It is easy to go down into Hell; night and day, the gates
of dark Death stand wide, but to climb back again, to retrace
one’s steps to the upper air—there’s the rub, the task.
—Virgil, The Aeneid

THE CB radio in Sall’s Jeep crackled and hissed, every rock in the mountains magnifying the signal until the static reverberated sinuously with the shape of the mountains and the lake.

Matt had been following Russ White’s car for the last hour. At first, Matt had tried to catch him, but Russ accelerated every time, slowing down when Matt dropped behind. Finally, Matt turned on the radio, hailing on every channel until he managed to get a terse acknowledgment on one channel from Russ. So far he’d only heard a few short responses—a “roger” here and there—but Matt kept hoping.

The microphone crackled unexpectedly in Matt’s hand. “Why the hell are you following me, Matty?”

“Jesus, Russ, come back with me, talk to people. You drive away this way, it looks like you’re admitting to things you didn’t even do.”

“I know what it looks like.” There was a moment of radio silence. “Jesus, Matty, you gotta understand, I never meant to lie to you.”

“Why?” said Matt. “That’s all I want to know. Why did you do it?”

Russ did not reply for a long moment. “I figured it was a little white lie—tell you that you’d been drinking, that it was your fault. You’d swear off the white lightning, and you’d be clean. Dammit, I did it for you. I figured I was doing you a favor.”

“You did it for me?” Matt said tightly. “Who asked you to tell me that?”

“Jesus, Matty, this is all coming out wrong—” Russ’s voice broke. When he spoke again, his voice was hoarse and desperate. “By the time she died, it was too late to take back what I’d said—you had convinced yourself that was the way it happened, and no amount of talking could get you to stop drinking. You heard me try, I tried to tell—”

Matt punched the button, his fingers trembling with suppressed rage. “Irene died. You told me I killed her. You sure as hell didn’t do her any favors. You didn’t try hard enough to tell me, you didn’t—”

The radio clicked as Matt spoke. Russ was trying to interrupt. “But that accident told you something I thought you needed to hear—something you could never hear from anyone, least of all your old drinking buddy. Dammit, Matty, the whole thing just spiraled out of control. By the time she died, it was impossible for me to take it back, I couldn’t do anything . . .”

Matt spoke softly. “You let me live in a lie.”

Matt could hear him pull away from the microphone. Russ blew his nose, the sound small and pathetic over the radio.

THE GIRL remembered the bus station. It was the middle of the night, the people moved as if they were old or drunk or asleep, sliding sideways into walls and sinking heavily onto benches. None of their eyes stayed on her tears. Instead, they talked to one another. The girl tried to listen, to hear if there was anyone she could trust, but it all seemed to turn to babble, dirty syllables splashing back and forth across empty spaces.

On the other side of the echoing room, she saw a gray-haired man with kindly eyes. He watched as she slapped the dirty man’s hand away from the top of her head. The tattooed man had brought her out of the car into the station, but he never let go of her. He lifted his tattooed hand and put it on her hair. She pushed at his fingers, but he never seemed to care that she squirmed under his touch. Gradually, his fingers slipped to the side in a weary torpor. She would not settle into him, but her movement slowed to a tick.

When the station’s loudspeaker squawked out a sudden surge of static, the dirty man startled, looking around wildly. His eyes had been heavy, he was almost asleep. The girl pushed forward in that moment, worming out from under his heavy grasp.

The CB radio crackled as Matt tuned the channel. His car followed in Russ’s wake, along the narrow and twisting Bitterroot Mountains highway. Matt knew this ground better than his own skin. He imagined tracing the route in a map drawn in flesh on the back of his very own hand, the curves and undulations lying like tendons and veins over a solid terrain of basalt and bone. The granite of the Bitterroot Range emerged like a jutting skeleton through the etched-on carcass of soil and snow that just barely concealed the lower regions of the range before the rock broke through at the top into a region of frost and wind.

Matt pushed the button on the microphone. “Let me tell you something, Russ, and I want you to listen to me. I forgive you for all of it. I forgive you for lying to me about Irene. I forgive you.”

