The Trackers

by Charles Frazier

There’s not but one true trail through the world, and all the truth you can say of it is it’s there. Everything else is a guess, your own made-up bullshit. There’s really no such thing as a guide. Just the trail.

Long sounded a lot like Hutch with his optimistic vision of how art in every small town, right there in your face filling up a whole wall every time you bought a stamp, could elevate the country, maybe by only an inch, but every upward movement, however small, accumulates.

Leaving me nothing would have felt more satisfying than that acre. I spent way too much time trying to decipher the message he intended to send from beyond the grave. Maybe it was no more complex than a bitter laugh or slap in the face or raised middle finger.

I couldn’t ever let on that the thing they wanted least was what I wanted most. This ranch. They’d have seen that as weakness. Like how they saw apologizing when you were wrong as a weakness. Strength was bullying the person in the right into apologizing to you.

as for weddings, the only ones I’ve ever attended have been mine, and those have been fairly casual so far.

—I didn’t ask for this, she said. It’s no different from finding a gold nugget or dying in a car wreck. Chance, not an accomplishment. People get confused.

And also, I said, the weirdest thing about the Constitution was that apparently the founding fathers had wanted a third of the government to be unelected and lifelong and therefore uncorrectably corrupt. Or else they’d been optimistic flower-sniffers when it came to human nature and its primary tendencies toward raw self-interest.

I said, Faro has a vivid imagination, doesn’t he? —If that means sometimes he makes shit up in his head and wants us all to take it for truth, then yes. Same as everybody.