by John Barnes
“Oh, I can get started. Fill the rest in later. And like that. What were you going to do today, though?”
“Sit around, read books I’d already read, play with the cats, try to get up the ambition to do some housework. Same things I always do the first day that Kara’s away. That place feels so big without her.”
“And how about this evening and tonight? You up for a drive?”
“Where to?”
“Down to Saguache. To a roadhouse called ‘The Mutilated Cow.’ Where we’re going to see a band called Skin2Skin. Or rather they’re playing, and I’m going there to see their manager, Jenapha Lee.”
“Jennifer—”
“She’s respelled it, J-E-N-A-P-H-A, and she makes a point of that final A. Like nigga or sista. And if you call her Jennifer, she acts like a nigga that’s been called a nigger. Anyway, she’s Skin2Skin’s manager, I’m mad-dog-bugfuck in love with her, and it’s all thanks to that goddam guided deer that wrecked your truck. And they’re playing at the Mutilated Cow tonight. Now, you want to go soak up some weirdness?”
“I have the weirdest feeling that I don’t really have any choice.”
Travis called the waitress over and basically ordered one of everything. I reflected on the unfairness of the fact that he was still wearing his college pants size.
When he’d acquired a coffee cup of his own, and begun to chase his morning load of coffee with more coffee, he said, “Actually, John, you’re welcome to just hang back here in Gunnison if you like. And I’ll still tell you the story. But I kind of thought you might like to get an actual look at some of the participants. And it does get pretty strange here and there, so maybe you can treat it as research or something.”
“Well,” I admitted, “it has to be more fun than sitting on the couch, re-reading a Lawrence Block mystery and wondering why I can’t get myself into motion enough to clean the cat box. Almost for sure. Is the band any good?”
“They suck, but they suck in a very important way. Jenapha Lee, or one of the band, will explain that part tonight.”
So I listened, and Travis talked, through his gigantic breakfast, which he washed down with another half gallon of coffee. I always wondered why moths didn’t fly at his eyes.
Well, to begin with, John, I really wanted to do something about that dead deer. I could hear you back there talking to yourself, mad as hell about everything, and on flat land in a mountain valley, on a clear night like that, sound carries a long way. I figured that, excuse my saying it, but it’s true, you’d be even less able to defend yourself than usual, and right then, mad as you were and noisy as you were being, probably a company of infantry could sneak up on you. So I wanted to make sure that whatever it was that was after me didn’t accidentally get you. And I figured they’d home in on a transponder or something on our friend Buck Cyborg, so the thing to do about that dead deer was to get him moved.
I was just thinking about that, real hard, standing there beside the deer and still hearing you cuss up a storm at the universe. Trouble was, I was also thinking about not wanting to take a long walk with both a duffel bag and a dead deer on my shoulders in the middle of the night.
Then a beat-up old pickup came along, going the other way, with just his parking lights on and real slow. I stuck out my thumb and the guy stopped—one thing I like about your part of the country, people will stop to pick up a guy who might be in trouble, rather than let him freeze his ass off. As he pulled onto the shoulder, the ass end of that dead deer was right in those parking lights.
And he got out, and said, “Hey, Travis, Travis Bismarck? Wash U’s best-known Nazi redneck baby killer?”
Well, wet my shorts if it wasn’t Brown Pierre.
He was pretty much the same guy as he’d been twenty-some years ago, when you and I used to watch him pick fights with the world on behalf of all the little furry woodland animals. Hell, you know. I hadn’t seen him since 1978, I’d guess, and here he was, probably still going on the same shirt, pants, haircut, and maybe bath. He fit in pretty well out here, your basic mountain hippie redneck, except for being gigantic, and even that kind of worked. Nowadays he wears wire-rimmed glasses, and ties that hair back in a long gray greasy ponytail that looks like fifty well-oiled house-rat pelts sewn together, and so many shredded-out flannel shirts that I kind of think he must just put fresh ones on as the outer layers wear down. He also had on a pair of greasy old jeans, those dumb-ass tire-tread sandals that never wear out, trucker wallet on a chain, and a cell-phone holster.
