The Loop (32 page)

Helen threw the letter onto the floor. Why should she have to read this shit? How
dare
he think he could tell her all this, give her a blow-by-blow account - oh yeah, no doubt cute little Marie-Christine was terrific in that department too, sex-goddess and Mother Teresa all wrapped up in one chic little Parisian bundle - how
dare
he?

She sat there for a moment, staring along the beam of her headlamp at the circle of light it made by the door. Her breathing made it rise and fall ridiculously. Then she reached for the letter - she couldn’t help herself - and read on.

That sounded familiar, Helen thought. She scanned ahead, searching for any reference to ‘soul mates’, but couldn’t see it, which was just as well, for she would probably have screamed and broken a fist against the wall.

Helen scrunched the letter up and threw it across the room.

‘You fucking bastard!’

She kicked off the sleeping bag and stood up, holding her hands over her face. Buzz was on his feet too. He started barking.

‘Shut up, you stupid animal!’

She ripped off her headlamp and threw it at him and he whimpered and slunk away somewhere while she stumbled in the darkness to the cabin door and fumbled for the catch. She found it and banged the door open and ran blindly out into the rain.

Her bare feet slipped on the mud and she fell heavily and lay there for awhile with her face pressed into the wet earth, panting and cursing him and herself and the day she was ever born.

And then she sat up and hunched herself and held her muddied hands to her face while the rain streamed down her, and wept.

All in all, Buck reflected, it had been a fine night’s work. He was relieving himself in the restroom of The Last Resort, with a cigar between his teeth and propping himself against the wall, where he saw some brave historian had already scrawled
Abe Harding for President
.

For the last hour Buck had been holding court at the bar, where everyone had adjourned when the fun outside was over. He’d never seen the place so packed or lively. Even the deer heads on the wall seemed to be having a good time.

The meeting had gone better than he could ever have dreamed. It made him nostalgic for the days when he was a state legislator. He hadn’t expected those greeno hippies to turn up, but they’d made such damn fools of themselves that in the end he was glad they had.

And then, old Abe, pulling that stunt with the wolf. Hell, what a performance. Money couldn’t buy that kind of publicity. Buck would never forget the look on Helen Ross’s cute little face when the wolf landed on the table in front of her. Boy, what a night.

He zipped up and made his way back through the crowd. He handed Lori behind the bar a fifty-dollar bill to buy everyone another drink and then said goodnight, promising the Harding boys he’d make some calls and get their daddy home as soon as possible. Poor old Abe was probably sharing a cell with a load of AIDS-ridden drug addicts down in Helena.

First, though, Buck had other business to attend to.

He’d seen Ruth at the meeting, but she was sitting too near to Eleanor and Kathy for him to have a quiet word. Eleanor’s lunatic idea of going into business with her was starting to cramp his love life a little. God, it was nearly two whole weeks since he and Ruth had been able to steal so much as a kiss. She always seemed to have some excuse not to see him and often as not it was to do with Eleanor, going through accounts or whatever.

Well, anyhow, he was going to put that right tonight. Rabble-rousing always got his juices flowing.

The rain was thinning. He drove past the gift shop and was pleased to see it was all shut up for the night. It meant she’d be at home, maybe even hoping he’d drop by. Waiting for him, all naked under that black robe of hers. The thought made his loins stir.

He wove the wet gravel out of town and soon saw the lights of Ruth’s house up ahead. He would take her against the hallway wall as soon as she answered the door, like he’d done that other time. As he came nearer, he saw the curtains were open and he swung the car into the driveway and parked in his usual place. She must have heard him because she was opening the door as he got out of the car. She was clearly as hot for him as he was for her.

‘Buck, you’ve got to go.’

‘What?’

‘Eleanor’s coming over. Right now.’

‘What?’

‘Don’t stand there gawping. She’ll be here any minute.’

‘What the hell’s she doing, coming here at this time of night?’

‘There’s a meeting with the accountants tomorrow and we need to go over the figures. Now, GO!’

‘Jesus.’

He stalked sulkily back toward his car and heard her shut the door on him. Without even saying goodnight! It was starting to rain heavily again. Buck stuck his half-smoked cigar between his teeth. It was all wet and had gone out and he flung it angrily away across the driveway, got into the car and slammed the door.

He turned the car, sending the gravel flying, and skidded back out through the gates. So as not to bump into Eleanor, he drove up to the end of the road and waited there, out of sight, with his lights off, until he saw the beam of her headlights turn into Ruth’s driveway.

Buck shook his head. Jesus, he thought. What was the world coming to, when a man couldn’t bed his mistress because his wife was with her? Scowling through the rain and darkly detumescent, he drove home.

The house was silent as a morgue when he got there. Luke must have already turned in, he figured. His hunger had shifted from sex to food and he went to the refrigerator, hoping there might be some leftover supper. But there wasn’t. He opened a beer instead and took it through to the living room, without turning on the lights. He sat down heavily on the couch and used the remote to switch on the TV. Jay Leno was joking with some unshaven young actor or singer or something, who looked like he’d just climbed out of bed. To Buck’s jaundiced eye, they both looked a lot too pleased with themselves.

He’d hardly settled when the phone rang. He killed the sound of the TV, leaned across and picked up.

‘Is that Calder?’

