by Larry Watson
He doesn’t of course. He cuts his meat into small pieces before he takes a single bite. Just like his brother.
Edie pries open her beef patty and examines its interior.
“Something wrong?” asks Roy. “You didn’t eat any salad either.”
“Not much of an appetite.”
“You feel sick? Maybe you have what Dean has.”
“I don’t.”
“You want to order something else?”
Edie shakes her head no.
“Suit yourself.” He spears another piece of steak and swipes it through the bloody juices on the platter before lifting the meat to his mouth.
And then there it is. The look that’s in the high school yearbook. The same look that’s in Edie and Dean’s wedding album as well. In the snapshot taken at their wedding reception, she and Dean were sitting on the couch in front of a stone fireplace, and Edie—Mrs. Linderman for less than an hour—had just turned around to look at something or someone who had commanded her attention. Eyes open wide, the sensual mouth unsmiling—it might as well be called the Edie Linderman Look. And she has it trained now on the entrance to the Spur, where two burly young men stand just inside the door and survey the restaurant.
They look as if they could be twins, with their identical crew-cut blond hair; their moon faces; their thick, short necks; their powerful chests and shoulders. They’re both wearing short-sleeved white shirts, though one is a T-shirt and the other a dress shirt like Roy’s.
Their inspection of the room passes over the two older couples who are laughing because one of the women has decided to begin her meal with dessert; over the gentleman who carries on a more animated conversation with the young man who came to clear away their dishes than with the woman sitting across from him; and over the young couple that had to bring their baby to the Spur. Then the man in the T-shirt points to the corner of the restaurant where Roy and Edie sit.
Even their walks are identical, with their muscular arms curled slightly at their sides and held away from their torsos.
“I think we have company,” Edie says, but by then the two men have arrived at the table and loom over Roy and Edie.
The man in the dress shirt asks, “Are you Linderman?”
The young man in the T-shirt stares at Edie, who of course could answer yes to the question but keeps silent.
Roy puts on that smile that’s supposed to bring everyone over to his side. “I’m Roy Linderman,” he says. He extends a hand, but when no other hand comes out to meet his, Roy pulls his back and removes his napkin from his shirt collar as if that’s what he intended to do all along.
“What can I do for you gentlemen?”
Up close it’s apparent that these men are brothers all right but not twins. The man in the white dress shirt is obviously older, though both men appear to be in their thirties. He’s taller too, by at least a couple inches, and the better looking of the pair, but both brothers have the small eyes that, in their ruddy round faces, give them a porcine look.
“You buy a truck today?” the older one asks.
“More like, did he cheat someone out of a truck today?”
“Whoa!” Roy tilts his chair back as though he needs a longer perspective on his interrogators. “I don’t know where you’re getting your information, but that deal was on the up-and-up. Nobody cheated anyone.”
“Bull. Shit,” says the younger man. He has a mouthful of bad teeth, and they lean and slant every which way like old stone markers in a graveyard.
“You two must be related to Mr. Bauer,” says Roy.
“He’s our grandpa,” the younger man says, but his older brother thrusts out a hand to silence him as if he doesn’t want that information revealed.
“I don’t know what your grandfather told you,” Roy says, “but he agreed to the price I offered. We shook hands on the deal and we signed the papers. And he accepted the money. If that’s not your idea of a fair deal, I don’t know—”
“You know that truck’s worth more,” says the older brother. “You goddamn well know that.”
“And it ain’t his to sell anyway!” the younger brother says. When he speaks he has to manipulate his lower lip to keep it from snagging on a tilting lower front tooth. “That truck was meant to be ours.”
“Look,” Roy says, gesturing toward Edie’s plate and then his own, “we’re trying to have supper here.”
“Eat up,” says the younger brother. “We ain’t stopping you.”
“Excuse us then,” Roy says, and he picks up his knife and fork and turns back to his meal. But before taking another bite, he lays his silverware aside and then pushes his platter away. “Maybe you fellows want to find a table of your own?”
“We want,” the younger man says, “the keys to the fucking truck.”
