The train moves west on the highline outside Browning,
tight-bound in an upward arc along the sidewall
of tremendous mountains, the movement of metal and muscle
working above the treeline, chugging out black smoke. 
Smoke, black first against the greyish rock, the granite face
of the mountain, then higher and farther
back black into the keen blue of sky without clouds. 

1

THE BOY five years old, and big, bull child his father calls him, and bulls he rides, starting at six on the grey old man his father owns, then at nine years and ten in the open fields of neighboring ranches.  He enters his first real rodeo at thirteen in Glasgow and on from there, three broken fingers, a broken ankle, broken clavicle and a cracked wristbone.  Otherwise unharmed, he knows the taste of blood, fights men twice his age while attending bars with his father.  When he loses his father grows quiet, cusses him when they get home, beats him.  When he wins, his father praises him.

Work, his father says, Because you ain’t getting nothing.  People are takers.  As well shoot you as look at you. 
At school he has high marks.  He desires to please his mother.   

Home, he smells the gun-cleaning, the oil, the parts in neat rows on the kitchen table.  The table is long and rectangular, of rough-hewn wood she drapes in white cloth.  He sees the elongated pipe-cleaner, the blackened rags, the sheen of rifle barrel, the worn wood of stock.  He hears the word Winchester and the way his father speaks it, feels his father’s look downturned, his father’s eyes shadowed, submerged in the bones, the flesh of the face.  The family inhabits a one-room ranch house, mother, father, son.  There is a plankwood floor, an eating space, a bed space, cook stove.  A small slant-roofed barn stands east of the house where the livestock gather in the cold.  Mom is in bed saying, Don’t make a mess.  The boy’s father, meticulous at the table, says, Quiet woman. Outside the flat of the high plains arcs toward Canada.  To the south the wild wind blows snow from here to a haze at the earth’s end.  A rim of sun, westerly, is red as blood.

The boy’s mother reads aloud by lamplight.  Looking up, into his eyes, Mind your schooling, she says.  She touches his face.  The words she reads go out far, they encompass the world, and in the evening quiet the boy and his father curl at her feet on the bed listening.  Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, she reads, and before you were born I set you apart. 

In town the boy witnesses a drunken Indian pulled from his horse by a group of four men.  Hard rain falling, the boy standing on the boardwalk staring out.  The man has wandered from the Sioux reservation, Assiniboine, day ride toting liquor, empty, seeking more.  They throw his body to the ground, his head they press down.  Their hands are knotted in his hair and into the wet earth they push his face until it’s gone.  They throw loud words from white-red mouths while the Indian’s body lurches and moves beneath them.  The man’s lathered voice seeks life and they laugh and champion each other before they rise and spit and walk away.  The Indian turns his head to the side and breathes.  The boy waits.  Directly, he walks and lifts the man, positions him on his horse.  He puts his hand on the round flank and horse and rider continue on.  He watches, cleans his hands on his pants and when he turns he is violently struck down in the street.

His father stands over him.  He holds the shovel, the long handle he put to the boy’s head, the father’s countenance as misshapen as the mud that holds the boy, the boy’s blood.  Sir? The boy says.  You helped the Indian, his father says, and lifts the handle again, fine circular motion that opens a straight clean gash above the boy’s cheekbone.  The boy lowers his head.  He touches the wound, dirtying it, feeling it fill and flow.  His eyes are down.  He keeps silent.  Next time finish it, his father says.  The father leaves him lie.  The boy follows him home.  Voiceless, they work the land, the boy in his father’s shadow from the dawn, walking.  The sound of his mother is what he carries when he goes.    

Sixteen years old, the boy walks the fenceline in a white out.  He is six foot seven inches tall.  He weighs two hundred and fifty pounds.  Along a slight game trail on the north fence he is two hours from the house at thirty below zero.  He wonders about his father, gone three days.  His father had come back from town with a flat look on his face.  He’d sat on the bed and wouldn’t eat.  At dark he’d made a simple pronouncement.  Getting food, he said, then gripped the rifle, opened the door and strode outside long-legged against the bolt of wind and snow. Gone. 

Walking, the boy figures what he’s figured before and this time the reckoning is true.  He sees the black barrel of the rifle angled on the second line of barbed wire, snow a thin mantle on the barrel’s eastward lie.  He sees beneath it the body-shaped mound, brushes the snow away with a hand, finds the frozen head of his father, the open eyes dull as grey stones.  A small hole under the chin is burnt around the edges, and at the back of his father’s head, fist-sized, the boy finds the exit wound.  

When the boy pulls the gun from his father’s hand two of the fingers snap away and land in the snow.  The boy opens his father’s coat, puts the fingers in his father’s front shirt pocket.  He shoulders his father, carries the gun, takes his father home. 

They lay him on the floor under the kitchen table.  At the grey opening of dawn the boy positions old tires off behind the house, soaks them in gasoline and lights them, oily-red pyres and slanted smoke columns stark in the winter quiet.  The ground thaws as the boy waits.  He spends morning to evening, using his father’s pick axe, then the shovel, and still they bury the body shallow.  He pushes the earth in over his father, malformed rock fused with ice and soil, and when he’s done the boy pounds the surface with the flat back of the shovel, loud bangs that sound blunt and hard in the cold.  The snow is light now, driven by wind on a slant from the north.  His mom forms a crude cross of root wood from the cellar and the boy manipulates the rock, positioning the cross at the head of the grave.  The boy removes his broken felt cowboy hat, his gloves.  His mom reaches, holds the boy’s hand.  Their faces turn raw in the cold.  Dead now, she says.  He saw the world darkly, and people darker still.  May his boy find the good.  She squeezes the boy’s hand, Dust to dust.  May the Good Lord make the crooked paths straight, the mountains to be laid low, the valleys to rise, and may the Lord do with the dead as He wills. 

Already inside the boy is a will he does not see but feels, abstruse, sullen, a chimera of two persons, the man of violence at odds with the angel of peace.  Find the good, the boy thinks, a burden that resides in the cavity of his chest. 

