The Final Country

or the smell of the burned elk burgers, nosed into the circle of firelight, sniffing as if he wanted to join the dance.

Once when my father and I were fly fishing up Six Mile, a black bear had come up to the bluff across the creek. I must have been four or five, old enough to be curious and young enough to be nervous. He told me that if I wanted the bear to move on to bark like a dog. I barked as loud and long as I could. The sow scrambled up the nearest tree. 'Sometimes, they'll do that,' my Dad said.

So when I saw the cub, I started barking. Within moments, my buddies had joined me, and the little devil scooted up a bull pine, where he swung precariously from a thick branch, hissing and spitting like a tomcat.

We laughed like madmen at the frightened cub, swept by gales of drunken mirth, until I spun and fell on my back at the base of the pine, my mouth wide open. The cub spit straight down into my mouth, a skunky stream of saliva, more solid than liquid, which I swallowed before I could stop. An electric moment. Suddenly I was sober and sorry for the cub. But I couldn't stop my friends from laughing and barking. I punched and shoved and wrestled them, but they thought I was crazy and wouldn't stop. I fought them to a standstill. Or until they got tired of beating on me. Nobody remembers which came first. Then they decided what they really needed was a road trip to the whorehouses in Wallace, Idaho, another hoary Montana tradition, so they drove down the mountain, leaving me with a couple of six-packs and a very sore head. I sat by the dying fire until dawn, the stink of the bear in my mouth, my nose, and seeping through my guts. The raspy sound of the bear's breath echoed in my head. When the sun cleared the saddle below Hammerhead Peak, we both went home. I never looked at a bear the same way again – or my friends, for that matter – and never got that wild taste out of my mouth. Leave me alone, fool, it seemed to say, we're in this shit together.

Something else had changed that night, too, but I didn't know what until much later. Turned out that it was the end of my childhood. After football season, after a shouting match with my crazy, drunken mother – she had accused me of only going hunting in eastern Montana so I could go whoring in Livingston like my worthless, dead father, which was only half-true – I said I was leaving for good, and she said 'good riddance to bad rubbish.' Three days later she signed the papers lying about my age, and I was in the Army, where I learned a bitter lesson about fear. But I never lost the taste of that bear. We were brothers, somehow, in this life and death together.

I shook Gannon's hand, reluctantly. Whatever had happened in Long's office, and whatever Enos Walker had done, he was a man like me. If he lived long enough to make it to court, chances were, with the testimony of the bartender and me, Walker could cop a self-defense or involuntary manslaughter plea and wouldn't have to die at the hands of a state I found much too fond of the needle. I knew the sweet taste of revenge, but living in a place that killed people with such casual aplomb made me a little jumpy. In the long run the death penalty had nothing to do with revenge or deterrence. It was just a way for the fools to get elected.

TWO

It took longer to find the bartender than it did for me to find out that he wouldn't give me the time of day. For a man who seemed without much backbone, he suddenly bowed up his neck and stayed grimly silent. Either he was more frightened of somebody else than me, or he had some sort of protection that I couldn't find out about.

So Sissy Duval was my only lead. She lived in a fancy ground-floor condo on the south side of Town Lake, which she owned outright, as she did her fairly new BMW 7 series, but except for a small trust fund from her father and several modest alimony checks, she didn't seem to have any visible means of support. And Sissy was her real name. All of which Carver de Longchampe discovered in a quick Internet search. Carver D had retired from the underground newspaper business when he sold The Dark Coast to an alternative chain but that hadn't stopped him from being nosy; he was connected to every information database known to be legal and some I suspected weren't.

When I rang Sissy Duval's bell late the next afternoon, the door was half-opened by a well-dressed black woman with light dusky skin, fine features, and frosted streaks in her straight hair.

'Mrs. Duval?' I said, and the black woman looked at me as if I had cowshit on my boots.

'It doesn't matter who I am,' she growled, 'whatever you're selling, we've got at least two. Now if you'll excuse me, sir, I'm on my way out.'

Before I could step back, though, a sleepy voice came from beyond the half-open door. 'Who is it, Eldora?'

'Well, it ain't your date, honey,' the black woman said as she opened the door all the way. Some decorator had gone through the living room in his beige-beach period – driftwood, glass, and sketches of sandy tan, wall to wall.

'Bobby Mitchell ain't coming, honey,' said a tall, lanky white woman with tousled hair as she drifted into the room.

'Old bastard's seventy-five if he's a day, and he still wants to be called Bobby,' the black woman muttered. But I didn't think she was talking to me.

'Bobby says his colon's acting up again,' Sissy Duval said as she stepped up to the door. Except for skin color, the two women could have been sisters.

'Well, this gentleman might be full of shit, honey, but he doesn't look like he has a problem with a lower bowel blockage. Maybe he'll take you to the benefit,' the black woman said, 'after he scatters his bullshit around and sells you another set of aluminum cookware. Or maybe one of those vacuum cleaners that'll suck the dust mites out of your mattress.'

'I'm not selling anything,' I said as the black woman brushed past.

'Not to me, you aren't,' she said.

'See you tomorrow, Eldora,' Mrs. Duval said, but she was looking directly at me. And smiling as she estimated my value within five thousand dollars and my age within ten days. She'd never see forty again, and nobody would ever know which one of the myriad shades of her hair might be real, and she'd never actually worked a day in her life, but she had good bones and the Texas sun hadn't turned her skin into a roast duck hide yet. She cocked her hip, rested her diamond-studded hand on it, and smiled innocently. 'And how can I help you, sir?' she asked. A question, I suspected, many men had rushed to answer.

I introduced myself, showed her my license, and told her that I would like to talk about her former husband. That seemed a good place to start her talking, since I knew she had several.

'I ain't got nothin' but exes, honey,' she said, 'and Jesus, they all live in Texas.' Then she sighed deeply. 'It's five o'clock somewhere,' she said. 'I'm gonna have a vodka. Can I get you something?'

'Maybe a beer,' I said. It seemed that I could still feel my guts burning from the four ounces of Canadian whiskey Enos Walker had made me drink the day before. But the beach atmosphere in the room called for something liquid.

'So which one of the bastards are you looking for?' she asked over her straight vodka after she had lodged me on a raw cotton couch and handed me a Shiner and a frosted glass.

'The one that owned a joint up in Gatlin County.'

'Oh, Dwayne, the only one that doesn't live in Texas. He's dead,' she said, which I didn't know. She walked over to lean on the mantel of the gas fireplace. 'Dwayne had a great ass. So I kept his name and his ashes right here to remind me to stay away from honky-tonk cowboys.' She patted a ceramic pot on the mantel, then knuckled a tear from the corner of her eye. 'That boy sure could dance,' she said fondly.

'I'm sorry, Mrs. Duval,' I said. 'How long were you married?'

'As long as I had a hundred thousand dollars a year to shovel up his nose and keep his tight little buns out of jail,' she answered, and finished her vodka, surely not the first of the afternoon, then poured another without freshening the ice. Then she began to rummage through the drawers of the small wet bar in the corner of the living room. 'You got a cigarette?' she said as she leaned on the bar.

'Sure,' I said, then walked over to lean on the bar across from her. Not a bad place for an aimless interrogation.