by Neil Mcmahon
"Ruining how?"
His face creased in a grimace of groping to explain.
"He wants things his way, so he tries to force her, same as he does everything else. It ain't that he's mean to her-he just can't get it in his head he's got to teach her, steady and patient. He'll get riled up and swat her for no reason, then maybe he'll catch a phone call that makes him feel better and he'll feed her a treat. Poor little thing don't know how she's supposed to behave. She's nervous as a whore in church."
I knew Elmer had been working with Balcomb and the mare, and he'd gone riding with them every day until recently. But that had stopped, and while Elmer wasn't the kind to come out and say so, I had a feeling this explained why-Balcomb couldn't tolerate his disapproval, and so had dismissed him.
Elmer had a deep love and respect for horses, and he was bone honest. I thought hard about confiding in him. Kirk was a long way off and the Anson brothers were out of earshot, too, milling around with occasional nervous glances in my direction. But I decided again to hold off. There was no point in getting him outraged and asking him to keep it secret, and since I was locked into meeting with Balcomb, I might as well find out what he wanted before I stirred things up.
Elmer fished a pack of Camels out of his shirt pocket and offered me one. I didn't usually smoke, but I took it. He hobbled on back to the office. I found a shed wall to lean against and settled in to wait.
Wesley Balcomb's makeover of this place had started when he bought it, about two years ago. The fences had been reinforced everywhere and electrified for roughly a mile around the headquarters. There were several dirt roads running across the property that used to be open for anybody to drive through-you just were expected to close the cattle gates, the old kind that you bear-hugged and slipped a barbed-wire loop over. Now all those roads were sealed off. He'd turned the property's east end into an adjoining compound and built a six-thousand-square-foot house and an ultramodern stable complex there. I'd heard the stables were an equine Ritz, with an enclosed heated arena, forty stalls, and every other kind of luxury. But I'd never been inside the compound-it was off-limits even to the hands, and had a high-security alarm system, ten-foot fences, and a gate with a camera.
While all that progressed, Balcomb had hired and fired a slew of managers, consultants, architects, and other experts. Most of them took themselves very seriously and seemed determined to make that clear. They'd set up a maze of rules and procedures that turned even simple decisions into major productions, and yet they were always screaming demands for better efficiency. They interfered in everything, trying to impose corporate thinking that simply wouldn't fit here. Elmer, who'd forgotten more about livestock than most people would ever know and had run this operation smoothly and profitably for decades, was now overseen by a firm of east coast accountants.
That sort of thing took its toll on the people who were trying to get the hands-on work done. I'd noticed it even during the few months I'd been here. Little irritations kept building up, the kind you didn't pay much attention to, but that started eating at you. It was all amped up by Kirk riding around with his binoculars and rifle. Some of the hands, like Doug, were eager to chop themselves a niche in the hierarchy. Others, like Elmer, looked on with pained weariness.
This ranch had its own persona, an old-fashioned quality that was hard to define. The word humanity wasn't quite right, but I couldn't think of a better one. The weather, the land, and the people on it could all be harsh; but fundamentally, they treated each other like human beings. That was true of most such places, and of Montana in general. Beneath the surface beauty lay a less visible and more powerful kind-a quiet understanding that the really important things were to pull your own weight and not fuck other people over. By and large, if you held to those, you could do whatever you wanted.
But now it was changing, not just here, but all around. You could tell from what you heard, saw, read-felt.
It was something else I couldn't fault Balcomb for. He, and others like him, had the right to do as they saw fit with the land they bought. Wanting the old ways to stay was backward, selfish, and above all futile, and nobody gave a damn what I wanted anyway.
7
Wesley Balcomb came into sight in a few more minutes, riding his pretty mare at a fair clip and bouncing in the saddle in a way that looked very uncomfortable.
