When a reporter asked if Rossie supported gun control, he smiled and shook his head. “You're not getting me on that one. We all know there are legitimate uses for guns, hunting and defending yourself and your liberties. But there is also drunks and crazy people killing each other. It would be good for everybody if we'd get the guns out of their hands. What we need is education. We've got to give up the idea of beating on people who don't agree with us. We've got to sit down and reason. That would have been a fine policy in Chicago.”
The reporter smiled and asked if Rossie supported abortion rights.
“I support liberties so long as they don't hurt anybody.”
“So you think killing a fetus isn't hurting anybody?”
“Everybody is hurt,” Rossie said. “But I don't think you're talking about killing a human being. It might be saving a woman.”
Eliza was furious when she saw in the newspaper headline, “Benasco Advocates Abortion.” “This is suicidal!”
Rossie shrugged. “It's what I think. At least my horses will talk to me when I get home.”
She mimicked him. “My horses will talk to me. You sound like a baby. Keep it to yourself.”
Lincoln Hutter, the Republican candidate from Bozeman, went on the attack. “Benasco says America is crazy. But it's Benasco who is crazy. Benasco claims to be a man of the people, but he's an elitist, supported by a leftist wife, determined to destroy the corporations that have brought us a hundred years of prosperity. As a consequence of his policies we'd have no jobs and empty pockets. Benasco and his wife go to Paris in the spring. They consort with the Frenchmen in fancy restaurants. Montana citizens are left to feed on their country fellows like ravenous fishes in the sea. We have to take Montana back from schemers like Ross Benasco. He reeks of confusion. Voting for gun control could possibly be thought of as voting against death but advocating abortion rights is voting in favor of death. He should go back to his horses. Then his Indian name could be Runs Away with Horses.”
“Ravenous fishes,” Eliza said. “It's from Shakespeare. Maybe he's not as dumb as we thought.”
The most legendary roping horse Rossie had ever trained was a roan gelding named Blue. “I keep track of that Blue horse,” Rossie told a young woman from the Billings newspaper. “He dances like Fred Astaire, and he knows every second where momentum is taking him.”
The reporter wrote: Ross Benasco lights up when talking about a horse named Blue. Some think he should go back to his corrals.
On an early October afternoon, Rossie was holed up in the Mis-soula apartment, looking down from a living room window on a cluster of high school children gathered under the approach ramp to the Higgins Avenue Bridge. A girl with hair in a bright-yellow braid licked the joint she'd rolled, dragged on it deeply, and turned to a gawky boy, digging her fingers into his neck, to pull him to her. She enclosed their mouths with her hands and blew smoke into him.
Hang on, boy, Rossie thought, hang tight. He held out his left hand against the sky, testing it for steadiness. He'd been enduring thoughts of his own mother sliding off, drugged against pain and willing to welcome the endless sleep. Evening dropped to darkness. The children under the bridge went on home, and recollections ran in shadows everywhere. He pulled the cork on twelve-year-old McCallum's Scotch and poured a shot over ice. After that taste of life, he would call Eliza to tell her it was too late for the highway. He'd say he'd dozed off and no matter what her response he would catch the remedy of her voice.
On the third ring she answered. “You're not coming,” she said before he could speak.
No, he wasn't.
“That's not a surprise,” she said, and hung up.
With another Scotch, this one lighter, Rossie accepted her anger and thought about going down to the Railroad Tavern, where he'd find men he'd known since the 1930s. They'd be in the back room at poker, smoking cigars, and would give him a smile when he bought a round of drinks and pulled up a chair. Then they'd be way down the road toward drunk by closing time and would want to come to the apartment and play on until sunrise. Rossie had been along that road and liked the idea that it was still paved, but not tonight. So he tried the cure that had worked for him the night before, punching the buttons on his tape deck until Bob Dylan and “It's All Over Now, Baby Blue” came up. There was an unforgiving quality in Dylan that Rossie liked, but he was sick of himself and of Dylan, and shut down the tape deck. Poor, old, sad-assed baby Blue. He'd go down to the Railroad Tavern and stay with it until daybreak.
