Under Tower Peak

by Bart Paul

  We didn’t say anything the next four miles into Piute Meadows. He knew I was steamed. He threw his empty can behind the seat and turned a sharp right on to the main street, then a left at the courthouse. A block behind that he hit the brakes hard in front of the sheriff ’s office.

  “Well?” he said. “Now what?” The boy wouldn’t even look at me.

  “You know damn well what. We can’t go in there with you wearing the dead guy’s watch.”

  He got an I-got-you look and moved the truck out again, driving slow this time. At the corner he turned away from Main Street and started to circle the block.

  “Tell me why,” he said.

  “You know damn well. Once we report it tonight, they’ll have him helo-ed out by tomorrow noon. His family will get notified and come on up here. Then they’ll have to ID the body and the belongings. Then pretty soon somebody from the family or one of his rich Flying W airplane pals will wonder where did that gold Rolex get to? And what happened to that eight thousand? And since you and me were the only ones up there, old Tommy and Lester will be branded all over CNN and Nancy Grace and the whole damn world as a couple of shitsucking body robbers.”

  “Come on.”

  “I ain’t no body robber and I won’t be known as one.”

  “Okay,” he said, “easy now.”

  He had circled the block, and we were cruising slow past the front of the sheriff ’s office again. There were a couple of white Ford Expedition cruisers out front with the Frémont County badge on the door.

  “Let’s think about this,” he said.

  “Nothing to think about, Lester.”

  “We could say that the whole deal had been messed with before we got there.” He said that like it was a good idea.

  “I won’t start lying so don’t ask me to.”

  “Or maybe one of those hungry bears chewed that watch clean off.” He laughed at himself. We turned left for a second trip around the block. The cinderblock office and jail was about the only thing on the block, so we’d be getting company pretty quick if he kept circling.

  “Listen to yourself, Lester. Tell one lie and you got to tell another to explain it.”

  “You said yourself we can’t report this now,” he said, “right?”

  “Round one for you, assbite. But get ready to saddle up, because we are riding back to that wreck in the next forty-eight hours and you are putting that watch and that money back where you found it.”

  “Sure, Tommy,” he said, “sure. You worry too much. Say, I wonder what May’s cooking for dinner tonight?” He grinned like he always did. “Why I’m so hungry I could eat a bear myself.”

  He stuck his headphones in his ears, fiddled with the volume on his little music player, and off we went. We turned off the Reno Highway five miles south of town onto the dirt road that climbed through the sagebrush up to Power Line Creek. Fifteen minutes later Lester parked next to Harvey’s stock truck tucked in the pines and boulders by the corrals. It was still light out, but there were electric lights on in the cabin and the sound of a TV. We went inside.

  “Greetings, Lindermans,” Lester said. He was carrying the paper sack.

  Harvey looked up from his San Francisco Chronicle, fiddling with his fork and looking sour. May looked over from the stove.

  “Hey handsome,” she said to Lester, “hey Tommy.” She handed a bowl of baked beans to her grandson parked in front of cartoons and pointed the little kid to the table.

  I took off my hat and set it on a chair, and we both went over and gave May a kiss on the cheek like always.

  “You get that trail done?” Harvey asked like we hadn’t.

  Lester and I glanced at each other for a quick second.

  “Sure did,” Lester said. He smiled like he didn’t have a worry in the world. “Tommy was a little rusty though. Forgot how to use a chain saw. Right, Tom?”

  “Forgot, huh?” Harvey said.

  “There’s one spot we got to do yet. Below the place the Forest Service sent us. Lester and I’ll ride back in a day or so.”

  Harvey just grunted at me.

  “Shouldn’t take us more than a couple of hours.”

  “It can wait,” Harvey said. “We got horses and mules to shoe before that Boy Scout trip to Hornberg Lake on the twenty-eighth.”

  “You think the snow will be clear by then?”

  “It better,” Harvey said, “or I lose a bundle. I wonder if leasing this damn second pack station was such a goddamn good idea.”

  “Where’s Albert?” Lester asked. “He’s the mule shoeing genius here.”

