The summer he almost killed his brother, Lander spent working at the front desk of the University library, watching the girls go by in their summer shorts and dresses. There was almost no traffic at the checkout counter, but the girls would come in early and late to check their email at the long banks of computers, wearing wet bathing suits under their clothes sometimes. The girls all wore river sandals, and their feet were tan. It was hot all summer, months without rain or even clouds. In the cool and quiet of the library, Lander could feel the whole world outside having fun without him.
The doctors said the fact that Tim was drunk might have saved his life in the crash. And Lander was definitely the one who should have been driving that night: he passed the breathalyzer and the blood test both, though not by much. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t like his parents called a family meeting to announce they didn’t like him anymore. But they weren’t pestering him to come home every weekend. They had troubles of their own.
His sister Jen was in and out of town that summer, too, finishing up the last three credits of her English teaching certificate. Jen would go back up to Bigfork on Friday and come back Sunday, while Lander worked his weekend job at the ice-cream store, but she never had much to say to him when she got back. Lander was under the impression that she spent most of her time at the lake working on her tan. Their parents had split up that spring, and their father was then living on a 42-foot power boat tied up to the dock by the Marina Cay, directly under the windows of their former condo, where his mother still lived. At least this is what Lander heard. He hadn’t gotten up to see it yet.
Day after day after day rose into the nineties and stayed there till evening. The sun was always shining hard and the sky was an even cloudless blue. The library was always quiet and cool and lined with pretty girls who wanted nothing to do with him. At night, those same girls would come to the Orpheum, the ice-cream store, for tangerine sorbet and yellowcake and bubble-gum cones. They would stand under the lights and lick their cones and laugh while Lander scooped another order out of the freezers with cold, chapped hands. Bugs circled and buzzed around the overhead lights. Summer was out there, out in the night.
* * *
Then, halfway through August, the call came that Tim was coming home from the nursing home in Kalispell.
Lander was supposed to drive up with his sister but he had to work till five that Friday. Jen went up at noon without him. The bank clock, when he finally got out of town, read 102 degrees, and the AC in his car didn’t work right. He slugged his way north through twenty miles of the most major bigtime road construction in the history of the world, stuck behind an elephant train of Winnebagoes, as the dust blew in through the windows and settled on the dash. At times he would roll the windows up and pretend to be cool. By the time he got to Bigfork he was so air-dried, dusty and parched that his first steps carried him across the parking lot, down the dock and in one motion into the cold clean waters of the lake.
A delicious blinding cold went through him all at once in the cold lake-water, a dangerous bliss. He stayed underwater for as long as he could, rinsing the heat and dust out completely. When he surfaced and shook the water out of his eyes, he saw his father before him, standing next to some weird-looking neighbor kid on the deck of the largest motorboat Lander had ever seen. The lettering across the stern read LUCKY ME. His father was wearing hat with a long birdlike bill and a complicated shirt with many flaps, pockets and buttons. In his salt-and-pepper beard, he did not look quite like Hemingway.
“Aren’t you going to say hello to your brother?” his father asked him.
At first Lander didn’t understand, then, dawning on him, he looked again at the weird-looking neighbor kid, who he had taken to be a 12-year-old, and saw that it was actually Tim, or some small shrunken version of him. He looked tiny, thin and frail, and Lander felt a pang of fear run through him at the damage done.
“Jesus Christ,” said Lander. “Get in the water.”
Tim grinned down at him and it was actually him, just smaller and more tired. He asked, “Is that your wallet?”
Lander touched his back pocket underwater, and it was certainly his wallet. His father noticed. Tim laughed.
“Dumbass,” Tim said.
“Actually, it’s pronounced Dumas,” Lander told him. He swam to the ladder on the side of the dock and clambered out, dripping, to man-hug his brother there. He was so small now! And pale, almost transparent.
“That is one big boat,” Lander said to his father, who waited on deck.
“I’d forgotten,” his father said, shaking his hand in his oversized burly way. “You haven’t seen it yet. Let me give you the tour.”
Behind his father on the rear deck of the boat, a pair of unnaturally good-looking tanned people sat in matching deck-chairs, beaming at him. They were somewhere in their forties or even early fifties but they both looked fit and rested and eager — like eager Golden Retrievers held under restraint, Lander thought. He was afraid they were going to jump up and lick him.
“Steve and Polly Langendorf,” said his father. “This is my son Lander.”
They waited for him in their chairs and Lander was suddenly aware, as he shook their hands, that he was dripping wet and pale and a little fat, almost, from his nowhere summer. His mother looked down from the flying bridge overhead and shyly said hello. His mother! Last time he checked, Dad had a girlfriend and Mom had a lawyer.
“Tough trip up?” she asked. “Hi sweetie. You look exhausted.”
“I’m all right,” Lander said. Just the fact that they had all been there together and he had not been invited, it left a weird taste in his mouth, like pennies or artichokes. OK, he had been invited, but not long ago. How long had this been going on?
“This is really something,” Lander said.
“Twin Chryslers,” his father said, as they passed through the living room and wheelhouse. “If you can afford to feed the beast, this thing will really go.”
