Distinctly Montana Magazine

P eople have a lot of theories about life — what it means, how to survive it, and other unadulterated bullshit. The only thing I’ve ever heard that made any sense came many years ago and in a country far away, not on some windswept mountaintop but among the crumbling sandbags of a night defensive position, and my guru wasn’t some bearded, balding wise man but a giant Hawaiian-Black-Mexican M60 gunner in the middle of his second tour in Vietnam. Because my job as a private investigator lent itself more toward the mundane and realistic, I didn’t have much use for theory, but it was a fine late-summer morning in the Winding Woods neighbor- hood of Meriwether, Montana, and I was lulled into aimless illusions of theory as I carried a clipboard and wore a fake name tag on my short- sleeved white shirt that identified me as JOE DON LOONY, REAL ESTATE AGENT, ostensibly checking for somebody who wanted to sell his house in the old neighborhood, but actually working a job I didn’t much care for, the crazy chore for my old buddy Dr. William MacKinderick, when Nacho’s dark face suddenly rose before me, not like a flashback — I knew about those — or a night- mare, just a sudden solid vision out of my past, a moment of unexpected laughter. The past hit me in the face like a bloody hand. Back during the Vietnam War, Nacho and I had survived a bad day in the bush. My first one, really. We had nearly lost a reinforced platoon patrol through the usual stupidity and lack of leadership. All of our officers were new guys getting their tickets punched in the combat zone, and most of the ex- perienced NCOs were back at the base camp club or drunk in Bangkok. The company commander, a young first lieu- tenant, was an ROTC jerk from Georgia. An NVA company was cleaning our plows — 30 percent casualties in ten minutes — and we would have gone the way of that idiot Custer if a passing flight of Cobra gunships that had been fogged out of their mission hadn’t been close enough to save our badly charred bacon. Their rockets and miniguns cleaned the NVA off the ridge top, flattened the hidden encampment, and showed me what hell really looked like. When it was over, it was too late to extract anybody but the dead and wounded, so we set up a night defensive position on the ridge line. Just before good dark, Nacho calmly stirred coffee over a burning scrap of C4. My hands were still shaking so badly that I had trouble holding my cup still when he asked me how I liked my baptism of fire. “Jesus, we were lucky,” I said breathlessly. He laughed, then reached over to poke his finger through a hole in the pocket of my fatigues. “Hey, man, look at it this way,” he said, still chuckling, “fistfights, fire- fights, and fucking love affairs — nothing counts but luck and geography, man.” Then he tugged on the bullet hole, laughing even harder as I shit my pants. Again. “Luck and geography.” For me it was laugh or cry, or some of both. I didn’t have much to laugh about, exactly, now or then. I already missed my wife. But it was my fault. I had refused to even consider moving with her a thousand miles away to Minneapolis, where she had taken a job at a high-powered firm in the Twin Cities. She was still miffed that I refused to go back to law school, and if that wasn’t bad enough, she had also taken my son with her. Insult to injury, as they say. And I’d been having endless nightmares since the day they left... Surveillance is never as easy as it looks in the movies, and working a one-man job in a small city like Meri- wether made it that much harder.... I rented an anonymous Taurus sedan, equipped it with my handheld police scanner and cell phone, added a small pair of binoculars and the Leica 35-mm camera with the 150-mm telephoto lens, a bouquet of gimme caps, a selection of windbreakers, and a couple pairs of sunglasses, and I was ready: your average, run-of-the-mill, hardworking private investigator perfectly equipped to track a bunch of Dr. MacKinderick’s neurotics around town. Mac’s patient list was organized by appointment times instead of the alphabet, with one name on each page. I assumed that meant something so I didn’t bother looking beyond the first name on the list. And it was one I knew, as Mac said might happen. The background on this guy was pretty easy. I just hung around the college bars for a couple of nights posing as a retired English professor on vacation, logging a half-dozen expensive hours and pick- ing up gossip. Professor Garfield Ritter saw Mac at 8:00 a.m. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Ritter had been chairman of the English Department at Mountain States since gasoline was eighty-nine cents a gallon. Ritter had come west with this Yale Ph.D., shoulder-length curly hair that went with his 36 DISTINCTLY MONTANA • SPRING 2011

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