Joe Service owned property down in the Ruby Valley, thirty-five or forty miles south of the city of Butte, as the eagle flies, fifty by highway. The nearest town was a village called Tinstar. Joe’s property was situated on Garland Butte. The Garland family had ranched a sizable spread there for at least three generations, but the Garlands weren’t there anymore. Old Mrs. Garland, a widow, had died in a tragic run-in with a crazy woman she’d befriended.
A couple of years before her death, Mrs. Garland had sold a section of her property to a young man named Joe Humann. This was one of Joe Service’s aliases. The turbulence surrounding Joe Service had caught her up, though only a few realized that Mrs. Garland’s death was linked to Joe’s problems.
Joe Service certainly knew it. He was not big on remorse, but he’d liked Mrs. Garland. She was the best kind of neighbor, helpful but not nosy, rarely to be seen or heard. His chief regret, however, was for his hideaway in the mountains of Montana. It was the ideal retreat, a place he could flee to after his typically hectic forays into the affairs of the mob, in Detroit or Los Angeles or points in between. The colonel had exploited Joe’s unabashed affection for the place when he’d offered the Butte mission. But now, the closer they got to Butte, the less attractive it seemed.
There had been some excellent moments on the road from Detroit—not a straight road by any means. The weather was good. They had a new vehicle, an SUV that Helen had insisted on buying. Joe had preferred a Toyota 4-Runner, or a Range Rover … but Helen had put her foot down. There was no way she was buying anything but Detroit iron—the very thought! She opted for a powerful Dodge Durango, a take-no-prisoners four-wheel-drive outfit—hardly a useful feature on the interstate. But at least he’d talked her out of the red one. Cops stop red cars at least 50 percent more often than black ones, was his theory. They got one in bottle green, although it was called something else. And, after all, they had driven some “blue highways,” through Wisconsin and Minnesota, and even gotten onto some fairly rough tracks in back country in the Dakotas and eastern Montana … just lollygagging, sightseeing.
Helen thought that as long as the colonel wasn’t in any hurry, neither should they be. Joe’s initial eagerness to get back to what he called his “Hole-in-the-Wall” had begun to modulate into a classical approach/retreat syndrome by the time they got to the Yellowstone River.
He discussed the matter with Helen. “The colonel says we’re secure,” he observed, “but what does that mean? Do you trust him? I’m not even sure what we’re supposed to do with this Franko when we catch up to him. As for the Hole-in-the-Wall, the last time I was up there was after that deal in Salt Lake. I was kind of riding a high, you know what I mean? And I was just there for a few hours. It was fine—the place was a mess, the house burned down and all—but the hot pool was nice.”
Helen had been thinking, too, and especially about the hot pool. It was an idyllic spot, a beautiful little thermal spring just over the ridge from where Joe’s house had been. But her memories of the pool weren’t entirely pleasant. She had been attacked and almost murdered in that pool. In the event, she had overcome her attacker. But it would never be the same. She didn’t know if she could bring herself to plunge into that pool again, certainly not with the same blithe confidence as before.
She realized that she’d been avoiding thinking about it. It was good that Joe had brought it up. “What are you thinking?” she said. “Just forget about the place?”
They were in a hotel in a small town in central Montana, an hour or so west of Billings, no more than a three-hour drive to Butte. They were sprawled naked on the queen-sized bed in a room on the second floor. It was the oddest hotel Helen had ever stayed in, or even heard of. It was an old cowboy hotel, they decided. There was a sink and a toilet in their room, but the real bathroom was across the hall. This wasn’t much of a privacy problem: nobody else seemed to be in the hotel. It was clean and decorated in an amusing mélange of cowboy chic and 1920s moderne—cane furniture, Charlie Russell prints on the walls, but art deco slipshade chandeliers.
The great draw here was clearly the restaurant downstairs. It was reputed to be great, and it certainly had been occupied for one seating at least. Good rack of lamb, excellent wines. They were told that movie stars stayed here when they were filming nearby, which was fairly often. Hunters and fishermen also kept the place booked, but they were just between seasons, it seemed—“Come November you couldn’t get a room here for five hundred dollars,” the desk clerk had claimed. Besides elk hunters, a movie was scheduled in a few months, when Redford was due in town.
