Dissolution: The Wyoming Chronicles: Book One

by W. Michael Gear

  Looking out over the valley—golden as it was with the slanted afternoon light—he saw a paradise. A fragile refuge.

  It counter-balanced the worry deep in his soul; he had no clue what was happening in New York. Wondered if The Yucateca wasn’t a charred hull of a building. Lived steeped in guilt over the suffering his parents must be enduring.

  If they still lived.

  Just because he couldn’t do anything for them didn’t alleviate him of the sucking sense of responsibility.

  Shanteel stepped out of the door, walked stiffly across, and carefully seated herself next to him as though every muscle in her body ached. Since her return, she’d spent her days with Brandon. Riding Old Tobe. It was like she’d been avoiding the field crew. Her thoughtful dark eyes stared off across the ridge-lined horizons all dotted with juniper. She, too, had a beer.

  “Word is that we’re drinking the last canned beer in the county,” Shanteel said. “From now on, it’s all gonna be bottles.”

  “Bottles can be refilled at the brew pub in town. Cans can’t.”

  “Bottles eventually break. What happens then? Put your beer in a ziplock?”

  “Won’t be any ziplocks. Shouldn’t be any problem coming up with bottles though. Plenty of them in the dump.”

  She gave him a suspicious sidelong look. “You’re telling me we’re gonna dig up filthy bottles covered with rotting garbage from the dump and drink beer out of them?”

  “Glass doesn’t get contaminated. Washed and boiled, it’ll be as sterile as the day it was manufactured.”

  Shanteel considered. Shook her head. “I still think I fell through the fucking rabbit hole.” A pause. “You got something on your mind, Delgado?”

  “None of my business.” A beat. “You’re different. Shyla thinks it’s drugs.”

  “Me and Brandon? Drugs? He does booze and that Copenhagen, but that’s it. I worry about the Copenhagen, but Dr. Holly told me when Brandon’s roll of chew is gone, there won’t be any more.”

  She gestured with her beer. “So, here’s the thing: I got lost, and I got scared. Every way I turned in that fog was wrong. I ran, I cried, and I was in a panic like I’d never felt before.”

  “Didn’t you hear the shots?”

  “Sure. And I just knew the Tappans were killing y’all. I mean, I grew up hearing gunfire, and when I did, it was because someone was killing someone else.”

  Sam made a face. “We’re so clueless sometimes. That thought never crossed our minds.”

  “I just ran harder. And then I was at this drop off on one side and trees on a really steep slope ahead, and I was getting cold and real hungry. Then it starts to rain. It’s getting colder, and I’m stumbling along the edge of the trees. The rain turns to snow, and I’m wet all the way through.”

  She smiled at the memory. “That’s when I hear this voice call, ‘You might want to take that deer trail to your left. Footing’s better.’ And I turn around and see my worst nightmare sitting there on a horse. And beside him is this big dog. Like a scene from hell: Gun-totin’ White man on a horse running down a terrified Black woman.”

  She took a drink of beer. “He says, ‘I got Old Tobe saddled up here. We might want to make tracks back to that patch of timber and hole up. The way you’re going, you’re headed down into Frying Pan Canyon.’

  “I mean, what am I going to do, Sam? Freeze to death, or let the man do what he will? I’m just standing there crying and shivering and miserable.”

  “So you got on the horse?”

  “Hey, I figured this girl’s already dead.” She flicked her fingers in an airy gesture. “So he leads my horse off through the snow, and it’s really coming down. Can’t see five feet in any direction. And then we’re in trees, and he says, ‘Here’s a good spot.’ And I see a sort of tipi made of lodgepoles.”

  “That’s the wickiup?”

  “‘Got to work some to make it tight,’ he tells me. So we carry more poles and make the thing bigger, and by then I’m shivering so hard I’m clumsy. He almost drags me in, scoops out a hole in what he calls ‘the duff’, and within minutes, he’s got a fire going.”

  She closed her eyes, a delicious expression on her face. “I never, in my whole life, felt such a wonderful thing as that fire. Meanwhile he ties a rope across the inside, and tells me, ‘You need to get out of those soaked clothes. Hang them on the rope to dry. Keep the fire hot, and it shouldn’t take more than an hour. Wrap up in your bedroll. If you run low on firewood, bust off squaw wood from the trees.’”

