by Leif Enger
“Did they see him?”
Andreeson seemed to feel he had offered adequate detail. “Yes. Almost certainly.” He leaned over, dropped his cigarette into the fire, then peered down after it. “What we’d like, Mr. Land, is for you to come with us, just for a day or two. Drive around a little.”
“Drive around?” Dad said.
“We’d appreciate it.”
Through all this Roxanna had held silent. Of course I didn’t know how much Dad had told her regarding Davy—nothing in our hearing. Clearly he hadn’t breathed a word about old Putrid here, yet watching Roxanna you’d have guessed she not only knew my brother but had raised him herself and tutored him in evading the law. Her face was shut and latched against Andreeson, which I suppose isn’t surprising, given how her great-uncle felt about Pinkertons.
“Drive around,” Dad mused. “Mr. Andreeson, do you still believe I can somehow lead you to my son?”
“Not by natural means,” answered Andreeson.
“Do you suspect the other kind are at my disposal?”
Andreeson said, “The work I am in sometimes overlaps into other domains. You may be able to help us—I would say, calibrate our search.”
Dad stiffened. “I’m no diviner. Don’t talk to me about it.”
“No offense intended,” Andreeson said, “but hear me out. Will you hear me out?”
Dad didn’t answer.
“Two years ago there was a kidnapping, a little girl in Michigan. The kidnapper put her in a rented cabin and drove away to find a phone booth, only he went off an icy curve and smacked a barn and that was it for him. Want to guess how we found the little girl?”
“Just finish, Mr. Andreeson.”
“I don’t blame you. Actually, I thought my supervisor was off his nut. He’d been talking to the family and their friends. There was a sister about eleven. He came to me—this is Ray Levy, my supervisor. He thought the sister could locate the little girl.”
“You don’t know what you’re associating with,” Dad said.
“Well, that’s the truth, and I don’t pretend to. But the sister went out with us. We drove in rough circles starting from their home. Listen—it’s not exactly procedure, and it doesn’t make any popular sort of sense.” To his credit, Andreeson appeared less than cozy with this story he was telling. He lit another cigarette and looked at it while he talked. “At some point she began telling us where to turn. It upset her, she cried and so forth. And we made some wrong turns, I’ll not lie to you.”
We all knew the ending, though—same as you do.
“We found her just before dark,” he said. “The cabin was freezing. She wouldn’t have made it till morning.”
The whole thing made my insides sick. Don’t get me wrong, I was glad the little girl was all right. Yet it gave me a seasick clutch behind the ribs, as if my heart were bobbing loose. I wanted to bolt from there! For I found I didn’t hate Andreeson anymore; I feared him, not knowing why, and can testify to you that this was worse.
“I can’t do what you’re asking, Mr. Andreeson,” Dad said.
“You’re a man of faith; everyone says it.”
“It isn’t faith you’re speaking of. It’s something else, foolishness or spookism.”
“There’s a man back in Roofing who believes you have access to—something large,” Andreeson said. “Some unusual authority,” he clarified.
“For goodness’ sake, be quiet,” said Dad.
“Your boss, Mr. Holgren—the fellow who fired you.”
Dad stood up. “I thank you,” he said, “for keeping us informed. Should anything develop, we’ve taken rooms with Mrs. Cawley. You may reach us there.”
At which Andreeson stood up also, handing Dad a card with a phone number, stressing his sincerity and hoping Dad would reconsider. We watched him walk back down the valley, vanishing amid firelit boulders.
Now, no doubt you’re asking some of the same questions I asked Swede later, back at Roxanna’s. Such as, Why hadn’t Andreeson arrested us on the spot, complicit fugitives that he figured us to be?
“I don’t know,” she answered. We were getting our pajamas on, the various thrills of the evening still working through our veins.
And why, if he was so confident about closing the net on Davy, was our Putrid willing to subscribe even to spookism to nail him down?
“Don’t know,” Swede said.
“What is spookism, anyhow?” I complained. The word conjured a scary version of faith in which a person believed mostly in malicious unseen fellows who might creep up behind you and breathe on your neck hairs.
But Swede paid no mind. She was wholly taken with the ambrosial thought of staying on at Roxanna’s and the turns of the past few hours. From no hint of Davy to an eyewitness sighting! From another frozen road trip to a warm reprieve—in a home that felt more like the term than Roofing ever had. I had to agree with her. It went to show that anyone could deliver good news, including a person like Martin Andreeson, even if he wasn’t doing so purposefully, and even if he was the king of pukes in most respects.
The Throbbing Heart of News
I WAS CARRYING A HATFUL OF EGGS IN FROM THE BARN AND SAW A MAN sitting a horse on the hillside back of Roxanna’s. This was next morning before full light and he was perhaps a half mile from the house, so what I saw was the black shape of him up there.
The rider was Davy. I knew it without question.
He sat the horse and watched me. The horse was still but for its flapping tail and as the light improved we looked at one another across the half mile of clean blue snow. I was sure it was Davy; yet I wouldn’t have been made a fool of, so I looked at the house to see who was watching. Nobody was. I waved.
