“Do you have a boyfriend?”
“Not really, just a friend who is a boy.” She found herself telling Rebecca about her friendship with old Tim and then Terry and Marcia. All the other boys in school were nitwits and she had never felt romantic about Terry.
“Alfredo’s a little old for you,” Rebecca teased. “I think he’s in his late thirties. He was married once and I know he has a daughter but I’m unsure about his sexual taste.”
The blood rushed to Sarah’s face and she pretended to be interested in a bird that had landed in the pyracantha tree and was singing beautifully.
“That’s a canyon wren. It’s my favorite song,” Rebecca said.
Rebecca had to go in to the university so Sarah took the dogs for a walk in the hills and sparse forest at the end of the road. She was immersed in something her dour history teacher had said about how certain minorities like blacks and Indians didn’t have much in the way of political empathy for each other. Soon she was lost in a long arroyo and fearful that she wouldn’t make it back for Alfredo’s arrival. A strong cool wind from the north came up and the dogs ran off chasing a jackrabbit. There was a lump of despair in her throat but then the dogs returned and she said, “Let’s go home,” like she did with Rover when she was lost. The dogs turned in what she thought was an unlikely direction but they were right as Rover always was.
Alfredo brought her a large bouquet of cut flowers and she was a little dizzy looking for a vase. He put the flowers on the piano and they began working on four-hand compositions of Mozart’s and then Fauré’s. They broke for sandwiches and coffee and he asked her to tell him about her life. She did so and he said, “It’s time for you to get out of there.” He said the same had been true about himself. His family and their relatives were prosperous farmers about fifty miles from Guadalajara but all he’d wanted to do was play the piano so his parents had sent him off to Juilliard in New York City when he was sixteen. At Juilliard it was finally determined that his hands were too small for him to become a top-notch pianist. His only other interest was plants so he went to Cornell and “froze his ass” for eight years until he had a PhD in botany. He had been married for a couple of years to a rich, spoiled landowner’s daughter but they had divorced. He had a thirteen-year-old daughter who went to a private boarding school in Los Angeles.
They were both melancholy about their stories and then he suddenly laughed and played a mocking version of the dirgelike “Volga Boatmen,” and quoted a line of Lorca’s in Spanish translating it as “I want to sleep the dream of apples far from the tumult of cemeteries.”
“Let’s take a walk. I have to give an evening speech to old-lady cactus gardeners and I’d rather stay here.”
They walked with the dogs for a half hour and he named the wild flora they were seeing then said good-bye at the car. When he smiled he reminded her of the Mexican cowboy who had brought the horse to the Lahren ranch.
“Rebecca said you weren’t sure. Will I see you in the fall?”
“If you want to.”
“You’re too young to say that.” He shook a finger at her.
“No I’m not. I’m older than you in most ways,” she laughed.
She watched him drive off with a palpable tremor, clear evidence to her that she was acting crazy and should dampen her own spirits. Inside she looked at the three botany textbooks he’d left behind for her. Inside one the bookplate was a small reproduction of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus and underneath he had written, “Dear Sarah, So good to meet you,” which, though it said nothing, she grasped to her being.
Chapter 12
The descent into Bozeman was tummy-clenching with high winds causing the plane to pitch and shudder, and the view out the tiny window blinded by snow. Sarah liked the irony that it was April Fools’ Day and the Montana weather was cooperating with the calendar. She was hoping to do her reconnaissance of Meeteetse in a few days but the weather would have to clear for the long drive. She was enervated because her sleep had been unkind to her. She hadn’t actually seen Karl in her dreams but his presence was as malevolent as the coldest wind in the world. He was hiding in the forest behind Tim’s cabin and was going to shoot and eat both Rover and Lad. She couldn’t find the cartridges for her .30-06 and she knew she had bought three boxes with twenty shells in each in preparation for her trip to Meeteetse. At the hardware store she had envisioned the exit wound along Karl’s spine as looking like a red basketball. As the plane taxied she was disturbed that Alfredo hadn’t even touched so much as her hand.
