“Smog,” she said, squinting critically at the murk; only the very nearest mountains around the city could be seen through the damn stuff. “Smoke from the forest fires in Idaho, I guess, and when it’s this humid . . .”
Smog? Shit, what next. Even the air was getting me down now. I wished to Christ the scribbler would haul his butt out here and we could head for—
“Here you go,” I heard next out of Mariah. The camera lifted to her eye and pointed at me. “A chance to pose with a general.” Behind me stood the statue of General Meagher on horseback with sword uplifted like he was having it out with the pigeons. After the Civil War he’d been made territorial governor of Montana, but disappeared off a Missouri River steamboat during a night of drinking blackberry wine. I suppose they couldn’t show that in a statue so they put him on horseback.
“Speaking of general,” I tried on this daughter of mine without real hope, “these pictures you perpetually want to take of me are a general nuisance, do you know that?”
“Thaaat’s my guy, just be your natural self if you can stand to,” she launched into her picture-taking spiel behind that damn camera, “and you—”
For once she brought the camera down without a click. “You look kind of under the weather, Jick.” Mariah’s gray eyes took stock of me. “Are you okay?”
“I been better,” I admitted. The morning in the unexpected company of our own sources was more major than I could put into words for her right then. Nor were the tears very far behind my eyes. “Must be the smog, is all.” I tried to move my mind from the past toward some speck of the future. “So. We can hit on toward the ranch this afternoon, huh? Leave right after lunch and we ought to be able to get there by about—”
“Mmm, not quite,” Mariah disposed of that hope in nothing flat. “We’re going to have to hang on here until tomorrow. Riley and I still have a load of old pictures to go through in there. This has got to be the most photographed red-light district anywhere, you wonder if they were putting it on postcards.”
Right then Riley emerged from the Historical Society building, a frown on him you could have plowed a field with.
“The BB wants to see us,” he told Mariah of the phone call without any fooling around at all. “Right now. If not sooner.”
What, a detour all the hell way back west to Missoula? At this rate the only chance I had of making a trip home to the ranch was to keep going in the opposite direction until I circled the globe to it.
“Why’s he want to see us?” Mariah was asking warily.
“He wouldn’t say,” Riley reported. “He sounded like he was too busy concentrating on being mad.”
“Oh, horse pucky,” Mariah let out in a betrayed tone. She drew herself up even more erect than usual, as if having put on an armor breastplate to do battle. “Riley, you swore to me, you absofuckinglutely swore to me you weren’t going to diddle around with the expense account this time! You know how pissed off—”
“Goddamn it, I haven’t been!” Riley defended.
“—the BB gets when—” She halted and looked at him differently. “You haven’t been?”
“No, I have not,” he maintained, pawing furiously at his cookie duster. “This whole frigging trip, the only invented arithmetic is going to be for those goddamn Bago repairs eventually. If the BB has been sniffing around in our expense account so far, all it’ll tell him is that it’s cheaper keeping us on the road than it is having us cause trouble around the office. Huh uh. It’s got to be something else on his tiny mind.”
• • •
The office of Baxter Beebe was in that turret of the Montanian building, with a spiffy outlook across the Clark Fork River to pleasant tree-lined Missoula streets.
The decoration of that round room, though, I would have done something drastic about. Currently the motif consisted of stuffed animal heads. They formed a staring circle around the room, their taxidermed eyes aimed inward at Mariah and Riley and me as we entered; an eight-point buck deer and an elk with antlers like tree limbs and a surprised-looking antelope and a moose and a bear and a bobcat and a number of African creatures I couldn’t begin to name and, my God, even a buffalo. Many bars used to have head collections on their walls and at first I figured the BB simply had bought one of those zoos of the dead when a bar was turned into a fern cafe. But then I noticed there was a gold nameplate under each head, such as:
Bull Elk
shot by Baxter Beebe
in the Castle Mountains
October 25, 1986
He was a pale ordinary enough guy sitting there behind a broad desk, but evidently he did his own killing.
