by Shann Ray
Three quick halts at Shelby, Cutbank, and Browning. East Glacier next, the station at the park’s east entrance, the one with the Blackfeet Agency greeting in which three Indians wait on the small gray platform in full regalia. An elder in full eagle-feather headdress gives out cigars. Two women in white deerskin dresses sell beadwork. Only a handful of white passengers gawk this time, not all as is customary. Most remain subdued, brooding, sitting in their seats. Then on the track past East Glacier, as the train climbs the high boundary toward the west side of the park and the depot at Belton, two more reports of impropriety, two more thefts, lesser, but significant, one of sixty dollars, the other forty. Not counting the unknown amount stolen from the dead man, the total, as Middie said, had reached four hundred and ten.
Middie loathes the thought of checking bags again. He thinks the people, all of them, close and far, dislike him. Some of the faces are full of disdain.
So? says Prifflach.
Yes? says Middie.
So start another check, says Prifflach. He speaks like a crow, thinks Middie. He watches Prifflach pull a small piece of paper from his vest pocket, the wire retrieved from the Havre station in answer to his plea at Glasgow. Prifflach turns the paper to Middie, shows these words: keep quiet—no police—security man finds thief—or loses job.
No good, says Middie, awkward, aloud, using a tone he’d seen his mother use to calm his father. Look at them, Middie says, motioning with his eyes to the people around him.
Prifflach turns on him, sharp-faced, and what he says makes Middie desire to kill him. It’s your own good, boy. Line’s takin’ you out if you don’t get it done. Move.
Middie sees it coming, and he wishes against it, but he knows no other alternative. All that college. Up against the wall with book learning, and nothing now for real life. Heavy shouldered, he rises from his seat. He begins again.
Pardon me, may I see your bag? and, Pardon, sir, I have to look through your personal effects. The words are graceful in Middie’s mind, his mind electric, his body like a fine-tuned instrument.
BUT PEOPLE ARE NOW OPENLY HOSTILE. A woman in the first car, one in the second, and one in the third make a scene and won’t unhand their bags. He pulls the bags from the first two, and lets Prifflach search the contents while he quickly pats the people down and pushes his fingers in their coat pockets. When he approaches the third woman she claws a bright hole in his cheek. His mind thinks terrible things. Ugly, he tells himself. Ugly. Has to be done, though. Other passengers help him do it too, they hold the woman back while he searches her and while Prifflach gives the bag a thorough inspection. Idiots, Middie thinks, all of them, and me with them. They see it too, the people. They all admit inwardly the logic is imprecise, but better than doing nothing. Check everyone or it’s no use. Futile, Middie thinks, a man can hide money anywhere. When he returns the third woman’s bag she curses him. Then she looks him in the face, says God curse you, and turns her back.
Middie can’t remember ever having heard a woman speak like that. He walks from the third car toward the fourth, opens the double doors at the end of the compartment, closes the doors behind. He stands on the deck, hears the raw howl of the train, the wind. Something will happen now. To his left a wall of wet granite undulates, hard and dark, blurred by the train speed. He looks up and sees the great face of it arching, reaching up and out, thousands of feet of rock, jagged and pinnacled at the top, swept up and out over the roof of the train. Beyond this, the gray sky is low and thick. The look of it gives him vertigo and he turns his head down and grips the handrail. He sees his worn boots on the grated steel. His mother, he thinks, he can’t remember her face.
To his right he can feel the valley out there, spread wide in a pattern of darks and lighter darks, filled from above by the distant pull of fog and rain. The downpour falls in wide diagonal sheets, descending into massive rock blacks and rock grays far on the other side of the valley. Among the bases of the mountains, forests are spread like cloaks. The water runs hard from the runoff of the storm and everything converges to a river colored black as the curve of a gun barrel. The river is the middle fork of the Flathead, past the summit of Marias Pass and past the great trestle of Two Medicine Bridge. They’ve crested the Great Divide and the train’s muscle pumps faster now, louder on the down westward grade. The river runs due west from here, seeming to bury itself into the wide forested skirt of a solitary mass of land. The flat-topped tower of the mass is obscured, mostly covered over by wet fog, but visible in its singularity and the ominous feel of something hidden in darkness, something entirely individual, devoid of any other, accountable to neither sky nor storm. At the mountain’s height a black ridge is barely detectable. The hulk of the land feels gargantuan. Is it Grinnell Point or Reynolds Mountain, Cleveland or Apikuni? He can’t make it out.
