Montana Noir

The Dive by Jamie Ford

Glendive

Carla “Train Wreck” Lewis bought her whiskey at ten a.m., right when the state liquor store opened for business. Not because she was eager for a breakfast of barleycorn mash, but because she didn’t like to show her face in Glendive anymore, especially since she’d had her nose broken in her last fight. Getting KO’d in an unsanctioned MMA tournament held in the parking lot of some Chickasaw casino had altered her brooding good looks as well as the trajectory of her fledgling career — if you could call getting shinned in the head a vocation.

The Liquor Store Lady raised a concerned eyebrow. “I don’t mind taking your money, honey, but if you keep coming in here every day for a bottle, it’s gonna become a habit.”

The silver-haired woman behind the counter had a good Christian name and probably an interesting life to go along with it, but everyone Carla knew back in high school just called her the Liquor Store Lady.

“And what kind of habit would that be?” Carla asked, an unlit cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth.

“The kind your mother wouldn’t approve of.”

Carla removed her sunglasses to reveal two black eyes — the unwanted offspring of a nose that now pointed ten degrees to the left, the result of fighting a southpaw for the first time. Carla gained new respect for the Liquor Store Lady when the woman didn’t even blink at the temporary ruin of her face.

“My mother doesn’t tend to approve of anything I do,” Carla said with a shrug. “Never has. Lucky for me, the feeling’s mutual.”

The Liquor Store Lady bagged the bottle of Roughstock. “Yet here you are, back in town. When I heard you won a couple of them crazy fights, I figured you’d left Dawson County for good this time. I didn’t think you’d let a beating in the ring send you running back home.” The woman cocked her head and raised a concerned eyebrow. “Or did some boyfriend lay hands on you?”

“I don’t have a boyfriend.” The words hurt more than the pain in Carla’s blocked sinuses. Especially since her ex-boyfriend, Sturgill Runyon, had also been her trainer and manager. The moment her perfect 3–0 record took a hit, he’d dropped her off at the nearest hospital before skipping town with her show money and the redheaded lefty who’d spilled Carla’s blood all over the canvas. Carla didn’t bother finishing Sturgill’s we can still be friends texted apology. Instead, she deleted all his messages and blocked him on her phone. A final lesson in self-defense.

The irony was that Sturgill said they’d been offered five grand for a worked fight and begged Carla to take a dive. She refused and took a beating anyway.

“And I’m guessing you know why I’m back in town,” Carla said as she grabbed the bottle by the neck. “There aren’t many secrets around here.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised,” the Liquor Store Lady chuckled. “That being stated, I am very sorry about your mother’s present situation.”

Carla nodded her gratitude. “Been a long time coming. But she’s got a few more days left in her — weeks maybe. I swear she’s just holding on to make sure the Ranger-Review gets her obituary right. Even on her deathbed—”

“No, dear,” the Liquor Store Lady interrupted. “I’m sorry she’s still married to your stepfather. Word is, that bastard from North Dakota got your mom to change her will and now she’s leaving everything to him: your family’s ranch, the oil rights, the Lewis Mansion, everything — lock, stock, and barrel. That’s what I hear, anyway.”

Carla bit down on her cigarette, tasted the bitter tobacco.

The Liquor Store Lady sighed. “This bottle’s on me.”

The afternoon sky was beginning to purple as Carla left the unopened bottle in the passenger seat, stepped out of her truck, and stood in front of the three-story building that had been built by her great-grandfather and namesake, Charles Lewis, a train conductor turned sheep baron. The old brick manse was nothing like the sprawling estates back east, the kind she’d seen in magazines. In fact, the building might pass for a guesthouse in the Hamptons. But in Glendive, Montana, the place stood out like the Hope Diamond in a dusty coal bin, and had just as many stories told about it. Some were apocryphal, others merely the cud chewed by local gossips, but as Carla spotted a kettle of turkey vultures circling a nearby field, she knew that just as many were true.

Even though Carla had grown up here, she still called the place by its formal name. Especially after her father committed suicide years ago and her mother married their attorney from Watford City, a business partner who called himself Arnold H. Chivers, Esquire. Since then the Lewis Mansion had felt even less like a real home.

“About time you showed up,” her stepfather snapped as he opened the front door and met Carla on the porch, which was littered with cigar butts. He tried not to grimace when he saw her broken nose and bruised cheekbones but failed miserably. If masking emotions had been an Olympic event, Arnold Chivers would have scored a 3 out of 10, with perhaps a generous 4.5 from the Irish judge.

He shook his head and glanced at the time on his cell phone. “I don’t even want to know. Your mother’s been asking for you nonstop, so get in there and be the prodigal daughter you always thought you were. I’m heading to my office to get some papers notarized. I’ll be back in a little bit. I expect she’s—”

“She’s in there dying,” Carla said flatly. “And you’re screwing her one last time, with your fountain pen. This building and every acre is part of us, built by and for my family.” Carla felt herself rising on the tide of emotion left over from losing her last fight. She used that anger as a cudgel, digging her forefinger into her stepfather’s chest. “I’ll see this place burned to the ground before it belongs to you.”

This was the longest conversation she’d had with her stepfather since she was twelve, when she came back early from Lincoln Elementary, heard strange noises, and walked in on her stepfather having sex with their young German housekeeper. He’d sent Carla to the family cabin on the Yellowstone River. When she returned three days later, the housekeeper had been fired and given a one-way ticket on a Greyhound bus. Carla’s mother had been a riot of drunken apologies but refused to leave the man or kick him out. Since then, the house had felt like a mausoleum, smelled like dust instead of wood soap, mold and mildew instead of scented candles.

As Arnold collected himself, Carla remembered how he was the first person she’d ever hit. It was an awkward, ugly, overhand right, straight to his neck-beard, when she was sixteen and he was... where he wasn’t supposed to be.

She never talked about that night to anyone, just quit FFA and took up wrestling. Then boxing. Then left town after graduation, never to return.

Until now.

“Look,” Arnold said, “I know you don’t think highly of me.”

“I don’t think of you at all.”

There was a crack of gunfire and they both glanced at the field. Two boys were shooting gophers, sighting their rifles for Glendive’s annual coyote hunt.

“This situation with your family’s estate isn’t my doing,” said Arnold. “Believe it or not, your mother had her will changed of her own volition and without my knowledge. I just found out yesterday. I didn’t expect it, I didn’t ask for anything beyond my stake in the business, but I’ll gladly take everything — if that’s your mom’s dying wish.” He shoved his way past Carla. “And good luck trying to stop me.”

Alyce Lewis had withdrawn from the world from time to time even before she got sick. Carla suspected it was because her mother enjoyed the drama her absences created. There were small-town rumors: Alyce had gone to New York City, worked in off-Broadway musicals under a stage name, and flamed out before coming home to Glendive in shame. She’d suffered a bad bout of plastic surgery in Mexico and now went to bed wearing her makeup. She’d had an affair, which was why her husband blew his brains out during harvest. As Carla walked into the parlor, she smelled dead flowers in vases filled with fetid water. She saw the spent oxygen bottles and listened for the grandfather clock, which had stopped working. She was reminded that nothing is as simple as gossip.

The truth was that Carla’s father had killed himself after learning the pipeline he’d built on their land had leaked benzene into the groundwater. Nearby homes and ranches were contaminated. Three newborn babies died. Arnold settled with the families, buying their silence. But when Alyce got sick, her heartbroken father took matters into his own hands. Arnold cleaned up the mess, literally and figuratively.

The affairs came later. Many of them.

“Hello, dear,” her mother rasped, staring out the front window into the dark clouds that had put out the sun. “People kept calling all week, telling me you were back in town. If I had known dying would have brought you home so quickly, I would have got on with this business years ago.”

Carla thought her mother looked like an aging movie star in repose. She was wearing silk slippers and a long ivory negligee whose plunging back showed her jutting shoulder blades, revealing how much weight she’d lost during her eight-year battle with leukemia. Alyce took a long drag on her cigarette, heedless of the wheeled oxygen tank at her side. The hose curled up beneath the nape of her neck, disappeared into the long blond tresses of her wig, and then reappeared just below her nose. Curlicues of smoke drifted up and caressed a ceiling the color of coffee-stained teeth.

“I think you died when you married Arnold,” Carla said. “I’m looking at a ghost who’s made some very bad financial decisions.”

“So you’ve heard.” Her mother fought a cough, then smiled through cracked lips. “Yes, everything that rightfully belongs to you, my dear. Everything your grandparents fought for during the Dirty Thirties when the weaker fled, everything your father endured those long winters for, so he could make this place what it is — I’m leaving it all to your stepfather.”

“If you’re doing this to hurt me—”

“I’m doing this to save you. Oh, I knew what he did to you, darling.” She paused to let that sink in, flicking her cigarette into a cracked ashtray. “And I know how that must make you feel. But if I’d left him, if we divorced, he would have ended up with half of everything and I just couldn’t allow that. So I waited and put it all in his name. People will think he forced me to change my will — they already do. Then when he returns, everyone in town will say that’s why I did this.”

Alyce opened a drawer. Inside was an old Colt .32 with black tape on the handle. Carla knew the gun — it was her father’s.

“I’m just a sick woman who is sick of dying,” her mother continued. “And sick people do terrible things when they’re not in their right minds, like protecting what is theirs.” She coughed until her eyes watered; it was the closest she ever got to crying. “And paying people to lose fights. So they’ll come home where they belong. I never thought you’d turn the money down and take a beating. Just look at you.”

Carla stared at her as thunder rattled the windowpanes and the electricity flickered. The Lewis Mansion creaked and groaned as wooden joists settled like the timbers of an old sailing ship heaving in the wind.

Alyce wiped her eyes without a hint of apology. “I’m dying but I’m not above trying to make amends. And I couldn’t wait any longer. I’m too old for the Make-A-Wish Foundation, and even if I wasn’t, I doubt they’d fulfill my desire to put an end to your philandering stepfather. With Arnold gone, when I’m laid to rest, everything will be yours. And you can fix that broken nose.”

She stubbed out her cigarette and lit another, coughing as she puffed away.

Carla went to close the drawer. Hesitated. She picked up the revolver and felt its weight. It didn’t seem real until she opened the cylinder and saw the gun was loaded. She trailed her fingers along the oiled barrel while her mother kept talking, wheezing, lecturing, until her voice became the sound of a drunken fight crowd throwing plastic cups of beer, screaming for Carla to step forward, to press on, to walk through the punishment. She heard Sturgill shouting from outside the ring, urging her to circle to her left, away from the gloved fist that kept coming out of nowhere. Carla closed her eyes and smelled her stepfather’s aftershave amid the smelling salts. When she opened them she saw a trail of dust out the window as Arnold turned down the lane toward the house. Her knuckles were white, laced around the grip. Her finger was on the trigger.

