On the far side of the freeway, under the lights up ahead, she saw gas pumps and a twenty-four-hour gambling and guzzling establishment that could have been the scene of the musical crime she’d just relished:

  The Ten Thousand Silver Dollar Saloon

  “Saint Willie, guide me,” Risa prayed, and took the exit.

  Giving the saloon-casino a miss, she pulled up to the pumps, took in the rough old pickups parked everywhere, and made a mental note to stop by a rental car agency to filch stickers that claimed the Crimson Exploiter belonged to Alamo or Hertz. She filled up, washed the windshield, strolled into the convenience store, used the restroom, washed her face. When she came back out, the clerk at the counter, a smoked-and-honey-cured-looking bouffant blonde, said, “You’re up with the coyotes, hon.”

  Copying the blonde’s patois in accord with Saint Willie’s guidance, Risa said, “You too, hon. Hey, I got an odd request for ya. I need three bags; two brown paper, one plastic. Nothin’ but the bags, please.”

  “Listen, hon,” the gal said as she handed them over. “In Montana that don’t qualify as one bit odd.” She eyed the dollar Risa offered. “But that does. You keep that, hon.”

  Feeling a little wash of affection, Risa bought Dentyne with the buck, thanked the woman, and headed out the door.

  Back in the Exploiter, she placed one paper bag inside the other, then both inside the plastic. Grabbing the urn, she removed the lid and tried to be invincibly matter-of-fact as she began pouring Dave’s ashes into the bags. The remains were pouring in smoothly and Risa was doing okay—when a parade of unexpected bone fragments clattered down like smashed chess pieces, raising a cloud of Dave-dust that spun in the still air of the Exploiter, refusing to settle. Inside that galaxy of dead fatherness, Risa felt paralyzed.

  “Fight it!” she ordered herself. Shaking the remaining bones and ashes abruptly into the bags, she waved aside the Dave galaxy, rolled the bags shut, throttled the urn like a neck, slammed on the lid, kicked open her door, stomped over to the convenience store trash can, shoved the urn in through the swing top, and relished the bang of it hitting bottom.

  Inside, the bouffant blonde looked up, startled. Risa waved and mouthed, “Sorry!”

  The blonde’s return wave and worn smile were right out of a Saint Willie tune.

  As Risa stepped up to the Exploiter she noticed its crimson growing more scarlet. Turning in a semicircle, she found the source: on ridges high above the Clark Fork Valley, the tips of a thousand night-darkened larches had turned gold thanks to an unseen but rising sun.

  Just that fast the day took on the bruised beauty of a Dobro solo.

  “One last time,” Risa whispered as she belted the bagged ashes back into the passenger seat. “Fuck mauve. Before this adventure’s over you’ll merge with the colors that created you. No others needed. Colors you loved all your life. No others.”

  Firing up the Exploiter, she turned, reasonably and prudently, back onto the freeway, and east into the sere palette of Montana.

  XIII. Becoming Pope

  (Elkmoon Valley, Montana, 1997)

  Consider the obvious! I did!

  —C. G. Jung (to Alice O. Howell, in a dream)

  ON A SWELTERING July day the same year Risa later arrived in Montana, on the 22,000-acre holding known as Valley Land & Beef Incorporated, three Black Angus cows—healthy calf producers, all—mired themselves in the quick-mud of a spring-fed pond at dusk. This brought the number of cattle trapped in the same pond to fourteen in five years. Ranch foreman Kale Broussard had long since left a water trough a safe fifty yards from the quick-mud, but in hot weather cattle prefer to stand belly deep in mire, cooling as they sip. The habit reminded Kale of his lifelong dance with whiskey, giving him sympathy for the beasts. When he learned it was the daughter of his new hand, Eddie Dominguez, who’d discovered the mired cattle, though, it spooked him. The pond was a quarter mile from the nearest ranch buildings and twice that far from Eddie’s Airstream. Kale had seen cow moose with calves at that pond, bear and cougar tracks circling the mud shoreline, stripped deer carcasses in the surrounding willows. Dusk, for predators, is suppertime. A solitary eight-year-old had no business being there at all, let alone at dusk. He and Eddie would be having a talk pronto.

  With too much office work to break free, Kale rounded up three weary hands and sent them to the pond, reminding them to take waders or hip boots and a come-along.

