by Bart Paul
“Hey you,” Callie said, “don’t you ever sleep?”
It was only about midnight, and she was skipping down the stairs to pee. She stood over the couch in her nightie watching me.
“Don’t want to fall asleep. They catch you when you do.”
“Who catches you, hon?”
“The bad guys, darlin’. The bad guys never sleep.” Callie smiled. “This is heaven on earth, remember?
There are no bad guys here.”
She sounded so damn sincere I thought she’d break my heart.
“You just keep thinking that, gorgeous.”
She scurried off to the bathroom. When she came back her hair was brushed and she looked as fine as always. She plopped herself next to me and kissed me on the cheek.
“Do I smell good?” she asked.
“You know what you smell like.”
“My god, Tommy, you are such a prude. You should have been a preacher.” She twirled a finger in the hair over my ear. “Have you been surfing the web since bedtime?”
“I spent some time on the deck just watching things.”
“It is beautiful,” she said. “The woman that owns this place says it reminds her of Switzerland.”
“Bullshit. Switzerland reminds itself of us.”
“So, cowboy,” she said, “tell me all about that airplane.”
I looked at her, but I didn’t say a word. Goddamn Lester.
About then he opened the bedroom door and came out on the landing just wearing a towel. He looked thrashed.
“Howdy, buckaroos and buckarettes,” he said. “Hell, old son, you still up?”
“So you kept our secret for what—two hours?”
“I was tortured,” he said. “She has ways.”
“So I heard.”
Callie giggled at that.
“Swearing a secret was your idea, bud.”
Lester just shrugged as he sauntered down the steps.
“Isn’t he just the cutest,” Callie said. “With that towel and surfer-boy blond hair, he looks like he should be on some beach in Hawaii.”
Lester was just eating it up.
“I should buy you a puka-shell necklace, babe,” she said. “Wouldn’t he look precious, Tommy?”
“He’d look guaranteed to get himself stomped in Elko is what he’d look like. Jesus Christ, Lester, put some pants on.”
He laughed and went off to the bathroom.
Callie gave me a funny look. “He hates the name Lester,” she said. “Everybody calls him Les except you.”
“Lester is his name. It’s about all his daddy ever gave him but grief, and what Missus Huntoon called him in the sixth grade.”
“So?”
“So I call him Lester just to aggravate him.”
“You can be such a dick, Tommy Smith.”
“Calling him that keeps him humble. Be no living with him otherwise.”
“He worships you, you know,” she said. “He thinks you hung the moon.”
“I don’t know what to think about talk like that.”
I had to look at her then. “I do surely wish he had a pinch of caution.”
She gave me a sweet kind of look. “If he had,” she said, “he wouldn’t be our Les and we wouldn’t love him so.”
“If he had, he wouldn’t try so hard to get his dingus in a wringer about this dead guy.”
“Les says he wants to contact the man’s family,” she said, “but you don’t.”
“I just want to report the wreck to the sheriff and stay the hell out of it.”
“You’re no fun.”
“Calling the sheriff is sort of like the chain of command. Then old Mitch can contact who-the-hell-ever he thinks is best. You get off that chain, things get complicated mighty quick and folks start asking questions you can’t answer.”
“You think too much.” She kissed my cheek again.
“Cut that out.” I turned the laptop to where she could read it.
Callie cuddled up smelling musky and good, her face lit up by the screen. She pulled the Mexican blanket covering the couch over her legs to keep warm. Pretty soon she was clicking and scratching away.
I was finally dozing off when she elbowed me.
“Boy,” she said, “the wife and the son are definitely not on the same page. If our billionaire was trying to disappear, they’re the reason why.”
“He ain’t our billionaire.”
“Go back to sleep,” she said, but she kept on talking. Then I noticed Lester sitting in the couch opposite, watching us.
