I stood up and lowered my hand down by my plate, still holding my napkin. “I’ll be back in a minute,” I said.
“Where you going?” Bernadine said.
I picked up my coffee cup. “Refill,” I said.
“Those guys don’t bother me. Leave them alone.”
“That’s a good attitude. There are people in this world who aren’t worth spitting on. You’re absolutely correct.”
The drunks weren’t expecting me. Their faces were bloodless in the artificial light, like white balloons that had started to go soft, the alcohol they had probably been drinking all night fouling their hearts and making their eyes go out of focus. “Hi,” I said. There was a windup clock by the serving window and you could hear it clicking in the silence. “Can y’all tell me the best way to Billings?”
They wanted to look me straight in the face, but they couldn’t keep their attention off my right hand and the napkin that covered the oblong object I held in my palm. I turned my gaze on the man who had made the others laugh. He had a double chin and was wiping at his nose with a paper napkin, like he had a head cold and an excuse for being gutless. He pointed at the window. “The highway is right there. It goes north to Billings and south to Cheyenne,” he said.
“My vision isn’t good. Can a couple of you go outside and point to it? My friend and me don’t want to get lost and have to come back in here. Just walk outside and stand in the light and point, then we’ll get in our car and drive away.”
“What are you talking about?” the fat man said. He was breathing through his nose and there was a shine on his upper lip.
I moved my right hand onto the counter, the napkin making a tent over my knuckles. “I’m just asking two of y’all to point out the road to Crow Agency and Billings. All four of you don’t have to go outside, just two of you. Y’all decide who goes out and who stays. It would be a big favor to us.”
“We were telling a joke, but it wasn’t about you,” another man said.
“You’re sure?” I said.
“Yeah. I mean yes, sir.”
“I’m glad to learn that. But I still need you to show me the way to Billings, because darned if I can figure it out on my own.”
The fat man walked to the window and pointed. “There’s the goddamn highway. Is that good enough?”
“No, not really.” I raised my hand from the counter, the napkin still draped across my knuckles.
“All right, you win,” another man said. “Come on, Bill. Give the man what he wants. We were out of line. If it’ll make him happy, let’s go outside and put an end to this.”
“I appreciate that,” I said. “Tell you what, I’ve changed my mind. We’re going to stay here and have a piece of pie.” I turned toward the waitress and pulled the napkin off my hand. “This spoon has water stains on it, ma’am. Could I have a clean one?”
We went down on the Powder River, where those blind fish live way back under the cuts in the bank. The air was cold and damp and smoky from a stump fire, the sky black and sprinkled with stars. We went into a shack that had no door and no glass in the windows among a grove of cottonwoods, and lay down on some gunnysacks and listened to the trout night feed in a long riffle that came right down the center of the stream, as shiny as a ribbon of oil under the moon.
She had hardly spoken since we left the truck stop. I took her hand in mine and said her fingernails made me think of tiny seashells. “Are you a mermaid?” I said.
“You could have gotten both of us hurt back there,” she said.
“I don’t read it that way.”
“Then you don’t know very much about Wyoming.”
“A man who abuses a woman is a moral and physical coward. That kind of man cuts bait as soon as you stand up to him. Truth is, I didn’t feel very good about what I did back there.” But I could tell that was not what was really on her mind.
“At the War Bonnet you split a paper match with your thumbnail,” she said.
“Yeah, I do that sometimes.” I lay back on the gunnysacks and watched a flock of birds lift out of the cottonwoods and fly low across the water, their wings drumming like they were made of leather. No, they were drumming as fast and loud as my heart. It’s funny how your past always trails after you, no matter where you go.
“Where were you in prison?” she said.
“A P-farm down in Texas. I wrote a bad check for thirty-seven dollars. The gunbull sent me to get the water can off the truck and I took off through a swamp and never looked back. The mud pulled my shoes right off my feet. I rode under a freight car plumb to Beaumont.”
