“And that’s happened?” Carole asks, continuing to look at her sister with concern. “You’ve lost your memory?”
Marjorie has done too good a job with her deception. Now she feels sorry for Carole and has to console her. “Well, not all my memories.”
“What don’t you remember?”
Before Marjorie can answer, Carole realizes the absurdity of her question. “Of course—you can’t remember what you can’t remember!”
At that, they both laugh, and for a moment Marjorie does forget. But only for a moment. In the next instant, Marjorie’s concern about Ann returns, hitting her as suddenly as an ice cream headache.
THE HIGHWAY DROPS DOWN out of the hill country. The land flattens. The pines give way to a few scattered stands of hardwoods, but soon they vanish too. Now there’s nothing but mile after mile of grassland—bluestem, bluejoint, blue grama, so-called—yet the only blue available to sight is the sky’s, a pure and topless blue that seems to rise all the way to God.
On the wall of his office, Bill Sidey has a calendar given to him by his insurance agent, and every month features a different photograph of the Montana landscape. As he speeds toward Gladstone, Bill thinks of how false is the picture that depicts a scene similar to the one he’s driving through.
The photograph is contained, limited, but if this landscape conveys anything at all it is boundlessness. And while a picture can give the impression of space, it can’t communicate what time means to this country. You can walk, run, ride, drive, even fly over this region, and your journey will seem to go on and on and on, world without end.
Ahead, on a hill, and not a hill really but only a little lift in the land, as if the earth drew a breath and swelled, there’s a ranch. From down here on the highway the ranch house and outbuildings look like parts from a children’s game, pieces to be moved around a board, though Bill knows it’s quite possible the actual structures have hunkered on that hilltop for a hundred years, and the inhabitants have watched other generations arrive and depart, with only failure to separate their coming from their going. Or maybe the ranch has only been there a few years, the spot chosen for no reason so much as its distance from other human beings.
No matter how long they’ve been there, the people who live out here believe that whatever life demands of them they can meet it on their own. And perhaps they can. But Bill Sidey knows he’s not cut from that cloth. The infinite sky that inspires certainty in some people breeds doubt in him, and he’s never been sure what the truth of human endeavor is: Are we meant to do it on our own or with the help of others? He wishes he could arrive at an answer before he enters the Gladstone city limits.
THIRTY-ONE
Will, Gary, and Stuart are fishing for bluegills and crappies in the Elk River. Well, Will is fishing for bluegills and crappies. While his friends throw spinners and spoons out into the faster water, hoping to lure a northern or a big bass, Will has been assigned to this back bay where his bobber and red worms are better suited for calmer waters and where there’s no danger that his drifting line can become entangled with Gary’s and Stuart’s.
The indignity of being relegated to this spot is the second reason for Will’s anger. He has smoldered for days over their plans to spy on his sister, and now that Will has his own counterstrategy in place—the fuse waiting in the driveway dust—Stuart and Gary have said no more about Ann and have not repeated their request that Will alter the draperies in his house to allow them to gaze at his sister without impediment. They seem to have forgotten the matter entirely.
Finally, when Stuart lets out a whoop and holds up the northern—close to two feet of fish, its long, slender body flashing silver as it wriggles in the sunlight—Will decides he’s had enough. He reels in his line and tears the fragment of worm off the hook. He pinches two chunks of lead split shot on the line only an inch from the hook, and he doesn’t bother putting another worm on the hook. He climbs off the log he’s been fishing from and walks down the pebble-studded sand toward the bend in the river where Gary and Stuart stand. Stuart has retrieved his lure from the fish’s mouth, put his catch on the stringer, and is already prepared to cast again into the fast-flowing water.
When Will comes within thirty feet of his friends—close enough, he thinks, to cast with reasonable accuracy—he brings his rod back, sidearm rather than overhead, and sends line, sinkers, and hook flying toward Stuart, the closer of the two boys.
He hits his target but to no effect. The line unfurls near Stuart’s waist, but the hook merely scrapes against his jeans. Stuart feels something, and he looks down, but Will is already reeling in his line, preparing for another cast.
