The Taking of Libbie, SD Page 23

  I halted and tried to calculate my progress. It was impossible. A backward glance showed me nothing. The prairie was like the ocean. There was no end to it, no edge lined with mountains or coastal waters or lush forests. Near seemed the same as far out there.

  I reminded myself that a man in fairly decent shape walking briskly should cover as much as five miles an hour. Only that’s over a flat surface, and despite what you might have heard, the Great Plains are not flat; at least they aren’t as flat as a football field or a baseball diamond. There were plenty of low, rolling hills to contend with. Plus, the damn vegetation. Along with the wheatgrass—see, I remembered what it was called—there were other prairie grasses to grab my shoes, pull at my legs, and slow my pace. There was a brown-colored grass that was several inches higher than the wheatgrass that reminded me of knitting needles. Another grass grew in dense mounds eighteen to twenty-four inches high with slender blue-green stems that sometimes turned a radiant mahogany red. Then there were a few grasses that I actually recognized—sunflowers and golden rods.

  Okay, you’re not walking briskly, but you are walking steadily, I told myself, even though every step caused my ribs to throb with pain. Call it four miles an hour.

  C’mon.

  Three and a half, then. Make it—I studied my watch some more—twenty-six and a quarter miles since I started. That’s pretty damn good.

  Except that you haven’t eaten anything in twenty-two hours, or drunk anything since the cups of coffee you had last night at the Perkins County Courthouse. Except that you’re slowing down—admit it, you’re slowing down a lot. Except that you have no idea how much farther you need to go.

  Shuddup.

  Remember all that distilled water you poured into the ditch yesterday? What a waste.

  Shuddup.

  Once I got it into my head, I couldn’t shake the thought away—the threat of dehydration. Fluids, in the form of sweat, were going out, yet nothing was coming in. What’s more, my sweat—which was supposed to cool my body—was being dried before it could fulfill its mission by the hard northwest wind that simply would not stop blowing. It was like standing in front of a huge fan for nine and a half hours. The symptoms became too pronounced to ignore—dizziness, headache, stomach pain, nausea, and an unpleasant taste in my mouth. True, these were also the symptoms of chloral hydrate working itself out of my system. Still … Add to it the unrelenting sun. If it wasn’t a hundred degrees, it was close to it. I had turned up the collar of my polo shirt, yet it did little to protect my neck. I could feel my skin burning there, as well as on my arms and on the right side of my face.

  If dehydration doesn’t kill you, sunstroke will.

  Whine, whine, whine, whine, whine …

  I was following my shadow now, the setting sun at my back, the shadow stretching so far in front of me that I could barely see where it ended. Then it disappeared, swallowed by a night that seemed to fall as swiftly as a hammer on an anvil. With it came a wave of cool air that engulfed me and settled around me as if I had just walked into a refrigerator. I had never felt air go from hot to cold so quickly.

  I could go no farther, so I sat on the prairie. Hunger clawed at my stomach, yet that did not concern me nearly as much as the parchedness of my throat or the dryness of my tongue as I ran it across my chapped lips.

  There were so many times when I should have died and I didn’t.

  “Hey,” I told myself. “Don’t talk like that. If you think you’re going to die, you’ll find a way to make it happen. Instead, do you know what you’re going to do? First thing in the morning, you’re going to walk a little ways until you find a road. Then you’re going to hike down that road until you find a farmhouse or hitch a ride with a local. Then you’re going to find a phone, make a few calls, go home, get cleaned up, and then you’re going to take Nina to Paris.”

  I settled against the hard ground; the earth was warm against my back. I cupped my hands behind my head and stared up at the night sky. I watched as it slowly turned from a sorrowful blackness into an extravaganza of light. I recognized the North Star immediately, as well as the Big Dipper. That was it. I didn’t know the constellations; I wished I did. Orion, Andromeda, Hercules, Pegasus, Cassiopeia—I knew the names, but not where to find them. An astonishing woman named Renée, who was far too good for the likes of me—just ask her family—had attempted to introduce them to me. Alas, something always seemed to distract us from our stargazing. Oh, well.