  “Sheriff ’s got him in the drunk tank again,” Harvey said. “I was supposed to pick him up this afternoon but never got to it.”

  “Well, shoot, Harv,” he said. “Me and Tommy was just practically at the sheriff ’s. We could’ve picked him up for you if we’d known.”

  “I can never get you on that goddamn new phone you carry,” Harvey said.

  “Nobody can,” Lester said. “That’s the beauty of it. Drives Callie crazy.” Lester took his phone and set the wires in the little boy’s ears then fiddled with the screen and handed the whole outfit to him. The kid started bobbing his head to the tunes.

  “Now I’ll have to buy him one of his own,” May said, but we could see she was tickled. She turned off the TV.

  “Those goddamn phones are just going to get better,” Harvey said. “Backpacker does something stupid in the high country, gets himself hurt or stranded, he just calls the Forest Service with his GPS location and they hire a damn helicopter to haul ’em out and we pay for it.”

  We’d all heard this tear before and knew best not to interrupt. I reached over and yanked Lester’s hat off his head and tossed it on the couch. May was too old fashioned to like men wearing hats in the house but too old fashioned to complain.

  “Jay-sus Chroist,” Harvey said, “one of these days the Forest Service will let them damn ’copters haul campers in during the summer like they haul skiers in during the winter and us packers will be damn dinosaurs.”

  It got real quiet for a minute. Then Lester pulled a sixpack of Coors out of the sack and set it on the table.

  “Hell, Harv,” he said. “Everybody knows you’re a dinosaur already. That’s what May says.”

  May laughed and Harvey’s eyes got some devilment in them then and he took a Coors. We grabbed a couple ourselves and sat down. The little boy turned at the three tops popping. Lester pulled a Hansen’s soda from the sack and held it up.

  “School out, Darryl?” he asked the boy.

  Darryl pulled a wire out of one ear. “Yessir.”

  “What grade you in next year?”

  “Fourth.” The boy took the soda.

  “What do you say?” May said.

  “Thanks,” Darryl said.

  May set a platter of ribs on the table and we dug in. “Always the charmer, Les,” she said.

  The boy put the wire back in his ear, and we quit talking for a bit and got serious about gnawing on those bones. After a while I could see Lester make of show of thinking about something like it had just occurred to him.

  “Say Harv,” he said. “You think they’ll ever find that missing billionaire that disappeared off the Flying W?”

  “I doubt it,” Harvey said. “If they haven’t found him by now there probably ain’t much to find.” He reached for another Coors. He was already in a better mood.

  “When that old boy first flew off the map, that was all folks around here talked about,” Lester said. “Now you don’t hear much on it. Just barroom talk, like whatever happened to Frémont’s cannon.”

  “People said he disappeared on purpose,” May said, “but I don’t believe it. Why would he leave all his money?”

  “Maybe his wife was a terror,” Harvey said, winking at Darryl.

  May flicked her napkin at him, but he jerked his head back like the mule Lester had been leading.

  “Come on, Harv,” Lester said, “I bet you could find him
if anybody could. You used to mustang out in that Flying W country when you were a young one.”

  “Too much country is why,” Harvey said. “Too many places to disappear.”

  “That is,” Lester said, “if that’s where he crashed. What if he came as far west as here?”

  “There’s wrecks up in these mountains that nobody’s found,” Harvey said. “Dozens. Back to World War Two. There’s a lot of country back up here. Jay-sus, I ought to know. If somebody does spot that bastard, it’ll be some goddamn backpacker and he’ll get that reward.”

  “There is no reward,” May said, “at least not from the family.”

  “No reward?” Lester said. “That’s crazy, May.”

  “That’s what I read anyhow,” she said. “I just think that’s shameful.” She turned to Lester and me. “If Harvey disappeared, I’d at least offer up the truck.”

  We all laughed at that, even Darryl.

  “Actually,” May said, “that guy has another billionaire friend from England who’s put up ten thousand, but not one penny from the wife or son.”

  “I heard the son paid for some of the searching,” Lester said. “Hired planes, led flyovers, and all that. Funny about the wife, though.”

  “Maybe he pissed his wife off,” Harvey said, “farted in bed.”

