He’s never told anyone about the feelings he had for those friends or the desire for physical intimacy. Not even his ex-wife knew. It used to scare him, and he would do his best to ignore and forget about it, in part to avoid overanalyzing himself. He didn’t want to be gay or bisexual, didn’t know how he would handle it, didn’t want to fool around with men just to prove something. His attraction to women had always been clear, since he was a teenager who couldn’t be physically close to a pretty girl without feeling his whole body burn and his groin throb. Making out with Josie Lloyd in the back of his big sister’s car drove him crazy with the need for more, and he’d think about her naked, the shape and softness of her breasts, when he lay in bed at night and jacked off. But how he felt about the men he was friends with, what he wanted from them, was always hazy and elusive. It hinged on an emotional closeness that slipped through his fingers every time he tried to grasp it and had all but evaporated the moment he finished college. He didn’t know how to even begin to create a close friendship with another man as an adult, so he threw himself into his romances with women instead, hoping that he’d get married one day and never want for anything else.
Since horseback riding on the Barbee ranch, Sam and Montgomery have seen each other a few more times, each meeting lasting for hours. They talk, but whenever Sam tries to think of what he knows about the other man, he doesn’t come up with much. The more time they spend together, the more Sam likes him, and he can’t explain why. He has to remind himself not to be too eager for Montgomery’s attention, which makes him feel like a puppy dog. It doesn’t help that he still can’t tell if Montgomery likes him back or if he’s simply tolerating Sam.
“Hey,” Lauren says. She rises out of the chair and steps along the foot of the bed, turning to face Sam. “Do you want me to leave or should I take off this robe again?”
One slender eyebrow is slightly arched and lifted, and she looks like she’s holding back a smile.
Sam looks at her and decides that he shouldn’t mention Montgomery. “You know,” he says. “We’re allowed to hang out with our clothes on, even though we aren’t dating.”
Now she does smile. “I know.”
“I don’t want you to go.”
“Okay.”
“Want to see if there’s anything on TV?”
“You got any cold beer?”
Sam nods.
She turns around and moves to where she left her clothes strewn on the floor. She drops her robe, her backside to him. Peeks over her shoulder just for a second, eyes coy.
He watches her get dressed.
CHAPTER FIVE
It’s a Friday night at the Fool’s Gold Saloon, and Montgomery’s drinking. He sits at the bar with his arms on the bar top and shot glasses lining up in front of him. There’s a pretty good crowd behind him, typical for the weekend. The saloon’s closer to Skull Valley than Prescott is, and there aren’t more than a couple places to go in town on the weekends. Like many dive bars and saloons in remote parts of Arizona, Fool’s Gold sees plenty of bikers, guys who ride up and down the state when the weather’s decent. Half a dozen of them are here tonight, their Harleys outside the saloon front like modern-day horses tied up at the drinking trough. Most nights Montgomery comes, he sees a handful of other ranch hands, usually wearing cowboy hats. Some of them he knows and some of them he only recognizes. They tend to be the youngest ones present, men in their twenties and thirties. The rest are older residents of Skull Valley with the kind of personality that sends them here instead of some Downtown Prescott bar or restaurant with a grade or two more class.
After Donna Rey gave him directions to the mobile home she and Joel Troutman used for sex, Montgomery drove east past Dewey-Humboldt proper into the boonies and located the old Airstream. It’s sitting alone past a smattering of trees, up a winding dirt road, invisible from Highway 169. Nobody could just stumble upon it by accident or find it without precise directions. Montgomery only got close enough to see it without being seen. Joel Troutman’s blue pick-up was parked outside the mobile home, and he didn’t want to risk getting caught.
