The Spirit of Steamboat Read online

She laughed softly. “Not really.”

  I smiled back, turning the corner and pulling into the parking lot of the facility. “Is that how you know Lucian, through your grandfather?”

  “No, I met him when I passed through here one time.” She unbuckled her safety belt and clutched the bag a little closer as I put the Bullet in park. “It’s also when I met you.”

  Before I could ask, she’d slipped from the seat and closed the door behind her. I watched as she crossed to the shoveled sidewalk, turned toward the building, and stood there with her head lowered, still with the vinyl sack hanging over her arms. The bottom of the thing turned gently in the slight breeze like an unfurled flag; whatever was in there was bulky but not long.

  I piled out and opened the door for Dog, who, with the experience of countless Tuesday night chess matches, led the way, his tail raised like a question mark.

  “Jingle Bells” was playing through the speaker system, a Count Basie version I remembered having heard down at the Elk Mountain Hotel when Martha and I had spent New Year’s there about twenty-five years ago, before her illness. As we walked toward the front desk, I could see that Mary Jo Johnson, a member of the staff, was engaged in a heated conversation with a client about the use of one of the communal rooms, informing him that the nightly Bingo was being preempted by a local middle school holiday concert. As a matter of courtesy, I waited until the conversation was over and then signed the guestbook.

  Mary Jo watched me sign my name. “The natives are restless.”

  I stopped in mid-dotting. “Great—what set them off?”

  She sighed. “Mrs. Hayden probably isn’t going to make it through the night; Doc Bloomfield is staying with her.” She nodded her head toward the other wing of the building. “It’s hard during the holidays, with so many of them passing.”

  “I’ll go over later and visit with Isaac and her—I think my mother was one of Mrs. Hayden’s baking buddies from church.”

  “Thank you, Walter.” Her face stiffened. “There is one more thing.” She glanced around, as if trying to keep a secret. “Lucian shot the television in the lounge.”

  I raised my eyes and, suddenly tired, looked at her. “Again?”

  “Again.”

  I glanced at the young woman at my side, who was politely ignoring the conversation.

  “Fox News; that’s the second one in a year and now there’s no holiday entertainment for the masses.”

  I thought about it. “Well, at least you’ve got the middle school musical show.”

  Not saying a word, she stared at me.

  “I’ll speak with him.” I nodded, making sure she knew I was aware of the severity of the situation. “And I’ll get Bert from Mossholders to get another one sent over from Sheridan.”

  Mary Jo studied me. “Flat screen, please.”

  I rested the chain-connected pen back in the holder and started down the hallway. “Merry Christmas.”

  She called after the three of us, “No smaller than forty-two inches.”

  —

  At the far end of the hall, I raised a fist and knocked on the door. The old sheriff’s hearing, having always been keen, had declined a little lately, so, after getting no response, I banged on the door again. “Lucian?”

  Inside, I could hear a voice, accompanied by a thumping noise that could only be my predecessor hopping toward the door; he had most likely forgotten his prosthetic leg, so I grabbed Dog’s collar—he had bowled my former boss over in his enthusiasm to get to the man’s sofa on our last visit. “Is this my ribey-ass, horseshit chess partner who usually doesn’t show up until the middle of the damned night?”

  It was five-thirty.

  The door swung open viciously, and we were treated to the sight of an old, one-legged man in boxer shorts and a wifebeater T-shirt with more than a little twenty-three-year-old Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve on his breath. He stared at me, then at the young woman, and then back to me, before shutting the hollow-core door in our faces.

  His voice, not having lost any of its crotchetiness, carried through it. “Jesus H. Christ, you could’ve told me I had company.”

  I turned and smiled down at the woman as he continued to crash and bang around inside. “He doesn’t get too many visitors.”

  After a few minutes, he thumped closer, and the door flung open to reveal the same man now standing there with a four-prong cane and resplendent in a vintage Pendleton wool shirt, jeans, and one polished Paul Bond boot, his bristle-brush crew-cut hair combed and pomaded.

  “Where’s your leg?”

