Way Down on the High Lonely (8 page)

Neal reached over and steadied the steering wheel as Steve Mills took a pack of Camels from his shirt pocket, stuck a cigarette in his mouth, struck a match, then lit it up.

“Hope you don’t mind,” Steve said, exhaling a deep drag of smoke, “but since my heart attack the wife raises unholy hell if she sees me with a butt. They had to whirlybird me into Fallon, so I finally got a little of my insurance money back! Kind of scared the wife, though. She says if it happens again, and she finds any cigs on me, she’s just going to leave me to die in the barn. I told her she might as well bury me there, too, seeing as how I’ve been ass deep in cow shit most of my life anyway. You don’t say a lot, do you?”

“I like to listen.”

“Well, this relationship might work out, because I like to talk and the wife and daughter have already heard all my stories—twice. I got a herd of cows rooting for my next heart attack just so they won’t have to listen to me anymore. My cattle don’t go ‘moo,’ they go ‘Shut up!’”

The truck reached the top of a long, steep grade. Neal could see a broad valley below them. A mountain range formed a backdrop beyond. The valley seemed to stretch endlessly to the south and north.

You can see forever, Neal thought.

“Welcome to The High Lonely,” Steve said.

“The what?”

“The High Lonely—that’s what we call it around here. You’re at about six thousand feet elevation, and it’s mostly empty space, as you can observe. Very few people, some more cattle, lots of jackrabbits and coyotes. Back there in the mountains you have cougars, bighorn sheep, and eagles.”

Steve pulled the truck off onto an overlook.

It’s like being perched at the edge of the world, Neal thought. A great brown vastness under a canopy of startling blue.

“We’re sitting on Mount Airy Summit,” Steve explained. “Six thousand, six hundred and seventy-nine feet high. Down there is the Reese River valley, although it isn’t much of a river as rivers go. That’s the Toiyabe Range across the valley. The big peak there is called Bunker Hill. My place sets at the base of it. Believe it or not, I actually climbed that damn thing once or twice with my daughter Shelly.”

Steve pulled the truck back onto the road and started the descent into the valley.

“It’s mostly cattle country,” Steve said, “but it takes a tremendous amount of land for the cattle to graze, it being mostly sagebrush. We grow the best alfalfa in the country up here but it costs an arm and a leg to irrigate and we don’t have the water to do more than we’re doing. Used to be a lot of gold mining around, but that’s about finished.”

“So what do people do?” asked Neal.

“Leave, mostly.”

Steve pointed to a dirt road off to the right. “Our place is about twenty miles down that way,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe the winters up here. That’s called a non sequitur, isn’t it?”

“Right.”

“I got a B.A. in English, although that doesn’t impress the cows.”

“From where?”

“Berkeley. Back before the whole free speech stuff, of course. Which is sort of too bad, seeing as how I’m all for free speech,” Steve said. The road took a sudden steep rise, curling through several switchbacks flanked by thick stands of piñon pine. “Now, we’re coming up to Austin, which ain’t got much except it does have a bar and I thought I should give you the whole tour.”

“The wife doesn’t approve of drinking either?” Neal asked.

“Well, not since my heart attacked me. Damn doctor … nice enough guy, but Jesus, he tells me to give up smoking, drinking, and red meat. I’m a rancher. I raise beef. I smoke and drink and eat my own beefsteak and I might be the happiest man in America. Well, here’s Austin, such as it is.”

It sure isn’t much, Neal thought. The town seemed to cling to one of the gentler slopes on the west side of the mountain range. Route 50 narrowed to make the town’s main street, along which there was a raised wooden sidewalk. Old buildings that looked like a run-down movie set of a bad western flanked the street. The buildings were mostly wooden, with a couple of red brick edifices thrown in, and featured classic western facades and wood canopies held up by long poles. There were a couple of cheap motels, a gas station, one restaurant, maybe three saloons, and a grocery store. A few houses dotted the hill that led up from the north side of the road. The hill was sparse except for a few pinon pine.

“Let’s go see and be seen at Brogan’s,” Steve said as he pulled the car over on the side of the road.

He brushed the dust off his pants and old leather boots and ambled toward Brogan’s. Neal watched his slightly bowlegged gait and the little hitch in his left leg. Then he gently lowered himself out of the truck and he followed him into the bar.

