She walked day after day in the hills and mountains around town, in the Bridgers, the Bangtails, and the Tobacco Roots. It was autumn now, and the chokecherry thickets and hawthorn breaks were changing color. Sometimes she went with other hikers, but she rarely spoke to them. At night, she treated her blisters and planned the next day’s walk. Once, she fell asleep with her shoes on, to the static of a radio station gone off the air. The phone messages piled up until her voice-mail box was full. Ho, ho, ho, she thought, this is a crisis. Before sunrise, she lay in bed staring at the window for the first signs of light. Andy’s last message suggested that she go to hell. She saved that one, suspecting that she might already be there.
She ran into Dr. Tsieu at the food co-op and, feeling comradely, told her about the hikes. Dr. Tsieu smiled supportively and said, “I feel sorry for your shoes.” By that time she was traveling to more-remote areas to walk, distant prairie hills and wilderness foothills. She got lost more than once and only just made it out of the hills, in flight from hypothermia. Her eyesight grew exceptionally sharp, and she could see ravens in the dark, the shadows of animals in brush, and the old footprints of her predecessors. In this state, her own hands seemed to glow, the stars fierce and the moon more than usually banal.
Jessica kept walking into winter. Twice, Andy tried to join her, jumping out of his little car at the trailhead, but the chill drove him back, shivering and waving her on in disgust. It was only a matter of time before she came to her senses, he told her the second time. He yelled something else, but he was too far away by then for her to hear.
In the gathering dark and the swirling snow, she began to imagine voices and distantly wondered if she could still see the trail. She stopped to listen more closely, hoping to hear something new through the wind. A pure singing note rose, high and sustained, then another, in a kind of courtly diction.
Wolves.
SHAMAN
The Rileys lived on a small piece of land, the remains of a much-bigger property that had been diminished over the generations; but what was left was a lovely place: the two-story clapboard house, built in 1911 in an old grove of cottonwoods, was fed crystalline water by a hillside spring and graced by morning sun in the kitchen and a shelter belt of chokecherry and caragana. On the benches above the creek, the evening sun revealed old tepee rings from when the land had all been Indian country. The doorstop at the front entrance was a stone hammer for cracking buffalo bones. Good hard coal from Roundup filled the shed, and on a painted iron flagpole the American flag popped in the west wind until it was in ribbons and had to be replaced. The house had a hidden fireplace vented by a center chimney, in which, during Prohibition, Pat Riley’s grandfather had made whiskey, which he sold from the trunk of his Plymouth at country dances. He was thus able to reverse the contraction of the property, for the time being, which soon resumed under Pat’s father, a small-time grain trader, usually described as “a fine fellow, never made a dime.” The Plymouth remained, with two rusty bullet holes, the shots fired from the inside during a hijacking attempt, and was now embedded in an irrigation dam serving two neighbors, since the Rileys had lost the water rights. The property, Pat’s birthright, was the Rileys’ pride and joy. The point of all their work, however tedious, was to keep them on the place.
Pat was a physical therapist who made the rounds of the small hospitals and rest homes and clinics in southwest Montana. Pat loved his job, feeling that he helped people every day he worked, mostly with postoperative rehabilitation and the debilities of age. He found the residents at the rest homes especially interesting: old cowboys, state politicians, a veteran of the Women’s Army Air Corps, and so on. His wife Juanita’s job at the courthouse was tiresome: reconciling ledgers, posting journal entries for accruals and transfers, tracking grant revenues and expenditures, and filing, filing, filing! So it was that, on the occasion of Pat’s overnight trip for a case in Lewistown, Juanita was ripe for the visit of the shaman. As a point of fact, she fancied him before even knowing he was a shaman. She just figured he was looking for a ranch job, but she never found a chance to tell him there hadn’t been a cow on the place in forty years.
