Lone Creek Read online

  Lone Creek

  Neil McMahon

  To Kuskay Sakaye, real-life Madbird.

  His wife, Susan; and my wife, Kim.

  The Atkins and Beer clans of Helena, Montana. Jim Crumley.

  And thousands of other great souls of this place and time,

  whose lives I have robbed to make this story.

  Gonna tell you how it is, cowboy, not how it could be.

  —BRAWL-PRECIPITATING STATEMENT OVERHEARD BY ERIC “THE DOCTOR” JOHNSON IN A ROUGHNECK BAR NEAR WOLF POINT, MONTANA

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Part One

  One

  I’d only ever seen Laurie Balcomb a few times, usually…

  Two

  A mile farther on, the hay fields gave way to…

  Three

  The Pettyjohn Ranch’s dump was a sea of trash the…

  Four

  The ranch roads were all rough and this one was…

  Five

  By the time I got to the ranch’s main road,…

  Six

  The ranch’s original headquarters consisted mainly of a huge old…

  Seven

  Wesley Balcomb came into sight in a few more minutes,…

  Eight

  Driving into Helena from the north was usually something I…

  Nine

  After maybe forty-five minutes, I heard somebody come walking down…

  Ten

  By the end of the summer that Celia was living…

  Eleven

  Sarah Lynn Olsen and I had been sweethearts in high…

  Twelve

  My father had left me a number of his possessions,…

  Part Two

  Thirteen

  Main Street in Helena was also known as Last Chance…

  Fourteen

  Madbird switched off the flashlight beam and we stood there…

  Fifteen

  Madbird crouched on his heels, his right hand reading the…

  Sixteen

  I ended up using all the two dozen frames in…

  Seventeen

  Indian ways, Irish blood, and alcohol don’t necessarily make for…

  Eighteen

  I got into my truck, shaking like I had after…

  Nineteen

  As I started the pickup’s engine, I couldn’t help glancing…

  Twenty

  I wasn’t in any hurry to get home to my…

  Twenty-One

  When I started coming to, I seemed to be hanging…

  Part Three

  Twenty-Two

  A distant sound jolted me awake, too dazed to grasp…

  Twenty-Three

  “I got another feeling that ain’t just coincidence,” Madbird said,…

  Twenty-Four

  “How’s it looking?” I said.

  Twenty-Five

  We took my bloody clothes from last night to a…

  Twenty-Six

  I didn’t think someone bent on harm would broadcast his…

  Twenty-Seven

  Saint Helena Cathedral was a lovely Gothic structure built in…

  Twenty-Eight

  Laurie hadn’t told me much that I didn’t already know.