We listened to you being rude to the Triple A lady—aw, shit, John, don’t argue, I heard you and I got a witness—and decided that maybe this wasn’t the time for reunion week. I didn’t explain everything because he grinned and said, “Well, damn, it’s nice to find a guy with some muscles, that I happen to know. Look, I’m not going as far as Salida, but I’m going most of the way, and you wouldn’t have too bad a walk to Poncha Springs from where I am going. I have sort of a, uh, delivery route for a man who has a little old pharmaceutical business—just herbal if you know what I mean—and I usually stay the night with a real nice lady that’s about to be my last stop, right up by Poncha Springs. Save you a lot of walking. Now, I’m still vegan, but this is good meat, and it’s nobody’s fault that it’s dead, and she and those kids are not vegan—and frankly a little protein in the diet would be a good thing in that house. And otherwise this will just end up being picked up by the highway patrol and thrown in a landfill—they don’t leave ’em out for coyotes anymore. Now, a ride from me will save you a good two hours—you want to help me get that deer into the back of my truck?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll even take the heavy end.” That’s the head, of course, and in the dark, I kept that Brown Pierre from seeing the funny collar, which was way up on the neck. If anybody was using a locator or something to track it, the trail would head back for a while, then end up in the backyard, among the other trash, behind some ganja-mama’s hippie shack.
Well, we only took maybe three minutes between talking, deciding, and heaving that deer up-oh, so you did look, later on, and you saw no traces that we’d taken it? Just out of curiosity, John, are you any kind of tracker? And that shoulder was dry hard-packed gravel, and we didn’t drag him since we wanted to preserve that meat and didn’t want to get any more blood around than we had to—so of course there wasn’t much sign, except for that splash of blood, that we’d been there.
Anyway, Brown Pierre had quite a bit of good quality dope in a little metal box under the chassis, and getting stopped with roadkill in the truck bed would get him searched, so he needed to be careful. He drove exactly the limit and obeyed every law, but he didn’t turn his lights on till we were over the hill from you, because he didn’t want anyone marking a place where his truck had stopped for a while and coming down to see what that was about.
It was maybe a ten-minute ride to Leslie-Sue’s place, and once we got away from the scene of the bambicide, he launched into one of his enviro lectures just like there hadn’t been a twenty-year interruption in it, everything about the intrinsic destructiveness of human beings and all that. I don’t know if he breathed once in the whole time.
But despite all that, getting a little deer blood on me and doing a little work, it was worth it. We went on by you, and the net effect was that I had doubled back and taken that possibly traceable deer with me, a win all around. When we got there, Leslie-Sue, the predictable big soft fat lady, came running out to hug him, and about three thousand kids all ran out to jump up and down and tell him everything in the world. I was invited for the night, with a suggestion of threesies, but since I like my ladies bathed, I kind of said duty was calling me, and took off. Besides, there might be a few questions I didn’t want to answer, if it should happen that they got a good look at that radio collar and the wire leading into the thing’s brain.
I slung up my bag and trotted back to 24, like I intended to walk the fifteen minutes to Poncha Springs and work from there, then doub
led back in the dark and headed north again. This time I needed to get thoroughly lost, so I was going to take the first road that wasn’t just a ranch access, off to either side, and go from there.
As it turned out, the first road I came to was to the left, and said it led to the Mount Shavano ski area, which was kind of perfect—it was a warm enough night, so if I kept moving I wouldn’t freeze, and that time of year, there’d be setup crew already up there and probably I could beg a floor to sleep on and a ride in the morning. Had my jogging shoes on, so it was just a matter of picking ’em up and putting ’em down till I got there.
After about a mile I saw something off to the side, just a ribbon of smooth darkness beside the road, and realized how much I was in modern Colorado. This was a barely-paved road leading up to a ski area, running mostly through cattle pastures, but there was a brand-new smooth modern bicycle trail down there beside it. I dropped down the next low point at a bank and started jogging on that; less risk of being seen, and a better, safer surface. It was getting truly late, and I’d been up forever, so I kept breaking into a run for a while, to help stay awake.