  Staring up at the starry, starry sky, I had a revelation.

  “You gotta believe,” I said aloud. “You just gotta believe.”

  It wasn’t a particularly profound thought, I know. Yet it worked for the ’69 Mets. It worked for my ’87 Twins. It worked for the ’07 New York Giants. It would sure as hell work for me.

  My eyes closed reluctantly. I slowly fell deeper and deeper through the layers of sleep, sliding effortlessly from dozing to the half-awake confusion that followed to sleep that resembled a coma …

  It was a slumber so deep, so profound, that I needed to crawl out of it in stages, reconstructing the events of yesterday, the boredom, the pain, the hunger and thirst, the never-ending walking across the never-ending prairie. The light increased very slightly, flitting across my closed eyelids, then sprang upon me like the opening of a window shade in a dark room.

  I was curled into the fetal position and shivering. The cool nighttime temperatures had created dew that covered everything. Why it didn’t wake me I couldn’t say; my clothes were drenched. I uncoiled my body and slowly, painfully stood. It was day in the east, yet still night in the west, and the sky in between varied by degrees from purple to violet to the purest aquamarine. The colors of the dew-soaked grass and shrubs also impressed me—a mosaic of silver, green, blue, red, yellow, and gold. The wind continued to blow, and the air was full of scents I had not encountered before.

  I stretched, and the effort reminded me that my ribs were probably broken, that my legs and feet were tender, that my stomach was empty. I stripped off my wet shirt and sucked the moisture out of the material. Afterward, I bent to grab tufts of grass, squeezing the dew off of them and licking the water off of my hands. It took about ten minutes to quench my thirst. When I was ready, I used the sun and my watch to realign myself and started walking east. My shoes and the cuffs of my jeans became even more soaked as I hiked through the wet grass, making travel more difficult than before. There wasn’t a single tree—not one. Nor could I discern any visible roads, fences, or power lines. Yet my spirits remained high.

  You wake up, live through the day, go to sleep; then you do it all over again. There’s a kind of victory in that, I told myself.

  I had an exquisite view of the eastern half of the sky, clear and perfect, stretching to the horizon with nothing, nothing at all, to interrupt it. The perpetual wind blowing from the west and north pushed my back, urging me along, even as it turned the landscape into a waving sea of grass and drove cumulus and cirrus clouds across the sky, the shadows of the clouds sliding along beneath them. There was a dragonfly and, later, a squadron of Monarch butterflies. I also saw plenty of animals that had eluded me the day before—badgers, gophers, prairie dogs, more jackrabbits.

  “Don’t mind me,” I told them. “I’m just passing through.”

  No one could possibly mistake it for Eden, yet the Great Plains had a kind of austere beauty, at least in the morning. I began to like it, although I did so against my better judgment. For the first time, I could appreciate why immigrants might travel across continents and oceans to get there. It was a country with both a glorious and appalling past. It was here that intrepid pioneers, lured by a Homestead Act that promised free land to anyone who would live on it and improve it, withstood loneliness, drought, blizzards, dust storms, and unyielding soil to help forge a nation. It was also here that men, who measured civilization by the color of their skin and advanced weaponry, pushed Native Americans off their ancestral homes and herded them onto reservations. It was a
land of outlaws and legendary lawmen, of boomtowns and busts, of builders and destroyers and dreamers. It was also a land with a precarious present and dubious future.

  I had no idea what would happen to the Great Plains.

  To be perfectly honest, I didn’t care.

  All I wanted to do was get off them.

  That was becoming increasingly unlikely.

  It was against my own intellectual inclination to linger in the past—the dark land, a poet once called it. Yet, without a clear destination, I was becoming more pessimistic with every thirsty step. I found myself thinking less about what was in front of me and more about what was behind. Normally my memories were happy ones. Oh, the stories I could tell. Now they were filled with grieving—the death of my father and before that the death of my mother, who had become little more than an image to me, an impression of beauty and strength that could very well be more a manifestation of my imagination than actual memory. Regrets, too, things I had done that I wish I hadn’t, things I had said that I wish I could take back, which were actually fewer in number than those things that I had left undone and unsaid that now made me sad.

