It made Bob’s headache worse. He thought Russia had fallen. We’d stood up to them, their economy had collapsed, they’d had their Vietnam in Afghanistan, and it had all fallen apart on them. Now they were back, in some new form. It didn’t seem fair.
Bob didn’t like Russians. A Russian had hit him in the hip all those years ago, and started this run of bad luck that, just recently he thought he’d beaten down, but then it had returned, ugly and remorseless.
Bob finished the coffee, threw on a barn jacket and an old beat-up Stetson and went out of the bright warm kitchen into the predawn cold, looking like an old cowboy who’d been to his last roundup. A grizzle of beard clung to his still sunken jaws and he felt woozy, a beat behind, his mind filled with cobwebs and other junk.
Just enough of the mountains were visible in the rising light. They stirred him still, but only just. They were so huge, caped in snow, remote, unknowing, vaster by far than the mountains he had grown up in back in Arkansas. They promised what he needed: solitude, beauty, freedom, a place for a man who went his own ways and only got himself into deep trouble when he got involved with other men.
He saw the barn, heard the snuffle and rasp of horses, and knew that Julie and Nikki were saddling up for their morning ride, a family ritual. He was late. His horse, Junior, would be saddled too, so that he could join them at the last second. It was not right: to earn the right to ride a horse, you should saddle it yourself. But Julie let him sleep for those rare moments when he seemed to do so calmly. She just didn’t know what nightmares lay inside his calm sleep.
He looked about for his other enemy. The landscape, high in the mountains but still a good mile from the snow, was barren. He saw only the meadows, where some cattle drifted and fed, miles of dense trees, and the rugged crinkles of the passes as they led to openings in the peaks that were the Sawtooths.
But no reporters. No agents. No TV cameras, Hollywood jockeys, slick talkers with smooth hair and suits that fitted like cream on milk. He hated them. They were the worst. They had exiled him from a life he had loved.
It began when Bob, at the insistence of a good young man who reminded him a bit of his wife’s first husband, Donny Fenn, had urged him to return to Arkansas to look into the matter of the death of Earl Swagger, his father, in 1955. Things got complicated and hairy fast; some people tried to stop him and he had to shoot back. No indictments were ever handed down as no physical evidence could be located and nobody in Polk County would talk to outsiders. But some rag had gotten wind of it, linked him to another set of events that took place a few years before that, and taken a picture of him and his wife, Julie, as they’d walked out of church back in Arizona some months later. He woke up the next Wednesday to discover that he was AMERICA’S DEADLIEST MAN and that he had STRUCK AGAIN. Wherever ex-Marine sniper Bob Lee Swagger hangs his hat, men die, it pointed out, relating his presence to a roadside shootout that left ten men, all felons, dead, and the mysterious deaths of three men, including an ex-Army sniper, in the remote forest, and recalling that some years earlier he had briefly been a famous suspect in the shooting of a Salvadorian archbishop in New Orleans, until the government dropped the charges for reasons that were to this day unclear. Why, he had even married the widow of a Vietnam buddy, the paper reported.
Time and Newsweek picked it up and for a few weeks there, Bob had the worst kind of fame his country could offer: he was hounded by reporters and cameras wherever he went. It seemed many people thought he held the keys to a fortune, that he knew things, that he was glamorous, sexy, a natural-born killer, which, by some odd current loose in America, made him, in the argot, “hot.”
So here he was, on a ranch that was owned by his wife’s father’s estate as an investment property, living essentially on charity, without a penny to his name except for a piddling pension and no way of making one. The future was unsettled and dark; the peace and quiet and good living he had achieved seemed all gone. Where am I going to get the money? My pension ain’t enough, by a damn sight. Though it had never been expressed, he had become convinced that his wife secretly wished he’d do something with the one asset he owned, his “story,” which many people believed was worth millions.
He walked toward the barn, watching the sun just begin to smear the sky over the mountains. The black dogs came upon him and overpowered him halfway between the structures. That was his name for them: the sense that he was a worthless failure, that everything he touched turned to shit, that his presence hurt the two people he cared about the most, that everything he’d done had been a mistake, every decision wrong, and anybody who’d gone along with him had ended up dead.
The dogs came fast and hard. They got their teeth into him good, and in seconds, he was no longer in the barnyard under the mountains where a red sun was about to pull itself up and light the world with the hope of a new day, but in some other, dank, foul place, where his own failures seemed the most prominent landform, and the only mercy was bourbon.
“Well, Mister, nice of you to join us,” called Julie.
He looked at his wife, at her smile, which continued to dazzle him if even now there seemed a layer of fear behind it. He had seen her first on a cellophane-wrapped photograph that a young man had carried in his boonie cap in Vietnam, and maybe he had fallen in love with her in that second. Or maybe he fell in love with her the second the young man died and she was the only part of him still alive. Still, it took long years, many of them soaked in bourbon, before he’d finally met her and, by the odd twists that his life seemed always to take, ended up being the lucky jerk she took as her second husband. Yet now … was it falling apart on him?
“Daddy, Daddy,” yelled Nikki, eight, running to meet him. She grabbed his blue-jeaned leg.
“Howdy, honey, how’s my girl this morning?”
“Oh, Daddy, you know. We’re going to ride up to Widow’s Pass and watch the sun come across the valley.”
“We do that every morning. Maybe we ought to find a new place.”
“Honey,” said Julie. “She loves that view.”
“I’m only saying,” Bob said, “it might be nice to change. Forget it. It don’t mean a thing.”
He had more edge in his voice than he’d meant. Where had it come from? Julie shot him a hurt look at his harsh words, and he thought, Well, that’s fine, I deserve that, and he had himself in control, everything was fine, he was fine, it was—
“I do get tired of riding the same goddamn place every goddamn morning. You know, there are other places to ride.”
“All right, Bob,” she said.
“I mean, we can ride there, no problem. Is that where you want to ride, sweetie? If that’s where you want to ride, that’s fine.”
“I don’t care, Daddy.”
“Good. That’s where we’ll ride.”
Who was talking? He was talking. Why was he so mad? Where was this coming from? What was going on?
But then he had himself back and he was fine again and it would be—
“And why the hell is she riding English? You want her to be some fancy person? You want her to go to little shows where she wears some red jacket and helmet and jumps over fences and all the fags clap and the rich people come and drink champagne, and she learns her old man, who don’t talk so good and swears a mite, he ain’t up to them folks who ride English, he’s just an old farm boy from shit-apple Arkansas? Is that what you want?”