Nothing Short of Dying (9 page)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

A
nd so it began. Their conversation became more friendly and intimate with each passing minute, and soon it sounded like they'd known each other their whole lives. Allie traded in her tough-girl persona for that of a protective older sister. It was a side I hadn't seen, but it looked good on her.

We continued north on the narrow two-lane state highway.

I tried to pay attention to the road and the surrounding scenery as the young ladies carried on, sisters now due to shared calamity. Though the subjects were varied, the conversations revolved around a central theme: men.

It was apparently an inexhaustible topic: problems with men, men they were trying to get away from, the stupidity of men, the horror and brutality of men. Sitting in the backseat, I felt like a human sacrifice, burnt on the pyres of gender. Although I resisted their blanket condemnation, a part of me had to concede their point: men tend to make a mess of things.

As the ladies' diatribe continued, the Jeep worked hard to pull us up the incline that would summit at Rio Blanco Hill. In front of us in every direction was rough, wild, and
empty country—my favorite kind. The mountains outside the window, the Hogback and the Roan, brought me back to my early teens. At thirteen I'd started driving around Junction's surrounding mountains and deserts to put meat on the table. Mom worked as a waitress, but between deadbeat boyfriends and her kids, the money didn't go very far. So I supplemented by hunting. It was illegal, of course—both my driving and the constant poaching—but we needed to eat. It was the beginning of my professional hunting career.

It was rough in the beginning: being alone in the mountains, figuring out the art of wilderness survival all by myself. Lightning, rock slides, poor driving, and a fledgling sense of direction had all come close to ending it for me.

Looking back on it now, I had to admit that those years in the hills were about more than obtaining food; they were also a way to escape. I was a big reader even then and my heroes were mountain men like Hugh Glass, Jim Baker, Liver-eating Johnson, and John Colter. They belonged to a different age. I guess I did too.

I broke away from my reminiscing in time to hear Allie and Katy conversing about the basics of vehicular locomotion. Allie was saying what she'd do if she were to fix the hundreds of problems with the Jeep. Katy was taking it all in and telling Allie that she was planning on becoming a chef when she grew up.

I stretched out in the back, trying to sleep, but ended up thinking about Jen.

WHEN I TURNED TEN, DAD
met a seventeen-year-old lot lizard while he was driving his Peterbilt to Nevada, and called Mom to tell her he wouldn't be coming home. Mom started dating
random drunks, then Ski. Deb and Angie were both gone, one marrying rich and the other getting her accounting degree. After the Ski debacle, there was what Jen and I called “The Year of Paxton”—the worst year of our lives.

Jimmy Paxton was a concrete contractor who ran a crew of ten illegals. They poured and formed foundations for the new subdivisions in town. When Paxton was working, he made decent money and was usually reasonable. He was working when Mom met him at the breakfast place where she slung plates. A month after they met, the housing market crashed and he was unemployed. He became a different person then—an absolute psychopath, bent on control and violence.

Mom wasn't allowed to work. Paxton had a little savings and thought he'd be back to work soon, so there was no need to have her out of the house where other men could look at her. Even though we were living on less money than before, it didn't matter. The market was coming back, he said. Soon Mom wasn't allowed to leave the house at all. Ever. Then she wasn't allowed to wear her favorite clothes. Paxton bought clothes for her, and if she wore something else, he'd break a rib.

He broke a lot of ribs. He'd taken to using a chopped-off piece of rebar from his never-moved work truck as the rod that would not be spared. When he moved in with us, after his big house was foreclosed on, there were rules that we all had to follow to keep our bones together. Mom couldn't voice any opinions. Jen and I couldn't talk in front of him. Any resistance was answered with precision strikes of steel. While Paxton was out looking for work, all of us went to the hospital with injuries that we said were the result of doors and stairs.

I was older then, and stronger, and had been hunting to supplement the meager meals that Paxton's savings allowed, but I still was no match for the man. I tried twice: once when he knocked a good book out of my hand, and the second when he called Jen a slut. Ski had been big, but what Paxton lacked in size he made up for in work-hardened muscles and rage. Both times I tried to stand up to the man, I was pummeled into putty. These were times that Mom was sleeping off a drunk. Paxton never hit us when she was awake. After the second futile attempt, I gave up and tried to follow the rules.

