“I remember,” Teddy said, “but I don't need your smoke.”
She drew on it, deeply. “Daddy would carry us on his shoulders,” she said. “One of us and then the other. Before Veronica was born. I wonder about Daddy, don't you, ever? What does he think of us? Do we make him happy, or are we just things that happened?”
“Now we're on our own,” Teddy said, “so we don't happen so much anymore, I guess.”
“What was wrong with you and me?” she said. “We were Eliza's projects. We were accomplishments.” Corrie drew on the joint again. “How about your real father, do you wonder about him?”
These were things they'd never talked about. “I don't know,” Teddy said. She was staring at him. “How would I know?”
“You could know. You could be his child.”
That night Benny Waxman called from Seattle, and early the next morning Teddy drove Corrie to the airport in Missoula.
“I'm a mess,” she said, “but I'm going back.” She kissed Teddy, close to tears.
It was curiosity that got Teddy to wondering about Charlie Cooper up in Edmonton, Alberta. What had Charlie turned out to be? What did he even look like? What did it mean to be his child? He kissed Wilma and their boys goodbye, left wheezing Lon Winston in charge of the store, and drove twelve long, highway hours into northern Alberta to visit Leonard Three Boy, who was managing an intertribal relief organization.
“What do you want with Charlie?” Leonard asked. They were sitting in his shabby offices on the outskirts of Edmonton, and Leonard was lean as ever, his braids flecked with gray.
“I got no idea,” Teddy said. “He's somebody I don't know. That's my fault. He escaped or I did. Like he fell out of my pocket or I fell out of his.”
Leonard told him that Charlie had three summers before gone to live with the Beaver Indian hunters and trappers on a reserve three hundred miles northwest of Edmonton, thirty miles from what Leonard referred to as a rat town called Batch Camp. Population: eight thousand, composed of Canadian old-timers, cowboys, draft-evading peacenik hippies from the States, oil field roughnecks, and natives in a strip of Quonset huts and steel prefabs.
“He's up there on his trap lines. You could make the drive. You never know. Big spirits might be speaking.” Again, the ironic smile. “Charlie and I both got where we thought we wanted to go when we were young. We got plenty of attention for it. But we stalled, we didn't know what next. Nowadays, I manage my accounts. Charlie runs his trap lines. We were boys with dreams, but our dreams only took us halfway. Eliza turned you into a white man in a hardware store. That's not the last step. Think about the next one.”
“Maybe I don't want to take a step,” Teddy said.
“Then why don't you go home?”
Teddy realized he didn't know the answer to that question, and spent the evening sorting out his thoughts in his journal. Sure, another two or three days would keep him away from the store too long. But he had long ago learned that excessive and endless efforts to order the world are evidence of excessive and endless fearfulness. And his worrying was a version of the same impulse. Had he missed the boat, making regret inevitable? Or was it that discovery and play unto themselves would equate with pleasure and happiness?
The next morning he called home and told Wilma he'd be one more week. By evening he was parking his pickup beside the Batch Camp Hotel and Lounge, a two-story, plywood building with peeling, white paint. He went inside seeking a man named Sammy Blacker, who Leonard had said would know where to find Charlie.
“Sure,” Sammy Blacker boomed. He was a porky-looking fellow, his mouth flashing with gold inlays. “A hundred and fifty dollars. Take us two days. So buy me a beer.”
“A hundred and fifty dollars is okay with me if you find him in two days or ten minutes.”
Sammy Blacker ordered his drink. “A green bottle of that Dutch beer.” It took several bottles and a case for the road to get going.
Thirty kilometers to the north, jolting on a rough track through a backland thick with ferns and second-growth timber, they wound down into a steep canyon until the road ended at the banks of a rocky creek.
“Not too much walking from here,” Sammy Blacker said. “One more beer and we walk. No beer in there.” After ceremoniously sharing another green bottle of the Heineken, Teddy and Sammy Blacker crossed the creek on the back of a fallen pine. They climbed rocky steps up out of the creek canyon and wound in and around the timber until Rossie spotted still water in a beaver pond gleaming through an aspen thicket. A string of smoke drifted above a steep-roofed log house with tufts of moss growing from the cedar shingles and chinking. Steel traps hung from wooden pegs.
