Lone Creek

by Neil Mcmahon

  The beer tasted fine, but I couldn’t see much except a few scattered lights in the distance, making this country seem even lonelier than it was.

  “I keep thinking about how careful he was, setting that up,” I said. “Somehow, that’s the worst part of it.”

  “I been thinking that, too. I don’t guess you got a look at a brand.”

  I shook my head. “They were so torn up and buried in junk, I probably wouldn’t have been able to see one anyway. But why would somebody else’s horses be in there?”

  “I just got this creepy notion. A story I heard about smugglers using dogs as mules. Sewed up dope inside them and run them across the border, then cut them open.”

  That gave this nightmare a new twist I hadn’t imagined.

  “Kirk?” I said, thinking of his meth habit. He could sure run that Cat—he’d grown up with it. He could have spotted me at the dump, gotten alarmed, and blown the whistle about the lumber. But I was still convinced that Balcomb was at least in on it—that that was what he’d been driving at when he grilled me—and that Kirk wouldn’t kill animals like that.

  Madbird had his own reasons for doubting Kirk.

  “He ain’t got the brains,” he said. “Besides, he wouldn’t have to pull something like that to run meth. Half the fucking double-wides in this state got labs in them. Heroin or coke would be more likely.”

  I tried to envision Wesley Balcomb, with his glossy lifestyle and elegant business operations and aristocratic wife, involved in the violent and dangerous world of dealing dope—especially at this level of viciousness. If he was at a complete remove, just putting up money, then maybe—but not hands-on dirty like that.

  “Goddammit, it’s just too much grunt work,” I said. “You know what I mean? Up to your elbows in blood and guts and shit, having to lug stuff around and clean up—that’s not how guys like him make money.”

  Madbird grunted assent. “Yeah, I don’t buy it either.”

  We didn’t talk much for the rest of the drive. When we got to my truck, Madbird pulled up next to it and we transferred my tools.

  When we finished, he said, “I’m nervous about giving advice, ’cause it could backfire. But I guess if it was me, I’d try a bluff. See which way he jumps.”

  “Bluff how?”

  “Tell him you got the pictures of them carcasses. Say you always keep a camera handy from being a news dog, so you had it when you found them. Then you went back later and figured out where they were killed. Show him those pictures if he wants proof. With all that together, he might figure it ain’t worth fucking with you any more.”

  I was still standing there as Madbird fired up his van and pulled away. Then he slowed and leaned out the window.

  “Hey, Hugh,” he called. “You better be ready to jump, too.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Indian ways, Irish blood, and alcohol don’t necessarily make for a very smart mix. But it can be a potent one.

  Back when the job had first started, Jack, my boss, had given me a printout of phone numbers for the architects and managers and ranch offices and everybody’s cells. I’d had to contact one or another pretty often, usually to hassle something out, so I kept it in the truck’s glove box. It included the Balcombs’ home number. I’d never called that one and never dreamed I would.

  It was getting toward midnight when I found a quiet phone booth outside an Albertson’s grocery store.

  A woman answered after four rings.

  “Yes?”

  I could tell from that one syllable that she was Laurie.

  “This is Hugh Davoren, Mrs. Balcomb. I need to talk to your husband.”

  There was a slight hesitation.

  “Do I know you?” she said.

  “We spoke, earlier today. You were out riding and I was in a pickup truck.”

  “Oh, yes, with the faux dueling scar.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s rather late to be calling.”

  “This is important.”

  She paused again, as if she was trying to imagine what, in my life, it possibly could be.

  But she said, “I’m remembering you more clearly now. Somebody told me something about you.”

  “Huh. They must have been pretty hard up for gossip.”

  “You weren’t quite honest with me this afternoon. Stanford, is that right?”

  I blinked in surprise. I hadn’t known what to expect, but it wasn’t this.

  “I don’t recall lying about it,” I said.

  “Oh, I think the ‘aw, shucks, ma’am’ routine was a kind of lie.”

  “I’ve learned I get along better if I don’t answer questions until they’re asked.”

