Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Good riddance, I tell myself the following day. But I should have known better.

It’s noon now, the sky like an inverted blue ceramic bowl. I hear the sputtering engine of an airplane above the house, then see a shadow rippling across the backyard and the barn and the pasture. Out on the back steps, I see a red-white-and-blue two-seater biplane that banks violently and almost collides with the mountain. The pilot straightens out and comes back toward the pasture but is losing altitude, gunning the engine, the wings tilting. He and the figure in the rear seat are wearing goggles and leather aviator helmets and white scarfs trailing from their necks. The horses are panicked and running from one end of the pasture to the other. The plane scrapes the top of a ponderosa, dips suddenly, and bounces off the ground once, then twice, ripping off one side of the wings on a tree and crashing through a wire fence before coming to a stop, the propeller stubbed into the dirt, the tail painted with the Stars and Stripes, sticking up in the air.

The pilot unstraps himself and drops to the ground and pulls off his goggles.

Guess who? “You got to let me borrow your shitter this time,” he says, unbuttoning his overalls and shoving them down his hips. “I dumped a whole load in my jockeys.” He steps out of his overalls one leg at a time. “Come look if you don’t believe me.”

“I accept your word, Mr. Kale,” I reply.

Jack Wetzel gets out of his seat and walks toward me, pulling off his goggles. “Sorry we busted your back fence, Mr. B. I’ll round up the horses.”

“No, you won’t,” I said.

“Sir?”

“You have some explaining to do, Jack.”

“Don’t be fussing at him, Mr. Broussard,” Kale says. “The boy’s been doing the best he can.”

“You keep your own counsel, Kale,” I say. “I’ve had it with y’all. There’s a hose in the backyard. But that’s as far on my property as you’re going to get.”

Kale picks up his overalls, his legs bare, his jockey underwear, as he said, soiled. “You’re a Holland, all right,” he says. “Cain’t wait to clear the holster.”

“What are you after, Kale? Why do you keep coming around?”

“Business. Goodwill. Montana is like Colorado was seventy-five years ago. There’s a fortune to be made.”

“I wouldn’t do business with you if you had a retroactive patent on the wheel. That said, get on your cell phone and bring a flatbed and a crew out here and get this junk out of my pasture. I’ll fix the fence myself.”

“I was gonna ask you to have dinner with me and Sister Ginny.”

“Are you serious?”

“You he’ped her boy. She feels obliged.”

“Her boy?”

“That’s right. Jack is her son. You brought a family back together.”

“Jack and his brother told me they didn’t know her.”

“Well, now you know,” he says.

“Is that true, Jack?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I don’t care if y’all are lying or not,” I reply. “I wish you the best of everything, Jack. One last note: Get away from Kale. He’s evil from his hairline to the balls of his feet.”

I start to walk away.

“That’s all you gonna say, Mr. Broussard?” Jack asks.

“You remember what Shane said to Joey in the movie last night? ‘You have to be strong and straight.’ ”

“We left before the ending,” he says.

“Why?” I ask.

Jack looks silently at Kale.

“We left because that movie stinks,” Kale says. “With his shirt off, Alan Ladd looks like a Hollywood faggot.”

I walk down the pasture and step through a rail fence and go inside the tack room and put together a half-dozen leads and halters and begin rounding up my horses. I guess my attitude toward Jack seems unforgiving. Secretly, I want him to follow me to the tack room, to denounce Kale, to apologize for the lies he has told me, or maybe to ask questions about George Stevens’s great film. But there are times when the lights of pity and charity have no influence upon evil, and we have to let it go for what it is.

After I catch up the horses and do a temporary repair on the fence with a battery-powered corral kit, I call Ruby and ask her to meet me for a Mexican dinner at Fiesta en Jalisco on Brooks. But the last words of Shane and Joey still echo in my head. I wish I had been kinder to Jack. I look out the back door at the place on the grass where Kale washed himself. The hose is neatly coiled and detached from the faucet so it won’t freeze up at night and break a pipe inside the wall. Jimmie Kale would not have those kinds of concerns.

