The box at the veterinary clinic in Columbus was a gray metal case no bigger than a loaf of bread. The receptionist, a girl of about twenty with a ponytail and a name tag that said Brittany, took it from the safe with both hands and set it on the counter as if it might bite. The tiny key slid into the lock and turned with a click. Inside lay a yellow film canister, a worn leather wallet, a folded letter in the hand of Dale, and a silver belt buckle engraved with the name Travis Longbow, Fort Peck.
I read the letter standing at the counter, with the dog sitting against my knee. Linda, it began. If you are reading this, I am gone and you are brave, and I am sorry for both. Travis was twenty two. He died at the Tioga Ridge well on the night of the third of June 2014, when the safety valve failed and the manager locked down the site and sent the crew home rather than report it. Travis had gone back for his coat. The company called it a fall. I have the film. I have his wallet. Duke has the rest.
I did not know what Duke had, but I looked at him. He looked back, serious as a judge. When we got to the car he jumped into the passenger seat, which no dog had ever done in my life, and put his chin on the dashboard and stared west. I thought of Dale, the man who sneezed at cats, who had driven sixty miles to a horse farm in Columbus to shelter the one witness he had. I put my hand on the head of the dog. “All right, Duke,” I said. “Let us go and see what you know.”
The loyal remember what the powerful would like to forget, and sometimes they wait ten years at the end of a dirt road.
A lawyer in Billings named Maribel Ruiz had the film developed in a laboratory in Denver. Twenty four frames. A ditch beside a drilling pad, a young man lying facedown with a hard hat beside him, a pressure gauge with the needle in the red, a tag on the wellhead reading LOCKED OUT by order of R. Strand, Regional Manager. And in the last three frames, a puppy, thin and wild eyed, standing guard over the boy, showing his small white teeth at the camera. “Mrs. Garrison,” Maribel said, “your husband kept this evidence for ten years.” I said, “He was a geologist. He believed in samples.”
Two days later, the truck with the company logo came to my house. I saw it from the kitchen window: a big silver truck, and a man in a clean white hard hat getting out, followed by a second man in a gray suit. I put on the old coat of Dale and opened the door with the chain on, and Duke came and stood in front of me, silent, with his hackles up. “Mrs. Garrison,” said the man in the suit, “we understand your husband left some items belonging to the company. We would like to purchase them. Fifty thousand dollars, and we would take the dog off your hands.”
“The dog stays,” I said. “And so does the camera.” He tilted his head, and for a moment he looked like a man who has never been refused. “Mrs. Garrison,” he said, “you are a retired schoolteacher in a ranch house. We have a legal department of forty people.” I smiled the smile that I used for thirty four years on the boys who threatened to tell their fathers. “And I have a recorder in my apron pocket,” I said. “I am so glad you said all that out loud.” Behind his truck, an unmarked car from the Bureau of Criminal Investigation, which Maribel had asked to wait at the end of the road, rolled up the drive.
The investigation lasted four months. The Bureau interviewed eleven men who had worked the Tioga Ridge well, and six of them, once they learned that someone had finally found the film, told the same story the dog had told with his eyes. The valve had failed. Rick Strand, the regional manager, had ordered the pad locked and the crew sent home to avoid a reportable accident, and Travis Longbow had gone back for his jacket and been overcome by the gas. The company had sent his mother a letter saying he had left for Texas.
Rick Strand was arrested in Williston at the airport with a ticket in his hand. The company paid a fine of eleven million dollars, the largest of its kind in the state, and its board dismissed a half dozen officers. A federal prosecutor, a woman with a gentle voice, told me afterward that without the film and the wallet she could never have made the case, and that the man who preserved them had been dead for months before anyone could thank him. I told her that Dale would have blushed, and gone off to look at a rock.
In October I drove to Poplar, on the Fort Peck reservation, to meet the mother of Travis. Mary Longbow was sixty five, a school bus driver with a long gray braid, and she met me at the door of a small blue house with her hands pressed together. I gave her the wallet and the belt buckle and the photograph. She sat down on the porch step and held them in her lap for a long time. Then Duke, who had been waiting patiently in the car, walked up the path and laid his big head on her knee, and she put her arms around his neck and wept into his fur.
In the spring we buried an empty casket at the cemetery of the mission, with an honor guard, a drum, and four hundred people. Mary asked me to stand with her. Afterward I drove home with the old dog in the passenger seat and the collar lying on the dashboard, its brass plate catching the light. Duke sleeps now at the foot of my bed, on the side that used to belong to Dale. He snores like a lumber mill. I would not trade it for anything in Montana, and I think my husband, wherever he is, is smiling at the two of us.
