by John Hansen
Two Medicine
Two Medicine
INTRODUCTION
Midpoint
Two Medicine
A Novel
by
John J. Hansen
Two Medicine is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product solely of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
2015 Burgundy Books Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2015
All rights reserved.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to Stephanie Sasscer, for her edits.
Note: Native Americans, at the time in the early 2000s, were still known in Montana by various names, used interchangeably: First Nation Peoples, Indians, Indigenous, Native Peoples, Native Americans, and American Indians. Only two were in common usage amount the locals where the book is set: Native Americans, and Indians, and as such are used in this story.
INTRODUCTION
I never set out to write a novel about how my life started in Glacier Park, Montana. I went there for reasons much less dramatic, less artistic, than to research for some future novel. I simply wanted to just get away from a humiliating breakup, and from a job I hated, and from being incredibly lonely. I desperately wanted a new life… a life in someplace a far away from Atlanta as I could get on short notice; inventive, maybe, but reasons born of desperation rather than exploration.
Leaving everything behind I left for Montana. But when I got to what I thought was going to be a new life, I fell in love with a girl, Alia. It was to be a short-lived love, however, and the finding out of the awful thing that happened with her led me through such a strange and profound journey that was compelled to write it down, despite the simple, desperate motivation that began my journey.
So, I sit here at my laptop, and our tale begins in Atlanta circa 2003, with a text message from my past-girlfriend, Holly the redhead.
One
I was working at a magazine in Atlanta that year in May, not too far out of college, as an assistant editor, in fact – a job more grandiose in title than in reality. It was a car magazine but I knew nothing about cars. What I did know was that my father, the big shot lawyer, got me the job because he was a partner with the corporate counsel for Gannett Publishing, a company that owned that car magazine, and pretty much every major magazine in the east coast.
I was broke after I graduated with no real prospects of my own, and I had majored in English Literature after all… So I considered myself lucky to have any kind of job awaiting me at all.
My three interests in life were, in no particular order: reading good books, playing guitar and piano, and being outside. At the time I was deciding upon college, I had read great works of literature, played in a few bands, and spend some wondrously peaceful times in the woods. That was what was in my mind as I pondered the list of college majors available. I knew I was in trouble from the start.
And as I pondered over my options back then I realized I was not dedicated or desperate enough with the music life to chuck all my hopes and dreams into a band van and tour around for years, perpetually trying to “make it” – too uncertain, too gritty a life. And as for the outdoors… could I be a park ranger like a watered-down cop or some kind of botanist… dendrologist? (I had to look that up). No, not those strange sounding and ill-defined in my mind careers, they just seemed to taint the very enjoyment of the outdoors that I cherished. Bringing a paycheck into those Garden of Eden, as it were, seemed a bad move. Thus, English it was.
So when my father’s deep voice – the big-time attorney voice that had years ago become his only voice – boomed out from my phone, calling from his golf trip in Arizona (talking over the noise of the golf course patio bar at which he was no doubt sitting at all day with his old buddies drinking leisurely and steadily) and when offered to “set me up at Gannett,” almost saying it as an afterthought (which it may have well been since he hadn’t been involved in my life in any real way since I was nine and he had stopped coming home on the weekends), I accepted readily enough. I accepted my father’s offer as he sat at the patio with a tentative “that sounds good…” part statement and part question.
This job at that magazine, that shall remain nameless, but that is still in print and is one of those that displays on its glossy cover pictures of heaving, hulking, power-overdosed cars and trucks with sexy, exotic, model girls in provocative poses draped here and there and all over the hoods and trunks, would begin in the morning with me sitting down at a grey metal and glass desk in a little office with glass walls on one side that looked out over Atlanta.
The first day I had moved into that office I was surprised to find myself in a state of a surprised excitement – a new job with my own office! Big title and sexy magazine! No idea what was expected of me, but cautiously optimistic nonetheless! I was surprised by these feelings as I sat down at my new desk that first day – I had gotten up that morning with only a sense of impending dread filling my heart as I steeled myself to start my uncertain career. But excited I was as I sat down at my desk, the smell of new plastic and metal filling my senses. Also, on my first day the tech guys had unpacked a brand new Apple desktop computer from its box and Styrofoam peanuts and set it up on my new desk with my new chair – I had enjoyed that sensation as well.
But it wasn’t long, unfortunately, until the glimmer left my eye and the pep in my step down those halls faded into a resentful and reluctant stalk, under the monolithic weight of the daily office grind – it probably took only a week, in fact. I don’t care what kind of work you do, even in some hyper-creative, artsy, free-wheeling, wild ass-slapping job you may take, if it’s in an office building, if you have the same desk you have to sit at every hour of every day, and if you see and hear the same people in the same places saying the same things every day, you will find your soul slowly shrinks down to a dried, hard, little stone. I promise.
So my bright and shiny new job and that pleasing sense of excitement quickly developed into a grey monotony for me. I’d look at myself in the bathroom mirror certain mornings, see a fairly good looking, tall, thin figure with a shock of brown hair sticking up from my head pre-shower, and wonder what I was doing with my life.
A sample of a typical day would be thus: I would kind of lose focus for the first half hour or so after getting to the office, I would daydream, then half-heartedly check the papers on my desk, check out my emails, fumble with this document or that file, check my phone messages for a bit. It was all about slowly adjusting. Like a deep-sea diver has to immerse himself in a steady descent and return ascent through the cold depths to avoid deadly internal disarray, my psyche would require time each morning, and then each evening, to slowly adjust to the fact that I was going to be in that room for eight hours, or so, or later, that I had just spent eight hours in that room, or so.
