One Sweet Quarrel (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Deirdre McNamer

  She stood on the front step, sipping, and surveyed the scrub grass, the random rutted paths, the haphazard presence of small houses down the long slope that ended in railroad tracks, the depot, the row of low businesses like a carnival midway.

  “This,” she announced to Vivian, “is absolutely beautiful, this place. Oh, you think I am making a mockery, but I mean beautiful in a spiritual sense.

  “Oh, that may not be the Woolworth Building,” she said, waving at the two-story square that was the school. “And that may not be the Taj Mahal,” she said with a mysterious, dismissive wave at what seemed to be the rim above town.

  “But that”—she squinted at the arena waiting on the edge of everything, huge—“that is a Miracle of the Modern World! Can you deny it? No, you cannot.”

  “I have never tasted such tea,” she said, holding the flowered cup aloft. “Perhaps it is the altitude, or the bracing air.” She sniffed long and hard.

  “How did the poet phrase it?” she mused. “‘Stepping westward seemed to be / A kind of heavenly destiny.’ Well, he is exactly, precisely right!

  “To me, even the humble aspect of the buildings, the mud, the frontier hurly-burly down there”—she waved in the direction of town—“speak to me of fortitude and faith, of the ordinary man getting out there and going for broke! Oh, how could you know how wonderful this is for me to see, Vivian, after the hardness, the corruption of the city?”

  There was a silence. Vivian had been wrapping the bread, listening, gazing at her sister-in-law’s silhouette through the doorway. She felt she should applaud now.

  “Yes?” she prompted politely. No answer. She joined Amelia, who had closed her eyes, the teacup pressed to her breastbone. Her lips moved. Then, as if on cue, her eyes snapped open.

  “I personally knew a young man who was cut down in cold blood by mobsters,” Amelia said reverently. “In broad daylight.”

  She clarified herself. “That’s not when I knew him. That’s when he was cut down. In broad daylight.”

  She sipped the last of her tea. “Well, that’s when I knew him too. In broad daylight. We were just friends. He was not a beau, is what I mean to say.”

  She gazed intently at Vivian. “He was conscripted by evil men and could not extricate himself, and he was cut down in the prime of life.” She drew a long breath and closed her eyes. “The wick of his being was snapped.”

  They put on their hats and descended the long shallow hill, walking along the edge of the track, where the mud had dried. The day was brash and blue and becoming noisy with autos, shouts, and manic birds.

  “The faith!” Amelia exulted, flinging her hand again toward the arena on the edge of everything. “It is like the Roman Colosseum. It is! If a thousand people could decide to build something like that, think what a million of the same sort of people could build. Why, they could build something that would cover the entire earth!”

  Jerry was out of the light, down in his cellar, behind his counter. A teenager was there too, one of the Wilson boys, the one with a grieved face of acne. He was scooping out ice cream for another teenager, and Jerry was telling him to charge two scoops for a mess like that. It was dim and shadowy down there, a peculiar murkiness that the kerosene could not chase away.

  Vivian plopped the wrapped bread on the counter.

  “Charge him anything you like,” she said cheerfully to the Wilson boy. Jerry looked at her curiously, with irritation. She had a sturdy smile on her face. Her voice was sturdily cheerful.

  “It’s off,” Jerry said flatly. “That’s the leading rumor at the moment, anyway. The twenty lifelong friends didn’t materialize. That’s what one of the newsboys told me.”

  “Give him two scoops,” Vivian urged.

  That was only one of the rumors on July 2. They were already scuttling blind and fast through town. Rumors that the whole thing was off. That it was on and Kearns had agreed to take what he got at the gate and call it even. That Dempsey and Kearns had left Great Falls with their $200,000 as soon as they heard that the rest wasn’t coming. That Gibbons was in seclusion. That he wasn’t and he had given a little speech about putting your best foot forward, and nothing attempted, nothing gained.

  By late afternoon, when the sun began to make the shadows long, those with blocks of tickets would begin to hawk them, their mournful cries like birds. Fifty-dollar tickets for thirty, for twenty, for five.

