Montana Noir

by James Grady

  He had grown up in heat and humidity, the air dense with smells of food, flowers, and garbage. He had come here to get away from all that. But he had not known about the fires.

  Sidd had been told about the renewing qualities of fire, how forests needed to burn so new growth could emerge. Some pine trees actually required the heat of a fire to release the seeds from their fallen cones. Old brush and dead trees became ash so green shoots could emerge on the forest floor.

  He read about fires in Canada and Siberia that might not burn out until they had exhausted their tinder. He knew about rising temperatures, thawing permafrost, and melting ice caps. And Montana was so dry that the Forest Service fire-danger signs seemed permanently set at VERY HIGH and EXTREME. He wondered whether there came a time when the old rules ceased to apply.

  Reaching the Y, he jogged a circle in the road, his trainers puffing dust as fine and arid as Martian soil, and turned back. Most of the road was monotonously straight, but a curve and a drop here, combined with the robust fringe of knapweed on the bank, made it a blind corner for cars coming up from behind.

  Sidd heard gravel popping under the truck’s tires before he heard its engine, a throaty V8. He stumbled into the weeds and pressed himself against the bank.

  The black truck pulled up next to him, its window down. The driver leaned forward and shouted across a gray-bearded man in the passenger seat who was concentrating on something in his lap. “Wear some lighter clothes, asshole!” The man had mirrored, wraparound sunglasses resting on the bill of his baseball cap.

  Sidd looked down at what he was wearing. Navy T-shirt, black shorts, blue running shoes. Should he apologize?

  “I’m trying to save your goddamn life!” The man gunned the engine and the truck sprayed gravel and surged forward. A pebble stung Sidd’s shin like a wasp.

  It wasn’t until the white GMC on the truck’s tailgate had disappeared around the bend that Sidd started running again, shakily, wondering whether the man would have said anything about his clothes if his skin hadn’t been dark as well.

  * * *

  Poe pounded the wheel. “Swear to fucking God, you could pack into the Bob Marshall and some fucking jogger would still run through your camp in his underwear.”

  “That was stupid,” said Mike, barely looking up from the glowing rectangle in the palm of his massive left hand.

  “Woulda been more stupid if we came back with him stuck in the grille.”

  “Maybe better that way.”

  Thing was, Mike was right. It was stupid. Yell at some guy, he was that much more likely to remember seeing your truck. Poe had been trying not to lose his shit so easily lately, but no sooner had he promised himself he’d be Clint Eastwood–quiet than he was ragging on someone again.

  Mike poked at the screen, calm as ever. Even when he said, That was stupid, it was like he was saying, Pull over at the next gas station. And if anyone had a right to be pissed at the world, it was Mike. Poor son of a bitch had only been out of Deer Lodge for a couple of months and it must have been like landing on an alien planet. He was so 1980s he still wore a fanny pack.

  He’d also never seen a smartphone except on TV and now he couldn’t stop playing the game Poe’s daughter had downloaded for him. Poe had been around enough addicts not to fall for the free first taste, but Mike was hooked on Candy Crush crack.

  Poe needed an extra set of hands and figured that Mike, who was still on parole, had plenty of incentive to keep his mouth shut about the job. That, and he was Poe’s cousin’s ex-husband and she’d been all over Poe to help Mike out. She needed money, so Mike needed money.

  A low voice said, “Sweet!” as the big man took out a row of jellybeans or something.

  “How’s the game going?” Poe asked. “You win yet?”

  “I think this is made for little kids’ fingers,” Mike said without looking up.

  “Think you’ll be able to take a break in a minute? We’re almost there.”

  Mike nodded but kept playing. Good thing he wasn’t behind the wheel. Poe was sure they didn’t teach inmates about the dangers of distracted driving. He held the wheel carefully as the road went steadily up.

  Poe wasn’t a firebug by nature, but his first job, a foreclosed lumber warehouse, had been a career-maker. Though he’d torched a lot of things since then, this was his first ski resort. Well, it wasn’t a ski resort yet, and if he did his job right, it wouldn’t be.

