“I wanted to tell you I’m sorry about what happened to your horse,” she says.
“It’s not your fault,” Albert says.
Her eyes leave his, then come back again. He thinks he can smell an odor in her clothes and hair like damp leaves burning in the fall. He hears his wife call to him from the bedroom. “Come in,” he tells the girl. “I have to see to Mrs. Hollister. She’s been ill for some time now.”
Then he wonders to himself why he has just told the girl his personal business.
“We’re on our way to Idaho. I just wanted to thank you and to apologize.”
“That’s good of you. But it’s not necessary.”
She looks down the pasture at the frost on the barn roof and the wind blowing in the bunchgrass. She sucks in her cheeks, as though her mouth has gone dry. “They got your name from me, not from the undersheriff.”
In the silence he can hear his wife getting up from the bed and walking toward the bathroom on her own. He feels torn between listening to the young woman and tending to his wife. “Run that by me again?” he says.
“One of them was my ex-husband’s cellmate in Deer Lodge. They wanted to know your name and if it was you who called the cops. They’re in the A.B. That’s why I’m going to Idaho. I’m not pressing charges,” she says.
“The Aryan Brotherhood?”
She sticks her hands in the pockets of her jacket and balls them into fists, all the time looking at the ground. Then Albert realizes she has not come to his home simply to apologize. He also realizes the smoke he smells on her clothes and person did not come from a pile of burning leaves.
“My boss is gonna send me a check in two weeks. At least that’s what he says. My boyfriend is trying to get one of those FEMA construction jobs in New Orleans. But his P.O. won’t give him permission to leave the state. I have enough money for gas to Idaho, Mr. Hollister, but I don’t have enough for a motel.”
“I see,” he replies, and wonders how a man of his age could be so dumb. “Will fifty dollars help? Because that’s all I have on me.”
She seems to think about it. “That’d be all right,” she says. She glances over her shoulder at the little boy strapped in the car seat. Her nails look bitten, the self-concern and design in her eyes undisguised. “The saloon will be open at ten.”
“I don’t follow you,” he said.
“I could take a check. They’ll cash it for me at the saloon.”
He lets her words slide off his face without reacting to them. When he removes the bills from his wallet and places them in her hand, she cups his fingers in her palm. “You’re a good man,” she says.
“When are they coming?” he asks.
“Sir?”
He shakes his head to indicate he has disengaged from the conversation and closes the door, then walks down the hallway and helps his wife back to her bed. “Was that someone from the church?” she asks.
During the night he hears hail on the roof, then high winds that make a rushing sound, like water, through the trees on the hillsides. He dreams about a place in South Texas where he and his father bobber-fished in a chain of ponds that had been formed by sheets of twisted steel spinning out of the sky like helicopter blades when Texas City exploded in February of 1947. In the dream, wind is blowing through a piney woods that borders a saltwater bay hammered with light. His father speaks to him inside the wind, but Albert cannot make out the words or decipher the meaning they contain.
In the distance he hears motorized vehicles grinding up a grade, throttling back, then accelerating again, working their way higher and higher up the mountainside, with the relentlessness of chain saws.
He wakes and sits up in bed, not because of the engines but because they have stopped—somewhere above his house, inside the trees, perhaps on the ridgeline where an old log road traverses the length of the canyon.
He removes the rifle from his closet and loads it. He disarms the security system and steps out onto the gallery, in the moonlight and the sparkle of frost on the bunchgrass. His hands and uncovered head and bare feet are cold. He levers a shell into the chamber but releases the hammer with his thumb so that it cannot drop by accident and strike the shell casing, discharging the round. The fir trees are black-green against the hillside, the arroyo behind his house empty. The air is clean and smells of pine and snow melting on the rocks and woodsmoke from a neighbor’s chimney down the canyon. In the whisper of the wind through the trees he wants to believe the engine sounds in his dream are just that—the stuff of dreams. Far up the hill he hears a glass bottle break on stone and a motorcycle roar to life.
Inside the topmost trees three separate fires burst alight and fill the woods with shadows. The sound of motorcycle engines multiplies and three balls of flame move in different directions down the ridgeline. Inside the house, he calls 911 and through the back window he sees the silhouette of one rider towing a fireball that caroms off the undergrowth, the points of ignition fanning down the slope in the wind.
“What’s the nature of your emergency?” the dispatcher asks.
“This is Albert Hollister, up Sleeman Gulch. At least three men on motorcycles are stringing fires down my ridgeline.”
“Which way are they headed?”
“Who cares where they’re headed? The wind is out of the southwest. I’ll have sparks on my roof in a half hour. Get the goddamn pump trucks up here.”
“Would you not swear, please?”