The Protector Forbidden by Blood

Mackenzie

The truck idles at the curb outside Great Falls International, black on black, mud to the wheel wells, the bull's skull beneath the lettering stenciled in white.

The name on the truck door says BLACKWATER RANCH.

Of course it's black. You do not build a name on other men's graves and then drive something cheerful.

And you do not send a man ninety minutes each way to fetch a federal agent unless you want her to understand, from the first mile, that there is no arriving in this county without the family knowing the hour.

I think about a coffin.

Not a figure of speech. An actual coffin, pine and cheap, the kind a county buries a man in when the family that put him in the ground has already paid the sheriff not to look too hard.

I grew up with the photograph of one, kept in my father's desk drawer and then in a box in the garage. Then it became mine along with everything else he'd spent thirty-five years and two wives failing to let go of.

The glare off the snow put me in my sunglasses before I cleared the terminal doors, and I'm glad of them now, standing at the curb with a whole county's worth of light coming off that black paint.

"You Agent Tatum?"

The window is down. I didn't see it come down.

I read the file on the flight. Read it for the ninth time, if I'm honest, which I try to be about most things and have entirely given up being about this one.

Five months. I requested this posting in September and wasn't handed it until February.

I put the delay down to budget season, Montana, and the fact that nobody cares about financial crimes in a county of four thousand people.

Put it where you put the thing you don't want to look at directly, in the drawer, under the photograph.

"That's right," I say.

"Get in. Gideon sent me."

Gideon. The king himself, extending a courtesy.

A ninety-minute ride in a February that has the roads glazed and the light going amber at three in the afternoon, a courtesy that puts me in a Blackwater vehicle for the entire distance between the airport and the only motel in Rimrock.

How thoughtful. How exactly like a family that wants to know precisely where I am, from the first hour, before I've so much as found the room.

I think about refusing the ride, the same doomed impulse as not scratching a bite. Then I open the door, because the alternative is standing in a wind that comes straight down off the Continental Divide with nothing to slow it but me.

And also because I want to see one of them up close.

The cab is dim after two hours of snow glare. I take the sunglasses off and hook them in my collar, and that's the first mistake, because now there's nothing between my eyes and him.

I got the biggest one.

That's my first thought, wholly involuntary, and I resent it on arrival.

The cab of the F-350 is not a small space, but he makes it one.

He’s folded behind the wheel the way tall men fold, knees wide, one wrist draped over the top of it.

I'm five-ten and I've spent my life being the tallest woman in the room; I know the math of a body that has to negotiate the world.

He has it worse. He has it, I think, like a loaded thing has weight.

I catalogue him because I can't not. It's the job, and it's older than the job.

Under the black hat his hair is long, shoulder-length and straight and true black, worn down and tucked behind the ear I can see.

His mother's hair. A line in his blood older than the whole ugly ranch.

A jaw that hasn't been shaved and doesn't plan to apologize for it.

And down the inside of his right forearm, where the sheepskin sleeve has ridden up on the wheel, there is a scar: old, white, the clean straight kind that doesn't come from ranch work, because ranch work tears. That one was cut.

I catalogue that too, and move on to the next thing before I can ask myself why a scar on a stranger's arm should make my stomach drop at all.

The earring makes no sense whatsoever. A small dark hoop, high in that right ear, nothing about it fitting the man attached to it.

Nothing in the file, which gave me only Holt Blackwater, 29, honorable discharge, Army, no priors, nothing on record.

A man so absent from the paper trail that the absence is the loudest fact about him.

He pulls out and drives the way he sits.

Economical, both hands available, a stillness to him that is not calm.

I watch his eyes go to the mirror. Then, thirty seconds later, again.

Then again. Not the nervous flick of a man watching for a tail.

It’s the slow, complete rotation of a man who decided, once, somewhere, that the mirror is where the bullet comes from, and has never once since been persuaded otherwise.

Somewhere in the third or fourth rotation his eyes cross mine instead of the mirror, just for a second, just long enough for me to understand he's clocked me watching him watch the road. I look away first. I never look away first.

Nobody drives like that in Montana. Nobody drives like that anywhere I've been except the two agents I know who came to the Bureau out of somewhere worse, and neither of them talks about it, and neither ever, ever stops.

He's the one they use, I think. I don't know it. I'd bet the pension on it.

"Riverview Motel," I say, when the silence has gone on long enough to become a thing he's doing on purpose. "It's on the east side of town, if you don't..."

