Montana Noir

Trailer Trash by Gwen Florio

Missoula

The graduate writing program at the University of Montana turned Benson down the same day it accepted his friend Gary.

“Me too,” Benson lied into the phone when Gary called with the good news. Gary whooped. Benson held the phone away from his ear and imagined sticking Gary with something thin and sharp, an ice pick — no, too clichéd — or maybe a good fillet knife, freeing all that ego in a single, deflating pffft. “But I’ve decided I’m not going.”

“Dude. The hell?”

“No money. Only way to go was if I got funding.”

“Fuck that. You’re coming with me. Worse comes to worst, you spend the first semester working and start a semester late. I’ll share all my stuff with you, the assignments and everything, give you a leg up.”

So Benson spent the last of his money on gas, horsed his embarrassing pinkish-purple 1998 Chevy Cavalier up and over Snoqualmie Pass, and gambled what was left of his luck on the switchbacks skirting Lookout, engine coughing and complaining, steering wheel juddering in his hand, coasting into Missoula on fumes and a busted transmission, only to find that Gary’s offer to share did not include his digs.

“Dude.” Gary stood barefoot on an unpainted porch dominated by a sprung sofa. Only the most determined rental agent’s squint could have seen Gary’s description — a cool Craftsman, near the U — in that cramped, sagging square. The bones of the same bungalow showed in the homes that flanked it, but those dwellings had been expanded up and out in a sort of Prairie-gone-vertical style, their smooth stuccoed walls crowding the limits of the landscaped lots.

“Lawyer.” Gary jerked his thumb toward the house on the left. Then he pointed right. “Professor. I was lucky to get this place. Doubt it’ll be here next year. Somebody will buy it for the lot, scrape this place and put up one of those. I’ll be out on my ass, just like you.”

Benson’s laugh joined Gary’s a beat late. The naked lightbulb above picked out the goose bumps on his arms, raised by a twilight chill that belied the mid-August date. Blades of wind skated off the bald hills that bordered the town, spearing street trash and depositing it around their feet. Gary kicked it away. “They call it the Hellgate wind. Named after the canyon.”

He gestured to the cliffy walls of gabbro-striped quartzite just to the east. The river running through them widened and flattened once it escaped their grasp, flowing tame past the campus and through downtown, unabashedly picturesque, a chamber of commerce wet dream.

“It funnels the wind right into town. Freezes your ass off soon as it’s dark. Winter should be a treat. Anyway, I got company, man.” He held his hands before his chest, sketching breasts, then moved them down and out. Hips. “What happened to the Dainty Lady?”

The car — its unwelcome nickname bestowed by Gary back in Enumclaw — sat ticking in a miasma of exhaust and something more ominous. “It started making a noise just over the Idaho line. Some red lights came on. And I’m about out of gas. Just a couch, man. That’s all I need.”

“Say no more.” Gary disappeared indoors. The home’s scabby facade, so dispiriting as the car sputtered up to it, now beckoned with the promise of warmth and Benson-sized horizontal surfaces. Benson heard a girl’s high, protesting voice and Gary’s soothing tones. He turned sideways to the wind, his T-shirt and shorts an inadequate defense. Sweats lurked at the bottom of his duffel. He’d retrieve them once he got settled on Gary’s sofa.

The door opened. Benson stepped toward it. Gary’s outstretched hand, a twenty-dollar bill snapping in the wind, stopped him. “This should cover gas, couple of beers besides. This town is crazy friendly. Hit up anybody in a bar, you’ll find that couch. That’s how I got this place. Ask around about jobs, too. That’s the quickest way to get one. Catch you in a few days. Oh, and hey — welcome to Missoula.”

Benson’s hands twitched. He imagined shredding Andrew Jackson’s face, tossing the pieces at Gary like handfuls of dirt flung into an open grave. “Keep your fucking money.” That’s what he should have said.

He took the cash.

A shit job — lobbing rolled-up newspapers from the Dainty Lady onto the chemically treated lawns of the old folks who were the only ones subscribing to the Missoulian anymore — was easy to find. A shit place to live, not so much. Although the job eventually led to the place.

For the privilege of earning twenty cents an hour over minimum, forget about benefits, Benson rolled out of the backseat at three-dark-thirty. He coaxed the Dainty Lady, with the rebuilt transmission that had maxed out his only credit card, through fog-shrouded streets to the Missoulian’s loading dock, where stacks of newspapers awaited. There, Benson spent a couple of hours rolling and rubber-banding them, leaving his hands sore and swollen and slippery-gray with ink.

He’d have taken longer still but for Harlan, the guy assigned to train him. Papers flipped and spun in Harlan’s hairy hands, rubber bands snapping like a teenager’s gum. “Got to be quicker,” Harlan said. “We ought to’ve hit the road by now.”

The papers were supposed to be on doorsteps by six thirty, latest, but they didn’t even head out until six. Harlan, knowing the route, held out his hand for Benson’s keys. He pointed the Dainty Lady up a hill stair-stepped with asbestos-shingled split-levels showing their age, cars sardining their driveways, the street lined with overflow, as though every house had thrown a party at the same time.

“Students,” Harlan said. “They pack them in there, charge them God knows what. You see all those cars in front of a place, keep driving. Not a one of them takes the paper.”

“Then where are we going?”

“There.” Atop the hill, a sign proclaimed, Mansion Heights.

Benson winced at the violation of show, don’t tell. The homes, steroidal versions of the stuccoed boxes taking over Gary’s neighborhood, told plenty. Wraparound decks that took advantage of the hilltop views nearly doubled the already excessive square footage. Naturally uninhabited at the early hour, the decks gave the appearance of permanent disuse, bereft of chaise longues or barbecue grills or other signs that anyone actually took his ease there. Benson tossed a half-dozen papers in front of three-car garages.

“Who lives here?”

“Nobody who wants to stay.” Faded FOR SALE signs adorned several yards. Unsold lots, thick with weeds, abounded. “Recession hit before they finished this place. It’s hardly worth the drive up here.”

It was nearly eight by the time light spilled like skim milk over the summits, playing catch-up with the Dainty Lady as Benson and Harlan headed for the far side of town, trying to make up time, speeding past the acres of apartment complexes beyond the chain restaurants and big-box stores. A few subscribers lived out by the dump, in the fast-built and faster-falling-down developments that housed the families who’d never make it into the striving neighborhoods closer to the university.

Benson rubbed his pitching arm. He was supposed to work with Harlan for a week, but told him never mind after the guy broke into a rasping fit of giggles on their way back to the newspaper.

Benson thought Harlan was laughing at him because, even after two hours on the route, his papers sailed into aborvitae and petunias, even into the yards next door. But Harlan disabused him of that notion: “Let the biddies walk.”

“Then what’s so funny?”

“That right there.” Harlan jerked his head toward an elementary school. In the playground, slides and swings awaited tiny bottoms. “I’m not supposed to be within a thousand feet of that place. And yet here I am. Bite this, judge!” He grabbed his crotch with both hands.

“Jesus Christ.” Benson caught the wheel just in time to avoid sideswiping a parked car. The Dainty Lady had a wicked pull to the right. Benson knew only one reason a judge would order someone away from places with little kids.

“Heh-heh-heh.” The seat shook with Harlan’s laughter.

“I think I’ve got this down. You don’t have to come with me tomorrow.”

The silence went on and on, broken only by the thwack of a few final papers.

“Looky there. Over by those widowmakers.” Harlan lifted a paw and pointed. A FOR RENT sign leaned against one of the towering cottonwoods that flanked the entrance to a trailer park. The trees, notorious for a shallow root system prone to giving way in storms, stretched outsized limbs capable of crushing the mismatched dwellings below.

The car rolled past. Nobody living in a trailer had money for the Missoulian.

“You said you were looking for a place to live? Might be that back there is your new home. Heh-heh-heh.”

“Dude. It’s not even ironic.” Gary jammed his car key into the bottom of a can of Hamm’s (which was ironic) and shotgunned it, his idea of a dramatic gesture to underscore his revulsion as he scanned the Mountain View Mobile Home Park.

Three doors down, a row of purple-headed irises bobbed beneath the ministrations of a woman with a watering can. Her short skirt crawled north of decent over meaty thighs as she bent to pluck a few weeds. “Check out the cougar. Talk about a walking STD.”

The woman straightened. Shot them a look.

Benson waited for a smile, a shrug, maybe even a Sorry, from Gary. But he turned his attention back to the trailer, a camper, really. “Don’t tell the group you live here.”

The “group” being some of the others in Gary’s classes. They convened at his apartment in the bungalow on Sunday nights to critique one another’s stories before turning them in for the verdict of the whole class. Benson had learned his lesson that first night on Gary’s porch. He didn’t ask to be included; just showed up after Gary let slip about the gathering, then sat back while Gary stammered his way through the whole here’s-my-friend-sitting-out-the-semester explanation. Benson even brought a submission, typed on a library computer and printed out for ten cents a page. Gary was old-school that way, wanting hard copies of everything. Easy for him. The money Benson spent copying a story for each of the eight people in the group would have funded a half-tank for the Dainty Lady. Money wasted, he thought after the first Sunday night.

“Your protagonist. What’s his name again? Harold.” Nathalie, pale of face and eye, twisted white-blond dreads around her finger. “He’s a sex offender?” She gave the Medusa ’do a rest and pulled an apple from a bowl of fruit. Apparently Gary had taken one look around Missoula after his arrival and gone as crunchy-granola as the rest of his part of town. Everybody else — except Benson — had brought something to drink. Lots of microbrews, along with PBR and more Hamm’s. Irony abounded.

“And all he does is drive around delivering newspapers?” Crunch. The waif’s little white teeth opened a wound in the apple. “Why doesn’t he try to molest the guy riding with him? I mean, if he’s a sex offender, he’s got to offend, right? That would ratchet up the tension.”

“Because he didn’t try anything.” Benson grabbed at the air as though to recall the words. Too late.

“Underfictionalized!” the group chorused. Even though that was the most fictional part of his submission. Gary looked at him with eyes full of pity. Benson imagined putting a thumb to each of those eyes. Pressing hard.

Gary handed him the fruit bowl. “Grape?”

Benson’s new neighbors would have cussed him twelve ways to Sunday if he’d shown up with a fruit bowl.

