She shot him the finger over her shoulder.
“Showtime is over,” the bearded man said.
“No harm intended,” Albert said.
“You got a church hereabouts?” the man with the black glasses said.
“There’s a couple up the road,” Albert said.
The three bikers looked at one another again, amused, shaking their heads.
“You’re sure slow on the uptake,” the bearded man said. “If you go to one of those churches next Sunday, drop a little extra in the plate. Thank the Man Upstairs he’s taking care of you. It’s the right thing to do.” He winked at Albert.
But the evening was not over. Fifteen minutes later, after Albert picked up his truck at the Express Lube, he passed by the saloon and saw the three men by the young woman’s car. They had pulled the taped cardboard from the passenger-side window and opened the door. The biker with the beard stood with his feet spread, his thighs flexed, his enormous phallus cupped in his palm, urinating all over the dashboard and the seat.
Albert drove down the state highway toward the turnoff and the dirt road that led to his ranch. The hills were dark green against the sunset, the sharp outline of Lolo Peak capped with snow, the creek that paralleled the road sliding through shadows the trees made on the water’s surface. He braked his truck, backed it around, and floored the accelerator, the gearshift vibrating in his palm. The note he left under the young woman’s windshield wiper was simple: The Idaho tag number of the red-haired man who vandalized your car is— He copied onto the note the number he had placed in his wallet the day the bikers had driven through his property. Then he added: I’m sorry you had this trouble. You did nothing to deserve it.
He walked back toward his truck, wondering if the anonymity of his note was not a form of moral failure in itself. He returned to the woman’s car and signed his name and added his phone number at the bottom.
On the way home the wind buffeted his truck, powdering the road with pine needles, fanning geysers of sparks out of a slash pile in a field. In the distance he saw a solitary bolt of lightning strike the ridgeline and quiver whitely against the sky. The air smelled of ozone and rain, but it brought him no relief from the sense of apprehension that seized his chest. There was a bitter taste in his mouth, like copper pennies, like blood, a taste that reminded him of his misspent youth.
It takes him most of the afternoon to hand-dig a hole in the pasture in order to bury the sorrel mare. The vinyl draw-string bag someone had wrapped over her head and cinched
tight around her neck lies crumpled and streaked with ropes of dried saliva and mucus in the bunchgrass. The undersheriff, Joe Bim Higgins, watches Albert fling the dirt off the shovel blade onto the horse’s flank and stomach and tail.
“I checked them out. You picked quite a threesome to get into it with,” Joe Bim says.
“Wasn’t of my choosing,” Albert replies.
“Others might argue that.”
Albert wipes the sweat off his forehead with the back of his forearm. The wind is up, channeling through the grass, bending the fir trees that dot the slopes of the hills that border both sides of his ranch. The sun is bright on the hills and the shadow of a hawk races across the pasture and breaks apart at the fence line. “Say again?”
“In the last year you filed a complaint because some kids fired bottle rockets on your property. You pissed off the developers trying to build a subdivision down on the creek. You called the president a draft-dodging moron in print. Some might say you have adversarial tendencies.”
Albert thought about it. “Yes, I guess I do, Joe Bim. Particularly when a lawman stands beside my dead horse and tells me the problem is me, not the sonsofbitches who ran her heart out.”
But Joe Bim is not a bad man. He removes a shovel from his departmental SUV and helps Albert bury the animal, wheezing down in his chest, his stomach hanging against his shirt like a water-filled balloon. “All three of those boys been in the pen,” he says. “The one who hosed down the girl’s car is a special piece of work. His child was taken away from him and his wife for its own protection.”
Then Joe Bim tells Albert what the biker or his wife or both of them did to a four-month-old infant. Albert’s eyes film. His clears his throat and spits into the grass. “Why aren’t they in jail?” he says.
“Why do we have crack and meth in middle schools? The goddamn courts, that’s why. But it ain’t gonna change because you get into it with a bunch of psychopaths.”
Albert packs down the dirt on top of his horse and lays a row of large, flat stones on top of the dirt. He cannot rid himself of the images Joe Bim’s story has created in his mind. Joe Bim looks at him for a long time.
“How’s the wife?” he asks.
“Parkinson’s is Parkinson’s. Some days are better than others,” Albert says.
“You’re a gentle man. Don’t mess in stuff like this,” Joe Bim says. “I’ll get them out of town. They’re con-wise. They know the hurt we can put on them.”
You have no idea what you’re talking about, Albert says to himself.
“What’s that?” Joe Bim asks.
“Nothing. Thanks for coming out. Listen to that wind blow,” Albert says.
Before his retirement he had taught at the state university in Missoula although he did not have a Ph.D. and had managed to publish several novels that had enjoyed a fair degree of commercial success. Early on he had learned the secret of survival among academics, and that was to avoid showing any sign of disrespect for what they did. But in actuality the latter had never been a problem for him. He not only respected his colleagues but thought their qualifications and background superior to his own. His humility and southern manners and publications earned him a tenured position and in an odd way gave him a form of invisibility. In the aftermath of the most bitter faculty meetings, no one could remember if Albert had attended the meeting or not.