by James Grady
When she returned, the same delegate was talking about how his grandfather had taken the train to Yellowstone and toured the park in a buckboard and how, with these socialist ideas of a clean and healthful environment, everybody would be suing the state.
She handed the newspaper to the Poplar delegate and he scowled at her. “Oh for God’s sake, girl. This is yesterday’s.”
Elizabeth’s eyes teared.
“Forget it,” he said.
Peg stood up. “Delegate Burns, is it in the public trust for the company not to pay taxes?”
“That is public trust,” Burns said. “And my grandfather, when he came to homestead—”
A Billings delegate interrupted him: “I’m a simple man, but I know this. We’ve got the Beartooth Mountains over there, highest in Montana, and I’ve been in them many times. We’ve got five mining companies that want to take those mountains, rip them wide open, and dig a pit five miles long and three miles wide. And once they’ve dug that pit and taken the soil out of there and polluted the river down below it, it’s not going to be there anymore. And we won’t be able to put it back.”
The amendment failed, 58 to 36.
The graduate student in a lime-green miniskirt shot up, her eyes blazing. “Mr. Chairman, I’d like to introduce a new amendment, guaranteeing Montanans’ right to a high-quality environment which is clean, healthful, and pleasant, for the protection and enjoyment of its people and the protection of its natural beauty and natural resources, including wildlife and vegetation.”
The Anaconda delegate shook his head. “Those words—healthful, high-quality, pleasant, and reasonable—are too metaphysical.”
“I’d like to point out that in the Bill of Rights, we have metaphysical terms such as liberty, freedom, and inalienable rights.” Her voice was as direct as a bullet. “But we have no trouble determining what they mean.”
The amendment was defeated, 51 to 43.
* * *
As Elizabeth walked from the Capitol down Montana Avenue, white clouds moved across the blue highway of sky and shadows pooled under the ash trees. She liked the momentum of moving downhill with the sun on her face and the snow-covered Sleeping Giant Mountain dozing on the horizon in front of her.
A pickup truck pulled up next to her. The driver leaned over and rolled down the passenger window. “Wanna ride?”
Patrick, wearing mirrored aviator sunglasses. Her breath caught in her throat as she stepped up into the cab.
At a drive-in, they ordered root beers and hamburgers from a carhop in a short skirt and ski parka, who skated with their orders back to the window, past heaps of sooty snow.
Patrick pushed his sunglasses up on top of his head and looked over at Elizabeth. His eyes were green flecked with brown.
The cab felt very close.
They talked. Patrick explained that he was a junior at Dawson County High School. He ran track, played trumpet, and had collected the autographs of almost all one hundred delegates. He had an older brother who was serving in an artillery unit in Vietnam. Then he leaned over and sang, badly: “Do you want to go to San Francisco?”
She almost laughed.
“I want to get out of here so bad,” he said, his eyes shining. “I need to see something besides goddamn cowboys. Rolling Stones. Cream. Jimi Hendrix. How ’bout you?”
“’Frisco for sure,” Elizabeth replied, though in truth that city’s flower-child scene scared her. “I want a yellow Karmann Ghia and a dog named Spud.” She paused, tilted her head, and looked at him. “And I want to have sex.”
He flushed and reared back. “You want to what?”
When she didn’t answer, he reached out for her.
She pressed herself against the door. “No! Not like that. This is a project.”
“What do you mean, a project?” He settled back behind the steering wheel.
“Eat your cheeseburger,” she said.
He studied Elizabeth, his hair falling across his face. “You’re an odd one.”
The two of them sat in a companionable silence, watching cars spin down the highway, drinking the sweet root beer and eating greasy hamburgers, watching a dog pick its way across the parking lot, nose down and looking for scraps.
As she crumpled up their hamburger wrappers, Patrick put his hand over hers and asked, “Are you serious?”
“About what?” she said, although she knew fully well what he was asking about.
He shook his head and started the pickup. Seeing her squinting in the light, he took off his sunglasses and handed them to her. “You can have these if you want.”
