Nels Hanson
The Blue Flower’s Scent

“Everything all right?” I asked.
“Mmm,” Beulah said. “Perfect, Phil—”
“More salad?”
She shook her head. “I can’t.”
I looked around the rustic cabin by the aspens and the blue river, the little hunting lodge that belonged to Sheriff Jack Blair’s father-in-law—Sergeant Glad and my headquarters for the Montana assignment. 
It was a famous place, an historical moment. The white and blue chimney stones, the cherry paneling, the mounted trout, and the antlered heads of big game above the mantel—
With a sudden jump, like a dangling loop of film touching the floor and then quickly winding tight as the projector’s sprocket gripped the perforations, the story of my life had started again. 
Now everything was normal and legendary. 
There was the hope of love. I had known Beulah Ransom only an hour and I knew it was true—I’d known from the moment she got out of the blue car and approached the cabin’s open red door, just after Glad and I had pulled in from Clarksville and the weird hectic day sifting Night Slayer clues with Sheriff Blair and his sergeant, Ray Bell.
I’d caught a rare scent on the air, not pine or a woman’s cologne but the subtle and elusive scent of a dark flower I remembered Fresno and The Blue Flower Case, the night I had dreamed Ellen was alive again and speaking to me about Montana— 
Now I felt a twisting stab, saw the orange light falling through the log cabin’s dusty window across the flagstone hearth. Ellen’s ghost would be no match for Beulah.

Outside, white buildings yellow in the sun.
Outside, the birds circle continuously
Where trees are actual and take no holiday.

Ellen’s sad and lost favorite poet Weldon Kees had written that, in The Last Man, the book I’d found at her New York apartment, when I flew back East to pack her things after the early morning phone call from her lover—
“You’re a teacher?” Glad asked. He sat in the wood chair he’d brought from his bedroom. 
Beulah nodded. “Uh-huh.”
“In Clarksville?”
“Yes.” Beulah put the last of her hamburger on the plate.
“Very long?” Glad looked at her closely. 
“Twenty years—” She smiled, dabbing at her lips with the paper napkin. “I’m giving things away.”
How lovely and beautiful she was, beyond Blair and Bell’s descriptions, beyond the praise of Viv Stone, the ex-Hollywood actress who’d stood beneath the flowering honey locust with her pet deer and the rescued black bear, Charlie. 
“Do you happen to remember a student named Jim Sloan?” Glad asked.
“Yes. I had him and his sister. I liked Jimmy—”
Beulah’s brown eyes shone in the cabin’s sunset light.
“Smart boy, was he?” 
“You know Jim?” Beulah asked with surprise.
“I’ve met him,” Glad said. “Last night.”
“How is he?” she asked eagerly. “I haven’t seen him in years.”
“He was a bit preoccupied when I met him,” Glad said. “Pete Willis took me out to his ranch.”
Again Beulah smiled her pretty grin. “Jim was always preoccupied.”
“Was he?”
“This project and that, one thing or another. He had a good imagination but it was hard for him to finish things.”
It sounded like Frankie Two-Shoes' description of his own inventor father, who'd drawn plans for a failed remote control bell cow—Frankie had later sold the blueprints to Jim Sloan. Prospecting on a creek on the Lemon Ranch, Frankie had seen the Night Slayer's silent, deadly craft, smelled the odor of fresh blood and found the hooves and eyeless head, the killer's gruesome calling card—
Now Beulah neatly folded her napkin. 
“At first I thought he was just a shy, lonely ranch kid. You know, too little stimulation. He was in ag, maybe ag mechanics, he was always building things. Then one day after class he asked me if Macbeth were like Oedipus. It made me stop and think. After that we were friends.”
That was something fine, I thought, to be a friend of Beulah’s.
“And what else did he talk about?” Glad pursued.
“Machines. His latest project, what he planned for the future,” she said hopefully.
“What kind of machines?” probed Glad.
