Lizardskin

by Carsten Stroud

  “Because … because I thought it might be true.”

  “Beau? Beau McAllister? Even I wouldn’t buy that. I know Beau. I mean, I know the kind of man.”

  “Like people knew Augustus Ballard? Or the great Doc Hogeland?”

  Feelings welled up around her, and she felt her eyes start to burn. Dwight saw that. He got up and came around the desk, stood beside her, uncertain. Finally, he put a hand on her shoulder. After a moment, she reached up and put her hand on top of his. She watched the yellow pool of light where it lay on the dark wooden desktop. The brass base glimmered and blurred.

  Dwight was handing her something. She tried to focus on it. Oh hell, it was a linen handkerchief. She raised her hand to brush it aside, stopped, then accepted it.

  She wiped her eyes, feeling the warmth of Dwight’s hand on her shoulder. It felt sweet and strange, and she realized that nobody touched her, not ever. She sighed and looked up at Dwight, at his bruised face and damaged nose.

  “You know, Dwight, you look better a little roughed up. Gives you some character.”

  “I didn’t bring your dad up to hurt you, Vanessa. I’m sorry. I was trying to apologize. Make it right.”

  She looked around the room, at the plaques and photos, at the artworks and the antique rifles, then at the skyline of Billings beyond the glass. Out in the darkness, past the city lights, Montana rolled away under an endless night sky. She felt the pressure of all that emptiness, and the weight of all the years that bore down on the ancient hills and valleys. She sighed and stood up, looked at the damp linen in her hand. Dwight’s face was drawn, pale with shock and worry.

  “That’s the trouble with memories, isn’t it, Dwight? You don’t always get to choose what to remember.”

  Dwight smiled at her. “Well, Vanessa. I’m going to give it a hell of a good try.”

  “Yes,” she said, gathering herself. “So will I.”

  27

  2300 Hours–June 19–Over Billings, Montana

  Hogeland had the jet throttled back so close to stall speed that the warning light was blipping red in the control panel, and even then the ground under the wing was a blurred impression of round hills, sudden flashing lakes, herds of cattle lumbering out of their flight path, and moonlight flickering like silver fire on hydro lines and the tin roofs of barns and coops as the Lear thundered over the landscape.

  Beau, so tight with fear he found it hard to swallow or talk, watched the earth rush past his windshield. He had the vertiginous illusion that they were racing past a huge wall of pale gray hills and valleys.

  “Doc, what are you going to do?”

  Hogeland wasn’t talking, and Beau didn’t have a single option.

  Hogeland didn’t look at him. He had his eye on the altimeter. Beau was watching the hills below them. They flew past under the wings, bulky and rounded, tinted a soft gray by the moonlight.

  Moonlight glittered on creeks and rivers threading through the valleys. They looked like bright wires. Little farm ponds glistened like pearls on the strings of the rivers. A grid of lights marked a crossroads. A hard square of blue light was a gas station. Soft yellow circles showed isolated homes and ranches. On a side road beneath them, twin white beams crawled along immense expanses of darkness. Far away to the east, Beau could see ragged tatters of cloud shining against the clearing night sky, the last of the front that had torn up eastern Montana, then gone off to dissipate itself over South Dakota. Stars showed through the rips and the moon rode above it, clear and brilliant, almost perfectly round. He could see the dark shadows of the lakes and craters on it. At the edge of the moon he saw the crater walls and mountains edged in hard light. He had never seen it so clearly. It held him for a moment, transfixed, until Hogeland’s voice, packed with strain, brought him back again and he looked down at the ground.

  “You’re not going to die, Beau.”

  “What are we doing? Running for it? They’ll scramble a jet out of Civil Air, or an F-16 from Rapid City. They want us down.”

  Hogeland was looking at the ground as it blurred past the port window. The jet was a missile at this height.

  “Doc, they’ll follow the transponder. They’ll have you on radar. Come on, man—stop this!” Beau had already tried his cellular phone. Useless, the battery dead flat.

  Hogeland had the Lear screaming across the eastern Montana hills, so close to the ground that they could see individual trees and houses in the luminous nightscape.

