by Ivan Doig
“The scientist can’t believe his ears. ‘What!? Another turtle?’ “ ‘Naturally,’ she tells him. ‘It’s turtles all the way down.’ ”
So, okay, I laughed in appreciation of Riley’s rendition and Mariah surfaced out of her deep think enough to chuckle at the back of her throat, too.
But Riley was just getting wound up. Now he crossed his arms on the table and leaned intently at me from that propped position, his shoulders square as the corners of a door, his voice suddenly impassioned.
“See, Jick, that’s the way something like this centennial usually gets looked at. Turtles all the way down. Hell, it starts right here in Virginia City—the turtle of brave pioneers, like the vigilantes here making windchimes out of outlaws. And next the cattle kingdom turtle.” Riley put his hands side by side on the table and pretended to type with his eyes shut: “Montana as the last grass heaven, end of the longhorn trail. It takes a little more effort with sheepherders than it does with cowboys, no offense intended, Jick, but there can be the sheep empire turtle too, woollies on every sidehill from hell to breakfast. And don’t forget the Depression turtle, hard times on good people. Come all the way to today and there’s the dying little town turtle. Or the suffering farmer turtle. Or the”—my distinct hunch is that he was about to say something like “the obsolete rancher turtle” but caught himself in time—“the scenic turtle, Montana all perfect sky and mountains and plains, still the best place to lay your eyes on even after a hundred years of hard use.”
Riley finally seemed to be turtled out, and in fact declared: “I am just goddamn good and tired of stacking up turtles, in what I write. It’s time, for me anyway,” here he laid a gaze on Mariah, who received it with narrowed eyes but stayed silent, “to junk the old usual stuff I do. If my stories in this series are going to be anything, I want them to be about what goes on inside that usual stuff. Inside the goddamn turtle shell.”
For me, this required some wrinkling inside the head. Granted that Riley’s writing intentions were pure, which is a major grant from someone as skeptical toward him as I was, how the dickens was he going to go about this inside-the-turtle approach? Just for instance, I still was perturbed that the Big Hole haying, say, had been bypassed. To Riley and evidently Mariah as well, the Big Hole as an oldfangled hay kingdom qualified as usual stuff, known like a catechism from one end of Montana to the other. Yet not nearly a worn-out topic to me, who first heard of it before either of them was ever born. My first wages in life were earned as a scatter raker for my uncle Pete Reese, in the hayfields of the ranch I now owned. Those summers, when I was fourteen and fifteen and sixteen, daydreams rode the rake with me. The most persistent one was of traveling to the storied Big Hole, hiring on to a haying crew there, spending a bunkhouse summer in that temporary nation of hayhands and workhorses. Quite possibly take a summer name for myself; even there in Pete’s little Noon Creek crew you might put up hay with a guy called Moxie or Raw Bacon Slim or Candy Sam all season, then when he was paid off find out that the name on his paycheck was Milton Huttleby or some such. Sure as hell take a different summer age for myself, older than my actual years—although it is hard now to remember that seething youngster urge for more age—and then do my utmost to live up to the job of Big Hole scatter raker there in the mighty fields ribbed to the horizon with windrows, hay the universe around me and even under me as the stuffing in the gunny sack cushion which throned my rake seat, the leather reins in my hands like great kite lines to the pair of rhythmically tugging horse outlines in front of me.
As I say, the Big Hole and its storied haying was a dream, in the sense that a world war and other matters claimed the summers when I might have gone and done. But that dream was a seed of who I am, too, for imagination does not sprout of nothing.
My haydream reverie was abruptly ended when I heard a bump behind me as someone stumbled into a chair and then a corresponding bump a little farther away, evidently a couple of customers finding their way to the table next to ours.
“It’s even darker in here than it looks, Henry. How do they do that?” a female whisper inquired.
“They must use trick lighting somehow,” came the male reply in an undervoice.
Meanwhile Mariah was staying cooped up with whatever was on her picture-taking mind while Riley was gandering off into the domain of the bartender behind her and me. Unusually thinkful, for a guy as wired up as him.
