Celine

by Peter Heller

  TWENTY-THREE

  There were gaps in Celine’s life that Pete had puzzled over and never figured out how to fill. She had skill sets that were not at all ordinary, reactions to crises that were not at all normal, and it was clear that at some point she had undertaken extensive training. He had asked a time or two and had been brushed off. He wondered if it were really any of his business and decided it might be. Then again, maybe not. As a genealogist and a family historian, his yen for research and investigative rigor competed with his congenital modesty and respect for people’s privacy. An inner life, he had concluded long ago, was inner because someone had decided they wanted to keep it inside. Respecting someone meant respecting that boundary. Biography, when it was done well, carried with it a sense of that tact. History, on the other hand, was the story of everything that had been exposed. And a wife…well. A wife’s mystery must at all costs be preserved. Probably.

  He was thinking this as Celine navigated the truck to Cooke City. It was the first time they had ever been shot at, and he was wondering where she had gotten the training to draw her gun that fast, and even more impressively, to stay so calm in the face of surprise gunfire. No, even more than that: To come alive. To quicken and harden. He had seen how fast she reacted, rising instead of shrinking, scanning and searching, reckoning angles and cover. He also noticed that her breathing, if anything, got more relaxed, fuller. He could only conclude that this kind of crisis made her happy. Kind of a marvel. Well.

  Hank had told him once about the second time he had seen her shoot. Celine was in Sun Valley helping Mimi die, and Hank had come up from Denver to say goodbye to his aunt. They were driving through Hailey, it was a breezy spring afternoon, and Celine had noticed a cement-block gun shop by the river and asked Hank to pull over. The man behind the counter was wearing a cowboy hat and coveralls, like a rancher who’d been working on his tractor, except that he wasn’t working on a motor, he was cleaning a Walther. He had the pieces scattered on a cloth. His expression became more and more intrigued as he watched the petite, genteel city slicker browse the guns and home in on a very large sidearm under the counter.

  “May I see that one?” Celine had said, pointing down, her gold bracelet tapping the glass.

  “This? This 1911? It’s a Colt ma’am, .45 caliber. A gift?”

  Celine looked up, smiled at him quizzically. “For me, of course.”

  He grinned. “It’s a little big. I recommend—you might start off with a .22.”

  Hank had acted out the voices, it was hilarious, and Pete had managed to emit an audible laugh. “Well, I’d just like to see this one,” Celine said. “I’ve never held it.” Which was possibly true.

  The man shrugged, reached in with a hand like a paw, and with the barrel facing toward the floor released the magazine and set it on the counter and tugged back the slide enough to check the chamber, then handed it to her on two flat palms the way gun dealers do, like a sacrament. He stepped back and watched her with a certain indulgence; he was now ready to be entertained, and he had the courtesy to not cross his arms. Celine picked up the black semiauto, raised an eyebrow at the man, plucked the magazine from the counter, slid it into the base of the grip, and banged it home with the heel of her palm. Then she wrapped the frame with both hands, left over right, slight pressure of the left against the slightly bent right arm, and sighted at the door. Hank saw the man’s mouth work to the side like he was probing a sore tooth with his tongue. He could read his thoughts as if they were in a cartoon bubble over his hat: Hunh, pretty good stance. Must watch a lot of cop shows on TV.

  Celine is really little according to the tape measure. The gun looked huge as she held it. She brought it down. “Heavy,” she said.

  “Helps with the recoil,” he said. She nodded. He said, “Plus I can see the grip’s much too big. We could modify it for you.”

  “Could you?”

  He really did look perplexed. And curious. Who the heck was this woman? She could barely lift the damn thing. He touched the frayed sleeve of his coverall and glanced at his watch. “Heck,” he said, “already five. I was closing in half an hour anyway. Let’s go shoot this thing. Want to?”