“Bullshit,” said Russ immediately. “People don’t forgive lies like the ones I fed you. People don’t forgive that kind of betrayal, that kind of—”

Matt pushed the microphone button furiously, cutting Russ off. “Listen, Russ—there’s nothing you could have done to me that would hurt worse than finding out about what my Pop did to all of us. After I found out about my Pop, Jesus, it was easy to forgive you. What you did was nothing, small potatoes.”

“Hell, I hadn’t thought of it that way.” Russ gave a strange laugh. “Small potatoes? This wasn’t small. I’ve shot a man in the line of duty. Maybe in the big scheme of things, that was small potatoes. This wasn’t—this is big enough to kill me.”

“C’mon, let’s stop driving these damn cars. You’re going over eighty, you know. It’s gonna get dangerous in the mountains here. Let’s stop, take a break, get some coffee or something. Chew the fat. I forgive you, Russ. That’s what I’ve been—”

“It doesn’t matter how many people you kill, Matt, or how many people forgive you. In the end, you still have to live with yourself. And what if you can’t do that?”

THE GIRL had pushed frantically between the suitcases and the legs of sleeping people. She did not look at him, but she knew where the gray-haired man with the kindly eyes was standing. It was hard to push through the crowd. No one saw her coming. When she glanced behind her, she realized it cost the dirty man no effort to follow her, people simply moved when he glanced at them. This was true even though he did not look angry yet, only bemused, irritated.

Ahead of her, she could see the gray-haired man had something heavy in his jacket pocket, he fingered it with one hand. He watched her and glanced at the dirty man moving through the crowd behind her. His kind eyes were weighing something.

She came close and held up her bedraggled doll. “My baby don’t feel well.”

“Ah,” said the man. His voice was nice too as he reached out to the doll. “Maybe I can make your baby all better. What’s your doll’s name?”

“Karyn,” she whispered. “That’s her name too.”

The man crouched down on his heels and stroked the plastic head, wrinkling his brow in concern. He leaned over her. “Do you remember me, honey?” he said.

The girl did not know. “Baby wanna go home,” she said in a singsong voice, pretending to be younger than she was. “Hungry, and tired, an’ she’s scared. She’s real scared, but I can make her better. Karyn needs her daddy.”

“That ain’t your daddy,” he said quietly. “Where’s that daddy your mommy got?”

The girl shook her head and leaned into him. “I don’t know,” she said. She lifted up her doll again. He wrinkled his nose and she knew he smelled her panties, where the pee had dried. She whispered hoarsely to him, as if it was pretend. “That’s not baby’s daddy. Baby need a real daddy. Karyn go home.”

“Ah, a real daddy.” The man laughed, as if the girl had said something funny. He reached out and tousled her hair, but she did not mind his hand on her head. As he stood, the dirty man reached them.

There was a momentary pause before the gray-haired man spoke again. “Hi there, Curtis. Mr. Siwood, sir. My name is Russ. I thought maybe we could talk about—”

The dirty man leaned close to them, the stale stink of sweat overwhelming her. “How the fuck do you know my name?”

“I was just talking to Karyn here and—”

As Russ spoke, the dirty man pulled his foot back and aimed a kick at the girl. She sprawled across the floor, so that he missed. When she got up, he kicked at her again. This time, she staggered backward, one arm over her head, to ward off another blow.

“Dammit!” Russ shouted and lunged forward. “What the hell are you doing?”

The dirty man jerked her off the floor. “I don’t care who you are, or how you know who I am. Don’t touch my girl!”

Russ reached forward. “She isn’t yours,” he hissed. “I’m telling you, I’ve got—” His arm shot in his pocket, clenching a fist, but then nothing came out. The girl was yanked backward, and for a moment she did not see the knife that the dirty man had pulled when he kicked her, the knife that made Russ pause, his face red with pent-up rage.

The dirty man pulled her across the floor, flinging back words over his shoulder to Russ. “Whoever the fuck you are—get away from us. Don’t touch her again!”

And the girl was sure that no matter how nice his eyes looked, no matter how many words came out of him, the man named Russ would not help her. The dirty man had won again.

THE MICROPHONE clicked, as if Russ were speaking. There was a hiss, and then Russ’s voice came from far away, the words catching and ripping on the static.

