by Dick Francis
‘To start with,’ he said disgustedly, ‘it’s not Yogi Bear.’
I waited in sympathetic silence and beckoned to the barman for a refill. On the paper a list of about eight souvenir manufacturers and distributors had been crossed out, a single line through each. The top lines were neat and straight, the last three a great wild slash across the paper. Walt had had a very bad day.
‘The handkerchief came from Japan, like you said.’ He took a swallow of his second drink and began to revive. ‘Several of the firms phoned their west coast offices for me. No dice. It seems as if at least half of the souvenirs sold in the west are made in Japan, but all these Yogi Bear concessionists say that this isn’t Yogi Bear at all, it’s the wrong shaped head.’
He pulled out of the by now battered envelope a very bedraggled looking handkerchief and looked at it with loathing.
‘If it was sold at or near Yellowstone Park, it could have come from any two-bit import business. As it’s not Yogi Bear, no one will have had to pay commission to use the picture, and there isn’t any way that I know of finding who brought it into the country and who sold it to where.’
After ten seconds I suggested diffidently, ‘We could start from the other end.’
He glared at me incredulously. ‘Are you plumb nuts? You can’t mean what I think you mean.’
The rocks in my drink had melted to pebbles. I tasted the drowned whisky and put the glass back on the bar.
I said, ‘One of the Snail Express trailers was checked in at Rock Springs, Wyoming. It’s still there: they haven’t had another customer for it yet. I’ve asked them to hold it until I’ve had a look at it.’
‘Why that one? Why that one particularly?’ Walt asked. Irritation only half repressed sharpened his voice.
‘Because it’s one of the three with no phone number. Because it’s in the same state as Yellowstone. And because it gives me an itch.’
‘Yellowstone is clear across Wyoming from Rock Springs,’ he said. ‘Must be four hundred miles.’
‘Three hundred. I looked at the map.’
He drank and rubbed his thumb over his fingers much faster than usual. Tired lines had appeared round his eyes.
I think it’s a futile waste of time,’ he said abruptly.
‘I’ve time to waste.’
‘And I haven’t.’
He put the glass down with a thump, reached into an inner pocket and brought out another white package which he tossed down in front of me.
‘These are your photographs.’
‘Thanks.’
The look he gave me was a long way from the smile of that morning. I wondered whether I would have let him go looking for answers if I’d known he was short on stamina, and decided I probably would. He hadn’t given up half way: only at the end.
Lynnie appeared in the bar doorway in her orange dress and the tired looking men there straightened their spines in a hurry. She wouldn’t come in. I eased Walt with me across the heavy carpet and introduced him to her in the hall outside. He made only a few perfunctory remarks and left in a short time with a glowering face and solid back.
‘Whatever’s bitten him?’ said Lynnie, looking after him.
‘He’s had a tiring day and he’s going home to his wife.’
She looked at me quickly, half laughing. ‘Do you always know what you’re saying?’
‘Frequently.’
She chuckled. ‘Anyway, you look a lot tireder than he does.’ We started to walk over to the desk to collect our keys.
‘That’s most encouraging.’
‘What shall we do this evening? Or do you want to sleep?’ She was unselfish enough to keep anxiety entirely out of her voice, but when I said we’d go wherever she wanted there was an extra bounce in her stride. She decided on a two hour taxi ride to everywhere in the city she’d ever heard of that she hadn’t managed to see that afternoon, followed by dinner in a second-floor glass-walled restaurant, looking down and across the lights of Broadway and Times Square. At eleven-thirty, when we got back to the Biltmore, she was still wide awake.
‘What a fabulous, fantastic day,’ she said in the lift.
‘Good.’
‘I’ll remember it as long as I live.’
I smiled at her enthusiasm. It was a thousand years since I’d been as happy as that, but sometimes I could still imagine how it felt. That evening it had been quite easy.
‘You are far from drizz,’ she said, contentedly grinning.
‘You’d be no great drag to be stuck in a lift with yourself.’
But the lift stopped unimaginatively at the eighth floor as scheduled and we walked along to our rooms. Her door was opposite mine.
I kissed her cheek. ‘Goodnight, little Lynnie.’
