The Loop (5 page)

There were two kinds of women he pursued and the ones he dated knew nothing of the ones he paid. What made this surprising was that several of the former had brothers or male cousins who knew all too well about the latter. One or two of these young men had indeed witnessed Buck unbuckling and roared at the Calder motto, coined in his cups one bawdy night, that all you had to do with women was ‘Buck ’em and chuck ’em’.

His friends’ silence on these matters, born less of loyalty perhaps than fear of self-incrimination, allowed Buck to be seen, throughout his twenties, as nothing worse than what some still quaintly called a ‘lady’s man’, which did little to prevent him simultaneously being seen, except by bad sports and the inordinately perceptive, as Hope’s most eligible bachelor.

By the time he turned thirty, most women his age, including those he’d so excited at high school, had sensibly looked and found elsewhere. All were married and most were mothers and Buck by now was dating their younger sisters. Like his father before him, his eyes came at last to settle on a young woman ten years his junior.

Eleanor Collins was the daughter of a hardware store proprietor from Great Falls and had just finished her training as a physical therapist. Buck was one of her first patients.

He had strained a shoulder hauling a broken hay wagon from a creek. The last time he had come to the clinic he’d been stretched and pummeled by an older woman whom he’d later mocked as having the looks and charm of a Russian tank commander. So when he saw this young goddess step through the door of the consulting room, he thought she must be an assistant or nurse.

She wore a white coat that fitted close enough to show Buck’s practiced eye the kind of figure he liked best, slim and lithe and full-breasted. She had skin like ivory and long black hair, held up with tortoiseshell combs. She didn’t return his smile, just fixed him with her wonderful green eyes, asked him what the trouble was and told him to take off his shirt. Dear Lord, Buck thought, as he unbuttoned, it’s like something you read about in
Playboy
magazine.

Had Eleanor Collins succumbed to the charm he instantly applied, had she agreed to meet him for a cup of coffee at lunchtime, had she so much as smiled even once, things might have turned out differently.

Months later she would tell him that she’d been nervous as a chipmunk that day; that as soon as she’d laid eyes on him, she’d thought this was the man for her and how hard it had been to mask her feelings with professional cool. As it was, Buck left the clinic with both his shoulder and his heart aglow. And from the latter alone, he knew this was more than just another buck-and-chuck, for normally he felt the glow in a baser place. No. He had met, at last, the woman he would marry.

Of the cautionary signs to which Eleanor might have paid heed, perhaps the most telling was the quiet, resigned sadness in the eyes of Buck’s mother. It could have shown her what grim toll there was to pay for living with a firstborn male Calder. But Eleanor saw in her future mother-in-law only a shared and understandable adoration for this handsome, charming power-house of a man, a man who had chosen her from all the women in the world to share his life and bear his children.

Her refusal to sleep with him before they were married only stoked Buck’s passion all the more. Eleanor remained a virgin until their wedding night, whereupon she dutifully conceived. It was a boy. His name was not up for discussion. Two daughters, Lane and Kathy, followed at intervals of roughly two years.

‘Only breed your best cow every other year,’ Buck said to his drinking pals at The Last Resort. ‘That’s the way to get prime beef.’

It was a description that he could honestly apply to the first three of his children. Henry IV was a firstborn Calder to the core and sometimes when the two of them were out hunting or rounding up cattle or fixing a fence, Buck would shake his head with pride at the boy’s easy, unwitting emulation.

Dear Lord, he thought, the power of the seed. And then he’d look at young Luke and think again.

This second son didn’t look like a Calder at all. It had taken Eleanor four years to have him and during that time something seemed to have happened to the Calder genes. The boy was the image of his mother: the pale Irish skin, the dark hair, the same watchful green eyes.

‘Well, he sure is his mother’s son,’ Buck joked in the hospital when he first laid eyes on the child. ‘No telling who his daddy is though.’ And ever since, even in front of the boy, he’d gone on referring to Luke as ‘your son’.

