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“Where are you?”
“Up on the Blackfeet res. I can see Canada from here. Where are you?”
“In the garden. Leslie is looking down at me from the window. I’ll call you back in five minutes.” She clicked off.
He left his duffel and rolled sleeping bag by the phone booth and went inside the filling station and bought a soft drink. He drank it outside by the booth, the wind blowing hot across the fields. To the west, past the undulating golden plains that had once been carpeted by buffalo, he could see the translucent smoky-blue outline of the northern Rockies and the eastern boundary of Glacier National Park. The phone rang inside the booth. His heart was beating when he picked up the receiver. “Hello,” he said.
“I’m on the other side of the stable. Leslie can’t see me. But I can’t talk long,” she said.
He told her where he was and described how she could get there, how to skirt the southeast corner of Glacier and to cross the Continental Divide at Marias Pass and to keep going through Blackfeet country all the way to the Milk River. He felt as though his words were actually creating her and Dale’s journey, drawing them closer as he spoke.
But she wasn’t hearing him. “Listen to me, Jimmy Dale!” she said. “I can’t drive up there. I don’t have a car. Leslie watches me all the time. There’s another way.”
“No, just get out of there.”
“You know how you ended up in jail? You
don’t listen to anybody. With you, it’s always full throttle and fuck it, no matter who gets hurt.”
He felt his hand squeeze tight on the receiver. He had left the door to the phone booth open, and he could hear the wind blowing through the ocean of dry grass that surrounded him. He cleared his throat.
“Are you still there?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’m here,” he replied. “I’m definitely way-to-hell-and-gone up here.”
She ignored the implication. “A man is going to help us. I’m buying a used Toyota. He’ll drop it in Arlee with the keys under the fender. There’ll be money and a cell phone in the dash compartment. The car should be ready tomorrow.”
“I don’t want Leslie Wellstone’s car, and I don’t want his money, either.”
“It’s not Leslie’s. I’m buying it with my money. You get rid of that stubborn attitude, Jimmy Dale.”
He pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead and realized he was rubbing her cell number off his skin.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“Everything. I thought you and me and little Dale was gonna be together today. I thought we’d be highballing up into Alberta. I know people who can take us across on a dirt road with no customs check. I thought we’d go plumb to Calgary.”
“We will. We just got to do it right. You don’t know what Leslie and Ridley are like. They own people. They suck the life out of them.”
He took the ballpoint from his shirt pocket and, pressing the phone receiver against his ear with his shoulder, tore a piece of paper loose from the phone directory and wrote out her cell number on it. Then he thumbed the piece of paper into his watch pocket. “I keep thinking we’re gonna get blown away in the wind, like leaves that go bouncing across a field. It’s the feeling I had in prison. That no matter what I tried to do, I was gonna be buried alive and wouldn’t ever see y’all again. You never come to visit me, Jamie Sue.”
“I couldn’t. But I’m going to make up for that,” she said.
He wanted to believe her. He wanted to believe her real bad. In the silence, a cluster of newspaper scudded across the concrete and broke apart in the air. He watched the pages lift above an irrigation ditch and float like broken wings inside a dust devil. “How’s little Dale?” he asked.
“He’s wonderful. You’re going to love him.”
“I already do.”
“I know that, Jimmy Dale.”
“Who’s this guy helping out with the car?”
“He just started driving for me. But I knew him from before. He’d do anything for me.”
“What’s his name?”
“Harold Waxman, the daytime bartender at the nightclub on the lake,” she replied.