“Was that you?” asks Stuart. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Trying to catch something,” Will answers.
“Jesus. You ain’t going to catch it over here. Don’t you know where the fucking water is?”
Gary seems to understand better what Will’s intentions are. “Cut it out, Will,” he says, flipping the bale on his reel closed and lowering his rod.
“I’m not trying to catch a fish,” says Will. “I’m trying to hook a shithead.”
He has his rod drawn back, this time for an overhead cast, when Gary starts running toward Will.
“Will, God damn it! Don’t do it!”
Stuart, however, is concentrating on his line, in reeling in his lure with a stuttering rhythm to fool a fish into believing a piece of shiny metal is an easy prey.
Will lets go his weighted line, and as soon as it begins to arc through the air, as balanced and swift as an arrow, he feels sure his aim is true.
The hook catches Stuart in the softer flesh of his arm, above his elbow, but when the barb goes in, he doesn’t startle or flinch as if he’s been stung. He simply drops his rod and reaches across to the line connecting him to Will. Stuart tears the hook out of his arm, a long strand of blood unspooling in its wake. Then, holding onto the line, hand over hand Stuart begins to haul Will in. “You little fucker—c’mere!”
Seen from a distance—like a hawk’s, coasting on the warm wind high above the river—it may seem as though Will is simply walking toward his bleeding friend. And once he’s no more than a fishing rod’s distance from Stuart, Will wonders why he didn’t just drop the rod or at least resist, or to dig his tennis shoes into the sand or even to tug back against Stuart’s pressure. And then Will knows. He wants as much fight as he can get, and he starts things off by launching a looping right hook at Stuart’s rage-clenched face.
The punch never lands, though Will doesn’t know how Stuart ducked or intercepted it. He doesn’t know because Stuart’s blow to Will’s diaphragm knocks not only air out of him but awareness, and he has no space in his consciousness for anything but the desperate attempt to draw air into his lungs.
Will catches his breath, but he barely has time for a single gasp when Stuart wraps him in a headlock. Will’s neck and face are squeezed in the crook of Stuart’s right arm—the arm pierced by Will’s hook—and he knows that his face is probably being smeared with Stuart’s blood. Will has seen Stuart scuffle and fight often enough to know his preferred strategy—immobilize the opponent with a head or neck hold and then pummel away with his free fist. In preparation, Will grabs Stuart’s forearm, less for the hopeless task of loosening Stuart’s grip and more for getting his hands up to protect his face when the punches come.
But they don’t come. This isn’t going to be anything like the battle Will fantasized about, one in which he would be obviously outmatched yet his rage and his nobility—yes, yes, what other word would describe his willingness to fight for his sister’s honor?—would give him a strength that he had never owned. In actuality, this fight—is it even right to call it that when one combatant is able to exert his will without opposition?—is a return to the powerlessness of infancy when you have neither the size, strength, nor language to affect, in any way, a world that can move or ignore you as it pleases.
Will is not being stru
ck because Stuart has another punishment in mind. Stuart is hauling Will in a direction Will can’t even determine. He can’t see anything but Stuart’s legs, feet, and the ridged sand below.
And then that view changes. The sand turns dark, then wet, and then they’re in the water, the river so instantly icy around Will’s ankles it feels as though he’s stepped into traps that spring shut on him. But the water is soon flowing over his calves, then splashing above his knees, and when it rises to his crotch he can’t be sure if it’s the cold water that makes him want to gasp again or the even icier realization of what is about to happen.
Stuart is going to drown him.
Does that thought arrive the second before Stuart begins to lower Will’s face toward the river, its surface barely wrinkled considering all the dark turbulence below? Or does Will have to glimpse the water coming closer to his mouth and nostrils to know what Stuart intends?
Will pulls and scrapes harder against Stuart’s forearm, but not with the hope that he can escape Stuart’s grasp. Realism now has as tight a hold on him as Stuart, and in Will’s mind Stuart’s strength has assumed the same implacable strength as the river. But Will wants at least to free his mouth so he can speak.
