on 85 toward Fort Laramie and Rangeland. Although he’d been trying to think it through, he had no idea at all where Robert and Stenko were going. He wasn’t sure even they knew.
Maybe a hospital, he thought. Stenko was obviously in pain.
Dusk threw gold light over the tops of the rolling hills and deep shadows into the draws. It was getting cooler. His back ached and his muscles were screaming at him from the constant vibration. His right inside calf was soaked with hot oil the motor was throwing off.
He topped a hill so fast he caught a few inches of air. The lights of the town of Lusk were splayed out ahead of him at the bottom of the rise. And the brake lights of a black Ford F-350 winked a mile ahead as the pickup slowed down at the town limits.
Because of the whine and the wind, Nate almost didn’t feel the burring of Joe’s cell phone in his front jeans pocket.
28
AFTER AN HOUR OF SMOLDERING SILENCE, ROBERT SAID, “I blame you for everything bad that’s happened.” Although he held the gun on his lap and the muzzle was pointed generally at the rancher, who drove, Robert was speaking directly to his father in the back seat.
Stenko, through gritted teeth, said, “I’m shocked.” Despite his condition, he still managed to project sarcasm. Maybe sarcasm was the last thing to go, he hoped.
The fight they’d had was vicious. It started when Stenko studied the numbers Leo had written on the napkin and said, “That rotten son of a bitch. These aren’t account numbers. These are the phone numbers of all of my Indian casinos. He just didn’t put hyphens in the numbers so you can’t tell at first. That rotten son of a bitch.”
And Robert realized what Stenko was saying—that the $28 million was out of reach.
“When I say everything, I mean everything,” Robert said bitterly. “I’m not just talking about the last two weeks when you corrupted me and made me see and do things I’d never even imagined. I’m not just talking about your great friend Leo who gave us worthless phone numbers. I’m talking about my whole life. Not to mention my entire generation. You people have ruined everything for us with your greed and your predatory consumption of all the resources of the planet. It’s like you were a bunch of drunks on the greatest bender of all time. You sucked everything dry and left us nothing but shit. When I think about it now, where I am, I think,
Stenko took it all like lashes that didn’t really hurt. Instead, he sat up enough to see clearly out of the window near his feet. Man, what a night. The long vibrant Technicolor dusk that dominated the western half of the sky for a half hour had faded into an exhausted twilight of blue-grays and midnight blue. Hard pitiless stars grew in intensity as the sky went black. The sliver of a moon looked like an afterthought.
“Do you ever think about what you left us?” Robert asked, his voice higher than normal.
Stenko said, “Doesn’t it matter that I’m doing everything I can to make it up to you?”
“It’s not enough,” Robert said with a snarl. “There are too many sins of the father.”
He was angry, manic. Stenko figured Robert was going to vent at him until he could reach some kind of equilibrium and calm back down. In the meantime, though, Stenko just let it roll. He threw his attention toward the dregs of the big western sunset and thought about how few sunsets he’d actually studied in his lifetime and what he’d missed. To think that this fireworks display occurred every night of the year—amazing. And there was no cost of admission. All one had to do was watch it. The thought of that—just watching the sunsets—hit him like a hammer. So simple. And it had taken more than six decades to experience the joy of a great sunset. How could that be possible?
It was then he knew this was it. It was crushingly disappointing for him to think that his last actual thoughts on earth might be about how beautiful the sunsets could be in Wyoming. He wanted more than that. He wanted some kind of reward, some measure of wisdom. Something from heaven. But maybe, he thought, God had priorities and a pathetic gangster from Chicago was pretty low on the list. He could live with that, so to speak. But in his hope for wisdom, he was stuck on how mundane his insights were. And when he put them into words, ah!—it was awful. They tended to resemble the phrases on the posters mounted to the ceiling he used to read in agony while on his back in the dental hygienist’s office. Crap like:
HAPPY IS THE HEART THAT HOLDS A FRIEND.
HE WHO LAUGHS . . . LASTS!
HARD WORK IS THE YEAST THAT RAISES THE DOUGH.
On it went. Sappy bromides from another era. Crap from hayseed publications like
Now here he was, wondering if he’d seen his last sunset and wondering if they’d always been that great. He doubted it. He wanted to think 99 percent of the time the sunsets sucked and no one noticed. That maybe this one was special.
And he almost completely tuned out Robert going on and on and on about how it was all
Stenko was ready to take responsibility for Robert’s wretchedness. It was just that he’d rather do so on his own terms. What a mistake it had been to try and reunite the family. How ridiculous it was that he’d fallen into a kind of pathetic role-reversal: the father desperately trying to gain some kind of approval from the son. Stenko realized how stupid it had been, how quixotic. To think that he could pick up the son who hated his guts and a girl who resembled Carmen and to somehow assemble them into what he remembered fondly as his only real family . . . was a failure. April/Carmen died once again and Robert tuned violent and then lost his mind. Stenko smiled with cynicism when he contemplated how badly it had gone. All Robert cared about was his silly website and his vapid efforts to save the planet. He didn’t know what April had wanted, and that continued to haunt him. April was special. What had happened to her was unfair. That she’d died in the crash Robert had carelessly instigated by grabbing for the cash in the box was more than tragic.
His attention drifted back over to Robert, who was still yammering.
“Al Gore said something recently that sounded like he was talking directly to me,” Robert said, “as if he were a
