Montana Noir

by James Grady

  At last, her hand fell to the binder. It was light, as if it held nothing at all, but Vera of all people understood the significance of the land descriptions it contained. They were all the neighbors’ riverfront ranches, the oldest and best water rights, flood-irrigated, her family’s old place that cousins still worked, the best land in the valley—even those hay fields Marshall relied on. They had worked that land for generations, learned its sacred secrets, drained their sweat and blood to keep it. No piece of paper could make it any less theirs.

  Vera thought of the land, its prairie-dog towns, unmarked burial sites, and crenellated buttes, and of the elders lined up at her conference table that very day. She thought of Jimmy Beck in the hallway, always pushing, so sure of her craven loyalty to the firm, and his implied threat about her partnership review. She thought of the lost baby and Peter’s plane touching down at LAX that night. She thought of boxing up the rest of what she had found and leaving it for another generation to puzzle over. Upstairs, Marshall shouted something at the TV. Soon he would notice her long absence and shuffle to the top of the stairs. Now was the time for decision.

  Her hand moving almost on its own, she opened the furnace. The documents she’d fed it had already disappeared like so much steam. There was nothing at the center of the fire but pure heat, pure hunger, avarice itself, like the flame of history that burned everyone, sooner or later. Down deep where she had protected her soul from all the coups counted against it, a few things sheltered. The family. The land. There was no law, no rule, and no duty beyond that, only the primal ruthlessness that won the West. Mine, she breathed.

  In one determined movement Vera took the whole stack, leather binder and all, and flung it at the hottest place where the fire swallowed once, just as she swallowed hard while watching, and left nothing behind.

  She pushed to her feet and gathered the small stack of papers put aside for saving, including the old deeds from the very bottom of the trunk. She set the lid to without a noise, picked up her sweater and jacket, and carried everything up to the kitchen table.

  “Find anything good?” Marshall asked from his recliner. He took his eyes from the game and followed her progress from door to table to sofa.

  “Nothing special. I cleaned it out for you.” Vera kicked off her shoes, sat on the far end of the sofa, and curled against the arm. The Packers’ offensive line filled the screen as something unreadable passed across Marshall’s face, another hidden thought in a lifetime of hiding thoughts, nothing he would ever allow her to extract.

  “Atta girl,” he said, and turned the volume higher.

  Oasis

  by Walter Kirn

  Billings Heights

  Oasis Pizza never closed. It was open all night and it delivered anywhere. That was its edge, the way it stayed in business. Unlike the shops that belonged to national chains, it served the grimmest parts of Billings, from meth-lab motels to pit-bull trailer courts to dirt-floor shanties by the river. The pizza itself was overpriced and awful. The crust was soft and starchy and the red sauce was a smear of tasteless paint. Worst of all, the pizzas had little cheese. Ray Rogers, the owner, who’d bought the place at thirty with money from a personal-injury lawsuit involving a runaway Polaris snowmobile, was too consumed by his video keno habit to buy mozzarella in sufficient quantities. Some nights the shop ran out of cheese entirely, forcing us, the drivers, to buy our own cheese and sprinkle it on en route. People won’t tip for a pizza without cheese, and our tips were all we had. Our wage was six dollars an hour, pitiful, and sometimes—as often as he could away with it—Ray paid us nothing. He gave us pills instead. Adderall. Dexedrine. Soma. Percocet. We took them too, especially the night crew. At four in the morning, lost on a dark street in a car that reeks of grease and garlic, a guy will do anything for a burst of energy, or even for just a new, distracting thought. That was the danger driving for Oasis: You ran out of thoughts. You forgot you had a mind. Except when it ached, which was almost all the time, you forgot you had a head.

  In the nine months I worked there, which sounds like a short time to people who’ve never worked jobs that start at midnight and end when the rest of the world is waking up, I only made one friend. His name was Crush. I assume he named himself. I’ve always been drawn to people of that type, the ones who start life as Dale or John or Brad but reach a mysterious crisis point that leads them to retake control of how they’re viewed. But what did Crush mean? He never told me. Was it intended to emphasize his strength? He was certainly broad in the shoulders and chest, and yes, it stuck with you when he shook your hand or clapped you thunderously on the back, but to me his most striking quality was his enormous capacity for pity. He felt sorry for people other folks detested, including Ray Rogers, who treated us like slaves and stole from the world with his cheese-free, doughy pizzas. “I love Ray,” Crush told me once. “I love his cruelty. So afraid he’ll be hurt if he doesn’t hurt you first.”

