Riley was spieling something I had wondered about, how the Indians kept track of their casualties. “Alahoos, an oldlike man who was still strong, made announcement of all incidents and events each day,” he read off what he’d copied in his notebook earlier. “All knew him and reported to him who had been wounded or killed in battle, who was missing or had disappeared.”
I’d stayed silent until something made me ask. “What was the weather like during the fighting here?”
“Cold, rainy, windy, generally shitty,” Riley named off. “It ended up snowing about half a foot.” This quicksilver battlesite in white, a first sift of snowfall halfway up the long grass, the bald brows of the hills showing through, I could readily see.
Then I recognized this day’s weather. As much so as if the wind had put on a uniform and the chilly air assumed a familiar mask of ice.
It was blowing from May 18, 1943. I was eighteen and supposedly a soldier. After enlistment and basic training I was shipped to find my war in a part of the world I had barely even heard of, the Aleutian islands. If you look hard enough at a map they are a line of stepping stones in the North Pacific between Asia and Alaska, and the Japanese were using them in just that way in World War Two. In the fighting on the island of Attu my platoon was sent out hours before daylight the morning of our attack on Cold Mountain. We were to sneak into position where we could work over a Japanese emplacement of heavy machine guns, at least three of the goddamn things. That mountain was cold, all right. Ice on the tundra as we climbed the slope, and the wind trying to swat us off the face of the earth. Just in the earliest minute or so when it was getting light enough to see we spotted the first enemy, a sentry about fifty yards away. I guess he was not the greatest of sentries, because he was standing up there against the skyline shaking out a grass mat. Our lieutenant motioned the rest of us to take cover under a cutbank. Then he laid down in firing-range position with his legs carefully spraddled and shot the sentry. I have wondered ever since if that is pretty much what war is: some ninny stands up when he shouldn’t and some other ninny shoots him when he shouldn’t. What I do know for definite is that our prescribed plan of attack, to grenade those machine guns, was now defunct before it even started because we were way too far away to throw. Yet, for whatever reason, all at once here came four or five Japanese soldiers and an officer with a sword, kiyi-ing down in a bayonet attack on us. Our BAR man opened up, the Browning Automatic making that kind of regretful tuck tuck tuck sound as it fired, and that took care of the bayonet proposition. While the Japanese were thinking matters over, our lieutenant’s next brainstorm was to send some of us out around to a little knoll so we could pinch in on the machine gun position. I was the third guy who had to scramble across there, running hunched down for maybe forty feet from the end of the cut bank to the cover of the knoll, and I was only a step from having it made when a bullet smashed my left leg not far above the ankle. I fell and rolled a long way down the mountainside. Not that I know an awful lot about it, except for the skinned up and bruised places all over my body later, because I’d immediately lost consciousness, but the other men of the platoon assured me I’d been the deadest-looking guy they ever saw, flopping down the slope like a rag doll.
That was my combat career, quick. Over with except for the piece of my leg where the ache lay under the bullet scar, my Attu tattoo. I—
No. Not over with. Not here, not this day. Peace of mind was splintered too by that bullet of forty-six years ago.
With a gulp I reached down and wildly rubbed my shin, trying to scrub away so much more than that boneload of pain. Oh sure, it served me right for traipsing around to these sorrowspots with this duo of Montanologists. Maybe my herder Helen had the right idea: go and live with rocks. Goddamn it all to hell anyway, how long did we have to stay here being augured by the wind? Mariah, I saw, had finally sorted her way across the deceptive levels of the battlefield and was at the far side marshaling a picture of the bust of Chief Joseph within an iron spike fence. I turned to strongly urge Riley too into finishing up this yowling site.
Riley was gone.
Gone where, gone how, there was no sign whatsoever.
I squinted against the wind and tried to get a grip on why he would up and vanish. My swoon back to the Aleutians surely hadn’t taken long enough for him to walk off over any of the ridges or back to the Bago. And I could see along the entire creek and all the battlefield to where Mariah was working. But abruptly only the two of us in this welter of geography.
