THEIR PLANS were to develop the valley, and my plans were to stop them. There were just the two of them. The stockbroker, or stock analyst, had hired me as caretaker on his ranch here. He was from New York, a big man who drank too much. His name was Quentin, and he had a protruding belly and a small mustache and looked like a polar bear. The other one, a realtor from Billings, was named Zim. Zim had close-together eyes, pinpoints in his pasty, puffy face, like raisins set in dough. He wore new jeans and a western shirt with silver buttons and a metal belt buckle with a horse on it. In his new cowboy boots he walked in little steps with his toes pointed in.
The feeling I got from Quentin was that he was out here recovering from some kind of breakdown. And Zim—grinning, loose-necked, giggling, pointy-toe walking all the time, looking like an infant who’d just shit his diapers—Zim the predator, had just the piece of Big Sky Quentin needed. I’ll go ahead and say it right now so nobody gets the wrong idea: I didn’t like Zim.
It was going fast, the Big Sky was, Zim said. All sorts of famous people—celebrities—were vacationing here, moving here. “Brooke Shields,” he said. “Rich people. I mean really rich people. You could sell them things. Say you owned the little store in this valley, the Mercantile. And say Michael Jackson—well, no, not him—say Kirk Douglas lives ten miles down the road. What’s he going to do when he’s having a party and realizes he doesn’t have enough Dom Perignon? Who’s he gonna call? He’ll call your store, if you have such a service. Say the bottle costs seventy-five dollars. You’ll sell it to him for a hundred. You’ll deliver it, you’ll drive that ten miles up the road to take it to him, and he’ll be glad to pay that extra money.
“Bing-bang-bim-bam!” Zim said, snapping his fingers and rubbing his hands together, his raisin eyes glittering. His mouth was small, round, and pale, like an anus. “You’ve made twenty-five dollars,” he said, and the mouth broke into a grin.
What’s twenty-five dollars to a stock analyst? But I saw that Quentin was listening closely.
I’ve lived on this ranch for four years now. The guy who used to own it before Quentin was a predator too. A rough guy from Australia, he had put his life savings into building this mansion, this fortress, deep in the woods overlooking a big meadow. The mansion is three stories tall, rising into the trees like one of Tarzan’s haunts.
The previous owner’s name was Beauregard. All over the property he had constructed various outbuildings related to the dismemberment of his quarry: smokehouses with wire screening, to keep the other predators out, and butchering houses complete with long wooden tables, sinks, and high-intensity lamps over the tables for night work. There were even huge windmill-type hoists on the property, which were used to lift the animals—moose, bear, and elk, their heads and necks limp in death—up off the ground so their hides could first be stripped, leaving the meat revealed.
It had been Beauregard’s life dream to be a hunting guide. He wanted rich people to pay him for killing a wild creature, one they could drag out of the woods and take home. Beauregard made a go of it for three years, before business went downhill and bad spirits set in and he got divorced. He had to put the place up for sale to make the alimony payments. The divorce settlement would in no way allow either of the parties to live in the mansion—it had to be both parties or none—and that’s where I came in: to caretake the place until it was sold. They’d sunk too much money into the mansion to leave it sitting idle out there in the forest, and Beauregard went back east, to Washington, D.C., where he got a job doing something for the CIA—tracking fugitives was my guess, or maybe even killing them. His wife went to California with the kids.
Beauregard had been a mercenary for a while. He said the battles were usually fought at dawn and dusk, so sometimes in the middle of the day he’d been able to get away and go hunting. In the mansion, the dark, noble heads of long-ago beasts from all over the world—elephants, greater Thomson’s gazelles, giant oryx—lined the walls of the rooms. There was a giant gleaming sailfish leaping over the headboard of my bed upstairs, and there were wood-stoves and fireplaces, but no electricity. This place is so far into the middle of nowhere. After I took the caretaking position, the ex-wife sent postcards saying how much she enjoyed twenty-four-hour electricity and how she’d get up during the night and flick on a light switch, just for the hell of it.
