Montana Noir

by James Grady

  Behind him, Benson heard the metallic pop and hiss of opening cans. He didn’t dare turn but knew Velma and Miss Mary were taking in the dreads snaking around Nathalie’s bony shoulders, the loose halter dress, the skinny legs disappearing into the cowboy boots. When she bent to dig a fresh tissue from her purse, Benson could see down the front of the dress, nipples like cinnamon gumdrops on a flat, pale expanse.

  “I’ve called and called and called. His roommates think he went fishing. All his gear is gone. But his car’s still there.”

  “Maybe he hitchhiked. He’s been known to do that.”

  “He has?”

  No, he hadn’t. But she didn’t know that, and no one else did, either. None of these people knew Gary the way he did.

  “Maybe he’s just moved on to someone else. He’s been known to do that too. Although, for the life of me, I can’t imagine why.” Benson put his fist to his mouth. Pumped. “You know?”

  “You’re horrible!” Hahhhrible.

  Slow claps from Miss Mary and Velma as Nathalie boo-hooed her way to her car.

  * * *

  The knock Benson had been expecting came when he was at the camper’s drop-down table, finally writing out in longhand the story he’d been spinning for Miss Mary and Velma. He closed his notebook.

  “I’d rather talk outside,” he told the cop. “I could use the fresh air.”

  The cop raised an eyebrow. “You been out yet today?”

  The weather had changed overnight and the Hellgate wind blustered past, tearing leaves from the cottonwoods. They piled up against the trailers, a jackpot shower of gold. The Mountain View Mobile Home Park had never looked so good. But the sun was a tease, winking from a blue, blue sky, promising relief that never arrived. Down the row, Velma fussed over her dead irises. She wore a jacket that failed to cover her bare thighs, mottled with cellulite and cold. The officer stamped his feet and beat gloved hands together. Between questions, his gaze strayed to the fading bruise along Benson’s cheekbone, his skinned knuckles.

  Yes, Benson had seen Gary the night before he’d disappeared.

  Yes, at Gary’s place.

  No, no one else had been around.

  No, no idea where Gary was. Maybe he’d gone fishing? Nathalie had said his gear was gone. As to Gary’s car sitting under its own blanket of leaves in front of the house: “He was always a big hitchhiker. Me? Hitchhike with him? Do I look like I can afford to fly-fish?”

  “Officer?” Velma sashayed toward them, smiling, coat open. The cop looked, smiled back. “Anything I can help you with, officer?”

  Plenty, according to his expression. “You know this guy?”

  “Depends on what you mean by know.” Velma cocked a hip.

  Benson watched the cop trying to work it out, looking his way and rejecting the obvious implication. “You see any unusual activity over at his place a couple of days back?”

  Benson had left Velma’s while she slept, pulling his damp clothes from the dryer, hustling back down the row to his camper, thankful Miss Mary wasn’t on her step. He hadn’t gone out since. Sweat pricked his hairline.

  “Anything unusual? I don’t think so. Not that I remember.”

  Benson breathed.

  “But I might think of something later. You got a card?”

  He did. The blouse beneath the parka was scooped low. The card disappeared into all that abundance. “See you later, hon,” she said. Maybe to Benson. Or maybe the cop, who watched her ass all the way back into her trailer. Tick-tock, Benson thought. The woman had mastered the art of the sway.

  The cop pulled a glove from one hand and wrote in a narrow notebook. “There was blood on the rug at your friend’s place. We’re going to test it. You up for a DNA sample?”

  “Sure. But you don’t need to take a sample. At least some of that blood is mine.”

  “Say what?”

  “We had a fight.” He held out his hand, scabbed knuckles up, pointed to his cheek, stopping himself just in time from adding a Nathalie-esque, Ahhbviously.

  “What about?”

  “Love.” Because wasn’t that what it was, the writing? The Unattainable One they chased, wooed, fought for and over? “Any idea where he is, officer?”

  “None. I’ll be honest: it doesn’t look good. He hasn’t showed up at any of his classes, and he’d never missed any until now. Nobody’s used his credit cards or his phone. Nobody’s heard from him. Those things usually add up to somebody being dead. Hard to know for sure, though, without a body.” He slapped his notebook against his thigh. “So I’m just going to come right out and ask. Did you kill him?”

