Billy Bob and Hackberry Holland Ebook Boxed Set (26 page)

But the home invaders were gone, except for a man with five days of unshaved whiskers and hair like black snakes who lay slumped against the door of the potato cellar, a hole as big as a thumb in his sternum. Wyatt picked up the man's wrist and felt for a pulse, then set the man's hand back in his lap. In the center of the man's forearm was a red welt, like wire that had been threaded into a design under the skin. Wyatt touched it with his fingertips, felt the hardness in the tissue, then wiped his fingers clean in the dirt.

He stood erect by pressing his weight down on the rifle butt and limped back toward the kitchen door.

Darrel McComb stepped outside, holding his jaw. “Where are they?” he said.

“Gone, except for that one yonder. Sunk one in a second man, but my aim was off.”

“I could lie and mess you up, Gomer. But I'm letting this slide for now. What happens down the road is another matter,” he said.

“You a student of Scripture?”

Darrel waited for him to go on.

“Take a look at the mark on that fellow's right arm,” Wyatt said.

McComb squatted down by the cellar door and clicked on a pen-light, moving it back and forth in the darkness. “What mark?” he said.

Wyatt limped back to where the dead man lay. The blood had already settled in the lower regions of the body and the face had turned unnaturally white, the eyes fixed and half-lidded. “Shine the light again?” Wyatt said.

He studied the dead man's forearm, then touched the skin gingerly with the balls of his fingers. He held on to the rifle with two hands and pushed himself to his feet.

“Where you going?” Darrel said.

“To sleep.”

“There's nothing on the guy's arm. Why'd you tell me to look at it?” Darrel said.

“He was carrying the mark of the beast. But it ain't there now. They don't take it with them when they die. Don't bust in my house again, McComb. Next time I'll take your head off.”

THE DEAD MAN
had been a Marine Corps veteran and inveterate gambler from Elko, Nevada. He had no criminal record, but he had gone into debt to moneylenders in Vegas and disappeared from the computer five years before. The insides of his arms and thighs were laced with scar tissue from repeated hypodermic injections. The most recent ones were infected.

The investigation into the homicide behind Wyatt's house cleared Wyatt of any culpability, but not Darrel McComb. He was suspended from the department without pay, pending a determination by Internal Affairs regarding the general deterioration of both his private and professional life. He had now shown up in the middle of two firefights without adequate explanation, been witness to the death of a federal agent he was following without authorization, and broken into the house of an ex-felon. To make matters worse, Darrel had been on the premises while the ex-felon killed a man. One of the investigators from Internal Affairs, dead serious, asked Darrel if he had been recently tested for syphilis of the brain. Humorous insiders at the courthouse suggested that Darrel resign his job now and consider a career as a mortician's assistant in a town that had never heard of him.

The following week I saw him on a steel bench on the walk by the river, feeding pigeons from a bag of caramel popcorn. In his scuffed, boxlike shoes, white socks, ill-fitting dark suit, and pale blue necktie printed with trout flies, he was probably the saddest-looking plainclothes cop I'd ever seen.

“Wyatt Dixon told me everything that happened,” I said.

“So?” he replied.

“If you'd been a little creative in your report, you could have skated and jammed up Dixon at the same time. I think you're a stand-up guy, Darrel.”

“Fay Harback ratted me out with Internal Affairs.”

“Doesn't seem like Fay's style.”

“Yeah? Well, she dimed me good. Those I.A. guys think I'm having a nervous breakdown. They say it's been a concern to the D.A.'s office for months. Ever try proving to people you're not nuts?”

“Why were those guys trying to break into Wyatt Dixon's potato cellar?”

“I spread the word the goods from the Global Research robbery were in there.”

“Through Greta Lundstrum?”

“Maybe.”

“You told the sheriff all this?”

“I don't trust anyone in that courthouse. You want justice, you got to get it yourself.” He felt the inside of his swollen jaw with his tongue, his eyes slitted.

“Why do you hate Wyatt Dixon?” I asked.

“It's enough I hate him. He's a psycho. What do you care, anyway?”

“Sometimes we hate the people who remind us most of ourselves. It can flat eat you up.”

He nodded his head. “You a churchgoing man?” he asked.

“I guess.”

“Keep doing that. It looks good on you,” he said. He dumped his popcorn on the cement, then walked across the lawn of a Holiday Inn to a cul-de-sac where his car was illegally parked.

