The Road to Deer Lodge

At 2:00 AM on a stretch of Interstate 40 outside Oklahoma City, Dick Spoils stepped off his paving machine to speak with the crew boss. In the glare of construction lamps, the massive contrivance squatted like a great mechanical frog laying out a black tongue of pavement two-lanes wide. As the two men spoke over the noise of the equipment, neither of them heard the sound of a car, fifty yards away, swerving out of its lane and bursting through a row of orange safety drums. The rogue vehicle veered toward them and missed the crew boss by a few feet, but grazed Dick at the hip and spun him down to the ground. The car rolled and crashed into a parked bulldozer, disgorging its parts in an awful spray of glass and metal. When it came to rest, the entire front end on the driver’s side was split away, exposing a dangling seat belt and an empty driver’s seat.

Dick got to his feet and limped to the wreckage, where he found the crew gathered around the body of a pregnant woman, dead on the pavement. “She’s big with that child,” one worker said. Another said, “It won’t survive with her dead.” Dick knew what had to be done. With a jagged piece of metal, he cut into the body where the flesh was already torn. He labored in blood and fluid to bring forth a flailing, gasping infant. Swaddling the baby in a yellow safety vest, he passed it to his boss. Then he slipped away to his pickup and drove off before anyone could ask questions.

Hours later, his name was on the local TV news. The caption on the screen read, “Mother dead, baby saved. Authorities search for missing hero.” The announcer described Dick’s pickup, an old Ford, light-blue with one gray fender. Dick had been in Oklahoma just a few months, but now he had to move on. He threw some clothes into a bag and got in his truck, headed north. He travelled all day and all night, more than a thousand miles, up through Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and then west, until he found a cluster of dingy rental cabins in eastern Montana. A sign in front of the office read, “Bitterroot Cabins,” and below that, “Monthly Rates.” Stepping out of his truck, the bruise on his hip jabbed a mild complaint. The leathery woman behind the front desk puffed on a cigarette and wore her makeup in uncanny smears—lime-green eyelids, rusty cheeks, colorless lips. In the crook of her arm she held a dirty poodle that seemed incapable of barking.

Dick paid cash for a night’s stay, and the woman handed over the key. “Third one on the left,” she said without looking up.

The cabins sat scattered and half-concealed among the pines and spruce, joined by a web of gravel roads. They all looked the same—white clapboard, gabled roofs, square windows, little canopies over their doors. Dick parked next to his cabin and found the door unlocked. Inside was a musty room with a bed, a table and two chairs, and a kitchenette. He put the unused key on the nightstand, next to a lamp fashioned from a deer antler. He had a vague sense that his next stop was further west—maybe Bozeman or Butte. But this place would do for a night.

He slept through the afternoon. When he awoke, he went to the kitchen table and placed a number of items before him: rubbing alcohol, cotton balls, ink, a spool of thread, a pack of needles. He took off his flannel shirt to reveal a cluster of self-made tattoos on the inside of each forearm, tiny stars, each one no bigger than a letter on a page. The stars on his right arm represented lives saved. On his left arm, lives taken. Dick sterilized a needle and wrapped it with thread, leaving just the tip exposed. He dipped the needle in ink, and put it to the skin of his right arm. The needle made a gentle popping sound as it penetrated the layers. With several pricks, he created a small star to represent the life of the baby he’d saved in Oklahoma. Then he put salve on the spot and went to the bathroom mirror. He counted the tiny stars, the marks of life and death in his flesh. The number on each arm was the same, save one. He shook out his arms. He lifted and dropped his shoulders, uneasy at the imbalance. Shirtless before the mirror, he thought the arithmetic of the universe would settle with him soon.

He opened a window and lay on the bed, listening to the birds in the trees, the occasional car or footfall on the gravel driveway. The ache in his hip softened, and in time he drove into town for something to eat. When he returned at twilight, an old man stood across the way, in the door of his own cabin, wearing a dirty white tee-shirt and pale jeans that hung on a pair of dull-red suspenders. With sunken eyes the man watched Dick warily.

“Nice evening,” Dick said to the man.

The old man looked at the trees, the evening sky. “I suppose,” he answered. He held Dick’s gaze for a moment. Then he asked, “What brings you this way?”

“Headed west” Dick answered. “Looking for work.”

The old man nodded his understanding. Then he said, “I just made coffee, if you’re interested.”

Dick Spoils didn’t believe in coincidence. He was in this place for a reason. “I guess I could use a cup,” he said.

The man turned and Dick followed him into the cabin, where he found the same table and chairs, the same kitchenette stove, the same musty smell. The old man motioned to the coffee pot. “Right there,” he said. Dick poured a cup of coffee for each of them and they sat down at the table.

“You look familiar,” the man said. “Did you ever drive a truck?”

“Years ago,” Dick answered.

