by Joe Wilkins
The night was still, the only sound the low patter of the river not more than a hundred yards away. She was nearly to the car when she heard it. For a time after, as she stood willow still, she couldn’t be sure. But then in the great hush of the night, the voice came again, from the direction of the river. A voice she thought she knew.
Verl
I remember when me and Kevin were just little green-nutters and one day packed our wire snares and steel traps and made camp in the foothills above the river. We nicked our thumbs with our jackknives and held hands our blood on our hands and swore we’d never leave not for a million dollars. No we’d live on rabbit stew and dress in furs and live the good way the pioneers and mountain men and Indians and such lived. That night we ate tomato sandwiches his mother old Elner packed for us and fell asleep right there by the fire though of course we didn’t stay. I don’t remember how we got back home.
Wendell
HE TOOK NOTHING BUT THE .22, AND THEN HE AND MADDY AND ROWDY were out the back door of the trailer with their heads low as they ran through the dry weeds.
Behind them the roar of rifle fire gave way to a final, asynchronous volley of shots that cracked and zinged off into the trees. Rowdy tripped, fell. Wendell, not meaning to, dragged the boy a moment where he had him by his wrist and a scrape opened up below the boy’s right eye. He lifted Rowdy into his arms, handed the .22 to Maddy, and they were off again along the lip of the junk coulee, their breath and steps hard and loud, no aim now but distance. Pine trees and a ridge were what he needed between them and Betts’s men.
They ran the better part of a mile, and Wendell looked back only once or twice. Maddy was right there with him, the rifle at her chest. The hard earth was cold, dry, bone-rattling beneath their feet. The sun drowned itself behind the pines, and the night began to clamp down. Wendell cut into the mouth of a box canyon. At the steep back wall he finally slowed and picked his way along the crumbling sandrocks, a route he knew from time and time before. He scrambled up the final slope of the ridge, and only there, in the duff, among a tangle of pines and cedars, did he set Rowdy down. He held the boy’s small shoulders a moment, their faces inches apart.
—You’re okay, bud. You did good. You hang on, okay? We’re gonna be fine.
Rowdy gave no response. The blood beneath his eye had blackened, smeared. His hands hung like dead fish at his sides. Wendell squeezed the boy’s shoulders once more and took the rifle from Maddy. Leaning over a sandrock, he sighted down the barrel, studied as best he could, in the dark, the black grassy canyon and shadowed country they’d come through. Maddy leaned over the rock right beside him, her breath in his ear, the heaving of their lungs tuned to the same pitch and frequency. It would be easier if it was just him, Wendell thought. But he was glad of her beside him. And of Rowdy. Despite—no, for—the goddamn madness of what had just happened, he was glad he could reach out and touch the both of them.
—That Betts is dead, he said. That one doing the talking. I imagine the sheriff’s deputy too. I don’t think they’d shoot the woman. I don’t think.
Wendell pulled the rifle back to his chest, thumbed the safety on.
—I expect they’ll chase us. They might think I had something to do with the deputy showing up. They might think I shot Betts. I don’t know. But it was either run or have them find Rowdy in the trailer and know what was what.
Maddy shivered beside Wendell, her shoulder just touching his. He wished he might put his hand there, on her shoulder, but rose and went over and checked on Rowdy instead. The boy stood there brushing at the dried blood on his cheek.
—I’m sorry you’re mixed up in this, he said to Maddy. I don’t even know what the hell this is myself, but I’m sorry.
The wind gusted, swirled along the ridgetop. Coyotes yipped off to the north, somewhere nearer the river. Maddy said nothing, just studied him, taking in every dark ridge and dry wash of his face.
Through the night they angled north and west. Given the shadows and the light of the stars, Wendell slipped now and again but managed each time to fall on his ass, keeping Rowdy safe in his arms. Maddy hadn’t yet said a word, and he would have thought her in shock or too weak to talk save for the fact that she’d more than kept up, that she’d carried the rifle without complaint, and that she’d once reached out and steadied him as he fell, her thin arm sure around him.
