by Reed Karaim
I don’t know when he first noticed that the Forest Service was being robbed. But something compelled him to a laborious private examination of the wide swath of forest being cut down by the multinational companies that held the principal logging leases in his region. He spent months putting his case together, traveling alone to isolated valleys where he calculated harvest rates and the size of the cuts that ran like brown scars up and down the mountains. When he knew for certain, he went to Washington with evidence the companies were illegally deforesting many square miles of land.
His end came swiftly after that. He made his report in the sixth year of a Republican administration, a time in which the men who ran industry and the men who oversaw the regulation of industry had become interchangeable. He clutched his picnic basket full of truth to his chest and marched into a haunted forest of corporate lawyers and government officials on sabbatical from the companies he was accusing. His charges were buried in official denials and bottomless studies conducted by consulting firms that were part of the industry. That might have been enough, but he had spoken out publicly and so he had to be discredited; his earlier work was attacked in anonymously leaked stories; doubts were whispered about his mental stability. He found himself accused of the misuse of government property. (Exhibit 1 was the times his wife was spotted in his Forest Service pickup at the hardware store.) His management of the day-to-day operations of headquarters was portrayed as chaotic. His expense accounts were examined and, inevitably, a few receipts were missing. When they fired him, it was for every reason but the real one. He would never hold a steady job again.
The family had long been prominent in Billings. Robin’s great-grandfather, one of Montana’s lesser land barons, had built the big, white Victorian house with its wraparound porch, where on slow summer evenings you could watch the sun set red on red along the Yellowstone rims. But the family inheritance had been frittered away over the years and Robin’s childhood home was sold within a year. After her father lost his job the family’s fortunes arced downward with the helpless grace of a diver. Still, there was no sense or justice in what happened next, only a strange intimation that some unseen law of momentum propels disaster. Six months before I met Robin, her younger brother slid the bright red convertible bought for him in better circumstances off a mountain road and tumbled end over end to land upside down in a stream. He was wearing his seatbelt and in a very dry state he drowned.
I didn’t hear that story until some time after I met Robin at the Billings Gazette. In Montana they don’t believe much in speed limits or government safety programs. They post whitewashed wooden crosses on the side of the road where accident victims fall, a simple reminder from a state that believes you take your own chances. Robin and I were returning from a story assignment, one of the few times we worked together, when a cross on the corner ahead was suddenly and starkly there in the bloodless glare of our headlights.
“See that cross,” she said. “That’s where my brother died.”
I had not known she had a brother. But that night she told me the story of her family while the road fell toward Billings and the mountains tore at the stars.
I think I was half in love with her by then. I remember the first time I saw her in the newsroom. She was arguing with an assistant editor about something, arguing fiercely; then they were both laughing and the change in her mood was as abrupt and hypnotizing as the edge of a summer squall.
I was introduced to her that afternoon. She nodded in recognition.
“Cliff O’Connell. You came from the Great Falls Herald, right? Political reporter?”
“I’m afraid so.”
She smiled. “And your father owns the paper up in Havre?”
“Owned. He died half a year ago.”
It’s something you get used to saying, like you get used to the dutiful moment of compassion in response. But the pain in Robin’s eyes was genuine. The connection she must have felt is obvious now, but then I only knew I was touched.
“I’m sorry,” she said, then, fumbling on, “How come you’re not running the—what is it—the Tribune?”
“The family’s selling it. It never made much money.”
Which was at least half true. My mother was selling the paper because I had refused to come home and take over. As far as I could determine the decision had been the signal act of cowardice in my life. Havre sat there, forty miles below Canada, hard along the Bear Paw Mountains, and it was my childhood and the ghost of my grandfather raising a sledgehammer and slamming spikes into railroad tracks marching west, and my father’s fingers arching in a similar manner and slamming the keys of his old Underwood, nailing down the truth as he saw it. The town was theirs, and when the time came to step into my father’s job, I knew I could never take the place of either of them.
Across the newsroom Peter Jensen, the state editor, stuck his head out of his glass office and called Robin’s name. She glanced at his door in irritation.
“Christ . . .”
“What?”
She hesitated. “Oh, I’m trying to get them to do a story on environmental problems on the Yellowstone, but they’re not interested.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. We’ve been going around and around about this for a week, and they think I’m being a jerk . . .”
She stood in front of my desk and we considered each other uneasily. Her anger was much sharper than it should have been. She stared across the room.
“I can’t get along with him. He doesn’t seem to understand. It’s important . . .”
“How about Prescott?” I asked. He was the managing editor.
She managed a jaundiced smile.
“Oh, we’ve had our disagreements, too.”
I noticed that the balding, pink-cheeked cops reporter sitting next to me had gotten busy, his nose buried in a file. I was too new to the paper to wade into newsroom politics, but I wanted to say something. She was young and beautiful and her anger floated awkwardly across her face and I was already on her side.
A copy aide approached holding a sheaf of photographs toward Robin like an offering. I glimpsed a strangely mutated, white-faced creature seemingly mounted on a pedestal.
