Yet the one blessed time we did stop so Mariah could fire off camera shots at a beaverslide stacker ramping up into the Big Hole’s blue loft of sky, Riley chewed the inside of his mouth dubiously and asked her if she was sure she wasn’t just jukeboxing some scenery. “Doesn’t work,” he dispatched her beaverslide idea. By the same token, when we hit the small town of Wisdom, far famous in the old horseworking days for the army of teamsters who jungled up in the creek willows there while waiting for the haying season to start, and Riley proposed doing a Wisdom piece of some kind, Mariah suggested he check the little filing cabinet he had up there instead of a brain and count how many wistful little town off the beaten path that, lo, I will now discover for you versions he’d churned out in that column of his. “Doesn’t work,” she nullified Wisdom for him.
So that was that for the Big Hole, too. Zero again on the Mariah-Riley centennial scoreboard.
• • •
Ditto for the Beaverhead Valley after that, nice substantial-looking westerny country that anybody with an eye in his or her head ought to have been able to be semi-poetic about.
• • •
Ditto after the Beaverhead for the beautiful Madison River, a murmuring riffle in its every droplet, classic water that was all but singing trout trout trout.
• • •
Ditto in fact for day after day of traipsing around southwestern Montana so that he or she but more usually both could peer out of the Winnebago, stew about whether the scene was the one that really truly ultimately ought to be centennialized, and decide, “Doesn’t work.” Doesn’t work? Holy J. Christ, I kept thinking to myself, don’t you pretty soon get to the point in any pursuit where you have to make it work? At this rate it was going to take them the next hundred years to get anything told about Montana’s first hundred. Their weekly deadline was marching right at them and increasingly Riley was on the phone to the BB, assuring him that worldbeating words and pictures were just about on their way into the Montanian, you bet. Why, I more and more wondered, did Mariah want to put herself through this? Riley in and of himself was rough enough on the nerves. Add on the strain of both him and her breaking their fannies trying to find ultraperfect topics for the series, and this daughter of mine had let herself in for a whole hell of a lot.
It showed. We were down near Yellowstone Park at Quake Lake, where the earthquake in 1959 sloughed a mountainside down onto a campground of peaceful sleepers, when Riley prowled off by himself into the middle of a rockslide slope. I’d just caught up with Mariah after remembering to go back and lock up the rig as we all had to make a habit of because of her camera gear, and happened to comment that if Riley didn’t muster what little sense he had and watch his footing up there, we’d be shipping him home to his momma in a matchbox. That was all it took for her to answer with considerable snap:
“Dad, I know your opinion of Riley by heart.”
She hardly ever slipped and called me Dad. Mariah arrived home at Christmas from her first quarter away at college calling her mother and me by our given names. Maybe because she’d been somewhat similarly rejigged herself, back east in Illinois, where the nickname “Mariah Montana” was fastened onto her by her college classmates for her habit of always wearing blue jeans and a Blackfeet beaded belt and I suppose generally looking like what people back there figured a daughter of Montana must look like. Or maybe being on a first-name basis with her own parents had simply been Mariah’s way of saying, I’m as grown as you are now. Even as a little girl she had seemed like a disguised adult, in possession of a disconcerting number of the facts of life. Our other daughter, Lexa, was a real ranch kid, always out with me among the sheep, forever atop a horse, so much like Marcella and I had been in our own growing up that it was as if we’d ordered Lexa from the catalogue. Mariah, though, ever seemed to be the only author of herself. Almost before we could catch our breath about having this self-guided child, she discovered the camera and was out in the arena dirt locally at Gros Ventre or down at Choteau or Augusta as a rodeo photographer, wearing hightop black basketball shoes for quick footing to dodge broncs. Tall colt of a girl she was by then, in one glance Mariah there in the arena would seem to be all legs. Then in some gesture of aiming the camera, she would seem entirely arms. Then she would turn toward you and the fine high breasts of the woman-to-be predominated. Next it would be her face, the narrow length of it as if even her smile had to be naturally lanky. And always, always, her mane of McCaskill red hair, flowing like the flag of our tribe. Even then guys were of course eyeing her madly, and by the time she was home from college for summers on the bucking circuit, the rodeo romeos nearly stared the ring finger off her left hand trying to see if she was carrying any gold. But a wedding band was not the circle that interested Mariah. Throughout high school and those college years of hers at the Illinois Institute of the Arts, a place her mother and I had never even heard of before she chose it for its photography courses, and on into her first job of taking pictures for the Gros Ventre Weekly Gleaner, only the camera lens cupped life for Mariah.
Until Riley.
That marriage and its breakup should have been sufficient cure of Riley for her, it seemed to me. Yet here she was, putting up with him for the sake of doing this centennial series. Here he was, as Riley as ever, like whatever king it was who never forgot anything but never learned anything either. And here I was, half the time aggravated by the two of them for letting themselves wallow around the countryside together this way and the other half provoked at myself for being ninny enough to be doing it along with them.
• • •
All in all, I was just this side of really peeved when we pulled into Virginia City, which Mariah and Riley had taken turns giving a tense pep talk about on our way up from Quake Lake, each needlessly reminding the other that this was it, this was the place, they had to do some fashion of story here or perish trying.
