Walking

The following short story first appeared in Interesting Tales of Other People's Woe, a collection of fiction by Damon Stewart (2014).

For the past two years, I’ve gone looking for my brother Jimmy.

I take a week off from work and fly out to Butte, Montana, then catch a twin prop out to the town of Red Lodge and land on this little dirt strip, hardly big enough for a Volkswagen, much less a plane. From there I take a rental (yes, there’s a fleet of four cars at the airport, and I always rent the same beat-up Ford Ranger).

It’s about another two hours to the trailhead that leads into the Beartooth Mountains. There’s more than one, I’m sure, but I go to the one from where we both set out three years ago. Two years ago—the first anniversary after it happened—I’d hiked for a few days, provisions and tent in my backpack, retracing the steps we took. I took photos of myself and put them on Facebook to let people know I hadn’t given up.

Last year I just walked in a few miles with some lunch in a day pack, and read a book on a ledge that overlooked a small creek. Took only a few photos, didn’t get into details of the trip.

This year I think I’ll just drive out to the trailhead and take a nap in the car. There doesn’t seem much sense in doing anything else. Coming here is enough of a ritual.

My employer—a small plastics recycling company in Albany, NY—doesn’t mind. Not under the circumstances.

“Do whatever you need to do, Dan. However often you need to do it, for as long as you need to do it.” That from my manager, Bill DeWalt. Redundant, but kind. He said that to me when I had first asked for the time off.

“We all hope to God you find him,” Bill added.

I thanked him, tears in my eyes, ridiculous in a way, but the sheer emotion of the moment—I’m not made of stone. Numb, maybe, but even that can be overcome, and the catch in Bill’s voice did it to me, despite everything else.

Then I was walking away, out of Bill’s “office”, a glorified cubicle in a forest of them. I passed the copy and fax machines, staring at the striations in the worn brown carpet as I turned the first corner and stopped to listen to Alice, Bill’s secretary, say, “He can’t possibly be alive. Still? He’s froze to death or starved.”

There was a quick, harsh, “shhh,” from Bill. “Alice. Please. You’re right, but he needs to find the body. For closure. His family needs to end this, they can’t go through their whole lives wondering.”

“Wondering what?” Alice asked, not without a little annoyance in her voice. Clearly, she felt that wondering about anything other than just how dead Jimmy was by now wasted one’s time. Sharp one, that Alice. Not someone I’d like to answer to.

“Wondering if he … I dunno, wandered off somewhere,” Bill said. “Maybe living in Phoenix. Became a security guard in Lima. Whatever, Alice, but people hold onto hope in these situations, even when they know there’s none left.”

“So he needs to stop hoping?” Alice was busting Bill’s balls, and I couldn’t help from smiling.

“I don’t know. Did you get the mail yet?” Bill asked.

I got moving before Alice could see me lurking. It feels like I’ve been moving ever since.

***

I got the job as a composites engineer for Re-Plastics four years ago. I’d been working for GE in Schenectady, my first gig out of school, but was recruited by a college buddy to Re-Plastics. I moved out of a one-bedroom apartment into a nice little townhouse just off of Lark Street in downtown Albany with my then-girlfriend, now very-ex, Angie.

Angie was an attorney for a small but successful firm that specialized in IT transactions, and between the two of us, we lived pretty well. Dinners out most nights, the tab hardly worth worrying about. New cars (a black Audi for her and a blue Ford Mustang for yours truly), all the right clothes, went to concerts, plays, even squeezed out a vacation in Aruba. And this was just after my first year on the job. Not bad. Not much to worry about.

The trip to Montana with Jimmy came as the result of a Christmas bonus my second year. Very generous. Y’know, most people bitch about their jobs and their pay, but man, it all went well for me. Re-Plastics is a good place to work, good work and good people.

I hadn’t done anything with Jimmy in a while, so in a rush of Christmas spirit asked Angie if she minded if I took Jimmy on a trip, instead of the Vegas weekend that she and I had recently talked about.

“No, not at all,” she said. “Where are you planning to go?”

“I don’t know. We’ve always talked about a real backpacking trip, a week or so. Maybe out West.”

She put her arms around me and kissed me on the forehead.

“Take your brother on a trip. You and I will go to Vegas next year,” she said.

“Sounds like a plan,” I said.

“He’s going to be so excited,” she said.

Excited he was. I called him at our folk’s house the next day. Jimmy was a senior at Siena, living at home in Troy, and itching to do something interesting before he had to use his four years of accounting classes.

