William Garland
The coyotes kept the two men from burying the bodies deep in the woods up near Mingo Creek. They’d been in Three Bridges for the past six days and people had seen them with Nikki, and Elliston wasn’t the kind of man they’d be likely to forget. An arm or a big toe turning up around town would dredge up problems Elliston didn’t want to have to consider. Carver had wanted to take the bodies back to the eastern part of Montana to bury them in the remote canyons, but Elliston knew that wouldn’t work. It’d been a hot summer and their rot would start to set in before long. The buzzards would start their circling before they cleared the state line. The glacier lakes just north of the park gave them the best option. The twin lakes were deep and could bury their memory beneath the blue-green waters and algae. Their bodies would sink into primordial rivers that separated the sunken mountains and lived on in the blackness of perpetual night. There, he thought, it could all be forgotten.
The tarp-covered bodies crouched in the center of the raft while Elliston paddled the four of them into the heart of the lake. Carver killed the spotlight once they cleared the underbrush and half-buried trees, and for the next several minutes the four still bodies slid through the moonlit lake. Her rock-weighted corpse broke through the water’s surface first as the splash receded and echoed over pine-covered hills. Elliston expected the tarp to fall away and force him to watch her face disappear into the darkness and for her lifeless eyes to stare up at him in a final cry for remembrance, but when the splash broke and the displaced water slid back across the lake, her body was gone, and he could no longer see her face, the tarp, or anything but the spreading ripples. The man’s tarp was next, and it fell and sank just as fast.
Elliston sat in the raft unable to move as the water settled back into smoothness. Carver began to cry. They both knew they weren’t going to outrun this.
*
It was their first night in Montana and thunderheads set off behind the hills like locusts. Carver and Elliston sat up looking at the clouds in the distance, wondering how long it would take for them to stretch out over the plains. Lightning uncovered shuddering patches of sagebrush and shadows in the empty earth beneath them.
Elliston watched Carver’s face light up and sink into silhouettes while he checked their map and took a pull off the whiskey they’d bought back in Colorado. They set up camp just off the Tongue River and the big hills to the west were still at least a two-hour drive. Elliston thought about what his granddaddy had once told him about the seconds between seeing lightning and hearing thunder. He tried to count the silence between the whitening skies and the rolling moans, but he lost count and told Carver that they still had some time before they needed to pull their sleeping bags into the Suburban and close themselves up for the night.
The two of them grew up in Mississippi and were used to seeing thunderstorms that were already on top of them. Seeing one that staggered more than a hundred miles off toward the horizon was something Elliston had to sip on, try and take it all in.
He spent most of his life living just south of Vicksburg. As a child, when his mom went up to the city each morning to clean and care for a white family that always seemed to need more than she could give them, Elliston would run up to the Mississippi to watch the old men from his street sit on their buckets fishing the banks and think about what it would take to make it all the way across.
Both men lived their lives buried east of the Mississippi. Their time was spent working at the Dixie Millworks plant or sitting up on Elliston’s porch with a cooler of Coors set down between them. Elliston was a twice-divorced cabinet maker with two grown children who lived down around Natchez. Carver was a forty-two-year-old forklift operator with most of a college degree, no kids that he was willing to claim, and a twenty-seven-year-old girlfriend that lived with him most of the time. And despite what most folks thought about the general state of race relations in Mississippi, the two men had been there for each other for the past twenty-three years.
Life is never simple, but they lived theirs as straightforward as they could. They’d only known sand-covered dirt and pine trees, yet Carver talked about the West every chance he could. Elliston assumed that Carver had seen a movie or something, but he never asked, just went along with it.
They’d sit out on lawn chairs, and between sips, Carver would set his beer down and throw his hands out across the porch, telling Elliston about the Big Sky country as if he’d been there. He’d talk about it all: the wide-open highways without speed limits or station wagons to slow you down, the wild women that rarely shaved their pits, and trout big enough to be grown on a Mississippi catfish farm.
