Lone Creek

by Neil Mcmahon

  It cut me to the bone. I stammered a denial and started to leave, but Pete came striding toward me. I figured he was going to show off for her by shoving me around. There wasn’t much I could do about it—physically, he was a grown man who outweighed me by fifty pounds.

  But when I saw his face close up, I knew he’d taken one of those spooky turns. He looked furious, almost manic. He balled up his fist and hit me in the belly so hard that I doubled over with the wind knocked out of me. He clobbered me again on the side of the head and tripped me as I staggered back. Then he started kicking me while I lay on the ground. Celia came running over, screaming at him and trying to pull him away. He spun around toward her with his fist clenched. I still couldn’t breathe, and I watched helplessly, certain he was going to smash her face.

  She stopped yelling, but she didn’t let go of him or back away an inch—just stared at him. She’d gone from looking upset to excited, and it stuck in my memory that her tongue quickly wet her lips.

  Pete lowered his fist, but they kept looking at each other for a few more seconds. Then she let go of him and knelt beside me, petting my forehead and apologizing for what she’d said. Pete helped me to my feet and apologized, too. He was sincere and he looked confused, like he wasn’t sure what had happened. I promised them I wouldn’t tell anyone. I wouldn’t have, anyway.

  The beating hurt for days. Celia’s treachery hurt far worse. But worst of all was my own weakness—my failure in her eyes. In spite of how she treated me, I wanted desperately for her to think of me as a man she admired instead of a pissant kid.

  I made up my mind that I was going to learn to fight. I started taking martial arts lessons, and over the next months, I fantasized a million ways I’d step in and rescue her from harm.

  I never got the chance.

  SIX

  The ranch’s original headquarters consisted mainly of a huge old barn that served as the maintenance shop for equipment and also housed the rudimentary office. A few other buildings were scattered around, along with corrals for cattle getting shipped off to feedlots and an acre-size field of rusting equipment that dated back into the 1800s.

  There wouldn’t be much of anybody around just now, and I figured that whoever was there wouldn’t pay any more attention to me than usual as I drove past.

  I was wrong. Two of the hands, Steve and Tom Anson, were standing in the road. Obviously, they were there to stop me. Everybody on the place carried walkie-talkies or cell phones these days, and Doug must have called them. It hadn’t even occurred to me that things would go this far. I coasted to a stop.

  The Anson brothers were both in their twenties, the kind of pleasant, straightforward young guys who tended to gravitate to ranch life. I’d always gotten along fine with them. But they looked tense and distrustful. They tended to operate as a unit, with Steve, the older, doing most of the talking. He walked over to me, while Tom stayed blocking the road.

  “Mr. Balcomb wants you to wait for him,” Steve said, repeating the start of Doug’s litany through a cheek packed with Red Man chew.

  “Yeah, I know. You got any idea what this is about?”

  “I’m just telling you what I heard.”

  “What else did you hear? Not to believe anything I say?”

  He shrugged uncomfortably and spat a stream of tobacco juice off to the side.

  This wasn’t helping my temper any.

  “I’ll talk to Balcomb Monday, Steve, just like I told Doug. Now you guys kindly get out of the way.”

  Instead, he turned toward a little rise that lay between here and the highway. On top of it was a man sitting astride an ATV. At Steve’s signal, he jumped off, unslung a rifle, trotted forward to a good vantage point, and dropped to a prone position. He was clearly aiming at me.

  My adrenaline kicked in again, not just because somebody was holding a gun on me, but because of who the somebody was. His name was Kirk Pettyjohn, and in my mind, he was a stick of dynamite with a lit match almost touching the fuse.

  Kirk was Pete Pettyjohn’s younger brother and the only other child of Reuben and his wife, Beatrice. He was in his early thirties, with the kind of slim build and generic good looks you saw on models in magazines. Wesley Balcomb had kept him on here as an employee, supposedly to help run things. But it was common knowledge that he’d never been worth a damn as a hand, and an open secret that he was pretty heavily into meth. What he seemed to spend most of his time doing was riding that ATV around and snooping. I’d almost gotten used to looking up and seeing him off in the distance, watching my crew through binoculars or a camera.

