Lone Creek

by Neil Mcmahon

  That passion was what troubled Sarah Lynn. She saw it as a threat, almost like another woman. It stood for a side of me that wasn’t at all in line with what she wanted, which was to get married and start a family. She’d gone to college the previous year at Montana State, but left after two semesters to work for her father. Now she was just waiting for me to graduate.

  I was having my own troubles, but I couldn’t grasp why. I only knew that I was more and more restless. That must have been clear to her, and it didn’t help any.

  We’d brought along a six-pack of beer for the drive home. But as we got close to Rocky Boy, Sarah Lynn surprised me by opening one. She surprised me again by finishing it fast and starting a second. She wasn’t much of a drinker. She pulled off her boots and leaned against the far door with her knees drawn up and her feet tucked under my thigh, sipping and watching me. It made me slightly uneasy.

  The town of Rocky Boy was several miles east of the highway, a pretty drive along Box Elder Creek. The site was steeply hilly, with a small settlement of houses and a number of reservation agency buildings. The bouts were being held in the school gym, and the parking lot was crowded with pickup trucks and station wagons.

  I felt the first real tingle of what was coming, and opened the pickup’s door.

  “Let’s not go in yet,” Sarah Lynn said. “Let’s drive around.”

  “Drive? Where?” Havre, the nearest town big enough to have more than a gas station, lay halfway between here and Saskatchewan. There wasn’t much else but snowbound prairie for a good fifty miles in every direction.

  “We could go to Bear Paw,” she said. “Daddy took us skiing there when I was little. I want to see if it looks the same.”

  Evening had settled in by now. It was around six, the scheduled starting time. But tournaments worked from the lightest weights up, and judging from the number of vehicles, there were going to be a lot of kids tonight. Most weren’t big enough to knock each other down, so they usually went the full three rounds. For sure, I wouldn’t be coming up for a few hours.

  A swirl of the damp chinook breeze slipped across my face and high into my nostrils. I closed the door and started the truck.

  I drove a couple of miles along the dead-end road toward the little Bear Paw ski area. The landscape was deserted. Sarah Lynn had gotten animated and was looking intently out the windows, like she was watching for something. Abruptly, she grabbed my arm and pointed at a dirt track leading into the woods.

  “Turn in there,” she said.

  I obeyed, thinking maybe she needed to pee, although I’d have expected her to go into the school. I took it slowly, feeling my way, nervous about getting stuck. But the ground surface was firm and we only had to go a hundred feet before we were shielded by trees. I coasted to a stop and cut the headlights.

  But instead of getting out, Sarah Lynn got all over me, her tongue hot and wet in my ear and her fingers tugging at my belt. Startled, I half embraced her and half tried to hold her squirming body still.

  “Sarah, baby, we can’t,” I said. Sex before a contest was an old athlete’s taboo, another thing I knew was superstition and yet still had a powerful hold. I caught at her hands, but she was determined, and maybe I didn’t fight her all that hard. Then her mouth was on my cock, and I could no more have stopped than I could have walked home with the truck on my back. I pushed down her jeans and panties, with her hips wriggling to help. She straddled me, heaving and then yelping while I heard myself growl, and I came so hard my slamming boot heel pounded that dent into the opposite door.

  The noise level in the gym was almost painful, compounded of shouting from spectators, loud conversations of others trying to be heard, and the thudding of blows. I guessed the crowd at about a hundred and fifty, standing around the ring or sitting in the bleachers. Young men and boys were getting their hands wrapped, shadowboxing, snapping punches at coaches who held gloves shoulder-high. Some, their ordeals already over, carried trophies.

  Sarah Lynn spotted a couple of other women from Helena in the bleachers, mothers of young contestants, and went to say hi. I stood there a minute longer, watching the eleven-or twelve-year-olds in the ring flail at each other with melon-size gloves strapped to the ends of their skinny arms. It was a little pathetic and really dull. A lot of the parents wore boosters’ jackets, made of shiny nylon of various bright colors and emblazoned with the name of their club. The fluorescent overhead lights cast a sheen on those and on human flesh that I’d never seen anywhere but at boxing matches. The yelling faces and the colors seemed magnified in a way that suggested a disturbing dream. Maybe it was because of all the aggression floating around. When I glanced up at Sarah Lynn, I saw that she and the other two women were talking with their heads bowed together. The gym was overheated and stuffy with the smell of sweaty bodies. I decided to take a walk.

  As I passed the ticket table inside the door, the hearty black-haired woman in charge gave me a big smile.

  “You running away?” she said.

  “Damn straight. I’m getting out while I can.”

  She shook her forefinger at me playfully. “That’s what you think.”

  The outside world was deliciously cool and quiet except for the gentle gusting wind. I scanned the license plates in the parking lot. A few were from other states or Canada, but most were from Montana, and most of those from the heartland. You could tell because the plate’s first number, one through fifty-six, identified the county. The local boxing club would meet in the back of an Elks lodge or VFW hall in some tiny town like Geraldine that you’d drive through and barely notice. But there’d be a few kids out on those ranches who thirsted for something more, to prove themselves or just to break the monotony, and grabbed at this small glory as a means.

