English Creek

by Ivan Doig

  For information’s sake, I leaned around Leona and peered over the hood of the car. And was met by startled stares from Ted and Thelma Tracy—Leona’s parents—and another couple with whom they were seated on a blanket and carrying on a conversation.

  “Your folks are looking real good,” I mumbled as I pulled my head back to normal. “Nice to see them so.”

  Leona, though, had shifted attention from me to the specimen of horseflesh at the other end of the reins I was holding. “Riding in style, aren’t you?” she admired.

  “His name is Mouse,” I confided. “Though if he was mine, I’d call him, uh, Chief Joseph.”

  Leona slowly revolved her look from the horse to me, the way the beam of a lighthouse makes its sweep. Then asked: “Why not Crazy Horse?”

  From Leona that was tiptop humor, and I yukked about six times as much as I ordinarily would have. And in the meantime was readying myself. After all, that brother of mine had written the prescription he wanted from me: entertain her.

  “Boy, I’ll have to remember that. And you know, that reminds me of one. Did you ever hear the joke about the Chinaman and the Scotchman in a rowboat on the Sea of Galilee?”

  Leona shook her head. Luck was with me. This was my father’s favorite joke, one I had heard him tell to other Forest Service guys twenty times; the heaviest artillery I could bring to bear.

  “Well, see, there was a Chinaman and a Scotchman together in a rowboat on the Sea of Galilee. Fishing away, there. And after a while the Chinaman puts down his fishing pole and he leans over and nudges the Scotchman and says, ‘Jock, tell me. Is is true what they say about Occidental women?’ And the Scotchman says, ‘Occidental, hell. I’m cerrtain as anything that they behave the way they do on purrpose!’ ”

  I absolutely believed I had done a royal job of telling, even burring the R’s just right. But a little crimp of puzzlement now punctuated Leona’s smiling face, right between her eyes. She asked: “The Sea of Galilee?”

  I cast a wide look around for Alec. Or even Earl Zane, whom I would rather fight with one hand in my pocket than try to explain a joke to somebody who didn’t get it. “Yeah. But you see, that isn’t—”

  Just then, Mouse got into the act. Why he could not have waited another two minutes until I had found a way to dispatch myself from Leona; why it didn’t come into his horse brain any other time of the day up until that very moment; why—but no why about it, he was proceeding, directly in front of where Leona and I were sharing the fender, to take his leak.

  The hose on a horse is no small sight anyway during this process. But with Leona there six feet away spectating, Mouse’s seemed to poke down, down, down.

  I cleared my throat and examined the poles of the arena fence and then the posts that supported the poles and then the sky over the posts and then crossed and uncrossed my arms a few times, and still the downpour continued. A wild impulse raised in me: Mouse’s everlasting whiz reminded me of Dode Withrow spraddled atop that boulder the second day of this unprecedented summer, and I clamped my jaw to keep from blurting to Leona that scene and the handhold joke. That would be about like you, John Angus McCaskill. Celebrate disaster with a dose of social suicide. Do it up right.

  Meanwhile Leona continued to serenely view the spectacle as if it was the fountains of Rome.

  “I’ll take over now, Jicker.” Alec’s voice came from behind us; he had circled outside of the arena on the bay horse. Peals of angel song could not have come more welcome. “How’d he do as company, Leona?”

  Leona shined around at Alec, then turned back to bestow me a final glint. And answered: “He’s a wonder.”

  • • •

  I mounted up and cleared out of there; Alec and Leona all too soon would be mooning over each other like I didn’t exist anyway; and as promptly as I was out of eyeshot behind the catch pen at the far end of the arena I gave Mouse a jab in the ribs that made him woof in surprise. Chief Joseph, my rosy hind end.

  But I suppose my actual target was life. This situation of being old enough to be on the edge of everything and too young to get to the middle of any of it.

  • • •

  “Hi,” Ray Heaney greeted as I climbed onto the arena fence beside him. The grin-cuts were deep into his face and the big front teeth were out on parade. Ray could make you feel that your arrival was the central event in his recent life. “What’ve you been up to?”

  “Oh”—summary seemed so far out of the question, I chose neutrality—“about the usual. You?”

