Lizardskin

by Carsten Stroud

  The flight attendant had seen him waking. She smiled at him and leaned forward, her cornsilk blond hair held back in a tortoiseshell barrette, her pale skin luminous in the hard yellow light from the rising sun.

  “You slept for a while, Mr. Picketwire.”

  “Yes. What time is it?”

  “Just after eight. We’re stacked up here for a little while. We’ll be landing at Logan International in twenty minutes. Can I get you anything?”

  Evian, he thought. Or black coffee?

  No, there was nothing she could bring him.

  10

  0730 Hours–June 15–Billings, Montana

  “Good morning, Mr. McAllister! Mr. McAllister!”

  Beau came up from a wonderful dream that had something to do with a fireplace and a swing chair and a lady he hadn’t thought about in years. He had known her in the old days in Provo. What was her name? She had been the night dispatcher for Steiger. Black hair and violet eyes. They’d spent a couple of weeks in his cabin down on the Yellowstone. In the dream she was sitting in front of him, the fire burning low, her hair a halo of amber light and her face in darkness. She was pulling a cashmere sweater up over her head and Beau was leaning forward … leaning forward, and then he was shaking—no, somebody was calling him.

  “Mr. McAllister, you’ll have to wake up now!”

  He opened his eyes and met the large fleshy face of a creature who was more or less taking up all of his personal horizon. She was leaning over him, a huge, powdered moon face full of craters and heavy red lips, tiny black eyes staring at him while she whipped the sheet back to his toes, revealing a certain autonomous response to—Irene! That was the name of the woman he’d been dreaming about!

  “Who the hell are you?”

  The heavy face swiveled on a chicken-skin neck, and her starched white uniform crackled as she stared at something in his lap. “I’m Hanrahan! Are we feeling some bladder pressure?”

  Beau looked down at himself. Captain Happy was wide awake. He reached down and tugged the sheet back up to his neck and moved away from this apparition above him.

  “What the hell is a Hanrahan?”

  She frowned and tapped her nameplate. “I’m the head nurse here. Are you confused?”

  “Confused? No, I’m not confused. Back away a little there, willya? I’m getting a neck crick.”

  “Hhmmph! Have we had a bowel movement today?”

  Beau thought about it.

  “Well, Hanrahan, I can’t actually tell by looking at you, but my guess’d be no.”

  “Funny. Perhaps we’ll need an enema.”

  “Perhaps you’ll have to go get some help.”

  “S’happened before, Mr. McAllister.”

  “I don’t doubt it. You first. I’ll watch.”

  She stepped back and pulled her glasses down off her forehead, where they settled into preset grooves in her cheeks and on her nose. Her tiny black eyes looked huge and wet behind the lenses. She pursed her thick lips and scowled at him.

  “You’ll need a bath, sir. You smell like a horse.”

  Beau inhaled. It hurt his belly. “Well, you look like a cow. Bath won’t do a damned thing for you, either.”

  “Hostility. Sometimes indicates a toxic reaction to medication.” She pulled up a clipboard at the end of the bed and looked at the sheet. “Perhaps we should cut down on our painkiller.”

  “Yeah. I’ll switch to beer. You switch to hemlock.”

  “Hhmmph. Dr. Vlasic was by to see you.”

  “Vlasic! He’s the coroner. Am I dead?”

  “Not yet. But we’re doing everything we can. You’re on a liquid diet, so there’ll be no lunch for you. Now get out of bed in ten minutes and walk around. Don’t go so far you tear out that drain in your leg there. Tug on that, and it’ll open up a whole new world of sensory experience for you. You’ll have to stretch those muscles, or you’ll be all bound up. And see to it you move your bowels, or we’ll do it for you.”

  “Hanrahan, I think you move me!”

  Hanrahan gave him one last look over the top of her glasses and sailed out the door. Beau sang another two choruses of “Wild Thing,” then trailed away into silence. Where the hell was Eustace!

  Beau spent an undefined amount of time lying on his back, counting the holes in the ceiling tiles and trying to figure out what had happened to the guy behind the curtains in the next bed. Whatever it was, it had been massive. There was some kind of machine on a rollaway cart up against the far wall. Power cables snaked all around the linoleum and ran up the far wall to a bank of grounded plugs. It emitted a regular sound, kind of a cross between a belch and a sigh, and a bellows would descend in a plastic cylinder.

