The last ranger, p.14
The Last Ranger, page 14
That was a first. A young man who was apparently its driver was pointing a six-inch-barrel chrome revolver at an older man who was trying to hold a lunging German shorthair on a tight leash. Ren bet that the handgun was a .357 Magnum. Both men were yelling. The young one with the gun wore an Arcteryx soft shell, brushed sage. The older man, fortyish, with paunch, wore a Carhartt canvas vest. California plates on the Mog, Minnesota on the pickup. Bumper stickers all over the Mog—“Baja 500,” “ ’19 Sahara Expedition,” “TransSiberia.” On the pickup was one decal of a horse in profile, probably American Quarter Horse Association.
Perfect, Ren thought. Class warfare. Minnesota’s two kids were huddled by the picnic table crying, under the wing of a woman, apparently their mother, who had a Shania Twain feathered perm and was also screaming. Had to be one more player. There was. At the rear corner of the Mog, Ren saw a young blond woman in a wool beanie and down vest holding a…speargun. Cocked, with double bands stretched to the notches. Jesus.
He saw all this in a flash and hit the bar lights and jammed the blast horn once. That got everyone’s attention. He hit the “On” button on his body cam, switched to PA, and unhooked the mic on its rat tail. He had found that his vehicle in full blaze often commanded more authority than a single man on the dirt. He turned up the volume. “Drop the weapons!” he blared.
Kid Mog did what Ren thought he might do and turned bodily and swung the handgun toward him. Ren understood that this was probably less of a threat than a startle reflex, but in any city in the United States it would be enough to get him plastered all over the tree trunks by law enforcement. “DROP THE GUN. NOW!” Kid Mog looked down at his hand and dropped it in the dirt. “That’s a three-thousand-dollar tire!” the kid screamed.
“Hands up! Step back! You! With the speargun. Drop it and step out. NOW!” The girl hesitated. What the fuck? Did she think she was in a James Bond movie? Enough of this shit. Ren shoved out of the car and in the same motion drew his .45 and brought both hands to the SIG and leveled it at Speargun. “Drop it!” Whoa, was that defiance in her eyes? “Not joking,” Ren said loud enough, but perfectly even. “You can die right here. Right now. Up to you.”
She tossed it. No shit. Like a baseball player tossing the bat after a strikeout. “Come around to the side next to boyfriend. Good. Both of you, turn and put your hands high and up against the truck.” Ren was pissed. He keyed the mic on his left shoulder and called the ranger station in Tower. He never called if he could help it. They were way understaffed and had enough to worry about on the roads to Mammoth and to West Yellowstone. “Inky,” he said, “Officer Twenty-two. Yeah, Ren. At Pebble Creek, campsite four. Can you get someone over here? Got an altercation, weapons, multiple parties. Controlled, yeah. For now. Thanks.” It’d be forty minutes, so Ren kicked the feet of the two twenty-somethings apart and was not at all gentle. He frisked them and hooked them up, one each to the oversized military-style pipe handrails on either side of the rear door, which was about six feet off the ground. So he handcuffed them hands forward, and their arms were now over their heads—good, they could stand like that until one of the other rangers got here. Ren now turned to the overweight father with the dog.
“Put him in the truck,” Ren said without preamble.
“But—”
“Don’t make me draw my weapon again.”
The man shook his head as if trying to clear it and, with an aggrieved spit to the side, he hauled his growling bird dog to the front door of his pickup and whistled him up. The dog jumped in with no fuss. At least someone was behaving. The man turned back and stepped forward, already talking.
“Stay!” Ren commanded, as if talking to the dog. The man was confused; he put his big hands up, palms out, and took another half-step. Ren tugged out the Taser at his thigh and pointed it at the man’s chest. “Don’t make me. Stay!”
The man was not used to being on the wrong side of anything. He stopped, but with reluctance.
“You drill holes in the kid’s sidewall?” Ren said.
