MONDAY MORNING. THE boy with the rifle heard the jeep coming from miles and miles away. It was early and the light was low across the Sawtooth Mountains. You could hide for a hundred years just in the shadows alone.
Maybe the car was just some damn tourist. Probably. Money had begun to discover Idaho. There’d always been rich folk come to the mountains, over in Sun Valley and up the rivers for the fishing, sporting types, been coming for years and years. But lately, with cell phones and the Net and staying in touch with everywhere from anywhere, they’d started buying the state up and building homes and claiming land, acres and acres, thousands of acres of land. Coming close, too close to people like himself and his family.
America was coming to an end, just like his dad said. His America, the real America, where self-reliant people built their own homes with their own hands and drew their own water and chopped their own wood and shot the wild game, slaughtered it and smoked it or put it in snow packs to freeze it through the winter.
Soon there’d be nothing left, no place a man could roam, call his own, them California people, movie and computer millionaires, coming in, dragging government in behind them. Vaccinating. Forcing schooling. Forcing the races to mix. Telling you what to think, what to say, how to live, crowding in.
The boy hated all that. Hated them. He wondered if this was one of the new outsiders. His rifle was loaded. He didn’t figure it would come to that. Not today. But someday, maybe.
Whoever it was coming, it wasn’t somebody he knew. The vehicle was too far off to make out in detail, but the boy was a young huntsman, a backwoodsman. In an earlier day he would have walked with Crockett through the Cumberland Gap, and he had the knack of recognizing even the things that he couldn’t quite see. He knew all the vehicles that ought to be coming up this way, which were very few, and this was not one of them.
He loped through the trees, an easy and tireless run, something you didn’t see much anymore, with all the sitting and TV watching and fear of living outdoors, but the boy didn’t know that he was so unusual, because he didn’t live down there, didn’t see the kids at the mall too wide to sit in a normal chair, too used to going from car to car to video game, to ever run eight or nine miles just because it was the only way to get from here to there.
This was just half a mile or so, through meadows and tall, wide-apart trees. There was time, time to warn his father; his father would know what to do, to fight or to run. His father always knew. A bearded man, iron-hard, hickory brown, lean and streaked with gray, not quick-tempered but with a long slow burn in his belly, like some underground coal seam that had a fire that would never go out.
His father was splitting logs. Hard enough work that he had his shirt off and the boy could see the twisted old scars from the bullet wounds from where the feds had shot him up. Bastards. Motherfucking bastards. Hated government and government men. Tried to kill his daddy. Shot him down like a dog.
But like some cunning old wolf his old man had crept off into the trees, into the deep dark woods, wrapping himself around his wounds, clutching straw and moss against his belly to stanch the flow of the blood, and he survived the shock and fought the fever and he’d lived. The scar was puckered and tight and white.
“Car coming,” the boy called.
His father put down the ax. He didn’t rush. Just put down the ax. He stretched and took a sip of water from the bottle he had sitting on a stump beside him. “Get the binoculars, boy.”
The boy went past his father and into the cabin. It was all hand built, mostly by his dad, himself, and his older brother, now doing twelve years’ federal time, built by the three of them, every board, every nail, every beam and shingle and the pipes and plumbing, too. The indoor plumbing was practically new, just finished it eight, nine months back. There was a cellar, underneath; they’d dug that out, with shovels. Storage for fruit and vegetables and ammo.
Damn arsenal down there. They could stand off whoever came for them. Well, that’s what the boy liked to say, said it the way boys do, full of pleasant bravado, but thinking, in his heart and in his head, too, that it might not be true. The government had all sorts of things, helicopters and missiles and lasers and all kinds of things. Maybe he and his pa couldn’t stand them off if they came in force, but the two of them could fade into the trees, head for the deep scarred passes made of stone, go for the caves. If the goddamn government couldn’t find no goddamn Osama bin damn A-rab, they must be pretty damn dumb, too dumb to catch up with an honest-to-God Idaho mountain man and his son.