She propped herself up on one elbow and looked me in the face. “Are you telling me the truth?”
“Who makes up lies about being an escaped convict?”
She put her fingers on my throat to feel my pulse and looked straight into my eyes. I could still smell the cherry milk shake on her breath. “You’re no criminal,” she said.
“I don’t think so either.”
She laid her head on my chest. I put my hand under her jacket and spread my fingers across her back. I thought I could feel her heart beating against my palm.
“Buddy Elgin and me are going to get us some land up in Montana,” I said. “We’ve got a spot picked out near a place called Swan Lake. The lake was scooped out of the land by a big glacier, right at the foot of this mountain called Swan Peak. The trout in the lake are big as your arm. It’s country that’s still new, where you can be anything you want.”
She felt the tips of my fingers, then felt between them and around the edges of the joints. “Did you ever pick cotton?”
“From cain’t-see to cain’t-see. Till my fingers bled on the boll and then some,” I replied.
“My father cropped on shares and preached on the side. He called me a hoochie-coochie girl once and I got mad at him. He explained a hoochie-coochie girl had music inside her. He used to preach out of what he called the Book of Ezra. He said before the Flood, people ate the flowers from the fields, just like animals grazing. He said the wind blew through the grass and made music like a harp does.”
“I heard about people digging up dinosaurs that had flowers in their stomachs. Maybe that’s what your father was talking about. It was an article in National Geographic.”
I heard her laugh. She curled against me and kissed the top of my hand and folded it against her breast. That’s when I saw headlight beams bouncing through the trees and heard a diesel truck grinding down the dirt track, a car with a blown muffler following 30 yards behind. There was a man in a fedora on the running board of the truck; he was waving to the car to close up the gap, like they’d found what they were looking for.
I know the differences between kinds of people. The drunks back at the truck stop worked at jobs that anyone could do and went to church on Sunday with wives who had been a hundred pounds thinner in high school, and woke up every morning wondering who they really were. The man in the fedora and the two men getting out of the diesel and the three getting out of the car were guys who avoided victimhood by becoming victimizers. Hollywood actors could stare down people till they blinked. These guys could make people wet their pants.
The man who was obviously in charge was at least six-foot-five and wore a heavy cotton shirt and a yellow wool vest buttoned to his throat and a tall-crown Stetson hat of the kind that Tom Mix wore. A badge holder with a gold badge in it was hung over his belt. “You two get your asses out here,” he said.
I went out first, in front of Bernadine. I heard the muted sounds of moss-covered rocks knocking together under the surface of the river, like the earth wasn’t hung together proper and was starting to come apart. The windshields of both vehicles were clear of dust where the wipers had scraped back and forth across the glass. Inside the car, sitting in the passenger seat, I could see Buddy Elgin staring back at me, one eye puffed shut, swollen as tight as a duck’s egg.
The man in the Stetson pulled the keys from the ignition of the woody. He looked at Bernadine
and stuck his finger through the key ring. “You know what grand auto can cost you in this state?” he said.
“Mr. Wakefield let me use it,” I said.
“He says you took off with it.”
“That’s not true. You can ask at the War Bonnet. The bartender saw him give me the keys.”
“That’s Mr. Wakefield setting up there in his Cadillac on the highway. You want to walk up there and call him a liar to his face?”
I knew how it was going to go. I’d been there before. I wondered how bad they had hurt Buddy. The man in the fedora opened the passenger door of the car and pulled Buddy onto the ground. Buddy’s hands were cuffed behind him and his shirt was unbuttoned on his chest. He wasn’t wearing his boots and in the moonlight the toes of his white socks were soggy with blood.
“We were invited to Mr. Wakefield’s ranch,” Bernadine said. “He probably thought we stole his car because we didn’t go straight there. Ask him.”
The man with the badge hooked me up, crimping the steel tongues tight in the locks, bunching the skin and veins on my wrists. He turned toward Bernadine. “If I was you, I’d go with the flow, girl,” he said.