  Kale’s phone rang three hours later. His 320-pound second in command, Hub Punker, said they’d managed to save one cow by using three ropes, two pulled by horses, a third by the winch on Hub’s pickup. The cow, once freed, Hub said, “plowed off through the willows like a rhino in a shit coat.” The winch strangled the second cow and dragged her out of the pond dead. Hub had Doty Nolan haul that one to town and dump her behind the butcher Don Steadles’s place. Don had agreed to clean and carve the croakers if Land & Beef Inc. would give him half of each. By the time Hub and Eddie reached the third cow she’d writhed herself in up to the neck, and no Doty Nolan meant no winch. Shovel work, and lots of it, was what was needed. Dusk was upon them, the men were spent, but Hub had his thinking cap on: he and Eddie nailed together an arrangement of two-by-fours and worn pickup tires, propping the cow’s head above water. Hub then tranquilized her and they called it a day. Come dawn they figured she’d be miserable but breathing.

  Kale thanked Hub, said he’d meet the crew pondside at 6 a.m. sharp, hung up, and went to bed. Sometime around 3 a.m., however, he woke from a weirdly sexual dream to the far-off sound of bawling, realized what he was hearing, threw on his clothes, grabbed his thirty-thirty and jacklight, and drove an ATV fast, to the pond. A pack of coyotes had light-stepped it over the quick-mud, found they couldn’t reach the cow’s submerged throat, and so began chewing her neatly propped face off, nose, muzzle, brows, ears, and eyes first. They vanished at Kale’s engine noise. The blind and faceless cow had quit bawling, but was nightmarishly gurgling. Leaden with guilt for having failed to think of coyotes, Kale shot her in the temple.

  He drove the ATV home and napped in his clothes. No dreams this time. But it felt like a dream when he and the crew returned to the pond at six to find a cloud of magpies, ravens, and one golden eagle swarming in frustration over the cow’s entirely submerged body, her skull and the top of her spinal column stripped clean, her bloody, emptied eye sockets staring at the sky. The coyotes had returned, eaten everything the two-by-fours and tires propped above water, and vamoosed.

  “Cool opening shot for a Western,” remarked the unflappable Eddie.

  By laying out plywood sheets, Doty Nolan and Eddie managed to get a rope around enough carcass that Hub could winch the faceless cow, then the two cowboys, out of the goop. They looked like Mud Men of New Guinea when they emerged, but no one laughed, knowing next time it was their turn. The carcass looked so violated that rather than haul it to Don Steadles’s, Kale fetched the backhoe, buried the cow deep, and had the men cover her with staked-down hog wire and a gob of big rocks so bears couldn’t dig her back up. He then gave the boys the morning off, donned clean clothes, climbed in his white Ford F-250, and headed for his least favorite building in Elkmoon City and all the valley, whacked fundie churches, H&R Block office, and morgue included: the Grand Lodge on the Elkmoon.

  GRAND LODGE. THE name pretty well said it. Seven hundred of the biggest, most beautiful ponderosa pines left in Montana converted, to the tune of fifteen million bucks, into a three-story log palace for men of commerce with outdoorsy pretensions, then named as if the KKK skulked inside—and perhaps it did.

  Valley Land & Beef Inc. was a small subsidiary of, and tax shelter for, the international banking Goliath, NorBanCo, for whom and by whom the lodge had been built. The man who’d christened the Grand Lodge, Charles Keynes Schiller III, also owned a name that pretty well said it. Schiller was a Dallas born, country-club raised, Exeter Academy and Yale educated blueblood who’d spent a decade corporate climbing in Chicago and Atlanta while answering to the name C. K. Schiller. But when his overlords sent him to Montana to mastermind the development of their 22,000-acre holding, C. K. exhumed a nickname he’d been given by Exeter classmates who hadn’t understood that Dallas country clubs aren’t exactly the cowboying portion of the Lone Star State: “Tex.”

  The moniker worked no wonders: Tex Schiller turned out to know exactly as much about cattle ranching as Kale Broussard knew about corporate climbing. Kale’s first impression of Schiller had felt a little random: Parisian concierge lost in cattle country. The intuition turned out to be prescient. Tex’s strong suit was hiring as many “service people” as needed to keep the Grand Lodge grounds looking like a PGA country club, the massive draped window treatments spotless, and the Charlie Russell knockoffs, Ahab Gilhooley glass gewgaws, two-hundred-thousand-dollar ninety-seven-key Bösendorfer grand piano, elk-horn chandeliers, indoor and outdoor bars, and twenty suites in immaculate condition. He also kept the restaurant’s cuisine at the four-star level no matter how many psychotic chefs he had to import from Europe. The “Concierge” had corporate sportsmen to impress, his efforts did impress, and none of this would have bothered Kale at all were it not for one small detail: the Concierge was also in charge of the 22,000 acres surrounding the lodge, including Foreman Kale Broussard, his cattle, and his cowboys. When disagreements arose, Tex was very fond of saying, “I’m NorBanCo’s man on the ground in Montana. You’re my foreman, Broussard, not your cows’. End of story.”

