The ceremony had taken eleven minutes, which was just about average for Judge Cooper, although he had once performed it in eight minutes for two American Indians.
'Do you, Allan Stewart Woods, take thee Annabeth to be your lawful wedded wife?' Judge Cooper asked, reading from the marriage application form.
'Annabel,' Annabel corrected in her biting Rhode Island accent.
'I do,' Stewie said. He was beside himself with pure joy Stewie twisted the ring off his finger and placed it on hers. It was unique; handmade gold mounted with sterling silver monkey wrenches. It
was also three sizes too large. The Judge studied the ring.
'Monkey wrenches?' the Judge asked.
'It's symbolic,' Stewie had said.
'I'm aware of the symbolism,' the Judge said darkly before finishing the passage.
Annabel and Stewie beamed at each other. Annabel said that this was, like, the wildest vacation ever. They were Mr. and Mrs. Outlaw Couple. He was now her famous outlaw, as yet untamed. She said her father would be scandalized, and her mother would have to wear dark glasses at Newport. Only her Aunt Tildie, the one with the wild streak who had corresponded with, but never met, a Texas serial killer until he died from lethal injection, would understand.
Stewie had to borrow a hundred dollars from her to pay the judge, and she signed over a traveler's check.
***
After the couple left in the SUV with Rhode Island plates, Judge Ace Cooper went to his lone filing cabinet and found the file with the information he needed. He pulled a single piece of paper out and read it as he dialed the telephone. While he waited for the right man to come to the telephone, he stared at the framed photo of himself on his former ranch. The ranch, north of Yellowstone Park, had been subdivided by a Bozeman real estate company into over thirty fifty-acre 'ranchettes.' Famous Hollywood celebrities, including the one whose early career photos he had recently seen in Penthouse, now lived there. Movies had been filmed there. There was even a crack house but it was rumored that the owner wintered in LA. The only cattle that existed were purely for visual effect, like landscaping that moved and crapped and looked good when the sun threatened to drop below the mountains.
The man he was waiting for came to the telephone.
'Stewie Woods was here,' he said. 'The man himself. I recognized him right off, and his ID proved it.' There was a pause as the man on the other end of the telephone asked Cooper something. 'Yeah, I heard him say that just before they left. They're headed for the Bighorns in
Wyoming. Somewhere near Saddlestring.'
***
Annabel told stewie that their honeymoon was quite unlike what she had imagined a honeymoon would be, and she contrasted it with her first one with Nathan. Nathan had been about sailing boats, champagne, and Barbados. Stewie was about spiking trees in stifling heat in a national forest in Wyoming. He even asked her to carry his pack.
Neither of them noticed the late-model black Ford pickup that trailed them up the mountain road and continued on when Stewie pulled over to park. Deep into the forest, Annabel watched as Stewie removed his shirt and tied the sleeves around his waist. A heavy bag of nails hung from his tool belt and tinkled as he strode through the undergrowth. There was a sheen of sweat on his bare chest as he straddled a three-foot thick Douglas fir and drove in spikes. He was obviously well practiced, and he got into a rhythm where he could bury the six-inch spikes into the soft wood with three blows from his sledgehammer, one tap to set the spike and two heavy blows to bury it beyond the nail head in the bark.
Stewie moved from tree to tree, but didn't spike all of them. He approached each tree using the same method: The first of the spikes went in at eye level. A quarter-turn around the trunk, he pounded in another a foot lower than the first. He continued pounding in spikes, spiraling them down the trunk nearly to the grass.
'Won't it hurt the trees?' Annabel asked, as she unloaded his pack and leaned it against a tree.
'Of course not,' he said, moving as he spoke across the pine needle floor to another target. 'I wouldn't be doing this if it hurt the trees. You've got a lot to learn about me, Annabel.'
'Why do you put so many in?' she asked.
'Good question,' he said, burying a spike deep in the tree as he spoke. 'It used to be we could put in four right at knee level, at the compass points, where the trees are usually cut. But the lumber
companies got wise to that and told their loggers to either go higher or lower. So now we fill up a four-foot radius.'
'And what will happen if they try to cut it down?'
Stewie smiled, resting for a moment. 'When a chainsaw blade hits a steel spike, the blade can snap and whip back. Busts the saw teeth. That can take an eye or a nose right off.'
'That's horrible,' she said, wincing, wondering what she was getting into.
'I've never been responsible for any injuries,' Stewie said quickly looking hard at her. 'The purpose isn't to hurt anyone. The purpose is to save trees. After we're finished here, I'll call the local ranger station and tell them what we've done--although I won't say exactly where or how many trees we spiked. It should be enough to keep them out of here for decades, and that's the point.'
'Have you ever been caught?' she asked.
'Once,' Stewie said, and his face clouded. 'A forest ranger caught me by Jackson Hole. He marched me into downtown Jackson at gunpoint during tourist season. Half of the tourists in town cheered and the other half started chanting, 'Hang him high! Hang him high!' I was sent to the Wyoming State Penitentiary in Rawlins for seven months.'
'Now that you mention it, I think I read about that,' she mused.