“Matt, there’s one thing I know for sure now. I know you didn’t kill Arlen—”

Matt keyed the microphone. “Russ, why would you ever even think—”

“Even you wouldn’t publicly announce your pop’s connection to the Sunshine thing, and to how Arlen got killed, if you had done it yourself. That’s why I know.”

“I didn’t know for sure, until last week. Will Herrick told me about my pop.”

“That damn Will Herrick—he keeps screwing me up. Keeps rubbing my nose in it. So fine!” Russ sighed, the sound breaking up over the channel. “So you’re clean.”

“But Russ, if you’d simply believed me all along, if you’d—”

“I needed to think you’d done it.”

“You needed to think that about me?”

“Anyone,” sighed Russ. “For the longest time, I needed to believe anyone else was responsible. I’d told you lies long enough that I could lie to myself this time. For months I lied to myself, thinking somehow Arlen got away, somehow you did it to him. But now I know for sure that Curtis killed him—and it was my fault.”

KARYN REMEMBERED her daddy coming down the stairs of the bus. When she saw him, something rose in her, but whether it was terror or hope she could not tell. He wore sleep like a drug, it slowed him down.

He reeled forward, the weariness in him vaulting him toward the ground. When he stopped walking, the girl was sure he would fall to pieces all over the floor.

But then he lifted his face to look at them silhouetted against the bright lights inside the bus station. She saw that the fatigue didn’t reach his eyes—they were as sharp as ever, the deep and peaceful blue she knew from her bedtime stories. A tight wire inside her let go as her daddy squinted up at the tattooed man.

She saw a boy standing in the shadow of the bus doorway behind her father, a thin fur on his head, his shoulders clenching reflexively, bloody snakes and dead girls on his shirt. The dirty man still held her wrist, pulling her high off the floor. The girl turned her head, her feet scrabbling for a purchase against his thick legs.

“I kept my promise,” her father said to the dirty man. “You didn’t have to take my daughter to get me here.”

“Dammit, you’re right. Hell, I didn’t want to do this.” The dirty man’s fingers dug into her shoulder, as if to take a piece of her with him. “Besides, I didn’t want her. The lil’ ones die too fast!” Then his voice broke apart, a hacking sound came out of his throat.

Behind her father, she saw the boy with the shaved head move forward, as if to hear better. Her father came close, his eyes sharp as agates. “We had a deal, Curtis.”

The dirty man made the sound again, and the girl realized he was laughing. “Jesus, Father, it’s a joke.” He took the car keys out of his pocket and shook them, jangling. “See, here’s the car—an’ I didn’ hurt her—here, take a look, huh? You hurt?”

The girl made a sound, an uncertain moan. The dirty man glanced down at her, and his fingers released her slowly, as if he had little control over their action. His voice sank, as if to get inside her. “I didn’ touch you, right? I wasn’t gonna hurt anyone. I don’t mean to hurt your daddy. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

The girl tried to squirm away from him. Unexpectedly, the man released her, so that she collapsed on the concrete. He held out his hand, a dragon tail coiled down onto his wrist. “Here she is—now where’s that damn notebook?”

There was a sharp pain in her mouth. She could taste it in her mouth, something gritty and wrong. As she pulled her feet under her, she wiped her hand over her mouth, and found a streak of red. She’d bit her lip.

Then she saw the man with the kind eyes—Russ—he was watching them too, from across the room. He put a finger up to his lips. He was still holding a heavy thing in his pocket, he lifted it so she could see the metallic gleam. It was a secret now, something between them.

Her father did not see Russ, far away across the room, and her father did not move, but his voice came to her, a low whisper, “It’s all right, honey, I’m right here.”

He spoke aloud to the dirty man. “I’m sorry, Curtis—I planned on bringing along that notebook, to give to you. But I can’t reach the man I left it with.”

“Dammit!” The dirty man swore loudly enough to turn heads all around the station. “You fuckin’ left it with someone!? What the fuck do I get out of this deal? What you got I can use? You got credit cards? You got a bank account? I’ll fucking do—”

Her father put his hand up in the air. “It’s all right—it’s in Wallace. The guy who has it is trustworthy. He’ll give to you as soon as I make a phone call.”

The dirty man lifted his arm, his fingers clenched in a thick fist. “You’re fuckin’ with me—goddammit! I’m gonna fuck you up!”