“I can hardly wait!” he said, and for a moment I saw in my mind’s eye a young Jimmy, six years old, wanting so bad for Santa to bring him a Transformer for Christmas. When Christmas finally came, he spotted a small box under the tree, in the back next to the wall, wrapped in green paper with black musical notes, and decided it contained Transformers. It was 6:00 am, and we were waiting for Mom and Dad to roust themselves, go through the motions of pretending it was no different than any other morning, raise the level of tension to near explosive force, then suddenly remember that there was something special to do. Dad would say, “Ok fellas, open ‘em up,” and we’d be off.

That morning Jimmy tore into the package, and sure enough, it was a set of Transformers— Defensor, if I remember correctly, and two others. Just what he wanted, and it wasn’t like you hear some people say, possession of the thing is less than the anticipation of it, to own it is to lose it, no, not with Jimmy. He loved them, played with them all the time, shit, that’s why I remember Defensor, because it was in his room on his shelf through high school. He acted like it was ironically funny, but I knew, it still made him happy to have it, even years later.

I was happy for him too, really, I mean, Jimmy was my brother, and I cared about him, and if he was happy, well, part of me was happy too, right? But then …. It’s hard to describe. They tried so hard, my parents, but they never seemed to be able to get the right thing for me. Not fair judging them like that, I know, it’s not like if they asked, “Dan, whatever you want, whatever makes you happy, we’ll get it. Just tell us.” I’d be paralyzed. I wouldn’t fucking know. But they were my parents, it was their job to know. Asking me would be worse, a tacit admission of failure.

They knew they never got anything for me that meant as much as it did for Jimmy. But we never acknowledged it. We just slugged out those Christmases, and soaked up the joy that Jimmy felt when another bullshit toy touched his soul.

“I can hardly wait,” the grown-up Jimmy repeated over the phone, “I hear it’s beautiful out west.”

And I hadn’t even told him where we were going, all I had said was that we were going on a trip, and it was my treat.

We met the following Saturday at our apartment. I had wanted to begin planning over some beers at Tess’s, the bar down the street, but Angie insisted on having him over for dinner.

I’ll never forget that night. I hadn’t seen Jimmy in a while, and I was in a really good mood, what with the job going well, the bonus, Angie. Living with her was a dream come true; I’d loved her from when we were freshman at Oneonta. She turned me down when I asked her out my freshman year; she turned me down again my sophomore year. But at the end of that year, at a party just after the last day of finals, I got a kiss that gave me hope all through the summer. Turned out I didn’t even need to ask my junior year, she asked me out the second day of classes when I ran into her at the student union, and I floated along nicely for years after. There was a time that I was planning on marrying her.

So we’re having dinner, I’m in a good mood, Jimmy’s in a good mood—Jimmy was always in a good mood, he was like that, it was one of the things that people always loved about him, the guy was really, seriously, happy. Not crazy, hyper, annoyingly happy or anything like that, but just generally always smiling and laughing, and always acted like every person he met was the exact person he had been wanting to talk to.

Angie too, she was … vibrant. Laughing, telling stories, listening intently to mine and Jimmy’s. She loved them all, even the ones I told twice. I hadn’t seen her like that in a long time.

After dinner—sushi and ramen bowls from this Japanese place around the corner—we decided to do some shots. Tequila, Angie’s favorite. Jimmy went along for the ride, and pretty soon we were drunk, or “dee runk,” as Jimmy liked to call it. I’d had a long week, and when the room began to tilt a bit, I told them I had to lie down. I got up, stumbled into the bedroom and dozed off.

***

The trip was scheduled for mid-June, so we had six months to plan. Every two or three weeks, we’d meet at this coffee shop on Lark and huddle over a small table figuring out the details.

“Where exactly are we going to go?” he asked at the first meeting.

“I’m thinking about the Beartooth Range, out in Montana,” I said.

“Why there?” he asked.

“It’s about a thousand square miles of wilderness,” I said. “I want to get out there where we are totally alone for a few days. No one else around for miles. “Great,” Jimmy said. “How long do you want to go for?” I asked. “I was thinking of a week.”

“Sounds good to me, Bro.” He laughed, then gently punched me in the arm. “If your tired old ass can handle it that long.”

“You’d be surprised what I can handle,” I said.