  Hogeland switched on the radio. “We might as well listen to them.”

  “—five five, repeat, you are out of your corridor, you are in violation of Federal Aviation Codes. Come in five five!”

  “Logan, this is five five.”

  “Five five, you are instructed to return to five thousand feet and assume bearing two eight zero. Repeat, five thousand, bearing two eight zero. We will scramble a chase plane, five five.”

  “What was that?”

  Hogeland shook his head. “They’re pissed. They’ve probably got some calls already, from ranchers or people on the reserves. We’ve scared the hell out of a lot of stock and rattled windows all over the county.”

  “So now what?”

  “Now we give them what they want. We take the flight path and come in on track. Then we kick out and drop off the screen. Then we kill the transponder and level out at five hundred feet.”

  Beau thought that over. Then he thought it over again. Then he tried not to think about it at all.

  Hogeland’s face was set and rock hard. In the light of the instruments, his skin was green and his deep-set eyes glittered with an emerald light.

  “Five five, this is Logan Tower.”

  “Tower, this is five five.”

  “Five five, you are cleared for landing. Come around to two eight zero. You are cleared for runway niner four. Wind is southeast at ten knots. Your ceiling is unlimited. Five five, please taxi to the government hangar when you land. Roger?”

  “Roger, tower. We are having guidance difficulties but have now stabilized and will assume bearing two eight zero, runway niner four. Wind southeast ten knots, ceiling clear, report to airport office upon landing.”

  The Lear dipped suddenly. Beau’s beer bottle jumped off the floorboards and struck the throttle bars. Beau grabbed it as his belly flew up into his throat. Suddenly the windshield was full of Montana, and it was coming up fast. Beau watched it, thinking this is probably how the newspaper looks to a fly in the last two seconds. Hogeland was making a funny grinding noise. Beau realized it was his teeth scraping together. The jets were howling, and the sound of the wind was like a waterfall breaking on the nose of the plane. Beau focused on a thin black line. There was a pair of headlights moving on it, and a small glimmer of silver light off the roof. It swelled and expanded as he watched it, and then it was moving away to the left and Beau’s face was stretching down over his cheeks like wax running.

  A bell was sounding in the plane. The gauges were spinning.

  Hogeland reached out and flicked a switch. The alarm bell cut off. He wrenched at the controls, and the jet, shuddering, leveled out, and now they were hurtling across the landscape and trees were rushing at them, on them, and flickering by, strobing, and the only fixed point in Beau’s existence was that cold clear three-quarter moon riding above the shredded clouds above him. He did not look down now. The ground was too close. He watched the hills rush at them and felt Hogeland correcting; the nose came up and dipped again, and then there was a line of orange lights like a string of Christmas bulbs, and Beau could see the lights of cars and trucks crawling down a flat ribbon of black road, and then it was under the wings and gone, and now they were into darkness again.

  “That was I-94. We’ll see I-90 in about ten seconds.”

  Beau looked at the altimeter. Red numerals blipped at him.

  650 FEET

  Their airspeed was shown in green.

  380 MPH

  And now there was another thin line of orange lights on the ho
rizon. Hogeland grunted and banked right. The right wing seemed to scrape the earth. He rose to clear a mounded slope, then dipped as the land fell away down the bowl between Pompeys Pillar and Hardin. Hardin was a yellow glow on the black horizon.

  “We’re gonna strafe Hardin, Doc?”

  “No, I’ll take it to the east. We better hope nobody’s up in his Beechcraft for a midnight flight.”

  The radio was crackling and hissing with frantic calls. Logan Tower was sending a crash alert. By now, they’d be scrambling the choppers out of the National Guard and sending out Highway Patrol cars.

  Hardin swelled to a grid of rectangular lights and the patterns of streetlamps. An ARCO sign showed above a hilltop, and a Shell sign beside that, and a Denny’s. Then it dropped away behind a range of hills, and the stars were clear again.

  “There’s I-90 down there. We’ll be onto 212 in thirty seconds.”

  “Oh, good. What are we going to do on Highway 212?”

  Hogeland smiled at him.

  “Land on it.”

