Force of Nature (11 page)

“Maybe,” Joe said. “It depends on the weather and circumstances. Everything’s fluid at all times.”

Brueggemann nodded earnestly and shut the door.

“I like him,” Marybeth said, giving Joe a delayed hello peck on the cheek. “He’s an eager beaver. He reminds me of you when you started.”

Joe nodded, and realized how hungry he was. He asked, “Did you give him all of the leftovers?”

“Oops,” she said.

WHILE MARYBETH
cooked Joe an egg sandwich in the kitchen, he said, “Nate was out there.”

He noticed how her back tensed when he said it. She looked over her shoulder from where she stood at the stove. “I had a feeling about that,” she said. “In fact, I knew we could have reached you by cell phone, but I didn’t suggest it to Luke. I thought if you’d hooked up with Nate, you probably wouldn’t want your trainee showing up.”

“You’re right about that,” Joe said.

“So how is he? Was he … involved with those men they found in the boat?”

Said Joe, “Nate’s injured, but he claims he’s okay. And yes, that was him who shot those men in the boat. He says they tried to ambush him and it was self-defense.”

Her eyes got big and she started to ask Joe a question, when she suddenly looked around him and said, “Hello, Lucy. Time for bed?”

“Yeah,” Lucy said. “I wanted to say good night.”

Fourteen-year-old Lucy was in the eighth grade at Saddlestring Middle School. She was blond and green-eyed and lithe—a miniature version of her mother. She was still getting used to not having
her older sister Sheridan in the house, but was using the occasion to bloom into her own personality, which was expressive and good-hearted. She was growing into an attractive and pleasant young lady, Joe thought.

Joe said, “Sorry about missing your speech tonight.”

“It wasn’t a speech,” Lucy said. “It was the first act of the play. I’ve got to have it memorized by the end of the week.”

“And how’s it going?”

“Good,” she said, and flashed a smile.

Sheridan had been an athlete, although not an elite one. Lucy had opted for speech and drama, and had recently been chosen for one of the female leads in
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
.

“My character is
Lucy
Pevensie,” Lucy said, and cued Marybeth.

Marybeth said,
“‘The White Witch? Who’s she?’”

Lucy’s face transformed into someone younger and more agitated, and she said,
“‘She is a perfectly terrible person. She calls herself the Queen of Narnia though she has no right to be queen at all, and all the fauns and dryands and naiads and dwarfs and animals—at least all the good ones—simply hate her. …’”

When she finished, Joe said, “Wow.”

“I always think of Grandma Missy when I say those lines,” Lucy said. “She’s my inspiration.”

Joe laughed and Marybeth said, “Get to bed, Lucy. That was a cheap shot.”

“But a good one,” Joe said, after Lucy had padded down the hallway to her room, pleased with herself for making her dad laugh.

“Don’t encourage her,” Marybeth said.

“Yeah,” sixteen-year-old April said, as she passed her sister in the hallway. “She gets enough of that as it is.”

April was wearing her tough-girl face and a long black T-shirt she slept in that had formerly belonged to Sheridan. Although the shirt
was baggy, it was obvious April filled it out. Joe caught a whiff of wet paint and noted that April had painted her fingernails and toenails black as well.

April had come back after years of being passed from foster family to foster family. She’d seen and done things that couldn’t be unseen or undone. Marybeth and Joe had thought they were on a path to an understanding with April, and then Marybeth had discovered April’s stash of marijuana.

“Good night,” April said, filling a water glass to take to bed with her. Then: “Seven more days of hell.”

Joe and Marybeth exchanged glances, and Marybeth arched her eyebrows.
For a second there
, she seemed to communicate to Joe,
April forgot she was angry with us.

“Maybe,” Marybeth said, “the sentence could be reduced by a day or two for good behavior. But there will have to be some good behavior.”

April turned and flashed a beaming, false smile and batted her lashes. “Good night, my wonderful parents!” she said. “How’s that?”

Joe stifled a smile.

“Not buying it,” Marybeth said. “But close.”

“Why did you paint your nails black?” Joe asked.

April recoiled as if shocked by the stupidity of the question. “Because it matches my mood, of course,” she said.

“Ah,” Joe said.

