Leaving Blythe River: A Novel (8 page)

“Yes, sir. Sam.”

“I guess three weeks isn’t much time to make new friends.”

Ethan snorted out a great cloud of steam. “You could give me three years and I couldn’t turn any of those guys into friends.”

He waited. But Sam said nothing. So Ethan took a great gulp of the dreadful coffee and jumped back into talking, still holding the dog’s collar so Rufus couldn’t duck through the rails of the corral and be trampled to death by a bad-tempered mule named Rebar.

“They think I’m a joke,” Ethan said. Another silence. “They laugh at me because I’m skinny and pale. Because I’ve lived in the city all my life. Not right to my face. They laugh behind my back, but it’s not like I don’t know. These kids . . . they drive tractors. They break horses. Even the girls. They ride in the roundups and help castrate calves and brand them. They drive their parents’ pickup trucks and mend fences and sling hay around. And they look at me like I’m absolutely useless. And like it’s really funny. You know. That anybody should be so useless. Even just the concept that there are people like me who don’t do all that cowboy stuff is hilarious to them.”

Ethan ran out of steam and waited again, in case Sam wanted to jump in. Sam didn’t jump in. It struck Ethan that he’d been wanting to talk about this. To someone. He couldn’t talk to anybody at school, because they were the problem. Even the teachers seemed to find him amusing. He couldn’t talk to his father because he couldn’t talk to his father about anything. He couldn’t call his mother and tell her because he would only risk disappointing her again by not being too tough to care.

He’d told Rufus, but it hadn’t helped enough.

Ethan briefly wondered if that was the real reason he’d followed this strange Santa-man with the runaway horses onto his property. Just to know somebody. Somebody who wasn’t back in New York. And who wasn’t his father.

“Sounds like a trip into those mountains would be just the thing for you,” Sam said. But he sounded unsure. As though Ethan had more problems than Sam could trust himself to fix.

“Maybe,” Ethan said, but it was a lie. He knew he wouldn’t go. “Thanks for the offer, anyway.”

He drained the rest of the dreadful coffee and handed the mug back to Sam.

“Stop by anytime,” Sam called as he was leaving.

“I will,” Ethan said. But he didn’t figure he would.

He was careful to latch the gate well behind him and his dog.

On the way home a gigantic long-haired orange tabby cat began to walk along with them as if he were a dog just aching for a good outing.

Rufus tried to sniff the cat, then tried to get him to play, and was rewarded for his efforts by a claw to the soft black tissue of his nose. The dog yelped pathetically, probably more hurt on the inside, and walked ten paces behind the cat from that point on.

When Ethan arrived home, the cat was still following. So Ethan figured the stray must be hungry. He slipped inside and snuck out with a slice of the meat loaf his father had made for the previous night’s dinner.

The cat seemed happy to scarf it down. Which was fine with Ethan, who figured that just meant less of the awful leftover stuff he would have to eat himself.

Chapter Seven: Snark

Two weeks before his father disappeared

Ethan arrived home from school to find that big stray cat mewing around on the porch steps of the A-frame. Again. For the sixth or seventh time in as many days. He could see the cat pacing near the door before he’d even stepped down off the big yellow bus.

The cat was huge, maybe twenty pounds. Or probably close enough to it, anyway. His long coat looked a bit matted here and there. He seemed fat, but Ethan worried that was just the cat’s coat—that maybe his ribs would show if he were wet, or shaved. Because he always meowed so plaintively for food. Why would he do that if not really in need?

Ethan opened the door of the A-frame with his key, and the cat wound around his legs all the way through the door. Rufus ran to greet Ethan, but retreated to a spot behind the coffee table when he saw the cat.

“Dad?” Ethan called out.

No answer. He breathed a sigh of relief.

“Come on into the kitchen,” he said to the cat. “I’ll try to find you something.”

Ethan was wondering in a disconnected way if his father would tolerate Ethan’s taking the cat in permanently when he saw the note on the table.

GONE RUNNING

That was all it said. Just those two words in big block letters.

“‘It’s very important to tell someone where you’ve gone,’” Ethan said, more or less in the cat’s direction. He tried to imitate his father’s voice. “‘Because you could get lost.’ Great. I can see it all now. Dad gets lost. And Ranger Dave asks, ‘Do you know where he was going?’ And I say, ‘Yeah. Running.’ Way to practice what you preach, Dad.”

He stared into the fridge until his eyes fixed on the half-and-half his father used in his coffee. He pulled it out, took a shallow soup bowl down from the cupboard, and poured. There wasn’t much in the carton, and he all but used it up serving the stray. Ethan didn’t care. His father could drink his coffee black, or drive into town, giving Ethan more alone time. Nobody here had serious problems with food supplies except the poor cat.

