Under Tower Peak

by Bart Paul

  I was sore-headed and dizzy the rest of the afternoon. I popped some aspirin and finished up the wiring for the yard lights, splicing in two switches so we could light up the whole canyon if we needed to. Lester wouldn’t look at me or talk to me. After about an hour I scribbled down a list and handed it to him. By then he’d quit work altogether and was just sitting on the pack platforms.

  “The hell?”

  “If you can, gather some of your tools for Harvey. Socket set, screwdrivers, water-pump pliers, and a couple of crescent wrenches. Big ones. Whatever he’ll need to pop a head on the GMC. He doesn’t have shit for tools up there. Put ’em in a pack box or something so he can pick ’em up next time he’s here.” If he knew I was lying to him, at least he didn’t let on.

  I took a break about four and had a beer. Then I haltered up Sarah’s dad’s colt and led him into the crowding pen by the chute. The pen wasn’t as big as I liked, but he wasn’t too rank and I could work with him there. I tied a braided cotton rope loose around his neck with a bowline then tied up a hind foot. He fired out and jumped a few times but not so much to make him fall. I started sacking him out easy with a saddle blanket. After about fifteen minutes I left him hobbled and standing quiet to think about things for a time while I gave my head a rest and tended to my rifle. I shook out a pack tarp and spread it down on the platforms and took my scope and a Crown Royal bottle from my saddle pockets and a deerskin bag out of the tin shack, then sat down. I dumped my tools and mounting hardware on the tarp and went to work. I yanked the bolt and ejected the chambered cartridge, then dropped the floor plate and emptied the magazine and snapped all five rounds into my shirt pocket. Then I set to unscrewing both sights and putting the pieces in a ziplock. I was screwing down the mounting rail when I see this car come down the hill toward the bridge. I pulled one cartridge from my pocket and left that on my lap while I slid the scope onto the rail and kept my eyes on the road. In a couple of minutes a snot-green rental sedan pulled through the aspen with Nora driving and Sarah riding shotgun. I took a sip of Crown Royal and watched them as they piled out and sauntered over. I knew I was in trouble on all sorts of levels. Nora had cleaned up a bunch in the nine hours since I’d left her. Sarah was back in Wranglers and a tank top, her hair stuffed in a ballcap. Nora was talking pretty nonstop.

  “Our presumptive widow called Miss Dean back on her cell to give her a piece of her mind,” she said. “It never occurred to her that she was leaving her phone number with someone outside her circle who did not wish her well. The very wealthy can be very naïve in their assumptions.”

  “I guess,” Sarah said. “Boy.”

  “Hi,” Nora said when they got close.

  “Ladies.”

  “How’s he coming?” Sarah asked. She looked from the colt to the Remington on my lap to the swelling on my cheek. Just like a cop.

  “So far so good.”

  Nora sat next to me.

  “Are we going to shoot someone?” she asked.

  I just tightened down the mounting rings with an Allen wrench like I did this every afternoon. Nora watched Sarah walk over to the fence by the loading chute.

  “Is she going to do something with that horse?”

  “No.”

  “Isn’t it her horse?” she asked. “She talked about it in the car.” She studied my puffy cheek like she just noticed it.

  “Come here,” Sarah yelled over. “Show me how he’s doing.”

  It didn’t seem like much, but that was about as unlike her as anything I’ve ever heard Sarah say. I put the tools in the pouch and slid the .270 back in the scabbard and set it on the tarp. I left Nora sitting there and walked over to the fence, snapping the loose round back into my shirt pocket. I untied the hobbles and sacked that old boy out a bit more. I set my saddle on his back easy-like, then took it off and did it again. He quivered the first time the cinch touched his belly, but pretty soon I had it screwed down and was popping the stirrup leathers easy against his sides and rubbing him down with him watching things and figuring it out. He was going to be a nice horse, you could see that right away. Pretty soon Nora followed over.

  “Does that hurt him?” she asked.

  “No,” Sarah said.