  There were scattered lights around the little settlement, but the only place besides the school where anything seemed to be going on was one of the old frame buildings, fifty yards or so up a hill. I could see movement through the windows and I thought I heard a faint sound like singing. I hesitated to intrude, but something about it drew me, so I started over there.

  Then I stopped. An eerie sensation was rippling over my skin, like the wind was blowing right through me.

  Abruptly, I realized I felt alone in a way I never had before.

  I walked on to the building. Three Indian guys about my age were sitting on the steps drinking beer. They stopped talking as I approached. I nodded to them and they nodded back, but none of them looked right at me.

  The sound I’d heard was clear now—not singing, but chanting. I went up the steps and along a hall to the room at the end where it was coming from. I stopped at the doorway. Several older people were sitting in a circle on the floor playing a game, casting handfuls of small sticks like dice, while more stood around and watched. Everybody joined in the singsong chanting that would die into laughter or exclamations of disgust as the sticks hit the floor. I was sure they were aware of my presence, but again, nobody really looked at me.

  I’d had no idea what I was going to see here, but maybe I’d sensed it somehow and that was what had pulled me—not the game itself, but an extraordinary and powerful force that pervaded the place, the people, the gathering. It was a kind of heart, a center. I’d looked for it in my own world but never found a way to tap in.

  But I had no business being there, and I turned to go. Just then, an old man with a headband and a long gray braid raised his face to me—the first direct gaze I’d gotten.

  I had noticed him moving his fingers gently over his sticks after he cast them, as if he was reading them. Now I saw that his eyes were clouded with cataracts.

  The lighter-weight bouts lasted even longer than I’d expected, and mine didn’t start until almost midnight. The wait seemed interminable. I tried to spend it concentrating on what I was there for, but a lot of other things were going on in my head.

  I figured out who Harold Good Gun was and watched him warm up, trying not to be obvious about it. He probably did the s
ame with me. He was about my size, six feet one or two and a hundred seventy-plus pounds. It looked like I had a little reach on him but he was thicker through the upper body. I had talked to a couple of people who’d seen him fight, and the consensus was that he tended to come out with a hard flurry, but didn’t have much in the way of either stamina or style. My own strongest points were a long fast left jab and a hard straight right. I needed to box him—keep him away at first, then go after him as he tired.

  Instead, I let myself get drawn into mixing it up, and just under a minute into the fight, he threw a wild roundhouse right that caught me square in the socket of my left eye. I should have slipped or blocked it easily, and worse, he wasn’t even looking at me, just windmilling furiously with his head down. In the upper weight divisions we wore ten-ounce gloves, not much more than ski mitts, and neither of us had on headgear. The impact was something like getting hit by a major league fastball. By the time I came to, sprawled on the canvas, the count was over.

  Late the next gray afternoon, while I nursed my world-class shiner and my crushed pride, I felt something pop inside my face. The upper left side filled with fluid so fast it was like it got pumped from a hose. By the time I could get to a mirror, the eye had swelled completely shut. When I pried open the lid and saw just a little crescent of white, I started to realize what had happened. The tissue that supported my eyeball had broken, and it had dropped down into my skull.

  Two days later, I got home from St. Peter’s Hospital with the eyeball cinched back up in place on a piece of plastic and the bones under it wired together.

  Of course Sarah Lynn felt terrible, and I tried to reassure her. I knew she’d been possessive because she was threatened, and seducing me was a naughty way of making me choose her over her rival. The last thing in the world she’d ever have wanted was to see me hurt. That had happened because I’d fought like a rank amateur, and putting any other kind of spin on it was absurd.

  Still, she was no doubt right that I harbored subconscious resentment. It was also transparent that she was pleased about my boxing days being over, and that added to the mix. The next summer, we broke up.

  By then I was feeling like that punch had smashed right through my face into my brain, jarring me into a new state of clarity. It wasn’t especially pleasant. I started seeing a more honest and less pretty picture of myself than the one I had painted in my mind—the kind you might see after you’d been on a three-day runner and ended up alone and wide-awake drunk.

  But I also started getting glimpses into my restlessness. It was a longing, an ache that everybody experienced at some point. Boxing, like the religious piety I’d felt as a boy, was a means I’d used to try to cope with it. Its source lay deeper. I realized that the reason I’d been so drawn to the Indians playing the stick game up at Rocky Boy that night was my sense of how close to it they were.

  Still, I couldn’t identify that hunger, let alone figure out how to satisfy it in a real and long-term fashion. The only thing I could think to do was to keep my options open. I held to the naive conviction that some event of critical importance to my life was out there on the horizon, and if I settled into practicality and security, I might miss it. That was the real reason I’d broken up with Sarah Lynn, who would have given me everything most men would ask.

  I got out of Stanford with a degree in history, not good for much except more school, and no particular focus. I decided to try journalism, with a vague notion that wide exposure to new things might help me find the direction I was looking for. I was able to get into a graduate program at USC.

