The last ranger, p.17
The Last Ranger, page 17
“He wanted you to press charges?”
“Yes.”
Ren could imagine Jansen’s face, thin, a lifelong runner—the dismay and pain and wonder of the memory playing over it. “I didn’t—press charges—nor did the DA. I’ve come to find out that very few people on the planet know how to give a real apology. He did.”
God. Ren thanked Nils Jansen and started the truck and pulled back onto the park road.
* * *
He turned east, figured he’d stop in at the gatehouse; he hadn’t checked in with Donna and Ray for a while. He liked it there; it was no more than a shack, or dollhouse, but they always had coffee on and they were always glad to see him. It was like docking at a tiny island where they were eager for news of the wider world. The last few days, it seemed he was always speeding through.
He took his time driving now, enjoying the open road and fast-warming air. Focus on that, he thought. He might have been about to hum, but then he saw the traffic jam ahead and finished his thought: Maybe I’m in the wrong job. A fireman probably shouldn’t secretly wish the whole neighborhood would burn down…He knew even before he hit the lights and pulled over beside the line of traffic that this was gonna be all about Mrs. Moose.
* * *
Dense woods on the right side of the road, but on the left were open groves of mostly lodgepole and fir in thick grass along the creek. The moose loved it. Mrs. Moose had been hanging around with her calf. Which created stellar photographic opportunities and one of the trickiest human-wildlife dynamics in the park. Because it’s a fact that moose are one of the most dangerous animals in the United States, injuring many more people than, say, bears, and a mother moose with calf can be particularly tetchy. This was a big female, and she had been, all in all, pretty laid back about the crowds. But there were limits. Ren zigzagged between cars stopped in both lanes and became alarmed when he heard what he knew by now was the collective hum of a score of visitors murmuring to each other, “No way! Are you seeing that?” He squeezed himself through a line of photographers at the edge of the pavement and had to take at least a split second to digest the scene.
Down in the thick grass, halfway to a stand of pines, were a mother and a father. He knew they were parents because their daughter was ten yards ahead of them, holding out an apple. She was about six. And about eight yards past her was the gangly calf, all legs and ears and little hump. Her long ears were twitching forward and back and her neck was extended, her wet nose inhaling the sweet aroma and wavering toward the apple as if it possessed agency of its own. Cute. Mom and Dad thought so. Look, two little ones, reaching across the human/wild-animal barrier. Dad had his camera up, probably on video mode, and Mom was urging on her own calf: Ren heard, “Aow, so cute! That’s right, honey, just like the horsey, remember?”
Well, it wasn’t just like the horsey. Mrs. Moose had her own ears flat back and the fur on her hump was raised, a bad sign. He could hear a low grunt. The little girl was in mortal danger, no exaggeration. Ren processed it all in a single second and then jumped and slid down the steep bank.
He went straight for the little girl. He didn’t give a shit, frankly, about the parents, except that it was probably no fun being an orphan. His dash frightened the calf, who shied back, thank God, and bolted toward her mother. Mrs. Moose had already been triggered, however, and Ren knew that once a moose gets an idea it’s very difficult to dissuade her. She lowered her head and half stomped, half pawed the ground, and grunted again, and Ren scooped up the girl and without breaking stride veered right back past the parents so that they would form the first line of defense. The girl shrieked, which was a perfect response. But his priority was to get her clear of all danger, and so he did not unholster his pepper spray or try to make himself the object of Mrs. Moose’s ire. He didn’t stop until he had charged up the bank and set the girl on her feet and told a woman in her forties who held binocs and whose mouth was open, “Here, take her hand! Do not, under any circumstances, let go. Understand?” He squatted beside the girl, level with her face, and said, fast and as gently as he could muster in his haste, “What’s your name?”
“Eva.”
“Okay, Eva, you stay right here for a minute with this nice lady, okay? I’m going to get your parents, okay?”
