The Last Honest Horse Thief Read online

  Larry lit a cigarette and blew smoke in silence, staring at the mountains.

  Markus went behind a thick stand of firs to change, and when he returned, Amigo wandered over and sniffed him curiously. Markus wondered what the dog understood about these clothes and their former owner. Wondered if Amigo wouldn’t prefer to be at whatever suburban home the clothes came from.

  “Perfect, kiddo,” his mom said. “You’re an old pro.”

  She touched his cheek with the side of her hand and smiled. Already she was unrecognizable to him; blue eyes turned brown, dark braid laced with feathers, a fringed doeskin smock hanging just below her slim, tanned thighs. She wore ankle-high boots, decorated with bright beads and leather thongs.

  “A damn shame to take the boy away when the fish are biting,” Ronny said.

  “The tourists will be, too. Or maybe you’ve got enough money in your pocket that we don’t need to worry about it today?”

  Ronny’s chest filled with a sigh and he turned away. “Just get done without having any trouble with the rangers. I’d like to be at the Mint Bar by sunset, having a steak.”

  As much as Mark didn’t like the idea of going up toward Medicine Wheel, he liked the idea of the Mint Bar. It was a place down in Sheridan that looked more like a taxidermy museum than a bar, filled with trophy animals and pictures of the Old West.

  “Let’s go on, then,” he told his mother, and she smiled and squeezed his arm.

  He wasn’t sure exactly when the strange feeling overtook him. Not in the parking lot, where they passed the first ranger without incident. It was sometime on the walk to the top. From the parking lot the path became a steep ramp of packed earth, and the wind rose the higher you went. More of the world became visible with each step, the mountains falling away in every direction. It wasn’t all that different from many places in the mountains, and yet there was something that felt different. Markus had no idea just why that was. He wished he’d brought Amigo along, but the dog had stayed back at the truck with his uncles. He wouldn’t have even minded walking with his mother, but of course he had to keep distance between them so that when she found her marks, the boy in the Jordan hat and sunglasses would seem unconnected to her, the rude product of some other, terrible family.

  He was fifty strides ahead of her, walking the way the worst of the tourist kids did, looking tired and bored and indifferent, when he heard the chanting.

  He came to a full stop and looked up at the summit, where the Medicine Wheel was, and felt a strange swirl of vertigo that he never had experienced even on the steepest slopes of the Beartooth or Absarokee ranges. There was nowhere to fall here, and yet he had the sense of being somewhere very high, the sense that the earth was sliding out from under his feet. He hunched over like someone caught with a stomach cramp, stared at the ground, and breathed deeply, listening to the chanting. It was beautiful, the rising and falling voices joined perfectly. Pow wow music. He’d heard it before. He always liked it, but for some reason today…

  “Markus? You okay?”

  His mother’s whisper stirred him into action. He looked back and saw her trudging solemnly up the path with a dreamcatcher held in her hands. From the distance, she looked authentic. He said, “I’m fine,” and walked away quickly, before she could catch up. She didn’t pursue—they were strangers here, after all.

  That was another reason he didn’t mind this con. In this routine, there was no way anyone associated him with her. In fact, he was her polar opposite, from another world entirely. That was why he didn’t mind playing the role.

  He hurried on up the path and followed a switchback to the top and for the first time he saw the Medicine Wheel. It was on a flat summit buffeted by the high-elevation winds, a simple arrangement of ancient stone cairns laid in a careful circle, with a small, fragile perimeter fence strung around them, lined with twisted bits of twine and feathers and even hair and bone. You could see endlessly in every direction, but Markus couldn’t bring himself to look at the view. He was, like the Ohio tourists, staring at the chanting group.

  They were Crow. Markus knew this without remembering or even understanding why. He’d been through the Crow Reservation countless times, but if there was a visual cue to their traditional dress, he didn’t recognize it. The chant, maybe. He wasn’t sure; he knew only that he was right.