She leaned forward, extending a tanned slender arm, then slipped a dropped slice of lettuce onto her empty plate. 
“I remember he built a chicken house, it was on exhibit at Public Schools’ Week. It was really something. All the eggs rolled down conveyors and fell into cartons. Everyone was excited, people crowded around, waiting for him to throw the switch—”
“Sounds pretty scientific,” Glad said.
Beulah frowned, moving a shapely finger around the edge of her glass. 
“It was. But there was some problem, when he got it running. It was too complicated and all the eggs smashed. It was quite a mess. Then the chickens got out, they were running all over, crowing and flapping their wings. Jim and I tried to catch them and everyone laughed. I think Jim was pretty embarrassed.”
“I guess so,” Glad said. “That’s too bad.”
I loved her more, for chasing the runaway chickens.
“I always felt tender toward him.” Beulah looked up with her hurt, slanted smile. “He had obvious talent but a bad home life.”
She shook her head, so her auburn hair waved and caught the gold light. Viv Stone had been right, about Beulah.
“No encouragement. Once I loaned him Moby Dick and he returned it the next day. He stayed up all night to finish it.”
“What did he make of it?” I asked.
“He wanted to know if the whale were God or the Devil.”
“What’d you tell him?” 
“Both and neither. He said, ‘That’s what I thought.’ The next week he read ‘Bartleby the Scrivener,’ about the man who refuses to live in the world, by its rules, who won’t help himself or let himself be helped and starves to death. He was sure the main character was Melville, that the story was autobiographical.”
“Did he read the story of the Trojan Horse?” Glad wondered.
“I don’t know if we did the Aeneid that year or not,” Beulah said. She raised her brows. “I know he was interested in Greek myths. I remember a paper he wrote on Pasiphaë and the Minotaur.”	
“Who’re they?” Glad asked.
Beulah grinned. “Do you want to hear another horror story? You’ve probably had your fill with the eggs and chickens.”
“I would,” Glad said.
“Sure,” I said. “If you don’t make it too personal.”
“I’ll try not to divulge any secrets,” Beulah began, then lifted her Scotch and took a drink. She held the glass in her lap. 
“Well, a greedy king, King Minos of Crete, had a beautiful white bull that swam from the surf, an amazingly perfect bull that the sea god Poseidon had given him to sacrifice. But Minos decided to keep the bull, to breed with his livestock.”
“An entrepreneur,” I said. 
“That’s right.” Beulah nodded and continued:
“So Poseidon made Pasiphaë, the king’s wife, fall in love with the bull—”
“What d’you mean?” Glad asked.
“Romantically.”
“I don’t get it. You mean—”
“Daedalus, the ancient world’s greatest inventor, built a lifelike heifer made of wood. Pasiphaë hid inside.”
“No,” Glad said. 
“Under an oak tree she mated with the bull.” 
Glad stared at Beulah with disbelief.
“It’s a myth,” I said to him.
“Later Pasiphaë became pregnant,” Beulah said. “Time passed and she bore a monster, called the Minotaur. It had the head and hooves of a bull and the body of a man. It was terrifying and ravenously hungry, all of Crete was in chaos. So King Minos ordered Daedalus to construct a stone labyrinth.”
“What’s that?” asked Glad.
“It was a maze, a kind of elaborate, complicated cage, where the Minotaur was imprisoned. No one who was put in the labyrinth could find his way out.”
“So he died?” Glad asked.
“Wait,” I said.
“Every seven years, seven girls and seven boys from Athens were forced into the dark labyrinth and eaten by the monster,” Beulah said.
“Jesus—” 
“One day, Theseus, the son of the king of Athens, arrives on a ship with the young people chosen for sacrifice. Despite the long odds, Theseus has vowed to end the Minotaur’s tyranny. Then he has a stroke of unforeseen luck.”
Beulah glanced at me.
“Ariadne, the daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë, falls in love with Theseus. She gives him a ball of string.”
“Why?”  
