Golden Age

  He drank some water and pulled out of the parking lot. South Dakota was strangely different from Iowa, even this close to the border. Already in May, the former farm fields were brown, the parking lots had no cars parked in them, and the abandoned buildings they surrounded had lost their names. It was spooky. He pulled onto I-90. By eight, the dust had settled, and he could turn on the AC, which might be, literally, a lifesaver. He remembered from school that the Ogallala Aquifer had never stretched this far north—it was mostly in Kansas and Nebraska. There must have been some aquifer up this way, but he couldn’t remember the name of it. It was gone now. The landscape was moonlike, except for the quality of the road (excellent) and the remnants of former towns that he passed along the way. The Missouri River at Chamberlain was almost dry—the bridge soared above it, and the former bed of the river was a dusty stretch of dirt with a thin, shiny greenish line running through it; there had been so little snow out west that it hadn’t flooded in five years. His dad had always been strangely anxious about floods.

  He was to the Badlands by lunch; he stopped and had a hot dog and a Coke at a bar in Wall, then drove south into maybe the strangest landscape he had ever seen. His car thermometer said ninety-eight outside, eighty inside. He took off his shirt and shoes, and drove barefoot. The Badlands came upon you gradually, but then there they were: you were driving along the edge of steep cliffs that fell away from the plains, rather than rising above them. The land was so dry that it looked rather like rock. Things got more and more desolate; after a while, he was among the cliffs, and then past them. A house here and there—abandoned ranches, no doubt. The switchbacks meant that he had to drive slowly, so it was dusk when he stopped, parked by the side of the road, and rustled up a box of crackers and another thermos of water. He thought it was perfect, in its way, that he would spend the night here, in the bleakest spot he had ever been in, bleaker than Iraq. Iraq was dry and forbidding, but you knew from ninth-grade history that every square foot of Mesopotamia had been walked over and thought about for thousands of years. Here, that did not seem to be so. Even though Native Americans had lived here, they seemed entirely vanished now, as if, Guthrie thought, the world had ended. But it was cooler than Sioux Falls. He slept fine, and was in a better mood in the morning. He detoured over to Rapid City and ate three fried eggs, an order of bacon, and a slice of cantaloupe. His car was saving him a lot of money. It got fifty miles to the gallon and was comfortable enough to sleep in—that was a hundred dollars a night in hotel costs.

  He knew three guys who had disappeared into the North Dakota oil fields—Jake Sharp, in 2012, Randy Case in 2014, and, the most desperate, Lundy Mitchell last year, when he lost his job at the Iowa City Veterans Administration, and left his wife and three kids on South Lucas Street. He sent back most of his paycheck from Williston, where he, too, lived in his car. But the oil business wasn’t what it had been five years ago. According to Tracy Mitchell—who had never wanted Lundy to go, but what else was there to do, especially since their four-year-old was battling liver cancer and needed a transplant—the best fields ran out in about a month.

  The weather cooled off a little as he drove north, but as soon as he crossed I-94, he felt the anxiety coming on. Even though he was alert about his triggers, he at first didn’t understand that it was the huge tankers rumbling by, shaking the road and buffeting his old car, that were giving him headaches and making his palms sweat. And the sunlight was blinding—or it seemed blinding to Guthrie—another trigger, because whenever he remembered Iraq he remembered squinting into the desert, barely able to make out where the danger was coming from. Finally, he saw a rest stop and pulled over. It was a nice rest stop, with aspen trees and a bit of a lawn, obviously built in the last few years, but the former oil fields encroached upon it—four dead derricks within a quarter-mile of the lookout, and another one in the distance. There was some sort of old holding pool nearby, and where there might once have been prairie grasses (and even wildflowers, at this time of year), there was now just dusty, gravelly earth. He imagined George Armstrong Custer sitting here on his horse, thinking he had been transported to Mars. On the highway, beyond the little break of trees, brakes squealed and two horns blared, a whining car horn and a deep, aggressive tanker horn. There was no sound of a crash (Guthrie didn’t turn around), but Guthrie’s heart was pounding anyway, as if the gunfire and explosions would commence momentarily. He went into the men’s john—rather luxurious—and sat there in the coolness for a long time, going through his exercises. Maybe, he thought, what worked in peaceful Iowa City would not necessarily work in oil country. He went back to his car, rolled down the windows, and stayed there for a while, practicing his card tricks. By one o’clock, he felt calmer, and also hungry—hunger was always a worthy distraction. He pulled out of the rest stop.

  But he couldn’t tolerate the highway. Every driver seemed predatory. So, at the next turnoff, he took a small road into the wildlife refuge, and it was like entering another world. The rough hills were marginally greener than the plains; deer stood by the side of the road as if they enjoyed observing passersby. Most important, the park was quiet and nearly empty: empty hills, empty roads, empty cliffs, empty valleys, empty enormous sky. He took some deep breaths, and found his box of crackers again—almost empty. He did not drive far into the park; it was pretty apparent that the roads were narrow and treacherous, it would be easy to get lost. But he got himself together here, so that when he headed back to the main road, even though it was now dusk and he could see the gas flares on the horizon more clearly, and smell the oily scent that pervaded the countryside as it came through his ventilation system, he was okay with it, more willing to think about his imminent hamburger than his imminent death.

