What I thought was that people any age shouldn’t be trying to fool one another. That I should be able to say flat out to Althea, “Look, terms have not changed between us even though our lives have. I am not second-husband material for you, so kindly just put the pattern away, please.”
But that was blunter than can be spoken in a room crowded with everyone who knew us. Even so, Althea didn’t take the chance that I might blurt the impolite truth. “Oh foo, look what time it’s gotten to be already. I’d better go look over the agenda for our meeting. It’ll seem so much more like a committee now that you’re back, Jick,” she left me with, but not before a last fond assault on my arm, pat pat.
My ears got the next unwelcome traffic, a mimicking voice approaching fast: “He’s kind of a shy type, but I bet if you tell him you’re from the newspaper . . .”
Innocence seemed the best tack to take with Riley right then. “Get a lot of fascinating stuff out of Good Help, did you?”
“Gobs and gobs,” he replied sardonically. “I figured I’d write that he’s as intrinsically American as the Mississippi River.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. A mile wide at the mouth.”
“Gee,” I said, genuinely interested in the prospect, “if you say that in the newspaper about a guy, won’t he sue your nuts off?”
“Put your mind at ease,” Riley told me. “Jick, damn you, you know that old codger could talk for a week and only ever tell the truth by accident. Even the BB would recognize it as the rankest kind of bullshit.” Riley’s two-toned gaze left me and went to the wall of fabric behind me. “The real story here is that humongous flag. If you characters ever manage to get it in the air.” Riley scanned the room as if in search of anyone capable of that feat. He got as far as Althea, busy in her bonnet, and inquired: “By the way, who’s your ladyfriend?”
“She is not—”
“Bashful never won the bushelful,” he trilled out, god damn him. “Don’t worry, I won’t snitch to Mariah that you’re busy girling behind her back. So, what’s next in this festive evening?”
Barbecuing a fatmouthed newspaper guy over a slow fire, was what I wished could be next on the agenda. But instead I told Riley I had my needlework to tend to, in a tone that let him know it was a pursuit preferable to conversation with him, and headed myself from the coffee urn toward the Two Medicine mountainline panel of the flag.
I wasn’t much more than in motion before a voice called out:
“Talk to you a minute can I, Jick?”
I was beginning to wonder: was there a procession all the way out into the street of people lined up to take aim on me?
This voice was that of Shaun Finletter from the Double W and so I at least knew what the sought minute of talk was going to be about. I turned around to Shaun’s faceful of blondish fuzz—some of these beardgrowers were maybe going to need a deadline extension to Montana’s bicentennial—and responded as civilly as I could manage: “How’s tricks?”
“Oh, not bad, Jick. Yourself?”
“Just trying to stay level.”
Shaun then plunged right down to business, which was the way Finletters were.
“Jick, I been hearing from headquarters. They’re still real interested in making you an offer on your place.”
“Are they.” I felt like adding, are you sure that was headquarters making itself heard instead of hindquarters? But Shaun was a neighbor, even if I did wish his bosses in big offices would take a long walk off a short balcony.
Shaun rattled it off to me. “It’s nothing against you at all, Jick . . . just a matter of big-scale economics . . . better able to put maximum animal units on that land . . . ” The Double Dub had a great history of that, all right. Running more cattle than it had country for. The original Williamson, Warren, had practically invented overgrazing, and his son Wendell got in on buying up bankrupt smaller ranches during the Depression and really sandwiched cattle along Noon Creek from hell to breakfast, and now the corporation computers doubtless were unitizing cows and calves onto every last spear of grass.
Yet it was their business and none of my own, how the Williamsons or the corporaiders comported themselves on WW land they had title to. The patch of earth I held title to was the matter here, and Shaun now stated the dollars per acre, a damn impressive sum of them, that WW, Inc. would pay to take the ranch off my hands. “You know that’s top dollar, the way things are, Jick.”
