In the taming of the West, the prairies, they bled. There was war between the white man and the Native American, the outlaw against the honorable, the harsh elements against anything that crawled or thirsted—yet as scurrilous and unforgiving as bloodletting always is, much still represented a kind of progress toward the future. Not always fair; not always judicious; not always kind. But it is 2012, and though we call ourselves more civilized, little has changed. The greedy still steal the land, the rich still get richer, murder still happens. Dark Prairies is set in the prime of the twenty-first century Wyoming gas boom, when some landowners become rich and others get nothing but ruined roads; fortunes are made or lost on what some would call a toss of the legal dice. When a terrible murder rocks a small town—when Sheriff James Pruett himself loses his beloved—the prairies, they WILL bleed again. How many will die this time, in honor and in vain? In this, his third novel, R.S. Guthrie has delivered his magnum opus. Dark Prairies carves into the raw, twenty-first century West at both its worst and its finest hours and does so in the depths of an ocean of both loyalty and greed.

“Remarkable…Deserving of more than five stars. A hypnotic storyteller and a gifted writer with a flair for intoxicating, gripping prose.” – Russell Blake, bestselling author of JET and Silver Justice.“A starkly beautiful tale of greed and redemption.” – Frederick Lee Brooke, bestselling author of Max Vinyl and Zombie Candy.

“R.S. Guthrie has produced a stunning work!” – Alan McDermott, bestselling author of Gray Justice and Gray Redemption.

 

And here, for your reading pleasure, is our free excerpt:

 

“I got a letter today,

how you reckon it read?

It said, ‘Hurry, hurry,

yeah your love is dead.’

I got a letter today,

how you reckon it read?

It said, ‘Hurry, hurry,

you know that gal you love is dead.’”

Eddie “Son” House,

Death Letter

 

Chapter 1

SHERIFF PRUETT toed the edge of the obsidian, geometric opening in the earth. Approximately four feet by two, and shallow. The big man ached all over. He’d cried, shut himself up, and cried again. His heart felt so worn down it did not beat so much as murmur; a utilitarian thing without feeling or sound. The loss consumed him, and his will would not rise—muted by a damp, negative space swallowing his physical being. Pruett was shattered; broken in ways he might never fix. He did not know loneliness, or at least he had no memory of it. Now this singularity encased him—an invisible, merciless force threatening to erase all he was or ever would be.

Like the victim of a holocaust.

Sorrow made the old man feel weak. Exposed to the emotional elements. But like everything else, he made room for it. A man got good at tamping emotions down—one here, one there—or at least Pruett had. The problem arose when there was no more room for packing.

And this last tragedy was far too oversized for his soul to bear. Even were his stowaway places clean and emptied, he’d still never have figured a way to subjugate this much devastation—at least not for long.

What reconciliation could stand up to a fate as twisted as this?

Pruett occupied a world now where all the songbirds had flown and only carrion remained. Elemental tasks tested him: waking, standing, breathing. He was a sheriff; how did he go forward from here? Just how did the balance sheets get equaled on all sides?

 

 

A phone rang, interrupting the late afternoon boredom of a slow Saturday at the Sublette County Sheriff Dispatch in the tiny town of Wind River, Wyoming. Sheriff James Pruett occupied the desk and answered the call.

“Sheriff’s office,” Pruett said

A thin, rattlesnake drawl tickled his ear: “There’s been a shooting over to the Rory McIntyre place, Sheriff. Things ain’t good, you need to come fast.”

The caller disconnected.

Pruett couldn’t move. He tried to reconcile the words; repeated them in his mind, hoping they’d scatter, reform, and produce a different result.

They didn’t.

Deputy Red Horse Baptiste was on patrol. Pruett reached for the radio, his hand trembling under the sovereignty of fear.

“Baptiste,” he spoke into the mike.

First, what seemed infinite radio silence, then: “Deputy Baptiste here, over.”

“Get to Rory’s place, Red Horse.” Pruett said. “Get there now.”

“Yessir,” Deputy Baptiste said. Pruett didn’t give orders that often. When he did, his deputies knew there was no point in discussion.

“Red Horse?”

“Yeah, boss?”

“Load your shotgun.”

 

Pruett dialed the emergency volunteers. Then he called his other two deputies at their homes. He locked the office and belted his holster; loped down the courthouse steps two at a time, his considerable girth bouncing in concert. The fringes of his vision felt blurred. He would remember later that the town seemed eerily quiet with a Saturday night so soon at hand. He would also never forget the foreboding that scampered like a river of ants up and down his spine.

The county Suburban reached ninety miles per hour before Pruett got to the dip at the edge of town, took the flattest spot, and still nearly tore the front bumper off.

He drove west of town, toward the Green River Valley, straight into the glaring, tragic beauty of the Rocky Mountain sunset. The blacktop flowed beneath him, a river of opaque charcoal, its surface pocked and crackly like old, broken skin.

There was one name playing through Pruett’s mind:

Bethy.

Again and again, as if looped on reel-to-reel.

God, don’t you let it be her.

Not a prayer, exactly, because he hadn’t done that in damn near forty years. More of a demand.

Bethy Pruett was the nexus of Pruett’s whole damned universe. He’d known her originally as Bethy McIntyre—back when she was the cutest little pigtailed missy in grammar school. Pruett figured he’d loved her all his life, or at least as long as memory served him.

Before Sheriff Pruett.

Before the war.

Before everything.

A shiver slid through him as easily as the point of a sharpened spear pierced warm flesh. He thought about the profound force of the inevitable.

You do not always see things in time, he thought.

Not even a sheriff.

Pruett had not paid heed to the thunderclouds gathering on the horizon of their lives. But he should have. The McIntyre feud was well over a year ongoing. Father, Rory, and his two sons, Rance and Cort, made several million dollars from the gas companies that had invaded Sublette and Teton counties; like many ranchers in the area, the trio received a fortune for the mineral rights they owned. But by the bad luck of hellfire, Rory’s youngest son, Ty, got nothing. As the legalities played out, Ty owned only surface rights on his inherited parcel; an oversight by the original Will and Testament of Rory’s father. The county owned all rights beneath Ty’s ground, so in the end all Ty McIntyre got were ruined roads, damaged irrigation, and a further hatred of democracy.

Rory, Rance, nor Cort had any legal obligation to Ty at all. And they didn’t feel any. Luck of the draw, they often said after whiskeys in the Cowboy Bar or across the street in the Wooden Boot.

Ty blamed them for it, as any person might, and he did so openly—to anyone who would listen. Hate was Ty’s common-law partner but toward his family, well, Pruett knew that hatred burrowed even wider and deeper.

