Lone Creek

37

We drove to the town of Lincoln, about an hour away, then went several miles farther north into the Scapegoat Wilderness. By the time we got where I wanted to go, the dirt road had petered out to almost nothing. I drove the van another couple of hundred yards through the trees to a little clearing beside a creek, a place that Madbird and I had found when we were fishing a few years ago. It was about as isolated as you could get and still have access to a vehicle. Hunting season hadn't yet opened and we were far from the horse trails that outfitters used to set up their camps. The chance that anybody would just happen by was next to nil.

I built a fire and broke into the grocery stash. Tonight's entree was Dinty Moore Beef Stew. It seemed like most of what I'd eaten the last couple of days had come from cans. Still, filet mignon wouldn't have tasted better to me. Laurie looked skeptical while it was heating, but she took to it fast, finally abandoning her spoon to sop up the gravy with slices of bread, then licking her fingers clean.

And Madbird, God bless him, had stuck that brandy bottle into the sack. That, she was very happy to see.

Now the fire was burning down to embers and so was I. Adrenaline and the speed had both worn off, and I felt like my veins were full of lead. I still had another dozen or so of the crosstops, but I'd reached the point where nothing could take the place of sleep. I got to my feet and trudged down to the creek to wash the dishes.

Weather-wise, we'd gotten a break. The elevation here was a good six thousand feet, and I'd feared that the rain might turn to snow. Instead, it had lessened as we'd gone deeper into the mountains, and this area was still dry. But the clouds blowing in from the west gave only occasional glimpses of stars, and the moon was a barely visible blur. The storm might move right on through, or settle in and get serious. The air was thin and sharp and clean with the scent of the forest. Even this early in the fall, the night wind carried the news of winter.

I scrubbed the kettle and utensils with a Brillo pad, and the stew cans, too. There were a lot of bears in the Scapegoat, including a fair number of grizzlies. They weren't any more likely than people to be around this particular spot, but it didn't pay to advertise. I brushed my teeth with a new toothbrush from Hannah's bag. She was on my God bless list, too. I carried everything back to the van, stashed it in the front seat, then got a shovel and went to put out the fire.

Laurie was sitting huddled on the other side, watching it in that kind of hypnotized glaze that was easy to fall into, especially with fatigue and alcohol.

"Time to crash," I said.

She looked at me swiftly. "What?" Her face had a peculiar expression-confused, alarmed, even a little wild-eyed. Her trance must have been deep.

"We've got to sleep."

She shook her head, maybe to clear it or maybe in disagreement.

"Well, I've got to sleep," I said. "Stay up if you want. Just make sure you put this out when you're done. Bust up the embers and cover everything with dirt."

Her face and voice both turned suddenly sharp.

"I know how to deal with fire."

She stood up huffily, plucked a Kleenex out of Hannah's bag, and stalked out to the far edge of the circle of firelight. I hadn't intended to insult her wilderness skills, but I was feeling touchy about fire just now. I leaned the shovel against a tree and headed in the other direction, to give her some privacy.

The forest was a lot like around my own place except that everything was magnified. The trees seemed ancient and gigantic, swaying and moaning as if the creature the Indians called the Wendigo was up there running across their tops. The wilderness wrapped around me with such intensity that after twenty yards, I felt like I might never see another light.

I picked my way along a little farther and came to a treeless rocky slope that gave me a window of open sky. I took a piss, apologizing half-unconsciously to anything I might offend, and started to turn back. But I kept standing there instead, with the wind crawling inside my shirt and lifting my hair.

Wesley Balcomb wanted me dead, badly. If Laurie was right, not distance or police or even prison-for either him or me-would stop him.

And now I wasn't just on the run. I was on the run with his wife, who had betrayed him.

On the drive here, she'd told me how she'd come to be waiting for me. She had kept her promise to keep tabs on Balcomb, even watching him with binoculars when he left the house. Late this afternoon, she'd seen him drive to the fence around their compound and toss a black plastic garbage bag over it into the weeds. He'd seemed furtive, although it was Sunday and the place was deserted. Then he'd driven on into the ranch.

That would have been just about the time I'd seen him at the shed.

He clearly hadn't thrown the bag at that particular place by accident. It was a dead end, one of the dirt roads that had been blocked off by the fence, with nothing around and no outlet. But it was a good drop spot. A vehicle could turn off the highway and drive in a quarter mile to the fence's other side, hidden by trees and without having to go on the property.

A few minutes later, a nondescript modern sedan, like a rental, did just that. It sounded like the same vehicle John Doe had been driving when he'd delivered the money to my place. I'd realized by now why Laurie called him that. He was the most ordinary-appearing man I'd ever seen, the kind you looked right through and wouldn't remember thirty seconds later. No doubt that was part of why he was good at his job.

