Montana Noir

  “I think I’ve got this down. You don’t have to come with me tomorrow.”

  The silence went on and on, broken only by the thwack of a few final papers.

  “Looky there. Over by those widowmakers.” Harlan lifted a paw and pointed. A FOR RENT sign leaned against one of the towering cottonwoods that flanked the entrance to a trailer park. The trees, notorious for a shallow root system prone to giving way in storms, stretched outsized limbs capable of crushing the mismatched dwellings below.

  The car rolled past. Nobody living in a trailer had money for the Missoulian.

  “You said you were looking for a place to live? Might be that back there is your new home. Heh-heh-heh.”

  * * *

  “Dude. It’s not even ironic.” Gary jammed his car key into the bottom of a can of Hamm’s (which was ironic) and shotgunned it, his idea of a dramatic gesture to underscore his revulsion as he scanned the Mountain View Mobile Home Park.

  Three doors down, a row of purple-headed irises bobbed beneath the ministrations of a woman with a watering can. Her short skirt crawled north of decent over meaty thighs as she bent to pluck a few weeds. “Check out the cougar. Talk about a walking STD.”

  The woman straightened. Shot them a look.

  Benson waited for a smile, a shrug, maybe even a Sorry, from Gary. But he turned his attention back to the trailer, a camper, really. “Don’t tell the group you live here.”

  The “group” being some of the others in Gary’s classes. They convened at his apartment in the bungalow on Sunday nights to critique one another’s stories before turning them in for the verdict of the whole class. Benson had learned his lesson that first night on Gary’s porch. He didn’t ask to be included; just showed up after Gary let slip about the gathering, then sat back while Gary stammered his way through the whole here’s-my-friend-sitting-out-the-semester explanation. Benson even brought a submission, typed on a library computer and printed out for ten cents a page. Gary was old-school that way, wanting hard copies of everything. Easy for him. The money Benson spent copying a story for each of the eight people in the group would have funded a half-tank for the Dainty Lady. Money wasted, he thought after the first Sunday night.

  “Your protagonist. What’s his name again? Harold.” Nathalie, pale of face and eye, twisted white-blond dreads around her finger. “He’s a sex offender?” She gave the Medusa ’do a rest and pulled an apple from a bowl of fruit. Apparently Gary had taken one look around Missoula after his arrival and gone as crunchy-granola as the rest of his part of town. Everybody else—except Benson—had brought something to drink. Lots of microbrews, along with PBR and more Hamm’s. Irony abounded.

  “And all he does is drive around delivering newspapers?” Crunch. The waif’s little white teeth opened a wound in the apple. “Why doesn’t he try to molest the guy riding with him? I mean, if he’s a sex offender, he’s got to offend, right? That would ratchet up the tension.”

  “Because he didn’t try anything.” Benson grabbed at the air as though to recall the words. Too late.

  “Underfictionalized!” the group chorused. Even though that was the most fictional part of his submission. Gary looked at him with eyes full of pity. Benson imagined putting a thumb to each of those eyes. Pressing hard.

  Gary handed him the fruit bowl. “Grape?”

  * * *

  Benson’s new neighbors would have cussed him twelve ways to Sunday if he’d shown up with a fruit bowl.

  “Hey, boy, get on over here. You look like you need a beer, and we’ve got beer. And snacks.” It was ten in the morning, but for Miss Mary, the yardarm constituted Mount Sentinel, the hill on the college side of town with its whitewashed concrete M—for the University of Montana—where the sun now sat comfortably ensconced.

  Miss Mary lived in the trailer next door. Only a single-wide, but someone had affixed a porch, its boards gone so gray and warped that the woman spent most of her days sitting on the sturdy cinder-block steps. There she held court, sparkle-dusted pink Crocs on her feet, pink bandanna on her bald head, a cigarette in one hand, beer in the other. Given that she apparently spent most of her Social Security check on beer, Miss Mary frequently had company. Usually it was Velma, she of the cosseted irises, a divorcée in her forties whose life of child-rearing had left her ill-equipped to counter the husband who’d sprung for the sort of lawyer who guaranteed he kept the house. Even though Velma, with no job and none of the skills that commanded pay for a woman her age, had ended up in this shithole of a trailer park, she retained enough suburban sensibilities to know that when someone else supplied the beer, it was only right to offer up some eats. A green plastic bowl of sour-cream-and-onion-soup dip sat on the step between Velma and Miss Mary, along with a party-size bag of ruffled and ridgy Lay’s, not the limp, inadequately salted supermarket variety that sometimes made an entire meal for Benson.

