Crossing the Divide: A Novel

By Lynn Stansbury

In Reagan-era Colorado, Forest Ranger Will Britt falls to a mysterious death, and his wife Noni is left with their new baby to defend their ranch and her dreams of a Wild West Peaceable Kingdom from a predatory US Senator, who wants to open the National Forest for coal development, and his local agent Petersen Tolstad, a neigbor and damaged Nam vet, who might have been a friend and now may be an enemy.

In the modern literary western tradition of Normal MacLean, Thomas McGuane, and Louise Erdrich, Crossing the Divide asks: Who owns the West? And who owns love?

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Sep 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9781663206633

Lynn Stansbury

Lynn Stansbury is a community medicine physician, researcher, and novelist. Crossing the Divide grew from a time when her husband was stationed at what was then Fitzsimmons Army Medical Center, in Denver, and she was running the Colorado Black Lung Program. They now live in Seattle.

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Acknowledgments

For John

and Aaron, whose story this is as much as mine;

For Cushla and Allison, who joined us of their

own free will (and Callum, brave man);

For Anya, Mila, Olivia, and Sam,

who know that stories are important;

And in memory of B (1960-2020),

who once said, "An adventure is something

you’d rather tell about than live through."

CHAPTER 1

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Late-afternoon light crowned the Park Range to the west and spun the forested mountain shoulders into velvet. Where the east-facing foothills unfolded into late-summer red-gold rangeland, a long line of pack mules and horseback riders filed out of the forest and snaked through the web of pastures above the cluster of log and timber buildings that was the Running Four Guest Ranch. At the head of the line, Petersen Tolstad twisted in his saddle, counted riders, scanned for animals limping, gear askew, guests flopped in saddles or clutching reins. He didn’t expect trouble this close to home after ten days horse trekking in the wilderness. One thing he had learned in the field artillery in Nam, though: make a mistake, and the wrong people die. Reassured, he turned front again. He didn’t ask anymore who the right people were. Hadn’t helped then, and now, fifteen years later, it still didn’t. By the time the lines of horses and mules were tangling in the ranch yard, the peaks to the west were a gray wall of cloud.

Petersen and his two wranglers got animals stripped of gear, corralled, and fed, and guests reconnected with duffel and ambling off toward the cabins, laughing and rubbing sore butts. Petersen was about to run the boys off to get cleaned up for supper when their boss, Mitch Sinclair, outfitter-owner of the Running Four, appeared around the end of the saddle shed, a six-pack of beer dangling from each hand. He was, at the age of damn near forty, amazingly untouched by the years, still the high school rodeo bronc-rider champ with the impish grin and aces up his sleeve. He tossed one of the six-packs at the boys.

Get lost. Need to talk to my foreman here. He split the word, fore man, like it was a joke.

They’re underage, Mitch.

Mitch winked at the boys. Relax, Eagle Scout. They’re not going anywhere. The boys bounded off like puppies. Mitch waved Petersen into the saddle shed. We got a visit from the law today. Sheriff Chuck Tooley, his own personal self.

Mitch hitched himself onto the workbench under the grimy window, opened a beer, and watched Petersen work. Petersen ranged around the space, racking bridles, stacking pack saddles, draping saddle pads to dry, easing into the home smells of barn dust, leather, horse sweat, old wool, old wood. Thinking through what needed to be done now, what needed to be done tomorrow, what could wait a day or two. He did need to check with the high school about his substitute teaching contract for the fall. Needed to get out to Boulder to check on his parents. Needed a haircut. Needed a good fuck. Not necessarily in that order. Somehow, now at the end of another summer living a timeless life on horseback in the wilderness, he had emerged into real time middle-aged. He didn’t drink on the trail, but he wasn’t on duty now. General anesthesia had real appeal. He opened a beer, chugged down half, and said, Yeah?

Yeah. Know that ranger been giving me all that shit? Wants to yank my outfitter’s license?

Will Britt, Petersen thought. So, Will Britt’s done it. Pulled Mitch’s license. That would put Mitch’s hunt guide license on hold as well, and fall hunting season was the Running Four’s main money. Britt had been around only a few years, not much savvy about horses or wilderness outfitters but a doctoral degree in forestry and a serious badass about abuse of delicate subalpine ecosystems. I should be sorry. And he was, for Mitch’s wife and kid. Rachel and Pauly were part of why he’d stuck around the last few years, to help Mitch and Rachel save the outfitting business after Mitch’s parents died. But he was tired of pulling Mitch’s ass out of the fire. One man only owes another man so much.