  But Kale was living a very different story. When he was a boy, eight families, his own included, owned adjoining family ranches on those same 22,000 acres. An Elkmoon Valley Bank president, Becker Brandt by name, then began snapping those ranches up. Beck had a vulture’s nose for families in distress and his banking work provided great intel. He purchased three spreads from widows of World War Two victims, two from aging couples with no offspring, one from a family ready to try city life, and one from a family whose only child drowned in Elkmoon River runoff. Kale’s meagre 2,000 acres were located in the very center of Becker’s otherwise contiguous 20,000 acres. Naturally Becker came calling. Kale told him he’d best get used to being neighbors, because Kale would never sell. Then the medical bills from Kale’s mother’s cancer death and his father’s dementia cleaned him out, Beck descended upon Kale again, and after brutal negotiation Kale was left with the 20 acres surrounding his family home and barn, and 100 acres atop Schoolhouse Bluff, named for the century-old one-room Testament Creek School Kale mothballed but continued to maintain. Becker had been Kale’s classmate at that school. His refusal as a banker to assist ranchers who’d formerly been neighbors, the better to predate their land, made him the first person Kale had ever fantasized about killing—so Kale felt a little guilty when Becker was killed, in a drunken water-skiing accident.

  The twist Kale didn’t see coming as a result of that death: Elkmoon Valley Bank and its holdings were then swallowed like an after-dinner mint by NorBanCo. Overnight the ranches and wilds that had been the scene of Kale’s entire life became a high-end development scheme under Tex Schiller’s governance. Tex then hired Kale as ranch foreman, not in admiration of his ranching skills but because of steely orders from Corporate to not let Broussard out of sight until NorBanCo acquired his two inholdings. Schiller’s determination to acquire Kale’s land was total, so he was not pleased the day Kale’s lifelong friend, Lou Roy Skinner, told him, “Tell you what, Tex. You wanna buy something from Kale he might actually sell, you gotta better chance makin’ an offer on his arms and legs.”

  The Concierge’s stewardship of the lands Kale loved then left him feeling as though he had sold off his arms and legs. The number of cattle Tex forced him to run was based on grazing data gathered before the invasion of noxious weeds and droughts caused by climate breakdown. The budget Tex granted for road and fence maintenance, weed control, irrigation gear, vehicles, and other necessities was a consistent one-fourth of what was needed. The budget for working horses, which the steeper gulches and Testament Creek Canyon demanded, was nonexistent. “Use the ATVs I pay for!” Tex would bark, though he paid for nothing and was speaking of terrain so precipitous his ATV advice was a cowboy death warrant. Money for maintaining the sound but aging buildings left by departed ranch families was nonexistent, but created a look of desolation that a visiting NorBanCo CEO had found “charmingly forlorn,” so decay was allowed to continue until the buildings collapsed. Cashing in on even this crumbling, Tex committed a literary crime against one of Kale’s favorite writers, Annie Proulx, by renaming NorBanCo’s impending recreational citadel the Brokeback Ranch & Country Club, leaving the tumbledown family ranch ruins standing to make sense of the name. Typical of NorBanCo’s fortunes, and Kale’s too, Tex’s rip-off name was then met with rumors that Proulx’s New Yorker yarn “Brokeback Mountain” would soon be a full-fledged Hollywood motion picture, enhancing his development’s cachet.

