The Loop (29 page)

She finished her drink and ordered another, pretending to be interested in a basketball game on the TV and wondering how the hell she ever thought coming to this godforsaken dump might be good for public relations. She drank the second margarita too quickly. They were strong and she wished she’d had something to eat first.

Then, in the mirror behind the bar, she saw Buck Calder coming in through the door. That was all she needed.

He eased his way toward the bar, working the crowd like a vote-hungry candidate. Helen watched his reflected progression and couldn’t help but be impressed. She wondered what those whose hands he shook and shoulders he squeezed really thought of him. They seemed dazzled by his smile and his wisecracks, by the way he tucked their names into his greetings. She saw him notice her and register her stare and though she immediately looked away, she knew, with a small rush of panic, that he was headed her way.

‘I can’t imagine what’s come over all these fellas, letting a pretty young woman sit drinking on her own.’

Helen gave a laugh that became almost hysterical. He was standing right behind her, looking at her in the mirror.

‘They’re not normally noted for shyness around these parts.’ Helen couldn’t think what to say. The tequila seemed to have numbed her wit. She saw in the mirror how inane her smile looked and tried to adjust it. Beside her, a man was collecting a round of drinks and when he moved away, Calder slipped neatly into the slot. Their bodies were only an inch or two apart and their legs briefly touched. She could smell his lemon-scented cologne and was disconcerted. It was the same kind her father now used.

‘May I make amends for their lack of courtesy and buy you a drink?’

‘Well, thanks, but actually, I was supposed to be meeting somebody here. I think he must have—’

‘What is it, a margarita?’

‘No really, I think I’d better be—’

He leaned over and called along the bar, ‘Lori? Can we have us a beer and another margarita here? Thanks, sweetheart. ’

He turned his head and smiled down at Helen.

‘Just want to show there’s no hard feelings about this morning. ’

Helen frowned, as if she didn’t know what he meant.

‘I appreciate you’ve got a job to do. Maybe I was a little harsh.’

‘Oh, I was born with a thick skin and broad shoulders.’

‘From here, Helen, I’d say they were just about right.’ She smiled. Her mind reeled. Was that a
pass
, for heavensake?

‘I think Luke was maybe a little more upset than I was.’

‘He gets that way sometimes. Takes after his mother.’

Helen nodded slowly, buying time. It seemed like dangerous territory.

‘Sensitive, you mean,’ she said.

‘I guess that’s one word for it.’

‘Being sensitive isn’t such a bad thing, is it?’

‘Didn’t say it was.’

There was a silence that was only saved from getting awkward by the barmaid coming to tell Helen there was a phone call for her. She excused herself with Calder and made her way through the crowd to the alcove where the phone was. It was Bill Rimmer, full of apologies for standing her up. He said Abe Harding had given him a hard time.

‘Do you still have all your limbs?’ Helen asked.

‘I haven’t counted them yet. Those are some dogs.’

‘What about the calves?’

‘He didn’t find a single bone up there. But he says he knows it was the wolves. Says he’s seen them and heard them.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I had to tell him that to qualify for compensation, he’d need verification that the losses were caused by wolves.’

‘And that went down pretty well, I imagine.’

‘Oh yeah. He really liked that bit. Anyhow, I spoke with Dan and he says maybe you and he should fly tomorrow, see if you can get a real fix on the pack, now you’ve a couple of collars on them.’

‘Sure, that’s a good idea.’

Rimmer apologized again for not showing up, but said he figured she might be better off sweet-talking angry ranchers on her own anyway. Helen told him in a lowered voice that she was having a drink with Buck Calder.

‘Well, there you go, Helen. He’s your main man.’

‘Thanks, Bill.’

Calder was talking to someone else when she got back to the bar and Helen thought this might be her chance to leave. But he immediately turned his attention back to her. He raised his glass and clinked it against hers.

‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘Congratulations on catching them.’

‘Even though I let them go again.’

He smiled and they both drank.

