Force of Nature Page 9

  With less than ten dollars, Pam had rolled into Kaycee on fumes and a mismatched left rear tire, feeling sick to her stomach—she suspected she was pregnant with Deke’s child—to find not only Deke but Mrs. Waldrop and two towheaded Waldrop boys waiting to watch their dad ride.

  She was devastated and furious, and as she returned to the parking lot, she saw a handsome, laconic cowboy climbing out of his ranch pickup that he’d just parked so closely to hers she couldn’t wedge in between them and open her door. It was the last straw. She set upon the stranger, pummeling his chest and shoulders with closed fists, but the man didn’t strike back. Instead, he smiled and said, “Whoa, little lady,” and leaned back so she couldn’t connect a punch to his jaw. She wore out quickly, and he gently clasped her wrists in his hands to still them and he asked if there was anything he could do to help her out, because she was obviously upset.

  She’d looked around him through tear-filled eyes and saw the rifle in his gun rack across the back window of his truck. “You can give me that rifle so I can shoot Deke Waldrop,” she’d said. Then a whiff of fried meat from the concession area wafted over them and the smell turned her stomach and she got sick on the hard-packed ground.

  He said, “You’re a pistol, all right,” and untied the silk bandanna from his neck and handed it to her to dry her face and wipe off her mouth. “Name’s Paul Kelly,” he said.

  FOR THE NEXT thirty-two years, she’d remind him that was the first and last act of kindness he’d shown her.

  But at the time, it worked. He bought her some ice cream and sat with her on the top row of the bleachers as she cried. Then he took her to his weathered old line shack in the Bighorn Mountains and offered her his bed and didn’t try to jump her. He was working for a local rancher, he told her, fixing fence and rounding up cows to earn enough money to go to college to become a mechanical engineer. He was, she told her mother over the telephone, “almost dashing.”

  They married, and Pam convinced her father to cosign on a loan for an ancient log cabin on twenty acres in the foothills of the mountains. It was to be their starter home, and they planned to burn it down and build a real house on the property. But Paul never went to college, and they never built a house, and his stint as a ranch hand was the last steady job he’d ever hold. If it wasn’t for monthly disability checks that came because that asphalt truck ran over his foot after he’d hired on that summer with the county road construction crew, they’d have no steady income during the months when Paul (and later Stumpy) weren’t guiding hunting clients.

  And now, she thought, the son-of-a-bitch went and got himself killed and took Stumpy—Deke’s son—with him, leaving her the place and six cows and two horses no one could ride. All that was left of her life was a stack of unpaid bills.

  “Fuck you, Paul,” she said again at the photo on the refrigerator. Earlier that afternoon, after the game warden had left, Will Speer, the county coroner, had called to ask her what plans she had for “making arrangements.” She’d asked him if she could donate Paul’s body to science.

  “Will they pay something for him?” she asked. “There’s got to be a college somewhere that wants to see what the inside of a loser looks like.”

  The coroner stammered that he didn’t know where to start.

  “Find out,” she said, and hung up the phone.

  PAM KELLY was still cursing to herself in the tiny cluttered mudroom as she pulled on a pair of knee-high rubber boots. On top of everything else, the cows and horses had to be fed. She normally ragged on Paul to go out and do it, but he wasn’t there to rag on. Inexplicably, she fought back tears as she buttoned up her barn coat.

  Several years before, she’d begged Paul to buy some life insurance. She made the appointment for him with Bernard, the insurance salesman she’d met in Saddlestring who said they could get $100,000 in term life for less than $20 a month. Paul drove to town with the checkbook and came back with a new hunting rifle. He shook it like a war lance and said, “This is all the life insurance I need.” Completely misunderstanding what she’d sent him to do, as usual. When she blew up, he’d promised he’d go see the insurance guy later. He never did, and Bernard had just confirmed it.

  She looked at her reflection in a cracked, flyspecked mirror next to the door. She was too old, too fat, too crabby, and too used up to ever get another man in her life now.

  “It just ain’t fair,” she said aloud.

  THE COWS milled around in a mucky pen on the north side of the collapsing old barn, and the two horses were in a corral on the south side. When she emerged from the cabin, the horses pawed at the soft dirt and whinnied. They wanted to eat. “Calm down,” she said to the mare and her colt.

  The cows just looked up at her dumbly, the way they always did.

  As she grasped the rusty door latch to the barn, she wondered what she could get for the stock. She’d heard beef prices were on the rise and she figured among all the cattle they weighed maybe five thousand pounds total. There should be some cash in selling the cows, and she sure didn’t want to have to keep feeding them. The hay supply was low, and the bales too heavy for her to stack on her own if she ordered a couple of tons. And the horses? They weren’t worth anything except to a slaughterhouse. The French could eat them, she thought. They liked eating horse meat, she’d heard.

  She swung the door back and reached for the light switch, which was mounted on the inside of the doorframe, when a hand grasped her wrist and twisted her arm back. The pain was sudden and excruciating, and she collapsed to her knees, gasping for air. She heard a muffled pop, and fireworks burst in front of her eyes. It felt like her arm had been jerked out of the socket.