“I drove a truck for fifty years. The only work I ever did.”

Dick knew about work. He’d toiled in coal mines in West Virginia, on fishing boats in the Atlantic, on giant wind turbines in Idaho. He’d driven semi-trucks and worked in slaughterhouses and prisons, on railroads and highways. He’d saved lives in hospital emergency rooms and sat with the dying in nursing homes, going wherever the gravity of life and death summoned.

“Where’d you come in from?” the old man asked.

“South Dakota, through Sioux Falls.”

“Interstate 29, and then on 90?”

“Sounds about right,” Dick said. “I just follow the roads.”

“That’s all you can do,” the old man said and fell silent.

Dick held his coffee cup before him. The sound of the wind in the trees came through an open window.

“My knees are bone-on-bone,” the old man said. “I can’t drive a truck.” He squinted, searching his thoughts. “When you’re out on the road, you see things regular folks don’t see.”

Dick took a sip of coffee. His eyes rested on a small picture that hung next to the darkened window, a meadow of wildflowers, the frame cut from the quartered trunk of a sapling.

“I studied folks,” the old man said. “Driving that truck, I studied the things people did—the good and the bad. I thought about it until my mind went in circles.”

“A fella can go crazy like that,” Dick said.

The old man looked at Dick, his face solemn. “Let me ask you something. There’s been good and bad men of every kind. Wouldn’t you say that? Hasn’t there been every kind of man?”

Dick nodded and said, “I guess that’s right.” He remembered a drunk he’d met in a bar. The man bragged that he killed his grandmother for the fifty dollars in her purse. A lawyer had gotten him off on a technicality.

“I’ve seen people cheat and lie,” the old man said. “Things you wouldn’t believe.”

Dick recalled a woman who’d killed her own baby, hoping to get her boyfriend sent to jail for the crime. Another woman, in Texas, wanted her rich husband dead. She offered five thousand dollars and said she’d gotten rid of two other husbands the same way.

“I’m not out on the road anymore,” the old man said, “so I sit and think about the things I’ve seen.”

Dick had known others—people who had done bad things. A businessman who smuggled drugs. A nursing home doctor who killed patients and cashed their Social Security checks. A man who trafficked immigrant children. Dick never searched for these people. They simply crossed his path. When the time came, he did what had to be done.

“Things people can’t imagine,” the old man said. He lifted his chin, eyeing Dick for a moment. “What’s the worst thing you ever saw?”

Dick turned his coffee cup a quarter turn. “Not sure I could say.”

The old man stared at his coffee and pursed his lips. After a moment, he said, “I watched a man get killed once. Right in front of me.” He stared at Dick. “At a truck stop in Rock Springs, Wyoming.”

Dick looked at the man, trying to place him.

“After that, I was never the same. You don’t get over something like that.”

Dick turned to the picture of the meadow, the colors so beautiful. He could almost hear the wind rustling the grasses. He suddenly felt tired as he remembered the little baby he’d brought into the world just two days before—squalling and bloody, innocent and new.

He looked at the old man now and leaned back in his seat. “There was this cute little teenage girl,” he said, “in Michigan. She climbed a suspension cable on the Mackinac Bridge. I don’t know how she got so high. She jumped, and I grabbed her by the leg with both hands and held on tight. She cried and cried. I took her back to her mama and they both cried.”

The old man stared blankly.

“Once I came upon a shipment of drugs,” Dick said. “Two teenage boys driving the car. I made them lay in the dirt and promise they’d never do it again. Then I set the whole car on fire. The flames went to the tops of the trees.”

There was more—more than he could say. He’d taken guns from drunks set on violence, knives from men with murderous intent. He’d once stopped a man with four illegals, nearly dead, hidden in the flooring of his trailer. Once there was a hurricane and a stubborn old couple who wouldn’t leave their house. Dick got them out before the whole town was wiped away. For each life saved, he had a star on his right arm—balancing the deaths on the left.

“All my life,” Dick said to the old man, “I’ve never been afraid. I don’t know what fear is.” It was a confession he’d never made before.

The old man leaned forward. “What kind of man are you?”

Dick shook his head. “Can anyone answer a question like that?”

The old man turned away, his face snarled up. “There was a woman I loved,” he said. “After what I saw, I couldn’t go back.” He slowly pounded a weak fist on the table and spoke in a whisper. “I can’t drive a truck.”

Dick rose and retrieved the coffee pot, knowing why he’d come to this place. With slow ceremony, he refilled their cups and replaced the pot. The old man sat silently, his veiny hands before him on the table. “Tell me what you saw in Rock Springs,” Dick said.

The old man studied Dick before he spoke. “It was a Flying J truck stop. About ten at night. A man in a brown suede hat with a floppy brim walked up to me in the restaurant. He said I’d slept with his wife and I said it was a lie. So he follows me out to the parking lot, where the rigs were idling.”