  It struck me that his ATV might have been what I’d heard when I was leaving the dump.

  Kirk favored camo fatigues, and he always wore those bug-eyed sunglasses with a neck cord, even indoors. He’d gotten himself an earring shaped like a grinning little skull. His hair was cut in a boot camp bristle, although he’d taken to dyeing it bright punkish blond, presumably to add a touch of glamour.

  And he loved guns, especially the one he had trained on me. It was a Ruger Mini-14, a semiautomatic that fired the same high-speed .223 round as an M16, as fast as you could pull the trigger—an excellent rifle for around a ranch, where coyotes and stray dogs might get into the cattle. But Kirk had turned it into a paramilitary weapon, replacing the standard five-round clip with thirty-round clips, and I was almost certain that he’d modified it illegally to full automatic capacity. Every so often while we were working, we’d hear it sound off like a string of firecrackers. I didn’t know if he ever shot any stock predators, but he sure made some men nervous.

  It all added up to me that Kirk had become the star of a commando movie inside his own head. Maybe that was because he didn’t really have much going for him, in spite of the bounty he’d grown up with. My sense was that above all he wanted people to take him seriously, but nobody did, and that was what worried me. Killing somebody would get him the kind of attention he craved, and while I didn’t think he’d do it on purpose, there was a lot of room for accidents.

  Then there was the long-standing tension between our families—once again, involving Celia.

  The office door opened and Hjalmar Stenlund, who everybody called Elmer, came walking out. Elmer was the ranch’s stock manager and the model of a sweet old cowboy, gaunt and leathery, close to eighty but with hair still streaked yellow. Like a lot of those men, he’d done his tour in the military—it had been the Pacific for Elmer—and spent the rest of his life on ranches. He’d worked on this place since before I was born, and he moved with a stooped, bowlegged shuffle from a spine and legs rearranged by years in the saddle.

  I got out of my truck and went to meet him. He looked puzzled and concerned.

  “I’m sorry as hell about this, Hugh,” he said. “I wouldn’t of stood for it if I could help it.”

  “I appreciate that, Elmer.” I gripped his shoulder and gave it a squeeze. It was bony and still hard with muscle. “I guess I put a hair across Balcomb’s ass, but I don’t know how.”

  “Me, neither. Doug got a phone call a little bit ago and blew out of here. I didn’t have time to ask him nothing. Then he called a few minutes later and said you was on your way here and we better stop you. I told him I’d talk to you, but what you did was up to you.” He glanced sourly at Kirk. “Guess I was wrong.”

  “You know what a hothead Doug is. Maybe he just popped off and I happened to be in range.”

  “Maybe,” Elmer said. His gaze checked me over. “He sounded kind of rattled. You look it, too. You get into it with him?”

  “Nothing serious.”

  “Huh. Well, Balcomb’s supposed to be on his way here.”

  “I guess that means sometime before midnight.”

  Elmer smiled. “No, Steve said he’s really coming. But he’s out riding, so he ain’t moving too fast.”

  In terms of horsemanship, Balcomb was at the opposite end of the spectrum from his wife. But he must have figured he’d have more credibility in the horse raisin
g business if he acquired at least basic riding skills, so he’d brought his own thoroughbred from Virginia, a young bay mare, and spent an hour on her most days.

  “Is he getting any better?” I said.

  Elmer shrugged. “He’s getting more experience. But he won’t listen to nobody, and he’s ruining that horse.”

  “Ruining how?”

  His face creased in a grimace of groping to explain.

  “He wants things his way, so he tries to force her, same as he does everything else. It ain’t that he’s mean to her—he just can’t get it in his head he’s got to teach her, steady and patient. He’ll get riled up and swat her for no reason, then maybe he’ll catch a phone call that makes him feel better and he’ll feed her a treat. Poor little thing don’t know how she’s supposed to behave. She’s nervous as a whore in church.”

