The old guy who had been taking tickets at the Montana for as long as I could remember always dressed in brown pants and a brown sweater vest over a collared white shirt and brown tie. He was flagpole thin, and the AC in there was arctic; we eventually took to bringing Grandma’s stadium blanket with us. Ticket Guy had a messy nest of thin red hair and called us the terrible twosome and every once in a while would wave us through without making us pay, but whenever we guessed it would be one of those nights, we were wrong. When he did come through, though, we would spend big money on popcorn and a graveyard soda, sometimes Milk Duds.
We’d go to the very last row, up against the wall, the projection booth above our heads, center if we could get it, but if it was taken there were these cool, old-fashioned booth things on either wing of the aisles, though sometimes there’d be a creepy guy flying solo in one of them. My dad had told me that the theater hadn’t changed much since he was a kid, and it sure hadn’t changed any since my first memories of it: burgundy carpeting, big orange and pink light sconces that I knew were art deco because my mom liked to go on about them, and behind the snack bar and down just a couple of stairs, a lounge area with stained velvet couches and the entrances to these amazing pink-and-green-tiled bathrooms, one on either side. The doors to the bathrooms said GENTS and DAMES in thin gold letters.
After a few weeks the whole place, from the heavy smell of the popcorn to the cold darkness and hush of the theater, felt like some semiprivate cave we had discovered and laid claim to. We held hands. We wound our legs together. When we could, we made out. Even there in the dark and the last row it was completely risky, and while that was only part of the thrill for me, it might have been most of the thrill for Coley. I couldn’t say for sure.
The movie itself was basically two hours of carefully maneuvered foreplay, so we’d leave the theater anxious and buzzing and wanting to be all over each other in the lobby, on the sidewalks as we walked to Coley’s truck, even within the truck itself, parked downtown on one of the mostly empty side streets; but we couldn’t do so much as hold hands without scandal and made ourselves walk a couple of feet apart, wouldn’t even let our arms brush, which just made it worse. Maybe you can’t really call what we were doing foreplay because it didn’t lead to anything more.
After we left the theater, we might drag a few Mains, talk to the cluster of kids parked at the Conoco station, and then Coley would drive me home and that would be that. It wasn’t as if the two of us could go anywhere that was a typical make-out destination, Spotted Eagle, or out behind the fairgrounds, or the long-abandoned drive-in, or Carbon Hill: We couldn’t possibly pull up and park next to our partially naked classmates at any of those places. And after that first afternoon in my bedroom we seemed to have outlawed our respective houses without actually saying as much.
And what made it all the worse was that we didn’t really discuss this thing we were doing, not in any detail. We just went to the movies and did what we could when we could, and then I tried my best to leave it all there, in the theater, gone with the roll of the credits, until we could do it again the next night. But while I was muddling through my days and waiting for those nights to come, a bunch of big things happened in rapid succession, or maybe they seemed small at first but turned out otherwise.
Big Thing No. 1: Ruth and Ray went to Minneapolis for a Bible weekend and an exclusive preview of the soon-to-be-open Mall of America—a preview that Ruth had somehow won via her Sally-Q sales—and they came back wearing matching blue I SURVIVED THE MALL TO END THEM ALL T-shirts and also engaged. Ray had asked me about his intended proposal beforehand, not really for my blessing, exactly, but something like that. I told him the truth: that I thought it was a great idea. I liked Ray. And more important, I liked Ruth with Ray. He gave her a monstrous gold ring with glinty diamonds all around, one that must have taken hundreds and hundreds of boxes of Schwan’s flash-frozen crab legs to buy, and for days afterward Ruth played “Going to the Chapel” on the downstairs record player while she sorted her Sally-Q shit. They didn’t see any point in waiting, and Ruth loved Montana in September, so they checked the church calendar and settled on Saturday, September 26, 1992.
People told them they were movin’ in an awful hurry. At least one old rancher said exactly that during coffee communion after Pastor Crawford announced their engagement during the Sunday-morning announcements.
