Justice

Table of Contents

 

 

 

Also by Larry Watson

novels

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

poetry

 

W
HEN Tommy Salter, Lester Hoenig, and the Hayden brothers left Bentrock, Montana, at dawn, only a gentle snow—flakes fat as bits of white cloth—fell from the November sky. But the spaces between those flakes filled in fast, and soon it became impossible to see more than fifty yards down the highway. Where the road dipped or was sheltered from the wind, snow lay so thick on the road that the bottom of the Model T, even with its high clearance, scraped the tops of drifts.

“We get high-centered,” Tommy Salter said from the backseat, “we're done for. We ain't going nowhere.”

Frank Hayden, the driver, said, “We're all right.” He tightened his grip on the steering wheel and kept the car aimed for the tracks made by the last car that had passed that way.

“You bring a shovel?” Lester asked.

Frank glanced quickly at his brother then shook his head.

Wesley Hayden tilted his head until it rested against the window's icy glass. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the car's slow, wobbly motion down the highway. God
damn
, he had wanted so badly for this trip to go well. Next fall, Frank, two years older than Wesley, would be in college,
seven hundred miles away at the University of Minnesota. This could be the last time the brothers took this trip together for years. For years? Wesley reconsidered. This could be the last time. Ever.

“Anyone want to turn around? Go back?” Frank asked.

Tommy laughed. “Where the hell you going to turn around?”

“It could let up,” Lester offered. “Down the road. I guess I'm for pushing on.”

Wesley kept his eyes closed. “It isn't going to let up.”

“You know that, do you?” Frank asked his brother.

“You know it too,” Wesley answered.

“We ain't going to freeze to death anyway,” said Tommy.

Wesley knew Tommy was referring to the three bottles of bootleg whiskey, purchased for them by Dale Paris, a hired hand on the Hayden ranch.

“What's the nearest town?” Frank asked.

Lester asked, “Are we in North Dakota?”

“We've been in North Dakota since breakfast,” Tommy answered.

“You know damn well the closest town,” Wesley said to his brother. “McCoy.”

Frank nodded. “If it doesn't let up I'm thinking we'll head for McCoy. That's got to be less than fifty miles.”

The plan had been to leave their home in northeast Montana, cross over into North Dakota, and head south. Eventually they would set up camp on the banks of the Little Missouri and from there hunt the red rocky bluffs, the dark wooded draws, and the sagebrush flats of the Dakota
Badlands. They had hunted that region for years, and just last year they returned with four deer and over fifty pheasant and partridge. Lester had even shot a coyote. Of course last year the weather had been much different—three days of sunshine and uncommonly warm temperatures.

“I don't hear you,” Frank said, cupping his ear to the group.

“What's in McCoy?” asked Lester. “Anything?”

Tommy laughed. “It's right off the reservation. You know what's in McCoy.”

Lester looked down the road. “It sure as hell ain't letting up.”

“What about you?” Frank asked Wesley.

“Do what you want. You don't need my permission.” When they were first planning this trip, Wesley had hoped that he and his brother would go alone. But Frank invited friends, and now Wesley not only had to share his brother, but since Lester and Tommy were Frank's age, Wesley was stuck being the youngest as well. He was the little brother; he didn't have any influence with this group. Hell, Wesley had hoped they'd actually hunt. Just hunt. But this snow covered that hope too.

Frank said to Wesley, “I'm not taking anyone where they don't want to go. If you don't want to go to McCoy, say the word.”

“I'll camp out in the snow,” Lester said. “Don't bother me.”

“Go to McCoy,” Wesley said to his brother. “Fuck if I care.

Frank took his hand from the steering wheel and slapped
his brother gently on the arm. “Hey—it's outside the jurisdiction, right?”

Outside the jurisdiction.
How many times had Wesley heard his brother use that phrase? They were the sons of Julian Hayden, the sheriff of Mercer County, Montana, and that fact made Frank's and Wesley's lives both easier and more difficult. They grew up knowing that if they ever got into trouble, their father, proud and protective of his sons, would bail them out. Yet knowing this, they felt they had to behave so it wouldn't seem as though they were taking advantage of their father's position. Only when they got out of town, out of the county, out of the jurisdiction, did they feel as though they could be other than the sons of Julian Hayden.