  Crush was a tip monster. He knew all the tricks. He taught them to me during my first two weeks, when he persuaded Ray to let me ride with him rather than learn the business on my own. His best trick was flapping open the pizza box when a customer met him at the door, supposedly to make sure the order was right but actually to stun the person’s nostrils with a warm Italian herbal cloud. Another trick was to show up out of breath, as though he’d sprinted from the car. If it was cold out, he wore a heavy coat buttoned right up to his chin, dramatically shivering as he made change. Quite often, his customers let him keep it. Sometimes his tips were as much as the whole bill, and sometimes they were more. His most generous customers were drunks and stoners, who he learned to identify by the toppings they ordered, which tended to be complex and over-rich. Pineapple chunks and jalapeños, say, or barbecue chicken with Canadian bacon. He scrapped with the other drivers to make these runs, and so did I, once I learned what they were worth. To hungry druggies at their euphoric peaks, a twenty is just a pretty piece of paper. If they pay you in coins, even better. They’ll hand you jars full. And one pound of quarters is a lot of cash.

  Though sometimes they robbed you. Not often, but now and then. “Cooperate,” Crush said, concluding my week of training over a cup of black coffee in the shop. “Hand it all over and never call the cops.”

  I asked him why.

  “In my experience, the same ones who rob you, you often meet again, and when you do, you find out it wasn’t personal. They needed something and had no way to get it. Tires for their car, child support. Who cares? Is money your god?”

  “Not exactly. Maybe sometimes.”

  “Not mine,” said Crush. “My god is love.”

  Was Crush a Christian? I braced for a full sermon. They spring them on you, I’d discovered over the years, usually just when you think you’re safe with them. I was only nineteen, but I’d done a lot of living, some of it on a juvenile work farm, thanks to a shoplifting ring I got drawn into during my sophomore year of high school. The work farm was full of religion. I’d learned to fear it.

  “Do you have a lady?” Crush asked me. “A lady beautiful?”

  “Not right now,” I said.

  “Well, I do. You’ll meet her sometime. She lights my way. She’s the reason I work here, to give her what she needs. I very much hope that you find one of your own. I’m saving to pay off her Jeep Grand Cherokee.”

  “That’s a lot of deliveries. A lot of tips.”

  “Fortunately, I’m highly disciplined.”

  “What’s her name?” I asked.

  “Beth. Beth Louise. But she dances under Cassandra.”

  A stripper. Poor Crush. I found it hard to look at him. It would have been better if he were born-again.

  “I love it at night,” he said, gazing out the window, which was fogged from his coffee breath, and dusty too. The stacks of the refinery flared red and orange. “Or maybe it’s that I hate the sun.”

  “How come?”

  He shrugged his big shoulders inside his army jacket. It smelled of oregan
o and it fit him wrong, suggesting that another, smaller man had earned its profusion of stripes and patches. “Because I’m a true romantic, I suppose. Sunlight diminishes people. It steals their dreams.”

  * * *

  Ray Rogers liked to raid the till to gamble. The Magic Diamond Casino—half gas station that sold sundries, half liquor store—stood kitty-corner across the street from us, allowing him to pop over at any time—he just locked the front door for ten minutes and disappeared. That’s why the empty cash drawer didn’t faze me. Our pizzas had been cheese-free for a month, indicating that Ray was on a spree. With video keno, the way Montana laws worked, you couldn’t bet more than eight quarters at a time, but as my great-uncle, a bank manager, once told me, it’s slippage that bankrupts people, not huge mistakes.

