Montana 1948

by Larry Watson

  My father said something I barely heard: “What do you mean by that?”

  Grandfather laughed a deep, breathy cuh-cuh-cuh that sounded like half cough and half laugh. “Come on, Wesley. Come on, boy. You know Frank’s always been partial to red meat. He couldn’t have been any older than Davy when Bud caught him down in the stable with that little Indian girl. Bud said to me, ‘Mr. Hayden, you better have a talk with that boy. He had that little squaw down on her hands and knees. He’s been learnin’ from watching the dogs and the horses and the bulls.’ I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t some young ones out on the reservation who look a lot like your brother.”

  One of them approached the screen door, and I quickly slipped away from my hiding post and into the living room. I picked up the first thing at hand—a cigarette lighter that looked like a derringer—and began to squeeze the trigger over and over, each time scraping the flint and throwing up a small, pungent flame. I tried to make my concentration on the lighter seem so total that no one would suspect me of eavesdropping.

  It was my father coming through the door, and as he did he said over his shoulder to Grandfather, “I suspect you might be right on that.” To me he said, “Put that down, David. It’s not a toy.”

  It was the second time I had heard my grandfather say something about my uncle and Indian girls. . . .

  Neither my father nor my uncle married women from Bentrock, or from Montana, for that matter. (That was probably another reason for people to resent the Haydens. I could imagine someone from town saying, “Weren’t any of the local girls good enough for the Hayden boys?”) My mother, as I mentioned, was from North Dakota, and Gloria was from Minnesota. My father met my mother while he was in law school, and Frank met Gloria while he was in medical school at the University of Minnesota. My parents were married soon after they met; Frank and Gloria, however, had an on-again, off-again romance for years.

  They were finally married in Minneapolis, Gloria’s home-town. This was during the war, and Frank was home on leave. The wedding took place right after Christmas, and it was a small, quiet affair, with only a few friends and family in attendance. Grandfather paid for all of us to travel by train to the wedding and to stay in a hotel in Minneapolis. It was the first time I was on a train and the first time I stayed in a hotel.

  The night before the wedding my father, Grandfather, Uncle Frank, an old college friend of his, and two of Gloria’s brothers went out together for Frank’s bachelor party.

  They didn’t return to the hotel until quite late. I was already asleep, but I woke up when my father came in. He was drunk—which made another first for me. I had never seen my father take more than one drink. I lay quietly in bed while my mother helped my father undress. She also tried to keep him quiet, but it was no use; he was too drunk and too excited to keep his voice low.

  “You should have seen it, Gail,” he said. “By God, it was something. This Minneapolis big shot, this city boy, wouldn’t let up. Kept saying to Pop, ‘Mighty fine boots. Mighty fine. Just hope you’re not tracking in any cow shit with those boots.’ Wouldn’t stop.”

  “Shhh. Watch your language. David can hear you.”

  “Just reporting. That’s all. Just saying how it was. Finally Pop says, ‘You don’t let up, I’m going to stick one of these boots up your ass. Then I’m going to track your shit all over this bar.’”

  “Oh, Wesley!”

  He laughed. Giggled would be more accurate. “I’ve got to say what happened, don’t I? This city fellow thinks he’s heard enough. He plops his hat down on the bar, takes off his glasses and sets them down too. He starts for our table. But by the time he gets there Pop has pulled out that little .32 revolver of his. Chrome-plated so it’s the shiniest thing in the place. Hell, I didn’t know he had it with him. Anyway, he’s got that gun right in the fella’s face, and the guy goes white. He’s just white as a sheet. Pop holds it there for a minute, and then he says, ‘Out in Montana you wouldn’t be worth dirtying a man’s hands on. Or his boots. So we’d handle him this way. Nice and clean.’ And he keeps holding the gun on him. I thought maybe I should say something, but Frank reaches over and puts his hand on my arm. Frank’s laughing to beat the band, so he must know something. Finally Pop says, ‘Now you head on out of here and you better hope the snow covers your tracks because I’m going to finish this whiskey and then I’m coming after you.’ By God, Gail, you should have seen that fella hightail it out of there! Left without his hat and glasses. And Pop just sits back down and finishes his whiskey. Doesn’t say a word. Meanwhile Frank’s laughing so hard he gets me going and then neither one of us can stop. People are leaving the bar right and left—probably afraid of these wild and woolly cowboys from Montana—and Frank and I are howling our heads off. Then when we leave we notice that Minneapolis hasn’t even got any snow. And that sets Frank and me off all over again. Oh, Gail, I wish you could’ve been there. The Hayden boys all over again. The Hayden boys and their old man.”

