Read Montana Online

Authors: Gwen Florio

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary

Montana (22 page)

BOOK: Montana
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She stripped off her shirt and bra and knelt below the spigot, shivering in the icy stream. She turned off the faucet and stood, untangling her hair with her fingers, her skin drying and tautening in the sunshine. She’d spent most of the last few years covered up, head always wrapped in a scarf, her hands and face the only parts of her body that ever felt the sun. She looked down at her breasts, small and pale in the unsparing light. Nipples like tender pink rose petals. She raised her arms above her head and pumped her fists and laughed at herself. Spot flung up his head. Bub barked. “Perverts,” Lola said. She hurried back into her wrinkled pullover and jogged toward the house for a real shower. She was almost through the kitchen when she stopped.

Something awry.

The coral bear sat on the counter, regarding her with turquoise eyes.

The cornmeal gone.

A fact that barely had time to register before she lifted her gaze to the window and saw the corral’s gate swinging a lazy rebuke. The horse was gone, too.

“S
HIT. GODDAMMIT
. Hell.”

Bub appeared from someplace and flopped at her feet. “Get up,” she said. “Find Spot.” He swished his tail agreeably against the tiles. “You get more useless by the day. I don’t know why Mary Alice kept you around.”

She tried to keep her voice light in denial of her rising panic. Charlie said Spot’s last escape had taken him to town. Entirely too easy to imagine Spot galloping onto the main road in a heady rush toward freedom. An oncoming hay truck. Shriek of brakes, too late, too late. Maybe, she thought in a sort of prayer, he’d remember that he’d gotten caught in town the last time he went wandering, and had decided to roam elsewhere. She wondered if horses had memories worth speaking of. The porch afforded a decent view down the two-track and she looked hard, hoping to see a spotted rump jogging along it. Nothing. The air hung heavy, smoke from the distant fire smudging the edges of her view. She turned and looked uphill toward the forest. She’d avoided venturing into the trees, unable to shake the image of Mary Alice’s body lying beneath them, but on this troubling morning, in the sun’s pulsing intensity, they extended a cool and green invitation.

“If I were a horse,” she said to Bub, “that’s where I’d go.”

Before she took a single step, he’d disappeared ahead of her into the forest.

T
HE PINES
, she quickly discovered as she followed the faint trail that ushered her into them, were hardly the refuge she’d envisioned. They blocked the sun, but also any breezes, and the air beneath them was as close and smothering as a grandmother’s parlor. The sun slanted through the branches in opportunistic shafts, the trail in constant transition from light to dark to light again. Lola’s steps thudded hollowly against hard-packed ground. Even Bub slowed his usual frenetic dash and kept warily to her side. Lola looked into the shadowy depths surrounding her and imagined bears, cougars, even wolves. Things that could eat her. She’d gathered a few items on her way out the door—a granola bar for her, a lead rope for the horse, and the bear spray. She patted the canister banging at her hip, a new one to replace the one she’d used up on the sheriff. A magpie scolded from above.

“Shut up,” Lola told it. How was she supposed to hear the horse over that racket? It shrilled louder, drawing voluble companions. Lola tried to focus on the trail, hoping to see hoofprints. “There,” she said to Bub. “Look.” A shrub held a few strands of long, silky hair, identical to the ones that had floated around her as she’d dragged a metal comb through the tangles in Spot’s tail just an hour earlier. She put her face to them and they brushed like spider webs against her skin. She eased the hairs from the branch and wound them around her fingers. Tried not to think of Mary Alice’s hair, so long and beautiful and blood-soaked. Losing the horse was just another way she’d let Mary Alice down.

The trail switchbacked up and up. Lola’s legs and lungs blazed pain. She looked ahead and saw a band of light, and then the trees peeled away and the trail led out along a rocky ledge, a cliff wall rising high on one side, falling away on the other. Lola did not like heights. She stopped with the forest at her back. The trail meandered along the ledge for some fifty yards, and then went back into the woods, the inverse of a tunnel, a streak of light bookended by darkness. It was about six feet across, a comfortable width for a rambling country path, but entirely too precarious, given the three hundred foot drop. Dust motes tumbled through the air. Lola stooped and put her hand on one of the rocks underfoot. It burned. The horse wouldn’t have gone there. He’d probably just wandered off the trail and deeper into the woods long before she’d ever reached this spot, Lola thought.

Unless.

She put her hands flat against the rock wall behind her and leaned forward by inches. But for a series of ledges, the side of the trail dropped straight away. The ledges were empty. She searched the landscape far, far below for the remains of a horse that had taken an unfortunate stumble. A quicksilver line of water ran along the canyon floor. Two Medicine River, she thought. Lola flattened herself against the wall, its heat suddenly comforting, and kicked a stone over the edge. It bounced off the ledges. Eventually, she heard a small final sound like a rifle crack. She looked up into a scorched sky. The horse might just as well have vanished into the vastness above as the abyss below. She turned to leave. A branch snapped nearby, much louder than the report of rock on rock just moments earlier. She heard a low, heavy breath
. Bear
, she thought. The underbrush shivered and she raised the bear spray and put her thumb on the tab and saw Bub prancing toward her, plumed tail raised high, Spot shambling behind.