Her brown eyes smiled serenely back. ‘Goodnight, Gene. Sleep well.’
‘You too,’ I said. ‘Kentucky first stop in the morning.’
It took four more days to find the girl in the photograph, though maybe I could have done it in two if it hadn’t been for Lynnie. Privately aware that it wasn‘t necessary for me to do the job myself I dredged up a cast iron-sounding reason for having to accompany her to Lexington, and we flew down via Washington, which involved another quick taxi tour instead of a lengthy wait at the airport. Lynnie didn’t intend to miss a thing.
Eunice met us at Lexington airfield and drove us to Midway, and after a prawn and avocado lunch lent me her car to go on my errand. I greased Chrysalis’s ex-groom into going with me with twenty dollars of his employer’s money, and took him off to Sam Hengelman’s. The horse van, Sam said out of the corner of his mouth as he watched an old movie on a cyan-heavy colour set, was still in care of the police department. If I wanted to look at it, go talk to them.
At the police department a state trooper listened to what I had to say, said ‘Yeah,’ several times, consulted higher authority, and sorted out some keys. Higher authority turned out to be a good-looking detective in his twenties, and we all four repaired to the parking lot behind the police building, where the horse van stood in one corner.
Chrysalis’s lad pointed out the stall the stallion had inhabited, and the state trooper came up with a successful conclusion to the expedition: four long shining bay hairs.
‘From his mane,’ said the groom authoritatively.
The detective kept two for the State and sent off the other two special delivery to Walt at Buttress Life, and the groom and I drove back to Midway.
Eunice and Lynnie were both in the pool, and the rest of the day and night came close enough to my daydream on the plane, except that the sixteen hours’ sleep shrank to six, but even that was spectacular by recent standards.
When Lynnie said over large cups of breakfast coffee the next morning that she wished I wasn’t going, I very nearly didn’t. If I’d stayed, Buttress Life would have paid the insurance and a load of grief would never have happened. Yet if I could go back to that cross-roads moment again I know I would inevitably make the same decision. Once a hunter, always a hunter: the inner compulsion hadn’t loosened its grip: the quality they’d hauled me out of the Army for was too basic in my nature, and being what I was, what I am, slopping out of the chase was impossible. Keeble had known, I admitted wryly, that he had only to get me hooked.
‘I must go,’ I said, ‘if I’m to find the horse.’
‘Damn the horse,’ Lynnie said.
I laughed at her. ‘You’ve learnt quickly.’
‘I like Eunice,’ she said defensively. ‘She doesn’t shock me.’
I gathered from that that she certainly did, but that Lynnie would never admit it.
‘But you will come back here? Before you go home, I mean?’
‘I expect so,’ I said.
She fiddled with her coffee cup, looking down. ‘It’s only a week since I picked you up at your flat, last Sunday.’
‘And you’ve aged a year.’
She looked up quickly, startled. ‘Why did you say that?’
‘It was what yo
u were thinking.’
‘I know,’ she said, puzzled, ‘but I don’t know how you do.’
‘Crystal set in the attic. Intermittent though, unfortunately.’
‘Just as well, if you ask me.’ There was a healthy mockery on her laughing face. ‘How would you like to be tuned in permanently to Eunice?’
Eunice herself trailed through the doorway at that moment wearing an electric blue wrapper and a manageable hangover. With both still in place, after two cups of coffee and a cigarette, she trundled Lynnie and me to the airport.
‘Goodbye, you son of a bitch,’ she said to me, as I stood beside her window. ‘I guess you can come back any time you want to.’
Lynnie glanced at her sharply, with sudden speculation: growing up in front of one’s eyes. I smiled goodbye to them both and walked away into the airport. From there I bus-stopped a thousand miles to Denver, and chartered a twin-engined Piper from a local firm for the last two hundred to Rock Springs. The pilot chewed his nails savagely beside me all the way as if he were a dedicated auto-cannibal, and I arrived feeling sick.