“Ellis,” he’d say. “They’ve got these damn monster browns that’re so fat they get stuck in these shallow riffle things and sit there, just begging to get their big ass caught.” Then, before Elliston had time to toss the lukewarm swill of his last beer out in the yard, Carver would launch into some other list of things that he had never seen or known anything about. When he’d finish, he would grab a hold of his Coors and sit back in his chair and give a nod of finality, never doubting that one day the two of them would pack up Elliston’s Suburban and head out for Montana. “It’s just what’s gonna happen,” he’d say. “You and me, and Big Sky country.”
Now that they were there, Elliston realized just how much he had needed this trip, how much he had needed to get away from his life back in Mississippi for a little while. And by the looks of Carver’s unfocused stare off into the grizzled-black sky, he figured that he felt that way too. The two of them bubbled the neck of the bottle one more time before Carver broke the silence. “You figure Jesse James really sat down and had a drink in that saloon?”
“I don’t see why they would lie to us about it.”
“Maybe the lady running the bar, but I don’t guess that everybody else in there would have joined in on it like they did if it wasn’t so.”
Elliston took the whiskey again and held it between his legs. “Nah, I don’t guess they would have. Not much reason to.”
“It’s pretty goddamn cool if you think on it for a while,” Carver said. “That place didn’t look like they have put a new nail in it since it opened. And we sat there looking at the same walls, setting our glasses down on the same bar, and might’ve even been sitting on the same stool as Jesse James. It don’t get much cooler than that. When’s the last time you sat in the same seat as anybody famous back in Mississippi?”
“I don’t guess I have. But you know they’ve put in new stools since then, don’t you?”
“Something to think about.” Carver grabbed the whiskey again for one last sip before capping it and tossing it into the back of the Suburban. “One night in, and this thing is already shaping up.”
A few years back, Carver saw a man fly fishing down on the Pearl River. He said he wanted to laugh at first, but when the man bent down to unhook his third fish before Carver had managed to set up his lure, he thought better of it.
The way he tells it, he took off from work early that next Monday and drove up to the Orvis in Jackson and got the salesman with the most unkempt beard to outfit him with the right gear and tell him all he knew about fly fishing. The salesman had lived up in Yellowstone for a summer, working in one of their hotels in the evening and fishing the nearby streams in the mornings, which made him more of an expert than Carver could’ve ever hoped for. By the time he got home, he was carrying on like he’d been doing it for the past thirty-five years.
For several days, Elliston sat up on Carver’s porch just to watch his friend make a fool of himself trying to cast under the floodlight in his front yard. It took him one more week of nighttime casting through the floodlit haze of moths and gnats to get beyond the awkwardness of it all, and by the time the summer months had drug on and the rivers had gotten too hot to fish, Carver had managed to out-fish Elliston.
After that summer, the itch to go out West and fish the streams of Montana was about all Carver could talk about.
“My buddy up at Orvis says there ain’t any better fishing place in the entire country,” he’d say.
“Is that a fact?”
“You damned right it is! And anyone who considers himself to be a true fly fisherman better damn well be able to say they’ve gone to Montana.”
“And at least fished the Beaverhead,” Elliston would add with just enough snark.
“That’s right.”
“And slept with at least one local redhead with pit hair.”
“And got drunk and hollered at a buffalo.”
And it’d go on like that for hours as the two men sat on their lawn chairs and stared out at the bugs racing toward the light. Elliston gave him a hard time as often as needed, but in reality, Carver had pulled at Elliston enough for him to also feel that this cross-country trip could be what he was missing in his life.
That April, their buddy George lost a thumb and the better part of two fingers in a band saw. The foreman at the plant had to dig out the scuffed up “0” from his desk drawer to put up on the “Dixie Millworks Employees Have Worked ___ Days Without a Lost Time Accident” sign, and Elliston had to dig through the congealing piles of sawdust to find George’s bloody digits, before throwing them in his lunch cooler and running them up to the hospital. Elliston spent the rest of the afternoon out in a waiting room with little kids staring at his bloody cooler tucked off behind his steel toes, and Carver spent his shift taking odd routes and doubling back on himself to get by without having to drive his forklift anywhere in eyeshot of the saw.