But for Helen’s money, the thing that would bring her back was the massive bathroom with its enormous shower and the sauna. This was as modern as it could be, showers with jets at all angles, heat lamps, great fluffy towels on heated racks, lots of mirrors, and good lighting. She was grateful to the movie stars, if they were responsible for the decoration. The sauna was brilliant, with its aromatic cedar paneling and benches.
“There’s no place to stay there,” Joe said, idly stroking her back. “I have bad feelings about it. The folks around there may not be so friendly. Maybe we should just avoid it. Find somewhere new. It’d be all right to take a run up there, clean out some stuff I’ve got stashed.” He was thinking about an abandoned mine, above the house site, where he’d stored a few useful things, like money, some guns, and—he had a vivid flash—the desiccated corpse of an unknown man.
“Hate to give up the hot springs,” he said. “When I was there I took a long soak and didn’t give a thought to the problem of returning, or rebuilding. I was too out of it. There’s some cops around, too …”
“You mean Mulheisen,” Helen said. “He’s in Detroit.”
“He knows about the place,” Joe said. “The colonel might be able to head off the other cops, but I don’t think he can do anything about Mulheisen. And there are some local cops, sheriff’s deputies. I’d bet Mulheisen made some good contacts there. They’d sure give him a buzz if they find out we’re back … and they’ll hear, probably within hours. Hell, I don’t even know if we ought to stay in Butte, though it’s not so likely that we’ll be noticed there.”
There was also a woman in Butte, but he didn’t mention her to Helen. He was pretty sure that Helen had no knowledge of the nurse, Cateyo. She’d been a useful ally when Joe was extricating himself from his problems. He wasn’t eager to encounter her again. He’d made a few promises …
Helen saw his point about the place, all right. Mulheisen was a real cop, a detective on the Detroit police force. Seemingly a simple, not too bright fellow, just a precinct sergeant, but somehow always in one’s way. “We can find someplace,” she said. An idea occurred to her: “Maybe we could stay here.”
“You mean rent this room?” Joe thought about it. “It’s too far from Butte, almost two hundred miles. Quite a commute.”
“How much time do we actually have to spend in Butte?” she asked. She suddenly didn’t have much appetite for this. It had seemed like fun, in the beginning, but now she felt an uncertain dread. Maybe she was picking up Joe’s vibes.
Joe considered. A few days poking around, maybe another few days following up leads. If they weren’t going to fix up the old spread down in the Ruby Valley, maybe they wouldn’t be spending so much time in Montana, after all. But if not, why had they come? He had plenty of money. Helen was loaded as well. They could go to … South America. He’d never been to South America. Brazil seemed suddenly attractive, maybe Argentina. Buenos Aires? Chile?
“What about the colonel?” Helen said.
“Gotta say good-bye to him someday,” Joe said. “Funny, but the farther I get from that guy, the less I look forward to seeing him again. Let’s just bag it … fly to Hawaii.”
Helen was game. But for some reason, they didn’t go. Neither could be accused of conventional attitudes toward duty, but … perhaps it was nothing more than curiosity. Instead, they wrestled.
In the morning, they lingered over the remains of their elegant breakfast of omelettes and toast and fruit, gratefully restored from the exertions of the night. At last Joe said, “Well, if we’re going to find our wandering scholar, let’s do it.” Some three hours later, the fancy Durango swept around a curve coming down off the Home-stake Pass, and the entire Silver Bow Valley opened up before them, a thousand feet below.
Butte was unlike most cities: from any of its approaches you could see the city laid out across an enormous canvas before you. It sprawled from the mountains in the north down into the valley. A Detroit or a Los Angeles was just endless habitation and industry, stretching into a haze, even when you approached from twenty thousand feet. They were vastly larger cities, of course, and that’s the problem: one can see no end of city. It can seem to be an inescapable trap to its citizens.
Joe Service considered that one attractive aspect of Butte was that you could see it all in its physical setting, the city in the frame around the canvas. The mountains and highlands on either side, especially the great, craggy ridge of the Continental Divide to the east, which they were now descending. But there was no ignoring the enormous abandoned pit mine, smack in the heart of the town. And now there were extended terraces of a new, active pit.
