by James Grady
“Bear!” yelled Cherry. “Drive off, leave her ass! Hell, you’ve already got her stash in the take, covers her tab, nothing to lose but her trouble!”
Roxy stalked to the other side of the highway.
Cherry’s shouts boomed from the van: “Show the bitch who leaves who. Get down the road, make one of us take the wheel while you call Luke, then—”
“Shut up!” yelled Bear.
Cherry yelled louder than she needed to: “You got it!”
I got it, thought the woman standing on the side of the road.
The van spun gravel as it sped back onto the road, a white blur on the gray-snake highway, shrinking, going, gone.
The woman stood watching with only the clothes she wore and the secrets she bore, alone on the side of a two-lane state highway that scarred the golden prairie beneath that massive blue sky. She heard a meadowlark whistle. Smelled the earth, the oil of the blacktop road, knew where she was, the direction of a face and a town where people lived.
She shouted her true name to the wind.
Started walking.
PART III
Custer Country
The Dive
by Jamie Ford
Glendive
3 Wins, 1 Loss
Carla “Train Wreck” Lewis bought her whiskey at ten a.m., right when the state liquor store opened for business. Not because she was eager for a breakfast of barleycorn mash, but because she didn’t like to show her face in Glendive anymore, especially since she’d had her nose broken in her last fight. Getting KO’d in an unsanctioned MMA tournament held in the parking lot of some Chickasaw casino had altered her brooding good looks as well as the trajectory of her fledgling career—if you could call getting shinned in the head a vocation.
The Liquor Store Lady raised a concerned eyebrow. “I don’t mind taking your money, honey, but if you keep coming in here every day for a bottle, it’s gonna become a habit.”
The silver-haired woman behind the counter had a good Christian name and probably an interesting life to go along with it, but everyone Carla knew back in high school just called her the Liquor Store Lady.
“And what kind of habit would that be?” Carla asked, an unlit cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth.
“The kind your mother wouldn’t approve of.”
Carla removed her sunglasses to reveal two black eyes—the unwanted offspring of a nose that now pointed ten degrees to the left, the result of fighting a southpaw for the first time. Carla gained new respect for the Liquor Store Lady when the woman didn’t even blink at the temporary ruin of her face.
“My mother doesn’t tend to approve of anything I do,” Carla said with a shrug. “Never has. Lucky for me, the feeling’s mutual.”
The Liquor Store Lady bagged the bottle of Roughstock. “Yet here you are, back in town. When I heard you won a couple of them crazy fights, I figured you’d left Dawson County for good this time. I didn’t think you’d let a beating in the ring send you running back home.” The woman cocked her head and raised a concerned eyebrow. “Or did some boyfriend lay hands on you?”
“I don’t have a boyfriend.” The words hurt more than the pain in Carla’s blocked sinuses. Especially since her ex-boyfriend, Sturgill Runyon, had also been her trainer and manager. The moment her perfect 3–0 record took a hit, he’d dropped her off at the nearest hospital before skipping town with her show money and the redheaded lefty who’d spilled Carla’s blood all over the canvas. Carla didn’t bother finishing Sturgill’s we can still be friends texted apology. Instead, she deleted all his messages and blocked him on her phone. A final lesson in self-defense.
The irony was that Sturgill said they’d been offered five grand for a worked fight and begged Carla to take a dive. She refused and took a beating anyway.
“And I’m guessing you know why I’m back in town,” Carla said as she grabbed the bottle by the neck. “There aren’t many secrets around here.”
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” the Liquor Store Lady chuckled. “That being stated, I am very sorry about your mother’s present situation.”
Carla nodded her gratitude. “Been a long time coming. But she’s got a few more days left in her—weeks maybe. I swear she’s just holding on to make sure the Ranger-Review gets her obituary right. Even on her deathbed—”
“No, dear,” the Liquor Store Lady interrupted. “I’m sorry she’s still married to your stepfather. Word is, that bastard from North Dakota got your mom to change her will and now she’s leaving everything to him: your family’s ranch, the oil rights, the Lewis Mansion, everything—lock, stock, and barrel. That’s what I hear, anyway.”