Ethan warmed the half-and-half in the microwave for thirty seconds or so, then set it down on the floor. The cat started in on it immediately. Rufus wagged in the direction of the kitchen, obviously jealous and hurt, but did not dare come in.

“You don’t miss too many meals,” Ethan told him.

A knock on the door nearly stopped his heart. Because it was a huge knock.

Actually more of an insistent pounding, like someone was standing on the porch using the back of his fist, and swinging his arm full force.

Like somebody was already mad.

Ethan’s heart began to hammer, and the trembling began in a spot behind his belt buckle.

“Who’s there?” he called, without moving even one step closer to the door.

“Why are you trying to steal my cat?” It was a woman’s voice. Big and deep. And unafraid.

Ethan took a long, steadying breath and walked to the door. He stood a moment with his shaking hand on the knob.

Then, because he could think of no way out of doing so, he opened the door.

The woman on the porch had snow-white hair, long and thick and done in a braid that trailed over her left shoulder. Her dark eyes narrowed at him. She wore overalls with a flannel shirt underneath. Cowboy boots. She looked about the same age as Sam. She looked like someone Ethan wouldn’t want to cross. Halfway to grizzly bear territory.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Is that your cat?”

“It is,” she said, all lumber and steel in her voice. Sure, and right. “And I don’t appreciate your trying to win her away.”

“I wasn’t. Really. I thought he was a stray.”

“She. Her name is Mirabelle, and she’s a she.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“You thought that overweight cat was a stray? How do you figure a cat with no home gets to be that size?”

“I thought maybe it was all matted fur.”

“Don’t know much about cats, do you?”

“No, ma’am.”

They stood awkwardly for a moment, each on his and her own side of the open door. Ethan knew he should invite her in. But he didn’t want her in. That was the problem.

“So you’re my neighbor?” he asked, as though the answer might be dangerous. Deadly, even. Then, before she could even answer, it hit him. “Oh. You must be Jone.”

It was an easy deduction. The neighbors were Sam, Marcus, and Jone. And she was neither Sam nor Marcus.

Ethan took her in all over again, trying to imagine someone calling her beautiful. It didn’t quite work. Then again, maybe if he were fifty . . . He tried again, as if through Sam’s eyes, but still didn’t quite see it. But maybe thirty-plus years of growth was simply impossible to imagine.

She narrowed her eyes further. “How’d you know that?”

“Sam the pack service guy told me about you.”

“What’d he tell you?”

“Oh. Nothing.”

The woman sighed. Then she marched past Ethan uninvited. He had to jump out of the way. It struck him that two young, untrained horses had stopped in their tracks when he stood in front of them. But not Jone.

She stopped in the middle of his living room, looking into the kitchen where Mirabelle lapped at the half-and-half. Then she burned her gaze back onto Ethan, who still felt a mild tremor in his hands and throat.

“That’s a good trick,” she said. “He told you about me but he told you nothing. How’s that work exactly?”

“He just asked if I’d met you. That’s all.” He squirmed under her gaze for a brief moment of silence. “He seems like a nice man.”

Jone snorted. “He tell you to say that?”

“No! Not at all. Why would he tell me to say that?”

“Because he tells everybody else to say that.” She unmoored her feet suddenly and marched into the kitchen. Picked up the carton of half-and-half and held it up like an accusation. “Half-and-half? And you still mean to tell me you’re not trying to steal my cat?”

“No! Not at all. I just thought he was hungry.”

“She.”

“Right. Sorry. She.” Silence. Ethan swallowed hard. “It was all I had.”

“I knew she’d been going somewhere. Coming back fatter than ever. Today I decided to follow her. See who had the gall to be feeding her.”

“I just thought . . .”

“You thought what?”

“I thought if he said he needed food, he needed food.”

“Wow, you
really
don’t know cats.”

“No, ma’am.”

“What
do
you know? Anything?”

Ethan felt his mouth drop open. He didn’t—couldn’t—respond.

“Oh . . . I’m sorry,” she said. “That was over the line, I suppose. I just get a little ticky regarding my animals. Don’t like anybody to get between me and what’s mine. But, hell. You’re just a kid.”

“I’m seventeen,” he said.

“You don’t look anything like seventeen.”

“And you don’t look anything like seventy.”

It had been intended as a defiant comment. A way of standing up to her. And that was exactly how it came across. But the moment it came out of Ethan’s mouth he wanted to grab hold of it and drag it back in.

Don’t poke the bear.

He waited, watching her face and shaking.

A huge sound burst out of her, and it startled Ethan. It took him a second or two to realize she was laughing.

“So I been told,” she said. “So here’s the best I can say to make you feel better: When you get to be as old as I am, looking younger than your age is not such a raw deal.”