Here in Middie’s reverie, muffled shouts are heard, faint like the far-off cry of a cat. He looks up to the doors of the fourth car, the final passenger car. Slender windows frame what he sees and suddenly the words, though disembodied, come clean. I’ve got him! yells a fatty-faced man, sealed up there in the box of the car. I’ve got the mother-hatin’ rat.
Middie leaps forward, opening the fourth car, shouting, Stop! Wait! About midway up the car the fatty-faced man, and now four others, have thrown a man to the floor in the aisle. The man wears a brown tweed suit, he makes a vigorous struggle with his assailants.
It’s him! cries the fat one. We caught him red-handed.
To avoid the wild flail, passengers press back against the walls. Women push their children in behind them, children with wide eyes, lit with fear.
Let go, says Middie, staring at the fat man, and the men heed his word quickly and without complaint. Middie is struck by the fear men harbor, larger than a child’s, and he recognizes suddenly the pure sway he holds, because he is big, over people, over men.
The captive stands in the aisle and brushes wrinkles from his suit, his hair flung forward, black and thick over his face. Dark-eyed. The Indian, thinks Middie, as he draws nearer.
When the man pushes his hair back, the bones of his face appear chiseled in stone, the skin a thin casing for all the intrepid want in him. Thin as a sheet of newsprint, Middie thinks, ready to tear open, ready for it all to break out. The man tucks in his shirt and realigns his belt. He straightens his vest, then the lapels of his jacket, visibly pulling the tension back in and down, breathing. He is silent. He views his captors with contempt, each one.
Middie pictures his firm step and upright gait when he first walked the aisle and positioned his bags. Assiniboine-Sioux he’d thought. Wolf Point. But after pulling his bag and questioning him four times he’d found him to be a Blackfeet-white cross, Blood in fact, a Blackfeet subtribe (and Irish on the other side, he’d said, one clan or another). He was on his way to his family’s home south of West Glacier after a “work-related” trip to Wolf Point. Middie had checked him once more than all the rest. The man said he taught at the college in Missoula. In education, he said. They locked eyes when Middie carried the dead man at Havre, but Middie had dismissed it and other than the agitation of the crowd during the checks, an agitation Middie felt always accompanied whites and Indians, he had found nothing unusual. The man carried no weapon.
What is it? Middie asks the man with the fat head.
A short man, a man with slick hair, one of the others who had held the accused, speaks up vehemently. This man—he points in the Indian’s face—this man has been lying! He’s the one. He took all the money.
Slow, says Middie. Say what you know.
I have not lied, says the prisoner.
Shut up! the slick man yells.
Middie puts a forearm to the slick man’s chest. Settle yourself, he says. Sit down.
The slick man obeys, whispering something, glaring. He’s lying, he says. Hiding something.
How do you know?
Check his side, see for yourself. He’s had his hand there in his jacket from the start.
>
The fat man butts in, edging with rage, He won’t show us what he’s got in there.
Is it true, sir? asks Middie, heightening his politeness. Is there something hidden in your waistcoat?
Yes, he states, looking into Middie’s face, but that makes me neither a liar nor guilty of the offense in question.
We will check it, sir, Middie replies, but he feels aggravated. He doesn’t like the uppity tone the Indian has used. What have you concealed? Middie asks.
My money belt, says the man.
