by Bart Paul
I drove west to the end of town. Instead of going straight out on the Reno Highway the way I’d come, I turned right and cruised the back streets to see if Kip or the Miller brothers were still around. Piute Meadows is barely four blocks wide, so it didn’t take me but a minute, but I still felt I was going nowhere fast as my dad used to say. I eased by the sheriff’s office and saw Sarah’s Silverado parked in the lot, then I drove out into the big meadows to hunt up some friends.
The Summers Lake Road turned one way then another every mile or so southwest across the valley. Four miles from town I passed the lane of the Bonner & Tyree ranch. Three more miles and I turned right off the pavement past some fishing cabins then climbed up a washboard logging road that angled across the face of the ridge. I could see the whole valley down to my right. After a mile or so the road turned left into Aspen Canyon. I crossed and recrossed the creek on Forest Service bridges before I got to the first drift fence. Beyond the locked aluminum gate was the Bonner & Tyree grazing permit, and down to the right was Harvey Linderman’s pack outfit, Aspen Station.
At the fence a dirt road made a hard right down the hill to the creek. I hadn’t got far before I hit another locked gate and a sign that said DOMINION LAND & CATTLE—PRIVATE PROPERTY. I rooted around under a couple of rocks until I found the key. I got back into the truck and could see that the meadow straddling the creek was full of cattle, not Harvey’s horses and mules. At the bottom of the slope I crossed the bridge and turned left through the aspen along the fence to the pack station, but it was gone. Harvey’s trailer at the end of the road was gone. The tin snow-survey hut in the aspen next to the trailer was gone. And the wood pack platforms had been burned where they sat. Only the corrals and loading chute and the refrigerator box off the back of a milk truck we used for a saddle shed were still standing. The corrals had been rebuilt by somebody with money. They’d replaced the long wood hitching rack and grain trough with welded pipe. The refrigerator box was half-hid back amongst the aspen, the painted sides mostly bare sheet metal with rusty streaks and the doors padlocked together with a big chain. I got out of the truck and sat on a log with a Coors and just about cried. I worked here all through high school and one summer two years ago when I was back from my second tour. This place had meant the world to me. But nothing lasts forever.
I looked out over the meadow at Dominion’s cattle. This piece of ground had belonged to Allison’s when my dad ran that ranch, and they’d leased it to Harvey since before the crust had cooled. Dominion bought Allison’s three years before, so they must have finally canceled Harvey’s lease and kicked him off. I drained my beer and looked out across the meadow to the creek where we’d walk out with the dogs before sunup and run in the stock, and I remembered how the horses and mules would charge out of the tamarack through the creek crossing to the corrals with the dogs on their heels.
I took a last look and got in the truck. When I came to the bridge, I got out again and walked out on the planks. It was nothing but the undercarriage of an old railroad freight car that Harvey had hauled up there somehow. I’d stood on that bridge one night with a rifle in my hand thinking I was going to make my stand right then and there and save the world. My world, anyway. It didn’t quite work out the way I planned—for me or for the guys trying to cross that bridge.
I got out one last time to drive through the gate and lock it behind me. When the road topped out at the trailhead, there was a pickup parked against the hill under the trees that wasn’t there when I drove in. It was the Miller brothers’ GMC. They must have followed me from town. And I must have been losing my touch. I pulled up next to the drift fence gate and shut off my engine and rolled down the windows. No one was in the GMC cab and there was no sound except the wind in the Jeffrey pine. I got out and walked over to the truck. The cab was full of fast food and beer trash. I didn’t see any weapons, but there was an empty 12 gauge shell box smashed on the floormats with the Subway wrappers and MGD bottles. There was a beat-up drink cooler in the truckbed along with some tools. Finally, I could hear a hammer pounding from the direction I’d just come. The Miller brothers arrived directly.
They walked up toward me along the fenceline on the other side of the wire. One carried a hammer and a number ten can that probably had fence staples in it. The handles of wire pliers stuck out of his back pocket. The other guy carried a shovel and wore a Ruger revolver on his belt.
