48
The boy walked the mares to the front pasture, released them, and walked back to the barn, passing the El Camino coming and going; his blood on the windshield was long gone and there was no other sign of that day but the caved-in door where Billy had kicked it.
Some cowboy, Dudley. Some Marlboro man.
In the barn he picked up the rake and began to muck the stalls. A black farm cat gathered herself and flew up to one of the saddles and sat there, tracking the flights of swallows in the dusty heights.
Two Saturdays gone by and now a third and he knew she wouldn’t come and he knew he would have to go to her, but what would he say if he did? And what did it matter anyway?
Then why don’t you stop thinking about it?
About it?
Her.
He was hindered by the cast but not as hindered as he had been, and before long he removed his jacket and continued working in his T-shirt, and this was how his father found him, planted in a dry blizzard of dust and straw, bending and forking and pitching the soiled straw into the wheelbarrow.
“Sean,” he said, and without stopping the boy said, “What.”
Then he stopped and turned and saw his father standing in the bay door.
It was the first day of April, a bright day with the smell of spring in it. She’d been gone for two years and eight months.
The deputy met them at the interstate and they followed his silver SUV down toward Denver, and they exited where he exited and followed him up again, climbing the pass toward Estes Park and Boulder. Spring had come indisputably to this county and the tires hissed as they struck the dark bands of thaw that lay across the road. The high bends of blacktop as they took them ignited in waves of granular light, starfields of quartz and mica, and they saw in memory the black dazzle of the cinder track in the spring—the brilliance of the white lines on the oily black, her long-striding legs scissoring between the lines as she neatly snipped one girl, and another, and then another
from the picture. The gleam and heat and sun-smell of her after. The other girls, their parents, stepping into their circle of happiness, circle of pride, congratulating and stepping away again.
There was no other sound in the cab but the rushing wind at their windows, and watching these new trees in this new county, the deep gorges and the far piney walls, they remembered the first time they’d climbed such a road and it could have been the same road, same mountain, a family from the plains who’d never seen such country before. And if the country was no longer strange to them, it was still strange in that it had never again astounded them, nor awed nor excited them again, but only reminded them every day and almost from hour to hour what it had taken from them and what it had made of them. The deputy’s signal winked and his taillights flared and he veered from the blacktop onto a sudden unpaved road, a narrow passage where such sunlight as reached their windshields, their faces, was green and trembling and heatless. The deputy’s SUV and the Chevy after it yawing and pitching in the graveled wallows until the road summitted and fed them down into a bowl of cleared land where four other cars sat waiting. Two of these were official SUVs like the one they followed and two were the meaningless parked cars of hikers.
Sheriff Kinney and his other young deputy stepped from the silver cruiser and moved toward Grant and the boy who were coming to meet the lawmen in the middle ground. Gravel and needles and deadfall crushing under their boots. The sheriff stopped and his deputies stopped and stood behind him, their young faces grave. He reached to shake Grant’s hand as he always did and then put his hands on his belt and regarded the boy.
“What happened to you?”
The boy looked at the cast on his wrist, as if he’d not been aware of it. He’d worn it for three weeks now and it showed the dirt of that time and could not be cleaned. He said he’d fallen off a horse.
“The hell you say. One of ours?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why wasn’t I told?”
“It wasn’t the horse’s fault,” said the boy.
“Don’t make no difference.” The sheriff studied him. He adjusted his hat and looked at Grant, and he remembered why he was there.
“You sure you all want to do this?” he said, and Grant looked up from the gravel.
“What else can we do?”
“You can wait down below.”
“Up here or down there, we have to look,” he said. “Don’t we, Joe.”
“That’s why I called you,” said the sheriff. “Though I shouldn’t of. I should of done it by the book and called you later. But it’s likely to be hours yet before we even get this”—he hesitated—“recovery under way.”
“I’m grateful you called, Joe.”
The way he figured it, said the sheriff, the perp had driven her up here
to the trailhead and parked. Then he either took her life here and carried her up the trail or else forced her to walk up there with him and then did it.
Took her life.
The boy stood remembering another shaded hollow in the woods. A cold bench and white crooked headstones. A tarnished metal plaque that promised forty days and all of it attended by the white statue with her maimed blessing and all of it so long ago.
What do you think will happen this time?
Nothing. Let’s go.
The path followed the mountain’s edge with only a thin median of pines separating the climbers from the gorge and the open sky. The going was steep, yet for every step there appeared a stone or a thick knee of root made bone smooth by time and weather and the treads of hikers, and the men ascended these crude steps single file, the sheriff in the lead and the deputies bringing up the rear, giving Grant and the boy the look and the feeling of two men on their way to some high alpine arraignment. Through the trees and not fifty feet off in the blue sky, two brown eagles rode the updrafts wing tip to wing tip, without effort or urgency, absolutely soundless, their hunter’s eyes searching.
Above the climbers, on a level stretch of trail, two more men in uniform stood waiting, peering out through the trees into the sky. They saw the eagles bank suddenly, pinions riffling, and dive down into the gorge like Messerschmitts.
“Oh, they saw something,” said one of the men. “They saw dinner,” said the other, but when they heard the climbers they said no more and waited for them to come over the rise of the trail: sheriff, father, son and deputies, all winded and all ready for the level strip of trail, crowded though it was with the seven of them clustered there. The two waiting men were the Boulder County sheriff and one of his deputies. Introductions were made and the Boulder sheriff, whose name was Price, tipped back his hat and said that this was where the hiker had spotted her. She was hard to see, said Price, you had to step through the branches, right up to the edge, and look straight down.
“What made the hiker do that?” said Kinney.
“I asked him the same thing, Sheriff.”
“What’d he say?”
Price glanced at Grant, the boy, and then at the ground.
“Said he was relieving himself.”
Within the trees there was only one place where a man could stand like that and Kinney stepped into it and looked down. After a moment he stepped back and stood with his hands on his belt, not quite yielding the spot to Grant. He seemed to be in argument with himself. Then he moved back to the trail and let Grant pass.