It was beautiful. Another family followed, then another, and another, until a stream of hooves and flanks and horns flowed around Sneed and his mother, on and on, the animals both nervous and bold, picking their way precisely around the two strange creatures entwined and weeping in the dust.
On and on this went—and on, it seemed, for an eternal moment that stretches now across my entire memory, my entire imagination, and infuses every scrap of my time, past and present, with a new type of end-all river, with loveliness and hope and above all, for me, with the miracle of sadness.
I could cut loose and cry at this. I could. I could just fucking weep.
And I would have—except just then across the rangeland appeared the twisted sprinting shape of Henderson Gray.
World-Record Brook Trout
Gray at first was a speck, an odd neon bug crawling across the vast landscape with his scooting, arm-flapping, ultra-marathoner’s gait. But in truth he came on with desperate speed over the hogback ridge, down the near side, and into the wild dispersion of pronghorn.
Once immersed among the animals, he zipped open his fanny pack and withdrew a camera. He photographed, even seemed to take video. Having captured their images in his camera, Gray charged at various juveniles—and once at a gimpy older buck—trying to split them out. But each of these animals simply squirted away in the direction of the general migration. Each of these animals pogo-hopped for a hundred yards or so, then turned to inspect Gray with placid ungulate curiosity.
Gray persisted. Time and again amidst the moving mass he singled out an animal, photographed it, stashed the camera in his fanny pack and lit out after the antelope. But time and again that pronghorn sprang away easily in the direction of the herd, leading Gray to abandon a chase that should have gone on—if I understood deer-running correctly—for several miles until the animal collapsed and surrendered to the Blackfoot brave or the Tarahumaran warrior.
Not without the fence, though. Not for Henderson Gray. Not without the confusion and stress of animals forced to go against their prehistoric grain.
Gray threw his red harrier’s beanie to the ground and stamped toward me, shouting something long before I could hear him, shouting it again and again until he kinked right up into my face. “What the hell?” he squawked. I gripped one scrawny, freckled arm and slammed him against the skinheads’ pickup.
“You tell me.”
“Who the hell cut this fence?”
“We did. Who the hell put it up? That’s the question. And why?”
“You’re trespassing,” Gray sputtered at me.
“So are you. Tucker fired you a year ago.”
He tried to wrestle free, but I had him. He gave up pulling and tried to shove me off my feet. But I could hold my ground in some of the biggest rivers in America. Core strength, I believe they call it these days. I didn’t budge. Not for that jerking weasel. Not a bit.
“Now I see it,” I told him.
“See what?” he panted.
“You had your thing with Jesse. She wouldn’t let you go. She wanted you to do something for her father. She stalked you, bothered you, whatever. Poor guy. You can have that. Jesse was like that. It’s all true.”
Gray stopped wriggling. He tried to reassemble the game face of a big-time lawyer. “This is aggravated assault,” he tried out for size. “This is an unprovoked attack.”
“I saw the same TV show,” I told him.
“You’ll be sued to the bone in civil court.”
“You’re looking at the bone, pal. This is it.”
We stayed nose to nose. Meanwhile I began to hear a faint low thumping, like the drumming of a prairie chicken.
I nodded toward Sneed and his mother. “Down there too. Bone. We got nothing to lose. So let’s talk about something else.”
Aretha noticed us. She stood up, grabbed her son beneath the armpits and hauled him up too. As they began to make their way in our direction, Gray thrashed hard, made me catch him up by his chicken neck.
“Here’s how I see it. Correct me if I’m wrong. Jesse thought maybe she could use Sneed to make you jealous. Then you’d come back to her, at least as far as helping her appeal her father’s sentence. But that didn’t work out. Instead what happened is that you told Sneed about your deer running. Probably Jesse told you about his interest in pronghorn. You sensed his interest, and so you told him about this fence. He didn’t like it.”
“I … I …”
I eased up on Gray’s throat. He spat. “I didn’t know about the whole migration thing. Until he told me.”
“Like hell you didn’t. You knew they would pool up here and get weak. Then all you had to do was pick one out and chase it back in the direction it didn’t want to go. That would make it easy.”
His temper flared at that. “Easy? It’s not easy. It’s never been done, never been proven to have been done. Only stories. That’s how easy it is.”
“So you’d be famous. You’d be a real hero.”
“I already am. In some circles.”
The thump-thumping grew louder. It came from the sky in the direction of Livingston. I glanced back. There was nothing in the air.
“Really? You’re famous? For what, for almost running down a pronghorn? Like I’m famous for almost catching a world-record brook trout?”
He glared. No effect on the Dog.
“My guess is that you’re more famous for being a fool and a liar, for hacking off a bunch of scientists who want you to prove your stupid idea, and to get that monkey off your back, you decided to cheat.”
Down the ridge, Aretha was now wrestling with Sneed. “No, Baby. Just take it easy. Dog is going to handle it. Baby, take it easy.”
“It’s not cheating,” Gray claimed, keeping an eye on mother and son.
