Montana Noir

by James Grady

  Her jaw dropped, gasps trembled her as she stared across Main Street to the brick building with a two-story tower, glass doors, and a yellow marquee.

  A man’s voice: “Are you okay?”

  “That’s me,” she whispered. “The movie theater.”

  “You mean the Roxy? Been there since before we were born.”

  “I’m where people go to watch the movies in their heads.”

  “You’re your own movie,” said the man, maybe thirty, clean and lean, quiet looking, with a smile and eyes that seemed wide open.

  She wanted to hit him. “You don’t know who I am.”

  “I’m Paul.”

  “Good for you.”

  “Well, I should do better.”

  “Everybody should. Get over yourself.”

  “That’s the whole point, right? Over yourself and with somebody.”

  “Look, cowboy,” she said, and a smile twitched his lips, “I’m not in your movie.”

  “So where are you?”

  “Walking. And I’m not gonna do whatever you wanna.”

  “I wanna walk with you, see my hometown through your eyes. ’Course, if you want coffee, we could pop into the Tap Room.” His nod flicked her eyes to a bar beside them with its door open to the morning. “Just dropped off breakfast for Gary to get into Denny. Gary’s the bartender, makes sure Denny eats, won’t let him sit ’less he does. Or we could go ’cross the street to the café. You saw Teresa and Bev walk in for their every-morning go-to-coffee, they’d like meeting a new face that could be a granddaughter since all theirs aren’t around.”

  “Doubt they’d like to have coffee with a stripper.”

  “Then we’ll get another table.”

  Roxy blinked. She turned the way she’d been drifting. He fell in step beside her.

  “What’s with you and the theater?” he said as that building slid past on their left.

  She kept her eyes on the road out of town to Jammers’ slaughterhouse, heard the truth sneak out of her: “Roxy’s not my real name.”

  “I’ve always been Paul. We keep going this way, you’ll see the post office where I work.”

  “You’re the mailman?”

  “And here I am out for a walk. What was I thinking?”

  Stop smiling at him. Ice eyes.

  “Mostly I staff the counter or the sorting room. You like your job?”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “I’m here,” he said. “Born and raised. Tried college, didn’t feel right. I wasn’t at home in other people’s big ideas. Worked, saved up, drove around the country.”

  “What did you see?”

  “That everyplace was someplace, even the road.” He shrugged. “I took a chance. Came back here where ’least I am who I am.”

  They turned off the main drag. He pointed out this, told her about that, about the library where he’d get books—only fictions, got enough facts just waking up. That tan house was where Linda used to live, heartbreaker but worth it, moved three hundred miles away to Billings, married, kids. The Curtis boy came out of that peeling white paint place, marine, didn’t make it back from Iraq. Paul’s great-aunt used to live down that street, not far from the Methodist church that never was for him.

  “What would your aunt say if she knew you were with me?”

  “We can ask her, she’s back that way in the Heritage, assisted living.”

  “Better spare her heart.”

  “Hell, the eyes in this place—by now, half the town knows we’re out walking.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Because there you were in my here I am. Because you see more than just a theater. Because there’s something about you that’s nobody else’s movie.”

  “No! I’m no rescue-me girl. I needed money, and work one party led to work another, then you’re on the circuit, so what, I’m not poking a fast-food cash register, not some forget-it face behind a counter like they said I’d be, I’m . . . I’m . . .”

  “Roxy,” he said.

  Their footsteps crunched gravel. Lilacs scented the wind. They’d die.

  “I got nothing for you,” she told him.

  “I get to walk with you. Hear you. See you.”

  “You wanna see me, it’s all out there for a five-dollar cover at Jammers, but tonight’s the last night.”

  “I want to see you, not it.”

  Her bones cracked. “Why?”

  “Might take forty, fifty years for me to answer that.”

  The wind blew dust into her eyes. She whispered: “Don’t come tonight.”

  “Don’t leave tomorrow.”

  Roxy said: “I don’t believe in this kind of shit.”

  “How’s the shit you believe in working out for you?”

  She watched him scan his windswept town.