“Theseus ties one end to a rock at the entrance to the maze, then unwinds the string as he enters the labyrinth. In the dark, he hears the Minotaur breathing, leaps on the monster with his sword, kills the Minotaur, then follows the string to escape.”
Beulah turned to me with sudden worry.
“Is Jim Sloan in some kind of trouble?” 
“No,” Glad said. “Not yet. Does he have a girlfriend?”
 “He went briefly with Sally—a studious girl,” she said with concern. “Attractive. I guess Jim got pretty serious. Sally’s father, he’s a prominent lawyer, wasn’t very happy. I’m not sure what pressures he applied—”
Beulah looked sympathetic. 
“Anyway, they broke up and she went away to journalism school. Northwestern. A few years ago she moved back. She’s our local TV anchor.”
“Sally Mathews?” I asked. “The Night Slayer reporter?” I’d seen the blonde girl this afternoon, on the steps of the sheriff's office with her cameraman as Blair slipped past with a terse, “No comment.”
“That’s right.” Beulah looked confused. “Is something wrong?”
“No,” I said. “Nothing’s happened.”
“They didn’t get back together?” Glad asked.
“I don’t think so. Why?”
“Did he ever mention anyone named Lucinda Olson?” I asked.
“Jim and the mythical Lucinda.” Now Beulah smiled. “Where did you hear about our local Lorelei?” 
“Did Jim talk about her?”
“He did,” Beulah said, nodding. “Now that you mention it. Abstractly.  He said she was a remote symbol. A projection of all a man wanted and would never have, she embodied both perfect love and the conquest of death.”
“Jim sounds like a Renaissance man—inventor, Platonic philosopher, lover.” 
“He was, in his way. With Jim, everything was a little abstract, interesting but abstract. But somehow personal. He was touching.”
I studied my hands, thinking, then spoke, half to myself:	
“So Jim was smart, he built things, he stayed to himself, he thought about Lucinda Olson, his pretty girlfriend Sally broke up with him, each night on the news he hears her announce the day’s atrocities, the latest bulletin on the cattle thefts and mutilations, the Night Slayer Case. 
“Jim knows Frankie Two Shoes and bought Frankie’s father’s plans for a robotic cow. Sheriff Blair says wealthy rancher Web Olson is death to rustlers, lonely and reads Dante, Jim is lonely too and probably upset, like Olson he’s a book lover. 
“One sad day Jim rediscovers the story of the Trojan Horse—in an updated version at the barbershop, Sergeant Rock and his Howling Commandos—about Helen of Troy, the captive queen who never loved Paris and is held against her will, waiting for Ulysses to save her—”
“Like I said,” Glad said. Last night he had picked up the tall tale in a bar and driven with Pete to the isolated ranch to see for himself. “Like Sleeping Beauty—”
“Who’s Frankie Two Shoes?” Beulah asked.
“The guy with the numbers painted on his boots,” Glad said. “He’s our only witness.”
“Numbers?”
“He drinks,” I said. “One is for left, two is for right.”
“I don’t know him,” Beulah said. “Should I?”
“His dad was an inventor,” Glad said. “So is Jim.”
“I didn’t know that,” Beulah said seriously. “I’m glad to hear it worked out. What are some of Jim’s inventions? You say he’s working on robots?”
Glad glanced at me as I stared at the fireplace, at the river stones and the blackened crack that angled upward toward the mantel, at the glass eyes of the elk, ram, Rocky Mountain goat. 
“Let’s leave it for now,” I said. “We don’t know much.” I looked back at Beulah.
“I see,” Beulah said. “Secret police business.”
“What about Web Olson?” Glad said. “Ever see him?”
“I don’t think anyone’s ever seen him, not for years. Sally used to mention him. Her father was Web Olson’s attorney.”
“Really?” I said.
Beulah frowned.
“She and Jim were pretty liberal, idealistic. I think Olson and her father represented the vested interests, big money and power, the cattle barons. I’m sure Sally’s father wasn’t taken with Jim—”
Beulah stopped and stood up. She’s leaving, I thought.