I felt that I was taking advantage of Beauregard, moving into his castle while he slaved away in D.C. But I’m a bit of a killer myself, in some ways, if you get right down to it, and if Beauregard’s hard luck was my good luck, well, I tried not to lose any sleep over it.
If anything, I gained sleep over it, especially in the summer. I’d get up kind of late, eight or nine o’clock, and fix breakfast, feed my dogs, then go out on the porch and sit in the rocking chair and look out over the valley or read. Around noon I’d pack a lunch and go for a walk. I’d take the dogs with me, and a book, and we’d start up the trail behind the house, following the creek through the larch and cedar forest to the waterfall. Deer moved quietly through the heavy timber. Pileated woodpeckers banged away on some of the dead trees, going at it like cannons. In that place the sun rarely made it to the ground, stopping instead on all the various levels of leaves. I’d get to the waterfall and swim—so cold!—with the dogs, and then they’d nap in some ferns while I sat on a rock and read some more.
In midafternoon I’d come home—it would be hot then, in the summer. The fields and meadows in front of the ranch smelled of wild strawberries, and I’d stop and pick some. By that time of day it would be too hot to do anything but take a nap, so that’s what I’d do, upstairs on the big bed with all the windows open, with a fly buzzing faintly in one of the other rooms, one of the many empty rooms.
When it cooled down enough, around seven or eight in the evening, I’d wake up and take my fly rod over to the other side of the meadow. A spring creek wandered along the edge of it, and I’d catch a brook trout for supper. I’d keep just one. There were too many fish in the little creek and they were too easy to catch, so after an hour or two I’d get tired of catching them. I’d take the one fish back to the cabin and fry him for supper.
Then I’d have to decide whether to read some more or go for another walk or just sit on the porch with a drink in hand. Usually I chose that last option, and sometimes while I was out on the porch, a great gray owl came flying in from the woods. It was always a thrill to see it—that huge, wild, silent creature soaring over my front yard.
The great gray owl’s a strange creature. It’s immense, and so shy that it lives only in the oldest of the old-growth forests, among giant trees, as if to match its own great size against diem. The owl sits very still for long stretches of time, watching for prey, until—so say the ornithologists—it believes it is invisible. A person or a deer can walk right up to it, and so secure is the bird in its invisibility that it will not move. Even if you’re looking straight at it, it’s convinced you can’t see it.
My job, my only job, was to live in the mansion and keep intruders out. There had been a For Sale sign out front, but I took it down and hid it in the garage the first day.
After a couple of years, Beauregard, the real killer, did sell the property, and was out of the picture. Pointy-toed Zim got his 10 percent, I suppose—10 percent of $350,000; a third of a million for a place with no electricity!—but Quentin, the stock analyst, didn’t buy it right away. He said he was going to buy it, within the first five minutes of seeing it. At that time, he took me aside and asked if I could stay on, and like a true predator I said, Hell yes. I didn’t care who owned it as long as I got to stay there, as long as the owner lived far away and wasn’t someone who would keep mucking up my life with a lot of visits.
Quentin didn’t want to live here, or even visit; he just wanted to own it. He wanted to buy the place, but first he wanted to toy with Beauregard for a while, to try and drive the price down. He wanted to flirt with, him, I think.
Myself, I would’ve been terrified to jack with Beauregard. The man had bullet holes in his arms and legs, and scars from various knife fights; he’d been in foreign prisons and had killed people. A bear had bitten him in the face, on one of his hunts, a bear he’d thought was dead.
Quentin and his consultant to the West, Zim, occasionally came out on “scouting trips” during the summer and fall they were buying the place. They’d show up unannounced with bags of groceries—Cheerios, Pop Tarts, hot dogs, cartons of Marlboros—and want to stay for the weekend, to “get a better feel for the place.” I’d have to move my stuff—sleeping bag, frying pan, fishing rod—over to the guest house, which was spacious enough. I didn’t mind that; I just didn’t like the idea of having them around.
Once, while Quentin and Zim were walking in the woods, I looked inside one of their dumb sacks of groceries to see what they’d brought this time and a magazine fell out, a magazine with a picture of naked men on the cover. I mean, drooping penises and all, and the inside of the magazine was worse, with naked little boys and naked men on motorcycles.