Her mother was smiling.

The room fell silent except for the soft hiss of the oxygen tank.

Carla sighed and her shoulders sagged. “That was a very nice speech, Mother. I bet you practiced it for days. But you should have just come out and asked. Instead of pretending you were going to do something noble for a change.”

Carla’s mother tried to look insulted. But she never had been an actress.

“I almost believed you,” Carla said. “Almost.”

She put on her sunglasses, popped her neck, and walked outside, gun in hand, as a stray dog barked in the distance.

Carla walked into the stubble field where her father had taken his own life. Where his body had been found at sunset, arms and legs akimbo.

She heard gravel spray as Arnold pulled up in his Cadillac.

She heard the car door slam as he began shouting for her to come inside, telling her that her mother needed her and it would soon be raining, hailing, or worse. She kept walking as lightning flashed on the horizon. She stared ahead at the furrowed ground, remembering how she used to wander these fields in the spring as a little girl, spending long afternoons looking for dinosaur bones and meteorites. But all she ever found were gophers and jackrabbits, tumbleweeds and the occasional rattlesnake.

Carla heard her stepfather stumbling behind her, babbling threats about legal precedents and powers of attorney. Reminding her that she’d run away and telling her she’d never wanted any of this to begin with. He finally stopped talking when Carla turned around and he saw the gun tucked into her waistband. Where his hands had once been.

Carla enjoyed the long moment of silence. She needed a moment to clear her head. To feel this place again.

She licked her lips and drew the pistol. She stepped forward and touched the barrel to the bridge of her stepfather’s nose. She closed one eye and cocked the hammer with a satisfying click, like the sound of an ambulance door closing, the latch of a coffin lid, or an expensive fountain pen snapping in two, splattering red ink all over the page.

Arnold froze. He sucked air past clenched teeth. He swallowed and his Adam’s apple rose and fell. “Look,” he whispered, “we can make a deal. I’ll give you anything you want. You don’t have to do this.”

“I don’t have to do anything anymore,” Carla said as she slowly lowered the gun. “And you have nothing to give.” She looked over her stepfather’s shoulder, toward the house. Her feeble mother was on the porch, mouthing the words, Do it.

She offered the gun to Arnold. “My mother wants you dead.”

Her stepfather hesitated, not trusting her. She lifted the Colt slightly. Take it.

“But I’m not my mother.”

He took the revolver in his trembling hands, quickly pointing the business end at her as his face showed fear, confusion, and relief. He chewed his lip while dust from the field settled into the beads of sweat on his forehead.

“You won’t get off that easy.” Carla reached out, placed her hand over Arnold’s, and squeezed his trigger finger.

Carla didn’t hear the gun go off. But she heard the ringing in her ears, her mother’s shouting. She thought she saw her stepfather smiling as her body bent in half and she tumbled to the ground. She closed her eyes and waited for the bell.

Two months later Carla limped back into the state liquor store.

The Liquor Store Lady was reading the morning paper and Carla couldn’t help but smile when she saw her stepfather’s face on the front page. The headline read: ATTORNEY GETS 15 YEARS IN DEER LODGE FOR ATTEMPTED MURDER. FRAUD TRIAL PENDING.

Carla owed the boys in the field for stopping the bleeding and saving her life. Especially for testifying that they’d heard a single shot that stormy afternoon and seen Arnold Chivers, Esquire, standing over Carla’s body with gun in hand.

Her stepfather swore that he’d been set up, of course. But the dying testimony of Alyce Lewis, a heartbroken woman so in love with the man she’d put her entire estate in his name, removed all doubt from the jurors’ minds.

“Nice to see you walking around under your own power,” the Liquor Store Lady said. “I’m sorry you couldn’t be there for your mother’s funeral.”

Carla shrugged. She felt the loss. But she had a bottle of Percocet to dull the pain from two surgeries and her memories of this town that she loved and hated. A place where you could buy shotgun shells along with chewing gum at the local diner. Where second-graders visited a museum featuring dinosaurs and Noah’s Ark side by side. Where poaching applied to mule deer, elk, and the occasional person.

Her family’s estate was in turmoil, and probably would be for years, but Carla didn’t care. She had better things to do.

“Back to the old standby?” the Liquor Store Lady asked.

Carla shook her head and placed an unopened bottle of Roughstock on the counter. “I don’t need it anymore. Figured I’d just return it to the source.”

The Liquor Store Lady nodded her head. “Given up drinking, have you?”

“I’ve given up losing,” Carla said as she left.

Driving east, she thought about the redheaded lefty who was out there somewhere. Along with the ex-manager who owed her.

And Carla “Gut Shot” Lewis was looking for a rematch.

Bad Blood by Carrie La Seur

Downtown Billings

The elders lined up in ergonomic conference-room chairs, birds on a wire, careful not to touch the sleek ash table that made Jimmy Beck so proud. Elbow to canvas elbow, braids down their backs like a fringe on the row, they watched the court reporter set up her machine and did not look at Vera. She was free to study their faces, which were the color of ripe acorns, and the river drainages mapped across their cheeks.

She had dressed down to the extent tolerated at Bennett & Haversham, LLP — a silk blouse and black trousers, expensive but not eye-catching. The satellite offices monitored appearances even more closely than the LA headquarters, to avoid the PR office’s microscopic attention.

Yet this was Billings, her hometown. LA had no context for the people in front of Vera today. If they were preparing for trial, Rita from Santa Monica with the improbable eyelashes would dress up these reluctant witnesses. She’d Hollywood-ize them with beads and make them speak in parables. It would be unbearable, alien. Still, Vera checked her cuffs and smoothed her gold collar necklace. Beyond the plate glass nine stories up, postcard views extended from sandstone cliffs to the north and southeast down to the swift Yellowstone fringed by refineries. This town, she thought. Country clubs and nickel casinos, half the folks trying to be something fancier than they were and the other half just trying to get by. PR would never understand that they’d have more credibility here in boots and jeans than suits.

At a nod from the court reporter, Vera stepped up to the table. “Thank you for coming. We’ve all spoken by phone, so you know what to expect today. I’m Vera Ingalls, the lawyer who called. I’ve reviewed all the documents forwarded to me and there’s no record of any applications for homestead patents by your ancestors, but we have good evidence that they did homestead in the area you’ve identified. The army has records of the promises made to honor homestead rights, and there’s the Indian Homestead Act itself. We’ll start with that and take your oral testimony. This is Kristie, who’ll be taking down everything you tell her. She has instructions about what we need. I’ll be just down the hall in my office if any questions come up. Is there anything you want to ask before we start?”

Shifting and sidelong glances moved up and down the row. Finally, a heavy man in a denim work shirt and a white cowboy hat leaned on his forearms. “We want copies of the testimony,” he said. “For each of us and for the tribal college. For the history department.”

“Certainly.” Vera ran an expectant look along the row of faces. They raised and lowered their eyes, but no one spoke. “Okay then. My assistant will be in around eleven thirty to take lunch orders if you’re still going.”

Beck was coming up the hall as she emerged from the conference room.

“This that pro bono project?” He slowed, but Vera still had to quicken her pace to join his efficient progress toward the restroom in order to have a conversation with him.

“They’re recording oral history today. What they told me by phone backs up the archived documents, so I’m getting it down.”

“Good stuff. LA wants this in the news as soon as you can get the complaint filed. We’re getting hammered — all the media wants to cover is those damn Navajo protestors. We need the redirect.” Beck halted at the restroom and put his hand on the doorknob to let her know the consultation was over.

“I’m on it, but we don’t have any record of homestead applications. That’s the real problem. Army generals making empty promises to Indians isn’t exactly a federal case.”

“I get it. But we need a win here. Your partnership review is coming up and LA is big on team players. Knock it out of the park for us, kid.” He raised a fist to her shoulder but didn’t punch it like he used to. A big sexual-harassment payout against one of the Denver partners had recently created a new, and welcome, force field around the associates. Beck disappeared into the restroom and Vera unconsciously rubbed her shoulder.

If the elders had been paying clients, she would have stayed to hold their hands and rack up billable hours, but they’d be fine. Vera had heard too much on the phone to hanker for the live performance.

“My ancestors traveled to Fort Keogh to meet with General Miles, before the reservation time. They promised peace and he promised land...”

“The soldiers gave no warning. They came with horses and wagons and told all the families east of the river they had to move to the new reservation west of the river...”

“The babies were buried down there, near the river. We had to leave them. We still go, for ceremonies. It is a sacred place...”

Anybody who grew up around here was raised on the litany of white savagery against the local tribes — what more was there to say, Vera asked herself, but mea culpa, mea maxima culpa? It was a bloodstain better assigned to the past. No present guilt could change it. Knowing the outcome, the century of community her ancestors and their neighbors had built, she wasn’t sure that changing it would be for the best anyway. Jimmy Beck and the management were so smug, so sure that they knew better than the locals how things should play.

“You don’t own me,” she whispered to the innocuous Western landscape art.

Her office had a glass door and wall onto the corridor. Nothing hidden. The managing committee frowned on the use of the blinds by associates. We thrive as a partnership in an atmosphere of maximum transparency, the employee handbook read, when what it really meant, Vera had discovered by observation, was maximum transparency for associates while the equity partners operated from the security of an absolute black box.

She glanced up and down the empty corridor, stepped into her office, and snapped the blinds shut. She had only just opened the complaint document when knuckles rapped the glass, a knock she recognized. Vera held a hand to her forehead, coughed, and said, “Come in.”

Peter was in business casual for the flight.

“Hi.” He greeted her in that tentative voice he used around women. It used to fool her, but since she’d met him she’d come to understand that the unassuming manner was a deliberately disarming front for Peter’s litigating MO, which was to reach down his opponent’s throat and rip his beating heart from his body.

“Moving up to the big leagues,” she said. He checked the time on his smartphone.

“Flight’s at eleven. Just turned in my keys.” He advanced to stand before her desk as if inviting some gesture from her, but she stayed seated, half turned toward her monitor.

“Good luck.”

He sighed. “Vera, can’t we put things behind us and be friends? I don’t want to leave bad blood between us.”

But he hadn’t seen the blood, had he? He wasn’t there when the toilet filled with blood like some cheap effect in a horror movie. He couldn’t spare the time to hold her hand as the gyno completed nature’s messy work, because it had all been her mistake. He’d made that clear.

“There is no us, Peter. Go to LA. Have a nice life.” She indicated the door with head and eyebrows.

Another sigh, this one more aggressive. “Fine. Just remember, you’re the one who wanted to leave it like this.”

She held her peace as Peter stalked out and enjoyed the little victory of the door whispering shut on its strong hinge in spite of his best attempt to slam it. The complaint sat before her, uninspiring, for the next half hour or so, until finally she went to check on progress in the conference room.

