by Ivan Doig
“My name is Nick Russo. I came into this country after the Second World War. Oh, I’d been west before, kind of. See, when I went into the Civilian Conservation Corps in ’34, just a punk kid from an alley in Philadelphia, the next thing I knew I was on a fireline in that big Selway forest fire in Idaho. Then I went from the CCC straight into the Army, so I was already a sergeant when the war hit. I saw Montana from a troop train and that was it for me. Little towns with all that land and sky around them. Right there I told myself that when my military time was in, if I lived to get my time in, I’d come out here and see if I could make something of myself.”
On our minds. I could agree with Mariah there. We wear what has happened to us like a helmet soldered on.
Off the freeway to our right, the lights of the town of Boulder, which signaled the caravan’s next stop and swap of Riley.
The used cars, a used man in each, move on.
“My name is Bud Aronson and I was a packer until I got too stove up to do it any more. What you maybe want to hear from me happened when I was pretty much in the prime of life, back about 1955, and figured I could handle just about anything that came along, until this did. That hunting season I was running a pack string into the Bob Marshall Wilderness, so when there was a plane crash way back in there, I was the guy the search party sent for to bring the two bodies out. The plane had slammed into a mountain, pretty high up, and so the first thing I did was wrap the bodies in a tarp apiece just as they were and then we slid them on the snow down the mountain to the trailhead where we had to camp that night. See, my intention was to fold each body facedown across a packsaddle the next morning. But that night turned clear and cold, and in the morning we could not get those bodies to bend. Of all the packing I had ever done, this was a new one on me, how to fit those stiff bodies onto packhorses. What I finally did was take the biggest packhorse I had and sling both bodies onto it in a barrel-hitch tie, one lengthwise along each side for balance like you would with sides of meat. But that was the worst I ever handled, balancing that cargo of what had been men.”
On a straight stretch where the Bago’s headlights steadily fed the freeway into our wheels, I cast another quick glance over at Mariah. The interiors of the two of us inside this chamber of vehicle; caves within the cave of night. What does it take to see the right colors of life? Whether or not that was on her mind as on mine, Mariah too was intent. She sat staring straight ahead through the windshield as though she could pierce the night to that frontmost car where Riley was listening and recording.
The night flew by the motorhome’s windows as I thought over whether to say the turbulence in me or to keep on trying not to.
“I’m Julius Walker. This is tough to tell. But if you want to know the big things about each of our lives, this has got to be mine. Quite a number of people lost a son over there in Vietnam. But my wife and I lost our daughter Sharon. All through high school in Dutton, what she wanted most was to be a nurse. She went on and took the nursing course at Columbus Hospital there in Great Falls and then figured she’d get to see some of the world by going into the Army. I kick myself every day of my life since, that I didn’t try to talk her out of that. She ended up at the evacuation hospital at a place called Cu Chi. Sharon was killed right there on the base, in a mortar attack. They eventually found out there were tunnels everywhere under Cu Chi. The Americans were right on top of a whole nest of Viet Cong. Good God Almighty, what were those sonsabitches Johnson and Nixon thinking about, getting us into something like that?”
“Mariah,” it broke out of me, “I don’t think I can go on with this.”
In the dimness of the Bago’s cab her face whitely swung around to me, surprise there I more could feel than see.
A minute of nothing said. The pale glow of the dashlights seemed a kind of visible silence between us.
Then she asked, her eyes still steady on me: “What brought this on?”
Here was opportunity served up under parsley, wasn’t it. Why, then, didn’t I speak the answer that would have included her situation with Riley and my own with the memory flood unloosed by the sight of Shirley in Missoula, the sound of Toussaint’s voice ventriloquizing in me at the buffalo range, the war report of bald ghost warrior Ed Heaney, the return of Big Hole longings across fifty years, the ambush of Pat Hoy’s lonesome death, the poised-beside-the-bar sensation again of Stanley Meixell and Velma Simms and the mystery of man and woman; the answer, simply but totally, “All this monkeying around with the past.”