We would spend a couple of hours in the cafe, figuring out exactly where we were going, the route we’d take, what supplies we’d need, etc. There was more planning than I had thought.

I ended up making most of the purchases since I had the steady paycheck. By unspoken agreement, Jimmy would end up carrying the slightly heavier load in return.

“You want to invite Angie?” Jimmy asked during one of our meetings.

“I hadn’t thought about it,” I lied, “Do you?”

He got a little red in the face. “No, whatever, of course not. You know. I thought, ah, I thought—”

“—don’t worry about it,” I said, laughing. “She wouldn’t want to go anyway.”

“Right,” he said. “Oh yeah, Mom wants to know if your cellphone will work out there. She wants us to call every day.”

I rolled my eyes. “Afraid that we’ll get eaten by bears? Attacked by savages?”

He chuckled. “Well. You know, she worries.”

I threw down a fiver for the coffee and stood up to leave. “She should,” I said.

***

By spring I had researched and purchased all the equipment we’d need: two internal frame backpacks, a three-season, two-man tent, two summer-weight sleeping bags. Jimmy was on his own for hiking boots, or so I told him at first, but a minute later I threw him $60 bucks and told him to get a pair. “That’s only half,” I said, “you cover the rest and don’t spend anything less than $100.” Cooking supplies, dried food, a water filter, two compasses, two detailed topo maps, a collapsible steel shovel, hiking shorts, shirts, and socks, and a few hundred other “basic” items we needed for a few days walk in the woods.

“I’ll get the weed,” Jimmy said with a wink.

***

“Whatever,” I said. I only smoked occasionally, usually with Jimmy. “I’ll take care of the whiskey.”

“That’s a done deal, Dan,” he said, and slapped my shoulder.

By summer, we had made the flight arrangements and planned the route, a thirty mile trek up to Mystic Lake. I had studied the trails and topography much more than Jimmy, who was relying on me to take care of such details.

I put in a lot of time on the job the weeks before we left. Worked late most nights, didn’t get home until 9 or 10 pm. Angie was usually in bed by then, sleeping off the day’s activities. Sometimes, earlier in the evening, I’d give her a call, but most of the time she didn’t answer. I didn’t usually leave a message, but later, after checking her cellphone, she’d see that I had called and would call back, explaining that she was out shopping, or working out, or doing something.

I didn’t mind. She needed to do what she could with the time she had.

Just like me.

I look back on that time now, and remember the numbness, the preparation. My whole focus was on that trip; there was only the trip and a blank after.

If I knew then how it would feel to come home without him, would I have still done it?

“He really looks up to you, you know,” Angie told me a couple of days before we left. “He’s so happy to be doing this with you.”

“Well, we have always been close, I suppose,” I said. “I look out for him.”

“That’s sweet,” she said, smiling at me.

“And he looks out for me,” I said, and kissed her on the forehead as I walked past her into the den, where I had piled the gear for the trip.

The flight out was bad. My stomach was in knots, and security took forever. I was sweating a bit, and Jimmy was all excited and happy and goofy, and the TSA boys must’ve keyed in on all the odd emotions and gave each of us our own special check over, with a full gutting of our carry-on luggage in addition to having to stand behind a semiprivate curtain for a pat-down, metal wand waving session, and general stern look over, as if one of us might crack and ‘fess up the bomb hidden between our toes.

“Jesus,” Jimmy said as we got away and were able to head to the gate, “I didn’t know they were so … thorough. This ever happen to you before?”

“Yeah, it happens,” I lied. I had flown enough times in the past, and this had never happened before. I sincerely hoped it was not a warning of things to come. It was only as we were walking down the ramp, into the plane itself that I remembered.

“Holy shit,” I whispered, “did you bring the weed?”

“In the backpack,” he whispered back, “packed inside a liquid soap container.”

I paused. “But, um little bro—I don’t like to smoke wet, soapy weed. I don’t care what the buzz is like.”

He rolled his eyes. “Duh. Don’t worry, it’s double bagged in plastic sandwich bags. Don’t worry Dan, it works. It’s an old trick.”

He didn’t get the sarcasm. He never did.

The first leg of the plane flight was eventful. Terrifyingly so. Jimmy thought the whole thing was fun, the fool, he was laughing and shaking his head with every “whump” of the aircraft as it fell fifty feet or so, then smack down hard on a concrete pocket of air. You’d think it was just another amusement ride from the way he acted. Me, I was sweating, nauseous, on the verge of panic, and I just wanted to go home and call the whole thing off. I couldn’t even get a drink, because the flight attendants were buckled in. The bad stuff only lasted an hour of the four hour flight to Butte, but it was one of the longest hours of my life.

