The color rises to her cheeks, two dark pink blotches as distinct as if someone had pressed thumbs to her flesh. “You’ve got no right—
no right.” She throws her napkin on the table. “I’m going to call the police or the sheriff or someone. This isn’t right.”
Edie starts to rise from her chair, but Roy reaches across to touch her forearm. “Easy, Edie,” he says. “There’s no need—”
“So that’s who this is,” says the younger brother. “Easy Edie. Yeah, Easy Edie, there’s no need—”
“Shut up, Bob,” says his brother. To Edie he says, “I apologize, Miss . . .”
“Mrs. ,” Edie says. “Mrs. Linderman.”
Mrs. Linderman. It’s the truth of course. But the pronouncement seems to change everything, as if the earth beneath the Spur buckled and the room tilted, and no one could be quite certain now where they sat or stood. Who did the Bauer brothers believe was sitting across from Roy Linderman? Had they spoken to that little girl? Had she told them it was a whore who rode in that white car?
Roy glances gratefully at Edie, and the brothers look at Roy as if they need to reassess the man. But the younger brother quickly switches his gaze back to Edie.
“Maybe,” she says, “I should talk to the owner. I’m sure they don’t want their customers disturbed.”
“So I’m disturbing you?” Bob says with a gap-toothed leer.
“Mrs. Linderman,” Bob’s brother says softly, “we just came in here to see if we couldn’t talk reasonably about this situation.”
Edie glares at him. “You’ve said what you have to say then?”
“I believe I have.” The older brother takes a step back, but Bob remains in place until his older brother reaches out and tugs at his T-shirt. They almost back into a table where two older couples nurse their beers while waiting for their steaks. Before the brothers reach
The Lives of Edie Pritchard
25
the front door, Bob Bauer turns around and points a threatening finger at Roy and Edie.
The Chevy and the truck are parked behind the Spur, but there’s enough light back there for Edie to see what’s happened.
“Uh-oh,” she says. “Roy?”
“Yeah?”
Edie points to the long scar along the driver’s side of the Chevy, stretching from the side-view mirror to the back door.
Roy licks his finger and rubs at the scratch. “Uh-huh,” he says.
“Maybe a key. Or a church key. Or a knife, I suppose.”
“I’m sorry, Roy.”
“Well, hell. I guess the boys had to have the last word.”
Roy steps back and looks over the other cars parked nearby. Then he lifts his gaze into the darkness beyond the Spur, over the ravine where trees rustle in the dying wind and on to the bluff across from theirs, a palpable darkness silhouetted against the night sky.
“I’m the one who ought to apologize,” he says. “I’m sorry you had to be a part of that. But that business about the sheriff? That wasn’t good. You just set them off with that remark. And I was handling it.”
“Did I violate some kind of manly code or something?”
“Like I said. I was handling it.”
“Fine,” Edie says, crossing her arms against her chest. The day’s warmth has vanished so completely it’s as if the season changed while they were inside. “Are you calling the police about this?”
“And say what? I don’t have any proof, but I’m sure I know who did this? No, hell no. The Bauers had to have their revenge. Fine. But I’ve got their truck.”
“If I can ever persuade Dean to leave Montana, it’ll be to get away from their kind.”
“They’re everywhere. Don’t blame Montana.” Roy steps closer to Edie. “But if you’re serious about a change of scenery, you know I’m your man.”
26
Larry Watson
Edie sighs and opens the car door carefully, as if the entire automobile has been compromised by that scratch in the finish. “I just want to go home.”
The car’s dome light comes on, and Roy steps in front of Edie and looks around the interior. After she climbs in, he closes the door then motions for her to open her window.
“I don’t know what kind of speed I can coax out of the truck, so you go on ahead. Don’t wait on me. Drive the Chevy as fast as you’re comfortable. It’ll keep up with you.”
Roy can’t see exactly who’s in the car following him—a Ford Galaxie by the look of the grille—but he can make out the silhouettes of the driver and a passenger. The Bauer brothers. He’d bet money on it.
The Ford had suddenly appeared a few miles outside Bentrock. By then Edie was well out of sight. She drove the Impala fast, even on this unfamiliar highway. And as it turns out, Roy is having trouble getting much speed out of the truck. He can cajole it up to sixty-five but that’s it. And at that speed, the truck begins to shimmy.
So he’s not about to outrace anyone. He tries a different tactic. He slows down to forty-five. The Ford slows as well.
“All right, stay there,” Roy says out loud. “I don’t give a damn.
As long as we’re poking along like this, Edie can put more miles between us.”
Underneath the expected smells of grease, oil, and cow shit, the truck smells faintly of tobacco, maybe the smoky-sweet fragrance of Mr. Bauer’s pipe. One of his children or grandchildren could no doubt climb inside the truck and identify the smell in an instant as belonging to that bandy-legged, sad-eyed little old man.
Even on high beam, the truck’s headlights are feeble, but the slower speed has the virtue of allowing Roy to see every curve and drop in the road in plenty of time to adjust. He doesn’t know this highway well; he isn’t one of those people who can travel a route only once and then remember it.
The Lives of Edie Pritchard
27
Not like Dean: as boys they could wander off into the hills with their .22s or follow the bends and backwaters of the Elk River with their fishing poles, and no matter what trail they followed—or didn’t—Dean could always find the way back. The truth is, Roy can still get lost in Gladstone if he crosses the bridge and ends up on the other side of town.
The car following him finally pulls out to pass, and Roy lets out a sigh of relief.
But it doesn’t pass. It keeps pace with him, its front end even with the truck bed. They continue down the highway like that for almost a mile, and then the headlights of an oncoming car appear up ahead.
The Ford will either have to pass or pull back. Its engine whines as the driver shifts down and slips behind Roy once again.
“Fine,” Roy says to the rearview mirror. “Follow me all the way to Gladstone, fucker. I’ll lead you right to the police station.”
Once the approaching car passes, Roy permits himself a look up at the night sky. Clouds have blown in since they left the Spur. He can’t see a star or any light from the almost-full moon. The highway climbs. Lightning flashes far off on the western horizon. The Linderman family ranch sat on a rise, just high enough to give their father the long view. On summer nights he’d stand out on the porch and watch the storms approach, silently at first, then grumbling as if thunderheads had a mind to be made up. Then the cannon fire. But when the country is hard up for rain like this, the clouds seem likely to do nothing more than flash their lights and then retreat.