Neil McMahon - Lone Creek

She had been there before. She had pointedly avoided telling me so. She had to have a reason for both those things.

The jolts kept rocking me hard and fast.

I know how to deal with fire.

There were people who thought it was me.

I finally got my voice back.

"My lumber," I said. "She's the one who torched it. That was her."

When I got back to Great Falls, she was gone.

I kept on driving after that, like a ghost haunting this land where I'd once lived-like I'd felt on the night of my last ring fight up at Rocky Boy all those years ago, sensing that I was unreal to the Indians. Except now it seemed turned around, with Madbird my only point of contact.

Little memory bytes kept coming all along the way, combining into an ongoing ache. When the first hints of dawn thinned the darkness, I was getting toward Lewistown, where my carpenter buddy Emil had grown up. Several summers ago, he'd gotten us a job framing a house in the nearby hills, a nice little gig except that you had to shit out in the brush and there were a lot of rattlesnakes living in that. It was funny, sort of.

I cut south through Judith Gap to Harlowton, then west again, following the Musselshell and the abandoned Milwaukee Road tracks. Twodot was the next town along the way, a place that lived up to its name. There wasn't much there but the Twodot Bar, where my boxing partner Charlie and I had stopped for a beer one time on our way home from Billings. He and a rancher's daughter fell in love, and I'd ended up hanging around drinking and playing pool for two days before they fell out again.

A few miles ahead, the other side of Deep Creek Canyon, I could see the peaks of Mounts Edith and Baldy. I'd taken Sarah Lynn camping up there early on in our courtship, a long hike to a pristine, deserted little lake. There we had shyly and clumsily lost our virginity to each other.

I'd sure been a sweetheart to her through all this.

The small road I was on dead-ended in a tee intersection with Highway 89. I put on my right turn signal, stopped at the stop sign, and carefully looked both ways. The vista was empty-no vehicles, no people, nothing moving but some cattle in a distant meadow.

But when I let out the clutch, my hands didn't turn the steering wheel. I just drove straight across the highway, through the dead end and into the grassy field beyond, until the truck's front wheels dropped into the roadside ditch and it lurched to a stop.

I had to put it into four-wheel drive to get out of there, but I managed to do it before anybody came along and saw me. I backtracked a mile or so along the Musselshell and found a dirt spur road that led down to an old railroad trestle.

Then I pulled the truck behind its shelter and crashed in a sleep of exhaustion and defeat.

I waited until dusk to go to Madbird's place, figuring that if the sheriffs came around to talk to him, they'd most likely do it during the day. As it turned out, they hadn't yet, and that made me nervous. He was due.

"Keep a eye open for Bill LaTray, too," Madbird said. "He called today, asking if I seen you. I didn't tell him nothing. Most Indians I could talk to and get things straight, but he ain't one of them."

Hannah looked tough and foxy and gave me a big warm hug. I returned her bag, with deepened shame at how Laurie had treated it and how I'd been too besotted to heed that warning. I couldn't bring myself to mention it.

"This was great," I said. "Like one of those fairy tales where every time you reach in, you pull out just the right thing."

"I figured that with her, you were going to need all the help you could get," Hannah said.

That took me aback. I'd thought Laurie had passed muster fine.

"What made you think that?" I said.

"I just didn't have a good feeling."

Madbird cut in. "She put it a little different, soon's you two drove away. How'd that go again, baby?"

"You shut up," Hannah said fiercely.

"'She already got his pecker on a string, he better watch out she don't hang him by it'-something like that," he stage-whispered to me.

I couldn't help smiling, although pathetically. I went outside to stash Balcomb's truck in the woods.

I'd slept only a couple of hours when I'd bombed out earlier today, but I'd slept hard, and it had helped a lot to clear my mind. I'd spent most of the time between then and now parked up a secluded Forest Service road in Deep Creek Canyon, pacing around through the trees and trying to put things together.

Laurie had recognized a special connection between her and me, all right-that I was fuckhead enough to rid her of the husband she hated and feared, and put her in control of her money again. The way she'd set it up was worthy of Balcomb himself. Clearly, she'd learned a lot from him.

She also clearly knew quite a bit about Celia, and not from any ethereal wavelength. I remembered something Kirk had said when we were out by the lake, which hadn't meant anything to me at the time-Beatrice, his mother, had mistaken Laurie for a grown-up Celia the first time they met.

My guess was that Laurie had been curious about that, asked around, and learned the story. Someone must have mentioned that I figured into it and I was now back working at the ranch. The information had germinated in her mind and sprouted into an idea. She'd cultivated that into a plan.

It had run into trouble as soon as she made her move, with me getting fired and thrown off the ranch, ending her pretexts for "accidentally" running into me and furthering our acquaintance. But she'd seen a way to turn that around-to keep the drama going, send my rage at Balcomb into orbit, and insinuate herself as my ally, all in one brilliant stroke. She knew that I was going to jail and that she'd have time to find my place.

And to set that lumber on fire.

But she hadn't known about what was going on behind the scenes-how desperate Balcomb was and how dangerous things would get. Once that came home to her, she'd realized, correctly, that Madbird was a much better bet for protection than me, and she'd made a grab for him. Probably she'd figured that she could convince him of the need to kill Balcomb, and he'd be a lot more skillful at that, too. But she'd ended up stuck with me, and Madbird had added insult to injury by turning down her advances-the underlying reason for the fury that led her to pitch Hannah's bag out the window.

She'd rebounded fast again and gotten the train back on track, sending me chugging along to what looked like a sure thing after all. Then she'd left me to twist in the wind. I'd discovered today that she'd peeled several hundred dollars off my roll of bills while I was in the shower or asleep, like a hooker rolling a drunk. She could have gone to another motel or another city. There was no knowing what kind of story she planned to tell the authorities; but for sure, Madbird was right-I'd have been on the wrong side of those lawyers once more, this time with cold, and highly visible, blood on my hands.

The Celia angle was another brilliant stroke, and she'd played it beautifully, starting slow, gauging my reactions, and jacking it up a little at a time. She'd picked up specifics somehow, like the bits of information and mannerisms she'd dropped. I guessed that her being on horseback when she'd first come on to me was no accident. She'd obviously known that Celia had done a lot of riding on the ranch, and probably intended for me to subconsciously make that association. I even suspected that she'd gotten a photo or detailed description of Celia, and had dyed her hair to heighten the resemblance-I remembered thinking that on the previous glimpses I'd gotten of Laurie, the color had seemed a subdued brown, but when I'd first seen her coming across the meadow, it had struck me as that same flaming auburn as Celia's.