Celine

TWENTY

The truck groaned on its springs and bucked their heads into the roof. Celine pushed the Toyota to the end of an unmaintained logging road. Chicksaw lived in a shithole. The “house” may have started as a single-wide but it had been chopped up more than once. And added to with logs and steel framing and plywood. A car windshield had been framed in for a picture window. The front door itself must have been salvaged from a school—it had a push-bar latch. They pulled into the dirt turnaround with their windows down and could hear loud yelping and howls. The door jerked open and Chicksaw stepped onto the pallet porch with a shotgun. A small beagle shot out of the gap and jumped down to the dirt and began to bay. The man spoke to it sharply and it hopped back up to his side and sat, tail thumping the porch.

Chicksaw was tiny, maybe five foot three, with a long gray beard like an elf. Skinny. He was the most elfin man Celine had ever seen. They hadn’t meant to surprise him: They tapped the horn half a dozen times before they even got to the yard. He held the gun in one hand and shielded his eyes with the other. When Celine stepped out of the truck in her short Austrian felt jacket and beret, with her gold bracelets and almost every finger bejeweled with rings, his hand dropped and his face betrayed raw skepticism—as if this might be a practical joke. Or some Publishers Clearing House scam. Celine stepped carefully around dried mud cakes in her Italian calfskin boots and waved a hand at him like an old friend she’d spotted on the beach-club veranda. Pete got out a little stiffly and zipped up his barn coat and settled his tweed newsboy cap into its nest of tufts. Gave a straight-across Maine smile.

Elbie Chicksaw had seen a lot of strange things step into clearings in Montana—once he had seen a bull moose with a goshawk perched on his rack, riding it like a mobile hunting platform—but this might take the cake. He set the shotgun against the doorframe and dug a pair of thick wire-rimmed grandpa glasses out of a breast pocket and looped them over one ear then the other and squinted. For a tracker his eyesight was terrible. He crossed his arms like a jinni and waited.

When Celine and Pete got within fifteen feet of the man they stopped. “Helloo,” Celine called in her best Hail the Natives register. Elbie couldn’t take it anymore. He started to laugh. It erupted out of him and his little frame shook like one of the leaves in the aspen at the edge of the yard. “For fuck’s sake,” he managed to blurt in a voice like a truck dumping gravel. “Who the fuck are you?”

Celine blinked. This man had clearly not been to finishing school, or maybe any school. He probably inverted his fork when he ate, if he used a fork at all. “The question seems a bit vulgar,” she said. “Maybe you’d like to reconsider your greeting.” Elbie took off the glasses he had just put on and cleaned them with the tail of his dirty flannel shirt. He blinked back.

“Sorry. I meant to say, ‘Where the fuck did you all beam in from?’ You’re not going to give me shit now for ending a sentence with a preposition?”

Ahh, Celine thought, a diamond in the rough. There seemed to be a lot of those in Wyoming and Montana. She cocked her head and studied the tracker with her squinty-eye-bird look. “Where’s the library at, asshole?” she murmured.

Which set Elbie off into another fit. “Right! Right!” he breathed. “The Harvard upperclassman with argyle socks! Damn! Fuckin’ hell!”

Celine tugged her wallet out of her front jean pocket and opened it to her license card. “Celine Watkins, private eye. This”—she motioned to Pete—“I mean he, is Pete, my Watson and my husband. Actually, I may be his Watson, but no one would know because he doesn’t say much.”

Elbie widened his eyes at the new information and let another gust of laughter run through him. “Oh, God,” he breathed. He replaced his glasses and opened three old-school aluminum lawn chairs that were leaning against the indeterminate siding. “Sit,” he said. “You’ve clearly come a long fucking way. I’d invite you in but it’s Tuesday and the cleaning ladies are wreaking havoc.”

They sat. Elbie broke some dry sticks from a stack on one end of his makeshift porch and piled them with some crumpled Red Lodge Advertisers into an oversize semitruck hubcap and lit the pyre. As the flames licked and rose he held his hands over them and rubbed them together. Fun, thought Celine. We can pretend we’re homeless right here on the porch. A little like pitching a tent in the backyard.

He tapped a Camel unfiltered out of a hard pack and offered it around, then took it himself and lit it on a burning twig. He coughed once, hawked and spat, and said, “What can I do you?”

She had to admit it was pleasant sitting around the fire in the shelter of the man’s porch with a few dry snowflakes blowing onto the planks. Chicksaw seemed to be pieced together like his shack, which was growing on her. The place looked haphazard, but on closer inspection everything seemed to have a function. The fifty-five-gallon drum at the east corner, for instance, which caught water from a guttered rainspout. The scrap-lumber framework on the other side of the porch, which she thought at first might be a lattice for vines but then realized was where he tacked out and stretched his hides. There was a beaver hide under the eave, drying right now. She recognized the fur from one of Baboo’s stoles.

