Back of Beyond

and… be a boy again. She wasn’t sure that was something she really wanted to see.

* * *

The trip the day before had begun on a jarring note, Gracie thought. It was taking her a while to process what had happened and why it bothered her, other than her natural and annoying propensity to simply worry too much about everything.

They’d kissed their mother good-bye at Denver International Airport in the morning and boarded the United/Frontier flight to Bozeman. Although they’d planned to carry on their luggage-which was ridiculously slight given the weight restrictions Jed McCarthy imposed-but because of all the metal and equipment in their duffel bags, they’d had to check the bags through. Gracie thought her mom looked forlorn and vulnerable, as if she wondered if she’d ever see her daughters again. That wasn’t a good way to start the trip.

Their arrival was slightly delayed-the airplane had to circle Bozeman while early summer thundershowers lashed the airport. Gracie had the window seat and looked out at the mountains in all directions and the black thunderheads on the northern horizon.

“Which way is Yellowstone?” she’d asked her sister.

“Like I would know?” Danielle said in a way that was both incredulous and offended.

“That’s right,” Gracie had said, “how dare I assume you know anything.”

Which was met with a hard twist on her ear.

She’d looked out expectantly for their dad in the luggage area because he was scheduled to arrive an hour before from Minneapolis, but he wasn’t there.

“His plane must be late,” Danielle told her. “I’ll check in a minute.”

When their bags arrived and the rest of the passengers cleared out, Gracie waited near the outside doors. She knew there was a problem by Danielle’s worried face as she came back from the Northwest counter.

“The plane arrived on time but he wasn’t on it, they said.”

Gracie fought panic. She looked up at the mounted animal heads and stuffed trout on the walls and out at the cold blue mountains to the south. She thought of how miserable it would be to be stuck in Bozeman, Montana, with her sister until they could figure out a way to get back home. And she was worried about what might have happened to their dad. Was he sick? Did he get in a car crash on the way to the airport? She flipped open her phone and powered it up, hoping there would be a message.

“I’m calling Mom,” Danielle said, having already opened her cell phone.

That’s when their dad bounded into the airport. Not from the area where the planes landed, but from outside on the street.

“Girls!” he shouted. His grin and his open arms made Gracie’s black dread melt away as if he had touched a flame to a spider’s web. He seemed almost too exuberant, she thought. As if he was happy but with a bit of desperation thrown in.

“Come on, the car’s out front,” he’d said. “Let me help you with your stuff.”

Danielle told him they were starting to worry, and what the people at the airline counter had said.

He waved it off, saying, “That’s ridiculous. Obviously, I was on the plane. I’m here, aren’t I?”

* * *

They turned onto a dirt road by a brown National Park Service sign indicating the campsite and trailhead. Her father once again closed his window to prevent the roll of dust from filling the car. Gracie turned off her phone and put it in a side pocket of the door and made a mental note not to forget it when they returned. She watched as Danielle seethed-no signal at all-and finally snapped her phone shut.

“Great,” her sister said, “I’m completely alone in the world.”

“Except for your sister and your father,” her dad said with caution.

“Alone in Hell-o-stone,” Gracie mocked gently, “Hell-o-stone alone…”

Danielle mouthed Shut the fuck up, Gracie.

“That’s your second offense,” Gracie said, deadpan. “We may need to turn you in to the rangers.”

“We’re here,” her dad said with an epic flourish.

Gracie once again bounded forward and hung her arms over the front seat. They’d rounded a corner and could now see that at the end of the road was a very long horse trailer in a parking lot. People stood around the trailer in the sun; a couple were already on horseback. Gracie counted ten or eleven milling about. When she saw the horses her heart seemed to swell to twice its size.

“We’re really going to do this, aren’t we?” she said, reaching up and putting her hand on her dad’s shoulder. He reached across his body and put his hand on hers.

“It’ll be the greatest adventure of our lives,” he said.

“I’m taking my phone,” Danielle said as if talking to herself. “Maybe we’ll find a place with a signal somewhere.” Then: “Oh my God. Look at all the people! We’re going to be stuck for a week with them?”

9

Outfitter Jed McCarthy pulled back and tightened the cinch on a mare named Strawberry- she was a strawberry roan-and squinted over the top of a saddle at the car that had just rounded the corner on the side of the hill. It was a blue American-made four-door sedan. Nobody normal drove those, he thought, meaning it must be a rental and therefore the last of his clients to arrive.

“That better be the Sullivans,” he said under his breath to Dakota Hill, his wrangler. She was in the process of saddling a stout sorrel a few feet away.

“Is that the party of three?” she asked. “The father and two teenage daughters?”

“Yup.”

Dakota blew a strand of hair out of her face. “You know what I think about teenage girls on these trips.”

“I know.”

“I may have to kill one someday. Push her off a cliff. Damn prima donnas, anyhow.”

“I know.”

“Or feed her to some bears.”

“Keep your voice down,” McCarthy said. “Their money’s as good as anyone’s. And we’ve got a full boat of paying customers for this one. This keeps up, I can get that new truck. Life is good.”

“For you,” she said, tight-lipped. “Me, I get the same damned wages no matter what.”

“At least you did before you started getting under my skin,” he said, smiling his smile that he knew could be interpreted as cruel. “Besides, you got perks. You get to sleep with the boss.” He waggled his eyebrows when he said it.

“Some perk,” she grumbled.

“I ain’t heard any complaints.”

“You ain’t listening.”

Almost twenty-five, she’d grown up on ranches in Montana and drove her father’s pickup at eight years old and was breaking horses by the time she was twelve. She had a round open face, thick lips that curved quickly into an unabashed and purely authentic smile, naturally blushed cheeks, and dancing brown eyes. She’d attended a couple of years at MSU, but quit to barrel race and never went back. He’d met her when she delivered some horses to him two summers before. Her barrel horse had come up seriously lame just that day at the local rodeo. The horse would never run again and never earn any more money. She needed a job. He needed a wrangler.

He stepped closer to Strawberry so none of his clients could see him draw a laminated three-by-five index card out of his breast pocket. On it were the names of each of his customers for the trip as well as vital information