The next day, sheriff and banker come and say I’m sorry and the four ride in the cab of the Studebaker back to town.  Papers and words, the ranch is taken, some little money granted and the two move thirty miles to Sage, farther yet toward the northeast edge of Montana, the town joined to the straight rail track that runs the highline.  Small town, Sage, post office, two bars, general store.  They room with an old woman near dead in a house with floors that shine of maple, neat-lined hardwood in every room.  At night the boy hears a howling wind that blends to the whistle of the long train, the ground rumble of the tracks, the walls like a person afraid, shaking, the bed moving, the bones in him jarred, and listening he is drifting, asleep, lost on a flatboard bunk near the ceiling in a sleeping compartment, carried far into forested lands.  Within the year the boy’s mom dies.  He finds her silent in the morning under cover of cotton sheet and colored quilt.  In her hair the small ivory comb given by the boy’s father nearly two decades before.  The boy places the comb in his breast pocket.  In her hand a page torn from scripture, Isaiah in her fingers of bone, the hollow of her hand, the place that was home to the shape of his face.  He lifts the page, finds her weary underline, Arise, shine, for your light has come.  And the glory of the Lord has arisen upon you.  Behold, darkness covers the earth, and deep darkness its people, but the glory of the Lord has arisen upon you. 

The boy waits.  He stays where he is, not knowing.  Behind the Mint Bar past midnight, he beats a man fresh from the rail line until the man barely breathes.  When it started the man had cussed the boy and called him outside.  The boy followed, not caring.  The man’s face was clean, white as an eggshell, but the boy had made it purple, a dark oblong bruise engorged above the man’s neckline.  She has been dead one month now. 

The boy lies on the hardwood floor at the house in Sage watching the elderly landlady as she enters the front door.  She is methodical, working the lock with tangled fingers.  Welcome, Ma’am, he mouths the words.  Same to you boy, she answers.  Same hour each day she returns from the post office.  It is dusk.  The boy sees the woman’s face, the boned-out look she wears.  They have their greeting, she passes into the kitchen, he notices the light.  He feels it as much as he sees it, a white form reflected left-center in the front window of the old woman’s house.  The house faces away from the town’s main street.  The thing is a quirk, he thinks, a miracle of fluked architecture that pulls the light more than one hundred feet from across the alley and down the street, from the pointed apex of the general store and its hollow globe-shaped street lamp beneath which the night people ebb and flow on the boardwalk.  The light comes through the aperture of a window at the top of the back stairs.  From there it hits a narrow gold-framed mirror in the hallway and sends its thin icon into the wide living room.  The light is morphed as it sits on the front glass, an odd-shaped sphere almost translucent at dusk, then bright white, bony as a death’s head by the time of darkness.  The boy hears the woman on the stairs, her languid gate, the creaking ascent to her room.  As her body passes, the light disappears then returns.  She is never in the front room at night and the boy rarely looks at her during the day, done as he is over his mother, over the loss of all things. 

A man will be physical, he thinks, forsake things he should never have forsaken, his kin, himself, the ground that gave him life.  Death will be the arms to hold him, the final word to give him rest.

The boy curls inward, lies on the floor for days.  The greeting remains the same, the woman leaves him his space.  He pictures the round bulb over the general store, pictures himself beneath it in the dirt street, standing in the deep night, looking up.  He beholds the bloom of light as he might a near star, a sun.  Then he sees himself above it, behind it, clenching the roof between his knees as he would a circus horse, his chest upraised, his father’s big sledgehammer lifted overhead.  He pulls down sky with arms like wedges.  He blasts the light to smithereens.  He floats in shards of glass and frozen light, soft, and softer, the wind and the powdery glass like dandelion white parachutes adrift through the opening, through the window and down, angled from the hall mirror and pulled inward to the living room, falling soft, clumsily, full-bodied onto the hardwood floor.  He has returned to the space he keeps.  It is dark.  The light’s reflection shines white in the night of the front window, the outline complete, precise.  He sleeps.  Outside, he hears the loud confidence of the engine, the steel wheels of the cars at high speed along the rails.  In the early morning the old woman puts a hand on his shoulder.  The touch awakens him.  Yes, he thinks, I will leave this place.

The next day he rises, moves south and west to Bozeman.  No jobs, but big he gets work in a feed store.  He passes a placement exam and enrolls in the agricultural college in Bozeman.  He rides bulls in every rodeo he can find.  Nearly every Saturday night he fights in bars.  He doesn’t drink.  He seeks only the concave feel of facial structure, the slippery skin of cheekbones, the line of a man’s nose, the loose pendulum of the jawbone and the cool sockets of the eyes.  He likes these things, the sound they make as they give way, the sound of cartilage and the way the skin slits open before the blood begins, the white-hard glisten of bone, the sound of the face when it breaks.  But he hates himself that he likes it. 

Still he returns.  In the half-dark of the bar in the basement of the Wellington Hotel outside White Sulpher he opens the curve of a man’s head on the corner of a table.  A small mob gathers seeking revenge, the man’s brothers, the man’s friends.  He throws them back and puts out the teeth from the mouth of one.  He breaks the elbow of another.  You’ll leave here dead, he says, and the group recedes, the power in him vital and full and he walks from the open door alone into darkness until he sits off distant wrapping his knees in his arms, weeping.  He seeks to turn himself and he turns.  He fights less.  He wanders more, dirt streets of rodeo towns when the day is done, the lit roads of Bozeman in the night after his reading.  It is the sound of gravel beneath his boots he seeks, a multitude of small stones forming a silver path under the moon and sky, leading nowhere.   He graduates college, barely passing, a first in agri-business, a second in accounting, Deppression on, jobs scarce.  He builds roads, digs ditches, dams, gets on at Fort Peck, his home a hillside cut-out, tarp angled over woodstove, single three-leg stool, small lamp of oil, he smells the earth, he sleeps on dirt.  North still but jobless, he waits overnight in a line of one hundred men.  The head man sees his size.  He gets on as a workman with the railroad.  He’ll earn some money, buy himself some land.  Perhaps buy back the land they lost.  Plant a hedge of wild rose, he thinks, for his mother.  He is six feet nine inches tall and weighs over three hundred pounds.  He works the Empire Builder, the interstate rail from east to west.  He works with muscle and grit.  He shovels coal.  He keeps his own peace. 
Alone in the late push across the borderlands they ride the highline of Montana and he stops for a moment and rests his hands on the heel of the shovel, rests his chin on his hands.  He feels the locomotive spending its light toward the oncoming darkness, toward the tiny crossings with unknown names, the towns of eight or ten people.  He feels the wide wind, sees the stars in their opaque immensity.  He hears the long-nosed scream of the train, bent in the night, and he pauses, considering how fully the night falls, how easily the light gives way, then he returns to his work. 

