by Bart Paul
“He probably caught a commercial flight back east from SFO,” she said. She dumped the eggs and some sausage on the plates. “I messed them up. You don’t have to eat them.”
I dug in. “They aren’t as bad as they look.”
That wasn’t the right thing to say.
“And you were right,” she said. “The blood type of the semen recovered from Nora Ross didn’t match GQ. We checked the Cuban kid’s too. Nothing there.” She fidgeted with her shirttail. “I asked them to check the two from the bridge. And the two at the snow cabin.” She clanked the spatula on the skillet. “Anybody else?”
“Tony?”
That wasn’t the right thing to say either.
“There was no powder residue on GQ’s hands,” she said. “And the round smashed two of his front teeth. I guess if you were killing yourself with a pistol to the roof of your mouth, you’d take better aim.”
“You’d think.”
“I just wanted to tell you you’ve been right about all this.”
“That don’t change anything.”
“The Cuban kid hinted to Francisco that it was Teófilo who killed them at the motel,” she said, “after he raped Nora. But the kid was too scared to come out and say it.”
“Shows good sense. Even with his pals gone.”
“He knows we’re going to have to let him go,” she said. “Even with him talking, Mitch still hasn’t connected the dots. If he did his head would explode. He never even asked why you rented the motel room. He thinks you did it just to screw the pretty lawyer.” She gave me a look. “The man is an idiot.”
“That’s why we got to lay it out for him. I got to straighten this out.”
“It’s like the missing plane story and the Les and Callie and Albert story came to a fork in the road,” she said.
“Only in Mitch’s tiny little brain.”
“Every day we say nothing,” she said, “makes it harder to say anything.”
“Then nobody knows the truth.”
She stood at the stove barelegged with her hair all over the place. When she caught me looking, she turned and walked back toward the bedroom.
I took my coffee outside with the stuff-sacks we’d laid out the night before. I loaded them with our food and kitchen junk in a pair of pack bags and set them on the platforms with my bedroll. When I came back in, she’d pulled on her Wranglers and boots, pinned up her hair, and set down to eat. The food helped her disposition.
“You think we’ll be able to see the fireworks from where we camp tonight?” she asked.
“Should be. Where the plane crashed is pretty high, so we’ll at least see the colors over the reservoir.”
“Thanks for doing this,” she said.
“Nothing like a little decomposing mule meat to redirect the mind.”
“Seriously,” she said. “I need to see where it happened.” She got up and took her plate to the sink.
We went outside and got to saddling. I went slow with the colt, brushing him down and laying my blankets just-so before I set Dad’s saddle on his back. Sarah’s horse was rigged up by the time I took the brush and swept the Hornberg Lake trail dust from the tooling on the skirts.
“It’s just going to get dusty again in twenty minutes,” she said.
“That’s okay.” I finished brushing the saddle off, then wiped it with a rag and hobbled the colt.
I saddled the dun mule with a sawbuck but no bags. We’d pack the stuff from the dead mule on him when we got to the forks. We hoisted the loaded pack bags and the one bedroll on the roan and lashed it all down. Then I tied the mule in behind him and took the rifle scabbard over to Sarah’s gelding.
“You mind carrying this? I don’t want it under my leg if the colt pitches a fit.”
“Sure,” she said. “Are you going to lug this rifle around for the rest of your life?”
“Yes ma’am.”
We strapped the scabbard under her stirrup leather. She swung up and I handed her the pack string. Then I buckled on my chinks, cheeked the colt, and stepped aboard and let Sarah lead the way up the canyon.
We didn’t talk. Not for a long time. We just rode up through the sagebrush into that familiar country with the creek cutting through the meadows and the first of Bonner and Tyree’s cows and calves out on the permit grass and the granite peaks up ahead, lined up one after the other with a wisp of cloud over them all. We stopped after a while up on the upper edge of the meadow on the wet grass covered with yellow monkey-flower. I rode the colt up next to Sarah and made him stand. With her watching the clouds and the ridges and finally looking sort of at peace, she reached over and put her hand on my neck and held it there for a minute the way she did. When she pulled it back, the colt must have noticed it for the first time and jumped sideways. He bogged his head and tried to buck and I could hear Sarah laugh almost like a shriek, happy and not worried at all. I let him buck a few jumps before I pulled him up and circled him back to where Sarah sat the gelding.
“Oops,” she said.
“He didn’t mean nothin’. He’s just feeling good.”
“Will I be able to see any of the plane?” she asked.
“Sure. I’ll show you where we hid all the pieces. Then you’ll be my partner in crime.”
“I’d like that.” She looked at her watch. “We’re missing the parade.”
“We’re making our own parade.”
She took off her hat and undid her hair, sort of combing it out with her fingers and half smiling to herself without looking at me as she put the hat back on.
I pushed the colt to take the lead when the trail left the meadow and wound through the old aspen where the Basques had carved their sheepherder names in the white bark a hundred years before. We stopped to let the horses drink in the next meadow, where calves stood in shallow water on the gravel of the creekcrossings and watched us until we passed. Then we rode on up the canyon a while more. We passed the two ATVs, where the Cubans I’d killed had left them in the boggy timber.
“Did they ever find that watch?”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Wasn’t Lester wearing a watch when your crew took him out of the chopper?”
“I didn’t see one,” she said. “You mean the gold Rolex he took?”
“Yeah.”
“He wasn’t wearing a watch,” she said. “And I read the coroner’s report. It was real specific.”
“He was wearing it when we strapped him down.”
“It probably fell off,” she said, “while he was struggling.”
We rode on a bit. We were in the baby aspen almost to The Roughs.
“That was a good watch with a diver’s clasp. It wouldn’t have just come off, no matter how much he thrashed. If it wasn’t on the body, that meant Lester took it off himself.”
“My god, why?”
“Sinking down in that freezing dark water and scared shitless knowing he’s about ten seconds from the worst kind of dying, what does he do? He reaches over and unclasps that damn watch. It was the last thing he did in this life.”
She pulled her horse up. I had to circle the colt back around and ride up next to her.
“Oh, no,” she said.
“Yeah. So folks wouldn’t call us body robbers.” I couldn’t look at her. “He made me swear the whole thing was just our secret. Like we were a couple of damn kids. He was keeping his word. So he wouldn’t let me down.”
“Oh, Tommy.”
“Goddamn that boy.”
I choused the colt and rode out ahead on to The Roughs. I could hear the clank of her gelding’s shoes hitting loose chunks of shale right behind me and the hollow sound of the shale sliding rock-on-rock, but I still couldn’t make myself turn around.
Even taking time to drag the dead mule off the trail and pack up its gear, we would get to the patch of grass just below North Pass where we found the wreck in a couple of hours and make camp. There wouldn’t be much trace of what had happened there. One more good rain
and it would be as if that old boy had never hit that mountain, had never missed that pass. It would be like he was just flying around over us forever, trying to find his way home. At least that’s how I like to think of it. And except for me, and now Sarah, any folks who would tell otherwise are dead. We kept on riding past The Roughs and disappeared into the trees.