  “All right, I’ll ask one,” she said. “Why are you making your living out here hauling trash?”

  Out of nowhere, I remembered her riding toward me across the meadow, looking for all the world like Celia, by some miracle grown up into her full womanly beauty.

  “The guy hauling trash is me, Mrs. Balcomb. The other guy was a suit I tried on that never fit. He’s long gone and we’re both glad of it. Is your husband around?”

  For a few more seconds, again, nothing happened. I was getting the feeling that her hesitations had a meaning beyond anything I could grasp.

  It seemed strange that she’d have heard that about me, and stranger still that she’d bring it up.

  “I’ll get him,” she said.

  Balcomb took his time coming to the phone—back in his dick-swinging mode of making people wait.

  “Mr. Davoren,” he said, in his cool, smooth tone. “How interesting to hear from you. This number’s supposed to be unlisted. I can see I’ll have to change it.”

  “This is getting out of control, Balcomb. Let’s stop it right now.”

  His sarcasm edged up a notch. “Out of control?”

  “Somebody came onto my land and burned that lumber.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” he said, now with weary patience.

  “You don’t believe me, come up and take a look.”

  “I don’t believe you about anything, Davoren, and I’m most certainly not going to waste any more time on you. Even if what you claim is true, my first suspicion would be that you burned it yourself.”

  “Me? Why the hell would I do that?”

  “Because you thought it might make me feel sorry for you. I advise you to forget about any more such naive little ploys. You committed crimes and you took my property. You’re going to pay for that.”

  “Then it’s going to cost you, too,” I said.

  Balcomb actually sounded amused. “Yes, I thought that would be coming next. When lying and whining don’t work, your kind shift to threats.”

  I was starting to think real hard about driving right through his fucking high-security fence and dragging him out of his house.

  “Remember when you asked me if I saw anything unusual?” I said. “I probably should have mentioned—the most unusual thing I didn’t see was two shotgunned and gutted horses in the ranch dump.”

  There came a pause, like with Laurie, but the feel was a whole different order of business. Everything seemed to stop dead.

  “I haven’t told anybody yet,” I said. “But I’m ready to head straight to the Independent Record and give them the story. They’ll have it all over the wires by morning.”

  He wasn’t shaken for long. He knew the carcasses were safely hidden now. His tone changed to the steely one of a man who had tried to be tolerant but had run out of patience.

  “Really, Davoren. This has gone from distasteful to sick. I won’t dignify that with a response. But if it was anything but another outrageous lie, you’d have said something earlier.”

  “I kept my mouth shut so I could find out more without tipping anybody off,” I said. “I went back a little while ago and followed the Cat’s tracks to the shed where those horses were killed. Oh, sorry—weren’t killed. Never even existed, right?”

  This time he was silent as stone.


  “There’s a kicker, Balcomb,” I said. “Sure, I’m a liar trying to get off the hook, but I’m a liar who happened to be a journalist for seven years. The Sacramento Guardian—you can check it out if you want to waste the time. I always keep a camera with my other gear, out of old habit. So I’ve got a bunch of photos I didn’t take. The whole shittarree—the carcasses, the tipped-over hay bales, the loose piece of siding.”

  I watched a middle-aged couple come out of the store and make their way toward a dusty sedan, pushing a cart filled with plastic sacks—out grocery shopping late on a Saturday night. There was something odd and yet sweetly sensible about it.

  “I’m starting to realize that I was wrong about you,” Balcomb finally said, with the weariness in his voice again. “Your real problem is not that you’re a petty criminal. You’re completely unhinged. But I have far too much on my plate to be mired down in something like this. What is it you want?”

  See which way he jumps.

  “You drop all charges first thing Monday and pay my bail,” I said. “We’ll call the lumber a wash. Maybe it wasn’t mine, but you’d have just thrown it away.”

  “What guarantee do I have that you won’t stir up more trouble?”

  “I never stirred up any trouble to start with. And I don’t ever want any fucking thing to do with you again. You can believe that.”