Jen didn't. She was older and a hell of a lot more rebellious. When I was away, and Mom was passed out, Jen got the losing end of the rebar. Two of the times were bad enough for hospital stays and visits from child welfare. Mom and Paxton covered it up well enough to keep us together. Now I wish they hadn't.

Because on a night in November, after I'd turned sixteen, Paxton destroyed our family. I came down from the mountain with deer meat and found Jen cowering in the living room corner. Paxton was beyond drunk, well into black-out mode, trying to suck the last drops out of the second empty vodka bottle on the table. Mom was asleep. We thought.

Jen had told Paxton that he should either go to sleep or leave. He told her that she was an uppity little bitch. Jen threw a vase of dead flowers, which bounced off Paxton's wide jaw. I swung my rifle at his head, which he caught with one iron hand and took from me, then slid the bolt out and tossed it on the couch.

I tried to kick him in the crotch, but he twisted and caught the boot on his leg. He took the boot and tossed it toward the moldy ceiling, sprawling me on my back. He grabbed the
rebar from the center of the coffee table and started stumbling toward Jen.

That's when Mom came out.

She was red-eyed and slurry, saying she needed one more cigarette. And for the first time, she saw Paxton hurt her daughter.

The rest happened in a hazy blur. For years I've been alternately trying to remember and forget what happened next.

Mom screamed and lunged at Paxton. Jen blocked one swing of iron with her arm, scratched at his face, drew blood, and caught a second swing of rebar on the skull. She dropped.

As I was getting to my feet, Mom was tearing and slashing and slapping at Jimmy. Jimmy tried to smile but was too drunk. I picked up the rifle, grabbed it by the barrel, and got in a lucky swing that connected with his neck and made him stagger against the coatrack.

But I didn't get lucky twice. The adrenaline in Jimmy's system must have overridden the alcohol and he came right at me, no stagger this time, and laid into me like he'd never done before. I didn't last more than a few seconds. The world went black.

I came to the next morning with a headache that has yet to be rivaled. From my spot on the floor I could see Jen, still out, her face caked with dried blood. She was lying beneath a skull-size hole in the paneled wall. Scanning the rest of the room, I saw Mom by the door.

I wished I hadn't.

There was a little linoleum section just inside the door, where we took off our shoes. The uncarpeted area was once yellow but had turned black. Completely covered by the blood that had leaked out of Mom's crushed skull. The walls and ceiling of the kitchen and the front door were covered in
crimson splotches. The house smelled of piss and shit, vomit and blood. I puked harder and longer than I have on any drunk night since.

When I finally was able to get to my feet, I checked Jen's pulse. She was still alive. There was no reason to check Mom's. No one can live when their head looks like it was trampled by buffalo. After the shock, and the tears, I called 911. Then I searched the house for Paxton.

He was gone.

THE JEEP STOPPED AND WOKE
me up.

“Where are we?” I asked, sitting up and adjusting my hat.

“Meeker, according to the sign,” Allie said. “Katy and I are starving. You got any money?”

I pulled out my money roll and peeled off a couple of twenties, handed them to the women, then scanned my surroundings. We were in a tiny parking lot in a tiny town, at one of the apparently rare convenience stores.

Inside the store were aisles of junk and crap food. Nutrient-­free jerky, chips, cupcakes, and candy bars, all full of modern chemicals. I read the ingredients on a few food-like items. Tertiary butylhydroquinone, hydroxytoluene, and sodium benzoate. I couldn't pronounce them out loud, and had no idea what they did. I wasn't sure the people who put them in there knew either. I wouldn't have been surprised if in another twenty years a new wave of cancer was attributed to one or more of these unpronounceable things. I wanted a fresh hunk of elk meat and mountain spring water. I settled for jerky, a big cup of coffee, and a pickled egg. I prepaid for gas, then stood by the door to wait for the girls.

