Crow Fair (19 page)

“Did you say anything?”

“Yes, Dad, I did. I told Cliff to blow it out his ass.”

Szabo could have taken this as evidence of David’s unresolved anger. Instead, he enjoyed the feeling that they were in cahoots. “How did Cliff take that?”

“He said he was sorry I felt that way. I told him not to be. I told him I didn’t feel anything at all.”

They were quiet for long enough to suggest the inkling of comfort. Finally, David said, “Tell me about Barney.”

“Barney! What about him?”

“Why did you send him here to see me?”

Startling as this was, Szabo did not react at first. He was quiet for a long and awkward moment. Then he asked quite levelly, “When did Barney show up?”

“While you were still in wherever. He said you sent him.”

“Not exactly. Perhaps, based on our conversations, Barney thought it might be something I wanted him to do.”

Szabo had no idea why he was dissembling like this, unless it was to buy time.

He suddenly recalled, from David’s childhood, the purple dinosaur toy called Barney that was guaranteed to empower the child, a multimillion-dollar brainstorm for cashing in on stupid parents. “Did he explain what he was doing here? How did he get here?”

“He came in your car.”

“Of course. Well, that was cheaper than flying. What was the purpose of his trip?”

“Are you asking me?”

“David, cut me some slack. I’ve been halfway around the world.”

“Did you sleep in those clothes, Dad?”

Now Szabo was on the defensive, still in the clothes of his Düsseldorf night with Amai, whom, in this moment of bewilderment, he was certain he should have married. Escape was not so easy. If he hadn’t fallen off a tractor and injured himself, this squirrel Barney wouldn’t be in the middle of his life. What would he be doing? Living in Germany with Amai, siring octoroons and trying to keep her out of the bars? “I’m afraid I underpacked, David. I wore this suit at meetings and slept in it on the plane. So, Barney was here … for what?”

“I guess for counseling of some kind, to prepare me for the outside world.”

David winced at these last two words.

“Why would Barney think he was in a position to counsel you?”

“If you don’t know, Dad, I’m sure I don’t, either. At least he has a Ph.D.”

“Is that what he told you?”

“Dad, I’m not following this! I didn’t send him here—you did!”

“I know, I know, and I’m sure it’s all to the good. Was Barney helpful?”

“You tell me. He said I should go home and take over the ranch.”

“It’s hardly a ranch, David. It’s just some property. What made him think you should do that?”

“Nothing you need to hear.”

“What do you mean by that? I want to hear what some jackass with a Ph.D. had to say.”

“You won’t like it.”

“David, I’m a big boy. Tell me.”

“He said that you’re incompetent and that it’s only a matter of time before you break your neck doing something you have no business doing.”

Furious, Szabo took this in with a false thoughtful air. Karen had said almost exactly the same thing. But her words had been motivated by a wish to replace the property with a winter home in San Luis Obispo, a town that had ranked number 1 in a
Times
survey of residential contentment.

“I trust you told Dr. Barney Q. Shitheel that you were not interested.”

“I didn’t tell him that, Dad.”

“What did you tell him?”

David smiled at his father. “I told him I wasn’t welcome there.”

“You could have come there anytime you wanted.”

“Right.”

“What’s this? Dave, why are you crying?”

David wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and spoke with odd detachment. “I knew I would never understand business, but I worked on a lot of ranches in high school. I was good at that.”

Not all the fight was gone out of Szabo. Nor had he given up on the story he’d been telling himself. But even as he asked his derisive question he was reminding himself how he might have been absent for his own child. “Did you think selling drugs was a way of learning business?”

David looked weary. He didn’t want to play anymore. “You’re right, Dad. What was I thinking?”

“I’m not saying I’m right.”

“No, Dad, you’re one hundred percent right.”

“Well,” he said, “I’m right some of the time.”

This exchange, more than anything, troubled Szabo. Here was David, broken down, imprisoned, soon to be released with his stigma. And Szabo was only adding to his insecurity, instead of trying to make the situation better.