Yeah, Mitch said, cracking another beer. Got himself killed. Broke his neck or something. Up in the high country. My lucky day, huh? He’ll be back. Tooley, I mean.

Petersen picked up a rubber curry and tossed it into a grooming bucket. He disentangled one last bridle and stood polishing the grass-stained bit on the thigh of his threadbare jeans until he couldn’t remember why he was doing it. You’d think I’d be used to death by now. He wanted to shove Mitch’s big white grin down his throat. Getting a lid on it, he said, That’s too bad. Didn’t Britt’s wife just have a baby?

Since when were you and him best buddies?

Petersen shook his head, thinking, I could have liked Will Britt a lot if things hadn’t gotten in the way.

Mary Campbell told me.

Mary was an Assiniboine from Fort Peck up in Montana, a career civil servant who had run the local Forest Service office since forever. Mary didn’t exactly refuse to deal with Mitch Sinclair, but things went smoother if Petersen did the Running Four’s Forest Service business.

Britt’s wife’s been a Forest Service summer hire last few years. Subs at the high school in the winter. Like me.

Like elk moving out of the high country to overwinter in the sheltered foothills, come fall, the traders in summertime dreams—outfitters, guest ranchers—moved into the edges of town to feed through the long winter. Petersen had been subbing high school math and English for much of the last ten years. New teaching staff supplied what little social life he needed, and he had noticed Noni Britt when she first turned up. Nothing special by way of tits or ass. Something about her though. Dark eyes barricaded behind wide cheekbones, long dark hair that rippled down her back with greeny-gold highlights, like sunlight through forest. A wry, elliptical way of talking, testing you, testing thoughts.

What’d the sheriff want with us?

Just, you know, being’s we both had groups out. And you know Chuck Tooley wouldn’t miss a chance to rattle your cage.

A distinction, Petersen would have said, he and Mitch shared. Twenty years ago, he and Mitch and Young-Buck Tooley had graduated from high school together: sheriff’s son and rancher’s son and Petersen, the army brat, the outsider. They had taken him in, the two local boys, given him a home place, and he had never forgotten that. Now Young-Buck was a Vietnam died-of-wounds statistic, Petersen was back here working for Mitch, and Mitch was the asshole he’d always been. And the sheriff had a long memory.

CHAPTER 2

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Groggy from exhaustion and half sleep, Noni Britt lay propped on pillows in the guest room of the parsonage of Medicine Springs Prince of Peace Lutheran Church with her son in her arms. Elaine Bateman, pastor’s wife, hospital head nurse, school health consultant, and, in the first two months after Dominic’s birth, the only thing that had kept Noni sane, sat wren-like on the end of the bed, small, brown, intense.

You mustn’t blame yourself, you know. Will loved being Wilderness Ranger.

Elaine’s face was soft, her voice full of concern. And, Noni thought, her face and voice now also alert, expectant. This morning, when the sheriff had first brought Noni here, no one had expected anything of her. Shock, chill, sprains, scrapes, and bruises from eighteen hours on horseback in the wilderness, finding and packing her husband’s dead body out of the mountains by herself; that story had given them everything they needed to know. Elaine, her husband, Sheriff Tooley—even Mary Campbell, hovering in the background by telephone—had been glad to take care of her, let her cling to Dom, bathe, sleep. Now, she knew, she was supposed to talk, cry, share. She loved these people. She wanted to give them what they wanted. But she was going to fail, not able to do grief for them the way a woman should. If you’ve been grieving all your life, it’s just the way things are. People you love go away and don’t come back. She was alone in this space. And it was, as it had always been, her fault.

John Bateman appeared in the guest room doorway, wearing his pastoral camouflage expression of mild bemusement.

To John, she said, I need to get home. Her voice sounded childish to her, plaintive, stubborn. I need to take care of my critters. There’s nobody—

She had been so angry. In the six years she and Will had been together—friends, dating, marriage—she had never shouted at him. She wouldn’t have dared, too afraid of losing the closest thing to love she had ever known. Before Dominic.

She could hear her voice: You have three days off. The most time off in four months. The first four months of your son’s life. He smiles now. He’s fun. You need to spend time with him. Not chasing that asshole Mitch Sinclair around the Ute Pass Wilderness.

