by W L Ripley
“Luke Hanson,” Kennedy said, when I’d finished. “That’s the guy with the broken hand. The other two are Jerry Caswell and Large Michael Moore. Caswell’s not a bad sort. Went through a bad divorce. Drinks too much. Shouldn’t hang around with those two. Large Michael’s the fat guy with the beard. He’s the night manager of the Truck Hangar out by the interstate. ‘Manager’ isn’t descriptive enough. He’s the muscle for a string of prostitutes they run in a motel next to the truck stop. A motel conveniently over the county line, where I can’t touch it and can’t get any cooperation from the sheriff of Ford County, a nice guy who used to own a junkyard. No lawman, but smart enough to know what to leave alone. Guy named Willie Boy Roberts owns the Truck Hangar and about everything else around Paradise.”
“The shooter said the dog belonged to a Mr. Roberts.”
He paused to draw on the pipe; the room smelled of maple tobacco. “Interesting. I’ll check on that. The guy shot at you sounds like a man I know. Doper named Killian. He used to mule drugs into the county. Disappear ‘on vacation’ for a few days, then he’d come back spending money and suddenly there’d be cocaine back in the county. Used to be we were too remote for such sophisticated drugs. But it’s a new day.” The last part came grudgingly. “That field is way back in there. That far back you could hide the Chinese army and a herd of elephants for them to ride. They probably figured nobody’d ever wander back in there.”
“Somebody did.”
“Yeah,” he agreed, nodding his head. “Fellas, you’ve managed to scrape the hide off most of the county’s criminal element. In one day. But Roberts is the big gun. He’s the one I want to turn the key on. But he’s damn near untouchable. But, I find Killian, maybe I can squeeze him a little. Most people don’t realize that Roberts—”
The door to the office opened and Deputy Baxter stepped in, his bulk darkening the doorway. He had a lump in his cheek this time. Chick bulged out his own cheek, then nodded at Baxter.
“What do you need, Les?” asked the sheriff.
“Thought you might need me.”
“I don’t. And where’s your tie? You look like a spavined goat. This is a professional police force, not a Burt Reynolds movie.”
“Simmons said these guys know something about a marijuana field.”
Kennedy’s whiskey eyes clouded over. He bit down on his pipe. I said, “Thanks for keeping this quiet. Let’s go, Chick.” Chick stood up. Kennedy’s face looked like a building summer storm.
“Just hold it a minute,” Kennedy said, holding a hand up to stop us. “Goddammit, Les! I’ve had enough of this shit. This is none of your business. These men have information pertinent to an investigation and I’ve agreed to keep it quiet. Do you understand? Now, get your well-padded ass out of here until I ask for you.”
“These are the two guys assaulted Luke and Large Michael,” Baxter said, looking us over as if cataloging us for future reference. I didn’t like it. “They fit the description Hanson gave me at—”
“Les, I don’t care if Hanson and Moore get beat up every day. In fact, I’d prefer it. I may make it department policy. I was about to give these men community service medals when you barged in. And why did Hanson give you a description? He didn’t know anything when I talked to him. He want to file charges?”
“Well…no.”
“That’s amazing, isn’t it? Doesn’t want to press charges, but he gives you a description anyway. And why’re you talking to Hanson? I don’t want a deputy of mine consorting with known dogshit like Hanson, you understand? Now get out, and from now on when the door’s shut you stay out. Go.”
Les was either thicker through the forehead than he looked or didn’t want to listen, or thought he didn’t have to listen. “Where’d you guys come across a marijuana field?” he asked.
“I’d tell you,” I said, “but you look like you’d just forget.”
Baxter’s bad eye filled with blood and his neck colored. “You get crossways with me, boy, and I’ll make you wish—”
“Les!” The sheriff’s voice cracked like thunder. “If you don’t get the hell outta here in the next five seconds, you’re fired.”
“But these guys—”
“Four seconds.”
Baxter glared at me.
“Three.”
Baxter left the room, quickly. But not before he gave me another tough-guy look as he shut the door. I didn’t even have time to shudder with terror.
“Sheriff’s going to keep this quiet,” I said to Chick.
