The Boy Must Die (10 page)

With his stomach settling, Justin walked back into his bedroom. The room housed an oak dresser and a large computer table. Beside his bed was his backpack, ready for the dig Professor Mucklowe had arranged for the summer semester. Today would go down in the history of his life as Doomsday. He always thought of himself as a man in control. As a man of decision. But all that had risen in smoke as if he’d purposely torched his own life.

Justin’s stomach heaved again. He hauled in breath to calm the spasms. His mind ran in a maze of questions and names. Who could he call for a loan? So far, every attempt had failed. On his way home, Justin had gone to the bank. The manager had welcomed him at first, but had pointed out that collateral was needed for a loan over five thousand. Justin then had driven to his former high school. He’d wondered if any of his old teachers might help him out. But who?

Now, with his pockets still empty, Justin found himself standing in
his mother’s room. He opened her closet and rummaged through the albums and boxes on the floor. Did she have any valuables he could pawn? He’d pay her back. She’d understand. The closet gave up nothing but the smell of leather and a faint hint of her perfume. To the left of her bed was his father’s chest of drawers. Justin rifled through them. He pulled back the mirror over his mother’s vanity table. Did she hide money behind there? All her jewels had been sold last Christmas. She hadn’t gotten much for them.

Then he remembered. He dashed down the stairs into the den and tore open the cabinet where his father used to store his golf balls. A small box with a red tassel sat behind a pile of yellowing golf magazines.

Justin pulled it open.

“A ten. That’s it?”

He tossed the box onto the floor and threw himself on the couch. The world conspired against him. The silver in the cabinets wouldn’t fetch much. He couldn’t sell the furniture. “Don’t panic,” he said to himself.

He went outside to the garage. It was an old wooden structure with a swinging door. At least in here, he thought, I can feel safe. Here was his father’s old workbench. His gardening apron. Justin picked the apron up and hugged it, its earthy fragrance rising to his nose. He imagined Yianni in a bathing suit. Hairy, skinny legs, like a spider’s. Justin started to laugh, but he stopped. Yianni hadn’t been joking.
What am I going to do?
He prayed under his breath to his father, the apron like a security blanket.
What am I going to do?

Crossing the border into the U.S. at Chief Mountain customs wasn’t going as easy as Randy Mucklowe had hoped. At 8:10 on this warm morning, two U.S. officials wearing green short-sleeve shirts and brown flat-brimmed ranger hats were doing a thorough search of Mucklowe’s old, cream-coloured Chevy van. Everything seemed normal when they began the standard interview, a procedure Randy knew well from frequent crossings and one that usually took no more than a few minutes. Chief Mountain customs was an outpost on the world’s longest undefended border, in the middle of Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park. It was a summer crossing for tourist buses going from Waterton Lakes on the Canadian side to the U.S. parks of Glacier and East Glacier. Fir and pine forests lined the two-lane blacktop leading to the twin log cabin border stations that sat surrounded by the soaring peaks of the Rockies. The first U.S. border guard Randy spoke to, as he pulled his van in to the station, asked for his driver’s licence. In an automatic and bored voice, he wanted to know the purpose of Randy’s visit. Randy explained he was finalizing details for an archaeological dig on Indian land. The excavation was on shale scree below the northwest face of Chief Mountain. The guard immediately demanded to see Randy’s permission papers.

“It was all arranged through the band council, officer,” Randy explained.

But the guard hesitated. He broke into a nervous smile and signalled to another guard who was standing inside the border station office. The
second guard strolled out, and the two of them spoke briefly in low voices, looking over Randy’s documents. Then they insisted on a vehicle search. “We need to see your dig tools, Professor,” one guard explained. “The Indian Act allows for certain kinds of shovels and picks but not others.”

Randy sighed, then complied. Reluctantly he pulled out the spare tire in the back of the van and helped the guards unwrap the tarps around the steel spades and mesh sifting screens. Both men consulted a sheet with official numbers and diagrams. They looked closely at the mesh. They picked up and studied the blades of the shovels. Randy knew they were going through an act; neither could tell a shovel from a pick-axe. But federal U.S. law required them to cross-examine all Canadians coming into the States to do work on federal Indian land. Randy knew this, but sighed again. This would surely create complications later on, especially with his new plans. But he wouldn’t let himself think about that right now.