“Hey, boy, get on over here. You look like you need a beer, and we’ve got beer. And snacks.” It was ten in the morning, but for Miss Mary, the yardarm constituted Mount Sentinel, the hill on the college side of town with its whitewashed concrete M — for the University of Montana — where the sun now sat comfortably ensconced.

Miss Mary lived in the trailer next door. Only a single-wide, but someone had affixed a porch, its boards gone so gray and warped that the woman spent most of her days sitting on the sturdy cinder-block steps. There she held court, sparkle-dusted pink Crocs on her feet, pink bandanna on her bald head, a cigarette in one hand, beer in the other. Given that she apparently spent most of her Social Security check on beer, Miss Mary frequently had company. Usually it was Velma, she of the cosseted irises, a divorcée in her forties whose life of child-rearing had left her ill-equipped to counter the husband who’d sprung for the sort of lawyer who guaranteed he kept the house. Even though Velma, with no job and none of the skills that commanded pay for a woman her age, had ended up in this shithole of a trailer park, she retained enough suburban sensibilities to know that when someone else supplied the beer, it was only right to offer up some eats. A green plastic bowl of sour-cream-and-onion-soup dip sat on the step between Velma and Miss Mary, along with a party-size bag of ruffled and ridgy Lay’s, not the limp, inadequately salted supermarket variety that sometimes made an entire meal for Benson.

“Here.” Miss Mary extended the smoke, its ends loosely twisted, with an illegal smile.

“Damn, girls.” Benson sucked deep. Possibilities caromed around his brain. Fuck Harlan/Harold. Miss Mary and Velma — now here were some worthy protagonists.

“Hey. Hey.” Velma snapped her fingers in front of her face. “Shit’s good, but not that good. Where’d you go?” She liked the sound so much that she kept snapping, arching her back and swaying to the beat, so that Benson couldn’t help but notice that Velma had herself a fine pair of titties. Tick-tock, he thought, before he wrenched his eyes away from the motion.

“Writing. I’m writing in my head.”

Snap, snap. Both hands raised high. “Respect.”

He could talk about his writing with the girls. Unlike the group that gathered at Gary’s, they took it seriously. He passed the joint to Velma.

“How’s the book coming? What’s the latest?”

Early on he’d intimated that he was writing a book, a fabrication that required endless embroidery. “George is working Benjamin’s last nerve.”

Velma picked a fleck of bud from her tongue and flicked it away. Her lipstick was harlot scarlet, matching the polish on her fingernails and toes. He’d have to tone her down for his story, Benson thought.

“I hate that George. He’s a privileged little shit and a bully. Reminds me of my ex. Is Benjamin gonna kill him?” She looked at her watch. Velma favored peasant blouses over short stretchy skirts with nary a hint of a panty line and, when sitting outdoors, religiously recrossed her thighs every ten minutes to keep her tan even, magnetizing Benson’s gaze with each shift change. He took cloudy days as a personal affront.

A little broad in the beam, Velma, and nearly twice his age. Still, Benson couldn’t deny he’d thought about it, in convoluted musings that involved those sun-coppered legs scissored around his skinny white frame, Nathalie’s whispery drawl in his ear. He bit into a chip laden with dip and savored the smooth and salty crunch. Not like that weak-ass fruit bowl at Gary’s, all waxed skin and no flavor.

“No,” he said. “Killing him is too obvious.”

“Ahhhbvious,” Nathalie sighed her opinion of the revisions to Benson’s sex-offender story, glancing at Gary for confirmation.

Benson had written a new section where the man’s hand had clamped around his — his protagonist’s — dick, fingers corpse-cold even through his jeans, freezing him into momentary immobility.

“I thought she’d like it,” he told Gary later.

“Me too. Because if there’s one thing that girl likes, it’s dick.” Gary made an O of his mouth. Pumped his fist in front of it. “Last week,” he said, “after everybody else went home.” Seeing the look on Benson’s face, he added, “Sorry, man. I didn’t know. Can’t say I blame you. She’s a few steps up from that trailer-trash hottie, am I right? Go for it.”

“No way,” said Benson. Way, he thought, and went home and wrote a new story for Nathalie. Which she dismembered the following Sunday with all the finesse of a child yanking the head off a Barbie doll.

“These women. You did everything but have them slinging hash in a diner. Aren’t we over Raymond Carver yet?” She cast a sidelong glance toward Gary as she pulled apart paragraph after paragraph.

Benson imagined the doll’s limbs flying: arms first, then legs, nothing left but a torso with Velma-worthy boobs and a sexless crotch.

“I know it’s cliché” — clichéd, damnit, Benson thought — “but why don’t you try writing what you know? Dig deep.” Nathalie pounded at her skinny chest with her fragile white fist, stopping just short of actual contact. “Get past these caricatures and write something real. This verges on genre.” At genre, a collective shudder ran through the room. “What’s next — ending with, In the distance, a dog barked?”

“Nathalie’s got a point.” Gary, that fucking hypocrite. As if he hadn’t hightailed back to his side of town, irony foaming in his wake, after the real of Benson’s trailer, of Velma. “You might want to think about taking a couple weeks off from the group, find your focus.”

Nobody laughed until the door closed behind Benson. Maybe they’d forgotten about the open windows. Or maybe that was the point.

“Benjamin could shoot him.”

Miss Mary cracked the beers even earlier than usual after Benson let drop he’d been informed that his services as a newspaper carrier were no longer needed.

“You don’t mope around after getting shitcanned. You celebrate your freedom...” Her words trailed off into a cough so violent that the pink bandanna slid sideways on her shiny pate, giving her the look of a pirate accessorized by Mary Kay.

Velma hustled over with Cheez Whiz and Doritos and the optimism that had kept her married far too long to the asshole. “Now you’ll have more time for your book. It’s going to make you a millionaire. But only if Benjamin kills that jerk George. I’m with Miss Mary: shoot his ass.”

Benson canted his head back, held the Cheez Whiz over his mouth, and jammed a finger against the spout. “Too messy.” He spoke around the gooey blob. “Blood spatter. Same with stabbing. And anyway, George is his best friend. They’re like brothers, always together. He’d be the first suspect. He’d never get away with it.”

“Aw, honey. There’s all kinds of ways to get away with murder.”

Miss Mary made a gun of her hand and aimed it at Velma. “Then why didn’t you murder the dickhead? You’d still have your house.”

“I probably should have,” Velma agreed.

“How?” Benson asked.

“How should I have murdered him?”

“How would you get away with it?”

“Whatever the cops ask you, just look them in the eye and tell the truth. Take your book. Say George is lying on the floor full of holes and Benjamin’s standing over him, blood up to his ankles and a gun in his hand, and Mr. Cop asks, Did you kill that man? What’s the only answer?”

“I don’t know.”

Miss Mary’s fingertips, when she adjusted the bandanna, were blue but for the liverish circles of nicotine. “I’m guessing that’s the wrong answer.”

Velma looked at Benson. He shrugged.

“You say, No sir, I did not kill that man.”

“But he did kill him, right?”

Velma handed him another beer. “No, he did not. The gun killed him.” She and Miss Mary traded fist bumps. “You just got to have the right moves.” Velma’s cheeks hollowed as she sucked Cheez Whiz from a crimson-tipped forefinger. She looked at her watch and executed a slow-motion leg cross. “Know what I mean?”

Benson was pretty sure he did.

Benson angled the Dainty Lady into a parallel-parking space in front of Gary’s place. The Cavalier’s purple ass stuck out about a foot into the street. He didn’t care. Maybe somebody would hit it hard enough to total it. Insurance could pay for a new car. Except that he didn’t have insurance. “Oops,” he said aloud. He said it again when he tripped on the steps. Pages flew from his hand. The Hellgate wind snatched them and hurled them high. They drifted down onto the porch, the patches of grass, the bushes.

“What the hell?” Gary stood in the open doorway.

Benson started to laugh. He couldn’t stop. “My story,” he choked out. “For tonight.”

Gary stalked past him, gathering pages. “There’s no meeting tonight,” he called from the yard. “We changed it. Jesus. How’d you get so plastered on that horse piss you drink?”

Benson stopped laughing. “Nobody told me.”

Gary came back and stood at the bottom of the steps, the pages crumpled in his fist. “I talked to Jeanine last week.”

“Who’s Jeanine? Nathalie’s replacement?”

“The administrator at the writing program. I was trying to do you a solid, find out if you’d gotten funding for next semester.” The Hellgate wind took another try at the papers in Gary’s hand. His fingers whitened around them. “She didn’t know who you were. She had to look you up. She said you’d never gotten in at all.” He thrust the pages toward Benson.

Benson hauled himself to his feet and ignored the unspoken invitation to leave. He walked toward the open door. “She in there?”

“Nathalie? No. Look, you can’t leave your car like that.” He was talking to Benson’s back.

Inside, the fucking fruit bowl sat on the table. Benson selected an apple, turned, and drew his arm back. He was drunk, but not so drunk that he didn’t nail Gary right in the middle of his fat mouth when Gary walked in behind him.

The Dainty Lady took the gravel road like a champ, even after it went to a two-track with autumn-brittle grasses making blackboard screeches along her rusted undercarriage.

The ruts ended atop a cutbank by the river. The water muttered and churned below, nothing like the lazy gleaming expanse that wound through town, its glittering surface festooned with neon-colored kayaks and paddleboards, along with the patched inner tubes from Benson’s neighborhood.

“It’s deep down there,” Gary had said at the bluff weeks earlier. He’d taken Benson fly-fishing, back when he’d thought Benson was still salvageable. “Watch where you step. You end up in one of those holes and lose your balance, the current will take your carcass all the way to the Pacific.”

There’d been no danger of Benson stepping in one of the holes that day. He didn’t have a fly rod and, after an initial venture into the icy water, declined Gary’s offer to share. He climbed back onto the bluff and watched Gary, mentally adding up the cost of his waders and special boots and vest and fly rod and license and even the flies themselves, and figured out that the fish they’d eat that night would be worth a few hundred bucks apiece. Except that they didn’t even eat them. “Catch and release, dude,” Gary had said, as a fish flashed jewel-like in his hand for the moment it took him to snap a photo.

“Catch and release,” Benson said now. He hauled the tarp and its burden from the trunk. He’d considered a blanket before remembering how they were always talking about fibers on those police shows.