Roy shakes his head, a little sadly. “I wish I could help you out there, but the deal’s done.”
“Well, now we’ll undo it,” says the younger brother.
Once again the older brother holds out a calming hand. “Here’s the thing,” he says, lowering his voice and trying to find a reasonable tone. “Our granddad more or less promised that truck to us. And we went ahead and made plans, and the truck was part of them. I don’t have any idea where he got that wild hair to sell, but he sure as hell never consulted us. What do you say we give you your money back and we call it square?”
“Can’t do it,” Roy says. “I might be willing to go for that, but it’s not up to me. I’ve already got a buyer for the truck. I’m here more or less as his representative.”
This little speech might be nothing more than a negotiating tactic on Roy’s part, but he wears such a pained expression it’s difficult to believe he’s anything but sorry.
“And did this fellow send you up here to screw an old man out of his truck?” the younger brother asks.
Throughout the entire push-pull of this conversation, Edie has sat quietly, demurely, not touching her food, not looking at the men hovering over her. She’s kept her hands in her lap and said nothing. But now she looks at the three men in quick succession.
“This is ridiculous!” she says.
The color rises to her cheeks, two dark pink blotches as distinct as if someone had pressed thumbs to her flesh. “You’ve got no right—no right.” She throws her napkin on the table. “I’m going to call the police or the sheriff or someone. This isn’t right.”
Edie starts to rise from her chair, but Roy reaches across to touch her forearm. “Easy, Edie,” he says. “There’s no need—”
“So that’s who this is,” says the younger brother. “Easy Edie. Yeah, Easy Edie, there’s no need—”
“Shut up, Bob,” says his brother. To Edie he says, “I apologize, Miss . . .”
“Mrs.,” Edie says. “Mrs. Linderman.”
Mrs. Linderman. It’s the truth of course. But the pronouncement seems to change everything, as if the earth beneath the Spur buckled and the room tilted, and no one could be quite certain now where they sat or stood. Who did the Bauer brothers believe was sitting across from Roy Linderman? Had they spoken to that little girl? Had she told them it was a whore who rode in that white car?
Roy glances gratefully at Edie, and the brothers look at Roy as if they need to reassess the man. But the younger brother quickly switches his gaze back to Edie.
“Maybe,” she says, “I should talk to the owner. I’m sure they don’t want their customers disturbed.”
“So I’m disturbing you?” Bob says with a gap-toothed leer.
“Mrs. Linderman,” Bob’s brother says softly, “we just came in here to see if we couldn’t talk reasonably about this situation.”
Edie glares at him. “You’ve said what you have to say then?”
“I believe I have.” The older brother takes a step back, but Bob remains in place until his older brother reaches out and tugs at his T-shirt. They almost back into a table where two older couples nurse their beers while waiting for their steaks. Before the brothers
reach the front door, Bob Bauer turns around and points a threatening finger at Roy and Edie.
THE CHEVY AND the truck are parked behind the Spur, but there’s enough light back there for Edie to see what’s happened.
“Uh-oh,” she says. “Roy?”
“Yeah?”
Edie points to the long scar along the driver’s side of the Chevy, stretching from the side-view mirror to the back door.
Roy licks his finger and rubs at the scratch. “Uh-huh,” he says. “Maybe a key. Or a church key. Or a knife, I suppose.”
“I’m sorry, Roy.”
“Well, hell. I guess the boys had to have the last word.”
Roy steps back and looks over the other cars parked nearby. Then he lifts his gaze into the darkness beyond the Spur, over the ravine where trees rustle in the dying wind and on to the bluff across from theirs, a palpable darkness silhouetted against the night sky.
“I’m the one who ought to apologize,” he says. “I’m sorry you had to be a part of that. But that business about the sheriff? That wasn’t good. You just set them off with that remark. And I was handling it.”
“Did I violate some kind of manly code or something?”
“Like I said. I was handling it.”
“Fine,” Edie says, crossing her arms against her chest. The day’s warmth has vanished so completely it’s as if the season changed while they were inside. “Are you calling the police about this?”