She was back at her desk, boxed salad open in front of her, when the phone rang. Muriel had instructions to take messages today while Vera drafted the complaint, but calls from her great-uncle Marshall were different. He was as likely as not calling from the hospital, after he or another aging relative wound up in care. Since her parents migrated to Scottsdale a few years earlier, Vera batted cleanup at home in Montana.

“Everything okay, Marshall?”

“Oh, just fine. How about yourself?”

She turned to her salad. “I’m fine. On a deadline, as usual.”

“I know how busy you are, but I got to thinking after we talked last weekend about that Indian case. Maybe I have something that could help.”

“Oh? What’s that?” Vera took a big bite and clicked Pause on her timekeeping software. Might as well eat while Marshall rambled.

“Grandad kept all his records for the old place in that sea trunk I’ve got in the basement. Down there I don’t know how long, but it’d all be from that area you’re talking about, along the Tongue River. That’s right where they homesteaded. Anything happened out there back around the turn of the century, he’d have something on it. Old man was a real pack rat. Guess I got that from him. Can’t stand to get rid of any of this stash I’ve got. Maybe you could help out and go through it to see if there’s anything worth keeping. I’d kind of like to use that trunk. I’ve got a bunch of LPs—”

“Yes, that sounds interesting,” Vera broke in. “What if I stopped by tonight after work?”

“Oh!” Marshall’s voice pitched up with excitement. “Oh, I’d like that. Maybe you can stay and watch the game with me.”

Vera wedged another bite of salad into her cheek. “Let me see how things go this afternoon. There’s something I have to finish before I can relax. But there could be something in the trunk. Maybe he traded with the families or something. It could help prove where they were living.”

This could be the break she needed, Vera thought, as she gently excused herself and clicked the line shut. New evidence from her own family archive had partnership written all over it.

When Kristie poked her head in to say that the elders’ testimony was complete, Vera went to thank them for their efforts and accept the cool press of their hands, not quite handshakes. From the window she watched them file down the street toward the Lucky Quarters just out of sight, where Vera knew the marquee advertised a five-dollar senior meatloaf special and SLOTS! THAT! PAY!

She had walked to work from the bungalow she rented just west of the business district. The early autumn was trying out a new crispness in the evenings. Vera left her office sweater on under her jacket and pulled on running shoes from the selection under her desk for the longer walk to Marshall’s on the near south side. She’d have to pass the rescue mission, but there was nothing dangerous about the route, just a depressing tour of blocks beyond the tracks that resisted gentrification. Her colleagues all lived in thousands of square feet in the western suburbs with garages full of toys and lawns that someone else tended. They drove full-size pickups to work and kept vacation homes in the mountains. Vera could have afforded some version of all that by now but she preferred the feeling of lightness in knowing that she could box up her few possessions, turn in her keys, and walk away. It was worth it to listen to Jimmy Beck give orders like she was a creature he’d personally shaped from clay and think, Maybe I will, and then again, maybe I won’t.

The streets of Billings drew her in as they always had. They were homey small-town streets, even with the population topping a hundred thousand these days, full of people who smiled and said hello even to strangers. Vera had seen cruelty and prejudice here, but surely that was mostly behind them as a city. There had been so much progress since the days when her grandparents, raised on ranches east and south of town, told her mother they’d disown her if she married a black man or a Catholic. When a chronically homeless man died here, a crowd of downtown workers who had been his friends came forward to testify to the value of his life. When a beloved independent bookstore closed, its bereft customers formed a cooperative to open a new one. Artists created their own open studio space. Churches transitioned struggling families from shelters into their own homes. Small businesses were passed down from generation to generation. It was not a town of big money, just small efforts day after day, by people who would never see their names recorded, until it all compounded into a sense of powerful resilience.

Marshall was in a plastic lawn chair on the front steps in his shirtsleeves when she arrived with her briefcase and a canvas bag from the food co-op.

“What are you doing? Aren’t you freezing?” Vera had her hands in her pockets and her collar turned up as the quick fall of night sucked more heat from the air by the minute.

“I was over at the senior center and when I got home it was colder than a witch’s tit inside,” he said as she nudged him to the door. “I went down and lit the furnace and came back out to catch the last of the sun.”

“You’ve got to do something about that furnace. You need one that comes on automatically, and one day the city’s going to crack down on you for burning coal.” Vera followed him in, where the air was indeed no warmer than outside.

“I’ll take care of that out of my trust fund,” Marshall said as he shut the door. “Lucky for me, hay’s doing well this year and I’ve still got a few acres out at the old place. Otherwise it’d be magical fruit out of a can three times a day for me.”

Vera rolled her eyes at Marshall’s habitual exaggeration of his poverty. He wasn’t willing to spend what money he had. Any more would only pad his mattress. She headed for the kitchen.

“I brought groceries.”

“Twinkies?”

“Salad. And ground beef.” She had a frying pan on the stove already for the one meal Marshall would reliably eat: instant mashed potatoes, a hamburger, and a small salad drenched in ranch. She cooked on autopilot while he talked about the Packers, then fed him, like she did several times a week.

“Best meal in town,” Marshall said as he wiped his mouth on a paper towel he’d carefully torn in half to make it go further. Vera smiled. For reasons she couldn’t have articulated, watching the old man eat a good meal satisfied her in a way her crisply written complaint did not.

“Now,” she said while Marshall topped up their Folgers, “show me that trunk. I have to get back to the office tonight.”

“I dragged it out from under the steps and put it under the light.” In the tiny kitchen, Marshall only had to stand up and turn around to hold open the basement door. His silhouette hung in the doorway as Vera descended toward the single bare bulb in the middle of the hand-dug cellar not six feet deep, steps protesting as she went. The furnace was an apparition from her childhood nightmares, exactly as she remembered. Its whooshing, clanking, leering presence could draw her in and consume her whole, like a crematorium, she had always felt sure. It was the fire that burned clean, that consumed all it touched. Nothing it swallowed could survive.

Vera turned her back on the conflagration visible through the isinglass window and kneeled in the dirt. The trunk lid rose with a banging of buckles at her push. Marshall had spoken the truth. From well to arched vault, yellowed papers crammed every available inch. There was no visible mold — not in this climate — but a smell of age emerged, acids breaking down organic compounds. Vera reached for a stack of seed receipts.

The fire was warm at her back and the dirt almost forgiving after she padded it with her sweater and jacket. She grew comfortable as she bent and lifted and read and sorted. There was a whole world here, every little transaction that had made up her ancestors’ days. She felt quite transported by the time she reached the bottom and found a leather binder in among some land documents, deeds for small parcels that had long since passed out of the family’s hands. The binder was so close to disintegration that it looked at least as old as the trunk itself, like it might contain the original owner’s manual: Load up all your belongings. Leave your homeland. Never look back. How had they done it?

The binder sloughed off dry leather particles when Vera drew it from the trunk.

“My my,” she said. “What could you be?”

A rawhide thong secured the flaps but tore in two at Vera’s first tug. She set aside the coverings and blinked at the first page. It was — it couldn’t be, but it was — an application for a homestead patent along the Tongue River by someone named Little Trees. And then one of her recent phone calls came back to her with a woman’s voice saying, My name is Camille Little Trees, the great-granddaughter of the first Little Trees, who homesteaded at the mouth of Hanging Woman Creek.

Here it was, the evidence, not of trading but of the land patent applications themselves, completed but never sent to Washington. Here was the evidence of a crime committed against the tribe over a century ago. The documents bore the seal of the Fort Keogh land patent office. The government had received and acknowledged them, then somehow the papers had found their way to the bottom of a white homesteader’s sea trunk in a dark basement and stayed there as whole lifetimes passed above ground.

Vera sat back and knocked her funny bone hard against the steel handle of the furnace. She turned her head to peer fully into the flames for the first time. She had been avoiding them out of her silly childhood phobia. Now she looked for real. The coals were red hot and the fire flickered blue and white at its heart. She felt its ferocious appetite.

From the tall stack of receipts for equipment long since abandoned, seed long since sowed, Vera took a thick wad. She pulled open the furnace and tossed in the papers. They made a satisfying little whistle as the fire rendered them white ash in an instant. She took up more of the pile — advertisements for implements, Norwegian-language newspapers already falling into unintelligible shreds — and threw them in as well, more and more, until her own breath seemed in rhythm with the fire’s, in and out, inhaling everything, exhaling only heat.

At last, her hand fell to the binder. It was light, as if it held nothing at all, but Vera of all people understood the significance of the land descriptions it contained. They were all the neighbors’ riverfront ranches, the oldest and best water rights, flood-irrigated, her family’s old place that cousins still worked, the best land in the valley — even those hay fields Marshall relied on. They had worked that land for generations, learned its sacred secrets, drained their sweat and blood to keep it. No piece of paper could make it any less theirs.

Vera thought of the land, its prairie-dog towns, unmarked burial sites, and crenellated buttes, and of the elders lined up at her conference table that very day. She thought of Jimmy Beck in the hallway, always pushing, so sure of her craven loyalty to the firm, and his implied threat about her partnership review. She thought of the lost baby and Peter’s plane touching down at LAX that night. She thought of boxing up the rest of what she had found and leaving it for another generation to puzzle over. Upstairs, Marshall shouted something at the TV. Soon he would notice her long absence and shuffle to the top of the stairs. Now was the time for decision.

Her hand moving almost on its own, she opened the furnace. The documents she’d fed it had already disappeared like so much steam. There was nothing at the center of the fire but pure heat, pure hunger, avarice itself, like the flame of history that burned everyone, sooner or later. Down deep where she had protected her soul from all the coups counted against it, a few things sheltered. The family. The land. There was no law, no rule, and no duty beyond that, only the primal ruthlessness that won the West. Mine, she breathed.

In one determined movement Vera took the whole stack, leather binder and all, and flung it at the hottest place where the fire swallowed once, just as she swallowed hard while watching, and left nothing behind.

She pushed to her feet and gathered the small stack of papers put aside for saving, including the old deeds from the very bottom of the trunk. She set the lid to without a noise, picked up her sweater and jacket, and carried everything up to the kitchen table.

“Find anything good?” Marshall asked from his recliner. He took his eyes from the game and followed her progress from door to table to sofa.

“Nothing special. I cleaned it out for you.” Vera kicked off her shoes, sat on the far end of the sofa, and curled against the arm. The Packers’ offensive line filled the screen as something unreadable passed across Marshall’s face, another hidden thought in a lifetime of hiding thoughts, nothing he would ever allow her to extract.

“Atta girl,” he said, and turned the volume higher.