  By that time, my mother had gotten him into bed and was covering him. “I don’t think you’ll find this so funny tomorrow morning. You’re lucky you weren’t all arrested.”

  “They couldn’t arrest us—we are the law!” My father found that idea hilarious. He started laughing so hard he could barely breathe. Soon he was coughing and choking, and then he had to rush to the bathroom. The next thing I heard was my father vomiting. He was in there so long I fell asleep before he came out.

  After the wedding the next day on the train going back to Montana, my grandfather offered a box of chocolates to my mother, Grandmother, and me. My father couldn’t even look at them, a fact that my grandfather found amusing. My grandfather had a sweet tooth, and he insisted those were the best chocolates in the world, available only from a small confectionary in downtown Minneapolis.

  Soon they were all talking about Frank and Gloria and the wedding, how nice the ceremony was, what a lovely woman Gloria was, how they hoped for a happy life for the two of them. Then Grandfather said, “Now he’s got himself a good-looking white woman for a wife. That better keep him off the reservation.”

  No one said another word. Every one of us turned to the window as if there were actually something to look at besides wind-whipped, snow-covered prairies.

  At dinner I sat between my grandmother and Aunt Gloria. My grandmother, a thin, nervous woman who seldom spoke when my grandfather was present, concentrated during the meal on cutting her ham into small perfect triangles before she ate them. Whenever she passed a dish to me she asked quietly, “Do you like this, David?” and her questions seemed so eager and pathetic that I said yes to everything. As a result, my plate was piled high with sweet potatoes and cooked carrots and sliced tomatoes and cottage cheese and kidney beans and corn bread and ham. And I had no appetite.

  Aunt Gloria chattered throughout the meal. She talked about the weather and the price of milk. She talked about how, even though the war had been over for three years, she still felt funny about throwing out a tin can. She taught first grade, and she talked about how she was going to make little construction paper Indian headbands for all her students, with their names on the feathers. She talked about her little brother who was in college in Missoula and who told her how the ex-GI’s pushed the professors around.

  I loved Aunt Gloria—she was sweet and beautiful and good to me—yet that day I couldn’t bear to look at her. How could she act normal, I wondered, when she was married to Uncle Frank? How could she not know?

  Those were the cleanest thoughts I had. The ones I tried to suppress went something like this: Why would Uncle Frank want another woman when he had a wife like Gloria? And this line of thought was nudged along by my own desire. I thought Aunt Gloria was more than pretty....

  A year earlier I had stayed with Frank and Gloria when my parents were in Helena for a law-enforcement convention. I usually stayed home with Marie or with my grandparents at the ranch when my parents were out of town, but during that time Marie was doing somet
hing with her family and Grandmother was recovering from gall-bladder surgery.

  While my parents were gone, I came down with a case of tonsilitis, as I frequently did as a child. Uncle Frank gave me a shot of penicillin, and Aunt Gloria took better care of me than my own mother. She made me chicken soup and Jell-O, she brought me comic books and ginger ale, and she never let more than an hour pass without checking on me.

  She came in late one night to make sure I was covered. I kept my eyes closed and pretended to be asleep, but when she bent down to feel my forehead I could smell her perfume. The scent itself seemed warm as it closed in on me. She backed away and went to the window, and I opened one eye. She was wearing just the top of a pair of pajamas, and as she stood before the window just enough light came in from the street lamp to silhouette her breasts perfectly. I closed my eyes again, out of both shame and fear of being caught looking.