  He half hoped to run into Lundy Mitchell—he didn’t—but he did run into, of all people, Scott Crandall, who had been in his unit in Iraq, and whom he hadn’t thought of once in the interim. He was sitting at a bar in Williston, and when he heard Guthrie order his burger and onion rings, he turned around and said, “Shit!”

  He looked so belligerent that Guthrie prepared himself right then to be cold-cocked, but the guy smiled (not many teeth), flexed his enormous biceps (years in oil country, setting rigs), and said, “Langdon, shit, man, what the fuck!” and threw his arms around Guthrie and squeezed. Guthrie was six feet tall, 190, but Scott—or, as he was now known, “Croc”—was two inches taller and forty pounds heavier, all muscle. Even his enormous belly was as hard as a rock. He was bald, had a tatt on his cheek and another on his forehead, and took Guthrie back to his man-camp room for the night. Which would have been fine, considering they both got pretty drunk, but Croc wanted to talk and talk and talk. He hadn’t been away from Williston in ten years; he’d once made plenty of dough, but he played a lot of poker, too; and he wanted Guthrie to know every detail of how his best friend in Williston had been crushed to death when a tanker rolled backward into a drilling rig—the screaming lasted ten full minutes, and they couldn’t do a thing about it. If Langdon thought Iraq was bad, he should stick around in Williston for a week. Anyway, that scam set up by the big oil companies and the Arabs, the one where they dropped the price of oil to fifty dollars a barrel and kept it there for a year, had worked—put most of the drillers on the Bakken out of business. Croc finally passed out (twelve Coronas and a bottle of vodka; Guthrie remembered him getting so drunk in Iraq that he set his duffel bag on end and shot it full of holes, laughing the entire time). Guthrie was out of the man camp and to Billings, Montana, by noon.

  He had $346, and wasn’t halfway yet. He was getting fifty miles to the gallon; he had eight hundred or so miles to go; so at $8.90 a gallon (the price of gas was back up now), it would cost him $150 just in gas. There was a part of him that wanted to arrive in Seattle with a dollar in his pocket and a new name—let’s say “Sage” (maybe, with effort, he could live up to that)—but it was a stupid part of him. There was no speed limit in Montana, so he could get pretty far in twenty-four hours. T
hat was what he was thinking. It would also be smart to plug in his phone, now dead, but he realized that he had left the car charger somewhere—it wasn’t under the seat.

  He filled up in Coeur d’Alene, happy to have gotten that far. He was a man of the plains, so the switchbacks over the mountains in the dark, the way the guardrail loomed into the light, spooked him and made him jerk the wheel. He did think many times about how one of the effects of PTSD was not that you were suicidal, exactly, but that death was such a familiar concept that it seemed like a reasonable alternative to, not fear, but shock, suddenness, the unexpected. Eventually, a person got very tired of those shots of adrenaline that didn’t stop firing. Your body itself became the enemy that could never be placated. At a place called Moses Lake, he turned off into Potholes State Park (how could he resist?), and pulled into a shady spot. The weather wasn’t terrible here—he only had to crack his windows a little. He was hungry, though. That was his last thought before he fell asleep.

  The blow against the window that woke him up was followed by the blow that cracked the window. The third one shattered it, and the glass poured into his lap. A face was right in his, the face of a teen-ager. The face was snarling, and behind it were more faces, three or more. Everyone was screaming. Guthrie jerked back, and the kid leaned in, saying, “How much money you got, fuckhead?”

  Guthrie had no idea, but he said, “Hundred bucks, maybe.” The kid said, “Hand it over. Hand me your wallet.”

  Guthrie hesitated, not out of fear—that hadn’t kicked in yet—but just out of surprise, slowness. The kid lifted his gun. Guthrie recognized it; it was an old Ruger. It came through the broken window, and Guthrie felt the muzzle touch his cheek. Instinctively, he turned his head.

  2019

  A LAWYER DID COME to the Hut. It wasn’t anyone from the IRS—he was working for the Loretta Langdon Family Trust. He had a Southern accent, and Andy, though she wasn’t getting around very well, invited him to have a seat and offered him a cup of mint tea, which he took. He had a briefcase with him, but before he opened it, he complimented her on how “charming” her place was. He said, “This is a lot like my grandma’s place, that I remember from a boy. It was up in Asheville? I used to love to go up there. My father’s mother. My mother was from Savannah; my word, she turned up her nose at the hillbillies on my dad’s side, but I did love them best, I have to say.”

  Andy said, “I take it your grandparents are no longer living?”