Juanita hardly knew what a shaman was and would have pictured someone on the Discovery Channel, feathered, painted, beaded, perhaps belled—certainly not someone dressed like this or presenting a calling card. His name was Rudy, and he seemed like an Olympian in his tracksuit and Nike shoes. He explained that he was an anthropologist and arid lands botanist, whose work had led him to discover a spiritual being living under a sandstone ledge on the Medicine Bow River, also named Rudy. It had taken seven years for the two Rudys to track each other down and become the united Rudy now standing before Juanita and touching a button of her blouse for emphasis. Juanita felt the heat rise. “I was out in the prairie. It was a hot day. All I could hear was wind and crickets or birds. Then the grass seemed to creak under my feet and I could feel the other Rudy was near and coming to me. The wind stopped as Rudy arrived. It was a lighthearted moment, Juanita. I said, ‘Welcome aboard.’ And that quick, I was unified. I was undivided, united as one, the one and only Rudy. But now there was…something else.” He seemed disturbed by Juanita’s hard, restless gaze. She let him follow her into the house, where she dug her phone out of her yellow, fringed purse hanging on the doorknob. She called her husband. “Pat, I’ve got a shaman here at the house. When are you coming home? You heard me. How on earth should I know? He says he’s a shaman.” She cupped the phone and said to the stranger, “What exactly is a shaman?”
“That’s a long story. I—”
“He says it’s a long story. Okay, sure, see you in a few.”
She hung up. It would not be a few minutes, more like a day, before she saw Pat. But the ruse had an immediate effect on Rudy the shaman: panic.
“Does he mean literally ‘a few minutes’?”
“Maybe five. He has to stop for cigarettes.”
Rudy the shaman burst through the door at a dead run. Juanita watched him windmill down the driveway and out onto the county road, stooping to pick up some kind of pack at the corner. She grabbed the phone again.
“As soon as I told him you were about to arrive, he ran for it.”
“Juanita, listen to me, you need to call the sheriff.”
“And tell him what? I had a shaman at the house?”
“What does that even mean?”
“Pat! I don’t know. I told you that.”
“Well, call anyway and then call me back. Or I’ll call them. No, better you, in case they need a description.”
“Aren’t you just assuming this guy is a criminal?”
“Maybe that’s all a shaman is, for Chrissakes. Just call and then call me back.”
At first, Juanita resisted making the call, then, realizing Pat wouldn’t let it go, she picked up the phone. Sheriff Johnsrud was at a county commissioners’ meeting, but she was put through to Eric Caldwell, his deputy.
“Hi, Juanita.”
“Eric, some strange guy stopped by here. Said he was a—something or other. When I told him Pat was due home, he ran out the door in kind of a panic.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“I don’t think it’s a big deal, but Pat insisted I call.”
“Pat has a point. Describe this guy, would you, Juanita? What’d you say he was?”
“I can’t remember, but he was wearing kind of a tracksuit, good-looking guy, maybe thirty-five, odd but with nice manners and one of those big watches tells you how far you walked, wavy brown hair, and talked educated like.”
“Whoa, Juanita, you did get a pretty good look!”
“That’ll do, Eric.”
“Okay, we’ll check it out. Wavy hair. Got it.”
“Do me a favor, call Pat on his cell or he’ll fret.”
Afterward, Juanita had to piece the story together. Sheriff Johnsrud came back from the commissioners’ meeting and joined Eric in scouring the area between the Riley place on the county road and
the edge of town, down by the Catholic church and the ball field. They confronted Rudy just past the Lewis and Clark Memorial. When he went for something in his backpack, Sheriff Johnsrud shot him. Looking at the body, Johnsrud said, “He’s done. Stick a fork in him.” Eric pushed the backpack open with his foot and said there was no gun. Neither spoke until Johnsrud mused that they should go get one, and Eric nodded. “That way,” said the sheriff, “it’s a senseless tragedy.”
Rudy, a low-risk mental patient, had just walked out of the Warm Springs hospital. The backpack contained pebbles, a dead bird, and a book on teaching yourself to dance. There hadn’t been a cloud in the sky for a week in Rudy’s hometown on the Wyoming border. He could have walked there in half a day.
