C. Box - Force of Nature

“Ha! I never would.”

Marybeth sent Brueggemann back to his room at the TeePee Motel with leftovers, which the trainee was enthusiastic about.

“I’ve been eating too much fast food and microwave soup and drinking too many sodas,” he said. “A home-cooked meal is pretty nice.”

“Anytime,” Marybeth said.

Joe told Brueggemann he’d call him in the morning.

“Are we going to check out those elk camps?” Brueggemann asked at the door.

“Maybe,” Joe said. “It depends on the weather and circumstances. Everything’s fluid at all times.”

Brueggemann nodded earnestly and shut the door.

“I like him,” Marybeth said, giving Joe a delayed hello peck on the cheek. “He’s an eager beaver. He reminds me of you when you started.”

Joe nodded, and realized how hungry he was. He asked, “Did you give him all of the leftovers?”

“Oops,” she said.

While Marybeth cooked Joe an egg sandwich in the kitchen, he said, “Nate was out there.”

He noticed how her back tensed when he said it. She looked over her shoulder from where she stood at the stove. “I had a feeling about that,” she said. “In fact, I knew we could have reached you by cell phone, but I didn’t suggest it to Luke. I thought if you’d hooked up with Nate, you probably wouldn’t want your trainee showing up.”

“You’re right about that,” Joe said.

“So how is he? Was he… involved with those men they found in the boat?”

Said Joe, “Nate’s injured, but he claims he’s okay. And yes, that was him who shot those men in the boat. He says they tried to ambush him and it was self-defense.”

Her eyes got big and she started to ask Joe a question, when she suddenly looked around him and said, “Hello, Lucy. Time for bed?”

“Yeah,” Lucy said. “I wanted to say good night.”

Fourteen-year-old Lucy was in the eighth grade at Saddlestring Middle School. She was blond and green-eyed and lithe-a miniature version of her mother. She was still getting used to not having her older sister Sheridan in the house, but was using the occasion to bloom into her own personality, which was expressive and good-hearted. She was growing into an attractive and pleasant young lady, Joe thought.

Joe said, “Sorry about missing your speech tonight.”

“It wasn’t a speech,” Lucy said. “It was the first act of the play. I’ve got to have it memorized by the end of the week.”

“And how’s it going?”

“Good,” she said, and flashed a smile.

Sheridan had been an athlete, although not an elite one. Lucy had opted for speech and drama, and had recently been chosen for one of the female leads in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

“My character is Lucy Pevensie,” Lucy said, and cued Marybeth.

Marybeth said, “‘The White Witch? Who’s she?’”

Lucy’s face transformed into someone younger and more agitated, and she said, “‘She is a perfectly terrible person. She calls herself the Queen of Narnia though she has no right to be queen at all, and all the fauns and dryands and naiads and dwarfs and animals-at least all the good ones-simply hate her…’”

When she finished, Joe said, “Wow.”

“I always think of Grandma Missy when I say those lines,” Lucy said. “She’s my inspiration.”

Joe laughed and Marybeth said, “Get to bed, Lucy. That was a cheap shot.”

“But a good one,” Joe said, after Lucy had padded down the hallway to her room, pleased with herself for making her dad laugh.

“Don’t encourage her,” Marybeth said.

“Yeah,” sixteen-year-old April said, as she passed her sister in the hallway. “She gets enough of that as it is.”

April was wearing her tough-girl face and a long black T-shirt she slept in that had formerly belonged to Sheridan. Although the shirt was baggy, it was obvious April filled it out. Joe caught a whiff of wet paint and noted that April had painted her fingernails and toenails black as well.

April had come back after years of being passed from foster family to foster family. She’d seen and done things that couldn’t be unseen or undone. Marybeth and Joe had thought they were on a path to an understanding with April, and then Marybeth had discovered April’s stash of marijuana.

“Good night,” April said, filling a water glass to take to bed with her. Then: “Seven more days of hell.”

Joe and Marybeth exchanged glances, and Marybeth arched her eyebrows. For a second there, she seemed to communicate to Joe, April forgot she was angry with us.

“Maybe,” Marybeth said, “the sentence could be reduced by a day or two for good behavior. But there will have to be some good behavior.”

April turned and flashed a beaming, false smile and batted her lashes. “Good night, my wonderful parents!” she said. “How’s that?”

Joe stifled a smile.

“Not buying it,” Marybeth said. “But close.”

“Why did you paint your nails black?” Joe asked.

April recoiled as if shocked by the stupidity of the question. “Because it matches my mood, of course,” she said.

“Ah,” Joe said.

Marybeth poured herself a glass of wine and sat down at the kitchen table while Joe ate his egg sandwich. After April’s bedroom door closed, she said, “It’s been tough, but in a way this grounding might turn out to be a good thing for all of us, if it doesn’t kill me first.”

Joe raised his eyebrows.

“In a weird way, she seems happier.”

“She does?”

“Not judging by what she says, of course. But she seems to have an inner calm I haven’t noticed since she’s been back,” Marybeth said, sipping at her glass. “Maybe it’s because she finally knows where the boundaries are. Sheridan and Lucy just know, but April, I don’t think, has ever been sure. She probably doesn’t even realize it, and she’d never admit it. But I think she might be kind of like my horses: she just needs to know the pecking order and where the fences are and then she’ll be more comfortable.”

Joe finished his sandwich and opened the cupboard door over the refrigerator, where he kept his bottle of bourbon.

Marybeth said, “But judging by the way things usually go, something could always happen that screws things up.”

“Are you thinking about Nate?” Joe asked.

She nodded.

“Me, too,” he said, thinking of what Nate had said earlier. Thinking of Nate’s devotion to Joe’s family, his tenderness toward Sheridan, his protection of Marybeth. How much he’d miss Nate if he never saw him again.

At the same time, fifteen miles upriver and four and a half miles to the east, Pam Kelly slammed down the telephone receiver and cursed out loud: “Fuck you, too, Bernard!”

Bernard was her insurance agent. He didn’t have any good news.

She spun around in her kitchen on the dirty floor-she’d quit scrubbing it years before when she realized Paul and Stumpy would never learn to take off their muddy boots outside-and jabbed her finger at two yellowed and curling photographs held by magnets to her refrigerator door, Paul squatting next to a dead elk with its tongue lolling, and Stumpy holding the severed head of a pronghorn antelope just above his shoulder, and shouted, “Fuck you, Paul. And fuck you, too, Stumpy! How could you do this to me?”

She’d met Paul Kelly thirty-two years before at a rodeo in Kaycee, Wyoming. She was chasing a bareback rider across the mountain west named Jim “Deke” Waldrop who had charmed her and deflowered her behind the chutes at her hometown rodeo in North Platte, Nebraska, and she was convinced he’d marry her if she could only get him to slow down long enough. So she’d borrowed her father’s farm pickup and stolen her mother’s egg money and hit the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association circuit that July, trying to locate Deke and nail him down. She’d missed him in Greeley, caught a glimpse of him getting bucked off in Cody but couldn’t find him afterward, and had a flat tire just outside of Nampa, where she could hear the roar of the crowd in the distant arena as he rode to a 92, and Deke Waldrop, flush with cash, went off to celebrate with his buddies.