And his voice, flat and distant as he moved around the corral, packing the mule, saddling the mare. It’s always about you, isn’t it? You and the baby. You and your dogs and your horses and the all the rest of your perfect little Wild West Peaceable Kingdom. He was a small man, built like a samurai, slender and fit, with narrow hips and wide, flat shoulders. He swung onto Classy, gathered up Barge’s lead rope, and rode away. Across the corral and up the creek trail into the mouth of Helsinger Canyon. And she would never see him again alive.

She said again, I have to take care of my animals.

Elaine said, I have to get over to the hospital for a meeting. But I don’t think you should be going anywhere. She looked at her husband. And I don’t think she should be alone.

John gestured pacifically. I’ll take her, he said. The girls can come. We’ll help with the chores. We can always bring her back. Elaine was from Detroit; John had grown up on a ranch in northeastern Wyoming. I only need to stay clean on Sundays. He pulled over a chair. That was Chuck Tooley on the phone. He’s expecting an FBI agent soon. They want to talk to you.

Noni nodded. He would never have been on that trail, angry, distracted, if it hadn’t been for me. Oh, Will, you stupid dork. Bright, funny, wonderful Will. We had so much fun. For the first time in my life, I thought I could catch the moon. But the one absolute she had known all her life was that the fate of an unwanted child is not a happy one. She would never have had a child Will didn’t want, never, and the biological clock be damned. Dominic was our choice. Together. Now he made it all sound so different. All about her. Nothing about him.

John was still talking. She buried her face in the downy feel and baby scent of Dominic’s hair, trying to remember what the sheriff had said this morning. Will was a federal officer, had died on duty, in uniform. The FBI had to be notified. Noni, I’m afraid there’s more. The FBI’s insisting on an autopsy. She thought, I fucked up the evidence. I brought him off the mountain—me, Sin, and Mud, the two best horses in Colorado—and fucked up the evidence.

Noni’s mind lurched off again. Classy and Barge had trotted into the ranch yard yesterday morning like an outtake from a grade-B western movie, the third time this summer. This time, she hadn’t panicked. She needed to talk to him so badly, away from the ranch, away from Dom, somewhere where they could see and touch and hear each other again. Taking old Mud up to him as a ride home was as good an excuse as any.

Instead, she had found his body, crumpled at the bottom of a low cliff partway across an unstable talus slope. Could he have had a heart attack? He was only thirty-eight. Three years older than she was. That’s still young, yes? Motherhood, in the flesh, had hit her so hard. An avalanche taking out a mountainside. She hadn’t meant to push Will away. Is that what he had thought? She knew he was resentful about the sex. She did it when he asked, but her heart wasn’t in it, and he knew that. Elaine had said not to worry. All nursing mothers go through this; it’s just hormones. Things’ll get back to normal. Give it time. Only now she and Will were done with time.

Can they do that here? The autopsy?

No. He—the body has to go to their contract lab in Denver, Chuck says. That’s another reason he called. He needs you to identify Will’s body. Release it for transport. I’ll take you. But we need to go now.

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The only official place to refrigerate dead humans in Ute County turned out to be the hospital. The sheriff’s department didn’t have a morgue, and the closest mortuary was sixty miles west, in Steamboat Springs. As they packed Dom and the girls into John’s minivan, she wondered if Elaine had been thinking all day as she tended her refugees that Will—husband, father, her own and John’s friend—lay in her hospital behind the laboratory between the boiler room and the kitchen.

That’s where the morgue had been in the Indian Health Service hospital anyway, when she’d quit college and come west as a VISTA volunteer. Will called her a Wild West romantic. Maybe. Her grandfather had been a geologist, and she had majored in geology when she’d gone back to school. Grand-Da always said rocks made so much more sense than people. Like animals, rocks don’t lie. They don’t need to. Only people need lies.

John kept glancing at her as he drove. Beyond this, when they’re done with the autopsy, do you know what you want to do?

You mean for burial? He nodded. I hadn’t thought. I need to talk to Will’s parents. She hadn’t thought of them before. In all this. How do you tell parents their child is dead? The thought crushed her. Will’s mother wasn’t well. What will this do to her?

Where are they?

Denver. From Maine originally, but they’ve been out here for years. Will went to high school in Denver, then to CSU. Will’s father teaches at DU. His mother works for the American Friends Service Committee. They’re Quakers.

