The Best American Mystery Stories 2014

Going Across Jordan by James Lee Burke

FROM The Southern Review

WHO WOULD BELIEVE somebody could drive a car across the bottom of an ancient glacial lake at night, the high beams tunneling in electrified shafts of yellow smoke under the surface, but I stood on the bank and saw it, my head still throbbing from a couple of licks I took when I was on the ground and couldn’t protect myself. The sky was bursting with stars, the fir trees shaggy and full of shadows on the hillsides, the cherry trees down by the lake thrashing in the wind. Most of the people we picked cherries for lived in stone houses on the lakeshore, and after sunset you could see their lights come on and reflect on the water, but tonight the houses were dark and the only light on the lake was the glow of the high beams spearing across the lake bottom, the ginks that had chased us through the timber with chains afraid of what their eyes told them.

Flathead Lake was a magical place back in those days, all 28 miles of it, the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi, so beautiful that when you stood on the shore at sunrise it was like day one of creation and you thought you might see a mastodon with big tusks coming down out of the high country, snow caked and steaming on its hide.

We called ourselves people on the drift, not migrants. Migrants have a destination. Buddy Elgin wasn’t going anywhere except to a location in his head, call it a dream if you like. He was the noun and I was the adverb. We never filed an income tax form, and our only ID was a city library card. Like Cisco Houston used to say, we rode free on that old SP. Tell me there’s anything better than the sound of the wheels clicking on the tracks and a boxcar rocking back and forth under you while you sleep. Buddy was like a big brother to me. Even though he was a water-walker and took big risks, he always looked out for his pals.

We worked beets in northern Colorado and bucked bales in the Big Horns during the haying season. I can still see Buddy picking up the bale by the twine and flinging it up on the flatbed, the bale as light as air in his hands, the muscles of his upper arms swollen like cantaloupes, a big Swedish girl in the baler not able to take her eyes off him. Buddy was on the square with women and never spoke crudely in front of them or about them, so any trouble we got into was political and never had female origins. Not until we got mixed up with a hoochie-coochie girl who could rag-pop your boots and leave you with a shine and a male condition that made it hard for you to climb down from the chair, pardon me if I’m too frank.

I loved the life we led and would not have changed it if you hit me upside the head with an iron skillet. I told this to Buddy while we were gazing out the open door of a flat-wheeler, the Big Horns slipping behind us under a turquoise sky and a slice of moon that was as hard and cold as a scythe blade.

He wore a gray flop hat that had darkened with sweat high above the band, one knee pulled up in front of him, the neck of his Stella twelve-string guitar propped against it. The locomotive was slowing on a long curve that wound through hills that were round and smooth and reddish brown against the sun and made me think of women’s breasts.

“What are you studying on?” he asked.

“I was wondering why most men get in trouble over a reasonable issue like money or women or cards or alcohol, not because they cain’t keep their mouths shut.”

Buddy tried to roll a cigarette out of a ten-cent bag of Bull Durham, but a flat-wheeler doesn’t have springs and makes for a rough ride and the tobacco kept spilling out of the cigarette paper cupped in a tube between his fingers. “It was a free country when I woke up this morning,” he said.

“You don’t hold political meetings in a bunkhouse. The people listening to you think Karl Marx has a brother named Harpo.”

He worked on his cigarette until he finally got it rolled and licked down and twisted on both ends. He lit it with a paper match and flicked the blackened match out the door and watched the country go by. I wanted to push him out the door.

“What do those hills put you in mind of?” he asked.

“Big piles of dirt and rock and dry grass that I wish would catch on fire.”

“It’s beautiful. Except there’s something out here that wants to kill you.”

“Like what?”

“It.”

“What’s it?”

“Everything,” he said. He picked up his guitar and formed an E chord and drew his thumb across the strings. “Sheridan coming up. Listen to that whistle blow.”

We got hired with a bunch of Mexican wets on a street corner not far from the old cattle pens north of town and went to work for a feed grower and horse breeder who was also a cowboy actor out in Hollywood and went by the name of Clint Wakefield. Except Wakefield didn’t really run the ranch. The straw boss did; he was a southerner like us by the name of Tyler Keats. He’d been a bull rider on the circuit, until he got overly ambitious one night and tied himself down with a suicide wrap and got all his sticks broken. You could hear Tyler creak when he walked, which is not to say he was lacking in smarts. It took special talents to be a straw boss in those days; the straw boss had to make a bunch of misfits who hated authority do what he said without turning them into enemies with lots of ways of getting even. Think of an open gate and dry lightning at nightfall and three hundred head of Herefords highballing for Dixie through somebody’s wheat field.

Our third week on the job the hay baler starting clanking like a Coca-Cola bottle in a garbage disposal unit. Without anybody telling him, Buddy hung his hat and shirt on a cottonwood branch and climbed under the baler with a monkey wrench and went to work.

Ten minutes later Buddy crawled back out, a big grin on his face, the baler as good as new. Tyler kept studying Buddy the way a cautious man does when somebody smarter than he is shows up in the workplace. Buddy was putting his shirt back on, his skin as tan and smooth as river clay. Tyler was looking at the scar that ran from Buddy’s armpit to his kidney, like a long strip of welted rubber. “Was you in Korea?” Tyler said.

“This scar? Got it up at Calgary, one second from the buzzer and seven seconds after being fool enough to climb on a cross-wired bull by the name of Red Whisky.”

“You got bull-hooked?”

“Hooked, sunfished till I was split up the middle, stirrup-drug, stove-in, flung into the boards, and kicked twice in the head when I fell down in the chute.”

“Mr. Wakefield needs six colts green broke. They’ve never been on a lunge line. You’ll have to start from scratch.”

“I like bucking bales just fine,” Buddy said.

Tyler took a folded circular from his back pocket and fitted on his spectacles and tilted it away from the sunlight’s glare. “You two boys walk with me into the shade. I cain’t hardly read out here in the bright,” he said.

I could feel my stomach churning. We followed him to the dry creek bed where two big cottonwoods were growing out of the bank, lint blowing off the limbs like dandelions powdering. The breeze was warm, the kind that made you want to go to sleep and not think about all the trouble that was always waiting for you over the horizon. The circular was ruffling in Tyler’s hand. “This come in the mail yesterday,” he said. “There’s a drawing of a man named Robert James Elgin on here. The drawing looks a whole lot like you.”

“I go by ‘Buddy,’ and I don’t think that’s my likeness at all.”

“Glad you told me that, because this circular says ‘Buddy’ is the alias of this fellow Robert James Elgin. His traveling companion is named R. B. Ruger. It says here these two fellows are organizers for a Communist union.”

“I cain’t necessarily say I was ever a Communist, Tyler, but I can say without equivocation that I have always been in the red,” Buddy said.

Tyler glanced up at the cottonwood leaves fluttering against the sky, his eyelids jittering. “Equivocation, huh? That’s a mouthful. Here’s what’s not on the circular. I don’t care if you guys are from Mars as long as y’all do your job. Right now your job is green breaking them horses. Is your friend any good at it?”

“I’m real good at it,” I said.

“Nobody asked you,” Tyler said.

I always said I never had to seek humility; it always found me.

“What’s in it for us?” Buddy asked.

“Two dollars more a day than what y’all are making now. You can have your own room up at the barn. You don’t smoke in or near the building and you don’t come back drunk from town. You muck the stalls and sweep the floor every day and you eat in the bunkhouse.”

Buddy waited on me to say something, but I didn’t. I liked Wyoming and figured Tyler was more bark than bite and not a bad guy to work for; also, a two-dollar daily wage increase in those days wasn’t something you were casual about. But I didn’t like what was on that circular. I wasn’t a Communist and neither was Buddy. “What are you going to do if we turn you down?” I said.

