“That’s true,” Wade said.
Duffy considered it a minute, then took off the handcuffs. The three trooped out together splashing across the inch deep street water. The prisoner tilted his head, slurped at the hard rain, and laughed like a jackal.
“Come on, you.” Duffy yanked him into the pickup cab. Wade joined Joe in back alongside the plastic-covered casket, and the funeral procession, such as it was, began. Slipping and sliding, coated gray by the alluvial Hellwater mud, the pickup spun up the lane, a one car caravan through the monochrome drizzle. The rain was so dense Duffy located the cemetery only by its windbreak of poplars, which drooped under the rain, looking just as lost as Duffy felt himself. Unable to locate the grave site, Joe jumped out to look, while Duffy continued to circle, cursing in despair of ever putting poor old Emma Meeks to rest, when Joe banged on the cab.
“This’s it. Stop here.”
“What makes you think so?
“Those mule deer there; they’re eating the new grass. Must be Leonard’s plot, so hers’ll be right next to it.”
Duffy and Wade joined Joe; the deer vanished, ethereal specters. Sloshing to the excavation, the black loam sucked at their boots, the outsized raindrops pelted their jackets. It fell in a frenzy, so hard it bounced so that it rained up as hard as down. The grave itself was full of loess-laden water, its walls rife with broken roots washed white by the liquid air. At the far end, the excavated earth had reservoired a large pond of rainwater behind it.
Duffy tugged at Joe. “Come on, let’s go get her and get this over with.”
Joe nodded but didn’t move, puzzled that such sandy loose soil could dam such a sizable body of water.
Duffy tugged again, then suddenly broke into a run. “Shit’n’ay, he’s gone!” he whooped, throwing open the pickup cab door and looking inside. He ran circles around his pickup in a futile search for clues where his prisoner might have run, cursing blinding condensation that had disguised the escape.
“Why didn’t you stop him?” he yelled at Wade, swearing and lamenting, leaping behind the wheel and spinning out in hot pursuit, bouncing Emma’s casket out into the mud so it landed just shy of everlasting repose. Wade ran to it, Joe right behind him.
“He said he just wanted some mud between his toes,” Wade said. He got no response from Joe, who just stood, shaking his head in resignation. Wade didn’t know what to do, but didn’t want the coffin getting waterlogged, knelt to push it, and to his surprise, with mud oiling the way, he had the strength to move it. He yelled to Joe, who, though even more surprised, joined him, and together they quickly slid it up next to the grave.
Where they then abruptly stopped. A biting odor hung in the air, and a weasely looking thing floundered in the grave. The thing became the possible felon, who continued leaping at the sides, failing to get a handhold, and sliding back down into the watery six foot depths.
“What are you doin in there?” Joe cried, “Get out! ”
The trapped man wiped the mud from his face. “I was walking in those poplars there when this muddy skunk sprayed me. I ran off this way and fell in. Gimme a hand, okay?”
“Damn you!” In his frustration, Joe kicked the pile of excavated dirt, and slipped, and fell, and the impact sent a shudder through it, and as they all gaped in astonishment, a channel broke the mound’s surface. The entire pond burst through in one moment. And as silty water flooded down upon him, filling the grave, and buoying him, in this way the possible felon was able to scramble out.
He joined Joe, and Wade, and all three stood wiping cold rain from their faces.
“Now what, Joe?”
“The hell with it.”
Joe bent down over the casket and gave it one big heave. As though by design, the bulky coffin slid home and came to rest in the grave, where it bobbed sublimely, slowly displacing the water and sinking to the bottom.
All three stood silent, possibly in reverence, Wade blowing onto his hands, the possible felon grinning absurdly. Joe, in time, began to feel an odd serenity come upon him, as he imagined, in time, a long time, soil would reclaim the chintzy casket and its corporeal remains, and the mineral-laden water would soak into her marrow and crystallize, petrify, and eventually preserve her, forever. And in time, he would—maybe—get used to the idea that he, through Leonard, issued from Emma, not Frances. And that—maybe—he, like his little brother Scotty, had receive, from Emma, those witless Meeks genes.
