“Before I got nailed, I used to live with this mulatto girl that played sometimes at Pat o’Brien’s. I sat down at the piano once with her, and she thought I was her Mister Cool, the best thing since Brubeck, Monk, Mel Powell, or anybody. Except she liked shooting craps better than playing jazz. She made me take her to a couple of those upstairs games on Rampart, and she’d fade every bet on the board. When we got cleaned out, she’d bust up the apartment and call up some Baptist preacher in Mississippi and promise never to hang around white musicians again.”
“How did you get the tattoo?”
“I just told you.”
“Buddy, you are a dislodged madman. I think the hacks were right. That glue got to you a long time ago.”
“That’s because you got all your wiring tuned in to another radio set,” he said. “And speaking of that, while your high-rolling daddy is about to move it down the road and do his act for the sweater girls and their Howdy Doody boyfriends, let me click on the radio so we can listen to that fine jazz station in Spokane and dig on Shorty’s flügelhorn.”
Buddy turned on the radio that was set in the kitchen window, his trousers unzippered, one-half of his shirt hanging off his back. The tubes warmed in the old plastic box, the static cracked, and when the sound sharpened through the speaker, Shorty Rogers and Shelly Mann were actually playing.
Buddy put his arm through the other sleeve, as though he had been in suspension, and then began jiggling all over in rhythm to the music while he buttoned his shirt in his bare feet.
“Tell me, truthfully,” he said. “Were you ever tempted when you were inside? I mean, to just quit fighting it and let the girl have her way?”
Without rising from the chair, I reached over and turned up the radio to full volume and finished the whiskey in my glass. A few minutes later I heard Buddy grind the starter on the Plymouth outside.
After I had showered and put on a soft wool shirt and clean pair of khakis, I saw the pickup truck stop in front of the porch. I opened the door and looked through the screen at Pearl in the blowing snow. She wore a man’s mackinaw with a scarf tied around her head, and her face was red with cold.
“Tell Buddy that—”
“Come in before you turn into a snowman,” I said.
“Just tell him that Frank—”
I opened the screen for her.
“Come in if you want to talk with me. You might not mind freezing, but I do,” I said.
She stepped inside, and I closed the wood door behind her.
“Frank’ll pick him up at six-thirty in the morning to go into Hamilton for some lumber,” she said.
“Oh, he’ll like that.”
“You can do it for him.”
“All right. No problem in that.” I could see she had on only a light shirt under the mackinaw, and she was shaking with the sudden warmth of the room. “You want a cup of coffee?”
“I have to get a loaf of bread up at the store before it closes.”
I took an unopened loaf from the bread box in the cupboard and set it on the table.
“Sit down. A cup of coffee won’t ruin your general feelings towards me.” I washed a cup under the iron pump and filled it from the pot on the stove.
She untied her scarf and shook her hair loose. It was wet with snow on the ends. She picked up the cup with both hands and sipped at the edge.
“Put a little iron it it,” I said, and tipped a capful of whiskey into her coffee. “Where’s Mel tonight?”
“He’s at a faculty meeting.”
“Is he serious about that revolution business?”
“In his way, yes, I guess he is.”
“What do you mean ‘in his way’?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” she said.
“I’ve had some experience with people who are always trying to right the world by wiping out large portions of it. They all have the same idea about sacrifices, but it’s always somebody else’s ass that gets burned.”
“Mel’s a good man,” she said, and looked at me flatly.
“I didn’t say he wasn’t. I didn’t say anything about him. I just asked a question.”
“He believes in idealistic things. He wasn’t in a war like you, and he doesn’t have your cynicism about things.”
I took a good hit out of the bottle on that one.
“You know, I think you’re a crazy woman and you belong in a crazy house,” I said. “The next time I get drafted into one of Uncle Sam’s shooting capers, I’ll write the draft board and tell them I’d rather opt out because I don’t want to come home with any cynical feelings.”
“Let me ask you a question. Do you feel anything at all about taking from everything around you no matter what it costs other people who have nothing to do with your life?”