Below decks, evidence of careless male living was strewn around: laundry, dishes, the Telecaster that Lander had never quite learned to play and Tim had given up on, too. There was a picture of this same boat in a frame on the wall of the main cabin, which brought that taste into Lander’s mouth again. It was just creepy, was all. The whole thing.
“I’m hungry,” said his sister from somewhere nearby. He still hadn’t seen her.
“We waited dinner for you,” said his father — like this was something special, something other than the everyday congress of life. And here was his father’s gigantic unmade bed in the rearward berth! For a moment, Lander wished himself back in the cool and quiet of the library, where things made sense. True, he was miserable there, but at least he knew why.
“And here’s the guest quarters,” said his father, leading him up to the slanted V-berth all the way forward, under the skylights, where two beautiful girls in tiny bathing suits were buffing their toenails. True, one of them was his sister Jen, but one of them was not.
“Hey,” said Lander.
“Hey,” said his sister, without looking up.
“Hey,” said the other girl. She smiled up briefly, insincerely, then went back to her work; but not before Lander saw she was pretty, polished but indifferent. She had the kind of lazy, languorous fog around her that Lander liked in a girl. Maybe there was something there for him.
“You’re staying up in the condo,” said his father. “Tim’ll show you what’s what. I’m going to go fire up the Weber.”
Lander looked back wistfully at the two girls in their swimsuits but they were head down, intent, elsewhere. His father led him up the passageway to where his brother waited on deck, under the eager gaze of the Langendorfs. Tiny, pale, frail.
“Who’s the girl?” Lander asked on the way upstairs.
“One of the Langendorfs,” Tim said. “Daughter of Ken and Barbie.”
“I thought it was Steve and Polly.”
“Whatever,” Tim said.
“What’s going on?” Lander said, when they got inside the condo hallway. A tomblike airconditioned quiet prevailed. “What the fuck, even. I mean, weren’t they trying to kill each other when last seen?”
“It’s an act,” said Tim.
“And what’s the deal with that fucking boat?”
“He’s trying to sell the Inman place,” Tim said, when they were into the condo. “He thinks he’s got a shot at it with these two.”
Lander set his bags down in the living room. The condo was unchanged since he last saw it, maybe since he first saw it, the clean quiet anonymity of a good hotel room. There was no sign of his mother’s presence or his father’s absence. He went to the refrigerator and took a cold beer, one of only three, he noted sadly. Beer run later. His brother was out on the little balcony, looking down at the little figure on the deck of the enormous boat. It dwarfed the other speedboats at the dock like a freighter in a yacht harbor.
“Dad thinks it’ll go better if they can socialize them up,” Tim said. “He’s had a few things fall through this summer.”
“Which one’s the Inman place?”
“Over on Rocky Point?” Tim said. “We went by there once in the kayaks. It’s the one with the fake waterfall.”
“Geez,” Lander said. “Two million?”
“Try eight,” Tim said. “Things have been going crazy up here. That’s the thing with the boat, Dad was going to buy a place for himself when he moved out, but every little rat shack with a dock is over a million. He couldn’t find anything to buy.”
“So he bought himself a private navy. What did that thing cost, anyway?”
“Cut him some slack,” Tim said suddenly. “Both of them. It’s been a tough summer.”
Lander looked into his brother’s face: small, hurt, closed. They were not in this together. They had always been before, always together.
“You want a beer?” Lander said. “Get you a beer?”
Again the closed, cloudy look in Tim’s eyes. “I’m not supposed to,” he said.
“OK,” said Lander.
“I’m going to go downstairs, give Dad a hand,” Tim said. “You go ahead and settle in.”
Lander watched him leaving, getting ready to go, and felt a kind of panic to watch it. What was happening? They had never been like this before. He wanted to say something, anything, to keep Tim from going. In the end, he could only come up with, “How are you doing, anyway?”
“I don’t have a spleen anymore,” Tim said. “I seem to get along without it just fine. That’s about it. I don’t miss that nursing home much.”
“I’m sorry,” Lander said.
“Don’t worry about it,” Tim said. “I don’t imagine you did it on purpose.”
He grinned at Lander in a hard cool way and left. Lander went out on the balcony again and looked down until he saw his brother set foot on the deck again, then turned back inside. Toy boat toy boat toy boat, he thought. The thing was three times the size of anything near it and gleaming white in the sun. Inside was the smell of perfumed soap and tears, his mother’s house.
Part Two
Her name was Beth but she called herself Soleil, ever since she started at the University of Florida, which she admitted changing the name was a mistake, but it was too late to back out of. She was very stoned, as was Lander’s sister. She had braids in her hair with little beads at the end, and a widespread tattoo, just above her ass, which Lander had not managed to get a good look at yet. “How was I to know?” she said. “Straight out of high school in Dallas. Now I’m stuck with a stripper name. What’s your stripper name?” she asked Lander.
“I didn’t know I had one.”
“The name of your first pet, then the first street you can remember living on.”
“Ginger Fourth,” he said.
“Ginger Forth!” said Soleil. “That’s fucking awesome!”