  The thing had been going on for years. Poe had seen headlines in the Missoulian a couple of times. Awhile back, Betty Jean Allaway, whose family had ranched the western half of the valley for almost 150 years, had surprised the shit out of everyone by marrying Bucky Severson, her ranch manager. Betty Jean was older than Bucky and didn’t have any kids. When she died, Bucky inherited the whole spread and got it in his head that he was going to build a ski resort on the part that covered the north side of Lolo Peak—and not just any ski resort, but the biggest one in North America.

  With the way society was going, you couldn’t put up a fireworks tent without a shit ton of paperwork. Even Poe knew a ski resort was bound to be a ten-year project at least. But Bucky being Bucky, he went and bulldozed the ski runs anyway to get a jump-start. Maybe he figured that once people saw the potential, they’d say, What the hell, you might as well finish.

  They didn’t. Once the environmentalists got involved, the whole thing was doomed. Bucky didn’t see it, so he lawyered up and got ready to fight to the bitter end. But apparently the developers he’d partnered with foresaw a different outcome. Because they were the ones who’d sent someone to find someone to burn the whole thing down a week before the Montana Supreme Court reached its bound-to-be-unfavorable decision.

  Poe had no proof he was working for WashIdaMont Development Partners. As far as he knew, he was working for the guy who’d slipped him $2,500 in worn bills behind Lucky Lil’s Casino. But there had to be insurance money, money that might not be on the table once the project was officially declared unviable. That’s how things worked, right? What they were paying Poe—half down, half on completion—probably came out of the coffee fund. And Mike? Mike was more than happy to take home five hundred dollars for a morning’s work. Given that his ex-wife had laid claim to the forty cents an hour he’d earned working in the prison bakery, it was the most money he’d seen at one time in twenty-seven years.

  Reaching the first switchback, Poe turned the wheel and geared down. The truck climbed into the trees.

  * * *

  Siddharth Ghosh was an unlikely caretaker. But the world itself was unlikely—how else could he account for the fact that he was living in a trailer on a mountain in Montana, halfway around the world from where he’d grown up?

  As a child, he’d felt perfectly at home in Mumbai. The heat, the rain, and the crowds were mundane obstacles his family navigated with good-humored exasperation. Even the city’s uneasy relationship with the sea and the saltwater that flooded the sewers at high tide seemed part of a natural pattern of ebb and flow.

  Then came July 26, 2005. When the skies opened, it felt as though there had been another ocean hiding in the clouds. Rain fell so hard and so fast that Sidd, watching schoolmates make desperate dashes to their waiting parents, imagined it might be possible to drown on two feet.

  Twelve years old, Sidd himself remained stuck at school overnight, unable to go home once the trains stopped moving. In the dark, he sat with his English teacher and listened to the news reports on a battery-powered radio barely audible over the water battering the roof.

  Sidd’s father reached him late the following afternoon on an army truck with giant wheels. He brought bad news: Aunt Janani, his mother’s beloved sister, had drowned in her car, unable to open her doors against the rising water.

  His family mourned but seemed to recover. Sidd could not. From that day, he lived in Mumbai as if under siege. The jostling crowds frightened him. The sea became an enemy. Monsoon season brought with it unrelenting anxiety, the wet air and mold s
eeming to foretell a watery doom. A teenage recluse, Sidd paged obsessively through his late aunt’s collection of National Geographic, an American magazine to which she had been peculiarly devoted. From the May 1976 issue, he cut out a picture of a snowcapped mountain in Montana. It seemed dry, cold, and tranquil—everything Mumbai was not.

  In time, Sidd’s older sister left Mumbai for the London School of Economics, and his brother was accepted to Stanford. Sidd, since the Maharashtra floods no more than a dutiful student, had fewer options. He earned his BS in chemistry at Mumbai University while plotting his escape to Montana.

  Accepted to the graduate chemistry program at the University of Montana, he arrived on a hot and dry August day, emerging from Missoula International Airport like a grateful refugee. In his new school, he was surprised to find himself treated as an academic superstar—and to discover that India was not the only country struggling with the legacy of a caste system.

