Gallatin Canyon

Old Friends

John Briggs was made aware of the fact that some sort of problem existed for his friend and former schoolmate Erik Faucher by sheer coincidence. A request for news came from the class secretary, Everett Hoyt, who had in the thirty years since they’d graduated from Yale hardly set foot out of New Haven. With ancestors buried at the old Center Church in spitting distance of both the regicide Dixwell and Benedict Arnold’s wife, Hoyt was paralyzed by a sense of generational inertia. It was said that if he hadn’t got into Yale, he would not have gone to college at all but would have remained at home, waiting to bury his parents. Now, in place of any real social life, he edited the newsletter, often accompanying his requests with small indiscretions delivered with a certain giddiness — which he called Entre News— concerning marital failure or business malfeasance, and they almost never made it into the alumni letter.

Hoyt phoned John Briggs at his summer home, in Montana, on a nondescript piece of prairie inherited from a farmer uncle, and, while pretending to hunt up class news, insinuated that Erik Faucher, having embezzled a fortune from a bank in Boston, had gone into hiding.

“I have heard through private sources that our class scofflaw is now headed your way.”

Briggs waited for the giggle to subside. “I certainly hope so,” he snapped. “I’ve missed Erik.” But he began to worry that Erik might actually come.

“See what you can do,” Hoyt sang.

“I don’t understand that remark, Everett.”

“Perhaps it will come to you.”

“I’ll let you know if it does.”

Faucher’s ex-wife, Carol, called around five in the morning, having declined to account for the time change. “How very nice to hear your voice,” said Briggs, producing a cold laugh from Carol. “How are you?”

“I’m calling about Erik. He has not been behaving sensibly at all, some very odd things to say the least.”

Briggs absorbed this in silence. He knew if he said anything at all, he’d have to stand up for Faucher, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to.

“Carol, you’ve been divorced a long time,” he said finally.

“We have mutual interests. I don’t know what sort of plan he has in place. And there’s Elizabeth.” Elizabeth was their daughter.

“I’m sure he’s made a very sensible plan.”

“I don’t want Elizabeth to wind up sleeping in her car. Or me, for that matter.”

“I don’t think we should argue.” This was in response to her tone.

“Did I say we should? I’m saying, Help. I’m saying, It’s about time you did.” When Briggs failed to reply, she added, “I know where he’s going and who to put on his trail.”

Briggs’s friendship with Faucher had been long and intermittent. Arbitrarily assigned as roommates at the boarding school they’d attended before Yale, they had become lifelong friends without ever getting over the fact that their discomfort with each other occasionally boiled over into detestation. Sometime earlier they had been sold loyalty much as the far-fetched basics of religion are sold to the credulous. When Briggs was in his twenties and had sunk everything into a perfectly legitimate though very small mining company in Alberta with excellent long-term prospects but ruinously expensive short-term requirements, Erik rescued him from bankruptcy by finding a buyer who bought Briggs out at a price that restored his investment and even gave him a small profit to accompany this dangerous lesson. Erik explained that he’d had to waste a valuable quid pro quo on this and waved his finger in Briggs’s face.

When Erik was pulled from the second story of a burning whorehouse on assignment for UNESCO as part of a Boston Congregationalists’ outreach to hungry Guatemalans, Briggs made a desperate stand to keep the matter out of the newspapers and saw that nettlesome citations on his dossier were expunged.

Against these decades of loyalty, they seemed to search for an unforgivable trait in each other that would relieve them of this abhorrent, possibly lifelong burden. But now they had years of continuity to contend with, and it was harder and harder to visualize a liberating offense.

“I’m glad you called,” he said to Erik, while holding a watering can over the potted annuals in his front window. “Everyone else has said you’re headed this way.”

“Everyone else? Like who?”

“Like Carol, the vulgar shrew you took to your heart.”

“Carol? I don’t know how she tracks my movements.”

“And things are not so well just now?”

“Oh, bad, John. It’s not wrong to claim the end is in sight.” His voice struck Briggs like a saw.