It didn’t seem to me silence was normal for either of these two, so I was about to try and jog Mariah by asking if her notion about photographs was the same as Riley’s about words, internal turtle work, when suddenly Riley’s face announced inspiration. Quick as that, the sonofagun looked as if he had the world on a downhill pull.
“I see the piece!” he divulged.
Mariah sat up as if she’d just been shaken awake and peered at him through the bar gloom. “Where?”
“Here.” He whomped his hand on the table. “This.”
I squinted at the shellacked surface. “What, you’re going to write about this table?”
“Gentleman and lady, you mistake me,” Riley let us know in the bartender’s Shakespeare tone of voice. “Not this table. This bar, and its innumerable ancestors the width and breadth, nay, the very depth, of our parched state. A piece about bars and bartenders! What do you say to that, Mariah Montana?”
Mariah took the last swig of her Calvert as if to strengthen herself, then studied Riley. What she said to it was, “This place? Get real.”
He only mm-hmmed and rubbernecked past us to the bartender’s domain as if trying to read the small print on the bottles. I could see Mariah gathering to jump him some more about this bar brainstorm of his, demand to know how the hell she was supposed to take a picture in here that wouldn’t look like midnight in a coal bin. Myself, I thought Riley had finally hatched a halfway decent idea. There is just no denying that bars seem as natural to a lot of Montanans as caves to bears.
“Why don’t we have another round,” Riley was all sweet persuasion to Mariah now, “and talk it over,” meaning his piece notion. Figuring that anything which might conceivably steer the two of them back on the track of their series was all to the good, I swung around in my chair to signal for the further round of drinks.
The bartender had changed sex.
That is to say, the handlebar specimen was gone and the ’tender now was a young woman—I say young; they all look young to me any more—in a low-cut red velvet outfit and brunette hair that lopped down on both sides long and crinkly like the ears of a spaniel and with a smile you could see from an airplane.
Need I say, it was a short hop to the conclusion that Riley’s story idea about bars and their ’tenders had been fostered with the change of shifts which brought this female version onto the Goldpanner scene. Be that as it may, the velvet smiler was in charge of our liquid. I held up an indicative glass and called over, “We’ll have another round of jelly sandwiches here, please, Miss,” a word which brought Mariah’s head sharply around.
I thought the new mode of bartender blinked at Riley a little quizzically when he beamed up at her and specified another G-ball, but maybe she was just that way, because when she brought the drinks her comment came out, “There you go?” and when she stated the damages, that too had a question curl on the end of it: “That’ll be seven dollars and fifty cents?”
I don’t know, is it possible that the more teeth there are in your smile, the less of anything you have higher up in your head? Watching Riley and this young lady exchange dental gleams, the theory did occur to me.
No sooner had Miss Bliss departed from us than Riley was onto his feet saying: “Actually, maybe I better go talk to her while she’s not busy and find out how she goes about it.” He gave Mariah a look of scrubbed innocence. “Bartending, that is.”
“Riley,” Mariah said too quietly, “you can go spread yourself on her like apple butter for all I care. I had my lifetime share of your behavior when we were married.”
“Behavior?” Surprise and worse now furrowed the brow under his curly dance of hair. “What the hell is that supposed to mean, behavior? You never had any cause to complain about other women during our marriage.”
“Oh, right,” she said caustically. “What about that blond in Classified?”
“That doesn’t count!” he answered, highly offended. “You and I were already separated then!”
With deadly evenness Mariah told him, “It all counts.”
Riley seemed honestly baffled as he stared down at her. “What’s got you on the prod? If it bothers you to see me have a”—he gave a quick glimpse in my direction—“social life, then look the other way.”
“It wouldn’t work,” she levied on him next. “I’d just see you circling around to your next candidate to fuck.”
Right there on the ef word my daughter’s voice changed from anger to pain. And as if that kind of anguish is catching, Riley’s tone sounded as afflicted as hers when he responded:
“Goddamn it, Mariah, you know I never played around while we were married. You know that.” Silence was the best he could get from her on that. “What I do now is my own aff—business.”