Odd, when I think about it now: it was the longest hour of that week, despite all that was to occur later.

After changing planes in Butte, our little Beechcraft hoisted us up and out of the small city and over to Red Lodge within another hour. We landed at noon, central time under a clear sky. The airport was tiny, a crude runway next to a bright red brick building that served as the terminal. We taxied up to one of the terminals and after the usual shuffling around to get our luggage from the overhead compartments and standing in line to get off the plane, we soon found ourselves walking through the back parking lot, looking for our rental.

“Christ, it’s beautiful out,” Jimmy said, staring up at the pale blue heavens.

“Sure is,” I mumbled. I was distracted. The heavily taped bubble wrap had somehow come off my backpack during transit, and I was worried that something had either been stolen or fallen out. I didn’t want to lose some vital gear and climb all the way to the top of some Godforsaken mountain before I realized it was missing.

“There it is,” Jimmy said, pointing to the ten-year-old Ford Ranger. He practically skipped over to it. “Can I drive?”

“Please,” I said. “I’d just as soon check out the scenery. What do we have, an hour’s drive?”

“More like two,” he said as he tossed his pack into the back and held out a hand for mine. “You might want to get some sleep.”

I looked at him, perplexed.

“It’s not like you slept on the plane,” he explained, smiling. “Man, I thought you were going to freak out there for a while.”

“Right,” I said, reaching for the passenger door, “Sounds like a plan to me.”

***

“Yo, big brother,” I heard Jimmy say, and I felt a hand on my arm. “Time to get up, dude. We’re there. Or here. Whatever.”

I lifted my head from the side of the door and blinked. In front of me was a grass and fern-covered slope. The sun was out, and I could hear a bird calling.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Three-thirty,” Jimmy said. “Listen, I thought we’d cook something before we got going. Give us some fuel for the hike.”

“Yeah,” I said. I was starving. I hadn’t eaten that morning, had only a cup of coffee. “Did we bring coffee?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said, and got out of the truck, pulled his pack from the back, and pulled out assorted packages that represented the disassembled contents of our portable kitchen and related provisions.

An hour later, we’d polished off some spaghetti with freeze-dried sauce.

“Not bad,” I said, “It tasted better than I thought it would.”

“How often are we going to be eating freeze-dried stuff?”

I almost said, “Only a night or two,” but caught myself. “Four of the five nights. I have something special planned for the last night.”

“Cool,” he said, and rubbed his hands together. I look back on the moment, at his innocent anticipation of what I was going to bring him, and I almost want to cry.

“Well, let’s clean up and get going,” I said. Meaning: you clean, I’ll look at the map. Jimmy got it, we’re brothers and understand how these things work out. Twenty minutes later, we were slowly picking our way along a lightly traveled trail that headed straight up the mountain.

“We’ll be going up for the next six miles,” I said after a while. I was winded, and wondering how Jimmy was doing.

“Whew,” Jimmy replied.

“It shouldn’t be too bad. According to the map, the trail’s not too steep. Shouldn’t be any worse than this.”

“Good.” He was in decent shape and was several years younger than me to boot. But his back had to be twenty pounds heavier; I lifted it out of the truck myself. I didn’t offer to lighten his load however, a deal was a deal.

We stopped to set up camp about three hours later. We found a place where the trail leveled out, not too far from a stream, and proceeded to pitch the tent and heat up a packet of freeze-dried beef stew. The air was getting chilly, and we sat and stared at the flame, an intense blue, emanating from the burner, too tired to talk. After a few minutes, I pulled out two brand new LL Bean fleece sweatshirts and handed one to Jimmy.

“Cool,” he said, fondling the soft fabric. “Dan, I just want to thank you again.”

“Sure.”

“For everything, man. The whole trip.”

“Hey,” I said. “No big deal. You’re my brother. You’d do it for me, right?

He didn’t reply at first, just stared out into the twilight. “I’d do anything for you, Dan. It’s just....”

“What?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Never mind. You want to start a fire?”

I nodded.

“I’ll look for wood. You get the saw,” he said, and got up and walked over to a stand of trees, stooping every now and then to pick up a dead branch.