Just before I Leave to join Ruby, I look through the living room window and see Fannie Mae idly throwing rocks in the river. Before I can go outside, she appears beside me, a smooth rectangular stone in her hand.

“Trying to give me a coronary?” I say.

Here, feel this.

I touch the stone, then jerk my hand away. “It’s hot,” I say.

It’s part of a tomahawk. See the groove?

“Why is it hot?”

It’s from the massacre. It’s a sign, Pops. Our war is with Eugene Baker. You’ve got the blues over this Wetzel kid. He’ll take you down with the ship.

She walks to the gun cabinet, her reflection wobbling in the glass. I join her reflection and look at her looking at me. You might have to do things you don’t want to, she says.

“With guns?”

Yep.

“Can you get me out of this?

There’s a lot of worry on this side of the veil, Pops. The neocolonial fuckheads who’ve been running things since the Spanish-American War are trying to turn the Big Blue Marble into a necropolis.

“Don’t use that kind of language. What’s the matter with you?”

Listen to the dead. I want to stay with you, but I’ve been with you extra-long, or at least that’s what the others are saying.

“Who are the others?”

People who died before their parents. Losing a child is the worst thing that can happen to a human being. That’s why we’re allowed to stay with you for a while. But only for a while. I’ve used up my extensions.

“I don’t know if I’m going to make it without you. I’ve been taking Prozac.”

Is it working?

“If you’re crazy, how can you tell when you’re well? Did Baker kill the waitresses or Clayton Wetzel?”

Hard to say. But that’s not the issue. Your enemies know your weakness, Pops. That’s not good.

“What is my weakness?”

You believe in your fellow man.

Her reflection disappears from the glass. But that’s not what bothers me. My reflection disappears also.

I can’t concentrate at dinner with Ruby. “What’s the matter?” she asks.

I have told her many times about my relationship with Fannie Mae. Oddly, I don’t know if she is convinced of its reality, perhaps because it pales in comparison to the panoramic display of historical violence and misery sealed inside her cellar.

“I have a bad feeling,” I say. “It’s like an ulcer or a cancer in the stomach. It dries out my mouth and takes away my breath, and then I feel a piece of wire tightening itself around my head, cutting off the blood to my brain.”

Ruby doesn’t speak. Outside, the sky is black, the street streaked with rain and the lights of cars. “It’s a foolish way to be,” I say. “But that’s the way I felt when I experienced my first combat. I couldn’t catch my breath. I felt like my skin was coming off. My teeth were chattering.”

“You want to go?” she says.

“No.”

“Can I do something?”

“The real problem is a warning given me by my daughter.”

“That someone is going to hurt you?”

“No, the real problem is I may have to kill somebody.” My hands are clenching and opening on top of the table. I can feel the waitstaff and people in the other booths looking in our direction. “My father was furious when I joined the army. He swore no one in our family would ever take a human life again.”

“Then take no more,” she says.

I stare at her blankly, then pinch my mouth with my hand and nod as though I have either said too much or said something shameful. “Yes, that’s the answer, isn’t it? I said the same thing to Jack Wetzel. You can’t undo a killing. And you can’t live with it, either.”

There’s sadness in her eyes. I completely forgot she shot and killed the rapist and murderer of two children. There was no mistake about her intention, either; she capped him four or five times from a short distance.

I try to change the subject. “Did you know A. B. Guthrie?”

“Who?”

“Bud Guthrie. He wrote the adaptation of Shane. He lived up in Choteau.”

“No, I didn’t know him.”

“He was a great writer,” I say. “The Way West and The Big Sky are two of the best novels in American literature. Academics will forgive any sin except commercial success. Over a twenty-seven-year period I taught in four universities and one community college and never heard his name mentioned.”

