And as regular as the basting bags taped over the Bago window flapped in the wind, I accepted every iota of their No Tell Motel linkup and still I sorrowed, fretted, all but wept.
Tonight, a single lightning night of them together, was no cause for bonedeep concern. Tomorrow and its cousins were. Any of the time ahead, the rest of this centennial journey or beyond, when Mariah might paradoxically backslide to Riley; with all the life that ought to be ahead of her, trapping herself into that again. I hoped against hope that what I was picturing was not about to happen. But as searingly clear as the flashes that had been coming to me from the gone years, I could see ahead to her and him failing with each other again. Their mutual season would not last, the solitude in each of them would win out, and they would break apart in anger and grief and worse again.
Some graft of time, I yearned for. Some splint of cognizance by which Mariah, Riley, the both, could be shown how not to repeat defeat. But all that was left of me seemed too used and brittle for any of that. Sixty-five years before, union between my parents passed existence along to me. On the Aleutian mountain battlefield in 1943, the poor aim of an enemy soldier lent me life from then until now. But what next. Or was this already the next. People do end up this way, alone in a mobile home of one sort or another, their remaining self shrunken to fit into a metal box.
I put my face in my hands and as if she could still be reached by such a clasp, I cried out:
“Marcella? Marce, what the hell am I going to do?”
• • •
Bread and ink making their morning rounds woke me.
The Eddy’s Bakery truck looming in front of the windshield of the Bago took a minute to register on me when I foggily craned up out of bed to see what all the traffic at this campsite was. Everything came back too fast after that, however. This campsite the Lass in a Glass parking lot, Mariah and Riley inside between the sheets, the whole mess. By the time the news agent pulled up to replenish the newspaper boxes outside the motel and had let the lids drops, kachunk kachunk kachunk, I had some clothes and a mood on. Such sleep as I’d managed to get was ragged, tossful. All over I felt bony and bruised, as if I’d been slumbering on a sack of doorknobs. Oldlike. And the main matter still awaited with the daylight which was just starting to find Chinook, planetary capital of romance: how to induce a thirty-five-year-old headstrong daughter to take a reality check on herself.
Even the interior of the Bago seemed foreign this morning. Strange as hell, how a domicile so empty could feel so mussed. I shook my head in a yawn or at least some kind of a groggy gawp and gimped up front to an unbagged window for a peek at the day. If there was any balance at all to things, at least the weather would have to have improved.
The meteorological outlook, though, was not what hooked my gaze.
I did not want it to be what it was. I looked long and hard across the thirty or so feet from the motorhome to the newsboxes. I tried telling myself, huh uh, naw, they wouldn’t, must be some other—yet newsprint does not lie, does it, at least not in this fashion.
Slowly I went out and dropped a quarter and a dime in the middle newspaper box. On either side of it the Great Falls Tribune and the Havre Daily News were reciting developments in Poland. The Montanian I plucked out hit closer to home than I’d ever dreamed print and picture could.
Center page, mighty, in splendid color, the photo of course was Mariah’s. Of the Double W gateframe, tall thick poles and crosspiece in angular outline like a doorway slashed into the sky. Under and around the flagrant gateway, the Two Medicine country of that month-ago evening on our way in to the centennial committee meeting: the night-rumple of mountains where the sun had just departed, the thin strokes of clouds still glowing above. One mercy—standing so stark and dark, the gateframe’s lettered sign announcing WW, Inc. ownership could not be read. But the steer skull dangling just beneath more than made up for it, declaring there against the Noon Creek sky like a horned ghost.
TWILIGHT OF THE RANCHER? epitaphed the headline beneath.
And beneath that, the words of Riley.
From a life spent under a Stetson, he has his divided mind written on his forehead, the tanned lower hemisphere where wind and sun and all other weathers of the ranch have reached and then above the hatline equator an oddly shy indoor paleness. When he was younger, that band of pearly forehead made him stand out at the Saturday night dances, as if a man needed to be bright-marked at the top to be able to schottische and square dance so nimbly. When he was that young, the fingers of his children traced there above his brow in wonder at the border between the ruddy skin and the protected zone of white. Now worry fits on at that line.
The rancher starts his day as usual now with a choice of frets. Looks at the weather and plays the endless guessing game of climate—an open winter coming, or another Alaskan Express? the droughtiness of the 1980s at last over (the numerals in his grandfather’s identical thought were the skein from 1917 into the mid-1920s, in his father’s they were the 1930s) or only stoking up for more years of grass-shriveling heat? Checks the commodities page and calculates one more time what the latest disappointment in livestock prices is going to cost him. (Of all of Montana’s hard weather, the reliably worst has been its economic climate.) He plots out all that needs immediate doing and tries to figure out why hired help has become the rarest commodity of all. Runs on through the wish list to where he always ends up, damning his bones for their increasing complaint against the daylight-to-dark ranch life, yearning with everything in him for someone to shoulder all this after he soon can’t.
