Chapter 1

Tom studied the front page he had been about to send to the printer. President Bush was reelected the week before and the lead story, under the headline “West End Is Bush Country,” reported that the president had won 81 percent of local votes.  Tom removed that story, thinking he’d move it below the fold, and also removed the story that he had earlier placed on the bottom half of the front page. That was a story he’d downloaded from a wire service about how the meth epidemic had hurt military recruiting in precisely the areas, like the West End, where those efforts had always been most fruitful. Tom liked how the two stories talked to each other: Bush was reelected at the same time potential soldiers were lost to drug addiction. He liked to think that by running the stories together on the front page, he was, in his own way, educating his readership; it was unlikely, but maybe a few readers outside the 19 percent who voted against Bush would see the connection.

Tom typed the headline “MISSING,” in 36 pts, all caps, boldface, at the top of the page.  But when he placed the mug shot of Ray beneath the headline and kept it at its proper dimensions it took up almost the entire page, leaving room only for a few words about Ray Walker’s disappearance, and no room for Bush.

At first, Tom wasn’t sure if that was the right way to go. But blown up large, the image of Ray had an iconic quality, even before it was reproduced several thousand times and widely distributed. In soft focus and slightly off-kilter, the snapshot created a strong if inadvertent impression that Ray was already fading away and difficult to visualize with clarity as someone you might see driving past in his tow truck on any given day, someone whose hand you would shake when you ran into him at the Merc, someone you’d see cheering on the sidelines of every sports event involving either one of his two kids. Besides, it was satisfying to push Bush off of page 1 by something of much more immediate interest to his readers. Tom went with it, placing the election story on page 3. That left no room for the story about the army’s recruiting difficulties. But he knew he could afford to hold that one for another week since neither meth use nor the need for military volunteers to fight the war in Iraq were going to abate in the next seven days.

Tom clicked on “send” to upload the paper to the printer in Cortez and walked across the state highway that served as the town of Radium’s main street to the Maverick Café, where a group of Ray’s friends had gathered. Tom grimaced to see that the flyers with Ray’s mug, already posted in the window, carried the same headline he had just written. But perhaps “MISSING” was simply unavoidable. It was odd that no synonym worked. Ray wasn’t “lost,” “gone,” or “absent.” All of those words had entirely different connotations.  Nor was Ray “misplaced,” like a set of keys or a wallet, although he could be said to have “vanished.” If you said he had vanished, though, that would imply something supernatural and would further suggest that neither the missing man, nor even a trace of him, would ever be found. And that seemed, at the moment, unlikely, as Sally Morgan, who owned the Maverick, promptly observed from her station behind the coffee shop counter, just as Tom walked in. 

“Hell of a thing,” Sally said. “A person doesn’t just vanish into thin air.” She meant it as encouragement to the search parties that were beginning to form: Start looking and you’ll find him.

This was a reasonable assumption because there were far likelier explanations for Ray’s disappearance than a vanishing into thin air. Anyone who lived on the West End could imagine taking a curve too fast on one of the remote highways that traversed the canyon country, skidding off the road to where they’d be invisible to anyone driving past. It could happen while swerving to dodge a deer or a rock on the road, or from skidding across black ice on bald tires. And while a single-car accident was the likeliest reason that Ray Walker would miss his daughter’s wedding, it was not the only thought that crossed the minds of the men and a few women gathered at the Maverick.

If Ray took a call from a stranded motorist, then who called, and where were they now?  Did he crash after he repaired the traveler’s vehicle and sent him on his way? 

Perhaps the call had been to assist a four-wheel drive vehicle stranded in the backcountry. SUVs got stuck out there and had to be rescued all the time. If that were the case, then Ray could be far from a main road, far even from a secondary road. He could be virtually anywhere in a vast area of rugged canyons and mesas, scrubland and mountains, an area covering hundreds of square miles traversed by nameless and numberless dirt tracks and long-abandoned mining roads, not to mention sandy streambeds, salt flats and slickrock, where vehicles ventured freely.

Or was Ray called out under false pretenses by somebody with criminal intentions?

On one point, everyone was agreed, and it was Sally, typically, who voiced it: “Ray always doted on that little girl of his,” she said. “He would not spoil her wedding, not if there was any way on God’s earth he could help it, that’s for sure.”

“Everyone find a partner,” Billy said, “and I’ll assign you a stretch of road.  There’s only a couple a hours a light left. You got to drive real slow and look on both sides of the road.”

“I’ll ride with you, if you’d like,” Dave Best said to Tom.

“Sure,” Tom nodded.  Dave owned the West End Merc.

“That was one helluva strange wedding,” Dave said as Tom steered west out of town on the state highway into the San Miguel river canyon, toward the Utah line.

