Free Fire (43 page)

On the other side of the ridge will be the elk. I will likely smell them before I see them. Elk have a particular odor
—
earthy, like
potting soil laced with musk, especially in the morning when the sun warms and dries out their damp hides.

I slow as I approach the top of the ridge. A slight morning breeze
—
icy, bracing, clean as snow
—
flows over the ridge and mists my eyes for a moment. I find my sunglasses and put them on. I can’t risk pulling up over the top of the hill and having tears in my eyes so I can’t see clearly through the scope.

The breeze is in my face, so I doubt the elk can smell me. The stalk has been perfect. I revel in the hunt itself, knowing this feeling of silent and pagan celebration is as ancient as man himself but simply not known to anyone who doesn’t hunt. Is there any kind of feeling similar in the world of cities and streets? In movies or the Internet or video games? I don’t think so, because this is
real
.

JOE PICKETT WAS STRANDED ON THE ROOF OF HIS new home. it was the first Saturday in October, and he was up there to fix dozens of T-Lock shingles that had blown loose during a seventy-five-mile-per-hour windstorm that had also knocked down most of his back fence and sandblasted the paint off his shutters. The windstorm had come rocketing down the eastern slope of the mountains during the middle of the night and hit town like an airborne tsunami, snapping off the branches of hoary cottonwoods onto power lines and rolling cattle semitrucks from the highway across the sagebrush flats like empty beer cans. For the past month since the night of the windstorm, the edges of loosened shingles flapped on the top of his house with a sound like a deck of playing cards being shuffled. Or that’s how his wife Marybeth described it since Joe had rarely been home to hear it and hadn’t had a day off to repair the damage since it happened. Until today.

He had awakened his sixteen-year-old daughter Sheridan, a sophomore at Saddlestring High, and asked her to hold the ricketywooden ladder steady while he ascended to the roof. It had bent and shivered while he climbed, and he feared his trip down. Since it was just nine in the morning, Sheridan hadn’t been fully awake and his last glimpse of her when he looked down was of her yawning with tangles of blond hair in her eyes. She stayed below while he went up and he couldn’t see her. He assumed she’d gone back inside.

There had been a time when Sheridan was his constant companion,his assistant, his tool pusher, when it came to chores and repairs. She was his little buddy, and she knew the differencebetween a socket and a crescent wrench. She kept up a constant patter of questions and observations while he worked, even though she sometimes distracted him. It was silent now. He’d foolishly thought she’d be eager to help him since he’d been gone so much, forgetting she was a teenager with her own interests and a priority list where “helping Dad” had dropped very low. That she’d come outside to hold the ladder was a consciousacknowledgment of those old days, and that she’d gone back into the house was a statement of how it was now. It made him feel sad, made him miss how it had once been.

It was a crisp, cool, windless fall day. A dusting of snow above treeline on the Bighorns in the distance made the mountainsand the sky seem even bluer, and even as he tacked the galvanized nails through the battered shingles into the plywood sheeting he kept stealing glances at the horizon as if sneaking looks at a lifeguard in her bikini at the municipal pool. He couldn’t help himself—he wished he were up there.

Joe Pickett had once been the game warden of the Saddlestringdistrict and the mountains and foothills had been his responsibility. That was before he was fired by the director of the state agency, a Machiavellian bureaucrat named Randy Pope.

From where he stood on the roof, he could look out and see most of the town of Saddlestring, Wyoming. It was quiet, he supposed, but not the kind of quiet he’d been used to. Through the leafless cottonwoods he could see the reflective wink of cars as they coursed down the streets, and he could hear shouts and commands from the coaches on the high school football field as the Twelve Sleep High Wranglers held a scrimmage. Somewhereup on the hill a chainsaw coughed and started and roared to cut firewood. Like a pocket of aspen in the fold of a mountain range, the town of Saddlestring seemed packed into this deep U-shaped bend of the Twelve Sleep River and was laid out along the contours of the river until the buildings finally played out on the sagebrush flats but the river went on. He could see other roofs, and the anemic downtown where the tallest structurewas the wrought iron and neon bucking horse on the top of the Stockman’s Bar.

In the back pocket of his worn Wranglers was a long list of “To-dos” that had accumulated for the past month. Marybeth had made most of the entries, but he had listed a few himself. The first five entries were:

The list went on from there for the entire page and half of the back. Joe knew if he worked the entire day and into the night he wouldn’t complete the list, even if Sheridan was helping him, which she wasn’t. Plus, experience told him there would be a snag of some kind that would derail him and frustrate his progress, something simple but unanticipated. The gutter would detach from the house while he scraped the leaves out of it, or the lumber store wouldn’t have the right fence slats and they’d need to order them. Something. Like when the tree branches started to shiver and shake as a gust of wind from the north rolled through them with just enough muscle to catch the ladder and send it clattering straight backward from the house to the lawn as if it had been shot. And there he was, stranded on the top of the roof of a house he really didn’t even want to live in, much less own.

The wind went away just as suddenly as it had appeared.

“Sheridan?”

No response. She was very likely back in bed.

“Sheridan? Lucy? Marybeth?” He paused,
“Anybody?”

He thought of stomping on the roof with his boots or danglinga HELP! message over the eave so Marybeth might see it out the kitchen window. Jumping from the roof to the cotton-woodtree in the front yard was a possibility, but the distance was daunting and he visualized missing the branch and thumping into the trunk and tumbling to the ground. Or, he thought sourly, he could just sit up there until the winter snows came and his body was eaten by ravens.

Instead, he went to work. He had a hammer and a pocketful of nails in the front of his hooded sweatshirt. And a spatula.

As he secured the loose shingles he could see his next-door neighbor, Ed Nedny, come out of his front door and stand on his porch looking pensive. Nedny was a retired town administrator who now spent his time working on his immaculate lawn, tendinghis large and productive garden, keeping up his perfectly well-appointed home, and washing, waxing, and servicing his three vehicles—a vintage Chevy pickup, a Jeep Cherokee, and the black Lincoln Town Car that rarely ventured out of the garage. Joe had seen Nedny the night before when he came home applying Armor All to the whitewall tires of the Town Car under a trouble light. Although his neighbor didn’t stare outrightat Joe, he was there to observe. To comment. To offer neighborly advice. Nedny wore a watch cap and heavy sweater, and drew serenely on his pipe, letting a fragrant cloud of the smoke waft upward toward Joe on the roof as if he sent it there.