Some of them it answered, some of them it didn’t. “I have one more.”
“Yeah.”
“What’s that motor I heard running in the shed?”
“My washing machine,” he said. “Now why don’t you just get yourself on out of here?” He spat again.
“You got it.” I climbed into the van and turned on the headlights. Trapped momentarily in the flash of the beams his eyes glowed red and feral like the eyes of a predator slinking across the highway.
The van bumped along the dusty road in the dark. If March hadn’t needed new shocks before this trip, he would now. I’d forgotten about the cattle guard, a series of metal corrugations that connected Brannen’s road to the highway, and I hit it too fast, jarred the van and set it rattling. Something had been knocked loose, a tailpipe, maybe, or worse. I couldn’t drive all the way back to Fire Pond with the bottom falling out, so I stopped at the friendly Mobil station. There was already a car up on the lift and the lone mechanic was working on it.
“Be with you in a minute,” he said.
“No hurry.”
I sat on a hard metal chair in the office and waited. The radio was playing “Take It to the Limit,” an old Eagles song about spending your love and time and hitting the road. I was hungry so I got some cheese crackers with peanut butter from the vending machine for dinner and peanut M&M’s for dessert. They’d put the red ones back in. I ate those first, and then the yellow and the green. “Care for an M&M?” I said to the mechanic, but there was nothing left but two shades of brown and who would choose them?
“Thanks anyway, I got dinner waiting when I get home.”
What would it be? I wondered. Steak? A three bean salad? That seemed to be the only vegetable they ate in Montana. It probably wouldn’t be a Lean Cuisine or even two, although he was skinny enough and tall besides with appealingly crinkled blue eyes, all the bluer in contrast to the dirt on his face.
He smiled. I smiled back. His teeth were crooked but they were nice and white, “I hope I’m not keeping you too late,” I said.
“Well, I promised this one for first thing tomorrow morning, but I’m about done. I’ll put the van up there next and take a look.”
He guided while I drove onto the lift. I got out, watched him lift the van up and move around gracefully underneath. There’s an appeal to a man who eats light and can fix things. There’s an appeal to hard-working, dirty fingers. I have a weakness for mechanics, I’ll admit it.
“Just knocked the tailpipe loose,” he said. “Won’t take but a minute to fix.”
“No hurry.”
He tightened it up and lowered the van back down to the ground, a cumbersome elephant of a vehicle, designed for leaf picking, not road running.
“Well, what do I owe you?” I said. It was good and dark by now, we were miles from the nearest dwelling, it might be hours before anybody else needed gas. Just the mechanic and I alone here in the night. There’s a kind of electric charge you get when you’re home alone during the day and an attractive guy shows up to deliver a package or repair the plumbing. Suddenly you’re alone with a man in your space and that space is filled with erotic innuendo. I wondered if it was like that for him being with me in the garage.
“Oh, I don’t know, how’s ten dollars sound?” He smiled again.
“Is that enough?” It was tax deductible, what the heck.
“It’ll do.”
“Well, thanks a lot.”
“Come back again next time you’re out this way.”
“I’d be glad to.”
He began slowly closing up the place, watching me carefully while he did. Desire and risk hung in the air, but so did condoms and grease. The sexual revolution had ended, like a lot of revolutions, in tyranny (in this case the tyranny of disease) but maybe it wasn’t all bad. There was a time when it seemed like an obligation to explore every opportunity, take every risk, but there comes a point when you’re ready to settle for what’s implied.
I said good-bye and turned the lumbering elephant onto the highway. The clock said 6:15, but it felt like midnight to me. It had been a long day—too much talking, too much investigating. I was ready to go back to the Aspen Inn, run a hot bath and curl up with the phone book—or Joan’s journal, but then that would require thought and I knew what the thoughts would be: Had she ever flirted with a mechanic or busboy? Had she ever kept condoms in the nightstand beside her bed? Had she ever even had a lover? When she was at her sexual prime it was the fifties and peaking sexually in the fifties was probably like the peaks of egg whites that hadn’t been beaten long enough and just fell over. By the time you were sixty-eight what did it matter anyway? Could memories ever compare to the now, to the quivering intensity of the moment? Joan’s moments had apparently been filled with intense stalking, fearful flight. There’s only one feeling more intense than desire and that’s fear. I knew a little about fear, a lot about desire; hardly anything about the two of them mixed together.
