by Neil Mcmahon
But that brief moment of satisfaction would destroy my life for keeps.
I walked out into the night-bound woods, trying to calm down. A grumpy yowl and a rustling in the brush told me I had company, a half-feral, torn-eared black tomcat with a kink in the end of his tail, who would come inside only in the coldest weather. I put out food for him every day, and he was always happy to share a beer. But he did a lot of foraging on his own, and he liked to leave me presents of pack rat guts and such to let me know he was on the job. No doubt he was real unhappy about the fire.
A hundred yards farther along, in a brushy little swale, a pair of badgers had denned up and were raising a family. Mom and pop were the size of beagles, fierce and fearless. More than once, I'd encountered one of their white-striped backs stalking down the middle of the road at night, refusing to give ground to my truck. They were known to take on bears. I swung wide of the den as I walked by. They didn't like anybody coming close, and they might also be riled by the fire. But they were good neighbors, quiet, private, and death on varmints.
There was a hoot owl living out here who kept me company late at night when I couldn't sleep. Mule deer were as common as squirrels, and an elk herd that lived in the Belts browsed through often at night, dark silhouettes of huge animals moving quietly as ghosts. Occasionally, I'd glimpse a black bear, and once in a great while, I'd find cougar tracks.
This peaceable little kingdom had its harsh side, for sure. Predators killed prey and the weak died quickly. But it was all within the bounds of what nature ordained. Everybody knew the rules and nobody caused trouble except for the sensible and honest reasons of survival.
Something warm rubbed against my ankle. I caught just a glimpse of the cat's green eyes, flickering in the moonlight, before he disappeared to have it out with a rival or take down a critter.
I started walking back.
I paused at the smoking heap and tried to figure how long ago the fire had been lit. It would have gone up fast-an accelerant had probably been used, and I'd stacked the lumber with the layers separated by one-by-two stickers, so there'd been airflow to create a powerful draw. But it had burned clear to the bottom, toward the center as well as the outsides. The boards had been tight together edgewise, so getting accelerant into the middle would have required something like a spray rig. The odds of an arsonist that sophisticated, around here, were tiny-this was almost certainly the work of an amateur who'd just splashed on gas or kerosene and thrown a match. Balancing all those factors off, I guessed it had been set an hour or more before I'd gotten here.
Balcomb wouldn't have come up here himself. He'd have sent somebody who was familiar with this area, who wouldn't balk at arson-who'd known I was in jail.
The first face that appeared in my mind was Kirk Pettyjohn's.
He knew where this place was, knew its isolation and that he could easily get in and out unnoticed. He was capable of something like this, on every level. And taking a gouge out of me would thrill him.
I wasn't happy about his waving that rifle at me this afternoon, but I'd intended to let it go.
Not this.
But first came the problem that the pile of ashes in front of me literally meant thirty-five hundred bucks up in smoke-on top of the bail money and whatever the hell else might be lurking down the road.
At least I didn't have to worry about finding a truck and driver any more.
With this new wrinkle, my hope that Tom Dierdorff might be able to smooth things over was out the window. Balcomb was twisting the knife as payback for riling him up and smarting off to him.
But there was a much more disturbing message. He had the power to stomp me like a bug. He could easily have had my whole place burned, except he didn't take me that seriously. This was a love tap, a joke. Without doubt, he could arrange to damage me far more in some sneaky way that the cops couldn't protect me from or even punish.
It gave my fears a concrete base. But my anger was still rising, too, and got another charge from the thought that he was probably laughing at me right now.
I dug out my money stash from the loose foundation rock where I kept it, inside an old metal drill bit box. I was better off than I'd thought, with a little over seventeen hundred. Together with what I had in the bank, that would almost cash out Sarah Lynn.
It would also buy me a disposable camera. The couple of good ones I'd had back in my newspaper days were long gone.
I made a point of locking up the pistol inside the cabin again before I started for town, and promised myself I wasn't going to do anything stupid. But I was getting more in the mood.
