This Given Sky

by James Grady

  He leaned toward Jake, said: “I blame the government.”

  Jake gave him flat eyes.

  “But hey,” continued Burdett: “We can’t be about blame, now can we? There’s probably enough to go around for everybody. What I’m here for, what we’re all here for—except for Audrey, there, right Audrey?”

  The on-Social-Security woman locked into the computer game muttered: “Yeah, hi, whoever, whatever, leave me concentrate.”

  Burdett said: “Now there’s someone who knows what she wants.”

  Steve said: “You see envelopes by the mirror. I see nobody I want.”

  “Is what we figured for expenses in them?”

  “And you don’t touch them until I touch her.”

  “About that.” Burdett swept his hand toward the man on the barstool. “A world traveler like Jake here understands these kinds of things. It’s been another two days to me and them envelopes getting together here tonight.”

  “You always knew that.”

  “But what I didn’t figure on—and here I apologize, I really do—is the world we live in. Expenses and clocks keep on keeping on. Plus when me and my boys risked going out looking for somebody’s daughter, we found out that the meth scene’s changed from the good old days. Now instead of reasonable Montana men cooking up some cash, it’s the damn Mexican Mafia bossing the show. They got no mercy when it comes to dollars. Course, they’re also into other businesses. People buy. People sell. And those hombres know how to turn a repossessed debtor into a revenue generator that puts out mucho profit.”

  Before Steve could jump over the bar, Jake said to Burdett: “How come you’re still alive?”

  “I don’t blink.”

  Steve said: “What you see here is all we’ve got.”

  Burdett shrugged. “Sometimes we all got more than we think.”

  Jake said: “What are you talking about?”

  “Well I’m not quite sure,” said Burdett. “I’m not as . . . sophisticated as a man like you who flies everywhere all the time with all kinds of cargo.

  “But let’s make this promise to each other, OK?” said Burdett. “Now that we’re all here in the old hometown, let’s sleep on what it is we can do to get our precious Sara out of the fix she’s gotten herself into, and then get together again in the morning and see what we’ve come up with.

  “Besides what’s in those envelopes,” added Burdett.

  Beep! went the poker machine.

  Burdett spread his arms wide: “We’re all reasonable men.”

  Jake said: “Nothing reasonable happens until our eyes see Sara.”

  Burdett slapped the bar. Turned to Steve. “You gotta love this guy. I just knew he was smarter than us two combined. Bet you figured that, too.

  “And,” said Burdett, “I bet if me and my boys nose around out there tonight, we can find where maybe, if a father was standing alone on the side of some lonesome highway, a car could drive by and he could get a good long look at his daughter riding past, giving him a wave even, showing how she was so he could decide for himself where she was going.”

  “Dawn tomorrow,” said Steve.

  “Naw,” said Burdett, “one more hard night of looking for Sara will tucker me out. One of us will either call here or fall by at . . . oh, let’s make it ten in the A.M. Be sure to have the coffee on.”

  Burdett turned from the bar toward the front door.

  His stubby-bodied, stubble-faced factotum scurried to hold it open.

  Weasel-eyes walked from behind Jake to step out first into the night.

  Burdett turned back as he reached the open door. Smiled.

  Said: “Sweet dreams.”

  And was gone, the door closing behind him.

  Beep!

  Jake started to climb off his barstool.

  Steve said: “Sit tight.”

  He picked up the bar phone, dialed: “Paul? . . . I was right, can you come in, stay, and close up? . . . Soon as you can get here.”

  Steve’s cell phone buzzed by the cash register.

  Into the bar phone, he said: “Paul, use the back door . . . Because.”

  Beep! went the poker machine and the old woman said: “Damn!”

  Steve hung up the bar phone, answered his cell phone: “Yeah . . . good . . . he’s here . . . be sure. Come in the back.”

  Jake spun off the barstool, unlocked the back door. When he reclaimed his stool, Steve handed him the two envelopes stuffed with cash.

  “You’re making that call,” said Steve. “I’m too over the line.”

