by James Grady
Too late for that, Colt. Too late! So now be a warrior.
I sipped my coffee. “I’m going to look up Bill Wendland. You said his office is in Morrill Hall?”
“Yes,” she said, her eyes wide. “What are you going to do when you see him?”
“I’m going to be who I am.”
She didn’t ask any more questions.
I followed her the rest of the way back to Havre and watched her make the turn toward her place. That could be a place to live. A place I could finally let go and settle down.
I kept driving, past the former site of the Montana Bar, then turned left toward the college that overlooks the town from the south.
I knew Central Montana had become mostly a vocational college, but back in the day there was a strong liberal arts focus to go along with the diesel mechanic school. The majority of the students were from Montana, white and Indian, now with a growing number of Latinos, all of whom needed the leg up in life—or at least the certification of success—that a diploma can provide. All of them needed someone with the good heart of Elizabeth to watch over them, teach them about life beyond dollar signs, and shelter them from academic wars and the power of nasty guys like Bill Wendland.
Morrill Hall was the centerpiece of the campus, an impressive Ivy League–looking structure with a big bell tower reaching for the sky. It was on top of a steep rise, with a large pond and fountain toward the bottom of the slope. I drove up the hill, around to the parking lot in back, and climbed the stone steps to the rear entrance. Another staircase with marble steps curved up and to the left, and as I made my way to the third-floor administrative offices, I could feel my adrenaline surge.
I walked down the hall past big oak doors with gilt lettering on them until I spotted the one with his name, just his name, on it. I opened the door and stepped inside, where I could see a receptionist’s desk with a hallway beyond. I stood there, and after a couple of minutes a middle-aged woman emerged from the hall. She looked like a drill sergeant.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“Yes, I’m here to see Bill,” I replied.
“Your name, please?”
“Mr. Smith.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“Yes, I think we were set for ten,” I lied.
“I don’t see anything on his calendar. May I ask what this is about?”
“I’m from the Edsel Foundation, here about matching your donor contributions with our dollars.”
That got her attention. “Let me go tell Mr. Wendland you’re here.”
She came back shortly. “His office is at the end.”
I walked down the hall and into Bill’s wood-paneled office. His back was to me as he rearranged twentieth-century file folders in a large cabinet. He heard me enter and turned.
“I’ll be damned,” he said, taking care to keep the desk between us.
I looked him straight in the eyes. “Long time no see.”
He gave me the grin of a hungry spider. “Have a seat.” He pointed to a leather chair.
I just stood there.
“I don’t figure there’s any foundation that sent the likes of you here, or anywhere, so what’s up?” He smiled broadly, as if I was a long-lost friend or his next meal.
“Elizabeth.”
“What about her?”
“Stop. Stop now and you still have a chance to keep all this glory and power. Stop messing with her, with her job and deanship. Stop hunting her in alleys and out of sight. Let her go, stay away, and keep her safe.”
“Her safety has nothing to do with me.” He sat in the leather-chair throne behind his big desk and grinned again. “I’ve done nothing wrong.”
“Right or wrong, I’ve got something of yours.”
His eyes narrowed. “What?”
“Meet me out at the Bear Paw Battlefield tonight.”
“The Bear Paw Battlefield? What the hell’s this all about?”
“If I was you, I’d be there, Bill,” I said, turning around and walking out. “Before sunset so we can see what we’ve got to see.”
* * *
I drove south from Chinook and turned off the highway toward the tourist facility on the edge of the battlefield. Across a coulee to the east, the monument sat on the highest point of ground. Farther to the east was a bare cutbank where I had buried the Montana Bar jacket in multiple plastic bags. My own private memorial on that sacred ground. My own feeble attempt to be a good witness and honor a victim.
Too many of what Bill called my “kind” had already been dishonored in history. I wanted him to represent his “kind” and answer for all that has happened to Indian people, to trapped women, to anyone his kind had abused. Even if I never got to crack his skull with the collapsible steel baton shoved in the back of my waistband.