  “Here.” Miss Mary extended the smoke, its ends loosely twisted, with an illegal smile.

  “Damn, girls.” Benson sucked deep. Possibilities caromed around his brain. Fuck Harlan/Harold. Miss Mary and Velma—now here were some worthy protagonists.

  “Hey. Hey.” Velma snapped her fingers in front of her face. “Shit’s good, but not that good. Where’d you go?” She liked the sound so much that she kept snapping, arching her back and swaying to the beat, so that Benson couldn’t help but notice that Velma had herself a fine pair of titties. Tick-tock, he thought, before he wrenched his eyes away from the motion.

  “Writing. I’m writing in my head.”

  Snap, snap. Both hands raised high. “Respect.”

  He could talk about his writing with the girls. Unlike the group that gathered at Gary’s, they took it seriously. He passed the joint to Velma.

  “How’s the book coming? What’s the latest?”

  Early on he’d intimated that he was writing a book, a fabrication that required endless embroidery. “George is working Benjamin’s last nerve.”

  Velma picked a fleck of bud from her tongue and flicked it away. Her lipstick was harlot scarlet, matching the polish on her fingernails and toes. He’d have to tone her down for his story, Benson thought.

  “I hate that George. He’s a privileged little shit and a bully. Reminds me of my ex. Is Benjamin gonna kill him?” She looked at her watch. Velma favored peasant blouses over short stretchy skirts with nary a hint of a panty line and, when sitting outdoors, religiously recrossed her thighs every ten minutes to keep her tan even, magnetizing Benson’s gaze with each shift change. He took cloudy days as a personal affront.

  A little broad in the beam, Velma, and nearly twice his age. Still, Benson couldn’t deny he’d thought about it, in convoluted musings that involved those sun-coppered legs scissored around his skinny white frame, Nathalie’s whispery drawl in his ear. He bit into a chip laden with dip and savored the smooth and salty crunch. Not like that weak-ass fruit bowl at Gary’s, all waxed skin and no flavor.

  “No,” he said. “Killing him is too obvious.”

  * * *

  “Ahhhbvious,” Nathalie sighed her opinion of the revisions to Benson’s sex-offender story, glancing at Gary for confirmation.

  Benson had written a new section where the man’s hand had clamped around his—his protagonist’s—dick, fingers corpse-cold even through his jeans, freezing him into momentary immobility.

  “I thought she’d like it,” he told Gary later.

  “Me too. Because if there’s one thing that girl likes, it’s dick.” Gary made an O of his mouth. Pumped his fist in front of it. “Last week,” he said, “after everybody else went home.” Seeing the look on Benson’s face, he added, “Sorry, man. I didn’t know. Can’t say I blame you. She’s a few steps up from that trailer-trash hottie, am I right? Go for it.”

  “No way,” said Benson. Way, he thought, and went home and wrote a new story for Nathalie. Which she dismembered the following Sunday with all the finesse of a child yanking the head off a Barbie doll.

  “These
women. You did everything but have them slinging hash in a diner. Aren’t we over Raymond Carver yet?” She cast a sidelong glance toward Gary as she pulled apart paragraph after paragraph.

  Benson imagined the doll’s limbs flying: arms first, then legs, nothing left but a torso with Velma-worthy boobs and a sexless crotch.

  “I know it’s cliché”—clichéd, damnit, Benson thought—“but why don’t you try writing what you know? Dig deep.” Nathalie pounded at her skinny chest with her fragile white fist, stopping just short of actual contact. “Get past these caricatures and write something real. This verges on genre.” At genre, a collective shudder ran through the room. “What’s next—ending with, In the distance, a dog barked?”