It was said in jest, of course. He was far too proud to think that any man would dare cuckold him or that any woman of his would allow it. But secretly he felt his genes had somehow been denied access to the boy. Or worse, that they had been admitted and failed. And he felt this even before Luke began to stutter.

‘Ask for it properly,’ Buck would tell him at the table. He didn’t shout. He’d say it gently, but firmly. ‘Say, “Please may I have the milk.” That’s all you have to say, Luke.’

And Luke, just three years old, would sit there and try and fail and keep trying and keep failing and he wouldn’t get the milk until he cried and then Eleanor would go and hug him and give it to him and Buck would yell at her, because how the hell was the boy supposed to learn if she did that every time, for Christsake?

As Luke grew, so did his stutter. And the space between his words seemed linked in some organic process to the space that opened little by little in the midst of the family, he and his mother on the one side, everyone else on the other. More than ever, he became Eleanor’s son and soon he was to be her only one.

On a snowy November day, when Luke was seven years old, two Henry Calders, his older brother and his grandfather, were killed in a car wreck.

Young Henry, just fifteen years old, was learning to drive and it was he at the wheel, when a deer sprang out before them. The road was like greased marble and when he swerved, the wheels locked and the car slithered and launched itself into a ravine like a wingless bird. The rescue team reached it three hours later and with flashlights found the snow-sprinkled bodies in a tree, frozen and entwined, as if in some fabulous balletic leap.

With seventy-six years on the clock, the older Henry’s death was the more easily absorbed. But the loss of a child is an abyss from which few families return. Some claw their way again toward the light, perhaps finding a narrow ledge where, in time, memory can shed its skin of pain. Others dwell in darkness forever.

The Calders found a kind of nether twilight, though each by a different route. The boy’s death seemed to act on the family with a force that was centrifugal. They could find no comfort in collaborative mourning. Like shipwrecked strangers, they each struck out for shore alone as if fearful that in helping others they might be dragged beneath the waves of grief and drown.

Lane and Kathy fared best, escaping as often and for as long as they could to the homes of their separate sets of friends. Their father meanwhile, like a brave pioneer, strode forward in manly denial. Unconsciously impelled, perhaps, to spread some compensating genes, Buck sought sexual solace wherever he could. His philandering, only ever briefly curtailed by his marriage, took on new zeal.

Eleanor retreated to a distant inner land. She would sit glazed for days before the TV. Soon she knew every character in every soap and saw the same issues and faces come around again and again on the morning shows. She would watch wives yell at cheating husbands and daughters berate mothers for stealing their clothes or their boyfriends. She shocked herself sometimes by yelling along too.

When she grew tired of that, she tried drink. But she could never quite get the hang of it. Every kind of liquor she tried tasted terrible, even if she drowned it in orange or tomato juice. It made her forget, but only the wrong things. She would drive all the way to Helena or Great Falls only to find she had no idea why she was there. She drank with such graceful discretion that no one ever suspected, even when they ran out of bread or milk or she served the same meal two nights running or, once, forgot to serve one at all. In the end she decided she wasn’t cut out to be alcoholic and simply stopped.

It was Luke who felt her distance most keenly. He noticed how she often forgot to come and kiss him goodnight and how she rarely hugged him anymore. She still protected him from his father’s rage, but wearily and without passion, as if it were a duty whose purpose she had forgotten.

And so the boy’s quiet harvesting of guilt went undetected.

On the day of their death, his brother and grandfather had been on their way to fetch him from his speech therapist in Helena. And with the unsullied logic of a seven-year-old, this fact alone made the accident his fault. With one stroke he had slain his father’s father and best-beloved child, the ancient king and heir apparent of the Calders.

It was indeed a splendid burden for a boy to carry.

4

T
he red and white Cessna 185 banked steeply against a cobalt dome of morning sky, then seemed to hang weightless for a moment above the rim of the mountains. As he tilted the starboard wing at the sun and pointed the nose for the twentieth time toward the east, Dan looked directly down at the plane’s shadow and saw it falter then fall, like the ghost of an eagle down walls of ancient limestone a thousand feet deep.

