Montana Noir

by James Grady

Nora ran past the fenced-off runway and airfield. The Multinational Aerospace Corporation—MAC, Inc.—the world’s second-largest aerospace empire, was using the airfield to test its latest technology up here in the cold, secret silence. Shiny new high-tech warehouses gleamed amidst the decay. Area Fifty-One-and-a-Half, the locals called it. Imaginations ran wild: UFOs, black ops, the Illuminati. Every few months, MAC, Inc. brought in a planeload of Germans or Japanese to check out the secret projects. A hundred of them at a time, the locals claimed, stayed a month in a nearby town, eating fat steaks and looking for cowgirls. Last week Nora had seen a convoy of rented cars with bewildered Asian faces behind tinted glass. Maybe they’d survive the month, but she doubted it. They’d die of boredom first.

  Nora continued on through the fog that rose from the overgrown playing fields and headed back toward home. Night ghosts hissed at her. She couldn’t begrudge their anger. She was alive. They were long gone but restless, their lives cut short by pink slips after the Cold War was forgotten. Most families had packed up their houses and transferred their dreams to warmer places. Some left their silverware in the sink as a gift to scavengers.

  Except Aunt Rosa. Aunt Rosa would never have left her forks and furniture to be picked over, Nora mused as she cleared a rotted pole fence. Aunt Rosa had stayed put. Deciding not to go south with her flyboy husband, she got herself a county contract dismantling the commissary where she had once worked. She found a new boyfriend, then another one. And then Phil came along with his big dream.

  Phil’s dream wasn’t even original. It was a hand-me-down from an old pal, a retired pilot who, thirty years ago, bought up the deserted houses, rechristened the base town St. Marie, and tried to build a refuge for right-living military retirees who wanted to hit golf balls over the horizon in peace and quiet. But the county raised the property taxes sky high. Bankruptcies, lawsuits, and liens followed. A luckless whore, St. Marie was once again abandoned. A few retirees hung on and Phil had seen opportunity in the isolation.

  Phil’s idea was short of work. He’d read a few business books on job retraining after the paper mill shut down and had a five-step plan. One: buy up the liens. Two: rebrand. Forget the golf course, build a shooting range to attract bird hunters. Three: horizontal expansion. Hunters need bullets. Maybe the government too, with all the wars it was getting itself into. He’d open a little manufactory in the empty commissary. Bring in some illegals, bunk ’em in the back, set ’em to work. Cartridges, casings, and slugs, all nice and quiet, off the map. Money from the cartridges would buy back the liens. Four: rename. No more St. Marie. Philson, Montana. He liked the sound of it. Five: he always forgot the fifth but loved the sight of his open hand.

  “You’re outta your mind,” Nora had replied to her aunt’s call to come home.

  “You speak Mexican, doncha? We need you to handle the Mexicans.”

  “Salvadoran, Rosa, you said they’re Salvadorans.”

  “Well, you speak Illegal, and that’s good enough for me.”

  Shit, Nora thought as she replayed their conversation. Now here she was, up to her tits. Phil scouring the back road junkyards for brass and lead. Aunt Rosa handling the business end, Nora using her service-worker Spanish to oversee the men who poured the casings and the women who packed the cartons.

  Phil wasn’t the only one with a scheme. A couple years back, out-of-town suits arrived, bought back some houses from Jenkins at the bank, and moved motel furniture in. Shiny vans arrived in the middle of the night—dark glass, no number plates—to drop off passengers and suitcases. The next morning the town awoke to new residents. Sometimes it took a week for the new arrivals to come out into the sunlight, blinking at the endless horizon, the wheat-field ghost town with tumbleweeds whipping across the airfield.

  For the most part, they kept to themselves. Always tetchy, always looking over their shoulders. Witness protection, the locals assumed, thereafter referring to them as the Witnesses.

  Nora smiled to herself. What bright light in the feds had decided to dump a load of Witnesses on an abandoned air base in Montana? It was like some twisted, cosmic joke. Hiding in the wide open, spooked by the emptiness, afraid to leave. The Witnesses had bartered their lives for a death sentence in nowhere.

  In the predawn, Nora and Stasi had the town to themselves. Lights flickered from a few scattered buildings as insomniacs twitched the curtains. Every seventh house or so was occupied. Early spring weeds poked through cracked roads. Some houses were immaculate, painted and polished. Others were lopsided, water stained, peeling.