I walked in my socks to the stove and poured more coffee and a flash of whiskey in her cup and sat back down. She had pulled back her mackinaw, and her breasts were stiff against her shirt as she breathed. Her full thighs were tight inside her blue jeans and spread open indifferently on the corner of the chair. I had to hold the anger down in my chest, and at the same time she disturbed me sexually.
“Let me hang this one on you, Pearl, and you can do with it what you want to,” I said. “I didn’t take anything from anybody, and any problem they have isn’t of my making. It was already there.”
She moved herself slightly in the chair, just enough so that her thighs widened an inch and her buttocks flattened.
“That must be a convenient way to think,” she said.
“It’s better than that. It’s the truth. And I don’t like anyone trying to make me take somebody else’s fall.”
“That must be some of your prison terminology.”
“You better believe it is. I paid my dues, and straight people don’t con a con.” I felt my heart beating and my words start to run away with themselves.
“Maybe all people don’t behave toward one another with a frame of reference they learned in jail.”
“Well, the next time you want to talk about people’s problems, come down here again and I’ll help you solve a couple of yours.”
She didn’t say anything. She just buttoned up her mackinaw, tied her scarf around her damp hair with the remote manner of a lady leaving a distasteful situation, and walked out the door to the truck. She left the door open, and the wind drove the snow into the room.
I didn’t even bother to shut it for ten minutes. I felt a red anger at myself for my loss of control that left me trembling. Talk about a con not being conned, I thought. You are a fish who just got conned into thinking he was a con who could not be conned. And for somebody who thought he had touched all the bases over the years, this was no mean thing to consider.
The two weeks finally passed, and it was a bright, cold day with the snow banked high on the lawns in Missoula when I knocked on Beth’s door. The boys were at school, and we made love on the couch, in her bed, and finally, in a last heated moment, on the floor. Her soft stomach and large, white breasts seemed to burn with her blood, and when she pressed her hands into the small of my back, I felt the fifteen days in jail and the two weeks of aching early morning hours drain away as in a dream.
Each morning I helped Mr. Riordan put in the stall partitions in the barn and feed the birds in the aviary; then after lunch I hitched a ride or flagged down the bus into Missoula. Beth and I whitefished in the broken ice along the banks of the Clark, a fire of driftwood roaring in the wind with the coffeepot set among the coals. We ate bleeding steaks by the stone fireplace in the German restaurant and explored ghost towns and mining camps up logging roads and drainages where the trees rang with the tangle of ice in their limbs. I had forgotten how fine it was to simply be with someone you love.
We drove up a graded log road off Rock Creek, high up the side of the mountain, to a mining camp that had been abandoned in the 1870s. The cabins were still there along the frozen creek, where they used to mine placer gold that washed down from the mother lod
e, and the old sluices and rocker boxes were covered with undergrowth, the rusted square nails and bits of chain encased in ice. But if you blinked for just a minute, and let your imagination have its way, you could almost see those old-timers of a century ago bent sweatily into their futile dream of a Comstock or Alder Gulch or Tombstone. They always knew that wealth and the fulfillment of American promise was in that next shovel-load of sand.
“What are you thinking so hard about?” Beth said, her face bright with the cold wind that blew down the drainage.
“Those old-timers must have really believed in it. Can you imagine what it was like to pull the winter up here in the 1870s when they had to haul everything up the side of the mountain on mules? Before they could even go to work, they had to do something minor, like build those cabins. I bet they didn’t even think about it. They just did it. And I bet you couldn’t tear those logs apart with a prizing bar.”
She put her hands inside my arm and pressed against my coat.
“You’re a strange mixture of men,” she said.
“Well, none of that analysis crap. You see that house down there with the elk droppings by the door? Think of some veteran from Cold Harbor in there, drunk every night on whiskey just to stay warm until the next day, and not sure that an Indian wouldn’t set his place afire after he passed out. Those must have been pretty formidable people.”
She pulled the bill of my fur cap and laughed and squeezed herself against my arm.
“I thought you believed Montana people were barbarians,” she said.
“Only those who burn up trucks and guitars that belong to me.”
