Death Sentence

by Sharkey, Joe;

  Gradually, the ground was firming under Bob’s feet. Blurred outlines came into sharper focus as a man, simply by routinely occupying a place and time, acquired a lengthening recent past. Merely by being unchallenged, Bob Clark’s identity began acquiring buttresses to support its rising structure.

  By 1975, in a city whose attention was directed west, not east, he knew that few people if any would remember a face that, even in 1971, had been only a one-day blip on the national media screen.

  He knew the time had come to reclaim his church, not as a haven, for a haven is intrinsically unsafe, but, again, as an abode.

  From his earliest days in Denver, he had known which church that would be when the time came. During one foray by bus into downtown Denver, Bob had noticed the tall stone bell tower and the soaring stained-glass windows of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church on Grant Street, a few blocks from the bus station and only one block from the gold dome of the Colorado state capitol.

  When he was ready, he did not push open the big oak doors and walk boldly in. No, he did what he knew best. He began blending in for a long period, until he was familiar.

  St. Paul’s was no inbred small-town parish like Zion Lutheran back in Bay City, where generations of a family were baptized, confirmed, educated, wed, and buried, and assessed. St. Paul’s was “on a bus line,” its pastor, the Reverend Robert A. West, pointed out. In a transient western city in the 1970s, St. Paul’s attracted “people starting their lives over, single people, people walking in off the street,” the pastor said.

  By no means was St. Paul’s a church of drifters. Then and now, it was a parish with a proud history and a tradition of practical urban Christianity. But by the 1970s, it had become a church of strangers. When he knew it was safe, Bob Clark found solace there, where he knew that a man’s past mattered little, that salvation was waiting to be reclaimed, now that he was born again.

  Pastor West had noticed Bob’s presence in the congregation for several months before the stranger officially rejoined the Lutheran church on June 29, 1975.

  In 1976, with his name in the phone book for the second consecutive year, Bob Clark decided that he was secure enough to pound another major supporting pile deeper down into the earth.

  Certain bureaucratic verities needed to be in place. Now it was time to obtain a driver’s license.

  This was possible because Bob Clark’s identity was now established. In a computer at the phone company, for example, there was the kind of ratification of his being that can come only from dealing with a customer who has a history of paying his bills. To accept Bob Clark as a valid person, all the data bank at the motor vehicles office needed to know was that the phone company data bank did. Soon after that, data banks all over the Denver area would be linked in mutual proclamation of his undisputed existence.

  So one day in the spring of 1976, Bob Clark, telephone customer, employee, taxpayer, congregant, and, at last, licensed driver, drove proudly back to Columbine Street in a used Volkswagen Beetle, bright orange.

  In many residential areas, an eccentric single man pulling up to the curb in an orange Beetle would be a curious sight, but here, with the campus of the University of Denver only a few blocks away and the Greek letters of the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity emblazoned on the big house across the street, Bob Clark knew he wouldn’t rate a second glance.

  Having wheels meant he was no longer restricted to the bus routes, and Bob acted accordingly. With a car, Bob could become more useful to his church, where he had already established himself as a friendly figure who would stay after services to help prepare the coffee hour and clean up when it ended. Now, with his car, Bob placed himself in the service of his parish, eagerly volunteering to drive the old and infirm people to and from services each week. As John List’s had been in college, Bob’s name was always there at the top when the volunteer sign-up list was posted. As always, he was known as kind, solicitous but distant, an “ordinary guy,” one parishioner said, who didn’t seem to leave much of an impression beyond that.

  Bob, eager to achieve status in the place where it mattered most to him, conveyed to his pastor that he had an advanced degree in accounting. He was eventually appointed to the parish finance council. Years later, Bob would even serve a two-year term as treasurer of the congregation, a post that many considered second in actual importance only to the pastor’s.

  As the days grew shorter in the autumm of 1976, Bob Wetmore started to feel restless, as a person accustomed to the open skies will when cooped up in town too long. He knew he was too old to face another winter in the mountains, but he was desperate to get away from the clutter of the city, where someone seemed to be in your face every waking moment, and to smell the timberline pine again, if only for a day. Since he knew that Bob hadn’t ever ventured any farther from Denver than Wheatridge, and knew the Rockies only as a decorative border on the horizon, he suggested they make a day trip, for a change of scenery.

