Wilderness Reform: A Novel - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Matt Query, born and raised in Boulder, Colorado, is a wildland firefighter and a litigator who focuses on legal issues related to water rights, natural resources, public lands, and fish and wildlife management. He and his brother are the authors of Old Country, Wilderness Reform, and Blood Trail. 

Harrison Query is a Colorado native whose work as a writer has spanned multiple genres. He has developed screenplays for a variety of film companies and has worked with Ridley Scott, Chris Columbus, Robert Zemeckis, and more. He and his brother are the authors of Old Country, Wilderness Reform, and Blood Trail.

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Chapter 1 CHAPTER 1

SOUTHERN LOUISIANA

A RESTAURANT’S GREASE trap stinks in a way that’s impossible to forget. The stench locks itself into a brain like initials carved into an old desk. Ben realized this in the days that followed his first close encounter with the vile waste.

He had found himself wedged into a small opening between a brick wall and a dripping, stinking grease trap behind a diner. He tried to stay as silent as he could as he watched the flashlight bob toward him down the weed-covered, trash-strewn alleyway.

He had not known it at the time, but the minute or so he spent in that hiding place would haunt Ben for a very, very long time. It was the first time in his life he’d been completely floored by dread. Paralyzed almost. He’d never felt anything like it before; he’d never felt his hands, joints, and mind completely seized up by shrieking, hysterical panic. It felt like black swamp mud filled his veins.

In the days that passed since that moment, he’d thought about it constantly. The grease trap’s putrid citrus stench of rot, the inch-thick black grime on the bricks and cracked asphalt around the trap, the humidity in the air, the din and roar of his heartbeat in his ears, the shrieking cicadas, the cop slowly pacing down the alley toward him. He’d actually gagged on several occasions as he’d recall the sensation of the reeking burnt-orange grease running down the sides of his face, his neck, forming an adhesive slick between his shirt and shoulder blades.

To Ben, it felt like every excruciating detail of the moment was laser-burned into whatever part of the brain was right behind the eyes.

Ben had robbed a gas station a few blocks away from that diner and its disgusting grease trap. He’d only had an airsoft gun, the orange muzzle of which had been lazily Sharpied over in the dark on his walk toward the gas station. Thing looks real enough, he’d thought.

The lady at the counter certainly couldn’t tell the difference. He grabbed about eighty dollars from the register and as many candy bars, jerky sticks, and packaged shitty pastries as he could carry. When he saw police lights start to pulse off the dirty windows of the abandoned old building across the street from the gas station, he bolted out the door. Ben ran as fast as he could until he saw the hiding place, and went for it.

He figured it was likely the cops had already seen him turn into the alley, but he dove behind the grease trap anyway. He thought about running once he’d wedged himself into the hiding spot, but he was shaking too badly. He was too exhausted, too dehydrated, too malnourished. His body knew it was already over. The grease and grime embraced him. Ben felt like he was stuck to a roach trap; those strips of adhesive brown tape the insects get trapped onto as they skitter across, then even more stuck as they kick and writhe until death takes them. Once the cop’s flashlight got to within about thirty feet, all Ben can remember is that he started screaming.

He screamed that he didn’t have a gun, he begged not to get shot, pleaded to be helped out from under the grease trap. He cried as he was put into the back of the cruiser. The next day, he cried more on the ride home from his arraignment in the back seat of Aunt Nicki’s old Buick. Not once on the whole drive did she glance up at the rearview mirror to look back at him through the haze of cigarette smoke. Worse than the smoke was the razor-edged silence, the kind that was loaded with the assurance of beatings and pain.

Over the next week, Ben caught up with the buddies he’d grown up with in Lafitte, Louisiana. He regaled them with the tale of his days on the run. He told them about how he’d stolen his neighbor’s johnboat and split off into the bayou, how he’d broken into private fishing camps where he drank good bourbon and robbed crab traps for his meals. He told them about how he’d finally run out of supplies and camps to raid, and about how he’d stashed his boat along a canal somewhere in Plaquemines Parish, then hiked up Highway 23 in the dark with a plan to knock over the first gas station he came across, then finally about how that plan had gone pear-shaped and how he’d been caught by the constables.

He told them about how he’d kept his mouth shut throughout a blistering, night-long interrogation from multiple different detectives. He told them about the deals he’d been repeatedly offered, which he’d repeatedly refused. He said he’d told the detectives to go fuck themselves, that he’d happily do his time in Louisiana state’s juvenile corrections, where he had plenty of friends he was excited to catch up with. Ben’s buddies were proud of him. Their elder brothers were proud of him too. Part of Ben felt like a king, like he’d sunk a buzzer-beater three.

In reality, no detective interrogated Ben. No one offered him a deal. He hadn’t been driven by some outlaw spirit as he’d stolen the boat, broken into the fishing camps, or knocked over the Chevron station. From start to finish, all he’d felt was fear and anxiety. He’d done it all to try to find somewhere safe to take his little brother, Wade, where their aunt couldn’t find them—and he’d been scared shitless the entire time. He hadn’t even considered how he’d sneak back to his hometown of Lafitte to get his little brother, let alone how he’d actually smuggle the small child away. The whole week was just a poorly planned cascade of fiascos, catalyzed by one moment of meteoric panic and rage. Panic for his little brother, and rage at being too small and not knowing how to protect him.

He hadn’t even actually been brought to the Plaquemines Parish Sheriff’s Office detention center in Davant, fabled among his friends, their elder brothers, uncles, fathers, and grandfathers. He spent his one night in “jail” locked in a sterile, fluorescent-lit room in the back of some double-wide that served as a district patrol office somewhere off state highway 23. He’d been relegated to this unique incarceration due to the late hour he’d been arrested and his only being thirteen years old. It felt worse to Ben somehow. It was insulting.

Ben spent several hours in that room disgusted by the stinking grease that still caked his upper body and head. He had been waiting for it to begin drying and crusting, hoping this would help abate its stench and allow it to be scratched away, but the nature of the wicked substance prevented that, so he tried to focus on how he was going to go about doing the one thing he’d always been good at: manipulating adults and talking his way out of shit.

He had read and thereby memorized the Bill of Rights and portions of several state statutes that he’d deemed potentially helpful based on their focus. He also had access to a collage of courtroom and interrogation scenes from television and movies he’d logged away over the years. However, over the last few hours Ben had started to see how truly useless that archive of surface-level information was. He’d sound like a damn fool just spouting off recitations of black-letter law without knowing when or how to use it. There was an operative nature to state law and constitutional rights; he knew they had to be employed in a particular sequence to specific facts. However, he didn’t...