Montana Noir

by James Grady

  Her family’s estate was in turmoil, and probably would be for years, but Carla didn’t care. She had better things to do.

  “Back to the old standby?” the Liquor Store Lady asked.

  Carla shook her head and placed an unopened bottle of Roughstock on the counter. “I don’t need it anymore. Figured I’d just return it to the source.”

  The Liquor Store Lady nodded her head. “Given up drinking, have you?”

  “I’ve given up losing,” Carla said as she left.

  Driving east, she thought about the redheaded lefty who was out there somewhere. Along with the ex-manager who owed her.

  And Carla “Gut Shot” Lewis was looking for a rematch.

  Bad Blood

  by Carrie La Seur

  Downtown Billings

  The elders lined up in ergonomic conference-room chairs, birds on a wire, careful not to touch the sleek ash table that made Jimmy Beck so proud. Elbow to canvas elbow, braids down their backs like a fringe on the row, they watched the court reporter set up her machine and did not look at Vera. She was free to study their faces, which were the color of ripe acorns, and the river drainages mapped across their cheeks.

  She had dressed down to the extent tolerated at Bennett & Haversham, LLP—a silk blouse and black trousers, expensive but not eye-catching. The satellite offices monitored appearances even more closely than the LA headquarters, to avoid the PR office’s microscopic attention.

  Yet this was Billings, her hometown. LA had no context for the people in front of Vera today. If they were preparing for trial, Rita from Santa Monica with the improbable eyelashes would dress up these reluctant witnesses. She’d Hollywood-ize them with beads and make them speak in parables. It would be unbearable, alien. Still, Vera checked her cuffs and smoothed her gold collar necklace. Beyond the plate glass nine stories up, postcard views extended from sandstone cliffs to the north and southeast down to the swift Yellowstone fringed by refineries. This town, she thought. Country clubs and nickel casinos, half the folks trying to be something fancier than they were and the other half just trying to get by. PR would never understand that they’d have more credibility here in boots and jeans than suits.

  At a nod from the court reporter, Vera stepped up to the table. “Thank you for coming. We’ve all spoken by phone, so you know what to expect today. I’m Vera Ingalls, the lawyer who called. I’ve reviewed all the documents forwarded to me and there’s no record of any applications for homestead patents by your ancestors, but we have good evidence that they did homestead in the area you’ve identified. The army has records of the promises made to honor homestead rights, and there’s the Indian Homestead Act itself. We’ll start with that and take your oral testimony. This is Kristie, who’ll be taking down everything you tell her. She has instructions about what we need. I’ll be just down the hall in my office if any questions come up. Is there anything you want to ask before we start?”

  Shifting and sidelong glances moved up and down the row. Finally, a heavy man in a denim work shirt and a white cowboy hat leaned on his forearms. “We want copies of the testimony,” he said. “For each of us and for the tribal college. For the history department.”

  “Certainly.” Vera ran an expectant look along the row of faces. They raised and lowered their eyes, but no one spoke. “Okay then. My assistant will be in around eleven thirty to take lunch orders if you’re still going.”

  Beck was coming up the hall as she emerged from the conference room.

  “This that pro bono project?” He slowed, but Vera still had to quicken her pace to join his efficient progress toward the restroom in order to have a conversation with him.

  “They’re recording oral history today. What they told me by phone backs up the archived documents, so I’m getting it down.”

  “Good stuff. LA wants this in the news as soon as you can get the complaint filed. We’re getting hammered—all the media wants to cover is those damn Navajo protestors. We need the redirect.” Beck halted at the restroom and put his hand on the doorknob to let her know the consultation was over.

  “I’m on it, but we don’t have any record of homestead applications. That’s the real problem. Army generals making empty promises to Indians isn’t exactly a federal case.”

