When she at last ran out of outfit to stash, Mariah gave a quick frown in the direction of the Montanian building and the prominently absent Riley Wright, then in the next second I and my unshaven condition were under her consideration again. Oh sure, you bet. Up to her eye leapt a camera.
“Mariah, don’t start,” I warned. “I am not in a photogenic mood.”
She dropped the camera to the level of her breastbone, holding it in both hands while she gazed at me as if she couldn’t understand what I could possibly be accusing her of. With a honey of a grin she asked, “Don’t you think you’re being unduly suspicious?” and right there under the sound of icious I heard the telltale click.
“Hey, damn it! I just told you—”
“Now, now,” she soothsoaped me. “Don’t you want the history of that beard recorded? If the world’s supply of film holds out, maybe I’ll eventually get a picture of you looking presentable.”
I kept a wary eye on her, but apparently she was through practicing camera aggravation on me for a while. Now impatience simply was making her goosier second by second. Her hair swung restlessly. Today’s earrings were green-and-pink half moons which I gradually figured out represented watermelon slices. “All we need is the scribbler,” her one-way conversation rattled on, “but you know him, you’d have to pay him to be late to get him to be on time.”
“The slanderous McCaskill clan,” in through the motorhome’s doorway arrived the voice, still as satisfied with itself as a purring cat. “Ever ready to take up the bagpipes against a poor innocent ex-husband.”
So here he was, Mister Words himself. I had not laid eyes on him in, what, the three years since he and Mariah split the blanket. But ducking into the Bago now the sonofabitch didn’t look one eyeblink older. Same slim tall build, an inch, maybe two, shorter than I am. But notably wide and square at his shoulders, as if he’d forgotten to take the hanger out of his shirt. Same electric hair, wild and curly in that color that wasn’t quite blond and wasn’t quite brown; more like applesauce, which I considered appropriate. Same foxtail mustache, of the identical color as his hair. A person’s first glimpse of this character, hair seemed to be the main agenda of his head, the face and anything behind it just along for the ride. But the guy was slyer than that, a whole hell of a lot. I have seen him talk to people, oh so casually asking them this or that, and before they knew it they’d been interviewed and were about to be served up with gravy on them in the next day’s newspaper.
He was studying me now. I stonily met his nearest eye, surprisingly akin to Mariah’s exact gray, and waited for something wisemouthed from him, but all he issued was, “Managed to find your way to civilization from Noon Creek, hmm?” which was only average for him. Even so, up in me came the instantaneous impulse to snap at him, let him know nothing was forgotten, not a thing mended between us. Instead, for Mariah’s sake I just uttered the one flat word of acknowledgment: “Riley.”
Meanwhile Mariah looked as if there was a dumpload she wanted to deliver onto him, but instead she expelled a careful breath and only asked: “Did the BB have any last words of wisdom for us?”
“You bet. I quote exactly: ‘Make our consumers sit up and take notice.’ ” Riley swung back to the doorway, stuck his head out and intoned to Missoula at general in a kind of robot voice: “CONSUMERS OF NEWSPAPERS. IT HAS COME TO THE ATTENTION OF OUR LEADER, THE INCREDIBLE BB, THAT YOUR POSTURE LEAVES SOMETHING TO BE DESIRED. SO SIT UP AND TAKE NOTICE.” He pulled back inside with us and said with a sense of accomplishment, “There, that ought to do it.”
Mariah regarded him as if she was half-terminally exasperated, half-helplessly ready to laugh. “Riley, one of these days he’s going to hear you mouth off like that.”
Riley widened his eyes under applesauce-colored eyebrows. “And demote me to a photographer maybe even? Shit oh dear!” Next thing, he was at the doorway again, sending the robot voice out again: “BB, I DIDN’T MEAN IT. MARIAH MONTANA MADE ME DO IT.”
“Demote?” Mariah pronounced in a tone full of barbwire. “Listen, mittenhead. You can barely handle the crayons you write with, let alone a camera.”