Oasis by Walter Kirn

Billings Heights

Oasis Pizza never closed. It was open all night and it delivered anywhere. That was its edge, the way it stayed in business. Unlike the shops that belonged to national chains, it served the grimmest parts of Billings, from meth-lab motels to pit-bull trailer courts to dirt-floor shanties by the river. The pizza itself was overpriced and awful. The crust was soft and starchy and the red sauce was a smear of tasteless paint. Worst of all, the pizzas had little cheese. Ray Rogers, the owner, who’d bought the place at thirty with money from a personal-injury lawsuit involving a runaway Polaris snowmobile, was too consumed by his video keno habit to buy mozzarella in sufficient quantities. Some nights the shop ran out of cheese entirely, forcing us, the drivers, to buy our own cheese and sprinkle it on en route. People won’t tip for a pizza without cheese, and our tips were all we had. Our wage was six dollars an hour, pitiful, and sometimes — as often as he could away with it — Ray paid us nothing. He gave us pills instead. Adderall. Dexedrine. Soma. Percocet. We took them too, especially the night crew. At four in the morning, lost on a dark street in a car that reeks of grease and garlic, a guy will do anything for a burst of energy, or even for just a new, distracting thought. That was the danger driving for Oasis: You ran out of thoughts. You forgot you had a mind. Except when it ached, which was almost all the time, you forgot you had a head.

In the nine months I worked there, which sounds like a short time to people who’ve never worked jobs that start at midnight and end when the rest of the world is waking up, I only made one friend. His name was Crush. I assume he named himself. I’ve always been drawn to people of that type, the ones who start life as Dale or John or Brad but reach a mysterious crisis point that leads them to retake control of how they’re viewed. But what did Crush mean? He never told me. Was it intended to emphasize his strength? He was certainly broad in the shoulders and chest, and yes, it stuck with you when he shook your hand or clapped you thunderously on the back, but to me his most striking quality was his enormous capacity for pity. He felt sorry for people other folks detested, including Ray Rogers, who treated us like slaves and stole from the world with his cheese-free, doughy pizzas. “I love Ray,” Crush told me once. “I love his cruelty. So afraid he’ll be hurt if he doesn’t hurt you first.”

Crush was a tip monster. He knew all the tricks. He taught them to me during my first two weeks, when he persuaded Ray to let me ride with him rather than learn the business on my own. His best trick was flapping open the pizza box when a customer met him at the door, supposedly to make sure the order was right but actually to stun the person’s nostrils with a warm Italian herbal cloud. Another trick was to show up out of breath, as though he’d sprinted from the car. If it was cold out, he wore a heavy coat buttoned right up to his chin, dramatically shivering as he made change. Quite often, his customers let him keep it. Sometimes his tips were as much as the whole bill, and sometimes they were more. His most generous customers were drunks and stoners, who he learned to identify by the toppings they ordered, which tended to be complex and over-rich. Pineapple chunks and jalapeños, say, or barbecue chicken with Canadian bacon. He scrapped with the other drivers to make these runs, and so did I, once I learned what they were worth. To hungry druggies at their euphoric peaks, a twenty is just a pretty piece of paper. If they pay you in coins, even better. They’ll hand you jars full. And one pound of quarters is a lot of cash.

Though sometimes they robbed you. Not often, but now and then. “Cooperate,” Crush said, concluding my week of training over a cup of black coffee in the shop. “Hand it all over and never call the cops.”

I asked him why.

“In my experience, the same ones who rob you, you often meet again, and when you do, you find out it wasn’t personal. They needed something and had no way to get it. Tires for their car, child support. Who cares? Is money your god?”

“Not exactly. Maybe sometimes.”

“Not mine,” said Crush. “My god is love.”

Was Crush a Christian? I braced for a full sermon. They spring them on you, I’d discovered over the years, usually just when you think you’re safe with them. I was only nineteen, but I’d done a lot of living, some of it on a juvenile work farm, thanks to a shoplifting ring I got drawn into during my sophomore year of high school. The work farm was full of religion. I’d learned to fear it.

“Do you have a lady?” Crush asked me. “A lady beautiful?”

“Not right now,” I said.

“Well, I do. You’ll meet her sometime. She lights my way. She’s the reason I work here, to give her what she needs. I very much hope that you find one of your own. I’m saving to pay off her Jeep Grand Cherokee.”

“That’s a lot of deliveries. A lot of tips.”

“Fortunately, I’m highly disciplined.”

“What’s her name?” I asked.

“Beth. Beth Louise. But she dances under Cassandra.”

A stripper. Poor Crush. I found it hard to look at him. It would have been better if he were born-again.

“I love it at night,” he said, gazing out the window, which was fogged from his coffee breath, and dusty too. The stacks of the refinery flared red and orange. “Or maybe it’s that I hate the sun.”

“How come?”

He shrugged his big shoulders inside his army jacket. It smelled of oregano and it fit him wrong, suggesting that another, smaller man had earned its profusion of stripes and patches. “Because I’m a true romantic, I suppose. Sunlight diminishes people. It steals their dreams.”

Ray Rogers liked to raid the till to gamble. The Magic Diamond Casino — half gas station that sold sundries, half liquor store — stood kitty-corner across the street from us, allowing him to pop over at any time — he just locked the front door for ten minutes and disappeared. That’s why the empty cash drawer didn’t faze me. Our pizzas had been cheese-free for a month, indicating that Ray was on a spree. With video keno, the way Montana laws worked, you couldn’t bet more than eight quarters at a time, but as my great-uncle, a bank manager, once told me, it’s slippage that bankrupts people, not huge mistakes.

I was making good coin, having mastered Crush’s system. One night I earned 180 bucks. Some delinquents were throwing a party in a parked bus. It took me a solid hour to find the thing because, of course, I had no address, just a treasure-map set of directions based on landmarks: a billboard for a dentist, a row of garbage cans, a tree with a plastic bag stuck in its branches. The pizzas were cold and hard when I arrived but mounded with cheese from the two-pound bag I carried. The kids were impressed. They were snorting ketamine. They passed a hat around to pay the check and collected three times what they owed. I’d learned to count money with a glance by then. I refunded them fifteen dollars to seem honest and pocketed the extra sixty-two.

I boasted to Crush when I got back to the shop, thinking he’d be proud of me. Instead he acted weird. “If you were a decent guy, with principles, you’d have given me half of that when you walked in here, without me even asking, as repayment. Was I not your mentor?” he asked me. “Yes, I was.”

I peeled a twenty off my roll, not because I felt indebted to him but because of his wrinkled, disgusted look. It scared me. I wondered if he was getting sick. He’d lost weight in his face but bulked up around his hips. Plus, he was losing his eyebrows. They’d gone patchy.

“Thanks,” he said, taking the money from my hand. I didn’t expect it. I’d thought that he was bluffing. He brought out his own roll from his jacket, wrapped it in my ransom, and put it back, keeping his hand in his pocket afterward as if to go on fingering his loot.

Hoping to calm things, I asked, “How’s Beth Louise? You two still going out?”

“Cassandra and I don’t go out. We keep things private. She has to seem unattached, for business reasons.”

I said I understood.

“She’s a child,” said Crush. “Incredibly naïve. We’d be married already if it were up to her.”

“Really?”

“She’s in her earning years. No reason to blow it. Our love will always be there.”

Behind us, the phone started ringing, but with Ray at the Magic Diamond for a quick game, it was okay to lose the order. Our cook had just quit and neither Crush nor I liked the smell of garlic on our hands. The caller hung up but tried back a moment later, and this time, out of annoyance, I picked up.

“Is Crush there?” a young woman’s voice asked. She sounded angry, like someone who’d been tricked and wanted vengeance. Her tone was the reason I didn’t have a girlfriend and wasn’t seeking one.

I covered the phone with my hand. “I think it’s her.”

“It can’t be,” he said. “She only calls my cell.” He spoke in a whisper, as though he feared discovery. Was he ducking another girlfriend? A wife, perhaps? I realized I knew very little about my pal — I couldn’t even guess his age. His smooth, undamaged skin made him look thirty, yet his air of prolonged rumination on major life themes seemed to fit a man in his midforties. But how could that be? He delivered pizzas. At nineteen, I was already plotting my next move: helicopter flight school. My dad used to fly one before a rocket got him when I was eight years old. His Marine Corps buddies sent me pictures.

“Who is this?” I said. “I’ll pass along a message.”

“Tell him it’s me and his phone’s dead and I’m done. Tell him he missed his last payment. They’ll take the Jeep.” The woman — Cassandra, obviously — hung up then. She hung up hard, in a way that hurt my ear.

Crush felt this somehow and slipped off to the bathroom. I didn’t hear a flush, just running water, which was still going when Ray returned from keno. His eyes were twinkling, which meant he’d lost a pile.

It was two in the morning, when the bars clear out, and in ten minutes, as happened every night, big orders from all over Billings would pour in. It would be my best night since I started, as I said, but not for Crush, who clocked out early, complaining of diarrhea and a stiff neck.

He didn’t come in the next night either, a Saturday. This told me his lady troubles were truly grave. Saturdays at Oasis were cash bonanzas, so much so that Ray kept his gun on him while cooking instead of leaving it stashed beneath the counter. When Crush didn’t show or answer when we called him, Ray fell quiet, a brooding, fretful silence that lasted until the calls stopped around dawn.

“I’ll be honest,” he said. “I thought he’d stick us up. He hasn’t missed a Saturday in years. Plus, he’s been pilfering lately. Something’s wrong.”

“He’s dating a stripper. She’s bleeding him.”

“Crush is gay,” Ray said. “I found his porn once. Country boys. Cowboys. He likes them blond and buff.”

“Maybe he’s branched out since then.”

“That’s rare, I’ve been told. Have you met this woman?”

“No. But I do know her name. And I think I’ve heard her voice.”

“If she dances, it’s either in Laurel or Lockwood. There are only two joints. Try and find her for me, would you? The man is deteriorating. We need facts.”

“They’ll card me. I’m underage. I won’t get in.”

“Bring some free pizzas over. Bribe the door guys. Say someone canceled an order and you have extras.”

I said I’d try.

“Her name’s not Lexus, is it? Like the car? Or Mango? Is it Mango? Like the fruit?”

“It’s Cassandra, I think.”

“She must be new in town. They float over from North Dakota, from the oil patch. There’s not much money there now, with crude so low.”

“You’re sure the porn was his?” I said. “Where did you find it?”

“In the men’s room trash can.”

“Then it could have been anyone’s. A customer’s.”

“Except that I don’t serve that type,” said Ray.

I ignored this remark and headed home, back to my basement apartment in the Heights. Too many late nights, too much coffee, too many pills, and people start saying things just to wake their brains. Whatever you hear after five a.m., it’s garbage, and whatever you say to others is garbage too. It’s the same way with pizza, which isn’t really food, just something to chew so you can feel your mouth move. Pizza is crap. A lot of things are crap. It’s okay, though — it’s fine. Crap won’t kill you, so it’s fine.