“I do wish this came at a better time. I’m on a short holiday myself, the theory being rest is indicated—”

“I won’t be any trouble.”

“Is that so?”

Erik arrived at night while Briggs was preparing his notes for a company stalemate in Delaware for which he was serving as an independent negotiator. It surprised Briggs that Faucher had found him at all, having ventured forth from the Hertz counter at the Billings airport with nothing but a state map. He arrived with a girl he’d picked up on the way. Briggs met her after being violently awakened by Erik’s jubilant goosing and her feral screeches. Her name was Marjorie, and Faucher confided that he called her Marge, “short for margarine, the cheap spread.” This was not the sort of remark Briggs appreciated and was therefore exactly in the style Faucher had adopted over the years. Around midnight, Faucher reeled downstairs to inquire, with a hitch of his head, “Do you want some of this?”

“Oh, no,” John said. “All for you.”

Thereafter Marjorie, who seemed an attractive and reasonable girl once she started sobering up, came downstairs to complain that Erik had asked her to brush his teeth for him. John advised her to be patient; Erik would soon see he must brush his own teeth and would then go to sleep. Briggs offered her the rollout on the sunporch, but she returned wearily to Erik, having gone to the front window to cast a longing eye at the rental car. She wore a negligee that just reached her hips and, when she slowly climbed the stairs again, presented a view that was somewhat veterinary in quality. The aroma of gin trailed her. When Briggs went to bed, he thought, Who drinks gin anymore? A full moon made bands of cool light through the blinds. The Segovia he’d put on at minimum volume to help him sleep cycled on, Recuerdos de la Alhambra, again and again.

He hadn’t been asleep long when he was awakened by noises. In the kitchen there were intruders. Briggs heard them, thumping around and opening cupboards and speaking in muffled tones. He wondered for a moment if he had forgotten that he was expecting someone. Once out of bed, he slipped into his closet, where his twelve-gauge resided on parallel coathooks for just such a time as this. Briggs quietly chambered two shells and lifted the barrels until the lock closed.

In the living room, he knelt behind the big floral wing chair that faced the fireplace and its still-dying embers. From here he could see the intruders as silhouettes, moving around the kitchen, briefly illuminated by the refrigerator light. He lifted the gun and, resting it on the back of the chair, leveled it at the closer figure. Only then did he recognize the man as his nearest neighbor, with whom he shared a water right from the irrigation ditch and a relationship that strained to be pleasant; the other intruder was the man’s wife, a snappish, leanly attractive farm woman who was less diplomatic in concealing her distaste for Briggs. Listening to their conversation, Briggs understood that they expected him to be out of town and were raiding his refrigerator for beer. Briggs decided that confronting them would create waves of difficulty for him in the future and that this episode was best forgotten or set aside for use another time. So he put the gun away and crept back to bed. The neighbors departed a short time later with a farewell fling of beer cans into his roses.

Faucher’s voice came from the top of the stairs. “Were those people looking for me?”

“No, Erik, go back to sleep. They’ve gone.”

Marjorie was the first up: she had a remedial geometry class to teach. “Always a challenge after a long night,” she explained to John. She wore a pleated blue skirt and a pale green sweater that buttoned at the throat. Her hair was drawn back from a prettily modeled forehead. She was at the stove, one hand on her hip, the other managing a spatula. “Potatoes O’Brien and eggs. Then I’ve got to run.”

“But you don’t have to cook—”

“Oh, I can’t have a day with missing pieces.” She cast a brilliant smile at him and held it just long enough to suggest he’d missed the boat. Erik wouldn’t be getting up for breakfast because, she explained, he had an upset tummy. She held the spatula in the air while she said this, suggesting by a jotting motion that she was only reciting facts as they had been given her. Then she made a tummy-upset face. Marjorie reminded John of teachers he’d had — punctilious, too ready to use physical gestures to explain the obvious, a hint of the scold. They ate together with the unexpected comfort of strangers at a diner. She paid absolute attention to her food, looking up at him intermittently. She raised a forefinger.