Carla bit down on her cigarette, tasted the bitter tobacco.
The Liquor Store Lady sighed. “This bottle’s on me.”
3 Wins, 2 Losses
The afternoon sky was beginning to purple as Carla left the unopened bottle in the passenger seat, stepped out of her truck, and stood in front of the three-story building that had been built by her great-grandfather and namesake, Charles Lewis, a train conductor turned sheep baron. The old brick manse was nothing like the sprawling estates back east, the kind she’d seen in magazines. In fact, the building might pass for a guesthouse in the Hamptons. But in Glendive, Montana, the place stood out like the Hope Diamond in a dusty coal bin, and had just as many stories told about it. Some were apocryphal, others merely the cud chewed by local gossips, but as Carla spotted a kettle of turkey vultures circling a nearby field, she knew that just as many were true.
Even though Carla had grown up here, she still called the place by its formal name. Especially after her father committed suicide years ago and her mother married their attorney from Watford City, a business partner who called himself Arnold H. Chivers, Esquire. Since then the Lewis Mansion had felt even less like a real home.
“About time you showed up,” her stepfather snapped as he opened the front door and met Carla on the porch, which was littered with cigar butts. He tried not to grimace when he saw her broken nose and bruised cheekbones but failed miserably. If masking emotions had been an Olympic event, Arnold Chivers would have scored a 3 out of 10, with perhaps a generous 4.5 from the Irish judge.
He shook his head and glanced at the time on his cell phone. “I don’t even want to know. Your mother’s been asking for you nonstop, so get in there and be the prodigal daughter you always thought you were. I’m heading to my office to get some papers notarized. I’ll be back in a little bit. I expect she’s—”
“She’s in there dying,” Carla said flatly. “And you’re screwing her one last time, with your fountain pen. This building and every acre is part of us, built by and for my family.” Carla felt herself rising on the tide of emotion left over from losing her last fight. She used that anger as a cudgel, digging her forefinger into her stepfather’s chest. “I’ll see this place burned to the ground before it belongs to you.”
This was the longest conversation she’d had with her stepfather since she was twelve, when she came back early from Lincoln Elementary, heard strange noises, and walked in on her stepfather having sex with their young German housekeeper. He’d sent Carla to the family cabin on the Yellowstone River. When she returned three days later, the housekeeper had been fired and given a one-way ticket on a Greyhound bus. Carla’s mother had been a riot of drunken apologies but refused to leave the man or kick him out. Since then, the house had felt like a mausoleum, smelled like dust instead of wood soap, mold and mildew instead of scented candles.
As Arnold collected himself, Carla remembered how he was the first person she’d ever hit. It was an awkward, ugly, overhand right, straight to his neck-beard, when she was sixteen and he was . . . where he wasn’t supposed to be.
She never talked about that night to anyone, just quit FFA and took up wrestling. Then boxing. Then left town after graduation, never to return.
Until now.
“Look,” Arnold said, “I know you don’t think highly of me.”
“I don’t think of you at all.”
There was a crack of gunfire and they both glanced at the field. Two boys were shooting gophers, sighting their rifles for Glendive’s annual coyote hunt.
“This situation with your family’s estate isn’t my doing,” said Arnold. “Believe it or not, your mother had her will changed of her own volition and without my knowledge. I just found out yesterday. I didn’t expect it, I didn’t ask for anything beyond my stake in the business, but I’ll gladly take everything—if that’s your mom’s dying wish.” He shoved his way past Carla. “And good luck trying to stop me.”
3 Wins, 3 Losses
Alyce Lewis had withdrawn from the world from time to time even before she got sick. Carla suspected it was because her mother enjoyed the drama her absences created. There were small-town rumors: Alyce had gone to New York City, worked in off-Broadway musicals under a stage name, and flamed out before coming home to Glendive in shame. She’d suffered a bad bout of plastic surgery in Mexico and now went to bed wearing her makeup. She’d had an affair, which was why her husband blew his brains out during harvest. As Carla walked into the parlor, she smelled dead flowers in vases filled with fetid water. She saw the spent oxygen bottles and listened for the grandfather clock, which had stopped working. She was reminded that nothing is as simple as gossip.