  “No, no. They died pretty young. I think Grandpa was sixty and Grandma was sixty-four.”

  “That is young,” said Andy, and he stared at her, at the life she had made herself by contemplating death so often and so thoroughly for as long as she could remember, training herself not to let death come unexpectedly, to step aside or look over her shoulder at every tire squeal, to note every slippery patch, every dangling wire, every scent of gas, every sign of infection. Frank had been alert, but never quite as alert as she was to the skull within the beautiful visage. Finally, the young man said, “You look in excellent health, ma’am.”

  Andy said, “I can’t complain,” and for some reason she laughed, and then he laughed. He took a deep breath and embraced his briefcase, as if to fortify his resolve. Andy sipped her mint tea. Her hand was just bones now, but no arthritis, at least.

  He opened the briefcase and pulled out some papers. He said, “It does appear, as we look into Michael Langdon’s estate, that he was making deposits into an account that is in your name. I am told by Mrs. Langdon that these were support payments to you.”

  “Or, perhaps,” said Andy, “restitution. His antics in 2008 cost me eighteen million dollars.” She grabbed this amount out of the ozone—her clearest memory of the Uncle Jens fund was from about 1955, when it hit a hundred grand because of real-estate investments Frank had made with that Mafia type they met at Belmont Park.

  “Mrs. Langdon said nothing to me about restitution.”

  Andy said, “How about money laundering? When the cash started being deposited was when all those offshore accounts were being investigated. Possibly he was stashing his money in my account to hide it, so I paid my taxes.” She smiled politely.

  “As you will remember, Mrs. Langdon, it was decided by the Supreme Court that offshore accounts are entirely legal, and that it was in the public interest for corporations to follow uniform international tax laws as set up by the Trans-Pacific Trade Agreement, and so there was no actual reason for Mr. Langdon to, as you say, launder any money.”

  “After 2017.”

  “True, that decision did come down a year and a half ago. However, that is neither here nor there from Mrs. Langdon’s point of view. She would like an accounting of the money you received from your son.”

  “I can send you the bank statements.”

  “And, if you don’t mind, can you estimate how much is in that account right now?”

  “I believe a hundred and six dollars.”

  Now the young man looked taken aback. He said, “Mrs. Langdon estimates that Mr. Langdon deposited at least a million dollars in that account.”

  “In the end, more, I would say.”

  “And you felt that this was your money, so you spent it?” He looked around the Hut in amazement. His gaze paused at the wall oven, as if she might have put the cash in there.

  Andy said, “I wouldn’t say that I spent it, though it undoubtedly has been spent. I gave it away.”

  He licked his lips.

  “Ma’am, have you kept a list of the persons or organizations you gave that money to? And do you have your tax returns from the last six years?”

  Andy said, “Oh, my goodness! You will have to subpoena me for those! But it isn’t going to do Loretta any good. That money is gone, as well it should be. If the IRS wants to put a ninety-eight-year-old woman in jail, they are welcome to do so.” She again gave him her best, most radiant, and, she knew some would say, skeletal smile. He looked taken aback.

  Andy said, “I didn’t give a penny to the Catholic Church.”

  He didn’t say anything to that. He took another sip of his tea. She said, “Will you tell me something?” She made sure she sounded wheedling, kind, and decrepit—she even got a little bit of a shake into her voice.

  He said, “What’s that?”

  “What has happened to the ranch in California? What was it, the Angel Ranch.”

  “The Angelina Ranch has been donated by Mr. Chance Langdon to the California Rangeland Trust, and he has moved to ten or so acres somewhere around Santa Ynez. Since the ranch sits square on the Monterey Shale, he thought maybe the trust was in a better position to preserve it, should fracking become viable again. Of course, there is the drought aspect as well.”

  They both shook their heads regretfully.

  “Mrs. Langdon has no quarrel with her son’s decision.”

  “She has her good points,” said Andy.

  The lawyer said, “Yes, ma’am. She does.”

  —

  WHEN, after a year of on-and-off suspense about Michael’s “accident,” Richie told Jessica over breakfast that it was he himself who had killed him, run him down in the Toyota because he laughed at Richie and gave him the finger, she lathered some pear jam on her toast and said, in her straightforward Jessica way, “I don’t believe that.”

  Richie pushed his plate away, even though he’d hardly touched a thing. “I tell you something that it has taken me a year to confess, and you don’t believe me?”

  “I believe that you think that you killed him, but I don’t believe that you did.” The toast was so crisp he could hear it crunching. Jessica did so love to eat.

  “You think I have dementia or something?”

  She set her elbows on the table and leaned toward him. “Darling, don’t you realize that you ask me certain things over and over, like whether we’ve watched Crystal and Cooper already this week, and why isn’t it on the DVR?”

  “I do ask you that?”

  “Yes.”

&
nbsp; “Why isn’t it on the DVR?”

  “Because we watched the latest episode Monday night and then you deleted it.”

  “Do I know how to operate the DVR?”