But the telephone rang as he was getting into his windbreaker. “I caught you,” Eliza said. She sounded faintly breathless. “I'm coming into town. Open two bottles of that Heitz Cabernet. Stay out of them until I get there.”
Surely what she hadn't liked the most, down there in that empty house in the Bitterroot, was the echoing of her own thoughts. She would be an hour on the road. He called down to the Delta restaurant and learned they had grass-range chickens raised by Hutterites. “Could you send one up?” he asked. “Tonight, I'm the cook.” After opening the Heitz he stood in the pale-yellow light before the open door to the refrigerator, peeling the wrapping from a brick of butter for the chicken when it came. Finally he was smiling. His lifetime treasure was on her way to find him.
When the antique elevator bell clanged, Rossie pressed the little yellow button that would buzz the visitor onto the creaking car. He opened the door to the hallway and listened as the lift ascended, looking forward to the familiar exchange with a delivery kid who looked like Bill Sweet thirty-five years earlier. But the young, clean-shaven man who came from the elevator, wearing a gray stocking cap pulled down over his ears, was someone he had never seen before. The man's wide, blue eyes gleamed with what Rossie took for excitement.
“Behold,” the stranger said, standing in the elevator door to prevent it from closing. Then he lifted a small silvery pistol, took careful aim, and fired. The shock of the bullet into Rossie's left shoulder spun him sideways. He would recall only the man's eyes and the flash of light. Arriving minutes later by pure luck of the draw, Eliza found blood pooling on the imitation marble floor and Rossie on his knees. Amid his raking attempts to open the heavy apartment door, which had automatically swung shut and locked, he'd smeared blood across it and the walls.
After the frenzy of police and ambulance, their sirens howling through the darkness to St. Patrick's Hospital, where surgeons probed for the slug of lead and sewed up, Rossie muttered to the police captain that he had no idea who the assailant was. He had been drugged and put to bed when a nurse knocked on the door to the room where Eliza was sitting by his side. She was followed by Emerald Finnegan, a newspaper reporter who had learned her work covering the crime beat in Butte. Eliza had known her for years.
“We need something,” Emerald Finnegan said. “We're holding papers all over the state.”
Eliza shook her head. “We were very lucky. Tell them that.”
“Maybe not lucky at all. The shooter called the police. They were on the way before you arrived. This is just what he intended. Your husband would not have died.”
“Would not have died?”
“Probably not.”
“Possibly, probably, hell,” Eliza said. “They shot him.”
“Who's they? So far as is known, one man shot him.”
Eliza rolled her eyes. “Tell them that we were very lucky. That's what I have to say.”
The Missoula newspaper printed a confession received in the mail, postmarked locally before the shooting. Bearing no fingerprints, it was signed by Fenimore Blake, who identified himself as a resident of Plen-tywood, in northeastern Montana. No one in that faraway town acknowledged having heard of any such person. An official from Plen-tywood was quoted saying that “the shooter was likely some crazy, blaming Plentywood because of our sins.” By sins he likely meant an election in the 1920s in which the county elected “an entirely communist slate of officials.”
The confession began with, Greetings from your fu
ture, claimed credit for the shooting, then delivered an ultimatum: Let this be a warning to you and your elitist kind. The consequences of scientific materialism and the leftist theft of inherent spiritual liberties have been devastating. We'll strike again, in more serious ways, unless you amend your irreligious federalism and consequent liberal social programs. We are determined to determine our own future. Benasco thinks he is a bridegroom but we will never be his bride. Darwinian fascisms will not be tolerated.
“Whatever that means,” Eliza said.
There were no more letters. The shooter and his phantom cohorts were never identified, and while initial reports in the national news described Rossie as a hero of suffering, within days his shooting was being discussed as a mere symbol of unrest in the heartland. Rossie's policies, it was written in a Chicago Op-Ed column, agitated the economic despair of the victimized poor, and violence was a logical consequence.