She took them, glimpsing her oblong reflection in the mirrored lenses, the way her face looked wide and egg-like, pink and contorted, all eyes and nose, and wavering.
* * *
During the afternoon break in the next day’s session, Elizabeth was getting a drink at the water fountain when she felt a tap on her shoulder.
“Follow me,” Patrick said.
They walked to the base of the rotunda. When Patrick was sure no one was looking, he grabbed her hand and led her to a small door. He opened it and led her inside. A sudden dusty quiet enveloped them.
They stood in a tiny closet where a narrow iron ladder rose up into the shadows.
“What are we doing?” Elizabeth was afraid a bat would fly out from somewhere and tangle itself in her hair.
Patrick began to climb the metal rungs. “Trust me.”
Elizabeth followed him, hand over hand, foot over foot. Her dress ballooned out and she worried that if someone opened the door they’d see her underwear.
As they climbed up into the shadows, shoes scraping iron, she stopped caring. In the cool, quiet shaft, Elizabeth thought she heard the flutter of birds. Finally, the curved underside of the rotunda appeared.
“Where are we?” Her voice sounded hollow.
“You’ll see.”
“It’s cold.”
When Patrick reached the top rung, he took a flashlight out of his pocket. He shined the circle of light on the wall. “Look.”
Above his head, on the narrow curved ceiling of the rotunda, were hundreds of signatures scrawled in marker, charcoal, and what looked like candle smoke. Some were large and loopy, some small and precise, some blurred, some feathery, others delicate as lace. The two of them clung there, sheltered by the names’ ghostly constellation.
Patrick climbed down over the top of her, pressing her into the iron ladder. She turned her head to him. They kissed. His lips were cool and soft.
Molly Stensrud, 1895. Joseph McKinsey, 1923. Hope Smith, 1911. Kilroy Was Here, 1941. Class of 1964 Rules.
* * *
That night, Patrick scaled the porch support to the balcony as Elizabeth waited in her room with the lights off.
She eased open the window, holding her breath at the scrape of wood against wood. “Hey, Romeo,” she whispered.
He crept under Elizabeth’s window, balanced himself on the clinker brick, and put his hands on the windowsill. Then he was inside. He seemed so tall in the cramped room.
Patrick looked at the rickety dresser and the iron bed. “So this is where you stay? What a dump.”
“It’s my dump,” Elizabeth said, irritated. “And keep your voice down. There’s someone next door.”
Patrick’s hands dangled at his sides like rope. His face was smudged. “What do we do now?”
“We kiss.”
He grabbed her waist. They sat on the bed and kissed. They lay on the bed and kissed. Each time they shifted position, the bed creaked. The walls and door were so thin they barely seemed to exist. In the hall, a door opened and footsteps shuffled down the threadbare carpet runner. Elizabeth and Patrick kissed as pipes groaned and water turned on and off.
Maybe she didn’t want to join the big chorus. She glimpsed the two of them in the speckled mirror over the dresser, tangled together on the lime-green bed: his brown hair, her red hair, his arms, her arms. She felt his smooth stomach and muscled shoulders a
nd she felt her breasts swell and heard the women in her head saying, Chippie, slut, whore.
Patrick slipped his hands under her shirt. He unsnapped her bra and cupped her breasts in his hands. Electricity shot through her.
Hmmmm, the voices said.
“You’re lovely,” Patrick said.
Elizabeth took off her shirt and bra. In the mirror, she saw her pink-nippled breasts, her long hair and round face, Patrick sitting next to her with his long legs dangling. Her stomach grew cold.
“Are you still okay with this?” he said.
“Yes,” Elizabeth whispered.
“What about . . . ?”
Reaching under the pillow, she pulled out the rubber she’d stolen from her father.
Patrick took off his shirt and she ran her hand through his chest hair. His nipples were brown, his chest lightly freckled. He had a scar on his abdomen.
“Appendicitis,” he said when she touched it. “I was ten.”
You will always regret it, said the voices in her head.
She put her hand on his stomach. His finger teased her nipple until it was hard.
“What are you smiling about?” he said, pulling her down on his chest. Their skin warmed together.
