The Farmer's Daughter (9 page)

Dawn was bright and clear but with slushy roads. They made it home by noon and Lolly told her that a man named Alfredo had called and left a number. Sarah was breathless until she got up to the cabin and could return the call though first she had to deal with the hyperexcited Rover and Lad who was screaming his horsey scream of welcome. Terry had house-sat and she could smell the slight fetor of his four nights of coupling with Marcia but didn't have time to be disgusted. She got Alfredo on the second ring.

“I saw the Weather Channel and was worried about you in the storm.”

“We made it okay but we had to stop for the night.” There was a long pause.

“Say something. I don't know what to say,” he said.

“I miss you.” This took courage.

“I miss you but this is crazy and maybe it's wrong.” His voice was a little weak.

“I asked Rebecca and she said I'd be legal in Arizona on my sixteenth birthday this summer.” Rebecca had been startled that evening when Sarah asked but looked it up on the computer.

“I think we should take this slowly.”

“If you like. We can always play the piano.”

“We'll figure this out by the fall. We can write letters. I'll start one when we hang up.”

“Me too,” she said.

She saddled up Lad and with Rover in the lead rode up to the canyon, her thoughts drifting. If only Tim were alive he would certainly shoot Karl for her. Probably Marcia would too. Maybe such attitudes were in the landscape. Montana was too large and there was vertigo in the landscape with no apparent peripheries. Boys left the school property to fistfight at noon down behind the grain elevator, and men fistfought at night in the tavern parking lot though Giselle had joked that fighting was showing a decline in Montana with the advent of marijuana. Some called a joint a “peacemaker,” the old name for a Colt revolver.

When she got back to the cabin she called the school principal and said she would miss school for a few days because she had to go to Denver to visit a sick aunt. He said, “Fine,” and that she should probably be teaching rather than studying anyway. His comment only served to remind her how abnormal her life had been. She had grown tired of teachers telling her that she was “gifted” or “exceptional” when all that she had ever wanted was to be normal and be around other young people more often than 4-H meetings.

She cleaned her .30-06 though it didn't need it and packed her duffel with outdoor wear and the three boxes of cartridges. She studied both her road and her topo maps of Karl's area suddenly worried about who would take care of Rover and Lad if she got caught. Certainly not her dad or Lolly. She thought about affection, or what the popular culture called love, which she had only recently experienced. You couldn't count Montgomery Clift. This emotion was often inchoate as music that startles us then regains its melodic shape. When she cleaned the lenses of her binoculars she knew that the rhythm of her affection for Alfredo was all in the music they played together because they didn't actually know each other. Peppy as an evangelical was always verbally assaulting the Catholic saints as “blasphemous” but now in the night Sarah wished she knew how to voice a prayer to Saint Tim whose spirit she tried to sense hovering in the roof beams of the cabin.

She left at five
A.M.
after vomiting up her breakfast cheese sandwich and coffee. Lad was difficult to load into the horse trailer not wanting to move at the early hour but she needed him because it was three miles according to her topo map from the county road over the hills to the small dirt road that led to Karl's place which originally had been owned by the famed “Indian killer” Thadeus Markin according to a book in the Livingston library.

Her stomach felt full of acrid ice cubes as she drove slowly on the blacktop trying to avoid the nearly invisible black ice she caught in her headlights. She figured that the drive to Meeteetse was eight hours and she had left so early to get a few hours of April daylight when she arrived. It would have been far shorter to drive through Yellowstone Park but the roads weren't open yet because of the snow so she was forced to take the same route as to the antelope hunt only following 310 south in Laurel toward Powell, Wyoming. She pretended she was only going to look things over but knew very well that if the opportunity was there she'd pull the trigger.

By midmorning her spirit had lightened and she felt righteous. Aside from her own vengeance she was on a mission to save other girls. Who knew but Karl and his friend how many victims there had been? She and Priscilla had never talked about what had happened to them but once when she was drunk in the evening after school had started Priscilla had tried to joke by saying that her ass had hurt for a week. Sarah deduced that this meant she had been sodomized which sounded worse than getting hairs torn out.

