Heart Mountain

by Ehrlich, Gretel;

  The door swung open.

  “Look who’s here.” Dutch stood in the hall with his arm around a woman. “It’s Loretta.”

  Pinkey hobbled toward Dutch, who had ridden the rails with him to find jobs cowboying in Montana, and the woman, Loretta, who had taken up with them on a St. Patrick’s Day in Butte, ten years before; even ridden the rails to Seattle, where they ate salmon out of trash barrels behind the good restaurants; and ridden back with them as far as Miles City and disappeared. She had black hair in a pageboy and a hard face. She was a head taller than Pinkey and when he lurched into her, he nuzzled his head on the swell of her opulent breasts. Dutch pulled an open bottle of beer from his coat pocket and offered it to Pinkey.

  “Come on down, you’re missin’ a good party,” Dutch said.

  Pinkey noticed Dutch’s ears and nose had grown grotesquely large. Dutch tipped the bottle up and held it to his mouth until it was drained, then dropped it to the floor and stepped toward the woman again.

  “I can’t, I’m on my way up to the ranch.”

  Now the woman edged away from Dutch’s grasp, toward Pinkey.

  “Just one more little kiss?” she asked, then pressed herself against him and put her lips to his bald head.

  “Oooowee! Do that again,” Pinkey said.

  After, arms entwined, the trio descended the stairs to the bar.

  When the hearse approached, Willard stood to one side of the street. The willow branch, stripped of ornament, looked narrow and closed up like an arrow. Some of the fallen tinsel had caught on Willard’s shoes and as he dragged his feet onto the sidewalk, silver strands let go of his ankles and blew away. He waved at the hearse driver, then looked at the small pines whose strings of light looped to the ground like jump ropes and the big tree at the end of the street, blinking and shuddering. The grocery store was locked. Willard pressed his face to the window. His breath made a balloon of frost which he scratched away, then saw how the one bare bulb in the back of the store cast a light over the hard butcher’s case, saw his package of meat abandoned there.

  The cactus on the sill of the south window cast a green light in the bar. Pinkey cut off the top of one paddle, peeled it with his pocketknife, diced the green flesh, and dropped the pieces into his whiskey.

  “Listen to this.” The bartender read from the newspaper: “‘Help Uncle Sam Nip the Nipponese! Come to the Big Horn Hotel, Saturday, 4:00, where a representative from California’s aircraft industry will interview you for a job. Contribute to the war effort!’ By God, that sounds better than the Red Cross sewing and knitting clubs.…”

  Loretta took her hand from Dutch’s thigh and dug into her purse for her sunglasses. She looked at the bar clock: three forty-five.

  “I think I’ll just go over to that hotel,” she said.

  Dutch yanked her arm. “I thought your dance card was already filled up for the night. Now don’t go shippin’ out on me.…”

  “Oh Christ, Dutch, shut up,” she said, pulling away.

  “‘Draft Board calls Men for Examination. All able-bodied men under the age of forty-five years, with or without dependents, will now be called for a physical examination on Monday, November 29, 1942. However, because of the shortage of farmhands, some men will be deferred from service if they are found to be regularly engaged in an agricultural operation. All men must come to the courthouse.…’” The bartender stopped reading.

  “Hell, they couldn’t run the outfit without me,” Pinkey drawled.

  “… and Bud here and his old bar is just as important as …”

  “That means me,” the bartender said.

  “What means you?”

  “I’m forty-four. I won’t be forty-five until spring.”

  “Christ, Bud, I thought you was way older than that.”

  “You are when you have eight kids.”

  “All out of the same mare?”

  The bartender scowled.

  “Well here’s to you, Bud. No, I mean it. Goddamn, we need a little patriotism around here,” Pinkey said.

  “Let me buy you a drink.”

  “Thanks, Dutch, I think I’ll take you up on that.”

  They drank. The rectangle of green light moved from the floor in the middle of the room to the bartender’s face and broke up on the cluttered wall behind him. Two men Pinkey had seen before but couldn’t remember where came into the bar. One had a crew cut and a square face. His head looked like a box. He ordered a shot with a water back and his friend ordered the same. They sat at the end of the bar close to the door and the shaft of shamrock light caught the tops of their heads. Pinkey drained his glass and poured the pieces of cactus into his hand.

