Christmas in Absaroka County: Walt Longmire Christmas Stories (4 page)

I glanced down at the service bars and the Purple Heart on his chest, visible just under the sling.

“He says those don’t count.” He rearranged the injured arm and placed the other hand in his pants pocket. “I get the feeling that he thinks I’m some kind of . . . I don’t know.”

I thought about how the Army and Marines had lost a hundred chaplains during WWII—the third highest mortality rate behind the infantry and Army Air Corps—and how, on the USAT
Dorchester
in 1943, four chaplains had given their life jackets and lives for others.

“I’m sure he’s very proud of you.” I paused a moment and then went ahead. “When I was in Vietnam, I remember thinking how I was glad that I wasn’t the guy without a weapon.”

He smiled at me, and, as he accepted a
Spirit
DVD for the cause, I could hear that there seemed to be some sort of hubbub going on at the center of the store—probably a fight over the latest computer game cartridge.

“It takes a lot of guts to be in the thick of it on the front lines with nothing to take cover behind other than your convictions.”

The young corporal nodded and looked at his highly polished shoes as the doors opened and shut two more times, the people departing looking over their shoulders.

I glanced back at him and was beginning to think I’d overstepped my ground when he spoke again. “Hey, I just sometimes wish that something had happened to me over there other than getting backed over by a truck. You know, something that I could be proud of when I talk to the old man.”

I glanced over his head and could clearly see that something was happening inside the store as employees seemed to be converging and customers appeared to be moving away, some of them exiting very quickly and rushing by us into the parking lot without a thought of a toy for a tot. “Well, careful what you wish for. I’m betting you’ll be going back.”

“No, I’m getting stationed stateside: Naval Base Point Loma, California. He shrugged again. “I guess they decided I wasn’t battlefield material.” He looked sad at the idea. “At least it’ll be warmer.”

The doors opened again, and this time I could hear people screaming and yelling. The young officer turned his head as the glass slid shut and then glanced at me.

“Something going on in there?”

I leaned sideways and could see a tall man pushing aside someone in a blue and yellow Best Buy vest and starting toward us with something under his jacket. “I’m not sure.”

The employee who had been shoved grabbed the man by the shoulder, but the large guy turned and made a quick, jerking move with his free hand and the employee fell to the floor, hugging his arm.

The big fellow took off at a dead run toward us, but as I started to move around Burch, he sidestepped directly in front of me. “What’s going . . .”

The large man, still holding something under his parka, charged through the sliding glass door into us.

The corporal was stormed over and fell backward into one of the concrete parking impediments, almost taking me with him, but I was lucky enough to latch onto the guy’s arm. I spun him around into the steel-reinforced glass beside the door, and his nose made the sound of a saltine cracker being neatly snapped in two. The laptop computer he’d been holding fell from his coat, along with the nylon-handled knife he’d had in the other hand.

He stood there for the briefest of moments and then took two and a half staggering steps before falling backward onto the hood of the Jeep, his iris rolling back in his head. I kicked the knife toward the corporal, who was working himself up onto his hand and knees.

Turning and grabbing the thief by the coat front, I lifted him a little further onto the hood of the Wrangler, pulled the handcuffs from my belt, and secured one of his wrists to the Jeep’s side-view mirror.

I reached down and helped Burch to his feet, scooped up the wicked-looking blade, and placed it in the sling hand. “Hey, that was something.”

He crooked his neck and looked up at me, stretching his eyelids as he massaged his recovering shoulder and stared at the knife in his hand. “What?”

People spilled from the store now, employees and customers alike, attempting to get a look at what had happened. I raised my voice to be heard over the general noise: “The way you took that guy out—that was something.”

Pulling my cuff keys from my belt, I slipped them into the breast pocket of his jacket. “The Billings PD should be here in about five minutes give or take.”

I stooped again, this time picking up the damaged computer and handing it to the store manager with the nametag that read
DALE
. “Did you see that? Boy howdy, that was something else.”

