I shook my head.
He studied my bathrobe, even going so far as to check my wrists for a medical bracelet. “If you’re from some loony bin . . .”
I took my hand down and leaned on the other side of the door. “Do you know who I am?”
He clutched his arms in an attempt to ward off the cold. “Well, I know you’re not Jesus Christ.”
“I’m Walt Longmire, the sheriff of this county.”
He adjusted his glasses and leaned in, peering through my beard and hair, finally leaning back and nodding his head. “So you are.” On more solid ground, he smirked. “I hear tell you’re a drunk.”
I looked out in the yard toward the east where the sun was still struggling to shoot a beam over the frozen ground of the Powder River country. “Is that what they say?”
His teeth were starting to chatter now. “Yeah, it is.”
I stretched my jaw in a wide yawn again and tried to feel the cold, but it just wasn’t there; in all honesty, I just wanted to feel something, anything. Maybe that’s why after Cady left last night I’d drunk to excess. “Well, they might be right.” I straightened my robe. “My wife died a couple of months ago.” I threaded my fingers through my beard and felt things in there. “It wasn’t a perfect marriage by any means; we fought, about stupid things—when our daughter should go to bed, the color of the mailbox, money. . . . But she was the best thing that ever happened to me.” I took a deep breath and exhaled, watching the twin clouds of vapor roll across my chest like a cartoon bull. “Maybe the best thing that ever will.”
He glanced at the closed door and then at the house slippers on his feet.
I flicked my eyes at the door, too. “She seems nice.”
He nodded. “Esther, her name is Esther.” He automatically stuck out his hand. “Ernie. My name is Ernie Decker.”
I shook his hand and noticed the swelling and bruises. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Decker.”
He quickly tucked the hand back under his arm. “We’ve hit a rough patch these past few months.”
“Well, at least you’ve got her to have a rough patch with.”
We stood there for a while longer, then I pushed off the doorjamb and started toward the steps; I stopped on the second to turn and look at him, my head dropped, hair covering my face, and I was pretty sure that even from this distance, my voice was vibrating his lungs: “You hit her again and I’ll be back, and this time it won’t take me two thousand years.”
I walked down the shoveled walk and driveway, took a left on Main, and struck off back the couple of miles toward the highway and the Sinclair station. After a moment, a tan Oldsmobile pulled up beside me, and I heard a window whir down.
“Walter?” I stopped and turned to see the Methodist preacher leaning across the seat to look up at me. “I thought I’d follow you and see if you needed a ride back to your truck.”
“Thanks.” I continued to watch for the sunrise as I tightened the sash on my robe. “But I think I’ll just walk.”
She paused for a second. “Are you all right?”
“Yep.”
“How is the woman in the car?”
I chewed on the skin at the inside of my lip, still watching the skyline, flat as a burned, black pancake. “I think she’ll be okay.”
“She seemed awfully confused.”
Just then, I thought I might’ve caught that first ray that shoots over the edge of the earth something akin to a hopeful but misguided thought, and it felt as if maybe, just maybe, I might’ve felt something. “Oh, like the rest of us. . . .” I sighed. “She’s just waiting on something.”
SLICK-TONGUED DEVIL
You steel yourself against those unexpected surprise visits in your mind, but it does nothing to prepare you for the physical evidence of a life shared, a life lost; her voice on the backlogged messages of the answering machine, photographs used as bookmarks, a song she used to hum, people who knew her but didn’t really, asking about her in casual conversation. Others telling you they know what it’s like when they don’t. If you’re lucky, you convince yourself that the only real world is the one in your head, and you make a fragile and separate truce that lasts until one of those depth charges erupts and you can no longer run silent or run deep.
It happened on a Tuesday morning at the Busy Bee Café two days before Christmas as I waited for “the usual.” I’d reached across the counter to snag the newly delivered Durant Courant and had flipped open the first page—and seen my wife’s obituary.
I don’t know how long I was frozen like that, but when Dorothy, the chief cook and bottle washer of the establishment, refilled my coffee cup she’d spotted the grainy black-and-white photograph. I suppose it was her voice, behind me and to the right, that had brought me back. “Oh, Lord.”
I went home early from work that day, and nobody asked why.
I parked the Bullet behind the house because I thought it would be easier to unload the cord of firewood that I’d stored in it through the back door. I draped my uniform shirt and gun belt on the back of my chair and took another shower, put on a flannel shirt, a pair of jeans, and my old moccasins. I opened a can of soup but left it on the counter; then I sat in my chair and drank eleven Rainier beers.
When I looked up, it was sleeting and dark.
* * *
I thought back to the exact afternoon it had actually happened—one of those warm November days we sometimes get on the high plains, a friendly chinook from British Columbia that stays the freeze that solidifies your marrow.
She wanted to sit outside on an aged wooden chair I’d bought at the Salvation Army, the red paint peeling away and revealing the gray, weathered wood underneath. “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”
Her eyes were closed, but she opened them, the pale blue matching the Wyoming sky that we could see through the windows of our tiny cabin. “Fresh air is good for you.”
I put on the kettle to make tea for her, wrapped her up in a thick Cheyenne blanket that our friend, Henry Standing Bear, had given her when she had gotten sick, and carried her outside where she could see the naked trees in the draws of both Piney and Clear Creeks, the branches moving only slightly as if the cottonwoods were stamping their roots to stay warm. “Could you get my Bible?”
I went back in and retrieved her Book from the nightstand downstairs where we’d moved the bed. I carefully placed it, opened to the marked page, in her lap. “Here, the feel-good book of the holidays.”
I watched as her narrow finger fit between the creased pages and the solemn words. She smiled. “You should be more tolerant of things that give people comfort.”
I watched a great horned owl drift above one of the creek banks and hitched a thumb into my belt. “Hmm.”
“Tough guy.” Her fingers climbed up my pant leg and caught my hand there. “You know, a little forgiveness in your character wouldn’t hurt.”
I glanced down at her. “Not my line of work.”
She nodded her head at my stubbornness. Except for the mild buffeting of the wind and the chirp of prairie finches, it was silent. “You know, I always thought you’d soften a little with age.”
I crouched by her chair, pulled the fine blanket up closer around her shoulders, and ran my hand across her back, the spread of my fingers as large as the trunk of her body. “Hang around. I might surprise you.”
She took a slight breath. “I’m trying.”
I went back inside at the call of the kettle and returned with two mugs, the paper flags flapping on the ends of the submerged teabags. It had been a dry fall, and there wasn’t much snow to make it a typical Thanksgiving, but the high desert was warm that afternoon. “It’s nice, isn’t it?”