C. Box - The Highway

Once, during a screaming argument, he’d told her he would borrow the Case backhoe and knock the house down and bury everything inside it. He’d told her the county would likely give him a medal for good citizenship for eliminating an eyesore. She’d screamed back at him, asking, “ Where would I live? What would I do? ” Breaking down into tears and sobs that disgusted him but somehow touched him at the same time and made him soften his demand. She’d promised to clean the place out, to sell what she could and have the rest hauled away. Except, of course, for her most valuable “collectibles,” she’d said, already backing off before doing anything. Adding that she’d also have to save her “memorabilia,” like the footlockers that once belonged to his dead sister JoBeth and all the medals and trophies she’d won in high school. Those she’d have to keep, of course. But the rest: gone!

She knew she had a problem, she said. But he’d been cruel and inhuman to point it out. After all she’d done for him, she said.

That was seven years ago. Since then, the hoarding had gotten worse. He’d not seen the top of the stove or the surface of the kitchen counter in years. JoBeth’s old bedroom was packed with boxes, clothing, papers, boxes filled with grocery bags and rubber bands-packed so tight the door barely closed.

There were missing cats. He’d brought them in and released them to silence the constant rustling he’d heard deep within the piles of “collectibles” and “memorabilia.” But the cats had vanished. She claimed they must have run off. He suspected they were long dead, moldering, crushed under the debris.

The only room in the old house that was habitable was his own. Sure, it was dark and small. The things on the walls-his first set of mule deer antlers, his diploma from graduating from Livingston High, the curled and yellowing ripped-out photos of hot rods and pickups and Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders-hadn’t been updated in years. But the room itself gave him warm and familiar comfort. It was his place to gather his thoughts, to dream, to masturbate. In a brushed-steel lockbox under his bed were his keepsakes and souvenirs from his successful hunts. He knew he shouldn’t keep them, and especially not in a place so close to him. But he couldn’t help it. He’d tried to dispose of the box once-taking it out to the pasture to bury-but he couldn’t do it. The contents were too important, and nothing he’d yet encountered would arouse the feelings he got when he rummaged inside.

He blamed the intense need he had for keeping the souvenirs on her . That evil wormlike trait had been passed on to him.

Before she got really bad, she used to enter his room while he was away. He knew it because the sheets on his bed were occasionally changed. And once when he returned the pinups of women he’d put up on the walls were simply gone. She denied she’d removed them but of course it was her.

Now he kept his door triple-locked and never left the keys. He never let her in there. Ever .

He’d often wondered how it was possible to so bitterly hate someone he loved. He chalked it up to blood ties and left it at that.

He slid through an opening in the stacks to enter the kitchen to turn off the light and there she was, glaring at him through her steel-framed glasses, a shapeless and massive woman in a flower-print housecoat the size of a mainsail. She was sitting at the table. Her elephantine ankles anchored her to the floor like tree stumps.

Her face was wide and fleshy, framed in a silver-white helmet of tight curls. Every week, no matter what, she made her appointment with her longtime hairdresser in Livingston. Her hair had never changed in style or length since he’d been alive. Why she cared about her hair and nothing else was another thing about her he couldn’t understand.

“It’s about time,” she said fiercely, biting off her words.

She was at the ancient table shoved up against a wall. The table had a foot of open surface on it, where she sat behind a plate and a bowl with something brown in it. Her meaty hands were curled on either side of the place setting.

“I didn’t know you’d be up,” he said.

“Of course I’m up. I made you dinner hours ago and waited and I’m still sitting here waiting. Your stew is cold now. I suppose you can still eat it but it’s cold. It’s as cold as your heart.”

“Stew?”

“Dinty Moore,” she said, shifting slightly back in the chair and lifting her chin. “An entire can of Dinty Moore.”

“How long has it been here?”

“I don’t know,” she said, blinking.

He paused. “I hate Dinty Moore stew.”

“You didn’t used to,” she said sharply, defensively. “You used to love it.”

“I never loved it. I never liked it. JoBeth loved the stuff-not me.”

“Oh, how you lie. You even lie about JoBeth.”

He shook his head. He thought again about getting the tractor and leveling the place. With her in it.

His cell phone vibrated in his pocket-a message. He ignored her and drew it out, read the screen, and dropped it back into his shirt.

“I have to go out again,” he said.

“What about this stew?” Her tone was filled with outrage.

“I don’t care,” he said, backing out, “Eat it. Put it in the refrigerator if you can find room. Store it in JoBeth’s room if you can even open the door.”

“You’re going to waste it?” she said, angry. “Where are you going, anyway?”

“To the shop.”

“The shop is closed. It’s nearly midnight.” Then, “Are you up to something, Ronald?”

“Just work.”

“Just work,” she mocked. “You come home at midnight, you stay long enough to insult me and my cooking, then you walk back out the door.”

“There are some loose ends,” he said.

“We need to talk about Thanksgiving. It’s coming up.”

“Let’s do what we always do,” he said. “Talk about it and then do jack shit when Thursday comes.”

“That’s a cruel thing to say.”

He shrugged.

“This stew,” she cried from the kitchen as he pinballed his way through the stacks of collectibles toward the front door, “You’re just going to waste it?”

2:30 A.M., Wednesday, November 21

Cody swung his pickup into the near empty parking lot of the First National Bar of Montana in Emigrant. His tires popped through the gravel and he pulled up so close to the entrance the front grille of his pickup nearly kissed the gray and sagging hitching post. There were only two other vehicles in the lot-an ancient Willy’s Jeep with a ragtop and a gleaming Montana State Patrol car. This was the place. Cody glanced at his wristwatch. He was on time.

When Trooper Rick Legerski had suggested the First National Bar as a place to meet and two thirty as the time, Cody had objected.

“Isn’t there anywhere else?”

“You have a problem with it?”

“I don’t drink,” Cody said.

“That’s not what I heard. Anyway, you don’t have to. It’s the only place open this time of night. Meeting there will give me time to patrol Yankee Jim Canyon into the park and back again and look for that missing car. If you keep your eye out on the way down to Emigrant, we’ll pretty much have seen the entire route you described and the First National is right in the middle.”

Cody grudgingly agreed.

He drove from Helena to Livingston via Highway 12 through Townsend, Three Forks, and Bozeman. The last time he’d taken the route was two years before on his way to Yellowstone to try and save Justin. He’d been held up in Townsend and nearly burned to death in Bozeman in the Gallatin Gateway Hotel, but he’d made it through. Mission accomplished.