by Mark Spragg
“Yes.”
“Did he cry?”
Helen nodded.
“You know what this is, don’t you?” Jean was searching the room but there was no Ksenia. “This whole fucking conversation? It’s a Salvador Dalí painting. In the goddamn extreme.”
“I thought you’d want to know.”
“I wish he’d been fucking you,” Jean said.
Her hand was on the table in front of her, the fingers tapping. They both looked at the pearl ring flashing dully. Jean brought the hand into her lap.
“I would too,” Helen said. “If I were you.” She stood, bringing her purse up from the seat of the chair beside her. She slung the strap over her shoulder and walked straight out without looking back.
Ksenia asked, “Would the lady like another cocktail?”
Jean pushed against the arms of the chair to stand, and when she lost her balance the girl caught her under the elbow. She pulled her arm away. “I hope you’ll like this country,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Jean smoothed her hands over her hips, turning toward the archway. “The lady will have her next in the bar,” she said.
Now the music was louder, and she was tapping the rim of her margarita glass and Jamie was coming toward her behind the bar.
“There’s a fine piece,” she heard, and turned with her elbows hooked back against the edge of the bar. She wanted to feel like a fine piece.
“So tell me, boys,” she said, and when only the men at the nearest table turned she repeated it loud enough that they stopped playing pool at the end of the room, leaning against their cues. She brought the fresh margarita up for a sip. “So tell me, boys,” she said again, pausing, “who’d like to fuck the sheriff’s wife?”
They stared at her, then glanced at one another like kids at a dance, and she began to laugh and couldn’t stop, didn’t even try to.
Twenty-eight
CRANE FORCED the county SUV along a rutted mining track, stopping at the edge of a gully where the road had washed out. He stood staring down at the collapsed and rusted body of the culvert, at the shabby remains of the company buildings just a hundred yards beyond.
He crossed the creek on foot, working up the north-facing slope through the sage and juniper, skirting the house-sized erratics of weather-paled basalt, stopping to look across the valley to the mineshaft—sealed now, but not until one of the Manon kids had fallen through the rotted planking. He’d been with the search-and-rescue team that had gotten her out. The sheets of muscle in his diaphragm clenched and he lay down against the sidehill, panting, waiting for it to pass. He wondered if God had spoken directly to the girl, lost for hours in the damp tunneling below.
When he gained the skyline he stretched out on his belly in the sweep of shade thrown by a stand of chokecherries, the ranch house and outbuildings just five hundred yards below. He brought the binoculars up from around his neck.
There were half a dozen parked trucks and cars, men emerging from the barn two and three at a time to start up their rigs and drive out through the log archway. More cars arrived, everyone going into the big, weathered barn but coming out too quickly to have been of any help.
At dusk a column of bikers rode in. They gunned their engines, then let them idle down, and Brady came out of the barn and stood there talking to them until a man pulled a pistol and fired into the dry brush along the creek. It was just dark enough to see the flames snapping out of the barrel and the house cat breaking from the undergrowth in a desperate sprint, disappearing through an opening in the masonry of the springhouse. Everyone but Brady was rocking at the waist with laughter.
He walked past the man, reached into a slash pile at the border of the drive and wheeled around with a four-foot length of pine scrap, catching the man full in the face, dropping him, then walked back into the barn. The downed man rolled onto his side and from there to his feet, staggering.
Most of the light had gone out of the day, and Crane sat back waiting for the moon to rise. He remembered hunting this valley with his father and old Jake Croonquist when he and Brady were still too young to shoot, sent ahead like eager hounds, circling, flushing the birds back toward them.
A covey of chukars was moving off the hillside behind him now, maybe a couple dozen in all, the accumulation of their low, harsh speech like the whispered conversation of anxious children.
It was late when he got back to town and swung past the clinic, pulling in at the curb. Dan Westerman was sitting on the front stoop.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” Crane said.
“I normally don’t.”
“You get a guy through here a little bit ago?”
“I just put thirty stitches in some simple son of a bitch’s head, if that’s what you mean.” He dropped the butt on the step before him. “I hate fucking motorcycles.”
“He going to be okay?”
“He’s going to be fine, but I hope he’s got a relative who’s a dentist. How are you feeling?”
“A little sick to my stomach.”
It was after midnight when he got home and found her car parked up on the lawn and looked in through the windshield to see if she was asleep on the seat, but it was empty. He could still hear the throaty rumble of the Harleys gearing down into town. The corner streetlight was out, the Milky Way leaving a smear of light across the night sky above him.
He went inside. In the living room his clothes were heaped in the La-Z-Boy with his toilet kit on top. Their bedroom door was shut.
He found clean sheets and a blanket in the hall closet and made up the couch, waking early the next morning. A man stood framed in the kitchen doorway, staring at Crane’s pistol on the table at the foot of the couch. He was middle-aged, dressed in chinos and a golf shirt, a light jacket folded over his arm.
They both looked over at the bedroom door at the same time.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with you,” Crane said. “It’s me she wants to hurt.”
