Montana 1948 (15 page)

The other men in the truck were probably also employees of my grandfather. If that were so, it didn’t take much reasoning to figure out why they were in town. They had come for Uncle Frank. How did they plan to get him? I didn’t care to speculate that far.

My mother caught me peeking out the window. “What are you so interested in out there?”

I felt I should protect her, though from what I wasn’t yet sure. “Nothing,” I replied.

My answer didn’t satisfy her, and she pushed the curtain aside in time to see the truck pass, close to the curb and driving so slowly you could hear the engine lug in low gear.

“Who was that?” she asked.

“I’m not sure.”

She looked at me a long time as though she knew I had the answer. When I couldn’t resist the power of her gaze any longer, I said, “I think they’re from Grandpa’s ranch. I saw them drive down the alley.”

Without a word, my mother spun and went toward the kitchen, where she could look out the back window. Each of us at our respective posts—I in front and she in back—we kept careful watch on the circling truck. It drove around the house two more times before stopping in the alley. That was when my mother called me to the kitchen.

“Who are they?” she asked again. “You know. Tell me.”

I looked out the window again even though I knew who she was talking about. The truck was parked along the railroad tracks, at the end of our yard, and straight out from the house. The men who had been riding on the truck’s bed had gotten down and were standing by the cab, talking to the man in the passenger seat.

“I think that’s Dale Paris,” I said.

“Who?”

“He works for Grandpa.”

One of the men standing by the truck pointed toward the house, and the other man nodded. I knew what they were noticing. The people who owned the house before us had once planned to finish the basement and rent it out as an apartment. Toward that end they had built a rear entrance, steps going down to a door into the basement. These men must have figured, with Grandpa’s help, that Frank was in the basement, and that rear door was the way they were going in after him.

The two men in the pickup got out. My mother clapped me on the shoulder. “Call your father,” she said. She remained at the window, as if it was important that she not take her eyes off the four men.

I gave the operator the number of my father’s office—two, two, three, two—and when Maxine, my father’s secretary, answered, I asked for him.

“He’s not here, honey,” she said in her Louisiana drawl. Maxine Rogers and her husband came to Montana in the 1920s, in one of the first waves of oil-drilling exploration. After her husband’s death, Maxine went to work for my grandfather, and she had been in the sheriff’s office ever since. She was a short, wiry woman full of what I took to be Southern charm. She had a streak of snow-white hair running from her forehead to the top of her head that I always associated—totally without reason—with her husband’s death. He was struck by lightning on a butte west of town. Maxine wasn’t anywhere near him when it happened.

“It’s important,” I said. “Do you know where he is?”

“Couldn’t say for sure. Haven’t seen him for an hour or so. You might try Mr. Paddock’s office.”

“How about Len? Is he there?”

“Haven’t seen him all morning.”

“If my dad comes in, please tell him to come over to the house.”

I turned to ask my mother the number of the state attorney’s office, but she was gone. The wind gusted, the curtains reached into the room, and when I looked out the window I saw four men crossing our lawn.

They walked abreast of each other but spaced out so that together they took up almost the entire width of the yard. Three of the men were dressed identically in straw cowboy hats, white T-shirts, blue jeans, and boots, so they looked like some strange uniformed team crossing the lawn in formation.

They came on slowly, looking about, as if they expected to be stopped at any time. I looked for weapons—rifles or shotguns or pistols—but saw none. Dale Paris, however, had an axe, and he carried it loosely at his side, the axe head swinging close to his leg.

Before I could turn or call out to my mother that the men were approaching, she came back into the room.

She was carrying my father’s shotgun and a box of shells. She put the box on the kitchen table, opened it, and took out two shells.

“Dad’s not in his office. Len either.”

She turned the shotgun over, looking for something, holding it awkwardly across her forearms and wrists, trying to cradle it, to balance it. When she found what she was searching for, the loading chamber, she tried to push in a shell. When she couldn’t get it in, I said, “You have to pump it open.”