  He leaned across the bar: “Audrey! You gotta go. They called.”

  “What? Who?”

  “Gotta unplug the machine, Audrey. Gaming commission.”

  The old woman glared at the bartender. “They got it rigged, don’t they? They always got it rigged.”

  She slung her purse over her shoulder, stalked out the front door.

  Two minutes later the back door opened and in walked Thel.

  Nobody should have to look that lost, thought Jake. He felt his chest rip open with his spreading arms as he stood and took her in a hug that neither of them wanted to end and both of them knew wasn’t enough.

  The back door opened again. Jake stepped away from the embrace he couldn’t name and saw an heir of yesterdays he could barely remember, a young man whose handsome face wore a soldier’s glare, just a kid, a teenager who stuck out his hand but didn’t resist when Jake stepped past it to hug Thel and Steve’s only other child, Sara’s younger brother. “Hey, Gary.”

  “Uncle Jake.” The young man nodded. “Thank you.”

  He turned to his father. “It’s done. And I checked it.”

  Steve pulled the Red Bull energy drink bottle from under the bar, unscrewed the top and set it front of his son. “Here.”

  “Dad, I’m not . . .”

  “What you are is strung out on no sleep like the rest of us, and we can’t afford that. Now go on; the whole thing.”

  The weight of three adults’ eyes pressed on the young man as he chugged the bottle. Turned it upside down above the bar. Out fell one drop.

  “Satisfied?” he said.

  “I hope so,” replied his father. Steve checked his watch. “Figure we’ve got about an hour. They parade all the bars on Main Street.”

  “Nobody saw us,” said Gary. “And it was just them.”

  Thel said: “That other puke Darnell, he’ll be . . .”

  Steve diverted her thought: “There’s only the four of them. It’s good that they left someone with her. That means she’s still gotta be close.

  “Gary and I will meet you back at the house,” Steve told his best friend and his wife. “Soon as Paul shows up, we’ll be there.”

  The boy said: “And then what? You still haven’t told me . . .”

  “You’ll know when we know,” said Steve. “You’ve done everything you can to help your sister.”

  “I should have . . .”

  “No,” said Thel. “All the should-haves are guesses and useless.”

  “And,” added the mother, “they aren’t all ours.”

  “They are now,” said the young man who’d barely started shaving.

  Thel passed car keys to Steve. Lingered their touch in that transfer.

  Led Jake out the back door and he led her to his white rental car.

  Told her: “I want to be ready with a full tank.”

  “I’m all empty,” she said.

  No one saw them walking down that dark alley of their hometown.

  Jake said: “What did Steve make him drink?”

  “My Xanax sleeping pills.” Thel climbed in the rental car of the man who’d driven her thousands of miles over these small town streets. “Gary can’t be part of this.”

  Jake drove backstreets toward the truck stop west of town. “Too late.”

  “All he did was duct tape a cell phone under Burdett’s SUV after we watched him park on Main Street from the roof of the old movie theater. Burdett
didn’t count on that. But he wants to be seen. He wants to make you look at him. Can you believe there’s a cell phone application called Family Locator? As if it were that easy.”

  Their route led past the house where Steve grew up.

  “Remember how we always wanted to get out of here?” Thel shook her head in the glow of dashboard lights. “Sara always wanted to get in.”

  “She still can.” At the truck stop, Jake picked the self-service pump furthest from the glowing restaurant, kept his back to any in-there local eyes that might recognize him. Thel huddled below the dash, as if that mattered.

  They heard only the wind as they drove to her home on Knob Hill.

  Their headlights illuminated Steve’s old car parked out front and the silhouettes of two passengers in front. Jake killed his lights, parked. Thel opened her door, saying: “I hid our bags in the laundry room.”

  The driver’s door on Steve’s car opened and he climbed out, the flash of the dome light revealing a groggy Gary inside his fastened seat belt.

  Steve stood in the night beside Jake. They looked up and down the block. Windows glowed in some of the houses, but most had curtains pulled across their glass. Garbage cans lined the curbs for pick-up and Jake smelled something like rotten orange peels in the wind. A dog barked.