She nodded and he was off, jumping down half the bank. Too late. The parents stared at the huge animal—who snorted now and bunched—and they turned back toward their daughter, confused, alarmed, terrified—one second they had the perfect Instagram shot, the next their kid had vanished in thin air, and now…
Mrs. Moose charged. She bunched and shot forward, head down like a battering ram, but Ren knew that that was not what would maim or kill these people. It would be the sharp and flailing hooves. From the road, from the couple, came a cry, part gasp, part shout, and the moose, who might as well have been breathing fire, closed in a flash to within twenty feet of Mom and Dad and…skidded and stopped dead. Dad was in front of Mom—gotta give him that—arms up as if crucified, his mouth an O of terror—and she was crouched behind him, shrieking, arms over the back of head and neck in nuclear-attack position. But the moose had stopped short. A bluff charge. Her hackles were stiff and straight up, and her head lifted, and for a moment she was a picture of outrage, her muscled hump and chest and shoulders dark with sweat and shining in the sun. And then she reared back and turned and trotted toward her baby, who was back in the shadows of the trees, not certain what all the fuss was about but certain there was a fuss.
Ren called back to the nice woman holding Eva’s hand and asked her to hold it for one more minute. He loped across the grass. Mom and Dad were still partially paralyzed and in semi-shock. In just a few seconds they would catch sight of their child and nothing he said would reach them.
“Look at me,” he ordered.
They did. It took a second for their eyes to focus.
“Are you okay?”
They both nodded like zombies.
“Good. That was close, right?”
Nod, nod.
“Too close. Way too close. Did you know that there is nothing in this park more dangerous than a cow moose with calf?”
The woman nodded. The man shook his head. His jaw was slack.
“They cause many more injuries in the U.S. than grizzly bears. I believe your little girl was in mortal danger. She could easily have been killed.”
He let that sink in. The mom started to shake.
“Okay,” Ren said gently. “Please, don’t get close to any wildlife again. Rule of thumb in the park is a hundred yards. Okay?”
They both blinked, as if staring into sun, but the sun was behind them.
“Okay, go get your daughter. She’s probably a little traumatized. Go on.”
They went. He had spoken calmly but he was more than pissed. Had the moose truly charged and made contact, she would probably have been put down. The calf, too, because she was still nursing. How many innocent lives had been lost in service to Instagram? He waited until the couple had clambered up the bank and disappeared, and then he walked back to his truck.
* * *
Why did he ever think he could do this job? The appeal was that he could live in a wild place, be out in it every day, make a living. Well. He should have been an offshore fisherman or a surveyor. Or a biologist. PR, which is what he spent the rest of the day doing, was becoming less and less his forte.
He continued on to the gatehouse and shared a Mountain Dew with Donna and Ray, who kept a mini-fridge next to the desk. Then he turned around and dove back into the park, cruising the road all the way back to Tower, directing traffic at the jams, stopping where tourists with spotting scopes had gathered off the road, answering questions. He made a valiant effort. But it was the anger again. He couldn’t quell it. He conversed with visitors while his spirit begged him to flee. He could not flee. People waved him over. They asked directions, they asked about the caching behavior of grizzly bears—there was a boar on a bend of the river feeding on a cow elk—they asked how to tell the difference between a vulture and an eagle, they even asked where was the closest cold beer. He could relate. He wondered himself if he’d rather be in a dark, cool bar with an iced longneck than out on this road. Rather be anywhere else. The anger was a tightness behind the sternum he could not shake. Its source was manifold. He could not point solely to an ignorant couple with a child and an apple, or entitled rich kids with a three-hundred-thousand-dollar camper truck and a speargun…or to poachers, or even to Les Ingraham. It was all of them and more, and deeper, and the reasons ramified. He really needed a break. There was no break.
Whining again.
Not whining.
What, then?
I feel like I’m choking.
Aw, poor guy. There is a classmate of yours fighting fires in California right now on his third month who will not be home to help his wife give birth to their son. There is—
Not helping.
