Open Season (26 page)

Joe nodded, not really listening.

“Wacey, will you help me out here?”

“You bet, Joe.”

“I need to unhitch a horse trailer and get to Billings. Will you help me unhitch it and then call my mother-in-law at Eagle Mountain and tell her what's happened? I'll call her and the kids from the hospital as soon as I get there and find out what's what.”

Wacey agreed, and the two of them went out to the road where Joe's pickup was. Wacey asked Joe if he was sure he was okay to drive, and Joe mumbled that he was. He was still shaken from the sight of all of that blood on the kitchen floor. Marybeth's blood.

They unhitched the horse trailer from the truck and lowered the tongue to the ground. Joe asked Wacey to corral Lizzie and feed and water her.

“Do you want me to take that saddle, too?” Wacey asked, shining his flashlight in the back of the pickup on the saddle with its bulging saddlebags and the butt of the Wingmaster shotgun still in the scabbard.

“No,” Joe said. “That stays with me.”

Joe ignored Wacey when he said he would be “more than glad” to take the saddle to the corrals.

As he pulled out into the road, in his rearview mirror, Joe could see Wacey leading his horse across the road and watching Joe's pickup drive away.

There had been something in Wacey's eyes, Joe thought, some glint that made him look just a bit unhinged and had made Joe want to keep the saddle and the things in it. Joe wondered why Wacey seemed so personally affected by what happened to Marybeth. Either Wacey was deeper than Joe gave him credit for—or something was going on.

Joe tried to erase the feeling he had, but it wouldn't go away. Maybe he was getting paranoid. Maybe finding that killing field and thinking about the circumstances that led up to it was making him suspicious. Maybe he just wanted to get mad at someone because he felt guilty about not being able to prevent what had happened to his wife.

He drove through Saddlestring, through four straight red lights, and out the other side. Billings, Montana, was an hour and a half away, an hour if he drove 100 miles an hour. He tried to imagine what Marybeth was thinking, and he tried to send his thoughts to her up there somewhere in the air probably right over the Wyoming/Montana border. He told her he loved her. He told her to be stronger than hell and hang in there. He told her he would be with her very soon. He told her that she couldn't die, because if she did, he didn't think he had the strength and ability to hold their perfect little family together by himself, without his anchor to the planet.

His hands strangled the steering wheel. His legs trembled strangely. He drove even faster.

Surgery was on
the third floor. He headed up there, ignoring the shouts of the receptionist to leave his holster at the desk and sign in. The elevator was busy, so he took the stairs two at a time and burst out into the third-floor hallway breathing hard. He approached the doorway of the operating room just as a heavyset woman in a green scrub suit emerged from it, held up a rubber-gloved palm, and said, “Stop!”

“I'm the husband,” he said. “My name is Joe Pickett.”

The woman said she would get the surgeon but only if Joe would stay exactly where he was.

“I'll stay here for about a minute,” Joe said. “If he isn't out here by then, I'm coming in.”

The nurse looked him over, sizing him up. “I'll get the doctor,” she said.

Joe paced. Through the thick windows covered by blinds, he tried to see what was going on in the OR. He could see movement and light; a half-dozen people in green suits like the nurse wore were standing side-by-side with their backs to him. Marybeth must be on the table in front of them. What were they doing to her? The thought of his wife in that room with all of those unfamiliar people around her disturbed him. Was she bleeding? Broken? Crying?

Joe had never liked hospitals. They brought out something mean in him. He had made an effort all of his life to avoid going in them. Even when Marybeth had been in one to have Sheridan and Lucy, he struggled with himself to be in the room with her when she delivered. It wasn't the blood or illness or weakness that turned his stomach. It was his memories of being in a hospital when he was very young, visiting his mother after she fell down the stairs. He must have been around six years old at the time. Looking out at him from her hospital bed, her face had been mottled and blue, her bottom lip was split and stitched back together, and her arms were in casts. He remembered how the nurses would smile at him like they were sorry for him instead of his mother, and how they would look at each other when he told them she had fallen down the stairs while he was sleeping. It was much later before he learned that she had never had the accident, that it was the result of a drunken fight with his father outside of the Elks Club. Nevertheless, he hated the forced quiet, the antiseptic smell, the artifice of the nurses who patted his head and looked at each other, and the doctors who thought of themselves as Olympian gods. He shivered when he heard the sounds of nurse's shoes squeaking down the hall as they walked.

