Biting the Moon (21 page)

Mary couldn't understand about Reuel. Why was he living in this place? He looked more like a rancher or an outlaw (for which Sweet Meadows actually might have made a good hideout), but he certainly never looked or sounded like a trash collector. He looked like a man made for something he either hadn't found yet or had found and didn't
much like. He looked as if he was going to waste here. He looked like a man with sorrow in his bones.

“May I ask you something?” When he nodded, Mary went on: “I was just wondering. What did you used to be? I mean before you . . . before your present employment.”

Reuel's thin mouth stretched in a smile. “You mean, before I come to be CEO of Landfill Operations? A lot of things. For some years I was in the rodeo.”

Andi said, “You mean you rode those wild horses?”

Reuel laughed. “I don't know how wild they were. I was doin' good at it, and then one day it just struck me that busting broncos has to be one of the most useless ways a man could make his living there was. A grown man spending his time hauling out of gates on a unbroke pony. Unfortunately, this revelation come at the wrong time, when I was bouncin' off the back of a horse. I just limped away. Bruised, sprained, but nothin' broke. I was lucky.

“Had me a sweetheart back then. Not so lucky there. I thought when I told her I was quittin' the rodeo she'd be real glad, relieved, like. I wouldn't be out there tryin' to break my neck along with my horse. Well, I was sure wrong. She called me everything in the book—called me a yellow-bellied coward and a mama's boy—where she ever come up with
that
I can't imagine, with me not having seen my mama for twenty years. I thought she loved me, but she didn't; she loved the danger, she loved goin' around with a ‘real' man. That's what I was before I said I was quittin'. Then I wasn't a real man.” He shook his head. “Real men are supposed to go round trying to get their necks broke, I guess that's what it was.”

Andi had her elbows on the table, hands bracing her chin, looking intense. “Did you love her?”

“Sure. I sure did. We was goin' to get married.” He set down his beer, looked off through the spindly trees. “Betty Rae, that was her name. Red hair, freckles, probably the prettiest woman I ever saw”—he looked at them—“except for present company, naturally. Well, I'd been saving up for after we were married. Money to buy furniture, stuff like that. I was already building the house. The money was in
both our names, for we were getting married real soon, and of course I considered anything of mine as hers—”

“Oh,
no
!” Andi wailed. “She took it, she
took
all your money!”

“She did indeed.” Reuel leaned over, said, “You sure takin' this to heart, girl.” He sat back, asked, “Where you girls from? I mean, where in New Mexico?”

“Santa Fe. But how do you know we're from New Mexico?” Mary asked.

Reuel looked from one to the other as if he'd expected better. “Lord, you'll never find whoever it is you're looking for if you can't even take in a license plate.”

Mary felt foolish; she was irritated with herself for not thinking about something so simple as the car's plate. “How dumb,” she said.

Reuel was lighting his cigarette, hands cupped against a little wind that would soon become a bigger one; the temperature would plunge by nightfall. “Sometimes we miss the obvious. Happens.”

They sat in a companionable silence for a few moments and then the couple who lived on Penny Alley called over and asked Reuel if he'd like some of their beans for his supper later; they were making a big pot. He called back his thanks. “Nice people, their names is Ruth and Ethbert.”

“Who lives in the white trailer there?” Andi inclined her head toward the woods.

“Serge. He's a friend of mine, comes around when we're both here.” Reuel looked at his watch. “Might be checkin' in about now.” Then his eyes narrowed, half hidden in the veil of smoke. The eyes seemed locked in a permanent squint. “You come a long way if you come from Santa Fe. This fella a particular friend, him you're looking for?”

“In a way,” said Andi. Then she asked, “After the rodeo, what did you do then?”

Reuel took a drink of his beer. “There was a pretty long spell I spent down in Mexico. Had me a girl there, too.”

“What happened? Who was she?” Andi asked.