  “What’s squaw wood? Sounds racist.”

  “He tells me that’s the low dead branches sticking out of the tree trunks. Then he says, ‘I’m leaving Talbot. I’ll be back by dark with supper.’ And he disappears into the snow.”

  “So you did it?”

  She shrugged. “Some part of my brain reminded me that I was still alive, and I clung to that. At dark he’s back with a rabbit. And damn if he doesn’t let me eat most of it. I ask, ‘Why are you doing this?’ and he looks real thoughtful and says, ‘I gave my word.’ Then he smiles. ‘But I’da done it anyway.’”

  “They consider it honor,” Sam told her.

  “Never had much to do with that. Honor? That’s the kind of shit you read in a fairy book where I come from. But the big surprise is when he unzips my sleeping bag and spreads it open. Then he digs down into the duff and makes a hole just big enough for the two of us. He lines the hole with my tent for a covering, and explains that, given the way we feel about each other, sleeping back-to-back will be best, but I can snuggle with the dog. Snuggle with the dog? Say what? When I ask why in the same hole, he says, ‘To keep from freezing to death.’”

  She laughed again. “Imagine my surprise when I wake up the next morning spooned around him like shrink wrap. I may be disgusted with myself, but I’m disgustedly warm.”

  Her expression turned serious. “The snow was still coming down outside. We built up the fire, got soaked getting more wood, and then we started talking.”

  “That had to be interesting.”

  Shanteel gave Sam a level gaze. “Outside of my aunt, I’ve never had conversations like those. Never knew a man could talk honest like that. Not only does he listen, he thinks. I’m telling him about what it’s like, growing up black and female in Philadelphia’s squalor. About the drug houses, the burned-out buildings and the roaches and rats. About my mother being shot. He heard me. But no man‘splaining, none of that patronizing white guilt shit.”

  She took a swig of beer. “We talked about everything and nothing. I told him things I’ve never told another human being. About what it means to be me. What I hope, what I’m afraid of.”

  “Did he open up?”

  She nodded. “Hopes, dreams, what it means to be alive. History and philosophy. The man got out of high school with a C average, and I’m arguing intricacies of the human condition with him? Then, on the third day, we see elk. He stops short in the snow, and we’re watching. I’m speechless, like having a religious vision as they stand in the timber, breath steaming. And when it’s all over, he says, ‘Wasn’t that the most magnificent thing you’ve ever seen?’

  “I look down at that rifle he’s carrying. ‘Surprised you didn’t shoot one.’ He gets this hurt look. ‘I’ve lived off elk all my life,’ he says. ‘I’m part elk. I love them, and I cry every time I kill one. It’s like I’m killing part of me.’”

  Sam said, “I don’t get it.”

  “I think you will.” She tossed off the last of her beer. “I think we all will. Something about the kind of world we’re living in now. What we had back east, it was an illusion, Sam. A warm cultural blanket of laws and social protection and food stamps. I’m not saying it didn’t wear thin in my ugly part of Philadelphia, but we’re all in the forest now. You know it. You’re packing a gun these days. I ate an animal I killed with my own hands. I felt it die. And in the middle of all that, I found the first man I ever respected. The first man who ever really respected me.
”

  She crumpled the can. “So, here I am, riding a horse all day to check and count the cows that will feed me. I can tell the difference between elk and deer tracks. I’m sleeping in a barn, with a white man, on hay bales, and for the first time in my life, I’m happy with myself.”

  “Funny, isn’t it?” Thomas Star said as he walked out and settled himself next to Shanteel. He braced his arms on his knees and stared down the valley. He was wearing a smudged white cotton shirt, his graying braids hanging down in back. “Society and culture made us all separate. So here we are, having all of that ripped away and finding human beings underneath.”

  “You think my Seminole Cherokee ancestors understood that?” Shanteel asked.

  Thomas absently shook his head. “They were all too busy being who they were supposed to be. That was Seminole, and only Seminole. Or Cherokee, and only Cherokee. In some ways I got lucky being Shoshoni. In others, not so lucky.”

  “How’s that?” Sam asked.