  Most of his fellow students scrupulously avoided the subjects of race and skin color in his presence, while others went out of their way to remind him that they were color-blind. The wife of one professor rhapsodized about her months at an ashram in upstate New York, where she had temporarily taken the name Mavis Devi.

  At the Oxford bar on Higgins Avenue, during a graduate-student pub crawl Sidd had endured as a forced march, two cigarette-voiced barflies had loudly debated whether he was a “feather Indian” or a “dot Indian” while everyone stared at their beers as if looking for signs. Sidd wondered if his color-blind new friends were color-deaf too.

  By his second year, his grades were slipping. When his academic advisor suggested that maybe he needed a break, he grasped at her offhand advice like a lifeline and canceled his classes for spring semester. He lost his housing and his teaching stipend, but he didn’t tell his parents. He didn’t want to go home.

  He found employment in a Missoulian help-wanted ad for a caretaker. The job paid poorly but included lodging and use of a vehicle. The interview, curiously, was held at the office of a local lawyer. A man named Buck Severson asked the questions while his lawyer keyed his laptop and frowned at the screen.

  Very few of the questions had anything to do with his duties, which apparently involved looking after a large, rural property south of town. Severson wanted to know whether Sidd was an environmentalist (he didn’t think so), whether he had voted in any local or state elections (as a citizen of India, he had not), and, puzzlingly, if he was a skiier (he wasn’t; snow still made him feel like he was hallucinating, so he wasn’t sure he could trust it to cushion his falls).

  All his answers except the last one seemed to please Severson, who, after a whispered consultation with his attorney, offered him the job as caretaker of the Montana Gold Ski Resort.

  Severson gave him a ride out that very afternoon, and it was only as they bumped up a road toward the site that Sidd realized the resort did not yet exist.

  “But it will!” exclaimed Severson, a red-faced man whose arms were so small compared to his burly torso that they seemed like vestigial limbs. “Any great visionary has his doubters. When these suckers realize what it’s going to do for the local economy, they’re gonna build a statue of old Buck Severson.”

  Passing through a gate hung with signs that said, NO TRESPASSING, and, FUTURE SITE OF THE LARGEST SKI RESORT IN NORTH AMERICA, Severson shifted into four-wheel drive to give Sidd a tour of the property. Ski runs had been carved into the forest, leaving stumps and rocks behind.

  As if making a pitch to a prospective investor, Severson pointed out the sites he had planned for the grand lodge with its roaring fireplace and Western bar, the condominium chalets, the pro shop, and several restaurants. Here would be the bunny slope, there would go the lifts, and right in front of them the buses bringing skiiers from the airport would drop off their cargo, turn around, and head out for more.

  Severson was a good salesman. Sidd went from being skeptical that such a thing could be accomplished to vividly seeing it in his own mind. Instead of thinking of the job as a chance to regroup before resuming school, he imagined that if he worked hard enough, he might someday be managing Severson’s ski resort. Perhaps he would even learn to ski.

  After the tour, with Sidd feeling slightly seasick, Severson bumped over primitive roads to the only two structures that occupied the land so far: Severson’s palatial log home and the dented trailer just down the road where Sidd would stay.

  “I’m not here as much as I’d like,” said Severson. “I still run the ranch, plus they got me flying all over the place pitching investors. It’s a grind but it’s gonna pay off.”

  “So I’m supposed to . . .”

  “You’re supposed to protect the investment. We need someone here basically 24-7. Look after my house and water the yard. Ride the property on a four-wheeler every day, check the fence, and make sure nobody’s torn down a No Trespassing sign. Kill the gophers. Carry a shotgun in case any sandal-wearers hike through. You know how to shoot, don’t you?”

  Under Severson’s brusque one-time tutelage, Sidd had learned to load and shoot the gun. Badly bruising his shoulder, he had pockmarked a tree stump, mutilated a plastic gasoline can, and murdered several other inanimate objects.

  * * *

  Mike opened the gate and waited for Poe to drive through so he could close it behind them. You could take the boy off the ranch and send him to prison for armed robbery, but he’d still remove his hat when a lady came into the room.