  The light came on, and she looked through the tears and starbursts at the Game Changer, the man she’d seen at her kitchen table talking with Paul, Stumpy, and Ron Connelly. The man who gave her arm another wicked twist.

  He said, “I believe we’ve met.”

  11

  WHEN THEY WERE SURE the girls were in their rooms with their doors closed, Joe and Marybeth sat together on the couch and he told her about his conversation with Nate. He left out the part about the falconry website. Although it was his practice to share everything with his wife, in this case he felt the need to hold back a little for her own protection. She wouldn’t agree with his decision—he was sure of it—but Nate had spooked him.

  “Nemecek?” Marybeth asked.

  “Nate said we wouldn’t find out much about him,” Joe said. “He said he was off the grid as well.”

  “No one is completely without identity.”

  Joe shrugged.

  “I have my ways,” she said.

  He nodded. “I know you do.”

  Marybeth’s part-time job at the library gave her access to data and networks that rivaled those of most local law enforcement, and certainly the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department. She’d used that access to her advantage many times, and, through a coworker who had once worked for the police department, had obtained passwords and backdoor user names that allowed her into N-DEx, the U.S. Justice Department’s National Data Exchange, and ViCAP, the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program.

  “I’m curious to hear what you find,” Joe said.

  “Of course, we could just go to the source and ask him,” she said.

  “I’m holding that in reserve.”

  She shook her head. If it were up to Marybeth, Joe knew, she would have had Nate spilling everything.

  They sat in silence for a while on the couch, each consumed by their own thoughts.

  Finally, Marybeth asked, “Do you think we’ll see Nate again?”

  Joe shrugged. “I hope so.”

  “If he said the things you told me, he must be really worried. I’ve never heard him talk like that.”

  “Me either.”

  She said, “I can’t help wondering what it was he did that drew him here. What was so awful that he thinks he deserves to die?”

  AT 2:30 IN THE MORNIN
G, Joe slipped out of bed and pulled on his robe and walked quietly down the hallway to his tiny and cluttered home office. He shut the door, turned on the light, and sat down at his computer.

  Emails from Game and Fish headquarters flooded his inbox, but nothing looked urgent. The department was temporarily without a new director, and a search by the governor was under way. Governor Rulon, who in the past had employed Joe directly but off the books in a bureaucratic sense, had two years left in his second and last term and had seemed to have mellowed somewhat. Joe hadn’t received an assignment from Rulon in more than a year, which was fine with him, although if forced to admit it, he’d come to crave the adventure and uncertainty of his missions. The respite had been healthy for his family, though, and being able to stay home was something he’d never regret.

  It didn’t take long to find the falconry website Nate had given him. He took a few moments to register a username and a password, and he was in. The site was rudimentary and cluttered, no more than a screen filled with topics and comment threads:

  WHAT KIND OF HOOD SHOULD I BUY

  FOR A PRAIRIE FALCON? <17 COMMENTS>

  FLYING SHORT-WINGS <21 COMMENTS>

  HOW LONG WILL MY BIRD KEEP MOLTING? <7 COMMENTS>

  How do I recognize a state of yarak? <14 COMMENTS>

  Joe clicked on that one because he was unfamiliar with the word yarak and recalled Nate had used it earlier. The thread had begun more than ten years before, and the last comment was eight years old. Nevertheless, he read the thread with interest. Yarak was a Turkish word describing the peak condition of a falcon to fly and hunt. It was described as “full of stamina, well-muscled, alert, neither too fat nor too thin, perfect condition for hunting and killing prey. This state is rarely achieved but a wonder to behold when observed.” In order to achieve an optimum state of yarak, one commenter wrote, full-time care, exercise, diet, and training were required.

  “Don’t think you can get your bird into primo yarak by working with it at night or on weekends. This is a twenty-four/seven commitment, and there are no guarantees.”

  Joe didn’t expect to find a new thread with the word “kestrel” in it, and it wasn’t there.

  He wondered if Nate would launch the thread before he achieved his state of yarak.

  12

  FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, on the Wind River Indian Reservation, Bad Bob Whiteplume had a dream in which he was hunting for pronghorn antelope. As he raised his rifle, a car horn blared from somewhere behind him and spooked the buck. He watched in vain as the pronghorn he wanted zoomed away and turned its small contingent of does and fawns, and the herd raced away trailing a dozen plumes of dust. The horn wouldn’t stop, and he rolled over in bed and wrapped the pillow around his head and it helped a little. In his dream, the buck antelope he’d been after had run so far away Bob would never get a decent shot.

  When Rhonda next to him elbowed him in the ribs, he opened his eyes to total darkness. But he could still hear the horn.

  “Bob,” she said, “get up. There’s someone outside.”

  “Who is it?” he croaked.

  “How in the hell should I know? But it’s nearly three in the morning and somebody is sitting out front in their car, honking their fucking horn.”

  “Go make them stop,” he said, scooting farther away from her and her elbow and her yammering. He wanted to go back to the antelope hunt. “And don’t turn on the light or they’ll know I’m back here and they’ll keep honking.”

  The house had been built long before his grandfather had added the convenience store to the front of it. The two structures were joined via a metal door with several bolt locks on it he always forgot to secure.