What will kill you are rockets fired from hidden positions in countries that your country is trying to save.

The first place was dead, with no one on the stage, just two girls at the bar with a trucker type between them dealing out fives and tens for their tequila shots and paying more attention to the TV — which was showing a ball game — than to their tits and babble. I ordered a beer and inquired after Cassandra, whom the bartender said had been fired over a year ago for biting the face of an off-duty state trooper who’d begged her to pee on him in a private room. I asked the bartender if he knew Crush and he said that he did but only by reputation, though what sort of reputation he didn’t specify. When I brought out a twenty and pressed him for details, one of the girls leaned over, snatched the bill, and dragged me off to a booth in a dim corner, where she asked for another twenty to tell her tale. I could see by her unfocused eyes she didn’t have a tale but was laboring to dream one up. In the meantime, she straddled my lap and went to work, grinding away with her coltish little ass and tickling my ears with precision bursts of breath that raised goose bumps on my neck and scalp. I liked her a lot. She had spirit. She had ideas. It made me feel less judgmental about Crush. I could see how the skilled devotions of such a girl — she reminded me of a nurse, this one, so dutiful and thorough — might rouse an impulse of selfless generosity.

During a pause to cool off, I mentioned Crush again, this time supplying a physical description.

“No eyebrows?” she said. “Or very little eyebrows? And stuck on Cassandra? And huge, with veiny hands?”

“Yes.” She was simply repeating what I’d just told her.

“No. Never met him.”

“But you know Cassandra?”

“I did. Before she hurt that guy and left.”

“Does she still dance?”

“Not publicly. You have a phone?”

I nodded.

“There’s no signal in this place. If you can wait five minutes, I’ll grab my real clothes and we can do this from the truck stop. I’m finished tonight. I took a Molly, but it wore off. Now I want pancakes. Do you want pancakes? I do. A short stack of pancakes loaded with chocolate chips.”

“Do what at the truck stop?” I asked her.

“Get online.”

The girl, who went by Ultra, used my debit card to register with the website. Our booth faced a window that looked out on the interstate where three police cars with whirling colored lights were involved in some sort of major enforcement action against the obese male driver of a green hatchback. Once we entered the site, a grid of photos appeared that showed up poorly on my phone, whose screen was cracked and slightly wet inside. Ultra tapped on one of the pictures several times before the shaky image of a woman sitting cross-legged on a bed appeared. She was dressed in a red bra and panties and held a teddy bear whose head lolled sideways as if its neck was broken. She was pretty enough, with high, curved cheekbones, but her hair was dyed blue and cut short, down to the roots, with lots of random tufts and fuzzy spots.

“Interact with her,” Ultra said.

“You. I’ve never done this.”

“She can’t see you, don’t worry.”

“Where is she?”

“Interact!”

“Hi out there. What’s your name?” Cassandra asked us. She stroked the dead bear and bit her lower lip. “Are we going to play tonight? I like to play.”

“It’s Ultra. From the Fox Hole,” Ultra said.

“Ultra,” Cassandra repeated. She looked confused. Behind her small bed was a poster of a boy band popular with seven-year-old girls.

“I’m here with a guy who says he wants to meet you — a guy from the club. He knows a friend of yours. I’m turning this over to him so I can eat.”

Our waitress approached with a thermal coffee pitcher but took in enough with one glance to understand that earning her tip meant ignoring us tonight.

“Cassandra, my name is Brian Schick,” I said. “I work at Oasis Pizza with your friend Crush. He didn’t show up for work last night. We’re worried.”

Cassandra set the stuffed animal aside, rolled off her panties over her long legs, and intimately displayed herself. “You like it? It’s yours if you want it. Check it out.” She reminded me of a 4-H kid with a prize rabbit. There was genuine pride in her face, a kind of glow.

“I’m wondering if we could meet somewhere and talk. Like a restaurant,” I said. “Tomorrow. Somewhere real.”

“This is my real.”

“I’m serious. I’ll buy you lunch,” I said.

“Impossible. I’m no longer based in Montana. I haven’t been there for sixteen months. You’re reaching me in a coastal Southern state famed for its theme parks and laid-back way of life.”

“You’re not in Billings?” I looked over at Ultra, who ignored me, cutting up her heap of sticky pancakes. These ladies stuck up for each other, which I admired.

“As for Crush,” said Cassandra, “there’s not much I can tell you. I really don’t know him. We’ve never met in person. Only like this, like you and me right now. He says he used to watch me dance, but I don’t remember. The lights were in my eyes.”

“But he’s paying for your Grand Cherokee,” I said.

“He’s been lagging on that, if you want to know the truth. I had to deactivate him.”

“Deactivate?”

Cassandra reached over and retrieved the bear. She stood it between her legs to block my view and then held up one of its arms with her right hand and waved goodbye with it. “I’ll catch you later, Brian. Have Ultra explain real life to you someday.” She switched off her feed and my screen displayed the bill: $27.50.

Ultra said, “Check your statement for that card. Close the account if you start to see weird charges. That probably wasn’t the most secure transaction.”

“No, it didn’t feel like it.” I drank the rest of my coffee, which was cold. The creamer had formed a skin across the top that stuck to my lip in a wrinkled little sac that I picked off and set on a napkin. Horrible.

“Let’s go to my place,” said Ultra. “Let’s keep this rolling. Drop some Molly. Drink a little wine.”

“I’m broke,” I said.

“This is friends. This isn’t business. This is two adult individuals in Billings who don’t keep normal hours or have relationships and may as well pass out together, not alone.”

“Romantic,” I said.

“I think it’s romantic. I think it’s about as romantic as it gets.”

Years later, when I was living in Las Vegas flying Grand Canyon tours for a nice salary that could have supported a family if I’d had one, I thought back to that line and realized she was right.

When Crush reappeared a week later, a Friday night, his eyebrows were completely gone. He looked like a man who’d been sleeping in his clothes and eating out of a microwave, sporadically. His earlobes were badly sunburned, which seemed strange, since Billings had been cold and overcast, and his fingernails were different lengths, the ones on his right hand trimmed, the left ones long. I asked him where he’d been, what he’d been up to, but he busied himself with his orders and blew me off. Oasis was crazy that night, a pizza jam, as though there was no other source of food in Billings. Coming and going with our deliveries, we repeatedly missed each other in the shop, and not until five or so did business slow down enough for me to try to question him again.

This time he answered. “Tarpon Springs,” he said. “A Greek sponge-fishing village on the Gulf Coast. Except now there aren’t many sponges left. Fished out.”

“You went to Greece?”

“It’s in Florida.” He bit his left thumbnail down to match his right one as Ray ghosted by with his haul from the night’s frenzy, headed for the Magic Diamond, jazzed. The machines had been good to him lately, but still no cheese. He’d learned to count on us to handle that part.

“Florida,” I echoed once Ray was gone. I’d never visited and didn’t plan to. My dad had lived there, near Pensacola. Florida is the state we stage our wars from. Florida and Texas. Consistent weather.

Crush brought out his phone, a new model, extra wide. He typed with his left hand, with his long nails. It made a bony clicking sound, so ghastly. I recognized the website when it popped up. First, there was a tiny pink heart, which beat, grew larger.

“You should see this,” he said. “It’s what happened to our love. It’s what happens to love in general now.”

“That’s okay,” I responded quickly, but Crush went on ahead. I’m sure that he’d heard me, but he was being hateful. And he knew it was late enough that I’d look at anything — the garbage hour, when your mind is empty and people like us hardly care what fills it up.

She wasn’t okay. That was clear from the first frame. Was it live or a recording? Like I’d ask him. She lay facedown on the bed under the poster, her naked legs tight together, mermaid style. Her hair was Ronald McDonald red. A wig? I knew it wasn’t a still shot because a meter was clicking away in the corner of the screen, racking up the charges for our visit. I waited for her to move. I got my hopes up. She didn’t move. Her bear was at her side. It looked cuter than last time, fluffier, less crumpled. I concentrated on its little paws, or at least I tried to. It was late. The brain goes wherever it wants at that hour, seeking energy, seeking a target, seeking heat.

“I’m sorry I’m making you watch this,” Crush said, sighing.

“It’s okay,” I replied.

And it was in a way, I’ve decided, since we weren’t there.

Motherlode by Thomas McGuane

Jordan

Looking in the hotel mirror, David Jenkins adjusted the Stetson he disliked and pulled on a windbreaker with a cattle-vaccine logo. He worked for a syndicate of cattle geneticists in Oklahoma, though he’d never met his employers — he had earned his credentials through an online agricultural portal, much the way that people became ministers. He was still in his twenties, a very bright young man, but astonishingly uneducated in every other way. He had spent the night in Jordan at the Garfield Hotel, which was an ideal location for meeting his ranch clients in the area. He had woken early enough to be the first customer at the café. On the front step, an old dog slept with a canceled first-class stamp stuck to its butt. By the time David had ordered breakfast, older ranchers occupied several of the tables, waving to him familiarly. Then a man from Utah, whom he’d met at the hotel, appeared in the doorway and stopped, looking around the room. The man, who’d told David that he’d come to Jordan to watch the comets, was small and intense, middle-aged, wearing pants with an elastic waistband and flashy sneakers. Several of the ranchers were staring at him. David had asked the hotel desk clerk, an elderly man, about the comets. The clerk said, “I don’t know what he’s talking about and I’ve lived here all my life. He doesn’t even have a car.” David studied the menu to keep from being noticed, but it was too late. The man was at his table, laughing, his eyes shrinking to points and his gums showing. “Stop worrying! I’ll get my own table,” he said, drumming his fingers on the back of David’s chair. David felt that in some odd way he was being assessed.

The door to the café, which had annoying bells on a string, kept clattering open and shut to admit a broad sample of the community. David enjoyed all the comradely greetings and gentle needling from the ranchers, and felt himself to be connected to the scene, if lightly. Only the fellow from Utah, sitting alone, seemed entirely apart. The cook pushed dish after dish across her tall counter while the waitress sped to keep up. She had a lot to do, but it lent her a star quality among the diners, who teased her with mock personal questions or air-pinched as her bottom went past.

David made notes about this and that on a pad he took from his shirt pocket, until the waitress, a yellow pencil stuck in her chignon, arrived with his bacon and eggs. He turned a welcoming smile to her, hoping that when he looked back the man would be gone, but he was still at his table, giving David an odd military salute and then holding his nose. David didn’t understand these gestures and was disquieted by the implication that he knew the man. He ate quickly, then went to the counter to pay. The waitress came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dishcloth, looked the cash register up and down, and said, “Everything okay, Dave?”

“Yes, very good, thanks.”

