by Paul Levine
He grabbed his video camera from the trunk and began recording the flowers, the snow, and every rock and shrub within eyesight. Then, we both started shivering, so I hustled him into the car. In a few moments, we passed the lookout point, driving through low-hanging clouds, a fine mist glistening in the headlights.
“That’s the Continental Divide,” I told my nephew, spotting a tourist information sign, but sounding as if I were an old Rocky Mountain hand.
“I know,” he said. “It’s a movie with John Belushi as a newspaperman who doesn’t like nature ‘till he gets out here.”
We began the long descent into the next valley, and just then the mist turned to rain, and in a moment, chunks of ice fell from the sky, pinging off the hood and plopping onto our canvas top.
“Jeez! What’s that?” Kip was wide-eyed.
“Hail, my boy. And not little pebbles, either.”
“What a racket. Yikes!”
I rounded a curve a bit too fast, then hit the brakes, just like you’re not supposed to do. The Mustang’s rear end skidded toward the darkness of a sheer drop-off. I let up on the brakes and swung the wheel back the other way. Too hard. We fishtailed toward the mountain side, nearly slamming into a boulder the size of a house. Again, I whipped the wheel the other way, and we skidded toward the black abyss. This time, I gave it some gas, tugged the wheel gently toward the mountain, and we straightened out, but I was in the left-hand lane, and a Jeep was headed toward me, headlights flashing, horn honking. I spun the wheel once more, and we skidded onto the gravel on the mountain side.
A long-lost word popped into my head. Makua, the Hawaiian word meaning “toward the mountain.” It came from a trip to Maui, and a deadly drive down Crater Road on the slopes of Haleakala. I’d gone after a woman then, too. What was the other word? Makai, “toward the sea.” If you’re going to go off a mountain road, choose the makua side. Always take a ditch or even a boulder over a two-thousand-foot drop.
I fought the skid and the urge to stomp on the brakes. The Mustang thudded to a stop and stalled in a shallow ditch. The hailstones, more like slabs of ice, clanged off the car with a frightening noise and stuck to the windshield in frozen sheets. Steam rose from under the hood. I sat there with both hands on the wheel, my heart pounding. Then I turned to Kip and tousled his blond hair, giving him a forced smile that said Uncle Jake had everything under control.
Our breath and body temperature was fogging the inside of the windshield. In front of the car, shrouded by our man-made fog and the frozen windshield, the mountain towered over us.
“You okay?” I asked Kip.
“Sure.”
“You’re kind of quiet.”
“Uh-huh.”
“What are you thinking, young man.”
“Nothin’”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. It’s just, I guess...”
“Go on, Kip. Tell me.”
“Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
***
I gave Kip his first driving lesson. It consisted of my standing in the ditch up to my ankles in slushy mud, bracing my arms against the trunk of the car and pushing as if the two-ton chunk of metal were a blocking sled. All the time, Kip was supposed to be gently giving it gas. Except he wasn’t so gentle. The rear wheels spun and splattered me with mud. I was just happy he didn’t throw it into reverse.
The hail stopped and was replaced by a fine cold mist. I tried to wipe off the mud, but it was everywhere, including in my right ear. I rested a moment and checked out the car. There were a few dents on the right side where we’d sideswiped a boulder shaped like a tombstone, but otherwise, we were fine. In a few minutes, Kip got the hang of it, and together we rocked the car out of the ditch.
Kip took a long look at me when I slid back behind the wheel. “Yuck!”
We started down the mountain toward Aspen. I was cold, filthy, and exhausted and now, on this narrow, slippery road, I began to wonder again just what I was doing. I didn’t know the territory. I didn’t know if Jo Jo wanted me to follow her. I didn’t know how to clear my name.
I had just traveled two thousand miles, but I didn’t have a plan. Where to begin?
With Jo Jo? With Cimarron? I decided to take one step at a time. It’s the way you build a case in the courtroom. The big picture is sometimes too complex, too daunting. So first, figure what you need to prove, then take a small step in that direction.
Kip flicked on the inside light and buried his head in the tourist brochure.
