(November 2018)
ERIN REECE LEANED FORWARD AND SWITCHED OFF THE RADIO. THE truck slowed as she approached the unincorporated village of Vida, passed two churches and a post office, and just like that the village was behind her. She eased her foot back down on the accelerator and coaxed the Chevrolet pickup toward its optimum speed of sixty-five miles per hour, since anything faster made the steering wheel shudder. She’d gotten the truck ten years ago, during her second year of vet school. It was an old thing even then, the green exterior faded almost to the point of being white. There were a few functional limitations. The passenger door could be opened only from the inside—not a problem, really, since her only semi-regular passenger was a three-year-old Rhodesian ridgeback named Diesel. The dog had accompanied her on this trip, and he lay stretched out on the bench seat with his head on her lap.
“Getting close to home, boy,” Erin said, although Diesel had never lived in Wolf Point, a community of some twelve hundred residents that was flanked by the Missouri River to the south and the two-million-acre expanse of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation to the north. Like much of Montana, it was driven by an agricultural economy. Farming and the livestock trade were its primary sources of income, supplemented by all the other things—schools, grocery stores, a small hospital—that make a city run. There was a time, back when Erin was growing up, when the population of Wolf Point was more than twice its current number. But there were things that had happened there, things that could change a place, and by the time Erin left for college, a common sentiment among many of the locals was that Wolf Point’s best days were already behind it.
Some of it was bad luck. A few years back, an early October snowstorm claimed the lives of thirty thousand cattle across Eastern Montana, decimating livestock and forcing many of the local farmers into bankruptcy. Her father had lost cattle as well, but enough survived that he hadn’t lost the farm. What would I have done if he had? Erin wondered, because David Reece had decided long ago that he was never leaving Wolf Point, and for fifteen years Erin had sworn to herself that she was never coming back.
Up ahead, she could see the metal frame of the old Lewis and Clark Bridge. Before its time, there had only been a ferry to shuttle cars from one side to the other. In the dead of winter, though, when the river was frozen solid, people used to drive across, although not all of them made it.
Erin let up on the gas a bit as she neared the river. In February of 1926, two young men named James and Rolla Cusker hit an open spot in the ice on their return trip from a basketball game late at night. Their car punched through the surface, and the men were swept away in the fast-moving current. It was several days before their bodies were discovered. By then, the flesh would’ve been eaten away in places, like the body she and Robbie had found in the river when they were children, the face bloated and purple, the eyes retracted into their sockets beneath a brackish membrane of river filth. Miles Griffin was sixteen years old, one of many casualties of Wolf Point she remembered from her childhood. In a way, she thought, he was one of the lucky ones, since most of the missing never surfaced. They just disappeared into the landscape and the dark belly of the town’s collective memory.
The tragedy of 1926 led to the construction of the Lewis and Clark Bridge four years later—the only one to span the Missouri River for three hundred and fifty miles in either direction. It was obsolete now, a historic relic overgrown with grass but left to stand beside its inevitable but unremarkable replacement. Erin’s stomach gave a small lurch as she passed the steel carcass of the three-span truss. She tried to think of the last time she had seen it, and then thought even further back to the days when she would sit on its girder and look westward across the plains toward the setting sun, her feet dangling two and a half stories above the surface. When she was ten years old, she had etched her initials, E.R., on one of its beams. That was a long time ago, the year her father got out of prison but still three years before her mother went missing.
Erin glanced at the bridge once more in her rearview. Her father’s farm was on the eastern outskirts of town, less than a mile from here, but she passed the access road without turning, heading instead for Wolf Point’s more populated section. To the left of the highway sat the single runway of the L. M. Clayton Airport, a modest track of asphalt with no tower and only three cars in the dirt parking lot as she drove past.
To her right were the railroad tracks that paralleled the last three miles of highway before Wolf Point. Roy Shifflet had found Curt Hastings’s Ford F-250 pickup nuzzled into a snowbank here—the driver’s door open and the engine still running. It was the same night that Rose Perry had gone missing on her walk home from work. Two unrelated people traveling along different paths in the late evening. Both of them had grown up in Wolf Point, and neither one of them was ever seen again.
Erin slowed as she passed the Silver Wolf Casino, the highway curving to the left and then right before it became Main Street. To the right was D&J’s pawnshop, followed by a hardware store and a series of bars advertising poker and keno. Erin rolled to a stop at Third Avenue South, waited for the light to change, then proceeded through the intersection. Prairie Cinemas was still standing, a single-screen theater she had frequented as a kid. She wondered if Connie Griffin still ran the place, leaning over the concession booth with her thick hands pressed against the glass countertop. Connie had lost a son to Wolf Point, and a few years later she lost another.