“How will you get everything done?” another woman asked Ruth. More women nodded, made big-eyed faces of disbelief.
“I’ve been mentally planning my wedding for years,” Ruth said. “This’ll be a piece of cake. Piece of cake.”
Grandma said, just to me, later, “I tell you what, it’s going to be one helluva ceremony. I can already see it.”
Big Thing No. 2: Mona Harris caught me totally off guard. She and I got put on copper sulfate duty one Saturday night at closing. To distribute the copper sulfate, you had to unhook this really crappy metal rowboat from where it was chained to the fence and haul it down the beach and wedge it out into the cattails. Then one of you would get in and hold the boat against the side of the dock while the other loaded up awkward, thirty-pound sacks of the chemical, grabbed the oars, and got in as well. Then one person rowed and one flung the copper sulfate, which was in a bright-blue crystal form and looked both like tumbled beach glass and oversize fish tank rocks. It was only activated with water, but parts of you were always wet in that leaky boat, and at the bottom of the bags the sulfate was mostly crushed and powdery and our scooping and flinging cup inadequate, and some of it always landed on your legs or your arms, rewarding you with a bunch of little red chemical burns.
We just made it a verb, called it copper sulfating, and we had to do it on Saturday nights because the lake didn’t open until noon on Sundays. That gave the chemical enough time to kill some lake weed, a bunch of those swimmers’ itch snails, and a myriad of additional lake life, mud puppies and small fish, things we’d find floating on the surface the next day; but also by then it was supposed to have stopped its dangerous toxicity so that human swimmers could again enter the water.
I rowed, Mona flung, and we were mostly silent. The sulfate spattered across the water like hard rain and left a ferocious storm of bubbles at the surface before sinking slowly, dissolving all the way down.
We’d finished one bag and were on to the next when Mona asked, “Have you thought about college at all yet? Like where you maybe want to go?”
“Not really,” I said, which was both true and not. I’d entertained daydreams of just following Coley to wherever.
“Bozeman’s a pretty cool town,” she said. “I’ve met all kinds of superchill people there.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.
“The world’s really big outside of Miles City.”
I thought she sounded sort of like Irene and her ideas about the whole big wide world.
Mona went on, flinging a scoop, trying for nonchalance. “You probably already heard that I dated a girl for a while this year. Not that it’s a big deal or anything. I don’t mean to like make it an announcement or whatever.”
I was glad I had my sunglasses on and hoped she couldn’t read anything on my face. “I hadn’t heard,” I said. “Why would I have?”
“Don’t freak,” she said. “I figured Eric or somebody would have managed to share that with everyone by now. I was just trying to give you an example of the kind of things that can happen once you get out of Miles City.”
I had bottomed us up against one of the banks of jungle-thick cattails and had to stick my oar into the muck to dislodge the boat. I pretended like this took all of my concentration so that I could avoid where we were in the conversation.
When we were moving smoothly on the water again, Mona said, “You don’t have to get weird. I wasn’t trying to stir shit up.”
“You didn’t,” I said. “It’s cool.”
“I just have a few years’ life experience on you.”
“Well, my
parents died,” I said. “And tragedy makes you age in cat years. So I’m technically older than you.”
“You’re funny,” she said without laughing or even smiling, really.
We were riding along the edge of something I wasn’t ready to talk about in a rowboat with a girl whose motivations I didn’t understand. So instead I asked Mona about her major and she humored me by telling me all about biofilm engineering, letting the other topic dissolve out there beneath the lakebed with the chemicals.
Big Thing No. 3: Gates of Praise welcomed Rick Roneous to lead a Sunday sermon and also as a guest speaker at a hastily planned Firepower. Firepower didn’t meet regularly in the summer save a weekend camping thing that happened in August, a big kickoff to a school year of spirituality, so this reconvening was billed as truly a special something.