“Not a thing. But I ain’t Mr. Wakefield. Communists are the stink on shit in Hollywood, in case you haven’t heard.”

Buddy picked a leaf off the cottonwood and bit a piece out of it and spat it off the tip of his tongue. “We’ll move in this evening,” he said. “Because I didn’t get this scar in Korea doesn’t mean I wasn’t there. The only Communists I ever knew were shooting at me. You can tell that to Mr. Wakefield or anybody else who wants to know.”

But Tyler had already gotten what he wanted and wasn’t listening. “One other thing: the trainer I just run off brought a woman back from town,” he said. “The only man who gets to bump uglies on this ranch is Mr. Wakefield.”

“Wish I could be a Hollywood cowboy,” Buddy said.

“I was at Kasserine Pass, son,” Tyler said. “Don’t smart-mouth me.”

We moved into the room at the end of the stalls in the barn. Tucked into the corner of the mirror above the sink was a business card with Clint Wakefield’s name on it. Buddy looked at it and stuck it in his shirt pocket.

“What’d you do that for?” I asked.

“I never had a souvenir from a famous person.”

I didn’t know why, but I thought it was a bad omen.

By midsummer the first shaft of morning sunlight in West Texas can be like a wet switch whipped across your skin. A sunrise in Wyoming was never like that. The light was soft and filtered inside the barn where we slept, the air cool and smelling of sage and wood smoke and bacon frying in the cookhouse. You could get lost in the great blue immensity of the dawn and forget there was any such thing as evil or that someplace down the road you had to die. I’d skim the dust and bits of hay off the horse tank and unhook the chain on the windmill and step back when the blades rattled to life and water gushed out of the pipe as cold as melt off a glacier. There was a string of pink mesas in the east, and sometimes above them I could see electricity forking out of a thunderhead and striking the earth, like tiny gold wires, and I’d wonder if Indian spirits still lived out there on the edge of the white man’s world.

I didn’t want to ever leave the ranch owned by the cowboy actor. But whenever I got a feeling like that about a place or a situation or the people around me, I’d get scared, because every time I loved something I knew I was fixing to lose it. I saw my dog snatched up by the tail of a tornado. I was in dust storms that sounded like locomotive engines grinding across the hardpan; I saw the sky turn black at noon while people all over town nailed wet burlap over their windows. I saw baptized Christians burn colored people out of a town in Oklahoma for no reason.

I saw a kid take off from a road gang outside Sugar Land Pen and run barefoot along the train track and catch a flatcar on the fly and hang on the rods all the way to Beaumont, the tracks and gravel and stink of creosote whizzing by 18 inches from his face.

I pretended to Buddy I didn’t know what “it” was, and I guess that made me a hypocrite. The truth was, people like us didn’t belong anywhere, and “it” was out there waiting for us.

On a July evening in Sheridan the sky could be as green as the ocean, the saloon windows lit with Grain Belt neon signs, the voice of Kitty Wells singing from the Wurlitzer “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.”

The War Bonnet was in the middle of the block, right by the town square, and had a long footrailed bar and a dance floor and card tables and an elevated bandstand and Christmas decorations that never came down. There was also a steak-and-spuds café in front where a mulatto girl worked a two-chair shoeshine stand by herself and never lacked for customers. She called herself Bernadine, and if you asked her what her last name was, she’d reply, “Who says I got one?”

She was light-colored and had hair that was jet black and gold on the tips and she wore it in a big Afro that seemed to sparkle when she went to work on your feet. She wore big hoop earrings and oversized Levi’s and Roman sandals and snap-button shirts printed with flowers, and when she got busy she was a flat-out pleasure to watch. I wanted to tell her how beautiful she was and how much I admired the way she carried herself; I wanted to tell her I understood what it was like to be different and on your own and clinging to the ragged edges of just getting by. Saying those kinds of things to a beautiful girl was not my strong suit.

Our second Saturday night in Sheridan I got up my courage and said, “What time you get off, Miss Bernadine?”

“Late,” she said.

She touched my boot to tell me she was finished.

“That’s Clint Wakefield at the bar. I break horses for him,” I said.

She gazed through the swinging doors that gave onto the saloon. In the background Bob Wills’s orchestra was playing “Faded Love” on the jukebox.

“I can introduce you if you want,” I said.

“He’s gonna put me in the movies?”

“Yeah, that could happen. You’d have to ask him, though. He doesn’t confide in me about everything.”

“Watch yourself getting down, cowboy,” she said.

I not only felt my cheeks flaming, I felt ashamed all the way through the bottoms of my feet. The truth was I’d hardly exchanged five words with Clint Wakefield. I wasn’t even sure he knew I existed. Most of the time he had one expression, a big grin. Actors train themselves never to blink. Their eyelids are stitched to their foreheads so they can stare into your face until you swallow and look away and feel like spit on the sidewalk. If you put those lidless blue eyes together with a big grin, you’ve pretty much got Clint Wakefield. He was leaning against the bar, wearing a white silk shirt embroidered with roses, his striped Western-cut britches hitched way up on his hips, his gold curls hanging from under a felt hat that was as white as Christmas snow. His wife was sitting at a table by herself. She was stone deaf and always had a startled look on her face. A couple of the guys in the bunkhouse said the ranch belonged to her and that Mr. Wakefield married her before his career took off. They also said he told dirty jokes in front of her, and the ranch hands had to choose between laughing and being disrespectful to her or offending him.

“Make any headway out there?” he asked.

“Sir?” I said.

“If I needed to change my luck, she’s the one I’d do it with.”

I could feel my throat drying up, a vein tightening in my temple. I looked through the window at the greenness of the sky and wanted to be out on the elevated sidewalk, the breeze on my face, the lighthearted noises of the street in my ears. “I’m not rightly sure what you mean.”

“That’s my restored 1946 Ford woody out there. Here’s the keys. Take the shoeshine gal for a spin. Bring her out to the ranch if you like.”

“Tyler said no female visitors.”

“Tyler’s a good man but a prude at heart. Your last name is Ruger? Like the gun?”

I tried to look back into his eyes without blinking, but I couldn’t. “I didn’t realize you knew my name.”

“You carry your gun with you?”

“I’m just a guy who bucks bales and stays broke most of the time, Mr. Clint.”

“I was watching you in the corral yesterday. You were working a filly on the lunge line. You never used the whip.”

“You do it right, you don’t need one.”

He dropped the car keys in my shirt pocket. “I can always tell a pro,” he said. “Bring your girlfriend on out and pay Tyler no mind. I think he pissed most of his brains in the toilet a long time ago.”

I wished I’d given Mr. Wakefield back his keys and caught a ride to the ranch with the Mexicans, like Buddy did. At 2 A.M. I was drinking coffee at the counter in the café and watching Bernadine put away her rags and shoe polish and brushes and lock the drawers on her stand.

“Mr. Wakefield let me borrow his car. I think he used it in a movie,” I said. “It’s got a Merc engine in it that’s all chrome.”

“You’re saying you want to take me home?”

“Maybe we could go out on the Powder River. The Indians say there’s fish under the banks that don’t have eyes.”

“I can’t wait to see that.”

“Mr. Wakefield said we could go out to the ranch if you like.”

“Is this your pick-up line?”

I scratched the side of my face. “I thought we’d get some bread and throw it along the edge of the current to see if the story about those blind fish is true. Fish have a strong sense of smell. Even if they’re blind.”

“Has anyone ever told you you’re a mess?”

“Actually, quite a few people have.”

