“I was.”
“You here because of the magpies?” He gestured with the BB gun. “’Cause I haven’t got a license, but I haven’t hit one yet either.”
“I’m here because of Rosey Wayman.”
“That one of my ex-wives?”
“She’s the patrolman who took your duty in Troop G.”
“The blonde?”
“Yep.”
He slipped off the sunglasses and studied me for a long while with sharp blue eyes. “You made the climb—you want a beer?”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
? ? ?
He turned the Morgan silver dollar I had handed to him over in his hands.
“You never found any of these on the road?”
“Nope, wish I had. Hell, this thing is like new.”
“Make you wonder?”
He lowered the coin and sighed. “Why is this important to you?”
“I know Rosey, and I think there must be something to it.” I propped the BB gun on my knee the same way that he had. “You worked this canyon for over thirty years; I find it hard to believe with all the stories flying around that you never had anything strange happen.”
“Did I say that?” He sighed again and then sipped his can of Coors. “That poor bastard ain’t ever gonna find peace. Every time things die down about Bobby, something else happens.”
“Did you know him?”
“He was my training officer.”
“Was he a good TO?”
“Better than I was as a trainee.” Harlow leveraged himself up from the swing and walked past me to the porch steps. When he leaned on one of the support posts, I watched it give a little. “He was about the best I ever seen; smart, patient, good-hearted but no pushover. He was tough, really tough.” Harlow shook his head. “Inhumanly tough.” He turned his back against the post and rubbed the way a bear would. “One of the first stories I heard after he died was one from these tourists out of Iowa. They came up here in early October in their short pants and T-shirts in this old sedan with bald tires on their way to Yellowstone. People think the thing is open year-round.”
He sipped his beer as I sighted in on one of the large black and white birds. I pulled the trigger and watched as the BB arced out, falling well short of my target.
“You’ve got to pump that thing four or five times or it won’t make the reach. Hell, I think I can throw a BB harder than it shoots. Doesn’t hurt the damn things, but it teaches ’em respect.”
I pumped the Red Ryder and took up my position again. “What happened with the tourists?”
“Oh, we had one of those high-plains clippers come through and dump a few metric tons of snow in the canyon back in ’91 and they blew a tire and then slid off the road. It was really coming down, and they were in the middle near Windy Point. Well, it wasn’t like they could change the tire or hike out in the clothes they had, so they just sat there.”
I took aim on another magpie. “With the motor running.”
“Yeah, and after a while they all start getting sleepy, but there’s a knock on the window and someone standing there, real close. It’s a trooper in one of the long black slickers with his hat pulled down so that you can’t see his face. The dad rolls down the window, and the fellow asks if they need some help. The dad says yeah, so the trooper goes around, pulls out the spare and jack, changes the tire, and sends ’em on their way.”
Sensing the oncoming shot, the magpie ducked and swooped down the canyon. “Uh-huh.”
“They take a wrong turn and end up in Worland, and the dad sees the Troop G headquarters and decides to stop in and tell ’em what a great guy we’ve got in that trooper that helped ’em out in the canyon. So the captain asks him which trooper, figuring it was me, and the guy says he doesn’t know ’cause the trooper never introduced himself. Then he remembers that when the patrolman told ’em they could go, he’d seen the name tag on his slicker.” Harlow sipped his Coors and fingered his Wayfarers down on his nose. “Womack, Bobby Womack.”
Another magpie lit on the feeder, and I re-aimed. “Twelve years after his death.” I pulled the trigger and fared better this time, knocking the big bird from the perch as he shrieked at us and disappeared over the porch roof.
“Nice shooting there, Tex.”
“Could’ve been carbon monoxide poisoning.”
“Yeah, it could’ve been.” He crossed back over and took his seat in the swing again and rested the beer on the railing. “Then there was this hitchhiker, hippie kid out of Benicia, California, who was heading north and got picked up by a trooper in the canyon really early one morning and said he gave him a ride all the way up to Canyon Hills Road and dropped him off. The kid wanted to buy him a meal to thank him, but the trooper said there was something he had to take care of but if the kid wanted to buy him lunch, he knew a place and would meet him at the end of the road in about an hour.”
“So?”
“The kid does what the trooper tells him to do and goes out to the end of Canyon Hills.”