She pulled back on the pump—the quick, smooth, oily clatter of steel on steel—and put in the shells. She pushed back up on the pump and the gun was ready to fire.

“It’ll hold five,” I told her.

She gestured to the box. “I’ve got more.”

The sight of my mother lo ading that shotgun was frightening —yes—but also oddly touching. She was so clumsy, so obviously unsuited for what she was doing that it reminded me of what she looked like when she once put on a baseball glove and tried to play catch with me. I wanted to rush over to her, to help her, to relieve her of the awful duty she had taken up.

“It’s got a tremendous kick,” I said. “If you fire it you really have to brace yourself.” I took a step forward. “Why don’t you let me—”

“Get out of here!” she snapped. “Go! Go over to the courthouse. Find your father. Find
someone!”

Before I left I looked out the window once more. The four men were closer, but they had not reached the house. They had closed their rank and were now side by side. I could see Dale Paris’s face clearly, sharp, intent, wind-bitten. One of the other cowboys laughed about something, and Dale Paris shut him up with a word and a scowl as quick and definite as a coyote’s snarl.

My mother still stood a few paces back from the window, but she hefted the shotgun up, holding it right below her breast, and pointed it toward the window.

“The safety,” I said and reached up close—close enough to embrace her—and clicked the safety off. “You’re ready.”

She didn’t take her eyes off the backyard.

“I’ll be right back.”

“Just
go!
Out the front door.”

I ran across the street, took the stone courthouse steps two at a time, pulled open the door—everything, the steepness of the stairs, the weight of the door, seemed to slow me down. I ran up another flight of stairs to the opaque glass door with the stenciled black letters “Mercer County State’s Attorney.” I pulled the door open with such force the glass rattled in its frame.

Flora Douglas, the secretary, was there, stacking reams of paper inside a cabinet. She was perhaps in her sixties, a round-faced, large-jawed woman whose severe look was made even harsher by her rimless spectacles and her steel-gray hair pulled tightly back in a bun. In truth, she was a kind, gentle woman—unmarried and childless—who had doted on me since she baby-sat me as an infant.

“Hello, David.” Her gold-backed teeth glistened when she smiled.

“Is my dad here?”

“He was here earlier. About an hour ago.”

“Do you know where he went?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t.”

“Is Mr. Paddock here?”

She shook her head and shrugged helplessly.

“If my dad comes back, will you tell him to come home right away?”

“I sure will.”

I ran from the house, down the stairs, and toward the jail in the basement. As fast as I was moving it seemed agonizingly slow when I thought of Dale Paris and the other men in our yard.

Maxine was at the counter out front where people paid their parking tickets. She was counting manila envelopes and whispering numbers to herself so she wouldn’t lose count.

“My dad back?” I panted.

She popped her Beeman’s gum before answering. “Not yet, honey.” She went back to her count.

“Could you call him on the radio please?”

“He’s not in his car. I thought he was someplace in the building.”

“Is Len here?”

“Still haven’t seen him.” She finished the stack, and when she looked up at me she must have seen something she hadn’t noticed before. “My God, David. What is it? Has something happened? Is it your mom?”

I was already backing away. “Just tell him to come home. Please. Right away.”

I was running back across the street when the shotgun boomed, and its blast was so loud, so wrongly out of place along that quiet, tree-lined, middle-class American street that the air itself seemed instantly altered, turned foul, the stuff of rank, black chemical smoke and not the sweet, clean oxygen we daily breathed.

I was panting hard anyway, and when the shotgun fired, my heart jumped faster and I was suddenly breathless, the air blown so far out of me I couldn’t get it back for a second and I wondered—but didn’t really—have I been shot?

Yet I kept moving and when I burst through the front door I let the screen door slam behind me and to my distorted hearing—both sharpened and dulled by the shotgun blast—it sounded like another gunshot.

My mother had fired out the kitchen window but from a few paces back so that the buckshot had a chance to spread slightly and not only tear a ragged hole in the screen but to pull in the path of its explosion the kitchen curtain.