A new crop of prickles broke out on me. Aggravating as Riley could be with his presence, to have him subtracted this way was uncommonly spooky. As if my Attu memory of brushing against oblivion had brushed Ri—
Not forty feet from me, his tall figure suddenly rose from the ground. Oh sure, scribbling. Where the hell else would Riley be extant? He had lain down in a little dip, most likely a rifle pit dug by one of the Nez Percé, to belly into that sense of concealment and now here he stood again, telling his everlasting notebook about it all.
. . . in a pock in the earth. In a disease scar older than smallpox or any other.
But craters of war heal over, don’t they? Why else the bronze calm of plaques, the even-handed attestations to both sides who fought here in the narrow bottomland of Snake Creek in 1877? The grass has grown back as thick as flame. The brow of the hill to the east wears strips of farming like a cheerful striped cap. Sunshine dodges the clouds, uncurls flags of light on the hills.
By now the only echoes at this battlesite are poetry. The sentences of surrender by Joseph, just the surviving chief of several who jointly led the Nez Percé almost magically through seventeen hundred miles of hostile territory and several battles before Snake Creek, were interpreted by one of General Howard’s staff, transcribed by another; scrawled in a report to the Secretary of War, the surrender speech was merely a knell for one more band of outgunned Indians. But Joseph’s words want to be more than that.
I am tired of fighting.
Our chiefs are killed.
The old men are all killed.
It is cold and we have no blankets.
My people have run to the hills,
and have no blankets.
Perhaps I shall find them among the dead.
I am tired: my heart is sick and sad
From where the sun now stands,
I will fight no more forever.
Combat pits nowadays are greatly deeper in the prairie south of the Bearpaws, where the Nez Percé ghosted across the center of Montana on their route to defeat. Concrete burrows, complete arsenals underground. Missile silos, we let the Department of Defense (née the Department of War, 1789–1947) call these most deliberate of craters, as if what they store is lifegiving. Two hundred Minuteman missile silos across Montana. More of these fields of nuclear warheads in the Dakotas and Wyoming, Nebraska and Colorado and Missouri. Enough gopherholed megatonnage to incinerate people by the million.
So, no, warpox does not heal. It merely scabs over with the latest materiel. And so we are still pitted, now with nuclear snipers’ burrows. Maybe the one nearest you is for Kiev; if Mutual Assured Destruction has been calibrated cleverly enough, maybe the one siloed in Kiev is for here. (It is cold and we have no blankets.) In any case, the combat pits still are dutifully manned. On highways crisscrossing the heart of the West today, you can meet the next shift-change of missile crews in their Air Force vans, blue taxis to Armageddon.
So time came and went, there along Snake Creek. On Aleutian wind agitating battle earth in Montana. Through summer into colder calendar. Into Mariah’s camera and Riley’s notebook and out as scene and story.
In me. In the arithmetic that if you add to an eighteen-year-old wounded soldier the years now since his bullet, my birthday—this day—was my sixty-fifth.
• • •
“Got it finally,” Mariah declared, ruddy from the wind but an exultant grin on her, as she coalesced with Riley and me at the footbridge. She’d earned grinni
ng rights, because what she’d done in her picture to go with Riley’s piece was put that weather to work—the flat-bottomed clouds, each drifting separate against the sky, in the same sad lopped way that the sculpture of Chief Joseph’s head seemed based in the air amidst them. Mariah hugged herself for warmth. “Brrr, let’s get in out of this.”
The wind put up a final struggle as we trudged head-on into it the last couple of hundred yards to the motorhome, which I forthwith went to unlock. Then remembered. “Oh yeah, I gave the keys to you, Riley.”
“Hmm? So you did.” He reached a hand into the side pocket of his coat and froze in that position. Next he cast an uh-oh look at Mariah where she was jigging in place trying to keep warm, then finally one toward me.
“Christamighty!” I yelped. “What’d you go and do now, lose the goddamn keys?”
“No, no, of course not,” Riley piped with a swallow. “They’re, ah, just in one of my other pockets, is all.”
“So dig them out,” I urged with vigor. “It’s colder than the moon’s backside out here.”