The golden dome on Holy Trinity Eastern Orthodox Church gleamed in the sun. The rest of the city sprawled up the great hill, surrounding the monstrous open-pit copper mines. A few old gallows frames—old hoists left over from more than a century of underground mining—also caught one’s eye from the highway, and then the chalk-white towers of Immaculate Conception Catholic church, and beyond that the extensive brick campus of the state technological university—the “School of Mines,” as it was inevitably known.
Butte was not the typical modern western town, aglow with the familiar icons of American popular commercial culture, the fast-food emporia, the big box malls. It had those, of course, and contemporary neighborhoods of modest ranch houses and working-class bungalows, but there were also the older brick apartment buildings, the hotels and department stores, now run-down. It was a place that evoked an earlier industrial culture, dominated by a single enterprise—the mining company—now long gone, but its imprint still visible. An odd mixture of the old and the new, a sense of a history. It resembled eastern rust-belt cities, though it was rapidly giving way to the new consumer culture. Still, it was quintessentially a working-class town.
Joe and Helen were depressed, despite the brilliant sunshine, the clear air, and the magnificent sweep of the massive Continental Divide. They had occupied themselves for several days with a kind of goofy American tourist travel, visiting natural monuments, enjoying the remarkable scenery from the Great Lakes, across the forests, the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, the plains. Indeed, just moments before they had still been in the great American back country, driving through a spectacular panorama of jumbled rocks and canyons, the forest looming above them, the mountains rearing on all sides. They’d been carefree, on vacation. Now all of a sudden, here was the workaday world. They had to go to work, and they weren’t eager for it.
They checked into the old Finlen Hotel, uptown. It stood in the very midst of the old city. It wasn’t very popular, they found. Most people stayed in the big motels down near the interstate. But the Finlen had been refurbished fairly recently, it appeared. They had a large, pleasant room, with good views of the city and the mountains, the pits.
Ordinarily, when working for the mob, Joe would have been provided with more local contacts than he wanted. Usually, he’d avoid them, preferring to dig out things on his own. There were people here, he knew, who had mob connections—no doubt they could provide him with useful information. But he had no intention of contacting them. It would just be a further complication; he still had some unresolved issues with the mob.
No, as usual, he’d do his own research, find out about these Serbian refugees the colonel had mentioned, visit the church, talk to the Serbian priest, look through the phone book and figure out where the Serbs lived, who they were. It was just that, for once, he felt a little uncertain, a little too isolated. But he had Helen, he reminded himself. She could certainly help him with the Serbian community.
Helen could see Joe was still a little down. “Why don’t I go over to the church?” she suggested. She could talk to the priest; she was familiar with these churches from childhood. She could even speak Serbian. She’d visited the church when she’d been here before, although she had not told Joe that. She remembered the priest as being from Detroit, in fact.
Joe readily fell in with that plan. “I’ll go see some realtors,” he said. “Maybe I can get a line on some property. Maybe even a house out in the hills. I don’t know how long I can take this old hotel.”
Helen agreed with that. They would meet later, for dinner. There was a restaurant on Main Street, near the power company. It looked like the kind of place that had a modern eclectic cuisine, vaguely French by way of California.
Joe wandered around uptown on foot. He began to feel better, just getting out, getting active. It was odd, he realized, but even if one has spent a significant amount of time in a place, once you’ve been away for a while you fall back on a kind of mental image or general impression of it. And when you return it seems neither as nice nor as awful as you remembered. The harsh necessities of everyday life are oppressive, at first, with their disregard for esthetics. Butte had plenty of that. But overall, he thought, the image lacked the interest of the real. The small dramas and successes assert themselves. The ways in which the city accommodates its aspirations to its needs begin to seem interesting.
He liked the old town’s mixture of Cowboy West, Mining West, and New West. People casually used the word “pardner” when you asked directions and cheerfully pointed out the way. It was a battered town, but remarkably upbeat. Just walking a few blocks uphill from the main business district, he came upon a remarkable stone chalet that had, according to a plaque, been erected by one of the copper barons. It had been purchased in Europe, dismantled, and rebuilt here.
He had turned away from contemplating it with amusement and was standing on the corner, undecided about which way to go next, when an SUV pulled over to the curb and its driver, an attractive blond woman, called out.
“Looking for something? Can I help?” She may even have said, “pardner”; he wasn’t sure.