It was a man’s voice he didn’t recognize. It sounded as if he was calling from a bar.

‘Buck Calder speaking. Who’s this?’

‘Never mind who it is. Scum like you deserve to die.’

‘Not man enough to give your name?’

‘Man enough to wipe scum like you off the face of the earth.’

‘You were at that meeting tonight, right?’

‘I saw you on the fucking TV and saw what your psycho pal did to that wolf. And we want you to know—’

‘Oh it’s
we
now?’

‘We’re going to kill your cows.’

‘Oh just my cows?’

‘No, pigs too. Pigs like you.’

‘And I guess you’ll do all this in the name of the wolf, the greatest killer of them all.’

‘That’s right. You’ve been warned.’

There was a click and the line went dead. Buck stood up and put the phone down. The answering machine was beside it and he noticed there were four messages. He pressed the play button.

‘So the wolves killed your calves, huh? Oh, dear!’ It was a woman’s voice. ‘Before
you
had a chance to kill them. That’s so unfair! You’re a dying breed, pal, and the sooner you die, the better.’

Buck heard a noise and looked up to see Luke standing at the top of the stairs. He was still dressed.

‘Did you hear that?’

Luke nodded.

‘And the others? Are they all like that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Jesus.’

He fast-forwarded to the next. It was a man this time and started with a howl.

‘This is Wolf. With a message for Buck Calder. You’re dead meat, motherfucker.’ There was another howl.

The next one sounded like the same man he had just spoken with and the last, another woman, was a screaming tirade he could only partly decipher. Buck shook his head and took a drink of beer.

‘Did you see it on TV?’

Luke nodded.

‘Speak, Luke, speak.’

‘Y-y-yes.’

‘Did they show Abe dumping the wolf?’

‘Yes. Th-the whole . . . thing.’

‘They don’t hang about. Did it say what’s happening to him?’

‘He’s in j-j-jail, in Helena.’

‘Guess I’d better get on the phone. He’ll need someone to stand bail for him. Boy, what a night. Who the hell are all these crazy people, calling me like that?’

‘I d-d-don’t know. I’m g-g-going to bed now.’

‘Want a beer?’

‘N-n-no, sir.’

Buck sighed. ‘Okay, Luke. ‘Night then.’

‘G-goodnight.’

It was a sad thing when your own damn son wouldn’t share a beer with you. Buck switched off the mute TV and went to find the phone book. He slumped himself down with it on the couch, thumbing the pages to find the number of the jail in Helena.

Maybe it hadn’t been such a great evening after all. Abe’s wolf stunt had seemed pretty good at the time, but now Buck could see it wasn’t a smart move. The guy should have just followed the old rule: shoot, shovel and shut up. Well, he hadn’t and now they had a war on their hands.

Buck was damned if he was going to be frightened off by a bunch of pot-smoking bunny-huggers, threatening him over the phone. But they’d got him wondering.

Maybe he wasn’t playing this wolf business the right way. Originally, he’d thought the way to go was to make a big public issue of it. That was the whole idea of the meeting. Hell, he was real good at all that publicity stuff. And he’d been sure that if he made life hard enough for Dan Prior and his gang, they’d be forced to take action.

But now he could see that Abe killing that wolf would probably have the opposite effect. They were going to dig their heels in. And if Buck was going to get a stream of abusive phone calls every time he gave an interview, maybe he should think again.

Rather than wage war in public, maybe he should play things a little closer to his chest; come up with some more subtle stratagems; fight on several different fronts at the same time, like you did in a real war.

He resolved to give it some thought.

 

The trail up through the forest was frozen hard and where it was steep Moon Eye’s feet would sometimes slip and he would check his pace and find a safer route among the rocks. The rain had stopped a little after midnight and the sky had opened to coat the land with the first true frost of the fall. It had come suddenly, seizing the rain that dripped from the trees in a million miniature icicles that now glinted and rain-bowed as they began to melt in the slant of the early sun.

Luke reached the creek and rode up beside it toward the lake, passing the place by the shallows where he used to leave Moon Eye to graze before he knew Helen. The grass there now was starched stiff with frost and the horse’s feet crunched prints in it. At the creek’s edge where the water lingered and eddied, curls of steam rose into the still air.

All the way up from the ranch, Luke had been trying to make sense of what his father had said over breakfast. After what happened last night at the meeting and then all those threatening phone calls, it was almost unreal, so that at first Luke thought it was some kind of sick joke.

‘I’ve been doing some thinking about this wolf business,’ his father had said, through a mouthful of bread and bacon. ‘And I reckon maybe I’ve been a little hard on those Fish and Wildlife guys. What do you reckon, Luke?’

Luke shrugged. ‘I d-don’t know.’

‘Way I see it, they’re only doing their job. Maybe, it’d be better for us all, if we cooperated a little more. Help sort this wolf thing out. You know, finding them, keeping an eye on them and all.’

Luke didn’t say anything. He was always wary when his father came on all reasonable like this. Sometimes he only did it to lay a trap, tempting you to relax and walk right in and then - snap, he had you by the neck. Luke took a spoonful of cereal and looked at his mother across the table. She was listening as warily as he was.

‘You know what that Helen Ross girl was saying the other day? How much she appreciated your help, catching that wolf. Fair singing your praises she was, saying how you had a real feel for that kind of work.’