MARYBETH POURED
herself a glass of wine and sat down at the kitchen table while Joe ate his egg sandwich. After April’s bedroom door closed, she said, “It’s been tough, but in a way this grounding might turn out to be a good thing for all of us, if it doesn’t kill me first.”

Joe raised his eyebrows.

“In a weird way, she seems happier.”

“She does?”

“Not judging by what she says, of course. But she seems to have an inner calm I haven’t noticed since she’s been back,” Marybeth said, sipping at her glass. “Maybe it’s because she finally knows where the boundaries are. Sheridan and Lucy just know, but April, I don’t think, has ever been sure. She probably doesn’t even realize it, and she’d
never
admit it. But I think she might be kind of like my horses: she just needs to know the pecking order and where the fences are and then she’ll be more comfortable.”

Joe finished his sandwich and opened the cupboard door over the refrigerator, where he kept his bottle of bourbon.

Marybeth said, “But judging by the way things usually go, something could always happen that screws things up.”

“Are you thinking about Nate?” Joe asked.

She nodded.

“Me, too,” he said, thinking of what Nate had said earlier. Thinking of Nate’s devotion to Joe’s family, his tenderness toward Sheridan, his protection of Marybeth. How much he’d miss Nate if he never saw him again.

AT THE SAME TIME
, fifteen miles upriver and four and a half miles to the east, Pam Kelly slammed down the telephone receiver and cursed out loud: “Fuck you, too, Bernard!”

Bernard was her insurance agent. He didn’t have any good news.

She spun around in her kitchen on the dirty floor—she’d quit scrubbing it years before when she realized Paul and Stumpy would never learn to take off their muddy boots outside—and jabbed her finger at two yellowed and curling photographs held by magnets to her refrigerator door, Paul squatting next to a dead elk with its tongue lolling, and Stumpy holding the severed head of a pronghorn antelope just above his shoulder, and shouted, “Fuck you, Paul. And fuck you, too, Stumpy! How could you do this to me?”

SHE’D MET
Paul Kelly thirty-two years before at a rodeo in Kaycee, Wyoming. She was chasing a bareback rider across the mountain west named Jim “Deke” Waldrop who had charmed her and deflowered her behind the chutes at her hometown rodeo in North Platte, Nebraska, and she was convinced he’d marry her if she could only
get him to slow down long enough. So she’d borrowed her father’s farm pickup and stolen her mother’s egg money and hit the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association circuit that July, trying to locate Deke and nail him down. She’d missed him in Greeley, caught a glimpse of him getting bucked off in Cody but couldn’t find him afterward, and had a flat tire just outside of Nampa, where she could hear the roar of the crowd in the distant arena as he rode to a 92, and Deke Waldrop, flush with cash, went off to celebrate with his buddies.

With less than ten dollars, Pam had rolled into Kaycee on fumes and a mismatched left rear tire, feeling sick to her stomach—she suspected she was pregnant with Deke’s child—to find not only Deke but Mrs. Waldrop and two towheaded Waldrop boys waiting to watch their dad ride.

She was devastated and furious, and as she returned to the parking lot, she saw a handsome, laconic cowboy climbing out of his ranch pickup that he’d just parked so closely to hers she couldn’t wedge in between them and open her door. It was the last straw. She set upon the stranger, pummeling his chest and shoulders with closed fists, but the man didn’t strike back. Instead, he smiled and said, “Whoa, little lady,” and leaned back so she couldn’t connect a punch to his jaw. She wore out quickly, and he gently clasped her wrists in his hands to still them and he asked if there was anything he could do to help her out, because she was obviously upset.

She’d looked around him through tear-filled eyes and saw the rifle in his gun rack across the back window of his truck. “You can give me that rifle so I can shoot Deke Waldrop,” she’d said. Then a whiff of fried meat from the concession area wafted over them and the smell turned her stomach and she got sick on the hard-packed ground.

He said, “You’re a pistol, all right,” and untied the silk bandanna
from his neck and handed it to her to dry her face and wipe off her mouth. “Name’s Paul Kelly,” he said.

FOR THE NEXT
thirty-two years, she’d remind him that was the first and last act of kindness he’d shown her.