He got out of the car and picked up the plastic bag that Balcomb had thrown. When Laurie recognized him, her fear jumped to outright terror.

"What happened to make you so afraid of him?" I'd asked her.

She'd shivered and said, "That's the story I said I'd tell you. But I don't even want to think about it now."

John Doe opened the bag to check its contents, and she caught a glimpse of a rifle inside. She'd already guessed that he was here to kill somebody, and the most likely candidate was me. She didn't dare call the sheriffs for fear of her husband's wrath. She tried to call me, but I wasn't there to answer. So she ran to her SUV and drove to my place as fast as she could, hoping I'd have come home by the time she got there.

But my cabin was dark and empty. She couldn't chance waiting there-if John Doe showed up, that would just have gotten her killed, too. She started to take off, thinking she could find a hiding place along the highway and flag me down. But she feared that John Doe was close behind her, and Stumpleg Gulch Road was barely wide enough for two vehicles to pass each other. If she met him, he'd certainly recognize her. She pulled her SUV into the trees, intending to wait until he drove by and then sneak on.

Her instinct was a good one. His car soon came into sight. But instead of driving farther, he stopped short of her and hid his own vehicle in the trees. She knew he'd hear her engine if she started it. So she sat there for close to two hours, shivering with cold, fear, and a dread of watching helplessly while I drove into a spray of gunfire.

But when headlights did appear, they belonged to a pair of sheriffs' cruisers.

Laurie almost wept with relief. She didn't know what was going on, but John Doe wasn't going to be shooting anybody with sheriffs around. After they passed, she started her SUV and eased her way through the trees toward the road, thinking that with the distance and the sound of their own engines, they wouldn't notice her.

But John Doe did. He appeared out of nowhere, smashed the passenger window with his rifle butt, and had the muzzle to her head before she had time to comprehend it. He got in the seat behind her and told her to keep driving.

He had probably assumed the same thing she had-that he'd been made somehow and the deputies were looking for him. He didn't take his own car for fear it had been identified, so he'd started to escape on foot. Then he'd heard the SUV or seen its silvery shape moving through the trees.

I had to hand it to Balcomb again. I'd gotten a good enough look at the rifle to be sure it was Kirk's Mini-14-he stored it inside the ranch office when he left the property because his Jeep was vulnerable to theft. Balcomb had given it to John Doe so the slugs found in my body would identify it as the murder weapon. Kirk's disappearance would remain a mystery, but the sheriffs would assume it had to do with the grudge between us-that he'd settled it and then vanished again. Balcomb didn't know for sure that he was dead, but even if he'd turned up, there'd have been a cloud of confusion to cover Balcomb-and Kirk would have been the one who'd have had to explain his way out of it.

I walked on back to the fire. Laurie had gotten into the van and made a nest of the sleeping bags where Madbird had sported with Tessa Wills and no telling who else. She was lying there curled up on her side. I sat down inside the open doors, next to her feet.

I owed a lot of people now in ways I'd never imagined-Madbird, Hannah, Sarah Lynn. But I owed Laurie my life. This afternoon while we'd driven around town, she had talked about feeling kinship. But it was hard to fathom her risking her own life for that.

"I can understand why you warned me today," I said. "Why you kept watch on your husband, why you tried to call me when you saw John Doe. But driving to my place with him right behind you-I mean, you hardly know me."

"What would you have done? Stood by and let somebody die?"

I shook my head. I had no idea what I would have done.

"I've started to say thanks a hundred times," I said. "But it sounds so feeble."

She patted my hand. "It sounds very sweet."

I knew she meant that, but somehow it underlined the fact that all the words in the universe were worthless. The only thanks that would count would be getting her out of this mess.

"We'll start making sense of things tomorrow," I said. "You better put your shoes inside your sleeping bag, otherwise they'll freeze." The bags were good ones, heavy goose down that would keep you warm even below zero, but footwear or damp clothing left outside would be stiff as a board by morning.

Among the gear I'd thrown into the van were a couple of foam pads, the kind you rolled up to carry backpacking. They weren't great for comfort but they helped keep the chill of the earth from creeping into you. I tucked them under my arm and started gathering up the empty sleeping bag beside her.

"Where are you going?" she said anxiously.

"Just outside."

"To sleep?"

"Well, yeah. I want you to have your space."

She sat up and grabbed my sleeve. "What about the wolverines?"

I wouldn't have believed that I ever could have laughed again. But Laurie was not amused.

"Why is that funny?" she said coolly.

