C. Box - Force of Nature

With less than ten dollars, Pam had rolled into Kaycee on fumes and a mismatched left rear tire, feeling sick to her stomach-she suspected she was pregnant with Deke’s child-to find not only Deke but Mrs. Waldrop and two towheaded Waldrop boys waiting to watch their dad ride.

She was devastated and furious, and as she returned to the parking lot, she saw a handsome, laconic cowboy climbing out of his ranch pickup that he’d just parked so closely to hers she couldn’t wedge in between them and open her door. It was the last straw. She set upon the stranger, pummeling his chest and shoulders with closed fists, but the man didn’t strike back. Instead, he smiled and said, “Whoa, little lady,” and leaned back so she couldn’t connect a punch to his jaw. She wore out quickly, and he gently clasped her wrists in his hands to still them and he asked if there was anything he could do to help her out, because she was obviously upset.

She’d looked around him through tear-filled eyes and saw the rifle in his gun rack across the back window of his truck. “You can give me that rifle so I can shoot Deke Waldrop,” she’d said. Then a whiff of fried meat from the concession area wafted over them and the smell turned her stomach and she got sick on the hard-packed ground.

He said, “You’re a pistol, all right,” and untied the silk bandanna from his neck and handed it to her to dry her face and wipe off her mouth. “Name’s Paul Kelly,” he said.

For the next thirty-two years, she’d remind him that was the first and last act of kindness he’d shown her.

But at the time, it worked. He bought her some ice cream and sat with her on the top row of the bleachers as she cried. Then he took her to his weathered old line shack in the Bighorn Mountains and offered her his bed and didn’t try to jump her. He was working for a local rancher, he told her, fixing fence and rounding up cows to earn enough money to go to college to become a mechanical engineer. He was, she told her mother over the telephone, “almost dashing.”

They married, and Pam convinced her father to cosign on a loan for an ancient log cabin on twenty acres in the foothills of the mountains. It was to be their starter home, and they planned to burn it down and build a real house on the property. But Paul never went to college, and they never built a house, and his stint as a ranch hand was the last steady job he’d ever hold. If it wasn’t for monthly disability checks that came because that asphalt truck ran over his foot after he’d hired on that summer with the county road construction crew, they’d have no steady income during the months when Paul (and later Stumpy) weren’t guiding hunting clients.

And now, she thought, the son-of-a-bitch went and got himself killed and took Stumpy-Deke’s son-with him, leaving her the place and six cows and two horses no one could ride. All that was left of her life was a stack of unpaid bills.

“Fuck you, Paul,” she said again at the photo on the refrigerator. Earlier that afternoon, after the game warden had left, Will Speer, the county coroner, had called to ask her what plans she had for “making arrangements.” She’d asked him if she could donate Paul’s body to science.

“Will they pay something for him?” she asked. “There’s got to be a college somewhere that wants to see what the inside of a loser looks like.”

The coroner stammered that he didn’t know where to start.

“Find out,” she said, and hung up the phone.

Pam Kelly was still cursing to herself in the tiny cluttered mudroom as she pulled on a pair of knee-high rubber boots. On top of everything else, the cows and horses had to be fed. She normally ragged on Paul to go out and do it, but he wasn’t there to rag on. Inexplicably, she fought back tears as she buttoned up her barn coat.

Several years before, she’d begged Paul to buy some life insurance. She made the appointment for him with Bernard, the insurance salesman she’d met in Saddlestring who said they could get $100,000 in term life for less than $20 a month. Paul drove to town with the checkbook and came back with a new hunting rifle. He shook it like a war lance and said, “ This is all the life insurance I need.” Completely misunderstanding what she’d sent him to do, as usual. When she blew up, he’d promised he’d go see the insurance guy later. He never did, and Bernard had just confirmed it.

She looked at her reflection in a cracked, flyspecked mirror next to the door. She was too old, too fat, too crabby, and too used up to ever get another man in her life now.

“It just ain’t fair,” she said aloud.

The cows milled around in a mucky pen on the north side of the collapsing old barn, and the two horses were in a corral on the south side. When she emerged from the cabin, the horses pawed at the soft dirt and whinnied. They wanted to eat. “Calm down,” she said to the mare and her colt.

The cows just looked up at her dumbly, the way they always did.

As she grasped the rusty door latch to the barn, she wondered what she could get for the stock. She’d heard beef prices were on the rise and she figured among all the cattle they weighed maybe five thousand pounds total. There should be some cash in selling the cows, and she sure didn’t want to have to keep feeding them. The hay supply was low, and the bales too heavy for her to stack on her own if she ordered a couple of tons. And the horses? They weren’t worth anything except to a slaughterhouse. The French could eat them, she thought. They liked eating horse meat, she’d heard.

She swung the door back and reached for the light switch, which was mounted on the inside of the doorframe, when a hand grasped her wrist and twisted her arm back. The pain was sudden and excruciating, and she collapsed to her knees, gasping for air. She heard a muffled pop, and fireworks burst in front of her eyes. It felt like her arm had been jerked out of the socket.

The light came on, and she looked through the tears and starbursts at the Game Changer, the man she’d seen at her kitchen table talking with Paul, Stumpy, and Ron Connelly. The man who gave her arm another wicked twist.

He said, “I believe we’ve met.”

When they were sure the girls were in their rooms with their doors closed, Joe and Marybeth sat together on the couch and he told her about his conversation with Nate. He left out the part about the falconry website. Although it was his practice to share everything with his wife, in this case he felt the need to hold back a little for her own protection. She wouldn’t agree with his decision-he was sure of it-but Nate had spooked him.

“Nemecek?” Marybeth asked.

“Nate said we wouldn’t find out much about him,” Joe said. “He said he was off the grid as well.”

“No one is completely without identity.”

Joe shrugged.

“I have my ways,” she said.

He nodded. “I know you do.”

Marybeth’s part-time job at the library gave her access to data and networks that rivaled those of most local law enforcement, and certainly the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department. She’d used that access to her advantage many times, and, through a coworker who had once worked for the police department, had obtained passwords and backdoor user names that allowed her into N-DEx, the U.S. Justice Department’s National Data Exchange, and ViCAP, the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program.

“I’m curious to hear what you find,” Joe said.

“Of course, we could just go to the source and ask him,” she said.

“I’m holding that in reserve.”

She shook her head. If it were up to Marybeth, Joe knew, she would have had Nate spilling everything.

They sat in silence for a while on the couch, each consumed by their own thoughts.