Eventually she got to Sixth Avenue. She stopped there and gazed across the street at the brick-walled structure of Wolf Point Junior Senior High School.
When Erin thought of her hometown, it was the high school and her father’s farm that she pictured the most. Maybe it was because these were transitional places, where childhood had ended and the path toward adulthood began. There was part of her that wanted to return here, to be eight years old again and surrounded by her close-knit circle of friends. If she could go back, knowing what she knew now, maybe this time things would be different. She believed in that, in the possibility of second chances. It was why she’d left after high school, why she’d refused to come back until now. Fifteen years was a long time, but it wasn’t long enough. She could feel the past pulling at her, all these years later, and the distance between then and now suddenly seemed like nothing at all.
Erin closed her eyes. She’d received the phone call from Dr. Houseman—Wolf Point’s only family practice physician—four days ago. She hadn’t answered it, and in Erin’s defense, the message he’d left on her voicemail hadn’t mentioned that her father was ill, only that the doctor needed to talk to her. She’d imagined that he might be calling about a high school reunion or just to catch up after all these years. It was strange how people felt the need to do that, to reach into their past and try to resuscitate it like it was something worth saving. When he left another message the following day, Erin hadn’t listened to it, only recognized the number from the day before and decided she would get to it when she could. She hadn’t been avoiding it, really, she’d just been . . .
“Busy,” she said to herself in the quiet of the truck’s cab, and Diesel lifted his head and gazed up at her.
When Dad recovers, I’ll take him back to Colorado, she thought. But from what Mark had told her over the phone, her father’s condition sounded serious, maybe even life-threatening. She tried not to think of it that way, but Mark had used words like “sepsis,” “ventilator,” and “pneumonia.” That had scared her. And despite the things that had happened here, it had been enough to bring her back.
“How’s he doing?” she asked over the phone, and Mark’s answer had been careful, enough for her to know that the outcome was anything but certain.
“Things seem to have stabilized,” he said. “His blood pressure has improved. I’m hopeful that pretty soon we can remove the breathing tube.”
Breathing tube, Erin thought. It wasn’t the first time she had pictured him that way. How many years had her father been struggling, hanging on to his little piece of survival in a town that had taken away everything else?
“That’s good,” she heard herself say, but on the other end of the line, Mark was quiet. “What is it?” she asked, gripping the phone a little harder. It was several seconds before the doctor responded.
“Erin, I have Jeff Stutzman sitting in the waiting room outside of my office. You remember Jeff?”
“Yes,” she said. “Jeff.” She had known him from school and the neighborhood, of course. Jeff had been on the wild side, prone to fighting and getting into trouble. But it was his older brother, Kenny, whose name still resonated in what was left of her family. Kenny Stutzman. A thin twist of a kid with red hair and freckles. Ten years old when her father hit him with the Bronco on that rainy night in April. The road Kenny died on was renamed in his memory, and three years of prison and a lifetime of guilt wasn’t going to bring him back.
“Jeff is on the police force here in Wolf Point,” Mark said. “He was promoted to lieutenant two years ago.”
“Police,” she said, and Erin felt a touch of panic, as if maybe they’d finally decided they wanted more from her father. The boy had been only ten. His head was crushed, but he kept right on breathing for an hour.
“I’m going to bring him in now,” Mark told her.
“Who?” she had asked, glancing toward the front door in her home in Colorado.
“Jeff. Lieutenant Stutzman.”
“Oh. Yes, of course,” she said, and Erin waited on the other end of the phone while Mark went out to fetch him.
It’s Jeff who’s sitting in the other room, she reminded herself, not Kenny. Kenny died that night in the emergency room. They buried him in a plot at Wolf Point Cemetery.
She held the receiver in her hand and listened to the distant sound of voices on the other end of the line. She cleared her throat and tried not to think about the many ways a person can be dead and keep right on breathing until the very end.
“Erin? Erin Reece?” a man asked.
“Yes.”
“This is Jeff Stutzman. We knew each other back in school.”
“Yes, Jeff. I remember.”
“I think Dr. Houseman explained that I’m a lieutenant now with the Wolf Point Police Department.”
“He did,” she said. “Congratulations.”
“Thank you,” he replied, and his voice did not project the gruff, antagonistic presence she remembered from her childhood. Instead, he sounded soft-spoken and remorseful, as if it pained him to bother her in the wake of the news she had just received from the doctor.
“I’m sorry about your father,” he said.
“Thank you, I . . . I appreciate that.”
“He’s in good hands, you know. Mark takes care of pretty much all of us here in Wolf Point.”
“Yes,” she said, “we’re lucky to have him.” She paused. We’re lucky, she’d said. She was still six hundred miles away, but already she could feel herself being pulled northward, the place wrapping itself around her. She glanced again at the door. “Mark said you wanted to talk to me about something.”
