Crazy Mountain Kiss (15 page)

“What did you see on your quest, Bear Paw Bill?”

“I saw the chickadee, too. But on the third day a great golden eagle knocked a mountain goat off the cliffs and it died down there by the lake. I took its skin for a blanket, but knew then that my soul would never be at rest, for the eagle is a bird of war. Forevermore, there would be a struggle for my heart between the chickadee and the eagle, between the goodness and the evil.”

“But I think you are a good man.”

“I fight against the rising of the violence inside me. I struggle mightily, but I am not a good man. Once I did a great evil in the valley. So have I become as Moses on his journey to the Promised Land. I sit atop this mountain and see the plains and the rivers, but God will not let me live at peace where men rest their heads, and so I am banished to wilderness.”

“Where did you learn to speak like that? I've never heard anyone talk like you before.”

“I seldom speak to people, but I read my Bible every day. Its language has reshaped my tongue. The animals that I talk to do not mind. That goat once passed by so close I could have stroked his nose. They sense that I mean no harm, but only take a deer every few weeks for my sustenance. Tomorrow my throat will be sore from talking to you, I have talked so much.”

“Will you let me shoot your muzzle-loader? You can hold the camera.”

“If you insist. But it kicks like the swat of a bear. I dare not use a full charge of powder.”

As Stranahan watched the next part of the video, his hand came up to worry the stubble on his cheeks. Bear Paw Bill's hands were thick with muscle as he measured out the charge of black powder, poured it down the long octagonal barrel, and tamped the ball down onto the charge with the ramrod. He handed the gun to Cinderella.

“It's heavy,” she said.

Sean watched her raise the rifle. “Pause it there,” he said to Celeste.

Celeste paused the video. Up to this point, the powder horn that Bear Paw Bill wore on a thong around his neck had been obscured either by the campfire smoke or his hands as he measured out the charge. For a moment the wind had changed, revealing the crescent of the horn, but the resolution was poor. Still, Sean was certain it was the horn that Jasper Fey had found in the stall. He could see the white of the mountains. He motioned Celeste to resume the video and heard the click as Cindy pulled the set trigger to reduce the tension on the sear, then the
ka-boom
of the rifle as she touched the front trigger. A jet of fire shot from the muzzle. Cindy's head jerked back, instantly enveloped in a rope of smoke.

“Wow,” she said. “That was cool.” She had lowered the muzzle to the ground, and when she turned to face the camera, her cheeks were wet.

“Whatever are you crying for, dear girl?”

She set the rifle on the ground and walked toward the camera with her arms outstretched.

“What is the matter? Was it the rifle?”

The man had set the camera down and the screen showed the ground cover, the autofocus sharpening on grouse whortleberry leaves turning from green to yellow.

“Oh, I don't know,” Sean heard her say. “My mom, all she does is
cry and sit up drinking in a coffee cup, but I know it's her whiskey, I put a piece of tape on the bottle so I know how much, and it's all because I'm different now, I'm . . . all strange in my head. And my stepdad doesn't look at me and then sometimes he gives me the strangest looks and they both had such high hopes that I'd be . . . and I know they're only together because of me”—she was sobbing now—“I've let everybody down, and Landon, he calls me his little sister and I want him so but I can't have him and maybe if I hadn't had the accident he'd have liked me. Oh God, I can't even rodeo. Nobody will say it but I know I'm dumb. I just want to run away but I don't have anywhere to go.”

“There, there, girl, things aren't so bad.” Although Sean couldn't see them, he envisioned Cinderella wrapped in the mountain man's immense arms.

“Oh, can I come up here and stay with you? You could show me how to do a vision quest and I could sit in the cave and maybe an animal would tell me what to do.”

“Leave the valley for the sanctity of the mountain? Become a seeker like this old man? But the ways of the mountain—”

Abruptly, the screen went blank. Then the video flicked back on, the camera steadying on Bear Paw Bill standing beside a dwarf whitebark pine shaped by the wind, His shaggy head silhouetted against the sky. The screen went black. There were no closing credits.

Celeste ejected the disk. Stranahan saw that he had the espresso cup in his hand, and he drank the cool bitter liquid.

“How many people have seen this?”

“No one, just you.”

“I thought it was a school project.”

“We only had to present one. Cindy's was the beekeeper guy. She said Landon could get in trouble if she showed that one, and the mountain man, people might come looking for him because he'd never told her what he did that made him go up there. She said she promised him she wouldn't show it to anyone.”

“Including you?”

She nodded.

“Did you keep your promise?”

“Yes. When the title came on I turned it off. I'm not like popular or pretty, but I know people's secrets. They know I can keep a secret. That's why Landon came out to me. I want to be a counselor someday.”

“I'm sure you will. I'm going to ask you to keep this a secret between us.”

She nodded. “Do you think that's where she was, she ran away up into the mountains?”

“I don't know.”

“He's not creepy or anything, though. Just sort of lonely and sad.”

“I'm going to have to show it to the sheriff.”

“Are you going to say where you got it?”

“Yes, but you aren't in any trouble.”

“Can I burn it? It would just take a minute.”