Marcia was there waiting for her having volunteered for the chore. She was a babbling brook and Sarah struggled to keep up with what she was saying. Priscilla had OD’d on her mother Giselle’s tranqs and was at a care facility in Helena. Marcia’s speech had always been colorful and was especially so with her obsessive interest in all things sexual. She said that “that bubble-butted whippet sophomore Karen” who ran the hundred on the track team had told her minister’s wife that her uncle, the town banker, had been “tinkering” with her since she was ten and the minister’s wife had told the sheriff who had tried to hush it up but failed. No one knew what was going to happen but everyone in the county knew the story.
There were a lot of semis collected along the shoulder at the bottom of Butte Pass in the drifting snow and it took Marcia a full half hour to get over the top in low-range four-wheel drive. They talked to a state cop at the interchange of Interstates 90 and 15 and decided to head south for thirty miles in the gathering dark and spend the night in Melrose where the weather wasn’t supposed to be quite as violent. They checked into a cabin at the Sportsman’s Lodge and Marcia revealed a fifth of schnapps she had swiped from her dad’s workshop. Her dad was always sure that it was one of her two brothers who did the deed. Marcia had a stiff drink and Sarah a small one and then Marcia began laughing and told her that Terry had arranged a mirror in his bedroom so he could watch them making love but Marcia had ruined it by laughing. She was so much taller than Terry and also outweighed him. She told Sarah that it looked in the mirror like some big Catholic priest was raping a little altar boy. Sarah found the image terribly ugly but Marcia continued laughing and said, “I might have to pick on someone my own size.”
They walked a hundred yards in the blowing snow to a bar and restaurant that actually had a hitching post for horses in the front. The place was owned by a second cousin of Marcia’s and was filled with cowboys, ranchers, and townspeople who all appreciated the moisture the snow was bringing which would help the spring grass after a fairly dry winter. Wet, heavy snow in April translated into weight gain for cattle on which the economy of the area depended.
Sarah was lost in her peculiar inner space so Marcia ordered her chicken-fried steak in creamy gravy and real mashed potatoes. Sarah could only deal with a third of the massive portion but Marcia finished it in a trice. The lovely waitress Nicole told Sarah that the two of them could be related. They had the same olive skin and light brown hair. Sarah was distracted by a memory of singing a song with her grandpa with the line, “If I had the wings of an angel over these prison walls I would fly,” which reflected on the idea that if she got caught shooting Karl she might never see Alfredo again. When her grandpa taught her the song at the piano she was only five and didn’t yet know what the word “prison” meant. When he’d died of a heart attack in his commercial truck garden she had looked at him in his casket at the funeral home and had sung in a whisper, “Wake up, sleepyhead.”
Dawn was bright and clear but with slushy roads. They made it home by noon and Lolly told her that a man named Alfredo had called and left a number. Sarah was breathless until she got up to the cabin and could return the call though first she had to deal with the hyperexcited Rover and Lad who was screaming his horsey scream of welcome. Terry had house-sat and she could smell the slight fetor of his four nights of coupling with Marcia but didn’t have time to be disgusted. She got Alfredo on the second ring.
“I saw the Weather Channel
and was worried about you in the storm.”
“We made it okay but we had to stop for the night.” There was a long pause.
“Say something. I don’t know what to say,” he said.
“I miss you.” This took courage.
“I miss you but this is crazy and maybe it’s wrong.” His voice was a little weak.
“I asked Rebecca and she said I’d be legal in Arizona on my sixteenth birthday this summer.” Rebecca had been startled that evening when Sarah asked but looked it up on the computer.
“I think we should take this slowly.”
“If you like. We can always play the piano.”
“We’ll figure this out by the fall. We can write letters. I’ll start one when we hang up.”
“Me too,” she said.
She saddled up Lad and with Rover in the lead rode up to the canyon, her thoughts drifting. If only Tim were alive he would certainly shoot Karl for her. Probably Marcia would too. Maybe such attitudes were in the landscape. Montana was too large and there was vertigo in the landscape with no apparent peripheries. Boys left the school property to fistfight at noon down behind the grain elevator, and men fistfought at night in the tavern parking lot though Giselle had joked that fighting was showing a decline in Montana with the advent of marijuana. Some called a joint a “peacemaker,” the old name for a Colt revolver.
