The Same River Twice

by Stephen Legault

  “What was Tabby’s role?”

  “Shit, he was one burned-out motherfucker. He was cooked. He killed a kid; did you know that? Fuck, even with my two years in Iraq, I never killed a kid. Lots of rag-heads and probably more than one or two women, but never a kid. Not that I know of at least. Lots of bullets flying around, mind you, so who the fuck really knows, right? But Tabby—he popped a kid in front of a fucking Shop N Go. He never got over it. Spent years with the barrel of his fucking piece in his mouth every goddamned night. Then he met Penelope at a SUWA meeting—”

  “SUWA?”

  “Southern Utah Wilderness Association. She took Tabby for a hike in the Grand Gulch, showed him the cliff dwellings, the kivas, all that shit, and Tabby stopped thinking about offing himself every minute of the day.”

  “Did you get along with him?”

  “Tabby? Sure. We were like brothers.”

  “When did you see him last?”

  “Oh man, it’s been a long time. You see, when Penny disappeared, we all just stopped hanging out, doing shit together. She was the glue. We came … unstuck after she disappeared. Kiel, he was always the least committed, so he went back to guiding full time. Darcy stayed in Flag and did her thing there. Tabby took the whole thing pretty hard. Me and him, we even tried to find Pen for awhile. You know, looked around, kind of like you did, but without the dreams and the maps all over the walls. But he had bills to pay, so he kept on doing his Dick Tracy thing up in Salt Lake. And me, well, I just carried on, you know what I mean?”

  The fire popped and Hayduke reached behind himself and put a few more pieces of juniper on the flames. “You got another beer?” he asked. Silas handed him one and opened a second for himself.

  “Why didn’t you tell me all this last year when we met?”

  “I wanted to, but I thought that you wouldn’t want my help if I told you about everybody. And then shit started to go down, you know what I mean? First Darcy, and then Kiel. I didn’t want to spook you.”

  “You wouldn’t have spooked me; we could have worked together. We might have even kept Tabby from going missing.”

  “Tabby was a big boy; he could look after himself. I doubt very much there was anything that you, or me, could have done for him.”

  “Do you know what happened to him?”

  “I got my suspicions. Isn’t that what you’re here to tell me about?”

  “I guess it is. But it’s a bloody mess and I don’t really understand much of it myself anymore.”

  “Try it out on me, and let’s see where it gets us.”

  Silas told him about his confrontation with the senator, and Katie Rain’s admission that Smith was under investigation, but not for Penelope’s murder. He told him about what he found in Isaiah’s office.

  “I don’t believe it for one fucking second,” Hayduke said, tossing another beer can on the ground. “From where I stand it all lines up. Isaiah, Love, Barry, Smith: they’re all in on this.”

  “That’s what I wanted to ask you about. It was Tabby that got the pictures of Barry and the senator.”

  “Yeah, he was doing her when he was mayor of Salt Lake, and we figured that it was likely still going on. Tabby got the pictures himself, you see? Pen didn’t want any part of it. She wanted a fair fight, but Tabby was a street cop, a scrapper. He wanted to put some insurance in the bank, so he followed Smith when he was in Salt Lake, and sure enough, Barry shows up. He didn’t get any porn shots, just the two of them holding hands, kissing, but it was enough. Tabby and the rest of us talked it through. It was a bit of a row, actually. In the end we decided to use it as insurance.”

  “Against what? The Colorado River Compact?”

  “That’s what this is all about, Silas. Everything. You must know that. All these places, all these landscapes, it still all comes down to the Colorado River. It’s the heart of the desert, of the canyon country. It’s the big enchilada. It’s all Penelope cared about. I can’t fucking believe you didn’t see that.”

  Silas fiddled with the tab on his beer can. “It would have been a lot easier if you had just spelled it out for me from the start.”