MIDDIE HARDENS HIS LOOK. His hands sweat. He wipes them on his pant legs as he stares at the man. Probably had it on his waistline, Middie thinks, concealed under the clothing, probably thin as birch bark. He remembers Prifflach muttering under his breath at the Indian as he checked the man’s bag, a small cylindrical briefcase made of beaten brown leather, sealed at the top by a thin zipper that ran between two worn handles, the word montana inscribed on the side. Mostly papers in the bag.
You have searched my briefcase and my wallet, says the man, and me once more than the others. I saw no need for you to search my money belt. And if I had shown you my belt, would that not become a target for the robber if he were present in this compartment during the search?
Don’t listen to him, the slick man says in a wet voice, he’s slippery.
The crowd murmurs uneasily. Middie notes that outside, the fog has pressed in. Nothing of the valley can be seen, and nothing of the sky. The mountains will be laid low, Middie thinks. He hears the words soft and articulate in his mother’s voice. Outside is the featureless gray of a massive fog bank, and behind it a feeling of the bulk of the land.
Check his belt, the fat face says.
Then the crowd begins. See what he’s got, says a red-haired woman, the fat man’s wife by the look of it, the small eyes, the clutching, heavy draw of the cheeks about the jowls. She says the words quietly but they are enough to hasten a flood. Do it now, hears Middie. Make him hand it over, Take it from him, Pull up his shirt, Take it—all from the onlookers, all at once, and from somewhere low and small back behind Middie, the quiet words, Cut his throat.
The conductor arrives and Middie exhales and feels his body go slack; he stares outside. The gray-black of the storm leaks moisture on the windows. The moisture gathers and pulls lines sideways along the windows, minuscule lines in narrow groupings of hundreds and wide bars of thousands, rivulets and the brothers of rivulets, and within them the broad hordes of their children, their offspring, all pulled back along the glass to the end of the train, to the end of seeing.
You will have him hand over that money belt directly, says Prifflach, his nose leading, his face pinched, set like clay. Pressure builds in the bodycage of Middie, a pressure that pushes out against his skin. Middie reaches and grabs the accused man’s wrist, gripping the flesh with frozen fingers, red-white fingers latching on.
To Middie’s relief the man responds. With one arm in Middie’s grip, the man uses his free hand to untuck the front of his shirt. He slides the money belt to a point above his waist, and undoes the small metal clasps that hold the belt in place. His fingers so meticulous, thinks Middie, so dexterous and sure. Eyes as clear as the sky before they reached Glacier, cold and steely-black. Middie looks again to the window. His own reflection is not unlike the gray outside, and behind it the unpeopled weight of land, the emptiness. He notes he has left his billy club in the last compartment, on the floor near a seat where he’d checked a man’s ankles, his socks. Middie’s fists feel big, hard as stones. He doesn’t need it, he tells himself.
Give up the belt, Prifflach says, though already the man is pulling the belt free.
He holds it out to the conductor. Nothing out of the ordinary, he says. I’m simply a man carrying my own money. His hair is still bent, his shirt poorly tucked. He does not look away from his accusers.
At once, the fat man and his wife shout something unintelligible.
We’ll see, says the conductor, interpreting their words. We’ll see if it’s his money. At the corners of Prifflach’s mouth the skin twitches. Prifflach takes the money belt and hands it to the slick man. Count it up, he says, watching the Indian’s face.
The slick man thumbs the money once, finding an unfortunate combination of bigger and smaller bills. How much is there? asks the conductor. The slick man counts again, slowly. Five hundred ten dollars, he says. Exactly one hundred more than the amount stolen. Middie knows a desire has gripped them, and that they all, silently, hastily, have calculated the old dead man’s loss at a clean one hundred. Middie has done the same.
I could have told you that, says the accused.
Prifflach tells the man to shut up, then says, A hundred dollars more than the total. He folds the money belt in half, and half again; I’ll take that, he says, placing it in the chest pocket of his coat.
It comes clear to Middie now, the look of the onlookers, the way of their eyes and their bodies, how they’ve all torn loose inside, all come unspun. He remembers what he’d read in a pamphlet at the West Glacier station a month ago. Something of a hidden passage west, close to the headwaters of the Marias, a high mountain pass that according to Indian belief was steeped in the spirit world, inhabited by a dark presence. Decades back, when the line first wanted to chart its track through here, no Indian would take a white man through. Death inhabited the place.