The prisoner was the first to stir. “I ain’t goin back,” he vowed. “I didn’t do anything.”
Joe turned to him. “You didn’t?”
“Hitch-hiking’s no crime.”
“Hitch-hiking? To where?”
“Independence.”
“Independence Basin?”
“I met a man. He told me, if you’re going nowhere, it was the place to go; that’s why he was going there.” He squeezed water out of his stringy hair. “I said to myself, that’s me, all right, and that’s where I’m going too.”
“But you didn’t even know this guy?”
“He had a look to him. Like, man, this guy knows. He just knows.”
Joe shook his head, sucking heat into his fingers, which were blue with cold.
The possible felon poked Wade. “I see you’re gettin too big for your shoes. You should try doing without. Like me.”
Wade looked at his feet; his toes had broken through his worn-out sneakers, and were coated thick with freezing mud.
“They’re better than. . .”
But the prisoner was gone. Wade caught only a glimpse as he disappeared into the poplars, a shadow in the rain.
“Hey! Where you going?”
The shoeless spirit pointed somewhere between straight ahead and straight up and was gone.
THE NEXT MORNING, Evan Gallantine, briefcase armed with packets of contracts and title transfers and appraisals to be completed, knew as soon as he joined Joe Meeks for breakfast he had a new problem. Not sure what it was, but he knew; the way Joe was sullenly drawing circles on the damp tabletop, he read like an wide open book. Evan sighed. No doubt this kind of indicative behavior many an irate construction manager came to know only too late.
“So, Joe. What’s on our mind this morning?”
Joe lost in thought. Or ignoring him.
“Having second thoughts, maybe?”
Joe sipped his by now cold coffee. “Just that maybe I oughta talk with Harlo, get his read on things, you know. Before doing anything further.”
Evan leaned back, taking a long thoughtful draw on his cigarette. “You even know where Harlo is?”
“I have a good idea. I was thinkin of goin up to see him this morning.”
Evan exhaled a sheet of smoke between his lips. He looked toward the kitchen, Marly keeping her distance, to prove she couldn’t be less interested. She caught his look, and brought the coffee, took her sweet time pouring it, and—though Joe waved his palm over it—thoughtfully filled his cup anyway. Slowly. To the brim.
“So, you two got the HRC deal all squared away?” she said with grand indifference.
“Close.” Evan looked at Joe. “But not just yet.”
“Problems?”
Joe fingered one of the decorative cattle brands burned into the wood paneled booth.
“Just I’d like to find out Harlo’s thinking on things, that’s all.”
Marly gave Evan a look. “I s’pose that only makes sense, don’t it?”
“I’m sure it does,” Evan said, with no enthusiasm, accidentally spilling coffee on his dress shirt.
“Sorry about that,” Joe said, as though it was his fault. Like everything else.
“Here, Evan, let me.”
As Marly wet a napkin and dabbed at the stain, Wade arrived, rubbing his eyes, ready for breakfast. No one greeted him, not even Marly.
“Joe, one thing to think about.” Evan smoothed the wet but now clean wrinkles on his shirt. “About this pattern of yours. How trouble follows you, job to job? Inconvenient,
maybe, but it was only ever you affected by the consequences, right? Up to now you always had the luxury of just drifting on.” He set his hand on Wade’s shoulder. “Now though, I just ask you to bear in mind, it’s not only you that’ll suffer from any ill-advised ideas you get into your head.”
He drained his coffee cup and rose to leave.
“Just a word to the wise. See you later.”
MARLY BROUGHT WADE’S second plate of hotcakes and eggs and sat down.
“So Joe, you really are goin to give Harlo a say?”
“I thought, yeah, maybe I should.”
“I’ll go too, Joe, okay?” Wade said just as Anne walked up.
“Go where?”
“To talk to Uncle Harlo.”
“Harlo? That no-good. . .you mean they actually let him out?”
“Why is he no-good?” Wade said, but no one answered. Marly reached to wipe gooseberry syrup drips from his mouth.
“You can take along some of my loganberry wine. You’ll want to lubricate them dried up vocal cords’a his.”
“Good idea, right, Joe?”
“He’s probly on probation; I doubt. . .”