  By midnight or shortly after, a second round of rumors would give serious chase to the first, and word would finally come to the Green Lite and the King Tut and all the other lit-up joints that Kearns had agreed to take it over. Get his last pound of flesh at the gate. That was the deal. Shelby learned about it from the wire services.

  When the rumors first began to run around, when they made their insect presence felt, everyone knew what that meant. It meant the tens of thousands would not come. They would hear that it might be off—reporters were filing stories by early afternoon—and they simply would not come. Or if they were already on their way, they would turn back, because why would anybody come to Shelby, Montana, if the fight was a bust?

  This, then, is what everybody in Shelby knew by the time they’d heard a second or third rumor. That the thing was a bust, whether it happened or not. This is what Jerry told Vivian and Amelia.

  It simply didn’t matter, now, what exactly came to pass.

  When Jerry heard the first rumor at ten o’clock, he walked very casually to the bank and retrieved all the money he owned—$400. By two o’clock, there was a small run on the bank, and within a week it would close its doors.

  By two o’clock, Jerry and Vivian and Amelia had eaten bread and cheese in the Cavern. They had scooped themselves ice cream cones and helped themselves to pairs of blue sunglasses and locked the Cavern and ascended into the sunlight of the afternoon.

  They passed Stepov in his cape, and Jerry introduced his sister. The news of the fight rumors had not deflated her. In fact—and this would be something to wonder about later—the news didn’t seem to deflate anyone right away. For the next forty-eight hours, Shelby would muster a strange kind of energy: the stylish kind of energy that is unconstrained because it is without hope.

  Amelia examined Stepov with delight, stepping back to take him in, his monocle, his cape, and she said urgently:

  “I have to tell you, Mr. Stepov. You live in a town that is truly beautiful. Spiritually beautiful. And in country, I might add, that is beautiful, inwardly and outwardly.

  “The water I saw, coming into this country! It lay in great golden pools on the grasslands, and there were birds of every imaginable variety, pelicans, I think, or cranes. The noblest and loveliest of birds. Oh, it thrills me simply to see it all again in my mind’s eye, that glossy water and those flocks and flocks of birds, more birds than I could ever have imagined in one place.

  “And the brass band at the station, of course. I bowed! I thought the band was for me!” They all laughed, even Stepov. “This is a valiant town,” Amelia insisted. “So bold. To take such a risk! To put on such an extravaganza. To live with these days and days of agonizing doubt—yes? no?—but to keep on, with some style too. Oh, I am…what is the word? Not charmed. Something stronger than charmed. Deeply impressed.

  “I feel privileged to be here,” she said, shaking Stepov’s hand again. “I am dumbstruck, sir.”

  The vendors began to sell their popcorn and hot dogs to each other. The lumberman who provided all the unpaid-for boards for the arena drove slowly down the street with a big sign on the side of his car: I BUILT THE DAMN THING. The shopkeepers, concessionaires, visitors, ambled to the curb to watch it pass. They shook their heads. Most of them laughed.

  Jerry and Vivian and Amelia, their sunglasses on, walked slowly down the street, past all the establishments, taking them in as though they were all tourists.

  The Days of ’49, the Red Onion, the Silver Grill, the King Tut, the Black Cat, the Blue Mouse, the Chicken Coop, the Green Lite, the Log Cabin.

&
nbsp; Shelby wanted to be Wild West, so it tried to be a cowboy movie. Tom Mix in Chasing the Moon was showing at the theater. And Mix himself was coming to the fight. He might be filming. He wanted plenty of Indians and cowboys around. This meant that the man who had the wit to sell big movie sombreros was doing the best of all the concessionaires.

  Shelby wanted to seem colorful and Western and lively. Also jazzy and clever and nobody’s dummies.

  Red, black, blue, green. Attach it to onion, cat, mouse, lite. Whimsical, fun, modern names. Light and sassy, with liquor in a special room in the back.

  All of it required a diligent casualness. The need to be flippant enough to get people to spend money that you desperately needed. It was like calling to an animal whose death would keep you from starving. It was difficult to be light-voiced. To look as if you didn’t care.