  Then he walked backward facing her like some goofy teenager: “I don’t know why you hit me like you do, but if the hit is all I get, ’least my hurt is earned and true.” He swung around to walk beside her again.

  Can’t look at him, can’t breathe, can’t—

  “You know what I want to do now?”

  YES, I KNEW IT, HERE IT COMES, ALL HE EVER WANTED TO DO WAS—

  “Listen,” he said.

  And he did. About her mother. That shit in high school. How her dad never backed down and seldom got it right, left her his IOUs. How she wouldn’t walk away from what was owed to creepy Luke because that’s not right or who she was, but the harder she worked to pay it off, the more she was who she wasn’t. How she was tough.

  “I believe you,” he said.

  Shelby was a small town. They didn’t walk up Knob Hill or cross the tracks to the pink high school three times the size today’s student population needed. They circled back to the west side of town and were crossing a truck stop’s parking lot when the white minivan roared off the street, crunched gravel in front them, and slammed to a stop.

  “Leave!” Roxy told Paul as Bear squeezed out of the van where Cherry rode shotgun. “I got nothing for you! I’m bad trouble!”

  Paul stood beside Roxy. “And I’m right here.”

  Bear stomped closer: “DezAray’s doing a date like she should, Star’s got the shakes in the motel shower, Cherry and me figure to grab some breakfast, end up finding your ass out here with some dude ain’t been road-boss cleared.”

  Roxy tried to stop Bear. “We’re just walking!”

  His paw spun her toward the van—she plopped on her bottom.

  “No!” yelled Paul.

  Under the law, he attacked Bear first when he grabbed him.

  Whump! Bear’s fist slammed into the mailman’s guts, lifted him off the gravel.

  Bear caught him on the way down, yelled, “Stop!” for witnesses to hear, tossed the gasping local guy smack into the closed sliding side door of the minivan—dented its white metal. Paul bounced off and fell to the ground. Bear gave him the boot.

  On her ass in the gravel, Roxy heard a new voice yell: “Done!”

  A brown-skinned man in blue jeans and a snap-button shirt loomed in front of Bear. “I seen Paul make his move, that’s on him and between you two, but it’s done.”

  “Says who?” growled Bear.

  “Us,” said another man’s voice from the truck-stop café’s stoop. A silver-haired guy in a windbreaker, his hands open and flat along his sides.

  “Bet you got iron, maybe rigged in your van for easy grab. Go for it. Float with the others, the Mekong or the Marias,” the silvertip said of the river running through trees seven miles south of town. “It’s all the same to me.”

  Cowboy Shirt Guy said: “Time for you to be gone.”

  Roxy scrambled toward where Paul lay crumpled in gravel, but Bear pulled her up, shoved her toward the van and Cherry’s waiting arms as he growled to the locals: “Fuck your nowhere town.”

  Cherry pulled Roxy into the van, whispered: “You got no win, not here, not now.”

  Roxy heard the van door slide shut on everythin
g but where she was.

  Jammers’ owner didn’t bitch when they pulled out an hour later and a gig early. Luke added that “projected lost revenue” and the repair of the white van’s sliding door to Roxy’s tab, though when they rolled out on the next circuit, the dent was still there.

  On the circuit. A loop through the whole state, twenty-seven days of driving, one or two shows a stop, on the road like the sweep of a second hand around a clock, up the spine of the Rocky Mountains to where they were the night before, now headed east across the Hi-Line to go beyond Havre, into the bleak northeast corner, drop down to Glendive and Billings, then the long run west, maybe to state capital Helena with its cathedral and bureaucrats, its new wine bars and old money, of course over to haunted Butte and then back home to Bozeman, to the Payday Dollars Now yellow shack, to the trailer she shared with DezAray, to the tab Luke said he’d figure some way to let her work off.

  Now here they were, back in Shelby.

  Cruising past that truck-stop parking lot, a few parked cars, a pickup, nobody in sight. The road curved them onto Main Street. Bear made their machine crawl through the heart of the town to draw out Roxy’s pain. She looked across the cooler, past Cherry, saw the reflection of the white van passing across the wall of windows of the lone café, wondered if Teresa or Bev would look up from their coffee to see her glide by.