Late he lies himself down in his sleeping berth.  He stinks of smoke and oil, the sweating film of his body envelopes him and he falls toward sleep as one who has come from the earth, who has molded it with his hands, who has returned again.  In his place in the dark, always he hears his mother.  Mind your schooling, she says.  It is after dinner.  She lays him down.  He is a child sleeping, and in the half-world between night and dawn, waking him she speaks her elegant words, presses her cheek to his small cheek, whispers, Awake, awake O Zion, clothe yourself with strength.  Put on your garments of splendor.  She smoothes his eyebrows with a forefinger.  You can get up now, she says.  She touches his face with her hand. 

It is not yet dawn.  He lies on his side, sees on the hard shelf before his eyes the ivory hair comb bright as bone.  He takes the comb in the curve of his hand.  He lies still.  He puts the comb to his lips in the half-light.  He breathes his deep and holy breath.  He remembers the clean smell of her hair.  Along the spine of the comb he moves his index finger, then he eyes his finger for a moment, coal and dirt deep set in the whorls.  He draws his hand to his mouth and licks the tip of his finger.  The sun has broken the far line of the world.  His tongue tastes of light. 

He works the train and travels to places he has not yet known, where day is buoyant and darkness gone, and when death comes seeking like the hand of an enemy he gives himself over, for it is death he desires, and death he welcomes, and the spirit of his good body is a vessel borne to the eternal. 

2

HE IS BORN INTO THIS WORLD, he is named.  He is made of dirt and fighting and the grace of his mother’s words.  He is one.  He is caught in the mass of many.  The earth bends beneath him and he listens to the whistle of the train, the notes like a voice of reason in the early dark that wakens him and returns him, takes him weary back to the loaded pull of the cars, the sound of the push and the steel of the tracks. 

He rises.  He begins again.

The older men on the line call him Middie because they’ve heard talk of him breaking the back of a bull that wouldn’t carry its weight.  It was at a rodeo he entered when he was 19, up in Glendive. The bull was old and skinny, put in by a local farmer as a joke.  The bull didn’t show enough verve so the boy bucked the animal himself. 

Bent its middle like a bow, the vet said.  Sprung its spine. 

The bull had to be put down.  The boy had both hated and delighted in this, delighted in undoing the farmer’s intention, hated that the animal was hard done by.  The railroaders laugh their heads off and Middie has to listen to them nearly every stop.  They sit behind their counters at each station chewing fat with Prifflach, the conductor, telling and retelling what they’ve heard.  Middie doesn’t like them.  When they speak they look through him, just as Prifflach does.  He sees he is nothing to them.  He lets them think they own him.  He has a job, he bides his time. 

The railroad furthers the chasm between father and mother.  Something lower down is revealed, something more sedentary and rooted even than the earth that had opened and closed, closing over him the darker image of his father alongside the subtle light of his mother, the stiff shock of his father’s hair under snow, the gray, grainy look of his mother’s teeth long after the last exhalation, after he’d found her in her bed. 

Riding the highline he is mostly unseen by the passengers, hauling freight, working coal.  But a change in duty comes, a change he doesn’t welcome.  He’ll provide muscle for the bossman, the conductor, Ed Prifflach.  Three times tossing drunks to local sheriffs at the next stop, twice tracking rich old lady no shows still wandering after the all aboard.  Then the real trouble begins.  Just past Wolfpoint, when the first theft is discovered, Middie is put in charge of public calm.  He keeps to the plan, following Prifflach’s words though it is distasteful to him and he begins to feel in the eyes of others he is becoming the conductor’s efficacy, an outline of Prifflach’s power, a bigger, more mobile expression.

Things aren’t what they seem, Middie thinks.  Danger, for reasons a man doesn’t comprehend.  On his first trip east a workman at the roundhouse in St. Paul threw himself between the cars of an outgoing train.  When Middie got word he went to see.  The man was severed in two at the chest.  Middie isn’t afraid to die, and when he dies he wants it to be hard and without any hope of return, as physical as rock and water so he can feel the skin give, the bones in the cavernous weight of his body broken, and blood like a river moving from the center of him, pooling out and away and down into the earth, to the soil that receives him and sets him free. 

In the first compartment Prifflach leans toward him, nonchalant in body in order to avoid alarm, yelling at him to surmount the noise.  First seat, worst position, thinks Middie, while Prifflach sets the course with regard to the thief.  Get some leads, he says.  Prifflach’s face is wolflike, a man with large buttocks, hairy arms and hands.  Middie dislikes him, his sunken eyes, the haughty tenor of his voice.  Happening nearly every stop now, Prifflach says.  Bad for business.  Under a long, narrow nose his mouth tightens.  The line ain’t gonna like it, guaranteed.  Give me the tally.

Five people, says Middie. 
 
Tally his take, says Prifflach.

Middie uses a small piece of paper, a gnawed pencil.  Near four hundred dollars, he says, four hundred ten to be precise.  His face feels colorless, his body breathes in and out. 
Get going, Middie, Prifflach says.

Middie stares at the double doors with their elongated rectangular glass, two top squares open for the heat.  Prifflach said he’d picked him because Middie had thighs like cottonwoods and thick arms.