On the hot late Sunday afternoon the little desert town looked lifeless. Shimmering air rose endlessly over the dump of abandoned rusting motor cars, a Greyhound bus rolled past with passengers staring like fish through its green glass windows, and sprinklers on the richer front lawns kept the parching heat at bay. At the bus station I learnt that old man Hagstrom’s boy was the agent for Snail Express, but when I found old man Hagstrom, fanning himself in a rocker on the front porch of his small frame house, he said that his boy was out calling.
Hagstrom himself seemed to be glad to have company and told me to go inside and bring two beers out of the icebox. The icebox was in the living room, just through the screen door. It was a shambles of a room with sagging broken-spring chairs, dirty worn out rag rugs, a scattered assortment of cups, glasses, and bottles, all unwashed, and a vast new television. I took the beer out on to the porch, sat on the top step, and drank from the bottle, like my host.
The old man rocked, scratched himself, drank, and said vaguely that his boy would be right along, I could bet on it. I looked up and down the hot empty street. There were other shapes rocking gently in the shade of the porches, half invisible because many had the insect screens round the outside rails. From behind them they watched the world go by: only thing was, the world rolled past in automobiles and didn’t stop to talk.
Two beers later, while old man Hagstrom was telling me how he personally would have dealt with the Saigon situation in ’67, his boy rolled up in a pockmarked Chrysler. His boy was literally a boy, not more than eighteen: old man Hagstrom’s grandson. He rubbed his hands down his grease-marked T-shirt and jeans, and held one out to me with as easy going a welcome as his grandfather’s. I explained what I wanted.
‘Sure you can look at the trailer,’ he said, amiably. ‘Now?’
‘If you don’t mind.’
‘You’re welcome.’
He waved me into his baking car and whirled it casually round a few corners, drawing up with a jerk outside a rickety looking gate set in a head-high wall. Through the gate, in a dusty area, stood four Snail Express trailers, all different sizes.
‘That one,’ I said, pointing to the largest.
‘Came in last Saturday. I think. I’ll look it up.’ He unlocked a small brick-built office on one side, and I followed him in. Hot enough in there to please Satan.
‘That’s right, Saturday,’ he said, consulting the ledger. ‘Came from New York State, renting charge paid in advance for one week. The week wasn’t up until Monday.’
‘Do you remember who brought it here?’
‘Uh, let’s see. Oh yes. An old guy. Can’t remember much about him. He had white hair, I guess.’
‘What sort of car did he have, to pull the trailer?’
‘I helped him unhitch … a station wagon, I think. Grey, mebbe.’
‘It wasn’t these two?’ I showed him the photograph.
‘Nope.’ He was definite. As far as he knew, he’d never seen them. Had I asked his grandfather? I had.
He said he’d swept out the trailer, but I could look inside if I wanted to.
‘Why did you sweep it?’ I asked.
‘Usually do. It was pretty clean already, though.’
I looked anyway. There were no bay hairs. Nothing at all to suggest that Chrysalis had ever been squeezed into it. The only suggestive thing about it was the way it was built: the roof opened outwards right along the centre line, to make the loading of tall objects easier. It had been worrying me that Chrysalis would not have walked into a tiny dark trailer: but one open to the sky was a different matter.
Old man Hagstrom’s boy obligingly dug out the Hertz agent, who rented me an air-conditioned black Chevrolet with only five thousand on the clock. Overnight I added three hundred and thirty-four more, and drove into Gardiner for breakfast.
The road there had led through Yellowstone Park itself where the dawn had crept in mistily between the pine trees, and glimpses of lakes had looked like flat puddles of quick-silver. I had seen an ugly great moose, but no bears. Yogi was asleep.
I spent all morning walking round the town. None of the shops were selling the handkerchief, or had ever stocked any like it. The photograph produced no reactions at all. After a toasted bacon, tomato, and lettuce sandwich at a lunch counter I left Gardiner and went fifty-four miles to West Yellowstone.
The afternoon’s trudge produced exactly the same absence of results. Hot, tired, and frustrated, I sat in the Chevrolet and wondered what to do next. No trace of Chrysalis in the trailer, even though it seemed likely it was the one the drivers had seen. No matching handkerchiefs at Yellowstone Park. Walt had been right. The trip was one pointless waste of time.
