Neil McMahon - Lone Creek

"That's not what I'm trying to do, Slo. It's-" I groped for words.

Then, abruptly, I was slammed by the exhaustion that had been hovering over me. I started to sag, and I had to physically brace myself back up. I felt like I could have collapsed into a puddle on the floor.

"It's not like that," I finished lamely. "I'm wiped out. I've got to go. I'll call you. I will."

"You better," she said, but she smiled. She lowered the flowers, inviting a quick kiss. I gave it to her, torn between shame and happiness. Then I stumbled out.

Helena's little rush hour was gathering steam, and I forced myself to concentrate on the traffic. But as it thinned, my feelings began to surface as fatigue-dulled thoughts, centering on whether Sarah Lynn and I might have another chance.

She was everything that Laurie wasn't. I still loved her in some way-not with the consuming passion of our youth, but with a deep, comfortable affection-and I was sure she felt the same. I wouldn't be much of a catch for her, but I was warm and breathing, and I wouldn't beat her up or steal her money and head to the casinos. She could probably even dress me up and take me out once in a while. From my side, I'd never come close to another woman who was simply so good, or to the satisfying life she had to offer. We had our differences, but they were far from insurmountable. And that young man who'd walked away from her was long gone.

Yet just in these past few days, something fundamental had changed for me and my life. I couldn't get hold of it, but I was already pretty sure that no amount of effort or good sense was going to turn me back toward being the kind of man that she needed and deserved.

When I got home, I fired up the woodstove and dug my last can of corned beef hash out of the cupboard. While it fried, I drank a beer and a couple of splashes of Old Taylor bourbon. I sat on the steps to eat, and drank another couple of shots as the day faded toward dusk.

Then, at last, I slept a real sleep.

The next day was another of those autumn beauties, with the air clear and crisp and the sky almost shockingly blue. There wouldn't be many more of them this year. In the afternoon, after making sure nobody was keeping tabs on me, I fired up the Victor and rode into the Belts behind my place.

I had slept in a near coma from yesterday evening until this morning, getting up once to stumble outside and take a leak, then collapsing again. For the first few hours after waking, I'd wandered around in a stupor. But finally my mind had cleared and I'd started thinking about practicalities, like the scrutiny I'd soon be facing. Top priority was to make sure that Kirk's interment was as hidden as I thought. Hunting season would be starting soon, and somebody just might go wandering by there.

The place where Madbird and I had stashed him was about three miles away as the crow flew, and a shorter trip overland than going down to the highway and looping up again. I took the familiar back trails through the woods and rock formations of my childhood sanctuary. That part of what I'd told Gary Varna was true. I left the bike at the logging road and hiked the last stretch through the brush.

The news was fine about the job we'd done. The site appeared perfectly natural-a passerby would never give it a second glance.

But I could almost imagine that I saw a hint of Kirk's outline behind the facade of earth and stone, and that there was a sort of grim satisfaction in his posture. It looked good on him. He had never amounted to much in his father's eyes, but he'd finally brought Reuben a kind of peace in a Byzantine way. Maybe that was another canceled debt, like the one between Reuben and me. I recalled thinking of Reuben in Shakespearean terms, as a kind of colossus. Now, with Kirk, another line from Shakespeare appeared in my mind.

Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.

I knelt down for a minute-not to pray, exactly, but to tell Kirk that although he'd given me no choice, I was bitterly sorry. Then I got back on the bike and started home.

My imaginings about Kirk were really for my own benefit, not his. I didn't know what to believe about an afterlife-whether the dead knew or cared what happened here on earth, or if anything that the living did could help them rest, or even if they continued to exist in any way we could conceive of.

But I did believe in an immense, mysterious machine of fate that ultimately exacted true final justice, that couldn't be swayed by influence peddling and didn't accept get-out-of-jail-free cards, and that kept track of who owed what right down to the molecule.

I had to think that everybody involved in these events had undergone a serious shake-up of their bank balances, for better or worse.

I'd called Madbird earlier to tell him I was temporarily off the hook, and he'd said he'd swing by. When I rode back into my place toward dusk, he was sitting on my steps drinking a Pabst. There were a couple of empties beside him along with a bag of store-bought ice. He fished in that, pulled out a fresh one, and tossed it to me. If he guessed where I'd been, he didn't say so.

I sat down beside him, opened the beer, and took a long, long drink.

Before we had a chance to say a word, the black tomcat came stalking into view and started yelling at me for being gone so long and letting strangers come on his turf. He'd probably heard the popping sound of the can's top and was running a guilt trip on me to score some brew for himself. Madbird crumpled an empty can in his fist, folding up the edges to make a crude saucer. He set it on the steps and poured a little beer in. The cat sniffed it, tasted it, sneezed, then started lapping it up. Bits of hay and leaves clung to his fur, and a raw red patch was scabbing over behind his left ear.

Madbird leaned back against the wall. He looked relaxed, like this was Friday afternoon after work and we were talking about maybe going fishing tomorrow.

"Hey," he said, and gave my boot a kick. "When that John Doe fuckwad had the gun on you back there at the camp-you didn't really think I'd sold you out, did you?" His teeth showed just slightly, in the beginnings of that grin.

My face got warm and my gaze shifted away. I reached down to scratch the base of the cat's bent tail. He arched his rump against my hand, but kept slurping busily.

"I guess I did," I admitted.

Madbird nodded approvingly. "You're picking up them Indian lessons pretty good."

That was about as pleasing a compliment as I'd ever gotten.

Overall, I had the sense that this was the culmination of a long series of events-that when I'd gotten my eye busted that night at Rocky Boy years ago, it had rung the death knell of the self that had lived in the familiar world of my youth, and lit the spark of another self, approaching a different world-the one where Madbird had been my guide. I'd never be at home there like he was. But I knew already that he was right about nothing ever being the same again. The immersion of the past few days had been a baptism, and the alchemy would keep working in hidden ways toward whatever came next.

I didn't have a clue as to what it might be. But if it managed to announce itself a little more sedately, that would suit me just fine.