“And say what? I don’t have any proof, but I’m sure I know who did this? No, hell no. The Bauers had to have their revenge. Fine. But I’ve got their truck.”
“If I can ever persuade Dean to leave Montana, it’ll be to get away from their kind.”
“They’re everywhere. Don’t blame Montana.” Roy steps closer to Edie. “But if you’re serious about a change of scenery, you know I’m your man.”
Edie sighs and opens the car door carefully, as if the entire automobile has been compromised by that scratch in the finish. “I just want to go home.”
The car’s dome light comes on, and Roy steps in front of Edie and looks around the interior. After she climbs in, he closes the door then motions for her to open her window.
“I don’t know what kind of speed I can coax out of the truck, so you go on ahead. Don’t wait on me. Drive the Chevy as fast as you’re comfortable. It’ll keep up with you.”
ROY CAN’T SEE exactly who’s in the car following him—a Ford Galaxie by the look of the grille—but he can make out the silhouettes of the driver and a passenger. The Bauer brothers. He’d bet money on it.
The Ford had suddenly appeared a few miles outside Bentrock. By then Edie was well out of sight. She drove the Impala fast, even on this unfamiliar highway. And as it turns out, Roy is having trouble getting much speed out of the truck. He can cajole it up to sixty-five but that’s it. And at that speed, the truck begins to shimmy.
So he’s not about to outrace anyone. He tries a different tactic. He slows down to forty-five. The Ford slows as well.
“All right, stay there,” Roy says out loud. “I don’t give a damn. As long as we’re poking along like this, Edie can put more miles between us.”
Underneath the expected smells of grease, oil, and cow shit, the truck smells faintly of tobacco, maybe the smoky-sweet fragrance of Mr. Bauer’s pipe. One of his children or grandchildren could no doubt climb inside the truck and identify the smell in an instant as belonging to that bandy-legged, sad-eyed little old man.
Even on high beam, the truck’s headlights are feeble, but the slower speed has the virtue of allowing Roy to see every curve and drop in the road in plenty of time to adjust. He doesn’t know this highway well; he isn’t one of those people who can travel a route only once and then remember it.
Not like Dean: as boys they could wander off into the hills with their .22s or follow the bends and backwaters of the Elk River with their fishing poles, and no matter what trail they followed—or didn’t—Dean could always find the way back. The truth is, Roy can still get lost in Gladstone if he crosses the bridge and ends up on the other side of town.
The car following him finally pulls out to pass, and Roy lets out a sigh of relief.
But it doesn’t pass. It keeps pace with him, its front end even with the truck bed. They continue down the highway like that for almost a mile, and then the headlights of an oncoming car appear up ahead. The Ford will either have to pass or pull back. Its engine whines as the driver shifts down and slips behind Roy once again.
“Fine,” Roy says to the rearview mirror. “Follow me all the way to Gladstone, fucker. I’ll lead you right to the police station.”
Once the approaching car passes, Roy permits himself a look up at the night sky. Clouds have blown in since they left the Spur. He can’t see a star or any light from the almost-full moon. The highway climbs. Lightning flashes far off on the western horizon. The Linderman family ranch sat on a rise, just high enough to give their father the long view. On summer nights he’d stand out on the porch and watch the storms approach, silently at first, then grumbling as if thunderheads had a mind to be made up. Then the cannon fire. But when the country is hard up for rain like this, the clouds seem likely to do nothing more than flash their lights and then retreat.
From this height Roy can also see the road ahead. A car’s taillights glow less than a half mile away. Has Edie slowed to let him catch up?
“No, Edie,” Roy says in the barely audible voice of a man accustomed to talking to himself, a man who has spent too many hours alone in a car. “Go,” he says. “Go. Go.”
EDIE PRITCHARD LEARNED to drive in her uncle’s 1939 Packard Super Eight, though it wasn’t Uncle Earl who gave Edie her first lesson but his wife, Nora. They drove out to a dirt road along the Elk River, and Nora put Edie behind the wheel and instructed her in the H pattern of the gears, the synchronization of the clutch and the gas, and the correct foot to use on the brake pedal. “Now go,” Aunt Nora said.
