by Jeff Sharlet
Not long ago Molly heard that Susan lives in her judicial district. Molly hasn’t seen her. Susan, she knows, “makes a living,” and since Molly is now law, she hopes that that is all she will ever know again of Susan, for the good of both of them. Some things must be left behind.
ON THE OTHER SIDE of South Park there’s a town called Fair Play, which is not really worth discussion: a heap of mud, a lumberyard that looks as if it was rooted out of the earth by a wild pig, and an American flag flying over a county jail. For prisons one must drive south, to Cañon City, the self-proclaimed incarceration capital of America. There’s the Colorado State Pen and the Centennial Correctional Facility, there’s Arrowhead and Four Mile and Fremont and Skyline, there are prisons for women and prisons for children and prisons for men who are mild, medium, and well done. Just south of town, in a little burg called Florence, there’s the federal Supermax, in which the Unabomber and Terry Nichols, one of the two Oklahoma City bombers, and one of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers spend twenty-three hours a day alone in soundproof rooms in an institution that has not received a visitor since September 11, 2001.
On your way to Cañon City you pass Cotopaxi, one of Colorado’s many abandoned utopias, a trick played in 1882 by a Portuguese Jew on Eastern European Jews lured into a dark canyon with promises of farmland evidently false to anyone who bothered to consult a map of the region. Jews mined, Jews died, Jews moved. Cotopaxi is now a Christian town, inasmuch as one can worship a loving God in the deep armpit of dry, brown mountains.
Cañon City—really a town—is another kind of planned community. As you drive in from the west on Route 50, alongside the Arkansas River, the first thing you see is a limestone tower with 360-degree purple windows; silhouetted within is a man with an assault rifle. The walls of Colorado Territorial, the state’s oldest prison, rise up on the left, and behind them the sliced-away sides of two quarried mountains, the one to the west purple and black, the one to the east yellow and black; a few hundred yards up the road is a field in which patriots have mounted a tank and a cannon and a tall white missile. There’s also a store that uses as an attraction a wagon heaped to overflowing with animal skulls; children like to have their picture taken in front of the wagon, crowned by bone.
On a hill overlooking the Territorial, there’s an old graveyard reputed to be a Confederate cemetery. Although Colorado did not exist as a state at the time of the Civil War, Cañon City loves the South’s Stars and Bars. You can buy pictures of it in drugstores and the flag itself in sporting-goods stores, and you can get it tattooed—martially crisp or romantically ragged, wrapped around a skeleton or a naked woman or a skeleton of a naked woman, buxom breasts still heaving—in a parlor on the main street of town. Civil War reenactments, with “live cannon fire,” are popular with prison guards; the South, I was told, often wins.
But up at the cemetery, entered through a steel gate out of which the shape of a pioneer wagon has been punched, I found little evidence that the South will rise again should Jesus return to rapture the dead from Colorado. In the northwest corner, fronting a section of tin crosses without names, labeled DOC—Department of Corrections, not Daughters of the Confederacy—there’s a row of Confederate soldiers, their flat, dull stones—none of which mention the Civil War—doubled by newer, white marble slabs displaying rank and regiment (Pvt. CJ Price, 9th Ky. Inf., C.S.A.—Confederate States of America—1837–1903) and flanked on one side by metal stars of the C.S.A. and on the other by sticks planted in the dirt and painted red, white, and blue. Such sticks grow like flowers among the thorns and tumbleweed choking the cemetery, but they don’t mark the remains of a Confederate army; they’re there for the Union dead, nearly a full company of whom—officers and privates, cavalry and infantry and artillery and even a sailor, far now from the seas, men born in New York and Pennsylvania, Iowa and Ireland—lay in the dry ground overlooking the town, forgotten by the would-be Johnny Rebs outside the prison walls.
I went to Cañon City to find out who had voted for Molly. Her husband, John, had given me an archive of local press; in rural areas like the eleventh District, campaigns are waged largely through letters to the editor. The best one came from a man named Don Bendell, a karate studio owner, who was much taken by the fact that Molly was not only a fourth-generation Coloradoan but also a fourth-generation attorney; his praise for this feat of inheritance was made all the more remarkable by his evident disdain for lawyers. “She is like a hero character from a John Grisham novel,” he wrote, supported by “police chiefs, undersheriffs, and correctional officers, and only one attorney.”
