“Okay. Let me get my things.”
They walked back to the stairs. Hogeland climbed up and Beau heard the hydraulics whine. The stairs started to fold.
Beau reached for the edge of the door, caught it, and pulled, and his fingers slipped off the metal.
Hogeland waved to him.
“Doc—there’s nowhere to go! For chrissake!”
“Yes, there is,” he said. The door whined upward and closed with a hissing snap. The latch turned and set.
Beau slammed the fuselage with the flat of his hand. Under the glistening skin, he felt the systems come to life. The turbines started to whine.
He raised his hand to slam it down on the blue skin and held it there, then he stepped back away from the accelerating blast from the engine nacelles.
He saw the old man at the controls, his face green in the uplight from the control panel. He smiled at Beau. Beau backed up the slope, shielding his face from the blast.
The blue jet was vibrating with restrained power, the turbines beginning to howl, a piercing shriek rising as Hogeland held the wheel brakes. The halogen light in the nose flicked on, and a mile-long beam cut through the darkness. Far off down the two-lane road, a pair of green eyes glittered in the sudden light, blinked twice, and disappeared to the side of the road.
The blue jet was moving now, rolling, gaining speed.
Hogeland shoved the throttles forward, and the blast drove Beau backward, staggering in the wash, his eyes burning with the smell of avgas and stinging from the dust, and the jet was a hundred yards away now, the searchlight jerking as the wheels thumped and bumped over the uneven roadway.
There was a deafening howl and the nose lifted, and the jet was suddenly free, and rising, and Beau felt a strange exhilaration as it cleared the rise and shot skyward, two bright blue flames marking the jet exhaust and the red winglights blinking.
Hogeland pulled the nose up. The thunder of the engines shook the hills, crested into a terrible hammering roar, faded as the little plane climbed into the sky. A quicksilver shimmer of moonlight arced across the fuselage. The twin blue fires merged into one.
Beau watched it climb, feeling the rumble of the engines in his chest, the little jet lifting up through the cloud-rack, higher and higher, disappearing into the eastern sky, and the thunder rumbled away. Beau watched the tiny pinpoint of blue fire as it climbed away to the east, still rising, shrinking away to a needle of faint light.
He stood there for a long time, straining to follow the blue glimmer, listening to the sound of the jets as they dwindled to a distant rumor and faded away. In a while, there was nothing left but a soft wind in the grasses and the jet was a wisp of blue fire in a field of stars. Then it was gone.
The horse ducked its head, tugging at the reins, trying to reach the sweetgrass. Gabriel released the reins and slid carefully from the saddle, fighting the dizziness and the pain. Under the broken moon, the black hide of the animal had a silvery sheen. The saddle smelled of soap and neat’s-foot oil. He found two more Percodans in his shirt pocket and swallowed them with water from the canteen. The setter trotted up to his knee and whined softly. Gabriel leaned down to run his fingers through the dog’s fur. The dog settled down in the grass, panting. Gabriel poured some water into his palm and offered it to the setter. The dog drank greedily, then wandered off down the hillside again.
Gabriel looked back at the starry night.
The little jet was gone now. Even the echoes of its ascent had faded into the night wind. Gabriel looked back down the long slope to the highway. In the moonlight the asphalt surface seemed covered in a shiny skin, silvery, like a lizardskin belt. The big man was trudging away down the middle of it, his head down.
It was the sergeant. McAllister. Gabriel knew him somehow. Charlie Tallbull had said the sergeant was in Los Angeles, that he was coming back in the little blue jet with the doctor. With the Walking Wolf. The man was limping badly, favoring his right leg.
Gabriel drank some more water and eased himself back into the saddle. He prodded the horse into a walk, easing him down a coulee. The horse’s hooves thumped on the clay. The sweet-grass swept along the horse’s barrel as he cantered up another rise, chuffing a little, the snaffle-bit jingling, a faint bell-like ringing. At the top of the rise, he slowed her to a walk. The cop was still in the roadway, a dark shadow against the metallic sheen of the highway. Every line of the man’s body spoke of weariness. His limp was getting worse, and he was hearing nothing around him, his thoughts apparently turned inward. He could be taken now. Easily.
The blue jet had gone straight up into the night. Something about the climb had seemed final, fatal.
