by S. M. Hulse
“Paint some lightning bolts on the horses’ legs,” One Bear advised me once. “Some feathers in their manes. A circle around one eye. Hell, paint a star on some horse’s butt and tell the customers it’s so it runs with all the speed of a shooting star.”
“I don’t suppose that last one’s authentic?”
He laughed. “White people love all that Dances with Wolves shit.”
I figured he’d given me permission, so I painted lightning bolts and feathers and circles (no stars). The Fuel Stop paintings don’t feel any more disingenuous than my others, with their clear skies and well-groomed wildlife. I usually sell two or three a month, enough to pay for paint and help with groceries.
I grab a filthy feather duster and start cleaning the coin banks. They aren’t particularly dusty. I glance outside. One of the reporters is gone. The other meets my eyes and I look away. I finish the coin banks and move on to the shot glasses. I dust and listen to the fourth track of the country compilation that plays over the tinny-sounding speakers on a loop all day every day and do my best not to think. Yesterday’s events still lie beyond a veil of surrealism, the hardest edges of knowledge blunted by shock. There’s a reckoning ahead, though, and not far off. I can feel the weight of it settling near my heart and smoldering there, ready to burn.
“I didn’t expect to see you today, Jo.”
One Bear stands at the end of the aisle, arms crossed.
“I’m on the schedule.” He glances away and doesn’t say anything more. I went to school with his son. The afternoon before my first winter formal, Samuel sat me down and told me it was important I hang out only with my own kind of people, did I understand? I said yes. I thought he meant people who lived outside town and occasionally ate squirrel; only later did I realize he was warning me not to dance with Reggie One Bear.
Most of the people in Prospect pretend not to remember Samuel’s tattoo. Pretend not to notice he never wears short sleeves. One Bear, I think, remembers. One Bear notices. At the very least he must have realized that Samuel never comes into this store, never hands One Bear any of his money. But he’s also never held it against me, never lumped me in with my brother.
The door chime sounds, and both of us look up. Not a reporter—not one I recognize, anyway—but not a local, either. The man starts perusing the jerky offerings. One Bear watches him a few seconds more, then glances at the reporter still loitering in the parking lot. “Um.” He picks up a Montana-branded lighter, lights it. Snaps the lid shut on the flame. “I could use another set of eyes on the books.” He gestures toward the papers he’s been marking. “Help me out?” I hesitate, and he adds, “Just for today.”
I want to tell him not to make promises he can’t keep, but instead I say sure and follow him into the back room. The books notably do not need another set of eyes. If I were in my boss’s position, I’d make a couple mistakes on purpose, just to bolster the charade, but it apparently hasn’t occurred to him to do so. I spend the rest of my shift at the gray table in the gray room, trying not to look at the newspaper with my brother’s face on it and wondering how long it will be before One Bear removes my paintings from the gift shop and what excuse he will give me when he does.
* * *
That evening, there’s a knock at the door just as I’m finishing dinner. To call it “dinner” is generous; I can muster neither the energy nor the enthusiasm for cooking, so I’ve poured cereal into a bowl, only to remember there’s no milk. I eat it dry. Samuel told me that after our mother’s death, the women of Prospect supplied him with food for weeks. No one has brought me anything now; apparently there is no casserole that says “Sorry your brother’s a terrorist.” The word—terrorist—still stings, but it no longer shocks the way it did that first day. The knock repeats, and I peer through the lower peephole Samuel drilled in the door. Devin, the FBI man. Same suit, different tie. I open the door and go out onto the porch.
Devin shows no surprise at my failure to invite him in. “I hear you don’t want to talk to me.” He glances around, presumably for a chair, and, finding none, leans against the porch railing. “Apparently you don’t … ‘recognize my authority,’ I think it was?”
It sounds foolish when he says it aloud, and I feel heat in my face. It never sounds foolish when Samuel says things like that—misguided, certainly; radical, perhaps—but never foolish. I’m surprised Hawkins used that line after all. I wish he hadn’t; I don’t want to pretend to believe it now. “You can hardly blame me for not wanting to talk to you.”