When she got back to the cabin she called the school principal and said she would miss school for a few days because she had to go to Denver to visit a sick aunt. He said, “Fine,” and that she should probably be teaching rather than studying anyway. His comment only served to remind her how abnormal her life had been. She had grown tired of teachers telling her that she was “gifted” or “exceptional” when all that she had ever wanted was to be normal and be around other young people more often than 4-H meetings.
She cleaned her .30-06 though it didn’t need it and packed her duffel with outdoor wear and the three boxes of cartridges. She studied both her road and her topo maps of Karl’s area suddenly worried about who would take care of Rover and Lad if she got caught. Certainly not her dad or Lolly. She thought about affection, or what the popular culture called love, which she had only recently experienced. You couldn’t count Montgomery Clift. This emotion was often inchoate as music that startles us then regains its melodic shape. When she cleaned the lenses of her binoculars she knew that the rhythm of her affection for Alfredo was all in the music they played together because they didn’t actually know each other. Peppy as an evangelical was always verbally assaulting the Catholic saints as “blasphemous” but now in the night Sarah wished she knew how to voice a prayer to Saint Tim whose spirit she tried to sense hovering in the roof beams of the cabin.
She left at five A.M. after vomiting up her breakfast cheese sandwich and coffee. Lad was difficult to load into the horse trailer not wanting to move at the early hour but she needed him because it was three miles according to her topo map from the county road over the hills to the small dirt road that led to Karl’s place which originally had been owned by the famed “Indian killer” Thadeus Markin according to a book in the Livingston library.
Her stomach felt full of acrid ice cubes as she drove slowly on the blacktop trying to avoid the nearly invisible black ice she caught in her headlights. She figured that the drive to Meeteetse was eight hours and she had left so early to get a few hours of April daylight when she arrived. It would have been far shorter to drive through Yellowstone Park but the roads weren’t open yet because of the snow so she was forced to take the same route as to the antelope hunt only following 310 south in Laurel toward Powell, Wyoming. She pretended she was only going to look things over but knew very well that if the opportunity was there she’d pull the trigger.
By midmorning her spirit had lightened and she felt righteous. Aside from her own vengeance she was on a mission to save other girls. Who knew but Karl and his friend how many victims there had been? She and Priscilla had never talked about what had happened to them but once when she was drunk in the evening after school had started Priscilla had tried to joke by saying that her ass had hurt for a week. Sarah deduced that this meant she had been sodomized which sounded worse than getting hairs torn out.
When she stopped for gas and food at a creepy McDonald’s in Livingston she sorted through her eight-tracks because Vivaldi, Scarlatti, and Mahler weren’t working. She found Hank Williams’s 24 Greatest Hits which Marcia had left in the truck months before. Williams’s hard and mournful voice was more in keeping with her mission.
By the time she reached Cody and made the turn toward Meeteetse she was nearly asleep at the wheel and the strong coffee in her thermos wasn’t working. She was drowsily amused by the idea that murder required physical training and good sleeping habits. She knew that the last time she had looked at the clock last night it was three A.M. and she had gotten up before five. If you intend to murder someone you need more than two hours of sleep. The fatigue gave her minimum control over her mind, the mystery of which boggled her to the point that she intended to read up on the brain. The merest thought of Alfredo gave her cold feet for her mission to the point that three times on the trip she had nearly turned around. And she was forced to admit the fact that shooting Karl didn’t mean her nightmares about him would end. She struggled to divert herself by thinking about cartridges. There was a carton of old 220-grain Silvertip cartridges in Tim’s cabin. Marcia would use those for elk but would drop back to the 165-grain factory loads for deer or antelope. Marcia’s whole family went elk hunting, even her feminine mother whose strongest swear word was “gosh.” They took four elk and a number of deer every year and though they were partial to beef they ate wild meat half the time like old Tim. Marcia was saving for a heavy Sako target rifle after hearing that a man north of Butte had shot a deer at seven hundred yards with his rifle but then he had been a sniper in Vietnam. You could pop a skull and the victim would be dead before the noise caught up.
