“Don’t get carried away,” Neal answered. He felt pretty dumb. He’d come on too fast with Doreen. And much too rough. He could have gotten the answers he needed without insulting her, just as he probably could have gotten the truth out of Paul Wallace without slapping him. He had substituted tough for smarts, and that was stupid. And flashing all that cash around had been just plain idiotic. He didn’t blame Doreen and her gun-wielding cowboy friend as much as he blamed himself. He’d been trained better.
He hauled himself back into the truck and the resulting pain felt almost like satisfaction.
Steve climbed into the cab and pulled the truck back onto the road. The old truck rattled, rumbled, and roared down the highway.
Neal settled back in the seat and tried to figure out his next move.
I’m headed toward Austin, he thought, the last known location of Harley McCall. I know McCall has hooked up with a rancher, someone he knew from his California days. That’s the plus side.
The down side is that I don’t have a car or much money, and that Levine and Graham are expecting me to show up in New York any day now. And they’re going to be pissed off that I didn’t follow orders. But at least I dumped the car.
He was pondering the wisdom of calling the office when he fell asleep. He woke up over an hour later.
“You don’t look crazier than a pet coon!” Steve shouted.
“What?” Neal Carey shouted over the noise of the old pickup truck as it rattled over Highway 50.
“I said you don’t look crazier than a pet coon.” answered Steve Mills. His face crinkled into a wry smile. “I was thinking that you’d have to be crazier than a pet coon to be wandering around this country all by yourself with no particular purpose.”
“Maybe I am.” Neal answered. “How crazy is a pet coon?”
“Pretty damn crazy. Course, anybody who tries ranching Nevada has no damn business calling anyone else crazy. So even if you are crazier than a pet coon, I figure I still got about twenty years of crazy on you! Hold the wheel, will you?”
Neal reached over and steadied the steering wheel as Steve Mills took a pack of Camels from his shirt pocket, stuck a cigarette in his mouth, struck a match, then lit it up.
“Hope you don’t mind,” Steve said, exhaling a deep drag of smoke, “but since my heart attack the wife raises unholy hell if she sees me with a butt. They had to whirlybird me into Fallon, so I finally got a little of my insurance money back! Kind of scared the wife, though. She says if it happens again, and she finds any cigs on me, she’s just going to leave me to die in the barn. I told her she might as well bury me there, too, seeing as how I’ve been ass deep in cow shit most of my life anyway. You don’t say a lot, do you?”
“I like to listen.”
“Well, this relationship might work out, because I like to talk and the wife and daughter have already heard all my stories-twice. I got a herd of cows rooting for my next heart attack just so they won’t have to listen to me anymore. My cattle don’t go ‘moo,’ they go ‘Shut up!’”
The truck reached the top of a long, steep grade. Neal could see a broad valley below them. A mountain range formed a backdrop beyond. The valley seemed to stretch endlessly to the south and north.
You can see forever, Neal thought.
“Welcome to The High Lonely,” Steve said.
“The what?”
“The High Lonely-that’s what we call it around here. You’re at about six thousand feet elevation, and it’s mostly empty space, as you can observe. Very few people, some more cattle, lots of jackrabbits and coyotes. Back there in the mountains you have cougars, bighorn sheep, and eagles.”
Steve pulled the truck off onto an overlook.
It’s like being perched at the edge of the world, Neal thought. A great brown vastness under a canopy of startling blue.
“We’re sitting on Mount Airy Summit,” Steve explained. “Six thousand, six hundred and seventy-nine feet high. Down there is the Reese River valley, although it isn’t much of a river as rivers go. That’s the Toiyabe Range across the valley. The big peak there is called Bunker Hill. My place sets at the base of it. Believe it or not, I actually climbed that damn thing once or twice with my daughter Shelly.”
Steve pulled the truck back onto the road and started the descent into the valley.
“It’s mostly cattle country,” Steve said, “but it takes a tremendous amount of land for the cattle to graze, it being mostly sagebrush. We grow the best alfalfa in the country up here but it costs an arm and a leg to irrigate and we don’t have the water to do more than we’re doing. Used to be a lot of gold mining around, but that’s about finished.”
“So what do people do?” asked Neal.
“Leave, mostly.”
Steve pointed to a dirt road off to the right. “Our place is about twenty miles down that way,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe the winters up here. That’s called a non sequitur, isn’t it?”
“Right.”
“I got a B.A. in English, although that doesn’t impress the cows.”
“From where?”
“Berkeley. Back before the whole free speech stuff, of course. Which is sort of too bad, seeing as how I’m all for free speech,” Steve said. The road took a sudden steep rise, curling through several switchbacks flanked by thick stands of pinon pine. “Now, we’re coming up to Austin, which ain’t got much except it does have a bar and I thought I should give you the whole tour.”
“The wife doesn’t approve of drinking either?” Neal asked.
“Well, not since my heart attacked me. Damn doctor… nice enough guy, but Jesus, he tells me to give up smoking, drinking, and red meat. I’m a rancher. I raise beef. I smoke and drink and eat my own beefsteak and I might be the happiest man in America. Well, here’s Austin, such as it is.”
It sure isn’t much, Neal thought. The town seemed to cling to one of the gentler slopes on the west side of the mountain range. Route 50 narrowed to make the town’s main street, along which there was a raised wooden sidewalk. Old buildings that looked like a run-down movie set of a bad western flanked the street. The buildings were mostly wooden, with a couple of red brick edifices thrown in, and featured classic western facades and wood canopies held up by long poles. There were a couple of cheap motels, a gas station, one restaurant, maybe three saloons, and a grocery store. A few houses dotted the hill that led up from the north side of the road. The hill was sparse except for a few pinon pine.
“Let’s go see and be seen at Brogan’s,” Steve said as he pulled the car over on the side of the road.
He brushed the dust off his pants and old leather boots and ambled toward Brogan’s. Neal watched his slightly bowlegged gait and the little hitch in his left leg. Then he gently lowered himself out of the truck and he followed him into the bar.
It wasn’t really a bar, though. It was a saloon, as dark and cool as an old cellar. The two small windows were grimy from forty years of collected grease and smoke and let in unsteady streams of filtered sunlight to highlight the specks of dust that floated in the stale air. The low ceiling sheltered cobwebs in each corner and the three small, round tables showed only a nodding acquaintance with anything resembling a rag.
A few stools, a couple with torn red upholstery, were pushed up against the bar, behind which sat an old man, fat and wrinkled as a bullfrog, with jowls to match. His butt sank deep into the cushion of an ancient wing-back chair and he was sipping what looked like whiskey from a jelly jar that was as greasy as the hand that held it. An enormous dog of dubious ancestry and ineffable color lay beside him and raised its gigantic head to see who was coming through the door.
A younger man, tall and wiry, was perched on a stool at the far end of the bar. His sandy hair peeked out under a red gimme cap advertising Wildcat. A spindly mustache outlined the narrow mouth that was bent into a frown. A long red beard hung straight down from his mouth. He was staring into a glass of beer.