The Cardinal Divide (47 page)

Cole watched as Smith stepped carefully past his hiding place. Now, thought Cole, was the moment to make his move. He guessed that Smith would come to the end of his tracks, where Cole had turned around, in less than a minute. Left elbow aching, Cole hoisted himself up the narrow crevice. He put the flashlight down in the snow and pulled himself up to the crest. He grabbed the heavy flashlight. His adrenaline surging, his temples pounding, he began to slowly close the gap between himself and David Smith.

Snow obliterates most sound, and so it was that Cole could get behind David Smith without being heard. Smith stepped onto the rock that Cole sat on to watch the grizzly family, and looked down to see Cole's tracks end twenty feet down the ridge.

Smith stopped.

Cole stepped onto the rock.

He brought the flashlight back behind him with his right arm and swung.

At that moment Smith turned, realizing that his quarry had doubled back, and saw Cole looming right behind him. Smith gasped. His eyes bulged and his mouth opened as if to speak. Cole
arced the flashlight down at Smith's head. But Smith was able to raise his left arm and the barrel of the rifle as Cole swung the heavy flashlight toward him. The blow caught the gun barrel first, knocked the rifle from Smith's hands, and then hit Smith in the side of the head with an audible crack. The man went down on one knee, the gun falling into the snow on the edge of the drop off.

Cole winced in pain as he completed the swing, his left ankle giving out under the force of his blow. The two men knelt in front of each other in the snow. Smith put his right hand down to steady himself. His eyes lacked focus. Cole blinked back tears and raised the flashlight again. As he struck, Smith lunged at him and the blow hit the man's back. Smith and Cole were locked in each other's arms, Cole beating at the man with the light and Smith punching at Cole with left and right jabs to his sides and kidneys. They rolled on the rocks and in the snow this way, pummelled each other with blows to the body, back, and arms, each man protecting his head. Cole pushed Smith away with his right foot and managed to land two quick punches to David Smith's face so that a spray of blood erupted from his nose. But Smith then found Cole's weakness. As the two men rolled, Smith's knee connected with Cole's ankle, and he roared in pain. Smith brought his foot down on the ankle and Cole blacked out. He felt a fist connect with his face and the world went momentarily white. He hit the rocks and felt the cold of the snow on his neck but he did not make any sound.

“This has gone far enough.” David Smith spat blood as he spoke. “Far enough.”

He struggled to his feet. Cole saw Smith through clouds of blood and the dizzying pain that obscured his vision.

“You fucking people come in here and try to fuck everything up. You try to destroy my town, and ruin my career. I own this fucking town,” Smith ranted. He moved backward, turned around, and searched the ground.

“And no Goddamn pointy head or some two-bit has-been is going to stop me.”

Cole struggled to sit up. He felt like puking and his left arm didn't want to work so he kept falling over.

“I'm going to make things right again. Now things will be back to normal around here.”

He's looking for the rifle, thought Cole. If he finds it, I'll never
see Sarah again. He steadied himself with his left hand and tried to make his legs work. He was nauseated and couldn't see anything but dim outlines. But he knew Smith neared the gun in the snow. He could see, through the miasma of pain and blood and memory, Smith bend over.

“Now, Mr. Blackwater ...”

The retort a pistol shot makes when heard in the open is so much quieter than one might expect, especially after hearing the blast from a rifle or shotgun. So it was that Cole heard the pop and then a voice yell through the snow: “Don't make another move!”

It was a female voice, and Cole's brain tried to connect it with a face. Why did Nancy Webber have a gun?

“Don't touch the rifle!” the voice called again. Cole tried to turn to see who spoke, but he fell sideways instead, his burning face cooled by the heavy, wet snow.

So it was that he didn't see what happened next, but heard four quick pops, and then nothing more.

