Lucian had lied. Lucian had lied when he said that he hadn’t seen her for all those years. I looked up at the large map of the county that was illuminated by the flat, winter sun and wondered where in the hell I was. The place on the wall wasn’t where I happened to be as of late; I was in a strange new place, a place where the people I had safely put on shelves were wandering around getting into messy things.
Lois came back into the room, placed a large ledger on the cast-off library table, and opened it to the exact page held by her index finger. I pulled out a chair. It amused me that the two places that had computers couldn’t seem to slap their asses with both hands, but the nice little old lady in the assessor’s office could conjure Charlie Nurburn in a matter of moments. Always follow the money; rendering unto Caesar what is his may not be pleasurable, but the records are great. I was having second thoughts about the computer; maybe I didn’t need one after all. I could use the extra money for a lie detector.
We have ledgers like these back at the office, three of them to be precise. They are beautiful, handbound leather with golden edging and marbled inner leaves with information that stretched back to the mid-1800s. Now we have floppy discs. The ledger was alphabetically organized, so it didn’t take long to find Charlie on the open page; he was the only Nurburn in the county. He had bought a small property in 1946, about 260 acres adjacent to the 50,000-acre Four Brothers Ranch; the brothers had sold it to him. Both Mari and Charlie were on the deed. He had paid the taxes on the property until 1950, whereupon he must have piled his syphilitic, wife-beating ass into his Kaiser, whatever it looked like, and driven off into the sunset. Or not.
Mari had paid the taxes on the property beginning in 1951. The Four Brothers had been split between her and her cousin, the priest, according to the Will of her father, the last of the four brothers to die. I asked for the B book. She said that it had been a popular letter lately. I asked her why, and she said that Kay Baroja-Lofton had been in yesterday to check things out on her mother’s behalf and that Carol Baroja-Calloway had requested information to be faxed to Calloway, Moore, and Gardner in Miami; the letters in Mari’s room were from that firm. It just kept getting better and better.
Where was Charlie Nurburn? I looked at the nine-numeral scrawl that I had made on the scrap pad. It was time to use my own resources. I left the courthouse, completely forgetting to set fire to it.
I keyed the mic. “Charlie Nurburn.” I read her the number from the piece of paper.
Static. “Who is this character?”
“Somebody I’m not so sure I want to find.”
It was only forty-five miles south to Swayback Road, then another three miles east toward the Wallows where the Four Brothers Ranch was located, or where I thought it was located. As I drove down the interstate, the tailgate of my truck buffeted by the gusts from the northwest, I started feeling like I was being pushed.
I had stood there in the doorway of Lana’s shop. It was one of those moments when you weren’t quite sure if what you heard was what you thought you had heard. In the second that it took me to make up my mind, she laughed. It was a wonderfully musical laugh, one that you couldn’t help but join. After I did, questions didn’t seem appropriate. I told her that if she wanted to see her grandmother, she could probably do it this evening; but, on the lonely stretch of highway between Durant and Powder Junction, with the Big Horn Mountains guarding my right and the Powder River flats racing east, my mind began to wander back to a man who had had the one woman in his life taken away. It’s one thing if she’d been gone but, as near as I could tell, she had only been forty-five miles distant.
There’s no way I’d have been able to stay away. I flattered myself by thinking that, if faced with such a circumstance, I would respond within the letter of the law; but passion is a strange thing, a thing that warps and twists everything with which it comes in contact. It was like the combination of moisture and sunshine on wood; sometimes it turned out all right, most of the times it didn’t, but you couldn’t ignore its strength. I had always dealt with passion with an evenhanded balance of attraction and mistrust, but I was talking about Lucian Connally, and he was a mechanism that operated on the caprice of passion as if it were jet fuel. Thursday midmornings would never be the same for me again. Where was Charlie Nurburn, and what was he feeling lately, if anything? Maybe I needed to see what Mari Baroja was about, but if that were the case then I would have to make an extended search in better weather for the place where a small house leaned away from the blows of the wind.
There was an aged wooden sign for the Four Brothers Ranch, which contrasted with the new one that read PRONGHORN DRILLING, RIG # 29, when I cut off the paved road and onto the county gravel. The snow wasn’t too deep, and there appeared to have been quite a bit of traffic as late as this morning. I slowed to a stop as I rounded the hill that led to the small valley where the homestead still sat, the snow sweeping around me and dropping into the rolling hills of the high plains. I thought about those hard men on their short horses. I wondered if they were still here and if they were aware that Mari was now with them.
I watched the sage straining at its roots to escape the force of the northwest wind, edged the truck farther out on the road that followed the hills, and descended into the valley of the four brothers and one lost girl. I buttoned my coat, flipped the sheepskin collar up, and twisted my hat down tight. With the sun starting to ebb, the temperature was dropping fast, and I was just starting to hear the little voices that spoke to you when you were out where you shouldn’t be when nobody knew where you were and the weather was getting bad.
I stumbled up to the first wheel hub and locked it in, trudging through the midcalf drifts to the other side and locking the mechanism there as well. Over the sound of the big ten-cylinder engine, I listened to the keening of the wind and to the cry of things you didn’t hear in town. If I could just separate Mari Baroja’s voice from the screaming cacophony, I felt that she would tell me the things I needed to know. There was a small switchback around a juniper tree at the base of the hill where the snow had filled a trough, but other tires had busted their way through and had created a path of sorts. I drove up the slight grade and stopped at the edge. This area was slightly sheltered, and the snow blew over the cab of the truck like a fake ceiling.
I had wondered what it was that could be of so much importance and, now that I was looking at it, I felt like a fool. I could make out at least a dozen methane wellheads, containment tanks, and a compression station. If all the wells I could see, and the ones I suspected I couldn’t, were on line and producing, someone was making a lot of money. I followed the most recent set of tracks across the arch of the hill. From this vantage point, I could make out another three dozen wellheads. There was a vague outline of a drilling rig with numerous vehicles parked below it; I shifted into low and headed in that direction.
Methane development in the northern part of Wyoming had become a mixed blessing, and it seemed like every jackleg that could turn a wrench had suddenly become a roughneck. The amount of trucks with plates from Oklahoma and Texas had certainly increased, but the number of people who were actually benefiting financially from the methane boom was few. In Wyoming, there is a practice of carving off a portion of the mineral rights from a property at the point of sale, resulting in ranchers who had very little say over whom the leases were sold to and, consequently, who could drive on your land and pretty much do as they pleased. The methane industry’s propaganda poster children were the ones who had retained their mineral rights, could enforce a suitable surface agreement, and got a portion of the money from the gas that was produced.