She stalked out, looking like a million bucks.
I spent most of another dreary hour back in my cell before a jailer led me to the main desk, where I signed away my immortal soul to Bill's Bail Bonds. Bill was there, with his hit-man leather coat and stony face. He didn't say much, but he didn't have to. We both knew that the last thing in the world I wanted was him on my ass.
The desk sergeant told me to show up first thing on Monday-the judge would see me as soon as he had time. A clerk got my truck keys and my plastic sack of clothes from a storage room.
When I put them on, I imagined I could still smell those horses.
I didn't see Gary Varna again. Sarah Lynn had come in along with Bill LaTray, but she'd disappeared by the time I finished dealing with the paperwork. I thought she'd probably slipped outside for a cigarette.
But when I walked out onto the worn stone steps of the courthouse, she was gone, too.
I sat down and threaded the laces into my boots. The afternoon had turned into a luscious September evening, with the sky a shimmering blue that deepened every minute and the mountainsides going from green to purple. The air was taking on the crisp chill it did that time of year, after the warm days suckered you into thinking it was still summer.
Maybe she'd left to spare me any feeling of obligation. Maybe the tawdriness of this had come home to her, and she'd wanted to distance herself.
Maybe it had to do with a road I didn't care to look back down.
She and I hadn't ever been officially engaged, but it was understood that we'd get married after I finished college. I was the one who'd pulled the pin, for reasons I'd never really been able to explain to her.
On my way out of town, I stopped at Louie's Market for a six-pack of Pabst. They kept their beer ice-cold, and the first one was about as good as anything I'd ever tasted.
Then I headed home, to scrub off that smell, root out my money stash to pay Sarah Lynn, and figure out where I was going to score a truck and driver to haul my ill-gotten lumber back to the ranch.
12
My father had left me a number of his possessions, most of them well worn, and all grounded in the reality of his world. The pickup truck I was driving was a prime example. He'd bought it new in 1968-a four-by-four GMC, with a lionhearted V-8, spacious toolboxes lining the bed's rails, and a sturdy welded-iron lumber rack. It was already long in the tooth when I'd learned to drive on it, and it probably blue-booked now in the hundreds of dollars. But he'd cared for it religiously, changing the oil every two thousand miles, and I'd done the same. It had paid us back by carrying us almost three hundred thousand miles, through long winters, hunting trips, and construction jobs, with just one short-block rebuild and occasional minor repairs. I'd slept in it, drunk in it, loved in it, and lived out of it to the point where it was more of an old comrade than a vehicle.
But the greatest of my old man's gifts was a chunk of land near the northeast shore of Canyon Ferry Lake-a quarter section of rough hilly timber that he'd bought for a song back when things like that were still possible. Some of my earliest memories were of being there with him. My sisters had lost interest in it after childhood, so he'd willed it to me, compensating them with most of the cash from our slender inheritance. Besides the truck and my tools, it was about all I owned. I'd lived there full-time for almost exactly nine years now. I sometimes wondered if he'd foreseen how critical to me it would be.
The drive from Helena to Canyon Ferry took me about twenty minutes. Traffic thinned quickly after I left town, and when I got there I had the road to myself. The lake was an impressive sight, a twenty-mile stretch of shimmering blue that stayed hidden until you topped a final rise, then appeared suddenly. It had been created by damming the Missouri in the 1950s, a century and a half after Lewis and Clark had traveled through on their way to finding the river's headwaters. During the summer it was crowded with boats and vacationers, but they dropped off once the weather changed, and not many people lived out there all year round.
I crossed the dam and drove through the tiny village, then turned off the paved road into Stumpleg Gulch, supposedly named for an early trapper who'd lost a limb to one of his own bear traps as a result of an overfondness for whiskey. My place was about two miles up, on a spur that dead-ended in the talus slopes of the Big Belt Mountains. Most of the surrounding land was national forest, buffering it from development. The nearest habitation was well out of sight and sound, and belonged to an elderly Finlander who was a perfect neighbor-glad to help if you needed it but otherwise he didn't care for company, and had been known to emphasize that point to strangers with warning shots. The few other places around were partly hidden little enclaves where families had survived for generations through some combination of raising a few animals, gyppo logging, subsistence mining, and living off the land, which, in practice, included a lot of poaching. The same traditional code that dictated other facets of life figured in there. Residents never noticed jacklights in the woods at night or gunshots out of season. The deer and elk herds stayed plenty strong, and fed people instead of falling to starvation or predators.
My old man had intended our place to be a family hangout during the summer and a base for hunting in fall. He'd built a cabin of lodgepole pine, using a Swede saw, an ax, and other hand tools-I still had them-and later added a good-size shed for storage, dressing game, and emergency vehicle repairs. He'd gotten a well dug and put in a cold water sink, which worked fine in good weather but the pipes would freeze by Thanksgiving if you didn't shut down the system. That was as far as he'd seen fit to take it. Light came from kerosene lanterns and heat from woodstoves. If you stayed up there long enough to want a bath, you filled an old washtub with hot water and hunkered down in it. More organic needs were consigned to an outhouse, with a coffee can full of lime beside the seat.
When I'd moved up there nine years ago, I'd thought at first that my stay was going to be temporary while I figured out what to do next. But eventually I'd realized that I wasn't going anywhere soon, and started making improvements.
The cabin was sound structurally, but drafty and crude-just a wooden box for cooking and sleeping. I'd re- chinked and insulated until it was tight and comfortable, paid Montana Power an arm and leg to bring in electricity, trenched the cold-water intake eight feet deep to protect against freezing, and installed a propane system for hot showers. I'd finally even broken down and gotten a phone.
Everything was dandy now except for the size. The outside walls were barely seven feet high and only a few strides apart. A couple months of winter put teeth in the term stir crazy, especially when you felt the need to pace but snow was blowing horizontally outside the windows. I'd been dying to add more space and I'd spent a lot of time sketching plans; but extra money came slow, and more pressing priorities were always cropping up.
When we'd started tearing those fine old floor joists out of the Pettyjohn mansion and I realized they were just going to be tossed away to rot, it was like manna falling from heaven.
That had jump-started me from fantasy to reality. Framing lumber was the big-ticket item that had been holding me back-my cash supply wasn't much, but it would get me a good start on other materials, and there was plenty of lodgepole pine on the land for log walls. The two-by-twelves would carry the floor and make perfect rafters for this country's heavy snow loads, and there'd probably be enough left to mill out for cabinets and trim. I could build the addition high-ceilinged and tie into the existing cabin with a valley roof. After a few years of weathering, the new part would seem like it had always been there. Of course I was looking at a long haul-working mostly alone, on the days I could spare-but I enjoyed that kind of thing, and I wasn't much involved in other forms of recreation.
But now those plans had plummeted back down to fantasy-in fact, quite a ways farther. Easy come, easy go.
I was just finishing my second beer when I reached the spur road to my place. It narrowed to a single lane, through thick forest that darkened the last of the evening to night.
But as soon as I made the turn, I caught a glimpse of something bright up ahead that seemed to be dancing around. The first notion that flashed through my mind was that some bizarre combination of the steep road and windshield refraction was giving me a view of the northern lights. Then the truth followed just as fast.
Flames.
I stomped on the gas pedal and tore the last few hundred yards, jolting and fishtailing. The pipe-metal gate to my property was hanging open. I had never put a lock on it, but I never left it like that. I drove on through and jumped out of the truck with it still rolling.