Carmen Tomarich was a big woman, at least a head taller than Joe, and she looked like she’d dress out nicely in a brass brassiere and a horned helmet. Instead, she was decked out in full western rig, complete with tooled cowboy boots, flared slacks, and a fringed buckskin vest over her prominent bosom. She looked to be in her late thirties. She had a throaty contralto voice and a big smile. Joe mentally dubbed her Queen of the Rodeo.
As it turned out, Carmen was the proprietress of her own real estate agency. “Just the gal I was looking for,” Joe said, pleased.
Carmen was more than happy to drive him around to look at some homes. They were just a few blocks from some real bargains, she said, if you liked old mansions with fifteen rooms, beautiful hardwood floors, cut-glass chandeliers, and curving staircases with splendidly crafted banisters. They also had, she pointed out, ancient furnaces, poor insulation, suspect plumbing and wiring, crumbling foundations, steep roofs that needed reshingling, rusty rain gutters, and brick chimneys that could use repointing.
Alternatively, she would love to show him some spectacular newer construction “out in the flat,” meaning the area spreading around the bottom of the hill, out into the valley. It was the modern part of town. She had some bargains in the “hundred-fifty to two-hundred-K range.”
Joe said “the flat” sounded more his speed. He didn’t have any problems with the “two-hundred-K range.” He hopped into Carmen’s fancy new vehicle. He liked Helen’s Durango better, but he said Carmen’s “outfit” was nice.
They drove out past the airport and up into the grassy, treeless foothills to look at a large, rambling house with far too many bedrooms but a lavishly modern kitchen and a vast open basement that was decorated as an entertainment room, with an enormous fireplace. The house sat on five acres of not very private lawn; no fences out here.
“You’ll need a riding mower,” Carmen said. “There’s one in the barn.” She pointed at a small utility shed artfully tucked away near the back. “It doesn’t come with, but the owner will sell it for peanuts. He’s moved to Helena. Got elected our new attorney general.”
She led him across the lawn along a path shielded by evergreens to a small, rustic-looking structure. “Ta-da!” she said. “Your own sauna. It’s a beauty, too.” It was. Helen would love the sauna, he knew. Joe hated the place. He didn’t like the deck, the high upkeep, the general hugeness of it. It wasn’t him. And the thought that it belonged to the new attorney general wasn’t appealing. But he didn’t say so. He said he’d have to bring his wife out to look at it.
On the way back into town, he asked, offhandedly, if there were a lot of Serbs around here. He said he thought he’d noticed an Orthodox church on the way into town.
“Oh, gosh, yes,” Carmen said. “People are always asking me if I’m Serb, but we’re Crotes. Well, my mom’s Mexican, which is why I’m Carmen.”
“Croats?” Joe said.
“Yeah,” she said, “you can’t always tell by the name. Some Tomariches are Serbs, though. The Crotes are Catholic, the Serbs are Orthodox. Everybody gets them confused. There’s plenty of Serbs in Butte.” They were passing a large car dealership on the road back into town. “That’s one, there.”
Joe looked at the sign. “O’billovich,” he read out loud. He smiled. “Irish?”
“I’m pretty sure he added the apostrophe,” Carmen said. “Lots of Irish around here. Fabulous Saint Pat’s Day celebration. You may have heard about it, even down in Salt Lake.”
“I didn’t live long in Salt Lake,” Joe said. “I’m from back East, really. But is that a real Serbian name?”
“Or Crote,” she said. “I went to school with some of them. Tomjanoviches, Kapariches, that kind of thing. There’s a lot of them around. There’s more than one Obillovich family. I’m not even sure if they’re all related.”
A thought suddenly occurred to Joe. “Do you know a Frank Obradovich?”
“I think I’ve heard the name,” Carmen said. “How old is he? I might have gone to school with some of his relatives.”
“You think so? I’d love to find Frank,” Joe said. “I knew him back East. He’s about thirty-five, medium height, kind of dark. That’d be something, to run into Frank out here! I’d forgotten all about him. He said he was from Montana, but I never made the connection.”
“I could ask around,” she said. “Realtors always know everybody, especially in a town like Butte.”
In fact, it took about ten minutes in her office, on the phone. There was a Frank Oberavich, who had returned to the Butte area a few years ago, she was told. Her informant wasn’t clear. He’d been living out of state, maybe in California or Washington. But he’d come back. “They always come back to Butte,” Carmen said. “That’s the old saying.”
