten—not a mean look, or disrespectful, the look perhaps of years spent in disappointment. He said, “Son, you got to remember something. Your brother killed two boys last year, then broke jail. This Robinson, Waltzer, whatever his name is—I don’t know him from Adam.” He let the reins fall against the horse’s neck and trotted up to talk to Lonnie Ford.
We were getting close, riding now through country I knew for certain, yet we’d slowed. Lonnie Ford, leading, stopped to squint from time to time. The wind was getting teeth, lashing the horses’ tails along their flanks and tilting Mr. Juval’s cowboy hat over his eyes. Under this faltering progress I had time to think it all over. To doubt what had appeared conclusive. The nearer we came to the cabin the more likely it seemed that the enigmatic Robinson really wasn’t Jape Waltzer; that he was simply what Mr. Andreeson had supposed, a fellow who’d given Davy a ride, then acquired cold feet about talking to a federal man. So what that Andreeson hadn’t found him in the phone book—lots of people didn’t have telephones. So what that Waltzer was unconcerned when I arrived all aflap about the putrid fed. It was senseless to give meaning to his reactions; the man talked about sea monsters, he steered by stars of his own invention. The idea emerged—seeming true the moment it wiggled free—that I’d betrayed my brother needlessly. That Andreeson, while he’d gone out foolishly in a dangerous storm, was in no danger from any Robinson.
I sat the bay mare, recognition of my blunder attached to my heart like a leech.
Up ahead Lonnie Ford, who’d been consulting with Mr. Juval in some serious matter, turned his horse and loped back to me through the snow. Unlike the self-contained Mr. Ford of my constructions, he was a nervous man with clear misery in his face. He rode up so our two horses met shoulder to shoulder; they rubbed necks, but Lonnie didn’t say anything to me. Or even look at me; he kept gazing off to his left.
“Is something the matter, Mr. Ford?”
He nodded. I saw he was a man for whom words were a desperate problem. I felt bad for him, though it did give me a lift somehow.
“I lease the ranch,” he said, after another hard moment. “I never saw this cabin before. I told Mr. Juval that.”
It took me a second to see where this placed us.
“Does any of this look right to you?” asked Lonnie Ford. He looked at me sideways—anguished is not too strong a word—then nodded at the hills around us. “Any of it?”
My first thought was that God in my disconsolate hour had slid open a hatch. Lonnie Ford didn’t know where we were! The fellow guiding us to Davy was asking me for directions! Suppressing dizzy yelps I took stock. We were on the west gradient of a gently beveled hill, ringed above with twisted jackpine and scrub juniper and larger trees like cedars. Ahead to the left rose exhilarating cutrock cliffs of sandstone and scoria and some schoolbrick-colored clay.
I knew where we were, all right.
Knew, moreover, if we bore to the left—behind the cliffs—we’d be steering away from Davy.
Lonnie Ford said quietly, “I told Mr. Juval.”
Behind us the deputies—blown clean of jocularity—had begun to mutter. Up front Juval sat the palomino, looking like a man set on winning by any means.
Someday, you know, we’re going to be shown the great ledger of our recorded decisions—a dread concept you nonetheless know in your deepest soul is true.
“We have to bear left,” I told Lonnie Ford.
It was a slick climb in places, a steep one in others, and no one really wished to make it. According to my misdirection Lonnie Ford trotted forward and I saw him pointing and nodding with something like assurance. Juval reached in a saddlebag and withdrew a large pair of binoculars and trained them on the slope of rock and snowswept talus that would take us up behind the cliffs. I remember he peered through those glasses for a long time, then put them down and turned and looked at me, a trenchant gaze I couldn’t return. He swung about and up we went.
We climbed strung out, so a skidding horse wouldn’t panic the others. Perhaps it didn’t seem as bad an ascent to me as to the rest—no natural rider, I exercised no authority over the mare, whose footing was like a guarantee. At the bottom lay a repose of burst sandstone, as though a vast slab or reef had breached from the height of land and slid rupturing down. The route then narrowed to a generous U, higher on right than left and occupied by a tribe of twisted dwarf evergreens. Only gradually did the incline become less manageable, narrowing first to a V, so it was like walking in the bow of a very small boat, then lifting before us until we leaned close over the horses’ necks and felt gravity looking for a hold. Briefly I feared for my deception—that Mr. Juval would throw off the climb as impossible and turn us back on course. Perhaps he would’ve, had the way been wide enough for a horse to turn.
Yet we gained the top. For a steep instant below the rim the mare seemed to balance upright—my heels at her haunches, arms round her neck, face in her mane—then she lurched and broke forward, coming out on level earth. There was the big cold sky moving over us. Juval and Lonnie Ford had dismounted to wait, their animals blowing and shaking their heads.
I confess to a certain exultation. My artifice had worked. The cabin lay somewhere to the right, in a valley; our way now lay clearly to the left. We were on a mesa of sorts where wind had removed all snow except a tan layer from which dead grasses poked. I slipped off the mare and stood beside her like the other men while the deputies struggled over the crest one by one. There on the mesa we enjoyed a prevalent good humor, even if my reasons were unique. Sheriff Lanz poured coffee in a thermos lid and passed it around. The deputy who’d followed me up, name of Fitger, came over and told me he was sorry to be hunting my brother. Lonnie Ford—and this ached—shook my hand
. His eyes were so grateful they appeared damp, though this was probably an effect of the wind. Only Juval remained detached. While the rest of us stretched with relief, he swung back on the palomino and trotted to a small rise atop the cliffs. Profiled against sky he looked like Robert E. Lee. He had his binoculars out.
“Ford,” he called.
The rancher was sipping coffee. He sighed, handed it off and heaved aboard. He came alongside Juval, who passed him the glasses. Adjusting them to his eyes he looked over the valley. The wind snaked across the mesa. I’d been warm from the climb, but no more. The grasses hissed like wire.
Ford dismounted. Sat down cross-legged. Elbows on knees he leaned into the binoculars.
Next thing the two of them were trotting back to us, Juval looking official and stormy and Ford unreadable.
Juval coughed and spat. “It’s back down then, gentlemen,” said he, and with barely a pause rode to the rim we’d all been so pleased to master and dropped over. Nobody spoke. We were listening to the palomino’s hooves sliding on rock and dirt. I felt people looking at me, but perhaps no one was. I know Lonnie Ford wasn’t; for later he didn’t look at me even when I wished he would, or ever again so far as I know. In a few words he told the men we’d come the wrong way. Mr. Juval had discerned the cabin lying down the valley. You might expect some outburst from men so informed, but there was none. I felt instead a hush. To say I felt like a caught sneak doesn’t touch it. I was a boy caught deceiving honest men.
