CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“Remington, be careful. Jeremiah and Zane are right. Their mother is crazy and the people following her obviously are as well.”
“I know,” he nodded shoving his med-kit inside the bag. He turned to look at her still slightly swollen belly, reminding him that she’d given him two beautiful, healthy sons. “You take care of yourself and my sons. We’ll be back. I promise.”
“Can you really promise that? I mean, I believed you before but this feels different. It feels more dangerous,” she said staring up at him.
“They’re all dangerous, honey. All of them. In their own way, each and every time we step out the door for a mission there is danger. But we are better trained, better equipped and smarter. That’s not ego. That’s fact.”
“Okay,” she whispered. “Okay. I’ll stay with your mom and the others. Maybe I can get to know Jeremiah better. Maybe see if he’d build something special for the babies.”
“I think he’d love that,” smiled Remington. “Take care. Be safe and don’t leave the property.”
“Where would I go?” she smiled. “This is my home. Here with you and our sons. I don’t ever want to leave here again Remington.”
He dropped his bags and moved swiftly to stand in front of her, holding her tightly to his chest. He took a deep breath, inhaling her fragrance, the scent of her shampoo. As he was holding her, his sons took that opportunity to cry out their displeasure of being left out of the hugs.
“Hey, she’s mine too,” he laughed bending over the bassinet.
“They’re quite possessive,” she smiled.
“Like their father. You’re mine, Saylor. You were from the moment we met and I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. I promise I won’t ever make that mistake again.”
“I know,” she said kissing him. “Go. They’ll be waiting for you.”
They walked out onto the porch together and Remington immediately felt better. His mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and aunts were all waiting there.
“Don’t worry, she’ll be just fine,” said Dana. “Go.”
One more kiss and he disappeared into the darkness with a pack of other men, all carrying bags that nearly weighed as much as their wives. The women stood still for a moment and then Julia stepped forward.
“I think this is a romcom, popcorn and pizza kind of night. What do y’all say?” she smiled.
“I’m all in,” said Dana.
“Is there room for the old gals?” asked Sara walking up with Erin, Lauren, Lena, and some others.
“First, you’re not old. Second, everyone is welcome. Let’s take over the cafeteria for tonight,” smiled Julia.
“Perfect,” grinned Saylor. “Do we bring the babies?”
“The old guys are taking care of the babies tonight,” smirked Erin.
“Great! I have some questions about some things I read in Charlies’ books.”
“Oh, yes!” said Nell pumping her fist in the air. “This is going to be a good night, Saylor. Your sex education and lessons on how to keep a very happy marriage, starts now. Which book are you up to?”
“I just finished The Pirate’s Bride and I’ve started on The Black Wolf of the Family.”
“Ohhh,” nodded Julia. “Yes, that one has some very interesting, umm positions.”
“Exactly,” said Saylor.
Then she unleashed a litany of questions and the women could only laugh. In spite of having been pregnant with twins, Saylor was incredibly inexperienced with sex and men in general.
While the women were inside the cafeteria watching romcoms and talking erotica, the older men sat outside in the grove, just watching, just making sure that all was well.
“I love watching them have fun,” said Nine. “Erin is the person who taught me how to enjoy life.”
“Same, brother,” said Tailor. “Life was just joking with all of you until Lena stepped in front of me.” Wilson smiled at his old friends, some of the younger men now joining them.
“We’re lucky bastards,” said Wilson. “Everyone got their books?”
“Got it,” said the men raising their books in the air.
“Okay, so we were going to start at chapter twenty when Captain Pickett has her pinned against the bed.”
“I have some questions about that,” said Tailor raising his hand. Wilson smirked at his old friend.
“I bet you do.”
****
The first sight of Devil’s Tower at night felt less like arriving at a landmark than stepping into the presence of something older than the idea of distance.
In the last wash of evening, the great column of stone had risen out of the Wyoming earth with such abrupt authority that the surrounding country seemed to have been made merely to frame it.