“Now this is something else entirely . . .” she said. “Have you heard of our feature, ‘Critter of the Week’?”
She flipped through the photographs and placed them gently back in his hand. She smiled finally, a real smile, and I had an excuse to look at that silly, sublime Botticelli mouth.
“You know,” she said gravely, “any way you look at it, a two-headed calf is still pretty much a two-headed calf. You can tell Julie they all look good to me.”
Then she shook her head and laughed and I felt she had captured some crazy, elusive essence of this business in which we worked.
I’ve pondered since how quickly we fell in love. Something about the romance was liberating for us both. We snuck off at odd hours to make love, crawling between cold sheets in the middle of the afternoon while through my window an old man tossed a spray of sunflower seeds to sparrows in the winter sunshine. Robin had been living in a room above a laundromat while sending her mother half her check, and almost overnight she moved into the bungalow I rented by the park, more of her clothes magically appearing in my closet or scattered about the bedroom floor every day, tossed from her old life into mine in a frenzy until one day she was there all the time. We were a couple. People invited us to things together and we had to sort socks. We lay in bed and sometimes I could not sleep, so I listened to the bungalow’s old bones creak in the cold and the floors groan about having to hold themselves up one more long night, and the bed swam as it can when you are very tired, sliding down a steep canyon, and it felt good to let it take me where it would.
I had come to Billings to escape the vague failures and inadequacies of my recent past and I had met this woman who was smart and beautiful and trying so very hard. More than anything I think I was captivated by her defiance. For her part, I
think she thought I was someone with destinations in mind. All my life, I have had my reticence mistaken for resolve.
Robin skated on the rink at the old park almost every night in winter, racing around the oblong moonlit eye with long, hurried strides. She borrowed a friend’s horse and rode across the arroyos and barren ridges in the foothills, turning him hard and galloping back and forth in a restless, invisible box. She was tiny on the broad white back, holding the reins high, bent forward slightly at her waist, riding until the horse was lathered and worn. She rode hard but rubbed him down carefully afterward, whispering to him what a good horse he had been.
At the Gazette she argued and shouted and worked harder than anyone and it got her nowhere. The editors of the paper never let her near her father’s story, of course, but she fought back with every word she wrote, trying to tilt the scales of justice toward whatever victims she found or imagined. She clenched her fists so tightly in her sleep that they sometimes cramped and she awoke in the middle of the night with a start.
We lived together for seven months in Billings. In May we stood on a bridge above the Yellowstone as a flatboat appeared out of the darkness and raced below us with the current, a blur of Christmas tree lights hung in loops along the railings. The air was warm and full of spring. We leaned forward to watch the boat disappear beneath the bridge, then turned to watch it reappear and hurry down the river. The voices of the passengers drifted up glittering, diaphanous, along with a splash of ragtime piano.
“I think you have to do it,” Robin said. “Let’s go. It’ll be exciting.”
“I don’t think that boat’s ever coming back. The current’s still too strong. Look at it fly.”
“You’re lucky they asked you. It’s really a compliment, Cliff.”
The Christmas lights receded like a swarm of fireflies. They rounded a bend and disappeared.
“I know that,” I said.
The sloshing sound of the flatboat and the revelry of the passengers gone, the river seemed strangely quiet. You could smell spring grass on the hills and the sweetly sour mud churned up below. Robin’s chin rested on her arms folded across the top of the railing, but she fidgeted, one tennis-shoed toe restlessly rasping concrete.
“Jesus,” she said, “what are we going to do? Spend the rest of our lives making out in the darkroom and pasting Jensen’s misspelled memos on the bulletin board to be naughty?”
“You have to admit, both those things were fun.”
She smiled. She was never really mad at me then.
“Sure. It was great. But—”
“We’re happy here,” I said. Some unexpected self-doubt was rising out of the dark.
“But we’re not doing anything,” Robin said. “There’s no future here for us. It’s such an opportunity.”
My reporting had gone well at the Gazette. I’d stumbled upon a small scandal in the governor’s office and, of course, I came with the pedigree of my father’s reputation in a business that, like all others, doesn’t want to admit how much it relies on mindless credentialism to make its choices. Cannon Newspapers, which owned the Gazette, had offered me a job covering Congress in Washington. It was the lowliest of beats there, watching the elected officials from the Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming, but it was Washington. So at a moment when our romance was a seamlessly woven magic of time and place, we were about to change it all.
Of course we thought we were unhappy.
“I know I’ll find work,” Robin said. “Jensen says he’ll help me.”
“Sure. You’ll do great. You’ll probably do better than I will.”
“I don’t know about that. But it’s an opportunity.” She stared at the ghostly slip of a sandbar down the river.
“I’m tired of trying so hard here,” she said. “I’m tired of trying so hard not to give a damn. I could use a change.”
Maybe we have used this place up, I thought. I knew the urge to move on. I’d been discarding pieces of my life since the day my father died. Standing on the bridge with Robin, I was twenty-nine years old and I felt that the sum of my material and spiritual worth could be packed in a small box and shipped on ahead without loss.