That night between swigs of his beer, Elliston looked over to Carver and said, “I guess it’s about time to get the hell out of here for a while and go catch us a fuck-ton of trout and an STD or two.”
Carver threw his half-drank Coors over the railing and yelled up to the moon, “About goddamned time!”
Elliston smiled. “I’ll go, but I better not get all the way out there and find out that there ain’t nothing but buffalo and cattle ranchers without wives.”
“Ah hell, you ain’t got to worry about that. There’ll be strange, hairy women just waiting on us in every town,” Carver said before adding, “Just swear to me that you ain’t gonna back out on me.”
“You ever known me too?”
“Nah, I guess I know better,” he said, and then after digging into the still-stained cooler for another beer, he added, “Just fucking swear that our trip won’t be like all of the other yahoos.” The crack of the Coors pierced the sounds of crickets. “Those yups go out to Montana with their families and stay at ranches with their fancy-ass guides that all wind up taking them all down the same damn rivers to find the same damn over-caught trout, in some existential freaking crisis that’s meant to get them to break from their day-to-day with nannies and real estate—” he trailed off without finishing his thought and just sat there sipping at his Coors.
Elliston wasn’t so sure he fully understood why Carver was so put off by these existential yahoos in crisis, but he nodded his agreement anyhow. It sounded kind of nice to him. They’d fish some crystal-clear waters, stay away from any rich wannabes, and drink a shit-ton of beer with some girls he could hope had the same goals he did. A few weeks of trout, tent sex with strange women, and beer would do a world of good for a weary soul like his. But he was worried about one thing.
“There are black folks out in Montana, ain’t there?”
“Yeah,” Carver said, without the slightest sound of certainty. “Black people ranch and need space to roam just like any other folks.”
“Just better not be a state full of disrobed Klansmen is all I’m saying. Their women may like me just fine, but none of that matters too much if some redneck that ain’t ever seen a black man decides to live out his Klan-loving wet dreams on me,” Elliston said, only half laughing.
“In fact, I believe I read somewhere that Ted Turner has a black son, and I know for a fact that there’s a Turner ranch out there somewhere.”
“Well if Montana’s good enough for Ted Turner’s made up black son, I guess that’s good enough for me.”
When they got up in the morning the two of them shook off the hangover and checked their paystubs to figure out just how much leave they’d accumulated over the years before putting in a request for a few personal days with Linda up in the front office. With that, it was as much as settled. That afternoon they clocked out a few minutes before the end of their shift in a foolhardy effort to beat the Jackson traffic on their way up to get outfitted by Carver’s buddy up at Orvis.
After spending the better part of his paycheck at Orvis, knowing good and well that a $50 rod and reel at Walmart along with his old tackle box and fishing hat would’ve have done him just fine, Elliston decided that they might just be the yahoos that Carver was so worried about, but he’d also decided that he wasn’t going to share those thoughts with Carver or his bearded Orvis buddy.
The next two weeks at the plant were brutal, but by the time Memorial Day rolled around they were packing up the Suburban and heading off to Big Sky country just in time to miss the end of the snow and the worst of the late-season runoff.
It wasn’t long into the drive that Elliston realized that to Carver, this wasn’t a trip for escape, and it wasn’t all about fishing. He recognized that Carver had that crazed look in his eyes. It was the same one that Carver would give when they used to get high, and he’d get going about them having their Thelma and Louise, their Alamo, their Riggs and Murtaugh, or some other shit Elliston couldn’t quite remember. Elliston was hazy on the analogy, but he knew the look that went with it. It was the one that always had some incoherent ramblings go along with it. The most likely of suspects was some talk about them finding that something real that had never been found. Their Alamo or Grand Canyon or moment on the shitter before the bomb blew the hell out of Murtaugh’s house. And now that they were on the road, Carver had that look.
