The Lodge of Broken Vows

The wind hit William Delaney the moment he opened the truck door, and it went straight through his jacket like it had a grudge. Fifty miles of gravel road behind him, and the last ten had been the kind where you keep both hands on the wheel and say a small prayer to the tire manufacturer.

The Elk Horn Hunting Lodge sat at the bottom of a bowl of bare hills, a two-story log building with a stone chimney smoking against a gray sky. Mounted elk heads were visible even from the drive, dark shapes in the big front windows. William had been telling himself the whole way out that this was a good idea. An old friend, a free weekend, a break from the pharmacy and the apartment and the same four meals.

Joyce Steiner was on the porch, thirty-three years old and thinner than the last time he had seen her, with her camera hanging off one shoulder and the strap cutting a line into her puffy coat. She was smoking, which was new. She put the cigarette out on the rail when she saw him.

"Ten years," she said, walking down the steps. "You could not visit me in Portland once in ten years, Bill?"

"You moved to Portland. I have a job that eats people alive."

"A pharmacist. A man who counts pills for a living is too busy for an old friend." She hugged him, and she smelled like woodsmoke and cold air, and he felt something in his chest loosen that had been tight for longer than he wanted to admit.

"It is good to see you," he said into her shoulder.

"It is good to see you too. Even if you look like someone who irons his jeans."

"I do iron my jeans."

"I know. I forgave you for it years ago."

She took his duffel bag without asking and led him up the porch. Inside, the lodge was warm and dark, all timber and brass, a bar in the great room that looked like it had not poured a drink since the previous owner. A fire was going. The wind outside made the branches scrape the windows in a slow rhythm, like something checking the glass.

A woman in her late twenties came out of the kitchen with flour on her hands and introduced herself as Ana, the cook. She had a firm handshake and tired eyes.

"Dinner is at seven," Ana said. "Mr. Tomlinson is out checking the fence line, but he will be back. He is always back." She looked at Joyce for a second longer than she needed to, then went back to the kitchen.

Joyce poured two whiskeys at the bar without asking what he wanted, which was also new, and also not new, because she had been deciding things for him since Seattle. They took the chairs by the fire. He was thirty-four now, and she had turned thirty-three in the spring, and they had met when he was twenty-four and she was twenty-three at a pharmacy convention neither of them should have been at, and they had dated for six months, and broken up gently, and stayed friends. That was the arithmetic of their whole history. Six good months, ten careful years.

"So," he said. "Photography gig?"

She looked at the fire instead of him. "Sort of. The owner, Tomlinson, hired me to shoot the property for a sale listing."

"Congratulations. That sounds like actual work."

"Except I am not doing the listing."

He waited. He knew her well enough to wait.

"The buyer is a corporate outfit out of Denver. They buy hunting lodges, strip them, and turn the land into private leases for executives at eight thousand a season. Tomlinson does not care, he just wants his money and a condo in Scottsdale. But the staff, Ana, the guide, the handyman, they all get cut loose. And the paperwork, Bill. I have seen the paperwork. There is a clause in the purchase agreement that lets the buyer void the severance terms if there are documentation irregularities, and there are irregularities, because Tomlinson has been cooking his books since before he bought this place."

William drank his whiskey. "Okay. And what do you want from me?"

She set her glass down and turned her whole body toward him. "Tomlinson keeps the only clean copies of the sale documents in a locked drawer in his office. If those documents went missing, the deal stalls. It stalls long enough for a conservation trust I know about to make a competing offer. A real offer. The staff keeps their jobs, the land stays whole. Everybody wins except the Denver people and a man who already has two condos."

"Joyce."

"Nobody gets hurt. Tomlinson loses nothing he has not already sold in his head."

"You want me to steal documents from a man's office."

"I want you to help me. There is one more thing." She looked at the fire again, then back at him, and her voice went flat and quick, the way it did when she was ashamed. "He has a routine. Whiskey at nine, coffee at ten. I need about twenty minutes in that office while he is slow. Not asleep, just slow. You are a pharmacist. You know compounds. I am not asking for anything dangerous. Something mild. Half a tablet of something a doctor would give his own grandmother."

William stood up. He walked to the fire, then back, because sitting still was impossible.

"No," he said. "That is not mild, that is drugging a man. That is a felony with extra steps. I could lose my license. I count pills for a living, Joyce, and you want me to put one in a coffee cup."

"It is one cup."

"It is one cup and it is my whole life."

"So that is it. You look at me and you say no."

"Yes. I say no!"

She stood too. She was quiet for a moment, and then she said, "Fine. Then let us at least not end the first night of ten years with an argument," and she came around the chairs and stopped in front of him by the fire, close, and she looked up at him and said, "This is separate from all that, and you can say no to this too. Can I kiss you? Because I have wanted to for about nine years and I am tired of being polite about it."

He said yes. He said it out loud, which mattered to him, for reasons he would examine later.