“Ginger Osprey,” said his sister Jen, but this wasn’t anywhere near as good, and they all knew it. A moment of silence followed, in which Lander smelled Judas on himself, to use his old love Ginger in such a way. She was a yellow Lab, shaded toward orange — an unusual color — who was tired and sweet and loved him unconditionally and showed it in her big tired eyes. All his life, Lander had tried to live up to the love of that dog, and now he had sold her out for a porn name.
“I want to go out,” Soleil said. “I want to get drunk like a monkey, like a crazy little shithouse monkey.”
“That can be done,” said Tim. “That can be arranged.”
They were the same age, Tim and Soleil, and they both had decent fake ID. Jen already had a date that night with her fiancée Erik — another real-estate guy, a friend of her father’s with nice teeth — which left Lander on the outside. Maybe. The four of them sat on the end of the dock at the state park, watching the sun go down across the lake. The hills on the far side were lion-colored and warm in the last of the sunlight and the lake was calm, dimpled with evening rises as the little fish came up to feed. Jen had brought a little bag of pot which made her Soleil’s best friend ever and even Lander had a little buzz, which made him mopey and nostalgic. Once he and Tim had stood on this very dock and tried to catch those rising fish, before they realized that all those rises were really tiny fish, and not even worth catching.
“It’s fucking awesome here,” said Soleil.
The sun slid gently down under the Chief Cliffs on the far side, four miles of water away. When it was gone, a million stars came out at once, also a couple of high flying planes and maybe a satellite. Lander thought it was, in fact, awesome, and there was nothing more to say.
Just then the Lucky Me steamed by, enormous and white and ghostly in the twilight.
“Where’s he going?” Lander asked.
“Right now he’s headed for the gas dock, it looks like,” Tim said. “I think they’re headed over to Lakeside for a drink later.”
“A thousand dollars,” Jen said.
“What?”
“That’s what it takes to fill that thing up all the way,” she said. “That’s what Dad told me. Three two-hundred-gallon tanks. I saw Cameron Diaz in Lakeside last year.”
“Shut the fuck up,” said Soleil.
“Shopping for wine in the Lakeside IGA,” Jen said. “She was with Christina Applegate . They both looked totally ripped.”
“Get the fuck out of here,” said Soleil.
“I’m one hundred percent not kidding,” Jen said.
“Let’s get out of here before he gets back,” Tim said. “He’s not going to like it much, me going out.”
“You’re not going anywhere,” said Jen.
“I’m going to have, like, a Coke,” Tim said. “I’ve been stuck inside that nursing home for six weeks. Besides, I feel fine.”
“I’ll get him home,” said Lander.
Then they all remembered what happened the last time he said that, the last time he took Tim out. Not so good. Even to Lander, it just didn’t feel right. Nothing was settled, nothing was done, and it wasn’t even that long ago. He felt again the size of the thing, the awfulness.
“It’s not a good idea,” Jen said.
“Safe as houses,” Lander said. “I’ll have him in bed by eleven o’clock.”
“Maybe,” Tim said.
“I don’t know a thing about this,” Jen said. “I’m not hearing a word you say. Where are you heading, anyway?”
“We’ll start off at the Garden Bar,” Lander said. “Don’t know after that.”
“Don’t say that! Bed after that. Bed!”
“We’ll see,” said Tim.
* * *
They would have made it undetected, except that Erik was waiting on the dock with the other grownups. Polly Langendorf was telling Lander’s mother about Texas in the summer.
“I’m sure you’ve never been to Dallas,” Polly said. “I’m sure you’d never want to go. But Dallas in the summertime is a special branch of hell.”
“I’ve been to Houston several times,” said Lander’s mother.
“It’s like living inside a cow’s mouth,” said Polly. “Between the heat and the pollution. This, on the other hand” — and here she swept her open hand across the horizon, where the setting sun made a bright edge along the tops of the hills, where the last light of day shined back at them on the water — “this is bliss.”
“No humidity, either,” said Steve Langendorf. “Plus the prices are still terrific.”
“I could use a drink,” said Lander’s mother, to no one in particular; then spotted Lander, Tim and Soleil skulking down the edge of the dock. She stood, as if action were required.
“We’re just going to walk downtown for a minute,” Lander said. “We’re going to show Soleil the bright lights of Electric Avenue.”
“No you’re not,” said his mother.
“No what?” said Time. “We’re just going for a few minutes. It’ll be fine.”
“It’s a terrible idea.”
“No, it’s fine,” Tim said. “Don’t worry. There’s no need to worry.”
And maybe it was the time of day and maybe it was the pot but Lander’s little heart just turned blue to look at her. She was right and they were wrong and it didn’t matter. They were going to leave anyway, just because they could, and she was going to sit and worry. That was the way it was with Lander’s Dad, too. People just did what they wanted to. Lander was the same way, too. He’d go downtown with his brother and the girl and later, when his brother went home, maybe he’d make a try for her. Maybe she’d be drunk by then. He looked at his mother and he smiled in a bright reassuring way.
“Everything’s going to be fine,” said Lander.
Part Three
“I want a cowboy,” said Soleil. “I’m going to get drunk as a monkey and I’m going to kiss a cowboy. That’s the plan.”
“It’s not exactly cow country around here,” Tim said.