They came to the crest of a hill, and on the other side a two-track road cut through the dark grass and greasewood of the plain below. Wendell paused, listened for what could be heard above the riptides of his breath and blood. Crickets, night birds, coyotes sparking the air with their cries. Then he led them down and across the plain.
The night wore on. And the miles. They stepped over cut fences, the slack wires coiled like shed skins in the grass. There were so many cut fences that Wendell figured Betts and the Wilson boy must have been at it for some time. They traveled on into the BLM land that mapped the heart of the Bulls, a land that had once belonged to the Crow, to the grizzly bears and buffalo. A land homesteaded less than a hundred years ago and abandoned not long after, a wilderness now of collapsed coal mines and yawing shacks, ghost towns not even old-timers could recall the names of, where the dry arteries of forsaken train lines bled into cactus and grass. A land leased and grazed and logged every so often but in large part empty, home to elk and antelope and mule deer, bobcat and cougar and coyote, and, for the past dozen years, a seldom-seen pack of wolves. A land beyond, traced at its edges by county roads but cut through its heart only by rutted, washed-out dirt tracks and faint horse trails.
They came slow and watchful. Wendell reckoned the way by memory, by story, by star. The night held them. The wind, the grass, the pines. He whispered to the boy of all the things they’d done, all the things they would yet do, of their lives together in the mountains. The coyotes were even now sniffing about their trapline, he told the boy. Somewhere a big bull elk bedded down in the tall grass was waiting, though he didn’t know it, for them. He told the boy of the rich, grassy taste of elk, of the gray-orange softness of a coyote pelt. He told the boy about the planting season and the far-off harvest, about the calving season and the roundup, the known circle of the year in the mountains. Maybe they’d save up, the two of them, and buy a few head of cattle or sheep and raise them on grass, sell halves and quarters at the farmers’ market there in Billings, like he’d heard was good business. They’d make enough to get ahead, to have new shoes and good winter coats and plenty of chicken noodle in the cupboards. He told the boy, too, about school and friends and reading and science experiments and all the good things to come. He told the boy what he knew of the world beyond, which wasn’t much but was more than the boy knew, and in this fashion he slipped from memory to story and on into dream, until the edges between them crumbled in the dark. Then he narrated for the boy the tales of other voyages, other travelers, and for a time they could have been trekking through Middle Earth or following the Missouri across the unknown continent—their journey, like all such journeys, long, dark, and dangerous, full of will and happenstance.
Searching for a story to map the last black quarter of a mile, Wendell told, finally, the story of his own father, Verl Newman, the boy’s great-uncle, who had taken off into the Bulls a dozen years ago and was never found, who for all anyone knew might yet be holed up fat and happy, living on deer steak and chokecherries, whose trail they might even now be following.
Deep in the night, atop a butte, in the lee of a half bowl of rock, Wendell swept up a bed of duff and dirt and laid the boy down and told him to sleep. He sat there and held the boy’s hand for a time but eventually let go and stood and in the dark navigated the perimeter of the butte. There was nothing in the black distance, no movement anywhere that he could see or sense or in any way know.
He sat in the dirt, somewhat off from the boy so as not to wake him, and leaned up against a pine. Maddy, a shadow with a rifle, had stayed with Rowdy but came over to Wendell now.
�
�Do you believe anything you told him? she asked.
—I guess. I don’t know. I was just talking.
—You’re lying to him.
She sat on a low rock shelf a foot or two above him. From this vantage the stars were tangled in her hair.
—I don’t know what you’re getting at.
—Yes, you do.
He stood, though he didn’t know where he was going and didn’t take a step. Maddy stayed right where she was and went on.
—You’re lying because whatever happens, it’s not going to be the same and you know it. That man’s dead. Even if they didn’t see, like we did, someone could figure out who it was that killed him. It’s not going to go back like it was. You and Rowdy living in the trailer. You and Rowdy together out here.
He sat back down, worked at his tired eyes with his finger and thumb. She was right. Maybe. But at least he could save Rowdy. He could bend the story the other way and say he was the one who’d shot Betts.
—That doesn’t mean it’s a lie, he told her. It was more like wishes, I guess. Like a dream.
Maddy leaned forward, starlight etching the curves and lines of her face.