Look alive, Middie. 

He hears the words, notes Prifflach’s face.  Wet lines in a wax head, he thinks.  Then he looks at the people. 
A weight of soot covers everyone.  Their eyes are swollen and bloodshot.  They have stiff red necks.  On their laps they hold children and bags, gripping them as if to ward off death.  Middie peers at the faces, and further back, through more doors at the end of the car, more elongated squares of glass into the second car where expressions breathe the same contempt, the shadow of a shadow, the same self-preservation, the same undignified desire.  They are on the upswing through great carved mountains and though Middie has worked the round trip St. Paul to Spokane five times, he still feels unlanded here, awkward under the long slow ascent of the train, the sheer drop of landscape, of trees and earth, and way down, the thin, flat line of the river. 

Side windows remain mostly shut, frozen in place by the interlock of the moisture inside and the frigid temperature of early winter outside.  The air in the compartments, especially those closest to the heat of the locomotive, is heavy, thick to the lungs, and lined with body odor.

Middie has succeeded, through a forceful combination of the billy club Prifflach issued him and a jackknife he carries, in slightly opening the casement adjoining his seat.  Air slides through the sliver of space he’s created and Middie can feel it, even if the chug of the train taints it all, he feels the clean blade of pine, the rich taste of high mountains, the snicker of winter, windy and subliminal.  He feels Bearhat Mountain and Gunsight out there, the draw of Going to the Sun Road lining the opposite side of the valley, spare of people now, the park locked in the grip of September, closed to visitors but for the oil and punch of the train, and the Blackfeet nation in the expanse below the great rocks.

Looking out he feels the calling an eagle might feel in the drafts over the backbone of the continent, that something of light and stone and water, perhaps fire, has created him and breathed life through the opening of his lips, and there is a violence in that, he thinks, and a tenderness, and he sees as if with the eyes of a child the wings of the eagle thrown wide over the body of the beloved, the scream of the bird in the highborne wind. 

YET A DARK PALL COVERS MIDDIE’S EYES; he stares at everyone suspiciously.  When Prifflach rises, Middie follows.  They walk a few steps and sit down again in another couplet of chairs, aimed back down the corridor, to the next car, and the next.  People are seen in a long line, from compartment to compartment, bumped by the small clicks and turns of the train, jilted forward, hitched to the side, bumped back.  The people say nothing.  They clutch their bags.

The scenario sickens him.  Too many people.  Too public.  If he was alone, or in the dark of barrooms, he’d feel clear, free to do as he wished, but here the fray of his mind annoys him.  He brushes the tips of his fingers over his left shirt pocket, the cloth there housing his mother’s comb, he feels the form of it, the tines like a small alien hand, the spine simple and hard.  He’s already checked them all three times by order of Prifflach.  Once each after the last three stops: Wolfpoint, Glasgow, Malta.  The first time, he apologized, comforting an older woman on her way to see her son in Spokane.  Prifflach had sent a wire out at Glasgow, inquiring what to do.  The second check more of the same, this time soothing the worry of a young gal off to the state agricultural school in Pullman.  Prifflach called it coincidence—two different burglars, two different towns, a little over three hundred dollars missing.  But after the third stop, at Malta, when an elderly man was found dead, his head askew, a small well of blood in his right ear, the rumors poisoned every compartment.

He had money, said the help in the dining car.  Paid for his meals in crisp new bills.  But when Middie checked the body, Prifflach looking over his shoulder, there was nothing, no money, not even any silver.  Middie felt the minds of the people beginning to hum and move and he sensed the interior of Prifflach, angry as if cornered, pushing him to take action.  Middie hated it, but the line chose him, and he was big.
 
On the first check, the ‘just checking’ check, no one resisted; everyone simply wanted the thief caught.  The second check, the ‘only a coincidence, folks’ check, people remained polite, grimacing some while Middie displaced their bags and Prifflach went through them.  Middie had to pat the people down, check their coats, their clothing, have them empty each of their pockets.  It took far longer than he wished, but mostly the people smiled and tried to be helpful.  On the third check the death had changed things.  The women whispered and shrank back from him.  The body itself, alone in a sleeping car until the next stop, was like an evidence, an imprint of the predator among them.  Middie felt the tension of it, the peoples’ thoughts in fearful accord, like a dark vein of cloud swept into the bank of mountains, collecting, preparing. 

Prifflach had declared all must hand over their weapons, and declared Middie the one to gather them.  The men looked boldly at Middie as Prifflach rifled their bags.  Some were openly angry.  Many, he thought, suspected him, or Prifflach.  Only a few gave up their arms, and unwillingly, a cluster of pistols, four Colts, two Derringers, along with one rifle.  Other men lied directly, though Middie felt their weapons, in a bootleg or under the arm, the stock of a gun, the handle of a knife.  He decided not to push and Prifflach silently colluded, the potential threat subduing the conductor’s zeal. What Middie retrieved he stored in the engineer’s cab.  Returning, walking the aisles, he felt weary.  People don’t like being pushed, he thought. 

The next stop, Havre, town of locked-in winters, town of bars.  At last, the removal of the dead man, to be shipped back to Chicago.  Not dusk or dawn, but day, not night as Middie would hope, nor the color of night.  The body is well blanketed, taken off from the back of the train.  Middie carries it across the platform and it feels light to him, almost birdlike in his arms.  He turns his back to shield the view.  Prifflach holds the door for him and as Middie enters the station he catches over Prifflach’s shoulder the faces of passengers in the fourth car, most of them pale and dumb-looking, not meeting his eye.  But one, the Indian man he’d noticed on his passenger checks, a crossbreed, looks right at him.  The eyes are black from where Middie stands.  He imagines round irises among the slanted whites; it reminds him of how people had stared at this man during the checks, a few uttering quiet threats while the man stared back at them as if taunting them to put meaning to their words.  Despite the fact that the Indian was well dressed, Middie had had to quiet the car twice as they searched him. 

