Justice (8 page)

Lester lay perfectly still under the beating. Wesley wondered if he was unconscious, if something in his head had been knocked loose when he collided face first with the shovel.

Rozinski swung even harder, and Wesley hoped the deputy could keep control of his shovel. If the blade angled at all and an edge came down onto Lester it could cut into his flesh like an axe.

“That'll do,” the sheriff said.

As Tommy had done, Lester crawled backwards off the snow pile, but he just kept crawling backward until he came to his place among his friends.

With Lester this close, Wesley could see the black drops in the snow from Lester's bleeding nose. Wesley traced Lester's path back to the snowdrift; yes, a trail of blood marked Lester's progress. Wesley remembered the look of Beverly Tuttle's blood staining the floor of the Buffalo Cafe. Blood for blood, Wesley thought. Was that in the Bible? No, there it was an eye for an eye.... Blood for blood. Where had he heard that before? He couldn't place it, yet it seemed as though he had been hearing it all his life, a saying as old as any Bible verse. Or perhaps it was not a phrase that had ever fallen on his ears. Perhaps he simply breathed it in, an attitude that
was as much a part of the Montana air as the smell of sage, the feel of wind.

Lester was still on his hands and knees when he coughed twice, then vomited. He bucked hard with the force of his retching.

Wesley turned away until he could be sure Lester was finished. When he looked down he saw steam rising from the fetid pool, like a campfire just extinguished.

Sheriff Cooke put his mitten to his nose. “Whew! Throw a little snow on that, Clarence.”

Clarence scooped two shovelsful of snow on top of Lester's vomit. He packed the snow down with the back of the shovel.

As he stood up, Lester staggered backward, reeling with the effort of getting his weakened body upright and his suspenders looped back over his shoulders. He kept his head tilted back to try to stanch the blood flowing from his nose.

Wesley felt something brush the front of his leg, but before he could look down to see what it was, he knew: Frank had stepped in front of him, putting his body between Sheriff Cooke and his younger brother.

The sheriff clapped his mittened hands together and let out a long cloudy breath, as if he were exhaling smoke from a cigar. “When you boys tell your daddy what went on here in McCoy, make sure you tell it right. And tell it all. He's already heard me tell the story, so you want to be damn sure your version matches up with mine. You don't want to add lying to your troubles.”

Wesley realized he had been drawing such shallow breaths
that he was winded from simply standing in place. Nothing was going to happen to them. Somehow Sheriff Cooke knew—or had found out—that their father was a sheriff, another peace officer, and Cooke was letting them go. Wesley inhaled deeply, filling his lungs with air so cold it felt as though something inside him would crack.

“If you were my sons,” Sheriff Cooke said to them, “I'd sit you down and give you some advice about choosing friends. Look at the trouble these two galoots got you into.”

They began walking out of the alley in single file again. Lester still had his head back and his hands cupped to his nose, but Tommy had turned to face Frank and Wesley. Tommy was rubbing his arms up and down, shivering, and his face, pale with cold and anger and shame, glowed in the dark. Through his chattering teeth he said to the brothers, “You lucky fuckers.”

They crested the last of a series of hills leading to Bentrock, still a good five miles from town but close enough to see the tiny scattering of lights in the valley that meant they were almost home. But this early morning, in the predawn dark, it was not the lights of town that caught their attention but the glow of a fire burning brightly just this side of the Knife River bridge, the last border separating Bentrock from all the wild country hemming in their town on every side.

“What the hell is that?” Wesley asked from the front seat.

Tommy leaned forward from the back. “What's what?”

Wesley pointed. “Out there.”

“A fire?” Tommy asked. “Is that a fire?”

Lester had not spoken since they left McCoy, and in fact had slept for most of the trip, but he roused at this announcement. “What's on fire?” His voice was thick and nasal because his nostrils were packed with gauze, medical treatment that Deputy Rawlins administered back in Sheriff Cooke's office.

“Jesus,” Wesley said. “What's burning?”

“Never mind,” Frank answered. “I know.”

“What? Can you see?” asked Tommy.

“It's Dad.”

They waited then, keeping their eyes on the fire, letting its enlarging flames and brightening glow signal their progress through the night.

When they were close enough they could see, exactly as Frank had predicted, Sheriff Hayden and his deputy Len McAuley. They were parked by the bridge, their cars still partially on the road to avoid getting stuck in the deep snow drifted in the ditch. And they had built a fire, a blaze of brush and scrub wood.

Frank pulled in behind his father's car as if there was nothing unusual about parking on this empty snow-packed stretch of highway where no car had passed for hours.

Before Frank turned off the motor, Wesley saw in the glare of their headlights the silver flask his father passed back to Len McAuley. Len dropped the flask into the pocket of his mackinaw.

Sheriff Hayden, in the great bulk of his buffalo coat, walked toward their car, twisting his head down to see into
the car's interior. His hands were in his pockets, and not just from the cold, Wesley guessed. His father often jammed his hands into his pockets when his temper was about to explode, when he couldn't be sure what he might do with his hands.

Frank was out of the car before his father came around to the side. “What did you think,” Frank asked his father, “we wouldn't see you without the fire?”