  Another blast of that frozen stillness came across the phone, as clear as if it had turned my ear blue.

  “Consider it done,” he said.

  The connection ended.

  EIGHTEEN

  I got into my truck, shaking like I had after mixing it up with Doug Wills. As I drove, I tried to balance off the plays in this nasty little game. I’d shown my hole card, but so had Balcomb. The fact that he’d given in was as good as an admission. I didn’t have the photos I’d claimed, but he hadn’t asked to see them—another sign that his denial was a bullshit show. It was going to cost him a couple of thousand dollars, but that was nothing to him. I’d lost the lumber, but it wasn’t coming out of my pocket.

  I wasn’t naive enough to trust Balcomb, like I would have when I was younger. I’d grown up with the dinosaur ethic of somebody’s word being everything. It was the way you lived, how you were judged by other people—who you were. Eventually, I’d wised up enough to realize how differently a lot of the world saw it. Promises were empty, lures with sucker punches behind them, to be chuckled about later in a boardroom or four-star restaurant. He was powerful, rich, cunning in a way I could never touch. I hadn’t forgotten his threat about my being out of my league. And whatever the reasons might have been for that butchery, the chill factor was off the charts.

  I just hoped that Madbird’s bluff would prove out, and the risk of exposure would spook Balcomb enough, in turn, to get off my case.

  I didn’t know if Sarah Lynn would still be awake, but I was carrying the wad of cash I’d brought from my place and I wanted to pay her back. She lived not far away, in the hills east of the capital, so I figured I’d drive by and see. I could have waited for Monday—Bill LaTray would refund her twenty-five hundred after Balcomb paid him. But my sense of honor had taken a serious pounding, and I was going to feel a little better if I made a point of settling the debt right away.

  I stopped at an ATM to clean out the seven hundred bucks in my bank account, and learned something I’d never known—I had a daily limit of two hundred, and that was all the son of a bitch would give me. I decided it was the thought that counted, and drove on to Sarah Lynn’s.

  Her house was modern and expensive, two-level, with a rock facade on the lower one. I knew that she and her ex had owned it together until they’d split the sheets. She’d married the kind of guy she wanted—the son of the local John Deere dealer, who had a cosmetic job working for his father. They had plenty of money and they lived well. But he was a small-town playboy, content to collect his easy checks and spend them on golf, skiing, and other women. Sarah Lynn put up with all that for a long time and probably would have kept on, except that she’d wanted children and they didn’t come. Her doctors assured her that she was fine, biologically. She’d pushed her ex to get tested, but after a lot of hedging, he finally flat refused, unwilling to allow the possibility that there might be any trouble with his manhood.

  “There were half a dozen problems all the time—like cats in a sack, fighting to get out,” she’d told me once. “It took all I had to handle them, but I could. Then that one more came along, and everything blew up.”

  Now she’d been single for several years—had gone through the shock of divorce, the first acute loneliness, the period of getting used to it, and then the realization that this was how things were likely to stay. There weren’t many eligible men around, and she was choosy.

  The front picture window was dimly lit. Behind the curtains I could see the flicker of a TV screen. I rang the bell. A few seconds later, she turned on the porch light and opened the door cautiously, just the few inches that the chain allowed.

  “Candygram,” I said, and held up the sheaf of bills.

  She smiled and closed the door to release the chain.

  When she opened it again, I could see that she hadn’t been kidding about her plans for a big Saturday night. She was wearing a white terry-cloth robe. The TV was showing an old movie, the couch was a nest of pillows and comforters, and a half-full glass of wine was sitting on the coffee table.

  “It’s a little short of two thousand,” I said, handing her the money. “I’ll get you the rest Monday.”

  “I told you not to worry about it.”

  “I want to keep my credit good, in case I have to hit you up again.”

  Her gaze sharpened. “I hope that’s a joke.”

  “Me, too.”

  “You still owe me that story.”

  “Any time,” I said.

  There was an awkward little pause.