Mariah rattled the ice in her glass like a castanet. “Not if it interferes with the series. We were going to talk over your piece idea, you said.”
“All right, let’s talk and get it over with.”
“Not with you standing there hot to trot.”
Riley abruptly sat.
“You’re rushing into this stupid bartender idea,” Mariah began.
“My bartender idea is the best shot we’ve got,” Riley began simultaneously.
“I think they’re having a fight,” the next-table woman whispered.
“I think you’re right,” the male undertone subscribed.
I would have refereed if I had known where to start. Riley, though, wasn’t going to sit still for Mariah to pull his inspiration out from under him. “All righty right, you stay here and stew,” he left her with as he scraped his chair back from the table. “I’ll be over there doing the piece.” With that he was away, taking up residence at the cash register end of the bar where the brunette item of contention had stationed herself. The solar increase of her smile showed that she didn’t at all mind being Riley’s topic.
I was beginning to see why Mariah had wanted me along as an ally against this guy. A paratroop battalion was about what it would take to jump on Riley adequately.
“Mariah, petunia,” I tried to assuage, “that mophead is not worth—”
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” she said in that too quiet way again. A sipping silence was all that followed that, from either of us. Spark patterns of light from the tiny bulbs trembled on the dim walls. Twinkle, twinkle, little bar. I watched Mariah watch Riley. He was right in one respect, she ought not to care how he conducted his life now that they were split. All too plainly, she cared with her every fiber. I don’t know. Maybe a person simply cannot help getting the willies about what might have been.
Riley’s sugared conversation with his story topic was going on and on and on. At last, though, here he came sashaying back to our table and in a not very good imitation of a matter of fact voice, wanted to know:
“What about a picture?”
Mariah eyed him as if he had slithered up through a crack in the floor.
“What about one, cradle robber?”
“Come on, Mariah, don’t be that way. Honest to Christ, I was going to do a bartender piece even before Kimi just happened to come on shift.”
“Kimi!?” Mariah voiced disbelievingly. “Riley, the only taste you’ve got is in your mouth.”
Riley rolled his eyes and stared at the barroom ceiling as if the letters p-a-t-i-e-n-c-e were inscribed up there. “Just out of curiosity. Flash, what’re you going to tell the BB when my written part lands in there and no picture with it?”
Mariah gave him a world record glower. Then she all but leapt out of the chair, tornadoed over to the end of the bar, began exhuming electrical cords and lightstands out of her camera baggage, and proceeded to aim into the targeted area of the bartending brunette. Next she pulled out what looked alarmingly like a quiver for arrows, but proved to be full of small white reflecting umbrellas which she positioned various whichways to throw more light on Kimi. Prang prang prang, Mariah yanked the legs of her tripod into extension.
“Henry, look at those people now!” from the lead whisperer.
“Isn’t this something?” murmured its chorister.
“Kimi, sweetie, give us your biggest smile, if you know which one that is,” Mariah directed in a kind of gritted tone as she aimed her light meter pistola at the bar maiden. Riley was hanging around right there handy, but she called out to me, “Jick, could you come hold this?”
I gingerly went over to the action area. Mariah thrust me an empty beer glass. “Hold it steady right there,” she decreed, positioning the glass about nose-high out in the air in front of me and then stepping back behind the tripod and sighting her camera through the glass at Kimi.
Being in the shine of all the lights was making Kimi positively incandescent. Through her smile she emitted, “This is totally, like, exciting?”
Click, and some more quick triggerings of the shutter, and Mariah was icily informing Riley the picture of the piece was achieved and the rest was up to him, then unplugged and dismantled the lights and the rest of the paraphernalia in about a second and a half and rampaged back to our table and her Calvert and water.
I joined her, but of course Riley stayed hovering at the bar. I will say, he was laying it on thicker with his tongue than I could have with a trowel. He would mouth something sparkling, Kimi would mouth something, he would laugh, she would laugh—after a bit, Mariah declared: “If I have to watch any more of this I’ll turn diabetic.” Out she went to the Winnebago.