Bad blood had spilled in the local saloons half a dozen times. Fists opened flesh wounds and words opened worse. Bar patrons paid the drunken scrapes little attention. Fights between Ty and anyone else were nothing new. And folks held no particular admiration for the McIntyre family. Most figured such business was typical feuding; father versus son, brother versus brother—a few small tumors that would die off once the oxygen quit flowing to them.

But Pruett knew it would go on, and so did Bethy. She knew her family was bad cement, poured from generation to generation and mixed with hateful blood. The McIntyres were racist and old school mean. Pruett appreciated the fact that he’d cut a sweet filly from a corral full of surly, untamable stallions. And though he suspected what boiled down deep, he chose to ignore it. Some of his reasons were out of respect for his wife; she was sweet-hearted to a fault and still loved all of them—naive love from the innocent, offered unrequited to cantankerous, oily hearts.

 

Bethy Pruett died a fair stretch before the sheriff arrived. As if she’d never existed. In less than an hour’s time the world changed so much it was as if Pruett had lived the past forty-four years in a vacuum. Deputy Zach Canter called from the ranch and tried to warn the old man off, told him to turn back; told the sheriff his team of deputies could handle everything just fine. But of course, Pruett came.

And when he arrived, he was not prepared. All the talking himself into being ready for the worst did no good. Bethy’s frail, elderly mother, Honey McIntyre, held the lifeless body in her lap, quietly stroking that magnificent auburn hair—the hair Bethy had tended to every other Thursday at the salon in town. Dark, chocolaty blood dripped off the porch and pooled in the dirt at Honey’s bare, arthritic feet.

Pruett couldn’t decide whether he wanted to burst apart or cave inward; he wanted to both scream and be forever silent. In the end he was capable only of doing his job. It was his only handhold on sanity. So he directed his deputies, orchestrated the scenario, as any good cop would. He motioned to Deputy Melody Munney:

“Secure the crime scene, Mel.”

“Honey,” he said to Bethy’s mother. “You’ve got to let her go. Let us take care of her now.” Pruett fixed his attention on Honey McIntyre’s red, swollen eyes, avoiding the horror just beyond the peripheral.

“Canter,” he said to his youngest deputy. “Gather everyone inside the tack room. Get statements. The barn’s heated…no sense anyone suffering this damn chill. Baptiste. You send the ambulance home. Get Scoot and his Coroner wagon. Cordon the whole front of the house, kitchen too. Nobody touches anything.”

 

The remaining sunlight gave up its attempt to escape the horizon and the gloaming sky, suffused by clouds the color of an angry bruise, turned brick red. Night descended then, and quickly. Sheriff Pruett’s team continued their mercifully robotic tasking.

“Ty got here in a rush,” Zach Canter told his boss an hour later, after the interviews. “They were all inside the kitchen, playing cards. They heard a truck come up the road, a big diesel. Vance Dustin, the hired hand, heard the same thing from the bunkhouse. By all accounts, each of them figured it was Ty, and knew for sure when he started shouting. No one can say for sure what he was sayin’ exactly, or who he was sayin’ it to. You know Ty. He was drunk and mostly incoherent.”

Canter hesitated.

“Tell me the rest,” Pruett said.

“Bethy got up and walked out on the porch. All the witnesses said they heard just one shot. It had to be a clean one, Boss. No way she suffered.”

“Now that’s hard to say, ain’t it, Deputy?”

“Yessir, I guess it is.”

“Ty fired the shot?”

“Dustin was the first outside,” Canter said. “But he was so drunk he was seeing double.”

“It’s okay, Zachary. Go on.”

“They all saw Ty drive through the lawn and down the road to the south entrance. Didn’t see anyone else.”

“Make casts of those tire tracks,” Pruett told Red Horse Baptiste, motioning to the deep impressions in the grass at the corner of the side yard.

The sheriff opened the door to the Suburban and climbed in.

“Where you headed, sir?” Baptiste said.

“I know where he went,” Pruett said, and drove away south.

The Willow Saloon was a billiards parlor from the late eighteen-hundreds. Sage, Wyoming, sat eight miles northwest of Wind River, a one-horse town made up of the saloon, a post office, and a small country store. A previous owner converted the upstairs of the Willow from bordello to residence in the early nineteen-hundreds.

Pruett put his hand on the hood of Ty’s truck. It was the only vehicle in the small dirt lot. The metal had long since cooled, the engine quiet. The sheriff unholstered his revolver. He checked the cylinders and eased up the stairs, peering through the dirty glass of the saloon door, his nerves dancing expectantly.

Ty sat alone, stooped over the Springfield. A weathered Stetson and a half-empty bottle of Wild Turkey sat next to him on the bar. Pruett saw no one else. Owner and barkeep, Roland Pape, was in the wind. Or worse.

Pruett opened the door slowly. He targeted the sweaty, thinning hair on the back of Ty McIntyre’s head. The door creaked loudly, but the old cowpoke remained motionless.

“Sheriff,” Ty finally said.

“Yep,” Pruett answered, his finger steady on the trigger guard. “That rifle loaded, Ty?”

“Wouldn’t be much of a rifle if it weren’t.”

“You know where Roland is, Ty?”

Ty pointed toward the back door.

“Took a powder,” he said. “Weren’t much jaw in him. Not like usual.”

“Ty, I’m taking you in. Just two ways that happens.”

“Takin’ me in?”

“I’ve got big questions need answering,” Pruett said. Streams of sweat ran down the nape of his neck and into the middle of his back. His stomach bucked and kicked like a wild horse. His mind screamed at him, questioning, wanting to know why he didn’t put a bullet in McIntyre’s spine. The law seemed insurmountably distant from Pruett. Frail. Unworthy of such moments in a man’s life.

“I said I got to arrest you,” Pruett hissed.

Ty did not answer him but he slowly raised the bottle and guzzled from it.

Hate swirled inside Pruett, no chimney for escape. He cocked the hammer of his weapon. The loud CLACK snapped the tenuous still of the bar. Ty’s head rose up. His shoulders tensed.

“Need you to put those hands on the back of your head, Ty. Slow and easy. Like you mean it,” Pruett said.

“Or it could end right here,” Ty said. “That’s what you was thinkin’.”

“End comes in a lot of ways,” Pruett said. “It doesn’t have to go down ugly.”

The tension in Ty McIntyre’s back and shoulders suddenly gathered itself. His head tilted back and forth, neck joints popping.

Pruett braced himself. He knew Ty had deceptive, bobcat quickness. The sheriff once saw the old cowpoke punch three college-aged drunks in the face; three in a row before any of them figured the situation.

Pruett put his finger on the trigger, exerting just enough pressure to be a fraction from discharge.

“Ain’t no use no more,” Ty said, and reached for the Springfield.

When the brain gets nervous, time slows down. It’s a coping mechanism. Processing cycles. The sheriff’s world dropped into quarter speed.

Movement in the shadows near the back of the bar.