The same for the man: If he’d been a quilt it would look at first glance very primitive, even crazy in its pattern. But study it a little closer and one might see some fine stitching and some very curious patches. Celine began almost immediately to revise her first assessment of his education. He had clearly been to some school somewhere. The closer she listened to his fitful outbursts, the more she thought: College. Yes, definitely. Then: English lit. Then: Northeast somewhere. Then: Ivy League, probably. Ending a brief discourse on the inevitability of corrupt law enforcement, he said, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” At one point he said that winter in Red Lodge was “colder than Winter frigging Carnival.” Finally, being Celine, she interrupted him and asked point-blank, in French, if he had studied comparative literature under Professor John Rassias at Dartmouth. Chicksaw’s cigarette fell from his mouth into the fire. Stopped him cold. It was either the precision of the question or the perfect, even beautiful French.

“Ouais, ouais,” he said in the vernacular, on the inhale, like a true Frenchman. He smiled and pouted his lips and assumed a completely different persona. Pete said it was like watching a brown octopus pass over a bed of green coral and almost disappear. “C’était réellement un maître, ce professeur. Un vrai don du ciel pour éclairer la littérature française classique, Molière, Racine, Voltaire. Vraiment.” Deep sigh. “Requiescat in pace,” he added, shifting smoothly into Latin. Celine was surprised he didn’t cross himself. Damn. What a weird world. Wonderful, really.

“What bothered you about the disappearance of Paul Lamont?” she asked abruptly, also in French.

“The tracks,” he said without hesitation in English. “The fucking tracks were all wrong.”

“Just a sec,” he said.

Chicksaw got up from his lawn chair and went into the house, came out a minute later with a bag of marshmallows and three long barbecue forks and handed them around. “No Graham crackers or chocolate. Still.” He browned himself a perfect treat and began to give them a lecture on grizzly tracks. He said that grizzlies walk with an “over-step” in which the rear track will appear just ahead of the front track of the same side. “The tracks will be offset, anglewise, something like twelve degrees and the rear track will be just a little deeper on account of the bear carrying more weight in the hind end. Now when he’s dragging something, usually a carcass, the rear tracks will set even deeper and the front tracks tend to lose their regular offset and may smear. If you get on all fours and try dragging that branch across the yard with your teeth you’ll see why.”

“We might skip that part,” Celine said with a sweet smile.

“Right. But the Lamont Bear—that’s what everyone calls him—his tracks ran in and out of the drag mark with the normal offset. Also, the depth of the impressions did not change.”

“Hmm.”

“Hmm. That’s what I said. Also, the impressions of the toes. Over uneven ground and especially dealing with cargo, so to speak, the toes will flex and move and the space between them will vary. Not to the untrained eye, but if you look closely.”

“And these toes stayed put.”

“Perfectly. Kept their spacing to the millimeter.”

“But you didn’t have that many tracks to check,” Celine said, peeling the blackened skin off her burned marshmallow.

Chicksaw looked up sharply. “What do you mean?”

“Well, it snowed the night he would have encountered the bear, didn’t it?”

He stared at her. “That’s right. I had the set beneath the big spruce by the road, the tree with the blood on it, and that was it. Five prints. A drag mark. The rest all covered up by snow in the night.”

“So if you were going to plan your own disappearance you’d pick just such a night, wouldn’t you?”

He studied her for a long beat. He had pieces of toasted marshmallow stuck to his beard. “Kinda what I was thinking,” he said.

“What does L.B. stand for?” Celine said.

“Lawrence Burton.”

“Lawrence Burton Chicksaw?”

“Chillingsworth.” He picked the bits of goo out of his whiskers. “In Montana you gotta pick your battles.” He took a flaming marshmallow out of the fire, blew it out, and gave it to the dog.

Elbie explained that a plausible track could be carved. “I knew an eccentric painter once in Colorado who carved a set of huge clawed tracks and glued fur between the toes and bolted them to a pair of running shoes. Jim Wagner was a character. He stomped all over the mudbank of his favorite fishing hole and it worked. Scared the crap out of everybody and he had the place to himself. People thought he was crazy for fishing there in the evening. The rancher brought in the game wardens who just scratched their heads, they’d never seen anything like it.” He laughed his gravelly laugh.

“Couldn’t you see human impressions off to the side? Of the Lamont Bear?”

“There were plenty under the snow. It’s the first creek and first pull-off outside the park. It’s pretty, I guess. Seems people pull over to picnic and pee.”

“Did you share your concerns?”

Elbie squinted at her. “I’m not at all shy.”

“And?”

“Travers hired me. The sheriff. This is before he got overruled by the park. I gave him my report.”

“Did you ever talk to Farney?”

“Farney is ex-marine. Kinda the charge-the-beach mentality. I’m not saying he can’t be subtle because he can. But his first instinct is to go straight ahead. Go for the simplest and most plausible explanation of anything. Lex parsimoniae. The more assumptions there are, the more out of his depth he gets. He’s a good man, and I guess over the long run, all things being equal, he gets more right than wrong. Going with the simplest explanations, maybe he comes out ahead of the rest of us.”

“Occam’s razor.”