She shook her head. “Nothing.”
There was the awkwardness of Patrick turning away from her, struggling with the condom.
He stroked Elizabeth’s back, pulled her to him, and mounted her, and the aunts and mothers in her head resumed that odd, Hmmm.
Then Elizabeth split in two: the Elizabeth on the bed who felt the lushness of Patrick entering her, slowly, the slight pain, then the warmth of him filling her; and the Elizabeth who hovered above herself, watching, listening to her murmurs in counterpoint to the rattle of the bed.
* * *
They woke up in a tangle of covers, sheets, and clothes. The window was still dark.
“Oh my God,” Patrick said, “are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” She wasn’t. She was shaky and upset. She wanted to be alone.
She got up to wash the blood from between her legs. As she crossed the room, she caught sight of herself in the mirror and stopped to see if she looked different. She didn’t, but she felt different, like one of those pod people who hatched into perfect but emotionless replicas of themselves.
It was the new version of her that slipped on Patrick’s shirt, buttoning it halfway. She opened the door, stepped out into the hall, and came face to face with Lillian.
The old woman was returning from the bathroom with her bent aluminum pie pan dripping with water, trembling in her unsteady hands. Her eyes registered the man’s shirt and glanced through the doorway before Elizabeth could pull it shut.
“You scared me,” said Elizabeth. “Are you feeding your cat?”
“I have no cat,” Lillian nearly spit. In her worn-thin nightgown, Lillian appeared even older, her back humped, her hair hanging in white wisps about her shoulders. Looking into her dark, empty eyes, Elizabeth wondered if she was demented.
“I guess we both have secrets,” Elizabeth said.
The woman’s mouth cracked open but no sound came out—a thin line of spittle stretched from one lip to the next. She pressed her lips back together and hurried down the hall, her footsteps scratching like paws.
Shit, thought Elizabeth.
She used the bathroom and returned to bed, trying to concentrate on Patrick’s smooth skin, the brush of his hair across her face, his smell of sweat and soap. The words fouled this earth flashed across her brain and then she was lost, remembering the warmth of him entering her. She wanted to stay inside herself, on this bed, in this room, but she rose up and out of herself. Hearing the voices and their deep, guttural Hmmmmm, she imagined the mouths of mothers and grandmothers opening and closing like fish out of water until they lost the ability to breathe. Elizabeth imagined the sound of a clear, single note that seemed to arrive from a distant galaxy.
* * *
Blood dripped into a pad between Elizabeth’s legs as she sat with the other pages at the front of the room. Patrick was just three seats away from her, his hair brushing his collar.
The delegates were discussing wording for a clean and healthful environment, which had come up for a third and final vote. It was late in the day, late in the convention. Everyone was rushed and frenzied by the sense that this moment in history was winding down. The air was thick with cigarette smoke.
A Missoula delegate with sideburns stood to read his revision of the amendment: “The state of Montana and each person must maintain and enhance a clean and healthful environment in the state for the enjoyment and protection of present and future generations.”
“Oh Lord,” another delegate sighed. “Haven’t we been through this?”
A buzzer buzzed. Elizabeth got up to answer it.
“Coffee,” Peg said. “We’re gonna be here awhile. You all right? You look tired.”
“Just that time of the month,” Elizabeth lied, her stomach knotting.
Peg patted her hand. “Oh, hon, I’m so sorry.”
The click of Elizabeth’s shoes on black-and-white tiles hammered into her brain as she walked to the coffee stand. Through an opened window in the rotunda, she saw wet snow falling and smelled the sweetness of budding cottonwoods. It surprised her that outside the riot of her body and the chaos in the rotunda, there were still seasons.
She delivered the coffee and returned to her black mahogany chair.
After hours of wrangling, a young delegate rose, cleared his throat, and said to the assembly: “When you go home, and a voter asks you what you did for the environment, what are you going to say? That we’re all for clean and healthful, but we don’t want to use the words in our constitution?”
The amendment passed, 68 to 26.