  From the doorway came Uncle Frank’s whisper. “Is he asleep? ”

  “Shhh,” Aunt Gloria whispered back. “Yes.” She tiptoed out of the room. In the hall Uncle Frank said aloud, “So this is what it’s like to have kids. Damn.”

  Before long, I heard them through the wall in their own bedroom. Their bedsprings squeaked rhythmically; I thought I could hear breathing—a sound spreading through the house as if it were more than sound, as if it were a presence, like perfume, like darkness itself. Later I heard them in the bathroom together. I couldn’t make out anything they said, but that didn’t matter. By then I was concentrating on only one thing: one more reason to envy Uncle Frank.

  It was shame again that Sunday that kept me from looking at Aunt Gloria during our meal. And the day had one more similarity to that night. As Gloria leaned toward me to take a plate of tomatoes from Grandmother, I smelled my aunt’s perfume again. But the lush sweet floral scent—so out of place in that rough-timbered room and among all those odors of food—did not excite me this time. This time it made me so sad I wanted to cry.

  As soon as the meal was over, I asked if I could be excused to go riding. My parents gave me permission so quickly I wondered if they were planning to bring up the accusations against Uncle Frank as soon as I was out of the house. No, not in front of Grandmother. My father might have said something to Grandfather, but they would have gone to any extreme to keep that from Grandmother. It was often said that she was “nervous,” a term that did not merely mean, as it does when it is applied to someone today, that she fidgeted, bit her nails, or worried too much (though she did all three); no, it meant that Grandmother had a condition that could strike her down at any time, as if a virus lived quietly in her but could suddenly run loose on a moment’s notice if something upset her. Everyone knew the importance of shielding Grandmother from shocks of any kind.

  Before I left the dining room, my grandfather stopped me. “Hold on there, David. Wait up a minute.” He got up from the table and went into his den.

  He came back in just a moment, and he was carrying a gun, a Hi-Standard automatic .22 target pistol and a box of cartridges.

  “Goddamn coyotes,” he said. “They’re getting worse than ever. You see any out there, blast away.”

  Like almost every kid in Montana I had my own little arsenal—a .22 for plinking at prairie dogs and snakes; a .410-gauge shotgun for hunting pheasant, grouse, ducks, and geese; and a 30-30 for hunting deer. But in my case, all were single-shot. My father believed there was nothing worse than sloppy marksmanship and wasting ammunition. Having only one shot was a great incentive for learning to make that shot count. The theory was a good one, but it did not prove out in my case. I was never a very good shot but I was awfully quick at reloading.

  Handguns were different, however. They were somehow not serious, not for bringing down game but for shooting as an activity in and of itself, and therefore slightly suspect.

  I looked eagerly at my parents for their permission. My mother didn’t care for guns of any kind but she had long ago seen the futility of trying to keep them out of the hands of a Montana boy. She simply shrugged. My father might have been troubled by my having both a pistol and a gun that could burn so much ammunition, but he only said, “Coyotes. Just coyotes.”

  I took the gun and shells from my grandfather and walked slowly out of the house, but once I was outside I ran to the stable. Within minutes I had saddled Nutty and was riding at a brisk trot out to some sagebrush hills and rimrock ravines where I often played. I didn’t actually think I’d see any coyotes out there, but I’d be far enough from the ranch that I could fire off as many rounds as I wanted without anyone hearing.

  I shot up that entire box of bullets. There was so much gunfire out there that afternoon that the ground glittered with my casings and Nutty became so accustomed to the shots that he grazed right through the barrage. After a while his ears didn’t even twitch at the continual pop-pop-pop.

  The .22 had very little recoil but after firing clip after clip, my hand and arm felt the effects. My hand tingled as if a low-level electrical current was passing through it, and my arm felt pleasantly loose and warm from the wrist to the shoulder.

  I could have used all that ammunition to improve my marksmanship, aiming carefully at my targets and slowly squeezing off one shot at a time, but I didn’t. Instead I tried to see how fast I could fire off a whole clip, shooting into the ground just to see the dirt fly. When I had a target (pinecones, branches, knotholes) I often fired at it from the hip or threw a hasty shot as I was whirling around. Most of the time I missed.

  But once. I shot and killed a magpie.

