I had already started typing. “Got any better ideas?”
Five minutes later we had hit a wall. There were no circuses based in or around Jackson Hole, not ones with clowns and tents at any rate. Of course, clowns could be hired for children’s parties. But somehow I didn’t see Kevin Kelly flying out to Jackson Hole to build his drug empire and making the time to stop by some kid’s birthday party and running into Fritz wearing an orange wig and gigantic shoes. It was beginning to feel a bit ludicrous. “Can you find out who Kelly met with in Wyoming?” I asked Briggs. “Maybe they could tell us where Kelly could have seen Fritz?”
“It’ll take time,” Briggs said. “DA might not want to share.”
“You’re resourceful.”
“He didn’t just go to Wyoming, Matthias. There’s California, Nevada, Oregon, Colorado. You want to look at all the circuses in those places, too?”
“If I have to, yes,” I said, though I felt deflated. Jackson Hole had felt so right, somehow.
After a pause, Briggs said, “Maybe we’re thinking about the wrong kind of clowns.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s the kind of clowns with the face paint and the rubber noses who honk horns at kids in a big top. Then there’s the kind who keep bulls from stomping all over their riders once they throw them off.”
“A rodeo clown,” I said, sitting up. I leaned forward and started typing again. “When was Kelly out in Jackson Hole, specifically?” I asked, looking at my laptop screen.
“Last May,” Briggs said. “Memorial Day weekend, actually. Why?”
“Because,” I said, my voice trembling with excitement as I stared at the screen, “the Jackson Hole Rodeo starts on Memorial Day weekend.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Jackson Hole Airport is in the middle of a wide valley, a flat scrubland underneath a dome of sky, ringed by sharp mountains. From a distance, the Blue Ridge Mountains around Asheville look like rising folds in a bedsheet; as you approach, they gather you in slowly until you realize all at once that you are among them. In Jackson Hole, the Tetons thrust themselves into view, giant rocks dropped from space by a Titan. As I stepped out of the plane and walked down a wheeled set of steps to the tarmac, I stared at the Teton Range jutting out of the scrublands. Although a couple of miles distant, they seemed within arm’s reach. It was a cloudless, sunny day in late May, and yet I was shivering in the breeze—I was well over a mile above sea level and freezing when I passed through shade. I had difficulty grasping that I was still on the same planet, let alone the same country.
I found a cheap hotel called the Lucky Dollar that seemed to have little familiarity with dollars and even less with luck, but it had a forlorn room with a king-sized bed waiting for me. I threw my suitcase onto the floor of the tiny closet and lay on top of a hideous saffron-colored bedspread that felt like it was made of oven mitts. I was exhausted but too keyed up to sleep, so I stared at the ceiling and waited for evening, when the rodeo would start.
THE RODEO WAS LOCATED in a fairgrounds lot backed up against Snow King Mountain, which rose steeply at the southern end of Jackson as if barring passage beyond. At half past six, I parked my rental car in the rodeo lot and crossed a dirt-and-gravel yard, my Achilles tendon stiff but not complaining yet. I passed several parked semis with transport rigs for horses and bulls and eventually stopped at a ticket booth, where I gained entrance through a swinging gate to the arena itself, a mud-churned space with stands on one side and chutes on the other. The stands were filling slowly with families, small groups of men in cowboy hats, grandmothers, and teenagers in denim and boots. I bought a cup of hot chocolate and cupped my hands around it, grateful for the warmth, and then found a seat near the front with a clear view.
Bright white floodlights shone down on the arena below. The parking lot was to the right beyond sheets of plywood hung over the fence. Off to the left, fenced-in pens extended from a large warehouse-like stable. Across from me stood the chutes, behind which milled several men in chaps and cowboy hats—I assumed they were the riders. I couldn’t see them well, but I knew that eventually they would come close enough for me to get a better view. Breath misted out of everyone’s mouth as the sun fell toward the western peaks and the sky began to shade toward a deeper blue.
A flat, metallic voice came out of the speakers, informing us that the rodeo was about to begin. A young woman with a sheet of shimmering brown hair and a white cowboy hat stepped up to a microphone at the far edge of the muddied field below, and everyone stood and removed his or her hat as the woman sang “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and we cheered politely. A crew of men in jeans and work gloves brought out a series of barrels that they placed around the arena before hurrying off into the shadows of the stable. The same flat voice as earlier announced the barrel-racing contestants, who rode one by one out of the stable, their tall, clean Stetsons and bright shirts contrasting sharply with their horses, who took dignified steps as they entered the arena, mud up to their fetlocks, heads carried high as if suffering their riders for only the moment. They raced around the barrels, the riders leaning into their mounts and coming within a hairbreadth of grazing the barrels with their knees as they rounded them tightly and then galloped for the finish line. After the adults competed, there was another race for children. A tiny girl on a huge brown horse, her hat almost as big as she was, won easily and waved a petite hand at the audience.