Though he could envision Martha Ettinger shaking her head—“He's not creepy or anything” wouldn't cut the mustard with her—Sean heard himself say sure, and while she was at it to burn a second copy for him. He knew that the video could be evidence, and if it got erased, the blame would fall squarely on him. But if it hadn't been for this girl who knew how to keep secrets, he would never have known there was a Bear Paw Bill, nor, for that matter, where to look for him. For when Cinderella shot the muzzle-loader, his mind heard in its echo the cracking boom of the rifle shot behind the forest cabin. A big bullet, going slow, Katie Sparrow had said. Someone getting himself a bearskin rug.

B
ack at his studio, Stranahan spun the dial on his safe, three-zero-zero-six, the designation of the most popular rifle caliber in Montana and the first combination any thief with lukewarm IQ would try. He locked up the original DVD—the burned copy he'd left in the glove compartment of the Land Cruiser—and looked at the paintings on the walls. His gaze settled on a somber oil titled
Nocturne,
a man wading a twilight river, the cherry glow from his pipe as he pulled the flame of a match into the tobacco. The hands cupping the pipe bowl were his father's, but he wasn't thinking of his father. Rather, he was back on the ridge in Cinderella's video, Bear Paw Bill standing with his massive hands folded over the muzzle of his rifle.
Hands forested with hair.
Stranahan's fingers drummed the top of his fly-tying desk. He sat down, found a pack of #14 Partridge dry fly hooks, and spun elk hair and hackle, turning out tent-wing caddis imitations while deliberately turning his mind back to the river.

He heard Choti whimper. “It'll come to me only if I don't think about it, girl.”

He was applying the whip finishing to the head of the third fly when it did.

 • • • 

N
orthern Hyalite County, worn-down mountains called the Bangtails, was a bluebird heaven in May, the cerulean males fighting over kingdoms of grass while the drab females preserved their modesty. A snowshoe hare the splotchy white of the mountains crossed the gravel
road the preacher had told him to take. The double-wide was up a muddy two-track in a greening stand of aspens.

“What do you want?” The woman who came to the door cast a glance past Stranahan toward the Land Cruiser. “Well, he's around back in the shop,” she said. Her eyes were small and distrustful in folds of fat. “But I'd leave that dog in the rig. Myron doesn't cater to strange animals mixing with the livestock.”

As Stranahan walked around the back of the trailer, the only livestock in sight a goat that nipped at his jacket cuff when he extended a hand, he became aware of a droning noise that rose in pitch, then ceased abruptly.

“Mr. McKutchen?”

Inside the open door of the shed, the man whose weight had made the floors creak at Cinderella Huntington's memorial service, whose appearance had reminded Stranahan of a domesticated boar, removed his work goggles. He ran a mittlike right hand across the stray hairs that clung to the barren landscape above his forehead.

“This number two board has more knots than plywood,” he said.

“You need a table saw for that kind of work,” Sean said.

“I've got a pack rat that chewed through the cord. You'd think he would have been satisfied gnawing the insulation off the spark plug wires in the tractor, but he's of a mind to put me out of business one piece of machinery at a time. If you're here for that cord of the seasoned, just pull around back and I'll help you load.”

“Actually, I'm here to ask after your brother.”

The man's eyes changed.

“I'm trying to find out what happened to Cinderella Huntington. Your brother was a friend of hers. She calls him Bear Paw Bill.”

Myron McKutchen replaced his goggles and picked up a jigsaw. He'd penciled a line on the board and bent to the saw, blowing the sawdust from the cut so that he could stay on the line. Stranahan stepped forward and held the edge of the board so that it wouldn't splinter as it fell. The blur of the blade passed within inches of his
hand and finished cutting through the board. The man turned the saw off and set it down.

“How did you find me?”

“We sat in the same pew at the memorial service. I called Reverend Crookshaw. He gave me your name.”

“That's not what I asked. How did you know Bill was my brother?”

“I saw a video Cinderella made with your brother. You two look alike, but I didn't put it together until I saw him fold his hands over the muzzle of his rifle. In the church, you folded your hands over your Bible.” Stranahan shrugged. “You have a similar face and they were the same hands and you're too young to be his father.”

The man looked at the backs of his hands, then turned them over so that the palms showed. “It was me they called Bear Paw first. Bear Paw Myron McKutchen, the Shelby Southpaw. I used to fight smokers on the reservation against these Indian bucks. One called himself the Red Death. He knocked two teeth out of my head before I got a right hand in and settled him down. It's the American way, isn't it, the disenfranchised beat the hell out of each other while the rich man collects the money?”

He looked off and Stranahan saw that his eyes were like blue watercolor, saturated around the pupils and then fading outward. “I thought it would be someone wearing a uniform,” the man said. “Ever since they found that girl, I expected someone with a badge, but nobody came.”

“How many people know Bill is your brother?”

McKutchen shook his head. “We moved here two years ago. A lot of people from up on the Hi-Line know our family; down here not so many. Bill moved here to be with us last spring, got a job building a barn in Ringling. He was a guest historian in the schools, traveling around and talking about life in the 1800s. He was taking medication to keep him on track. It was the most I saw of him in the last ten years and it was probably the best I saw of him in twenty.”