—You might wish your father was out here in the mountains, she said. You might wish he weren’t a murderer and tell the story that way, but then you’re no better than those others. Those ones we’re running from. Because that’s what he was. He was a fucking murderer.
For a moment Wendell couldn’t figure the glass in her voice or the way her face fell apart as she dropped it into her hands. But then, as if he’d been going sixty on a bad road and hit a rut that sent the steel frame bouncing and the pickup fishtailing, the full force of who Maddy was, who she had to be, came upon him, and his blood lifted, fell, slammed home.
—Oh Christ, he said. Jesus Christ. I never thought. I never thought at all.
He sputtered on for a time, waves of shame rolling through his gut. But then shocks of anger arced back up through him. He wasn’t his father. This wasn’t on him. He was just living out here, trying to make it. She was the one who’d called him, the one who’d driven all the way out here with her charity. Was it his fault she’d come into the mountains, even knowing what she might find?
—Why’d you come out here, then? If you knew?
She breathed and pulled her face from her hands, shivered as she leaned back into shadow.
—I didn’t, really. Till tonight. I guess it never seemed real. I mean, my mom is always telling me stories about my dad, but those stories are about the two of them together, when they were young and traveling. She’s trying to convince me of something, make me see him a certain way. She’s told me about his death only once or twice, and just the facts. I can barely remember that time, and he’s been dead so long it just seems like that’s the way it’s always been. Not like it could have been different. Not like, Jesus, someone shot him. Not like I could’ve ever had a dad.
Her voice broke, and she covered her face once more, and Wendell didn’t know what to do. He didn’t do anything. After a time, Maddy went on.
—My mom only talks about this place to say how he would come home from work and play with me and throw me in the air and how much he loved me. She never tells me what it was really like here. And he grew up here. I’ve got relatives here, a grandmother even. When I found out Jackie was from Delphia, I just sort of latched onto her. It felt like it was maybe a chance for me to finally know the place for myself. But then, well—then you were there at the bar that night. And then it was something else.
She paused, leaned forward again, looked right at him.
—I know it’s the clothes, she said, the jeans and snap shirts, but even without them, if I didn’t know you and you walked into Starbucks wearing whatever, I’d still know you weren’t from Billings or just passing through on your way down the interstate. I’d know you were from here and nowhere else. It’s the way you walk, like you’re leaning up against a wind or something. How you hesitated when you stepped into the Antlers that night. You slowed and looked around, like you had to make sure of things. I was little, but I still remember how my dad used to do that. My mom would tease him, say he was casing the joint. It made me feel so bad when you got mad at me. Like my own dad was mad at me. Like I couldn’t handle knowing something important about him and this place. That’s why I called you. Why I came out. Maybe I’m like you. Maybe I was wishing too.
—And you never got my last name? You never thought to ask Jackie? You could’ve saved yourself a load of trouble.
—I didn’t want anyone telling me anything anymore. I wanted to know for myself. And Wendell, I’m glad. I don’t know any other way to say it. I wish we weren’t here right now—fuck—but I’m glad I know you. And Rowdy.
He swallowed, tried to look at her. The stars were in her hair again.
—I knew your dad, Maddy. He and my dad—well, they went hunting now and again. I don’t know that they were good friends or anything, but they were friendly. And I liked him. Your dad, I mean. He had a uniform and a green government pickup. He was a good talker, smart. He was someone I paid attention to as a kid. He was different. I liked him. Jesus, I’m sorry.
A scrim of cloud darkened the stars, though as the clouds thinned and disappeared, the Milky Way shone all the brighter, a river of white light.
Maddy stood and came over and sat down beside him, their shoulders touching, their hips.
—Thank you for that, Wendell.
Deep in the Bull Mountains, their hearts drifted and knocked about, and Wendell couldn’t understand how they’d ever ended up out here, the two of them—no, the three of them. Not a father among them. Not a world unbroken. Each knowing the bone-deep emptiness.
Wendell stood and walked over to where Rowdy lay awake in his bed of pine needles and dry grass and picked the boy up and sat back down beside Maddy, who wiped her eyes with her shirtsleeve and reached for Rowdy as well. Together they held him, the three of them close enough that they cast a single shadow against the stars.