He shoved me headlong into the back seat of the car, then picked up Buddy by his hair and the back of his shirt and did the same thing with him. I saw Bernadine’s face slide by the window as we drove away.
They didn’t take us to a regular jail. It was a basement under a brick warehouse, with windows like gun slits that had bars high up on the wall, and a toilet without a door in one corner. The man in the fedora gave Buddy back his boots, but his toes had been stomped so bad he could hardly walk after he got them back on. At noon a man in a filling station uniform with greased hair that was combed straight back and a face like a hatchet brought us a quart jar of water and a hamburger each. He refused to speak no matter how many times we asked him what we were being charged with. “What did y’all do with Bernadine?” I said.
“We didn’t do anything,” he said. “You’d better not be saying we did, either.”
He went up a set of wood steps and locked the metal door behind him. Buddy was sitting in the corner, his knees drawn up in front of him. He drank from the water jar but didn’t touch his hamburger. “They’re studying on it,” he said.
“Studying on what?”
“What they’re going to do with us.”
I unwrapped the paper from my hamburger and started to eat, but I couldn’t swallow. “Mr. Wakefield set me up, didn’t he?”
“His wife flew out late last night to visit her mother in Denver. He thought you were going to bring the girl out to the ranch. I heard him yelling at Tyler. He was mad as hell.”
“About what?”
“He wanted his way with her. What do you think?”
I couldn’t believe I’d been so dumb. I’d been on the drift since I was fifteen. You learn a lot of lessons if you’re young and on the drift. If you’re thumbing, you find out your first day that only blue-collar people and people of color will pick you up. A rich man never picks you up, and I mean never, unless he’s drunk or on the make. That’s just the way they are. I’d gone and forgotten the first human lesson I’d ever learned.
Suppertime came and went, but nobody brought us any more food or water; if we wanted a drink, we had to dip it out of the toilet tank with the jar. The sun was a red ember inside a rain cloud when we heard somebody unlock the metal door and come down the steps, one booted foot at a time. I hoped it was Mr. Wakefield. I wanted to tell him what I thought of him, and expose him for the cheap Hollywood fraud he was. But that was not all I was thinking. I was drowning in all the memories that traveled with me everywhere I went. At age fifteen I was sent to Gatesville Training School for Boys. Nobody knows the kind of place Gatesville was. People would run from the stories I could tell. That’s why even today there are nights I keep myself awake because I don’t want to give my dreams power over me.
Our visitor was not Mr. Wakefield. It was the man in the Stetson; under the overhead light his hat darkened his face and seemed to give him a permanent scowl. He was dressed in an unpressed brown suit and was wearing a spur on one boot, and I could see tiny wisps of hair on the rowel. There was no sign of his gold badge.
“You,” he said, pointing at Buddy. “Upstairs.”
“What for?” Buddy said.
“Because you look like you have more than three brain cells.”
“Anything I do includes R.B.”
“Your window of opportunity is shrinking by the second, boy. Don’t misjudge the gravity of your situation.”
Buddy followed the man in the Stetson up the steps, trying not to flinch each time his weight came down inside his boot.
“What about Bernadine? What about her? Did y’all leave her out there on the river? What’d y’all do?” I said.
I got no answer. The man in the Stetson clicked off the light and the room dropped into darkness. An hour later the man in the filling station uniform came and took me upstairs and through the back door into an alley where a pickup truck was idling. Buddy was sitting in the bed, his shoulders hunched over, one eye still swollen shut. His guitar and duffel bag were next to him, and so was my old cardboard suitcase, a rope holding the broken latch together. Tyler was talking to the man in the Stetson by the side door of the building. Tyler was smoking a cigarette and listening and not saying anything, his face pointed down at the walkway. The man in the filling station uniform told me to get in the back of the truck. “Where we going?” I said.
