As they headed out into the Centennial valley, Hawk and Sally held hands. He kissed her fingers. She pointed out antelope grazing. The Mustang’s engine kept missing: it wasn’t tuned to the altitude. He said he could adjust her carburetor, if she wanted. She smiled and told him he already had. Told her no, seriously, maybe he’d take the car in to a mechanic and get the carburetor looked at and have the brakes adjusted. He was not at all happy with her brakes.
They slowed down through Centennial, past the Old Corral, where Sally had once made the ill-advised decision to agree to a request for “Ode to Billy Joe,” a song Hawk termed “a real room-clearer.” As they rolled through town and up the grade, Sally took a breath and said, “Technically, I never lied to you.”
“Technicality,” he declared. “I never asked.”
“You should have,” she told him.
“I know,” he answered.
After a minute, she said, “If you’d asked, it might have been different. I wondered sometimes, lots of times, when you were gone, if you really cared.”
A minute more. “I did,” he said.
“I know,” she answered.
Two heartbeats. “You should have known then,” he said very quietly. “I told you I loved you.”
“Yeah, you did. It stayed with me a month maybe, and then I started wondering again. It wasn’t the first time somebody told me he loved me, and I was inclined to take the words for what they were generally worth. It took me a while to realize that those words were hard for you to say, and by then it was way too late.”
Hawk drove on, waiting for more.
There was more. “You left me alone a lot,” she said. “I was pretty needy in those days, Hawk.”
He nodded. “I didn’t understand what that meant. Didn’t know what I was supposed to do.” And he knew, of course, that he hadn’t tried all that hard to figure it out. Wasn’t love supposed to solve problems?
“You were supposed to get the idea and settle down and move in with me.”
“It wasn’t an option, then.” He took a curve a little too wide, but fortunately there was no oncoming traffic.
“Oh,” was all she said.
Hawk thought a bit, then took a breath of his own. “I have one main question. You always said Sam Branch was a slimeball. Why in hell would you go to bed with him?”
“He was a slimeball,” Sally said. “He undoubtedly still is. I made an error in judgment. I think the three major variables were loneliness, tequila, and a high degree of persistence on his part.”
Three major variables. She really was cut out to be a college professor. Now a tougher question. “Did you happen to repeat that error?” he inquired, keeping his hands carefully steady on the wheel as the road wound up the mountain. He tossed a glance her way, as if to say: Moral reckoning, Sally. What’s the point in lying?
“Actually, I did.” The car swerved slightly, but not dangerously. “Look at it this way, Hawk. After you walked out, the loneliness wasn’t exactly going to go away. For that matter, neither was the tequila.”
The memories had dulled over time, but now they were sharp as knives. Still, he was a long way from the torment he’d endured then. “I didn’t want to talk to you. I told everyone that they were not, under any circumstances, to tell you where I was. Sometimes I thought I should just drive back to Laramie and shoot Branch or shoot you or shoot you both, or at least have a big screaming scene. But after a few weeks it didn’t matter anyway, because I decided I had to look for a job as far away from you as possible, and I got hired to log well data in Argentina.”
“So you were gone and I was lower than whale snot,” Sally continued. “And then there was the fact that Branchwater had a bunch more gigs around the state that winter, and there’s nothing lonelier or more conducive to the tequila solution than a winter weekend at some puke-hole in Newcastle, Wyoming, playing ‘Jaded Lover’ to snowbound coal miners, then laying up at some godforsaken motel with the radiator banging and the lights from the cars on the main drag and the motel sign glaring in your window all night long. You can only watch so much cable TV. Only smoke so many joints. Do you have any idea what it’s like to live on Tombstone pizzas?”
He gave her a narrow sidelong glance, watching the road. “And Sam continued to be persistent,” she said.