They drove through the nights and camped off the shoulders of side highways. The Suburban was full of gas station biscuit wrappers and empty bottles of Mountain Dew, and they were on their way to catch trout the size of their forearms and drink their beer until they found the real Montana that Carver had dreamed up in his mind. It was a place that was tucked away in dive bars and side streams, hidden in the plains and behind the mountains, and Elliston had little doubt that they wouldn’t even get close to finding it. Although he was growing a little more worried that they also wouldn’t find another black man, either.
It took the three days of driving to cross over the border into the eastern side of the state, but they were still hours away from any river that was even remotely fishable, and near a half a day’s drive from a place called Three Bridges.
The two men woke up to drizzling rain. The windows in the Suburban had fogged over, and Carver had to use a bandana to wipe down the glass and take in the steam rising across the prairie lands. Those far off mountains looked to be even further than they had been during the late-night thunderstorm. It was a big country, and the drive across it didn’t appear to have an end to it. The stale Suburban air was already hot when they got back on the highway, even though the sun had hardly cleared the horizon. They rolled down the windows and allowed the freshness of the Montana morning to blow past their arms as they tried to outdrive the heat. After two hours of driving, Carver was grateful to find a roadside diner outside of Big Timber. They still had a few hours between them and Three Bridges, but this place seemed as good as any to stop and grab some breakfast.
Carver ignored Elliston while they ate by talking up the waitress. “You ever been over to Three Bridges?”
“Can’t say I’ve ever had any reason to go.”
“It’s not in the Frommer’s books or anything, but I’d heard it’s a good spot. It’s got a lot of good rivers near it to fish. I’d been told it was the place where the guides that were worth a damn fished when they weren’t babysitting tourists.”
The waitress laughed. “Aren’t you boys tourists?”
Elliston couldn’t help but laugh with her, but Carver didn’t. “Well, we’re not from around here, if that’s what you’re asking. But we ain’t trying to be some tourists out here. We’re hoping to find out where we should settle in if we were just wanting to hang out and fish the same waters that the folks around these parts fish.”
“Well honey, I don’t fish, but if we were to tell you all about our secret rivers, they wouldn’t be much of a secret, now would they?” With that, she walked away and filled another round of mugs.
By the time they reached Three Bridges, it was too late to go out and find a run to fish. Instead, Elliston drove the Suburban around the small town looking for a motel or a campground. The town was more rustic than either of them had imagined. It didn’t have the uniform Old West charm of a place from the movie sets. Instead, it was a place that was built up over time, and survived off the salaries of motel workers, waitresses, and ranch hands. There were a handful of fishing guide outfits littered around the main stretch of road, and all but one was operating out of the guide’s house or truck. Most of the buildings had hand-painted signs advertising tax preparation or cheap feed and seed, and there was one overly pink sign pointing people toward a nail salon and tanning bed operating out of a clapboard bungalow no bigger than a truck stop bathroom.
Elliston ducked when Carver started beating his fists against the roof of the Suburban. He looked up at his friend and saw that the man just couldn’t contain it. “Goddamn, this is the place! It’s about damn perfect! Did you see that man set up on his porch? This whole town is a freaking Edward Hopper painting.”
On the edge of town, they saw a place that could best be described as a fishing lodge. The motel was built from unpainted wooden slats and there was a mutt sleeping in front of the office door that appeared to be dead. They got a room for the week.
Later that evening, the two men drove back into town looking for a bar that was serving food. With the help of a gas station attendant, they found a place called Sunny’s, which was marked by a painted satellite with an arrow pointing up to a tree-covered hill.
There were locals and a handful of college students who worked down in Yellowstone strewn about the bar. Aside from the bearskin and elk horns on the walls, Sunny’s looked about like any other bar that Elliston and Carver had visited. The two of them worked their way past the pool tables and grabbed a booth on the far wall.