  “Pilot again.” So saying, Ray held up his hands to show his calluses. One hard oblong bump across the base of each finger, like sets of knuckles on his palms. I nodded in commendation. My shovel calluses were mosquito bites in comparison. This made the second summer Ray was stacking lumber in his father’s lumber yard—the “pile it here, pile it there” nature of that job was what produced the “pilot” joke—and his hands and forearms were gaining real heft.

  Now Ray thrust his right mitt across to within reach of mine. “Shake the hand that shook the hand?” he challenged. It was a term we had picked up from his father—Ray could even rumble it just like Ed Heaney’s bass-drum voice—who remembered it from his own boyhood in Butte when guys still went around saying “Shake the hand that shook the hand of John L. Sullivan,” the heavyweight boxing champ of then.

  I took Ray up on the hand duel, even though I pretty well knew how this contest of ours was going to turn out from now on. We made a careful fit of the handshake grip; then Ray chanted the start, “One, two, three.”

  After about a minute of mutual grunted squeezing, I admitted: “Okay. I’m out-squoze.”

  “You’ll get me next time,” Ray said. “Didn’t I see Alec riding around acting like a calf roper?”

  • • •

  Some years before, Ed Heaney had driven out from Gros Ventre to the ranger station one summer Saturday to talk forest business with my father. And with him, to my surprise and no little consternation, came his son my age, Ray. I could see perfectly damn well what was intended here, and that’s the way it did happen. Off up the South Fork our fathers rode to eyeball a stand of timber which interested Ed for buckrake teeth he could sell at his lumber yard, and Ray and I were left to entertain one another.

  Living out there at English Creek I always was stumped about what of my existence would interest any other boy in the world. There was the knoll with the view all the way to the Sweetgrass Hills, but somehow I felt that might not hold the fascination for others that it did for me. Ordinarily horses would have been on hand to ride, the best solution to the situation, but the day before, Isidor Pronovost and some CCC guys had taken all the spare ones in a big packstring to set up a spike camp for a tree-planting crew. Alec was nowhere in the picture as a possible ally; this was haying time and he was driving the scatter rake for Pete Reese. The ranger station itself was no refuge; the sun was out and my mother would never let us get away with lolling around inside, even if I could think up a reasonable loll. Matters were not at all improved by the fact that, since I still was going to the South Fork grade school and Ray went in Gross Ventre, we only knew each other by sight.

  He was a haunting kid to look at. His eyes were within long deep-set arcs, as if always squinched the way you do to thread a needle. And curved over with eyebrows which wouldn’t need to have been much thicker to make a couple of respectable blond mustaches. And then a flattish nose which, wide as it was, barely accommodated all the freckles assigned to it. When Ray really grinned—I didn’t see that this first day, although I was to see it thousands of times in the years ahead—deep slice-lines cut his cheeks, out opposite the corners of his mouth. Like a big set of parentheses around the grin. His lower lip was so full that it too had a slice-line under it. This kid looked more as if he’d been carved out of a pumpkin than born. Also, even more so than a lot of us at that age, his front teeth were far ahead of the rest of him in size. In any schoolyard there always were a lot of traded jibes of “Beaver to
oth!” but Ray’s frontals really did seem as if they’d been made for toppling willows.

  As I say, haunting. I have seen grown men, guys who ordinarily wouldn’t so much as spend a glance at a boy on the street, stop and study that face of Ray’s. And here he was, thank you a whole hell of a lot, my guest for this day at English Creek.

  So we were afoot with one another and not knowing what to do about it, and ended up wandering the creek bank north of the ranger station, with boredom building up pretty fast in both of us. Finally, I got the idea of showing him the pool a little ways downstream in English Creek where brook trout always could be seen, hanging there dark in the clear water. In fact, I asked Ray if he felt like fishing, but for some reason he looked at me a little suspiciously and mumbled, “Huh uh.”

  We viewed the pool, which took no time at all, and then thrashed on along in the creek brush for awhile, just to be doing anything. It was semi-swampy going, so at least we could concentrate on jumping across the wet holes. Ray was dressed in what I suppose his mother thought were old enough clothes to go into the country with, but his old clothes were so noticeably ritzier than my everyday ones that he maybe was embarrassed about that. Anyway, for whatever reason, he put up with this brushwhacking venture of mine.