If the legends of his landed occupation are to be believed, a century and more ago Montana ranching began heroically, almost poetically, splendid in the grass. Yet even then, here and there a rancher twinged with the suspicion that legends are what people resort to when truth can’t be faced. In 1882, cattleman Charles Anceny contemplated himself and his neighbors in Montana’s new livestock industry with just such skepticism: “Our good luck consists more in the natural advantages of our country than in the scale of our genius.”
Old Anceny portended even more than he knew. Natural advantages have a habit of eroding away under spirited exploitation. And the spirit of the West, of Montana, of America, has been what the legends speak of as grand and truth has to call aggrandizing. The consolidating, the biggening, goes on yet and with consequences below; as economic structures become more global somebody has to become more granular, and the rancher is among those. The marketplace that is the land is slipping out from under him. If you possess your own television network or have the spare change to own a professional football team or are paid an anchorman’s salary for your face or are commensurately compensated for your appearance on the big screens of the movies, yes, you can maybe compete with corporations and foreign buyers to own enough ground to be a Montana squire. But this rancher born on a few thousand family acres doesn’t have those infinite pockets. Instead what he owns is a penchant for counting too much on next year, and the notion that he’s not actually working himself to death because he’s doing it outdoors. Well, those are possessions too. But not the marketplace kind.
The rancher goes back and forth in his mind—give it up, tough it out. The past stretches from him like a shadow, recognizable but perplexing in the shapes it takes. He knows too well he is alone here in trying to look from those times to this. He rubs at that eclipse-line across his forehead and wonders how he and his way of life have ended up this way, forgotten but not gone.
I felt as if I’d been stripped naked, painted rainbow colors, and paraded across the state.
I spun from the newsbox and went to search the building.
• • •
He was established at a window table in the not yet open coffee shop, tippetytapping words into his processor. Flexing his fingers for his next character assassination, no doubt.
The newspaper page still was in my hand. Not for long. I wadded it up and hurled it in Riley Wright’s face.
He fl
inched, but let it bounce off him without otherwise moving.
“The latest reader survey shows that the Montanian draws considerable reaction from sheep ranchers with a Scottish surname,” the sonofabitch droned in the BB’s tone of voice.
My fury was compounded of what he’d written about me, of how he’d resumed with Mariah, of everything this Wright character represented. Hours, years, could have been spent in the telling. But it shot out hard and quick.
“The stuff you do to people would gag a maggot.”
“Jick, I think if you’d just simmer down—”
“I don’t that much care a shit what you think. Just tell me this. Why do you keep giving the McCaskills so much grief?”
That got to him. At least something could. Dreadful squintlines of what I took to be anger pulled the skin white and webbed at the corners of his eyes. The torn look of a man seeing something he had hoped to avoid.
For once Riley searched a while to find anything to say. When he did, his voice was surprisingly husky, as if he was having trouble down in his throat, too.
“I’m not going to debate Mariah with you—that’s between her and me, even if you don’t want it to be. So let’s just talk ranch.”
“Yeah, let’s,” I snapped. “Now that you’ve written me up as such a supreme failure.”
The goddamn guy would not give in to my gaze. He folded his arms across his chest and sighed. “Honest to Christ, it never dawned on me they’d slap that Double W picture on the ranch piece. As soon as I saw it this morning, I knew you’d come in here pissing fire. The only people who don’t react to being written about are in the obituaries. But you’re taking it entirely too personal. Jick, you’re not the only one in that piece. Anybody trying to run a family ranch or farm, maybe any kind of a family outfit, is in that situation.”
“Anybody, my rosy rear end. You might as well have plastered my name all over that description of—”
I stopped. The only face Riley had described was that of the situation, just as he claimed. Try mightily as I did, except for the universal hatline I could not point to where it wore a single identifiable feature of myself.
Riley said quietly, “Jick, there are only four of us in the world who know that piece fits you at all.”
Himself and Mariah and . . . “Who’re the other two?”
“You are. One version of you is as mad as if you’d found flyshit in your pepper. The other one of you knows what I wrote is the absogoddamnlute truth.”
Right then I ached, in mind, in heart, worse than my Attu shin ever could. “You figure you even have the right to do my epitaph, don’t you,” I spat out at him. “ ‘Here lie the collected versions of Jick McCaskill.’ ”
Riley bailed out of his chair so abruptly I figured we were proceeding to fists, which suited me fine. By God, that suited me just fine. Sixty-five sonofabitching years old notwithstanding, extinction ordained for me in every goddamn copy of that morning’s Montanian be as it may, I could still plant a few knuckles before Riley did me in.
But the slander merchant was snapping the screen down on his laptop and stepping back from the table carrying it at his side like the most innocent of appliances. See how the guy can’t even be counted on to erupt when he ought to? Riley only said, “Not that this’ll improve your disposition any, but I’ve got to get to a phone and send in this Chief Joseph piece. I’m sorry that other one happened to hit the paper today. If I’d done the Chief Joseph one last night instead of—well, just instead of, I’d have modemed it in then and the ranch piece wouldn’t have run. But I guess that’d just be postponing the inevitable, hmm?” And with that he walked away, squaring those broadloom shoulders, out of the coffee shop toward the mutual motel room.