When she stopped for gas and food at a creepy McDonald's in Livingston she sorted through her eight-tracks because Vivaldi, Scarlatti, and Mahler weren't working. She found Hank Williams's 24 Greatest Hits which Marcia had left in the truck months before. Williams's hard and mournful voice was more in keeping with her mission.

By the time she reached Cody and made the turn toward Meeteetse she was nearly asleep at the wheel and the strong coffee in her thermos wasn't working. She was drowsily amused by the idea that murder required physical training and good sleeping habits. She knew that the last time she had looked at the clock last night it was three
A.M
. and she had gotten up before five. If you intend to murder someone you need more than two hours of sleep. The fatigue gave her minimum control over her mind, the mystery of which boggled her to the point that she intended to read up on the brain. The merest thought of Alfredo gave her cold feet for her mission to the point that three times on the trip she had nearly turned around. And she was forced to admit the fact that shooting Karl didn't mean her nightmares about him would end. She struggled to divert herself by thinking about cartridges. There was a carton of old 220-grain Silvertip cartridges in Tim's cabin. Marcia would use those for elk but would drop back to the 165-grain factory loads for deer or antelope. Marcia's whole family went elk hunting, even her feminine mother whose strongest swear word was “gosh.” They took four elk and a number of deer every year and though they were partial to beef they ate wild meat half the time like old Tim. Marcia was saving for a heavy Sako target rifle after hearing that a man north of Butte had shot a deer at seven hundred yards with his rifle but then he had been a sniper in Vietnam. You could pop a skull and the victim would be dead before the noise caught up.

She was parked dozing on the main street of Meeteetse at four and when she woke in fifteen minutes there was Karl's big pickup parked in front of the tavern in a twisted version of luck. She drove around the corner to use a pay phone in case he might recognize her out the tavern window. She called his home and got Karl's dad letting him know she'd be dropping off a horse at the front gate at eight the next morning. He told her to bring the horse down to the corral near the hay shed and she said no because she was hauling a real big rig from Sheridan and had to deliver seven more horses in Casper. He said okay and then said, “Who are you?” and she answered, “I'm one of Karl's hot young chicks from Billings.” The man cackled.

She went into a grocery store and bought bread, baloney, and a can of beans which she would eat cold not wanting to chance a campfire. She drove off northeast on a county road along the Greybull River, then a few hundred yards up a log road to conceal her truck and horse trailer. Rover was pissed when Sarah left her in the truck and saddled up Lad to reconnoiter, putting her loaded rifle in the saddle scabbard just in case. It was an easy ride up and over the hill but the steep descent was slow. She wended her way through a patch of boulders and loblolly pines and then she could see the gate to Karl Burkhardt's place, a drive leading to a small ranch house about a mile distant. She found a boulder that would make a perfect rest for her rifle to ensure accuracy. She decided to load up with 220-grain Silvertips for what gun magazines referred to as “knock-down” power.

She made it back to her truck just before dark and Rover acted as if she had been gone for days. She fed Lad some hay and shared her can of beans and boloney sandwiches, both of which were barely edible. Even Rover wasn't enthused. Rover had loathed Peppy but Lolly was fine because she offered little tidbits of Reggio Parmesan as dog treats.

Of course it was the longest night of her life, longer than the night of her uprooted short hairs and the ketamine-and-alcohol swoon which had made her feel like her brain was vomiting. She had intended to sleep on the ground but it was pretty cold and she had forgotten the air mattress for her sleeping bag so she curled up in the bag on the front seat using Rover as a pillow. She read one of Alfredo's botany texts with a penlight wishing she had brought along something more appropriate like one of the Elmore Leonard murder mysteries that Terry's mother had turned her on to. She slept fitfully waking at midnight with a start because her mind was playing loud symphonic music that she had never heard before. This had happened twice before in her life and it made her think she might become a composer. This time in the pickup the music was loud and discordant and derivative of Stravinsky. It was strange enough to frighten her and she looked up through the windshield at the density of the stars of the Milky Way. She questioned whether this music would prevent her from shooting Karl. She would ask her glum history teacher if those wretched Nazi generals loved classical music or did Mozart prevent murder?