  Benson locked eyes with the cop. He shook his head long and slow. “The last time I saw Gary, he was alive.”

  * * *

  Benson had never thought much about the term dead weight until he’d wrestled Gary out of the car and toward the lip of the cutbank.

  “How’d you get so heavy eating all that goddamn fruit?” he asked the back of Gary’s lolling head. It would have been easier to drag him faceup but he couldn’t stand the thought of Gary’s dead eyes staring at him.

  “Hunh?” Gary said.

  Benson dropped him and jumped back, teetering on the edge of the bank. “Jesus Christ!”

  When Benson was a boy, he’d gone duck hunting with his dad. Try as he might, he hadn’t been able to get the hang of leading them as they coasted in toward the decoys. All his shots went wild. But his dad was a good shot, and as Benson had stuffed the mallards into a sack, their rich brown breast feathers still soft and warm, the blood on them only beginning to stiffen, he’d accidentally squeezed one. For years, his father retold the story of how Benson burst into tears when the dead duck emitted a final quack as the last of its breath was forced from its lungs.

  Benson nudged Gary with his toe. Nothing. He nudged him harder, finally working up the nerve to turn him over. Gary’s lips moved. “Dude. The fuck?” He stared up at Benson. His eyes widened as he went over the rim.

  * * *

  “That Benjamin. He’s a better man than me,” Miss Mary said.

  Than I, Benson thought.

  Miss Mary spoke from inside a pink parka that looked like it had swallowed her whole. Fuzzy pink socks warmed her feet inside their sparkly Crocs. Her skin seemed grayer than usual next to all that color. Velma had finally traded in her skirts for seam-stretched jeans. The cottonwoods, limbs creaking a warning, stood bare against a sky that spat snow.

  “George was his best friend,” Velma said. “Even if he was a shitheel, it makes sense that Benjamin was all broken up when George killed himself. Look at Benson here. He’s still messed up over that college boy who . . . went missing. Aren’t you?”

  “Yeah. Well. It’s hard, not knowing what happened.”

  Miss Mary’s cackle competed with the rattle of dried leaves. “Nothing hard about not knowing. Look all around you. It’s the easiest thing on earth.” Not dead yet, she liked to say about herself. Not by a long shot.

  “It’s all about how things end.” Velma leaned back and stretched her legs as though the sun still shone upon them. “Like the ending to your book. It got me.” She took Benson’s hand and laced her fingers through his, speaking the words like a vow. “In the distance, a dog barked.”

  Custer’s Last Stand

  by Debra Magpie Earling

  Polson

  Nina Three Dresses worked at a fast-food stop called Custer’s Last Stand at the edge of Polson, a mean little joint where the cars parked in a circle and blistered picnic tables sat squat beneath a stingy strip of shade. The road sign couldn’t be missed: three white-bulb arrows falling in perpetual motion toward a round building made to look like a drum. They served up coffee drinks with lame names like SacaJoewea and Joeranimo, and cups of grainy soft ice cream with tomahawk sprinkles. Wednesdays it was “scalped” potatoes and red dogs. Oddly enough, it’d become an Indian hangout. I was drawn to the place by a sense of irony.

  I’d had trouble I couldn’t shake.
Got myself arrested for walking out on a steak and a bottle of whiskey at the Depot Restaurant. Thrown in the hoosegow for a quick wink, then told to get out of town. No sentencing, no arraignment. Just a night of steel bars and Pine Sol dreams.

  I didn’t want to hang around Missoula anyway. I hated the hippies and the high-school university, the lazy-ass writers writing about lives they’d never led, the college kids with rich parents and low IQs, the shit-asses who hang out at breweries and call recreation a living. I hightailed it back to the Flathead to get a job and lay low.

  It’s the shitty little things that dog a person. Three years back, I was arrested in Butte for breaking a bottle on the sidewalk and not for the real crime I’d committed there. Hit-and-run. The guy’s shoe landed topside up on my hood where I found it the next morning when I woke to a belch of bad memory, recollecting a sound like a pig squeal, the image of a man’s crazy eyes as he looped in the air. I ditched my truck and headed farther west.