I slumped into a chair at the abandoned table. How long I stared out along Highway 2 at the Lass in a Glass sign, extinguished now, I do not know, but she found me there after the morning light had flattened into that of day.
“Hi. Up early, same as ever, I see,” Mariah imparted too brightly, swinging her camera bag down and herself into the chair opposite me that Riley had vacated.
When I made no response, she took in a breath and tried some more of the obvious: “I was out shooting the country while the nice light lasted. The Bearpaws are a different set of mountains today.”
“I imagine.”
She glanced at me, then down at the table, then off into various corners of the comatose coffee shop. “They ought to be opening up here pretty quick and we can get some breakfast.”
“Swell.”
“How about a machine cup of coffee until then?”
“Why not.”
On her way back from the coffee machine in the lobby she managed balance all the way to the table before the two Styrofoam cups slopped. “Shit,” she said. Then while she was mopping at the spill with napkin after napkin, her voice took on another rare tone, a tinny one of every word having been rehearsed. Mariah, Mariah, ran in my mind, what you’re doing to yourself. What she was letting be known now was:
“Actually, you were right about that deal you tried to make with me at the start. We can just borrow the rig to do the rest of the series and you can be shed of us, how about. I can drive you home to the ranch this morning, right now, while Riley pokes around town.”
“Naw, that’s okay,” I said pleasant as pie but thinking, to hell with this noise, daughter of mine. No way are you going to cut me out of the picture so you can fall heart over head for Mr. Wrong again. Overnight is one thing, every night is another. “I’m kind of growing used to the Bago life. I’ll just stick with you and Romeo until you’re done. No problem.”
Mariah swung her head the little bit to sway her hair away and clear a look at me. “No, really, we—I can get by okay.”
“Mariah, I wouldn’t dream of leaving you in the lurch. Besides, there’s a lot of Montana left to be seen, isn’t there, which I’d hate to miss, wouldn’t I.” I gave her a steady gaze before adding, “Then there’s the other thing.”
“Which other thing?”
“That if you’re going to make a fool of yourself over Riley a second time in the same life, you’re goddamn well going to have to do it in front of me.”
Mariah reddened as if my words were a slap. But I kept on, I had to. “That’s what you originally brought me along for, isn’t it? To ride shotgun against your inclinations to regard Riley Wright as a worthwhile human being? So that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
“Jick . . . Dad . . .” she sorted nervously. “That, last night. Riley and I were just . . . feeling frisky.”
I continued to look squarely at her. I hadn’t thought it was a mutual yen for a night’s deep sleep.
She moved her eyes from the path of mine and tried to maintain, “I don’t know that I’m making a fool of myself over Riley.”
“You’re giving quite an imitation of it.”
“This isn’t like what happened before,” she essayed in what was surprisingly like a plea but failed to convince me one least bit. “Riley and I, this time we’re not, mmm”—to my horror, she was conscientiously sorting out in that flaming head of hers which way to translate to me the fact that they were scratching the bed itch; my God, I thought, does their generation have an entire warehouse of expressions for it?—“taking up with each other. We’re just seeing each other.”
Speak of the devil, Riley right then stalked back into the coffee shop, spied Mariah and marched grimly over, calling out:
“That’ll teach me ever to go near a fucking telephone. Can you believe this, that sonofabitching—”
Tension must have grown pretty dense in the vicinity of Mariah and me, because Riley stopped as if he’d walked into a glass wall.
“Uh huh,” he evaluated. “A family conference. I’ll just wait outside until the blood quits flowing.”
“Why don’t you hang around?” I offered. “You might learn something definitive about yourself.”
“Depends on the source,” he replied with
extreme wariness as he regarded me and then my daughter the paramour.
“He thinks we’re crazy to . . . be with each other,” Mariah minimally summed up my views for him.
“Never heard of try, try again, hmm?” Even though the words pittered out of him as syruplike as ever, Riley looked drastically serious. “Jick, it wasn’t anything intentional, last night. You know better than anybody that Mariah and I both came into this despite each other.”
“Then why in goddamn hell didn’t you keep it that way?” I erupted. The majority of parents my age were wildly worried about their married kids breaking up. Why was I the one to have to throw a fit that mine were getting back together? “You both were managing to get done what you wanted to, without having to tumble”—into bed, into the jungles between the legs, into an old fever newly risked—“all over each other just the way you originally did. I don’t understand why you’re willing to set each other up for grief again.”
“Last night didn’t remake the world,” Mariah protested in a perplexed tone, drawing a startled glance from Riley. “I don’t know that we’re—”
Riley held up both hands as if stopping a shove. “This must be the ultimate definition of the morning after,” he growled to Mariah. “We’ve got Cupid’s conscience right here on our case and the BB waiting his turn.”
“The BB,” Mariah echoed, her perplexity giving way to something a lot worse.