Dale looked at the chaplain, who was still shaking his head and looking a little confused. “He did that?”

“Single-handedly.” I glanced at the young man’s sling and resisted making further comment.

It was about then that I felt someone grab my arm, crowding in close. “Daddy, you are not going to believe what just happened. This guy was stealing a laptop and then security confronted him and the guy started yelling and pulled out this knife. . . .” Cady looked past me to the man lying on the hood of the Jeep, still unconscious. “Jesus.”

I reached down and took her shopping bag, pulled Cady’s receipt out, and tore the end off. I plucked the pen from my shirt, scribbled a number down on the paper, and handed it to the manager. “Call Chris Rubich from the
Gazette
right now and you can get this in tomorrow’s paper; its good advertising and you’ve got a heck of a human interest story here.”

He nodded his way back into the store with the number in his hand and the laptop under his arm. I propelled my daughter past the gathering crowd but paused long enough to catch the eye of the chaplain, still trying to gather his wits. “Heck of a job, Corporal—heck of a job.”

I steered Cady past the Wrangler into the parking lot through the swirling snow and toward my three-quarter-ton as she whispered. “Did you have anything to do with that?”

“No.”

“Daddy?”

“No, I didn’t.” I loaded her in, started the engine, and began backing out as a Billings City Police car with siren trumpeting and light bar twinkling sledded across four lanes of opposing traffic and beelined for the Best Buy entrance.

As I waited, Cady leaned down and pulled out an interactive child’s reader from one of her shopping bags. “Damn it, I meant to put this in that corporal’s toy bin but you rushed us out of there so fast.” She unhooked her seat belt. “I’ll be right back.”

“I don’t think that’s such a great idea.”

She climbed out the passenger-side door. “I won’t be long, Dad. Honest Injun.” She grinned at me and tossed her head, strawberry blonde in full sway.

I sighed and watched in the rearview mirror as she ran, careful to avoid the Billings patrolmen as they loaded the would-be thief into the back of their cruiser. She paused and spoke to Burch, put the reader in the Toys for Tots box, and laughed.

Dog whined, and I reached back and petted him. “It’s all right. She’ll be here in a minute.”

Three delayed slaps of the windshield wipers and she’d returned.

She climbed in, shut the door behind her, and rehooked the belt as I slipped the truck into gear and pulled into the light traffic of King Avenue. There were about two inches on the road and it felt like we were driving on a thick bed of quilt batting. Cady seemed preoccupied with the falling snow darting through the headlights like neon guppies, but I had to admit that my mood had improved.

Three more slaps and we were through the underpass and rolling quietly onto the blanketed surface of I-90 when, with a knowing smile, Cady reached up and clicked my handcuffs onto the rearview mirror. “Merry Christmas, Pops.”

UNBALANCED

She was waiting on the bench outside the Conoco service station/museum/post office in Garryowen, Montana, and the only part of her clothing that was showing was the black combat boots cuffed with a pair of mismatched green socks. When I first saw her; it was close to eleven at night, and if you’d tapped the frozen Mail Pouch thermometer above her head, it would’ve told you that it was twelve degrees below zero.

The Little Bighorn country is a beautiful swale echoing the Bighorn Mountains and the rolling hills of the Mission Buttes—a place of change that defies definition. Just when you think you know it, it teaches you a lesson—just ask the Seventh Cavalry.

I was making the airport run to pick up Cady, who had missed her connection from Philadelphia in Denver and was now scheduled to come into Billings just before midnight. The Greatest Legal Mind of Our Time was extraordinarily upset but had calmed down when I’d told her we’d stay in town that night and do some Christmas shopping the next day before heading back home. I hadn’t told her we were staying at the Dude Rancher Lodge, a pet-friendly motor hotel that was assembled back in ’49 out of salvaged bricks from the old St. Vincent’s Hospital and was a family tradition. I loved the cozy feeling of the weeping mortar courtyard, the kitschy ranch-brand carpets, and the delicious home-cooked meals of the Stirrup Coffee Shop.