Instead I said, “I’m not sure I’m cut out for this rambling life, is all. With you newspaper people, it’s long days and short nights.”
“There’s more to it than that, though, isn’t there,” Mariah stated.
“Okay, so there is,” I admitted, wondering how to go on with the confession that I was being spooked silly by things out of the past. “It’s—”
“—the ranch, isn’t it,” she helpfully spliced on for me. “You worry about the place like you were a mother cat and it was your only kitten.”
“Well, yeah, sure,” I acknowledged. “I can’t help but have the place on my mind some.”
The caravan resumes speed, into a curve of the highway, another bend toward the past.
“And I’m Jerome Walker. If there’s one thing in my life that surprises me, it’s that I’ve ended up in a city. Yeah, yeah, I know Great Falls isn’t Los Angeles or New York. But pretty damn near, compared to how Julius and me grew up out in the hills between Cascade and Augusta on our folks’ cow outfit. The home place there had been our granddad’s homestead, and I suppose I grew up thinking the Walkers were as natural to that country as the jackrabbits. But I turned out to be the one who cashed it all in, back in 1976, when the wife and I moved in to the Falls to live on our rocking chair money. I suppose in earlier times we’d have just moved to town, Cascade or Augusta either one. A lot of towns in those days had streets of retired ranchers they’d call something like Horse Thief Row, you know. But our kids were already in the Falls, in their jobs there, and naturally the grandkids were an attraction. So we went in, too. It’s still kind of like being in another country. I about fell over, the first time I went downtown in the Falls and heard a grown man in a suit and tie say, ‘Bye bye.’ ”
“I’ll make you a deal,” this Mariah Montana daughter of mine resorted to. “If you want to check on the place so bad, we’ll all three go on up to the ranch just as soon as we’re done in Helena, how about. Riley and I have got to do some pieces along the High Line anyway, and there’s no real reason why we can’t swing through the Two country getting there. How’s that sound?”
Sweet enough to whistle to. I kept my eyes on the dark unfolding road while I asked: “And then?”
“Then you decide. After you’ve looked things over at the ranch, if you still think you’d rather be on your lonesome than . . .” she let the rest drift.
I sat up straighter behind the steering wheel. Maybe I was going to be able to disengage from this traveling ruckus fairly simply after all. “You got yourself a deal,” I told Mariah with fresh heartiness.
Ahead of us the signal of blinks danced out of the night one more time. As the entire series of cars pulled over to stop again, Roger Tate’s van now had become the last in line in front of us. In our headlights the sticker on Roger’s rear bumper declared: DIRTY OLD MAN, HELL—I’M A SEXY SENIOR CITIZEN.
Mariah mused, “We ought to get a bumper sticker of some kind for the Bago.”
Driver seven, the last who has become first.
“My name is Dale Starr. What I want to talk about is, am I losing my g.d. mind or are things repeating theirselves? I’ve tried to do a little thinking about it. The way all the bad I’ve seen in my lifetime and figured we’d put behind us seems to be coming around again now. People losing their farms and ranches. Stores out of business. All the country’s money being thrown around like crazy on Wall Street. How come we can’t ever learn to do better than that? Of course we know the weather
has got some kind of a more or less basis of repeating itself. Nature does have its son-of-a-bitch side too, doesn’t it. Like the big thirty-year winters, 1886 and 1919 and 1948 and 1978. And the drought just after the First World War and again in the thirties and again these past years now. But I guess what I keep wondering is, shouldn’t human beings have a little more control over theirselves than the weather does over itself?”
As he finishes, into view glow the lights of Helena, thousands of gemmed fires, each a beacon of some life young or old.