I knew from where she stood, from the angle of the shotgun’s barrel, and from where the buckshot flew that she hadn’t shot anybody. She had simply fired in warning or general panic or both.

She raised the shotgun, pumped another shell into the chamber—the ejected empty shell skittered across the linoleum—as if she were as practiced with that weapon as she was with her typewriter.

She stepped to the window and shouted, “You get away from there! Get away from the house—do you hear me!”

I came up behind her—did she even know I was there?—and I planned on wresting the shotgun from her. The thought of my mother shooting someone seemed the worst possibility the moment held. It was not that I preferred being overrun and beaten or killed by those men, but they were still
out there.
My mother was there in front of me, now trying clumsily to poke the shotgun barrel out through the hole in the screen, and I wanted to protect her not only from Dale Paris but from herself and the life she’d have to lead with someone’s blood on her hands.

But before I could stop her I saw something outside that made it unnecessary.

Len McCauley was stepping through the hedge that divided our property from his. He was hatless, barefoot, and his dungarees were riding low on his hips. His shirt was untucked and unbuttoned, flapping open in the wind. Even at a glance and from a distance, I could see how rib-skinny and pale his torso was, but there were ropey strands of sinew along his arms. Then I saw something that made the issue of muscle irrelevant.

In his right hand, held close to his side against his thigh, Len carried a gun, a long-barreled revolver, probably a .44 or .45.

Once he was in our yard Len broke into a long-legged lope. When he was about thirty feet from our house he dropped to one knee, brought his pistol up to eye level, rested the barrel in the crook of one arm, and aimed in the direction of the four men, who must have been by the back door leading to our basement. He said something quick and sharp. It sounded like “right there.”

Was Len drunk? I don’t know why I thought that. His shooting position may have been faintly comical—nothing like the cowboys in the movies—but his aim and his eye looked rock-steady. Maybe it was simply the sight of that skinny bird-chested old man suddenly appearing in our backyard with a gun in his hand, ready to save us from marauders. And since there was nothing in the realm of logic or rational thought to explain his being there, the illogic of drunkenness seemed as ready as anything.

Len gestured with his gun, indicating that the men were to move away from the house.

As they came into view, walking slowly and watching Len closely, Len stood up. He kept his pistol aimed—right at Dale Paris’s head, or so it looked. One of the men had his hands up. Len said something to them again, and though I couldn’t hear what he said, all four men began to walk quickly back toward the truck.

Len turned toward the house and the window with the blown-out screen. “Okay in there?” he called.

“We’re okay!” my mother shouted back. Then she was hurrying toward the door, still toting the shotgun. She banged open the screen door as if she couldn’t wait to get outside. I followed her, wondering why we were leaving the house now that it was safe.

The sun was shining, an unremarkable fact except that I felt, standing on our lawn, as if I had just returned from a strange, hostile country where there was neither sunlight nor soft grass. At the end of the yard the black truck and its four riders sped off, sending up a spray of gravel and raising dust we could taste even from our distance.

My mother laid the shotgun down gently and ran to Len McAuley’s side. Because you do not leave a shotgun lying in the grass, even hours after the dew has burned off, I picked up the gun. It smelled of gun oil and cordite.

“Oh, Len,” she said and put her arms around him. He did not return her embrace, but he raised one arm to keep his gun hand free.

My mother noticed me and, still clinging to Len, reached out to me. “David,” she said. I felt as though she were asking me to step over and become part of a new family consisting of Len our protector, my mother, and me. I remained in place, holding my father’s shotgun.

At that moment, with those thoughts of betrayal and loyalty running through my brain, my father came around the side of the house. “What is it?” he asked. “What’s going on? Maxine said. . . .”

My father was sweating, red-faced, and out of breath. With his bad leg, even walking fast exerted him. His hands were empty, and in our little armed enclave that made him seem out of place, almost naked.

Len took a step back, and my mother left his side to run to my father’s arms.

When he had held her long enough to reassure both of them that everything would be all right, my father asked again, this time to Len: “What happened here?”