Death Without Company

by Craig Johnson

  Her eyes were very large. “How did you know what mile marker?”

  “Habit. Stay here, but look for me? 10-50, mile marker 12 on route 87, emergency ambulance and wrecker.”

  I crunched through and sank past the powder to the slick surface below. The hard ring of ice at my knees was the only traction I could get, so I used it to bull my way up the slope. The air was burning in my lungs as I got to the shoulder. I looked back in the direction from which we had come; there hadn’t been anybody on the road since we had passed Sheridan, so I had a chance.

  I looked at the car again and froze. Lying on its side was Isaac Bloomfield’s ’71 Mercedes.

  The doors hadn’t sprung and the windows were intact, the motor was running, and the wheels turned like a gut-shot horse. The lights of the metallic-colored sedan pointed off toward the hills of Lodge Grass as the motor sputtered and started to fail. The steam was still rising from the surface of the road so it must have just happened. I slid into the trunk lid. The glazed surface of the road made it difficult to navigate, but I traversed my way around to the back glass; the condensation had fogged the surface from the inside so that I couldn’t see. As I scrambled, I heard a groan, and I suddenly had a little trouble breathing. I threw myself around the rear bumper and was relieved as the motor finally died, taking with it the hazard of internal combustion and two wheels driving.

  Somewhere along the way I must have put my gloves on, which was good because the bottom of the car was still hot. I climbed up, and the sizzle of the wet leather on the exhaust smelled like a burning steak. I reached and grabbed the bump strip at the middle of the passenger-side door. I pulled at the handle and the damn thing actually gave with a quick bump but then settled back and fastened. I yanked it hard enough to get my fingers under the lip of the door and leveraged it open again. It wasn’t going to stay, so I lodged my feet against the opening and hit it with all the weight that had inconvenienced me up to now. The door bent completely back on its hinges and ripped loose, flipping past the hood, and sliding away on the frozen sheen of ice. Piss on Ralph Nader, they never made ’em like they used to.

  Isaac wasn’t moving. His eyes were closed, and there was blood on the side of his head. An arm was lying across the trunk of his body. It’s always the same, if there’s even the remotest possibility of neck or back injury, you might do more bad than good. If I went in, I was going to crash down on top of him, so I put a leg over the side to give me a little advantage. He was warm, and there was a familiar rhythm at the inside of his wrist. It was then that one of those little miracles happened. He stirred once, adjusting his weight as if trying to find a more comfortable position. It wasn’t much, but it told me that his spine and nervous system were intact. He could be moved. I strained to reach the seatbelt that had saved his life and thanked God that seat-belts were designed to fasten on the inside. As I pulled him from a sitting position, his legs caught below the steering wheel, and I had to hoist him a little to the right to get him free. As I negotiated the controls of the vehicle, I got my other hand on the front of the doctor’s coat and lifted him up.

  That was when I felt the lights. Nothing I had called would have flashing yellow lights, and nothing I called would be that big. The state of Wyoming uses large five-ton plows equipped with shale spreaders that could disseminate five yards of granulated scoriae; this meant ten tons of bad news arriving in a little more than a minute.

  Suddenly rediscovering my strength and glad that Isaac hadn’t gained that much weight since prison camp, I pulled him free from the steering wheel and almost had him when his foot caught on the seatbelt. Forcing myself to be calm, I turned him to the side, but the seatbelt clung there. I took a breath and twisted him in the other direction as the belt slipped free and slithered back into the darkness. I raised him up the rest of the way and turned.

  It was way too late. The driver must have seen my emergency lights and he had started braking, but it didn’t look like he was going to make it. I looked down at the icy reflection of the black road. There was nowhere we could go. Anywhere we went from here would be just as bad as where we were and probably worse, so I did nothing. I watched as ten tons of WYDOT equipment hit the first ice slick and started its sickening slide sideways.

  As we sat there on the side of the car like some bizarre modern pieta, I couldn’t help but think that this is what I got for thinking I could have a night off to take a beautiful woman to a magical place to meet wonderful people. Retribution was at hand in the form of cold rolling steel and red shale.