Ty’s hand curling around his weapon.

The smoothness of the Smith and Wesson’s curved trigger.

Sweat running freely.

Ty McIntyre’s skull.

Bethy.

The ache in his heart.

The avenger inside, demanding vengeance:

Him or you.

Then, at the moment he needed to react, Pruett froze.

The soldier training did not fail him. The years of law enforcement experience did not fail him. His mettle did not fail him.

It was his will to live that quit on him.

Pruett eased off the trigger.

Let the chips drop where they might.

Ty McIntyre hesitated, as if he’d read the old sheriff’s mind—and then he slid his rifle the length of the bar, raised his arms, and placed his hands on the back of his head. Roland Pape shuffled out from behind a table near the stairs to his home.

Pruett exhaled.

Sick. Shamed.

The sheriff used his left hand to put the handcuffs on Ty. He read the man his rights and escorted Ty out to the Suburban, wishing he could wash the stench of cowardice from his own skin.

 

The funeral and wake proved nearly unbearable. Pruett’s mind struggled for oxygen, drowning deep in a murky sadness. He feigned connectedness with the guests, stomached the canned epitaphs, returned the heartfelt handshakes. All the guests knew Bethy in one way or another and most of them Pruett considered friends. But today they were all outsiders. Spectators on the periphery of his devastation.

And there was Sam, his adult child, returned home only because of the death of an estranged mother; Sam, most peripheral of all. Pruett could not help but think of the biblical story of the prodigal son. In the bible’s version, the father waited with open arms. The sheriff’s own arms had been closed so long he feared they might never be pried apart again.

Pity confounded Pruett, challenged his self-respect. He knew when given purchase, pity anchored itself to a man’s heart, soothing him, making promises—keeping him company in the low hours until a man cleaved to it; until he worried more about it leaving than staying.

Mourners oozed pity. The stench of it emanated from them like perspiration, spoiling the air Pruett breathed.

And the old sheriff felt naked; exposed to the elements: a stumblebum amongst the agile; emotional cripple amongst the stalwart. The barber had trimmed Pruett’s gray, thinning hair earlier in town and the old sheriff wore loose, wrinkled trousers tucked unevenly into brown Abilene roper boots. He hid behind a felt-brown, Charlie 1 Horse hat; held it before him like a talisman: protection against the omnipotence of the mighty torment in his heart.

Pruett stole glances at Sam. His blood. A part of him. Out of his and Bethy’s lives since turning eighteen.

The deputies all stood with their sheriff.

Melody Munney.

Zach Canter.

Red Horse Baptiste.

In the end, Pruett waved as the four-wheel drive taillights disappeared back down the mountain; back the way they came.

Sated by sandwich wedges, comforted by cake, and warmed by coal-black coffee, the mourners and the prodigal child receded.

And the pity receded with them.

The steep south flank of the Gros Ventre range sliced up from the distant coniferous canopy, timeless and severe, sharpened by God’s whetstone and left to protect the northwest Wyoming territory like a tyrannical king’s castle spire. Sheriff James Pruett stared out through the cold, misting rain. Across the expanse. Pruett land. Twenty-two coniferous acres scattered with a dozen sprawling patches of prairie, full of gorgeous wildflowers and on most days a wondrous, heavenly integrity of light.

The land belonged to the Pruetts since before Wyoming gained statehood. It contained a small family cemetery, marked on three and a half sides by a weathered, two-rail fence. Behind the newly refinished log house, the burial ground sat just past two oak trees that grew together as one in the middle, separating again as they prayed, open-armed toward the sky.

Against the land, the cemetery appeared austere; as cemeteries went, it struck one as describable and unassuming. The Pruetts buried three generations there, including his mother, father, and baby brother, lost in childbirth. They also buried several hired hands there—men from the ranching days who had no other family. Some were from a tribe of Nez Perce who came across the Idaho border in the early nineteen-hundreds—Deputy Baptiste’s kin.

Pruett stood before the cemetery’s newest grave. The calluses on his palms and fingers paled next to the malignant lesions on the surface of his soul. The icy Wyoming rain offered no purgation; shame and guilt secreted from Pruett’s pores, dripping soundlessly with the sweat and rain into the black opening beneath him.

So much of a man got wrapped around the axle over a forty-four year marriage. The task of unraveling seemed impossible; it lay before Pruett, terrifying and enigmatic, like an unfinished nightmare. He spat tobacco into the rivulets of rainwater that spread like spider webs at his feet, then stared toward the heavens.

I always said to do your worst. Guess you were listening.

His old man had been a preacher, but Pruett always found faith a tough nut, even as a boy. And it didn’t get better. Things happened in a man’s life.

Things done in the name of war.

Things left unsaid.

Only death promised relief.

Memento mori—everyone dies.

But while they lived, men grew regrets. And some regrets made strong men emotional wanderers. Pruett’s regrets bore teeth. Guilt, however, was far stronger than regret.

Guilt swallowed a man’s faith whole. Left him with nothing but a gaping, loveless, inescapable void.

And the burden of seeing Sam, his once beloved child—seeing his betrayer firsthand after all these years—caused more guilt in his own heart than Pruett anticipated. It cleaved the sheriff like the honed edge of the sword drawn across an unhealed wound.

 

Light, diffused by the storm, began its retreat. Pruett could no longer see the spattered earthen floor in the shallow hole. He kissed the cold metal urn and bent stiffly, placing Bethy’s ash remains in the ground. He picked up a shovelful of muddy earth, but stopped short of dropping it in.

His wife would have demanded a prayer; would have said no body deserved burying in the ground without some words spoken to God on behalf of its soul.

Anger notwithstanding, Pruett did his best to speak to God:

“We’ve had our disagreements. Neither one of us lives up to the other. I can’t apologize for that now. Don’t want to. But I loved Bethy with everything I had. And she loved you. Now, since you took her from me, I am asking you to open the gates of heaven wide. You welcome her into your arms, because she’s never done anything to hurt another living soul, and she damn well deserves it. Amen.”

He stared again at the shovel in his hands.

Tools felt nothing.

They existed only to make trails for men; to build homes for them; to make their lives more productive.

And tools existed to bury them.

Arthritis seared Pruett’s joints as he dropped the muddied earth on Bethy. Towering there in the freezing mist—implement in hand, prostrate inside—Pruett lamented the will of God.

 

 

“One of these days

I’m gonna run
I’m gonna leave these fields behind

To find what’s over the horizon
One of these days

I’m gonna go
When you look at me

you’re not gonna see a scarecrow.”

Montgomery Gentry,

Scarecrow

Chapter 2

 

“CATTLE THIEVES beware.”

The auditorium barely contained Professor Hanson’s booming voice. The students’ chatter pursued a hasty diminuendo. Rustling papers stopped rustling; the girl smacking gum in the front row paused.