At least by leaving so late I’d missed the evening rush. There was a long stretch of lonesome highway between Warren and Fire Pond and there weren’t many of us on it. It was too dark to wave or be friendly, although you could always flash a high beam just to say we’re all in this alone. A truck or van approached from the opposite direction. I couldn’t say which, except that the double headlights seemed to be too high up for a car, and too bright to be on the road, even in New Mexico where they have no inspection. “Turn ’em down,” I said and, when that didn’t work, flashed my own high beams and, when that didn’t work, flashed them again. It kept right on shining those piercing lights, nearly blinding me. “Asshole,” I said. I looked away while the vehicle passed, thinking of the white crosses, those straight-as-an-arrow places where drivers go off the road. This place was as straight as any and, once the taillights had disappeared from my rearview mirror, there was nothing to see but yellow line and the arcs the van’s lights made, not even a coyote slinking off into the darkness, its red eyes burning holes in the night.
I was getting sleepy. I pulled a tape out of the glove compartment, any tape, I didn’t care, and plunked it in. There was a whirr and then a gnashing sound as the tape deck ate it up. I’d have to talk to March. He couldn’t expect me to drive all over the state with no music to listen to. I began singing lonesome highway songs just to keep myself awake. There was “Take It to the Limit,” of course; James Taylor’s “Sweet Baby James”; Janis Joplin, “Me and Bobby McGee”; “Born to Run,” Bruce Springsteen. Songs from the sixties, seventies and eighties, the decades blend in the lonesome night. Songs come up out of the melt, stab you with memories and sink back in. There’s always a station your car radio pulls in late at night from hundreds of miles away, one of those stations that believes in yesterday, someplace like Harlingen, Texas, or Topeka, Kansas, or Roswell, New Mexico, that’s playing songs aimed right at your heart. March didn’t have a working radio, so I had to do it myself. I went way back to Judy Collins’s song about the man who loved the rodeo, but that was entering another category—man who got away songs, or a subcategory, man who got away down the lonesome highway songs.
The highway had gotten a little less lonesome while I sang, as a vehicle was coming up behind me. I’d been so wrapped up in my musical reverie I hadn’t noticed. It was gaining on me very fast—and I was doing seventy-five myself. It pulled up close and instead of dimming the high beams, the driver turned them on. “If anyone is following you out there, you’ll know.” It was a new twist to an annoying trick. Another asshole, maybe even the same asshole, the lights were double and bright enough, piercingly bright lights, lights that spotlighted me to whoever was watching, but when they hit the rearview mirror they blinded me to them. March’s van didn’t have one of those mirrors you could flick down to block the assholes out. I ducked my head and blinked rapidly, trying to get my vision back. In that split second while I looked away, I was rear-ended. “What the fuck?” I said. It was happening very fast and very bright in the glare
of the lights, but there was time enough for the rush to the extremities of fear and the chilling at the bone. Whoever was stalking me rammed again. The van was not exactly road steady. It was square and unwieldy and hard to control. There was one more thud and then a sickeningly out-of-balance lurch and I drifted into the slow-motion time of car wrecks as the van left the road, skidded across the shoulder, hit a ditch, lifted into the air, turned over, came down ever so slowly and heavily, crunched the roof and rolled over again. There was all the time in the world to observe it but no time at all to prevent it. On the last roll I saw the brake lights of the offending vehicle come on and then, as the van landed on the driver’s side, my head snapped forward and hit something hard and unyielding; the lights went out.
