From the Black Hills

by Judy Troy

  “It’s probably better for Mike to stay busy,” Noleen said. She said it so kindly that Mike’s anger just left him. He sat down and let Donetta take his hand.

  “I just wanted you to have company this morning,” Donetta told him shyly, and that made her seem more like herself again to Mike. She understood how he felt—partly because they were alike. She had told him, as early as their first date, that he was the only person who’d ever made her feel less alone. “Alone in what way?” Mike had asked. “Alone as a person,” she’d said, and he’d felt that she was talking about him, even though she’d been talking about herself.

  They were both more themselves when he walked her outside to her car. “I can’t believe this shit,” Donetta said. “I can’t believe this is real.”

  They were standing next to her silver Geo, in view of the policeman parked across the street, looking at the house through his open window. Donetta put her arms around Mike’s neck. She was small and small-boned; she had long hair streaked blond at the beauty school her mother owned. She was a year behind Mike in school. “That cop is watching us,” Mike told her.

  “I know,” Donetta said, and she put her hand down the front of his jeans for just an instant as she kissed him. After she left, there was just Mike and the policeman, the empty street between them, and Donetta’s silver car speeding away twice as fast as it should have.

  “She’s late for work,” Mike said to the officer as offhandedly as he could before walking across the soaked grass toward the house. He picked up branches from the oak tree his father had planted the year he was born, and he picked up pieces of his mother’s bird feeder. He knew that the policeman was probably watching him, and he felt as if he were in a movie, acting the part of a criminal’s guilty son, even though he didn’t know what he was guilty of.

  Inside, he sat at the table with Noleen Watkins and ate a bowl of cereal. He felt uncomfortable alone with her. His mother had gone upstairs to dress. Noleen, in jeans and a pink shirt, her hair pulled back and her glasses hanging from a chain around her neck, was holding her coffee cup with both hands. “I haven’t seen you in a long time,” she told Mike. “Your mother says that you’re going to South Dakota State in the fall.”

  “I was. I still am, I guess.”

  “I know how you must feel,” she said. “But don’t lose sight of your own plans.”

  “I won’t,” he said, to be polite. Outside, the sun broke through the clouds and streamed in through the window, filling the kitchen with light.

  “It’s easy to give advice, isn’t it?” Noleen said. “Teachers do that too much. It becomes a habit.”

  “I guess it would,” Mike said. After a small silence he asked, “Do you still take classes to the Badlands?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  “Do they have to go through the nature center?”

  “Why? Did you dislike that part?”

  “No. But I liked walking around better,” Mike said.

  “I do, too.”

  They were quiet, and Mike could hear his mother on the phone, upstairs—the anxious tone of her voice and a few stark words: shock, Glenn, police.

  “Donetta and I go out there sometimes,” Mike said, to drown out his mother’s voice. “We sit on the rocks and watch for mountain goats.”

  “Do you?”

  “I like how empty it is.”

  “Why?” Noleen asked.

  “It’s peaceful. It’s just you and the rocks.”

  “And the goats,” Noleen said.

  “Yeah. And the goats.”

  They heard something break upstairs, then Mike’s mother saying, “Damn it!” A moment later she came down to the kitchen.

  “What was it?” Noleen said. “Let me clean it up.”

  Carolyn shook her head. She got out a broom and dustpan and went back upstairs. After that, the light in the kitchen seemed hotter, less bearable. Across from Mike, Noleen moved out of the sun, away from the window.

  LATER in the morning, when it was just Mike and his mother at home, a police officer came and asked more questions. But only Tom DeWitt, who arrived at noon, spoke to them at any length. Wearing a shirt and tie, he sat formally with them in the living room. “In a situation like this,” he said, “you either find the person by now, or you don’t find him for quite a while.”

  “A situation like this?” Carolyn asked.

  “Where the susp—person is intelligent and doesn’t have a record.”

  “You can call him whatever you want,” Carolyn said. “We know what he did. We’re as horrified by it as you are.”