  Whacked was what he got. My mind was on something else, likely how much of the day still gaped ahead of us, and without thinking I let a willow spring back as I pushed past it. It whipped Ray across the left side of his face and drew a real yelp from him. Also a comment to me:

  “Watch out with those, beetle brain.”

  “Didn’t mean to,” I apologized. Which most likely would have buried the issue, except for what I felt honor bound to add next: “Sparrow head.”

  You wonder afterwards how two reasonably sane people descend into a slanging match like that.

  “Slobberguts,” Ray upped the ante with.

  “Booger eater,” I promptly gave him back.

  “Pus gut.”

  “Turd bird.”

  As I remember it, I held myself in admirable rein until Ray came out with “turkey dink.”

  For some reason that one did it. I swung on Ray and caught him just in front of the left ear. Unluckily, not quite hard enough to knock him down.

  He popped me back, alongside the neck. We each got in a few more swings, then the fisticuffs degenerated into a wrestle. More accurately, a mud wallow.

  We each were strong enough, and outraged enough, to be able to tip the other, so neither one of us ended up permanently on top. Simply, at some point we wore out on wanting to maul one another any further, and got to our feet. Ray’s clothes looked as if he’d been rolled the length of a pig pen. Mine I guess weren’t much better, but they hadn’t started off as fancy and so I figured my muss didn’t matter as much.

  Of course, try convince my mother of that. Come noon we had to straggle in to get any dinner, and when she laid eyes on us, we were in for a scouring in more ways than one. Ray she made change into a set of my clothes—funny, how improved he looked when he was out of that town gear—and sat us at opposite ends of the table while we ate, then immediately afterward she issued two decrees: “Jick, I believe you would like To Read in the Other Room. Ray, I think you would like To Put Together the Jigsaw Puzzle I Am Going to Put Here on the Table for You.”

  When I started high school in Gros Ventre, Ray came over to me at noon hour the first day. He planted himself just out of arm’s reach from me and offered: “Horse apple.”

  I balled up both my fists, and my tongue got ready the words which would fan our creekside battle to life again: “Beaver tooth.” Yet the direction of Ray’s remark caught my notice. “Horse apple” was pretty far back down the scale from “turkey dink.”

  For once in my life I latched on to a possibility. I held my stance and tendered back to Ray: “Mud minnow.”

  It started a grin on him while he thought up: “Slough rat.”

  “Gumbo gopher,” I provided, barely managing to get it out before we were both laughing.

  Within the week I was asking my mother whether I could stay in town overnight with Ray, and after that I made many a stay-over at the Heaneys’ throughout the school year. Not only did I gain the value of Ray and me being the best of friends; it was always interesting to me that the Heaneys were a family as different from ours as crochet from oil cloth. For one thing they were Catholic, although they really didn’t display it all that much. Just through a grace before every meal and a saint here and there on the wall and eating fish on Friday, which eventually occurred to me as the reason Ray had looked at me suspiciously there at the creek when I asked him about fishing. For another, in almost every imaginable way the Heaney family was as tidy as spats on a rooster. (The “almost” was this: Ray and his sister Mary Ellen, three years younger, were allowed liberties with their food that I’d never dreamt of. Take hotcakes as an example. Ray and Mary Ellen poured some syrup on, then rolled each hotcake up, then syruped the outside and began eating. A kind of maple syrup tamale, I now know enough to realize. When I first began overnighting with them they urged me to try mine that way, but the thought of my mother’s response to something like that made me figure I might as well not get converted. At other meals too Ray and Mary Ellen squooged their food around in remarkable ways and ate only as much of it as they felt like. I tell you, it shocked me: people my own age leaving plates that looked more as if they’d been walked through than eaten from.) Ray’s mother, Genevieve, kept that big two-story house dusted and doilied to a faretheewell. Mary Ellen already had her mind set on being a nurse—she was a kind of starchy kid anyway, so it was a good enough idea—and you couldn’t scratch a finger around there without her wanting to daub it with Mercurochrome and wrap you up like a mummy.

