Brown-Eyed Girl

Brown-Eyed Girl

VIRGINIA SWIFT

Dedication

for Peter

Contents

 

Part One

Chapter 1
Twenty Thousand Roads

Three days from LA. Almost there.

Over the high country, late afternoon sun glinting off the rocks and shining grasslands where Colorado rose into Wyoming. Sally fiddled around trying to pick up a radio station (Broncos 17, Patriots driving, stupid exhibition season football) and put up with static until she could see the Monolith Cement Plant. Then she could indulge herself and slip the tape in the slot. She caught sight of some antelope loping dark shadows across the golden meadows, with day waning into night, lights flickering on in the Laramie valley and the tiniest August chill in the air.

She'd had the hammer down since Longmont, where the traffic thinned out, and found the cutoff that put Fort Collins behind her. She could never resist the urge to see what kind of time she could make between the Denver Mousetrap, where I–25 and I–70 snarled, and the first sight of the lights of Laramie coming on in the dusk. Two hours and twenty minutes, for what some people called a three-hour drive. She sang, loudly, along with the tape, along with Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris and her whole life. Sang her way down twenty thousand roads. Maybe, finally, heading straight back home.

The sun painted the hills pink. The air got just a taste chillier. Sally could really get nostalgic now, if she weren't obliged to history, so adept at remembering the bad with the good. How they'd all headed west, to grow up with the country . . .

Shit!

Where the flaming hell did that cop car come from?

So much for the peaceful fading glow of day in the high country. Now it was bubblegum lights in the rearview, and Sally's perfect certainty that she'd had the Mustang doing better than seventy passing the Holiday Inn, and despite her most earnest efforts, over fifty as Route 287 turned into Third Street. What was the statute of limitations in Wyoming? She looked again in the mirror, knew she was cooked, slowed and pulled over to the right, heart pounding.

California plates. A '64 Mustang, restored to sleek perfection by the Mustang King of LA, doing maybe fifty-seven miles per hour in a thirty zone entering Laramie, Wyoming: She was dead meat, looking at a ticket for a hundred bucks easy. She turned off the tape, composed her face. She wondered again about ancient outstanding warrants, looking at the police cruiser in the rearview. She leaned over slowly and opened the glovebox.

The Laramie cop did things with his brake, his radio, his clipboard, his hat, got out of his cop car, walked up to her window, peered down at her through predictably mirrored sunglasses, and drawled genially, “Well, Sally, guess you'd better slow that Mustang down.”

She stopped in the middle of getting out the registration slip. Freakin' Dickie Langham. Guess this was Road Number 20,000 after all.

He didn't give her a ticket. Instead, he gave her the biggest hug she'd had since the last time, sixteen years ago. He hadn't gotten any shorter than the six foot four inches he'd been back when he'd been tending bar at Dr. Mudflaps, and he hadn't gotten any lighter. Back then, Mudflaps had the gall to pretend to be an upscale restaurant and lounge but was really a place with orange plastic booths (red leatherette? Sure.) and a brisk trade in bad white stuff. Dickie had been carrying maybe thirty pounds less than now, had been a completely different color (greenish gray-white to his current reasonably tan) and extensively more jittery. That's what living on Dr. Langham's Miracle Diet (booze and blow) would do for you. He'd been unerringly decent then, in his own way, and funny as hell, but not so much so that four big guys from Boulder had seen either the humanity or the humor of his coming up a little short of cash one time when they were in town.

“The Boulder guys were drinking black coffee,” Dickie explained to Sally, “and they weren't enjoying being squeezed into one of those orange booths. I had experienced their form of persuasion the year before,” he re-called as they looked at the plastic-covered menus in the Wrangler Bar and Grill. “My shoulder still aches sometimes from where they simulated ripping my arm off. Extremely frightening guys. So, lacking the money to pay them, I told them I was going into the back room to get something and, well, I came back eleven years later.”

By the time he returned to Laramie, Dickie said, as he requested a double cheeseburger, an order of rings, an order of fries, a side salad with blue cheese dressing, and an iced tea, the Boulder guys were who knows where, and the sensible people who ran the Wyoming Law Enforcement Academy had use for somebody who'd personally seen law enforcement from a variety of different points of view, but upon whom nobody could seem to make a particular rap stick. He had picked up some valuable skills along the way, including familiarity with a range of firearms, fluency in Spanish, and intimacy with the rigors, re-wards, and limitations of twelve-step programs. Now he was an Albany County deputy sheriff with four years in, likeliest candidate for sheriff when the incumbent moved, on to the state legislature this November. Dickie was a lucky man on his way up in the sometimes forgiving (or at least forgetting) state of Wyoming.

