Weapons of Mass Destruction (19 page)

Sergeant Troy insisted the devil was in the details. Nobody minded elaborating on their proudest memories. But when something really upset them, it seemed cruel to drag things out. Eventually they learned to trust the process. Guys started telling stories without really knowing why. Then they’d stumble over a secret kept even from themselves, embedded in a seemingly incidental fact or feeling. Things got pretty hairy at times. You wouldn’t have wanted cops listening in. The platoon was unconditionally nonjudgmental, the ultimate safe space. Nothing brought men closer together than confession and absolution.

Sinclair was horrified by the idea of divulging anything personal. It was the most grueling part of boot camp. He was as emotional as the next guy, maybe more so. But he distrusted verbal expression. Words cheapened everything, especially feelings. He finally managed to tell a story about hating his father, something he had previously only admitted to Pete. Sergeant Troy was unimpressed.

“Big deal.”

“Yessir.”

“Are you proud or ashamed of the fact you can’t stand your old man?”

“Ashamed, of course.”

“Aren’t you forgetting something?”

“Sir!”

“You’re stalling, Sinclair. If I had a nickel for every jarhead who hates his father, we’d buy Iraq instead of having to invade it.”

Sinclair was on the brink of making shit up, the way his Catholic friends back home invented sins to spice up their confessions. In desperation, he started talking about Pete. For all his bluster, Sergeant Troy was remarkably sensitive to emotional nuances, especially the body language of men who were disinclined to express themselves more directly. Whenever Sinclair mentioned his buddy Pete, he avoided eye contact. Now they were getting somewhere. He tried to cut to the chase, the part of the story where the police showed up. Sergeant Troy made him start at the beginning. The whole point was to try to remember every last detail, no matter how trivial. Everyone was lounging in the bunkhouse, ready for the long haul. Logan’s sister had sent another care package from Des Moines. They ate chocolate chip cookies while they listened.

Grandpa had promised them a trip when they graduated from high school. Sinclair half expected Pete to pretend he couldn’t get off work. By then he was hiring himself out as a buckaroo on neighboring ranches. The plan to attend college together had already been scrapped. But the fact that they hadn’t been getting along for a few months didn’t change the fact that they’d been dreaming of this trip for years, unbeknownst to everyone else. Grandpa kept throwing out ideas, one more extravagant than the next. They pretended to weigh their options, knowing full well where they were headed.

“I’ve always wanted to fly-fish No Tell-Um Creek,” Pete said.

“Think big,” Grandpa said.

“We could go to Denver for rodeo season,” Sinclair said.

“Maybe even Fort Worth.”

“Why not both?” Grandpa said.

“Too expensive.”

“I’m paying. Remember?”

Planes, trains, and even Greyhound buses would have taken them farther faster, all the way to Mexico or the Pacific Ocean, which neither of them had ever seen. But they had their hearts set on riding as far west as possible on their horses, Buck and Paco. It was a quixotic journey, next to impossible with all the housing developments and shopping malls and freeways, let alone barbed wire every which way but up. But there were still plenty of ranches scattered between Frost Valley and Yellowstone Park, and contiguous deserts and mountains across the border in Idaho. Their history teacher claimed a century had passed since the closing of the frontier. They refused to believe it. If necessary they’d cross property lines by cover of night. Young and romantic in a quintessentially western way, they’d be damned if anyone was going to tell them what they could or could not do.

Even Grandpa thought they were spending the month camping in the Beartooth Mountains, just north of the ranch. No one would be the wiser if they just kept riding into the sunset. Sinclair’s mother kept insisting they pack a mule with food and a tent. They resisted the idea, pretending they wanted to rough it. The real reason was mobility. The lighter they traveled, the faster they could make their getaway. Besides, mules were ornery and notoriously afraid of traffic.

“There might be a highway or two involved,” Pete said, out of earshot.

“And a fair amount of fence jumping,” Sinclair said.

“All we really need is bedrolls, fishing rods, and rifles.”

“Maybe a few carrots.”

“For rabbit stew?”

“For Buck and Paco.”