“No? And I guess it wouldn’t be cheating if I trapped that world-record brook trout behind a dam, let it starve a couple weeks, then tossed in a nightcrawler? How would that look? Because that’s what people are going to know about you when we get out of here.”
“Let me go,” he seethed, and I saw no reason not to. But I stayed in front of him while he shook out his legs and began to jog minutely in place. The thump-thumping grew louder in the sky.
“You didn’t anticipate that Sneed would react to your fence the way he did. Then you figured out he was either going to expose you, or he was going to stop you by cutting the fence and letting the pronghorn out. First Jesse was a problem, now Sneed too. You paid those skinheads to scare them off, but it didn’t work. So you found a way to get rid of them both.”
By now, Sneed and his mother had reached the truck. She had him contained, she thought. “You wait in there.” With an application of her firewoman’s brawn, she stuffed him in.
Then we all looked up. The thumping was helicopters, two of them, government maybe, skimming fast up the Roam River from the Paradise Valley. As they hammered toward us, the pronghorn bolted en masse to the south. On came the copters until the down-draft from the rotors enveloped us in a stinging, blinding dust storm—and inside of this storm, Henderson Gray broke past me and darted off across the scrubby rangeland.
And there would be no catching him—not now, I thought—until Sneed started the pickup.
And Then What?
“Sneed!”
“Baby, no!”
But he jacked the gear shift into drive and spun the tires, slung the box around so hard that his mother and I had to bail or be crushed. He squared the truck in Gray’s direction and floored it. “Jump in the back!” I hollered at Aretha, and we just made it.
“Baby!” She pounded on the cab window, clawed at it. But it was an old truck. Nothing moved, nothing opened. A jolting swerve threw her down beside me. “What do we do, Hoss?”
“I guess we hang on.”
The next several minutes were wild enough that no real thoughts entered my head except this one: Gray could outrun the truck over rough terrain, like a pronghorn could easily outpace a human, but for short dis
tances only, and the truck had as much endurance as it had fuel—and the gasoline gauge, visible over Sneed’s shoulder, said plenty. Sneed would catch him. And then what?
Aretha and I hung on to the box sides and dodged the various sliding pieces of skinhead junk—some iron fence posts, a bale of wire, a few dozen empty beer cans, and the two empty rifles. A toppled oil drum sloshed and slammed side to side each time Sneed slung around a rock pile or pounded through a gully in pursuit of Henderson Gray.
Twice Sneed had the grill six feet from Gray’s bony ass, was about to bury him under the truck until Gray zagged like antelope and escaped.
“He’ll cross the river,” I predicted, and soon after, Gray did just that, slogging in, then falling in, then wallowing with a spastic overhead crawl to the far bank.
Sneed did not hesitate. He gunned down a long sand spit until he found a marginally shallow spot, where he plunged the truck into the Roam and fishtailed across. Emerging at the far bank, he buried the truck’s grill in a dirt hump and had to reverse. I jumped out, tried to rip his door open. But Sneed saw me coming, cranked the window up, hammered down the button lock. He rooted the truck free with a to-and-fro motion that spat dirt and rocks back into the river. Just in time, Aretha caught my arm and hauled me back in.
“I told him his girlfriend was dead,” she shouted half in wonderment at one point. She watched Gray stumble up a rise through sage brush. “So he killed her? And hurt my baby?”
“Looks like they both know it,” I shouted back, “don’t they?”
I yanked her aside as Sneed bucked up the rise and the oil drum skidded down from the tailgate. What the hell, Dog? I kicked the tailgate open, jerked the barrel around, and on the next uphill the damn thing spun out and bounced free, spewing loops of oil down a dusty draw.
“He’s going to get away,” Aretha hollered.
“That’d be good,” I hollered back. “We wouldn’t get our necks broken and he’d be caught soon enough.” At that I pounded on the cab roof and pleaded for the tenth time, “Sneed! It’s okay! Let him go!”
But the chase went on. There was little time to wonder how Sneed stayed focused for so long, but he did. He and Gray played out their crazy crisscross over the entire western floodplain of the Roam until at last Tucker’s roadside fence rose on the horizon, with Gray having opened a good half-mile lead.
“This will do it,” I told Aretha, and for an entire ten seconds I was sure of Gray’s escape. But the ground leveled out and Sneed gained velocity. He was only a few hundred yards behind when Gray decided to take the fence. The deer runner cut right, tried to hurdle the four-strand barbed wire. He snagged his back foot and fell hard. Gray recovered, hobbled away—and not a half-minute later Sneed blew right through the fence and summarily closed the distance to a few frightening yards.
Gray had made a terrible error, obviously. Now the chase was down the highway, down a corridor of heavy fencing that Gray was too exhausted and too injured to hurdle a second time. Still he labored along the shoulder on the right side, his runner’s gait a broken, desperate catastrophe. “Just pull alongside him, Sneed!” I reached around the cab and hammered on the window. “Just stop the truck and I’ll grab him!”
