by Chris Offutt
“Wasn’t like that, Joe. You don’t care for me calling you Joe, do you?”
“No. What do you mean?”
“It wasn’t your leg I was aiming for.”
“Just a warning shot that got lucky?”
“No.” Johnny’s voice was forlorn. “I was aiming spang at the middle of your chest, but I got scared at the last and dropped the barrel.”
Joe held the cane tightly in both hands, glad he’d unloaded the pistol. Johnny bunched his mouth like pulling a drawstring bag tight. He wiped his chin with the back of his hand. His voice was hoarse.
“Owen don’t know about that,” Johnny said. “He’d think I was yellow.”
The anger went out of Joe like a dumped sack. “Anybody can shoot somebody,” he said. “It takes a lot more guts to hand a man a loaded gun.”
“You ever kill anybody?”
Joe looked upslope. A steady wind bowed the cheatgrass in a gentle curve, aiming its spikelets east.
“Not me,” he said. “But I used to know somebody who did. It didn’t do him a damn bit of good.”
“What was it, an accident?”
“No more accident than you tracking me.”
Four cows crested the ridge and descended along a path cut into the earth. The last cow’s swollen udder swung like a bell beneath her legs. Johnny squeezed his thumb to the side of his hand, forcing a huge lump of flesh to rise.
“Feel that,” he said.
“What is it?”
“My milking muscle. Go ahead, feel it.”
Joe tapped on the tight skin. The muscle beneath was hard as clay.
“See that cow,” Johnny said. “Only one we never got rid of. She’s my favorite.”
“How come?”
“Got the softest tits I ever touched.”
The cow’s back ran straight as a rope from neck to rump. Manure clung to its tail. Joe felt a terrible sympathy for this boy.
“Johnny,” he said. “I forgive you. You’ll never understand it, but I appreciate what you done. I think you’re as brimful of courage as an egg is of meat.”
Johnny looked quickly away. He tugged his hat and stared at the sky. There was no sound of bird, animal, or wind. Bullets lay at his feet.
“Joe,” he said. “You want to go to town?”
They took the ranch rig. The Bitterroot River flashed silver panes of light beside the road. The mountains were blue, their peaks still topped by snow, Johnny drove with his palm on the bottom of the steering wheel and his other arm out the window.
“How come you to shoot me anyhow?” Joe said.
“You were too damn close to Frank’s place.”
“I guess so,” Joe said. He wasn’t sure what Johnny meant. “How close?”
“Mile, maybe two.”
“What were you all doing?”
“Me and Owen brought in supplies. We do that every month. Food, water, and propane mostly. Fresh batteries for his CB and shortwave. We’re the only ones who know where he’s hiding out. Us and Ty.”
“Ty Skinner?”
“Sure. They post me on sentry when they work their plans out. That’s what I was doing when you came along.”
“Working plans out with Ty?”
“He’d already left. He’s not part of it, you know.”
“I didn’t think he was,” Joe said. “But I don’t know what it is he does do.”
“He’s the gun man.” Johnny turned in the seat. “But don’t let on I told you, okay?”
Joe nodded.
“He’s got the nicest guns I ever saw.”
Dimming strips of crimson lay in the western sky. The mountains became deep blue, then gray, and finally black. Johnny flicked on his headlights. In Missoula they stopped at a three-way intersection near the fairgrounds, where traffic was backed up in all directions.
“Malfunction Junction,” Johnny said.
“How come everybody wears those Buffalo Bills hats all the time?” Johnny shrugged. “It’s just a sign.”
“Of what?”
“That we believe in the Bill of Rights.”
“I got another question.”
“Fire away.”
“What are those damn letters on the hillsides for?”
“High school kids do it. The L is for Loyola. Then a bunch of dumb college kids put the M up. They started out rock but now they’re concrete.”
“Where do you want to go?” Joe said.
“Heck, it’s town. We can go anywhere.”
