A Catskill Eagle

CHAPTER 50

“IF THE MINE DEPENDS ON OUTSIDE FOR POWER or water we could cut it off and force them out,” Hawk said. We were eating dinner in the Idanha dining room.

“If we could find a way to do it,” I said. “But when they came out they’d have such security around Costigan that we’d be no better off.”

“And they’d know we here,” Hawk said.

Susan was quiet, eating some cutthroat trout amandine. Hawk had ordered a Sokol Blosser Pinot Noir and I sipped some. I made a pleased motion with my head.

“Oregon,” Hawk said. “Best Pinot Noir comes from Oregon.”

“Who knew?” I said. I poured a little into Susan’s glass. She smiled at me.

“Also,” she said, “the Costigans aren’t officially doing anything illegal. They can, and probably will, call the cops as needed. You would end up in trouble with the law again and you already have too much of that.”

“Also reasonable to assume that Costigan has some influence with the law wherever he is,” I said.

“Okay,” Hawk said, “so we don’t force him out. Mean we gotta go in.”

I nodded. “At least he won’t expect us in there,” I said.

“Hell,” Hawk said, “I don’t expect us in there.”

“We can’t force it,” I said.

“True,” Hawk said. “Eighty-second Airborne couldn’t force it.”

“Guile,” I said. “We’ve got to think our way in.”

“We may be in trouble,” Hawk said.

“Best we can do,” I said, “is poke around and see what develops and keep thinking.”

Susan looked up from her trout. “That’s your master strategy?” she said. “Poke around and see what happens?”

“It’s all anyone can do,” I said. “The thing about us is when we start poking around we are hard as hell to discourage.”

She put her hand briefly on my forearm. “You are that,” she said.

We had some dessert, and some coffee, and some pear brandy, and after dinner Susan and I took a walk around downtown Boise. We stopped to look in the window of a bookstore on Main Street. Across the street a western-wear store showed a collection of high-heeled boots, and big-brimmed hats, and long-skirted canvas dusters. Just down from the hotel a storefront restaurant advertised steak, eggs, and fresh biscuits. There was a pawnshop where everyone seemed to have pawned a shotgun or a hunting knife. Everything was closed and there was around the small city a dark starlit sense of space running off in all directions under a dark disinterested sky.

“Not like Boston,” Susan said.

“No,” I said.

“I’ve never been in the West before,” she said. “Have you?”

“In a sense,” I said. “I was born here.”

“In Boise?”

“No, next state, Laramie, Wyoming.”

“I never knew that,” Susan said.

“My father and my two uncles and I moved east when I was small.”

“Your mother died when you were small,” Susan said.

“No,” I said. “She died… actually she died before I was born.”

Susan looked at me in the light from the streetIamp. She raised her eyebrows.

“She was in an accident,” I said, “when she was nine months pregnant. She died in the emergency room and the e/r doctor took me by cesarean section.”

“So in some sense you never had a mother,” Susan said. “You were posthumous.”

“Un huh. Not of woman born.”

“What kind of accident,” Susan said.

“I don’t know. My father never spoke of it. Neither did my uncles.”

“Not your father’s brothers, as I recall.”

“No,” I said, “my mother’s. It’s how my father met her. The three of them had a little carpentry business.”

“And your father never remarried.”

“No. He and my two uncles brought me up.”

“Is he alive still?”

“No.”

“Your uncles?”

“No.”

“You never talk about them.”

“I’m interested in what’s going to happen tomorrow,” I said.

“But what’s going to happen tomorrow grows out of what happened yesterday,” Susan said.

“Maybe,” I said, “but I can’t control what happened yesterday.” Leo had looked amazed when the bullet hit him.

“But you can change what yesterday did to you,” Susan said.

“Yes,” I said, “I guess you can.”

We were back at the hotel. I held the door for her. We went in and walked up to the room. Hawk was lying shirtless on the bed, reading the local paper. When we came in he put it on his chest and smiled at us.

“Guile paying off already,” he said. “Russell called up and say he can get you into the mine.”