had been over an hour since he had seen even a single set of oncoming headlights. So he pulled over to the side of the road, covered himself and the rifle with a blanket he found behind the bench seat, and went to sleep.
IT WAS WHEN he awoke that he looked out over the sparse, open, endless vista and saw the fence.
Now, as he drove toward it off the highway, on a rough two-track still choked with dirty snowdrifts that meandered across the top of two hills, he saw a real cowboy astride a real horse, and J.W. Keeley thought he had awakened in the middle reel of a western movie.
The cowboy wore a long heavy coat and a wide-brimmed hat, and a dog tailed him. In the distance, toward the Shirley Mountains, Keeley could see a pickup and horse trailer parked on the side of a hill, glittering in the early- morning sun.
There were cows on the bottom of the basin, and the cowboy was probably headed down the slope to gather them up or count them or something. Whatever real cowboys did. Keeley wasn’t sure. In movies, cowboys were always in town, having just come from somewhere else.
The real cowboy stopped his horse and turned when he heard the sound of a motor coming.
Keeley drove up and got out of the truck, but the dog started yapping at him, barking so hard it skittered stiff- legged across the ground. Keeley jumped back in the cab and closed the door, opened the window, and heard the cowboy say, “Sorry about that, mister. Pay no attention to him. He don’t bite.”
Keeley looked at the cowboy. Except for the heavy coat, scarf, and hat, the man looked normal, like anybody, like a shoe clerk or something. The cowboy wore round wire-rimmed glasses and had a brushy mustache. His cheeks were flushed red from the early-morning cold.
Keeley rolled down his window but didn’t get out.
“What can I help you with?” the man asked.
Keeley gestured toward the hill. “I was wondering about that fence up there. Ain’t they ever going to finish it?”
The cowboy looked at him for a moment, then burst out laughing. Keeley felt his rage shoot to the surface. The fucking cowboy kept laughing, and even raised a gloved hand to his stupid shoe-clerk face to wipe away a tear.
“You’re kidding me, right?” the cowboy said.
“I guess I’m not,” Keeley said, much more calmly than he thought himself capable of.
“A snow fence?” Keeley said. “But it’s made of wood.”
Which got the cowboy laughing again, and the rage boiling up in Keeley, as much at himself as at the shoe- clerk cowboy for saying that, as if the fence would be made of snow, which was stupid.
“Yer killin’ me, mister,” the cowboy wheezed, between belly laughs.
Keeley looked off into the distance at a single cloud that was hardly a cloud at all, just a wispy white stringer across the light blue, like egg whites dropped in hot water. He asked, “Hey, you got family around here?”
“What?” That stopped the guy.
“You work for some rancher, or is this yours?”
The cowboy’s eyes narrowed. The question had obviously thrown him off stride. “Talk about apropos of nothing,” he said, then: “It’s a corporate operation. They hire me and a half dozen other men to manage the place.”
“But you have family, right?”
“Yeah, my wife and a couple of kids, but what does that have to do . . . ?”
Keeley said, “Glad I made your day,” and turned the wheel sharply and floored the accelerator. He could see the cowboy watching him—still shaking his head with profound amusement—in his rearview mirror as he drove up the hillside toward the snow fence.
At the top, he parked and got out near the fence—it was practically ten feet high—and survyed the hillside he had driven up. The cowboy had finally turned his horse and was continuing back down the hill, toward the cattle on the bottom of the basin.
Keeley got out and took a moment to look around. He had never seen country so desolate, and so mean. It reminded him of one of those old western movies, but worse. The movies always showed desert as being hot and dry. This was high and rough, with dirty snow. He preferred desert, he thought; at least it was warm. And except for that laughing cowboy down there, Keeley was the only man on earth for as far as he could see. There were no cars on the highway.
Keeley snapped back the bolt of the rifle, saw a flash of bright brass as the cartridge seated, and aimed the rifle across the hood of his pickup. He leaned into the scope, putting the crosshairs just below the nape of the cowboy’s neck, on a band of pink skin between the scarf and the collar, and pulled the trigger.
The shot snapped out, an angry, sharp sound, and the cowboy slumped to the side and rolled off his horse. Keeley watched as the dog trotted over and started licking the cowboy’s face, which almost made Keeley feel bad until he realized the damned dog was tasting blood, so he shot it too.
Keeley got back into the stolen pickup with his stolen gun, said, “Fuckin’ cowboy, anyway,” and turned the vehicle toward the highway, to drive north, to find that game warden.
7
TWO DAYS LATER, MARYBETH PICKETT THREW OPEN the front door after her morning walk and shook their copy of the Saddlestring
