"Aw, Huey," she sighed. "Gary didn't tell me anything except you'd asked to see me. What'd you do?"
"Pissed somebody off."
Her eyes widened in fake disbelief. "No!"
"My bail's twenty-five thousand bucks, Slo."
She sat back a little-maybe at the amount, maybe because it suggested a serious crime.
"I need twenty-five hundred, cash, or else I stay here," I said. "I can pay you back most of it as soon as I get out, and the rest within a few days."
"I'm not worried about that, honey. I'm worried about what kind of trouble you're in. Of course I'll help you."
I closed my eyes briefly in relief.
"I'll buy you a drink and tell you all about it," I said.
"Deal."
"You're an angel, Slo. I'm sorry to wreck your Saturday night."
Her mouth twisted in a quick wry smile. "My Saturday night's a bottle of white wine and whatever trash is on TV."
"You look like maybe you had a hot date."
She glanced down at her outfit.
"Oh, that's left over from this afternoon. Once in a while I decide I'm going to go out and do something wild and exciting. I usually end up shopping."
Then she looked at me straight on. Her eyes were a deeper blue than Gary's and usually seemed dreamy, but right now, they were very focused.
"Thanks for noticing," she said.
"It was easy."
She stood up, still holding the phone, and smoothed her skirt with her other hand.
"I'll have to go to the office safe to get the money, so it'll take a few minutes," she said. "What then?"
I told her about Bill LaTray's bargain basement option. She said she'd make sure he agreed to it, and I knew she would. She might have been dreamy in some ways, but she had a good business head, like most people who'd grown up in that world.
She stalked out, looking like a million bucks.
I spent most of another dreary hour back in my cell before a jailer led me to the main desk, where I signed away my immortal soul to Bill's Bail Bonds. Bill was there, with his hit-man leather coat and stony face. He didn't say much, but he didn't have to. We both knew that the last thing in the world I wanted was him on my ass.
The desk sergeant told me to show up first thing on Monday-the judge would see me as soon as he had time. A clerk got my truck keys and my plastic sack of clothes from a storage room.
When I put them on, I imagined I could still smell those horses.
I didn't see Gary Varna again. Sarah Lynn had come in along with Bill LaTray, but she'd disappeared by the time I finished dealing with the paperwork. I thought she'd probably slipped outside for a cigarette.
But when I walked out onto the worn stone steps of the courthouse, she was gone, too.
I sat down and threaded the laces into my boots. The afternoon had turned into a luscious September evening, with the sky a shimmering blue that deepened every minute and the mountainsides going from green to purple. The air was taking on the crisp chill it did that time of year, after the warm days suckered you into thinking it was still summer.
Maybe she'd left to spare me any feeling of obligation. Maybe the tawdriness of this had come home to her, and she'd wanted to distance herself.
Maybe it had to do with a road I didn't care to look back down.
She and I hadn't ever been officially engaged, but it was understood that we'd get married after I finished college. I was the one who'd pulled the pin, for reasons I'd never really been able to explain to her.
On my way out of town, I stopped at Louie's Market for a six-pack of Pabst. They kept their beer ice-cold, and the first one was about as good as anything I'd ever tasted.
Then I headed home, to scrub off that smell, root out my money stash to pay Sarah Lynn, and figure out where I was going to score a truck and driver to haul my ill-gotten lumber back to the ranch.
12
My father had left me a number of his possessions, most of them well worn, and all grounded in the reality of his world. The pickup truck I was driving was a prime example. He'd bought it new in 1968-a four-by-four GMC, with a lionhearted V-8, spacious toolboxes lining the bed's rails, and a sturdy welded-iron lumber rack. It was already long in the tooth when I'd learned to drive on it, and it probably blue-booked now in the hundreds of dollars. But he'd cared for it religiously, changing the oil every two thousand miles, and I'd done the same. It had paid us back by carrying us almost three hundred thousand miles, through long winters, hunting trips, and construction jobs, with just one short-block rebuild and occasional minor repairs. I'd slept in it, drunk in it, loved in it, and lived out of it to the point where it was more of an old comrade than a vehicle.
But the greatest of my old man's gifts was a chunk of land near the northeast shore of Canyon Ferry Lake-a quarter section of rough hilly timber that he'd bought for a song back when things like that were still possible. Some of my earliest memories were of being there with him. My sisters had lost interest in it after childhood, so he'd willed it to me, compensating them with most of the cash from our slender inheritance. Besides the truck and my tools, it was about all I owned. I'd lived there full-time for almost exactly nine years now. I sometimes wondered if he'd foreseen how critical to me it would be.
The drive from Helena to Canyon Ferry took me about twenty minutes. Traffic thinned quickly after I left town, and when I got there I had the road to myself. The lake was an impressive sight, a twenty-mile stretch of shimmering blue that stayed hidden until you topped a final rise, then appeared suddenly. It had been created by damming the Missouri in the 1950s, a century and a half after Lewis and Clark had traveled through on their way to finding the river's headwaters. During the summer it was crowded with boats and vacationers, but they dropped off once the weather changed, and not many people lived out there all year round.
I crossed the dam and drove through the tiny village, then turned off the paved road into Stumpleg Gulch, supposedly named for an early trapper who'd lost a limb to one of his own bear traps as a result of an overfondness for whiskey. My place was about two miles up, on a spur that dead-ended in the talus slopes of the Big Belt Mountains. Most of the surrounding land was national forest, buffering it from development. The nearest habitation was well out of sight and sound, and belonged to an elderly Finlander who was a perfect neighbor-glad to help if you needed it but otherwise he didn't care for company, and had been known to emphasize that point to strangers with warning shots. The few other places around were partly hidden little enclaves where families had survived for generations through some combination of raising a few animals, gyppo logging, subsistence mining, and living off the land, which, in practice, included a lot of poaching. The same traditional code that dictated other facets of life figured in there. Residents never noticed jacklights in the woods at night or gunshots out of season. The deer and elk herds stayed plenty strong, and fed people instead of falling to starvation or predators.
My old man had intended our place to be a family hangout during the summer and a base for hunting in fall. He'd built a cabin of lodgepole pine, using a Swede saw, an ax, and other hand tools-I still had them-and later added a good-size shed for storage, dressing game, and emergency vehicle repairs. He'd gotten a well dug and put in a cold water sink, which worked fine in good weather but the pipes would freeze by Thanksgiving if you didn't shut down the system. That was as far as he'd seen fit to take it. Light came from kerosene lanterns and heat from woodstoves. If you stayed up there long enough to want a bath, you filled an old washtub with hot water and hunkered down in it. More organic needs were consigned to an outhouse, with a coffee can full of lime beside the seat.