“Put it away in an awful hurry. Out to Larsen’s?”

“No, I was there yesterday. Bred heifers. They held everything back.”

“They’re big on next year. I wonder if it’ll do them any good.”

“They’re still here, ain’t they? I’m headed for Jorgensen’s. Big day.”

Two of the ranchers had finished eating and, Stetsons on the back of their heads, chairs tilted, they picked their teeth with the corners of their menus. As David put his wallet in his pocket and headed for the door, he realized he was being followed. He didn’t turn until he was halfway across the parking lot. When he did, the gun was in his stomach and his new friend was smiling at him. “Name’s Ray. Where’s your outfit?”

Ray had a long, narrow face and tightly marcelled dirty-blond hair that fell low on his forehead.

“Are you robbing me?”

“I need a ride.”

Ray got in the front seat of David’s car, tucked the gun in his pants, and pulled his shirt over the top of it, a blue terry-cloth shirt with a large breast pocket that contained a pocket liner and a number of ballpoint pens. The flap of the pocket liner said, Powell Savings, Modesto, CA.

“Nice car. What’re all the files in back for?”

“Breeding records — cattle-breeding records.”

“Mind?” He picked up David’s cell phone and, without waiting for an answer, tapped in a number. In a moment, his voice changed to an intimate murmur. “I’m there, or almost there—” Covering the mouthpiece, he pointed to the intersection. “Take that one right there.” David turned east. “I got it wrote down someplace, East 200, North 13, but give it to me again, my angel. Or I can call you as we get closer. Okay, a friend’s giving me a lift.” He covered the mouthpiece. “Your name?”

“David.”

“David from?”

“Reed Point.”

“Yeah, great guy I knew back in Reed Place.”

“Reed Point.”

“I mean, Reed Point. Left the Beamer for an oil change, and Dave said he was headed this way. Wouldn’t even let me split the gas. So, okay, just leaving Jordan. How much longer, Morsel?... Two hours! Are you fucking kidding? Okay, okay, two hours. I’m just anxious to see you, baby, not being short with you at all.”

Lifting his eyes to the empty miles of sagebrush, Ray snapped the cell phone shut and said, sighing, “Two fucking hours.” If it weren’t for the gun in his pants, he could have been any other aging lovebird. He turned the radio on briefly. Swap Shop was on the air: “Broken refrigerator suitable for a smoker.” Babies bawling in the background. He turned it off. David was trying to guess who Ray might really be — that is, if he was a fugitive from the law, someone he could bring to justice, in exchange for fame or some kind of reward, something good for business. He had tried everything he could to enhance his cattle-insemination business, even refrigerator magnets with his face on them that said, Don’t go bust shipping dries.

He asked, “Ray, do you feel like telling me what this is all about?”

“Sure, Dave. It’s all about you doing as you’re told.”

“I see. And I’m taking you somewhere, am I?”

“Uh-huh, and staying as needed. Jesus Christ, if this isn’t the ugliest country I ever seen.”

“How did you pick me?”

“I picked your car. You were a throw-in. I hadn’t took you along, you’d’ve reported your car stolen. This way you still got it. It’s a win-win. The lucky thing for you is you’re my partner now. And you wanna pick up the tempo here? You’re driving like my grandma.”

“This isn’t a great road. Deer jump out on it all the time. My cousin had one come through the windshield on him.”

“Fuckin’ pin it or I’ll drive it like I did steal it.”

David sped up slightly. This seemed to placate Ray and he slumped against the window and stared at the landscape going by. They passed an old pickup truck, traveling in the opposite direction, a dead animal in the back with one upright leg trailing an American flag.

After they’d driven for nearly two hours, mostly in silence, a light tail-dragger aircraft with red-and-white-banded wings flew just overhead and landed on the road in front of them. The pilot climbed out and shuffled toward the car. David rolled down his window, and a lean, weathered face under a sweat-stained cowboy hat looked in. “You missed your turn,” the man said. “Mile back, turn north on the two-track.”

Ray seemed to be trying to send a greeting that showed all his teeth but he was ignored by the pilot. “Nice little Piper J-3 Cub,” Ray said.

The pilot strode back to the plane, taxied down the road, got airborne, and banked sharply over a five-strand barbed wire, startling seven cows and their calves, which ran off into the sage, scattering meadowlarks and clouds of pollen. David turned the car around.

Ray said, “Old fellow back at the hotel said there’s supposed to be dinosaurs around here.” He gazed at the pale light of a gas well on a far ridge.

“That’s what they say.”

“What d’you suppose one of them is worth? Like a whole Tyrannosaurus rex?”

David just looked at Ray. Here was the turn, a two-track that was barely manageable in an ordinary sedan, and David couldn’t imagine how it was negotiated in winter or spring, when the notorious local gumbo turned to mud. He’d delivered a Charolais bull near here one fall, and it was bad enough then. Plus, the bull had torn up his trailer and he’d lost money on the deal.

“So, Dave, we’re about to arrive and I should tell you what the gun is for. I’m here to meet a girl, but I don’t know how it’s gonna turn out. I may need to bail and you’re my lift. The story is, my car is in for repair. You stay until we see how this goes and carry me out of here, if necessary. My friend here says you’re onboard.”

“I guess I understand, but what does this all depend on?”

“It depends on whether I like the girl or not, whether we’re compatible and want to start a family business. I have a lot I’d like to pass on to the next generation.”

The next bend revealed the house, a two-story ranch building with little of its paint left. Ray gazed at the Piper Cub, which was now parked in a field by the house, and at the Montana state flag popping on the iron flagpole. “Oro y plata,” he said, chuckling. “Perfect. Now, Davey, I need you to bone up on the situation here. This is the Weldon Case cattle ranch, and it runs from here right up to the Bakken oil field, forty miles away, which is where all the oro y plata is at the moment. I’m guessing that was Weldon in the airplane. I met Weldon’s daughter, Morsel, through a dating service. Well, we haven’t actually met in real time, but we’re about to. Morsel thinks she loves me, and we’re just gonna have to see about that. All you have to know is that Morsel thinks I’m an Audi dealer from Simi Valley, California. She’s going on one photograph of me standing in front of an Audi flagship that did not belong to me. You decide you want to help, and you may see more walkin’-around money than you’re used to. If you don’t, well, you’ve seen how I put my wishes into effect.” He patted the bulge under his shirt. “I just whistle a happy tune and start shooting.”

David pulled up under the gaze of Weldon Case, who had emerged from the plane. When he rolled down the window to greet the old man again, Case just stared, then turned to call out to the house.

“It’s the cowboy way,” Ray muttered through an insincere smile. “Or else he’s retarded. Dave, ask him if he remembers falling out of his high chair.”

As they got out of the car, Morsel appeared on the front step and inquired, in a penetrating contralto, “Which one is it?” Ray raised his hands and tilted his head to one side, as though modestly questioning himself. David noted that the gun was inadequately concealed and turned quickly to shake Weldon Case’s hand. It was like seizing a plank.

“You’re looking at him,” Ray called out to Morsel.

“Oh Christ!” she yelled. “Is this what I get?” It was hard to say whether this was a positive response or not. Morsel was a scale model of her father, wind-weathered and, if anything, less feminine. Her view of the situation was quickly clarified as she raced forward to embrace Ray, whose look of suave detachment was briefly interrupted by fear. A tooth was missing, as well as a small piece of her ear. “Oh, Ray!”

Weldon looked at David with a sour expression, then spoke, in a lusterless tone: “Morsel has made some peach cobbler. It was her ma’s recipe. Her ma is dead.”

Ray put on a ghastly look of sympathy, which seemed to fool Morsel, who squeezed his arm and said, “Started in her liver and just took off.”

A small trash pile next to the porch featured a couple of played-out Odor-Eaters. David wondered where the walkin’-around money Ray had alluded to was supposed to come from. “Place is kind of a mess,” Morsel warned. “We don’t collect but we never get rid of.”

As they went into the house, Weldon asked David if he enjoyed shooting coyotes. He replied, “I just drive Ray around” — Ray turned to listen — “and whatever Ray wants I guess is what we do... whatever he’s into.” David kept to himself that he enjoyed popping coyotes out his car window with the .25–06 with a Redfield range-finder scope and a tripod that he’d gotten from Hill Country Customs. David lived with his mother and had a habit of telling her about the great shots he’d made — like the five hundred — yarder on Tin Can Hill with only the hood for a rest, no sandbags, no tripod. David’s Uncle Maury had told him a long time ago, “It don’t shoot flat, throw the fuckin’ thing away.”

David, who enjoyed brutally fattening food, thought Morsel was a good cook, but Ray ate only the salad, discreetly lifting each leaf until the dressing ran off. Weldon watched Ray and hardly said a word, as Morsel grew more manic, jiggling with laughter and enthusiasm at each lighthearted remark. In fact, it was necessary to lower the temperature of the subjects — to heart attacks, highway wrecks, cancer — in order to get her to stop guffawing. Weldon planted his hands flat on the table, rose partway, and announced that he’d use the tractor to pull the plane around back. David was preoccupied with the mountain of tuna casserole between him and the peach cobbler and hardly heard him. Ray, small and disoriented next to Morsel, shot his eyes around the table, looking for something he could eat.

“Daddy don’t say much,” Morsel said.

“I can’t say much,” Ray said, “with him here. Dave, could you cut us a little slack?”

“Sure, Ray, of course.” David got up, still chewing.

“See you in the room,” Ray said sharply, twisting his chin toward the door.

Weldon had shown them their room by walking past it and flicking the door open without a word. It contained two iron bedsteads and a dresser, atop which were David’s and Ray’s belongings, the latter’s consisting of a JanSport backpack with the straps cut off. David was better organized, with an actual overnight bag and a Dopp kit. He had left the cattle receipts and breeding documents in the car. He flopped on the bed, hands behind his head, then got up abruptly and went to the door. He looked out and listened for a long moment, eased it closed, and shot to the dresser, where he began rooting through Ray’s belongings: rolls of money in rubber bands, generic Viagra from India, California lottery tickets, a passport identifying Raymond Coelho, a woman’s aqua-colored wallet with a debit card in the name of Eleanor Coelho from Food Processors Credit Union of Modesto, Turlock grocery receipts, a bag of trail mix, and the gun. David lifted the gun carefully with the tips of his fingers. He was startled by its lightness. Turning it over in his hand, he was compelled to acknowledge that there was no hole in the barrel. It was a toy. He returned it to the pack, fluffed the sides, and sped to his bed to begin feigning sleep.

It wasn’t long before Ray came in, singing “Now Is the Hour” in a flat and aggressive tone that hardly suited the lyrics: “Sunset glow fades in the west, night o’er the valley is creeping! Birds cuddle down in their nest, soon all the world will be sleeping. But not you, Dave. You’re awake, I can tell. I hope you enjoyed the song. It’s Hugo Winterhalter. Morsel sang it to me. She’s very nice, and she needs a man.”

