Lizardskin (10 page)

So it had been high summer, on a long haul from Gary to Coeur d’Alene with a flatbed of steel rods. The load had been shifting on him for days, and he had pulled off I-90 at Crow Agency to warp it down some. Although he had passed it many times, off in the blue distance, that day he had been drawn by the sight of it: a little cluster of white marble beneath a stone pillar on the side of a brown hill.

He stood awhile at the cairn and read the names of those men from Prague and Dublin and Naples and Aberdeen who had come to America and somehow found themselves in the
cavalry, surrounded by all this open light and land, maybe stunned by it, or crazed, or hypnotized by it as it sometimes hypnotized Beau. They’d come all this way from some eastern hellhole or, beyond that, from some Silesian coal mine or a ghetto in Dusseldorf—all this way to die at Greasy Grass under a Dakota hatchet.

He had walked the five miles along the crest of the slopes to the bowl-shaped roundtop where Reno and Benteen had made their stand, feeling the sun on his shirt and the hard-packed clay under his boots.

Here and there in the coulees and the slopes, rising out of the dry grasses, white marble stones marked the places where troopers had died. Sometimes they had gone down in groups—McAllister could see them with their ponies down and their backs together, working away at their Sharps or their Henrys, cursing or crying in five different languages. But down they had gone, either alone or in a crowd.

Even in 1968, the battlefield looked exactly as it had in 1876. He stood there on the brown slope and watched the cloud shadows move across the valley all the way south to the Bighorn range and the Wyoming border. At the bottom of the long shallow hill, the Little Bighorn River wandered through stands of cottonwood trees and green grass, a ripple of sunlight on blue water, a slow hot wind ruffling its surface. A shimmer warped through the trees, and he could hear the cars and trucks like a dull seashell murmur as they worked their way up the shallow grade over on I-90. From Weir Point, a man could look north and east fifty miles, see a world of rolling brown hills as old as time, marked here and there with shadings of blue pine.

He was still a little saddened when he went into the bookstore to find some kind of souvenir. He found Alice Manyberries instead, an oval Crow face with high bones and a direct brown look and long-fingered delicate hands. He managed to have three years and one daughter with her before that propane tanker put an end to all that.

He used to think if he’d never come to the battlefield, then
she’d still be working at Crow Agency in the heart of the Whistling Wind land and not lying dead in a field in Utah.

Well, then it was the army’s fault, for not taking him when he asked. Or it was his own fault, for playing football back at Ukiah or later at Cal State, because if he hadn’t cooked his knees then, he would have been in Vietnam instead of driving up I-90 in Montana for Steiger Freightways.

And he wouldn’t have Laurel Manyberries McAllister, now twenty-two, postgraduate in cultural anthropology. Laurel was working on a site down in Wyoming now. There had been enough of Alice in Laurel to keep Beau together when it was just the two of them after the funeral. Three months it had taken Alice to die. Beau and Laurel had taken a place in Billings to be near her. And the old man, Doc Hogeland, he’d become sort of a grandfather to Laurel and a solid friend to Beau. He’d been there at the bedside, sometimes, when Beau had come in to see her.

Back then, the doc had been the chief of surgery, and he did everything for her that there was to do. Grafts. Antibiotics.

And then one day it had been time for her to go, and she did. Doc Hogeland came looking for him at the Muzzleloader Lounge down on the Frontage Line. He talked to Beau a long time about what it was like to lose a wife. Hogeland had lost his wife after a six-year struggle with kidney failure. They’d been trying to get a transplant arranged when she went into a coma. She died a few days later. They’d been married thirty-six years.

Listening to the old man talk about his wife didn’t help much, but it started a bond between them. It was the doc who had advised Beau to stay here in Billings, and it was the doc who got him the job with the Highway Patrol.

He went along with the suggestion more or less to keep Laurel near her clan rather than have her grow up an outcast breed in Provo, surrounded by Mormon real estate salesmen and cracker cowhand kids.

She had set aside her babyhood like a girl taking ribbons out of her hair. By seven, she had been cooking and cleaning and ordering him around, a little brown wand of graceful motion
and a smile like a bright white flower, suddenly all grown and out of the house more than she was in it.

