“These men are criminals. They’re burning my land.”
“Repeat, please. I cannot understand what you’re saying.”
His voice has wakened and frightened his wife. He comforts her in her bed, then goes outside again and watches a red glow spread across the top of the valley. The summer has been dry and the fire ripples through the soft patina of grass at the base of the trees and superheats the air trapped under the canopy. A sudden rush of cold wind through the timber hits the fire like an influx of pure oxygen. Flame balloons out of the canopy and in seconds turns fir trees into black scorches dripping with sparks. He can hear deer running across rocks and see hundreds of bats flying in and out of a sulfurous yellow cloud that has formed above the flames. He connects a hose to the faucet on the back of the house and sprays the bib of green grass on the slope, his heart racing, his mouth dry with fear.
By noon the next day the wind has died and inside the smell of ash is another odor, one that reminds him of the small room on the third floor of the parish prison where a man was strapped down in a wood chair and cooked to death with thousands of volts of electricity. Joe Bim Higgins stands next to Albert in the south pasture and stares up the hillside at the burned rocks and great stands of fir that are now rust-colored, as though stricken by blight.
Joe Bim blows his nose into a handkerchief and spits into the grass. “We found a sow and her cub inside a deadfall. The fire was probably crowning when they tried to outrun it,” he says.
“Where are they, Joe Bim?” Albert asks.
“Just up there where you see that
outcropping.” He tries to pretend his misunderstanding of Albert’s question is sincere, then gives it up. “I had all three of them in a holding cell at seven this morning. But they got an alibi. Two people at their campground say they was at the campground all night.”
“You cut them loose?”
Joe Bim is not a weak man or one who has avoided paying dues. He was at Heartbreak Ridge and one side of his face is still marbled from the heat flash of a phosphorous shell that exploded ten feet from his foxhole. “I can’t chain-drag these guys down the Blackfoot highway because you don’t like them. Look, I’ve got two deputies assigned to watch them. One of them throws a cigarette butt on the sidewalk—”
“Go back to town,” Albert says.
“Maybe you don’t know who your real friends are.”
“Yeah, my wife and my yellow Lab, Buddy. I’d include my sorrel, except the two of us buried her.”
“You’re like me, Albert. You’re an old man and you can’t accept the fact you can’t have your way with everything. Grow up and stop making life hard for yourself and others.”
Albert walks away without replying. Later, he spreads lime on the carcasses of the bears that died in the fire and tries not to think the thoughts he is thinking.
That night, during a raging electric storm, Albert leaves his wife in the care of the nurse’s aide and drives in his pickup to the only twenty-four-hour public campground on the Blackfoot River in Missoula County, his lever-action rifle jittering in the rack behind his head. It’s not hard to find the three bikers. Their sky-blue polyethylene tent is huge, brightly lit from the inside, the extension flaps propped up on poles to shelter their motorcycles. Lightning flickers on the hillside across the river, limning the trees, turning the current in the river an even deeper black. The smell of ozone in the air makes Albert think of the Gulf Coast and his youth and the way rain smelled when it blew across the wetlands in the fall. He thinks of his father, who died while returning from a duck-hunting camp in Anahuac, Texas, leaving Albert to fend for himself. He wonders if this is the way dementia and death eventually steal upon a man’s soul.
Down the road he parks his truck inside a grove of Douglas fir trees that are shaggy with moss and climbs up the hill into boulders that look like the shells of giant gray turtles. He works his way across the slope until he can look down upon the bikers’ campsite. In the background the river is like black satin, the canyon roaring with the sounds of high water and reverberated thunder. The flap of the bikers’ tent is open and Albert can see three men inside, eating from GI mess kits, a bottle of stoppered booze resting against a rolled sleeping bag. They look like workingmen on a summer vacation, enjoying a meal together, perhaps talking about the fish they caught that day. But Albert knows their present circumstances and appearance and behavior have nothing to do with who they really are.