We had a collapsible saw in my pack. I pulled it out and set it up, then dug out the matches and some fire paste. I was so tired I could have just crawled into my sleeping bag and gone to sleep right there, but Jimmy would want a fire either way, and I knew that I wouldn’t mind a few minutes of its warmth, a chance to look at the orange and the yellow and the blue, and try to find my place in them.

He returned a few minutes later with an armful of branches. “Here,” he said, dropping them in front of me. “Hey, you didn’t dig a pit.”

“Sorry,” I said. “Look, Jimmy, I’m shot.

“Hey, old man, that’s ok,” he said, and clapped me on the back. “I’m still young and spry. I’ll dig it out. Where’s that shovel?”

“In my pack.” I watched him pull out the short, black foldable shovel.

“I can’t believe you packed this,” he said. “This thing isn’t made for backpacking, it’s for car camping.” He juggled it up and down. “It’s gotta weigh, what, ten pounds? Half steel too, not even aluminum.” He shook his head. “But, I guess it’s going to come in handy now, right?”

“Right,” I said, staring up at the sky.

He dug, and I somehow found the energy to saw up the branches. Soon we were enjoying a small fire under the Montana sky. Just like in the movies.

The next morning, we got off to a reasonable early start, eight-ish, after a breakfast of freeze-dried omelet and gourmet Italian roast coffee.

“Christ, I’m sore already,” I said as I pulled the straps of my pack over my shoulders.

“Yeah,” Jimmy said, which surprised me. I figured my comment would generate some more “old man” remarks, but I saw how carefully he put his own pack on, wincing slightly as the weight settled on his back.

“I have some aspirin,” I said.

“Good to know,” he replied, and started walking up the trail.

I grinned; he wasn’t going to give in that easy. He’d let his arms fall off first. Typical Jimmy. He was always competing with me regardless of whether I was even aware of it. For the life of me, I didn’t know what I’d done to bring that out in him.

A few hours later, we had lunch just off the trail, on a ledge that offered a spectacular view of a small valley. In the distance we could see a bear picking his way through a field, stopping now and then to sniff or paw at the ground. Suddenly he stood up and looked around. He turned our way and held the pose for a moment, and Jimmy waved.

“Hello, Mr. Bear,” he said, and the bear eased back down and continued on his way.

It was amazing, all that open space, and nothing there but a wandering bear. All that room, open to the sun, the empty rustle of wind, no significance, no connection to anything that went on in the larger world, just a place on its own, only to be occasionally observed by hikers who sat and watched an aimless bruin, so far from home.

We hiked for another five and a half hours with only two short breaks.

“What’s the rush?” I had asked him, hours ago, when I wanted to rest, but he didn’t answer and just kept walking. You can run … I thought to myself.

I had let him keep going, made myself follow, one step at a time, focusing only on the ground in front of me. It hurt, but I can deal with pain. Did it before the trip, Lord knows, and did it after, and the Devil knows that part. We humped along that Godforsaken, middle-of-nowhere, lame-ass, hick-stupid country mountain trail for another two hours, my shoulders on fire, my knees ready to unhinge, and overall wishing to just close my eyes and drop, but I didn’t. I followed Jimmy to where he wanted to go.

Finally, at dusk, he stopped. The trail had leveled out, and a cool breeze hushed across the brush and scrub grass.

“Dan, this is perfect,” he said. His voice was distant, like a faint light through the fog, but I got it. It meant I could stop. Take the pack off my back. Lie down. Rest.

But not yet. I had to think. I pulled out my map, the one I had spent many late night hours studying in preparation for the trip. I made a guess as to where we were, then I stared at the ground for another moment. A sigh, and I made my decision.

“Wait,” I said. “Let’s get off the trail a little ways.”

“Why?” He asked.

“I don’t want anyone walking by our site in the morning, waking us up. In case we sleep in.”

“Dan.” Jimmy held his arms out. “Who the hell is going to walk by out here? We are two miles east of Nowhere St. Bumblefuck. There’s nobody here.”

But I had just started walking, straight off the path, through the knee-high grass towards a stand of pines about a hundred yards away.

“This way. Trust me, little brother,” I called over my shoulder. “I read that evergreens keep bugs away. And there will be firewood.” To prove the point, I stooped to pick up a stick and waved it at him. “Fire! Jimmy like! Come on.”

I kept going until I got to the trees. I was in luck, there was a clearing about ten feet in, and I shrugged off my pack and sat down. Jimmy was following, like I knew he would.