Inside the station Middie hears Prifflach tell the attendant the death is nothing.  Old man died in his sleep, Prifflach says.  Line informed the family; they’ll meet the body in St. Paul.  The attendant is a pot-bellied bald man, chewing snuice.  Prifflach orders Middie back to the train to watch the passengers.  No sheriff, thinks Middie.  Line saving its own skin.  Close-mouthed, he looks at Prifflach, but the conductor waves him on and Middie does as he is told.

He sits on the train, puts his head in his hands, runs his hands through his hair, he disembarks, rounds the platform and crosses the dirt street.  He approaches the front door of the Stockman Bar.  Door painted black, oiled hinges, inside a dim small room and three tables, dark marble counter with five stools, the place is clean, a lone bartender wiping things down.  Help you? he says.  No, Middie answers, the murmur of his voice barely audible.  He needs a chair to sit in, a space to calm his mind.  The bartender spits in a tin cup on the counter.  You don’t drink, you don’t stay, he says.  Middie feels things shutting down, his insides are heavy and tight, the center of him like an eclipse that obscures the light, three quick steps to the barman and one fist that rides the force of hip and shoulder, the man laid cold on the hardwood floor.  Not dead, but still, and flat-backed, and Middie, seated in the chair he desires, watches the blood curl from a three-inch line over the man’s eye, elliptic down his face to his neck, to the floor.  Orbital bone still sound, eyes rolled back in the head, the man lies motionless and Middie considers him.  Should’ve been Prifflach, he says aloud.  But saying it Middie feels broken.  He can’t go back.  His eyes are grave, dark as his father’s.  Darkness covers the earth and deep darkness its people.  It is a darkness he feels he cannot undo.  But he must, he thinks, he will.  Prifflach comes cursing, and Middie walks in the conductor’s shadow, back to the train, the people. 

Three quick halts at Shelby, Cutbank and Browning.  East Glacier next, the station at the park’s east entrance, the one with the Blackfeet Agency greeting in which three Indians wait on the small grey platform in full regalia.  An elder in full eagle-feather headdress gives out cigars.  Two women in white deerskin dresses sell beadwork.  Only a handful of white passengers gawk this time, not all as is customary.  Most remain subdued, brooding, sitting in their seats.  Then on the track past East Glacier, climbing the high boundary toward the west side of the park and the depot at Belton, two more reports of impropriety, two more thefts, lesser, but significant, one of sixty dollars, the other forty.  Not counting the unknown amount stolen from the dead man, the total, as Middie said, had reached four hundred and ten. 

Middie loathes the thought of checking bags again.  He thinks the people, all of them, close and far, dislike him.  Some of the faces are full of disdain. 

So? says Prifflach. 

Yes? says Middie. 

So start another check, says Prifflach.  He speaks like a crow, thinks Middie.  He watches Prifflach pull a small piece of paper from his vest pocket, the wire retrieved from the Havre station in answer to his plea at Glasgow.  Prifflach turns the paper to Middie, these words: keep quiet – no police – security man finds thief – or loses job. 
No good, says Middie, awkward, aloud, using a tone he’d seen his mother use to calm his father.  Look at them, Middie says, motioning with his eyes to the people around him.

Prifflach turns on him, sharp-faced, and what he says makes Middie desire to kill him.  It’s your own good, boy.  Line’s takin’ you out if you don’t get it done.  Move.

Middie sees it coming, and he wishes against it, but he knows no other alternative.  All that college, he thinks, up against the wall with book learning, and nothing now for real life.  Heavy shouldered, he rises from his seat.  He begins the procedure again. 

Pardon me, may I see your bag? and, Pardon, sir, I have to look through your personal effects.  The words are graceful in Middie’s mind, his mind electric, his body like ether around his words. 

BUT PEOPLE ARE OPENLY HOSTILE.  A woman in the first car, one in the second, and one in the third make a scene and won’t unhand their bags.  He pulls the bags from the first two, and lets Prifflach search the contents while he quickly pats the people down, pushing his fingers in their coat pockets.  When he approaches the third woman she claws a bright hole in his cheek.  His mind thinks terrible things.  Ugly, he tells himself.  Ugly.  Has to be done though, he thinks.  Other passengers help him do it too, they hold the woman back while he searches her and while Prifflach gives the bag a thorough inspection.  Idiots, Middie thinks, all of them, and me with them.  They see it too, the people.  They all admit inwardly the logic is imprecise, but better than doing nothing.  Check everyone or it’s no use.  Futile, Middie thinks, a man can hide money anywhere. When he returns the third woman’s bag she curses him.  Then she looks him in the face, says God curse you, and turns her back.   
Middie can’t remember ever having heard a woman speak like that.  He walks from the third car toward the fourth, opens the double doors at the end of the compartment, closes the doors behind.  He stands on the deck, he hears the raw howl of the train, the wind.  Something will happen now, he thinks.  To his left a wall of wet granite undulates, hard and dark, blurred by the train speed.  He looks up and sees the great face of it arching, reaching up and out, thousands of feet of rock, jagged and pinnacled at the top, swept up and out over the roof of the train.  Beyond this, the grey sky is low and thick.  The look of it gives him vertigo and he turns his head down, gripping the handrail, seeing his worn boots on the grated steel.  His mother, he thinks, he can’t remember her face. 
To his right he can feel the valley out there, spread wide in a pattern of darks and lighter darks, filled from above by the distant pull of fog and rain.  Sleet falls in wide diagonal sheets, descending into massive rock blacks and rock greys far on the other side of the valley.  Among the bases of the mountains, forests are spread like cloaks, and everything bleeds to a river that glistens coal like the curve of a gunbarrel, choked by the runoff of the storm.  The river is the middle fork of the Flathead, past the summit of Marias Pass and past the great trestle of Two Medicine Bridge.  They’ve crested the great divide and the train’s muscle pumps faster now, louder on the down westward grade.  The river runs due west from here seeming to bury itself into the wide forested skirt of a solitary mass of land.  The flat-topped tower of the mass is obscured, mostly covered over by wet fog and cloud, but visible in its singularity and the ominous feel of something hidden in darkness, something entirely individual, devoid of any other, accountable to neither sky nor storm.  At the mountain’s height a black ridge is barely detectable in among the grey fog.  The hulk of the land feels gargantuan.  Is it Grinnell Point or Reynolds Mountain, Cleveland or Apikuni?  He can’t make it out.  Here in Middie’s reverie, muffled shouts are heard, faint like the far-off cry of a cat.  He looks up to the doors of the fourth car, the final passenger car.  Slender windows frame what he sees and suddenly the words, though disembodied, come clean.  I’ve got him! yells a fatty-faced man, sealed up there in the box of the car.   I’ve got the mother-hatin’ rat.

