I&#39ll Be There (26 page)

Cate Rocce had seen him at church months ago, and she said she knew right away that something was deeply wrong in his life and she had wanted to help. She now claimed that she’d spoken to
him that day and that he was a totally cool guy. She said if she hadn’t been going out with Emerson Chapman, she would have hooked up with him for sure.

Teachers at Churchill had been sent an email explaining that the community had been part of a tragedy.

By the community, they meant Emily Bell and Bobby Ellis, but the school counsellor, Mrs Beister, found herself inundated by kids who wanted to come in during school to talk, if for no other
reason than to get more details and maybe an excuse to miss gym class.

And then, after a week, Taylor Perry crashed her car late at night while coming home from a party where kids were drinking vodka mixed with Gatorade. Taylor got her license taken away and was
sent to live with her father in Arizona, and the spotlight shifted.

From Taylor’s car crash, everyone moved on to the final social event of the year, the junior/senior prom.

Emily had no intention of going to a dance. Any kind of dance. But especially prom.

It took everything she had in her to get out of bed in the morning and put on clothes and go to school. The idea of dressing up and pretending to be some version of Cinderella was beyond
horrible.

But Bobby Ellis asked her over and over again to go with him, and he said that it was something they should do and he had all kinds of reasons why. None of them made any sense. Emily said no for
a straight week.

And then he fell, and that changed things.

He was wearing her down; he could feel it. He did his best work in silence. Bobby had Nora and Rory doing their part, and he’d even brought it up to Emily’s
parents, who said they’d talk to her when the timing was right.

Bobby dropped off Emily at her house, telling her that he had to do some work for his mom. He thought she looked relieved when he said that he couldn’t come in. He hoped that he was
imagining that.

Emily shut the front door, realising that she’d made it through another day. She literally counted the minutes now until she could come home, go up to her room, shut the
door, and shut down.

She always took the two cats with her. Even if they were skittish, there was comfort for her in connections. The cats, like Riddle, didn’t like to be confined, and they threw themselves at
her door once it was closed.

But Emily barely heard their cries.

The Mountain Basin Inn was where the prom was going to be held. It was a place that pretended to be a resort, but it was really just a hotel with a spa. Bobby Ellis’s dad
always went there before a court appearance. He got a full facial treatment and had his eyebrows groomed. He said it gave him an extra edge.

And that’s why Bobby Ellis went to see Olga. It was part of his furtive prom preparation.

The waiting room in the spa played music that sounded like a kid hitting wind chimes with a twisted fork. There were scented candles burning on all the flat surfaces, even though it was the
middle of the afternoon and the place was flooded with natural light.

The flickering candles all smelled like fake Christmas trees. One of them might have been tolerable, but a dozen Christmas tree candles made Bobby’s eyes water. His allergies were
stirring.

Bobby had pictured a tall, slender but busty girl from somewhere in rural Eastern Europe. In his mind she was around twenty years old with thick blond hair pulled back in a messy ponytail.

But the Olga who now greeted him was in her late sixties. She stood less than five feet tall, and ‘busty’ did not adequately describe the massive tubes that surrounded her
sausage-like body in the area between her armpits and her belly button.

Olga looked to Bobby like she could have once professionally wrestled in the mud. Bobby tried not to gasp, covering the instinct with a hoarse cough, as he got to his feet and followed her into
the bowels of the hotel spa.

More bad news for Bobby. Olga was a talker. And her accent was thick, making it hard to understand half of what she said. However, there was one thing that was perfectly clear. She was calling
him Booby.

‘So, Booby. We start with analysis and consultations.’ Bobby was now positioned in what looked like a reclining dental chair. Olga turned on a light that was as bright as the sun and
then swung a magnifying glass over Bobby’s face. He shut his eyes and felt his jaw tighten like a vice.

‘Booby, you are young. And young peoples have good skins. But we must take care of our skins, Booby . . .’

Bobby was mute. Great. She was a talker who loved the plural form.

