Montana Noir

Fireweed by Janet Skeslien Charles

Farm Country

It was Jim who found the body. Ten miles off the highway. In the middle of Sigurd Sorenson’s summer fallow. Fireweed had taken root, its dull green leaves nearly concealing the blond stubble — stubborn, rigid — that stuck out of the gray dirt. In a fifty-mile radius, no other farmer let weeds onto his fields. Slumped in the passenger seat of the Ford, the dead man was not wearing a seat belt. His body leaned toward the glove compartment. A line of blood had dried on his cheek. Like a tear, someone insisted the deputy said, though that didn’t sound like her. The gun sat in the driver’s seat. The bullet had gone clean through his skull and even the roof of the car. As always, the sky was blue, but anyone who knew anything knew that snow was on its way.

I squeeze behind the counter and grab the coffee pot while Flo waits for her order to come up. I’m waitressing for one last year before I go away to college. As she serves their breakfast, four farmers huddle around the table and talk about the stranger — Who was he? How the hell’d he get out there? — at the Town Dump. That’s what we call the Town Pump — the only café in town. The only gas station too. Like a boxing ring, it has corners: one for the Ladies’ Auxiliary, one for the farmers, one for county workers, one for the hot shit posse. No one likes the posse, a handful of businessmen who act better than everyone else. “If you think you’re such hot shit, why don’t you get out of this pissant town?” Uncle Jarl responded when John Junior called him a hick, and the name stuck. The posse are good tippers, though, always making a point of contributing to my college fund.

The posse lawyer likes to give me advice while I pour his coffee. Don’t take too many credits your first semester, College Girl. You don’t want to be overwhelmed. Take the billiards class, College Girl. When you start work and beat the good ol’ boys at pool, they’ll respect you. You should wear your hair down like that more often, College Girl. It looks nice.

I smile. Flo frowns. Though nearing retirement, she’s as nimble as the roller-skating teen she used to be. Truckers of all ages flirt with her. When she crosses her arms like that, she has the intimidating presence of a bouncer.

I move on to the farm table.

“Sorenson’s is a hell of a place to die,” Uncle Jarl says as I refill his coffee.

He’s right. Now that Sig’s in the nursing home, his farm is downright dismal.

Talk shifts to Sig. The first farmer to pull his tractor out of the Quonset to plow in the spring, the one with the highest yield. He lived on crackers and sardines washed down with vodka, and remained a bachelor until the age of fifty. Most people thought he was too smart to get hitched. He surprised everyone by marrying the Widow Crawford, who was half his age, and even adopted her son Billy. She’d been pretty then. How was anyone to know she wasn’t just a drunk, but a mean drunk? Once she hit Sig with a skillet and fractured his cheekbone. Not that he ever pressed charges.

“Phyllis,” the men say, remembering the dead.

“Her boy’s not much better.”

“Billy’s all grown up, turned thirty-one this fall.”

They nod.

Then my uncle says the worst thing you can about a man: “He has no ambition.”

“Did you see Billy’s summer fallow? I heard the damn car was half-hidden by fireweed.”

We live in constant drought. Weeds show apathy. Weeds take what wheat needs. And like gossip, weeds spread. If a farmer doesn’t take care of the problem, they become someone else’s problem.

The conversation swings back to the stranger. He’s been dead for five days, maybe more. “Of course it wasn’t Billy who discovered the body. He hasn’t spent a minute on the farm since harvest.”

“Heard he’s hiring custom cutters next year. Custom cutters! Do you know what that costs?”

“If only Sig had sold me the land, dumb bastard.”

“I heard the Ford in the field had New York plates.”

“I heard New Mexico.”

Either is suspicious.

“Maybe it was a suicide,” John Junior, the posse banker, says.

“I tell you right now,” Uncle Jarl says, “he didn’t kill himself. And the killer didn’t walk ten miles back into town. So there’s an accomplice. Someone who knows Billy Sorenson doesn’t look after his land. Someone who knows us.”

My uncle has birthed colts and babies. He’s roped calves as well as his share of thieves who think that if no one lives on an old family homestead, everything from the light fixtures to the wood-burning stove is theirs to steal. An ambulance-crew beeper squats on his buckskin belt. He skinned the deer himself. Uncle Jarl dresses like a hillbilly and blows his nose with a big red handkerchief, but everyone listens to him because he’s usually right.

According to the stranger’s driver’s license, Randall Sullivan was forty-two and had green eyes. No one could recall seeing him when he was alive. Not at church. Not at the grocery store. Not at the Town Dump. Anyone could have killed him. In a farming community, there is no shortage of guns. You never know when you’ll come across a badger or a rattlesnake. My whole life, my uncle’s had his rifle tucked in the gun rack of his truck. (Ford, Chevy, Ford, Chevy — never new, always alternating between dealers in Good Hope or south of here in Chaplain, so no one’s nose gets bent out of joint. We spend a great deal of time making sure all noses stay straight.) Though Uncle Jarl’s pickup changes every few years, the rifle doesn’t. We don’t lock our doors. The gun cabinet is only locked in December, to keep prying eyes away from the gifts stashed inside.

Children talk about the stranger and worry about dying. At the grocery store, they see dead bodies hidden behind quarts of Neapolitan ice cream. On the farm, the creak of the Quonset door sets my cousin Mindy on edge. Suddenly she wants to live in town like her friends. She hates the haunted howl of the wind, the desolate whistle of the train. She never gave much thought to the bogeyman but now believes he’s taken up residence in the barn and won’t tend her steer. She’s half my age but tougher than I am. For the last three years, she’s raised a bull to auction off at each county fair, earning a 4-H Best in Show ribbon and enough money to pay for a year of college. Four years ago, when I first moved to the farm, Uncle Jarl bought me a calf. The whole school year I babied Brutus, so much so that when the time came to sell him off for organic hamburger, I couldn’t do it. He spends his time in the pasture, an obese bull who hobbles over when he sees me.

Tonight, Mindy wants me to go feed Theodore with her. I tell her I’m too tired after my shift. I don’t tell her John Junior got in a fight with his wife at dinner. Or she got in a fight with him. Flo was out back having a smoke, so I was the one who had to break it up. I could smell the beer on his breath when he grabbed me. It was only when Flo stepped toward him that he backed away.

“Coward,” his wife said.

After he paid, Flo said, “We see a lot of things we shouldn’t have to in this job,” before letting me off fifteen minutes early. I want to be like Flo, wise and tough, and fear I’ll end up like her.

My arm is still tender. Bruises have formed. I just want to sit with my feet up. I tell Mindy not to worry, the killer isn’t going to hunt her down on the farm.

“A man died in a field just like ours,” she says.

I pull myself off the couch. When I pry open the barn door, she peeks her head in and looks both ways like she’s crossing a busy street.

The next morning, Mindy tells us she wants to see where the stranger was found. My aunt — a hospice nurse used to dealing with death — says it’s weird, and that no good can come of it, but my uncle tells me to take her, so we climb into the old Ford and crawl down the bumpy back roads. I don’t know why she wants to go. I don’t think she knows why. I suppose that for her, murder used to be something on TV, something far away. Now it’s in our county.

At Sig’s, all that are left are the indentation marks from the cars. The field is a field. It’s lonesome, but not sinister. The fireweeds are a foot high. Once I told my uncle they looked like Christmas trees and got the lecture of my life: Do you know this “Christmas tree” is toxic to cattle? Do you know a single plant can produce 50,000 seeds? Do you know it’ll break off at the base and travel for miles? Looking over the long strip of summer fallow, I see the lines that tumbleweeds have drawn, sowing Russian thistle or fireweed on their journey. It drives Uncle Jarl crazy to see land abandoned like this. I understand why he asked me to bring Mindy. I glance over at her. Her blond hair is in a ponytail, and she has that look on her face, the one she gets when folks start bidding on her steer. Sad but stoic. She starts pulling up stalks of fireweed, ripping the roots from the soil. I wish I could remove the angst she feels as easily.

“Poor man,” she says. “I feel bad for his family.”

When she’s ready to go, I tell her to take the wheel. We roll down the windows and turn up the volume. Maybe singing Dolly Parton at the top of our lungs will exorcise Mindy’s feelings of fear. I learned to drive when I was ten, too. She hits the gas and the truck flies down roads that run parallel to the big sky.

We survey your land, we survey your life. We hear what you won’t say. Nothing escapes us. Nothing escapes. If you were born here, you will die here. I think of the stranger. Even if you weren’t born here, you’ll die here. We know everything. We know that Nancy Mallard loves her horses more than her husband John Junior. We figure her brother Davey might be gay. We know the hospital administrator resigned because he got caught embezzling. (He’s not from here.) Knowledge moves through us, around us, with us, against us. So why don’t we know who killed the stranger?

Rob Skelton, the posse lawyer, starts coming into the café earlier. Choose your friends wisely, College Girl. Partiers might be fun, but you’ll end up bailing them out for the rest of your life. Do you know how many times I had to go get John Junior from the drunk tank this summer? Nancy won’t pick him up anymore. You sure do look good, College Girl. I begin to think of him as apart from the posse. Rob. In crisp suits that still smell of dry-cleaning chemicals, he makes me think of life in New York City. Talking to him lets me dream of other worlds. It doesn’t feel like he’s almost twenty years older than me.

When John Junior and Brad Halsted join Rob, I move on to the Ladies’ Auxiliary table. At my graduation party, Hazel Murphy gave me a homemade laundry bag embroidered with my initials. It’ll come in handy in the dorm. Betty Davis gave me twenty-five dollars in quarters. “For warsh,” she said loudly. But in my ear, she whispered, “Play the slots. I hope you win big.”

People are still talking about the stranger. “What drove him to come here, of all places?” Brad asks as I pour his coffee.

“A Ford!” my uncle shouts out for a laugh. The Town Dump is a boxing ring after all, full of fights, jabs coming from all corners. It’s a place we see everything, we hear everything.

Who killed Sullivan? Why here? Why now? Speculation continues all week though there’s an hour intermission for church. After Pastor Joe frees us, we lumber over to the church hall for donuts. At the pulpit of the percolator, the sheriff tells us what he knows: “The stranger was” — a pause as he sips his coffee — “here undercover.”

Like heavy heads of wheat whispering to each other right before harvest, murmurs ripple through the room.

“FBI?”

“Border patrol?”

“Workers’ Comp?”

“PETA?” They were here last year, nosing around the Bar None feedlot, just out of sight of the highway, where 1,700 horses were crammed together in two corrals completely unprotected from the elements.

“I knew it,” Uncle Jarl says. “He was investigating someone.”

This is the thing: we’re used to watching. But we had no idea we were being watched. That an outsider was interested in us.

“An investigator?” I ask my uncle. “What was he doing here?”

Was he after Jim Ballestreri? Jim said he injured his left shoulder plumbing underneath Blanche Hellinger’s sink. He’s been on disability for years. He’s also the town’s best southpaw bowler, playing in weekly winter tournaments.

Was the investigator targeting Meg Walker? She said she’d hurt her back hoisting bags of flour at her job in Albertson’s bakery. In front of God and Great Falls, the doctor (her brother-in-law) swore that she could barely lift a bar of soap. Yet who hadn’t seen her picking up fifty-pound bags of Purina for those pit bulls of hers?

Or maybe it isn’t about disability at all. Maybe it’s about fraud. Several tavern owners pay barmaids under the table. That’s how farmers, even my uncle, pay summer help.

The possibilities are as endless as our horizon.

At noon, the Starks, who own the Breeze Inn, sit in one of Flo’s booths. They answer our questions tersely. Mrs. Stark admits they talked to the stranger when he checked in. He kept to himself. Had been here two days. Hadn’t ordered any of those extra TV channels. The Starks didn’t know if he had any visitors. They didn’t find any binoculars among his belongings, no camcorder either, just an empty Minolta and a metal briefcase they hadn’t tried to open. There was a copy of The Grapes of Wrath on the nightstand.

No, they didn’t know when he was at the motel or when he was out in the field, so to speak. They had twelve rooms and prided themselves on the privacy reserved for their guests. No, they didn’t think he was having an affair. He was a middle-aged man, just like you see in the background of movies or at the mall.

The sheriff, who wears his holster strapped underneath that reassuring gut, is tight-lipped as he and Deputy Dina examine the dead man, his motel room, our faces. They find fingerprints on the gun, alibis in the bar. If they have a suspect, we don’t know about it. And a suspect would be reassuring. Someone to blame. Someone to target. Someone who would let us relax, knowing the killer and his accomplice are locked away.