She kissed him and her mouth opened against his and he made a sound he had not made in years, something low and half embarrassed, and she laughed against his lips because she heard it. "There he is," she whispered. Her hands went to the buttons of his flannel and undid them one by one, unhurried, like she was counting pills herself, and when the shirt came off her palms slid over his chest and down his sides and he shivered even though the fire was close enough to feel on his knees.

"Bedroom," she said. "If you want to. Do you want to?"

"Yes. I mean yes."

"Words, Bill."

"Yes. Please."

"Better."

Her room was at the end of the hall and the window in it faced the tree line, and as she pulled her sweater over her head he saw something out there, or thought he did, a pale shape standing between two trunks at the edge of the light the lodge threw into the yard. It was gone when he blinked. The branches kept scraping the glass in that slow patient rhythm. She took his face in her hands and turned it back to her. "Eyes on me," she said. "Whatever is out there, it is not in this room."

Her bra came off and her nipples were already hard, from cold or want, and he leaned down and took one into his mouth and she gasped and fisted a hand in his hair, holding him there, and he sucked until she made that rough sound he remembered, the one that had ruined him at twenty-four and was ruining him now. Her hands worked his belt open, then his fly, and she pushed his jeans and boxers down together and wrapped her fingers around his cock and he swore, out loud, into the dark room, and she smiled like she had won something.

She sat back on the bed and pulled him down after her and got her jeans off, her underwear, nothing left, and she was under him with her thighs open and he could feel the heat of her before he touched her. He slid his hand down and found her clit with two fingers and she arched off the mattress. "Yes, there, fuck, Bill, right there." He circled it slow and then faster, and she got wetter under his hand until he could hear it, and then she grabbed his wrist. "In me. I need you in me, now, I have waited nine years and I am done waiting."

He got a condom out of his duffel because some things survive ten years, and she watched him roll it on with an expression that was half hunger and half grief, and then he lined up and pushed into her, slow, inch by inch, and her mouth opened and no sound came out until he was all the way in and she breathed, "Fuck," against his neck. He started to move. Long strokes first, then deeper, and she wrapped her legs around him and dug her heels into his back and met him, thrust for thrust, the bed frame knocking the wall in a rhythm that answered the branches on the window.

He looked down at her once and the firelight was gone from the window behind her and the glass was dark, and for one second there was a face in it, or a smear of pale where a face should be, and dread went through him like ice water, and Joyce felt him hesitate and opened her eyes. "Hey. Look at me. Stay here. I am here." She pulled his mouth down to hers and clenched around him and the fear broke apart into her, into this, and he fucked her harder, her heels drumming, her clit pressed between them, and she came first, shaking, saying his name over and over like a fact, and then he was gone too, groaning into her shoulder, cum pulsing through him until there was nothing left.

They lay tangled afterward, breathing hard, and out past the tree line something stepped between two trunks again, pale and tall, and stood there. Joyce did not open her eyes. William did, and watched it, and did not move, because she was warm against his chest and he wanted one more minute before the night got to have them.

She kissed him and it was not careful at all. Her hand was flat against his chest and she kissed him like she was mad about something, and when she pulled back her eyes were wet, which surprised him more than the kiss had.

"I came out here with a plan," she said quietly. "Get you here, get you on my side. This was never part of it, and it is not a payment, and you do not owe me a thing for it, whatever you decide about the coffee. Then you walked up the steps with your ironed jeans and your sad pharmacist face and I mostly just wanted to see you."

"You are still trying to con me."

"I know. I know I am. I am bad at this now, Bill. I lost my last job because a scam went wrong, a real one, and I have been running on cons ever since because they are the only thing I trust." She laughed, not happily. "And the one honest thing I have done in two years is tell you that."

William looked at her. He thought about the last four years of his life, the prescriptions and the single-serving friendships, and he thought about six months when he was twenty-four that he had never once stopped carrying around.

"Get the documents," he said slowly, "without the coffee. If he leaves that office unlocked, if you can do it clean, I will stand in the hallway and be your lookout. That is my whole offer. No pill. Ever."

"That is a terrible offer."

"It is the only one."

"God!" She pressed her forehead against his chest. "Fine. Clean only. Lookout only." Then, muffled: "You are still impossible."

"I iron my jeans."

They had barely got their clothes back on when the front door banged open at half past six and Milton Tomlinson came in with the wind, a heavy man of sixty-two in a canvas coat, cheerful in the loud way of men who have made every decision in their own favor for thirty years. He shook William's hand hard.

"Delaney! Joyce's friend from the drug business. Good, good. Dinner soon. But first," and he smiled the way a man shows off a car, "you have to see the trophy room. Best room in Wyoming."

The trophy room was off the hall, long and low-ceilinged, and it was full of elk. Eight heads, maybe ten, antlers spreading out over the lamplight, glass eyes everywhere. Tomlinson talked about lot sizes and gravel driveways and the corporation that was going to pay him, and William nodded and said the right nothing at intervals.

Then he stopped in front of the biggest mount, at the far end. Six-point, enormous, gray with age. Its eyes were not glass. They were black and cracked, like old glaze on pottery, and they did not catch the lamplight the way the others did. The others looked