“First thing he said to me was, ‘You’re amazing.’ I have learned that when they tell you you’re amazing, it’s over before it starts.”

“Just as well. Neither of you was feeling any pain.”

“I never have any idea what will happen when I get drunk. But why would you get drunk if you knew what was going to happen?” she said. “You probably get off just watching people make mistakes. That’s not a nice trait, Mr. Briggs!”

She smoothed her skirt and checked it for crumbs. “I’m out of here,” she said, as she stood up. “What’s it like?” She went to the window and craned to see the sky. “Not too bad. Okay, bye.”

Their boarding school was modeled on English public schools and built with iron ore and taconite dollars. In four years, the boys were made to see America through some British fantasy and believe that the true work of the nation fell to pencil-wristed Episcopalians who sang their babies to sleep with Blake’s “Jerusalem” or uttered mild orotundities like great good fortune and safe as houses. Their hostility toward each other was such that dormitory reassignment was considered, but they seemed always to find a reason to mend their differences. They kept up a sort of friendship at college, but when Erik moved into a rented place on Whitney Avenue with an Italian girl from Quinnipiac, they lost track again. After college, each had been in the other’s wedding, and they had, for a short time, lived in the same New Haven neighborhood while they attempted to launch their careers. Then, as John was less and less in the country and Faucher relocated to Boston, they became part of each other’s memories, and certainly not ones either enjoyed revisiting, though they continued to make sentimental phone calls on holidays, euphorically recreating soccer triumphs on the rare occasions they were actually together. John Briggs didn’t know quite why Erik Faucher was visiting him now. Surely this would be a dumb place to hide; he must want something.

When Briggs heard the shower start upstairs, he went outside and smelled the new morning wind coming through the fields. There were a few small white clouds gathering in the east, and a quarter mile off he could see a harrier working its way just over the surface of the hills. From time to time it swung up to pivot on a wingtip and then resumed its search.

The window of the upstairs bathroom opened and a wisp of steam came out, followed by the head of Erik Faucher. “John! What a morning!” Briggs was swept by a sudden and unexplained fondness. But when Erik began singing in the shower, Briggs found his voice insufferable.

Erik appeared in the yard wearing light cotton pleated pants, a hemp belt, and a long-sleeved blue cotton shirt. Though his hair was uniformly gunmetal gray, he still had the eyebrows that John associated with his French blood. John did not expect much accurate detail about the previous night’s bacchanal, as it was clear he held his liquor less well than he used to. It was Erik who’d said that a Yale education consisted of learning to conceal the fact that you were drunk. He raised his vigorous black eyebrows. The wordless greeting made Briggs impatient, and he relinquished the pleasant sense that he could drink better than Erik.

“This is my first day in the American West. Of course I hope to start a successful new life here.” Erik claimed to have flown from Boston, only less convenient than Kazakhstan, now that centralized air routes had made Montana oddly more remote. He didn’t seem tired or hungover, and his frame looked well exercised.

“I see Marge made off with the rental car,” he said.

Briggs made him some coffee and a piece of toast, which he nibbled cautiously while reading the obituaries from a week-old Billings Gazette.

“One of these Indians dies, they list every relative in the world. This one has three columns of kinfolks: Falls Down, Bird in Ground, Spotted Bear, Tall Enemy, Pretty on Top. Where does it end? And all their affiliations! The True Cross Evangelical Church, the Whistling Water Clan, the Bad War Deeds Clan. All I ever belonged to was Skull and Bones, and I ain’t too proud of that! So please don’t list it when I go. I’m no Indian.”

Briggs reflected that he could read the paper perfectly well and spare himself the nonsequiturs. He eyed the bright prairie sun working across the window behind the sink. He treasured his solitary spells, infrequent as they were, and wasted very few minutes of them. This one, it seemed, was doomed.

“Look at us, John, two lone middle-aged guys.”

“Filled with blind hope.”