  A saxophone player in a tuxedo passes Miss Lorena Tricky, a girl trick rider in huge woolly chaps. A young fellow wearing a tin deputy’s badge clops horseback past Heywood Broun, obese, pensive, scribbling in his notebook. A fortune-teller with a long chiffon scarf, cherry lips, sagging jowls, many rings, scurries across the street and drops one of her scarves. It is handed back to her by a man carrying foot-high oil derricks in a box.

  A skinny man with a pencil mustache, shouldering a big camera tripod, rests it for a minute against a large poster—a poster of the human head divided by dotted lines into regions of propensity. The tripod tip rests, an armless marker, on the region of Tune. A painted arrow points down the street to the phrenologist’s tiny shack, wedged between two stores, suddenly there one day like a toadstool. Another poster advertises the Knight and Day Wild West Show, two performances a day, and there atop a mane-flowing horse is the cowgirl we just passed in the flesh, her spurs the sound of ice cubes in a sturdy glass. In the poster, she is chapless—wears a kind of bathing outfit, a trapeze-artist outfit, in fact—and clings to the back of a running horse with her bare feet, her lasso roping the entire sky.

  An oilman in jodhpurs stalks past a kid hawking near beer. A drunk reels out of the soft-drink room of the Sullivan, bowing elaborately to a young girl who runs toward the mercantile, sent by her mother for a can of lard.

  Two middle-aged Blackfeet men pad past in moccasins, elaborate beaded buckskins, swaying feather headdresses, war shields. They take off their headdresses and place them carefully in the rumble seat of a Model T. One of them bends to crank the starter. The other places his braids behind his shoulders and dons large driving goggles.

  Esmerelda the fortune-teller, a fat woman with paste-jewel rings on her index fingers, sits in her little wooden box and knits something that looks like a baby blanket.

  Everyone is in costume. Even the local people, the local men and women and kids, seem costumed. It is a moving picture lot for now, and they are playing “locals.”

  An empty frankfurter stand.

  Mangy dogs at the kitchen door of the Red Onion.

  Near the end of the street, two barkers with megaphones. Girl shows, they say. A Big Girl Review at the King Tut. Also Tom Howard, the funniest comedian in America.

  The afternoon performance at the King Tut Castle was called “The High Cost of Loving.” Fifty cents at the front door. A quarter more at the top of the stairs.

  Part of the dance floor was staked off as a stage. Through the open window at the back of the stage area, you could see the railroad tracks in the early dusk, and now a freight train gliding, bumping, coming apart, regrouping.

  A girl named Patsy Salmon sang something.

  A comedian made a joke about cowboys and gin.

  The train cars crashed and the whistle shrieked.

  Jerry and Vivian and Amelia watched the entire performance from a bench in the first row. The sun was slanting in the window behind the heroine’s copper-colored hair. They left their glasses on.

  Amelia tried to engage the phrenologist in a discussion. She was a middle-aged woman with a turban on her head, and she didn’t want to talk. Amelia pressed fifty cents on her and invited her to run a finger over her head. She guided her. “You see. Ideality,” she said, resigned. “That has been the undoing of me, I fear.”

  Vivian began to laugh. She laughed right out loud.

  The phrenologist was Susan Watkins—the second wife of Lem Watkins, who had come out to Montana the year they did and farmed north of town somewhere.

  They stopped at the King Tut. The women had lemonade for ten cents and Jerry had “lemonade” for twenty. Six couples moved around the floor. A sign offered five-cent dances with any of ten beautiful women. Amelia told them that she wished she had written down everything Sir Arthur Conan Doyle said about King Tut and the death of Lord Carnarvon. She said she would charge at least twenty cents to dance with any of the men she saw on that floor.

  One table in the King Tut was filled with men and women in identical safari outfits—jackets, hard-brimmed hats, trousers tucked into boots. They roared with laughter. They signaled for service.

  Another table of strangers wore neckerchiefs and brilliant cowboy boots.

  The Fitzgeralds and the Smiths from Cut Bank sat at a third table. The men wore rumpled suits, the women, pretty dresses and hats. The rest of the tables were empty.

  They walked up the hill to the house. The mud had dried. Amelia was finally silent, though she looked around with an alert, almost rapt, look on her face.

  “Did you happen to go to the bank?” Vivian asked, as though she didn’t care very much.

  “Yes, I did,” Jerry said. “We’ve got what we’ve got. It ain’t a fortune.”

