“Because of what he said at the hospital, about living on the Rez.”
“It’s as good a guess as any.”
He braced a hand against the dash as the gravitational pull of a sweeping turn almost slid us into the barrow ditch. “What did Lonnie say about the writing on the box?”
“He said it was Lucian’s . . . You never heard that?”
“I never asked.”
“I guess it was done a long time ago, when Lucian was shooting with Lonnie’s father.” At the next straightaway he opened what looked like a cleaning kit and pulled out two long stems and began threading them together. “What’re you doing?”
“I am cleaning this rifle.”
“That’s evidence.”
“No, it is a weapon.”
It took awhile, even at our speed, but we finally made it to the northern end of the Powder when another vehicle popped over the horizon that was traveling at a pretty good speed of its own. From the distance, it was hard to tell who it was but, after a moment, I could see the lights. I grabbed the mic. “Vic, is that you?”
Static. “Fuck yes, it’s me. Where in the hell did that little shit go?” I slowed and stopped. By the time I had, she was pulling up alongside us and was rolling down her window; she had to crank. I cut the siren, and she leaned an elbow on the sill. “What now?”
I thought. “Well, if he didn’t take 14 back toward Sheridan, the only other main road is Powder River back here.”
“North or south?”
“We’ll take south, you take north.” She was gone in a billowing cloud of blue burned oil and tire smoke before I could finish my sentence. Maybe, if I bought her a new unit . . . I turned the Bullet around and laid a little strip of my own, accelerating back to the Powder. When we got to the cutoff, the only thing headed north was a drifting cloud of dirt that hazed the gravel road into the distance. We made the turn and headed south as the back end of the Bullet attempted to get ahead of us. I countersteered and hit the gas again as we slid around the first turn just about sideways and clipped a few mailboxes. I noticed Henry struggling to hold onto the Sharps and find his seat belt with one hand. “What’s the matter?”
“Just buckling up. It is the law.” This was the first time I had taken the big beast up to speed for any length of time; there hadn’t been any reason before. It was heavy, but I was surprised by the agility it had. “All right, you can crash now.” He had gotten his seat belt on and was studying the road farther ahead as I dealt with the ground at hand. “I see dust.”
If it was George, he had just jumped off the highway. A thought snagged in my mind. “Do you think he’s got the radio on in that thing?”
Henry turned to look at me as I negotiated another turn and another quickly afterward. “That would explain why he got off the state routes.”
“There’s something else.”
“What?”
“The old Esper place is out here somewhere, the one that Reggie’s great-great-grandfather settled. I remember Vonnie telling me about it. She bought a bunch of property on a speculation that they were going to put that power plant out there someday.”
“How does romance bloom?”
“Don’t ask.” I could feel his disapproving glance as we crossed a cattle guard and momentarily became airborne. We made for the washboard curve that lay ahead, and he braced himself. “Hey, I thought you guys always thought it was a good day to die.”
“Attributed to Crazy Horse who was often misquoted.”
* * *
The road straightened after the washboard, and I was able to bring all ten cylinders on line. The speedometer was creeping back up on eighty, and we were starting to get that light, floating feeling on the ball bearings of loosely packed dirt. My testicles felt as if they were somewhere in my chest cavity, and it wasn’t a pleasant feeling. If we missed one of the curves at this speed, we were most assuredly dead. All Henry said was “Ooh, shit.”
We hit the next turn at just about a hundred, and the sickening feeling in my stomach magnified as the laws of geometry exerted themselves on the velocity of all that Dearborn steel. At any reasonable speed it wasn’t much of a turn, certainly nothing worthy of a Jan and Dean ballad, but it was enough to slam the side of the truck into the red clay embankment. When we bounced off the wall, I overcorrected, and the Bullet shot for the river. I turned ever so slightly, trying to urge our velocity forward, and only the left rear wheel slipped off the road. The truck tipped slightly back to center where we gained purchase and shot into the next straightaway. He looked over at me, the passenger-side mirror beating against his door. “You want to wreck? Do your side, okay?”