Sam Branch was the human version of a Tombstone pizza, as far as Hawk could tell. This whole thing had really pissed him off, from time to time, for seventeen years, and it was at this moment freshly infuriating. But Hawk had, after all, just spent an extremely memorable night in her bed, conducting a field trial on Professor Marvin Gaye’s theory of Sexual Healing. He was determined to get to the other side of something painful that had happened so long ago that he had put it in the context of worse things that had come before, and after. He reminded himself that this was pretty much old news, and he had no plans or obligations for the future. He was willing to listen.
She seemed relieved to see his willingness, and so told him the rest of the story. “It ended very definitively. I was sick of his games and his ego, and I’d had it with the road and the band. I was really involved with women’s studies at the U by then, and I decided that I had to get out from under the sexist crap in my life. I had this inkling Sam might be treating me sort of badly. At the time he was fucking half the women in Laramie and using my phone to make long-distance dope deals. How clueless was I?” Hawk declined to offer an opinion.
“I was still gigging with Penny Moss sometimes, and he hated her. He told me one night while we were packing up at the Gallery that if I wanted to play with some dyke, that was fine with him, but he didn’t want people thinking that Branchwater’s chick singer was a lesbian. I told him I had lots better things to do than drive seven hours to Buffalo to sing the same goddamn songs and watch a bunch of brain-dead rednecks get commode-huggin’ drunk. He told me to fuck myself, because I was probably already doing that anyway, and I was fired. He went out to put his guitar in his truck, and I just went out and got in my truck and chased him down Grand Avenue, trying to run him down.”
“You might have had a few,” Hawk offered, vastly enjoying the mental image.
“I might at that.” She grinned faintly. She had taken her hand out of his and was now sitting with both hands in her lap, looking out the window. Now she reached for him again, a question aching in her eyes.
“All right,” he said. “It’s okay.” That was the best he could do.
She closed her eyes, for a long moment, opened them, gazed at him. “I look at you now, and all I can think about is how much I want to make love with you.” She almost smiled, but her eyes were too bright.
“No fair appealing to my libido, Sal,” he joshed.
“And I’d like to know why in hell not,” she retorted, sliding her fingers up his leg.
This made it hard for him to assess the costs and benefits of giving her another chance. “Okay. Say we use last night as Day One. It wouldn’t be a bad thing to use some of it as a kind of template.” He thought a minute. “If we do this thing again, there have to be rules,” he told her. “No tequila. It evidently shuts off the flow of blood to your brain. And if Branch starts hitting on you again, I break his fucking neck.”
She took a breath. “I guess I ought to tell you that I ran into him at that stupid Hasta la Pasta! place at lunch Friday, and he’s already started hitting on me.” Hawk stared hard at her. She gripped his quadriceps muscle, on the high side. “He must be suffering from amnesia. It’s the only thing that can explain it. Or maybe it’s just blinding ego. Anyway, he’s anything but tempting, believe me. He’s a frigging Realtor. He’s a Republican. He’s probably in the Aryan Nation. Hey—if you want me to, I can try to run him over again. He made me want to throw up the lunch I hadn’t managed to get down. And I have a confession.”
“Another one?” Hawk asked, apprehensive.
“The whole time he was coming on to me, I was thinking of you. The food and the service and the atmosphere at Hast
a la Pepto were so bad, all I could think about was how much fun it would be . . . to hear you trash the place.” He laughed. “I missed you. I’ve missed you badly, on and off, for seventeen years.”
“I’ve thought of you from time to time, too,” he considered with a wry look. “Especially when I was confronted with a truly terrible meal.”
They had reached their destination. They pulled off the road, into the parking lot at the Peak trailhead. They were off on a tangent about one of their long-ago favorite topics of conversation, horrible food they’d eaten in interesting places. But as they got daypacks out of the backseat, putting on sweaters and windbreakers against the high mountain chill, tightening up the laces of their boots, she asked, in a low voice, “What about the loneliness, Hawk? I mean, it’s not a constant thing. I’ve gotten to where I need a fair amount of time by myself. I’ve discovered that I need the solitude so that I have time to think. But if I let you back into my life, you’re gonna make me lonesome when you go.”