  He felt the dizziness again, stronger than ever, and he sat down on the ground. That still didn’t feel steady enough, so he lay flat on his back and closed his eyes and the swirling sensation steadied just a touch, but he felt like he could hear echoes from deep within the earth. The chanting, yes, but something else. Footsteps.

  From long ago. They are the footsteps of someone who walked this way long ago.

  “Son? Are you all right?”

  It was one of the Ohio tourists, a man with bifocals and a sunburn, learning down to Markus with a concerned face.

  “I’m fine. Sorry. Just resting.”

  “The way you went down, we thought you’d fainted or something.”

  “No, just tired. It’s steep coming up here.”

  The man’s face was impossibly kind. “It sure is! I know we were winded.”

  Markus nodded but didn’t say anything else. He was watching the chanting group of Crow. There were ten of them. They sang with their eyes closed and their faces turned to the sky.

  “It’s a sacred place to them,” the sunburned man whispered.

  Yes, Markus thought, it really is. They are real, and to them, this place is, too.

  That was when he understood how badly he wanted to go back down, and take his mother with him. There were places where it was a game, and the people whose palms she read understood it as a game, even if they hoped some bit of it was real.

  That was nothing like this place.

  He’d just gotten back to his feet when the sunburned man said, “We lost our little girl this spring. And it might seem silly to folks, but we’ve tried to make stops at places like this, for her. We were going to make this trip together, you know, as a family. We’d had that all arranged and she was so excited about all of it, especially Yellowstone, and then summer came and she was gone but…but we decided we should make the trip anyhow.”

  Markus could see the man’s wife now. Same age as him but weathered in a worse way, someplace that seemed to come from not her face but her eyes. She was watching with concern.

  “Sorry,” the sunburned man said. “I didn’t meant to unload all that on you, son. I talk too damn much.”

  “It’s okay,” Markus said, and he got up and shook the man’s hand and said, “I’m sorry about your daughter,” and just as he was saying it he saw his mother approaching, and she gave a little nod, as if she thought Markus was singling the man out to her.

  He had a few times before.

  “Go on and find your family,” the man said, and his voice was rough. “Be careful walking up here. It’s thin air. Don’t push yourself. That thin air, it can be tough on both the head and the heart.”

  Markus nodded and slipped away. He left the Medicine Wheel without walking around it. He’d wanted to do that, but now he just wanted to get back to the truck and his uncles and his dog.

  He stumbled back down the steep path and then a cloud passed over the sun and the path fell into shadow and he had the strange vertigo again. He wondered numbly if he was getting sick. What was the last thing he’d eaten? He sat down on a boulder that lined the path, put his head between his knees, and sucked in air. His chest felt like there was a small bird trapped in it, beating against his ribs. A sickly bird, though, something wrong with it, like a bird with only one wing. He kept his eyes closed and he breathed and at length the strange feeling subsided and the shadow fell away from the sun and he was left with only a thin, cool sweat on his forehead.

  He opened his eyes then and got shakily to his feet and started back down. Before he
did, he cast one glance back up at the Medicine Wheel, and that was when he saw his mother.

  She was sitting on the ground a hundred yards up the slope, and she was with the man and woman from Ohio. The man’s head was bowed, listening, and the woman with the hurt-filled eyes had her hands extended. Markus’s mother was tracing the lines on her palms.

  He ran toward them.

  The dizziness didn’t follow him; he ran fast and fluid, even on the steep slope, and he didn’t break stride until he reached them, lungs burning, and said in a gasp, “Don’t give her any money.”

  They all looked up. Two of them in surprise; his mother with calm acknowledgement. She clearly expected this was just a variation on the routine. Instead of his standard racist taunt, he was opening with some description of her as a beggar. She looked almost proud to see him improvising.

  He said, “She’s not real. She’s not like them.” He pointed at the group of Crow who were descending from the wheel.

