Heart Mountain

by Ehrlich, Gretel;

  “I love you.”

  “What?” She hadn’t heard.

  “Christ,” he mumbled. “I love you,” he roared.

  “Shut up, McKay.”

  She slowed her horse to a walk and McKay rode so close their legs touched. He leaned toward her mischievously.

  “I think you were the first person I saw when I was born.”

  The shipping corrals loomed black against the sky. Dust hung in the air as they approached the yards. McKay, Jesse, and Madeleine moved back and forth behind the herd, whooping and yelling, and the dogs, normally silent, broke into excited barks.

  The yardmen opened the gates. Bunched tightly and surrounded by riders, the cattle finally went in. The sorting corrals and smaller pens had gates that swung into wide alleyways. These ended in loading chutes where cattle cars were shunted to a stop and the wooden doors rolled open. Madeleine and McKay rode through the cattle quietly and began sorting the steers from the bulls and taking out any strays and cripples. The dust was pulverized into a fine powder and the riders wore neck scarves over their noses and mouths. They took small bunches of steers down one alley while Jesse and Frank took another bunch to a waiting railroad car. Their horses nipped the rumps and necks of the animals, pushing them with their chests until, at the end of the day, their fronts were smeared with green manure and dust ran from their soft eyes and muzzles in streams. The parts of the riders’ faces left uncovered were black with dirt—raccoonlike—through which only the whites of their eyes showed.

  “Unto you I give these animals,” McKay mumbled to himself as he passed back and forth through the alleys. “Whom I have loved and nurtured, bosomless,” he continued. He felt sad and relieved and didn’t think of their impending death, only their safety.

  Madeleine unsaddled her horse and let him drink and roll in an empty pen. The windows of the café across the road had steamed up and the lights looked like an ornament against so much desolate land. She walked toward McKay and took hold of his arm. “Come here,” she said in a wooden voice. She pulled him closer. He thought about the night before when she had found out about Henry and had slept in the bedroom above his. He had felt rage at first because he could not hold her and comfort her. He had blown out his lamp and lain on his narrow cot and watched snow cover his sleeping bag.

  Madeleine’s horse rolled in the far corner of the pen. His black hooves glistened under the yard lights. They flailed like pieces of hard coal in the air. Madeleine unbuttoned McKay’s shirt, then his long underwear, and pressed her hand into the blond hair on his chest.

  McKay made a sound and his head tipped back. It seemed they were naked. He was moving in and out of her like a furred animal, long and warm and sweet, standing on his hind legs like an elk. To be inside her he had to hitch his whole body up. There were elk around him—cows barking at calves, bulls whistling and grunting. They were both on their knees now and when he came or imagined he came, water whooshed over the tops of their backs.

  Madeleine held him obstinately. He did not know what she wanted of him. First she had opened to him, her body undulating against his. Now she was still.

  “I’m so tired of waiting,” she said and sighed.

  He felt the rim of his penis rise and push against her through his jeans. She looked at him.

  “Oh, McKay …”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “Damn you,” she said.

  “Damn me?”

  “I love you too,” she said.

  “Quit it.”

  “I know.”

  McKay turned from her.

  He carried his dog into the café. It was hot inside and the floor was greasy with melted snow and mud. He swung over a stool at the long counter. The dog curled up at his feet and began snoring. The room was full with men. Those who weren’t eating stood behind those who were and each time the door opened the noise inside the café redoubled with the sound of bawling calves.

  “McKay?” Carol Lyman stood in front of the young rancher, a coffeepot suspended in air. He nodded. She poured, then turned, catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror, and primped her brittle hair.

  “And I’ll have a piece of that pie,” McKay said.

  She slid a plate toward him.

  “And the little shit probably wants a hamburger,” he said, indicating the dog on the floor.

  “With everything?”

  “No onions,” he said and winked at her.

  “You heard about Henry, I guess …,” McKay said when she came with coffee.

  “No.”

  “Missing in action … that’s all we know.”