  But by then I was seriously involved with one of my former classmates, who had started law school at UC Davis, near Sacramento. The long-distance relationship was a strain, and so was Los Angeles, especially with trying to live there poor. After a year at USC, I left and took a job at the Sacramento Guardian. The position and salary were both well below what I’d have made if I’d gotten my master’s degree, but I was ready for a change and a steady paycheck. I figured I’d give it a year or two, then go back and finish school.

  I never did. Emilie and I got married—Stanford blessed the union between two of its own in traditional fashion, by bold-printing our names in alumni newsletters—and new factors entered the equation. Her father was a wealthy business executive, her mother a socialite. For a wedding gift, they put the down payment on a house, which, privately, made me very uncomfortable. It was no secret that they considered my profession undignified and my earning potential a joke, and they wished I’d grow up and go to law or business school myself. The pressure mounted as time passed, with Emilie joining the chorus.

  I didn’t have any interest in law or business or anything of the kind, but that wasn’t why I dragged my heels. It wasn’t out of love for my work, either—I’d lost my illusions early on. Mostly, I covered local-interest topics like Rotary conventions, bureaucratic incompetence, and couples who preserved historic street signs. Occasionally juicier things happened along—an unusual crime, political scandals—but even those always came down to the same sordid underpinnings.

  There wasn’t any physical punch to shock me into awareness this time—just the growing sense that I’d let myself get put in a box, and even helped to build it. It was a good box, a lot better than most people ever got, but I was having more and more trouble breathing, like the air inside was running out. Almost worse was the crushing sense that the real problem was me—that I didn’t belong anywhere and I was blighting everything around me. Discomfort edged into quiet panic. I started drinking too much, jacking the family disapproval level way up.

  One night Emilie and I went to bed without touching, as had become common. We didn’t talk, either, just lay there side by side awake. I knew she was thinking the same thing I was. Our marriage had been based on our trying to please each other and do what the world expected of us, but now we’d grown, or retreated, into who we really were. Whatever connection there once had been was between two different people.

  But I saw another truth alone. I’d allowed myself to believe that with all the external changes, I’d embarked on a new life. In fact, I had only caved in to the very thing I’d avoided with Sarah Lynn. The trappings were different, that was all.

  I had just turned thirty then. Not long afterward, I took a solo vacation to Montana, thinking I’d refresh myself for a few days. It was the same time of year as now. The plane arrived just at dusk, coming in from the southwest over a carpet of green mountain wilderness.

  Madbird picked me up at the airport and took me out drinking, a great night of cruising the bars and running into old friends. He let me know that he’d started working with a crew he liked a lot, and they could use a framer.

  Within another month, my marriage and my journalistic career were both over, and I was back in Montana growing calluses on my hands again. I hadn’t left since.

  Like memories of Celia, that old restlessness had faded to the point where I’d barely thought about it for years. In a way that was a great relief. But I had never come any closer to resolving it, and in another way, it was like the death of an enemy—you lost a powerful force that had been driving you.

  Now I was pushing forty.

  TWENTY

  I wasn’t in any hurry to get home to my dark, empty cabin and burnt lumber, so I took a roundabout way, drifting along the country roads and crossing the Missouri at the York Bridge.

  I’d reached the northeast rim of Canyon Ferry Lake when headlights flashed at me out of the darkness ahead—a double flick that was repeated a couple of seconds later. The vehicle was a few hundred yards farther on, down near the shoreline, not moving. Most likely it was a signal for help. That area lay between a couple of campgrounds, a half-mile-plus stretch of brush and gullies that was off-road, but that teenagers often drove into at night. There were little beaches where you could skinny-dip, cliffs you could dive off, plenty of places to drink or steam up your windows. A lot of the ground was sandy and soft, and getting stuck was easy.r />
  It was after one o’clock in the morning now and my mood was far from helpful. But the headlights kept flashing and I decided I’d better at least make sure that whoever was there was OK. I was probably the only person who would come along this way before morning, and the night had gone cold.

  I slowed and turned off the highway onto a dirt track that led in there. I knew the landscape well from my own teen years, for the same reasons as the kids nowadays. I was still edgy, and I cut my headlights and stayed in the brush, coming up on top of a little knoll. I got out quietly and walked to where I could get a look.

  The other vehicle was maybe sixty yards away now, a little below me on a slope toward the lake. The moon was dropping behind the Rockies, but there was enough light for me to see that it was a dark-colored Jeep, with a man pacing around beside it.

  Kirk Pettyjohn drove a black Jeep just like it. And his wiry form and pale hair were unmistakable.

  That sure put a new spin on things.

  He was staring in my direction, his head swiveling with jerky meth agitation. He’d probably heard my engine and was trying to spot me. Anger and wariness rose up in me together. My first thought was that Balcomb had sent him, maybe to extort the photos I’d claimed to have. He wasn’t carrying his rifle, although he could have had it stashed within easy reach or had somebody else hiding.

  But it didn’t make sense that he’d wait at a place like this and flag me down—taking the chance that I’d just drive on past or even have a gun of my own—instead of nailing me when I wasn’t expecting it.