  This came in handy because if Bob and his buddies did too much alcohol or weed, Bob could crash in his own bed without having to drive anywhere. But sleeping so close to his day job came with annoyances. Like this. All the Indians were family on the reservation, which was fine, usually. There was always someone to borrow tools or bullets from. But familiarity sometimes meant neighbors didn’t honor rules, like when a store was open or closed.

  “No,” she said, prying his hand and pillow away from his ear and leaning into him. “I’m not going out there. You go make them stop.”

  “Give it a minute,” Bob grumbled. “They’ll realize I’m not coming out and they’ll go away.”

  She huffed a long stream of air into the back of his neck from her nostrils as she sighed in frustration. There was a few seconds of silence.

  “See?” Bob said, closing his eyes.

  Then the horn resumed: a long blast, followed by several short blasts, followed by the long blast again.

  “They’re not leaving,” she hissed.

  “Okay, okay,” he growled, swinging his thick brown legs out from beneath the sheets. The floor was cold when his wide bare feet slapped it. “But I’m going to tear those knuckleheads a new one.”

  “Just make them stop,” Rhonda said, collapsing back into bed.

  Rhonda liked showing up around closing time and staying the night. She was a thick white woman with red hair and broad hips originally from Boston, who had shown up in Wyoming after a messy divorce looking for, she said, spirituality and something that would give her life meaning. Hence, she gravitated toward the folks on the res and provided free mental-health-care services at the tribal center one day a week.

  She ran the only psychology practice in the little town of Winchester to the north, and she said she liked the idea of being a shrink to ranch wives and other assorted miscreants during the day and sleeping with an angry Indian at night, that somehow it gave her existence a kind of balance. She told Bob she considered herself a liaison between white problems and Indian problems, and maybe someday she’d write a book about her experiences. Bob doubted anyone would buy or read such a useless book, but he didn’t tell her that.

  Before he could get her into bed, Bob had to answer her questions about native culture and beliefs and practices. He made them sound more mysterious than they were, and he made up a lot of it on the spot. For example, he had shown her the mottled scars on his chest and claimed they’d come from participating in a traditional sun dance where warriors pierced their pectoral muscles with sharpened bones and let themselves be hoisted into the air on rawhide ropes until they obtained their visions or the flesh ripped. Actually, the scars were a result of a motorcycle accident when Bob was a teenager. But no matter. It got her engine running, which was the point.

  She begged him to take her to a sweat lodge someday, to show her how to do a vision quest, to let her see the actual sun dance (where dancers no longer pierced themselves or hung from ropes). He told her she’d have to earn those privileges by submitting to him and “his hot-blooded ways.” He suspected at times she was onto him—she was a psychologist, after all—but she didn’t put up any objection or question his stories or his motives. So one or two times a week he took her to bed, where she showed dexterity and a youthful hunger that decried her appearance and profession. Afterward, she’d rise early and drive back to Winchester before he got up, so he didn’t even have to feed her.

  HIS MOOD was very, very dark as he stood and fished around on the chair through a pile of old clothes. He pulled on a pair of baggy gym trunks and a grease-stained hooded sweatshirt. His flip-flops were side by side under the bed, and he stepped into them.

  “Come back soon,” she sang from bed. “I’m wide awake now.”

  “Go back to sleep.”

  The .30-30 lever-action Winchester was propped in the corner, and he grabbed it by the barrel as he walked by and shuffled down the hallway.

  Maybe, he thought, the people outside honking their horn were visitors to the res, because locals would have known by now he wasn’t coming out. They’d know he meant business when they looked up and saw a big pissed-off Indian approaching the car with a hunting rifle.

  He pushed through the steel door into his retail store. It was dim inside; the only lights were from the drink coolers.
He paused at the front of his store and squinted, trying to see who was in the offending car. But because the bulb on the overhead pole light had been shot out recently—teenagers Darryl and Benny Edmo and their new pellet gun, he suspected—he couldn’t see much more than the outline of a vehicle in the moonlight on the other side of the gas pumps. One of the pumps blocked his view of the driver, but he could see no other occupants in the car.

  Bad Bob slammed back the bolt locks and threw open the front door. Without the barrier, the blaring of the horn was louder and more infuriating than before.

  “Hey!” he yelled. “Knock it off!” But his voice was drowned out.

  Bob strode across the loose gravel on blacktop, ignoring the sharp little stones that wedged between his bare toes and between the soles of his feet and the flip-flops.

  “KNOCK IT THE FUCK OFF!” he bellowed, and worked the lever action on his rifle with a swift and metallic clatch-clatch sound.

  The horn ceased.

  Bob said, “Thank you!”

  Overhead, the full moon hung fat and low over the western mountains. As he glanced at it, he noticed a distant hawk cross over the white/blue surface like a miller moth dancing across a porch light. The hawk gave him pause, and something inside of him stirred a little. What? he thought. Does it have some kind of meaning? The old folks still talked as if everything that happened in the natural world had meaning outside of the obvious, but Bob never paid any attention to that stuff. But something tweaked him inside now and he couldn’t entirely ignore it.