October Skies (5 page)

Ben smiled at his own reckless bravado.

They had successfully managed to scare the shit out of him and he promptly decided to throw in his lot with them and even contributed a substantial portion to the pool of money that purchased the services of ‘Wild’ Bill Keats, a prairie guide who dressed more like an Indian than a white man. Keats confidently assured them he had led dozens of parties safely across to the far side of both the Rockies and the more challenging Sierra Nevada mountain range beyond.

With Keats came an Indian partner, Broken Wing - a Shoshone, Keats assured his clients, one of the friendlier tribes.

The other contingent, about forty Mormon families led by their First Elder and spiritual leader, William Preston, had travelled down from Council Bluffs, Iowa, and had arrived with great haste just as Keats and the others were setting off. With both groups intending to head west at the same time, both equally keen to beat the season and cross the Rockies, the salt deserts, and the Nevada range beyond before the snows arrived, it was Keats’s idea that both groups should combine, there being safety in such numbers.

They set out from Fort Kearny on a fine morning, the last day in May, with the rumpled and leathery old trail guide announcing solemnly that they were the last party who were going to be able to make it across the mountains this year. They left the fort behind with Keats and his party leading the way, and the Mormon wagons behind, led by Preston.

‘Hey, Mr Lambert!’

Ben turned away from the distant peaks. Passing beside him was the Dreytons’ conestoga. The large wagon was perhaps more than this small family needed. Mrs Dreyton was a widow - Ben guessed - in her early thirties. She dressed, like all the other Mormon women, very modestly, covered from neck to toe in a drab-coloured dress of hard-wearing material, every last wisp of her hair tucked away inside a bonnet for modesty. She shared the wagon with her two children; Emily, a pretty girl of nine or ten who made no secret of the fact that she adored Ben, and her older brother Samuel, a tall, broad-shouldered and muscular young lad of seventeen, with a sun-bronzed and freckled face, topped with sandy hair.

The young man held the reins in one hand and waved with the other. ‘Morning!’

‘Good morning!’ Ben shouted cheerfully across to them. He reined his pony in, and steered it and a second, tethered behind and bearing all his worldly possessions, towards them. He fell into step beside their wagon, which was clattering noisily with pots and pans dangling from hooks along the outside, and the jingling of the oxen harnesses ahead of them.

Samuel and Emily’s smiles were as wide as they were warm, a marked contrast to most of the sour-faced and stern-lipped members of Preston’s people.

‘How’s the riding today?’ asked Sam.

Ben shuffled in his saddle and winced. ‘My blisters have blisters, I think.’

‘You can always tie up your pony on the back and sit up here with me,’ offered Sam. ‘We got room.’

Emily’s face, poking through a canvas flap over her brother’s shoulder, lit up. ‘Oh we got room, Mr Lambert, haven’t we, Momma?’

Mrs Dreyton shot a cool glance back at her children, and then at Ben. ‘I don’t think it would be appropriate,’ she said flatly. ‘And, Emily, put your sun bonnet on, this instant!’

‘Mom,’ Emily chimed unhappily, ‘it makes my head hot.’

She turned round to her. ‘Do you want a face as brown as a savage?’

Emily shook her head.

‘Then you best put it back on.’

She then turned to stare at Ben with an expression that quite clearly indicated there wasn’t room on the jockey board.

Ben quickly responded. ‘That’s all right, Mrs Dreyton. I’m just fine where I am.’

Sam shrugged apologetically. Emily wilted.

He liked the two children. The rest of their group had kept very much to themselves under the stern and watchful eyes of Preston and his cadre of loyal elders. They were all a little too sombre and cheerless to make easy travelling companions - ‘too churchy’ Keats had grumbled after only a couple of days on the trail with them. But these two youngsters were as bright and as welcoming a sight as a couple of shined pennies.

He turned his pony away, wary that tongues amongst the neighbouring Mormon wagons might start wagging if he loitered too close and for too long beside the Dreytons.

‘I’ll bid you good morning.’ Ben doffed his broad-brimmed felt hat.

Sam called out to him. ‘Will you take a mug of coffee with us, Mr Lambert? When we stop at noon?’

The young man’s mother looked sharply at her son with steel-grey eyes.

Ben nodded. ‘That’s kind of you, Sam, but maybe not today.’

He turned round and, with a jab of his knees, urged his pony to break into a lethargic trot, taking him up to the front of the column where the small contingent of wagons under Keats rolled on, through the dust.

 

They emerged from the woods and onto the gravel parking area just as the pallid autumnal sun dipped down behind the brow of tree tops. There were only two vehicles parked up here - Grace’s Cherokee, marked with the National Parks Service logo, and the Toyota Prius Julian had rented from Hertz.

They exchanged goodbyes, and Grace gave them her home and mobile numbers to call when they were ready to trek out there again. She firmly reminded them both that she was going to do the right thing and call in the find to the park’s manager in a fortnight’s time . . . and no later.

Julian and Rose thanked her, watching her dump her pack in the boot and carefully put away the Parks Service issued hunting rifle in a case on the back seat. She climbed in, offered them a wave, started up the Cherokee and swung out of the parking area, kicking up a rooster tail of stones and grit, onto a single lane of road that wound its way down the mountainside to the nearest town, Blue Valley - a half-hour’s drive through some of the most beautiful scenery Julian had ever seen.

