Wait for Signs: Twelve Longmire Stories (12 page)

I quietly slipped the .45 back into its holster and watched as the young man left, tucking the wad of cash into his Carhartts as the door swung closed behind him. Henry walked back behind the bar to stir the cranberry sauce and then returned to the back door to check the brussels sprouts and give the turkey one last look.

“How do you know he’ll come back?”

He stood there, looking out the door. “Signs.”

After a moment he crossed behind the bar again and rested the pistol by the cash register. He stood there for a moment with his back to me and then turned and placed the gunman’s keys between us.

He said nothing more, so I lifted my Rainier and watched as he picked up the stemmed glass of Armagnac. He held it out in a mutual toast, and as I touched the aluminum to the glass, I provided the words he could not bring himself to say. “Happy Thanksgiving, Henry.”

It was one of those late summer days that sometimes showed up in early October after a killing frost—warm, dry, and hazy; Indian summer. The term is over two hundred years old, coined in 1778 by the French American writer J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur to describe the warm calm before the winter storm.

Boy howdy.

If one of these miraculous days happened to appear on an autumn Saturday in north central Wyoming, Henry and I would head up into the Bighorn Mountains in pursuit of rainbow, brown, brook, and cutthroat trout. One late afternoon, we were returning from one of those trips with a cooler of fish. By that time in the season, the aspens had turned a shimmering gold in counterpoint to the dense verdant green of the conifers. The made-for-me VistaVision effect was ruined by only one thing: due to the rough road leading into and out of one of our favorite spots along Baby Wagon Creek, relatively unknown to the
greater fishing population, I was forced to accompany the Bear in his truck, Rezdawg, a vehicle I hated beyond all others.

Making the environs more decorative, however, was Vic, who had decided to join us on the spur of the moment. She was seated between Henry and me, and I glanced at her, dressed in tight jeans, hiking boots, and a hooded Philadelphia Flyers sweatshirt. The buds of her iPod were in her ears, her eyes were closed, and she was ignoring everything, including me.

We’d just rounded a corner when Rezdawg’s wrinkled right fender collided with one of the aspens, which scraped along the door and knocked into my elbow. It might’ve collided with the passenger side mirror if there had been one, but we’d knocked that off a mile back. The trunk was a little bit bigger in circumference than a Major League Baseball bat.

“Ouch.”

Diving between two more trees before heaving the vintage 4x4 over a rock outcropping on top of a small ridge and then sliding down the other side, the Bear sawed at the wheel and looked at me rubbing my elbow. “Are you okay?”

I opened the glove compartment, which contained a pair of work gloves, a box of fuses, an old radiator cap, a seventeen-year-old vehicle registration, and a large mouse nest, but not one Band-Aid. “Scarred for life.” I glanced back at him, unsure of what to make of the attention, but then focused on Vic’s head instead, bobbing along with the music playing so loudly we could hear it, too. “I don’t think she’s concerned for my welfare.”

“Do you think she is upset about not catching any fish?”

“If she was, she should’ve tied a fly on the end of her line and put it in the water—that’s where I usually catch fish.” I reset the handheld radio that kept trying to ride up under my rump
and placed it back between Vic and me. “Are you sure this is the way we came in?”

He shot me a look, the corners of his mouth pulled down like guidelines on an outfitter’s wall tent. “Shortcut.”

“Uh-huh.”

The handheld radio chattered briefly, but it had been doing that all day; set on scan, it was picking up the signals from the sheriff’s department, the highway patrol, the forest service, and the wardens from game and fish. I picked the thing up and toyed with the squelch in an attempt to get better reception, but it didn’t seem to do any good. “Wardens must be busy . . .”

The Cheyenne Nation nodded. “Hunting season and the last of the tourists.”

I pointed toward the road, or the lack thereof. “If you’d pay more attention to where we’re going, you might save some of these trees.” He ignored me, and I continued to fiddle with the knobs on the police radio, the only concession I made to my full-time job while fishing. In my line of work, it’s sometimes important for people to get in touch—not too often, but sometimes.

I could feel his eyes on me as he looked past Vic, grooving in her own world. “What?”

He did his best to sound innocent, something he wasn’t particularly good at. “What?”

“Why are you behaving strangely?”

He turned back to the road. “Define strangely.”

“You keep watching me and asking me if I’m all right.”

He didn’t turn to look at me this time. “Are you?”

“Yep.” I sighed. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“As a good friend . . .” He sounded annoyed now. “Can I not simply be interested in your general well-being?”

