Tom was stopped at a guardhouse a few miles up the access road to the Uranium King Ranch.
“I have an appointment to see Albert DeRichter,” he told the armed guard. “Name’s Tom Austin.”
The guard glanced at a clipboard and nodded.
“He’s expecting you. He’s at the shooting range. Do you need directions?”
“I’ve been there.”
The guard waved Tom on and he drove the remaining few miles up the winding road deeper into the woods to the cluster of buildings on the relatively flat mountaintop. He parked next to Albert DeRichter’s polished black Hummer, which occupied a place of honor in the lot adjacent to the main lodge building.
There was plenty of parking available. Despite efforts to promote the latest DeRichter family enterprise, the UK Ranch was never very busy. Tom’s first visit there had come along with a reporter from the Telluride paper at DeRichter’s invitation to do a story about the region’s exclusive new resort. The intention, clearly, was to capitalize on Telluride’s growing reputation as a chic destination, even though it was eighty miles away, along with any mystique associated with the ranch’s history. The first autumn the resort was open, Tom had been a guest at a sad, sparsely attended Oktoberfest, the staff bravely outfitted in dirndls and lederhosen, a yodeler providing the entertainment, and brats, kraut and beer on the menu; a year later he had attended an open house at the resort’s most unusual amenity, the Olympus Shooting Club, featuring demonstrations of every way it is possible to engage with a firearm. The initiation fee was $10,000, leaving Tom well out of the running as a prospective club-member.
Getting out of his car, Tom was struck as he had been on previous visits by the eccentricity of the place. The historic, sprawling ranch house and a few traditional ranch outbuildings, still the personal residence of the DeRichter family and off-limits to resort guests, sat at the compound’s edge. Sometimes the stooped figure of the elder DeRichter, the Uranium King himself, could be spotted from a distance, passing time on the expansive front porch. He occasionally waved to visitors. By comparison, the new resort buildings seemed out of scale and ill-placed on the hilly, densely forested landscape. There was an oversized main-lodge building housing the elegant dining facilities, a bar, a spa, and hotel rooms, awkwardly sited overlooking an artificial pond. Nearby there were guest cabins in the woods, a wedding chapel in a clearing, and the shooting club facilities, adjacent to Tom’s destination, the shooting range. As Tom headed up a paved walkway in that direction, he encountered another of the armed guards.
“Good afternoon Mr. Austin,” the guard said, affirming that he knew exactly who Tom was and had expected to find him there, having been alerted by his colleague at the gatehouse that Mr. DeRichter’s guest was on his way up. He had, undoubtedly, been sent to ensure that Tom was not straying from the path to his appointment.
Was the guard’s attentiveness a form of the resort’s discreet five-star personal service to the visitor, simply to ensure that he was finding his way and in no need of assistance? Or was it something more? The ambiguity seemed intentional.
Indeed, the pervasive obsessions with weaponry, self-defense and security were the UK Ranch’s most distinctive qualities. Albert DeRichter’s marketing concept when he converted the family homestead into a hotel was that as the world’s only five-star resort that incorporated a shooting club as its primary amenity, North Mountain would attract titans of corporate America and the ultra-wealthy from all over the world, powerful individuals with realistic concerns about their personal safety. In addition to marksmanship, the club offered courses and ongoing training in the martial arts and self-defense, some expressly for women. DeRichter was especially proud of the state-of-the-art “scenario house,” which he personally designed with help from Hollywood special effects experts, where hostage incidents and break-ins could be staged and defended against using live ammo, because the bad guy targets were holograms. As a community service, DeRichter had opened up the shooting club at no cost to law enforcement agencies from the entire Four Corners region, for their officers to practice and perfect their marksmanship and other SWAT-team skills.
The day was cold and overcast, threatening snow, and DeRichter was the only shooter on the field, which would have been a sea of ankle-deep mud if the ground hadn’t been frozen solid.
DeRichter glanced at Tom and then greeted him by shouting, “Pull!”
An unseen assistant catapulted a clay pigeon into the air. DeRichter took aim, fired, and shattered it.
“Ever shoot a gun?” he asked, turning to Tom.
“Never have.”
DeRichter handed Tom his shotgun. “Let me see you take aim,” he said, pointing to a stationary target a hundred feet away.
DeRichter corrected Tom’s form and posture as Tom took aim.
“You are holding a fine precision instrument whose fundamental purpose is to kill,” DeRichter said. “How does it feel?”
“Reminds me of the first time I took a seat at a blackjack table at a casino, when I was 22. My heart kind of jumped.”
“In a minute, you’ll squeeze the trigger and then it will feel like the first time you touched a girl’s naked breast, when you were … how old?”
“I don’t know. Fifteen, maybe sixteen.”
“Late bloomer, I guess.”
“Ha!”
“Marksmanship is about discipline and self-control,” DeRichter said. “You need to be loose enough to adjust to the target, and quickly, if it’s a moving target, and steady enough so that the recoil doesn’t throw you back; you’ve got to be relaxed and steady at the same time.”
“I see.”
“It’s not as easy as it sounds.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“Make sure you are balanced and comfortable,” DeRichter coached. “Here’s what you’re going to do. Inhale, exhale, hold your breath and squeeze, without trying to anticipate when the round will fire, because that will totally screw you up. Got that?”
