Keeley rolled down his window but didn’t get out.
“What can I help you with?” the man asked.
Keeley gestured toward the hill. “I was wondering about that fence up there. Ain’t they ever going to finish it?”
The cowboy looked at him for a moment, then burst out laughing. Keeley felt his rage shoot to the surface. The fucking cowboy kept laughing, and even raised a gloved hand to his stupid shoe-clerk face to wipe away a tear.
“You’re kidding me, right?” the cowboy said.
“I guess I’m not,” Keeley said, much more calmly than he thought himself capable of.
“. . .‘Ain’t they ever going to finish it?’” the cowboy said. “Pardon me, but that’s one of the funniest things I ever heard. That there’s a snow fence. This must be the first time you seen one.”
“A snow fence?” Keeley said. “But it’s made of wood.”
Which got the cowboy laughing again, and the rage boiling up in Keeley, as much at himself as at the shoe-clerk cowboy for saying that, as if the fence would be made of snow, which was stupid.
“Yer killin’ me, mister,” the cowboy wheezed, between belly laughs.
Keeley looked off into the distance at a single cloud that was hardly a cloud at all, just a wispy white stringer across the light blue, like egg whites dropped in hot water. He asked, “Hey, you got family around here?”
“What?” That stopped the guy.
“You work for some rancher, or is this yours?”
The cowboy’s eyes narrowed. The question had obviously thrown him off stride. “Talk about apropos of nothing,” he said, then: “It’s a corporate operation. They hire me and a half dozen other men to manage the place.”
“But you have family, right?”
“Yeah, my wife and a couple of kids, but what does that have to do . . . ?”
Keeley said, “Glad I made your day,” and turned the wheel sharply and floored the accelerator. He could see the cowboy watching him—still shaking his head with profound amusement—in his rearview mirror as he drove up the hillside toward the snow fence.
At the top, he parked and got out near the fence—it was practically ten feet high—and survyed the hillside he had driven up. The cowboy had finally turned his horse and was continuing back down the hill, toward the cattle on the bottom of the basin.
Keeley got out and took a moment to look around. He had never seen country so desolate, and so mean. It reminded him of one of those old western movies, but worse. The movies always showed desert as being hot and dry. This was high and rough, with dirty snow. He preferred desert, he thought; at least it was warm. And except for that laughing cowboy down there, Keeley was the only man on earth for as far as he could see. There were no cars on the highway.
Keeley snapped back the bolt of the rifle, saw a flash of bright brass as the cartridge seated, and aimed the rifle across the hood of his pickup. He leaned into the scope, putting the crosshairs just below the nape of the cowboy’s neck, on a band of pink skin between the scarf and the collar, and pulled the trigger.
The shot snapped out, an angry, sharp sound, and the cowboy slumped to the side and rolled off his horse. Keeley watched as the dog trotted over and started licking the cowboy’s face, which almost made Keeley feel bad until he realized the damned dog was tasting blood, so he shot it too.
Keeley got back into the stolen pickup with his stolen gun, said, “Fuckin’ cowboy, anyway,” and turned the vehicle toward the highway, to drive north, to find that game warden.
7
TWO DAYS LATER, MARYBETH PICKETT THREW OPEN the front door after her morning walk and shook their copy of the Saddlestring Roundup. Joe and the girls were having breakfast.
“Wacey Hedeman is dead, that bastard,” she said, showing Joe the front page.
Sheridan said, “Good!”
Lucy said, “You probably shouldn’t say ‘good,’ Sherry.”
“But I mean it,” Sheridan said fiercely. “I hate—hated—that man.”
Joe glanced at his wife and saw that Marybeth had the same reaction as Sheridan. Because Wacey had been the man who had shot her, causing the loss of their baby.
“You know how you wish things, bad things, on people?” Marybeth said. “I have wished harm to Wacey ever since he shot me. But to read now that he’s really dead . . . it’s strange. I feel sort of cheated. I wanted him to know how much I hated him.”
Joe was not surprised at Sheridan’s and Marybeth’s reaction, but it was disconcerting to see such mutual anger on display.
Joe looked at Lucy, trying to gauge what she was thinking of all this. Lucy shot her eyes back and forth between her mother and her sister. She had been three at the time, while Sheridan had been seven. Lucy seemed to take the comments in stride, probably since she’d grown up with the whole Wacey Hedeman thing—it was part of the family history.
“It says he had some kind of seizure,” Marybeth said, reading the story. “They’re still investigating. He might have been poisoned.”
“Poisoned? By another inmate?” Joe asked.
“It doesn’t say,” she said. “But I guess I really don’t care, considering what he did to us.”
“But we’re tough!” Lucy said, repeating something she’d heard over the years. It made Marybeth smile, and wipe a tear from her cheek.
“We’re tough, all right,” Marybeth said.
May
We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.
—WILLIAM RALPH INGE, OUTSPOKEN ESSAYS, 1922
If you walk around with a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
—UNKNOWN
8
IN THE MONTH SINCE SHE’D BEEN REPORTED MISSING, Opal Scarlett—or her body—had not turned up. Not only that, but her car was missing. It wasn’t that she was missed for sentimental reasons. She was missed because she held the keys to so many projects, so many relationships, so much history. Not until she was gone did most people within the community realize how integral Opal Scarlett was to so many things. Opal was on the board of directors for the bank, the museum, the utility company, the Friends of the Library. She was one of three Twelve Sleep County commissioners. Her annual check to fund the entirety of the local Republican Party had not arrived. The GM dealer had already taken the order for her new Cadillac, and it sat in the lot with a SOLD sign on it.
Joe kept expecting something to happen. A call from a ranch downriver saying a body had just washed up on the bank. A postcard from some faraway island, or a phone call to one of her sons to bark an order—something.
None of those things had happened. Opal’s status was in a dread state of limbo and rumors that were starting to fly had practically destabilized the entire valley.
Joe had carefully read the report issued by Sheriff McLanahan’s office, and he had spoken at length to Robey Hersig. It didn’t make sense that her body had not turned up. The river was, as Tommy had pointed out, surprisingly low and slow. Spring runoff hadn’t started yet. There were places near town where a person could walk across the river, hopping from stone to stone. The likelihood of Opal’s body washing downriver without being seen was remote.
Joe had heard some of the theories being bandied about town. Three garnered prominence:
Tommy Wayman threw her in the river, all right, but that was after he strangled her and weighted the body down with stones;