  “I’m sorry,” Hayduke said. “I’ve got a big fucking mouth. But what I’m trying to say is, yes, it’s about the Compact. If Smith had gotten his way—if he gets his way—then the feds would have had the power to refill Lake Powell without having to coddle the lower basin states. Shit, the water level is down to less than fifty percent. If Smith passes his bill, then Utah can tell the lower basin states to go fuck themselves, and hide behind the Bureau of Reclamation to do it. They could shut the tap on Glen Canyon Dam and just let a trickle through for the next ten years. I mean, we’re still talking about a huge amount of water—something like seven or eight million acre-feet a year—but it would violate the Law of the River, not to mention our treaty with Mexico.

  “That water is big money. Power for a million-plus people. Beaucoup dollars coming from that. Last I heard more than a hundred and twenty-five mill each year. And the recreation dollars! You know how much Paul Love could rent a slip on that new marina for? Our old pals Jacob Isaiah and that Barry woman stand to make a mint if they can build their Escalante Resort.

  “They say to hell with the Grand Canyon; to hell with all the endangered fish downstream. Fuck the Mexicans. Smith’s bill would have given the feds the power to turn off the spillway and destroy Glen Canyon for a second time. It would have killed us. It would have killed Pen. So we did what we had to do.”

  “You blackmailed a US senator.”

  “We did what we thought was necessary. It wasn’t like we set out to do it. It was our only chance to kill Smith’s bill.”

  “How did the reporter, Kresge, get involved?”

  “He was our insurance policy. Pen knew him. He covered politics. She gave him a package of information, but embargoed it. She told him that he could only use the images if she said so.”

  “How did that work? These days if a reporter had a scandalous story like the Smith-Barry affair, they would run with it, consequences be damned.”

  “Tabby had something on Kresge too.”

  “Really? What?”

  “Sleeping with a source. Not Penelope; no way. But Kresge was a sleazeball too. Everybody has something they don’t want to go public, so Tabby got something on Kresge, and that way we could control the story.”

  “So you told Smith what you had on him?”

  “That was Penelope’s job. I said I’d do it, but by then I was looking less like a clean-cut vet and more like, well, more like—”

  “More like Hayduke.”

  “Yeah, so Penny volunteered. She met with Smith in the spring five years ago. We had it all lined up. Smith was going to introduce the Bill the next week. He had the votes, but just barely. It was going to be tight. So Pen met with him and laid it out. I guess they got at it pretty good. Smith had her tossed from his office down in Blanding. But he thought about the consequences. The man wants to be president; did you know that? He’s got an exploratory committee and everything. I don’t know how he thinks fucking over California will help him, given that they have fifty-five electoral college votes, but I guess he figures a wild-eyed Mormon conservative from Utah will never win California anyway. So he thinks it over and decides to kill his bill. Says that it would be too expensive, cost the country too much during a time of austerity. The country was hurting, so it made sense.”

  “But you think he didn’t leave it alone?”

  “No way he left it alone. He killed Penelope, and he killed Kresge.”

  “Penny told him who had the story?”

  “Fuck no, he must have figured that out on his own. It wouldn’t take much. There’s only so many national political reporters in Utah. He must have narrowed it down.”

  “But there wasn’t any investigation into Kresge’s death?”

  “Smith made it look like an accident. Just like you on Comb Ridge. Just a brake malfunction on one of the most dangerous roads in U
tah. Who’s going to investigate a US senator for murder? It was a perfect crime.”

  “How did Smith know that with Kresge dead the photos wouldn’t simply fall into the hands of the next reporter down the food chain?”

  Hayduke seemed to stare into the flames for a long time, his face a mask of contemplation.

  “How did he know?”

  “I don’t know. I have no idea. Maybe he had some pull at the paper? I don’t know.”

  “It seems like one hell of a risk to take for a man who wants to be president. I mean, there’s been more than one sex scandal on the road to the White House, but murder? That’s tough to get over.”

