Innocent Foxes: A Novel. Torey Hayden

everyone was disappointed. It was full of sex and gore and not at all the sort of thing decent, church-going folks went to see. There were a few, of course, who got starstruck. They tried to cosy up whenever they saw them and be friends, but that never happened. The canyon folk always brought their own friends with them.

      More and more started staying. For a couple of years, there was a mini land rush as they bought up the dilapidated cabins that peppered the narrow mountain canyons. When those ran out, they started buying ranches along the river. You couldn’t blame folk for selling up, because it was like they’d won the lottery. Never, ever in a million years could they have got that kind of money selling local. Everyone knew it was all bad land, even down by the river. Scrubby, dry and alkaline. It wasn’t fit for anything except running cattle, and you needed five thousand acres at the very least to make a living doing that. But then canyon folk would turn up out of the blue, knock on your door and right there on your doorstep they would offer you more for fifty acres than the whole ranch was worth. If you had a good view of the mountains, you could name the most unbelievable amount you could think of, and like as not you’d get it.

      Tom O’Grady, the real-estate agent, was the person to know in those days. He was good at sizing the canyon folk up, at knowing which piece of property would suit them, and then charming them into feeling they got the best of the deal when he sold it to them. Truth was, though, never for a moment did Tom forget that he was an Abundance man. He fleeced every one of them.

      Almost as good as the money he got for people was the gossip he gleaned. Because Tom spent so much time with the canyon folk, he always knew what was going on with them and it was often juicy as a mango.

      The canyon folk brought with them a lifestyle that people in Abundance had only ever read about in stories. They bought ranches just because they liked the scenery and not because they had to make a living from it. They bought up, tore down, threw out and built back up again without ever once using a local man. The bathroom tiles came from Italy; the oak in the cupboards came from Vermont; the man who made it into a kitchen came from Mexico. The canyon folk did all that and then only lived in the houses a few weeks in the summer. This made no sense to anyone local but you still felt in awe of it.

      Dane Goodman was the first big-name movie star to move into the canyon and stay there on a fairly regular basis. He bought Grampa Cummings’s ranch house up on Dry Creek and first thing he did was knock down the old porch on the west side and build a cedar deck. Then he installed a Jacuzzi hot tub and there was all sorts of gossip about naked starlets running through the woods. At the time, Dane Goodman was married to a well-known actress, but she only lasted four months before she went crazy and had to go back to California. So he took up with the screenwriter guy’s wife, which was all right because the screenwriter guy had already taken up with one of the naked starlets. Then Dane Goodman went off to do a movie and fell in love with someone else and brought her up from California. Meanwhile, the screenwriter guy’s wife moved in with Tim Mason. This shocked folk considerably, not only because Tim Mason was a local man but because everyone in town knew he was gay. There was no end of speculation about what Tim and the screenwriter guy’s wife were getting up to amidst the white wine, cedar decks and hot tubs.

      Spencer Scott was the next big name to make the Abundance area his home, and after him came that director guy, who had done all those anguished movies about poor people, and finally the Writer From Back East. They thought they were being cowboys, but they behaved like mountain men, letting their hair and beards grow, clomping down Main Street in raggedy jeans and boots and getting very publicly drunk. Mostly, however, they liked owning things: Hummers, vintage pick-ups and cattle from breeds nobody local had ever heard of. Most of all, however, they liked to own land. It had gone beyond the land-rush days by this point. The canyon folk and their hangers-on now owned most of the river valley, the canyons and even the mountains themselves.

      As a consequence, the look of the canyons changed. Roads were cut through the virgin forest. A landing strip was bulldozed down along the river. There was a helipad beside the highway just beyond Simpson’s Bridge. The novelty of having movie stars walking around had long since worn off for the residents of Abundance. Celebrity faces in the drugstore or the supermarket became an ordinary event. No one really noticed anymore. Not that the canyon folk were part of things now. They weren’t. They still kept themselves to themselves, while the Abundance folk went on as usual. Almost nobody mixed.

      This wasn’t to say, however, that the canyon folk weren’t good to Abundance. One year they decided the town ought to have a Fourth of July picnic, like the kind you read about in books, with sack races and watermelon-seed spitting contests. They set up a committee, got money for it and organized it as well. It was good fun. There was a parade and a pig roast and a huge fireworks display at the end. Another time, the canyon folk decided there ought to be a pretty white wrought-iron gazebo in the park so that a band could come and play on Sunday afternoons in the summer and they got that done. And they brought live theatre back to Abundance for the first time in ninety years with what was probably the most star-studded local dramatics group in all of the West.

      It wasn’t that the locals were ungrateful. These things were meant for everyone and the folk of Abundance really did enjoy themselves too. It was just that while a band playing in a gazebo on Sunday afternoon was nice, a new scanning machine for the hospital would have been nicer. This was the whole problem. The canyon folk only seemed interested in Abundance as a dreamy kind of place where they could do storybook stuff. When they got tired of the crappy internet connection or the bad coffee or having only two full-time doctors, they would fly away. For Abundance folk, however, Abundance was all there was.

      On Tuesday evening when Dixie went to the funeral home to dress Jamie Lee, Main Street was alive with high-school kids ‘turning the point’, as they called the ritual of relentlessly driving around the two-block downtown area in their parents’ cars. Entering the mortuary was like stepping into another dimension. The heavy oak doors closed behind Dixie, and there was a sudden vacuum of silence before her ears adjusted enough to hear the softly piped organ music. Her eyes took longer to leave behind the summer evening’s brilliance for the mortuary’s shadowy interior of burgundy carpets and heavy velvet drapes.

      The funeral director came out of his office to lead her down a dimly lit corridor to a small room adjacent to the chapel. Right in the middle of the room was what looked to Dixie like one of those little folding tables you put your dinner on when you eat in front of the TV. On top of it was the tiny blue coffin. Jamie Lee lay inside, swathed in a white baby blanket.

      ‘Is your husband coming?’ the funeral director asked.

      ‘He’s not my husband,’ Dixie replied softly as she bent to take the clothes out of the plastic carrier bag.

      ‘I just wondered if I should leave the door unlocked. It’s the kids, you know. They get up to mischief at this time of night.’

      ‘It’s not his little boy, you see.’

      The funeral director looked at her.

      ‘I mean, he’s been good to Jamie Lee and all. Just like a proper daddy. He didn’t even mind about Jamie Lee being the way he was. But it got kind of hard. ’Specially right here at the end. Know what I mean? But Billy tried to be good to Jamie Lee. Better than Jamie’s real daddy. His real daddy never even seen him …’

      ‘It’s all right. I understand,’ the funeral director said gently.

      ‘I just didn’t want you to be thinking Billy isn’t here because he doesn’t care. It’s that he’s been working all day and he’s real tired. He’s just got a job out at the sawmill, running one of them strippers, and he comes home dog-tired from it.’

      The funeral director nodded.

      ‘He’ll be coming tomorrow though,’ Dixie added. ‘He wouldn’t dream of missing the funeral. He was real attached to Jamie Lee.’

      After the funeral director left, Dixie went over to the coffin. Jamie Lee lay on his back, his head turned slightly to one side, his eyes closed. The way he looked that moment, you really would have thought he was just asleep. He didn’t have that bluish colour of death about him. In fact, he looked better now than he had