The Trackers

Charles Frazier The Trackers ISBN: 9780062948106, 9780062948083 Kindle / ASIN: B0B6JSJQLH Genre: Historical Goodreads Rating: Hardcover, 336 pages Published: 2023 From the New York Times bestselling author of "Cold Mountain" and "Varina", a stunning new novel that paints a vivid portrait of life in the Great Depression Hurtling past the downtrodden communities of Depression-era America, painter Val Welch travels westward to the rural town of Dawes, Wyoming. Through a stroke of luck, he's landed a New Deal assignment to create a mural representing the region for their new Post Office. A wealthy art lover named John Long and his wife Eve have agreed to host Val at their sprawling ranch. Rumors and intrigue surround the couple: Eve left behind an itinerant life riding the rails and singing in a western swing band. Long holds shady political aspirations, but was once a WWI sniper--and his right hand is a mysterious elder cowboy, a vestige of the violent old west. Val quickly finds himself entranced by their lives. One day, Eve flees home with a valuable painting in tow, and Long recruits Val to hit the road with a mission of tracking her down. Journeying from ramshackle Hoovervilles to San Francisco nightclubs to the swamps of Florida, Val's search for Eve narrows, and he soon turns up secrets that could spark formidable changes for all of them. In "The Trackers", singular American writer Charles Frazier conjures up the lives of everyday people during an extraordinary period of history that bears uncanny resemblance to our own. With the keen perceptions of humanity and transcendent storytelling that have made him beloved for decades, Frazier has created a powerful and timeless new classic. 2023 - ePub verification and revisions by zardox Copyright This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. THE TRACKERS. Copyright © 2023 by 3 Crows Corporation. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books. Ecco® and HarperCollins® are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers. FIRST EDITION Cover design by Allison Saltzman Cover illustration © Tom Haugomat Interior art: Douglas fir and spruce trees © Max_Lockwood/shutterstock Digital Edition APRIL 2023 ISBN: 978-0-06-294810-6 Version 03172023 Print ISBN: 978-0-06-294808-3 Dedication For David and Elizabeth Contents Cover Epigraphs I. Ten Thousand Foot Blue II. Charcoal and Umber III. Rust and Chartreuse IV. Cinnabar and Azure V. Indelible Black Author’s Note Acknowledgments About the Author Also by Charles Frazier About the Publisher Epigraphs As soon as you embark, you’ll be free . . . But don’t go astray. —Sophocles, The Trackers . . . hunger and cold and death ride the green light of every train the child tramp flips. Soon he knows them as old acquaintances. —Thomas Minehan, Boy and Girl Tramps of America, 1934 A MUDDY BLACK-AND-WHITE NEWSPAPER PHOTOGRAPH. I’m standing on a scaffold made from two tall stepladders with boards running between them. I’ve barely begun the mural, haven’t even started putting color on the wall of the brand-new post office. In the photo, the wall looks almost blank, though if you know what you’re looking for, you can faintly see the penciled grid I’ve been laying out, where I’ll soon sketch the underlying form of my plan—curving lines moving across the space, swelling and rising and breaking like waves, the flow of energy moving left to right like a line of text. Up on the scaffold, my head nearly touches the ceiling. My tousle-top hair needs a trim. I’m wearing baggy khaki pants and a workingman’s T-shirt and an old pair of Converse All Stars. In the photograph, the paint stains barely show. I’m holding a brush in my hand, not because I’ve I Ten Thousand Foot Blue MID-AFTERNOON, MAY, UNDER AN EMPTY HIGH-ALTITUDE sky, cool but the sun blazing like it yearned to cinder you, I took a right turn off pavement and passed under a massive H-shaped ponderosa-log entryway. A nearly discreet sign swinging on two chains from the crossmember read Long Shot. Down the dirt drive, two black arcs of telephone and electric lines drooped pole to pole for half a mile of tallgrass and sage. At the end of the road, the ranch house sat long and dark brown. It wasn’t old—not much is out there except the land itself—but this was aggressively new. Its angular flattish rooflines looked like Frank Lloyd Wright had been hired to draw up an enormous log-and-stone cabin one morning and had tossed it off in time for lunch. The center of the house stood tall and angled, and the two wings stretched low and