The only sound left to Hanson was his ego, serenading him.

Hanson was tall and lanky, with so little fat that his features looked as if they’d been chiseled from stone. He was not handsome, exactly—too skinny for that—but he had an intriguing look about him; a look that drew people in, and his perfect blue eyes looked as if they’d been intentionally etched by a divine artist to fit his gauntness and bring it to life.

Still, were he to stand unmoving at night, outlined in shadow, one might believe a scarecrow had come in from the field for a dutiful rest.

“Given the choice between burning alive or being cut down by a truckload of gunfire,” he said, “which do you choose?”

The gravity of the question was intentional—it was, after all, the segue to the lecture’s core.

“Another question: would any of you…would I…have the temerity to write an entire journal while facing imminent execution?”

Years ago, when a younger version of Hanson had commanded the courtrooms, the galleries came to expect rapture. Lecturing to a hundred college students proved more of a challenge. They constituted a collectively fickle will. Prone to boredom, likely to move in one direction as well as another; they were not unlike pieces of driftwood on the shoulders of wide, ever-changing current.

“Nate Champion, a poor cattle rancher—a man who didn’t even own the property on which he ran his nominal twenty head of livestock—was murdered in eighteen ninety-two by the hired guns of the Cattlegrower’s Association of Johnson County. Anyone care to guess why?”

No takers. The fear he might pluck a name from thin air was palpable. His reputation from the Law College preceded him, and Hanson enjoyed the ambiance of discomfort such possibility instilled.

“Moving on,” he said, mercifully. “It was uncomplicated, like the razing of the countryside while civilization moved westward. The Johnson County War was nothing more than a systemic reality taught to us by history: the politically staked, super-rich—in this case, cattle barons—making themselves richer on the backs of the poor, uneducated proletariat. What happened in this part of Wyoming’s history is no worldly mystery. It is a microcosm of the way society has always been.

The words hung there like ephemeral wisps of winter breath.

“Nate Champion made a courageous stand. He owned a single handgun, had a few reloads, and one knife. He took out a few of those who intended to steal from him one of the only valuable things he owned—his life. But it was hard to make do against those kinds of odds. We’re talking Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid here. Bonnie and Clyde.”

He paused.

“Scream versus the babysitter.”

A ripple of laughter.

“There was no storybook ending coming. No hero in the midst. The mob started piling Champion’s own firewood against the cabin, meaning to burn him down or flush him out. Either way, the mob didn’t care because it was the same end result.

Lucky for posterity, Champion had been writing journal entries all along. While the bullets tore the cabin apart—with his friend lying dead in a pool of blood outside the front door—Champion put down his final testament.

Here is what he wrote last, just before he signed the final page, stuffed the book in his shirt pocket, and broke out the back door to a hail of gunfire:

‘Boys, I feel pretty lonesome just now. I wish there was someone here with me so we could watch all sides at once….Well, they have just got through shelling the house like hell. I heard them splitting wood. I guess they are going to fire the house tonight. I think I will make a break when night comes, if alive. Shooting again. It’s not night yet. The house is all fired. Goodbye, boys, if I never see you again.’”

Professor Hanson let the words hang there. The symphony conductor, holding forth his baton; the notes still resonating.

“Land,” he said quietly. “In the end, it wasn’t the cattle. You can own a thousand automobiles, but if you don’t have the highways to drive them on, they are just so many parts.

And owning livestock isn’t like owning cars. Cattle breed. You can grow a herd, but not if there’s no land to put them on.

Free-grazing, cattle rustling, ‘don’t fence me in’…it’s all about the same song.

Woody Guthrie had a great thought:

‘This land is your land, this land is my land’.

But not in Johnson County.

Not then, and not now.

The great state of Wyoming, perhaps more than any other, was built on the value of the land, and it is the value of the land that makes her both wonderful and as dangerous as a merciless, murderous posse.”

Hanson stood. Surveyed the sea of flesh-colored ovals. He’d infused them with his interpretation of the song. He walked languidly around to stand at the front of the lectern, his posture both reflective and authoritarian.

“How many have heard of the murder in Wind River?”

A surprising number of hands.

“Brother murdering sister, it’s not a pleasant thing. But when one pays particular attention to history, and to the current stakes, not entirely unexpected.”

A lone student rose in the center of young adults. Hanson recognized her. Wendy Steele, one of his best students. Older than most of these young ones, yet declared pre-Law.

“I thought you were an attorney,” Wendy Steele said.

“Retired,” said Hanson.

“I can see why,” she said, loudly.

“Excuse me. Ms. Steele, isn’t it?”

“I believe the legal system presumes a person innocent until determined guilty by a jury of peers,” she said flatly. “One would think a defense attorney to be intimate with this basic core of his profession.”

“I think you’ve found the wrong class, madam,” Hanson said in his best lawyerly tone. He was reaching deep for his courtroom swagger. Steele’s surety and tenacious accusation surprised him; he needed a reacquisition of equilibrium.

“This is Wyoming History,” Hanson stated. “My law classes gather in a different building altogether.”

“As do your principles, apparently,” Wendy Steele said.

A snicker from the rear. A few gasps.

Hanson just stood there.

Statuesque.

Incredulous.

Spellbound.

Unsure of whether his mouth was truly agape or whether it was simply the jaw of his ego.

She’d sabotaged his entire concerto. Skewered him in front of his student body. Worse, he felt an embarrassingly cool attraction.

One predator’s respect for the other?

There was no time to decide. Wendy Steele picked up her backpack and, deftly as she had attacked, climbed the stairs, two at a time. Up and away—away from the muted, smitten presence of the great J.W. Hanson.

 

The wind takes few holidays in Laramie, Wyoming. It sweeps over and down from the Medicine Bow forest. Right to left; front to back; top to bottom. More often than not, it’s all of them in the same few minutes. One moment it will swirl in place, aimless and punch drunk—as if it’s forgotten what it came for. Then it will suddenly blow all its force directly under a person, rendering them near weightless; as if they will relinquish their belief in the physical laws of the earthbound and fly away.

To the environmentalist, wind is the power of the future. To the physicist, it is not an entity at all but, rather, equalization: air rushing from a zone of high pressure to one of lower.

Pressure and time formed much of the earth. The historian learned the same lesson regarding society. Professor J.W. Hanson knew that history proved society a construct of the various pressures of the ages, both sociological and technological:

Race.

Industry.

Religion.

Classes.

For Wyoming it was the pressure between ranchers and free-grazers; the Cavalry and Native Americans; women and the vote.

Most recently, because of the gas boom in many parts of the state, it was between those with mineral rights and those without.

Hanson actually summarized his own theories of the social strife in an interview he did with a reporter from the Laramie Boomerang:

“In every county, township, or parcel, regardless of population or relevance, there is high pressure, low pressure, and the force of greed between.”