It had been too obvious that Rudy was harmless. The doctors at the Warm Springs hospital made such a huge point of it that the whole town was embarrassed. Otis Sheare at the Ford dealership said it was like they had shot the Easter Bunny, “Town Without Pity,” and so forth. So Sheriff Johnsrud conceded the terrible misfortune and took full responsibility. After all, he had fired the shot. But eventually Johnsrud changed, or everyone thought he had, though some admitted they would’ve changed, too, if such a thing happened to them, or else they concluded they were only imagining the sheriff was any different than he had always been. Eric, however, who had been born right there in town, moved away. Eventually people quit asking where Eric had got off to, just assuming he had landed on his feet somewhere. Probably his sister still heard from him. She lived over where the first post office burned down, giving her a great view of the mountains.
When, sitting under the Dos Equis beer umbrella, Pat joked that Eric had left law enforcement, Juanita startled herself by spitting in his face. Things had started to go wrong for them, though it didn’t seem so at first and not really for a while afterward, because the Cancún trip had provided needed relief, especially for Juanita, who found she could still turn a few heads on the beach. “Oh God, we’re not really going back to Montana,” she said on the last day. Pat said, “I hate to think how much we’ll miss these warm sea breezes,” but that wasn’t what she meant at all, at all, at all.
During a pensive moment in the airport, while waiting to board, Pat said, “Tell me honestly, Juanita, why did you spit in my face?”
“I admit I thought about it.”
“Darling, you didn’t think about it, you did it. You spit in my face.”
“I did?”
Juanita found this very disturbing. She knew she’d thought about it but…really?
Winter went on well into April, and they both were working very hard, trying to become a “unit” again, but the word itself had lost its meaning. They had been one for so long they couldn’t comprehend why it had become so hard. They couldn’t understand what was happening to them in other ways either. For example, Sandy Hayes, the sheriff’s dispatcher, who worked at the courthouse down the hall from Juanita and was just about her best friend, right out of the blue told Juanita to her face that she was a bitch on wheels. Juanita was astonished.
“What can you possibly mean!”
“Isn’t it obvious, Juanita?”
Juanita shrank into the files and deeds of her musty corner and went off to lunch with her head down. She didn’t want to dignify Sandy’s remark by asking further what it meant, and as a result it just hung over her like a cloud. She quit going to the window and staring in the direction of their house, almost visible beyond the poplars at the fairgrounds. Oddly, she became more efficient. The small annoyance she once felt at being confined to this room was gone. There was a kind of relief in feeling she belonged here, as though the fight had gone out of her. And what good had that been anyway?
Pat’s situation had become more precarious. While rehabilitating an old priest after rotator cuff surgery, he had been a bit zealous, causing a new tear. It was quickly repaired, but the surgeon appeared at physical therapy and rebuked Pat, who would remember the vehemence, if not the words particularly, and the fact that the surgeon, still in his scrubs, wore the most beautiful pair of oxblood loafers, slippers almost, with the thinnest of soles. Pat was so friendly with the staff that he was ashamed to have been scolded in front of them like a dog or a child. They couldn’t look at him.
The exceptionally long winters—the drifted driveway, the circles of ice in the windows, the days that abruptly ended in afternoon—might have had something to do with it, but that same hard April they decided to put the place on the market. They made no secret of thinking it a case of good riddance and didn’t mind letting the neighbors and their former friends know it. They put up a FOR SALE BY OWNER out front and awaited results.
At the courthouse, Juanita held up their deed for Sandy the dispatcher to see. “This will have a new name on it for the first time in ninety years. It’s only a matter of time.”
“Where do you think you’re headed?”
“I’ll let you know.”
Sandy went back to her desk opposite the front stairs. There wasn’t any point in talking to Juanita anymore. Pat used to be so much fun, too. Now he was a regular sad sack; so maybe Juanita came by this new disposition honestly. The truth was, they didn’t know where they were headed, but since they had never before known liquidity, they were sure it would come with ideas they didn’t yet have, ideas resembling hopeful points on the map. This confidence came and went, and there was little to be gained by mentioning the dread that seemed to seep out of nowhere.