Damn right, Colt, you take a job, you go in prepared and do it right.
I stood there waiting in the fading light. Thinking about Elizabeth. Me. Us.
With about a half hour of daylight left, I spotted the vehicle—a big black Suburban like the security guys in movies drive—heading south on the old highway coming from Chinook. It was going like a bat out of hell and careened off the blacktop onto the gravel road leading to where I was. When it straightened out again it raised a big plume of dust as it bore down on the tourist lookout point and skidded to a stop in the parking area.
Bill was out and on the ground before the car was fully settled to a stop, his red face nearly matching the tie loosely knotted around his beefy neck. He wore his hotshot lawyer suit, and I wondered if he still carried killer steel in his back pocket. He was breathing hard and didn’t look happy as he stomped up the footpath to the lookout.
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re doing back here, or what you’re up to, but I’m here to find out,” he said, putting his hands on his hips as he stopped about ten yards from me.
“Leave her alone.”
“Like you did. Like she is. Like she will be after you’re gone again. All alone.”
“You stop it all right now. No more going after her in any way, shape, or form. Or we’ll see you in court. Win, lose, or draw there, your rep will be ruined, your clout will evaporate, and all your money will make you a big target that’s been made weaker for every other person you’ve fucked with or fucked over all these years. They’ll come out of the woodwork to go after you.”
“What, you think you’re a goddamn attorney or something now too?”
“Yup. University of Minnesota Law, class of ’85.”
“They gave you a law degree because you’re a blanket-ass Indian son of a bitch?”
“Talk about blankets, Bill, I’ve followed your rape charge for a long time.”
He looked at me incredulously. “So what,” he finally said. “That’s over and done with.”
I reached into my shirt pocket, took out a folded piece of paper with three pictures printed on it, and handed it to him. The top picture was of the back of a satin warm-up jacket with Montana Bar silk-screened on it. The middle picture was of the front of the jacket, with Bill Wendland embroidered over the left breast. The bottom picture was of a dried stain below the name and above the left front pocket.
“You were a pretty good stick on that softball team, remember?” I said, as he looked at the pictures. “Those were nice jackets. Too bad yours has that stain on it. Like a stain on a blanket. What do think that is, DNA evidence maybe?”
“Statute of limitations,” he shot back. “And even if that wasn’t already up, I was found not guilty, and they can’t try me twice for the same offense. The law’s the law.”
“True. But I bet I can get some DNA match from you somewhere—off a cup you drink coffee from, at your barber. You’ll have to spend the rest of your life watching out for that.”
You need more to nail him! You need—
“And even if I don’t get the criminal science, the girl is a woman now and has heirs. Some of them live around here. I’ll file a dozen civil la
wsuits, spill out every accusation in subpoenas for evidence, and make it huge so it’ll get in the papers. Sure, you might get every one of those lawsuits thrown out, but the evidence I’ll introduce will create evidence others can use to, say, show a legally established pattern of propensity for . . . for whatever someone else accuses you of. With me as a witness to put it all in context, because the law is the law, ennit?”
“You come after me—”
“I come after you only if you keep after Elizabeth. If she so much as gets bit by a mosquito, I’m going to file some of the most beautiful briefs you’ve ever seen. And out of where I and my friends know it’s hidden—”
“Shit, I know more than you know ’bout bluffing!”
“—I’ll display that jacket at every press conference. Makes a great photo. Or hell, I’ll post one online. New century, new ways, same old shit.”
He made a move toward me.
The baton filled my hand and flicked out like a black stick to count coup. “Not quite a crutch, but it’ll do,” I said.
Whether or not he had iron in his back pocket, seeing the baton made him weigh his chances. “You keep all that yesterday shit to yourself,” he said, “and she gets a clear road.” Then he sneered the truth: “But the two of you, never! I won’t let you win that much. You come around here, you take up with her, I’ll spend every dime I’ve got making your lives miserable. Whatever smears you hit me with, I’ll wipe twice as worse over the two of you. I’m a lawyer who’s rich enough to afford my own cavalry of lawyers.”