She had been sixteen when he brought Maureen home to meet her. Before that, he had kept his women away from the house, out of respect for Alice’s memory and for Laurel as well.

But Maureen Sprague was pregnant by then and determined to marry Beau and make a home for him. Maureen was all streaked blond hair and angles and lanky East Coast lines. She played tennis and squash and jogged and wore headbands and little terry wristbands when she worked out. She drank vodka gimlets and watched
Brideshead Revisited
and
Upstairs Downstairs
. She read everything
The New York Times Book Review
told her to read. She was a nurse at the Julia Dwight Clinic when Beau met her. He saw her all the time, brought her the latest knifing victim, or a carload of bruised boys from a bar fight in Hardin, or a survivor of a pickup rollover. She had seemed funny and fresh and, he had to face this, as different from Alice as any woman could be. Alice had been all dark-skinned intensity and controlled passion, fierce in her own way, always probing Beau to find out his state of mind or his dreams or the contents of his soul.

Maureen Sprague was not like Alice. She liked it light and breezy and happy. Like most nurses, she had learned to make a joke out of tragedy, which fit neatly with McAllister’s own instincts about the way to survive a career in law enforcement. Around her, Beau had been light and happy for longer and longer periods, until he realized he hadn’t thought about Alice Manyberries for almost a week, and that had saddened and eased him at the same time.

Maureen had them in bed the first date, and she kept him there until he asked her to marry him. Maureen was an astonishing lover, delicate, powerful, inventive, slightly corrupt and dark in some of her needs. They had Roberta Lee five months after the wedding. And Maureen packed Laurel off to Montana State when she was eighteen.

Maureen’s relationship with Laurel had always been friendly but careful, as if they both felt something might go
bang if they hit it hard enough. Laurel had never spoken a word against Maureen, never made Beau feel guilty about marrying again, had always been sweet and gentle with Bobby Lee.

But she had been … dwindling. Getting spiritually smaller, was how it seemed to Beau. As if she were being bled nightly.

When she left for Bozeman and Montana State, they all drove her to the bus station. Maureen said she would miss her, but when she was gone, only Bobby Lee and Beau ever wrote to her.

A few years later, Beau too began to feel that he was being bled nightly, and he left as well. As soon as he was packed and out, Maureen had made Bobby Lee the battleground. Let a support payment be a day late, and Bobby Lee suddenly had the flu. Let a hard word be said at the door, and Bobby Lee would be “out” and Maureen would not know when she’d be back.

Or Bobby Lee was playing with friends.

Or Bobby Lee was too tired.

Or Bobby Lee had chicken pox, and no he couldn’t come in and see her. She was quarantined.

She was at somebody’s house.

She didn’t want to see him.

Beau, Maureen would say, the sweet smile of reason stretched across a thin face shiny with hatred, Beau, we think it would be best for Bobby Lee if you didn’t come around here anymore.

We?

Bobby Lee and I.

Let me hear her say that.

Why put her through that, Beau? Why not just go away?

Why not get the hell out of my way? he had said, and they had fought on the doorstep of his old house in Hardin, with the neighbors all out on their porches and Maureen shrieking at him, her muscular neck a bundle of tight cords, her mouth a twisted cut, her face flushed and bright.

Three days later, he had gotten the letter in the mail, a thick creamy bond paper with “Mallon, Brewer, Hogeland and
Bright” in the upper left corner. The next three years had been an endless round of court actions, countersuits, legal warnings, scheduled visitations, postdated checks, and ulcerated feelings. Some of his friends had delicately suggested that he give it up and walk away, for Bobby Lee’s sake. But the more clearly he saw Maureen for what she was—the cruelty and the ugliness in her, her readiness to make Bobby Lee a game piece—the less willing he was to leave his child entirely under her control.

A pain in his right jaw let him know how hard he was biting the stem of his pipe. A pain in his stomach let him know how it hurt to think about things like this when you had no way to fix them, short of murder.

And he had thought about that.

It was a fantasy of his, to put a round made of dry ice into his MacMillan and fire the dry-ice round at five hundred yards into the side of Maureen’s head. The round would burn away in the air and blood. They’d never get a slug, have no ballistics.