For a moment the blue flower’s scent returned, strong and sweet, and instantly, fleeting as a thought, disappeared in the pine-scented summer air.
“We’re going to have coffee,” Glad said with alarm. “Don’t you want some? There’s ice cream.”
“I’ve got some dessert in the car,” Beulah said. “And something else. I forgot—” 
She crossed the room and went out the open door.
“Am I talking too much?” Glad said.
“It’s all right.” 
The flower’s pungent delicate flavor was gone—I’d heard of such things, a smell or taste attached to a deep memory, so either one triggered the other—
“You like her? I do.”
“I like her,” I said. 
“Where shall I put this?” 
In the doorway Beulah held out a blackberry pie with crisscrossed strips of crust. Had she baked it on purpose, all day been planning to stop by?
Again I remembered the soft richness of her voice—over drinks we’d spoken quietly and intimately like old friends as Glad made supper in the kitchen and I’d sensed the blue flower’s presence.
“I’ll take that,” Glad said, jumping up. “I’ll serve it with the coffee and ice cream.”
He took the pie from Beulah and hurried from the room. 
“Betty gave me this for you,” Beulah said, sitting down. “I’d forgotten. Until we started talking about Jim. Jack asked her to send it along.” 
She pulled an 8 x 10 black and white photo from a manila envelope and handed it to me. 
“It’s Web Olson,” Beulah said. 
Squinting, I removed the mustache, and focused on the stubby nose, the strong jaw, serious thin-lipped mouth, the sandy crewcut and wide forehead, the cool killer’s icy blue eyes, the slightly turned ears. 
Clean-cut, handsome, deadly. The perfect Marine. 
In the sunlit square my father, Lieutenant Richard Lambert, fell below the library tower in Texas, crouching over Lisa Barlow, 13.
I turned the photo over.

1947—Reynolds Photographic Studio—Clarksville, Montana

It was stamped in a black oval. 
I looked at the face again, carefully, dispassionately this time, taking in the pearl-buttoned shirt and string tie, but still it was true, a sure likeness.
“This is Web Olson?” 
“Yes,” Beulah said. “I’m sorry.” 
“It can’t be. It’s—” 
In ’47 Whitman would have been a child—
“The assassin, the mass murderer,” Beulah said. “The picture in Life magazine.” 
“Blair knows,” I said. “He told you.” 
I looked up and Beulah nodded. 
I could see now how the nose was slightly different, more finely drawn, and the set of the eyes half an inch wider. My eye was like a ruler. I’d kept the magazine in my room, hidden from my mother, rolled inside a cardboard tube. 
As a boy, I’d studied Whitman’s picture over and over, searching for a secret clue, some overlooked reason, but the face remained inscrutable, blank as God’s. It was God who had given him the brain tumor, the abusive father who harangued him to earn his Eagle Scout’s badge and join the Marines.
“What do you make of things like this?” Beulah asked when I didn’t speak. 
The likeness was unreal. It was as if Whitman had a secret twin or had faked his own death and escaped to Montana. The resemblance didn’t make sense, it was gratuitous, a random addition to an already contorted story.
“I don’t know.” I kept looking at the photo, expecting it to suddenly talk, to explain.
“It happens to me sometimes. Not like this but it happens. I put up a picture of Chief Joseph in the classroom, then on Back to School Night I see his double, a 40-year-old logger whose son has a reading problem. For a second, when I meet him, I expect him to say, ‘We were deer, and white men were grizzly bears.’ I don’t know if I’m supposed to turn and run or offer an apology for Lewis and Clark.”
“It’s strange.” 
