Читать книгу Snow - Mike Bond - Страница 11

STEAL FROM A THIEF

AFTER FOUR CUPS of whisky when Zack had crawled into his tent he hadn’t even bothered to turn on his ebook, not caring about what went on in some imaginary world. Over-weary, weirdly unsettled, he wanted to talk to Monica but there was no damn service up here.

The griz, the wrecked plane, the cocaine.

The meeting next week that would decide his future.

Steve’s bullet smashing into the aspen.

What had Steve been shooting at? There’d been no elk, no nearby tracks.

He thought of the two Vegas debt collectors who’d shown up at his door last week. One tall and muscular with a tiny mustache. The other short and swarthy, light on his feet.

He could’ve taken them both out, but what then? And then it’s in the news …

He’d tell Steve to sell his auction rate securities. Get those assholes off his back.

He tried to find a more comfortable position in his sleeping bag but kept sliding off the foam mat. A root underneath bit into his ribs, he pushed it down but it kept popping back up.

How many years had Steve been like a brother? Believed in Zack when nobody else would. Told him, “You’re the best out there. And I’m going to make you more money than you ever even imagined.” And so he had.

When Zack hit the NFL, chances were that like most guys he’d be finished in a year. From horrendous injuries during training camp inflicted by older guys on your own team protecting their buddies whose position you were trying to take. Didn’t matter if you were better. There were always better players coming up – by that they meant less injured.

Like everyone he’d compared football to the Coliseum. You survive by killing others. But back then there was no way out. You were a slave and this was your fate. Was he somehow still a slave?

After his first year Zack was locked into the NFL. Till the injuries took him out. A dance of fate: if somebody’s helmet had been two inches lower it wouldn’t have blown out your knee … that kind of thing … millions of injuries every year – for what? What did the TV viewer not get?

And now nearly 2,000 NFL veterans suing all 32 teams for violating Federal drug prescription laws, for handing out opioids, narcotics, like candy. Here, pop these Vicodins, these Percocets and OxyContins before you go out on the field. And more at half time. Take home another handful to deal with the pain tonight. We’ll have more for you tomorrow.

And here’s a shot of Toradol before every game, and another at half time. All season long, every time you were hurt. When you were hurting all the time. When the drug company says don’t use Toradol more than five times in a row or it can give you a heart attack or stroke.

Guys who played a whole season with a broken leg and the team docs didn’t tell them it was broken. “A bone bruise,” the docs said. “Play through it.”

How many times had he played through it? How many concussions had he had? Back in the days when you shook them off, maybe a couple a game. Whacked the holy Hell out of your head. You hopped up, headed back to where you thought the huddle might be, realizing that the guys in the white were your team, not the guys in brown. Trying to remember what the fuck you were doing, could you possibly run the next play.

You’re in the huddle, body screaming with pain, your eyesight fuzzy, a cascade of wavering images before you. Over the razor howl in your ears you can’t hear what the defensive captain’s saying. You clap like the others, but a little slower, turn to O’Donnely, the nose tackle. “What the fuck is the play?”

You’re strong on the tight end but it’s a weak side pass play so you make a quick run at the QB till he throws and now your head is clearing a bit and you realize how lucky you are that the offense didn’t come at you …

It had always seemed to him hilarious that the Federal government had its knickers in a knot about cocaine but never says a word about the thousands of NFL players with deadly concussions, narcotics damage, and who can barely walk and talk.

That the government doesn’t even tax the NFL.

After seven years, too injured to play anymore, Zack had found his way out: TV Sports Analysis – hilarious, that idea. That well-trained violence was worthy of analysis, like some important historical event, a new triumph in medicine.

And the wannabees can even play “fantasy” football. Pretend they’re their favorite player. Go out there and hit, while you sit in your armchair with a sixpack of Bud Lite. When one single real hit would take you down for life.

Football’s a mix of ballet and chess, he’d always said. But watching it is just sports porn, as Monica had once told him: seeing others do what you’d like to do yourself. And it panders to the viewers’ love of violence. And pain.

As long as the violence and pain doesn’t happen to them.

CURT WATCHED the dancing voluptuous flicker of the dying fire on the tent over his head.

How lovely to lie in this lingering smoke of lodgepole and scrub oak, the frigid wind sifting between bare oak boughs and tall swinging firs, the cold metallic snow, the bitter air and the whisper of distant stars, the warmer upwind scent of horses standing asleep in the corral. The memory of fire on mossy rock in rooted soil, of the lives lived here for many thousand years, Blackfoot, Arapahoe, Sioux, Nez Perce, Cheyenne – all the way back to the first adventurers into this huge land between the towering glaciers, hunting the reindeer, mammoth and buffalo south.

When the spirits were with them.

Till the white man came the buffalo herds so huge it took three days to walk through one herd, antelope in hundreds of thousands, the earth white and tan with their backs to the horizons, a sky thick with eagles and hawks, and darkened for days by flights of geese, cranes, ducks, swans, passenger pigeons, and a hundred other bird tribes that had vanished since the white man. Or so few in numbers that everyone celebrates when one is seen.

And wolves far as the eye could see. And their raven twin spirits watching over them.

So many wolves that a two-mile road in Montana is built up entirely on their bones …

Unending forests.

Infinite prairies soaring into clean blue sky.

