Let Him Go: A Novel (6 page)

George steps outside, careful not to allow the outer door to lock behind him. He walks a distance away from the courthouse and the small, bug-speckled lighted sign declaring Mercer County Sheriff, as if it were trying to draw customers. The windows of the houses across the street are all dark now but one, and in that square of yellow light a shadow moves, someone for whom sleep is as hard to corner as it is for George Blackledge.

Autumn has come to northeast Montana. The vapor of one’s breath, the clarity of the stars, the smell of woodsmoke, the stones underfoot that even a full day of sunlight won’t warm—these all say there will be no more days that can be mistaken for summer. One might as well stand out here until frost whitens the ground and geese cry overhead.

George lights a cigarette and walks to the car. The condensation that will need to be scraped off by morning can at this hour be wiped away with a hand, which is what George does, right over the remnants of the block-letter
B
gas ration sticker, still not entirely scraped or peeled away, though six years have passed since anyone cared how much gas you used. He peers into the car’s dark interior as though he expects someone might be on the other side of the glass, watching him. He takes out his key, unlocks, and opens the door, and, squatting down, does what he was certain to
do all along, never mind the delays of stargazing, sniffing the air, or smoking a cigarette. He reaches under the seat and brings out the paper bag with the bottle of bourbon. Earlier today, he got no farther from the Roundup than his car when he broke the seal and a promise that had aged longer than the bourbon itself. But the whiskey had worked none of its magic then, and when George lifts the bottle to his lips now, it’s with no more expectation than that the night’s chill will retreat a little.

He caps the bottle and slides it back under the seat, right where it rode during his years in office. The .45 that was its companion, then as today, is no longer there. George transferred it to his suitcase when he and Margaret unpacked the car for their night in the Mercer County Jail.

A train’s whistle travels easily on the night air. The tracks for the Empire Builder run through Bentrock, and the train itself stops at the station across from the Northern Pacific Hotel, not four blocks from the jail. George could leave the keys in the Hudson, and, before the sun rises and Margaret wakes, he could walk to the depot, buy his ticket, board the train, and be well on his way to Spokane, Seattle, Minot, or Minneapolis, depending on which way this train runs.

That’s what he could do.

He flips his cigarette high in the air, letting its pinwheeling sparks imitate the stars. He walks back into the jail. Its dark corridors are no easier to negotiate than before, but he finds his way to Margaret’s cell. A woman who sleeps without fear of locks, bars, or imprisonment, accidental or otherwise, she has left her door only slightly ajar.

George stands outside the cell, his hands gripping the
cold steel bars. His wife’s slumbering breaths, slow-paced chuffs, bounce from one concrete wall to another.

Go back, George whispers. Go back. He aims this command squarely in the direction of her dreaming head.
Go back.

T
HE
B
LACKLEDGES DON’T LEAVE
B
ENTROCK AT FIRST
light, as they told Sheriff Nevelsen they intended to do. Instead they eat a leisurely breakfast of sausage, eggs, and fried potatoes at the Bison Café, chosen because from a booth in the front window they can keep watch on Frontier Saddlery right across the street.

And when someone unlocks its front door and turns the sign from Closed to Open, George and Margaret rise from their unfinished cups of coffee and cross First Avenue in the middle of the block.

Inside the saddle shop a young man who looks as though he should be in algebra class slides a drawer into an old brass National cash register. He’s unsmiling and slight, and steel-rimmed spectacles make his eyes, pale as twilight, appear even paler. His dark hair is combed tight to his skull, and his shirt is buttoned to his throat. He looks suspicious, unaccustomed as he is to early customers, especially those who have never walked through the door before.

But Margaret Blackledge’s smile can calm most creatures, no matter how skittish.

Good morning, she says.

Morning.

George inhales deeply, as if the smell of leather is more welcome to him than Montana’s open air.

When Margaret puts her wrist through the wood stirrup of an elaborately hand-tooled saddle and lifts stirrup and fender, the stiff leather creaks. That sounds like my knees when I got out of bed this morning. She lets the stirrup fall. You have beautiful saddles.

Yes, ma’am. Fellow in Miles City makes some of them. The fancy ones.

Very impressive. Wouldn’t you say, George?

A hell of a craftsman.

Margaret squints at the inked numbers of a price tag. And not bashful either.

These are one of a kind, ma’am.

Oh yes. As I said. They’re beautiful. Her smile widens. But we’re not shopping for saddles.

The young man adjusts his glasses and looks over at a wall hung with tack.

Or bridles or bits.

And now it’s apparent why all his buttons are buttoned. This is a young man too easily undone. He moves back and forth behind the counter like a horse not sure whether it wants to break from its stall or back up deeper inside it.

Would you be a Weboy too? Margaret asks.

No ma’am. But a cousin to. I’m a Tucker.

George asks, Donnie’s your cousin, then?

Margaret’s smile subsides somewhat when she looks her husband’s way. But it shines brightly again when she turns in young Mr. Tucker’s direction.

We’re relations too, of a sort, Margaret says. Donnie married our daughter-in-law.
Former
daughter-in-law. My,
family can get complicated, can’t it? So Donnie’s step-daddy to our grandson. We were up here in this corner of the state, and I said to my husband, Let’s look in on Donnie and Lorna while we’re here. Oh, I say Donnie and Lorna, but you know—doting grandparents. It was the boy we truly wanted to see. So imagine how we felt when we were told, Oh no, you don’t want the Bentrock Weboys. Donnie’s from down around Gladstone. But I was sure, just
sure,
that Donnie used to talk about his days in Bentrock. Margaret waves toward the ceiling of the shop as if it were twenty feet high and gilt-painted. He even talked about the store here. His uncle’s? Do I have that right? Your dad?