  “I’d ask you in, Huey, but it wouldn’t be a good idea,” she said.

  “I know.”

  She smiled again, a trace sadly this time, and touched a fingertip to the scar under my eye.

  “You ever going to forgive me for this?” she said.

  “I never blamed you.”

  “You did in a way—you just wouldn’t admit it. And in a way, it was my fault.”

  “You didn’t have anything to do with it, Slo. I dodged left when I should have dodged right. That’s all there is to it.”

  “I was being a selfish little girl.”

  “That’s the best kind of selfish I’ve ever run across,” I said.

  For a second, I thought she might change her mind and invite me to stay. Instead, her smile turned wry.

  “You’ve still got the blarney, Davoren,” she said, and closed the door, politely but definitely.

  The reason I’d come here was to give her the money, and that was the truth. But I admitted that there’d been a fantasy in the depths of my mind that we’d end up in bed. I’d been subsisting for the past years on occasional one-nighters and even rarer connections that lasted a while longer, but never held. That had worn thin to the point where it was almost more trouble than it was worth. Something in me understood that no longer caring about getting laid was a bad sign.

  Tonight, with her, it would have been natural and easy—and I knew that was why she hadn’t gone for it. It wasn’t just that I looked like a goat and smelled worse. She was in the same situation as me, only more vulnerable, and this would have been a dangerous step toward another heartache.

  I walked back to my truck, filled with morose admiration for her good sense.

  NINETEEN

  As I started the pickup’s engine, I couldn’t help glancing across the seat at a dent in the passenger door panel. It had come into being the same night as my scar, and Sarah Lynn was right—irrational though it was, I couldn’t help connecting the two things.

  Toward the end of Christmas break my junior year in college, she and I had driven this truck to the town of Rocky Boy, on
the Chippewa-Cree reservation up near the Canadian border. They were hosting an AAU boxing tournament and I was on my way to face another light heavyweight, Harold Good Gun.

  It was a Saturday afternoon in early January. A chinook had sprung up two days earlier, a freak warm wind that stripped snow from the fields, leaving streaks of dark earth through the cover of winter. The sky was the color of frost, with no visible horizon. From Wolf Creek to Fort Benton, the highway followed the Missouri northeast. We could see it most of the way, winding through the bleak landscape, thawing in stretches that shone metallic gray in the flat afternoon light. Small white crosses marked the roadsides where people had died in car wrecks. Sometimes there’d be several of them in a cluster.

  Sarah Lynn was quiet for most of the drive. She’d come along only because we had such a short time together before I went back to Palo Alto, and we wouldn’t see each other again until June. This wasn’t a part of my life she liked. On the surface, that was because of the brutality, but there was a deeper aspect.

  After Pete Pettyjohn had thumped me, I’d stuck with my vow to learn to take care of myself. I took tae kwon do lessons for a while, then segued into boxing because of my admiration for a coach named Jimmy Egan—a tough, salt-of-the-earth mick from the smelter town of Anaconda who taught English at the local Catholic college and shepherded young men into becoming respected and respectful fighters. His view of the sport was parallel to his steadfast religious faith. Dedicated training and clean ring work were along the paths of righteousness. Any kind of moral transgression was punching below the belt.

  I trained with Jimmy my last three years in high school, then went on to Stanford. It had long since disbanded its politically incorrect boxing club, but I hooked up with an informal group who worked out and sparred together and sometimes got bouts at a gym in San Jose. I kept on with Jimmy during the summers and took every local bout I could get.

  I had no illusions about achieving any major status. There were plenty of amateur light heavies out there who were faster, more experienced, and a lot hungrier. What kept me at it was a passion that had developed over the years. I was still always jumpy when I got into a ring, but fear had become outweighed by the electric charge of the experience. At its best, it thrilled me with a sense of power that nothing else I’d ever done could touch. I had also gotten plenty familiar with the downside—a soundless explosion in my head, then opening my eyes to the sight of another man’s ankles, with my face on the canvas and the ref yelling numbers in my ear. But even that had a raw, real edge.