“Not me, John. But I’m expecting Montana will change all that. What a thrill that the bad times are behind me and the real delights are but inches away!”

Briggs wasn’t falling for this one. He said, “I hope you’re right.”

“One of my great regrets,” said Erik solemnly, “is that when we were young, married, and almost always drunk, we didn’t just take a little time out to fuck each other’s beautiful wives.”

“That time has come and gone,” Briggs said.

“A fellow should smell the roses once in a while. Now those two are servicing others. Perhaps, in intimate moments, they tell those faceless new men how unsatisfactory we were, possibly including baseless allusions to physical shortcomings.”

“Very plausible.”

Their wives had despised each other. Carol was a classic but now extinct type of Mount Holyoke girl from Cold Spring Harbor, New York, a legacy whose mission it was to bear forward to new generations the Mount Holyoke worldview. When their daughter, Elizabeth, was expelled from the college for drug use, Erik’s insistence that there were other, possibly more forgiving institutions had placed him permanently outside the wall that sheltered his wife and child. When, even with certified rehabilitation, Elizabeth failed to be reinstated at Mount Holyoke, she lost interest in college altogether and joined the navy, where she was immediately happy as a machinist’s mate. Faucher was bankrupt by then, a result of habitual overextension, and his inability to support Carol in the style to which she had been accustomed led to divorce and Carol’s current position as a receptionist at a hearing-aid outlet on Route 90 between Boston and Natick. Very few years had brought them to this, and neither quite understood how.

Briggs had always been quite uncomfortable with Carol, and he had been greatly relieved when it was no longer necessary for them to speak. His own wife, Irena, was a beauty, a big-eyed russet-haired trilingual girl from Ljubljana whom he’d met at a trade conference in Milan, where she was translating and he was negotiating for a Yugoslav American businessman whose family’s property had been nationalized by the Communists. John and Irena were married for only a few years, long enough for her to know and loathe the Fauchers. Briggs wasn’t sure what else went wrong, except that Irena hadn’t much liked America and had been continually exasperated by Americans’ assumption that Briggs had rescued her. With John flying all over the world, she was stuck with the Fauchers. In the end, aroused by the independence of Slovenia, she grew homesick and left, remarking that Carol was a pig and Erik was a goat.

All of this lent Erik’s wife-swapping lament its own particular comedy.

Faucher was surveying the hills to the east. “Don’t worry about me overstaying my welcome,” he said. “I’m quite considerate that way.”

“Farthest thing from my mind,” Briggs said.

“Do you have an answering machine?”

“Yes, and I’ve turned it on.”

“A walk would be good,” Faucher said. “We’ll teach those fools to wait for the beep.”

“I want you to see the homestead cemetery. It’s been fenced for eighty years and still has all the old prairie flowers that are gone everywhere else. I have some forebears there.”

They followed a seasonal creek toward the low hills in the west where the late-morning sun illuminated towering white clouds whose tops tipped off in identical angles. The air was so clear that their shadows appeared like birthmarks on the grass hillsides. Faucher seemed happier.

“I was glad to get out of Boston,” he said. “It was unbelievably muggy. There was a four-day teachers’ demonstration across from my apartment, you know, where they go Hey, hey, ho, ho, we don’t want to—whatever. Four days, sweating and listening to those turds chant.”

Briggs could see the grove of ash and alders at the cemetery just emerging from the horizon as they hiked. About twice a summer, very old people with California or Washington plates came, mowed the grass, and otherwise tended to the few graves: most homesteaders had starved out before they’d had time to die. These were the witnesses.

As they came over a slight rise, a sheet of standing rainwater was revealed in an old buffalo wallow; a coyote lit out across the water with unbelievable speed, leaving fifteen yards of pluming rooster tails behind him. Erik gazed for a moment, and said, “That was no dog. You could run a hundred of them by me and I’d never say it was a dog. Not me.”

