All too soon Mariah was emerging from the ladies’ room, to the tune of the under-the-breath emission beside me, “Look at the local motion in that blouse.” Ron the Romancer was applying a companionable leer all over her as she came back to the bar. If called into court, his defense could only have been that at no time did his eyeballs actually leave his body.
“Hey you, yayhoo,” I began to call him down on his behavior just as Mariah gave him a look, then a couple of sharper glances as it dawned on her where his interest lay. But her admirer continued to spoon her up with his gaze even after she reached the bar and us again. Then, as if in a staring contest with what were standing sentinel in Mariah’s blouse, the would-be swain swanked out to her: “That green sure brings out your best points.”
I brightly suggested we call it a night.
“Ohhh, not till I finish this,” Mariah said, and picked up her drink but didn’t sit down with it. Instead she delivered me a little tickle in the ribs and said, “Trade places with me, how about.”
That would put her directly next to the pair of shagnasties, removing me as a barrier of at least age if not dignity. “Uh, actually I’m just real comfortable where I am.”
The tickle turned into an informative pincer on my rib. “Riley needs the company,” she let me know. I flinched and made the trade.
Sidling onto the stool where I’d been, Mariah remarked to the staring bozo, “You seem pretty interested in what I’m wearing.”
He looked like he’d been handed candy. “Yeah, I like what you haven’t got on.”
“Aw, crud,” Riley uttered wearily and began to get off his stool in the direction of combat.
Mariah halted him with a stonewall look and a half-inch of head-shake. Riley considered, shrugged, sat back down.
Turning around to her unremitting spectator again, who now seemed hypnotized by her earring dealybobs, she said in a way that left spaces in the air where her words had been: “Well then now—what’s on your mind besides what’s on my chest?”
He blinked quite a number of times. Then: “I was wondering if you’d, er, want to go out.”
Mariah presented him what I recognized as her most dangerous grin. “Now doesn’t that sound interesting,” she assessed. “I’ll bet you’re the kind of guy who shows up for a date in your ready-to-go tuxedo.”
“Er, I’m not sure I’ve got—what’s a ready-to-go tuxedo?”
Mariah swirled her Calvert and water, took a substantial swig, then delivered in a tone icier than the cubes in her glass:
“A ten-gallon hat and a hard-on.”
Into our drinks Riley and I simultaneously snorted aquatic laughs, which doubtless would have drawn one or the other of us the wrath of the red-faced bozo, except that his buddy on the other side of him gave out a guffaw that must have been heard in northernmost Canada and then crowed, “He can at least borrow the hat someplace, lady!”
“Screw you, Terry,” the still-red shagnasty gritted out, in a 180-degree turn of his attentions. Then he swung around on his stool with his right fist in business, socking Terry in the middle of his hilarity and sending him sailing off backwards.
Terry rebounded off the pool table and with a roar tackled Mariah’s suitor off his stool. The locked pair of them swooshed past us in midair, landed colossally and then rolled thumpedy-thump-thump across the floor in a clinch, cussing and grunting.
“Maybe I missed a chance there,” Mariah reflected as the bartender whipped out a Little League baseball bat and kept it within quick reach while phoning the town marshal. She cast a last glance at the tornado of elbows and boots and oofs and ooghs as it thrashed across the floor-boards. “He does seem to be a person who cares a lot.”
• • •
Leaving the second battle of Shelby behind, we truly began tooling along the High Line, eastward on Highway 2 across that broad brow of Montana.
The Bago purred right along but the other three of us seemed to have caught our mood from the weather, which had turned hazy and dull. No trace whatsoever of the hundred-mile face of the Rockies behind us to the west, and on the northern horizon the Sweetgrass Hills were blue ghosts of themselves. With only the plains everywhere around I began to feel adrift, and Mariah and Riley too seemed logy and out of their element. As far as we were concerned this highway had been squeezed out of a tube of monotony. I wished the day could be rinsed, to give the High Line country a fairer chance with us.