“Not Obradovich?” Joe said. “But Oberavich?”
“You don’t pronounce the e,” Carmen said. “Ob’ravich.”
“Well, it could be,” Joe said. “Where does he live?”
That wasn’t so clear. Carmen said it seemed like he hadn’t stayed in town long. He’d found a place up in the mountains, up toward Helena. “Kind of a reclusive fellow, I guess,” she said. “I don’t know if I’ve ever met him. Most of the Oberaviches I know are real friendly, social kind of folks. My friend Trudy—she’s a realtor, too—knows him. Is your friend, um … I don’t mean to pry, and no disrespect, you know … as far as I’m concerned, everybody’s got a right to his own, ah, choice—”
“Gay?” Joe said, with a disarming smile. “You know, I never thought of it, but”—he shrugged—“it could be, I guess. Is your friend’s Frank gay? Maybe it’s not the same guy.”
“Maybe not,” Carmen said, “but it’s not too common a name, is it? Anyway, he lives out in the brush, not too far from a little town called French Forque.” She spelled the second part of the name. “It’s over the pass, north. Trudy doesn’t know just where the house is, but you could ask in the town. Ask a realtor. Let’s see … that’d be Denny, Les Denny.”
Joe practically ran to the restaurant to tell Helen his discovery. She had some great news, too, she said, “But you first.” They were sitting at dinner, eating a very good veal parmigiana.
When Joe told her about Oberavich Helen’s face fell. “That’s what I was going to tell you,” she said. The priest had told her about “Franko Bradovich,” correcting her pronunciation of the name and confirming her hunch.
But they were pleased with their joint discovery. Helen said they were just like Nick and Nora Charles, in The Thin Man. Joe wasn’t familiar with the movie, but Helen filled him in, mentioning that Myrna Loy had played Nora, to William Powell’s Nick. Joe said that was auspicious, because he’d just been told by Carmen that Helena was the birthplace of Myrna Loy, and that was the direction their investigation was headed.
The next morning they drove north, over the pass, and took the turnoff to the little village of French Forque. Most people just called it Forkee, they’d been told in the bar of the restaurant last night. In fact, there were ruder versions of the name, based on a “fork-you” pronunciation. It was an old mining town, now in considerable decay, located in a well-wooded gulch, through which flowed Frenchy’s Fork of the Boulder River. This was a beautiful little twisting stream, easily wadable except during the spring runoff. It was lined with alder and, according to locals, “very trouty.” Many miles farther down, where this gulch opened into a much broader valley, the stream flowed into the Boulder River, which in turn flowed into the Missouri. But Joe and Helen were not interested in fishing.
Carmen had called ahead to Les Denny, the local realtor, who was also the owner and bartender of Frenchy’s, the one remaining tavern of a dozen or more that had catered to the deep thirst of hundreds of gold and silver miners in the area. The mines were all closed now, although Denny said that there were still some prospectors working claims. An unlooked-for business had developed, he said: “radium treatment” mines. These were old mines with a fairly high radiation level. People paid good money to go sit in these mines, some of which were outfitted comfortably, to “take the cure.”
“Personally, I think they’re nuts,” Denny said. He was a pleasant man, burly and with a bushy beard that covered the open neck of his plaid shirt. “Hell, you’re more likely to get some kind of radiation sickness, I’d say. Wouldn’t you? But these are desperate people, mostly. They already got cancer, or had it, I guess, and they’ve had radiation therapy, so maybe they’re not so dumb. But it can’t be the same thing, you reckon?”
Joe agreed. Denny was happy to pour them whiskey and draw beers and talk about the fishing and the mines, but when it came to discussion of Franko, as Denny called him, he became more guarded. There was no one else in the tavern at this hour of the morning, but Denny dropped his voice.
“You know, I’m not a close pard to ol’ Franko,” Denny said, “but I known him a while and he’s a guy who likes his privacy. Y’gotta respect that up here. Are you a friend of his?”