  Cherry said: “You’re doing it smart, Bear. Don’t even stop to take a piss.”

  Bear snapped his attention away from the old movie theater. “Hell, Roxy, now I know why you like this dump: they named that place after you!”

  DezAray chirped: “Oh wow! How cool, Roxy!”

  Someone whispered: “Leave it be.”

  The bleached-blond big girl blinked. “What’d I say?”

  From the way back came Star’s whisper: “I don’t want nothing named after me.”

  Bear laughed: “No worries.” He glared at Roxy: “Your worry is to ride the circuit right.”

  “Ignore them, Bear,” said Cherry. “You’re driving good for being shaky tired.”

  He frowned at her in the rearview mirror.

  The white van cruised past the squat green visitors’ center. Past the turn for the post office. Over a spur of railroad tracks as the highway followed the main track line and rolled the minivan toward the edge of town and the slaughterhouse turned into a bar called Jammers.

  “Some gigs are worth losing,” said Cherry. “Sometimes you gotta get up and go. Speaking of go—Bear, you gonna two-hour us all the way to Havre? I could give you a break, let you pee, drive, let you—”

  Bear pushed the pedal to surge past the gray skyscraper-huge grain elevator before the turnoff to the county fairgrounds. “You aren’t the one who lets.”

  “I know who I am,” replied Cherry as the van rumbled up the east wall of the prairie valley. She smiled at Roxy: “You played that cool and smart.”

  Roxy mumbled: “I just sat there.”

  The van topped out of the valley, sun glistening off the train tracks to their left, the vast prairie rolling out before them like a golden sea to the long-gone horizon.

  “Wow,” said DezAray. “Imagine getting stuck out here? Hello, Mr. Serial Killer.”

  “You know what I bet?” said Cherry. “I bet the take in Bear’s belt’d probably be enough to cover Roxy’s line.”

  What?

  Cherry shrugged for everyone to see. “Just saying, she threw in a big chunk.”

  Twenty-one bucks from last night’s stripping tips is a big chunk?

  Bear flicked his eyes to the mirror to—

  “Cop!”

  The police cruiser pulled around the white minivan, whooshed past, and sped away until it was a black dot vanishing on the long gray highway.

  “Where’d he come from?” mumbled Star.

  “You’re in the way back!” said Bear. “You’re supposed to be the lookout!”

  “You got mirrors.” Star stared at the ceiling of the van.

  “Was that your trooper, Cherry?” asked DezAray.

  “No,” she replied. “He’s got Wolf Creek Canyon patrol this month, remember?”

  “I barely remember where we’re going now!” DezAray giggled.

  “Don’t ever remember,” said Star.

  “I’m glad I remembered to pee.” Cherry looked at Roxy: “You okay, girl?”

  Like suddenly you care?

  “Gotta do what we gotta do.” Cherry smiled, her lips the color of her name.

  DezAray, who kept looking for the TV cameras she like totally deserved, burst into the song that Luke wouldn’t let her use in her routine, even though she did the swirl in high heels pretty good for a bleached-blond big girl and could whip off the sequined bikini top with flair as she belted out: “I GOTTA BE ME!”

  “You strip so guys think they are who they wanna be,” Luke had told her. “So no gotta for you.”

  But for that moment, that one April morning moment in a white van speeding east on a gray-snake, two-lane highway, DezAray was.

  Blue sky arced above them.

  Nothing to see out the windshield except the horizon rushing toward that glass.

  Bear flipped up the turn signal. “Damn it!” His eyes glared at Cherry from the rearview mirror. “Barely a couple miles out of that shit-for-a-town and look what all your pee talk’s making me do.”

  The white van glided off the highway to a graveled roadside historic attraction, a wooden sign burned black with letters about the Baker Massacre south of there at the Marias River where in 1870 the US Cavalry slaughtered 173 Blackfeet men, women, and children who were all innocent of killing one white man, the official motive for the military action. Bear stopped the van, turned off the engine.

