by Joe Wilkins
—Brian, he said. Someone’s coming.
Dust rose in long plumes from the road, and the light glinted on the windshield of a sedan, then on the silent but unmistakable reds-and-blues of a sheriff’s SUV behind it.
Betts turned to Wendell, his mouth slack. He looked nothing so much as hurt, as if everyone should have known this wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. Maddy cranked the wheel to get around the Wilson boy and tried again to back out, but Betts snapped his mouth shut so hard his teeth clicked and strode over and slammed the flat of his hand on the hood.
—Stop the fucking car! he yelled.
He unholstered his pistol, told his men to take positions, and they did, falling to their knees, leaning over truck beds, shouldering their rifles.
Wendell leaped down the cinder-block stairs of the stoop, ran to Maddy’s car, and pulled open her door. She stared at him, something shattered and shattering in her eyes, something beyond any of this. He held out his hand. She didn’t take it but got out of the car and dashed for the trailer with him.
They were nearly to the steps when Betts cocked his pistol behind them.
—Nope, Betts said. No fucking way. Come on back. That’s right. Stay close.
Betts turned them around, made them sit in the dirt up against Maddy’s car, and told them to stay hidden, down.
The light was in their eyes. Soon the rising edge of the trailer’s shadow would swallow them, but for now they blinked and shied. Wendell could feel the hard bite of rubber at his back, the cooler, somehow softer press of steel. He reached for Maddy’s hand. This time, she let him take it. She was shaking. So was he. He scanned the trees, then looked at Maddy, mouthed, Rowdy, and shook his head. Maddy caught her breath and her eyes cleared. She turned her face to the trailer, the trees.
The crunch of gravel, the squeak of dusty brakes, the slowing of engines, and the rustlings of Betts’s men. Now a scratchy, amplified voice:
—This is Deputy Sheriff Ryan Bouchard out of Roundup. Please lower your weapons and identify yourselves.
A beat of silence. Not even crickets or magpies. The shadow from the trailer had risen to Wendell’s jaw.
—I repeat: This is Deputy Sheriff Ryan Bouchard out of Roundup. The vehicle with me belongs to Anna Prentiss of Child Protective Services, also out of Roundup. We are here to see Wendell Newman about Rowdy Burns. We understand Mr. Newman to be the child’s caretaker and need to speak with him. That is all we are here to do.
Wendell tried to stand. Betts jammed his pistol into Wendell’s clavicle and hissed at him.
—Sit. This is my show.
Then, with the nose of his pistol still pinning Wendell to the ground, Betts spoke up.
—Well, Mr. Bouchard, this is right interesting. I believe we have ourselves a bit of a disagreement about how to proceed. You see, how a man raises up his boy, well, that’s a sacred thing, and it ain’t up to you or me or anybody but him. So I’ll kindly ask you and Miss Anna there to turn around, take your leave of us. Your authority ain’t recognized here, which means you are trespassing, and as friends of Mr. Newman’s, we are acting within our constitutional rights in defending private property. We aim to—
The first shot came from nowhere but the sky, as if it were riding the wide river of red light washing west over the mountains and pines. Though in the next moment, as the shadow of the trailer slid all the way over Wendell’s eyes, he alone could see that the second—pewwhg!—tore from the corner of the living-room window. The bullet-ripped screen gusted and then settled gently back into the metal frame.
Betts, still standing, gargled another word, indecipherable, and a cup of blood sloshed from his mouth.
And the day deepened into itself. Became a thing that scratched and growled and drew breath. A great muscled beast rising on its hind legs, lifting up to its full and terrible height, pulling into its lungs the setting sun, the low wind, the evening songs of birds. It breathed them all in, every one of them, like so much dust, and breathed back out.
Betts dropped his pistol, swam his hands through the air, and toppled, the ripe weight of his head smacking the hood of Maddy’s car.
Freddie screamed. Wendell pulled Maddy toward the trailer. The speaker atop the sheriff’s SUV crackled once.
And Betts’s men opened fire.
Verl
24?