At the little graveyard, John said, “All screwed by the government.” He was standing in front of his family graves, just like all the others: names, dates, nothing else. No amount of nostalgia would land him in this sad spot. “Cattle haven’t been able to get in here since the thirties. The plants are here, the old heritage flowers and grasses. Surely you think that’s interesting.”

“I’m going to have to take your word for it.”

“Erik, look at what’s in front of you,” Briggs said, more sharply than he intended, but Faucher just stared off, not seeming to hear him.

Needle and thread, buffalo, and orchard grass spread like a billowing counterpane around the small headstones, but shining through in the grass were shooting stars, pasqueflowers, prairie smoke, arrowleaf balsam, wild roses, streaks of violet, white, pink, and egg yolk, small clouds of bees, and darting blue butterflies. A huge cottonwood sheltered it all. Off to one side was a vigorous bull thistle that had passed unnoticed by the people in battered sedans; hard old people who didn’t talk, taking turns with the scythe. They looked into cellar holes and said, “We grew up here.” No sense conveying this to Erik, who mooned into the middle distance by the old fence.

“I could stand a nap,” he said.

“Then that’s what you shall have. But in the meanwhile, please try to get something out of these beautiful surroundings. It’s tiresome just towing you around.”

“I was imagining laying my weary bones among these dead. In the words of Chief Joseph, ‘From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.’ Who was in the house last night? I hope they weren’t looking for me.”

“That was my neighbor and his wife. They stopped by for a beer.”

“Well, you know your own society. This would seem very strange in Boston.”

From the alcove off his bedroom, which served as his office and which contained a small safe, a desk, a telephone, and a portable computer, he could look through the old glass windows with their bubbles and imperfections and see Erik sitting on the lawn, arms propped behind him, face angled into the sun like a girl in a Coppertone ad. Briggs was negotiating for a tiny community in Delaware that was being blackmailed by a flag manufacturer for tax abatement against purported operating costs, absent which they threatened to close and strand 251 minimum-wage workers. A North Carolina village that had lost its pulp mill wanted the company, and if Briggs worked as hard as he should, one town would die.

He explained this to Faucher as they drove to town for dinner. Faucher made a bye-bye movement with his hand and said Hasta la vista to whichever town it was that had to disappear. But it was otherwise a nice ride down the valley, mountains emerging below fair-weather altocumulus clouds, small ranches on either side at the heads of sparkling creeks. A self-propelled swather followed by ravens moved down a field, pivoting nimbly at the end of each row, while in the next meadow, already gleaned, its stubble shining just above the ground, a wheel line sprinkler emitted a low fog on the regrowth. A boy in a straw hat stood at a concrete head gate and, turning a wheel, let a flood of irrigation water race down a dusty ditch.

Town was three churches, a row of bars, a hotel, and a filling station. Each church had a glassed frame standing in front, the Catholic with Mass schedules, the Lutheran with a passage from the Bible, and the Evangelical a warning. The bars, likewise, had bright signs inviting ranchers, families, sportsmen, and motorcyclists respectively. Different kinds of vehicles were parked in front of each; old sedans in front of the ranchers’ bar and pickup trucks in front of the local videogaming youth; and in front of the hotel some foreign models from Bozeman and Livingston. The clouds were moving fast now because of high-altitude winds, and when Briggs parked and got out of the car, the hotel towering over him looked like the prow of a ship crossing a pale blue ocean.

Faucher scanned his menu vigorously. “My God, this all looks good and will look even better after a nice cocktail.” He was a vampire coming to life at sundown; with each drink pale flames arose beneath his skin.

They ordered from a ruddy-faced girl who seemed excited by every choice they made, especially the Spanish fish soup with which they both commenced. She had a Fritz the Kat tattoo on her upper arm, which Faucher peered at over the top of his menu. John asked for a bottle of Bandol, and when the candles had been lit he thought the way lay clear for Erik to make himself plain. Erik looked down at the table for a long moment, absentmindedly rearranging his silverware. He heaved a great sigh and raised his eyes in self-abnegation. “I feel right at home here,” said Erik. “Talk about your fresh start!” Briggs remained quiet and didn’t take the bait.