“Where was the first drink we had?” Robin asked.
“At the Western. We thought everything was funny.”
“What was our first date?”
“We went to see Dune. A really bad movie.”
“Where?”
“The theater in the mall. A really really bad movie.”
“Our first kiss?”
“In the storm.”
“Our first . . .”
“My place,” I said. “A Friday night, I think.”
“Very good. A Friday night and the wind blew that damn branch against the window. I was awake all night. You slept like a log.”
“Men do that when we’ve been carnally satisfied. We have innocent hearts—troubled by nothing but lust.”
“Yeah, right.”
I decided to play. “The first meal you made?”
“Beef stew. Romantic, huh?”
“But very good. The first flowers I sent you.”
“A dozen red roses. Predictable.”
“I like to think of it as time-honored.”
“I love you so much,” she said.
A quarter-moon sat high over the mountains. Tomorrow’s clouds waited along the saw-toothed horizon. A hawk materialized out of the black, gliding low along black water. A splash. We listened. A faint rustle along the bank, nothing more.
Robin slid along the railing toward me, leaned into the circle of my arm.
“I need the chance to do more than I have,” she said. “In newspapers or whatever. I just think . . . I just think I’ve worn this place out, or it’s worn me out, or something. There has to be something better ahead.”
You can smile at us, two innocents for whom Washington, possibly one of the most institutionally corrupt cities in the world, shimmered like some Edenic island on the edge of the sea. You can wonder how we could not see things that now seem so obvious . . . the fragility of our joined shadows quivering in the water.
But most wrong turns are taken in optimism. Robin’s head fell against my shoulder and on a bridge outside of Billings I took a deep breath and let myself believe I was undaunted by the prospect of reinvention. We were still young enough then to feel that life, by definition, is promise. We believed we had talent; we thought we put fine faces forward to the world; we knew we were in love; we felt our lives had an inevitable charm that must carry us forward.
Did I ever truly believe all this? I don’t know. Maybe Robin did and I chose to believe her.
She turned in my arms and I could feel her hips slide close to mine, her breasts softly pointed against my chest, the lovely mop of her hair under my chin.
“Okay. We’ll go,” I said. “It’ll be fun. If we bomb, we can always come back.”
She smiled, closed her eyes; in the small of my back her hands squeezed me tightly within her dream.
“We won’t bomb,” she said. “It’s the start of our lives.”
On a morning in March, in a hotel lobby in Baltimore, at a table of green enameled wrought iron, Myra sat down beside me. Her hair was plastered back and she had a drawn, stretched look around her eyes.
“Good morning,” she said. “My damn shower didn’t work this morning. Nothing but cold water. I feel like I’ve fallen off the goddamn Titanic.”
She took my second cup of coffee, swallowed a big gulp and shivered.
“Is the air conditioning on in here?”
“People have been going in and out of the door.”
She pulled the cup toward herself and warmed her hands on the outside.
“I need to go home,” she said. “I need new clothes, I need to see if my cat’s still alive, I need a warm shower, I need to watch a dozen reruns of Mary Tyler Moore, I need to not hear Thomas Hart Crane say, ‘I want a nation true to its best instincts . . .’ one more goddamn time.”
Th
e past picked up its skirts and fled, casting a last ambiguous glance over its shoulder.
“That must have been some shower,” I said.
“Very cold.”
“When do you get a break?”
“After Super Tuesday. You?”
“I love this. I might stay out here forever.”
She scowled, sipped more of my coffee.
“Saw your old girlfriend going up the elevator.”
“Yeah, she was down here.”
“Want me to have her killed?”
“No, maybe a year ago.”
Myra slid my coffee cup back my way. There was a single swallow left in the bottom. She tapped the side of the table in a drum roll.
“So you’re recovered?”
“Absolutely.”
“Twelve-step program?”
“More like a hundred little steps.”
“Good. Safer that way.”
“Sure.”
She ran a hand through her damp hair and sourly eyed the campaign staff milling about the lobby in hastening disarray.
“Because if you wanted to get even, you’d have a hell of an opportunity right now, cowboy. A hell of a chance to work out a grudge.”
I watched a dirty yellow bus pull up on the other side of the plate glass. Laugh at me now, but in a hotel lobby in Baltimore, in the stained light of March, I felt pure of heart.
“It’s okay,” I said. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”
Myra glanced at my coffee cup and grimaced as if something distasteful had settled on her tongue.
“That’s the heartbreaking thing about romance,” she said. “By the time you figure out how to get even, it’s always too late.”
X.
COLORADO. Maryland. Crane won them both despite last-minute advertising blitzes by Wilson, but he lost Georgia to the dour governor of Pennsylvania and we were back in the air before the final tallies were in. The great slew of southern primaries came next and we flew over swamps and mountains and hills with farms sagging like piles of scrapwood in the middle of lovely hollows. We rode through somnolent small towns and Sunbelt cities popping out of themselves like stevedores splitting their shirts.