A short, wiry doctor came out of the operating room and walked directly to him. The man's scrub suit was flecked with dark blood and his latex gloves were tinted pink from being immersed in it. The doctor slipped his mask down to his neck. Joe introduced himself.

“You may want to sit down,” the doctor said by way of introduction.

“I'm okay,” Joe said calmly. He tried to brace himself for the absolute worst.

“She's stable but still in danger,” the doctor said bluntly. “The baby is lost. It might have been possible to save him, but it wouldn't have been the wisest thing to do considering his condition. We had to make a choice between saving your wife and saving a very damaged fetus.”

Joe stepped slowly backwards until he could rest against the wall. Otherwise, he was afraid he might slump over. The moment passed.

“Are you all right?” the doctor asked.

Joe couldn't think of anything to say, so he nodded that he understood.

“The bullet entered below her sternum, glanced off of her rib cage, and exited her lower back. It may have injured her spine. We don't know how extensive that injury will be.”

Joe appreciated the fact that the doctor was being absolutely straight with him. But he struggled with the magnitude of what he was being told. His baby—
his first son
—was lost, and his wife might not be able to walk again.

“When can I see her?” Joe asked, his voice a whisper.

The doctor sighed. He started to say something soothing and procedural but the look in Joe's eyes made him reconsider. Then: “They're finishing up in there now. She's sleeping. They should be done and have her back in bed in intensive care within the hour. You can see her then, but don't expect her to be awake.”

Joe nodded. His mouth was dry, and it hurt to swallow.

The doctor approached him and put his hand on Joe's shoulder.

“There's no easy way to tell you these things,” the doctor said. “Be strong, and love her back to health when she's out of here. That's the best advice I can give you.”

Joe thanked him, but he really wanted to tell him to go away. He didn't want to be seen by anyone right now. He didn't want nurses clucking over him like they had when his mother was in the hospital. The doctor seemed to sense what Joe was thinking and went back into the operating room.

Joe turned and stumbled down the hallway until he found the men's bathroom. He went in it, turned out the lights, and wailed for the first time in his life.

Wacey knew just
enough about the telephone lines in rural Twelve Sleep County to be dangerous. What little he knew he had learned from a couple of U.S. West telephone company engineers who had once needed his help. They were up from Denver to do some repairs and upgrading of the microwave station that served Saddlestring when they had run into a cow moose who wouldn't let them near the building. The microwave station was on the summit of Wolf Mountain. Between the microwave dish and the metal shack, they said, stood the moose. They showed Wacey the dent in the door of their pickup from her first charge. They had never experienced anything like it before.

Wacey had explained to them that moose couldn't see very well at all, and when panicked, they sometimes charged at whatever blur threatened them. He said it was likely that the moose had a calf somewhere up there in the bushes near the station and she was protecting her young.

He had driven to the summit with the engineers, but they never saw the cow moose. What they found instead was the stillborn body of her calf, still warm, the umbilical cord wrapped tightly around its neck. The engineers had probably appeared just after the calf had been born, when the cow was crazed with rage.

Wacey stood in the front yard of Joe Pickett's yard and looked up at the lone red light on the top of Wolf Mountain where the microwave station was. He had volunteered to stay at the crime scene until morning when Sheriff Barnum would send McLanahan or someone to relieve him. Under the front porch light, he looked at his wristwatch. Then he looked back at the mountain behind the house, where he was certain Sheridan was hiding.