  Custer’s Last Stand was a new joint, a shitty idea dreamed up by a loser. When I first visited it, I made the dumb-ass comment to a big Indian behind the counter that the local Indians didn’t even fight Custer, so why this stand here? It’s way out of place, I told him. Rightfully belongs in Crow Country, I said. The big Indian in his Flathead Braves T-shirt stared at me from behind the counter, then placed a weak espresso in front of me with three packets of Coffee-Mate. “Yeah, well,” he said, “just so you know, you’re out of place.” And he closed the serving window on me.

  A few weeks later, Nina showed up and the little stand became my haven. She’d slide that serving window open and poke her head out, shield her eyes with her slim hands, and in a shivering half-whisper say, “Looks like it’s going to be a scorcher.” She’d wink at me and the world took on new meaning.

  She’s what drew me to Custer’s, her calm demeanor. I felt right at home at those peeling picnic tables with a cup of steaming coffee, my morning paper, and a cigarette. I’d stop in once a week, sometimes twice, and for hours at a time if I was feeling lonesome.

  The joint was run by a jaded cop who’d fled from Missouri to Montana all for the love of a Merle Haggard song. I’d been off the Flathead since I was a teenager but remembered there’d been others like him over the years. A woman who’d started a pancake house in a concrete teepee on the east shore of Flathead Lake. A couple who’d dyed their hair black, wore headbands with feathers, and had the balls to sell “Indian” beadwork they’d made themselves at the Crazy Daze festival in Ronan.

  But Custer’s Last Stand was another thing altogether—an anomaly three hundred miles out of place. Eavesdropping on the old Indians who slurped coffee, I heard about the history of the place and plenty more. Apparently, Officer Verlin Custer, the proprietor, was a character. A mean SOB who waved Indians through yield signs and then pulled them over for traffic violations. There was talk he had some deal going with the smoke shops, kickbacks from cigarettes sold for triple the price to lazy gamblers at the Wolf Den. Pissy penny-ante shit that would eventually turn to bad-ass shit. All his workers called him Squint—even in his presence—but he was too arrogant, too much of a prick, to appreciate their own stand against him.

  Nina’s “coworkers” were a joke: a big smiler named Toolbox, and a tattooed half-breed called Smug who had the longest cleavage I’d ever seen. Those knuckleheads would sit outside and smoke while Nina flipped burgers and cut fries.

  Around eleven in the morning the gang would show up. Indian girls plinked away on cell phones, flirted with plump-ass boys, and picked flecks of eyeliner from the corners of their eyes. Surly girls who wore black hoodies, smirked instead of laughed, jiggled their keys like they were going somewhere but instead ordered yet another coffee with whipped cream and crushed-candy toppings.

  Nina was immune to their jittery talk. She must have been twenty-five. She had a wicked scar that dented her left cheek, a dusting of freckles across her nose. Whenever work slammed the counter, Nina floated from task to task as if she had all the time in the world, and that grace made her seem far wiser than the others, especially when she served the boss.

  She delivered every item to Squint with a cool countenance, and then double-flicked her wrists. It was a secret language he was too dumb to get. His coffee, flick flick, nothing here; his coffee straws, flick flick, no more; his steaming butterhorn, flick flick, all gone. Her nonchalance was natural, an easy read. Nothing here for you, buster.

  He’d stop by every morning at nine a.m. to inspect the place, except for good days when he’d roar by the stand, his siren wailing: MeMEmeeeeEEE.

  Squint didn’t know enough about weights to exercise for health. He worked out to strut bulging thighs, lifted heavy to have arms that strained against his sleeves like tethered mutts. His neck bulged against his uniform collar as he leaned on the service counter to perform semi-push-ups.

  “How’s business?” he puffed. “Are you smiling for our customers?”

  He wiggled a toothpick between his teeth and squinted at Smug’s cleavage. He grabbed Nina’s hands and traced his thumbnails along her palms to read her misfortune.

  “One day a handsome man is going to snatch you up,” he said. “And it may very well be me.” Folks knew he was married to a battle-ax who made her profit off the sale of waterfront property that rightfully belonged to the Indians.

  The old Indians would catch me watching Nina too. They’d smile at me through puffs of smoke. I’d shrug, order another cup of coffee, and sit at a picnic table so I could watch Nina come outdoors to serve them. It was worth any trouble for her quick glance, her smugly beautiful snub.

