The last ranger, p.8
The Last Ranger, page 8
Ren’s mother, too, was taken with the old coot and would sometimes bring him half-casseroles in her daypack, or pieces of pie, or bags of cookies, and even fifths of bourbon, on her way around one of the loops.
So Ren was already well versed in the outdoors and most happy in wild country by the time his mother took him to Montana. They flew through Denver to Missoula, where one of her college friends had bought a horse facility at the edge of town. “Facility” is a sterile word. The place was on the edge of the Clark Fork, just above its confluence with the Bitterroot at Kelly Island, and it had a log lodge looking over the river where Missy lived with her husband, Dave; and back of the river were red barns and white rail fences and horses and pasture and more horses. To Ren it was a ranch, and paradise.
Ren and his mother stayed for a week. Dave was some kind of financier and a great cook, and they had dinner every night on the back porch, and Ren had his first glasses of wine—half-glasses—and his first taste of how the stuff lubricated the storytelling. Which fascinated him—the tales did, since Missy and Dave were well read and well traveled and they had senses of humor and could spin a good yarn. He noticed that his mother mostly listened with deep appreciation, and he saw how her eyes grew shiny and her listening more avid and her laughter looser as the dinners wore on. It was the first time he noticed how many glasses of wine she drank. One after another.
It was late July, and the rivers ran clear and every morning he and his mother took off after breakfast and fished the Clark Fork. They brought lunch in small daypacks, and they would eat their sandwiches in the shade of the massive narrowleaf cottonwoods on the island and wave at the passing drift boats, and Ren recognized the lingering smell of deer from the beds back in the trees. His mother was so at home and so peaceful she didn’t say much as they ate, but she leaned into him and tousled his hair and complimented him on his fishing, and when the wind shifted upstream it blew strands of her hair across his face and he felt something that he could name as simply as those trails back home: Joy. Unadulterated joy. Joy undulled by fear or any anticipation of collapse. Joy sufficient to itself and at home in the world, and so entwined with the beauty of the spot and the warming breeze and the sounds of water it was almost too wonderful to bear. But he did bear it. And they would wipe the crumbs from their mouths on the arms of their lightweight shirts and pick up their rods and wade into the cold current once more. Sometimes they were out until the sun hit the mountains, which was very late, and they would have to run home, sticking to the game trails away from the banks.
Ren leaned into the railing of the Perk’s deck, and the memory of the trip was sweet but burned going down—like single-malt Scotch, which was his mother’s drink of choice. Because he would never feel joy like that with his mother again.
After they returned home from that trip to Montana, things changed. First of all, Ed Hedges got sick. He began to cough, and he grew thin, and Ren noticed over the next couple of months that he was weaker and trying to hide it. His mother brought him food more often, and one afternoon in mid-October Ren and his father dropped off two pickup loads of cured and split firewood, about a cord and a half. Pop, who didn’t spend as much time with Ed, wanted to take him down to the hospital in Brattleboro or, barring that, have his friend Dr. Dixon come up and see him. His mother, on the other hand, was adamant: Ed didn’t want to see a doctor, he refused, he’d rather die, he’d attended to both parents and a sister in deathbeds in that very hospital, and there was no way on God’s earth he was going out with tubes and beeps, he was just fine where he was, thank you very much.
“We can’t just let him wither up and blow away,” Pop insisted, and his mother shot back, “Yes, we can! That’s exactly what we’re going to do if that’s what’s in the cards.”
There was also Aileen, the ex-nurse who worked at the co-op where Ed and everybody else got their groceries. She had befriended Ed at the store when he’d first moved over from Dummerston. He came in on Thursdays, and she nudged him to share his story, and little by little, over the stainless deli counter, he told her. She was about thirty, rawboned, with a tight mouth and flat blue eyes, and had left nursing for undisclosed reasons. Ren’s mother hated her. She had overheard Aileen once tell a co-worker that Oprah was a pig and a communist, and suspected Aileen of being rabidly racist. But Ed didn’t—hate her. He gravitated to her, maybe because it seemed she just wanted to listen. It turned out she was a deacon at the Baptist church in Brattleboro, and after a few months she convinced Ed to get his groceries on Sundays so that she could drive him to the bigger town for church. When Ed got sick, Aileen somehow got him pills for the pain, and dedicated herself to his care. If Ren’s mother was on her way up the hill with a casserole and saw Aileen’s Explorer parked at the end of the good dirt, she turned around.
One day, a week before Thanksgiving, Ren’s mother came back from a walk in the first snowfall. She was carrying Squirt, and she stood inside the door and forgot to set him down, and the snow melted on her shoulders and hat. Ren saw that she was sobbing. She said that Ed had shot himself, that he was dead.
No ambulance could climb the rutted track and exposed ledge rock to the green trailer, so that night the sheriff drove his own ATV up the mountain and took the body down. He and his deputy loaded it into a department Suburban parked at Florence’s—the last house on the county road. Many neighbors had gathered there. The deputy pulled away, and the sheriff asked Ren’s parents if he could have a word with them. So they all drove back to Ren’s house, and his mother made coffee, and they sat at the kitchen table. Ren sat, too, and made himself quiet; nobody seemed to notice or mind that he was there.