"I know where it is."

Five words. He does not offer a sixth.

The heater ticks. I turn toward the window so I won't have to find something to do with my hands.

For a long time there is only I-15 running north and the white country falling away on both sides, flat, then the first low roll of foothills that lie about what they're building toward.

Because off to the west stands the Rocky Mountain Front, and the Front does not rise the way mountains are supposed to, in polite stages.

It stands straight up out of the plains: a ridgeline of granite ten thousand feet high, snow-loaded, blue-shadowed, the east faces catching the low February sun and giving none of it back.

Beautiful is too small a word, and too safe. It is the most stunning and most indifferent thing I have ever driven toward.

I've spent my whole life being told one of those peaks killed my grandfather.

I press two fingers to the cold glass without meaning to, as if to prove it's real. Then I catch him not watching the mirror for once, watching me watch the mountain, and I put my hand back in my lap like I've been caught at something worse.

He takes the Highway 89 exit and swings us west and then north, up the spine of the Front.

The wall runs along the left side of the truck, granite and timber and the dark line of the Flathead forest climbing into it, while ahead the country rises toward Glacier and the reservation line, everything getting bigger and colder and less interested in me the farther we go.

The last ranches before town slide by behind their gates, every gate a name. I read them like street signs.

Somewhere out past all of them is a mountain I can't see from here and have hated my entire life.

I try once more, because it's the job to try and because I want to watch his face when I do it.

"You knew I was coming. Down to the flight number, I'd bet. That's a lot of trouble for a man who supposedly doesn't work for the family that owns this truck."

A muscle goes at the hinge of his jaw and is gone before I can be sure I didn't invent it. First real thing I've gotten out of him, and I enjoy it more than the job allows.

"Gideon sent me," he says again, which is not an answer, and is.

"You always say that when you don't want to answer a question, or just when it's me?"

He doesn't look over. "Haven't decided yet."

Three words that time, and I count them the way I count everything about him. I hate that some small, ugly part of me is already looking forward to whatever he says next.

That's the whole ride. Ninety minutes, and he gives me maybe twenty words for it. Most of them are the same four in different orders, and in that hour and a half I give him back a mental file thicker than the one the Bureau managed in five months.

By the time the truck stops under the RIVERVIEW / VACANCY sign, buzzing its one dead letter, I understand two things I didn't understand on the plane.

The first: the courtesy pickup is not a courtesy. It's a hand laid flat on the table so I'll know the table is theirs.

The second: somewhere in those ninety minutes, I have noticed the exact line of his throat above the sheepskin collar, the one seam of him that isn't armored, and I've noticed it like a threat gets noticed, filed under vulnerability, tactical.

"Thanks for the ride," I say without meaning it, and get out.

He waits. I feel him wait, feel the truck sit there behind me, engine running, while I get my key from the office and fight the door of Room 6. It's frozen shut, iced into the jamb, and I have to put my hip into it before it gives.

Only when I'm inside does the diesel note change, the tires speak against the frozen lot, and the headlights sweep the curtain once and leave.

Making sure I went in.

Making sure I'm where the family can find me at will.

I sit on the edge of a bed that smells of another decade and do not turn on the television.

I take out the folder instead. Jacob Mercer's folder, the foreman's folder, the door that five months of somebody's patience finally cracked open just wide enough to let one accountant through.

Beside it I set the other thing. The thing with no case number because it was never a case: a field notebook, my father's, the cardboard cover gone soft as cloth from thirty-five years of a man's hands.

I don't need to open it. I copied the one page that matters into my own hand years ago, the way you learn a prayer you don't believe.

Blackwater knows. Meeting refused. They'll bury this like they buried '41.

My grandfather wrote that in the last week of his life, then went up the mountain to survey a section line for a family that didn't want it surveyed.

The mountain killed him.

Exposure, the county said, a careless old man caught out in weather, ruled and filed and buried in pine.

In the box in the garage is one page of a coroner's supplement naming the last man known to have spoken to Caleb Tatum before he walked up into the snow.

The name was Blackwater.

Outside, thirty miles north up a county road I haven't driven yet, a black truck is turning in under a gate with the family's name on it, ten miles past the Sullivan land, onto Blackwater ground running back into the foothills toward the peaks.

I think about the man driving it, the scar, the mirror, the throat above the collar.

I think, with the clean cold certainty of a woman who has already decided:

I am going to take this family apart.

They have already assigned me the one who takes things apart for a living.

I turn off the light.