There were a couple of clean tables next to the coffeepots.
Wrinkled old men wearing hats sat at the tables talking, cussing, and discussing, their loud elderly voices drifting across the store. They didn't notice me or the girls. It was a common sight almost everywhere I'd been. Old men gather, separate from the women, letting the wives do all the work. Other places, these men would be a central part of society and would be revered. Their stories were important, because it's only through stories that we truly learn. Here, they set up shop in a gas station and are ignored. I tipped my hat to them as I passed.

Allie led Katy up, down, and around the store and ended up with armloads of junk food. I had to fish another couple singles out of my pocket to pay for the crap they lugged to the counter. We trudged outside, gassed the Jeep, and headed back out on the road. Meeker seemed calm, peaceful. There were only a few vehicles on the road, mostly beat-up ranch pickups pulling gooseneck trailers full of livestock. There were no pedestrians.

Once upon a time, I'd read somewhere, this area had been a meeting place for the Ute, a hardy mountain people that roamed from the Rockies to the Uinta Mountains. Then the government had tried to settle them, had started an Indian agency here and tried to get the aggressive hunters to start plowing and farming.

They'd responded by brutally killing the chief agent, Meeker, kidnapping his wife and daughter, then fighting and killing some of the army troops who were sent to put down the uprising. I couldn't blame them. Now the valley was full of ranches and farms, big buildings, and paved roads. The town even had one of those fancy health clubs, full of treadmills and weights, in a place where most people spent their time chasing sheep and lifting hay. Made me wish I'd seen the place before Meeker arrived.

An hour of nothing but deer and empty gray valleys and winding roads ensued, and then we were in Craig. It was a bigger town, big enough to have a Kmart and a Walmart, but small enough to drive all the way through in ten minutes. On the other side of town I had Allie swing the Jeep into a seemingly abandoned parking lot and shut off the engine. I made a quick phone call to order a bus ticket while Allie and Katy got out to continue their conversation. Allie was dispensing life advice, and Katy was all ears.

Twenty minutes later it was hugs and tears and then Katy stepped into a Greyhound and headed west, hopefully toward something brighter. I tried not to think about it, tried to focus on the fact that she'd asked me to take her away and I had. If it turned out that where she was heading was worse than where she'd been, well, I'd done my best. You control what you can control.

Allie opened her Jeep door and leaned on the cab. “Please tell me that was the first time you ever kidnapped a girl.”

I shrugged and climbed in. She didn't
really
want to know.

After Allie put the Jeep in gear, I saw her reach down and pluck a marshmallow-type thing from her snack horde and begin absentmindedly nibbling on it. I looked outside my window at the sun's position above the mountains. It would be getting dark in a few hours. “How about we head east,” I said. “Maybe we can find some real food.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

W
e careened up the Yampa River Valley, through another town full of irrigated fields and fat cattle, and then pulled into Steamboat Springs. It felt good to be out of the high desert, which was predominately brown, and back in the mountains, which were nice and green. The ski season was mostly over, and the summer season full of mountain bikers, hot air balloon riders, and rafters hadn't started yet.

I suggested we stop at McDonald's.

Allie sneered. “That's your idea of
real
food, Barr? You scorn my chemical-laced convenience store crap but yearn for the Golden Arches?”

I told her that when I'd been overseas, I was in places where they didn't have fast-food restaurants. To me, a double quarter pounder was an exotic delicacy.

“We're
not
going to McDonald's,” she said, ending the debate. “A place like this ought to have something better than that.”

We were rolling down Main Street when she started scowling again. That's when I felt the Jeep surge and heard clicking in the engine compartment. The digital clock on the dash flickered; then the numbers disappeared.

“Problem,” she said.

“What?” As I said it, the engine died and we coasted into a lot. “Oh.”

Allie muscled the Jeep into the middle of a shopping complex parking lot. She popped the hood, and we got out and looked at the engine. The snake-pit of cables, lines, and modern accoutrements under the hood baffled me. I'd worked on old Rovers, and Toyotas and Nissans, but nothing this new.