  And now they could both see the lamplit intersection. Moonlight glinted off the twin tracks of the Burlington and Northern Railroad, where it paralleled the highway. Two tractor-trailers were making their way up the long low rise toward Garryowen. The Custer Battlefield entrance was a pool of white light, and underneath the forest they could make out the ordered ranks of white stones in the military cemetery. The information house was closed and dark. Beau saw the road rise, and he could make out the tall stone tower that marked the burial place for most of Custer’s two hundred and twenty-five men. The ones they could find. Custer wasn’t there. They’d taken him to West Point and given him a hero’s monument. But the rankers stayed where they had fallen.

  Moonlight lay on the slopes and hills of the battlefield. It glinted off the curling ribbon of the Little Bighorn River and glimmered under the cottonwoods. Beau could make out little clusters of white stones hidden in the long grasses, bunched in small groups in Medicine Tail Coulee, or singly up the long slope of Deep Ravine, where the survivors had struggled up away from Gall’s Hunkpapas, trying to make the high ground.

  They had dragged their wounded and shot their horses for breastworks. It was hand-to-hand up the long hillside. Custer and the last of his company, maybe thirty men left. Custer turned at Boston’s shout, looked over his shoulder up the hillside, and saw Crazy Horse at the crest. Custer didn’t know who it was, nor did Crazy Horse recognize the white soldier in the buckskins.

  Crazy Horse was in front of his warriors, a plain man in his breechcloth and a single hawk’s feather in his hair, red dust on his body and on his pony’s flanks, his body painted with zigzag lightning strokes, his left cheek scarred and twisted where No Water had shot him for taking Black Buffalo Woman away.

  Then Crazy Horse kicked his pony, and his men came down beside him. Twenty minutes later the last of Custer’s men were dead in the long yellow grass and the women were busy at their work in long shadows. A smoky yellow sun was going down beyond the ochre hills.

  Somehow it was as real to Beau as yesterday’s sunrise or the fight at 220 Ditman. It had always been that way for Beau, a crazy parallax illusion that left him half in his own time and half in the past. The jet banked left and Hogeland pointed to the east. “That’s 212.”

  Now the low hills of the Crow Reserve climbed up on both sides of the highway, and Beau saw the white strobe light on the nose reflected in the puddles and creeks beside the roadway. It lit up the surface of the road like a photo-flash, freezing images in Beau’s mind like snapshots—a rabbit in the glare and thunder, flattened into itself and trembling, a windblown scrap of brush, a clutter of beer cans by the side of the road, that strobing yellow line flashing under the nose of the plane.

  Hogeland dropped the nose and throttled back. The plane yawed, came back, shuddered, and yawed again. The STALL alarm was sounding, a high-pitched electric squeal. The black two-lane road was rushing under the wing. Beau watched the yellow lines twisting and straightening.

  They hit the ground at two hundred miles an hour. The wheels bounced and lurched. The plane rocked and bucked, and Hogeland slammed the flaps down full, braked and released and braked again, and the turbines whirled up through the RPM’s in a banshee wail.

  On Beau’s right, the silver lines of the hydro wires rose and fell as they rushed past, a hypnotically beautiful illusion of rhythmic motion and silver light. The nose dipped down, and all Beau could see was the highway, and the yellow line in the headlights of the Lear. Hogeland was saying something very fast under his breath and then the plane shuddered again and the yellow lines turned into yellow dashes and Beau’s seat belt cut into his belly and then they were stopped.

  Hogeland shut down the jets.

  He let out a long breath.

  Beau could hear the sound of metal contracting.

  Smoke drifted past the cockpit and eddied in the headlights.

  Hogeland leaned back into his seat and rubbed his cheeks. Beau unstrapped himself and climbed around the controls. He went back to the door and hit the red button. The door hissed open and the stairway unfolded onto the highway. The smell of oil came in the door, along with the cool wind off the hills and the scent of sweetgrass. He jumped down to the pavement, legs trembling, and suddenly he was sitting on the ground and his chest was heaving and he struggled to find breath.

  He was dimly aware of the old man climbing down the steps and sitting down on the highway next to him.