 

Friday night at the Buckskin, the crowd surged with the explosive release of a week’s tension. A few hardscrabble regulars sat at the bar, but the pool tables and other open areas teemed with young men and women in the prime of their lives.

Professor Hanson sat at his usual table in the corner, near the basement stairs. It was the best observation point in the place and the least likely to suffer the hips and elbows of drunks. One sip into a two-finger whiskey, Hanson noticed Wendy Steele. She was looking at him across the room; a partial smile bent her left cheek, belying the hostility of their first brief encounter.

She walked over, dressed in tight Wrangler jeans, a belt with an oversized rodeo buckle, a white cotton sweater, and red boots. She carried a half-empty bottle of beer; her gait was keen and clearly unaffected.

“May I sit down?” she asked, raising her voice to be heard.

The smile was authentic, so Hanson acquiesced, pointed to the empty chair, and sipped at his drink apathetically. He tried to hide his admiration of her sturdy beauty—tomboyish, unbreakable, she carried both rural curves and soft, womanly swells. Her eyes were haunting, charcoal windows that promised you no access to the complications that lay deep within.

Hanson knew several faculty members who ignored the largely unenforceable rule against teacher-student relations. His own abstinence was far less ethical than practical. Adherence to principle was, in the absence of opportunity, simple mathematical surety. Wendy Steele was a young, beautiful woman with a sovereign intelligence—there was no reason for him to fear the possibility of opportunity, though a strange, oblong throe in his gut made him strangely sorry for the fact.

“As you walked from the midst of my class, you must have been thinking, ‘That asshole is not from Wyoming’.”

“I’ve thought it.”

“Would it surprise you to know I was born in Buffalo?”

Wendy took a pull on her beer. “No, but you graduated from Penn Law. You spent your best years in New York. You’re no more Wyoming than Wall Street.”

Hanson’s ego bristled. Externally, he forced a grin.

“Touché.” Less pithy than he’d intended.

“And yet you came back,” she said.

“This only is denied to God: the power to undo the past,” Hanson said.

“Agathon,” Steele said. “They teach Greek poetry at the state schools, just like in the Ivy League.”

Hanson nodded. “May I add that my evening seemed to be shaping up nicely until your impromptu visit?”

“Look, I didn’t come to continue the fight. I came over to tell you I’m sorry.”

“Apology accepted,” Hanson said.

“May I buy your next one?”

“No, thanks,” he said. “I think I’m finished for the night.”

Wendy placed her hand on his.

“One drink. A peace offering.”

Hanson swallowed his whiskey and slid his hand out from under hers. A sting the color of roses climbed Steele’s cheek.

“I’ll see you in class,” he said.

He pushed through the mass of flesh to the loitering coolness of the Wyoming night.

In class, Hanson purposely skipped over the face of Wendy Steele as he lectured. It was two weeks later when she caught him on his way to the Law School office.

“Could we talk?” she said. “Have a coffee maybe?”

“A coffee?”

“We’re adults. Coffee seems innocent.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I did apologize. And I wasn’t hitting on you.”

“Imagine my deflation.”

“I don’t know what I was trying to accomplish before. Seems I can’t get the words right with you.”

“Maybe,” Hanson said, sitting down on a short stone ledge, “there just isn’t much to say between us.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“Maybe not. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

“Dinner tonight,” Wendy said. “Your place. I’m inviting myself over.”

Hanson smiled. “I don’t cook. Epitome of the savage bachelor.”

“Pizza, then. Use your bachelor skills to dial up a pie. I’ll bring cold beer.”

“Grinders,” Hanson said.

“What?”

“The Buckskin does these delicious meatball grinders. I’ll call down and you can pick them and the beer up before you come upstairs to the apartment.”

“You live on top of the bar?”

“Eight o’clock.”

“Nice space,” Wendy said as she flopped down in Hanson’s reading chair. “Not as noisy as you’d think. Being above the bar, I mean.”

“We’re actually in the back. Over the storeroom. It works.”

Hanson felt uncomfortable in his own skin. Or apartment.

Wendy pointed to the wall, inside a nook where a piece of framed art hung in a remodeled space built for a flat-panel television.

“Great painting.”

Hanson said and put four of the six Railyard Ales into the fridge. “One of the only extravagances I allow myself.”

“That’s a Chardin?” Wendy said, kicking off her boots.

“Glass of Water and Coffee Pot.” He opened the beers and joined her, sitting across from her on the matching leather loveseat. “What exactly are we doing here, Ms. Steele? I don’t generally hang out with students.”

“I’ve never cared for you much,” she said.

“Not exactly fit for print, is it?” Hanson said, taking a long swallow from the sweating bottle. “Not newsworthy, I mean. You more than made that point in the classroom.”

“I’ve always been impressed by you, though. That is, of course, a different thing.”

“Consider me commensurately flattered. But impression is no reason to approach a man and invite yourself to his bedroom loft.”

“Is that what this is?” she said.

Hanson could not categorize her tone. It bothered him. He’d made a career reading people—facial expressions; nervous ticks; eye movements—tone was elementary. Prelude to the coup de maître. With this one he was stumbling amidst the planted fields of his own repertoire.

“Your last test score was abysmal,” Hanson said.

“Test score?”

A basic tripwire. Diversion.

Jurisprudence for Dummies.

“Your grade. Down to a C. Even in a state school, that’s not a good sign.”

“I, uh…right. I mean, I know.”

Hanson stood, walked to the kitchen.

“Grinder?”

“Yes.”

He brought the food back on paper plates, along with two more beers; the aroma of sweet marinara tantalized his hunger. When he sat this time, he leaned slightly forward, intentionally stealing a bit of the space between them. She was a strong woman, but still, unschooled.

“Why are you here, Ms. Steele?”

He felt better. Control was back within his grip, gelatinous and unwieldy as it was. He took a large bite of the sloppy sandwich—it was delicious.

Wendy did not answer him. She nibbled at the crust of the baguette.

“I am related to the McIntyres,” she said finally. “Ty is my uncle. So what you said in class, you were speaking of my family.”

“I had no idea. I can see why I offended you, and I apologize.”

“Maybe. I mean, no. You were just talking about it in the way anyone would. But the way it affected me, the way it stung me. Well, it caught me off-guard. I’ve never been close to them. To any of my family, really. My father and I haven’t spoken in years, and uncle Ty…well, like my father, we were nothing alike. I let my emotions get the better of the situation.”

“We’re all vulnerable to a moment.”

Wendy Steele looked away, back to the painting.

Hanson stood and retrieved the last two Railyard Ales.

“He went against the style of his era,” Wendy said.

“Sorry?”

“Chardin. When most of the others were painting grand masterpieces of ornate, asymmetrical complexity, Chardin did his best to capture the simple, beautiful truth at the core of existence.”