‘First Olga will massage Booby. Then Olga will clean Booby. Then Olga will clean Booby again, but this time with brushes. Then Olga will perform the extractions. Then disinfect Booby. Then
mask Booby. Then moisturise Booby.’

He was stuck on the word
extractions
. What exactly was that about? His eyes flickered open, and he now saw small metal picks in a glass jar on the counter.

Olga swung the magnifier out of the way and moved to a position behind his head. Bobby pressed his eyes closed even tighter, and then Olga’s muscular fingers began to rub some kind of grit
into his face. Hard. It was possible she was bruising him.

Bobby tried not to squirm, but Olga was now kneading his cheeks as if they were bread dough. Should it really hurt this much? Bobby made a small, involuntary yelp, and Olga laughed at him. He
was sure of that. He opened his eyes to glare at her.

But instead of seeing her face, Bobby saw two enormous sandbags, which were part of the tubes of her upper body. And they were pressing right into his head. Suddenly he saw himself only
millimeters from possible suffocation.

Now he couldn’t breathe.

Someone had turned up the heat and that same person was somewhere unseen, sucking the oxygen right out of the room. Bobby could feel himself start to sweat at the same time that his stomach
roiled. He tried to shut his eyes, but everything began to pixilate, like a high-def channel that suddenly freezes when the signal gets messed up.

And then the room started to spin. That’s when he forced himself to try to sit up. But when he did, he hit the massive sandbags that were Olga’s massive bust, and in a panic he
recoiled. And then the room spinning turned into wild swirls as if he were on a carnival ride. He tried to stop it, and the next thing he knew, he was falling.

And on impact, Bobby broke his right arm on the faux-marble floor.

There were two hospitals in town, and it was just Bobby’s luck that he was taken by ambulance to Sacred Heart, where the nurse on duty in charge of the ER for the afternoon was Debbie
Bell.

Very few ranchers in the United States can afford to own the land needed for their cattle to graze. And so the great majority lease terrain from the government.

The last official estimate was that there was livestock on three hundred million acres of public property, and most of that in national parks. A war is being fought between environmental groups
who believe that livestock is destroying the natural habitat and the ranchers and farmers who assert that their livelihood depends on the current system.

So while Riddle and Sam were in the middle of a national forest, so was a herd of Black Angus cattle.

Sam opened his eyes.

The warm afternoon sun had dried parts of his clothing so that, as he painfully pulled himself up onto his elbow, it felt as if the front of his pants were made of cardboard.

His pockets were filled with sand and silt. Under his fingernails were crescents of dried orange mud from when he’d crawled up onto the shore.

His shoulder ached, and his skin and even scalp felt like he’d been shot with a fire hose. It was as if his body had been scrubbed clean and then dipped in orange clay.

Sam blinked in the harsh light and confusion took hold. Who was he? Where was he? And how did he get here, on this slimy shoreline?

He shut his eyes and tried to concentrate. Impossible.

No answers came to him. He was nobody from nowhere, and nothing was all he knew. And then he heard a noise crashing through the bushes. And it sounded enormous.

Sam opened his eyes again and was able to pick out something black. A bear? This was a very large bear. Hadn’t he seen a bear somewhere? Was that a long time ago or was it recently? And
where was he when he saw that bear?

Sam didn’t have time to even try to get to his feet before the moving black mass burst through the greenery to reveal a cow. A one-thousand-pound Black Angus.

The cow looked at Sam and didn’t seem to find the teenager to be anything special. She walked right past him to the water, leaned down, and began to drink her fill.

Sam, even more confused, pulled himself to his knees and slowly, painfully, dragged himself up the riverbank.

He didn’t go far.

Just over the knoll, through the stand of swaying aspen trees, was a rolling meadow thick with tall grass and wildflowers.

And on it was a large herd of grazing cattle.

A cowboy who was under the employment of three ranchers was driving the cattle that Sam could now see.

He was known to people as Buzz Nast.