  It did nothing for Kale’s mood that Tex earned ten times what Kale did, or that every half-cracked Euro-chef Tex “yarded across the pond,” as he put it, made more than all five of Kale’s cowboys combined. But the protocol by which Kale could express his grievances was classic mega-corporate: he could talk his troubles over with Jesus, or he could go fuck himself. Last time Kale checked, NorBanCo was the third largest investment firm in the world: $88 billion in assets in two dozen countries, office towers in nineteen cities including Tokyo, Copenhagen, Paris, London, Dallas, Singapore, and soon, Tex promised, at the Grand Lodge on the Elkmoon. But it wasn’t as if the Elkmoon was being picked on: NorBanCo owned half a million acres of failed ranches in Montana alone; the acres that were the scene of Kale’s entire life represented just 4.4 percent of their in-state holdings, and Valley Land & Beef Inc. was basically just corporate sleight of hand: NorBanCo’s interest in the Elkmoon holding was the recreational potential and viewsheds that represented the development’s chief value. Until such time as NorBanCo sliced and diced the entirety into ranchettes, mountain bike trails, ski runs, hunting grounds, fishing beats, golf links, and so on, Kale and his “boutique cows and cowboys” (an actual Concierge quote) were there to serve Grand Lodge guests as “colorful but silent features of our bucolic Western Landscape” (another Texism). The fact that boutique cows and cowboys had non-colorful and very audible needs about which Kale was not silent infuriated the Concierge.

  KALE ARRIVED AT the Grand Lodge at 8 a.m. sharp, ordered himself to remain impervious to whatever was about to happen, strode with purpose through the Great Room but, as always, came to a halt before the ten-foot-tall, four-inch-thick door of Tex Schiller’s ground-floor office. It was the half-life-sized bronze head of Chief Sitting Bull door-knock beneath Tex’s name that stopped him. Kale was far too serious a student of Western history to grab that hero by his cheekbones and bash his eagle feathers against a metal plate. He used his fist on the door instead. But he and the Concierge had been over this many times: a hell of a lot of pounding had to go on before Tex deigned to answer, and when he did answer his words were “Oh. Broussard. I thought that feeble thumping was the maid emptying wastebaskets. Next time, use the Chief. That’s what he’s there for.”

  Kale swallowed his desire to give Tex an example of what a “feeble thumping” felt like, but did not accept the proffered chair. Holding his Stetson over his unbreakfasted and grumbling belly, he deployed his most understated tone as he told of the mired cattle. Having once been asked by the Concierge, “What were you thinking, hiring a Mex up in these parts?” Kale left the Dominguez girl out of his account, but did not leave out the fourteen animals mired in five years, or nose, eyeball, and spinal surgery the coyotes had performed on last night’s still-living cow. Without hope, but with firm clarity, he concluded: “For half a decade I’ve asked you every year for funds to fence off that pond. It’s time, Tex.”

  In the eternally offended tone that had won him his nickname, the Concierge huffed. “Cowboy bull hockey rides again. I pay you to contain those animals, not drown them. Why can’t you and your cows be low-maintenance like the elk and deer?”

  Having expected this, Kale managed to flex neither fists nor jaw.

  “Guess what, though,” Tex added. “There’s government funds for this kind of crap now. With wetlands involved, maybe even a stewardship prize. Which would up land value. Which would keep the board off my ass when I’m forced to defend your ass. Research it, Broussard. Target a prize, apply for grants, and fence your swamp. Receipts for every man-hour and expense. All the proper permits. I’ll paint your negligence as a chance for Brokeback’s visionary investors to capitalize on our ‘harmony with nature.’”

  “Thanks,” Kale murmured, with which he turned, strode past Sitting Bull with an expression to match, crossed the parking lot, climbed in his F-250, calmly closed the door—then slammed his left fist down so hard on the armrest he sent a crack shivering down through the entire synthetic door panel. Summoning the default curse he’d been deploying in his lifelong battle against compulsive swearing, he barked, “Lordy!”

  When he got home, Kale called the nearest Ford dealer—a hundred forty gas-guzzling miles distant—asked for the repair costs, and got an eight-hundred-dollar estimate.

  “Lordy!”

  TWO MONTHS LATER, proper permits in hand, Kale popped the Ford into low-range and eased down through the aspens toward Cowkiller Pond. His windows were down and the September air was pellucid, but his cab was claustrophobic in ways that no breeze could clear. Kale was his own unpaid secretary and his traveling office was the back seat of his cab. At the moment, that “office” contained six phone books, a large leather briefcase that could no longer close due to all the paperwork generated by trying to raise cattle under the second-guessing of Tex Schiller, a file bulging with riparian fencing designs and receipts for materials, and a file jammed with regs from federal, state, and county agencies. As the big Ford heaved and jounced down through the aspens to the pond, Kale glanced back to see that both files had opened and swirled their contents together on the floor. “Lordy!”