  I slipped a boot in and stood up in the stirrup for a second, which I normally wouldn’t have done for another couple of days if I wasn’t showing off like a twelve-year-old. He just stood there, and I eased back down. I unsaddled the colt and loosened the rope, then rubbed him down with just my hand and left him tied while I put my saddle away. Those two followed me to the tack trailer.

  “I’d have thought you’d use one of these beat up rigs on him in case he pitched a fit,” Sarah said.

  “I knew he wouldn’t pitch no fit.”

  That got a funny look from Nora.

  “Where’s Les?” Sarah asked.

  “Hibernating.”

  The two of them followed me over to the platforms where I’d left my rifle and we all sat.

  “This is a beautiful spot,” Nora said, but she was glancing around at the storage trailer with the name of a dairy painted on the side but so faded you could barely read it, and the generator parked next to the tin shack, and the housetrailer with the homemade steps. Nora looked like we could have done a lot better by the place. The afternoon breeze was dying off, and it was a real nice time of day. She pointed out to the creek. “Are those ponderosa pines?”

  I couldn’t tell if she was teasing about the Ponderosa Motel the night before.

  “Tamarack.”

  She kind of wrinkled her face at me.

  “Really? I thought tamarack was some sort of larch.” She stood up and shaded her eyes. “We had them at summer camp when I was a kid. I remember. Tamarack.”

  “Where was that?” Sarah asked.

  “The Berkshires,” Nora said. “Connecticut.”

  “Out west it refers to a species of lodgepole,” Sarah said. “You can call it Sierra Lodgepole or Tamarack Pine. Totally interchangeable.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Nora said.

  “The proper name is Pinus contorta,” Sarah said. “They call it that because the subspecies down on the coast are all twisted and gnarly. You know, contorted.”

  “Like the people, you mean,” Nora said.

  They were like two old mares switching their tails at each other at feeding time. About then Lester stumbled out of the trailer and sat down on the step. Sarah stood up and ran a finger across the bruise on my cheek.

  “Falling out among thieves?” She walked over and sat next to Lester on the trailer steps. Pretty soon they disappeared inside.

  “Boy,” Nora said. “Cowgirls in tight jeans.”

  “You don’t want to call her that. So what’d you tell her?”

  “Nothing,” Nora said. “Nothing except what she already knew about Callie Dean’s phone calls.”

  “Are you going to get your tit in a wringer for not coming clean with the law?”

  “I beg your pardon?” she asked, but she smiled like I was flirting with her or something. “The firm wants to hold off until they see what move Gerald makes next. Obviously they’d like to catch him coloring outside the lines.”

  “He’ll be doing way more than that. You got your satellite phone on you?”

  “It’s charging back at the Ponderosa,” she said. “The car charger burned up last night.”

  “I need to borrow it for a couple of days. I’ll follow you into town after you leave.”

  “Can you stay?”

  “Nope. Can’t risk leaving Lester alone too long.”

  She just sort of shrugged like she was disappointed. “What are you up to?”

  “Better if I don’t tell you.”

  “You’re going back up there,” she said. “That’s why you want my phone.” She looked up the canyon. “Is that where it crashed?”

  “Yeah. About nine miles back.”

  Lester and Sarah came down from the trailer with a couple of pitchers and plastic glasse
s and a big chunk of cheese and set them on the tarp. Sarah poured the three of us all a shot of Crown Royal with ice from the pitcher. She handed a plastic glass to Nora.

  “I thought you’d like a whisky with the boys,” she said. “Help you settle in to life in the mountains.”

  Nora looked into her glass at the whisky for a minute, then took a sip and made a face.

  “How can you drink this?” she asked. Then she tossed off the rest like a tequila shot and gave a shiver.

  Sarah poured herself a big iced tea and sat down next to me on the boards close enough so our shoulders touched.

  Lester was eyeing me the whole time to see if I was pissed at him. He downed his drink and poured another shot, then dug his Copenhagen out of his pocket and took a pinch. Nora studied him like he was some Fiji Islander.

