“Shit, I know more than you know ’bout bluffing!”
“—I’ll display that jacket at every press conference. Makes a great photo. Or hell, I’ll post one online. New century, new ways, same old shit.”
He made a move toward me.
The baton filled my hand and flicked out like a black stick to count coup. “Not quite a crutch, but it’ll do,” I said.
Whether or not he had iron in his back pocket, seeing the baton made him weigh his chances. “You keep all that yesterday shit to yourself,” he said, “and she gets a clear road.” Then he sneered the truth: “But the two of you, never! I won’t let you win that much. You come around here, you take up with her, I’ll spend every dime I’ve got making your lives miserable. Whatever smears you hit me with, I’ll wipe twice as worse over the two of you. I’m a lawyer who’s rich enough to afford my own cavalry of lawyers.”
He stormed to his vehicle, got in, and tore off back toward the highway, throwing gravel as he went. I went back over to the lookout bench, sat down.
Guess this isn’t win-win for you after all, Colt. You can’t come back here, stop your wandering. You’re like... You’re my blood.
The lights of Havre were just over the hill from where I sat. And now I was never going to grow old in their glow.
Or see again who I’d seen after I’d ambushed Bill in his office.
After that visit, I’d driven to Elizabeth’s house, I don’t know why — to warn her or to reassure or to just see her blue eyes again before I went off to battle. Maybe to find a reason to stop my wandering, even though I’d already figured Bill would do everything in his power to derail any plans I might have.
Then, as I turned the corner onto Elizabeth’s block, I saw him coming out of her front door.
He was the same age as the years I’d been gone, a full-grown man with his mind and heart made up about who he was, and after I saw him wave goodbye to her without either of them seeing me, Havre’s public library helped me track him down through Facebook and high school yearbooks. He’d grown up thinking that cancer had killed his biological father a long time ago. If I suddenly came into his life, he might hate his mother for lying and punish her in ways she didn’t deserve. He’d take one look at me and wonder, but if he saw any paintings or pictures of my — our — famous great-grandfather, he’d know. And he didn’t deserve to have the ground he called home pulled out from under him by that truth. That had already happened to enough of our blood.
As I sat there in the night, looking around the brown hills and at the two monuments, one of them visible only to my eyes, I thought about how remembrance is a piss-poor substitute for justice. I had lived into my own history, coming full circle, and now I was headed for the highway, driving away from another hand I couldn’t beat. I felt the spirit of my never-met, long-dead great-grandfather, who for all he’d done right and wrong ended up wandering too. He would always be with me. The ghosts of who we come from are witness as we play the cards we’re dealt and make monuments to what we did.
All the Damn Stars in the Sky
by Yvonne Seng
Glasgow
Nora Jones began each morning much the same way since arriving on Montana’s abandoned Glasgow Air Force Base, a rifle shot from the Canadian border. Stepping into her running shoes, she pulled a fleece over the sweats she slept in. Sipped cold coffee in the dark. Worked a wet washcloth across her face and shaved head, polishing the scar that still itched, avoiding the mirror, not turning on the light. Put on her watch cap, headlamp, gloves.
She shoved a log into the wood stove, stoked it against the spring chill that seeped through the thin walls. She paused outside her aunt’s bedroom, drawing the door closed across the worn linoleum, smiling at the smell of senior sex and alcohol that wafted from the lumped-up quilt. Aunt Rosa and her boyfriend Phil. Phil — no illusions, just stubborn old love. Rosa — the reason Nora was there.
Stasi, Nora’s doberman, sat erect by the front door, ears forward, waiting for the command. The dog was ready. A familiar spirit, silent, sleek, troubled.
In Vegas after the accident, Stasi had sat by Nora’s bed for weeks, retrieving the phone when she dropped it, dragging up the covers and books that fell to the floor. The hospital wouldn’t let the dog in, so Nora had gone home to a shitty apartment in the desert with an empty pool and Leonard Cohen’s voice on repeat in the apartment upstairs. Stasi took up guard, kept visitors away, killed cockroaches. When restless, she’d leap through a neighbor’s open window, bringing back a magazine for Nora, a packet of Cheetos for herself. Nora didn’t ask questions.
Nora had liked it that way, just her and her silent guardian. Especially when her partner came to apologize. Nick, her aerial partner from Cirque du Somethin’. Nick who, stoked on early-morning coke, had forgotten to secure their practice cables and sent both the grapnel and Nora flying into the void. Scalped by the hooks, she broke bones, broke her heart. Something else too. At thirty-six, damaged, she was too old to fight the young wolves snapping at her heels. It was the end of Nick and Nora. The end of flying high.
The dog waited, silent, its eyes piercing the front door.
Nora whistled low and soft.
Stasi stood on hind legs and slid back the bolt with her teeth.
Nora had inherited Stasi from a friend doing time for burglary. Stasi, his assistant, had gone scot-free. Everyone in Vegas had a game. Stasi’s was thieving. Which added a spark to their road trip back to Montana.
Outside, in the predawn dark, a billion cold stars pressed down, squeezing Nora’s heart with their soft hum. As a child, she had wanted to fly among them, circling the earth, peering down on adoring faces looking up. Now she closed her eyes against the stars and concentrated on stretching out her hamstrings, checking the pins that held her body together.
Goddamn that endless Montana sky. Goddamn those stars. She had split because of those stars. A teenage runaway, fleeing into their embrace. She’d joined the circus. Not even original.
Now here she was, back again. Back to Aunt Rosa, her mother’s sister, who’d taken her in after her folks died and left her alone to grow like a weed. Aunt Rosa, for whom neglect meant love.
Who’d said on the phone: “Get your sorry ass out here, girl. We’re buildin’ a dream and I need you.”
Nora blew on her hands and started slow, Stasi tracking her left.
They ran the barbed-wire perimeter of the old air force base. Up here it was so flat you could see the curve of the earth. Bitter cold and clear skies. Decades ago, proud Cold Warriors floated three at a time on the sky’s gentle arc, their planes idling among the stars, ready to speed across the Arctic and bomb the hell out of Russia at a moment’s notice. Missile silos hid in wheat fields. Underground airmen, their fingers on the red launch button, stood ready to back up their airborne heroes, to bomb the shit out of a pigeon if they got the chance. The third-largest nuclear power in the fuckin’ world, bragged the locals. With concrete sixteen feet deep, the jets’ runway was long and strong enough for the thump of a landing space shuttle if needed.
Her cousin Frank, Rosa’s son, had worked on that runway, shoveling cement the last summer of high school before he escaped to college, so she knew all about it. Only eight, she had a hard crush on Frank.
“Got a thing for your cousin, pet?” Rosa’s only try at parenting.
Nora had blushed.
“First cousins,” Rosa said. “Off limits. Taboo. Got it?”