“He's there,” Sammy Blacker said. “There's smoke. We'll hang quiet. I got to call him out. We don't want some craziness.”
“Cooper,” Sammy Blacker called. “This here is Sammy. I come bringing you company.”
Beyond the calling of a magpie there was silence.
“Son of a bitch,” he said. “He's got a fire. But could be he ain't here. Could be the woman. Guess we got to ease on down.”
They commenced moving carefully along the trail toward the cabin when a single shot from a small-gauge rifle twanged over their heads. In the silence, Teddy stood with one foot off the ground and Sammy Blacker crouched. The ravens had gone quiet.
“Cooper!” Sammy shouted. “This is friends. What the fuck is wrong with you?”
The answer came drifting from nowhere. “Just playing with you boys.” The one-armed man in greasy leathers resting on a rotting stump off in the undergrowth was Charlie. His rifle was cracked open, lying across his knees. He snapped it shut. “Heard you coming a half mile away.”
Sammy Blacker raised his hands, palms up. “This fellow says he saw you once before, when he was a baby but he don't remember.”
“I don't either,” Charlie said, slowly getting up off the stump.
“Me,” Teddy said. “I'm Eliza's boy. You remember Eliza?”
“You're the boy called Teddy?”
“The same one.”
This Charlie Cooper was not the man Teddy had expected. Later, in his journal, he would write: One-armed, toothless. Mean if he wanted to be, a warrior in retirement, gone contemplative.
“You and me got older,” Charlie said, stepping closer to his son. He shook his head. “Hope you did better than me.”
Inside the house, remnants of a fire smoldered in a cast-iron cookstove. Charlie looked into a simmering pot. “Mary made stew. She'll be coming back. Everything with her is pretty soon.” He gestured toward the roll of tanned hides and greenish carpeting that lay on the plank flooring. “No chairs, but we'll have stew pretty quick.”
“What got you coming here?” he asked Teddy.
“You,” Teddy said.
The old man gazed toward one of the three dim windows. “Must have been. There's nobody else you know around here. What you wondering about?”
Teddy shook his head. “Wondering what you made of things. Who you are. Who you think I ought to be.”
“What could anybody make of things? You been playing sweet little Teddy Bear? You got Teddy Bear buttons for eyes?” The old man grinned, holding it for what seemed an intentionally cruel amount of time. “What you can do,” he said, after minutes of this, “is go cold and freeze and swell up like ice in the water and break out cracks in the rocks. Freeze up and break out. But way out here I don't think about being a shithead. I do the hunting, Mary cooks.”
He gestured toward the gaunt woman easing in through the creaking back door. She was not old, her hair was clean and black, and she was silent while dishing steaming bowls of stew.
“Damn,” Sammy Blacker said, holding out his bowl for another helping. “Charlie, you got the idea.”
“High time,” Charlie said. “Me and Mary struck a treaty.” He placed his hand on Teddy's shoulder.
“Mary, this here is Teddy Bear. You know about Teddy Bear.”
The woman smiled, her teeth rich wi
th gold. “You come to see us,” she said. “He knew you was coming to see us.”
“What we're doing is settling before we die,” Charlie answered. “Me and Mary give up on freezing the rock.”
Mary was still smiling. “That's what he's doing. I don't expect dying for a long time.”
“Teddy Bear, what I tell you?” Charlie said, and he was quiet for a moment. “There's not enough time. You got any cigarettes?”
Teddy didn't, but Sammy Blacker had a full pack of Chesterfields. “He always wants Chesterfields.”
Faint, drifting flakes of snow flurried softly as they walked Charlie's trap lines along the creek. Charlie sniffed the air. “Be at it before long.” As he showed them how he set and positioned the traps, he said that killing the animals he caught could get him to hating how he'd let himself get trapped. “Towns are the trap line.”
Back at the cabin they ate another round of stew, and Teddy and Sammy, wrapped in the fur rugs, slept by the stove.
“Teddy Bear,” Charlie said in the light of the morning, after he'd built a fire. “You don't want trap lines. Quick as you can, go out there and be sweet.” He waved Teddy off, not offering to listen when his son stammered at an answer.
Teddy and Sammy Blacker walked out through four inches of snow, and after three long days of driving Teddy was home in Hamilton. He called Eliza and announced that he'd come back changed.
