Open Season (11 page)

Marybeth brought him a glass of water and the bottle of painkillers and returned to the sink. She had stripped to her bra and panties to scrub her face. Joe thought she looked good standing there. She stood on her toes to get her face closer to the mirror, and he admired her legs. Marybeth was not extremely thin, but she was firm and still looked athletic. The only place she looked pregnant was her belly. Marybeth carried her babies high and straight out as if she were already proud of them. She looked perfect as far as Joe was concerned. She could be fun in bed, and Joe suddenly wanted her there.

“What are you thinking?” she asked, looking at him from the mirror.

“I'm thinking you look pretty good.”

“And . . .” Marybeth said, “aren't you too tired?”

“And I want you.”

Marybeth stopped scrubbing and turned toward him. “Honey ...” she said, almost pleading and gesturing toward the closed bedroom door.

“She can't hear us,” Joe replied dryly. “I'll make a point not to shout.”

Marybeth glared at him. “It's not that. You know I don't like to do anything when my mother is in the house.”

Joe knew. They had had this discussion before, many times. But he continued, “Do you think she thinks the kids were conceived by divine intervention?”

“No,” Marybeth said, “but I'm just not comfortable when I know she's in the house, under the same roof. If I'm not comfortable, how fun can it be?”

Joe conceded the point, as he had conceded the point before.

“Okay,” he said, covering up. “No hard feelings.”

“Good,” she said. “I'm glad you understand. I know it's irrational, but it's the case here.”

When she came to bed, he was still awake.

“Do you want to know who came in and saw me last night in the hospital?” Joe asked as she snuggled into him.

“Wacey.”

“Well, him, too,” Joe said. “But after Wacey, Vern Dunnegan came to call.”

He felt her stiffen.

“I really hate hospitals,” Joe said.

“I know you do. What did Vern have to say?”

“He just wished us well and said he thought I had done a good job up there in that camp with Wacey. He said he was proud of his two boys.”

“You're my boy, not Vern's,” Marybeth said. Then she cautioned him. “Be careful with that man. I don't trust him. I never have.”

Joe chuckled at that. The pills were beginning to work. He felt numbing waves slowly wash over him. “He just stayed for a minute, but he said he wanted to meet with me later this week. He said he wanted to talk about my future.”

“What did he mean?” Marybeth asked haltingly.

“He kind of offered me a job with InterWest Resources,” Joe said. “For a lot more money.”

“You're kidding,” Marybeth said, sitting up and turning to him.

“I'm not,” Joe said, patting her.

“Well, my goodness, Joe,” she said.
“My goodness.”

Lists

(c) (1) The Secretary of the Interior shall publish in the Federal Register [, and from time to time he may by regulation revise,] a list of all species determined by him or the Secretary of Commerce to be threatened species and a list of all species determined by him or the Secretary of Commerce to be an endangered species. Each list shall refer to the species contained therein by scientific and common name or names, if any, specify in respect to such species over what portion of its range it is endangered or threatened, and specify any critical habitat within such range. The Secretary shall from time to time revise each list published under the authority of this subsection to reflect recent determinations, designations, and revisions made in accordance with subsections (a) and (b).

 

The triple funeral
for the three dead outfitters was unlike anything Joe Pickett had experienced before. Ote Keeley's wish that he be buried in his 1989 Ford F-250 XLT Lariat turbo diesel had caused complications with the staff of the Twelve Sleep County Cemetery in that they were required to dig the biggest hole in the ground they had ever dug. The rental of an earthmover was necessary, and the size of the hole created a fifteen-foot mound of fresh soil at the head of the grave. The ceremony had been organized by the widows of Ote Keeley and Kyle Lensegrav (Calvin Mendes was unmarried) and the “unconventional” Reverend B. J. Cobb of the First Alpine Church of Saddlestring.

Joe Pickett stood soberly in his suit, hat, and bandage on a hillside listening to Reverend Cobb give the eulogy as he stood perched on the hood of the pickup. The Keeley and Lensegrav widows and children flanked the crowd and the truck. Behind the families, a blue plastic tarp hid a large pile of something.