Shaun was a nice enough human being. Someone who would look you square in the eye, as he was now while I scanned back at him and noticed he was growing beefier, a little more face, a bit more belly, than since I’d last seen him. Actually just a year or so older than Mariah, he and she had gone together a while in high school. My God, the way things click or don’t. If that had worked out into marriage instead of her going on to photography and him to an ag econ degree at Bozeman, Shaun might well have been the answer to run my ranch; might have become the one to perpetually tell the Williamsons and WW, Inc. of the world to go to hell, instead of being their errand boy to me.
If I had pounds more of brains I might be smarter, too. I struggled to get myself back on the necessary train of thought. How to reply to the dollar sign. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t had practice closing one or both eyes to money. The first corporate guy, who’d acted as if he already owned my ranch and me as well, I’d told to stick his offer where the sun doesn’t shine. All the others since, one or two every year, I’d just told nothing doing. But now here I was being perfectly polite with Shaun because even though he was the current factotum, I had known his family and him from when he was a waggy pup. Even I had to admit I seemed to be trending away from that original stick-it stance.
Click.
Shaun gave a little jump as if he’d been goosed. For once I didn’t even mind that Mariah included me in her picture ambush. It was worth it to see the caught-while-sucking-eggs expression on Shaun.
“Don’t let me interrupt Noon Creek man talk,” Mariah put forth coolly with the camera still up to her eye. This was a different one than I’d yet seen her use tonight. Did she possibly have a calibre for every occasion?
“It’ll keep,” said Shaun, wincing at the next click. Maybe it had been purely coincidental but after splitting up with Mariah he all but instantly married Amber, who notably stayed home and raised kids. “Think the proposition over and let me know, Jick. Mariah, it’s always an event to see you,” and he headed rapidly off out of pointblank range.
“He always was about halfway to being a dork,” Mariah mentioned as we watched Shaun retreat. “He even necked like he was doing math.”
“Yeah, well, he’s maybe getting better at his calculations,” I let her know. “You sure you don’t want a ranch?”
“You saw how far I’ve gotten from the place,” Mariah answered after a moment. “On the way into town.”
It took me a moment, too, to discard that incident at the Double W gate. “I guess when you get to my age you’re a little touchy about skulls.”
“Quit that,” she directed quickly. “You’re much too young to be as old as you are.”
Didn’t I wish. But I let that pass and instead took Mariah by the elbow and turned her around to the golden flood of flag cloth. “Something I need you to do.” I indicated to the panel where I’d sewn Jericho Reef halfway to completion; the panel for the McCaskills to have their stitches ride the wind on. “Sit down there and immortalize yourself.”
“You promise I won’t get a reputation for domesticity?” she kidded, but I could see she was tickled pink to be included in the centennial stitchwork.
“Probably not much danger,” I said, and we laughed together as we hadn’t for a long time.
So Mariah sat and had at it, the needle disappearing and then tugging through another dark dash of the mountainline above the ranch earth where we were both born. “It’s like putting ourselves on a quilt, isn’t it,” her similar thought came out quietly.
“Kind of, yeah.” I stood an
d watched her neat intense work with the needle. “But the next hundred years don’t look that simple.”
She knew I meant the ranch and whether to sell now or stagger on. “How are you leaning?”
“Both directions. Any advice from somebody redheaded would be a whole lot welcome.”
Mariah crinkled a little face and I thought she’d stuck herself. But it turned out to be the topic that was sharp.
“You know I couldn’t wait to get off the place when I was growing up,” she mused. “Away to college. Away to—where I’ve been. I got over that and before I knew it I was fond of the place again. The ranch meant, well, it meant you and Mother, in a way. As if it was part of you—some member of the family you and she made out of the land.” Now Mariah addressed downward as if reasoning to the sliver of metal passing in and out of the cloth. “But it’ll never be part of me in that same way. It hurts to say, but I’m just a visitor at the ranch any more. Lexa and I dealt ourselves out of it by going off to our own lives. That’s what happens. You and Mother maybe didn’t know you were raising an Alaskan and a Missoulian, but that’s how we turned out, didn’t we. So it has to be up to you what to do with the place, Dad. It’s yours. Not ours in any way that we should have a say.”