“Name a place.”
“I don’t like college bars or music bars except on country nights. And I don’t like sports bars or old men bars, either.”
“That leaves plenty. This place is fall of bars, ain’t it.”
“Ever been to the Wolf?”
“Once or twice.”
Johnny drove into the clear streets of Missoula’s old downtown and parked in front of the Wolf. A line of drinkers sat at the bar’s end, their backs turned to the world. Hard men and women sat at tables beneath the garish fluorescent light. The poker room held three players waiting to start a game. Joe followed Johnny to the strip club, where the doorman let them in free. The lights were dim and the walls held many mirrors that reflected shadows. Slot machines stood beside the restroom doors. Johnny sat at the table farthest from the stage and Joe was amused by his shyness. They ordered beer while watching a woman remove her shirt. She walked with her shoulders arched back and her chin high, kicking her legs forward as if in a marching band. Just above her G-string was the faint scar of a cesarean section.
After a few minutes, another stripper approached their table. She wore knee boots, a short skirt, and a leather vest. Her left eyebrow was split by a scar and Joe wanted to touch it. He felt very warm. The woman smiled at Joe and sat on Johnny’s lap. She held his head in both her hands and kissed him, pressing him against the wall. Joe had never seen a dancer do any more than accept a kiss on the cheek. He hoped she’d kiss him next.
The woman pulled away from Johnny, who shouted above the music.
“This is Sally,” he said. “Sally, this is Joe. He’s sort of a friend of the family.”
“Uh-oh,” she said. “I don’t like the sound of that.”
“He’s not like the rest,” Johnny said. “He knows my sister.”
“Nice to meet you,” Joe shouted.
She smiled, her teeth bright in the dusky light. Her black hair was long and straight. Makeup lay on her face like enamel. Joe wondered if Johnny’s family knew where he spent his time.
During a lull between songs, she spoke.
“I sunbathed in my yard today,” she said. “The baby sat in a box and watched.”
“Anybody else?”
“No way, honey. But you know I have to get a tan all over.”
“You could go to one of those tanning beds.”
“I hate those things,” she said. “They’re like a microwave.”
“Anybody can see you in the backyard.”
“You got it backwards, Johnny. Anybody can see me in here.”
“That’s different.”
“I think you’re Jealous is what I think.” She turned to Joe. “Do you think he’s jealous?”
Joe shrugged and faced the stage. The dancer was completely nude and working for the dollars that customers flourished in the air. Two young men sat immobile, as she quickly rid them of a pile of money beside their beers. The music ended and the dancer left the stage.
In the sudden silence, poolballs cracked against each other across the room.
“I can’t stay now,” Johnny said. “I came with Joe so I have to go back with him, too.”
“He’s sweet,” she said. She wiggled on his lap. “Let’s talk about the first thing that pops up.”
A woman tapped Sally on the shoulder. Sally kissed Johnny, walked backstage, and emerged into the light. She moved with a confident grace that Joe hadn’t noticed at the table. She smirked while prancing, as if flaunting the power granted by the men.
“Come on,” Johnny said. “I hate to see her dance. I mean, I like seeing her dance. It’s the guys who watch I can’t stand seeing.”
Outside the night spread like black oil, shiny stars glowing low in the sky. The mountains were dark hulks on the horizon.
“She’s a nice girl,” Joe said.
“I like her, you know. I really like her.”
He glanced at Joe.
“I don’t just see her here. We have dates. Her kid’s great, she’s just ten months, but she knows who I am. She can say my name, Joe. She knows me.”
He stopped talking and Joe looked away to grant him the privacy of emotion. Joe took the keys and started the truck, letting the big engine warm itself.
“Is she yours?” Joe said. “The baby?”
Johnny nodded.
“Is that why you never told the family?”
“No.”
“Because of her job?”
“That’s not it. Sally makes good money and they treat the dancers better than you’d think.”
“Does it bother you what she does?”