As the three of us walked in, Beebe plainly wondered who the dickens I was. Riley had just made that same point as we parked the Winnebago in the Montanian lot and I remarked that I’d be kind of interested to meet this famous boss of theirs. “Oh, just great,” he’d grumbled, “your general enthusiasm will help us a whole fucking lot in handling the BB.” But when Mariah introduced me, the editor automatically hopped up, gave me a pump-handle handshake—I suppose a person in his position gets paid by the handshake—and instructed, “Call me Bax.”
Riley and Mariah both sat down looking exceedingly leery, as if the seats might be those joke cushions that go pththbfft! when sat on. I found a chair too and did what I could to make myself less than conspicuous.
The BB—Bax—sat with his hands folded atop a stack of letters on the desk in front of him and stared expressionlessly at Mariah and Riley for what he must have thought was the prescribed amount of bossly time. Then he intoned in a voice so deep it was almost subterranean:
“Let me put it this way. There has been a very interesting response to your centennial series. A record number of letters to the editor. For instance.” He plucked the top letter off the stack and held it straight out to Mariah and Riley as if toasting a marshmallow on the end of a stick. The two of them reached for the sheet of paper simultaneously and ended up each holding a corner. I leaned over to peek along as they silently read:
Your so-called series on the centennial is downright disgusting. If Riley Wright, whose name by rights ought to be Riley Wrong, can’t find anything better about Montana than the guff he has been handing us, he should be put to writing about softball instead.
Also, the pictures in your paper are getting weird. Since when is the Berkeley Pit art? I can go out to the nearest gravel pit with my Instamatic and do just as good.
PO’d on Mullan Road
Mariah started to say something, which I knew would be relevant to the letter writer’s photographic judgment and general ancestry, but then caught herself and just gritted. For his part, Riley was grinning down at the letter as if he’d just been awarded the world prize for smart aleckry. Eventually, though, he became aware of the BB’s solid stare.
“Yeah, I see your point here, Bax,” Riley announced thoughtfully, too thoughtfully it seemed to me. “Before you can print this one,” he flapped the letter in a fond way, “we’ve got to solve the PO’d style question, don’t we. Grammatically speaking, PO’d has to stand for Piss Offed. So you’d think Pissed Off ought to be P’d O, now wouldn’t you? But nobody ever says it that way, so do we go with PO’d as common usage? Shame to lose that nice rhyme, too, ‘PO’d on Mullan Road.’ ” Riley brightened like a kid remembering what nine times eight equals. “Here we go. If the guy would move across town to Idaho Street, we’d have it made—‘P’d O on Idaho!’ What do you think, Bax? You figure we can get him to agree to move if we promise to publish his dumbfuck letter?”
“Riley,” Beebe uttered in his deepest voice yet, “what are you talking about?”
Riley never got the chance to retort anything further smart, because the editor now started giving him and Mariah undiluted hell. How come Riley’s pieces were all about slaughtered buffalo and coppered-out miners and, it was incredible but the fact of the matter was inescapable, the angelic qualities of bartenders? And where was Mariah getting picture ideas like the fannies of geezers and, it
was incredible but the fact of the matter was inescapable again, Kimi the bartender seen woozily through the beer glass?
Wow, I thought to myself, and he doesn’t even know yet about the hardheaded whores of Helena.
Beebe paused long enough in his bill of particulars to slap a hand down onto the stack of letters, thwap. Then he announced: “In other words, the two of you are outraging our readers.”
Mariah tried to point out, “Bax, in Missoula people will write a sackful of letters to the editor if they think a stoplight is a couple of seconds slow.”
The BB was less than persuaded. “This is very serious,” he stated in a funeral tone and proceeded to elaborate all over again on how the expectations of the Montanian’s readers, not to mention his own extreme forbearance, were being very abused by the way the pair of them were going about the centennial series.
