Clete nodded as though agreeing with a profound truth. “The VC did that sometimes,” he said. “A guy who was genuinely medevac in my recon group did it, too. By ‘medevac,’ I mean he was nuts, you dig? He rolled a head into a fire where we were cooking a pig. It scared the shit out of us. Then we all laughed. I didn’t take any pics, or I’d show you one.”
“I want both of you out of my sight,” the sheriff said.
Clete’s face looked poached in the artificial light, his green eyes neutral and unblinking, puffing air with one cheek and then the other, like a man gargling with mouthwash. The scar that ran through his eyebrow resembled a strip of welted rubber on a bicycle tire. “One of your guys just stepped in Younger’s blood,” he said. “Too bad Bill Pepper and Jack Boyd aren’t still on the job.”
Tell me Clete didn’t know how to do it.
We drove through Missoula and into the Jocko Valley and onto the Salish Indian reservation. We passed under a pedestrian bridge that had been created out of stone and dirt and trees for big-game animals, and through the tangle of shrubbery and birch trees planted along the retaining wall, I could see the multipointed racks of half a dozen elk crossing right above us.
“One day you and I will come up here and stay at the campground on the Jocko and fish for a week, then head on up to British Columbia,” Clete said. “A guy was telling me you can take a dozen twenty-inch cutthroat trout a day on the Elk River. You don’t even have to rent a canoe. You can catch a dozen lunkers right off the bank.”
“That sounds great, Clete.”
“See, you drive into Fernie, and you’re into mountains even bigger than these. It’s like being in Switzerland, I guess. You could go to meetings. I could do a little roadwork and lighten up on the flack juice and get my weight down. We eighty-six all these bozos. What do you think?”
“Sure,” I said. “When we get things squared away here, I’ll talk it over with Molly.”
“Gretchen and Alf might want to go, too,” he said. “Canada is the country of the future. See, places like British Columbia and Alberta give you the chance to start your life over. They do things in a smart way up there.”
It would have served no purpose for me to mention the Canadian exploration for shale oil that was destroying whole mountain ranges. Clete had transported himself into a brighter tomorrow in order to avoid thinking about the things we had seen today. If we were lucky, we’d make the trip to Fernie one day, but I knew he would never stop drinking, nor stop eating large amounts of cream and butter and fried food. If we had another season or two to run, we would probably involve ourselves in the same situations we had seen today. If you’re wired a certain way, you’ll always be in motion, clicking to your own rhythm, all of it in four-four time, avoiding convention and predictability and control as you would a sickness, the whole world waiting for you like an enormous dance pavilion lit by colored lights and surrounded with palm trees. I’m not talking about the dirty boogie. The music of the spheres is right outside your bedroom window. It just comes packaged on a strange CD sometimes.
I checked in with Alafair on my cell phone. “Where are you, kid?” I said.
“What’s with the ‘kid’ stuff again?” she replied.
“That’s the way I always talk to my broads,” I said.
“Well, lose it, Pops,” she said. “We’re up by Yellow Bay. The lead on the amphibian plane isn’t much help. So far we’ve seen four of them, spread out all over the lake. There might be more north of us.”
“Don’t do anything else until we get up there, okay? Let’s meet in Polson and start over.”
“The clock is running out for those girls, Dave.”
The evening star was twinkling in the west. Even though their great bulk was dark with shadow, the Mission Mountains were lit on the tops by streaks of gold that probably reflected off the clouds after the sunset. The world was indeed a glorious place, well worth fighting for. But what kind of place was it for two innocent girls whose parents had been murdered and who were perhaps entombed in a basement, at the mercy of a monster, while the rest of the world passed them by?
“We’re on our way,” I said. “I love you, Little Squanto.”
That had been her nickname when she was a small child. It was borrowed from the Baby Squanto Indian books she had loved, and I seldom used it today. I closed the phone so as not to embarrass her any worse than I already had.
We drove through Ronan and past the Salish Kootenai College and entered Polson, located at the southern tip of Flathead Lake. Alafair and Gretchen were waiting for us by the side of a Dairy Queen that had closed for the night. I could see the great blackness of the lake and a white amphibian moored by an island, rocking in the chop, the cherry trees on the slopes along the lakeshore alive with wind and the flicker of heat lightning. It was part of the chain of glaciers that had slid down into Montana aeons ago, scouring out lakes that contained mountain peaks a few feet under the hull of your boat, as though you were floating through the heavens rather than on top of a lake.
I mention these things for one reason: The setting did not seem coincidental. The topography was primeval. It had been the playground of dinosaurs and mastodons. Some archaeologists believed there had been people here who antedated the Indians, or at least the ones who migrated from Asia across the Bering Strait. Had we somehow allowed Asa Surrette to entice us into a backdrop containing a seminal story encoded in our collective unconscious? Was he hoping to rewrite the final act? The idea sounded fanciful. However, there was a nagging question: Why would a psychopath from Kansas name himself Geta unless he was acutely aware of the name’s historical implications and wanted to reach back in time and gather the sand from a Carthaginian arena and throw it in our faces?
Alafair and Gretchen got out of the chopped-down pickup and walked toward us when we pulled into the lot. “Molly is pissed,” Alafair said.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“You bagged out and left her,” she said.
“I told her where we were going.”
“That doesn’t cut it, Dave. She was getting her coat, and y’all drove off. She and Albert are on their way.”
“Don’t tell me that.”
“She said she called the FBI and the sheriff. She was in fine form.”
“Why didn’t she call me?” I said.
“Because she’s so pissed off, she’s afraid of what she might say?”
“Why’d you bring this?” Gretchen said. She was standing by the bed of my pickup.
“Bring what?” I said.
She lifted up a rusted chain. “The bear trap Surrette almost lured me into,” she said.
I looked at Clete.
“I put it in there,” he said. “You never know.”
“Know what?” I asked.
“When you might need one.” He stared out at the black luminosity of the lake, his fatigue and powerlessness clearly greater than any hope he had for the rescue of Felicity Louviere and the two teenage girls.
Chapter 36
Asa Surrette did not like electricity. During winter, in the home where he was born, static electricity was always nestled in the house, in the rugs ingrained with dust, on the surface of doorknobs and refrigerator handles and pipes in the cellar, in the touch of another human being’s hand. It was symptomatic of a harsh and unforgiving land, of winter winds that could sand the paint off a water tower, of horizons that seemed to blend into infinity.
Nor did he like electricity in the heavens, when it crawled silently through the clouds, flaring in yellow pools that leaped chainlike all the way to the earth’s rim, as though there were powers and spirits at work in the natural world that he could never control or understand. He sat in a straight-back chair on the first floor of a two-story stone house that had belonged to a California woman who no longer needed it. That was how he remembered her. She was the California woman who no longer needed things, not even her name. Now he sat in the almost bare living room of her former house, gazing at the light show in the sky, thinking about what he should do next, his fingers hooked under his thighs, his sandy-blond hair hanging in his eyes, a scab the size of a dime glued on his cheek.