* * *
There are twenty-four counties in Wyoming, and each one’s assigned number sits in front of Steamboat, the bucking horse that is the symbol for the state on the longest-running license plate design in the world. Absaroka, being the least populated, gets twenty-four—the number that was on the Buick—so it was not only in-state but also in-county. Stumbling across the snow-covered parking lot in my moccasins, I approached the car, exhaust clouding the air on the driver’s side.
The woman was elderly, probably approaching eighty years of age, dressed in a pair of sweatpants and an oversized parka with fake fur around the collar.
Standing there on the hard-packed snow, I tapped on the window.
It startled her, and I could clearly see the butcher knife clutched in her hands as she turned to look at me. Her face was wet from tears, one of her eyes was swollen shut, and I was betting she had a full-blown headache to match mine. She stared at me the same way the ladies in the convenience store had.
I watched my breath cloud the window between us as the wind lifted the hem of the bathrobe. “Hey, could I speak with you for a moment?”
She sat there with her mouth a little open and then began fumbling at finding the window button, but when she did, it only whined a little and then pulled at the rubber weather seal at the top—frozen shut.
I gestured toward the passenger-side door. “How ’bout I come around and get in?”
She nodded, and I ambled my way around the four-door and pulled on the handle—it too, frozen shut. Unwilling to take no for an answer, I put all six feet five inches and two hundred and thirty pounds behind the effort and almost took the door off. I quickly climbed in and slammed it shut behind me.
It seemed warmer in the car, but not by much. The radio was on some AM station, and a guy was screaming about it being the Millennium, and therefore the end of the world, and about salvation and a bunch of other stuff. I didn’t think my head could hurt any more than it already did, but the radio was so loud that the pain escalated. I reached up, turned the thing off, and looked at her. “Sorry, I can’t take that crap.”
She stared at me with her mouth still hanging open.
I was ready to rest my head on the dash but figured I’d better see what was what first. I stamped the snow off my moccasins onto the rubber floor mats. “Lot of snow.”
She nodded.
I gestured toward the weapon in her hands. “Mind if I have the knife?”
Without hesitation, she handed it to me, and I placed it on the floor by my feet. I turned back to look at her, but she was the first to speak. “You . . . You’re bigger than I thought you’d be.”
It seemed like an odd thing to say, especially since I was pretty sure I didn’t know her. “I get that a lot.” She seemed to want more, so I added, “From my father’s side.”
She nodded, studying me. “I understand.”
I straightened the collar of my robe. “I apologize for the way I’m dressed, but I really wasn’t planning on going out today.”
“That’s okay.”
She started crying, and I felt a little empathetic twinge. “I’ve had some problems of my own as of late . . .”
She nodded enthusiastically, wiping the tears away with the back of a hand aged with spots and wrinkled skin, careful to avoid the wounded eye. “Me, too.”
I held my fingers out to the heater vents, stretching them as a matter of course, buying time till my head stopped hurting enough so that I could concentrate. “I guess that’s what this life is all about, getting from one trouble to the next, at least in my job.”
She turned in the seat. “I would imagine; and you get everybody’s problems.”
“Pretty busy, especially during the holidays.”
“Yes.” Her eyes shone. “Everybody thought I was crazy, but I said you’d come.”
I looked around and yawned, the popping in my head sounding like gunshots. “Well, when we get a call . . .” I sat there for a moment longer, looking at her, and then reached a hand out and touched her cheek. “Tell me about this problem.”
She ducked her head away but then reached up and took my hand, holding it in her lap like she had held the knife. She didn’t say anything, and we just sat there, listening to the Buick’s motor running and the fan of the heater. “He doesn’t mean to do it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“But I forget things.” She sobbed a little. “I just don’t remember like I used to.” She stared at the dash, the instruments glowing a soft green.
* * *
It was a modest home on the outskirts of town, a single-level ranch, the kind that can contain a lot of rage. There was a yellowed-plastic, illuminated Santa in the yard, and I was surprised that when we met at the front of the car, she looked at it and then at me and said, “I hope you don’t mind.”
Wondering what she was talking about, I glanced at the jolly old elf and decided not to judge. “Um, no. I’m a big fan myself.”
Her spirits appeared buoyed. “Oh, good.”
Oddly, she took my hand again, and we walked up the shoveled walk to the front porch, a gold cast emanating from a needless bug bulb. As we stood there, she threaded her fingers into her parka and produced a prodigious key ring.
Suddenly, the door was yanked open, and a bald man with a Little League baseball bat in one hand was yelling at the two of us through the storm door; another wave of pain ricocheted around in my head.
“Where the hell have you been? Do you know there’s no damn cigarettes in this house?” Peering through heavily framed glasses, he glanced up at me. “And who the hell is this?”
Her head, having dropped in embarrassment, rose as she clutched my arm. “This, Ernie, is our Lord and Savior.”
I stopped pinching my nose in an attempt to relieve the pain and turned to look down at her. She smiled a hopeful smile, and then we both turned to look at her husband.
He stood there for a moment staring first at her, then at me, and then back to her before leaning the baseball bat against the doorjamb. “Jesus H. Christ.”