I do have to admit, my feelings were radically more mixed than I expected, sitting there listening to their boss ream out Riley and Mariah. Oh sure, I was as gratified as I ought to have been by the perfectly evident oncoming fact that he was working around to the extermination of the centennial series and our Bago sojourn. And any time Riley got a tromping, it suited me fine. But I hated to see Mariah catch hell along with him. Then there was the, well, what might be called this matter of office justice. Put it this way: it really kind of peed me off, too, that this yoyo of a BB could sit here in his round office and prescribe to Mariah, or for that matter even Riley, what they were supposed to be seeing, when they were the ones out there in the daylong world trying to do the actual work.
The beleaguered pair of them now were attempting to stick up for their series while Beebe went on lambasting it and them. So while the three of them squawked at each other, I gandered around at the BB’s stuffed trophies. Massive moose. Small bobcat. African something or other. That big elk. Dead heads, I could just hear Mariah steaming to herself, symbolic.
“Excuse my asking, Bax,” I broke in on the general ruckus, “but where’s your mountain goat?”
Everything stopped.
Then Beebe eyeballed me as steadily as if a taxidermist had worked on him too, while Riley, damn his hide, started gawking ostentatiously around the room as if the mentioned goat might be hiding behind a chair. For her part, Mariah was shaking her head a millimeter back and forth and imperatively mouthing No, not now! at me.
Beebe set to answering me in a frosty way, “If you do any hunting yourself, Jack—”
“Jick,” I corrected generously.
“Whatever. If you do any hunting yourself—”
I shrugged and put in, “Not quite fifty years’ worth yet.”
The BB blinked a number of times, then amended his tone considerably. “Then you will know it is very hard to achieve a mountain goat. I have never been privileged to shoot one.”
“The hell!” I exclaimed as if he’d confessed he’d never tasted chocolate ice cream. “Christamighty, I got them hanging like flies on the mountains up behind my place.”
“Your place?”
“My ranch, up along the Rocky Mountain Front. Yeah, I can sit in my living room with a half-decent pair of binoculars and watch goats till I get sick of them.”
He steepled his fingers and peered at me over his half-prayerfulness. “That is very interesting, ah, Jick. But I would imagine that getting within range of them is another matter.”
“No problem. Anybody who’s serious about his hunting,” I nodded to the dead heads along the walls, “and I can see you definitely are, I usually let them onto the place, maybe even take them up one of the trails to those goats myself. Tell you what, whyn’t you put in to draw for a permit, then come on up this fall and we’ll find you a goat?” I gave the BB a look overflowing with nimrod enthusiasm. What fault was it of mine if the mountain goats in west of my ranch actually were unreachable on the other side of the sheer walls of Gut Plunge Canyon? The BB had only asked me whether it was possible to get within range of them, not whether it was feasible to fire off a shot.
I figured I’d better land him before my enthusiasm played out. “In fact, Bax, how about you coming on up to go goating right after these two,” I indicated Riley and Mariah with the same kind of nod I’d given the stuffed trophies, “get done with this centennial stuff of theirs in November?”
He kept gazing at me from behind his finger steeple for a while. Then he gazed a further while at Mariah and Riley. All three of us could see him working on the choice. Sacrificial sheep or mountain goat.
At last Baxter Beebe announced, “That is a very, very interesting offer, Jick. I am going to take you up on that.” He turned toward the other two. “Riley, as I was getting to, there has been some marked reaction among our readers to your centennial pieces. Of course, one way of viewing it is that you are provoking people’s attention. The exact same can be said of your photos, Mariah. So, speaking as your editor, I will tell you what.” We waited for what. “As you continue the centennial series, I would expect that your topics will become somewhat more, shall we say, traditional. Perhaps I should phrase it this way: tone things down.” The BB sent a final gaze around to Mariah, then to Riley, and even to me. He concluded: “Anyway, I thought you would want to know you are being read, out there in readerland.”
I give Mariah and Riley due credit, they both managed not to look mock astonished that newspaper readers were reading newspapers.
No, instead Riley said in a hurry “You can’t know what an inspiration that is to us, Bax,” and stood, and Mariah was already up and saying brightly “Well, we’ll go hit the road again then, Bax,” and even I found my feet and joined the exodus while the BB shuffled the letters to the editor together, squaring them into a neat pile which he put in his OUT basket.