None of the men or boys in the pictures were ever doing anything, they were never touching each other, but still the whole magazine—the part of it I looked at, anyway—was nothing but heinies and penises.
I’d see the two old boys sitting on the front porch, the lodge ablaze with light—those sapsuckers running my generator, my propane, far into the night, playing my Jimmy Buffett records, singing at the top of their lungs. Then finally they’d turn the lights off, shut the generator down, and go to bed.
Except Quentin would stay up a little longer. From the porch of the guest house at the other end of the meadow (my pups asleep at my feet), I could see Quentin moving through the lodge, lighting the gas lanterns, walking like a ghost. Then the sonofabitch would start having one of his fits.
He’d break things—plates, saucers, lanterns, windows, my things and Beauregard’s things—though I suppose they were now his things, since the deal was in the works. I’d listen to the crashing of glass and watch Quentin’s big, whirling polar-bear shape passing from room to room. Sometimes he had a pistol in his hand (they both carried nine-millimeter Blackhawks on their hips, like little cowboys), and he’d shoot holes in the ceiling and the walls.
I’d get tense there in the dark. This wasn’t good for my peace of mind. My days of heaven—I’d gotten used to them, and I wanted to defend them and protect them, even if they weren’t mine in the first place, even if I’d never owned them.
Then, in that low lamplight, I’d see Zim enter the room. Like an old queen, he’d put his arm around Quentin’s big shoulders and lead him away to bed.
After one of their scouting trips the house stank of cigarettes, and I wouldn’t sleep in the bed for weeks, for fear of germs; I’d sleep in one of the many guest rooms. Once I found some mouthwash spray under the bed and pictured the two of them lying there, spraying it into each others mouths in the morning, before kissing...
I’m talking like a homophobe here. I don’t think it’s that at all. I think it was just that realtor. He was just turning a trick, was all.
I felt sorry for Quentin. It was strange how shy he was, how he always tried to cover up his destruction, smearing wood putty into the bullet holes and mopping the food off the ceiling—this fractured stock analyst doing domestic work. He offered me lame excuses the next day about the broken glass—“I was shooting at a bat,” he’d say, “a bat came in the window”—and all the while Zim would be sitting on my porch, looking out at my valley with his boots propped up on the railing and smoking the cigarettes that would not kill him quick enough.
Once, in the middle of the day, as the three of us sat on the porch—Quentin asking me some questions about the valley, about how cold it got in the winter—we saw a coyote and her three pups go trotting across the meadow. Zim jumped up, seized a stick of firewood {my firewood!), and ran, in his dirty-diaper waddle, out into the field after them, waving the club like a madman. The mother coyote got two of the pups by the scruff and ran with them into the trees, but Zim got the third one, and stood over it, pounding, in the hot midday sun.
It’s an old story, but it was a new one for me—how narrow the boundary is between invisibility and collusion. If you don’t stop something yourself, if you don’t single-handedly step up and change things, then aren’t you just as guilty?
I didn’t say anything, not even when Zim came huffing back up to the porch, walking like a man who had just gone out to get the morning paper. There was blood speckled around the cuffs of his pants, and even then I said nothing. I did not want to lose my job. My love for this valley had me trapped.
We all three sat there like everything was the same—Zim breathing a bit more heavily, was all—and I thought I would be able to keep my allegiances secret, through my silence. But they knew whose side I was on. It had been revealed to them. It was as if they had infrared vision, as if they could see everywhere, and everything.
“Coyotes eat baby deer and livestock,” said the raisin-eyed sonofabitch. “Remember,” he said, addressing my silence, “it’s not your ranch anymore. All you do is live here and keep the pipes from freezing.” Zim glanced over at his soul mate. I thought how when Quentin had another crackup and lost this place, Zim would get the 10 percent again, and again and again each time.
Quentin’s face was hard to read; I couldn’t tell if he was angry with Zim or not. Everything about Quentin seemed hidden at that moment. How did they do it? How could the bastards be so good at camouflaging themselves when they had to?
