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By Root 976 0

air and achingly pulled the airplane from the runway into the sky. Joe kept his eyes closed and his hands gripped tightly on the headrest of the seat in front of him as the ground shot by and he wondered if they’d reach cruising altitude before the plane shook apart. For the longest time, he forgot to breathe. The aircraft was the oldest one in the state’s three-plane fleet, and Joe had heard it described as “the Death Plane” because it was the same make and model that had crashed years before and killed the popular governor of South Dakota. Joe wondered if his governor was sending them a message by ordering the old death trap out of mothballs in the Cheyenne hangar and sending it north to pick them up. Inside, the seats were threadbare and a detached curl of plastic bulkhead covering vibrated so violently in the turbulence that it looked like a white apparition. There were six seats in the plane, three rows of two. Randy Pope sat in the first row and had put his briefcase on the seat next to him so Joe couldn’t use it. Not that Joe wanted to. Instead, he took a seat in the third row so he could grip the headrest in front of him and, if necessary, pray and vomit unobserved.

Eventually, as the craft leveled out and stopped shaking, he relaxed his grip, took a breath, chanced looking out the cloudy window. It helped, somewhat, to get his bearings. The Bighorns rose in the west looking hunched, dark, and vast like a sleeping dinosaur, and the town of Buffalo slipped beneath them. He noted how the North Fork and Middle Fork of the Powder River, Crazy Woman Creek, and the South Fork flowed west to east, one after the other, like grid lines on a football field. Joe envisioned each from ground level where he was much more comfortable. It calmed him to put himself mentally on the ground on the banks of the rivers, either in his pickup or on horseback where he could look up and see the silver airplane like a fleck of tinsel in a blue carpet. He sat back, closed his eyes, and tried to slow his heart down.

JOE AWOKE with a start as the plane bucked through an air pocket that left his stomach suspended in the air a hundred feet above and behind him. He was surprised he’d actually fallen asleep. Joe gathered himself and looked outside and saw the rims and buttes of Chugwater Creek and the creek itself. It wouldn’t be long before they touched down in Cheyenne. His feet were freezing from what he guessed was a leak in the fuselage, and he lamented that he’d not had time to change out of his bloody clothes before leaving for Cheyenne to see Rulon. He rubbed his face and shook the sleep from his head, saw that Pope, two rows up, was staring ahead at the drawn curtains of the cockpit. Not reading, not talking on his cell phone. Just staring, deep in thought.

Joe unbuckled his belt and moved up a row until he was behind and to the left of his boss. “Why did you bring Wally Conway?”

The question startled Pope, who flinched as if slapped.

“I didn’t know you were there,” Pope said. “Quit sneaking up on me.”

“Why did you bring Wally Conway?”

Pope looked at Joe, his eyes furtive. “I told you. I wanted a friend with me. Someone I could trust.”

“Then why did you leave your friend?”

“He wanted to help. What, did you want to leave Robey up there all by himself while you and Buck Lothar went on your little walkabout?”

“So why did you leave?”

“I told you,” Pope said, his eyes settling on Joe’s forehead. Despite the cold inside the cabin of the plane, tiny beads of sweat had broken out across Pope’s upper lip. “I’ve got an agency to run. I can’t run it and communicate with the governor while I’m out running around in the woods.”

“Something’s not making sense to me here,” Joe said.

Pope squirmed in his seat and his face flushed red. “Wally Conway was one of my oldest and best friends.” Pope’s eyes misted. “I don’t have that many friends anymore.”

The admission startled Joe. Pope had never confided anything personal to him before.

“There’s something I want you to see,” Pope said, digging into the pocket of his coat and producing a small