“Maybe I did. That Denver, he brung me a whole stack of papers. It’s all up there at the cabin.”
“And when was that, exactly?”
“Let’s see. That would’ve been day before yesterday.”
When the riders had reached the barn, the shape that was Addie swung down from her saddle and bent to quiet the dog.
“You’re right about one thing.” Bradley extracted the phone from his pocket and studied the photo he’d taken. “That man from Denver is not your friend. But if we play our cards right, he may have done us both a very big favor.”
6
Arusting Ford Bronco, Creamsicle orange with a white driver’s door, pulled to the graveled shoulder along a wooded stretch two miles from the state highway. The strapping young man who alighted slung a rifle case over his shoulder. He locked his door and pocketed the keys and looked both ways before wading into the roadside brush.
His hike through the tangled bulwark of oak brush and elm was but twenty or so yards, and once to the clearing he set down the case and paced off his distance and removed four thumbtacks from his pocket. From another pocket he removed a folded page he’d torn from a magazine. He slapped the page onto the bark of a cottonwood and tacked it in place and stepped back to study the effect.
What breeze there was came from the west. Gently, like a breath. He figured it for two miles per hour. Facing it with eyelids closed he could smell the coming winter as he listened for cars on the highway.
Before returning to his rifle he climbed the bank of a low earthen dike behind the tree. The stock pond, ankle-deep when last he’d seen it, today was a dried flower arrangement of cattails and cockleburs bleached by mud and sun to the color of cold chicken gravy.
Again he listened in silence. From a treetop behind him a blackbird whistled a single mournful note. To his right, insects buzzed and jumbled. Of life there was no other sign.
He shed his coat, a faded brown Carhartt, as he strode back to the rifle. Draping it on the ground, he knelt and slid the gun from its case along with two foam earplugs and one new box of .30-30 cartridges.
He stoppered his ears and cradled the weapon in his elbow and thumbed six of the cartridges into the receiver while humming an Aerosmith tune, “Dream On,” his head nodding in time to the beat.
He stood. The distance he’d paced was a hundred yards. The breeze held steady at two, maybe two and a half. His rifle was a lever-action Marlin 336C, his scope a Weaver K4. His target was a color photograph in the upper-right quadrant of the torn magazine page, the photo depicting a smiling man in a button-down shirt with his sleeves rolled to reveal tanned forearms and a fancy gold wristwatch.
BoomchackaBoomchackaBoomchackaBoomchackaBoomchackaBoom. He squeezed off the rounds with a rapidity that bespoke either skill or anger, and when the echo of the last report had died in the trees he lowered his weapon and ejected the final casing.
After returning the rifle to its case, he unplugged his ears and stood and shrugged back into his coat. He bent once more to collect the ejected shells, counting them as he did. Shouldering the rifle this time, he re-paced the distance to the tree.
The tacks he removed with a blackened thumbnail to examine what was left of his target. The man in the photo—his dimpled smile, his fancy-ass watch—had been obliterated by a tight cluster of five bullet holes that had overlapped into one. The sixth shot—high and right by an inch—had altered the headline above the photo to read “One Man’s Quest to Save the American West.”
“Dream on,” the young man sang aloud, folding the page into his pocket and turning again toward the road.
7
Addie knew that, try though she might to simply accept his bolstering presence, she was fated to see the day, and her old hometown, and the people who lived there, through Bradley Sommers’ eyes.
The Bradley Sommers, she reminded herself, whose father was a Caltech professor and whose mother had once served on the Pasadena city council. The Bradley whose boyhood home had been a meticulously restored Craftsman bungalow in a leafy enclave of other historic houses whose owners needed something like three city approvals and a special variance before they could replace so much as a front doorknob.
Montezuma County in contrast had virtually no zoning, since it interfered with a man’s God-given right to live as he damn well pleased. It had no building department because it neither licensed contractors nor inspected their work. Instead it had as part of its Comprehensive Land Use Plan a “Code of the West”—commonsense tips for country living—inspired by the writings of pulp novelist Zane Grey. Things like, “Children are exposed to different hazards in a rural setting than they are in an urban area,” or “Be aware that adjacent mining uses can expand and cause negative impacts.”
The result, not surprisingly, was an architectural hodgepodge in which the custom log-and-glass aeries of urban retirees might overlook a warren of singlewide trailers. In which automobile graveyards or mini storage units might sprout, weed-like, in the middle of residential neighborhoods. In which even the pristine beauty of McElmo Canyon had been marred by the odd junkyard or gravel pit or, in the case of one enterprising neighbor, an off-road racing track.
So what was Bradley thinking, riding in front with her grandfather as their procession snaked the twelve wending miles from the Red Rocks Ranch to the faux-stone solemnity of the funeral home in Cortez? The route took them past four pawn shops, and three liquor stores, and two defunct service stations. It traversed rubber-tomahawk tourist emporia and weekly-rate motels. And once onto the state highway that ran like a scar through downtown Cortez, they passed a succession of faded billboards for the likes of Denny’s and Wendy’s, Arby’s and JESUS SAVES.
For her part, seeing it all again, Addie thought how much better off Cortez and the surrounding communities might have been had they been settled a century later, when the area’s centrality to forested peaks and high-desert mesas might have attracted the sorts of seekers and dreamers who’d settled in places like Santa Fe or Taos, Sedona or Moab. She imagined, and not for the first time, a cosmic pulse erasing man’s first muddy footprints and giving the town, the county, the newly pristine landscape the second chance they deserved.
Amid the wood-paneled quiescence of the viewing room, where her grandmother’s rouged propinquity reduced all conversation to murmur, Addie watched as Bradley, standing apart from her family, fielded the tremulous handshakes of curious mourners whom Addie recognized from the Historical Society, or the Cowbelles, or the Episcopal Church. Several with canes, still others bent over walkers, their shuffling parade past the casket left a slipstream of Old Spice and Mineral Ice and the faintish redolence of mothballs.
Addie herself proved an object of no small curiosity. The hands squeezing hers were blue-veined and spotted, their skin like waxed paper. Carole’s girl, she heard herself called. Vivian’s pride and joy. Do you remember? they asked her, but mostly she did not. Mostly she felt numbed by grief and guilt at the realization that she among all those present had probably been longest in seeing her own grandmother alive.
Once the torrent of new arrivals had slowed to a trickle she joined Bradley where he stood by a sideboard display of framed family photographs.
“She was very beautiful,” he said, restoring one to its place. Addie recognized it as her grandmother’s favorite—she and Grandpa Jess on their honeymoon at the Broadmoor on the morning after the night on which, she’d once confided to Addie, they both had lost their virginity.
“You’re a saint for doing this.”
“I feel more like the bearded lady.” He turned to survey the room. “Everyone seems to want a closer look.”
“The rubes lining up to watch, corndogs in hand, while the fat man and the bearded lady watch them right back.”
“That sounds overly judgmental.