“Just unlucky, I guess.”
A barmaid considerably beyond the bloom of youth came over as soon as we’d established ourselves at a table. “Hi, kids. What’s it gonna be?”
I observed to her, “Quite the scheme of decoration.”
“Isn’t it, though,” she said with a sigh. “They absolutely ruined this place when they went and redid it. They ought to be taken out and shot.”
“What was it like before?”
“It looked like a whorehouse. The walls were red, all the chairs and booths were red velvet—we even had red lampshades. It was real pretty.”
When we managed to get down to the business of drinks, Mariah of course had her usual Lord C and I my Johnny, and Leona’s version had turned out to be forthright Jack Daniels and water. As the three of us entered the company of those gentlemen, though, Riley was brought a white production in a clear glass goblet.
“What in the name of hell are you drinking now?” I had to ask. “Rattlesnake milk?”
“Naw, it’s a White Moccasin. Want a sip?”
“I’d rather parch,” I let him know.
“Honestly, Jick, he was raised better than that,” Leona frowned in reproof at her son’s frippy concoction.
The barmaid saw it was six o’clock and turned the television set behind the bar on. If it proved to be T. V. Purvis I damn well was going to ask her to click it right back off, but the commercials eventually gave way instead to sportscasters, who seem to come in triplets.
“Well, well,” Mariah contributed after craning around to check the screen scene as the players came on, “a bunch of high-paid hot dogs showing us their buns. My God, are they still playing that stuff?”
“You bet,” I said. “The World Series, petunia.”
“Or at least the California one,” Leona said with a least little smile as the Oakland and San Francisco lineups electronically materialized on the screen.
“It comes to the same, I’m sure, Mother,” maintained Riley, who I knew didn’t give a hoot about sports except for cantering across the countryside.
“What beats me about having three guys on there to tell us what we’re looking at, though,” I started in, “is—”
“THERE’S AN EARTH—” one of the sportscasters declaimed and the television picture went blooey.
You didn’t have to be a seismic scientist to fill in the rest of the word. For the next hours, when the TV people found a way to get back on the air, the four of us sat fascinated watching what the earthquake had done to the San Francisco Bay area. The collapse of that freeway, motorists crushed under slabs the size of aircraft carriers; the broken Bay Bridge; fallen buildings in Santa Cruz; all of San Francisco spookily lightless in the night except for the one neighborhood where apartment houses were burning; my God, I felt as sorry for people in that quake zone as if they had been bombed. And along with it, the overwhelming thought of how much worse it could have been. Candlestick Park with the World Series crowd of sixty thousand in it had not crumbled.
“Holy shit, think of it!” Riley said in genuine awe as a blimp camera panned down on Candlestick. “Fifteen hundred sportswriters at that ballgame and every one of them trying to transmit the same lead: On this beautiful afternoon beside San Francisco Bay, God chose to shake the ’Stick.”
“Helicopters,” Mariah uttered wistfully, like a kid pointing out toys in a catalogue, as pictures of the gap in the Bay Bridge taken from midair came onto the screen. Both she and Riley erupted every time the coverage cut away from on the scene. “You fucking talking heads!” Riley roared at the set when a guy at a network desk somewhere began speaking with the Governor of California who had been caught on a sojourn in Germany. “Piggyback on what KGO is showing! You bunch of dumbfucks, let the local guys do the story in the streets!”
Eventually earthquake experts began coming on and saying this wasn’t the Big One but it was a Pretty Big One. By then Leona and I had looked at each other a number of times with new understanding. A new feel for the distance between us and this avid pair glued to the coverage, maybe say. Neither she nor I would have willingly lived where such quakes kept happening if you deeded the whole of California to us. But if Riley and Mariah could have hopped on a plane and joined the newsgatherers right in the middle of all that earthquake mess, they instantly would have.