Soon we were in the wheat sea. Out among the straw-toned fields occasional round metal bins and tall elevators bobbed up, but otherwise the only color other than basic farming was the Burlington Northern’s roadbed of lavender gravel, brought in from somewhere far. That railroad built by Jim Hill as the transcontinental Great Northern route—farthest up on the American map and hence its Montanized designation “the high line”—cleaved open this land to settlement in the first years of this century and even yet the trackside towns are the only communities in sight. One after another as you drive Highway 2 they come peeping over the lonely horizon, Dunkirk, Devon, Inverness, Kremlin . . . a person would think he really was somewhere. Which can only have been the railroad’s idea in naming these little spots big.
Our destination today was Havre, which didn’t reassure me either. I’d been there a number of times before when livestock business compelled me to and knew it wasn’t the kind of place I am geared for, out as the town is like a butter pat in the middle of a gigantic hotcake. So any conversation was something of a relief, even when Mariah caught sight of a jet laying its cloud road, the contrail stitching across a break in the sky’s thin murk ahead of us, and said in disgruntled photographer fashion, “The Malmstrom flyboys have got the weather I want, up there.”
That roused Riley to poke his head between us and peer through the windshield at the white route of the bomber or fighter or whatever the plane from the Great Falls air base was. “Another billion-dollar silver bullet from Uncle Sam,” he preached in a gold-braid voice. “Take that, you enemy, whoever the hell you are any more.”
“Reminds me of your ack-ack career, petunia,” I contributed to the aerial motif.
“Mmm, that time.” The start of a little grin crept into Mariah’s tone.
“Old Earlene.” I couldn’t help but follow the words with a chuckle.
“Brainpain Zane.” Mariah escalated both of us into laughter with that.
Riley had sat back into his dinette seat. “I knew I should have brought a translator along when I hooked up with you two.”
“This goes back to when I was a freshman in high school,” Mariah took over the telling of it to him. “Initiation Day—you remember how dumb-ass those were anyway. This one, the seniors had us all carry brooms and whenever one of them would catch us in the hallway between classes and yell ‘Air raid!’ we were supposed to flop on our back and aim the broom up like an antiaircraft gun and go ‘ack-ack-ack-ack.’ Cute, huh? Somehow I went along with the program until Earlene Zane, the original brainpain as we called her, caught me walking across the muddy parking lot to the schoolbus and yelled out, ‘Air raid, McCaskill! Dump your butt in that mud, freshie!’ I looked down at that mud and then I looked at Earlene, and the next thing I knew I’d swept the broom through the gloppiest mudhole, right at her. Big globs flew onto the front of her dress, up into her face, all over her. So I did it a bunch more times.”
“Hey, don’t leave out the best part,” I paternally reminded her as Riley chimed in with our chortling.
“Oh, right,” Mariah went on in highest spirit. “Every time I swatted a glob onto old Earlene, I’d go: ack-ack-ack-ack.”
By the time we’d laughed ourselves out at that, we were beyond Kremlin, with only another ten minutes or so of hypnotic highway to put us into Havre. I figured we had this High Line day made, whatever the rest of them were going to be like, when abruptly a spot of colors erupted at the far edge of the road.
Like a hurled mass the flying form catapulted up across the highway on collision course with the w
indshield in front of my face. Before it could register on me that I’d done any of it, I yelled “Hang on!” and braked the motorhome and swerved it instinctively toward where the large ringneck had flown up from, trying to veer over just behind the arc of its flight. The body with its whirring wings, exquisitely long feathered tail, even the red wattle mask of its head and the white circle around the bird’s neck, all flashed past me, then sickly thudded against the last of the uppermost corner of the windshield where the glass meets the chrome fitting, on Mariah’s side of the Bago. She ducked and flung up both arms in a horizontal fence to protect her face, the way a person automatically desperately will, as the web of cracks crinkled down from the shatterpoint.
By the time any of this was clear to me, the pheasant was a wad of feathers in the barrow pit a hundred yards behind us.
“You all right?” I demanded of Mariah as I got the Bago and myself settled back down into more regular road behavior. “Any glass get you?”
