Chapter Six
American West
Present Day
GLAD I GAVE myself a week, Walker thought as he pushed the van across the fat bottom of Idaho, Paladin curled up on the front passenger seat.
Snap out of it.
He reached over to pet Paladin and distract himself from the signs.
At fifty-seven miles an hour, Walker managed about four hundred miles a day.
When he hit Boise, he navigated to Scheels, where he stocked up on ammo.
What are you doing? You are not going to war, are you?
That night found him under the stars of the Morley Nelson Snake River Birds of Prey National Conservation Area.
The next, in the desolate expanse of Craters of the Moon National Monument, northwest of Pocatello, the juniper wood burning in the campfire hissing and popping, filling the air with the sweet, resinous scent of the West. The high desert sage and distant red hills reminded Walker of Afghanistan, and he was relieved when the sky finally surrendered its colors and turned to black.
With clear skies, he slept outside on the ground rather than in the rooftop tent, Paladin next to him on two wool blankets by the fire.
His morning started with cowboy coffee for him and whistle drills for Paladin.
Whistle commands were not something they used in the Teams, but Paladin had gone from the military to a former SEAL’s dog rehab center in Southern California that provided Hollywood with dogs trained to act on set responding to whistle command and hand signals from a distance.
Before packing up, he went for a run to clear his head, Paladin at his side.
The following night, near Jackson, Wyoming, they camped in the shadow of the Tetons.
Crickets chirped, owls called, and bats darted beneath a sky so thick with stars it looked like glowing smoke.
The air was colder at elevation, but Walker couldn’t resist the view.
After a dinner of trout fried over the fire, he leaned back and let his mind drift to time, space, and eternity.
As always, the old philosophers came whispering, asking the fundamental questions that have plagued mankind since the inception of human cognition: Who are you?
Why are you here? What is the nature of your soul?
Walker stared into the flames as man had done from time immemorial.
Maybe he would only have answers when he pressed the trigger for the last time.
You are struggling. Make it stop.
Sensing his unease, Paladin thrust a nose into Walker’s armpit, bringing him back, grounding him.
“Okay, boy,” Walker said, looking around at the landscape, gray in the starlight. “If you really want me to. There’s no one around.”
He stood up and unstrapped his Martin six-string acoustic from the ceiling of the Volkswagen and returned to his camp chair, tuning the guitar in the pale moonlight. Paladin sat beside him, wagging his tail, his eyes glowing with the reflection of the embers.
“What’ll it be?” Walker asked, strumming a few simple chords to warm up. Paladin lay directly on top of Walker’s feet, as though intentionally keeping him in place.
The former SEAL reached down and rubbed his dog behind the ears.
“What do you feel like tonight, boy? How about one of your favorites?”
He dropped the guitar pick into his shirt pocket and used his fingers to pluck out notes of “Oh, Bury Me Not—A Cowboy’s Prayer” by Johnny Cash.
After mastering the riff through the introductory bars, Walker took one last look around.
He guessed there wasn’t another living soul within ten miles.
It was safe to play. Paladin’s tail thumped.
Walker hummed until he found the right note, and then, while his fingers danced over the strings, he sang to the dog and the stars:
Lord, I’ve never lived where churches grow…
I loved creation better as it stood…
Oh, bury me not, on the lone prairie…
North of Denver, at Medicine Bow, Walker and Paladin watched a spread of towering cumulus clouds march over the plains from the west, its base as flat and forbidding as the iron skillet he had used for the trout.
Walker thought briefly of the clouds from the Pacific and the rain that had hammered him at the Quinault Reservation.
Invariably, that led him to think of the letters that were beneath the foam that held the weapons.
He shook it off. The guns and the letters weren’t going anywhere.
Finish the mission. The final mission. Return Staub’s favor.
He ejected the Led Zeppelin cassette in the eighties-era Blaupunkt stereo and tried to find something more upbeat. He ended up with his favorite Rolling Stones album, Sticky Fingers, which lasted forty rumbling miles.
That evening, he cooked a pot of beans with bacon on the galley stove and slept in the rooftop tent because the clouds had thickened and a gentle rain was falling. The sealant he’d applied back in Sisters to cover the crack made by the bullet held. No leaks.