They both tried to take the whole scene in. The pool tables appeared to be dominated by locals who were confident enough and knew their way around the bar. The college kids sat in a group of tables close to the restrooms and kept to themselves. A few of them were drunk beyond comprehension, and they all looked like the types that would sing Journey songs if someone pulled out a karaoke machine. But it was the women sitting over by the restrooms that drew Carver in.
The two women were leaning in talking to each other. They both had dark hair and had that look about them that said they could be twenty or they could be a year away from hitting forty. Elliston guessed they had lived life hard and were closer to a rough-looking twenty. The one closest to them was drawing the attention of at least five other people in the bar. Her neckline plunged low and her dress clung tight to her body. Even though he figured she wasn’t much older than his own daughter, Elliston couldn’t help but imagine what she would look like when she removed that dress.
She and her friend placed a few loose bills on the table and got up to leave. When she turned, she looked over at Carver and Elliston and stared a second too long before her friend turned back to her and yelled out in a voice louder than the stereo, “Those Coronas back at your place better be cold. I ain’t got but an hour before I got to go pick up my kids from Eileen’s.”
“They’ll be plenty cold by now,” was all she said as she smiled and broke eye contact. There was a sliver of blue buried in the corner of her left eye, and Carver kept his eyes on her when she walked past him and the pool tables into the graveled lot outside.
“You damn horndog, look at you just a staring,” Elliston said, poking at him. “All this time I thought I was the only one that came out here with an actual mind at getting laid.”
Carver just laughed.
For the next two days, Carver and Elliston were both determined to fish the nearby rivers. They went out on their own on a little creek just south of town the first day and it was a bust. The next morning, they went into a little store on the main drag to re-up on supplies and catch up with a local outfitter who was friendly enough.
“You fellas came out here at a bad time,” she informed them after she put the flies they’d picked out back in their bins. “The runoff from the late snowfall was hanging around a good bit longer than usual, and there was that good rain storm a few days back. It’s too murky out there for any real good fishing.”
Carver jumped in. “Hell, we’re from South Mississippi. I can promise you that we’re used to worse. Those Mississippi rivers ain’t got nothing but silt in them, and we ain’t ever been fishing out here before, so I don’t guess we know what clear waters could look like.”
“I just felt I should give you fair warning,” she said. “The trout ain’t going to be jumping. If you got your own raft, I’d drive on up to the Beaverhead and fish it wet with these Doc Spratleys over here. Tie you off tippet with a good-sized nymph on it.” She reached in a few bins behind them and pulled out a handful of steelhead flies and nymphs. “These should get you going.”
Carver knew the Beaverhead was overfished and had decided he hated the idea of it. He tried to press the woman into telling him about some other options, but the outfitter, put off by the whole interaction, fumbled around and made some generic suggestions: “You could also put in on the Big Hole just a little ways from here, but if you boys are dead set against fishing with wet flies, you could drive on down to the Madison or the twin lakes. There are a few shallow runs on the Madison that I’ve seen folks fishing, and the twin lakes are always good for a big brown every now and again.”
This wasn’t what Carver wanted to hear, but he thought it’d be better than floating the overcrowded and muddy Beaverhead or some other crowded river he’d never heard of. “We might well head on down that way. I’ve been wanting to check out those lakes anyhow.”
“They wouldn’t be my first stop, but if you don’t want to hit the Beaverhead or the Big Hole, that’s about your best bet this time of year,” the outfitter had said.
Not intending on following any of her advice, Carver grabbed a handful of dry flies the woman had settled on as alternatives and left the store.
Back in the Suburban, Carver dug around in the glove box and ripped out the map. He spread it out over the hood, and Elliston had to rush over to help keep the wind from catching beneath it. Carver pulled a pen out from his pocket and began marking big squigglies across every river that Elliston had heard about. After he defiled their map, he traced his finger alongside the bends in the remaining rivers until he stopped on one that ran close enough to them to fish.