“We’re fixing fence for Becky Tyree,” one said.
“I don’t recall asking you what the hell you’re doing. But the fence don’t need fixing.”
“Well, we’re tellin’ you,” the other said. They started climbing over the H brace next to the aluminum gate and had a slow time of it. They obviously didn’t have a key to the gate.
“Becky Tyree wouldn’t hire the likes of you to drag off a dead cow.”
“You go to hell,” the first one said. He was panting from his climb.
“Say hi to Jedediah for me. And make sure he don’t wipe any boogers on you.”
The second one put his hand on the butt of his Ruger.
I turned my back on them and walked over to my Dodge and got in. They took a couple of steps toward me but didn’t seem to have the stomach for much more. I could see them rooting in their cooler in my rearview as I drove away.
I bounced back down the logging road, dust trailing above me. On the downslope toward the valley I passed an old Toyota pickup heading upslope with a Mexican guy in a straw hat behind the wheel. He waved and I recognized him from a few years back as Dominion’s irrigator, a guy named Francisco. I crossed the creek and turned in among the fishing cabins alongside Summer’s Lake Road, backing my truck around so I was hidden from anything coming up behind me by a big clump of granite. Pretty soon the GMC rattled by me, and I waited until they hit the pavement. They stopped there for a housekeeping minute to throw their trash out the cab windows into the sagebrush.
I stayed on their bumper for about a mile, cruising at seventy through the sage. The pavement straightened out and you could see the Bonner & Tyree headquarters about a mile beyond. I eased off then and let the two drunks pull ahead fast on their way toward town.
In a couple minutes more I turned into Becky Tyree’s ranch. In the distance down her lane was a big old house in some poplars with a screened side porch. I saw three riders coming up from below the barn behind two cow-calf pairs. When they got closer, I got out of the truck.
“Jay-sus Chroist,” one of them said. “Look what the dog drug home.” It was Harvey Linderman, closing the corral gate from the back of a big old gelding. The other two were Becky and her half-Piute son, Dan, who was ten or fifteen years older than me. I walked down to the barn with them as they unsaddled and we talked. It was the first time I felt comfortable since I stepped off the plane the morning before.
Becky gave me a long hug and told me they’d all been worried about me there in Afghanistan. Then she asked me as easy as she could what brought me back into their country.
“Got a message from Sarah. She asked me to get on out here as soon as her dad disappeared.”
“That’s what I hoped happened,” Becky said. “I’m glad you two are talking. She needs you now.”
“I don’t know what I can do.”
“Just being here for her is important,” she said. We all walked out of the barn toward the house. “Hearing you were back is the only bright spot in this whole mess.”
“I don’t know if her husband or Mitch’d agree with you.”
We went inside and washed up, and Dan and Becky heated up a mess of leftover chili and corn bread and invited me to lunch. We all danced around the Dave thing at first. It was just too grim to talk about all the time. Becky asked about my mom, and I asked about the pack station. That was like I figured. Dominion had stopped renting Harvey the site in the canyon so Dan had hired him to irrigate that summer and let him lease pasture for his stock while he figured out his next move. I asked him if he was getting out of the outfitting busi
ness for good.
“Chroist,” Harvey said, “since the economy went into the shitter, it’s anybody’s guess. I got a bunch of hunters booked this fall, so me and Dan will pack them out of Hell Gate into that Little Frémont country in late September. Always plenty of deer up there. I don’t know if it’s going to be worth it to even get the permits, though.”
We jawed about this and that until we got to what brought me back. I told them what I’d learned from Sarah and Mitch about the FBI and their theories and protocols. It was Harvey who first brought up Kip Isringhausen, and everyone around that table took a deep breath and stopped looking me in the eye.
“You’ve met him,” Becky said. “Haven’t you Tommy?”
“Had dinner with him just last night. Cheerful bugger—considering the situation.”
“And easy on the eyes,” she said.
“He’s a world-beater,” Dan said. “He’ll tell you so himself.”
“Yeah. I guess he and Dave were pretty tight.”