He stormed to his vehicle, got in, and tore off back toward the highway, throwing gravel as he went. I went back over to the lookout bench, sat down.
Guess this isn’t win-win for you after all, Colt. You can’t come back here, stop your wandering. You’re like . . . You’re my blood.
The lights of Havre were just over the hill from where I sat. And now I was never going to grow old in their glow.
Or see again who I’d seen after I’d ambushed Bill in his office.
After that visit, I’d driven to Elizabeth’s house, I don’t know why—to warn her or to reassure or to just see her blue eyes again before I went off to battle. Maybe to find a reason to stop my wandering, even though I’d already figured Bill would do everything in his power to derail any plans I might have.
Then, as I turned the corner onto Elizabeth’s block, I saw him coming out of her front door.
He was the same age as the years I’d been gone, a full-grown man with his mind and heart made up about who he was, and after I saw him wave goodbye to her without either of them seeing me, Havre’s public library helped me track him down through Facebook and high school yearbooks. He’d grown up thinking that cancer had killed his biological father a long time ago. If I suddenly came into his life, he might hate his mother for lying and punish her in ways she didn’t deserve. He’d take one look at me and wonder, but if he saw any paintings or pictures of my—our—famous great-grandfather, he’d know. And he didn’t deserve to have the ground he called home pulled out from under him by that truth. That had already happened to enough of our blood.
As I sat there in the night, looking around the brown hills and at the two monuments, one of them visible only to my eyes, I thought about how remembrance is a piss-poor substitute for justice. I had lived into my own history, coming full circle, and now I was headed for the highway, driving away from another hand I couldn’t beat. I felt the spirit of my never-met, long-dead great-grandfather, who for all he’d done right and wrong ended up wandering too. He would always be with me. The ghosts of who we come from are witness as we play the cards we’re dealt and make monuments to what we did.
All the Damn Stars in the Sky
by Yvonne Seng
Glasgow
Nora Jones began each morning much the same way since arriving on Montana’s abandoned Glasgow Air Force Base, a rifle shot from the Canadian border. Stepping into her running shoes, she pulled a fleece over the sweats she slept in. Sipped cold coffee in the dark. Worked a wet washcloth across her face and shaved head, polishing the scar that still itched, avoiding the mirror, not turning on the light. Put on her watch cap, headlamp, gloves.
She shoved a log into the wood stove, stoked it against the spring chill that seeped through the thin walls. She paused outside her aunt’s bedroom, drawing the door closed across the worn linoleum, smiling at the smell of senior sex and alcohol that wafted from the lumped-up quilt. Aunt Rosa and her boyfriend Phil. Phil—no illusions, just stubborn old love. Rosa—the reason Nora was there.
Stasi, Nora’s doberman, sat erect by the front door, ears forward, waiting for the command. The dog was ready. A familiar spirit, silent, sleek, troubled.
In Vegas after the accident, Stasi had sat by Nora’s bed for weeks, retrieving the phone when she dropped it, dragging up the covers and books that fell to the floor. The hospital wouldn’t let the dog in, so Nora had gone home to a shitty apartment in the desert with an empty pool and Leonard Cohen’s voice on repeat in the apartment upstairs. Stasi took up guard, kept visitors away, killed cockroaches. When restless, she’d leap through a neighbor’s open window, bringing back a magazine for Nora, a packet of Cheetos for herself. Nora didn’t ask questions.
Nora had liked it that way, just her and her silent guardian. Especially when her partner came to apologize. Nick, her aerial partner from Cirque du Somethin’. Nick who, stoked on early-morning coke, had forgotten to secure their practice cables and sent both the grapnel and Nora flying into the void. Scalped by the hooks, she broke bones, broke her heart. Something else too. At thirty-six, damaged, she was too old to fight the young wolves snapping at her heels. It was the end of Nick and Nora. The end of flying high.
The dog waited, silent, its eyes piercing the front door.