Beside him in the narrow cockpit, Bill Rimmer sat with the radio receiver on his lap, going methodically, again and again, through the list of frequencies of every collared wolf there was from Canada to Yellowstone. There was an antenna on each wing and he constantly switched between them, while both men strained their ears for the unmistakable cluck-cluck-cluck of a signal.

It wasn’t the easiest country for spotting wolves. All morning they’d combed the peaks and the canyons, using their eyes as much as their ears, squinting into the shadowed spaces between the trees, scanning ridges and creeks and lush green meadows for some telltale sign: a carcass in a clearing, a flock of ravens, a sudden flight of deer. They saw plenty of deer, both white-tail and mule, and elk too. Once, flying low over a wide ravine, they startled a grizzly bear feeding with her cub in a patch of buffaloberries and sent them bounding for the shelter of the forest. Here and there they came across cattle, grazing the ‘allotments’, high summer pastures that many ranchers leased from the Forest Service. But of the wolf or wolves there was no trace.

Last night Rimmer had driven Dan back into Hope to get his car and they’d gone into The Last Resort for a beer both felt they’d earned. The place was dark, its walls crowded with trophy heads whose unseeing eyes seemed to follow them as they took their glasses to a table in the corner. At the other end of the room a couple of ranch hands were playing pool and feeding a jukebox. The music had to compete with the ball game on the TV above the bar, where a lone drinker in a sweat-stained hat sat recounting the details of his day to the barmaid. She was trying to sound interested and overdoing it a little. Dan and Rimmer were the only other customers. Dan was still seething from his encounter with Buck Calder.

‘I told you he was a piece of work,’ Rimmer said, wiping the froth from his mustache.

‘Piece of something, anyway.’

‘Oh, he’s okay. Reckon his bark’s bigger than his bite. He’s one of these guys likes to test you, see how tough you are.’

‘Oh, that’s what he was doing.’

‘Sure it was. You stood up pretty good.’

‘Well, thanks Bill.’ He took a long drink from his glass and put it down with a clunk. ‘Why the hell couldn’t he wait before calling all those goddamn reporters?’

‘They’ll all be out there again soon enough.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘He told me they’re gonna bury the dog, you know, give it a proper hero’s funeral, tombstone and all.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘That’s what he said.’

‘What do you reckon they ought to put on the tombstone?’

They both thought awhile. Dan got there first.

‘Maybe just, “Labrador formerly known as Prince.”’ They laughed like a couple of kids and far longer than such a dubious joke deserved, but it felt good and that and the beer soon put Dan in a better mood. They had another and stayed until the ball game finished. By then the place was getting busier. It was time to go.

As they headed for the door, Dan heard a voice on the TV say, ‘And in the Hope Valley, a baby’s narrow escape from death when Mr Wolf comes to call. That story coming up. Stay with us.’

So they did, but stood in the shadows by the door in case they were spotted. And true to his word, after the commercials, the local anchorman came back with the story and Dan felt his hackles rise at the sight of Buck Calder’s crocodile smile.

‘The wolf’s a killing machine. He’ll take anything he can.’

‘The guy ought to run for president,’ Dan said in a low voice.

Then, over a shot of Dan and Rimmer, trying to keep a low profile at the back of the crowd, just as they were doing now, the report went on to say that federal officials were ‘embarrassed’ by what had happened. They used a snippet of the short interview Dan had given, in which he proved the point before he even opened his mouth. He was squinting furtively into the glare of the lights, like a man on trial for unspeakable crimes.

‘Could this wolf be one of those wolves you released into Yellowstone?’ the reporter in the red suit asked him, shoving the microphone up his nose. The
you
hurt.

‘It’s really too early to know that. Until we’ve had a chance to examine the body, we can’t even confirm it
was
a wolf.’

‘Are you saying you don’t think it was?’

‘No, I’m not saying that. I’m just saying we can’t confirm it yet.’ His attempt at a disarming smile just made him look shiftier. Dan had seen enough.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said.