  The guy himself was out of sight behind the curtain. The cables and pipes emerged from behind the curtain and ran into the machine. The machine had nothing to say. It had been there since Beau woke up this morning.

  An accident, maybe? Or kidney dialysis?

  Beau hated hospitals. When he had been courting Maureen, back when he was just another gentleman ranker in a pinto car, he had spent a lot of his time dragging cut-up or shot-up or banged-up kids into her clinic in Hardin. Most of them survived, but the main impression Beau took away was of thinlipped nurses in white polyester using stainless-steel scissors on bloody jeans and scorched shirts, tearing away at underwear, opening up the victim like greedy kids ripping away at a Christmas present. The gift was always bloody meat. The nurses were cranky, combative, unpredictable.

  So why had he fallen for Maureen?

  Well—one thing, she was a tiger in the dark. Beau felt a certain kind of heat in his lower belly as he remembered that part of their relationship. He shifted his weight in the hospital bed and felt a sharp tug at his left wrist.

  Just what the hell were they dripping into him anyway? These hanging bottle things always made him think of that injured airman in Catch-22, the guy all wrapped up like a mummy. The nurses would come in and change his bottles around twice a day.

  He tugged the sheet back and looked down his body, half afraid to see a tube coming out of his essentials.

  No. That part of him was okay. The rest was a mess.

  He had a vague memory of Eustace Meagher standing in a cone of hard light as something huge floated overhead and a massive beating sound hammered the cottonwoods up on the bank. Then he was being lifted onto a board as the hutt-hutt-hutt boys shoved him inside the chopper. Meagher had been trying to tell him something, but the chopper blades were beating them both into the ground.

  He had watched them working on Benitez until some kid who looked about thirteen stuck something in his arm and the rest was more than a little vague. One thing for sure, he figured Benitez had beaten that nickname.

  Well, he was still alive. And they’d gotten the arrow out of him while he was unconscious. He appreciated that. His leg was wrapped in gauze and a yellow plastic tube stuck out of the mound, dripping pink fluid into something underneath the bed.

  He felt like a gunny sack that used to have a man in it but they’d taken that out and filled it with broken glass.

  The girl … not that she didn’t deserve it. But still—and the kid—Christ what a slaughter. What a Friday. Edward Gall, the young boy Joe Bell shot. The girl Beau had gunbutted. The nameless man he had shot. Probably others.

  Peter Hinsdale.

  Cops, like some professional athletes, most combat soldiers, and half the civilians in America, were always trying to organize the terrible randomness of bad times into a predictable matrix. It was all delusion, of course, and they knew it, but that never stopped them from giving it a shot. Full-moon Fridays were going to be crazy. Four guys in a car is a hostile stop, even if they turn out to be seminarians going to a vasectomy clinic. Bad things come in threes. If you always put your gun on last, you’ll never have to use it. Always get up on the same side of the bed every morning, or you’ll be off balance all day. If things start to go sour in a neighborhood, they’ll get a lot worse before they ge
t better.

  It seemed to Beau that something ugly had come to visit in Yellowstone County.

  He spent some time trying to drag an insight up from the bottom of this pool of disconnected events. He had a stray feeling that there was a unifying theme here, but the only one he could come up with was the obvious one—all the events had involved some kind of collision with Indians. Mary Littlebasket, if he remembered the family correctly, was from the Whistling Wind clan, the same clan that Alice belonged to. So that was Crow.

  Charlie Tallbull, the man who’d been driving the pickup that Mary Littlebasket was killed in, Beau knew from his patrol car days. The Tallbull clan held a grazing tract down on the Wyoming border, and they leased it out to local ranchers from a little office in Wyola. The Tallbulls were Crow as well, but they were mainly businessmen. In the middle of the sun-parched desolation of the southern reaches of the Crow Reserve, the Tallbull operation was actually making money for the tribal collective. He and Charlie Tallbull had known each other slightly when Beau was assigned to speed patrol along the stretch of I-90 that ran from Garryowen to Wyola. Charlie Tallbull was the one with bail money or fine money for the young bucks Beau would catch driving drunk or racing on the interstate; Beau’s impression of Charlie Tallbull was a good one, a solid hard-handed older guy with a deliberation to him, a slow and steady balance, and a brilliant smile that he showed rarely. How Charlie Tallbull got himself involved in a police chase was a mystery to Beau. Now Charlie Tallbull was here in the same hospital.