Gabriel hoped that it was. It was too easy a death, but it was an ending. Charlie Tallbull had the woman, and now the police would have to deal with it. Tallbull would see to that. Tallbull had also promised to get Gabriel some medical help. He’d given him this horse, a Tennessee Walker, one of the best. By now, the county would be full of men looking for him. Maybe even some of his old friends from the Section.
He settled the horse into a slow walk, breathing in the sweet-grass scent and the chill purity of the night air, the sharp clear smell of the horse, a good smell. He thought about the man down there, trudging along the Lizardskin road, about what should be done with him.
Beau had walked a long way down 212 when he looked up to his left and saw the slope of the battlefield on his left. He turned away from the pavement and climbed up the hillside to the wire fence that marked the monument land.
The stone pillar was a half-mile away. The little gathering of white markers seemed to glow in the moonlight. He climbed over the fence. The sagebrush rustled around his boots, and the sweetgrass smell was everywhere in the air. It took him awhile to walk up the coulee. He was breathing hard by the time he cleared the crest and walked up to the low wrought-iron picket fence that enclosed the hillside where the last of the soldiers had died.
To his right down the hillside, a stand of trees sheltered the formal rows of the military cemetery. A white flagpole rose above the treeline, empty. Each evening they took the flag down, and now and then someone would play the Last Post.
He leaned against the rail and read some of the names in the dim light. Here was Boston Custer’s stone, and Autie Reed’s. Farther up the slope, in the center of a cluster of stones, a marker with a black shield carried Custer’s name. Most of the stones read simply:
U.S. SOLDIER
7th CAVALRY
FELL HERE
JUNE 25 1876
From this sad gathering of stones the land descended toward the valley of the Bighorn River. More white stones were scattered here and there in the grassy decline. Beyond the river there were a few rectangles of yellow light from the little houses around Crow Agency. Down in the valley, the river shimmered under the cottonwoods. Beau felt a sweet sadness for all the men who had ridden over and fallen under this country, the long grass parting to take them in and closing over their heads again, seamless and eternal.
He pushed himself up and walked down the stone path toward the park building. He was halfway down the path when he heard something moving in the dry grass behind him.
He turned and watched as a dog came bounding down through the tallgrass. It was an old dog, some kind of setter. It padded up to him and sniffed him in a friendly way. He crouched down to ruffle its red fur and stroke its ears.
“Hello, pup. Out for a midnight wander?”
It whined a bit, then left him, trotting away back up the hillside toward the crest and the coulees that lay beyond it. He watched it as it rambled up the walkway past the monument fence. It reached the top and bounded away down the other side and was gone.
He looked that way for a while, wondering where it had come from and who owned it, but he saw only the soft hills under the broken moon, and the dry grasses moving in the scented wind, and the cloud shadows drifting over moonlit valleys and gliding down the rolling slopes, and rising again into the higher hi
lls until they passed away into the distance where the curving earth and the night sky blended into a shining mist. The empty land was all around him, and a cold wind on his cheek, and the half-heard sound of a horse and rider, and suddenly, tired beyond belief, chilled and alone, he turned and walked away toward the yellow lights of Crow Agency.
Gabriel watched him go. He was thinking about his own name. There was a river, down on the New Mexico border, east of the Sangre de Cristo range. It was a fork of the Arkansas. It ran through very bad country. The first white men who had traveled it, French trappers, had found it so hard, they named it the Purgatoire, which means purgatory in English. When the Americans came, they heard Purgatoire and pronounced it Picketwire. He had been named for the river. The name was either a curse or a kind of prophecy.
Now the sergeant was almost down to the banks of the Bighorn River. The lights of Crow Agency showed through the cottonwoods.
Gabriel turned away, kicked the horse into a slow walk.
It was over.
Let it end.
For Linda Mair,
who crossed the Missouri with me,
and brought me to the bluffs above Chamberlain,
and showed me how to see.
CARSTEN STROUD,
Thunder Beach, 1991.
Also by Carsten Stroud
Sniper’s Moon
Close Pursuit
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CARSTEN STROUD has written two books of nonfiction, including the New York Times bestseller Close Pursuit, and in 1988 was given the City and Regional Magazine Award for writing excellence. Sniper’s Moon, his first novel, won the Ellis Award for Best First Novel from the Crime Writers of Canada.
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