“Most likely the alternator,” she said. “I can fix it.” She pulled her phone out and flicked around on the screen for a while, then said, “But not today. All the parts stores are closed.”

“Then we ditch it and get a new horse,” I said.

“We can't steal a car, Barr. The cops are probably looking for us, because of your little shootout, and we don't need to add grand theft auto to the reasons to lock us up.”

Her comment reminded me that she was continuing to take a risk by playing Bonnie to my Clyde. “Why
are
you partnering with me anyway?” I asked. “Why didn't you grab a bus ticket back in Craig and head west with Katy, or go back to see your mother or something?”

“So you want me to do that?”

I looked down. “Well, no, it's just . . .”

“Look, Barr. If I could explain this ‘partnership,' as you call it, I would. Maybe I like that a brother would do this for his sister, try to rescue her from the Big Bad Wolf. I never had a brother—or a sister for that matter. And Jen, the little I knew of her—she seemed like good people. Maybe I think there's ultimately some money in this. Lance has a lot. And you seem like a determined guy. Hell, maybe I just find you . . .
interesting
. I've been bored for a long time.”

“So what you're saying is, you like me,” I said, trying not to smile.

“Let's not go that far, Barr. You're pretty unevolved. Let's just say I'm interested in seeing how the Clyde Barr movie ends.”

“Yeah, me too,” I said with some dread.

“Anyway, I won't
let you steal another car, and the one we have is dead. Suggestions?”

I turned around slowly, taking in the layout of the town. “I say we walk to the motel across the road and rest. Take a shower. We might even find a place to eat better than ­McDonald's.”

“You think?” She agreed to the plan.

Once in our room, Allie immediately took her bag into the bathroom. While she was showering I took a quick walk around the hotel, checking for potential threats. There weren't any, of course—this wasn't Juárez, Mexico; it was Steamboat, USA—but old habits die hard.

When I came back into the room, I was presented with a brand-new Allie. Somewhere in her bag, she'd found a small, silky black dress that ended halfway down her shapely, tanned thighs. The neckline plunged down her breasts in a naughty V. Her hair rested neatly on her shoulder in a tight braid.

“Nice,” I said. I was trying my best not to stare but doing a terrible job of it. I wondered why she'd pack something impractical like that. Is an evening dress something that every woman throws in their backpack? I thought about it some more, and maybe it made sense. On her, this dress was a weapon.

“You should shower,” she said. “The water pressure's great. And you stink.”

In the shower I scrubbed hard to get flecks of Chopo's
blood off me and thought about family, which led to remembering the morning a month after we buried Mom.

LIKE USUAL, I'D MADE BREAKFAST
for Jen and me: coffee, eggs, and leftover poached meat from dinner. I ate alone at the Formica table, reading a library book, and waited for my sister to roll out of her disastrously messy room and join me. She didn't. I finished the page I was reading, scoffed down the rest of my breakfast, and then went to wake her. She wasn't in her room.

Instead, a yellow note lay half-crumpled on the unmade bed. I read it, understood, grabbed my pack, and went to track her down. This was after the police had given up looking for Paxton. White-trash cases fetch only minimally more interest than minority ones. Jen and I had been in court a couple of times, when they'd tried to put us into the system, but eventually they deemed us old enough to live on our own.

Jen's note said that she thought she'd found Paxton and was going to watch the place all night to see if he showed. She left the address. I walked the two miles and found her little Toyota in a dusty alley behind a house built in the sixties. Twenty minutes later, the ugly son of a bitch walked into the backyard and lit a cigarette.

“It's his mom's house. He's living with his mom,” Jen whispered as we crouched beneath the dash of her car. “Do we call the cops?”

“No,” I said, and laid out my plan. A plan that would change our lives again.

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER I'D FINISHED
showering and toweling off and was trying to get Allie's fit body out of my mind as I dressed
in a pearl-snap shirt and jeans, then ran a comb through my unruly beard and mussy hair.

All this time Allie apparently had been reclining on the bed, reading. She pulled herself into a sitting position as I came limping out.

