Lone Creek Read online

  “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.

  FOURTEEN

  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.”

  FIFTEEN

  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 ranc
h 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 could 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.

  Except for one piece that didn’t look right. It was bowed out at the top, with a few nails missing along its length and a couple more clumsily bent over.

  Madbird crouched again, got hold of its bottom, and wrenched. It started coming loose. I got my hands in between it and the pieces to the sides, and we worked it upward, popping it free. The flashlight showed what had bowed it out up top—a nail head sticking out an inch. That was common when old wood was pried loose, especially with soft stuff like pine. The nail would stay lodged in the cross-timber and the board would split or splinter or just disintegrate around it. If you replaced the board, you usually had to get rid of the nail to keep it from pooching out like this one. Whoever had done this either hadn’t noticed it or was in too big a hurry to care.

  The gap we’d made was about a foot wide. I stayed back and let Madbird peer in, with the flashlight beside his ear. He spent a good long minute there. Then he motioned me over. As the light beam shifted, I caught a glimpse of his eyes. They brought to my mind the old saying, A good friend and a bad enemy.

  “He probably figured a shotgun was his best bet for knocking them down quick, and the sound don’t carry so far,” Madbird said. “Muffled it some more, piling up them hay bales and shoving the barrel through. That’s what blew this shit loose, him swinging it back and forth.” He shone the light on some bits of fresh hay strewn on the floor just inside the wall. “But he couldn’t of aimed much—just stood here and kept pulling the trigger.”

  I was jolted by an electric image of the terrified animals rearing, screaming, crashing against their wood prison in a frenzied attempt to escape the unseen thing that was ripping them apart. Coming across the carcasses had been bad, but this was a whole new level of awfulness. We were looking at an ambush—cold-blooded, premeditated murder, without even the mercy of clean shooting.

  I shook my head hard and started walking, not to anywhere, just away.

  SIXTEEN

  I ended up using all the two dozen frames in the cheap throwaway camera I’d bought, figuring I might as well. But it wasn’t much use. The crime scene had been covered carefully—the shed’s inside cleaned, the shell casings picked up, even the stack of hay bales knocked down. What was left amounted to zilch and could be explained in other ways. Like a TV cop, I needed a body for real proof.

  And I was more confused than ever. I’d assumed that Balcomb could run the D-8 Cat well enough to hide the horses in the dump—that wouldn’t have taken much. But whoever had maneuvered it inside the shed was a skilled operator. Either he was better than I’d suspected, or I was guessing wrong about a lot of things.

  Madbird and I tacked the piece of siding back into place the same way it had been. Then we started home, driving with headlights out, the van bouncing slowly along the rough road.

  When we passed the spur to the old mansion, he turned onto it. I glanced at him, surprised.

  “Let’s pick up our tools,” he said. “You might as well do it while you got the chance, and I ain’t working for that motherfucker no more, either.”

  I felt bad enough already. I hadn’t figured on costing him this job, too. It wasn’t that either of us was going to end up unemployed. The contractor we worked for, Jack Graves, kept several projects going at any given time. He’d switch us to another and pull men from there to cover here. But we’d both liked this one.

  “I’m sorry about all this,” I said.

  “Hey, I’d rather know about this bullshit than not. I could use a few days off, anyway.”

  “I’ll call Jack tomorrow and tell him Balcomb ran me off. You want me to say anything about you?”

  “Jack already knows I got a lot of grandfathers up on the rez, and sometimes one of them dies.”

  The site of the mansion was the choicest on the property, overlooking Lone Creek and the thick forest rising up into those seemingly endless mountains. Nathan Pettyjohn and his wife once had hosted grand dinners and hunting parties for dignitaries here—governors and senators, European nobility, famous musicians and artists. There was a story that Teddy Roosevelt had stopped by long enough to bag himself a bull moose.

  Tonight, the creek’s clear rippling water seemed alive with moonlight. It made me think again about Celia. In a roundabout way, she’d been responsible for my starting construction work, like she’d been for so many other things.

  After her death, my family’s closeness with the Pettyjohns was over, and I didn’t go back to do ranch work for them anymore. The next summer, my father got me on as a construction gopher instead. My name was “Hey, kid!” and my job was to run all day, carrying materials, fetching tools for the journeymen, and cleaning up the site. I didn’t like it at first, and there were plenty of assholes doing their best to make it tougher. But there were a lot more good men, and as I learned the work, I got caught up in it. It was great training for boxing—every summer I gained more coordination and lean weight. And there was the practical bonus that by the time I finished college, I could build a house from the ground through the roof.

  The mansion was coming back to life nicely. One thing I had to give the Balcombs—they wanted top-quality work and weren’t pinching pennies to get it. Madbird and I gathered our gear fast, our boot steps echoing in the darkened old building—a dozen kinds of saws and drills, homemade wooden boxes of hand tools, extension cords, leather belts hung with heavy pouches that we wore like pack animals, all beaten into comfortable familiarity and marked with different colors of spray paint to identify the owners.

  I’d never been sentimental about walking off a job and I wasn’t now, but I felt a tug of loss, mostly be
cause of the crew. Like Laurie Balcomb had pointed out, they weren’t a pretty bunch. We had an ex-junkie Mexican plasterer with a full back tattoo of his naked girlfriend, a redneck new age plumber with the insane eyes that came from inhaling too much pipe dope, a finish carpenter who’d once broken his neck getting thrown from a rodeo bucking horse, a laborer who hand-dug like a backhoe and occasionally had to head down to the penitentiary in Deer Lodge for a stint making license plates, and a cast of others like them who came and went with the need. We’d gravitated together over the years because we all carried our weight and stayed off each other’s nerves, and we’d all been on many other jobs where that wasn’t true. I was the nominal lead man, not because of any enhanced ability, but because as the main structural carpenter, I was in the best position to line out what was coming. They didn’t require pushing and wouldn’t have tolerated it. Jack Graves took care of the business end of things, paid us well, and left us alone—another rare setup. They were also a hell of a lot of fun. I was going to miss that.

  We loaded our tools in the van and started up again. For the next tense mile we stayed quiet, past the ranch hands’ trailers and the darkened headquarters. If we were going to get stopped, this was the place. But everything was still quiet, and we made it out as easily as we’d come in.

  “So what you gonna do, Huey?” Madbird said.

  I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. “What would the Blackfeet do?”

  He spat out the window. “Hang Balcomb’s bloody fucking hair on the lodge.”

  “I’d love to. But I might as well put a gun to my own head.”

  “Yeah, you got to be smart about it.”

  “I’m not feeling too smart right now. It looks like I’m going to lose any way I go. I’m just trying to weigh how much and where.”

  “That’s a real lesson in what it’s like being a Indian.” His teeth showed in that grin, although this time it looked humorless. “Have another beer. Maybe you’ll get a vision.”