  His mother said, “Child, these people are grieving. Please find your family and leave us in peace. Do not bother the spirits that—”

  “You are my family,” Markus said. He turned to the sunburned man. “That’s my mother. She’s not an Indian. She’s a white woman from Billings, and she dresses up like that to take money from people like you. Don’t give her any.”

  Neither the husband nor wife had spoken. They were both staring at him, stunned. Markus said, “Ask her to say a single Nez Perce name. One that’s not Chief Joseph, at least. Go on, ask her. She doesn’t know any of them. I know more about them than she does.”

  The woman withdrew her hands stiffly. She looked from Markus to his mother and said, “I was telling you about my child. About my baby.”

  His mother turned to him, and he was expecting anger, or perhaps even a denial as she tried to stick with her lie, but all she said was, “Markus, I can help them, you know. It’s not all a lie.”

  “Trust me,” Markus told the sunburned man, “it is all a lie.”

  The Crow contingent was close enough to hear now, and they were speaking among themselves in soft voices. Markus couldn’t look in their direction.

  “She shouldn’t be here,” he said. His voice broke and he was close to tears. “This place is real, and she isn’t. She shouldn’t dress up like that in a place like this.”

  Someone broke free from the group of Crow onlookers and walked toward them with a brisk stride. When Markus looked up he realized it wasn’t one of their group, at all. It was the ranger, and he had a radio at his lips.

  Markus’s mother’s voice was gentle when she said, “This is going to be a problem, son. We’ve all got active warrants. You know that.”

  The first adult to call Markus “Mark” was his foster father, a rancher with faraway eyes who opened his home after the trouble at Medicine Wheel. In exchange, he was paid a stipend by the state to host his troubled ward.

  “Sixty days ain’t so long,” he told Markus during his first dinner at the house. “We’ll figure each other out. It’s a nice place here and we’ll take good care of you so long as you respect us, and respect the property. You think you can do that, Mark?”

  Markus looked at the rancher’s wife, Beth, an overweight woman with gray hair and a wide face, and said, “Isn’t there any way I can get my dog back, at least?”

  The rancher answered for her. “That’s none of our business, Mark. That’s all for the state to figure out. But we got plenty of animals around here for you.”

  That was the truth. Markus spent most of his day with animals. There were eggs to be collected in the morning, a solitary milk cow to be milked, and countless head of beef cattle. The rancher worked him hard, but not in a cruel way, or even an unkind way. They were both kind to him, in fact, but he could feel them circling like wolves when they asked questions about his family that were disguised as casual, and so he let a full week pass before he asked if they could take him to the bookstore in Powell.

  “We can take you to the library,” the rancher said after a measured pause. “Books are free there.”

  “I know it. But the one in Powell…they’ve got the books by my favorite writers. A big old stack of paperbacks. They aren’t expensive. I’ll earn it back. Whatever it costs, I’ll earn it.”

  “What kind of books are these?”

  “Westerns, mostly.”

  Beth frowned. “Shooting and sex is what he means.”

  “They aren’t like that. They’re real good stories. There’s good stuff in there, good lessons, like remembering honor and being true to your word and your…”

  He stopped before he said family.

  The last time he’d seen his uncles they were in the blue Ford, headed west, after he’d waved them away. The rangers had his mother’s identity by then, and there was no way she was going anywhere but jail. Markus didn’t think his uncles needed to end the night in the same place. Truthfully, he also hadn’t wanted to face them. At that point they’d been clueless, unaware of what had happened at the summit of Medicine Wheel, when Markus had committed the only sin his family considered unpardonable and turned on one of his own.

  Gotta remember your sense of honor, just like the men in those books. You gotta have a plan, and you gotta take care of the people you ride with. And your family.

  When he thought about his betrayal, he wondered if it had been bad enough that his Uncle Larry wouldn’t even have followed through on the plan. Maybe they wouldn’t want to see him again, after what he’d done.