“Well, whoop-de-fuckin’-do,” he said when he saw the spot. But then he smiled and said, “Hey, you’re right. This is beautiful.” He took off his pack and did a slow turn. “Dan, you are indeed the man. I love this place.”

Then he was all bouncy, walking around the site, saying things like, “put the tent here,” and “fire pit there” but he faded fast, and within a few minutes we were both sitting on the ground, leaning against our backpacks, sharing the flask of Dewar’s that I had brought.

“Fuck, I’m tired,” he said.

“Me too,” I said.

“I’ll set up the tent. You take it easy.”

“Why are you being so nice?” he asked, all mock suspicion.

“I set up tent, you take care of breakfast.”

“Deal, bro.”

I got up slow, putting a hand to my lower back. I hate to admit it, but I can feel the signs of age, and my lower back is the most prominent reminder of the beginning of a steady deterioration. The fucker just can’t handle what it used to. My knees, too, I can feel them, as the lining of youth that protected the joints wears away. Back, knees, and that evening, everything else. It all hurt.

I pulled the tent out of Jimmy’s pack. It was getting dark, so I took my backpacker’s flashlight out of my pack, strapped it to my head to free my hands, and proceeded to set up the tent. Bone tired and distracted as I was, the task was still easy and within minutes I had it up and ready to go.

I looked over at Jimmy. He had dozed off, his head tilted back on his pack and his mouth open.

Well, I thought to myself, there’s no time like the present. Might as well get it over with. I think other clichés went through my head, as if the banality of my thoughts could counter the specific judgment due of my actions.

I pulled the steel shovel out of my back. I wasn’t in a rush, he was out cold, so I took my time as I pulled the heavy blade upright so that it ran parallel with the shaft, turning the screw at the base tightly so the blade wouldn’t bend when used. I pulled the retractable handle to its full length, then tightened that into position as well.

Then, without any further ado, I stepped around and stood in front of Jimmy, and raised the shovel, ready to hit him so hard his ghost would get a concussion.

These things we do. Evil things, and I am aware of my use of the royal “we”. Anyway, just as I was ready to hit him, he opened his eyes and sat up, the fucker, a tear in the right eye, and he was looking at me like he knew all along what I was going to do. And in that brief instant I wondered if that was why he had been walking so fast, why he’d been so intense. He was hoping that we’d get somewhere, some destination where it would all be ok between us, forgiveness and redemption all around, and we’d walk out as brothers once again, a new beginning in our future and a firm resolve in our hearts, or some shit like that.

Too late Jimbo, I thought, and hit him in the forehead with the shovel. It knocked him back, but it didn’t knock him out like I expected. He fell back on his pack, then sat up again, propped on his elbows, staring at me while blood from the swelling wound on his forehead poured down his face. He had a very specific look, and I’m not talking about any guilty interpretation on my part. Nope, I swear to God, he’d managed to capture a mixture of disbelief and pleading just perfectly. Sort of how he cocked his eyebrows, framed his mouth, and got this special intensity in his eyes.

The blood helped, I suppose.

Fuck pleading. I had a future with Angie. He stole it. The second time I hit him, I did it with feeling, swung hard with my hips, and that shovel blade cracked his skull like the proverbial eggshell, seriously, it felt just like that, a sharp report and a feeling of something giving, and his head walloped down on his backpack, bounced up again, and when he fell back, he was out. Out and Gone. Jimmy’s gone to his fucking reward, I thought, and did the other things I had to do.

Angie. This was for that night in my apartment, six months ago, and no doubt many nights before and after.

When I invited him over for dinner and had too much to drink. I passed out, like I said.

Then I woke up again about twenty minutes later, feeling a little nauseous. Not sure I’d throw up, but I figured I’d better get up, walk around maybe, just be ready in case I had to make a sprint to the bathroom. So I walked out of the bedroom, not all that quietly, I didn’t think, through the kitchen, and into the darkened living room, where Jimmy and Angie were screwing each other’s brains out. It’s odd, the details you absorb. Like, I thought how Angie didn’t moan like that for me. Either he was that good, or she cared enough to fake that hard. Or how, afterwards, just before I crept back into the bedroom, stomach calm and mind cold, I heard her say, “That’s the last time here. At least not when he’s here,” and that last part said in a way to suggest, well, the whole thing might be a bit wrong, but doing it while I was here, well hey—that was really bad.