 

JOHNNY AMERICAN HORSE
was hurt. He had been hurt several times while federal agents and county lawmen chased him across the state—abrasions, sprains, and cuts from falls—but this time it was serious and he had lost the medical supplies Amber had sent him. Up in the Bob Marshall Wilderness a sharpshooter's round had ricocheted off a boulder and driven a stone splinter deep into his left forearm. He had removed the splinter, bled the wound, and washed it clean in a stream, but two days later the edges of the hole were red and tender, a tiny pearl of infection in the center. He gashed the wound open with the point of his survival knife, an electrical current climbing instantly into his armpit, then heated the knife blade in his campfire and stuck the point inside his flesh.

He passed out and fell backwards into a patch of moss under a fir tree. When he woke in the morning, western bluebirds filled the branches, their breasts as orange as new rust in the sunrise. He made a poultice of birch bark, wrapped it on his arm with a leather boot-lace, and walked higher up on the mountain, out of the smoke of forest fires, into strips of snow among fir trees.

Fever took him the next day, although he wasn't sure if it came from infection in his arm or bad water in a slough. He wandered deeper into the Bob Marshall, climbing to the top of the Grand Divide, from which he could see Marias Pass and the ancient home of the Blackfoot Indians. Farther east, beyond the roll of the plains, was the home of the Crow, the Northern Cheyenne, and the Oglala Sioux. The Blackfeet called the place he stood on the Backbone of the World. Somewhere in the distance, beyond the vastness of the landscape below him, was a place called the Sand Hills, where the dead went to live with the buffalo and the grandfathers who watched over the four corners of the universe. Far to the east, it was raining on the hills, and clouds veined with lightning moved across the sky like bison flecked with St. Elmo's fire.

In that moment Johnny American Horse knew he would never be alone.

Canned food, a GI mess kit, and a canteen filled with apricot brandy, even a GI can opener tied on a thong to an obsidian arrow-point, had been left for him under rocks or hung in trees by other Indians, all of whom knew Amber and told her where Johnny was and where he was going. But the living were not the only friends Johnny had. Perhaps because of his fever, or perhaps not, he believed his odyssey across the Backbone of the World had intersected the Ghost Trail.

On it he saw the spirits of Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and the holy man Black Elk. But there were others on the Ghost Trail who had no names. Heavy Runner's band, who had been massacred on the Marias River by the U.S. Army in 1871, still lived inside the morning fog and looked at him with hollow eyes from inside the trees. The hundreds of Blackfoot men, women, and children who had died of smallpox and were supposedly buried in a pit on Ghost Ridge outside Browning sat on rocks high overhead, beckoning, their agency-issue clothes hanging in rags.

When he passed them by and waved farewell, they did not appear to him again. Instead, a lone Indian woman materialized on a ledge, inside a mist, above a stream that boiled over rocks. She wore beaded moccasins and a white buckskin dress fringed with purple glass beads, eagle feathers tied to her braids. He did not have to ask who she was. For years she had been seen not only by Indians but by the military personnel who guarded the intercontinental missile silos positioned along the eastern slope of the northern Rockies. Soldiers standing sentry swore they had seen her inside secured areas that no unauthorized person could have entered, her dress glowing in the darkness, her large eyes filled with an indescribable sadness.

Once, when Johnny had lost his coat crossing a stream, she pointed to a cave behind a cluster of box elder. Inside it, he found a blanket pack rats had made a nest in and six cans of condensed milk. When he slipped on the edge of a crevasse and almost fell three hundred feet onto rocks, she appeared on the cliff and moved a ponderosa branch aside so he could see handholds cut into the stone by Blackfeet hundreds of years ago.

He circled back through the Bob Marshall, crossed the middle fork of the Flathead River, and kept going south toward the Swan Peaks, his arm throbbing, his fever like a warm friend inside his clothes. He no longer thought in terms of calendar days. In fact, he began to think of time as a self-contained entity that could not be compartmentalized. The present disappeared inside morning fog or the misty haze of smoke and rain that lay on the mountains at sunset, smudged out as though by a giant thumb, leaving only the woods, the creeks, the peaks against the sky, then suddenly a trapper's log cabin hidden in a hollow, flint tools washed loose from a hill by snowmelt, a rusted ax head buried deep in a tree trunk, a rocker box standing starkly in a dry streambed, tepee rings on a shady knoll, a turkey track carved on a flat rock, pointing to the North Star.