An hour later the night deepened, and Wendell woke to that stillness and sat up, his heart charging off in the dark. Maddy slept on. She was yet curled around the boy, as Wendell had been curled on the other side, the two commas of their bodies warming him. Rowdy shifted in his sleep for the new trickle of cold down one length of him. The silence was too much—Wendell rose to a crouch.
At the butte’s edge he bellied himself down and studied the country to the east. A grassy, flat-bottomed plain flowing between more buttes and hills, the hills themselves cut with washes and the dark mouths of draws and canyons. There was nothing else to see. After a time he closed his eyes and simply listened.
When he finally heard it—the far-off slam of a pickup door, that metallic whummpf carrying through the windless air—he held himself still. He knew what he had to do. They were men moving angry and fast, men with guns. He couldn’t carry the boy and outrun them. He couldn’t. They’d have to split up. He made his way back. He gave himself only a moment, memorized them in his mind, the girl with her long dark hair and the boy with his hands knotted beneath the little stone of his chin, and he let himself dream a life of this—of honesty and forgiveness, of rest and touch—then knelt and woke them both.
With Rowdy wrapped in his arms, he told Maddy he’d lead Betts’s men west and south, that she and Rowdy had to go north. Maddy took him in and closed her eyes and opened them, and he didn’t know how it had ever happened that she was who she was, but he was thankful. She nodded and asked where, and he pointed north along the ridge, had her sight along his arm. He made sure she knew what was west, what was east, and to keep herself north, ever north. If she stayed true, he said, and kept the North Star in front of her, they’d likely be just west of the Delphia-Colter Road when they came to the river, and then they’d be able to cross at a shallow rapids near an old abandoned farmhouse. That was Glen Hougen’s property, and town would be only a few miles north and a dogleg east down the highway. He thought it might ta
ke four or five hours, all told. Less if Rowdy could walk some. There was a phone at the café. He told her to call who she needed to call, her mother or whoever, and then he would be grateful if she would call Glen. And she should ask at the café for the number to call her people. The Kincheloes. He knew them. They’d come. They’d keep her and Rowdy safe until her mother showed.
Wendell paused and hitched the boy up higher on his hip, wrapped his arms around him all the tighter. He told Maddy to tell them he had shot Betts—she couldn’t waver on that, not even a little—and he told her not to let go of Rowdy for anything, not until she was sure. And talk to the boy, he said. Let him know they were safe, let him know what was happening.
Then Wendell held Rowdy in front of him, looked on his boy that way for a long time. The boy had slept, Wendell could tell, and perhaps he would be able to imagine the day past as a worrisome dream he could wake from. Maybe he could.
—All right, bud. I got a few things to do, but Maddy’s going to take good care of you. You keep up. You know your way around these mountains now. You be a help to her.
He pressed the boy to his chest. How sleep-warm he was. How thin.
—Can I call you Rowdy Newman this once? Okay. All right. Good.
And he ran a hand through the boy’s tangled hair, let his hand slide along the boy’s cheek.
—I love you, Rowdy Newman. I do.
Verl
It is a season of wonders. I come to this high rock wall by moonlight and now by moonlight see two men carved into the stone. One has killed what looks to be a bear. He is the smaller of the two and the other is a long ways off but bigger. Behind them both there are the triangles of mountain peaks and between them nothing but a far space of rock. They were put on the stone together. Why so far apart? Why this stone? Was this where they killed the bear? This where they slept on their way home with packs of fatty meat? This where the bear killed one of them? Where the other came cowarding afterward with the screams in his ears? It is mystery and a wonder and it puts me in mind of how daddy my daddy used to steal things just little things a neighbor’s shovel or a tank of gas when old Jake was asleep at the station. I would catch him at it now and again but never said a thing. One time your mother brought it up and that is the only time I put a hand to her popped her across the mouth and could feel her jawbone beneath the flat of my hand. I need to tell you boy I feel it still. If I were to pick up a rock or stone out here and call it mine it would only fall back down when I die