I wanted to trick them. I wanted to hide and see them reveal their hearts. I wanted to watch them when they did not know I was watching, and see how they really were—beyond the fear and anger. I wanted to see what was at the bottom of their black fucking hearts.
Now Quentin blinked and turned calmly, still revealing no emotion, and gave his pronouncement. “If the coyotes eat the little deers, they should go,” he said. “Hunters should be the only thing out here getting the little deers.”
The woods felt the same when I went for my walks each time the two old boys departed. Yellow tanagers still flitted through the trees, flashing blazes of gold. Ravens quorked as they passed through the dark woods, as if to reassure me that they were still on my side, that I was still with nature, rather than without.
I slept late. I read. I hiked, I fished in the evenings. I saw the most spectacular sights. Northern lights kept me up until four in the morning some nights, coiling in red and green spirals across the sky, exploding in iridescent furls and banners. The northern lights never displayed themselves while the killers were there, and for that I was glad.
In the late mornings and early afternoons, I’d sit by the waterfall and eat my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I’d see the same magic sights: bull moose, their shovel antlers in velvet, stepping over fallen, rotting logs; calypso orchids sprouting along the trail, glistening and nodding. But it felt, too, as if the woods were a vessel, filling up with some substance of which the woods could hold only so much, and when the forest had absorbed all it could, when no more could be held, things would change.
Zim and Quentin came out only two or three times a year, for two or three days at a time. The rest of the time, heaven was mine, all those days of heaven. You wouldn’t think they could hurt anything, visiting so infrequently. How little does it take to change—spoil—another thing? I’ll tell you what I think: the cleaner and emptier a place is, the less it can take. It’s like some crazy kind of paradox.
After a while, Zim came up with the idea of bulldozing the meadow across the way and building a lake, with sailboats and docks. He hooked Quentin into a deal with a log-house manufacturer in the southern part of the state who was going to put shiny new “El Supremo” homes around the lake. Zim was going to build a small hydro dam on the creek and bring electricity into the valley, which would automatically double real estate values, he said. He was going to run cattle in the woods, lots of cattle, and set up a little gold mining operation over on the north face of Mount Henry. The two boys had folders and folders of ideas. They just needed a little investment capital, they said.
It seemed there was nothing I could do. Anything short of killing Zim and Quentin would be a token act, a mere symbol. Before I figured that out, I sacrificed a tree, chopped down a big, wind-leaning larch so that it fell on top of the lodge, doing great damage while Zim and Quentin were upstairs. I wanted to show them what a money sink the ranch was and how dangerous it could be. I told them how beavers, forest beavers, had chewed down the tree, which had missed landing in their bedroom by only a few feet.
I know now that those razor-bastards knew everything. They could sense that I’d cut that tree, but for some reason they pretended to go along with my story. Quentin had me spend two days sawing the tree for firewood. “You’re a good woodcutter,” he said when I had the tree all sawed up and stacked. “I’ll bet that’s the thing you do best.”
Before he could get the carpenters out to repair the damage to the lodge, a hard rain blew in and soaked some of my books. I figured there was nothing I could do. Anything I did to harm the land or their property would harm me.
Meanwhile the valley flowered. Summer stretched and yawned, and then it was gone. Quentin brought his children out early the second fall. Zim didn’t make the trip, nor did I spy any of the skin magazines. The kids, two girls and a boy who was a younger version of Quentin, were okay for a day or two (the girls ran the generator and watched movies on the VCR the whole day long), but little Quentin was going to be trouble, I could tell. The first words out of his mouth when he arrived were “Can you shoot anything right now? Rabbits? Marmots?”
And sure enough, before two days went by he discovered that there were fish—delicate brook trout with polka-dotted, flashy, colorful sides and intelligent-looking gold-rimmed eyes—spawning on gravel beds in the shallow creek that ran through the meadow. What Quentin’s son did after discovering the fish was to borrow his dad’s shotgun and begin shooting them.