“The wife has been to court in L.A. to get the guy declared legally dead, but the son in Miami says the old guy’s taken a powder before and will turn up sooner or later,” she said. “I say we call them both then just stand back.” She pushed the computer away and fairly bounced off the couch.
She landed on the other one next to Lester without enough nightie to do the job.
“Nothing like a billion dollars to get folks fighting among themselves,” she said. “We could get rich on the spillage.”
“You’re crazy, woman.”
“Knowledge is power,” she said, “and right now nobody knows about that wreck but us.”
“And in about thirty hours once that watch and the cash . . .”
“And the cash?” Lester asked.
“Yeah, the cash too. Once it’s back with the body, the sheriff will get told. Then if there’s some sort of reward, like from that English guy, then Lester can have some money and you can sleep with a clear conscience.”
“I’d rather sleep with a billion dollars,” Callie said, mussing Lester’s hair, “or the hot guy who’s got it.”
I stretched out on the couch and closed my eyes. These two were wearing me out.
I rousted Lester before sunup. He wasn’t any easier to wake up after a night in the sack with Callie than he was after a night in camp fixing trail, but he wasn’t any harder either. I was itching to grab a microwave breakfast from the store at the campgrounds then blast on up to the pack station and shoe a couple of horses while we still had the gumption, but while Lester was in the can Callie skipped down the stairs in that nightie, gave me a big smile, and threw open the refrigerator. Every time I think that girl is eight kinds of useless and trampy, she pulls a stunt like that—breakfast steak, Mexican omelet, toast, coffee, and melon. While she was cooking I used the house land-line to phone my mom in Jack’s Valley near Carson City where she did bookkeeping for a polled Hereford outfit. The first sun was just hitting the ridges above the lake when we piled into the truck for Aspen Canyon.
We were clinching the nails on the last hind foot of the second mule when we heard Harvey’s GMC coming off the hill through the trees. The truck disappeared, but we heard the rattle of the stock racks then the whinny of the horses as he drove over the bridge. We unloaded the six head at the chute, then got Harvey some coffee from the trailer. It was about ten in the morning.
“You get these ’morphadites shod, I guess you can finish that trail section tomorrow if you think you ought to,” he said. “I don’t want the goddamn Forest Service asking why the next time they ride through there and find it ain’t done.”
“Now, it’s not so bad,” Lester said, “that it couldn’t wait a few days. Maybe we should stay here and tighten up the loading chute.”
“Let’s get it done, Lester. The season starts we’ll never get the time.” I buckled my chinks back on over my jeans and grabbed a halter to catch one of the new horses I remembered from years past. They hadn’t had shoes since Lester and Albert had jerked them in November before they were trucked down to Nevada for the winter. “We’ll ride up there tomorrow, Harv.”
Harvey grunted and walked over to the generator. It was a big Navy-surplus Caterpillar diesel that wasn’t worth the trouble to keep running. It sat on its own trailer and was so damn noisy and smelly I never liked using it in the summer. We could get by with kerosene lamps and the propane stove and fridge until deer season when we needed it
for yard lights. Lester had replaced the glow plugs and some battery cables the week before.
“You got this running?” Harvey asked.
Lester shrugged, looking pleased with himself. “Fire it up,” he said.
Harvey walked around to the back, flipped a big switch, then pushed the starter and fired it up. Black smoke chugged out. He looked pretty surprised.
“Not bad for boys,” Harvey said. He had to shout over the noise, but he was smiling. The thing had a muffler running along the top as big as a water heater. After about a minute it sputtered and died and we couldn’t get it started again.
“Jay-sus Chroist,” he said, “check the fuel filter and the damn alternator. I got a Delco-Remy down at my shop in Hudson might work on the sonofabitch. Damn.”
In another half hour, after we’d talked about the generator some more, talked about which horses we’d keep here on pasture until the Boy Scouts came to Power Line Creek in ten days, talked about the Forest Service which would be damn grateful for all the trail work he was doing for them, and talked about the Giants’ improved bullpen, he climbed into the GMC and drove off. We watched the truck disappear in the aspens then rattle over the bridge and climb the hill before either of us opened our mouths.