  I knew Elmer had been working with Balcomb and the mare, and he’d gone riding with them every day until recently. But that had stopped, and while Elmer wasn’t the kind to come out and say so, I had a feeling this explained why—Balcomb couldn’t tolerate his disapproval, and so had dismissed him.

  Elmer had a deep love and respect for horses, and he was bone honest. I thought hard about confiding in him. Kirk was a long way off and the Anson brothers were out of earshot, too, milling around with occasional nervous glances in my direction. But I decided again to hold off. There was no point in getting him outraged and asking him to keep it secret, and since I was locked into meeting with Balcomb, I might as well find out what he wanted before I stirred things up.

  Elmer fished a pack of Camels out of his shirt pocket and offered me one. I didn’t usually smoke, but I took it. He hobbled on back to the office. I found a shed wall to lean against and settled in to wait.

  Wesley Balcomb’s makeover of this place had started when he bought it, about two years ago. The fences had been reinforced everywhere and electrified for roughly a mile around the headquarters. There were several dirt roads running across the property that used to be open for anybody to drive through—you just were expected to close the cattle gates, the old kind that you bear-hugged and slipped a barbed-wire loop over. Now all those roads were sealed off. He’d turned the property’s east end into an adjoining compound and built a six-thousand-square-foot house and an ultramodern stable complex there. I’d heard the stables were an equine Ritz, with an enclosed heated arena, forty stalls, and every other kind of luxury. But I’d never been inside the compound—it was off-limits even to the hands, and had a high-security alarm system, ten-foot fences, and a gate with a camera.

  While all that progressed, Balcomb had hired and fired a slew of managers, consultants, architects, and other experts. Most of them took themselves very seriously and seemed determined to make that clear. They’d set up a maze of rules and procedures that turned even simple decisions into major productions, and yet they were always screaming demands for better efficiency. They interfered in everything, trying to impose corporate thinking that simply wouldn’t fit here. Elmer, who’d forgotten more about livestock than most people would ever know and had run this operation smoothly and profitably for decades, was now overseen by a firm of east coast accountants.

  That sort of thing took its toll on the people who were trying to get the hands-on work done. I’d noticed it even during the few months I’d been here. Little irritations kept building up, the kind you didn’t pay much attention to, but that started eating at you. It was all amped up by Kirk riding around with his binoculars and rifle. Some of the hands, like Doug, were eager to chop themselves a niche in the hierarchy. Others, like Elmer, looked on with pained weariness.

  This ranch had its own persona, an old-fashioned quality that was hard to define. The word humanity wasn’t quite right, but I couldn’t think of a better one. The weather, the land, and the people on it could all be harsh; but fundamentally, they treated each other like human beings. That was true of most such places, and of Montana in general. Beneath the surface beauty lay a less visible and more powerful kind—a quiet understanding that the really important things were to pull your own weight and not fuck other people over. By and large, if you held to those, you could do whatever you wanted.

  But now it was changing, not just here, but all around. You could tell from what you heard, saw, read—felt.

  It was something else I couldn’t fault Balcomb for. He, and others like him, had the right to do as they saw fit with the land they bought. Wanting the old ways to stay was backward, selfish, and above all futile, and nobody gave a damn what I wanted anyway.

  SEVEN

  Wesley Balcomb came into sight in a few more minutes, riding his pretty mare at a fair clip and bouncing in the saddle in a way that looked very uncomfortable.

  He was maybe forty-five, tanned and handsome, with the fit look of someone who played a lot of golf—he’d had an Astroturf driving range and putting green installed behind the compound so he could keep in practice. But he had the stiffness of being uncomfortable doing things that might involve getting dirty. His clothes looked like they’d been picked out by a film fashion consultant—Wrangler jeans, western cut shirt, and off-white Stetson. The rumor was that his outfits were tailored and his boots were handmade Luccheses that went for upwards of fifteen hundred bucks.