Some of the tension went out of the man’s face, but he cut his eyes back at the pistol.
“This isn’t a movie,” Crane said. “You can go home now.”
He washed his face and under his arms at the kitchen sink and dressed and scooped the clothes and toiletries onto the couch, folding the corners of the blanket back across them, then slung the whole works over his shoulder.
Starla was at her desk when he came in to work.
“You run this back to the far cell for me?”
“You bet.” She didn’t ask why.
Two highway patrolmen, and his undersheriff, Hank Kosky, were waiting in his office.
“You boys get any sleep last night?”
They all nodded.
“Good.”
He walked back out to the wheeled cart by Starla’s desk and poured himself a cup of coffee, stirring in the artificial sweetener as he returned to the office.
The senior patrolman said, “Goddamnit, Crane, it’s not just baby-boomer accountants anymore. We’ve got some bad ones this year. Some Diablos and Angels on their way to Sturgis, I guess.”
Crane sat down behind his desk. “You need more help?”
“I wouldn’t mind it.”
“I’ll make a call.”
The state cops shook his hand, telling him they appreciated his cooperation, and then lingered outside to gossip with Starla.
Hank was still in his chair. “I hope you know this thing’s going to get somebody killed one of these years,” he said. “Or raped.”
“I agree with you, but it’s the mayor you need to talk to.” His back ached but the coffee was helping.
“I’m here to tell you I won’t work that Iron Horse Rodeo. It ain’t Christian.”
Crane stared at him until the older man looked away.
“It’s that weenie-bite event they run. Riding them women under that row of strung-up hotdogs and making ’em snap at them.”
Crane came around the end of the desk and Hank stood out of his chai
r. He was puffed up, ready for a fight, and Crane looped an arm across his shoulders and guided him through the doorway. He could feel Hank soften.
“They’re just hotdogs,” he said. “And I’m not sure Jesus keeps that close an eye on any of us.”
He drove to the top of the Bighorns, pulled into a campground and turned off the radio and slept in the backseat. He woke in the early evening, feeling more rested than he had in a week, and returned to the office. He cleaned up in the restroom while Starla warmed two Hot Pocket Ultimates in the microwave.
It was after ten when he double-parked at the corner of Ash and walked out into the milling crowd. There were two thousand Harleys backed into the curb for eight blocks along Main and two blocks back on Madison, Jefferson and Adams.
The volunteer fire department had lined hay bales through the crosswalks west of the main drag and the vendors had set up their tents and kiosks in the streets behind them. They hawked knives and cups of beer, leather clothing, Harley-Davidson patches sewn with silver thread. There were two tattoo artists and another offering hygienic piercings. A braut-and-soda stand. Burritos sold from a corner of the IGA parking lot, half the proceeds going to the Boys and Girls Club.
The Chamber of Commerce had mounted speakers and American flags on the corner lampposts and sixties and seventies rock and roll blared from noon until the bars closed.
He was standing across the street from the Spur when Brady came out. He watched him working the sidewalk like a politician, stopping to shake hands and clap shoulders.
Crane crossed at the intersection, following him east through a reeling street dance of curb-to-curb drunks and past the raised plywood stage where a band from Great Falls was butchering the chorus of CCR’s “Fortunate Son.”
Two blocks farther back, in the dirt and pigweed lot where Vorachek Saddlery had burned down, a gathering stood with their heads bowed before two sky-blue Dodge Power Wagons. The trucks were parked tailgate to tailgate, and in the bed of one a man paced back and forth wearing jeans and a leather vest, his beard grown to his waist. At certain points in his rant against Satan’s onslaught of alcohol, drugs and fornication, the beard lifted away stiffly, exposing his naked chest. Brady sat at the edge of the congregation on a cairn of blackened bricks. He was drinking a beer, and Crane squatted down next to him. They watched a young woman get helped up onto the bumper of the second truck and from there into the bed.
“Haven’t seen you in town in awhile,” Crane said.
“I haven’t been in awhile.”
The preacher stepped over the tailgates, the woman sinking to her knees in front of him. He spread his hand against her forehead and intoned, “‘We have been buried with Christ by baptism into death.’”
Brady sang, “‘It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no fortunate son,’” then said, “I always liked that song.”
“But you been doing okay?”
“I’m doing great. You look like shit, though.” He took a pull from the beer.
The pickup bed was lined with plastic and filled with water that sloshed over the sidewalls and onto the dirt as the girl was lowered into it, the preacher cupping the back of her head and pinching her nose.
“That boy didn’t have to die like he did.”
Brady squinted through the weak glare of the streetlamp. “It wasn’t my first choice either.”
“Brought light and life to a formless world,” the preacher said.
“Cooking that shit wasn’t something he thought up on his own. He wasn’t even twenty yet.”
Brady swigged from his beer. “Hell, Crane, you don’t have to look so sad about it. I knew him a bunch better than you.”
The girl’s head came up, sputtering, and the preacher proclaimed, “And Jesus said unto Nicodemus: ‘No one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water.’”
“We aren’t kids anymore,” Crane said.