Uh huh. We hadn’t so much as turned a wheel yet and the road war was already being declared by both sides. The two of them faced each other across not much distance there in the middle of the motorhome, Mariah standing straight yet curved in that wonderful womanly way, Riley cocking a gaze down at her from that wilderness of hair. An outside soul couldn’t help but wonder how they could stand to work under the same roof, even though Mariah had explained to me that they didn’t really need to cross paths all that much at the newspaper, Riley’s column appearing as it did without photos except his own perpetual smartass one. So imagine the mutual nasty surprise when Mariah unbeknownst put in her suggestion to do a series of photographs around the state during its centennial celebration and Riley in equal ignorance put in his suggestion to write a series of stories about same, and their editor the BB—his actual name was Baxter Beebe—decreed that they were going to have to do their series together, make a mix. Likely that’s how gunpowder got discovered, too.
Which of them relented now I couldn’t really tell, but it was Riley who turned a little sideways from Mariah and delivered to me as if we were in the middle of a discussion of it:
“Still hanging onto the ranch, hmm, Jick?”
To think that he would even bring that subject up.
“How’s that going?” he pressed, blue eye fixed steadily on me.
Him and his two colors of eyes. I don’t know what that particular ocular condition is called, maybe Crayola in the genes, but on Riley the unmatched hues were damn disconcerting—his way of looking at you in two tones, flat gray from one side and bright blue the other. Rampant right up to his irises.
I returned his gaze squarely and gave the ranch answer I’d heard Marcella’s father Dode Withrow give whenever my own father asked him that question during the Depression, the selfsame answer that Montana ranchers and farmers must have given when times turned rocky for them in 1919 and the early twenties, and probably back before that in the crash of 1893. “Doing good, if you don’t count going broke.”
Brisk, or maybe the better spelling is brusque, Mariah passed between us toward the front of the motorhome, saying, “This isn’t getting anything done. Let’s head out.”
“Mariah, you keep forgetting,” Riley spouted in her wake. “Your license to boss me expired three years ago.” At some leisure he proceeded to give himself a tour of the layout of the motorhome. The gateleg table where he’d have to write on his computer or whatever it was in the case he was carrying. The bathroom with its chemical toilet and the shower just big enough for a person the height of us to duck into. The kitchenette area with its scads of built-in cupboards all around the little stove and sink and refrigerator and microwave. Riley of course recognized the derivation of that condensed kitchen and delivered me one of his sly damn grins. “Jick, I didn’t know you sheepherders have engines in your wagons these days.” No, there was just a hell of a lot he didn’t know. One silo after another could be filled with what this yoyo did not know, even though he did go through life as if it was all being explained through him.
“Tight goddamn outfit,” I heard Riley mutter as he finished nosing around. I flared, thinking he was referring to the Winnebago, which was as capacious as Marcella and I had been able to afford; but then I realized from the note of resignation in his voice that he meant the management of the Montanian, who utterly would not hear of four months of travel expenses for Mariah and Riley until she came up with the frugal notion of using my Bago.
Something other than the fact that the newspaper’s bean counters would sooner open their veins than their wallets seemed to be bugging Riley, though. He fixed a long look onto Mariah’s camera bag as if the fake white hide with brown spotted pattern was in fact the rump of an Appaloosa. He’d had that equine paint job done and given her that bag the first Christmas they were married. I wondered if during
the breakup of their marriage it ever occurred to Mariah to tell him he was the resident expert about a horse’s ass, all right. Now he prowled some more, nosing into one end of the motorhome and then the other, until finally he turned to Mariah and asked: “Well, where do we sort out?”
“Sort out what?”
“Our bodies, Little Virgin Annie,” Riley enunciated so elaborately you could all but hear his teeth click on that second word. “Where do we all sleep in this shoebox?”
Mariah sent him a satisfied glint that said she’d been waiting several thousand whetted moments for a chance like this. “I sleep here,” she indicated the couch along the wall opposite the dinette area. Then with a toss of her head she aimed his attention, and mine, to the bed at the very rear of the motorhome, scrunched in behind the toilet amid closets and overhanging storage compartments. “You two,” she gladly informed Riley, “sleep there.”