  “I’m just saying, don’t panic each time the phone rings, or when you see a police car out front. We probably won’t have any news for some time.”

  “I don’t know whether that’s good or bad,” she said, looking at Mike; Mike avoided looking at either of them.

  “It’s bad for us,” the agent said. “I don’t know which would be easier for you.” He stood up to leave, then turned to Mike’s mother apologetically. “That was insensitive,” he told her. “Of course it’s hard for you either way.”

  He opened the front door and closed it silently behind him. From the window, Mike watched him observe the house and yard for a few minutes before getting into his car.

  HIS mother spent the early part of the afternoon on the phone; then she and Mike tried to sleep. Mike, in his room, shut the curtains against the sun. In his mind were his mother’s conversations with her parents, up in Mobridge—his father’s parents were no longer alive—and with insurance people and friends. No one could believe what had happened. No one could have predicted it. No one knew what to say. To Mike it seemed as unreal as it did too real. It was like, only worse, the time Donetta’s period didn’t come and she did a home pregnancy test that came out positive. Facts were the scariest things there were. Anything else you could change in your head, somehow, make less bad, but a fact was as definite as an object. It stayed where it was until something else happened—in Donetta’s case, a miscarriage she’d had three weeks later. Mike took her to the doctor himself; no one else ever knew, and Donetta had never wanted to talk about it again, even to Mike. He remembered what those three weeks were like. And they were nothing compared with this.

  He gave up on sleep. He walked past his mother’s closed door and went downstairs to the den. He sat in the armchair his father had sat in to watch television. His father, who liked mysteries, tried to figure out the endings in advance. “The brother of the priest did it,” he’d say to Mike. “I’ll bet you fifty dollars.”

  “I don’t want to bet,” Mike would say, meaning, I don’t give a shit who did it and I don’t see why you do. But now it seemed significant, his father caring so much about complicated plots. It revealed something about him. “If you know enough,” Mike’s history teacher had said once, “everything means something.” They’d been talking about wars and how they got started.

  It was too hard for Mike to stay in the house. He went into the backyard and sat on the picnic table they hadn’t used in years. It was stained with birdshit and littered with twigs. They used to eat out there on summer nights when Mike was small. The worst thing he ever did to his parents was grow up. He didn’t know where that thought came from, but he knew it was true. His parents had been happier when they’d had him to take care of.

  He went back inside. His mother was still in her room, and he wrote her a note: “Be back for dinner. Don’t worry. I rode out to the Schofields’.”

  LEE-ANN came outside as soon as Mike rode up. What he’d started feeling about her last fall—that he counted on her for something important—now seemed so true that the muscles in his legs were quivering, as though he’d ridden his bicycle all the way there instead of his motorcycle.

  “Come inside,” she told him. “I just made coffee.” Neil’s white truck wasn’t around; Ed’s old Corvette was parked near the barn.

  Mike took off his helmet and followed her into the kitchen. She was wearing shorts an
d a T-shirt Mike had given her when he’d outgrown it: WHEATLEY WRESTLING, it said on the back. She used to tease him for wearing it so much. “You just want girls to know you’ve got muscles,” she used to say. From the living room he could hear The Little Mermaid playing on the VCR.

  “Janna’s almost asleep,” Lee-Ann said. “Sit down. I didn’t think you’d come today.”

  “I know. I can’t stay long.”

  She poured him coffee with a lot of milk—the only way he could drink it and like the taste. She sat next to him at the table, and when he crossed his legs, jiggling his foot up and down, she reached over and touched his boot. “Don’t be nervous,” she said.

  “Okay. I mean, I’m not, really.”

  “We kept thinking about you last night,” she told him. “We wondered if you were all right, if you could sleep.”

  He hated that she’d said we. Before, he thought, she would have said I. “I slept some,” Mike said, more conscious than he wanted to be of the shape of her breasts under the white T-shirt. He wasn’t ashamed of looking, but he didn’t want to be too obvious about it. He made himself look away, at the squares of light on the clean kitchen floor. “My father was having an affair with her,” he said then. “Big surprise, right?”