Suck it up.
He did. He drove to the Tower Ranger Station and picked up his mail. The envelopes held a Trout Unlimited membership renewal, an electronic paycheck deposit receipt. There was a postcard from his dad. His father had remarried—the Putney property assessor—nine years ago and they were, apparently, on vacation in Zihuatanejo. The card featured a Corona on the arm of a beach chair in the foreground, and a breaking wave with a rocky island behind it. On the back the scrawl said simply, “There’s a reason that guy in Shawshank Redemption always dreamed of coming here. We’ll all go together next time. Miss you, Ren. Pop”
We’ll all go together next time. That would be nice. He missed his father, too.
Something about the promise. We’ll all go. Did his father know he was lonely? That he was always lonely, no matter how many people he had around him?
Tower was pretty much just an intersection with a compact Park Service–brown building and a gas pump. Inky was in; the other two enforcement rangers were on the road. She was behind the counter, where she would sell park fishing licenses and hand out maps all afternoon. Nobody loved the job, and the three traded off.
“Zihuatanejo looks nice,” she said.
“Everything looks nice in mid-September.”
“Right? I was even dreaming about visiting my sister in San Antonio.”
“That sounds fun.”
“It’s never fun. Her husband is the biggest mansplainer on the planet, and we always get in a wicked fight, and he always kicks me out before my flight home.”
“Damn. Where do you go?”
“Well, it costs two hundred fifty dollars to change the flight, so I always figure I’ll just keep the return ticket and spend that money on a few nights at the Alamo Inn—there’s three of ’em—and I sightsee and read, and meet my sister for lunch without Josh. Did you ever sightsee in San Antonio?”
Ren shook his head. He felt a little better already.
“They have this historical movie they play on the side of a church. It’s really cool. Not being sarcastic.” She smiled. “You’ve been busy lately.”
“I guess.”
“Those kids with the Mog and the speargun really pissed off the judge. They wanted to go on vacation, too, I guess. To Belize, to scuba-dive. Vacation from vacation. They started whining about it.”
Ouch. Is that what he’d been doing, in his head? “I heard,” he said.
“He made them spend two nights in jail.”
Ren fist-bumped her and thanked her. He checked his watch: 4:15. Good. From here, going straight north through Mammoth, he’d make it to Livingston in under two hours. Plenty of time to have a barbecue dinner at Zach’s before his date with the Pathfinders. Shouldn’t be too many folks so early; in fact, tonight it shouldn’t really get crowded until seven o’clock.
Chapter Eleven
Dinner at Zach’s should have been on the Park Service. He was working, after all. But he had told no supervisor about his investigation into the group, said nothing about his suspicions. If anyone in Special Investigations was alarmed by the increasing incidents of vandalism and poaching, and the mounting evidence that they were organized, it would have been news to the rangers on the ground. So he was on his own.
“Hey, I’m going to use Cell Block Six to change,” he had said to Inky. It’s what they called the small back room where the station’s rangers wrote their reports and played cribbage.
“Be my guest,” she said. “Promise I won’t look.”
And when he emerged in jeans, dress boots, and a flannel snap shirt, and settled the black Stetson on his head, she whistled low and long. “Someone’s gonna get lucky tonight,” she said.
He waved. He honestly hoped she was right.
He’d been wrong about the crowd. When he pulled into the sun-blasted gravel parking lot at five-fifty, the place was already packed. Rows of pickups, flatbed ranch trucks carrying water tanks with coiled lariats hung from rifle racks, stakebeds with goosenecks and loops of orange baling twine slung from the rails, and, at the edges, in the shade of the cottonwoods along the river and up along the ball fields, the duallies hauling four- and six-horse trailers. A day riding the range wasn’t going to keep anyone from Saturday barbecue at Zach’s.
He drove past slowly and looped back toward the town center and parked in deep shade at the edge of a lot belonging to a closed craft store. He walked back the half-mile; he could smell smoked meat for most of the distance.