  The guardrail of the underpass looked like a galvanized funnel, and I glanced at the ice plastered on the northwest surface of the metal. Arching showers of melted snow flew from the tires of the truck. The plow seemed as big as the ones I had seen on the front of Burlington Northern locomotives.

  I looked down at Isaac and smiled; this shit didn’t happen to Tom Mix when he was saving some nubile young thing who had been tied to the tracks. What happened to me didn’t seem to matter, but Isaac was different; how could a life so full of meaning end so meaninglessly? I smoothed the old man’s hair on one side; there was blood, but I didn’t think he was hurt badly. As the light of the oncoming truck lit the red liquid streaks, I heard a noise in the distance. It might have been the rhythm of the big studded and chained Bandag tires clawing the aggregate surface of the highway or the thump of the Bullet’s diesel, but it sounded like drums.

  When I looked up again, the back of the truck was sliding toward us, and the taillights were two angry eyes. The spin continued, but the showers of slush didn’t seem to be arching quite so high. I watched as the headlights turned back toward us again along with the vaulted metal of the plow. The truck slid to a stop about nine feet from where we sat. It looked like an irate buffalo, blowing steam from its stacked nostrils and dripping sweat from its forehead. The drums had stopped.

  Static. “Unit Six, 10-55, over.”

  I knew Wes Rogers because he was old like me. He was the first highway patrolman on the scene, and I was helping him with his report. The other HPs oozed in under throbbing blue light in their mercury black cruisers, and the EMTs loaded Isaac Bloomfield into the back of the ambulance.

  “So you just sat there?” He was smiling as he wrote on the metal clipboard, his Smoky the Bear hat pushed back in a pretty good likeness of Will Rogers, no relation. It was strange being on the passenger side of the cruiser. He shook his head and chuckled. “You got an extra pair of shorts?”

  “I don’t wear shorts; that’s why women are drawn to me.”

  He stopped writing. “Well, I don’t mind telling you, I’da had to go home and change mine.” He handed me the clipboard to sign the forms. “How far you away from retiring?”

  When I pushed on the pen it lit up the writing surface. “Chronologically or financially?” I handed him back the clipboard and stuck the nifty pen in my pocket. “Why do you ask?”

  He tucked the forms back into the center console. “I’m gone next month. Scottsdale, Arizona.”

  I was surprised; I figured Wes was going to be around forever. “What’re you gonna do in Scottsdale?”

  He looked out at the frozen landscape, and we might as well have been on the dark side of the moon. “Watch my grandson grow up, and keep the Mexicans outta the golf course ponds at night.”

  I thought for a moment and came up with Wes’s wife’s name. “What’s Ruth got to say about all this?”

  I followed his eyes, and we watched as Pete’s Towing pulled the lowered and narrowed Mercedes over and onto its wheels. “I figure she’ll take it all right, seein’ as how she’s been waiting for it for the last twenty-six years.”

  I stuck my hand out, and he shook it back. He told me I could keep the pen as a token of his affection and a fond farewell.

  I trudged through the crusty snow of the roadside toward the Bullet and pulled up short as a chain line dragged Isaac Bloomfield’s sole transport up onto the levered platform of the wrecker; a coveralled driver c
inched the vehicle down with log dogs. The elderly physician’s baby was headed for Sonny George’s junkyard, just outside of Durant. They would hold the car there until Isaac could decide what to do with it. It was a shame, really. The doc had owned the car for as long as I’d known him, and he kept it in tip-top condition. Fred Ray, the mechanic at the local Sinclair station, had once told me the car was in immaculate shape due to Isaac’s preventive maintenance. I suppose even German engineering failed sometimes; that, or the eighty-five-year-old driver had.

  In the brief conversation we had had while the EMTs had loaded Isaac into the van, he told me that he had grown uncomfortable with the idea of someone else performing the autopsy on Mari Baroja and so had decided to hop in his classic two-wheel-drive Mercedes and motor a couple of hours through a high-plains snowstorm at midnight. He thought it was his brakes that had failed.