“Yep.”
“Okay then, inhale, exhale, hold and squeeze.”
Tom followed DeRichter’s instructions and the gun fired, missing the target entirely, though by how much there was no way to know.
“How was that?”
“Good,” Tom said, lowering the gun.
“That’s all?” DeRichter sounded disappointed. “Just good?”
Tom laughed. “There’s more?” he asked.
“Most people get it right away,” DeRichter shrugged, as if he had just learned that Tom belonged to a lesser category of human being. “But you’re welcome to come and use the club anytime you’d like, as my guest.”
“Thank you. I appreciate that.”
DeRichter took the rifle back and cradled it lovingly. He was tall, muscular and bald, and had dark brown eyes. He wore a sheepskin coat. Abruptly he shouted “pull,” and another clay pigeon flew into the sky. DeRichter smoothly turned to it, put the rifle on his shoulder, fired, and shattered it.
“If you’re firing at a living thing, it’s even harder because then your emotions may be engaged, even if it’s just a pheasant whose life you’re taking. A pheasant is a beautiful bird. That’s why they had to invent machine guns, because it’s a rare soldier who can be expected to control his emotions in combat but any idiot can suppress a wide area with an automatic weapon by spraying bullets all over the place. Marksmanship has evolved into a highly specialized skill. It’s only real applications are for target shooting, which has become a sport but is really just practice for hunting and … can you think of the other application?”
Tom shook his head.
“Designated marksman. Sharpshooter. Pick off a high value target from a safe distance, whether it’s a sniper like Lee Harvey Oswald carrying out an assassination or a SWAT team officer trying to prevent one. In combat, the DM is usually assigned to take out the enemy’s commanding officers.”
DeRichter reveled in his expertise.
“Interesting,” Tom said.
“Pull!” DeRichter shouted, and he fired, but this time he missed the pigeon. He turned abruptly to Tom and asked: “You need a loan?”
“A loan?” Tom said. “Why would I ask you for a loan?”
“I don’t know why you wouldn’t,” DeRichter barked. “Every damn business in Radium asks the DeRichters for money sooner or later. Even the damn bank. I’ve wondered why you haven’t. The old man put thousands into the paper before you bought it. Town needed a paper, he figured. If he’d ever done any proper accounting, we’d own you, but he didn’t bother. I thought it was just a matter of time until you came around with your hand out.”
“Actually, I came to ask you about Ray Walker.”
“What about him?”
“You must have some theory about how or why your brother disappeared.”
DeRichter scowled, an expression that might have reflected nothing more than lifelong irritation at the mention of his half-brother’s name.
“Pull!” he shouted, and he fired, knocking off another clay pigeon.
“I’ve got no idea,” he growled. “Is that all? Because if it is, you’ve wasted your time, which is fine, but I won’t let you waste any more of mine.”
The interview, such as it was, was over.
DeRichter’s flat denial that he had any interest in or concern about his illegitimate stepbrother’s disappearance brought Tom to a dead end. There was really no other lead to follow, nobody else to interview. He had already gone much further than he’d intended in pursuit of the mystery, brazenly and pointlessly confronting Albert DeRichter for reasons that very likely had more to do with himself than with Ray Walker. He had been driven by his basic curiosity but also something deeper, something to do with his understanding of his profession and his betrayal of it, and his sense of himself and how and why he had ended up in Radium, but those were all subjects he preferred not to think about very deeply. Denial operates on many levels.
In any case, having been thwarted, Tom thought about how Ray Walker’s disappearance had already receded far enough into the past after only a little more than a week that it now felt virtually preordained. Something that begins as unlikely or unthinkable suddenly happens and is shocking, but then it is simply a fact. To take a huge example of the same phenomenon, three years earlier the World Trade Center towers in New York disappeared from the city skyline. Who other than the perpetrators who planned and executed the attack could have imagined such a gigantic effect? But it is the very appeal of violence to the violent that it changes something, whether it changes the entire world, a community like Radium, or an individual’s private world. Even if a shattering event was predictable, nobody can know exactly how it will unfold, but once it takes place both the reality of it and the sharp details of how it occurred make it seem as if it were predetermined. Isn’t this why human beings often imagine they can foresee the future? Because the moment the future becomes the present, and just as instantaneously slips into the past and later is remembered, it all seems so obvious in retrospect?
The phrase that ran through Tom’s mind was: that’s what happened. Tom’s father died without warning when he was 13. The World Trade Center towers were destroyed in 2001. Ray Walker disappeared in 2004. In the 1940s, physicists working just a few hundred miles away, at Los Alamos in New Mexico, learned how to refine uranium mined on the West End and manufacture nuclear weapons from it and soon after that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed into oblivion. All of those things happened and the world was not the same afterward. They, and countless other occurrences, significant and trivial, complex and simple, affecting individuals and all of mankind, cumulatively bring the world to its present moment. History itself might be written as nothing more than a series of simple declarations of what happened and how, but not necessarily why they happened. For another example, as Albert DeRichter so casually noted, in 1963 a sniper’s bullet killed President Kennedy. Everything may change, but the world keeps turning.