  “Can I see?” she held out her hand, and he put the snuff tin in it. She opened it and sniffed, making a not-bad face, then handed it back. “We don’t see a lot of this on the Third Street Promenade,” she said. She looked down at the Remington laying close enough for her to touch. “Not any of this.”

  Lester drained his glass then grinned at her over a lip of snuff.

  “Alcohol, tobacco, and firearms,” he said. “The all-American trifecta.”

  Sarah stood up like she was ready to leave. I remember when I was about fifteen hearing her tell a college girlfriend at the Fourth of July dance that she didn’t date local boys because she hated the taste of chew and whisky when she kissed them. That was about all she ever had in common with Callie Dean.

  “You want to turn him loose?” I nodded to the colt.

  “You should,” she said.

  “Oh, he won’t mind. Your dad picked another good one.”

  That got a smile out of her, and she almost skipped down to the fence. Inside the pen she talked to the horse a minute before leading him to the pasture gate.

  “I didn’t tell her about last night,” Nora said, “but I think she’s figured it out. Women can tell.”

  “If that old girl knows I slept with you, ain’t no way that’s good for either one of us.”

  “That’s a double negative,” she said.

  “Tell me about it.”

  I headed on down the mountain about twenty minutes after they left and caught up with Nora at the motel. She gave me a little hug once the door was closed. She unplugged the satellite phone charger and handed me the whole rig. “What do I do now?” she asked.

  “You should check out of here and scoot back to Mammoth. Better yet, L.A.”

  “I should be safe here,” she said.

  “Well, you’re not safe. Not till this thing settles.”

  “Will you tell me what you’re doing?”

  “Let’s just say I don’t plan on waiting around to get shot.”

  She took a card out of her bag and wrote something on it and stuck it in my shirt pocket.

  “That’s my cell,” she said. “If I wait in Mammoth, will you keep me updated?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I guess I won’t feel safe here by myself.” She put her arms around me then like she didn’t feel safe at all. “Do you ever come to L.A.?”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  I stayed with her longer than I should have. When I left I got her to say she’d check out right after. It was dark when I turned off the Lake Road to the pack station. As I drove through the timber, I could see a glow in the sky from the yard lights before I even got to the drift fence. When I got closer, I saw the glow reflected on the windows of the backpacker cars parked to the side of the aluminum gate. When I turned down the hill toward the creek, the pack station was lit up like a Walmart parking lot. I stopped my truck near the generator and got out, setting the rifle on the hood. I could see Lester inside the trailer eating ice cream by the refrigerator, but with the generator roaring away he never even heard my diesel. Most of the horses were down along the creek, but a few still milled around in the corral. The dust they kicked up swirled in the electric light.

  I walked down the road and checked the new switches I’d wired in. When I was done, I went in the trailer.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey,” he said, just as loud.

  I lit the kerosene lamps.

  “I’m going to check the generator. It’ll be off for a sec.”

  He nodded and put away the ice cream. I went back outside and shut it down. The roar faded away, and the yard got black until my eyes adjusted. I walked down the road in the dark and fiddled with a couple more switches, then fired up the generator again, turning on a whole different set of lights. Then I shut it off, picked up my rifle, and went inside. Lester stared at me in the yellow lamplight.

  “You might as well put a target on your back, bud.”

  “I wanted to see what I’m doing,” he said.

  “You’re eating ice cream.”

  “So?”

  “Those bastards are going to take it to us tonight. Maybe tomorrow. No later. They could drive right up to the trailer with Cuban music blasting on their stereo and you couldn’t hear them over that noisy sonofabitch.”

  He watched me set the rifle scabbard on the table.

  “So what do we do?”

  “You box them tools like I asked?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Then gather your goods for a little pack trip. You and me are heading out by sunup.”

  “To do what?”

  “To get some revenge for Callie Dean.”

  That made him happy. “Can I take my Ruger?”

  “The Ruger would be good.”

  He started for the back room of the trailer to fetch his gear. For once in his life he wasn’t too full of questions. He came back out with a packed stuff-sack.