  “Nathalie’s got a point.” Gary, that fucking hypocrite. As if he hadn’t hightailed back to his side of town, irony foaming in his wake, after the real of Benson’s trailer, of Velma. “You might want to think about taking a couple weeks off from the group, find your focus.”

  Nobody laughed until the door closed behind Benson. Maybe they’d forgotten about the open windows. Or maybe that was the point.

  * * *

  “Benjamin could shoot him.”

  Miss Mary cracked the beers even earlier than usual after Benson let drop he’d been informed that his services as a newspaper carrier were no longer needed.

  “You don’t mope around after getting shitcanned. You celebrate your freedom . . .” Her words trailed off into a cough so violent that the pink bandanna slid sideways on her shiny pate, giving her the look of a pirate accessorized by Mary Kay.

  Velma hustled over with Cheez Whiz and Doritos and the optimism that had kept her married far too long to the asshole. “Now you’ll have more time for your book. It’s going to make you a millionaire. But only if Benjamin kills that jerk George. I’m with Miss Mary: shoot his ass.”

  Benson canted his head back, held the Cheez Whiz over his mouth, and jammed a finger against the spout. “Too messy.” He spoke around the gooey blob. “Blood spatter. Same with stabbing. And anyway, George is his best friend. They’re like brothers, always together. He’d be the first suspect. He’d never get away with it.”

  “Aw, honey. There’s all kinds of ways to get away with murder.”

  Miss Mary made a gun of her hand and aimed it at Velma. “Then why didn’t you murder the dickhead? You’d still have your house.”

  “I probably should have,” Velma agreed.

  “How?” Benson asked.

  “How should I have murdered him?”

  “How would you get away with it?”

  “Whatever the cops ask you, just look them in the eye and tell the truth. Take your book. Say George is lying on the floor full of holes and Benjamin’s standing over him, blood up to his ankles and a gun in his hand, and Mr. Cop asks, Did you kill that man? What’s the only answer?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Miss Mary’s fingertips, when she adjusted the bandanna, were blue but for the liverish circles of nicotine. “I’m guessing that’s the wrong answer.”

  Velma looked at Benson. He shrugged.

  “You say, No sir, I did not kill that man.”

  “But he did kill him, right?”

  Velma handed him another beer. “No, he did not. The gun killed him.” She and Miss Mary traded fist bumps. “You just got to have the right moves.” Velma’s cheeks hollowed as she sucked Cheez Whiz from a crimson-tipped forefinger. She looked at her watch and executed a slow-motion leg cross. “Know what I mean?”

  Benson was pretty sure he did.

  * * *

  Benson angled the Dainty Lady into a parallel-parking space in front of Gary’s place. The Cavalier’s purple ass stuck out about a foot into the street. He didn’t care. Maybe somebody would hit it hard enough to total it. Insurance could pay for a new car. Except that he didn’t have insurance. “Oops,” he said aloud. He said it again when he tripped on the steps. Pages flew from his hand. The Hellgate wind snatched them and hurled them high. They drifted down onto the porch, the patches of grass, the bushes.

  “What the hell?” Gary stood in the open doorway.

  Benson started to laugh. He couldn’t stop. “My story,” he choked out. “For tonight.”

  Gary stalked past him, gathering pages. “There’s no meeting tonight,” he called from the yard. “We changed it. Jesus. How’d you get so plastered on that horse piss you drink?”

  Benson stopped laughing. “Nobody told me.”

  Gary came back and stood at the bottom of the steps, the pages crumpled in his fist. “I talked to Jeanine last week.”

  “Who’s Jeanine? Nathalie’s replacement?”

  “The administrator at the writing program. I was trying to do you a solid, find out if you’d gotten funding for next semester.” The Hellgate wind took another try at the papers in Gary’s hand. His fingers whitened around them. “She didn’t know who you were. She had to look you up. She said you’d never gotten in at all.” He thrust the pages toward Benson.

  Benson hauled himself to his feet and ignored the unspoken invitation to leave. He walked toward the open door. “She in there?”

  “Nathalie? No. Look, you can’t leave your car like that.” He was talking to Benson’s back.

  Inside, the fucking fruit bowl sat on the table. Benson selected an apple, turned, and drew his arm back. He was drunk, but not so drunk that he didn’t nail Gary right in the middle of his fat mouth when Gary walked in behind him.