Everyone made a fuss when they left. Even Pete’s father made an appearance, hiding the previous night’s dissipation behind reflective sunglasses. He stood apart, next to the old elm, watching them check their gear one last time. Sinclair’s mother made them pose for pictures with the horses. Buck and Paco had never looked so handsome. Grandpa had given them both brand new Circle Y saddles equipped with rifle holsters. The leather was impossibly soft and supple, like butter, Candace said. She kept rubbing Buck’s saddle, tracing its elegant lines from the swell to the cantle.

“Too bad Circle Y doesn’t make purses,” Candace said. She leaned over and breathed in the leather’s fragrance. “Or perfume.”

For some reason, Pete got a big kick out of her shenanigans. They kept yukking it up and all Sinclair wanted to do was get the hell out of there. He couldn’t wait to leave everything behind them. His cloying sister. All the bad blood with their fathers. He blamed everyone but Pete for their adolescent growing pains. When they were boys, everything had been so simple. Perfect, really. Sometimes he wished they’d never grown up.

By the time they finally tore themselves away from their families, half the day was wasted. They rode past one after another of their boyhood haunts. The hollow log, great-great-grandfather Tyler’s mythic hiding place a century ago. The ruins of a cliff fort reduced to rubble by a thousand winter frosts. Their favorite skinny-dipping pond. Every day after mending fences or branding colts, they used to swim off the day’s grime. The ranch was on a high plain surrounded by the foothills of the Beartooths on the north and the Absarokas on the south. It never got all that hot at five thousand feet. But ranching was dusty work and the stinging cold water felt like a brisk slap, heightening the glorious sensation of being strong healthy boys preparing to be men.

Two creeks converged in the pond. When they were very young, they used to race frogs through the lily pads. They ran separate qualifying heats to select the sleekest swimmers. It was terribly exciting until they turned eight. Then they couldn’t believe they’d ever been so juvenile. They started catching snakes instead. Pinching behind their heads to avoid bites, they stretched them out to see whose was longer. The winner got dibs on the best hunting blind that afternoon. They worked the ranch from six to three and swam and hunted the rest of the day. A more sublime boyhood was unimaginable.

When they reached the aspen grove, they stopped to water the horses. Sinclair hauled out the lunch his mother had packed, roast beef sandwiches, potato salad, and peanut butter cookies with crisscross fork patterns, their last civilized meal. They ate in the shadow of the moose rack mounted in the center of the grove. Pete pointed to two smooth round stones commemorating one of myriad rituals they had once performed with the incomparable moral gravity of little boys.

“Remember that?”

“I remember everything.”

“So do I.”

That first night out, camped by Willow Creek, they stayed up late, watching stars reel across the sky. The night was warm. Pete made a fire anyway. It had been a long time since they just lay quietly together, listening to a fire under the stars. Some sort of truce had been called, quelling a fight Sinclair wasn’t aware they were having. He only knew it was an immense relief.

Dawn roused them, a minute or two earlier every morning as the solstice approached. Still half asleep, they rolled up their sleeping bags and climbed on their horses. Buck and Paco made good time, not that their riders were going anywhere in particular. They were devoted to the idea that the middle of nowhere still existed. It may have been an illusion all along, their most cherished boyhood fantasy. If they hadn’t begun to doubt its existence, they would never have tested its limits by heading out to the territories. Pete knew this. Sinclair didn’t. The wilderness seemed eternal, an endless tract of virgin land. He implicitly believed that by riding west they might turn back the clock, returning to a bygone age of innocence just out of sight over the next ridge.

Sinclair had packed plenty of maps, none of which they needed in Montana. It would take four full days to reach unfamiliar territory. They skirted the Walker Valley Ranch, so vast a day’s hard ride left them still encamped on its western boundary. No use asking for trouble. The Walkers were relative newcomers to the area, Los Angeles speculators who bought up land when scores of dairymen went bust during the Great Depression. Real locals considered them outsiders. Homemade signs bearing timeworn slogans spontaneously appeared when the Walkers’ huge herds drove down the price of beef.

Don’t Californicate Montana
Buy Local. Boycott Big Beef

The Sinclairs disliked the Walkers for the simple reason that cattle and horse ranchers never saw eye to eye on anything. Breeding horses was a privilege. They were man’s better half, his very soul embodied in flesh. Cows, on the other hand, were almost as bad as sheep. Cattle ranches were nothing but glorified fast-food joints.

“Hamburgers with a heartbeat,” Pete used to say.

