Vic turned and looked at him. “Jesus.”
He dropped his head, and we watched as a brief exhale wracked his narrow chest. None of us moved, and then his face rose and he smiled the crooked smile. “Hi.”
Vic traded the hand from me to him and held it there between them. “Kid, I’m sorry.”
He nodded. “It’s okay.”
The skinny youth started to walk past us toward the steps as Vic glanced up at me in appeal. I cleared my throat and called out to him. “Hey, Cord, how would you like to go meet your grandmother?”
He stopped and glanced back with a confused look on his face. “Huh?”
“Your father is Roy Lynear, and your mother is Sarah Tisdale?” He looked at me blankly. “That’s your mother’s maiden name, the name she had before she married your father—Tisdale. Did she ever mention any relatives you might’ve had here in Absaroka County?”
His head dropped, and he nodded. “Yeah, but she never told me any names.”
“But that’s why you really came here, to look for them, right?” He stared at me for a moment and then nodded again. “Would you like to meet your grandmother?”
His eyes escaped for an instant but then came back to mine, and the color there was like fear. “Would she like to meet me?”
• • •
We weren’t having much luck in locating Rockwell, so I took the opportunity of a trip south in hope of possibly finding him on the roadside as we had before. Figuring the kid could probably use some company in the backseat, I stole Dog back from Ruby; the only thing I was worried about now was that he was going to wear the brute’s hair off petting him.
“So, do you have any idea where Mr. Rockwell might’ve gone?”
He shook his head at me in the rearview mirror.
“We don’t want to hurt him; we may not even arrest him, but it would probably be a good idea if we knew where he was.”
He looked at Dog, who looked back at him.
Vic, still evidently feeling a little embarrassed at having Cord overhear our conversation, was now half-turned in the seat in order to attempt to engage the youth in conversation. “So, what are you doing with all the money you’re making washing dishes, Cord?”
I glanced at him in the rearview as he continued to pet Dog.
“Saving it.”
“What for?”
“I don’t know.”
My undersheriff pulled a leg up and tucked it under her. “A car?”
“I don’t drive.”
“How are you ever going to get a girl if you don’t have a car?”
He shrugged. “You have to have a car to have a girl?”
She smiled, exposing the lengthy canine tooth. “Doesn’t hurt.”
I interjected, “Especially if you’ve got a mustache and your name is Rudy.”
She reached over and slapped my shoulder without looking. “You ever had a girlfriend?”
“One time, kinda.”
“What’s kinda mean?”
He looked embarrassed. “I made a necklace for this girl I knew, but she’d been promised to her uncle, who was one of the elders.” He plucked a tuft of dog hair from the seat and let it float. “He was an old guy.”
Vic glanced at me and then back to Cord. “That’s fucked up, just so you know.”
I thought the kid’s head was going to explode. “You know you’re going to hell, right? I mean it’s okay—I’m going to hell, too.”
Vic’s voice took on a different tone as she continued to study him. “What makes you say that?”
“All my family is on the inside and they’re going to heaven, so where does that leave me?”
“What if they’re wrong?”
“I don’t think that they can be wrong.”
“Kid.” She gestured between the two of us. “Our very livelihood depends on everybody being wrong sometimes, trust me.” She leveled the eyes on him again. “So, what are you saving up for?”
He squirmed a little, obviously taken aback by Vic’s unadulterated attention—I knew how he felt.
“I don’t know; maybe a gun.”
I thought about the magazine the kid had buried in the pump house and unconsciously let off the accelerator. I put my foot down again when Vic glanced at me. There was an uncomfortable silence as I drove south on the two-lane blacktop. “What do you need with a gun—you’ve got us.”
He stopped petting Dog and glanced at me. “I won’t always have you, so I’ll need a gun.”
My undersheriff readjusted herself, the irony of her squeaking gunbelt underlying her next statement. “Who you wanna shoot?”
He sat there under her interrogation. “Nobody in particular; I just want to be left alone.”
“I get like that sometimes.”
I laughed.
She ignored me. “Cord, there are people out there who are good at believing things and following orders, and then there’s the rest of us, the ones who have urges and get mad about shit; the ones who ask questions. I’m one of those people, and I think I turned out all right.” She pointed a loaded finger at me. “Shut the fuck up.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“. . . Anyway.” Her eyes softened as she studied him. “Just so you know; there’s room for all of us.”
I wanted to kiss her but just kept driving as the afternoon sun cast rays across the rolling hills in that horizontal light like clean windows.
• • •
Cord was leaning forward when we got to Short Drop, his eyes staying on the cottonwood from which the noose twisted in the breeze. “Did they hang somebody here?”
“A long time ago, or at least they think they did.”
“They’re not sure?”
I pulled the truck down the embankment and into the town proper. “Back in the day, saying you’d hung somebody was almost as good a reputation as actually having done it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“This is cow country, and back in the late nineteenth century there was a lot of rustling, so if a town had a reputation of being hard on criminal activity, fewer operators were likely to go freelance and rustle cattle.”
His eyes were still on the noose as we drove by. “So they didn’t really hang anybody.”
