Parker decided to keep quiet. There was no point in arguing. Clint spoke with the deranged fervor of a true believer, despite the outlandishness of the tale.
Clint said, “Look around you. There are thousands of antelope on this ranch, just like there were in 1936. Engler used the plane to herd antelope into a box canyon, where he bound them up. Grandpa showed me where he done it. Engler loaded them into the Ryan and started east, selling them all along the way. He had connections with Hitler because he was German! His family was still over there. They were a bunch of fucking Nazis just like Engler. He knew who to call.
“He sold those fawns for a hundred to two hundred dollars each because they were so rare outside Wyoming at the time. He could load up to forty in the plane for each trip. He made enough cash money to buy airplane fuel all the way to New Jersey and back and still had enough to pay off Wendell Oaks’s loan. He did the whole thing in a plane co-owned by my grandpa, but never cut him in on a damned thing!
“Then he started buying other ranches,” Clint said, speaking fast, spittle forming at the corners of his mouth. “Then they found that damned oil. Engler was rich enough to spend thousands on lawyers and thugs to keep my grandpa and my dad away from him all those years. Our last shot was contesting that old Nazi’s estate—and you shut us out.”
Parker sighed and closed his eyes. He’d grown up in Cody. He despised men who blamed their current circumstances on past events as if their lives were preordained. Didn’t Clint know that in the West you simply reinvented yourself? That family legacies meant next to nothing?
“I can’t take this ranch with me,” Clint said. “I can’t take enough cattle or vehicles or sagebrush to make things right. But I sure as hell can take that damned book collection of his. I’ve heard it’s worth hundreds of thousands. Ain’t that right, Parker?”
“I don’t know,” Parker said. “I’m not a collector.”
“But you’ve seen it, right? You’ve been in that secret room of his?”
“Once.” Parker recalled the big dark room with floor-to-ceiling oak bookshelves that smelled of paper and age. Fritz liked to sit in a red-leather chair under the soft yellow light of a Tiffany lamp and read, careful not to fully open or damage the books in any way. It had taken him sixty years to amass his collection of mostly leather-bound first editions. The collection was comprised primarily of books about the American West and the Third Reich in original German. While Parker browsed the shelves he had noted both volumes of Mein Kampf with alarm but had said nothing to the old man.
“And what was in there?” Clint said. “Did you see some of the books I’ve heard about? Lewis and Clark’s original journals? Catlin’s books about Indians? A first edition of Irwin Wister?”
“Owen Wister,” Parker corrected. “The Virginian. Yes, I saw them.”
“Ha!” Clint said with triumph. “I heard Engler brag that the Indian book was worth a half million.”
Parker realized two things at once. They were close enough to the imposing old ranch house they could see its Gothic outline emerge from the white. And Juan had stopped the pickup.
“Books!” Juan said, biting off the word. “We’re here for fucking books? You said we would be getting his treasure.”
“Juan,” Clint said, “his books are his treasure. That’s why we brought the stock trailer.”
“I don’t want no books!” Juan growled. “I thought it was jewelry or guns. You know, rare things. I don’t know nothing about old books.”
“It’ll all work out,” Clint said, patting Juan on the shoulder. “Trust me. People spend a fortune collecting them.”
“Then they’re fools,” Juan said, shaking his head.
“Drive right across the lawn,” Clint instructed Juan. “Pull the trailer up as close as you can get to the front doors so we don’t have to walk so far with the—”
“So we can fill it with shitty old books,” Juan said, showing his teeth.
“Calm down, amigo,” Clint said to Juan. “Have I ever steered you wrong?”
“About a thousand times, amigo.”
Clint huffed a laugh, and Parker watched Juan carefully. He didn’t seem to be playing along.
Clint said, “Keep an eye on the lawyer while I open the front door.” To Parker, he said, “Give me those keys.”
Parker handed them over and he watched Clint fight the blizzard on his way up the porch steps. The wind was ferocious and Clint kept one hand clamped down on his hat. A gust nearly drove him off the porch. If anything, it was snowing even harder.
“Books,” Juan said under his breath. “He tricked me.”
• • •
THE MASSIVE DOUBLE FRONT DOORS to the Engler home filled a gabled stone archway and were eight feet high and studded with iron bolt heads. Engler had a passion for security, and Parker remembered noting the thickness of the open door when he’d visited. They were over two inches thick. He watched Clint brush snow away from the keyhole and fumble with the key ring with gloved fingers.
“Books are not treasure,” Juan said.
Parker sensed an opening. “No, they’re not. You’ll have to somehow find rich collectors who will overlook the fact that they’ve been stolen. Clint doesn’t realize each one of those books has an ex libris mark.”
When Juan looked over puzzled, Parker said, “It’s a stamp of ownership. Fritz didn’t collect so he could sell the books. He collected because he loved them. They’ll be harder than hell to sell on the open market. Book collectors are a small world.”
Juan cursed.
Parker said, “It’s just like his crazy story about the antelope and the Hindenburg. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
“He’s crazy.”
“I’m afraid so,” Parker said. “And he sucked you into this.”
“I didn’t kill your dog.”