There was plenty to do when he got home. And there was something to learn when he visited his mother: Barney had absconded with the Charlie Russell painting. The next morning, Szabo met the detective who was interviewing his mother while fanning away the smoke with his clipboard. She only glanced at Szabo, crestfallen, defeated. From the detective, a handsome fellow in a short-sleeved shirt, too young for his mustache, Szabo learned that his ranch hand’s name wasn’t Barney; it was Ronny—Ronny Something. Ronny’s gift was for slipping into a community with one of his many small talents: the sculptural woodpile had taken him far. The painting would go to a private collector, not likely to be seen again. “This isn’t Ronny’s first rodeo,” the detective said. “The only thread we’ve got is the Ph.D. There is no actual Ph.D., but it’s the one thing Ronny drops every time. There’s been a string of thefts, and they all lead into the same black hole. I don’t know why everyone is so sure that Ronny wants to help them.” When Szabo repeated this to Melinda and saw her wide eyes, he just shrugged and shook his head. Maybe to change the subject, she asked after David, and Szabo told her that he would soon be coming home.

Only the very treetops caught the first light as Jessica started up Cascade Creek, a sparkling crevice in a vast bed of spruce needles. As she walked, the light descended the trunks and ignited balsamic forest odors, awakening the birds and making it easy to find stepping-stones to cross the narrow creek. She’d found this trail on a Forest Service map; the contour lines had suggested a climb she could manage, and by scrutinizing images on Google Earth she had seen the small watershed open into what looked like a meadow or a strip of saturated ground. Jays were foraging in the hawthorns and, as day emerged, the hurrying clouds signaled fast-changing weather. Jessica’s pack held a spare down vest, a windbreaker, and an apple.

She came to a spot where the creek fell through a tangle of evergreen roots to form a plunge pool. Sitting for a moment, she followed the movement of bubbles into its crystalline depths, lost in her thoughts, free of history. Time was not the same dimension here that it was in the rest of her life, and floating like this was something to be savored. The bubbles in the plunge pool reminded her of the stars she had fallen in love with so long ago, years before she became an astronomer and began to spend her days analyzing solar data from the
Yohkoh
satellite or the
RHESSI spectroscopic imager. The stars were no longer a mystery to her; these bubbles would have to do.

After the plunge pool, the trail became steeper, and it pleased Jessica to feel her attention shift to her aching calves. She surprised a hawk on a low branch, not a soaring hawk but one that flashed through trees and seemed to take her with it. As she followed its search for an opening wide enough to ascend through, she saw a bright, grassy area ahead, a gap of light in the evergreens. She would explore there, then retrace her steps down the creek.

Once she’d reached the edge of the meadow, she stopped, unable at first to understand what she was seeing: two figures, proximate and mutually wary, one circling the other. Without moving, she grasped that a man, pistol dangling from one hand, was contemplating a wolf he had trapped; and the wolf, its foreleg secured in the jaws of a trap, was watching the man as he looked for a shot. Then the wolf turned and faced the forest in what seemed a despairing gesture. Jessica began to shout, running toward the man. She called, “You’re not going to do that!”

The man turned, startled. “I sure am,” he said gently. He was of an indeterminate age, tall and bareheaded in a canvas coat. His lace-up boots had undershot heels. A hat lay on the ground by his foot; his face was slick with sweat. “If this isn’t something you’d like to watch, you might just want to be elsewhere.”

Jessica was taken aback by his soft voice and by his peculiar tidiness. She noticed a mule tied in the trees, plywood panniers lashed to its ribs. Looking back at the terrified wolf, which was trying now to fling itself away from the trap, she heard herself say, “I’d rather shoot you than that animal.”

“Oh? I don’t think you know how hard it is to pull a trigger,”
the man said. “You have to feel pretty strongly about anything you kill. My old man used to tell me that you have to kill something every day, even if it’s a fly.”

He handed her the gun, and Jessica took it readily, surprised at how warm it was in her hand. She had a sense that some kind of power might shift to her, if she knew what to do with it.

“You obviously don’t read the papers,” she said. “People aren’t having any trouble pulling the trigger these days.”