  “I guess we all figured that, after what he did.”

  “I should have known before that,” Mike said. “I should have known something was going on.”

  “Why?” Lee-Ann asked.

  Mike looked at her, feeling his face get hot. “You know,” he said. “You can tell when there is. People act different around each other.”

  She hesitated, then said gently, “You’ve got too much on your mind. You can’t think about everything at once. You have too many things happening to you.”

  Mike felt foolish then, and looked out the window at Route 8 and the distant hills.

  “I’m glad you came, though,” Lee-Ann said. “I wanted you to know that you could come over and talk. I mean, we’re friends. We can talk about things, right?”

  “We are talking,” Mike said.

  “I mean, really talk. Like about how you feel and what’s going on in your life. You’re not the most talkative person in the world.”

  “I’m better at other things,” Mike said, and as soon as he said it he knew that he’d struck the wrong note.

  “That’s because those other things are easier,” Lee-Ann told him quietly. In the next room The Little Mermaid ended, and she went in to see if Janna was asleep. Mike could hear the videotape rewinding, and the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hallway. When she returned, she poured herself more coffee. “Did I make yours too strong?” she asked Mike. He hadn’t drunk any.

  “No,” he said. “I forgot about it.”

  He watched her remove her barrette, which caused her soft hair to fall against her face. “So did your mother know about your father’s affair?” she asked him.

  “Not for very long.” He told her part of his mother’s story, leaving out the fact that she’d asked Mary Hise to stay in her job a few weeks longer. That had become a secret the moment Mike had heard it.

  “Why do you think your mother just didn’t leave him?” Lee-Ann asked.

  “Because she thought it was over.”

  “But she knew that it had happened.”

  “I know,” Mike said. “Maybe she just didn’t care about him enough for it to matter.”

  “Maybe it was the opposite. Maybe she loved him so much that she was willing to forgive him. Or maybe she just understood how it could happen. Maybe she understood that it would be natural, almost, for people who were around each other a lot.” Lee-Ann averted her eyes from Mike’s then, and looked down at her coffee.

  “For people who were attracted to each other, you mean,” Mike said softly. Lee-Ann didn’t look at him. “I don’t think my mother would understand about that,” he said then. “I don’t think she loved him a whole lot, either.”

  “It’s hard to tell about a marriage from the outside,” Lee-Ann said.

  “How outside could I have been?”

  But Lee-Ann was watching out the window now, as Neil and Ed came up the long driveway in Neil’s white truck. There was a wooden structure in the back of it. “That’s an old lean-to they bought,” she said. “From somebody out near Red Shirt.”

  She stood up then, and Mike did, too, and there was a moment before he opened the door when Lee-Ann was close enough for him to smell her clean hair and the lotion on her skin. Neither of them moved. Finally Mike said, “Thanks for the coffee,” and let his arm brush against hers as if by accident. Then he walked out into the bright afternoon, keeping himself from turning around to see her again.

  NEIL and Ed stopped talking to each other when Mike walked up.

  “I’m sorry, Mike,” Ed said. “I found out this morning.”

  “Did you hear it on the news?”

  “A neighbor told me. He heard it on the radio.”

  “Has anything else happened?” Neil asked.

  “No. I mean, he hasn’t been caught yet.” It was a weird thing for Mike to hear himself say. “I mean, found.”

  The three of them stood there, looking at the old, musty-smelling lean-to. Mike had often heard Neil and Ed say that they would have been happier a hundred years ago, when the West was a frontier—at least more than it was now. But it was hard for Mike to imagine that the past could have given them more than the present did.

  “I can’t stay long,” Mike said to Neil. “But I thought we could fix that fence.”

  “Screw the fence,” Neil said. “Ed and I can do that.”

  “I hate sitting around,” Mike told him. “I’d rather do something.”