“What kind of country is it?” she asked.
The brothers looked at each other. Really, the answer was lately that it was tourist country, tourists, skiers, hunting guides and real estate agents. Everybody else was just making motel beds. The logging was long-gone. But neither one of them had the stomach to tell her.
“The cows are about three hundred miles east of here,” Lander said. “So are most of the cowboys.”
“I’ve got a cowboy hat,” Tim said. “I can run home and get it, if you want.”
“You’re too short,” Soleil said, and took a long pull from her Long Island iced tea. Lander admired the workings of her neck as she swallowed, the well-groomed well-tanned length of her. She really was a good-looking girl.
“I’ve got a pair of boots, too,” Tim said. “I’m way taller in my boots. That’s the cowboy’s secret weapon.”
It was a slow Tuesday night in the Garden Bar. Maybe it would pick up later. Maybe everybody was still at home, out on the deck, watching the stars appear out of the gathering dark of the sky, or maybe having an after-dinner shower to wash the sunblock and lake-water out of their hair. It didn’t feel like that, though. It felt like it was going to stay Tuesday night forever, like the clocks were just going to stop and everybody stuck here in the same motions shooting pool, making small talk, feeding nickels into the video poker machine as the hands of the clocks rusted and fell away. That pot of Jen’s was maybe better than he had given it credit for.
“This is boring,” said Soleil.
“I’ll shoot you a game of pool,” Tim said.
“That’s not boring?”
“It’s boring in a different way,” Tim said. “Come on.”
Lander kicked back in his chair to watch them play. Like a lot of girls lately, especially the ones with money, she looked kind of fixed up and kind of trashy all at once. She wore big dangly earrings and a nice necklace, nice shoes, but her shirt was tiny and tight and her pants started way down low. After a couple of long shots, there wasn’t much of a mystery about her tattoo anymore; it was a kind of Grateful Dead affair with wings ands roses and a skull, arching over her butt, which was also worth regarding. He knew that women had the psychic power to know when someone was staring at their ass but he thought that Soleil probably didn’t care. She wouldn’t dress like that if she did; or maybe she would. It was a question he had been working over all summer.
“Dead,” Soleil said.
“What?”
“This place is dead. There’s got to be someplace better than this.”
“It’s Tuesday night,” Lander said.
“It’s always something.”
“We could try the Rusty Scupper,” Tim said.
Lander looked at him long and discouragingly. The Rusty Scupper was not exactly a biker bar but there were usually a few parked out front. Plus it was eight or ten miles down the lakeshore, and he was not supposed to be driving anywhere with Tim in the car, not yet. He didn’t know exactly what the rules were anymore but he knew this was one of them.
Also, and this was not anything he wanted to talk about, but wasn’t Tim supposed to be getting on home soon? Lander thought the deal was, Tim would come out for a while, then they would walk him home and Lander would get his chance with Soleil, whatever that was. He wasn’t optimistic, not at all, but he thought he was going to get a shot. Not with his brother hanging around, though.
“Who’s driving?” he asked Tim.
“I will if you want me to,” Tim said.
“You going to tell the folks?”
“They’re out on the boat,” Tim said. “I don’t thing they need to know every little detail. Besides, it’s probably every little bit as dead down there as it is here.”
“Don’t tell me that,” said Soleil. “I’d have to kill myself.”
“Well, don’t do that,” Tim said. “I tried it and I didn’t like it one damn bit.”
“What was that all about?” she asked.
Which is how Lander found himself driving down Highway 35 in his new old pickup with Soleil riding bitch and Tim in the window seat, windows down, telling her his fascinating near-death story. The way Tim told about the accident, it was funny and mysterious and interesting, which was not at all the way Lander remembered it. It seemed to him to have been brutal and filthy and quick. He had turned left in front of a pickup truck he didn’t see. It smashed into the passenger side, where Tim was sitting. Lander didn’t remember a thing between that and the emergency room but Tim kept coming up with descriptive details of the event: the drunk housewife who found them and called the cops, the lights of the Medevac helicopter through the trees. Lander didn’t believe any of it but he didn’t really mind a lie or two. Tim had all summer in the nursing home to make this shit up.
What he did mind was the way Soleil seemed to be taking it all in: avid, eager, a little greedy for the gory detail. “What happened to the guy?” she said. “The guy in the pickup, the one who hit you.”
“He died,” Tim said.
“Oh, shit,” said Soleil; and then all three of them went quiet for a moment. Lander felt lost and lonely and sad and pissed. This wasn’t Tim’s story to tell. Not this part.
“Wasn’t wearing his seat belt,” Lander said. “Wife and three kids.”
He had to say this, every time it came up. Otherwise it was just a story, something that happened. He needed to make it real, and saying this made it real. The wife’s name was Barbara and the three kids were named Ellen, Susan and Mark.
“Shit,” Soleil said quietly, and they drove the rest of the way to the bar without talking.
A band was playing at the Rusty Scupper when they got there, a country band you could hear perfectly well in the parking lot. Lander discovered a headache at the edge of his brain, sneaking up on him. Inside was overflowing with smoke and beer and shouted conversations, lots of hats and boots, which Lander thought would make Soleil happy. At this point, he was resigned to not getting any of the girl’s attention, but it would please him no end if Tim didn’t get any either.