Dawn is when I have always liked life most, the forming hour or so before true day, and that next morning at the Prickly Pear RV Park, with Mariah up extra early to develop her shots of the Baloney Express contingent, I went out to sit on a picnic table and watch Helena show off its civic ornaments in the daybreak light. The dark copper dome of the state capitol. The Catholic Cathedral’s set of identical twin steeples. The pale Arabianlike spire of the Civic Center. My favorite, though, stood perched on the high side of Last Chance Gulch, above the historic buildings downtown; the old fire watchtower up on four long legs of strutwork. Like a belltower carefully brought to where it could sound alarm into every street when needed. What a daystarting view it must be from there, out over the spread city and this broad shallow bowl of cultivated valley and the clasping ring of mountains all around.
In what seemed just another minute, the sun was up. That’s the trouble with dawn, it doesn’t last.
A joggedy-joggedy sound interrupted the quiet morning. Riley was out for his run. Mariah had already done her Jane exercises on the floor of the Bago. These two kept everything about themselves toned up except their heads. I watched as Riley rounded the endmost motorhome and cantered along the loop road toward the Bago and myself. He ran in a quick pussyfoot style, up on his toes as if dancing across hot coals.
“Feel better?” I greeted him as he trudged into our site, gulping air into his heaving chest.
“There’s nothing like it,” he panted, “except maybe chasing cars.”
For a change, I didn’t feel on the outright warpath against the guy, pacified as I was with the prospect of getting home to Noon Creek later today and not budging from there when Mariah and him set out to invade the rest of Montana. Let history whistle through their ears all it wanted. Mine were ready for a rest. So it was without actual malice, just kind of clinically, that I pointed out the bare wheelhub where the hubcap had flown off after Riley’s tire-changing job of last night, and he gave a wheezing sigh and a promise to add a new hubcap onto the expense account along with the buffalohead dent in the hood. He’d regained some oxygen by now and started to take himself into the Bago for a shower.
“Whup, off limits yet,” I warned. “Mariah’s souping film.”
Riley nodded to save precious breath. As he dragged over and draped onto the picnic table beside me to wait, I couldn’t help but notice his running costume. Skintight and shiny, it made him look like he’d had a coat of black paint applied from the waist down to just above his knees. I let my curiosity ask: “What’s that Spandex stuff made of?”
“Melted money,” Riley formulated. “It’d be a whole lot cheaper to just do a Colter, I do admit.”
As John Colter was the mountain man who was stripped naked and barefoot by the Blackfeet and given a few hundred yards headstart before they began chasing him over the prairie with murderous intent—talk about a marathon—I pleasantly enough passed the time imagining Riley in nude version hotfooting it across this valley going oo! ow! on the prickly pear cactuses.
But shortly the side door of the Bago opened and Mariah poked her head out and gave the all clear. She studied Riley in his running getup. “Good morning, Thunder Thighs.”
In actual fairness, Riley’s legs were not truly scrawny; but sectioned as they were into the top portion of pore-hugging black fabric and the elongation of contrasting skinwhite below, they did kind of remind a person of the telescoped-out legs on Mariah’s tripod. But she’d said what she said with a grin, and although Riley gave her a considerable look, he decided not to go into combat over his lower extremities and instead asked, “How’d your geezer shots come out?”
“Show you after breakfast,” she said, and somewhat to my surprise they both kept to their best behavior through that meal. Oh, still several tastes short of being sweet to each other, but civil, ever so carefully civil. Who knows, maybe it was only the temporary influence of my cheffing of venison sausage patties and baking powder biscuits swimming in milk gravy, or that Riley still was feeling sunny due to his epic of the Baloney Expressers, but in any event he perused Mariah’s exactly apt photographic rendition of those seven bent-over elderly behinds judiciously clustered around the flat tire, seats of wisdom if there ever were, then he actually said: “Helluva picture, shooter. How good are you going to get?”
The little toss of her head, which stayed cocked slightly sideways as she eyed back at him. “How good is there?”
I honestly figured I was contributing to the general civility with my question. True, there was the consideration that the sooner I could get these two budged from Helena, the quicker we could motate to the ranch and I could see what that situation was. In any case, I asked: “So what kind of piece are you two going to do here today?”
