The sun was rising behind him, starting to warm the cabin’s tin roof. Neal savored the sounds that he had first heard only as silence. Listening carefully, he now heard the western breeze ruffle the trees, the distinct crackle of the creek as it rushed over rock and sand. He heard that same old ornery crow scolding him from the same pine branch, the hammering noise of a downy woodpecker as it hunted for ants in a dead cedar, the rattling chirp of a ground squirrel.
And there were the smells. The dominant odor of pine needles, distinct from the muskier smell of pine pitch, the warm, acrid smell of the acidic dirt beneath the rabbit brush, the sagebrush itself, dry and sweet smelling in the crisp early morning. And now there was the aroma of the eggs frying in the bacon grease and the wonderful bread smell as it browned on the grill above the stove.
Neal walked back into the cabin and turned the eggs over, then pressed the spatula down until the yolks broke. He took the toast off the grill, buttered it, and placed it on the old, white, chipped plate with the little blue flowers around the edge. He watched the eggs until they turned solid, then flipped them onto the plate, poured himself more coffee, and sat down at the table, three wide pine boards hammered onto a frame of split logs. He pulled up his chair-another primitive pine job hacked out with a hatchet-and opened his Carson City Gazette to the sports page.
The newspaper was exactly one week behind. Neal hitched a ride to town with Steve once a week to buy his supplies and stocked up on his newspapers seven at a time. He had disciplined himself to read only one paper a day, and so his news was a week old, but it wasn’t long before that didn’t matter, and it wasn’t long after that that he took to only glancing at the hard news anyway, turning his attention to sports, book reviews, editorials, and the comics. He got very involved with the comic strips, actually feeling suspense at the fate of Gil Thorp’s baseball team and Steve Roper.
On this morning, as on every other morning, building a life was mostly a matter of maintenance. Joe Graham had taught him that a long time ago-that managing your life was about doing the small tasks well and doing them when they needed to be done. “People think that they’re ‘free,’” Joe Graham had lectured one time as he was browbeating Neal into cleaning his pigsty of an apartment, “when they don’t have any order in their lives. They’re not free. They’re prisoners of their own sloppiness. They spend a hell of a lot more time and energy cleaning up their messes than they do having fun, whatever they tell you. Now, if you just do the little boring things every day, in some kind of order, you leave yourself with more time to sit around, drink beer, and watch ball games on TV, which is, after all, what you want to be doing in the first place. Besides which, sloppy detectives tend to end up dead.”
It was true in detective work, it was true in scholarship, and it was true in living a reasonably comfortable life on an isolated mountain.
So he finished his breakfast, heated some water, and did the dishes right away, before he lost the ambition to do them. He poured himself a second cup of coffee and went out to sit on the porch. It was the time he allowed himself to enjoy the terrain, think about the upcoming day, and watch the coyote.
The coyote had started coming just a few days after Neal’s arrival at the cabin. Apparently it was just as much a creature of routine as Neal was. It would arrive just after breakfast and skitter fifty or sixty yards away from the cabin until Neal came out to start his hike to the Mills place. Then the coyote would fall in behind him, trailing him, always staying well behind and running off if Neal turned around too suddenly.
At first Neal thought he had some kind of Disney experience going for him, until Steve explained that the coyote was using Neal like a hunting dog, staying behind him to pounce on any grasshoppers, mice, or rabbits that Neal might stir up. Also, coyotes were scavengers, just smart enough to learn that human beings left a lot of garbage in their wake. Neal preferred the Disney scenario and came to look on the coyote as a friend.
So he was looking for the animal when he went out on the porch to sip that wonderful second cup of coffee. All the more wonderful because the mornings were now quite cold. The higher slopes of the mountains had snow now, and it wouldn’t be long before the first big storm covered the whole valley in white. Neal had spent many hours of his spare time getting wood off the mountain and stacking it on the porch.
The way the job is going, Neal thought, I might need it.
He’d been there for two months and hadn’t seen another sign of Harley or Cody McCall.
Maybe they did move on, Neal admitted to himself. Maybe I should too. But I won’t be any closer to finding the boy in New York than I am here.
He’d had a tough time selling that concept to Levine and Graham. There had been that difficult conference call about three weeks after Neal had moved into the cabin.
“Get your ass back here,” Ed had demanded.
Neal insisted, “I’m staying.”
“What the hell for?” Graham asked. “They won’t even let you into the stupid compound!”
“I’m still in the probationary period,” Neal said, feeling more than a little foolish. It was true. Hansen had checked out his cover story, bought it, and invited Neal to attend the “self-defense” training sessions he held at the ranch. Outside the compound.
Ed broke in. “We’re working it from this end now, Neal. You’re off the case.”
“I’m off the case when I bring back Cody McCall, Ed.”
Neal could picture Ed filming, leaning over his desk, sucking on a cigarette.
Graham said, “Son, come back and go to school. You’ve done what you could do. We’ll try something else, that’s all.”
“I don’t care about school, Dad. I care about the boy. And until I know that he’s not here, I’m not leaving.”
Besides, I like it here.
Which was true. Neal Carey, denizen of Broadway, inveterate strap hanger, with sidewalk smarts and a three-newspaper-a-day habit, loved his life on The High Lonely. Neal, whose previous experience herding cattle was maneuvering a cheeseburger into his mouth, had come to enjoy bringing Mills’ cows down from their summer pastures in the mountains. Neal, who had once seen the Hudson and East rivers as the borders of the universe, now reveled in the panoramic dawns and dusks of the high desert. Neal, whose idea of a dead lift had been restricted to the weight of a large coffee to go, now thought nothing of flinging bales of hay into the loft, or stretching barbed wire, or digging post holes, or wrestling a calf that needed an injection. Neal, who once couldn’t wait to get back to New York after his years of confinement in China, now dreaded the idea of leaving his splendid isolation in the Reese River valley for the tight confines of the Big Apple.
So he wasn’t going to do it. This was going to be his last job. He’d find Cody McCall, as long as it took. But once that was over, he was staying right here in the valley. Take his back pay and buy himself a little place, maybe even this cabin. He’d have to give up graduate school, but he didn’t need graduate school to read books. In fact, he’d had a lot more time to read these past two months than he’d had for the past five years.
So as soon as I find Cody McCall, I’m quitting, Neal thought as the coyote peeked up from behind a clump of brush.
He shucked off his clothes, slipped on rubber thongs, and paddled over to the lister bag. He stepped up onto the wooden platform he had built, opened the nozzle, got himself wet, and closed the nozzle. He soaped up, washed his hair, and opened the nozzle again to rinse off. Then he lathered his face with soap, crouched a little to look into the mirror hanging from the stump of a branch, and shaved.
“Shaving,” Peggy Mills had warned him, “is what separates you from the goofball survivalists. As long as you shave, you’re a guy who just wants his privacy. When you stop shaving, you’ve gone a little too mountain man. So shave, Neal, and I won’t nag you or worry about you as much.”