  They were at work in the noisy kitchen at the Pinery. It was late in October, when the quaking aspen are shimmering in the hills and the skies at the higher elevations are so clear you can see the stars at noon. Both he and Bob were off on Mondays.

  “So let’s you and me go up that way first thing Monday morning?” Wetmore said. “You’ll like the scenery, and we’ll be able to be back at a reasonable time.”

  “Sure,” Bob said. “Thanks.”

  But the next thing Wetmore knew, Bob had hurried out to the gift shop and come back with a map of Colorado and a look of concern. He wanted to know exactly where they would be going.

  “Well, I figure we’d go up to the North Park—along Poudre Park, past Collins, over the Cameron Pass up a ways to Walden,” Wetmore said laconically. “Down Fourteen to the old Rabbit Ears’s still passable this time of year. Then on to Granby. A full day’s trip. I figure we’d stop up there for a couple of minutes to see this old rancher I used to work for that’s retired now.”

  Wetmore didn’t need to consult a map. He could envision the great loop around the Front Range. It wasn’t like city driving: basically, there’s one way in and one way out, the same as it had been since the trails were blazed and the passes first forged. But Bob, with his brow furrowed, had spread his map out on the table and was trying to trace the route with a pencil. He had Wetmore go over it again, slowly, with estimations of when they would arrive where. He jotted the information down in a notebook, into which he finally tucked the map. About 350 miles all told.

  “How about you driving?” Bob suggested. “I’ll navigate. That way we won’t get lost.”

  Wetmore shrugged. He didn’t mind driving. “It’s fine with me,” he said. “That way you’ll be able to appreciate the scenery better, too, Bob. I tell you, you ain’t seen the like of it.”

  They set off early on Monday with Wetmore behind the wheel of the orange Volkswagen and Bob alert with his map and his notebook. They weren’t a half-hour out of Denver on Interstate 87 North before Bob began looking for landmarks. When he found one, he’d tick it off on his list.

  It was a spectacular day, crisp and fragrant. As they drove north, the terrain quickly changed from the hamburger joints and car lots on the edge of the city to alpine meadows dotted with snowberry shrubs curling into the foothills. Neither man spoke much as the little car climbed higher.

  Bob watched carefully for the turn onto Route 14 just past Fort Collins. Now the ascent began in earnest. Wetmore was pleased to find that the Volkswagen didn’t falter badly on the ascent as they drove west into the Rockies. Wetmore could never drive into this country without thinking of early settlers and pioneers who had to hack and bull their way across these mountains, inching up the crests of the massive rocks week by week, always to turn another bend and suddenly behold a vista of supernal beauty that took your breath away with its visual force, its staggering assertion of the obstructions that lay ahead, as far as the eye could see across snow-crusted peaks and icy glacial summits hoving into a sky that no longer held the assurance
of horizons.

  Wetmore parked the car a little off the two-lane highway just past the Cameron Pass, at ten thousand feet. He shut the engine off and got out, walking to the side of the road, where he stood alone for a while, with his arms folded across his chest and the cold wind tousling his thin white hair. He was a tiny figure on the edge of a precipice over a world where waterfalls plunged unheard into canyons far below, down past the treelines where the spruce and fir give way to the ponderosa that cover the troughs of the great granite seaswells of the Continental Divide, where the courses of rivers are determined, east across the plains to the Mississippi, west to the Colorado.

  Wetmore didn’t understand why his companion hadn’t got out to take it in. Bob said it was too cold to get out of the car. When he walked back to the Volkswagen, Wetmore was surprised and a little disappointed to find Bob huddled in the passenger seat with the engine on and the heater running, studying his map with a frown.

  “We’d better get going,” Bob said.

