by Bart Paul
“Buddy liquidated a lot of his herd to clear up some debt,” she said, “and I wanted to expand.” She gave me a quirky look. “Worked out for everybody.”
It was what I’d figured. She’d helped Buddy just like she’d helped Sarah and me.
“You need to ride up sometime and see how the cabin’s coming.”
“Invite me,” she said. “May says that log house is perfect for the canyon.” She squeezed my hand. “And you running a new pack outfit up there is just what our valley needs—even if to get it started you’re working yourself like a rented mule.”
“Harvey’s doing most of the work.”
“Yeah, right,” she said.
“You haven’t asked me about Erika.”
For a minute the only sound was bellowing cattle. “I don’t dare,” she said. “If it is her you found, I only hope she’s finally at peace.”
In another hour we all sat at a long table in the cottonwood shade and ate the asada burritos and beans Dan had cooked. A wind was kicking up, so we ate fast. When I was a kid, I never missed a branding. Not ours, not our neighbors. It was always one of the best things a kid could do on a ranch, working right along with the grownups, polishing your skills. I tried not to think about this being my first branding in years, or to wonder why that old feeling was gone.
I went back to the barbeque for seconds.
“Hear you took a trip with Buddy Hornberg yesterday,” Dan said.
“Yeap.”
“Me and him went to school together,” he said. He cut me another slice of beef. “Even then, I thought he was useless as tits on a boar.”
“Didn’t you used to date Erika?”
“You know how it is in a small town,” he said. He looked kind of muley. “Sooner or later, everybody dates everybody.”
Audie sat by herself in the stiff wind with Hoot, chewing on a burrito and watching the cows and calves while Hoot chewed on scrotum sacks scattered by the branding fire. She inhaled food like Burt and seemed happy to be away from folks, even the ones who were kind to her. She looked suspicious when I came over and sat cross-legged next to her in the dirt.
“What’d I do?” she said.
“Nothin’ yet.”
“Can I have a sip of your beer?”
“Hell no.”
She went back to eating and didn’t pay me any mind. When I glanced over at the other folks, I saw Sarah and Becky looking my way and talking amongst themselves. They stopped when they saw I’d noticed.
The doll Mom got for Audie was lying in the dirt already looking trashed.
“You don’t like the doll?”
“What am I supposed to do with it?” Audie said.
I didn’t know how to make small talk with a kid, so I got right down to it. “You need to tell me what the deal was with those two drifty characters. Who were they and why were they pretending to be your parents, and why were they sayin’ you were lost?”
She got scowly and ignored me.
“You gotta tell me.”
“You’ll be mad at me. You’ll make me go away.”
“Hell I will.”
She finished her last bite of tortilla, and I finished my beer. Then she told me how we all got sent on a bullshit errand that morning by the guy named Sonny. The dead guy called Cody worked for Sonny in Reno. Doing what, Audie didn’t rightly know. The one called Chrystal Dawn was really named Myrna Jenks, and Audie hated her. She’d been living with her since her own mother died.
“She a relative?”
“Uh-uh,” Audie said. “They useta work together.”
“Doing what?”
“Dancing for Sonny.”
That was a sight I didn’t want to conjure.
“Where?”
“The Pink Corral.”
“Do I want to know what that is?”
“It’s a titty bar.”
She told me things that painted a damn grim picture of life for a kid at a place called 4th Street in Reno. It was no world for a little girl, or for a big girl either.
“Why were they pretending you were lost?”
“They wanted you to find something they’d hid. Sonny said people would find it when they was looking for me.”
“What was it they hid?”
“A dead person.”
“Who was supposed to find the dead person?”
“People like you,” she said. “Shitkickers.”
I gave her a look. “How the hell would that work?”
“Sonny said he’d let all you guys chase your tails ’cause you were rubes and chumps and stuff.”
“Sounds like a pretty lame plan.”
“They’re all totally lame,” she said. “I hate ’em. They left me up in the trees, and I was scared as crap.”
“Scared of ghosts?”
“Of guys with guns. Sonny had guys watching you. They had guns. I wasn’t supposed to see ’em, but I did.”
“They damn near killed Jack and me.”
She picked up the doll and looked at it, then tossed it back in the dirt.
“Why were Sonny’s guys trying to kill us? They didn’t even know us.”
“I don’t know. Sonny was hella mad about what you did to him. And he was mad at that guy over there.” She pointed at Jack. “He don’t let people diss him like that and live to tell the tale.”
“What was supposed to happen when we found the dead person?”
“I dunno,” she said. “I was up in the mountains freezing my buns off, remember?”
The kid made me laugh.
“Who was the dead person we were supposed to find?”
She looked at me like I was an idiot. “How would I know?”
I turned and saw Sarah studying us again. I thought about that cash in my saddle pockets that I still hadn’t told her about and wondered why I hadn’t.
“Where were you while I was looking for you?”
“Hiding in the trees.”
“Do you remember where?”
She shook her head no. “I saw you once. On a pretty horse with the Indian guy and a big dog. You seemed nice and I wanted to holler at you, but Cody said if I tried to get away he’d make it bad for me.”