“What?”
“I didn’t kill it. I shot by its head and it yelped. I couldn’t shoot an old dog like that. I like dogs, if they don’t want to bite me.”
“Thank you, Juan.” Parker hoped the storm wasn’t as violent in town and that Champ would find a place to get out of it.
They both watched Clint try to get the door open. The side of his coat was already covered with snow.
“A man could die just being outside in a storm like this,” Parker said. Then he took a long breath and held it.
“Clint, he’s crazy,” Juan said. “He wants to fix his family. He don’t know how to move on.”
“Well said. There’s no reason why you should be in trouble for Clint’s craziness,” Parker said.
“Mister, I know what you’re doing.”
“But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”
Juan said nothing.
“My wife . . .” Parker said. “We’re having some problems. I need to talk to her and set things right. I can’t imagine never talking to her again. For Christ’s sake, my last words to her were ‘Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.’”
Juan snorted.
“Please . . .”
“He wants you to help him,” Juan said, chinning toward the windshield. Beyond it, Clint was gesticulating at them on the porch.
“We can just back away,” Parker said. “We can go home.”
“You mean just leave him here?”
“Yes,” Parker said. “I’ll never breathe a word about this to anyone. I swear it.”
Juan seemed to be thinking about it. On the porch, Clint was getting angrier and more frantic. Horizontal snow and wind made his coat sleeves and pant legs flap. A gust whipped his hat off, and Clint flailed in the air for it but it was gone.
“Go,” Juan said.
“But I thought—”
“Go now,” he said, showing the pistol.
• • •
PARKER WAS STUNNED by the fury of
the storm. Snow stung his face and he tried to duck his head beneath his upraised arm to shield it. The wind was so cold it felt hot on his exposed bare skin.
“Help me get this goddamned door open!” Clint yelled. “I can’t get the key to work.” He handed Parker the keys.
“I don’t know which one it is any more than you do,” Parker yelled back.
“Just fucking try it, counselor!” Clint said, jabbing at him with the Colt.
Parker leaned into the door much as Clint had. He wanted to block the wind with his back so he could see the lock and the keys and have room to work. He tried several keys and none of them turned. Only one seemed to fit well. He went back to it. He could barely feel his fingers and feet.
He realized Clint was shouting again.
“Juan! Juan! What the hell are you doing?”
Parker glanced up. Clint was on the steps, his back to him, shouting and waving his arms at the pickup and trailer that vanished into the snow. Faint pink taillights blinked out.
At that moment, Parker pulled up on the iron door handle with his left hand while he turned the key with his right. The ancient lock gave way.
Parker slammed his shoulder into the door and stepped inside the dark house and pushed the door shut behind him and rammed the bolt home.
Clint cursed at him and screamed for Parker to open the door.
Instead, Parker stepped aside with his back against the cold stone interior wall as Clint emptied his Colt .45 at the door, making eight dime-sized holes in the wood that streamed thin beams of white light to the slate-rock floor.
He hugged himself and shivered and condensation clouds from his breath haloed his head.
• • •
PARKER ROAMED through Engler’s library, hugging himself in an attempt to keep warm and to keep his blood flowing. There were no lights and the phone had been shut off months before. Muted light filtered through gaps in the thick curtains. Outside, the blizzard howled and threw itself against the old home but couldn’t get in any more than Clint could get in. Snow covered the single window in the library except for one palm-sized opening, and Parker used it to look around outside for Clint or Clint’s body but he couldn’t see either. It had been twenty minutes since he’d locked Clint out.
At one point he thought he heard a cry, but when he stopped pacing and listened all he could hear was the wind thundering against the windows.
• • •
HE STARTED A FIRE in the fireplace using old books as kindling and fed it with broken furniture and a few decorative logs he’d found in the great room downstairs. Orange light from the flames danced on the spines of the old books.
He wanted a fire to end all fires that would not only warm him, but also act as his shield against the storm and the coming darkness outside.
• • •
AFTER MIDNIGHT Parker ran out of wood and he kept the fire going with Engler’s books. Mainly the German language volumes. The storm outside seemed to have eased a bit.
As he reached up on the shelves for more fuel, his fingers avoided touching the copies of Mein Kampf. The act of actually touching the books terrified Parker in a way he couldn’t explain.
Then he reasoned that if books were to be burned, Mein Kampf should be one of them. As he tossed the volumes into the flames, a loose square of paper fluttered out of the pages onto the floor.
Parker bent over to retrieve it and flick it into the fire when he realized it was an old photograph. The image in the firelight made him gasp.
• • •
PARKER RAN DOWN THE STAIRS in the dark to the front door and threw back the bolt. The force of the wind opened both the doors inward and he squinted against the snow and tried to see into the black-and-white maelstrom.
“Clint!” he shouted to no effect. “Clint!”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The story is fiction, but the photograph is not.
In 1936, in one of the odder episodes of the modern American West, Wyoming rancher and noted photographer Charles Belden did indeed catch pronghorn antelope fawns on his ranch and deliver them to zoos across the nation in his Ryan monoplane, including a delivery to the German passenger airship LZ 129 Hindenburg in Lakehurst, New Jersey, bound for the Berlin Zoo.
