C J Box - [Joe Pickett 01]

by C. J. Box

  The mourners consisted of a few fellow Alpine Church members and several of the outfitters' drinking buddies. Joe noticed that there were no other outfitters present, and when he thought about it, he wasn't that surprised. Keeley, Lensegrav, and Mendes had been drummed out of the Wyoming Outfitters Association for their radical views and tendency to commit obvious game violations.

  "They were salt-of-the-earch types," intoned the Reverend Cobb, a pudgy bachelor with a crew cut, who was known for his survivalist tendencies and small but fervent congregation.

  "They loved their trucks. They were throwbacks to a time when men lived off of the land and provided for their families by their outdoor skills and cunning. They were prototypes of the first white Americans. They were frontiersmen. They were outdoors men They were sportsmen of

  the highest caliber.

  And these boys knew their calibers, all right. They ate elk, not lamb. They ate venison, not pork. They ate wild duck, not chicken ..."

  The three mahogany-stained pine caskets were in the bed of the pickup, two side-by-side on the bottom and the third laid across them on top. Joe couldn't tell which casket contained whom.

  The weight of the caskets made the four-wheel-drive pickup list to the rear. The Reverend Cobb finally finished up his comments about what the outfitters ate.

  Ote Keeley's wife wasn't hard to pick out as she was the only pregnant woman there. She was thin and small and severe. Joe guessed that normally she wouldn't weigh more than 100 pounds. She had short-cropped blond hair and a pinched, hard face. Her mouth was set around an unlit cigarette. She tightly held the hand of a small girl who wanted to go look at the big hole instead of stand there respectfully with her mother. The girl--Joe would later learn that her name was April--was a five-year-old version of her mother but with a sweet, haunting face.

  Joe had introduced himself to her before the services began and had said he was sorry about what happened and that he had children, too, with another on the way.

  She had glared at him, her eyes narrowing into slits.

  "Aren't you the motherfucking prick who wanted to take my One's outfitting license away?" Her Southern accent made the last word sound like "uh-why."

  The little girl didn't flinch at her language, but Joe did. Joe said he was sorry, that this was probably a bad time, and scuttled back to the loose knot of mourners on the side of the pickup.

  The Reverend Cobb ended his eulogy by saying that there were certain sacred items that the families of the deceased wanted their loved ones to have with them in the afterlife. At his cue, Mrs. Keeley and Mrs. Lensegrav peeled back the blue tarp to reveal a large pile of objects.

  "Kyle Lensegrav would be lost in heaven ..." the reverend paused until Mrs. Lensegrav turned from the pile with her arms full, ".. . without his Denver Broncos jacket."

  Mrs. Lensegrav approached the pickup and draped the jacket over one of the coffins on the bed of the truck.

  "Where Kyle will be, the Denver Broncos will always be predominantly orange and blue, as they were in the seventies, eighties, and mid-nineties before they changed into their new hideous uniforms," thundered the reverend.

  Joe watched in fascination as Mrs. Lensegrav placed Kyle's favorite hunting cap, spotting scope, Leatherman tool bag, meat saw, Gore-Tex boots, and saddle scabbard on the coffin.

  Mrs. Keeley was next. "Not every man has the skill, determination, and acumen to bag a moose that will forever be listed as one of the top five Boone and Crockett-sanctioned trophies of North America!" the reverend said.

  "But Ote Keeley can make that claim and these massive beauties ..."

  Mrs. Keeley struggled under the weight of the huge moose antlers--rumor had it that Ote had actually shot the animal illegally within Yellowstone Park and sneaked it out--and Joe felt an urge to step forward to help her. He caught himself because he wasn't sure that she wouldn't attempt to skewer him. Somehow, she summoned the strength to place the antlers over the top coffin.

  ".. . will forever be mounted above Ote's celestial easy chair."

  There were more items for Ote, including a television, VCR, tanned hides, his happiness Is A warm gut pile T-shirt. Calvin Mendes was probably shortchanged in the ceremony overall because the only items the women put on his casket were his bound volumes of Hustler magazine and a case of Schmidt beer.