He unrolled the tarp. It had been a job wrestling Gary into the waders, the vest, the felt-soled boots. He grabbed him under the arms and dragged him to the lip of the cutbank. The hole below was especially deep. “Where the big ones hide,” Gary had told him that day, although he’d been unable to entice any onto his fly.

“Here’s a big one,” Benson said, and heaved.

The fly rod went next. Benson watched as it caught the current and sailed out of sight. Gary rocked along behind it, bouncing in slow motion off the rocks, making his ungainly way toward the Pacific.

The tarp had required some back-and-forthing, first to the trailer to get it, then the return to Gary’s house, cutting through downtown each way. The streets — lined with restored brick buildings that housed the brewpubs and distilleries where Benson couldn’t afford to drink, the outdoor-gear stores where he couldn’t afford to shop, and the cafés where he couldn’t afford to eat — were deserted except for the bums sleeping it off in doorways, awaiting the return of not-Bensons who might toss a few spare bucks their way. The sky shaded gray as Benson left the river, reminding him of his paper-delivery days. By the time he got back to the Mountain View Mobile Home Park, the sun hung above Sentinel, the M gleaming its promise to the fortunate who lived at its feet. Benson cut the gas and popped the trunk.

“Need a hand?”

He hadn’t heard Velma behind him until she was so close her breasts brushed his elbow when she leaned over to study the contents of the trunk.

“I’m just taking this tarp inside. I’ve got it.”

But she’d already grasped two corners, backing up, motioning him to bring his own two corners in, pulling him toward her until the fold hid the still-damp blotch between them. Their hands touched, Velma so close he could smell the beer on her breath. He’d missed the morning session on Miss Mary’s stoop.

“You got in late last night.”

“More like this morning,” Benson acknowledged.

“And went right out again. With something under your arm, all folded up. Just the way we’re folding this.” Her thighs pressed against his. He felt their heat even through the double thickness of the tarp.

She took it from him, making the last folds herself. “Maybe I’ll just take this back to my place. I’m painting my kitchen. It’ll come in handy.” Her gaze lingered on the dark places on his shirt and pants. “I got a washer-dryer. I can take care of those. You don’t want to leave them too long. Stain’ll set. Come on.”

He’d never been inside her trailer. She had a rare double-wide, carpeted, clean, smelling of air freshener.

“Well?” she said, and waited.

“What?”

“Can’t wash your clothes if you’re still in them. Here’s how this goes. Let’s see if you remember.”

She stripped down first.

He concentrated on undoing the buttons of his shirt, grateful for the reason to look away.

Nathalie showed up a couple of days after Gary disappeared. She lifted a shredded Kleenex to her raw little nose as she choked out questions.

Behind him, Benson heard the metallic pop and hiss of opening cans. He didn’t dare turn but knew Velma and Miss Mary were taking in the dreads snaking around Nathalie’s bony shoulders, the loose halter dress, the skinny legs disappearing into the cowboy boots. When she bent to dig a fresh tissue from her purse, Benson could see down the front of the dress, nipples like cinnamon gumdrops on a flat, pale expanse.

“I’ve called and called and called. His roommates think he went fishing. All his gear is gone. But his car’s still there.”

“Maybe he hitchhiked. He’s been known to do that.”

“He has?”

No, he hadn’t. But she didn’t know that, and no one else did, either. None of these people knew Gary the way he did.

“Maybe he’s just moved on to someone else. He’s been known to do that too. Although, for the life of me, I can’t imagine why.” Benson put his fist to his mouth. Pumped. “You know?”

“You’re horrible!” Hahhhrible.

Slow claps from Miss Mary and Velma as Nathalie boo-hooed her way to her car.

The knock Benson had been expecting came when he was at the camper’s drop-down table, finally writing out in longhand the story he’d been spinning for Miss Mary and Velma. He closed his notebook.

“I’d rather talk outside,” he told the cop. “I could use the fresh air.”

The cop raised an eyebrow. “You been out yet today?”

The weather had changed overnight and the Hellgate wind blustered past, tearing leaves from the cottonwoods. They piled up against the trailers, a jackpot shower of gold. The Mountain View Mobile Home Park had never looked so good. But the sun was a tease, winking from a blue, blue sky, promising relief that never arrived. Down the row, Velma fussed over her dead irises. She wore a jacket that failed to cover her bare thighs, mottled with cellulite and cold. The officer stamped his feet and beat gloved hands together. Between questions, his gaze strayed to the fading bruise along Benson’s cheekbone, his skinned knuckles.

Yes, Benson had seen Gary the night before he’d disappeared.

Yes, at Gary’s place.

No, no one else had been around.

No, no idea where Gary was. Maybe he’d gone fishing? Nathalie had said his gear was gone. As to Gary’s car sitting under its own blanket of leaves in front of the house: “He was always a big hitchhiker. Me? Hitchhike with him? Do I look like I can afford to fly-fish?”

“Officer?” Velma sashayed toward them, smiling, coat open. The cop looked, smiled back. “Anything I can help you with, officer?”

Plenty, according to his expression. “You know this guy?”

“Depends on what you mean by know.” Velma cocked a hip.

Benson watched the cop trying to work it out, looking his way and rejecting the obvious implication. “You see any unusual activity over at his place a couple of days back?”

Benson had left Velma’s while she slept, pulling his damp clothes from the dryer, hustling back down the row to his camper, thankful Miss Mary wasn’t on her step. He hadn’t gone out since. Sweat pricked his hairline.

“Anything unusual? I don’t think so. Not that I remember.”

Benson breathed.

“But I might think of something later. You got a card?”

He did. The blouse beneath the parka was scooped low. The card disappeared into all that abundance. “See you later, hon,” she said. Maybe to Benson. Or maybe the cop, who watched her ass all the way back into her trailer. Tick-tock, Benson thought. The woman had mastered the art of the sway.

The cop pulled a glove from one hand and wrote in a narrow notebook. “There was blood on the rug at your friend’s place. We’re going to test it. You up for a DNA sample?”

“Sure. But you don’t need to take a sample. At least some of that blood is mine.”

“Say what?”

“We had a fight.” He held out his hand, scabbed knuckles up, pointed to his cheek, stopping himself just in time from adding a Nathalie-esque, Ahhbviously.

“What about?”

“Love.” Because wasn’t that what it was, the writing? The Unattainable One they chased, wooed, fought for and over? “Any idea where he is, officer?”

“None. I’ll be honest: it doesn’t look good. He hasn’t showed up at any of his classes, and he’d never missed any until now. Nobody’s used his credit cards or his phone. Nobody’s heard from him. Those things usually add up to somebody being dead. Hard to know for sure, though, without a body.” He slapped his notebook against his thigh. “So I’m just going to come right out and ask. Did you kill him?”

Benson locked eyes with the cop. He shook his head long and slow. “The last time I saw Gary, he was alive.”

Benson had never thought much about the term dead weight until he’d wrestled Gary out of the car and toward the lip of the cutbank.

“How’d you get so heavy eating all that goddamn fruit?” he asked the back of Gary’s lolling head. It would have been easier to drag him faceup but he couldn’t stand the thought of Gary’s dead eyes staring at him.

“Hunh?” Gary said.

Benson dropped him and jumped back, teetering on the edge of the bank. “Jesus Christ!”

When Benson was a boy, he’d gone duck hunting with his dad. Try as he might, he hadn’t been able to get the hang of leading them as they coasted in toward the decoys. All his shots went wild. But his dad was a good shot, and as Benson had stuffed the mallards into a sack, their rich brown breast feathers still soft and warm, the blood on them only beginning to stiffen, he’d accidentally squeezed one. For years, his father retold the story of how Benson burst into tears when the dead duck emitted a final quack as the last of its breath was forced from its lungs.

Benson nudged Gary with his toe. Nothing. He nudged him harder, finally working up the nerve to turn him over. Gary’s lips moved. “Dude. The fuck?” He stared up at Benson. His eyes widened as he went over the rim.

“That Benjamin. He’s a better man than me,” Miss Mary said.

Than I, Benson thought.

Miss Mary spoke from inside a pink parka that looked like it had swallowed her whole. Fuzzy pink socks warmed her feet inside their sparkly Crocs. Her skin seemed grayer than usual next to all that color. Velma had finally traded in her skirts for seam-stretched jeans. The cottonwoods, limbs creaking a warning, stood bare against a sky that spat snow.

“George was his best friend,” Velma said. “Even if he was a shitheel, it makes sense that Benjamin was all broken up when George killed himself. Look at Benson here. He’s still messed up over that college boy who... went missing. Aren’t you?”

“Yeah. Well. It’s hard, not knowing what happened.”

Miss Mary’s cackle competed with the rattle of dried leaves. “Nothing hard about not knowing. Look all around you. It’s the easiest thing on earth.” Not dead yet, she liked to say about herself. Not by a long shot.

“It’s all about how things end.” Velma leaned back and stretched her legs as though the sun still shone upon them. “Like the ending to your book. It got me.” She took Benson’s hand and laced her fingers through his, speaking the words like a vow. “In the distance, a dog barked.”

Custer’s Last Stand by Debra Magpie Earling

Polson

Nina Three Dresses worked at a fast-food stop called Custer’s Last Stand at the edge of Polson, a mean little joint where the cars parked in a circle and blistered picnic tables sat squat beneath a stingy strip of shade. The road sign couldn’t be missed: three white-bulb arrows falling in perpetual motion toward a round building made to look like a drum. They served up coffee drinks with lame names like SacaJoewea and Joeranimo, and cups of grainy soft ice cream with tomahawk sprinkles. Wednesdays it was “scalped” potatoes and red dogs. Oddly enough, it’d become an Indian hangout. I was drawn to the place by a sense of irony.

I’d had trouble I couldn’t shake. Got myself arrested for walking out on a steak and a bottle of whiskey at the Depot Restaurant. Thrown in the hoosegow for a quick wink, then told to get out of town. No sentencing, no arraignment. Just a night of steel bars and Pine Sol dreams.

I didn’t want to hang around Missoula anyway. I hated the hippies and the high-school university, the lazy-ass writers writing about lives they’d never led, the college kids with rich parents and low IQs, the shit-asses who hang out at breweries and call recreation a living. I hightailed it back to the Flathead to get a job and lay low.