“‘One makes use of colors, but one paints with emotions,” Hanson said, quoting the painter.

Wendy turned from the painting. Tears brimmed on the edges of her exquisite bottomless eyes. A singular drop crossed the barrier of her control, running a true line down her flushed cheekbone and into the darkness of shadow below.

“Family is the damndest thing,” she said.

“That it is,” Hanson said. “My father died when I was in my thirties, already deep into my law practice.”

“I’m sorry.”

Hanson waved her off politely.

“He was a good man. Moral. Just a baker, actually, but his turpitude is what caused me to take up law. I saw how honest and unyielding he was. Law-abiding, I remember always thinking. Then he got sick. Stomach cancer. Really one of the worst ways to go. Painful.

So my father, this man of principle and morals, he lies. Lies about the severity of the pain early on so that he can hoard enough opiates under his mattress so that, when the pain becomes very real, he has more than enough to end it.”

“Oh my God,” Wendy said.

“He didn’t want it to look like an overdose. That’s why he hoarded the pills. He planned the whole thing out. Just increased his dosage each day. Pill by pill he put himself to sleep.”

Wendy crossed the small space between them and knelt, putting her arms around him. Hanson’s eyes, though, were dry; his voice was steady.

“It’s not that I blamed him. He did what he had to do. No one suspected. It was me who found his stash—the pills he still had stockpiled. I never told anyone, not until now.”

“He must have been in tremendous pain.”

“No, he planned for that too. The doses he was taking would have assuaged his suffering. He was a smart man. He knew what he would need to kill the pain and he knew what he would need to kill himself. It was then I decided to devote my talents to defending the accused. You see, I realized at that moment that any man or woman can be driven to something they would ordinarily never consider. Those people need someone on their side.”

Her face moved close in, eyes locked momentarily with him. Lips moved together, his mouth opened in surprise, hers with confident passion.

She kissed him. She tasted of beer and smelled of vanilla cream. She reminded him of all things in the world he believed to be sensual. Hanson was a little drunk. He pulled her close. Unable to deny himself. They stayed like that, entwined, exploring each other with hands and tongues. They stood as one and moved to the bed.

The last sex Hanson had was three years prior, with one of the mousy librarians from the Special Collections branch at Coe Library. Liza Dexter, he remembered suddenly. It had been perfunctory lovemaking and had done nothing to assuage his fears of having gotten too old to be any good in bed.

With Wendy, Hanson rediscovered his youth. Because they’d been drinking, they were less restrained; they wrestled passionately, discovering each other’s’ shapes, needs, and desires. He was easily twenty years her elder. Probably more like thirty. Yet she cleaved to him as if he were the only man in the world. She made him feel not only younger but relevant. As if he’d not spent the better years of his life alone.

They made love for over an hour. Fell asleep in each other’s arms. The heat of her lithe body infused him with hope.

 

In the morning, Hanson did not want to move. He woke first. Wendy lay there, delicate as a bird, still pressed unobtrusively against him. He was relieved. The last thing he wanted was for her to awake and realize her horrible misjudgment—relegate him to the purgatory of bad drunken choices.

She did awake. And as soon as she did, she squeezed him harder. Kissed him deeply. They made love again. Slower. More intimate than the night before. Hanson allowed his newfound confidence to guide him. Still she intimidated him, and he strove to show her that he was worthy.

I’ve never cared for you much.

There are times when hearing what you already know to be true is the most unbearable accusation of all. Even as situations change, such words remain lodged in the back of the heart like splinters. They fester. Infect the better times with accusatory concerns.

Was it possible?

Did Wendy Steele come to his bed in order to garner his services? Could her motives be so tactical?

“Back to your uncle Ty,” Hanson said, breaking a palpable yet comfortable silence. “You came here to ask me if I would defend him.”

Wendy avoided his eyes, measuring her response. She kissed his cheek.

“I think so. I’ve never really been one to use subterfuge. The whole idea of asking it now feels pretty unseemly.”

“I suppose it’s only subterfuge when you’ve not been candid regarding your motives,” he said.

“My motives aren’t as clear as they once were.”

“Just like that?”

“Maybe. Or maybe I am just rethinking the whole ‘get involved’ option. Me, I mean. With my family. Not with you.”

“In matters of family,” Hanson said, “we’re always involved. Whether to engage. That, my lady, is the dilemma.”

Wendy nodded solemnly. Her dark eyes conveyed caution. And what else?

A defeated admiration?

“What would you say if I did ask?”

Sitting there, mesmerized by the reawakening this young woman had produced in him—deserted to an extent by his own conscience and principles—Hanson wasn’t sure there was anything he would not be willing to give her. He stroked her cheek and kissed her on the top of her head.

“I’d say no.”

 

“And those people in Black Mountain

are mean as they can be.

Now they uses gun powder

just to sweeten up their tea.”

Janis Joplin,

Black Mountain

 

Chapter 3

PRUETT STOOD outside Ty McIntyre’s jail cell with a plate of hot food from Casa de Zenda. Proprietor Zenda Martinez served the food and took care of the books. Her husband, Roberto, set the authentic Mexican menu and cooked the food.

Ty lay on his back, knees up, boots flat on the mattress.

“Lunch,” said Pruett.

Ty looked over with his eyes only.

“Brung in from where?”

Pruett opened the slat in the door and set down the tray of steaming refried beans, crispy flour quesadillas, and sweet rice.

“From next door.”

“Pruett,” Ty said and got up from his bed. He walked to the bars, leaned against them. He extended a thick, callused hand.

Sheriff Pruett stared for a moment, finally accepting Ty’s meaty, sandpaper paw. It was just something you did.

“Ain’t much in this world I’m sorry for,” Ty said, “but this is one time. I loved her too, though I never said so.”

Pruett felt the barbaric strength in McIntyre’s grip. A nervous flutter ran across his backside. He’d let his guard down. Miscalculated. The gun was holstered on his right side. If anything went down, he’d never be able to cross-reach for it with his left hand. Not in time.

Ty smiled, as if he knew the chess game going on inside the sheriff’s brain. His lips peeled back in a hangman’s smile, exposing battered, wood-colored teeth. He released Pruett’s hand, picked up the tray of food, took it back to his bunk, and started eating hungrily.

The sheriff walked the hallway back to the office. He again felt cowardly. It was not a feeling he planned on befriending. Maybe it was too soon to be back. Baptiste and Munney argued against his returning so soon, and only with what candor they could muster. It was clear that he was pushing the line, but that was how he lived and worked; he wasn’t planning on changing that. And Pruett prided himself in his ability to detach from the personal. He knew how to work; how to put the job first and be a sheriff.