“Sure, but—”
“Not in the mood. Turn around. Hands to the camper. Like the kid.” Ren patted him down and hooked him. This time wrists back. He took a pair of zip ties and fastened the man to the campsite’s rusty standing grill.
“That little prick told me to get my fat-ass kids out of the campsite,” the man said.
Kid Mog craned around on his hookup and shouted, “The host lady down there gave us dibs!”
“Not in the mood,” Ren said to fat man. And he wasn’t. He turned to the mom. The kids stopped crying as if on a switch. “You have any weapons? On you or in the truck?”
Shania Twain nodded.
“I’d like you to stay at the picnic table and tell me what they are and where they are.”
The woman nodded. She looked like a zombie.
“Well?”
She glanced at her husband. Ren said, “Look at me, not him. Look at me! Good. I am not. In. The. Mood. Backup is coming right now. You mess with me once and I promise you serious jail time.”
She opened her mouth, shut it, then began to recite the locations of a shotgun and two pistols. America on vacation, Ren thought.
* * *
This was turning into the longest day ever. He had begun it seeking respite in simple work, but nothing would stay simple anymore, and now all he wanted to do was sit on a porch and not move, ever. He was a little surprised that he wanted to share some of the stories with Hilly, and that he was relieved when she answered his knock.
She yelled him in. Her cabin had a big picture window, and it opened south through the pines to the valley, and it streamed sunlight. She had a fire going, and inside it was warm and bright. In lieu of a dining table she had a broad oak desk covered in field notebooks, microscope, binders; and a drafting table under the window on which lay thirty-six-inch sheets of wolf family trees. The open room smelled of toast, wool, and something musky—wolf, maybe.
“Taking a break?” she said. She was in a stuffed chair angled to the woodstove. A book lay open on her lap. Her cane leaned against an arm.
“Knocking off. I’ll be writing reports tonight.”
She didn’t ask. Again Ren marveled. Who else on the planet wouldn’t have taken that opening? “Want tea?” she said.
“Okay.”
She tucked a waxy yellow aspen leaf between the pages and closed the book.
“I’ll get it,” he said.
“No, I’ve gotta move.”
“Why? It’s just a bad bruise.”
“Mental health.”
“Oh, that.”
“In short supply out there, huh?” She waved her hand in the general direction of the valley and the road. “Take off your coat and stay awhile.”
He did. She got up and limped over to the kitchen, in the corner under the big window. She ran spring water into the squat Japanese steel kettle and brought it to the woodstove. She pulled a chrome lever on the stove forward to give the flames more air, and they responded with a fluttering rush. She caned back to a shelf over the sink and took down two mugs. One had a yellow Tweety Bird, the other Sylvester the pussycat. That surprised Ren. He figured her cups might feature fabled wolves; you could buy them in any of the park gift shops. She caught him watching.
“I like to think of the conversations they have at night on the shelf,” she said. “Also, it reminds me that life on the food chain is always a crapshoot.”
Ren took the bentwood rocker, and they drank Lapsang souchong. He handed her the shirt with the two bears. As soon as she unfolded it she began to laugh. “You have no idea,” she managed to say. “I really hate those stick-figure families.” She had to set her mug down, because her laughter was rocking the tea over the lip. “I mean, I can’t stand ’em. Why don’t we just go around bragging about our contribution to overpopulation.” She patted the tears at the corners of her eyes with her sleeve. “The ones with everybody’s name underneath really kill me. Johnny, Suzy, Holly. Mom and Dad are just Mom and Dad; they never get proper names, because of course they only exist to pump out more little stick figures.”
“Have you seen the ones with the families of guns?” Ren said.
“Oh, yeah.”
“Where’d you learn to shoot?”
“Deer hunting. Northern Minnesota.”
“No shit.”
“Shit.” She refolded the T-shirt and picked up her mug.
