Breaking Wild

by Diane Les Becquets

  “She was pretty,” Amy Raye said. “She had light brown hair and these brilliant blue eyes. Kind of like people who wear colored contacts, only she never wore contacts or glasses.”

  “What else?” Farrell said.

  “She could be funny. I thought she was funny. She made me laugh.”

  “How so?”

  “I don’t know. It was just her way. Sometimes she’d say she wanted to go for a drive. She’d want me to go with her. Said we were going for a ride in the country, which was kind of funny because we already lived in the country. Then we’d drive by all the fields we could find that had horses and we’d name the horses and see which one of us could come up with the best names. One day she stopped alongside a field and got out of the car. She climbed over the barbed-wire fence and walked right up to this Thoroughbred. I sat in the car and watched. The horse didn’t even run from her. Then she walked back, climbed over the fence again, and got in the car. She said she’d thought the white spot on the horse’s forehead had looked like an oak leaf and that she’d been going to name him Acorn, but when she’d gotten a closer look, she’d been wrong. She said the marking looked like the star of Bethlehem.”

  “So what did she name him?” Farrell asked.

  “Bethlehem,” Amy Raye said. “And from then on when we drove by the field and the horse was out, we’d roll down our windows, and we’d wave to him and call out his name.”

  Farrell hugged Amy Raye closer and laughed. “Sounds like something you would do.”

  But these had been the days before Amy Raye had found her mom crying and sitting naked on the bathroom floor, and perhaps there was blood on the floor, as well. Before the days her mother would call in sick to work and stay in bed all day in a dark room, when she no longer stopped by the farm to see her parents, and cried each time she took communion in church.

  “I think I would have liked your mom,” Farrell said.

  But then Amy Raye turned quiet. “I don’t know,” she said. “People change.”

  —

  As Amy Raye lay with her face upon the cold rock, as she looked to the sky and waited for the helicopter to return, the wind shifted and blew through her hair and down her back like a gentle stroke of her mother’s hand. Amy Raye searched the stars. She found Ursa Major, or the Great Bear, as some of the Native American cultures called it. She thought upon all the stories her mother had read to her of the Great Bear, how it was the guardian of the western lands, the people’s spirit protector. And she thought upon the day her mother climbed the fence and named the Thoroughbred that had been grazing in the McAllisters’ pasture, and by remembering she felt the moment happening all over again. And maybe the fence wasn’t barbed wire. Maybe it was only cedar. Maybe the horse trotted away from her mom at first. Amy Raye couldn’t be sure. But none of that mattered. What mattered was the way the light shone on her mom’s face as she stood in the field and looked upon the deep brown horse, as she brushed aside the mane from his forehead. What mattered was the way her mom smiled, and that beautiful aching moment of how the world could be.

  PRU

  Several weeks had passed since Amy Raye had gone missing. Thanksgiving had come and gone. Dean had picked up Amy Raye’s laptop, and while Colm pored over her cell phone records, a specialist with the Garfield County agency worked on the computer.

  “The husband’s not going to like what we found,” Colm told me. We were grabbing a beer together at the VFW one night after work. “Of course, I don’t see how he couldn’t have known.”

  “Does this have anything to do with Kenny?”

  “It has to do with Kenny and Aaron. From what we can tell, she was involved with both of them at one time or another.” Colm and I were sitting at the bar. He took a slow swallow from his beer. “That’s not even the half of it,” he said. “We found dating sites, chat rooms, illicit emails. I got text messages coming and going. We know of at least two men she’d been seeing within the month of her disappearance.”

  I shook my head and ordered another beer. I kept seeing Amy Raye’s husband, the pictures of the children. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t wrap my mind around what Colm was telling me.

  “And I got to tell you,” Colm went on. “This whole thing’s got me thinking more about that gun. It seems pretty goddamn interesting that Kenny was the only one who knew about Latour going off to some tree stand we never found. Then, only after we find the gun does Kenny decide to tell us it’s his, and by the way he loaned it to her, seeing as how it’s got his prints all over it. And I find it goddamn interesting that neither he nor that friend of his thought to mention their involvement with Latour.”