I kept thinking. And driving. I’m not sure I could have chewed gum too.
Inside my head I was pacing. Socolow thinks I killed Kyle Hornback. Cimarron thinks I defrauded him. Covering up the fraud was the motive for the murder. So, if I can prove I didn’t defraud Cimarron…Right.
That’s thinking like a lawyer. Building my case, chipping away at the other guy’s, proving I had no motive to kill, maybe proving that somebody else did.
Which made me think of Kit Carson Cimarron again, which in turn, made me flex my right hand. Clenching the fist was fine, but spreading the fingers caused the hand to flare with pain. If I hit anybody tougher than the Pillsbury Doughboy, it would hurt me more than him.
Kip turned off the map light and looked toward me. “You know why they call it the Continental Divide?”
“Something to do with the way the water flows,” I said, remembering a tidbit of lost information from a long-ago geography class.
“Right. It’s the part of the Rockies that divides the continent, east from west. On the Leadville side, the Arkansas River flows east. On the Aspen side, the Roaring Fork and the Frying Pan flow west, eventually reaching the Pacific. Do you believe that, Uncle Jake? I mean, if the wind is blowing one way, or if the raindrop hits this rock or that one, it determines whether the drop goes to the Atlantic or the Pacific Ocean?”
“Sure. It’s just like with people. Little things push us one direction or the other. But we’re not drops of water, Kipper. We’ve got free will, and the power to act, to change course. Trouble comes when we see that shallow reef dead ahead, and we plow right along, damn well knowing that any moment we’ll hear the crunch of coral against hull.”
That quieted him for a moment, but not much longer. “Is this one of your lessons about life, Uncle Jake?”
“Yep.”
We were slowing down again as the two lanes seemed to narrow, and we crept along mountainside cliffs cut deep by torrents of water that tumbled into channels alongside the road.
“I get it,” he said. “That’s the reason we’re here, right?
Like you could stay in Miami and get scorched by that goober, Mr. Socolow. But you’ve seen the reef and decided to change course, right?”
“Something like that.”
“Totally excellent. I’ll help you steer, Uncle Jake.”
Chapter 15
Birds of Prey
An owl sat on a fence post eating a skunk.
The owl’s legendary eyesight is apparently keener than its sense of smell.
“Kip, that’s a great horned owl,” I said, with authority, having been told as much by the fellow at the front desk of the Lazy Q ranch.
“Yuck. I think I’m gonna blow chunks.”
“Whoo,” said the owl, between bites. The skunk didn’t say a thing.
I didn’t want to stay at any of the hotels in town. If Abe Socolow thought about it, he probably would figure I followed Jo Jo or Cimarron, or both. So the Hotel Jerome, the Little Nell, and the Ritz-Carlton were out, it being damn near impossible to check into a decent hotel under a phony name these days. Having to surrender your credit card takes care of that.
I hate credit cards. I hate leaving a trail of where I’ve been, what I’ve eaten, how I’ve shopped. A credit history these days is a life story. Where would divorce lawyers and other snoops be without the computer printouts of hotel rooms, jewelry stores, and weekend flights to Nassau when the business meeting was in Tampa? Government at every level
, companies that employ you and companies that choose not to, every school you’ve attended, and every liquor store you’ve frequented maintain a cradle-to-grave digital trail of facts and figures about you. The data—some mundane, some striking at the core of intimate privacy—is never discarded and never fades into yellow clippings. Ask not for whom the computer chimes. It chimes for thee.
I chose a ranch located just off Maroon Creek Road outside Aspen. It had nine wooden cottages that were a tad too primitive even to be called rustic. My skiing buddies and I had stayed here once after we’d been thrown out of an Aspen condo complex for staging diving contests into the swimming pool.
In January.
The pool was filled with five feet of powdery snow, and nobody got hurt, but the building manager was screaming about his insurance rates until I dragged him up the three-meter board and tossed him in. His belly flop sounded like a whale breaching.
The lodge of the Lazy Q was an A-frame made of logs with a Ben Franklin stove, a moth-eaten bearskin rug, and what I took to be the antlered head of a deer on the knotty pine wall, but it could have been an elk or an orangutan for all I knew.