Cady, my hi-tech urban daughter, hated the place.

In my rush to head north, I hadn’t gassed up in Wyoming and was just hoping that the Conoco had after-hours credit card pumps. They did, and it was as I was putting gas into my truck with the motor running that I noticed a person stand and trail out to where I stood, an old packing blanket billowing out from her shoulders.

Looking at the stars on the doors and then at me, she paused at the other side of the truck bed, her eyes ticktocking either from imbalance or self-medication. She studied my hat, snap-button shirt, the shiny brass name tag, and the other trappings of authority just visible under my sheepskin coat.

I buttoned it the rest of the way up and looked at her, expecting Crow, maybe Northern Cheyenne, but from the limited view afforded by the condensation of her breath and the cowl-like hood of the blanket, I could see that her skin was pale and her hair dark but not black, surrounding a wide face and full lips that snared and released between the nervous teeth.

“Hey.” She cleared her throat and shifted something in her hands, still keeping the majority of her body wrapped. “I thought you were supposed to shut the engine off before you do that.” She glanced at the writing on the side of my truck. “Where’s Absaroka County?”

I clicked the small keeper on the pump handle, pulled my glove back on, and rested my elbow on the top of the bed as the tank filled. “Wyoming.”

“Oh.” She nodded but didn’t say anything more.

About five-nine, she was tall, and her eyes moved rapidly, taking in the vehicle and then me; she had the look of someone whose only interaction with the police was being rousted: feigned indifference with just a touch of defiance and maybe just a little crazy. “Cold, huh?”

I was beginning to wonder how long it was going to take her, and thought about how much nerve she’d had to work up to approach my truck; I must’ve been the only vehicle that had stopped in hours. I waited. The two-way radio blared an indiscernible call inside the cab, the pump handle clicked off, and I pulled the nozzle, returning it to the plastic cradle. I hit the button to request a receipt, because I didn’t trust gas pumps any more than I trusted those robot amputees over in Deadwood.

Without volition, I found words in my mouth the way I always did in the presence of women. “I’ve got a heater in this truck.”

She snarled a quick laugh, strained and high. “I figured.”

I stood there for a moment more and then started for the cab—now she was going to have to ask. As I pulled the door handle, she started to reach out a hand from the folds of the blanket but then let it drop. I paused for a second more and then slid in and shut the door behind me, clicked on my seat belt, and pulled the three-quarter-ton down into gear.

She backed away and retreated to the bench as I wheeled around the pumps and stopped at the road. I sat there for a moment, where I looked at myself and my partner in the rearview mirror, then shook my head, turned around, and circled back in front of her. She looked up again as I rolled the window down on the passenger-side door and raised my voice to be heard above the engine. “Do you want a ride?”

Balancing her needs with her pride, she sat there huddled in the blanket. “Maybe.”

I sighed to let her know that my Good Samaritan deeds for the season weren’t endless and spoke through the exhaust the wind carried back past the truck window. “I was offering you a ride if you’re headed north.”

She looked up at the empty highway and was probably thinking about whether she could trust me or not.

“I have to be in Billings in a little over an hour to pick up my daughter.” It’s always a good idea to mention other women in your life when faced with a woman in need; it usually reassures them by letting them know that there
are
other women in your life—and that you might not be a complete psycho. “Are you coming?”

The glint of temper was there again, but she converted it into standing and yanked something up from her feet—a guitar case that I hadn’t noticed before. She indifferently tossed it into the bed of my truck, still carefully holding the blanket around her with the other hand, her posture slightly off.

“You want to put your guitar in here, there’s room.”