  That’s how they ended up in Dick Roop Jr.’s Bronco, bouncing up a Forest Service road to an arroyo above Hailey. It was a narrow gully shaded by ponderosas. An old log lay against a dirt bank. A fire pit and scattered empties, a favorite party spot. Dick picked up four cans and three bottles and lined them up on the log in no particular order. He walked back about twenty-five feet and held the gun down and said, “Mrs. Watkins? This is how you rack it. Now you hold it down and away like so. Don’t want to shoot your pretty toes off.” Celine nodded, very attentive and polite. He grinned and pulled the slide. “Here’s the safety, you work it with your thumb like so. It’s always on until you’re ready to fire. You think you can remember that?”

  “I’ll certainly try, Mr. Roop.”

  “Now it’s going to kick like a mule so make sure your right arm is locked like I saw you do before.” He handed her the gun and stepped back. “Try to hit that first can on the left.”

  Celine took half a step back with her right foot and half turned and lifted the pistol and wrapped it in her hands and smiled at Mr. Roop. Then she lowered the gun. She pursed her lips and breathed. Hank’s gut tightened. He knew she should be using oxygen at this altitude. Well, she was very stubborn.

  “Don’t be scared,” Dick said.

  She glanced at him, and only Hank would have seen in the look the slightest shade of annoyance. “I’ll try,” she said.

  Then she lifted her hands swiftly and fired, concatenate echoes, a blizzard of shots, two then three, then one, then one, the slightest of beats between as if she were firing to music, and cans flew into air and bottles broke and sprayed glass and the log was emptied of targets and the echoes rolled down the gully. The last shot sent a can against the cliff into the air. She turned to smile at Dick Roop the Younger, and his expression was priceless. One could not exaggerate or caricature the disbelief. The shock. The perfect awe. He took off his cowboy hat and ran his hand through his thinning hair, and Hank thought his hand shook a little. He spat.

  Celine let her lungs get what fill they could of the cool mountain air and stepped over to the man and handed him the gun, and said, “I like it. Stopping power is what we’re after.” Big smile. “Yes, please modify the grips, if you would. I’d like to pick it up next week if that’s possible. The background check shouldn’t take more than a day I wouldn’t think.”

  It took him a moment to find his voice. They bounced back down the dirt track in his Bronco and on the way he stopped calling her Mrs. Watkins and was now calling her Celine.

  The story did not surprise Pete, of course, who knew that she went regularly to the range on DeKalb Avenue and every few years up to the Lethal Force Institute in New Hampshire for refresher courses. But responding under live fire is another kettle of fish. Hmph. He noticed as she drove that she checked the side mirrors often.

  Cooke City was hopping, there were pickups and rusting SUVs parked up and down Main. They decided to visit the bar first and make their calls later. They parked at the motel and walked slowly across. Blues Night at the Beartooth was their most popular event. The Choke Setters were all the rage in the valley, all the way to Livingston. Celine realized that they were barhopping today, and what a different vibe this one had than the last joint. The place wasn’t bursting at the seams, but there were at least twenty-three patrons ranged along the bar and scattered among the tables. Can a blues band be called a trio? Celine didn’t know, but there were three of them: a very fat, baby-faced man on bass in loose jeans and a Sara Lee Frozen Dinner T-shirt; a scrawny teenage kid with hair down over his shoulders and a sparse blond beard on lead guitar; and a woman who might have been his mom on drums—young middle age in a business-casual polyester black skirt and hose and an ivory-colored faux-silk blouse. With plastic pearl buttons. Hair to the neck and curled. All the details
Celine had trained herself to see. It was maybe the oddest combo she had ever witnessed.

  And they rocked. Wow. It took Pa and Celine a moment to surface through the wave of sound and rich smells. Rich was one way of putting it. They stood in the door blinking and got their bearings, and the waitress, if that’s what she was, waved them to an empty table. She wore a very short skirt and huge hoop earrings and work boots and a crop top and she must have been at least sixty. Well, thought Celine, she is very skinny.

  Celine and Pete sat at the table in the corner underneath an open window where the cigarette smoke wasn’t too thick. The kid was in the middle of a lead, who knew how long. The fat man bit his lower lip and stared at the ground and seemed to let the bass in his hands live on its own. Live and squirm and thump and thrum, like some giant genius frog that had just jumped into his arms. The mom on drums—just off work, it seemed, from maybe the insurance adjuster’s office—kept an arterial backbeat, and the kid…well. The kid had come untethered. His own music was breaking the grip of his sneakers on the stage. The notes poured from the guitar and battered at his feet and shins and ankles in a pitiless current and shoved him backward. He would fall over but for the tide of unresolved and flattened fifths keeping him afloat. Extraordinary. Pete wondered if three people had ever, on this sad planet, spilled forth the blues with such conviction. In Montana, go figure.