“Maria, that was her name. Thought we was going to get married, too, but her dad didn't take to her marrying any gringo.” He shrugged. “Down there I hired myself on as a government hunter, went out with
others tarred with the same brush to get rid of coyotes.
Los coyoteros,
we were called. Back then it was shootin' and steel-jaw leghold traps. It's still shootin' and leghold traps and a lot more. I wouldn't say refined ways of killin', just more deadly and more determined. It's almost as if wiping the last coyote off the face of the earth was like a religious mission. They set fire to the dens, stuff like that—”

“We saw one. One den, I mean,” said Andi. “In a state park. Somebody dragged coyote pups out of it.”

“You saw that?”

To Mary, it was clear Andi wished she hadn't brought up the subject. Mary rushed in to say, “There was one still alive, but the poor thing was so messed up, and it was dying. So I had to shoo—” She stopped, feeling Andi's kick. “I had to—uh, kill the poor thing.” She hated thinking about it; the guilt was still hard in her.

“That took a lot of guts, girl.” He repeated: “A lot of guts.”

Mary suddenly felt better, as if a rush of cool water had sluiced over and through her.

Reuel was silent for a moment, then said thoughtfully, “This fella you-all are looking for. As a matter of fact, I do know somebody fits your description. He goes to New Mexico, Colorado, likes to gamble at them new casinos the Indians run. He went off somewhere around end of January or February, I think it was. Hardly any business then, so it's as good a time as any to get away. He's got one of these boating outfits over near the Salmon, Middle Fork it is, and him and his people take the tourists on float trips. There's a lot of good money in that. He gives lessons, too, in kayaking, canoeing, all that. Fishing. There's lots of steelhead in the Salmon, lots of good fishing. I do it myself when I get a chance.” He struck a match. “The landfill business bein' so demanding.”

Andi leaned forward. “What's his name? Where's his business?”

“Harry Wine. He's probably the best outfit around.”

Surprised, Andi turned to Mary. “Isn't that the one—”

Mary finished for her: “—the cook told us about.”

“What cook?” asked Reuel.

“Just a place we stopped for directions. How well do you know him?”

“Enough to have a beer with. Not enough to get personal.”

“How far from here is his place? Can you tell us how to get there?” asked Andi breathlessly, too much so, for Reuel looked suspicious, his eyes narrowing even more.

“Sure, I can. It's maybe ten miles from here, south of Salmon. But evening's coming on; you might rather wait till morning.”

“No, we'd rather go now.”

We
actually wouldn't. Mary was tired. But Andi was, understandably, eager. They were so close to the mark, if Harry Wine was the mark.

Reuel said, “Tell you what. I can drive you. We can all just pile in my car, and it'd be a lot less trying on you girls.”

The thought of driving with someone who actually knew
how,
who could keep all four wheels on the road, who could accelerate without sideswiping a parked car, or downshift without stripping the gears—this sounded like heaven to Mary, who said, “Okay.”

“Let me have another beer before we leave. You girls want some more coffee? Or a Coke?”

They shook their heads and Reuel walked back into the trailer. While Andi was teasing Sinclair by pretending to throw a stick, Mary picked up the binoculars and scanned the empty land to the west and the wooded lot between Reuel and his friend. The little wood was made large by the binoculars, green and swimming, out of focus. She fiddled with the wheel but hadn't much luck focusing, so she stopped trying. And then she saw the undergrowth and the low branches of the trees disturbed by a man walking through them. In the green light, he did not look exactly like a man. She squinted and in her even more distorted vision imagined this was a jungle and what came toward them was some strange animal. As he got closer, she dropped the binoculars. “Andi.”

Andi had finally thrown the stick and Sinclair had run to retrieve it. She looked around and saw him. Her eyes widened. She opened her mouth but no words issued from it.

His was the most disfigured face Mary had ever seen. It was like a topographic map limned with ridges and craters. Welts in almost perfect symmetry swept from his hairline to below his chin and down his
neck, as if massive claws had swept across it—which might have been exactly what happened. He wore a black patch over the eye on that side. The other side of his face had escaped, untouched by anything but time, and not much of that, for he looked young—or, perhaps, ageless. Mary felt watched by two different people, which unnerved her more than any disfigurement could have done.