Now, under a summer sky deepening from cobalt to a blue so dark it was almost velvet, the tower stood in full silhouette, a mass at once singular and immense, its fluted sides only faintly catching the last remnant of light.
Around it, the land opened in broad quiet folds of meadow, low ridges, scattered pine, and darker tangles of brush, all of it holding still in the suspended hour when day had withdrawn but night had not yet fully declared itself.
The sky above it seemed impossibly large, far larger than any sky seen from a town or even from open country that still carries the memory of porch lights and passing traffic. For the men of Belle Fleur, they never imagined something feeling bigger than their own bayou.
Here it unfolded in a clean, uninterrupted dome, and as the light drained from the horizon, the first stars appeared not timidly but with startling precision and brilliance, as if they had been waiting just behind a curtain.
One bright point burned above the western rim of the world, then another, then ten more, and soon the whole vault began to fill with a cold and patient fire.
The tower, black against that brilliance, gave the heavens scale; without it the stars might have seemed abstract, but with it they looked near enough to lean upon the earth.
Sound returned gradually, and because the land was so open each small noise seemed to arrive with unusual clarity.
The men realized they would need to be even more careful with every step if they wanted to maintain silence.
The grasses whispered first, bowing and lifting in a light summer wind that moved low along the ground before it touched the trees.
Insects stitched the dark with their steady metallic rhythms, a thousand thin notes rising from the meadow at once until the air itself seemed to shimmer with them.
From somewhere farther off came the dry, abrupt clicking of something alive moving through brush, and beyond that the occasional tremulous call of a night bird carried over the prairie in a single silver thread.
Nothing in the soundscape was loud, yet everything was distinct, and the effect was not silence but an intricately layered hush.
At the base of the tower, the terrain gathered itself into darker textures.
Ponderosa pines stood around the monument in uneven ranks, their trunks straight and dusky, their upper branches shifting softly against the sky.
Between them lay boulder fields and rough ground where stone had broken and settled over ages too long to imagine.
The earth smelled warm where it still held the day’s heat, but the air above it had begun to cool, carrying the resinous sharpness of pine, the faint sweetness of summer grass, and now and then the mineral scent of dry rock.
Breathing there felt like breathing in two seasons at once—the stored heat of afternoon rising from the ground and the clear descending chill of night lowering over everything.
Even in darkness the structure of the tower announced itself. Its long vertical columns, famous in daylight for their geometric severity, were now sensed more than seen, hinted at in the way starlight grazed the edges and disappeared into the depth of the stone.
The summit looked almost unnatural from a distance, not flat exactly, but deliberate, as if the monument had been lifted whole from some buried architecture of the earth.
The surrounding hills and meadows seemed softened by night, their boundaries melting into one another, yet the tower resisted that softening.
It remained exact. It remained solitary.
It rose out of the gentled land with the same stern confidence it must have held under lightning, snow, drought, and centuries of unrecorded summer evenings.
As full night settled, the Milky Way began to reveal itself, first as a pale uncertainty overhead and then as a vast, rivered band pouring across the black.
It did not look delicate. It looked immense and granular, thick with innumerable lights, with dark rifts opening through it like channels in snowmelt.
It was not lost on these men that they were witnessing something magnificent and rare. A beauty created by nature, by time, and by the chaotic shift of the earth and space together.
Seeing it for the first time above Devil’s Tower produced a kind of stunned recalibration, as if all previous ideas of the night sky had been timid sketches and this was the completed work.
The monument beneath it was no longer only a landmark of stone but a witness, a black and motionless figure beneath the oldest visible light, joining earth and sky in a way that made both seem stranger and more intimate.
The horizon spread wide and low around the monument, a dark ring of earth that never quite interrupted the sense of openness.
Far beyond the immediate trees, the prairie ran outward in long, nearly invisible reaches, and the distant ridges appeared only as variations in darkness, like waves after sunset on a black sea.