Read Online Turn Left at the Trojan Horse by Brad Herzog - Free Book Online

and park the Aspect with its rear bumper almost hovering over the Grande Ronde (French for “big roundabout”). From the window in the rear bedroom, it looks as if I am on a riverboat.
    The sun has ducked behind the hills, and the sky has morphed from a robin’s-egg blue to an aluminum gray. Above me dozens of tiny swallows—almost Hitchcockian in number—are darting and dive-bombing and gliding in grand arcs. They seem to be moving in layers of concentric circles, some flying low and frenetically, others amazingly high and moving in tranquil sweeps of the sky. The birds are hovering, but this time I resist the temptation to think of buzzards. I made it to Troy.

    A lonely campground in Troy, Oregon
    Morning arrives to the sound of the Grande Ronde murmuring, and I opt for breakfast at the café, where I am greeted by a half-dozen antlered animals peering from their mountings on a wall, as well as the torso of a bear, teeth bared, claws sharp, ready to pounce. Such is the attraction for most of the visitors here—hunting for elk in the hills, fly-fishing for steelhead in the river.
    Some locals, all in their seventies, invite me to sit with them at a small circular table in the center of the room. Sharon and Del are my neighbors at the RV park. They have a house about fifty miles south in the town of Joseph, but they spend most of their time in Troy, where Del pursues steelhead. Ginger and Harvey, dressed in complementary flannel, have a home on the mountain, having ranched in the area for many years. In all, the four of them have been married to their respective spouses a combined ninety-nine years.
    â€œI remember my first impression of Troy,” recalls Harvey with a smile. “I said, ‘Wouldn’t you hate to live somewhere where you have to drive up and down like that?’” Harvey turns to Ginger. “Didn’t I say that?” He leans back in his chair. “We’ve lived here since 1987.”
    I tell them my tale of that very drive, and they all react with groans and raised arms, as if to tell me I don’t know the half of it. They recount how frightened travelers constantly have trouble getting in and out of Troy. There was that time a frozen food truck plummeted over the bank, and a fertilizer truck, too. And that day when the pickup went over the edge, but the horse trailer—with two horses inside—stayed on the road, saving the truck from falling…
    The door opens, and in strolls a fellow with longish silver hair and a white goatee, looking a bit like a cross between Kenny Rogers and Kid Rock. He is a good twenty years younger than the rest of them, but he pulls up a chair and slips into the conversation without missing a beat. His name is Dean E. Dean.
    â€œMy parents thought I was going to be dean of a college or something,” he says, winking. Having retired from the army after two years in Vietnam, one in Korea and a stint patrolling the Czech and German border, Dean is a hunter, fisherman, and occasional river rafting guide. “If I have to work, I work a little,” he admits. “I’ve lived here seventeen years, and I’m going to die here.”
    Harvey perks up and, to general laughter, asks, “When do you want it?”
    Which returns the conversation to the harrowing road into Troy. My breakfast mates start listing the fatalities—that Kessler kid, that couple a few years back, those two folks in the yellow pickup…
    â€œAnd then there’s that kid who put that old Pontiac into Horseshoe Bend,” says Dean. “That car’s still there!”
    At this, I have to interject, only half joking, “Now I’m scared to leave.”
    â€œIt’s scarier than that staying here,” says Dean, with another wink. His smile stops halfway, and he shrugs, taking the conversation to the other side of the world. “You never think it’s gonna be you. We lost twenty-six men once from