‘You think she’ll keep her word?’ asked Julian.

‘Not tell her boss?’ Rose nodded. ‘Yeah, I think so. I think we won her round.’

Julian unlocked the car and dropped his pack on the back seat. ‘Well, Rose . . . what do you think?’

She carefully placed her camera bag on the back seat, setting the folded-up tripod down beside it. ‘I think we might’ve hit the jackpot,’ she muttered, trying to keep an excited smile off her lips. ‘So we’re going to drop the other project then?’

‘Yup,’ he replied, pulling open the driver-side door and sitting down. ‘It’s a no-brainer,’ he added, squeezing long gangly legs into the space beneath the steering wheel.

‘No discussion about it?’

‘Nope.’

Rose sighed as she sat down heavily beside him, pulled the seat belt down and clicked it home. ‘Yeah, I really like the way this partnership thing works. You decide stuff, and I get to nod dumbly.’

Julian winced guiltily inside. Rose was a one-woman production studio; deft with a camera, a solid sound technician, a shrewd editor - he’d be buggered without her. She was the talent behind the films they had put together over the last few years; Julian was merely the vaguely recognisable TV face fronting their small company, Soup Kitchen Studios.

Business was ticking over, but it wasn’t great. They had a window of time to make their production company work. That window was his rapidly fading C-list celebrity status. The general TV-viewing public still recognised his face; some might even still remember his name . . .

The Cooke bloke . . .

Julian had reached what now seemed to have been his showbiz peak five years ago as a regular host on a late-slot, anarchical, current affairs quiz show. The panellists were the usual mixed bag of stand-up comedians, red-top columnists and publicity-hungry MPs. Julian Cooke had, arguably, been a household name for at least a couple of seasons. Prior to that, he had spent about fifteen years working in the BBC as a production assistant, then as a senior researcher. He couldn’t remember exactly how the transition from research-monkey to front-of-camera personality had occurred, but it had happened surprisingly quickly after he’d put together a tongue-in-cheek show reel in his spare time.

The quiz show never really took off, but it led to some work as a presenter on various off-the-wall documentaries. Round about the same time he’d stumbled across Rose - a media graduate knocking out amazingly satirical, biting, short pieces and uploading them onto YouTube. When he first saw her work she was already an established name in the Tube community, routinely getting hundred-thousand-plus views for each of her five-minute films.

For Julian, Soup Kitchen Studios was the right next step; an agile little studio with plenty of technical know-how and a recognisable figurehead and presenter, capable of knocking out TV content quickly and cheaply.

In rapid succession they made half a dozen fly-on-the-walls following around a succession of characters: a British National Party parliamentary candidate; a Muslim cleric recently returned from Guantanamo; a veteran soldier from Iraq attempting to rebuild his life (and his face); an ex-soap starlet trying to launch her pop career; the ‘ASBO King’, an objectionable hooded thug who enjoyed boasting and blustering about his criminal record; Dennis the Dentist, a charming old man who was serving an indefinite sentence for the serial murders of a dozen of his patients; and Tone, a guitar band from Reading on the cusp of success, but never quite managing to make it.

It was a great series: Uncommon People.

Since then he and Rose had failed to capitalise on the success, picking up shitty stocking-filler commissions like this one; a seedy poke at American trailer-trash and the weird crap they reckon they’ve seen. Rose already had a dozen digital tapes full of interviews they’d had with an auto mechanic, a waitress, several bored college kids and a couple of old guys in the woods who made slow-burn charcoal - swearing blind they’d picnicked with Sasquatch, made love to Jim Morrison, or seen the ghost of Elvis wandering the hills and woods around Blue Valley.

Julian sighed. It would be nice to make some serious TV again.

‘Yeah, we’re dropping that bloody project,’ he said, starting up the Prius.

‘Fair enough,’ Rose agreed.

 

I should have written more in this dairy than I have. I look in here and find my last entry is more than four days old.

I shall make immediate amends.

So, we have travelled in this loose association for a while now, out of Fort Kearny. We are an interesting mix of people at this end of the train. Our guide, Keats, insists our contingent refer to itself as the ‘Keats Party’ since he has been employed as our trail captain. Rather than antagonise a man I fancy could skin and fillet me with one flick of his large ‘Bowie’ knife, I’m more than happy to go along with that.

Amongst our group I’ve found the most fascinating diversity of people you could ever hope to travel with. Our contribution to the long train of carts is just five wagons long, with myself, Keats and his Indian partner Broken Wing as the only members travelling without the encumbrance of one.

We have the McIntyres, a family of four whose journey west, so they tell me, started in New York, and before that, Cork in Ireland. Their tales of squalor, the overcrowded tenement buildings in New York, the desperate gang fights amongst groups of immigrants, sound quite grim.

Then we have another family, the Bowens, who hail from my home city; more specifically, from the East End. Just as grim a place as any I’ve seen in the Five Points.

The other two wagons are occupied by a dark-skinned family. I have spoken with the only one of them who knows enough English to manage a conversation: Mr Hussein, the head of the family. His oldest son, Omar, pilots the second wagon and also speaks a little English.