  He glanced around as if it might’ve snuck up on him at an ass-kicking contest. “Well, if I knew that I’d have the damn thing on, now wouldn’t I?” He turned to look at the young woman and extended his hand, the knuckles scarred but the fingernails clean and blunt cut. “How do you do, miss.”

  Bashfully, she shook the proffered appendage and studied him.

  They were about the same height. Lucian, unsure of the situation but with women always gracious to a fault, hopped back and invited us in, Dog of course leading the way.

  His keepers, as he liked to refer to the people who helped him, had made their annual gesture toward holiday festooning by stringing blinking, multicolored lights outside his sliding glass doors, but there was little else to recommend the season other than a pine-scented candle that partially masked the vague but ever-present odor of pipe tobacco and Ben-Gay.

  The chessboard was sitting on the side table between the two large, overstuffed leather chairs that he had brought with him from the ancestral Connally family ranch house, along with the aforementioned bourbon and a telltale glass of half-melted ice.

  He gathered a Durant Courant and his holstered sidearm from one of the massive chairs and handed both to me, thereby discovering his prosthetic leg lying beneath. “Well, hell . . .”

  Dog took up his position on the sofa, and I gestured for the woman to take a seat in the chair that had been cleaned of Lucian’s paraphernalia as I assisted him in sitting in the other. He rolled up his pant leg and began strapping the prosthetic on, pointy-toed cowboy boot and all.

  Slipping the newspaper under my arm and hanging the worn leather gun belt from my shoulder, I pulled out the revolver and could, indeed, smell the quartzite and gunpowder residue from when it had been fired. “Lucian, you need to stop shooting the TVs.”

  He licked some spittle onto his thumb and rubbed away a spot on his boot but said nothing.

  “It’s getting to be an expensive habit.” I clicked the cylinder open on the revolver and dumped the remaining rounds into the pocket of my sheepskin coat; it was an exercise in futility until I discovered where he stashed his ammo, but it made me feel better.

  He finally glanced up. “Well, are you just gonna stand there like the high cock o’laural between here and saltwater, or are you gonna offer the lady a drink?”

  I sighed and turned to the young woman, who was preoccupied with staring at the wartime leaflet framed on the wall, the Japanese one that denounced the Doolittle Raid in which the old sheriff had taken part.

  I looked down at the dent in the back of Lucian’s head, the result of a run-in with the four Baroja brothers and a tire iron when they had taken exception to the fact that he’d eloped with their sister. It seemed like everybody in the county had attempted to beat some sense into him at some time or another, but it didn’t seem that any of us had made so much as a dent, figuratively speaking.

  When Lucian was fifteen, he ran away from the family ranch near Sheridan, Wyoming. Admittedly a drastic move, Lucian told me on more than one occasion that it had been the best damn decision he’d ever made, considering that the alternative would have been staring at the ass end of a couple hundred cows for the rest of his life. He had convinced the Yentzer brothers, who had owned Elkhorn Airways in Sheridan proper, to teach him to fly and let him bunk in the loft of their small Quonset hangar in return for working as a mechanic helper and hangar sweeper.

  Both
Dick and Jack Yentzer had been members of Lucian’s original Tuesday night poker crew, but Jack had died when a cargo shift in his Piper Cub had blocked the aft control stick, causing the plane to pitch up and stall out, and Dick had been found dead in the bathroom by his family. This would not be worth telling except that as the story goes, he was found dead clutching the front of the sink and staring at himself in the mirror.

  My reverie was broken by the young woman’s voice as she read from the framed leaflet on the wall: “‘The cruel, inhuman, and beastlike American pilots who, in a bold intrusion of the holy territory of the Empire on April 18, 1942, dropped incendiaries and bombs on hospitals, schools, and private houses and even dive-strafed playing school-children, were captured, court-martialed, and severely punished according to military law—’”

  “Miss?”

  She looked up at me.

  I slipped off my coat and laid it on the sofa beside Dog. “Would you like a drink?”

  “I . . . Sure.”