Joe fed him the Franko Bradovich story that he’d told Carmen. Joe said he and his wife, Helen, were from out of state, just passing through, but they were impressed with the country. It might be nice to buy some property, maybe even move out here. They were in a kind of on-line consulting business that didn’t require them to live in a city, the way things were these days. And then he’d stumbled on this Oberavich thing. It looked too good to pass up. Joe just wanted to meet this Frank and see if he wasn’t the same guy. And who knows? They might even see some property that would interest them.
“Well, it’s damn nice back there,” Denny conceded, “and I do know about some property, right on the crick. But you gotta know that there ain’t no electricity back there and not likely to be anytime soon. Great place for a hunting or fishing cabin, maybe, but if you’re doing anything in the computer business, you’re gonna want power.”
Joe said that consideration could come later. Mainly, for now, he thought it’d be interesting just to take a look and meet Frank.
“The thing is,” Denny said, his voice dropping again, “Carmen referred you, but she admits she don’t know you from Adam. You see what I mean? You got Michigan plates on your rig, you look like good folks, but …” He shrugged. “You got any identification?”
Joe fished out his wallet and showed a Utah driver’s license in the name of Joseph Humann. He also had one in the same name from Montana, as well as a couple in different names from California and Colorado, but he thought the Utah one more consistent with the story he’d told Carmen. They’d bought the vehicle in Detroit, he explained, and licensed it there for convenience, until they decided where they were going to settle.
Denny nodded at all this while staring at the Utah license. Finally, he said, “Well, it’s you all right,” tapping the picture on the license. “But I don’t know … ol’ Franko’s pretty much a hermit…. I feel kinda like I should give him a call, first.”
“Oh? So there’s phone service back there?” Helen said.
“Well, he’s got a cell phone, of course,” Denny said. “You guys doing okay with those beers? I’ll be right back.” And he went into the back room.
“Hm,” Helen said, “he’s damn cautious. What do you think?”
“I think we’re on to something, Nora, my dear,” Joe said. “If this doesn’t work, we’ll just take it in good humor and ask about property and then go on our way. We can always locate the guy one way or another. In fact, it might be bet—” He broke off as Denny reappeared. “You get hold of him?” he called out.
“Yeah,” Denny said, lifting his eyebrows quizzically. “He says come on back. Funny thing is, he don’t know no Joe Humann. But that’s how it goes with these hermits…. I guess he’s feeling like company today.”
“That’s great,” Joe said. “I guess he forgot me. It was a while back. He’ll recognize me, though, if it’s him. Listen, I appreciate your being careful and all that, and I’m sure Franko does, but isn’t this a little, uh, mysterious? What’s the big deal?”
Denny made a defensive, apologetic grimace. “Oh, well, he said it was all right,” he said, “but…. Look, I’ll be straight with you. You aren’t cops, are you?”
Joe’s surprise must have been convincing. Denny smiled and said, “He grows a little pot, maybe, nothing big. He doesn’t sell it or nothing, but you know how it is …”
Joe and Helen both laughed, relieved. “Oh, for cryin’ out loud,” Joe said. “That sounds like Franko, all right.”
Denny drew them a crude map on a bar napkin, showing the road that ran up Frenchy’s Fork. They had to take another road, this one not so good, and it soon got much worse, becoming a mere two-track that angled up over rocky humps, ran along bluffs above the stream, and wound through scrubby pine thickets. But they had four-wheel drive and were pleased with an opportunity to use it. Just when the road dropped down to the stream—which may not have been Frenchy’s Forque anymore, for all they knew—and seemed to promise to angle into a valley, it would climb up into the hills again and into a different drainage. They forded streams twice and carefully crawled over some pretty rough knobs and ridges before the road let down into a beautiful valley that opened out before them, backed by craggy mountains beyond. Altogether, it was a good ten miles back into the brush before they came out onto an open meadow.
They arrived at a well-constructed barbed-wire fence line, at last, and a gated cattle guard. There was no sign of a house, just a rising meadow filled with brown bunchgrass waving in the steady breeze and an occasional pine tree. Joe got out to try the gate and look around. It appeared that there was a bluff off to the south, presumably fronting the stream. The rising land crested a quarter of a mile before him, and a couple of modern-looking windmills poked their tops over the ridge, their huge propellers spinning briskly. Joe supposed that beyond that might be the house they were looking for. But there were no signs. And when he tried the gate, which wasn’t chained or padlocked, it didn’t yield.
“Now what?” he said to Helen, who had gotten out to join him at the gate.