  No, no, no. Stop it. Get out of your head.

  Easier said than done. I became obsessed with the notion that if I died out there, no one would ever know what had happened to me. Without my wallet, no one would even know who I was, assuming someone stumbled upon my body, which seemed unlikely.

  Stop it. Just stop it.

  I’ve been here before, I told myself. Just the other day, Miller’s minions locked me in that damn trunk. Things looked bleak then, too. Remember? What did I do about it? I got tough, that’s what I did. There was a nun, my sixth-grade homeroom teacher back at St. Mark’s Elementary School, Sister John Evangela. Do you know what she used to tell us? “You can live for forty days without food, four days without water, and four minutes without oxygen, but you can’t live four seconds without hope.” Well, guess what? I had hope, and plenty of it.

  “Hear that, bitch?” I spun in a circle, making sure the Great Plains knew I was talking to her. “You ain’t putting me down. A little heat, a little wind, a couple of miles of empty country? C’mon, is that all you got? It didn’t stop the pioneers, did it? It didn’t stop them, and they had ornery Indians to deal with, too. It isn’t going to stop me, either. Get used to the idea. Great American Desert, my ass.”

  That’s telling her.

  Despite my defiance, dehydration and hunger were taking their toll. I was no longer sweating; I wiped my brow with my thumb, and my thumb came away dry. My pace had dropped off dramatically; if I was making two miles an hour now, I was lucky. It was becoming harder to walk in a straight line. It was becoming harder to walk, period. Just breathing the furnacelike air in and out had become a burden. Hell, I decided, was a place where you found yourself under a relentless, unmoving sun in a land that did not change, where the wind never stopped blowing.

  I stumbled and fell, not for the first time. I rolled onto my back and looked up at the sky. A bird with a long, curved bill circled above me.

  “You gotta be kidding,” I said.

  I thought about it—I really did. I thought about just lying there, about giving up. Only I couldn’t do it. No voice spoke to me; I wasn’t visited by images of my dead parents or friends or Nina or some ethereal creature sent by God. I just couldn’t do it—quit, I mean. I got up and I started walking. I had no idea if I was heading east or not. It didn’t seem to matter anymore. All that mattered was that I remain on my feet.

  What we have here is a stand-up fight with Death, my inner voice proclaimed.

  Damn, that’s heroic, I thought.

  Except that you’re losing.

  It was when the sun was as low as my heart, when I was sure that I was slipping away, that I first saw it, something white moving in the distance. It came and it went, and for a few moments I was convinced I was seeing things.

  It was heading toward me, so I started toward it.

  After a while, I saw that it was a horse.

  There was a rider on the back of the horse.

  The rider was a young woman.

  The young woman was beautiful. Her hair was the color of wheat and neatly tucked beneath her wide-brimmed cowboy hat, the hat tied beneath her chin to keep it from falling off. She wore a blue cotton short-sleeve shirt tucked inside worn blue jeans. Her eyes were blue. Her soft face and arms glistened with sunscreen.

  She reined up in front of me.

  I kept walking until I was standing next to the white horse. I ran my hand over its neck, patted it.

  “You’re real,” I said.

  “Are you all right, mister?” the young woman said.

  She slid out of the saddle and dropped to the ground. She unwound the strap of a canteen from the pommel of her saddle. She unscrewed the cap and offered the canteen to me. I took the canteen and drank. I tried to drink slowly.

  She asked me what I was doing out there.

  I stopped drinking just long enough to tell her that it was a complicated story.

  She asked if I needed help.

  I told her that I did.

  I drank some more of the water and handed the canteen back.

  She suggested that I wasn’t from around there.

  I asked if it would be too much of an imposition for her to take me to Libbie.

  “Who’s Libbie?” she said. “Is there someone else out here?”