Zach’s was a low log building with a narrow porch and potted geraniums hanging from the eaves. As soon as he pushed through the double glass doors he was hit with more than the roast of barbecue: there was the toasted sweetness of fresh-baked pie crust, the heady aroma of French fries, a tannic whiff of iced tea. And the noise: clatter of plates hitting wood, the steel ring of a spatula knocking the grill, the call of waitress to her cook, ting of the counter bell, and beneath it all, like a groundswell, the clamor of conversation. It was festive, almost celebratory. Why not? It was Saturday, end of the week, the summer had brought rains, the fall was coming clear and crisp, and dishes piled with maybe the best barbecue on earth were hitting the tables in an almost syncopated rhythm.
From where he stood he could see two rooms, the red-check-covered tables almost all full with what looked to be families, ranchers in sweat-stained cowboy hats just off rides checking stock, a men’s softball team in purple jerseys, couples of every age. Ren understood immediately why people came from all over the county to eat here. And why the place worked for semi-clandestine meetings: everybody was already here; a convergence of trucks would attract little attention, and a back room amidst the hubbub would be almost as secure from eavesdropping as a sound booth.
A young woman, maybe college age, in blue apron and carrying a tray with baskets of fries, breezed by so close and fast he felt the wind, and as she did she half turned and said, “Be right with ya!” She came back, the tray now full of half-empty iced tea glasses; she blew a strand of hair off her face and said, “Just one?” He nodded. Another girl was passing, heading for the kitchen, and the first handed the tray off seamlessly, and without a single word; Ren thought of a relay race in track. He loved watching a pro, whatever the work. She swept a menu off a rack without looking and over her shoulder said, “Follow me,” and he did.
There was a small table, just cleared, in the corner. She handed him the laminated menu. “Tea?” she said.
“Sure.”
“Sweet?”
“Sure.”
She breezed off. He twisted in his chair. Above him on his left was a black-and-white photo of “Main Street Livingston 1892”—rutted mud in the road, wagons, boardwalks. The mandatory false front advertising “Dry Goods.” It didn’t look like much fun—there was no Zach’s, no softball, no sweet tea. No Pathfinders. He checked his watch: 6:28. Plenty of time. A sweating plastic glass appeared on the tablecloth. “Ready?” she said. She was smiling down at him, head cocked to one side, studying. He was dressed like a rancher or a hand, but he didn’t really look like one. He had deep crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes and his hands were dark and weathered, but. There was something about him. Ren read the question in her eyes, and an alarm bell sounded. He was relieved that he hadn’t tried anything cute like gluing on a fake mustache. A round tray was tucked under her arm, and she held up an order pad and a pen.
“Sure,” he said. “Whatever combo you recommend.”
Her smile remained but she narrowed her eyes, quizzical. My first mistake, he thought. Or maybe second, or third. Maybe I shouldn’t have ventured out into open ground. Maybe I should have ordered straight off the menu. “You been here before?” she said.
“Nope,” he said. Best to stick to true things. “But I heard it’s the best anywhere.” He was bracing for another personal question, like did he work on a ranch in the valley, but her eyes were steady and they roved over his face, and then she said, “I wouldn’t know. Never been to any other barbecue ’cept Pete’s in Bozeman and, between you and me, it sucked.”
He laughed. “Pete’s my brother,” he said.
Her eyes widened, and she put the hand holding the pen to her mouth. “Oh! Jeez. Sorry!”
“Just kidding.”
She blew out, snorted. She was laughing and she wanted to slug him in the shoulder; he knew that if he were her relative he’d have a bruise right now. Okay, good, he had derailed her curiosity or suspicion for the moment; now they were buds.
“Pork ribs, brisket, chicken,” he said.
“Works for me.” She wrote it down, tongue in the corner of her mouth. Then her eyes came up, lit with play. “My mom says it’s better to be decisive, even when you’re not sure. The world likes you better.”