The truth was that Carla’s father had killed himself after learning the pipeline he’d built on their land had leaked benzene into the groundwater. Nearby homes and ranches were contaminated. Three newborn babies died. Arnold settled with the families, buying their silence. But when Alyce got sick, her heartbroken father took matters into his own hands. Arnold cleaned up the mess, literally and figuratively.
The affairs came later. Many of them.
“Hello, dear,” her mother rasped, staring out the front window into the dark clouds that had put out the sun. “People kept calling all week, telling me you were back in town. If I had known dying would have brought you home so quickly, I would have got on with this business years ago.”
Carla thought her mother looked like an aging movie star in repose. She was wearing silk slippers and a long ivory negligee whose plunging back showed her jutting shoulder blades, revealing how much weight she’d lost during her eight-year battle with leukemia. Alyce took a long drag on her cigarette, heedless of the wheeled oxygen tank at her side. The hose curled up beneath the nape of her neck, disappeared into the long blond tresses of her wig, and then reappeared just below her nose. Curlicues of smoke drifted up and caressed a ceiling the color of coffee-stained teeth.
“I think you died when you married Arnold,” Carla said. “I’m looking at a ghost who’s made some very bad financial decisions.”
“So you’ve heard.” Her mother fought a cough, then smiled through cracked lips. “Yes, everything that rightfully belongs to you, my dear. Everything your grandparents fought for during the Dirty Thirties when the weaker fled, everything your father endured those long winters for, so he could make this place what it is—I’m leaving it all to your stepfather.”
“If you’re doing this to hurt me—”
“I’m doing this to save you. Oh, I knew what he did to you, darling.” She paused to let that sink in, flicking her cigarette into a cracked ashtray. “And I know how that must make you feel. But if I’d left him, if we divorced, he would have ended up with half of everything and I just couldn’t allow that. So I waited and put it all in his name. People will think he forced me to change my will—they already do. Then when he returns, everyone in town will say that’s why I did this.”
Alyce opened a drawer. Inside was an old Colt .32 with black tape on the handle. Carla knew the gun—it was her father’s.
“I’m just a sick woman who is sick of dying,” her mother continued. “And sick people do terrible things when they’re not in their right minds, like protecting what is theirs.” She coughed until her eyes watered; it was the closest she ever got to crying. “And paying people to lose fights. So they’ll come home where they belong. I never thought you’d turn the money down and take a beating. Just look at you.”
Carla stared at her as thunder rattled the windowpanes and the electricity flickered. The Lewis Mansion creaked and groaned as wooden joists settled like the timbers of an old sailing ship heaving in the wind.
Alyce wiped her eyes without a hint of apology. “I’m dying but I’m not above trying to make amends. And I couldn’t wait any longer. I’m too old for the Make-A-Wish Foundation, and even if I wasn’t, I doubt they’d fulfill my desire to put an end to your philandering stepfather. With Arnold gone, when I’m laid to rest, everything will be yours. And you can fix that broken nose.”
She stubbed out her cigarette and lit another, coughing as she puffed away.
Carla went to close the drawer. Hesitated. She picked up the revolver and felt its weight. It didn’t seem real until she opened the cylinder and saw the gun was loaded. She trailed her fingers along the oiled barrel while her mother kept talking, wheezing, lecturing, until her voice became the sound of a drunken fight crowd throwing plastic cups of beer, screaming for Carla to step forward, to press on, to walk through the punishment. She heard Sturgill shouting from outside the ring, urging her to circle to her left, away from the gloved fist that kept coming out of nowhere. Carla closed her eyes and smelled her stepfather’s aftershave amid the smelling salts. When she opened them she saw a trail of dust out the window as Arnold turned down the lane toward the house. Her knuckles were white, laced around the grip. Her finger was on the trigger.
Her mother was smiling.
The room fell silent except for the soft hiss of the oxygen tank.
