Montana Noir

by James Grady

  She pointed toward the decaying elementary school that had failed to contain her. “Down there,” she said.

  A cloud of dust rose from the state highway turnoff. A large black van was headed for the MAC, Inc. compound. Morning sun ricocheted off its tinted windows as it juddered over a pothole and flew toward the main gate, toward the stalled tank, toward the men in camouflage and their assault rifles.

  The van pulled to a stop. Windows rolled down. Montana’s smiling congressman rode up front. Dazed Asians sat in back. Hungover. Saki time in cowgirl land. Little sleep and no context.

  “Fuckin’ chinks!” one of the militia shouted at the Japanese delegation. He raised his rifle.

  Nora took out her phone and dialed Rosa. Pick up, Rosa. Pick up the goddamn phone.

  “Listen up,” Nora told her. “Don’t argue. Just do it. Now, goddammit!”

  Another dust spiral from the highway turnoff. A blue light revolving on a beat-up pickup, its siren whining in the wind. Fifteen minutes since Rosa had called the new volunteer sheriff, and he’d beat the record from town.

  Three brown high-powered SUVs slipstreamed the sheriff: duckers ready to test their new toys on the firing range they’d rented for the day from Phil.

  Right behind them was a white van with four women hanging out the windows, shrieking up a party. Old Bert’s birthday girls.

  The sun topped the water tower.

  “Fuckin’ chinks!” the pin-eyed militiaman yelled again. He fired into the air, just missing the blades of the Fox News helicopter that chopped the sky.

  How the hell did that get here? Nora wondered as the MAC, Inc. sirens drowned out the world. She set Stasi loose. Smaller mass. Smaller target.

  A pickup honked behind Nora, forcing her into a ditch. Mike Smith was at the wheel and the extended cab was packed with fellow Witnesses, armed for gang warfare. Gravel sprayed like buckshot as he shimmied to a stop in front of the militia’s tank. The local volunteer fire engine rumbled behind, Phil riding shotgun, armed with the duckers’ arsenal.

  Phil was out before the engine stopped, his posse close behind. Jabbing Mailer’s rooster chest with his fat ring finger. All set to press the red button on the console. Ready! Launch! War! Mailer stepped back slightly, then stepped forward and threw out his chest, smacking Phil in the nose. Mailer’s militia pressed forward, weapons ready. Phil’s posse raised theirs.

  Nora stopped, closed her eyes, and waited for the violence. Instead of apocalypse, she heard a voice. His voice.

  “Gentlemen.”

  Nora heard Leonard Cohen in her head. Give me back the Berlin Wall. Maybe it was the painkillers.

  “Gentlemen,” the voice said, gravelly, familiar, like the road home. “Let’s be reasonable.”

  She opened her eyes to see the volunteer sheriff standing easily between two men ready to battle for their empires. His careworn face broke into rivulets of smile lines.

  “Shall we try taking one step back in time?”

  Phil and Mailer moved sideways, their heads high, their eyes small and threatening. Phil’s posse and Mailer’s militia lowered their weapons.

  “Now, let’s talk.”

  Nora stood mesmerized. Inside her head, she heard the hum of stars. Down by the commissary she saw Rosa’s van, the Salvadoran families piling into the back, their arms loaded with children and bundles. She watched Rosa steer down the dirt road toward the state highway. Rosa would do them right.

  Nora caught the shadow from the corner of her eye. Saw Stasi leap into the cab of one of Mailer’s pickups, grab the Ray-Bans from the windshield ledge. Saw Stasi push off toward the ground.

  Saw Stasi shudder in midair before she heard the shot.

  “Fuckin’ thievin’ dog! Told you I’d kill her one day!” Mike Smith roared.

  Mailer’s militia took cover behind their tank. Phil’s posse got behind the fire engine. When all the world’s a target, there’s no time to ask who fired the first shot. The duck hunters were on the radio for support. The Japanese were taking phone photos, sending them to the world. Oblivious, the congressman stepped out of the van, smiling for posterity. The Fox News helicopter hovered overhead, sending live video back to the station: Congressman taken hostage by Montana militia.

  Radio static. Backup on the way. Federal. State. Extraterrestrial.

  Behind the barbed-wire fence, MAC, Inc.’s warehouse doors rolled open, releasing strange aircraft like dandelions on the wind. Outside, the paid-for party girls stopped dancing and started screaming for real.