  “Hors d’oeuvres, anyone?”

  The man with the crew cut turned to him. He wasn’t sitting on the stool but standing with his short legs spread wide apart and he didn’t smile. Then Pinkey knew it was the army man in civvies, the one who had taken him to the hospital to give blood. He dumped the cactus back into his glass, and ordered a round for the house.

  “There better be some of that cactus left when I get back from wherever the army sends me … if I do … hell, even if I don’t!”

  Pinkey grinned. “You bet, Bud. Harvest’s over.”

  When the taller of the two men reached for the drink Pinkey had bought he saw the tattoos just above the man’s wrist and a tangle of brown hair raked over it. He thought it might be a sailfish or a seahorse but he couldn’t be sure.

  “Hey boys!” Loretta sashayed past the army men to the far end of the bar. “I got me a job.”

  “As what?” Dutch asked and howled with laughter.

  “In one of them airplane factories,” she said indignantly. “In Los Angeles.”

  “Ooowee.… Ain’t that near Hollywood?” Pinkey asked.

  She turned a sour face to him. Pinkey reached up and took her dark glasses off. He whispered. “What’d ya have to do to get this job?”

  Loretta grabbed her glasses back. “I just signed my name is all.”

  “Well I’m proud of you,” the bartender chimed in.

  Dutch and Pinkey turned to him.

  “Well ain’t you getting to be a patriotic sonofabitch all of a sudden,” Pinkey said.

  Bud stopped drying the beer glass and the army man, the one with the crew cut, shifted his feet to look down the bar. Pinkey hiccuped, grabbed a stirrer, and plunged it into his new drink until chunks of cactus swirled upward in the brown liquid.

  There was a scratching sound.

  “Look,” Loretta whispered.

  A boy with a Japanese face stared in. His eyes had the same hooded look as Willard’s and he uttered a sound—something between a rooster’s crow and a human whine—then scratched at the broken screen door. Before Pinkey could think about that face and sound, a bar stool skidded sideways across the floor and knocked into him, spilling his drink. He felt the sudden wetness on his broken leg and thought he had pissed in his pants. Then he heard a scream like a gut-shot fawn’s.

  The army men had the Japanese boy on the ground. He was half in and half out of the bar and the screen banged against the men’s elbows and backs as they dropped the boy. Pinkey and Dutch reached the two men at the same time, but Loretta was already there. She jabbed one high heel into the back of the tall man’s knee and when he lurched, she grabbed his shirt collar, yanked him off the boy, and let the man fall. The one with the crew cut staggered toward her.

  “You can’t do that,” he stammered.

  She waited until they were face to face, his hands on her, then she kicked him in the groin.

  “Eeehaa,” Pinkey yelled. He leaned down toward the face with the hooded eyes. The boy screamed.

  “Hell, I ain’t going to hurt you. That hurtin’s all over now.” He fell, sitting, beside the boy and groaned with the pain in his leg. Another terrible sound erupted. This one didn’t come from the bar but from somewhere in town. It was the harsh whistle of an air raid horn.

  Pinkey listened for the drone
of Zero fighters. There’s no hiding now, he thought. I might as well just sit here and order me a last drink.

  “Bud …” He had to yell to be heard. “Drinks for the house …”

  Something bumped into him.

  “Oh my God,” Loretta squealed.

  When Pinkey looked up he saw the two army men fighting with each other. The boy whimpered and Pinkey shielded the boy’s head and every once in a while hammered a fist spastically in the air as the two men reeled above him. The air raid whistle roared on.

  “Where’s that drink?” Pinkey hollered into the bar long since vacated by Bud, who hated fights. Pinkey looked at the young boy. His jaw had swollen and blood oozed from a cut by his mouth. People flooded the streets, scanning the sky for bombers. They formed a circle around Pinkey and the boy because the army men had fled down the alley. When Pinkey looked up he saw Willard, his body oval and oversize, his eyes, like the young boy’s, holding the same bottomless stare.