  The security light tripped on at Witness Mike Smith’s small house and Nora caught the glint of his binoculars through the upstairs window. Always ready. An arsenal of guns in his garage. Late fall, Stasi had nicked a steak waiting by Mike’s grill and the jerk had sworn he’d shoot the dog if she came in sight of his place again.

  Winded, Nora slowed her pace on the edge of town. The burned-out shell of the bachelors’ quarters always spooked her, its jagged edges cutting the horizon.

  Stasi sensed the presence before Nora. Ears back, her body a sleek arrow, she pointed movement at the corner of the carbonized building.

  Nora narrowed her eyes, stopped in Stasi’s frozen shadow.Smelled a whiff of cigarette smoke. Saw the red light of a draw.

  High schoolers sometimes roared the twenty miles from Glasgow, up Zombie Road, they called it. They held all-night keggers in abandoned houses, had sex among the near-dead, and then torched the houses. Some tweakers had tried to move in and cook meth for the workers in the Bakken oil fields but blew themselves up. Now Philson had itself a repurposed fire truck, compliments of MAC, Inc., and a volunteer fire department, compliments of themselves.

  Nora crouch-ran toward the safety of a dead cottonwood for a closer look. Her knee cracked and she cursed silently.

  Among the ruins, hulking shapes from childhood memory. A tank. Convoy trucks. Vintage, as if from a black-and-white movie. She flashed on the air base doing military maneuvers: crisp uniforms, adrenaline smell, the thrum of convoy trucks. Her mental newsreel turned in the projector, motes of dust dancing in the light, as her young self sat squished between Rosa and Frank in the safe, warm dark.

  But that was then. Like the billboard said, this was the future.

  Beside the outdated convoys, a circle of new, mud-spattered pickup trucks. A glammed-up Humvee nearby. Not bird hunters—hunters of another kind.

  She steadied her breath and lowered her temperature, an amphibian on a wire. Edging a few steps closer, she squatted down. Stasi quivered with readiness.

  Nora clicked her tongue and released the dog like a silent missile. “Good girl. Bring me something.”

  Dawn leaked into day, pouring itself across the bleak ground. She picked out a couple of sleeping bags humped with blankets. Folding chairs blown on their sides. A head slumped against a truck window.

  The breeze kicked up and chilled her sweat. Flapped the Confederate flag on the back of a pickup.

  A truck door creaked open. Nora dropped low. Saw the leg—army boot, camouflage pants—coming down. Heard the hock of boozy phlegm followed by the sound of urine marking territory. Stasi hopped into the cab of the now-empty truck. Nora held her breath until she saw the canine shadow leap out.

  Circling back to her, Stasi dropped the wad of paper on Nora’s knee and waited for the handstroke on her forehead that said love.

  Nora flattened out the paper and wiped away the dog saliva. She squinted at the blur of words.

  WARNING! PRIVATE PROPERTY . . . You are hereby notified that the owner of this property requires all public officials, agents, or person(s) to abide by “THE SUPREME LAW OF THE LAND” . . . A person who knowingly enters unlawfully upon this property could place his/her LIFE AT RISK . . .

  She stuffed the paper in her back pocket.

  Militia. Nora had dated one once. A one-night stand, more like it, on the road home from Vegas. Too much booze, too many painkillers. She was lonely. He was in his midtwenties
, on his way to Lincoln, Montana, to support some miners in an armed standoff against the Forest Service.

  The militia were just regular guys, he’d told her: carpenters, drywallers, firefighters, EMTs. Even cops. Hard-working guys in a tough land. Vets from Iraq and Afghanistan. He’d done three tours. He was a concerned patriot who didn’t like what our government was doing over there and liked what he saw at home even less.

  I got no problem with Obama being black, he’d told her. I fought next to his kind. But he’s pushing un-Christian values. Others in the militia thought Obama was the Antichrist. A front for the United Nations taking over the world or the Chinese buying America.

  Someone’s gonna get hurt, her new friend had said. She’d since met others like him. Locals who filled their freezers with deer and elk in the fall to feed the wife and kids. Stacked supplies in their sheds in case the feds took away their constitutional right to bear arms. They’d change a tire for you on a dark road, call you ma’am, and shoot you if you trespassed on their land.

  Nora ran back through town to the house.

