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“Then you won’t mind taking it back.”
“So I take it back. It’s just a word. No offense meant.”
“Where’s that leave you now?”
“Say again?”
“It leaves you back where you started when you were telling me you’re about to head out. Is that where you are? You’re heading out?”
“Not necessarily.”
“That’s what I thought. What’s my name?”
“I don’t know your name.”
“So you thought that gave you the right to call me ‘bub’?… Don’t turn your back on me. What’s my name?”
“It’s ‘sir,’ if that’s
what you want.”
“No, what’s my name?”
“It’s ‘sir.’”
“You’d better get out of the rain. You’re going to catch cold. Your nose is already running.”
The dirt under the dark-suited man’s boots sifted down on top of Candace’s head. She stared helplessly at Jimmy Dale Greenwood’s back. He had stretched the tape on his wrists to the point where he could get an index finger under the adhesive and start working it down over one thumb. High above her, she saw lightning flare inside the thunderheads, like a match igniting a pool of white gasoline.
CLETE AND I should have taken my pickup truck and not the Caddy. Most hillside roads in Montana were cut years ago by logging companies and left unseeded and at the mercy of the elements. With the passage of time, they had become potholed, eroded, strewn with rocks and boulders and sometimes fire-blackened trees that had washed out of the slopes. The Caddy bounced into a hole and went down on the transmission. When Clete tried to shift into reverse, we heard a sound like Coca-Cola bottles clanking and breaking inside a steel box. The Caddy would not budge in reverse and was high-centered and couldn’t get out of the hole by going forward.
Clete looked glumly through the windshield. The road wound higher and higher through the trees, with water rilling down the incline. We saw no sign of a structure of any kind, much less a lodge under construction.
“What a mess,” he said. “Maybe this isn’t even the right road.”
“When we first turned off, I thought I saw headlights behind us. Maybe it was Troyce Nix,” I said.
“If it’s Nix, he’s coming up the road on the braille system. There’re no headlights behind us.”
“I saw them, Clete.”
“Okay, you saw them. We shouldn’t have listened to Jamie Sue. This is three monkeys fucking a football.”
“Why don’t you get out of your bad mood?” I said.
“My bad mood? Look at my car. It’s probably impaled. The transmission is frozen in low. My paint job probably looks like a herd of cats used it for a scratching post.”
“We’ll get the jack out and bounce the car out of the hole. We’ll just keep bouncing it in a circle until we can point it back down the road.”
“What about Greenwood and the Sweeney woman?”
“We’ll walk to the top of the mountain. That’s all we can do. It’s my fault, Cletus. I don’t see any other tire tracks. I think it’s a bum lead.”
“No, the tracks could be washed out. Let’s bounce it out of the hole and go all the way up with the car. If we’re on the right road, there should be enough space by the lodge to drive the Caddy in a circle so we can head back down.”
We got the jack out of the trunk, fitted it under the frame, and raised the Caddy high enough so that when we pushed it off the jack, it fell sideways, partially clear of the hole the wheel had sunk into. We repeated the process three times, filling in the hole each time with rocks and mud and rotted timber that was as soft as old cork. Our clothes were soaked with rainwater and splattered with mud. Clete’s porkpie hat looked like a wilted blue flower on his head.
“What are you grinning at?” I asked.