He followed a trail used by grizzlies along the crest of the Flathead Range. To the west he could see Swan Lake, like a giant blue teardrop, and the Swan Peaks rising gray and steel-colored and cold into the clouds. At night, the Indian woman in the buckskin dress lit his way, the incandescence of her dress moving ahead of him in the trees.

It rained on the canopy, but he could not feel the water on his skin. Sometimes he had to stop and rest, his head reeling from the thin air, the wound in his arm tightening against the poultice wrapped around it. Up ahead, the Indian woman waited for him in the evening shadows. Somehow he had lost his backpack and his food and cans of condensed milk, although he could not remember slipping the straps from his shoulders. He took a swallow of the apricot brandy from his canteen, but the liquor was like diesel fuel on his empty stomach, and he vomited on the ground.

He saw the Indian woman walk toward him, her cupped hand extended. He opened his palm without being told and she filled it with huckleberries.

“Thank you. You're a kind woman. But you haven't told me your name,” he said.

There was no smoke in the wind that gusted up the trail, and he could smell the odor of wet leaves on her skin and rain in her hair. She spoke to him in the Blackfoot language, but he could not understand what she was saying. She pointed to the south, at the Swan Peaks, and touched his shoulder, indicating that he must follow her now, that he must not sleep until he was in a safer place.

“We're safe on the trail. There's no one up here,” he told her.

But she ignored his words and beckoned for him to follow, an urgency growing in her face.

Around the next bend she left the trail, mounting the hillside, and set her hand on a dome-shaped, lichen-encrusted boulder protruding from the soil. Behind it was a deep depression filled with trees that had rotted into dark brown humus and a burrow that a bear had dug for a winter den. Johnny crawled inside the den, took off his canteen, trade ax, and knife, and laid his head down on a thick pile of animal-smelling moss just as a helicopter roared by overhead, its searchlights vectoring down into the forest.

The next morning he thought someone might have shot at him, but he couldn't be sure. Dry thunder had been echoing in the canyons, and a violent gust of wind could snap a tree limb as loudly as a rifle shot. But the second time he heard a popping sound, he also saw pulp fly from the trunk of a dead larch. He left the trail, zigzagging through the forest, not stopping until he had crested a hill. He slid at least two hundred feet down an arroyo into a streambed, next to a row of nineteenth-century sluice boxes strung out on the rocks like a miniature wrecked train.

That night he came out of the mountains into a wet glade spiked with cattails, where he watched a cinnamon bear and two cubs cornering and swatting fish out of a slough. He crossed the glade, following the Indian woman, whose moccasined feet left soft green depressions in the reeds she walked through. He entered mountains again, where he found a cairn with a deer antler protruding from the top of the pile. Under the rocks were cans of sardines and boned chicken, a package of nuts and dried fruit, a box of Hershey bars, toothpaste and a brush, aspirin, bandages, iodine, and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. He pulled the poultice from his arm and a smell like rotten eggs rose into his face. He poured the disinfectant onto the wound and watched it boil in the moonlight, then washed it clean with brandy from his canteen. In the distance he could see a ranch house surrounded by a rick fence, inside of which were red horses racing through a meadow, under the moon.

He lay back in the grass to sleep, but the Indian woman squatted next to him and looked entreatingly into his face.

“What is it?” he said.

She placed her hand on the disturbed pile of stones. As she did, a white light shone through the pile as though it emanated from the earth rather than her palm. Crumpled between two pieces of slag was a letter inside a Ziploc bag. It was written in longhand, and it read:

How long had it been since they had danced to “The Eight-Thirty Blues” under the stars at the Thursday evening concert on the river? It seemed a lifetime ago. He put the letter inside his shirt and fell asleep in the grass. Through the ground he could hear the drone of automobiles on a highway.

He woke just before dawn, the mountains like a black bowl around him, the sky and stars swept clean of smoke and dust, the air dense with the smell of ozone and distant rain. He ate a can of boned chicken, washed his face in a stream, and brushed his teeth. He started to examine the wound in his arm for infection, but the bandage was still clean and taped solidly in place, and he felt no pain when he touched its surfaces. He decided to let well enough alone.

Just as the light went out of the sky and the stars faded into the morning, he thought he saw the Indian woman among a grove of cottonwoods farther down the stream, waiting for him. But when he approached her, the wind gusted through the trees, and a large doe clattered out of the grove and churned up the hillside. Then it stopped and stared back at him.