I parked the truck in front of the Short Drop Mercantile. “I didn’t say that.”
Eleanor was standing on the boardwalk as we climbed out of my truck, and as tough as she was, I saw her sway just a tiny bit and then rest a hand on one of the support beams of the porch when she saw the boy.
I let Dog out, and he baptized a tumbleweed that had lodged itself against the steps. “Hey.”
Vic brought Cord around the side of the truck with a hand on the young man’s shoulder, and I watched as the breath caught in Eleanor Tisdale’s throat. “Um . . . Howdy.”
Cord glanced at me and then returned his eyes to her for only a second before dropping them to the gravel at his feet. “Hello, ma’am.”
Gathering herself, she pushed off the post and stepped toward the edge of the porch. “How would you folks like to come up and have a soda to wash the dust out of your mouths?” She started in but then added, “You can bring that grizzly bear, if you want.”
The beast and I followed Vic and Cord as they mounted the steps, and we followed the little troupe into the Merc, where, strangely enough, stacks of books stood all over the wide-planked oak floor in piles about three feet high. Eleanor tracked her way through the maze and stood amid the piles like some acolyte of literature. “I have a problem.”
I nodded as I reached down and plucked a particularly vintage tome from the nearest stack. “I know—it’s hard to borrow shelves.”
“I go to these auctions and estate sales and the one thing I cannot resist is the books, so I’m thinning the herd and taking the excess over to the library.”
I opened the volume to the title page and read: “The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, Volume XXV, History of Nevada, Colorado, and Wyoming 1890.” I gen
tly closed the heavy, leather-bound hardback and rested it against my chest. “Is this book for sale?”
She smiled at me with all the warmth of a Moroccan rug salesman. “Do you know what it’s worth?”
“I do.”
“Twenty-five dollars.”
I studied the marbled edges of the pages. “That’s not what it’s worth.”
“I wasn’t negotiating a price; I was simply trying to see if you knew the value.” She sighed deeply and picked up another from one of the towers near her. “I’m past the point of caring what things cost; I just want to know that beautiful and important objects are in the hands of people who will appreciate them.” She thumbed open the book in her hands. “Tensleep and No Rest, Jack R. Gage, first printing and it’s signed; do you know he was the governor of Wyoming for two years?”
“I do.”
She thumbed the binding. “I guess he wasn’t much of a governor, but he was a hell of a writer.” She tossed the book to me, and I caught it. “Twelve dollars.”
I stood there holding the two books and looking at the piles around us—they were like literary land mines just waiting to explode minds. “Um, is there any way I could get you to lock the front door and not sell any more books until I’ve had a chance to go through all of them?”
“I’m going to have the books out of here by Sunday afternoon. I’m closing the place and selling the merchandise—other than what goes to the library, of course.” She glanced at Cord, who stood holding his own selection. “Did you find something of interest there, young man?”
His eyes came up slowly from the open pages. “There’s a book?”
The proprietor’s eyes shone. “Well, I’m not sure which book it is you’re talking about.”
He tipped the cover up so that we could see the familiar green hills, a boy, and a horse.
“Oh, My Friend Flicka. Is that a book you’d be interested in?”
He looked embarrassed. “I, um . . . I don’t read that well.”
Vic took the book from him and flipped a few pages back. “First edition, first printing, signed and dated.”
The owner/operator turned back to look at me. “My mother was a friend of Mrs. O’Hara down in Laramie.”
I looked around the stacks on the floor, estimating that there must’ve been close to two thousand volumes. “I repeat my request.”
She spread her hands. “All gone come this weekend.” She turned and walked toward the heavy door leading to the bar. “C’mon, the refreshments are this way.”
We followed her into The Noose, and Eleanor scooped a few pops from the cooler at the bar-back and placed them on the counter.
“Mrs. Tisdale, we were thinking of making the run out toward the East Spring Ranch and taking a look around, and I was wondering if it would be possible for us to leave Cord and Dog here with you?”
She studied the young man now seated on the end barstool, his nose buried in the book, his finger tracing the lines as he read very slowly with his lips moving. “Hey, youngster.”
His head swiveled, and he looked at her, smiling.
“You think you can tote books?”
He nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, ma’am.”
I gestured to Vic, and we started toward the front door of the bar, but only after I paused at Eleanor Tisdale’s side. “You do know what that book is worth, right?”
She smiled as she watched her grandson, his lips moving in time to the words. “I know what it’s worth to him.”
• • •
“You told her about My Friend Flicka?”
I drove south and east of the little hamlet, the road undulating with the rolling breaks of the Powder River country. “It might’ve come up.”
She studied the stack that reposed on the seat between us, then picked up the heavier of the books and began studying the Bancroft. “It’s like a history of the state?”
“The history of the state.”
She leafed through the pages, marveling at the imprinted words on them, her fingers touching them like braille. “‘Even the serpent, emblem at once of eternal life and voluntary evil, was not absent, taking up his residence in the underground inhabitation of the prairie dog, to escape the blistering heat of the sands, where he sometimes met that strange inmate, the owl, also hiding from the intense sunshine of the plains. So did this region abound with life in ages when the white man, to the knowledge of the red man, was not.’”
