The Terror of Living (2 page)

    "It's been an education."

    Hunt thought he heard the kid laugh, but he didn't turn around. It was the last run of the season; soon the mountains would be covered in snow. What had Eddie been thinking, sending the kid up here? A big job like this, and some kid who doesn't know the first thing about the business. He could get killed just riding a horse; one mistake and he'd come up short and throw himself face-first over a cliff.

    The horses were Hunt's, two roans he'd raised on the back acre of his property, Hunt feeding them and letting them run-chestnut brown with flecks of white, muscles as beautiful and sculpted as carved rock, rounding the field, divots of earth kicked up under the pounding of their hooves - his wife, Nora, and he taking turns every morning, casting hay through the field, standing at the fence, arms resting, enjoying the playful nicker and whinny of the horses. He didn't know where they'd have been without them. He hated that he needed them for this, that he let them be pulled up one hill and down the next, led by the inexperienced hands of this kid.

    Hunt cast a wary eye at the kid, half expecting him to be riding backward in the saddle. Weather beginning to turn cold and the kid wearing nothing but jeans, tennis shoes, and a black nylon jacket that snapped and fluttered in the wind as they came up over the hump of the ridge and descended along a line into the next valley. Hunt wore a pair of leather gloves, jeans, and a thick, padded hunting jacket to keep out the cold, the jacket mottled green to blend in with the forest. On his head he wore a cowboy hat he kept in the back of his truck for jobs like this one. It made him feel official and he liked to tip his hat for his wife and see the smile come across her face. He felt young in the thing, the short-cropped gray of his hair covered by the hat, and the strong lines of his face shadowed by the brim. He'd given the kid one of his baseball caps, an adjustable Mariners cap, and left it at that.

    "You been at this long?" the kid asked, leaning back in the saddle as they came down off the ridge, trying to keep himself from tumbling frontwise over the nose of the horse.

    "Only thing I can do that makes any money."

    "How so?"

    "Not much work out there for a man of my history."

    "I'd imagine we've been in the same line of work," the kid said, a smile creeping across his face.

    DEPUTY BOBBY DRAKE HOOKED THE RIFLE STRAP with his thumb and brought it around. He carried a pair of regulation binoculars, but the sight on the rifle was stronger. He carried a.270 for hunting and wore a pair of good mountaineering boots, strong enough for crampons in the winter and light enough to wear in the summer. He carried the pack over his back, lungs working for every step. He was young, just thirty years old. Heart trained for endurance, trained for the long haul of the mountains. Skin colored dark as the earth from a summer of swimming and hiking.

    He'd come back to the car the next day, his day off, early. Looked the plates over again. Nothing. He stood out there next to the car, with the big blue waters of Silver Lake stretched out beyond him and the windblown dust from the edge of the road coming up and rolling along the cement. He rapped absently on the glass, perhaps just to make sure the car existed at all, that it wasn't some phantom mirage. He stood there and peered down inside. Nothing had changed. The whole thing made him uneasy.

    As he walked, parting bear grass and the low-lying tops of mountain blueberries, his thoughts turned to his wife, whom he'd left behind that morning, Sheri sitting there at the breakfast table, a bowl of Cheerios, the milk turning yellow, sick and sweet in the air. She'd wanted to know what he was doing, what it mattered. He knew what she would say if he told her. They were newlyweds still and the idea of her there every morning, double- checking his life, hadn't quite set in. He couldn't explain why he had packed up his car, strapped on the tent, his rifle, and enough food and clothes to get him through the night. It wasn't like him. None of it was, just running off like that. It was something his father would have done. He walked on, thinking about what type of man he was becoming.

    He'd grown up in these mountains. His father had brought him up in them, taking him on weekend trips. The valley leveled off at around two or three thousand, and as Drake hiked through fields of sedge and bluegrass, following the little streams that cut the base of the valley, he looked up to scan the ridges.

    He could smell the scent of fall mountain bells, and as he passed he drifted a finger beneath the flowers and caught the wilted pink petals in his hand. He needed to get higher.

    HUNT TOOK OUT THE TOPOGRAPHICAL MAP AND HELD it in his gloved hand, giving it a once-over. He checked his watch and found their altitude. They had camped the night before in a thicket of white birch and he'd slept all wrong, with a pebble digging into his back on the uneven ground. For a moment he'd dreamed of being back in prison, that locked-away, lonely feeling worse in his dreams than it had been twenty years ago. Hollow sounds of voices echoing down cement hallways. The poor, eaten- away souls residing there, the weak and starved, blubbering nonsense, rib cages like two claws come together across their sternum. He woke, stunned, his tongue pulled back in his throat, floating back there like something meant to suffocate him. He rolled over, breathing the cool mountain air.

    Hunt had parked his truck and trailer a day's ride behind them, far enough back that they wouldn't be found. He held the map in one hand, guiding his horse forward with the other. As they rode, cutting through a stand of fir, he bent to avoid branches, taking in the smell of the horse's coat, the thick sheen of it, dust and oil rising off her and commingling with the air. She was a beautiful girl. He felt pride in her, in what she'd become.

    They came down through a tangle of black raspberries, following the edge of a scree chute, the kid eating as he went. Hunt got down off his horse, shielded his eyes, and looked toward the sun.

    He judged there to be about three more hours of light. "Come on now, get down off your horse and help me out here."

    The kid swung his leg over and half slid, half fell off the saddle, holding on the whole while to the pommel.

    Hunt took a GPS from his saddlebag and gave the map another look. They were standing in a thicket of low alder, the white bark shining around them and the green moss floating off the trees with the wind. "We're too low," Hunt said, checking the altimeter on the GPS, then looking at his watch to make sure. He handed the GPS to the kid and began walking.