“A shot of Jose Cuervo and a Corona,” she said happily, once they were inside. “I’m going native!”
Lander said, “You’re not going to go and get drunk on us, are you?”
“Fuck you, Ginger,” said Soleil. “I was born drunk.”
She waded off toward the bar, through the sweat and smoke, and both of the boys watched her go, as did several others. Her peekaboo tattoo.
“Ginger?” Tim asked.
“My porn name,” said Lander.
“I thought it was Dumas,” Tim said. “Guess I’ll go get myself a drink, too.”
“Don’t do it,” Lander said.
“Don’t be such a candy ass,” Tim said. “I paid five dollars to hear this crap band. I’m not going to just sit here with a Pepsi in my hand.”
“You just got out of the hospital.”
“Glad of it, too,” Tim said. “Get you anything from the bar?”
Lander looked at him then but there was no way down from here. No way back. “Bottle of Bud, I guess,” he said.
“That’s more like it,” Tim said, and was swallowed up by the crowd.
Bars: he used to be OK with them but not lately. The feeling had been coming and going all summer — Ellen, Susan and Mark — not entirely sadness, though sadness was part of it. Regret. Almost a sense of wonder, at how quickly things could change, how little decisions snowballed into big differences, seconds became lifetimes. He looked at his hands, still chapped from the hours at the Orpheum, and thought: there were the hands that turned the wheel, without meaning to, without trying for anything. He expected it would be bad when he was alone, this feeling, but actually it had been coming at him worse when he was in crowds, like this one. These were the moments where he felt cut off and alone and stuck inside himself, looking out at the grinning shouting crowd, smoking and drinking, dancing and flirting away a summer night. Lander thought they looked stupid. This was how he knew how fucked up he was: when happy looked stupid.
He was OK when he was by himself, though. His little station in the library. Dishing up cones to the girls in their summer dresses.
Tim led the way back from the bar, blocking the drunks out of the way for Soleil and her tray of drinks: three bottles of Corona, six shots of tequila.
“Let’s get this thing started,” she said, setting the tray down on a ledge, handing each of them a wedge of lime and a shot. This was not going to end well, Lander knew it. He looked over toward Tim but his brother ignored him, sucking the lime, tinking the shot glass against Soleil’s and then both of them downing the shot in one take. There was really not much else to do but drink. Lander smiled at his brother in what he hoped was a skeptical, distant way, then downed his own shot. The tequila tasted like gasoline and burned all the way down. He could feel it even afterward in his stomach, like a banked fire.
“And another,” Soleil said, and she and Tim picked up their glasses and drank. They both looked at Lander.
“Not for me,” he said. “Thanks.”
“Well, I’m not going to fucking waste it,” said Soleil, sweeping up the last shot and downing it as well. Which would be three shots in under three minutes. We’ll see, Lander thought. Could be a short evening after all.
I’d like to settle down but they won’t let me, sang the main guitar player, a short fellow in a tall hat. Soleil grabbed Tim and dragged him out onto the dance floor. Lander leaned against a wall and watched them twirl around. Maybe this would turn out all right after all. In the dim light of the bar, the sparkly Christmas lights over the stage had their own small magic. The crowd was a mix of everything, men in hats and men in sandals and women in Western pearl-snap shirts. Off to one side of the stage, a couple was swing-dancing, the man rag-dolling the girl around and then she’d snap back into step with him, just in time. It was quick and entertaining and Lander didn’t even know Soleil was coming after him till she was standing there breathing tequila in his face.
“You aren’t getting off that easy,” she said. “Come on and dance. I can dance with two of you.”
And Lander was going to say no, he meant to say no, but then he saw the proprietary look in his brother’s eyes and decided what the hell. Like a dog in a manger: ain’t going to eat hay, ain’t going to let nobody else eat hay, either. He tried to remember where he knew the joke from and then he was out on the dance floor, doing the white-man dance next to his brother while Soleil did her stripper moves. She had a nice big ass and she knew how to shake it. She seemed like a nice-enough rich girl and Lander wondered where she had gotten the hooker clothes and the hooker moves. People were watching. She had that go-anywhere do-anything alcoholic burn in her eyes and she kept shouting “Woo!”
Somewhere in here was when the guy in the black Resistol started poking in.
Part Four
He was just another man in the crowd, a drunk gent in Western clothes, thirty or thirty-five, with an older, seamed and dark-tanned face. The second or third time he came through their little group was when Lander noticed him, and thought that he looked like a cleaned-up guy from a road crew and also that he looked like a man who might like to fight. He had the leather skin and the deep angry lines around his eyes. Lander looked around and wondered if these others—there were several others who looked like him, sundried and sunbaked — wondered if there was a crew of them to go along with the man in the black hat. He had a little slurve in his movements, a little drunken wobble on his high boots, and he orbited around Soleil like a bug around a light.