“Thank you, sir,” a guard said. “We’ll need to run a check on the computer. It won’t take a moment.”

Randy started loading his gear.

“Morning, prof,” a voice said from behind.

Randy turned to see a tall thin woman with blonde hair striding towards him. She wore a brown shirt and long pants. On her lapel glowed a red maple leaf pin. Her hat was the standard ranger model of the Canadian border guard. She came up to Randy from the station on the Canadian side, not twenty feet away.

“Margie!”

“The boys giving you a hard time?”

“You know. How are you?”

“Good. You on a new dig this summer?”

“Up at the Chief. Working a vision quest site. Just a week. I hope my comings and goings won’t take this much time later on. I’ve got a crew of three students with me.”

“What you looking for?”

“Skulls, burial items, prayer gifts. Site’s been in use for over threehundred
years. The Browning Museum is interested in the artifacts.
If
we find any. I’ve always wanted to do the Chief site, but for years the band in Browning wouldn’t authorize it.”

“You’re looking fit, Randy. You and Connie still doing fine?”

Randy paused. He decided not to tell the truth. Margie didn’t need to know about Connie and the divorce and. . . .

“Fine. Good. How come this border crossing’s getting so sticky? Used to be so soft.”

“Drugs, Randy. And some artifact smuggling. There was that Indian mask heist down at Missoula last fall. Looks like they may still be in the country. We’ve almost given up looking for them. Rumour was they might cross the border here or farther east. But lately, not much has been going through here but
RVS
and the gear jammer buses from Glacier.”

“Well, you’ll be seeing me on and off for the next few days. What shifts do you do, by the way?”

“Usually evenings. My supervisor put me on this morning as extra since they’re expecting a lot of traffic, being the first big summer weekend.”

“Do you need me to give you a list of the names of my students? I have the forms.” Randy lifted his briefcase from the front seat of the van and snapped it open. He pulled out a sheet with the names of three students: Justin Moore, Cara Simonds, and David Home. Other papers included their passport numbers, student cards, and dig permit information.

“I can take it now if you want, prof. But there’s no rush till we see you. You’ll find it a lot easier coming back to Canada since we know who you are and the work you’re doing.”

“Thanks, Margie. I should be en route by now. I’ve got a meeting with Sam Heavy Hand from Browning in the next hour, and I also have to get back to the university to catch up on office duties.”

Margie smiled, took the paper from Randy, and headed back towards the Canadian side of the border. Randy shut his briefcase and slid it onto the front seat just as the two U.S. border guards re-emerged.
They approached and handed him his permission papers and told him he was free to proceed.

“Thanks, officers,” Randy said, knowing that a polite and obedient face gave you credit with men such as these.

Randy finished packing the van, folding the tarps over the shovels and mesh screens. He stood for a moment and ran over the words he would use to tell Sam about what happened. He wanted to make sure his partner understood the difficulty. He wanted to make sure Sam would trust him, especially since he now had plans that did not include Sam.

By 8:32, Randy was on the road again, driving south to Babb, Montana. He felt weary. His mind kept harping on the incident at the border and what Margie had said about the heist of the Indian masks. He and Sam had been right — lying low for a year had been a good idea. Still, Randy was worried. Would the Canadians search him every time he crossed back into Waterton Lakes after a day’s digging? His plans were based on the crossing being hassle-free.

As he drove into the morning sun, Randy tried to encourage positive thoughts. He’d been a respected archaeologist for eighteen years. Digging up the earth of the Porcupine Hills and the foothills near the Rockies had been his principal joy. A year ago he published his fifteenth article on the prehistory of the Kootenay peoples. Before that, he had been well known for excavating Blackfoot campsites and buffalo corrals, and interpreting tipi rings. He owned rare amulets and obsidian arrowheads, and he was one of the few men in his field who could locate the legendary Flathead Pass, a trail walked for thousands of years by local tribes long before Columbus sailed west.

