Lone Creek

by Neil Mcmahon

  I recognized that line, all right. You could call it exotic if you wanted, but it didn’t come from any poem. It was an old construction workers’ riff, tossed around with grim humor when competent men busting their asses on tough jobs under bad conditions got hassled by bean counters who rode around in heated pickup trucks wearing clean white hard hats.

  “Build a thousand bridges, they’ll never call you an engineer,” was how it went. “Suck one cock, they’ll call you a cocksucker for the rest of your life.” The sentiment probably dated back to the Stone Age. Laurie must have picked it up somewhere, without any notion of the tag line or meaning.

  But what shook me was that it had been Celia’s favorite bad-girl taunt.

  Growing up like she had on ranches and around workingmen, she’d learned that kind of stuff early, and by the time she’d come to live with us, she had it honed into a multipurpose weapon. Most often, she’d used it when somebody took her to task for a chore she’d done poorly or not at all. She’d roll her eyes, sigh, and say those first few words, “Build a thousand bridges.” Men, in particular, would tend to stop cold and back off in confusion. Then she’d go right on doing as she pleased.

  I couldn’t for the life of me come up with a reason why that would appear in Laurie Balcomb’s mind right now.

  As I drifted off, the movie screen behind my closed eyes started playing an image of Laurie or Celia or the two of them together inside one bare shining skin, rising up out of Lone Creek with a million crystal shards of water exploding into my face.

  FORTY-ONE

  I awoke to the sound of a woman weeping. That had happened a number of times before in my life, almost always because she was wishing that one of us was someplace, or somebody, else.

  Lord knew that Laurie Balcomb had plenty of cause for that.

  It was still night. I couldn’t tell how late. I knew I’d slept a while, and I sure could have kept on going. But her muffled sobs pierced me like little stabs. Whatever bond of kinship she might have felt had been safely abstract, but now it was shattered by the waffle-head hammer of reality. She was in a hell of a spot, and all because of me.

  I crawled out of my sleeping bag into the near-freezing chill, hobbled to the van, and sat beside her feet again, trying to drag up words of reassurance that I didn’t feel.

  “I know you’re scared,” I started, but she cut me off.

  “Of course I’m scared.” She was curled up like a child, her face hidden by her hair. “Not of Wesley. I mean, I am, but that’s not it.” She shook her head. “I don’t know how to explain. There’s something happening to me. It’s almost like a voice in my mind. Maybe I’m going crazy. But it seems so right.”

  I was still groggy, and this bewildered me. It wasn’t at all what I’d expected.

  “What does this voice say?” I said.

  “That I’m not really who I always thought I was. Like I’ve been living in a dream that’s pretty, but all for show, and I’m starting to wake up.”

  She pushed her hair aside and looked at me. Her face was a shadow, but her legs, pressed against me now, were warm.

  “That you and I go way far back,” she said.

  “How do you mean?”

  She turned away again. “Now you’ll think I’m crazy. I started feeling it when I first saw you, months ago. It wouldn’t leave me alone.”

  “Months ago? I thought you didn’t know who I was until yesterday.”

  “I had to pretend. I couldn’t just come out and tell you,” she said impatiently.

  “No, I guess I can see that.”

  “So I arranged for us to accidentally meet.”

  “You arranged it?”

  “I knew your routine, knew you’d go get rid of that trash at the end of the day. So I went riding out there. I’d finally decided—this isn’t a nice thing to say, but I thought if I got to know you a little, I’d see how silly it was.”

  “That would have worked pretty quick, all right. It’s just your bad luck that all this other stuff happened instead.”

  But she shook her head again. “It’s here right now, stronger than ever,” she said quietly. “Not an ‘it’—a ‘she.’”

  My scalp started to bristle.

  Laurie rose up on one elbow and put her other hand on my arm. Her shoulders were bare.

  “Do you know at all what I’m talking about?” she said, with a hint of pleading. “Or is it just me?”

  I stared at her hidden eyes.

  “What do you know about her?” I said.