Rossie held a press conference billed as the termination of his campaign. “I'm ruined and out of this. I been shot twice, in the same shoulder each time, for pushing myself into places I didn't understand. It's too late for a Democrat in my place to have much chance. For which I'm sorry but there isn't much I can do about it. A lot of people don't want anything to change. I see how they think. Nineteen thirty-four, that was the great year of my life, should have gone on forever so far as I'm concerned. But anybody with eyes can see that standing still won't ever work. A sizeable number of Montana people don't believe in evolution even when their lives teach them to believe in survival of the fittest. I proposed changes, and that encouraged people to think I'm the devil's helper. Politics should be about finding agreement and justice. But it's more like football, banging heads. There's plenty about this country to be afraid of. I don't envy the man who takes my place. So, I'll finish with words spoken two years ago by Robert Kennedy, in South Africa.”
Rossie cleared his throat, and read from a typescript, his cadences faintly but unconsciously echoing the Kennedy he'd seen on television. First is the danger of futility; the belief there is nothing one man—or one woman—can do against the enormous array of the world's ills. Yet, each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
Eliza was smiling, almost tearful, but Rossie couldn't leave it.
“Otherwise, dreams of freedom turn into every bozo for himself.”
After he sat down, she whispered, “You could have left out the part about bozos.”
A university journalism student came up and asked if he'd been educated in the east like so many children of the Western rancher aristocracy.
“University of Neversweat,” Rossie said, smiling.
At the breakfast table two days later, Eliza read from the Helena newspaper: Ross Benasco, the martyred lion, wouldn't shut up and go with grace. He claims to have quit because of his injury but in truth he seems to be quitting in disgust, no doubt in part with himself.
“I believed what I said,” he told Eliza. “I was partway right and partway wrong.” While in the hospital, he had lain awake before daylight and grappled with a mounting sense that his ideas about reinventing Montana were just another load of pointless nonsense. “Carloads of people have ideas of what's right to do, and most of them are cockeyed and trying to run the world. Drumming your ideas at people is bound to turn them away from you. I forgot all I learned from working with the horses.”
Eliza drove him south in the Cadillac to California, where they rented a many-windowed house on a mountain overlooking the sea north of Santa Barbara. Together they walked the beaches and dined with the ranchers who raised quarter horses on the inland plains to the north—old Spanish, land-grant country turning green around Los Olivos. Maybe a dozen people would gather at a long table in one of the sprawling, Spanish-modern houses and talk of the stud horses and mares, their blood-lines and confirmation and whether these contributed to intelligence.
“Horse people, our kind,” Eliza told friends when they got home to Montana. “Nobody mentioned the idea of extending intelligent breeding to politics. Not once.”
THE SUMMER OF 1972, TEDDY ENTICED LEONARD THREE BOY TO come down from Edmonton and introduce them to the woman he planned to marry. Also, he'd noticed “a mystic and inexplicable demeanor has come over Rossie. You might help him make sense of it.”
Leonard didn't make the drive until the bright, short days of late September. His new wife, when she stepped from their nine-year-old El Camino, lifted her arms to stretch while she looked around. Slender and graying-blond, she was got up in ballet slippers and a shirt embroidered with her name, Sylvie, and she was unadorned by jewelry—not a ring on her fingers—yet she shone.
Leonard was all leanness and eyeglasses and braids. “Here,” he said, “we have my Sylvie Delmonico.”
Sylvie smiled. “Not yet,” she said, “nobody's got her.”
Leonard lifted his hands. “I'm trying.”
“We are,” Sylvie said, “we're trying.” She turned to Rossie. “We hope you can stand us. We're caught up in one another.”
“You're looking pretty good. Think I might be able to stand it.”
“You'll get used to this,” Leonard said to her. “Rossie has an eye for horseflesh.”
When they'd settled with the suitcases and were lunching on turkey soup and fried ham-and-egg sandwiches, redheaded Lionel appeared.
“Lionel,” Eliza said to Leonard and Sylvie. “This fellow Lionel and our Veronica are wedded.”