"They're tough little bastards, but even they can't chew their way in here."

"I'm not worried about in here. I'm worried about out there."

"I'll leave the keys in the ignition. If there's nothing left of me in the morning but bloody bones-"

"Asshole," she snapped. "I need a lot more from you than the fucking keys, and you better be here for me." She let go of me and thumped herself down again, this time with her back turned.

I rubbed my hand over my hair, feeling like I'd been punched. I'd been trying to lighten things up. But after watching her stab John Doe, I should have known she was volatile.

"Sorry," I said. "I wasn't thinking."

"I don't even know what they are, really," she said, still facing away.

"What what are?"

"Wolverines."

"Kind of a skunk on steroids, with an attitude like a pit bull," I said. "But they don't usually come near humans."

"Then why did they come near you?"

"They were hungry."

"See?" She sat up again triumphantly.

"No, not hungry for us-"

"Who was us?"

"Madbird and me."

"And?" She folded her hands in her lap and looked at me solemnly. My clouded brain grasped that she had changed, within a few seconds, from a fiercely demanding woman to a child expecting a bedtime story. Auburnlocks and the Three Wolverines. And yet, I still felt like she was the grown-up and I was the kid.

I sat back down and told her.

A couple of years earlier, Madbird and I had been looking for a new place to fish-driving back roads, drinking beer, mostly just enjoying a fine Saturday in May. Neither of us had tried this spot before, and we stopped to check it out. The stream was too fast and clear to look really promising, but there were pools, and the place was as pretty as they got.

"What kind of flies were you using?" Laurie said. It had the feel of a question she'd learned to ask to sound knowledgeable.

"The kind called worms."

"Oh." She looked taken aback. "I thought that was-well, bad form."

"So do the trout." To a hungry rainbow or brookie, a fat squirming nightcrawler was a Big Mac with fries.

We'd judged the stream correctly-after a couple of hours we'd caught four or five and kept just two, barely pan-size. We were reaching the point of having to decide whether we were really fishing-in which case we knew a spot on the Little Blackfoot, on the way home, where we could pull out a half dozen pretty good ones in short order-or just fucking around, and we'd hang there a while longer and drink another beer and save ourselves a bunch of fish cleaning. Things were definitely leaning toward the second choice.

Then I heard Madbird say, "We ain't got much, but you're welcome to it."

He was a little way upstream, his voice loud enough to carry over the rushing water. For a second I assumed he was talking to me, but his words didn't make any sense, and he was looking straight ahead. I followed his gaze.

A wolverine was standing across the creek in the forest maybe a hundred feet away, watching us. I'd never seen one before, and my immediate hit was of a bear cub. But then I registered the white markings and the low, built-for-assault body shape. Something behind it was rustling around in the brush. After a few seconds I glimpsed a kit, then a second one. There might have been more.

At this elevation, spring came late. There was still a lot of snow around and not much food. Wolverines were voracious, and a single mom with a family to feed would be hard-pressed-hungry and aggressive. They were lightning-fast, vicious, and fearless, capable of chewing their way out of a cage of eight-inch logs in a matter of hours, known to attack grizzlies, and rumored to have killed humans. I didn't know if that was true, but she sure wasn't backing away.

Like a lot of animals, wolverines had figured out that people were likely to have food around-they were notorious for raiding unoccupied cabins and camps. She might have smelled our fish or even known that men doing what we were doing sometimes caught fish. She wanted to bully us out of there and have lunch.

That was fine with me.

But Madbird, moving slowly, set down his fishing rod, crouched at the water's edge, and pulled out the net bag with our pair of keepers. He tossed one toward her onto the rocks of the opposite bank. The wolverine shifted in agitation, a quick sinuous movement that brought her a few feet closer, and had me ready to run for it. But she didn't charge us. The trout was still alive enough to flop feebly. Mom lifted her nose, sniffing hard.

Madbird tossed the second trout. "Stick around, I'll try and get you something better," he called to her.

He backed away and, with that same almost lazy lack of haste, reeled in his fishing line and picked up his other gear. I did the same. Mom watched us until we'd retreated twenty or thirty yards. But then she started warily toward the fish, with the kits running around her like berserk little satellites.

When we got to the van, Madbird pulled out his 30-30.

"I'm gonna see if I can bag them a chuck or something," he said. "I won't be long."

I stowed the fishing gear, then opened a cold beer and walked back down to where I could see the lunch party. It was long since over-it had probably lasted about ten seconds-but they were still there, with mom watchful again. Her head moved constantly, taking in everything that was happening around her. But her gaze kept coming back our way and lingering. I was sure she wasn't seeing me. I got the damnedest feeling that she was counting on Madbird to deliver.