  “That she died young. That you were in love with her.”

  My rational mind told me this was insane, some kind of folie à deux. But that came about when two people developed it together—it didn’t arise in them independently.

  Then there was the fact that my whole world had gone insane.

  “It’s not just you,” I said.

  She sank down again, exhaling like she was letting out a breath that she’d held to the lung-bursting point.

  “That’s why I’m afraid,” she whispered. “That I’m going to lose this as soon as I found it.”

  Her hand slipped down my arm into mine.

  “She loved you, too, but she couldn’t show it,” Laurie said. “She wants to, now.”

  No doubt it was wrong, too, in all kinds of ways, but what the hell did right and wrong have to do with anything anymore?

  The rest of Laurie was bare, too. I shut down my thoughts and let my hands dare to warm themselves on her silky skin.

  FORTY-TWO

  When dawn broke a couple of hours later, Laurie had fallen asleep, but I could tell I wasn’t going to. I gathered my clothes quietly and dressed outside. My boots had gone cold and stiff, but I hardly felt them as I pulled them on. I walked into the trees to hunt for firewood, finally starting to think about what to do next.

  The bit of sleep I’d gotten and the bracing morning air both helped to get my brain working again. But Laurie’s warmth had been a far more potent reviver. Although our troubles hadn’t lessened in any tangible way, I was gliding in an almost goofy rapture, an invisible shield that allowed me to see the situation without its choking me, and which pushed back the fatalism that had gripped me last night. Formidable as Balcomb was, he wasn’t all-powerful. There still might be a way to take him down.

  By the time I had a little blaze going, I’d formed a plan of sorts. It might not have been smart, but I didn’t really care. There was a lot to be said for cheerfully accepting that you’d lost your mind.

  I filled Madbird’s camp kettle with clear water from the stream and put it on the fire. I was reluctant to wake Laurie, but I was feeling restless. I waited until the water boiled, then made a cup of instant coffee and took it to her. She looked tousled and pleasantly dazed, like she’d spent the night doing just what she had.

  “I’d like to hit the road before too long,” I said.

  She stretched luxuriously, then lifted the sleeping bag’s cover enough to give me an alluring glimpse inside.

  “Sure you don’t want to come back in?” she said.

  “Soon, don’t worry. I need a break. I’m out of shape for that kind of thing.”

  “Me, too,” she said, a little shyly.

  She’d seemed as hungry as me, that was for sure, and it pleased me to know that I wasn’t sharing her with Balcomb.

  She took the coffee mug, sipped, and grimaced.

  “That woke me up,” she said.

  “There’s sugar if you want it, and that nondairy creamer stuff.”

  “This is fine. Where are we going?”

  “The Hi-Line. Up near the Canadian border.”

  Her face turned puzzled. “What’s up there?”

  “Kirk had a place in the Sweet Grass Hills. I want to look around it.”

  “Kirk? What’s he got to do with this?”

  “I’ll tell you on the way.” I started toward the fire to make a cup of coffee for myself.

  “So you really did kill him,” she said.<
br />
  I managed not to turn around too fast. She smiled, like she was teasing me. I hoped so. The way she seemed to know things I couldn’t explain was very unsettling.

  “Where’d you come up with that?” I said.

  She shrugged. “Just a feeling. You want to go there to make peace with him somehow.”

  Going to Kirk’s didn’t have anything to do with that—I would have sworn it on a stack of Bibles. But I felt that prickling in my scalp again.

  “Sure, I killed him,” I said. “That’s the real reason I wanted to go to the sheriffs last night. Tell them all about it and get myself thrown in prison.”

  “All right, that was dumb. I just don’t want you fooling around with any other ghosts. Laying them is what they say, you know.”

  “We’re not at all sure Kirk is a ghost, and he’s not my type, anyway.” I leaned inside the van and kissed her. “Besides, the one I’ve got’s already more than I can handle.”

  She bit my ear, not too hard, but not too soft, either.

  “You do possess a certain rough-hewn charm,” she murmured. “Where can a girl get a bath around here?”