Now again I felt things were closing in, converging, like the night in Albert Rainie’s house in Fresno when past and present seemed reflected in his long mirror attached to the closed bedroom door—the blue flower in the crystal vase of special water, the folded letters from Rainie’s fiancée from 50 years ago, my face that matched my murdered father’s, as if in death he had aged and now we’d become perfect counterparts who stared a minute into each other’s blue eyes—
Glad and I had found Rainie dead on the lawn beside the flower, the old man stripped bare of the overcoat that later turned up at Sacred Heart with the note and $90,000 sewn in the lining—
“I just want to take some water.”
It wasn’t a murder-robbery but a coronary and that night at home the scent of star jasmine wafted through the bedroom’s gauze curtains and I dreamed about the blue flower—
I was Albert Rainie and his lost love had become Ellen who wore a blue dress silvery in the moonlight and whispered something secret about Montana, after she bent to kiss me, her cool lips tasted blue and sweet like the flower, like blue vanilla and sandalwood and something else, I tried but I couldn’t pin down the elusive flavor, just as the phone rang and rang and she was gone, I thought it was the painter calling to say that Ellen had taken her life again in New York— 
The Blue Flower Case hadn’t ended but only just begun—	
“It’s unsettling, Phil.”
I’d dreamed of it again last night, the blue flower’s strange perfume, before the doe entered the cabin through the door left ajar and nipped me on the ear as I dozed in the chair by the blue-flamed fire—
Before Glad arrived drunk and told the story of Jim and the bull and I went to bed and hid within the Horse and entered Troy to free Helen, then woke to find the nude statue in the river by the cabin—an old joke on newcomers Blair’s father-in-law liked to play, Blair had forgotten to warn me—
“It gives me a chill, makes you really wonder about the hidden nature of things—”
And later met Viv Stone and petted Blossom her tame deer in the lovely yard with blooming purple wisteria and she’d insisted I had to meet Beulah—“If you don’t hurry, you’ll miss the chance of a lifetime”— 
And Blair nearly hit the wild buck and doe and two fawns as we rushed past Web Olson’s famous Bar-Circle Ranch after the radio call, to question Frankie Two Shoes about the flying saucer and the dismembered steer and meet the Air Force who’d lost the secret part . . . .
At the jail, Blair had sent us home, while he and Ray Bell went to interview Bill Sharp, who ran a hardware store and dealt in black-market electronics pilfered from Walker Field— 
“We’ll see where that leads,” Blair said. “Take off and go fishing, before it gets dark. You’ve had enough of Blue Monday.”
“It’s an odd series,” I said. “Of coincidences.”
I was being led down a maze, with something shadowed at its center, Web Olson or Charles Whitman, Theseus or myself. 
Or Ellen, holding the blue flower . . . . 
If it had a center. And if I could reach it and return without a string. What would Jim Sloan make of my story that apparently was also his own? 
God and the Devil, Love and Death.
In Montana, on the same evening, in a cabin by a river, I’d met lovely Beulah, and my father’s hated killer from 35 years ago.
“Phil?” 
I looked up at her clear face and the brown eyes flecked with gold. Through the windows, the last light touched her hair so it shone copper and red, the way Ellen’s used to look as she painted or gardened in the evening sun, before she’d gone away forever to New York—
“You okay?”
“Would you like to take a walk?” I asked her.  “Down by the river?”  
“Yes,” she answered quietly. “I’d like to take a walk by the river.”
I sat a second longer, watching the sheen of Beulah’s cheek framed by glowing hair, then slipped the photograph into its envelope and set it on the coffee table. I got up and took a step toward the kitchen.
“Thanks for dinner, Bob,” I called to Glad. “We’re going for a walk.”
Glad came to the kitchen door, drying his hands.
“Okay, Phil. I’ll hold the coffee.”
“Thank you, Bob,” Beulah said. “Everything was perfect.”
“You’re welcome.”
I moved to the open red door, then touched my chest and stopped.
“Forget something?” Beulah asked.
I had worn my gun all through dinner. It had been a long, unpredictable day.
“Just be a minute,” I said.
I went into the bedroom and took off the holster and placed it in the top bureau drawer. 