Reverend Rick was a big-deal Montana Christian made good: He had written a couple of books about practicing Christianity in a “changing world,” and had recently returned to the state he so loved to launch a full-time school and wellness center for teenagers crippled by sexual brokenness. Also, he had Elvis-blue eyes and very hip shoulder-length brown hair (like so many pictures of Jesus and also rock star Eddie Vedder); and since Rick was youngish, only in his midthirties, and could play the guitar, he pulled off the Christian-as-cool thing pretty well.
At the sermon he wore a nice button-down shirt and a silvery-blue tie and read from one of his books, talked in generalities about the importance of Christian faith starting and staying in the family. But at the Firepower meeting we got jeans-and-T-shirt Rick, guitar in tow, and more than a few of the female members expressed their megacrushes in barely whispered whispers.
Coley and I sat next to each other, Indian style (though we were being told to now call it crisscross applesauce), on the gray carpet of the meeting room. We were careful not to let our knees touch, our shoulders brush, lest we call up our movie-night activities.
Rick lead us in the acoustic versions of a couple of songs by popular Christian rock acts, Jars of Clay for one, and everybody, including me, was impressed at the up-to-dateness of his repertoire. He tucked stray curls behind his ear and smiled at compliments in that shy kind of artsy-poet way that made husky Mary Tressler and birdlike Lydia Dixon giggle and wink at each other.
“We’ll do this up casual, you cool with that?” Reverend Rick asked, removing the guitar strap and setting his shiny acoustic at his side, then turning back to us and tucking some more of that hair, despite its not needing to be tucked. “So ask me anything. What’s on the minds of teenagers in Miles City, Montana?”
Nobody spoke. Lydia Dixon giggled again.
“You can’t always be this quiet,” Reverend Rick said, doing a semiconvincing job of appearing unaware of his celebrity status.
“You could tell us about what you’re doing with your school in Montana or whatever,” licorice-smelling Clay Harbough said to his lap, no doubt as anxious as I was to get this meeting over and done with, though in his case it was probably to get back to whatever he was doing with his computer that month, and in my case it was to avoid the topic that he’d just suggested.
“You bet,” Rick said, smiling that shy smile. “It’s a big summer for Promise—we’re celebrating our third-year anniversary here in a couple of weeks.”
“My parents just sent in a donation card,” Mary Tressler said, all puffed up, seriously almost batting her eyes at the poor guy.
“Well, we certainly appreciate any and all of those,” Rick said, smiling back at her, not smarmy like a televangelist either, but with a genuine sort of smile.
“But it’s for like curing gays or whatever, right?” Clay asked, talking more during this meeting than I could remember him talking ever.
Coley had to have known that this was what we were getting to—I knew it, this is what this guy did, what he was known for—but I could feel her, next to me, tense just a little at those words: curing gays. Maybe I tensed too. I tried to seem cool, though, cool like Rick. I made a point of keeping eye contact with him.
“We don’t really use the word cure so much,” Rick said, without seeming at all like he was necessarily correcting Clay, which was a real kind of conversational gift. “We help teens come to Christ, or in some cases come back to Christ, and develop the kind of relationship with him that you all are working on. And if we can do that, then it’s that relationship that helps people escape these kinds of unwanted desires.”
“But what if somebody wants to be that way or something?” Andrea Hurlitz asked, and then she told a story about some documentary she had seen at the church she used to go to back in Tennessee about how the only true cure for homosexuality was AIDS, which she said was God’s way of curing it.
Reverend Rick listened to her story, and he nodded in places where you could tell Andrea thought she was making some big point; but when she was finished he said, breathing in some and tucking that hair again, “I’ve seen that film before too, Andrea, and I know people who hold that belief, but my own relationship with Christ has taught me compassion toward my neighbors no matter what the sins they’re struggling with.” Pause, hair tucking. “I know a bit about how this works from the inside. I was a teenager who struggled with homosexual desire, and I feel grateful, really, I feel blessed, that I had friends and spiritual leaders to help me, and I still have people help me. Mark, chapter nine, verse twenty-three: ‘Everything is possible for him who believes.’”