“My, my. You almost look like a human, Barr.” She had a Haggard book in her hands—one of the novels I'd read twenty times.

“Ha,” I said. “What's with that dress anyway?”

“We're back in civilization. This is how you dress, Barr, especially if you're eating somewhere besides McDonald's.”

AFTER A LENGTHY DEBATE, WE
decided on a grill with a view of the river. She wanted Mexican, but after I'd explained where I'd been the last three years, and the food I'd forced down my gullet, we agreed on the grill. We walked and stretched car-cramped muscles. Within the first block, she noticed my now-more-pronounced limp.

“You going to make it?”

“I'm fine.” I tried to walk normally, but the badly healed tendons around my knee wouldn't let me until they had a mile or two to limber up.

“That happen today, when you were kidnapping and shooting people?” she asked. She tried to hide it, but I could see the faintest hint of worry. It was the first time I could remember her showing concern for me.

“It's an old thing. Gets tight if I sit for too long.”

“How did it happen?” she asked as we turned a corner and hit the walking path that followed the river. The roaring water and the chirping swallows and the moss-scented air brightened my mood, so I decided to answer honestly.

“I was in Africa, guiding hunts. A wounded Cape buffalo
hooked me in the leg, the clients split, and I was left unconscious for a day. That night a hyena started gnawing on the leg, until I woke up and shot him. A couple of villagers found me the next day, and the local nurse sewed me up and stopped the infection. I got lucky.”

“It doesn't sound lucky.” She was still staring at me with concern, but also something else. Interest?
We were nearing the restaurant, and the fragrance of grilled meat and seasonings made me salivate.

“Well, I still have the leg,” I said, forcing a smile.

Inside the little place, which was all mirrors and wood, I ordered the biggest, rarest steak on the menu. Allie ordered a tofu noodle bowl. Whatever that was.

By tacit agreement we both kept the conversation light, playing a game of imagining what the people in the room around us did for a living. Allie was better at it. She noticed small things about people's jewelry or dress or the way they held their napkin, and she created unique histories for them based on it.

“You win,” I said. “I like your stories better, and you notice things Sherlock Holmes would miss.”

“You've been in rough country for a long time, Barr,” she reminded. “You're easily entertained.”

“The opposite, actually. I'm pretty particular.” The words hung there for a moment, and then I pulled a fifty out of my pocket and tossed it on the table.

“What, no dessert?” Allie asked, mock offended.

“Nah. We need to go. Get a good sleep, wake up fresh, hit the road. Jen's in the mountains, and I need to break her out of wherever she is.”

“
Oh my God
,” Allie said suddenly. Her eyes squinted as if she was staring into her own thoughts.

“What?”

“Something just came to me, a memory . . . of when I was being held in the junkyard.”

“I thought you said they knocked you over the head and temporarily put you in a self-storage unit.”

“They did. I was really woozy and couldn't hear much. The unit had a metal roller gate. But I heard a couple guys talking outside. One was running his mouth about Mr. Alvis. He said something about this one girl he had drugged up, that he needed her for something—a break-in.”

“Why didn't you tell me this before?”

“It didn't seem real until just now. I probably had a concussion at the time, but I'll swear that's what he said. When you mentioned ‘breaking her out,' it made me remember the ‘break-in' comment.”

“You sure he was talking about Jen?”

“Of course not. But it fits, doesn't it? And I think it could be good news?”

“How do you figure?”

“If Lance needs Jen, she's okay—for a while at least.”

“But for how long?” I felt my fist clenching and unclenching. I wanted to
do
something. Allie reached over and touched me lightly on the arm. “Barr, there's nothing to be done tonight. In the morning I'll fix the Jeep and we'll head to Leadville. In the meantime, I could use a drink.”

“I don't know . . .” I had half a mind to steal a car and drive to Leadville right then.

“C'mon, Barr. One drink. Then we turn in, get a good sleep, okay?”

My eyes kept going to the thin straps that kept that tiny black dress on her shoulders. They seemed pretty precarious there, as though if she twisted quickly, the dress might fall off. “Okay,” I said, “but just one drink.”