The horseman didn’t wave back. He turned and started working round the side of the hill. I could see the plunge and heave of the horse’s chest and the Roman curve of its neck as it struggled through the deep snow. The rider urged it forward, following some upward path. Alarmed lest he leave my sight I peeled for the house, herded the eggs across the countertop where Swede was waiting to candle them, and churned back outside.
Horse and rider were gone.
“What’s going on?” Swede yelled. She’d followed me and was on the back step in an apron. Roxanna had promised to teach us her great-uncle’s cinnamon rolls, those he had served to young Butch Cassidy.
“There was a guy on a horse up the hill there.” I pointed. Not one to hold back, I’d certainly have claimed it was Davy, except Roxanna appeared in the door to say her neighbor Lonnie Ford pastured cattle on that hill, and on others beyond it, and kept a trail open during the winter. She had mentioned this Lonnie before—a rancher who preferred to be horseback than at home with his wife—who according to Roxanna took little joy in range beeves or the pastoral life in general.
Swede said, “We’re going to make the rolls. You coming in?”
“I’ll be just a minute.”
The door shut.
I jogged to the barn, as though perhaps I’d forgot something out there, slipped in nonchalantly, then sped through to the back, dislodging hens. I vaulted into the goatpen and banged out the door into the small corral. From here I could trot off toward the hillside in question without being observed from the house.
It wasn’t that I wholly believed anymore the horseman I’d seen was Davy; you can imagine how my hopes slumped when Roxanna mentioned the rancher Lonnie Ford. But it sure had looked like Davy, even if the distance was great and the light poor and the thinking wishful. If nothing else I meant to get up to where that horse trail was and follow it a little ways; it was something to do that was real and outdoors and required work. As such it was also a spontaneous adventure—I could picture how Swede would react later. “You thought it was Davy, and you just took right off after him?” Why, it was like something Davy himself would do! Feeling lively and prideful I pressed forward. The sun was full out; the field was a glacier; I lifted my eyes to the hills.
What a hike, though. Whil
e most of the snow had blown into chalky dunes a boy could walk on, in the lee of some drifts lay soft pockets that could drop you waist-deep, and then it was a tough slog. Such travel eats time, and I imagined ways my spontaneous adventure might turn out, the better to entertain Swede. Suppose I followed the horse trail to the far side of the hill and there encountered Lonnie Ford. What would he say to a boy who’d tracked him so boldly? While Roxanna’d described him as middle-aged, I imagined Mr. Ford as young (he’d looked young enough to me that morning, though anyone knows a man looks younger on horseback—it’s the effect of the mount on your posture; even August Shultz shed years when he rode) and placid in nature. I imagined coming on him round the side of the hill, warming his hands over a twig fire, in fact probably brewing some coffee in a pot up there, not being welcome to do so at home, where his wife sat pining for skyscrapers. I imagined him turning to me, pleased for company, though not the sort of fellow who’d say it in so many words; asking my name, walking over to his patient horse, taking a tin cup from a saddlebag. Coffee, Reuben? Thank you, Mr. Ford—yes, that’ll do.
Here I was taken suddenly aback by my own poetic deficiency. Were Swede out adventuring, she’d surely concoct spunkier upshots than a cup of joe with a henpecked rancher. I started again. I’d come round the side of the great hill—which I was starting to climb now, to my relief—and there he’d be, the aloof and dark-browed and oftimes terrifying Ford! And stretched before him on the snow would be the corpse of the calf he had come seeking, a corpse ripped open throat to guts, eyes froze wide, tongue pushed out like the humped beef tongues at Otto Schock’s Red Owl, and Ford would be kneeling there, fingers touching the perfect blood-borne tracks of a stupendous wolf. A fearful sight! And Ford would turn to me and, “Boy,” he’d growl, “what are you doing up here? These hills aren’t for wandering on foot. Come look at these prints”—as big as my face!—“notice, boy, he didn’t even eat. He kills for sport. Probably,” Ford would conjecture, squinting about, “probably’s watching us, even now.”
Well, you can see why Swede was the writer; but I did devise several more such overbaked scenes, and they made me happy enough and killed time until I reached the horse trail; which, once reached, was nothing but the track through drifts of a single long-legged horse and not the clean footpath I’d imagined. I slumped to my haunches. Trail, my eye—it was thigh-deep in snow and all the worse for the fact that a horse had walked on it, breaking through the crust. The truth is I nearly cried at this point; for I’d worked so hard to get here, and Mr. Ford had no doubt ridden home by now anyway, and Swede, of all unfairnesses, was back in Roxanna’s kitchen, stirring up cinnamon rolls. I stewed in this distress till my hind end, which had rocked back in the snow, started with that cold ache that’s worse for also being soaked; then, getting up, I looked back at the house and barn.
Well—they were way back there! A very decent stretch considering the terrain, and considering I was a pauper in the lung department.
It stirred me up.
I clawed snow off the back of my pants. In fact, though I badly wanted to go home and warm up, I now saw that at this height the hill tapered considerably, and that the snow up here looked generally hard-swept. It also occurred to me that cinnamon rolls are made with yeast and take a good while to rise. What would it hurt to follow the horse trail as planned? Might not Mr. Ford even now be round that bend, examining the slaughtered calf?