  “Did the husband know anything? Could this be some kind of scam?”

  Colm was getting ready to take another drink from his beer. He held the bottle in front of him for a second. “I think it’s more like an addiction. It’s sad when you think about it. She’s got a beautiful family. We found emails between her and her husband. You’d never know she had something going on. And there must have been at least a hundred pictures of her with the kids. It’s like our missing person is two people. Makes me wonder which one we’ve been looking for.” Colm drank several long swallows of his beer. Pool balls clacked behind us, and the chatter in the room was getting louder.

  Colm’s thinking surprised me. He’d hit on something going on with my own thoughts. Amy Raye wasn’t all one thing or another. She was the mother and she was the wife, and she was someone completely different from both of these things. I couldn’t help but wonder, as did Colm, if it was the stranger whose life had been put at risk, the one Kenny and Aaron had reported missing, or the one with a husband and children back home. The truth was, we didn’t know who this woman was. I was fairly certain the husband didn’t either. And because of that, we couldn’t make assumptions about her motivations.

  Colm set the bottle down and began turning it around and around against the sticky wood-grain finish on the bar. “You know, you hear about this sort of thing. But when you get right down into the thick of it, it’s hard to believe.” He shook his head. “Goddamn mess.” Then he said, “I keep thinking, what if the husband didn’t have a clue?”

  I leaned in closer so as not to lose what Colm was saying. He tapped the empty beer bottle against the bar. “It doesn’t matter,” Colm said. “I’m still going to have to question him.”

  “What about Kenny and Aaron?”

  “I’m going to have to question them, too, and the whole sorry lot of other guys she was involved with.”

  “You could be shaking up a lot of relationships out there.”

  “Wouldn’t you want to know?”

  “Yeah, I would.” I drank more beer, found myself getting quiet.

  “At least Maggie never did this,” Colm said.

  And I wanted to say, How do you know? But I didn’t. I thought back to Brody’s funeral. I thought about the girl who was crying a lot louder than she had any right to. She’d probably gone to school with us, but I didn’t remember having seen her before. And for weeks after the funeral, whenever anyone would leave cards at Brody’s grave site, I’d read those cards and wonder if any of them were from the girl who’d cried all those tears. Greg said Brody had touched lives in a lot of different ways and everyone handled their emotions differently. Maybe we could never know everything about another person. I felt sad for Farrell Latour, because if he didn’t know those things about his wife, he was going to be grieving the loss of her all over again, and this second loss was going to be a lot worse than the first.

  —

  Though my work often involved assisting with search-and-rescue efforts and responding to accidents on public lands, the primary scope of my job was protecting the Bureau of Land Management’s cultural resources from vandalism and looters, or pothunters, as they were often referred to. My job fell under the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, which dealt with
federal and Indian lands. The law made it illegal for anyone to remove or damage artifacts of human life if those artifacts were over one hundred years old. The only exception would be if a person had a valid permit to conduct professional archaeological research.

  Looters typically focused on sites that were likely to yield artifacts with high market values. Visitors, as opposed to serious looters, tended to be less selective, collecting small sherds and waste flakes, which over time could result in a serious depletion. And though picking up arrowheads wasn’t something a person would get charged with under ARPA, it could be considered a misdemeanor. Oftentimes when conducting my work, I’d think back to my brother and me when we’d looked for arrowheads and picked up flakes. Most people, like us, had no idea that kind of activity was illegal.