  I gestured toward the bottle. “It would appear that the libation of choice at the shank of the evening is bourbon.”

  “I’ll have bourbon.” She smiled but covered it with a hand as Lucian paused in his labors to glance at her.

  Nodding, I started for the abbreviated kitchen as the old sheriff went back to attending to his fourth limb. “I’ll get you a fresh setup, Lucian.”

  Snatching his glass, I put the folded newspaper onto the counter and rested the holstered revolver on its front page, which announced that the problem with the homeless, who had been run out of the shelter in the mornings these weeks before Christmas and had subsequently occupied the library, had been solved when a local church had allowed them to stay in its cafeteria until the shelter opened again at dinner—God bless us every one.

  I rinsed his glass; it took a while to find another clean one, let alone two, since I was thinking it would be a good idea to get into the holiday spirit myself. Breaking the cubes from the tray, I returned to see Lucian rerolling the cuff of his jeans back down over the initialed, handcrafted boot.

  “There, like a new man.” He winked at the young woman. “Or three-quarters of one.”

  She pointed toward the leaflet. “Is that how you lost your leg?”

  “Lose hell; they cut it off . . . Course, I’ve been losing it ever since.” He glanced back at the framed yellowed piece of paper and then shook his head. “Nope, lost it not paying attention to where Beltran Etxepare was keeping his hands.”

  I arrived with the glasses, and she shifted her eyes to me. “Basque bootleggers.”

  Her eyes widened. “Oh.”

  He snatched the bottle from the table and motioned for me to set the glasses on it. “I’ll pour; I know how liberal you can be.” He tipped the bottle into the three tumblers, and I noticed he held out the lightest to me.

  I took the Lismore Waterford tumbler—my mother had had the same design—leaned against the substantial wing of his cowhide chair, and gestured toward the young woman, who sniffed the spirits, made a face, and then held the cut-glass like a benediction, the reflection from the golden liquid underlighting her face, making the scar more evident in that small illumination—white and ghostlike.

  “This lady says she knows you, Lucian.”

  He motioned toward the vinyl garment bag, still in her lap. “Well, I didn’t figure she was from the dry cleaners.” He winked at her. “No tickee, no shirtee?”

  There was an uncomfortable silence as I listened to the ticking of the clock on Lucian’s sideboard and made a conscious effort to melt into the floor.

  Finally, she spoke. “I’m Japanese, not Chinese.”

  He sipped the Pappy Van Winkle’s and studied her. “And I’m confused; if you don’t mind my asking, just who the hell are you, anyway?”

  With her black hair shrouding her face, she could have been one of Henry Standing Bear’s many unofficial nieces as she moved a few of the chess pieces with the tips of her fingers. With her head still down, she carefully set the glass on the coaster beside the board and took a quick breath to steady herself. “You don’t remember me, either.”

  The old sheriff craned his neck to look up at me and then back to her. “You’ll have to forgive me, young lady, but my memory isn’t quite what it used to be. Perhaps if you were to give me a clue?”

  Her face came up, and the glow from the blinking lights challenged the reflection from the tumbler and planed the scar again as if lightning had struck across her forehead.

  Her perfect lips moved, and the whistle returned in her breath. “Steamboat.”

  December 24, 1988

  The fire trucks’ emergency lights rhythmically crashed into the plate glass of the observation deck along with a few snowflakes that flew toward my face and then against the outside of the window, the ones that missed the glass avoiding the Durant terminal altogether in a race for Nebraska. I studied the line I’d read over and over again in my attempts at distracting myself: “. . . no space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunity misused. . . .”

  I stuffed the leather-bound copy of A Christmas Carol into the inside pocket of my sheepskin coat and pulled at the brim of my new hat. With a little help from Martha, my daughter, Cady, who had turned nine in April, had given me a very nice chocolate brown one as an early Christmas present. I adjusted the brim, rested my gloved hand against the window, and stared into the wind coming from the Bighorn Mountains to the west.

  What would Lucian Connally, the sheriff who had lost to me in the election in November, have done?