13
Main Street in Helena was also known as Last Chance Gulch, the place where some on-the-ropes miners in the 1860s had discovered the gold that put this place on the map. It was the city's prime downtown business strip, but when I was growing up, it had had several bars where you could get your ass kicked just for walking in. I'd seen that happen more than once, along with men getting thrown out through doors or lying unconscious on the sidewalk in front. Sometimes in the mornings there'd be bloodstains in the snow. Those were people who'd come up in hard times, tough and proud and with a lot of pent-up emotion, including anger. The bar life was one of the few outlets.
Most of those places were gone now. The roughest ones, the Indian bars at the south end, had been torn down to make way for a pedestrian mall. About the closest thing left was O'Toole's-small, dark as a cellar even on bright afternoons, and thick with cigarette smoke that had started building up generations ago. Tonight it was crowded and noisy. When I walked in, I could hear the jukebox playing, but it was impossible to tell what.
I'd hoped that Madbird would be here and he was, standing at the far end of the bar. In a place like O'Toole's, there was always the chance of a fist or bottle coming at you, and it paid to stay on your feet. I made my way over to him, saying hello to a couple of people I knew, trying to act like everything was the same as ever. By the time I got there, he had frosty cans of Pabst and shots of Makers Mark bourbon waiting.
His nostrils widened in a snort as he looked me over.
"You smell like you been rolling around in a ashtray," he said, in a gravelly voice that was like no other I'd ever heard.
I drank down my shot and signaled Denise, the bartender, for refills.
"Deep shit is more like it," I said. "I've got trouble, Madbird."
He lifted his chin in acknowledgment. Deep shit and trouble came as no surprise to him.
He had the kind of harsh powerful face and thick black hair I'd seen in photos of old-time chiefs and braves, and an agile, compactly muscled build like a natural halfback. His grandmother had been born in an Indian camp in Heart Butte, northern Montana, in 1910. His family name was actually Mag-dah-kee, which meant "Bird of Prey." Nobody ever used his first name, Robert. One time when we'd been drinking seriously, he'd let it out that he'd had a favorite stepbrother Robert who had died young, and that the name had died with him.
Madbird had grown up near his grandmother's birthplace on what was now the Blackfeet Reservation, legendary for its toughness. I remembered often that when I was eighteen I'd gone away to college in California, but at that same age, he'd been a Marine forward observer in Vietnam.
The two of us had first worked together more than twenty years ago, and steadily for the past nine. He was an ace electrician and carpenter, handling the job in the same cool quick way as everything else. While other guys were standing around talking about what to do, Madbird was getting it done. I'd come to depend on him heavily in a lot of ways. I'd never been quite sure why he liked me, but I had the feeling it was largely because I didn't make any sense to him.
"I was about to go get some pussy, but there ain't any rush," he said. "What's the deal?"
He gazed straight ahead while I gave him a low-voiced, two-minute version of what had happened. When I finished, he shook his head, once.
"I never heard of nothing like with them horses," he said.
"I
'm still having a hard time believing it, but I know what I saw."
He didn't move again or change expression for another minute or so, just kept staring at the mirror behind the bar. You couldn't see much of it because of stacked-up liquor bottles, and what you could see was mostly a murky kaleidoscope of talking heads and gesturing hands behind us. But Madbird's face was in the foreground, looking like a chunk of Mount Rushmore.
"You gonna take on Balcomb?" he finally said.
"I'm hoping I can make him back off. I want to go out there and get some photos of those carcasses. But if I get caught on the property, I'm more fucked than ever."
He nodded slowly. "So you could use a ride. Say, in a electrician's van, so you could hide in back if somebody come along."
"I guess that occurred to me."
He raised his beer and drained it. "Funny thing-I just remembered I left my Hole Hawg at the job, and I'm gonna need it tomorrow."