  “Shoshoni all came from a loosely organized ethnic band societies. Total egalitarianism. No big chiefs, no hard clan rules or stratified society like Native people had back east. No kivas, or sodalities like down south. We were ‘Be who you are’ Indians. Don’t like the group you’re with? Pack up and leave.”

  “Doesn’t sound so bad.” Shanteel leaned forward, propping her chin on her crossed arms. “What’s the unlucky part?”

  “Unlike, say, the Arapaho, we didn’t have the tight-knit age-grade societies, the social cohesion necessary to deal with the white world and its agencies, institutions, and bureaucracies. It’s a lesson I’ve been talking to Evan about. Something you’re all going to have to deal with in the coming years.”

  “Where’s the balance? That’s what we’re going to have to figure out.” Sam got Thomas’ point.

  Thomas said, “There’s going to be a lot of pressure to make an authoritarian government in the Basin. Edgewater is already setting up the foundation for it. He’s the strong man, the one who is going to offer security in a time of crisis.”

  “I’ve had a taste of his security. No thanks.”

  “He’s threatened your wife.”

  “Shyla’s not my wife.”

  Thomas smiled blandly, asking, “Think outside of your Western Christian culture. You and she work side-by-side all day long. You laugh and smile and dream together. You share the burdens of the future as partners, and at night you make love and sleep in the same bed. In Shoshoni terms, what else would you call your relationship?”

  “But, I mean...”

  “Oh?” Thomas asked. “This is just a quick dalliance? A brief affair for the sex?”

  “No!”

  “You want to build a life with her?”

  “Yes, damn it.”

  “Because you love each other.”

  “I... Okay, yes.”

  “But for the Judeo-Christian religious baggage and legitimacy requirements for the rearing of children in a patrilineal system, isn’t that usually the way marriage is defined in the anthropological literature?”

  Sam wasn’t the only one staring wide-eyed at Thomas.

  “Shit,” Shanteel whispered, a stunned look on her face. “According to your terms, I’m married to a white man?”

  Thomas slapped hands to his Levi’s. “I’m always amazed by anthropologists and how blinded they are by their own cultural biases. A white man? Is that how you really see him? Answer honestly, Shanteel, and think about the inherent hypocrisy practiced by those who shouted the loudest about racial equality in the past.”

  She bowed her head onto her crossed arms and nodded. “Lot of comeuppances out here aren’t there?”

  “You’re in love with Brandon.” Thomas made a tsking sound with his lips. “The rebellious part of you is reveling in the new wonder. You’re breaking the taboo, blaming it on the place, the times, on the precariousness of your situation. Another part of you is insisting that it can’t work because of who you really are. Because of what he is.”

  “How you know?” Shanteel only slipped into street slang when she was really upset.

  “My first wife, Angie, was white. Met in college. She was from Amherst, Massachusetts. In the end, we called it quits because once the exotic and daring part wore off, we both thought we had to be different people than our souls wanted us to be. She went back to Massachusetts and married a lawyer who was a partner in a Boston firm that specialized in corporate law. I went back to the reservation and married a Crow pow-wow grass dancer. It wasn’t what society thought of us that made us do that, it was what we thought of ourselves. We were such fools. Angie was the one real love of my life.”

  “Yeah, makes you wonder. What’s a lust-bunny like that doing with a beaner?” The words from the tannery came back to haunt Sam.

  Made Sam wonder how much deep-seated and festering ethnic baggage he might have in some dark recess of his mind.

  “Why are you still here, Thomas?” Sam asked. “The pass has been open for days.”

  The Shoshoni thoughtfully watched an eagle come soaring over the valley. “The spirits haven’t told me it’s time to leave. They want me here for a while. Speaking of which, you seen Nynymbi?”

  “Just the picture of him hanging on the cabin wall.”

  “Nynymbi?” Shanteel asked.

  “I have a spirit helper.”

  “Trouble is coming,” Thomas said. “He’ll warn you before it breaks, you’ll see.”

  “Thomas,” Shanteel asked, “what you were saying about not being who we think we are? Who do you think Brandon thinks he is?”