13
I CAME TO bathed in light. “It’s going to be a bitch getting her out of there,” I heard someone say, but somehow they pulled me out through the passenger side. Emergency medical technicians got me into an ambulance with a wailing siren, even though there was nothing on the road to wail at. The bright lights and the siren didn’t help the pain in my head any. Neither did the noise in the overly bright hospital in Fire Pond where I ended up. Since I was barely conscious when they found me, I wasn’t asked to take a Breathalyzer test, which turned out to be unfortunate for me because, when it came time to fill out an accident report, no one believed that I had been run, cold sober, off the road. They did believe my head hurt and they gave me something for it. I wasn’t showing any signs of concussion, fracture, whiplash or any lawsuit-provoking injury, but they asked me to stick around overnight for observation and to rest up.
Fire Pond Hospital was the noisiest place I’d ever tried to rest up. It would be quieter at the junction of I-25 and I-40 in Albuquerque with the windows wide open in the middle of summer, but I guess I needed the rest because I did finally fall asleep. Late in the morning I had a dream that someone was standing at the foot of my bed. He was tall and skinny as a street dog but he did have shoulders and black curly hair—the Kid. It was a wonderful dream and I wanted to snuggle down into it. But then there was a loud crash as a bedpan hit the floor. I fought to stay in the dream, but when it didn’t go away, I began to believe I was already awake.
“Kid?” I asked.
“Chiquita.” He walked around the bed. It was the Kid all right—he was carrying his well-worn copy of Cien Años de Soledad, a.k.a. One Hundred Years of Solitude, in one hand. The Kid had already read that book five times and probably once more on his way here. With his free hand he touched my cheek. His hand was dark and callused; it never felt rougher or better. “Are you okay?” he asked.
“I think so. I have a bit of a headache, but I’m all right. They wanted to keep me around for a while just to be sure I didn’t have a concussion or something. I am still in Montana, aren’t I?”
“Yup.”
“Well, uh, what are you doing here?”
“The police call me, Chiquita, last night. They find my address on a postcard in your car.”
Did that make the Kid my nearest and dearest, the one to come if I lived through a wreck, tidy up after me if I didn’t? Well, he was young enough to outlive me anyway. My purse and the address book, which should have been in it, were not in the car—the police had told me that—but they hadn’t told me they found the Kid’s postcard or called him. Maybe they didn’t want to be blamed if he didn’t show up. “You’re a sweetheart for coming,” I said.
“I leave right away when they call, get the midnight flight to Denver, then I get a plane here early this morning. I was worried. What happen to you anyway? Were you…?” He looked around him to see if anyone was watching and tipped an imaginary bottle to his lips.
“Of course not,” I said, wondering what to leave in this soon-to-be-edited version of the episode, what to leave out. “I … I guess I just fell asleep. I wasn’t drinking.”
“You just fell asleep?” asked the naturally skeptical Kid.
“Yeah.”
“If the doctor says you are okay to leave, maybe we can get on the same plane tomorrow.”
“I can’t go back tomorrow, Kid. I’m working on an important case, a murder. I told you all about it in the postcard.” But I told him more about it in person. I told him about seeing Pedersen dive off the cliff and March ending up in prison and the prince and the sting operation. I told him about all the people in Montana who had an interest, criminal or otherwise, in the gyr, but I didn’t tell him that one of them had tried to kill me. I didn’t tell him that like 99 percent of the animal kingdom, I had become a prey, a little brown bird stalked by a predator, not necessarily larger or faster but more willing to kill. He’d worry.
“People kill for a bird?” he said.
“Apparently.”
“And that guy March is in prison?”
“Yes, but he didn’t murder anybody.”
The Kid shrugged. He has a certain Mediterranean quality to his shrugs. I’d always suspected there was Italian blood in him somewhere, probably from his mother’s side, the Argentine side. In New Mexico he blended right in; in Montana he didn’t. Dark-skinned, but too curly-headed and lighthearted to pass for an Indian—he’d never looked better to me. “So you’ve been driving all over Montana looking for a murderer and then you … drive off the road?” he said.
The police hadn’t believed me when I filled out the accident report and told them I’d been forced off the road. The Kid didn’t believe me when I said I hadn’t been. No credibility when I told the truth, none when I lied either.
“I can’t leave, Kid, until I find out who did it.” He didn’t ask what. “How long can you stay?”