She was parked dozing on the main street of Meeteetse at four and when she woke in fifteen minutes there was Karl’s big pickup parked in front of the tavern in a twisted version of luck. She drove around the corner to use a pay phone in case he might recognize her out the tavern window. She called his home and got Karl’s dad letting him know she’d be dropping off a horse at the front gate at eight the next morning. He told her to bring the horse down to the corral near the hay shed and she said no because she was hauling a real big rig from Sheridan and had to deliver seven more horses in Casper. He said okay and then said, “Who are you?” and she answered, “I’m one of Karl’s hot young chicks from Billings.” The man cackled.
She went into a grocery store and bought bread, baloney, and a can of beans which she would eat cold not wanting to chance a campfire. She drove off northeast on a county road along the Greybull River, then a few hundred yards up a log road to conceal her truck and horse trailer. Rover was pissed when Sarah left her in the truck and saddled up Lad to reconnoiter, putting her loaded rifle in the saddle scabbard just in case. It was an easy ride up and over the hill but the steep descent was slow. She wended her way through a patch of boulders and loblolly pines and then she could see the gate to Karl Burkhardt’s place, a drive leading to a small ranch house about a mile distant. She found a boulder that would make a perfect rest for her rifle to ensure accuracy. She decided to load up with 220-grain Silvertips for what gun magazines referred to as “knock-down” power.
She made it back to her truck just before dark and Rover acted as if she had been gone for days. She fed Lad some hay and shared her can of beans and boloney sandwiches, both of which were barely edible. Even Rover wasn’t enthused. Rover had loathed Peppy but Lolly was fine because she offered little tidbits of Reggio Parmesan as dog treats.
Of course it was the longest night of her life, longer than the night of her uprooted short hairs and the ketamine-and-alcohol swoon which had made her feel like her brain was vomiting. She had intended to sleep on the ground but it
was pretty cold and she had forgotten the air mattress for her sleeping bag so she curled up in the bag on the front seat using Rover as a pillow. She read one of Alfredo’s botany texts with a penlight wishing she had brought along something more appropriate like one of the Elmore Leonard murder mysteries that Terry’s mother had turned her on to. She slept fitfully waking at midnight with a start because her mind was playing loud symphonic music that she had never heard before. This had happened twice before in her life and it made her think she might become a composer. This time in the pickup the music was loud and discordant and derivative of Stravinsky. It was strange enough to frighten her and she looked up through the windshield at the density of the stars of the Milky Way. She questioned whether this music would prevent her from shooting Karl. She would ask her glum history teacher if those wretched Nazi generals loved classical music or did Mozart prevent murder?
At first light she woke from a delightful dream of her walk with Alfredo. He was explaining to her the mysterious life of a pyracantha bush that was almost solid with berries. After a hard frost the berries would ferment and the birds eating the berries would get drunk. At the exact moment he said this a canyon wren began singing nearby and she shivered at the beauty of its voice.
She ate half a sandwich and drank cold coffee then saddled up Lad while Rover examined their surroundings for threats. Rover didn’t want to be left behind and refused to get back into the truck. She flopped down in the frosty grass and Sarah had to lift her ninety-pound body back into the truck which made her cold back twinge. “You miserable bitch,” Sarah said.
She reached her destination a little after seven and tethered Lad several hundred yards back in the trees. She sat beside the boulder letting the early-morning sun warm her cold hands and face and body. At about a quarter to eight Karl drove his pickup up the driveway towing an ancient slat-sided open trailer most often used for hauling a bull or pigs. He pulled the truck in sideways with the trailer near the gate. She watched through the Leupold scope as he got out and leaned against the hood with a cup of steaming coffee. He limped badly when he opened the gate and she hoped he hurt. She squeezed off three rounds blasting out the truck’s windshield and the two near-side tires in case he tried to escape. Karl started screeching and struggled to get in the near-side truck door. She put a bullet near the handle and he crawled quickly back to get behind the trailer. Another bullet shattered a low wood slat of the trailer into splinters.