13
The old Chevy that his son had left him still had good kick in the mountains, but Grant was content not to pass the logging trucks and other rigs laboring up the steep switchbacks. He lit a cigarette and watched the range rear up around him, the patterned thick walls of pine and more pine and now and then a copse of yellowing aspen like a blight on the green. At the top of the pass was a paved lot, a scenic overlook, a refuge from the harrowing turns—irresistible to a family from the plains who had never seen such country before.
Why do they call it the Continental Divide if it’s not the exact middle of the continent? his son wanted to know. Standing with their backs to the view while a stranger aimed the camera, found the button. Because, said his daughter, this is where the water changes direction. On the eastern side the streams and rivers all flow to the Atlantic. On the western side everything flows to the Pacific.
Looking out, each of them, as if they might see these streams and rivers running obligingly toward their endings.
Grant drove to the far end of town, to the Black Bear, and parked, and made his way to the counter. I am starving, said Sean. How shocking, said Caitlin. A few faces looked up—looked again, then bent to their sandwiches, their soups. Waylon Reese appeared from the kitchen, raising his hand in an automatic wave, but then came forward with his hand held out. He asked Grant how he was and Grant said he couldn’t complain, and Grant asked after Waylon’s family and Waylon looked away at something and said they were fine, they were all just fine.
He’d been one of the good ones, Waylon Reese. Free sandwiches and coffee for the sheriff’s people, the government men, the volunteers. He’d hauled his whole family up into the mountains, Julie and the two boys, to help look. He’d kept the poster up at the Black Bear long after others in town had taken it down.
A good man who now flipped to a fresh page on his little pad and, staring at it, said, “What can I get you, Grant?”
A CAR HONKED AND he looked up. The light was green.
He accelerated around the corner and drove down the old street, past the school playground, the town hall, until he reached the sheriff’s building. Inside was the woody, dusty, faintly sour smell of a church. The groaning floorboards, the rack of shotguns aligned ceilingward like organ pipes. He looked over the head of the young deputy to the bulletin board and felt his heart fall out of him—his daughter’s face, there amid the postings. Her good teeth, her sun-squinted eyes. Black hair whipping away as if she were in full sprint. It was the picture taken at the top of the divide by a stranger. Grant and Angela and Sean, mountains and sky, all cropped out. He had looked on it a thousand times and it never failed to kill him.
The young deputy sent him on back, and at Grant’s rap on the doorjamb Joe Kinney swiveled and brought his chair level with a sharp mechanical outcry. “Well now,” Kinney said. He got to his feet and Grant came forward to shake his hand. The sheriff’s hair was getting whiter and thinner, coming into the blown, snowy style of his father. But unlike Emmet, the sheriff was yet a big man, with a high, hard gut he wore as if according to some official stipulation.
Grant told the sheriff he’d got a hankering for the Black Bear, and Kinney, hitching his thumbs in his belt, affirmed that it was worth the drive.
In the outer room the young deputy opened a drawer, shut it, and muttered something.
“Do you mind if I close this door one minute, Joe?” Grant said, and the sheriff said, “No, sir. Shut it and sit down. You want Donny to get you a coffee?”
“No, thanks. I’ll only take a minute here.”
“Take as long as you like.”
On the desk between them a walkie-talkie faintly hissed. Grant knew the exact heft of it, its leathery, electronic smell. Off to the right, staged with a father’s pride, stood the picture of Kinney’s daughter on her horse at the rodeo, cowboy hat sailing behind her.
Kinney offered him a cigarette and he took it and leaned to meet the lighter. The sheriff lit himself and said, “Everything all right down there at Dad’s?”
“Well,” Grant said, and the other man said, “Shit, don’t tell me he fell off another roof—”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Man his age, climbing on roofs.”
“Nothing like that,” Grant said. He gazed critically at the tip of his cigarette. “I just wondered if you knew Billy’s come home again.”
The sheriff leaned back and drew on his cigarette. “Last I heard he was in Nevada.”
Grant sat forward to tip his ash into the glass ashtray. “No, he’s back. I thought you might like to know about it, if you didn’t already.”
“I appreciate that, Grant. But I guess if anything was wrong I’d of heard from Dad.”
Grant nodded. “It’s not my place, Joe. But your dad and Billy. Well, your dad’s getting on.”
The sheriff smiled crookedly. “I know he is, Grant. But if you’re sitting here telling me he can’t handle that piss-ant little brother of mine, well, I’d say you ought to know better by now.”
“I’m not trying to tell you anything, Joe. I probably shouldn’t have said anything at all. I just thought you might like to know he’s come home again, that’s all.”
The walkie-talkie crackled, throwing a quick, reflexive flurry into Grant’s heart. Kinney scooped it up and frowned at it and set it down again.
Grant said, “Well,” and he stabbed out his cigarette and began to rise. But the sheriff motioned with his hand and said, “Now, hold on a minute, Grant. I got something to tell you too.”
“All right.”
“It’s about Angela.”
“What about her?”
“She’s been calling again. Day, night, it doesn’t matter. ‘What are you doing, Sheriff? What’s your plan? What are you people doing up there to find my girl?’ She’s been working that phone and . . . I don’t know how else to put it, Grant, but she don’t sound like she’s got both feet altogether on solid ground. I’m sorry for what she’s had to go through—what you’ve both had to go through—you know that. But . . .” He lifted a hand and dropped it again.
Grant studied his own hands. The truncated two fingers. He’d heard this tone from the man before—that first time, that first morning, when the sheriff wanted to know what a fifteen-year-old boy was doing way up on that mountain by himself.
Kinney tapped his cigarette, staring fixedly at the ashtray. He had something more to say but he wasn’t going to say it, not today. Behind him was the large green map of the front range; in a few square yards of paper and ink it contained all the millions of true, godless places a person might be. How long was long enough when it wasn’t your child?
And when it was?
“I’m sorry to hear this, Joe,” Grant said. “I’ll talk to her.”
Kinney shook his head and stubbed out his cigarette. “I just thought you might like to know, that’s all.” He came around the desk and opened the door and followed Grant into the outer room. At the front door Grant turned and the two men shook hands again.
“I want to thank you for keeping that up,” Grant said.
The sheriff didn’t turn to look at the bulletin board. He looked down and scuffed the old floorboards with the sole of his boot and he studied the scuffmark a long time.
“I don’t believe it’s in the papers here yet, I haven’t looked. But I heard from a lawman yesterday about this gal in Texas got kidnapped when she was twelve. Dragged into a car right in front of her house. Fifteen years ago and they just now found her. Living in a garage all this time behind the man’s house not ten miles from her home. Neighbors never knew a thing. Say they never saw her. Never saw the little girl she had by the man, neither.”
The sheriff looked up. “Twenty-seven years old now, this girl. A little daughter same age she was when she got taken and who don’t know a thing about this world but that garage.” He drew a breath through his nostrils and shook his head.
Grant held his eyes.
“I didn’t know if I should tell you about it or not,” Kinney said. “I guess I decided I should.”
Grant nodded. “Thanks, Joe.”
“Oh, hell.” The sheriff drew himself up. “You’d of read about it anyways.”