  Then the Reverend Cobb started up the pickup, eased it into drive, and leaped from the cab. Joe watched, as did the rest of the small crowd and the families, as the Ford inched forward and descended into the massive hole. It settled to the bottom with a solid thump, and no one wanted to look down to see if the caskets had jarred loose and broken open.

  Joe wondered, as he walked down the hill through the cemetery, how long the engine of the pickup would keep running and whether or not the cemetery staff would choose to shut it off before they filled up the grave with the earthmover.

  After the funeral, Joe went to work. It felt good to get out of town and away from the cemetery and go to work. He had packed his lunch that morning in the kitchen and filled a Thermos of coffee. Maxine had been waiting for him in the back of the pickup, her heavy tail thumping the toolbox like a metronome as he approached.

  He patrolled a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) tract to the west of Saddlestring, a huge, nearly treeless expanse that stretched from the river to the foothills of the Bighorns. It was deceptive, complicated country, and he had always liked it. From a distance, it appeared to be simply a massive slow rise in elevation from the valley floor to the mountains. In actuality, it was an undulating, cut-and-jive high-country break land of hills and draws and sagebrush. The landscape had folds in it like draped satin, places where shadows grew and pronghorn antelope and large buck mule deer thrived. A spider's web of old unnamed ranch roads coursed through it. Herds of deer and antelope had long learned how to take advantage of the land and the landscape, to live within its folds and draws and literally vanish when pursued. The antelope especially used the starkness of the break land for defense, and they often frustrated hunters by silhouetting themselves on the tops of hills and rises so that they were so much in the open there was no way to sneak up on them. The only trees in the area were the silent markers of hundred-year-old failed homesteads and

  cabins.

  It was opening day of antelope season, the only day there would be real hunting pressure, and it was Joe's job to check the licenses and wildlife stamps of hunters. Most of the hunters he had checked that morning were local and out for meat, although he did visit the trailer camp of an outfitter with four hungover Michigan auto executive clients who were wearing state-of the-art outdoor gear and were struggling through a Dutch-oven breakfast. Everyone was legal, with the correct licenses and stamps. They planned to go hunting later in the day when they sobered up.

  Joe idly wondered how Missy Vankeuren would react when Marybeth told her about Joe's job offer with Inter West Resources. Joe harbored a feeling of sweet vengeance and secretly wanted to be there when Marybeth gave her the news. It had been a special time in bed after he told Marybeth, and they had both been a little giddy. Marybeth had even broken her rule about not having sex hile her mother was under the same roof. Neither before or after had Marybeth said she wanted Joe to take the job, and Joe didn't say he wanted to take it. But the possibilities electrified them both. He wondered now if Missy would warm up to him, now that she knew that his salary could soon triple. In his experience, the women in his life were brutally, honestly practical. Maybe she would think that her daughter had done all right after all.

  As he left the camp, he heard the booming of rifles in the distance, and he drove toward the direction of the shots. There was the closed-in pow-WHOP sound rather than an open-ended explosion, and he knew that whoever had been shooting had hit something. They had; three local hunters had killed four antelope, which was one too many. The hunters explained to Joe that a bullet had passed through a buck and hit a doe unintentionally. Although Joe believed them, he gave them a speech about
shooting into the herd instead of selecting specific ta gets, and he ticketed the hunter who had killed two. Joe asked the hunters to field dress all four animals and to deliver the extra animal to the Round Home, a halfway house in Saddlestring that fed and housed transients and local alcohol and drug addicts. More than half of the Round Home population consisted of Indians from the reservation, and they preferred wild game meat.

  Throughout what remained of the morning, joe moved from camp to camp, stopping periodically to survey the landscape through his spotting scope. He liked working outside, in the break lands and in the mountains. He liked working outside and coming home and taking a shower before dinner. When he went to sleep most nights, he was physically tired. He knew there were not many jobs left like his anywhere in the world.