“Have I ever lied to you?” said her father. Then the girl was shocked to see him reach out and put his palm on the man’s dragons. “We can go get it tomorrow. You aren’t going to have to go chase this on your own. I can promise you we’ll get it back together, and then you’ll be done with this whole game.”

“All right,” sighed the dirty man. “You made it here, damn straight. Everyone fucks with me—oh yeah, just fuck over ol’ Curtis, he can handle it—but you’re not doing that, are you? You made it here, I guess that’s proof nuff you ain’t fuckin’ with me . . .”

Her father cupped a hand around the man’s rough-colored shoulder. “No, I’m not, Curtis. Not at all.”

The dirty man put his arm down, a slow movement, as if it hurt not to punch something. “So what’s gonna happen? What’s gonna happen, huh?”

“Well,” said her father calmly. “We’ll get the notebook, and that’ll be an end to it. You’ve done your part. If you’re ready to acknowledge what you did, we can end it. If we can find proof he did this to them, to you too—the police can talk to the Herricks also.”

Then her father calmly took out his wallet and put a bill in the machine on the wall. With a gush and a hum, a cup dropped down and filled with dark fluid. Her father picked it up, held it out for the dirty man.

“Here, have a cup of coffee, okay? Take a load off.”

He looked up at the dirty man with his calm blue eyes. “You don’t need to worry about running away, Curtis. We’ll be able to take care of this thing. You’ll be done with the whole burden. Just give it to Jesus.”

Suddenly the man looked nervous, as if he had become aware of her again. The coffee shook in his hand. The girl looked down to see black drops spatter on the smear of blood her lip had left on the floor.

“You won’t hold all this on me?”

“No, there really won’t be anything against you, Curtis. You’ll be free.”

The dirty man seemed reassured. He lifted the cup and swallowed from it. He took another drink, and the girl thought he was about to leave them. When he was done, he wiped a hand across his mouth, just as the girl had.

“I got a knife,” he said abruptly. “Big-ass pigsticker.”

Her father paused at what he said, something changing in the way he stood. “What were you going to do with that, Curtis?”

Behind her father, the girl could see the boy with the shaved head move close enough to touch. There was some bond between the two of them she didn’t understand.

“I don’t know,” the dirty man said in a bemused tone. He took another swallow of coffee. “Stick somebody? You, maybe your girl, someone who fucked with me. Stan maybe. Someone’s always fuckin’ with me—tell me go do this job, do that job.”

“But that’s over now, right? Can you give me the knife, Curtis?”

“Sure, that’d be okay,” the dirty man said. He lifted his jacket and took out a knife. To the girl, the shiny blade seemed two feet long. As he turned it to give the handle to her father, he muttered something again. “You aren’t fuckin’ with me, are you.” This time it was a statement, a bemused moment of wonder.

THE HIGHWAY was incomplete. Beside the road, Matt began to see water-filled pylons instead of the heavy concrete barriers that bordered the lower reaches of the road. A few hundred feet above them, the waiting fog hung down, an empty gray morass.

Cautiously, Matt punched the microphone. “Where the hell are we going, Russ?”

“Just tell the truth, Matty, are you part of the Herricks’ dirty little game? Is this your job—talk me off the ledge, so they can take me apart on the ground for sport?”

“Russ, you know I’ve always been on your side. But right now I’m driving blind, and I wish you’d give me some answers. Why are you doing this, why . . .”

There was an answering hiss, and then nothing for a moment before Russ spoke again. “I should have known that the past would catch up with me. It catches up with all of us. You can’t avoid it.”

“Now wait,” said Matt. “Just slow down, Russ. What did you do that was so bad? So, you messed with Arlen’s dead body. How could it be your fault that Curtis—”

A jolting stab of static punched through the fog. “I was there, Matty. I was there in the station that night that Arlen was abducted.”

“What do you mean, you were there? You saw him? Just slow down a sec, Russ.”

“Matty, I was there in the bus station—before the body was found in the resort. I was there because I had a job to do for Val. There was a leak, and it threatened both Val and her brother.”

Russ kept talking as the fog sank down on the mountainside all around them. “Will found out first, and he was the one who told this guy Siwood to go get answers—find the evidence and destroy it. But Val didn’t trust them—she didn’t trust either Will or his hired gun. So she sent me to take care of it, finish it off, shut down the source.”