  “I get it. But we need a win here. Your partnership review is coming up and LA is big on team players. Knock it out of the park for us, kid.” He raised a fist to her shoulder but didn’t punch it like he used to. A big sexual-harassment payout against one of the Denver partners had recently created a new, and welcome, force field around the associates. Beck disappeared into the restroom and Vera unconsciously rubbed her shoulder.

  If the elders had been paying clients, she would have stayed to hold their hands and rack up billable hours, but they’d be fine. Vera had heard too much on the phone to hanker for the live performance.

  “My ancestors traveled to Fort Keogh to meet with General Miles, before the reservation time. They promised peace and he promised land . . .”

  “The soldiers gave no warning. They came with horses and wagons and told all the families east of the river they had to move to the new reservation west of the river . . .”

  “The babies were buried down there, near the river. We had to leave them. We still go, for ceremonies. It is a sacred place . . .”

  Anybody who grew up around here was raised on the litany of white savagery against the local tribes—what more was there to say, Vera asked herself, but mea culpa, mea maxima culpa? It was a bloodstain better assigned to the past. No present guilt could change it. Knowing the outcome, the century of community her ancestors and their neighbors had built, she wasn’t sure that changing it would be for the best anyway. Jimmy Beck and the management were so smug, so sure that they knew better than the locals how things should play.

  “You don’t own me,” she whispered to the innocuous Western landscape art.

  Her office had a glass door and wall onto the corridor. Nothing hidden. The managing committee frowned on the use of the blinds by associates. We thrive as a partnership in an atmosphere of maximum transparency, the employee handbook read, when what it really meant, Vera had discovered by observation, was maximum transparency for associates while the equity partners operated from the security of an absolute black box.

  She glanced up and down the empty corridor, stepped into her office, and snapped the blinds shut. She had only just opened the complaint document when knuckles rapped the glass, a knock she recognized. Vera held a hand to her forehead, coughed, and said, “Come in.”

  Peter was in business casual for the flight.

  “Hi.” He greeted her in that tentative voice he used around women. It used to fool her, but since she’d met him she’d come to understand that the unassuming manner was a deliberately disarming front for Peter’s litigating MO, which was to reach down his opponent’s throat and rip his beating heart from his body.

  “Moving up to the big leagues,” she said. He checked the time on his smartphone.

  “Flight’s at eleven. Just turned in my keys.” He advanced to stand before her desk as if inviting some gesture from her, but she stayed seated, half turned toward her monitor.

  “Good luck.”

  He sighed. “Vera, can’t we put things behind us and be friends? I don’t want to leave bad blood between us.”

  But he hadn’t seen the blood, had he? He wasn’t there when the toilet filled with blood like some cheap effect in a horror movie. He couldn’t spare the time to hold her hand as the gyno completed nature’s messy work, because it had all been her mistake. He’d made that clear.

  “There is no us, Peter. Go to LA. Have a nice life.” She indicated the door with head and eyebrows.

  Another sigh, this one more aggressive. “Fine. Just remember, you’re the one who wanted to leave it like this.”

  She held her peace as Peter stalked out and enjoyed the little victory of the door whispering shut on its strong hinge in spite of his best attempt to slam it.
The complaint sat before her, uninspiring, for the next half hour or so, until finally she went to check on progress in the conference room.

  She was back at her desk, boxed salad open in front of her, when the phone rang. Muriel had instructions to take messages today while Vera drafted the complaint, but calls from her great-uncle Marshall were different. He was as likely as not calling from the hospital, after he or another aging relative wound up in care. Since her parents migrated to Scottsdale a few years earlier, Vera batted cleanup at home in Montana.

  “Everything okay, Marshall?”

  “Oh, just fine. How about yourself?”

  She turned to her salad. “I’m fine. On a deadline, as usual.”

  “I know how busy you are, but I got to thinking after we talked last weekend about that Indian case. Maybe I have something that could help.”

  “Oh? What’s that?” Vera took a big bite and clicked Pause on her timekeeping software. Might as well eat while Marshall rambled.