It was a beautiful day at the cemetery. A very light breeze rattled the leaves of the cottonwoods, and the sun shone down brilliantly. Dew twinkled in the late fall grass, and the last of the departing morning river mist paused at the treetops.

Although Reverend Cobb's eulogy covered the short history of the outfitters—boyhood friends who hunted in Mississippi, joined the army together, served the country well in Operation Desert Storm, and relocated to the game-rich mountains and plains of Wyoming—Joe couldn't stop looking at the massive hole in the ground in front of the pickup and wondering what was under the blue tarp behind the families.

The mourners consisted of a few fellow Alpine Church members and several of the outfitters' drinking buddies. Joe noticed that there were no other outfitters present, and when he thought about it, he wasn't that surprised. Keeley, Lensegrav, and Mendes had been drummed out of the Wyoming Outfitters Association for their radical views and tendency to commit obvious game violations.

“They were salt-of-the-earth types,” intoned the Reverend Cobb, a pudgy bachelor with a crew cut, who was known for his survivalist tendencies and small but fervent congregation. “They loved their trucks. They were throw-backs to a time when men lived off of the land and provided for their families by their outdoor skills and cunning. They were prototypes of the first white Americans. They were frontiersmen. They were outdoorsmen. They were sportsmen of the highest caliber. And these boys knew their calibers, all right. They ate elk, not lamb. They ate venison, not pork. They ate wild duck, not chicken ...”

The three mahogany-stained pine caskets were in the bed of the pickup, two side-by-side on the bottom and the third laid across them on top. Joe couldn't tell which casket contained whom. The weight of the caskets made the four-wheel-drive pickup list to the rear. The Reverend Cobb finally finished up his comments about what the outfitters ate.

Ote Keeley's wife wasn't hard to pick out as she was the only pregnant woman there. She was thin and small and severe. Joe guessed that normally she wouldn't weigh more than 100 pounds. She had short-cropped blond hair and a pinched, hard face. Her mouth was set around an unlit cigarette. She tightly held the hand of a small girl who wanted to go look at the big hole instead of stand there respectfully with her mother. The girl—Joe would later learn that her name was April—was a five-year-old version of her mother but with a sweet, haunting face.

Joe had introduced himself to her before the services began and had said he was sorry about what happened and that he had children, too, with another on the way.

She had glared at him, her eyes narrowing into slits. “Aren't you the motherfucking
prick
who wanted to take my Otie's outfitting license away?” Her Southern accent made the last word sound like “uh-why.”

The little girl didn't flinch at her language, but Joe did. Joe said he was sorry, that this was probably a bad time, and scuttled back to the loose knot of mourners on the side of the pickup.

The Reverend Cobb ended his eulogy by saying that there were certain sacred items that the families of the deceased wanted their loved ones to have with them in the afterlife. At his cue, Mrs. Keeley and Mrs. Lensegrav peeled back the blue tarp to reveal a large pile of objects.

“Kyle Lensegrav would be lost in heaven ...” the reverend paused until Mrs. Lensegrav turned from the pile with her arms full, “. . . without his Denver Broncos jacket.”

Mrs. Lensegrav approached the pickup and draped the jacket over one of the coffins on the bed of the truck.

“Where Kyle will be, the Denver Broncos will always be predominantly orange and blue, as they were in the seven-ties, eighties, and mid-nineties before they changed into their new hideous uniforms,” thundered the reverend.

Joe watched in fascination as Mrs. Lensegrav placed Kyle's favorite hunting cap, spotting scope, Leatherman tool bag, meat saw, Gore-Tex boots, and saddle scabbard on the coffin.

Mrs. Keeley was next.

“Not every man has the skill, determination, and acumen to bag a moose that will forever be listed as one of the top five Boone and Crockett-sanctioned trophies of North America!” the reverend said. “But Ote Keeley can make that claim and these massive beauties . . .”

