“Yep.”
She nonchalantly reached down, feigning an itch in order to snag the pistol. She slid it back under the blanket and carried it onto her lap. “Your daughter live in Billings?”
“Philadelphia.”
She nodded and murmured something I didn’t catch.
“Excuse me?”
Her eyes came up, and I noticed they were an unsettling shade of green. “Philly Soul. The O’Jays, Patti LaBelle, the Stylistics, Archie Bell & the Drells, the Intruders . . .”
“That music’s a little before your time, isn’t it?”
She sipped her coffee and turned to stare out the windshield. “Music’s for everybody, all the time.”
We drove through the night. It seemed as if she wanted something, and I made the mistake of thinking it was talk. “The guitar case—you play?”
She watched the snow that had just started darting through my headlights again. “Your dog sure has a nice truck.” We drifted under the overpass at the Blue Cow Café and Casino as an eighteen-wheeler, pushing the speed limit, became more circumspect in his velocity when I pulled from the haze of snow behind him and passed.
There was another long pause, and the muffled sound of the tires gave the illusion that we were riding on clouds. “I play guitar—lousy. Hey, do you mind if we power up the radio? Music, I mean.”
I stared at her for a moment and then gestured toward the dash. She fiddled with the SEEK button on FM, but we were in the dead zone between Hardin and Billings. “Not much reception this close to the Rez; why don’t you try AM—the signals bounce off the atmosphere and you can get stuff from all over the world.”
She flipped it off and slumped back against the door. “I don’t do AM.” She remained restless, glancing up at the visors and at the console. “You don’t have any CDs?”
I thought about it and remembered my friend Henry Standing Bear buying some cheap music at the Flying J truck stop months ago on a fishing trip to Fort Smith, Montana. The Bear had become annoyed with me when I’d left the radio on SEARCH for five minutes, completely unaware that it was only playing music in seven-second intervals. “You know, there might be one in the side pocket of that door.”
She moved and rustled her free hand in the holdall, finally pulling out a $2.99 The Very Best of Merle Haggard. “Oh, yeah.”
She plucked the disc from the cheap cardboard sleeve and slipped it into a slot in the dash I’d never used. The lights of the stereo came on and the opening lines of Haggard’s opus “Okie from Muskogee” thumped through the speakers. She made a face, looked at the cover, and read the fine print. “What’d they do, record it on an eight-track through a steel drum full of bourbon?”
“I’m not so sure they sell the highest fidelity music in the clearance bin at the Flying J.”
Her face was animated in a positive way for the first time as the long fingers danced off the buttons of my truck stereo, and I noticed the blue metal-flake nail polish and the bracelet that clearly read LAKESIDE PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL—LAKESIDE, TN.
“You’ve got too much bass and the fade’s all messed up.” She continued playing with the thing, and I had to admit that the sound was becoming remarkably better. Satisfied, she sat back in the seat, even going so far as to hold out her other hand for Dog to sniff. He did and then licked her wrist.
“I love singer/storytellers.” She scratched under the beast’s chin and for the first time since I’d met her seemed to relax as she listened to the lyrics. “You know this song is a joke, right? He wrote it in response to the uninformed view of the Vietnam War. He said he figured it was what his dad would’ve thought.”
I shrugged noncommittally.
She stared at the side of my face, possibly at my ear, or the lack of a tiny bit of it. “Were you over there?”
I nodded.
“So was my dad.” Her eyes went back to the road. “That’s why I’m going home; he died.”
I navigated my way around a string of slow-moving cars. “What did your father do?”
Her voice dropped to a trademark baritone, buttery and resonant. “KERR, 750 AM. Polson, Montana.”
I laughed. “I thought you didn’t do AM.”
“Yeah, well now you know why.”
Merle swung into “Pancho and Lefty,” and she pointed to the stereo. “Proof positive that he did smoke marijuana in Muskogee—he’s friends with Willie Nelson.”
I raised an eyebrow. “In my line of work, we call that guilt by association.”
“Yeah, well, in my line of work we call it a friggin’ fact, and Willie’s smoked like a Cummins diesel everywhere, including Muskogee, Oklahoma.”
I had to concede the logic. “You seem to know a lot about the industry. Nashville?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, so you’re not a musician. What did you do?”
“Still do, when I get through in Polson.” Her eyes went back to the windshield and her future. “Produce, audio engineer . . . Or I try to.” She nibbled on one of the nails, on the hand that held the shiny cup. “Did you know that less than 5 percent of producers and engineers in the business are women?” I waited, but she seemed preoccupied, finally sipping her coffee again and then pouring herself another. “We’re raised to be attractive and accommodating, but we’re not raised to know our shit and stand by it.” She was quiet for a while, listening to the lyrics. “Townes Van Zandt wrote that one. People think it’s about Pancho Villa but one of the lines is about him getting hung—Pancho Villa was gunned down.”
I nodded and glanced at her lap. “Seven men standing in the road in Hidalgo del Parral shot more than forty rounds into his roadster.”
“You a history teacher before you were sheriff?” I didn’t say anything, and the smile lingered on her face like fingerpicking on a warped-neck fretboard. “You’re okay-looking, in a dad kind of way.”
I widened my eyes. “That’s a disturbing statement for a number of reasons.”
She barked a laugh and raised one of the combat boots up to lodge it against the transmission hump, but realized she was revealing the pistol from the drape of the blanket on her lap and lowered her foot. “My dad never talked about it, Vietnam. . . . He handled that Agent Orange stuff and that shit gave robots cancer.” Her eyes were drawn back to the windshield, and Polson. “He died last week and they’re already splitting up his stuff.” The mile markers clicked by like the wand on a metronome. “He taught me how to listen; I mean really listen. To hear things that nobody else heard. He had this set of Sennheiser HD414 open-back headphones from ’73, lightweight with the first out-of-head imaging with decent bass—Sony Walkmans and all that stuff should get down and kiss Sennheiser’s ass. They had a steel cord and you could throw them at a talented program director or a brick wall—I’m not sure which is potentially denser.”
It was an unsettling tirade, but I still had to laugh.
“You don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, do you?”
“Nope, but it all sounds very impressive.” We topped the hill above Billings and looked at the lit-up refineries that ran along the highway as I made the sweeping turn west, the power of internal combustion pushing us back in the leather seats like we were tobogganing down the hill in a softened and diffused landscape. The tires ran silent and floated on a cushion of air headlong into the snowy dunes and shimmering lights that strung alongside the highway like fuzzy moons.
She turned away, keeping her eyes from me, afraid that I might see too much there. “You can just drop me at the Golden Pheasant; I’ve got friends doing a gig that’ll give me a ride the rest of the way.”
Nodding, I joined with the linear constellation of I-94.