She arched her neck and massaged a muscle, her eyes closed, her hair glistening as bright as dew on blackberries. “What part of the South you from, hon?”

“Who says that’s where I’m from?”

“I thought that peckerwood accent might be a clue.”

“The West and the South are not the same thing. I happen to be from Dalhart, Texas. That’s where wind was invented.”

Her eyes smiled at me. The owner had just turned off the beer signs in the windows and you could see Mr. Wakefield’s station wagon parked at the curb, the wood panels gleaming, the maroon paint job on the fenders and the boot for the spare tire hand-waxed and rippling with light under the streetlamp. “How fast can it go?” she said.

“We can find out.”

“You weren’t lying, were you?”

“About what?”

“The man you work for being a movie star. About him asking me out to his ranch.”

I looked at her blankly, disappointed in the way you are when people you respect let you down. “Yeah, he’s big stuff,” I said. “Maybe he’ll give you an autograph.”

“No, thanks. He’s been in here before. He says mean things about his wife,” she replied. “I just wondered who he was.”

Outside, I opened the car door for her and held her arm while she got inside. The interior was done in rolled white leather, the dashboard made of polished oak. She looked up at me, uncertain.

“Anything wrong?” I asked.

“I don’t know if I should do this.”

“Why not?”

“Because this isn’t my car. Because I don’t like the man who owns it.”

“You’re accepting a ride from me, not from Mr. Wakefield. What’s the harm?”

She gazed at the empty street and the trees on the courthouse square and the shadows moving on the grass when the wind blew. “Would you buy me a hamburger and a cherry milk shake?” she said. “I can’t tell you how much I’d like that.”

A half-hour later we were sitting in a booth by the window at the truck stop when four drunks came in and sat down at the counter, like a bunch of bikers coming into church with muddy boots on in the middle of a church meeting. One of them leaned over to the others and said something that caused them to glance sideways at us and laugh. Then I heard the word nigger. Bernadine looked out the window as though she didn’t hear it. I stared at my plate, my ears starting to ping with a sound that was like being underwater too long. The steak bone on the plate had pieces of torn pink meat along the edges; it lay with my steak knife in grease that was black and streaked with blood, and it made me remember things I had taught myself not to think about, things I never wanted to see again. I stared at my plate for a long time. When I raised my eyes, two or three of the men at the counter were still watching us, like we were zoo creatures that shouldn’t have any expectation of privacy or respect.

I stood up and lowered my hand down by my plate, still holding my napkin. “I’ll be back in a minute,” I said.

“Where you going?” Bernadine said.

I picked up my coffee cup. “Refill,” I said.

“Those guys don’t bother me. Leave them alone.”

“That’s a good attitude. There are people in this world who aren’t worth spitting on. You’re absolutely correct.”

The drunks weren’t expecting me. Their faces were bloodless in the artificial light, like white balloons that had started to go soft, the alcohol they had probably been drinking all night fouling their hearts and making their eyes go out of focus. “Hi,” I said. There was a windup clock by the serving window and you could hear it clicking in the silence. “Can y’all tell me the best way to Billings?”

They wanted to look me straight in the face, but they couldn’t keep their attention off my right hand and the napkin that covered the oblong object I held in my palm. I turned my gaze on the man who had made the others laugh. He had a double chin and was wiping at his nose with a paper napkin, like he had a head cold and an excuse for being gutless. He pointed at the window. “The highway is right there. It goes north to Billings and south to Cheyenne,” he said.

“My vision isn’t good. Can a couple of you go outside and point to it? My friend and me don’t want to get lost and have to come back in here. Just walk outside and stand in the light and point, then we’ll get in our car and drive away.”

“What are you talking about?” the fat man said. He was breathing through his nose and there was a shine on his upper lip.

I moved my right hand onto the counter, the napkin making a tent over my knuckles. “I’m just asking two of y’all to point out the road to Crow Agency and Billings. All four of you don’t have to go outside, just two of you. Y’all decide who goes out and who stays. It would be a big favor to us.”

“We were telling a joke, but it wasn’t about you,” another man said.

“You’re sure?” I said.

“Yeah. I mean yes, sir.”

“I’m glad to learn that. But I still need you to show me the way to Billings, because darned if I can figure it out on my own.”

The fat man walked to the window and pointed. “There’s the goddamn highway. Is that good enough?”

“No, not really.” I raised my hand from the counter, the napkin still draped across my knuckles.

“All right, you win,” another man said. “Come on, Bill. Give the man what he wants. We were out of line. If it’ll make him happy, let’s go outside and put an end to this.”

“I appreciate that,” I said. “Tell you what, I’ve changed my mind. We’re going to stay here and have a piece of pie.” I turned toward the waitress and pulled the napkin off my hand. “This spoon has water stains on it, ma’am. Could I have a clean one?”

We went down on the Powder River, where those blind fish live way back under the cuts in the bank. The air was cold and damp and smoky from a stump fire, the sky black and sprinkled with stars. We went into a shack that had no door and no glass in the windows among a grove of cottonwoods, and lay down on some gunnysacks and listened to the trout night feed in a long riffle that came right down the center of the stream, as shiny as a ribbon of oil under the moon.

She had hardly spoken since we left the truck stop. I took her hand in mine and said her fingernails made me think of tiny seashells. “Are you a mermaid?” I said.

“You could have gotten both of us hurt back there,” she said.

“I don’t read it that way.”

“Then you don’t know very much about Wyoming.”

“A man who abuses a woman is a moral and physical coward. That kind of man cuts bait as soon as you stand up to him. Truth is, I didn’t feel very good about what I did back there.” But I could tell that was not what was really on her mind.

“At the War Bonnet you split a paper match with your thumbnail,” she said.

“Yeah, I do that sometimes.” I lay back on the gunnysacks and watched a flock of birds lift out of the cottonwoods and fly low across the water, their wings drumming like they were made of leather. No, they were drumming as fast and loud as my heart. It’s funny how your past always trails after you, no matter where you go.

“Where were you in prison?” she said.

“A P-farm down in Texas. I wrote a bad check for thirty-seven dollars. The gunbull sent me to get the water can off the truck and I took off through a swamp and never looked back. The mud pulled my shoes right off my feet. I rode under a freight car plumb to Beaumont.”

She propped herself up on one elbow and looked me in the face. “Are you telling me the truth?”

“Who makes up lies about being an escaped convict?”

She put her fingers on my throat to feel my pulse and looked straight into my eyes. I could still smell the cherry milk shake on her breath. “You’re no criminal,” she said.

“I don’t think so either.”

She laid her head on my chest. I put my hand under her jacket and spread my fingers across her back. I thought I could feel her heart beating against my palm.

“Buddy Elgin and me are going to get us some land up in Montana,” I said. “We’ve got a spot picked out near a place called Swan Lake. The lake was scooped out of the land by a big glacier, right at the foot of this mountain called Swan Peak. The trout in the lake are big as your arm. It’s country that’s still new, where you can be anything you want.”

She felt the tips of my fingers, then felt between them and around the edges of the joints. “Did you ever pick cotton?”

“From cain’t-see to cain’t-see. Till my fingers bled on the boll and then some,” I replied.

“My father cropped on shares and preached on the side. He called me a hoochie-coochie girl once and I got mad at him. He explained a hoochie-coochie girl had music inside her. He used to preach out of what he called the Book of Ezra. He said before the Flood, people ate the flowers from the fields, just like animals grazing. He said the wind blew through the grass and made music like a harp does.”

“I heard about people digging up dinosaurs that had flowers in their stomachs. Maybe that’s what your father was talking about. It was an article in National Geographic.”