I am not naturally nocturnal. Not enough to sit around in a tourist bar into the whee hours while watching Riley lay siege to Kimi, at least. I drained the last of my drink and headed to the bar.
As I approached, Kimi was wanting to know where he got such a wild pair of contact lenses—“You can, like, color each eye different, I mean?”—and with a straight face Riley drawled that they were a hard-to-find kind called aw, natural. Then he was inquiring of her in a confidential way, “Okay now, Kimi, serious question. If I just came in here from Mars and asked for a drink, what would you give me?” Granted, he did have the notebook open in front of him. Maybe he was mixing business with pleasure, a little.
Kimi smiled a mile and said, “Oh, wow, I guess maybe a slow comfortable screw?”
Riley looked as if his ears could not believe their good fortune. My God, I thought to myself, does it just jump into his lap this way?
Kimi kept the smile beamed on him as she asked, “You know what that is, don’t you?” Before Riley could muster an answer, which would have been highly interesting to hear, she was explaining: “It’s sloe gin, Southern Comfort, and orange juice, like in a screwdriver? Get it? A Sloe Comfortable—”
“Got it,” Riley vouched, trying not to look crestfallen. He downed a long restorative drag of his G-ball, evidently thinking furiously about how to get past that smile of Kimi’s. Now he noticed me and frowned. “Something on your mind besides your hat, Jick?”
Something was, yes. A couple of somethings. How Riley and Mariah behaved toward each other wasn’t any of my business, theoretically. Yet if you don’t feel strongly enough about it to take sides with your own offspring, what in the hell did you spend the years raising the kid for? So on Mariah’s behalf my intention had been to deliver some snappy comment to Riley that would let him know what a general louse he was being. But instead I seemed to be seeing myself, from the outside—I know that sounds freaky; it was freaky—standing there in a remembered way. As if I had stepped into a moment where I’d already been once: a waiting man beside me, his arm on the bar, a woman equally near: myself somehow suspended in the polar pull between them. Or wa
s I imagining. Three scotch and waters will start the imagination going, I suppose. Whatever it swam in, the strange is-this-then-or-now remembering suddenly became not this bar but the Medicine Lodge, not this Riley-Kimi recipe but Stanley Meixell and Velma Simms. Velma in that long-ago time had been Gros Ventre’s divorce champion, thrice married in an era that believed once ought to be plenty for anybody. That Fourth of July and others of the Depression years, she in her slacks of magical tightness served as timekeeper at the Gros Ventre rodeo, in charge of the whistle that signaled time’s up during bronc rides; as one of the yearning hangers-on around the bucking chutes pointed out, “Think of all the pucker practice she’s had.” Stanley was . . . Stanley. The original forest ranger of the Two Medicine National Forest, who forfeited that million-acre job when his oldest friend, my father, turned him in for his hopeless drinking. Stanley who came back out of nowhere into our lives that summer of 1939 and freed our family of as much pain as he could. Who perched on that Medicine Lodge bar stool timelessly, the back of his neck lined and creased as if he’d been sleeping on chicken wire but the front of him durable enough to draw Velma Simms snuggling onto the bar stool close beside him. And there in the heat field between that woman and that man after I had popped in innocent as a day-old colt to discuss a matter with Stanley, I was the neutral element. The spectating zero rendered neutral by circumstances. Circumstantial youth, in that fifteenth summer of my life. Circumstantial widowerhood now.
“Jick?” Riley was asking. “Jick, are you okay?”
“Uh, you bet,” I answered although I could feel that the backs of my hands were sweating as they do when my nerves are most upset. Spooky, how utter and complete, how faithful, that spasm of memory had seemed. As if there were furrows behind my brow, interior wrinkles to match the tracks of age across my forehead, and that memory out of nowhere clicked exactly into those grooves. I drew a breath and managed, “As good as a square guy can be in a round world, anyway. Just wanted to tell you, I’m calling it a night.”