“You want me to walk over there and tell Shaun the Double Dub’s got itself a deal, is that it?”
Mariah swallowed, but both the tug of her needle and the look she sent me stayed steady. “It’s up to you,” she stood by.
Maybe I would have made that journey across the room to Shaun, right then and there, if Mariah had not abruptly put down her needle in exchange for her camera, twirled a lens on, and aimed in sudden contemplation of something occurring behind me. In curiosity, not to mention self-defense, I shifted half-around to see.
Riley at work. He had sicced his tape recorder onto the lawyer Don Germain, who for once had the quite unlawyerly look that he wasn’t sure how he got into this but didn’t know how to get out either. Without being able to hear the words, I could tell by the carefully innocent way Riley asked his questions and Don’s pursed lips as he cogitated his answers that the interview topic must be something fundamental.
How and when should we lift our own roots? Or as we more usually ask it in this spacious nation, how many times? His were temporarily shifted for him from Rhode Island after law school, when his military stint put him at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls. Malmstrom made him a galvanized westerner, the shirts with pearlescent snap buttons and the brass belt buckle proclaiming THE BUCKAROO STOPS HERE on his outside but the original element underneath, so he chose a place (Gros Ventre, but it could have been any of a thousand others) to try this trafficless wide-sky life. He himself tells the joke that the town is too small for one lawyer but big enough for two. Readily enough, too, he reveals his snug fit into his generation’s statistics: a second wife, two children, considerable tonnage of vehicles-TVs-VCR-snowmobile-gas barbecue-power tools-satellite dish. It is his wife, though, who teasingly tells that he has been struggling with the decision of whether to keep his centennial contest beard or not, because of the gray showing up in it.
So, he meets middle age in the mirror these mornings and they debate. “I’ve really liked living here, don’t get me wrong. Cathy and I both would hate to leave Montana. But the money is better almost anywhere else you can name. Sure, this has been a good place to raise the kids. But whether to spend the rest of my life here . . .”
Ever so casually I said to Mariah, “I see you and Riley are piecing up a storm.”
“We’re managing to,” she said, and picked up where she had left off in her stitching.
• • •
While Mariah completed Jericho Reef, I decided I had better seize that opportunity to heed a certain call of nature—damn Althea and her loveydovey cups of coffee anyway—and headed myself into the bar toward the men’s room.
And popped around the corner into light so extreme it set me back on my heels. Tonsil Vapor and accomplice had Good Help Hebner sitting there posed against the dark oaken bar.
Not even a TV guy would voluntarily go near Good Help if he knew what he was getting himself into, would he? During my business in the men’s room I worked out what must have taken place: after his opening stand-up Tonsil Vapor had poked his head back into the supper club, discerned Riley getting both ears loaded by Good Help, and figured there was his ripe interview subject.
When I emerged, Fred Musgreave was behind the near end of the bar, ever so slowly wiping the wood with a dish towel as he eyed the million-watt spectacle. Fred by nature was so untalkative it was said of him that he was an absentee owner even when he was here on the premises of the Medicine Lodge, so I merely walked my fingers along the bar top to indicate to him that this was a night that needed some Johnny and propped myself there to spectate, on the chance that television might be more interesting outside the box than in.
Poised beside Good Help, Tonsil Vapor gave a royal nod, the camera’s red light lit up, and he intoned into his microphone: “Here with us now is tonight’s builder of Montana, Gros Ventre’s own Garland Hebner—born, as he likes to say, with the century. Mr. Hebner, first off let me ask you, what was your line of work?”
“I have did it all,” our new TV star airily assured his interlocutor.
“I’m sure you have,” emitted Tonsil Vapor with a chuckle that sounded a trifle forced. “But what I meant was, what did you do for a living?”
“I was what you call self-employed.”
Self-unemployed was more like it. Garland Hebner’s only known activity had been that one that produces children, and as soon as they were big enough to be sent out to herd lamb bunches in the spring or drive a stacker team in haying, Hebner child after Hebner child brought home the only wages that tatterdemalion household ever saw.