It didn’t take her long to notice. Maybe he was tall enough. He wore brand-new Wranglers that looked like they had been sprayed on. She circled back toward him and he performed a little roosterish bob and weave. It was like watching a fucking nature show, Lander decided, predator and prey — though it wasn’t clear at this point in the dance which one of them was which. He had the home advantage but she looked like she might know a trick or two herself. First she was dancing with Tim, then with the two of them, then with the three of them, then with the man in the black hat alone. It was deftly done, by each of them. When the song ended, they glided toward the bar for another shot, his hand on her tattoo.
“We’ve got to get her out of here,” said Tim.
“Why? She looks like she can take care of herself.”
“You think her parents are going to like it?”
“You sure you don’t have a little motive of your own?” Lander asked. “Besides, her parents have had plenty of practice by now, getting used to shit like this. That’s my bet, anyway.”
“Dad needs this,” Tim said, his face suddenly up in Lander’s face, right inside his personal space. Lander fought an urge to punch him away but Tim was intent. “Dad is fucking broke. What kind of a chance do you think he’d have with those two?”
“The parents?”
Tim nodded.
“About the same,” Lander said. “Those two aren’t buying shit. They’re just along for the ride.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Just a hunch.”
“Your well-known hunches,” Tim said. “They always work out so great.”
“Look,” Lander said. “You want me to go get your girlfriend, I’ll go fetch her out of there, fine with me. Just get out of my face, Tim.”
“I’m going with you.”
“No, you’re not. Sit your ass down.”
“You can’t tell me what to do.”
“We’ll settle this later, Tim. You want to fight, we can fight sometime when it won’t put you in the hospital. Meanwhile, sit your ass down.”
A moment, in which Tim was ready to punch him, almost did, finally didn’t. They had been punching each other for eighteen years. Sooner or later they would have to quit. Maybe that time had come.
Tim looked from Lander to the door to the bar and back to Lander. “I’ll wait here,” Tim said.
“Good boy,” Lander said. “Right back.”
But turning from his brother to the circle of dark-faced men at the bar, circled around Soleil, he realized that he had no clear idea of what would happen next and no desire at all to do this. The band played “Don’t Take Your Guns To Town” and Lander slowly walked toward the bar. The men — there were three or four of them — were clearly part of the same crew, highway workers or roofers, out in the sun, young men and middle-aged men who wore old men’s skin. Soleil was standing in the middle, up against the bar, with her head thrown back and laughing and the original cowboy, the one in the black hat, was pretending to laugh with her and checking out her tits. Nothing wrong with that, Lander thought. He was just as guilty himself. The bartender, a solid tanklike woman in her fifties, set a beer down on the bar, took a twenty and went to make change. One of the friends noticed Lander walking up to them and then they shouldered each other and they all watched him.
“Come on, Soleil,” Lander said. “We’ve got to get running.”
“Now?”
“Now,” Lander said.
“I don’t want to go now,” Soleil said.
“I can give her a ride,” said the man in the black hat. He was leaning back against the bar, now, with a bottle of beer in one hand, and he looked down at Lander from the height of his boots and he smiled in an unkind way. He said, “Be on your merry way.”
“I don’t think her mom and dad would appreciate that,” Lander said.
“Who gives a fuck about my mom and dad?” said Soleil.
“You are a thumb-sucking nincompoop,” Lander told her. “Just get in the car and let’s go.”
“What did you call her?” said the man in the black hat.
“Come on, let’s go,” Lander said, and took Soleil’s wrist with his hand.
“No,” she said, and they all looked down at where he had hold of her. The leathery man in the black Resistol, looked back up, smiled into Lander’s eyes, set his bottle of Coors Light back onto the bar with unhurried care and in one motion cold-cocked Lander into the middle of the dance floor.
The punch hit Lander as a surprise and an immediate onrush of pain. Everything went kind of swimmy and vague. He had a strong urge to get to his feet and punch the leathery man back, but he did not have the wherewithal to do so. Somewhere along the line he had let go of the girl. He looked up from the floor, expecting to be kicked. This man, whoever he was, had been in a bar fight before, and he would not be interested in ending it fairly or in a sportsmanlike manner. Lander knew that he had made a serious mistake in entangling himself in this and felt that he was about to pay the price for this mistake.
He looked up, expecting to be kicked, and what he saw was his brother wading in through the crowd, heading for the girl and the black-hatted cowboy, who was moving toward the dance floor against the wishes of the girl, who was screaming in a kind of a strange slow-motion way while the little Christmas lights twinkled and twirled behind her head. Lander had the dreamlike feeling of watching a thing unfold and being unable to move, unable to stop it. He felt like he could move if only he could get his brain to tell his body what to do but it was all lost in confusion.
He watched from the floor as Tim advanced on the man in the black hat who stood coiled and ready. When Tim came within range, without preamble, he knocked him into the dance floor, too. Tim landed unconscious with his eyes open.
In a moment, a few seconds, Tim started to puke blood.
The girl screamed. The cowboy stood there puzzled and angry, as if they had played a trick on him.
Lander got to his feet. He was suddenly better, suddenly clear-headed. The nearest emergency room would be in Kalispell.
“The door,” he said.
“What?” said the girl.