Yet the sight of the shimmering blacktop forced him to wonder if his reputation was worth anything now. Why was he staking his future on such a risky venture? Driving into Montana to cut a deal in a hole like Babb? It was nothing more than a cluster of rundown buildings huddling by highway 464 leading into the Logan Pass. Even thinking about Sheree Lynn and the good things they had together did not comfort him. At least she was loving enough to let him go his own way. Yet
Randy knew he must be cautious.
Never tell a woman everything.
Sheree didn’t think his plan would work. Could she really be trusted? She’d done all right in the last twenty-four hours, but why had she hugged that supercilious detective? No way she could win him over. That bloody ethnic dick suspected her of criminal negligence.
Go easy, easy.
Randy hated it when his jealousy taunted him. It was true: Sheree could blow the plan if she got emotional.
If all goes smoothly, we can move out of that smelly Satan House.
Randy smirked. He was on the brink. Soon, he figured, his money worries would evaporate. And Darren Riegert? The image of his lifeless body in that dank basement rose in his mind, but he refused to look at it. “To hell with him,” he said.

He drove on. Catbirds and brown thrashers arose from the warm fallow grass. They flitted into groves of diamond willow that grew in the hollows between the landscape’s shallow rises. Randy had killed a couple of meadow mice, which had run faster than gunshot out from the deep scrub by the mountain highway. Sam Heavy Hand would’ve told him that killing them was a good thing. Sparrow hawks would feed the carcasses to their young.

Turning south, Randy had a cold feeling, a sudden premonition of doom. Then Babb appeared in the distance. Eventually Randy pulled into a parking lot, shut off the engine, and locked up. The air was warm and fragrant with pine as he walked into the smoky Horseshoe Bar. He looked at his watch: 8:55. He ordered a Coors Light, grabbed a stool, and took a deep haul on the cool liquid, debating whether he should bum a Marlboro from the bartender, a three-hundred-pound man called Babe. Sam Heavy Hand was late, as usual. Did he have them with him? Was there going to be an argument like last time?
On the brink.
And nowhere to go but on a student dig and maybe, if Randy played his cards right, well. . . .
Maybe
was all he would dare think. He remembered what his grandmother used to say: “Don’t write your history ’til it’s happened. Then change what you want to suit yourself.” More than once he’d rewritten his history, and where had it got him? He’d lost his wife, his house. He’d been caught with “miscatalogued” artifacts from the dig on
the Belly River two years back, screwing up forever his contacts with the prestigious Glenbow Museum in Calgary, a place where his reputation had been platinum-plated. He’d worked hard. He’d gambled hard. Life had made him some enemies. But he sure didn’t want to spend the next twenty years paying loan interest and bickering with his ex-wife.

Leaning back from the bar, he recognized Sam Heavy Hand’s huge frame coming towards him through the smoky air. Greed and anger were Sam’s middle names. He’d been a good friend years ago. Randy had liked Sam’s love of the outdoors, his belief in his people and their lost past. But ever since Sam had been in the Montana state pen for arson and robbery, ever since he’d started in on booze again and gone to work for his sister, Rita, he had turned against his old ways. All he wanted these days was cash. The only things Sam cared about now were new rifles, the half-ton he wanted to buy, and going to Las Vegas to win at blackjack.

“You ready?”

Sam’s voice lay low in his throat. He was wearing a new Stetson, a jean jacket, and a pair of torn Levis. Randy paid for his Coors, nodded to Babe, then followed Sam out the side door of the bar and up a shale bank into a low grove of aspens. By the side road, he saw Sam’s blue Ford half-ton. A tarp was thrown over the bed, and Sam’s old hound, Crow, was sleeping on it. At the cab, Sam unlocked the door and hauled out a large canvas suitcase. He shut the door and signalled to Randy to follow. Randy waited a moment before going along behind, like they had arranged. Just in case anyone — a kid, Babe, a state police officer — might be watching from the distance.

Randy walked alone, scanning his mind for the words. His eyes squinted in the morning light as he followed Sam up the hill into a woodlot of cottonwoods and birches, then down into a gully cut by a creek running over blue-streaked boulders.

Sam sat under a birch. He pulled out a key from his jean pocket and unlocked the suitcase. Carefully and slowly he lifted the lid. Randy became nervous. He leaned in close.