“I grew up on a farm,” she continued. “We had sunflowers, soybeans, oats, cows, and Dad drove a truck, just day trips. Hunting was a religion. I mean, we lived as rural as you can get, pretty much, and Dad still had a hunting cabin with four friends. This thing was spiff. Two of them, Dad and Calvin, were closet engineers, and they built a solar-powered hoist station to hang deer, with a rail system that ran into a cold shed. They had a fridge just for lager set to thirty-seven degrees. Not kidding. And a smoker that Dad built, for which they kept a small grove of white oak the way some people have a sugarbush. The woodshed was divided that way: a cord of oak always on hand for smoking, and the rest for everything else. The cabin had a shop off one side with one bench pretty much just for gunsmithing and reloading. Off the other side was a shed for two ATVs. This was serious business. Dad lived for it. So of course I shot my first buck when I was eleven.” She sipped her tea, glanced back to Ren. “What’re you staring at?”
He didn’t know. Was he staring? Hilly had never, in the four years he’d known her, run so many sentences together. Well, she had probably not sat still indoors for so many hours in a row in all that time either. Within her range, she was a restless traveler, like her subjects.
“Were there wolves?” Ren said.
“Oh, yeah.” Hilly straightened in her chair and cocked her head as if she’d heard a summons. “I heard them at night, singing, since I think I was in my crib. Our dog, Jib, would howl back. Most children I think were afraid of the sound. I mean, it can be pretty eerie. My older sister certainly was—she became a Realtor in Orange County, BTW. I was never scared. Mom said that when I heard it on an early-fall night when the windows were open to the screens I would crawl to the door.”
“Damn.”
“I know. When I first saw them I was twelve. Dad and I were on a hunt together. We liked to hunt right from the cabin—we didn’t have to drive anywhere. This is Minnesota, so a quarter-mile away was a lake. Pretty big, only two camps on the shore, at the far end. This was timber-company land, was why. We walked slowly down a long meadow heading for a copse of birch and hemlock on the shore. Where we’d wait. Uncle Bill had killed a nice buck just yards away the night before. We were coming down the hill, slowly, like I said; there was a heavy frost, and I remember the whisk of the stiff grass against my pants; and then Dad put out a hand against my shoulder and stopped me. He held his breath. I followed his gaze. There, against dark water that smoked with mist, were two wolves. Timber wolves. Huge. Feeding on Uncle Bill’s gut pile. I wonder if they heard my heart thumping, because they lifted and turned their heads and I could tell they were drinking in the scents slipping down the hill, and then they bolted. Turned together and ran flat out along the shore and into the pines. No sound. Like two ghosts. Like they were made of the fog drifting off the water. I don’t know how long it took me to breathe again. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Not even beautiful, more than that. Like you couldn’t name it.”
She stopped. Her own eyes were smoky. Ren didn’t say a word.
Finally, he said, “Did you study them in high school?”
“I tracked them. To study. I think they got to know my scent, as these do here. Our neighbors used dogs. The pack would kill a calf in a neighbor’s field, and the men with dogs would go out and kill a wolf. Almost like an honor killing. I hated it. They had half a dozen dogs and one or two rifles, all against one hungry wolf. Didn’t seem fair to me at all. I would never let Dad do it. When Calvin killed a nursing female, I stopped talking to him. Never talked to him again.”
Jeez. What was he doing in high school? Driving to the bar in Bellows Falls. Getting into more trouble.
Hilly picked up her cane, and with the tip of it she shoved the vent lever on the woodstove forward and shut it down. The fluttering of air in the stovepipe throttled, and the stove wheezed and ticked. After the rush of conversation, she and Ren were happy to cool a little, like the stove. They sat and drank their tea. Ren thought how, aside from being at the library with Karen Logan, he hadn’t sat beside a woman indoors for this long in a couple of years. He liked it.