  “Don’t fucking kid yourself, Silas. You Canadians think politics isn’t a blood sport, but it is. Lots of presidents have had lots of people killed for political gain. Look at that motherfucker Bush. He sent more than four thousand Americans and more than a hundred thousand Iraqis to the grave, and all so he could win a second fucking term and continue to give blowjobs to the oil and gas companies.”

  Silas felt his cell phone buzz in his pocket: an incoming text message. There was practically no cell reception anywhere in the Monument, but he had found that from time to time, depending on the wind direction and cloud cover, he could occasionally send and receive texts. He ignored it for the time being. “That’s a little different than cutting someone’s brake lines or shooting someone in cold blood.”

  “Yeah, with the Iraq thing we committed war crimes against a whole nation; with Pen and Kresge and the others it was simple ideological differences.”

  “Are you saying that Smith killed, or had all these people killed, just because they disagreed with him?”

  “Sure, it happens all the time.”

  “It doesn’t happen all the time. You don’t kill people just because they have a different point of view.”

  “You kill them because their point of view threatens yours; because their point of view is getting in the way of what you want.”

  “I thought you said Smith had them killed because of the blackmail.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  Silas watched him through the fire.

  “You didn’t agree with that strategy, did you?”

  “Penny didn’t, but Darcy and Tabby thought it was the only way to stop the Compact Bill. Kiel just went along with whatever they said. Pen didn’t like it, but she agreed it was the only way.”

  “What about you?”

  “The Compact didn’t matter one fucking way or another, man. It was just another piece of paper, just another bunch of people talking, rather than doing something. I am sick to death of listening to people talk about all this shit. Saving the desert, saving the canyons. Free the Colorado! And then, at the end of the goddamned day, what we get is a sludge-filled sewage lagoon where there was once a wild and beautiful river. People think that because you can wade through houseboaters’ shit to Cathedral in the Desert again that everything is alright, and we should be happy with what we have. It’s bullshit! The goal is to destroy that motherfucking dam. To smash it to pieces, to see the Colorado running free once more. C. Thorn Smith’s bill would have drowned the Glen a second time; we wouldn’t let that happen, but someone figured that stopping Smith from filling up the reservoir again was good enough. It was a total fucking betrayal.”

  “Who betrayed who? What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing, man, I’m not talking about nothing. The goal was never to just stop Smith, that’s all I’m saying. Give me another beer, would you?”

  Silas threw Hayduke a beer and opened the last one on the ring for himself. He watched the young man drink half of the can in one long pull. “What are you going to do now? You’re the last person from that photograph alive.”

  “You don’t know that. Tabby could be out there. Maybe he got spooked. Maybe he’s hiding out.” Hayduke looked down at the sheet of paper in his hand. In his anger he’d partially crumpled it up. He smoothed it out on his leg and while finishing the can of beer he looked at it. He leaned forward and laid it down on the coals of the fire. It instantly ignited and burned, sending the tattered residue to rise up on convection currents of heat into the night sky.

  Silas watched him. Hayduke remained immobile, staring at where the photo had been in the flames. Silas considered the young man’s predicament: he was the last man standing of the five friends who had stared down a US senator, blackmailing him, and risking their lives in doing so. It had cost them, and now this young man was all that stood in the way of someone getting away with murder and reintroducing a bill in the Senate that would drown Glen Canyon yet again.

  Then Silas thought again: Hayduke was the last man standing.

  35

  “I GOT TO TAKE A piss.” Hayduke rose heavily from his chair and walked off into the darkness. Silas watched the fire and then regarded the dark, heavy sky above. It would almost certainly rain before the night was out. He waited a long time before Hayduke returned, another six-pack in his hairy hand. Something about how Hayduke walked triggered a memory. He seemed to be favoring his injured leg. He offered Silas one. Both men opened the beer. “Sorry, it’s a little warm. No ice.”

