j ESS WALTER
THE NEW FRONTIER
hen I'm on my way to Vegas with my old friend Bobby Rausch. Bobby's an Air Force survival instructor in Spokane and he gets us two jump seats on a military transport, a flying boxcar that rumbles and groans and finally lifts off the ground. It's the summer of 2003, six weeks after my divorce. Two weeks before Bobby leaves for Iraq. He's going to teach pilots how to survive on bugs and tree bark, how to withstand torture. Over the rumble of the plane I ask Bobby if he's scared. "You know what scares me," he says. "Go in' my whole life without gettin' the chance to prove myself." Two hours later our plane crests the pocked red and tan bluffs and we bank over the north end of Las Vegas, over a baked floodplain of shrimp-curled cui de sacs, a sprawl of earth-tone houses bleeding into desert. We're here to save Bobby's sister. True story. "Some guy is whorin' her down there, Nick," Bobby said the day he called. I played high school football with Bobby back in Montana, but hadn't seen him in years. Then, a month ago, our mothers crashed carts at the Grocery Outlet in Great Falls and my mom stupidly bragged to Bobby's mom that I'd finished law school "And I realized I might need a lawyer down there," Bobby said. I explained to Bobby that I did graduate from law school-three years ago. That I failed the bar exam. Twice. That Amanda left me, in part, because I refused to take the test again. That I was working most recently for a beer distributor.
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60 I JESS WALTER