  “Leave it open,” called Poe. “We might need to leave quick.”

  Mike got back in, adjusted his fanny pack under his belly, and they rolled up the road. Poe hadn’t scouted the site because he hadn’t wanted to risk being spotted in the area. When he came to a fork in the road, he guessed and turned left, following a couple of tight switchbacks past an old trailer with a four-wheeler out front, before dead-ending at a varnished log palace with picture windows that must have given an IMAX view of the valley.

  “Well, this ain’t it,” Poe grumbled, starting a three-point turn.

  Mike unlocked the phone and started poking the screen again. Poe grabbed it out of his hands and dropped it into his own shirt pocket. Mike tensed, and Poe wondered if the guy was really as mellow as he seemed.

  Poe nodded toward the windshield. “Look around. We’re on the job. I’m not paying you to play video games.”

  Mike stared at his shirt pocket and for a long second Poe thought he was going to reach out and take the phone back. Poe looked away first and started driving back down the direction they’d come. Mike would not have gotten fucked with in the yard.

  This time, they took the right-hand turn, which rose at a steady grade across the face of the hill. It was wider than the other one.

  “This is the way,” said Poe confidently. “They got this wide enough for two busses to pass on the corners and the drivers to high-five.”

  Then the road ended in a flat, open field of churned dirt, with weeds and pine seedlings poking through and ski runs carved out of the forest going up and out of sight. Poe put the transmission in park.

  “No ski lodge, no lifts. What the hell are we supposed to burn?”

  Mike dug in his beard like he was probing for ticks. “They didn’t give you instructions?”

  Poe remembered that fleeting moment in the parking lot of Lucky Lil’s when he’d thought it was too easy, that the guy should have said something more. Or that he should have asked a follow-up question. But this was another problem he’d always struggled with: as much as he ran his mouth, he hated looking stupid, even when one simple question could save him a world of trouble.

  “Burn down the Montana Gold Ski Resort, is what the man said,” he told Mike. “That’s it.”

  Mike leaned forward, putting his face right next to the windshield, so he could look up the mountain to where the stubbled ski runs disappeared into the haze. Dawn was breaking across the valley, making the air glow like a washed-out kitchen curtain.

  “Maybe h
e meant to burn down all of this. Burn down the mountain.”

  * * *

  Sidd pulled the gate closed behind him and looped the chain over the post. He always left it cracked when he went out for a run, but the breeze must have creaked it wide open. Not something he wanted Mr. Severson to see—the next time, he would shut it properly.

  He went slowly up the road, barely faster than walking, the smoke getting thicker as he climbed higher. He thought he could taste dust, as if someone had just driven by. But Mr. Severson was still in Chicago, talking to potential investors.

  Twelve thousand years ago, these valleys had been lakes filled with water backed up behind an icy dam. There was no evidence of that water now. Sidd had walked trails in the forest where the cracked dirt formed mosaics like a dry lake bed in a desert. The yellow grasses rustled and crunched like paper. Lightning strikes and stray sparks made fire a constant presence in summer, from the standing-next-to-a-campfire smell of smoke to the falling-ash smog of apocalypse. The first time he stood in the forest, it had been so quiet that he wondered whether anything survived here at all.

  The water shortage did not bode well for Mr. Severson’s dream. In his idle hours since taking the job, Sidd had read everything published online about the project and even some articles about the environmental forecast in Montana. To begin with, the lower ski runs were at too low an altitude, and snowfall would be uncertain each season, even more so as global warming wreaked havoc on weather patterns. The higher ski runs, which would have better snowpack, were not contiguous with the lower ones. Mr. Severson was counting on skiers’ willingness to take shuttles between the two.

  To Sidd’s amazement, many modern ski resorts relied on huge machines that manufactured artificial snow. Water was required to make snow. Sidd saw now that Severson had counted on the goodwill and forbearance of so many people and government agencies that the project had almost certainly been doomed from the beginning. In years long past, the land owner could have played king, but Severson didn’t even own the land now. He had signed over the deed to the Montana Gold Ski Corporation in exchange for a minority share of future profits.