This was a woman he had once, he had to admit, loved. He’d found her in bed with Sam Branch and driven straight south to Colorado Springs, where he’d put his fist through the single grimy window of his room in the Super 8. The cuts had taken months to heal. He could hardly believe that he was almost thinking about falling in love with her again. And now she was telling him that she’d betrayed him more than once. Was he that big a sap?
But she was someone older and new, too now, someone intriguing. A distinguished professor. He preferred women his own age, and in his very eccentric opinion, she probably qualified as a worthy companion and a babe in the first degree. She had also lit him up all night long.
On the other hand, she was a guilt-stricken, vulnerable, complicated, fully adult woman. As far as he knew, she had lately lived alone a lot. So had he. He liked it. It wouldn’t be easy to adjust to having someone else asking questions and making demands.
He would have to take it one moment at a time. Hawk decided that wasn’t a problem. He was older enough, and wiser enough, to realize that this was a moment for a really good kiss. He gave Sally one, and then put on a daypack and cinched the straps.
She tightened up her own pack and narrowed her eyes at him, awaiting an answer in words. On that late August Sunday, as far as he knew, he wasn’t going anywhere except up Medicine Bow Peak with Sally Alder. They’d go up it, and when they came back down, they might get some dinner and then, assuming she was as interested as he expected to be, they might want to go back to bed. Sex wasn’t a cure for loneliness, but it was a pretty good placebo. “Let’s walk,” he said.
The first half mile was gentle. They loosened up their legs and chatted about their new jobs. Sally had caused the University of Wyoming as much embarrassment as anything else during her brief affiliation two decades before. She had gotten drunk and abusive at parties for visiting scholars, had endlessly mocked the pomposity of the ivory tower, had insulted members of the faculty on many occasions.
Hawk said, “It really is amazing they’d let you back in the state.”
“It really is,” Sally agreed, gasping as they passed the cold shores of Lookout Lake and headed up the loose gray quartzite scree of the switchbacks. They walked on a careful path through fragile meadows dotted with tiny pale phlox, amid stands of spruce and fir krumholtz, scrubby trees flattened by wind. Willow bogs grew level with the krumholtz, providing a home for obstinate late-summer mosquitos.
Hawk had been a boomer, a hitchhiker on the state’s mineral wealth at a time when deals created a lot of work for lots of people, most of them horribly maladjusted. He’d been, in the words of an immortal bumper sticker, oilfield trash, and proud of it. What in the hell had happened since the time he was walking up and down the obscure slopes of the Sierra Madre, cashing a paycheck, hoping to find radioactivity? He had loved the stingy, breathtaking country as much as anyone who had ever known it on foot. But what had he done to merit coming back as a college professor?
He told the story as they hauled from switchback to switchback, pausing to take in each spectacle. Glaciers had scooped out immense bowls of whitened rock and ice. The gnarled things that grew out of snowmelt and thin soil spoke mutely with the stubbornness of Darwinian victors in the cold, scant air.
Wyoming’s Medicine Bow Peak, in the little-heralded Snowy Range, towered a couple of paces more than twelve thousand feet above sea level. Getting to the top and back was half a day’s work. It was a mountain to climb for the views, not for the wilderness champ points. If you wanted coolness awards in the world of climbing mountains, nothing counted except bourgeois Fourteeners in Colorado. The good news was that the spandex crowd tended, to a surprising degree, to leave Wyoming alone.
Hawk and Sally had climbed the Medicine Bow Peak together three times, many years before. She had snapshots in albums, of the two of them with a changing crew of sunburned friends, hair flowing, toasting each other at the top with—could you believe it?—cans of Old Milwaukee. But elapsed time, and the sense of rediscovery of the place and each other, and the putting of one foot in front of another made the walk once again something to be registered, savored, paid attention to. The air kept getting thinner and colder, paler gray and icier like the unreliable rocks under their feet. Even in late August, there were still ovular fields of crusty, wet, rust-streaked snow curving along the cirques. Their boots got soaked and their feet got cold, so they hiked a little harder. Both of them were breathing hard and happy to rest from time to time.
