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oncoming shot, the magpie ducked and swooped down the canyon. “Uh-huh.”
    “They take a wrong turn and end up in Worland, and the dad sees the Troop G headquarters and decides to stop in and tell ’em what a great guy we’ve got in thattrooper that helped ’em out in the canyon. So the captain asks him which trooper, figuring it was me, and the guy says he doesn’t know ’cause the trooper never introduced himself. Then he remembers that when the patrolman told ’em they could go, he’d seen the name tag on his slicker.” Harlow sipped his Coors and fingered his Wayfarers down on his nose. “Womack, Bobby Womack.”
    Another magpie lit on the feeder, and I re-aimed. “Twelve years after his death.” I pulled the trigger and fared better this time, knocking the big bird from the perch as he shrieked at us and disappeared over the porch roof.
    “Nice shooting there, Tex.”
    “Could’ve been carbon monoxide poisoning.”
    “Yeah, it could’ve been.” He crossed back over and took his seat in the swing again and rested the beer on the railing. “Then there was this hitchhiker, hippie kid out of Benicia, California, who was heading north and got picked up by a trooper in the canyon really early one morning and said he gave him a ride all the way up to Canyon Hills Road and dropped him off. The kid wanted to buy him a meal to thank him, but the trooper said there was something he had to take care of but if the kidwanted to buy him lunch, he knew a place and would meet him at the end of the road in about an hour.”
    “So?”
    “The kid does what the trooper tells him to do and goes out to the end of Canyon Hills.”
    “And?”
    “There’s nothing out there but Monument Hill Cemetery.”
    I didn’t say anything.
    “Where Bobby’s buried.”
    I rested the Red Ryder in my lap for lack of targets. “You ever have anything strange happen to you?”
    He thought about it for a while, watching the smaller birds come in and take advantage of the magpies’ absence. “Back in 2000, WYDOT was painting the center strips, and we had to ride along in front of them, straddling the line so some idiot didn’t come around a corner and run into their trucks. Well, I’m pulling the duty, and we stop at the Tipi Camp about halfway for lunch, and one of the crew comes up and asks me to say something to the trooper who’s running behind us. According to this guy, he’s got his windows down and has been playing the same song over and over and would I please do something about it.”
    I sipped my beer. “And?”
    “Well, I tell this idiot that there isn’t any other trooper, that I’m the only one on duty in the canyon, but he keeps complaining, so we walk back there and of course there’s no other patrol car. Now, normally I would’ve just let it drop, but I was curious, so I asked him what the song was.”
    “Yep?”
    “Said it was that old Rolling Stones tune ‘It’s All Over Now,’ and that he must’ve heard it about forty-seven times.”
    “So?”
    “You know who wrote that song?”
    “Nope.”
    “Bobby’s namesake—Bobby Womack.” There was a long pause as he looked out to his right toward the byway. “Strange stuff, I shit thee not. I used to let it prey on my mind a great deal, but I just got to the point where I stopped. I figure things are going to happen, and a lot of them are going to be unexplainable.”
    “‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’”
    “Meaning?”
    “There might be a lot more going on around us in this world than we’re aware of.”
    He handed me back the coin. “Amen to that, brother.”
    I pocketed it. “Do you think he did it?”
    “Stole that money?” His eyes unfocused, and he sat there looking at nothing. “Hell, no.”
    “Then why did he do it?”
    “Do what?”
    “Pull out in front of that runaway tanker truck and kill himself?”
    He got up again and walked back over to the same post, leaning