While he was on the summit that spring, the engineers showed Wacey the circuitry inside of the shack and the thousands of telephone wires that fed into the main trunk line. He had noted where the trunk line emerged from the station to begin its descent into Saddlestring. He had thought at the time that a single high-powered rifle bullet into the base of the trunk line would disable the telephone system for the entire valley. It might take days to repair, but Wacey was concerned only about tonight.

He had a .30-06 in his gun rack. He would chance it that Sheridan wouldn't even know he had left.

It was 11
o'clock but seemed much later when Joe put coins into the telephone in the hospital lobby to call Missy Vankeuran. He had silently rehearsed to himself what he was going to say, how he was going to tell Sheridan and Lucy what had happened and try not to scare them into hysterics. It was time to be calm. It was time to be fatherly.

It took a few moments of ringing before Joe realized he had absently dialed the telephone number to his house on Bighorn Road. He found the Eagle Mountain number in his notebook and dialed. While he did, he wondered how it was possible that Barnum had already cleared the scene and left no one to watch the house. Maybe Barnum was incompetent after all. Maybe Wacey was right. Maybe Wacey would be a welcome addition as sheriff.

His mother-in-law picked up the telephone on the second ring. Her voice sounded angry and cold.

“Yes?”

“Missy, this is Joe.”

First there was a pause. Then: “Oh, hello, Joe. You surprised me. I was expecting it to be Marybeth.” Her reaction caught him off guard.

Joe was confused. Then he realized that no one had contacted her yet. But Wacey had said he would do it . . .

“I called your house over and over at dinner time,” Missy said, speaking fast. “It was busy every time. Every time. Then all of the sudden there is no one there. Marybeth said she would be home in an hour. That was four hours ago, Joe. My dinner is ruined!”

“Missy ...”

“I haven't cooked, actually
cooked
in ages. It took me all afternoon to make my famous lasagna. Marybeth used to love it. She said she was looking forward to it. I'm starting to think staying with her isn't such a good idea. For either of us, Joe . . .”

To Joe it sounded like Missy had a good start on the wine she must have had planned for dinner. He was angry.

“Missy, goddamnit, will you stop talking?”

Silence.

“Missy, I'm calling from the hospital in Billings.”

Silence.

“Marybeth has been shot. Someone shot her when she went to the house. They don't know who did it. The doctors say she's going to make it, but the baby isn't . . .” There was more silence, and he realized that the line was dead. He wasn't sure she had heard any of it. It didn't seem possible she could have hung up on him.

He dialed again. There was no ringing. He dialed again, and a recording said that the number he was calling was not in service at this time. He tried Sheriff Barnum's office. The line was dead as well.

 

Joe couldn't sit.
He couldn't stand still. He tried several times to read a magazine from the stack in the waiting room, but found he couldn't concentrate on the words or even remember what the article was about. He approached the nurses' station to check if he could see Marybeth yet.

The nurse was polite but annoyed. She pointed at the clock on her desk and reminded him he had asked her the same question not ten minutes before. Joe could not recall time ever moving so slowly. It would still be at least a half an hour before Marybeth would be wheeled out of the operating room.

He tried three more times to reach Missy and Barnum. Then he tried Sheriff Barnum's office again. He couldn't believe his bad luck. The phone lines all over the county were apparently down.

So he wandered the hallways, looking at his wristwatch every few minutes. The halls were all the same: heavily painted light blue cinder-block walls, dimmed fluorescent lighting, occasional black marks from gurney wheels on the tile floors, nurses at every station looking him over from behind their desks. He located the room where Marybeth would be. Her name was written on a card outside the door and the ink was still wet. She would be alone inside, he noted. She wouldn't have a roommate. He walked down the hall to the maternity ward and heard babies crying. He found himself staring at a young mother still plump and flushed from delivery. She was cradling a tiny red baby in her arms, waiting for a nurse to wheel her to her room. The scene poleaxed him. In a daze, he ascended a set of stairs to the next level.