Buzz was not made for the modern world. He was a technophobe who had never been on a computer. He refused to use a cell phone. And he wouldn’t even take a two-way radio with him when he
drove a herd into the Manti-La Sal National Forest for a ninety-day stretch. He was a cranky man who wanted a challenge but was suited to being alone.

The only human contact Buzz had happened once a week, when Julio Cortez drove a pickup truck into the forest on a side road from the highway and then walked two miles to a meeting point where he
dropped off supplies.

Keeping track of three hundred head of cattle is a hell of a lot of work. And Buzz spent every waking hour doing some aspect of his job. Most of that time he was on horseback.

When Buzz took off after an Angus that went down to the river, the last thing he expected to find was a disoriented seventeen-year-old boy with a fractured shoulder.

But he did.

Riddle decided to follow the river because, by his reasoning, he had to follow something. Not having pants was a problem, but not having shoes was a lot worse.

It didn’t take long for his socks to become caked with dirt and debris. He considered taking them off but decided against it. They had to be doing something to protect his already torn-up
feet.

Riddle stopped a few times to eat river plants and fistfuls of grass. He saw a pair of otters, and they seemed to slightly lift his spirits. But as the minutes turned into hours, he was
heartsick over Sam, exhausted, and fast becoming delirious.

I will put my head down. I will shut my eyes. And I will sleep.

And maybe I will never wake up.

And then I will be in a place where it is okay that I can’t find Sam. That is all I want. Because I am done.

Didn’t I tell Sam in the river? Didn’t I say . . .

I was done?

Riddle moved up the bank away from the water. He was finished following anything. He was finished trying.

And then, in the very moment that he no longer cared about anything, he saw neon orange.

Neon orange was not part of the landscape.

But neon orange was his favourite colour. He now had a goal. He would get to the orange spot, and there he would be done.

Minutes later he was close enough to see that the neon orange spot was shaped like a beetle and fastened down into the earth as if it was meant to be part of the scenery.

Riddle stared as if he were looking at an alien spaceship. It was a breathtaking discovery.

He moved closer and saw that it said
Coleman Exponent
on the side. Riddle marvelled at the printed letters. He put his hand out and touched the words, half expecting them to not be
real.

But the Coleman Exponent tent was very much for real. Riddle cautiously unzipped the opening and peered inside.

He saw three green puffy sleeping bags set out on blue convoluted pads. There was also a closed propane cookstove and three mostly full backpacks. Behind the backpacks were clear plastic bags of
varying sizes filled with rocks.

Riddle removed his filthy socks and stepped into the tent. He then carefully zipped the opening back shut. The light inside was orange, and it was warmer than outside. Riddle felt as if he had
climbed into the sun. He then lowered himself to the nylon floor and slipped into the first sleeping bag.

Riddle leaned back and his head sank into the inflatable camp pillow. He hadn’t felt this physically cosy, this comforted, in as long as he could remember.

And then he thought of Sam.

His eyes filled suddenly with tears, and his final thought before he gave in to his exhaustion was that he was Goldilocks. And he wondered what the three bears would look like.

Buzz Nast could see that the lanky teenager was in bad shape. Besides being injured, he was cold and hungry and in some kind of shock. The boy said he didn’t even know
his own name. Then, painfully, he started to cry.

It was the first time Sam had cried in a long, long time. And he was frightened by how violent the release of the emotions felt.

Buzz watched, his face expressionless.

And then the old cowboy made a decision to do something he never, ever did. He left his cattle. Because Buzz hoisted Sam up onto his horse and took him back to his campsite.

Once there, Buzz heated Sam a can of chilli and beans and then he gave him dry clothes, three Advil tablets, and put him to sleep on a tarp with a thermal blanket.

The kid’s shoulder was busted up. That much was obvious. But Buzz wasn’t a doctor, and he had no way to call for help. The kid needed rest more than anything. Plus he said that he
thought the break might have happened a while ago. But he didn’t know how. Or where. Because he just wasn’t sure of anything, really.

After Buzz felt the boy was settled, he rode back through the aspen trees to corral the cattle, which were at this point spread out in a mess of bovine freedom. Two of them would never again be
found.