  Thel came out of their family home carrying three suitcases. Jake heard what he’d never heard as a child in these small-town American streets: the sound of a door being locked. She walked to her husband’s car, tossed the bags in the backseat, opened the front passenger door and caressed the face of the unconscious young man riding shotgun.

  Closed the door, asked his father: “How did he take it?”

  “By the time he realized what was happening, he could barely mumble. You’ll need help to get him into the motel room. Tip the desk clerk, say he’s going to rehab, they probably get that enough. They’ll remember you. Get a receipt when you gas up in Conrad, talk to the night clerk ’bout how your son fell asleep; make sure he sees.”

  “I know.” Thel looked at Jake, who’d gone to college there, said: “I always wanted to go to Missoula.”

  Steve said: “He should be out until mid-morning. His wallet is in the paper bag behind your seat. Hide the car keys.”

  She hugged him and they each whispered I love you. Hugged Jake, said so they all heard: “We love you.” Got in the family car and drove away with her unconscious son under April’s full moon.

  Gone.

  Steve said, “You’re driving.”

  Navigated Jake through the residential streets to a graveled alley. Jake angled toward somebody’s backyard fence to get the white rental car into a dark open garage. Steve’s arms cradled a glowing laptop.

  “Burdett’s SUV is still on Main Street,” said Steve. “Hasn’t moved.”

  He left the laptop on the seat as he climbed out in a wink of dome light. Pushed a wall-mounted button. The garage door rumbled closed.

  The two men walked toward a wooden house reverberating with TV.

  Steve led Jake through the backdoor into a kitchen lit by flickers from the blaring TV in the living room where a table stood firm under its burden.

  A gray-haired man filled the easy chair across from the TV. His white plaster cast-encased right leg lay propped across a footstool. A pair of crutches leaned against one side of his chair while the other side was flanked by a fold-up table holding a phone, the TV remote, and a beer bottle.

  “A fucked up old vet like me can’t hear nothing because he plays his TV too damn loud!” yelled the broken-legged man sitting in the chair.

  Reflections of Jake and Steve ghosted across the TV screen and its drama about sex and vampires.

  The old man kept his face toward the TV as he yelled: “Crazy Len! Always talking to himself. Clumping around now on those fucking crutches. Can’t do what he should ’n’ barely do what he could. Somebody could walk into his house ’n’ steal him blind and he’d never notice nothing!”

  Steve nodded as if somebody besides Jake could see him.

  Led Jake over to the table.

  Two shotguns. A deer rifle. Three pistols. Boxes of shells. Two pairs of men’s leather gloves and rubber overshoes. A hunting knife.

  The table smelled of gun oil. Rubber.

  The old man yelled at the TV screen: “You fucking idiots think vampires are the worst thing? Worst thing is when you can’t do nothing when you know how and it’s a gotta-get-done world!”

  Two ghosts flowing over the old man’s TV show pulled on gloves.

  Gloved Steve picked up a shotgun, its box of shells.

  Call it sentiment, Jake chose the 1911 .45 automatic pistol Army grunts like Len carried to write American history from Pancho Villa’s Mexico to Len’s Vietnam. Besides, that pistol had two spare ammunition magazines and the aura of belonging more than the snub nose revolver he gave Steve, who also strapped on the hunting knife. Jake picked up the rifle. They took the black rubber overshoes.

  The old man watching TV muttered: “This fucking world.”

  Steve said: “This is ours, Len. But you give us a chance.”

  The old man muttered to the TV, “They don’t even call it Saigon.”

  Steve and Jake headed back through the kitchen.

  In the closed-to-the-night garage, Steve turned on the light so they could load the guns, lay the long ones on the back seat of the rental car along with the overshoes. Steve tucked the revolver into the front of his belt.

  “Better not blow my balls off,” he said.

  Jake had to laugh. The .45 rode in the heart pocket of his flight jacket.