It wasn’t really a bar, though. It was a saloon, as dark and cool as an old cellar. The two small windows were grimy from forty years of collected grease and smoke and let in unsteady streams of filtered sunlight to highlight the specks of dust that floated in the stale air. The low ceiling sheltered cobwebs in each corner and the three small, round tables showed only a nodding acquaintance with anything resembling a rag.

A few stools, a couple with torn red upholstery, were pushed up against the bar, behind which sat an old man, fat and wrinkled as a bullfrog, with jowls to match. His butt sank deep into the cushion of an ancient wing-back chair and he was sipping what looked like whiskey from a jelly jar that was as greasy as the hand that held it. An enormous dog of dubious ancestry and ineffable color lay beside him and raised its gigantic head to see who was coming through the door.

A younger man, tall and wiry, was perched on a stool at the far end of the bar. His sandy hair peeked out under a red gimme cap advertising Wildcat. A spindly mustache outlined the narrow mouth that was bent into a frown. A long red beard hung straight down from his mouth. He was staring into a glass of beer.

“Whoohoo,” the fat man wheezed. “I guess
Mrs.
Mills didn’t come into town.”

“Hello, Brogan,” said Steve. “This is Neal Carey.”

The man at the end of the bar looked up.

“Steve,” he said, nodding his head.

“Cal,” Steve nodded back. “What are you drinking, Neal?”

“A beer?” Neal asked.

“I guess Brogan’s got one or two. A beer for my friend and I’ll have a beer and shot.”

“You know where it is,” Brogan answered. Neal got the feeling that Brogan didn’t spend a lot of time out of that chair. “Leave the money on the bar first.”

“You don’t trust me, Brogan.”

“I trust myself and my dog and I don’t turn my back on the dog.”

Steve climbed over the bar and reached into an old-fashioned Coca-Cola cooler and pulled out two sweating bottles of beer. Then he took a bottle of Canadian Club out from under the bar, grabbed a shot glass from a rack, and filled it up.

“I wouldn’t either if I had that dog,” Steve said. “It would probably try to screw you in the ass, and it’s big enough to do it.”

Neal saw Cal flinch ever so slightly, then bury his head deeper in his beer. The dog lifted its muzzle with somewhat less interest. Steve Mills knocked the shot back, shook his head, turned red, coughed, and set the glass down.

“I love this country,” he said. He popped the caps off the beer and handed one to Neal.

Neal sat down on a stool and took a tentative sip of the beer. It tasted bitter and cold. It tasted great. He took another sip, then a swallow, and then tipped the bottle back and guzzled the stuff, savoring the feel of it pouring cool and wet down his throat.

Steve pulled a couple of crumbled bills out of his pocket and laid them on the bar.

“Mrs. Mills letting you have a little of your money?” Brogan teased. His voice sounded like a slow leak from a steam pipe.

Steve turned to Neal. “The missus handles the money, which is kinda funny, seeing as I’m the one who’s supposed to have the head for it.”

Cal looked up from his beer again and glanced quickly but sharply at Steve Mills. Nobody seemed to notice but Neal, who took an instant dislike to the guy. That felt almost as invigorating as the beer. Neal hadn’t allowed himself to feel very much in the way of emotion for a while. He swigged down the rest of the bottle and saw Steve Mills watching him.

Steve lit up a cigarette and took a drag. “Why don’t you come out to the place with me? We can feed you and give you a place to sleep and you can sort things out from there.”

“I couldn’t impose on you like that.”

“We are starved for company out there, and I have a teenage daughter who would just love to interrogate you about life in the big city.

He does have a point, Neal thought. I’m hungry and tired, and if I call Friends just now they might send the old van out to haul me back in. And I’m not ready for that just yet.

And after all, I am looking for a ranch near Austin.

“Well, thank you. It’s very kind of you,” Neal said, feeling like a lying hypocrite.

But that’s what undercover work is all about, he thought.

Three more beers met their maker before Steve and Neal got back in the truck and headed out of town. They drove west for a mile or so and then turned south down the dirt road Steve had pointed out earlier. The road ran roughly parallel between the Toiyabe Range to the east and the Shoshones to the west, through pretty flat sagebrush plain broken by deep gullies. It took an occasional dip down into one of the wider gullies but then rose right back up onto the plain.