Alberta could break your heart. It was a place of paradox. The way the prairie grasses rose to the undulating swell of the Porcupine Hills and gave way to the twisted pines and clutching aspens at their summit. The way the land plunged again, down into valley after valley, the rise and fall of ridges of rough fescue along the corrugated spine of the Whaleback. Finally, the perpendicular thrust of the Front Range Mountains, peaks dragging their ragged edges along the basement of heaven. It was heartbreakingly beautiful. But what could break your heart without remorse was how little regard some had for its majesty. Torn and ripped by off-highway vehicles. Plundered by logging and oil and gas companies. The guts ripped out of the land by mining. That left your heart in pieces.

And there was the weather, impervious to people's will. Winter and summer failed to obey even the most basic rules of their respective seasons. In the Eastern Slopes, some of the most vicious storms happened late in the spring, on the solstice's door step, dumping a foot of snow or more as the winds shifted and twisted and curled. These storms didn't come from the west as winter weather did, but from the south, and from the east. As high-pressure systems formed in the Rockies and on the Great Plains south of the Medicine Line, they pushed moist Pacific air back toward the eastern edge of the mountains. These “up slope” storms could make May feel like January, and June feel like March.

Then in November and December, summer often found its redemption, as autumn ushered in days so sunny, and skies so blue, that a walk in the woods, with the golden leaves crisp underfoot from a light frost the night before, seemed like heaven on earth.

It could break your heart.

Cole Blackwater dreamed of such things. He dreamed of a twisted patch of aspen tucked in along the banks of a tiny creek that emerged from the eastern side of the Porcupine Hills. It was a place he knew well, not far from the family ranch, but far enough that he could pretend not to hear his father's angry yelling or his mother's invitation to dinner. In the shortening days of autumn he could run along an ancient trail that wove through those trees, their grey bark dull against the copper-coloured ground. He could run until his legs gave up as he reached the top of the rise, find
a place alone on the crown of the hill, and rest against a twisted pine to watch the final rays of sunlight be eclipsed by the Rocky Mountains. The sky would fade from blue to indigo, and finally grey, like the aspens. In that half-light of autumn he would make his way home.

He opened his eyes slowly. The room was dim, but even the soft light hurt so he closed his eyes again.

“Cole?”

He opened his eyes more slowly. They adjusted to the light and he blinked several times and drew the room into focus.

“Hi Cole.”

He tried to turn his head to see who was speaking. But his neck and shoulders ached and he closed his eyes instead.

“Cole, it's Nancy.”

He opened his eyes for a third time. “I'm in the hospital?” he croaked.

“Yes,” she said, and reached for a bottle of water with a bent straw and handed it to him.

He took it and sipped. The water was cool in his throat, and the image of water tumbling from a glacier onto sun-parched rock came to his mind. “What day is it?”

“Sunday.”

Two weeks. A lifetime.

“How do I look?” he asked, remembering the accident.

“Like shit,” she said. “But the doctor says it won't be any worse than you normally look in a couple of weeks.”

He smiled thinly. His lips felt dry. “That's a relief.”

“David Smith is dead,” she said.

His brow furrowed, trying to remember. He remembered climbing down the crevice of rock, but couldn't remember climbing back out.

“Sergeant Reimer and one of her constables shot him. Four times.”

Pop, pop, pop, pop, he remembered, the individual sounds merging into one.

“I remember now,” he said, then, “You called me?”

“Yeah, I called you,” she smiled. “I called you from Anne's place. Right after I found Mike Barnes' appointment book. After Peggy gave me the name of the people you figured to be moles and their
stories, I went to Anne's apartment and confronted her, you know, just hoping for the story. Totally self-serving. But she cracked and said she didn't know what her uncle was up to.”

“Uncle.” It was a statement, not a question.

“Yeah, David Smith's sister is Anne's mother. Anyway, she just cracked, told me that she didn't mean for anybody to get hurt. She was just trying to help her uncle save the town. She cried and cried. I called the
RCMP
but by the time they got to the Chamber, Smith was gone. I guess he was headed back to the mine to destroy evidence or something. We'll never know. I found the Day-Timer in Anne's recycling. She said she'd found it in the trash one night after her uncle had been over and thinking that it must have been a mistake, put it in her blue box.”