She lowered the spray. “You pair of miscreants. You scared me.”

The animals stopped just out of reach. Lola held out her hand and Bub ran to her and licked it. She scratched behind his ears, rubbed his stomach. “Good boy. You found him.” But when she turned to Spot, he flattened his ears and took a step back. Lola eased the granola bar from her pocket and held it out. Spot made her wait. But when she raised the bar to her own mouth, he rumbled up to her in a flurry of dust and scattered pine needles. She broke the granola bar in half and balanced a piece on her palm and snapped the lead rope onto his halter as he tongued it up. She gave him the rest and tugged at the rope. Spot, apparently having made his single concession, planted his feet wide and stood unmoving. She pulled harder on the rope and he pinned his ears back again and stamped a front hoof. Lola cursed herself for having given him the whole granola bar. She cursed herself for having spent half the day chasing a stupid horse. She cursed herself for ever having come to Montana. Then she cursed herself just on general principles for a while. She let the rope go slack and came close to Spot, standing obstinate and spraddle-legged, and put her face against his neck and thought of how her newspaper was letting the news in Afghanistan go unreported and how the sheriff was letting Mary Alice’s murder go unsolved, and somehow it all seemed the same.

“I know just how you feel,” she said to Spot, and she thought that it was just as well the path ahead was so discouraging. Otherwise, she’d have been tempted to take horse and dog and keep moving up the mountain, deeper into the woods, where the only things that might hurt someone would do so for reasons that made sense—they were hungry, say, or protecting their cubs, or defending their territory. Spot was large and warm and reassuring and she thought that maybe she’d just stand there awhile longer, leaning on him and trying not to think about all of the things that lay ahead that she didn’t understand. But Spot took one step, and another, and at some point Lola realized he was leading her back down the trail, with nothing for her to do but hang onto the rope and follow along.

D
OWNHILL WAS
harder.

Lola slipped and slid on the pine needles underfoot, sometimes reaching for a tree to balance herself. The rough bark tore at her hands. Bub ran ahead and back, ahead and back, seemingly puzzled by her slow progress. Lola had long since ceased to care about bears. A fallen tree lay beside the trail, severed roots twisting high into the air. Lola looked at her watch. It was midafternoon. “Hold up,” she said.

She sat on the trunk and held her pullover away from her damp skin, shaking the fabric, trying to coax cooler air beneath the hem. She vowed to abandon her long-sleeved wardrobe, at least for the remainder of her time in Montana, as soon as she got back to the cabin and raided Mary Alice’s dresser for some T-shirts. Spot drowsed companionably beside her, hind leg bent, neck down, eyes half-shut. She looked at him, then at Bub, who sprawled panting across the trail. Both appeared supremely bored. Lola considered the horse again and narrowed her eyes. She wound the lead rope once around her hand and clambered up onto the tree trunk. She put her other hand onto Spot’s broad back. He opened his eyes and craned his neck and looked back at her. She leaned over and raised a leg and eased herself onto his back, falling forward and wrapping her arms around his neck. Bub stood up on the trail. Lola pushed herself upright. The horse was wide and solid.

“Um,” she said. “Walk?”

He nibbled at her booted foot.

Lola jiggled the lead rope.

“Giddyup?”

He lowered his head and yawned.

Lola nudged at his ribs with her heel and he rocked forward in a single step. Lola started to slide. She clutched at his mane and he paused. She balanced herself and again tapped her heel to his side. Another step, another slide, the lunge and lurch of learning to drive a stick shift. Some minutes later, Spot proceeded sedately down the trail, Lola sitting wide-eyed and erect, her hands wound in his mane. The surface of the trail felt very far away. She was at eye level with the lowest tree branches. At first she ducked beneath, stretching herself along Spot’s neck, but as she became more accustomed to his swaying gait she unwound her fingers from his mane and reached up and pushed the smaller branches aside. When the trail was particularly steep, she leaned back so as to ease his progress, sitting up again and finding her balance and resting her hands on her thighs when the trail leveled off. She realized that she was enjoying herself. The cabin came into view. Spot picked up the pace. But Bub darted off the trail, nosing hard at the ground to one side. Lola twisted atop Spot to see what he was looking at. She grabbed the lead rope and pulled back on it, succeeding only in turning his head to one side and stopping his forward progress not at all.

“Stop! Whoa!” She dragged harder on the rope, jerking Spot’s head nearly around to her foot. He spun a circle, once, then again, and finally stopped. Lola slid from his back, almost falling, but also making sure not to let go of the rope. She had no intention of repeating the day’s ordeal. Spot hauled at the rope, trying to move downhill. Lola dug her heels into the ground and braced herself against his weight. She wasn’t going to move until she’d had a chance to inspect the spot where she’d found Mary Alice.

BOOK: Montana
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