I exhaled with relief. The ranch was probably dead as a tomb right now, but if we did run into somebody, he had an excuse for being there.
Then there was the deeper truth-I wanted him with me, and he knew it.
"You sure?" I said.
"Hell, yeah. My old lady's probably still out with her girlfriends anyway. But you got to buy the beer."
"Denise, how about a sixer to go," I called to her, dropping a ten on the bar.
Madbird scooped up his change and tossed out another ten.
"Make it two," he said. "Why fuck around?"
When we walked to where Madbird was parked, the evening chill was more noticeable, maybe because of the body heat inside the bar. His van was of about the same vintage as my pickup, one of the four-wheel-drive models Ford had made in the early 1970s. It was packed with emergency equipment and supplies, and saturated with the smell that men in this line of work came to savor: oily tools and musty clothes and the building materials that kept this world running. There was even a foam pad-and a couple of sleeping bags on the floor that I could burrow into if I had to take a dive. I wouldn't be proud of it, but I'd rather live with that than add a trespassing bust to the mix.
We drove out of town past Fort Harrison, angling northwest toward the Rockies' foothills. The moon was on the wax, hanging over the high peaks of the divide. This was another drive that I usually really enjoyed.
"That little prick Kirk come on to me in the bar the other night, trying to pal up," Madbird said. "I flicked my finger crost his ear." He snapped his forefinger off his thumb against the metal dash hard enough to make it ring. "That was the end of that shit."
"You better watch it. You can bet he'll be looking for an excuse to take you out, too."
Madbird gave me a fierce grin that I'd come to know well, and that I could never help associating with scalping.
"He don't have to look far. You ain't the only one been helping himself to something that don't exactly belong to him."
I wasn't entirely surprised. "Yeah? What?"
"You know that Tessa?"
"Sure, sort of." Tessa was Doug Wills's wife-a rangy, unhappy-looking bleached blond stuck living in a trailer out in the middle of nowhere, with a couple of young kids. I'd been pulled off our job one time to go there and fix a jammed bathroom door. The floor had seemed carpeted with dirty diapers and National Enquirers.
"Every so often she gets somebody to sit them kids, and I take her for a drive," Madbird said. "She got some rose-colored panties she hangs out in the wash. That's the signal."
I was surprised now. That explained why those sleeping bags were spread out into a bed.
"Christ on a bike," I said. "I've been passing by her trailer every day myself. I've even seen those panties hanging on the line. I didn't know that was any kind of signal."
"That's 'cause you ain't a Indian. You don't know how to read the trail."
"I guess I could use some lessons."
"You just got one."
"If you're so fucking smart, how come you're letting yourself get dragged into this?"
"Hey, at least I ain't dumb enough to drag in a drunk Indian."
I took the bait, and said the sort of thing you'd better not say unless you'd spent a few thousand hours sweating together.
"I didn't know there was any other kind."
He rumbled with deep gut laughter and answered me with his hands in sign language, fingers flexing and weaving like snakes. I caught the wheel of the veering van and steered it back onto the road.
"What's that mean?" I said.
"Your squaw give lousy head."
We cracked fresh beers, and I realized I was feeling a little better.
14
Madbird switched off the flashlight beam and we stood there in the dark, up to our ankles in the sea of garbage that was the dump at Pettyjohn Ranch. We'd spent a good ten minutes kicking and pawing through it. We'd found some of the plywood that had come from our job. But there wasn't any doubt. The D-8 Cat had been moved again, and the horses were gone-dug out, with junk then spread around to cover the hole. The only sign that they'd been there was a trace of that rotten smell.
That slick bastard Balcomb had long-cocked me again. Maybe he'd come out here to check and seen that hoof sticking up. Maybe he was just playing it safe.
Maybe I hadn't done such a hot job of convincing him I hadn't seen them.