The photograph appears courtesy of the Charles Belden Collection, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.
I can find no information on the fate of the pronghorn antelope. They would have arrived shortly after the conclusion of Adolf Hitler’s Olympics.
— CJB
When it’s twenty-two degrees below zero on a high mountain lake, the cracking of the ice makes an unearthly howling bellow that chills the blood and makes hearts skip a beat. The crack itself, looking like a jagged bolt of crystal-white lightning, zips across the ice with the flick of a lizard’s tongue. But it is the sound of the crack, the plaintive, anguished moan, that penetrates a man and makes his skin crawl, reminding him that if the earth wanted to swallow him up, well, it could. And no one could stop it.
Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett froze with the sound and looked down at his feet as the crack shot between them. The sound washed over and through him. The crack itself was no danger to him. Ice shifted and buckled all the time. Nevertheless, he sidestepped over the crack before continuing.
The ice fishermen were still a quarter of a mile away across the surface of Dull Knife Reservoir in the Bighorn Mountains. Four fishermen, two sitting on upturned plastic buckets, two standing near their holes in the ice. All bundled up like black snowmen, their shapes rounded and without angles because of the thick winter parkas and insulated coveralls they wore. Snippets of their conversation carried crisply over the distance: a growl, a laugh, a bark. They were obviously watching him approach, and were amused when he froze and altered course.
In January, Joe had little to do besides paperwork, reports, and repairs. All of the hunting seasons were closed, and the streams and lakes were frozen. Except for a few goose hunters who had pits on the southeastern corner of his district, checking the licenses of ice fishermen was the only game in town. Even though it was nearing dusk and he could literally feel the temperature dropping as the sun gave up, defeated, and slipped behind the western mountains, he had decided to park his truck and walk across the ice to check the fishermen out. Well, not really a walk. More like a shuffle.
Joe admired ice fishermen, although he thought they were crazy. To stand around on the surface of a lake, fishing through a hole that had been augured through fourteen inches of ice, took a special breed. To fish when it was twenty-two below took a particular kind of dedication, or madness. Joe often thought that if he caught an ice fisherman without a license, the violator should be sentenced to more ice fishing for punishment.
“Hey, Joe,” one of the fishermen called out. “Fine weather we’re having.” The other three laughed. Joe smiled. He recognized the fisherman to be Hans, a retired Saddlestring cop who now worked part-time as a janitor for Barrett’s Pharmacy. Jack, his partner for hunting and fishing, was a retired schoolteacher. The other two fishermen were their sons.
“How’s fishing?” Joe asked.
Jack opened a cooler and displayed a dozen fat rainbow trout and two dozen silvery cans of beer. “Fishing’s been good,” Jack said. “You can make up for every fish you lost in the summer by fishing in the winter.”
Joe admired the big fish, oohing and aahing. “Since I walked out all this way . . .” he started to say.
“You want to check our licenses,” Hans finished for him. All four men started unzipping and unsnapping their coats, digging through layers to find their wallets.
“Do you know anything about that light under the ice over there?” Hans’s son asked as he handed his license to Joe.
“What light?”
Hans pointed across the lake. “We noticed it this morning when we came out,” he said. “I
t was still dark, and it looked like it was lit up under the ice. It was kind of creepy.”
Joe looked where Hans was pointing, and he could see it. On the far shore, beneath the black wooded bluff of the shoreline, was a faint yellow glow.
“Are you sure it’s not a reflection from somewhere?” Joe asked.
“Where?” Hans asked back.
Joe squinted. “How could there be a light under the ice?”
“That’s what we were wondering,” Jack said. “We were going to walk over there and check it out, but the fish started hitting and, well, you know.”
Joe nodded, handing back all of the licenses, but he continued to look across the lake. As it got darker, the glow became more pronounced.
Hans’s son said, “Jesus, it’s getting cold all of a sudden.”
“We’d best head back,” Jack said, reaching down to clear a skin of ice from the top of his fishing hole so he could reel in.
“Let me know what you find over there,” Hans said to Joe. “I’d go with you, but my feet are starting to freeze.”
“That’s because you have old feet,” Hans’s son said, cracking open a beer.
“Not so old I can’t kick your ass with one of ’em,” Hans said.
Jack hooted.
Joe smiled and left.
• • •
HE SHUFFLED ACROSS THE LAKE as the sun set. Hard white stars flickered in the sky, followed by a thin slice of moon that seemed too cold to bloom full. Joe felt icy fingers of cold probing into his collar and up his sleeves. He knew his feet would freeze, even in his thick Sorel Pac boots, the moment he stopped walking.
There was no doubt that there was light under the surface of the lake. It now illuminated the very ice he was walking on, so his feet looked like black silhouettes. It reminded him of being on a hip dance floor once when he was in college. He remembered dancing very badly on it. Another crack on the lake brought a moan that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. The moan echoed softly back and forth across the lake.
He stopped and stared. Something was sticking up through the surface of ice in the middle of the glow; something thin, spindly, and black. His first thought was that it was a tree branch.