I heard her laugh. She curled against me and kissed the top of my hand and folded it against her breast. That’s when I saw headlight beams bouncing through the trees and heard a diesel truck grinding down the dirt track, a car with a blown muffler following 30 yards behind. There was a man in a fedora on the running board of the truck; he was waving to the car to close up the gap, like they’d found what they were looking for.

I know the differences between kinds of people. The drunks back at the truck stop worked at jobs that anyone could do and went to church on Sunday with wives who had been a hundred pounds thinner in high school, and woke up every morning wondering who they really were. The man in the fedora and the two men getting out of the diesel and the three getting out of the car were guys who avoided victimhood by becoming victimizers. Hollywood actors could stare down people till they blinked. These guys could make people wet their pants.

The man who was obviously in charge was at least six-foot-five and wore a heavy cotton shirt and a yellow wool vest buttoned to his throat and a tall-crown Stetson hat of the kind that Tom Mix wore. A badge holder with a gold badge in it was hung over his belt. “You two get your asses out here,” he said.

I went out first, in front of Bernadine. I heard the muted sounds of moss-covered rocks knocking together under the surface of the river, like the earth wasn’t hung together proper and was starting to come apart. The windshields of both vehicles were clear of dust where the wipers had scraped back and forth across the glass. Inside the car, sitting in the passenger seat, I could see Buddy Elgin staring back at me, one eye puffed shut, swollen as tight as a duck’s egg.

The man in the Stetson pulled the keys from the ignition of the woody. He looked at Bernadine and stuck his finger through the key ring. “You know what grand auto can cost you in this state?” he said.

“Mr. Wakefield let me use it,” I said.

“He says you took off with it.”

“That’s not true. You can ask at the War Bonnet. The bartender saw him give me the keys.”

“That’s Mr. Wakefield setting up there in his Cadillac on the highway. You want to walk up there and call him a liar to his face?”

I knew how it was going to go. I’d been there before. I wondered how bad they had hurt Buddy. The man in the fedora opened the passenger door of the car and pulled Buddy onto the ground. Buddy’s hands were cuffed behind him and his shirt was unbuttoned on his chest. He wasn’t wearing his boots and in the moonlight the toes of his white socks were soggy with blood.

“We were invited to Mr. Wakefield’s ranch,” Bernadine said. “He probably thought we stole his car because we didn’t go straight there. Ask him.”

The man with the badge hooked me up, crimping the steel tongues tight in the locks, bunching the skin and veins on my wrists. He turned toward Bernadine. “If I was you, I’d go with the flow, girl,” he said.

He shoved me headlong into the back seat of the car, then picked up Buddy by his hair and the back of his shirt and did the same thing with him. I saw Bernadine’s face slide by the window as we drove away.

They didn’t take us to a regular jail. It was a basement under a brick warehouse, with windows like gun slits that had bars high up on the wall, and a toilet without a door in one corner. The man in the fedora gave Buddy back his boots, but his toes had been stomped so bad he could hardly walk after he got them back on. At noon a man in a filling station uniform with greased hair that was combed straight back and a face like a hatchet brought us a quart jar of water and a hamburger each. He refused to speak no matter how many times we asked him what we were being charged with. “What did y’all do with Bernadine?” I said.

“We didn’t do anything,” he said. “You’d better not be saying we did, either.”

He went up a set of wood steps and locked the metal door behind him. Buddy was sitting in the corner, his knees drawn up in front of him. He drank from the water jar but didn’t touch his hamburger. “They’re studying on it,” he said.

“Studying on what?”

“What they’re going to do with us.”

I unwrapped the paper from my hamburger and started to eat, but I couldn’t swallow. “Mr. Wakefield set me up, didn’t he?”

“His wife flew out late last night to visit her mother in Denver. He thought you were going to bring the girl out to the ranch. I heard him yelling at Tyler. He was mad as hell.”

“About what?”

“He wanted his way with her. What do you think?”

I couldn’t believe I’d been so dumb. I’d been on the drift since I was fifteen. You learn a lot of lessons if you’re young and on the drift. If you’re thumbing, you find out your first day that only blue-collar people and people of color will pick you up. A rich man never picks you up, and I mean never, unless he’s drunk or on the make. That’s just the way they are. I’d gone and forgotten the first human lesson I’d ever learned.

Suppertime came and went, but nobody brought us any more food or water; if we wanted a drink, we had to dip it out of the toilet tank with the jar. The sun was a red ember inside a rain cloud when we heard somebody unlock the metal door and come down the steps, one booted foot at a time. I hoped it was Mr. Wakefield. I wanted to tell him what I thought of him, and expose him for the cheap Hollywood fraud he was. But that was not all I was thinking. I was drowning in all the memories that traveled with me everywhere I went. At age fifteen I was sent to Gatesville Training School for Boys. Nobody knows the kind of place Gatesville was. People would run from the stories I could tell. That’s why even today there are nights I keep myself awake because I don’t want to give my dreams power over me.

Our visitor was not Mr. Wakefield. It was the man in the Stetson; under the overhead light his hat darkened his face and seemed to give him a permanent scowl. He was dressed in an unpressed brown suit and was wearing a spur on one boot, and I could see tiny wisps of hair on the rowel. There was no sign of his gold badge.

“You,” he said, pointing at Buddy. “Upstairs.”

“What for?” Buddy said.

“Because you look like you have more than three brain cells.”

“Anything I do includes R.B.”

“Your window of opportunity is shrinking by the second, boy. Don’t misjudge the gravity of your situation.”

Buddy followed the man in the Stetson up the steps, trying not to flinch each time his weight came down inside his boot.

“What about Bernadine? What about her? Did y’all leave her out there on the river? What’d y’all do?” I said.

I got no answer. The man in the Stetson clicked off the light and the room dropped into darkness. An hour later the man in the filling station uniform came and took me upstairs and through the back door into an alley where a pickup truck was idling. Buddy was sitting in the bed, his shoulders hunched over, one eye still swollen shut. His guitar and duffel bag were next to him, and so was my old cardboard suitcase, a rope holding the broken latch together. Tyler was talking to the man in the Stetson by the side door of the building. Tyler was smoking a cigarette and listening and not saying anything, his face pointed down at the walkway. The man in the filling station uniform told me to get in the back of the truck. “Where we going?” I said.

“It’s okay, R.B.,” Buddy said.

“The heck it is. Where’s Bernadine?” I said.

He didn’t answer. Tyler dropped his cigarette on the walkway and stepped on it and approached the truck, looking right through Buddy and me.

“Buddy, you’ve got to tell me what’s going on,” I said.

“We’re leaving town,” he said. “If that doesn’t suit you, go back to that damn ranch and see what happens.”

I hadn’t believed Buddy would ever speak to me like that. I thought someone else had stepped inside his skin. The Buddy I knew was never afraid. He had been with the First Marine Division at the Frozen Chosin; he’d never let a friend down and never let himself be undone by finks and ginks and company pinks. If you were his bud, he’d stay at your side, guns blazing, the decks awash, till the ship went down.

I climbed onto the truck bed and pulled up the tailgate and snapped it into place. “Is she hurt?” I said.

When he looked up at me, I knew they had busted him up inside, probably in the ribs and kidneys, maybe with a phone book or a rolled-up Sunday newspaper or a sock full of sand. “The guy in the Stetson?” I said.

“He’s an amateur. They all are,” Buddy said.

“Are you going to tell me what happened to Bernadine?”

“Use your imagination.”

I tried to make him look into my face, but he wouldn’t.