But after the stupid mistake back in lockdown, he now wondered if he’d misjudged the place of his heart in all of it. No one would blame him, but that wasn’t the point. He would not be able to stand the look of his own mug in the mirror.

Back in his chair, shame and fury swirled in his head like a chimney fire. Fueled by the self-embarrassment of his failure back at the Willow Saloon, he returned to Ty’s cell.

“I’d kill you if duty didn’t say otherwise,” Pruett said.

Ty did not look up from his plate.

“Guess I have it coming,” he said.

“You do,” Pruett said. “But my job is to treat you like any other. Let the jury decide and the State hang you.”

“Don’t hang ‘em in Wyoming anymore, Sheriff. You know that. It’s been a few years at least.”

“You and I never cared much for one another, Ty. But I’m guessin’ we both loved Bethy.”

“I always thought highly of you, Sheriff. Really I did, no matter what me or some of the fellas mighta said on a drunk occasion or two. You’re a good man, sir, and over the years, I became grateful you found Bethy and did right by her. You always treated me fair, too, every damn time I was in the poke.”

Ty was a brawler and a drunk and had spent many nights cooling off in the very cell that he now occupied. “Is that all you come back to say?” Ty said.

“No,” said Pruett.

Ty looked up at him with coal-colored, scurrilous eyes.

“Then say it.”

“I don’t know what happened on the ranch for sure,” the sheriff said. “I know what you already said. Your pa and brother aren’t saying anything else. Neither is Honey. I would advise you to get a lawyer and follow suit.”

“Already happenin’,” said Ty. “Niece in Laramie is tryin’ to gather one up. Some professor.”

“A professor?”

“Like that’ll help, I says to her. But she said to shut my trap just the same.”

“Give a shout when the food’s done,” Pruett said. “I’ll send a deputy.”

“I meant what I said about sorry,” Ty said, returning to his plate. “But just so we’re clear…I won’t be sayin’ it again.”

“I meant it, too,” Pruett said. “All of it.”

As the sheriff walked away, a cold line of sweat ran down his spine. The gun on his right hip felt dense; as heavy as the world atop his shoulders.

McIntyre boys stacked hard time. Life in many ranch households left few choices for the sons—or sometimes even the daughters. Fathers wore the ranching mentality into a boy, long and relentless. A rancher’s son would unlikely ever choose any other type of life. Psychologists called such conditioning institutionalization. Ranchers passed it forward decade by decade, century by century. Not a rite of passage but rather an inheritance of duty, burned hotly and deeply into a child; as permanent as any brand.

Ranch country made for a hard living. The land was unkind to those who worked it, so families sometimes became commensurately unkind to their own. Few, however, were as unkind to their own as the McIntyres.

Ty’s father, Rory, inherited the entirety of the McIntyre property when his own father died of a weak heart. Two-thousand upper acres of rough terrain and hayfields; a lower four-thousand acre parcel. The ranch house, a barn, a stable, two corrals, and all the heavy equipment were on the lower piece. Rory’s two brothers had died early in life; young, in their twenties. Rory’s father found the pair, trapped and frozen in a surprise fall blizzard while moving the last of the cattle down from the upper McIntyre place.

Rory married and Honey gave him four sons in a row before he drew a daughter. Ty was the youngest of the boys and a year older than Bethy. Still, he was the best ranch hand, as well as the toughest and the meanest. Ty easily wrestled calves for branding when he was eight and could buck a bale of hay faster than some adult men could when he was ten or eleven.

When he was thirteen, a man named Sketch Borland made a wisecrack about Ty’s cereal bowl haircut. The boy lit into Borland like a small bobcat tearing into a grizzly ten times its size. Borland was no fighter, and a bit of a drunkard, but he had at least a hundred pounds on the young boy. The rest of the crew had to pull little Ty off the older man.

Ty’s brothers—Rance, Cort, and Dirk—were tough too, in that order and according to age. But Ty could handle them all. One at a time or together.

Like Ty, Rance and Cort had parcels of the ranch. The two of them rode saddle bronc and bareback almost every summer weekend at the rodeo grounds in Wind River. Dirk did not ranch. He worked as a crack rider for an outfitting business that caravanned tourists and hunters in and out of the Wind River Mountains.

Ty considered them all pussies. Dirk because he rode soft horses for a living and never did rodeo. The other two because Ty had never really considered it rodeo to ride any animal less angry or dangerous than a bull.

Bulls bloodied and broke Ty into pieces throughout his life. Doctors pinned together and replaced parts of him so many times that against the gloaming light you could see his spine make two distinct turns, like an S-curve on a mountain road. His face had been stomped so magnificently one Friday night that his head swelled to double its size, his face grape-colored and horrifying. It healed mostly, but stayed as cratered and uneven as the surface of the moon.

Over the years, hardship took several inches off Ty’s stature, but those same years added twenty pounds of mass, too. A thin layer of wintering fat hid fresh, sinewy muscle, and more than a few pounds of angst.

Ty McIntyre was getting old, but he was still a man most would rather see on the other side of the street.

Returning to Rory McIntyre’s ranch was something Pruett had been putting off. There were many reasons. He wanted to think that the fear of seeing the spot where his wife died wasn’t one of them, but the old sheriff knew better.

As Pruett stepped down from the truck, Rory opened the screen on the front door and stepped out, a cup of coffee in his left hand.

“James,” Rory said.

“Rory. How’re you holdin’ up?”

“Life don’t allow for men to spend much time mournin’. Work needs to git done.”

“One way to look at it,” the sheriff said.

“Ain’t no two ways about it. You comin’ in or can we do this while I git the wagon rigged up to the tractor?”

“Wagon is fine,” Pruett said.

He followed the old bowlegged cowboy toward the barn where Rory started throwing spools of baling wire and boxes of staples onto the hay wagon.

“Shoulda offered you a coffee,” Rory said. “Honey’s in the house. I can yell for her.”

“I’m good. Not planning to stay here long.”

“Looks like you wintered okay,” Rory said, gesturing to the sheriff’s stomach.

“I did all right.”

“I was rememberin’ all the times you and your family came out here for brandins.”

“Never missed one that I can recall,” said Pruett.

“You got knocked on your ass more than a few times,” Rory said.

“Sure did.”

“You liked my little Bethy, even back then. Always lookin’ after her more ’n yourself.”

“Been fond of her long as I’ve lived and breathed, I reckon,” Pruett said.

“You’ve always knowed my mind on the subject.”

“I know you never liked me,” the sheriff said.

“Liked you just fine. Thought you were lazy, is all.”

“Someone put cow shit in your cereal bowl this morning, Rory?”

“Just conversation.”

Pruett tried to understand. Believe it wasn’t personal. Most ranchers he knew didn’t have much respect for any other way of life. They might tolerate you, even befriend you—but it was a closed society.

“My family’s been working the land as long as any McIntyre,” the sheriff said.