  Twenty-Nine

  The Red Meadow was a no-frills blue-collar bar near the…

  Thirty

  Elmer came in a few minutes later, wearing the pearl…

  Thirty-One

  I got back to my place about five o’clock, parking…

  Thirty-Two

  I stashed the Victor in a stand of quaking aspen…

  Thirty-Three

  The hired hands’ trailers lay deeper into ranch property, but…

  Thirty-Four

  As I rode to Helena I started getting into a…

  Thirty-Five

  When the south end of Last Chance Gulch had been…

  Thirty-Six

  When I got down to the empty wet street, my…

  Thirty-Seven

  After Gary’s cruiser and the tow truck disappeared into the…

  Part Four

  Thirty-Eight

  After Laurie and I had gone about a mile, it…

  Thirty-Nine

  I warned Laurie to be ready to scramble—if we saw…

  Forty

  We drove to the town of Lincoln, about an hour…

  Forty-One

  I awoke to the sound of a woman weeping. That…

  Forty-Two

  When dawn broke a couple of hours later, Laurie had…

  Forty-Three

  John Doe took hold of Laurie’s hair and pressed the…

  Forty-Four

  We found Laurie a hiding place up in a rock…

  Forty-Five

  We sat John Doe on the ground, pulled off his…

  Forty-Six

  Laurie and I split off from Madbird, with him and…

  Forty-Seven

  The ranch that surrounded Kirk’s place was owned by a…

  Forty-Eight

  When I got into the pickup truck, Laurie gave me…

  Forty-Nine

  We drove on south to Great Falls, stopping at a…

  Fifty

  I was falling into the sleep that my whole being…

  Fifty-One

  I left Great Falls in a state of cold euphoria,…

  Fifty-Two

  But by the time I got to the red rock…

  Part Five

  Fifty-Three

  I kept on driving after that, like a ghost haunting…

  Fifty-Four

  I waited until dusk to go to Madbird’s place, figuring…

  Fifty-Five

  When I got back to Madbird’s house, he made it…

  Fifty-Six

  I hadn’t used my journalism training to speak of in…

  Fifty-Seven

  A little before ten o’clock that night, I did something…

  Fifty-Eight

  It was getting toward midnight when the lights in Wesley…

  Fifty-Nine

  We made sure Balcomb wasn’t carrying any other weapons, then…

  Sixty

  I drove with headlights out again to the shed where…

  Sixty-One

  Reuben and I caused quite a stir when we showed…

  Sixty-Two

  I spent a couple of minutes waiting out front for…

  Sixty-Three

  Sitting behind the wheel of my good old pickup again…

  Sixty-Four

  I called Bill’s Bail Bonds first thing, apologized to Bill…

  Sixty-Five

  I walked into Sarah Lynn’s office at twenty minutes to…

  Sixty-Six

  The next day was another of those autumn beauties, with…

  Sixty-Seven

  I’d called Madbird earlier to tell him I was temporarily…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by Neil McMahon

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PART ONE

  ONE

  I’d only ever seen Laurie Balcomb a few times, usually glimpses while I was working and she was passing by on her way to someplace else. I’d never met her or spoken with her. She and her husband were the new owners of the Pettyjohn Ranch, and they didn’t socialize with the help.

  But when she came into sight on this afternoon, riding horseback across a hay field, there was no mistaking her even from a quarter mile away. Her hair was auburn shot through with gold, she was wearing a brindle chamois shirt, and the way the sunlight caught her, she looked like a living flame.

  I hadn’t paid much attention to Laurie before this, other than to notice that she was a nice-
looking woman. The sense I’d gotten from her was subdued, distant. Even her hair had seemed darker.

  But now, for just a second, something slipped in my head—the kind of jolt you got when you were walking down a staircase in the dark and thought there was one more step at the bottom.

  I shook it off and slowed my pickup truck to a stop. This was September, a warm afternoon at the end of a dry Montana summer, and I’d been raising a dust cloud the size of a tornado. I figured I’d let it settle so Laurie wouldn’t have to ride through it.

  But instead of passing, she rode toward me and reined up. The horse was one of the thoroughbreds she’d brought out here from Virginia, a reddish chestnut gelding that looked like he’d been chosen to fit her color scheme. Like her, he was fine-boned, classy, high-strung. A couple hundred thousand bucks, easy.

  “Are you in a fix?” she called. She had just enough accent to add a touch of charm. In a fix, I remembered, was Southern for having trouble.

  I pointed out the window toward the thinning dust storm.

  “Trying not to suffocate you,” I said.

  “Oh. How thoughtful.” She seemed surprised, and maybe amused, to hear that from a man in sweaty work clothes, hauling trash in a vehicle older than she was.

  She walked the restless horse closer, stroking his neck to soothe him. She handled him well, and she knew it.

  “So you men are—what’s the term—‘gutting’ the old house?” she said.

  The truck’s bed was loaded with bags of lath and plaster, crumbling cedar shakes, century-old plumbing, the skin and bones from the ranch’s original Victorian mansion. Nobody had lived there for more than a generation, but the Balcombs had big plans for this place. The mansion was on its way to being restored and turned into a showpiece for the kinds of guests who would buy the kinds of horses that Laurie was riding.

  “That’s the term,” I said.

  “You’re an unusal-looking group. Not what I would have expected.”

  “You mean we’re not like the guys on New Yankee Workshop?”

  “Well, there do seem to be a lot of tattoos and missing teeth.”

  “They’re all good at what they do, Mrs. Balcomb.”

  “I’m sure they are. And don’t misunderstand me—I think they’re charming.”

  That opened my eyes. I’d heard my crew called a lot of things, but none of them involved words like charming.

  “I’ll pass that on,” I said. “They’ll be knocked out.”

  “So why are you here all alone on a Saturday?”

  I shrugged. “Only chance I get to be the boss.”

  Her smile was a quick bright flash that shone on me like I was the one important thing in the world.

  “You look like you could be bossy,” she said. Then she caught herself up as if she’d slipped. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be impolite.”

  I was confused, and it must have shown.

  “That scar,” she said. “It’s like on a villain in an old-fashioned movie.”

  My left hand rose of its own accord and my thumb touched the raised, discolored crescent that topped my cheekbone. It wasn’t something I ever thought about any more. The touch broke loose a run of sweat from the hollow under my eye down my nose. It itched like hell, and while I knew that scratching was bad manners, I couldn’t help myself. My hand came away smeared with plaster dust and red chalk.

  “Just a low-rent injury and a surgeon with a hangover,” I said.

  She smiled again, but this time she seemed a little disappointed.

  “You could come up with a more interesting story,” she said. “Think about it.” She turned the gelding away and eased him into a trot with her boot heels.

  I gave her a hundred yards lead on my dust cloud, then drove on.

  “Interesting” wasn’t in my job description.