The mayor came to the table with the vibrant merry hustle with which he drew all attention to himself. Briggs introduced him to Faucher, smiled patiently, and did not rise but stared at the mayor’s fringed vest. Following a local convention, the mayor asked John when he had gotten back.

“I’ve been back about five times this summer,” said John, “from Tanzania, Berlin, Denver, and Surinam.” He was always exasperated at being asked this question.

The mayor held his head in his hands. “Surinam! Never heard of it! Denver, I’ve heard of! What’s in Surinam?”

“Bauxite.”

“Baux—”

“Pal,” said Faucher, “give it a rest. We’re trying to eat.” He made a shooing motion and the mayor left; Faucher raised his eyebrows as he asked Briggs, “How can we miss him if he won’t go away?”

The last time Briggs had seen him, Faucher had been insuring marine cargo out of a nice office on Old Colony Avenue in Boston and doing rather well, especially in the early going, when Everett Hoyt had tipped him off to opportunities with far-ranging classmates. Now, Faucher said, he was an investment adviser at a tiny merchant bank in Boston, a real boutique bank. He liked meeting his people in St. Louis Square on warm spring days (he had a key), to lay out the year’s strategy, clients who were charmed by his arrival on a Raleigh ten-speed. For a long time he had made cavalier decisions about his clients’ investments, but now, in harder-to-understand times, they trusted him less and obliged him to chase obscure indices across the moonscape of U.S. and foreign equities. He vowed to deepen his mystery. He kept a hunter-jumper at Beverly and dropped into equestrian talk to baffle the credulous, using terms like volade and piaffe and volte to describe the commonplace trades he made (and commissioned), or comparing a sustained investment strategy to such esoterica as Raimondo D’Inzeao’s taking the Irish bank at Aachen on the great Merano. His own equestrian activities, he admitted, consisted in jumping obstacles that would scarcely weary a poodle, in company with eight- and nine-year-old girls and under the tutelage of roaring Madame Schacter, a tyrant in jodhpurs married to a Harvard statistician. To his clientele, yachts and horses were reassuring entities, things to which one’s attention could turn when times were good.

Faucher said, “John, I’ve got to tell you, nothing makes me happy anymore. I need new work. I want to be more like you, John. I need a gimmick. You get the time-zone watch from Sharper Image, and the rest is a walk in the park. Whereas my job is to reassure people who are afraid to lose what they have because they don’t know how they got it in the first place. John, it’s not that I mind lying but I like variety, and I’m not getting it.” His face was mottled with emotion Briggs found hard to fathom. “I desperately wish to be a cowboy.”

“Of course you do, Erik.”

“That family”—Faucher pointed conspicuously toward a nearby table with a rancher, his wife, and their three nearly grown children—“has been here an hour, and they have never spoken to each other once. Don’t people here know how to have fun?” The family was listening to this, the father staring into the space just over his plate, his wife grinning at a mustard jar in fear. “We do that when we hate each other,” Faucher said.

“I don’t think they hate each other, Erik.”

“Well, it sure looks like it! I’ve never seen such depressing people.”

Marjorie proceeded from the bar with a colorful tall drink. She was wearing a red tunic with military buttons over a short skirt and buttoned boots, hair pulled tight and tied straight atop her head with a silver ribbon. Briggs was glad to see her; she looked full of life. She said, “May I?”

Briggs got quickly to his feet and drew a chair for Marjorie, steadying her arm as she sat. Faucher looked very glum indeed. He said in an unconvincing monotone, “Sorry I missed you this morning. I understand you cooked a marvelous breakfast.”

“It filled us up, didn’t it?” she said to Briggs.

“All we could eat and no leftovers,” Briggs agreed.

“What’d you do with the rental car?” Faucher barked.

“In front of the bank, keys under the seat.”

Faucher lost interest in the car. “Not like I’ll need it,” he said with a moan.

