The Farmer's Daughter by Jim Harrison Page B

tipped over. They rather nervously checked into a room at the Murray Hotel that had two double beds. Terry in particular was giddy opening his suitcase and showed the girls six bottles of fine French wine he had swiped from his mother’s cellar. It wasn’t quite noon and they agreed it was a little early for wine. Marcia called her uncle over past Forsyth to say they’d be delayed, and then they abandoned the sack of baloney sandwiches they were going to eat for lunch and went across the street to Martin’s Cafe. After lunch Marcia winked at Sarah so Sarah went off to Sax & Fryer’s to look at the new books for sale and Marcia virtually led Terry back to the hotel. Sarah thought that to be on the safe side she’d give Marcia an hour to manage her seduction.
    It occurred to her that this was a good time to do some research on Meeteetse and hard thinking on how to exterminate Karl. Pop goes the muskmelon, she thought, or she could aim lower since she clearly remembered what the big exit wound of a .30-06 looked like on an elk that Tim shot a half mile from his cabin. The elk was so large it took two trips to get it back to the cabin in the dark on a packhorse, at which point Tim fried up part of the delicious liver with onions. Sarah had read how many people these days were squeamish about hunting but where she lived it was merely a fact of life.
    She spoke at length with the proprietor of the bookstore who was kindly and rather handsome. He knew a lot about the country south of Cody and said the main fact of Meeteetse was the huge Pitchfork Ranch. His cousin cowboyed there. Sarah flushed because this man reminded her of Tim and was not at all repellent. As a future murderer she lost some caution and asked about the Burkhardt spread because that was Karl’s last name. He said, “Those people are rapscallions,” and she said she was unsure what that meant and he answered, “Real rough people.” The father was a mean old goat, one of the boys was in prison in Deer Lodge for repeated assaults, one was an itinerant musician who had done time for selling coke and meth, and one was fine having left with the mother years ago for Boise. When the man was curious about why she wanted to know Sarah said a friend of hers had gotten mixed up with the musician and it was unpleasant. “I bet it was,” the man said, then he pointed out the public library down the street where she might find solid information about that area of Wyoming. She bought the new novel of a regional writer named Thomas McGuane whom Terry was very fond of but she had found a bit abrasive.
    The snow seemed to be lifting but the fierce wind continued from the northwest so that she raised a hand to protect her eyes while walking to the library. Karl had it coming, that’s for sure, she thought. Shooting him would be a public service. The point was to make certain that she got away with it.
    The library was grand and a librarian helpful and she soon had a stack of books about Wyoming on the table before her but then she drifted. Even so, once in a while she had a microsecond glimmer that she might be insane. Conjoined to this was the brief flash from her unconscious of a physical memory of the hairs of her pubis being uprooted. If there’s a God why can’t we control our minds? she thought. She’d talked to Terry about this and he had read some Oriental literature and quoted, “How can the mind control the mind?” This boggled her. In her weakest moments she found herself wishing she had an actual mother to talk to. Or anyone she could trust like Tim.
    She ended up sitting at the library table for a couple of hours and wished her area had such a library. She even studied topographical maps of the location of the Burkhardt ranch which included two-tracks to get on and make a good departure. She would have to call first to make sure he was there and not on the road playing music. Perhaps for relief her