“No leaks here,” Chick said. “Very tight lipped.”
“Simmons took the first call you made. On the 911 line. Baxter was close by when it came in. Sorry. Couldn’t be helped. I should’ve let Baxter go a long time ago.”
“Why haven’t you?”
“He’s got experience. A good man to have in a situation where your back’s against the wall and a handicap everywhere else. He was an all-state defensive tackle here fifteen years ago. Next month he’s going to run against me for sheriff. Willie Boy Roberts has his money behind him. I fire him now it’ll look personal.” His pipe had gone out. He paused to relight it. “But I’ll fire him if it comes to that.”
I believed him.
The sheriff walked us out to the parking lot, shook hands with us. I liked him. “Best place to eat supper around here is the Raintree Inn,” he said. Gave us directions. I gave him the rifle. He thanked me for coming in and went back inside. As I backed the Bronco out of the parking lot, I saw Baxter’s face at the window. Chick waved at him.
“You know he’s taking your plate numbers, don’t you?” Chick said.
“Yeah.”
“As a trained bodyguard I would recommend you watch your ass.”
Sounded like good advice.
FOUR
The Raintree Inn was a nice place, too dark, but the food was excellent. Chick had a steak and I had rainbow trout. Chick had Wild Turkey on the rocks. I drank ice water and coffee. We didn’t ask about each other’s past.
I did find out he was a bowhunter and had brought his bow and tackle with him. Since he was still looking for Prescott, the bail jumper, he couldn’t go hunting in the morning. We made plans to go the morning after next. After supper I drove him out to the Best Western, where he’d already paid for another night. I told him I’d come by to get him and his things the next evening. Told him to stay at my cabin until we left for Colorado.
The dream.
It came again. It came less often as the years went by. Each time with a different wrinkle. I was humping through the rice paddies, mud sucking at my boots as if alive. My helmet was gone, but I didn’t know where or why. Through the mist I saw a phalanx of NVA regulars moving toward me. With my M16 on rock-and-roll I swept their ranks—some fell, but they kept coming, their numbers unchanged, seeming to move no closer, as if they were on a treadmill. Then they disappeared. Out of the quagmire came VC in black pajamas. The swamp under me became solid and raised, leaving me on a small hill, alone. Raining now. Forms leaped at me from the fog. Steel knives flashed. My gun jammed, so I swung it like a club, sweat rolling into my eyes, its saltiness stinging and blinding. One of the black forms stabbed me in the chest. I felt the coldness of the knife, sharp, like an icicle in my heart, but I didn’t die. Continued to fight.
Then the face came.
The face I couldn’t forget, the chin and jaw flayed back, leaving a skeletal smile. The last smile. I fired, my gun working now. She stopped and her hair fell loose from the band tied around her head. She had looked like a man. I had thought she was a man. She had looked like a man! She fell to the ground in slow motion, her arms flapping like a rag doll’s. The black pajamas stopped attacking, stood in the swamp, the mist wrapping around their heads like a smoky shroud. They were faceless. She was a girl. Looked fourteen. What was she doing here? This was a man’s work. A man’s fight. She wasn’t pretty. Just a child carrying a gun. A child facing eternity with the bottom of her face missing, the teeth sunk b
ack in her mouth.
I wiped a hand across my face. The hand felt sticky. It was. Sticky and red.
She was a child.
She wasn’t pretty.
She was dead.
I didn’t know.
Why was she here?
Why, God?
Suddenly she sat up, a skeletal leer on her face. I screamed. A man in black pajamas leapt at me, changing into a horrible black hound, mouth frothing, jaws popping…
I sat up in bed, mouth open, sweating. The darkness of the room pressed in on me.
I was on my deer stand by 5:30 a.m. Saw two does and a spike buck. Didn’t shoot. I was waiting on a ten-point patriarch I’d seen a week ago. The woods were cool and quiet. There had been a skin of frost on the ground, but the sun melted it away. Very cold for this time of the year. Unseasonably so.