“Who were you going to shut down? Curtis or Arlen?” said Matt, but the radio just kept hissing with the sound of Russ’s voice.

“So I was there in the station, that’s where they’d agreed to meet, and I was waiting there for him. I saw the guy pull a knife, and that could have easily been the reason I shot him. I could have done my job for the Herricks, and walk away with a clean story. But it didn’t work out that way. That damn kid interfered.”

THE BOY with the shaved head moved forward with a sudden, violent shout, his hard boot swinging up in the same moment. At first, the girl shrank back, thinking that he was kicking at her, but then she saw the boot strike into the belly of the dirty man.

She reached out for her father, but the dirty man staggered backward at the boy’s kick. In that moment, she looked in the other direction. She reached out toward the kind-eyed Russ who had said he’d make her baby all better. She twisted out of the rough grip and ran across the room.

The dirty man turned, as she darted away, and held up his knife so it flashed like a flag in the air. She nestled into Russ’s chest and arms. Russ was breathing hard, yanking frantically at something in his pocket, a hard metal thing. There were voices all around her. The engine sound of a bus pulling in, a rush and a rumble.

Everything seemed to slow in a sickening moment as the dirty man pivoted, swinging his arm violently in the air, grasping her father and lifting back the blade of the knife. She screamed, the sound high and piercing as a dying animal.

The boy with the shaved head did not seem to care about the knife. He moved forward with a slow insolence, hitting quickly with his fists. His face didn’t change at all, as if the fight bored him. Yet he broke the hold the dirty man held on her father.

When he struck a third time, she saw the dirty man suddenly stagger backward. The boy kicked out, and there came the sodden thunk of the man’s head hitting the floor, a set of keys falling off his belt, jangling on the floor.

The boy picked up the keys. Then he kicked once more and the knife went spinning across the concrete floor.

Russ held her tightly. “Close your eyes,” he whispered. “Close your eyes, honey.”

But her eyes were locked on the dirty man. He stared at her, looking deep into her soul as the boy’s thick boot struck him over and over again. Across the blue black arms, a bloom of red started.

The man scrambled onto his knees, curling into a ball as the boy picked up the keys and kicked him one last time. The man stared up at her, a forceful hatred thrusting through the pain to center unblinkingly on her. Slowly, the blood on the dirty man’s face became a dripping scrim across his eyes. Finally, his stare was broken.

A THIN film of water covered the broken gravel on the road. Already it was freezing. Matt felt Sall’s Jeep slide under him as he corrected for the turn. Suddenly, he knew that Russell was counting on the fact that they’d never fixed the broken barrier at Independence Loop, despite all the accidents and near misses documented up here.

“Wait,” he whispered. “Wait for me. Goddammit, Russ, just wait and talk to me. Whatever you’ve done, we can get through it together. Wait for me, talk to—”

As if Russ had heard him, the CB radio in the car suddenly crackled with sound. “What you did today, you took away the guilt for a lot of things, but you can’t lift this burden off of me, Matty, no one can. I’ll never be free of what I did. There’s only one way to—”

Frantically, Matt pushed the button. “Jesus, Russ, you’re scaring me here. Get some therapy—go to counseling, do something for how you feel. I’m telling you, you haven’t done something you should beat yourself up about, you haven’t done anything—”

“I don’t think you know shit about what I’ve done, Matty.” Russ sighed, his voice as empty as a whistle. “This is not your fault, you know that. All you did at the funeral today was point out what I’ve been thinking for weeks now. We have to let go. Let go or die. That’s the damnedest thing about life—you got to go on living with yourself.”

“But I don’t understand what you could have done, Russ, you didn’t hurt—”

“I killed a man, Matty. A good man. Oh, I may not have pulled the trigger— or in this case, cut his throat. But I knew what was going to happen to Arlen. I knew what this guy Siwood was there for, and yet I gave him up. I betrayed Arlen. I let him do it.”

“You let Siwood kill Arlen? Why would you—”

“I thought it was the way to get the life I always wanted—but after it was done, it felt all wrong. I couldn’t enjoy it, and I still can’t live with it. The worst is, she knows. I can see it in her eyes.”

“Who?”