  Willard dropped his willow branch to the ground and it lay like another downed body. He had seen the two army men burst out of the bar and descend on the boy. He felt as if the blows were aimed at him instead and, when the air raid siren started, thought the noise was issuing from someplace inside himself. He saw Pinkey on the ground next to the boy and had seen the things Loretta had done to the men, saw the men flee, and remembered how, just before the Nisei boy’s head had seemed to gyrate all the way around on his neck, his jaw made a snapping sound and he had screamed, how he—Willard—had thought it was the kind of sound the bird of paradise would make if it were backhanded, its long jawbone flower breaking into flame.

  By the time Bud came back Pinkey had made drinks for Dutch, Loretta, and himself, and anyone else who came in. Pinkey had picked up the paper and wondered aloud whether his name would be in next week’s issue for heroism. When Dutch asked him what was at the movies, he said he couldn’t read and handed the paper back to Bud, who said Woman of the Year with Katharine Hepburn.

  “Anyone wanna go?” Dutch asked.

  Bud shook his head.

  “Sure, Dutch, since you’re treating,” Loretta said.

  Pinkey stirred the cactus in his glass to the top again and watched it drown.

  Pinkey lay flat on his back on the bed. A big crack had cut across the ceiling since the last time he had rented the room. It ran its course like a creek, its headwaters in the middle of the ceiling, widening where it met the wall. He rolled on his side and pulled the pint bottle from under the mattress. I’m going to thumb a ride to the ranch, he said aloud to himself and took a swig. He heard cars on the street below and went to the window. The black hearse filed by, then a line of pickups and cars. Across the way, Rose and Larry and Willard stood on the boardwalk. After the procession passed, someone at the end of the street turned the Christmas tree lights back on.

  He sat on the bed with a thud and thought about the war. The United States had lost in Bataan, won in the Coral Sea, lost again in Corregidor. He thought about the trains that brought the war prisoners from the West Coast and the ones that brought the dead bodies home. He sank back wide awake. The ceiling only spun if he closed his eyes. He heard the door to Dutch’s room squeak open, then close, and a woman giggling.

  Pinkey listened. “I thought you was up to the picture show,” he yelled into the other room without moving his head from the pillow.

  The sounds stopped. Pinkey’s eyes moved like hard globes. He took another swig. Now the sounds were muffled. He heard a bed creak and laughter and a low groan. He lay motionless. Now the muffled laughter exploded into a hissing sigh.

  “You bitch,” he whispered. His face stiffened the way it had before he was sick in the alley with his son watching; then it went soft and tears stood in his reddened eyes.

  In the morning a fog covered the town. It was so thick Pinkey could not see the grocery store across the street. He heard the 10:10 pull in and depart and wondered how many more coffins had been unloaded.

  “Look,” he said, meaning his hands. They were shaking. Dutch had come in the room and Pinkey asked for a shave.

  Dutch held the straight razor at an angle to Pinkey’s jaw and pulled against the graying whiskers with uneven strokes. The fog was not a solid thing but, like self-hate, sank and once in a while, pulled apart as if to let in fresh air. One of those times Pinkey saw Willard traipse across the street toward the boardinghouse. Then he saw Carol Lyman’s black coupe pull up and Carol, eyeless behind dark glasses, stand by the car, put two fingers in her mouth and whistle, and after, Willard run out and climb in.

  It was more frozen air than a true coastal fog. And so heavy, it wrapped tree limbs and lampposts in frost. Pinkey had seen that Willard’s willow branch had turned white. It glistened like sequins threaded together and tied in a knot at one end.

  Dutch shaved the other side of Pinkey’s face, then the upper lip and chin.

  “Do you think we’ll make green grass?” he asked.

  “Hell, my crystal ball’s broke,” Pinkey said.

  “You know, I get tired of town sooner than I used to,” Dutch said.

  “Ouch.” Pinkey wiped a spot of blood from his chin. “I’m ugly enough without you adding to it.”

  “… to where I don’t even know if it’s worth coming into town at all anymore,” Dutch continued.

  “Not even for last night?” Pinkey asked, grinning.

  Dutch left his hand, the one holding the straight razor, suspended in air.

  “Well you …” He stopped, embarrassed, then finished up the shave. “I guess two old men like us only deserve one girl.”