She swung the door open, gathered the folds up around her knees, and slid in. “Nah, it’s a piece of shit.” She closed the door with her left hand and looked at the metal clipboard, my thermos, and the shotgun locked to the transmission hump. She blinked, and her eyes half closed as the waft of heat from the vents surrounded her, and we sat there longer than normal people would have. After a while her voice rose from her throat: “So, are we going or what?”

“Seat belt.” She opened her eyes and rapidly looked out the passenger window, and I placed her age at early twenties.

“Don’t believe in ’em.” She wiped her nose on the blanket, again using her left hand.

We didn’t move, and the two-way crackled as a highway patrolman took a bathroom break. She looked at the radio below the dash and then back at me, then pulled the shoulder belt from the retractor and swiveled to put it in the retainer at the center—it was about then that my partner swung his furry head around from the backseat to get a closer look.

“Jesus!” She jumped back against the door, and something slid from her grip and fell to the rubber floor mat with a heavy thump.

I glanced down and could see it was a small wood-gripped revolver.

She slid one of her boots in front of it to block my view, and we stared at each other for a few seconds, both of us deciding how it was we were going to play it.

“What the hell, man. . . .” She adjusted the blanket, careful to completely cover the pistol on the floorboard.

Thinking about what I was going to do as I spoke, I sat there without moving for a moment, then pulled onto the frontage road, and headed north toward the on-ramp of I-90. “That’s my partner—don’t worry, he’s friendly.”

She stared at the hundred-and-fifty-plus pounds of German shepherd, Saint Bernard, and who knew what. She didn’t look particularly convinced. “I don’t like dogs.”

“That’s too bad—it’s his truck.”

I eased the V10 up to sixty on the snow-covered road and motioned toward the battered thermos leaning against the console. “There’s coffee in there.”

She looked, first checking to make sure the gun was hidden, and then reached down, and paused long enough so that I noticed her bare hands, strong and deft even with the remains of the cold. There was something else, though—a plastic medical bracelet, the kind that hospitals put on you to help remember who you are. She saw me watching her and quickly stuffed the municipal jewelry under the sleeve of a stained sweatshirt; then she lifted the thermos by the copper-piping handle, connected to the Stanley with two massive hose clamps, and read the sticker on the side:
DRINKING FUEL
. She twisted off the top and filled the chrome cap. “You got anything to put in this?”

“Nope.”

She rolled her eyes and settled back against the door, careful not to move enough to re-produce the revolver. She pulled the blanket further up on her shoulders and crouched against the door like a cornered animal as she drank. “Good coffee.”

“Thanks.” I threw her a tenuous, conversational line and caught a glimpse of a nose stud and what might’ve been a tattoo at the side of her neck. “My daughter sends it to me.”

The two-way squawked again as the highway patrolman came back on duty, and she glared at it. “Do we have to listen to that shit?”

I smiled and flipped the radio off. “Sorry, force of habit.”

She glanced back at Dog, who regarded her indifferently as she nudged one foot toward the other in an attempt to push the revolver up and onto her other shoe. “So, you’re the sheriff down there?”

“Yep.”

She nonchalantly reached down, feigning an itch in order to snag the pistol. She slid it back under the blanket and carried it onto her lap. “Your daughter live in Billings?”

“Philadelphia.”

She nodded and murmured something I didn’t catch.

“Excuse me?”

Her eyes came up, and I noticed they were an unsettling shade of green. “Philly Soul. The O’Jays, Patti LaBelle, the Stylistics, Archie Bell & the Drells, the Intruders . . .”

“That music’s a little before your time, isn’t it?”

She sipped her coffee and turned to stare out the windshield. “Music’s for everybody, all the time.”

We drove through the night. It seemed as if she wanted something, and I made the mistake of thinking it was talk. “The guitar case—you play?”

She watched the snow that had just started darting through my headlights again. “Your dog sure has a nice truck.” We drifted under the overpass at the Blue Cow Café and Casino as an eighteen-wheeler, pushing the speed limit, became more circumspect in his velocity when I pulled from the haze of snow behind him and passed.