  I held Hannah’s down coat for her while she slipped demurely into it, then led her to the creek. The water was icy and this wasn’t a sunny afternoon when you could jump in for a pleasant shock and then lazily warm yourself, so I showed her how to take a cowboy bath, crouching on the bank with a bar of soap and splashing face, armpits, and crotch, without getting in and freezing completely.

  It was still very cold. She watched me skeptically, staying huddled up in the coat. I toweled off with a denim jacket of Madbird’s I’d found in the van, then reversed it and gave it to her. The inside was flannel and a lot softer, although it smelled about the same. She took it gingerly, like she’d decided that being a little gamy wasn’t so bad after all. But while I got dressed, she started rummaging through Hannah’s magic satchel. She took out a little makeup kit and then a new packet of panties. They didn’t look dainty, more like the everyday white cotton variety, and she examined them critically.

  “Looks like Hannah got you covered for every contingency,” I said.

  “Well, these aren’t the kinds of things I’d pick. But they’ll do until I can get my own.”

  “Hey, no problem. There’s a Bloomingdale’s just down the road.”

  She gave me a contrite glance. “I didn’t mean to sound rude. It’s very sweet of her.”

  Probably no woman, in her heart, ever really approved of any other woman’s taste. I walked to the campsite to clean up.

  Apparently she found her nerve—when she came back she looked cold and damp, but fresh. She got into the van to dress. I heard the sound of plastic tearing, then the snap of elastic.

  “Hannah and I are about the same size,” she said. A minute later she got out, walked around to the van’s side mirror, and started putting on lip gloss.

  I was stowing the last of the gear when I heard a little clatter. I glanced at her and realized that she’d dropped the makeup kit. But instead of bending to pick it up, she was staring into the woods.

  A man was walking out of the trees toward us. He was dressed in outdoors clothing that looked like it had just come off the shelf at Cabela’s, and otherwise was completely ordinary-looking.

  Except that he was carrying a leveled rifle.

  As John Doe advanced, staring back at Laurie, his forefinger rose to tap menacingly beneath his right eye. It stood out like a stoplight, bloodred around the pupil.

  Her knees gave a little kick like they were going to buckle. I stood stunned, with a single realization burning through my numbness—there was only one conceivable way he could have found us.

  Madbird.

  My great old friend had contacted Wesley Balcomb and turned Laurie and me into cash.

  FORTY-THREE

  John Doe took hold of Laurie’s hair and pressed the gun’s muzzle into the small of her back—not roughly, but with the air of a man who knew he was absolutely in control. This was the first real look I’d gotten at his face. Behind the blandness was something that suggested the kind of kid who enjoyed pulling the legs off bugs.

  “Get down on your knees,” he told me. His voice was an accentless monotone. “Then walk me through these last two days. Everything you saw, everybody you talked to, everything you said.”

  I didn’t have any grandstand play of bravery in me. If I’d been alone, I might have gone for him out of sheer desperation. But he kept Laurie carefully between us, and if I did, she’d drop to the ground with her spine snapped in two. I didn’t kneel, either. I would have, or flopped on my belly or back or done anything else in the world if I thought it would keep him from pulling the trigger. But he was going to anyway. I knew I’d end up screaming and groveling, but I’d go out feeling like less of an asshole if I did it after he shot me instead of before.

  His mouth tightened. “All right, let’s start with her,” he said.

  The rifle’s muzzle slid down the back of her right leg to the pocket behind her knee. She was wild-eyed and panting, but this time there was nothing like a car key at hand.

  I dropped to my knees.

  He shifted the gun barrel to beside her waist, so it was pointed toward my belly. I sucked in my breath, staring at that quarter-inch circle inside a ring of blued steel that could hurl out a slug the size of a baby’s fingertip with enough speed and force to turn a human being into an agonized lump of flesh.

  A boom and a shriek ripped into my ears, so close together they were almost the same sound. My body convulsed, braced for the terrible surge of pain that would come in an instant.