Devin makes no indication of either agreement or disagreement. “I want your help finding your brother,” he says. “If you’re more willing to give me that help with Sheriff Hawkins as intermediary, I’m not necessarily opposed to the idea. He knows the area; he knows you. I don’t discount that.” My gut tightens; I didn’t propose Hawkins as go-between in order to aid Devin. “I am not, however, going to disappear, and you need to accept that.” I say nothing, and Devin continues speaking, though only after a pause long enough to make me uncomfortable. “I spent most of the night reading the file we pulled together on Samuel.”
It’s a gentle evening. Still a pale gold glow above the ragged mountain horizon to the west, and though the forms of the aspens beside the creek have faded into the dusk, I hear their leaves fluttering against one another in the breeze like rustling paper. Something else I’ll miss.
“Samuel’s what we call a lone wolf,” Devin says. “He’s not acting as part of any organized group, not inspired by any one person or entity. He’s tried out plenty of movements, but never seemed to find one he liked enough to stick with, though he appears to have adopted a handful of beliefs from several.”
“You’re profiling him.” It should bother me—it does, because it reduces him to what he did yesterday—but I’m curious, too. I want to know if Devin will be able to explain the things about my brother I have never understood: Why has he tried so hard to believe in philosophies I could see through even as a teenager? Why has he so often sought meaning in anger and hate?
Devin continues as though I haven’t spoken. “He has no social media presence. He occasionally posted on a handful of extremist message boards, but by the skewed standards of those communities, the opinions he expressed were downright moderate. He enjoys pointing out the flaws in others’ ideologies. An intelligent man.” It’s a transparent attempt at flattery; I ignore it. “Most of the information about him comes from records kept after the death of your mother”—Devin lets his eyes fall from mine then, just for the briefest moment—“and from recent state court documents.” He glances toward the front door. “I’m sorry about your house.”
“I doubt that,” I say. “You work for the folks razing it.” Not strictly true. The state of Montana is razing it, not the feds. But, as Samuel would say, Both stomp on their citizenry.
“Eminent domain is enshrined in the federal and state constitutions,” Devin says. He presses his lips together then, almost a grimace, and I wonder if the words were automatic, if he regrets them. If I’ve seen Devin make a mistake.
“Yes,” I say, “I did learn that during my crash course in legal ways your government can screw you over.”
Devin looks at me closely, as though reconsidering whether I share Samuel’s views. There’s something sharp in his gaze, and I want to look away but don’t. “After this, talk to Hawkins,” he says finally. “You’ll still hear from me—and I expect you to talk to me when you do—but if I can go through him, I will.”
I can’t bring myself to thank him. It should feel like a victory. But I never really expected Devin to agree to my proposal, and now that he has, I’m already wondering why. Is it an olive branch? A kindness? A trick?
“I actually came tonight to tell you something else.”
I cross my arms, hope I look skeptical rather than apprehensive. I can’t shake the hunch that Devin can read my thoughts, or at least guess their tenor.
“I don’t think your brother meant to hurt anyon
e.” Devin says it plainly. “I think he detonated that bomb on a Sunday because he knew the courthouse would be empty. I think he placed it at the south facade in part because it was shielded from Main Street and he wouldn’t be seen, but also because the stores across Lincoln Street were closed Sunday mornings. I think he had no idea a church had moved in the week before.”
Yes, I want to say. Yes, you see it, too. Amid all the other evidence—the damning photographs and the eyewitness reports and whatever was hauled out of the house in FBI boxes—are these small truths. And here is proof I haven’t imagined them. It isn’t an excuse. It doesn’t make the bomb okay. But it does mean something that he intended to destroy stone, not flesh. Maybe it doesn’t matter to the law, but it matters to me. And I am not the only one who knows.
