American Masculine (5 page)

Prifflach declared all must hand over their weapons and named Middie the one to gather them. The men glared at Middie as Prifflach rifled their bags. Some were openly angry. Many, he thought, suspected him, or Prifflach. Only a few gave up their arms, and unwillingly, a cluster of pistols, four Colts, two Derringers, along with one rifle. Other men lied, though Middie felt their weapons, in a bootleg or under the arm, the stock of a gun, the handle of a knife. He decided not to press and Prifflach silently colluded, the potential threat subduing the conductor’s zeal. What Middie retrieved he stored in the engineer’s cab. Returning, he walked the aisles and felt weary. People don’t like being pushed.

The next stop, Havre, town of locked-in winters, town of bars. At last, the removal of the dead man, to be shipped back to Chicago. Not dusk or dawn, but day, not night as Middie would hope, nor the color of night. The body is well blanketed, taken off from the back of the train. Middie carries it across the platform and it feels light to him, almost birdlike in his arms. He turns his back to shield the view. Prifflach holds the door for him and as Middie enters the station he catches over Prifflach’s shoulder the faces of passengers in the fourth car, most of them pale and dumb-looking, not meeting his eye. But one, an Indian man he’d noticed on his passenger checks, a crossbreed, looks right at him. He remembers seeing him board the train in Wolf Point. The Indian’s eyes are black from where Middie stands. He imagines round irises among the slanted whites; it reminds him of how people had stared at this man during the checks, a few uttering quiet threats while the man stared back at them as if taunting them to put meaning to their words. Despite the fact that the Indian was well dressed, Middie had had to quiet the car twice as they searched him.

Inside the station Middie hears Prifflach tell the attendant the death is nothing. Old man died in his sleep, Prifflach says. Line informed the family; they’ll meet the body in St. Paul. The attendant is a potbellied bald man, chewing snuice. Prifflach orders Middie back to the train to watch the passengers. No sheriff, thinks Middie. Line saving its own skin. Close-mouthed, he looks at Prifflach, but the conductor waves him on and Middie does as he is told.

He sits on the train, puts his head in his hands, runs them through his hair, then disembarks, rounds the platform and crosses the dirt street. Between two buildings, the wind, low to the ground and fast from the north, bends a cluster of three bitterroot blooms. A kind of gesture, he thinks, and kneels to behold them, the bright stamens like small cathedrals, shaken not destroyed.

He approaches the front door of the Stockman Bar. Door painted black, oiled hinges, inside a dim small room and three tables, dark marble counter with five stools, the place is clean, a lone bartender wipes things down. Help you? he says. No, Middie answers, the murmur of his voice barely audible. He needs a chair to sit in, a space to calm his mind. The bartender spits in a tin cup on the counter. You don’t drink, you don’t stay, he says. Middie feels things shutting down, his insides are heavy and tight, the center of him like an eclipse that obscures the light, three quick steps to the barman and one fist that rides the force of hip and shoulder, the man laid cold on the hardwood floor. Not dead, but still, and flat-backed. Middie, seated in the chair he desires, watches the blood curl from a three-inch line over the man’s eye, elliptic down his face to his neck, to the floor. Orbital bone still sound, eyes rolled back in the head, the man is motionless as Middie considers him. Should’ve been Prifflach, he says aloud. But saying it Middie feels broken. He can’t go back. His eyes are grave, dark as his father’s. Darkness covers the earth and deep darkness its people. It is a darkness he feels he cannot undo. But he must. He will. Prifflach comes cursing, and Middie walks in the conductor’s shadow, back to the train, the people.

Three quick halts at Shelby, Cutbank, and Browning. East Glacier next, the station at the park’s east entrance, the one with the Blackfeet Agency greeting in which three Indians wait on the small gray platform in full regalia. An elder in full eagle-feather headdress gives out cigars. Two women in white deerskin dresses sell beadwork. Only a handful of white passengers gawk this time, not all as is customary. Most remain subdued, brooding, sitting in their seats. Then on the track past East Glacier, as the train climbs the high boundary toward the west side of the park and the depot at Belton, two more reports of impropriety, two more thefts, lesser, but significant, one of sixty dollars, the other forty. Not counting the unknown amount stolen from the dead man, the total, as Middie said, had reached four hundred and ten.