“Don’t you backtrack on me, Lester.”
“I wasn’t backtracking,” he said. “I just thought riding up there could wait a day.”
“It can’t wait. As long as we know, it can’t wait at all. What if someone else sees that wreck from the air, reports it, then you’d get called a goddamn body robber the rest of your life.”
“What someone else would be flying around up there?” he asked.
“There is always someone else.”
I tied up an old horse to an aspen and started prepping the hoof. The foot was long and smooth and shiny and hard like hooves get on new grass. Lester followed me to the tree.
“I still don’t see why once we dump the watch, we can’t call the family first,” he said.
I just pointed to the corral and went back to shoeing.
Lester put his headphones on and caught himself a big bay mare to do the same thing. It wasn’t long until that old witch pulled back while Lester was digging in his box for his nippers and knocked him into the dirt. I pointed to his ear, and he pulled out the wires.
“You can’t hear that sow, you lose your advantage.”
He just grinned and got up.
“The old whore-bucket never touched me,” he said. He put the headphones back on, then fiddled with the thing in his pocket, talking in a fake whisper. “But I’ll turn it down real low so you won’t worry about me none.”
We quit about four and had a beer then piled into my old truck. Lester wanted to see Callie and talk high finance before her shift started at the Sierra Peaks, so after we showered up I pointed us down the mountain again.
“Last time I summered up here we’d go a week sometimes between trips to town.”
“Yes, old son,” Lester said, “but Harvey and May and Albert were all up here then and we had three squares a day and I didn’t know Callie Dean. Is it my fault Harvey Linderman wants to be the goddamn Colonel Sanders of the eastern Sierra and franchise this pack outfit to Power Line Creek years after it and Summers Lake and all the other pack outfits in the valley go bust?”
“We’re spending a fortune in diesel, bud.”
He just grinned and put his headphones on. “Fuel is high, but so am I.”
“It must be great to be in love. She even got you off Copenhagen.”
He said something back to that but by then we were rattling over the cattle guard on the point of the hill and I couldn’t make it out.
When we got to the cabin at the lake Callie was sitting in her bra and some slacks working on the computer and putting on makeup at the same time.
“What’s shaking, beautiful?” Lester asked.
“Doing some homework,” she said. “The billionaire’s son is named Gerald, middle name Quinn, but after he had a falling out with his dad down in Miami he goes by Jerry Q or GQ.” She looked up happy like this all made sense. “Like the magazine, you know? He won’t use his family name. Since his daddy has all these aviation records in planes and balloons, the boy made a name for himself as a helicopter pilot.” She scrolled around some more.
“From the Internet sign I cut last night, he tried to make a name for himself as a dope smuggler too.”
Callie shot me a look for that. “No way.”
“Got himself arrested for flying marijuana into Key West back when he was nineteen, and his dad had to lawyer him out of the mess.”
“Anyway, Mister Preacher,” she said, “I found something on the wife trying to get the husband declared dead. It mentioned a Beverly Hills law firm, so here’s their number.” She held up a piece of paper. “I called four-one-one so you boys can phone her up. Hit the lottery in the cosmic jackpot. And here’s the number of Club Tiburón, the son’s hangout in a place called South Beach.” She smiled right at me. “I got the name from his Facebook wall like he just can’t wait for us to call. Now look at this.” She got to some personal site that showed this Jerry Q with some big-boobed girls outside a nightclub.
“A lady on cable said GQ is the cowboy in the family,” Callie said.
Lester laughed at that. The video showed the same guy I’d seen in the same stupid hat wearing a Hawaiian shirt.
“What a fruit bat,” Lester said. “Lookit them baggy pants. And pointy-toed boots he probably bought off some dead Mexican. Cowboy my ass.”