  Armageddon in a blink.

  Nora ran.

  She followed the trail of Stasi’s blood over a rise to the old barn she rented from a wheat farmer. The blood trail went through a broken board in the wall she’d meant to fix. Nora reached for the two keys on the chain around her neck. The first was for the padlock on the door. The second one she hadn’t touched in years.

  Inside, she threw on the lights even though she knew every inch of the barn with her eyes closed. Her high-wire rig was in place above a safety net and a sawdust floor.

  She called Stasi. No reply. She followed the blood to the drop-cloth mound in the center of the room and raised the shroud.

  Stasi lay against the car door.

  A pink-and-gold 1952 Dodge convertible. An eight-year-old girl in a pink tutu doing handstands on the hood, her toes caressing the stars. A teenage boy racing time, racing to freedom.

  Nora sat in the sawdust on the barn floor with Stasi’s head on her knee. She pulled gauze from her backpack and swabbed the dog’s wound. She didn’t hear the approaching pickup or the footsteps.

  “Hey, pipsqueak,” said the voice.

  She stroked Stasi’s head. Took her time looking up. “’Bout time, Frank,” she replied to the volunteer sheriff.

  “You kept the car.” He ran a finger along the side, slowly, as if he felt vibrations in the metal.

  “You’re a doctor now?”

  He nodded.

  “Then give me a hand.”

  Frank retrieved his emergency pack from his pickup. He wrapped Stasi’s wound and gave the dog a shot.

  “Your mother saved your car. She kept everything after you left.” Nora bent her head and nuzzled Stasi.

  Frank’s eyes focused on Nora’s skull, the raw cap of scar where her flesh had been pulled from her and she’d been turned inside out. He reached his fingers toward it. Touched her.

  Nora felt the stars race through. “Six months, Frank. I’ve been back six months.”

  He traced a tear down to her lips. “Couldn’t do it, Nora. Couldn’t come close.”

  “Your mom got away.”

  “I saw her in the van with the illegals.”

  “You knew.”

  “I knew.”

  The sounds of Armageddon filtered into the barn. Jets. Helicopters. Gunshots. Screams.

  Nora pushed herself to her feet, Stasi cradled against her chest. Frank held the car door while she laid the dog on the cream-leather seats.

  “Feel like a ride?” said Nora. She opened the driver’s side, taking the second key from the chain around her neck. It slid in smoothly and the engine turned. It purred. “Get in, Frank. I’m driving.”

  He leaned over and kissed the salt from her mouth. “I’ve seen the future,” he whispered.

  “It’s murder.”

  “We’re cousins,” he said simply.

  The words had sat between them for years, had driven her away, had kept him from her. Their own no-fly zone.

  Nora touched the badge on his shirt, traced that star. “It’s the law.”

  “Law goes where you take it.”

  Stasi stretched out on the backseat, enjoying the drugs.

  Nora took a moment to pull on her blond wig and paint her lips pink in the rearview mirror. Satisfied, she put the car in reverse and backed it out the barn door.

  The gunfire song of Armageddon played all around them and across the curve of the earth.

  “Canada?” Nora asked. �
�Zombie Road?”

  “Montana’s a big state.” He looked at her hands on his steering wheel.

  “Don’t worry, Frank,” Nora said, lips pursed, cool as an Arctic breeze. “I’ll do it slow. Real slow.”

  The Road You Take

  by James Grady

  Shelby

  A big blue sky arced over that prairie highway driven by a lone white minivan.

  Roxy rode behind DezAray who’d called shotgun when they left last night’s motel in a pine-trees-and-good-money town across the mountains. Shotgun meant riding next to Bear, three hundred–plus pounds of watch out crammed behind the steering wheel. He stank of weed he wouldn’t share, cigarettes, and whiskey, plus you might catch a paw if he thought you sassed or he simply got the itch to pop somebody, but DezAray packed sixty extra pounds of flesh on her five-eight-in-stiletto-heels frame and the big girl knew how to take a hit.

  Cherry rode on Roxy’s left, past the cooler, behind Bear. Her golden-blond dye job had more class than DezAray’s motel-sink peroxide. Cherry craned to see where they were going as if there were some destination besides the next gig. She was a few high-school years ahead of Roxy, who wondered if somewhere under heaven there was a letter or e-mail inviting her real name to her class’s ten-year reunion. That notion made Roxy sort of laugh as the white van rumbled her life away.