Middie loathes the thought of checking bags again. He thinks the people, all of them, close and far, dislike him. Some of the faces are full of disdain.

So? says Prifflach.

Yes? says Middie.

So start another check, says Prifflach. He speaks like a crow, thinks Middie. He watches Prifflach pull a small piece of paper from his vest pocket, the wire retrieved from the Havre station in answer to his plea at Glasgow. Prifflach turns the paper to Middie, shows these words: keep quiet—no police—security man finds thief—or loses job.

No good, says Middie, awkward, aloud, using a tone he’d seen his mother use to calm his father. Look at them, Middie says, motioning with his eyes to the people around him.

Prifflach turns on him, sharp-faced, and what he says makes Middie desire to kill him. It’s your own good, boy. Line’s takin’ you out if you don’t get it done. Move.

Middie sees it coming, and he wishes against it, but he knows no other alternative. All that college. Up against the wall with book learning, and nothing now for real life. Heavy shouldered, he rises from his seat. He begins again.

Pardon me, may I see your bag? and, Pardon, sir, I have to look through your personal effects. The words are graceful in Middie’s mind, his mind electric, his body like a fine-tuned instrument.

BUT PEOPLE ARE NOW OPENLY HOSTILE. A woman in the first car, one in the second, and one in the third make a scene and won’t unhand their bags. He pulls the bags from the first two, and lets Prifflach search the contents while he quickly pats the people down and pushes his fingers in their coat pockets. When he approaches the third woman she claws a bright hole in his cheek. His mind thinks terrible things. Ugly, he tells himself. Ugly. Has to be done, though. Other passengers help him do it too, they hold the woman back while he searches her and while Prifflach gives the bag a thorough inspection. Idiots, Middie thinks, all of them, and me with them. They see it too, the people. They all admit inwardly the logic is imprecise, but better than doing nothing. Check everyone or it’s no use. Futile, Middie thinks, a man can hide money anywhere. When he returns the third woman’s bag she curses him. Then she looks him in the face, says God curse you, and turns her back.

Middie can’t remember ever having heard a woman speak like that. He walks from the third car toward the fourth, opens the double doors at the end of the compartment, closes the doors behind. He stands on the deck, hears the raw howl of the train, the wind. Something will happen now. To his left a wall of wet granite undulates, hard and dark, blurred by the train speed. He looks up and sees the great face of it arching, reaching up and out, thousands of feet of rock, jagged and pinnacled at the top, swept up and out over the roof of the train. Beyond this, the gray sky is low and thick. The look of it gives him vertigo and he turns his head down and grips the handrail. He sees his worn boots on the grated steel. His mother, he thinks, he can’t remember her face.

To his right he can feel the valley out there, spread wide in a pattern of darks and lighter darks, filled from above by the distant pull of fog and rain. The downpour falls in wide diagonal sheets, descending into massive rock blacks and rock grays far on the other side of the valley. Among the bases of the mountains, forests are spread like cloaks. The water runs hard from the runoff of the storm and everything converges to a river colored black as the curve of a gun barrel. The river is the middle fork of the Flathead, past the summit of Marias Pass and past the great trestle of Two Medicine Bridge. They’ve crested the Great Divide and the train’s muscle pumps faster now, louder on the down westward grade. The river runs due west from here, seeming to bury itself into the wide forested skirt of a solitary mass of land. The flat-topped tower of the mass is obscured, mostly covered over by wet fog, but visible in its singularity and the ominous feel of something hidden in darkness, something entirely individual, devoid of any other, accountable to neither sky nor storm. At the mountain’s height a black ridge is barely detectable. The hulk of the land feels gargantuan. Is it Grinnell Point or Reynolds Mountain, Cleveland or Apikuni? He can’t make it out.

Here in Middie’s reverie, muffled shouts are heard, faint like the far-off cry of a cat. He looks up to the doors of the fourth car, the final passenger car. Slender windows frame what he sees and suddenly the words, though disembodied, come clean. I’ve got him! yells a fatty-faced man, sealed up there in the box of the car. I’ve got the mother-hatin’ rat.

Middie leaps forward, opening the fourth car, shouting, Stop! Wait! About midway up the car the fatty-faced man, and now four others, have thrown a man to the floor in the aisle. The man wears a brown tweed suit, he makes a vigorous struggle with his assailants.