  “Oh no,” she gasped. She had known Henry when she was a girl and began coming west to a ranch in the Pryor Mountains—not a dude ranch, just an outfit that took in guests during hard times.

  The noise in the café increased. More bodies crowded in behind McKay, men he had known all his life, men his father’s age, bundled in long overcoats.

  “I’ll have a whiskey and a piece of that pie,” one of them shouted.

  “Which kind?” Carol snapped.

  “I don’t care. Just one of them round ones,” the man said and broke into laughter.

  Two old cowboys shouldered in behind McKay and set their cups on the counter to be refilled.

  “Hell no, I was tied hard and fast and when that ol’ bull hit the end of the rope he whipped around …”

  Carol Lyman returned with the pie.

  “Where’s my whiskey?” the man asked.

  “It’s too damned early for you to be starting on that stuff,” she said curtly and poured the coffee for the cowboys.

  “… and my horse backed up so fast the saddle rode up on his neck. Hell I was sittin’ plumb between his ears.…”

  “Well it’s been a crazy goddamned storm. Those guys over in Sheridan really got it bad. Lost forty-five percent of their lamb crop, I heard.…”

  “… and she went out in the morning and they was just dead, cows and horses everywhere. Then her hired man come up froze to death. Christ, things is bad enough with this war going on without a mess like that. Poor woman.”

  Carol Lyman brought the dog’s hamburger and refilled McKay’s cup. “No onions.”

  “No onions,” he replied.

  One of the yardmen talked to someone behind him. “Hey did you hear about Fred’s boy? He was taken prisoner of war by them dirty Japs. And Henry’s missing in action over there.”

  “I think I could stand anything but that,” a voice behind McKay said.

  “Carol, where’s my whiskey at?”

  “You eat that pie first.”

  “Well when was you hired on to be my mother?”

  Carol snorted and turned on her heel. Steam from the coffeepot flew over her shoulder like a feather boa.

  The seat next to McKay emptied and filled up again.

  “How’d you fare, McKay? Get those ornery old cows of yours loaded up?”

  “Yep, I guess we did.”

  Carol Lyman removed the empty pie plate from in front of McKay. Her quick movements reminded him of his mother. Carol had come back to Luster in 1930 and had helped Margaret Allison cook during haying and branding.

  McKay looked out the window. Someone had cleaned the panes. The sorting pens were full again with another man’s cattle, and through the slats of the cars he could see the bulge of a rump and protruding horns.

  “There goes more Japs,” someone yelled excitedly.

  A passenger train slid behind the cattle cars on another track. The shades were all drawn.

  “I don’t see how they could get any more into that Camp.”

  “They say there’s going to be ten thousand of them.”

  “Hell, I ain’t even seen that many cattle in one bunch before.”

  Instead of the news, music came on the radio. An old cowboy with a hat shaped like a volcano and no front teeth grabbed Carol Lyman’s hand and tugged at her until she came out from behind the counter. “I don’t feel like dancing,” s
he protested. The crowd made a space for the old man and he waltzed.

  Carol glided by again.

  McKay thought about the day his parents’ car had been pulled from the canal. He remembered Carol Lyman standing in the doorway of the beauty parlor, watching the rescue crew. A curler had dropped from her head—like an antler, McKay thought—and bounced on the ground.

  “I heard Madeleine’s gonna ride with them cows,” the man next to McKay said.

  “Yep. She sure is.”

  “I wonder what poor old Henry would think of that.”

  McKay warmed his hands around his coffee cup and said nothing.

  The blacksmith went behind the counter and started pouring coffee. He stopped in front of McKay.

  “I’ve been thinking about your ma and pa this morning,” he said quietly.

  “Well thank you,” McKay said.

  “I guess you must be having a time out there … kinda lonely on that ranch, isn’t it? Kinda lonely for a young man …”

  McKay looked down, then out the window. His face reddened. When Madeleine entered, every man in the café turned to look at her.