It is like dreams no matter if my eyes are open or closed. I do not know where I am. Cannot even for the sun or stars figure it. I tried not to but circled some and am here in this country of broken ridges and box canyons. Do I know this country? Sometimes it seems I know it. Sometimes I don’t. Sleep is what I need. I will lie down and sleep here in this country that I cannot even for the whole of my life in this country reckon.
Later
Fuck it. None of this makes any goddamn sense. I do not need sleep. I will even now get up and go deeper into the mountains this is the best time to go. I am greasy haired and lean. I am lunging. This moonlight road into the mountains. The spine of the mountains now.
Gillian
…MUSSELSHELL COUNTY AUTHORITIES…SHOTS FIRED…POSSIBLE hostage situation…
Some static in the air, in her. Gillian coughed, wiped at her eyes. Bumped the table and knocked her water glass to the patio stones, where it shattered.
…multiple vehicles…Musselshell County plate…Yellowstone County plate…Oregon plate…
She nearly ran through the sliding screen door. They hadn’t given plate numbers but said one was Yellowstone County. She’d heard that clearly. And where was Maddy? Where had her daughter been all these weeks? Something burned down through her. It had happened before—that was the feeling. This had happened before. Of all the many turnings of the universal tumblers, she hoped it wasn’t happening again.
She found Maddy’s phone on the microwave and punched in the security code, opened her recent calls, scrolled. Christ. There it was. A Musselshell County prefix and the name Wendell. Ah, God. And the voices on the radio so calm.
…property of Wendell Newman…shots fired…situation yet unclear…
Gillian did what she was supposed to do. She called the police, then sat there and cried and when they arrived told them what she knew, handed them Maddy’s phone and a couple of pictures. She waited on the sidewalk out front until the red eyes of their taillights blinked out between the houses, then went back in and gathered what she thought she might need. She stopped once on the way out of town, at the Walmart in the Heights, and bought shells for the .22 and the 30.06. She didn’t know what she planned to do. But the rifles felt important. And the need to close the distance between her and her daughter.
The sun had set and in the blackening night she drove north toward the Bull Mountains. Highway 87 fell down the slope of the divide, a thin gray line narrowing into shadow. Deer haunted the bar ditches. The shiver of dun haunches, the oval lanterns of their eyes. In her headlights she’d seen already three loose piles of bone, meat, and hide, rusty sprays of dried blood on the roadside. This was just the hour for it, the day having surrendered and the first stars dimpling the night’s blue bowl.
She hesitated for a moment, then punched the radio to life. She wasn’t much more than thirty miles north of Billings, twenty miles into the Bulls, but already YPR fuzzed and snapped as it came in and out:
…the developing story…tiny Delphia, Montana…shots fired…hostage situation…
The newscaster’s voice chirruped, whined, and slid back and forth into the exhortations of some late-night preacher:
By the blood…a dozen years ago…I bind you…Verl Newman…that you may not ever…months-long manhunt…be unbound…
She cut the radio off. Checked her phone. Kent had called three times, Dave Coles once. She turned her phone off and tossed it in the glove box. Listened instead for the clink of the shell boxes in the backseat. She let herself consider her call to CPS yesterday and almost had to pull over for the roil of nausea and shame coursing through her. If she had something to do with t
his—but she could take the thought no further than that.
She slowed coming into Roundup and for the cool air rolled down the windows. Pickups and SUVs were parked out front of all the downtown bars, grimy windows lit with neon—the Sportsman, the Keg, the Occidental, the Hitching Post, the Arcade. Roundup was one of only two towns in the entire county—Delphia the other—and had barely a thousand people, but there were so many bars, so many people out at them on a Friday night. Who was yet at home? Who was yet taking care? Though if they were here, she thought, at least they weren’t out there, in the mountains. She remembered stopping at the Sportsman a time or two with Kevin. They used to have a cook there, an old Bulgarian, who made a spicy chopped-pork-and-cabbage dish with roasted potatoes and a salad of cucumber, tomato, sweet onion, and white cheese. Outside of their own kitchen, it was the only interesting meal they could get for ninety miles, with most everywhere else serving tasteless chicken strips, freezer-burned steaks, and whatever else came off the Sysco truck. Now the Sportsman’s door hung open like a dark tongue, and pop-country music pulsed from somewhere inside.