He pointed to a crooked line just off of Fir Ridge. “What about this little stream over here? Mingo Creek. That sounds like a winner if I’ve ever heard one.”
“Well I hadn’t ever heard anything about it, so I guess that should be about what we’re looking for, ain’t it?” Elliston said.
“Yeah. I’d guess we should be able to get to it somewhere around here.” Carver pointed to a spot on the map. “From the looks of it, there is a hiking trail that gets us right up to it.”
“That’s still a good solid haul from here. I reckon we should skip out on a night in the lodge and set up a camp down by the creek, so we can be out there on the water by sun-up tomorrow.”
The creek was small. At times it was too narrow to fish without getting caught up in the overhang, but it proved to be a good spot for them. They both trudged up and down in calf-deep water and threw their lines into slow moving runs that sat beneath the shades of overgrown bushes. They were high enough for the runoff not to be much of a factor, and while neither of them caught any trout over thirteen inches, they both brought in their fair share, and managed to do so without having to fish alongside a river full of other people. For two full days, both Carver and Elliston cast their lines into pristine, untouched waters and talked about what a life west of the Mississippi might look like.
By the end of their second day on the creek, both of them had decided that it was time to pack it up and head back into Three Bridges for the night. After grabbing a shower and cleaning themselves up, they went back out to Sunny’s to settle in. The girl was there again.
Despite their previous plans of fishing one of the lakes when they got up the next morning, Carver had decided to stay in town for the day. “You can’t hope to find out what a place is all about by fishing in some lake and hanging out in the same old dive bar,” he’d said. “You got to walk around and pull up a chair in the laundry mat. Take it all in.”
“What about all of those big browns you were talking about pulling in today?”
“Well Ellis, I guess you can still go pull them in if you want, but I think we should take a break from it and do a little exploring. Take in the town. Find out what these people are all about. We hadn’t hardly said word one to anybody since we got here. Hell, we might even find out that there are some black people living here after all.”
“You can piss away your day if you want to, but I’m going out to the lake to fish.”
“Suit yourself. I’ll be mingling with the good folks of Three Bridges. The fish will still be there waiting on me tomorrow.”
“Mingle away, but you know as well as I do that there ain’t another black person within thirty miles of here.”
Carver wasn’t at the motel when Elliston returned. He walked around town looking for him, then went up to Sunny’s for a drink. When he got back to the room, Carver was sitting on the end of the bed with a Coors tucked between his legs. The girl from the bar was in the chair in front of him.
Up close and in the light, Elliston could see that she was young—no older than twenty-five. Life hadn’t been easy on her. Her poorly matched makeup couldn’t do much to cover the dark spots under her eyes, and her skin was taut but already showing signs of sun damage. Despite this, she was still just as beautiful as Elliston had remembered. She sat there with her foot pulled up into the chair. Her nonexistent shorts and a wet Coors were pressed up against a tanned thigh that seemed to go on for miles. There was that blue streak still buried in her eye, and more than ever, Elliston couldn’t stop himself from stealing glances her way.
“Ellis, I’d like you to meet my friend, Nikki. And Nikki, this here is my friend I was telling you about, Elliston.” The words came out flustered and with the hint of a slur.
“Your friend Carver invited me over for a drink. I hope that’s all right.”
“Of course, as long as y’all saved me one.”
Carver reached into the Styrofoam cooler and tossed out a cold one.
“I was just telling Carver about my baby boy. You want to see a picture?”
She reached into an oversized purse and pulled out a creased Polaroid of a two-year-old boy. He was standing in front of an easel that had been covered in an illegible jumble of paint strokes and markers. The sag in the kid’s diaper made him look like he might have just crapped himself.
“Gorgeous kid,” Elliston said as he lifted his beer in a mock toast.
“I know, ain’t he? He lives down in Kansas with his grandparents now, but he’s the light of my life.”