  It was dark when the “all-aboard” sounded. Snow blew across the tall yard lights like black gravel. Madeleine boarded the train. She wore a long yellow slicker over her trousers and her hat was pulled down low against the wind.

  “Call when you get to Omaha,” McKay yelled up to her. “And watch for that shipping fever. I had Bobby pack the medicine kit. And if you need help that kid from the Two Dot Ranch is on board somewhere.”

  “Yes, McKay,” she said and winked.

  “And be careful.…”

  The train lurched once and stopped. They could hear cattle scramble for footing, then the train lurched again.

  “McKay, I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  The train moved and she slid from him.

  McKay took the shortcut home in the dark. Even so, the ride would take three hours. His horse climbed through the breaks. Snow from juniper branches spilled down his neck as he brushed by. His companion, the errant bomb, made a little wind just above his head. When the horse climbed to the top of the bench McKay could see the train shooting south, out of the basin.

  He didn’t know how long he rode with his eyes closed. He had been drinking from the flask in his saddlebag. Blasts of snow scratched his face and the electric needle of hard cold punctured each toe. When he opened his eyes he knew he had reached the lower end of the ranch.

  He passed the gate and climbed the knob toward the family graveyard. When he reached what seemed to be the top, he stepped off his horse. Snow from the ground blew up in his face, then plummeted down, mixing with the new snow. For the second time in two days, he found himself in a whiteout. He leaned out and pawed the air. Then the reins dropped from his numb hands.

  “Roany, you sonofabitch … come back.…” The horse was gone. His foot hit something hard. He crouched down and brushed away the snow but it was a rock, not his parents’ headstone. Something—either the booze or the blowing snow—made him close his eyes again.

  McKay woke with a start and whistled. His dog came to him and licked his eyes and the top of his nose and behind his ears. He stood up and called for his horse, circling one way, then the other. He tripped against something taller and thinner than a rock. That’s how he knew it was his father’s grave.

  “Hello, Pa.” He threw one arm around the headstone and cupped his ear to it.

  “Talk to me. I need a little help.” He paused. “I’ve lost my roan horse. Tell me where he is … please?”

  He pressed his ear against the polished rock. His nose was running and his blond hair stuck out from under his hat. A dark form appeared in front of him. He stood up quickly.

  “Well, you dumb sonofabitch.” He grabbed the horse’s head and planted a kiss on his big jaw.

  As he brushed the snow off the seat of the saddle, he thought about how his parents had been extracted from the car and pulled dead from the ditch, up through a thin layer of ice that broke over his mother’s head in long, translucent staves; how her gray hair had come unbraided and floated like sea grass. He remembered his father’s wounded, wistful eyes—how they had still been open and when he tried to close them with his own hand, he couldn’t. How the lariat, always kept on the front seat of the car coiled neatly, had opened across his father’s chest as if to spell out one last cry of dismay: 0000000.

  When McKay reached the ranch no lights were on. He lit an oil lamp and wandered through the house. The living room had been straightened up and swept clean of snow, and the photograph of his parents had been set on the mantle with incense burning on either side. That’s what the brothers had called “Bobby’s witchcraft.”

  McKay went upstairs. The old pine staircase creaked. He opened the door of the bedroom where Madeleine had slept and set the lamp on a small table. For a long time he stared at the bed. His hands were blue from the cold and he had trouble taking off his clothes. Then he pulled the blankets back and rubbed his lonely, aching body on the sheets where she had been.

  7

  When Carol Lyman’s shift at the shipping yard café ended that afternoon, she drove to Snuff’s Bar. It was located on a bend in the road that came from nothing and led to nothing for a hundred miles and the mill’s pink dust blew back over the gaunt building as if to conceal its ramshackle edifice and clothe it decently.

  Out back an archipelago of small cabins made a line up the hill. In the twenties they housed the only madam in that part of the state and her three employees, though after a few years they moved back to Butte, Montana, where they had come from, because business was brisker there. When the Depression hit, Snuff opened the cabins again, fitted the beds with worn sheets, and let jobless men and women coming through on freights sleep in them. Carol had left Luster in 1932, moved on with those seeking work in California, vanished, without saying good-bye. Now she was back.