• • •
Billings begins a long way out from itself. Scatterings of housing developments and roadside businesses and billboards full of promises of more enterprises to come began showing up miles ahead of the actual city. The Bago and we four were rolling in on the freeway that runs shoulder to shoulder with the Yellowstone River, then the Yellowstone shied out of the picture and snazzy profiles of hotels and banks against the rimrocks became the feature.
“The Denver of the north,” Riley crooned in an oily voice as downtown Billings came up on us. “The Calgary of the south.” He waited until we were wheeling past a petroleum refinery that was obviously functioning much below capacity. “The Butte of tomorrow?”
“Mmm, though, look what the light is doing,” Mariah put in. There in the late afternoon sunlight, the cliffs rimming the city were changing from baked tan to a honeyed color. Then and there I formed the opinion that held for the rest of our time in Billings, that if you had to have a city this was an interesting enough place to put it.
• • •
“No, honest to Pete, it’s the truth, Jick, if I can call you that. Just about the highest place you can drive in Delaware is the overpass on Route 202 where it goes into Pennsylvania.”
“Aw, come on, Carl. How do you keep your heads above water back there?”
We’d been in the Energy City RV Park most of a week while Mariah and Riley were out toiling away at the implications of Billings—not to any avail that I could see yet—and Leona and I were getting to know the couple in the Bago next door. Retirees from Wilmington, Carl and Harriet DeVere were out here tasting mountain country, and inasmuch as they were going to drive the alpine Cooke City highway into Yellowstone Park this afternoon, by nightfall they might have their fill of mountains, all right.
The DeVeres now said they hated to break up our coffeeklatch but they had to go food shopping, did we want to come along? It was a handy chance to do so because they towed behind their rig a Honda Civic—Winnebago Shopping Cart, a carved wooden sign on it said—and Leona volunteered while I said I had something else I’d better get at.
The shopping expedition hadn’t much sooner gone out, though, than Riley came in. He plopped the Sunday editions of the Montanian and the Billings Gazette on the dinette table. “Holding down the Bago all by your lonesome?”
“Yeah. Nothing injurious seems to happen to it when I’m here by myself.”
He gave me a two-toned look but let that pass. Before he could start pawing through the Sunday papers, I asked: “Where’s Mariah?”
“Shooting my mother,” he reported absently. “The DeVeres, too. They are kind of cute, the three of them peeling off out of here aboard their Japanese skateboard.” He noticed my own endeavor. “What’ve you got there, your prayer book?”
“Aw, an old paperback I bought in Wolf Point. Figured I better get going on that centennial speech or—what the hell you looking at me like that for?”
“You do it deliberately, don’t you.”
“Do what?”
“Oh, come on!” He aimed a finger at the title of the book I was holding. The Collected Eloquence of Winston Churchill. Riley actually looked a little wild-eyed, in both separate-hued eyes. “Winnie, in the Bago? If that isn’t a weird sense of—”
“Riley, a walking word game like you doesn’t have any right to—”
The side door popped open, and the camera bag and then Mariah alit inside with us. She stood there a moment, straight as a willow, and studied Riley and me. “Sipping herbal tea and discussing Zen, guys?”
“Just practicing for the union of our families again,” I let her have.
“Actually,
our agenda at the moment is to just read the Sunday papers,” Mariah addressed back to me. “Do you suppose that can be accomplished without hand-to-hand combat?”
Riley still looked snorty and I maybe was a little that way myself, but we clammed up. They put their noses into their literature and I into mine.
Never in the field of human conflict was so much—Churchill was hard to keep concentration on, though. I was bothered, not to say baffled. My eyes kept drifting first to Mariah, then to Riley, each of them busily mauling through a newspaper. Was that love? If so, how had it come out of the ash and salt of their first try together? Was I ever going to savvy what, when, how, why? Some great record so far, mine. Plainly I had underestimated Riley. I had misestimated Leona and what I figured would be her natural reaction against our offspring falling for each other again. And after my thirty-five years as her father, Mariah still went up, down, and sideways in my estimation practically all day long. Maybe reading other people’s heads was not my strong suit.