  As the white rental car backed out into the alley, Steve reported from the laptop: “They’re on the move. On the old river road going south.”

  “Quite a system you got there,” said Jake.

  “Over the counter. Len drove three hours to get it cheaper at the PX on Malmstrom Air base. His hundred percent disabled vet rating gets him in.”

  Steve shook his head. “He still won’t take our money. For any of it.”

  Neither he nor Jake turned to look at what lay on their backseat.

  “Where they going?” asked Jake as he reached the old river road.

  “South. If they take this road instead of the interstate, it’s easier for them to assume any headlights in their mirror are personal.”

  “How far can I hang back?”

  “Thirty miles,” said Steve.

  Neither he nor Jake looked at the prison that shimmered like a golden sphere on the prairie across the interstate highway.

  “Plenty of deserted farmhouses out this way,” said Steve. “What big farmers or agri-corps didn’t gobble up, banks took. Turn off your lights.”

  “What?” But Jake did it before their white car topped a hill to follow this two-lane blacktop down across the wide river valley where anyone could spot any headlights on that stretch of empty road.

  The full moon lit the black snake two-lane highway ahead of Jake’s windshield and bathed the river valley with a pale glow.

  “Can’t go so fast,” he told Steve.

  “We gotta let them get there first anyway. Get . . . comfortable.”

  The road hummed under their tires.

  “Sometimes it seems like none of this is real,” said Steve.

  “I know what you mean.”

  Then Jake heard himself say: “Buddha’s Ripple.”

  Steve stared at him from the passenger’s seat. “Did you get religion? Something more than our usual whatever—whatever?”

  “Not religion. Physics.”

  “This isn’t school, man.”

  “There was an article in a magazine at the dentist’s office,” said Jake. “Einstein says that for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction.”

  “You want to talk about this now?” said Steve.

  “What else are we going to talk about?”

  The two-lane highway merged with the interstate to cross the only bridge over the river in the
valley. Still, they rode without headlights.

  “Buddha’s Ripple,” continued Jake as their car surged up the other end of the valley. “That concept says there’s a flaw in Einstein.”

  “Oh, great. Now we gotta worry about . . . They’ve turned off to the left. About five miles ahead, onto a gravel road. Farm country.”

  “The flaw is,” said Jake, “getting from action to reaction requires time plus energy. Both get used up in that transformation. So the reaction is not quite equal, not quite the same. And whatever that opposite reaction is, it then creates yet another different reaction reality. Maybe a lot different, maybe not much. Say a cat walking across a street in Paris is black, but in the reaction reality, the cat has one white paw.

  “What it means is this reality, this thing that doesn’t feel real to you, theoretically, is part of a causal chain of unique realities.”

  “Why is that Buddha’s Ripple?”

  “Call the transforming caused by what our energy does karma and call its flawed reaction our next time around reincarnation.”

  Their white car turned onto a graveled path through the darkness. The bumpy road stretched out like a pale snake across the rolling prairie under a full moon. Jake saw movies of other realities, a new movie with every beat of his thundering heart.

  Beat, and the movie shows moonlit silhouettes of him and Steve wearing black rubber overshoes, walking from a parked white car carrying the shotgun and the rifle toward lights glowing in a foreclosed farmhouse.

  Beat, and the movie shows Steve and him kicking in that farmhouse door, shows horror being done to their daughter Sara by Burdett and crew.

  Beat, a shotgun and rifle roar and splatter blood on the farmhouse walls.

  Beat, a different movie, no one stops them from walking out to the car with Sara, safe, Burdett and his crew living on to some who cares, no matter while Jake and Thel take Sara to Denver and rehab that works, Steve goes back to wiping the bar at the Tap Room, knowing his wife will come home.

  Beat, or maybe Thel doesn’t, Denver’s not so bad.

  Beat, they find Sara overdosed in the farmhouse.

  Beat, he and Steve walk up to the farmhouse but get cut down by flashes of gunfire before they even see what’s what, or get shot up on the way out and bleed to death in their white car on the road back to Shelby.