with the results of his mentorship. That is, if he’s not laying dead under that heap of a house over there.” The men were all waiting for this conversation to conclude in the only way it could.
“Buster, I got no choice but to take you in.”
“Aw, but Sheriff, ah ain’t killed nobody…”
“That’s what he always says,” someone muttered.
“Turn around. I’ll have to cuff you.” Buster almost burst out in tears, but complied docilely. As the sheriff escorted him to the back of his cruiser, Buster called out to the diggers.
“Hey, fellers, keep an eye out for my ro-day-oh buckle, will ya?”
Sheriff Dudival pushed his head down to fold him into the back seat.
“Buster, that’s the least of your damn problems.”
b
Down at booking, the corrections officers gave Buster a more thorough pat down. Then they fingerprinted him, photographed him, and collected his personal effects. He surrendered a bag of Bugler with some rolling papers, the keys to his Chevy Apache truck, his lucky Ute arrowhead, and his Colorado State Fair wallet with four dollars in it. The corrections officer looked up and smirked when he found a dried buttercup pressed between his social security card and an unpaid parking ticket. He was told to unstring the shoelaces from his manure-covered White’s Packers so they couldn’t be used to commit suicide. They took his hat. They gave him an orange county uniform and a towel, and then led him to lockup.
Someone, probably the sheriff, had sent down orders that Buster be put in the “suicide watch” cell. It was brightly lit with a big porthole-like window that faced the correction officer’s desk so he could keep a constant eye on him. Buster sat on his bunk and looked around his new digs. The toilet was a one-piece stainless steel job, as was the sink. There was no mirror and, worse, no window. Was it possible for someone who had spent his entire life outside to survive the rest of it inside? He could already feel his strength ebbing. He would surely die if he couldn’t be out under the sky. That is, if they didn’t execute him first.
Buster sighed and looked at his hands. They were as big as Rawlins baseball gloves and just as broken in. What made him think he could make his way in the world with his brain instead of these? Probably Mr. Mallomar. He was always overvaluing, pumping things up. Maybe his friends had been right when they’d told him not to get mixed up with people like the Mallomars. There was going to be plenty of time for regret. He wasn’t going anywhere. In his mind, he began to flip through the stupid events leading up to this—as if they were the embarrassing red-eyed snapshots the sober person always takes of the drunks at a party.
Dudival stormed past Janet Poult, his secretary, who’d already heard what had happened at the Mallomar ranch on the police scanner, and slammed his office door behind him without even a “howdy-do.”
He sat at his desk and rubbed his face with tedium and aggravation. Under the harsh florescent light, his face was a craggy composite of avalanche chutes, scree slopes, and deeply cut drainages, the result of forty years of wearing a badge in Lame Horse County. When he opened his eyes he saw that his lunch had been brought in—a paper plate of beef taquitos that Mrs. Tejera, the cook at the High Grade, had made especially for him. White fat had begun to congeal at its borders—the chalk outline of a murder victim on a sidewalk. Dudival knew that she was an illegal but left her alone. Vanadium couldn’t afford to have their best Mexican cook sent back to Chihuahua. She made chicken mole from scratch, and he would be damned if he’d send her packing. As the highest ranking elected official in the county, it was the privilege of the sheriff’s office—a precedent set by his predecessor Sheriff Morgan—to adjudicate most matters himself, without the help of judges or outsiders. But what he could do for Buster?
Having no appetite, he threw his lunch in the trash and unlocked the top drawer of his desk removing his private journal. He opened it from the beginning and read in his own faded handwriting the narrative that he began recording over twenty years ago.
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
Native Son
According to town lore, Buster McCaffrey was born on New Year’s Day. His mother, a slight nineteen-year-old Mormon girl from Monticello, Utah, left her folks to run off with a Jack Mormon—one who had lapsed in his faith and broken from the church. McCaffrey père was said to have worked for the Atomic Mines Corporation. This was 1987 and by then the mine was over forty-five years old—requiring the miners to go down two thousand feet to work a seam. Sheriff Dudival was never able to gather a complete picture of the man. Some said he claimed to have worked at the famous Eldorado uranium mine in Canada. Because of this experience, management put him on a jackleg percussion drill. A co-worker vaguely remembered a guy named Tom McCaffrey as a complainer, that he hadn’t been on the job more than a week before he started saying the mine tunnels were narrower than what he was used to up in Canada—and the place was giving him claustrophobia. One of the muckers—the people assigned to slushing the blasted rock and ore from the stopes and bringing them up the chutes to the main haulage-way—remembered a new guy, he believed his name was McCaffrey, being assigned to a miniature diesel bulldozer—six feet long and four feet wide. The muckers were paid less than drillers, but on the bright side, they got to sit on their asses all day. One of the old timers said he recalled a story about a guy—was it McCaffrey?—asleep on his dozer, not fifty feet from where the blasting crew put a charge of Tovex in the hole. After the blast, this fellow, McCaffrey, had the brass to tell the supervisor that fumes from his diesel had stultified him. He blamed the Atomic Mines Corporation’s lack of proper ventilation, once again citing the Eldorado Mine in Canada as the paragon of mining procedure. Management asked Sheriff Dudival to run a background check on him. When it came back, Sheriff Dudival said that McCaffrey wasn’t who he said he was. There had never been a McCaffrey on the payroll at the Eldorado Mine in Canada and his Social didn’t match. Concerned that he might be a troublemaker or a rank malingerer angling for a free ride on Workmen’s Comp, the Atomic Mines people instructed Sheriff Dudival to escort him off the property.
Dudival recorded in his journal that he waited for him at the main gate the next morning, but McCaffrey never turned up for work. He learned that McCaffrey and his wife had bought a little piece of land up on Lame Horse Mesa—this was when you could still get it for cow pies—and headed over there to tell him he was fired for falsifying his application.
He found the McCaffreys living in an abandoned sheepherder’s wagon. Sheriff Dudival knocked on the tiny, rickety door. This missus came out and said McCaffrey was gone.
“Where did he go?”
“Didn’t they tell you?” she said, tearing up.
According to Sheriff Dudival, Mrs. McCaffrey broke down and said that her husband had come home from work the day before with bad news. There had been an accident at the mine. He had been exposed to a deadly level of radiation.
She said the doctor at the mine gave her husband one week to live. Even worse, he said there was a 90-percent chance he would contaminate their unborn child if he were to stay with them—in as close quarters as theirs. She suggested that they move, and get a second doctor’s opinion, but he wouldn’t hear of it. There was no time, or money. No, the only thing for him to do, in everyone’s best interest, was to leave. Were any of the other men exposed as he was? No, he said. But then, none of the other men had stood up to the Corporation and complained about the unsafe mining conditions, either. Had management tried to kill him? Who knows? I’m dead anyway, he answered. He asked that she put a change of his clothes in his rucksack