He was maybe forty-five, tanned and handsome, with the fit look of someone who played a lot of golf-he'd had an Astroturf driving range and putting green installed behind the compound so he could keep in practice. But he had the stiffness of being uncomfortable doing things that might involve getting dirty. His clothes looked like they'd been picked out by a film fashion consultant-Wrangler jeans, western cut shirt, and off-white Stetson. The rumor was that his outfits were tailored and his boots were handmade Luccheses that went for upwards of fifteen hundred bucks.
Kirk Pettyjohn came down the rise to meet him, carrying himself with importance, apparently thinking the two of them were going to have a confab. Balcomb ignored him completely and rode right on by, straight toward me. Kirk tagged along sheepishly behind. The Anson boys fell in with him, and Elmer came back out of the office. I'd half expected Doug to show up, but there was no sign of him. Maybe he didn't want anybody to see his nose.
Elmer was right about the mare's being skittish, and Balcomb wasn't in good control of her. He didn't rein her up until she was almost close enough to step on my feet, and she stamped and swung her rump around at me, the way horses do when they're ready to kick. I put a hand on her haunch and shoved her away.
Balcomb stared down at me as if it was his wife's ass I'd grabbed. Like Kirk, he hid his eyes with sunglasses-his were aviator-style, giving him the authoritative look of a military officer-and his face was smooth and bland. But I got a quick weird hit that behind his shield, he was nervous.
"You're an enterprising fellow, Mr. Davoren," he said. He spoke louder than he needed to, like he wanted to make sure the other men heard. I was surprised that he knew my name. He even pronounced it right, to almost rhyme with "tavern."
"That's the first time anybody ever told me that," I said.
"Unfortunately, the enterprise isn't an admirable one. It seems you've been helping yourself to ranch property. Lumber, to be precise."
Son of a bitch.
That had crossed my mind a couple of times, but I just couldn't believe it would cause this ruckus.
What had happened was that the plans for the old mansion's remodeling called for tearing out a couple of downstairs walls to open up space. We'd had to redo the second-story floor structure with glu-lam beams to allow longer spans. That had left us with a few dozen of the old joists, full two-inch by twelve-inch clear coast fir, a lot of them twenty feet long and straight as a wedding dick.
Goddamned right I'd been taking them home-a load on my pickup's lumber rack every Saturday for the past three weeks. I'd intended to haul off another one today. Otherwise they'd have been thrown away like all the other scrap. But it was true that I hadn't exactly asked permission. I knew that if I got tangled up in Balcomb's bureaucratic grid, I could kiss the whole thing good-bye. As it was, nobody had cared or even much noticed.
Except for whoever had ratted me off. I glanced over at Kirk. His bug-eyed shades were fixed on me in a biker-style hard stare. But his mouth jerked suddenly in a twitch.
I turned back to Balcomb. It came as a nasty shock, realizing that he had me up against a hard place. I started circling.
"You mean those scabby old floor joists?" I said.
"They're obviously worth stealing, to you."
"That's not stealing, that's recycling."
"It's common theft, in the eyes of the law. Grand larceny."
"For Christ's sake, they'd have ended up in the dump."
"What belongs to this ranch stays on this ranch."
"You're saying you'd rather throw them away than let somebody else use them?"
"I'm saying you owe me for them." Balcomb
unsnapped a tooled leather holster on his tooled leather belt and got out one of those Palm Pilots.
"I'll just double-check my figures," he said, punching buttons with a stylus. "You've taken about eight hundred and fifty linear feet, at four dollars and ten cents per. That comes to three thousand four hundred eighty-five dollars-"
"Four dollars a foot? That lumber's worthless. It's old and rough cut and full of nails."
"I'm talking about replacement value. Clear fir's very pricey these days."
"All right, I'll bring it back. You want me to take it straight to the dump?"
The bland mask left his face for a second. It wasn't a pleasant look.
"I don't want you on this property again," he said. "You can hire someone to return it. That will take care of restitution. There's still the matter of criminal charges. Oh, yes, and assaulting one of my employees."
I stared at him in disbelief. He turned to the other men, coaxing the mare into sidestepping showily, like he was Roy Rogers or Ronald Reagan. He even put on that same kind of rugged, comradely half smile.