“Did you have food?”
“Couple energy bars.”
“Cody give them to you?”
“No,” she said, “the spirit lady. At first I thought it was my mom come down from heaven to see me, but when she got close I could tell it wasn’t. Then I was afraid it was the dead person’s ghost, but she was real nice. The spirit lady, I mean.”
I started to ask her more about that, but the kid was wiping away tears so I let it be.
“Those energy bars musta tasted good if you were hungry.”
“They tasted like dirt.”
“Were you cold?”
“It was cold as balls. Chrystal and Cody took my jacket.”
“Where’d you get the sleeping bag?”
“The spirit lady give it to me. She said it was hers when she was little.”
“Were you alone the whole time?”
She gave a shrug. “Mostly. I heard stuff. I was scared they might be bears or ghosts. Or Cody. He scared me too. Asshole.”
I told her Cody was dead. She didn’t react a bit. No fake sorrow or fret. Not like the thing about the spirit lady. That seemed to make her sad.
I asked her where Chrystal, or Myrna, or whatever she called herself, was now.
“We were staying in that town near your place,” she said. “In Paiute Meadows?”
“Whereabouts?”
“Some motel. It was crummy, and it stunk. Partly ’cause Myrna drank so much. When she drank she’d whup me and make me drink the hot sauce if I sassed her.”
“You remember the name of the motel?”
“No. But it had a big cow out front. A cow and a guy with a beard and an axe. I remember that. I wanted to sit on it. The cow, I mean.”
Midafternoon we loaded up to haul the horses back to the pack station. I got
behind the wheel, and Audie ran over.
“You won’t make me go back to Sonny, will you?”
“No. You’re safe with my mom. For now.” I felt like I was lying to her.
“Sonny made me do—.” She stopped talking but looked me right in the eye. “I know you shot Cody.”
“I did not shoot Cody.”
“The sheriff said you did. Look, you can shoot Sonny too if you want. I wouldn’t mind at all. Just sayin’.”
CHAPTER NINE
The rain started as we topped out at Hell Gate Pass, a gusty summer storm that dumped buckets on us then cleared, then poured even harder as we took sheets of water on the windshield from the big trucks ahead of us on the two-lane road. Our rig drenched the smaller cars that we passed. Ten miles farther on, in Paiute Meadows, the pavement was wet but the storm had stopped and the sky in the west was clear.
I pulled over behind Sarah’s department SUV. After me pestering on her for a year or two, she’d picked up my paranoid parking protocol—always park on a side street so you’re as inconspicuous as possible, and never park with someone in front of you in case you’ve got to rattle on out of there quick. It may not have made a damn bit of difference but it made me feel a whole lot better.
She and I got out, and Harvey and May took Lorena and the rig back to the pack station. We were eating in town—sort of like a date—and would follow in about an hour. The Mansion House Hotel had the nicest dining room in town, so we washed up, then we took a table by the window. The sunset with the rainclouds was a big mess of purple and pink and gray. Sarah was still enjoying the newness of being the married lady and the mom, so she hadn’t got indifferent to us doing the couple thing in public. I kept to my old habits, sitting sideways across from her so I could watch the dining room and the entrance. The whole front of the room was windows, so I could keep my eyes on the street, too. Sarah was in her dirty branding clothes but looked so strong and pretty I forgot my paranoia for a while. I’d no intention of ever getting indifferent to anything about her. She ordered salmon for herself and prime rib for me. She asked me once if I minded when she ordered for us both. She said she did it to save time. I’d laughed. I thought it was cute, but I wouldn’t say so to her face. We both sat quiet a minute. The last three days was just a tangle of loose ends.
“Do you think this guy Sonny is some relative?” Sarah said.
“I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”
The waitress put down some salads, and we got started. We were hungry enough not to talk for a bit.
“Somebody left a wad of cash for me to find at the pack station.”
“I know,” she said. “In your saddle pockets.”
“How the hell did you know?”
“I’m married to a guy who taught me that a sharp knife is a good knife,” she said. “I was looking for your whetstone.”
“How come you didn’t let on you saw it?”
“I knew you’d tell me when you were ready. I know you probably wanted to sort it out in your own mind.”
“Yeah, but I’m coming up empty.”
“It does make the whole dead embezzler story a lot less clear-cut,” she said.
“No foolin’. Hate to think somebody’s setting us up.”
Sarah tensed when I said that. “Or trying to send us a message.”
“I don’t know what else it could be. It all seems related somehow.”
The owner of the Sporting Goods, Nick, and his wife, Sonia, stopped by the table, and we talked for a few minutes about the weather, the fishing so far this year, and dead embezzlers. Nick was one of the local business folks whose check deposits for fishing guides got screwed up by the bank. I studied Sarah after they left.
“So what were you and Becky talking about at lunch?”
“You, of course,” she said. “You’re our favorite person.”
“Yeah, right.”
“She’s sorry the whole forty-acre thing makes you uncomfortable,” she said.
“I’da felt better if she’d taken payments or something.”