With no suspect, everyone is suspect. People start asking what Jim was doing on Sig’s land. It was hunting season, but Billy insisted Jim hadn’t asked permission to be there. Maybe Jim murdered the investigator and couldn’t stand to wait till Billy got around to finding the body. And then there’s Meg Walker, who has a permit to carry a concealed weapon. “So she carries a gun,” Flo says. “How would she ever find it in that purse of hers?”

“Laugh all you want,” John Junior says. “I’m telling you, she gets a look in her eye.”

“So does every woman who sees you,” my uncle says. “You ask me, Duke Miller has the most to lose. What if Uncle Sam makes Duke reimburse all the workers’ comp payments? There goes his bar. His house. His wife.”

“That bar’s his life.”

“Some life.”

A man is dead. There has to be a reason.

The sheriff and the deputy drive to the funeral in Helena, where there is already said to be talk of naming something after the inspector. The Sullivan Building. Or maybe Sullivan Street.

The widow comes up a week later. The sheriff’s wife offers to let her stay with them, but Mrs. Sullivan wants to stay where her husband did. She reserved his room for a week. She walks around town in a daze. We don’t know what to do. Meet her eye and nod? Give her privacy to grieve by glancing away and pretending we don’t know who she is?

The Ladies’ Auxiliary takes over homemade buns and salads. Mr. Stark puts his daughter’s old dorm refrigerator in the room so the food will keep. In the end, Mrs. Sullivan stays just two nights before quietly bundling her husband’s things into the trunk of her Chevy. Folks in town take care of her bill.

Late fall, it already feels like winter with flurries of snow swirling along the Hi-Line. Farmers feed their animals, then come in. Harvest long over, they have time. All morning, they sit in one of my booths. They talk taxes. Politics. Murder. I like the cadence of their voices, smooth as the cream they pour in their decaf.

“Remember the Johnson case?” one asks.

“It’s been what, twenty years now?” my uncle responds.

“No, thirty.”

It’s hard to understand how they let an entire decade slip from their grasp. The minutes of my life tick by so slowly.

The Johnsons were accountants, from Arizona originally. After a forty-year career here on the plains, he wanted to return there for good. The cold had seeped into his bones and maybe even a part of his brain. She wanted to stay in the home where she’d raised her kids and now spent time decorating with her son’s old wrestling trophies and her daughter’s photography. But Old Man Johnson wasn’t sentimental. To get her around to his way of thinking, he doused the house and burned it down. She retaliated the only way she knew how: she grabbed her daddy’s rifle and shot him. The judge, who we call “Catch-and-Release,” was understanding. She’d been provoked. Still, he said, she couldn’t stay in Montana. And that was her sentence.

“Duncan McKenzie,” my uncle says.

The men look deep into their cups.

I wasn’t alive when he raped, tortured, and strangled Lana Harding, a young teacher. Years of legal pirouettes keeping him on death row have not kept McKenzie slim. Most people want him to hang, but he’s so fat that a noose would rip his head clean off his body. Frankly, no one sees a problem with this.

That murder happened not far from a one-room schoolhouse in another Montana field. Years later, my uncle still tears up when he thinks of Lana and her parents.

But these cases are different. The Johnsons were from Arizona. McKenzie was born in Chicago. We could console ourselves that these killers were not from here. But whoever killed Sullivan is.

Snow continues to come down, flakes glint on the garden and whisper along the sidewalk, the first of the season that stick. When I come back from feeding the steers in the barn, Mindy is thrilled because KSEN announced that today is a snow day. For one day, no blaring bells, no soggy fare in the lunchroom. It is the middle of the week and her time is her own.

While she puts her pajamas back on, I get ready for work, tying my brown apron over my uniform, a sherbet-orange dress.

“Do you have to go?” asks Mindy, holding up the Parcheesi board.

“Waitresses don’t get snow days.” When had I sailed from salutatorian to waitress?

“Just a few more months,” she says, echoing the words I keep telling myself.

“I don’t want you driving those roads!” my aunt — probably attached to her curling iron — yells from the bathroom. “Why don’t you call in and tell ’em you can’t make it?”

I perk up at the pity, but my uncle says, “She can handle herself.”

Suddenly, I don’t feel so bad about going in to work. I tell Mindy to get dressed again because I know she won’t want to stay alone on the farm. “You can help me wrap silverware in napkins.”

Uncle Jarl started my truck and scraped its windows, so by the time Mindy and I step into the cold, the cab is warm. The drive to town is only fifteen miles. Up the dirt road onto the Hi-Line, which runs parallel to the tracks, which runs parallel to the Canadian border. The sky is white, the highway is white. The snowplow passed by earlier this morning, but the wind has already whipped the snow off the skinny shoulders and flung it back on the road. On days like this, the road feels narrower than ever, an ice rink rather than an artery that leads to the heart of town. I crawl along at forty, grateful my uncle has weighed me down with feedbags that stop the Ford from fishtailing.

We walk through the door of the Town Dump just as KSEN announces that the highway patrol decided to close the highway, 120 miles of whiteout. My first thought is, why couldn’t they have decided before Mindy and I got in the truck? My second thought, as I pass behind the counter and hang up my coat, is that if the snow keeps up all day, we might be stuck in town and have to spend the night at Flo’s. My third thought almost makes me drop the carafe as I pour myself a coffee. Among us is the killer. He can’t get far and neither can we.

At the counter, Mindy swivels on the stool. The daily ballet begins. Though the wind revs up to forty miles an hour, locals aren’t afraid to drive short distances. It feels like most everybody passes through for a cup of coffee or Flo’s hot chocolate, to marvel out the window at the snow or to complain about winter before it even starts.

Rob comes in. “Hey, College Girl,” he says, and I grin.

Flo notices us smiling at each other. “Maybe I should take the posse table for a while.”

I shake my head, unwilling to give Rob up.

“Did you get that early admissions application in, College Girl? Did you...” Rob stops talking when John Junior sinks into the booth, still hungover. He should be just plain John — his dad’s been dead for a decade — but we call him Junior because he’s still the high school jock who copied Rob’s homework.

“Pity he and Nancy never had children,” Flo tells me. “Sometimes a man like that grows up at the same time as the kids.”

Ever the real estate agent, Brad Halsted goes around to each table and hands out flyers with photos of the house his agency is selling, like we all haven’t been inside the Thornton place a thousand times. He nods politely at Flo before sitting with Rob and John Junior.

We all watch the sheriff hold the door open for Deputy Dina. The holster at her waist accentuates the sway of her hips. Both of them look tired. The sheriff listens as she speaks. She’s much younger than him. If he desires her, he hides it well. When I finish taking their order, Dina tells me the night before was spent trolling the highway and pulling out-of-staters from ditches. They are always looking out for us. If we go down the wrong road, they will bring us back. I feel safe when they are here.

The farmers come in next. My uncle pulls off his old work gloves. His callused hands cup the beige mug. County trucks sidle up to the café and work crews bring in gusts of cold with them.

“Close the damn door!” Meg Walker yells from a booth close to the entrance.

One of them is the fiancé who jilted her at the altar twenty years ago, so no one takes offense. Another flirts with me. I don’t flirt back. He dated my best friend — she’s at Carroll College now — and I know what’s hidden behind those smiles.

“Leave her alone,” Jim Ballestreri warns him.

“No way,” Meg Walker tells her daughter as I set the bill between them on the table. “You’re not quitting, I worked too hard to get you on the squad!”

Meg comes up to the register to pay. She digs around in her Dooney & Bourke, and I wonder if she really has a revolver in there. Finally, she finds her checkbook and writes out the exact amount, $8.53. Anyone else would have made it for ten. She has the money to buy a $150 purse but can never seem to find a few quarters for a tip. I imagine her riding in the car with the stranger, things not going her way. I wonder if they were lovers. When she leaves, I tell Flo, “It’s easy to believe a bad tipper might be a murderer. No respect for rules or social contracts.”

“Hon,” Flo says, “it’s more complicated than that.”

But this is the lens through which I see people.

Snow is still falling, downy as dandelion fluff. It sticks to windshields, the parking lot, the wet sidewalk.

“Report came in yesterday,” the deputy says, just loud enough for everyone to hear. An informal press conference. No one makes a sound. “The Smith & Wesson .357 revolver on the seat of the car wasn’t the murder weapon.”

“It was a Colt .45 automatic,” the sheriff adds. He looks over at the posse. “A few folks around here have one.” He ambles over to the men.

“I thought it was suicide,” John Junior says.

“Oh, you thought,” the sheriff scoffs. “We almost missed finding the .45’s ejected shell casing way back under the front seat. The killing bullet blasted out the roof to who knows where, but the state crime lab in Helena says they can match the casing to the gun that shot it.”

“We’ll need to see your gun,” the deputy tells John Junior.

“That’s going a little far. You reading his rights?” Brad Halsted says. I’m surprised it is the real estate agent who speaks up for his friend, not the lawyer. My eyes skitter to Flo’s, and it dawns on us that Rob knows something about the murder.

“You want to get involved in this?” the deputy asks Brad Halsted.

The sheriff has more cards than anyone in town and he knows how to stack the deck. Brad’s son got a DUI his junior year of high school, and we’re all pretty sure he forgot to mention it on his college applications. He has two more years to go at Cornell. One phone call might change that. Shaking his head, Brad folds.

So does John Junior. “Spent half an hour looking for that casing,” he tells the sheriff. “It’s always some little thing.”

They escort him into the blizzard and the backseat of the squad car.

Someone exhales. I move to Mindy, still on the stool. She hugs me tight and I can feel her tremble. No one moves. No one speaks. For the first time, my uncle is silent. He sits in the booth, handkerchief in both hands, eggs over easy half-eaten on his plate.

There is no satisfaction. It’s not like TV with a standoff between the criminal and the law. It’s not an Agatha Christie novel with a soliloquy explaining why. Without a motive, it feels like a random game of Clue: the banker did it, in the field, with the automatic.

Over the next few days, facts flurry together. John Junior thought his wife was having an affair. He followed Nancy around town and saw her talking to Sullivan in his car, heads tilted together, behind the bowling alley. He didn’t know that she’d been gathering information about the Bar None feedlot, where she’d snuck in and taken photos of forty dead horses rotting in pens filled with soggy manure. We learn that it was Rob who picked up John Junior from Sig’s farm after the murder and drove him back to town. Not an accessory, but an accomplice nonetheless.

He still comes in early — Hey, College Girl, have you signed up for your classes yet? — trying to be friendly like before. We don’t talk to him. Flo pours his coffee now.

We’re glad Mindy’s back to tending her steer. Good thing too. It’s almost fair time. Theodore’s up to 1,200 pounds. She spends more time blow-drying his hair than I do mine. We still don’t understand how the killer could be someone we know, someone who contributed to my college fund every morning. “I smiled at a murderer while serving him breakfast,” Flo murmurs to herself. It’s the first time we’ve ever seen her fazed. After the trial, John Junior ends up in the state pen. We feel sorry for his mother. Folks shake their heads and say this never would have happened if John Senior were still alive.

You can see the wind today. It whips car antennas in the parking lot, it turns the pasture across the highway into an ocean of light-green waves. Tumbleweeds blow by the gas pumps, through town, on their way to the rest of the world. Won’t be long and I’ll follow.

Dark Monument by Sidner Larson

Havre

Back when I was alive, we knew better than to chase yesterday, but here you are, blood of mine, a full-grown man with no more sense than those wandering orphan ponies we called catch colts.

I flew into Denver and then changed planes for Helena. It would take a couple more hours to get to Havre from Helena than from Great Falls, but I didn’t mind because it would allow me to drive through the healing space of Wolf Creek Canyon and give me time to think. I upgraded to the biggest rental car available in case I needed to sleep in it, tossed my duffel bag in the backseat, and hit the road around six p.m.

Havre, Montana. Shit. After nearly thirty years gone and now sixty-some years old, I was on my way back to Havre. Havre of the underground tunnels where hookers and Chinese railroad workers once roamed. Havre where the Indians were treated so badly in the old days that the Catholic Church had to send Black Robes to intervene with the other whites. Havre where my great-grandfather was the government scout and packer who found Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce for General Miles at the time of their desperate flight to Canada.

Didn’t like the son-of-a-bitch Miles, but I took a job, so I did it. Indians like me keep their word, Colt.

It was about ten when I arrived. I drove slowly through town toward the Montana Bar, shocked to see the entire block was now a parking lot. Back when, there’d been three bars and a hotel, with the Montana on the east end. Wiped from the face of the earth, I thought. Biblical. Or at least corporate, which does not reward family, community, or “cities” in the middle of nowhere with no industries or oil or glitter and populations the size of Havre’s not-quite ten thousand souls.

