C Box - Blood Trail

Joe Pickett had once been the game warden of the Saddlestring District and the mountains and foothills had been his responsibility. That was before he was fired by the director of the state agency, a Machiavellian bureaucrat named Randy Pope.

From where he stood on the roof, he could look out and see most of the town of Saddlestring, Wyoming. It was quiet, he supposed, but not the kind of quiet he was used to. Through the leafless cottonwoods he could see the reflective wink of cars as they coursed down the streets, and he could hear shouts and commands from the coaches on the high-school football field as the Twelve Sleep High Wranglers held a scrimmage. Somewhere up on the hill a chain saw coughed and started and roared to cut firewood. Like a pocket of aspen in the fold of a mountain range, the town of Saddlestring seemed packed into this deep U-shaped bend of the Twelve Sleep River, and was laid out along the contours of the river until the buildings finally played out on the sagebrush flats but the river went on. He could see other roofs, and the anemic downtown where the tallest structure was the wrought-iron and neon bucking horse on the top of the Stockman’s Bar.

In the back pocket of his worn Wranglers was a long list of to-do’s that had accumulated over the past month. Marybeth had made most of the entries, but he had listed a few himself. The first five entries were:

Fix roof

Clean gutters

Bring hoses in

Fix back fence

Winterize lawn

The list went on from there for the entire page and half of the back. Joe knew if he worked the entire day and into the night he wouldn’t complete the list, even if Sheridan was helping him, which she wasn’t. Plus, experience told him there would be a snag of some kind that would derail him and frustrate his progress, something simple but unanticipated. The gutter would detach from the house while he was scraping the leaves out of it, or the lumber store wouldn’t have the right fence slats and they’d need to order them. Something. Like when the tree branches started to shiver and shake as a gust of wind from the north rolled through them with just enough muscle to catch the ladder and send it clattering straight backward from the house to the lawn as if it had been shot. And there he was, stranded on the roof of a house he really didn’t even want to live in, much less own.

The wind went away just as suddenly as it had appeared.

“Sheridan?”

No response. She was very likely back in bed.

“Sheridan? Lucy? Marybeth?” He paused. “Anybody?”

He thought of stomping on the roof with his boots or dangling a HELP !message over the eave so Marybeth might see it out the kitchen window. Jumping from the roof to the cottonwood tree in the front yard was a possibility, but the distance was daunting and he visualized missing the branch and thumping into the trunk and tumbling to the ground. Or, he thought sourly, he could just sit up there until the winter snows came and his body was eaten by ravens.

Instead, he went to work. He had a hammer and a pocketful of nails in the front of his hooded sweatshirt. And a spatula.

As he secured the loose shingles he could see his next-door neighbor, Ed Nedny, come out of his front door and stand on his porch looking pensive. Nedny was a retired town administrator who now spent his time working on his immaculate lawn, tending his large and productive garden, keeping up his perfectly well-appointed home, and washing, waxing, and servicing his three vehicles-a vintage Chevy pickup, a Jeep Cherokee, and the black Lincoln Town Car that rarely ventured out of the garage. Joe had seen Nedny when he came home the night before applying Armor All to the whitewall tires of the Town Car under a trouble light. Although his neighbor didn’t stare outright at Joe, he was there to observe. To comment. To offer neighborly advice. Nedny wore a watch cap and a heavy sweater, and drew serenely on his pipe, letting a fragrant cloud of smoke waft upward toward Joe on the roof as if he sent it there.

Joe tapped a nail into a shingle to set it, then drove it home with two hard blows.

“Hey, Joe,” Ed called.

“Ed.”

“Fixing your roof?”

Joe paused a beat, discarded a sarcastic answer, and said, “Yup.”

Which gave Ed pause as well, and made him look down at his feet for a few long, contemplative moments. Ed, Joe had discerned, liked to be observed while contemplating. Joe didn’t comply.

“You know,” Ed said finally, “a fellow can’t actually fix T-Lock shingles. It’s like trying to fix a car radio without taking it out of the dash. It just can’t be done properly.”

Joe took in a deep breath and waited. He dug another nail out of the pocket of his hooded sweatshirt.

“Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t try or that you’re wasting your time. I’m not saying that at all,” Ed said, chuckling in the way a master chuckles at a hapless apprentice, Joe thought. The way his mentor-gone-bad Vern Dunnegan used to chuckle at him years ago.

“Then what are you saying?” Joe asked.

“It’s just that you can’t really fix shingles in a little patch and expect them to hold,” Ed said. “The shingles overlap like this.” He held his hands out and placed one on top of the other. “You can’t fix a shingle properly without taking the top one off first. And because they overlap, you need to take the one off that . What I’m saying, Joe, is that with T-Lock shingles you’ve got to lay a whole new set of shingles on top or strip the whole roof and start over so they seat properly. You can’t just fix a section. You’ve got to fix it all. If I was you, I’d call your insurance man and have him come out and look at it. That way, you can get a whole new roof.”

“What if I don’t want a whole new roof?” Joe asked.

Ed shrugged affably. “That’s your call, of course. It’s your roof. I’m not trying to make you do anything. But if you look at the other roofs on the block-at my roof-you’ll see we have a certain standard. None of us have patches where you can see a bunch of nail heads. Plus, it might leak. Then you’ve got ceiling damage. You don’t want that, do you?”

“No,” Joe said defensively.

“Nobody wants that,” Ed said, nodding, puffing. Then, looking up at Joe and squinting through a cloud of smoke, “Are you aware your ladder fell down?”

“Yup,” Joe answered quickly.

“Do you want me to prop it back up so you can come down?”

“That’s not necessary,” Joe said, “I need to clean the gutters first.”

“I was wondering when you were going to get to that,” Ed said.

Joe grunted.

“Are you going to get started on your fence then too?”

“Ed…”

“Just trying to help,” Ed said, waving his pipe, “just being neighborly.”

Joe said nothing.

“It isn’t like where you used to live,” Ed continued, “up the Bighorn Road or out there on your mother-in-law’s ranch. In town, we all look out for each other and help each other out.”

“Got it,” Joe said, feeling his neck flush hot, wishing Ed Nedny would turn his attention to someone else on the street or go wax his car or go to breakfast with his old retired buddies at the Burg-O-PARDNER downtown.

Joe kept his head down and started scraping several inches of dead leaves from his gutter with the spatula he’d borrowed from the kitchen drawer.

“I’ve got a tool for that,” Ed offered.

“That’s okay , Ed,” Joe said through clenched teeth, “I’m doing just fine.”

“Mind if I come over?” Nedny asked while crossing his lawn onto Joe’s. It was easy to see the property line, Joe noted, since Ed’s lawn was green and raked clean of leaves and Joe’s was neither. Nedny grumbled about the shape of Joe’s old ladder while raising it and propping it up against the eave. “Is this ladder going to collapse on me?” Ed asked while he climbed it.