  Joe vividly remembered, as a 10-year-old, when it first came to him that being a game warden was the thing he wanted to do. He and his younger brother, Victor, had been sleeping outside in the backyard like they did most nights in the summer--in sleeping bags spread out on the trampoline. The stars were bright, and there was a light night breeze. Inside the house, his parents were yelling, fighting, and drinking, which was not unusual for a Friday night. Outside in his sleeping bag, young Joe Pickett read the latest issue of Fur, Fish, and Game magazine under a flashlight. He couldn't wait until the magazine was delivered every month, and he read it from cover to cover, even the advertisements in the back that sold animal traps and urine lures and do-it-yourself boats. Victor slept next to him in his sleeping bag, or at least Joe hoped he did. It was worse than usual with his parents that night. Inside, there had been a loud crash of glass, and he had heard his father scream "Goddamnit, woman!" and then his mother was crying and his father was consoling her. It went back and forth like this a lot, only usually it wasn't this loud.

  While he read and hoped his little brother slept, he heard the clattering rattle of ice in a shaker. His father was the last of the great martini drinkers, and this was the eighth time he had heard the shaker that night. The hollering and crashing was punctuated by periods of silence marked by ice rattling in a shaker, as if both parties had agreed upon time-out while they refueled. Joe knew the neighbors had probably heard the commotion as well. His flashlight was dimming but he hadn't finished reading yet, so he climbed down from the trampoline and tried to sneak through the house to his bedroom where he kept fresh batteries. He didn't want to be seen and he didn't want to see his parents, but he stepped on broken glass in his bare feet in the kitchen and trailed bloody footprints down the hall carpet, all the way to his room. On the way back outside, with two D batteries in his pajama pockets, he met his mother in the hallway. She was drunk and sentimental, the way she sometimes got, and she rained sloppy kisses on him (which he preferred, considering that if she were sober, he'd have gotten a violent rage and open-handed slaps because of what he had done to the carpet) and guided him into the bathroom.

  While she tried to pull slivers of glass from his feet (she said she was sorry for breaking the glasses on the floor earlier), he watched her and winced. Her makeup was smeared with tears, and a cigarette danced in her mouth as she talked. It reminded him that she thought of herself as an early sixties hipster.

  Because she was in such bad shape, she tended to drive the slivers deeper into his foot with the tweezers before regaining her balance enough to pull them out. He told her he was okay even though he wasn't, and he bandaged his own feet while she went out to rejoin his father and the pitcher of martinis

  With new batteries, the flashlight glowed white and strong and he lay on his stomach in his sleeping bag and wished he lived somewhere in the mountains, anywhere other than where he was. It was then that he read the advertisement in the back of the Fur, Fish, and Game magazine:

  HOW TO BECOME A GAME WARDEN

  Don't be chained to a desk, machine, or store counter. This easy home-study plan prepares you for an exciting career in conservation and ecology. Forestry and wildlife men hunt mountain lions, parachute from planes to help marooned animals, or save injured campers.

  Live the outdoor life you love. Sleep under pines. Catch your breakfast from icy streams. Live and look like a million!

  Under the text was a photo of a rugged and smiling proto game warden in a six-point hat holding up what appeared to be a bobcat. The game warden had indeed looked like a million.

  "I want to be a game warden," Joe had said aloud.

  "Me, too," Victor mumbled from deep in his sleeping bag, surprising Joe.

  "I want to go where you go."

  Joe reached in Victor's sleeping bag and found Victor's hand. They shook on it.

  The next day, Joe sent in his five-dollar fee. It had set him on this course.

  Victor never followed. Ten years after that night, while Joe was in his second year of college and Victor Pickett was a senior in high school, Victor broke up with his girlfriend, got drunk, and drove his car into the massive stone arch to Yellowstone National Park's north entrance. It was three in the morning, and he was going 110 miles per hour. No one ever knew why Victor had traveled for two hours to get to Yellowstone to do what he did. Joe could only speculate that it had something to do with a vicious emotional brew of alcohol and violence and the dream escape from both that a place like Yellowstone seemed to offer.