Probably about two in the morning, when pasture had given way to mountain passes and if I didn’t keep moving I’d feel how chilly it was, the sign said I was only three miles from the Shavano ski area, which meant if I just kept moving it was all going to work out fine. Orion was just rising, coming up over the mountains bow-first like he was on a commando raid across the sky, and my eyes had become so starlight-adjusted that I could pick out most of the shapes I needed to easily, especially with nice bright Jupiter bang overhead.
The bicycle trail swung away from the road to switchback its way down a ravine to a bridge; in daylight I might have chanced cutting off some switchbacks, but here in the dark I really didn’t want to turn an ankle a long way from help, and then have to wait till somebody came along in the morning.
I was rounding the right turn around the end of the third switchback, just starting to notice how dark it was getting down here, when it got just a little brighter, as if a crescent moon had come out from behind the clouds—and yet there was no moon.
Just beyond and below the ridge, a bright light was moving around, apparently in the sky, without any sound. The road was the other way, so it wasn’t just headlights, and anyway, I was hearing the gurgle of the creek a hundred yards away—those mountains are quiet late at night—and if there’d been an engine I’d’ve heard it. So I just quietly trotted back to see if I could see anything from the trail.
I was looking up the draw toward a low saddle, covered thick with pine trees. Right above it were fistfuls of bright stars flung all over the deep blue of the sky—and it was a real deep indigo-blue, not black, because something big was glowing and moving around back there. I looked down at my feet. In the light bouncing over the ridge from whatever the hidden, glowing object was, I could see a dirt trail that took off up towards the saddle so maybe it went there—you know how mountain trails are, who knew what it might do when it bent into the trees a dozen yards away?
You know me, John, the Bismarck family motto is “What the hell.” I figured I’d follow the trail till it wasn’t going where I wanted to go, then turn back. That light in the sky, and that trail pointed that way, were just too interesting to walk on by.
It was dark and stumbly as I went up out of the draw, and I about kissed a couple of trees that I hadn’t been introduced to, and one part of me kept expecting to do something truly lame-ass dumb, trip over a mama bear or something, but instead, once it was further from the bike trail, the trail straightened out and became smoother; by the skyglow I could see it had been graveled, and maybe even tarred a little. I could’ve ridden a bike on it.
Now that I knew I was onto something, and that I was unlikely to lose my way back, I put my rear in gear and charged on up that saddle to see what I could see. And unlike the bear that went over the mountain, I found a lot to see.
I left the trail just before it summited, and went up between two trees, over a big old freeze-ass cold boulder. And lying on top of that, and looking into the draw below, I saw a mountain cabin. Nothing rusticky and old-timey—this was one of those split-level lots-of-deck golden-varnished-wood things that rich people put up around here, the kind of thing that looks like it belongs in the tony suburbs of Rivendell. Light was glaring and flashing off all that glass in all those windows, and gleaming off the propane tank. No wonder it had been bright enough to be noticeable over the saddle.
The source of the light was a slowly descending flying saucer, about thirty feet across the flat cylindrical part, with a stick-out bevel that put maybe another six foot on the radius, the whole thing about seven foot thick. It was painted dull gray, like autobody primer, with no markings; if the dark squares on the upper surface of its beveled sides were windows, no light came from them. It had a single fin that rose from its center to about five feet above its rim, in a long smooth curve that was maybe parabolic or elliptical or one of them, I can’t remember how you tell the difference anymore.
It was making no sound but there was light around it, gold-white flickering light like a hot campfire.
It set down on the grass. The flickering light couldn’t be too awful hot because it didn’t affect the grass at all. I slid down the rock in front of me and trotted down the trail to the next swichback turn, hoping to see better.