Behind the counter was a skinny clerk in faded jeans, scuffed boots, greasy hair with long sideburns, and a cigarette jammed into the corner of his mouth.
“Dork thinks he’s Harry Dean Stanton,” Kip whispered to me.
“Hush.” I shooed the kid away, and he wandered around the one-room lodge, pausing in front of a wall calendar featuring cowgirls wearing nothing but boots and hats. When he was done with July, he studied August and September, too.
The clerk said his name was Rusty or maybe Dusty. He handed over a key to number seven and told me about the great horned owl that called the fence post home.
“Got a golden eagle, too, in the blue spruce trees out back. Come daylight, you’ll get a gander at him if you want. Got a set of talons could tear your head off. Son of a gun dives after mice. Clocked that sucker with a radar gun at a hundred fifty miles an hour in his dive. Can you beat that?”
“Not on my best day,” I said.
“Got a couple little falcons out there, too. Called kestrels around here. They’ll eat whatever the eagle misses. Raptors, that’s what the fellow called them. Birds of prey, flesh eaters.” He studied me a moment. “Will you be wanting binoculars, or you got your own?”
I didn’t know what he meant.
“We got people come out here to ride the horses, some to see the birds. Which is it with you, Mr. Lassiter?”
I might have been bleary-eyed and muscle-cramped from the trip. I might have had jet lag and a sour stomach, but I knew the answer. “The raptors,” I said. “I came for the birds of prey.”
***
“I’m ow-dee,” Kip said.
“Huh?”
“Ow-dee, like outta here.” Kip gestured around the small cottage. “What’s missing from this picture?”
I looked around. Two single beds whose springs had sprung. A nightstand with a two-bulb reading lamp. A couple of ersatz Frederic Remington prints of cowboys busting broncos and branding steers. A porcelain sink stained orangish-brown under the faucet, a shower and toilet tucked behind a partition.
“I don’t know, Kip. I’m going to sleep.”
“A TV! Uncle Jake, there’s no TV!”
I was already peeled down to my Jockey shorts and was stripping a paper-thin brown blanket off the bed. “We’ve had enough entertainment for one day. Lights out, Kip. Go to bed.”
“Without a TV! Without dinner! I’m hungry, Uncle Jake. We haven’t eaten anything since the pork rinds and root beer at the gas station.”
“There’s a machine with peanut butter crackers at the lodge. If that’s not enough, ask the horned owl to share his dinner with you.”
He said something to me, probably some eleven-year-old sassified backtalk, but I was falling toward the squashed pillow, already drifting off to dreams of mice and falcons, wondering which I was.
***
The Pitkin County Courthouse is a hundred-year-old red-brick building that sits formidably on Main Street. Courthouse architecture is intended to represent strength and permanence and a certain majesty of the law that mortar and stone can convey better than the weak-willed Homo sapiens who ply their trade therein. This one was a solid building that would be considered squat, if not for a faintly baroque tower that might have been the battlement of a castle. The American and Colorado flags flew atop the tower, crackling in the early-morning breeze.
Rosebushes crept up a knee-high iron fence that surrounded the building, and spruce and aspen trees provided a measure of shade. On the lawn was the obligatory statue honoring local lads who died in various wars, and above the entrance was Lady Justice.
Inside were plaques naming 4-H champions, old black-and-white photos of cowboys, miners, and farmers at work. The local police and county sheriff s offices were in the basement, the county treasurer, the county commission, and tax assessor’s offices were on the first floor. Hardwood stairs with a polished balustraded railing led to the courtroom on the second floor, but my business wasn’t there.
I went into the tax assessor’s office where a pleasant young woman in jeans and a cotton sweater hoisted a ledger book off a shelf for me. The book had the musty smell of age and the heft of a decent-sized barbell. The walls were decorated with framed deeds from the 1800s, plat maps, and the other official memorabilia of the town.
Before opening the book, I studied a framed map of what looked like the town maybe a hundred years ago. There was the courthouse, just where it is now, at the corner of Main and Galena. But there was something odd.