The terrain was mostly the blue-gray of sagebrush above the yellow-gray of the alkaloid soil, punctuated here and there by a few deep green fields of alfalfa. The mountains in the background, rising as high as twelve thousand feet, were a blend of the darkest—almost black—green, and purple, with patches of gray stone and bright yellow spreads of wildflowers.

Cattle dotted the landscape. Most grazed in small herds far from the road, but a more adventurous few explored the grass along the roadside, stopping to stare indignantly at the truck as it passed by. Steve had to stop once or twice for cows and calves that were standing in the middle of the road.

“Most of what we’re on now is Hansen Cattle Company land,” Steve explained. “Hansen owns most of this part of the valley. In fact, my spread is about the only piece he hasn’t bought up the past few years.”

“Does he want to buy you out?” Neal asked.

“Oh, I suppose he would if I ever left, but he doesn’t seem to mind my puny presence. Bob Hansen’s a good guy, which is a good thing, seeing as how we’re each other’s only neighbors. His son Jory and my daughter Shelly are the hot item at the high school right now.”

The truck lurched down into a particularly bumpy old wash. A jackrabbit, its big ears twitching with anxiety, broke out of the sagebrush and sprang away with long jumps at amazing speed. A skinny coyote appeared at the edge of the road, gave the truck a thanks-a-heap glare, and trotted back into the brush.

They drove for another forty minutes or so before coming to the Mills place. It was a big, two-story log house that sat about two hundred yards east of the road, on the left side of the dirt driveway. An enormous hay bam just to the west almost dwarfed the house. On the side of the barn was an open shed, with two tractors and some other agricultural equipment that Neal didn’t recognize. About fifty yards north of the house was a corral made of metal piping. Three horses pricked up their ears at the sound of the truck, saw the vehicle, and trotted to the edge of the fence. There were two other, smaller livestock pens and then another barn beyond that.

“It’s beautiful,” Neal said as he got out of the truck.

He meant it. The Mills place seemed to stand alone in the sagebrush, the only building within sight in the beautiful valley, framed by the mountains. The stillness was at once soothing and alarming.

“Yeah, well, it has its moments,” Steve said. “Of course, it’s under about two feet of snow from October to April, then you’re knee-deep in mud until sometime in June, then you got your dust until September, and autumn lasts about an hour and a half until it snows again. But goddamn if I don’t love it. Speaking of which, here’s the missus.”

The “missus” was maybe five feet three on tiptoes. Her black hair, cut short just below her ears, framed her strong cheekbones, strong nose, strong jaw, and wide eyebrows. Her face wasn’t pretty. It was handsome, and its beauty wasn’t diminished by the laugh lines and worry lines etched by twenty years of crazy on an isolated ranch twenty miles from nowhere.

She was wearing a red shirt tucked into trim blue jeans over white sneakers. Her sleeves were rolled up and the whole effect was one of energy, efficiency, and strength.

She kissed her husband on the cheek and offered Neal her hand.

“I brought home a stray,” Steve said to her. “This is Neal Carey.

“I’m Peggy Mills. Welcome.”

If she was surprised or annoyed at having a strange guest sprung on her, she didn’t show it. Neal had the feeling that he wasn’t the first stray that Steve had ever brought home.

“Thank you.”

“Has Steve been showing you the sights?”

“Some of them.”

“I’ll bet. Come on in.”

She led them into the kitchen and sat Neal down at a wooden drop-leaf table. The kitchen was small but uncluttered. Pots, pans, and spoons hung from a metal ring above the sink. Checkered contact paper covered the counter.

“Where’s Shelly?” Steve asked her.

“Riding around with Jory Hansen. She should be back soon.”

Steve chuckled. “Jory’s old man won’t like him wasting a Saturday afternoon.” He poured himself a cup of coffee from a pot on the counter and sat down.

“Don’t get too comfortable,” Peggy said. “I think Eleanor’s sick.”

“Oh?”

“She’s been bawling all afternoon.”

Steve sipped his coffee, set his cup down, and headed for the door.

“There is no rest for the weary,” he said. “See you in a bit, Neal.”

“I’ll be right back,” Peggy said. “Grab yourself a cup.” She followed her husband out onto the small enclosed mud porch where he was putting on a pair of rubber boots.

Neal figured that Steve was filling her in on their visitor. Neal took the moment to look around the house.