“Not ranchin’, though. You wouldn’t claim that.”

“Not by your definitions, no.”

“Dirt farmers,” Rory said.

“You got a hornet you want to put under my bonnet this morning,” said Pruett. “I’ll tell you now, old man: you don’t quit on the idea, you’re gonna find your huckleberry.”

“Fair enough,” Rory said.

He’d never once looked Pruett directly in the eyes.

“I did all right by your daughter,” Pruett told him. “Best leave it at that.”

“Not sayin’ you didn’t. Not tryin’ to cling to the past, neither. Doesn’t mean I won’t jaw on it from time to time.”

“Bethy was wearing your coat and hat when she was killed,” Pruett said.

“Yep. So?”

“Well, she brought her own coat, didn’t she?”

“Mine was closer.”

“And you were all playing cards.”

“Euchre.”

“What?”

“We was playin’ euchre.”

“So you’re saying she grabbed your coat because it was closer to the door?”

“Yep.”

“And hat.”

“Say again,” Rory said.

“Your hat. She was wearing your hat, too.”

“If you say so.”

“I’m just trying to make sense of all this,” Pruett said.

“Are you? I’m glad for that,” Rory said, and opened a can of chew. “Dip?”

“Trying to cut back,” said Pruett.

“What for?”

“Doc’s got me on a regimen.”

“Doc Percy?”

“Is there any other?”

“Percy’s a quack. I wouldn’t let him doctor one of my animals.”

“My other question, Rory, is why Bethy was getting up anyway?”

“Huh?”

“It’s your house. Ty comes roaring up the road with piss in his veins—I’m just wondering why you didn’t go out to greet him.”

“Why I didn’t?”

“Yeah, why you didn’t.”

Rory seemed to be letting that one settle a bit. He removed his sweat-stained hat, rubbed a patch of gray whiskers, and spat on the ground.

“Hmm. I guess she just jumped to it first.”

“And put on your coat and hat.”

“And put on my coat and hat. Christ, Pruett, is this the best you got to be doin’ right about now?”

“Just procedural, Rory.”

“Fuck procedure, Pruett. That’s my daughter you’re jawin’ about.”

“Just trying to get all the facts straight.”

“Well I got fences to mend. We done here?”

“Just about,” Pruett said. “You aware that Ty’s saying he doesn’t remember anything?”

Rory nodded. “Blacked out as usual, I guess.”

“Might have some more questions for you and Honey a bit further down the road,” Sheriff Pruett said.

“We done?”

“We’re done, Rory.”

“Goddamn right we’re done,” Rory mumbled as the old codger threw a tool belt over his shoulder and mounted the tractor.

Pruett sat on the wide rocker swing on his front porch. His boots rested comfortably atop the flat pine rail, toes pointed toward the expanse of the Wyoming night sky. The cloudless night opened up unabashedly before him; a foreboding conduit to the heavens. The umbrella of stars glowed exquisitely; pinpoints of diamond light floating atop innumerable fathoms of insatiable blackness.

Pruett’s index finger stirred the glass of clouded whiskey. The aroma drifted upward. Pungent and sweet. Inviting and unsettling. His stomach circled and snarled within him like a cornered animal.

He’d purchased the bottle of whiskey almost a month before at the Wooden Boot—the bar had a package liquor store with a drive-up window. Pruett purchased it with a resolve that he would not crack the seal, hoping the gesture alone would both assuage the ache in his soul and calm the demons.

But it seemed over the weeks all the disjointedness and fear and lonesomeness leaked down and gathered in one tepid pool in his chest, solidifying there like a huge, rounded stone.

Pruett looked up into the vastness of the universe. All week he’d dreamed of a drink. He told himself it was because he was willing to do anything to counter the overarching pain in his soul. But that wasn’t true. Not entirely.

He had put the bottle away. Taken it out again. Played the old game of angel and devil on the shoulder; good cop, bad cop. Teasing himself. Knowing that in the end it always came down to himself; who he was at his core.

And how fervently he needed to numb the pain.

Twelve years of sobriety was not something Pruett took lightly. He’d been through several sponsors. Unlike most tenderfoots, he worked a job he loved. And there was the truckload of determination that it took to stay sober every single damn day of that dozen years. Drunks didn’t count by years; they counted by minutes. They clawed their way until enough minutes made an hour and then enough hours made a day.

Pruett had no idea how many moments there were in twelve years, but he’d thought about having a drink in damn near every one of them.

But so far, he’d withstood.

Then, that morning, going through the box of mementos Bethy stashed behind the dresses in her closet, Pruett discovered a single sheet of parchment paper. A weathered eight by ten cardboard folder frame.

A birth certificate.

Samantha Wendy Pruett.

The prodigal daughter who dropped Samantha and now answered only to “Wendy”.

The sheriff drained the orange booze in a single, fluid motion. He poured himself another. Then a third. This time he paused. The feral warmth of the whiskey washed down over the immovable stone, loosening it some; it also tamed the restless animal in his belly.

Losing his wife was a terrible thing, but there were memories that cost him nearly as much—and proved just as impossible to outrun.

 

Pruett heard the car before he saw the headlights. He did not get up as Wendy Steele walked the path toward the house. The two hadn’t spoken more than a dozen words in the past few years, incl

In the taming of the West, the prairies, they bled. There was war between the white man and the Native American, the outlaw against the honorable, the harsh elements against anything that crawled or thirsted—yet as scurrilous and unforgiving as bloodletting always is, much still represented a kind of progress toward the future. Not always fair; not always judicious; not always kind. But it is 2012, and though we call ourselves more civilized, little has changed. The greedy still steal the land, the rich still get richer, murder still happens. Dark Prairies is set in the prime of the twenty-first century Wyoming gas boom, when some landowners become rich and others get nothing but ruined roads; fortunes are made or lost on what some would call a toss of the legal dice. When a terrible murder rocks a small town—when Sheriff James Pruett himself loses his beloved—the prairies, they WILL bleed again. How many will die this time, in honor and in vain? In this, his third novel, R.S. Guthrie has delivered his magnum opus. Dark Prairies carves into the raw, twenty-first century West at both its worst and its finest hours and does so in the depths of an ocean of both loyalty and greed.

“Remarkable…Deserving of more than five stars. A hypnotic storyteller and a gifted writer with a flair for intoxicating, gripping prose.” – Russell Blake, bestselling author of JET and Silver Justice.“A starkly beautiful tale of greed and redemption.” – Frederick Lee Brooke, bestselling author of Max Vinyl and Zombie Candy.

“R.S. Guthrie has produced a stunning work!” – Alan McDermott, bestselling author of Gray Justice and Gray Redemption.

R.S. Guthrie grew up in Iowa and Wyoming. He has been writing fiction, essays, short stories, and lyrics since college.