Will wants to make a joke.
He isn’t sure if he can quite present the situation as hilarious, but he can certainly make a number of ironic, mordant observations, the total effect of which might be humorous. He can say the fisherman, not the fish, has been hooked—the fish has its revenge! He can point out that Stuart hasn’t hooked him—Stuart has crooked him, caught Will fast in the crook of his arm. And isn’t it funny that fish die when they’re kept out of the water—they drown in fresh air!—whereas Will is about to die because he can’t breathe in water? If he could get his mouth free—lips and tongue would be enough—to make these words, and with his words alter the mood of the boy about to kill him, then Will could control his fate. This is the only real strength and power he’s ever had. To think that only days ago he believed he could make his way in the world, survive, like his grandfather, with the prowess of his physical being! If Will Sidey has a life beyond this day, this hour, it will be without any cowboy illusions.
And here is an observation he’s sure he would never be able to share with anyone—this water tastes of its opposite element. When Stuart pushes Will’s head under, Will tries to hold his breath—Don’t breathe in water! he tells himself. Don’t breathe in water!—but the river, with the force of its current, pries his lips apart and flows between his clenched teeth and, wonder of wonders, the water tastes of dirt! The discovery is so marvelous that Will can’t be sure if it might not be his sharpest grief—he’ll never be able to impress anyone with this special knowledge: The Elk River chews its way through Montana’s landscape, and by the time it swallows Will, it has taken in hundreds of miles of dirt, sand, and grit, and if you put your mouth into this churning, yellow water you’ll be reminded more of garden loam than anything that flows from the kitchen faucet.
But this taste is soon replaced by the scalding, sour panic of vomit, and when Will has to cough that out—One more discovery! He can drown from the liquid inside him as easily as that on the outside!—in its wake the river rushes in, and Will feels his life’s borders being washed away in the rush of the current.
The Gladstone Municipal Pool opened three years earlier, and from the day of its opening, Will and his friends were there almost every summer day. Yet for all those hours spent in the pool, Will never dared to open his eyes under water. He couldn’t do it in his own bathtub, so he certainly couldn’t do it in that water stinging with chlorine. But the next summer, the very first time he jumped into the pool it was with his eyes wide open; over the winter he had forgotten his fear. He’d stay under water for as long as he could, watching the bobbing, kicking, sometimes flailing bodies of the other people, kids mostly, who had no idea they were being watched below the water line. He cherished his invisibility, his ability to be there yet not there. He kept waiting for a dangerous situation to develop—one of the little children sinking to the bottom of the pool perhaps—and only Will with his special vantage would notice, prevent the tragedy, and be hailed as a hero.
The muddy Elk River is as dark as coffee, of course, and Will can see nothing. But then why would he? On this occasion, his life is the one that’s dissolving, and the river’s murk is indistinguishable from that other darkness that will hold him down forever.
THIRTY-TWO
Brenda Cady must be inside her house—Beverly can hear that little boy crying, a persistent, desultory wailing.
And there’s the push mower, abandoned in the middle of the brown patchy yard. Was Brenda interrupted in her work by Calvin Sidey? Was she lying unconscious inside, knocked out when she refused to give Calvin the information he demanded? Is that why her little boy is crying—because he can’t rouse his mother? Is it possible that Brenda, that both Brenda and her boyfriend, are lying inside on the floor . . . ? Beverly bangs on the door so hard her knuckles hurt, but it helps distract her from these dark premonitions.
She jumps off the concrete slab that serves as the step to the front door, and heads toward the backyard, hoping she’ll discover Brenda there. Or perhaps Beverly will find a window that will allow her to peer inside.
Beverly has not turned the corner of the house, however, when the front door opens behind her and a voice stops her. “Hey! What the hell are you doin’?”