Two reasons why that was a mistake. One reason it was a mistake, I missed a lot in those few seconds of sneaking around. Next time I got a good look, the boarding ramp had already dropped, so I’d missed that part, and the flickering had gone out, so I wasn’t seeing as well, but that was partly made up for by the bright ordinary light coming from inside. In that light, as it spilled across the cabin’s yard, I could clearly see two clowns, in big baggy pajamas, orange hair, white face paint, and round red rubberball noses, but with strangely normal-sized feet, get out and run down the ramp with bags of something over their shoulders.
The second reason it was a mistake was that I’d already been spotted and I was moving into a more vulnerable position.
I found that out a minute later, while I was watching the ramp fold up after the two clowns had gone back and forth one more time. A guy behind me whipped a big old burlap sack over my head, followed by a loop of rope, and all of a sudden I was bagged up neat and clean. The rope tugged hard, once, while I was still yelling in surprise, and I fell backwards onto the trail, my hands pinned to my side and that bag over my head. I felt the cuffs going around my ankles even as I was kicking and yelling. Then they dragged me down to that cabin by the rope, bouncing and thumping all over the trail, like I was the coon and they were setting up coon dog trials, only I didn’t think they’d let me just climb a tree and wait for the dog pack when we got to the end.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
They chained the cuffs holding my feet to a post on the porch of that cabin, and told me that if I kicked around and ended up hanging head down over the side of the deck, from that chain, my arms crushed against my sides, they’d be just as happy. Then they cut a hole in that bag with a box knife, so I could breathe better, and then cut away some of the burlap around my hands and cuffed my wrists together before they undid the rope loop. I wasn’t feeling great but at least I could breathe now, the bag had protected me from the worst of the scrapes if not from the bruises, and they were acting like, while they might not care if they hurt me, they weren’t especially out to do it, either.
“Travis Bismarck,” a voice I didn’t recognize said. “This is Travis Bismarck. I just beat the fuck out of him the night before last, and here he is again.”
The figure that swam into my field of view was very tall and dressed, like the others, as a clown, but something about the ready-to-go way he carried himself was familiar, and I said, “Umm, yeah, you’d be the guy that visited me in my hotel room, wouldn’t you?”
He laughed. “‘Visited.’ I hope you don’t ‘visit’ your mother in the hospital. Yeah, I looked a litt
le different at the time. Shitfire, man, you get around. I think we’ve just decided you’re a major nuisance. Which is not as bad as it might sound.” The big clown turned to the three smaller clowns beside him. “This is the one that trashed Elvis and tried to take the Gaudeamus box back—the one I beat up at the hotel. Detective, based out of Billings, working for Xegon, reports to Hale there, and he’s had a dose of the Gaudeamus pill so watch what you think.”
The smallest clown said, in a woman’s voice with a distinct Memphis twang, “Well, I’m impressed. What do we do with him?”
“Let’s start off by taking him inside and making sure he doesn’t get away,” the big clown said. By now I was picking up that slight grunted enunciation that meant he grew up on the res, probably spent some time at boarding school, and then had lived among whites for a long time, since it was faint; one of the Northern Plains nations, I guessed. “Sorry, Travis Bismarck, but you’ve pretty well convinced me that you can put up a good fight, so we’ll have to drag you, since I don’t want to untie you.”
I cooperated as much as I could, not seeing any reason to get my head bashed any more than it already was. They were less rough than they had been while dragging me down the trail. The living room they carried me into might have been any affluent Dallas or Atlanta family’s “Christmas house,” used only for a few weeks around the holidays—clunky-looking sorta-Southwest-Mission peeled-log furniture, godawful Bev Doolittle puzzle picture stuff on the walls, a bunch of dreamcatchers just in case anybody ever happened to have a dream, the whole thing suggesting that the residents liked being Westerners (for about three weeks out of the year) and felt real bad about the Indians. They set me down on a thick rubber-and-poly rug in a Taiwanese approximation to a Hopi pattern, which lay on the hardwood floor (of course there aren’t many hardwoods in Colorado, but pine and fir are known to be cheap) that had been painted with polyurethane to make it shiny and golden yellow.