Then again, she’s a fucking lawyer, and they all can spread evil thinly and shade the layers and call it something else and argue over the particular hue.

They kept it up, of course. Turns out they had a regular Wednesday afternoon gig at some stoner friend of Jimmy’s who lived just down the street from our folks. And those weeks before the trip? Oh, I know they picked up the pace, heaven forbid they go a whole week without their regular fuck. I guess it was good that James got as much of that sort of fun in while he could.

But who am I to judge, right? But I don’t try to shade my evil. It is what it is, baby.

I pulled a towel out of my pack and wrapped it around his head to keep the blood from draining out all over the place. I got his sleeping bag out of his pack, and with a little more effort than I expected, stuffed him inside it. I took a roll of plastic, ostensibly brought as a ground cloth, and wrapped it around the bag and then took some duct tape from my backpack and taped the shit out of it, making the best seal I could.

I sat down next to him and picked up the flask. I nodded at ol’ dead Jim, a toast of sorts, and took another swig. I had some work to do.

I had brought a compass and had spent hours studying a topo map of the area. If I had correctly judged where we were (or, to be technically correct, second son of Robert Cooper Madison and Sandra Lorne Madison, nee’ Richards, into it. Pulled out a baggie of mothballs that I had stuffed into the thigh pocket of my LL Bean outdoorsman pants, and sprinkled them over the body. They might not keep critters away forever, but it couldn’t hurt.

And with no further ceremony I filled the hole, spread the remaining dirt out into the grass as best I could, and trudged back to the camp. Whereupon I crawled into the tent and fell into a very deep and, sorry again, undisturbed sleep.

The rest is details. The next day I hauled our gear a few more miles up the trail, set up a camp for another night, and stomped around a lot to look like two of us had been there. After sitting in front of the morning fire, sipping the remains of my whiskey, I got up and commenced my “rush” back to the truck and the short drive to Red Lodge, where I found the Sheriff and reported my missing brother.

“Christ,” I said, shaking my head as the tears ebbed from my eyes, “I was drinking—” the empty flask was, helpfully, stuck in my back pocket at the time—“and I passed out. When I woke up, I dunno, midnight, one o’clock, Jimmy was gone!”

Then the search, a three day affair, where my fear of discovery was mistaken for the tension between hope and despair. Or maybe it really was the tension between hope and despair, they just missed the exact nature of said tension.

Two bad moments: first, when they brought out the dogs on day two. I was afraid they’d find the campsite in the trees (which I had failed to mention and nobody ever asked) then, naturally, they’d sniff their way to Jimmy.

However, the day before, as I was returning to the truck, in a moment of what I can only describe as brilliant inspiration, I had stopped to piss over the area where we initially left the trail. I’ll bet that threw the dogs. In any event, their handlers were determined to take them to the spot where I had last “seen” Jim, and naturally, those fool hounds were unable to locate their man.

The other brilliant part: me taking Jimmy’s sweaty bandana from his pocket before I stuffed him in the sleeping bag, and wiping it all around the campsite where I had last seen him. I then wiped it up the trail a ways and off into some woods that led to a deep gorge. The dogs fell for it and so no one else ever questioned the theory that he wandered off into the gorge.

The second bad moment: the helicopter on day three. I figured that from the air, the hole I dug and all the dirt I spread around would be easy to spot.

Maybe it should have been, but nobody ever did.

I stayed there another week, in a hotel room in Red Lodge. Talked to a grief counselor for awhile. She was good, I actually felt a little better about it all before I left.

There it is. Oh yeah, it ended with Angie when I got back. I never told her that I knew about her and Jimmy. She was wrecked by the news, and suggested that we live apart for a while, “while we got through this.” She left, according to the plan, and never came back.

And even though the sheriff and deputies have long since given up—“he’s lost son, sorry,” from a kindly old soul who looked just like a western lawman should and who put his hand on my shoulder, wiping a tear from his eye—for appearances sake I think I’ll keep up my little pilgrimage west for another year or two. Besides, there’s this nice bar just past the airport where I’ve gotten to know one of the waitresses, Trish. She’s very cute, and we spent a rather pleasant half an hour in the cab of my rental truck just before I flew back last year. When we were through, she said, “I really like you, Dan. When you come back, maybe you can stay a while.”

“Or you can come east with me,” I said, and she hugged me.

So maybe that’ll work out. I hope she stays true in the meantime.

Or else.

Just kidding.

Ⓒ 2014 Damon Stewart