The boy brought out the long-range sniper rifle with the scope and the hand loads along with the binoculars. His father gestured to him that he didn’t want the rifle, but he took the glasses and climbed up onto the big rock outcropping that gave him some extra height and a pretty clear field of vision, clear field of fire, too.
About forty minutes later, with an eagle flying overhead, by coincidence, but beautiful all the same, Neil Carllson came up to the house with the stranger, the stranger driving Neil’s car, Neil with a shotgun across his lap. At a word, the stranger stopped and turned off the engine, put the parking brake on. At a gesture, he got out, Neil covering him.
The stranger was a city type. He was wearing boots and jeans and a plaid shirt and wool-lined denim jacket that had seen a few years, but you could tell he was a city type. The boy had never seen him before, but his father clearly had, the two of them recognizing each other without saying much.
There was some uncertainty there, in his father, which the boy rarely saw. For the most part his father showed no more vacillation than the forests and the bears and the elements themselves. Not that a bear couldn’t start one way, then go another, not that sunshine couldn’t turn to a raging storm in a matter of moments, but that such changes weren’t full of confusion and bafflement and conflicted selves as humans were.
“You want something?” his father said.
“I want to talk to you,” the city man said.
The boy’s father seemed to study on that, consider it, like looking at the horizon for weather signs. Finally he said, “All right, Michael, you come on in then,” and he turned and walked toward the cabin, stopped after a couple of steps, and looked back and said, “Thank you, Neil, I’ll get him on down.”
“Right enough,” Neil said, holding his shotgun like he was born with one in his hand. He headed back to his old Cherokee and pulled himself in, released the brake, stepped on the clutch, spun the wheel, and let it roll in a half circle backward. Then he spun the wheels the other way and moved off down the hill.
The city man, Michael, followed the boy’s father into the cabin. Then the boy followed after, not having been told not to, and being curious.
It was dim inside, shadowy, and smelled of smoke: wood smoke and tobacco and the smoke from kerosene lamps. The boy had a knack for shadows, indoors and out, and he found one now, because he didn’t want to be sent away, not that his father often did send him away, but he sensed there was something unusual here.
“You want a drink?” his father asked the stranger.
“Sure.”
His father opened a cupboard. They’d built that and the boy was proud of it. It was clean and square and it swung smooth on its hinges and closed just right. He took out a bottle and then found a couple of glasses and set everything on the table. Only then did either of them sit. His father poured, a couple of fingers in each glass, clear liquid.
The stranger raised his glass, offering it.
There was that odd hesitation, a reservation—his father never did anything with reservation—but then they touched glasses. The stranger lifted his to his mouth, took a small sip, tasting it like a curious man seeking understanding, then lifted the glass and swallowed it all down. His father did the same.
The stranger shuddered, though not too, too hard, then said, “Smooth,” in a drawn-out, comic way.
His father smiled, not that it was funny, but more like it was funny once, long ago. “Kinda vodka,” he said. “Learned it from the Russkies, from potatoes.”
“Hey, it’s Idaho.”
“Yeah, it’s Idaho.”
Then they sat, looking. His father poured another, into the silence, poured it into the silence. They raised their glasses to each other, but did not touch, and they drank.
“You want something?”
“Yes. Yes I do.”
His father nodded his head, not that it would be given, whatever it was, but that he would listen.
“I don’t know how this election is going to turn out,” Mike said. “Anne Lynn’s done a hell of a job.”
The boy’s father shrugged. It was none of his never mind.
“I thought she might make it. Now I think she might get beat. But I don’t want her humiliated. I don’t want her to lose Idaho. I want her to at least win her home state. You understand what I’m saying.”
The boy’s father looked stern and angry even.
“Damn it,” the stranger said.
“I don’t hold with it.”
“I want you to tell your people and the people who listen to your people to come out for Anne Lynn. I’m asking you, Kevin.”