    Thick and crooked, the alder stand stretched on up the valley, following a small stream, and this is the way they went, leading the horses.

    The kid swore and lifted his foot off a soggy mess of lowland marsh.

    "Careful now."

    "I didn't think I'd say this, but it would be nice to get back on the horse."

    "All we need to do is find an open meadow with a view to the north, we'll set camp and let the horses out for a little while. Just keep your eye on the GPS. We want to keep this latitude if we can."

    "There a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow?"

    Hunt looked back at the kid, but smiled and said, "If we're lucky there'll be a couple pots."

    "Hope you're good at sharing," the kid said.

    "Not particularly."

    They walked on in silence, leading the horses, Hunt thinking about what could be done with the money ahead. He walked on, adding dollar figures in his head. He thought about this for some time, thinking of his wife, Nora, of their life together, picking his steps with an absent mind. He thought about how they were, about how they'd been in the early years, when they couldn't keep their hands off each other, night and day hot as blood in the vein, famished and pulsing its way back to the heart.

    Afterward, in the middle years, life had felt as if they had been trying to fill something in, pour it like cement over the questions of their lives, the answers down there, but the liquid rock just flowing in. Again and again they'd been to the doctor, looking for answers, just to return to the same house, the same spare bedrooms and empty space.

    "Do you blame me?" Nora had asked, the two of them lying there in the coal black of their room, shades drawn and not a light on anywhere to tell him the voice he heard was his wife's at all. Turned away from her in the dark, he pretended to be asleep, his eyes wide open, feeling his cowardice grow deep within him, not saying anything. He didn't know what to say. She'd left him then, just got up from bed and left. He heard the car start up and he lay there listening to the night sounds beyond their window, cars passing on the road nearby, the rush of wind wrestling its way through the alder branches. This is it, this is how it ends, he thought. No desperate run for the driveway, no pulling the door open and begging her to come back. Staring up into the darkened room, he felt as if hours passed, and when he got up to wander the house, to find some salvation in the life he'd led, he saw Nora out there beyond the windows, engine running, headlights on, but the car still there.

    They'd had nothing then; it had felt as if everything had been taken from them. And the truth-had he anyone to tell it to - was that the possibility of success scared him. They'd worked through much of what had come between them, much of the trouble he'd felt that night, watching her out there in the car.

    In the years that followed, he knew they'd reached some plateau of understanding, some partnership that kept them there together.

    He knew also that money could change things, he knew this, knew it could change for the better or change for the worse. Following the small mountain stream through the woods, thinking this over, he found a line of higher ground and led the kid forward, climbing up until they came into thick stands of pine. It wouldn't be long now, not long at all.

    The trees gave way to an open meadow, the stream winding down from somewhere high above and nothing but grass to look at, flat and wide in front of them. From somewhere far away he heard the shrill call of a marmot announcing them to the valley. There was no speaking, just the two men leading the horses, and the gray rock faces of mountains looking down on them, sparse clumps of tree and rock climbing like vines along the tip of the ridge.

    The kid looked around, taking it all in. "You always work alone?" he asked, bringing his horse parallel with Hunt's.

    "Most of the time," Hunt said, looking for a place to hide their camp beneath the trees. "Why do you ask?"

    "I can tell."

    "It's not human resources, kid."

    "No, it's not," the kid said. "This is a whole different skill set."

    WHEN HE CAME UP OUT OF THE TREES AND FOUND a place to set up, Drake laid the.270 out on the ground, took a sleeping pad from his pack, and put it down under him. He checked the sun and then he checked his watch. It was nearly fifteen past five and he hadn't eaten a thing in more than six hours. On the far ridge he could see a hawk or an eagle climbing in the updraft, marmots calling to each other as the predator's shadow passed over the rock. He ate one of his packed sandwiches and brought out his binoculars. "What did you expect?" he said, feeling the contempt rise up. He looked the map over and guessed at where he was on the ridge. He didn't have anything but his own intuition to tell him if he was right or not.

    There was a good view of the valley below and the valley he'd just climbed out of. He looked back down the way he'd come and found the little stream and the patch of mountain bells he'd walked through. From where he was lying he had a good view all the way back to Silver Lake. The clear-cut stood out on the far hills, marked with little strips of gravel and dirt where the logging roads passed. He put the binoculars aside and sighted with the rifle, squinting into the scope and hoping to pick out a nice buck shot.

    The light overhead was fading and it left ghostly shadows in the meadows below him, whole fields taken up as the jagged fall of light swept across them. His eyes adjusted. The low sun crept onto the edge of the rifle sight, and he found that by shielding the end of the scope and bracing the rifle on a rock, he could better see into the shadows. He figured he had almost twenty hours before he'd need to be back at the station, enough time to buckle down and wait for something to skitter out of the bush. A whole forest and not a thing but the treetops moving.

    THE SUNDOWNER ROSE PAST THE RIDGE, THEN STEADIED, dipping its wings as the wind hit and the body of the plane shuddered without warning, everything in night shades of gray and blue, the cockpit blacked out, a thin film of green from the display clinging to the faces of the pilot and co-pilot. Well past midnight, the plane had taken off from a private runway near Reclaim, just north of the border, and flown low and tight to the ground for nearly fifty miles. The pilot checked his GPS, signaling the co-pilot to approach the door and prepare the load.

    For a brief moment, all the pilot could see was the next ridge rising up and the blue black night ahead. He bent from side to side, looking down, marking the potential and trying to guess at what lay below. He pulled the controls back and made a wide, looping turn through the valley, highlighting the plane for a moment against the white glaciers farther out. As he came around he could see the flare go up, red and full, sputtering in the cross- wind but climbing all the same.