It’s the shitty little things that dog a person. Three years back, I was arrested in Butte for breaking a bottle on the sidewalk and not for the real crime I’d committed there. Hit-and-run. The guy’s shoe landed topside up on my hood where I found it the next morning when I woke to a belch of bad memory, recollecting a sound like a pig squeal, the image of a man’s crazy eyes as he looped in the air. I ditched my truck and headed farther west.

Custer’s Last Stand was a new joint, a shitty idea dreamed up by a loser. When I first visited it, I made the dumb-ass comment to a big Indian behind the counter that the local Indians didn’t even fight Custer, so why this stand here? It’s way out of place, I told him. Rightfully belongs in Crow Country, I said. The big Indian in his Flathead Braves T-shirt stared at me from behind the counter, then placed a weak espresso in front of me with three packets of Coffee-Mate. “Yeah, well,” he said, “just so you know, you’re out of place.” And he closed the serving window on me.

A few weeks later, Nina showed up and the little stand became my haven. She’d slide that serving window open and poke her head out, shield her eyes with her slim hands, and in a shivering half-whisper say, “Looks like it’s going to be a scorcher.” She’d wink at me and the world took on new meaning.

She’s what drew me to Custer’s, her calm demeanor. I felt right at home at those peeling picnic tables with a cup of steaming coffee, my morning paper, and a cigarette. I’d stop in once a week, sometimes twice, and for hours at a time if I was feeling lonesome.

The joint was run by a jaded cop who’d fled from Missouri to Montana all for the love of a Merle Haggard song. I’d been off the Flathead since I was a teenager but remembered there’d been others like him over the years. A woman who’d started a pancake house in a concrete teepee on the east shore of Flathead Lake. A couple who’d dyed their hair black, wore headbands with feathers, and had the balls to sell “Indian” beadwork they’d made themselves at the Crazy Daze festival in Ronan.

But Custer’s Last Stand was another thing altogether — an anomaly three hundred miles out of place. Eavesdropping on the old Indians who slurped coffee, I heard about the history of the place and plenty more. Apparently, Officer Verlin Custer, the proprietor, was a character. A mean SOB who waved Indians through yield signs and then pulled them over for traffic violations. There was talk he had some deal going with the smoke shops, kickbacks from cigarettes sold for triple the price to lazy gamblers at the Wolf Den. Pissy penny-ante shit that would eventually turn to bad-ass shit. All his workers called him Squint — even in his presence — but he was too arrogant, too much of a prick, to appreciate their own stand against him.

Nina’s “coworkers” were a joke: a big smiler named Toolbox, and a tattooed half-breed called Smug who had the longest cleavage I’d ever seen. Those knuckleheads would sit outside and smoke while Nina flipped burgers and cut fries.

Around eleven in the morning the gang would show up. Indian girls plinked away on cell phones, flirted with plump-ass boys, and picked flecks of eyeliner from the corners of their eyes. Surly girls who wore black hoodies, smirked instead of laughed, jiggled their keys like they were going somewhere but instead ordered yet another coffee with whipped cream and crushed-candy toppings.

Nina was immune to their jittery talk. She must have been twenty-five. She had a wicked scar that dented her left cheek, a dusting of freckles across her nose. Whenever work slammed the counter, Nina floated from task to task as if she had all the time in the world, and that grace made her seem far wiser than the others, especially when she served the boss.

She delivered every item to Squint with a cool countenance, and then double-flicked her wrists. It was a secret language he was too dumb to get. His coffee, flick flick, nothing here; his coffee straws, flick flick, no more; his steaming butterhorn, flick flick, all gone. Her nonchalance was natural, an easy read. Nothing here for you, buster.

He’d stop by every morning at nine a.m. to inspect the place, except for good days when he’d roar by the stand, his siren wailing: MeMEmeeeeEEE.

Squint didn’t know enough about weights to exercise for health. He worked out to strut bulging thighs, lifted heavy to have arms that strained against his sleeves like tethered mutts. His neck bulged against his uniform collar as he leaned on the service counter to perform semi-push-ups.

“How’s business?” he puffed. “Are you smiling for our customers?”

He wiggled a toothpick between his teeth and squinted at Smug’s cleavage. He grabbed Nina’s hands and traced his thumbnails along her palms to read her misfortune.

“One day a handsome man is going to snatch you up,” he said. “And it may very well be me.” Folks knew he was married to a battle-ax who made her profit off the sale of waterfront property that rightfully belonged to the Indians.

The old Indians would catch me watching Nina too. They’d smile at me through puffs of smoke. I’d shrug, order another cup of coffee, and sit at a picnic table so I could watch Nina come outdoors to serve them. It was worth any trouble for her quick glance, her smugly beautiful snub.

On lucky days, Nina would sit with the old Indians in the shade. I’d listen in, pretending I was reading the paper or checking texts. Nina sipped her coffee and reached for anyone’s cigarette. She’d take a long pull, then blow a slow stream of smoke from her thin nose. She was sexy as hell but there was always a worried look on her face.

I overheard her say that her grandfather was getting worse. They’d all be in trouble if she couldn’t get help. I gathered that he lived up Hell Roaring Creek, the last house before the road became a skinny ledge over the canyon. I knew the place.

“He’s got some crazy shit going on up there,” Nina said. “Anyone within a mile of his place is screwed.” The Indians clucked their tongues. Nina gazed off toward the Mission Mountains that were as blue as a raven’s heart above us.

Every once in a while, Johnny Sees Red Night would stop by and Nina would be out of the stand in a shot. There was a morose urgency to their chats. They’d head over to the scrub pines and talk in low voices. I’d catch a few lines here and there, enough to patch together there was trouble I couldn’t comprehend. The other Indians would stop talking and glance over their shoulders at the two, swat at invisible flies, put their heads together, and whisper conspiratorially. Something bad was going down that apparently didn’t concern my white ass.

By August, the wind woofed at the window screens and the double fans blew the smell of grease out to the highway. Tourists stopped by in their cutoffs and cover-ups, gulped iced tea and huckleberry shakes, and took off their reflector sunglasses to gawk at Flathead Lake shimmering just beyond the edge of the highway.

I’d been working up the courage to ask Nina out. I had a job at the Polson lumberyard and was finally making money. I put cash down on an El Camino, rented an apartment on the lake, and was ready to make my move. I planned to take Nina to Bigfork on a real date: after a meal at Showthyme, we’d go to the theater.

Summer unleashed the hottest spell on record. Heat sizzled the highway and glittered up from the shore. Squint became a dog on the prowl, a monster loosed on our tiny world. He slapped the asses of cocktail waitresses, leered at high-school girls, and spun nickels at them as he patrolled slowly past. Two teenagers from Browning got their skulls cracked and were left for dead but no one tattled. When old Bigshoe pissed behind the China Garden, Squint shattered every bone in his hands and still no one censured him, not even the whites. He whooped his siren without cause and gunned his car up on sidewalks to scare any Indian minding his own business. He turned his attention on Nina and pestered her relentlessly. He ignored the static of the dispatcher announcing disturbances — the damn Indians, always those damn Indians causing trouble for whites. Never the opposite, never whites like Squint causing Indians trouble. He let everyone know he was a big-shot son of a bitch who could shirk his duties to chase tail.

“Tell me where you live, baby girl,” he said.

Nina tried to throw him off with kindness, play like she halfway cared, but that only made him more of a jackass.

“I’m going to find you,” he said. “You know I have the means. I’ll follow you home.”

He wrapped his arms around her and gripped the back of her neck. “Please don’t,” I heard her say, and I stepped up. She swiped her hand at the window and cut me a pleading glance that said I’d only make matters worse. Whether for her or me, I couldn’t tell. When Squint went to the head, Nina ducked outside and beelined for me. “You don’t want to cause yourself trouble and please don’t cause me any. But stay here,” she said. “I have more I want to say to you.”

I twisted a cigarette in my mouth and took a couple of drags. I thought she didn’t want to be alone in the situation with Squint. She needed an ally, nothing more. We waited until Squint got into his cruiser and drove away. His heavy car humped up over the dirt road and as his front tires gripped the highway, his back tires spit gravel at a few customers lounging at the picnic tables. He was pissed.

Nina stood away from me to watch Squint leave. There was no glee in her watching. She waited until he was far down the road before she spoke: “He says he’s going to come back for me.” She rubbed her forehead and blinked away tears.

It was late. She closed up shop, slung her backpack over her shoulder, and headed toward the highway. “Don’t follow me,” she said. “I mean it.”

But I did follow. I followed her on foot until she disappeared into the dark fields beyond the road. I called out but I’d lost her as if she’d vanished before my eyes. I’d become her second stalker. Lurking around. Chasing where I wasn’t wanted.

I tried to conjure Nina’s soothing voice telling me to calm down, tried to turn my thoughts from the Sig Sauer in my glove box. I didn’t wish to cause Nina trouble. She needed this job and everyone knew it. It wouldn’t do her any good if I was to pop a cap in his ass, but I had to make Squint back off. He was out of control.

I arrived at eight in the morning, the quiet time at Custer’s. The regulars were drinking coffee and eating cinnamon rolls. It was already a scorcher, so hot my coffee didn’t even steam the air. My stomach quivered. I had the peculiar feeling something was gaining on me. Squint wasn’t going to give up his pursuit of Nina. There was no place to go but ugly from here.

Nina had just finished her prep work and was ready to hear me out when I caught sight of an old pickup. I don’t know what drew my attention, maybe a jagged flash of chrome. The pickup was miles away, just a speck on the horizon, but I swear I heard its engine. I wasn’t the only one. As the vehicle covered ground we watched a bad-ass wind barrel round and round behind it, making its own crazy static.

Toolbox came out, whistled, then scurried back inside. I took off my shades. Man-sized tornadoes spun in the wake of the pickup, sparking tiny arrows of blue lightning. Wind rushed the fields and the muggy heat licked us like a pup.

Indian kids made for their cars. Old Indians limped away quick.

“If you know what’s good for you,” Angelina Thump Bird told me, “you’ll skedaddle.”

Nina raised the service screen and pushed herself halfway out the window to get a better look at the speeding truck. Her shirt hiked up to reveal the small of her back, the sensuous curve of her lean spine. “Shit,” she said.