Dick listened, watching the man’s grizzled face.

“We stood in between two big trucks, the diesel engines running. Then I saw he had a crowbar. He was tapping it against his leg.”

“Was anyone else there?” Dick asked.

“I didn’t think so,” the old man said. He watched Dick for a moment. “Then someone comes along. Someone big and tall like you. The man in the hat hands the crowbar to the tall man like it was nothing. Like they were friends or something. Then the tall man grabs him by the neck, calm as you are right now, lifts him off the ground and the hat falls off, but nobody makes a sound. Then the tall man hits him in the skull with the crowbar. Once, but hard.” The old man watched Dick for a reaction. “He dropped that man dead to the ground. Right at my feet.”

Dick turned his eyes to the picture of the meadow. “That was it?”

“Then he was gone, quick as he came.”

In the picture on the wall, the sky was blue. The wildflowers bloomed in an array of colors. The old man’s rattled breathing was the only sound in the room. Dick turned toward the old man and said, “I’m sorry you had to see that.”

“I’d been with that man’s wife. More than once.”

“You’re not the one who struck the blow,” Dick said.

“I sit here and draw breath, and he’s been dead all these years. I never went back to that woman. I couldn’t face her after that.”

“That man would have killed you.”

The old man took in a breath, his hands flat on the table. “It was you, wasn’t it? You were the tall man that night.”

Dick put his coffee cup in the sink and leaned against the counter, his arms folded over his chest. “That man in the brown suede hat, he wasn’t a good man. That’s the part you need to understand.”

The old man rose slowly and stood in place, his palms flat on the table. “There’s no use for a man like me.”

Dick put a hand on the man’s shoulder and gently sat him down. He leaned down and spoke softly into the old man’s ear. “What happened that night was something that had to be done. It was no wrong of yours.”

The old man looked up. “I saw him fall dead to the ground.”

Dick straightened, his hand still on the old man’s shoulder. “That man had a truck, a panel truck with explosives. He had plans to drive it into a church full of people. So I stopped him. That’s all.”

The old man’s mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out.

“I’m headed west in the morning,” Dick said, stepping away. “But I’m glad we had this talk.”

“That man’s wife—I knew her, and she was a good woman.”

“She never found out what her husband was. You can rest your mind about that.”

“I drove that truck a million miles. Things went around in my mind, over and over. I was never right after that.”

“I did what had to be done,” Dick said.

The old man put his hands to his face. “Does justice live in the human heart?”

Dick thought about that. “Would there be a right or a wrong if nobody was there to do it?”

The old man gave no response.

Then Dick went to the door, leaving the man at his table, still as a dumb mannequin.

* * *

In the canopy of the great Montana sky, the stars glimmered softly as Dick walked the gravel lane between the cabins, past the front office, where the glow of the leathery woman’s cigarette signaled in a dark window. He walked out to the main road and stood in the middle of the empty highway. Beyond the horizon, the Milky Way arched out like a spray of astral powder.

Time and again, Dick Spoils had weighed life against death, sparing the innocent and taking the guilty. He bore the very marks of it in his flesh. But he never stayed, even for a day, to see the fruits of his work. He’d saved that church full of people and saved that old man. But the old man’s life was marred. The thought of it was tiresome.

On the black silhouette of the horizon, the jagged edge of the mountains stood far in the distance. The night air carried with it the smell of the sagebrush and the lone howl of a coyote. Dick rolled up his sleeves, but the tiny stars on his arms were obscured by the darkness. As he stood there on that silent, empty highway, the arithmetic of the universe wouldn’t add up. There was no way to balance it, no way to justify. The sweep of humanity left a stain that couldn’t be wiped away. He walked back to his cabin with one move left. He was done with wandering, done with justice. In the morning he would go to some new place, and that’s where he would stay.

* * *

Hours later, in the dark stillness of his cabin, he woke suddenly. He heard the old man’s breathing even before he smelled his sweat. He sat up and switched on the deer antler lamp next to his bed. The old man stood there stiffly, one hand on the wall to steady himself. In the other hand he held a hatchet. The cabin door was ajar, darkness framing the man’s form. Dick rose to dress but said nothing. He took up his clothes, crumpled there on the floor. “You should be asleep,” he said as he pulled on his pants.

The old man held out the hatchet, offering it to Dick. “I need you to kill me.”

Dick put on his shirt. He took the hatchet from the old man’s grasp. The blade was dull and blackened, the handle worn, the thing more hammer than hatchet. He set it aside. “I’ve never killed an innocent man,” he said. “I don’t plan to now.”

The old man touched the crown of his head. “Hit me where the skull is brittle.”

Dick righted a chair and sat down to put on his socks and boots. “There was a man in Alabama. He beat his wife every day. You’re not like that.”

