Locked Doors

26

ON Halloween I flew into Rock Springs, Wyoming, rented a car, and by sunset was cruising north up Highway 191 into the unending bleakness of the high desert plain.

At dusk I pulled over at an abandoned gas station in Farson where 28 crosses 191 and runs northeast around the southern terminus of the Wind River Mountains for seventy miles to the city of Lander, my destination. Stepping out of the car, I walked across broken faded pavement into the middle of 191 and gazed north and west into the evening redness.

I wondered if my brother’s cabin still stood in this wasted country. Just thirty miles north I imagined I could feel it, a dark presence on the horizon exhuming memories I would not acknowledge. The wind was calm, the highway empty. The silence and loneliness of the desert bore down on me, matching my spirit.

At an elevation of 7,550 feet I crested South Pass. Through the driver side window I could see the lavender foothills of the Winds. When I swallowed my ears popped.

The highway descended at a gentle grade. A brown sign informed me that I was now in grizzly bear country.

The moon came up, lit the hills.

I drove through downtown Lander, a small town that in the summer months served as a port of entry to the eastside of the Winds. But now that the range was snowmantled and inaccessible most businesses had closed for the winter leaving the streets of Lander forlorn and listless.

Brawley’s Self-Storage Co. was located off 287, two miles north of town. I pulled up to the gate several minutes past eight o’clock and punched in the access code. The facility was dark and deserted. As I entered and the gate rolled shut behind me, I recalled the last time I’d come here, after fleeing the cabin seven years back, in that state of shock and dread. At the time I didn’t think I’d last through Christmas. My life was over in every way imaginable and the first enticing whispers of self-destruction had begun to germinate in the weakened tissue of my psyche.

I drove through the empty rows of storage buildings for five minutes until I located mine.

It was colder when I stepped outside, the moon still rising, the snowfields glowing high on the distant peaks. I unlocked the door and stepped into the hallway of small storage lockers. Mine was a 3’ by 4’ on the bottom row. I’d rented the space for nine years at a cost of $1,200.

Kneeling down, I removed the padlock and pulled open the door.

Dust plumed.

I coughed.

The overhead light had burned out in the corridor and the moonlight that streamed in through the doorway did not provide adequate illumination. So I dragged the filthy suitcase out of the locker. I walked back outside, set it down on the hood of the Buick.

I unzipped the suitcase.

They moved me in a terrible way, these artifacts of Orson. Sitting down on the hood, I lifted a manila folder and a notebook from the stash. Despite what I would have to pay for looking at his photographs and reading his words, I intended to examine everything, to immerse myself once more in my brother’s depraved world, to learn what I could of his accomplice, Luther Kite, and where he might possibly be.