We walked around for several more minutes trying to figure out where the Cat had taken them. But the ground around the dump was scarred with years of its tracks, and the dirt road was hard as concrete. To the northeast lay a big chunk of grazing land, several thousand acres of scrub timber and prairie where nobody ever set foot. I was willing to bet that those carcasses were out there now, dropped into a ravine or shoved up against a hillside and covered over-this time, thoroughly enough so nothing could get to them.
Madbird stopped, like he was listening. I stopped, too, thinking he was hearing a vehicle. But the night was still quiet. That part, at least, was going well.
"I'm wondering if we ain't looking in the wrong direction," he said. "Forget where they went to-what about where they come from? It don't seem likely they got killed right here. They'd of had to be penned up or tethered. If we find that, it might tell us something."
I rubbed my hair in exasperation. With all the brain racking I'd done, that obvious point had slipped right by me.
"I'd guess he took them out in the woods and tied them to trees," I said.
"Then why didn't he just bury them there? It don't make sense he'd haul them back here." He swung his hand southwestward, toward the ranch proper. "I'd say more likely he was in the hay fields. Then he'd of had to move them someplace he could cover them up, and this is the closest."
We started walking in the direction he'd pointed, making an arc through the meadow that surrounded the pit's rim. Within a minute, his flashlight picked out the Cat's tracks, wide ridged lines crushed into the stubble of second-cut hay.
"Well, will you fucking look at that," he said softly. "You know this place pretty good. What's out there?"
The tracks angled away from the road, straight across the field toward the northernmost border of the ranch. I had to think for a few seconds, but then I remembered.
"An old calving shed," I said. "It's another half mile, give or take."
15
Madbird crouched on his heels, his right hand reading the ground-testing its feel, picking up chunks of dirt, crumbling and smelling them. Every half minute or so he'd edge a couple of feet sideways and do it again. I walked along with him, holding the flashlight so he could see.
The shed was the kind of old structure that every good-size ranch had a few of, made of weathered rough-sawn timber and a corrugated metal roof. This one was a sort of frontier post, used for calving in late winter and early spring. Cows going into labor would sometimes seek out the remotest possible places, and the shed was a sanctuary both for them and for the hands out rounding them up, often in blizzards and subzero temperatures. Four walls and a propane heater cou
ld make all the difference. But nobody came here this time of year, and the nearest habitations were the hired hands' trailers, a mile and a half away.
It was a perfect place for dirty work.
The walls were a good ten feet high and the barn doors were wide enough to bring in a midsize truck for equipment and feed. Or a D-8 Cat. It would have been tight, but the dirt floor looked freshly turned, as if the blade had scraped and dragged it over-probably to cover the traces of butchering the horses. What was left was a sour-smelling mash of old hay, manure, and hair, along with some dampness and soil-crusted bits that might have been blood and flesh. But blood and flesh were what this place was all about. Calf birthings left a lot of organic residue. The lucky ones made it with relative ease, but many came harder, and sometimes there was no other choice than to pull the infant out with a come-along. If one calf lost its mother and another cow her calf, it was common practice to skin the dead calf and drape the hide over the live one, in the hope that the bereft cow would adopt and nurse the orphan that smelled like her own. This earth was soaked with decades of that necessary carnage. Trying to separate out the new from the old would have called for a sophisticated technical analysis, and all it stood to prove was that some horses had somehow gotten into the mix.
Madbird crunched a last fistful of dirt, then tossed it away and stood. I followed him outside and we checked the perimeter, until he stopped at several hay bales lying on the ground.
"What are you doing here?" he said to the bales. It did seem odd. Hay was brought in to feed, but not in this season, and there was no reason to drag it around the building's rear.
He took the flashlight from me and moved the beam slowly across the ground, then crisscrossing up the shed's wall. The siding was pine of random widths, mostly ten or twelve inches, run vertically. The wood had dried and shrunk away from the rusting nails over the years, but the workmanship, although rough, was neat-the product of some long-gone cowboy carpenters who hadn't cared about pretty, just decent.