"You see why I warned you against trusting Mr. Davoren," he said to them. "Considering the position he's in, I don't think he's going to get any more honest. Men like him will say anything, trying to weasel out."
I took a step toward him, my left hand rising to yank him off the horse.
"Hugh!" Elmer said sharply.
Balcomb swiveled, his face turning alarmed. But Elmer was right-busting his head would make a bad situation a hell of a lot worse. I clenched my teeth hard and stopped.
Only then did Kirk, late to the party, throw his rifle to his shoulder and yell at me, "Freeze!"
Elmer walked over to him and pushed the barrel aside, shaking his head in disgust.
"You'd better be very careful, Davoren," Balcomb said, in that same grandstanding voice.
Many times, I'd read the phrase hands itching to get hold of someone, but I'd never felt the sensation literally before. It was actually more of a throb.
He watched me, maybe expecting me to humbly agree with him. When I didn't, he waved his hand impatiently at the other men, like he was brushing off a pesky bug.
"We need a word in private," he said. They moved away, Steve Anson stuffing his jaw with another wad of chew, Elmer shaking loose his thirtieth smoke of the day, and Kirk backing up reluctantly with his weapon at port arms.
"Doug Wills told you to stay where you were and wait," Balcomb said to me harshly.
"Doug doesn't tell me to do anything."
We both knew that I was really talking about Balcomb.
Flies were zeroing in on the mare, and she snorted suddenly and flicked her tail. Her ass end swung around toward me again. I gave it another shove.
"You seem to feel free to take matters into your own hands," he said. "Even though you're on my property."
"I'm on your property by invitation. Doing the job I was hired to."
I could see a muscle jump in his jaw. "I'm getting very impatient with you."
I waited.
He glanced around, then leaned forward and lowered his voice.
"I was going to give you a chance to make this go away, before anyone else knew about it," he said. "I could still be persuaded to call it a misunderstanding."
"Persuaded how?"
"I want to know if anything-unusual-happened to you this afternoon."
"How would something 'unusual' turn this into a misunderstanding?" I said.
"You let me worry about that."
Any hint of polish was gone from his face now. I could feel the intensity of his gaze burning right through those sunglasses. Out of my side vision, I sensed that Kirk was staring at me just as hard.
That feeling of wrongness hit me again. Maybe I was only imagining it. But I was abruptly very glad I hadn't said anything about what I'd found in the dump.
"No, it was pretty much like every other day," I said. "One man starts a fight with me for no reason I can tell, another holds a gun on me, and I get called a thief and a liar over some scrap wood."
Balcomb looked unfazed. If anything, he seemed pleased.
"That's all?" he said.
"It's plenty for me. You want more unusual than that, give me a hint. A guy like me will say anything to weasel out."
He straightened up again, relaxed now, and clucked his tongue like he was chiding a little kid.
"Well, since you haven't done me any good, I don't see why I should do you any. If you'd stayed with Wills, I might feel more charitable. I had to ride another mile and a half to get here."
"Try bag balm," I said. "Best thing for saddle sores."
That venomous look crossed his face again.
"You don't have any idea how far out of your league you are, do you?" he said.
It sounded like a line from a bad movie, but he spoke it with real conviction.
He walked the mare away, pausing to talk to the waiting men. Elmer glanced at me and shook his head again, this time sympathetically. Kirk pulled out his cell phone and punched numbers, looking smugly important.
Wesley Balcomb rode off into the sunset, tall in the saddle after cleaning up Dodge.
Then, from a little copse of aspens down the road, Laurie Balcomb came riding out. There was no telling how long she'd been there-she might just have arrived, or she might have been hidden in the trees and seen the whole show. She glanced coolly toward me with no sign of recognition, then cantered away to catch up with her husband. The two of them continued on side by side, apparently talking. Balcomb pointed back in my direction with his thumb, but didn't turn around.
Oddly, it struck me that she was on a gelding and he was on a mare.
I walked to my pickup. The Anson brothers were waiting there, same as when I'd first driven up.