  But it didn’t, and I started to grasp that the scream hadn’t been mine.

  John Doe was reeling backward, his arms flying upward like he’d just stepped barefoot on a hot wire. Blood was spilling out of his right upper arm. Laurie was stumbling away from him, moving like she was running underwater. The rifle was lying on the ground.

  I scrambled to my feet, lunged forward, and full-faced John Doe with my right fist, catching him on the side of his mouth. The sound was like an ax splitting a chunk of wet larch. He screeched again and went spinning away.

  I was starting after him to rip him several new assholes when a familiar gravelly voice spoke out.

  “Sorry that took so long. I was trying to line up a better shot. Finally couldn’t wait no more.”

  Madbird came walking into the clearing, holstering his long-barreled .41 Magnum pistol. He pulled a thick wad of bills out of his pocket and handed it to me.

  “Here’s your half,” he said.

  FORTY-FOUR

  We found Laurie a hiding place up in a rock pile with a good view of the terrain, just in case Balcomb knew where we were or someone had heard the pistol shot. We made her comfortable with sleeping bags, food, and water. Then Madbird and I took John Doe for a hike deep into the back country, shoving him stumbling along with his elbows duct-taped tight together behind him and more wraps of it as blindfold and gag. Madbird had done this before. He stayed quiet and so did I. I wasn’t about to intrude on what he might be remembering.

  The way he’d engineered this left me helpless with admiration. Like I thought, he’d called Balcomb and offered us up for ten thousand dollars.

  “Hot enough to fuck twice,” was how he described Balcomb on the phone.

  But Madbird had refused to identify himself, or give up our location, or meet face-to-face. Instead, he’d insisted that John Doe drop the money where the dirt road to here turned off the highway, and wait a few hundred yards away. Madbird then had appeared out of the woods, riding my Victor for maneuverability, scooped up the cash, and led John Doe to this spot. He’d marked it by throwing a towel on the roadside, then hauled ass. John Doe couldn’t kill him before that, not knowing where the place was, or catch him afterward. A half mile farther, Madbird had dumped the bike and run back through the woods. John Doe had been wary, probably on the lookout for exactly that. Before he’d moved in on us,
he’d hidden and waited ten minutes. With only the pistol, Madbird hadn’t been able to get close enough for a decent shot until John Doe decided he was safe and got busy with us.

  Five thousand bucks was a lot of money for me, especially if I figured it by the hour. Better still, another hired gun disappearing was going to drive Balcomb nuts. The more frustrated and desperate he got, the more likely he was to make a mistake.

  After we’d marched John Doe four or five miles, we came to a rock shelf above a steep, deadfall-choked ravine.

  Madbird gave me a nod and said, “This’ll work. Tape his wrists.”

  He sliced John Doe’s elbows free, at the same time torquing his wounded arm up into a hammerlock. John Doe thrashed and snarled into his gag. The round hadn’t lodged in his triceps, just torn a gouge, and the bleeding had pretty much stopped. But it must have hurt like a bitch. Madbird shoved him face-first against a thick Doug fir. We forced his wrists around it so he was hugging it and I taped them together good and tight.

  I’d been following Madbird’s lead, assuming half-consciously that John Doe wouldn’t be coming back with us, but not thinking about specifics. Now that the moment was here, my heart was starting to pound again. I tried to slow my breathing, reminding myself of what he’d been about to do to Laurie and me.

  Then it occurred to me that you didn’t need to bind somebody to a tree to shoot him.

  John Doe seemed to be realizing the same thing. He craned his head around at us, cheeks puffing in and out like gills as he tried to mouth threats or pleas through the tape.

  Madbird unsheathed his knife again—a scalpel-sharp, crescent-bladed Puma game skinner.

  “Time you learned how to do this,” he said to me. “I’ll get you started, then you take over.”

  Learn how to do what? I tried to say. But my breath stuck in my lungs. Madbird put his left hand on top of John Doe’s head like he was palming a basketball and slammed a hip into his back, pinning him against the tree.