He wiped the froth from his lips. ‘As I say, you’ve got a job to do and I understand that, even though I may not agree with it. I was just mad at Luke for leaving the herd, specially after seeing how many calves old Abe lost. I’m sorry if I was . . . well, discourteous.’

‘Oh, that’s okay.’

Helen took out another cigarette and he picked up her matches and lit it for her. She thanked him. For awhile neither of them spoke.

‘Luke knows the country up there really well,’ Helen said.

‘Yeah, I guess he does.’

‘And he’s got a real feel for my kind of work.’

‘Yep, he’s a born bunny-hugger.’

They both laughed.

‘Does he get that from his mother too?’

‘I guess. She grew up in the city, anyhow.’

‘Where all us bunny-huggers grow up, of course.’

‘That’s how it seems to be.’

He smiled and lifted his glass to drink, keeping his eyes on her over the rim. And suddenly, despite herself, Helen could see how women might find Buck Calder attractive. It wasn’t his looks, which weren’t bad, she had to admit, for a guy his age. It was entirely to do with confidence. It oozed from him. The way he focused his attention on you was brazen, laughable even, if you chose to see it that way. But Helen guessed many women might prefer instead to bask in it.

Without asking her, he ordered them both another drink and changed the subject. He got her talking about herself, about Chicago and her work in Minnesota about her family and even about her dad getting married again. And though this was clearly another of his techniques with women, he did it so effortlessly and with such well-measured empathy that Helen had to stop herself spilling secrets that, sober in the morning, she knew she would regret.

‘Does it bother you that she’s so much younger?’

‘Than my dad? Or me?’

‘Well, both, I guess.’

Helen thought for a moment. ‘Than me, no. I don’t think so anyway. Than him . . . well, damn it, yes. If I’m honest, it does. I don’t know why, it just does.’

‘A man can’t help falling in love.’

‘Yeah, but why can’t he pick on someone his own age?’ He laughed. ‘Grow up, you mean.’

‘Exactly.’

‘My momma used to say men never grow up, they just get grouchier. There’s this little boy hiding inside every one of us and he’s there till the day we die, hollering
I want, I want
.’

‘And women don’t want?’

‘I’m sure they do. But they can handle not getting it better than men.’

‘Oh, is that so?’

‘Yes, Helen, I believe it is. I think women see some things a little more clearly than men.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like, wanting something can be better than getting it.’

They looked at each other for a moment. Finding a philosopher in him surprised her, though as always, what he said seemed to have some other meaning swirling beneath it.

Ethan Harding and his po-faced logging pals went by, on their way to the door. Ethan nodded to Calder but none of them so much as glanced at Helen.

Looking around her, she realized how much the crowd had thinned. They had been talking for nearly an hour. She said it was time she went home and resisted his efforts to persuade her to have a last drink. She’d had more than enough already, as she could tell by the way the walls moved as soon as she stood up.

‘I sure have enjoyed our talk,’ he said.

‘Me too.’

‘Are you okay to drive? I could easily—’

‘I’m fine.’ She said it a little too quickly.

‘I’ll see you to your truck.’

‘No, no. Thank you. I’m fine.’ She was sufficiently sober, thank you very much, to know it wasn’t a great idea to be seen leaving the bar with him. There would be enough tongues wagging as it was.

The street was empty and the cool of the night air delicious. She searched in her bag for the keys to the pickup and after emptying its entire contents onto the hood, found them in her jacket pocket. She managed to turn the truck around without hitting anything and drove with great deliberation out of town, already aware that she might have embarrassed herself, though still too drunk to care. Shame and self-loathing, she murkily recalled, only came with the hangover.

Doing her best to follow the meandering pool of her headlights, she remembered she was going flying with Dan and that hangovers and small planes didn’t go too well together.

Up ahead now, she could see the row of mailboxes. She hadn’t checked hers for three days. Earlier, heading into town, she had feared finding it empty might spoil her mood and decided to stop instead on the way home. She was drunk enough now to take it.