  Pinkey remembered Loretta’s breasts. Then the fog was not of a piece but rolled into muscular forms that flattened out quickly. Her breasts were like clouds wound tightly by strong winds above the mountains, Pinkey thought, and smooth. Smooth.

  Dutch stood back to examine his shaving job while Pinkey touched the left side of his face, then the right. He wanted to look in the mirror but was too weak to stand. He had made love to Loretta sometime during the night; that much he remembered. She had come into his room from Dutch’s and when she climbed into his bed he asked her if she wasn’t Dutch’s girl and she said, “I’m no one’s girl,” which was the same as saying “I’m everyone’s girl,” as if it made any difference, as if we could own anything—a piece of land, a dog, the weather, even bodies which form so slowly in someone else’s body and come apart so fast in front of a gun.

  Now he remembered how she had leaned in toward him. He could have lit a match with her breath. The moles on her chest looked like hailstones coming fast and her too-black hair bent sharply under as if recoiling from the strength in her shoulders. He had drawn her closer until he could not tell where his body stopped and hers began and thought how all opposites come to nearly the same thing: how a hailstone like a hardball can knock you out with its coming; how her pendulous breasts, clanging together like buoy bells, could make him deaf; how her banking into him—an undulation of fog—was like not being able to see. When he woke she was gone.

  11

  The first funeral for a boy killed in the Pacific had to be moved up a day because the ground had started to freeze and the gravediggers didn’t want to open the grave with pickaxes unless they had to. It was December and an arctic front had pushed down from British Columbia. There had been snows and thaws all fall but cold that came to stay smelled different, McKay thought as he filed by the boy’s gold coffin, like a rubbed flint and the sparks were snow.

  He had looked in the mirror that morning when he was naked and shivering and saw how skinny he was, as if life were a subtractive process, not an additive one.

  “I know life is supposed to be a great thing but I can’t shape it to my liking,” he had written to his brother Ted. “Any advice?” He could feel the letter in his breast pocket as he shook hands with the boy’s family after the last graveside prayer. He had added, “Nothing new here. You know how November and December are. I’m like a fish on ice. I’m
already tired of winter and of national pride that feeds on world ruin and winter hasn’t even happened yet. Girlwise, I’m no better off than you probably are. I continue what Mother called ‘my questionable practice’ of sleeping with the dog. I suppose that for someone like Champ, going to war maps out one’s life for a while, or forever, but why follow a map that leads to hell. Hell’s right here at home, and Pinkey would say, ‘Ain’t it lovely?’”

  On the way home McKay stopped off at Snuff’s. He always stopped there before weddings and after funerals. The desolate look of the place cleansed him, the way certain foods clean the palate.

  “I’ll have a shot of that Cobb’s Creek,” McKay said.

  “You mean out of Pinkey’s bottle.… He’ll be mad,” Snuff said and winked. His untied bow tie hung around his neck and the front of his white shirt was wet from washing glasses.

  “Yea, Pinkey just bought me a drink only he isn’t here to pay.” Snuff smiled as he filled the shot glass. Restless, drink in hand, McKay swung off the bar stool. He was wearing one of his father’s tweed jackets and it was too big for him through the shoulders. The bar smelled of ammonia and for a moment McKay couldn’t get his breath.

  “A funeral’s a hell of a thing to go to first thing in the morning,” Snuff remarked. His boney hands were covered with soapsuds.

  McKay walked to the back door and yanked it open. On the other side Carol Lyman’s eyes met his. She was bent over the Wild Man, scissors in hand. A mass of thick hair lay strewn on the ground and in the sagebrush and the snow that had begun to fall an hour before when the pallbearers lowered the coffin into the hardening ground, covered it.

  “Hello, stranger, need a trim?”

  “Hello, Carol. You taken up barbering now?”

  “He needed it bad.”

  “I’ll say,” McKay said. He couldn’t look at Carol without thinking of the day his parents drowned and he didn’t want to think about that now. Something else pulled at him. He turned back to the bar.

  “Hey, Snuffy, would you drop this in the mail for me; I’ve got to get home,” McKay said. He wanted to get out of there and he had forgotten to mail the letter to Ted in town.