The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 (17 page)

“You,” he said, pointing at Buddy. “Upstairs.”

“What for?” Buddy said.

“Because you look like you have more than three brain cells.”

“Anything I do includes R.B.”

“Your window of opportunity is shrinking by the second, boy. Don’t misjudge the gravity of your situation.”

Buddy followed the man in the Stetson up the steps, trying not to flinch each time his weight came down inside his boot.

“What about Bernadine? What about
her
? Did y’all leave her out there on the river? What’d y’all do?” I said.

I got no answer. The man in the Stetson clicked off the light and the room dropped into darkness. An hour later the man in the filling station uniform came and took me upstairs and through the back door into an alley where a pickup truck was idling. Buddy was sitting in the bed, his shoulders hunched over, one eye still swollen shut. His guitar and duffel bag were next to him, and so was my old cardboard suitcase, a rope holding the broken latch together. Tyler was talking to the man in the Stetson by the side door of the building. Tyler was smoking a cigarette and listening and not saying anything, his face pointed down at the walkway. The man in the filling station uniform told me to get in the back of the truck. “Where we going?” I said.

“It’s okay, R.B.,” Buddy said.

“The heck it is. Where’s Bernadine?” I said.

He didn’t answer. Tyler dropped his cigarette on the walkway and stepped on it and approached the truck, looking right through Buddy and me.

“Buddy, you’ve got to tell me what’s going on,” I said.

“We’re leaving town,” he said. “If that doesn’t suit you, go back to that damn ranch and see what happens.”

I hadn’t believed Buddy would ever speak to me like that. I thought someone else had stepped inside his skin. The Buddy I knew was never afraid. He had been with the First Marine Division at the Frozen Chosin; he’d never let a friend down and never let himself be undone by finks and ginks and company pinks. If you were his bud, he’d stay at your side, guns blazing, the decks awash, till the ship went down.

I climbed onto the truck bed and pulled up the tailgate and snapped it into place. “Is she hurt?” I said.

When he looked up at me, I knew they had busted him up inside, probably in the ribs and kidneys, maybe with a phone book or a rolled-up Sunday newspaper or a sock full of sand. “The guy in the Stetson?” I said.

“He’s an amateur. They all are,” Buddy said.

“Are you going to tell me what happened to Bernadine?”

“Use your imagination.”

I tried to make him look into my face, but he wouldn’t.

Tyler got in the passenger seat of the pickup and the man in the Stetson clanked the transmission into gear and drove us out to the train yards, both men silhouetting in the cab when lightning leaped through the clouds. I suspected rain was swirling across the hills and mesas in the east, washing the sage clean and sweeping through the outcroppings of rock layered above the canyons, threading in rivulets down to streambeds that were braided with sand the color of cinnamon. But for me the land was stricken, the air stained with the stench of desiccated manure blowing out of the feeder lots and the offal and animal hair burning in the furnaces at the rendering plant.

Tyler and the man in the Stetson watched us while we threw our gear inside a boxcar and climbed in after it. “I’m sorry about this, boys,” Tyler said.

“Like hell you are, old man,” I said.

Buddy sat against the far wall, away from the door, staring into space with his eye that wasn’t swollen shut.

“You made a deal with them?” I said.

“They’ve got an antisedition law in Wyoming,” he said. “I’m not going to jail because I don’t know when to get out of town.”

“We’re Judases,” I said.

“Call it what you want. I’m not the one who went off with a girl in the boss man’s car and brought a shitstorm down on our heads, plus—”

“Plus what?”

“Why do you think Clint Wakefield took his Caddy down to the river? He wanted to try out a colored girl without having any social complications. You gave him total power over both us and her, so you stop trying to rub my nose in it.”

My face felt as though it had been stung with bumblebees. I couldn’t wait for the boxcars to shake and jostle together and begin moving out of the yard, carrying us into the darkness of the countryside, away from the electrified ugliness of the cattle pens and loading chutes and rusty tanker cars and brick warehouses and gravel and railroad ties streaked with feces that for me had come to define Sheridan, Wyoming.