I thought of the long forest drive back through the park, the canyon gradients at midway, and the final hundred miles of desert to Rock Springs, and decided to put it off until the next day. Sighing, I found the best-looking motel and booked the best room they had, stood under the shower until the day’s aches had run down the drain with the dust, and stretched out for a couple of hours on the kingsized Slumberland.
The waitress who brought my steak at dinner was large, loosely upholstered, kind natured, and with an obvious conviction that a man alone liked a bit of gossip. I wanted her to go away and let me eat in peace, but custom was slack and I learnt more than I cared about her complicated home life. In the end, simply to stop the flow, I pulled out the crumpled handkerchief and asked if she knew where I could get a new one like it.
She thought ‘the girls’ might know, and went off to ask them. Relieved, I finished my steak. Then she came back and doubtfully put the white square down beside me on the tablecloth.
‘They say you might get one in Jackson. They do have bears on ashtrays and things down there. Down in the Tetons. A hundred, hundred-fifty miles. It’s a holiday town, Jackson.’
I’d driven straight through Jackson the night before on the way up from Rock Springs, and seen only a small western town fast asleep. When I went back on the Tuesday morning it was buzzing with holidaymakers and local inhabitants, dressed all alike in cowboy clothes. Dude ranch country, I learnt. The main street was lined with souvenir shops, and the first one I went into had a whole pile of small white handkerchiefs with bears on.
Chapter Eight
The girl in the punt opened the ranch house door, walked halfway to meet me from the car, and greeted me with professional instant welcome.
‘Mr Hochner? How nice to have you with us.’
‘I’m glad you could take me at such short notice, with the Fourth coming up next weekend.’ I shook her hand, putting a slight touch of German accent into my voice because it was easier for me than American if I had to keep it up for any length of time. It didn’t seem altogether wise to be English.
‘We’re seldom full this early in the season.’ She smiled as far up her face as her cheek bones while her eyes skimmed my clothes, car, and lug
gage. Only a hotel keeper’s check up: it hadn’t occurred to her that she’d seen me before.
‘I’ll show you straight to your cabin, if you like? Then you can freshen up and come along here to the ranch house for dinner later on. There will be a bell, to let you know when.’
I parked the car, and carrying my two suitcases, the old one and the new one from Jackson, followed her along a grassy woodland track towards one of several small log cabins scattered among the trees.
She was tall and strong, and older than she had seemed on the river: twenty-six or twenty-seven, I guessed. The fair hair no longer hung childishly loose, but was combed up into a round topknot, leaving her neck cool and uncluttered. She wore dark blue Levis instead of the white trousers, but the pink shirt on top looked identical. One of the storekeepers in Jackson, the fifth I tried, had known her immediately when I had artistically let the photograph drop face up in front of him as I took money for a local map out of my wallet.
‘Yola Clive,’ he said casually, picking it up. ‘And Matt. Friends of yours?’
‘I’d thought of looking them up,’ I agreed, sorting out bills. ‘How do I get there, do you know? I haven’t been to their place before.’
He obligingly gave me clear directions for a fifteen-mile drive, finishing, ‘and the High Zee Ranch is the only place along there, so you can’t miss it. But if you’re planning on staying, I’d give them a call and make a reservation. It’s a mighty popular place they run.’
I sure will,’ I said: and I did. I also bought some Levis and shirts and a pair of riding boots, and the suitcase to put them in. In cowboy country guns passed without comment: I added a heavy black tooled leather belt with a silver buckle, and the clerk didn’t show any surprise at my wanting to make sure that the small-of-the-back holster I sometimes used would slot on to it.
Jackson preserved its own wild western flavour to the extent of a small authentic stage coach waiting in front of the drug store: but the sleepy disillusioned horses between the shafts looked a poor prospect against galloping redskins. Broad raised boardwalks edged with hitching rails ran along in front of the stores in the short main street, though the mud they had been built to avoid had long been metalled over. Motels with signs saying ‘air-conditioning and central heating’ were called ‘Covered Wagon’ and ‘Rustlers’ Hideout’. Jackson was an uneasy mixture of evolution and make believe, and clearly a success.