She swiped her forehead with the back of her hand and jumped down. She didn’t take her eyes off the approaching truck. She reached over, switched off the coffee urn, and dumped the whole pot into the sink. Toolbox and Smug hid behind the ice-cream machine. Nina closed all the blinds and turned off the ever-blinking arrow sign. She slammed the window closed and flipped the sign on the door. SHUT UP, the sign read.

I stood beneath the arrow sign wondering what the hell was going on. I felt peculiarly alone. The only dumb-ass facing a churning funnel. A fierce wind roiled around me and I had to catch myself or fall. The wiry-haired Indian gunned his pickup and trundled toward the stand. The trash barrel tipped over and rolled toward the highway; napkins, paper cups, and greasy baskets flittered across the road and littered the fields. Hail pelted a twenty-foot circumference directly over Custer’s. I tented my newspaper above my head and wondered if I was in my right mind. The sun shimmered down and cars kept passing, their drivers oblivious.

The Indian shunted his pickup around back of the stand and I heard the familiar slam of Custer’s door. When Nina spotted me she gestured wildly, and before I could understand what she was trying to communicate, the old Indian was turning toward me.

In my nightmares, one bad dream plays over and over again: the hit-and-run. I hear ribs shatter, the snickering thunder of kneecaps striking earth, the hollow ker-blonk sound of a man’s skull batting from grille to undercarriage. And now I smelled the acrid bloom of singed hair as the nightmare leaped from the Indian’s palm.

I woke up in the bed of my El Camino — red as a red dog, my skin almost seared. I sat up and saw sparks of light. I couldn’t tell how long I’d been out. What had happened to me?

The doctor took one look at the scattershot wounds that’d blown clean through my arms and legs and asked if I needed counseling. When I said no, he shook his head. “You don’t like yourself,” he said. I called in sick.

A little over a week later I limped my way back to Custer’s and sat at the rickety picnic table. I didn’t have enough energy to get a drink. The Indians kept their distance and I couldn’t blame them. I looked worse for the wear — torn up. Nina came out with a cup of coffee, a weak offering. She sat across the table from me. “I should have warned you,” she said. “But really, it’s nothing you need to know. And nothing that can be any good for you.”

I didn’t understand but knew I wasn’t meant to. “You mean, it’s none of my business,” I responded.

She patted her lips lightly. “That wouldn’t be exactly right. I’m not trying to scold you.” She touched my hand. “I’m trying to save you.”

I didn’t ask questions. I figured she’d tell me what she wanted to tell me, eventually. My ribs ached. Dry heat pulsed in my throat. I gulped my coffee.

“My grandfather didn’t mean to hurt you,” she said. A car passed by on Highway 93 and we heard the tick tick tick of studs. Nina was watchful but didn’t look at me as she spoke. “Grandpa Magpie is scary crazy these days. He sees things other people don’t. It’s hard to explain. If it were only his dementia...” She shrugged. “If he doesn’t like someone, well, that person kind of goes away.” Her Salish accent gave the bad news a lilt.

The other Indians had gathered at the table behind her, listening to our conversation. “He got help, don’t he?” Myra Little Bull asked. “Sure, he got that social worker. Snooping around. Shaking her big white finger. That’s what those social workers do. Aye.” The other Indians laughed and jostled each other.

Nina reached over for Joe Elder’s cigarette. She pulled a long smoke then streamed it out her thin nose. “You guys didn’t hear?” she said. “She disappeared about a week ago. They found her car straddling the road edge.”

They quieted down. Angelina Thump Bird gazed at me. “Don’t know what we’re gonna do.”

“All I need,” Nina said, “is to have Squint follow me. Wouldn’t that be great. I even told the tribal police not to go up there. To wait it out until I got some help.”

Little Bull gripped her elbows and rocked back and forth. “We need a medicine doin’s.”

“Go home and heal up,” Nina told me.

A car pulled up to the stand and a family threw open their doors but didn’t move. They argued about the menu. “It’s a joke,” the woman said, applying her bright pink lipstick. “I sure as hell wouldn’t eat here.”

A fat boy struggled out of the backseat. “I want a JOE-RAN-imo,” he announced.

Nina turned to me. “I gotta go, but come back when you’re feeling better. I’ve got a surprise for you.”

I’d had all the surprises I could take. I’d been off work for more than a week and I had some thinking to do. I told the boss I couldn’t shake the flu and that I was giving notice. I hated to do it; I’d just been promoted to yard foreman and I liked my job.

I went home and slept. Out my door, Flathead Lake lapped the rocky shore. I drifted off and imagined I was swimming out to the deepest part of the water, out where the Flathead Lake Monster was hiding, and woke with the idea that there were things beyond my knowing in these mountains that only the Indians understood.

I thought about Nina working endlessly in Squint’s hellish kitchen, how Custer’s Last Stand really was a joke, another way for the white man to grind the Indians down and trivialize their victories. Can’t beat ’em, make fun of ’em. Nina was between a rock and a hard place. I didn’t understand what was going on with her grandfather, but knew it had something to do with dementia and his medicine powers run amuck, and deep down I was afraid. What if her grandfather did have the power to kill someone with his feelings? Or worse: what if he knew what I had done? I turned the idea over and over in my head until I was sick with it.

I was nursing a cup of coffee at the Polson Bakery. I didn’t want to keep showing Nina how weak I’d become, how I’d got the stuffing knocked out of me, so I’d begun avoiding the stand. I was about ready to settle up when Squint came into the bakery and plopped down at a table not far from me. I’d lost so much weight I didn’t think he’d recognize me. He slurped his soup and chomped his sandwich in three bites. His appetite sickened me. Squint surveyed the coffee shop, nodding at a few customers who shifted uneasily. He was about to leave when he took a hard look in my direction. I kept my head down as he sized me up.

He swaggered over to me and pushed back his hat. “I don’t allow vagabonds in my town,” he said. “And if I see you around here again, I’m going to haul you in.” He stabbed his toothpick between his front teeth and smiled. “And if I catch you near that squaw again, it’s not going to be pretty — she’s not going to be pretty. Get my drift?” He gazed around the room to make sure he’d been heard.

My first thought was to be flattered, bowled over with giddiness, and that’s when I knew I was in a world of shit. A man can get in trouble with the law; he can be obsessed with motorcycles and fast cars; he can drive himself to ruin with gambling and drink — but if a woman even shadows the frame of his life, if she begins to be his first thought in matters where he should be thinking, then he’s already gone. I’d fallen in love with Nina Three Dresses, and Squint saw me as a threat. One big, glorious hallelujah!

I decided to keep my mouth shut and let it pass. I’d get even with the son of a bitch another way. But just as he turned to leave and his grubby mitt touched the door, I got a stab of inspiration.

“You don’t have to worry no more,” I called out.

Four old men who’d been gossiping stopped midsentence and glared at me, then at Squint.

“The two of us are heading south this evening. All she’s gotta do is pack her bags and we’re outta here. You get my drift?”

Squint gave me the kind of look that could fry eggs. He stopped picking his teeth and let the toothpick teeter in his mouth. “We’ll see about that,” he said. “We’ll just see about that.” I’d stepped into a scene from High Noon, an old-fashioned showdown between men where the woman would take the hurt.

My heart was a furiously ticking time bomb. I’d taken too big a risk. I should have headed over to the stand, talked to Nina, told her what I’d done. But I knew Squint would be on my tail. I’d counted on that, hadn’t I? It was my ace in the hole. He’d follow me. Jesus, he’d follow me to hell.

I waited until Nina got off work and then I waited awhile more. The seconds ticked. Stink rolled down my rib cage in small rivulets and stars circled my head. I wondered if I’d ever feel right again. Yet that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but Nina, her future, and her happiness.

When the evening light rippled over the lake and the stars emerged, I got in the El Camino and headed slowly into town. I picked up a carton of cigarettes at the Town Pump. I checked my rearview mirror but saw no sign of Squint. I waited and then drove like a weary old man. I smoked three cigarettes while I searched. I canvassed the alleyways, the spaces behind the 4B’s, and Walmart, but caught no sign of him. I blasted music. Bass thundered through the soles of my feet, edged up my spine, and flared out the windows like a flag, and still no sign of Squint. I rubbed my wet palms on my jeans and drove on, a man determined. I’d banked everything on an idea only a nutcase would believe.

I cracked a beer and took a long tug and headed up the east shore. I’d been up Hell Roaring many times and knew every sharp turn, every dry dip. As I followed the first curve up the road, dust sparkled in my headlamps like a sorcerer’s mist. An electric charge hummed along the hood of the El Camino. Weird sparks lit the ends of my fingers. My funny bone was lit. Hell Roaring behind me, ahead of me, and still no sign of Squint. The thin moon smiled wickedly over the valley as I gunned the engine and headed up and up that dark road.

I came to the road chain and jumped out. I worked steadily, sawing through the link until it clanked off. I tossed the chain aside. The wind began to pick up, snarling through the trees and creating a bluish blister around me. I smelled the scent of freedom that is older than time, a scent immune to white civilization. For a reeling moment, the scars of my long-ago sadness disappeared. Then I heard a relentless chuffing, an engine grinding low. I cupped my ear to listen. Spinning tires huffed along the road below, growling, coming for me.

I continued onward, upward. The smell of elk piss wafted through my windows. The road was a thin gray tongue over hell’s chasm. No road barriers. No fences. Nothing to save me but the thought of Nina. I spotted the white Buick half on, half off the road, straddled precariously over the darkness. One little push and it would clatter mercilessly off the cliff edge. One tire slip from me, and off it’d go. It had to be the social worker’s car that Nina had spoken about, but I wouldn’t risk edging past it.

I stopped dead center in the road and checked my glove box. No flashlight. I could smell the oily dust beneath the carriage of my car, the only thing that made the night seem real. I’d driven a long way and had only a few more steps to go. The windows of the Buick glinted and flashed in the flimsy light of the moon, but just past the curve was Magpie’s house — all its windows dark. An engine died behind me. I heard cussing. A thin light jittered up the road, then a tunnel of light roiled over the deep canyon, and I wanted to snicker with glee. My plan was working. The flashlight shot up past the line of trees and I skittered into the bushes.

Grandpa Magpie’s shack sat perched above me. I’d seen this place way back when I was a teenager and had looked through the windows at the tidy kitchen, a few scrubbed pots hanging from the wall, a kettle boiling on the stove. I remembered I couldn’t fathom how anyone could live up here, let alone survive the brutal winters.

