Nathan's Big Sky

Chapter 1 The silence was deafening. Nathan gripped the crowbar-handle of his car’s jack so tightly that it hurt his hand but he couldn’t ease up. It was his sole hope of survival. The only sound for miles on the emptiness of the Montana prairie was the hot-metal pinging of his cooling Miata sports car, lurched awkwardly to the roadside by a flat tire. The chill of the cold April evening almost hurt his lungs. The sun hadn’t quite set; instead it illuminated the clouds of his own breath like some horror movie with a fog machine turned on too high. How was it that he’d come to this place to die? Chefs were not supposed to die alone in the forsaken wilderness, they were supposed to have a butter-induced heart attack in the middle of a meal service. But the safety of his New York kitchen lay an impossible distance behind him. He’d bolted forty-eight hours ago, sleeping only a few fitful hours in Chicago before punching west as if all the hounds of hell were after him. And they’d caught up with him in the form of a monster. Two days to cross most of the country and now, like a gunslinger fated to his doom, he was going to be murdered in the emptiness of the Montana wilderness by the largest cow ever born. It put Paul Bunyan’s mythically massive blue ox Babe to shame. Purest black, it was an inkblot on the continuance of Nathan’s life. Horns the length of a New York cabbie’s woes sprang from either side of its head, ending in points that looked sharper than his finest boning knife. He’d hit Choteau, Montana, in the late afternoon for directions, as his little brother’s instructions had turned out to be utterly useless: “Henderson Ranch, just west of Choteau.” There wasn’t a single app on his phone that told him where the ranch might be. There’d also been no answer on his brother’s phone, but he was used to that. Apparently most of the ranch was beyond the pale of civilization and didn’t have reception. His brother had always been useless about answering the phone anyway, unless you were a pretty girl—them he’d always had a sixth sense for, even on a blocked number. Maybe Patrick’s directions sucked because he was messing with his big brother. Or maybe it was because he assumed Nathan would never cross west of the Hudson River—which historically was a reasonable assumption—so it wasn’t worth the effort to be more descriptive. A Choteau (Cho-toe that was almost Sho-toe) local had known the name, however. In a town only three blocks long, it made sense that he did. “Just go down the highway apiece until you hit Anderson’s farm. Can’t miss it. He has the last big white cow barn this side of Augusta. Take a right on the main road and go on until you’ve just about hit the mountains. Out onto the dirt a ways. That’ll set you in the right place.” The “highway” was a narrow two-lane called Montana 287. By the time Choteau was two miles behind him, he’d passed two Andersons, an Andersen, and an Andreassen. This driveway had no mailbox that he could see, but it had a big white barn and a road along one side of the property. The map on his cell phone said that Augusta was fifty miles ahead. Telling him “the last big barn before Augusta” counted as a local having fun chapping his ass. He must have taken one look at Nathan’s two-seater Miata and painted a little mental target on Nathan’s forehead—just as the monster cow now had one painted on Nathan’s life. The turnoff road was a lane and a half wide. Nathan guessed that in its favor, it was paved and had an actual stop sign where it met the “highway.” Sunlight was streaming out the backside of the sign through several bullet holes. He wondered if someone was going to shoot him for being in a sports car instead of a pickup with a gun rack. Did upstate New York even have roads like this one—not even two lanes wide and with no painted stripes? Or was that only legal west of the Mississippi? Manhattan and Long Island certainly didn’t. During his five years in Paris, he’d rarely been farther out than the Metro could carry him. For thirty miles past the white cow barn, he drove unknowingly toward his doom as the mountains drew closer and closer. He kept assuming he’d reach them in another few miles and they insisted on teasing him just like his brother. After the unremitting flatness of the Great Plains, they had loomed tall and rough to the west as seen from Choteau. Now he was discovering that Australia wasn’t the only place that had an Outback. The peaks kept growing bigger and climbing higher but the land remained flatter than the ocean off Coney Island on a hot summer’s day. The peaks’ jagged flanks were shrouded in snow despite it being April. He turned on the Miata’s heater as the sun settled toward the west, but he left the convertible top down because the view was so amazing. The blue sky arced forever over him until the mountains sliced it off like a kid’s construction project: sharp, jagged, unreal. Each time he’d passed a ranch, he checked the name, but none said Henderson. He even pulled out his phone to check that he’d remembered it right—and almost drove his car into the gaping ditch. Not a good idea. For all he knew, there might not be another person down this road for a week. He’d seen a few tractors—which were far bigger than he thought they would be—far out in the fields, but no one else on the road. With a crash and thud that made him check his rearview to see if he’d left an axle on the road behind him, the pavement ended. “Out onto the dirt a ways.” Maybe the old-timer in Choteau hadn’t been completely chapping his ass. He slowed down to preserve his suspension. A cloud of brown dust obliterated his past. If he wanted to turn around, he’d have to eat his own dust. That sounded like a properly cowboy-like metaphor for the last decade of his life. Two days ago he’d cut every tie to that past. If only he could figure out how that had led him to the Montanan Outback, he