  Aunt Rosa and Phil took up half the kitchen, two old crash cars in a fading carnival ride, brewing coffee, burning toast. Rosa, in the middle of pulling her long silver hair up in a ponytail, let it fall loose when she saw Nora in the doorway. Instead she pulled the threadbare kimono around her slight body and raised her coffee mug in the air, offering. At seventy, Rosa was flirting with twenty.

  Nora nodded yes to the coffee and pulled off her watch cap. Stasi lapped water before bringing in her food bowl and dropping it at Nora’s feet. Phil muted the local Fox News. A Botoxed face yapped in silence. Montana’s congressman and an Asian trade delegation appeared on the screen.

  “Look who’s back,” Phil said. “Fuckin’ Yul Brynner.”

  Nora dried her bald scalp with Stasi’s mud towel.

  “Put some clothes on, fuckface,” she replied. “Animal act is over.”

  Phil looked down at his ragged T-shirt, his paunch, his birdy legs that barely held his weight. He ran his hand through his thinning hair and tugged his stringy ’Nam ponytail.

  “Girl, I love ya,” he said, putting her in a headlock.

  Stasi growled. Nora raised two fingers to signal she was fine and the dog sat.

  “Cut it out, you two,” Rosa intervened, her voice burred with sleep. “We’ve got work ahead.”

  Phil rubbed his face with his T-shirt, turned to Rosa who was scraping toast. “Got a spliff?”

  “Not today, hon. Today’s the big day. We’re buying off the old man’s liens. Tell her, Phil.”

  Nora pulled a parcel of chopped elk from the freezer to thaw for Stasi’s dinner.

  “Whoa, back up, girl,” Phil said to Rosa. “Gonna be next week. Jenkins says more paperwork and then down to Great Falls for the big OK.”

  Aunt Rosa frowned. “Well, we’re signing the bill of intent today, though. I hate all this waiting.”

  “Just one more week, love,” Phil said. “Then Mailer and his militia can go eat shit. We beat them fair and square. This’ll be ours, for our business, and no damn Constitutionalist militia is comin’ in here and buildin’ a compound.”

  Nora reached into her pocket for the piece of paper and handed it to him. “Too late,” she said. “They’re here.”

  Phil fumbled for his glasses. While he read, everything on him sagged: his jaw, his shoulders, the hula-girl tattoo on his arm.

  Nora unscrewed a bottle of cheap bourbon, tipped coffee out of her mug, and added a generous shot. She broke a painkiller in quarters, popped one, and washed it down.

  “No way!” Phil shouted. “Not today! It’s not happenin’!” He crumpled the paper into a ball and threw it at the unmarked cartons sitting near the door. “You know that bird-hunting group? The Duck Fuckers? They rented the range for today. Raffling off new guns for their fundraiser. Today! Money in the bank.” Phil lurched toward the cartons and started pulling them apart. “Look! Springfield Stainless model 1911 .45 ACP!” He put it down, pulled a twelve-gauge shotgun from another carton. “Beretta A400 Xplor! Even has its own ducker serial number!”

  Rosa balanced against the sink, her eyes as big as poached eggs. “Today was supposed to be our day, Nor. That money from the duckers puts us over the top.”

  “Browning bolt-action 7mm!” Phil ranted, spit flying.

  “The duckers brought them here last night, so’s we’d be all good and ready this morning.” Rosa cocked her head toward the building where the illegals slept. “And the girls in the back are doing the food. Mexican. Real nice.”

  Nora heard sounds outside. A staple gun punching wood. Measured voices. Idling trucks. She held up her hand for quiet. “Shh.”

  “Shit, shit, shit.” Phil paced. “And Bert’s eightieth. The party.”

  “We hired those exotic dancers,” Aunt Rosa explained. “From that white van. They’re giving Bert a breakfast surprise.”

  Nora broke the bourbon bottle on the corner of the counter, loud as a hammer, shards and whiskey flying. “Shut. The. Fuck. Up.”

  “Don’t talk to your uncle—”

  “Mailer’s militia. They know about the ammunition?” Nora asked. “The business? The illegals?”

  Phil shrugged. “Fuck if I know.”

  “They want the UFOs,” put in Rosa.

  “The what?”