  “Grandad kept all his records for the old place in that sea trunk I’ve got in the basement. Down there I don’t know how long, but it’d all be from that area you’re talking about, along the Tongue River. That’s right where they homesteaded. Anything happened out there back around the turn of the century, he’d have something on it. Old man was a real pack rat. Guess I got that from him. Can’t stand to get rid of any of this stash I’ve got. Maybe you could help out and go through it to see if there’s anything worth keeping. I’d kind of like to use that trunk. I’ve got a bunch of LPs—”

  “Yes, that sounds interesting,” Vera broke in. “What if I stopped by tonight after work?”

  “Oh!” Marshall’s voice pitched up with excitement. “Oh, I’d like that. Maybe you can stay and watch the game with me.”

  Vera wedged another bite of salad into her cheek. “Let me see how things go this afternoon. There’s something I have to finish before I can relax. But there could be something in the trunk. Maybe he traded with the families or something. It could help prove where they were living.”

  This could be the break she needed, Vera thought, as she gently excused herself and clicked the line shut. New evidence from her own family archive had partnership written all over it.

  When Kristie poked her head in to say that the elders’ testimony was complete, Vera went to thank them for their efforts and accept the cool press of their hands, not quite handshakes. From the window she watched them file down the street toward the Lucky Quarters just out of sight, where Vera knew the marquee advertised a five-dollar senior meatloaf special and SLOTS! THAT! PAY!

  She had walked to work from the bungalow she rented just west of the business district. The early autumn was trying out a new crispness in the evenings. Vera left her office sweater on under her jacket and pulled on running shoes from the selection under her desk for the longer walk to Marshall’s on the near south side. She’d have to pass the rescue mission, but there was nothing dangerous about the route, just a depressing tour of blocks beyond the tracks that resisted gentrification. Her colleagues all lived in thousands of square feet in the western suburbs with garages full of toys and lawns that someone else tended. They drove full-size pickups to work and kept vacation homes in the mountains. Vera could have afforded some version of all that by now but she preferred the feeling of lightness in knowing that she could box up her few possessions, turn in her keys, and walk away. It was worth it to listen to Jimmy Beck give orders like she was a creature he’d personally shaped from clay and think, Maybe I will, and then again, maybe I won’t.

  The streets of Billings drew her in as they always had. They were homey small-town streets, even with the population topping a hundred thousand these days, full of people who smiled and said hello even to strangers. Vera had seen cruelty and prejudice here, but surely that was mostly behind them as a city. There had been so much progress since the days when her grandparents, raised on ranches east and south of town, told her mother they’d disown her if she married a black man or a Catholic. When a chronically homeless man died here, a crowd of downtown workers who had been his friends came forward to testify to the value of his life. When a beloved independent bookstore closed, its bereft customers formed a cooperative to open a new one. Artists created their own open studio space. Churches transitioned struggling families from shelters into their own homes. Small businesses were passed down from generation to generation. It was not a town of big money, just small efforts day after day, by people who would never see their names recorded, until it all compounded into a sense of powerful resilience.

  Marshall was in a plastic lawn chair on the front steps in his shirtsleeves when she arrived with her briefcase and a canvas bag from the food co-op.

  “What are you doing? Aren’t you freezing?” Vera had her hands in her pockets and her collar turned up as the quick fall of night sucked more heat from the air by the minute.

  “I was over at the senior center and when I got home it was colder than a witch’s tit inside,” he said as she nudged him to the door. “I went down and lit the furnace and came back out to catch the last of the sun.”

  “You’ve got to do something about that furnace. You need one that comes on automatically, and one day the city’s going to crack down on you for burning coal.” Vera followed him in, where the air was indeed no warmer than outside.

  “I’ll take care of that out of my trust fund,” Marshall said as he shut the door. “Lucky for me, hay’s doing well this year and I’ve still got a few acres out at the old place. Otherwise it’d be magical fruit out of a can three times a day for me.”