“Right. Bear tracks, drag mark, bloody boot, case closed. Plus, he really looked pained every time the girl showed up.”

“Gabriela?”

“Right. That was her name. We had a meeting, the four of us.”

“You did? Who?”

“Travers, Farney, Gabriela, and I. At the site. She kept insisting and finally Farney thought it was the least we could do. Show her how they found everything. Give her a little closure.”

“Good God, the sheriff didn’t mention that.”

“I don’t think it was anyone’s finest hour.”

A gust blew along the pallet porch and sent sparks against Celine’s and Pete’s legs. A few dry snowflakes blew into their faces. The tracker got up and fetched more broken sticks from the stack and built up the fire.

“How do you mean?” Celine said.

“Well. Farney set it up. I wasn’t invited but Travers called me in. Like he knew what all Farney was going to tell her and he wanted me to be there. Like maybe the conscience of the outfit, I guess. She was so young and I gathered now she was an orphan. It was heartbreaking. But she was sharp as a tack.

“The sheriff wasn’t allowed to give her his report and he never expressed his doubts about what all the park concluded. He had to keep a united front for so long—especially with the media. I mean. Imagine if he had broken ranks and started bringing up questions. What a media clusterfuck that would have been. And what would it have accomplished? Pain and doubt for the girl. Suffering, that’s what. Everyone knew they would never find this guy. Not dead, not alive. Whatever the hell happened that night it was for keeps. Sometimes you can just feel it, in your bones like a change in weather.”

He shuddered. Celine could see that, like her, he took his assignments to heart.

“So we all met,” he said. “She came in her own car, a little compact out of Bozeman probably. We parked at the bridge and walked the short distance into the trees. Cold, mid-November, a dry fall so far—except that one week—and not much snow, a lot of patchy dirt showing through. She was wearing a hooded parka that was too big for her, it had patches that said ‘Smithsonian-Arctic Institute Antarctica Expedition 1975.’ I guess it was her dad’s. And she wore mittens, I remember, and held a little picture in a frame. I asked her what it was and she showed me: her mother and father, close up, arms around each other, leaning close and smiling big as anything. There was a railing in the picture, looked like they were on a boat, their hair was blowing around. Lord, they were a handsome couple.”

“So the four of you were under that tree.”

“That’s right. And she was so skinny in the big parka. I mean I should talk. Farney and Travers are both big men, football players, and she looked like a child next to them. She pushed back her hood so she could hear better and the impression was not dispelled. I mean she looked so young and she was wearing mittens and holding on to that photograph. It broke my heart. I mean. I am not a sentimental man.”

“Don’t be so sure of that,” Celine said.

“Well. How she was, it may have had something to do with what happened. Farney cleared his throat and proceeded with about as much alacrity as if someone were holding a gun to his head. He went through all the details, the boot here, the blood here, the tracks, the cameras, the drag mark, not looking at her, not able to, then he’d glance over fast and bite his lip and clear his throat some more.

“‘The conclusion—bla bla—is that he did not survive the initial attack. We have data on these sorts of attacks, bla bla bla. More than a very brief initial engagement, they are almost always fatal. Especially when equipment or clothing are separated from the, well, ah.’ He shut the fuck up. He was beet red. It wasn’t the cold. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. You could tell he wanted to put a hand on her but he didn’t. Her eyes were big and shiny. You knew she was using all her strength. Farney clears his throat and looks over at Travers and says, ‘Sheriff?’ I told you how it was. Imagine the scene. Do you think Travers or I was going to pipe up and say, ‘Well, gee, young lady, who just lost your last remaining parent, there are about ten fishy things with this whole fucked-up disappearance—’ Wasn’t going to happen. We caved. I admit it. Not my finest hour. She deserved to know the truth. I thought it then and I have thought it often since. A little time passes and it’s, well… sleeping dogs.” He turned and spat off the porch.

You let the sleeping dogs lie. Celine glanced at the beagle curled at the man’s feet, and the piece of marshmallow stuck to its black nose.

They drove in silence back down the forest track. When they hit the county road Pete said, “What was that about argyle socks?”

“Oh,” Celine said, “you honestly don’t know that one? Your alma mater and all.”

Pete shook his head.

“Well, the kid from Arkansas arrives at Harvard and is trying to get his bearings and sees an upperclassman striding across the Yard—wearing argyle socks and smoking a pipe. ‘Excuse me,’ says the kid very respectfully, ‘can you tell me where the library’s at?’ The upperclassman peers down and haughtily says, ‘Young man, at Harvard we do not end our sentences with a preposition.’ ‘Oh,’ says the boy, mortified. ‘Let me rephrase that: Where’s the library at, asshole?’”

Pete’s soft chuckle was the best part of the day so far. “I do remember it now,” Pete said. “I guess I just wanted to hear you tell it. Speaking of libraries, I think that should be our next stop.”

“You’re reading my mind again.” She licked clean two sticky fingertips. “We need to read a little history and find the National Geographics we are missing. Lamont was in South America a lot, and I have a hunch he was there at just the worst time.”