  ***

  Joe parked his truck on a hilltop that allowed him to see most of the break land, and he ate his lunch and drank coffee. He mounted his spotting scope on his window and left the radio on. The sun had burned off the early morning damp and the day was warm, dry, and cloudless. From this vantage point, Joe watched as a scenario developed far below him. A large herd of nearly 80 pronghorn antelope were spread out along the top of a plateau, warily eating grass and moving east to west. To the west, snaking along a four-wheel drive road, was a single white vehicle. The occupants of the vehicle were below the rim of the plateau where they could not be seen by the herd. From the movements of the antelope, Joe could tell they had not yet noticed the white vehicle.

  Chewing on a chicken salad sandwich, Joe focused on the white truck through his spotting scope. He recognized the vintage International Scout and the two older hunters who were driving it. Joe watched as the hunters stopped their vehicle and slowly walked up the side of theplateau. It took nearly a half an hour for the hunters to get to the top. Once there, they hunkered down behind a reef of tall sagebrush to take aim.

  Joe leaned away from the scope and watched the herd in its entirety. The herd, as a single unit, suddenly jerked to life and rocketed east along the plateau, each animal trailing a thin plume of dust. Then the delayed sound of two heavy shots, one a definite hit, washed up to him over the distance. He lowered his eye to the scope again and could see at least one downed antelope in the distance. One of the hunters was now walking toward it, and the other was going back to get the Scout.

  Joe washed down the last of his sandwich with coffee, then started the pickup and began to move over the hill. The herd was now a long way away, still running fast. He could no longer make out individual animals, just a rapidly retreating white cloud of dust. Pronghorn antelope were the second fastest mammals on earth--only an African cheetah could outrun them.

  By the time Joe drove his pickup over the rim of the plateau, the hunters had completely field-dressed the pronghorn and were in the process of attaching the back legs of the animal to a hook tree. He recognized the men as Hans and Jack, a retired ranch hand and retired school teacher from Saddlestring. Hans now ran a janitorial business part-time, cleaning downtown commercial buildings such as the drugstore and the video rental store. Hans and Jack had hunted together for more than 30 years, and they had developed antelope hunting into an annual craft. Their Scout was a customized traveling meat-processing plant. The older they got, the more refinements they made to compensate for their age and the more their appreciation for taking care of and eating game meat grew. First it was the old freezer they packed with ice that filled most of the bed of the small pickup
.

  They had learned to cool down the meat as soon as possible to prevent any spoilage from the warm days of September. Then they had added the winch and the crane to elevate the carcass from the ground in order to skin it and further cool it out. They showed Joe their newest invention, a five-gallon gravity based water tank with a hose that they could use to wash and scrub the carcass down once it was skinned. Joe watched as the hunters quartered the animal into sections and rotated each section on the winch to the icebox. Hans' movements were getting shakier with each year, Joe noticed, and Jack kept his distance when both of them were skinning with their knives.

  Then Hans asked Joe a strange thing. "You ever heard anything about endangered species being found up in the mountains, Mr. Pickett?"

  "What?" Joe asked, suddenly paying more attention to what the two old men were saying.

  "Hans," Jack said, eyeing his partner.

  "Just wondering." Hans said with a bemused, holier-than thou expression on his face. Hans and Jack exchanged glances, and went back to their work. Joe waited for more that finally came.

  "It'd probably be best for everyone if nothing was ever found," Hans said, looking up at Joe.

  "My guess is that we wouldn't be able to hunt out here anymore if someone thought there were endangered animals out here."

  "Damned right," Jack said.

  "Why'd you bring this up?" Joe asked. "Do you know something?"

  "No reason," Jack said.

  "Just bullshitting you," added Hans.

  "If you know something, you need to report it," Joe said looking from one to the other. He couldn't tell whether he was being fooled with or not.

  "And that's what we would do," Jack assured Joe. "Indeed we would."