📸 Photo

1

The Key

As soon as the pickup truck rolled up to the curb, the teenage computer geeks squatting on the sidewalk knew there'd be trouble. “Fucking wavers!” one of the cowboys called out the window. A beer bottle flew from the truck and crashed on the pavement. The geeks, who'd left the club to talk away from the din of music, had seen it all before. In Boise in 1988, being caught in public without a wide belt buckle and a cowboy hat was a bottlin' offense.

Then one of the geeks did something the cowboys weren't expecting: He stood up. Tall and broad shouldered, Max Butler cut a quietly imposing figure that was enhanced by his haircut, a spiky punk-rock brush that added three inches to his height. “Waver?” Max asked calmly, feigning ignorance of the Boise slang for New Wave music fans and other freaks. “What's that?” The two cowboys blustered and swore, then finally drove away with a screech of tires and the waving of mud flaps.

Since they met one another in junior high, Max had become the unofficial bodyguard in the klatch of fellow computer nerds in Meridian, Idaho, a bedroom community then separated from Boise by eight miles of patchy farmland. The town fathers had named Meridian a century earlier for its placement directly on the Boise Meridian, one of the thirty-seven invisible north-south lines that form the Y-axes in America's land survey