Just then a clattering racket of pots falling came from the kitchen.
“Good Christ, there goes Squash again. Every time you show yourself, Anne. Poor love-sick kid.”
Marly quickly ran back to head off more trouble. The table fell silent, listening to her yelling at Squash to get his mind off her daughter and on his work. Anne, leaning against the table, reluctant to leave, unsure whether to stay. Wade noticed that her hair was brushed and tied back with a blue scarf, and that her face was washed and shining, and her work shirt ironed. So pretty looking, he thought, wondering if Joe noticed too, how he looked at her when she wasn’t looking, and wondering if she was wondering too, how she looked at Joe when he wasn’t looking. Weird, Wade thought, no one looking at anyone. He went back to eating.
“Joe, if you want,” Anne said after a while, “I guess I could drive you to find Harlo.”
“You don’t got work today?”
“Too wet. From all that rain.”
“Well still. Maybe if I could just borrow your pickup. No reason for you to have to go.”
“I never let anybody drive my pickup; too temperamental. And anyway I don’t mind at all. Got nothin else to do.”
“Knowin Harlo, I should probly just go myself.”
“All right, take it or leave it. Be hard findin that rascal without wheels though.”
“Guess that’s true enough.” Joe shook his head. “Ain’t really sure why even go. What would it change, except to make things worse.”
“Joe, I think it’s a good idea,” Wade said, “and plus I’d like to meet Uncle Harlo. Why can’t we just go anyway?”
“Uncle Harlo?”
“Well, I mean, uncle, meaning your uncle. That’d be fun, don’t you think?”
“Fun,” Joe muttered. He pushed his half eaten plate aside.
“Well, so go get you a jacket then; ain’t exactly hot as hell up at Independence.”
ABOVE THE MEEKS ranch, the Hellwater road leaves the open upper valley and becomes an old mining access, climbing the spruce slopes of Sweetgrass Moraine. For a few miles it parallels the cataract falls of the Hellwater. Here, the air cools under the towering lodgepole pine, whose crowns split forest sunlight into dusty angular planes, and whose redolent needles carpet the twin ruts of the road. It is quiet but for the serene tumble of whitewater over the falls. Above the cirque behind Sweetgrass Moraine, the mining road begins ascending the series of switchbacks which lead to Independence Basin.
Joe noticed the falls were already low, despite the heavy rains of the week before. His arm dangled out the window, brushed by undergrowth. Anne smiled at something, he didn’t know what; he smiled reflexively. Mountains sharpened by sunlight beckoned here and there through the trees.
Wade, eager to see Independence Basin, because of what the possible felon had said about it, pointed at the majestically glaciated peaks and broke the tranquility.
“Just like New York, isn’t it, Joe?”
“Just like New York?” Anne said. “You kidding? What does that even mean?”
“How in the morning the skyscraper tops are all sunny and down below the streets are still dark.”
“Y’know,” Joe nodded. “It kinda is how it looks, at that. You know?”
“No, I don’t know. How would I?”
Wade, riding next to her, felt her stiffen.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothin’s wrong. What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing, I just thought. . .”
“I know what you thought. You think I can help where I’m from? And it don’t make you better’n me, so how about you stop always rubbin it in?”
“Rubbing what in?”
“I don’t have anyone to take me places like New York like you. I’m stuck in Meagher, just like my mom, just like everyone I know. How far you think I’m ever goin to get? Nowhere, that’s how far. You guys don’t even know. You guys can just leave. Any time you damn want to.”
“That’s not quite true,” Joe ventured. “I mean, well, you have a job. And no tellin where that can get you. You give it time.”
Anne vented a jet of breath through her lips, but said nothing.
The road wound down into an aspen hollow, then back out into sky and open scree, where it sliced up again along a hanging wall of rock and scrub pine. As the air rarefied, so did the mood in the pickup, Anne thinking of her work again, how for days now she’d lived and breathed nothing else, the transit and standard, the calibrations and math, the transcriptions and field sheets. How she’d wanted to give it up that day she was late. She looked sidelong at Joe now. A real engineer, but who’d grown up here same as her. Then thinking, what had happened, why’d he leave, and why not her mom? Then about that photograph, and whatever happened, and that happy looking guy. And how now, here he was back here, with her, flesh and blood.