She had known Will’s parents before she met him. She had stumbled into the Religious Society of Friends the way she had stumbled into a lot of things in Denver in the first chaotic years after the reservation job, before she had gone back to school, moved to Fort Collins. Found Will. Like so many of her enthusiasms, it was supposed to have been the answer to everything: the Zen of the Protestant Christian tradition; the best of Anglo American thought and practice, guilt-free, priest-free; refugees from persecution, not colonizers; the only Europeans never to break a treaty with Native people; chosen by many tribes as the only government agents they could trust not to cheat them; pacifist, abolitionist, egalitarian, thrifty and plain living, honest and logical. Look for that of God in every person, they said. Look for the Light. She tried. And saw it sometimes. Though mostly the way animals scent fear, danger, and aggression, often with frightening clarity. Like she had known in the months since Dom’s birth that something had gone horribly wrong between her and Will.

John said, Death is never easy, and sudden death is worse. Having a structure can help.

Quakers don’t do structure.

Everybody does structure. They just do it their own way.

She didn’t answer. His parents were going to blame her for Will’s death. How could they not? He had never told them how bored he was teaching, angry at grants and advancement he thought he deserved going to other researchers. Like she hadn’t been able to explain to him that lightbulb moment in her master’s work after she’d remapped the Ute County coal deposits for her field work: geology isn’t tales told by your grandfather; it’s what your thesis adviser can sell to a developer. Well, joke’s on him: Helsinger Canyon has nothing worth developing.

The hospital was a mesa of yellow brick and plate glass. John circled the ambulance portico, headed for the senior staff parking lot, empty this late on a Friday afternoon. A sheriff’s department cruiser filled the two spaces nearest the ambulance entrance. Chuck Tooley lounged against the closed rear door, talking into a radio.

John said, Do you want me to come?

No. Please. Stay with Dom and the girls. It isn’t anything I haven’t seen before.

She read his understanding in his face. A woman—feeling it was for the best of reasons—would have needed to break that control. He understood it was all she had left. He nodded.

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The back hall was long, clean, and brightly lit. Tooley stopped in front of a door marked Morgue—authorized personnel only. Keys in hand, he looked at her. You okay with this?

She wanted to scream, Of course I’m not okay! It wouldn’t help though. She moved one shoulder, feeling the ache in it. I found him. I packed him out.

Two metal tables were jammed side by side in the narrow, chill space. One held a long, black, plastic body bag. Tooley unzipped the bag. She hadn’t expected the slow grind of metal teeth to be so dreadful. She saw first a corner of tarp, the makeshift shroud she had tubed him in to haul his body up those three steps onto the cabin porch, slide it across the floor, lever it across Mud’s saddle. Then dark red hair matted with blood. Then the battered face: gray, twisted, familiar, alien.

She glanced up at Tooley. Like Elaine and John, his face was expectant. What was she supposed to do? Throw herself across Will’s body? Howl against fate? She’d done all that, there, sliding down from the trail to cradle her husband’s body in her arms, her cries coming back to her in a mocking echo across the canyon. She touched the tarp.

The tarp belongs to the Forest Service. I’ll need to get it back to them. She looked at Tooley again, feeling her own face flat against her skull. The prisoner showed no emotion. But yes, that’s Will. That’s the body of my husband, William Penn Britt.

And she thought, Okay, I’ve done my duty. Now give me my child and let me go home. My sorrow is my own.

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John drove the dirt lane between Noni’s neighbors’ fence lines, made the sharp left over the second cattle guard and into the cottonwood grove. Noni wondered if they would come out of the trees into her ranch yard and everything would be gone. No shingled bungalow with its screened front porch, no home corrals or garden rows between the house and barn, no tidy row of work sheds or chicken run out from the barn. Then the dogs ran out barking, three sharp-faced heeler-herder mutts: red Addie, blue Alice, and border collie Neddy. She was home.

She was glad for their help, John and the girls—with Dom, with neglected horses and anxious dogs and cranky chickens and a plaintive barn cat. Then Noni was standing with Dom in her arms, watching John drive away through the cottonwoods. Wind rattled through the stiff leaves like dry bones. She stood for a time staring out to the east across the parklands, toward the purple wall of the Medicine Bows. Memory stabbed her: Will’s voice, his scorn. Your own little Wild West Peaceable Kingdom. Then looking down at his broken face in the morgue. And she thought, I refuse to believe our life here together meant nothing. I will build a life here for our son, a life for a life. She turned back to the house. Easy to say. Beyond the barn and the pasture, the mouth of Helsinger Canyon gaped into the darkening sky.