Carla sighed and her shoulders sagged. “That was a very nice speech, Mother. I bet you practiced it for days. But you should have just come out and asked. Instead of pretending you were going to do something noble for a change.”
Carla’s mother tried to look insulted. But she never had been an actress.
“I almost believed you,” Carla said. “Almost.”
She put on her sunglasses, popped her neck, and walked outside, gun in hand, as a stray dog barked in the distance.
3 Wins, 3 Losses, 1 Draw
Carla walked into the stubble field where her father had taken his own life. Where his body had been found at sunset, arms and legs akimbo.
She heard gravel spray as Arnold pulled up in his Cadillac.
She heard the car door slam as he began shouting for her to come inside, telling her that her mother needed her and it would soon be raining, hailing, or worse. She kept walking as lightning flashed on the horizon. She stared ahead at the furrowed ground, remembering how she used to wander these fields in the spring as a little girl, spending long afternoons looking for dinosaur bones and meteorites. But all she ever found were gophers and jackrabbits, tumbleweeds and the occasional rattlesnake.
Carla heard her stepfather stumbling behind her, babbling threats about legal precedents and powers of attorney. Reminding her that she’d run away and telling her she’d never wanted any of this to begin with. He finally stopped talking when Carla turned around and he saw the gun tucked into her waistband. Where his hands had once been.
Carla enjoyed the long moment of silence. She needed a moment to clear her head. To feel this place again.
She licked her lips and drew the pistol. She stepped forward and touched the barrel to the bridge of her stepfather’s nose. She closed one eye and cocked the hammer with a satisfying click, like the sound of an ambulance door closing, the latch of a coffin lid, or an expensive fountain pen snapping in two, splattering red ink all over the page.
Arnold froze. He sucked air past clenched teeth. He swallowed and his Adam’s apple rose and fell. “Look,” he whispered, “we can make a deal. I’ll give you anything you want. You don’t have to do this.”
“I don’t have to do anything anymore,” Carla said as she slowly lowered the gun. “And you have nothing to give.” She looked over her stepfather’s s
houlder, toward the house. Her feeble mother was on the porch, mouthing the words, Do it.
She offered the gun to Arnold. “My mother wants you dead.”
Her stepfather hesitated, not trusting her. She lifted the Colt slightly. Take it.
“But I’m not my mother.”
He took the revolver in his trembling hands, quickly pointing the business end at her as his face showed fear, confusion, and relief. He chewed his lip while dust from the field settled into the beads of sweat on his forehead.
“You won’t get off that easy.” Carla reached out, placed her hand over Arnold’s, and squeezed his trigger finger.
Carla didn’t hear the gun go off. But she heard the ringing in her ears, her mother’s shouting. She thought she saw her stepfather smiling as her body bent in half and she tumbled to the ground. She closed her eyes and waited for the bell.
1 Win, 0 Losses
Two months later Carla limped back into the state liquor store.
The Liquor Store Lady was reading the morning paper and Carla couldn’t help but smile when she saw her stepfather’s face on the front page. The headline read: ATTORNEY GETS 15 YEARS IN DEER LODGE FOR ATTEMPTED MURDER. FRAUD TRIAL PENDING.
Carla owed the boys in the field for stopping the bleeding and saving her life. Especially for testifying that they’d heard a single shot that stormy afternoon and seen Arnold Chivers, Esquire, standing over Carla’s body with gun in hand.
Her stepfather swore that he’d been set up, of course. But the dying testimony of Alyce Lewis, a heartbroken woman so in love with the man she’d put her entire estate in his name, removed all doubt from the jurors’ minds.
“Nice to see you walking around under your own power,” the Liquor Store Lady said. “I’m sorry you couldn’t be there for your mother’s funeral.”
Carla shrugged. She felt the loss. But she had a bottle of Percocet to dull the pain from two surgeries and her memories of this town that she loved and hated. A place where you could buy shotgun shells along with chewing gum at the local diner. Where second-graders visited a museum featuring dinosaurs and Noah’s Ark side by side. Where poaching applied to mule deer, elk, and the occasional person.