Strip Search (34 page)

Tommy had said the same thing when he telephoned Wager and told him that his sons were supposed to be at this rodeo. The stockman for the show had seen the names on the list of registrants and recognized them. “I don’t know if you want to go over there, Gabe, but if so, it’s on Saturday, near Winter Park.”

“You want to come along?”

The telephone was silent, and Wager could imagine Tommy sucking on a cigarette while he thought about it. “No, I guess not. They’d see me and wonder what the hell I was doing there. I got stock to look at, anyway.”

“I haven’t found any police record on either of the boys.”

“I’m relieved to hear that. I did find out that John does some drinking at a place in Glenwood Springs—the Hanging Lake Lounge.”

“Who gave you the information?”

“An old boy I used to travel with. He saw Johnny there three or four times, he said. John’s working out that way, but he didn’t know at what. I don’t know if there’s anything to it, but that’s all I got.”

“I’ll check it out. If you hear any names, let me know.”

“Will do, Gabe.
Adios
.”

And he had checked out the bar, with the same results: nothing official in police files, no contact card in the DPD computer.

They slowed behind a laboring tanker truck that jetted black smoke from its upright exhaust as the driver geared down on the long climb to the summit. When a passing lane opened, Wager swung out and floored the pedal, the Trans-Am settling against the pull of its engine to dodge quickly back in front of the truck.

“I’m glad the road’s not icy.” Jo looked over the edge of the unguarded highway where the tops of pine trees fell away toward a foamy streak glimmering far below. “It’s a bad road in winter.”

“You come up here skiing a lot?”

The question meant more than it asked, and Jo answered its full range of inquiry. “Not anymore.”

That was the way they handled the inevitable questions about each other’s past. First, Wager tried not to ask because it wasn’t any of his business; and if on some impulse he did, he refused to pick at scabs. That had been another of Lorraine’s specialties which surfaced through the cracks of their marriage: she just had to know—completely, precisely, absolutely. She had to know what he meant when he said anything and what he meant when he was silent. And if he had no intended meaning at all, she had to know what that meant, too. She would have, he’d often thought, done damn well in the old Interrogation Unit. “I never learned to ski.”

“We’ll have to try cross-country.”

“Is it any easier than downhill?” Wager had seen a film of a hot-dogger bouncing down cliffs of humped snow, blond hair wild against an aura of glaring sun, knees almost as high as his black goggles while snow clods exploded from his skis. He’d be willing to try it. Even if it broke both his legs—and it probably would—Wager would try it. But he wasn’t sure how much he’d enjoy it.

“Not necessarily. But we can go at our own pace. We won’t try anything we’re not ready for.”

“All right,” said Wager, relieved. “You got a date for next winter.”

They crested Berthoud Pass, skirting a parking apron crowded with cars bearing a variety of out-of-state license plates. Beyond the heavy dark timbers of a restaurant, the towers of a cable car marched above stony tundra and snowfields toward the peak above. Across the highway, a closed chairlift disappeared among stunted pines. Ahead, flanked on the east by the wall of the Front Range, a gully dark with pines gradually widened into a broad valley that was patched here and there by the paler green of aspen stands. Far to the north, a band of ragged blue and snowy glimmer, was Rocky Mountain National Park.

“Sometimes I forget all this exists,” murmured Jo.

Wager’s eyes and mind were rested by it, too. It had been a long time—over a year?—since he had been away from the streets of Denver with their steady pulse of unnatural deaths and far from natural lives. He, too, had forgotten how clean a sky could be, how massively the earth could loom over the scratch of a highway down below, how far—when the walls and office towers and neon glare were gone—one could see. His hand touched hers resting on the seat between them. “It’s peaceful.”

Her hand turned up to welcome his.

Stretched across the highway that formed the main street, a red, white, and blue banner read “Welcome to Buckaroo Days.” On the dozen or so lamp standards that marked a vague center to the string of buildings scattered down each side of the pavement, red, white, and blue ribbons spiraled up to a cluster of wind-tossed bows. A Saturday jam of pickup trucks and four-wheel-drive vehicles filled the lot of a large, modern grocery store advertising cold beer and picnic supplies. Car traffic moved slowly up and down the highway to nose in and out of the few side streets and to swing in sudden halt at various shops and motels and fast-food stores that filled the ground floors of timbered buildings whose cantilevered balconies thrust out over busy malls. Wager asked at a gas station for directions to the rodeo grounds and then followed the highway a mile or so until they saw the large sign and arrow pointing left: “Buckaroo Arena—Rodeo Today!”