  The stars were coming out in the purple. Vivian thought she had not seen so many for years, not since her days out on the grass in her shack. A breeze had come up. It blew various smells at them. Cut hay. Horse dung. Sweet prairie grass.

  The arena grew larger. It looked mysterious and huge in the half dark.

  “Would it be round from above?” Amelia asked.

  “It’s eight-sided,” Jerry said.

  “Hmmm.” She seemed to be trying to remember something. She hummed a small tune as they walked, and it sounded quite lovely.

  She said, “Ixion? Do you remember Ixion from school? Mr. Graham, the classics man with the beating cane?”

  Jerry said he didn’t, or only vaguely.

  “Ixion,” she said. “He wanted too much. He wanted Hera, Zeus’s wife. For punishment, Zeus put him in the center of an eight-spoked wheel and set him turning for all time.

  “You must remember Mr. Graham, Jerry,” she urged. “He made you get the asthma. He was one of the worst in that respect.”

  20

  IT WAS dawn and the world existed on its own terms, breathed its own breath like a huge resting animal, the first human scurryings only gnats on its back. The first wheels, the first feet, skittered across the surface of something broad and deep where the birds were and the wind; also the sounds of grass moved by wind and the black molten hum of whatever it was that might be below.

  There were many birds then, and at dawn they were a beautiful roar.

  A splash of thrown wash water. The sight of it arcing silver from a door. The muffled thwap of someone beating a rug. A cough.

  The autos and the moving feet begin to sink in and raise dust. The dust thickens and the noise too—the dogs, the cars, the concessionaires. By seven, eight o’clock, there is shouting and firecrackers. Automobiles shrouded with alkali dust lurch spectral into town and move aimlessly around the rutted tracks between the buildings and around the edges. Montana cars, mostly, with signs on the sides: SHELBY OR BUST.

  Down the street from the Malones, Mrs. Torgerson stands over a hot stove in a stifling kitchen, making candy for her husband to take to the little stand he has hammered together over by the arena. She has been up since three, stirring the burbling stuff, because her brother-in-law in Great Falls owns a bakery and he sent her the expensive sugar out of pity and the kindness of his heart.

  She is a stout bent woman in her fif
ties, exhausted now and wringing wet. She is making meringues, and she bends over each cooling batch and presses walnuts into the sticky white pieces, walnuts she shelled the night before with her arthritic fingers blazing, and droplets of her sweat fall on some of the candies but she keeps at it. She takes no shortcuts. She makes beautiful candies for her silent husband to box up and take to his little stand, where they will fall out of shape and gather flies that Torgerson will bat at, the smell of the sugar cloying and stupid almost as soon as he begins to bark through a cardboard megaphone.

  Candy! he will scream furiously at the crowd. Sweets!

  A group of big-shot reporters and photographers will pass by his booth, not long before the preliminary fights, and one of them will call out in that nasal back-East voice of theirs, “Hey, sport! Got any candy to go with them flies?” And then he’ll take a swig out of a small silver hip flask and offer a mocking conciliatory swig to Torgerson and that’s when Torgerson will leap out at him and get his arm broken by a wildly swung tripod.

  Then he will have to go home, the candies abandoned, all that valuable sugar, and wait until the day ends so he can find Doc Nelson and get his arm plastered. All afternoon he will sit in his oven of a house gulping spoonfuls of his wife’s tonic, listening to the distant roar of the crowd in the arena—the roar of a poisonous ocean is how it will begin to sound to him through his pain and the sugar smell in the house and the odd whinnying of his horse out in the corral and the deep breathing of his exhausted wife, who sleeps upright in a chair on the porch, head on hand, her mouth absolutely sad.

  An almost-imperceptible insect whine grew louder and began to fill the air. A small plane wobbled into view over the top of the rim. It was roofless, with two men inside, front and back. The noise became deafening. Horses bolted and whinnied. Dogs howled like coyotes at the sky thing.

  Stunters had been harrying the skies ever since the rain stopped, and this was only the first one of the day.

  The plane wavered screaming over the hilltop and began to circle Shelby like a drunken bird, buzzing low over the arena. It seemed then that the day declared itself.