I drove the rest of the way through town with the hair on the back of my neck standing up. It was like driving through a fog bank full of ghosts. I gripped the steering wheel, put my foot back on the accelerator, and emerged on the other side of town, headed for Chinook. The Bear Paw Battlefield was fifteen miles farther south, and I yearned to get out there to listen for the spirits on the morning breeze. I shit you not, when things are right you can hear voices along the creek below the monument.

I picked up my phone as the Plainsman Bar outside of Chinook came into view, eerie in the darkness and looking like it had been closed for quite a while. Elizabeth answered on the second ring and I said, “I just passed the Plainsman.”

“Okay,” she replied, “I’ll meet you at the Chief Joseph Motel.”

Motel? Man leads his tribe damn near a thousand miles, beating the hell out of the US Cavalry most of the way until I come along, then takes a stand and surrenders so his women and kids won’t get killed, and what — they name a seedy motel after him? And you stay there?

It took me awhile to roust the motel clerk, a disheveled older woman who grumpily shoved the registration card my way, then went to the front window to see if I had a “floozy” in the car. Not that the clerk cared, as long as I paid.

The room smelled of dust that had probably been there since the eighties when Elizabeth and I first used these highway “cabins” as our rendezvous, our safe place. Tan bedspread, a couple of saggy pillows, a chair, a table, a TV on a chest of drawers (one wouldn’t close), a bathroom with a shower that dripped. I tried not to pace a hole in the thin carpet as I left the room open to the night.

Elizabeth filled the doorway twenty-three minutes after I got there. Her hair was longer and darker, lined with silver, but she’d kept her elongated beauty. She still had full breasts and good legs.

We stood staring at each other like a couple of teenagers.

“Thanks for coming,” she said. “And meeting me here.”

“Why not in Havre?”

“I don’t know, it’s not like before, I guess.”

Fine woman, bad liar, and you know it, but as usual you are letting her lead you on, Colt.

“Not like before,” I said.

“When we were married to other people.”

“We buried all of that. And both of them. It’s too bad, but...”

“Yeah,” she said. “But letting some secrets out on Main Street won’t do anybody any good now.”

You got no idea what she means, do you?

She sat on the chair. I sat on the bed.

“Besides, if you really can help, I don’t want Bill to know you’re going to until.”

“He has always considered himself bigger and better than anybody else until,” I said. “Especially when the anybody else is somebody like me.”

I grew up part Gros Ventre Indian, on the Fort Belknap reservation in Montana, smack in the middle of the Grovons’ ongoing battle with the modern world. All these hundreds of years since we were “discovered,” many of us came from the mingling of blood, both a devastating and strengthening thing.

Least you got that right.

“Wild Bill” Wendland was a rich white kid from up on the Hi-Line — the stripes of highway and railroad that run across the top of Montana and smack through Havre. Bill had gone to law school someplace back east, then come home to claim his due. He’d been a customer when I ran a tavern, liked to hang out because Elizabeth and her husband drank there, even though there were classier joints in Havre. Elizabeth’s husband never figured out why she preferred it, but Bill’s eyes figured us out even as he brazenly put the moves on her in front of her husband. The husband was a “lots of potential” man who’d peaked in college. As Elizabeth worked her way up the academic ladder of success, eventually becoming a dean, she’d been unable to make him strong or successful, though part of his problem might have been the cancer slowly eating him. We didn’t know about that until years later.

Wild Bill had been a bad customer in every sense of the word, even before his lecherous behavior toward the marriage-trapped woman I loved in secret until my own wife saved herself, dumped me, and I wandered away from Havre. I realized how deep Bill’s badness ran in those confusing times one hot summer night in the parking lot outside my bar. I’d carried a bucket of beer bottles out to the trash and turned around to see Bill had left the jukebox country-and-western songs and followed, probably to mock or challenge me in that rich, small town — jerk way of his. But headlights caught us standing there before either of us could say a word.

The car rattled to a stop and out of the driver’s side came JoeBoy Eagleman. There were a few Indians, like JoeBoy and me, who had been around both the white towns and the reservations since we were kids. He was a friend, about six feet tall and slender. He had a wooden crutch under his left arm, and his left leg was crooked below the knee, marking him as one of polio’s last easy victims in America. He stood on the parking lot gravel in the headlights of his car and said in a singsong Indian brogue, “Hey, I’m lookin’ for you, Bill, ennit?”

Bill, a good three inches taller and probably thirty pounds heavier, sneered at the Indian with the crutch. “Whyn’t you come over here then?”

“I can’t walk too good, ennit!” JoeBoy replied, limping ahead a couple steps.

“That’s too bad, ain’t it?” Bill said, mocking the all-purpose Indian phrase.

“Hey, I come to tell you to quit those lawsuit things you doin’ on my brother Tennyson.”

“The law’s the law. Even for your kind.” Bill grinned. “Maybe especially for your kind.”

“What you doin’, finding that shit to take him to court, bust him flat paying for lawyers so he’s got to sell the land to you? That’s what you’re doin’, ennit?”

Bill growled: “Fuck you, smoked meat.”

“Hey, fuck you too, then.”

Bill walked toward JoeBoy. “You better get outta here before I kick your Indian ass!”

“Come over here and make me then, ennit?”

JoeBoy moved back a step, tossing his crutch to the side. Then he crouched, putting weight on his good right leg while raising his fists. Bill punched with his right hand. JoeBoy deflected the swing with his left and hit him so hard on the chin that Bill dropped to the ground like a sack of potatoes.

JoeBoy nodded to me and picked up his crutch.

Splayed on the ground, Bill fumbled around under his hips, reaching for his back pocket, where he could have—

JoeBoy swung the tip of his crutch through Bill’s legs and slammed him hard in his crotch. Whatever Bill was reaching for got forgotten as the hotshot lawyer doubled up and grabbed his throbbing groin with both hands.

JoeBoy climbed in his car and drove off.

Bill slowly raised himself to his hands and knees. From where it had fallen on the gravel, he scooped up a short-barreled revolver like the cops carried on TV when we were kids. “You saw! That was assault and battery! Call the cops.”

“You call the cops,” I said. “I’ll tell them and everybody else what I saw. You threatened him, he defended himself, and then you got your ass kicked by an Indian with a crutch and a bum leg.” I laughed, even as the notion nudged my wandering what if’s: what could the law do?

Bill pushed himself to his feet. “You fucking... Indian!”

“Don’t worry about your tab tonight. On the house.”

The house of my bar and marriage lasted only another two years, but that was longer than JoeBoy’s brother, who Bill hit with every possible lawsuit he and his money could conjure up out of life in Montana. But while the Eagleman family lost their ranch, they always told the part of the story where JoeBoy kicked that lawyer’s ass and I was the witness.

And that story is what sent JoeBoy’s auntie to see me as I was packing up the last of my stuff in the bar to wander in a new direction. I was leaving Elizabeth, my ex-wife, and my tavern behind to become one of the oldest law students in University of Minnesota history, in an attempt to reinvent my life away from Havre.

Don’t you know we never get to leave who we are, just like we never get to go back and be someone else? You think I didn’t have regrets about Looking Glass?

A few weeks before I thought I was leaving Havre for good, Wild Bill was acquitted of raping an Indian girl from the Rocky Boy reservation.

JoeBoy Eagleman’s aunt walked in through the front door I’d kept unlocked so I could carry boxes out to the U-Haul.

“Here,” she said. “I want you to make that Wasichu suffer.”

She handed me one of the Montana Bar jackets I’d bought for the softball team I sponsored over the years. Bill’d played on the team just long enough to get a jacket and piss off everyone in the league.

“This was in the backseat of the car the night Bill Wendland raped my niece. After he did it, she got away and ran off carrying it. She threw it away but I went back and found it.”

“You should give this to the police,” I told her.

“Hah, them were barely believing my girl, and she didn’t think to tell me ’bout it until after that judge let him off.” She shook her head. “You was witness once to him. That damn jacket’s got the name of your place on it, so now your place is stuck bein’ witness with it, too.”

She walked out before I could figure out what to say.

I kept the jacket and held my tongue. I wanted to help but didn’t know how, figured after I became a lawyer I’d find a way to right the old wrong. But that would have meant coming back to Havre. I never forgot about the girl but I never did a damn thing, either. I sure as hell never made Wild Bill suffer for what he’d done.

And now, thirty years later, Elizabeth and I sat in a cheap and musty motel out of sight of Havre’s eyes as she told me what he’d been up to lately.

“All the time since you left, all the time even before my husband died, it didn’t matter if one of his wives was around or not. Bill’s... I don’t think he even really wants me. He just wants me to suffer because I wouldn’t say yes to him but I said yes to you.” She shrugged. “I need a lawyer, one he doesn’t own.”

“You need a friend too, not just a lawyer. How bad is it?”

“Relentless. And invisible. Forget about whatever happens in the streets or grocery store. He’s a big donor to the college, serves on all sorts of boards, they even give him an office, and yeah, maybe there’s some way that’s also spinning bucks for him, but mostly he does it because he loves the clout, the power. He’s been pushing the college to ‘modernize’ by dumping my humanities programs to replace them with computer classes and how-to-be-a-cog business classes. He doesn’t give a shit, but he lets me know that if I want to stop the squeeze and save the department so I’ll still be a dean, what I have to do is...”

“You said stuff happens in the streets?”

“The usual harassment most women get, but a couple times... I’ve seen his car drive through the alley behind my house. Or parked just up the block with him sitting in it. I called the cops once and he told them he was pulled over to take a call, just like the law says.”

He was stalking her at night. I couldn’t say what I was thinking. Fearing. All I could say was: “I’ll talk to him.”

She laughed. “Like that’ll do any good.”

“Some words weigh more than others.”

“But—”

“No. No more tonight. You called me to come help. I will.”

Outside, the high prairie wind blew from the west, over the motel, toward Havre.

“It’s late,” I said. “Why don’t you stay?”

“Aren’t we kind of old for this?”

“Yes.”

She looked at me a long moment, then took her purse into the bathroom.

I turned off the rest of the lights and sat on the bed, watching as she took off her clothes. I pulled back the covers and lay down. A few minutes later, she stretched out beside me.

We were still for a while and then I traced the contours of her face and breasts with my fingers. She was wet when I touched between her legs and I rose and settled on her like a dark bird seeking her white flesh. I entered her quickly, opening my senses at the same time, and knew that although time and distance had intervened, our old connection was still alive and well.

Afterward, we didn’t talk about what was going on. I couldn’t stop myself from telling her about my great-grandfather, Louis Shambo, and the Battle of the Bear Paw where he shot Looking Glass, war chief of the Nez Perce, as they tried to escape from Idaho to Canada.

When I was kid, my friends and I used to ride up to the battlefield to look for shell casings and smoke cigarettes in the willows along the creek below the monument at the top of the hill. People still leave offerings inside the wrought-iron fence that encloses the spot where my great-grandfather shot Looking Glass as he raised his head to look out of the rifle pit he had dug.

The next morning, Elizabeth and I bought coffee at a gas station near Havre after we left the motel. We filled our cups and sat, listening to news of the latest mass shooting on the radio.

“Jesus,” I said, “what’s the world coming to?”

“What do you think I should do?” she asked.

“Give me a chance to do,” I told her.

“After all these years, now it’s my turn?” she said.

“It was always your turn. Just never my time.”

She shook her head but her face wouldn’t tell me what she was really thinking.

Too late for that, Colt. Too late! So now be a warrior.

I sipped my coffee. “I’m going to look up Bill Wendland. You said his office is in Morrill Hall?”

“Yes,” she said, her eyes wide. “What are you going to do when you see him?”

“I’m going to be who I am.”

She didn’t ask any more questions.

I followed her the rest of the way back to Havre and watched her make the turn toward her place. That could be a place to live. A place I could finally let go and settle down.

I kept driving, past the former site of the Montana Bar, then turned left toward the college that overlooks the town from the south.

I knew Central Montana had become mostly a vocational college, but back in the day there was a strong liberal arts focus to go along with the diesel mechanic school. The majority of the students were from Montana, white and Indian, now with a growing number of Latinos, all of whom needed the leg up in life — or at least the certification of success — that a diploma can provide. All of them needed someone with the good heart of Elizabeth to watch over them, teach them about life beyond dollar signs, and shelter them from academic wars and the power of nasty guys like Bill Wendland.

Morrill Hall was the centerpiece of the campus, an impressive Ivy League — looking structure with a big bell tower reaching for the sky. It was on top of a steep rise, with a large pond and fountain toward the bottom of the slope. I drove up the hill, around to the parking lot in back, and climbed the stone steps to the rear entrance. Another staircase with marble steps curved up and to the left, and as I made my way to the third-floor administrative offices, I could feel my adrenaline surge.