“I bet.”

“It was half wedding, half funeral, with Ray not showing up,” Dave said. “Sarah did her best to keep it together, but everyone was just trying to think where he was at.”

“Man that’s harsh.”

“It was a real shame for Angie and Craig to start their married life like that.”

“No doubt.”

“And there was no drowning of sorrows neither,” Dave added. “It was a dry wedding. Some of their friends just come out of rehab so they didn’t want to put temptation in front of them. Craig’s stepfather’s a part-time preacher from Paonia, and he performed the service. This guy sells insurance during the week, and he made all these cracks about how following Christ and buying State Farm is one and the same thing. ‘It’s all insurance,’ he says. That’s what he preaches.”

“Hell, I’ve got no religion and no insurance,” Tom said. “So I guess I’d really be in trouble with that guy.”

“I mean, he was trying to sell fucking insurance while performing the nuptials while everyone’s mind is on Ray. I guess Ray didn’t miss much. Or maybe he did.  He’d have gotten a good laugh out of it, and then it would have been okay for me to laugh, too. We could of snuck out for a beer, maybe. But instead I’m just listening to this guy try to sell insurance wondering where the hell Ray was. Or where he’s at now.”

They drove in silence for a moment.

“I’ve known Ray Walker my whole life,” Dave said. “We played Little League together. He was a hell of a pitcher.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“You know the Springsteen song, ‘Glory Days’? That was Ray and me and a bunch of us when we was 12 and won the Southwest League. We beat a Cortez team, the D’backs. They hadn’t lost a game in a couple a years. Not a single game. Ray had the winning hit, right over the shortstop to center field. The parents of those Cortez boys were in shock, man, they were crying, their eyes all red.  I almost felt bad for them. Almost, but it was too sweet for that. Their pitcher, he was their ace and they’d worn him down in the tournament and that’s why we won ’cause he was usually unhittable, he’d beat the crap out of us all season long, had this wicked cutter, just shut us down with it, and after the game this poor kid, he says to me, ‘I pitched bad,’ and I say to him, ‘Nah, you pitched good, Ray was just on, man,’ you know, I was just trying to make him feel better, and then the kid’s dad grabs him by the arm, by his pitching arm, which was prolly about ready to drop off him as it was, and yanks him away like he shouldn’t be talking to me ’cause I’m the enemy…. ”

He shook his head.

“I wonder where the hell he is.”

Tom turned onto the Disappointment Valley road and slowed down. 

“I’ll look left, you look right,” he said. 

Despite their purpose, Tom found himself glancing up to admire the scenery. He couldn’t help himself. People who had grown up on the West End were oblivious to the landscape. Tom had been there only five years and still drank in the long views of distant blue peaks and rocky red-hued canyons spiked with juniper and pinion that fell away to a vanishing point.  There were many places in the region where abandoned cars sat rusting away on some ledge or precipice where they had landed after their driver had crashed them, not worth the effort for anyone to try to salvage them. Most such wrecks dated from the forties or fifties, though, when uranium prospectors ventured into what was then even more remote country than it was now.

If a driver were to lose control of his vehicle and shoot off the highway at a high speed, how far from the road would he land?

“He could be too far from the highway for us to see him,” Tom said.

“Look for fresh skid marks,” Dave said.

But there were many places where slickrock on the side of the road would not show any skid marks.

“I’m afraid Ray might have been mixed up in some bad business,” Dave said.

“What kind of bad business?”

“Meth.”

“I never would have guessed that,” Tom said mildly. “Why do you think it?”

“Dunno.  It just seems like everything that goes bad lately around here has meth at the bottom of it.”

“He doesn’t seem the type.”

“Awww, I guess you’re right. He’s a straight arrow.”

Tom wondered if Dave was trying to tell him something, but didn’t ask any more questions. He would be “new” on the West End even if he stayed another forty years and died of old age at the West End Clinic. His obituary in the Forum at that point, whoever wrote it, even if he wrote it himself from his deathbed, would describe him as an Easterner.  “Tom Austin of Boston, longtime owner and editor of the West End Forum, died Friday at the age of 79 at the West End Clinic….” But if Tom could never be a true West Ender, he had been there long enough to know that aggressive questions would only push the answers away. He had run into a wall of resistance when he first arrived and tried to write an exposé of uranium’s legacy of poisoned land and water and ruined health. How the Cold War had domestic victims. Even though he had abandoned his ambition of writing a big story, he was still considered a troublemaker by members of the old mining families he had tried to interview for it. He guessed that if Ray Walker’s disappearance had anything to do with methamphetamines, he would learn the sad details soon enough.