  As I stood there thinking, my eyes drifted past the ghostly silver of the German car to the rolling snow-covered hills to the east. Henry Standing Bear had said it best. He had started me running about a month ago as the first part of a four-part plan of redemption. I had had one of my collapses along Clear Creek and had stalled for rest time by telling him about the improvements I was going to make to my place with the help of friends of his who owned Red Road Contracting. He didn’t look at me but rather looked across the small valley at the land where his grandfathers used to hunt and fish. I had seen the downturned corners of that mouth before and asked, “What?”

  “You don’t own the land.” I had slumped against a pole and prepared myself for another tirade about the heathen-devil-white-man’s theft of the North American continent, but instead Henry’s voice was softened with dismissal. “You do not own your mother, do you? Sounds silly, owning your mother? It is like that with the land, silly to think you own it.” He was silent for a moment; when he spoke, his voice had a tiny edge to it. “But this land owns you.”

  I thought about the drums; they were the same drums I had heard on the mountain, the ones that had kept me going when there wasn’t anything else to go on. I wondered if the Old Cheyenne were there, just out of sight. Had they held the big buffalo truck back? Had they ridden alongside it on their war ponies, using their spears to coax it to a sullen stop and had it cost them? Even in the spirit world, I would imagine such actions are not taken without risk. I looked north and west toward the Little Big Horn and the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. It was comforting to think that they were still here, stewards of a mother they did not own. The stinging wind began making my eyes tear, at least I think that’s what it was, so I laughed and lifted a hand, tipping my hat just to let them know I knew where they were and to say thanks.

  I turned toward my truck. Fatigue was starting to drag at my shoulders, but I made it. I was almost too tired to walk but drove us safely back to Durant and deposited Maggie at the Log Cabin Motel. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to come in?”

  I looked past her and into the inviting little cabin, and I was tempted but very tired. “I better take a rain check.” I couldn’t see her face, backlit as she was and standing in the doorway. “I’ve got Dog.”

  She studied me for a moment. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Tired, that’s all.” I smiled. “I usually pay more attention to my dates.”

  I could just make out the glow of her eyes in the shadow. “When I want your attention, I’ll get it.”

  I looked down at my boots that were covering with snow. “I guess it’s only fair to tell you . . .”

  “Hey, Sheriff?”

  I glanced back up, and her face was very close. “Yep?”

  “Maybe you think too much.” She leaned over and kissed me very softly, and my lungs felt as if they were going to burst through my chest. She didn’t close her eyes and neither did I. It was a long kiss, and I leaned in after her as she drew away. A chill fired off from my spine like a coiled snake.

  She smiled a slow, languid smile. “How was that, without thinking about it?”

  It took me a second to reacquire speech. “Pretty wonderful.”

  “Maybe you should try it more often.” She looked into me for a moment more, taking soundings, and the door closed.

  I stood there for a while, maybe hoping that the door would open again, but finally trudged back to the Bullet and drove Dog and myself over to the hospital to check on Isaac.

  I didn’t know the young man at the desk, but he told me that Isaac had suffered minor scrapes and contusions and that his head had a bump the size of a goose egg, but he was resting comfortably and was in room 111 if I wanted to take a look. I declined, and the kid surmised that as old as Isaac was, he was one tough cookie. I told him he had no idea.

  When I got back to the jail, Vic’s unit was parked out front, and the office lights were on. Dog followed me as I made my way in and started down the hallway. There was a Post-it on my doorjamb, but the handwriting was strange. I leaned in and read it: SHERIFF LONGMIRE, I CALLED CHARLIE NURBURN’S NUMBER IN VISTA VERDE THREE TIMES AND

  LEFT MESSAGES. SO FAR, NO CALL BACK. SANCHO. It gave the date, and the times of the three separate phone calls. Jeez, the kid was even polite in his Post-its, and obviously Vic was making an impression in that he had signed with his new nickname.