  He wished his mother had been angry. It would have been easier then. He’d expected outrage but he’d received none, and now he found himself wishing that there had been some, just to relieve his guilt.

  “It won’t hurt the boy to read a western,” the rancher said, and Markus thought of his uncle’s prediction that everyone thought a kid should read. A smart choice. Larry saw the horizon awfully well, it seemed.

  The next day they took him into Powell, and when they saw that the bookstore was part of a pawnshop they nearly refused, but he assured them he never looked at anything in there except the books in the back.

  That wasn’t true, as he usually enjoyed browsing the entirety of the odd collection, particularly the knives, but he didn’t think it was wise to mention that.

  Instead, he went straight back to the old bookcases, and though it was cool in the old brick building that had once been a company store for miners, he was sweating and his heart was thumping as he scanned the yellowed, dusty paperbacks—Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour, Terry C. Johnston, Loren D. Estleman, Elmore Leonard….

  He felt his breath catch when he ran out of titles and hadn’t come across George Ranger Johnson. This was the price of his choice, he thought. You betrayed your family, and your family moved on without you. He’d known this and still—

  “Isn’t this the one you was talkin’ about?” the rancher said, and pointed to a stack on the floor, waiting to be shelved.

  George Ranger Johnson.

  “That’s him,” Markus said, and it came out nearly a whisper. He knelt and thumbed through the stack and recognized each one. He didn’t dare look for a note in front of the rancher and his wife, so he just gathered the whole stack and said, “I promise I’ll earn the money.”

  The rancher’s wife looked at the cover with her lips set in a thin line and said, “Looks like sex and shooting to me.”

  “Then let’s be glad he’s only reading about it and not doing it,” the rancher said, and he took the stack of paperbacks to the counter and paid for them.

  The gratitude Markus showered on him was sincere, but something about that felt wrong. It wasn’t so different from what his mother did, was it? He was running a con, even if it didn’t hurt anyone.

  He checked the books on the ride home, when he was confident that nobody was watching him. There was a note in each book, and each bore the
same message, written in Larry’s block printing.

  IF YOU’RE DRIVING A HOT EIGHT, THEN YOU’VE GOT A DATE IN SILVER GATE.

  That was the stronghold! That was where they’d gone to hide, and they’d picked the perfect town for it, Silver Gate, Montana, was high up in the Beartooth Mountains with only one road in and out. The town was built up beside Amphitheater Mountain, a great towering bowl of rock that seemed designed to guard your back. And once you left the road and got up into the Beartooths, why, you were as good as gone.

  Now he knew where they were. It was just a matter of figuring out how to join them. Silver Gate was not walking distance, not by a long shot.

  That night, after dinner, when Markus joined the rancher and his wife out on the porch, as was their custom at sunset, he looked to the northwest where the peaks were just barely visible.

  “Silver Gate’s up that way, isn’t it?” he said.

  “Silver Gate, Montana? Why, that’s right outside of Yellowstone.”

  The rancher said this as if it altered Markus’s statement.

  “Right.” He pointed northwest. “Up there.”

  Beth smiled. “It’s an awful long way off, Mark.”

  He realized then that they didn’t think he could find his way to Silver Gate if given the chance. He supposed that made some sense. Most 13-year-old kids didn’t have much understanding of a map. Most of them hadn’t spent endless hours in a truck with road atlas at hand, calling out directions, either. He didn’t push the subject, though, just watched the sun settle, picturing the way the top of Mount Republic would glow at this time of day, and how the bowl of Amphitheater would hold the slanted light.

  It would take some planning to get all the way up there. A hot eight, as Larry had termed it, was a stolen car. Markus knew how to drive, but he couldn’t bring himself to consider stealing the rancher’s truck.

  “Say,” he ventured cautiously, “what’s that old car under the tarp in the pole barn?”

  The rancher laughed softly, and Beth closed her eyes and shook her head as if Markus had mentioned a nest of rattlesnakes out in the barn instead of a car.