He glanced at the famous wolf biologist drinking tea, and tried to see the passionate teenager teaching herself to track them. Preparing the ground for a life of study. What had he been preparing for at the same age? Stumbling from one disaster to another. He had almost been suspended again for getting in a fight with the captain of the lacrosse team, who had been bragging about screwing a very drunk freshman at a school dance.
Ren cricked back in the rocker and sipped the tea, which was like liquid smoke. His eyes traveled from the squat green kettle to the apple crate left of the stove, which held split kindling. “Excelsior Orchards” in fading stenciled letters on the slatted wood. He wondered where that was—Colorado or Washington or Vermont—and how it ended up here. On the floor beside the box was an old red Folger’s coffee tin with no lid, for matches probably, but…he rocked forward and looked more closely. Inside it was a bottle of Karo corn syrup. The same stuff used recently to destroy an outfitter’s engine. When he glanced back at Hilly she was watching him, willfully expressionless. But her eyes met his and the tiny gold flecks there seemed brighter, like embers in a wind.
He was trying to decide if he should say something—probably not—when he heard boots on the porch steps and then a rapping at the door. If Ren thought he was done with campground drama for the day, he was wrong. Hilly set her tea on the side table and picked up her cane, but now Ren put a hand on her shoulder. “I got this,” he said. He rose and opened the door.
It was Tenner. The usually merry Santa was not jolly. He took a step back to let Ren onto the porch and his breath rasped. His eyes shone and his cheeks above the snowy beard were flushed, but not with good cheer.
“What’s up?” Ren said, alarmed.
Tenner took a sec to catch his breath. “You know,” he said, “when you’re my age—” He coughed into his fist.
“You think you’ve seen everything?” Ren said.
“What the hell is going on in this valley?”
“What?” Ren said.
“I tried calling you on the radio.” Tenner was having an unusually hard time gathering his thoughts.
“Yeah, I left it in the cabin. Sorry. Tenner, what happened?”
“Okay, you know about the Kelli-Robbie drama and all that—”
“Kelli hooked up with the mountain man.”
“Right. Well, it gets worse.”
“Oh, no.”
“Oh, yes. So listen. She wouldn’t come out of Kyle’s trailer to do her job, do anything. She’d wait until Robbie took the truck somewhere, and then she’d come out and go for a hike up the trail, get some fresh air. Mr. Mountain Man told Robbie to his face that she was his squaw now. I mean. So Kyle goes off to guide the next wildlife group from Jackson Hole. This afternoon. So she’s, like, Fuck it, I’m going to town. I’m a Baptist and all, but I sure as shit need a drink, and I’d kinda like to be back at the Motel Eight when Kyle returns from dinner with his clients. It’s where the group stays, and Kyle, too, while he’s guiding. So Robbie, he’s stinging pretty bad, as you can imagine…”
“Crap.”
“Oh, man, you’ll never guess.”
Ren thought of the sweet, goofy kid. Kid—he was probably thirty, a few years younger than Ren was. “He takes the dirt bike into town behind her and tries to kill himself in front of her?”
“Oh, no, that’d be just about normal.”
“What, then?”
“He breaks the lock on Kyle’s Airstream and leaves six cans of tuna fish open inside. Opens all the windows, too.”
“Oh, crap.”
“Right. Guess who comes to dinner within an hour?”
“705.”
“Oh, no. No, we’re talking a special honorary visit.”
“God.”
“Gimme a chew. Please.”
Ren snagged the can of Copenhagen out of his breast pocket and handed it over. Tenner pinched out about a quarter of the can, stuffed it under his upper lip. Now, even under the white mustache, it looked swollen, as if he’d gotten into a fight. He turned and spat over the rail.
“689.”
“Oh, boy.”
“He trundled into camp…” Tenner checked his watch. “Less than an hour ago. I was at the restrooms and I heard the shouts. He turned that trailer into a marvel of shredded aluminum. Looks like a goddamn art installation. Robbie’s got more smarts than I gave him credit for—he put each can in a special hiding place—the fridge, the closet, the oven, the bathroom…”