“I guess destroying half of a parking lot at the mill doesn’t count,” she said, and laughed again.
I built a fire in the snow and boiled a can of stew on a piece of tin from one of the cabins, and as the snow melted away in a widening circle from the heat, I looked over at her and wanted her again. We went into her car and made love on the backseat, with the doors open and the wind blowing snow in the sunlight and the distant sound of a gyppo logger’s truck grinding up the next hill.
We went grouse hunting up Rattlesnake Creek for blues and ruffs with an old dogleg twenty-gauge that I borrowed from Buddy’s little brother, and we knocked six down in a stand of pines on the lip of a huge canyon and cooked them at her house in wine sauce, onion, and wild mushrooms. The next day I bought a resident deer tag, and we drove into the Swan Valley, which was so white and blinding under the sun that you had to look at the green of the timberline to keep from losing the horizon. We crossed two hills of lodge pine in deep snow, pulling her boys’ sled in blue tracks behind us, our lungs aching in the thin air, her Enfield rifle slung by its leather strap on my shoulder.
We found a place on the edge of the trees that overlooked a long valley where they would probably cross at sunset. I took the folded tarpaulin off the sled, spread it in the snow between the pine trunks, and set down the big coffee thermos and ham-and-turkey sandwiches. The air was clean and sharp, with the sweet scent of the pines, and the far side of the valley seemed to grow and recede in the sunlight over the mountain. I unscrewed the thermos top, and the steam and the smell of the coffee blew around us in the wind.
I hadn’t hunted for deer, or any animal for that matter, since I was discharged from the army. At home after the war, I had shot ducks and certainly fished a lot, but I wouldn’t go out with my father any more after coons or shoot deer with him in east Texas. Once, he asked me why I would take the lives of fish and knock birds out of the air with a double-barrel when I wouldn’t drop an animal running across the ground. I didn’t have an answer for him, because I had thought until his question that it was just a general reaction to killing things, and he said: “You don’t want to bust something living on the land because it’s just like you. You know it hurts him just like it does a man.”
Regardless of my father’s explanation about the lack of ethical difference in taking the lives of wild things, I wasn’t up to busting a deer or an elk that might work down through that snowfield in the sun’s last red rays over the mountains. Also, I had hunted enough deer at home to know that anything that came out of that distant stand of pine on the far side of the valley would be either a doe or an elk cow, because the males always kicked them out into the open before they would cross themselves.
However, Beth had no such reservations. She was a real Montana girl. While I was holding an unlit cigarette and cup of coffee in my hands and thinking about striking a match (my dead army friend from Texas, Vern Benbow, used to say that a deer can see you fart from six miles), Beth slipped the sling of the Enfield up her left arm, eased the buckle tight, pushed a shell into the chamber, and lay on the tarp in a prone position. The sun had started to dip behind the line of trees on the next ridge, and the light fell out in long bands of scarlet on the valley floor.
“You know how to use iron sights at a distance like that?” I said.
“Be quiet. They’re coming down in a minute,” she said. The hood of her coat was back on her shoulders, and her black hair was covered with snow crystals.
“You’re frightening, woman.” But she wasn’t listening. She was aimed into the other side of the valley, her white hands numb with cold, those wonderful breasts as hard as ice against the ground.
I leaned back against a pine trunk and drank out of the coffee and ate a ham-and-turkey sandwich. Before the last Indian wars of the 1860s and 1870s, the Blackfoot and the Salish used to pass through this valley on their way to the Clark in their timeless migrations across their sacred earth. As I set my coffee down in the snow and felt the sandwich bread turn stiff in my jaw, I looked into that dying sunset on the snowfield and thought of how those coundess people who had been here for thousands of years were decimated and removed without trace in one generation. I wondered if in spring, when the snow melted and mountain flowers burst from the wet ground, there wouldn’t be some scratch of them there—a rose-quartz arrowhead, a woman’s broken grinding bowl, a child’s foolish carving on a stone.