Mariah looked brightly across at Riley. “We were just about to talk that over, weren’t we.”
“Ready when you are,” Mister Geniality confirmed.
Her gaze at him stayed determinedly unclouded. “Mmm hmm. Well, I wondered if you had anything for here squirreled away in your notes.”
“Actually, I did jot down one idea,” he granted, spearing another biscuit.
“Trot it on out.”
“I just absolutely think it captures the essence of early Helena.”
“Sounds good. What is it?”
“You maybe won’t be real keen on it.”
“Why won’t I? Come on, let’s hear it.”
“Promise not to get sore?”
“Riley, will you quit dinking around and just tell me what the fuck it is? I promise I’m not going to get sore, cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die, will that do? Now then. What’s this great Helena idea of yours?”
“Whores.”
“What?”
“See, you’re sore. I knew you would be.”
Mariah expended a breath that should have swayed the trees outside. “I. Am. Not. Sore. But here we need some humongous idea for Helena and you come up with—”
“Pioneer businesswomen. Is that better?”
“Not hardly,” she spoke the words like two cubes of ice. “Riley, take a reality check on yourself, will you? I am not going to burn film for that old half-assed male fantasy of prostitutes who just happen to be selling their bodies so they can save up to go to ballet school.”
“That’s just it. The wh—prostitutes here in Helena weren’t. They were hard-headed real estate investors.”
Mariah eyed Riley without mercy, trying to see if he was on the level. I have got to say, from the expression on his face his motive seemed purely horizontal. After a long moment she told him: “Say more.”
Boiled down, Riley’s discourse was about how, for a while back in the last century, the really quite extensive red-light district of Helena generated the funds for some of its, uhmm, practitioners to buy their own places of enterprise and that, whether you approved of their profession or not, their sense of local investment made them civic mothers just as much as any downtown mercantilist was a civic father. It of course didn’t last, he said; that self-owned tenderloin trade went the way of other small frontier capitalists, done in by bigger market forces. But why shouldn’t he and Mariah tell the story of those women, who’d tried to hold onto some financial independence in their desperate lives, just as readily as they would the one of some pioneer conniver who’d made his pile selling dry goods? I had to admit, it was something to think about. Who qualifies when it comes to history. Mariah too seemed to be mulling pretty hard by the time Rile
y got done dissertating.
From some distance off came the sound of someone opening the side door of a rig and announcing, “Going to be another hot one today, Hazel.”
• • •
Mariah at last granted that Riley’s idea was maybe worth a try but-he’d-better-know-what-he-was-talking-about-and-not-make-this-just-some-dippy-piece-about-whores-with-hearts-of-gold et cetera and when the newspaper aces went up to the state historical society to search out old photos of that domestically owned red-light district, I decided to tag along.
I ought to have known better than to hope that the two of them would get their photographic digging over with in a hurry and we could head to the Two country while the day was yet young, though. After some hours of killing time in the historical society I had all but memorized the countless exhibits about Montana’s past. I had squinted at every everloving piece of the cowboy art of Charley Russell, reminded all the while of what Riley had said in one of his most notorious columns, that Montanans were as proud of the guy as if he had been Bertrand or Jane. By then my feet were like walking on a pair of toothaches and so I trudged upstairs one more time to check the place’s library, where Mariah and Riley had said they’d meet me as soon as they surfaced from the photograph archives. Naturally, no trace of either of them. But this time I decided I would just find a place to sit until they eventually presented themselves.
Yet sitting doing nothing is not my best pastime either. Particularly not in a library, for it brought to mind Marcella, the winter we started going together when she was the librarian in Gros Ventre and I was conspicuously her most frequent patron.
No, I told myself, don’t let it happen, don’t get yourself swept up in one of those memory storms. My mind determinedly in neutral, I watched the library traffic. Over behind the librarian’s desk was a distinguished guy wearing a tie and a mustache both, and though he was no Marcella he looked more or less civil. People came up to ask him various things, but I could hear that about every second one of them was pursuing genealogy.