Riley’s gaze at me turned sickly. “The pocket of that jacket,” he admitted, indicating toward the Bago. The jacket he’d changed for a heavier one. The jacket he’d left in the Bago. The jacket he’d locked in the Bago.
Right then I could have gladly mangled him. Riley Wright Ground Sausage, Handmade on Snake Creek. But Mariah put herself between us and headed me off with multiple adjurations of “Whoa now, that isn’t going to get us anywhere!” and eventually I cooled down—in that wind it didn’t take all that long—enough to agree we had to do something drastic.
And it is a drastic amount of effort to break out a motorhome’s safety-glassed rear sidewindow, above head height, with a rock at the cold blowy end of a miserable day, just as it is an even more aggravating chore to pluck and dig all the shards of glass out of the windowframe, as we stretched and shivered and did until at last the frame was safe for Riley and me to boost Mariah up to shinny through.
After she unlocked the doors and the keys were retrieved and I’d revved the heater up to full blast to start thawing us out, Riley assured me he knew precisely what to do next.
“Do you,” I said icily. “Isn’t it kind of late in life for you to start in on growing a brain?”
“We’ll just swing by the hardware store in Chinook and patch some weather glazing over the window until we can get it fixed,” he outlined. Under my continued stare he added, “Ah, which reminds me,” and flipped open his notebook to the page of the buffalo-bashed grill, the AWOL hubcap, the pheasant-cracked windshield and dented chrome, and added the rear sidewindow to Accounts Outstanding.
When we reached Chinook, Riley’s bright weatherizing idea proved to have missed only one detail: the hardware store was closed up tight for the holiday.
“Pull in here,” Mariah directed before I could start on Riley again, pointing with great definiteness at the IGA foodstore. In she marched while the window assassin and I sat in mutual polar silence, although the wind howled merrily in through the surprise aperture it found at the rear corner of the Bago, and in a jiffy she was back with a roll of freezer tape and a box of bags made out of some kind of clear crinkly material, remarkably stout. Riley and I piled out to help her tape the bags over the window. I can testify there is some justice in life, because he was the one who gave in to curiosity and asked her, “What are these anyway?”
“Turkey basting bags,” Mariah told him.
Then she surprised the daylights out of me.
“Your main present is that I held off mentioning what day this is until right now,” she addressed to me as soon as we were back inside the bandaged Bago, “knowing how owly you always get about your birthday. And now that we’ve faced the issue, I’m taking you out to birthday supper. And here’s a little something to add to that, even.”
Mariah produced out of one of her ditty bags a small package with a major bow on it and delivered it to me with a kiss, without even any daughterly comment about the risk her lips were taking on my whiskers.
This was more like it and I was much touched, sure, but could easily have stood not to have Riley within a hundred miles of our family moment. He too looked as if he wished himself absent, but contributed a semigruff “At least you picked a day with enough wind to help you with the candles.”
A western tie, one of those bolo ones that hangs like a large locket, lay in the small box I’d unwrapped. Its centerpiece was a polished oval of stone set in a broochlike clasp. The stone was darkest green, so intensely so it approached black, but full of sparks of color, reds, golds, grays; like a night sky of stars of hues never seen before.
“Isn’t this nifty,” I not much more than whispered, overcome with the star-specked beauty of the gift after this mortally awful day. “Thank you, honey, my God, thank you.” I breathed tenderly on the gem and rubbed it on the sleeve of my shirt, brightening the amulet’s constellations of sparks even more. “What kind of stone—?”
“It’s jasper,” Mariah said, her gray eyes bright. “Helen found it for me on the North Fork, in that coulee that leads down to the McCaskill homestead. You really like it?”
“Do I ever.”
“Then let’s dude you up in it.” Mariah came over and slipped the bolo loop over my head and critically slid the oval gem into place at the base of my throat; most painless way in the world to dress up, all right. “There now, look at you.”
And for once she even asked. “How much would you mind having your picture taken, just for the occasion?”
“I guess it wouldn’t necessarily be fatal,” I allowed. “Bang away.”