Don himself was hard to label. He was a skinny guy with a gut I mistook at first for a paunch and a grip that made me wince, but he also had the eyes of a beagle and a droopy black mustache, a jet black pompadour, and a bright white overbite when he smiled, all of which made it hard to resent him for the bone crushing. His Web site featured a picture of him in his karate uniform (he’s a seventh-degree black belt grand master, an inductee into the Karate Hall of Fame), military dress (he’s a former Green Beret, he speaks Vietnamese, and he considers the Montagnards his blood brothers), fringed and beaded leather Indian gear (“I’m strawberry cake with vanilla frosting,” he said, “white on the outside, red on the inside.”), and as a cowboy silhouetted against stained glass (“Trust in God,” he advises, “but keep your powder dry, pardner!”). He is the author of twenty-five published books on Western, science fiction, and military adventure themes, among them Black Phantom, Death Hunt, Fire Kill, Blood Money, Snake Eater, The B-52 Overture, Colt, Matched Colts, Blazing Colts, War Bonnet, Bamboo Battleground, and a book of verse, Poems of the Warrior. He was especially proud of a review of his 1993 Chief of the Scouts: “Don’t expect a sensitive, multi-dimensional treatment of the Old West here. This is full-dress genre stuff: action galore, heaps of graphic violence, and stereotypical characters straight from central casting.”
Don used to own a movie studio in Cañon City, called American Eagle Entertainment. Once Cañon City was the Hollywood of the Rockies, the site of dozens of silent Westerns. Don wanted to revive the tradition. In 1981 he and his wife, Shirley, spent their honeymoon making a movie called The Instructor. The poster, across from an artificial stream in the lobby of his karate studio, features a bare-chested, black-hooded man in midair, kicking in the face of a menacing motorcyclist. Don said he had a deal with Tri-Star Pictures to make a low-budget sequel, Revenge, starring a stuntman who would jump off the Royal Gorge Bridge up the road, 969 feet above the Arkansas River. But the stuntman died jumping off something else before he could get to Cañon City, and the deal went upside down. He is still paying back his debts from that venture, but he insisted on treating me to a meal at his favorite Western restaurant, Chili’s, east of town on the highway, past Walmart and across from the new Fremont County Jail. He wanted to tell me about his latest project, a magazine called American Hero.
“I’m from Akron, Ohio,” Don said. “The West is the place of my dreams. I always wanted to have a horse. I always wanted to be a cowboy. Always wanted to be an Indian. Plus, I used to play soldier all the time, so I also wanted to go into the army. I wanted to be a hero, like the guys on TV, the Roy Rogers, the Hopalong Cassidys, the Lone Rangers, Zorro. Every issue of American Hero I want to have a sports hero, a TV hero, a big-screen hero, and a real hero. I believe it’s important for children—and adults, too—to have heroes that are so over the top, because when you reach for the moon you never end up with a handful of dirt.”
In Vietnam, when he was on the A-team, Don was known as “Clint,” as in Eastwood, because he smoked cigarillos and wore a poncho and didn’t shave. But he didn’t really like Eastwood. “He was personally responsible for Westerns being too realistic,” Don said. “His hero wasn’t black-and-white, he was gray. I’m not interested in being real, a realistic cowboy. There’s been enough of those.”
Don had been one of Molly’s chief supporters in
Cañon City. For him there were two issues: (1) Her opponent, Rocco Mecconi, a sour middle-aged Democrat, had defended Don’s first wife in a bitter divorce, (2) Molly could ride a horse and shoot a six-gun.
And then there were the Stovall boys. Joel and Michael Stovall were twenty-four-year-old identical twins who worked as bouncers and devoted most of their time to acquiring weapons and, it was suspected, making bombs. Their mother was a prison guard and their father made a living selling skeleton keys over the Internet. The men had few friends besides each other, and they tended to dress identically, in camouflage. Their former schoolmates remembered them primarily for setting fires.