  The night sky was full of stars, and the three-quarter moon rode through shreds of storm clouds like a white gull.

  Finally, Beau put his head back against the wheel strut and looked sideways at the old man’s profile. Hogeland was staring up at the grassy hillside. Moonlight lay on the blades like a silver mist, and a soft wind hissed in the coulee.

  “I guess you can fly that thing, Doc.”

  Hogeland grinned and slapped his hand on his leg. “Yes, I was always good at it. Maybe those were my best days, Beau. Maybe the boys who never come home are the lucky ones.”

  “Maybe they’ll find us here. Someone will have heard us go over. I don’t see what this will—”

  Hogeland was holding his hand up, head down, shaking his head from side to side. “Damn, you like to talk, son. Let’s give it a minute.”

  Beau was silent for a long time. The night sounds began to rise around him. Far off in the dark, the sound of music drifted across the hills, and the sweep of traffic from the interstate down the line, and the flutter of a bat as it crossed the starry sky, a scrap of blackness in the moonlight, and the tick-tick-tick of the turbines cooling, and the hush-hush sound of his own blood pumping through his carotid artery, and the raspy wheeze of the old man’s breathing at his side.

  And from far away the thump and jingle of a horse, his hooves a steady syncopation on the hillside.

  “What now, Doc? Into the hills? Let them run you down tomorrow, or the night after that? Or let the Crow find you?”

  Hogeland sighed. “No, I suppose not.”

  “Then let’s get up, go find a phone,” said Beau, struggling to his feet on shaky legs, “or use the radio. My cellular’s dead. Come on, Doc. We’ll sort this out somehow. I’ll stay with you.”

  Beau’s voice was thickening in his throat. He felt at once the terrible strength of love and friendship and the sinewy cords of years that bind one man to another, and all men to their town and their times. He held out his hand and the old man looked up at him. Finally, he reached out his right hand and let Beau pull him to his feet, and they stood there, face to face in the roadway.

  “I never meant for hurt to come on you, or to touch your family. I would never have opened any door that would harm your girls, or even Maureen. And I have, haven’t I? I’ve hurt my own son, maybe past healing.”

  Beau could think of nothing to say. He watched the old man’s face, the pain in it.

  “I think of Julia, you know, more and more as I get old. A woman dies, you’ve kn
own her all the days of your life, every morning and every sundown is marked with her hand and the sound of her voice, the way she folds a sheet, the colors she likes, the flowers or the magazines, her brushes and her creams in the bathroom, the feel of her beside you at night, warm and sleeping, yours to guard and love, the way she moves around the house. And when she goes, most of you goes with her, Beau, you know this, you’ve gone through it. What’s left is a hollow thing. You fill it up as best you can, and I filled myself up with … nothing. An obscenity, and made my name filth in my own county. How will you think of me, Beau? How will my son think of me?”

  Beau heard the vibration in the man’s chest and felt the strength of his fingers, and the age in his old hands, a surgeon’s hands, now ropy and knotted with age.

  “Doc, I’ll always remember what you did for Alice. You made her life easier while she had it, and you made the leaving of it something she could do in a quiet place, surrounded by friends. No matter what you do or what you may have done, there’s a blessing in this, that even though you can’t go back and right the things you did wrong, the things you did right, they’ll never fade. A man’s friends, they’ll remember the good things he did, and he’ll have a place in their memories, a good place—what he was when he was young and his mistakes were all ahead of him.”

  “Do I have that, Beau?”

  “Yes. As much as it’s mine to say.”

  He smiled and let go of Beau’s hand.

  “You have a good heart, Beau. You should find someone.”

  Beau thought of Bobby Lee and Laurel and even Trudy Corson. “I have people.”

  “A woman, Beau. I should have found-another.”

  “I’ll try. Now we ought to get going.”

  Hogeland looked up at the moon. His eyes were bright and moist, and Beau saw the age in the man, and the skull behind the skin.

  “Okay. You’re right. Enough whining. I guess I just needed a moment to get my bearings. Thank you, Beau.”

  “Well, it was a hell of a ride, Doc.”