As she got nearer she could see something white lying in the road and, a moment later, realized what it was. She stopped the pickup so that the headlights were on it and got out.

It was her mailbox. The metal stake had been twisted to the ground and the box itself flattened. It looked as if someone had smashed it with something and then for good measure driven over it. The other mailboxes were unscathed.

Helen stood, half lit by the headlights, frowning down at the wreckage and swaying slightly, though more sober with each second. The car’s engine spluttered and stalled and for the first time she heard the moan of the wind. It had shifted and was coming cold from the north.

Somewhere in the forest a coyote began to yip then broke off, as if rebuked. She peered along the gray gravel to where her shadow reached the blacker black of the night. For an instant, she thought she saw a flicker of something pale there. But then it was gone.

She turned and walked back toward the pickup. And as she did so, the letter jigged again, only this time unseen. Then it flipped and scuttled away in the wind.

19

D
an Prior was not a religious man. At his most indulgent, he considered faith an obstacle to understanding, an excuse for not sorting out the here and the now. More practically, if something needed fixing, it just seemed smarter to try and fix it yourself than leave it to someone you’d never met and who might not show up in any case.

There were two exceptional occasions however when Dan resorted to prayer. The first was any Saturday night when his daughter was out later than they had agreed and hadn’t phoned (which happened so routinely nowadays, God would soon have him down as a new recruit). The second was whenever he went flying. It seemed only logical. At several thousand feet, room for self-help was limited and if there did happen to be Someone up there, you were at least well placed for a hearing.

Today, however, as he tried to hold the Cessna steady in the bruising north wind, Dan didn’t pray for his and Helen’s safety. Looking down at the higher reaches of the Hope Valley, he could see that word of Abe Harding’s alleged losses to the wolves had indeed spread. All along the mountain front, herds were being gathered from their summer allotments. So instead, in a worrying and psalmic extension of normal practice, Dan asked the Lord that all the ranchers he saw down there, on their horses tiny as ticks, would find their cattle had safely grazed.

He watched the plane’s shadow pass over the last of them, then looked ahead again to where the mountains curved away north like a fossilized spine, its vertebrae sprinkled with a first fall of snow. The wind had scoured all residue of summer haze from the sky. It was that kind of limpid, limitless blue that made you feel you could fly to the moon and back if you only had the fuel.

Dan kept his poetry to himself, knowing that in her present state, it would be lost on Helen. She was hunched in the seat beside him, scanning the radio frequencies and hiding her hangover with sunglasses and a faded Minnesota Timberwolves cap. Her face was a grayer shade of green every time he glanced at her.

She had arrived at the airfield in Helena with a large black coffee that she’d stopped for on the way and warned him at once that she was in no mood for jokes. She was in such a fragile state that when they’d picked up the first signal, a couple of miles south-west of Hope, she winced and reached for the volume control.

The signal belonged to the young male and, scanning on, Helen had soon found the mother’s. Both were strongest as the plane crossed Wrong Creek, which was good news, because it meant they were away from the cattle. They seemed to be on the north side of the canyon, probably resting up somewhere, about a mile farther up from where Helen had trapped the male. But in the three passes they had so far made, they hadn’t been able to spot them.

Apart from a few small meadows, the canyon was thick with trees and though the wind was stripping the aspens of their bright yellow leaves, the green of the pine and fir was impenetrable. Even away from the trees, there were a thousand rocky nooks where a wolf might lie hidden.

They reached the end of the canyon again and Dan climbed toward the sun and banked into another turn. At once the wind caught them and the plane lurched and bumped like a car in a pothole, making Dan grateful he hadn’t had breakfast.

‘God almighty, Prior!’

‘Sorry.’

‘I see your flying hasn’t improved.’

‘I see your hangover hasn’t.’

He went lower this time, flying above the southern rim of the canyon and tilting the plane so Helen could get a better view. The signals from the starboard antenna grew stronger and stronger and suddenly Helen called out and pointed.