“Cut,” called out Tonsil Vapor, looking nonplussed. “But Mr. Hebner, this is an interview about how you helped to build Montana. Isn’t there some interesting job you held, sometime or another?”
This did stump Good Help. He sat there blinking as if each of his eighty-nine years was being projected one after another onto the inside of his eyelids. Until:
“By the Jesus, I remember now! Sure, I had a job! Goshdamn interesting one, too! What it was, I—”
“No, no, wait until we roll and tell me then. Spontaneity is the lifeblood of television, Mr. Hebner. Now, then. Ready?” The cameraman minimally indicated he was, and Good Help appeared to be absolutely primed and cocked. The instant the line-of-work question had been recited again, Good Help got hold of Tonsil Vapor’s mike hand, drew the instrument almost into his mouth and pronounced in a kind of quavery roar:
“I was the pigfucker! One entire summer! Ought to been the summer of 19-and-18, no, was it 19-and—”
“Cut!” squawked Tonsil Vapor as if he just had been.
The TV maestro stepped back a large pace, his mouth twice as far open as it had been yet tonight. Holding the microphone protectively against his sport jacket, he took stock of Good Help.
Eventually he managed, “Mr. Hebner, I’m afraid you misheard my question. What I asked you was what you did for a living, not—”
“I just was telling you! Don’t you hear good? I was the pigfucker! Over across the mountains in that white pine country, in them big woods! Best goshdamn job I ever—”
While Tonsil Vapor expelled in a rapidly rising voice, “But we can’t let you say that on the AIR!” I took a contemplative sip of my scotch ditch. Riley and Mariah’s story on the red-light duchesses of Helena and now Good Help’s unexpected occupation; kind of a rough day for history.
“He’s trying to tell you the truth for once,” I called down the bar.
Good Help squintily glared my way while Tonsil Vapor’s coiffure rotated toward me. My own startlement had not been at the nature of Good Help’s job but that he’d ever held one at all. 1918, though, explained it: enlistment into employment rather than the war in Europe.
Tonsil Vapor ap
proached me, trailed by his electronic Siamese twin. He wore an expression as concerned as his cameraman’s was languid. Leaning close, Tonsil Vapor asked me in a hushed tone:
“You mean to tell me that your town’s historic citizen had sexual congress with—” and twirled his index finger in the corkscrew pattern of a pig’s tail.
“Well, I can’t testify one way or the other on that,” I hedged. “But what he’s trying to tell you about here is something else. One of the jobs on those logging crews over west of the mountains was, uh, like he says.”
Tonsil Vapor peered at me in even more perplexity.
“Pigfucker,” I clarified. “See, in those days when they’d go to skid logs out of the woods they’d string them together end to end with eye-bolt hitches, sort of like links of sausage. And the last log they’d hitch on was a hollowed-out one called the pig. After all the other logs were snaked out of the woods, then the eye-bolts and tools and anything else got thrown in the pig—I guess that’s maybe why they called it that, you could toss anything into it—and it’d be skidded back into the timber for the next string of logs, same again. Anyway, the guy, usually he was just a punk of a kid,” although it was at least as hard to think of Good Help Hebner young as it was to imagine him employed, “who threw the stuff into the pig was called the—”
“Pigfucker,” intoned Tonsil Vapor, gazing down the bar to where Good Help was passing the time by grooming his goatee with his fingers. “But wasn’t that job ever called anything nicer?”
I shrugged. “Not that I ever heard of. Lumberjacks tend not to be dainty talkers.”
The bored cameraman shifted his feet as if settling down for another wait, and he and Fred and I watched Tonsil Vapor chew the inside of his mouth as he continued staring down the bar at Good Help.
At length the cameraman suggested, “Let’s just bleep out the mothering word.”
“Shit, that just emphasizes it,” Tonsil Vapor let out peevishly. “No, we’ve got to get our historic citizen to talk about the job without . . . Wait, I know!” His face lit up as if the camera and lights were on him. “I’ll just say, ‘Mr. Pigner, I—’ ”