Crazy Mountain Kiss (14 page)

A
s an old-fashioned man living in a state of anachronisms, the yawning gaps between cell towers paramount among them, Sean Stranahan embraced communications technology with reluctant arms. Though it was mighty convenient to receive calls from the road, most of the time the phone was just draining the battery, searching for service. As usual he had forgotten the charger and was about out of juice when he saw that he had two text messages.

The first was from a number he didn't recognize and had five question marks in as many sentences.

This is Celeste? Landon's friend? At the memorial? You said to call if I found anything that might help? Can you call me?

“Kids these days,” Sean said to Choti, who was riding shotgun and opened her blue eye and then shut it when a dog biscuit failed to materialize.

He scrolled to the second text.

Please join me for dinner tonight at Chico Hot Springs. 7. Best behavior. Etta.

The phone died halfway through Sean's muttered “Hmm.” He grabbed the pen that the librarian from the Mile and a Half High
Club had used to scrawl on his hand, found a gas pump receipt, and jotted the number as best as he could recall it. At the Town Pump in Three Forks he dropped coins into a pay phone. Wrong number. Tried again, switching the last two digits, and got a professionally pleasant voice saying, “Three Rivers Realty.” Down to his last two quarters, he tried reversing the first two of the last four numbers.

“Hello?”

“Celeste?”

“This is me.”

 • • • 

T
he address was two blocks off Main Street in Ennis, a rental with a plastic tricycle and a swing set minus swings in the front yard. Celeste lived on the upper story, each narrow step a creak from a horror movie. She seemed nervous to the point of hyperventilation, rattling in run-on sentences about a bear in the yard the night before and how driving back from the dude ranch where she waitressed she was afraid to walk from the car to the door and the couple downstairs were fighting all the time while the baby cried and how it was driving her crazy, that and the washing machine going night and day because they were using cloth diapers and she was paying half the utilities which wasn't fair, and it was a month before the lease was up and she wanted to move but couldn't afford the deposit. Stranahan tried to calm her down by having her busy herself making espresso. He'd seen the machine on the counter; it was a studio, the kitchen and living area in the same room. She said that she'd got the expresso maker as a gift from the owner of the drugstore when they upgraded and wished she hadn't because he was divorced and now he was coming on to her and he was like, forty, no offense.

“None taken,” Sean said. “I got three years to go.”

“Sorry about the mess,” she said. She was wearing a Woody Woodpecker T-shirt and distressed jeans with horizontal slashes at the knees. She was actually an attractive girl, Sean realized, and as she sat
beside him and took her first sip of espresso, a changed one. She seemed to lose her breathless quality and for a moment they sat in an unexpected silence.

“Quaalude in a cup,” she said quietly. “The doctor thinks I'm ADHD. When coffee slows you down, that's like a red flag. But he wants to try relaxation techniques before dosing me with Ritalin.” She took another sip. “I've got something to show you. It's probably nothing, but you said call, so I did.” She walked to a television set opposite the couch and inserted a DVD. “These are documentaries Cindy made for class. We all did them, either on phones or renting out video recorders at the library. She made one about Landon last year, when he was working at her parents' ranch. She gave me a copy because she knew him and me hung out. I don't know how it can help you but I'd feel really bad, well, you know, he's still missing and he could be alive and—”

“You did the right thing, Celeste. Let's watch it.” Sean had a mild sense of anticipation. Knock on enough doors and the first cog on the wheel clicks over. It was like fishing for steelhead; the first five hundred casts were just finding the rhythm, but the five hundred and first . . .

The title was in white block letters on a black screen—
THE CRAZY MOUNTAIN HOR
SETAIL DETECTIVE
. At the bottom of the screen was “Produced and Directed by Cinderella Huntington.” The video opened with horses in a hayfield shot through with golden light. Stranahan heard a young woman in voice-over. “In this peaceful valley, nobody would dream of locking their doors. Nothing ever happens here except the bear getting into the bee houses or mister wolf passing through, taking a bite out of missus sheep. That is, nothing ever happened until this summer.” Stranahan realized he was listening to Cinderella for the first time. It was a lilting voice with a melodramatic flair, and it went on to say how on the night of October 7—now the title theme of
Jaws
was playing—someone had sneaked into the stables and cut the tails off eleven horses, even Goldilocks, the prize palomino whose tail was so long it swept the ground. “Something had
to be done,” Cinderella said, “so we employed the services of the fearless Landon Anker. Say hello to the camera, mister horsetail detective.”