  Kirk Pettyjohn came down the rise to meet him, carrying himself with importance, apparently thinking the two of them were going to have a confab. Balcomb ignored him completely and rode right on by, straight toward me. Kirk tagged along sheepishly behind. The Anson boys fell in with him, and Elmer came back out of the office. I’d half expected Doug to show up, but there was no sign of him. Maybe he didn’t want anybody to see his nose.

  Elmer was right about the mare’s being skittish, and Balcomb wasn’t in good control of her. He didn’t rein her up until she was almost close enough to step on my feet, and she stamped and swung her rump around at me, the way horses do when they’re ready to kick. I put a hand on her haunch and shoved her away.

  Balcomb stared down at me as if it was his wife’s ass I’d grabbed. Like Kirk, he hid his eyes with sunglasses—his were aviator-style, giving him the authoritative look of a military officer—and his face was smooth and bland. But I got a quick weird hit that behind his shield, he was nervous.

  “You’re an enterprising fellow, Mr. Davoren,” he said. He spoke louder than he needed to, like he wanted to make sure the other men heard. I was surprised that he knew my name. He even pronounced it right, to almost rhyme with “tavern.”

  “That’s the first time anybody ever told me that,” I said.

  “Unfortunately, the enterprise isn’t an admirable one. It seems you’ve been helping yourself to ranch property. Lumber, to be precise.”

  Son of a bitch.

  That had crossed my mind a couple of times, but I just couldn’t believe it would cause this ruckus.

  What had happened was that the plans for the old mansion’s remodeling called for tearing out a couple of downstairs walls to open up space. We’d had to redo the second-story floor structure with glu-lam beams to allow longer spans. That had left us with a few dozen of the old joists, full two-inch by twelve-inch clear coast fir, a lot of them twenty feet long and straight as a wedding dick.

  Goddamned right I’d been taking them home—a load on my pickup’s lumber rack every Saturday for the past three weeks. I’d intended to haul off another one today. Otherwise they’d have been thrown away like all the other scrap. But it was true that I hadn’t exactly asked permission. I knew that if I got tangled up in Balcomb’s bureaucratic grid, I could kiss the whole thing good-bye. As it was, nobody had cared or even much noticed.

  Except for whoever had ratted me off. I glanced over at Kirk. His bug-eyed shades were fixed on me in a biker-style hard stare. But his mouth jerked suddenly in a twitch.

  I turned back to Balcomb. It came as a nasty shock, realizing that he had me up against a hard place. I started circling.

  “You mean those scabby old floor joists?
” I said.

  “They’re obviously worth stealing, to you.”

  “That’s not stealing, that’s recycling.”

  “It’s common theft, in the eyes of the law. Grand larceny.”

  “For Christ’s sake, they’d have ended up in the dump.”

  “What belongs to this ranch stays on this ranch.”

  “You’re saying you’d rather throw them away than let somebody else use them?”

  “I’m saying you owe me for them.” Balcomb unsnapped a tooled leather holster on his tooled leather belt and got out one of those Palm Pilots.

  “I’ll just double-check my figures,” he said, punching buttons with a stylus. “You’ve taken about eight hundred and fifty linear feet, at four dollars and ten cents per. That comes to three thousand four hundred eighty-five dollars—”

  “Four dollars a foot? That lumber’s worthless. It’s old and rough cut and full of nails.”

  “I’m talking about replacement value. Clear fir’s very pricey these days.”

  “All right, I’ll bring it back. You want me to take it straight to the dump?”

  The bland mask left his face for a second. It wasn’t a pleasant look.

  “I don’t want you on this property again,” he said. “You can hire someone to return it. That will take care of restitution. There’s still the matter of criminal charges. Oh, yes, and assaulting one of my employees.”

  I stared at him in disbelief. He turned to the other men, coaxing the mare into sidestepping showily, like he was Roy Rogers or Ronald Reagan. He even put on that same kind of rugged, comradely half smile.

  “You see why I warned you against trusting Mr. Davoren,” he said to them. “Considering the position he’s in, I don’t think he’s going to get any more honest. Men like him will say anything, trying to weasel out.”