“Oh, come on!” Riley howled, honestly aggrieved. “This wasn’t in the deal, that I’d have to bed down with Life’s Revenge here!” indicating none other than me.
“It sure as hell wasn’t anywhere in my plans either,” I apprised him.
“Then one of you delicate types sleep on the pulldown instead,” said Mariah, which Riley and I both instinctively knew was a worse proposal yet. Guys our size, only a bare majority of the body would fit into the bunk that pulled down above the driver’s and passenger’s seats and the rest of our carcass would have to be folded up like an accordion some way.
“I wonder if it’s too late to volunteer for the South Dakota centennial,” Riley grumbled, but tossed a knapsack onto the rear bed as if deciding to stay for a while.
By default then, the wordbird and I unhappily resigned ourselves to being bedmates, and once Riley got his laptop computer and a fanny-pack tape recorder and a dictionary and a slew of other books and a bunch more kit and caboodle aboard, it finally looked like the historic expedition could strike off across Montana. Something was yet tickling at my mind, though. Here we were into the afternoon already and nobody had mentioned the matter of destination. Thus I felt compelled to.
“How far do we have to get to today, anyway?”
“Moiese,” Mariah proclaimed, as if it was Tierra del Fuego.
She and Riley kept going on about their business as if that wasn’t some kind of Missoula joke, so I had to figure it wasn’t. “Now wait a goddamn minute here, am I right that Moiese is just up the road a little ways?”
“About an hour, yeah,” Riley assessed, helping himself to a handful of the Fig Newtons he’d discovered in a cupboard. “Why?”
“Are you telling me I got up before daylight and drove my butt off for half a day in this rig just to chauffeur you two somegoddamnwhere you could get to and back in a couple of hours yourselves?”
It was Riley and Mariah’s turn to look at each other, accomplices unhappily harnessed together. Riley shrugged and chewed a cookie. “Having you along as chaperone is strictly Mariah’s idea,” he pointed out. “I wanted Marilyn Quayle to come, myself.”
“Shove it, Riley,” he was instructed by Mariah. To me, she stated: “Moiese is where we both think the series ought to start. Begin the world at the right end, as somebody always said to me when I was growing up.”
In the face of being quoted back to myself I surrendered quick and fished out the Bago’s ignition key. “Okay, okay, Moiese it is. But how come there?”
Riley’s turn to edify me. “Jick, companion of my dreams, we are going to see the ideal Montanans,” he announced as if he was selling stuff on TV. “The only ones who were ever able to make a decent living in this state, before the rest of us came along and spoiled it for them.”
Since I’d never been up into the Moiese country, I didn’t have a smidgen of an idea what he was yammering about.
“Meaning who?”
Riley, damn him, gave me another sly grin.
“The buffalo.”
• • •
Tracking buffalo from a motorhome the size of a small boxcar was an occupation I had never done, and so when we rumbled across the cattleguard—buffaloguard, I guess it’d be in this case—into the National Bison Range at Moiese, I didn’t know how things were going to go. Especially when the Range turned out to be what the word said, a big nice stretch of rolling rangeland that included Red Sleep Mountain sitting fat and slope-shouldered across the southern end of the Flathead Valley, enough country for livestock of any kind to thoroughly hide away in. The best I could imagine was that we’d need to creep the Winnebago along the gravel road until maybe eventually some dark dots might appear, far off across the prairie. About as thrilling as searching for flyspecks, probably.
For once, I was short of imagination. Just a couple of hundred yards beyond the Park Service visitor center, all of a sudden here were a dozen or so buffalo lolling around like barnyard cows.
“How’s this for service?” I couldn’t resist asking Mariah and Riley as I braked the Bago to a stop within fly-casting distance of the buffalo bunch. But he already was intent on them, leaning over my shoulder with notebook and pen ready for business, and she long since had rolled down her window and connected her camera to her eye.