“No, not really.” I played with the radio again and thought about what this kind of inordinate attention usually meant. “Have you been talking to Cady?” Newly married, she was pregnant with her first child, but still liked to treat me as if I were one. “What’ve the two of you been cahooting about now?”

He shook his head. “I know you are in the suspicion business, but your paranoia may be getting the best of you.”

“Are you saying you haven’t been talking with her?”

“No.”

“No what?”

He shook his head solemnly. “No, I did not say that.”

“No, you haven’t been talking to Cady or no you didn’t say that?”

“Exactly.”

I shook my head and watched the passing scenery as we bumped along.

After a few moments, he spoke again, just as I knew he would. “I am supposed to broach a subject with you.”

“Ahh . . .” This is the way it usually worked; Cady, sometimes unwilling to ask me questions on more sensitive issues, would ask the Bear to intercede and bring up the subject, floating a topic so she could gauge the response before the real familial debate began. “What’s this about?”

“Your granddaughter.”

I took a breath, realizing the subject matter was of true import. “Okay.”

“She is going to need a name.”

I nodded. “Tell my daughter I agree, the child should have a name.”

He quickly added, ignoring the humor, “It is a question of
what
name.”

I smiled. “We discussed that when she was here for rodeo—she’s going to name her Martha.”

Henry had been friends with both of us long before we’d gotten married. There was a long pause as the Cheyenne Nation fought the wheel, the road, and possibly me.

I turned and looked at him. “She’s not going to name her daughter after her mother?” He shrugged. “We talked about this; we sat there in the bleachers at rodeo and she brought up her mother’s name and I seconded it.”

“She says you are the one who brought up Martha’s name.”

“I wasn’t.”

“She said she mentioned something about the baby’s name and that you brought up Martha.”

“I just brought her mother’s name up casually in conversation, and then she said she was going to name the baby after her.”

He shook his head some more. “When you bring Martha’s name up in conversation, it is never casual.”

We drove in silence, hearing only the music in Vic’s ears.

“I might’ve brought it up un-casually.” He continued to say nothing, which spoke volumes. “So, she doesn’t want to name the baby after her mother?”

“She is not sure.”

“Fine.”

“Obviously, it is not.”

“I just . . .” My voice sounded a little confrontational even to me, so I changed my tone. “It’s just that I’d gotten used to the idea.”

“Your idea.”

“Evidently.” We glanced off another tree, but they were fewer and farther between. “What does she want to name the baby?”

“Lola.”

“She wants to name my granddaughter after your car?”

He gestured toward the vehicle in which we rode. “At least she is not going to name her Rezdawg.”

“Lola, really?”

“Yes.”

I thought about it. “Where did the name of your car come from?”

“There was a lovely young woman from South Dakota . . .”

“The stripper?”

He smiled a knowing smile. “She was a dancer, yes.”

“A stripper; she was a stripper from over in Sturgis that you dated in the seventies.”

“She was a very talented performer.”

“And you named the car after her.”

“Yes.”

“I’m not having my granddaughter named after a car named after a stripper.” I shook my head. “Lola Moretti. Lola Moretti?”

Vic chimed in for the first time, and I noticed she’d taken the buds from her ears and was cupping them in her hand. “Sounds like a pole dancer to me.”

Static. “. . . A couple of lives endangered, and if we don’t get any help here pretty soon I’m going to have to do something drastic.”

Henry, Vic, and I looked at the handheld radio in my grip—surprised at the interruption.

I punched the button on the mic and responded. “This is Walt Longmire, sheriff of Absaroka County. Copy?”

Static. “. . . Crazy Woman Canyon, and the situation is pretty serious. We can’t get to our vehicles and . . .” The sound drifted off, and I glanced at Henry. “. . . Without backup I’m going to have to use my gun.”

I keyed the mic again; it sounded like Chuck Coon, one of the forest service rangers. “Chuck, this is Walt Longmire. Over?”

The Bear mumbled under his breath. “Did you say Chuck? Chuck Coon?”

I nodded and smiled. Coon was actually a very nice guy—he wasn’t the kind of ranger who would cite you if your campfire was an inch too close to the trail or your horse was picketed a little too near a water source. Henry, however, had had a few visits with him about the difference between brook trout and brown trout and the number of each species allowed a day, but ever since I had dissuaded a group of motorcyclists traveling from Sturgis from beating Coon to death at West Ten Sleep Campground, the ranger had pretty much decided we were best friends. “Sounds like he’s in trouble.”