“Get the door,” he said, and lifted his brother from, the floor, so light in his arms that he felt like a child, blood smearing both their shirts. The girl held the door and then suddenly she seemed to know what to do, too: she went to the pickup and flung the passenger door as far open as it would go, then got in, sat with her arms open as Lander passed his brother to her in the truck, cradling him in her arms. They folded him in and then Lander gently closed the door on them and then they were out of the parking lot in a shower of gravel.
“He’s breathing,” said the girl. “He’s breathing fine.”
Lander thought to answer for a moment but he was going a hundred by then and it was a bitch to keep the old truck on the road. It bucked and swayed like the derelict it was, onto the shoulder and then back across the centerline, headlights raking the trees.
“Don’t kill us,” said the girl.
“I’m not going to kill us,” Lander said. He knew the road like he knew his name, backwards and forwards, knew when to slow and when to speed. The lake glimmered in and out of the trees on his left, shining in the moonlight, restless. Low clouds shined over the surface of the water and it was like driving through a dark dream and at one point Lander was overcome with unreality, as if he would soon wake up sweating, with his feet burst through the bottom of the sheets.
Then he nearly put them in the lake, sliding through a turn he had forgotten. Then he slowed. Driving around Bigfork, stuck momentarily at a light, he saw the girl’s hand gripped hard around the window-crank, like that would save her. He peeled into the other lane, ran the red light and accelerated for Kalispell.
“The mint,” said Tim. At least that’s what it sounded like he said, low and indistinct.
“What’s that?” asked the girl.
“Taking it to the mint,” Tim said.
For whatever reason, this scared Lander worse than any of the rest of it and he drove with concentrated speed across the flat hay-fields at the head of the lake, making enemies out of the other traffic as he swerved around them and passed with abandon, honking the horn of the old pickup, gunning the loud 283 under the hood. The lights of Kalispell were upon them and then streaking past. “Call 911,” Lander said. “Tell them we’re coming. Kalispell emergency room.”
“Sure,” said the girl. “What’s the number?”
This hung in the air between them for a moment and then they both cracked up. This was the single stupidest thing anybody had ever said and he couldn’t stop laughing at it and she couldn’t either. All the fear came out as laughter and they laughed at this all through Kalispell and were still laughing all the way to the canopy over the emergency room entrance, where they stopped.
“Open the door,” he said, and Soleil did, and Lander came around the hood of the car and took his brother and carried him in his arms — so light since the accident! like carrying a child — and into the emergency room, where the two or three people inside fell into a hush.
Lander looked down and saw the blood on his shirt, him and his brother both.
The lull gave way to quick activity and soon Tim was on a gurney and gone, back into the inner reaches of the hospital, without explanation or delay. Lander’s part was done and only then did he realize that his mouth was dry and his hands were shaking. He went out to move the truck and outside the moon was flying through scraps and tatters of cloud, a werewolf kind of night but warm. Somewhere down at the lake, not far from here, people were sitting out on the dock and watching the stars come out, enjoying the quiet, the little lake-waves against the pilings of the dock. Somewhere people thought they were safe.
Part Five
An hour later, the doctor came out of the back and scanned the waiting room, looking for Lander. “Are you family?” he asked, and Lander nodded. “Come on back.”
Something deadly in his tone, his eyes, and Lander followed him back expecting the worst. When he got into the curtained-off back, though, there was Tim sitting up in bed and smiling weakly.
“Hey,” Tim said.
“Hey, Dumas,” said Lander.
“Your brother has an ulcer,” said the doctor. “I don’t know how they missed it in the nursing home. I don’t know what he was doing in the nursing home in the first place.”
“I didn’t really have anywhere else to go,” Tim said.
Lander looked at him. He said, “You could have stayed with Mom.”
“She’s been kind of depressed this summer.”
“Or me.”
“Really?” Tim said. “I’ll keep that in mind for next time. I don’t know if you noticed, but I was a little pissed at you.”
The doctor broke in halfway through. He said, “I just want to keep him here overnight, keep an eye on him. You can come and get him in the morning, though. I’m pretty sure he’s all right.”
Lander asked Tim, “Is that OK with you?”
“What are we going to do?” Tim asked. “Fight our way out of here?”
“I’ve had enough of that for one night.”
“Me, too,” Tim said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Right you are,” said Lander; took his brother’s hand in his own, like a girl would, and held it to his chest. He said, “I’m fairly glad you’re alive.”
“Me, too,” Tim said.
Then it was over, and Lander was out under the sky again, walking out toward the truck. Soleil, who had been sulking or sobbing in the corner of the waiting room all by herself, trailed a few feet behind him. He didn’t know, until he got outside, how much he hated the air of the hospital, not just the scent of shit and rubbing alcohol but the contaminated lethal air itself. He didn’t want it in his lungs.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Soleil said.
Lander didn’t answer, just got into his side of the truck, unlocked her door for her, rolled down the window and started the engine. The cab still smelled a little like blood. If nothing else this summer, he wanted to get the smell of blood off him. He looked down at his stained shirt and knew it wouldn’t happen tonight.
“None of this had to happen,” said Soleil, as they stood at a stoplight in downtown Kalispell. It wasn’t late but the streets were deserted, as if it was winter.
