The Gravelly Range soared above the Madison Valley in southwestern Montana like a sentry. It was possible to hide in these mountains from all but the grizzly bears. Or packs of wolves. Beasts that could sniff out the lost wanderer from thirty miles. It was a pit stop for Ludek, as he passed through Ennis on his way to Spokane.
Ludek’s black Lincoln, squarely in the sights of half the repo kings of North Jersey, stood out like a hot flare among the diesel pickups and all-terrain vehicles that peppered the town of Ennis. Locals were ranchers or fishing guides or the few loved ones who kept them from joining the bones of the dead.
Ludek parked the Lincoln in front of the Village Pharmacy, an Old West style storefront on the main drag. An ancient sage at the lone gas station had told him that this was the only place one should get breakfast in Ennis. A pharmacy with an attached grill. He was starting to warm to the West.
As Ludek got out of his car he shoved his fingers through his hair, slick and shiny black. A round scar the circumference of a beer bottle circled his left eye. He rubbed two days-worth of salt and pepper whiskers.
A mule deer doe paused in the middle of the road. It was still crisp enough in the mornings that steam rose from the doe’s nostrils. She snorted and pawed the road with her hoof, trying to get Ludek to make a move.
Ludek’s mind stilled at the sight of the deer. He felt no impulse to frighten the animal, quite apart the stare downs he usually found himself in. He felt a rare calm, like when his grandpa walked with him through the low breakers at the Jersey Shore as a kid.
Before he stepped through the pharmacy door, Ludek patted his .380 to make sure it was still fully concealed. A few shadowed faces turned his way then went right back to their eggs and bison gravy biscuits. The sterile rubbing alcohol scent of a pharmacy was absent. Instead, frying bacon draped the room like a warm serape.
Ludek claimed the smallest corner table beneath a mounted pronghorn head with a cigar stuck in its teeth. He was the only customer not wearing a cap or cowboy hat of some sort. Eyes were cast upon his ox-blood imported leather and sockless loafers. Behind the counter stood the owner and grill cook, Jakesy, sizing up Ludek.
Jakesy’s wife, Helena, was the smarts of the operation. Jakesy had been kicked in the head by a bull twice too often. Helena clung to flickers of her Butte rodeo queen days. Soft features and edges. Just a few strands of gray.
“I’ll have two eggs poached and goat milk,” Ludek informed Helena, tortoise shell reading glasses perched upon his nose. “What type of oatmeal do you have?”
“You’ll have to find your own goat to milk,” Helena said. “Eggs are fried or scrambled. Or sucked down raw, if you like. Our oats are Quaker and horse varietals.”
“Toast, dry. Coffee,” Ludek clipped. “Black.”
“Your breakfast going to be for cash?” Helena asked.
“Got some trust issues around here do we?”
Ludek by then considered Helena in full. Her rawness, the authenticity. Her attitude. With a toothy smile he gazed straight into her clear blue eyes.
“It true that the mountains out here are purple?” Ludek asked. “In all their majesty?”
“In a certain light, yes, they are.”
“A light like the one across your face right now?”
Helena did not smile. Her eyes bore into Ludek’s.
“Did you shoot that pronghorn on the wall?” he asked.
“No one shot it. My husband Jakesy killed it. Bare hands.”
“I’m sorry what?”
“During the rut. Crashed right through the plate window. Started ripping this place apart. Would’ve killed somebody had Jakesy not wrestled him down. Strangled him.”
Ludek pondered that scenario. “Had to be quite a scene.”
“When a wild thing winds up where it don’t belong, things will happen.”
Helena then let slip a smile that twitched the corner of her mouth.
Steam rose from the road outside the window. The early sun burned away the frost and haze.
Ludek broke eye contact. He scanned the pharmacy for security cameras and exit routes. An easy hit for prescription drugs if not for the handgun armed diners that sat about all day. The sooner he got on his way to Spokane the better.
Wally, Ludek’s second cousin, was from Perth Amboy. He had the ball already rolling in Spokane. A solid and discreet base of operation. With a degree from Rutgers in production and inventory management, Wally was the ying to Ludek’s yang.
Ludek downed the toast and coffee with his customary smacking and open-mouthed grinding. He avoided eye contact with the locals. As he was getting up to hit the latrine,he spottedJakesy tossing his apron on the counter.
Ludek sat back down.