I saw Becky and Harvey trade a look.
“Ran into him in town again this morning. At Nick’s. Wants to go shooting with me.”
“Hell,” Harvey said. “We should warn that city boy to watch his back.”
“Hey, Tommy,” Dan said, “you’re not going to go shoot Sarah’s new husband are you?”
“You two,” Becky said. She glared at them both and went to rap Harvey’s knuckles with a spoon, but he yanked his hand back. His beer gut kind of shimmied when he tried not to laugh at her.
“Kip seems like he means well,” she said. “He called me last month to see if Dan and I could help Dave when they gather his desert permit. Dave was talking about getting his cows out before the BLM deadline because they were running out of feed. Kip seemed real concerned about Dave not overdoing things with his bad heart and everything.”
“When Kip says he’ll do something, he does it,” Dan said. “I’ll give him that.”
We were all quiet for a minute.
“Anybody here know a couple of big old guys with the name of Miller?”
“The Miller brothers?” Dan said. “Oh yeah, Tommy, I know ’em. A pair of no-accounts from Indian Camp in Shoshone Valley. Pretty good cowboys when they were young. Later they worked for a hay outfit when they were sober till they beat a guy half to death when they weren’t. You know those lowlifes, Tommy?”
“Nope. They’re friends of some guys Kip knows.”
“Friends of Randy Ragazino and Jedediah Boone, too,” Dan said. “So don’t you turn your back on ’em.”
“They just followed me up Aspen Canyon and back.”
“Did they give you trouble?” Dan said.
“Uh-uh.”
“Their last name is Sam or Tom or Jim,” Harvey said, “one of them traditional Piute families. But they been called the Miller boys since they were young ones ’cause they were weaned on Genuine Draft. Started as a joke, but they been called that so long most folks don’t rightly remember their real name.”
We finished and Dan got us some more coffee. The late spring afternoon wind had kicked up with some bite in it, and they were all glad to linger inside a bit. I asked Dan if he had a pistol I could borrow in case Kip and I did go terrorize some targets before I left. He said a Smith & Wesson .22 Mag was all he had ammo for at the house, but I was welcome to it.
From tiptoeing around the subject of Sarah’s husband, now it seemed like that was all these folks could talk about. Harvey was joking about a Ford flatbed Kip had bought from some guy in Fallon for a work truck for Dave, but it had one thing wrong with it after another.
“Talk about him doing whatever he’d brag he’d do,” Harvey said to Dan. “When he had to replace the clutch and rebuild the transfer case the same summer, he said the next damn thing to go wrong with that bastard, he’d rip the steering wheel right off the column, and I should remember I’d heard him say it.”
“He’s stout,” Dan said, “but nobody’s that stout.”
Becky stood up and put the plates in the sink. Then she leaned back on the kitchen counter and watched us like she had heard all this before.
“Well, a couple weeks after that, the alternator went,” Harvey said, “and I saw that sonofabitch jump in the cab and grab that wheel and go for it. His veins were popping and his face was purple, but damned if he didn’t rip that goddamn wheel right off the column.” He laughed. “That wheel was bent half-over. I never seen anything like it. That is one stout boy.”
“Sounds like roid rage,” Dan said. “You about ready, Harv?”
“Let’s get to it,” Harvey said.
The two of them said their good-byes to me, grabbed their hats and headed out the back door to doctor a cancer-eyed cow they’d just brought in. Becky was leaning her hands on the counter, staring out the window toward the barn watching them go. She turned and saw me get up to leave. At around sixty, Becky was still a real pretty woman, tall and shapely and full of life, with a long braid down her back like a girl, though the braid was mostly gray.
“Wait right here,” she said. She headed for the dining room door.
I sat back down to finish my coffee and listened to her footsteps on the stairs. I’d sat at this table with my dad and the Tyrees when I was little and their world was all I thought I ever wanted to know. In a couple of minutes Becky came back into the kitchen with a cloth sack and set it down on the table in front of me. It thunked when it landed.
“This was my late husband’s,” she said. “It’s kinda low-tech, but it’s got more oomph than a twenty-two.”