“Sure it did,” said Lander.
“You could have just left me there,” she said.
“I could have. I would have. But Tim wasn’t going to.”
“Why not?” she asked. “Seriously, I would have been fine.”
“You would have been,” Lander said, and wondered for a moment how much of an explanation he really owed her. But he felt like it. He said, “You would have been fucked, flustered and far from home, and that would have been fine with me. It was Tim that didn’t want to leave you there. He had some dumbass idea that your folks were interested in a house up here. I told him you were just along for the ride, stringing my Dad along, but he didn’t believe me. I knew all the time.”
“They might have,” said Soleil.
“They might have,” Lander said. “What’s that?”
“Well, they might have.”
“You’re just a whole family of liars and whores, aren’t you?” Lander asked. This shut her up, and they drove in silence out of sleeping Kalispell, out into the hayfields and broken moonlight. Lander was suddenly exhausted, easy in his seat. He felt like this night had been going forever, days and nights all compressed into one, event piled on top of event and more to come. He would have to explain where his brother was when he got back. Just the thought of this sent the copper-penny taste into his mouth again and this time he recognized it as fear. Nobody would hit him or sue him or even talk badly to him. They just wouldn’t want anything to do with him anymore.
“I do have some good points,” Soleil said after a few miles.
“Like what?”
“I give a wicked blow job,” she said. “Also I’ve been told that I’m a very good traveling companion. I’m always interested to see new things.”
Lander laughed and shook his head. He said, “Those are important things to know about yourself, I guess.”
“I’m sorry about tonight,” she said.
“That’s all right.”
“No, I mean it. He’s going to be OK, isn’t he?”
“I expect he will,” Lander said.
“I just get so cooped up,” Soleil said. “I don’t hate my parents or anything but after three days in the car with them, you know, I could scream. Then I get a chance to get away from them and then just run with it a little, I don’t know — sometimes things just get out of hand.”
“I can see that.”
“I never mean for anybody to get hurt,” she said, touching Lander’s thigh through the leg of his jeans. “It just happens that way sometimes.”
The touch went through him like a solid poke to the funny bone, a sudden galvanic response on the part of his whole body, which reorganized itself around her touch. She seemed to have said everything she meant to and Lander didn’t want to start anything new. He knew for certain that he would fuck this up somehow but he didn’t want to just yet. He wanted her to leave her hand there, which she did. At the light in Bigfork — how long ago had they been there before? it felt like days — he pressed his own hand down along the top of hers, and Soleil gave him a thrilling little squeeze.
She took her hand away as they pulled into the drive of the marina. The Lucky Me was not at the dock. A fifty-foot hole in the line of boats where his father’s boat was supposed to be.
“Where are they?” asked Soleil.
“Maybe they’re up in the condo,” Lander said.
“What did they do with the boat?”
This was not a question with an answer and Lander left it alone. He parked the truck and they went inside to investigate, the same odd sensation of no time and no air as before. In the artificial light and flocked wallpaper was the smell of death. The dried blood flaked and fell from his shirt. He checked his watch and it was not yet one o’clock in the morning, which was not possible. It felt like the day after tomorrow.
Nobody home in the condo, either.
Lander went into the back bedroom to change his shirt. All the laundry he had brought with him was worn but he found a black t-shirt that wasn’t too bad. When he come out, Soleil was standing on the little concrete balcony, looking out over the lake. Lander was tired, deep-tired, but he didn’t want to sleep just yet. He would have to solve the problem of the girl, anyway, before he slept. He went to the refrigerator which had magically refilled itself and was now full of beer, got one for himself and one for the girl and brought them out onto the balcony.
“Look,” she said, and pointed out over the lake.
Lander couldn’t see a thing at first, just the lake, shimmering and shining in the moonlight as the clouds shifted, casting long blue shadows over the water. Then he saw it, a pale shape in the water, silent and drifting: the boat.
And there was Jen, out on the dock. Where had she been before?
Hello, she called through cupped hands, and Lander heard his father’s answering voice, Hello!
What’s wrong? Jen called, and his father answered Out of gas!
What do we do? asked Jen, and his father said Too late!
Then they left off shouting. There was maybe nothing more to say. As his eyes cleared into the dark, Lander could see the big boat clearly, see that it was moving only slowly toward the shore. They must have almost made it home. He must have just underestimated the distance, his father, or else he had been taken with one of his fits of optimism. We’ll probably make it, his father would have said to himself. It’s probably OK. Lander thought wistfully of the Orpheum, of the quiet, event-free nights. The wind was pushing the boat toward shore, toward the gravel beach at the state park, and not into the dock, which was just as well. Soon he would be back at the library, back in the quiet and the cool. Dishing up huckleberry, espresso heath bar, double chocolate, rum.
“What do we do now?” asked Soleil.
“We wait,” said Lander. “The wind will bring it on to shore.”
“And what shall we do while we wait?” asked Soleil, turning her back to the emergency so she could face him. Nobody knew they were there. Nobody would be paying the slightest attention.
“You are the craziest of them all,” said Lander.
“Kiss me, kiss me, kiss me,” said Soleil; and he did, he did, he did.