Mrs. Keeley struggled under the weight of the huge moose antlers—rumor had it that Ote had actually shot the animal illegally within Yellowstone Park and sneaked it out—and Joe felt an urge to step forward to help her. He caught himself because he wasn't sure that she wouldn't attempt to skewer him. Somehow, she summoned the strength to place the antlers over the top coffin.

“. . . will forever be mounted above Ote's celestial easy chair.”

There were more items for Ote, including a television, VCR, tanned hides, his HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUT PILE T-shirt. Calvin Mendes was probably shortchanged in the ceremony overall because the only items the women put on his casket were his bound volumes of
Hustler
magazine and a case of Schmidt's beer.

Then the Reverend Cobb started up the pickup, eased it into drive, and leaped from the cab. Joe watched, as did the rest of the small crowd and the families, as the Ford inched forward and descended into the massive hole. It settled to the bottom with a solid thump, and no one wanted to look down to see if the caskets had jarred loose and broken open.

Joe wondered, as he walked down the hill through the cemetery, how long the engine of the pickup would keep running and whether or not the cemetery staff would choose to shut it off before they filled up the grave with the earthmover.

After the funeral,
Joe went to work. It felt good to get out of town and away from the cemetery and go to work. He had packed his lunch that morning in the kitchen and filled a Thermos of coffee. Maxine had been waiting for him in the back of the pickup, her heavy tail thumping the toolbox like a metronome as he approached.

He patrolled a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) tract to the west of Saddlestring, a huge, nearly treeless expanse that stretched from the river to the foothills of the Bighorns. It was deceptive, complicated country, and he had always liked it. From a distance, it appeared to be simply a massive slow rise in elevation from the valley floor to the mountains. In actuality, it was an undulating, cut-and-jive high-country break land of hills and draws and sagebrush. The landscape had folds in it like draped satin, places where shadows grew and pronghorn antelope and large buck mule deer thrived. A spider's web of old unnamed ranch roads coursed through it. Herds of deer and antelope had long learned how to take advantage of the land and the landscape, to live within its folds and draws and literally vanish when pursued. The antelope especially used the starkness of the break land for defense, and they often frustrated hunters by silhouetting themselves on the tops of hills and rises so that they were so much in the open there was no way to sneak up on them. The only trees in the area were the silent markers of hundred-year-old failed homesteads and cabins.

It was opening day of antelope season, the only day there would be real hunting pressure, and it was Joe's job to check the licenses and wildlife stamps of hunters. Most of the hunters he had checked that morning were local and out for meat, although he did visit the trailer camp of an outfitter with four hungover Michigan auto executive clients who were wearing state-of-the-art outdoor gear and were struggling through a Dutch-oven breakfast. Everyone was legal, with the correct licenses and stamps. They planned to go hunting later in the day when they sobered up.

Joe idly wondered how Missy Vankeuren would react when Marybeth told her about Joe's job offer with InterWest Resources. Joe harbored a feeling of sweet vengeance and secretly wanted to be there when Marybeth gave her the news. It had been a special time in bed after he told Marybeth, and they had both been a little giddy. Marybeth had even broken her rule about not having sex while her mother was under the same roof. Neither before or after had Marybeth said she wanted Joe to take the job, and Joe didn't say he wanted to take it. But the possibilities electrified them both. He wondered now if Missy would warm up to him, now that she knew that his salary could soon triple. In his experience, the women in his life were brutally, honestly practical. Maybe she would think that her daughter had done all right after all.

As he left the camp, he heard the booming of rifles in the distance, and he drove toward the direction of the shots. There was the closed-in
pow-WHOP
sound rather than an open-ended explosion, and he knew that whoever had been shooting had hit something. They had; three local hunters had killed four antelope, which was one too many. The hunters explained to Joe that a bullet had passed through a buck and hit a doe unintentionally. Although Joe believed them, he gave them a speech about shooting into the herd instead of selecting specific targets, and he ticketed the hunter who had killed two. Joe asked the hunters to field dress all four animals and to deliver the extra animal to the Round Home, a halfway house in Saddlestring that fed and housed transients and local alcohol and drug addicts. More than half of the Round Home population consisted of Indians from the reservation, and they preferred wild game meat.