“I can't believe how ironic that is,” said Cole, smiling.

“Recycling really does pay,” said Nancy.

They sat in silence for a moment, then Cole asked, “What happened to Dale?”

“He's been released. I got a front-page story with him saying he planned to sue the
RCMP
and the town and the mine and anybody else he could think of. He came by yesterday to see you, but you were asleep. Peggy McSorlie has been here a few times, and so has Perry Gilbert.”

“That's nice, isn't it?” asked Cole.

“It is,” she said. She put her hand on his, and he held her fingers.

“What about Sarah?”

“Peggy called her. Talked to your ex. They know you're fine. Sarah called here yesterday evening, and I told her you would call her when you were awake.”

“Sounds like you've been here a lot.”

“I've left to sleep,” she said, “but otherwise, someone's got to be here to make sure you don't do anything stupid.”

Cole smiled. “Thank you,” he said. He managed to turn his

head to look at her. She smiled at him.

“It's
OK
,” she finally said, her smile wide, showing her lovely teeth. “But you better start talking, buddy. I'm just waiting around here to get a story out of this.”

They rode together across the open meadows, the first wildflowers of summer touching the bellies of the horses. The May blizzard had dumped more than a foot of wet snow all up and down the foothills, and that moisture, when the sun finally emerged at the beginning of June, created a riot of colour. From the meadow at the crest of the gently sloping hill, Cole pointed the nose of his horse west and the other followed, so they could sit side by side and look out over the vast sweep of hills and valleys.

Far below, to the west, ran Highway 22. Every now and again a truck was heard labouring up the grade heading south, but aside from that intrusion there was no sound save the wind, the cacophony of bird song, and the buzzing of the season's first insects.

In the late afternoon light the row upon row of hills that climbed and fell between their perch on top of the Porcupine Hills and the great, breaking wave of stone that formed the eastern wall of the Rocky Mountains were painted in receding tones of green and blue. Then at the base of the great mountains grey, and finally black. A cloud scudded overhead and its shadow followed it, as if pulled by a string, slipping easy across the folded earth below.

“This is the most beautiful place in the world,” said Sarah, her eyes wide.

“It is God's country,” agreed Cole.

“I can't believe you've never taken me here!”

“We're here now. Enjoy it.”

“You grew up here,” she said, as if that somehow that made him different than everybody else.

“I did,” he said, knowing that even this place couldn't mask the other forces that shaped his life.

“It's so beautiful.”

“It's so beautiful,” he said, turning from the vista to look at his daughter, “that it breaks my heart.”

“I won't let that happen,” she said.

Cole turned away and pushed the tears across his cheek with his knuckles.

They turned their horses and Cole led her down through the aspens and picked their way along the faint trail of his youthful exploits. The new leaves unfurled, so green and so fragrant, that
the eyes ached for seeing them and the mind reeled to know that the fight between winter and spring had finally been settled.

Cole had stayed in the hospital for three more days. He had suffered a serious concussion and a host of other maladies that required medical attention, including a broken ankle, a sprained wrist and a cracked bone in his cheek. When he was finally released, Peggy McSorlie wheeled him to her car and drove him to her ranch, where he spent another two weeks nursing his wounds, and once again wrapping up loose ends.

There were many to be wrapped.

Perry Gilbert came to the McSorlie Ranch one afternoon. Cole sat on a lawn chair with his foot resting on a pillow on a stump under a cottonwood when Gilbert drove up. He motioned him over.

“How's the foot?” Gilbert asked. He pulled up another stump and sat down on it.

“Doc says I'll be back walking in another week. But I won't be able to pole vault anymore.”

“Life's tough.”

“Yeah, but I never was good at it anyway. Kept spearing myself with the pole.”

Gilbert told him that Dale had been cleared of all charges and the
RCMP
had issued an apology. “He's still going to sue,” said Gilbert.

“Does he have a chance?”