He’s been sitting on the information ever since, trying to pick his next move. If he wants to do the right thing, he’ll give up Joel Troutman to the Sheriff’s Department—but Montgomery might like doing the wrong thing. He might like killing the asshole and keeping the money, because that’s as much justice as the alternative would be. Troutman’s not just a man who robbed a diner full of good people, he’s a cheating husband who was always going to break his lover’s heart as much as his wife’s. Death might be too harsh a punishment for him, but nobody can argue with the fact that the world would be better off without Troutman in it. Montgomery’s been thinking about Troutman’s wife. He’s been thinking about Donna Rey, with her angelic blonde hair and blue eyes. He’s been thinking about that night in the diner, killing Ed Decker.
And that’s not all Montgomery’s chewing on. He’s thinking about Deputy Sam Roswell. He doesn’t let on, but he likes Sam. Likes him too much too soon and doesn’t know what the hell to do about that. Montgomery hasn’t been close to anyone in a long time. Not since he was married. He gave up on it, maybe swore off it without realizing. He got comfortable being alone, a man with no attachments. Spending time with Sam is starting to feel like getting kicked in a bruised place, and Montgomery is too grown and too smart to believe that, after a long history of heartbreak, he could be in for something different this time.
He tells the bartender he’s coming back, then goes to the men’s room. He steps outside through the back door to smoke a cigarette, and the cold air feels good on his face after sitting inside for a couple hours. He enjoys the silence. The music playing inside sounds muffled through the walls, and there isn’t even the sound of cars passing by the saloon on Iron Springs Road. There’s nothing else in between Skull Valley and Prescott except this place, the lights in the windows and the neon sign strange and unexpected as UFO orbs in the blackness. Fool’s Gold has been open since the 70s, when Skull Valley was even smaller than it is now and most of Prescott’s residents and tourists were part of the mining boom. The saloon used to be a roadhouse but closed its boarding rooms in the 90s, once Prescott got itself a few more hotels.
Montgomery looks at the stars in the sky and tries not to think about Sam. He looks at them and remembers the night sky in South Texas, the thick comforter from his bed wrapped around his favorite woman and his arms around her, too, the two of them standing on the back porch because he tried not to smoke inside and she’d followed him out.
“Fuck it,” he says under his breath and drops his cigarette butt on the ground.
He walks around the side of the saloon to the pay phone still installed there, slides a few quarters into the slot, and dials one of the few numbers he has memorized. Listens to the phone ring, half-hoping nobody picks up.
“Hello?” she says.
He almost closes his eyes, doesn’t quite smile, sags against the wall with the phone pressed to his ear. That voice hasn’t changed at all since the last time he heard it.
“Hello?” she says again.
“Al,” Montgomery says. “It’s your ex-husband.”
“Oh, my God. Mud Pie?”
He grins at the old nickname. “Yeah, it’s me. Did I wake you up? I know it’s not a good idea calling this time of night, but I was thinking about you and…”
“It’s all right,” she says. “Daniel ain’t here, I’ve got the house to myself for the weekend. He’s on a trip with his brother…”
So she’s still with him—Daniel Lynch, the man she met not long after the divorce was finalized. Montgomery saw him once, when he showed up unannounced at the house to drop off the dog for Al to keep. It was just before he left Texas six years ago. The two men eyed each other, wary and tense, over her shoulder. They didn’t speak to each other directly, like they both wanted to pretend the other wasn’t there.
“Where are you?” Annalee says.
“At a
bar,” says Montgomery. “Just north of Skull Valley, Arizona, where I live.”
“Arizona still. I thought you must’ve been in California by now. Or Alaska.”
“What the hell would I do in Alaska?”
She laughs. “I don’t know, kill bears.”
Montgomery smiles, his heart in that bittersweet twist she always works it into.
“Are you all right?” she says.
“Yeah. I’m fine. You?”
“I’m good. Everything’s real good here.”
“I’m glad,” Montgomery says, and he is. He’s never wanted anything for her but peace and happiness.
“There must be some reason you’re callin’,” she says, after a pause.
He’s quiet as he decides how to ask it. “I need you to answer a question for me, and I need you to be honest.”