Someone pulled up into the driveway in a brown four-door. It was the same shade of brown as Pat’s grandfather’s shot-up Plymouth rip-rapping the irrigation dam upstream. They watched from the edges of the front window, careful not to seem eager. The driver’s door opened, and a pair of narrow legs in old farmer pants swung out, resting on the ground. The driver gingerly slid out and shut the door: a woman perhaps just entering old age and remarkably unkempt, the wild gray hair pinned off her forehead with a red plastic comb, her barn coat done about the waist with twine. Walking unsteadily, she stared hard toward the house; she did not have the look of a prospect.
Pat and Juanita opened the door before the woman could knock. She made no attempt at introducing herself. “Yes?” said Juanita, Pat at her side attempting, “How can we help you?”
“I’m not sure you can,” she said distantly, looking from one to the other, and then just stopped. She had green eyes. Later, when Pat and Juanita remarked on them to each other, it seemed to start a conversation that went nowhere.
“What brings you here?” Pat asked like some sort of radio announcer too hearty for this small stalemate.
“A glass of cold water out of that spring behind the house.”
“Why, most certainly! You know, it’s piped right to the faucet. So why don’t you come in. I’ll bet you’re thirsty.”
“For some of that spring water.”
“You shall have it!” said Pat in that same hale voice, causing Juanita to glance quickly at him.
“How did you know about the spring?” Juanita chirped.
“I was told about it.”
They sat the woman down at the kitchen table made of cottonwood planks from the old stall barn. Pat had fitted the planks together with perfect joints when they were first married. This encumbrance they also intended to leave behind, because, as Juanita said, “It weighs a ton.” Pat felt they could have taken it but didn’t want to argue.
Juanita went to the sink and filled her tallest glass, and as she started to turn toward the refrigerator, the woman said, “No ice,” so Juanita turned back and set the glass of water before her. The woman nodded thanks. Pat sat at the far end tilting back his chair, hands behind his head in a pantomime of nonchalance.
The woman drained the glass and held it to eye level as though to look through it. Staring thus, she said, “I’m Rudy’s mother, the dead boy.”
Pat pulled his chair upright and set his hands close to him on the table. Juanita grinned with pain. “I’m so sorry.”
; Pat said, “We’re both so sorry.”
“Oh?”
After a long silence, Juanita asked, “Is there anything we can do?”
“Sure,” she said, fishing a cigarette out of her coat and lighting it with a beat-up old Zippo. Pat and Juanita refrained from mentioning how much they hated smoking. The woman held the cigarette between her second and third fingers, as if in the middle of her hand. “You can tell me about his last day here.”
“I can do that,” said Juanita, getting braver. “He—Rudy—really just turned up and immediately started talking about his life like I had known him before.”
“You had known him before?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Okay.”
“Oh yes, and then, uh, we were just chatting in general, well, really it was quite brief, and he told me he—”
“He gave you some reason to call the law?”
“Well, ma’am, I have to be honest, he kind of frightened me the way he, the way he was talking.” Juanita was startled to hear her own voice rise so quickly. “How he knew things.”
The woman took the cigarette from her mouth but kept it in her hand in front of her face. “Rudy was a shaman.”
“We don’t even know what that is!” cried Pat.
The woman got up and dropped the cigarette hissing into the nearly empty water glass. “I just feel like you made a big mistake, but I guess time will tell if it hasn’t already.”
At the door they assured her they felt just as bad as she did. She shook her head slightly; she seemed to wonder at them. “I wouldn’t have done that,” she said. “I’d of had more sense.”
They watched her go to her car. They expected her to say something or glance back, but no. In the house, when Juanita said she had eyes like a cat, Pat didn’t seem to pick up on it, remarking instead that she must have been a great beauty in her day. He left the room, and Juanita emptied the cigarette butt into the sink before going to the window. The car was already gone.
Cloudbursts Page 46