Nobody knew where to look after that. I’d lock eyes with someone across the circle and we’d shift our stares, fast, to someplace else. I hadn’t known that piece of the puzzle, that background about Rick, and judging from the faces of most of my fellow Firepower members, neither had they. Except for Clay Harbough, who looked like he was unsuccessfully attempting to eat a grin, his mission of revelation apparently accomplished.
“Do you all have more questions about this?” Rick asked. “This is not a shameful secret for me anymore. You can bet that it once was, but in Christ I have found redemption and a new purpose. So let’s go ahead and talk about anything you want to talk about.”
I had many, many questions, and I didn’t dare look at Coley, but I knew that she did, too. There was no way that I was raising my hand, though, and nobody else did either until Lydia asked, “So do you have a girlfriend now?”
Everybody laughed, Rick included, and after he told us not at the moment, but not for lack of trying, and we all laughed more, somebody asked something about the different kinds of sexual brokenness and that led to a discussion of promiscuity in teenagers in general and then to the appalling teenage pregnancy rates around the country and then, predictably, to abortion, and we seemed to have fully moved on.
After the meeting Coley clumped with a couple of other members around the snacks table. Rick had put a pile of pamphlets about his God’s Promise Christian Discipleship Program at one end next to a plate of peanut-butter brownies. She picked up one of the pamphlets and pretended to nonchalantly peruse it and then slipped it into her purse. I wanted to take one too, though I can’t exactly say why. I guess just to see what it said, to see if there were like pictures of the kids who went there, more information about what actually went on, but there was no way that I could just grab it in front of everybody. Not like Coley could. She didn’t need to sneak it, because nobody would ever suspect that she might be taking it because she needed to go there, or at least thought that maybe she did. Not the Coley Taylor of Brett & Coley. No way.
Big Thing No. 4—the Really Big Thing: Just a few days after Reverend Rick’s visit, Coley got an apartment in Miles City. Her own apartment. Maybe that sounds big-city or glamorous or something, but it wasn’t at all unheard of for kids whose families lived on ranches miles and miles away from Custer High. There were easily a couple dozen such students—four of them sharing a little bungalow not far from the school, or somebody renting out an old lady’s top floor or, like Coley, a one-bedroom sixth-floor walk-up in the Thompson apartment building dow
ntown, just a few blocks off Main Street.
Coley had mentioned the possibility to me before, but when Ty hit a deer driving back to the ranch one night, and then a couple of days later drove off the road and into an irrigation ditch (that having more to do with the alcohol he had been drinking than the rutted and curvy ranch roads), Mrs. Taylor decided that an apartment in town would be good for them all. Coley would stay there Sunday through Thursday nights during the school year; Ty could use it when he’d had too much to drink; and Mrs. Taylor would go there to sleep a few hours after she worked a twelve-hour shift and was too bleary to make the trip out to the ranch. But ultimately, it was to be Coley’s place.
She told me that it was happening for sure when she came to pick me up at Scanlan. I was still on left chair, the lake wrapped in shadows from the cottonwoods and a family of out-of-towners playing a loud game of Marco Polo just beyond the rope line.
We’d been surprisingly steady since the Firepower meeting, since Coley had taken that pamphlet. In our typical style, we hadn’t even talked about it, and we’d since been to the movies without any noticeable change in our routine. But Brett would be back in a week, and school would start fifteen days after that, and even if we weren’t talking about it, our routine was most definitely gonna have to change.
Still, that evening, Coley in dirty work clothes, grit and dust in her hair, stood next to my guard stand and leaned one arm against its warm wood and flaky paint and told me in this excited voice of hers how great this apartment was going to be, despite the fact that she said it currently smelled like bleach and feet, and how she wanted me to help her decorate it, and how her mom had already taken her to Kmart and bought her a red metal teapot and a soft yellow bathmat and a bunch of vanilla and cinnamon candles, and how the bathroom had a claw-foot tub and black and white tiles, and how we could start moving her in the very next day.