“Just give him some time to make it right,” Joe said to Dietrich’s shuffling back. “He’s putting roots down here and his son is in high school. It’s not Kyle’s fault you want something impossible to happen. Give him a reasonable project and he’ll get it done. He’s a good man.”
“Losers stay losers,” Dietrich said over his shoulder. “They don’t ever make it right. Now where’s that stupid boy?”
Joe stood in silence. He was played out. He watched Dietrich exit the building, wave his walker at Kyle Jr., and climb in the ranch pickup.
He heard about the accident over the mutual aid channel of his truck’s radio. A pickup had plunged into the Twelve Sleep River off the one-car bridge at the Crazy Z Bar Ranch. There was one, and possibly two, fatalities. Joe tossed the sandwich he was eating out the driver’s-side window and put his pickup into gear. He roared up the hill and past the airport and hit his emergency flashers when he cleared town.
The scene at the bridge told him most of what he wanted to know: The Ford F-350 was on its side in the river and the current flowed around and through it, cables on the right side of the bridge had been snapped by the impact and dangled from the I-beams, a sheriff’s department SUV was parked haphazardly on Joe’s side of the bridge, Kyle Sr.’s personal pickup was parked on the other, and in the middle of the bridge itself was Sandra Hamburger’s Dodge Power Wagon.
“Jesus, help us,” Joe whispered to Daisy.
Deputy Justin Woods climbed out of his SUV as Joe pulled up behind it. His uniform was wet from the shoulders down and his eyes looked haunted.
“You gotta help me, Joe,” he said. “I was able to pull the boy out of the truck but I can’t find the passenger down there.”
“Is the boy okay?” Joe asked, swinging out of the pickup, followed by Daisy.
“He says he is,” Woods said, nodding toward a bundled figure in the backseat. “He says Lamar Dietrich was in the truck with him. Fuckin’ Lamar Dietrich.”
As they descended through the brush toward the river, Joe looked across. Joleen and Kyle Sr. stood near their pickup. Joleen was consoling a wailing Sandra Hamburger, trying to hug her to calm her down. Kyle Sr. stood with his hands on his hips and a terrified look on his face.
“Kyle Junior’s okay!” Joe shouted.
“Thank God,” Kyle Sr. replied, his shoulders suddenly relaxing with relief.
“So what did he say happened here?” Joe asked Woods.
“He said he picked up old man Dietrich at the airport and he was bringing him out here. He said he was crossing the bridge when he looked up and saw Sandra Hamburger coming straight at him, going fast. It was either hit her head-on or take it off the bridge, and he took it off the bridge.”
Joe winced. Sandra’s wails cut through the rushing sounds of the river.
“I cut him out of his seat belt,” Woods said, “but I guess the old man wasn’t wearing his.”
Joe nodded and they plunged into the river together. The current was strong and pushed at his legs, and the river rocks were round and slick. He slipped and fell to his knees and recovered. The water was surprisingly cold.
“Maybe Dietrich is pinned under the truck,” Woods said. “I don’t know.”
The windshield glass was broken out of the cab when they got there, and Joe confirmed that Dietrich wasn’t inside. The current flowed through the smashed-out rear window and through the open windshield. Anything inside would have been washed downstream.
Joe balanced himself against the crumpled metal hood of the pickup and gazed down the river.
“There he is,” Joe said. Twenty yards downstream, beneath the surface, Dietrich’s overlarge jacket rippled underwater in the current. His body had been sucked under and was wedged in the river rocks. At a distance downstream where the river made a rightward bend, his large straw hat was caught at the base of some willows.
By the time they dragged the surprisingly light body to the bank, three more sheriff’s department vehicles had arrived along with an ambulance. Sheriff Reed dispatched his men to take measurements and photographs of the bridge and the vehicles, and statements from Kyle Jr. and Sandra Hamburger.
Joe leaned against his pickup with a fleece blanket over his shoulders, next to Kyle Sr.
“Sheriff Reed hasn’t said anything about any charges,” Kyle Sr. said. “I don’t know if he’s gonna file on Sandra, or Kyle Junior, or neither. It was a damn accident, plain as day. Anybody can see that.”
Joe nodded.
“That poor Sandra, you know how she is. If she’s running late there isn’t anything she’ll let slow her down. I don’t even know if she saw Kyle Junior coming across the bridge. I asked her but she just keeps blubbering about her schedule being screwed up.”
Kyle Sr. sighed heavily. “That son of mine — I hope he’s okay after this. It’s a hell of a thing that happened.”
“Yup,” Joe said, looking over at Kyle Jr. in the back of the SUV. When he did, the boy quickly looked away.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen now,” Kyle Sr. said, nodding toward the ranch. “I don’t know if he had heirs or what.”
“Whatever happens will take awhile,” Joe said. “You might as well hunker down and see where it goes.”
“I guess.”
“It might take years to straighten out,” Joe said. “These things take time to sort out.”
Kyle Sr. looked over and closed one eye. “What are you getting at, Joe?”
“Kyle Junior will be able to stick around. He might even graduate here.”
“He’d like that.”
“Yup,” Joe said.
Later that night, after dinner, Joe told his wife, Marybeth, about the accident and the death. April listened in as well, and wondered aloud if Kyle would be in school on Monday.
After April left the table, Marybeth looked hard at Joe and said, “What’s wrong? Something is bugging you.”
He was astonished, as always, how she could read his mind.
He said, “I don’t know for sure, I keep thinking about Kyle Junior. He’s an observer, you know? He kind of hangs back and just tracks everything around him.”
Marybeth nodded her head, then gestured for him to go on.
“He saw Sandra on her rounds on his way to the airport, just like I did,” Joe said. “He knows her schedule. He knows the rhythm of that ranch and when Sandra Hamburger is going to show up every day. And he knows how she is. He also knew old man Dietrich didn’t buckle his seat belt when he got in the truck.”
Marybeth sat back and covered her mouth with her hand.
“Joe, are you saying…”
“I’m not saying anything. But it sure was unique timing for him to just happen to be on that bridge going one way when Sandra was on it coming the other, driving like her hair was on fire.”
“My God,” Marybeth whispered.
“No way to prove a thing,” Joe said. “Not unless Kyle Junior decides to break down and confess, and no one is accusing him of anything. Heck, they might not even believe him if he did.”
After a long pause, Marybeth asked, “Are you going to mention this to the sheriff?”
Joe shook his head. “Nope.”
Pirates of Yellowstone
Vladdy pressed his forehead against the glass of the van window as they drove. The metal briefcase was on the floor, between his legs. It was cold in Yellowstone Park in early June, and dirty tongues of snow glowed light blue in the timber from the moonlight. The tires of the van hissed on the road.
“Look,” Vladdy said to Eddie, gesturing out the window at the ghostly forms emerging in the meadow. “Elks.”