  Silas continued to regard him. He’d listened to his speech but despite the young man’s bluster, Silas had something else on his mind. “So, you still have that copy of Desert Solitaire?”

  “Of course! It’s my most treasured possession.”

  “Penelope got that signed by Abbey. Did you know that?”

  “I knew he had signed it.”

  “Yeah, when she was an undergrad. She found the first edition copy in a bookstore in Tucson and when he was doing a signing there, after he released The Fool’s Progress, she got him to sign Solitaire too. She said they talked for almost ten minutes. The rest of the lineup was getting pretty agitated, and the bookstore owner made her step aside. He asked her to have a drink with him afterwards, but she declined.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he had a reputation.”

  “So what, man? Have the drink; what could it hurt?”

  “She didn’t. And he died a year later.”

  “That’s the way she was, you know. Always morally superior.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Penny. That’s the way it was with her sometimes. She was quick to take the high road, to point out when you were on the low road.”

  “How is that a bad thing?”

  “It’s not, I guess. It was really fucking annoying sometimes. That’s the way it was with the Glen, you know what I mean?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “It’s nothing, man. Forget about it.”

  Silas felt a raindrop on his head. He looked up at the sky and another one hit his cheek. “I, ah, I noticed, Hayduke, that you had Penelope’s notebook in your Jeep.”

  There was a long silence. A few more drops of rain hit the fire, making a hiss. Hayduke sat still, facing the flames, the can of warm beer in his left hand.

  “Did you break into my house and steal it?”

  Again, a long silence.

  “Hayduke—”

  “I fucking heard you!” he exploded. “I heard you the first fucking time.”

  “You did, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, I broke in and stole it. I needed it. There are places in that journal that still need to be saved, man. I needed to know what Penelope had in mind for her Ed Abbey National Monument plan. I needed the journal.”

  “Why didn’t you just ask?”

  “I don’t know.” Hayduke was quiet again.

  “I would have let you see it.”

  “I said I don’t know!”

  “So you drove down to my place in the Castle Valley that night, the night when my bookstore burned down, and broke into my house? I thought you were up in the La Sals that night.”

  “I was. It’s a short drive. Only like an hour.”

  “Were you in Moab?”

  Hayduke looke
d at him. The flames had burned up around another piece of juniper and there was a red glow in the man’s eyes.

  “Did you come through Moab? You knew I wasn’t going to be home, didn’t you. You knew that I wasn’t in the Castle Valley. You knew exactly where I was.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, man. I went to your place to ask you for the journal and when you weren’t there, I just … let myself in. You told me you kept the journal hidden and there were only so many places.”

  “You broke into my place.”

  “I just … yeah, fuck, I broke in. Shit, it wasn’t hard. I didn’t even have to wreck anything. I just popped the lock. You really should get a better set-up. When I was in Iraq we used to slip in and out of places all the time, no big deal.”

  “This isn’t Iraq. Why didn’t you just come to the store? You must have known where I was.”

  Hayduke was silent. He drank his beer.

  “You did know where I was. You were in Moab.” Silas closed his eyes. In the time it took for the fire to pop and send sparks into the sky, two images aligned in his mind. One of them was Hayduke limping as he walked back from the Jeep just now, warm beer in his hand. The second image was that of a man with a Molotov cocktail in his hand, moving awkwardly but confidently before tossing the bomb into Silas’s bookstore. Silas had convinced himself that the limp was that of an old man—Jacob Isaiah—but it wasn’t. It was the limp of a young man who had recently been injured. “You were at the store. It was you I saw through the window. It was you.”

  36

  “YOU BETTER STOP NOW, DR. Pearson. Just stop now.” Hayduke hadn’t moved. He sat still in his camp chair, his left hand pressing into the flimsy tin of the beer can.

  “Did you burn my store down?”

  Hayduke shifted his weight now. He finished the beer and tossed the can into the flames. The paint on it began to bubble almost immediately. He pushed himself to standing.