Colter McDaren

The fireworks crew found the body before dark. A boot under the cattle trailer first. Then the rest of him dragged into the dust beside the feed barn while the fiddle band kept sawing through another dance tune twenty yards away. Kids still lined up for pony rides. Somebody near the beer tent shouted for more ice. Silver Creek did not stop for dead men. Colter's hand stayed locked around my upper arm. Calm grip. Hard grip. The kind used on horses liable to break fences. Deputies rolled the body over with their boots. The dead man wore rodeo denim & a pearl snap shirt gone black beneath the ribs. One side of his face looked sanded down to meat. The other side stayed strangely clean, one eye fixed open toward the ferris wheel turning slow against the evening sky. "You know him?" Colter asked. "No." Too quick. Boone appeared through the crowd a moment later. Dust on his jeans. Blood drying across two knuckles. He grabbed a beer off a passing table that did not belong to him & drank from it without asking. "The other fella ran," he said. Colter looked at Boone's hand. Boone shrugged once. Near the midway, a clown in smeared paint lit a cigarette beside a game booth while a child cried over a dropped funnel cake. The smell of diesel & brisket hung low in the heat. One deputy crouched near the corpse & lifted something silver from the dirt. A belt buckle. Mine.  Even from twenty feet away I recognized the scratch across the center star. Colter noticed before I could hide it. Boone saw it first. His jaw shifted. Colter took the buckle from the deputy without asking permission. Turned it once in his palm. The metal flashed bright in the carnival lights. "When'd you lose this?" he asked. I could hear the ferris wheel motor grinding overhead. "I didn't."