I thought about Sandy as I sat in the tree, my body heat rising from my collar and warming my neck and chin. Thinking about Sandy tied my brain in Gordian knots. It had been three months now. Three months since she’d taken the job in Denver. I didn’t blame her. I couldn’t hold her back, didn’t want to. But that wasn’t all of it. Something about our relationship bothered her. Right now, there was no relationship. She said it wasn’t me. Said it was her, but that was all she would say. Whether it was her or me, I was still denied her—her laughter, her face, her eyes sparkling with life, my reflection in those eyes.
I kept up two cabins—one in Missouri and another in Colorado. I moved back and forth between them. Missouri was my childhood home, but Missouri summers drove me into the Rockies. I had played football at Colorado State before turning pro and had fallen in love with the mountains. Denver was three hours away from my Colorado cabin. Three hours away geographically and light years away socially. She went places I no longer wanted to walk. Did things I no longer wanted to do. No more concrete canyons and smog. No more hermetically sealed, freeze-dried, one-size-fits-all lifestyle. No more shopping mall lemmings rushing to the edge of their gold cards. No more fitness clubs. No more elevator Muzak nightclubs and foreign luxury wheels. No more insurance salesmen piecing off my life. No more acrylic suits in BMWs rushing off to take another bite of American fabric.
No. No more. Farewell to all that. Good riddance to all that.
Was I just hiding? Or fooling myself? Hiding from what? A nineties dropout. Too late for existential posing. Maybe I was socially retarded. Hated crowds. Liked people. Maybe I was afraid. I had seen what civilization had to offer, had briefly reached for its definition of success, then, just as I was about to snatch it, I pulled my hand back and fled. Society was too lupine, too vicious and unrelenting for me.
Freedom. How I love her. Sandy. How I love her. How to have both? Or, settle for only one? But perhaps I couldn’t have both and half was somehow less than half.
Back at the cabin, I cut up a cantaloupe and brewed coffee. Sliced turkey breast from a block I’d bought at a deli two days ago. Noticed I was out of milk and flour. I put the turkey between two slices of wheat bread, not white. The last two pieces. I turned the stereo to an oldies station. The Byrds sang “I Wasn’t Born to Follow.” The phone rang. Startled me. It didn’t ring often. Only a handful of people had the number.
“Storme’s all-night Chinese laundry and fortune-cookie factory.” I was expecting to hear Matt Jenkins’s voice.
“Is Grizzly Storme there?” said a female voice. A voice like a silver bell in my head. Sandy’s voice. Lovely. I hadn’t expected it. There was a catch in my chest, a dull pang.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe if you describe him, I’ll recognize him.”
“He’s a broken-down wide receiver. Six two, maybe six three, gray eyes. Bad knees, worse attitude. Conceited chauvinist smirk on his perpetually boyish face. Loves John Wayne and Bob Dylan and beautiful newswomen. He can’t polka, but has excellent taste in women.”
“Nobody like that here. There’s a guy who kinda resembles Robert Redford, but his taste in women runs to media snobs with strange sexual appetites.”
“Mmmmm,” she purred. An electric shiver raced down my neck. “Sounds more interesting than the guy I had in mind. Maybe I’d like to meet him.”
“I can arrange it,” I said. “Anytime.”
“How about this weekend? She really needs to get away from the city for a while. Like maybe forever.”
“I think he’s told her that before.”
“Highway runs both ways, cowboy,” she said.
“My guy rides a one-way horse.”
“Sounds like the guy I’m talking about.”
“The Redford look-alike?”
“No. The stubborn has-been with the great hands and bad knees.”
“Oh. Him. He waits for you. Always will. When can you get away?”
“Saturday. I’ll have to do the six o’clock news, but Karen can cover me on the late broadcast. Do you watch the news?”
“Only the sports.”
“Liar. You probably tape the shows and dream of my sun-kissed hair and laughing eyes.”
“Self-assured TV snob,” I said. “Actually, I only think of your milky-white teeth and tanned legs.”
“I miss you, Wyatt.”
I admitted missing her. How long had I waited to hear those words. Three months. Seemed longer. She had called Matt when she couldn’t reach me in Colorado. He told her where to find me. Thank God, I hadn’t removed the phone as I’d thought about so many times. We talked. Good, fluid conversation, playing off each other. Filling in where it was needed, saying nothing when it wasn’t. Hearing what was not being said as well as what was. Her voice was a sunbeam, her laughter the west wind, warming me. Thawing me. Hearing it created an ache I couldn’t rub.