The sheriff said, “It’s my understanding that he was quite ill.”
“He was,” Ren’s mother said. Her face was still tearstained, or tearstained again. “It almost seemed like tuberculosis. Does anyone get that nowadays?”
The sheriff didn’t answer. Pop said, “We tried to get him to see a doctor, but he wouldn’t have it.”
“You all visited him often.”
Ren’s mother nodded. “We brought him food sometimes. More lately.”
“That pile of cordwood?”
Pop nodded.
The sheriff nodded, too, but to himself, Ren thought. The sheriff worked his jaw. His eyes lingered on Ren’s mother and back to Pop.
“He shot himself,” the sheriff said. “Appears he’d had enough.”
Ren’s mother trembled, a wave of body shudder. She said, “It looks that way, Sheriff. I think he was suffering a great deal, but he’d never say it.”
The sheriff said, “You were bringing up a Tupperware of mac and cheese. On a late-afternoon walk, as you often did—is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“How was he when you found him?”
Ren’s mother closed her eyes. “Shot,” she said. “Lying back on his bed. Blood and bits of him were on the ceiling.”
“Was he dead?”
Ren’s mother’s eyes sprang open. “Of course he was dead. He’d propped the shotgun under his chin and pulled the trigger—Jesus.”
Now the sheriff studied her. He worked his jaw and he watched her, and if he wanted to say something he didn’t. Then he said, “Did you hear the shot?”
Ren’s mother hesitated. “No.”
“You were too far down the hill.”
Now Ren’s mother sat up straight in the chair. “I don’t know where I was, Sheriff. I didn’t hear it.”
He nodded. He sipped his coffee, set the cup on the grained cherry. And said, “How do you know he set the shotgun under his chin?”
Ren felt a pressure drop in the house. Silence. The woodstove cricked with heat. Outside the windows, gray snowflakes fell and swirled in the last light. Almost no wind.
“Thing is,” the sheriff said, “he shot himself with a Beretta White Wing over-under with a twenty-eight-inch barrel. Mr. Hedges was not a tall man by any means.” He let that settle. He put two fingers through the handle of his coffee mug. “There’s no way he could reach the trigger. There was nothing like a forked stick near the body, or a crescent wrench, or anything he might have tried to use to extend his reach.”
Now Ren saw his father turn to his mother, and Pop’s face lost color. His lips trembled. He didn’t say a word. But the sheriff did. He said, “Now I’m gonna ask you again, Mrs. Hopper: how was Mr. Hedges when you entered the trailer?”
She wasn’t looking at any of them now. She was staring out the window at the snow falling in the dusk. “Dead,” she murmured.
* * *
That night, Ren lay in his bed and heard his parents arguing. He’d heard it before, but not for a while. And unlike the other times, this argument did not resolve but intensified over the next days. Frustrated, angry voices slipped into his dreams. His father, who had always laughed so much, now laughed less and came home later. She, who had spent every waking hour outside when she wasn’t teaching math at the elementary school down the hill, came in earlier and poured a Scotch.
Two weeks after Ed died, there was a service at the Baptist church in Brattleboro. Ren’s family attended, although with some reluctance. Ren’s mother believed that Aileen, the former nurse, had gotten Ed addicted to pain pills and so made him dependent on her and her God.
It was not a long service, thank goodness, but the minister had compared Ed to Job, which Ren’s mother thought was over the top and had railed against on the drive home. She said that pumping Ed up into something saintly obscured the rare courage and decency of the man. And during much of the service, Aileen had twisted her head and glared at the three of them.
In January, Ren turned thirteen and insisted on no party. Two weeks later, near the end of the month, he came home from a cross-country ski meet and the house was dark and empty. His father must have been still at work—he was an architect at a firm in Brattleboro. His mother must be taking a night walk on the road up to Dusty Ridge. Or maybe drinking wine in the dark, or maybe napping. Ren called out. No bark and scrabble of little Squirt on the slate floor. No Mom. Ren switched on the kitchen light and saw an envelope on the round table. His name alone on the white field, in her script. He remembered now that his hand had shaken hard as he picked it up. So hard he had to open it and lay it again on the cherrywood to read it. Because he realized that he had feared this moment and known it was coming. For months, maybe. He read. And the gist of it was that she loved him more than anything and that she couldn’t tolerate it anymore and was not coming back. And that she took Squirt because she needed a companion in her grief and he had Pop.
Ren had no idea what “it” was. The thing she could not bear. Ed Hedges had died—that seemed to be when things turned—and it was heartbreaking for all of them but not something to leave over. When he asked his father that night, Pop just looked away and shook his head.
She moved to Keene Valley in the Adirondacks, close to the Ausable River, where her father had taught her to fish. And though she made efforts to see Ren, and invited him to come fish with her, or to canoe Long Lake and the Fish Creek Ponds, he always refused. It was not so much the idea of the trip, it was that when she called she was indulgent and sentimental and her words slurred.
And he did not forgive her then or later, for stealing the possibility of a family in which he might have experienced again the kind of happiness he had known on the banks of the Clark Fork and the Bitterroot. Also, he’d grown attached to the dog.