“Into what?” Eliza asked.
“Charlie walks his trap lines, and no matter what he says, I think he loves it. I take care of my hardware. Wilma takes care of me and the kids. She says it's what she wants. I'm lucky, so long as that lasts. But hardware, lately, is nothing but making a living. I mean I loved the store at first, the ten thousand specific things in their bins in the system of bins—each with a name. No mysteries. But I'm ready for the next stage. Rossie did it and so can I. I've decided to try for Rossie's old job and run for county commissioner in the Bitterroot.”
Eliza hooted with dismay. Indian bloodlines weren't often elected to office in Montana. “They'll laugh. They'll slap you on the shoulder and call you Chief. Behind your back they'll call you a quarter-blood bastard.”
“Actually people might think a quarter-blood bastard is just the ticket. Without it I'd be considered an elitist with unearned privileges, but I've got the Blackfeet blood. People in Montana know what happened to the Indians, and they see that it's happening to them. Some of them will overcome their racism and think I'm okay because I'm an Indian and Indians are oppressed like they are. They might think I was a hell of a good idea.” Then he hung up, tired of her apprehensions. Trust Eliza, he wrote in his journal. She keeps the bees in our bonnets.
Teddy started traveling the valley, imitating Rossie in his methods, up streets and down roads, knocking on doors, door to door, parking the big, three-quarter-ton pickup he used to haul logging cable out into the woods, and walking and talking. To the surprise of not many locals, he won, and kept winning, year after year.
In Hawaii for the first time in nearly four decades, Eliza retreated to her rustic cabin after a daylong hike in the dry crater on Maui. She sat cross-legged on the floor and, sipping pinot noir from a plastic cup, wrote in her journal of the ideas she had been encountering in D. H. Lawrence for years. Until now, at sixty-nine, she had never considered them foremost in her mind.
The worth of marriage lies in disillusionment. Marriage confounds, and delivers us into the reality of solitude, natural separateness, to discover the true nature of intimacy.
The next day, when she read this aloud to the women she was hiking with, and a younger one asked if she ever said such things to Rossie, Eliza rolled her eyes. “Why? They said he was a failure at ideas so he went back to being a boy with horses. It's easy to say horses are a game, but for him it's life. He says it's his last turn at bat.”
“They're all boys, aren't they,” another woman said. They had stopped for a picnic on Waikamo Ridge, and Eliza—with good humor, even eagerness—poured herself another glass of wine and raised it to her companions. “We'll get our turns at bat, do you think?”
In the meantime, while Eliza traveled the islands, Rossie was towing an empty horse trailer behind his Cadillac on back roads across the San Joaquin Valley. He played the music of that countryside, a tape of Merle Haggard's lamentations he'd found in a truck stop before turning off the interstate south of Tracy. Bellowing along with “Tulare Dust” and “Shopping for Dresses” and “They're Tearing the Labor Camps Down,” he made his way into the Tulare Basin, the dusty cotton field of what had been one of the largest lakes in the Far West before it was drained for agriculture—if you could call cotton a kind of agriculture, he thought.
He had driven south from Montana to pick up a quick little roping horse named Blue, a creature of twenty-one years and the best roping horse he'd ever bred and trained. Blue was old for a horse but still sound in the legs after all the cross-country travel to rodeos. The man who owned him and had retired him was a farmer and Saturday roper named Ben Ambler, and he'd told Rossie on the telephone that Blue wasn't for sale but Rossie could have him—he was the one man who could.
“I won't ride him,” Rossie said. “I'm heavy for that little old horse. But my wife might.”
The price was one fresh-mint silver dollar. “I'd mount that shiny dollar in a plaque,” Ben Ambler said. “Show up with a trailer, and that Blue horse is yours. I worry about him out in them empty fields. There's nothing to occupy the mind in cotton country if you don't have work. He's just out there thinking, remembering. Good horses don't forget anything.”