  They almost forgot what they had come for. They both scanned the crowded room for a handsome young man in a trimmed black beard. Celine counted four, but none were Mr. Tanner. When the waitress, who was muscled and corded like jerky, finally came to take their order, they were back on task. They asked for club soda with lime and Celine called out, “Are you Sitka?” The woman had been mid-wheel, balancing a tray of empties, and she caught her own momentum and wheeled back and didn’t tip a single longneck. Pretty good. Her hazel eyes flashed with alarm and swept them both, then came back for a closer study—exactly like the spotlight at a prison camp. Apparently she was not placated by what she’d seen because she tensed for a jump and said, “Who’s asking?”

  Celine motioned the woman to bend down and she put her mouth right against the ear and its big hoop and said, “We’re not here for you. Not anything about you. Can you take a ten-minute break?” It would be just like Celine to ask in the middle of Blues Night, but she did not at all wish to wait until the next morning. She was feeling the heat of the chase and if she’d learned anything in investigative work it was that you struck while you had momentum. Because the universe, she came to believe, was composed of currents, just as a river or an ocean. When you wanted to go somewhere, and the cosmos wanted to pull you forward, you jumped. Especially if someone was chasing you.

  And of course for Sitka, the sight of this elegant older woman in her fabulous felt jacket and gold scallop earrings inspired too much curiosity to say no. “Just a sec,” Sitka said. The band was in the middle of “Stormy Monday”: “Lord, and Wednesday’s worse, and Thursday’s all so bad…” The harried co-owner of the Beartooth slammed the tray on the bar, whipped off her stained apron. She tapped a younger woman in blond dreadlocks, who was drinking beer at a table with four rough men, and handed it to her. Easy as that. The girl shook her head and stood, dropping her unfinished cigarette into a mostly finished beer bottle and tied the apron on. Then Sitka nodded at the two and strode to the front door, grabbing a parka off a hook as she went through.

  The night had cleared. There were stars and it was cold and the cold felt bracing and good after the closeness and smoke of the bar. Nobody else was out on the porch for the moment. Sitka sat her butt against the far railing and crossed her arms in the coat and steeled herself. Her cheeks were drawn and her eyes were large and heavily mascaraed. “Okay,” she said. “What can I do you?” Again her eyes traveled up and down the genteel older woman.

  “We have some questions about Paul Lamont.”

  At the words the face transformed. For an instant. It was as if the shadow of a large beast had moved fast through the forest behind her eyes.

  “Who?”

  Celine said, “You know who. We’re trying to find him. For his daughter, Gabriela. Who, I’m sure, you will also remember. She told us her father drank here often, with you and your husband, before he went missing. She misses her father terribly. She has never believed he was killed by a bear.”

  “And who are you?” Mercifully she omitted the fuck. Celine listened for a trace of Afrikaner and heard the slightest flattening of the vowels. Barely there.

  “We find missing people. On our own. Mostly we reunite birth families. We only take the cases that we feel have merit and we often work pro bono, for free. So mostly we work for people who can’t afford an investigator.”

  “I know what pro bono means.”

  Celine nodded. “Gabriela went to my alma mater and saw an article about our investigative work in the alumni magazine. She called and asked if we could help her. She is an orphan, as you know, and she has been tortured these last years by the thought that her father might grow old and die without seeing her again. That he might not know his grandson. You can imagine, it’s very hard.”

  The suspicion in Sitka’s face softened. No one, probably, on earth, would disbelieve Celine in that moment. Anyone with half a working antenna would know she was speaking the truth. Pete looked on with mild approval, as if he were watching a German shepherd lick a kitten.

  “We know that Lamont came into your bar often over the weeks he was here. And it’s a long time ago. But we just wondered, well, what he might have talked about when he was drinking at the bar. I know he was gregarious and sometimes voluble.”

