They piled into their machines again and drove down the switchbacks to the old bridge. They went as fast as possible without kicking up a tell-tale cloud of dust and, whether because of this or some other reason, nothing appeared to bar their path. When they were safely across Rogers let out a breath he had not realized he was holding.
Brady’s Toyota turned left down a residential street, the Nissan tucked in tight behind. The truck blocked their view ahead, so Rogers occupied his time by surveying the houses as they passed. They went by a speed limit sign going much faster than was posted. Not that it mattered. There were no children playing in the yards that bordered the street. No pack of bicycles carrying their riders to the swimming hole on Callahan Creek. There were no retirees laboring in the backyard gardens that had become almost critical to their survival. It struck him as odd, even despite the day’s events. He thought he saw a curtain in the window of a house move slightly as they went by. A corner pulled back as someone watched them from inside. At the end of the block, they turned right.
They crossed the railroad and entered the heart of town. A large steel building that served as the fire hall loomed in front of them as they rumbled over the tracks. To the right a string of saloons lined the street. Their facades faced the train siding, a strip of taverns and watering holes as old as Troy itself. In the town’s adolescence, when the miners and loggers would come in from the camps and the Great Northern Railroad maintained a division yard there, the bars were awash in whiskey and working girls. Those raucous times were long past, but Bar Street, as the locals called it, continued to serve a steadfast clientele. Today even these bastions of permanence seemed strangely quiet and unnaturally still. The GT-R swung left and Rogers watched them disappear.
The turn led them down a rough road. Its surface broken and marred by years of carrying ore trucks between the nearby silver mine and the railroad siding. The mine had long been closed, and although the haul road was in desperate need of resurfacing, there was no impetus to do so. After the break up that followed every winter season, the potholes grew, were patched by the city, and disintegrated once again, until, essentially, they consumed the entire road. Gunnar grimaced as his prized possession rattled over broken chunks of blacktop, the Nissan scraping its spoiler as it struck one particularly large hole in the pavement that Gunnar failed to avoid. Rogers noticed that the barn doors of the city maintenance shop stood open, but no workers were in sight. Not that there was anything more they could do. They had already done all they could to salvage the road. Everyone knew further repair was pointless. Its useful life had long been exceeded, and a lingering, prolonged death was all that remained.
The haul road followed a long sweeping curve beside a chain-link fence that encircled the elementary school and a sports complex. Their chests grew tight as their view of the road ahead was momentarily obscured by an ancient wooden grandstand. Rogers had played a little baseball during that first season in Montana. It would be a good way to make friends, his mother had said. He quit soon after he started, when the coaches realized how good he was, and returned to practicing basketball, shooting jump shots on the flawless rectangle that had been the first improvement his father had made to their new property once the house was completed. He shot until his hands hurt, shot until he made more of them then he missed.
A set of goal posts came into view beyond the baseball diamond, the thin, patchy grass of the football field as good as it was going to get, the tottering bleachers flaking faded maroon paint. Here, each Friday night, clusters of halide lamps mounted like crow’s nests atop towering poles pushed back the darkness to illuminate a sphere of self-determinism and possibility, a field where hope still ruled and dreams still flourished, if only in a relative sense and simply for a moment.
A lot of things may have fallen by the wayside in the far flung reaches of rural America, but interscholastic athletics was not one of them. Local sports enjoyed a renaissance that had not been seen in generations, and home teams played to packed houses at every game. People might not be able to travel with the same freedom they had once enjoyed, but they made certain their high school sports teams could.
This football field was where Rogers had first met his friends. He never battled beneath the Friday night lights, but he walked onto it with the team one August afternoon. He had spent that first day of school in an even deeper state of introversion than usual. The boys in the junior high eyed him with suspicion, but the girls were exceedingly friendly. Coach made a point of catching him between classes to ask how things were going. On the football field after school, as he stood shoulder to shoulder with the other seventh and eighth-grade boys, in a circle around the lecturing coach, he finally took a moment to look around. Even in the homogeny of red nylon shorts and grey t-shirts, Brady Yargus and Leighland Harper stood out to him, with stout frames and jovial expressions. Without a word yet spoken between them, Rogers knew they would come to be his friends.
He played only that one year, but their junior high squad did well that season starting two ruthless tackles and a towering wide receiver. The coach had tried to play Rogers at quarterback, but he had politely refused, leaving the job instead to another youth whose entire identity was tied up in the notion that he would one day lead the Trojans’ varsity lineup.
After one game, Rogers’ father introduced the boy to a graying man who walked with a limp and told the boy a story from his youth. He had been a prospect, the old man declared with the confidence of truth, a basketball prodigy until one fateful day when a pack of opposing football players gang-tackled him during a touchdown run and snapped his leg. Sure he had, the man answered, when Rogers asked if he ever played basketball again. Bones were pinned and rods put in, and, yes, he played basketball again, but it was never like it once was. No longer was he able to do whatever he wanted, like he had been before.
Rogers understood, and he thanked the man before they walked away. Life, his father said, was a continuous balance of risk and reward. Rogers devoted his summers to basketball camps and AAU tournaments and left football to Gunnar Vind, Brady Yargus, Lee Harper, and even the impossibly tall and dangerously skinny Scott Ewell, who turned out for the team only because his estranged father had called to say that he didn’t care if the boy was a whooping crane, he was damn well going to play football. Rogers watched their every game, home and away, the junior varsity action of their freshman year evolving quickly, after bulking up on beer and manual labor, into starring roles in the weekly battles waged before a roaring crowd each Friday night.