I could make out a hundred tiny flags on the switchback path that led up to the house. I heard Squint’s hard breath as he worked his way up the first step. Suddenly, an eerie light illuminated the darkness and for a second I was blind.

“Harold?” Nina’s voice called. “Is that you?”

The thought crossed my mind that she was calling someone else. But Harold was my name.

“Stay where you are,” she said. “Don’t come any closer.” She lifted the kerosene lantern and I saw Squint’s oily eyes, his smug face haloed by darkness.

Nina gasped. “Officer Custer, don’t. Please go away. You’re in danger.”

He chortled and quickened his stride. As he passed the first flag, a rattling gust blew so hard his hat flew off and tumbled down the road and off the embankment. He thrust his hands out to steady himself but continued onward, pitching unnaturally forward like a cartoon character. His clothing plastered his body and his coat flapped behind him. He was heading toward Nina but each time he passed a flag the wind would abruptly change and knock him backward and sideways. A shadow moved behind Nina and she retreated into the house.

“I warned you!” she shouted back. “I’m sorry!”

A sound careened from the old Indian’s body, a warble that issued from his chest, a buzzy zing. Trees groaned and cracked around me. I felt jazzed, electrified. Squint’s eyes flashed in terror. He was lit up, a gigantic neon-road-sign pig. His hair frazzled red like lit grass. I smelled burning fingernails, the old body scent of death. It came to me that I was only dreaming as I watched Squint sail through the night and wing out over the edge of the precipice to fall forever into the pitch darkness from where he’d come. The last thing I saw in the whistling night was the young man I had hit. He was smiling. He was alive.

The boss had left a message on my phone. My job was still waiting for me. I combed my hair and brushed my teeth. It was eight in the morning. I’d been asleep for three days. I got in my El Camino and was headed for the Polson Bakery when I changed my mind. I turned toward the mountains, toward Nina and Custer’s Last Stand. I had a burning desire to see her.

I parked and watched her from my car. The windows of the stand gleamed as if someone had polished them to a squeak. I caught a whiff of fresh food — not fries or stale hamburgers, but good food. I smiled when Nina spotted me, smiled so wide my face hurt. I felt better than I had in years, better than I ever could or should. She took off her apron and unleashed her hair. Her beautiful hair tumbled down and the sun shone on her face.

“You would not believe what happened,” she said. “Never in a million years.” The concussive sound of wind drummed my ears. Her hair glittered with brilliant light. “He’s gone. And even stranger...” She patted her chest and her eyes welled up. “His wife turned the place over to me. Just like that. Said she wanted none of it. I sign the papers this afternoon.”

“Did it really happen?” I asked, dumbfounded at the larger question that loomed before us.

Nina didn’t answer. She went back inside and poured me a large cup of coffee with real cream. All the stupid signs had been torn down. Now it was coffee, the best buffalo burger in the state of Montana. There were boxes of fresh vegetables on the counter. Buy local. Buy organic. Buy Indian-made.

She raised an eyebrow. “You’re with me, aren’t you?”

I looked off toward the blue Mission Mountains and understood their power was something akin to magic. “Yes,” I said, “I’m with you.”

Red Skies of Montana by Keir Graff

Lolo

Sidd breathed hard as his shoes crunched the gravel. He thought: You can’t outrun smoke.

He’d woken early to run his eight kilometers before the sun rose above the mountains and began to scorch the brown hills of the Bitterroot Valley. He loved the quietness, broken only by the scree of a cricket, the twee twee of a bird, the distant burr of an engine on the highway. After only two years in Montana, he was still unused to the exhilarating joy of being alone.

The cold nights, too, gave him a thrill, and it was a pleasure to be awake when the first rays of sunlight topped the mountains to warm his skin.

On a normal morning, the light would have had a lovely violet tint. Today it was just brown. Smoke from Idaho wildfires had been drifting east for more than a week, dimming the stars, blunting the sun, and, if the way he was gasping now was any indication, infiltrating his lungs.

Exercise in such foul air was probably worse than no exercise at all. He worked phlegm out of his throat and spat, laboring toward the Y in the road where he usually turned around.

He had grown up in heat and humidity, the air dense with smells of food, flowers, and garbage. He had come here to get away from all that. But he had not known about the fires.

Sidd had been told about the renewing qualities of fire, how forests needed to burn so new growth could emerge. Some pine trees actually required the heat of a fire to release the seeds from their fallen cones. Old brush and dead trees became ash so green shoots could emerge on the forest floor.

He read about fires in Canada and Siberia that might not burn out until they had exhausted their tinder. He knew about rising temperatures, thawing permafrost, and melting ice caps. And Montana was so dry that the Forest Service fire-danger signs seemed permanently set at VERY HIGH and EXTREME. He wondered whether there came a time when the old rules ceased to apply.

Reaching the Y, he jogged a circle in the road, his trainers puffing dust as fine and arid as Martian soil, and turned back. Most of the road was monotonously straight, but a curve and a drop here, combined with the robust fringe of knapweed on the bank, made it a blind corner for cars coming up from behind.

Sidd heard gravel popping under the truck’s tires before he heard its engine, a throaty V8. He stumbled into the weeds and pressed himself against the bank.

The black truck pulled up next to him, its window down. The driver leaned forward and shouted across a gray-bearded man in the passenger seat who was concentrating on something in his lap. “Wear some lighter clothes, asshole!” The man had mirrored, wraparound sunglasses resting on the bill of his baseball cap.

Sidd looked down at what he was wearing. Navy T-shirt, black shorts, blue running shoes. Should he apologize?

“I’m trying to save your goddamn life!” The man gunned the engine and the truck sprayed gravel and surged forward. A pebble stung Sidd’s shin like a wasp.

It wasn’t until the white GMC on the truck’s tailgate had disappeared around the bend that Sidd started running again, shakily, wondering whether the man would have said anything about his clothes if his skin hadn’t been dark as well.

Poe pounded the wheel. “Swear to fucking God, you could pack into the Bob Marshall and some fucking jogger would still run through your camp in his underwear.”

“That was stupid,” said Mike, barely looking up from the glowing rectangle in the palm of his massive left hand.

“Woulda been more stupid if we came back with him stuck in the grille.”

“Maybe better that way.”

Thing was, Mike was right. It was stupid. Yell at some guy, he was that much more likely to remember seeing your truck. Poe had been trying not to lose his shit so easily lately, but no sooner had he promised himself he’d be Clint Eastwood — quiet than he was ragging on someone again.

Mike poked at the screen, calm as ever. Even when he said, That was stupid, it was like he was saying, Pull over at the next gas station. And if anyone had a right to be pissed at the world, it was Mike. Poor son of a bitch had only been out of Deer Lodge for a couple of months and it must have been like landing on an alien planet. He was so 1980s he still wore a fanny pack.

He’d also never seen a smartphone except on TV and now he couldn’t stop playing the game Poe’s daughter had downloaded for him. Poe had been around enough addicts not to fall for the free first taste, but Mike was hooked on Candy Crush crack.

Poe needed an extra set of hands and figured that Mike, who was still on parole, had plenty of incentive to keep his mouth shut about the job. That, and he was Poe’s cousin’s ex-husband and she’d been all over Poe to help Mike out. She needed money, so Mike needed money.

A low voice said, “Sweet!” as the big man took out a row of jellybeans or something.

“How’s the game going?” Poe asked. “You win yet?”

“I think this is made for little kids’ fingers,” Mike said without looking up.

“Think you’ll be able to take a break in a minute? We’re almost there.”

Mike nodded but kept playing. Good thing he wasn’t behind the wheel. Poe was sure they didn’t teach inmates about the dangers of distracted driving. He held the wheel carefully as the road went steadily up.

Poe wasn’t a firebug by nature, but his first job, a foreclosed lumber warehouse, had been a career-maker. Though he’d torched a lot of things since then, this was his first ski resort. Well, it wasn’t a ski resort yet, and if he did his job right, it wouldn’t be.

The thing had been going on for years. Poe had seen headlines in the Missoulian a couple of times. Awhile back, Betty Jean Allaway, whose family had ranched the western half of the valley for almost 150 years, had surprised the shit out of everyone by marrying Bucky Severson, her ranch manager. Betty Jean was older than Bucky and didn’t have any kids. When she died, Bucky inherited the whole spread and got it in his head that he was going to build a ski resort on the part that covered the north side of Lolo Peak — and not just any ski resort, but the biggest one in North America.

With the way society was going, you couldn’t put up a fireworks tent without a shit ton of paperwork. Even Poe knew a ski resort was bound to be a ten-year project at least. But Bucky being Bucky, he went and bulldozed the ski runs anyway to get a jump-start. Maybe he figured that once people saw the potential, they’d say, What the hell, you might as well finish.

They didn’t. Once the environmentalists got involved, the whole thing was doomed. Bucky didn’t see it, so he lawyered up and got ready to fight to the bitter end. But apparently the developers he’d partnered with foresaw a different outcome. Because they were the ones who’d sent someone to find someone to burn the whole thing down a week before the Montana Supreme Court reached its bound-to-be-unfavorable decision.

Poe had no proof he was working for WashIdaMont Development Partners. As far as he knew, he was working for the guy who’d slipped him $2,500 in worn bills behind Lucky Lil’s Casino. But there had to be insurance money, money that might not be on the table once the project was officially declared unviable. That’s how things worked, right? What they were paying Poe — half down, half on completion — probably came out of the coffee fund. And Mike? Mike was more than happy to take home five hundred dollars for a morning’s work. Given that his ex-wife had laid claim to the forty cents an hour he’d earned working in the prison bakery, it was the most money he’d seen at one time in twenty-seven years.

Reaching the first switchback, Poe turned the wheel and geared down. The truck climbed into the trees.

Siddharth Ghosh was an unlikely caretaker. But the world itself was unlikely — how else could he account for the fact that he was living in a trailer on a mountain in Montana, halfway around the world from where he’d grown up?

As a child, he’d felt perfectly at home in Mumbai. The heat, the rain, and the crowds were mundane obstacles his family navigated with good-humored exasperation. Even the city’s uneasy relationship with the sea and the saltwater that flooded the sewers at high tide seemed part of a natural pattern of ebb and flow.