Lionel deposited a box of snap beans, beets, carrots, and kale on the kitchen floor. “Working,” Lionel muttered, dangling his heavy arms and hands, no longer the blithe, chipper California boy. “Out in raspberry heaven.” Lionel finally smiled. “The boys are boxing berries like they ought to be, even the youngest, just learning to walk. Winter's coming, the season is about over.”
“Let it rest,” Eliza said. “This is Leonard Three Boy, a friend from the old days. And his wife, Sylvie Delmonico.”
“Raspberry heaven,” Leonard said. “Sounds like a name some hippie Indian cooked up.”
Lionel grinned. “Come down and we'll show you. Try some picking. But I got water running. It won't wait on me.”
“Important and barefoot in his ditches,” Rossie said when Lionel was gone. “Mud halfway to his knees.”
“Veronica says he dreams about his gardens,” Eliza said. “What if running water and raspberries materialized in your dreams. Rossie dreams of horses. He says they're as real as we are now.”
Rossie rolled his eyes.
“Dreams could be as alive as anything,” Leonard said. “I once met a Navajo medicine man in the northern Arizona outback who told me that each thing is part of a living whole, that the world is alive and everywhere holy. He said each name is the name of all things including the gods in the mountains. Which is where I climbed off the boat.”
“That's where I would have gotten off,” Eliza said.
“But I wonder. I was educated to believe that electricity is fundamental to the way nature behaves. So the flutter of electricity zapping around in our cortex is the essence of what's real. Seems like gods could live in the connections between our synapses. Where else?”
“For Christ's sake,” Rossie said. “Let's go down and look at the horses.”
“You seem pretty sensible,” Leonard said. “I got the idea you'd gone goofy.”
“Oh, I'm good for picking a destination every morning and going a few miles horseback after my first coffee. There are times when I don't get to where I started for and end up sitting like a fool watching the eddies in the creek or find myself down in the weeds under an old railroad bridge on the logging line between Hamilton and Missoula, listening to the breathing and scratching of the short-term world.”
“There i
t is,” Leonard said. “Goofiness.”
“I always thought it was a good idea to teach a horse to think. But too much figuring what you ought to be thinking, and you're in blinders. I'm out of plans beyond buying a couple of horses.”
In the afternoon Leonard and Sylvie rode out with Rossie beyond the last field to a sandy-bottomed spring-fed pool called Fandango. The Salish had camped there for hundreds of years before they were driven off to the Flathead. Then the Bitterroot locals came in their place and left behind heaps of trash. Bernard locked the gates in the 1920s.
“This pool was forgotten,” Rossie said. “There was bottles and rusted cans scattered everywhere when I found it. I hauled that shit out of here in gunnysacks.”
They sat on a fallen aspen looking down into the clear water bubbling from under the mountains. Rossie told them he imagined people feasting on mule deer and fucking in the firelight. This, clearly, was a remark cooked up in advance.
“What I do,” he said, “is study long-legged spiders walking on water. Stars or the sun, whatever it is, quit their whispering. Water bubbles up and I fall asleep. I come awake and the bats are out. Would you think a man like that was crazy?”
“Fucking in the firelight,” Sylvie said. “The hippies said nineteen sixty-seven was the golden age of fucking. Doesn't sound goofy to me.”
Rossie skipped a stone off the water. “If it was me,” he said, “I would have picked nineteen thirty-four.”
In October, Rossie and Eliza were off at the Montana Constitutional Convention in Helena when Corrie came home to visit, sad-eyed and lamenting her marriage to the archeologist. “I loved the look of his hands on me,” she told Teddy. “He was so sun-dark and I was white. I thought his hands were what he was, that he was beautiful.” She smiled in a heartbroken way that seemed learned. “But other women love them, too.”
After a dinner with Wilma, she wanted to go walking in cotton-wood leaves by the river. Teddy saw what she really had in mind when she began rolling yet another joint. “It helps me,” she said. She got it lighted and offered it to him. “I smoke and remember happiness.”
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