Henry shrugged. “We could go help whoever is trying to kill him.”

I thought about the distance between where we were now and where the ranger was. “How long do you think it’ll take us to get there?”

“Not too long.”

Looking out the window to avoid Henry’s intermittent gaze as we glanced off another tree, I folded my arms on my chest. “Lola.”

Henry remained resolute. “It is a lovely name.”

Vic shrugged. “She’s my niece, and I vote for Lola. We just better start stocking up on body glitter.”

*   *   *

Passing Muddy Creek forest station, Henry accelerated into the turn and slowed at the dirt road marked Crazy Woman Canyon, a spot in the Bighorn Mountains where a settler family had been decimated, leaving only the mother who had, reasonably, lost her mind, the incident made famous in the Robert Redford film
Jeremiah Johnson
. “Did Coon say Crazy Woman Canyon or the campground at Crazy Woman Creek?”

“There is no campground in the canyon, but there is one at the north fork of the creek.” I braced a hand on the dash and again reached around for a seat belt, even though I knew there were none.

My undersheriff looked to our left. “He must’ve been confused.”

Henry hit the gas, the engine wheezed, and we lugged our way up the hill, finally lashing back onto route 16 and flailing the quarter of a mile down the pavement.

Vic pointed past Henry up the small valley. “There—I can see a forest service vehicle with the light bar on.”

The Bear spun the wheel, and we flat-tracked our way northwest, sliding to a stop beside a silver Mustang with California plates and a Federal Standard 595 mint-green truck with the driver’s-side door hanging open. There was a Porta Potty nearby, on top of which were two people who I gathered were trying to get away from a large sow black bear and her two adolescent cubs milling around the base of the convenience.

As the Cheyenne Nation slid to a stop from a distance of about sixty feet, he rolled the window down, and Vic called out. “Hey, Chuck, looks like there’s a line for the john.”

I hoisted myself up onto the sill of the passenger-side window and looked over the top of Rezdawg’s headache rack as the younger bears, munching on what appeared to be a large amount of popcorn scattered across the ground, glanced at us for a moment before resuming their snuffling around the one-seater. The sow, all six hundred pounds of her, left the snack food and the area around the Porta Potty and ambled two steps our way, grumbling a little and then bouncing up on her hind legs to sniff the air in our direction.

Henry didn’t move, his own elbow still hanging from the driver’s-side window. “Looks like she is on-the-fight.”

Vic glanced through the windshield at the two on the roof and then back to the three bears, raising her voice to be heard. “Hey, Chuck, what were you doing, looking for a Porta Potty that was just right?”

Maintaining his position, but allowing his legs to drop over the side, he adjusted his campaign hat and glanced at the young woman who was with him. “This is Ms. Andrea Napier from Pasadena. She thought it might be fun to feed the bears a bag of caramel corn.”

I waved at the young woman. “Hi, Andrea.”

She waved back but without much enthusiasm. “Hi.”

I ducked my head down and looked at the Cheyenne Nation. “How attached are you to those fish we caught?”

He sighed, relinquishing the idea that trout was going to be the special at the Red Pony Bar and Grill tonight.

Vic and I watched as the Bear nonchalantly opened the
door of the truck, slid his chukka boots onto the gravel of the parking lot, and faced the bear. The sow leaned a little forward and huffed at him again but didn’t take any further aggressive action. Henry slowly raised a hand and spoke in a calming voice. “Hello, little sister; you should not let your young ones eat such things.” He reached into Rezdawg’s bed, flipped open the old metal Coleman cooler, covered with stickers, and pulled out the plastic tray containing all the beautiful cleaned fish.

He tossed one of the brookies to the sow, and she immediately dropped onto all fours, landing a paw on the tail of the fish and pulling it apart, devouring it head first. “That is much better for you; you are going into the winter’s sleep soon and need to eat healthfully.”

The younger bears took notice, but by the time they got to their mother she had already eaten the fish; then all three looked up at the Cheyenne Nation in expectation, Henry slowly creeped forward, calling up to the ranger. “Hey, Chuck, I am not sure if these are brownies or brookies and whether we have sixteen apiece of the one and three of the other; do you want to check them?”

Coon called back, “Ha. Ha.”

Henry pulled another trout from the tray and tossed it away from the facility. One of the adolescents ran after it; then he tossed another for the second, and finally another for the sow. Slowly, the Bear led the bears toward Crazy Woman Creek and away from Chuck Coon and Andrea Napier.