My reverie was broken by the explosion of the Enfield. Two doe had started down out of the pines on the opposite side of the valley, their tracks sharp and deep behind them, and Beth had fired high and popped snow into the air off of a wind-polished drift. She ejected the brass casing, slammed another shell into the chamber, and fired again. I saw her cant the rifle before she squeezed off. The deer turned in a run and headed for the far end of the valley.
“You better hold it straight and lower your sights,” I said, quietly. “We’re higher than they are, and that bullet’s not dropping.”
She worked the bolt and pushed it home, pulled the rifle tight against its sling, and let off another one. The doe in the rear bucked forward on her knees as though she had been struck by an invisible hammer. She struggled in the snow, the hooves tearing long scratches and divots in the incline as she tried to get to her feet. Then she stumbled forward, with a single trail of bright red drops behind her.
“Damn, you gut-shot her,” I said. “Bust her again.”
Beth’s hands were shaking, and when she pulled the bolt, it hung halfway back, and the spent shell caught in the chamber. The doe was pumping hard for the cover of the trees, the blood flying in the wind between her flanks. I pulled the sling of the Enfield free from Beth’s arm, banged the heel of my hand against the magazine until the brass casing dislodged, shoved another shell into the chamber, and locked the bolt down. I didn’t have time to use the sling or get into a prone position. I steadied the Enfield against a pine trunk, aimed the iron sights just ahead of the deer, let my breath out slowly, and squeezed off. The bark shaled off the pine from the recoil, and my right ear was momentarily wooden from the explosion. I hit the doe right behind the neck, and I knew that with the downward angle the soft-nosed bullet must have torn through her heart and lungs like a lead tennis ball.
Beth sat up on the tarpaulin and shook the snow out of her hair with her hands. She tried to find a cigarette inside her coat,
but it was as though all of her pockets were sewn together. I set the rifle down and handed her my pack.
“That was a wonderful shot,” she said, but her voice was uneven with an unnatural pitch to it in the quietness.
“Where did you learn to hunt deer?” I said.
Her hands were still shaking when she lit the cigarette.
“Why?”
“Because you never take a shot from a distance like that without a telescope.”
“Should I apologize?”
“Don’t be defensive about it. Hell, you know you were wrong.”
She picked up my coffee cup from the snow and drank out of it, then took a deep drag on the cigarette.
“Buddy told me you could be righteous sometimes,” she said.
“Well, shit, you let off on something that you can only hit with luck, and she wanders around for two days before she dies.”
We didn’t speak for a moment, and I ejected the spent shell from the Enfield and slipped out the unused cartridges from the magazine. She looked out over the valley, where the last light was starting to glow in a rim of fire on the mountain’s edge.
“You didn’t want to shoot anything and you did,” she said. “You want me to walk home with my mad money?”
I pulled the hood of her coat up on her head and tied the strings under her chin. Her cheeks were red, and there was still a brush of snow in the black hair over her eyes. I pushed her hair back with my hand and stuck one stiff finger in her ribs.
“We’d better get her on the sled before they send the search-and-rescue in after us,” I said.
She looked away, still angry and unwilling to give up, then kicked me gently in the calf with her boot and turned her fine woman’s face into mine.
The snow was already starting to freeze as we pulled the sled across the valley floor. Our boots crunched through the surface, then sank in the soft snow underneath, so that by the time we reached the doe, we were sweating inside our clothes, and the moon had come up in a clear sky and turned the whole valley into a blue-white, tree-lined place on the top of the world that made you fear time and mortality. I gutted the deer and threw the steaming entrails on the ground, and we tied down the frozen carcass on the sled and worked our way back up toward the dark border of pines. The sleeves of my coat were splattered with blood, my head was dizzy from the thin air and the effort of pulling the sled up the hill behind me, but I felt a quiet exhilaration in the long day and its completion. We roped the doe on the fender of the car and drove back out of the moon-drenched mountains of the Swan Valley toward Missoula, and as I steered down that blacktop highway with those huge, dark shapes on each side of me, I understood why men like Jim Bridger, Jediah Johnson, and Jim Beckworth came here. There was simply no other place better, anywhere.