  I was making good coin, having mastered Crush’s system. One night I earned 180 bucks. Some delinquents were throwing a party in a parked bus. It took me a solid hour to find the thing because, of course, I had no address, just a treasure-map set of directions based on landmarks: a billboard for a dentist, a row of garbage cans, a tree with a plastic bag stuck in its branches. The pizzas were cold and hard when I arrived but mounded with cheese from the two-pound bag I carried. The kids were impressed. They were snorting ketamine. They passed a hat around to pay the check and collected three times what they owed. I’d learned to count money with a glance by then. I refunded them fifteen dollars to seem honest and pocketed the extra sixty-two.

  I boasted to Crush when I got back to the shop, thinking he’d be proud of me. Instead he acted weird. “If you were a decent guy, with principles, you’d have given me half of that when you walked in here, without me even asking, as repayment. Was I not your mentor?” he asked me. “Yes, I was.”

  I peeled a twenty off my roll, not because I felt indebted to him but because of his wrinkled, disgusted look. It scared me. I wondered if he was getting sick. He’d lost weight in his face but bulked up around his hips. Plus, he was losing his eyebrows. They’d gone patchy.

  “Thanks,” he said, taking the money from my hand. I didn’t expect it. I’d thought that he was bluffing. He brought out his own roll from his jacket, wrapped it in my ransom, and put it back, keeping his hand in his pocket afterward as if to go on fingering his loot.

  Hoping to calm things, I asked, “How’s Beth Louise? You two still going out?”

  “Cassandra and I don’t go out. We keep things private. She has to seem unattached, for business reasons.”

  I said I understood.

  “She’s a child,” said Crush. “Incredibly naïve. We’d be married already if it were up to her.”

  “Really?”

  “She’s in her earning years. No reason to blow it. Our love will always be there.”

  Behind us, the phone started ringing, but with Ray at the Magic Diamond for a quick game, it was okay to lose the order. Our cook had just quit and neither Crush nor I liked the smell of garlic on our hands. The caller hung up but tried back a moment later, and this time, out of annoyance, I picked up.

  “Is Crush there?” a young woman’s voice asked. She sounded angry, like someone who’d been tricked and wanted vengeance. Her tone was the reason I didn’t have a girlfriend and wasn’t seeking one.

  I covered the phone with my hand. “I think it’s her.”

  “It can’t be,” he said. “She only calls my cell.” He spoke in a whisper, as though he feared discovery. Was he ducking another girlfriend? A wife, perhaps? I realized I knew very little about my pal—I couldn’t even guess his age. His smooth, undamaged skin made him look thirty, yet his air of prolonged rumination on major life themes seemed to fit a man in his midforties. But how could that be? He delivered pizzas. At nineteen, I was already plotting my next move: helicopter flight school. My dad used to fly one before a rocket got him when I was eight years old. His Marine Corps buddies sent me pictures.

  “Who is this?” I said. “I’ll pass along a message.”

  “Tell him it’s me and his phone’s dead and I’m done. Tell him he missed his last payment. They’ll take the Jeep.” The woman—Cassandra, obviously—hung up then. She hung up hard, in a way that hurt my ear.

  Crush felt this somehow and slipped off to the bathroom. I didn’t hear a flush, just running water, which was still going when Ray returned from keno. His eyes were twinkling, which meant he’d lost a pile.

  * * *

  It was two in the morning, when the bars clear out, and in ten minutes, as happened every night, big orders from all over Billings would pour in. It would be my best night since I started, as I said, but not for Crush, who clocked out early, complaining of diarrhea and a stiff neck.

  He didn’t come in the next night either, a Saturday. This told me his lady troubles were truly grave. Saturdays at Oasis were cash bonanzas, so much so that Ray kept his gun on him while cooking instead of leaving it stashed beneath the counter. When Crush didn’t show or answer when we called him, Ray fell quiet, a brooding, fretful silence that lasted until the calls stopped around dawn.

  “I’ll be honest,” he said. “I thought he’d stick us up. He hasn’t missed a Saturday in years. Plus, he’s been pilfering lately. Something’s wrong.”

  “He’s dating a stripper. She’s bleeding him.”

  “Crush is gay,” Ray said. “I found his porn once. Country boys. Cowboys. He likes them blond and buff.”