We crossed into Montana and went through a long valley backdropped by sawtooth mountains that were purple against the dawn, and you could see the grass in the valley flattening as green as wheat in the wind. The wheels of the boxcar were clicking louder and louder as the locomotive gained speed, and I thought about Bernadine and her father and the story she had told me about the wind blowing through a field that was like a grass harp and I wondered if I would ever see her again.

The train followed the Yellowstone River and by midmorning we were climbing the Continental Divide, over 6000 feet high, the hillsides littered with giant broken chunks of yellow rock and spiked with ponderosa pine and Douglas fir trees, the wheels of the boxcar screeching and sparking on the rails as we slid down the west side of the divide into Butte. We caught a hotshot straight into Missoula and thumbed a ride up to Flathead Lake, where you could make twelve to fifteen dollars a day picking cherries on a ladder in orchards that fanned up from the lake onto the hillsides and gave you a fine view of water so green and clear you could count the pebbles on the bottom.

I tried to forgive Buddy and forgive myself for what had happened in Wyoming, but unfortunately the conscience doesn’t work like that. We’d bailed on Bernadine. But how could I make it right? If we went back there, Buddy could end up in prison as a syndicalist, a man who had the Silver Star and a Purple Heart. Then something hit me, the way it does sometimes when you least expect your thoughts to clear. Buddy and I were standing on ladders, deep inside the boughs of a cherry tree, the lake winking at us from down the slope, the sun spangling through the leaves, and I blinked once, then once again, and realized I’d been taken over the hurdles. “How’d those guys know you were a union organizer?” I said.

“I guess they have their ways.”

“No, they don’t. They’re dumb. The only one who knew was Tyler Keats. I didn’t make Tyler for a fink.”

“Search me. I’m done thinking about it,” he said. His eyes were fixed on his work, his fingers picking the cherry stems clean of the branch, which was the only way cherries can go to market.

“They told you they were going to send you to the pen as a Communist agitator, but you never asked where they got their information?” I said.

“I don’t rightly recall, R.B. How about giving it a rest?”

“It wasn’t you they were going to send up the road. It was me.”

“What difference does it make? They were holding all the cards.”

“Somebody called down to Texas and found out I’m an escapee.”

He climbed back down his ladder, his canvas bucket brimming with cherries, his shoulders as wide and stiff as an ax handle. “Clint Wakefield raped Bernadine,” he said. “They got us out of town so we couldn’t give evidence against him. The real issue is Wakefield’s reputation. The guy is a western hero. He knows guys like us cain’t send him to the pen, but we
could
smear his name, so he got us out of sight and out of mind.”

“Where is she?”

“Probably at work. What is she going to do? Stop living? Quit fretting on what you cain’t change.”

“Why didn’t you trust me enough to tell me the truth?”

“Because you’re a hardhead. Because you would have stayed in Sheridan for no purpose and ended up in a joint like Huntsville Pen.”

I stepped down from my ladder and followed him to the water can the labor contractor kept on the tailgate of his truck. The wind was cool in the sunshine, the lines of sweat drying on Buddy’s face. He filled two paper cups with water from the can and handed one to me, his gaze never meeting mine. I could tell there was something he hadn’t told me.

“Wakefield is right on the other side of the mountain, over on Swan Lake. He’s got a cottage there,” he said. “They’re shooting a western at the foot of Swan Peak.”

“You’re making this up,” I said.

“Here’s the rest of it. I talked to Bernadine. I mailed her some money for a bus ticket. She’ll be here tomorrow. I thought you might like that.”

I didn’t know what to say to her when she got off the bus, and I didn’t try. I think Bernadine was one of those people who didn’t expect a lot from the world. It was Saturday and there was a dance and cookout up by the motel where a lot of the pickers stayed during cherry season. We drank wine out of fruit jars and ate potato salad and barbecue pork and pinto beans and homemade ice cream a church group brought. The moon came up big and yellow over the mountains and you could see fireflies lighting in the aspens and birch trees down by the water. Buddy got his old Stella twelve-string from the motel and sat in with the country band, and started playing one Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston song after another. I guess I should have known what he was thinking about. Buddy came out of the coalfields of eastern Kentucky and would be a radical and labor agitator till somebody put pennies on his eyes. No matter what the circumstances, there was always a vinyl record playing in Buddy’s head, over and over again, and the lyrics weren’t written by Hank Williams or Lefty Frizzell.