Middie leaps forward, opening the fourth car, shouting, Stop!  Wait!  About midway up the car the fatty-faced man, and now four others, have thrown a man to the floor in the aisle.  The man wears a brown tweed suit, he makes a vigorous struggle with his assailants. 

It’s him! cries the fat one.  We caught him red-handed. 

To avoid the wild flail, passengers press back against the walls.  Women push their children in behind them, children with wide eyes, lit with fear.     

Let go, says Middie, staring at the fat man, and the men heed his word quickly and without complaint.  An understanding strikes Middie, a remembrance of the fear men harbor, bigger than a child’s, and Middie recalls the pure sway he holds, because he is big, over people, over men.
 
The captive stands in the aisle now, brushing wrinkles from his suit, his hair flung forward, black and thick over his face. The Indian, thinks Middie, as he draws nearer. 

When the man pushes his hair back, the bones of his face appear, cheekbones driven up as if by hammers, chin chiseled like stone, and dark aggressive eyes, the skin a thin casing for all the intrepid want in him.  Thin as a sheet of newsprint, thinks Middie, ready to tear open, ready for it all to rush out.  The man tucks in his shirt and realigns his belt.  He straightens his vest, then the lapels of his jacket, visibly pulling the tension back in and down, breathing.  He is silent.  He views his captors with contempt, each one.

Middie remembers seeing him board the train in Wolfpoint.  Assiniboine-Sioux he’d thought.  But after pulling his bag and questioning him four times he’d found him to be a Blackfeet-White cross, Blood in fact, a Blackfeet subtribe (and Irish on the other side, he’d said, one clan or another).  He was on his way to his family’s home south of West Glacier after a “work-related” trip to Wolfpoint.  Middie had checked him once more than all the rest.  The man said he taught at the college in Missoula.  In education, he said.  They locked eyes when Middie carried the dead man at Havre, but Middie had dismissed it and other than the agitation of the crowd during the checks, an agitation Middie felt always accompanied whites and Indians, he had found nothing unusual.  The man carried no weapon. 

What is it? Middie asks the man with the fat head. 

A short man, a man with slick hair, one of the others who had held the accused, speaks up vehemently.  This man—he points in the Indian’s face—this man has been lying!  He’s the one.  He took all the money. 
Slow, says Middie.  Say what you know. 

I have not lied, says the prisoner.

Shut up! the slick man yells. 

Middie puts a forearm to the slick man’s chest.  Settle yourself, he says.  Sit down. 

The slick man obeys, whispering something, glaring.  He’s lying, he says.  Hiding something.

How do you know?

Check his side, see for yourself.  He’s had his hand there in his jacket from the start.

The fat man butts in, edging with rage, He won’t show us what he’s got in there.  

Is it true, sir? asks Middie, heightening his politeness.  Is there something hidden in your vestcoat?

Yes, he states, looking into Middie’s face, but that makes me neither a liar nor guilty of the offense in question. 

We will check it, sir, Middie replies, but he feels aggravated.  He doesn’t like the uppity tone the Indian has used. What have you concealed? Middie asks. 

My money belt, says the man.

MIDDIE HARDENS HIS LOOK.  His hands sweat.  He wipes them on his pantlegs as he stares at the man.  Probably had it on his waistline, Middie thinks, concealed under the clothing, probably thin as birch bark.  He remembers Prifflach muttering under his breath at the Indian, checking the man’s bag, a small cylindrical briefcase made of beaten brown leather, sealed at the top by a thin zipper that ran between two worn handles, the word MONTANA inscribed on the side.  Mostly papers in the bag. 

You have searched my briefcase and my wallet, says the man, and me once more than the others.  I saw no need for you to search my money belt.  And if I had shown you my belt, would that not become a target for the robber if he were present in this compartment during the search?

Don’t listen to him, the slick man says in a wet voice, he’s slippery.

The crowd murmurs uneasily.  Middie notes that outside, the fog has pressed in.  Nothing of the valley can be seen, and nothing of the sky.  The mountains will be laid low, Middie thinks.  He hears the words soft and articulate in his mother’s voice.  Outside is the featureless grey of a massive fog bank, and behind it a feeling of the bulk of the land.

Check his belt, the fat face says. 

Then the crowd begins.  See what he’s got, says a red-haired woman, the fat man’s wife by the look of it, the small eyes, the clutching, heavy draw of the cheeks about the jowls.  She says the words quietly but they are enough to hasten a flood.  Do it now, hears Middie.  Make him hand it over, Take it from him, Pull up his shirt, Take it—all from the onlookers, all at once, and from somewhere low and small back behind Middie, the quiet words, Cut his throat.  

The conductor arrives and Middie exhales and feels his body go slack; he stares outside.  The grey-black of the storm leaks moisture on the windows.  The moisture gathers and pulls lines sideways along the windows, miniscule lines in narrow groupings of hundreds and wide bars of thousands, rivulets and the brothers of rivulets, and within them the broad hordes of their children, their offspring, all pulled back along the glass to the end of the train, to the end of seeing.
 