Then came July 26, 2005. When the skies opened, it felt as though there had been another ocean hiding in the clouds. Rain fell so hard and so fast that Sidd, watching schoolmates make desperate dashes to their waiting parents, imagined it might be possible to drown on two feet.

Twelve years old, Sidd himself remained stuck at school overnight, unable to go home once the trains stopped moving. In the dark, he sat with his English teacher and listened to the news reports on a battery-powered radio barely audible over the water battering the roof.

Sidd’s father reached him late the following afternoon on an army truck with giant wheels. He brought bad news: Aunt Janani, his mother’s beloved sister, had drowned in her car, unable to open her doors against the rising water.

His family mourned but seemed to recover. Sidd could not. From that day, he lived in Mumbai as if under siege. The jostling crowds frightened him. The sea became an enemy. Monsoon season brought with it unrelenting anxiety, the wet air and mold seeming to foretell a watery doom. A teenage recluse, Sidd paged obsessively through his late aunt’s collection of National Geographic, an American magazine to which she had been peculiarly devoted. From the May 1976 issue, he cut out a picture of a snowcapped mountain in Montana. It seemed dry, cold, and tranquil — everything Mumbai was not.

In time, Sidd’s older sister left Mumbai for the London School of Economics, and his brother was accepted to Stanford. Sidd, since the Maharashtra floods no more than a dutiful student, had fewer options. He earned his BS in chemistry at Mumbai University while plotting his escape to Montana.

Accepted to the graduate chemistry program at the University of Montana, he arrived on a hot and dry August day, emerging from Missoula International Airport like a grateful refugee. In his new school, he was surprised to find himself treated as an academic superstar — and to discover that India was not the only country struggling with the legacy of a caste system.

Most of his fellow students scrupulously avoided the subjects of race and skin color in his presence, while others went out of their way to remind him that they were color-blind. The wife of one professor rhapsodized about her months at an ashram in upstate New York, where she had temporarily taken the name Mavis Devi.

At the Oxford bar on Higgins Avenue, during a graduate-student pub crawl Sidd had endured as a forced march, two cigarette-voiced barflies had loudly debated whether he was a “feather Indian” or a “dot Indian” while everyone stared at their beers as if looking for signs. Sidd wondered if his color-blind new friends were color-deaf too.

By his second year, his grades were slipping. When his academic advisor suggested that maybe he needed a break, he grasped at her offhand advice like a lifeline and canceled his classes for spring semester. He lost his housing and his teaching stipend, but he didn’t tell his parents. He didn’t want to go home.

He found employment in a Missoulian help-wanted ad for a caretaker. The job paid poorly but included lodging and use of a vehicle. The interview, curiously, was held at the office of a local lawyer. A man named Buck Severson asked the questions while his lawyer keyed his laptop and frowned at the screen.

Very few of the questions had anything to do with his duties, which apparently involved looking after a large, rural property south of town. Severson wanted to know whether Sidd was an environmentalist (he didn’t think so), whether he had voted in any local or state elections (as a citizen of India, he had not), and, puzzlingly, if he was a skiier (he wasn’t; snow still made him feel like he was hallucinating, so he wasn’t sure he could trust it to cushion his falls).

All his answers except the last one seemed to please Severson, who, after a whispered consultation with his attorney, offered him the job as caretaker of the Montana Gold Ski Resort.

Severson gave him a ride out that very afternoon, and it was only as they bumped up a road toward the site that Sidd realized the resort did not yet exist.

“But it will!” exclaimed Severson, a red-faced man whose arms were so small compared to his burly torso that they seemed like vestigial limbs. “Any great visionary has his doubters. When these suckers realize what it’s going to do for the local economy, they’re gonna build a statue of old Buck Severson.”

Passing through a gate hung with signs that said, NO TRESPASSING, and, FUTURE SITE OF THE LARGEST SKI RESORT IN NORTH AMERICA, Severson shifted into four-wheel drive to give Sidd a tour of the property. Ski runs had been carved into the forest, leaving stumps and rocks behind.

As if making a pitch to a prospective investor, Severson pointed out the sites he had planned for the grand lodge with its roaring fireplace and Western bar, the condominium chalets, the pro shop, and several restaurants. Here would be the bunny slope, there would go the lifts, and right in front of them the buses bringing skiiers from the airport would drop off their cargo, turn around, and head out for more.

Severson was a good salesman. Sidd went from being skeptical that such a thing could be accomplished to vividly seeing it in his own mind. Instead of thinking of the job as a chance to regroup before resuming school, he imagined that if he worked hard enough, he might someday be managing Severson’s ski resort. Perhaps he would even learn to ski.

After the tour, with Sidd feeling slightly seasick, Severson bumped over primitive roads to the only two structures that occupied the land so far: Severson’s palatial log home and the dented trailer just down the road where Sidd would stay.

“I’m not here as much as I’d like,” said Severson. “I still run the ranch, plus they got me flying all over the place pitching investors. It’s a grind but it’s gonna pay off.”

“So I’m supposed to...”

“You’re supposed to protect the investment. We need someone here basically 24-7. Look after my house and water the yard. Ride the property on a four-wheeler every day, check the fence, and make sure nobody’s torn down a No Trespassing sign. Kill the gophers. Carry a shotgun in case any sandal-wearers hike through. You know how to shoot, don’t you?”

Under Severson’s brusque one-time tutelage, Sidd had learned to load and shoot the gun. Badly bruising his shoulder, he had pockmarked a tree stump, mutilated a plastic gasoline can, and murdered several other inanimate objects.

Mike opened the gate and waited for Poe to drive through so he could close it behind them. You could take the boy off the ranch and send him to prison for armed robbery, but he’d still remove his hat when a lady came into the room.

“Leave it open,” called Poe. “We might need to leave quick.”

Mike got back in, adjusted his fanny pack under his belly, and they rolled up the road. Poe hadn’t scouted the site because he hadn’t wanted to risk being spotted in the area. When he came to a fork in the road, he guessed and turned left, following a couple of tight switchbacks past an old trailer with a four-wheeler out front, before dead-ending at a varnished log palace with picture windows that must have given an IMAX view of the valley.

“Well, this ain’t it,” Poe grumbled, starting a three-point turn.

Mike unlocked the phone and started poking the screen again. Poe grabbed it out of his hands and dropped it into his own shirt pocket. Mike tensed, and Poe wondered if the guy was really as mellow as he seemed.

Poe nodded toward the windshield. “Look around. We’re on the job. I’m not paying you to play video games.”

Mike stared at his shirt pocket and for a long second Poe thought he was going to reach out and take the phone back. Poe looked away first and started driving back down the direction they’d come. Mike would not have gotten fucked with in the yard.

This time, they took the right-hand turn, which rose at a steady grade across the face of the hill. It was wider than the other one.

“This is the way,” said Poe confidently. “They got this wide enough for two busses to pass on the corners and the drivers to high-five.”

Then the road ended in a flat, open field of churned dirt, with weeds and pine seedlings poking through and ski runs carved out of the forest going up and out of sight. Poe put the transmission in park.

“No ski lodge, no lifts. What the hell are we supposed to burn?”

Mike dug in his beard like he was probing for ticks. “They didn’t give you instructions?”

Poe remembered that fleeting moment in the parking lot of Lucky Lil’s when he’d thought it was too easy, that the guy should have said something more. Or that he should have asked a follow-up question. But this was another problem he’d always struggled with: as much as he ran his mouth, he hated looking stupid, even when one simple question could save him a world of trouble.

“Burn down the Montana Gold Ski Resort, is what the man said,” he told Mike. “That’s it.”

Mike leaned forward, putting his face right next to the windshield, so he could look up the mountain to where the stubbled ski runs disappeared into the haze. Dawn was breaking across the valley, making the air glow like a washed-out kitchen curtain.

“Maybe he meant to burn down all of this. Burn down the mountain.”

Sidd pulled the gate closed behind him and looped the chain over the post. He always left it cracked when he went out for a run, but the breeze must have creaked it wide open. Not something he wanted Mr. Severson to see — the next time, he would shut it properly.

He went slowly up the road, barely faster than walking, the smoke getting thicker as he climbed higher. He thought he could taste dust, as if someone had just driven by. But Mr. Severson was still in Chicago, talking to potential investors.

Twelve thousand years ago, these valleys had been lakes filled with water backed up behind an icy dam. There was no evidence of that water now. Sidd had walked trails in the forest where the cracked dirt formed mosaics like a dry lake bed in a desert. The yellow grasses rustled and crunched like paper. Lightning strikes and stray sparks made fire a constant presence in summer, from the standing-next-to-a-campfire smell of smoke to the falling-ash smog of apocalypse. The first time he stood in the forest, it had been so quiet that he wondered whether anything survived here at all.

The water shortage did not bode well for Mr. Severson’s dream. In his idle hours since taking the job, Sidd had read everything published online about the project and even some articles about the environmental forecast in Montana. To begin with, the lower ski runs were at too low an altitude, and snowfall would be uncertain each season, even more so as global warming wreaked havoc on weather patterns. The higher ski runs, which would have better snowpack, were not contiguous with the lower ones. Mr. Severson was counting on skiers’ willingness to take shuttles between the two.

To Sidd’s amazement, many modern ski resorts relied on huge machines that manufactured artificial snow. Water was required to make snow. Sidd saw now that Severson had counted on the goodwill and forbearance of so many people and government agencies that the project had almost certainly been doomed from the beginning. In years long past, the land owner could have played king, but Severson didn’t even own the land now. He had signed over the deed to the Montana Gold Ski Corporation in exchange for a minority share of future profits.

The trailer almost in sight, Sidd slowed the four-wheeler. Again he tasted dust, and wondered whether it was carried on a hot wind. He knew that huge forest fires created their own chaotic climates, the oxygen-hungry blaze producing gusts that could howl like freight trains. But the fires in Idaho were nowhere near that close.

Even though he no longer believed the Montana Gold Ski Resort was viable, Sidd was still happy as its caretaker. He didn’t fully understand his duties and sometimes felt he was cheating Buck out of his meager pay, but he loved the solitude and had come to love the land itself. The ski runs had scarred it and the persistent drought had choked it, but he knew now that he was wrong about its lifelessness. All he had to do was sit still. Large birds of prey wheeled on thermal currents, and deer came to lap the water that pooled around the sprinklers on the big house’s green lawn. Sometimes it was so quiet he could hear beetles scratching in the dust.