Not a town to improve my mood much, either, old Virginiapolis. Sloping down a brown gulch, one deliberately museumy street—sort of an outdoor western dollhouse, it struck me as—crammed with tourists like sheep in a shearing pen. But I determinedly kept my mouth shut, even about having to navigate the Bago in that millrace of people and rigs for half an hour before a parking spot emptied, and we set off on foot for whatever it was that these two figured they were going to immortalize here.
All the rest of the day, another scorching one, we touristed around like everybody else, in and out of shacky old buildings from the 1860s when Virginia City was both a feverish goldstrike town and the capital of brand-new Montana Territory and up onto Boot Hill where vigilantes did their uplifting ropework on a crooked sheriff’s gang, and I myself utterly could not see the attraction of any of it. More than that, something about our tromping through town like a Cub Scout troop fresh off a yellow bus wore on my nerves more and more. Riley, you might know, seemed to be writing an encyclopedia about Virginia City in his notebook. And Mariah was in her surveying mood; today she was even lugging around a tripod, which made her look like a one-person surveyor crew, constantly setting up to sweep her camera with the long lens along the streetful of sightseers below us from where we stood hip-deep in sagebrush on Boot Hill, or aiming out across the dry hogback ridges all around. This was tumbled country. Maybe it took convulsed earth of this kind to produce gold, as had been the case in the Alder Gulch treasure rush here. Now that I think it over, I suppose some of what was grating on me is what a wreck the land is after mining. Miners never put the earth back. At the outskirts of Virginia City are miles of dishwater-colored gravel heaps, leavings of hydraulic and dredge mining like monstrous mole burrows. Or scratchings in the world’s biggest cat box, whichever way you want to put it. If Mariah’s camera or Riley’s pen could testify to that ruination, well, okay, I had to figure that the day of lockstep sightseeing was maybe worth it. Maybe.
So I was somewhat mollified, the word might be, as the three of us at last retreated into a bar called The Goldpanner for a drink before supper, R
iley rashly offering to buy.
Inside was not quite the oasis I expected, though. As we groped toward a table, our eyes still full of the long summer sunlight, Riley cracked in a falsetto tone, “Basic black, very becoming.” Indeed the bar’s interior was about as dark as a moviehouse, with flickery little bulbs in phony gas lamps on the walls, but a person probably couldn’t do any better in a tourist town.
Out of the gloom emerged a strapping young bartender wearing a pasted-on handlebar mustache and a full-front white apron the way they used to.
“Gentlemen and lady,” he orated to us. “How may I alter your consciousness?”
It took me aback, until I remembered where we were. The Virginia City Players do summer theater here, and this fellow must be either an actor or desperately wanting to be. He was going to need a more receptive audience than Mariah, who took no notice of either his spiel or his get-up while specifying a Lord ditch for herself. I told the young Hamlet, “You can bring me a scotch ditch, please.” It occurred to me that I still had to get through supper with Riley, so I added: “Go light on the irrigating water, would you.” Then I remembered he was buying and tacked on, “Make the scotch Johnny Red, how about.”
Riley was regarding the pasted-together bartender as if he constituted the world’s greatest entertainment. All the knothead said, though, in a movie cowboy voice, was, “Pilgrim, I’m gonna cut the dust of the day with a G-ball.”
When the drinks came and Mariah and I began paying our respects to Lord Calvert and Johnnie Walker—respect was right; Holy Jesus, in this joint the tab for drinks was $2.50 apiece; I could remember when it only took 25¢ to look into a glass—I glanced across and wondered disgustedly how we had ever, even temporarily, let into the family a guy who would sabotage his whiskey with ginger ale. But I suppose it couldn’t really be said Riley was a G-ball drinker then. It was hard to know just what to call him. The very first night of this excursion of ours, in St. Ignatius after the buffalo range, he had studied the bottles behind the bar for about an eon and eventually asked the bartender there what he sold the most seldom of. “Water,” the St. Ignatian cracked, but then pondered the inventory of bottles himself a while and nominated “Sloe gin, I guess it’d have to be.” Whereupon Riley ordered one. Our night in Dillon, he’d taken another long gawk behind the bar and ordered an apricot brandy. In Monida, it’d been a Harvey Wallbanger. In Ennis, a benedictine. Evidently he was even going to drink goofy this whole damn trip.
But Riley’s style of imbibing, or lack of one, was not what surprised me worst here. No, what got me was that I noticed he was holding his notebook up right in front of his eyes, trying to catch any glimmer of light from the sickly wall lamps, while he thumbed through page by page, shaking his head as he did and at last asking Mariah hopefully, “Got anything that works?”
She shook her head too, halfmoon earrings in and out of the red cloud of her hair as she did. “Still zippo.”
This was just about it for me. An entire damn day of touristing this old rip-and-run gold town and not a particle of picture or print to show for it? After having chased all over this end of Montana? Little kids could produce more with fingerpaint than these two were.
