Jane Smiley - Golden Age

But he couldn’t tolerate the highway. Every driver seemed predatory. So, at the next turnoff, he took a small road into the wildlife refuge, and it was like entering another world. The rough hills were marginally greener than the plains; deer stood by the side of the road as if they enjoyed observing passersby. Most important, the park was quiet and nearly empty: empty hills, empty roads, empty cliffs, empty valleys, empty enormous sky. He took some deep breaths, and found his box of crackers again — almost empty. He did not drive far into the park; it was pretty apparent that the roads were narrow and treacherous, it would be easy to get lost. But he got himself together here, so that when he headed back to the main road, even though it was now dusk and he could see the gas flares on the horizon more clearly, and smell the oily scent that pervaded the countryside as it came through his ventilation system, he was okay with it, more willing to think about his imminent hamburger than his imminent death.

He half hoped to run into Lundy Mitchell — he didn’t — but he did run into, of all people, Scott Crandall, who had been in his unit in Iraq, and whom he hadn’t thought of once in the interim. He was sitting at a bar in Williston, and when he heard Guthrie order his burger and onion rings, he turned around and said, “Shit!”

He looked so belligerent that Guthrie prepared himself right then to be cold-cocked, but the guy smiled (not many teeth), flexed his enormous biceps (years in oil country, setting rigs), and said, “Langdon, shit, man, what the fuck!” and threw his arms around Guthrie and squeezed. Guthrie was six feet tall, 190, but Scott — or, as he was now known, “Croc”—was two inches taller and forty pounds heavier, all muscle. Even his enormous belly was as hard as a rock. He was bald, had a tatt on his cheek and another on his forehead, and took Guthrie back to his man-camp room for the night. Which would have been fine, considering they both got pretty drunk, but Croc wanted to talk and talk and talk. He hadn’t been away from Williston in ten years; he’d once made plenty of dough, but he played a lot of poker, too; and he wanted Guthrie to know every detail of how his best friend in Williston had been crushed to death when a tanker rolled backward into a drilling rig — the screaming lasted ten full minutes, and they couldn’t do a thing about it. If Langdon thought Iraq was bad, he should stick around in Williston for a week. Anyway, that scam set up by the big oil companies and the Arabs, the one where they dropped the price of oil to fifty dollars a barrel and kept it there for a year, had worked — put most of the drillers on the Bakken out of business. Croc finally passed out (twelve Coronas and a bottle of vodka; Guthrie remembered him getting so drunk in Iraq that he set his duffel bag on end and shot it full of holes, laughing the entire time). Guthrie was out of the man camp and to Billings, Montana, by noon.

He had $346, and wasn’t halfway yet. He was getting fifty miles to the gallon; he had eight hundred or so miles to go; so at $8.90 a gallon (the price of gas was back up now), it would cost him $150 just in gas. There was a part of him that wanted to arrive in Seattle with a dollar in his pocket and a new name — let’s say “Sage” (maybe, with effort, he could live up to that) — but it was a stupid part of him. There was no speed limit in Montana, so he could get pretty far in twenty-four hours. That was what he was thinking. It would also be smart to plug in his phone, now dead, but he realized that he had left the car charger somewhere — it wasn’t under the seat.

He filled up in Coeur d’Alene, happy to have gotten that far. He was a man of the plains, so the switchbacks over the mountains in the dark, the way the guardrail loomed into the light, spooked him and made him jerk the wheel. He did think many times about how one of the effects of PTSD was not that you were suicidal, exactly, but that death was such a familiar concept that it seemed like a reasonable alternative to, not fear, but shock, suddenness, the unexpected. Eventually, a person got very tired of those shots of adrenaline that didn’t stop firing. Your body itself became the enemy that could never be placated. At a place called Moses Lake, he turned off into Potholes State Park (how could he resist?), and pulled into a shady spot. The weather wasn’t terrible here — he only had to crack his windows a little. He was hungry, though. That was his last thought before he fell asleep.

The blow against the window that woke him up was followed by the blow that cracked the window. The third one shattered it, and the glass poured into his lap. A face was right in his, the face of a teen-ager. The face was snarling, and behind it were more faces, three or more. Everyone was screaming. Guthrie jerked back, and the kid leaned in, saying, “How much money you got, fuckhead?”

Guthrie had no idea, but he said, “Hundred bucks, maybe.” The kid said, “Hand it over. Hand me your wallet.”

Guthrie hesitated, not out of fear — that hadn’t kicked in yet — but just out of surprise, slowness. The kid lifted his gun. Guthrie recognized it; it was an old Ruger. It came through the broken window, and Guthrie felt the muzzle touch his cheek. Instinctively, he turned his head.

A LAWYER DID COME to the Hut. It wasn’t anyone from the IRS — he was working for the Loretta Langdon Family Trust. He had a Southern accent, and Andy, though she wasn’t getting around very well, invited him to have a seat and offered him a cup of mint tea, which he took. He had a briefcase with him, but before he opened it, he complimented her on how “charming” her place was. He said, “This is a lot like my grandma’s place, that I remember from a boy. It was up in Asheville? I used to love to go up there. My father’s mother. My mother was from Savannah; my word, she turned up her nose at the hillbillies on my dad’s side, but I did love them best, I have to say.”

Andy said, “I take it your grandparents are no longer living?”

“No, no. They died pretty young. I think Grandpa was sixty and Grandma was sixty-four.”

“That is young,” said Andy, and he stared at her, at the life she had made herself by contemplating death so often and so thoroughly for as long as she could remember, training herself not to let death come unexpectedly, to step aside or look over her shoulder at every tire squeal, to note every slippery patch, every dangling wire, every scent of gas, every sign of infection. Frank had been alert, but never quite as alert as she was to the skull within the beautiful visage. Finally, the young man said, “You look in excellent health, ma’am.”

Andy said, “I can’t complain,” and for some reason she laughed, and then he laughed. He took a deep breath and embraced his briefcase, as if to fortify his resolve. Andy sipped her mint tea. Her hand was just bones now, but no arthritis, at least.

He opened the briefcase and pulled out some papers. He said, “It does appear, as we look into Michael Langdon’s estate, that he was making deposits into an account that is in your name. I am told by Mrs. Langdon that these were support payments to you.”

“Or, perhaps,” said Andy, “restitution. His antics in 2008 cost me eighteen million dollars.” She grabbed this amount out of the ozone — her clearest memory of the Uncle Jens fund was from about 1955, when it hit a hundred grand because of real-estate investments Frank had made with that Mafia type they met at Belmont Park.

“Mrs. Langdon said nothing to me about restitution.”