Sheriff Hayden shook his head vigorously. “That is not the tone you want to be taking. No. No sir. Not after Len and I stood out here half the night, worrying and freezing our asses. No. You best start over.”

“Hell, I half expected to see you coming our way. Every time I saw a pair of headlights I wondered if they were yours.”

“We thought about it. Believe me, we talked about it.” He looked in at Wesley. “How are you boys?”

“I think Lester's nose might be broke,” Wesley answered. “It's swelled up pretty bad.”

“Come on out of there, Lester. Let Len take a look.”

As Tommy slid out of the car with Lester behind him, Mr. Hayden said, “Thomas Salter. If I didn't know you were a part of this, I would have guessed.”

“When did you talk to Sheriff Cooke?” Frank asked his father.

“The first time? Late afternoon. Around 5: 30, I reckon.”

“They got more snow over that way,” Wesley said, getting out of the car.

Both his father and brother looked at him but said nothing.

Len gently led Lester over toward the fire and hunched his tall frame down so he could look directly at Lester's nose.
“Tell me if I'm hurtin' you.” After a moment of careful examination, Len said to Sheriff Hayden. “I don't know. Could be broke.”

“Who had the pistol?” Sheriff Hayden asked the boys.

Neither Frank nor Wesley said anything but Lester spoke up. “It was Tommy's.”

Sheriff Hayden nodded knowingly. “Where is it now?”

Frank answered, “Cooke confiscated all our guns. Rifles. Shotguns. Everyone.”

“He say anything about you getting them back?”

“We didn't even know he had 'em at first. They packed us up and we were down the road a good piece before we thought to look.”

Len and Lester came back to the car. “That's too much,” Len said. “Keeping the guns.”

Sheriff Hayden shrugged. “His jurisdiction.”

“I could see taking the pistol—” said Frank.

“—that was what got you in trouble. That more than anything. Boys waving a pistol around. That was stupid. Disrespectful and stupid.”

“It was that Indian girl,” Tommy said, his voice too loud for the still night. Then Tommy must have seen something in Sheriff Hayden's eyes—something glinting in the firelight—and he fell silent.

“Len, you want to take Lester and Tommy home?”

“Should I wake their folks?”

“Might just as well. With you telling the story maybe there'll be fewer versions floating around.”

“How about a doctor for Lester?”

The sheriff gazed for a moment at Lester's swollen, discolored face. “No, let his folks decide about that.”

Wesley watched Len lead Tommy and Lester to Len's car, and he felt again the separation from his two friends—his brother's friends—that he had felt when they walked out of that alley in McCoy, and he knew that he was privileged, his father's son, protected from some of the blows the world would inevitably offer.

His father stepped closer to the fire, took his hands from his pockets, and warmed them over the flames. “I suppose you two would like to get back home to your own beds.”

“It wasn't us, Pop,” Frank said. “It wasn't us that started any of it.”

His father spit into the fire. “Doesn't matter. You're the only ones was Haydens. If it's just those two spreading trash around somebody else's territory, that's one thing. But you were there. And you had your name with you. You've got it everywhere you go. You can't take it off and put it on like a pair of boots. You're a Hayden. Like it or not. And you damn well better start thinking about what that means. Because you sure as hell don't seem to know now.”

While his father was talking Wesley stepped away from the fire and looked back down the road in the direction from which they had come. It always surprised him, looking at snowy fields on a moonless night like this one, how briefly the snow's whiteness lasted in the dark. It seemed as though its pale glow should shine for miles, lighting up the path they had driven that night.

By now Frank was arguing with their father. “What were we supposed to do, goddammit. Why don't you tell us that?”

“If you don't know,” his father said to Frank, “it's not going to do a damn bit of good for me to tell you. Now get back in your car and head for home. I'll be right behind you.”

It took a few tries to get the Model T started, and while the boys cranked the car, their father scattered the fire and kicked snow on its remains. Soon they were heading west again. Once out of the firelight, Wesley could see into the distance. An occasional light from a farm or ranch had come on. It was time for predawn chores to begin.

“I wonder how long he's going to be on the rampage,” Frank said.

Wesley didn't answer. He wondered if he was getting sick. He was so tired. His throat was dry and raspy, and he didn't think it was only from breathing in wood smoke. His jaw ached as if the cold had gotten deep into the joints. His head felt heavy and full and warm. He pulled off his glove and pressed the back of his hand to his forehead. He didn't know if he had a fever, but then his mother said your hand couldn't tell—it was always cooler than your forehead. If he told her he didn't feel well, she would hold him gently by the shoulders and put her lips, soft and warm, to his brow, the test she had used since he was a baby to determine if he had a fever. Wesley decided he wouldn't say anything to her.

J
ULIAN Hayden came to Montana in 1898 with two vows: he was determined, first of all, to prove out his claim to a quarter section of land. To do that, according to the terms of the 1862 Homestead Act, he had to settle on the land in a more or less permanent dwelling (a sod house or railroad shack would qualify) and make improvements on the land for five years. Although Julian was only sixteen and homesteaders were supposed to be at least twenty-one, land was so plentiful in the region and the government wanted settlers so badly that homestead officers didn't check anyone's age too closely.