He was of medium height and barrel chested; he looked strong. The cheekbones were high, the cheeks hollowed, which lent him an air of distinction. The eye left intact was the dark green of palm fronds. His hair was black and straight and fell across his forehead, perhaps trained that way to hide what little it could.

He nodded to both of them, smiled. He drew a package of small cigars from his back pocket and laid them on the picnic table, where he sat down. He was wearing the olive drab of old uniforms, and in the pocket of his green T-shirt were a pen and several pencils. He seemed at home, accepted, familiar, at ease even in the absence of Reuel.

The couple across the way called to him and he raised his hand in a salute, palm out like a traffic cop.

Reuel emerged from the trailer with the beer and Cokes and was clearly glad to see the newcomer. “Serge! I was just saying you might be here about now.” He made the introductions: “Sergei Yavoshenko, this here's Mary Dark Hope and Andi Oliver.”

“Olivier,” Andi corrected him.

Sergei rose slightly, extended his hand to both of them.

Andi said, “Sergei Yavoshenko,” with perfect articulation. It was as if she'd been saying it all her life. “It's Russian, isn't it?”

“Yes.” He removed a small cigar from the pack, offered the pack to Reuel, who took one.

“Which part?”

“Siberia, in the Far East.”

“
Siberia?
” To Mary, it was a place of myth—awful, frozen myth.

“I'm from Yakutsk, in the north.”

“I thought Siberia was all north,” Mary said.

Sergei laughed. “That's perhaps the idea most people have of Siberia. In January, in Yakutsk, the noon sun looks like bright fog; you can barely see its shape. We have what is called habitation fog, which
I've always found rather a wonderful way of speaking of it; it's not actual fog, see. The air is so cold in winter that warm air from cars, people, houses can't rise. It is indeed very cold most of the year.”

“Serge here worked on a game preserve. Where was it?”

“Yes. Lazovski Reserve. Lazo has more Siberian tigers than anywhere else in the Far East. That's where I got this.” He pointed to his face. “Tiger.”

From Andi there was an inrush of breath. “A fight with a
tiger
?”

Sergei laughed. “Not much fight. Pretty one-sided.”

“What happened? Did you run?”

“No. If you can imagine a safe falling out of a window above you and landing on you—that's what it felt like. Eight hundred pounds of tiger. I could barely move.”

“But how'd you get away, then?”

“That was most strange. It was a poacher. He fired several shots into the air—not at the tiger itself, for he might have hit me. Anyway, I would not want him killed; there are too few tigers like this left in the world. Amur tiger, you know: Siberian. There are only a few hundred left. You can imagine how tempting to poachers.”

“A poacher.” Andi sounded torn between admiration of what the poacher had done and aggrievement at his being on the reserve in the first place.

He must have heard this in her tone, for he said, “There is very little money; people are forced to live as best they can. Don't forget Russia is now a democracy. Everything is up for sale: the land, the tigers. In Yakutsk most livelihoods are earned through hunting and trapping. I can tell you that we don't get many animal-rights people there.” He smiled broadly.

“Did you leave out of disgust? I mean with all the poaching and everything?”

It was plain she hoped so.

He laughed. “No. Because I had nothing to sell. I had no money, either. You forget poachers have no other way to make a living.”

Andi said, “What a lame argument.”

Reuel blew out a stream of smoke. “Miss Righteousness.”

She said to Reuel, “A person can survive on next to nothing.” Then, to Sergei, “They kill your tigers for—I don't know; probably the fur brings a lot of money.”

Sergei nodded. “Fifteen, twenty thousand dollars. And then there are the bones. The Chinese highly value the Siberian tiger's bone powder for medicines.”

Andi still seemed antagonistic toward his easy attitude toward poaching, but he did not flinch under her disapproving stare. Mary liked his calm way, the way he sat back, drank his beer, poked his finger through a smoke ring.

Andi simmered a moment longer before she apparently relented and forgave him his sorry principles. She was really more curious than she was judgmental. She leaned forward, face propped in her tight fists (for she always retained some slight sign of the pugilist). “What do they look like?”