“Sometimes,” Johnny said, “but that’s not it, either.”
“What, then?”
“She’s an Indian. Salish-Kootenai.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Around here it sure does.”
Johnny slumped in the seat. Joe wondered if Botree would mind that he went to a strip club with her brother. He jerked his head as if to sling the thought from his mind, and tried to think of Abigail, a wedge he could slip into the gap. Abruptly he knew that he had never loved her. At the fore of his feelings lay sympathy. They’d been together because the community had expected it. He suddenly understood that he’d spent his life following patterns that were designed by other people.
He felt the faint glimmerings of actual freedom, a sensation that scared him. At a red light he looted through the front window of a tavern. There was another bar across the street. Town was where people went when they didn’t have anywhere else to go. They drank and loved and fought, and Joe wished he could be one of them, but knew he never would. He was tired of trying to be like everyone else.
19
* * *
By June the days were long slabs of sun. Weather moved down the valley like water in a ditch. Joe limped around the house without his cane, saving it for outdoor walks on rough ground. He tied a leather strip to its handle and carried it slung over his back like a carbine. He no longer wore a bandage on his knee.
Botree offered to take him fishing. They rose early and drove the mud-spattered ranch rig to a dirt road heading south. Owen and Johnny watched the boys. An overnight snow lay like shredded lace against the red rock slopes.
“I can’t believe it snowed in summer,” Joe said.
“When I was a girl, it snowed in July.”
“At least August’s safe.”
“Coop said they got snowbound in August when he was a kid. They wore long underwear all year long.”
“Must be hard on kids in winter.”
“Winter’s hard on everything.”
“I mean school,” Joe said. “I had to walk up and down a hill every day for twelve years.”
“I don’t see having that problem.”
“The school bus come all the way out to the ranch?”
“No,” Botree said. “I’ll be home schooling.”
“What’s that?”
“Teaching them at home. They’re already off to a good start. Dallas knows the alphabet and can count to a hundred.”
“You won’t send those boys to school?”
Botree shook her head.
“Don’t the state get on you?”
“Not here,” she said. “A lot of people do it. You’d be surprised.”
“How come?”
“Freedom to learn, Joe. School doesn’t have anything to do with learning anymore.”
“It doesn’t?”
“You take a puppy and you train it for a month. Then you put it on a bus fall of other puppies. When it comes back home it starts shitting in the house again.”
“You lost me already.”
“Schools aren’t educating kids, Joe. They’re raising them. That’s my job.”
“Teaching is the school’s job. Teachers go to college for it. They’re trained, like any work.”
“Trained to make kids shut up and sit down,” Botree said. “They have class until the bell rings, then it’s time to stop. That doesn’t have anything to do with learning.”
“Keeping your kids out of school doesn’t sound that great to me.”
“If I sent them, it would make me a hypocrite.”
“How’s that?”
“It’s supported by taxes, which I don’t believe in paying.”
“This is a state road.” Joe said, “Does driving it make you a hypocrite, too?”
Botree swerved to avoid a rough spot. “Tax money working hard there.”
“I tell you what,” Joe said. “It’s pretty easy not to believe in something. Do you have a driver’s license?”
“No.”
“How about a telephone?”
“No.”
“Reckon your kids don’t believe in brushing their teeth or taking baths.”
“You leave them out of this.”
Along the river, rock bluffs glinted orange and green, laced with crevices like dark veins. Botree stopped for gas. The attendant wore a cap emblazoned with the emblem of the Buffalo Bills and carried a pistol on his hip. Leaning behind the counter was a military rifle gleaming with oil. Botree paid and left.
“It’s still the Wild West out here, ain’t it?” Joe said.
“Not really. All those guys were from the East—Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill Hickok, Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp. Billy the Kid was from New York. Families back East sent their crazy sons out here. That lawless time only lasted about twenty years.”
“Still pretty wild to me.”