You will have him hand over that money belt directly, says Prifflach, his nose leading, his face pinched, set like clay.  Pressure builds in the bodycage of Middie, a pressure that pushes out against his skin like a large child caught inside, big feet placed on the ribs, forcing out as if to crack the ribs wide and emerge leaping from the open ribwork.  Middie reaches out, grabbing the accused man’s wrist, gripping the flesh with frozen fingers, red-white fingers latching on. 

To Middie’s relief the man responds.  With one arm in Middie’s grip, the man uses his free hand to untuck the front of his shirt.  He slides the money belt to a point above his waist, and undoes the small metal clasps that hold the belt in place.  His fingers are so meticulous, thinks Middie, so dexterous and sure.  His eyes as clear as the sky before they reached Glacier, cold and steely-black.  Middie looks again to the window.  He thinks his own reflection is not unlike the grey outside, and behind it the unpeopled weight of land, the emptiness.  He notes he has left his billy club in the last compartment, on the floor near a seat where he’d checked a man’s ankles, his socks.  Middie’s fists feel big, hard as the stones of a landslide.  He doesn’t need it, he tells himself.   
Give up the belt, Prifflach says, though already the man is pulling the belt free.

He holds it out to the conductor.  Nothing out of the ordinary, he says.  I’m simply a man carrying my own money.  His hair is still bent, his shirt poorly tucked.  He does not look away from his accusers. 
At once, the fat man and his wife shout something unintelligible.

We’ll see, says the conductor, interpreting their words.  We’ll see if it’s his money.  At the corners of Prifflach’s mouth the skin twitches.  Prifflach takes the money belt and hands it to the slick man.  Count it up, he says, watching the Indian’s face.

The slick man thumbs the money once, finding an unfortunate combination of bigger and smaller bills. How much is there? asks the conductor.  The slick man counts again, slowly.  Five hundred ten dollars, he says.  Exactly one hundred more than the amount stolen.  Middie knows a desire has gripped them, and that they all, silently, hastily, have calculated the old dead man’s loss at a clean one hundred.  Middie has done the same.
I could have told you that, says the accused.

Prifflach tells the man to shut up, then says, A hundred dollars more than the total.  He folds the money belt in half, and half again; I’ll take that, he says, placing it in the chest pocket of his coat.

It comes clear to Middie now, the look of the onlookers, the way of their eyes and their bodies, how they’ve all torn loose inside, all come unspun.  He remembers what he’d read in a pamphlet at the West Glacier station a month ago.  Something of a hidden passage west, close to the headwaters of the Marias, a high mountain pass that according to Indian belief was steeped in the spirit world, inhabited by a dark presence.  Decades back, when the line first wanted to chart its track through here, no Indian would take a white man through.  Death inhabited the place.  

Middie sees the demeanor of the Blackfeet man change.  The man’s face loses expression, his body pulls inward and a gathering is felt in the space between them, Middie senses it, the surging, up through the flesh of the Indian’s forearm.  Middie tightens his grip. 

The crowd moves. 

Suspected him back in Glasgow, a stout man pipes up.  I should have known, says another, and from the slick man, He ain’t gettin’ outta here.  Low again, deep back in the crowd, a voice says slit his throat.   

The movement begins in words and rustling, then leaps upward like a mighty wave that breaks upon the people and the man all at once.  The Blackfeet man jerks free and jumps the chair back next to him, seeking to flank the men and escape from the rear of the compartment.  The men scramble after him, Prifflach leading, the others following, all of them livid with hate. 

Middie vaults a set of chairs and lands on the Blackfeet man, slamming him bodily against the sidewall of the car.  The man rights himself and spits in Middie’s face and Middie, fueled now, lifts him, encircling the Indian’s neck in the crook of his left arm, positioning him.  He props him up, left hand on the man’s shoulder, holding him an arm’s length away.  Then he levels a blow with the right that bounces the Blackfeet man’s head off the near window, flings his hair like a horsetail, and leaves a grotesque indentation where the cheekbone has caved in.  Four other men, along with Middie, jerk the prisoner from the wall, shake him hand over fist to the aisleway.  They surround him, and proceed to drag him toward the back of the car.  The shoving lurches the Indian forward and makes his neck look thin, snaps his head back, throws his eyes to the ceiling. 

What are you doing? he cries out, I’m innocent, and straining from the hands that grasp at his upper body, turning his face to the window, to the grey valley beyond, he says, I have a wife.  I have a child. 

With shocking swiftness the Indian throws his forearms out and lunges forward with his head in order to strike someone.  But now his flailings are as nothing to the weight of the accusers: there are many men now, their arms entangled in his limbs, controlling him easily.  They punch him in the back, and in the back of the head.  Keep your head down! they say; You’ll lose your teeth in a second.  The group is packed in, forming a tight untidy ball in the aisleway and among the spaces between the seats.  A thick odor is in the air.

The prisoner’s head is near the floor.  Reaching for the Indian’s waist, Middie sees a look of resignation, a look of light among the features of his face.  The man stares at Middie and whispers something Middie cannot hear or understand.

Amidst the tumult a smaller voice says, Wait!  It comes from behind Middie, up near the front of the car.  Turning, looking up and back through the moving heads, back behind the bending, pressing torsos, Middie sees the source of the voice, a small man, adolescent in appearance, thin-boned in a simple two-piece suit.  The man has fine, blonde hair and oval wire-rimmed glasses. 

Wait! the man says, I know him. 

A large man at the back of the mob turns to the boyish man and says, You shut up.
 
The small man’s face goes red, he shrinks back to his seat.  Middie sees this and turns back to the mob.  The people are grabbing the Blackfeet man’s clothing in their hands and shaking his body like a child’s doll.  Men are emerging from their seats, running the aisles like ants, joining the mob.  The man’s limbs appear loose in the torque of the crowd.  The arms move as if boneless, the elbows seem disconnected from the shoulders.