“Yes,” Jeff said. “I was wondering if we could arrange a time to meet when you get here. There are . . . some things I’d like to go over with you.”
“Things,” she said. “What things?”
“It’s complicated. It would be easier to talk about in person.”
Erin was silent for a moment, turning his words over in her mind.
“What is it?” she asked. “Something’s happened.”
“It can wait until you get here.”
“It’ll take two days to make the drive.”
“That’s fine,” he said. “I’ll see you in a few days, then. Your father needs you. I’m . . . I’m glad you’re coming.”
“Of course I’m coming,” she’d said. “My father’s in the hospital.”
Only, it hadn’t been that easy, had it? And the years since she left had been riddled with their own private struggles. She’d struggled in college with feelings of isolation and depression. Vet school at Colorado State had been better, the rigorous workload distracting her from the kind of inward reflection that led to nowhere good. After that, it had been private practice, first as a veterinarian for a small-animal clinic near Boulder, but eventually establishing her own practice in Fort Collins, about sixty miles north of Denver. There had been a steep learning curve, not just in the practice of medicine but in the art of running a business. She’d taken a loss during the first two years, but this year she was turning a corner. In another year or two, if things continued to go well, she could hire someone to cover Saturdays and maybe—
“I’m sorry,” David said, and just like that she was ten again, standing in the kitchen of her childhood home. He was sitting in a chair at the table, looking lost and out of place on that first day home, like a bear in human clothing. His deep blue eyes studied her for a moment, taking in the many ways she’d changed while he was away.
“I’m sorry I had to go away these past three years,” David said. “You know I’ve missed you.”
“I missed you, too, Daddy.”
He smiled. It was the kind of smile that made him look sad and happy at the same time.
“You’ve gotten taller,” he said. “I noticed it a bit when you came to visit, but . . . I think you’ve grown even more since then.”
She shrugged.
“You’ve been taking good care of your mother?”
“I help her with the dishes.”
“That’s a good girl. I’m sure she appreciates that.”
Erin reached out with a child’s hand and touched his arm. “What was it like in prison, Daddy?”
He turned his head for a second to look at the telephone that hung from the wall. She looked, too, and ran her eyes along the twisted cord that dangled from a silent receiver.
“It’s lonely,” he said. “Days pass and nothing happens.”
She turned back to him. “It sounds boring.”
“I think it’s meant to be boring,” he told her. “You can see the wasted part of your life right out in front of you.”
Erin was silent for a moment, considering. “How can you see that? Is it real?”
“No,” he said. “It’s like a dream, but every day is the same dream. All you want to do is wake up and go home to the people you love.”
She smiled. “Like me and Mommy.”
“Yeah,” he said, “like you and Mommy.”
She leaned forward and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Mommy cried a lot while you were gone.”
He nodded. “Your mother is very strong and very brave. So are you.”
“I’m not that strong,” she told him. “Jacob McCloskey can beat me in arm wrestling.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t believe it.”
“It’s true.”
“Let me see your muscle.”
She flexed her arm for him, and he reached out and felt her bicep with fingers that were rough and calloused.
“Whoa,” he said, “it’s like a rock. No one can beat you in arm wrestling.”
“Jacob McCloskey can.”
“Is he a robot?”
Erin shook her head.
“Is he a gorilla?”
She giggled. “No, silly. He’s a boy.”
“Oh, I see. A boy robot gorilla named Jacob McCloskey.”
Erin laughed. “A boy robot gorilla named Jacob McCloskey.”
David stuck out his lower jaw and scratched the top of his head. He stood up from his chair and lurched around the kitchen.
“Jacob McCloskey! Jacob McCloskey!” she screeched, pointing.
Erin ran from the room, and David lumbered after her down the hall, snorting and chuffing as he went. Even when they were playing, it was a little scary being chased by her father, something frightening within a game.
Eight years later, she’d gone away herself and left him here in a town he might never escape. In the fifteen years since then, she’d found ways to keep herself busy, to put Wolf Point behind her in every way she could.
“We should go and see him,” she said, and Diesel’s tail went back and forth once and then lay still.
(“You know I’ve missed you.”)
(“I missed you, too, Daddy.”)
She leaned forward and clicked on the radio, an old 1970s-style model that matched the feel of the truck but was generally useless. Erin turned the tuning knob with her fingers as she moved through the dial. It was static mostly, the sound of stations long since forgotten. She listened anyway, catching scratches of music and voices she could not quite decipher. She made a right at the intersection and put the school behind her as she headed north toward the hospital. Along the way the reception improved, and she found something she could listen to, a song whose lyrics she almost remembered. She turned it up, tapped her fingers on the steering wheel, and rolled through the town as if it still belonged to her.