Lone Creek

13

Main Street in Helena was also known as Last Chance Gulch, the place where some on-the-ropes miners in the 1860s had discovered the gold that put this place on the map. It was the city's prime downtown business strip, but when I was growing up, it had had several bars where you could get your ass kicked just for walking in. I'd seen that happen more than once, along with men getting thrown out through doors or lying unconscious on the sidewalk in front. Sometimes in the mornings there'd be bloodstains in the snow. Those were people who'd come up in hard times, tough and proud and with a lot of pent-up emotion, including anger. The bar life was one of the few outlets.

Most of those places were gone now. The roughest ones, the Indian bars at the south end, had been torn down to make way for a pedestrian mall. About the closest thing left was O'Toole's-small, dark as a cellar even on bright afternoons, and thick with cigarette smoke that had started building up generations ago. Tonight it was crowded and noisy. When I walked in, I could hear the jukebox playing, but it was impossible to tell what.

I'd hoped that Madbird would be here and he was, standing at the far end of the bar. In a place like O'Toole's, there was always the chance of a fist or bottle coming at you, and it paid to stay on your feet. I made my way over to him, saying hello to a couple of people I knew, trying to act like everything was the same as ever. By the time I got there, he had frosty cans of Pabst and shots of Makers Mark bourbon waiting.

His nostrils widened in a snort as he looked me over.

"You smell like you been rolling around in a ashtray," he said, in a gravelly voice that was like no other I'd ever heard.

I drank down my shot and signaled Denise, the bartender, for refills.

"Deep shit is more like it," I said. "I've got trouble, Madbird."

He lifted his chin in acknowledgment. Deep shit and trouble came as no surprise to him.

He had the kind of harsh powerful face and thick black hair I'd seen in photos of old-time chiefs and braves, and an agile, compactly muscled build like a natural halfback. His grandmother had been born in an Indian camp in Heart Butte, northern Montana, in 1910. His family name was actually Mag-dah-kee, which meant "Bird of Prey." Nobody ever used his first name, Robert. One time when we'd been drinking seriously, he'd let it out that he'd had a favorite stepbrother Robert who had died young, and that the name had died with him.

Madbird had grown up near his grandmother's birthplace on what was now the Blackfeet Reservation, legendary for its toughness. I remembered often that when I was eighteen I'd gone away to college in California, but at that same age, he'd been a Marine forward observer in Vietnam.

The two of us had first worked together more than twenty years ago, and steadily for the past nine. He was an ace electrician and carpenter, handling the job in the same cool quick way as everything else. While other guys were standing around talking about what to do, Madbird was getting it done. I'd come to depend on him heavily in a lot of ways. I'd never been quite sure why he liked me, but I had the feeling it was largely because I didn't make any sense to him.

"I was about to go get some pussy, but there ain't any rush," he said. "What's the deal?"

He gazed straight ahead while I gave him a low-voiced, two-minute version of what had happened. When I finished, he shook his head, once.

"I never heard of nothing like with them horses," he said.

"I'm still having a hard time believing it, but I know what I saw."

He didn't move again or change expression for another minute or so, just kept staring at the mirror behind the bar. You couldn't see much of it because of stacked-up liquor bottles, and what you could see was mostly a murky kaleidoscope of talking heads and gesturing hands behind us. But Madbird's face was in the foreground, looking like a chunk of Mount Rushmore.

"You gonna take on Balcomb?" he finally said.

"I'm hoping I can make him back off. I want to go out there and get some photos of those carcasses. But if I get caught on the property, I'm more fucked than ever."

He nodded slowly. "So you could use a ride. Say, in a electrician's van, so you could hide in back if somebody come along."

"I guess that occurred to me."

He raised his beer and drained it. "Funny thing-I just remembered I left my Hole Hawg at the job, and I'm gonna need it tomorrow."

I exhaled with relief. The ranch was probably dead as a tomb right now, but if we did run into somebody, he had an excuse for being there.

Then there was the deeper truth-I wanted him with me, and he knew it.

"You sure?" I said.

"Hell, yeah. My old lady's probably still out with her girlfriends anyway. But you got to buy the beer."

"Denise, how about a sixer to go," I called to her, dropping a ten on the bar.

Madbird scooped up his change and tossed out another ten.

"Make it two," he said. "Why fuck around?"

When we walked to where Madbird was parked, the evening chill was more noticeable, maybe because of the body heat inside the bar. His van was of about the same vintage as my pickup, one of the four-wheel-drive models Ford had made in the early 1970s. It was packed with emergency equipment and supplies, and saturated with the smell that men in this line of work came to savor: oily tools and musty clothes and the building materials that kept this world running. There was even a foam pad-and a couple of sleeping bags on the floor that I could burrow into if I had to take a dive. I wouldn't be proud of it, but I'd rather live with that than add a trespassing bust to the mix.

We drove out of town past Fort Harrison, angling northwest toward the Rockies' foothills. The moon was on the wax, hanging over the high peaks of the divide. This was another drive that I usually really enjoyed.

"That little prick Kirk come on to me in the bar the other night, trying to pal up," Madbird said. "I flicked my finger crost his ear." He snapped his forefinger off his thumb against the metal dash hard enough to make it ring. "That was the end of that shit."

"You better watch it. You can bet he'll be looking for an excuse to take you out, too."

Madbird gave me a fierce grin that I'd come to know well, and that I could never help associating with scalping.

"He don't have to look far. You ain't the only one been helping himself to something that don't exactly belong to him."

I wasn't entirely surprised. "Yeah? What?"

"You know that Tessa?"

"Sure, sort of." Tessa was Doug Wills's wife-a rangy, unhappy-looking bleached blond stuck living in a trailer out in the middle of nowhere, with a couple of young kids. I'd been pulled off our job one time to go there and fix a jammed bathroom door. The floor had seemed carpeted with dirty diapers and National Enquirers.

"Every so often she gets somebody to sit them kids, and I take her for a drive," Madbird said. "She got some rose-colored panties she hangs out in the wash. That's the signal."

I was surprised now. That explained why those sleeping bags were spread out into a bed.

"Christ on a bike," I said. "I've been passing by her trailer every day myself. I've even seen those panties hanging on the line. I didn't know that was any kind of signal."

"That's 'cause you ain't a Indian. You don't know how to read the trail."

"I guess I could use some lessons."

"You just got one."

"If you're so fucking smart, how come you're letting yourself get dragged into this?"

"Hey, at least I ain't dumb enough to drag in a drunk Indian."

I took the bait, and said the sort of thing you'd better not say unless you'd spent a few thousand hours sweating together.

"I didn't know there was any other kind."

He rumbled with deep gut laughter and answered me with his hands in sign language, fingers flexing and weaving like snakes. I caught the wheel of the veering van and steered it back onto the road.

"What's that mean?" I said.

"Your squaw give lousy head."

We cracked fresh beers, and I realized I was feeling a little better.