The two vehicles made their way along the broken road and entered a narrow constriction, walls appearing to rise up around them as the street passed between a thick grove of cottonwoods on the left and a large cinder block construction on the right. Their field of view was compressed, and for a moment they were unable to see what lay ahead. Apprehension rose within them.
Gunnar exhaled an audible sigh of relief as they cleared the corner of the building and entered the town’s economic center. Ahead of them and to the right was the bowling alley where Rogers and Brady had parked yesterday. To one side of it was a bank, to the other, a fast food restaurant. A sheet of macadam, broken only by the highway where it ran through town, connected the parking lots of the various businesses, the grocery and general store lying immediately on their right. All of it was empty. Devoid of the machines around which it had been created, the concrete landscape appeared strange and lifeless. For the first time, Rogers fully grasped that the town had not been constructed with people in mind. Rather, it had built itself up around their cars.
Here the path they had been following intersected with several others. Ahead of them, the road continued onward, ascending the deep notch that Callahan Creek had carved into the rugged mountains. To their left a bridge carried the highway across the creek, and it was this they turned onto, past the wooden carving of a miner stationed like a sentry in front of the tiny museum. Rogers studied the scene. Nothing moved. He spied the chief of police, or at least his patrol vehicle. It was parked directly in front of the supermarket’s entrance, as if in an attempt to blockade the doors. Broken shards were scattered beneath the façade where several of the plate glass windows had been shattered. Refuse littered the lot, random items, as though a portion of the store’s inventory had been blown out the door by a storm. Otherwise, the parking lot was empty. Even the staff’s vehicles, typically lined up on the far side, were nowhere in sight. Other businesses ringing the square were equally deserted. It seemed as though Troy had, in a flash, become a ghost town. Not that it had to go too far to get there.
It was unbelievable, but they were nearly free from the confines of town, and without incident. Across the bridge a road broke off to their right through a narrow gap between the creek bank and a steep cut slope. The track hugged the hill as it wound away into a pleasant hollow. Initially, their plan had them taking that route, an anecdotal byway that ultimately connected to a greater county road that crossed over to Lake Creek and the Dunn place. However, when the police officer stationed at the edge of town departed his post and left the direct path to Rogers’ house unguarded, that plan had been abandoned. Now they accelerated away from the bridge along the same route Rogers had the taken the day before, only under decidedly different circumstances.
Gunnar gritted his teeth as he shifted through the gears. He had a sudden desire to pull into the oncoming lane and race past Brady’s Toyota. Part of him wished he could leave his friend’s green pickup and this whole situation in the rear-view mirror. All he had to do was kick his turbo in the ass and head back to his apartment in Butte. He could drop off Rogers along the way. He knew the car was capable of carrying him away from all of this. It was his heart that wasn’t. Still, something told him that was the best idea he had all day.
It had been decided back on the hill that the two friends in the GT-R would function as a rear guard. If anyone attempted to intercept the group, it was up to them to try and give Brady enough time to spirit Lee away. Now it appeared as though that would be unnecessary. Their path was clear, and only a quick stop at Rogers’ house lie between them and their destination. They would ditch their reluctant accomplices, and then Rogers and Lee would proceed on to the Sanders County seat in Thompson Falls, where Harper would turn himself in.
They were driving sixty-five miles per hour through a residential section of town that was posted as forty-five. Houses along the road here were set well back from the wide shouldered highway. There didn’t appear to be anyone in them. The street was completely empty.
They reached the bridge over Lake Creek. Brady swung his truck to the right, onto a road that intersected the highway at a ninety-degree angle. The road climbed a steep grade then wound through a series of switchback corners until it broke over the summit onto a relatively flat plateau. Here, hayfields were separated into parcels of varying sizes by hedgerows of trees. A checkerboard of pastoral homesteads covered the landscape. It was one of the places Rogers’s father had considered buying property, an area called Iron Creek after the tributary that watered it. With an abundance of productive soil and level ground, it was an idyllic locale, a broad rolling bench above the Kootenai valley, nestled amidst the rising mountains, populated by massive whitetail bucks and roving bands of rogue elk. The road twisted through a stand of evergreens and then traveled straight for nearly a mile distant, where the tall grasses faded once again into forest.
They raced alongside a large pasture. Hay had been cut and was lying in the field to dry. Now that they had nearly made it, their apprehension intensified. Time slowed to a crawl. It seemed an eternity for them to travel that even that short length of tattered pavement. Then it was gone, lost to the past, and suddenly they were winding downhill to the junction with Lake Creek.
Their shortcut over Iron Creek left them only miles from the Dunn property. They hardly paused at the intersection. To the left, another county road shadowed the course of Lake Creek back toward town. It was a narrow rural track that wound through heavy forest dotted with occasional farmsteads. In recent years, the skyrocketing cost of petroleum had begun to cause changes in the rural countryside. Small, nearly self-sufficient homesteads had sprung up once again, and the sight of draft animals at work had become more common. Most of the region’s inhabitants still relied upon diesel and gasoline powered machines to do their work, but only the wealthiest were able to do so without regard. Necessity became a driving force behind their use. On several occasions the county had waited so long to plow the snow along the Lake Creek road that it was almost too deep to move when they finally did so, and the poorest families along the route had traded their gas burner for a mule.
Brady turned right, and the GT-R followed. Rogers anticipated lights would flash in the rear-view mirror to signify their failure, but none appeared. Rather than being elated, he was actually disturbed by their success. He didn’t regret his involvement in the incident, really didn’t see how he could have played it any other way, but still it left him unsettled. None of it made any sense, and there was no reason they should have been able to get away with what they had. Someplace, there must have been a breakdown. He didn’t know precisely what it was, but he knew that it existed. Somewhere the defense had crumbled and left the baseline wide open.
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