He turned in behind an oversized pickup towing a horse trailer with two brown rumps jiggling against the sway of the dirt road. They lurched through the stately shade of an aspen grove and then into a stubbled field where teenagers wearing orange vests wagged their hands at the arriving cars and headed them into dusty parking rows. At the far end of the field where tires had mashed pale tracks in the mown grass, the arena’s white paint glared in the sun, and they heard the quack of the announcer’s voice introduce someone who mumbled something into the microphone and was answered by the sound of polite applause like a mild surf lifted on the wind.

“Do you want to look for them before we go into the stands?”

Wager nodded. “We can ask around, anyway.” He wasn’t sure what he would do if he found them. Check them over; see if they had two legs, two arms, one head, all regulation issue. Tell them hello from their dad, maybe. And perhaps admit to himself that they weren’t the reason for this trip but the excuse—that it made Wager feel less guilty about sneaking out of Denver for a while.

He angled away from the line of people in boots and cowboy hats and jeans filing from the parking lot toward the grandstand gates. “Where are they likely to be?”

“Behind the chutes looking at the animals, I suppose. But we’ll probably need a pass to get there.”

They walked around the outside fencing, where officials and participants parked their cars. Here and there, cowboys unloaded gear from camper shells that weighed down the back of their pickup trucks; vans, their side doors and roof vents flung open for a breeze, showed other cowboys eating or smoking and working with ropes or leather rigging. Most were young, and near some stood nervous mothers and fathers asking if their son was sure he had this or that, or offering advice he already knew, or making him idly kick the dirt with red-faced embarrassment. Others, old enough to be free of parents, looked their way and grinned and turned to the more serious business of sizing up the girls. They flitted like butterflies through the cowboys’ parking area and then resettled along the fence near the contestants’ gate. There, number tags pinned to the backs of checkered shirts, young men filed in and out past a guard who looked like the others except for a cast on his leg and a badge on his shirt that said “Arena Policeman.” Wager asked if he knew the Sanchez brothers.

“Not offhand. You got numbers for them?”

“No. But they’re registered.”

The guard called to one of the girls. “Teri, let me see that there program you got.”

The girl, seventeen or eighteen and chewing gum behind lips that never closed, said sure and glanced carelessly at Wager in his city clothes and then eagerly back at a pair of cowboys wearing large shiny belt buckles.

“Yeah, here they are. Numbers thirty-seven and thirty-eight. They’re in all five events, so they’re probably over with the riding stock behind the chutes. They’re holding the drawing now for the timed events,” he explained. “Most of the boys like to be there. Sorry I can’t let you in without a pass.”

“Any place I can leave a message for them?”

From the stands came the steady clump of boots on boards and a ripple of laughter at an exchange between a clown and the announcer.

“Arena secretary’s office, I guess. It’s over there.” He pointed to a door leading to a small room tucked under the stands.

Wager thanked him and led Jo to the plank door. A hand-lettered sign said “Arena Secretary: If You Got Business Come In. If Not Keep Out.” He opened the door.

It was a cramped room with a beat-up metal desk piled high with papers and folders and even a stack of black-and-white photographs of smiling cowboys. Thumb tacked to the unpainted board walls was a variety of lists and notices; half-buried on the desk, a portable radio reached its antenna up for air and a drawn-out voice sang, “I’m laying down my ace of hearts for you.” A harried woman under a tangle of bleached hair looked up and tugged a cigarette off her lip. “You need something here?”

“I’d like to leave a message for James and John Sanchez. They’re riders.”

“Riders and ropers, too. Sure, stick it up on that wall there. But hurry up—I got about two minutes to get up to the booth and then this office closes.” She turned back to the form and scratched at it with a pencil.

Wager tore a leaf from his green pocket notebook and scribbled a line, then found a free thumbtack and stuck it to the board under the messages sign. “If the office closes, how will they get this?”