“You go to hell, Michael. I tol’ you, I don’ hold with it. Don’ hold with nothin’ to do with this government. It’s an illegal government as far as I’m concerned, it’s tax collectin’, rights stealin’, coercive thing and I do not hold with it and will have nothing to do with it.”
“I am asking you.”
“You got no right, no call, to come here asking me for any damn thing.”
“I don’t?”
“’Cause we’re brothers?” the boy’s father said derisively. If that was the stranger’s excuse for asking, it wouldn’t hold.
Brothers? The boy was astounded. He didn’t know anything about a brother. This man was his uncle?
“I’ve never asked anything before.”
“Your wife, running for president, well, I don’t know, I don’t know if I hold with that either. Bible says the place of a woman is beneath that of the man. That would make you the first lady, and that’s all wrong. I don’t hold with it.”
The boy wanted to speak but was afraid to. He was kin to Anne Lynn Murphy, first woman to ever run for president?
“The hell with what you hold with,” the stranger snapped back.
The boy was surprised. He looked soft, this man, his newfound Uncle Michael, too soft to be talking that way to his father, hard, hard as an ax handle.
“You got no right to talk that way to me,” his father said, face set in stone, even his beard looking like granite. “Our father traveling around from town to town planting his seed may make us kin but we didn’t grow up as brothers. There’s blood but no bond.”
“That’s not what I’m calling on.”
“Don’t matter what you’re calling on.”
The stranger suddenly lunged up from his seat, his right hand driving toward his father’s chest. His father rose up too and his left hand came sweeping down and around and grabbed the other man, swift and hard as a third-time felony count, and grabbed him and turned, flinging the city man toward the floor, but the city man had grabbed on to Kevin’s shirt and he clutched the fabric tight in his fist and the shirt ripped open even as he went and landed on his side, Kevin following, looming over him, looking like he was about to give his brother, half brother, a stomping.
But they stopped. Both of them frozen there, the mountain man’s scar seeming to glow in the dimness.
The stranger pushed himself up.
“You don’t owe me shit,” he said. “You owe her, and you damn well know it.”
Kevin McCullough touched his hand to his scar. He’d been shot in a botched bank robbery up in Coeur d’Leon. Three men dead. Two of his, one of theirs, a cop. A long time ago. He was still wanted for the things that happened that night. For murder. Bank robbery. Terrorism. Conspiracy. Lot of things, a whole lot of things. He’d been gut shot. He’d been close to death. His wife, Esther, a good Bible name, Esther, had done her best, tried to nurse him, knew she was failing, knew he was going to die. She knew a lady doctor, down in Ketchum, and went to see her, this Anne Lynn Murphy. Took a chance, had to take a chance, though Kevin would have told her not to, would’ve rather died than spend a life in prison. Live free or goddamn die. Still would. Still would, if they came for him now—he’d fight to the death. Send the boy away and go down dying.
But Esther brought this lady doctor. And the lady doctor had cleaned the wound. Hadn’t flinched, Esther told him later, done it like she’d seen lots of wounds, seen worse even. So she’d gone in and cleaned it, pulled out bullet fragments and bits of cloth and chips of bone and washed away the pus and put topical antibiotics on the flesh and gave him antibiotics to take internally and painkillers, too. She’d never reported it. She never said nothin’, not to nobody.
So Kevin owed her. Of course, she wasn’t asking.
Strange twists of fate, that it was his own blood kin, though they were raised separately, raised differently, never knew each other until Kevin was almost thirty and Mike just turned twenty-one.
Esther was dead. Oh, twelve years now. Died two years after her second son was born. Kevin missed her. Her second son, the boy in the corner, watching, his name was Andrew. Closest Esther could get to Anne for a boy. Andy. That was how grateful Esther had been.
Kevin didn’t hold with government. He was a bank robber and a terrorist. But he did hold with paying his debts and he knew that this was a debt that was owed. Didn’t matter what her politics were. Could be a goddamn Communist and a Taliban besides. Didn’t matter a good goddamn. Kevin McCullough paid his debts.