I opened my mouth to deliver the message that the Bago and I had had enough of this centennial futility and in the morning would head ourselves home toward the Two Medicine country and sanity, thank you very goddamn much just the same, when instead an electronic chicklike peep peep peep issued from Riley’s wrist.
“Shit oh dear,” he uttered and shut off his wristwatch alarm. “I’ve got to call the BB about the teaser ad. He’s going to be pissed when I tell him it’ll just have to say ‘Virginia City!’ and then as vague as possible.” As he groped off in search of a phone, Mariah too looked more than a little apprehensive.
Civilly as I could, I asked her: “Have you ever given any thought to some other line of work?”
“I know, the way Riley and I have been going about this must seem kind of strange to you.” Kind of? “But,” she hurried on, “we both just want this centennial series to be really good. Something different from the usual stuff we each end up doing. It’s, well, it’s taking a little time for the two of us to hit our stride, is all.”
Despite her words her expression stayed worried. Tonight this was not at all the bossypants daughter who’d gotten me into this dud of a trip. This was a woman with something grinding on her.
“Maybe it’s Riley,” I diagnosed.
That got a rise out of her I hadn’t expected. “Maybe what’s Riley?” she demanded as if I’d accused her of orphanage arson.
“Well, Christ all get out, isn’t it obvious? Riley goes through life like he’s got a wild hair. Don’t you figure that’s going to affect how you’re able to work, being around a walking aggravation like him?” What did it take to spell it out to Mariah? Riley flubbed the dub in that marriage to her, he turned down my ranch and as much as told me straight to my face that I was a dodo to try to keep the place going, not exactly the most relaxing soul to have around, now was he?
Speak of the devil. Riley returned out of the gloaming, appearing somewhat the worse for wear after the phone call.
“So how ticked off is he?” Mariah asked tautly as he plunked himself down.
“Considerably. This is about the time of day anyway he wakes up enough to get mean. The bewitching BB and his wee bitching hour. But he was shittier than average, I’d say.” Riley fingered his mustache as if making sure it had survived the withering phone experience. “What he suggested was that instead of the teaser ad, he just leave a blank space in the paper all the time with a standing headline over it: WATCH THIS SPACE—MARIAH AND RILEY WILL EVENTUALLY THINK OF SOMETHING.”
That plunged them both into a deep brood.
Oh, sure, Riley surfaced long enough to say as though it were a thought that was bothering him: “You know, every now and again that tightass SOB can be surprisingly subtul.” But otherwise, these were two people as silent as salt.
The stumped look on the pair of them indicated they didn’t need to hear trouble from me at that very moment. Besides, the Johnny Red was the pleasantest thing that had happened all day and it was soothing me sufficiently to begin what I thought amounted to a pretty slick observation. “I don’t know all that much about newspapering, but—”
“—that’s not going to keep you off the topic anyway, hmm?” Riley unnecessarily concluded for me. “What’s up, Jick? You’ve had something caught crosswise in you all day here.”
“Yeah, well, I’m just kind of concerned that you two didn’t get anything today,” I nicely didn’t include again, yet, or one more goddamn time, “for your series.”
By now Mariah seemed almost terminally lost in herself, tracing her camera trigger finger up and down the cold sweating glass in front of her. I could tell that she was seeing the day again shutter click by shutter click, sorting over and over for the fretful missing picture of the essence of Virginia City. For his part, Riley swirled his G-ball and took a major gulp as if it was soda pop, which it of course virtually was. Then he grinned at me in that foxy way, but he seemed interested, too. “And?”
“And so I just wondered if you’d maybe thought about some kind of story about the mining here. How it tore up the land like absolute hell and all.”
Riley nodded acknowledgment, but said: “Mining has got to be Butte, Jick, when we get there in a couple of days. What the gold miners did here isn’t a shovelful compared to Butte.”
At least agreement could be reached about another round of drinks, and after those were deposited by the handlebar bartender I tackled Riley again. “Just tell me this then. What kind of stuff is it you’re looking for to write about, exactly?”
In what seemed to be all seriousness, he replied:
“Life inside the turtle.”
“Riley,” I said, “how do you say that in American?”
“It takes a joke to explain it, Jick. So here you go, you lucky man.” Riley was reli
shing this so much it all but puddled on the floor. “The world’s greatest expert on the solar system was giving a talk, see. He tells his audience about the planets being in orbit around the sun, how the force of gravity works, and all of that. So then afterwards a little old lady comes up”—Riley caught a feminist glint from Mariah—“uhmm, a big young lady comes up to him and says, ‘Professor, that was real interesting, but you’re dead wrong. Your theory of gravity just doesn’t make a lick of sense. The earth isn’t a ball hanging out in thin air at all. What it is is a great big turtle and all of us live on top of its back, don’t you see?’
“The scientist figures he’s got her, right there. He says, ‘Oh, really, madam? Then what holds the turtle up?’
“She tells him, ‘It’s standing on the back of a bigger turtle, what did you think?’
“He says, ‘Very well, madam.’ Now he knows he’s got her nailed. He kind of rocks back on his heels and asks her: ‘Then what can that second turtle possibly be standing on?’
“She gives him a look that tells him how pitiful he is. ‘Another even bigger turtle, of course.’