One Friday in September 2001 they shot a dog owned by a neighbor of their grandmother, for no reason they ever gave. They dumped the body in the Arkansas River, but it floated up. Sheriff’s Deputy Jason Schwartz was dispatched to bring them in. He caught up with the twins later that night and herded them into the back of his cruiser. Schwartz was twenty-six, the father of a one-month-old son, a small-town cop not inclined to look for trouble. He and his partner searched the boys, but they failed to find the skeleton key Michael Stovall carried with him. They also missed Michael’s two 9 mm pistols. A key and two guns—Schwartz could have saved time and his life by simply turning over his cruiser to the twins. Joel would later say it was Michael who shot out the window of the car, leaned out into the night wind and around the bulletproof barrier, and pointed a gun at Schwartz’s head. “Stop,” he said.
Schwartz made his third mistake: He kept driving. Michael emptied the 9 mm into the left side of Schwartz’s skull. The car literally flew off the highway, but the twins had more luck than brains, and both emerged without injury. To celebrate they paused before fleeing to shoot the dead man some more. The coroner later removed sixteen bullets from Deputy Schwartz’s body, twelve of them from his head.
Then the Stovall twins did just what anyone would do after they’ve killed a deputy sheriff in plain view of the highway: They walked home and rearmed. Two policemen drove past their trailer, according to witnesses—did they not have the right address?—and the boys opened fire, hitting one of the officers four times—Cpl. Toby Bethel, permanently paralyzed—before making a run for it in a stolen pickup truck. Joel drove, Michael served as rear gunner. They circled back, parked, and watched, laughing and waving, while two other officers tried to extract the wounded man from his cruiser.
More luck than brains but not enough of either: Instead of fleeing north toward Denver or east toward Pueblo, cities into which they could have disappeared, the brothers headed for the hills, driving back into the mountains on Route 50, a straight shot to Salida, a running gun battle much of the way. The police had laid out traffic spikes for the truck and ruined its tires, so after they’d unloaded enough ammo into their pursuers to put some distance between them and the police, the boys ditched the pickup and set out on foot. They thought that perhaps they could hike to Mexico.
Around then Don Bendell, who besides being a black belt and a retired commando was a master tracker (he was locally famous for having helped catch two cop killers on a Navajo reservation) saddled up his horse, Eagle, loaded his M-16 and his 9 mm, called out his dogs, and prepared, spiritually, for battle. (“I was ready to rock and roll,” he recalled wistfully.)
But another former Green Beret beat him to the collar—a lightly armed officer from the Department of Wildlife who came upon the boys hiking a dry streambed and rounded them up, if the local paper can be believed, by throwing his voice and convincing the evil twins that they were surrounded.
Up to that point the story had gone exactly as Don might have written it if he’d felt inclined to combine one of his commando novels with one of his Westerns. The local paper, a small operation that usually consisted mostly of church supper news, told the story over and over for days, until it began to take on the shape of a murder ballad.
But then, as a man in a bar in Cañon City told me, Molly’s predecessor as DA “queered the deal.” He didn’t seek death. And now the boys are serving life sentences; perhaps they’ll spend some of that time in Cañon City.
When Molly ran, what was widely perceived as the retiring DA’s cowardice became a backdrop for Molly campaigning on horseback and at the shooting range, a new Old West hero of the type that never was. She campaigned not so much on any issues—of little importance in a district where the average voter actually knows who the DA is, plus half a dozen rumors—as on what conservatives are currently calling “character.” What that term means, though, is myth—not in the sense of a falsehood but of a narrative, an ideal that the candidate, the aspiring hero, must embody. The code of the West may have been just a story, but Molly told it true.
4
AND THEN I REACHED Salida, where I had been going all along, a flat little town of houses without foundations and broad avenues and desperate hopes of reinvention: Art galleries line the main street, an innovation since the last train full of ore extracted from the mountains rumbled through town in the early 1990s. On the eastern edge of town stands a 365-foot-tall tower of red brick, a smokestack for a smelter, construction completed 1917, last used 1920. Later Salidans became miners of molybdenum, a metal used in steel alloys. Now they pray for tourist runoff from the higher, prettier mountain towns. Once the smokestack was the tallest man-made structure west of the Mississippi. Today it is a symbol of this high western town’s true past, industrial, and its probable future, rusting.