“Huh uh.” She was avidly studying the damage pattern zigzagged into the upper corner of the windshield in front of her. “Damn, I wish I’d caught that with the camera.”
“How about you, Riley?” I called over my shoulder. “You come through that okay?”
“Yeah,” the scribbler answered in an appreciative voice. “Fine and dandy, Jick.”
“Good. Then open that notebook of yours to the repairs page.”
• • •
The next morning there in Havre was the fourth of September, which also happened to be Labor Day—always the message that summer is shot and winter is at the door—and two full months since Mariah cornered me into the centennial trip. Sure, I thought to myself while easing out of bed onto my tender leg, which was feeling the change in weather, why not lump all dubious anniversaries into one damn Monday and frost it with Havre.
Mariah mentioned nothing at breakfast—not even my hotcakes alBago, doily-size but by the dozens—she and Riley poring over a map spread between them, him listing off towns ahead of us on Highway 2 and jotting them into his notebook with question marks after them while she cogitated out loud about photographic prospects, so I ended the meal fed up in more ways than one. A High Line breeze whined insistently in the overhead vent of the motorhome. Riley’s pen tippy-tapped monotonously in his notebook. I peered out to see what kind of weather was in store, but no luck there either, Havre being down in a hole so much you can’t even begin to see to any significant horizon. The day had me disturbed, even I will admit. Try as I did to rein in my mood, I suppose a bit of it worked loose in my general remark:
“Whatever in hell you two eventually manage to come up with, I hope to Christ it’s got some mountains somewhere around for a change. This country where there’s nothing to lean your eyes on is getting me down.”
Riley’s pen quit tapping the notebook, and when I glanced over at the unaccustomed welcome silence, he had the pen angled like a pointer onto a spot on the map. Mariah’s index finger was there from the opposite direction. Both their faces were lit up as if they had hit the same socket at the same time.
It was Mariah who gave me a thankful grin and said, “Great minds run on the same track.”
“What, me and you two?” I said skeptically.
“Better than that,” Riley chimed in. “You and Chief Joseph.”
• • •
On the map, out beyond Havre a backroad dangles lonesomely south from the little town of Chinook. Down it, across miles and miles of grassland being swept by the wind and at last almost into the Bearpaw Mountains, we pulled in at the Chief Joseph Battleground.
The Joseph story, actually the Nez Percé story because he was but one of several chiefs who led their combined bands—not just their fighting men but women, children, their old people, their herd of horses, the whole works—out of the Wallowa Mountains in Oregon in flight from the push of whites on their land, I’d of course read the basics of: that after a dodging route of seventeen hundred miles and several successful battles, the Indians were cornered into surrender here only a few more days’ march to sanctuary in Canada. What I saw now, at history’s actual place, was that the Nez Percé in that autumn of the last century had two more horizons to get over. Up onto the brief rise above this Snake Creek bottomland where they’d pitched camp. Then over the wider rim of skyline ridge to the north and across the boundary into Canada. The small horizon, suddenly deadly with cavalry and infantry, had been the one that doomed them.
Our threesome sat within the protection of the motorhome and studied the ground of battle, across the somehow wicked-looking little creek of wild rose brambles and stunted willows.
After a bit, Riley tested the air with his cocked-to-one-side tone of voice. “Custer was a loser, and he’s famous as hell. Chief Joseph fought longer and harder and didn’t get his people killed wholesale, and all he’s got is that plaque on a rock over there. Why’d it turn out that way?”
Whether or not Riley really expected an answer, I turned and gave him the one that needed no words—simply rubbed the back of my hand, the skin there.