“Only for somebody like Johnny. He believes that Code of the West stuff. It’s a big crock, but you can’t tell any of them.”
“Them?”
“All the young boys,” Botree said. “The worst is when they start trying to be outlaws because they think outlaws are cool. They can’t rob trains or rustle cattle anymore, so the only thing left is moving drugs.”
“You know a lot about it.”
“Don’t take much to know. Over half the people locked up are in for drugs, including Dallas’s daddy. That leaves the real outlaws free.”
“If a drug dealer ain’t an outlaw, what is?”
“Killer. Rapist. Robber. People who like to hurt people.”
“Are you saying they don’t lock them up?”
“I’m saying half of them go free because the cells are already filled with guys who picked the wrong drug.”
“Well, what’s the right drug?”
“Alcohol, or cigarettes.”
“Look, Botree. The way you talk and all, I guess it makes me think you might be a dope addict or something.”
The truck weaved from her laughter. She lifted her foot from the accelerator and straightened the wheel, still laughing.
“No,” she said. “I don’t even smoke or drink.”
“Then what’s this all about?”
“Making something illegal doesn’t stop people from doing it, it Just turns them into criminals. Laws should protect us from bad people. Nothing else. If they protect us from ourselves, they hurt freedom.”
Joe was astonished not only by Botree’s words but also by her vehemence. He had never spoken with such conviction about anything, not even his work or family. What she said made a certain sense but he couldn’t put the bootlegger at home in the same category as a town drug dealer.
“All I know,” Joe said, “you all sure got a funny way of being free. Don’t pay taxes or get a driver’s license. Coop don’t believe in daylight saving time, and you don’t believe in schools. What’s Owen against?”
“Gun laws, mainly.”
“So’s that guy at the gas station. That looked like some kind of machine gun he had.”
“No, it was an AR-15.”
“Reckon you’re a gun expert, too.”
“It’s made by Colt. The civilian model of an M-16. The only difference is it doesn’t have the full-auto lever. Takes the same ammunition as an M-16,”
“And what’s that?”
“Two twenty-three caliber in a thirty-round magazine.”
She rounded a curve and the river valley opened before them, like a fan. An eagle dove at an osprey that carried a fish. The osprey dropped the fish and the eagle caught it in midair and glided to a bare tree limb.
“What’s so special about Frank’s place?” Joe said.
“Who told you about that?”
“Your brother.”
“If it was Owen, you’d know what was special. So it must have been Johnny and he let something slip.”
“You know your brothers all right.”
“If this has to stand between us, there’s nothing we can do. I can’t tell you about Frank.”
“Can’t or won’t.”
“It’s all the same, Joe.”
“Why?”
“Because I won’t have a hand in it, that’s why. Ask Owen. Coop’ll ran on till you don’t know what he’s talking about, and no telling what Johnny might say.”
“What do you say?”
“I have a few things to say, but not yet.”
“When, then?”
“Depends on you.”
“Now you’re talking just like the rest of your family, out of the side of your mouth. I’m tired of that, Botree. I don’t mean to fight, I just want straight talk.”
“I never met a man yet who didn’t like to fight. They like to tell me what to wear, what to do, where to go, and what to say.”
The low sound of distant thunder drifted over the river. Snow made a white skullcap on each mountain peak.
“You all know a lot about me,” Joe said.
“Right,” she said. “That business at the barn.”
“Did I pass?”
“It’s not that way.”
“And this is my reward?”
“You got it backward, Joe. Just like every man I ever met. This isn’t your reward, mister. This is a damn date.”
She pressed the accelerator. Tools and supplies banged in the back and Joe thought of Taylor driving the trash truck, careening through campus. Dewey and Rundell followed in his thoughts. He quickly blocked them, off as if building a wall, but Marlon, Sara, and his mother rushed over it. Each attempt to keep someone out brought a new person in. When Abigail appeared, everyone left, and he knew that he’d been trying to prevent her memory all along.