  “So what do we tell Harvey?”

  “Nothing. I figure I’ll be writing him a check for the use of his animals once he finds out.”

  “How many?”

  “How many pack rigs do we have sitting out there?”

  He got it then. “That’s gonna cost us plenty, pard.”

  I started setting out the food we’d take. “Like it hasn’t already.”

  I went outside to snag a set of pack bags. I stopped in the dark outside the tack trailer and studied the trees across the creek and the road where it comes down out of the trees. The moon helped a bit, but it would help someone looking from the other direction just as well. After a minute I went back inside. When we’d packed our goods in the bags and hoisted the bags on the table ready for morning, Lester went off to bed. I pulled the rifle out of the scabbard, got my jacket, and went outside. I thumped the fuel tank on the generator to make sure it was full, and I grabbed the Crown Royal bottle we’d left on the pack platform and walked down the road in the dark.

  I found a spot under an aspen in the sagebrush and the rocks above the curve in the road. I was directly facing the bridge. I sat down with Dad’s rifle across my lap and waited. The timbered slope facing me was high and kept out a good bit of the moonglow. I was deep in the shadows and pretty much out of sight. I felt wide awake as I watched that bench of the canyon where the logging road cut through like it had for a hundred and fifty years, and I remembered every turn in the road and every big smooth hunk of granite that had been scraped to the side by blade and oxen, and what the washboard road and the creek with the moonlight on it and the bridge would look like through the windshield of a rented Escalade. I sipped the Crown Royal and thumbed the safety off, then pulled it back on again and touched the cartridge box in my jacket pocket and felt for the electrical wire lying next to me in the sagebrush. It didn’t seem long until I saw little flickers of light through the black mass of trees down-canyon. After a bit I could see two sets of headlights moving closer up toward the drift fence, then it all went dark. I took another sip of Crown Royal and ran my thumb across the safety again but left it on.

  Finally one set of parking lights glowed way up the hill in the clearing by the aluminum gate and started floatin
g down toward me in the dark. The Escalade drifted on down the hill toward the bridge, still with just the parking lights on but outlined by little red and white lights along the running boards and above the tailgate. I couldn’t see any sign of the second car. When the Escalade got ten feet from the water, it stopped. One of the Cuban fly fishermen got out of the driver’s side and climbed a few feet to stand on the start of that narrow bridge. He was one of the shooters who blew up the cabin and wore a holster on his belt. He took a few steps out on the bridge and looked down at the fast moving creek. He walked back to the car and got in. The electric windows rolled down and the headlights blazed on and hit me right in the face, though I was still more than a hundred fifty feet in front of them. I didn’t move, but they wouldn’t see me sitting still in the rocks. The driver was watching that bridge.

  The Escalade started across, just creeping, correcting a bit from side to side with more room to spare than he thought. When he was almost halfway across, I reached down and felt for the wire and the big plastic switch and thumbed it on. It was a full second before the generator fired up about a hundred yards away and another second until four big halogen spots flared on in a semicircle behind me and lit up that bridge like noon. The Escalade stopped hard, then started to back up, slow at first, the driver halfblind from the spots. I thumbed off the safety then and squeezed off a round into the road on my side of the bridge just so they could hear the shot and see the dirt kick up. The driver hit the gas, and one back wheel started to spin on the iron plate between the planks. In that bright light I could see the two Cubans in the front seat scrambling as the car drifted ass-first to one side. When the spinning rear wheel hit the planks, it bit into the wood and got instant traction. The driver overcorrected, and that wheel slid off the upstream edge of the bridge. I fired a second shot way over their heads and saw the front tires jerk sideways like they thought they could still back themselves out of trouble. The Escalade tilted, and the left front wheel went over the edge too. The whole thing hovered there for a second until it rolled off the bridge and splashed into the creek on its side. With the front windows open it sunk fast. When I could see the headlights under water, I snapped off the switch, and the spotlights dimmed out and the bridge went dark.