Barnum began to object, then caught himself. 'Well, I don't see why not, since you're volunteering. How soon could you get going?'
Joe rubbed his jaw. 'This afternoon. I've got to fetch my horse trailer and get outfitted, but I'm pretty sure I could get on the trail by about two or three.'
'Take my guy McLanahan,' Barnum said. 'I'll get on the radio and tell him to grab his saddle and some heavy artillery and get his lazy butt out here. You guys might run into some bad business up there, and I want to make sure you've got 'em outgunned.'
Barnum grabbed his microphone but halted before he spoke into it.
'Who is it who knows where that hunting camp is?' Barnum asked.
'Wacey Hedeman,'Joe replied.
'Wacey Hedeman?' Barnum hissed. 'He's declared that he's going to run against me in the next election, that blow-dried son of a bitch.'
Joe shrugged. Wacey was the game warden in the next district but had patrolled in the Twelve Sleep area temporarily after Vern left and before Joe was assigned the position. Wacey had once mapped out all of the licensed outfitters' elk camps along the Crazy Woman drainage.
'Goddamnit,' Barnum spat vehemently. 'I hate it when things turn cowboy.' Barnum cursed again, then turned away to radio his dispatcher.
Wacey didn't answer the telephone in his home office and didn't respond to the radio call, but Joe had a good idea where to find him. Before he left in the truck to find Wacey, he kissed Marybeth and his girls good-bye. Lucy gave him a bored kiss. She didn't approve of him leaving the house at any time for any reason, and this was how she showed it. Because she was so much younger and was wise beyond her years--she had absorbed, as if by osmosis, many of the lessons her older sister had learned the hard way--Joe often treated Lucy as a fellow adult conspirator, fighting the many emerging preadolescent forces other animated older sister.
Sheridan and Lucy were confused by why they had to leave their house. Marybeth was telling them how exciting it would be to stay in a motel, but they weren't yet convinced.
Joe stopped at the door and turned back. Sheridan was watching him closely.
'You okay, honey?' Joe asked her.
'I'm okay, Dad.'
'Next time you say you see a monster, I'm going to believe you.'
'Okay, Dad.'
'You remember who's coming tomorrow night, don't you?' Marybeth asked.
He had not thought about it at all with everything that had happened that morning.
'Your mother.'
'My mother,' Marybeth echoed. 'So we'll be back in the house by then. Hopefully, you will, too.'
Joe grimaced.
***
While her mother PaCked a suitcase in the bedroom, Sheridan did exactly what she had been told not to do and went to the dining room window to watch. However, before she did, she made sure that Lucy was still wrapped in her blanket on the floor watching television. Lucy would gladly tell
on her older sister.
The man her dad called Sheriff Barnum stood in the yard near the woodpile, and another man wearing the same kind of policeman's uniform--he was younger than Sheriff Barnum but still old, like her dad--stood near him. The sheriff stood with his back to the woodpile, pointing toward the mountains and talking. His arm swept along the top of the mountains and up the road, and the younger man's eyes followed the gesture. Sheridan couldn't hear what the sheriff was saying.
At one point, the sheriff walked from the woodpile to the house. He stopped squarely in front of Sheridan at the window, and Sheridan was too scared to move. Over his shoulder, to the other man, the sheriff called out the number of paces he had measured. Before turning back, he had looked down and grinned at her. It had been a kind of 'get out of my way, kid' smile. Sheridan wasn't sure she liked Sheriff Barnum. She didn't like his pale eyes. She didn't like cigarettes, either, and even through the screen in the window she could smell them on his uniform.
As Sheriff Barnum returned to the woodpile, Sheridan thought about how surprised she was that this thing had happened. How could it be that what she had thought the night before was a monster from her 'overactive imagination' (as her mom called it) had turned out to be real. It was as if her dream world and the real world had merged for this event. Suddenly, adults were involved. She had had a strange notion: what if her imagination was so powerful that she could dream things into existence? But she decided this wasn't the case. If it was, she would have brought forth something much nicer than this. Like a pet-- a real pet of her own.
Sheriff Barnum took a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, shook them, and flipped one up into his mouth. It was a neat trick, she thought. She had never seen it before. The man with Sheriff Barnum reached over and lighted the sheriff's cigarette for him. A great roll of white smoke grew around the sheriff's head.
Sheridan wore her glasses. She wished now she would have had her glasses on the night before, so she could have seen the man's face in detail when he looked at her. If she would have seen him clearly, she would have trusted her own mind over her imagination and run to her parents' room instead of convincing herself that she had a nightmare about monsters coming down from the mountains.
She loved that she could see clearly now but hated the fact that she was the only student in her class who had to wear glasses. Her first day of school at Twelve Sleep Elementary was also her first day wearing glasses. She would never forget how tall she seemed to be when she looked down or how awkward she felt when she walked. The chalkboard and the words on it were in such sharp focus that they hurt her eyes. It was bad enough that she was one of the new girls in school, and the rude girls had already grouped her into a category called 'Weird Country' that was made up of students who lived out of town. Or that she could already read books and say