“Every time I’ve seen that girl, I can tell she knows what I did to him. The blood doesn’t come off my hands. Jesus died for thirty pieces of silver—but hell, I got Arlen killed for something a lot worse than that.

“I took away the only daddy she had ever known . . . I don’t think some things can be redeemed.”

The last word Russ said seemed to echo in the car. Quickly, Matt put his foot on the gas, skidding around the icy corners, coming as close as he dared to Russ’s car. Matt turned on the Jeep’s high-beams, they glowed uselessly against the encroaching fog.

SHE BOUND herself to Russ with her heart and her mind. With him was the only way she would ever get out. She squeezed her eyes shut and held to him as tight as she could, the frantic breath rushing in and out.

His voice was deep. It came from inside his chest and reverberated against her ears. “Stand up, you—dammit, face me when I shoot you. You’re no coward, are you?”

She slit her eyes open and saw that Russ’s other hand was holding a squat black thing pointed at the man on the floor. The dirty man scrabbled to get to his feet as the boy with the shaved head swiveled around, staring in sudden consternation at Russ’s unwavering grip on the gun.

“Close your eyes,” Russ whispered to her. “When you open ’em, it’ll all be okay. Forget about all this. Close your eyes, cover your ears, honey.”

The dirty man stared out of a mask of bruised and broken skin. He glared at her face, unblinking and unafraid. She glanced down at Russ’s hand. His fingers were tightening on the dull black metal, his knuckles growing white.

There was a flurry of motion, and her father was abruptly standing in front of Russ and the gun. “No,” he said quietly.

“Goddammit, shoot the bastard!” yelled the boy. “He’s a scary motherfucker!”

Her father flinched at these words, and she could barely hear his response. “I gave my word. I should go with him, take him where he wants to go.”

“Sure,” said Russ. “You believe that? Then you go with him. You do that.”

Her father’s answer echoed always in her dreams. “You don’t understand his story. God will be with me. Anyone can be redeemed.”

Russ waved the gun to the side. “Curtis—you should know the truth, we planned it like this. Arlen and I set you up to be caught, and now I’m gonna shoot you dead.”

Her father turned, a sudden shock on his face. “No, it wasn’t like that.”

The dirty man had an answer for that. He looked at Arlen, saying, “This is just between you. And me.” Then he moved rapidly toward her father, pausing only when Russ gave a low whistle, as if he were calling a dog.

Russ lifted the gun again, pointing it at the dirty man. “You got any last words?”

“No!” Her father waved his hands frantically. “In God’s name, you can’t do this!”

The dirty man paused and looked at the girl and Russ. He wiped a swollen hand across his bloody face, his eyes narrowed with loathing. “Fuck you—whoever you are.”

“I’m an angel, Curtis, or didn’t you know? I’m an Angel of Death.” Then Russ smiled, a strange expression on his face. “But it seems I’m taking a vacation tonight.”

Russ pointed the gun at the ceiling. “Bang. You’re not dead,” he said. “Someone else can do the dirty tonight, because I’m off duty, as of Father Arlen’s request.”

She saw her father step back, a sudden uncertainty in his step. When she saw that, she stopped listening. She watched him speak without hearing the words, watched him take the cross from off his neck and give it to the boy with the shaved head.

Then her father said good-bye, said he’d see her later, and even as he spoke, the girl knew that it was a lie. She began to cry.

“Don’t worry, honeybunch.” Russ took her face in his hands, made her listen to him. “It’ll be alright—Curtis here just wants to ask your daddy some questions. That’s what your daddy wanted. Right, Arlen? I’m not doing it for me, right?”

Her father did not seem to be listening either, but Russ continued talking to him. “I’ll wait here, Arlen. I’ll take care of Karyn until you get back. This won’t take long.”

The girl watched something clench in Russ as the dirty man took her father’s arm in his grasp. He stared at them until they went out of the building, and then they were gone. A moment after her father was out of sight, Russ took the girl to a different car. “Let’s go.”

Then she began to cry again. “But my daddy . . . he . . .”

“Get in the car, honey.”

“Why do you call me honey?”

But he didn’t seem to have heard what she’d said. He helped her into the car, locking the belt of the front seat gently around her. She had forgotten her doll in the other car, and she was about to tell him that when the boy with the shaved head came up to the car.

