Lone Creek

49

I kept on driving after that, like a ghost haunting this land where I'd once lived-like I'd felt on the night of my last ring fight up at Rocky Boy all those years ago, sensing that I was unreal to the Indians. Except now it seemed turned around, with Madbird my only point of contact.

Little memory bytes kept coming all along the way, combining into an ongoing ache. When the first hints of dawn thinned the darkness, I was getting toward Lewistown, where my carpenter buddy Emil had grown up. Several summers ago, he'd gotten us a job framing a house in the nearby hills, a nice little gig except that you had to shit out in the brush and there were a lot of rattlesnakes living in that. It was funny, sort of.

I cut south through Judith Gap to Harlowton, then west again, following the Musselshell and the abandoned Milwaukee Road tracks. Twodot was the next town along the way, a place that lived up to its name. There wasn't much there but the Twodot Bar, where my boxing partner Charlie and I had stopped for a beer one time on our way home from Billings. He and a rancher's daughter fell in love, and I'd ended up hanging around drinking and playing pool for two days before they fell out again.

A few miles ahead, the other side of Deep Creek Canyon, I could see the peaks of Mounts Edith and Baldy. I'd taken Sarah Lynn camping up there early on in our courtship, a long hike to a pristine, deserted little lake. There we had shyly and clumsily lost our virginity to each other.

I'd sure been a sweetheart to her through all this.

The small road I was on dead-ended in a tee intersection with Highway 89. I put on my right turn signal, stopped at the stop sign, and carefully looked both ways. The vista was empty-no vehicles, no people, nothing moving but some cattle in a distant meadow.

But when I let out the clutch, my hands didn't turn the steering wheel. I just drove straight across the highway, through the dead end and into the grassy field beyond, until the truck's front wheels dropped into the roadside ditch and it lurched to a stop.

I had to put it into four-wheel drive to get out of there, but I managed to do it before anybody came along and saw me. I backtracked a mile or so along the Musselshell and found a dirt spur road that led down to an old railroad trestle.

Then I pulled the truck behind its shelter and crashed in a sleep of exhaustion and defeat.