She smiled and nodded. “That’s right.”
I smiled—it seemed like the thing to do.
He pushed open the storm door, reached out, grabbed her hand, and half yanked her into the house. “God damn it, get in here before you wander out into traffic.”
He tried to close the door, but I caught it and held it open. He struggled, but I figured I had him by a hundred and fifty pounds. His eyes had a panicked look. “You’re not coming in here.”
I took the aluminum frame in my other hand and pulled him through onto the porch. “Nope, you’re coming out here.” I looked in at the elderly woman and smiled reassuringly, holding up my index finger. “We’ll be just a minute.”
She nodded and gave me a little wave.
I turned to the old man, who had shuttled toward the corner of the porch like a sand crab. He looked uncertain and then spoke in a low voice. “Look, if you’re a hobo and need some change . . .”
I shook my head.
He studied my bathrobe, even going so far as to check my wrists for a medical bracelet. “If you’re from some loony bin . . .”
I took my hand down and leaned on the other side of the door. “Do you know who I am?”
He clutched his arms in an attempt to ward off the cold. “Well, I know you’re not Jesus Christ.”
“I’m Walt Longmire, the sheriff of this county.”
He adjusted his glasses and leaned in, peering through my beard and hair, finally leaning back and nodding his head. “So you are.” On more solid ground, he smirked. “I hear tell you’re a drunk.”
I looked out in the yard toward the east where the sun was still struggling to shoot a beam over the frozen ground of the Powder River country. “Is that what they say?”
His teeth were starting to cha
tter now. “Yeah, it is.”
I stretched my jaw in a wide yawn again and tried to feel the cold, but it just wasn’t there; in all honesty, I just wanted to feel something, anything. Maybe that’s why I’d drunk so much after Cady left last night. “Well, they might be right.” I straightened my robe. “My wife died a couple of months ago.” I threaded my fingers through my beard and felt crumbs in there. “It wasn’t a perfect marriage by any means; we fought, about stupid things—when our daughter should go to bed, the color of the mailbox, money . . . But she was the best thing that ever happened to me.” I took a deep breath and exhaled, watching the twin clouds of vapor roll across my chest like a cartoon bull. “Maybe the best thing that ever will.”
He glanced at the closed door and then at the house slippers on his feet.
I flicked my eyes to the door as well. “She seems nice.”
He nodded. “Esther, her name is Esther.” He automatically stuck out his hand. “And I’m Ernie—Ernie Decker.”
I shook his hand and noticed the swelling and bruises. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Decker.”
He quickly tucked the hand back under his arm. “We’ve hit a rough patch these past few months.”
“Well, at least you’ve got her to have a rough patch with.”
We stood there for a while longer, then I pushed off the doorjamb and started toward the steps; I stopped on the second to turn and look at him, my head dropped, hair covering my face, and I was pretty sure that even from this distance, my voice was vibrating his lungs: “You hit her again and I’ll be back, and this time it won’t take me two thousand years.”
I walked down the shoveled path and driveway, took a left on Main, and struck off back the couple of miles toward the highway. After a moment, the tan Oldsmobile that had been parked at the Sinclair station pulled up beside me, and I heard a window whir down.
“Walter?” I stopped and turned to see the Methodist preacher leaning across the seat to look up at me. “I thought I’d follow you and see if you needed a ride back to your truck.”
“Thanks.” I continued to watch for the sunrise as I tightened the sash on my robe. “But I think I’ll just walk.”
She paused for a second. “Are you all right?”
“Yep.”
“How is the woman in the car?”
Watching the skyline still flat as a burned, black pancake, I chewed on the skin at the inside of my lip. “I think she’ll be okay.”
“She seemed awfully confused.”
Just then, I thought I might’ve caught sight of that first ray that shoots over the edge of the earth like a hopeful thought, and maybe, just maybe, I might’ve felt something. “Well, like the rest of us . . .” I sighed. “She’s just waiting on something.”
SLICK-TONGUED DEVIL
You steel yourself against those unexpected surprise visits in your mind, but it does nothing to prepare you for the physical evidence of a life shared, a life lost—her voice on the backlogged messages of the answering machine, photographs used as bookmarks, a song she used to hum, people who knew her but didn’t really, asking about her in casual conversation. Others telling you they know what it’s like when they don’t. If you’re lucky, you convince yourself that the only real world is the one in your head, and you make a fragile and separate truce that lasts until one of those depth charges erupts and you can no longer run silent or run deep.
It happened at the Busy Bee Café on a Tuesday morning two days before Christmas. As I waited for “the usual,” I’d reached across the counter to snag the newly delivered Durant Courant and flipped open the first page—and there was my wife’s obituary.
I don’t know how long I was frozen like that, but when Dorothy, the chief cook and bottle washer of the establishment, refilled my coffee cup, she spotted the grainy black-and-white photograph. I suppose it was her voice, behind me and to the right, that brought me back.
“Oh, Lord.”
I went home early from work that day, and nobody asked why.
I parked the Bullet behind the house, because I thought it would be easier to unload the cord of firewood that I’d stored in it through the back door. I draped my uniform shirt and gun belt on the back of my chair and took another shower, put on a flannel shirt, a pair of jeans, and my old moccasins. I opened a can of soup but left it on the counter; then I sat in my chair and drank eleven Rainier beers.