“Hey, dude—”

Without pause, Russ had the black gun back in his hand, it was already pushed into the boy’s chest. “What the hell do you want?”

“That dirty bastard . . . he dropped the preacher’s car keys. What do I do with them?”

Russ stared at him coldly. “You took my kill away from me. Now you got the keys for your efforts, so take the damn car. I don’t give a shit what you do with it.”

“But what about Arlen? Isn’t he coming back?” The boy’s voice rose into a whine. “What’s going to happen to him?”

“Why the fuck should I care?” said Russ. He shrugged, and the girl watched him sink down into the car seat and close the door. Carefully, he rolled down the window and put the gun back into his pocket. He started the engine as he spoke to the boy outside.

“If you care, you can track ’em down. Otherwise, get out of my way. I gotta go to Spokane. See you in hell.”

MATT COULD see Russell’s car dead ahead, it drifted back and forth across the lanes. Matt hoped there were no other cars in the higher elevations this time of day. The headlights scraped from snowy verge to center line, the fog seemed to sweep aside as the car cut through it.

Matt accelerated across the ice, driving as fast as he could. A sudden helplessness came across him—what could he do, after all, if he did catch Russ? Why had Russ betrayed Arlen at the station? What secret was Russ killing himself to hide?

He pushed the microphone button on the CB radio. “Russ, I’m going to be here for you, come hell or high water. Come on back, you don’t have to do this, you don’t have to go here.”

“Matty, it’s too late for that. You don’t know where I’m going. You never will.” There was a strange sound over the channel, and Matt realized Russ was crying. “See, the problem is that here in Bitterroot, people know only one story about my life. I thought I could go on with life, but this isn’t the story they know, and I can’t change it anymore.”

Matt could hear the blustery air howling over the pass, a monstrous howl as skeins of distant snow were lifted and thrown by the wind. “But you can change, you can survive this, you can.”

Russ didn’t seem to hear him over the roar of the wind. “Y’know, Arlen asked me not to kill Curtis, but it was my choice to send him away with the bastard. When I gave him up, I knew I’d signed his death warrant. Yet I was happy when I was doing it. I was happy—that’s what I’m telling you. I did it because I wanted that life. I broke my life, Matty. I did it to myself, and no one can ever forgive me.”

A pleading note came into Matt’s voice. “Why were you happy about that? What life? For God’s sake, Russ, just talk to me, please tell me why.”

Russell muttered something he couldn’t understand. The radio clicked off with a horrible finality.

SHE REMEMBERED Russ glancing over at her while he drove. This car was different, and somehow worse. It smelled so sweet it was close to rotten. When she first sat down in the car, her fear was like a poison eating at her heart and her bones, a heavy leaden thing eating away at her lungs, until she felt she could not breathe any longer, as if she would suffocate under its weight. When she took another breath, she was surprised by the lightness of the air in her mouth.

She glanced up at Russ, and then something in her released itself. It let go when she saw the wrinkles around his mouth, the kindness in his eyes. “It’s going to be all right, honey,” he said. “See, there’s a secret your momma never told you. Your daddy isn’t really . . .”

She could see spittle on the edge of Russ’s thin, narrow lips. Some of the spit came out and touched her face as he spoke, his hint of a smile somehow dangerous, like a warning or a badge.

Her fear welled up again, leaking out her eyes in hot tears. “Where’s my daddy? I want my daddy! My daddy . . . where is he . . .” She gasped, the sobs bursting out of her.

Nervously, Russ reached across her, pulling a plastic bag out of the glove box. Without looking at her, he took a small piece of white paper out of his pocket and put a pinch of something inside it. Then he put the paper up to his lip and rolled it back and forth. A moment later, he was holding a thin white stick.

“Sorry, honey, I just . . .” He held up his hand, and she saw it quivering in the air. “I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time, honey. I just . . .” He held up a lighter and struck a flame in the dark.

Time seemed to stretch out as she watched the smoke drift out of Russ’s mouth. The strong smell of the smoke was hypnotic, the musk scent took the fear away again.