“It’s okay, R.B.,” Buddy said.
“The heck it is. Where’s Bernadine?” I said.
He didn’t answer. Tyler dropped his cigarette on the walkway and stepped on it and approached the truck, looking right through Buddy and me.
“Buddy, you’ve got to tell me what’s going on,” I said.
“We’re leaving town,” he said. “If that doesn’t suit you, go back to that damn ranch and see what happens.”
I hadn’t believed Buddy would ever speak to me like that. I thought someone else had stepped inside his skin. The Buddy I knew was never afraid. He had been with the First Marine Division at the Frozen Chosin; he’d never let a friend down and never let himself be undone by finks and ginks and company pinks. If you were his bud, he’d stay at your side, guns blazing, the decks awash, till the ship went down.
I climbed onto the truck bed and pulled up the tailgate and snapped it into place. “Is she hurt?” I said.
When he looked up at me, I knew they had busted him up inside, probably in the ribs and kidneys, maybe with a phone book or a rolled-up Sunday newspaper or a sock full of sand. “The guy in the Stetson?” I said.
“He’s an amateur. They all are,” Buddy said.
“Are you going to tell me what happened to Bernadine?”
“Use your imagination.”
I tried to make him look into my face, but he wouldn’t.
Tyler got in the passenger seat of the pickup and the man in the Stetson clanked the transmission into gear and drove us out to the train yards, both men silhouetting in the cab when lightning leaped through the clouds. I suspected rain was swirling across the hills and mesas in the east, washing the sage clean and sweeping through the outcroppings of rock layered above the canyons, threading in rivulets down to streambeds that were braided with sand the color of cinnamon. But for me the land was stricken, the air stained with the stench of desiccated manure blowing out of the feeder lots and the offal and animal hair burning in the furnaces at the rendering plant.
Tyler and the man in the Stetson watched us while we threw our gear inside a boxcar and climbed in after it. “I’m sorry about this, boys,” Tyler said.
“Like hell you are, old man,” I said.
Buddy sat against the far wall, away from the door, staring into space with his eye that wasn’t swollen shut.
“You made a deal with them?” I said.
“They’ve got an antisedition law in Wyoming,” he said. “I’m not going to
jail because I don’t know when to get out of town.”
“We’re Judases,” I said.
“Call it what you want. I’m not the one who went off with a girl in the boss man’s car and brought a shitstorm down on our heads, plus—”
“Plus what?”
“Why do you think Clint Wakefield took his Caddy down to the river? He wanted to try out a colored girl without having any social complications. You gave him total power over both us and her, so you stop trying to rub my nose in it.”
My face felt as though it had been stung with bumblebees. I couldn’t wait for the boxcars to shake and jostle together and begin moving out of the yard, carrying us into the darkness of the countryside, away from the electrified ugliness of the cattle pens and loading chutes and rusty tanker cars and brick warehouses and gravel and railroad ties streaked with feces that for me had come to define Sheridan, Wyoming.
We crossed into Montana and went through a long valley backdropped by sawtooth mountains that were purple against the dawn, and you could see the grass in the valley flattening as green as wheat in the wind. The wheels of the boxcar were clicking louder and louder as the locomotive gained speed, and I thought about Bernadine and her father and the story she had told me about the wind blowing through a field that was like a grass harp and I wondered if I would ever see her again.
The train followed the Yellowstone River and by midmorning we were climbing the Continental Divide, over 6000 feet high, the hillsides littered with giant broken chunks of yellow rock and spiked with ponderosa pine and Douglas fir trees, the wheels of the boxcar screeching and sparking on the rails as we slid down the west side of the divide into Butte. We caught a hotshot straight into Missoula and thumbed a ride up to Flathead Lake, where you could make twelve to fifteen dollars a day picking cherries on a ladder in orchards that fanned up from the lake onto the hillsides and gave you a fine view of water so green and clear you could count the pebbles on the bottom.
The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 Page 13