Middie sees the demeanor of the Blackfeet man change. The man’s face loses expression, his body pulls inward. In the space between them Middie senses the man gathering himself. A surge is felt, up through the flesh of the Indian’s forearm. Middie tightens his grip.
The crowd moves. Suspected him back in Glasgow, a stout man pipes up. I should have known, says another, and from the slick man, He ain’t gettin’ outta here. Low again, deep back in the crowd, a voice says, Slit his throat.
The movement begins in words and rustling, then leaps upward like a mighty wave that breaks upon the people and the man all at once. The Blackfeet man jerks free and jumps the chair back next to him, seeking to flank the men and escape from the rear of the compartment. The men scramble after him, Prifflach leading, the others following, all of them livid with hate.
Middie vaults a set of chairs and lands on the Blackfeet man, slamming him bodily against the sidewall of the car. The man rights himself and spits in Middie’s face and Middie, fueled now, lifts him and encircles the Indian’s neck in the crook of his left arm, positioning him. He props him up, left hand on the man’s shoulder as he holds him. Then he levels a blow with the right that bounces the Blackfeet man’s head off the near window, flings his hair like a horsetail, and leaves a grotesque indentation where the cheekbone has caved in. Four other men, along with Middie, jerk the prisoner from the wall, shake him hand over fist to the aisleway. They surround him, and proceed to drag him toward the back of the car. The shoving lurches the Indian forward and makes his neck look thin, snaps his head back, throws his eyes to the ceiling.
What are you doing? he cries out, I’m innocent, and straining from the hands that grasp at his upper body he turns his face to the window, to the gray valley beyond, and says, I have a wife. I have a child.
With shocking swiftness the Indian throws his forearms out and lunges forward with his head in order to strike someone. But now his flailings are as nothing to the weight of the accusers: there are many men now, their arms entangled in his limbs, controlling him easily. They punch him in the back, and in the back of the head. Keep your head down! they say; You’ll lose your teeth in a second. The group is packed in, forming a tight untidy ball in the aisleway and among the spaces between the seats. A thick odor is in the air.
The prisoner’s head is near the floor. Reaching for the Indian’s waist, Middie sees a look of resignation, a look of light among the features of his face. The man stares at Middie and whispers something Middie cannot hear or understand.
Amidst the tumult a smaller voice says, Wait! It comes from behind Middie, up near the front of the car. T
urning, looking up and back through the moving heads, back behind the bending, pressing torsos, Middie sees the source of the voice, a small man, adolescent in appearance, thin-boned in a simple two-piece suit. The man has fine, blond hair and oval wire-rimmed glasses.
Wait! the man says, I know him.
A large man at the back of the mob turns to the boyish man and says, You shut up.
The small man’s face goes red, he shrinks back to his seat. Middie sees this and turns back to the mob. The people are grabbing the Blackfeet man’s clothing in their hands and shaking his body like a child’s doll. Men are emerging from their seats, running the aisles like ants, joining the mob. The man’s limbs appear loose in the torque of the crowd. The arms move as if boneless, the elbows seem disconnected from the shoulders.
From his vantage Middie turns and sees the little man with his head down now as the people swirl toward the rear of the car, down to the doors they have already pulled back and the opening tilted like a black mouth from which the wind screams. Middie hears the accused grunting, cursing. The little man rises and walks directly to the rear guard of the mob. Unable to get through he sidesteps the knot of people. He climbs over three or four seats as he repositions women and children. He travels awkwardly but insistent, like a leggy insect, toward the back of the compartment, toward the opening and the landing beyond. He goes unrecognized by all but Middie and when he reaches the far wall of the car, he stops, and stares. The prisoner is held about the neck by the thick hands of Prifflach, clinched about the waist by Middie and on both sides by bold, angry men.