  Beau decided to get up in a minute and go look for him. And maybe when he got out of here, he’d go see Moses Harper and ask him a few questions too.

  And now the Bell thing—Indians again.

  Well, maybe it really was just a coincidence. After all, if you counted the Northern Cheyenne Reserve, which was just to the east of the Crow Reserve, there had to be close to six thousand Indians in southeastern Montana. It stood to reason that some weeks would bring you a high rate of Indian-related police calls.

  But the kind of call—this was a little more violent than usual, wasn’t it, Beau? But it had been getting more and more violent everywhere in America over the past couple of years. Why be surprised that trouble had come to Montana?

  And where the hell was Eustace Meagher? Somebody ought to have the decency to drop by, tell him what the hell had happened to everybody.

  Christ, that was a bad day. You go months half-asleep from boredom and monotony, and in one bloody shift you get enough terror and misery to last you the rest of your career.

  Maybe it was time to think about getting out.

  Well, let’s see … we have, if memory serves, $793.60 in the account at Bank of Montana, another $1,445.86 in the Highway Patrol Credit Union. Twenty undeveloped and unserviced acres on the Yellowstone River outside of Brisbin, the Chevy wagon, the Harley—which needs a new clutch and a paint job—and the double-wide up in Lizardskin.

  Against that, you have to put fifteen hundred dollars a month in support and maintenance for Maureen and Bobby Lee—by the way, Maureen’s making noises about the roof, at the same time she’s been flashing a new Gold Card and spending wheelbarrows of cash at the Hilltop Mall—but if he has to pay for a roof, that’s another three grand.

  Okay. Maybe it’s not time to start thinking about getting out. But it was hard to avoid concluding that maybe he had pushed his luck for too long; under that, there was the feeling, as well, that he had misread everything yesterday, and the terrible suspicion that it could have gone differently for everyone. Like most career cops, Beau liked to avoid confrontations. Violence always made things worse. He’d tried to settle things at the Oasis in a reasonable way, but that had gone badly, and the Indians had gotten away while he tangled with Joe Bell.

  Then they’d hijacked the wagon—who the hell would have anticipated that? So now—thanks to you, Beau—we have some dead and some wounded, and nobody connected to what happened here will ever be the same again.

  Or maybe it was just a bad shift. Things like that came along, usually out of nowhere, a dumb domestic call, a drunk with a gun nobody thought to look for, or sometimes you just walked right into it, into something that was more complicated than it looked on the surface.

  The simple fact was, there was no way to do the job and stay safe from all disasters. Disasters were part of the package, and every cop was going to get his share.

  About the girl … Beau tried not to let it get to him. She’d made an heroic effort to perform radical liposurgery on his belly, and all was fair in that kind of fight. But she was an Indian girl, and Indian girls got at whatever softness there was in the flintier canyons of his nature. As soon as he found his clothes, he’d go look for her. Maybe Hanrahan would know.

  He was looking for the call button when he heard rubber squeaking on polished tiles, and something short and black-haired hurtled across the room and jumped up on his belly.

  “Daddy! Mommy says you got arrowed!”

  He plucked her away from his throbbing leg and held her up in the light. Her blue eyes were huge in her round pink face, and her hair was tied up in two absurd ponytails that stuck out at the sides of her head. She was holding a tattered bunch of daffodils.

  “Bobby Lee! Hey—happy birthday, six-year-old!”

  She twisted and settled beside his chest on the sheet, sitting cross-legged and looking down at him with childish gravity.

  “You got arrowed?”

  “Who told you that, darling? No, I just fell down a bit.”

  She twisted her face up in massive disapproval and thumped his chest. Beau jumped, and she scowled at him. “Don’t lie, Daddy. Uncle Dwight told me all about it.”

  When the Lord giveth, he fucketh not around. He was giving it to Beau real good. Uncle Dwight! Jesus, maybe Maureen could find work with the Inquisition—she had a real talent for the delicate refinements of ex-husband torture.