  “There’d be a whole lot more missing husbands if that was the case,” May said.

  “You think me and Tommy could find that wreck?” Lester asked.

  “Now I don’t know,” Harvey said, “Maybe. Tommy here was always a damn fine hunter.”

  “Come on, Harv,” he said, “are you saying I couldn’t find that plane?”

  “You gotta be smarter than a watermelon to eat one,Les,” Harvey said, “so the jury’s still out.” Harvey had no teeth on top so when he laughed he looked downright mischievous.

  “Maybe he flew over Area Fifty-One and saw some space aliens,” Lester said.

  “Here he goes,” Harvey said to May.

  “Seriously Harv,” Lester said, “maybe Mister Billionaire saw something he wasn’t supposed to see and the government shot him down. They could be holding him on Moonbase Five right now. Isn’t that so, Tommy?”

  “Only space case I know oughta pass me that coleslaw before I beam his ass up.”

  May gave me a funny look. “You’re being awfully grumpy tonight, Tommy.”

  “That guy’s plane went off the radar before I got back to this country. I got nothing to say about it.”

  Lester fiddled with his beer can, then finished it off and picked up Harvey’s paper.

  “So,” he said, “how are your Giants doing this year?”

  “Off to a goddamn lousy start,” Harvey said, “like that’s a big surprise. Where’s that goddamn Barry Bonds when a guy needs him?” He pushed himself away from the table and scratched his belly. “If Albert stays drunk, I’ll need you boys to do some shoeing up here, too.”

  We both nodded.

  “Seems like Albert Coffey’s been drunk as long as I can remember,” Lester said. “Drunk and horny.”

  “Longer,” May said. “He hasn’t been the same since Vietnam. He’s had a hard time.”

  “I don’t know,” Lester said. “You’d think after almost forty years a guy would get over it, wouldn’t you, Tom?”

  I reached for another beer, but Harvey had drunk the last one.

  “Nosir, I sure wouldn’t think that at all.”

  We had some ice cream, then got in the truck and headed off down the mountain.

  Chapter Three

  “May’s right,” Lester said. “You are in one piss-poor mood, old son.”

  We were rattling downhill through the sagebrush on the washboard road in the early dark, heading back toward the Reno Highway. It was about a quarter past nine.

  “For a guy who wanted us to swear never to tell nobody about the wreck, you sure as hell were dropping hints.”

  “I just wanted to find out what Harvey knew,” he said.

  “You were about to spill it, bud.”

  “Oh they didn’t catch on.”

  “I known Harvey and May my whole life. They’re what makes this valley. Them and the old ranchers. Now I’m lying to ’em.”

  He just shrugged it off.

  “Let’s go out to the lake,” he said. “See Callie Dean.”

  I pulled a bottle of Crown Royal from under my jacket. “You’re the one driving.”

  I took a drink and handed him the bottle. He grinned and took it like we were eighteen and off to Reno on a Saturday night. I’d figured that after a couple days away from that girl, he wouldn’t be wanting to take the time to drop me off at the pack station before he took a run at her, so I’d come prepared.

  On the main street of Piute Meadows there were new pickups and campers and trailers parked in front of the bars and motels, tourists on their way to the campgrounds and trailheads. When we’d crossed the meadows, instead of turning up the logging road, we kept on the blacktop toward Summers Lake. Truth be, I didn’t mind. You forget just how it is, a deep pocket set under the high peaks, timber on the ridges and the breeze ruffling the aspen and pines along the shore, and the light of the stars or moon or even headlights on the deep water.

  Callie was house-sitting a vacation cabin. The owners were city people who only came up a week or two all summer. When they came, she would go back to her crummy apartment behind the general store. The paved road followed the water’s edge. It dead-ended at the ramshackley campground and boat rental at the far end of the lake at the Yosemite trailhead half a mile beyond the cabin. Lester turned off on a dirt drive marked by the owners’ name carved on a wooden sign. The cabin sat a hundred feet above the lake buried in thick aspen. You could hardly see it when you drove by.