But at the time, it worked. He bought her some ice cream and sat with her on the top row of the bleachers as she cried. Then he took her to his weathered old line shack in the Bighorn Mountains and offered her his bed and didn’t try to jump her. He was working for a local rancher, he told her, fixing fence and rounding up cows to earn enough money to go to college to become a mechanical engineer. He was, she told her mother over the telephone, “almost dashing.”

They married, and Pam convinced her father to cosign on a loan for an ancient log cabin on twenty acres in the foothills of the mountains. It was to be their starter home, and they planned to burn it down and build a real house on the property. But Paul never went to college, and they never built a house, and his stint as a ranch hand was the last steady job he’d ever hold. If it wasn’t for monthly disability checks that came because that asphalt truck ran over his foot after he’d hired on that summer with the county road construction crew, they’d have no steady income during the months when Paul (and later Stumpy) weren’t guiding hunting clients.

And now, she thought, the son-of-a-bitch went and got himself killed and took Stumpy—Deke’s son—with him, leaving her the place and six cows and two horses no one could ride. All that was left of her life was a stack of unpaid bills.

“Fuck you, Paul,” she said again at the photo on the refrigerator. Earlier that afternoon, after the game warden had left, Will Speer, the county coroner, had called to ask her what plans she had for
“making arrangements.” She’d asked him if she could donate Paul’s body to science.

“Will they pay something for him?” she asked. “There’s got to be a college somewhere that wants to see what the inside of a loser looks like.”

The coroner stammered that he didn’t know where to start.

“Find out,” she said, and hung up the phone.

PAM KELLY
was still cursing to herself in the tiny cluttered mudroom as she pulled on a pair of knee-high rubber boots. On top of everything else, the cows and horses had to be fed. She normally ragged on Paul to go out and do it, but he wasn’t there to rag on. Inexplicably, she fought back tears as she buttoned up her barn coat.

Several years before, she’d begged Paul to buy some life insurance. She made the appointment for him with Bernard, the insurance salesman she’d met in Saddlestring who said they could get $100,000 in term life for less than $20 a month. Paul drove to town with the checkbook and came back with a new hunting rifle. He shook it like a war lance and said, “
This
is all the life insurance I need.” Completely misunderstanding what she’d sent him to do, as usual. When she blew up, he’d promised he’d go see the insurance guy later. He never did, and Bernard had just confirmed it.

She looked at her reflection in a cracked, flyspecked mirror next to the door. She was too old, too fat, too crabby, and too used up to ever get another man in her life now.

“It just ain’t
fair
,” she said aloud.

THE COWS
milled around in a mucky pen on the north side of the collapsing old barn, and the two horses were in a corral on the south
side. When she emerged from the cabin, the horses pawed at the soft dirt and whinnied. They wanted to eat. “Calm down,” she said to the mare and her colt.

The cows just looked up at her dumbly, the way they always did.

As she grasped the rusty door latch to the barn, she wondered what she could get for the stock. She’d heard beef prices were on the rise and she figured among all the cattle they weighed maybe five thousand pounds total. There should be some cash in selling the cows, and she sure didn’t want to have to keep feeding them. The hay supply was low, and the bales too heavy for her to stack on her own if she ordered a couple of tons. And the horses? They weren’t worth anything except to a slaughterhouse. The French could eat them, she thought. They liked eating horse meat, she’d heard.

She swung the door back and reached for the light switch, which was mounted on the inside of the doorframe, when a hand grasped her wrist and twisted her arm back. The pain was sudden and excruciating, and she collapsed to her knees, gasping for air. She heard a muffled
pop
, and fireworks burst in front of her eyes. It felt like her arm had been jerked out of the socket.

The light came on, and she looked through the tears and starbursts at the Game Changer, the man she’d seen at her kitchen table talking with Paul, Stumpy, and Ron Connelly. The man who gave her arm another wicked twist.

He said, “I believe we’ve met.”

WHEN THEY WERE SURE
the girls were in their rooms with their doors closed, Joe and Marybeth sat together on the couch and he told her about his conversation with Nate. He left out the part about the falconry website. Although it was his practice to share everything with his wife, in this case he felt the need to hold back a little for her own protection. She wouldn’t agree with his decision—he was sure of it—but Nate had spooked him.