George had obviously had a little trouble getting around that one, too; his side-view mirror bounced and clattered under the Bullet. We had gained a good amount on him. When we saw him next, he had topped a hill and was bouncing immediately through another cattle guard that was on his right. The road continued a steady climb until we got to where he had been, and I slowed just a little because there might be a slope on the other side. It was a good thing I had, because the road did make a sharp cut to the right and there was a reasonable drop-off. George had not made it.
You could see where the Toyota had gone through the fence sideways, taking the majority of the barbed wire and aged posts with it. The little truck had most certainly gone over, but it had landed on its wheels, and George was still bumping his way across the bottomland where the pasture ended in a gate only about a quarter of a mile ahead. If we kept our speed up, we would get there before him and arrive in a large wash that opened to the east with a rise of about eight feet in more than a mile. This was the part of the river that admitted honestly to the moniker “a mile wide and an inch deep.” There wasn’t much in that direction other than the access road to the Burlington Northern/Santa Fe tracks. There wasn’t anywhere else for him to go. He couldn’t turn back and try to climb the hill he had just slid down, and the river blocked him to the left where the water might only be an inch deep but the mud was bottomless. He had to go for the gate, and we were going to be there before him.
I slowed just a little, since time and topography were now on our side. The Toyota leapt in and out of the hillocks and sagebrush. You could see him in there, sawing at the wheel in an attempt to keep the pickup on a relatively straight line, his head beating against the headliner as he topped each rise. I cringed a little at the thought of what he was doing to his leg, his jaw, and other assorted and sundry injuries.
We made the last turn before the gate, and I accelerated briefly before sliding to a stop and blocking his path. I figured the faster I got there, the sooner he might pull the battered little Toyota to a stop, but he kept coming and I was beginning to wonder if he could see us or if he had beaten himself senseless. I waited as he approached, and it was only when he was about seventy feet from the gate that I saw the wheels turn and the vehicle lurch down the hill. George had decided to test the waters.
“Jesus H. Christ . . .” I gunned the Bullet farther down the fence line till I found a likely spot and cut the wheel myself, this time pulling a couple of yards of barbed wire and stapled posts after me. We followed him to the cut bank of the river and watched as the underside of his truck suddenly became visible. The jump didn’t get very far and, as anticipated, the wheels and most of the front of the Toyota sank into the soft mud of the Powder River, effectively ending the vehicular portion of George’s getaway.
I pulled up sideways and watched in absolute exhaustion as George climbed out of the window of his truck, fell into the water, rose up, and began quick-slogging away from us as fast as his bandaged leg would carry him. I looked past Henry in disbelief as he turned to hand me the rifle. “If you do not shoot him, I will.”
“We don’t have any bullets, or I would seriously consider it.” He laughed and pulled a gleaming .45-70 from his shirt pocket and held it up. “Where did you get that?”
“Off your desk, where do you think?”
I pulled the handle and opened my door. “We’re trying to keep somebody from shooting him.”
He started out on the other side. “I am beginning to question the logic in that.”
George had gotten a good start, but his injury and the mud were slowing him quite a bit, and I could see the gray slime of the riverbed clinging to his pants well above his knees. I stopped at the cut and stood at the edge; he was about fifty yards out. I cupped my hands around my mouth and yelled, “George, where do you think you’re going?!”
Henry joined me at the dark crust edge of the bank. He was still carrying the rifle. “If you shoot him now, we do not have to bury him.”
I cupped my hands around my mouth again. “George, that’s enough, get back over here!”
George continued on. I started down the bank and slipped, barely catching myself before I fell into the river. I looked down into water that I was sure was just above freezing and tried to figure out what the best approach might be. I was never an all at once guy, preferring to ease myself into things, but I was about ready to throw prudence to the wind when Henry spoke. The tone of his voice ran a chill colder than the Powder had ever run. “Walt, there is somebody over there.”
I raised my head and searched the opposite bank, but all I could see was George slowly making his way across. “Where?”
“Long way out. See that pointed clump of sage to George’s right? Just to the right of that, all the way out at the horizon.”