Tyler got in the passenger seat of the pickup and the man in the Stetson clanked the transmission into gear and drove us out to the train yards, both men silhouetting in the cab when lightning leaped through the clouds. I suspected rain was swirling across the hills and mesas in the east, washing the sage clean and sweeping through the outcroppings of rock layered above the canyons, threading in rivulets down to streambeds that were braided with sand the color of cinnamon. But for me the land was stricken, the air stained with the stench of desiccated manure blowing out of the feeder lots and the offal and animal hair burning in the furnaces at the rendering plant.

Tyler and the man in the Stetson watched us while we threw our gear inside a boxcar and climbed in after it. “I’m sorry about this, boys,” Tyler said.

“Like hell you are, old man,” I said.

Buddy sat against the far wall, away from the door, staring into space with his eye that wasn’t swollen shut.

“You made a deal with them?” I said.

“They’ve got an antisedition law in Wyoming,” he said. “I’m not going to jail because I don’t know when to get out of town.”

“We’re Judases,” I said.

“Call it what you want. I’m not the one who went off with a girl in the boss man’s car and brought a shitstorm down on our heads, plus-”

“Plus what?”

“Why do you think Clint Wakefield took his Caddy down to the river? He wanted to try out a colored girl without having any social complications. You gave him total power over both us and her, so you stop trying to rub my nose in it.”

My face felt as though it had been stung with bumblebees. I couldn’t wait for the boxcars to shake and jostle together and begin moving out of the yard, carrying us into the darkness of the countryside, away from the electrified ugliness of the cattle pens and loading chutes and rusty tanker cars and brick warehouses and gravel and railroad ties streaked with feces that for me had come to define Sheridan, Wyoming.

We crossed into Montana and went through a long valley backdropped by sawtooth mountains that were purple against the dawn, and you could see the grass in the valley flattening as green as wheat in the wind. The wheels of the boxcar were clicking louder and louder as the locomotive gained speed, and I thought about Bernadine and her father and the story she had told me about the wind blowing through a field that was like a grass harp and I wondered if I would ever see her again.

The train followed the Yellowstone River and by midmorning we were climbing the Continental Divide, over 6000 feet high, the hillsides littered with giant broken chunks of yellow rock and spiked with ponderosa pine and Douglas fir trees, the wheels of the boxcar screeching and sparking on the rails as we slid down the west side of the divide into Butte. We caught a hotshot straight into Missoula and thumbed a ride up to Flathead Lake, where you could make twelve to fifteen dollars a day picking cherries on a ladder in orchards that fanned up from the lake onto the hillsides and gave you a fine view of water so green and clear you could count the pebbles on the bottom.

I tried to forgive Buddy and forgive myself for what had happened in Wyoming, but unfortunately the conscience doesn’t work like that. We’d bailed on Bernadine. But how could I make it right? If we went back there, Buddy could end up in prison as a syndicalist, a man who had the Silver Star and a Purple Heart. Then something hit me, the way it does sometimes when you least expect your thoughts to clear. Buddy and I were standing on ladders, deep inside the boughs of a cherry tree, the lake winking at us from down the slope, the sun spangling through the leaves, and I blinked once, then once again, and realized I’d been taken over the hurdles. “How’d those guys know you were a union organizer?” I said.

“I guess they have their ways.”

“No, they don’t. They’re dumb. The only one who knew was Tyler Keats. I didn’t make Tyler for a fink.”

“Search me. I’m done thinking about it,” he said. His eyes were fixed on his work, his fingers picking the cherry stems clean of the branch, which was the only way cherries can go to market.

“They told you they were going to send you to the pen as a Communist agitator, but you never asked where they got their information?” I said.

“I don’t rightly recall, R.B. How about giving it a rest?”

“It wasn’t you they were going to send up the road. It was me.”

“What difference does it make? They were holding all the cards.”

“Somebody called down to Texas and found out I’m an escapee.”

He climbed back down his ladder, his canvas bucket brimming with cherries, his shoulders as wide and stiff as an ax handle. “Clint Wakefield raped Bernadine,” he said. “They got us out of town so we couldn’t give evidence against him. The real issue is Wakefield’s reputation. The guy is a western hero. He knows guys like us cain’t send him to the pen, but we could smear his name, so he got us out of sight and out of mind.”

“Where is she?”

“Probably at work. What is she going to do? Stop living? Quit fretting on what you cain’t change.”

“Why didn’t you trust me enough to tell me the truth?”

“Because you’re a hardhead. Because you would have stayed in Sheridan for no purpose and ended up in a joint like Huntsville Pen.”

I stepped down from my ladder and followed him to the water can the labor contractor kept on the tailgate of his truck. The wind was cool in the sunshine, the lines of sweat drying on Buddy’s face. He filled two paper cups with water from the can and handed one to me, his gaze never meeting mine. I could tell there was something he hadn’t told me.

“Wakefield is right on the other side of the mountain, over on Swan Lake. He’s got a cottage there,” he said. “They’re shooting a western at the foot of Swan Peak.”

“You’re making this up,” I said.

“Here’s the rest of it. I talked to Bernadine. I mailed her some money for a bus ticket. She’ll be here tomorrow. I thought you might like that.”

I didn’t know what to say to her when she got off the bus, and I didn’t try. I think Bernadine was one of those people who didn’t expect a lot from the world. It was Saturday and there was a dance and cookout up by the motel where a lot of the pickers stayed during cherry season. We drank wine out of fruit jars and ate potato salad and barbecue pork and pinto beans and homemade ice cream a church group brought. The moon came up big and yellow over the mountains and you could see fireflies lighting in the aspens and birch trees down by the water. Buddy got his old Stella twelve-string from the motel and sat in with the country band, and started playing one Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston song after another. I guess I should have known what he was thinking about. Buddy came out of the coalfields of eastern Kentucky and would be a radical and labor agitator till somebody put pennies on his eyes. No matter what the circumstances, there was always a vinyl record playing in Buddy’s head, over and over again, and the lyrics weren’t written by Hank Williams or Lefty Frizzell.

About 9:30, when the summer light at the top of the sky began to fade into the density and color of a bruise, I picked up Bernadine’s hand under the picnic table and curled my fingers in hers. “I’m sorry for leaving you behind in Sheridan,” I said.

“You couldn’t have changed anything. Nobody there is going to stand up to Clint Wakefield.”

In my mind I kept seeing the things he had probably done to her. But I couldn’t bring myself to ask how bad she had been hurt, or how, or where, or if she was suffering now. “Did you talk to any cops?” I said.

“His lawyer called me a liar. When I left the sheriff’s department, I looked back through the window and saw the deputies I’d talked to. Clint Wakefield was with them. The three of them were laughing.”

“I’m going to make him pay for what he did.”

She took her hand from mine. “Not on my account you won’t.”

“In Gatesville Training School I saw boys killed for a whole lot less. I know where there are unmarked graves. Things happened there that I don’t ever talk about. If Clint Wakefield was a boy, he wouldn’t last a week in Gatesville.”

I saw the fatigue in her face, and realized I was making her relive not only the assault on her body but the theft of her soul. The air had turned cold, and the candles burning in the jelly jars were flickering and about to go out. I took off my denim jacket and draped it over her shoulders. “We got you your own room at the motel,” I said. “It’s a dollar and a half a day, but it’s right nice.”

“What’s that song Buddy’s singing?”

“‘Union Maid.’”

“Songs like that get people in trouble,” she said.

“You bet they do.”

“Why does he sing them?”

I shook my head as though I didn’t know. But that wasn’t the case. I knew. Buddy was going to spit in the soup for all of us. And he wasn’t through with Clint Wakefield by a long shot.