MOTATING THE HIGH LINE
Centennialitis will break out in Gros Ventre again on Thursday night. A combined work party and meeting of the Dawn of Montana steering committee will be held at the Medicine Lodge, beginning at 8:30 p.m. “Everybody better come or they’re going onto my list to sweep up the parade route after the horses,” stated committee chairperson Althea Frew. Other members of the steering committee are Amber Finletter, J. A. “Jick” McCaskill, Howard Stonesifer, and Arlee Zane.
—GROS VENTRE WEEKLY GLEANER, AUGUST 1, 1989
BRRK BRRK.
My waking thought was that the guy who invented the telephone ought to have been publicly boiled in his own brainwater. Outside the bedroom window, dawn was just barely making headway against dark. If manufactured noise at such an hour isn’t an offense against human nature, I don’t know what is.
BRRK BRRK.
Christamighty, Mariah already, was my next realization. When I’d deposited her and Riley back in Helena the afternoon before to put the finishing touches on their masterpiece of mattress capitalism, that daughter of mine had told me she’d call me at the ranch today and let me know what time to come back and get her and her haywire companion. But this time of day, before there even properly was a day yet?
BRRK BRRK.
Maybe I would do that getting and maybe I just wouldn’t. Late as I’d gotten in after the drive from Helena to Noon Creek, I hadn’t even had a chance yet to see Kenny and Darleen and gather any report on the ranch. And even in so milky a start of the day, I couldn’t help but wonder what order of fool I was for turning the BB around with goat bait the way I had. What got into me, there in Missoula, not to let His Exterminatorship go ahead and kill off the centennial series and my unwanted part in it?
BRRK BR—
I helloed and braced.
“Oh, Jick, I’m so glad I caught you before you got out and around, I know what an early bird you are,” a woman’s voice arrived at full gallop. Never Mariah, expending words wholesale like that.
I elbow-propped myself a little higher in bed. “Uh, who—”
“Oh, you’re funning me, aren’t you, pretending not to know this is Althea. Next thing, you’ll be claiming you forgot all about tonight.”
??
?Forgot what?”
“Jick, our centennial committee meets tonight,” the phone voice perceptibly stiffened into that of Althea Frew, chairperson. “We’ve missed you at the meetings lately.”
“Yeah, well, I been away. Unavoidably so.” And it mystified me as much as ever, how she and undoubtedly the whole Two Medicine country knew that in the dark of last night I had come back. Did bunny-slipper telegraph even need the existence of the telephone or did they simply emanate bulletins out through the connecting air?
“All the nicer to have you home with us again, just in time for tonight,” she informed me with conspicuous enthusiasm. “We have an agenda that I know you’ll be interest—”
“Althea, I’m not real sure I’m going to be able to stick around until tonight. I—”
“You’re turning into quite a gadabout, Jick. But I’m sure you can make time for one eensy committee meeting. Oh, and would you ask Mariah if she can come take pictures for our centennial album sometime? See you tonight,” and Althea toodled off the line.
The burden of conversation with Althea thus lifted, I sat up in the big double bed and by habit took a meteorological look out the window to the west. A moon new as an egg rested in the weatherless sky above the mountains. So far so good on that front, anyway.
I was at least out of bed and had my pants halfway on before the phone rang again. Typical Mariah. I grabbed the instrument up, doubly PO’d at her for calling before I even had any breakfast in me and for not calling before Althea did her crowbar work on me.
“Damn it, petunia, do you have some kind of sixth sense about doing things at exactly the wrong time?”
Silence, until eventually:
“Uhmm, Jick, was you going to line us out on haying the Ramsay place, before Darleen and me head up there?”
Kenny’s voice, across the hundred feet between the old house and my and Marce’s. Jesus, the day was getting away from me. Ordinarily I’d be over there by the time my hired couple finished up breakfast. Hurriedly I told Kenny, “Must’ve looked at the wrong side of the clock this morning. I’ll be right over.”