“You know, I don't know how Mary did it, or why she took back a lowlife like you,” Sally said, thinking of Dickie's wife. Sally told the waitress she wanted an order of rings, a dinner salad with Italian dressing on the side, and a Budweiser. You did not order chardonnay, even if this was the Equality State.

Mary Langham, it turned out, was most forgiving of all. Fifteen years ago, when Dickie took a powder, their daughter Brittany was six, Ashley was four, and Mary was pregnant again. On the day their son was getting ready to be born in the Ivinson Memorial Hospital, Dickie, on the lam but knowing the time was near, called Mary collect from a pay phone at the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota. He was crying. Mary started to cry, too, and said, “Tell me what you want me to name him, you bastard, and if you don't get your shit together and come back, I'll hunt you down and take your balls off with the nail scissors.”

There are so many ways to say, “I love you.”

Fortunately for Dickie, Mary was an unaccountably loyal wife. Her kids had inherited something of her quality of mercy. Josh first met his father when he was eleven, but he looked up to him anyway. Brittany and Ashley seemed to be perfecting ways of making Dickie pay, as they had every right to do, but now and again, he said, they made him think they might somehow end up all right.

Their food came, and they dug in. Wrangler onion rings: nothing else possessed the sheer grease power to soak up seven or eight tequila and grapefruits.

“You know, I've never understood those curly fries they have at the state fair,” Dickie mused, stuffing a huge forkful of dripping lettuce into his mouth in hot pursuit of a giant bite of burger. “I mean, you've got your fries, and you've got your rings. One is for potatoes; the other is for onions. Seems to me curly fries are a mixed metaphor.” Dickie had earned a master's degree in English from the university at the same time Sally had been getting her own master's over in the history department, quite a few years ago.

“You have to admire that machine, though,” Sally told him. “The way it just keeps curling 'em out.” They ate awhile in silence, the waitress refilling Dickie's iced tea and eying Sally's disappearing Budweiser. “Well, I'm glad you came back, Dick. I feel safer knowing that the deputy sheriff has such an intimate acquaintance with the criminal mind.”

“Thank you very much for that extravagant vote of confidence. Helps me out a lot when I'm looking for lost dogs and chasing speeders,” he said modestly.

“Come on now. I bet you get your share of criminal mischief, or at least hunting accidents and one-car rollovers. Aren't those the main causes of death in Wyoming?”

“We do get a few, what with the interstate going through here. But it's a lot worse up around Jackson these days. They seem to be killing off tourists right and left, and even the locals are running off the road and shooting themselves to beat all hell. Teton County sheriff told me about a guy from Dubois who drove his Range Rover off a cliff in Togwotee Pass last fall, and wasn't even drunk. Guy named Mickey Welsh. Pillar of the community—a church-going, big-money accountant, big deal Republican. Used to be only the reprobates terminated themselves in their cars.” He shook his head and considered ordering more food.

“Yeah, it's a real pity when even upstanding Republicans buy it,” Sally commiserated.

“They're dropping like flies, I understand,” said Dickie, who would run for sheriff, of course, as a Democrat. “Especially in Teton County. Have you ever heard of Walt Flanders?” Sally shook her head. “He is—or was—a lawyer in Jackson Hole, personal buddy of George W. Bush.” Sally whistled in admiration, and let Dickie continue. “He was only
forty-two
, a real Republican rocket, and last hunting season he went out to get his antelope and never came back. Big NRA activist, and he still managed to shoot himself in the head with his own rifle!”

Sally looked askance. “Tax problems?” she asked. “A little cowgirl on the side?”

Dickie chewed, shrugged. “Not my problem.” Albany County was plenty enough for him to handle, he was thinking. Two weeks previously, he'd been called out to investigate an abandoned vehicle in the Snowy Range west of Centennial. A remarkably aged Ford Fiesta with a flat tire, Arizona plates (stolen), and nobody home. He'd rummaged around in the woods nearby and found a young couple, two Mexican nationals probably on their way home from illegally making beds and running leaf-blowers in Jackson Hole. They'd been beaten horribly, burned with cigarettes, and shot again and again. Dickie did not like to contemplate what kind of people did such things to other human beings.