“Is your brother mentally unstable?”

“He's on the more manageable end of some spectrum or other, not
bipolar but like that. I looked it up on the Internet and it's just a catchall term for a set of behaviors nobody understands. Bill says the meds dumb him down. In the past it's only been a matter of time before he dumped them into the river.”

“Does he really live in the mountains?”

“For three or four months at a time. He was gone almost a year once. It's not entirely living off the land. He packs in a lot of dried peas and flour. And he's got the muzzle-loader he made here in the shop. He shoots a deer now and again, makes his own clothes.”

“How long has he been gone this time?”

“He left Labor Day weekend.” He counted on his fingers. “Just over eight months ago.”

“Do you know how to find him?”

“He had me drop him off on the west side of the Crazies.”

“Do you think he'd still be there?”

“There being where, exactly? It's a big mountain range. But I don't even know if he's alive. He's never spent a whole winter before.”

“In the video, he talks about committing an act of evil.”

“If you're not a policeman, who are you? Coming to my house, wanting to talk about Bill?”

Sean told him.

“I think you better explain to me about this video.”

As he spoke, Sean watched the man lower his head and shake it. Then McKutchen removed his work goggles and looked up. His eyes held one of the saddest expressions Sean had ever seen.

“My brother,” he began quietly, “equates not being able to prevent someone's death with killing a person. Bill was the promise of our family—class salutatorian, center on the basketball team, got a scholarship to play ball at MSU. It was a ticket out. But there was this girl who'd moved from the Rocky Boy Reservation who'd taken a fancy to him, trailed him around the halls like a puppy. You got to understand that on the reservations, basketball players are rock stars. Girls make no bones about wanting to have their babies. To hear Bill tell it, Lucinda lied to him about the pill and got pregnant to stop him from
going to college. They had it out at a graduation party and he stuck to his guns, said she could come with him or not, but he was going. She stormed out, swearing on her mother's grave that she was going to kill herself and the baby, too. He said, ‘Have it your way,' or something like that, depending on who was telling the story. I wasn't there.

“When I get a call, it's Bill saying someone came to the party talking about a crazy person out by the station who said she was going to lay down on the tracks and wait for the 6:47 from Malta. Well, I got alarmed, because that form of suicide isn't an unheard-of thing where you got liquored-up Indians passing out—that's not a politically correct thing to say, but there you have it. So Bill met me where this guy said he'd seen the girl, we were running because the train was due, and we heard the train passing and followed it out of town and there was what looked like a pile of clothes in the middle of the tracks. The wheels cut her right in half. The baby was still moving when the ambulance came. It was like a hairless puppy. Bill was holding it, trying to keep it warm. It didn't die for hours. I mean it was just awful.” He looked at Stranahan. “How can you recover from something like that? It's been thirty years, but how do you get past it. I can understand why he feels like he's in exile.”

“Did you know he was in touch with the Huntington girl?”

“No. But he'd talked about her. She'd made an impression on him when he went to her school. He said he hoped if his child had lived it would have grown up to be like her. That's why I went to the memorial.”

“His baby was a girl?”

McKutchen nodded. “That's when he started going to the mountains. The first time, up there in the Little Belts, we thought he'd died. Then this man came out, full beard, dressed in some deerskins he'd made into clothes, quoting the Bible. You would never have known it was my brother.”

“How would Cinderella have found Bill up there?”

“I didn't know she had. You're the one telling me.”

“You had to have suspected when she went missing.”

“I didn't, though. Not until last week when I read where they'd
found her. That cabin, that's the trailhead where I dropped Bill off. If you're asking if he would have harmed her or taken advantage, I can't see it. Bill was a gentle man.”

“A powder horn of your brother's was found among Cinderella's possessions. It had engraving on it, mountains and birds.”

McKutchen was nodding. “We found that horn packed in a dynamite box after our uncle John passed. He had a lot of antiques and taped notes to them, the provenance and so forth. The note said his grandfather had found the horn up on the Musselshell. Bill cut the scrimshaw himself. I told him it would ruin the value, but then we weren't going to sell it, so I didn't stop him.”

He looked away. “Have you gone to the sheriff?”

“I came to you first.”

“They'll go after him.” It was a statement.

“Cinderella talked about wanting to run away to the mountains to live with him.”

McKutchen shook his head. “He isn't dangerous to anyone but himself.”

“You need to tell that to the sheriff. Can you come in tomorrow morning, if I arrange it? You'd be helping your brother.”

McKutchen bit his lips, his nod almost imperceptible. He was leaning forward as he had in the church, his heavy hands folded on the workbench.

“What are you making?” Sean said. They were just words, something to break the silence.

“A box to bury my dog. The coyotes got him last night.” He shook his head. “I never let him out after sunset, but I was having an argument with the wife. What they do is send a female out to lure him from the house and then the pack kills him. We heard him yelp but it was too late to do anything but shoot into the air.” He shrugged, made a helpless gesture. “You get to love a dog when you don't have kids.”

Stranahan was sorry he'd asked. He said he'd call in the morning and left the Shelby Southpaw staring at the backs of his hands.