“It’s open at halftime for a little bit. It opens for payoffs as soon as the rodeo’s over. If they win something, they’ll sure as hell be here. If not, they might. You finished yet?”

“Yes ma’am.”

Jo and Wager made their way into the bleachers to find a seat high in the open section. The covered seats, already full, were capped by a roofed box, and they could see the announcer in a white cowboy hat and fringed jacket lean out of the window with a microphone in his hand. On the raked dirt of the arena floor, a clown in baggy pants, red underwear, and fright wig was going through his routine with the announcer as he chased after a yapping dog.

Across the sandy oval, another tier of bleachers was filled with restless movement, and beyond, gigantic and rising like a ragged wall, the west side of the Front Range loomed clear and sharp against the blue sky.

“What did you tell them?”

“I asked them to meet me by the contestants’ gate after the show.”

“Are you looking for anything special?”

Wager shook his head. “I don’t know if there’s anything to look for. But I promised I’d look, so I’ll look.”

Jo pointed at a flash of color and sparkle at the far end of the arena. “They’re getting set for the grand entry. I used to love this part!”

“Did you do this?”

“Sure! I was on a girls’ riding team, and we’d do the county-fair rodeos around Denver—four or five every summer. Figure eights, cross-overs, in-and-outs—you name it.”

Wager couldn’t name any of it. The most riding he’d ever done was on a fenced track with a horse whose head came up only when it faced the barn. Which was fine with Wager. “Pretty exciting, was it?”

“The practices weren’t, but the shows sure were. Everybody rode a lot faster then. And it can be dangerous, too, if you tighten up the formations.”

“But fun,” he said, watching her eyes.

She nodded, a strand of dark hair blowing across her forehead, and her smile light and quick with remembered excitement. “Here they come!”

The announcer’s voice rose until it was drowned out by the frantic thump of the small band and finally by the cheers of the crowd. From an opening in the fence at the arena’s far end, two columns of riders galloped hard, one file led by the American flag, the other by the flag of Colorado. Standing in the stirrups and lashing their reins across the horses’ necks, the riders leaned forward, wind pushing their hat brims back, and circled the grounds in two loops that, still galloping at full speed, curved back to cross in the center, then open to loop again. With the thud of hooves and a spray of flying dirt, they circled once more at a gallop, the hoots and yelps of the crowd and the crash of the band driving them faster. Then they skidded to a halt in front of the announcer’s booth, a long straight line of gasping horses and girls sitting at stiff attention. The flags snapped in the middle of the rank.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the Buckaroo Team Riders! And here comes the rodeo royalty, ladies and gentlemen, our Rodeo Queen, Miss Sharon Dingle, and her lovely court …”

Quickly, the arena floor filled with winners, runners-up, and entrants to the local beauty contest; rodeo committee members; contestants, clowns, judges; and an assortment of Boy Scouts and service group representatives who helped make the show a success and who each deserved a big hand from the crowd. Following introductions and prizes awarded to winners of an earlier kids’ rodeo came the National Anthem; and amid the cheers that covered the last few notes, Jo and Wager settled back for the first event, bareback bronc riding.

The Sanchez brothers’ turns came near the end of the go-round, after a series of rides, some of which lasted the full eight seconds. But most ended with either the cowboy flying hard into the dirt or the horse choosing to run or twist rather than buck. James’s name boomed out of the loudspeakers, and a second or two later the gate to chute two flew open and the horse and rider, plunging with jarring shocks, exploded onto the sand.

“It’s a good ride,” said Jo, and it was. Sanchez’s left hand stayed high and clear of the horse and saddle, while his knees, pumping with the twisting leap of the horse, lifted to drive his spurs above the animal’s shoulders. Writhing high, the unbridled horse twisted and tried to plunge its head down and heels skyward to rid itself of the flopping, clinging rider. But James, fist tight on the grip, hung on until the eight-second buzzer sounded and the pickup men galloped in to lift him off the bronc and guide the suddenly calm animal toward the exit. Vaulting across the pickup man’s horse and into the churned dirt, James walked stiffly, head down, through the applause and cheers of the audience.