A week later we had moved to the orchards higher up on the lake, close to Bigfork. The cherries were so red they were almost black, and our crew picked truckloads of them from first light until shadows covered the trees and made it hard to pick the cherry and the stem cleanly from the limb. Bernadine and Buddy and I worked as a team, and would talk to each other inside the leafy thickness of the tree, like kids playing on a summer day rather than adults working at a job. I couldn’t help noticing that Bernadine paid a lot of attention when Buddy talked, even though the subject matter seemed to roam all over creation, from the Garden of Eden to Jesus and Joe Hill and ancient highways in Montana he said primitive people had used even before the Indians showed up.

“There’re two or three roads under the lake,” he said. “If you look carefully along the banks, you can see the worn places in the rocks where people rode over them with carts that had wooden wheels. They were probably going to the glaciers, right across the lake, where all those buttercups are.”

“How do you know all this?” Bernadine asked.

“You trust what your eye tells you and then you have to believe in things you cain’t see,” he said.

“Believe what?” she said.

“That all these things happened and are still happening. We just cain’t see them. Maybe those ancient people are still living out their lives all around us.”

There was no question about the expression on Bernadine’s face. She was looking at Buddy in a way she had never looked at me. I wanted to climb down my ladder and dump my bucket in one of the boxes on the flatbed and keep walking all the way back to the motel, or maybe just head on up the road to British Columbia.

“You’re kind of quiet, R.B.,” he said.

“The conversation is obviously over my head. Excuse me. I got a crick in my neck,” I said.

When I walked to the truck, the pair of them were buried from the waist up in the cherry tree, talking like they already knew what the other one was going to say, like they could talk on and on now that they didn’t have to stop and explain themselves to a third party. I felt a spasm in my innards that made my eyes cross.

There was nothing unusual about Buddy organizing farm workers, but it was unusual for him to try it with the cherry pickers, particularly in the orchards along Flathead Lake in a remote area like northwestern Montana. The cherry harvest was a one-shot deal that offered at best only a few weeks’ employment, and the people who did it were a strange mix-drifters like us, wetbacks, college kids, Romanian Gypsies, and white families from Oklahoma and Arkansas who weren’t interested in politics or unions.

The most successful attempts at union organizing always took place within shouting distance of a metropolitan area. Union people organized in the San Joaquin Valley, but they operated out of San Francisco or sometimes Fresno or Bakersfield. The fort was never far away. Did you ever hear of anybody organizing cotton pickers in Mississippi? Why didn’t they? There was no fort. The labor organizers’ life expectancy would have been about five minutes.

Buddy started by distributing leaflets in a bar where a lot of the pickers hung out. The bartender told him to lose the leaflets or hit the bricks. “No problem. Give me a shot and a Grain Belt back, will you?” Buddy said. “Did you know Clint Wakefield was making a movie over on Swan Lake?”

The bartender didn’t reply. He had cavernous eyes and the hands of a man who had pulled the green chain or boomed down fat ponderosa logs on a semi or dug postholes in twenty-below weather. His eyes seemed to smoke when he stared back into Buddy’s face.

“It’s a fact,” Buddy said. “I know Mr. Wakefield personally. He’s looking for a saloon to shoot a couple of scenes in.”

“Wonder why he didn’t mention it when he was in here,” the bartender said. His eyes drifted to the front window. “That’s him, across the street, signing autographs. Why don’t you say hello?”

Buddy and I walked outside into the evening shadows and the coolness of the wind blowing off Flathead Lake. The mountains that loomed over the water had turned dark against the sun and looked edged with fire on the peaks. Clint Wakefield was standing by his 1946 woody, wearing a white western-cut suit and hand-tooled boots and a black vaquero hat that had small white balls hanging from the edges of the brim. I was glad Bernadine was down at the drugstore and in all probability had not seen him. I could only imagine what she would feel looking at the man who had raped her. My own feelings were such that I could barely deal with them. It was like looking at somebody you saw in your dreams but who disappeared at daylight and was not quite real. But here he was, flesh and blood, standing on the same street, breathing the same air we did, people gathering around him like flowers around a toadstool. His trousers were hitched up so you could see the thickness of his penis against his leg. He signed autographs with a grin at the corner of his mouth but glanced at his watch like he had to get on the road in the next few seconds. Even in the gloaming of the day, his eyes were blue orbs that had the brilliance of silk when they settled on a young girl’s face. I had to clear my mouth and spit.

I began to see things that I thought I had left at Gatesville, things I believed were not a part of my life anymore and that were not me and that had been imposed by mistake on my boyhood. I saw myself walking into a concrete latrine in my skivvies, a shoe-polish handle outfitted with a sharpened nail file gripped tightly in my palm, the sound of a flushing toilet as loud as Niagara Falls.

“You got any ideas?” I said.

“I think I’ll get in line,” Buddy said. “I’ve never gotten the autograph of a famous person.”

I couldn’t move. I kept staring at Clint Wakefield, who was no more than 30 feet away from me, my pulse jumping in my throat like a crippled moth. I thought he recognized me, then realized he was squinting into the last rays of the sun and probably couldn’t see past the glare. When it was Buddy’s turn to get an autograph, I stepped forward so Wakefield would see us both at the same time. I heard Buddy say, “Would you write ‘To my pal Bobby James,’ please, sir? Actually the full name is Bobby James Elgin of Pikeville, Kentucky.”

The grin never left the corner of Wakefield’s mouth when he wrote on the back of the leaflet Buddy had given him. He didn’t speak when he handed it back to Buddy, either. Maybe his eyes lingered two seconds on Buddy and then on me, but that was it. Who or what we were and the damage he had done to us either didn’t register on him or wasn’t worth remembering.

I put my hands in my pockets and followed Buddy back across the street and stepped up on the high sidewalk in front of the saloon. Down the street I could see Bernadine coming out of the drugstore. “Let’s get her out of here,” Buddy said. “Did you hear me? Stop looking at Wakefield.”

I wanted to say, I aim to fix him proper. I wanted to show people what it’s like to carry a stone bruise in your soul. I wanted to give him a little piece of Gatesville, Texas.

I felt Buddy’s fingers bite into my upper arm. “You get rid of those thoughts, R.B.,” he said. “You’re my bud, right? We don’t let others take power away from us.”

Bernadine was walking toward us, her dress swirling around her knees in the wind, proud of the new silver belt she had notched tight around her waist.

No, we just take away our best friend’s girl, I thought.

“What did you say?” he asked.

“Not a dadburn thing,” I replied.

That night Buddy did something that I thought was deeply weird, even for him. He sat down at the small table in our motel room and studied the inscription Wakefield had written on the back of Buddy’s leaflet, then took out his wallet and removed the business card he had found tucked into the mirror above the lavatory in Wakefield’s barn. He started writing on the back of the business card, then realized I was watching him. “You’re standing in my light,” he said.

Two days later we started seeing new pickers on the job. All of them were white and looked like hard cases; a Gypsy said they were from the stockade down in Sanders County, working off their sentences at a dollar and a half a day. That night we saw a new ’53 Ford parked across the two-lane from our motel. Dried mud was splattered on the fenders and tags, and two guys in suits and fedoras were sitting in the front seat, smoking cigarettes. Buddy came away from the window and turned out the light.

“Goons?” I said.

“No, feds.”

“How do you know?”

“County cops don’t have vehicles like that. Climb out the back window and get Bernadine and stay gone for a while. I’ll handle it.”

“We’ll handle it together.”

“You’re an interstate fugitive. Maybe these guys have already found your jacket. They can put you on a train to Huntsville.”

I tried to hide my fear by clearing my throat, but I felt like somebody had just dipped his hand in my chest and squeezed my heart into a ball of red gelatin. “Well, what’s stopping them, then?” I said. “Let them do whatever they damn want.”

