Boot Hill, Jasper Fey’s western TV series, was better than its premise, a twenty-first-century pipe dream of a West that wasn’t, complete with a sheriff who had to duck under doorframes, a deputy who doubled as a tribal elder on the nearby reservation, and a fallen angel who flashed turquoise rings and had quite the time of it keeping her body under wraps for a full sixty minutes.
“They’re all so good-looking I wouldn’t know who to screw first,” Sam said. “Be like hunting water with a divining rod. Shut your eyes and start drilling where the stick hits the ground.” He popped the cap off a bottle of Arrogant Bastard Ale. The horned devil on the label reminded Sean of the mask Charles Watt wore in the Mile and a Half High Club video, which reminded him of why he was here, sitting in the littered living room of Sam’s house-slash-fly-shack on a bench overlooking the Madison River, halfway through season one.
The truth was he’d been without direction or morning coffee when Martha Ettinger left his studio, and after brewing a cup and adding wings made from a crow feather to a half-tied wet fly clamped into his vise, he’d called Sam, who said he hadn’t got around to watching the video yet. Sean had invited himself over just to be doing something while he considered his next move.
• • •
Sam hit the pause button. “I got to water the garden,” he said. Sean followed him outside and walked to the edge of the property while Sam unzipped. The Madison had come up ten inches in twenty-four hours and looked like chocolate milk. He heard Sam say, “Shaking it, boss,” then the big man hitched up beside him, spinning underarm hair around his forefinger through a hole in a Rodriguez T-shirt that read I WONDER on the front, and on the back of which Sam had penned BUT I REALLY DON’T GIVE A SHIT. in magic marker.
“You’d have better luck catching snakes in Ireland than trout in this soup.” Sam shook his head. “I’m so fuckin’ depressed I couldn’t get excited about pulled pork.”
For a man without an appetite, Sam managed to get interested enough in the pizza Sean had picked up on the drive down. He put away half of it in the time it took the sheriff to kill a good man gone wrong, the deputy to mutter Native American wisdom about the meaning of life, and the love interest to pop peyote and run topless through a field of lupine.
Sam flipped a bottle cap. “I like six-guns and sweater venison as much as the next fella, but I don’t see what any of this has to do with that.” He jutted his chin toward the pictograph panels that Sean had set up near the television set.
“Let’s take a look at the extra features,” Sean said.
Sam reached a hand to pat Killer’s broad forehead. The two men were sitting on Sam’s couch with the stuffing coming out, two dogs between them with their heads on their masters’ laps.
“You know what this is, Kemosabe? Couple bros watching the tube with man’s best friends? It’s a Montana double date.”
Sean grunted his acknowledgment, his mind elsewhere. He clicked on deleted scenes. Nothing there. He clicked on “The Making of Boot Hill,” still not knowing what he was looking for and not finding it. The last of the features was a running commentary with the director and lead actor, who bantered in film school shorthand as they dissected the pilot episode. The opening shot was Boot Hill, a treeless burial ground outside the fictional town of Malice, Montana, where a nineteenth-century gunslinger named Pinky “Fast Finger” Stubbs was said to be buried. In the opening scene a young couple with a bottle of hooch for fortification decided to make love among the dead, in a grave slated for tenancy the next day. The young woman had insisted on lining the grave with a blanket, which the man objected to on principle but didn’t argue too hard about. The sex was off camera, and the scream didn’t have anything to do with ecstasy. The camera zoomed into the grave, the girl cowering under the blanket in her lover’s arms, the focus shifting to a finger that protruded from the wall of the grave. The finger beckoned, then a hand appeared to reach out of the grave, spreading against a red sunset as the credits rolled.
“What a great opening shot, mate,” the actor said in his Aussie accent. Upon which the director, who had written the pilot, said, “Credit where credit due. The hand was suggested by Jasper Fey, he’s our western expert. Jasper had all kinds of ideas for unearthing bodies. One was by erosion where the Musselshell River ate away the bank; we used that in episode five. Another was to have a body in a pit grave where ranchers bury livestock. Jasper said if you buried a body underneath a horse or a cow carcass, then if a cadaver dog sniffed it, the CSIs would find the animal and decide it was a false positive and quit digging. Perfect crime. I liked it, but you’d have to mock up the carcass, and that’s ten grand for maybe five seconds’ screen time. We don’t have the budget. Now this next scene, this is shot with that new tracking dolly . . .”
Sean hit the pause button. He turned to Sam. Sam’s side of the couch was next to a fly rod rack, and he reached a hirsute hand for the longest, an eleven-foot-seven-inch Meiser, and tapped the tip against the pictograph in the lower left corner of the back panel, where the horses lay on their backs with their hooves in the air.
“Do I have to say ‘burial pit,’ or are you thinking along the same lines as Uncle Sam?”
Sean didn’t say anything. He couldn’t believe what he’d just seen. Could Jasper Fey have described the very crime he would later commit? Would he be that careless? But then he remembered that Jasper claimed he hadn’t watched the DVD. He may not have known anything about the director’s comments in the special features.
“If you know where the pit is, I got the shovels,” Sam said.
Sean scratched at the stubble on his jaw. “Maybe later, Sam. I better think this over. Would you mind taking Choti till tomorrow?”
“Be that way. Leave Sam out of it. All he did was step off a fucking cliff for you.”
“I knew you’d understand.” Sean scratched Choti’s ears and stood up.
“Hey, that fly on your hat, you name it?” Sam said.
“I just tied it this morning. I was thinking Crazy Mountain Special, but then I remembered this secret kiss Etta Huntington had with her daughter. So I’m going to call it the Crazy Mountain Kiss.”
Sam grunted his approval. “Has a ring,” he said. “I like the red throat.”