Montana Creeds: Logan (9 page)

“You don’t like him much, do you?”

“Cimarron?” Logan asked, hedging.

“Dylan,” Briana said.

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“What
would
you say, then?”

“That we had a falling-out a long time ago,” Logan told her. His tone was stiff; she’d crossed a line. “It happens with brothers.”

Briana looked up ahead, at her boys, and felt the usual surge of wild, helpless love for them. “Alec and Josh argue all the time,” she confessed. “But if they grew up and hated each other, I don’t think I could stand it.”

Logan didn’t answer for a few moments. “I don’t hate Dylan,” he said.

Briana glanced at him, saw that his jawline had tightened. Since she’d already said too much, she decided to hold her tongue. No sense in digging herself in deeper.

Logan whistled, the sound low and distinctly masculine, and both boys and both dogs turned at the sound, sprinted back toward him.

“Thanks for supper,” Logan said. “Sidekick and I had better be getting back home now. Big day tomorrow.”

Briana merely nodded.

Logan said goodbye to the boys, and then he and Sidekick headed off toward the orchard. If either one of them were worried about encountering a bear, it didn’t show in the easy way they strolled that country road.

L
OGAN’S CELL PHONE
rang as he walked through the twilight-shadowed orchard, the dog prancing briskly alongside. He squinted at the caller ID panel, swallowed hard and thumbed the appropriate button.

“Hello, Ty,” he said.

The responding chill was transmitted in milliseconds, bouncing from Tyler to some satellite and straight into Logan’s right ear to pulse through his whole head.

“You left a message?” Tyler asked. His voice was deep—the last time they’d spoken, it had still been changing.

Logan suppressed a sigh. “We need to talk,” he said.

“Maybe
you
need to talk, big brother,” Tyler countered, “but
I’ve
got nothing to say to you.”

Logan stopped in the middle of the orchard, looked up into the branches arching over his head, in case a bear was about to land on him. The weight of what lay between him and Tyler was heavier than anything that could have dropped out of a tree, though.

“Don’t hang up, okay?” he asked. He’d had to swallow a measure of pride before he could get the words out.

“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t,” Tyler snapped, but at least he was still there. Still listening—if that stony stillness could be considered listening.

“Because we’re brothers?”

Ty laughed, but there was no humor in the sound, only the numbing coldness that had greeted Logan’s initial hello and expanded like a low-crawling fog drifting over a rain-soaked landscape. “That was a reach,” he said. “And we’re
half
brothers. Guess which half is my favorite?”

“Too easy,” Logan said, moving again, but slowly. Sidekick was looking up at him, every few steps, in that worried way of his. “The half that isn’t related to me.”

“Right. What do you want, Logan? It can’t be money—you’ve got plenty of that. If it’s my signature on a sales contract for the ranch, you can forget it.”

Logan had to unclamp his back molars to go on. “Nobody said anything about selling the ranch,” he snarled. “Dylan reacted the same—”

“You talked to Dylan?”

“Yeah, yesterday.”

“If you talk to him again, tell him he’s a chickenshit son of a bitch.”

In spite of everything, Logan grinned. He and Sidekick cleared the orchard, and the dog dashed ahead to sniff at the mega-load of steel fence rails, lumber and other building materials that must have been delivered while he was having supper with Briana and her kids.

“Tell him yourself,” he said.

A second silence ensued. Then Tyler repeated the pertinent question. “What. Do. You. Want?”

Logan had given that a lot of thought, since he and Dylan had had a similar conversation. He didn’t exactly know, specifically, so he made something up. “I’m planning to renovate the main house. Build a new barn.
Replace some fences. Since you and Dylan own equal shares of the ranch, I thought you might want to look things over. Approve the changes.”

Another silence.

“Are you still there?” Logan finally asked. He’d reached the front porch by then, but he wasn’t ready to go inside, so he sat down on the step. Sidekick chased a low-flying bug through the high grass, snapping his jaws and missing every time.

“I don’t have any say in what you do with the main house,” Tyler said, at long last. His voice was even, but charged with resentment. “Build a barn if you want to. And you’ve never needed my approval before, so why start now?”

“I plan to run cattle,” Logan answered. “If I want to keep them from straying, I’ll have to put up new fences around the grazing section, and part of that land is yours.”

“Suppose I don’t want you to graze cattle on my share of that section?”

You little rooster,
Logan thought, sourly amused. “Then I guess you’d better get your ass back here and try to stop me,” he said. “And while you’re telling Dylan he’s a ‘chickenshit son of a bitch,’ pass that on to him.”

