In Plain Sight

Joe set the staple, tightened the wire, pounded it in with three hard blows. He tested the tightness of the wire by strumming it with his gloved fingers.

“It sings better than you,” Joe said, and bent down to the middle strand, waiting for Bud Jr. to unhook the tightener and move it down as well. After a few moments of waiting, Joe looked up to see that Bud Jr. was still watching the vapor trail of the jet. Bud Jr. shot out his cuff and looked at his wristwatch. “Isn’t it about time for a coffee break?”

“We just got here,” Joe said. they’d driven two hours across the Longbrake Ranch on a two-track to resume fixing the fence where they’d left it the evening before, when they knocked off early because Bud Jr. complained of “excruciating back spasms.” Bud Jr. had spent dinner lobbying his father for a Jacuzzi.

Joe stood up straight but didn’t look at his companion. There was nothing about Bud Jr. he needed to see, nothing he wasn’t familiar with after spending three weeks working with him on the ranch. Bud Jr. was thin, tall, stylishly stubble-faced, with sallow blue eyes and a beaded curtain of black hair that fell down over them. Prior to returning to the ranch as a condition of his parole for selling crystal methamphetamine to fellow street performers in Missoula, he’d been a nine-year student at the University of Montana, majoring in just about every one of the liberal arts but finding none of them as satisfying as pantomime on Higgins Street for spare change. When he showed up back at the Longbrake Ranch where he was raised, Bud Sr. had taken Joe aside and asked Joe to “show my son what it means to work hard. That’s something he never picked up. And don’t call him Shamazz, that’s a name he made up. We need to break him of that. His real name is Bud, just like mine.”

So instead of looking at Bud Jr., Joe surveyed the expanse of ranchland laid out below the hill. Since he’d been fired from the Wyoming Game and Fish Department four months before and lost their state-owned home and headquarters, Joe Pickett was now the foreman of his father-in-law’s ranch—fifteen thousand acres of high grassy desert, wooded Bighorn Mountain foothills, and Twelve Sleep River valley. Although housing and meals were part of his compensation—his family lived in a 110-year-old log home near the ranch house—he would clear no more than $20,000 for the year, which made his old state salary look good in retrospect. His mother-in-law, Missy Vankueren-Longbrake, came with the deal.

It was the first October in sixteen years Joe was not in the field during hunting season, on horseback or in his green Game and Fish pickup, among the hunting camps and hunters within the 1,500-square-mile district he had patrolled. Joe was two weeks away from his fortieth birthday. His oldest daughter, Sheridan, was in her first year of high school and talking about college. His wife’s business management firm was thriving, and she outearned him four to one. He had traded his weapons for fencing tools, his red uniform shirt for a Carhartt barn coat, his badge for a shovel, his pickup for a ’99 Ford flatbed with LONGBRAKE RANCH painted on the door, his hard-earned authority and reputation for three weeks of overseeing a twenty-seven-year-old meth dealer who wanted to be known as Shamazz.

All because of a man named Randy Pope, the director of the Game and Fish Department, who had schemed for a year looking for a reason to fire him. Which Joe had provided.

When asked by Marybeth two nights ago how he felt, Joe had said he was perfectly happy.

“Which means,” she responded, “that you’re perfectly miserable.”

Joe refused to concede that, wishing she didn’t know him better than he knew himself.

But no one could ever say he didn’t work hard.

“Unhook that stretcher and move it down a strand,” Joe told Bud Jr.

Bud Jr. winced but did it. “My back . . .” he said.

The wire tightened up as Bud cranked on the stretcher, and Joe stapled it tight.

THEY WERE EATING their lunches out of paper sacks beneath a stand of yellow-leaved aspen when they saw the SUV coming. Joe’s Ford ranch pickup was parked to the side of the aspens with the doors open so they could hear the radio. Paul Harvey news, the only program they could get clearly so far from town. Bud hated Paul Harvey nearly as much as silence, and had spent days vainly fiddling with the radio to get another station and cursing the fact that static-filled Rush Limbaugh was the only other choice.

“Who is that?” Bud Jr. asked, gesturing with his chin toward the SUV.

Joe didn’t recognize the vehicle—it was at least two miles away—and he chewed his sandwich as the SUV crawled up the two-track that coursed through the gray-green patina of sagebrush.

“Think it’s the law?” Bud asked, as the truck got close enough so they could see several long antennas bristling from the roof. It was a new-model GMC, a Yukon or a Suburban.

“You have something to be scared of?” Joe asked.