She didn't have to wait long. Within a few minutes I heard the rifle's crack, maybe a hundred yards away. The 30-30 was not an ideal varmint rifle, but Madbird had been hunting since he was old enough to point a gun, and had been a rifle range instructor at Pendleton. He knew where the critters hung out and how to get close to them, and when he shot at something, he generally hit it. I figured he'd be back in another minute carrying a woodchuck or hare by the tail.

Instead, he whistled, a quick piercing sound that meant, Get your ass over here.

When I found him, he was kneeling beside a little spike mule deer buck with spring velvet on its antlers. Its blood was pooled on the ground below its neatly slit throat, and he was just finishing cutting through its sternum. Now he was moving very fast.

My mouth went dry. I had no problem with jacking an occasional deer, and I believed in my heart that Indians should have special rights that way, and an Indian doing it to feed wolverines was so twisty it made me want to vanish.

But the Fish and Game Department didn't see it like that. May was about as far as you could get from the end of the last hunting season and the start of the next one. You usually tried to poach where you had a good security buffer, like on private land, and not in broad daylight. The sound of a 30-30 wouldn't carry all that far, but rangers and game wardens had sharp ears, and even a hiker or fisherman might come to check it out and report us.

Then there were grizzlies, also very hungry in the spring, and some hunters had found out the hard way that bears were learning to associate the sound of a gunshot with a fresh kill. That was no rumor.

"We'll leave them the guts," Madbird said, not looking up. "That'll make mama happy."

"We're taking the meat?"

He looked at me like I was an eighteen-year-old who'd asked how babies were made.

"What the fuck you think this is, Dances with Wolves? Start cutting, we ain't got all day."

I pulled out my knife and went for the scent glands in the rear hocks.

Mom probably would have smelled the gut pile, but Madbird wanted to make sure. He draped the carcass over my shoulders to take back to the van while he dragged the intestines to the creek. She'd start there and follow the scent trail to the rest. It seemed to me that it took him longer than it should have. Maybe they were conversing some more, or maybe I was just nervous about getting caught. But we made it home fine, and for the first time in my life, I grilled fresh venison steaks for Memorial Day.

Laurie had relaxed in stages while I'd talked, first back against the van's front seat, then on one elbow, then down to horizontal again. Her eyes were still open, but she looked like she'd fallen back into that same kind of trance as beside the fire. I'd always had a talent for edge-of-the-seat storytelling.

I gathered up my sleeping gear and eased away.

"Do you know any poetry?" she murmured.

"Not much. Why?"

"There's this line that's been coming into my mind. 'Build a thousand bridges.'"

I stopped, almost choking.

"Where'd you hear that?" I said.

"I don't know. It's like it's from a poem I read a long time ago and can't remember. It sounds so exotic. Do you recognize it?"

"No." I started to close the van's doors.

"Leave them open-please?" she said. "And don't go far?"

I broke up the last of the embers with the shovel and smothered them with dirt. I found a reasonably flat spot without too many rocks and spread out my bedding, then wrapped up my boots in my jacket and put them under the bag's head flap. It made a decent pillow, and would keep them warm enough. Stretching out on the cold hard ground felt so good I almost groaned. I could have slept on a bed of nails-except that now I had yet another something on my mind.

I recognized that line, all right. You could call it exotic if you wanted, but it didn't come from any poem. It was an old construction workers' riff, tossed around with grim humor when competent men busting their asses on tough jobs under bad conditions got hassled by bean counters who rode around in heated pickup trucks wearing clean white hard hats.

"Build a thousand bridges, they'll never call you an engineer," was how it went. "Suck one cock, they'll call you a cocksucker for the rest of your life." The sentiment probably dated back to the Stone Age. Laurie must have picked it up somewhere, without any notion of the tag line or meaning.

But what shook me was that it had been Celia's favorite bad-girl taunt.

Growing up like she had on ranches and around workingmen, she'd learned that kind of stuff early, and by the time she'd come to live with us, she had it honed into a multipurpose weapon. Most often, she'd used it when somebody took her to task for a chore she'd done poorly or not at all. She'd roll her eyes, sigh, and say those first few words, "Build a thousand bridges." Men, in particular, would tend to stop cold and back off in confusion. Then she'd go right on doing as she pleased.

I couldn't for the life of me come up with a reason why that would appear in Laurie Balcomb's mind right now.

As I drifted off, the movie screen behind my closed eyes started playing an image of Laurie or Celia or the two of them together inside one bare shining skin, rising up out of Lone Creek with a million crystal shards of water exploding into my face.