She looks wanly out the window at the car lights in the rain; she has probably gone to a place inside her head for the rest of the evening. It’s my fault. Participating in the mortality of others leaves a stain you don’t easily rinse from your soul. That’s why Fannie Mae advised me to listen to the dead. They have far more wisdom than the living.

But there is a macabre element in this. In one way or another, many of us have contributed to the membership of the dead. I have. So has Ruby. So have Jack Wetzel and John Culpepper and Ginny Stokes and perhaps Jeremiah McNally. So has the drunk speeding through an intersection, never seeing the crash in his rearview mirror. So do the right-to-life supporters who approve of the bombing of innocent civilians in foreign countries, and so do the politicians who love wars but never go to them.

I quit hunting when I realized why I did it. I was the giver of death rather than its recipient. Now I feel at peace with those whose voices are stopped with dust, whose anger has been taken from them, who have silently forgiven us for committing a theft that is unforgivable, just as Shane said. But the sword is not easily beaten into a plowshare. It’s a great challenge and not easily borne. Hence the Holland curse. We wrote our history in blood.

Five days later I receive a phone call from John Culpepper. “I don’t want to pester you, Mr. Broussard, but my boy went off three days ago, and I thought you might know where he’s at.”

“No, sir, I’m afraid I don’t.”

“I think he went off with the Wetzel boy. You ain’t seen him?”

“Last week.”

“He didn’t say nothing about Leigh?”

“No, sir.”

“Nine bikers at Sister Ginny’s church got arrested for transporting meth. They think I’m the one snitched.”

“I don’t want to get involved in this, Mr. Culpepper.”

“This is all happening because of the little boy I killed. The Bible says it. The sin is unto the seventh generation.”

“That’s a symbolic statement, sir.”

“I’m gonna get whoever give my boy the LSD. That was the sweetest boy in the world till them goddamn people come here with their dope and their homosexual marriages and all the rest of it.”

How do you address a mindset like this? You don’t. I try to console myself. “Them goddamn people” is a collective term, so maybe he won’t single out Jack Wetzel. But my self-consolation is of little value. I fear for Jack’s life.

“How about we have a cold drink on my veranda, Mr. Culpepper?”

“It’s all coming to an end.”

“What’s coming to an end?”

“Everything. The world. It’s in the Bible.”

“Sir, don’t do this.”

The line goes dead.

That evening the lead story on the local six o’clock news is the attempted suicide and arrest of Jeremiah McNally. The charge is homicide. The camera shows two plainclothes detectives walking him from his apartment to an unmarked car, an overcoat draped over the handcuffs on his wrists. His face is unshaved, as though half of it is patinaed with metal filings. Neighbors called 911 when they smelled gas leaking around the newspaper he had wadded under his apartment door. I start to turn off the TV but stop when I see a face in the crowd I would not expect to be there.

I have finally bought a smartphone, and I call Ruby’s cell phone. She answers in her cruiser. The connection is bad, and she keeps fading in and out. “Where are you?” I say.

“North of Evaro Hill. By the casino. The sky’s black. We’ve got a mean one coming.”

“McNally was on the evening news. He’s under arrest for the murder of the waitress. It looks like he tried to kill himself.”

“How?”

“He turned on the oven.”

“He went out on a gurney?”

“He walked out in cuffs.”

“When suicides pull the plug, they pull the plug.”

“You’re not a McNally fan?”

“I think he’s a fraud.”

“Ray Bronson was in the crowd.”

The connection is breaking up again. “Repeat,” she says.

“Your ex, Ray Bronson, was there. Why would he be there?”

“Ray doesn’t do anything that isn’t about Ray. What’s your twenty?”

“I’m home.”

“We’ve got some spot fires breaking out below Lolo Peak. I may see you later. You okay?”

“Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“It’s like you said at Fiesta: I think the shit is about to hit the fan. But I don’t know why. How’s the weather at your place?”

“Quiet.”

“Get ready. The wind is ripping up trees along the Jocko. Gotta go. Out.”