“Your thinking powers are questionable, R.B., but nobody can say you’re not stand-up. Before those guys knock on the door, I want to know what’s been eating you. I thought you’d be happy when Bernadine arrived.”

“She likes you more than she likes me.”

“That’s not my perception.”

“You see things out there in the world other people don’t. So does she. Y’all are a natural fit. It’s just kind of hard for me to accept that.”

“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

“She believes in stuff about primitive people eating flowers instead of killing animals and the wind singing in the grass and something called the Book of Ezra, whatever the hell that is.”

“That sounds like you talking instead of her.”

“I just repeat the kind of stuff you and other crazy people talk about. Mastodons and sea monsters and cave people throwing rocks at each other and such. You ought to listen to yourself. You put me in mind of somebody living in a comic book.”

“Bernadine didn’t tell me any of this, R.B. She told it to you. You sure she’s right in the head?”

I didn’t know what to say.

The knock on the door shook the wall.

The agent who entered the room didn’t bother to remove his hat or give his name; he smiled instead, as though that was enough. He was so tall he had to stoop under the frame. He had long fingers and knobby wrists and small teeth and no color in his lips, unless you wanted to call gray a color. He opened the flap on a government ID and closed it quickly and returned it to his coat pocket.

“Could I see that again?” Buddy said.

“No,” the agent said. “You must be Elgin.”

“That’s me,” Buddy said. “Why’s the other guy standing outside?”

“He’s got a fresh-air fetish. He doesn’t like places that smell like a locker room. You know what the McCarran Act is?”

“Something a senator down in Nevada put together to keep working people in their place?” Buddy said.

“No, more like a law that requires representatives of the Communist Party to register as such.”

“Then I guess I’m not your huckleberry. Sorry you had to drive out here for nothing.”

“Who are you?” the agent said to me.

“R. B. Ruger.”

“Wait outside.”

“This is my room.”

“It was your room. It’s mine now.” He smiled again.

I sat down on the side of the bed. “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll stay.”

The agent opened the bathroom door and looked inside, then looked in the closet.

“When did you start rousting guys like us?” Buddy asked.

“You’re like a bad penny, Mr. Elgin. Your name keeps going across my desk. We don’t have labor problems here. I think you’d like Seattle or Portland this time of year. Or even Salt Lake City. Or did something happen in Salt Lake City?”

“Yeah, Joe Hill got shot by a firing squad,” I said.

I glanced through the front window. The other agent was gone. I could hear my blood start to pound in my ears.

“Is there a problem, Mr. Ruger?”

I stood up from the bed, my ears ringing, the backs of my legs shaking. I wasn’t good at going up against guys who wore suits and badges. My words were clotting in my throat.

“You worried about your shine?” the agent said.

“What?” I said.

“You heard me.”

I wanted to believe he had said something about a shoeshine girl, but I knew better. “She doesn’t have anything to do with unionizing people,” I said.

Buddy took his billfold from his back pocket and thumbed open the pouch where he kept his paper money. “Did you know we have friends in high places?” he said.

“Dwight Eisenhower, somebody like that?”

“No, better than that. A famous Hollywood actor. You don’t believe me? He’s one of us, not just up there on the screen but down here in the trenches.” Buddy took Clint Wakefield’s business card from his wallet and handed it to the agent. “Check it out. See what happens if you try to push Clint around.”

The agent held the card in the flat of his hand and stared at the words written on the back. I leaned forward just long enough to read them too:

Dear Buddy,

Keep up the good work. Call me if the feds come around. I’ll have them transferred to Anchorage.

One big union,

Clint

“Keep it,” Buddy said. “See if that’s not his handwriting. He’s over on Swan Lake. Go talk to him. Get in his face and see what happens, Mack.”

“I might do that. By the way, we talked with your boss about you guys. You might get a cigar box to go with your guitar.”

“We were looking for a job when we found this one,” I said.

The agent laughed to himself as he left. I went down to Bernadine’s room. When she opened the door, the side of her face was filled with creases from the pillow. “I’m sorry I woke you up,” I said.

“I was having a bad dream,” she said. “Land crabs were trying to tear us apart.”

The neon VACANCY sign in front of the motel lit up in orange letters. Maybe it was coincidence. Or maybe I was losing my mind. “I killed a kid when I was fifteen. It’s haunted me all these years,” I said.

I went inside her room and told her all of it: the boys who wrapped a horse blanket around my head and arms and dragged me into a stall and stuffed my shirt in my mouth and spread-eagled me facedown over a saddle; the staff member who gave them permission because I sassed him, and smoked a cigar outside while they did it; the boys who spit in my food and put chewing gum in my hair when I was asleep and shoved me down in the shower and called me Anybody’s Pork Chop; the ringleader nicknamed Frank the Blank because he had only one expression and it could make you wish you hadn’t been born.

Frank’s upper lip wedged into an inverted V when he smiled, exposing his teeth. His face was as white as a frog’s belly and sprinkled with purple acne, his eyes like wide-set green marbles. When I found him in the concrete latrine, he was sitting on the commode, his jeans and Jockey underwear bunched around his ankles. He looked at what I was carrying in my right hand and couldn’t have cared less. He stood up and tucked in his shirt and buckled his jeans. “Go into the shower and wait for me,” he said.

I didn’t know what he meant. That’s how dumb I was. No, that’s how scared I was.

“This is your big night. It’s just you and me,” he said. “You can fold one of those rubber mats under your knees.”

Then I saw myself going outside of my skin, just like I had left half of me behind to be a spectator while another me attacked Frank and did things to him he thought would never happen. I saw the surprise and shock in his face when the first blow hit him; I saw the meanness go out of his eyes and I saw the helplessness in his mouth when he realized something had gone wrong in his voice box and that his cry for help had become a gurgling sound he couldn’t stop. I broke off the shank inside him and pulled the cover off a shower drain and dropped it down the pipe.

I told Bernadine all these things while she sat on the side of her bed and trembled with her hands between her knees. “Don’t say any more,” she said.

“I’m not the guy you think I am,” I said. “I feel ashamed because I left you behind in Sheridan. I feel ashamed of what I did in Gatesville.”

“If you hadn’t left, they would have killed you. Lie down next to me.”

“I see Frank the Blank in my dreams sometimes. He still has that surprised look on his face, like he’d gone backward in time and was a little boy again and couldn’t believe what was being done to him.”

“You’re a sweet boy, R.B. Now lie down and go to sleep,” she said.

And that’s what both of us did, side by side on top of the covers, while a rain shower swept across the lake and tinked on the windows and the cherry trees, and the orange VACANCY sign blinked on and off inside the fog.

Buddy and I got fired from the orchards and went to work for a man who made log houses and shipped them as kits all over the country. I got a driver’s license and we cut and hauled and planed trees north of Swan Lake, up in the timber and cattle country where he and I had always hoped to buy land and start up our own ranch. But Buddy wasn’t going to let go of his vendetta against Clint Wakefield. He made telephone calls to two or three newspaper reporters, who blew him off, then wrote a letter to a gossip columnist in Los Angeles and told her Wakefield was under investigation by the FBI for possible Communist activity.

I thought he was spitting into the wind. What kind of credibility did a pair like us have?

One month later big piles of monkey shit hit the fan for Clint Wakefield. The gossip columnist used professional snoops to look into his past. One of his ex-girlfriends was on the Hollywood blacklist; another said Wakefield’s mother was from Russia and had a picture of Joseph Stalin in her home. A male prostitute said Wakefield had invited him to a western movie set in San Bernardino, on a Sunday, for private riding lessons.