* * *
His reverie was broken by the shout of his name from the Perk’s little window. He made his way between the tables, thanked Paul, brought his drink back to his spot in the sun, and turned into the railing. Just a few more minutes here; it was so intensely pleasant, even if the memories were painful.
He pried the plastic lid off the cup and inhaled the sweet milk and bitter espresso and sipped. Yum. He made an effort to think nothing. The clamor of conversations behind him intruded again, but he didn’t mind. He heard the four fishermen he had noticed at a table on the other side—their voices carried. They were from the Midwest somewhere, maybe Minnesota—they had the flat inflection—one was talking about his “firstborn” moving to Colorado to be a fishing guide, they were proud of him because he walked in Christ. From the table just behind him in low murmurs he heard just snatches: “Pretty proud of their coffee, ain’t they?…Some ranger found her in the trap…the prick that’s been harassing…” Ren held his breath, turned his ear barely. One had an accent, maybe Arkansas or West Tennessee. The one who had called him a prick. He heard the scrape of a chair pushed back. “Let’s roll,” the other said.
Ren turned as the men stood. One was tall, athletic, broad-shouldered, with a trimmed black beard. He wore duck work pants and a battered cap bearing the POW-MIA black patch: You Are Not Forgotten. The other man was short, in thick black-framed glasses, clean-shaven, soft at the edges, in a Realtree camouflage windbreaker with a large Livingston Archery logo on the chest. The words were crowned by a recurve bow. The man was forty-something and maybe ten years older than his buddy.
He nodded to the two, said, “Mind if I snag your table?” The tall man barely glanced, said, “Have at it.” Yep, Tennessee accent. “Thanks.” Ren watched the men climb into a cement-gray late-model F-250 dually with a compound bow racked into the rear window. The short man drove. Ren noticed the license plate. It was easy to remember: it said “BRDHED2.” A broadhead is a hunting arrow, a shaft tipped with tapered razors.
He’d been planning to enjoy his flat white on the deck in the sun but now he was wide awake and impatient. He crossed the street and started the pickup and nosed into the space the men had left. He’d get the best Wi-Fi signal right here. He drank his espresso and steamed milk in the front seat, with a good view of the coffee drinkers on the deck, and he opened the laptop mounted to the dash.
* * *
Ren did not mind the investigative side of his job. In truth, he didn’t get to exercise it much. Most of his law enforcement duties entailed handing out summonses to tourists for doing dumb stuff. When there was a traffic accident, it was not usually hard to tell who was at fault; if the accident involved a death, he took photos of everything and took statements, and a special team came over from Mammoth. The poaching was his domain also, but if he needed immediate help, the two Montana game wardens posted in Gardiner were cross-commissioned in the park and would drive over. There was also U.S. Fish and Wildlife in Bozeman. The feds had asked to be kept in the loop on the shooting and skinning of the wolf last year, but they had only actually come in once on a wildlife crime: it was Ren’s first year, and a poaching ring out of Salt Lake had killed three grizzlies in the park and had taken only their gallbladders.
Now Ren brightened the screen of the Toughbook and opened the National Crime Information Center database and searched for Les Ingraham. He pulled a memo pad from the center console and slid the pen from the wire spiral and began to jot a string of notes. Then he unclipped the mic from the radio mounted to the headliner and keyed it and called for Ty.
“Yuh,” he answered.
“You on the pass?”
“Almost to the top. What’s up?”
“Did you know Les had a sheet?”
“Yeah. Misdemeanor assault, when he was like eighteen.”
“No, aggravated assault. There’s an arrest but no prosecution.”
“Happens a lot with teens. If I remember, it was a fight.”
“You’re not sure what it was?”
“Before my time. I knew him at Missoula. Only reason I know at all is ’cuz I was mad once or twice, just like you are, and looked him up.”
“Okay. You got another minute?”
“I’m just driving. Shoot.”
“What do you know about Livingston Archery?”
“It’s an archery shop…in Livingston.”
“Ty?”
“Sorry. What did you want to know?”
“Who owns it?”
“Lawton Krebbs.”
Ren made a note. He said, “Pudgy guy in thick black glasses?”
“About right.”
“He into anything?”
“Boston cream donuts, mostly.”
“No sheet?”
“Don’t think so, never checked. Why?”
“He have a good buddy, six two, two thirty, fit, broad-shouldered, short black beard, accent maybe Tennessee?”
“Dan Chesnik. Whole different story there.”
“How so?”
“They’ve got a club in Livingston. The Pathfinders. Advertised as a men’s club defending and fostering traditional values. Whatever the hell that means. Not your typical. Bunch of wealthy ranchers belong—seventh-generation ranchers with big spreads. It’s basically a militia. Not on the watch list yet, but it should be. Don’t have to tell you that they have an issue with federal land. Protected land. Think all of it should be opened to grazing, hunting, mining. Logging. Or else privatized. But that’s not an uncommon view. Truth be told, I wouldn’t mind myself if the park opened an itsy-bitsy elk season. Anyhow, Chesnik is one of the founders.”