The ranch family stood without looking at one another, obliging at least two of them to survey the crown molding. The father glared at Erik and dribbled some coins to the table from a huge paw while his waitress scowled from across the room. Karaoke had started at the bar, and a beaming wheat farmer was singing “That’s Amore.” “Can I get a menu?” Marjorie asked, craning around the room.

“Has it possibly occurred to you that we’re having a private conversation?” Faucher said.

Marjorie stopped all animation for a moment. “Oh, I’m so sorry.” She looked crushed as she arose. Briggs tried to smile and opened his hands helplessly. She gave him a little wave, paused uncertainly, picked up her drink, and then turned toward the bar and was gone.

Briggs’s face was red. “I’m surprised you have any friends at all!” He was practically shouting.

“I only have one: you.”

“Well, don’t count on it if you continue in this vein.”

“I suppose it made sense for me to make two changes of planes plus a car rental to have you address me with such loftiness,” Faucher wailed. “I came to you in need, but your ascent to the frowning classes must make that unclear.”

After dinner, they had a glass of brandy. And then Marjorie appeared at the karaoke and managed to raise the volume as she belted out “Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song,” followed immediately by a Cher imitation, pursed lips and slumberous eyes. “I Got You, Babe”—she directed various frug moves and Vegas gestures in Faucher’s direction.

Feeling under attack, Faucher urged Briggs to call for the bill and pay it promptly. “I can’t believe how quickly things have gone downhill,” he said, as if under mortar fire.

Marjorie followed them out of the bar. She was so angry she moved in jerks. She walked straight over to Briggs and said, “You think you’re above all this, don’t you?” Then she slapped him across the face, so astonishing him that he neither raised a protective hand nor averted the now-stinging cheek. “You want another one?” she inquired, lips flattened against her teeth.

“I think I’ll hold off,” Briggs said.

“Ask yourself what Jesus would do,” Faucher suggested.

Marjorie whirled on him and John hurried away toward a boarded-up drygoods store where he’d parked; Faucher joined him. When they got to the car, they looked back to see Marjorie’s friends restraining her by the arms theatrically. A cowboy with a goatee and jet black Stetson stared ominously as their car passed close to him on the way out of town.

“Don’t drive next to them, for Christ’s sake!” Faucher said. “The big one is about to come out of the bag!”

Faucher mused as they drove south into the piney hills and grassland.

“People have become addicted to hidden causes. That’s why you were the one to get slapped. They’ve been trained to mistrust anything that’s right in front of their eyes. That woman was a turnoff. Everything reminded her of family, like it was a substance. Not the family or my family but just family, like it was liverwurst or toothpaste. You can’t imagine the difficulty I had preserving the pathetic taco I was trying to sell as an erection in the face of all that enthusiasm for family. I told her she was amazing, and that seemed to take all the wind out of her sails. Oh, John, my path has been uneven. I’ve made so many enemies. Some of them intend to track me with dogs.”

“Outlast them.” Briggs listlessly watched the road for deer.

“I hope I can. Really, I’ve come here because you never quite give up on me, do you?”

“We’re old friends,” Briggs droned.

“Perhaps once I’m a cowboy, you’ll invest your remarks with greater meaning. Anyway, to continue my saga: I knew the noose was tightening; charges were being prepared. But I had been so nimble over the years at helping my clients improperly state assets for death taxes that they saw the wisdom in dropping all complaints against me.”

Erik had moved in with his daughter and harassed her with dietary advice until she drove him to the bus station. Settling for a year in Waltham, he lived on the thinnest stream of remaining Boston comforts that shielded him from freefalling disclosure of his curiosity-filled investment days. He might have stayed, but the only job he could find was teaching speed-reading with a primitive machine that exposed only a single line of text at a time, gradually accelerating down the page; that didn’t appeal to him. He went back to Boston to “clean some clocks,” but important inhibitions were gone and he crossed the line, running afoul of the law at several points but especially attempted blackmail. Nevertheless, he survived until a client — with whom he had reached a mutually satisfactory settlement exchanging forgiveness for secrecy — died; and that brought snoopy children into Faucher’s world, followed by investigators, and “Net-net, I’m on the run.”