“You know I always am.”
He does. They never lied to each other, except when he had to. “Was I a good friend?” he says. “I mean, aside from us being married and all.”
“Montgomery. You were my best friend. The best I’ve ever had.” She says it like she can’t believe he doesn’t know, a little bit breathless. “I don’t think I’ll ever have another friend as good as you.”
He shuts his eyes and hangs his head, back against the cold wall of the saloon and the sole of his right boot flat on it, too. Now, he aches—for her and what they had.
Montgomery was twenty-three years old when he met Annalee Ford at a Fourth of July party outside Luckenbach, Texas. She smiled with blinding white teeth, laughed and danced all night, and he watched her unnoticed in the crowd, the only young man who didn’t try to flirt with her. She introduced herself to him, looking at him with something in her eyes he still can’t define, and to this day, he doesn’t know how or why she saw him at all.
They were friends for three years before she kissed him one night like she’d been waiting a long time to do it. He never tried making a move on her because he didn’t want to. He loved her more than all his other friends, but it didn’t occur to him to ask her on a date because romance wasn’t something he wanted or felt. Neither was sex. He’d done it with a few girls in high school and college, but he never liked it. Didn’t even think about it unless somebody else brought it up.
When Annalee kissed him, he liked the intimacy, but it didn’t change how he felt about her. He agreed to date her because he did love her and wanted to be the most important person in her life, even if he wasn’t in love with her. He had sex with her because he knew she wanted it, knew he was supposed to, and those first few years, he didn’t mind so much. He asked her to marry him because he’d always figured he would get married—didn’t want to be alone his whole life and what else was there?—and if there was any woman in the world he could like more than Al, he couldn’t imagine who she might be.
But his tolerance for sex started to wane a couple years into the marriage and even before he quit initiating altogether, she could tell something was off. She wasn’t a woman who needed a lot of romance, and Montgomery was pretty good about doing sweet things for her. But she could feel the absence of whatever romantic, erotic energy she was used to receiving from her lovers. That was the one thing he couldn’t fake. It didn’t help that eventually she had to ask her husband, a man in his late twenties and early thirties, for sex if she had any hope of getting laid on a regular basis. At some point, he realized that he couldn’t be the man she needed and couldn’t live with himself if he tried keeping her anyway.
“You know, I’ve thought about it a million times,” she says. “Asked myself if I should’ve tried harder, if I should’ve given it more time, if there was something else we could’ve done, some way we could’ve stayed together. And you know what I think?”
He doesn’t answer.
“Maybe we should’ve stayed friends all along. Maybe marrying you was a mistake. My mistake. And if we hadn’t done it, you’d still be here. I’d still have you in my life.”
He hears the regret, longing, and sadness in her voice, and it wrenches him. He quit trying to figure out how things could’ve gone differently between them a long time ago. Hearing her say that she shouldn’t have married him hurts more than he could describe, but he can’t argue with it. In the end, they arrived at the decision to end their marriage together. She didn’t need convincing, and he didn’t put up a fight.
“I don’t mean that I’d take it back,” Al says. “I’m just sorry that I hurt you and I’m sorry that I drove you away.”
“You didn’t,” says Montgomery. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Al. I made my choices. I wasn’t honest with you, and I should’ve been. Should’ve been honest with myself.”
They’re quiet for a minute, listening to each other’s silence. Montgomery scrubs the back of his head, looks toward the front of the saloon and doesn’t see anything move.
“You know I want you to be happy, right?” she says. “God, I think about you all the time. I think, somebody better come along and love him better than I could.”
He smiles, but his chest still feels stuck full of broken glass.
“That why you called?”
“Something like that,” he says. “I don’t want another wife, Al.”
She sniffs and sounds a little more light-hearted. “Well, that’s all right. It’s not about gettin’ married, Mud Pie. It’s about having somebody that makes you happy.”