“Amen,” the crowd declared.
“It’d be a hell of a lot better all around if you turned yourself in.”
“For you, maybe. I don’t believe it would be for me.”
“Do you repent of your sins, my child?”
The girl was shivering, her wet clothes clinging.
Crane stood.
Brady was looking up at him. “My guess is you didn’t bring an arrest warrant out with you tonight.”
“I wanted to talk first.”
“Now we have.” The light fell so completely from his eyes they appeared mere replacements a taxidermist might have chosen.
Crane unsnapped the leather strap over the hammer of his pistol as Brady stood up next to him, dropping the beer bottle. They heard it break.
“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations,” the preacher said.
“This isn’t just going away.”
“For the love of our Savior, Jesus Christ.” The preacher’s arms were spread wide.
Brady lifted the front of his shirt. “What you’ve got to do now, old buddy,” he said, gripping the pistol stuck in the waistband of his jeans, “is decide just how fucking Western you’d like this to get.”
The worshipers were dispersing around them, a woman brushing past with a crying baby in her arms. Crane lifted his hand away from his side, and Brady turned with the crowd, pulling his shirt down over the gun.
“You be sure to call before you come out,” he called back over his shoulder. “I’d hate like hell to miss you.”
Twenty-nine
CRANE WAS STILL awake when the light came on in the hallway outside the cells. He heard her footsteps on the tiles and then she was standing at the open doorway.
“You mind if I come in?”
He sat up on the cot and leaned back against the wall. “What time is it?”
“It’s late.” Jean checked her wristwatch. “A quarter after three.” She sat on the cot across from him looking around at the graffiti on the walls, then set her purse on the floor. “Well,” she said, “here we are.”
“I guess so.”
“I saw Helen,” she said.
“She called. She said you two were thinking about starting a book club.”
She wagged a forefinger at him. “You’re funnier when you’re homeless.” She opened her purse, fishing around until she pulled out a joint. “You mind?”
“Pearl’s out there.”
“I don’t have enough for her too.”
He shrugged. “What am I going to do—put you in jail?”
“Twice as funny. You really are.”
She lit the joint, inhaled, then reached it across to him. They sat for a moment, holding the smoke in, and he took another hit and handed it back.
He turned his head aside to exhale. “You think we ever were in love?”
“You were with me.”
“Not the other way around?”
“I was in love with Griffin.”
He felt removed from his body and didn’t know whether it was the weed or something else. “Are you still?”
“He didn’t live long enough to disappoint me.”
“But you think about him?”
“Yeah.”
His face felt unnaturally relaxed, heavy in the cheeks and around the eyes, and when she offered the joint again he waved her off.
“Are you fucked up?” she asked.
He nodded. He could hear his hair scraping against the cinderblock. “I snuck a little from your stash,” he said. “About a week ago.”
“I know. Addicts always know exactly how much shit they’ve got left.”
“You aren’t an addict.”
“Don’t you think it’s cute, though? Saying I am.”
He thought about it. “It’s adorable.”
She fished a can of beer from her purse and opened it. “I’ve got more in here,” she said. “They’re cold.”
“I’m fine.”
“It’s weird.” She sipped the beer. “But you dying’s kind of sexy. It’s like you’re being sent on a secret mission, or to the
front or something.” She set the can on the floor, stood up and undid the top two buttons of her blouse. “I feel like if I came over there right now, something could happen for us.”
She was only a step away, her hands at the waistband of her slacks. She had beautiful hands. “It’s not going to work,” he said.
“We could try.”
“I’m not up to the humiliation.”
She sat down, bending forward with her forearms against the tops of her thighs. Her blouse was open, and he stared at the rise of her breasts.
“I’m sorry about the other night,” she said. “He was just the most adventuresome guy in the bar.”
“I had it coming.” He lay over on his side, still looking at her. She tilted the can up. He watched her throat as she swallowed.
“I want you to come home,” she said. “Whenever you feel like it.”
“I will in the morning.”
“It’s cold in here.”
“It’s the cinderblock. It holds the AC.”
She finished her beer. “I’m going to take care of you.”
“I don’t want you to.”
“How do you think it’ll look if I leave you now?”
He was still lying on his side. He lifted his head, getting a hand under it. “It’s what I’d do.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
“I might.”
She placed the can on the floor and stood and stomped it flat, then put it in her purse. “Here’s how it’s going to be,” she said. “Me and my girlfriends are going to go out every weekend and drink shots and I’m going to bitch about how hard it is watching you die. I might even let them pry it out of me that you tried to fuck your ex-wife.”
“You don’t have any girlfriends.”
“I’ll find some. It’ll be the best time of my life.”
When he closed his eyes she sat watching until his breathing deepened, then gathered up his clothes from where he’d folded and arranged them at the foot of his cot.
She turned off the light in the hall when she left, said good night to Pearl and put his things on the backseat of her car. She walked around and leaned against the trunk. It was raining lightly, enough that it made a purring sound. The air smelled of mown hay and sage and asphalt, and she didn’t feel a bit tired.