From his vantage Middie turns and sees the little man with his head down now as the people swirl toward the rear of the car, down to the doors they have already pulled back and the opening tilted like a black mouth from which the wind screams.  Middie hears the accused grunting, cursing.  He sees the little man rise and walk directly to the rear guard of the mob.  Unable to get through the little man sidesteps the knot of people, climbing over three or four seats, repositioning women and children.  He travels awkwardly but consistently, like a leggy insect, toward the back of the compartment, toward the opening and the landing beyond.  He goes unrecognized by all but Middie and when he reaches the far wall of the car, he stops, and stares.  The prisoner is held about the neck by the thick hands of Prifflach, clinched about the waist by Middie and on both sides by bold, angry men. 

The small man positions himself, mounting the arms of the last two aislechairs so that he stands directly before the mob.  He straddles the aisle, the land a blur in the open doorway behind him, around him the live wind a strange unholy combustion.  He draws his fists to his sides, billows his chest as he gathers air, and screams, Stop!  A wild scream, high and sharp like the bark of a dog. 

The little man’s effort creates a brief moment of quiet in which the people stand gaping at him.  Seizing this, he strings his words rapidly.  I know him.  I spoke with him when he got on in Wolfpoint.  He has a three-year old daughter.  He has a wife.  He has a good mother, a father.  He will be dropped off at the stop on the far side of Glacier where they are waiting for him.  He will return with them by car to the Mission Range.

Shut up, says the fat man.

I won’t, says the small man.  He told me precisely.

He lied, says the slick man. 

Let me speak, the small man pleads.  He touches his hand to his face, a gesture both elegant and tremulous.
We won’t, the mob responds, and in their movement and in the pronounced gather of their voices the prisoner is lifted by the neck and shoved forward toward the door. 

Out of the way! someone yells, and Middie watches as the small man takes a blow to the side of the head, a shot of tremendous force that lifts him light as goosedown, unburdened in flight to where his body hits the wall near the floor of the car and he lies crumpled, his face lolling to one side.  Thickly now the small man says, He told me precisely.  His words are overrun but he continues, slow, distinct.  He told me precisely, in Wolfpoint.  Before all of this, he had five hundred ten dollars of earnings.  He meant to do what he and his wife dreamed.  Middie’s fists are bound up in the clothing of the Blackfeet man, his forearms are bone to bone with the man’s ribs.  The little man is speaking, He meant to buy land, off the reservation.  The voice seems small, down between the chairs, He meant to build a home.

The opening through which they pass is wide, the small man’s body a bit of detritus they have cast aside, the landing now beneath their feet solid and whole, like a long-awaited rest.  Middie hears the velocity of wind and steel as he flows with the crowd to the brink.  He feels the rush, like the expectancy of power in a bull’s back when the gate springs wide, like the sound a man’s jaw makes when it breaks loose.

Also he feels sorrow; he wants to cry or cry out.  He wants to reach for the ivory hair comb but a weight of bodies presses him from behind and his hands are needed to control the captive.  He feels the indent of the guardrail firmly on his thigh.  He hears the small man’s voice, back behind him.  He told me at Wolfpoint—precisely five hundred ten dollars.  Five hundred ten. 

The landing is narrow, the people many, and they are knotted and pushed forward by a score more, angry men running from other cars, clogging the aisle to get to the man.  Those at the front grab the railing, the steel overhead bars, they grab each other, the Indian, the enemy.  Noise surrounds them, the train’s cry, the wide burn of descent, the people’s yells are high and sharp above everything, shrill as if from the mouths of predatory birds.  The Indian’s suitcoat and vest are gone.  His slim torso looks clean in his worried shirt, a V-shaped torso, trim and strong.  In the press of it Middie is hot.  Oxlike, he feels the burden of everyone, borne at once in him, and he bends and grabs the man’s leg.  Other men do the same, there are plenty of hands now.  He wants to hold the man fast but instead the crowd shoves the man aloft, tipping him upside down, clutching his ankles, removing his shoes.  They tear off his shirt, then his ribbed undershirt.  They throw the shoes down among the tracks.  The clothing they throw out into the wind where it whisks away and falls deep into the fog of the valley, rolling and descending like white leaves. 

From here the man is lowered between the cars.  He becomes silent.  Below the captive, Middie sees the silvery gleam of the tracks, parallel lines in the black blur of the ties, the lines bending almost imperceptibly at times, silver but glinting dull like teeth.  With his elbows he tries to hold the people back.  He feels the oncoming force of the crowd behind him, the jealousy, the desire.  A woman’s voice is heard, a voice he knows but does not recognize.  He bows his back, groaning, trying to draw the man forth.  The words are like a song, simple and beautiful in his mind: Put on your garments of splendor.  He smells the oil of the train, the heat, the wet rock of the mountain.
He sets his jaw and strains, he would pull the people and the man and the whole world to the mercy of his will; he gains no ground. 

In the gusts of wind, the mob squints their eyes.  Leaning forward, their hair is blown back, it swirls some, it blows back again.  The speed of the train and the noise of the tracks, the scent of high sage and jack pine, the fogged void of grey as wide and deep as an ocean, but foremost the wind, rushes up against the mob creating an almost still-life movement into which they carry their considered enemy.  Then the wind dies.  The river of men flowing from the compartment, bottlenecks in the doorway.  Bodies from the choked opening to the guardrail twist and writhe and a vast shouting commences.  Middie says No!  This must stop!  He grips the Blackfeet man’s belt with both fists and pulls him upward.  His big body is a counter movement against the rise of all around him but angry yells issue from wide red mouths and the mob grows to an impossible mass that pushes and swells, and breaks free in a sudden gush.  Middie finds himself with the Indian airborne, cast into the gulf without foot or handhold, he has lost everything, and falling he sees a shaft of blue high in the grey above him and he is surprised at how light he feels, and how time has slowed to nothing.  He reaches back seeking a purchase he will not find, and in the singular sweep of his arm he takes people unaware—Prifflach, the fat man, his wife, the slick man—they fly from the edge, effortless in the push of the mob, unstrung bodies and tight faces, over the lip of the guardrail and down between the cars, down to the tracks, the wheels, the black pump of the smoking engine, the yell of the machine.