Grasslands gave way to foothills too steep for grazing. Still navigating by memory, they threaded through valleys and passes. They fished streams with gene pools unsullied by farmed stock, feasting on the sweet pink meat of rainbow trout. It was too early for berries. They followed bear tracks to patches of earth where sows taught their cubs to dig deep into the loam. There were plenty of roots, even a few tubers. They boiled them until they were soft enough to mash into what looked like potatoes and tasted like the earth smells after summer rains.

On the third day they ascended the final ridge of the Beartooths overlooking Wyoming. Sinclair hauled out the maps for the first time, consulting them not to locate but to avoid roads and towns. They would weave their way through blank spaces, taking refuge in uncharted territory. Yellowstone was a mixed blessing, chock-full of people but conveniently free of fences. Pete had a coil of barbed wire strapped to his saddle, covered with burlap to protect Buck’s flanks. When they couldn’t steer clear of fences, they’d cut and mend them. Yellowstone postponed this inevitability by some thirty miles.

The park was crawling with tourists, herds of them snapping pictures of buffalo wandering in and out of traffic jams. Even hiking trails were overcrowded. Sticking to designated bridle paths to blend in, Pete and Sinclair camouflaged their rifles, wrapping them in their bedrolls. They had entered the area illegally, on horseback rather than by car, and were subject to stiff fines, if not outright arrest. Fortunately forest rangers were too busy policing Old Faithful and Mammoth Hot Springs to notice outlaws traversing the park without a permit. Far too many people crowded far too close to geysers and paint pots, which never looked as good in person as they did on the website. The appeal of vomitous shades of mud-belching sulfide gas eluded city slickers, but they couldn’t tear themselves away. Unconsciously they were still mesmerized by the promise of transcendence.

“Grandpa used to warn me about bubbling pots. He said they’d melt the skin right off your bones.”

“Sounds familiar. Remember Uncle Joe?”

“It’s hard to forget a guy with a stump.”

“He claimed he lost his arm fishing his hat out of Dragon’s Mouth Spring.”

“Did you believe him?”

“He had proof, didn’t he?”

Having so recently eaten the earth’s subterranean fruits, they understood the subliminal attraction of fumaroles and steam vents. Deep down, even people with New Jersey license plates wanted to dive back into the earth that had birthed them. Little girls wandered down wooden walkways, gawking at transparent pools that erupted with violent regularity. Their fathers whisked them back to cars laden with souvenirs. Plastic facsimiles of geysers. Teddy bears. Postcards of everything they hadn’t really seen.

Pete and Sinclair camped in the woods, without a fire to avoid detection. Bears kept waking them up, looking for midnight snacks in their packs. Nothing was really wild in Yellowstone, not even wolves and panthers, which were tagged and monitored by Fish and Game wardens. What had once been a natural wonder of the world was now a glorified zoo. When they finally slipped past the western gate of the park, elk started fleeing instead of staring back, chewing their cuds like cows. They hauled out their rifles again. Lush forests gradually gave way to arid plains. They kept riding.

Vivid geometrical expanses of green, mostly potato farms, sprouted out of the prevailing brown landscape. Harvest was still months away and virtually no one was in the fields. They rode along irrigation ditches, picking wild asparagus and hunting jackrabbits. Ranches started outnumbering farms. When sagebrush appeared they knew fences wouldn’t be far behind. There still wasn’t a soul in sight, but Buck and Paco started getting jumpy. The threat was imperceptible, purely intuitive. Horses knew what they were feeling before their riders did.

The mentality of farmers and ranchers was miles apart. Guys who tilled the land for a living were as territorial as the next gun-toting redneck. But they rarely took potshots at trespassers. Ranchers, on the other hand, gave the Second Amendment a bad name. You couldn’t even hunt pheasant in cattle country without taking your life in your hands. Never mind the fact that the days of rustling herds were long gone. What had once been prudence had evolved into paranoia. Warning signs were posted on every other fence post. Enter at your own risk.

Pete and Sinclair started traveling by night. In high desert country, even waning moons provided ample illumination. Coyotes serenaded their progress. When dawn spread across the eastern horizon, they bedded down in ravines hidden from the heat of the sun and the watchful eyes of ranchers. Occasionally they heard pickups patrolling the range. One of them stopped to inspect a fence that had recently been snipped and mended by yours truly.