When I looked up, it was sleeting and dark.
* * *
The afternoon it happened had been one of those warm November days we sometimes get on the high plains, with a friendly chinook from British Columbia that stays the freeze that can solidify your marrow.
She wanted to sit outside on an old wooden chair I’d bought at the Salvation Army, the red paint peeling away and revealing the gray, weathered wood underneath. “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”
Her eyes were closed, but she opened them then, the pale blue matching the Wyoming sky that we could see through the windows of our tiny cabin. “Fresh air is good for you.”
I put on the kettle to make tea, wrapped her up in a thick Cheyenne blanket that Henry had given her when she had gotten sick, and carried her outside where she could see the naked trees in the draws of both Piney and Clear Creeks, the branches moving only slightly as if the cottonwoods were stamping their roots to stay warm. “Could you get my Bible?”
I went back in and retrieved her Book from the nightstand downstairs where we’d moved the bed. I placed it carefully in her lap, opened to the marked page. “Here, the feel-good book of the holidays.”
I watched as she fit her narrow finger between the pages like a bookmark. She smiled. “You should be more tolerant of things that give people comfort.”
I watched a great horned owl drift above one of the creek banks and hitched a thumb into my belt. “Hmm.”
“Tough guy.” Her fingers climbed up my pant leg and caught my hand there. “You know, a little forgiveness in your character wouldn’t hurt.”
I glanced down at her. “Not my line of work.”
She shook her head at my stubbornness. Except for the mild buffeting of the wind and the chirp of prairie finches, it was silent. “You know, I always thought you’d soften a little with age.”
I crouched by her chair, pulled the fine blanket up closer around her shoulders, and ran my hand across her back, the spread of my fingers as large as the trunk of her body. “Hang around. I might surprise you.”
She took a slight breath. “I’m trying.”
I went back inside at the call of the kettle and returned with two mugs, the paper flags flapping on the ends of the submerged tea bags. It had been a dry fall, and there wasn’t enough snow to make it feel like a typical Thanksgiving, and the high desert was warm that afternoon. “It’s nice, isn’t it?”
She didn’t answer.
* * *
Being awakened ruined some of the best dreams.
Dog watched as I got up from the La-Z-Boy and tossed the same blanket that Henry had given her over my uniform and gun belt. I walked across the plywood subfloor to the window facing northwest where something was making noise. The wind was picking up, it had started to sleet, and the heavens had gone nickel-plated underneath the darkness.
There were the skeletal poles of a half-erected, Cheyenne-style lodge that the Bear had built in preparation for a New Year’s sweat. He hadn’t covered it yet, and it hunkered out there in the frozen grass like a naked fan, loose willow branches splayed toward the winter sky.
A few granules of snowy sleet had swept across the ridges along the Bighorn Mountains and collected in the low spots and windward sides of the European blue sage, and on one of the escaped structural limbs of the sweat lodge, a great horned owl sat with his back to me. The Cheyenne believe that owls are messengers of the dead and that they bring word from worlds beyond.
The alcohol was having an effect, like those electronic governors that keep modern cars from going over one hundred and fifty miles an hour, and my thoughts meandered back to the sunny afternoon when my wife had passed and to the days since when the owls had come to impart providence.
I raised an almost-empty Rainier to the window and tapped the aluminum punt against the glass; the large head swiveled and the great golden eyes looked back at me. As the owl watched, I spoke to him with words that clouded the glass.
Dog barked from his spot alongside the sofa and moved over to the unpainted half-panel glass door. I belched, hung an elbow on the sill, and looked at him. When I glanced back, the owl was gone, and the frozen rain was already collecting on the splines of the partially assembled sweat lodge. Dog barked again. I thought I’d heard a knock but, considering the weather, was sure it couldn’t be a visitor and that something must’ve blown against the side of the cabin.
I pushed off the sill and walked past the sofa to the door, placed a hand against the glass, and peered across my porch to the two mud troughs that led across the irrigation ditch to the county road. There was a car parked in the drive close to the house, a taupe-colored Cadillac with Nevada plates. He stood to the side, his back to the wind and rain. The gusts that traveled up the drive blew his long silver hair around his face, and plastered his city-type overcoat against him. He was tall and thin and held some sort of package against his chest.
The man raised his hand to knock again, but when he saw me, he started and froze. I scooted Dog away with my boot and opened the door about ten inches. “Can I help you?”
The man leaned in close and looked at me as he adjusted a pair of wire-rimmed glasses on his long nose. “Do I have the pleasure of addressing Mr. Longmire?” He hunched a shoulder against the wind and ducked his head. “I was wondering if it would be possible for me to speak to Mrs. Longmire?”
In my beer-fogged brain I thought of something Dorothy had said, that these things always happened in threes—the newspaper, the owl, and now this. “I beg your pardon?”
He clutched whatever it was against his chest and pressed himself closer to the doorjamb. “I was wondering if Mrs. Longmire was available.”
Wait for Signs: Twelve Longmire Stories Page 3