The faint, snowy Sierras shone on the eastern horizon like spooks of mountains on the moon as Rossie drifted past great, empty, wintertime cotton fields and an endless scatter of rigs pumping oil. That night he put up in a plank-walled hotel in a field-worker's town. Across the broken highway in a tavern, he sat alone at a table, listening to the rhythms of Mexican talk from the bar as he ate the chicken-fried steak, drank cans of Blitz, and counted his blessings. But for the grace of Eliza he might have centered his life in this faraway, dusty, son-of-a-bitching flatland instead of Montana.
The roan, Blue, was abruptly alert when Rossie approached the next morning, recognizing maybe his odor or his demeanor. As Rossie stepped forward with a halter in his hand, Blue watched, twitching his ears forward but showing no sign of suspicion. “You're right,” Rossie said. “They don't forget a goddamned thing.”
“You got him,” Ben Ambler croaked. He was a broken-fingered old fellow leaning on a steelwork fence.
Rossie handed over the single silver dollar.
“Too bad that horse can't talk,” Ambler said. “We could run him for president.”
“I tried that,” Rossie said. “Made me crazy.”
“Running for president? Was you already crazy?”
“Politics. I made a sorry show of it.”
“Anybody would,” Ben Ambler said. “What politics we got around here is the Boswell family, from mountain to mountain. The Boswells run politics. They showed up in the twenties and Old Man Boswell bought out the Portagee farmers along the Kern River during the Depression. Myself, I worked for Boswells for thirty years—hired and fired Mexicans and paid for this property.” He shook his head. “There's no way of accounting for what's wrong with the rich boys. They set theyselves up like little kings. Boswells bought into the federal government and had them dam the Kern River and dry the lake for farming. It was a wall-to-wall crime. Fields started blowing selenium. I'm pleased to see you take that horse out of here. He don't deserve selenium. That's best left for me and the Boswells and the Mexicans. I could leave, but I won't. Mexicans come up from down south and don't find much rewards when they get here. One of these days they're going to come off those fields after us, me and the Boswells.”
“Selenium?”
“Poison, some kind of chemistry. This was pretty a country as anybody ever saw, with grasslands and flowers in the spring and that big lake with the redhead duc
ks and canvasbacks. Don't see many of those anymore. Blue herons and sandhill cranes, they're gone. So you got out of politics?”
“Went sane,” Rossie said. “But I kept thinking that I should have gone back after the bastards instead of quitting like a chickenshit.”
“Stay at it long enough and you'll turn into a pure-bred bastard,” Ben Ambler said. “That's what it looks like. The best ones go sour or get out early. We better load up that horse and send you on your way.”
The road to Montana was four days on interstate highways. Rossie had it timed so Eliza would be home from Hawaii on the same autumn afternoon as his return, and indeed she was down to greet him when he came driving in through the dusty twilight to pull up before his cork-floored barn in the Tailfeather Field. Without a word of hello, except for her look, she came to help him let down the tailgate.
“Anyway,” Rossie said, “he's yours. For you to ride around on. Smartest horse you ever saw, he's yours and for nobody else.”
Together they unloaded that Blue horse into a corral where he'd once upon a time been introduced to Rossie and roping.
“Horses,” he said, grinning at Eliza, as if he was echoing some country song, “look good on you.”
Her face lit up, and why not? He'd meant it, and saw she was pleased.
IN 1991 TEDDY ANNOUNCED HIS RETIREMENT. HE'D BEEN COUNTY commissioner in the Bitterroot for seventeen years, running for reelection every other autumn, trekking out on winter nights to explain bond issues at school board meetings, then convening at breakfasts on winter mornings to discuss the funding for a sewage treatment plant. He'd listened to the endless tirades, semi-coherent anger, and smooth-talking hustle and negotiated and renegotiated and called bluffs.
Bitterroot people filled the Elks Club ballroom in Hamilton for Teddy's farewell speech: “Bricks get laid one at a time. Each brick is part of getting the work done. Houses get built brick by brick, one at a time. I'd like to think I've helped build the house we have here in the Bitterroot. There's a story about a young girl skipping across the Red Wolf Crossing of the Snake River on the backs of the sockeye salmon. Which now, of course, are extinct in that river. My whole life I've wanted to dance with that girl and go to powwows and watch fancy dancers and drummers and hang around by the chutes at rodeos and join boys and girls down by the river while the fish jump. I've been playing white man. Now I'm going Indian. I'm giving up on what might have been or ought to be and living with what we've got.”
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