I came back into the living room and Beulah was out front, waiting beyond the open door. 
I held out my hand. We started across the bed of dry needles through the last slanting shafts of yellow light broken by pine boughs.
We stepped through the arch of aspen to stand on the bank. 
The sky shone rose and yellow behind the western mountains. The leaves were growing dark, the parchment trunks whiter now, the moving water changing from gold to a cool silver. Below the surface the white statue shone like blue marble. 
“I love Montana,” Beulah said. 
At our feet lay the fresh, sharp night scent of ferns. Above our heads the aspen leaves rattled. Crickets called across the river. A mourning dove cooed.
“‘Already with thee,’” Beulah said. “‘Tender is the night.’” 
“‘But here there is no light—’”
“‘Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown—’”
“‘Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.’”
“I love that, Phil.” Her loose hair drifted across her mouth, and she touched the dark strands with her hand. Her face was lifted in the afterlight.
“Is this real?” Her voice was low.
“I think so,” I said. “It feels like a dream but I think it’s real.”
“Hold me close,” Beulah said. 
I took a step and kissed her mouth. Her hair smelled fresh as sun and I held her against me, then moved my lips from hers. 
“Let’s sit down,” Beulah said softly.
“All right.” 
I took her hand and let her down gently on the bank, back among the ferns. I sat down and she lifted a hand and touched my forehead, looking at me, then whispered. 
“I don’t even know you and I feel I’ve known you all my life—”
She slipped her hand behind my neck, gently pulling me to her, and I leaned down at last to drink the blue flower’s lost flavor—
“Phil! You out there?”
It was as if a hundred years had passed. I touched her hair. Like the river, it reflected starlight.
“We better go,” Beulah said. 
“I guess,” I said, but I drew her closer among the dark ferns.
“Phil!” 
Glad’s voice sounded closer, echoing through the arch of aspen. I sat up, cradling Beulah’s head. The river moved with a loud hush over round stones, over the darkened alabaster statue—
“Web Sloan Bull Lucinda Pete—”
He was calling from the path through the ferns and then Beulah and I were dressed and hurrying hand-in-hand toward the cabin where tall Pete Willis stood by the chrome bumper of his taller 4 x 4—
In the orange porchlight Glad wore his gun and held my holstered revolver in his outstretched hand—
“Jim Sloan’s on his way to Olson’s.”
“You got the keys?” I hesitated halfway to the car where Glad stood by the open passenger door.
“Got ’em!”
“Phil, you be careful!”
“I’ll be back, Beulah. Wait,” I said, gazing into her eyes a last time.
“You ready, Phil?”
I jumped in and hit the ignition, flooring the pedal as the car slid and steadied as the tires caught the gravel. 
“It’s all Blair needs—the kid playing hero in the middle of the Night Slayer mess.”
“You want to call Blair?” 
“He’s got enough on his mind handling Sharp.”
“Yeah, the fence.”
“Let’s try to head Sloan off—” 
I drove fast up the unpaved road as leafy aspen branches hit and brushed along the windows. A pair of eyes flashed from the white-trunked trees—a black-masked raccoon paused at the road’s edge, twirled as it broke the headlights’ trance, striped tail swinging back toward the river.
Loud rock flew against the wheel wells, the aspen stood up bright and disappeared and the orange reflection stripes of the main road jumped.
“Clear right—” Glad said.
I looked left and without touching the brake pulled out onto the asphalt road in a long mushy slide. In the mirror I saw Pete’s headlights bounce as he followed us onto the pavement, then ahead the glow of two blue lights and the dark buffalo standing by the barbed-wire fence. 
Glad lifted something from the seat.
“I forgot to take in the radio.” He fiddled with the switch.
“Roger. Running Doe Road!” It was a woman’s voice. 
“Opened fire—”
“I read. Over.” The radio crackled. “Sheriff Blair?” 
Shouts and static.
“Running Doe Road. This is Juana. Sergeant Lujan. Over.”
“Need assistance!”
