The Highway Kind(7)

Sally told Brandon it wasn’t a nice thing to say even if it was true.

“He left the ranch to us kids,” she said. “I’ve talked to Will and Trent and of course nobody wants it. But because you’re the accountant, we decided you should go up there and inventory everything in the house and outbuildings so we can do a big farm auction. Then we can talk about selling the ranch. Trent thinks McMiller might buy it.”

Jake McMiller was the owner of the neighboring ranch and he’d always made it clear he wanted to expand his holdings. The old man had said, “Over my dead body will that son of a bitch get my place.”

So...

“Do I get a say in this or is it already decided?” Brandon had asked Sally.

“It’s already decided.”

“Nothing ever changes, does it?” Brandon asked.

“I guess not,” she said, not without sympathy.

Will and Trent were Brandon’s older brothers. They were fraternal twins. Both had left home the day they turned eighteen. Will was now a state employee for Wyoming in Cheyenne, and Trent owned a bar in Jackson Hole. Both were divorced and neither had been back to the ranch in over twenty-five years. Sally, the third oldest, had left as well, although she did come in from South Florida to visit the place every few years. After she’d been there, she’d send out a group letter to her brothers confirming the same basic points:

The old man was as mean and bitter as ever.

He was still feuding with his neighbor Jake McMiller in court over water rights and road access.

He was spending way too much time drinking and carousing in town with his hired man Dwayne Pingston, who was a well-known petty criminal.

As far as the old man was concerned, he had no sons, and he still planned to will them the ranch in revenge for their leaving it.

The brothers had been so traumatized by their childhood they rarely spoke to each other about it. Sally was the intermediary in all family business because when the brothers talked on the phone or were in the presence of each other, strong, dark feelings came back.

Like the time the old man had left Will and Trent on top of a mountain in the snow because they weren’t cutting firewood into the right-size lengths. Or when the old man “slipped” and branded Trent on his left thigh with a red-hot iron.

Or the nightmare night when Will, Trent, Sally, Brandon, and their mother huddled in the front yard in a blinding snowstorm while the old man berated them from the front porch with his rifle out, accusing one or all of them of drinking his Ancient Age bourbon. He knew it, he said, because he’d marked the level in the bottle the night before. He railed at them most of the night while sucking down three-quarters of a quart of Jim Beam he’d hidden in the garage. When he finally passed out, the family had to step over his body on the way back into the house. Brandon still remembered how terrified he was stepping over the old man’s legs. He was afraid the man would regain his wits at that moment and pull him down.

The next day, Will and Trent turned eighteen and left before breakfast.

When their mother started complaining of sharp abdominal pains, the old man refused to take her into town to see the doctor he considered a quack. She died two days later of what turned out to be a burst appendix.

When the Department of Family Services people arrived on the ranch after that, the old man pointed at Sally and Brandon and said, “Take ’em. Get ’em out of my hair.”

Brandon had not been back to the ranch since that day.


“It’s a car with one headlight out,” Brandon said to Marissa. “You stay in here and I’ll go and deal with it.”

“Take a gun,” she said.

He started to argue with her but thought better of it. Everyone in Sublette County was armed, so he had to presume the driver of the approaching car was too.

“I wish the phone worked,” she said as he strode through the living room to the old man’s den.

“Me too,” he said.

Apparently, as they’d discovered when they arrived that morning, the old man hadn’t paid his phone bill and had never installed a wireless Internet router. The electricity was still on, although Brandon found three months of unpaid bills from the local power co-op. There was no cell service this far out.

Brandon fought back long-buried emotions as he entered the den and flipped on the light. It was exactly as he remembered it: mounted elk and deer heads, black-and-white photos of the old man when he was a young man, shelves of unread books, a lariat and a pair of ancient spurs on the wall. The calendar behind the desk was three years old.

He could see a half a dozen rifles and shotguns behind the glass of the gun cabinet. Pistols inside were hung upside down by pegs through their trigger guards. He recognized a 1911 Colt .45. It was the old man’s favorite handgun and he always kept it loaded.

But the cabinet was locked. Brandon was surprised. Since when did the old man lock his gun cabinet? He quickly searched the top of the desk. No keys. He threw open the desk drawers. There was a huge amount of junk crammed into them and he didn’t have time to root through it all.

He could break the glass, he thought.

That’s when Marissa said, “They’re getting out of the car, Brandon. There’s a bunch of them.” Her tone was panicked.

Brandon took a deep breath to remain calm. He told himself, Probably hunters or somebody lost. Certainly it couldn’t be locals because everyone in the county knew the old man was gone. He’d cut a wide swath through the psyche of the valley where everyone knew everybody else, and the old-line ranching families—who controlled the politicians, the sheriff, and the land-use decisions—were still royalty.