While rain thumped the roof, Walker delved back into philosophy beneath his battery-powered reading lamp.
Since it had been a while, he focused on pre-Renaissance thinkers, starting with Socrates, who tutored Plato, who in turn influenced Aristotle.
He was soon swept up in a direct translation of Plato’s ancient dialogues, a collection of philosophical texts that featured Socrates as a central character who argued various points about government and ethics.
This led Walker to consider Plato’s view that democracy was ultimately a flawed concept and that the only way to govern a nation was through an oligarchical or aristocratic elite.
He thought of the chaos that had accompanied the rise of social media, the deterioration of civil discourse, logic, and reason, and the creation of platforms that had turned a republic into a democracy.
“Maybe Plato was right. What do you think, Pal?”
Hearing Walker’s voice over the raindrops, Paladin thumped his tail. Walker turned off the light and closed his eyes dreaming of ancient Athens with his dog curled at his feet.
The mountains gave way to hills and then to fields as Walker drove the van south along Route 385.
When he finally arrived in Amarillo, Texas, he turned on his flip phone to update Leigh Ann and triple-typed a text message on the keypad: Two or three days out.
See you soon. After that, he powered the phone off and left Amarillo in the rearview.
He found a different kind of beauty in Texas.
The landscape was flat and treeless for miles, but not featureless.
The tan concrete road, tilting telephone poles, and endless farm fields had a certain unity of form that reminded him of Edward Hopper paintings.
A girlfriend had taken him to a Hopper exhibit while he was at NYU, introducing him to the intersection of art and philosophy, disciplines now inevitably linked in Walker’s mind.
He had admired Hopper’s eye for early American industrialization and the changes it made on the landscape, and, most of all, the feelings of loneliness evoked by the artist’s silent figures, who so often faced into the sunlight, alone and quiet.
Like Hopper, Walker found something beautiful in the desolation.
With his hands on the wheel and his eyes focused two miles ahead, his mind wandered as he mentally debated the nature of beauty.
One of the most lasting themes in Western philosophy was whether beauty was subjective, in the eye of the beholder, or objective, inherent in a thing itself.
Making matters more complex was whether it applied only to the senses, like physical beauty, or to the abstract, such as the beautiful ideas of justice or truth.
Walker turned the debate over in his head to pass the time, arguing both sides in the style of Plato’s dialogues, remembering the things he had learned from his professors and presented in his papers at NYU.
When the current cassette, a Who album, clicked and stopped, Walker drove on in silence, continuing both sides of the debate until fatigue weighed on his eyelids.
He pulled over to the side of the road to stretch his legs and fired up the coffee percolator using the LP gas in the port galley stove.
A little caffeine would keep him going. Well past midnight, he found a dirt road in the middle of a cattle ranch and, for the first time since Colorado, slept outside by the fire, stargazing while Paladin’s ears twitched at the sounds of unfamiliar animals and night birds.
The next day, as he crossed the state line between Texas and Louisiana, he recalled how he had told Staub that he thought the entire state of Louisiana was one long bridge.
Surveying the hazy skies and green fields through the windshield, he now understood that he had formed that idea during a drive across the South, skirting the Gulf Coast. Approaching from the northwest through the top of the state’s boot-shaped outline, however, he saw dense trees, corrugated farm fields, and scattered towns that might have kept Edward Hopper busy with his paintbrush.
He replaced a Moody Blues cassette with Lynyrd Skynyrd and fast-forwarded until he got to “Sweet Home Alabama.” It wasn’t quite the right state, but Mobile was only a few hundred miles down the road.
In Baton Rouge, he stopped for gas, bought a map of Louisiana, and plotted the route to New Orleans.
At Vanagon speed, Leigh Ann Staub’s home was just under three hours away.
“Last chance to back out, buddy,” Walker said to Paladin as he pulled the van to a stop looking left down the frontage road.
Paladin barked.
“Not sure what that means.”
He looked back at the vault under the rear seat where the .45 waited.
“Soon,” Walker said, turning to the dog in the passenger seat. “Now, it’s time to return a favor.”