Helena watched side-eyed from the small office. A small window cast a warm hue across her face. The window also framed a perfect view of the Gravelly Range peaks, the lands beyond which Helena would at times ponder. She would allow herself to imagine what they may hold for someone like her. Someone at her stage of things. She tapped her near inkless order pen on a pad of paper atop the cash box.
“Enjoy your breakfast?” Jakesy asked. He loomed over Ludek.
For years Jakesy had ridden piss angry bulls in the rodeo circuits that coursed the West like jack rabbit trails. When a few of his aging ribs were rearranged, Helena drew the line. Jakesy procured the pharmacy grill operation with his last winnings. He set about perfecting his bison gravy, revered throughout the land.
In quiet moments, Helena would let her mind run. Consider the steady domesticity that her edict, the taming and breaking of Jakesy, ushered in. There now was a droning predictability of endless days. Days that went on and on.
“Breakfast was wonderful,” Ludek said, avoiding eye contact. “Yes indeed.”
“You ain’t from anywhere around here.”
“That is a fact.”
There was a pause as Jakesy gathered his thoughts through an oft concussed brain.
“Come here to fish the Madison?”
“Not much of a fisherman. Killed some sharks now and then on the East Coast.”
“Slippery bastards, those sharks.”
“You bet they are. Bad as the ones in the ocean.” Ludek winked.
Jakesy didn’t smile, no longer quick enough to keep up with the witticisms of fast talkers.
“Got business in Ennis?”
“Only passing through,” Ludek said. “To Spokane.”
Jakesy was poker faced.
“I’m from back East,” Ludek said. “Jersey and what not.”
Jakesy scratched his cheek, eyes narrowing on Ludek.
“We’re a tight old bunch here,” Jakesy said. “Simple ways.”
“Anything shady ever go down here?” Ludek asked. “You even have a county sheriff?”
Jakesy’s eyes narrowed yet further.
“We have a sheriff,” Jakesy said, leaning into Ludek’s face. “A veteran marksman.”
“That so?” Ludek croaked.
“Could shoot a hair out of your nose from across the road.”
Ludek wiped his napkin across his nostrils.
Helena’s gaze had not yet left Ludek.
“Justice is always served ‘round here,” Jakesy said. “Always. One way or another.”
“Yes sir,” Ludek said, standing back up to go to the latrine. “Law and order. Hell yes.”
Jakesy eyes locked on Ludek’s.
“If you’ll excuse me, I need to hit the head,” Ludek said.
Jakesy stepped aside. Ludek disappeared into the dank restroom. Helena approached the table and topped off Ludek’s coffee cup. She watched the heat rise from his cup. The steam seemed to dance, like a cobra charmed from its vase.
Ludek drained himself into the urinal then went to the lone bathroom window. It was painted shut many times over. The earlier layers were old lead-based paints enough to kill a bison herd. He scanned the window frame for alarms or cameras.
Ludek opened the Case jackknife from his pocket and went to work on the paint along the edges that sealed the window. The chips and fragments flaked to the tile below. After more than a few minutes the window was freed. He unlocked the latch and wiggled the frame open just a sliver, careful not to open it wide enough for sunlight to shine through the crack. With his shoe he spread the paint dust around until it blended in with the straw, mud and cow shit cocktail covering the floor.
Back in the dining room Jakesy was waiting for Ludek like a high school hall monitor.
“Thought maybe you flushed yourself down the commode.”
“All’s good. Bit backed up. From the long drive and all.” Ludek laughed.
“There’s a pharmacy aisle that’ll hep’ you out with that.”
Ludek smiled. He tossed a twenty on the table. He looked at Jakesy with flat dead eyes.
“Be seeing you,” Ludek said.
“Paths can be unpredictable critters.”
Helena’s eyes rolled from the twenty on the table to the door as it shut behind Ludek. She had the cash in her apron before Jakesy made it back to the kitchen. She lingered. She studied the remains of the table left behind. She ran her fingers through her hair, her wedding ring getting tangled in the curls.
Helena walked to the window. She watched Ludek slip into his Lincoln and drive away.
***
The night fell cold. A cutting wind out of Idaho blew. Jakesy was in a deep slumber on the sofa. His worn and creviced face at peace. Helena had stood looking at him for some time. She then shuffled to the bedroom, tapping tears on her robe as she went.
Chilly as it was, Helena awoke sweating and restless. The nightstand clock, next to her latest steamy pulp novel, read 11:45PM. She sat up and gazed at the wall, tinted blue by the moon through the blinds. The longer she stared, the more the wall became a passage, a portal, to another place. Somewhere past the Gravelly Range, where beginnings and hopes thrived like winter wheat.