Little Quentin loaded, blasted away, reloaded. It was a pump-action twelve-gauge, like the ones used in big-city detective movies, and the motion was like masturbating—jack-jack boom, jack-jack boom. Little Quentin’s sisters came running out, rolled up their pant legs, and waded into the stream.
Quentin sat on the porch with drink in hand and watched, smiling.
During the first week of November, while out walking—the skies frosty, flirting with snow—I heard ravens, and then noticed the smell of a new kill, and moved over in that direction.
The ravens took flight into the trees as I approached. Soon I saw the huge shape of what they’d been feasting on: a carcass of such immensity that I paused, frightened, even though it was obviously dead.
Actually it was two carcasses, bull moose, their antlers locked together from rut-combat. The rut had been over for a month, I knew, and I guessed they’d been attached like that for at least that long. One moose was long dead—two weeks?—but the other moose, though also dead, still had all his hide on him and wasn’t even stiff. The ravens and coyotes had already done a pretty good job on the first moose, stripping what they could from him. His partner, his enemy, had thrashed and flailed about, I could tell—small trees and brush were leveled all around them—and I could see the swath, the direction from which they had come, floundering, fighting, to this final resting spot.
I went and borrowed a neighbor’s draft horse. The moose that had just died wasn’t so heavy—he’d lost a lot of weight during the month he’d been tied up with the other moose—and the other one was a ship of bones, mostly air.
Their antlers seemed to be welded together. I tied a rope around the newly dead moose’s hind legs and got the horse to drag the cargo down through the forest and out into the front yard. I walked next to the horse, soothing him as he pulled his strange load. Ravens flew behind us, cawing at this theft. Some of them filtered down from the trees and landed on top of the newly dead moose’s humped back and rode along, pecking at the hide, trying to find an opening. But the hide was too thick—they’d have to wait for the coyotes to open it—so they rode with me, like gypsies: I, the draft horse, the ravens, and the two dead moose moved like a giant serpent, snaking our way through the trees.
I hid the carcasses at the edge of the woods and then, on the other side of a small clearing, built a blind of branches and leaves where I could hide and watch over them.
I painted my face camouflage green and brown, settled into my blind, and waited.
The next day, like buffalo wolves from out of the mist, Quentin and Zim reappeared. I’d hidden my truck a couple of miles away and locked up the guest house so they’d think I was gone. I wanted to watch without being seen. I wanted to see them in the wild.
“What the shit!” Zim cried as he got out of his mongo-tire jeep, the one with the electric winch, electric windows, electric sunroof, and electric cattle prod. Ravens were swarming my trap, gorging, and coyotes darted in and out, tearing at that one moose’s hide, trying to peel it back and reveal new flesh.
“Shitfire!” Zim cried, trotting across the yard. He hopped the buck-and-rail fence, his flabby ass caught momentarily astraddle the high bar. He ran into the woods, shooing away the ravens and coyotes. The ravens screamed and rose into the sky as if caught in a huge tornado, as if summoned. Some of the bolder ones descended and made passes at Zim’s head, but he waved them away and shouted “Shitfire!” again. He approached, examined the newly dead moose, and said, “This meat’s still good!”
That night Zim and Quentin worked by lantern, busy with butchering and skinning knives, hacking at the flesh with hatchets. I stayed in the bushes and watched. The hatchets made whacks when they hit flesh, and cracking sounds when they hit bone. I could hear the two men laughing. Zim reached over and smeared blood delicately on Quentin’s cheeks, applying it like makeup, or medicine of some sort, and they paused, catching their breath from their mad chopping before going back to work. They ripped and sawed slabs of meat from the carcass and hooted, cheering each time they pulled off a leg.
They dragged the meat over the autumn-dead grass to the smokehouse, and cut off the head and antlers last, right before daylight.
I hiked out and got my truck, washed my face in a stream, and drove home.
They waved when they saw me come driving in. They were out on the porch having breakfast, all clean and freshly scrubbed. As I approached, I heard them talking as they always did, as normal as pie.