“I have to leave tomorrow night,” he said. “I play the accordion at El Lobo Friday.”
It wouldn’t be like him to ask me to come home with him again. It wouldn’t be like me to ask him to stay longer either. He didn’t. Neither did I.
“The birders are having their farewell dinner tonight. You want to go with me?”
“Sure, why not?”
The Kid was a closet birder himself, something I had only recently found out, but there were a lot of things about the Kid I didn’t know and one reason was that I only saw him at my place or his shop. We didn’t exactly have a social life or a network of friends. But when he heard I was in trouble he jumped on the first flight. Wasn’t that enough?
The Kid went down the hallway to get himself a Coke. While he was gone, I called March to tell him about the accident. But the news had already made its way into the Fire Pond County Jail.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’m okay.”
“What happened?”
“Someone rear-ended me and pushed me off the road.”
“Jesus. Who would do that?”
“Someone, I guess, who thinks I am closer to finding the murderer than I am. Someone in a four-wheel-drive or a pickup.”
“That’s ninety percent of Montana.”
“You haven’t heard any rumors there, have you?”
“No. Only that you had the accident and also, actually, I did hear that your boyfriend was in town. I hope he’s watching out for you.”
“He’s helping. The van is a wreck.”
“I know. It was totaled, but don’t worry about that—it’s insured. You’re lucky you’re all right. That’s the important thing. Were you going very fast?”
“Fast enough.”
“It’s pretty risky to rear-end someone at high speed—to both parties. I’d say whoever did it was a very careful driver.”
“Very careful … or very crazy,” I said.
“The police called here, by the way, when they saw the car was registered to me. I gave them the name of your law firm in Albuquerque and they called but it was late and no one was there, so they tracked down your boyfriend instead. How long is he staying?”
“He’s going back tomorrow.”
There was a pause while March probably looked down at the tear in his jeans and picked at
a loose thread. “Be careful, Neil.”
“Don’t worry,” I said.
The Kid was coming down the hallway with his Coke in his hand. “I’ll come by tomorrow,” I told March and hung up the phone.
At the farewell dinner, the Kid and Avery hit it off right away. A young eccentric and an old one, they had a lot in common, enough to set Avery’s hair in motion: a shared interest in pigeons (Avery had kept pigeons in his youth, too) and a shared disbelief that I had driven off the road. “That’s a very straight stretch of highway,” said Avery, who knew everything there was to know about Montana.
“You see white crosses beside those straight stretches all the time.”
“There’s a reason for that.” Avery raised his hand to his lips in a similar gesture to the Kid’s, only Avery indicated a glass rather than a bottle.
“Everyone assumes every accident involves drinking,” I said. “Isn’t it possible that people just fall asleep or their minds wander?”
“It’s possible,” said Avery. “If you think of the mind as a series of flickering images like a movie, a dotted line rather than a straight line, it is possible for something to slip in between the dashes, so to speak.”
“Or slip out,” I said. “I’m going to see what’s at the buffet.” I left them talking about pigeons and dotted lines and wandered over to the buffet table. For reasons known only to management, the Sheraton was holding our dinner next to the pool room and the food smelled, naturally, of chlorine since someone had opened the sliding glass door. The water that lapped at the edges of the pool was just about the same artificial and uninviting blue as Wayne Betts’s eyes.
The dining quarters had a crimson carpet, thick enough to soak up the food scraps, hideous enough so stains were an improvement. The fluorescent lighting made the food look like it was being X-rayed for disease. There was a slab of roast beef, a pink and gelatinous ham with a slice of pineapple and a maraschino cherry on top, a whole pineapple with toothpicks spiked with wedges of cheese sticking out of it, chicken in a gloppy creamed sauce that looked suspiciously like cream of mushroom soup, a tricolored Jell-O mold, the ubiquitous three bean salad, a carrot and raisin mess, a bowl of creamed cottage cheese. Was it the food that made me queasy or was I suffering from a car rollover hangover? Just to be safe I ordered a ginger ale and put only a dinner roll and a pat of butter on my plate.
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