  NEIL and Mike drove out to the farthest pasture, beyond which were pine-covered hills and the late-afternoon sun shining through the tops of the trees. Neil asked how Mike’s mother was.

  “Tired,” Mike said. He told him part of what he had told Lee-Ann. He also told him about the police asking questions, and about how Tom DeWitt wanted to think like Mike’s father.

  “Good luck,” Neil said.

  “I know.”

  They were riding along the fence line, with the windows down, the road less dusty after last night’s rain. “I shouldn’t have said that,” Neil said. “Your father usually seemed all right. But I saw him not too long ago at the bar in Hermosa, giving the waitress a bad time.”

  “About what?” Mike asked.

  “Not coming over to the table enough times, or not talking to him enough—something like that.”

  “He gets strange sometimes,” Mike said, which was such an understatement, given the circumstances, that he stopped talking and looked out the window.

  “But then I didn’t know him well,” Neil said.

  He parked on the roadside, and he and Mike got out with their tools. They worked without speaking—Neil faster, as usual, and Mike feeling sluggish, as if he were moving through water. He felt “thick,” as Donetta would say, explaining a sensation she had once in a while, lying in bed, when her limbs felt as thick and heavy as logs. “You know why I think that happens?” she’d said to Mike. “Because in my mind I’m trying to fly away from myself, and my body is telling me I can’t go. I’m stuck here. Extra gravity is making sure I stay.”

  “Did my father ever talk about me?” Mike said. He listened to himself say it, conscious of the past tense, and thinking that his voice sounded as fake as it did on the answering machine at home: “The Newlins can’t come to the phone right now. Please leave a message, and we’ll call you back.”

  “No,” Neil said. “Not that I remember.”

  They kept working. Mike, kneeling down clumsily, snagged his sleeve on a rusty wire and tried to free it too quickly. He cut his arm pretty badly—more like a rip than a cut.

  “Let me see it,” Neil said. Mike rolled up his torn sleeve, and Neil went back to the truck for antiseptic and a bandage. “Get a tetanus shot tomorrow,” he told Mike.

  “I go
t one last fall,” Mike said. “Dad makes me get them more often than I need.” He said it without thinking, and suddenly he was trying to keep from crying. He walked away from Neil, toward the wide field beyond Neil’s ranch, where at dusk there were almost always ten white-tailed deer. He tried to get control of himself by watching for them now. He didn’t know why he was crying. No one had died except somebody he hardly knew. And what his father had done he’d done to her.

  “Mike?” Neil said, behind him, not coming closer. He finished the fence himself and waited until Mike walked back toward him before he put the tools in the truck. “Just so you know,” he told Mike, “we can help out easily enough, if money’s a problem.”

  “Okay,” Mike said. “Thanks.”

  The sun was setting by then, and as they drove the few miles back to the house Mike fell asleep for a second, dreaming that his father had set fire to the lean-to with somebody inside it. Neil woke him. “It’s all right, Mike,” he said. “It was just a bad dream.”

  AT the house, in the kitchen, with Lee-Ann in the next room with Janna, Mike called his mother. “I’m leaving now,” he told her. “I didn’t mean to stay this late.”

  Still, he took as long as he could to leave. He drove the tractor into the pole barn and checked on five baby rabbits, born the week before, under the Schofields’ porch. Finally he put on his helmet and started his motorcycle. It was twelve miles to the Wheatley water tower, then half a mile more to Mike’s house. He’d been riding his motorcycle for two years, but tonight was the first time he’d minded the things he’d heard older riders complain of: bugs, wind shears, cars that followed too closely.

  By the time he got home, he was like somebody thirty-five or forty, he thought, who couldn’t feel the satisfaction of speed anymore, who just rode a motorcycle to get someplace he didn’t want to go.

  FIVE

  AT nine o’clock on Saturday morning Mike drove to his father’s office to unlock the door for an insurance agent named Stuart Wells, from Rapid City. Mike didn’t know anything about his father’s business, except that it wasn’t very profitable.