dropped down into my skull.
Two days later, I got home from St. Peter's Hospital with the eyeball cinched back up in place on a piece of plastic and the bones under it wired together.
Of course Sarah Lynn felt terrible, and I tried to reassure her. I knew she'd been possessive because she was threatened, and seducing me was a naughty way of making me choose her over her rival. The last thing in the world she'd ever have wanted was to see me hurt. That had happened because I'd fought like a rank amateur, and putting any other kind of spin on it was absurd.
Still, she was no doubt right that I harbored subconscious resentment. It was also transparent that she was pleased about my boxing days being over, and that added to the mix. The next summer, we broke up.
By then I was feeling like that punch had smashed right through my face into my brain, jarring me into a new state of clarity. It wasn't especially pleasant. I started seeing a more honest and less pretty picture of myself than the one I had painted in my mind-the kind you might see after you'd been on a three-day runner and ended up alone and wide-awake drunk.
But I also started getting glimpses into my restlessness. It was a longing, an ache that everybody experienced at some point. Boxing, like the religious piety I'd felt as a boy, was a means I'd used to try to cope with it. Its source lay deeper. I realized that the reason I'd been so drawn to the Indians playing the stick game up at Rocky Boy that night was my sense of how close to it they were.
Still, I couldn't identify that hunger, let alone figure out how to satisfy it in a real and long-term fashion. The only thing I could think to do was to keep my options open. I held to the naive conviction that some event of critical importance to my life was out there on the horizon, and if I settled into practicality and security, I might miss it. That was the real reason I'd broken up with Sarah Lynn, who would have given me everything most men would ask.
I got out of Stanford with a degree in history, not good for much except more school, and no particular focus. I decided to try journalism, with a vague notion that wide exposure to new things might help me find the direction I was looking for. I was able to get into a graduate program at USC.
But by then I was seriously involved with one of my former classmates, who had started law school at UC Davis, near Sacramento. The long-distance relationship was a strain, and so was Los Angeles, especially with trying to live there poor. After a year at USC, I left and took a job at the Sacramento Guardian. The position and salary were both well below what I'd have made if I'd gotten my master's degree, but I was ready for a change and a steady paycheck. I figured I'd give it a year or two, then go back and finish school.
I never did. Emilie and I got married-Stanford blessed the union between two of its own in traditional fashion, by bold-printing our names in alumni newsletters-and new factors entered the equation. Her father was a wealthy business executive, her mother a socialite. For a wedding gift, they put the down payment on a house, which, privately, made me very uncomfortable. It was no secret that they considered my profession undignified and my earning potential a joke, and they wished I'd grow up and go to law or business school myself. The pressure mounted as time passed, with Emilie joining the chorus.
I didn't have any interest in law or business or anything of the kind, but that wasn't why I dragged my heels. It wasn't out of love for my work, either-I'd lost my illusions early on. Mostly, I covered local-interest topics like Rotary conventions, bureaucratic incompetence, and couples who preserved historic street signs. Occasionally juicier things happened along-an unusual crime, political scandals-but even those always came down to the same sordid underpinnings.
There wasn't any physical punch to shock me into awareness this time-just the growing sense that I'd let myself get put in a box, and even helped to build it. It was a good box, a lot better than most people ever got, but I was having more and more trouble breathing, like the air inside was running out. Almost worse was the crushing sense that the real problem was me-that I didn't belong anywhere and I was blighting everything around me. Discomfort edged into quiet panic. I started drinking too much, jacking the family disapproval level way up.
One night Emilie and I went to bed without touching, as had become common. We didn't talk, either, just lay there side by side awake. I knew she was thinking the same thing I was. Our marriage had been based on our trying to please each other and do what the world expected of us, but now we'd grown, or retreated, into who we really were. Whatever connection there once had been was between two different people.
But I saw another truth alone. I'd allowed myself to believe that with all the external changes, I'd embarked on a new life. In fact, I had only caved in to the very thing I'd avoided with Sarah Lynn. The trappings were different, that was all.
I had just turned thirty then. Not long afterward, I took a solo vacation to Montana, thinking I'd refresh myself for a few days. It was the same time of year as now. The plane arrived just at dusk, coming in from the southwest over a carpet of green mountain wilderness.
Madbird picked me up at the airport and took me out drinking, a great night of cruising the bars and running into old friends. He let me know that he'd started working with a crew he liked a lot, and they could use a framer.
Within another month, my marriage and my journalistic career were both over, and I was back in Montana growing calluses on my hands again. I hadn't left since.
Like memories of Celia, that old restlessness had faded to the point where I'd barely thought about it for years. In a way that was a great relief. But I had never come any closer to resolving it, and in another way, it was like the death of an enemy-you lost a powerful force that had been driving you.
Now I was pushing forty.
20
I wasn't in any hurry to get home to my dark, empty cabin and burnt lumber, so I took a roundabout way, drifting along the country roads and crossing the Missouri at the York Bridge.
I'd reached the northeast rim of Canyon Ferry Lake when headlights flashed at me out of the darkness ahead-a double flick that was repeated a couple of seconds later. The vehicle was a few hundred yards farther on, down near the shoreline, not moving. Most likely it was a signal for help. That area lay between a couple of campgrounds, a half-mile-plus stretch of brush and gullies that was off-road, but that teenagers often drove into at night. There were little beaches where you could skinny-dip, cliffs you could dive off, plenty of places to drink or steam up your windows. A lot of the ground was sandy and soft, and getting stuck was easy.
It was after one o'clock in the morning now and my mood was far from helpful. But the headlights kept flashing and I decided I'd better at least make sure that whoever was there was OK. I was probably the only person who would come along this way before morning, and the night had gone cold.
I slowed and turned off the highway onto a dirt track that led in there. I knew the landscape well from my own teen years, for the same reasons as the kids nowadays. I was still edgy, and I cut my headlights and stayed in the brush, coming up on top of a little knoll. I got out quietly and walked to where I could get a look.
The other vehicle was maybe sixty yards away now, a little below me on a slope toward the lake. The moon was dropping behind the Rockies, but there was enough light for me to see that it was a dark-colored Jeep, with a man pacing around beside it.
Kirk Pettyjohn drove a black Jeep just like it. And his wiry form and pale hair were unmistakable.
That sure put a new spin on things.
He was staring in my direction, his head swiveling with jerky meth agitation. He'd probably heard my engine and was trying to spot me. Anger and wariness rose up in me together. My first thought was that Balcomb had sent him, maybe to extort the photos I'd claimed to have. He wasn't carrying his rifle, although he could have had it stashed within easy reach or had somebody else hiding.
But it didn't make sense that he'd wait at a place like this and flag me down-taking the chance that I'd just drive on past or even have a gun of my own-instead of nailing me when I wasn't expecting it.
I stood there for most of a minute, trying once again to choose the path of greatest caution.