The Polson chapter of the American Legion flushed a Labor Day speech he was supposed to make. A reporter at the local newspaper called up Wakefield’s press agent and asked where he’d served during the war years. The press agent said Westfield had been deferred as the sole supporter of his family but had dedicated himself to doing volunteer work with the USO. Not in the South Pacific or even London. In Los Angeles.

On a Saturday afternoon in the last week of August, the boss paid us our salary and as an afterthought told us to deliver a truckload of fence posts and rails to a cherry grower on Flathead Lake. We picked up Bernadine at the motel and dropped off the fence materials and decided to take a ride down to Swan Lake and have dinner at a roadhouse where Bugsy Siegel and his girlfriend Virginia Hill used to hang out. The shadows of the ponderosas and fir trees were long across the two-lane highway, the lake glimmering like thousands of bronze razor blades in the sunset, the tips of Swan Peak at the south end of the lake white with fresh snow. It was a grand way to end the summer, with a case of longneck beer on the floor of the truck, chopped-up chunks of ice jiggling between the bottles, and Buddy snapping off the caps with an opener he’d tied on a string around his neck.

Up ahead, on a slope where a group of asbestos cottages were nestled in a grove of beech trees, we saw Wakefield’s movie cast and film crew eating their dinner at picnic tables. There were Indians in feathered bonnets and buckskin clothes, and cowboys in costumes no cowboy would wear, and women dressed like cowgirls with ribbons in their hair, and platters of fried chicken and dark bottles of wine on the tables. They made me think of carnival people, in the best way; there was even something lovely about them, like they had created something out of a West that had never existed. I suspected they were at the end of filming and were having a party to celebrate. We saw no sign of Wakefield.

“Keep going,” Bernadine said. She was sitting between us, a warm beer balanced on her knee.

Buddy drained his beer bottle and set it on the floor. “Pull over,” he said. “I want to talk to these guys.”

“Why borrow grief?” I said.

He opened the glove box and took out a sheaf of the same pamphlets that had gotten us fired from the orchards, and I knew Buddy was going up on that knoll and fix it so the whole house came down on all of us.

“If you’re not up to it, bag it down the road, R.B.,” he said. “I’m staying.”

“It’s a bad idea,” I replied.

“One big union,” he said.

After I slowed the truck to a stop, he got out and walked into the beech trees, his body bent forward, like he was leaning into a wind.

“I have to go with him,” Bernadine said.

“I don’t want to hear that.”

“He’s your friend.”

“That’s what I mean. My friendship with him keeps getting us in trouble.”

“Then why do you stay with him?”

“Because he’s the best guy I ever knew.”

That was the history of my life: trapped one way or another. I got out of the truck and slammed the door. Then I went around to the other side of the cab and helped Bernadine down.

“Most of these are union workers, aren’t they?” she said.

“Of course not. Film companies make movies in Canada or out in the sticks so they can use scab labor.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Am I the only sane person here?”

Like it or not, we followed Buddy into the trees. I had heard his speech before. The reactions were always the same: curiosity, amusement, sometimes a thumbs-up, and sometimes the kind of anger you don’t want to mess with. People don’t like to be told they’re selling out their principles by going to work at the only job that’s available to them. It’s not like what you’d call a mild yoke to drop on somebody. You got screwed by the bosses when you tried to feed your family, then a nutcase shows up and tells you you’re a traitor to the working class. That’s not what Buddy said, but I suspect that’s what they heard.

“Ginks” is the name union organizers gave heavies back in those days. They came out of the shade like flies on pig flop. I saw Clint Wakefield emerge from a cottage and stand on the porch and watch it all, his hands on his hips, the shoulders of his white satin cowboy costume embroidered with stars on a field of dark blue. I knocked a guy down with a rock and almost tore his ear loose, but that didn’t help us. They knocked me down and kicked me in the head and shoved Bernadine and me back onto the road and slapped me silly against the truck. They grabbed Buddy by his arms and stretched him across a picnic table and smashed the backs of his hands with wine bottles. They broke the windows in the truck and pushed me behind the steering wheel, then picked Bernadine up in the air and threw her in the passenger seat.

I could see Buddy struggling up the knoll, his T-shirt torn off his back. There was nothing I could do to help him. I got the truck started and into gear and gave it the gas, the frame lurching over some large rocks, the lake glittering with thousands of tiny metallic lights through the fractured windshield. There was spittle on Bernadine’s face and in her hair. Her eyes had a darkness in them that was like water at the bottom of a stone well.

One mile down the road, the needle on the oil pressure gauge dropped to zero and smoke poured from under the hood and streamed through the firewall into the cab. I had ripped out the oil pan on the rocks. We were both choking when we got out on the asphalt, our knees weak, the truck useless, all our means of escape taken from us. The sun had disappeared behind the mountain on the far side of the lake, and the wind was cold and cutting long lines across the water and smelled like fish roe, as though winter had descended unfairly upon us.

Then I saw Wakefield’s 1946 woody come down an embankment, skidding through saplings onto the asphalt, almost going into Swan Lake. The woody fishtailed, the rear tires burning rubber on the road surface, and came straight at us. I thought Wakefield had gone on a kamikaze mission and was about to take us out in a head-on collision and a blaze of gasoline. I should have known better. Wakefield was a survivor, not a self-destructive avenger. The woody skidded to a stop and Buddy leaned out the window, a lopsided grin on his face. “I boosted his car. Grab a few beers and pile in,” he said. “These guys are in a nasty mood.”

Nasty mood?

We roared northward, toward the top of the lake, the Merc engine humming like a sewing machine, the twin Hollywood mufflers rumbling on the asphalt. The sky had turned dark by the time we crossed the bridge over the Swan River and reached the highway that bordered the eastern rim of Flathead Lake. We could have turned right and kept going to the Canadian border, but somehow I knew Buddy would choose otherwise. Maybe for some people the book is already written and a person becomes more a spectator in his life than a participant. I’m not qualified to say. But we’d signed on with Buddy Elgin and I figured however it played out, we’d be together one way or another.

The ginks blocked the road halfway down the lake. We turned off on a gravel lane and headed toward the water. “What the hell are you doing?” I said.

He stopped the car and cut the lights but left the engine running. I could see small waves sliding up on a beach at the end of the lane. “You guys jump out,” he said. “Head back through the cherry trees and keep going north. They’ll be chasing me.”

“What are you doing, Buddy?”

“Watch.”

“Don’t leave us.”

“You don’t need me anymore. Take care of each other. Stomp ass and take names, R.B.”

“Listen to him,” Bernadine said, pulling on my arm.

And that’s the way he left us, powering down the lane, full throttle, the woody in second gear, the windows up, the high beams back on. When he dipped into the water the woody went straight down the incline, the exhaust pipes bubbling, the sediment from the lake bottom rising in a gray-green cloud.

We moved off into the trees and continued to watch as the ginks ran to the water’s edge and stared in disbelief at the headlights crossing the lake bottom. But what Bernice and I saw next was not the same thing the ginks saw, or at least what they later claimed they saw. They said the woody never made it to the other side of the lake, that it was dredged out of the water the next morning by a wrecker, full of mud and weeds. They said Buddy had drowned and that his body was still at the bottom, probably near Wild Horse Island. I saw the woody come out on the far shore, the high beams still on, water spilling out of the exhaust pipes. Buddy had said there were ancient highways under the lake, and I knew that’s how he had crossed over and that one day he’d show up just as sure as the sun comes over the mountain.

That’s why Bernadine and I live way up here in Alberta, where the golden poppies grow on Lake Louise, and the wind and the animals drift through the grass, just like they would in a dream. We didn’t cross Jordan, but at least we made it to Canada.