She strode three steps through the tiny kitchen and picked up Mirabelle, who strained to get down again and finish her treat. Rufus bolted in to clean the bowl.

“If my cat comes around here again,” Jone said, leveling him with that withering gaze, “you tell her she’s too fat as it is, that she eats fine at home, and to get her butt back where it belongs. And next time you talk to our neighbor who you think is so very nice, you tell him the answer is still no.”

She stomped out of the house, slamming the door behind her.

Ethan looked at Rufus, who looked back. The dog was licking stray half-and-half off his nose.

“Whoa,” Ethan said. “Sam was right. She’s worse than Rebar. I wonder why he thinks she’s so beautiful and wonderful, then?”

Still, if anybody understood how love could do strange things to a poor guy, it was Ethan.

Chapter Eight: Alone

The day his father disappeared

Ethan’s eyes flickered open.

There had been a moment—an all-too-brief moment—every morning upon waking for the last three months. This was one of those moments. Ethan had been studying the art of making it last, but it was a lost cause. As soon as you acknowledge you’re in the moment, you’re out of it.

When in it, his heart was not shattered, nor were his nerves. There was nothing haunting him from behind, nothing dark and shadowy down the road. No betrayals in the past or grizzly bear possibilities in the future. If not for the fact that it lasted less than a second, there would be nothing to be said against that moment. It was perfect. Except it was too short.

Then it passed, and the truth of his life settled into his stomach like a clamp. It always felt like something had grabbed his stomach and was holding it too tightly. Painfully tightly. He pictured the sensation as one of those claw-foot traps people use to catch bears. But maybe he just had bears on the brain.

Because it wasn’t really a trap holding his belly, because it was him doing the holding, it always made him feel tired.

It was the first day of summer vacation. He allowed that thought to come in and join all the others.

Ethan sat up and looked out the window. There were no shades or curtains on the window, because none were needed. There was no one out behind the house. Ever. Unless you think it’s important to maintain your privacy from coyotes, elk, and the occasional black bear or grizzly.

A fresh fall of light, powdery snow had fallen in the night. Yes, still. In early June. Where Ethan came from, such a thing would not happen. Where he found himself now, it did. Snow still clung to the rocky towers of the mountain range outside his window. It was beautiful, Ethan thought, but in the abstract. Really no different from a painting on the wall.

So he had actually elevated his opinion of the mountains in the time he’d lived here. But they still didn’t mean much.

Rufus was up on the bed with him, thumping his tail on the quilt.

Ethan scratched behind the dog’s droopy ears.

“Let’s see if there’s time to catch him. Talk him into taking you with him on his run.”

He threw the covers back and stepped out of the bedroom, Rufus bounding ahead into the A-frame’s more or less one big room. No Dad. He looked to his father’s bedroom. Its door stood wide open, making it clear that the bedroom was empty. The house was empty.

“Damn it,” Ethan said. “He ditched you again.”

Meanwhile he was half aware of the message machine beeping. Someone must have called without waking him up.

He stumbled to the machine and hit “Play.”

“Dude.”

Glen.

“Wish I’d gotten to talk to you before I go. Let’s trade places. I’ll sit in that tiny house with your dad all summer, and you go out and probably drown on a sailboat with my dad for three weeks.”

A pause.

“Oh, well. Wish me luck.”

Ethan felt a pang of regret at having missed the call.

He stumbled into the kitchen area, divided from the rest of the house only by a tile counter, and looked, blinking, into the cupboards. Maybe for cereal. Maybe for kibble. He wasn’t even sure which.

“It’s such a dirty trick,” he told Rufus. “Who likes to go running more than a dog?”

Then again, Ethan thought, not all dogs are suited to a run over twenty miles long, which was a possibility on any given day.

Giving up on looking for anything, and half asleep, Ethan sat down at the table with a surprising thump.

“I’ll have to take you out,” he said.

Without that holster of bear spray it was not a happy thought. Except to Rufus, who swung his tail with renewed vigor.

“No. I can’t take you till he gets back. He has the bear spray. Unless I can find the spare can. He keeps saying there’s a spare can. But I haven’t seen it.”

He stared at the mountains for a moment in an unfocused way. His eyes were focused, but his brain was not. So when the thought came into his head, it surprised him. He hadn’t seen any thoughts coming.

“What the hell am I supposed to
do
all summer?” he asked the dog. “I mean, if I’m here all summer?”

It seemed to disturb Rufus to be asked a question. He seemed to feel he should attempt to answer, or otherwise help, but ended up just wiggling uncomfortably.

“At least at school I dared to go outside. At least I was in town. But out here in the middle of nothing and nowhere? With the wolves and the bears?”

He realized he’d been so focused on getting away from the young cowboys and cowgirls who found him so funny that he hadn’t really thought about the downside. All that time to kill. Right in the foothills of the wilderness.