Elliston was scared to ask why he didn’t live with her, and one look over at Carver confirmed that it was best if he didn’t ask. The three of them sat there and drank for the next few hours.
The girl was more open than Elliston cared for. In that sense, she reminded him of his ex-wife. She had been living on a reservation south of Billings, but was now in town, subleasing a friend’s old apartment. She used to be married to a man that had some stature in the Crow tribe, but he left them all to join the service and died a few years back while he was on a tour in Iraq. The government gave her a flag and told her that he was the first Native American soldier to die in Desert Storm. Until recently she’d lived with his parents. The more she went on, the more convoluted her back-story got. Elliston hoped Carver saw this, but if he did, his face didn’t show it.
It had gotten late, and Elliston nodded off. He was having a dream about a young redheaded girl who was wandering through a rainstorm and crying because she was walking over old cotton husks and her feet were bleeding. He wanted to call out to her and help. Maybe even get off his porch and walk out to her, but when he tried to pull himself from the lawn chair, the old men fishing on their buckets reached out and placed their arms on his chest to stop him. He jerked awake. The little girl wasn’t there, and he was alone in the room.
Carver had left a note propped up on Elliston’s pillow: See you at breakfast. That diner off on South Madison. 8:00… Give or take 30.
Carver wasn’t at breakfast, and Elliston decided to go off and fish on his own again. This time, he drove down to the Gallatin with the raft to fish in some of the river’s big waters. On the way there, Elliston passed by two Confederate flags and after the second one, he considered turning the Suburban around and heading back to Mississippi, where at least there was some comfort in the worn-down argument of heritage and the predictability of the racists who hid behind the argument. That, and in Mississippi, Elliston had numbers on his side. Out here, it was just him and Ted Turner’s mythical black son. He could send Carver a postcard from the bar where Jesse James drank and make it back in time to visit with his kids and still be at work by Monday. But instead, he just kept traveling deeper into his own version of Deliverance country.
When Elliston reached the Gallatin, it was crowded but far from unbearable, and any racists who might’ve been on the river were at least quiet and civil about it. For the first time on the trip he caught a brown trout almost as big as any bass he could hope to catch back home. A guy from Helena fishing on the bank said it was one of the biggest browns he’d seen all summer, and Elliston decided he’d say it neared twenty-five inches when he caught back up with Carver.
When Elliston got back to the motel, there was another note sitting on the bed: Sorry about breakfast. Meet us out at Sunny’s if you’re not too pissed. Dinner is on me.
He pulled up to the bar and the two of them were shooting pool. Carver stepped away from the table to greet him. “Sorry, man. I’ll explain it all later.”
“Don’t worry about it. I caught a big fish.”
“Hell yeah! That’s what I’m talking about. You need a drink. Let me buy you one.”
They sat down for dinner and Nikki slid into Elliston’s side of the booth, as if to apologize for taking his friend away from him for the last two days. She leaned into him to give him a hug. Her hair whipped around and slapped him in the eye. It smelled like cigarettes and Herbal Essence.
Like the night before, Nikki carried most of the conversation. The talk centered around her and her friend, who Nikki just knew Elliston would like, and who was probably going to be up there to meet up with them a little later. But Nikki was also curious about what life was like in Mississippi. She’d never been east of Kansas, but she heard it was nice in their part of the country.
They left Sunny’s before Nikki’s friend ever showed. Carver sent Nikki off to her car ahead of him so that he could talk to Elliston for a minute.
Elliston was leaning against the hood when Carver approached.
“Be honest. What do you think?”
“I think you’re a damned fool. That’s what I think.”
“She ain’t that bad.”
“No. But she’s got a shit ton of baggage and she might just be fucking crazy. That, and you’ve got a beautiful, sane woman waiting on you back home. Yet here you are, running around with mother of the year.”