  She lived in a house on the edge of town. The neighbors had a yard full of roosters who awakened her and her retarded son each morning. They strutted and crowed and brawled until Mañuel fed them. Carol looked like a bird herself. She had long legs and gnarled toes and the skin on her neck showed gooseflesh in the winter. She had a handsome, haughty presence, a regal posture, and carefully kept red fingernails. Sometimes she walked in the badlands looking for arrowheads or, when she had enough gas, she’d drive to another town and drink a milkshake at a drive-in restaurant there. She thought of her ability to step out of routine as a discipline—the way some women her age do volunteer work or take up ballet.

  She began going to Snuff’s the day the Mormon women invited her to their Relief Society meeting. They felt sorry for her and because wartime heightens people’s sense of community (in direct proportion to their bereavement), the women issued an invitation to the solitary Carol Lyman. She attended once. To show her gratitude, she made a banana cake and a gallon of nonalcoholic punch, but sat back as the women made Christmas presents for the soldiers and never joined in. During a break she went outside to have a smoke. From behind the currant bush, she watched the kindly women reconvene. They kept looking toward the door, expecting her to return. Instead, she stubbed out her cigarette against the wall of the church and drove north, wearing her dark glasses. That was a Thursday. She decided she would be obligated to no one from that Thursday on.

  Normally, she was a guarded person. Her life was as narrow as a pine needle. But Snuff’s was the loneliest place she had ever seen and on a whim, she began stopping there.

  Stepping out of the car, she straightened her dress, took a deep breath, and walked in. She had never gone to a bar alone. A chandelier in the center of the room swung in the draft of the opened door. Its bottom tier was bent and only four crystal prisms remained. A long cord descended through the middle of the fixture and a bare bulb hung down in the room like a punching bag. She walked to the middle of the floor and turned slowly. It was a big, drafty place with a cream-colored tin cei
ling blackened by soot. A sour smell moved stiffly through the air and mixed with something antiseptic. Flannel curtains with scenes of duck hunters aiming their shotguns hung limply over unwashed windows and the ten-by-ten linoleum dance floor was badly nicked and stained. Tables and chairs and spittoons were arranged at the far end and in one corner, there was a card table sparsely padded with green felt. Snuff stood behind the bar and looked at the woman who walked in.

  “You want to buy the outfit, or do you just want a drink?” he asked jovially.

  Carol Lyman turned to him. He was tall and dapper and nearing fifty. He wore a trimmed mustache and his hair rose in a tuft at the top of his skull. His face was windburned and when he smiled, his thin lips turned white.

  “A Manhattan,” Carol said. “Do you make them here?”

  Snuff looked askance at her and went to work. He poured and shook and strained and in a moment, held out the drink she requested. She ate the cherry first, then drained the glass of its reddish orange liquid.

  “Very good. Thank you,” she said, handed Snuff the correct change, and left the bar. That was the first time. After, Snuff looked for her through the greasy porthole window at the end of the bar and a week later to the day, saw her coupe glide in—like a black swan—snapped on his red bow tie, and made another pitcher of Manhattans.

  Inside the door, Carol pulled a compact from her purse. She did not like the way she looked. She touched her cheek. The skin was dry. “Oh well,” she thought. When she saw the drink waiting for her, she gave the bartender a hesitant smile. She was not used to being waited on; it made her uneasy.

  “How very sweet,” she said and swung one hip onto the barstool.

  The tall man extended his hand. “Hello, I’m Snuff.”

  “Carol Lyman.”

  “Which side of the line are you from?”

  “Wyoming. Luster. I work at the shipping yards. In the café.”

  She drained her glass and dabbed at the corner of her mouth with one finger. “I’d like a card game. Is that possible?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Poker or blackjack?”

  “Five-card draw.”