Their goatees down in the grass, the miniature herd methodically whisked at flies with their short tasseled tails. Huge-headed. Dainty-legged. Dark as char. I knew buffalo only from the stories which the oldest of Two Medicine oldtimers, Toussaint Rennie, held me hypnotized with when I was a boy, and so it was news to me that a buffalo up close appears to be two animals pieced together: the front half of a shaggy ox and the rear of a donkey. There is even what seems like a seam where the hairy front part meets the hairless rear half. But although they are a cockeyed-looking creature—an absentminded family where everybody had put on heavy sweaters but forgot any pants, is the first impression a bunch like this gives—buffalo plainly know what they’re on the planet for. Graze. Eat grass and turn it into the bulk of themselves. Protein machines.
These munched and munched while we gawked. Digestion of both sorts until suddenly an old bull with a head big as a mossy boulder began butting a younger male out of his way, snorting ominously to tell the rest of creation he was on the prod, and of course at that exact same moment came the sound of the passenger-side door as Mariah went out it.
“Hey, don’t get—” I started to yelp and simultaneously bail out of my side of the Bago to head her off, but was halted by the grip of Riley’s paw on my upper arm.
“Far be it from me to poke my nose into McCaskill family affairs”—oh, sure—“but she generally knows what she’s doing when she has a camera in her hand, Jick.”
True, Mariah so far had only slipped her way in front of the Bago to where she could sneak shots at the bulls doing their rough stuff. But I was staying leery about how she was going to behave with that camera. Long lens or not, she had a history of getting right on top of whatever she was shooting. Years ago at a Gros Ventre rodeo, Marcella and I heard the announcer yap out, “FOLKS, HERE’S SOMETHING A LITTLE BIT DIFFERENT! MARIAH MCCASKILL WILL NOW . . .” and we looked up to see this daughter of ours hanging sideways off a running horse, snapping the view a bulldogger would have as he leaned off to jump onto the steer. We counted ourselves lucky that at least she didn’t jump.
These buffalo now were not anything to fiddle around with. Compact though they were, some of them weighed as much as a horse, a big horse; couple all that muscle and sinew to those wicked quarter-moon horns and you have a creature that can hook and rip open a person. The reputation of buffalo is that even a grizzly bear will back off from them, and for once I vote with the bear. My buffalo unease was not helped any by their snorelike grunts, umhh . . . umhh, which somehow kind of hummed on in the air after you heard them. I noticed even Riley keeping half an eye on Mariah despite his unsought advice that there wasn’t anything in her picture-taking behavior to sweat about.
She did nothing too suicidal, though, in firing off her click as a pony-sized calf suckled on its mam
a or the proddy old bull laid down and vigorously rolled, kicking all four legs in the air as he took his dust bath. Up until the point where she climbed onto the top of the Winnebago to see how the buffalo scene registered from up there.
My heart did some flutters as Riley and I listened to her prowling around on that slick metal roof. I mean, oughtn’t there be some kind of hazard rule that a photographer never do anything a four-year-old kid would have the sense not to?
My flutters turned into genuine internal gyrations as the old bull shook off the last smatters of his dust refreshment, stood for a minute with his half-acre head down as if pondering deeply, then began plodding directly toward the motorhome.
“It must take nerves of utter steel,” Riley observed to me.
“What, to be a photographer?”
“No, to be Mariah’s father.”
Riley’s mouthery wasn’t my overriding concern by now, though. The buffalo bull continued toward us in a belligerently businesslike way, horned head growing huger with every undeviating step.
“Hey, up there,” I leaned out the Bago window and called nervously to Mariah on the roof. “How about coming down in? This old boy looks kind of ornery.”
Answer from on high consisted of a sudden series of whingwhingwhings, like a little machine going. It took me a bit—about four more paces by the inexorable buffalo—to figure out the blurty whing sounds, which kept on and on, as being the noise of a motorized camera Mariah resorted to when she wanted to fire the shutter fast enough to capture every motion. As now. “You’ve got to be kidding,” her voice eventually came down but of course none of the rest of her. “When am I ever going to get closer buffalo shots than this?”