“Looks like you got the job.”

“Doing what? Hey, here’s what’s going on with me: I’m starving.”

“I’m sure you are, Ray. You ate like a bird.”

“I had no choice. That kind of food gathers around the chambers of the heart like an octopus. But right behind the house they got a vegetable garden, and my plan for you is to slip out and bring me some vegetables. I’ve been told to stay out of the garden. Don’t touch the tomatoes — they’re not ripe.”

“What else is there?”

“Greens and root vegetables.”

“I’m not going out there.”

“Oh yes you are.”

“What makes you think so?”

Ray went to his pack and got out the gun. “This makes me think so. This will really stick to your ribs, get it?”

“I’m not picking vegetables for you, or, technically speaking, stealing them for you. Forget it.”

“Wow. Is this a mood swing?”

“Call it what you want. Otherwise, it’s shoot or shut up.”

“Okay, but not for the reason you think. I prefer not to wake up the whole house.”

“And the body’d be a problem for you, as a house guest and new fiancé.”

“Very well, very well. This time.” Ray put the gun back in his pack. “You don’t know how close you came.”

“Whatever.”

David rolled over to sleep, but he couldn’t stop his thoughts. He should have spent the day at Jorgensen’s with his arm up a cow’s ass. He had a living to make and if it hadn’t been for his inappropriate curiosity about Ray and Morsel, he’d already be back in Jordan, looking to grab a room for the night. But the roll of money in Ray’s pack and the hints of more to come had made him wonder how anxious he was to get back to work. There was opportunity in the air and he wanted to see how it would all play out.

“Ray, you awake?”

“I can be. What d’you want, asshole?”

“I just have something I want to get off my chest.”

“Make it quick. I need my Zs.”

“Sure, Ray, try this one on for size: the gun’s a toy.”

“The gun’s a what?”

“A toy.”

“You think a gun’s a toy?”

“No, Ray, I think your gun’s a toy. It’s a fake. And looks like you are too.”

“Where’s the fuckin’ light switch? I’m not taking this shit.”

“Stub your toe jumping off the bed like that.”

“Might be time to clip your wings, sonny.”

“Ray, I’m here for you. Just take a moment to look at the barrel of your so-called gun, and then let’s talk.”

Ray found the lamp and paced the squeaking floorboards. “Taking a leak off the porch. Be right back,” he said. Through the open bedroom door, David could see him silhouetted in the moonlight, a silver arc splashing onto the dirt, his head thrown back in what David took to be a plausible posture of despair.

By the time Ray walked back in he was already talking: “...an appraiser in Modesto, California, where I grew up. I did some community theater there, played Prince Oh So True in a children’s production and thought I was going places, then Twelve Angry Men — I was one of them, which is where the pistol came from. I was the hangman in Motherlode. Got married, had a baby girl, lost my job, got another one, went to Hawaii as a steward on a yacht belonging to a movie star who was working at a snow-cone stand a year before the yacht, the coke, the babes, and the wine. I had to sign a nondisclosure agreement, but then I got into a fight with the movie star and got kicked off the boat at Diamond Head. They just rowed me to shore in a dinghy and dumped me off. I hiked all the way to the crater and used the restroom to clean up, then took the tour bus into Honolulu. I tried to sell the celebrity drug-use story to a local paper, but it went nowhere because of the confidentiality agreement. Everything I sign costs me money. About this time, my wife’s uncle’s walnut farm was failing. He took a loan out on the real estate, and I sold my car, which was a mint, rust-free ’78 Trans Am, handling package, W-72 performance motor, solar gold with a Martinique-blue interior. We bought a bunch of FEMA trailers from the Katrina deal and hauled them to California. We lost our asses. The uncle gasses himself in his garage, and my wife throws me out. I moved into a hotel for migrant workers, and started using the computers at the Stanislaus County Library and sleeping at the McHenry Mansion. One of the tour guides was someone I used to fuck in high school and she slipped me into one of the rooms for naps. I met Morsel online. I told her I was on hard times. She told me she was coining it, selling bootleg OxyContin in the Bakken oil field, but she was lonely. It was a long shot. Montana. Fresh start. New me. Bus to Billings and hit the road. I made it to Jordan, and I had nothing left. The clerk at that fleabag barely let me have a room. I told him I was there for the comets. I don’t know where I come up with that. Breakfast at the café was my last dime and no tip. I had to make a move. So what happens now? You bust me with Morsel? You turn me in? Or you join us?”

“You pretty sure on the business end of this thing?” David asked, with a coldness that surprised him.

“A hundred percent, but Morsel’s got issues with other folks already in it. There’s some risk, but when isn’t there, with stakes like this? Think about it, Dave. If you’re at all interested in getting rich, you tell me.”

Ray was soon snoring. David was intrigued that all these revelations failed to disturb his sleep. He himself was wide awake, brooding over how colorless his own life was in comparison to Ray’s. Ray was a con man and a failure, but what had he ever done? Finish high school? High school had been anguish, persecution, and suffering, but even in that he was unexceptional. He’d never had sex with a mansion tour guide. He’d had sex with a fat girl he disliked. Then the National Guard. Fort Harrison in the winter. Cleaning billets. Inventorying ammunition. Unskilled maintenance on UH-60 Blackhawks. Praying for deployment against worldwide towel heads. A commanding officer who told the recruits that the president of the United States was a “pencil-wristed twat.” Girlfriend fatter every time he went home. He still lived with his mother. Was still buying his dope from the same guy at the body shop he’d got it from in the eighth grade.

Perhaps it was surprising he’d come up with anything at all, but he had: Bovine Deluxe, LLC, a crash course in artificially inseminating cattle. David took to it like a duck to water: driving around the countryside detecting and synchronizing estrus, handling frozen semen, keeping breeding records — all easily learnable, but David brought art to it, and he had no idea where that art had come from. He was a genius preg-tester. Whether he was straight or stoned, his rate of accuracy, as proven in spring calves, was renowned. Actually, David preferred preg-testing stoned. Grass gave him a greater ability to visualize the progress of his arm up the cow’s rectum. His excitement began as soon as he donned his coveralls, pulled on his glove, lubed it with OB goo, and stepped up to the cow stuck in the chute. Holding the tail high overhead with his left hand, he got his right hand all the way in, against the cow’s attempt to expel it, shoveled out the manure to clear the way past the cervix, and finally, nearly up to his shoulder, grasped the uterus. David could nail a pregnancy at two months, when the calf was smaller than a mouse. He never missed, and no cow that should have been culled turned up without a calf in the spring. He could tell the rancher how far along the cow was by his informal gradations: mouse, rat, Chihuahua, cat, fat cat, raccoon, beagle. Go through the herd, or until his arm was exhausted. Throw the glove away, write up the invoice, strip the coveralls, look for food and a room.

Perfect. Except for the dough.

He’d once dreamed of owning jewels, especially rubies, and that dream was coming back. Maybe glue one on his forehead like a Hindu. It’d go over big on his ranch calls.

Morsel made breakfast for her father, David, and Ray — eggs, biscuits, and gravy. David was thinking about Ray’s “last dime” back in Jordan versus the rolls of bills in his pack and watching Weldon watch Ray as breakfast was served. Morsel just leaned against the stove while the men ate. “Anyone want to go to Billings today to see the cage fights?” she asked. David looked up and smiled but no one answered her. Ray was probing around his food with his fork, pushing the gravy away from the biscuits, and Weldon was flinching. Weldon wore his black Stetson with the salt-encrusted sweat stain halfway up the crown. David thought it was downright unappetizing, not the sort of thing a customer for top-drawer bull semen would wear.

At last Weldon spoke at top volume, as though calling out to his livestock: “What’d you say your name was?”

“Ray.”

“Well, Ray, why don’t you stick that fork all the way in and eat like a man?”

“I’m doing my best, Mr. Case, but I will eat nothing with a central nervous system.”

“Daddy, leave Ray alone. You’ll have time to get to know each other and find out what Ray enjoys eating.”

When Morsel brought Ray some canned pineapple slices, he looked up at her with what David took to be genuine affection.

She turned to David and said, “It’s all you can eat around here,” but the moment he stuck his fork back in his food she put a hand in his face and said, “That’s all you can eat!” and laughed. David noticed her cold blue eyes and thought he was beginning to understand her.

To Weldon, she said, “Daddy, you feel like showing Ray ’n’ ’em the trick?”

Weldon stopped his rhythmic lip pursing. “Oh, Morsel,” he said coyly.

“C’mon, Daddy. Give you a dollar.”

“Okay, Mor, put on the music,” he said with a sigh of good-humored defeat. Morsel went over to a low cupboard and pulled out a small plastic record player and a 45, which proved to be a scratchy version of “Cool Water” by the Sons of the Pioneers. Weldon swayed to the mournful tune and then seemed to come to life as Morsel placed a peanut in front of him and the lyrics began: “Keep a-movin’, Dan, / Don’t you listen to him, Dan. / He’s a devil not a man.” Weldon took off his hat and set it upside down beside him, revealing the thinnest comb-over across a snow-white pate. Then he picked up the peanut and, with sinuous movements, balanced it on his nose. It remained there until near the end of the record — “Dan, can you see, / That big green tree, / Where the water’s runnin’ free” — when the peanut fell to the table and Weldon’s chin dropped to stare at it. When the record ended, he replaced his hat, stood without a word, and left the room. For a moment it was quiet, and then came the sound of Weldon’s plane cranking up.

“Daddy’s pretty hard on himself when he don’t make it to the end of the record,” Morsel said glumly, as she cleared the dishes. Heading for the living room, she added, “Me and Ray thought you ought to see what dementia looks like. It don’t look good and it’s expensive.”

David had taken care to copy out the information from Ray’s passport onto the back of a matchbook cover, which he tore off, rolled into a cylinder, and put inside a bottle of aspirin. And there it stayed until Ray and Morsel headed off to the cage fights. David used his cell phone and 411 Connect to call Ray’s home in Modesto and chat with his wife or, as she claimed to be, his widow. It took two calls, a couple of hours apart. The first try, he got her answering machine: “You know the drill: leave it at the beep.” On the second try, he got Ray’s wife. David identified himself as an account assistant with the Internal Revenue Service and Ray’s wife listened only briefly before stating in a firm, clear, and seemingly ungrieving voice that Ray was dead: “That’s what I told the last guy and that’s what I’m telling you.” She said that he had been embezzling from a credit union, left a suicide note, and disappeared.