She drove on. Turned east onto Highway 12, where the outskirts of Roundup—the feed and video store, the retirement home, the derelict sawmill—gave way in a matter of seconds, as if swallowed in the closing jaws of the night. Now there was only the pure dark of the highway, the black river, the abstruse pines, the intricate and tortured-looking sandrocks of the mountains rising like sentinels or slumped judges. She was close now, but she knew, too, she hadn’t gone nearly far enough. Maddy was out there somewhere, in the mountains that had taken her husband.
She drove by the abandoned train yard at Nine Mile, the Antlers bar, and the burned edifice of the old hotel at Gauge, and as she turned through the S-curves, the Musselshell River below moved in mirroring oxbows and hairpins, scouring the north flank of the Bulls. She dropped down onto the flats, where some farmer was still running his center pivot, the pock, pock, pock of its end nozzle irrigating, for the most part, the weeds and deer bones in the bar ditch. Was this where it had begun? In bygone notions and blind myths? The idiocy of watering the bar ditch? The vanity of irrigating this dry land at all? The land where the failures of the nation, the failures of myth, met the failures of men. Where history went to die. Where rivers brimful in April slicked to gravel by August. Where the grass was tough and thick before the plow and ever after dust lifted from the sour, alkali hardpan left in the plow’s wake. A land of ravaging pine beetles, of ever longer summers and shorter, dryer winters. The land itself animated sorrow and anger, birthed and cradled and raised up failure and fear, a raw and righteous violence. Gillian heard again the radio—shots fired—and imagined her daughter’s terrified face. She mashed her foot to the floor and sped toward the heart of this dark place, her own dark parcel of violence in the seat beside her.
The lights of Delphia conspired in the distance. Still on this side of town, near the rodeo grounds, Gillian braked hard, the speedometer falling from eighty-five, and turned south onto the Delphia-Colter Road. The gravel was always a surprise, and the car fishtailed as she was forced to slow that much more. Her headlights hollowed the night before her—washboard road, fences studded with tumbleweeds, black snarl of cottonwoods along the river. She knew roughly where the Newman place was, fifteen miles or so south. She hadn’t ever been out there but had seen the road plenty of times, when she and Kevin went hiking or hunting or just out on a Sunday drive. Kevin would have been able to trace on her palm every back road, every little ribbon of dirt, every two-track and ATV trail. She might get lucky, might take whichever road she could find north or south of the Newman place and eventually make her way there. Surprise them. But what then? The shells rocked and clinked. The empty rifles silent, waiting. She wasn’t sure. She knew only what had happened last time. Out here the usual rules didn’t apply. What was good and kind could be gunned down. What was violent and vile could disappear forever into the mountains. And there was no way, no fucking way, they were going to take Maddy from her too.
Her headlights caught the rusty trusses of the one-lane bridge over the Musselshell, and she saw to her right the turnoff to the old house by the river. It was just where it had always been, though she hadn’t seen it in twelve years, and this night the sight of it snagged at her heart—the leaning, gray gatepost, its top still whitewashed, and the weedy cattle guard below, the dirt road beyond disappearing into the chokecherries and cottonwoods.
Some bit of blood memory turned the wheel for her. Before she understood what she’d done, the tires were rattling over the cattle guard and bouncing in the ruts. She hadn’t meant to, and for the narrowness of the road she wouldn’t be able to turn the car around now until she got to the house. She cursed her stupidity. It would take that much longer to find Maddy. But there was nothing for it. She drove on.
Tall grass scraped against the underside of the car. Frogs and owls screamed. She had to stop twice to move cottonwood branches that had fallen into the road. The second was even bigger than the first, heavy and not yet hollowed with rot, and as she tried to lift the thick limb, a chunk of bark slipped beneath her grip. The wind-torn end of the branch raked her forearm and ribs, and a stinging pain rolled in waves across her belly and chest, up her arm and into her shoulder. When she touched the spot, her fingers came away tacky.