I walked down the hall past big oak doors with gilt lettering on them until I spotted the one with his name, just his name, on it. I opened the door and stepped inside, where I could see a receptionist’s desk with a hallway beyond. I stood there, and after a couple of minutes a middle-aged woman emerged from the hall. She looked like a drill sergeant.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“Yes, I’m here to see Bill,” I replied.

“Your name, please?”

“Mr. Smith.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“Yes, I think we were set for ten,” I lied.

“I don’t see anything on his calendar. May I ask what this is about?”

“I’m from the Edsel Foundation, here about matching your donor contributions with our dollars.”

That got her attention. “Let me go tell Mr. Wendland you’re here.”

She came back shortly. “His office is at the end.”

I walked down the hall and into Bill’s wood-paneled office. His back was to me as he rearranged twentieth-century file folders in a large cabinet. He heard me enter and turned.

“I’ll be damned,” he said, taking care to keep the desk between us.

I looked him straight in the eyes. “Long time no see.”

He gave me the grin of a hungry spider. “Have a seat.” He pointed to a leather chair.

I just stood there.

“I don’t figure there’s any foundation that sent the likes of you here, or anywhere, so what’s up?” He smiled broadly, as if I was a long-lost friend or his next meal.

“Elizabeth.”

“What about her?”

“Stop. Stop now and you still have a chance to keep all this glory and power. Stop messing with her, with her job and deanship. Stop hunting her in alleys and out of sight. Let her go, stay away, and keep her safe.”

“Her safety has nothing to do with me.” He sat in the leather-chair throne behind his big desk and grinned again. “I’ve done nothing wrong.”

“Right or wrong, I’ve got something of yours.”

His eyes narrowed. “What?”

“Meet me out at the Bear Paw Battlefield tonight.”

“The Bear Paw Battlefield? What the hell’s this all about?”

“If I was you, I’d be there, Bill,” I said, turning around and walking out. “Before sunset so we can see what we’ve got to see.”

I drove south from Chinook and turned off the highway toward the tourist facility on the edge of the battlefield. Across a coulee to the east, the monument sat on the highest point of ground. Farther to the east was a bare cutbank where I had buried the Montana Bar jacket in multiple plastic bags. My own private memorial on that sacred ground. My own feeble attempt to be a good witness and honor a victim.

Too many of what Bill called my “kind” had already been dishonored in history. I wanted him to represent his “kind” and answer for all that has happened to Indian people, to trapped women, to anyone his kind had abused. Even if I never got to crack his skull with the collapsible steel baton shoved in the back of my waistband.

Damn right, Colt, you take a job, you go in prepared and do it right.

I stood there waiting in the fading light. Thinking about Elizabeth. Me. Us.

With about a half hour of daylight left, I spotted the vehicle — a big black Suburban like the security guys in movies drive — heading south on the old highway coming from Chinook. It was going like a bat out of hell and careened off the blacktop onto the gravel road leading to where I was. When it straightened out again it raised a big plume of dust as it bore down on the tourist lookout point and skidded to a stop in the parking area.

Bill was out and on the ground before the car was fully settled to a stop, his red face nearly matching the tie loosely knotted around his beefy neck. He wore his hotshot lawyer suit, and I wondered if he still carried killer steel in his back pocket. He was breathing hard and didn’t look happy as he stomped up the footpath to the lookout.

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re doing back here, or what you’re up to, but I’m here to find out,” he said, putting his hands on his hips as he stopped about ten yards from me.

“Leave her alone.”

“Like you did. Like she is. Like she will be after you’re gone again. All alone.”

“You stop it all right now. No more going after her in any way, shape, or form. Or we’ll see you in court. Win, lose, or draw there, your rep will be ruined, your clout will evaporate, and all your money will make you a big target that’s been made weaker for every other person you’ve fucked with or fucked over all these years. They’ll come out of the woodwork to go after you.”

“What, you think you’re a goddamn attorney or something now too?”

“Yup. University of Minnesota Law, class of ’85.”

“They gave you a law degree because you’re a blanket-ass Indian son of a bitch?”

“Talk about blankets, Bill, I’ve followed your rape charge for a long time.”

He looked at me incredulously. “So what,” he finally said. “That’s over and done with.”

I reached into my shirt pocket, took out a folded piece of paper with three pictures printed on it, and handed it to him. The top picture was of the back of a satin warm-up jacket with Montana Bar silk-screened on it. The middle picture was of the front of the jacket, with Bill Wendland embroidered over the left breast. The bottom picture was of a dried stain below the name and above the left front pocket.

“You were a pretty good stick on that softball team, remember?” I said, as he looked at the pictures. “Those were nice jackets. Too bad yours has that stain on it. Like a stain on a blanket. What do think that is, DNA evidence maybe?”

“Statute of limitations,” he shot back. “And even if that wasn’t already up, I was found not guilty, and they can’t try me twice for the same offense. The law’s the law.”

“True. But I bet I can get some DNA match from you somewhere — off a cup you drink coffee from, at your barber. You’ll have to spend the rest of your life watching out for that.”

You need more to nail him! You need—

“And even if I don’t get the criminal science, the girl is a woman now and has heirs. Some of them live around here. I’ll file a dozen civil lawsuits, spill out every accusation in subpoenas for evidence, and make it huge so it’ll get in the papers. Sure, you might get every one of those lawsuits thrown out, but the evidence I’ll introduce will create evidence others can use to, say, show a legally established pattern of propensity for... for whatever someone else accuses you of. With me as a witness to put it all in context, because the law is the law, ennit?”

“You come after me—”

“I come after you only if you keep after Elizabeth. If she so much as gets bit by a mosquito, I’m going to file some of the most beautiful briefs you’ve ever seen. And out of where I and my friends know it’s hidden—”

“Shit, I know more than you know ’bout bluffing!”

“—I’ll display that jacket at every press conference. Makes a great photo. Or hell, I’ll post one online. New century, new ways, same old shit.”

He made a move toward me.

The baton filled my hand and flicked out like a black stick to count coup. “Not quite a crutch, but it’ll do,” I said.

Whether or not he had iron in his back pocket, seeing the baton made him weigh his chances. “You keep all that yesterday shit to yourself,” he said, “and she gets a clear road.” Then he sneered the truth: “But the two of you, never! I won’t let you win that much. You come around here, you take up with her, I’ll spend every dime I’ve got making your lives miserable. Whatever smears you hit me with, I’ll wipe twice as worse over the two of you. I’m a lawyer who’s rich enough to afford my own cavalry of lawyers.”

He stormed to his vehicle, got in, and tore off back toward the highway, throwing gravel as he went. I went back over to the lookout bench, sat down.

Guess this isn’t win-win for you after all, Colt. You can’t come back here, stop your wandering. You’re like... You’re my blood.

The lights of Havre were just over the hill from where I sat. And now I was never going to grow old in their glow.

Or see again who I’d seen after I’d ambushed Bill in his office.

After that visit, I’d driven to Elizabeth’s house, I don’t know why — to warn her or to reassure or to just see her blue eyes again before I went off to battle. Maybe to find a reason to stop my wandering, even though I’d already figured Bill would do everything in his power to derail any plans I might have.

Then, as I turned the corner onto Elizabeth’s block, I saw him coming out of her front door.

He was the same age as the years I’d been gone, a full-grown man with his mind and heart made up about who he was, and after I saw him wave goodbye to her without either of them seeing me, Havre’s public library helped me track him down through Facebook and high school yearbooks. He’d grown up thinking that cancer had killed his biological father a long time ago. If I suddenly came into his life, he might hate his mother for lying and punish her in ways she didn’t deserve. He’d take one look at me and wonder, but if he saw any paintings or pictures of my — our — famous great-grandfather, he’d know. And he didn’t deserve to have the ground he called home pulled out from under him by that truth. That had already happened to enough of our blood.

As I sat there in the night, looking around the brown hills and at the two monuments, one of them visible only to my eyes, I thought about how remembrance is a piss-poor substitute for justice. I had lived into my own history, coming full circle, and now I was headed for the highway, driving away from another hand I couldn’t beat. I felt the spirit of my never-met, long-dead great-grandfather, who for all he’d done right and wrong ended up wandering too. He would always be with me. The ghosts of who we come from are witness as we play the cards we’re dealt and make monuments to what we did.

All the Damn Stars in the Sky by Yvonne Seng

Glasgow

Nora Jones began each morning much the same way since arriving on Montana’s abandoned Glasgow Air Force Base, a rifle shot from the Canadian border. Stepping into her running shoes, she pulled a fleece over the sweats she slept in. Sipped cold coffee in the dark. Worked a wet washcloth across her face and shaved head, polishing the scar that still itched, avoiding the mirror, not turning on the light. Put on her watch cap, headlamp, gloves.

She shoved a log into the wood stove, stoked it against the spring chill that seeped through the thin walls. She paused outside her aunt’s bedroom, drawing the door closed across the worn linoleum, smiling at the smell of senior sex and alcohol that wafted from the lumped-up quilt. Aunt Rosa and her boyfriend Phil. Phil — no illusions, just stubborn old love. Rosa — the reason Nora was there.

Stasi, Nora’s doberman, sat erect by the front door, ears forward, waiting for the command. The dog was ready. A familiar spirit, silent, sleek, troubled.

In Vegas after the accident, Stasi had sat by Nora’s bed for weeks, retrieving the phone when she dropped it, dragging up the covers and books that fell to the floor. The hospital wouldn’t let the dog in, so Nora had gone home to a shitty apartment in the desert with an empty pool and Leonard Cohen’s voice on repeat in the apartment upstairs. Stasi took up guard, kept visitors away, killed cockroaches. When restless, she’d leap through a neighbor’s open window, bringing back a magazine for Nora, a packet of Cheetos for herself. Nora didn’t ask questions.

Nora had liked it that way, just her and her silent guardian. Especially when her partner came to apologize. Nick, her aerial partner from Cirque du Somethin’. Nick who, stoked on early-morning coke, had forgotten to secure their practice cables and sent both the grapnel and Nora flying into the void. Scalped by the hooks, she broke bones, broke her heart. Something else too. At thirty-six, damaged, she was too old to fight the young wolves snapping at her heels. It was the end of Nick and Nora. The end of flying high.

The dog waited, silent, its eyes piercing the front door.

Nora whistled low and soft.

Stasi stood on hind legs and slid back the bolt with her teeth.

Nora had inherited Stasi from a friend doing time for burglary. Stasi, his assistant, had gone scot-free. Everyone in Vegas had a game. Stasi’s was thieving. Which added a spark to their road trip back to Montana.

Outside, in the predawn dark, a billion cold stars pressed down, squeezing Nora’s heart with their soft hum. As a child, she had wanted to fly among them, circling the earth, peering down on adoring faces looking up. Now she closed her eyes against the stars and concentrated on stretching out her hamstrings, checking the pins that held her body together.

Goddamn that endless Montana sky. Goddamn those stars. She had split because of those stars. A teenage runaway, fleeing into their embrace. She’d joined the circus. Not even original.

Now here she was, back again. Back to Aunt Rosa, her mother’s sister, who’d taken her in after her folks died and left her alone to grow like a weed. Aunt Rosa, for whom neglect meant love.

Who’d said on the phone: “Get your sorry ass out here, girl. We’re buildin’ a dream and I need you.”

Nora blew on her hands and started slow, Stasi tracking her left.

They ran the barbed-wire perimeter of the old air force base. Up here it was so flat you could see the curve of the earth. Bitter cold and clear skies. Decades ago, proud Cold Warriors floated three at a time on the sky’s gentle arc, their planes idling among the stars, ready to speed across the Arctic and bomb the hell out of Russia at a moment’s notice. Missile silos hid in wheat fields. Underground airmen, their fingers on the red launch button, stood ready to back up their airborne heroes, to bomb the shit out of a pigeon if they got the chance. The third-largest nuclear power in the fuckin’ world, bragged the locals. With concrete sixteen feet deep, the jets’ runway was long and strong enough for the thump of a landing space shuttle if needed.

Her cousin Frank, Rosa’s son, had worked on that runway, shoveling cement the last summer of high school before he escaped to college, so she knew all about it. Only eight, she had a hard crush on Frank.

“Got a thing for your cousin, pet?” Rosa’s only try at parenting.

Nora had blushed.

“First cousins,” Rosa said. “Off limits. Taboo. Got it?”

Nora only glared. Unreachable, just like her mother.

“Can’t say I didn’t try,” Rosa added with a shrug before walking away.

Nora rode Frank’s lunch over every day, knobby knees bumping the handlebars of her outgrown bike. After work, he’d shower, back his pink-and-gold 1952 Dodge convertible out of the driveway, and she’d leap in. Pink tutu. Bare feet. Up the pin-straight highway, ripping past wheat fields, burning up the road to the Canadian border. He sweated out his anger while she swallowed her scream as they hit a bump in the road and went airborne, bending into the curve around a silo town. She soaked up Frank’s approval: “Good girl, never show your fear.”