* * *
The next day was Saturday, her day to ride home with Peg. When Elizabeth walked downstairs to go to breakfast, Mrs. Neal and Lillian were waiting at the desk like clerks at a hotel. Lillian had taken some care with her appearance and was wearing a blue polka-dotted dress.
“Why, you are just the person we’re looking for,” said Mrs. Neal in a saccharine voice.
Elizabeth went numb.
“Why don’t you sit down?”
It wasn’t a question. She lowered herself on the doily- covered chair in the front room.
A door opened and Peg walked in. She nodded curtly at the two older women, two small red circles burning in her cheeks.
Elizabeth began to shake.
“Let’s leave these Missoula people alone, Lillian,” Mrs. Neal said.
The woman in the polka-dotted dress seemed reluctant to leave. She opened her mouth and Elizabeth pictured the thin strand of saliva that had spanned her lips that night in the hall.
Lillian said: “Some people seem to just think they’re above the rules. Awful high and mighty.”
Mrs. Neal shut the door behind them before Elizabeth could respond.
Peg turned on her. “I’m so mad I could spit. How could you do this to yourself? To your parents? To me?”
Elizabeth stared at her hands. She tested the nubby brown brocade fabric of the chair. She would forever think of shame as having exactly this texture.
“Why would you, a good girl, a straight-A student with everything to lose, risk it all for a night in the sack?”
Elizabeth lifted her head and stared at Peg. Over the noise in her head—chippie, slut, whore—and despite the way her face seemed frozen, she forced the words out: “Because I chose to.”
“You chose to?”
She nodded, gripping the armrest to keep from shaking.
“For the love of God, why?”
“Your son.”
“My son?” Peg was genuinely puzzled. Elizabeth saw where the woman’s lipstick was smeared, the gray roots at her scalp, and the white hairs Elizabeth’s mother called goat hairs growing from her chin. “Why are you bringing my son into this?”
“Your son made me touch
him. While you and my parents played bridge, he snuck upstairs and unzipped his pants. He made me touch him. Over and over. And I hated it. Hated it. Hated it!”
Peg crumpled in the chair, her head in her hands, her back heaving.
* * *
When Peg came back a few hours later, she was wearing sunglasses that didn’t hide how much she’d been crying. Elizabeth felt strangely dry-eyed, but she slipped on the sunglasses Patrick had given her before she got into the car. They muted the day’s brightness but brought out other colors, subtle greens and browns.
The only sound on the ride back to Missoula was the tires crackling across the pavement as Peg piloted the car. Elizabeth saw that they were both driving away from who they had been, driving away from what the state had been, toward what it could become.
At MacDonald Pass, both of them were silent as the road snaked down through the mountains to the wide oxbows of the Clark Fork River. As the old car wound through the valley, the Garnet Mountains folded in on themselves like the Y of a woman’s body, their round flanks split by a coulee—a French word meaning to flow—the land bending toward water. Years later, Elizabeth would learn to love those broad flanks, the undulating plains of flesh, and the Y of a woman’s body, her body, with its mysteries, its givings and takings, but on that drive, she had to content herself with a weak spring sunlight warming her face and hands and the knowledge that, at least for now, they had crossed the Continental Divide and she was halfway home.
Ace in the Hole
by Eric Heidle
Great Falls
Civic-pride billboards and the drab county jail swept past the chilly Greyhound’s windows as it dropped down the hill into the night of Great Falls. Through frosted glass, Chance watched the town pull him in as the Missouri passed below, the bus thrumming over dark water and skiffs of ice. Beyond the bridge he saw the OK Tire sign was gone; its cinder-block building was now something new.
The bus pulled a lazy turn toward downtown, rolling through blocks of low brick warehouses before banking hard into the alley behind the depot. It settled with a hiss in the garage as the passengers roused and began filing off.
The snap of deep cold hit him at the door. The driver’s breath huffed with each suitcase he tossed from the coach’s gut. Chance only had his green duffel. He split off from the line shuffling into the warmly lit lobby. Ducking under the half-open bay door at the front of the garage, he stepped onto the street and walked toward Central Avenue.