  Vera rolled her eyes at Marshall’s habitual exaggeration of his poverty. He wasn’t willing to spend what money he had. Any more would only pad his mattress. She headed for the kitchen.

  “I brought groceries.”

  “Twinkies?”

  “Salad. And ground beef.” She had a frying pan on the stove already for the one meal Marshall would reliably eat: instant mashed potatoes, a hamburger, and a small salad drenched in ranch. She cooked on autopilot while he talked about the Packers, then fed him, like she did several times a week.

  “Best meal in town,” Marshall said as he wiped his mouth on a paper towel he’d carefully torn in half to make it go further. Vera smiled. For reasons she couldn’t have articulated, watching the old man eat a good meal satisfied her in a way her crisply written complaint did not.

  “Now,” she said while Marshall topped up their Folgers, “show me that trunk. I have to get back to the office tonight.”

  “I dragged it out from under the steps and put it under the light.” In the tiny kitchen, Marshall only had to stand up and turn around to hold open the basement door. His silhouette hung in the doorway as Vera descended toward the single bare bulb in the middle of the hand-dug cellar not six feet deep, steps protesting as she went. The furnace was an apparition from her childhood nightmares, exactly as she remembered. Its whooshing, clanking, leering presence could draw her in and consume her whole, like a crematorium, she had always felt sure. It was the fire that burned clean, that consumed all it touched. Nothing it swallowed could survive.

  Vera turned her back on the conflagration visible through the isinglass window and kneeled in the dirt. The trunk lid rose with a banging of buckles at her push. Marshall had spoken the truth. From well to arched vault, yellowed papers crammed every available inch. There was no visible mold—not in this climate—but a smell of age emerged, acids breaking down organic compounds. Vera reached for a stack of seed receipts.

  The fire was warm at her back and the dirt almost forgiving after she padded it with her sweater and jacket. She grew comfortable as she bent and lifted and read and sorted. There was a whole world here, every little transaction that had made up her ancestors’ days. She felt quite transported by the time she reached the bottom and found a leather binder in among some land documents, deeds for small parcels that had long since passed out of the family’s hands. The binder was so close to disi
ntegration that it looked at least as old as the trunk itself, like it might contain the original owner’s manual: Load up all your belongings. Leave your homeland. Never look back. How had they done it?

  The binder sloughed off dry leather particles when Vera drew it from the trunk.

  “My my,” she said. “What could you be?”

  A rawhide thong secured the flaps but tore in two at Vera’s first tug. She set aside the coverings and blinked at the first page. It was—it couldn’t be, but it was—an application for a homestead patent along the Tongue River by someone named Little Trees. And then one of her recent phone calls came back to her with a woman’s voice saying, My name is Camille Little Trees, the great-granddaughter of the first Little Trees, who homesteaded at the mouth of Hanging Woman Creek.

  Here it was, the evidence, not of trading but of the land patent applications themselves, completed but never sent to Washington. Here was the evidence of a crime committed against the tribe over a century ago. The documents bore the seal of the Fort Keogh land patent office. The government had received and acknowledged them, then somehow the papers had found their way to the bottom of a white homesteader’s sea trunk in a dark basement and stayed there as whole lifetimes passed above ground.

  Vera sat back and knocked her funny bone hard against the steel handle of the furnace. She turned her head to peer fully into the flames for the first time. She had been avoiding them out of her silly childhood phobia. Now she looked for real. The coals were red hot and the fire flickered blue and white at its heart. She felt its ferocious appetite.

  From the tall stack of receipts for equipment long since abandoned, seed long since sowed, Vera took a thick wad. She pulled open the furnace and tossed in the papers. They made a satisfying little whistle as the fire rendered them white ash in an instant. She took up more of the pile—advertisements for implements, Norwegian-language newspapers already falling into unintelligible shreds—and threw them in as well, more and more, until her own breath seemed in rhythm with the fire’s, in and out, inhaling everything, exhaling only heat.