Rivers like diamonds, wide and pure, tasting of every good thing they’d come from.

All gone now.

Was that world better? What if he’d lived back then, he and Diana, instead of running a ten-section cattle ranch in Judith Basin County, up in the Little Belt Mountains an hour north on bad roads from White Sulfur Springs, itself a forgotten dot on the vast map of Montana? With only two alfalfa cuttings this year because of the drought? The cattle market in the tank and the industrial wind bastards hunting down every rancher in Judith Basin.

Now the industrial wind bastards had a lien on his ranch.

And it would take two hundred thousand dollars to buy them out. When he and Diana had, what, maybe seven hundred dollars in their Bank of the Rockies account in White Sulphur Springs?

This land had belonged to the people till Wihio the white man came. Came with his lies, guns and diseases. Just as Sweet Medicine, the ancient prophet of the people had predicted. A white man, a trickster, will come to destroy the world.

At first the people had welcomed the white man, the ancient Cheyenne courtesy toward visitors. Then the land stealing, the slaughter of the buffalo, the liquor madness, the endless battles, the last murderous conflicts at the Washita and hundreds of other places, and Sand Creek massacre, the death march to Oklahoma and the deadly escape back to Montana …

Where are you, Maheo the Creator? Why did you let this happen?

He had to forget all this. Pretend it had never been.

This was how the world is.

Stop thinking.

He settled into the sleeping bag’s warmth. Both his dudes jumpy tonight, mostly Steve. Who knew what disasters went on in his life? Maybe not even he.

Even though Curt had spent ten days with them in each of the last three years, he realized he didn’t really know them. In fact they seemed suddenly like strangers.

BACK in his tent, Steve tried to digest what Marcie had told him. But it was too horrible, too awesomely encompassing. To be damaged in so many places, all at once.

The auction rate securities had been sold to everyone as liquid cash equivalent. Citigroup, UBS, Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, RBC Group – all too big to fail … “The single greatest fraud ever perpetrated on investors,” Marcie’d said some financial analyst had just called them. And he’d dropped his clients into them. Like giving them AIDS.

How was he going to tell Zack? Why was Zack pushing to sell out, anyway?

If he could convince Zack to postpone selling them, maybe they’d come back? In the meantime, how were he and Marcie going to live? The apartment, the cars, the private schools … all that going up in flames?

The SEC, why hadn’t they overseen this, like they were supposed to? When the government agency you pay taxes for doesn’t protect you, why have it?

And up the hill, in the deepening snow, a plane of cocaine worth ten million.

Maybe more.

Under maritime law, when a ship is abandoned the cargo belongs to whoever finds it first. Was that true too for air cargo?

Is it wrong to steal from a thief?

He rolled up on one elbow, tipped some coke on his knife and sniffed it. Oh God good. How lucky he’d pocketed some when he’d left the plane, because he needed to stay high for what he now had to do. The coke felt lovely and warm sinking through his chest, his stomach, his arms and legs. This golden glow.

Lady Coke I love you. How many times have I buried myself in your luscious flesh, felt your lissome skin against my chest? How many times I’ve kissed every inch of your tantalizing body? Tasted every cell of your sacred heat?

How many times have I inhaled you with the dedication of a lover? Made you mine?

How many times have I followed your counsel, to grave success?

I’m not giving you up again. Never again. I promise.

He turned over restlessly in his sleeping bag. Must have hiked twenty-five miles today, most of it through deep snow. How come he wasn’t tired?

How come he was trying to sleep when he knew he couldn’t?

Zack would go apeshit about his portfolio. Like it was a big thing, twelve million bucks. That wasn’t real money. And he, Steve, had done his best to make it grow.

Zack had said no risks. But no risks didn’t grow it, and Steve’s job was to grow it. Not his fault the markets went sideways. Not his fault at all.

But it was his fault. He couldn’t deny it, didn’t want to.

Zack had wanted the money protected and now it was gone.

He had savaged his friend’s well-being.

You can’t blame yourself for everything, Marcie had said.

But that’s how you get ahead, he’d told her. Taking responsibility for everything.

Trying to fix everything.

He had to tell Zack about his lost money.

The tent above his head sank toward him with the weight of new snow.

ZACK WOKE, wondered why. A sound, an absence? Had to piss.

He banged on the tent sides to shake off the new snow, squirmed out of his sleeping bag, tugged on his unlaced boots, unzipped the tent fly and crawled out.

The snow had stopped. A carious moon glared through the branches. Cold stung his nostrils like fire. He shivered, had a moment’s sorrow for all the animals out in this frozen night, without a sleeping bag or tent or fire or even a gun to protect them.

And death comes fast, at the tiniest mistake.

Or even no mistake.

He shuffled to the side of the tent and pissed with a long deep sigh, burning a hole in the snow.

From Steve’s tent a faint line of tracks led down toward the distant highway and came back up again. And new tracks led up the mountain toward the plane. He must have gone uphill to piss, Zack decided. But why so far?

Was he crazy, out in this deadly night?

Zack checked Steve’s tent. Empty.

Steve’s rifle and the pack frame he normally stowed down one side of the tent were gone.

Zack ducked back into his tent for his coat, hat, gloves, gun and headlamp, laced his boots, zipped his tent shut and followed Steve’s tracks uphill over the ridge toward the plane.