  “I gotta take a piss,” he told the four women in the van. “You know the drill.” He pushed his way out from behind the steering wheel.

  Cherry watched Bear stomp around to the front of the van, said: “Pass me a Coke, would you please, Roxy?”

  “Please,” came Star’s soft voice from the way back where her mind wasn’t.

  Roxy felt herself open the cooler, stick her hand into its motel ice, bottles of beer and soda and energy drinks that Bear always bought before hitting the road, lift out a Coke, and hold it across the backseat toward Cherry.

  Cherry said: “Perfect of you to set it up for me, Roxy—isn’t it, everybody?”

  “Whatever,” said DezAray as her thumbs and eyes played Candy Crush.

  From the way back came the whisper: “Everything’s so fucking perfect.”

  “You know the way it always works,” said the golden-blond woman with red lips, steel eyes, and breasts she’d chosen herself. She took the bottle from Roxy, growled an imitation of their road boss: “You drain the lizard, you gotta give him a drink.” Cherry’s eyes flicked between the windshield’s view of a hulk with his back to the van and what she was doing that Roxy couldn’t see. “You know, Roxy,” she said loudly, stepping into a conversation they’d never had, “you might be right, could be lots of opportunities coming up in the company.”

  What? Roxy heard a soft pop.

  Beyond the windshield, Bear’s shoulders shook as he fumbled in front of himself.

  “He likes to piss on things,” said Cherry as that mass of flesh and fury turned to storm back to his command chair. “Here.”

  Roxy reached to take what Cherry’s closed fist passed her.

  An unlabeled pill bottle filled Roxy’s hand. An empty pill bottle she’d just smeared with her DNA and fingerprints.

  Cherry locked eyes with her, held the twist-cap Coke bottle out between them, shook it like a rattlesnake.

  Bear jerked open the driver’s door, glared at the women, stuck out his paw.

  “Don’t look at me,” DezAray told him.

  “You bitches all work for me,” he snapped.

  “Well, for Luke,” said Cherry as she let Bear and everyone watch her open the Coke bottle.

  “Life’s a ladder, bitch.” Bear grabbed
the bottle. “And you ain’t ever gonna climb above me.”

  Cherry said: “Don’t stress. You’re way too stressed, isn’t he, everybody?”

  “I’ll show you stress.” The open bottle of dark liquid trembled in Bear’s paw as his eyes lashed Roxy. “And tonight I’m gonna show you what’s what.”

  Cherry said: “A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.”

  “You got it.” Bear raised the bottle.

  Roxy pictured that brown liquid glistening with skimmed and dissolved meth crystals, a hyperdrive solution destined for the hulk who smoked too much, an easy heart-attack verdict for whatever small-town law got the 911 about trouble on the road, highway patrol right there when the call came, nobody to tell the tale except women in the white van whose fingerprints and stories . . . She pictured herself knocking the bottle from Bear’s hand. Him believing Cherry’s lies and what truth DezAray and Star could tell, his temper exploding, his fists. His promised tonight. She saw herself telling some cop that she’d been hands-on part of Bear’s fate, but I didn’t do it, wasn’t me after the money or because of . . . whatever.

  “Sometimes,” Cherry said straight into the dawning light on Roxy’s face, “you give somebody a chance.”

  “What chance’ve I got?” whispered Star.

  Roxy imagined stories Cherry’d tell creepy Luke, the chance he had coming, the chances a situation named Roxy would have cupped in Cherry’s red smile.

  We all gotta do.

  She said nothing as Bear tilted the bottle and glugged down what it held. He burped, wedged himself behind the steering wheel.

  Whir went the dented side door of the white van Roxy threw open. She knew the only thing she could count on being there for her was the big sky. She stepped out under its blue forever anyway.

  “What the hell!” yelled Bear. “Get your ass back in here!”

  “Roxy!” cried DezAray as the escaping woman slid the van door shut. “Nobody will see you out here!”

  “Nobody,” sighed Star in the way back. “Cool.”