  Sitka dug a soft pack out of her parka pocket and turned her head and lit up, blowing smoke up into the corner of the porch.

  “He talked a lot about the bears. The ones he was shooting. How they were much smarter than anyone gave them credit for, how they seemed almost like people at times. The way they cared for their young, the way they dealt with threats…” She turned and blew smoke. “He talked about what an asshole Ed Pence was, the bear biologist he was profiling. How he hogged the limelight whenever he could. How he was ambitious. He wanted his own TV show. I think he thought he was the next David Attenborough. Ha!” She coughed. Celine winced. She could hear a kinship in the hack, sisterhood of the scarred lungs.

  Celine glanced quickly at Pete. “Anything else?” she said. “Did he talk about going anywhere after? Or for vacation? Or pine for a place?”

  Sitka dropped the butt and found the half-crumpled pack again and lit another. Celine had the distinct impression that she and Lamont had been closer somehow than patron and barkeep. Well, he was as charismatic as they come and he was a ladies’ man. Sitka half turned against the railing and looked off down the street toward the deep woods and Yellowstone and Barronette Peak outlined against the starry sky. “When he got pissed”—there it was, the South African emerging—“he sometimes said he’d like to go to the Ice Mountain. The one in the fairy tale. I hadn’t a clue. He said there was a lake there, the color of his true love’s eyes. And a cabin where a man could find himself again.” She turned back to Celine and her eyes were wet. “My eyes are sorta brown, aren’t they? So I knew this lake, wherever the fuck it was, wasn’t going to be brown, was it?” She dropped the half-smoked cigarette and forced a smile. “Anything else?”

  “Did he say that the lake sounded like a bird and the mountain was a king?” Celine asked.

  Sitka flinched as if burned and looked up quickly. “Yes,” she said. “Like that. Just what he said.” Celine doubted he had told her that over the sanded wood of the plank bar. Across a pillow more like. Or from the warm plain of her own stomach.

  “He said he would take me there. A day’s drive. He never did, did he? That it?” she said. “I better get back.”

  “Yes, thank you.” Celine touched the woman’s forearm. “Thank you.” She was going to beg her to stop smoking, but thought better of it.

  “Any time. The
club soda’s on the house.” She sucked in one last long breath of night air and flung the door open and dove back in.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  They walked back to the motel. They’d try to locate the artist Fernanda Muños first, and then call Gabriela who, in San Francisco, was an hour behind. No one shot at them and Celine had a feeling no one would. That had been a warning, stark as the clanging of a buoy in the sound.

  The buoy. That had tolled each night through the screen of her open window at Las Armas. Singing out the temper of the sea. The thought of that relentless and lovely bell buoy gave her an immediate ache. Of nostalgia and also grief. How many nights had she gone to sleep to its angelus? Feeling that a hole had been torn inside her? She felt again what it was to miss a father. What if someone could have waved a magic wand for her? So that they were together again, always?

  Celine did not see her father much in the years she attended Brearley. The three sisters went to his apartment on East Seventy-Fourth Street on Christmas afternoons. He sent a driver in a black sedan to their building off Lexington and the sisters piled in the back with their bags of presents. They were not coerced into it, they wanted badly to see their father on Christmas day and they shopped for months to find him the perfect gift. He received a drawersful of ties and tiepins and silver golf-ball markers and cashmere scarves and even wool sweaters over the years. His daughters wanted him to be warm and play great golf, and they wanted him to love them, which he did. He just wasn’t very good at showing it.

  He was a principled man, which people sensed from the moment he shook their hands, which is one of the reasons he had been so successful in banking. He was also a natural athlete, a superb golfer, a legendary Montauk fisherman. A man’s man in every respect. But not much of a little girls’ man. He was awkward around his daughters, and they could see the relief coming over him when he said goodbye to them at the town car that took them home. But they also sensed, because they were those kind of girls, that his awkwardness stemmed from deep love, and deep embarrassment that he had abandoned them in their tender childhoods. He could never accept the less than half—far less than half—presence, and he punished himself for not being a complete father, and in doing so, without meaning to, he punished them.