The mattress creaked. The pine floor was icy to her feet.
***
Ludek hunkered high up in the Gravelly Range in his car until it was dark as a West Virginia coal train. He marveled at the pitch of a midnight in the West. None of the false light. No cast of fast food and strip club neon. And the quiet, like a morgue.
Soon, the lamps in the modest houses in the valley below began to go out, one by one.
It was time.
Ludek slithered his way down the forest service road by the light of stars and the moon, just sufficient to leave his headlights off. Once in Ennis the security lamps above the hay barns and sheds lit the way.
As he had hoped, there was a dirt alley behind the pharmacy. Barely wide enough for his Lincoln.
After he jimmied open the john window, he bagged the modest supply of opiates from the behind the pharmacy. He tossed in prescription strength Benadryl and some antibiotics. He hoped they might knock out something he picked up in Atlantic City.
Ludek snatched the cigar from the mounted pronghorn’s teeth. Just as he bit down on it, she stood before him.
He froze.
The exit sign above the pharmacy door outlined her shape in an opaque shadow.
“I’m surprised,” Ludek said. “Pleasantly.”
***
Near Norris Springs Ludek caught just enough of a cellphone bar to reach Wally in Spokane.
“Wal, I managed to come into some bonus goods in Ennis of all forsaken places.”
“Sure those aren’t horse fertility pills?”
“Maybe so. I’ll see you in Spokane by daylight.”
“Let the good times roll, Ludes.”
Ludek cracked his window and fired up the antelope’s cigar. He despised being called ‘Ludes’. Needed to set Wally straight about that. Made it seem like he was small time, flipping his mom’s Quaaludes to teen delinquents under the Wildwood boardwalk.
Ludek turned to face his silent passenger. “Never call me Ludes, by the way.”
She smiled. Her eyes, now clear, drifted to the car door mirror. She wondered, as the reflection of Ennis faded into distant darkness, if Jakesy yet knew.
“Justice always served here in Ennis,” Ludek laughed, aping Jakesy’s boast. “Yessiree. Don’t try to pull any funny shit on us good folks, you East Coast slick.”
Their eyes met in an electric complicity. The pharmacy cash box sat in her lap.
The moon drifted behind a peak. Ludek realized his headlights were still off. They were far enough out of Dodge to pop them on high-beam and enjoy the drive.
Just in time too.
The headlights illuminated the eminent terror at its most inspiring, at its most magnificent angle. A sight worthy of raw spellbound awe if only it had afforded an instant to appreciate it.
Less impressive to them, at least at first, was the hulking mass of the beast into which they were about to collide, fender to fur. It was that regal rack of antlers. Antlers that resembled an oak tree sans its leaves. Dozens of tines so it seemed, honed to sharpness attainable only in nature’s harshest creation. Antlers pointed with such rigidity as to shatter the windshield as if by atomic blast. A single tine pierced Ludek’s left eye then travelled right on through his skull, like a spear launched from a whale gun.
The antler through the brain, as it turned out, was not necessary. Not in the least. The sheer bulk of the bull elk’s frame alone was sufficient to compress the Lincoln and its contents like a junk yard auto crusher. A collision that sent forth into the night a reverberation calling to mind two freight locomotives on the same track, one of which was headed the wrong way.
All of this made the aftermath that much more untidy. An abstract composition. Flesh and metal and smoke. A vicious stew of fuel, blood and steam. Now deep in slumber, come morning the lone sheriff of the county would at long last encounter a scene worthy of his training.
***
At dawn the sun unfurled the divine majesty of the valley. Jakesy stirred the stout bison gravy amidst a shroud of steam in the pharmacy’s kitchen. Despite making the gravy thousands of times he still went down the index card recipe with his finger. Helena’s absence at home had gone unnoticed to him. Separate bedrooms were only sensible. Jakesy’s last head injury had bequeathed him with a chronic grinding snore. Like a chainsaw.
He knew that the sirens, not often heard around Ennis, had to have awakened Helena back at the house. He glanced out the pharmacy window expecting her to arrive at any moment, to brew up a pot of her famous cowboy coffee that could jolt a dead steer to attention. Hay would be baled and trout would be caught.
Jakesy marveled at the endless string of very fine days in this valley. On and on they rolled.
William Burtch has lived in the West and returns often to chase trout. A recent widower, writing keeps him alive. He tweets at @WilliamBurtch2. More at: williamburtch.com