  At eighteen years old, when I took the job as a seasonal worker, my duties involved anything from spraying ditches for noxious weeds, to repairing roads by filling in potholes, to assisting geologists with field surveying. I spent my days outdoors, sometimes walking six to ten miles in ninety-degree heat, hot dust beneath my feet, and skies so blue I was certain heaven had never felt as close. And when I was alone, I’d talk to Brody, I’d talk to God, I’d talk to myself. When I arrived in Colorado, my capacity for grief was like the Grand Canyon. Some people don’t make it out of the Grand Canyon. The rapids and the terrain can be highly unpredictable. And yet there is something about exploring an area by oneself. When I took my grief to Colorado, I found the space I needed. I found the wind and the sky and the sun and the rocks and the high desert pinyon and sage to be the most effective balm of all. It was there that my grief became quiet and allowed me to hear the whispers of something much greater than myself, and I couldn’t get enough of it. And sometimes when I was working alone on a road, shoveling dirt and hauling rocks, feeling the muscles in my arms and legs and back, I’d feel Brody all around me as well.

  The BLM was low on housing that summer. The two bunkhouses were already full with seasonal firefighters. Three other seasonal workers were sharing an apartment in town. I was going to be on my own to arrange for my living quarters. I’d brought basic camping gear: a tent, sleeping bag, foam pad, cookstove. I picked up a bear canister at the hardware store and a couple of other items, including a folding chair and a large cooler. I had over a million acres to choose from for my summer home. I studied the maps and looked for natural springs. There is not a lot of water in the high desert, and many of the brooks dry up in the summer. That was when I met Ray. He’d been working as a geologist for the BLM for over thirty years. He told me about an area at the base of Danforth Hills, up Cabin Gulch, where there was a spring that would provide plenty of fresh water and a nice swimming hole. He said there were lion and some bear in the area, but he doubted they’d pay any attention to me. And so I set up camp on an embankment just above the spring, with an unbelievable amount of sky above me. I’d never really thought of a place as home before. I had simply been a child who’d been growing up in her parents’ arms, and who’d been moving into the arms of another. But lying underneath that big sky, the grief that had been winding itself tight inside me started to loosen, and I found myself settling into the depths of that land and sky as if it were the place I’d been born to find. My days consisted of waking up before dawn, working hard all day, and then driving up the four-wheel road to my gold tent and chair. I would sit in that complete quiet and peace and comfort, and I’d feel something infinite going on inside me. I knew I was home, and there was no way I could walk out of there come summer’s end. I didn’t want to be inside college walls, or working in my parents’ store. I wanted to live with this vast beauty around me. I wanted to feel the fatigue at the end of the day from my bones and muscles having worked hard. I wanted big stretches of space to talk out loud all the thoughts going on in my head. The solitude I found that summer became my greatest companion. I’d already lost Brody. I wasn’t going to lose this companion, too.

  The field office didn’t have any full-time positions that I qualified for, but the more tasks I completed, the more work different folks in the office seemed to find for me to do. And there were some changes going on with the permanent staff that ended up working to my advantage. By summer’s end, Glade had been hired to head up all of the archaeology efforts. The office team had never had a trained archaeologist before. Glade was pretty much a one-man show with more work than he could handle, which included surveying and mapping hundreds of sites within the White River jurisdiction. I’d already proven myself a quick study when it came to surveying, and I was willing to work for minimum wage. Glade’s passion for his work became a new territory for me, full of all kinds of possibilities. I felt protective of the places we mapped. We didn’t have all of the cameras for surveillance at that time. Instead, I would backpack into the areas and hike and camp for weeks, patrolling the sites by foot.

  By my fifth year on the job, the BLM had decided to send me for an eight-week law enforcement training program in Nebraska. The program would take place during January and February, when fieldwork was slow. I’d been renting a small apartment close to town by then, a seven-hundred-square-foot building that had been converted into living quarters, on the edge of some public grazing land and the Smith ranch. I’d been seeing Todd that fall. By December, I was ready to break things off, and he didn’t seem too unagreeable when I told him, so we went our separate ways. I didn’t know I was pregnant when I drove to Missouri to stay with my parents for Christmas. My dad had come down with a stomach bug, and I thought I’d been suffering from the same. Then I was so busy with the eight-week intensive training program that I didn’t pay my menstrual cycle, or lack of one, any mind. When I returned to Colorado, I bought a pregnancy test. It was nighttime and dark outside, and I closed all the blinds as if trying to create a cave in which I could hide when I found out the results. I peed on the stick and then carried it into my small living area. I set the stick on a coffee table, lit a candle, and sat on the floor.