  “No, Libbie—Libbie, South Dakota. It’s a town.”

  “Mister, this is Montana.”

  But not Canada, my inner voice said.

  “I better take you to our place,” the young woman said. “Can you ride?”

  I told her that the only time I was ever on a horse was during a vacation in Colorado.

  She showed me how to mount the horse. I sat in back and she sat in front, holding the reins. She told me to hang on tight and I did. I hung on for dear life.

  We set off at a trot.

  “Our ranch is just a few miles over the rise,” she said.

  Rise? my inner voice said. I didn’t see any rise, but I took the girl’s word for it. I asked her name.

  “Angela,” she said.

  No one is going to believe this, my inner voice told me. Saved from a slow and probably agonizing death on the Great American Desert by a beautiful young woman named Angela riding a white horse. Hell, I don’t believe it.

  “May I ask how old you are?” I said.

  “Seventeen.”

  Well, of course she is.

  “Are you in high school?” I said.

  “I start my senior year in September.”

  “What are you going to do after that?”

  “I’d like to go to college. I have a list of about a dozen schools I’m going to apply to. Except times are tough, you know? Where I go, if I go, depends on how much scholarship and grant money I can scrape up.”

  “Well, don’t worry about it.”

  “Why not?”

  “I know an eccentric millionaire who will guarantee you a full ride to any school you can get into.”

  Angela turned in the saddle to look at me.

  “Why would he do that?” she said.

  It wasn’t a particularly funny question, yet it made me laugh just the same.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Angela halted the pickup in front of the Pioneer Hotel and put it in park. As I slid out of the passenger seat, she jumped out of the driver’s side and sprinted around the truck to my side. I didn’t need her help. A full day in the comfort of her family’s ranch house, being ministered to by both Angela and her mother, had set me up nicely. Even the sunburn didn’t hurt anymore, unless someone hugged my neck like she was doing now.

  “Thank you, McKenzie,” Angela said.

  Her eyes were as bright, wet, and shiny as they were when I had H. B. Sutton transfer fifty thousand dollars into her father’s money market fund. He thought that was a sufficient reward for saving my life, despite protests that I c
onsidered my health and well-being to be worth considerably more than that. ’Course, now that I had his account numbers, I figured I could deposit a couple more bucks when he wasn’t looking. Call it a tip for letting me use his razor.

  “Thank you, Angela,” I said and hugged back.

  “I’m glad I met you.”

  I laughed at the remark. Just about everything she and her family said Wednesday and Thursday morning while I was recuperating from my two days on the plains had cracked me up.

  “Believe me,” I said, “the pleasure was all mine.”

  I smiled when she went back to the pickup, smiled some more when she drove off, and smiled again when I turned and faced the front door of the hotel. No one in Libbie knew what had happened to me except for the people who arranged it. While I was convalescing at Angela’s ranch, I made calls to Nina and the Dunstons and Harry. They told me that both Big Joe Balk and Chief Gustafson had made inquires when it became clear that I had disappeared. After assuring them that once again rumors of my demise were greatly exaggerated, I made them all promise not to reveal that I was alive and well. Surprisingly, Harry seemed most annoyed by what was going on; even more so than Nina, who pretended—I knew that she was pretending—to take it all in stride. I reminded Harry that the FBI field office in Minneapolis covered all the counties in South Dakota, and then I explained why he should care. That brightened his disposition considerably. I glanced at my watch. I expected to see him in a few hours.

  “This is going to be fun,” I said aloud.

  Sharren Nuffer was in her usual spot behind the registration desk, her glasses balanced on the tip of her nose. When she saw me, her eyes grew wide and her entire face became one enormous smile. I was happy to see it. It confirmed my hypothesis that she was guiltless in my abduction. She threw her cheaters down and circled the counter.

  “McKenzie,” she said way too loudly. I silenced her with an index finger quickly pressed to my lips. She hesitated for a beat and then continued toward me until her arms were wrapped around my shoulders and her cheek was pressed hard against mine.