“Hey, pipsqueak,” he’d say as they approached the border roundabout, a casual thumbtack on the map before the world went crazy. “Ready?”

“Do it slow, Frank,” she’d reply, cool as an Arctic breeze, lips pursed like she’d seen in the movies.

While he slowed the car to a crawl, she would stand in her seat, stepping over the windshield onto the hood, unfolding herself into a handstand. Spider legs in the air. Toes caressing the endless sky. Pink tutu fluttering like a spring blossom. They would slowly circle the border roundabout, past the cheering, dark-blue guards. An eight-year-old girl, hood ornament on a pink-and-gold convertible. Behind the wheel, a teenage boy in a checkered cowboy shirt, counting the hours to freedom.

On the road back, they’d give one final roaring yell before reaching the turnoff to the base. Slowing down, they’d salute the billboard that proclaimed: This Is the Future.

Proud days those had been for the residents of the base, who went to bed in their idyllic tract houses dreaming of that future. More than seven thousand brave souls, flyboys and their families, up there at the stark edge of the earth, beautiful except for the six months of winter, three months of mosquitoes, and the month of mud in between. Fewer than two hundred fools now slept in their abandoned beds.

Nora ran past the fenced-off runway and airfield. The Multinational Aerospace Corporation — MAC, Inc. — the world’s second-largest aerospace empire, was using the airfield to test its latest technology up here in the cold, secret silence. Shiny new high-tech warehouses gleamed amidst the decay. Area Fifty-One-and-a-Half, the locals called it. Imaginations ran wild: UFOs, black ops, the Illuminati. Every few months, MAC, Inc. brought in a planeload of Germans or Japanese to check out the secret projects. A hundred of them at a time, the locals claimed, stayed a month in a nearby town, eating fat steaks and looking for cowgirls. Last week Nora had seen a convoy of rented cars with bewildered Asian faces behind tinted glass. Maybe they’d survive the month, but she doubted it. They’d die of boredom first.

Nora continued on through the fog that rose from the overgrown playing fields and headed back toward home. Night ghosts hissed at her. She couldn’t begrudge their anger. She was alive. They were long gone but restless, their lives cut short by pink slips after the Cold War was forgotten. Most families had packed up their houses and transferred their dreams to warmer places. Some left their silverware in the sink as a gift to scavengers.

Except Aunt Rosa. Aunt Rosa would never have left her forks and furniture to be picked over, Nora mused as she cleared a rotted pole fence. Aunt Rosa had stayed put. Deciding not to go south with her flyboy husband, she got herself a county contract dismantling the commissary where she had once worked. She found a new boyfriend, then another one. And then Phil came along with his big dream.

Phil’s dream wasn’t even original. It was a hand-me-down from an old pal, a retired pilot who, thirty years ago, bought up the deserted houses, rechristened the base town St. Marie, and tried to build a refuge for right-living military retirees who wanted to hit golf balls over the horizon in peace and quiet. But the county raised the property taxes sky high. Bankruptcies, lawsuits, and liens followed. A luckless whore, St. Marie was once again abandoned. A few retirees hung on and Phil had seen opportunity in the isolation.

Phil’s idea was short of work. He’d read a few business books on job retraining after the paper mill shut down and had a five-step plan. One: buy up the liens. Two: rebrand. Forget the golf course, build a shooting range to attract bird hunters. Three: horizontal expansion. Hunters need bullets. Maybe the government too, with all the wars it was getting itself into. He’d open a little manufactory in the empty commissary. Bring in some illegals, bunk ’em in the back, set ’em to work. Cartridges, casings, and slugs, all nice and quiet, off the map. Money from the cartridges would buy back the liens. Four: rename. No more St. Marie. Philson, Montana. He liked the sound of it. Five: he always forgot the fifth but loved the sight of his open hand.

“You’re outta your mind,” Nora had replied to her aunt’s call to come home.

“You speak Mexican, doncha? We need you to handle the Mexicans.”

“Salvadoran, Rosa, you said they’re Salvadorans.”

“Well, you speak Illegal, and that’s good enough for me.”

Shit, Nora thought as she replayed their conversation. Now here she was, up to her tits. Phil scouring the back road junkyards for brass and lead. Aunt Rosa handling the business end, Nora using her service-worker Spanish to oversee the men who poured the casings and the women who packed the cartons.

Phil wasn’t the only one with a scheme. A couple years back, out-of-town suits arrived, bought back some houses from Jenkins at the bank, and moved motel furniture in. Shiny vans arrived in the middle of the night — dark glass, no number plates — to drop off passengers and suitcases. The next morning the town awoke to new residents. Sometimes it took a week for the new arrivals to come out into the sunlight, blinking at the endless horizon, the wheat-field ghost town with tumbleweeds whipping across the airfield.

For the most part, they kept to themselves. Always tetchy, always looking over their shoulders. Witness protection, the locals assumed, thereafter referring to them as the Witnesses.

Nora smiled to herself. What bright light in the feds had decided to dump a load of Witnesses on an abandoned air base in Montana? It was like some twisted, cosmic joke. Hiding in the wide open, spooked by the emptiness, afraid to leave. The Witnesses had bartered their lives for a death sentence in nowhere.

In the predawn, Nora and Stasi had the town to themselves. Lights flickered from a few scattered buildings as insomniacs twitched the curtains. Every seventh house or so was occupied. Early spring weeds poked through cracked roads. Some houses were immaculate, painted and polished. Others were lopsided, water stained, peeling.

The security light tripped on at Witness Mike Smith’s small house and Nora caught the glint of his binoculars through the upstairs window. Always ready. An arsenal of guns in his garage. Late fall, Stasi had nicked a steak waiting by Mike’s grill and the jerk had sworn he’d shoot the dog if she came in sight of his place again.

Winded, Nora slowed her pace on the edge of town. The burned-out shell of the bachelors’ quarters always spooked her, its jagged edges cutting the horizon.

Stasi sensed the presence before Nora. Ears back, her body a sleek arrow, she pointed movement at the corner of the carbonized building.

Nora narrowed her eyes, stopped in Stasi’s frozen shadow.Smelled a whiff of cigarette smoke. Saw the red light of a draw.

High schoolers sometimes roared the twenty miles from Glasgow, up Zombie Road, they called it. They held all-night keggers in abandoned houses, had sex among the near-dead, and then torched the houses. Some tweakers had tried to move in and cook meth for the workers in the Bakken oil fields but blew themselves up. Now Philson had itself a repurposed fire truck, compliments of MAC, Inc., and a volunteer fire department, compliments of themselves.

Nora crouch-ran toward the safety of a dead cottonwood for a closer look. Her knee cracked and she cursed silently.

Among the ruins, hulking shapes from childhood memory. A tank. Convoy trucks. Vintage, as if from a black-and-white movie. She flashed on the air base doing military maneuvers: crisp uniforms, adrenaline smell, the thrum of convoy trucks. Her mental newsreel turned in the projector, motes of dust dancing in the light, as her young self sat squished between Rosa and Frank in the safe, warm dark.

But that was then. Like the billboard said, this was the future.

Beside the outdated convoys, a circle of new, mud-spattered pickup trucks. A glammed-up Humvee nearby. Not bird hunters — hunters of another kind.

She steadied her breath and lowered her temperature, an amphibian on a wire. Edging a few steps closer, she squatted down. Stasi quivered with readiness.

Nora clicked her tongue and released the dog like a silent missile. “Good girl. Bring me something.”

Dawn leaked into day, pouring itself across the bleak ground. She picked out a couple of sleeping bags humped with blankets. Folding chairs blown on their sides. A head slumped against a truck window.

The breeze kicked up and chilled her sweat. Flapped the Confederate flag on the back of a pickup.

A truck door creaked open. Nora dropped low. Saw the leg — army boot, camouflage pants — coming down. Heard the hock of boozy phlegm followed by the sound of urine marking territory. Stasi hopped into the cab of the now-empty truck. Nora held her breath until she saw the canine shadow leap out.

Circling back to her, Stasi dropped the wad of paper on Nora’s knee and waited for the handstroke on her forehead that said love.

Nora flattened out the paper and wiped away the dog saliva. She squinted at the blur of words.

She stuffed the paper in her back pocket.

Militia. Nora had dated one once. A one-night stand, more like it, on the road home from Vegas. Too much booze, too many painkillers. She was lonely. He was in his midtwenties, on his way to Lincoln, Montana, to support some miners in an armed standoff against the Forest Service.

The militia were just regular guys, he’d told her: carpenters, drywallers, firefighters, EMTs. Even cops. Hard-working guys in a tough land. Vets from Iraq and Afghanistan. He’d done three tours. He was a concerned patriot who didn’t like what our government was doing over there and liked what he saw at home even less.

I got no problem with Obama being black, he’d told her. I fought next to his kind. But he’s pushing un-Christian values. Others in the militia thought Obama was the Antichrist. A front for the United Nations taking over the world or the Chinese buying America.

Someone’s gonna get hurt, her new friend had said. She’d since met others like him. Locals who filled their freezers with deer and elk in the fall to feed the wife and kids. Stacked supplies in their sheds in case the feds took away their constitutional right to bear arms. They’d change a tire for you on a dark road, call you ma’am, and shoot you if you trespassed on their land.

Nora ran back through town to the house.

Aunt Rosa and Phil took up half the kitchen, two old crash cars in a fading carnival ride, brewing coffee, burning toast. Rosa, in the middle of pulling her long silver hair up in a ponytail, let it fall loose when she saw Nora in the doorway. Instead she pulled the threadbare kimono around her slight body and raised her coffee mug in the air, offering. At seventy, Rosa was flirting with twenty.

Nora nodded yes to the coffee and pulled off her watch cap. Stasi lapped water before bringing in her food bowl and dropping it at Nora’s feet. Phil muted the local Fox News. A Botoxed face yapped in silence. Montana’s congressman and an Asian trade delegation appeared on the screen.

“Look who’s back,” Phil said. “Fuckin’ Yul Brynner.”

Nora dried her bald scalp with Stasi’s mud towel.

“Put some clothes on, fuckface,” she replied. “Animal act is over.”

Phil looked down at his ragged T-shirt, his paunch, his birdy legs that barely held his weight. He ran his hand through his thinning hair and tugged his stringy ’Nam ponytail.

“Girl, I love ya,” he said, putting her in a headlock.

Stasi growled. Nora raised two fingers to signal she was fine and the dog sat.

“Cut it out, you two,” Rosa intervened, her voice burred with sleep. “We’ve got work ahead.”

Phil rubbed his face with his T-shirt, turned to Rosa who was scraping toast. “Got a spliff?”

“Not today, hon. Today’s the big day. We’re buying off the old man’s liens. Tell her, Phil.”

Nora pulled a parcel of chopped elk from the freezer to thaw for Stasi’s dinner.

“Whoa, back up, girl,” Phil said to Rosa. “Gonna be next week. Jenkins says more paperwork and then down to Great Falls for the big OK.”

Aunt Rosa frowned. “Well, we’re signing the bill of intent today, though. I hate all this waiting.”

“Just one more week, love,” Phil said. “Then Mailer and his militia can go eat shit. We beat them fair and square. This’ll be ours, for our business, and no damn Constitutionalist militia is comin’ in here and buildin’ a compound.”

Nora reached into her pocket for the piece of paper and handed it to him. “Too late,” she said. “They’re here.”

Phil fumbled for his glasses. While he read, everything on him sagged: his jaw, his shoulders, the hula-girl tattoo on his arm.

Nora unscrewed a bottle of cheap bourbon, tipped coffee out of her mug, and added a generous shot. She broke a painkiller in quarters, popped one, and washed it down.

“No way!” Phil shouted. “Not today! It’s not happenin’!” He crumpled the paper into a ball and threw it at the unmarked cartons sitting near the door. “You know that bird-hunting group? The Duck Fuckers? They rented the range for today. Raffling off new guns for their fundraiser. Today! Money in the bank.” Phil lurched toward the cartons and started pulling them apart. “Look! Springfield Stainless model 1911 .45 ACP!” He put it down, pulled a twelve-gauge shotgun from another carton. “Beretta A400 Xplor! Even has its own ducker serial number!”

Rosa balanced against the sink, her eyes as big as poached eggs. “Today was supposed to be our day, Nor. That money from the duckers puts us over the top.”

“Browning bolt-action 7mm!” Phil ranted, spit flying.