  And in those couple of minutes that followed, I knew I wanted to be pregnant, and I was afraid to look at the white piece of plastic, because I was afraid I’d find out I wasn’t. But I did look, and I was pregnant, and hope perched on my body, as if this new life forming inside me were all the affirmation I’d ever need, and I knew then, in this huge awakening sort of way, that it wasn’t grief that had driven me to Colorado. It was love. The capacity for my grief was all the love I’d had for Brody. And my own capacity wasn’t big enough. I needed a space just as wild and vast as that love to set it free.

  —

  I worked out of the White River Resource Area office in Rio Mesa, which was responsible for approximately one and a half million acres of land. And most of that land was rich in Paleo-Indian heritage, especially in the Douglas Creek territory, the same area where Amy Raye had disappeared.

  Throughout the year, I patrolled the different sites and investigated them for any disturbance, such as holes in the ground, back-dirt piles, discarded fragmentary artifacts, or tools left in the area. I also kept record of and looked into footprints on an open site. I reported my findings to Glade, who would then try to determine what artifacts might have been at the ruin before the area was vandalized.

  The previous summer, I’d worked with a field school team on a stratigraphic excavation where several living sites had been stacked one on top of another. The earth had eroded away in a deep gulch that ran one hundred feet long. The site was named Hanging Hearths Shelter because the hearths were hanging on the side of the cut bank of the cliff.

  But the site was also a prime target for vandalism, so I patrolled the shelter several times a week. I had set up a surveillance camera as well. The camera, built into a synthetic rock, operated with a motion sensor. When the sensor was set off, the camera took pictures that would trip the radio back at the office with a code and deliver the pictures digitally to my computer. I strategically placed cameras at shelters like this to catch any loote
rs—amateur archaeologists who would scavenge the ruins before all of the permits had been obtained and a field school could begin.

  Such was the case with Hanging Hearths Shelter. Prior to the first field school, I’d noticed a number of footprints coming and going from the area. Then pictures began to show up on my computer. One morning the camera captured a man and his dog walking up to the shelter. The man was carrying a shovel. By the time Glade and I got out to the site, the man was gone, but in one of his freshly dug holes, he had left behind a cigarette butt with his DNA. Colm was able to come up with a couple of suspects from the photo, and with the DNA, he was able to make a perfect match.

  Though my fieldwork slowed down in the winter months, I still checked on as many sites as I could, particularly those with rock art, which could be vandalized at any time of year. I’d also make sure whatever cameras we had in place were working and had not been knocked down by wind or covered with snow. At present, we had several surveillance cameras positioned in the Douglas Creek area, including one I had installed at the recently discovered Coos shelter, situated in the southeastern corner of East Douglas Creek Canyon. A two-week excavation of the site was scheduled for the upcoming summer, just enough time for all of the permits to be obtained.

  After Joseph and I returned from Boulder, where we’d spent Thanksgiving with my brother and his wife, I decided to spend most of December canvassing some of the areas where a fairly high volume of hunting tags had been sold. This was routine following a hunting season. I’d check on some of the sites in those locations by assessing for damage that might have occurred as a result of foot traffic and off-road vehicles. That first week after Thanksgiving, I was checking out some hunting ground in the West Douglas Creek territory, where over the years the BLM had surveyed several prehistoric astronomical drill hole sites, as well as an ancient lookout tower. The West Douglas range was situated on the western side of Highway 139, an approximately fifty-mile expanse of dry, rocky terrain. Even though the land had less drainage and forests than where we’d searched for Amy Raye, there was still a healthy population of wild game, including antelope, mule deer, and some elk.