“I’ll take it back now, thank you,” the man said patiently. “I need to go about my business, and it doesn’t look to me like you feel any big need to save this animal.” The wolf was on its belly now, staring at the trees, its trapped leg drawn out taut in front of it.

“I’m going to shoot you,” Jessica said.

She could almost see these words go out of her mouth.

“You think you’re going to shoot me.”

“I know I am.”

“Just wait until you try to turn him loose. That wolf isn’t going to be very nice to you.”

When the man seized the barrel of the gun, she felt as if she might fall, but she let him pull it away. Later, she felt that she hadn’t struggled hard enough. “You need to picture this thing a little better,” the man explained in his thoughtful voice. “I’m going to make a rug for my cabin out of his hide. I’m going to make jewelry out of his teeth and claws. I’m going to sell them on eBay.”

Jessica started to laugh miserably, and by the time the laughter got away from her the man had joined in, as though it were funny. The wolf was watching them, up on its haunches now. The
man wiped his eyes. “Honest to gosh,” he said. “Where would we be without laughter?”

Maybe the laughter was an opening. Jessica tried to explain to the man that the wolf stood for everything she cared about, everything wild. But he laughed and said, “Honey, can’t you hear those chain saws coming?” Her confession had gotten her nowhere.

The wolf made no attempt to escape as the man walked over and killed it.

It was the only place you could get coffee at that hour—sunrise had barely lit the front of the building—and the customers were already lined up right to the door. The young woman at the cash register, too sleepy to interact with anyone, made change mechanically, while her colleague, a young man in a woolen skullcap, seemed to hang from the levers as he waited for the coffee to pour. Jessica kept her hands in the sleeves of her sweater as she awaited her turn behind four people staring absently at their phones. Once she had the coffee, she put a second paper cup around it, went out into the morning, and felt a minor wave of optimism, ascribable to either caffeine or the sunrise.

Customers emerging from the shop were quickly absorbed by the town. As Jessica walked to Cooper Park to watch the morning dogs, the sunlight caught her, and she blew silver steam from her mouth. She had still been able to see a few stars when she left home, but they were gone now. The diehard dog people were already at the park, with others trickling in from the old houses around the neighborhood. This was the world of the
cherished mongrel—rescue dogs, shelter dogs, strays that had dodged euthanasia: a part border collie that made an exuberant entrance, then spun away from any dog that wanted to play, a dignified Labrador with its nose elevated, a greyhound missing a tail, a terrier that kept getting overrun by the others only to bounce up again in furious pursuit. They all froze in tableau at the call of a crow, a distant siren, or the arrival of another dog. The owners sat at the perimeter watching, as if at the theater. It occurred to Jessica that she might have been happier as a dog. Then again, she didn’t play well with others.

She had always had the stride of a country girl and felt that she had to cut through people to get anywhere. She walked at such a clip that someone asked, “Where’s the fire?” On her way to the university, she bumped into an unyielding clutch of trustafarians, gathered for the day’s recreation in front of Poor Richard’s and one called her a douche cannon. A woman swiped at her from behind with an umbrella. She stopped only to pet dogs or to sideslip between children. In a clear stretch, she tended to run. She seemed to be clashing with everything.

Walking was how she’d met Andy Clark, on the trail along Bozeman Creek. Later, it occurred to her that it was odd for someone to hike the way he did, with his hands in his pockets. Andy was thirty years old, looked about twenty, and was in no hurry. No hurry was Andy all over. He was good-natured and full of ideas, but Jessica suspected that there was something behind that—not concealed, necessarily, but hard to know, and possibly not all that interesting. Still, Andy’s boyish momentum and playfully forceful suggestions had made him good company at a time when she needed cheering up; and for a while, at least,
he hadn’t gotten on her nerves. It was eventually reported to Jessica that, during the production of an independent film in the city the previous summer, Andy had hung around the actresses so much that he was referred to locally as “the sex Sherpa to the stars.” When Jessica brought this up, she was exasperated to see that it pleased him.