“Where we going to stay?” Lester asked. “I don't mind sleeping in the car if we can find someplace to park it out of the wind. Shit, I'll sleep in the tent for that matter.”

“We'll get a room at the hotel,” said Frank.

“They got a hotel?” asked Lester.

“Hotel or a boardinghouse. I forget which.”

“It's a hotel,” Tommy said. “I think.”

“You think they'll give us a room?” Lester asked.

“Hell, yes,” Frank replied. “Why not? If we can pay they'll give us a room.”

Wesley understood that Lester's true concern was over money. A good many families in Mercer County were poor, but the Hoenigs were worse off than most. Their family was large (Wesley could never keep track——were there nine or ten kids?), and whether it was the land it sat on or Mr. Hoenig's incompetence Wesley never knew for sure, but their farm, year
in and year out, was one of the least productive in the area. Lester tried to cover their poverty by pretending not to care about what other boys cared about—new shotguns or rifles, cars, horses, pretty girls, baseball gloves. Frank and Wesley's mother had stopped giving Frank's hand-me-downs to Wesley; instead she had Frank give them to the shorter, slighter Lester.

“Me and Frank will pay for the room,” Wesley offered.

“You sure?” Lester said.

Frank picked up on his brother's suggestion. “The trip's our idea. Hell, McCoy's my idea. It's only fair.”

“Okay by me,” agreed Tommy.

“I still wonder if they'll give us a room,” worried Lester.

“Frank's right,” Tommy said. “If we got the money, we're in. That's McCoy.”

Frank shook his head. “Pop says it's not as wide open as it used to be.”

“That's not what you said last summer,” Tommy replied.

“What?” Lester asked. “What about last summer?”

“We had a baseball tournament over there,” Tommy said.

Wesley interrupted. “It's hardly even cattle country around there now. Fucking wheat farmers.”

“Where were you?” Frank asked Lester. “How come you didn't play?”

“Working,” Lester answered. “We was bringing in a crop of hay. Trying to. What there was.” He turned back to Tommy. “What happened in McCoy?”

Tommy leaned toward Frank. “You want me to tell him?”

Frank shrugged.

“How long has it been since we saw another car?” Wesley asked.

“You never see anybody on this road,” Frank said. “Even when the weather's good.”

“You wonder why they put the money in a road nobody uses,” Wesley said.

Tommy tapped his fingers over his mouth in an imitation war chant. “Woo-woo-woo-woo! You didn't hear? Frank got himself a little Indian gal in McCoy last summer. Got her good.”

Tommy had stolen a box of cigars from Douglas's Rexall before they left, and he and Lester had been smoking since they drove out of town. The car was drafty, but cigar smoke still gathered so thickly in the backseat that when Wesley turned around it looked as though Tommy and Lester sat in their own little blizzard. Ahead or behind, Wesley thought, you can't see a goddamn thing.

Lester leaned toward Frank. “Did you force her? Did you have to force her?”

Frank's laugh sounded like a bark in the car's close quarters. “Where did you get an idea like that? Force her. Such language. You read that somewhere?”

Tommy was laughing too. “Shit, she followed him around with her skirt over her head practically. She let him fuck her right by the ball field. In somebody's truck, wasn't it?”

“How come I never heard about this?” asked Lester.

Wesley wiped his nose on the back of his glove. “You should've. Seemed like everybody in the whole school knew about it.”

“Even Loretta?” asked Lester. Loretta was Loretta Gerber, the girl with whom Frank was supposed to be going steady.

Frank's laughter stopped. “She better not. If Loretta found out, I'd know someone was telling tales out of school. Someone would get his ass whipped.”

“Hey, she ain't going to hear anything from me,” said Tommy. “But it's hard to keep a secret in Bentrock.”

Frank's smile returned. “I don't know about that.”

Wesley turned away from his brother and waited. He thought he knew what would come next.

Frank said, “You haven't got the facts quite right.”

Wesley recognized those words as the same ones that came often from their father's mouth. When asked about a crime in the county, their father loved to let people speculate on the incident and then to correct them, smiling slyly, with the phrase, “You haven't got the facts quite right.”

“I'm surprised at you, Tommy,” said Frank. “What with you being there and all. I didn't fuck that little Indian girl.”