“Maybe we have to climb over and walk,” she said.
At that moment a voice spoke from a concealed speaker somewhere nearby: “Yes?” it said. “Mr. Humann?”
Joe looked around. The best he could make out was that the voice emanated from a pile of field rocks about five feet high beyond the gate. He peered at it. There could be a television camera there as well, he thought.
“That’s us,” Joe said, loudly.
“Come on in,” the voice said. There was a buzz, and the gate swung open on oiled hinges. “The house is just down the road. You’ll see it.”
They found the house all right. They drove up the road, accompanied by four large Rottweilers, and stopped in a yard in which were parked three four-wheel-drive pickup trucks of vintages ranging from old to current. The dogs waited patiently, tongues lolling, not barking, but watching.
The house was impressive, essentially a rustic greenhouse. It was more or less oval, sheathed in rough cedar, with a roof that was covered with solar-collector panels and a lot of skylights. It even had a tower. The southern exposure and parts of the east and west sides were glassed in and all but bursting with cultivated greenery. It looked like Frank Oberavich grew more than just a little pot.
The man who came out to greet them, shushing the Rottweilers, was not anyone Joe or Helen had expected to see. This man was short and slight, heavily bearded, with long blondish hair gathered into a ponytail that trailed out from beneath his battered old cowboy hat. He squinted at them in the bright sunlight through glasses mounted in clear plastic frames. His thin, wiry arms were deeply tanned, and he wore baggy frayed khaki shorts and mocassins with no socks. It was sunny, but cool in the fall air, and his stained T-shirt was inadequate. He crossed his arms on his narrow chest and rubbed his elbows. He was none too clean, and when he smiled they saw that his teeth were stained brown.
“Hi,” he said, in a soft voice. He addressed Helen, who was in the driver’s seat. “I guess you must be Mrs. Humann?” He turned to the nosing dogs and told them to get back. They retreated but looked on with interest. Joe and Helen got out, warily eyeing the dogs.
“Don’t worry about them,” Oberavich said. “They recognize dog people. They’re very reliable that way.”
“I never thought of myself as a dog person,” Helen said. “I had a puppy once, but he got run over by a car, and I was so heartbroken I never got another one.”
“I don’t think it’s necessary to actually have dogs,” Oberavich said, “just be … I don’t know … okay people.” He smiled uncertainly, as if embarrassed.
“Well, I’m Helen,” she said, thrusting out her hand. “Sedlacek, actually. It’s more convenient to say Mrs. Humann. You know?”
“Sid-logic?” he repeated. “You’re Serb?”
Helen shrugged. “Could be. I’m not sure.” They both laughed lightly.
This was not Franko, Joe was sure. Not Colonel Tucker’s Franko, anyway.
But he was amiable. He invited them in, and while they sipped some wine, which they’d brought along on Denny’s recommendation (and at his extravagant price, for California jug wine), he enthusiastically showed them around his amazing greenhouse. It was plenty warm inside, and moist. There were plants everywhere, huge and small. One walked through and among them on a slatted walkway. Besides magnificent marijuana plants he had flowers, many kinds of cacti, and some ornamental shrubs. He had devised an elaborate watering system, run off the solar-power-generating system. A radio played classical music from a distant station.
They got along very well, right away. He had a truly interesting house, albeit considerably disheveled and disorderly, except for his plants. There were books everywhere, dishes in the sink, clothes tossed about at random. Although there were a couple of bedrooms and a bath, it seemed that he lived in one large room, basically, except for a delightful tower room, which one reached by climbing a ladder. Here there were more books, a stereo system, and many recordings, mostly CDs of Mozart and Haydn. The tower room had a bench running about it at desk height. The room was barely large enough for the three of them to stand in; there was only one chair, a pretty good upholstered leather desk chair. He had a typewriter buried under some books and papers, and a very up-to-date laptop computer with the lid open, running a screen saver that displayed constantly changing geometric shapes.
There were windows all around, and one could look out on a splendid panorama of mountains. The stream, Frenchy’s Fork, was beyond the line of scrubby pines, he pointed out. The bluff dropped down about a hundred feet, but there was a good path. If they liked, they could walk down there. The fishing was very good, he said. Fly fishermen came up there from time to time, but not many knew about it or were willing to drive back in this far.