Edie stalled the car the first few times she tried to get it going, but she caught on quickly—and before long she had that big black automobile flying down the road, a dust cloud rising behind her and the treetops rushing by overhead.
Once Edie had demonstrated her proficiency behind the wheel, Aunt Nora said, “All right. I’ve got one more lesson for you. Don’t ever get into this car or any other with your uncle Earl. Not alone. You hear me? Not ever.”
Edie didn’t say, “Uncle Earl? Your husband? Mom’s brother?” And she didn’t tell her aunt that she, Edie, had already had to slap the hands and wrestle out of the grasp of boys her own age and older, boys bigger and stronger than Uncle Earl.
She has found few pleasures as pure as driving fast, even in the car she and Dean own, an underpowered Volkswagen with a slipping clutch.
But in this Impala? My God! She has the windows open, the volume on the radio turned up high, and the speedometer holding steady at eighty. After dark the signal from Moosejaw’s CHAK comes in stronger than ever, and Edie sings along with nearly every song: “Come on baby, light my fire.” “My baby, just-a wrote me a letter.” “I know that my baby loves me.” . . . The wind flows through her short hair with no more resistance than over a grassy field.
ROY IS LOOKING for that collapsed, abandoned barn not far off the highway. “Like a shipwreck,” Edie had said when they drove by it earlier.
A dirt road turns off the highway near the barn, a road Roy could turn onto, and in the process lead that Ford off Edie’s trail.
There it is, the barn’s hulking shape looming not far ahead.
And is that the road? It might be. He shifts down, the gears grinding, and turns the wheel hard, aiming for what might be a road and might be nothing more than a dirt trail that runs into a ditch. For an instant it feels as though the truck is tilted on two wheels and in danger of rolling over. But it rights itself, and Roy is able to keep the truck moving ahead, bumping and scraping across the prairie, the headlights illuminating nothing in their bouncing,
wavering beams but brush, weeds, dirt, and stones. Within fifty yards he’s able to shift back into third and pick up a little speed across the flat land.
He hazards a glance in the rearview mirror. The Ford seems to be following him off the road but with far more caution than Roy exercises. “Go, Edie, go,” he says under his breath.
A creature—a jackrabbit most likely—bounds across the truck’s path, leaping from darkness to light and back to darkness.
He realizes, too late, that this was no road, though maybe it was a trail the cows used to come home. Roy is climbing now, steering the truck up a hill steep enough that he has to shift down again. Once he reaches the top, he can look back and determine whether the Bauers gave up the chase or are still coming on.
But the crest of the hill does not lead to a gentle slope down the other side. Instead the hill falls off sharply, as if a giant knife has sliced off its other half, the earth dropping away and exposing its rocky underside. The truck’s headlights suddenly illuminate nothing but night air, the beams traveling out over space like starlight.
Roy brakes and turns, and in so doing he avoids going over the steepest edge. But he’s still headed downhill and sideways, the truck sliding, skidding, and banging against the boulders that jut out of this ravine. Hang on, he tells himself, hang on, because the truck suddenly seems to have become a living creature with the intent to go its own way and to get rid of him in the process. The truck leans hard into its descent, tilts, then tips, and when its great weight begins to tumble and roll, Roy spreads out his feet and hands as if it’s his balance that can be regained. But he’s a passenger now, riding inside these tons of steel along the earth’s slope with no more power or control than an infant caught in a strong man’s arms. One headlight blinks into darkness while the other flashes, like miniature lightning bolts, first across the horizon, then into the earth, then across the horizon again, and then into the earth once more.
Time itself becomes a casualty of this accident, and events seem to happen out of sequence, as if everything is ordained only in the instant before it occurs. The sound of shattering glass seems to precede the windshield breaking under the weight of the roof caving in. The truck’s frame groans before it bends in its roll down the ravine. Roy already seems to be tumbling out of the truck before the door pops open. The taste of brass is in his mouth before he bites through his lip. The warm gush of blood precedes the pain of the gash across his forehead. The soggy crack of his femur arrives at his ears before the pain rises up to and registers in his brain.
