C. Box - Force of Nature

Finally, Marybeth asked, “Do you think we’ll see Nate again?”

Joe shrugged. “I hope so.”

“If he said the things you told me, he must be really worried. I’ve never heard him talk like that.”

“Me either.”

She said, “I can’t help wondering what it was he did that drew him here. What was so awful that he thinks he deserves to die?”

At 2:30 in the morning, Joe slipped out of bed and pulled on his robe and walked quietly down the hallway to his tiny and cluttered home office. He shut the door, turned on the light, and sat down at his computer.

Emails from Game and Fish headquarters flooded his inbox, but nothing looked urgent. The department was temporarily without a new director, and a search by the governor was under way. Governor Rulon, who in the past had employed Joe directly but off the books in a bureaucratic sense, had two years left in his second and last term and had seemed to have mellowed somewhat. Joe hadn’t received an assignment from Rulon in more than a year, which was fine with him, although if forced to admit it, he’d come to crave the adventure and uncertainty of his missions. The respite had been healthy for his family, though, and being able to stay home was something he’d never regret.

It didn’t take long to find the falconry website Nate had given him. He took a few moments to register a username and a password, and he was in. The site was rudimentary and cluttered, no more than a screen filled with topics and comment threads:

WHAT KIND OF HOOD SHOULD I BUY FOR A PRAIRIE FALCON?

‹17 COMMENTS›

FLYING SHORT-WINGS

‹21 COMMENTS›

HOW LONG WILL MY BIRD KEEP MOLTING?

‹7 COMMENTS›

How do I recognize a state of yarak?

‹14 COMMENTS›

Joe clicked on that one because he was unfamiliar with the word yarak and recalled Nate had used it earlier. The thread had begun more than ten years before, and the last comment was eight years old. Nevertheless, he read the thread with interest. Y arak was a Turkish word describing the peak condition of a falcon to fly and hunt. It was described as “full of stamina, well-muscled, alert, neither too fat nor too thin, perfect condition for hunting and killing prey. This state is rarely achieved but a wonder to behold when observed.” In order to achieve an optimum state of yarak, one commenter wrote, full-time care, exercise, diet, and training were required.

“Don’t think you can get your bird into primo yarak by working with it at night or on weekends. This is a twenty-four/seven commitment, and there are no guarantees.”

Joe didn’t expect to find a new thread with the word “kestrel” in it, and it wasn’t there.

He wondered if Nate would launch the thread before he achieved his state of yarak.

Fifteen minutes later, on the Wind River Indian Reservation, Bad Bob Whiteplume had a dream in which he was hunting for pronghorn antelope. As he raised his rifle, a car horn blared from somewhere behind him and spooked the buck. He watched in vain as the pronghorn he wanted zoomed away and turned its small contingent of does and fawns, and the herd raced away trailing a dozen plumes of dust. The horn wouldn’t stop, and he rolled over in bed and wrapped the pillow around his head and it helped a little. In his dream, the buck antelope he’d been after had run so far away Bob would never get a decent shot.

When Rhonda next to him elbowed him in the ribs, he opened his eyes to total darkness. But he could still hear the horn.

“Bob,” she said, “get up. There’s someone outside.”

“Who is it?” he croaked.

“How in the hell should I know? But it’s nearly three in the morning and somebody is sitting out front in their car, honking their fucking horn.”

“Go make them stop,” he said, scooting farther away from her and her elbow and her yammering. He wanted to go back to the antelope hunt. “And don’t turn on the light or they’ll know I’m back here and they’ll keep honking.”

The house had been built long before his grandfather had added the convenience store to the front of it. The two structures were joined via a metal door with several bolt locks on it he always forgot to secure.

This came in handy because if Bob and his buddies did too much alcohol or weed, Bob could crash in his own bed without having to drive anywhere. But sleeping so close to his day job came with annoyances. Like this. All the Indians were family on the reservation, which was fine, usually. There was always someone to borrow tools or bullets from. But familiarity sometimes meant neighbors didn’t honor rules, like when a store was open or closed.

“No,” she said, prying his hand and pillow away from his ear and leaning into him. “ I’m not going out there. You go make them stop.”

“Give it a minute,” Bob grumbled. “They’ll realize I’m not coming out and they’ll go away.”

She huffed a long stream of air into the back of his neck from her nostrils as she sighed in frustration. There was a few seconds of silence.

“See?” Bob said, closing his eyes.

Then the horn resumed: a long blast, followed by several short blasts, followed by the long blast again.

“They’re not leaving,” she hissed.

“Okay, okay,” he growled, swinging his thick brown legs out from beneath the sheets. The floor was cold when his wide bare feet slapped it. “But I’m going to tear those knuckleheads a new one.”

“Just make them stop,” Rhonda said, collapsing back into bed.

Rhonda liked showing up around closing time and staying the night. She was a thick white woman with red hair and broad hips originally from Boston, who had shown up in Wyoming after a messy divorce looking for, she said, spirituality and something that would give her life meaning. Hence, she gravitated toward the folks on the res and provided free mental-health-care services at the tribal center one day a week.

She ran the only psychology practice in the little town of Winchester to the north, and she said she liked the idea of being a shrink to ranch wives and other assorted miscreants during the day and sleeping with an angry Indian at night, that somehow it gave her existence a kind of balance. She told Bob she considered herself a liaison between white problems and Indian problems, and maybe someday she’d write a book about her experiences. Bob doubted anyone would buy or read such a useless book, but he didn’t tell her that.

Before he could get her into bed, Bob had to answer her questions about native culture and beliefs and practices. He made them sound more mysterious than they were, and he made up a lot of it on the spot. For example, he had shown her the mottled scars on his chest and claimed they’d come from participating in a traditional sun dance where warriors pierced their pectoral muscles with sharpened bones and let themselves be hoisted into the air on rawhide ropes until they obtained their visions or the flesh ripped. Actually, the scars were a result of a motorcycle accident when Bob was a teenager. But no matter. It got her engine running, which was the point.

She begged him to take her to a sweat lodge someday, to show her how to do a vision quest, to let her see the actual sun dance (where dancers no longer pierced themselves or hung from ropes). He told her she’d have to earn those privileges by submitting to him and “his hot-blooded ways.” He suspected at times she was onto him-she was a psychologist, after all-but she didn’t put up any objection or question his stories or his motives. So one or two times a week he took her to bed, where she showed dexterity and a youthful hunger that decried her appearance and profession. Afterward, she’d rise early and drive back to Winchester before he got up, so he didn’t even have to feed her.