We stepped from the Bago into a wind just short of lethal, Mariah and I stepping right back in and swapping our hats for winter caps and pulling on heaviest coats. But Riley must have been in some kind of writing fever because he braved the wind in just a jacket to hustle over for a look at the Joseph plaque. By the time we joined him at that—there actually proved to be three memorial markers, a plaque apiece in honor of the U.S. soldiers, the Indians, and the Chinook townsman who’d helped preserve the battlefield; about as democratic as you can get about a combat site, I suppose—gusts were whistling even harder out of the west and Riley had to give up on his polar bear act. Borrowing the Bago keys from me, along with my look that said I hoped he wasn’t going to keep diddling around in this fashion in weather like this, he scooted back to the motorhome to don a saner coat while Mariah and I ducked behind a little wall of shelter put up to keep visitors from being spun away like tumbleweeds.
Hunched in out of the gale, she blew on her fingers to get ready for shutter action. I blew on mine simply because they were cold. Both of us scanned the battleground in front of us across the brambles of Snake Creek. Everywhere out there the dead grass flowed identically in the wind, coulees and brief benchlands merging into each other as just slightest dents and bulges in the grass-color of everything.
“What year was the battle?” I asked above the whoosh of the wind.
“1877,” Mariah raised her voice in turn.
“This place still is in a bad mood,” I observed.
Mariah said an eloquent nothing. I recognized why. I am not a cameraperson but even I could see that for her photography purpose, this site was hiding its face.
“Not nice,” Riley reported meteorologically as a gust propelled him behind the windbreak wall with us.
“In more ways than one,” Mariah shared with him out of her contemplation of the tan smudge of battlefield. “This is going to take some real figuring out to shoot.” So saying, she automatically reached up and reset her winter cap with the bill backwards now over the neckfall of her hair, to keep the brim out of the way of her camera.
“I sympathize,” the scribbler responded. Not in any smartass way, but as if he might actually mean it, which made me wonder what was getting into Riley Wright lately. “I need to tromp around out there a while myself,” he sped on. “The wind just lends a little atmosphere, hmm?”
Atmosphere was one way of putting it. I expected prickles at a place like this, and they came at once. Spirits hovering in their old neighborhood are not something I can bring myself to believe in. But I do figure there could be sensations left over in us—the visitors, the inter-lopers—from tribal times, from cave times; maybe our hair roots go deep into that past and it rises up out of us as the prickles at such a site as this battlefield.
Wanting to stay out of the way of Mariah and her lens as she bowed her neck and started stalking for any photo chance, I stuck with Riley when h
e began his own prowl along the little ridge at the south edge of the battle site. Up as we were, I could see that the country here was higher than the Milk River Valley where Chinook lay, these surroundings gradually stairstepping into the rounded small summits of the Bearpaw Mountains. The nicest ranching country I’d seen yet on the High Line, actually; snowdrifts would last and last in the gullies on these north slopes, and other water surely awaited in springs tucked here and there. For livestock, a promising enough place. For a life-or-death encampment, no. As we tromped around, hunching in that wind, every sense told me what nasty country this was to fight in—the creek bottomland dangerously unsheltered yet all different levels of land around the site like crazy stairs and hideyholes.
Riley had the order of battle, to call it that, down pat from his research while we were driving from Havre. The slightly higher ground we were on was where the Nez Percé had been able to flop down in cover and drive back the white soldiers’ first attack. The U.S. troops lost an immediate twenty-two men and two officers in that opening charge against the ridge, and about twice that many wounded. Some of the Nez Percé were killed that night by their own warriors who mistook them for Cheyennes allied with the white soldiers. Both sides dug in and it dragged on into a kind of sniping marathon from trenches and rifle pits. In all. Riley said, five days of such mauling took place. Near where we stood Chief Looking Glass was the last man killed, picked off by an army scout. Over there, Riley pointed out, the body of Chief Toohoolhoolzote had lain unburied because of the field of fire from the white soldiers. Down here below us, a howitzer shell caved in a shelter pit on a Nez Percé woman and her child.
In no time at all of that chilly trudging and standing, my achy shin felt like fire. Yet it never crossed my mind to retreat to the Bago.
Even the clouds were askew here, scattered fat cottonwad ones with perfectly flat bottoms as if skidding on the top of the wind. Every so often, a floe of cloudshadow would blot across the battlefield and I would see Mariah frown upward from her camera.