No. They’d just have Beau McAllister, the victim’s ex-husband, whose hatred for her was now a countywide legend.

It struck him as ironic, how he seemed to be tied up with the Hogeland family. He couldn’t think about Alice Manyberries without thinking how much he owed Doc Darryl.

And he couldn’t think about Maureen without wanting to beat the living hell out of the doc’s kid. What was that old cop line, about stress. Stress is the feeling you get when you want to, but can’t, choke the shit out of some asshole who desperately needs it. That summed up his feelings about Dwight Hogeland.

Screw this, he decided. He knocked the pipe bowl clean on the heel of his boot and put the pipe away in his shirt pocket, where the heat of it against his chest warmed him a little against the growing chill of the evening.

Five minutes later he was out on the interstate headed east toward Pompeys Pillar, into the rising night.

Gabriel Picketwire was staring at Dr. Sifton’s bald spot and trying not to scream when his cellular phone rang. They were in one of the crew tents, trying to patch up his knee; he’d cracked it hard on the side of the dumpster when he’d jumped. Dr. Sifton, the sawbones on the set, was a broken-down medic who was pretty liberal with the mood-altering chemicals and the Valium prescriptions. His ears stuck out at the sides as he bent over Gabriel’s knee, poking at the cartilage. The phone sounded again, where it sat across the room on a card table full of explosives and electronic gear. It gave out a nasty peremptory burr, like a robot wasp.

“You gonna get that for me, Doc?”

“I look like a gofer to you, Chief?”

Sifton raised his heavy head like a buffalo disturbed at his grazing. His eyes were red and wet in a pink fleshy face. His hands still worked at Gabriel’s knee. The phone burred again.

“Well, I can’t get it. And don’t call me Chief.”

“It’s probably your wife.”

“I’m not married.”

“Your boyfriend, then.”

“Why are you such a miserable son of a bitch, Doc?”

“The world is tragedy for those who feel and comedy for those who think.”

“Yeah? How about those who drink?”

“Bearable. I have to use the toilet anyway.”

Gabriel lurched off the cot and hopped to the table. Dr.
Sifton took the opportunity to shuffle into the Porta-Potty at the side of the crew tent. He left the door open. Gabriel could see him rolling up a sleeve. Under the hot downlight, the doctor’s arm looked like a tube of pink sausage. In his right hand he held a hypodermic needle. A thin jet of fluid leaped from the glittering tip. Sifton smiled at Gabriel and closed the door.

“Hello?”

Background noise—trucks maybe. A highway.

“Blue Coat? Gabriel Blue Coat?” The voice was cramped and husky, but he knew it. Grief and some other emotion colored the timbre of it.

“Jubal … you’ll have to speak louder. Where are you?”

“They killed him.” Jubal’s voice was old and wintry. Gabriel could hear frost in it, and dry branches.

“They what? Killed? Killed who?”

Gabriel balanced on one leg, stared out the flap of the tent at the crewmen walking by, and past them, out into the silky California dusk.

“Jubal, I don’t understand. Where are you?”

“We are in … I should not say into this thing. They have machines. We should not say.”

“Is everybody all right?”

“No. They plugged him. Plugged him good. He had no stomach. We shot at them but it did nothing. You must come.”

“They shot Eddie?”

“They shot Eddie.”

“Why? Why did they shoot Eddie?” He had a brief vision of a small boy chasing a scruffy black dog across a beach. Two women in linen skirts laughed into the wind, and the wind carried the sound up the beach toward him.

“Because they had guns and they can do that here. Will you come?”

“What happened to Eddie? Is he dead?”

“Yes, Blue Coat. But we have him.”

Lately, Jubal had taken to calling him Blue Coat sarcastically. It was part of that whole obsession that had taken him over. Gabriel found it tiresome, but he tolerated it. Jubal had little else in the world, and now it seemed he had lost a great
deal of that. A ragged lance of heat punched through his lower belly. It took him a time to recognize it as rage.

“How … what do you mean?”

“We took him back.”

“Took him back? How?”

Dr. Sifton came out of the Porta-Potty and subsided into the cot, wheezing and groaning, working at the sleeve of his shirt. He looked past Gabriel, past the flap of the tent, at something out of sight in the deepening night.