  “The UFOs,” repeated Phil, nodding at Rosa. “At MAC, Inc., Mailer’s got this thing about the feds saying there’s no UFOs when we all know they’re everywhere. Says it’s a secret base for a secret war and the Asians and the Germans are in on it too. They’ve got UFOs over there. Aliens too. And we’re not talking fuckin’ illegals.”

  “So Mailer doesn’t want the town, he wants the UFOs?” said Nora.

  “Take over the world, is what he wants,” Phil replied. “He says if he don’t fight back, the feds are gonna enslave the common man. The United Nations . . . the Chinese . . .”

  Nora put her elbows on the kitchen counter, hid her head in her hands, her shoulders quaking. Tears of frustration and silent laughter sluiced down her face.

  Schemers. Every goddamn one of them had a goddamn scheme. She had left Vegas to get away from the circus and here she was, back in the center ring.

  “Now what, Phil?” demanded Rosa.

  “Don’t know, woman. You tell me.”

  Nora raised her head and wiped away the tears. She stood and kissed her aunt’s forehead. “Call everyone and tell them to keep calm. We’re having an emergency meeting.”

  “Even the Witnesses?”

  “Yes, even the Witnesses. They may want to . . . duck.” God help her. The absurdity of it all. “But first, get the sheriff out here.”

  “You really want that?” Rosa asked. “Him coming out here?”

  Nora nodded. “No other choice. He’s the sheriff.”

  “You know he’s not a real sheriff, Nor. He’s a doctor now. Real proud of him, we are. Just deputized a few weeks while Bert’s off fishing.”

  “I said call him.” She turned to Phil. “The banker lied to you. Ask the piece of shit how Mailer got there first.”

  “This is war!” shouted Phil.

  “No, Phil. This is a problem,” Nora countered. “The circus lion’s loose, that’s all.” She clicked Stasi to follow, then stepped over shards of glass in a puddle of booze. Grabbing her daypack, she checked for her phone, fingered two keys on the chain around her neck, and made for the door.

  “Take a wig,” Rosa insisted. “Can’t go out there lookin’ like that.”

  Nora snatched the long blond one from the stands by the door—seven wigs, blond on Friday—and headed out. Stuffing the wig in her pack, she pulled on the watch cap.

  “Think I’ll call Fox News,” Phil muttered.

  Nora followed the thrum of idling vehicles, the thwack of notices being stapled to abandoned houses. A score of militiamen in army-surplus camo, semiautomatics slung across their shoulders, huddled outside the MAC, Inc. gate amid plum
es of vehicle exhaust. In their center, Beau Mailer stood ramrod straight and flapped a large sheet of paper. He jabbed a finger toward three long buildings behind MAC, Inc.’s chain-link fence. He shook the paper at the barred gate. “Those buildings over there are ours. Part of the old man’s lien. MAC, Inc. is on our land, men, and we have the right to occupy it.”

  One of Mailer’s militia rattled the gate. “We’re comin’ in, fuckers!” he shouted up at the security cameras, then, grinning at the camera, he took aim and shot the invisible face watching through its lens. Everyone laughed. His eyes roved over Nora without seeing her.

  She pressed herself into the rotting walls of the building. Never show your fear, pipsqueak.

  Inside the fenced area, air force sirens wailed. A warehouse door rolled up. Two jeeps filled with athletic clones in black body armor drove across the tarmac, stopped a hundred feet from the security gate, and halted while the drivers waited for orders from their earphones.

  Outside the gate, the pavement shuddered beneath Nora’s feet. Expecting a lumbering circus elephant, she saw instead the militia’s refurbished tank clanking toward them. The tank rammed the main gate and broke the guard bar. After two more runs, the machine ground to a halt, its elephantine trunk jammed into the chain-link fence.

  “I think something’s broke, boss!” the tank driver yelled over the MAC, Inc. sirens.

  A voice behind Nora startled her: “What’re you up to, ma’am?” He was young, feigning tough. Acne fighting through his downy whiskers. A pile of leaflets in one hand, a power staple gun in the other.

  “Walking my dog.”

  He eyed the doberman. “You local?”

  She nodded.

  “Then where’s this commissary place? Shit all looks alike ’round here.” He showed her one of the leaflets. “Gotta post these warnings on the commissary.”

  The sirens were getting louder. Nora covered one ear and tried to think. The illegals were inside the commissary and God knew what Mailer’s militia would do to them. And it was only a matter of time before they found Phil’s munitions factory.