  * * *

  The Dainty Lady took the gravel road like a champ, even after it went to a two-track with autumn-brittle grasses making blackboard screeches along her rusted undercarriage.

  The ruts ended atop a cutbank by the river. The water muttered and churned below, nothing like the lazy gleaming expanse that wound through town, its glittering surface festooned with neon-colored kayaks and paddleboards, along with the patched inner tubes from Benson’s neighborhood.

  “It’s deep down there,” Gary had said at the bluff weeks earlier. He’d taken Benson fly-fishing, back when he’d thought Benson was still salvageable. “Watch where you step. You end up in one of those holes and lose your balance, the current will take your carcass all the way to the Pacific.”

  There’d been no danger of Benson stepping in one of the holes that day. He didn’t have a fly rod and, after an initial venture into the icy water, declined Gary’s offer to share. He climbed back onto the bluff and watched Gary, mentally adding up the cost of his waders and special boots and vest and fly rod and license and even the flies themselves, and figured out that the fish they’d eat that night would be worth a few hundred bucks apiece. Except that they didn’t even eat them. “Catch and release, dude,” Gary had said, as a fish flashed jewel-like in his hand for the moment it took him to snap a photo.

  “Catch and release,” Benson said now. He hauled the tarp and its burden from the trunk. He’d considered a blanket before remembering how they were always talking about fibers on those police shows.

  He unrolled the tarp. It had been a job wrestling Gary into the waders, the vest, the felt-soled boots. He grabbed him under the arms and dragged him to the lip of the cutbank. The hole below was especially deep. “Where the big ones hide,” Gary had told him that day, although he’d been unable to entice any onto his fly.

  “Here’s a big one,” Benson said, and heaved.

  The fly rod went next. Benson watched as it caught the current and sailed out of sight. Gary rocked along behind it, bouncing in slow motion off the rocks, making his ungainly way toward the Pacific.

  * * *

  The tarp had required some back-and-forthing, first to the trailer to get it, then the return to Gary’s house, cutting through downtown each way. The streets—lined with restored brick buildings that housed the brewpubs and distilleries where Benson couldn’t afford to drink, the outdoor-gear stores where he couldn’t afford to shop, and the cafés where he couldn’t afford to eat—were deserted except for the bums sleeping it off in doorw
ays, awaiting the return of not-Bensons who might toss a few spare bucks their way. The sky shaded gray as Benson left the river, reminding him of his paper-delivery days. By the time he got back to the Mountain View Mobile Home Park, the sun hung above Sentinel, the M gleaming its promise to the fortunate who lived at its feet. Benson cut the gas and popped the trunk.

  “Need a hand?”

  He hadn’t heard Velma behind him until she was so close her breasts brushed his elbow when she leaned over to study the contents of the trunk.

  “I’m just taking this tarp inside. I’ve got it.”

  But she’d already grasped two corners, backing up, motioning him to bring his own two corners in, pulling him toward her until the fold hid the still-damp blotch between them. Their hands touched, Velma so close he could smell the beer on her breath. He’d missed the morning session on Miss Mary’s stoop.

  “You got in late last night.”

  “More like this morning,” Benson acknowledged.

  “And went right out again. With something under your arm, all folded up. Just the way we’re folding this.” Her thighs pressed against his. He felt their heat even through the double thickness of the tarp.

  She took it from him, making the last folds herself. “Maybe I’ll just take this back to my place. I’m painting my kitchen. It’ll come in handy.” Her gaze lingered on the dark places on his shirt and pants. “I got a washer-dryer. I can take care of those. You don’t want to leave them too long. Stain’ll set. Come on.”

  He’d never been inside her trailer. She had a rare double-wide, carpeted, clean, smelling of air freshener.

  “Well?” she said, and waited.

  “What?”

  “Can’t wash your clothes if you’re still in them. Here’s how this goes. Let’s see if you remember.”

  She stripped down first.

  He concentrated on undoing the buttons of his shirt, grateful for the reason to look away.

  * * *

  Nathalie showed up a couple of days after Gary disappeared. She lifted a shredded Kleenex to her raw little nose as she choked out questions.