She got Dom bathed and ready for bed and settled with him in the old wooden rocker in front of the cold fireplace, cradling him as he suckled himself to sleep. She had called Will’s parents, blurting the news to Will’s father. He had been mercifully taciturn. Yes, she was okay. The baby was fine. Yes, a horrible accident. Yes, she would let them know as soon as she knew anything more. No, please don’t worry. Yes, she had support. He would assume that support was her mother. Her mother charmed and confused Will’s parents the way she charmed and confused everyone, but they hadn’t done badly as in-laws. Noni had not yet called her mother. Part of her wanted so much to believe that her mother would bully her way onto the next flight west and make things all better. Noni had been wishing for that all her life. It hadn’t happened yet.

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An hour later, Sheriff Tooley sat in Noni’s living room in the oak armchair he had pulled from Will’s desk under the front window. Tooley always seemed too big for enclosed spaces: shoulders too wide, chest too thick, hat-ringed hair and untidy mustache grizzled like an old bear, a comforting smell of horses. The FBI agent sat on the sofa to Noni’s right, facing the fireplace. He was tall and urbane, prematurely gray hair in a crisp flattop, gray three-piece suit, damasked silver tie. With that peripheral vision instinct she had for animals and people, she wondered if he was gay. And then she thought, If he is, he’s buried that sense of otherness too deep to do either of us any good.

The agent’s voice was high-pitched, and he spoke in a near whisper as if trying to disguise it. He said again, You must have known there’d be an investigation.

She said again, I couldn’t leave him there. For the crows and the coyotes. It’d already been a day—

How do you know that?

The way the cabin looked. Like he’d gotten there, dumped his stuff, gone for a walk.

Two days ago.

Yes. Wednesday. Like I said. She took a deep breath, pulling up the horse rider’s mantra: Heels down, butt in the saddle, don’t lean forward too soon. He would have gotten to the Ute Pass ranger cabin about six o’clock Wednesday afternoon. Classy and Barge—his horse and mule—turned up here about noon yesterday. Which means he hadn’t been there to feed them in the morning. So, they jumped out of the coral and came home. Or at least Classy did, and Barge followed.

Tooley said, I shoulda shot that goddamn mare first time she jumped a fence.

Will and Chuck Tooley had liked each other in that tangential male way, respected each other’s professionalism, their commitment to their jobs. Noni thought, He’s lost a friend.

The agent said, And you weren’t worried? Didn’t call anyone?

I did. I called Mary Campbell at the Forest Service office. And Elaine Bateman, for help with Dom—

The agent looked at Tooley. The ones called you? Tooley nodded. The agent peered at Noni again, cocking his head to one side. How heavy was your husband?

In the summer, maybe one forty. He always lost weight in the summer—

And you’re what, five four, maybe one twenty soaking wet? And just had a baby.

The accuracy was startling. Maybe being a cop. She wanted to say, I take care of a barn. I hump bales of hay, bags of feed. My barn, she thought, my critters. Will hadn’t done it all himself. She had had savings. She had paid the down payment. She wasn’t just a tick, sucking him dry, giving nothing. If only he hadn’t said that. If only those weren’t the last words I remember.

Now you tell us you couldn’t find your husband’s radio to call for help, got that limp dead weight—if you’ll pardon me—up a cliffside, dragged it down the trail to a ranger cabin, up a set of steps and onto a horse’s back, started home in the dark, got caught in a freak snow squall, holed up under some trees for the night, and trailed again in the morning. Only then happening to meet the sheriff and his search parties.

His tone did it, the sly we-both-know-the-truth. It’s why you don’t ever tell. Nobody believes you. For a moment, she panicked, alone, trapped in this room with two powerful men, one of whom at least she had trusted. She wanted to snatch up her child and run.

The mudroom dog flap creaked. Before Noni could speak—Will didn’t like dogs in the house—little black Neddy was halfway across the kitchen, arrow-sharp ears aimed at the men in the living room.

He said, Woof. Not a bark or a yip or a growl or any sound she had ever heard a dog make before, the meaning clear: what are you fuckers doing in my house?

She said, It’s okay, Ned. She was lying. And we both know that. He gave an apologetic sweep of his tail, crossed the room, and sat on her feet, gaze hard and steady on the intruders, his