At first light she woke from a delightful dream of her walk with Alfredo. He was explaining to her the mysterious life of a pyracantha bush that was almost solid with berries. After a hard frost the berries would ferment and the birds eating the berries would get drunk. At the exact moment he said this a canyon wren began singing nearby and she shivered at the beauty of its voice.

She ate half a sandwich and drank cold coffee then saddled up Lad while Rover examined their surroundings for threats. Rover didn't want to be left behind and refused to get back into the truck. She flopped down in the frosty grass and Sarah had to lift her ninety-pound body back into the truck which made her cold back twinge. “You miserable bitch,” Sarah said.

She reached her destination a little after seven and tethered Lad several hundred yards back in the trees. She sat beside the boulder letting the early-morning sun warm her cold hands and face and body. At about a quarter to eight Karl drove his pickup up the driveway towing an ancient slat-sided open trailer most often used for hauling a bull or pigs. He pulled the truck in sideways with the trailer near the gate. She watched through the Leupold scope as he got out and leaned against the hood with a cup of steaming coffee. He limped badly when he opened the gate and she hoped he hurt. She squeezed off three rounds blasting out the truck's windshield and the two near-side tires in case he tried to escape. Karl started screeching and struggled to get in the near-side truck door. She put a bullet near the handle and he crawled quickly back to get behind the trailer. Another bullet shattered a low wood slat of the trailer into splinters.

She slowly reloaded wondering why she was teasing him rather than shooting him. Now the crosshairs of the scope were directly on his forehead and eyes peeking through the slats of the trailer. This was the money shot but she couldn't do it, seeing again the antelope arching upward. Instead she shot twice a foot or two on each side of his head. He tried to run for it so she shot once in front of him and once on each side. Now he was screaming and sobbing and groveled in a shallow irrigation ditch. When she reloaded this time she finally realized she wasn't going to shoot him and possibly end her own life in misery. For good measure she fired five rounds around him in the ditch noting afterward that he was now playing dead. She reloaded a last time and scrambled up the hill. Before she entered the trees she fired two more rounds into the truck to make sure he stayed in the ditch for a long while.

She was soon back in her truck with the horse loaded and heading down the country road but about fifteen minutes later she was weeping and confused because she couldn't find the road to Cody. She tried to turn at too sharp an angle and the horse trailer bound up against the back of the pickup and she couldn't move it. Now she would have to get out and unhitch the trailer and start over. She leaned her head against the steering wheel sniffling and cursing and then Rover began to bark and roar. A county deputy had pulled up, gotten out of his squad car, and had stooped to look at where the trailer had bound up against the back bumper of the truck. The deputy was an older man with gray muttonchops and a big tummy. Sarah rolled down her window halfway struggling with Rover who was snarling.

“You're a girl!” the deputy said.

“Yes, I am. I tried to turn too sharp. I drove too long in the night and pulled off on the side road when I got sleepy. Then I hid my rig when I heard a lot of shooting because it's not hunting season, is it?”

“No. There's this guy over east of here. We think he shot up his pickup for insurance. He's three payments behind so it was going to get repoed anyway. He's a longtime chiseler. He's got enemies so maybe someone was shooting at him but who gives a shit.”

He helped her detach the trailer and swing it around so she could hitch up properly and gave her directions to Cody. They shook hands.

“You're a handsome girl. Be careful,” he said.

She was damp with the sweat of fear as she drove off though she knew she was home free. She ate most of an enormous breakfast in Cody and had her coffee thermos filled. To celebrate she bought Rover biscuits and sausage to go, her favorite food.

Chapter 13

She had made it home just before dark, stoked the woodstove, and slept a dozen hours getting to school a little late. The principal asked after her sick aunt in Denver and Sarah for want of an answer said, “She died,” and walked off down the hall. She had had a thin slice of a nightmare about Karl but the leaden aftereffects weren't there when she awoke. Lolly had left a piece of fine lasagna in her refrigerator which she'd shared with Rover for breakfast after which she'd sung the dog part of the Hank Williams song about Kaw-Liga, the wooden Indian. When she sang to Rover the dog squirmed with pleasure.