“I’m just out here taking it all in. We live our lives back in Mississippi without ever really living them. You know what I mean? Just going by, day-by-day, driving from the plant over to your front porch. I wanted to get a taste of it out here. Find out what Lewis and Clark knew back then. This place ain’t going to be around for long. Not like this. Not like this right here.”
“Here we go with this shit again.”
“Just look around. The yahoos are going to set up shop out here, turn all this into a fucking resort. I’m telling you, they’re going to have nets in the river to make sure they catch a fish, and the bars ain’t gonna serve nothing but Heineken. It’ll be a goddamn yups’ paradise.” He spoke with a disgust that was usually reserved for disgraced football coaches and the Jehovah’s Witnesses that always seemed to show up extra early on the Saturdays after he’d tied one on. “I just want to grab a hold of whatever’s left and see where it takes me. I thought you’d want to do the same.”
“I’m out here having fun. I ain’t mad at you for having a girl. Hell, if I’m being honest, I’m jealous. Just wondering at your end game,” Elliston said. “She looks good and all, but she’s also practically homeless. And she sounded pretty damned interested in life back in Mississippi.”
“Ah man, listen, I’m going back to her place tonight, and then we can go fishing tomorrow. And then we’ll just hop back on the road in the evening and work our way up toward Missoula. She don’t even have to know that we’re going. We can just get on out of here and go. You’ll see. I’ll be back by lunch. You can show me where you caught that fish, and then we can just disappear like a fucking dream.”
Carver was sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at the empty chair when Elliston woke up. A sliver of sun was shining through the curtain and falling onto Carver and the can of Coors sitting on the floor next to him. He looked like hell. His left eye had already swollen shut and the right one had a good shiner set down beneath it. His hair sat matted in greasy clumps and the congealing blood crusted around his lip and nose still managed to drip down onto his pant leg and the floor beneath him. There was a welt forming around a future scar on Carver’s cheek that he was half rubbing with his thumb. Elliston looked to his knuckles, but they were bloodless. The room smelled of his friend’s shit.
It wasn’t until Elliston stood up from the bed that he managed to catch Carver’s attention. Carver watched as Elliston pulled on his jeans and walked over to check outside the window.
“Fucking yahoo just showed up,” Carver was mumbling. “I don’t know who he was. I didn’t know. He just walked in.”
There was a part of Elliston that felt he already knew what had happened and what was coming. It was there in the unfocused pain buried behind Carver’s remaining good eye and the nervousness buried deep in his bloodless fingers. Perhaps he’d really known all along. Perhaps some signs of what was to come were already there when Carver first locked his eyes on Nikki in the bar. Maybe he even saw some glimpse of it in the reflection in Carver’s eyes when they were crossing over into Louisiana, ready to take on the entire West without a thought or a care in the world. Or maybe none of this was true. Maybe it was just a fight that Carver couldn’t avoid. A boyfriend or an ex-boyfriend that showed up in a room that smelled of sex. That was likely all it was, but as Elliston stood there looking back at his friend, he couldn’t help but feel as if he knew nothing and everything at the same time. He was staring at a beaten man that no longer wanted anything from this place, and that scared him.
“Let’s go home, Ellis. Can we please just get back home? Goddammit, I just want to go home, Ellis.”
Elliston buttoned his jeans, thought back to the Confederate flags on the side of yesterday’s highway and turned back toward his friend. “What exactly have we done, Carver?” he asked.
Carver didn’t move. Didn’t say another word.
“Was there just one of them?”
Carver didn’t even allow himself to look up again.
Elliston grabbed his shirt off the back of the chair and walked toward the door. “Fucking yahoos.”
William Garland teaches Literature and Creative Writing at The John Cooper School in The Woodlands, TX. He received an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of South Carolina. While there, he worked as an editor for Yemassee. His work has appeared in storySouth, Tulane Review, The Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Review, Steel Toe Review, Real South Magazine, and other literary journals and anthologies. His writing most recently appeared in Found Anew, an anthology from the USC Press. He is currently working on a book about a disappearing culture on the backroads of Texas.