  I felt someone standing beside me and glanced over to see the Ferg, peering in the same direction, his voice raised to be heard above the wind, pressing against the glass in repetitive howls, almost as if the noise and the revolving yellow lights represented the sound and its accompanying fury. “Weren’t they supposed to be here already?”

  I turned and looked at the moonfaced man, roughly my age, and the one I’d leapfrogged to sheriff only two months ago—a move that didn’t seem so smart right now. “Yep.”

  “The NOAA says it’s shaping up to be the worst storm of the century, and it’s headed our way.”

  I took a deep breath and slowly exhaled, hazing the glass in front of my face. “The old-timers say forty-nine was horrible, but I don’t remember it . . . You?”

  He shook his head. “Can’t say I do.” He turned back to the darkness. “What the heck are you gonna do, Walt?”

  I tipped my hat back, smoothed my mustache, and leaned a forearm against the window, hoping that maybe if I got those ten inches closer, I would see the running lights of a Flight For Life helicopter out of Billings. “Funny, I was just thinking about that.”

  “Only one survivor?”

  I listened to the wind press against the casings with that scrubbing sound it can make, hoping it wasn’t attempting to clean the helicopter from the sky. “Yep.”

  “How bad?”

  “Burns.” I sighed, thinking how it was the one thing you didn’t want to say when talking about a child. “Fifteen percent TBSA’s with inhalation injuries.” Total Body Surface Area burns over 5 percent were bad enough to cause most doctors to want to get a patient to a pediatric ICU as quickly as possible, but with the added complications of smoke inhalation injuring airway tissues, this little girl needed Colorado, and she needed it within hours or she would die. “Bad enough that they couldn’t do anything in Billings; bad enough that the only chance is Children’s Hospital in Denver.”

  Another reflection—Isaac Bloomfield, the doctor I’d called in to help the traveling medical staff who would be with the victim, was standing just behind us holding a sheaf of papers in his shaking hands. “Walt?”

  “Yep.”

  “Emma at the administrative office says that since the gusts are approaching forty miles an hour they had to alter their flight plan; they’re still thirty minutes away.”

  “Right.”

  “I thought you would want to know.”

/>   “I do.” I calculated in my head as my hand curled into a fist. “Any idea where Rick Koehmstedt is?”

  “In the hangar with Julie.”

  I had known of Julie Luehrman—she had taught part-time at Cady’s school—but I had finally actually met her six months ago while waiting for a chartered flight carrying the attorney general. I’d been eavesdropping, listening to her explain the finer points of plotting, bearing, and distance to one of her student pilots. “Thanks, Doc.”

  I pushed off and walked between the two men, the Ferg slipping a hand to my shoulder. “Walt, it would take eight hours to drive it in these conditions, and the Highway Patrol has already pulled the barricades down.”

  I nodded and continued on.

  The main hangar of the Durant Airport was only ten yards from the terminal, but with the wind and the snow piled from the storm that had hit a couple of days ago, it might as well have been a hundred. I cranked my hat down as far as it would go, flipped up the collar of my coat, forced the door open, and, tacking to my right to counter the pressure of the wind, trudged along the snow-clogged chain-link fence. There was no chance of my thoughts being blown away—they clung to me like the bony fist of Christmas Future.

  There had been an automobile crash on I-90 where it merged with I-94 on the outskirts of Billings, Montana. There was a fire, and three people were dead; the one person who had survived would not continue to do so unless I figured out a way to get her to Denver. When the high-powered helicopter had left Billings they’d thought they had a chance of outrunning the Canadian front that was barreling down out of Alberta, but conditions had changed and now the authorities were shutting down the highways and pilots were grounding anything that flew north and west of here other than a few wayward Canada geese.

  I stumbled against the door of the hangar and grabbed at the handle, forcing it open just enough to let my bulk through. A large clump of snow slid from the roof and landed squarely on top of my new hat. Standing there for a moment, I took a breath of the heated air and could smell the tang of fresh paint and the sound of a drill somewhere in the depths of the maintenance hangar.