“Pretty good for a historian, huh?”
She silently watched the scenery, or, in her opinion, the lack thereof, pass by. “Why do you suppose she didn’t mention closing the Merc when we were here before?”
“Seems sudden, doesn’t it?” I admired the profile of her features at once refined and dangerously focused. “Maybe something to do with news of the daughter and the grandson.”
“In what way?”
“Sometimes we spend our lives thinking we’re doing something, when in reality all we’re doing is waiting; maybe what Eleanor’s been waiting for has arrived.”
“Yeah, well . . . I wouldn’t know anything about that mother/daughter relationship thing.”
“Uh-huh.”
She closed the book in her hands carefully and looked at the Roman numerals on the binding. “Twenty-five of them?”
“Yep.”
“Think the ol’ broad’s got all of them?”
“Looks like.”
“So, what are they worth?”
“Thousands.”
“Let’s go back and rob the place.”
I smiled. “That would be against the law.”
She settled in the seat and propped her boots onto the dash. “We’ve done enough for the law—look where that’s got us.”
“Where’s that?”
She opened her arms and gestured to the landscape with dramatic flair. “Nowhere.”
• • •
We’d taken a left just after another of the roadside fatality markers onto a gravel road with a ranch gate hewn from strapped-together logs with an archway that read EAST SPRING RANCH. It wasn’t exactly the end of the earth, but you could send it a telegram from here, not that you’d get an answer.
I ignored the signs warning us that the land was posted and didn’t welcome trespassers and continued down the road toward what looked like one of the towers we’d seen in South Dakota. Once we got to the structure, I could see that the distance in both directions was strung with a ten-foot chain-link fence with three strands of diagonal barbed wire on top.
We stepped out of the Bullet and, looking at the desolate landscape, I got the odd sensation that I was back in the military. A breeze was coming off the mountains, cool and putting a rub in the air that I could feel between my teeth. I sighed the way I always did when I got that feeling, walked over to the large gate seated on a pair of rolling casters, and noticed a small intercom with a plastic shield to protect it from the weather.
On closer inspection of the greenish wooden tower, I could make out a small security camera under the eaves. “We may or may not be on Candid Camera.”
Vic walked to the fence and then across the dirt road. “Not motion activated, and it may not even be hooked up.”
“How can you tell?”
“The unconnected wires hanging off the back.” She returned to the gate and the intercom, flipping up the plastic cover and pushing one of the buttons. “Hello, have you found Jesus Christ as your personal savior? We’re on a mission, and we hear you fuckers are up to some really heinous shit in His name.” After a moment she turned to look at me with an eyebrow raised like a question mark. “I don’t think it’s working.”
“Are there wires hanging out of the back of it, too?”
“No, but it doesn’t make any noise, static, nothing—smart-ass.”
I came over and looked at the intercom and then the three massive padlocks on the gate. “I guess they’re serious about not wanting visitors.”
“You bring your bolt cutters?”
&
nbsp; “Unfortunately, no.”
She looked past my shoulder toward the road, where a two-tone brown ’71 Plymouth Satellite station wagon with its leaf springs resting on its axles slowed at the turnoff. “Company.” The car stopped as the dust behind overtook it and blew our way, partially concealing us. “Is that color scours?”
“No, more of an Autumn Bronze Poly, as I recall.”
She glanced at me.
“I had one.”
She continued to stare at me and then muttered to herself, “Family man.”
The driver, an aged, extremely heavyset, Hispanic-looking woman in a powder blue prairie dress got out of the station wagon, went over to the roadside grave marker, and straightened the plastic, floral wreath attached to a makeshift wooden cross. Her hands were clasped at her waist and her head lowered.
Her ministrations continued for quite some time, and Vic finally spoke. “She praying her way to heaven or what?”
I stepped past her toward the newcomer on the dirt road. “Some people need it more than others.”
Probably hearing our voices, the woman’s head rose, and she looked at us through the thin veil of dust. Maybe it was the dress, maybe it was the surroundings, but I had the feeling that it was an old stare—one from a different era, a different time.
I waited as she slowly made her way back to the vehicle and climbed in, shifting the still-running car into gear and turning where we were parked, effectively blocking the road. I raised a hand and motioned for her to move. She paused, even going so far as to look back up the road for traffic, which was absurd considering our environs, but then turned, looked at me, and finally drove forward.
I walked over to her and strung a hand on the fender as I stooped to look inside, Vic walking past me, taking a textbook stance behind the woman’s left shoulder.
Her bloated face was surrounded by straggles of dark hair, gray at the roots, that had escaped from the bun high at the back of her head, and I could barely see her dark eyes. Her voice was surprisingly high and decidedly Spanish. “Sí?”
I looked into the station wagon, the backseat covered with an abundance of bulk-food containers, drinks, and home supplies in franchise plastic bags, and finally allowed my eyes to rest on what looked to be two dozen bricks of 12-gauge, .30-06, .357 Mag, and .50 BMG ammunition on the seat beside her. “I didn’t know Sam’s Club in Casper sold ammo, especially .50.”
A Serpent's Tooth: A Walt Longmire Mystery Page 13