None of what Margaret says is directed toward George, yet he walks away from her spell-casting anyway. He positions himself in the front window of the saddlery and surveys a gray, dusty main street not very different from Dalton’s. The Cattleman’s First National Bank, a squat brick building with two columns good for nothing but show. A five-and-dime. A Rexall’s. The Bijou, where
Royal Wedding
will play at seven o’clock only. Two old men with their boots up on the bumper of a late-model Oldsmobile. And that car, like every truck or car passing or parked, wears a layer of dirt the color of coffee with cream, dirt that even a day of rain wouldn’t wash away. Around Dalton the vehicles often wear orange-tinted dust coats, the residue from scoria, the volcanic rock present in the Badlands. Across the street at the Bison Café, the door opens, and when it does its glass releases a flash of sunlight like a knife blade. George returns to Margaret and young Mr. Tucker’s conversation.

Yet I was sure, Margaret is saying, that Donnie said
they were relocating up around here because he could hire on as a hand on his uncle’s place.

This here’s his uncle’s place, the boy says, taking in the store and all its leather with an owner’s wave of the hand.

And we sure as hell don’t see Donnie on the premises, do we, George?

No, we don’t.

But didn’t Donnie say his people had an outfit in Montana? And work was waiting for him?

The young man says, An outfit? More like nesters, I’d say. That’d be his folks’ place down around Gladstone. Well, his ma’s place. His dad passed away some years back.

Your uncle.

The young man nods. Not that Donnie’s ma’ll make him lift a finger if he ain’t in the mood. And I don’t know what kind of ranch work he’d be doing. They don’t raise much of anything except old junker cars and trucks. And Cain, maybe. At this, young Mr. Tucker permits himself a smile.

Margaret winces. Oh, this isn’t good. You’re not painting a picture of a very promising husband or father.

The young man shrugs as if the truth must be borne no matter how unpalatable.

And of the two, Margaret says, it’s how he’ll do as a father that concerns us most.

Sort of the reason we want to look in on them, adds George.

Not that we don’t care about Lorna. But you understand.

The boy nods as though the fitness of men and women for parenthood is a subject to which he’s devoted considerable thought.

George, who once in motion lacks his wife’s patience in
some matters, asks, The Weboy place down by Gladstone—will we have any trouble finding it?

Hell, you let it be known you’re looking for Weboys, they’ll find you.

Margaret, efficient gleaner that she is, understands when there’s nothing more to be found in this field. We’ll be on our way then. She wiggles her fingers in young Mr. Tucker’s direction. And thank you for this little chat.

The Blackledges are almost across the threshold of Frontier Saddlery before the proprietor’s son comes back to his purpose. Chaps! he calls out. We got chaps too in the back. And leather to special-make a pair if you like.

But they are on their way, leaving behind so many empty saddles it looks as though every horse decided at the same instant to throw its rider.

F
ROM THE BLUFFS EAST OF THE CITY
, G
LADSTONE
, Montana, looks as though it could have been laid out by a shotgun blast, the commercial and residential districts a tight cluster in the center and then the buckshot dispersing in the looser pattern of outlying houses and businesses owned by those Montanans for whom space is a stronger article of faith than neighborliness. And farther from the heart of town, trees are sparser until, beyond the city limits, nothing grows higher than a tall man’s knees, except for the cottonwoods near the glittering curves of the Elk River. In the vast, arid distance are a few ranches, but viewed from this height they could as easily be abandoned as running.

On this plateau, near a tall knob of rock and clay that looks like an upside-down bowling pin, George and Margaret have parked and look down on their destination.

About the size of Dickinson? Margaret asks.

Hell no. Maybe a third as big.

Do you know anybody from here?

Del Wick.

Del at the hardware store?

George nods, a gesture lost to Margaret since she’s
staring intently across the miles of riven sandstone and sagebrush. He’s down there, she says. Jimmy.

You’re sure of that, are you? They could be in California by now. Or anyplace between here and there.

Margaret shakes her head. That’s what I thought before. But Donnie will stay close to his people. Especially knowing we’re trailing him.

And how the hell would he know that?

You think the boy in the saddle shop wouldn’t tell his folks we were in the store asking about Donnie? And they didn’t phone down here and say we’re on the way?

Maybe you’re putting your feelings about family on others.

And what—you can imagine Donnie striking out on his own? Making his fortune for himself and his bride?

People change.

Do they.

I thought we needed to believe so.

Margaret walks to the edge of the bluff. Hardly a cliff’s drop-off but still steep enough to snap an ankle with a misstep. She kicks a stone and its clattering fall startles something into motion, a jackrabbit, probably, and it makes a scratchy echo through the brush.

There, by those cottonwoods, Margaret says, pointing down and to her right. That flatland. Where the creek or the backwater is. We could set up camp there.

If it’s dry.

Well, you can see it is.

Is there even a road going down there?

Off to the right, says Margaret. Don’t you see it? She points to a steep, rocky trail that widens, narrows, then widens again for no discernible reason.

Those rocks, George says. Good way to knock a hole in the oil pan. You sure you don’t want to check in to a hotel for the night?

We have the tent. Might as well use it.

And save a buck in the bargain.

I can’t believe you’d object to that.

George relents. I guess the ground can’t be any harder than that jail cot.

He heads back toward the car, but when Margaret doesn’t come with him he returns to the edge of the bluff. She’s still looking westward at the town and the prairie beyond and he takes his place beside her. There they stand like the statues of pioneers who never face each other but always the new land.

After long moments of silence, Margaret steps close enough to press herself against his bony chest. Her tremor is a countermeasure to his heart’s slow beat. We’ll build a fire, she says. It’ll be romantic.