I cracked a beer and took a long tug and headed up the east shore. I’d been up Hell Roaring many times and knew every sharp turn, every dry dip. As I followed the first curve up the road, dust sparkled in my headlamps like a sorcerer’s mist. An electric charge hummed along the hood of the El Camino. Weird sparks lit the ends of my fingers. My funny bone was lit. Hell Roaring behind me, ahead of me, and still no sign of Squint. The thin moon smiled wickedly over the valley as I gunned the engine and headed up and up that dark road.
I came to the road chain and jumped out. I worked steadily, sawing through the link until it clanked off. I tossed the chain aside. The wind began to pick up, snarling through the trees and creating a bluish blister around me. I smelled the scent of freedom that is older than time, a scent immune to white civilization. For a reeling moment, the scars of my long-ago sadness disappeared. Then I heard a relentless chuffing, an engine grinding low. I cupped my ear to listen. Spinning tires huffed along the road below, growling, coming for me.
I continued onward, upward. The smell of elk piss wafted through my windows. The road was a thin gray tongue over hell’s chasm. No road barriers. No fences. Nothing to save me but the thought of Nina. I spotted the white Buick half on, half off the road, straddled precariously over the darkness. One little push and it would clatter mercilessly off the cliff edge. One tire slip from me, and off it’d go. It had to be the social worker’s car that Nina had spoken about, but I wouldn’t risk edging past it.
I stopped dead center in the road and checked my glove box. No flashlight. I could smell the oily dust beneath the carriage of my car, the only thing that made the night seem real. I’d driven a long way and had only a few more steps to go. The windows of the Buick glinted and flashed in the flimsy light of the moon, but just past the curve was Magpie’s house — all its windows dark. An engine died behind me. I heard cussing. A thin light jittered up the road, then a tunnel of light roiled over the deep canyon, and I wanted to snicker with glee. My plan was working. The flashlight shot up past the line of trees and I skittered into the bushes.
Grandpa Magpie’s shack sat perched above me. I’d seen this place way back when I was a teenager and had looked through the windows at the tidy kitchen, a few scrubbed pots hanging from the wall, a kettle boiling on the stove. I remembered I couldn’t fathom how anyone could live up here, let alone survive the brutal winters.
I could make out a hundred tiny flags on the switchback path that led up to the house. I heard Squint’s hard breath as he worked his way up the first step. Suddenly, an eerie light illuminated the darkness and for a second I was blind.
“Harold?” Nina’s voice called. “Is that you?”
The thought crossed my mind that she was calling someone else. But Harold was my name.
“Stay where you are,” she said. “Don’t come any closer.” She lifted the kerosene lantern and I saw Squint’s oily eyes, his smug face haloed by darkness.
Nina gasped. “Officer Custer, don’t. Please go away. You’re in danger.”
He chortled and quickened his stride. As he passed the first flag, a rattling gust blew so hard his hat flew off and tumbled down the road and off the embankment. He thrust his hands out to steady himself but continued onward, pitching unnaturally forward like a cartoon character. His clothing plastered his body and his coat flapped behind him. He was heading toward Nina but each time he passed a flag the wind would abruptly change and knock him backward and sideways. A shadow moved behind Nina and she retreated into the house.
“I warned you!” she shouted back. “I’m sorry!”
A sound careened from the old Indian’s body, a warble that issued from his chest, a buzzy zing. Trees groaned and cracked around me. I felt jazzed, electrified. Squint’s eyes flashed in terror. He was lit up, a gigantic neon-road-sign pig. His hair frazzled red like lit grass. I smelled burning fingernails, the old body scent of death. It came to me that I was only dreaming as I watched Squint sail through the night and wing out over the edge of the precipice to fall forever into the pitch darkness from where he’d come. The last thing I saw in the whistling night was the young man I had hit. He was smiling. He was alive.
The boss had left a message on my phone. My job was still waiting for me. I combed my hair and brushed my teeth. It was eight in the morning. I’d been asleep for three days. I got in my El Camino and was headed for the Polson Bakery when I changed my mind. I turned toward the mountains, toward Nina and Custer’s Last Stand. I had a burning desire to see her.
I parked and watched her from my car. The windows of the stand gleamed as if someone had polished them to a squeak. I caught a whiff of fresh food — not fries or stale hamburgers, but good food. I smiled when Nina spotted me, smiled so wide my face hurt. I felt better than I had in years, better than I ever could or should. She took off her apron and unleashed her hair. Her beautiful hair tumbled down and the sun shone on her face.
“You would not believe what happened,” she said. “Never in a million years.” The concussive sound of wind drummed my ears. Her hair glittered with brilliant light. “He’s gone. And even stranger...” She patted her chest and her eyes welled up. “His wife turned the place over to me. Just like that. Said she wanted none of it. I sign the papers this afternoon.”
“Did it really happen?” I asked, dumbfounded at the larger question that loomed before us.
Nina didn’t answer. She went back inside and poured me a large cup of coffee with real cream. All the stupid signs had been torn down. Now it was coffee, the best buffalo burger in the state of Montana. There were boxes of fresh vegetables on the counter. Buy local. Buy organic. Buy Indian-made.
She raised an eyebrow. “You’re with me, aren’t you?”
I looked off toward the blue Mission Mountains and understood their power was something akin to magic. “Yes,” I said, “I’m with you.”
Red Skies of Montana
by Keir Graff
Lolo
Sidd breathed hard as his shoes crunched the gravel. He thought: You can’t outrun smoke.
He’d woken early to run his eight kilometers before the sun rose above the mountains and began to scorch the brown hills of the Bitterroot Valley. He loved the quietness, broken only by the scree of a cricket, the twee twee of a bird, the distant burr of an engine on the highway. After only two years in Montana, he was still unused to the exhilarating joy of being alone.
The cold nights, too, gave him a thrill, and it was a pleasure to be awake when the first rays of sunlight topped the mountains to warm his skin.
On a normal morning, the light would have had a lovely violet tint. Today it was just brown. Smoke from Idaho wildfires had been drifting east for more than a week, dimming the stars, blunting the sun, and, if the way he was gasping now was any indication, infiltrating his lungs.
Exercise in such foul air was probably worse than no exercise at all. He worked phlegm out of his throat and spat, laboring toward the Y in the road where he usually turned around.
He had grown up in heat and humidity, the air dense with smells of food, flowers, and garbage. He had come here to get away from all that. But he had not known about the fires.
Sidd had been told about the renewing qualities of fire, how forests needed to burn so new growth could emerge. Some pine trees actually required the heat of a fire to release the seeds from their fallen cones. Old brush and dead trees became ash so green shoots could emerge on the forest floor.