I trotted ahead, keeping the trail on my right. From someplace a cow bawled, and the sound rattled around the frozen hills. Practically before realizing it I’d come round and was looking down at a valley beyond which rose more and steeper hills, some with barren stratified cliffsides, others with juniper and twisted scrub pine dabbing up from the snow.
Twenty yards down the trail sat Davy on a stamping bay horse.
He looked smaller and darker than my memory of him.
I tried to say—I don’t know what I tried to say. I didn’t say anything.
He looked me over while the horse ducked and steamed and shook its head. He had on a fur cap with ragged long flaps that fell to his chest and a green army parka so large the sleeves were rolled back. Over his jaw lay a whiskery scrub that erased the boy I might’ve expected; when I looked at his face I felt dizzy and fearful, for it was Davy’s face and yet another’s also.
But my faintness disappeared when he grinned, under the hat, and chuckled, and nodded the horse forward, saying, “Pretty long climb, wasn’t it, Natty Bumppo?”
It was hard to talk at first. He walked the horse up and offered me his hand; I took it and he lifted me up behind him. I sat back of the saddle on the horse’s wide rump, a slippery arrangement; I kept tilting one way or the other while we worked down the back side of the hill. It was steeper here and the horse, name of Fry, kept skidding sideways and catching himself. I leaned forward and grabbed Davy around the ribs.
“It’s all right, Rube, he’s good at this.”
But to me it was like standing on a steep roof in wind, and I hung on tight. It was such a relief to hold on to my brother again; but it was strange, also. Davy’s coat smelled smoky. Sulfurish. He was thinner and harder than I remembered. He seemed compressed. He spoke to the horse in quiet clipped phrases. We bumped and slid and finally angled down to a stand of juniper where the hill leveled out, and there Fry stopped.
“You all right?” Davy asked.
“Sure thing,” I said. “Nice horse,” I added, as if I could discern any such thing.
“You freezing?”
“I’m okay.”
“Jump off, why don’t you.”
“Okay.” But I monkeyed around quite a bit. The trouble came when I lay bellywise across the horse with both legs hanging down; then I froze, for once starting the downslide there’d be no stopping, and Fry seemed a tall animal.
“You’re clear, Rube—slide away,” Davy encouraged.
“Yup.” But I hung tight. I couldn’t see my feet, that was the difficulty. Then Fry lost patience and haunched right, and I slipped down, missed the earth and lit on my back under Fry. The horse stamped, throwing snow in my eyes. I scrambled to safety as Davy swung down, and then he did grab hold of me like I was his little brother for real, and I hugged him back, clenching all muscles so he’d notice how strong I’d become. The best thing was to hear him laugh, and his laugh was as I remembered, only deeper. Davy always had a lot of bass for his size.
“Tell the truth now,” he said. “Did you know it was me? How’d you know?”
“Well, I could just tell! I knew right away! Even far away.” I fairly spouted; back on the ground I was a geyser of joy and vindication. “I saw you up here and knew it was you,” I added. It had been my first thought, after all; he didn’t have to know about Lonnie Ford.
“You didn’t tell anybody, did you?”
“Why, no!” Not that I meant to portray myself as a boy of wisdom and self-restraint, but it felt fine to have Davy admire me, especially after my clumsy landing.
“Good for you, Rube. Man, I’m glad to see you.”
The great question suddenly occurred. “But how’d you know where we were?”
“I heard you last night—you and Swede fooling around by that coal vein.” He perched back on a deadfall pine. “Swede doesn’t sound like anybody else, you know. I tied Fry and prowled up.”
“You were watching us?”
He smiled big.
“But you didn’t come out! You should’ve—”
“Good thing I didn’t, wouldn’t you say?” Davy asked, striking me silent a moment till I recalled how Martin Andreeson had showed up. He said, “Rube, who was that guy?”
So I described the putrid fed. Though Davy had assumed being the object of pursuit, these were the first particulars he’d heard, and they fascinated him. He wanted a complete portrayal of Andreeson. He wanted to know how he spoke, what sorts of things he said, how he treated Swede and me, how he got along with Dad. He got a kick out of Andreeson spying on the Airstream in
Linton, the way he waved at us, how he saluted driving away. To my great annoyance Andreeson didn’t come off as badly in these recountings as I felt he deserved. But Davy didn’t mind; he kept nodding and smiling and cracking his knuckles, which reminds me to mention he was still wearing those yellow farm-chore gloves he’d had on the previous fall, the day I shot the goose.
“Where do you live?” I asked abruptly; a person can’t live outside in the winter with only farm gloves.
“Come on, Rube, you were saying how you shook him off in Linton.”
True enough, I’d just been getting to the good part, and when I told about Swede slinking over and emptying the Aunt Jemima down Andreeson’s tank, Davy laughed so hard he tipped over onto the snow and the horse, Fry, laid back his ears and crutched about stiff-legged.
I said, “Are you staying around here?”