"I'll get the lumber back here tomorrow," I told Steve.
He spat a stream of tobacco juice. "Doubt it."
I did, too, seeing as how tomorrow was Sunday, and I needed to round up a good-size truck and driver.
"Monday, then." I took hold of the steering wheel, pulled myself in, and reached for the keys. They were gone from the ignition.
I swung back to glare at Steve. "What's this bullshit?"
"You're going to jail, Hugh," he said. He spat again nervously, and added, "Nothing personal."
8
Driving into Helena from the north was usually something I enjoyed. The old part of the city was a pretty sight, built in a pocket at the base of steep forested slopes that rose like waves into the mountains beyond. Downtown was studded with grand old stone buildings. There were quite a few real mansions, and even the modest houses lining the streets conveyed a comfortable old-time feel. The huge dome of the state capitol and the twin spires of St. Helena Cathedral gave a sense of grandeur.
But on this particular trip, two khaki-uniformed sheriff's deputies in a cruiser were right behind me, escorting me to the Lewis and Clark County jail.
By now I'd had long enough to start grasping how slick Balcomb was, how far ahead of me he'd been at every step. All the time I'd worked there, I'd considered Kirk's commando act to be a silly show of "security." Now I realized that he'd really been gathering information, and that had provided Balcomb a ready-made excuse for bracing me. I'd been stupid enough to make it easy, but I was willing to bet that Balcomb had some pretext for getting rid of just about anybody on the place. He'd also had the foresight to impress on the other men that I wasn't to be trusted or believed, before I'd had a glimmer of what was happening.
I stood amazed at the kind of mind that could think like that. I suspected that he'd had a lot of practice.
The jail was in the original county courthouse, in the hills toward the south end of town. Probably its most famous resident had been the Unabomber, when they'd first nailed him a few years ago. I'd spent a night there once myself, the result of a youthful indiscretion involving too much tequila and a barroom brawl that ended with a friend of mine running a bouncer's head through a wall. The
bouncer came out of it OK and the only damage was a minor drywall repair, but everybody agreed how lucky it was that he hadn't hit a stud.
When we got there, the deputies put handcuffs on me. The older one was burly and grizzled, with the seen-it-all look of a veteran. He was decent enough to be apologetic about the cuffs, and told me it was a formality for booking prisoners. The other wasn't much more than a teenager, and had a withered arm. Helena was a big enough place so you didn't know everybody, and I didn't know these men, which was just as well-it kept things impersonal. Cops tended to give me a two-edged feeling. On the one hand, they were usually just doing a thankless job. On the other, it was easy to imagine that they liked pushing people around, and the kid with the bad arm sure seemed to.
Inside, they turned me over to the jailers. The place didn't look any more modern than on my last visit, but the drill was different. Back then, they'd just made sure my friend and I didn't have any weapons and thrown us in a tank. Now they took away my clothes and issued me a bright orange jumpsuit, so small that the seam cut into my crotch. They made me take the laces out of my boots, then shuffle in them down a hallway with a few individual holding cells not much bigger than closets. The door to mine, a solid metal slab with a mesh-fortified window about a foot square, locked behind me with a no-bullshit clang.
Late on a Saturday afternoon, it was going to take a while to reach a judge and set my bail. I figured I'd be released on my own recognizance-I was a local, and an upstanding citizen. At least, I had been until an hour ago.
The jail would probably be busy later tonight, but now the other cells were empty, with nothing stirring in the hallway, no windows to the outside world, no diversions except graffiti, scrawled by well-equipped guys eager to meet others like themselves. The bunk was a thinly padded bench too short for me to stretch out on. I sat back with my knees up and my hands behind my head, and tried to make use of my first chance to concentrate.
Maybe Balcomb didn't know anything about those dead horses-would have been appalled to find out, investigated the matter, seen to it that anybody who had it coming got punished. Maybe there'd just been some kind of bizarre accident. Maybe I was overblowing the situation and blaming him out of shock and anger.