She pivots and sees Brenda Cady standing at the door and shouting at Beverly through the screen. Brenda is dressed in a bandanna-print dress and its elasticized top leaves her shoulders and upper chest bare. Near her neck are a series of bright pink blotches, exactly the kinds of marks that a man’s fingers would make digging into flesh. Below her right eye is a similar patch of discoloration. That area looks swollen too, as if she might have been slapped or punched. And her lower lip—it looks puffy . . . The scene leaps unbidden to Beverly’s mind’s eye—Calvin grabbing Brenda Cady, slapping her across the face, ready and willing to do more if she didn’t tell him where her husband could be found.
“I know what you’re doing here,” Brenda says when she recognizes Beverly. “But you can turn right around. He ain’t here.”
“He was—?”
“He left about ten minutes ago and good riddance.”
Ten minutes . . . If Beverly had not stopped at the Texaco station and bought gas, she would have been here in time. But in time for what? To stop him? She has already failed at that endeavor.
“He’s crazy, you know,” Brenda Cady says. “Your husband. Crazy mad and mad crazy. And he’s going to get what’s coming to him.”
“Did he want to know where your husband is? Is that what he came for?”
“Lonnie? He ain’t my husband. My choice, not his.”
Now Beverly wishes she too had corrected Brenda’s misunderstanding; it might have established a useful commonality between them, but at the time—on the instant, in fact—she felt that to deny Calvin as her husband would have been disloyal.
Brenda opens the screen door and walks out toward Beverly with a stride that’s so languid and self-assured it’s vaguely threatening. If she approached Calvin in that manner, it was no wonder he struck her. But Brenda seems to know that Beverly has no choice but to stand still and accept whatever abuse Brenda wishes to bestow.
Beverly wants to ask how long Brenda held out before Calvin got from her the information he wanted, but instead she asks, “Where did he go?”
“Lonnie? Or your man?”
“Mine.” At the single word Beverly feels her eyes grow warm with tears. She hopes Brenda doesn’t notice, for this tough-talking young woman would surely regard tears as weakness.
“Not that it makes much difference.” Brenda Cady puts her hands on her hips, a defiant stance she hadn’t assumed in front of Calvin, of that Beverly is sure. “That old man is going to get himself stepped on and squashed flat.”
“Please,” Beverly says. “
Just tell me where I can find him.”
“Why? So you can try to save him? That old man deserves whatever he gets. He should know better than to mess with Lonnie Black Pipe.”
The name is familiar to Beverly. Lonnie Black Pipe has a reputation for being a troublemaker, someone whose temper has landed him in jail on more than one occasion. Beverly wants to say something in Calvin’s defense but nothing comes to mind but the kind of remark a child might make boasting about his father. Your man’s a bad Indian? Well, mine’s a cowboy.
Instead, Beverly says, in a voice almost too soft for the out of doors, “He’s got a gun.”
Her statement elicits exactly the response that might be expected. Brenda Cady’s eyes blink as if she has not heard the word gun but its sharp report. “Are you sure? I didn’t see no gun when he came to the door.”
“Believe me,” Beverly whispers.
Brenda Cady looks back over her shoulder as though she needs to see the site of her conversation with Calvin in order to recall its contents. “The Wagon Wheel. Lonnie likes to play pinochle there.”
“The Wagon Wheel—that’s down by the depot?”
Brenda nods. “A gun. Would he use it?” Apparently Brenda is new enough to Gladstone that she has not heard any Calvin Sidey rumors.
“Why don’t you call the Wagon Wheel—talk to your Lonnie. Tell him to leave the bar.” Beverly is already backing up toward the car.
Brenda shakes her head strenuously. “He won’t do it. He won’t run from any man.”
“It’s not running, it’s . . . Say something else then. Tell him you have to take your boy to the doctor, an emergency. Tell him something. Just get him the hell out of there!”
Beverly turns and runs toward Adam’s car, parked haphazardly at the curb. But before she speeds toward Northern Pacific Avenue and the Wagon Wheel Bar she has to know if the man she’d be racing toward is worth any of her efforts. She turns back toward Brenda Cady, who is still standing on her weed-choked lawn, squinting and staring up the street as if future events are already in place, located in the sun struck distance and available for sight.