I don’t let Devin know how relieved I am, how grateful, though I have to push away a surprisingly strong impulse to confess my own ignorance and hurt, to offer up Samuel’s history to this man who seems to think he might make sense of it. I remind myself that Samuel would not trust Devin, would not want me to trust Devin. I channel my brother’s wariness, his silence. Secrecy is safer; he taught me that. I clear my throat, pitch my voice carefully. What I mean to say is something like, Thank you for telling me, and good night. What I say instead is, “Emily.”
Devin looks at me. Waits. I am suddenly angry with him again. He has to know what I mean; he doesn’t need to make me say it. “How is she?”
Devin pushes away from the porch railing, straightens. He adjusts the knot of his tie, smooths a palm down the front of his coat. I’m afraid he’s going to refuse to answer, tell me it’s none of my business. And it isn’t, really, but at the same time I feel I must know. I need to know, need Emily to be okay, need my brother to not be guilty of anything more. “She hasn’t regained consciousness,” Devin tells me. “They say it could go either way.”
* * *
I’m having nightmares, Jo. Only right, I suppose. I even expected it, was willing to bear it as a consequence of what had to be done, but I thought the nightmares would be about the explosion, the aftermath. Instead, I dream about you.
I dream about that night, but not about Mom, and not even about the hallway, but about afterward, going into Mom’s room and opening the closet door and finding you there. My dream starts when I see you huddled in the corner. Your eyes are squeezed shut, and tear tracks streak your face. There’s not much blood. I don’t even see it at first, and for a second I feel this tiny spark of relief through the rage and grief. But then I notice the light coming through the little hole in the back wall, and I remember hearing you scream, and I thought I was scared before but now I’m scared, now I know what it is to be scared. None of this should have happened, none of it, but especially not this. I know I must look frightening, so I wipe my palms across my face and they come away red, and I kneel down and try to be calm and pray in my head, just one word over and over: please. Please please please. I say your name. You open your eyes. I wake up.
I don’t have to guess at the meaning of these dreams. I know what you looked like, Jo. The girl from the church is a mystery.
* * *
Tuesday I listen to the radio: they’ve found the truck I saw in the photograph; it had been stolen from a parking lot in Elk Fork, abandoned across town. I wash the dishes. Go to work: the back room again, more meaningless paperwork. Return home and stare at the moving boxes in the living room. Leave them empty. Thirty-five days left.
Hawkins read my statement for the reporters the afternoon before, and it made the evening news. So, he warned me, had the photo I’d seen part of in the Chronicle, but this time in its uncropped state, me beside my brother. Afterward the number of vehicles parked outside the gate fell by half.
I cook an early dinner. Nothing fancy, just a fried egg sandwich. I eat it and remember they’re Samuel’s favorite, not mine. Afterward I go to the barn to feed Lockjaw, and I would like to linger there. My mule treats me no differently, looks at me with the same patient expression she always wears. She knows nothing about eminent domain, extremist politics, explosives. Samuel is the one who feeds her carrots from the flat of his hand; I am the one who tosses her hay and rides her into the hills.
I leave for Elk Fork in late afternoon. The deputy opens the gate for me again, and this time no cars follow when I turn onto the highway. Just south of town I pass the turnoff for Split Creek, where Samuel has spent the last decade working at the sawmill. (He comes home every day carrying with him the piercing scent of freshly slaughtered timber; it is simultaneously comforting and violent and will always remind me of my brother.) Then the old road that connects the highway east of the mountains to this one, the road that crumbled in a mudslide two years ago after a brutal wildfire season and a wet winter, that will not be repaired, will instead be replaced by the new road soon to pass through what is now my living room, because it has been determined by people who do not live here that it is more practical, more useful, more beneficial to pave the old, overgrown access lanes that cross the low saddle at the northern edge of Eden Mine, just beyond my home.
I continue south. The highway is mostly empty, the curves familiar. I wish they weren’t, wish I had to work harder to focus on the drive. Samuel, too, might be driving now. He could have gone anywhere once he realized his name had been attached to the bombing. Probably not Wyoming, but anywhere else. Perhaps to the Bakken oil fields, where he could try to lose himself in the waning boomtowns, or farther into the Dakotas, where there’s plenty of space to disappear into. Canada, even; there are ways to get there that don’t involve official border crossings. Or maybe he hasn’t gone so far. I hit play on my car’s CD player, spend the next couple hours doing my best to concentrate on the music and nothing else.
