Page 20 of The Fourth Option
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 hummeduntil 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.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Garden District, New Orleans