They could as easily wear starched uniforms as they do jailhouse tats. Their identity lies in their misogyny and violence and cruelty to animals and children, not the blue teardrops at the corner of the eyes or the greasy jeans or the fog of testosterone and dried beer sweat on their bodies. These are the same men who operated Robespierre’s torture chambers. They’re the burners of the Alexandrian Library, the brownshirts who pumped chlorine gas into shower rooms. They use religions and flags that allow them to peel civilizations off the face of the earth. There is no difference, Albert tells himself, between these men and a screw in a parish prison on the Louisiana-Texas border where a guard frog-walked a kid in cuffs down to an isolation area, shoved him to his knees, and closed the door on the outside world.
The rain looks like spun glass blowing in front of the open tent flap. The biker with the red beard emerges from the opening, fills his lungs with air, and checks his motorcycle. He wipes off the frame and handlebars with a clean rag and admires the perfection of his machine. Albert levers a round into the chamber and steadies his rifle across the top of a large rock. The notch of the steel sight moves across the man’s mouth and throat, the broad expanse of his chest, the hair blossoming from his shirt, then down his stomach and scrotum and jeans that are stiff with road grime and engine grease and glandular fluids.
In his mind’s eye Albert sees all the years of his youth reduced to typewritten lines written on a sheet of low-grade paper. He sees the paper consumed by a white-hot light that burns a hole through the pulp, curling through the typed words, releasing images that he thought he had dealt with years ago but in reality has not. In the smoke and flame he sees a stretch of rain-swept black road and his father’s car embedded under the frame of a tractor-trailer rig; he sees the naked, hair-covered thighs of a former Angola gunbull looming above him; he sees the ax-bladed face of a state executioner, a toothpick in his mouth, his eyes staring whimsically at Albert, as though it is Albert who is out of sync with the world and not the man who cinches the leather straps tightly to the wrists and calves of the condemned. Albert raises the rifle sight to the red-bearded man’s chest and, just as a bolt of lightning splits a towering ponderosa pine in half, he squeezes the trigger.
The rifle barrel flares into the darkness and he already imagines the bullet on its way to the red-bearded man’s chest. The round is copper-jacketed, soft-nosed, and when it strikes the man’s sternum, it will flatten and topple slightly and core through the lungs and leave an exit wound the size of Albert’s thumb.
My God, what has he done?
Albert stands up from behind the boulder and stares down the hillside. The bearded man has taken a candy bar from his pocket and is eating it while he watches the rain blowing in the light from the tent flap.
He missed, thanks either to the Lord or to the constriction in his chest that caused his hand to jerk or maybe just to the fact he’s not cut out of the same cloth as the man he has tried to kill.
Albert grasps the rifle by the barrel and swings it against a boulder and sees the butt plate and screws burst loose from the stock. He swings the rifle again, harder, and still breaks nothing of consequence loose from either the wood or the steel frame. He flings the rifle like a pinwheel into the darkness, the sight on the barrel’s tip ripping the heel of his hand.
He cannot believe what happens next. The rifle bounces muzzle-down off the roof of a passing SUV, arcing back into the air with new life, and lands right in front of the bikers’ tent.
He drives farther down the dirt road, away from the bikers’ camp, his headlights off, rocks skidding from his tires into the canyon below.
When he gets back home, he strips off his wet clothes and sits in the bottom of the shower stall until he drains all the hot water out of the tank. His hands will not stop shaking.
The rains are heavy the following spring and in May the bunchgrass in Albert’s pastures is tall and green, as thick as Kansas wheat, and the hillsides are sprinkled with wildflowers. In the evening whitetail and mule deer drift out of the trees and graze along the edge of the irrigation canal he has dug from a spring at the base of the burned area behind his house. He would like to tell himself that the land will continue to mend, that a good man has nothing to fear from the world and that he has put aside the evil done to him by the bikers. But he has finally learned that lying to oneself is an offense for which human beings seldom grant themselves absolution.
He comes to believe that acceptance of a wintry place in the soul and a refusal to speak about it to others is as much consolation as a man gets, and for some odd reason that thought seems to bring him peace. He is thinking these thoughts as he returns home from his wife’s funeral in June. Joe Bim Higgins is sitting on the front steps of his gallery, the trousers of his dress suit stuffed inside his cowboy boots, a Stetson hat balanced on his knee, a cigarette almost burned down to a hot stub between two fingers. A pallbearer’s ribbon is still in his lapel.