  As they drove on, Wetmore noticed with some annoyance that Bob’s attention was riveted on the map. When he did look outside, it was to confirm certain landmarks—Bald Mountain prominent to the north just a thousand feet above the pass, and Hagues Peak and Mummy Mountain together at a greater altitude to the south, Richthofen looming ahead at thirteen thousand feet—as if they were service stations and traffic lights turning up on a set of directions someone had drawn up for an address on the other side of town.

  After a while, as the road descended from the highest elevations, Bob seemed to relax. He looked idly out the window, watching for road signs giving the distance to Walden, the little ranch town up at the fork of the Michigan and Illinois creeks that was their destination. It wasn’t far from the Wyoming border.

  “Anybody who’s ever been up there and can’t get just a little bit shook up is dead,” Wetmore muttered peevishly as the rugged high elevations give way to scraggly meadows where the occasional knot of livestock could be seen grazing. Bob didn’t say anything.

  So Wetmore laughed. “That is, of course, till you feed cows seven days a week in them blizzards, thirty-five degrees below zero,” he said. “You got to harness up four work horses, two of them broncs. Take your saddle horse along and he’s disgusted, but you need him just in case something happens—you got a way to get back, see. He’ll take you back if you get lost. Then it ain’t beautiful, of course. There ain’t a fucking thing beautiful about it then.”

  But Bob remained intent on the road signs. A little way up the highway, he saw the one he wanted.

  “You go right at this stop sign up ahead,” he told Wetmore.

  Wetmore knew the way. He had spent a good part of his middle age and beyond here around Walden, winter and summer. He turned right and drove along a dusty two-lane road that led to the ranch that he had considered his headquarters in the years before he came down to Denver. It was early in the afternoon.

  “I know this place pretty good,” Wetmore told Bob. “This fellow here, Howard, that had backed me in business had a private cow horse, which was named Tony, a damned good cow horse, all business, which was broke out by an old drunk down by Granby, and Howard had later bought him. He had me in to feed him. This horse wouldn’t ever let nobody ride him but Howard or me. Me and Tony hit it off.”

  “Tony who?” Bob asked. “I thought we were going to stop in to see someone named Howard.”

  “We are. Howard is this rancher,” Wetmore said with some consternation. “Tony is the horse that’s probably still kept here.”

  Wetmore made another turn on a road that ran past the outbuildings of the ranch, which appeared deserted. “Over there’s the old bunkhouse,” he pointed out. “Up ahead is the barns. Over here’s the shed. There’ll be a wood gate up ahead, just past those trees, by the pasture.”

  They parked in front of the gate. Both men got out and walked to the fence. Wetmore squinted across the pasture and smiled broadly when he spotted the big red bay dozing with four other horses in a shady dell. He made a little clucking noise. Shaking out its mane, the old bay looked toward the noise, a good 250 feet away. The horse stirred itself and trotted quickly up the pasture, then pulled up short about twenty feet from the two men to take visual measure of the familiar sound with a sidewise look. Wetmore made the noise again. The bay tossed its head and whinnied, and sauntered right up to him.

  The cowboy was immensely pleased. “Tony, you miserable old son of a bitch,” he cackled, rubbing the bay’s face. He looked at Bob’s impassive expression and said, “This here is Tony.”

  Almost as if he was remembering his manners, Bob put out his palm tentatively toward the horse’s head, as if to pat it, but then quickly withdrew it, like a child afraid of having to wash its hand in disgust because an animal licked it.

  The bay, of course, could have cared less. Ears back, the horse turned, put up its head and trotted off down the meadow to the shade.

  They spent only a few minutes with Wetmore’s rancher friend before Bob suggested it was getting late and there was a long way to go. He remained subdued, and seemed chilled despite the bright afternoon sun, even when they stopped for a late afternoon lunch down in Granby.

  “I saw that,” Bob said over lunch, in a tone that seemed to carry a hint of accusation.

  “You seen what?” Wetmore asked as he munched his sandwich.

  “The way that horse came to you. That horse knew who you were.”

  Wetmore made a pained face. “Well of course the goddamn horse knew me! Jesus Christ, a horse ain’t like a cow, for Christ’s sake.”

  Bob flinched a little, as he always did when directly confronted with profanity. But he didn’t mention the horse again, and he fell into a long silence back in the car.