  “What you’re really asking is whether deep in his soul he ultimately sees himself with a white girl? I think he finds some amusement that he’d fall for a black, big-city woman from back East. A sort of divine joke because he’s been looking in the wrong place. But Brandon doesn’t care what his wife looks like, or where she comes from, or if she’s black. The woman he craves in his heart is a partner: strong, capable, and fearless like his mother. He will stand with whichever woman stands with him.”

  “How’d you get so damn wise? The spirits tell you all this?”

  “Spirits? I wish. I got this wise from sixty years of making stupid mistakes.” He squinted at the distance, and said under his breath, “Ah, yes. I see.”

  A black suburban came roaring down the ranch road.

  Sam leaned in the door, calling, “Vehicle coming! Just one.”

  Evan and Bill rose from where they were sitting at the dining room table; dishes stopped clinking in the kitchen.

  Everyone came trooping to the front porch, and Sam recognized the Wyoming State Patrol emblem on the door panels as the Tahoe pulled to a stop in the yard. A uniformed officer stepped out and fixed his hat to his head. He looked around at the mountains, before slamming the door behind him.

  “Bill. Frank. Evan,” he greeted, and then added, “Pam, Meggan, good to see you.”

  “Sully,” old Bill cried in delight as he hobbled out and took the officer’s hand. “What brings you out this way?”

  “Got a message. Governor wants to see you.” He glanced warily at the rest of them. “Wants to see you and Evan in Cheyenne tomorrow afternoon.”

  From a pocket he produced an envelope. “Here are passes and travel permits for you, Dr. Holly, and Frank. You’ll have an escort. Lot of trouble on the roads these days. Car jackings, gangs stopping and looting vehicles. Gets worse the closer you are to the border.”

  “What’s Pete want to see us about?” Bill asked as he took the envelope.

  “The governor wants a briefing on the committee and what you’re planning. Wants Dr. Holly to interface with some of his people. And there are...”—the patrolman shot a wary look at the rest of us—“some other matters.”

  “Oh, it’s all right, Sully,” Bill said. “These are my people, and sure as hell not Edgewater’s.” To the field crew he said, “This is Captain Sully Richardson. He’s the honcho for the Highway Patrol in the Basin. Go ahead
, Sully.”

  “Doug showed up today. The Cody committee says they’re about a week out from ready to roll. The Powell group is with us, and so are the eastern Basin towns.”

  “By God, that’s good to hear,” Frank said. Then he winked in a conspiratorial way at Pam. She clasped his hand and gave it a squeeze.

  “Got time for a cup of coffee? Something to eat?” Bill asked.

  “Can’t. I’ve got to be back in Cody. People are watching. Keeping track. Bad as it is with Edward Tubb in Hot Springs, it’s a hell of a lot tenser in Cody now that that son of a bitch Edgewater has set himself up in the South Fork. He’s got a lot of people crawling to him. Folks I never would have thought would suck up to a piece of shit like him.”

  “How about a sandwich to go?” Meggan asked hopefully. “It’ll only take a second. And give me your travel cup. I’ve got hot coffee. The real thing. Won’t be any more when this is gone. The grocery store is sold out. Last there is.”

  “Sure, Meggan.” He opened his door, reached in, and handed her an old Maverick travel cup.

  As Meggan hurried inside, Evan asked, “Any more news from the east?”

  “It’s like a friggin’ black hole. Just rumors. Our guys on the Nebraska border heard that Washington’s gone. Some sort of dead zone. Nothing alive within a hundred-mile radius. No one’s said anything about a nuke. But—and brace yourself for this—we’re at war with someone. Warren Air Base launched four missiles up over the pole in some kind of retaliation. People coming in from the west say there’s real warfare around San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland. A guy from South Dakota on a motorcycle said that the whole northeast is like something out of a bad horror movie. Roving gangs, cannibalism, bodies piled and rotting. Gutted and burning buildings. Eerie.”

  Evan asked, “Well, if DC’s gone, where’s Edgewater getting his orders?”

  “That’s just it,” Richardson said. “As best we can figure, there’s no one calling the shots. We think he’s making it up on his own. The governor will fill you in. He’s been in touch with the governors of Nebraska, Utah, Idaho, Montana, and South Dakota. As far as I know, it’s anarchy, Bill. Even the military command structure is in complete disarray above the divisional level. Or so we hear from General Kyzer at Warren Air Base.”