Joe was intrigued. How did he keep all these things going, the pumps, the stereo, and so on, without commercial power? Oberavich eagerly showed them his power system. It was multifaceted, employing not only solar converters but the windmills and even a couple of small stream-driven turbines, and was backed up with a bank of batteries. All of this, in turn, was connected to a very deep well that provided heat and water and served as an energy reservoir. It was fairly complicated, a little capital intensive, but totally reliable and over time almost free to run.
“I never have power failures,” Oberavich said proudly. “The power company is always breaking down. Not me.”
From there the conversation went on to topics like flowers, music, books, and so on, mostly conducted with Helen, while Joe drifted about, nodding and remarking approvingly. Oberavich built furniture, he raised vegetables, he had been studying the stars. Soon he was urging them to stay for dinner. Joe and Helen readily accepted. While he was preparing dinner they went for a stroll over to the bluff and looked down at the stream below. They could see up a narrow canyon, from which the stream issued, towering cliffs on either side.
When they came back and sat down to a decent spaghetti with a marinara sauce, they asked about the canyon. You could walk up it about a mile, Oberavich told them, and it was spectacular, but eventually it got to be pretty tough going. There was nothing beyond it but more mountains, as far as Deer Lodge, he said. He owned several hundred acres of this, he added, shyly. How many hundreds? Actually, a couple thousand or so.
Developers had been after him to sell for years. They’d bring in power, sell large acreages to wealthy Californians. He wasn’t having any of it. He was well protected, with a state forest and BLM land adjoining his. He didn’t think there would be any development in his lifetime, although across the river was some property owned by an old lady in Great Falls, which might eventually be sold. But the bluff isolated him from that. “I don’t need their power,” he said, smugly.
Joe was enraptured. This was a Hole-in-the-Wall indeed! He was already trying to figure out how to get into this paradise. But he didn’t mention it to Oberavich. That would take some doing, he realized. A long, careful campaign would be required. He didn’t mind; he could be patient.
After dinner, Oberavich was comfortable enough with them to roll some huge spliffs of his best stock. It was dynamite grass, potent but mild to the palate. They went out and sat on the grass in the yard, smoking and drinking the last of the wine. It had turned quite cool, and as night had fallen the sky had filled with an almost oppressive number of brilliant stars. Oberavich was mellow, relaxed in long pants now and a heavy sweater. He pointed out the constellations to Helen.
Joe and Helen were having trouble focusing. They were absolutely swelling with good feeling from smoking so much powerful marijuana. Although they had discussed Joe’s quest for his old friend earlier and had dismissed it as a lost cause, Joe cautiously brought it up again. He vaguely described having met Franko Bradovich “back East.” They’d worked together, he said, on a “research project.” He said it was a “nature thing,” trying to organize some research materials for computers. It was too complicated to go into. But he hadn’t really known Franko very well. In fact, he hadn’t given much thought to the guy since, but after coming to Butte …
Oberavich didn’t press for details, fortunately. He was obviously feeling pretty mellow himself. But he did ask what this Franko looked like. When Joe provided the description given them by the colonel, however, Oberavich said, after a very long moment in which they all just sat back in the now cold grass and stared at the billions of stars, “Sounds like my cousin.”
“Really?” was all Joe could think to say.
After another long moment, Oberavich said, “Yeah. Paulie’s into that stuff, that research. Eco stuff. He’s the smart one in the family. Always traveling around. India. Got up into Kashmir. Loved Kashmir. Went to the poppy fields.”
“Poppy fields?” Helen said. “You mean, like opium?”
“Oh yeah,” Oberavich said. “He said it was bitching stuff. Too good, he said. Scared him, I think. He left, went to … I don’t know, somewhere in Yugoslavia. He spent quite a while there, I think. Another great place. But then they had the war, you know. Whew! Are you guys as fucked up as I am?”
They all laughed at the incredible wit of the comment, almost uncontrollably. Eventually they staggered to their feet and went inside. It was warm indoors. They were amazingly hungry again. But when they’d devoured the remains of the spaghetti, they were soporific. No way they could drive out. Oberavich invited the visitors to sleep over—an extra bedroom that he used for storage had a mattress on the floor, and he had blankets. Joe and Helen fell asleep in seconds.