He looked around the one big room they now called home.

“We should get this over with.”

He began to rummage around the house for the spare can of bear spray. He found it fairly quickly in the kitchen pantry. Because his father had the holster, Ethan would just have to carry it in his hand. That was okay. That was not the problem. The problem was, when he checked the expiration date on the bottom as he’d been taught to do, it had passed.

“It’s expired,” he told the dog.

For a moment Ethan wondered how a product that’s made to last for a year and a half had expired in less than three months. It must have been old when his father bought it. He must not have looked at the date when he chose it. That sounded about right for his father.

“Sure,” he said out loud. “It’s only life or death.”

Rufus slithered over to the door and wagged desperately, and Ethan realized his father probably hadn’t even let him out to pee before running. The poor dog had probably been holding it since bedtime the night before.

Ethan sighed, and opened the door for him.

“Don’t go far!” he shouted as the dog bolted past him.

His worst fear was always that Rufus would disappear, led astray by some wonderful scent. And then Ethan would have to go out there alone to find him.

“Great,” Ethan said. “Great place to be all summer. Let’s get Ethan out of the city. It’ll be good for him. Nothing to be scared of out here. No thieves or muggers or murderers. Just eight- or nine-hundred-pound grizzly bears. Who murder people. But we’ll give you this nice can of expired bear spray. See? Nothing to worry about.”

To his relief, Rufus came wagging back.

“Okay,” he said, closing them back into the safety of the house. “We’ll go for a real walk when he gets home.”

Ethan’s father never got home.

For most of the day Ethan felt dissatisfied and angry at the inconsideration of it all. It wasn’t until the sun began to set that he realized it might be time to be afraid.

Of something new for a change.

Ethan tried to call Ranger Dave after dark, using a general number for the Blythe River Ranger District. He got only a recording stating the office hours, and suggesting 911 for an emergency.

But it didn’t feel like an emergency. Well, that’s not entirely true. It
felt
like one. But Ethan didn’t figure it would seem like one to anybody else. He couldn’t imagine convincing a 911 dispatcher that a father out late was an emergency, especially when a person had to be gone for something like forty-eight hours before being reported as a missing person.

But gone into the wilderness . . . didn’t that make a difference?

What if he told the dispatcher that his father had been out running in a wilderness area full of wild animals, a place freezing cold at night, and better not faced in the dark?

Still, Ethan couldn’t imagine a search party going out to look for anybody in the pitch blackness. He would have to wait and call the rangers in the morning. Assuming his father wasn’t back in the morning. Which he still might be.

And what if Noah wasn’t even out in the wilderness? Lately he’d been making vague excuses, like “Ethan, I’m going into town to buy groceries,” before disappearing for eight hours or more. Ethan had been so happy to have the house to himself that he’d asked no questions. Even the couple of times he’d come back close to dark. Maybe Noah had finished his run hours ago and had gone into town for a drink. Or a few drinks.

Maybe he was seeing somebody in town.

Ethan went to bed and tried to sleep. He failed miserably.

Shortly before midnight he got up and let himself into his father’s room, where he had never trespassed before. He began plowing through Noah’s things. Dresser drawers. Desk drawers. Closet.

If someone had asked him why—if his father had walked in and demanded an explanation—Ethan would have been hard-pressed to justify his actions. But somewhere in the back of his head he felt there must be something to find. Some
reason
for this sudden abandonment.

Maybe there was something Ethan didn’t know. God knows there had been in the past.

And now he felt it was his right to know. So much so that he didn’t even try to cover over the fact that he’d been in each drawer, each cubby. Quite the opposite. He pulled clothes out onto the Persian rug and left them there. Pulled socks and briefs out onto the dresser and didn’t put them back. Other than a box of condoms, which did seem to indicate something Ethan hadn’t been told, he found nothing to help explain the situation.

In fact, he did not find anything related to the disappearance.

But he did find something.

He opened a wooden box on his father’s dresser. He’d expected it to contain some kind of male jewelry. Watches and rings, maybe. In it was one single lollipop. The kind with the wrapper that twisted around the white paper stick, and the caramel fudge in the middle of the hard candy sphere.

It hit him hard. It was sudden and unexpected. If he had walked into the living room and found Jennifer sitting on the couch as if she lived there he would only have been marginally more shocked.

He stared at it for a long time, a kind of buzzy static setting up in his chest. Trying to think of nothing. Trying not to remember.

Then he picked it up from its box and carried it to the front door, Rufus wagging behind. He opened the door, holding the dog’s collar so he wouldn’t dash out into the night, and threw the candy as far and as hard as he could. Which wasn’t far. He vaguely pictured all the kids from school smirking at his latest inability. He could almost hear them adding “throws like a girl” to their ever-growing list.