“You think so, do you?” he’d replied, giving me that half-suppressed grin I would come to know so well.
Pulsifer was in his late forties and at a place in his career when many wardens consider applying for leadership positions, not just because they have families and can use the increased pay but also because pensions are based on the rank you have when you retire. Pulsifer didn’t seem to care about money or rank. He lived simply with his wife and four children on a farm in Flagstaff, just down the road from where my family had once rented a ratty-ass trailer.
He had a narrow face and clever brown eyes that were set a little too close together over his nose. The effect was to make him appear somewhat foxlike. He wore his rusty brown hair on the long side, right at the limit of what was permissible in the warden handbook. Pulsifer seemed to inhabit that perilous borderland. He always seemed to be fighting back a smile, as if he were in on a joke the rest of us were missing.
“How do I know if I passed the test?” I’d asked him. “I’m worried I didn’t.”
“Well, how much were you lying?”
“I wasn’t lying.”
“Everyone lies,” he’d said with a merciless grin. “It just depends how good you are at doing it.”
That was my introduction to the untrusting, ever-mocking worldview of Gary Pulsifer.
*
He began our phone conversation the way he began all our phone conversations: “What fine mess did you get yourself into this time, Bowditch?”
“It’s not what I did. It’s what you did.”
“Amber Langstrom found you, did she?”
“What the hell, Pulsifer?”
“I didn’t tell her where you lived. I just pointed her in your general direction.”
“Come on!”
“You’re right,” he said. “I shouldn’t have done it, but I was curious to see what would happen, and I couldn’t help myself. So what did she want to talk to you about?”
Pulsifer was aware that his last name sort of rhymed with that of a certain fallen angel. At times, it seemed, he liked to play up the resemblance.
“She didn’t tell you?” I asked.
“She said it was personal. She didn’t explain how you two knew each other, just that you went back a ways and she needed to get in touch.”
“I never met her before last night.”
He chuckled. “Well, it wouldn’t be the first time Amber Birch lied.”
“I thought her name was Langstrom.”
“Birch was her maiden name. She was the hottest girl at Mount Abram High. She’s still smoking. Don’t you think?”
“Is that why you helped her find me—because you want to get in her pants?”
When he spoke again, his voice was different, harder. “I hope I haven’t created a problem for you.”
“Yeah, well, you have. What can you tell me about her? Is she crazy?”
“Crazy, no. Trouble, always. She works in the pub over at Widowmaker. Been there forever now, ever since the Red Stallion closed. She married A. J. Langstrom right out of high school. Who knows why. We used to joke they hooked up because A.J. had the biggest dick at Mount Abram. Everybody knew his only ambition in life was to take over his old man’s gas station. But Amber had champagne wishes and caviar dreams, as my old man used to say.”
He paused to take a sip of something.
“I think Amber realized she’d made a mistake pretty fast. I used to go over to the Sluiceway during my drinking days, and she had a reputation. I remember she didn’t wear her wedding ring at work, said it would get scratched or something. I think she was hoping one of the rich skiers would sweep her up and take her off to Fiji. Then she got pregnant, and that was that.”
I needed to be careful about what I said next.
One of the impediments to Pulsifer and me ever becoming friends was the history he had with my father. I might have called them archenemies if the rivalry hadn’t been so one-sided. Gary had been a district warden during the heyday of my father’s poaching career, and he had never managed to catch him in the act. My dad delighted in spreading stories about all the deer and moose he was taking out of season, knowing how much it would humiliate the local warden. The relationship between Gary Pulsifer and Jack Bowditch was not unlike the one between Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner.
To his credit, Pulsifer never seemed to hold my dad’s misdeeds against me, although he was far too subtle to reveal his true feelings. Still, I had no intention of asking him if my father might have been the one who knocked up Amber Langstrom.
“So what’s the story with her son?” I asked.
“Her son?” He seemed genuinely taken aback. “Now I get it. She asked you to help find Adam, didn’t she?”
“Yes.”