Nora whistled low and soft.
Stasi stood on hind legs and slid back the bolt with her teeth.
Nora had inherited Stasi from a friend doing time for burglary. Stasi, his assistant, had gone scot-free. Everyone in Vegas had a game. Stasi’s was thieving. Which added a spark to their road trip back to Montana.
Outside, in the predawn dark, a billion cold stars pressed down, squeezing Nora’s heart with their soft hum. As a child, she had wanted to fly among them, circling the earth, peering down on adoring faces looking up. Now she closed her eyes against the stars and concentrated on stretching out her hamstrings, checking the pins that held her body together.
Goddamn that endless Montana sky. Goddamn those stars. She had split because of those stars. A teenage runaway, fleeing into their embrace. She’d joined the circus. Not even original.
Now here she was, back again. Back to Aunt Rosa, her mother’s sister, who’d taken her in after her folks died and left her alone to grow like a weed. Aunt Rosa, for whom neglect meant love.
Who’d said on the phone: “Get your sorry ass out here, girl. We’re buildin’ a dream and I need you.”
Nora blew on her hands and started slow, Stasi tracking her left.
They ran the barbed-wire perimeter of the old air force base. Up here it was so flat you could see the curve of the earth. Bitter cold and clear skies. Decades ago, proud Cold Warriors floated three at a time on the sky’s gentle arc, their planes idling among the stars, ready to speed across the Arctic and bomb the hell out of Russia at a moment’s notice. Missile silos hid in wheat fields. Underground airmen, their fingers on the red launch button, stood ready to back up their airborne heroes, to bomb the shit out of a pigeon if they got the chance. The third-largest nuclear power in the fuckin’ world, bragged the locals. With concrete sixteen feet deep, the jets’ runway was long and strong enough for the thump of a landing space shuttle if needed.
Her cousin Frank, Rosa’s son, had worked on that runway, shoveling cement the last summer of high school before he escaped to college, so she knew all about it. Only eight, she had a hard crush on Frank.
“Got a thing for your cousin, pet?” Rosa’s only try at parenting.
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Nora had blushed.
“First cousins,” Rosa said. “Off limits. Taboo. Got it?”
Nora only glared. Unreachable, just like her mother.
“Can’t say I didn’t try,” Rosa added with a shrug before walking away.
Nora rode Frank’s lunch over every day, knobby knees bumping the handlebars of her outgrown bike. After work, he’d shower, back his pink-and-gold 1952 Dodge convertible out of the driveway, and she’d leap in. Pink tutu. Bare feet. Up the pin-straight highway, ripping past wheat fields, burning up the road to the Canadian border. He sweated out his anger while she swallowed her scream as they hit a bump in the road and went airborne, bending into the curve around a silo town. She soaked up Frank’s approval: “Good girl, never show your fear.”
“Hey, pipsqueak,” he’d say as they approached the border roundabout, a casual thumbtack on the map before the world went crazy. “Ready?”
“Do it slow, Frank,” she’d reply, cool as an Arctic breeze, lips pursed like she’d seen in the movies.
While he slowed the car to a crawl, she would stand in her seat, stepping over the windshield onto the hood, unfolding herself into a handstand. Spider legs in the air. Toes caressing the endless sky. Pink tutu fluttering like a spring blossom. They would slowly circle the border roundabout, past the cheering, dark-blue guards. An eight-year-old girl, hood ornament on a pink-and-gold convertible. Behind the wheel, a teenage boy in a checkered cowboy shirt, counting the hours to freedom.
On the road back, they’d give one final roaring yell before reaching the turnoff to the base. Slowing down, they’d salute the billboard that proclaimed: This Is the Future.
Proud days those had been for the residents of the base, who went to bed in their idyllic tract houses dreaming of that future. More than seven thousand brave souls, flyboys and their families, up there at the stark edge of the earth, beautiful except for the six months of winter, three months of mosquitoes, and the month of mud in between. Fewer than two hundred fools now slept in their abandoned beds.