Don Winslow - Way Down on the High Lonely

“I can have that effect on people,” Neal said.

“I hadn’t noticed,” said the man. He stuck his hand out. “I’m Steve Mills. I have a ranch out by Austin. Or it has me.”

A ranch out by Austin, Neal thought. It has a ring to it. “My name’s Neal Carey.”

“Come on over to the truck. I have a first-aid kit.”

Mills led Neal over to an old Chevy pickup, opened the passenger door, and sat Neal down. Then he got his kit, expertly cleaned the wound on Neal’s head, swabbed some antiseptic on it, and applied a bandage.

“I’m a regular Sue Barton, student nurse,” he said. “Out where we live, you have to be a little bit of everything-medic, mechanic, cook, farmer, cowboy, and sometime psychiatrist. You’re from back East, aren’t you?”

Neal focused his eyes and took a good look at the man for the first time. He was in the tall range, real thin, with that slight stoop at the shoulders that tall men get from having to duck under things. He wore a blue checkered shirt rolled up at the sleeves, with a pack of cigarettes peeking out of the breast pocket. He had on jeans over his cowboy boots, which were old, tan, and worn.

He had a handsome face that had weathered more than its share of cold, harsh winds, and baking sun. It was deeply tanned up to the telltale line on the forehead that betrayed a habitual ball cap. His brown hair was still thick at about forty-five years of age, and his dark brown eyes shone with life. It was a face you liked right away, a face with nothing to hide.

“I’m from New York,” Neal said.

“City or state?”

“City.”

Steve Mills scratched his cheek. “I’d have thought you could have gotten yourself mugged there. What brings you out this way?”

I’m looking for a man who works on a ranch out by Austin. “I like to travel,” Neal said.

“Well, you don’t have to tell me,” Steve said.

Good.

“Well, Neal Carey, mystery man, why don’t I throw what’s left of your personal possessions in the back of the truck and take you to Austin with me? If your destination is nowhere, Austin is at least close. There’s a bus that comes through every couple of days.”

Neal reflected on his options and quickly arrived at the conclusion that he didn’t have any.

“This is very generous of you,” he said.

Steve was already tossing Neal’s duffel bag into the truck.

“I’m going there anyway. Wouldn’t mind some company for the ride.”

“Hold on a second,” Neal said. He straightened himself up, tottered over to the Nova, and opened up the trunk. He tore the fabric off the inside of the trunk hood, reached in, and pulled out a stack of bills, the last five hundred dollars of his expense money.

“You may not be as dumb as I thought,” Steve observed.

“Don’t get carried away,” Neal answered. He felt pretty dumb. He’d come on too fast with Doreen. And much too rough. He could have gotten the answers he needed without insulting her, just as he probably could have gotten the truth out of Paul Wallace without slapping him. He had substituted tough for smarts, and that was stupid. And flashing all that cash around had been just plain idiotic. He didn’t blame Doreen and her gun-wielding cowboy friend as much as he blamed himself. He’d been trained better.

He hauled himself back into the truck and the resulting pain felt almost like satisfaction.

Steve climbed into the cab and pulled the truck back onto the road. The old truck rattled, rumbled, and roared down the highway.

Neal settled back in the seat and tried to figure out his next move.

I’m headed toward Austin, he thought, the last known location of Harley McCall. I know McCall has hooked up with a rancher, someone he knew from his California days. That’s the plus side.

The down side is that I don’t have a car or much money, and that Levine and Graham are expecting me to show up in New York any day now. And they’re going to be pissed off that I didn’t follow orders. But at least I dumped the car.

He was pondering the wisdom of calling the office when he fell asleep. He woke up over an hour later.

“You don’t look crazier than a pet coon!” Steve shouted.

“What?” Neal Carey shouted over the noise of the old pickup truck as it rattled over Highway 50.

“I said you don’t look crazier than a pet coon.” answered Steve Mills. His face crinkled into a wry smile. “I was thinking that you’d have to be crazier than a pet coon to be wandering around this country all by yourself with no particular purpose.”

“Maybe I am.” Neal answered. “How crazy is a pet coon?”

“Pretty damn crazy. Course, anybody who tries ranching Nevada has no damn business calling anyone else crazy. So even if you are crazier than a pet coon, I figure I still got about twenty years of crazy on you! Hold the wheel, will you?”

Neal reached over and steadied the steering wheel as Steve Mills took a pack of Camels from his shirt pocket, stuck a cigarette in his mouth, struck a match, then lit it up.

“Hope you don’t mind,” Steve said, exhaling a deep drag of smoke, “but since my heart attack the wife raises unholy hell if she sees me with a butt. They had to whirlybird me into Fallon, so I finally got a little of my insurance money back! Kind of scared the wife, though. She says if it happens again, and she finds any cigs on me, she’s just going to leave me to die in the barn. I told her she might as well bury me there, too, seeing as how I’ve been ass deep in cow shit most of my life anyway. You don’t say a lot, do you?”

“I like to listen.”

“Well, this relationship might work out, because I like to talk and the wife and daughter have already heard all my stories-twice. I got a herd of cows rooting for my next heart attack just so they won’t have to listen to me anymore. My cattle don’t go ‘moo,’ they go ‘Shut up!’”

The truck reached the top of a long, steep grade. Neal could see a broad valley below them. A mountain range formed a backdrop beyond. The valley seemed to stretch endlessly to the south and north.

You can see forever, Neal thought.

“Welcome to The High Lonely,” Steve said.

“The what?”

“The High Lonely-that’s what we call it around here. You’re at about six thousand feet elevation, and it’s mostly empty space, as you can observe. Very few people, some more cattle, lots of jackrabbits and coyotes. Back there in the mountains you have cougars, bighorn sheep, and eagles.”

Steve pulled the truck off onto an overlook.

It’s like being perched at the edge of the world, Neal thought. A great brown vastness under a canopy of startling blue.

“We’re sitting on Mount Airy Summit,” Steve explained. “Six thousand, six hundred and seventy-nine feet high. Down there is the Reese River valley, although it isn’t much of a river as rivers go. That’s the Toiyabe Range across the valley. The big peak there is called Bunker Hill. My place sets at the base of it. Believe it or not, I actually climbed that damn thing once or twice with my daughter Shelly.”

Steve pulled the truck back onto the road and started the descent into the valley.

“It’s mostly cattle country,” Steve said, “but it takes a tremendous amount of land for the cattle to graze, it being mostly sagebrush. We grow the best alfalfa in the country up here but it costs an arm and a leg to irrigate and we don’t have the water to do more than we’re doing. Used to be a lot of gold mining around, but that’s about finished.”

“So what do people do?” asked Neal.

“Leave, mostly.”

Steve pointed to a dirt road off to the right. “Our place is about twenty miles down that way,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe the winters up here. That’s called a non sequitur, isn’t it?”