I pulled a Colt single-action Army .45 out of the sack. It was in a plain leather gun rig with three cartridges still in the loops. I looked up at Becky to see if she was serious. Old as it was, this was a pretty serious piece of hardware.
“Dave’s been kidnapped or worse,” she said. “Sarah’s in some kind of trouble, and now you’re back, looking as grim as the wrath of god. Don’t think I’m a crazy old woman, but all this gives me a bad feeling.”
“Me too, I guess.”
“Anyway,” she said, “since you and Dan were talking guns.”
“Yes, ma’am. I know.”
I pulled the pistol out of the holster and half cocked it so I could spin the cylinder across my palm and listen to that old gunfighter sound that no other revolver quite makes. I lowered the hammer and set the gun on the table and slid a round out of the loops. The brass was sticky green with verdigris from the tannins in the leather.
“Those are wrecked,” she said, “but I know Nick stocks these Long Colts in town.”
“Little WD-40 and a rag and these are good-to-go. But I might be wanting more than three.”
“That sounds ominous.”
“Yeah, well. We don’t know what we’re dealing with here.”
“Right enough,” she said.
It did start to worry me that old Becky was thinking the way I was thinking—that Dave had been taken and was probably dead, and that this wasn’t the end of it. More likely just the beginning of something we didn’t understand. Becky had seen a lot in her day, and not all of it good. Her late husband was a legendary horse trainer in our part of the country and well-loved, but he had his dark side, and had done time.
“You got any thoughts on Dave selling his water rights?”
“I think it’s nuts,” she said. “I blame the husband for dangling dollar signs over a sick old man’s head.”
“No argument here. Does Hoyt Berglund still have that environmental consulting office in town?”
“Just across from Nick’s,” she said. “You passed it getting here. You going to talk to him about Dave?”
“Thought I might.”
“Good,” she said. “That restoration plan is going to ruin this country.”
I put the Colt back in its holster and the whole rig in the sack and got up, nodded thanks, and headed for the door. I had almost made a clean getaway before she said a word.
“Tommy,” she said, “I’m just
sorry as can be about all this business with Sarah. You two were meant for each other, and everybody in this valley knows it.”
“I know it too, ma’am. I just don’t know how to make it right.”
“You’ll figure it out,” she said. She nodded at the sack in my hand like my whole life was inside it. “Or it’ll get figured for you.”
Chapter Seven
The one-story building sat on a corner across a side street from the firehouse. There was no sign that you could see driving by, but I remembered the building had been a thrift store for years and a liquor store owned by Lester Wendover’s grandfather before that. Lester’s dad used to tell us that, when he was in high school, he’d pick an argument with his old man to distract him while his pals shoplifted Jim Beam half-pints. Then he and his friends would stuff the half-pints in their boot-tops before local dances. When they were good and drunk, they’d start hellacious fights with boys from Rickey Junction.
I was almost to the door before I saw a brass plaque that said BERGLUND CONSULTANTS. Seemed like overkill on such a crappy unpainted little building, especially as there were no other consultants besides Hoyt. A girl who looked about fifteen was sitting at a computer. She told me that Hoyt was “out in the field” today. When I asked where, she said she didn’t rightly know. She did say that he’d be by the Hoffstatler ranch tomorrow and offered me directions. I asked if I could look at the maps on the wall for a minute. Hoyt had maps of both the East and West Frémont drainages. They were covered with clear plastic sheets so he could color and outline the parcels, and just looking you could see how the acquisition was going. On the Shoshone Valley maps I could see Hoffstatler’s outlined and shaded in red—a done deal. I could see several more red parcels downstream for thirty-five miles until the two rivers joined. It was forty miles more to the desert lake.
To the left of Hoffstatler’s parcel, the Cathcart ranch was shaded in gray. I asked the girl what that meant. She said it meant the parcel was still in play. She said Dave Cathcart was real positive about moving forward. She didn’t have a clue, but that didn’t make her much different from anybody I’d talked to since I touched down.