She closed her eyes and squatted down and hefted the log again, managed to get it off the road, then got back in her car. In the dome light, the right side of her blouse was torn and dark with blood. Jesus. What was she doing?
She pulled up outside the old house, vacant now, she was sure, and probably had been ever since she’d left, as there was simply no one hereabouts to rent it. The only light fell from faraway stars, and she made her way along the path through the weeds and dry grass. The porch stank of mice and piss. Scattered here and there were silver cans and cigarette butts, likely from some teenagers who’d been out here drinking and fucking. The door, of course, was unlocked, and given the absolute dark inside she might as well have had her eyes closed as she moved through the front room, down the hallway, and into the kitchen, where with a screech and a pop she yanked open the door to the small closet beneath the stairs, reached in, fumbled about a moment, and got ahold of, yes, a candle and a box of matches.
Her fingers wet and sticky, she broke the first two matches. The third flared and evened into flame. She lit the candle, and the dark of the house rolled back to reveal dust-heavy spiderwebs and peeling yellow paint. She cringed at her ragged, blood-sheened shirt, then lifted the candle into the closet. Everything was right where they’d left it, though covered in a decade’s dust—a half dozen or so candles and another box of wooden matches, a flashlight, a hunting knife, a wool blanket, a jug of water, two tins of sardines in mustard, a box of saltines, a silver flask, and a small leather valise that held a rudimentary first-aid kit.
She’d left the house here along the river less than a week after the memorial service. It wasn’t what anybody had said. It was what they hadn’t said. No one, not even Elner or either of Kevin’s sisters, had spoken a word against Verl Newman, who at the time was still out there, still on the run. As the days went on, Gillian got angrier and angrier. The silence of her co-workers and neighbors and—worst of all—Kevin’s family was so loud, it was like a roaring in her brain, and her need for the roaring to be silenced by their words was as raw as the need for breath or water. But they said nothing, and she packed what she could fit in her car and she and Maddy left for Billings. That was the very last time, until today, that she’d driven these roads, though Maddy had been with her all those years ago. Maddy, just six, sitting in the backseat, confused and wide-eyed and asking every few miles where they were going.
Maddy.
Gillian remembered herself. She had to move. She dribbled wax on the counter and stuck the candle in the mess of it, waited until the cooled wax held it firm, then lit another and did the same. Her forearm was scratched but fine. The cuts along her ribs,
though, were deep and wouldn’t stop bleeding. With materials from the first-aid kit she cleaned the wounds and tore open a package of gauze and held it hard against herself, hoping the pressure would help. Her ribs were slippery, and the gauze soaked through. She opened another sheet of gauze and made her way to the front room, lay down on her unhurt side on the old couch, in an attempt to elevate the wound—and like a small boat on a quick river, she drifted into sleep.
With a gasping breath she woke from dreams of drowning—water no matter which way she swam—and followed the flickering glow back into the kitchen, where the candles were merely wicks in pools of wax now. Christ. How long had she slept? She took a slug from the flask—bourbon. She took another. Pulled off her shirt and unclasped her bra, cleaned the wound again, covered it with fresh gauze, and wound the white tape tightly around herself. In an upstairs closet she found one of Kevin’s park service shirts and pulled it on, his name as ever stitched on her heart. She walked back out to the car and hauled in the rifles and by candlelight loaded both at the kitchen table. Ought she to burn the house down? She decided against it. In the car she stowed the rifles, the bourbon, the crackers and sardines, the flashlight, and the first-aid kit, and after looking around the house to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything, she blew out the candles. A lake of blackness washed over her. By the blue-black at the windows she moved down the hallway. She stubbed a toe on something in the living room but righted herself and found the door.
God, the stars. The night had lifted and the sky was a shade of stone blue, lighter than the true dark of the house. The stars were softer now as well, no longer diamond points but a thousand-thousand small pools of white fire. She touched her breast, the embroidered thread of Kevin’s name. He’d been wrong about some things, they both had, but he’d been right about the stars.