“What are those lines going through the streets?” I asked the woman, who sat nearby, using a fountain pen to make entries in another ledger.
She followed my gaze to the framed map. “Mines.”
I read some of the names aloud. “‘Durant, Little Nell, Enterprise, Little Mack, Pride of the Hills, Mollie Gibson, Copperopolis, Esperanza.’ I thought the mines were in the mountains, but some of the tunnels go right under Main Street.”
“That’s right,” she said. “The shafts generally were up on the slopes of the mountains, but once they got as deep as they were going to go, the tunnels started branching in all directions, like the streets of a town that hasn’t been planned too well. We’ve got some right below the courthouse here. Some old-timers say you could get from Smuggler Mountain over to Aspen Mountain and never see the light of day. Just go down the Mollie Gibson shaft, take the right tunnels and come up the Compromise. The skiers on Aspen Mountain don’t know it, but underneath all that snow are dozens of shafts and tunnels. They’re still there, maybe some filled with water, some with rotting timbers, but there are locals hereabouts who own the claims and are just waiting for the price of silver to rise.”
“And if it does?”
“Well, wouldn’t it be interesting if the ski companies could make more money leasing the land to miners, instead of hitting up tourists for fifty bucks a day for the lift?”
While I pondered that, I opened the plat book and thumbed some pages until I found K. C. Cimarron’s parcel, all properly described in the arcane language of metes and bounds and “running thence” of the property rolls. This little side excursion might not have been necessary if I hadn’t botched it with the clerk at the ranch this morning. While Kip was eating some dry corn flakes from the box, I asked the skinny clerk, who must have worked all night, if he’d ever run across my buddy, Kit Carson Cimarron.
“You a friend of that big ole hoss?” he asked, dropping ashes from his cigarette onto the scarred counter.
His tone was neutral, giving nothing away. Cimarron could have been his cousin or someone he hated, or both.
I put on my amiable, out-of-towner face. “Yeah, I met him back in my skiing days.”
He exhaled a puff of smoke at me. “Never heard of him skiing. Horses, sure. ‘Course, ole Kit needs one about the size of an elephant.”
Ole Kit. Ma
ybe these two guys skinned mules together, whatever the hell mule skinning was.
“No, I was skiing. He was ranching and, as I recall it, always talking about buried treasure, or some such stuff.”
That loosened up his face a bit. “Yeah, that’s ole Kit. The dreamer, that’s what we call him. Spent a fortune, hell two fortunes, on wild-goose chases. Years ago, I remember the town offered a five-thousand-dollar reward for anyone who could find the Silver Queen. Ole Kit musta spent a hundred thousand hunting for her, but the damn thing hadn’t been seen since the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. I could understand it if ole Kit could profit from it, but hell, she would have gone to the town.”
“The Silver Queen,” I said. It was more of a question, but what I was really thinking about was the clanging dissonance of Kit Carson Cimarron, the civic booster and historical preservationist, and Kit Carson Cimarron, the coldly efficient mugger and partner of Blinky Baroso.
“A statue made of silver from the biggest damn nugget ever found,” the clerk continued, “more than a ton, damn near a hundred percent pure. The mining folks got together and made this silver lady, had some gold and diamonds in her too, and some crystals and precious stones for her eyes, the way I hear tell. Anyway, they took her to the World’s Fair, but she disappeared, and ever since, the town wants her back.”
“Sounds like some wise guys may have melted her down for the metals and stones.”
“Sure does, and everybody in these parts knows it, except ole Kit. That’s what I mean, a dreamer.”
“Yeah, that’s him,” I agreed. “Anyway, I don’t see his name in the phone book, and I was wondering where I could find him.”
The clerk squinted at me. If Kip hadn’t been scarfing down a second box of corn flakes, he would have said ole Rusty / Dusty was into his Clint Eastwood mode. “Same place as always,” the clerk allowed.
“Same place as always,” I repeated, as if savoring rich memories. “The old ranch, I suppose.”
“Well, not the old ranch off Frying Pan Road just over the Eagle County line. That was Kit’s daddy’s, and they lost that, oh hell, thirty years ago.”