  “What’s so fucking funny?” mumbled Star from the way back, where she rode slumped amidst suitcases, sound system speakers, cables, minispots, makeup and costume bags, telescoping dancing poles, and the deflated ring for oiled-up bikini-wrestling gigs.

  “What isn’t.” Cherry arched her back to stretch. Potholes on this two-lane highway across the top of the state rattled the minivan, but Roxy saw no tremble in the breasts some surgeon built beneath Cherry’s red sweater.

  Wonder if Cherry paid back the loan plus vig Luke fronted her for that work. Wonder how much longer I can keep him from “helping” me go under some knife.

  Star said: “’Nothing funny ’bout one of you skimming my stash.”

  “Not me!” said DezAray. “And no way it’s Bear: crystal’d make his heart fart!”

  Whoosh came Bear’s backhand toward DezAray—missed because a gopher ran across the road, made him swerve the minivan, and messed up his aim.

  “Almost,” said Cherry of the attempted varmint murder. “Star, Luke’s rules say no rips, no hold-backs, so there’s no thieves in this ride.”

  Bear growled: “Don’t talk ’bout Luke. I’m road boss. And no more you askin’ to drive or some What the fuck you want? and cozyin’ up to the man.”

  “I’m just trying to stick to my place,” said Cherry.

  Roxy said: “Nobody’s skimming you, Star. You could tell.”

  Tweakers know tweakers.

  So far, Star’d steered clear of the needle and the pipe, only sniffing. She’d kept her high cheekbones, tawny-haired, stop-traffic beauty, her teeth, and her tight T&A, no tremor in her pony legs when she stripped. But her eyes were always black holes.

  “Catch some sleep,” Roxy told the beauty in the way back.

  “Sleep is when they get you,” said Star.

  “You can really get got when you’re tweaked,” said DezAray.

  “Don’t care then.”

  DezAray stared out the windshield: “There’s a whole lot of out there out there.”

  The western third of the state was the Rocky Mountains marching down from Canada, pine tree crags soaring more than a mile above sea level. East of the mountains meant scrub-grass prairies and chessboard-brown-and-gold fields of rotated crops, which if you weren’t born there looked like one terrifying, big empty.

  In the two weeks Roxy’d gone to community college in Miles City, some 413 crow-fly miles from where the white van now rumbled, a teacher had said Montana held seven regions, each bigger than many other states. Where she was now was the Hi-Line, named for the railroad built after the Civil War by a tycoon who got free land along his tracks from the federal government, got the feds to create cargo and passengers for his trains with public-land giveaways to homesteaders who didn’t understand it rained next to never out there. Before Roxy’s lifetime when the glaciers melted, forty-below-zero blizzards roared over the prairies a few times a year. Most homesteaders fled, died, or went crazy. The ones who stayed leathered up tough.

  Like me. Roxy’s eyes found the van’s mirror. What the locals saw when she stripped was some lanky bitch with chopped hair the color of dirt, nothing special behind, and up front too small for more than five-dollar tips. Ice eyes. And no matter the hoots, hollers, and creep games, nobody ever saw more than what she was tough enough to sell.

  Except Paul.

  Dead rabbit on the road.

  Bear swerved to run over it. His mirrors showed mountains shrinking forty miles behind them. They’d rolled east out to the prairies, blew through Browning on the Blackfeet reservation, barreled through Cut Bank like that town wasn’t there.

  Coming up on the left horizon, Roxy saw three blue humps, the Sweetgrass Hills, mini-mountains left over from dinosaur days. Her heart punched her ribs. Keep it together. She stared out the windshield. “Here come the space aliens.”

  Like an army of giants ten stories tall, a hundred windmills with spinning white blades rose from the prairie, big-money invaders that—in harmony with Montana’s history—were built elsewhere and sent electricity spun from the local wind out of state.

  A dozen miles beyond the army of windmills waited Shelby. And Paul.

  “Yay, I got cell service! Okay,” DezAray said, waving her cell phone registered by Luke through some gonna bust it account, “promise I’ll work my geeks, but first I need me some Candy Crush.”