Blair shouted again between bursts of pistol fire, a heavy-caliber machine gun erupting in a roaring sickening bark and something exploded like a windshield blowing out.
“Sheriff Blair! Do you copy?” Juana shouted. “Over!”
“Request back-up! Olson Ranch.” Now it was Bell. “Hurry! Get down, Jack—Christ!”  
“Back-up en route,” Juana radioed.
I swung left at the crossroads just before the tall mountain and sped a quarter mile past a white wood fence, missed the sign for the on-ramp, crimped the wheel and slid onto the interstate in front of a semi that squealed its air brakes as its lit trailers zigzagged like a shattering constellation.
Car and pickup taillights rushed up and the lit town off to the right flashed by as I held the car at 95 for seven miles, my hand on the horn to move traffic over, afraid to push the Ford any harder, the rapid machine gun booming from the radio over Bell’s breathless shouts to Blair—
The air went dead. 
“Ray!”
Sergeant Lujan tried frantically to raise them again and I shot past a cattle truck, saw the sign

Running Doe Road

and took the exit, the tires throwing a wave of gravel at the shoulder when I nearly lost the car in the tight unmarked turn.
“Sheriff Blair!”
I raced along the narrow two-lane blacktop and switchbacks, swerved once in a tilting slide to miss what looked like a coyote, gunned on past dim farmhouses and the lightless hills and a white-winged swooping owl, hitting the horn to scare deer until the asphalt turned to rock and I grabbed the wheel with both hands. I skidded the heavy car through corners without touching the brake, slamming down the pedal and swinging almost sideways out of each unbanked curve.
“Sergeant Bell? Do you read?”
Glad lowered the window, cocking his head.
“I hear it. It’s up ahead.”  
Something moved beyond my lights. I leaned over the wheel to make out the dark blur as I moved the car over. I thought of Viv Stone’s bear. Charlie— I let up the gas, ready to swerve if the big animal cut in front of us.
At a hundred feet my stomach turned over. 
Night Slayer— I almost said it out loud. 
Then I saw the shape of the high rump and the white rocking horns jumped from the darkness.
“Jesus—”
“It’s him!” Glad sat up toward the dash.
In the headlights a mass the size of an SUV shone and swayed slightly from side to side, a single yellow reflector shining at the back. 
I gave it a wide berth, the car’s tires bouncing on the shoulder. I caught the long shadow of flank, high hump atop massive shoulders, starry horns rocking, sprouting from the monumental flattened head.
“God it looks real—”
But it was real, it was monstrous, like a hand or fingernail a yard wide.
“I told you, Phil.” 
I watched the looming bull pass like a black ship. 
“We may need him,” Glad said. 
In the mirror I had a shadowed glimpse of the great face, the glint of eyes eight feet off the ground. A pale spotlight shot from the mouth, illuminating a wavering patch of gravel twenty feet beyond the front hooves that camouflaged the turning aircraft wheels.
But inside the bull it was pitch dark, all Jim could see was the face of Lucinda—like me, like Albert Rainie, maybe like Web Olson himself, who loved Dante, Jim too had tasted the blue flower’s fatal scent—
“She embodied both perfect love and the conquest of death—”
Jim was right, that was it, the third part I couldn’t identify.
I shivered and looked back up the narrow road, pushing the smoking Ford to reach Blair and Bell in time, leaving Jim Sloan to wander like a derelict Ulysses toward Web Olson’s fearsome Bar-Circle Ranch and his phantom heartsick waiting daughter— 

_____

Nels Hanson’s work has appeared in the Antioch Review, Texas Review, Black Warrior Review, Southeast Review, Long Story, Short Story, South Dakota Review, Starry Night Review and other literary journals. "The Death of Zorro," is currently appearing in The Sixers Review (www.sixersreview.com), and "The Dripping Net" at Word Riot (www.wordriot.org), and stories are in press at The Iconoclast and The 13th Warrior Review.