William Browning

James T. Hammes embezzled $8.7 million from an Ohio-based Pepsi distributor, and then he went on the run. Or rather on the hike—he took off on the Appalachian Trail for six years.

A young man’s memories of quitting the football team:

“The boy remembers walking the hallway toward his office, telling himself not to give in. He sat face-to-face with Coach, Bear Bryant’s picture hanging nearby on the office wall. Are you sure you want to spend your senior year in the bleachers? Coach said. Full of teenage arrogance, the boy said he wouldn’t be attending any games. He said he had watched from the sideline for two seasons and had his fill.

“Coach, always slow to speak, leaned back in his chair and warned him. He warned him that not that season, but in a decade or so, he would come to regret his decision and that once made, it could not be undone.

“The boy laughed. A grown man, said the boy, has no business thinking of games he did or did not play in high school. Coach said all right and the boy left. He never called him ‘Coach’ again. Not because he walked away from football, but because that summer the coach married his mother.

“And the boy hated him for that.”

A man terminally ill with cancer and his friendship with a hospice worker:

“Andres was in his brother’s living room on the Northside last August as he told his story. A small group of family and friends was his audience. No one flinched as he covered the tougher parts – everyone there knew the story. When he finished, though, he turned toward an empty spot in the room and said something that made the room go silent.

“‘There’s just one thing I can’t understand,’ he said. ‘They can fix all these people. But they can’t fix me.’

“Kelly Racine broke the silence. She is a psychosocial specialist with Community Hospice who was on one of her weekly visits to see Andres. Hearing him talk about things that can’t be explained, she asked him what he had decided to do despite the incurable disease. His eyebrows lifted.

“‘Make people laugh,’ he said.

“‘And what is your word?’ she said.

“‘Survive,’ he said, and his mood brightened a little.”

More than three decades ago, these murders shook Wyoming’s blue skies and open spirit. He admitted to committing them, testified against a man later given a death sentence and — poof — vanished into prison under an alias. Now, people were saying he had come home. Hard, unanswered questions circled the rumor. So not long after spring broke this year, a knock on his door. No response.

It was midday on a bleak and hard highway when bullets cut the air — cool, thin, Wyoming air. The first came through the windshield, into his left eye, stopping millimeters from his brain. If there was pain, he doesn’t remember. It’s the sensation of a falling red curtain he talks about. He slumped right, across the seat. Fumbling, he clutched the radio, screaming to dispatchers, “I’ve been shot! I’ve been shot! Help! Help!” Then it felt like burning iron thrusting again and again through the flesh of his lower back.