Sneed slowed and looked at me once—that was it. He was flooded with adrenaline, looked fully alive. Then he turned back to Gray, regained his losses, and swerved the truck onto the narrow, sloping gravel shoulder and nipped at Gray’s heels. Gray’s head hung, flapped to the right, and his gaze remained locked on the road three feet ahead even when a sedan and then a panel van flashed by in the opposite lane.
Now I knew this would end in blood. A third vehicle, a school bus, lumbered around a curve toward us. I prayed without hope that Gray would look up, would wave, appeal for help, for mercy. I pleaded into the barren wretchedness of that doomed moment that Sneed would be contained, would lose focus or pass out, that order would be restored, and justice would come through for us. But instead Sneed seemed to be calculating, timing something, maybe waiting for a flat stretch of shoulder, or one so steep that it would force Gray back onto the pavement. “Gray! Sneed! Damn it, stop!”
Aretha pounded the cab roof. “Baby, stop!”
She had just turned back to me, aggrieved and desperate, when I slammed an iron fence post through the cab’s back window. Glass popped, hailed against Sneed’s head and onto the dashboard. I shoved my legs through, wrenched the rest of me after.
“Sneed, you don’t need to do this!”
I fought him for the wheel. The swerving truck lost ground—ten yards, twenty yards, then a cushion of forty that might have given Gray a few moments to collect his wits, dodge back the other way, stop some traffic and get help.
But Henderson Gray plowed on, his head dangling down as if on a broken neck, even as a fourth chance, a black SUV, sped toward him.
Sneed caught me good on the bridge of the nose, knocked me back. He flattened the gas pedal. That old pink Ford roared up to speed, dragging a hundred feet of fence and poles. Gray’s new lead disappeared in seconds and the roadway narrowed into a chute of rock. His problem was insurmountable now—until he solved it, neatly and with horrible suddenness, by darting into the grill of the oncoming SUV.
A Pair of Café Americanos
Tom Gorman was the name of the hulking, phlegmatic U.S. Border Patrol agent who fetched us at the Geyser Motel the next morning in a Park County Meals-on-Wheels van because his federal-issue SUV had been totaled.
“I’ve hit deer before,” he announced to Aretha and me as we sat touch-close, still traumatized, in his back seat. “But never a deer runner.”
Aretha took my hand for the hundredth time, squeezed it and held on. The van smelled like lasagna.
“Gosh,” Tom Gorman said. “What was that guy thinking?”
I was still seeing the loose sack of skin that was Gray’s body as he sprawled in the center of the road. Sneed had slammed the brakes and spun the truck. With that iron fencepost in hand, he had vaulted from the skinheads’ truck. But his legs had crumpled beneath him the moment his feet touched the pavement. He lay on his back, gasping at the sky.
Now he was back in custody, in the hospital, and neither his mother nor I had slept. After a lengthy period of questioning by law enforcement agencies from the FBI all the way down to a frazzled and fumbling Russell Crowe, we had sat up side by side on Aretha’s motel bed, staring at the television and sometimes talking. Around dawn, I managed to tell her, finally, what it was she needed to know about me and my family, and Aretha thanked me for filling her in, told me how sorry she was and how things didn’t feel quite so terribly awful for her after hearing it. Her son was alive and would get off without any too-serious charges, she decided, whereas my son, well … you know … and it was shortly after that wordless moment, as the sun came up on the Crazy Mountains, that this touchy-feely hand-squeezing thing got started. And damn did I like it. I really did.
Tom Gorman rumbled on. “Went up the mountainside this morning to give my condolences to the widow. Hell’s bells, that’s an awful thing to have to do, you know?”
He looked at me in his mirror. He had taken a pretty good shot from the airbag and wore a faint racoon mask of bruises around his eyes. But I gathered that a man of his phenomenal obtuseness had taken worse hits from the various doors in his life.
“It’s not like, hey, sorry, I ran over your dog, you know? But then again, dogs don’t murder people … so hey, what are you gonna do?”
He gave us a second to post the silence that a man like him took for agreement.
“I told the woman her husband didn’t suffer. I figured that would help.”
He pulled the van into the Livingston hospital parking lot. “Helluva thing though, all this from top to bottom. Your Sheriff Chubbuck’s going to be a hero around here, if he makes it. Hell, even it he doesn’t make it. Posthumously, right?”
Aretha let go of my hand was we climbed from the van. She whispered in my ear, “Hoss, can you translate?”
Sheriff Roy Chubbuck had collapsed in his driveway the morning before. Now he wanted to talk to us. It was slow going. There were no tubes in his nose, just one large one, withdrawn from his windpipe so he could talk. His wife, in a chair beside the bed, fed him ice shavings to lubricate his voice. As the sheriff wheezed and whispered from his hospital bed, the various events that had made my last seven days a baffling mosaic began to come into focus, and Chubbuck resolved before my eyes as a man of startling vision and courage.
Toxicology tests on Sneed had taken time, he told us, and despite the public rush to judgment, despite his public statements to the contrary, he had never closed out the option that someone other than Sneed had killed Jesse. Nor had he let on that he was still considering other suspects. Including me. Only when I wouldn’t leave Livingston did he check me off as someone who was simply going to be in his way.
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