The camera lens that had been swooping over the ranch entered the long corridor of the stables. It focused on a young man sitting in a horse stall, grinning sheepishly and scratching at strands of straw in his tousled blond hair.

“Sleeping on the job, are we? We have a way of dealing with slackards where I come from.”

The young man pointed to his sleeping bag. “Sleeping here
is
my job,” he said. He was fighting a smile, trying to keep a straight face.

“And what precisely are you going to do when the dastardly criminal sweeps in with the night? Leap on Snapdragon and lasso him like a steer out of the chute, tie him up like a rodeo calf? ‘And the flag comes up and it's, no, I can't believe it, two point three seconds. It's a world record for catching a horsetail thief.'” Stranahan could hear Cinderella laughing; it was a wonderful laugh, full of music. “Let me just set this camera on the tripod so I can punish our employee for sleeping on the job. What is the appropriate sentence? Forty lashes? No, I say. Forty kisses.”

The camera steadied on Landon Anker as Cinderella leapt on top of him, the video jolting as she bowled the young man over and hugged him while he tried to struggle up, Cinderella making kissing noises as her lips sought holes in his defense. Wrestling and laughing, he managed to get back to a sitting position. His cheeks were flushed.

“That's enough punishment,” he said. “I can't take any more.”

“No, I say, four more kisses!” She gave him a dozen more.

“Seriously,” the young man said, “if I hear or see anything, all I do is ring the house extension.”

“But what is this I see? Is this old Charlie Watt's .30-30 with the seal of Montana on the stock?” She grabbed a lever-action rifle and held it to the eye of the camera. “The one that's supposed to be in the tack room in case hungry varmints come a-calling?”

“He said I could keep it here.”

“No, say no more.” She ran a finger across her lips and shook her head dramatically. “Your secret is safe with me.”

“Does—”

“Shhh, I said say no more. Until the Crazy Mountain Horsetail Thief dares to strike again, this is Cinderella Huntington reporting from the stables of the Bar-4, where Landon Anker keeps his lonely vigil through the wee hours of the night, so that men and horses may sleep. I think you need one more lash with the lips, young man.” She kissed his cheek as the video showed the range of mountains behind the ranch, then crooked block letters reading
THE END
.

A few seconds later an image came onto the screen of what looked like the same mountains. Celeste stopped the video. Her cheeks were shiny. “I've seen this a zillion times and even though it makes me jealous it always makes me cry. It's all I have left of him.”

Stranahan felt a wave of emotion. Anker seemed a very sweet young man, not without charisma. But it was Cinderella who had captivated him. Up until this point, Sean had been searching for a key to unlock the history of a name. Now there was a face to go with the name, dark golden hair to frame the face, eyes before the crow took them, a voice not yet stilled. He recalled Ettinger's words.
You just wanted to bottle her and carry her around in your pocket.

“Play it again,” he said.

“Okay.” Celeste reached for the remote. Again there was the brief image of mountains before she stopped the video to return it to the beginning.

“No, wait,” Sean said. “What was that?”

“That's the next documentary. She made three. There's Landon and then there's one about a beekeeper and then there's the mountain man. They all open with a shot of the mountains.”

“Play them all.”

THE BEEKEEP
ER OF SHIELDS VALLEY
featured a bandy-legged man with a droopy mustache and cold blue eyes. Jimmy John Aaberg was a toothpick-in-the-mouth raconteur, holding forth as he drove with his left hand while his right dexterously rolled a cigarette.
Cinderella's camera followed him as he collected bee houses from three ranches. At one point, Aaberg took a grainy photograph from the glove compartment and held it up for Cindy's camera. The photo showed Aaberg standing among smashed bee houses holding a rifle, his cowboy boot on top of a dead bear. “That was at your ma's ranch, little lady,” he said. “I called him Snaggletooth because of that right upper canine. Did I want to shoot him? No, I get no pleasure taking an animal's life lest it's going to grace the dinner table. But yours was the fourth place he hit inside a month. That bear durn near put me out of bees.”