“Can you get back this weekend?” she asked.
I had planned to hunt for another week or so before returning. To get back by Saturday left me four days to hunt and one day to travel.
Reluctantly, I said good-bye. The phone clicked but didn’t break the spell. On the stereo Bob Dylan was singing “Forever Young” backed up by J. Robbie Robertson and The Band. The best version. The right version. The words wrenched from Dylan’s lips and the horns soared and Robertson’s guitar buzzed and cried. I tasted some coffee. Just right.
Forever young.
I showered, shaved, put on a pair of Levi’s, smoothed by time and memory, and a Colorado State University sweatshirt. Pulled on a pair of Adidas basketball shoes and drove to town. It was a beautiful day. Harvest autumn in Missouri. Cornstalks in fields stretching across the horizon. Trees blazing gold and orange. Leaves drifting and the wind sighing at summer’s passing.
I bought a cup of coffee, “made fresh every twenty minutes,” at a convenience store. Must’ve been nineteen minutes old. I stopped at a mom-and-pop supermarket in town. I don’t shop chains and conglomerates. A small rebellion, but we strike where we can. I parked the Bronco at the back of the hot-top parking lot. When I got out of the truck a slender, attractive young woman with chestnut hair and matching eyes stopped me. She had a bag slung over her shoulder that wasn’t a purse.
“You’re Wyatt Storme, aren’t you?” she asked, without preamble. She looked confident, assured, as if she were revealing something I wouldn’t know.
“He’s much taller,” I said, walking on. I smelled media. The lowest form of life. After lawyers. But I make exceptions. Sandy was one. The only one.
“Wait,” she said. I heard her low heels clack on the asphalt. I stopped. She said, “You’re the guy tipped the sheriff about the marijuana field.”
I looked at her. Wondered about the sheriff’s promise of anonymity. Maybe I’d misjudged him. No, I hadn’t. Somebody else had clued her in. Probably Baxter. But why? “You’ve got the wrong person. I’m just passing through.”
“I’d like to interview you.”
“No.”
“What are you afraid of?” Her eyes were defiant.
“Lots of things. What are you afraid of?”
“I’
ll ask the questions.”
I smiled. “Maybe you can supply the answers, too.”
“How did you discover the field?”
“I looked under the letter F in the dictionary. It was right across the page from ‘fiasco’ and ‘fiction.’ ”
“My, my,” she said, cocking her head to one side. “How glib we are. How did you manage to kill the guard dog?” She was beginning to annoy me. An old prejudice. Old memories of microphones in my face. Cheap aftershave and cheaper cigar smoke in my nostrils, and the same tired questions and pat answers. “League policy, Storme,” I was told. “You will talk to those people or be fined again.” And again. But her perfume smelled good and she didn’t look the cigar type.
She said, “That’s quite a story. Man bites dog. A classic.”
I walked on. She trailed me. Followed me across the parking lot, through the whoosh of electric door and warm air. Down the aisles. I am irresistible to female journalists.
“You can’t get rid of me that easily,” she said. I selected a can of Campbell’s chunky clam chowder. Yummy.
“That’s okay. Are you housebroken? Maybe I can teach you to fetch my slippers, bring in the paper—”
“Where are you from?”
I pushed my cart. Somehow it’s difficult to feel supremely manly while pushing a shopping cart. But I thought manly thoughts. Hoped that would help.
“Why are you here?” she asked. “Where are you staying? Where have you been since the Super Bowl? What do you know about yesterday’s events?” People, women mostly, stared at us as we paraded through the frozen food section, through the produce. I paid at the register and she followed me to the parking lot.
“I’m going to get this interview,” she said, as I put the groceries in the Bronco. “One way or another.”
“Good luck,” I said. A young guy with a camera scooted quickly up and pointed the camera at me. I turned my head away before the shutter clicked. Years of practice.
“You get it?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “Sorry, Jill.”
“Try again.”