“I’m doing home health care. Whatever he stole he kept. Killing himself was the one good idea he come up with in the last thirty years. At least it’s kept the government from garnishing my wages, what little they are. I been through all this with the other guy that called, and we have to wait for his death to be confirmed before I get no benefits. If I know Ray, he’s on the bottom of the Tuolumne River, just to fuck with my head. I wish I could have seen him one more time to tell him I gave his water skis and croquet set to Goodwill. If the bank hadn’t taken back his airplane, I would have lost my house and been sleeping in my car. Too bad you didn’t meet Ray. He was an A-to-Z crumb bum.”

“I’m terribly sorry to hear about your husband,” David said mechanically.

“I don’t think the government is terribly sorry to hear about anything. You reading this off a card?”

“No, this is just a follow-up to make sure your file stays intact until you receive the benefits you’re entitled to.”

“I already have the big one: picturing Ray in hell with his ass en fuego.”

“Ah, you speak a bit of Spanish, Mrs. Coelho?”

“Everybody in Modesto speaks a bit of Spanish. Where you been all your life?”

“Washington, DC,” David said indignantly.

“That explains it,” Mrs. Coelho said, and hung up.

Of course he had no car when we met, David thought. No need to leave a paper trail by renting cars or buying tickets on airplanes. He’d got done all he needed to get done on the Modesto library computers, where he and Morsel, two crooks, had found each other and gone into business without ever laying eyes on each other.

Before heading to Billings, Morsel had told David how to get to the Indian smallpox burial ground to look for beads. Otherwise, there was nothing to do around here. He wasn’t interested until he discovered the liquor cabinet and by then it was early evening. He found a bottle marked Hoopoe Schnapps, with a picture of a bird on its label, and gave it a try: “Bottoms up.” It went straight to his head. After several swigs, he was unable to identify the bird but he was very happy. The label said that the drink contained mirabelles, and David thought, Hey, I’m totally into mirabelles.

As he headed for the burial ground, David was tottering a bit. Rounding the equipment shed, he nearly ran into Weldon Case, who walked by without speaking or apparently seeing him. Behind the ranch buildings, a cow trail led into the prairie, then wound toward a hillside spring that didn’t quite reach the surface, visible only by the greenery above it. Just below that was the place that Morsel had told him about, pockmarked with anthills. The ants, Morsel claimed, carried the beads to the surface, but you had to hunt for them.

David sat down among the mounds and was soon bitten through his pants. He jumped to his feet and swept the ants away, then crouched, peering and picking at the anthills. His thighs soon ached from squatting, but then he found a speck of sky blue in the dirt, a bead. He clasped it tightly in one hand while stirring with the other and flicking away ants. He didn’t think about the bodies in the ground beneath him. By the time it was too dark to see, his palm was filled with Indian beads and he felt elevated and still drunk.

As he passed the equipment shed, he made out first the silhouette of Weldon Case’s Stetson and then, very close, the face of Weldon himself, who gazed at him before speaking in a low voice. “You been in the graves, ain’t you?”

“Yes, to look for beads.”

“You ought not to have done that, feller.”

“Oh? But Morsel said—”

“Look up there at the stars.”

“I don’t understand.”

Weldon reached high over his head. “That’s the crow riding the water snake,” he said, and turned back into the dark.

David was frightened. He went to the house and got into bed as quickly as he could, anxious for the alcohol to fade. He pulled the blanket up under his chin, despite the warmth of the night, and watched a moth batting against an image of the moon in the window. When he was nearly asleep, he saw Morsel’s headlights wheel across the ceiling, then turn off. He listened for the car doors, but it was nearly ten minutes before they opened and closed. He rolled close to the wall and pretended to be asleep, while the front door opened quietly. Once the reverberation of the screen-door spring had died down, there was whispering that came into the bedroom. He felt a shadow cross his face as someone peered down at him. Soon the sound of muffled copulation filled the room, stopped for the time it took to raise a window, then resumed. David listened more and more intently, until Ray said, in a clear voice, “Dave, you want some of this?”

David stuck to his feigned sleep until Morsel laughed, got up, and walked out with her clothes under her arm. “Night, Ray. Sweet dreams.”

The door shut and, after a moment, Ray spoke: “What could I do, Dave? She was after my weenie like a chicken after a june bug.” Snorts, and, soon after, snoring.

Morsel stood in the doorway of the house, taking in the early sun and smoking a cigarette. She wore an old flannel shirt over what looked like a body stocking that revealed a lazily winking camel toe. Her eyes followed her father while he crossed the yard very slowly. “Look,” she said, as David stepped up. “He’s wetting his pants. When he ain’t wetting his pants, he walks pretty fast. It’s just something he enjoys.”

Weldon came up and looked at David, trying to remember him. He said, “This ain’t much of a place to live. My folks moved us out here. We had a nice little ranch at Coal Bank Landing, on the Missouri, but one day it fell in the river. Morsel, I’m uncomfortable.”

“Go inside, Daddy. I’ll get you a change of clothes.”

Once the door had shut behind him, David said, “Why in the world do you let him fly that airplane?”

“It’s all he knows. He flew in the war and dusted crops. He’ll probably kill himself in the damn thing.”

“What’s he do up there?”

“Looks for his cows.”

“I didn’t know he had cows.”

“He don’t. They all got sold years ago. But he’ll look for them long as he’s got fuel.”

Morsel turned back to David on her way inside. “I can’t make heads or tails of your friend Ray,” she said. “He was coming on to me the whole time at the cage fights, then he takes out a picture of his wife and tells me she’s the greatest piece of ass he ever had.”

“Huh. What’d you say to that?”

“I said, Ray, she must’ve had a snappin’ pussy because she’s got a face that would stop a clock. He didn’t like that too much. So I punched him in the shoulder and told him he hadn’t seen nothing yet. What’d you say your name was?”

“I’m David.”

“Well, Dave, Ray says you mean to throw in with us. Is that a fact?”

“I’m sure giving it some thought.”

David was being less than candid. He would have slipped away the day before if he hadn’t felt opportunity headed his way on silver wings.

“You look like a team player to me. I guess that bitch he’s married to will help out on that end. Long as I never have to see her.”

David had an unhappy conversation with his mother, but at least it was on the phone, so she couldn’t throw stuff.

“The phone is ringing off the hook! Your ranchers are calling constantly, wanting to know when you’ll get there.”

“Ma, I know, but I got tied up. Tell them not to get their panties in a wad. I’ll be there.”

“David!” she screeched. “This is not an answering service!”

“Ma, listen to me. Ma, I got tied up. I’m sparing you the details but relax.”

“How can I relax with the phone going off every ten seconds?”

“Ma, I’m under pressure. Pull the fucking thing out of the wall.”

“Pressure? You’ve never been under pressure in your life!”

He hung up on her. He couldn’t live with her anymore. She needed to take her pacemaker and get a room.

That week, Morsel was able to get a custodial order in Miles City, based on the danger to the community presented by Weldon and his airplane. Ray had so much trouble muscling Weldon into Morsel’s sedan for the ride to assisted living that big strong David had to pitch in and help Ray tie him up. Weldon tossed off some frightful curses before collapsing in defeat and crying. But the god he called down on them didn’t hold much water anymore, and they made short work of the old fellow.

At dinner that night, Morsel was a little blue. The trio’s somewhat obscure toasts were to the future. David looked on with a smile; he felt happy and accepted and believed he was going somewhere. His inquiring looks were met by giddy winks from Morsel and Ray. They told him that he was now a “courier,” and Ray unwound one of his bundles of cash. David was going to California.

“Drive the speed limit,” Ray said. “I’m going to get to know the airplane. Take it down to the oil fields. It’s important to know your customers.”

“Do you know how to fly it?” This was an insincere question, since David had learned from the so-called widow about Ray’s repossessed plane.

“How’s thirteen thousand hours sound to you?”

“I’ll keep the home fires burning,” Morsel said, without taking the cigarette out of her mouth.

David had a perfectly good idea of what he was going to California for, but he didn’t ask. He knew the value of preserving his ignorance. If he could keep his status as a simple courier, he was no guiltier than the United States Postal Service. “Your Honor, I had no idea what was in the trunk, and I am prepared to say that under oath or take a lie-detector test, at your discretion,” he rehearsed.

He drove straight through, or nearly so. He stopped briefly in Idaho, Utah, and Nevada to walk among cows. His manner with cattle was so familiar that they didn’t run from him but gathered around in benign expectation. David sighed and jumped back in the car. He declined to pursue this feeling of regret.

It was late when he got into Modesto, and he was tired. He checked into a Super 8 and woke up when the hot light of a California morning shone through the window onto his face. He ate in the lobby and checked out. The directions Ray had given him proved exact: within ten minutes, he was pulling around the house into the side drive and backing into the open garage.

A woman came out of the house in a bathrobe and walked past his window without a word. He popped the trunk and sat quietly as she loaded it, then closed it. She stopped at his window, pulling the bathrobe up close around her throat. She wasn’t hard to look at, but David could see you wouldn’t want to argue with her. “Tell Ray I said be careful. I’ve heard from two IRS guys already.” David said nothing at all.

He was so cautious that the trip back took longer. He stayed overnight at the Garfield again, so as to arrive in daylight, and got up twice during the night to check on the car. In the morning, he skipped eating at the café for fear he might encounter some of his rancher clients. Plus, he knew that Morsel would take care of his empty stomach. He was so close now that he worried about everything, from misreading the gas gauge to flat tires. He even imagined the trunk flying open for no reason.

He had imagined a hearty greeting, an enthusiastic homecoming, but the place was silent. A hawk sat on the wire that ran from the house to the bunkhouse, as though it had the place to itself. It flew off reluctantly when David got out of the car. Inside, there were soiled plates on the dining room table. Light from the television flickered without sound from the living room. David walked in and saw the television first — it was on the Shopping Network, a closeup of a hand dangling a gold bracelet. Then he saw Morsel on the floor with the channel changer in her hand. She’d been shot.

David felt an icy calm. Ray must have done this. He checked the car keys in his pocket and walked out of the house, stopping on the porch to survey everything in front of him. Then he went around to the equipment shed. Where the airplane had been parked in its two shallow ruts lay Ray, also shot, a pool of blood extending from his mouth like a speech balloon without words. He’d lost a shoe. The plane was gone.

David felt as if he were trapped between the two bodies, with no safe way back to the car. When he got to it, a man was waiting for him. “I must have overslept. How long have you been here?” He was David’s age, thin and precise in clean khakis and a Shale Services ball cap. He touched his teeth with his thumbnail as he spoke.

“Oh, just a few minutes.”

“Keys.”

“Yes, I have them here.” David patted his pocket.

“Get the trunk for me, please.” David tried to hand him the keys. “No, you.”

“Not a problem.” David bent to insert the key but his hand was shaking and at first he missed the slot. The lid rose to reveal the contents of the trunk. David didn’t feel a thing.