Tyler swore. But he still didn’t hang up.

Logan wondered if that was a good sign, or if his youngest brother was simply spoiling for a fight, even by long distance. Maybe the people he associated with now were too nice to provide an opportunity.

Not likely.

“No fences, Logan,” Tyler said. “Not on my land, at least.”

“Too late,” Logan retorted. “The supplies are here and I’ve already hired the crew. They start tomorrow morning, bright and early.”

“No fences.
Do you hear me, Logan? If you put them up, I’ll make you take them down again.”

“Big talk for a little brother,” Logan said, knowing full well that he might just as well have dropped a lighted match into a gasoline tank. “I’m a lawyer, remember? By the time you untangle yourself from all the red tape, I’ll have the biggest cattle operation in the state of Montana.”

“Goddamn
it, Logan—”

Logan stretched luxuriously, and made the sighlike sound to go with it. “Nice talking to you, Ty. Say hello to Dylan for me.”

“Logan—”

Logan yawned. “I’m a rancher now,” he said. “We get up early, if you’ll recall. So I guess I’ll turn in.”

“Do
not
hang up on me—”

Logan thumbed the end button.

The cell immediately rang again.

Logan checked caller ID. Tyler.

He ignored the ringing, whistled for Sidekick.

And the two of them went inside.

The old house seemed to echo around them, empty of furniture and pictures and all the knickknacks several generations could accumulate. The soles of Logan’s boots made a lonely clunking sound on the plank floors.

The phone stopped ringing, started up again.

Again, Logan looked at the tiny panel.

Sidekick turned his head to one side, perked up his ears. He might have been on his own for a long time—
as Logan had expected, the vet hadn’t found a microchip—but he knew a ringing phone was supposed to be answered. Feeling guilty for confusing a dog, Logan shut the cell off and set it on the mantelpiece above the empty fireplace.

“It’s okay,” he told Sidekick, flipping the light switch next to the door that led into the dining room. The pale glow only made the house look worse.

He thought of the album Alec and Josh had shown him over at Briana’s, earlier that evening. And a lonely feeling welled up inside him.

His mother and both his stepmothers had been big on taking pictures—there were scores of photographs, if not hundreds, chronicling his childhood, Dylan’s and Tyler’s.

Where
was
all that stuff?

He had most of the furniture carted off to storage a year after Jake died. Had the albums and the trunk full of family papers gone with it?

He couldn’t remember—if he’d ever known in the first place.

He had a key to the storage unit in town, but he didn’t feel like driving in there and going through a bunch of old junk with a flashlight. He wanted the pictures, though—because all of the sudden he felt strangely insubstantial, almost as though he didn’t have a past, didn’t exist at all.

He and Sidekick might have been ghosts, the pair of them, haunting that run-down ranch house. All they lacked was chains to rattle and somebody to scare.

Knowing he wouldn’t sleep anytime soon, Logan decided the attic was the logical place to start the search
for the pictures. He headed for the back of the house, and Sidekick tagged along, still afraid, apparently, to let Logan out of his sight.

The attic steps were concealed behind a trap door in the kitchen ceiling.

Tall as he was, Logan had to jump, lay-up style, to catch hold of the rope handle and pull them down.

Dust billowed out of the space overhead as the heavy stairs struck the floor, causing Sidekick to leap backward in alarm and Logan to cough until his eyes watered.

“Stay here,” Logan told the dog, before he started the climb, lowering his head to keep from banging it against the heavy timbers edging the opening.

Sidekick ignored the order and scrambled nimbly up behind him.

Logan ran a forearm across his face. He should have brought a flashlight, he thought, but since that would involve descending the stairs again and going all the way out to the truck, he decided to make do with his eyeballs.

There was stuff in that attic, all right.

Trunks. Boxes. A long plastic toboggan with a crack down the middle. An old aluminum Christmas tree, catching stray, winking glimmers of light from outside.

At least the old man hadn’t been able to saw
that
tree in half, Logan reflected. He’d bought it himself when he was twelve, with money he’d saved mowing lawns and shoveling snow in town and doing odd jobs on neighboring ranches. Gone right into the hardware store and plunked down the cash. He’d even gotten one of those funky lights that rotated, casting a red glow over the tree, then green, then gold. Damn, but Dylan and Tyler had loved that tree.

They’d been too big to believe in Santa Claus—with Jake Creed for a father, they probably never had—but Logan could see the gleam of that garishly lighted silver tree reflected in their eyes as clearly as if he’d gone back in time.