“She knows that. But you’re missing her point.” She looked like she was getting up the nerve for a touchy subject, but it wasn’t what I guessed.
“If your dad hadn’t got sick, he’d still be running Allison’s. The Allisons wouldn’t have sold out, and there would be no Dominion Land and Cattle here in the valley. You and your mom would still be living on that ranch whether you married me or not, and Harvey would still have his pack station in Aspen Canyon on leased Allison land. When you and your mom had to move off after your dad died, there was nothing to hold you here. You just vanished on us all.”
“Like you noticed.”
“You were eighteen,” she said. “Of course I noticed.”
“I was in the Army pretty soon after.”
“Yeah. And as far away from here as you could get.” She reached across the table and took my hand. “Becky wanted that pack outfit for the whole valley’s economy, not to mention tradition. But more than that, she wanted to give you something to hold you here. To— I don’t know—to root you to this place.”
“I got you. I’d live with you in a trailer park in Fernley if it came to that.”
That made her laugh.
“I get Becky’s point, I guess.”
“Okay,” she said. “Now you share with me what else you and Audie were whispering about.”
I told Sarah more about the things I’d learned from Audie about VanOwen and his crazy plan to have folks find a corpse in the canyon. And how he had the notion that I somehow knew about that. I tried to keep it jokey, but the idea of a low-rent thug putting me in his sights scared Sarah, I could tell. I finished with Audie’s story of the motel with the cow and the guy with the axe.
“The Paul Bunyan Motel,” she said.
“Yeah. Why would someone name a motel in gold rush and ranching country after a folk legend from Wisconsin?”
“People are idiots?”
“So … after dinner?”
“Yeah,” she said. “After dinner. We should check it out.”
Our dinner came, and we tried to talk about other things like how cool our log house would be when it was finished. That didn’t last long.
She gave me one of her looks. “What else is gnawing at you? And don’t say ‘nothin’.’”
“I’m thinking Mom is getting too attached to Audie.”
“Are you sure it’s your mother you’re worried about?”
After dinner we walked without talking into the evening still damp from the rain. We passed under the streetlights and turned up the side street to the SUV. I hung back on the curb as Sarah unlocked it with her clicker and pulled out her duty belt with the 9mm. She got back to me, and we started the two blocks to the Paul Bunyan. She buckled on the 9mm over her Wranglers and walked like she was Wyatt Earp. When I was young and my dad felt the need to smarten me up about women, he said that with the right one it was more than just tight jeans and pretty faces. He tried to hint that it could be like an add-on to yourself, like the right person could let you find out just who the hell you were supposed to be. I’d already decided when I was maybe twelve and Sarah was in high school that if I couldn’t have her somehow I’d never want anyone else, but it was just then with her buckling on that pistol and both of us wondering what we were going to find that I thought about Dad and knew in my bones what he meant. The tight jeans and pretty face still got me, but us guys are shallow that way.
The Paul Bunyan Motel was the oldest one in town, built maybe in the fifties, and small. Babe the Blue Ox stood about seven feet at the shoulder. The blue paint was chipped and the plaster hooves weren’t cloven like a bovine but rounded like a horse or mule. It wasn’t the only thing the first owners hadn’t thought out. Old Babe was a long way from Wisconsin, stuck in the wrong legend there on Main Street.
The motel rooms were set in an L, less than a dozen of them, and only three cars were parked in the slots in front of the rooms. It wasn’t
full dark, and the light was on in the office under the red neon vacancy sign, but we couldn’t see any movement inside. We stood watching for a couple of minutes, then crossed into the parking lot, staying in the shadows where we’d be hard to spot. There was a newish Toyota parked next to the office and a Ford F-150 close by a room with a light shining through the curtains. In front of the room farthest from the street was a beater 280-Z that somebody must’ve thought was a hot car sometime during the first Reagan administration. It was parked in shadow, and there were no lights on in the room. We walked along a block wall that separated the parking lot from a Shell station. When we were just a step from the door, we stopped to listen. A semi rolled west on the wet asphalt of Main Street, so for a minute it was hard to hear. I glanced at Sarah, and she half smiled as I put a hand on the door. Unsaid was that a deal like this could always go sideways. The door wasn’t latched and swung open with the littlest push. We stood on either side of it, letting our eyes focus on the gloom. I saw Sarah had drawn her piece.
The woman had been dead for at least a day, maybe more, and the room stunk. There was blood and a broken bottle of Fireball on the carpet. Sarah flipped the switch to the bedside lamp lying on the floor and we gave the place a look-over in the jaggedy shadows. She stepped outside and radioed her office, and I took a close look at some of the bruising on the woman’s head and arms. I saw small diamond shaped marks on her skin, but that didn’t surprise me much. The machined steel walking stick lashed to the Harley a few mornings ago was made to be a weapon. The woman looked like she’d taken a hell of a beating, hard with no let-up. Where the force of the steel hit bare skin, the row of diamond-shaped bruises made a snakeskin pattern—like a rattler. Like it was supposed to send a message from the dead to the living.