  Then there was Ray’s father, Ed. You could hang your hat on Ed Heaney’s habits. Every evening he clicked the lock on the door of the lumber yard office as if it was the final stroke needed to complete six o’clock, and if he wasn’t walking in the kitchen door at five minutes after six, Genevieve started peering out the kitchen window to see what had happened to him. Another five minutes, Ed washing up and toweling down, and supper began. As soon as supper was over Ed sat at the kitchen table going through the Falls Leader and visiting with Genevieve while she did the dishes, his deep voice and her twinkly one, back and forth, back and forth. Then at seven straight up, Ed strode into the living room, planted himself in his rocking chair and clicked on the big Silvertone floor radio. He listened straight through until ten o’clock—if somebody spouting Abyssinian had come on the air, Ed would have sat there and listened—and then went up to bed. Thus everything in the Heaney household in the evening was done against the backdrop of Ed’s Silvertone, and Genevieve and Ray and Mary Ellen had become so used to tuning out sound that you often had to say something to them a couple of times to make it register. In Ray, there was an opposite kind of consequence, too. Ray had heard so much radio he could mimic just about any of it, Eddie Cantor and Walter Winchell and Kaltenborn giving the news and all those.

  But Ed, I was telling about. You couldn’t know it to look at Ed Heaney, because the lumber yard life had put a middle on him, and he was bald as a jug, but he served in France during the war. In fact spent I don’t know how much time in the trenches. Enough that he didn’t want to squander one further minute of his life talking about it, evidently. Just once did I ever manage to get him going on that topic. That Ed won some medals over there I knew because Ray once sneaked them out of a dresser drawer in Ed and Genevieve’s bedroom and showed them to me. You wouldn’t expect medal-winning about Ed either. In any case, though, one Heaney suppertime when I was in to stay with Ray some topic came up that emboldened me to outright ask Ed what he remembered most about being in the war. Figuring, of course, I might hear tales that led to the medals.

  “Shaving.”

  After a while Ed glanced up from his eating and realized that Ray and Mary Ellen and Genevieve and I were all regarding him in a stymie
d way.

  “We had to shave every day,” he elaborated. “Wherever we were. Belleau Wood, we only got a canteen of water per man per day. But we still used some of it to shave. The gas masks they gave us were a French kind. Sort of a sack that went over your face like this.” Ed ran a hand around his chinline. “If you had whiskers it didn’t fit tight enough. Gas would get in. You’d be a goner.”

  Ed began to take another bite of his supper, but instead repeated: “Belleau Wood. About midday there we’d be in our foxholes—graves, we called them—all of us shaving, or holding our shirts up to read them for lice. Thousands of us, all doing one or the other.”

  The other four of us waited, dumbstruck, to see where this sudden hallway of Ed’s memory led.

  But all he said more was “Pass the stringbeans, please.”

  • • •

  Now that we were established atop the arena corral, I reported to Ray my chin session with Dode Withrow at the beer booth. Ray took what might be called a spectator interest in the Withrow family. He never came right out and said so, but his eye was on the middle Withrow girl, Marcella, who was in the same high school class we were. Marcella was trim in figure like Midge and had a world-by-the-tail grin like Dode’s usual one. So far Ray’s approach to Marcella was distant admiration, but I had the feeling he was trying to figure out how to narrow the distance.

  Maybe the day would come when I was more interested in a Leona or a Marcella than in perching up there above general humanity, but right then I doubted it. I considered that the top-pole perch Ray and I had there next to the bucking chutes was the prime site of the whole rodeo grounds. We had clear view of every inch of the arena, the dirt oval like a small dry lake bed before us. And all the event action would originate right beside us, where even now the broncs for the first section of bareback riding were being hazed into the chutes alongside my corral spot. The particular Gros Ventre bucking chute setup was that as six broncs at a time were hazed in for their set of riders, pole panels were retracted between each chute, leaving what had been the half-dozen chutes as one long narrow pen. Then as the horses crowded in a single file, the panels were shoved in place behind them one by one, penning each bronc into the chute it would buck into the arena from. As slick a system as there is for handling rodeo broncs, I suppose. But what is memorable to me about it is the instant before the pole panels were shoved into place to serve as chute dividers: when the horses came swarming into the open chute pen, flanks heaving, heads up and eyes glittering. From my perch, it was like looking down through a transom into a long hallway suddenly filled with big perplexed animals. Not many sights are its equal.