About 9:30, when the summer light at the top of the sky began to fade into the density and color of a bruise, I picked up Bernadine’s hand under the picnic table and curled my fingers in hers. “I’m sorry for leaving you behind in Sheridan,” I said.

“You couldn’t have changed anything. Nobody there is going to stand up to Clint Wakefield.”

In my mind I kept seeing the things he had probably done to her. But I couldn’t bring myself to ask how bad she had been hurt, or how, or where, or if she was suffering now. “Did you talk to any cops?” I said.

“His lawyer called me a liar. When I left the sheriff’s department, I looked back through the window and saw the deputies I’d talked to. Clint Wakefield was with them. The three of them were laughing.”

“I’m going to make him pay for what he did.”

She took her hand from mine. “Not on my account you won’t.”

“In Gatesville Training School I saw boys killed for a whole lot less. I know where there are unmarked graves. Things happened there that I don’t ever talk about. If Clint Wakefield was a boy, he wouldn’t last a week in Gatesville.”

I saw the fatigue in her face, and realized I was making her relive not only the assault on her body but the theft of her soul. The air had turned cold, and the candles burning in the jelly jars were flickering and about to go out. I took off my denim jacket and draped it over her shoulders. “We got you your own room at the motel,” I said. “It’s a dollar and a half a day, but it’s right nice.”

“What’s that song Buddy’s singing?”

“‘Union Maid.’”

“Songs like that get people in trouble,” she said.

“You bet they do.”

“Why does he sing them?”

I shook my head as though I didn’t know. But that wasn’t the case. I
knew
. Buddy was going to spit in the soup for all of us. And he wasn’t through with Clint Wakefield by a long shot.

A week later we had moved to the orchards higher up on the lake, close to Bigfork. The cherries were so red they were almost black, and our crew picked truckloads of them from first light until shadows covered the trees and made it hard to pick the cherry and the stem cleanly from the limb. Bernadine and Buddy and I worked as a team, and would talk to each other inside the leafy thickness of the tree, like kids playing on a summer day rather than adults working at a job. I couldn’t help noticing that Bernadine paid a lot of attention when Buddy talked, even though the subject matter seemed to roam all over creation, from the Garden of Eden to Jesus and Joe Hill and ancient highways in Montana he said primitive people had used even before the Indians showed up.

“There’re two or three roads under the lake,” he said. “If you look carefully along the banks, you can see the worn places in the rocks where people rode over them with carts that had wooden wheels. They were probably going to the glaciers, right across the lake, where all those buttercups are.”

“How do you know all this?” Bernadine asked.

“You trust what your eye tells you and then you have to believe in things you cain’t see,” he said.

“Believe what?” she said.

“That all these things happened and are still happening. We just cain’t see them. Maybe those ancient people are still living out their lives all around us.”

There was no question about the expression on Bernadine’s face. She was looking at Buddy in a way she had never looked at me. I wanted to climb down my ladder and dump my bucket in one of the boxes on the flatbed and keep walking all the way back to the motel, or maybe just head on up the road to British Columbia.

“You’re kind of quiet, R.B.,” he said.

“The conversation is obviously over my head. Excuse me. I got a crick in my neck,” I said.

When I walked to the truck, the pair of them were buried from the waist up in the cherry tree, talking like they already knew what the other one was going to say, like they could talk on and on now that they didn’t have to stop and explain themselves to a third party. I felt a spasm in my innards that made my eyes cross.

There was nothing unusual about Buddy organizing farm workers, but it was unusual for him to try it with the cherry pickers, particularly in the orchards along Flathead Lake in a remote area like northwestern Montana. The cherry harvest was a one-shot deal that offered at best only a few weeks’ employment, and the people who did it were a strange mix—drifters like us, wetbacks, college kids, Romanian Gypsies, and white families from Oklahoma and Arkansas who weren’t interested in politics or unions.