take care of our problems?”
Lester found a slop bucket, an enameled pot that he dragged out into the middle of the cell. He lifted the lid, spread his legs and urinated, the stream hissing and ringing off the metal. “But if he heard someone was waving a gun around in Roller’s Cafe he’d sure as hell come running.”
“That he would,” agreed Frank.
Lester covered the pot and slid it back under the bunk. He kept staring down at his fly, as if he weren’t quite convinced he had buttoned it correctly. “Maybe you should’ve told him who your pa is though.”
Frank nodded at Tommy. “Maybe he should’ve kept that gun in his goddamn pocket.”
Wesley weighed in on his brother’s side. “Maybe he should’ve left it in the goddamn room.”
Tommy aimed a listless kick in Wesley’s direction, and as he did, Frank shoved him, sending Tommy stumbling into the wall. Tommy let himself be carried further than the push’s actual force warranted. “Fine,” said Tommy. “I don’t give a good goddamn. Go ahead and put this on me.”
“Nobody’s putting it all on you,” Frank said. “We’re just saying, you’re the one had the gun.”
“Well, the sheriff didn’t say too much about a gun.”
“Figures though, don’t it,” added Lester.
Tommy rubbed the floor with the toe of his boot and then spit toward that spot. “Shit ass.”
Frank squatted against the wall, leaning his head back and trying to make himself as comfortable as he could. “And you can leave off that business, telling him who our dad is. We’re not going to do it.”
Wesley sat next to his brother and looked at his companions.
Each stared at a far wall or into a dark corner as though he was waiting for something in the room’s shadows to take shape and lead them out of their predicament.
On the floor in front of Wesley was a small dark stain. He wondered if blood could have made that mark, and then he tried to push that thought away by concentrating on the stain’s shape. Iowa? Was that its shape? Like the state of Iowa on a map of the United States? Their father originally came from Iowa, and whenever he looked at a map Wesley liked to estimate the distance between Iowa and Montana. Or maybe rust made that stain.
Wesley held his head very still, trying to determine if he was still feeling the whiskey. The stain didn’t move, and neither did his head, even when a drop of icy nervous sweat fell from his armpit to his ribs. He was sober, for all the good it did him.
His shoulder still held the memory of Sheriff Cooke’s hand resting there. His hand had felt warm, tender, and for the few seconds it rested on his shoulder Wesley could allow himself to believe that the sheriff meant them no harm.
None of the cells had windows, but there was a small high window at the other end of the jail. Wesley considered going down there, hoisting himself up, and looking out. What would he see? Another wall? Snow, certainly. Snow, snow, and more snow.
Three years ago in late December, right before Christmas, warm chinook winds rolled down the Rockies’ eastern slopes, pushing temperatures into the forties and fifties. For five days the western winds blew, and when they stopped there wasn’t a patch of snow left in northeast Montana. Women went coatless, men gathered in the streets in their shirtsleeves, and the town skating rink turned into a pond of slush. Boys threw baseballs in the streets and their fathers went out to the golf course.
That Christmas Wesley was in love with Martha Woods, a girl in the class ahead of him at school. Martha didn’t know of Wesley’s feelings for her; in fact, they had no relationship at all beyond saying hello on the streets or in the halls of their school. Nevertheless, as that warm, gusty, snowless Christmas approached, Wesley felt he had to do something to declare his feelings for Martha. At Douglas’s Rexall he bought her a gift, a perfumed powder puff and mirror set, and he took it to her house on the afternoon of Christmas Eve.
As Wesley stood on the porch of the Woods home and waited for Martha to appear, he could hear the warm wind rattling the house’s rain gutters and humming through the window casements. Snowmelt ran through the streets like bright new rivers.
At last Martha appeared, but she was with a friend, and the small speech Wesley had prepared could not be delivered in front of another listener. He thrust the package out to Martha, and he saw now how sloppily he had wrapped it—the uneven ends, the crumpled and creased paper, the drooping ribbon. He said, “For you, a Christmas gift”—a phrase that sounded ridiculously formal. No one talked that way! At least no one in Bentrock, Montana.
Martha took the package and she smiled at Wesley, a smile that told him in an instant exactly how she felt about him. She thought he was a foolish boy, and though she thanked him extravagantly, it was plain she received this offering the way a mother or older sister would accept a gift from a five-year-old son or brother.
As soon as the package was out of his hands Wesley backed away, and he got off the porch quickly so he would not have to hear the laughter of Martha and her friend.
He trudged home, soaking his boots in the water and slush that filled the gutters and streets of Bentrock on Christmas of 1921.
He thought that day that he would never again experience a Christmas like those of his childhood—stealing his mother’s cookies, opening the expensive gifts from his father, pushing through the crowd of friends and neighbors who often filled the house, listening to his mother play the piano and sing carols, sledding and skating with his brother—all that innocence and joy seemed to vanish with the melting snow.
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