“The duckers brought them here last night, so’s we’d be all good and ready this morning.” Rosa cocked her head toward the building where the illegals slept. “And the girls in the back are doing the food. Mexican. Real nice.”

Nora heard sounds outside. A staple gun punching wood. Measured voices. Idling trucks. She held up her hand for quiet. “Shh.”

“Shit, shit, shit.” Phil paced. “And Bert’s eightieth. The party.”

“We hired those exotic dancers,” Aunt Rosa explained. “From that white van. They’re giving Bert a breakfast surprise.”

Nora broke the bourbon bottle on the corner of the counter, loud as a hammer, shards and whiskey flying. “Shut. The. Fuck. Up.”

“Don’t talk to your uncle—”

“Mailer’s militia. They know about the ammunition?” Nora asked. “The business? The illegals?”

Phil shrugged. “Fuck if I know.”

“They want the UFOs,” put in Rosa.

“The what?”

“The UFOs,” repeated Phil, nodding at Rosa. “At MAC, Inc., Mailer’s got this thing about the feds saying there’s no UFOs when we all know they’re everywhere. Says it’s a secret base for a secret war and the Asians and the Germans are in on it too. They’ve got UFOs over there. Aliens too. And we’re not talking fuckin’ illegals.”

“So Mailer doesn’t want the town, he wants the UFOs?” said Nora.

“Take over the world, is what he wants,” Phil replied. “He says if he don’t fight back, the feds are gonna enslave the common man. The United Nations... the Chinese...”

Nora put her elbows on the kitchen counter, hid her head in her hands, her shoulders quaking. Tears of frustration and silent laughter sluiced down her face.

Schemers. Every goddamn one of them had a goddamn scheme. She had left Vegas to get away from the circus and here she was, back in the center ring.

“Now what, Phil?” demanded Rosa.

“Don’t know, woman. You tell me.”

Nora raised her head and wiped away the tears. She stood and kissed her aunt’s forehead. “Call everyone and tell them to keep calm. We’re having an emergency meeting.”

“Even the Witnesses?”

“Yes, even the Witnesses. They may want to... duck.” God help her. The absurdity of it all. “But first, get the sheriff out here.”

“You really want that?” Rosa asked. “Him coming out here?”

Nora nodded. “No other choice. He’s the sheriff.”

“You know he’s not a real sheriff, Nor. He’s a doctor now. Real proud of him, we are. Just deputized a few weeks while Bert’s off fishing.”

“I said call him.” She turned to Phil. “The banker lied to you. Ask the piece of shit how Mailer got there first.”

“This is war!” shouted Phil.

“No, Phil. This is a problem,” Nora countered. “The circus lion’s loose, that’s all.” She clicked Stasi to follow, then stepped over shards of glass in a puddle of booze. Grabbing her daypack, she checked for her phone, fingered two keys on the chain around her neck, and made for the door.

“Take a wig,” Rosa insisted. “Can’t go out there lookin’ like that.”

Nora snatched the long blond one from the stands by the door — seven wigs, blond on Friday — and headed out. Stuffing the wig in her pack, she pulled on the watch cap.

“Think I’ll call Fox News,” Phil muttered.

Nora followed the thrum of idling vehicles, the thwack of notices being stapled to abandoned houses. A score of militiamen in army-surplus camo, semiautomatics slung across their shoulders, huddled outside the MAC, Inc. gate amid plumes of vehicle exhaust. In their center, Beau Mailer stood ramrod straight and flapped a large sheet of paper. He jabbed a finger toward three long buildings behind MAC, Inc.’s chain-link fence. He shook the paper at the barred gate. “Those buildings over there are ours. Part of the old man’s lien. MAC, Inc. is on our land, men, and we have the right to occupy it.”

One of Mailer’s militia rattled the gate. “We’re comin’ in, fuckers!” he shouted up at the security cameras, then, grinning at the camera, he took aim and shot the invisible face watching through its lens. Everyone laughed. His eyes roved over Nora without seeing her.

She pressed herself into the rotting walls of the building. Never show your fear, pipsqueak.

Inside the fenced area, air force sirens wailed. A warehouse door rolled up. Two jeeps filled with athletic clones in black body armor drove across the tarmac, stopped a hundred feet from the security gate, and halted while the drivers waited for orders from their earphones.

Outside the gate, the pavement shuddered beneath Nora’s feet. Expecting a lumbering circus elephant, she saw instead the militia’s refurbished tank clanking toward them. The tank rammed the main gate and broke the guard bar. After two more runs, the machine ground to a halt, its elephantine trunk jammed into the chain-link fence.

“I think something’s broke, boss!” the tank driver yelled over the MAC, Inc. sirens.

A voice behind Nora startled her: “What’re you up to, ma’am?” He was young, feigning tough. Acne fighting through his downy whiskers. A pile of leaflets in one hand, a power staple gun in the other.

“Walking my dog.”

He eyed the doberman. “You local?”

She nodded.

“Then where’s this commissary place? Shit all looks alike ’round here.” He showed her one of the leaflets. “Gotta post these warnings on the commissary.”

The sirens were getting louder. Nora covered one ear and tried to think. The illegals were inside the commissary and God knew what Mailer’s militia would do to them. And it was only a matter of time before they found Phil’s munitions factory.

She pointed toward the decaying elementary school that had failed to contain her. “Down there,” she said.

A cloud of dust rose from the state highway turnoff. A large black van was headed for the MAC, Inc. compound. Morning sun ricocheted off its tinted windows as it juddered over a pothole and flew toward the main gate, toward the stalled tank, toward the men in camouflage and their assault rifles.

The van pulled to a stop. Windows rolled down. Montana’s smiling congressman rode up front. Dazed Asians sat in back. Hungover. Saki time in cowgirl land. Little sleep and no context.

“Fuckin’ chinks!” one of the militia shouted at the Japanese delegation. He raised his rifle.

Nora took out her phone and dialed Rosa. Pick up, Rosa. Pick up the goddamn phone.

“Listen up,” Nora told her. “Don’t argue. Just do it. Now, goddammit!”

Another dust spiral from the highway turnoff. A blue light revolving on a beat-up pickup, its siren whining in the wind. Fifteen minutes since Rosa had called the new volunteer sheriff, and he’d beat the record from town.

Three brown high-powered SUVs slipstreamed the sheriff: duckers ready to test their new toys on the firing range they’d rented for the day from Phil.

Right behind them was a white van with four women hanging out the windows, shrieking up a party. Old Bert’s birthday girls.

The sun topped the water tower.

“Fuckin’ chinks!” the pin-eyed militiaman yelled again. He fired into the air, just missing the blades of the Fox News helicopter that chopped the sky.

How the hell did that get here? Nora wondered as the MAC, Inc. sirens drowned out the world. She set Stasi loose. Smaller mass. Smaller target.

A pickup honked behind Nora, forcing her into a ditch. Mike Smith was at the wheel and the extended cab was packed with fellow Witnesses, armed for gang warfare. Gravel sprayed like buckshot as he shimmied to a stop in front of the militia’s tank. The local volunteer fire engine rumbled behind, Phil riding shotgun, armed with the duckers’ arsenal.

Phil was out before the engine stopped, his posse close behind. Jabbing Mailer’s rooster chest with his fat ring finger. All set to press the red button on the console. Ready! Launch! War! Mailer stepped back slightly, then stepped forward and threw out his chest, smacking Phil in the nose. Mailer’s militia pressed forward, weapons ready. Phil’s posse raised theirs.

Nora stopped, closed her eyes, and waited for the violence. Instead of apocalypse, she heard a voice. His voice.

“Gentlemen.”

Nora heard Leonard Cohen in her head. Give me back the Berlin Wall. Maybe it was the painkillers.

“Gentlemen,” the voice said, gravelly, familiar, like the road home. “Let’s be reasonable.”

She opened her eyes to see the volunteer sheriff standing easily between two men ready to battle for their empires. His careworn face broke into rivulets of smile lines.

“Shall we try taking one step back in time?”

Phil and Mailer moved sideways, their heads high, their eyes small and threatening. Phil’s posse and Mailer’s militia lowered their weapons.

“Now, let’s talk.”

Nora stood mesmerized. Inside her head, she heard the hum of stars. Down by the commissary she saw Rosa’s van, the Salvadoran families piling into the back, their arms loaded with children and bundles. She watched Rosa steer down the dirt road toward the state highway. Rosa would do them right.

Nora caught the shadow from the corner of her eye. Saw Stasi leap into the cab of one of Mailer’s pickups, grab the Ray-Bans from the windshield ledge. Saw Stasi push off toward the ground.

Saw Stasi shudder in midair before she heard the shot.

“Fuckin’ thievin’ dog! Told you I’d kill her one day!” Mike Smith roared.

Mailer’s militia took cover behind their tank. Phil’s posse got behind the fire engine. When all the world’s a target, there’s no time to ask who fired the first shot. The duck hunters were on the radio for support. The Japanese were taking phone photos, sending them to the world. Oblivious, the congressman stepped out of the van, smiling for posterity. The Fox News helicopter hovered overhead, sending live video back to the station: Congressman taken hostage by Montana militia.

Radio static. Backup on the way. Federal. State. Extraterrestrial.

Behind the barbed-wire fence, MAC, Inc.’s warehouse doors rolled open, releasing strange aircraft like dandelions on the wind. Outside, the paid-for party girls stopped dancing and started screaming for real.

Armageddon in a blink.

Nora ran.

She followed the trail of Stasi’s blood over a rise to the old barn she rented from a wheat farmer. The blood trail went through a broken board in the wall she’d meant to fix. Nora reached for the two keys on the chain around her neck. The first was for the padlock on the door. The second one she hadn’t touched in years.

Inside, she threw on the lights even though she knew every inch of the barn with her eyes closed. Her high-wire rig was in place above a safety net and a sawdust floor.

She called Stasi. No reply. She followed the blood to the drop-cloth mound in the center of the room and raised the shroud.

Stasi lay against the car door.

A pink-and-gold 1952 Dodge convertible. An eight-year-old girl in a pink tutu doing handstands on the hood, her toes caressing the stars. A teenage boy racing time, racing to freedom.

Nora sat in the sawdust on the barn floor with Stasi’s head on her knee. She pulled gauze from her backpack and swabbed the dog’s wound. She didn’t hear the approaching pickup or the footsteps.

“Hey, pipsqueak,” said the voice.

She stroked Stasi’s head. Took her time looking up. “’Bout time, Frank,” she replied to the volunteer sheriff.

“You kept the car.” He ran a finger along the side, slowly, as if he felt vibrations in the metal.

“You’re a doctor now?”

He nodded.

“Then give me a hand.”

Frank retrieved his emergency pack from his pickup. He wrapped Stasi’s wound and gave the dog a shot.

“Your mother saved your car. She kept everything after you left.” Nora bent her head and nuzzled Stasi.

Frank’s eyes focused on Nora’s skull, the raw cap of scar where her flesh had been pulled from her and she’d been turned inside out. He reached his fingers toward it. Touched her.

Nora felt the stars race through. “Six months, Frank. I’ve been back six months.”

He traced a tear down to her lips. “Couldn’t do it, Nora. Couldn’t come close.”

“Your mom got away.”

“I saw her in the van with the illegals.”

“You knew.”

“I knew.”

The sounds of Armageddon filtered into the barn. Jets. Helicopters. Gunshots. Screams.

Nora pushed herself to her feet, Stasi cradled against her chest. Frank held the car door while she laid the dog on the cream-leather seats.

“Feel like a ride?” said Nora. She opened the driver’s side, taking the second key from the chain around her neck. It slid in smoothly and the engine turned. It purred. “Get in, Frank. I’m driving.”

He leaned over and kissed the salt from her mouth. “I’ve seen the future,” he whispered.

“It’s murder.”

“We’re cousins,” he said simply.

The words had sat between them for years, had driven her away, had kept him from her. Their own no-fly zone.

Nora touched the badge on his shirt, traced that star. “It’s the law.”

“Law goes where you take it.”

Stasi stretched out on the backseat, enjoying the drugs.

Nora took a moment to pull on her blond wig and paint her lips pink in the rearview mirror. Satisfied, she put the car in reverse and backed it out the barn door.

The gunfire song of Armageddon played all around them and across the curve of the earth.

“Canada?” Nora asked. “Zombie Road?”

“Montana’s a big state.” He looked at her hands on his steering wheel.

“Don’t worry, Frank,” Nora said, lips pursed, cool as an Arctic breeze. “I’ll do it slow. Real slow.”

The Road You Take by James Grady

Shelby

A big blue sky arced over that prairie highway driven by a lone white minivan.

