Savage Run

8

Marybeth slammed down the telephone receiver and, wide-eyed, looked around her house to see if anyone was watching her. Of course, no one was. But she was shaking, scared, and angry nonetheless. And very self-conscious.

It was the same voice on the telephone from the day before. He had called at the same time: after the kids had left for school and Joe had gone to work, but before Marybeth left for the stables. He had either guessed very well when he could talk to her alone or knew her schedule. Either way, it was disconcerting.

“Is this Mary?” the man had asked. “Maiden name Harris?”

That was as far as it went yesterday before she hung up. When the telephone rang again this morning, she knew intuitively that it was him. This time, she wanted more information about why he was calling, although she was afraid she already knew.

“Who is this?” she asked.

He identified himself as a writer for Outside magazine. He said he was doing research for a story he was writing about deceased ecoterrorist Stewie Woods.

“Why are you calling me?” she asked. “You should be talking instead to our sheriff or my husband. Would you like the sheriff’s telephone number?”

The reporter paused. “You’re Mary, aren’t you?”

“Marybeth,” she corrected. “Marybeth Pickett.”

“Formerly known as Mary Harris?” he asked.

“My name has always been Marybeth,” she insisted. This was not completely a lie. Only two people had ever called her Mary.

The reporter’s voice was more tentative. “Maybe I’ve got the wrong person here, and if so, I apologize for wasting your time. But my research led me to you,” he said. “Did you know Stewie Woods when you were growing up?”

She hung up on him.

It had been a wonderful summer. That summer, the one between high school and college, had been tucked away in her memory but still came back to her from time to time. She had fought it back successfully and never let it bloom. She had tamped that flower back into the earth with her heel. But when she read in the newspaper that Stewie Woods was dead it all came back. Even now, fifteen years later, the memory of it was still vibrant.

Back then, Stewie Woods was terribly homely but very charismatic, a gawky teenager turning into a fine but unpredictable athlete, who was already envisioning the building of an environmental terrorist organization that would rock the world. Hayden Powell was handsome, sardonic, and talented and vowed to make Stewie and their joint mission to Save the West famous. Although she never shared their radical passion for environmental causes, Marybeth’s attraction to both rogues was exciting in the same way that it was exciting for other girls her age to hook up with rock stars or rodeo cowboys. Stewie and Hayden were bad boys, smart boys, wild boys, but they had good hearts. They were already wreaking havoc with environmental vandalism. An evening out with them generally involved pulling up survey stakes for a planned pipeline or removing the bolts from bulldozer tread. Although there were several close calls, the three of them never got caught.

And they loved her. Stewie, especially. He was so in love with her that it was as embarrassing as it was flattering. Once, after intercepting a pass for the Winchester Badgers and taking it into the end zone for a touchdown, Stewie had turned to the partisan Saddlestring crowd and spelled out “M-A-R-Y” with his long arms because he knew she was watching the game with her friends.

During the summer, the three of them spent nearly every evening together. They fished, they went to movies, they committed sabotage.

Hayden Powell went on to Iowa State for the writing program. Stewie got a football scholarship to Colorado. Marybeth went south to the University of Wyoming, intending to become a corporate lawyer. Instead, she met Joe Pickett, a gangly, soft-spoken sophomore majoring in wildlife biology.

She had not kept in touch with Stewie Woods or Hayden Powell because they were dangerous. With Joe’s job as a fledgling game warden, they had moved six times in the first nine years and so it had been relatively easy for her to miss the telephone calls, letters, or Christmas cards they might have sent. With her name change and the fact that her mother remarried and moved to Arizona, she knew she would be difficult to track down. But she had read about Stewie’s exploits and seen him on television. The biography had been published six years before, and had garnered minor critical attention but instant cult status. At the time, Joe and Marybeth were in Buffalo, Wyoming, with Joe’s first full-fledged district as game warden. Marybeth was pregnant with Lucy, Joe worked insanely long hours, and Sheridan was a four-year-old. Marybeth couldn’t have been further removed from the environmental derring-do of Stewie Woods or the literary escapades of Hayden Powell if she lived on the moon.

Finally, a year ago, during her breaks while working in the county library, she had read the biography. She had not checked the book out or brought it home. Stewie had mentioned “his first love, Mary Harris” but, thank God, he didn’t know her married name. But she was in there. And she had to admit to herself that when she found the volume the first thing she looked for was her name and what Stewie had said about her.

Marybeth assumed that the reporter had read the same biography, but unlike Stewie, the reporter had located her. And the reporter wanted some comments from her for his story.

She had never told Joe about this short period in her life. It hadn’t seemed necessary; it would have complicated things that didn’t need complicating.

But now, she thought, she needed to talk to her husband. She would do so when he got home that evening. He deserved to know why she was upset at breakfast the week before and he needed to know about the telephone calls from the reporter. It was better she tell him than that he find out when a story was published in a magazine or he heard it some other way. It was time.

Marybeth checked her watch and realized it was time for her to leave for her job at the stables.

As she grabbed her purse and headed out the front door, she could hear the telephone ringing in the kitchen.