knelt, too, and lightly pushed Kirk's eyelids closed with his fingertips.
'You better understand something, Hugh,' he said. 'You just walked into a different world. Ain't nothing ever going to be the same again.'
Neil McMahon – Lone Creek
'How's it looking?' I said.
Madbird leaned back and eyed the cliff face critically. We were dangling ten feet down into a little coulee, roped to a tree, wearing the harnesses we used for bridge work. Kirk was wedged upright into a fissure in front of us, covered with a mixture of sticky foam insulation, dirt, and rocks several inches thick.
'You missed a spot over by his left ear,' Madbird said. 'The rest ain't bad.'
I got another can of foam from the sack hanging off my belt and popped the seal. The gunk came out in a thin rope like toothpaste from a tube and quickly swelled to several times that size, an expansion that was powerful enough to bow window and doorjambs. I filled the divot and packed it with soil to match the surroundings.
He grunted OK. 'I'll throw you some brush,' he said, and hauled himself up his rope hand over hand.
This time he hadn't just helped me out. He'd flat saved my ass-sized up the situation, muttered that if the old downtown bars were still open we could just set Kirk on a stool and nobody would ever notice, then drove us to town for a quick supply run. When we got back we carried Kirk half a mile farther into the woods, lowered him over the cliff, and started foaming him in.
I took the handfuls of brush and duff that Madbird dropped down to me and created a tangled little deadfall in the narrow cleft above Kirk's head. Then Madbird trotted around to a vantage point and gave me directions while I dusted the foam once more with scree, trying to make it look like the natural result of years of rain and erosion. Within an hour it would harden like lightweight concrete, and hold its shape after the flesh decomposed. Big animals wouldn't have any perch for digging him out, and varmints or ravens weren't likely to chew their way through several inches of toxic polyurethane embedded with rocks. The foam dried to about the same color as the soil, so any that showed through would barely be noticeable. The rare human who might happen along would see only another debris-choked crevice in a cliff. An earthquake might shake him loose, but this wasn't earthquake country. I was willing to take my chances there.
When we got back to Madbird's van we spent a couple of minutes trying to scrub hardened foam off ourselves, without much luck. You couldn't walk across the street from the stuff without getting it all over you, and although we'd worn rubber gloves and long-sleeved shirts, it had managed to sneak inside them. Gasoline or WD-40 would cut most kinds of gunk pretty well, but it barely touched the top layer of this stuff. The rest came off only with your skin.
But that was only a nuisance. The really bad part had been facing Kirk from only a foot or two away while we'd walled him in. We'd kept him wrapped in the tarp to avoid getting scent on us, but I'd felt him as clearly as if I could see through it. Neither Madbird nor I had suggested turning him around. That would have been like burying somebody facedown in a coffin.
It was starting to come home to me that I had made a living human being dead-someone I'd known all my life. I'd pitied him more than I liked him, but in some strange way, that almost made it worse.
I screwed the top back onto the red plastic gas container and stowed it in the rear of the van.
Then, out of nowhere, I started crying. Blubbering like a little kid.
After a minute or so I was better. I blew some snot onto the ground and got my eyes clear. Madbird was leaning against the van with his arms folded.
'You go a ways up in them mountains, there's a place nobody much knows about,' he said. His right hand extended, forefinger pointing northward. Something about the gesture suggested a distance that wasn't measurable on a map. 'It ain't exactly what you'd call a burial ground, but people been going there a long time to take care of their dead. My mother and my stepbrother Robert, my first wife and our little girl that got meningitis-their ashes are hanging from a tree in leather bags. We can go there some day if you want.'
He spoke casually, still not looking at me. He'd never mentioned this before.
Still shaky, I said, 'I'd be honored.'
He finally turned to me. I'd never seen his face like that-gentle, patient, with a hint of things he'd been through that I couldn't begin to fathom.
'If you're feeling sorry for him, remember he tried to kill you first,' Madbird said. 'From behind.'
I shook my head. It wasn't just sorrow for Kirk or for myself that I was feeling. It was a much vaster grief, for all of this that was happening and for everything else like it that ever had.
23
We took my bloody clothes from last night to a creek a good mile away, soaked them with gasoline, and burned them to ashes, then dissolved the ashes in the swiftly flowing water. There were a few things left-my knife and belt buckle, some grommets from my boots and the rubbery residue of their soles, and Kirk's camcorder. I'd almost dumped that along with the Jeep, but then realized that experts might be able to recover its images, and there just might be something that would point to me. But I checked it while the clothes were burning, and the only footage was that brief scene of Laurie Balcomb in the creek. I doubted her husband knew that Kirk had done his job of shadowing her so thoroughly.
I pounded the camcorder to small pieces with a hammer and washed them and the other nonflammable stuff clean of blood and fingerprints. Then I took it all down into a thickly brush-choked draw and foamed it into a rockpile like we'd done with Kirk. I kicked a small landslide over the site for good measure, and headed back.
I was sure I'd left loose ends in spite of all my caution, and without doubt the investigation would soon come around to me in a serious way. But this was going to have to do it for now.
Madbird and I drove home.
He followed me through the trees to my cabin, this time carrying the old lever-action 30-30 he kept in his van. I trotted in a crouch to the windows and peered inside. Everything seemed the same as when I'd left. I turned to him and raised my hand. He saluted, and then he was gone. Neither of us had said much more. It was like we'd been on a fishing trip instead of doing what we'd done. But I knew he was thinking the same thing I was-that it would be best if we didn't hang around together for a while.
It was a little before one o'clock. The afternoon had taken on a hazy warmth. But when I stepped inside the cabin, it felt so cold and lifeless that I stopped in the doorway. I hadn't ever fired up the woodstove last night, and the log walls held in the chill. I'd never finished making that coffee for Gary Varna, either. The unheated kettle was still sitting by the sink.
I closed the door and walked back out to a big wind-twisted Doug fir that was probably the oldest living thing on the place. The sun was obscured by light clouds that might signal coming rain, but it showed as a ragged yellowish blur behind them. I sat on my heels facing it, with my back up against the fir. I'd started doing this after the end of my marriage and that previous life that had gone along with it. Eventually, I'd realized that it was an unconscious attempt to soak up energy, sandwiching my body between the sun in front and the tree behind, in the hope that this would trickle-charge some internal battery that was drained dry. The warmth always felt good and sometimes it seemed to help in other ways, but not today.
That grief was still with me, but I was starting to wake up to the reality of what Madbird had pointed out. My notion that I might have falsely accused Balcomb had vaporized. I was certain that he'd sent Kirk to kill me. He didn't know what had happened to Kirk, but he'd have realized from talking to Gary Varna early this morning that something had gone wrong. Dropping the charges against me was another of his smoke screens, a way to establish his ignorance of the murder attempt and to keep me off guard.
There were a couple of spin-offs. First, whatever was behind the slaughter of those horses was worth killing for.
Second, Wesley Balcomb was still alive and no doubt still wanted me dead. He would try again. My luck had been twisting and turning, but it had come through for me big-time last night. I couldn't keep counting on it.
I'd be crazy to hang around like a sitting duck. But if I left town, with Gary Varna as suspicious as he was already, it would be taken as an admission of guilt for Kirk's disappearance. The law would damned sure find me, I'd go back to jail, and my little cover-up scheme would be put under the kind of scrutiny that would rip it apart.