Callie walked over to the dinner table and punched a button on the house phone message machine.
“Hey, babe,” some guy said, “no veal picata tonight since . . .” She skipped to the next message. It was the lady in Palo Alto that owned the house reminding Callie about the propane delivery.
“Who’s calling you ‘babe’?” Lester asked.
“Ed,” she said. “My boss?”
Lester gave her a sour look. She was punching in numbers on the phone just ignoring him.
“So who you calling . . . babe?” Lester asked.
“Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills,” she said, kind of smirky.
“Jesus, Callie, this ain’t some high-school crap.”
She shushed me and asked whoever answered the phone for the lawyer handling the missing billionaire’s wife.
“. . . well if you would please tell him that Callie Dean of Piute Meadows, California, has information on the location of her husband’s plane. That’s right, the location of the crash. Yes, Callie Dean. They can reach me at this number. Thank you.”
I stood up and got myself a beer from the fridge.
“Damn, girl. What are you thinking?”
“Now Tommy, by the time these lawyers get back to me, you boys will have returned the watch and called the sheriff. All I’m doing is establishing a time line. Like a record. So if there is any kind of reward from anyone, they’ll know it was us had the skinny before the sheriff even knew. You heard me. I played it cool. Never mentioned a reward. Just tried to sound like a concerned citizen.”
“I told you she was a smart one,” Lester said.
“What time is it, Les?” she asked.
He looked down at that watch. “Four forty-six.”
“Damn,” she said. “I gotta run.” She scampered up the stairs.
Lester sat at the dinner table and watched her go. “What you need to do, old son,” he said, “is develop a sense of humor about all this.” He picked up the phone and just sort of stared at it. “This is once-in-a-lifetime stuff. When do you think something like this will pass our way again? We got this little secret that’s all ours. Let’s play this smart and see where it goes.” He punched the message button. “What could go wrong?”
“Hey, babe, no veal picata tonight. You can do some sort of chicken picata if you think you have to . . .”
Lester clicked it off. Before I knew it he was punching in numbers himself, looking at Callie’s sc
rap of paper. At first I thought he was calling Ed at the Sierra Peaks to make an idiot of himself.
“Yeah,” I heard Lester say after a pause, “Club Tiburón? Is this where that Jerry Q hangs?” He looked over at me and laughed like we were making prank calls in grammar school. Like, is your refrigerator running, sir? Well you best go catch it.
“Oh yeah,” Lester said, “Jerry Q.” His voice changed then. “Yessir. That’s right, Mister Q. My name is Lester Wendover, and I found your dad’s plane.”
I sat up sharp, just listening to this nonsense. There wasn’t much else to do.
“That’s right. Me and my partner Tom Smith found the wreck just short of North Pass. That’s in California, on the east side of the Sierra. Right, just as plain as day. At the head of Aspen Canyon west from Piute Meadows, then up the north fork. You know where that is? Nosir. About two hours drive south of Reno. No, we didn’t tell nobody yet. Thought you should be the first to know. No. We only found it yesterday, and we been trying to track you down.” Lester looked over at me as serious as I’d ever seen him. The guy on the phone must have been doing more talking than Lester. That was a switch.
Callie came down the stairs dressed for work. I nodded toward Lester, and she sat next to me and listened.
“Yessir. It was . . . intact. That’s right. A positive ID shouldn’t be a problem if that’s what’s worrying—”
Lester put his hand over the phone and whispered loud to us. “He got interrupted. He’s yelling at some Mexicans. It’s all in Spanish.” Lester went back to listening.
I got up and walked out to the deck and just grabbed the railing and held on for a minute. Lester was still sucking up when I came back in, but at least I didn’t hear him use my name again.
“Okay, okay. That’s right, drive south from Reno. They got car rentals right there at the airport. Sure. You can leave me a message right here at this phone. We got zero cell service up here. Right. Well you’re surely welcome. Look forward to it. So long.”