  He was teetering on a branch, his black feathers glistening like oil and his long tail wavering to steady him in the wind.

  Less than forty yards away, I brought the .22 quickly up to shoulder height and snapped off a shot with no more care than pointing my finger.

  The bird toppled from the branch, but in the instant of its fall it had enough life left—or perhaps it was only the wind—to open its wings and in so doing slow its descent.

  To confirm my kill I walked over to where the magpie lay. Its half-open, glassy green eye was already beginning to dust over. This wasn’t the first time I had killed something and it wouldn’t be the last, and I felt the way I often did, that extraordinary mixture of power and sadness, exhilaration and fear. But there was something new.

  I felt strangely calm, as if I had been in a state of high agitation but had now come down, my pulse returned to normal, my breathing slowed, my vision cleared. I needed that, I thought; I hadn’t even known it but I needed to kill something. The events, the discoveries, the secrets of the past few days—Marie’s illness, Uncle Frank’s sins, the tension between my father and mother—had excited something in me that wasn’t released until I shot a magpie out of a piñon pine.

  I felt the way I did when I woke from an especially disturbing and powerful dream. Even as the dream’s narrative escaped—like trying to hold water in your hand—its emotion stayed behind. Looking in the dead bird’s eye, I realized that these strange, unthought-of connections—sex and death, lust and violence, desire and degradation—are there, there, deep in even a good heart’s chambers.

  With my boot heel I dug a shallow depression in the hard-baked dirt and nudged the magpie into it. I kicked some dirt over the bird, just enough to dull the sheen of its feathers.

  I took a different route back to the ranch, riding slowly along a pine-covered ridge that looked down on McCormick Creek, a stream I sometimes fished. I was scouting for places where the water was high enough to give the trout pools to gather in.

  Less than a mile from the ranch, where the creek widened and was bordered by an expanse of rocky, sandy beach, on the near side I saw two men. I pulled up Nutty and watched until I could see who it was. Uncle Frank and my father were standing on the riverbank, and they seemed to be arguing. I was too far away to hear what they said, but they were gesturing angrily at each other and speaking over the other’s words.

  It was strange. From that height I noticed someth
ing I had never noticed before. I noticed how the two men were brothers in posture and attitude. Two men in dress pants and white shirts, each bent forward slightly at the waist almost as if he were leaning into the wind. Each pointed at the other like a schoolteacher scolding a pupil. And when each was done talking he leaned back, squared his shoulders, and put his hands on his hips—exactly the way my father stood while he listened to one of my excuses for not cutting the grass or doing some chore.

  I figured my father must have been confronting his brother over Marie’s accusations, and I wanted to get closer so I could hear what they were saying. I dismounted and, as quietly as I could, began to weave my way down the hill. About halfway down the trees thinned, so I had to stop or be seen. I hid behind a thick pine.

  I still couldn’t hear them, but I wasn’t sure if it was the distance or the fact that they had lowered their voices. Now they were barely speaking. Uncle Frank was backing away and muttering something. My father picked up a rock, wound up as if he were going to throw it as far as he could, then simply tossed it into the creek. I watched the splash to see if a trout rose to check it out as they sometimes will. Nothing. I wasn’t surprised. You weren’t likely to get a trout out in the middle of a shallow creek on a hot day.

  Then Frank took a sudden step toward my father. Frank’s arms were spread wide, beseechingly, yet his movement was so quick it seemed threatening.

  I still had my grandfather’s pistol, tucked inside the waistband of my jeans. I took it out, thumbed off the safety, and rested the gun against the stub of a branch. My view of Uncle Frank was unobstructed, and I steadied the sights on his head, right in front of his ear.

  The gun was unloaded, of course, but I wondered at that moment what might happen if it weren’t. And my first question wasn’t, could I pull the trigger; it was, could I, from that distance, with that weapon, under those conditions—the wind, the slope of the hill—hit my target. Only after I decided, probably not—an unfamiliar gun, its small caliber, my poor marksmanship—did I wonder what might happen if I killed my uncle. Would everyone’s problems be solved? Would my father be relieved? Could I get away with it?