There was another long pause, and the muffled sound of the tires gave the illusion that we were riding on clouds. “I play guitar—lousy. Hey, do you mind if we power up the radio? Music, I mean.”

I stared at her for a moment and then gestured toward the dash. She fiddled with the
SEEK
button on FM, but we were in the dead zone between Hardin and Billings. “Not much reception this close to the Rez; why don’t you try AM—the signals bounce off the atmosphere and you can get stuff from all over the world.”

She flipped it off and slumped back against the door. “I don’t do AM.” She remained restless, glancing up at the visors and at the console. “You don’t have any CDs?”

I thought about it and remembered my friend Henry Standing Bear buying some cheap music at the Flying J truck stop months ago on a fishing trip to Fort Smith, Montana. The Bear had become annoyed with me when I’d left the radio on
SEARCH
for five minutes, completely unaware that it was only playing music in seven-second intervals. “You know, there might be one in the side pocket of that door.”

She moved and rustled her free hand in the holdall, finally pulling out a $2.99
The Very Best of Merle Haggard
. “Oh, yeah.”

She plucked the disc from the cheap cardboard sleeve and slipped it into a slot in the dash I’d never used. The lights of the stereo came on and the opening lines of Haggard’s opus “Okie from Muskogee” thumped through the speakers. She made a face, looked at the cover, and read the fine print. “What’d they do, record it on an eight-track through a steel drum full of bourbon?”

“I’m not so sure they sell the highest fidelity music in the clearance bin at the Flying J.”

Her face was animated in a positive way for the first time as the long fingers danced off the buttons of my truck stereo, and I noticed the blue metal-flake nail polish and the bracelet that clearly read
LAKESIDE PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL—LAKESIDE, TN
.

“You’ve got too much bass and the fade’s all messed up.” She continued playing with the thing, and I had to admit that the sound was becoming remarkably better. Satisfied, she sat back in the seat, even going so far as to hold out her other hand for Dog to sniff. He did and then licked her wrist.

“I love singer/storytellers.” She scratched under the beast’s chin and for the first time since I’d met her seemed to relax as she listened to the lyrics. “You know this song is a joke, right? He wrote it in response to the uninformed view of the Vietnam War. He said he figured it was what his dad would’ve thought.”

I shrugged noncommittally.

She stared at the side of my face, possibly at my ear, or the lack of a tiny bit of it. “Were you over there?”

I nodded.

“So was my dad.” Her eyes went back to the road. “That’s why I’m going home; he died.”

I navigated my way around a string of slow-moving cars. “What did your father do?”

Her voice dropped to a trademark baritone, buttery and resonant. “KERR, 750 AM. Polson, Montana.”

I laughed. “I thought you didn’t do AM.”

“Yeah, well now you know why.”

Merle swung into “Pancho and Lefty,” and she pointed to the stereo. “Proof positive that he
did
smoke marijuana in Muskogee—he’s friends with Willie Nelson.”

I raised an eyebrow. “In my line of work, we call that guilt by association.”

“Yeah, well, in my line of work we call it a friggin’ fact, and Willie’s smoked like a Cummins diesel everywhere, including Muskogee, Oklahoma.”

I had to concede the logic. “You seem to know a lot about the industry. Nashville?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, so you’re not a musician. What did you do?”

“Still do, when I get through in Polson.” Her eyes went back to the windshield and her future. “Produce, audio engineer . . . Or I try to.” She nibbled on one of the nails, on the hand that held the shiny cup. “Did you know that less than 5 percent of producers and engineers in the business are women?” I waited, but she seemed preoccupied, finally sipping her coffee again and then pouring herself another. “We’re raised to be attractive and accommodating, but we’re not raised to know our shit and stand by it.” She was quiet for a while, listening to the lyrics. “Townes Van Zandt wrote that one. People think it’s about Pancho Villa but one of the lines is about him getting hung—Pancho Villa was gunned down.”