I shut Churchill. Newsprint was more my speed at the moment, too. All that was left of the Sunday Gazette from the rummaging those two were doing of it was the section with astrology, crossword, and wedding couples. A little leery of learning what I might be on the cusp of, and not much one for killing time crosswording either, I examined the fresh faces of the couples, each wearing the smile of a lifetime. Kimberlee This and Chad That said their vows to each other at the . . . There were seven or eight such enraptured pairs pictured and I read the particulars on each, trying to divine any logic in Mariah and Riley repeating this process of matrimony. Pretty hard to make parse: Mariah McCaskill and Riley Wright have announced their betrothal, again. Parents of the couple are Mrs. Leona Wright of the Shields River country and, against his will, Mr. Jick McCaskill of the Two Medicine country. The bride-to-be graduated from Gros Ventre High School and Illinois Institute of the Arts, and is a photographer who does not have a lick of sense beyond her camera. The incipient groom graduated from Clyde Park High School and the University of Montana and has been a Missoula inmate ever since. Ms. McCaskill will retain her maiden name, just as she did the first time they attempted the wedded state and royally screwed it up. Upon saying their vows one more time, the rewedded couple will go to California to have permanent lunch with the future. No, try as I might, I couldn’t credit these two with as much perspicacity as the eighteen- and twenty-year-olds radiating out of the wedding pictures.
“Funny place they pick to do it, though,” I thought out loud.
“Who do what?” Mariah asked from where she was competitively sizing up a Gazette color photo of a Crow Indian fancy-dancer.
“Newlyweds.”
Both she and Riley shot quick hard looks at me.
“Where they get married, I mean,” I hastened to explain. “Not much church to it any more, I guess, huh?”
Now they glanced at each other. On their established principle that each of them was the wartime ambassador to his or her respective parent, it was Mariah who inquired of me in a combat tone:
“Is this leading up to another sermon against our getting married again? Because if it is . . .”
“It is not,” I answered chillily. “I am only making the observation that it’s kind of interesting that of this week’s wedding crop here in the paper, three of the couples got hitched in one church or another, but there’s four other pair who went and did it at—”
• • •
The Holiday Inn was quite the extravaganza, whether or not you were about to get your nuptial knot tied there.
Walk in as the four of us were doing and the lobby vastly soared all around you; in fact, that cubic center of the enterprise at first encounter seemed to be universally lobby, a hollow square the entire six stories to the roof and equally out to the perimeters of the half-acre carpeted-and-plantered space. You had to wonder whether the architect remembered to put on motel rooms, until you discerned that the half dozen beige facings that ran all the way around this atrium at equal heights apart like the ribcage of the building were actually balconies, with room doors off them. The place had a lot of other ruffles, too. Up one side of the whole deal shot a glassed-in elevator shaft outlined with sparkly dressingroom-like lights the full altitude to the ceiling. There, natural light descended through a skylight, I suppose for the sake of the trees—some of them fairly lofty—in eight-sided containers, beige, plunked near the middle of the atrium. At the far end of the expanse was a waterfall, no less.
I fingered my bowtie. A tuxedo was a new sensation for me. Beside me as we trailed the Mariah-Riley vanguard into the assemblage, Leona behaved like she went to weddings in the atrium of the Holiday Inn every day of her life.
True, she had been a little surprised to come into the Bago with the groceries and be informed by Riley we were going to a matrimonial function. “But I thought you two were waiting for the privacy of California. I don’t have a thing to wear and—”
“Mother, it’s not Mariah and me, it’s”—he consulted his note-book—“Darcy and Jason.”
Which didn’t help Leona get her bearings any. “Do we know them?”
“That never matters with these two,” I edified her about journalism.
