“David!” she screeched. “This is not an answering service!”
“Ma, listen to me. Ma, I got tied up. I’m sparing you the details but relax.”
“How can I relax with the phone going off every ten seconds?”
“Ma, I’m under pressure. Pull the fucking thing out of the wall.”
“Pressure? You’ve never been under pressure in your life!”
He hung up on her. He couldn’t live with her anymore. She needed to take her pacemaker and get a room.
That week, Morsel was able to get a custodial order in Miles City, based on the danger to the community presented by Weldon and his airplane. Ray had so much trouble muscling Weldon into Morsel’s sedan for the ride to assisted living that big strong David had to pitch in and help Ray tie him up. Weldon tossed off some frightful curses before collapsing in defeat and crying. But the god he called down on them didn’t hold much water anymore, and they made short work of the old fellow.
At dinner that night, Morsel was a little blue. The trio’s somewhat obscure toasts were to the future. David looked on with a smile; he felt happy and accepted and believed he was going somewhere. His inquiring looks were met by giddy winks from Morsel and Ray. They told him that he was now a “courier,” and Ray unwound one of his bundles of cash. David was going to California.
“Drive the speed limit,” Ray said. “I’m going to get to know the airplane. Take it down to the oil fields. It’s important to know your customers.”
“Do you know how to fly it?” This was an insincere question, since David had learned from the so-called widow about Ray’s repossessed plane.
“How’s thirteen thousand hours sound to you?”
“I’ll keep the home fires burning,” Morsel said, without taking the cigarette out of her mouth.
David had a perfectly good idea of what he was going to California for, but he didn’t ask. He knew the value of preserving his ignorance. If he could keep his status as a simple courier, he was no guiltier than the United States Postal Service. “Your Honor, I had no idea what was in the trunk, and I am prepared to say that under oath or take a lie-detector test, at your discretion,” he rehearsed.
He drove straight through, or nearly so. He stopped briefly in Idaho, Utah, and Nevada to walk among cows. His manner with cattle was so familiar that they didn’t run from him but gathered around in benign expectation. David sighed and jumped back in the car. He declined to pursue this feeling of regret.
It was late when he got into Modesto, and he was tired. He checked into a Super 8 and woke up when the hot light of a California morning shone through the window onto his face. He ate in the lobby and checked out. The directions Ray had given him proved exact: within ten minutes, he was pulling around the house into the side drive and backing into the open garage.
A woman came out of the house in a bathrobe and walked past his window without a word. He popped the trunk and sat quietly as she loaded it, then closed it. She stopped at his window, pulling the bathrobe up close around her throat. She wasn’t hard to look at, but David could see you wouldn’t want to argue with her. “Tell Ray I said be careful. I’ve heard from two IRS guys already.” David said nothing at all.
He was so cautious that the trip back took longer. He stayed overnight at the Garfield again, so as to arrive in daylight, and got up twice during the night to check on the car. In the morning, he skipped eating at the café for fear he might encounter some of his rancher clients. Plus, he knew that Morsel would take care of his empty stomach. He was so close now that he worried about everything, from misreading the gas gauge to flat tires. He even imagined the trunk flying open for no reason.
He had imagined a hearty greeting, an enthusiastic homecoming, but the place was silent. A hawk sat on the wire that ran from the house to the bunkhouse, as though it had the place to itself. It flew off reluctantly when David got out of the car. Inside, there were soiled plates on the dining room table. Light from the television flickered without sound from the living room. David walked in and saw the television first — it was on the Shopping Network, a closeup of a hand dangling a gold bracelet. Then he saw Morsel on the floor with the channel changer in her hand. She’d been shot.
David felt an icy calm. Ray must have done this. He checked the car keys in his pocket and walked out of the house, stopping on the porch to survey everything in front of him. Then he went around to the equipment shed. Where the airplane had been parked in its two shallow ruts lay Ray, also shot, a pool of blood extending from his mouth like a speech balloon without words. He’d lost a shoe. The plane was gone.
David felt as if he were trapped between the two bodies, with no safe way back to the car. When he got to it, a man was waiting for him. “I must have overslept. How long have you been here?” He was David’s age, thin and precise in clean khakis and a Shale Services ball cap. He touched his teeth with his thumbnail as he spoke.
“Oh, just a few minutes.”
“Keys.”
“Yes, I have them here.” David patted his pocket.
“Get the trunk for me, please.” David tried to hand him the keys. “No, you.”
“Not a problem.” David bent to insert the key but his hand was shaking and at first he missed the slot. The lid rose to reveal the contents of the trunk. David didn’t feel a thing.
Part IV
Rivers Run
Trailer Trash
by Gwen Florio
Missoula
The graduate writing program at the University of Montana turned Benson down the same day it accepted his friend Gary.
“Me too,” Benson lied into the phone when Gary called with the good news. Gary whooped. Benson held the phone away from his ear and imagined sticking Gary with something thin and sharp, an ice pick — no, too clichéd — or maybe a good fillet knife, freeing all that ego in a single, deflating pffft. “But I’ve decided I’m not going.”
“Dude. The hell?”
“No money. Only way to go was if I got funding.”
“Fuck that. You’re coming with me. Worse comes to worst, you spend the first semester working and start a semester late. I’ll share all my stuff with you, the assignments and everything, give you a leg up.”
So Benson spent the last of his money on gas, horsed his embarrassing pinkish-purple 1998 Chevy Cavalier up and over Snoqualmie Pass, and gambled what was left of his luck on the switchbacks skirting Lookout, engine coughing and complaining, steering wheel juddering in his hand, coasting into Missoula on fumes and a busted transmission, only to find that Gary’s offer to share did not include his digs.
“Dude.” Gary stood barefoot on an unpainted porch dominated by a sprung sofa. Only the most determined rental agent’s squint could have seen Gary’s description — a cool Craftsman, near the U — in that cramped, sagging square. The bones of the same bungalow showed in the homes that flanked it, but those dwellings had been expanded up and out in a sort of Prairie-gone-vertical style, their smooth stuccoed walls crowding the limits of the landscaped lots.
“Lawyer.” Gary jerked his thumb toward the house on the left. Then he pointed right. “Professor. I was lucky to get this place. Doubt it’ll be here next year. Somebody will buy it for the lot, scrape this place and put up one of those. I’ll be out on my ass, just like you.”
Benson’s laugh joined Gary’s a beat late. The naked lightbulb above picked out the goose bumps on his arms, raised by a twilight chill that belied the mid-August date. Blades of wind skated off the bald hills that bordered the town, spearing street trash and depositing it around their feet. Gary kicked it away. “They call it the Hellgate wind. Named after the canyon.”