He felt a grinding ache in his throat, remembering.

Back then, he and his brothers had been close. They’d had to be—it was the three of them against the old man and a hard world.

Sure, they’d fought with each other, the way boys do, more for sport than out of any particular hostility, but when there was trouble—and that was often—they’d stood shoulder-to-shoulder to face it down.

When had that changed?

It must have happened before Jake’s funeral, or they wouldn’t have been ready to go for each other’s throats the way they had, but for the life of him, Logan couldn’t remember a turning point.

“Shake it off,” he told himself aloud. The words, like so many things, were an unwanted legacy from Jake.

Shake it off, boy.
That had been Jake’s answer for everything.

Dylan’s broken arm, in fifth grade, so bad that the bone came right through his skin.

Tyler’s screaming nightmares, after Sheriff Book came to tell them his mother had been found dead in a distant motel room.

Logan’s emergency appendectomy, the night of his senior prom. He’d damned near died in the ambulance.

Shake if off, boy.

“Fuck you, old man,” Logan said.
“Fuck you.”

Far in the back of his brain, he thought he heard Jake laugh.

He started opening boxes and trunks.

Papers. Journals so old the pages were crumbling. Deeds and maps and what appeared to be a family tree, rolled up scroll-style and tied with a disintegrating ribbon.

He set those things aside and moved on. He’d come in search of the albums kept by Teresa, Maggie and Angela, and he was nothing if not single-minded.

He found the fat books inside a large plastic container with a snap-on lid, the word
pictures
scrawled on the side with a black marker. The handwriting was Jake’s bold, slanted scribble.

Logan didn’t allow himself to wonder—not consciously, at least—if that meant anything, Jake’s apparent effort to preserve the albums he’d always scorned. Even without refreshing his memory by looking, Logan knew he probably wouldn’t find a single picture of Jake simply smiling for the camera, like anybody else. He always had to mug, scowl or duck out of the frame at the last second before the flash went off.

Always had to screw it up somehow.

Logan attributed the burning in his eyes to the freerange dust he and Sidekick stirred up with every movement. After blinking a couple of times, he hoisted the surprisingly heavy container, into which much of his, Dylan’s and Tyler’s lives were compressed, and started for the stairs.

In the kitchen, he set the plastic box on the only original furniture left in the place—the round oak table and mismatched chairs that had belonged to every generation of Creeds since Josiah.

Sidekick’s toenails made a clicking sound on the linoleum as he leaped over the last couple of steps, did a Bambi-on-ice thing and finally righted himself in a way that said “I
meant
to do that” as clearly as if he’d spoken in a human voice.

Logan chuckled hoarsely and bent to muss up the dog’s ears.

“I’m not sure I’m ready for this,” Logan said.

At the same moment, the wall phone rang. It was old, so he couldn’t screen the call. In case Briana had bears on her back porch, or Cimarron had escaped the pasture to go on a rampage, Logan answered.

Dylan launched right in. “What the hell are you doing out there?” he demanded.

Logan smiled. Dylan and Tyler might have been on the outs about something, but Tyler had obviously passed on the news about the pasture fences. “Right now? I’m standing in my kitchen.”

“Tyler said you’re fencing off the whole ranch so you can run cattle,” Dylan accused.

“That’s right,” Logan said. “I might even breed some of my heifers to your bull, since he doesn’t seem to be serving any other purpose besides burning through a lot of grass and grain.”

“You own a
third
of that ranch, not the whole thing!”

“What is the big deal about fences?” Logan asked, popping up a corner of the container lid and peeking in at the dusty cover of an old album.
Our Family
was stamped on the front in flaking gold letters. “It’ll be an improvement, and I didn’t ask either you or Tyler to contribute a dime.”

“Just leave my third of the ranch alone, okay?”

“I might do that, if it weren’t for your bull.” He paused, letting that sink in, subtext and all. “I shouldn’t have to tell you, Dylan, even considering how many times you’ve had your brains rattled by rodeo stock, that if Cimarron gets out and hurts somebody, there
will
be a lawsuit. And the plaintiff isn’t going to give a rat’s ass which of us owns the animal. If it happens anywhere on the property, it’ll be our responsibility, since we own it jointly. Maybe you don’t mind taking that chance, but I do.”

Dylan was still seething, but the mention of a lawsuit must have reined him in a little, the way it did most people. “I’ve been paying Chet Fortner two hundred bucks a month to make sure Cimarron’s looked after,” he said. His voice had shrunk a little.