  “Maybe he’s branched out since then.”

  “That’s rare, I’ve been told. Have you met this woman?”

  “No. But I do know her name. And I think I’ve heard her voice.”

  “If she dances, it’s either in Laurel or Lockwood. There are only two joints. Try and find her for me, would you? The man is deteriorating. We need facts.”

  “They’ll card me. I’m underage. I won’t get in.”

  “Bring some free pizzas over. Bribe the door guys. Say someone canceled an order and you have extras.”

  I said I’d try.

  “Her name’s not Lexus, is it? Like the car? Or Mango? Is it Mango? Like the fruit?”

  “It’s Cassandra, I think.”

  “She must be new in town. They float over from North Dakota, from the oil patch. There’s not much money there now, with crude so low.”

  “You’re sure the porn was his?” I said. “Where did you find it?”

  “In the men’s room trash can.”

  “Then it could have been anyone’s. A customer’s.”

  “Except that I don’t serve that type,” said Ray.

  I ignored this remark and headed home, back to my basement apartment in the Heights. Too many late nights, too much coffee, too many pills, and people start saying things just to wake their brains. Whatever you hear after five a.m., it’s garbage, and whatever you say to others is garbage too. It’s the same way with pizza, which isn’t really food, just something to chew so you can feel your mouth move. Pizza is crap. A lot of things are crap. It’s okay, though—it’s fine. Crap won’t kill you, so it’s fine.

  What will kill you are rockets fired from hidden positions in countries that your country is trying to save.

  * * *

  The first place was dead, with no one on the stage, just two girls at the bar with a trucker type between them dealing out fives and tens for their tequila shots and paying more attention to the TV—which was showing a ball game—than to their tits and babble. I ordered a beer and inquired after Cassandra, whom the bartender said had been fired over a year ago for biting the face of an off-duty state trooper who’d begged her to pee on him in a private room. I asked the bartender if he knew Crush and he said that he did but only by reputation, though what sort of reputation he didn’t specify. When I brought out a twenty and pressed him for details, one of the girls leaned over, snatched the bill, and dragged me off to a booth in a dim corner, where she asked for another twenty to tell her tale. I could see by her unfocused eyes she didn’t have a tale but was laboring to dream one up. In the meantime, she straddled my lap
and went to work, grinding away with her coltish little ass and tickling my ears with precision bursts of breath that raised goose bumps on my neck and scalp. I liked her a lot. She had spirit. She had ideas. It made me feel less judgmental about Crush. I could see how the skilled devotions of such a girl—she reminded me of a nurse, this one, so dutiful and thorough—might rouse an impulse of selfless generosity.

  During a pause to cool off, I mentioned Crush again, this time supplying a physical description.

  “No eyebrows?” she said. “Or very little eyebrows? And stuck on Cassandra? And huge, with veiny hands?”

  “Yes.” She was simply repeating what I’d just told her.

  “No. Never met him.”

  “But you know Cassandra?”

  “I did. Before she hurt that guy and left.”

  “Does she still dance?”

  “Not publicly. You have a phone?”

  I nodded.

  “There’s no signal in this place. If you can wait five minutes, I’ll grab my real clothes and we can do this from the truck stop. I’m finished tonight. I took a Molly, but it wore off. Now I want pancakes. Do you want pancakes? I do. A short stack of pancakes loaded with chocolate chips.”

  “Do what at the truck stop?” I asked her.

  “Get online.”

  * * *

  The girl, who went by Ultra, used my debit card to register with the website. Our booth faced a window that looked out on the interstate where three police cars with whirling colored lights were involved in some sort of major enforcement action against the obese male driver of a green hatchback. Once we entered the site, a grid of photos appeared that showed up poorly on my phone, whose screen was cracked and slightly wet inside. Ultra tapped on one of the pictures several times before the shaky image of a woman sitting cross-legged on a bed appeared. She was dressed in a red bra and panties and held a teddy bear whose head lolled sideways as if its neck was broken. She was pretty enough, with high, curved cheekbones, but her hair was dyed blue and cut short, down to the roots, with lots of random tufts and fuzzy spots.