Riley now did bring us to a halt at the edge of where the guest chairs and the altar and the food tables and all the rest were set up for the wedding and the reception after, the first sign of restraint he’d shown in any of this. That Leona and I were here at all was due to his cockeyed inspiration that this could serve as a kind of substitute function—a surrogate wedding, to quote him exactly—for our not being on hand whenever he and Mariah did their deed in California. Next he must have used a chisel instead of a pen to get the rental of formalwear for Leona and me as well as for him and Mariah onto the expense account. I do have to say, on Riley the money looked well spent. Those wide level shoulders of his filling out the fit of the tuxedo like a ship under full sail, his mustache and curly spill of hair a handsome topping to the regalia below, the guy looked slick as an ambassador. Hard to believe this was the identical yayhoo who once cracked to me, back in that living-together period of theirs before he and Mariah got married the first time, “Jick, in the immortal words of Robert Louis Stevenson, marriage is a sort of friendship recognized by the police.”
“Okay, crew, people are going to be gathering for a while yet,” he was briefing Leona and me currently, “and I’ve got to go locate the bride and groom, see what their last words are.” Meanwhile Mariah was chewing the inside of her mouth as she gauged the airy acreages of the atrium, so it was plain that finding a photo was going to occupy her for some time to come. That left two of us at loose ends, and when I questioned Riley about what role Leona and I were supposed to perform here where we were perfect strangers to everybody, his set of directions was, “Mingle.”
As the Montanianeers invaded the wedding party, Riley off to corner the wedding couple and Mariah just off, I admitted to Leona: “I don’t really feel like wading right in. I’ll just hang on here and watch things for a while. You go ahead and circulate, why don’t you.” With a quick understanding smile she said yes, she’d wander and see who was who, until it came time for the ceremony.
Is it just me, or does such an occasion inevitably prompt a lot to think about? Oh, sure, Mariah and Riley’s forthcoming repeat performance—what do you suppose the California custom is, holding the wedding in a swimming pool?—was prominent in those thoughts, but so was the wife I wished was beside me. I hadn’t missed Marcella so much in weeks and weeks. Anybody’s start of married life I suppose can’t help but remind you of your own. Up toward the altar, where there was an archway of flowers, I could see Riley was now interrogating today’s nuptial couple. The bride Darcy was a looker, a dark-haired young woman with an outdoor tan that set off priceless teeth and quick eyes. The groom Jason, there was hope for; he was at that boy-man age that teeters on the Adam’s apple and perhaps before he quite knew it he’d be a full-throated husband and father. Even though
the two of them had agreed happily when Riley phoned about him and Mariah doing a piece on their great day, I hoped they had some inkling of what they were in for when put in print. But probably not even Riley Wright could dent them today.
“Sir?” I heard and realized it referred to me. What this was, a waitress had come by to prime me with a cup of punch or a glass of champagne, and of course punch wasn’t even in the running. I sipped at the bubble stuff and as a I did, the tail of my eye caught a motion down behind where my elbow had been.
Taking a peek over my shoulder, I discovered a bronze statue about a foot and a half high levitating past. Then another appeared and vanished, and by the time I’d blinked at that, a third one silently circled in.
I backed off to where I could view the entire revolving trio. Huh. Elvis Presley, all three of him. Coming and going as a slowly spinning turntable revolved the triplet statuary. Huh again: in each stage Elvis was in full pelvic deployment, but otherwise these were three distinct ages of him, at the guitar-whanging start of his career, then in summit, and lastly in pudgy decline. Hound dog, top dog, and pound dog, I guess could be said.
The Elvi in orbit behind me, I was just getting my attention back onto the wedding crowd when Leona detoured out of it toward me.
“See what you think of this,” she instructed and handed me a dainty cracker loaded with a tapioca-looking substance.
I tried it. “Not bad,” I assessed, “particularly with a chaser of champagne.”
“Montahnskaya eekrah!” Leona reported in jubilation. “Montana caviar!”
“Yeah? Where’s it come from, up on the High Line by Kremlin?” I asked, which I thought was pretty good.
But Leona only shook her head seriously and informed me, “Over by Glendive. It’s sturgeon eggs, out of the Yellowstone River.” Having imparted that, she swept back to the crowd to delve further into wedding matters.