All at once the pickup rose onto the windblown barren saddle of the Absaroka divide; Joe grabbed the dashboard in fear, as though the earth was about to end and they were about to fall to their doom, as suddenly, below, the terrifying spread of Independence Basin, and above, the soaring peaks of the Beartooths, Mount Contact foremost of all.
Anne gasped; Wade in turn.
There was no mistaking it. The landslide lay like a slain dragon fallen across the narrow sunlit cirque. The entire north face of Mount Contact as if frozen in time and motion avalanching down the valley wall, a fallen citadel plummeting across the basin floor and careening of its own megalithic weight halfway up the opposite slope, burying everything in its path. Chunks the size of barns lay strewn miles from where they had been wrenched loose. The fragile network of headwaters damned by the slide into a pristine tarn of shallow transparence, studded with now dead drowned tree tops, leafless bone-white sticks rising from liquid blue.
“God,” Anne said, “I never had any idea.”
“Let’s get out, can we?”
Wade nudged Anne and they walked to an overlook, then stepped back, feeling vertigo. After a while, Joe followed them out, faceless as a ghost.
“Wow, right, Joe? That was some earthquake.”
Joe’s gaze rolling over the scene, the morning haze like the dust of that cataclysm still settling twenty years later. So little changed. Here and there, fringes of pioneering aspen interspersed with colonies of Sitka spruce, but in the thick swath of the slide itself, not a blade of grass nor sprout of juniper had been able to root. It was an unhealed wound on the side of Mount Contact.
Wade looked up. “Was that where Scotty died?”
Joe nodded.
“Did you see it happen, though?”
“Yeah. I did. The morning we planned to leave.”
Long minutes he stood, eyes reliving the stupendous flow of rock, the naked flank of Mount Contact, its interior secret, Scotty entombed under the debris. In the high
blue above, a jet’s fan-tail iced a white line through the sky, streaking east into the sun.
“Who’s Scotty?” Anne asked.
“Joe’s brother,” Wade whispered.
“He got killed?”
“Yeah but we don’t like to think about it.”
“What’s to think about; you can see for yourself.”
Joe coughed. Wishing he were back on that jet overhead, headed away, looking down upon this from on high, free, and unaffected, above it all. Superior to the elements of calamity, upheaval, change.
Anne took Wade’s arm and pulled him to the pickup. Something about leaving Joe alone.
So they waited. While Joe stood a while longer. Sweaty in the mountain air, shivering from the hot sun. A breeze fluttered up from below, whipping his sleeves, the kind of slow weathering it did on all that he overlooked.
Then he realized he was alone. And returned to the pickup.
CONTINUING DOWN THE pass, the Hellwater road frayed into indistinct marmot trails into raw meadow; it was off road low-gear maneuvering to find a way to the grassy bottom along the lake, avoiding rocks and dead ends and trees, laden with a wet veil of snow still surviving into mid-May in the innermost boughs. In time they reached a timber cabin that obviously predated the quake triggered landslide and the lake it created, and now was settled half in the water, half out.
“This is that hunting lodge you told me about on the plane, isn’t it?”
Joe said it was. White smoke feathered from the tin pipe in the roof.
“That’d likely be Harlo.”
“And maybe the possible felon, if he made it,” Wade said.
“Wait here.” Joe walked to the cabin. He poked open the door. Inside, nothing but black.
“Figured you’d find your way here ‘ventually.”
The voice husky and eerily familiar. Joe widened the door, enough to make out a man, Harlo, far to the back. Continuing inside, ducking the dank and sagging timber beams, Joe had to feel more than see his way through slits of sunlight streaking between cracks in the mud-fill seams, to the back room, the floor of which was half hard dirt, half black liquid of the intruding lake water.
Harlo was sitting on a salt block deeply grooved by sheep tongues, his big grin knife-like and white. Joe went to the one boarded window, knocked a plank loose, jarring loose a soft flour of dust, which sparkled brilliantly in the bands of sunlight.