Zim was lecturing to Quentin, waving his arm at the meadow and preaching the catechism of development. “You could have a nice hunting lodge, send ‘em all out into the woods on horses, with a yellow slicker and a gun. Boom! They’re living the western experience. Then in the winter you could run just a regular guest lodge, like on Newhart. Make ‘em pay for everything. They want to go cross-country skiing? Rent ‘em. They want to race snowmobiles? Rent ‘em. Charge ‘em for taking a piss. Rich people don’t mind.”
I was just hanging back, shaky with anger. They finished their breakfast and went inside to plot, or watch VCR movies. I went over to the smokehouse and peered through the dusty windows. Blood dripped from the gleaming red hindquarters. They’d nailed the moose’s head, with the antlers, to one of the walls, so that his blue-blind eyes stared down at his own corpse. There was a baseball cap perched on his antlers and a cigar stuck between his big lips.
I went up into the woods to cool off, but I knew I’d go back. I liked the job of caretaker, liked living at the edge of that meadow.
That evening, the three of us were out on the porch watching the end of the day come in. The days were getting shorter. Quentin and Zim were still pretending that none of the previous night’s savagery had happened. It occurred to me that if they thought I had the power to stop them, they would have put my head in that smokehouse a long time ago.
Quentin, looking especially burned out, was slouched down in his chair. He had his back to the wall, bottle of rum in hand, and was gazing at the meadow, where his lake and his cabins with lights burning in each of them would someday sit. I was only hanging around to see what was what and to try to slow them down—to talk about those hard winters whenever I got the chance, and mention how unfriendly the people in the valley were. Which was true, but it was hard to convince Quentin of this, because every time he showed up, they got friendly.
“I’d like that a lot,” Quentin said, his speech slurred. Earlier in the day I’d seen a coyote, or possibly a wolf, trot across the meadow alone, but I didn’t point it out to anyone. Now, perched in the shadows on a falling-down fence, I saw the great gray owl, watching us, and I didn’t point him out either. He’d come gliding in like a plane, ghostly gray, with his four-foot wingspan. I didn’t know how they’d missed him. I hadn’t seen the owl in a couple of weeks, and I’d been worried, but now I was uneasy that he was back, knowing that it would be nothing for a man like Zim to walk up to that owl with his cowboy pistol and put a bullet, point blank, into the bird’s ear—the bird with his eyes set in his face, looking straight at you the way all predators do.
“I’d like that so much,” Quentin said again—meaning Zim’s idea of the lodge as a winter resort. He was wearing a gold chain around his neck with a little gold pistol dangling from it. He’d have to get rid of that necklace if he moved out here. It looked like something he might have gotten from a Cracker Jack box, but was doubtless real gold.
“It may sound corny,” Quentin said, “but if I owned this valley, I’d let people from New York, from California, from wherever, come out here for Christmas and New Year’s. I’d put a big sixty-foot Christmas tree in the middle of the road up by the Mercantile and the saloon, and string it with lights, and we’d all ride up there in a sleigh, Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve, and we’d sing carols, you know? It would be real small town and homey,” he said. “Maybe corny, but that’s what I’d do.”
Zim nodded. “There’s lonely people who would pay through the nose for something like that,” he said.
We watched the dusk glide in over the meadow, cooling things off, blanketing the field’s dull warmth. Mist rose from the field.
Quentin and Zim were waiting for money, and Quentin, especially, was still waiting for his nerves to calm. He’d owned the ranch for a full cycle of seasons, and still he wasn’t well.
A little something—peace?—would do him good. I could see that Christmas tree all lit up. I could feel that sense of community, of new beginnings.
I wouldn’t go to such a festivity. I’d stay back in the woods like the great gray owl. But I could see the attraction, could see Quentin’s need for peace, how he had to have a place to start anew—though soon enough, I knew, he would keep on taking his percentage from that newness. Taking too much.
Around midnight, I knew, he’d start smashing things, and I couldn’t blame him. Of course he wanted to come to the woods, too.
I didn’t know if the woods would have him.
All I could do was wait. I sat very still, like that owl, and thought about where I could go next, after this place was gone. Maybe, I thought, if I sit very still, they will just go away.