Montgomery considers telling her about Sam, only for a moment, then decides it’s too soon. He checks his watch. “Guess I better get going. You probably want to go to bed.”
She pauses, then says, “You ever get sick of everyplace else, you come on home, okay?”
“Yeah,” he says, voice raspy.
It’s the kind of thing they both know probably won’t ever happen.
“Montgomery,” she says.
“Yeah, Al.”
“I miss you.”
He misses her. Every day. Every time he looks at the night sky, when he sees a peach pie that she didn’t bake, when he falls asleep alone in his bed and when he wakes up without a warm body next to him.
“Take care of yourself,” he says, and hangs up before he can find out whether or not either one of them is about to burst into tears.
~~*
They’re stretched out in the bed of Montgomery’s pick-up truck, parked in the middle of a field somewhere in West Skull Valley. The sky looks like they’re on the inside of a cotton candy maker, gauzy layers of purples, pinks, and blues swirling around them in the last half hour of dusk. The sun’s already disappeared into the mountains, and a few stars show themselves sharp and bright high above the horizon line. The grass is still a yellowed green this late in the fall, but the hackberry trees are bright red, only a few of them dotting the plains.
“You any closer to finding Troutman?” Montgomery asks, looking into the distance behind the truck.
“Not that I know of,” says Sam. “I’m not really supposed to be involved in hunting him down, on account of I was at the diner that night, but the sheriff and the other deputies keep me informed.”
“They afraid you’ll kill him if you get the chance?”
Montgomery smiles as he says it, like the idea’s ridiculous. Sam doesn’t know if he should feel offended or flattered.
“It’s protocol,” he says.
“Are you abiding by it on your own time?”
Sam glances at him. “I may have been out to Dewey a time or two since the robbery.”
“You talk to his wife?” Montgomery says.
Sam nods. Willa Rae Troutman is a blue-eyed brunette in her late twenties with the kind of face that blends in when she’s at the grocery store with no makeup on but could win her a modeling career if anybody ever saw her outside Dewey, Arizona. She had her and Joel’s baby on her hip when Sam knocked on her door, the boy no older than two with silky hair and pouty lips. She works part-time at Starbucks and ever since Joel disappeared after the robbery, she’s been trying to pi
ck up extra hours and limit how much money she takes out of the Troutman joint checking account, in case he never makes it back. She tried to put on a brave face, talking to Sam, but eventually, she broke down apologizing for what Joel did. Said she didn’t know what she was going to do.
“I’ve been mulling it over,” Sam says, looking out the back of the truck bed, past his shoes. “And I don’t think Troutman’s a bad guy. I think he’s somebody who made a bad decision that went sideways on him, and he doesn’t know how to get out of the hole.”
“And again, I’m telling you that plenty of people got money troubles, but most of ‘em don’t go holdin’ up businesses at gunpoint, truckin’ with would-be killers.”
“Who’s to say Troutman ever would’ve robbed anyone, without Ed Decker involved? If you ask me, Decker was the mastermind. Without him, Troutman wouldn’t have had the stones to rob the diner. And if you remember, he was the one who wanted to take the money and go without hurting anybody. Decker was the dangerous one. That’s why he’s dead.”
Montgomery doesn’t reply, and they lapse into silence again. They can hear pinyon jays singing in the distance. Eventually, Montgomery lights up a cigarette.
“Can I ask you a personal question?” Sam says.
Montgomery glances at him. “Yeah.”
“Why don’t you have any other friends around here?”
“Who says I don’t?”
Sam looks at him. “Do you?”
Montgomery pauses. “No.”
“Why not?”
Montgomery blows a stream of smoke out his mouth and taps his cigarette over the side of the truck bed. “I told you, people wear on me. It’s enough to work with them all day, five days a week, and that’s when talk’s at a minimum.”
Sam thinks about it, then says, “Am I wearing on you yet?”
Lone Star on a Cowboy Heart Page 5