wouldn’t feel quite so overwhelmed at the moment. Twenty-eight years old and his life fit in a two-seater sports car—with room to spare. That might not be right, but it didn’t make it any less true. For the last ten miles he’d been hoping to meet someone on the road to ask directions again. Or maybe how to escape, little knowing it would soon be too late. The dirt road narrowed and then he actually hoped he didn’t meet anyone because he’d have to crawl to the side to get by them. Out here he wasn’t threatened by ditches anymore, they’d disappeared along with the pavement, but instead by barbed wire running close down either side of the dirt track. Not a chance that his Soul Red Metallic paint job would survive the encounter. After a few miles of dodging potholes and gritting his teeth over washboard ripples, he started looking for a place to turn around. The road wasn’t wide enough to be sure he could turn even his small car without dinging it up. He’d been climbing slowly since Choteau, and spring had turned back into winter. There was a bitter snap to the evening air that promised what looked like snow and ice up ahead…really was snow and ice up ahead. By this point the mountains were so high they looked as if they were going to roll over and land on him. Manhattan didn’t have places like this. Neither did Paris, where he’d done his time at Le Cordon Bleu and three years servitude for Chef Guevarre—may his brutal training and magnificent palate both be in hell by now. There was something wrong about the flatness behind and the impossible mountains ahead. Then, topping a low rise, facing straight into the setting sun, he was confronted by the beast from hell that was going to kill him. He’d slammed on the brakes, skidding sideways on the washboard gravel, and barely managed to avoid hitting the cow. A tire caught in a pothole where it had blown with a loud bang that scared him almost as much as the creature of his doom had. Now he stood in the middle of the road between his crippled car, pinging the last dying notes of its hot-metal song, and the monstrous black cow that was about to charge him. The damn thing didn’t so much as blink its malevolent eyes, as if it was trying to hypnotize him. His only weapon choices were his chef’s knives, which would be very useful if the cow was already dead and butchered but not until then, and his car’s jack handle. Retreating into his car and pulling up the convertible’s roof would be pointless—this monster was so big it could practically step over the Miata. And the tips of its horns were actually wider than the car itself. His ears rang with the silence, now broken only by a scuffing of one New York metro bus-sized hoof as the cow prepared to charge. Nathan had served a thousand roasts, ten thousand steaks, and this meal-still-on-the-hoof knew it. It had come to exact revenge for all of its spiritual forebears…fore-steaks? The last thing Nathan was going to smell was the crackling dry grass of the prairie, the biting chill of the fast-approaching night, and the hot breath of the demon cow so big it seemed to block out even the vast expanse of the Montana sky. There had been fourteen hundred miles of flat since Chicago, but here, with his back up against the mountains, the vast horizon seemed far bigger than should be possible. His last-ever vision would be to actually see the curvature of the earth. Then, impossibly, as if it wasn’t bad enough that his epitaph was going to read: Here a once-decent chef was trampled to death by a cow—trampled sounded like a marginally more pleasant way to go than gored—he heard a clip-clop sound coming from behind him. He didn’t dare turn, because he knew the beast-cow would charge the moment he looked aside. Still, the sound behind him grew. Unable to stand it any longer—the sound was so close—he spun and raised his foot-long jack handle in one last desperate bid for life. Backed by the sun, a silhouetted cowboy sat up on a horse even taller than the cow and looked down at Nathan from under the brim of his cowboy hat. “What are you doing out in the road?” Not cowboy, cowgirl. A soft voice, but no less disgusted for all that. Against the dazzling sun he could see that she wore cowboy boots, a heavy leather jacket, and had a rifle tucked close to hand. Hope? Maybe she could shoot the demon cow before it trampled, trompled, gored, or whatever demon cows did. He tried to speak, but his throat was clogged dry with fear and road dust. The air was so dry it seemed to suck the moisture right out of him. She rode around him and his car as if he wasn’t even there. “Go on now, Lucy. Scoot!” A hell-beast named Lucy? He’d had a great Aunt Lucy, but she hadn’t been very fierce—more the quiet and retiring type, which was perhaps inevitable beside her husband’s garrulous stockbroker charisma. The woman rode her black-and-white patterned horse up to the “monster cow from hell” before he could warn her off. Yet, in a startlingly sudden surrender, the gigantic animal turned and ambled back through a broken gap in the barbed wire fence that Nathan hadn’t noticed. As it walked, he recognized the scuffing sound that he’d thought proceeded a deadly charge—it was just the sound the cow made by walking. After riding her horse through the gap as well, she then swung a long leg over the back of the saddle and came down out of the sky. Paying no more attention to him than if he was a bump in the road, she pulled out some tools and walked up to the fence. He could only watch—numb with his unexpected last-second stay of execution and the biting cold—as she repaired the fence. It was only the work of minutes before she had three fine strands of barbed wire strung back up between the posts; her and the cow on one side and he and his broken car on the other. The flimsy wires had no chance of stopping a baby cow, never mind the hell cow Lucy, currently tearing at the low dead grass.