  Callie was up watching Bones on TV when we piled in. We got some glasses and ice and put a dent in the Crown Royal before she dragged Lester off to bed. The cabin was sixty years old and had a big main room like a lodge with two stairways running up each side and a stone fireplace with a buffalo head hanging over it. That there’d never been buffalo in our part of the West didn’t bother these folks. A buck would’ve made more sense. In the aspen uphill from the cabin the mule deer were as common as flies. Any fall you could fill your tag from the kitchen window.

  “You mountain men don’t look any the worse for wear,” Callie said. She got up for more ice. “How was it up in the great beyond?” She flounced into the kitchen in a shorty robe. Lester couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  “Nothing special.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Lester said. She came back in and freshened our drinks. “The trails were open and we were high enough to see all the way out to the Flying W range.”

  He got up and grinned at me like he just couldn’t help himself. He was following Callie up one of the staircases.

  “There’s clean sheets in the master bedroom, Tommy,” Callie said. “See you in the AM.”

  “I’ll just flop on the couch. Besides, I want to run down something on the web. These tofu-munching gunsels have Wi-Fi?”

  Callie pointed down to a laptop glowing on a couch. “They got everything, hon,” she said. She nodded across to the opposite staircase. “Really, use the bedroom. They wouldn’t mind.”

  “Wouldn’t want to get comfortable in a house that wasn’t mine.”

  “God, Tommy,” she said, “you are such a hard case.”

  “That’s what she says about me,” Lester said, dragging her into the bedroom and shutting the door.

  I topped off my drink and fired up the laptop. It didn’t take me long to find all sorts of sites on the missing billionaire. There was blog nonsense about where he might have crashed, did he crash at all, or was he hiding out somewhere, and what kind of plane he was flying. Some of them sounded like Lester, saying the government either killed him or was holding him in some desert Guantanamo in the middle of Nevada because he saw what was supposed to stay hid. They said the wreck was stashed in some guarded
hanger at some secret base out east of Tonopah—that sort of craziness. I learned that his wife lived in a high-end part of Los Angeles, and that she wasn’t his first. Some folks trashed her like May Linderman had for not putting up a reward. They said she had more money than god, or would have soon enough. I read stuff about a son about thirty-five years old from the first wife who had died some time back. The son seemed like a no-account. He owned a helicopter business in Miami Beach that the dad had staked him to. He’d had scrapes with the law and hung out with bad companions. But when his dad’s flying pals didn’t keep him in the loop during the search, he’d hired local pilots to look for his old man. Maybe he wasn’t such a useless tool after all. You can find just about anything on a computer if you stay up all night.

  When the noise up in the bedroom got aggravating, I took my drink out to the deck. It was ringed by aspen and Jeffrey pine so thick you could barely see the paved road down below. This late at night there were no cars, only that huge ridge rising straight up off across the lake and that dark water just as still as you please. Above it all were granite peaks. I could see the one they called the Cleaver. It seemed far away and lonesome and cold. It was hard to believe Lester and I had climbed it when we were seventeen. We’d ridden up the night before our day off, camped at a lake with good grass at almost ten thousand feet, then hiked up at dawn and climbed that sucker from the back side then rode our horses home down narrow switchbacks in the dark. That was a day. I couldn’t figure owning such a place as this cabin and not spending every day in it, even if there wasn’t a place to keep a horse.

  I went back in and picked up the computer again. There wasn’t any picture of the dead guy’s wife, but I found a video on YouTube of the son from a Florida air show a year before. He was doing a power-off landing in a helicopter from a couple hundred feet, letting the rotors slow the fall. I’d heard about army pilots trying that, but on the tape it looked dicey as hell, too easy to get off balance, flip over and fall like a rock, then crash and burn. I rode bad horses from time to time and didn’t think too much of it, but I never felt safe in a helicopter. The son either had big cojones or was flat out of his mind. Or both. At the end of the video this idiot-stick walked up to the camera with some blond. He was wearing shades and a muscle shirt and some gay-looking fake cowboy hat like you see skiers or actresses wear, so I couldn’t see his face. He shouted something at the camera and did pointy, gang-sign nonsense with his fingers. If his old man had ever seen that video, the crash up by North Pass was pure suicide.