It’s him! cries the fat one. We caught him red-handed.

To avoid the wild flail, passengers press back against the walls. Women push their children in behind them, children with wide eyes, lit with fear.

Let go, says Middie, staring at the fat man, and the men heed his word quickly and without complaint. Middie is struck by the fear men harbor, larger than a child’s, and he recognizes suddenly the pure sway he holds, because he is big, over people, over men.

The captive stands in the aisle and brushes wrinkles from his suit, his hair flung forward, black and thick over his face. Dark-eyed. The Indian, thinks Middie, as he draws nearer.

When the man pushes his hair back, the bones of his face appear chiseled in stone, the skin a thin casing for all the intrepid want in him. Thin as a sheet of newsprint, Middie thinks, ready to tear open, ready for it all to break out. The man tucks in his shirt and realigns his belt. He straightens his vest, then the lapels of his jacket, visibly pulling the tension back in and down, breathing. He is silent. He views his captors with contempt, each one.

Middie pictures his firm step and upright gait when he first walked the aisle and positioned his bags. Assiniboine-Sioux he’d thought. Wolf Point. But after pulling his bag and questioning him four times he’d found him to be a Blackfeet-white cross, Blood in fact, a Blackfeet subtribe (and Irish on the other side, he’d said, one clan or another). He was on his way to his family’s home south of West Glacier after a “work-related” trip to Wolf Point. Middie had checked him once more than all the rest. The man said he taught at the college in Missoula. In education, he said. They locked eyes when Middie carried the dead man at Havre, but Middie had dismissed it and other than the agitation of the crowd during the checks, an agitation Middie felt always accompanied whites and Indians, he had found nothing unusual. The man carried no weapon.

What is it? Middie asks the man with the fat head.

A short man, a man with slick hair, one of the others who had held the accused, speaks up vehemently. This man—he points in the Indian’s face—this man has been lying! He’s the one. He took all the money.

Slow, says Middie. Say what you know.

I have not lied, says the prisoner.

Shut up! the slick man yells.

Middie puts a forearm to the slick man’s chest. Settle yourself, he says. Sit down.

The slick man obeys, whispering something, glaring. He’s lying, he says. Hiding something.

How do you know?

Check his side, see for yourself. He’s had his hand there in his jacket from the start.

The fat man butts in, edging with rage, He won’t show us what he’s got in there.

Is it true, sir? asks Middie, heightening his politeness. Is there something hidden in your waistcoat?

Yes, he states, looking into Middie’s face, but that makes me neither a liar nor guilty of the offense in question.

We will check it, sir, Middie replies, but he feels aggravated. He doesn’t like the uppity tone the Indian has used. What have you concealed? Middie asks.

My money belt, says the man.

MIDDIE HARDENS HIS LOOK. His hands sweat. He wipes them on his pant legs as he stares at the man. Probably had it on his waistline, Middie thinks, concealed under the clothing, probably thin as birch bark. He remembers Prifflach muttering under his breath at the Indian as he checked the man’s bag, a small cylindrical briefcase made of beaten brown leather, sealed at the top by a thin zipper that ran between two worn handles, the word
montana
inscribed on the side. Mostly papers in the bag.

You have searched my briefcase and my wallet, says the man, and me once more than the others. I saw no need for you to search my money belt. And if I had shown you my belt, would that not become a target for the robber if he were present in this compartment during the search?

Don’t listen to him, the slick man says in a wet voice, he’s slippery.

The crowd murmurs uneasily. Middie notes that outside, the fog has pressed in. Nothing of the valley can be seen, and nothing of the sky. The mountains will be laid low, Middie thinks. He hears the words soft and articulate in his mother’s voice. Outside is the featureless gray of a massive fog bank, and behind it a feeling of the bulk of the land.

Check his belt, the fat face says.

Then the crowd begins. See what he’s got, says a red-haired woman, the fat man’s wife by the look of it, the small eyes, the clutching, heavy draw of the cheeks about the jowls. She says the words quietly but they are enough to hasten a flood. Do it now, hears Middie. Make him hand it over, Take it from him, Pull up his shirt, Take it—all from the onlookers, all at once, and from somewhere low and small back behind Middie, the quiet words, Cut his throat.