  I walked down the hallway to the holding cells in the back. Santiago Saizarbitoria was asleep on my usual bunk, and evidently he was not completely trusting in that his handcuffs were locked around the bars to hold the cell door open. Once a corrections officer . . . Dog and I stood there in the dark, listening to the soft rhythm of his breath as the beeper rose and fell on his chest.

  I looked down at Dog. “No room at the inn.” He stayed close as I turned the corner to the other holding cell, and we crawled onto our individual bunks. I pulled my jacket over me, carefully placing my hat over my face. Maybe it was the emotional drain of the evening or just the length of a very physical day, but I forced my eyes closed in a furtive and uncomfortable sleep. I held my eyelids together, and what I saw was like the credits on a movie whose format had not been changed for television.

  I watched the rainbow threads of grass shimmer in a gentle summer gust that traveled across the middle fork of the Powder River with the swell of something beneath. It rolled like the ocean, moving with a quality that was sensual and female. There was a moist, weighty warmth, not in the scorching of the summer sun, but in the laden air the grass trades for carbon dioxide. Heavy riches.

  I was floating now, even though I was lying deep in the swaying stalks. The sky was without a cloud. It was late, though, because the light was parallel to the earth and flat.

  I could feel the heat burning through my limbs, easing the ache of my throbbing joints and loosening the tightness in my muscles. As the tendons in my neck relaxed, I felt my head slip to the right, and I could see someone lying beside me. I knew who it was before I could really see her; the scarf that I had seen before trailed across the seed heads of the buffalo grass and back to her hand. I was so close I could make out the texture of the material and the quality of the work.

  She knew I was watching her. Her profile was sharp against the light of the sky, and the angles of her face planed the colors of the late afternoon like a prism. I felt the breath catch in my throat at the wonder of her and knew that everything I had heard was true. After a moment, she rolled over and looked at me with those dark eyes, a plucked piece of grass between her teeth. She smiled and reached a hand across to touch my shoulder. Her fingers were light, and a shiver went through me; the coolness of her spread like a welcome cloud on an overly sunny day.

  She looked toward the mountains, as if she were trying to think of how to say what she wanted to say. After a moment, she looked back, pulled the thick sweep of hair from her face, and withdrew her hand as she rolled over and supported herself. She was still wearing the blue-and-white spotted dress, the one Lucian had described. She had trouble steadying herself, and it was only then that I noticed she was very pregnant. Her ha
nd came out again, slowly, as if she didn’t want to frighten me. The slim fingers wrapped around mine and lifted my hand toward her. A few clouds appeared like solemn voices and broken hearts.

  I started, caught my hat against my chest, and sat up with my weight on my arms. I stared into the small amount of light from the hallway, pulled my pocket watch out to read the time, and took a deep breath; I’d only been asleep for an hour or so. I could feel a cooling sweat at my throat and decided I wasn’t going to be able to go back to sleep so I reached down slowly to pick up my coat where it had fallen and placed my hat on my head. I was a little unsteady at first but walked out to the main part of the room and turned the corner to check on Saizarbitoria. He was still sleeping, and I had a brief twinge of jealousy; oh, to be twenty-eight, clear of conscience and young of body. “In the May-morn of his youth, ripe for exploits and mighty enterprises.” I wondered how the kid was with Shakespeare.

  Dog followed as I made my way to my office and then curled up beside my desk and fell fast asleep; he didn’t have a care. Something was bothering me though, in the recent scheme of things, and the first thing I could think of was Isaac’s car. The old Mercedes was in miraculous condition; why had the brakes failed? In the few words that had passed between us, he had said that they hadn’t worked. It was crazy, but a lot of things were as of late. I got an empty Post-it from Ruby’s desk and wrote a note to Saizarbitoria to go over to Sonny George’s tomorrow and check the Mercedes’s brakes for tampering. I stuck the note on his handcuffs, still locked to the door.

  I absentmindedly plucked Sancho’s Post-it from the doorway of my office, walked around Dog, and sat at my desk. It was the middle of the night, and I was too awake to sleep. I looked at the Post-it in my hands, noting that the last time Sancho had called the notorious Charlie Nurburn was at 9:32 P.M. The kid was courteous to a fault.