JoeBoy climbed in his car and drove off.
Bill slowly raised himself to his hands and knees. From where it had fallen on the gravel, he scooped up a short-barreled revolver like the cops carried on TV when we were kids. “You saw! That was assault and battery! Call the cops.”
“You call the cops,” I said. “I’ll tell them and everybody else what I saw. You threatened him, he defended himself, and then you got your ass kicked by an Indian with a crutch and a bum leg.” I laughed, even as the notion nudged my wandering what if’s: what could the law do?
Bill pushed himself to his feet. “You fucking... Indian!”
“Don’t worry about your tab tonight. On the house.”
The house of my bar and marriage lasted only another two years, but that was longer than JoeBoy’s brother, who Bill hit with every possible lawsuit he and his money could conjure up out of life in Montana. But while the Eagleman family lost their ranch, they always told the part of the story where JoeBoy kicked that lawyer’s ass and I was the witness.
And that story is what sent JoeBoy’s auntie to see me as I was packing up the last of my stuff in the bar to wander in a new direction. I was leaving Elizabeth, my ex-wife, and my tavern behind to become one of the oldest law students in University of Minnesota history, in an attempt to reinvent my life away from Havre.
Don’t you know we never get to leave who we are, just like we never get to go back and be someone else? You think I didn’t have regrets about Looking Glass?
A few weeks before I thought I was leaving Havre for good, Wild Bill was acquitted of raping an Indian girl from the Rocky Boy reservation.
JoeBoy Eagleman’s aunt walked in through the front door I’d kept unlocked so I could carry boxes out to the U-Haul.
“Here,” she said. “I want you to make that Wasichu suffer.”
She handed me one of the Montana Bar jackets I’d bought for the softball team I sponsored over the years. Bill’d played on the team just long enough to get a jacket and piss off everyone in the league.
“This was in the backseat of the car the night Bill Wendland raped my niece. After he did it, she got away and ran off carrying it. She threw it away but I went back and found it.”
“You should give this to the police,” I told her.
“Hah, them were barely believing my girl, and she didn’t think to tell me ’bout it until after that judge let him off.” She shook her head. “You was witness once to him. That damn jacket’s got the name of your place on it, so now your place is stuck bein’ witness with it, too.”
She walked out before I could figure out what to say.
I kept the jacket and held my tongue. I wanted to help but didn’t know how, figured after I became a lawyer I’d find a way to right the old wrong. But that would have meant coming back to Havre. I never forgot about the girl but I never did a damn thing, either. I sure as hell never made Wild Bill suffer for what he’d done.
And now, thirty years later, Elizabeth and I sat in a cheap and musty motel out of sight of Havre’s eyes as she told me what he’d been up to lately.
“All the time since you left, all the time even before my husband died, it didn’t matter if one of his wives was around or not. Bill’s... I don’t think he even really wants me. He just wants me to suffer because I wouldn’t say yes to him but I said yes to you.” She shrugged. “I need a lawyer, one he doesn’t own.”
“You need a friend too, not just a lawyer. How bad is it?”
“Relentless. And invisible. Forget about whatever happens in the streets or grocery store. He’s a big donor to the college, serves on all sorts of boards, they even give him an office, and yeah, maybe there’s some way that’s also spinning bucks for him, but mostly he does it because he loves the clout, the power. He’s been pushing the college to ‘modernize’ by dumping my humanities programs to replace them with computer classes and how-to-be-a-cog business classes. He doesn’t give a shit, but he lets me know that if I want to stop the squeeze and save the department so I’ll still be a dean, what I have to do is...”
“You said stuff happens in the streets?”
“The usual harassment most women get, but a couple times... I’ve seen his car drive through the alley behind my house. Or parked just up the block with him sitting in it. I called the cops once and he told them he was pulled over to take a call, just like the law says.”
He was stalking her at night. I couldn’t say what I was thinking. Fearing. All I could say was: “I’ll talk to him.”
She laughed. “Like that’ll do any good.”
“Some words weigh more than others.”
“But—”
“No. No more tonight. You called me to come help. I will.”
Outside, the high prairie wind blew from the west, over the motel, toward Havre.
“It’s late,” I said. “Why don’t you stay?”
“Aren’t we kind of old for this?”
“Yes.”
She looked at me a long moment, then took her purse into the bathroom.
I turned off the rest of the lights and sat on the bed, watching as she took off her clothes. I pulled back the covers and lay down. A few minutes later, she stretched out beside me.
We were still for a while and then I traced the contours of her face and breasts with my fingers. She was wet when I touched between her legs and I rose and settled on her like a dark bird seeking her white flesh. I entered her quickly, opening my senses at the same time, and knew that although time and distance had intervened, our old connection was still alive and well.
Afterward, we didn’t talk about what was going on. I couldn’t stop myself from telling her about my great-grandfather, Louis Shambo, and the Battle of the Bear Paw where he shot Looking Glass, war chief of the Nez Perce, as they tried to escape from Idaho to Canada.
When I was kid, my friends and I used to ride up to the battlefield to look for shell casings and smoke cigarettes in the willows along the creek below the monument at the top of the hill. People still leave offerings inside the wrought-iron fence that encloses the spot where my great-grandfather shot Looking Glass as he raised his head to look out of the rifle pit he had dug.
The next morning, Elizabeth and I bought coffee at a gas station near Havre after we left the motel. We filled our cups and sat, listening to news of the latest mass shooting on the radio.
“Jesus,” I said, “what’s the world coming to?”
“What do you think I should do?” she asked.
“Give me a chance to do,” I told her.
“After all these years, now it’s my turn?” she said.
“It was always your turn. Just never my time.”
She shook her head but her face wouldn’t tell me what she was really thinking.
Too late for that, Colt. Too late! So now be a warrior.
I sipped my coffee. “I’m going to look up Bill Wendland. You said his office is in Morrill Hall?”
“Yes,” she said, her eyes wide. “What are you going to do when you see him?”
“I’m going to be who I am.”
She didn’t ask any more questions.
I followed her the rest of the way back to Havre and watched her make the turn toward her place. That could be a place to live. A place I could finally let go and settle down.
I kept driving, past the former site of the Montana Bar, then turned left toward the college that overlooks the town from the south.
I knew Central Montana had become mostly a vocational college, but back in the day there was a strong liberal arts focus to go along with the diesel mechanic school. The majority of the students were from Montana, white and Indian, now with a growing number of Latinos, all of whom needed the leg up in life — or at least the certification of success — that a diploma can provide. All of them needed someone with the good heart of Elizabeth to watch over them, teach them about life beyond dollar signs, and shelter them from academic wars and the power of nasty guys like Bill Wendland.