  Wetmore didn’t feel like talking either on the long, winding drive south from Granby along Route 40. He had supposed Bob would enjoy the trip—for all he knew, Bob had enjoyed it—but by the time they turned onto Interstate 70 for the last leg eastward, back to Denver, it was nightfall. As they pressed on toward the lights of the city, Wetmore decided that Bob Clark was a man he no longer trusted. He didn’t seem to have an inner core. “The man was hollow,” Wetmore said. From that day onward, Wetmore would remain friendly, but he would have very little more to do with Bob Clark.

  Wetmore tried to explain it years later: “You develop a sense of self-preservation living in them hobo jungles, but that’s a different thing. I can’t say that I got any bad signals from Bob Clark—as a rule, the signals were neutral. But toward the end, especially him not showing any animation up there in them mountains, except some weird kind of suspicion, well, I just didn’t care to be around him any longer.”

  Familiar patterns began to emerge. On their way to work, Gary noticed that Bob seemed to be talking more frequently about his training as an accountant. Before long, Gary, who was extremely proud of his perception in having chosen Bob as his protégé, came to realize that this full-blown natural in the restaurant business was in fact pining for his own true vocation: Accounting. Accounting! The idea was heartbreaking to Gary.

  But since the chef was more friend than boss, he understood and acquiesced. A restaurant calling had its joys and remunerations; it was creative; at a certain level, it was certainly a craft, and at its highest peak, some had even claimed for it the status of a minor art. But it did have two very persuasive drawbacks.

  One was those awful hours. For two years after graduating from the all-night shift at the Holiday Inn, Bob had worked a split day shift—half of it during the lunch rush and the other half for the dinner period. In between there was little to do but read and wait to begin work again, or dabble with his numbers.

  “He’d take a couple of hours off in the afternoon,” Gary recalled. “Well, when you’re out in the middle of nowhere with no place to go, you’d read or whatever. Bob had a big pad of paper—it must have been twenty-four inches by thirty inches or so, one of those accounting pads. He began developing a system for p
laying roulette. I have never in my life seen such a conglomeration of numbers.”

  And worse than a split shift, spending your time off dreaming up roulette combinations, was the work week itself. This was, after all, a business whose employees ate their meals, by definition, when no one else especially wanted to eat. The allure of holidays is lost on those who toil in restaurants; when normal people relaxed, you only worked harder, you worked like a whipped cur at times, you damned well made hay while the New Year’s, Mother’s Day, Easter, Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas suns shone.

  And the other drawback was the intrinsic instability of a business in which today’s trendy new restaurant can very easily become tomorrow’s arson investigation.

  Gary had sensed that Bob would say no late in 1977 when he told him he had received a better job offer at a country club in Golden and asked him to come along. Accounting, Gary had come to realize, “was just in his personality, which was very thorough, very exact. I realized that his unbelievable ability to work with figures, and the lack of stability in the food service industry, was leading him directly back into accounting, where the hours were more stable, where you weren’t looking at working every Saturday and Sunday.”

  As it turned out, this had become a major consideration for reasons that had nothing to do with Bob’s personality. For Bob had begun courting. In the spring of 1977, for only the second time in his life, the man had fallen in love.

  Delores H. Miller was a tall, pleasant-looking woman in her mid-thirties, recently divorced from a military man. A shy, religious person, she had recently taken a job in the warehouse of the base exchange at Fitzsimmons Army Medical Center in Aurora, just across the Adams County line east of Denver.

  They met at a singles social sponsored by area Lutheran churches. It was not a whirlwind romance. Delores would tell friends she barely recalled anything Bob had said during their first conversations. Shy people have a way of identifying each other and gravitating together in social events, and she and Bob did just that. Soon the encounters became regular. Before long, Delores had even prevailed upon Bob to learn how to square dance. He was embarrassed and clumsy at first, and while no one would ever accuse Bob Clark of being a natural dancer, he did develop some poise and with it some enthusiasm. In an informal atmosphere, Bob’s coat and tie had always stood out. But with Delores, Bob started showing up in shirts open at the neck. He even bought a pair of jeans.