“I might be worse,” the old man said, his voice lacking conviction.

Dick pulled on one boot and then the other. “There was a woman in Georgia—she strapped her babies in their car seats and rolled the car into a lake.”

“The minute I saw you,” the old man said, “I knew it was the last day I had to live.”

Dick stood to button his shirt. “Go back to your cabin. I’ve got to leave here now.”

The old man picked up the hatchet. “You owe me this—for the misery I’ve suffered.”

Dick understood now. What was wrong would be wrong still. So he turned and pulled up the bed covers, hoping the old man would simply go away.

Perhaps he heard the hatchet cut through the air as the old man lunged toward him. Perhaps he saw a flash from the corner of his eye before feeling the dull blade strike his shoulder. But the blow was weak and the angle was all wrong. Dick grasped at the man’s swinging limb, and the two of them fell to the bed first and then to the floor. He pushed the old man off and got to his knees. The old man climbed on his back, swinging the hatchet wildly, begging, “Please, please.”

Getting to his feet, bringing the old man with him, Dick twisted the hatchet from the man’s grasp and tossed it aside. Still, the man kept fighting—punching and kicking and crying, showing no surrender. Seeing the man wouldn’t relent, Dick pushed him hard against the wall and held him there by his throat until the room went silent. A horrible gratitude registered in the old man’s last expression before Dick dropped him to the floor.

Outside the night was still. Dick shut the cabin door softly.

He sat with the body for a long time, thinking about his last move. After a while, he took the tattoo kit from his bag and sat at the table. He placed the items before him and rolled up his sleeves. He gazed at the tiny stars on each arm, counting them, recalling the deeds behind them. But there was no way to balance it. After a few minutes, he put the items back in their bag—the needles, the thread, the bottle of ink. The arithmetic of the universe added up to this.

* * *

He waited with the old man’s body until daybreak, then decided what to do. He rolled the body gently and took the wallet from its place in the man’s back pocket. He took out the bills and dropped the empty wallet on the bed. On the table, the rental receipt for the cabin had the license plate number of his pickup. He placed the receipt just right on the edge of the table, to make sure authorities wouldn’t miss it. He could say he’d killed the man for the few dollars in his wallet. He would tell the judge he did it in cold blood. It would be good to sit in a jail cell, eat three square meals a day, and have time to rest and think.

He left the cabin with the old man still inside and drove his truck slowly along the gravel drive toward the highway. The leathery woman stood in front of the office, holding her poodle, smoking her cigarette. He rolled down his window as he passed. “Headed west,” he said, “down Interstate 90.” She nodded but answered nothing. Travelling the freeway, he stopped in one place for gas, another for lunch, taking his time. He spoke to every server and cashier he met, telling them where he’d come from, where he was going. He made sure they saw his old Ford truck, light-blue with one gray fender.

By noon he was driving in a gentle snowfall when he saw three Montana State Police cars in his rearview mirror, their lights flashing violently. He pulled carefully to the shoulder and killed the engine.

The officers positioned themselves at the corners of his truck, guns drawn, barking their orders. “Exit the vehicle slowly,” one of them said. Dick stepped out of the truck, hands behind his head. “On the ground,” another said. Dick lay face-down on the snow-dusted pavement and spread his arms wide. An officer knelt on his hip, where the bruise was still tender, and handcuffed him. Dick was silent as they roughed him into the backseat of a patrol car, where a wire cage separated him from the troopers in the front. As they merged onto the freeway, Dick watched the Montana landscape moving out the window. He felt a strange sensation in his gut, like rodents nesting there. He thought it might be fear.

One of the officers said to Dick, “You’re a hot item, Mister. Several agencies have been after you for a long time. You killed a nursing home doctor and murdered a widow. Plus that old man in your cabin last night. We figure that’s just for starters.”

Dick waited a moment, giving the man’s words their due. Then he asked, “Is the state prison in Butte?”

“The state prison’s in Deer Lodge,” the officer said, “forty miles from Butte. You’ll be there for a long, long time.”

Dick liked the sound of it—Deer Lodge. It seemed like a good place to rest.

Then, remembering the picture of the meadow in the old man’s cabin, he said, “I’d like a picture.”

One of the officers looked back. “What was that?”

“In my jail cell. I’d like a picture. Something nice to look at.”

The officers glanced at each other but made no reply.

Dick turned to his window to see the world pass by. He took in the lay of the land, the sagebrush and barren rocks, the snowfall drawing his vision to the big Montana sky. It was all so much. So much world, so much wrong, so much future and past. He had no strength to balance it, no power to make it right. He saw that now. Someone else would have to do it. Someone more than a man. Someone who could swallow up every wrong and even death itself.

Learn more about Jack by clicking on his bio: https://thievingmagpie.org/jack-harrell-bio/