Roxy rode behind DezAray who’d called shotgun when they left last night’s motel in a pine-trees-and-good-money town across the mountains. Shotgun meant riding next to Bear, three hundred — plus pounds of watch out crammed behind the steering wheel. He stank of weed he wouldn’t share, cigarettes, and whiskey, plus you might catch a paw if he thought you sassed or he simply got the itch to pop somebody, but DezAray packed sixty extra pounds of flesh on her five-eight-in-stiletto-heels frame and the big girl knew how to take a hit.

Cherry rode on Roxy’s left, past the cooler, behind Bear. Her golden-blond dye job had more class than DezAray’s motel-sink peroxide. Cherry craned to see where they were going as if there were some destination besides the next gig. She was a few high-school years ahead of Roxy, who wondered if somewhere under heaven there was a letter or e-mail inviting her real name to her class’s ten-year reunion. That notion made Roxy sort of laugh as the white van rumbled her life away.

“What’s so fucking funny?” mumbled Star from the way back, where she rode slumped amidst suitcases, sound system speakers, cables, minispots, makeup and costume bags, telescoping dancing poles, and the deflated ring for oiled-up bikini-wrestling gigs.

“What isn’t.” Cherry arched her back to stretch. Potholes on this two-lane highway across the top of the state rattled the minivan, but Roxy saw no tremble in the breasts some surgeon built beneath Cherry’s red sweater.

Wonder if Cherry paid back the loan plus vig Luke fronted her for that work. Wonder how much longer I can keep him from “helping” me go under some knife.

Star said: “’Nothing funny ’bout one of you skimming my stash.”

“Not me!” said DezAray. “And no way it’s Bear: crystal’d make his heart fart!”

Whoosh came Bear’s backhand toward DezAray — missed because a gopher ran across the road, made him swerve the minivan, and messed up his aim.

“Almost,” said Cherry of the attempted varmint murder. “Star, Luke’s rules say no rips, no hold-backs, so there’s no thieves in this ride.”

Bear growled: “Don’t talk ’bout Luke. I’m road boss. And no more you askin’ to drive or some What the fuck you want? and cozyin’ up to the man.”

“I’m just trying to stick to my place,” said Cherry.

Roxy said: “Nobody’s skimming you, Star. You could tell.”

Tweakers know tweakers.

So far, Star’d steered clear of the needle and the pipe, only sniffing. She’d kept her high cheekbones, tawny-haired, stop-traffic beauty, her teeth, and her tight T&A, no tremor in her pony legs when she stripped. But her eyes were always black holes.

“Catch some sleep,” Roxy told the beauty in the way back.

“Sleep is when they get you,” said Star.

“You can really get got when you’re tweaked,” said DezAray.

“Don’t care then.”

DezAray stared out the windshield: “There’s a whole lot of out there out there.”

The western third of the state was the Rocky Mountains marching down from Canada, pine tree crags soaring more than a mile above sea level. East of the mountains meant scrub-grass prairies and chessboard-brown-and-gold fields of rotated crops, which if you weren’t born there looked like one terrifying, big empty.

In the two weeks Roxy’d gone to community college in Miles City, some 413 crow-fly miles from where the white van now rumbled, a teacher had said Montana held seven regions, each bigger than many other states. Where she was now was the Hi-Line, named for the railroad built after the Civil War by a tycoon who got free land along his tracks from the federal government, got the feds to create cargo and passengers for his trains with public-land giveaways to homesteaders who didn’t understand it rained next to never out there. Before Roxy’s lifetime when the glaciers melted, forty-below-zero blizzards roared over the prairies a few times a year. Most homesteaders fled, died, or went crazy. The ones who stayed leathered up tough.

Like me. Roxy’s eyes found the van’s mirror. What the locals saw when she stripped was some lanky bitch with chopped hair the color of dirt, nothing special behind, and up front too small for more than five-dollar tips. Ice eyes. And no matter the hoots, hollers, and creep games, nobody ever saw more than what she was tough enough to sell.

Except Paul.

Dead rabbit on the road.

Bear swerved to run over it. His mirrors showed mountains shrinking forty miles behind them. They’d rolled east out to the prairies, blew through Browning on the Blackfeet reservation, barreled through Cut Bank like that town wasn’t there.

Coming up on the left horizon, Roxy saw three blue humps, the Sweetgrass Hills, mini-mountains left over from dinosaur days. Her heart punched her ribs. Keep it together. She stared out the windshield. “Here come the space aliens.”

Like an army of giants ten stories tall, a hundred windmills with spinning white blades rose from the prairie, big-money invaders that — in harmony with Montana’s history — were built elsewhere and sent electricity spun from the local wind out of state.

A dozen miles beyond the army of windmills waited Shelby. And Paul.

“Yay, I got cell service! Okay,” DezAray said, waving her cell phone registered by Luke through some gonna bust it account, “promise I’ll work my geeks, but first I need me some Candy Crush.”

Every circuit girl had a website for credit-card chats and “private” downloads with viruses run by some hacker in Russia. Once Luke’s crew had gotten all they were gonna get from a cyber-sex troll, that citizen might find his credit crashed and bank tapped, a touch of that coming back to Luke to be washed in his Payday Dollars Now yellow shack on Bozeman’s strip of warehouses, seedy motels, and bars. Luke kicked a slice of the hacks’ score to the women he put online, minus any vig they owed him.

Then there’s the cash from dates.

Roxy didn’t do that.

“Yet,” Cherry had whispered to her a week before in Lincoln, the truckers’ and Unabomber town in the mountains halfway — eighty-three miles — between Missoula and Great Falls, the city a hundred miles southeast of where Roxy rode in a white minivan. In Lincoln, Roxy’d caught Cherry sneaking back into the diner from the highway patrol cruiser parked out back, from the badge who had a kink Cherry parlayed into lawman tips that got her nods from Luke. But that badge wasn’t clocked to meet up with Cherry on this circuit.

Cherry saw herself caught in Roxy’s eyes, put her finger to her smeared ruby lips: “We all got secrets.” Roxy ratted Cherry out to nobody. That night Cherry gave Roxy a nod, told her how life wasn’t yet.

Now on that April morning, the white van rushed past the wind-farm army of towers. Shadows from the spinning blades slashed Roxy.

Cherry told the driver: “Your belt’s packing the take just fine.”

“Shut up ’bout my belt or you’ll get it,” growled Bear.

Cherry ignored him. Gave Roxy a look about... about the take?

There’s the take and there’s the books.

The books are the circuit’s fee plus a cut of the door at bars, bachelor blowouts, or frat-house gigs, negotiated taxes on beers and booze, payouts for gas and motel rooms, and “independent contractor” fees to the stable. The books are for the law.

The take is everything else. A cut of all the presidents tucked into G-strings or tossed on a beer-stained floor. Half the dollars from dates cleared by the road boss that Roxy still said no to. DezAray said yes to such gotta pay dates from the kind of guys who mocked fatty back in high school, so who’s laughing now, huh? “Cherry-picked,” they all joked, referring to the big shots who were reeled in by the blonde with big breasts and big ideas. Star let any guy with the right cash hang her up in whatever night he wanted. But the major dollars in the take came from the envelopes that nameless mooks brought to Bear as they traveled the road, cash laundered into the books as gross income.

The books and the take — what they say you do and what you really get.

White letters on a green road sign: Shelby, 7 Miles.

Bear’s eyes goaded Roxy from the rearview mirror: “Maybe I’ll stop.”

Shelby’d been a gig on the circuit last month.

A mesa rim flowed off to Roxy’s left. Up on the right, she saw the truck-sized flapping American flag near the highway crossroads, one road through town, the other to Canada or toward Great Falls past the electrified chain-link fence of a private prison.

The books claimed they’d done great the first night of their double-header gig in Shelby at Jammers, a former trackside slaughterhouse renovated to a bar with a liquor license acquired from a gone-broke tavern in pollution-poisoned Libby, 246 miles away in the pine-forests-and-mountains northwestern corner of the state. Jammers’ owner clung to Shelby’s dreams that wind-farm workers and prison guards someday were gonna drop enough dollars in town to banish the whitewashed windows from Main Street.

Roxy woke up in a motel, Cherry asleep in the next bed, the others zonked in their rooms. The night before, opening night in Shelby, Roxy’d scanned a mere handful of faces nursing beers as Bear emceed “our Big Sky’s best exotic dancers.” They worked the poles, two shows, couldn’t have pulled in enough legitimate dollars to pay for their motel rooms, but it wasn’t worry about dollars that woke Roxy early, it was the wind.

“Fucking never stops blowing here,” Bear’d grumbled.

The wind felt crisp and fresh, felt good, felt free on Roxy’s face.

She did what you never do in a small Montana town: walked.

Near ten a.m. on a spring Tuesday, strolling the highway to where it curved into Main Street. Houses with peeling paint. Vacant lots. A church. A quarter-mile of flat-faced stores, a bank, empty curbs for parked cars. She thought about taking the bridge over the train tracks where a freight whistled through ’bout every other breath, but stayed on the main drag where teenagers cruised loops in quests they couldn’t name. This town nestled in a rolling prairie valley supposedly housed three thousand — plus souls, felt shrunken from its used to be. As two white-haired ladies shuffled into the lone café, Roxy saw—

Her jaw dropped, gasps trembled her as she stared across Main Street to the brick building with a two-story tower, glass doors, and a yellow marquee.

A man’s voice: “Are you okay?”

“That’s me,” she whispered. “The movie theater.”

“You mean the Roxy? Been there since before we were born.”

“I’m where people go to watch the movies in their heads.”

“You’re your own movie,” said the man, maybe thirty, clean and lean, quiet looking, with a smile and eyes that seemed wide open.

She wanted to hit him. “You don’t know who I am.”

“I’m Paul.”

“Good for you.”

“Well, I should do better.”

“Everybody should. Get over yourself.”

“That’s the whole point, right? Over yourself and with somebody.”

“Look, cowboy,” she said, and a smile twitched his lips, “I’m not in your movie.”

“So where are you?”

“Walking. And I’m not gonna do whatever you wanna.”

“I wanna walk with you, see my hometown through your eyes. ’Course, if you want coffee, we could pop into the Tap Room.” His nod flicked her eyes to a bar beside them with its door open to the morning. “Just dropped off breakfast for Gary to get into Denny. Gary’s the bartender, makes sure Denny eats, won’t let him sit ’less he does. Or we could go ’cross the street to the café. You saw Teresa and Bev walk in for their every-morning go-to-coffee, they’d like meeting a new face that could be a granddaughter since all theirs aren’t around.”

“Doubt they’d like to have coffee with a stripper.”

“Then we’ll get another table.”

Roxy blinked. She turned the way she’d been drifting. He fell in step beside her.

“What’s with you and the theater?” he said as that building slid past on their left.

She kept her eyes on the road out of town to Jammers’ slaughterhouse, heard the truth sneak out of her: “Roxy’s not my real name.”

“I’ve always been Paul. We keep going this way, you’ll see the post office where I work.”

“You’re the mailman?”

“And here I am out for a walk. What was I thinking?”

Stop smiling at him. Ice eyes.

“Mostly I staff the counter or the sorting room. You like your job?”

“Are you crazy?”

“I’m here,” he said. “Born and raised. Tried college, didn’t feel right. I wasn’t at home in other people’s big ideas. Worked, saved up, drove around the country.”

“What did you see?”

“That everyplace was someplace, even the road.” He shrugged. “I took a chance. Came back here where ’least I am who I am.”

They turned off the main drag. He pointed out this, told her about that, about the library where he’d get books — only fictions, got enough facts just waking up. That tan house was where Linda used to live, heartbreaker but worth it, moved three hundred miles away to Billings, married, kids. The Curtis boy came out of that peeling white paint place, marine, didn’t make it back from Iraq. Paul’s great-aunt used to live down that street, not far from the Methodist church that never was for him.

“What would your aunt say if she knew you were with me?”

“We can ask her, she’s back that way in the Heritage, assisted living.”

“Better spare her heart.”

“Hell, the eyes in this place — by now, half the town knows we’re out walking.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Because there you were in my here I am. Because you see more than just a theater. Because there’s something about you that’s nobody else’s movie.”

“No! I’m no rescue-me girl. I needed money, and work one party led to work another, then you’re on the circuit, so what, I’m not poking a fast-food cash register, not some forget-it face behind a counter like they said I’d be, I’m... I’m...”

“Roxy,” he said.

Their footsteps crunched gravel. Lilacs scented the wind. They’d die.

“I got nothing for you,” she told him.

“I get to walk with you. Hear you. See you.”

“You wanna see me, it’s all out there for a five-dollar cover at Jammers, but tonight’s the last night.”

“I want to see you, not it.”

Her bones cracked. “Why?”

“Might take forty, fifty years for me to answer that.”