  TWO

  A mile farther on, the hay fields gave way to timber. I started to glimpse the sparkle of Lone Creek, draining down from the continental divide to the Missouri River. Even in dry years, it always flowed swift and cool. If you followed it upstream, you came to a little waterfall that spilled into a swimming hole. I’d hung out there a lot as a kid, but I hadn’t been back since the summer I turned fourteen—almost twenty-five years, now that I thought about it. A quarter of a century, one-third of a good long life, ago.

  I’d worked on this ranch that summer, for the first and last time until now. My family weren’t the social equals of big landowners like the Pettyjohns—my father was an ironworker, my mother a schoolteacher, and we lived in a modest house in nearby Helena—but my dad had gotten to be pretty good friends with the clan’s head, Reuben Pettyjohn, with the common bond that they’d both fought in Korea. We were welcome on the ranch, and I came out here every chance I got, to fish or wander in the woods. The men finally decided that they might as well put me to use.

  That same summer, a girl named Celia Thayer had come to live with us. She’d grown up near my family’s hardscrabble old homestead near the Tobacco Root range, which my father’s brother was still working. She was usually around, hanging out with my cousins, when we went to visit.

  Celia was a year and some older than me, just turning sixteen then. Supposedly, her parents decided that she’d benefit from living in Helena—it was the state capital, and with a population of about thirty thousand, one of the few places in Montana that could be called a city. But I eventually figured out that she was already too much to handle for those people from an older world, living in the middle of nowhere. My older sisters were gone, one married and one in college, so we had room. Celia’s folks worked out a deal with mine to board her at our house while she finished high school.

  She was glad to leave her bleak home behind, except that she was crazy about horses, and already an expert rider. So my dad arranged for her to work on the Pettyjohn Ranch along with me that summer, helping in the stables. She could ride to her heart’s content and make some money, too.

  I was a typical gawky, terminally shy boy of that age. The issue of girls was just starting to appear as a haze on the horizon of my life, portending the coming storm. Celia fascinated me, but what I felt was more like worship than desire. Even as a little girl, she’d been the bright light in any group, pretty and compelling. At sixteen, she was flowering, with a tough, sultry beauty and a ken that sometimes seemed much older. I was bewildered, humbled, and scared by her.

  But what drew me to her most powerfully was my belief that there was a special intimacy between us—that some deep part of her was lonely, wistful, and hurt, and that she showed it only to me. Maybe I only imagined it. I sure learned the hard way that when she did, she could be like a cat offering its belly for petting, then sinking its fangs into your hand when you tried.

  While Celia worked with the ranch’s horses, I started on the haying crew, two months of killing labor from dawn to dusk. But things relaxed after the first cut was in, and I went to taking care of general chores. Nobody cared if I sneaked away for a swim at the waterfall, so I did it almost every day. Sometimes Celia would come along.

  One particular afternoon, I went there alone. I hadn’t seen her earlier, and it never occurred to me that she might show up. I was lazing in the stream, not paying attention to anything, and all of a sudden, she came walking into sight. When she was with me I always swam in my jeans, but when she wasn’t, I went in bare, and I’d left my clothes on the rocky bank; I hollered at her to turn around until I could get covered.

  Instead, she beamed that smile at me and said, “Lighten up, we’re practically family.” She’d always brought a swimsuit before, but not this time. She peeled off her own clothes and stepped in.

  There was no way I could get out of the water after that. I stayed crouched to my chin while she splashed and pranced and tiptoed on the stones like a tightrope walker. She kept talking all along like things were the same as always, just us being kids and goofing around. But I knew that she was doing this on purpose. It was like she was using me as some
kind of test, and she was pleased at the result.

  I had plenty of other memories of Celia. A lot of them were painful, and I’d done a good job of burying them. But seeing Laurie Balcomb on that horse—if Celia had lived, she’d look just about like Laurie now.

  THREE

  The Pettyjohn Ranch’s dump was a sea of trash the size of a city block and fifty feet deep, gouged into a section of prairie toward the northeast corner. It held more than a century’s accumulation of old refuse, from kitchen slop to sprung mattresses to entire vehicles. There was also plenty of stuff nobody wanted to talk about—refrigerators, asbestos insulation, tons of toxic sludge from fertilizers and pesticides and lead paint, enough to make a private little superfund out in the middle of God’s country.

  Officially, it hadn’t been used for the past few years—new sanitary codes required that the ranch’s refuse was now hauled off to the city landfill. But it saw occasional action on the sly, for things like our construction scrap and items that were inconvenient to get rid of legally.

  I had never known that to include carcasses, but I started catching the first hints of the smell before I could even see the dump—the sickly reek of meat gone bad. The closer I got, the more it filled the pickup’s cab, lying like a greasy blanket on the warm afternoon air. The dump always smelled some, like any big collection of garbage. But this was special.