And Hawk had much to tell. How he’d come back from Argentina and decided he might as well go back to school. He’d wanted to study rocks that might make money. “Emphasis,” he added, “on ‘might.’” He’d worked in the gold and silver country in the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada, and in the high Andes, and in remote parts of Brazil. He had looked, too, for diamonds. His father had taken him in on some gigs in South Africa and Zimbabwe.
“My dissertation was, as geologists say, an advanced piece of arm-waving,” Hawk admitted as they leaned panting against freezing boulders, swigging from water bottles , breaking off pieces of a Hershey bar and feeding them to each other. “But it attracted some attention among people with money.”
And so he’d worked in wild, hard, compelling places, running field crews up tough woody slopes and down cliffs and into valleys and canyons on foot and in clanking trucks and by helicopter. He’d made a name as an independent, to say the least, consultant, but he’d also kept his hand in, publishing in the scholarly journals. He’d lost and made money betting on the rocks he found.
By the time he’d told this much, they were on the last, high, steep scramble to the top, over slick rocks and slippery snow. They stopped talking. Neither was willing to concede the rigor of this part of the climb, and they were saving their air to breathe. Arms and legs working, they made the summit. And then they looked around.
A small part of Wyoming spread out immense and cold and magnificent before them, swooped endlessly and pitilessly down to high, faraway valleys. They drank more water, ate the cheese and fruit and the banana bread, gaped amazed. They both knew what it was to blow good chances, and they both felt, for the moment, immensely grateful for tastes of good fortune. What in the hell had they ever done that life could be so good to them?
Part Two
Chapter 14
With the Truckers and the Kickers
Over twelve years of sobriety, Dickie Langham had fallen off the wagon only twice. The first time was six months after he’d started cleaning up his act. The second time was seven years ago. And now, for the first really itchy time in seven years, he was sorely tempted to get himself a bottle of Cuervo and call up a friend.
He’d made a fire in the fireplace, and he got up to throw on another log. It popped and hissed. It was way after midnight; he didn’t even know how late. Mary had gone with Josh to a state band competition in Powell. They’d called to say they were snowed in at a motel in Thermopolis. Ashley had an apartment with two other UW students, so
who knew where the hell she was. Brit lived at home, but she was working. He was staring out through his living room window at snow falling in the night, thick and bright and soft in black velvet darkness. Jimmy Buffett was dreaming of Havana on Dickie’s stereo, and Dickie was remembering tropical beaches, big scores, and pretending he didn’t have any responsibilities. God, just this once.
Jesus help me.
Jesus, as usual, appeared to be hard of hearing.
Dickie zipped the cellophane off his third pack of Marlboros in twenty-four hours. Struck a “strikeanywhere” match against the brick facing on his fireplace. Filled his lungs up with smoke, let it out, reached for the giant plastic “Diamond Shamrock Fill-er-Up” coffee mug on the end table next to him and took another strong swig.
People on the high plains got real squirrelly the week before Thanksgiving. They knew there’d be a snowstorm that would shut down the roads relatives would try to travel, strand thousands in the Denver airport en route to turkey dinners and family feuds, generally fuck up everyone’s plans and leave the world so damned silent and beautiful into the bargain that you felt guilty for resenting the inconvenience. This storm had come a little ahead of schedule, starting on the Friday morning before the holiday weekend. Usually the Thanksgiving blizzard waited until Wednesday night, to have the best chance of screwing the greatest number. Nonetheless, it had generated plenty of action for the newly elected but not yet installed sheriff of Albany County. Cars sliding off the roads, damned fool drivers trying to bullshit their way onto roads the highway patrol had closed, people with gunked-up chimneys setting their houses on fire, housebound husbands drinking themselves into mean-ass stupid brutes when their football teams lost.
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