Don Winslow - Way Down on the High Lonely

It was true in detective work, it was true in scholarship, and it was true in living a reasonably comfortable life on an isolated mountain.

So he finished his breakfast, heated some water, and did the dishes right away, before he lost the ambition to do them. He poured himself a second cup of coffee and went out to sit on the porch. It was the time he allowed himself to enjoy the terrain, think about the upcoming day, and watch the coyote.

The coyote had started coming just a few days after Neal’s arrival at the cabin. Apparently it was just as much a creature of routine as Neal was. It would arrive just after breakfast and skitter fifty or sixty yards away from the cabin until Neal came out to start his hike to the Mills place. Then the coyote would fall in behind him, trailing him, always staying well behind and running off if Neal turned around too suddenly.

At first Neal thought he had some kind of Disney experience going for him, until Steve explained that the coyote was using Neal like a hunting dog, staying behind him to pounce on any grasshoppers, mice, or rabbits that Neal might stir up. Also, coyotes were scavengers, just smart enough to learn that human beings left a lot of garbage in their wake. Neal preferred the Disney scenario and came to look on the coyote as a friend.

So he was looking for the animal when he went out on the porch to sip that wonderful second cup of coffee. All the more wonderful because the mornings were now quite cold. The higher slopes of the mountains had snow now, and it wouldn’t be long before the first big storm covered the whole valley in white. Neal had spent many hours of his spare time getting wood off the mountain and stacking it on the porch.

The way the job is going, Neal thought, I might need it.

He’d been there for two months and hadn’t seen another sign of Harley or Cody McCall.

Maybe they did move on, Neal admitted to himself. Maybe I should too. But I won’t be any closer to finding the boy in New York than I am here.

He’d had a tough time selling that concept to Levine and Graham. There had been that difficult conference call about three weeks after Neal had moved into the cabin.

“Get your ass back here,” Ed had demanded.

Neal insisted, “I’m staying.”

“What the hell for?” Graham asked. “They won’t even let you into the stupid compound!”

“I’m still in the probationary period,” Neal said, feeling more than a little foolish. It was true. Hansen had checked out his cover story, bought it, and invited Neal to attend the “self-defense” training sessions he held at the ranch. Outside the compound.

Ed broke in. “We’re working it from this end now, Neal. You’re off the case.”

“I’m off the case when I bring back Cody McCall, Ed.”

Neal could picture Ed filming, leaning over his desk, sucking on a cigarette.

Graham said, “Son, come back and go to school. You’ve done what you could do. We’ll try something else, that’s all.”

“I don’t care about school, Dad. I care about the boy. And until I know that he’s not here, I’m not leaving.”

Besides, I like it here.

Which was true. Neal Carey, denizen of Broadway, inveterate strap hanger, with sidewalk smarts and a three-newspaper-a-day habit, loved his life on The High Lonely. Neal, whose previous experience herding cattle was maneuvering a cheeseburger into his mouth, had come to enjoy bringing Mills’ cows down from their summer pastures in the mountains. Neal, who had once seen the Hudson and East rivers as the borders of the universe, now reveled in the panoramic dawns and dusks of the high desert. Neal, whose idea of a dead lift had been restricted to the weight of a large coffee to go, now thought nothing of flinging bales of hay into the loft, or stretching barbed wire, or digging post holes, or wrestling a calf that needed an injection. Neal, who once couldn’t wait to get back to New York after his years of confinement in China, now dreaded the idea of leaving his splendid isolation in the Reese River valley for the tight confines of the Big Apple.

So he wasn’t going to do it. This was going to be his last job. He’d find Cody McCall, as long as it took. But once that was over, he was staying right here in the valley. Take his back pay and buy himself a little place, maybe even this cabin. He’d have to give up graduate school, but he didn’t need graduate school to read books. In fact, he’d had a lot more time to read these past two months than he’d had for the past five years.

So as soon as I find Cody McCall, I’m quitting, Neal thought as the coyote peeked up from behind a clump of brush.

He shucked off his clothes, slipped on rubber thongs, and paddled over to the lister bag. He stepped up onto the wooden platform he had built, opened the nozzle, got himself wet, and closed the nozzle. He soaped up, washed his hair, and opened the nozzle again to rinse off. Then he lathered his face with soap, crouched a little to look into the mirror hanging from the stump of a branch, and shaved.

“Shaving,” Peggy Mills had warned him, “is what separates you from the goofball survivalists. As long as you shave, you’re a guy who just wants his privacy. When you stop shaving, you’ve gone a little too mountain man. So shave, Neal, and I won’t nag you or worry about you as much.”

It was a good bargain, so Neal dutifully scraped his face every day and felt better for it. One of the challenges of living a primitive life was keeping clean, and a beard would make it more difficult, a repository of sweat, dirt, and dead little bugs. Besides, this was his big day of the week, the day he went to town, and he always liked to show the locals that he had it together. It was a point of pride. He put on a reasonably clean denim shirt, jeans, and jacket, and then his brand-new black Stetson. It was Saturday, his big day in town.

He started his hike to the Mills’ house. He didn’t have to look back over his shoulder to know that the coyote was trotting a good distance behind him.

Far back in the mountains an old man lay in the brush watching a rabbit in the clearing a few feet in front of him. The old man was naked except for a breechcloth made of pounded sagebrush. His long hair was white, as were the few scraggly whiskers that hung from his chin. He was a small man, well under five feet, and his copper skin was stretched tautly over muscles that were still lean and tight. The old man lay perfectly still as the rabbit lifted its head, twitched its nose, and sniffed the air.

The old man was not concerned. He had taken great care to stay downwind of his prey and he had watched the rabbit for many days, learning its habits. Meat was hard to come by, the rabbit was a wary prey, and his own reflexes were not as fast as they had been in his younger years. The old man recognized that the days when he could survive on speed and strength were long gone; now he must make do with experience and craft.

The rabbit put its nose to the ground and hopped slowly toward the bush. The old man released the string of his bow and the tiny arrow went through the rabbit’s neck. The rabbit twitched and kicked in its death spasms and then lay still. The old man got up, took the rabbit by its feet, and headed back to the cave to begin the long process of skinning it with a sharpened piece of flint.

Getting food was a full-time effort and would only get harder. The old man was sorry that summer-that time when the Creator stayed close to the earth and warmed an old man’s bones-was coming to an end. It was so much easier getting food in summer, when it was easy to dig roots, gather pine nuts, and pull up big clumps of desert grass. Then there were mesquite beans and the reeds that grew along the creek banks, and it was good for an old man to sit on a rock in the sun and grind the beans and nuts into a paste, or sit by the creek and make soup from the reeds and grass.