Just before sunrise, Briggs heard Faucher calling to him. He climbed the stairs, pulling on a sweatshirt and his shorts, and entered the guest room. He found Erik kneeling next to the window, curtains pulled back slightly. He gestured for Briggs to join him.

In the yard below, two men stood smoking next to a vehicle with government plates. The smoke could be smelled in Erik’s room as he stared hard at them. “They’re here for me, John,” he said. “I can’t believe you’ve done this. Now I’m going to jail.”

“You know perfectly well that I didn’t do this,” Briggs said. But nothing could prevent him from feeling unreasonably guilty.

“Judas Iscariot. That’s how I shall always know you.”

They carried Faucher away. Briggs ran alongside in an L.L. Bean bathrobe pouring out offers of help, but Erik waved him off like a man shooing flies.

The weather began to change, and the high white clouds that had remained at their stations for so long moved across the horizon, leaving ghostly streaks in their place. One quiet afternoon, while John looked at the casework that was to follow the demise of the town in Delaware and the new prosperity of the town in North Carolina — mine mitigation in Manitoba, bike paths, a public swimming pool, a library wing in exchange for ground permanently poisoned by cyanide — the phone rang. It was Carol, bringing news that Erik was going to prison. He had been ruinously disagreeable in court, which inflated the sentences to which his crimes had given rise. She aired this as another grievance, as though little good could be extracted from Faucher now. “You were with him, John, why didn’t you help him?”

“I didn’t know how to help him. We were just spending time together.”

“You were just spending time together?”

“I’m afraid that’s it. I feel I wasn’t very perceptive.”

“You have my agreement on that,” said Carol. “He left you literally eager for imprisonment. You had a chance to put him back on his feet, and you let him fall.”

“Well, I don’t know the facts. I—”

“You don’t need to know the facts. You need to listen to what I’m telling you.”

“Carol, I don’t think you understand how tiresome you’ve become.”

“Is that your way of commiserating with me?”

“Yes,” Briggs said simply. “Yes, Carol, it is.”

At times, John worried there was something he should have done. The whole experience had been like missing a catch on the high trapeze: the acrobat is pulling away from you, falling into the distance. Or perhaps the acrobat is pulling you off your own trapeze. Neither thought was pleasant.

It was inevitable that he would get worked once more for the newsletter. Hoyt wanted to know how Briggs had found Faucher.

“Breathing,” Briggs said.

“You’ve got good air out there,” said Hoyt. “I’ll give you that.”

In November, on his way to the town in North Carolina he had saved from oblivion, he stopped in Boston, rented a car, and drove to the prison at Walpole but Faucher refused to see him. Sitting in his topcoat in the pale-green meeting room, Briggs rose slowly to acknowledge the uniformed custodian who bore his rejection. He was furious.

But once he was seated on the plane, drink in hand, looking out on the runway at men pushing carts, a forklift wheeling along a train of red lights, a neighboring jet pushing back, he felt a little better. His second drink was delivered reluctantly by a harried stewardess — only because Briggs told her he was on his way to his mother’s funeral. At this point, a glow seemed to form around Briggs’s seatmate, and Briggs struck up a conversation, ordering drinks for both of them as soon as the plane was airborne. The seatmate, an unfriendly black man who worked for Prudential Insurance, actually was going to a funeral, the funeral of a friend, and this revelation triggered a slightly euphoric summary of Briggs’s friendship with Faucher, delivered in remarkable detail, considering that Briggs’s companion was trying to read. Briggs concluded his description of his visit to the prison by raising his arms in the air and crying, “Hallelujah!” a gesture that made him realize, instantly, that he had had enough to drink. The seatmate narrowed his eyes, and when Briggs explained that, at long last, a chapter of his life was over, the man, turning back to his open book, said wearily, “Do you actually believe that?”