I stopped breathing, strained my eyes, and there it was. A small vertical figure in a horizontal landscape. “You sure that’s not a pronghorn or a mule deer?”
“No, it is a man, and he is armed.”
As Henry spoke, a small burst of smoke erupted from the figure. Just over two seconds later, George was cartwheeled backward into the frigid water. I took an involuntary step forward and splashed into the river water as George hit the mud. He struggled to get up, rolling himself sideways as he attempted to sit. It was a slow, grinding motion before things slipped into the adrenalin-induced rate where the real world cannot keep pace. I yelled with everything I had, “Stay down!” He couldn’t hear, or it didn’t matter. I had seen it in Vietnam, and I had seen it here. When you are a standing animal and you suddenly discover that you are not, there is an overriding need to rise and prove to yourself that you are intact.
“Reloading.”
When I turned, he had already thrown me the rifle. I caught it and quickly jacked the lever down and extended a hand up for the shell as he fished in his shirt pocket. At that point, all I could think of was the penny he had tossed to me at the bar that night. He threw me the round; it hit the side of my palm and started to ricochet off, but I caught it against my chest and quickly inserted it past the dropped block and brought the lever up. I squared myself for the shot, and my shoulder jarred as the stock came up and slammed against it. I had to calm down and bring it all together in a fluid motion; that’s when it occurred to me to breathe. I filled my chest cavity and felt the burn of flooding oxygen as I flipped up the Vernier sight . . . “Six seventy-five . . .”
“Seven hundred if it’s an inch.”
“Damn it.” I readjusted as quickly as I could. “Where’s Omar when you need him?”
Henry laughed as I brought the rifle up again, and it was just what I needed. All the tension faded from me. I pulled the set trigger and paused for a moment to check my target. Even at this distance, there was something familiar, something I knew, someone I knew. I adjusted my figures to encompass the season, general elevation of the shooter, and mean temperature. An approximation of one twenty-one-hundredths of an inch was the starting point, but I would have to go higher with current conditions. I peered through the pinhole of the Vernier’s tiny disc, which was capable of measurements as small as one one-thousandth of an inch, and through the knife-shaped, German-silver blade sight.
He was waiting for me there, whoever he was, a mirror image at seven hundred yards with the same off-hand positioning. It occurred to me that the first one of us to find something to rest against might be the one who would still be standing, but there was no time. I had an ace in the hole because I wasn’t the one he was shooting at, at least as far as I knew. I considered how many unfortunate individuals had held that as a last thought. George was clearly in my peripheral vision as I closed my left eye and blocked out the sight of the suffering youth. He had struggled up into a sitting position and now cradled his right arm in his left. It was difficult to tell what was blood and what was darkened from the water. I could hear him sobbing and only hoped it would continue.
I allowed my breath to slowly drift out with the faint breeze and it blended with the rounded river stones, the rustling of the dying buffalo grass, and with the faint wisps of high-altitude clouds. I could hear the song I had heard before on the mountain, the one that had shaken the trees and resonated through rock. The Old Cheyenne were there now with me, and I could hear their voices ascending as I held their rifle. I pulled the trigger of the big Sharps, and they whistled across the Powder River and beyond with a deadly accuracy that begged forgiveness as they went. They imparted death as a release and an involuntary shudder in the ongoing action of things. I hardly felt the kick and lowered the rifle in acceptance of a forgone conclusion. The figure dropped, and I listened as his wayward shot passed just above our heads. It screamed like misplaced vengeance and slapped through both sides of the Bullet’s double-sided bed.
George continued to sob, and I was glad that he was alive. After a few moments, I became vaguely aware of Henry as he took the rifle away from me and leaned it against the bank. He stood there for a moment, and I think he touched my arm. He continued on into the river. The voices of the Powder would continue to tell the stories they had told before I was born and would tell long after I was gone. Henry carefully picked his way on the large, flat rocks that George had had no time to look for. I watched him for a moment and then looked back in the direction of the shot. My jaw set, and sadness overwhelmed me.