Elk Fork sits beside the interstate in the center of a round valley ringed by low, barefaced mountains; every winter it fills with woodstove smoke, every summer with wildfire smoke. Perhaps because I so often see them veiled, the mountains here seem less distinct than those in Prospect, impressionistic rather than solid. I reach the city just as the sun is beginning to sink toward the western slopes, exit near the center of town and find Lincoln Street still closed to traffic. I pull to the curb just beyond the blocked intersection, hope I look like just another rubbernecker. I peer past the oaks lining the sidewalk and see reams of caution tape, orange plastic barriers, a hastily erected chain-link panel fence into which someone has tucked a tiny American flag. It trembles in the wind.
Samuel used to talk a lot about America, about the Constitution. I agreed with what he said then: that the most important thing a government could do was leave its citizens alone, that people in suits on the other side of the country couldn’t be expected to know what it was like to live in a tiny mountain mining town and shouldn’t pretend to, that regular folks were always meant to hold the real power. Those ideas didn’t sound much different from the ones I still hear around town, or on the radio—from the ones I still hold myself—and I can’t quite pinpoint when they became something more sinister.
I can see very little of the courthouse itself from this angle, and the fading light doesn’t help. I’ve been here so recently for the hearing that my mind sees what my eyes cannot. Samuel placed the bomb outside the south facade; the radio hasn’t said where, exactly, but I imagine it tucked beside the stone staircase leading to the heavy double doors. On the other side of the thick walls: parquet flooring that clacks beneath women’s heels, long benches crowded with people in department store suits, brass-framed signs posted at hallway crossings. The courtroom in which we lost the house.
They found where he built the bomb. Hawkins told me. A storage unit in Split Creek. I’m relieved to know he didn’t build it in our home, or the barn, but the more details I learn, the harder it is to picture. The transition from thought to action. The many chances to change his mind, ignored. The time it must have taken, and the effort to keep it secret.
I think again of the shattering glass. The sound,
the dust, the debris. The blood.
As I pull back into traffic, I force myself to glance across Lincoln Street, but the storefronts are indistinguishable from one another, a line of shattered windows boarded up with plywood. No way to know which had been the church.
* * *
The prayer service is being held in an elementary school a few blocks away. The lot is already full when I arrive, but I find a handicapped spot near the school’s front entrance. I sit behind the wheel for ten minutes, watching people walk inside. Most are dressed casually, but a few wear more formal clothes, some in colors dark enough to suit a funeral. When the trickle through the doors has slowed to almost nothing, I pull my chair from the backseat, reassemble it, and transfer into it. I rearrange my skirt, touch my hair to make sure it’s still tightly braided.
Inside, I roll slowly toward the auditorium. I pass a trophy case filled with prizes lauding the Sacajawea Hawks, a sagging butcher paper banner promoting a schoolwide read-a-thon, a poster advertising the upcoming spring field day. Outside one classroom rows of student papers are taped to the wall at elementary school student height. I stop beside them: identical worksheets outlining the process of photosynthesis. Bold arrows arc around each paper, pointing from the sun to the leaves of an apple tree and back toward the sky. Some of the papers show careful attention to detail, crayon colors precisely contained within black outlines. Others are sloppier, with bare white patches and printed lettering that gets bigger or smaller toward the end of each word. One child has colored the sun purple. I move on, careful not to look at the names on the papers.
The lingering scent of tater tots and canned green beans betrays the auditorium’s double duty as cafeteria. There are more people than I expected—several hundred, surely far more than are affiliated with a church that meets in a small retail space—and all are standing, eyes on the screen above the stage, where the lyrics of a hymn are projected four lines at a time. I quietly make my way to the rear corner of the room, take a place behind the last row of chairs. I glance around one more time, checking that no one has turned in their seats, noticed me. Tell myself I’m not hiding, that this is the easiest place to park my chair.