He changed the subject. “Do you still pick up a guitar now and then?”

Sally wagged her head. “My Martin's in the Mustang.”

“Well whatever it is you're up to, it sure made headlines here. You should have seen the story in the
Boomerang
about you coming back to be an endowed professor,” Dickie continued, squirting ketchup all over his fries. “Mary cut it out of the paper, but I don't think she saved it.” The last part was true technically. There was no reason Sally needed to know what Mary had done with the clipping, that she'd mailed it off to someone in Tucson. Although Dickie didn't know what had become of it upon arrival in Arizona, the clipping had been read, crumpled, tossed away, straightened out, crumpled again, thought about, and incinerated. “She was so excited about you coming back, so proud of you. Even prouder than when ‘The Going Home Alone Again Waltz' was such a big hit.”

“Yeah,” Sally said. “Sally and the Mustangs' wonderful one hit. That was the highlight of that band's career, honey. Although we did have a steady Bay Area following at gay cowboy bars with names like The Rainbow Cattle Company. Guys in tight jeans and western shirts and Stetsons, drinking cans of Coors and dancing with each other, went insane when I sang ‘Crazy.' I wonder how many of those good-lookin' boys are still around?”

Dickie looked down at his plate.

“So after all, I wasn't sorry to leave it behind. The whole thing didn't mean much, when you think about it from a distance. What did it cost me to kiss off too much cigarette smoke and tequila shooters, too much time among scumbags, dope everywhere and one-night stands that were hellishly scary, when I think about it too much? It's a lot safer and more peaceful sitting in a quiet library, or in front of a computer screen, or performing lectures for students who don't usually send up cocktail napkins with handwritten messages reading ‘Why don't we get drunk and screw?'”

Dickie let her know precisely how far Laramie thought she'd come from the hell-raising chick singer she'd been. “I think the headline on the story about your new gig said something like, ‘Former Bar Singer Returns as Dunwoodie Chair.'” He laughed.

“Sounds like Dunwoodie Barstool,” she declared dryly. Dickie snorted. “Nobody is ever supposed to be anything except what they were the last time,” Sally said, pouring viscous yellow salad dressing out of a little plastic cup onto a pile of iceberg lettuce and a hard, pale pink wedge of tomato. “Well, maybe it's not that big a leap from the Gallery Bar to the special collections, trading in the ought-to-be-dead for the literally deceased. Officially, I'm now holder of the Dunwoodie Distinguished Chair in American Women's History, which also makes me chair of the Dunwoodie Center for Women's History. I never expected to have a named piece of furniture.”

She ate an onion ring, considered. “If you want to know the truth, the whole thing is a little bit strange. Usually when colleges hire professors, they do a search, let anyone who wants to apply for the job, interview the people they think they might want to hire, and then choose somebody.

“But this thing didn't work that way. Last fall, I got a call from Edna McCaffrey—”

“Sure, the one who got the MacArthur genius grant. Dean of the college now. Her kids were at Laramie High with Brit and Ashley,” Dickie said.

“That's her. She was calling to ask me if I'd be interested in applying for this new endowed chair, funded by a bequest from Laramie's most famous poet et cetera.

“I said, ‘Whoa Edna, what's this about?'

“She said, ‘Sally, the university has just received a bequest from the estate of Margaret Dunwoodie, in the neighborhood of five million dollars. You remember Miss Dunwoodie—she taught in the English department for forty years or so. Didn't start publishing her stuff until she was an old lady, and she died before they gave that last collection of poetry the National Book Award. Her gift includes an endowed chair in women's history. You've been nominated.'

“Imagine me, an endowed professor at the University of Wyoming. Do you remember, Dick: the biggest thing I'd ever done as a student here was to walk into the history department office, get hassled by that pickle-sucking powderface of a secretary who never did any work. That day I got so fed up with her losing my mail that I told her to go fuck herself. That asshole professor, Byron Bosworth, was standing there listening to the whole thing, and when that secretary died of a stroke a month later, the Boz told everyone I had caused it.”