  “Uncle Dwight, eh, kid? When’d you see him?”

  “He brought me here. He’s out in the hall with Mom. We brung you a bucket of flowers.”

  Oh, super. Maureen and Dwight. He kept his emotions off his face and smiled at Bobby Lee.

  “A boo-kay of flowers.”

  “No, they’re in a bucket.”

  “Okay. They’re out in the hall?”

  “Yeah. Where is it?”

  “Where’s what?”

  “The arrow?”

  “Why?”

  “I wanna take it to school.”

  “Right—I’ll see if I can get it for you.”

  “Well, it’s yours, isn’t it? It was stuck in you. That makes it yours. Anything you get stuck in you belongs to you.”

  “Words to live by, Bobby Lee.”

  He was staring at her. Every time he saw her, he was transfixed, by her coloring, the depth of blue in her round eyes, the sheen of her hair, her skin, the childish smell of sugar and sweat and soap. The strength of his feelings for her sometimes shook him down to the bone.

  “How are you, baby? I’m sorry I didn’t get to see you on your birthday.”

  “That’s okay now, Daddy. You got stuck with a arrow. I wouldn’t expect you to come to a party with a arrow stuck in you.” She looked around theatrically and leaned forward to whisper, “Mommy’s mad at you again.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  “Why’s she always mad at you? It wasn’t your fault you got stuck with a arrow.”

  “An arrow.”

  “A narrow?”

  “An arrow. I got stuck with an arrow.”

  “An arrow.… You know what I think?”

  “No, what do you think?”

  “I think, if you said you were sorry to Mommy, she would let you come home.”

  Beau tried to keep his voice steady. Maybe the day would come when he wouldn’t feel so desperate about Bobby Lee, so sick with worry and concern for her. It was crazy. Maureen wasn’t evil. She was just … mean as a snake. How do you explain that to your baby? You don’t. Beau had taken a vow
never to say anything against Maureen to Bobby Lee, or within her hearing. It was too bad Maureen didn’t share the feeling. It was one of the worst things about this situation; Maureen felt free to say anything at all about Beau, and Beau had no defense other than to try to be as sweet and fair to Bobby Lee as he could manage, and trust in her own clarity to see what was true and what was not.

  “I know, honey. And I’m sorry, too. But right now your mommy is very … unhappy. And she’s—”

  “No, she’s not.”

  “She’s not what?”

  “She’s not unhappy. I heard her laughing last night.”

  “Last night?”

  “Yes. Her and Uncle Dwight were laughing.”

  “Yeah? What were they laughing about?”

  She made a mouth, sighed heavily. “How would I know, Daddy? I was in bed!”

  Right—all Beau ever wanted out of religion was the promise that someday he’d get close enough to God to slap the cuffs on Him and boot the Cosmic Butt into the back of a cruiser. Possession of a Loaded Universe without a Permit. Careless Operation of a Galaxy in a Built-Up Area. Exceeding the Grief Limit.

  “Did you get birthday stuff? I have some things for you in the car. I’ll get one of the guys to bring them over.”

  “It’s all right, Daddy. Are you gonna be okay? Can I have the narrow?”

  “Yeah, honey. You can have the narrow. I’ll get it for you.”

  There was a motion at the door. They looked up and saw Dwight Hogeland leaning on the jamb.

  Eddie Bauered to his earlobes in pressed jeans and melton plaid, six foot three of genetic perfection and the rewards of regular exercise, Hogeland was holding a huge plastic bucket full of wildflowers and baby’s breath. He was smiling a Mona Lisa smile that was full of forensic secrets. He moved in that special atmosphere, partly inherited money and partly the lampwick exhalations of burning wax and moldy paper that always seems to float around successful lawyers. His silky blond hair was slightly gelled and combed straight back in a graceful sweep from his beardless chiseled bones and deep-set gray eyes. He had one foot crossed over the other, striking a pose in a pair of dark blue lizardskin boots that must have gone for eight hundred dollars in Denver, where Hogeland’s firm kept an office. Beau knew where Hogeland bought his boots because Maureen was always telling him about Hogeland—where he bought this, how much he paid for that, what his next deal was going to net out at.