The house Molly shares with John and her son, Sam (who generally answers only to the unwieldy name of Keek, the Singing Cowboy), is a one-story white stucco with blue trim next to an empty lot that affords them a clear view of the green-brown hills and the giant electrified S, for Salida, that sets the dark nights aglow. Molly owns water on the Front Range and a farm on the plains, and her mother is a rich woman, her father a rich man, but she and John prefer modest houses. They are blending in with the land. There’s a painting of a cowboy by the front door, a swirl of oily colors on a board, the cowboy’s face nothing but a glob. The living room is bare, no rugs, inexpensive furniture: a couch, a scratched and scarred table, a rolltop desk from which John conducts church business—he’s a deacon in a little church in town that he helped rehabilitate, stripping away a century of improvements to reveal an altar beneath a ceiling painted full of stars.
The night I arrived John was at the church, teaching a Bible study. Molly had cooked me spaghetti, but I was two hours late. She heated up a plate for me and poured two glasses of wine and sat across from me with Sam. There was a story I wanted to ask her about, a story that for me had long been at the heart of the West of my imagination. “Molly,” I asked, “will you tell me again about how your father lost his hand?”
She nodded; she had been expecting this question. She knew I’d come to find out something about the mountains I’d left behind, something about the person she’d become. She knew that this story, one I’d never quite been able to understand, would seem to me, at least, central to both questions.
When we were eighteen she’d discuss the matter only after whiskey. Now, though, she had perfected the Western squint-eyed gaze of her father, who was, like her, a lawyer and a cowboy. It was better than whiskey, that look: It drew a thin line around the past that let you get at what was raw in it without giving anything away.
She sipped her wine. Sam worked on building a telegraph line across the table with tiny plastic wooden poles. Molly began to speak. Her voice was smokier than it once was, fifteen more years of Marlboros in her lungs. “Well,” she said, “it was Spook.”
Spook was a white gelding, one of several horses Molly’s father kept on the dry land above the ranch house he’d built an hour north of Denver, when he’d fled the city life he loathed and the political speculation that had once whirled around the name Chilson.
“An awesome horse. Only Dad could ride him.”
Molly’s father was a small, l
ean, taut man, bow-legged from a life in the saddle and given to flamboyance when it came to horses.
“Dad could sit any horse there was.”
“I recall that he was especially good at cutting a steer from a herd,” I said.
Molly shook her head. “No.”
“Really? What about lassoing?”
“Nope. No better than any other.”
“No special skills?”
“He is a cowboy, Jeff,” she said. The details I was looking for, I was to understand, were not part of the way cowboys tell stories.
“So Spook runs away one day,” I prompted.
“Right. You couldn’t keep Spook in. He’d just go where he wanted.” She shook her head. “Beautiful horse. So me and the girls went after him.” Every kid in the neighborhood—a cluster of houses John Chilson had developed on dirt roads he’d let Molly and her brother name—had a horse. Molly’s was the big-boned black gelding, Bo, on which she raced barrels—an all-out sprint against the clock around three barrels you can’t knock over—in local rodeos. The girls corralled Spook, but there was nothing they could do to bring him in, since he was too much horse for anyone but John Chilson. Molly’s father had grown up citified but had rejected the training, hiring himself out for harvest season when his own father would rather he’d’ve taken tennis lessons or worked as a lifeguard at the country club pool. He’d nearly lost a thumb on the job and he still wore the scar with pride.
“Dad comes up with a feed bucket. He’s on foot now and he can see he can’t calm Spook that way, so he borrows a lariat from one of the girls.”
This was Molly’s favorite part. She steadies Bo and sits in the saddle grinning as John Chilson starts swinging the rope in the air. Out flies the loop. It falls soft as snow around Spook’s neck, taking him gently.