Free Wait for Signs: Twelve Longmire Stories by Craig Johnson Page A

lap and lowered her foot. “My dad never talked about it, Vietnam . . . He handled that Agent Orange stuff and that shit gave robots cancer.” Her eyes were drawn back to the windshield and Polson. “He died last week and they’re already splitting up his stuff.” The mile markers clicked by like the wand on a metronome.“He taught me how to listen—I mean really listen. To hear things that nobody else heard. He had this set of Sennheiser HD414 open-back headphones from ’73, lightweight with the first out-of-head imaging with decent bass—Sony Walkmans and all that stuff should get down and kiss Sennheiser’s ass. They had a steel cord and you could throw them at a
talented
program director or a brick wall—I’m not sure which is potentially denser.”
    It was an unsettling tirade, but I still had to laugh.
    “You don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, do you?”
    “Nope, but it all sounds very impressive.” We topped the hill above Billings and looked at the lit-up refineries that ran along the highway as I made the sweeping turn west, the power of internal combustion pushing us back in the leather seats like we were tobogganing down a hill. The tires ran silent and floated on a cushion of air headlong into the snowy dunes and shimmering lights strung alongside the highway like fuzzy moons.
    She turned away, keeping her eyes from me, afraid that I might see too much there. “You can just drop me at the Golden Pheasant; I’ve got friends doing a gig who’ll give me a ride the rest of the way.”
    Nodding, I joined with the linear constellation of I-94.
    I had a vague sense of the club’s location downtown, took the Twenty-seventh Street exit, rolled past the Montana Women’s Prison and the wrong side of the railroad tracks, and then sat there watching the hundred and fifty coal cars of a Burlington Northern Santa Fe train roll by.
    When she finally spoke, her voice was different, saner. “It belonged to my father. When I was leaving for Tennessee, hegave me a choice of those headphones I was telling you about, but I figured I’d have more use for the gun.” She placed her hand on the dash and fingered the vent louvers as the two of us looked at the plastic strip on her wrist. “I got in some trouble down there.” Her voice died in her throat, but after a moment she started again. “I got picked up by a few guys over in South Dakota earlier tonight and they tried stuff. They seemed nice at first . . .” She gestured with the pistol, still under the blanket. “Anyway, I had to pull it.”
    I turned down a side street and took a right, where I could see the multicolored neon of the aforementioned pheasant spreading his tail feathers in a provocative manner. I parked the truck in the first available spot and turned to look at the girl with the strange eyes, the sifting snow providing a surreal scrim to her backlit face.
    “I didn’t shoot anybody.”
    “Good.”
    She smiled and finished the dregs of her coffee, wiped the cup out on her blanket, and screwed the top back on the thermos. She placed it against the console, but the movement caused the revolver to slip from her leg and onto the seat between us.
    We both sat there looking at it, representative of all the things for which it stood.
    I leaned forward and picked it up. It had been a nice one once upon a time, but years of negligence had left it scuffed and rusted, emerald corrosion growing from the rounds permanently imbedded in the cylinder. “How ’bout I keep this for you?”
    She didn’t say anything for a long time but finally slipped through the open door, pulled the guitar case from the bed of my truck, and stood there in the opening.
    The plaintive words of Haggard’s “A Place to Fall Apart” drifted from the speakers, and she glanced at the radio as if the Okie from wherever might be sitting on my dash. “I’d give a million dollars if he’d go into a studio, just him and a six-string guitar, no backup