The video ended with a freeze-frame of Jimmy John, smiling as bees walked over his face.

The screen of the TV flickered and the third documentary came onto the screen:
BEAR PAW BILL—LAST
OF THE MOUNTAIN MEN
. The camera swept peaks streaked with autumn snow, then focused on a Rocky Mountain goat nosing along a trail through rock scree. It panned from the goat to the foot of the slide, where an emerald lake was skimmed with ice.

Cinderella's voice-over began.

“Way far up in the Crazy Mountains, where Crow warriors sent their sons on vision quests and Billy Goat Gruff is king of the cliffs, lives the last of the old-time mountain men.” The camera dipped to reveal a man sitting cross-legged before a small campfire. An ax gleamed in the firelight and Stranahan noticed a small rucksack propped beside it. Like the Lewis and Clark scholar, this man was dressed in animal skins, but there the similarity ended. Brad Amundson's jacket was chrome-tanned to a rich shade of chestnut. This man's skins were worn to a hard dark shine, and instead of a monocle on a chain, he wore a rawhide necklace strung with wickedly curved birds' talons.

The voice-over resumed: “Like the fur traders of yore, Bear Paw Bill doesn't talk much. I only know him because, riding my horse Snapdragon one day, I came across his camp and he offered this young reporter a leg of a rabbit to eat—”

“It wasn't rabbit. It was a stick of deer jerky. Journalism is a search for the truth.” The man's voice was gravel rattling at the base of the kettle. The camera zoomed in to reveal a broad, bearded face with pale eyes and wild hair tamed into braids, at the ends of which fluttered feathers of various hues. “And we did not meet in my camp. We met at your school where I spoke to your American history class.”

“Haven't you heard of poetic license?” The girl's voice was indignant. “Now we're going to have to start over.”

“As you wish. But you may find my life worthy of record even if we stick to facts.”

“The search for prophecy in the realm of the gods?”

“I see you have listened to at least a little of what I have told you. Someday you will see that life can take many paths and that the important thing is not the path but the courage to take it, and then the courage to take the next path if you find the first was a false trail to happiness. When faced with the opportunity to take a new path, most are reluctant, so that they live their lives at crossroads, frozen as time marches past them.”

The frame shook as Cindy perched the camera on a rock and walked into the frame. She sat down cross-legged alongside the man. With Cinderella for scale, Sean saw that the man was immense, not tall or fat so much as wide and thick. The back of the hand that moved a stick to stir the embers was black with hair and Stranahan felt a shivering, as if tiny fish were swimming in his veins. He had seen this man before, or someone who reminded him of the man, but couldn't place the circumstance. Now the man had sat back and put an arm around Cindy, drawing her toward his shoulder. She rested her head and closed her eyes, their faces veiled by the smoke of the fire.

“It's a far way up here. You are kind to visit this old seeker.”

Cinderella opened her eyes, her look one of beseechment. “What do you think it was really like for the Indians who came on vision quests? You went on one, but never told me about it.” She bent herself
to him as a smaller tree fetches up against the trunk of an oak. She appeared to have forgotten that she was making a film.

“I cannot put myself in the place of those who came before me. But I understand the concept of the quest, the search for the spirit animal that lends its wisdom so that one makes the right choice at life's crossroads. When the Crow warrior Plenty Coups came to these mountains, he dreamed of a time when the buffalo were replaced by spotted cattle and saw four great winds advancing, destroying all the forests. When the winds had passed, only one tree stood on the mountain. It was the pine from which the chickadee sings. To Plenty Coups, the dream meant the Crow must make peace with the white invaders or perish in their inferno. The bird was a symbol of peace.”