  Every circuit girl had a website for credit-card chats and “private” downloads with viruses run by some hacker in Russia. Once Luke’s crew had gotten all they were gonna get from a cyber-sex troll, that citizen might find his credit crashed and bank tapped, a touch of that coming back to Luke to be washed in his Payday Dollars Now yellow shack on Bozeman’s strip of warehouses, seedy motels, and bars. Luke kicked a slice of the hacks’ score to the women he put online, minus any vig they owed him.

  Then there’s the cash from dates.

  Roxy didn’t do that.

  “Yet,” Cherry had whispered to her a week before in Lincoln, the truckers’ and Unabomber town in the mountains halfway—eighty-three miles—between Missoula and Great Falls, the city a hundred miles southeast of where Roxy rode in a white minivan. In Lincoln, Roxy’d caught Cherry sneaking back into the diner from the highway patrol cruiser parked out back, from the badge who had a kink Cherry parlayed into lawman tips that got her nods from Luke. But that badge wasn’t clocked to meet up with Cherry on this circuit.

  Cherry saw herself caught in Roxy’s eyes, put her finger to her smeared ruby lips: “We all got secrets.” Roxy ratted Cherry out to nobody. That night Cherry gave Roxy a nod, told her how life wasn’t yet.

  Now on that April morning, the white van rushed past the wind-farm army of towers. Shadows from the spinning blades slashed Roxy.

  Cherry told the driver: “Your belt’s packing the take just fine.”

  “Shut up ’bout my belt or you’ll get it,” growled Bear.

  Cherry ignored him. Gave Roxy a look about . . . about the take?

  There’s the take and there’s the books.

  The books are the circuit’s fee plus a cut of the door at bars, bachelor blowouts, or frat-house gigs, negotiated taxes on beers and booze, payouts for gas and motel rooms, and “independent contractor” fees to the stable. The books are for the law.

  The take is everything else. A cut of all the presidents tucked into G-strings or tossed on a beer-stained floor. Half the dollars from dates cleared by the road boss that Roxy still said no to. DezAray said yes to such gotta pay dates from the kind of guys who mocked fatty back in high school, so who’s laughing now, huh? “Cherry-picked,” they all joked, referring to the big shots who were reeled in
by the blonde with big breasts and big ideas. Star let any guy with the right cash hang her up in whatever night he wanted. But the major dollars in the take came from the envelopes that nameless mooks brought to Bear as they traveled the road, cash laundered into the books as gross income.

  The books and the take—what they say you do and what you really get.

  White letters on a green road sign: Shelby, 7 Miles.

  Bear’s eyes goaded Roxy from the rearview mirror: “Maybe I’ll stop.”

  Shelby’d been a gig on the circuit last month.

  A mesa rim flowed off to Roxy’s left. Up on the right, she saw the truck-sized flapping American flag near the highway crossroads, one road through town, the other to Canada or toward Great Falls past the electrified chain-link fence of a private prison.

  The books claimed they’d done great the first night of their double-header gig in Shelby at Jammers, a former trackside slaughterhouse renovated to a bar with a liquor license acquired from a gone-broke tavern in pollution-poisoned Libby, 246 miles away in the pine-forests-and-mountains northwestern corner of the state. Jammers’ owner clung to Shelby’s dreams that wind-farm workers and prison guards someday were gonna drop enough dollars in town to banish the whitewashed windows from Main Street.

  * * *

  Roxy woke up in a motel, Cherry asleep in the next bed, the others zonked in their rooms. The night before, opening night in Shelby, Roxy’d scanned a mere handful of faces nursing beers as Bear emceed “our Big Sky’s best exotic dancers.” They worked the poles, two shows, couldn’t have pulled in enough legitimate dollars to pay for their motel rooms, but it wasn’t worry about dollars that woke Roxy early, it was the wind.

  “Fucking never stops blowing here,” Bear’d grumbled.

  The wind felt crisp and fresh, felt good, felt free on Roxy’s face.

  She did what you never do in a small Montana town: walked.

  Near ten a.m. on a spring Tuesday, strolling the highway to where it curved into Main Street. Houses with peeling paint. Vacant lots. A church. A quarter-mile of flat-faced stores, a bank, empty curbs for parked cars. She thought about taking the bridge over the train tracks where a freight whistled through ’bout every other breath, but stayed on the main drag where teenagers cruised loops in quests they couldn’t name. This town nestled in a rolling prairie valley supposedly housed three thousand–plus souls, felt shrunken from its used to be. As two white-haired ladies shuffled into the lone café, Roxy saw—