  On lucky days, Nina would sit with the old Indians in the shade. I’d listen in, pretending I was reading the paper or checking texts. Nina sipped her coffee and reached for anyone’s cigarette. She’d take a long pull, then blow a slow stream of smoke from her thin nose. She was sexy as hell but there was always a worried look on her face.

  I overheard her say that her grandfather was getting worse. They’d all be in trouble if she couldn’t get help. I gathered that he lived up Hell Roaring Creek, the last house before the road became a skinny ledge over the canyon. I knew the place.

  “He’s got some crazy shit going on up there,” Nina said. “Anyone within a mile of his place is screwed.” The Indians clucked their tongues. Nina gazed off toward the Mission Mountains that were as blue as a raven’s heart above us.

  Every once in a while, Johnny Sees Red Night would stop by and Nina would be out of the stand in a shot. There was a morose urgency to their chats. They’d head over to the scrub pines and talk in low voices. I’d catch a few lines here and there, enough to patch together there was trouble I couldn’t comprehend. The other Indians would stop talking and glance over their shoulders at the two, swat at invisible flies, put their heads together, and whisper conspiratorially. Something bad was going down that apparently didn’t concern my white ass.

  By August, the wind woofed at the window screens and the double fans blew the smell of grease out to the highway. Tourists stopped by in their cutoffs and cover-ups, gulped iced tea and huckleberry shakes, and took off their reflector sunglasses to gawk at Flathead Lake shimmering just beyond the edge of the highway.

  I’d been working up the courage to ask Nina out. I had a job at the Polson lumberyard and was finally making money. I put cash down on an El Camino, rented an apartment on the lake, and was ready to make my move. I planned to take Nina to Bigfork on a real date: after a meal at Showthyme, we’d go to the theater.

  Summer unleashed the hottest spell on record. Heat sizzled the highway and glittered up from the shore. Squint became a dog on the prowl, a monster loosed on our tiny world. He slapped the asses of cocktail waitresses, leered at high-school girls, and spun nickels at them as he patrolled slowly past. Two teenagers from Browning got their skulls cracked and were left for dead but no one tattled. When old Bigshoe pissed behind the China Garden, Squint shattered every bone in his hands and still no one censur
ed him, not even the whites. He whooped his siren without cause and gunned his car up on sidewalks to scare any Indian minding his own business. He turned his attention on Nina and pestered her relentlessly. He ignored the static of the dispatcher announcing disturbances—the damn Indians, always those damn Indians causing trouble for whites. Never the opposite, never whites like Squint causing Indians trouble. He let everyone know he was a big-shot son of a bitch who could shirk his duties to chase tail.

  “Tell me where you live, baby girl,” he said.

  Nina tried to throw him off with kindness, play like she halfway cared, but that only made him more of a jackass.

  “I’m going to find you,” he said. “You know I have the means. I’ll follow you home.”

  He wrapped his arms around her and gripped the back of her neck. “Please don’t,” I heard her say, and I stepped up. She swiped her hand at the window and cut me a pleading glance that said I’d only make matters worse. Whether for her or me, I couldn’t tell. When Squint went to the head, Nina ducked outside and beelined for me. “You don’t want to cause yourself trouble and please don’t cause me any. But stay here,” she said. “I have more I want to say to you.”

  I twisted a cigarette in my mouth and took a couple of drags. I thought she didn’t want to be alone in the situation with Squint. She needed an ally, nothing more. We waited until Squint got into his cruiser and drove away. His heavy car humped up over the dirt road and as his front tires gripped the highway, his back tires spit gravel at a few customers lounging at the picnic tables. He was pissed.

  Nina stood away from me to watch Squint leave. There was no glee in her watching. She waited until he was far down the road before she spoke: “He says he’s going to come back for me.” She rubbed her forehead and blinked away tears.

  It was late. She closed up shop, slung her backpack over her shoulder, and headed toward the highway. “Don’t follow me,” she said. “I mean it.”

  But I did follow. I followed her on foot until she disappeared into the dark fields beyond the road. I called out but I’d lost her as if she’d vanished before my eyes. I’d become her second stalker. Lurking around. Chasing where I wasn’t wanted.