She shot a variety of me in my new neck adornment feeling swave and looking debonure, but didn’t radically prolong this camera session. “Okay, you both got your faces set for supper?” she asked with the last click.
“Why don’t you two go ahead,” Riley suggested, reason personified for once. “I’ll stay here and write the piece from today, get it on in to the evil elf.”
“If you do that, I have to race back here and run film through the Leafax yet tonight,” Mariah objected as if Riley had peed in the path of her parade. “What about that back-up piece you sneaked in? What does that need on it, anything I can send in quick?”
Even I admit, Riley was showing the frazzle of the day as much as any of us and obviously could stand a square meal and a night off. He rubbed his eyes one at a time, first the blue one left showing and then the gray, like he was dimming down even as we watched. “Let me think. Yeah, it’s just a thumbsucker, any number of your shots of country you’ve already sent in will go okay with that one.”
“Then come on,” Mariah urged. “Let’s go birthdaying.”
• • •
So we were not spared Riley for the occasion, but all else seemed auspicious enough at the moment, Mariah’s thoughtfulness, my new jasper dazzler, evening dining ahead along the Milk River. Chinook was a tidy town, some nice logic to it—its block of bars, just for example, was a concentrate of western oasis nomenclature: Mint, Stockman, Elk, right there door by door by door. Where we headed, though, was out to the edge of town to a blue-painted rambly enterprise Mariah had singled out for this birthday shindig of mine. By now the day was losing the last of its light, so the place’s high old neon sign out front was like electric paint against the onset of night: a giant long-stemmed glass, in which was seated the representation of a curvy woman in fringed skirt and bandanna and high-heeled boots—she too was long-stemmed, one shapely leg cocked over the edge of the martini glass and the other extended fully into the air—with her head thrown back and her arm up, tossing her cowgirl hat into the sky. When the sign blinked, the leg kicked in frolicsome fashion and the hat sailed high.
THE LASS IN A GLASS, the red-tubed wording underneath I guess not unexpectedly said, and spaced beneath that ran the enumeration of Bar, Lounge, Supper Club, Coffee Shop, Bus Depot and Motel. Riley evidently figured he was back in my good graces now that we were amid my birth
day celebration—he could not have been more mistaken—and gandering up at those neon announcements he commented: “Wouldn’t you think they’d go all the way and add a maternity ward and a funeral parlor?”
As soon as we were inside, Riley did the dutiful and employed the lobby phone long enough to coax some functionary in Missoula—despite that earlier elf crack, the BB naturally was nowhere to be found on the newspaper premises over a holiday—into just going with the back-up piece and picking a nice one of Mariah’s file photos to illustrate it with, happy fucking Labor Day to him too. The day’s wind must have sharpened all our appetites, for without even any debate we then bypassed the bar and lounge and set ourselves for supper.
• • •
Our exit occurred a considerable while later, the three of us stuffed with soup, salad, fondue and breadsticks, prime rib, baked potato, two or three vegetables, and chocolate cake—when this place said supper club it meant it—but Mariah lighter by quite a few dollars. I thanked her a kabillion for the birthday feast, but if I thought I’d had an eventful enough day to hold me for another sixty-five years, I had another think coming.
Riley of course was the culprit. We were harmlessly on our way out of The Lass in a Glass enterprise, headed for the motorhome ready to tuck in for the night, when he made the uncharacteristic error of trying to be nice.
“Tell you what, Jick. Just to show you my heart’s in the right place,” patting his rump pocket where his billfold resided, “I’ll buy you a birthday drink.”
“Naw,” I demurred as civilly as I could, “it’s been kind of a hefty day. I think I’ll turn in early.”
Say for Riley, he didn’t smart off with anything about somebody my age needing his sleep. Instead, worse, he turned to Mariah and invited, “At least I can keep my reckless generosity in the family. Buy you a round, can I, Mariah Montana?”
“Best offer I’ve had since Shelby,” she responded, surprisingly full of cheer. Then to me: “You don’t mind if we hang on in here a little while, do you? We’ll let ourselves in the Bago quiet as we can.”