Occasionally, at dawn or at twilight, he even glimpsed the gophers Mr. Severson so despised. Disobeying instructions, he hadn’t shot at a single one.

He did his best with the other duties, though. He kept the four-wheeler fueled up and patrolled the land every day. And while the gopher invasion was real — the holes and mounds were proof of that — Sidd had yet to see a sandal-wearing conservationist, and the NO TRESPASSING signs had not been tampered with.

Winter was months away, but Sidd was anxious for his first one on the mountain. He was curious to see how deep the snow would fall. Buck had told him that riding a snowmobile was more fun than bull-riding, not quite as fun as getting laid.

Reaching the trailer’s weedy yard, he stretched his hamstring and calf muscles, then worked the hand pump by the side of the trailer. He drank straight from the spout, the first mouthfuls of water lukewarm and tasting of iron. On a hot day, it was like drinking blood.

He worked the handle, letting water splash over the river stones that had been piled around the pipe to keep the yard from turning to mud. Then he drank again, gulping cooler water until his belly was full.

He walked to the edge of the yard and urinated into the trees, a genuine pleasure. It was in mundane moments like these that he knew he could never return to Mumbai. A man who belonged nowhere could live anywhere. This dry place would be his home.

Sidd liked to do his first patrol right after his run, before the sun grew too intense. It was best to change into jeans and a long-sleeve shirt to protect his arms and legs from the four-wheeler’s hot metal and the rocks thrown by its knobby tires, but putting on clean clothes when he was sweaty was too unpleasant.

He climbed the railroad-tie steps, went into the dim trailer, and came out wearing the visored helmet and carrying the shotgun. He considered putting the shotgun back. He had already decided not to kill gophers, so logically it followed that he could not kill a human being. But nobody else knew he wasn’t going to kill a human being, so he supposed the gun was at least good for show. If he did meet any of Buck’s sandal-wearers, and if they refused to leave the property, he could always fire it into the air.

Sidd slung the gun over his shoulder, the thin membrane of his running shirt doing nothing to cushion the hard stock against his back. He tightened the helmet under his chin. Then he climbed on the four-wheeler and turned the key to start its engine.

The thing about arson was that it couldn’t look like arson. Obviously. Insurance companies didn’t pay out if they found a pile of melted gas cans at the place where the fire started. Poe did have two red five-gallon cans strapped in front of the wheel wells, but using an accelerant was an absolute last resort. Over his career Poe had figured out, usually by talking to contractors over cans of beer, a few simple ways of starting a fire and making it look like an accident.

“Why don’t you just call him?” asked Mike.

Dumb shit had been in stir too long. He didn’t even know why you didn’t do business on a cell phone.

Poe put the truck in four-wheel drive and started easing up the slope. “Look, it makes sense. They got insurance for everything now. This place is insured as a ski resort. Scenery’s part of the package. No one’s gonna fly to Montana to vacation in a moonscape.”

They probably should have gotten out and hiked. The truck was lurching from side to side, and the undercarriage sounded like it was being swept with the wrong end of the broom. But he wanted to get this thing done.

At the top of the lowest ski run, there was a little bench and the ground leveled out into a meadow. Poe angled the truck toward a thicket of trees. “You think here?”

Mike didn’t answer. He was tapping the screen again.

Unbelievable. Poe slapped the phone out of Mike’s hands and it tumbled onto the floor mat. “Hey, Mike! You think this place is okay?”

Mike looked at him, and again Poe had the feeling that, if the sleepy man-mountain ever erupted, the crater would be deep and wide. But Mike glanced out the window and nodded. “Here’s fine.”

They climbed out of the truck, walked into the trees, and picked up rocks, which they arranged in a circle. Then they filled the circle with tinder-dry wood. The fake campfire sat right in the brittle yellow grass. Poe felt confident he’d be able to get the whole job done with one match.

“Good?” asked Mike, breaking a stick over his knee and leaning the pieces together like a teepee.

Poe thought, shook his head. “This looks like two guys drove up here to make a campfire. We need a stack of firewood next to it, logs to sit on, all that shit.”

Mike rubbed his neck and then walked deeper into the trees. Poe heard him crunching around and wondered what went on in his head. Was he wishing he could get back to that video game? Missing his cage and his bunk?

Then Mike came back dragging a log so big Poe couldn’t have managed it if there were two of him. He let it down with a grunt. “Bench.”

They gathered more firewood and stacked it close to the fire ring. Poe pictured the campers as a couple of stoned college kids who don’t know the first thing about fire safety.

“Needs trash,” said Mike, and Poe was actually impressed.

“I got some beer cans. I’ll wipe ’em down, but the fire’ll burn off the prints anyways.” Mike went back to the truck, knowing there would be empties rattling around in the bed. Yet when he came out of the trees, he stopped. The sun had cleared the bald hills to the east. The Bitterroot Valley was hidden by the flank of the mountain, but the Missoula Valley opened up below him to the north.

Brown smoke smothered the town like a winter air inversion, but above it, a steady wind had scoured the sky an aching, brilliant blue. It was like being in a plane above the clouds.

Then he heard a four-wheeler in the distance. It sounded like a VW Bus in reverse. He froze — no backup plan except to apologize, get the hell out of there, and try again in a few weeks. That’s when he saw the rider. “What in Christ?”

“Oh boy.” Mike was beside him.

It was the brown-skinned jogger from half an hour ago: same dark shirt and shorts. Only now he was wearing a helmet and had a shotgun strapped across his back.

Poe’s first instinct was to open the cab and pull his Savage .270 out of the gun rack. But since it was fishing season, all he had to protect himself was the cheap Zebco rod he sometimes used to kill time. He never caught anything because he slept too late.

“You bring a gun?” asked Mike.

“Hell no, I didn’t bring a gun. Nobody hired us to shoot anybody.”

“I guess it’s a good thing I did.” Mike unzipped his fanny pack and took out a .38. It was small in his massive hand, and so old the bluing was wearing off. It looked like a $150 pawn-shop special.

Poe’s stomach dropped. The big man really did want to go back to Deer Lodge.

Sidd’s heart started hammering as soon as he came out of the trees and saw the men — real, live trespassers. It looked like one of them was holding a beer can, so hopefully they were just some “good old boys” enjoying a drink. But why had they driven so far up the mountain?

The whole thing was puzzling. Sidd braked the four-wheeler about fifty yards away. Buck had given him strict orders to show the shotgun and to fire a warning shot in the air if necessary, but he doubted it would come to that. “This is private property!” he shouted.

Then he saw the GMC on the side of the truck and realized that this was the one that had passed him while he was running, and the shorter man was the angry driver who’d yelled at him. Judging by the way he threw his beer can into the bed of the truck and spat on the ground, he was still angry.

Sidd suddenly had a powerful urge to fire the warning shot. As he pulled the shotgun over his head, the strap snagging on the back of his helmet, he saw the two men struggling over something. And then, as he raised the barrel of the shotgun in the air, the big man cuffed the smaller one, who staggered back. The big man leveled a small dark gun over the side of the truck.

Sidd didn’t think. He dropped the barrel and squeezed the trigger. The big man ducked. The shotgun boomed and the recoil punched Sidd’s shoulder, almost turning him sideways. The big man peered over the truck and shot twice. His breath loud in the helmet, feeling like a spaceman, Sidd peered down at his own body, checking for holes. Then he ejected the spent shotgun shell and fired again. The pellets ripped holes in the side of the truck, right above the gas-cap door.

The big man shot back again, and Sidd heard one of the bullets — he heard the bullet — whine past him.

Moving clumsily, as if a child were at the controls of his body, Sidd slung the gun around his neck and turned the four-wheeler down the slope, looking for cover. Swiveling his head, he saw the smaller man scramble into the cab. The truck started moving and the big man grabbed onto the tailgate, ran a few steps to keep pace, and pulled himself into the back, nearly getting thrown off as the truck lurched and bounced.

Sidd brought the four-wheeler around and braked. They were going up, toward what Mr. Severson had told him would be a black-diamond run.

He hesitated. Then he accelerated and went after them.

It was hard going up the slope in the four-wheeler — he had no idea how the truck was doing it. The white GMC on the tailgate blurred as the truck’s tires chewed their way up the pockmarked slope. The man in the back rose up, aimed the gun, and lost his balance before he could shoot.

Sidd zigzagged back and forth, knowing it made no sense to follow but hating the intruders, wanting to chase them off Severson’s land. His land.

The truck struggled as the pitch grew steeper. When the driver turned to take another diagonal line up the slope, Sidd half-expected the vehicle to roll over.

The underside of the four-wheeler struck a rock, so hard it almost jarred his palms loose from the handgrips. He smelled gas. He looked back and saw flames, little signal fires dotting the slope. Sparks? A hot tailpipe?

Then he looked forward and saw trails of fire behind the truck, moving unnaturally fast. At that moment he saw liquid sheeting out of the gap at the bottom of the tailgate. There was panic on the big man’s face as he shouted to the driver and threw a large gas can, amber fuel draining from a dozen holes, beading and shining in the sunlight. Flame from the already-burning grass leaped up to meet it, ignited, and obscured the truck behind a sudden wall of flame.

Sidd stopped as another big red gas can arced through the air. He looked down the slope. The fire was spreading fast, the little islands joining together, the flames rising, smoke whipping. Once it spread from the grass to the trees it would explode. Men would climb the mountain to cut fire lines, and planes would drop orange plumes of retardant.

He turned the four-wheeler downhill, feeling a roller-coaster drop in his stomach, and aimed for a gap in the flames.

The heat from the rising sun was nothing compared to the heat from the fire. The sound, like ripping fabric, was louder than his engine. How could it spread so fast? He piloted the four-wheeler blind through a pocket of smoke, hitting a depression so hard his head almost banged the handlebars; he felt lost, felt fire singe his arms, panicked — and then he was through. Glancing up, he could just make out the truck fighting its way up the slope. He couldn’t see the big man in the back.

Dawn was red. As smoke poured over the hills from the west, new smoke rose up from below. The hope of home was a dream for children. Sidd imagined the fire burning all the way to Idaho, through Washington, to the rising sea. Someday, someone would start a fire that would burn until all the fuel was gone.