“Listen to me,” said Russ finally. “I call you honey because you’re mine. Your momma and I—we made you. Five years ago. An’ after that, since I couldn’t leave my wife, your momma met Arlen there, and they got married just before you were born. But you’re mine. You’ll always be mine.” He sucked in, the stick pulsing redly in his mouth. Then he blew the smoke out and looked down at her, his eyes watering.

Then he seemed to see the thin stick of smoke. “I guess that’s enough of that. If I’m a daddy, I better start acting like one, eh?” Carefully, he emptied the bag of green stuff out the window. She could see the moving flicker of cars on the highway. When he flicked the small stick outside too, it burst apart, making a flower of sparks against the black road.

“You can’t tell your momma you know this yet—it’ll be our secret, you understand? Just don’t tell her.” He rolled up his window and gave her another smile, but this time it was nice underneath.

“I’m your real daddy, your other daddy,” he said. After he said that, everything seemed to fragment and break apart. Nothing made sense anymore.

All these months later, she could only recall isolated phrases Russ had said in the car, as if everything she’d heard had been spoken to her from a distance, drifting into her mind from miles away. “I’ll always be here for you.”

She had been drifting in and out, the weariness in her bones taking her under every other moment, but she could still recall things he had said. “I’m coming back for you, as soon as I can figure out how to move to Spokane . . . your other daddy, he left you. He didn’t really love you like I do . . . I’m your daddy now. And your momma and I will be together soon . . . because I’m your real daddy.”

Russ kept saying that part over and over. “I’m your other daddy, your real daddy.”

She remembered his face coming closer as he kissed her, whiskers rubbing her cheek. She woke up when they reached Five Mile Prairie. “I’ll be back,” he said. “Don’t tell your momma, you understand? But I’ll be back as soon as I can. I’ll be your daddy for real as soon as I can, you hear me?” When she went inside the house, her mother and her grandmother were on the couch, they’d fallen asleep in front of the TV, waiting for her.

THE RADIO was dead. Matt rolled down his window and tried to shout ahead to Russ, but his voice dwindled against the high-pitched rush of the wind. In the ghostly light of the fog, it seemed a vast pack of hounds were baying up the mountain, running ceaselessly alongside their cars.

300

Russell took Independence Loop at the same speed he’d been driving up the mountainside, he didn’t slow an inch as the front tires edged off the road. Matt swerved away at the last moment from the Loop as Russ passed through the gap where so many cars had caught themselves before, spinning their wheels wildly on the edge of disaster. Without pausing, Russ bumped over the gravel verge and left the highway. The car slowed for a moment before it leaped forward, bumping aside three water-filled pylons.

The barriers split open in front of Russell’s car, baptizing the car, blurring the road with a cascade of water. Matt slammed his brakes on and twisted the wheel of the Jeep, sliding across the ice, to land finally on the opposite side of the highway, as close as he could get to the solid rock of the mountain.

A clump of hoarfrost dusted the Jeep, and then Matt yanked the door open and ran wildly to the side of the road, looking down to where Russell’s car was still airborne, a thousand feet above the Silver Valley. Matt’s stomach rose, a heavy thing inside. It came to him that the last thing Russell murmured had been a prayer: Forgive me, this isn’t how my life was supposed to go . . . Forgive me . . .

Matt watched the car drop horizontally through the cloudbank. The rear fender lifted silently, as if the engine were revving. It hit a rock outcropping a few hundred feet above the Valley floor. Snow exploded into the air, the cracking sound came a moment later. Then the car corkscrewed violently end over end and disappeared into an icy fog.

WHEN SHE woke in the car, the sun was going down over the distant lake. The funeral was far away now. All the people in the church were gone.

Only faint traces of the fog remained, a creeping condensation on the road. She sat up. The ground outside was wet and black. All the buildings had a darkened, scuttled look.

She wondered at the way time had slipped away, the past shifting in and out. It seemed suddenly that all the houses they were passing were empty, as if the town itself had emptied while she slept. She felt like a leaf caught in a current. She reached out to her mother, holding her tight in her arms. “Where is he?” she said. “Where’s my other daddy now?”

“I don’t know,” said her mother. “I don’t know if he’s ever coming back to us.”

Far away on a distant hill, there was a signal pulsing over the water. It blinked on the top of a radio tower, shining for the pilots of planes. She turned and watched the beacon on the tower float, suspended, above the darkening trees, caught in a moment of light.