The wind blew dust into her eyes. She whispered: “Don’t come tonight.”

“Don’t leave tomorrow.”

Roxy said: “I don’t believe in this kind of shit.”

“How’s the shit you believe in working out for you?”

She watched him scan his windswept town.

Then he walked backward facing her like some goofy teenager: “I don’t know why you hit me like you do, but if the hit is all I get, ’least my hurt is earned and true.” He swung around to walk beside her again.

Can’t look at him, can’t breathe, can’t—

“You know what I want to do now?”

YES, I KNEW IT, HERE IT COMES, ALL HE EVER WANTED TO DO WAS—

“Listen,” he said.

And he did. About her mother. That shit in high school. How her dad never backed down and seldom got it right, left her his IOUs. How she wouldn’t walk away from what was owed to creepy Luke because that’s not right or who she was, but the harder she worked to pay it off, the more she was who she wasn’t. How she was tough.

“I believe you,” he said.

Shelby was a small town. They didn’t walk up Knob Hill or cross the tracks to the pink high school three times the size today’s student population needed. They circled back to the west side of town and were crossing a truck stop’s parking lot when the white minivan roared off the street, crunched gravel in front them, and slammed to a stop.

“Leave!” Roxy told Paul as Bear squeezed out of the van where Cherry rode shotgun. “I got nothing for you! I’m bad trouble!”

Paul stood beside Roxy. “And I’m right here.”

Bear stomped closer: “DezAray’s doing a date like she should, Star’s got the shakes in the motel shower, Cherry and me figure to grab some breakfast, end up finding your ass out here with some dude ain’t been road-boss cleared.”

Roxy tried to stop Bear. “We’re just walking!”

His paw spun her toward the van — she plopped on her bottom.

“No!” yelled Paul.

Under the law, he attacked Bear first when he grabbed him.

Whump! Bear’s fist slammed into the mailman’s guts, lifted him off the gravel.

Bear caught him on the way down, yelled, “Stop!” for witnesses to hear, tossed the gasping local guy smack into the closed sliding side door of the minivan — dented its white metal. Paul bounced off and fell to the ground. Bear gave him the boot.

On her ass in the gravel, Roxy heard a new voice yell: “Done!”

A brown-skinned man in blue jeans and a snap-button shirt loomed in front of Bear. “I seen Paul make his move, that’s on him and between you two, but it’s done.”

“Says who?” growled Bear.

“Us,” said another man’s voice from the truck-stop café’s stoop. A silver-haired guy in a windbreaker, his hands open and flat along his sides.

“Bet you got iron, maybe rigged in your van for easy grab. Go for it. Float with the others, the Mekong or the Marias,” the silvertip said of the river running through trees seven miles south of town. “It’s all the same to me.”

Cowboy Shirt Guy said: “Time for you to be gone.”

Roxy scrambled toward where Paul lay crumpled in gravel, but Bear pulled her up, shoved her toward the van and Cherry’s waiting arms as he growled to the locals: “Fuck your nowhere town.”

Cherry pulled Roxy into the van, whispered: “You got no win, not here, not now.”

Roxy heard the van door slide shut on everything but where she was.

Jammers’ owner didn’t bitch when they pulled out an hour later and a gig early. Luke added that “projected lost revenue” and the repair of the white van’s sliding door to Roxy’s tab, though when they rolled out on the next circuit, the dent was still there.

On the circuit. A loop through the whole state, twenty-seven days of driving, one or two shows a stop, on the road like the sweep of a second hand around a clock, up the spine of the Rocky Mountains to where they were the night before, now headed east across the Hi-Line to go beyond Havre, into the bleak northeast corner, drop down to Glendive and Billings, then the long run west, maybe to state capital Helena with its cathedral and bureaucrats, its new wine bars and old money, of course over to haunted Butte and then back home to Bozeman, to the Payday Dollars Now yellow shack, to the trailer she shared with DezAray, to the tab Luke said he’d figure some way to let her work off.

Now here they were, back in Shelby.

Cruising past that truck-stop parking lot, a few parked cars, a pickup, nobody in sight. The road curved them onto Main Street. Bear made their machine crawl through the heart of the town to draw out Roxy’s pain. She looked across the cooler, past Cherry, saw the reflection of the white van passing across the wall of windows of the lone café, wondered if Teresa or Bev would look up from their coffee to see her glide by.

Cherry said: “You’re doing it smart, Bear. Don’t even stop to take a piss.”

Bear snapped his attention away from the old movie theater. “Hell, Roxy, now I know why you like this dump: they named that place after you!”

DezAray chirped: “Oh wow! How cool, Roxy!”

Someone whispered: “Leave it be.”

The bleached-blond big girl blinked. “What’d I say?”

From the way back came Star’s whisper: “I don’t want nothing named after me.”

Bear laughed: “No worries.” He glared at Roxy: “Your worry is to ride the circuit right.”

“Ignore them, Bear,” said Cherry. “You’re driving good for being shaky tired.”

He frowned at her in the rearview mirror.

The white van cruised past the squat green visitors’ center. Past the turn for the post office. Over a spur of railroad tracks as the highway followed the main track line and rolled the minivan toward the edge of town and the slaughterhouse turned into a bar called Jammers.

“Some gigs are worth losing,” said Cherry. “Sometimes you gotta get up and go. Speaking of go — Bear, you gonna two-hour us all the way to Havre? I could give you a break, let you pee, drive, let you—”

Bear pushed the pedal to surge past the gray skyscraper-huge grain elevator before the turnoff to the county fairgrounds. “You aren’t the one who lets.”

“I know who I am,” replied Cherry as the van rumbled up the east wall of the prairie valley. She smiled at Roxy: “You played that cool and smart.”

Roxy mumbled: “I just sat there.”

The van topped out of the valley, sun glistening off the train tracks to their left, the vast prairie rolling out before them like a golden sea to the long-gone horizon.

“Wow,” said DezAray. “Imagine getting stuck out here? Hello, Mr. Serial Killer.”

“You know what I bet?” said Cherry. “I bet the take in Bear’s belt’d probably be enough to cover Roxy’s line.”

What?

Cherry shrugged for everyone to see. “Just saying, she threw in a big chunk.”

Twenty-one bucks from last night’s stripping tips is a big chunk?

Bear flicked his eyes to the mirror to—

“Cop!”

The police cruiser pulled around the white minivan, whooshed past, and sped away until it was a black dot vanishing on the long gray highway.

“Where’d he come from?” mumbled Star.

“You’re in the way back!” said Bear. “You’re supposed to be the lookout!”

“You got mirrors.” Star stared at the ceiling of the van.

“Was that your trooper, Cherry?” asked DezAray.

“No,” she replied. “He’s got Wolf Creek Canyon patrol this month, remember?”

“I barely remember where we’re going now!” DezAray giggled.

“Don’t ever remember,” said Star.

“I’m glad I remembered to pee.” Cherry looked at Roxy: “You okay, girl?”

Like suddenly you care?

“Gotta do what we gotta do.” Cherry smiled, her lips the color of her name.

DezAray, who kept looking for the TV cameras she like totally deserved, burst into the song that Luke wouldn’t let her use in her routine, even though she did the swirl in high heels pretty good for a bleached-blond big girl and could whip off the sequined bikini top with flair as she belted out: “I GOTTA BE ME!”

“You strip so guys think they are who they wanna be,” Luke had told her. “So no gotta for you.”

But for that moment, that one April morning moment in a white van speeding east on a gray-snake, two-lane highway, DezAray was.

Blue sky arced above them.

Nothing to see out the windshield except the horizon rushing toward that glass.

Bear flipped up the turn signal. “Damn it!” His eyes glared at Cherry from the rearview mirror. “Barely a couple miles out of that shit-for-a-town and look what all your pee talk’s making me do.”

The white van glided off the highway to a graveled roadside historic attraction, a wooden sign burned black with letters about the Baker Massacre south of there at the Marias River where in 1870 the US Cavalry slaughtered 173 Blackfeet men, women, and children who were all innocent of killing one white man, the official motive for the military action. Bear stopped the van, turned off the engine.

“I gotta take a piss,” he told the four women in the van. “You know the drill.” He pushed his way out from behind the steering wheel.

Cherry watched Bear stomp around to the front of the van, said: “Pass me a Coke, would you please, Roxy?”

“Please,” came Star’s soft voice from the way back where her mind wasn’t.

Roxy felt herself open the cooler, stick her hand into its motel ice, bottles of beer and soda and energy drinks that Bear always bought before hitting the road, lift out a Coke, and hold it across the backseat toward Cherry.

Cherry said: “Perfect of you to set it up for me, Roxy — isn’t it, everybody?”

“Whatever,” said DezAray as her thumbs and eyes played Candy Crush.

From the way back came the whisper: “Everything’s so fucking perfect.”

“You know the way it always works,” said the golden-blond woman with red lips, steel eyes, and breasts she’d chosen herself. She took the bottle from Roxy, growled an imitation of their road boss: “You drain the lizard, you gotta give him a drink.” Cherry’s eyes flicked between the windshield’s view of a hulk with his back to the van and what she was doing that Roxy couldn’t see. “You know, Roxy,” she said loudly, stepping into a conversation they’d never had, “you might be right, could be lots of opportunities coming up in the company.”

What? Roxy heard a soft pop.

Beyond the windshield, Bear’s shoulders shook as he fumbled in front of himself.

“He likes to piss on things,” said Cherry as that mass of flesh and fury turned to storm back to his command chair. “Here.”

Roxy reached to take what Cherry’s closed fist passed her.

An unlabeled pill bottle filled Roxy’s hand. An empty pill bottle she’d just smeared with her DNA and fingerprints.

Cherry locked eyes with her, held the twist-cap Coke bottle out between them, shook it like a rattlesnake.

Bear jerked open the driver’s door, glared at the women, stuck out his paw.

“Don’t look at me,” DezAray told him.

“You bitches all work for me,” he snapped.

“Well, for Luke,” said Cherry as she let Bear and everyone watch her open the Coke bottle.

“Life’s a ladder, bitch.” Bear grabbed the bottle. “And you ain’t ever gonna climb above me.”

Cherry said: “Don’t stress. You’re way too stressed, isn’t he, everybody?”

“I’ll show you stress.” The open bottle of dark liquid trembled in Bear’s paw as his eyes lashed Roxy. “And tonight I’m gonna show you what’s what.”

Cherry said: “A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.”

“You got it.” Bear raised the bottle.

Roxy pictured that brown liquid glistening with skimmed and dissolved meth crystals, a hyperdrive solution destined for the hulk who smoked too much, an easy heart-attack verdict for whatever small-town law got the 911 about trouble on the road, highway patrol right there when the call came, nobody to tell the tale except women in the white van whose fingerprints and stories... She pictured herself knocking the bottle from Bear’s hand. Him believing Cherry’s lies and what truth DezAray and Star could tell, his temper exploding, his fists. His promised tonight. She saw herself telling some cop that she’d been hands-on part of Bear’s fate, but I didn’t do it, wasn’t me after the money or because of... whatever.

“Sometimes,” Cherry said straight into the dawning light on Roxy’s face, “you give somebody a chance.”

“What chance’ve I got?” whispered Star.

Roxy imagined stories Cherry’d tell creepy Luke, the chance he had coming, the chances a situation named Roxy would have cupped in Cherry’s red smile.

We all gotta do.

She said nothing as Bear tilted the bottle and glugged down what it held. He burped, wedged himself behind the steering wheel.

Whir went the dented side door of the white van Roxy threw open. She knew the only thing she could count on being there for her was the big sky. She stepped out under its blue forever anyway.

“What the hell!” yelled Bear. “Get your ass back in here!”

“Roxy!” cried DezAray as the escaping woman slid the van door shut. “Nobody will see you out here!”

“Nobody,” sighed Star in the way back. “Cool.”

“Bear!” yelled Cherry. “Drive off, leave her ass! Hell, you’ve already got her stash in the take, covers her tab, nothing to lose but her trouble!”

Roxy stalked to the other side of the highway.

Cherry’s shouts boomed from the van: “Show the bitch who leaves who. Get down the road, make one of us take the wheel while you call Luke, then—”

“Shut up!” yelled Bear.

Cherry yelled louder than she needed to: “You got it!”

I got it, thought the woman standing on the side of the road.

The van spun gravel as it sped back onto the road, a white blur on the gray-snake highway, shrinking, going, gone.

The woman stood watching with only the clothes she wore and the secrets she bore, alone on the side of a two-lane state highway that scarred the golden prairie beneath that massive blue sky. She heard a meadowlark whistle. Smelled the earth, the oil of the blacktop road, knew where she was, the direction of a face and a town where people lived.

She shouted her true name to the wind.

Started walking.