Eventually I would shake off my daze, and force myself to stare at list of files on my monitor for a few minutes, files that would appear for me each morning to download and edit, and then turn over to my managing editor. These were stories submitted from our roving, loosely-affiliated team of freelance writers that went to all of the major car shows, trade shows and racing events in the country. They would then write and submit to me their stores for each magazine edition. I would open these files on my computer, print them out because I could never read anything accurately on a monitor, then review and edit the article with the editing software we had (and by old-fashioned eyeballing for grammar errors) to clear up any mistakes and make the stories read better. Then I’d email them to the managing editor above me, who would do the same.
The file would then travel to Mr. John Jeffries, senior editor, who would give the artic
les a final once over before sending it to be plugged into a layout by the graphic designers. And like that another edition is born and sent out into the world.
That was essentially my job, at least 80% of it. The rest was talking on the phone with the freelancers trying to track down their stories for deadlines, and working with the art department (a saving grace for my creative mind) to get images for each article that made sense based on the stories. The stories mostly had to do with some new part that would make an air-intake function quieter and make a manifold run colder, or create more torque on the back end to avoid burn outs, etc.
So this was my job and I hated being there after one week. Every morning, as I sat at my desk adjusting to the my descent into the deep, when I looked at the writers’ names on the articles lists, and saw where they were emailing the articles from, California, Utah, Florida, Mexico, Italy – all the car and racing hotspots – my lethargy would be suddenly spiced up with a simmering envy and bitter depression. Just the term “freelance” made me envious, made me feel like I was in the wrong career bound to my desk as I scanned articles for mistakes. I would often sit back in my grey-blue, plastic, swivel chair and swivel 180 degrees to stare out the large window I had in my office (thank God) that overlooked downtown, at these times of lethargy/envy/depression, and I’d think about these writers, the Free Lancers.
Getting paid to do what the hell they liked… I would ponder this freedom they enjoyed during those long, grey days in my office, as I slowly swiveled myself back and forth in my grey-blue, plastic, office swivel chair. There were so many window-watching mornings and afternoons that I remember being embarrassingly caught a few times gazing out into the distance.
And not just them, I had always been talented enough at guitar and piano to be in and out of bands over years, mostly in my college days, as I mentioned. And some of the guys I played with had never given up their dream, and were still struggling to make it in the music business, uncompromising, putting all their eggs in that one basket – even if it meant teaching guitar at some rinky-dink guitar shop, or waiting tables, or driving a brown UPS truck around.
One of them I knew had recently chucked it all up and moved penniless to Austin, and was still playing weekly open mikes – for nothing. Yet another has just went to Nashville, and started working during the day as a painter – of houses, not canvases. But he was still nobly, un-deviated from the path of his dreams. In fact both of these friends of mine were suffering but could suffer proudly, with dignity.
I had certainly “deviated” at bit, I realized as I sat swiveled over to my window view on grey mornings. Every day in my little office was becoming a wasted, blank day.
So I would lose focus and drift, down into the deep sea depths, adjusting to the pressure and change, to make it through the day. Staring out the window helped… watching the distant cars speeding down the highway cutting through the city, and looking farther past the city, farther out into the rolling green hills north of the skyline. I longed to be out of that building, past those tall city buildings, and into the distant light-blue forested hills, lost, wild, and….
SMACK! Linda, my managing editor, tossed a stack of papers on my desk with a loud and exaggerated sigh. Linda must have weighed about 400-pounds back then, with the blotchy red face and squinting eyes of a morbidly obese woman. She was a big, flabby mess; and she would often savagely intrude my daydreams at just the worst moments, routinely giving me a horrible shock to my system.
This particular morning, she was at this moment pointing at our magazine’s last edition that was on the top of the stack on my desk. “Will,” she said, “you certainly missed a few things in the last edition that John wants me to point out to you – and he’s pissed!” Linda had a strange way of talking in that she would emphasize certain words at odd times, which made her sound like she was always saying something crucially important.
As I listened to her I knew that John Jeffries would not be pissed because I had never seen him get pissed over anything, especially a few missed edits here and there. He barely ever read our magazine; he cared primarily about readership numbers: our “circulation.”
But everything was a disaster to her Linda, everything was crucial.
“What’d I miss?” I asked, shrugging my shoulders and staring at my computer monitor.
Linda flipped the magazine open with a flourish and jammed a thick finger onto one of the pages. “Right here, you missed a comma and you don’t have a closing quotation at the end!”
Linda’s voice was rough and throaty from having to be forced out of her giant bulk of a torso. Also, worst of all, she always slathered on this hand lotion she had that smelled sharply sour and always remained in the room after she left, like a toxic cloud. Everything about her repelled me; my soul always dried up a little and a part of it flaked off like flint just having her in my office.
“John is seriously pissed off, and said I gotta make sure it doesn’t happen again!” She raised her eyebrows high and jerked a thumb back towards John’s office.
I still hadn’t looked at her but I was fake-typing and kept my eyes on the screen. I felt enormously depressed having Linda stare down at me, her big flowery dress billowing around her like a spent parachute caught in the wind. That lotion cloud…
“Yea well, won’t happen again,” I muttered.
She wouldn’t leave so I finally looked up at her. I felt absolutely no enthusiasm to defend myself to her, though; I just wanted her gone from my sight. After an increasingly tense silence, I said to her in a flat, grim voice, “I’m sorry Linda, won’t happen again – I had a lot going on that day that I working on this one.” And PLEASE JUST LEAVE!
She frowned at me, raised her eyebrows as if in warning – her eyebrows were pencil thin, and with her breathing and her parachute dress and her shifting eyebrows she stared down at me.
“Well what’s the problem here?” she rasped. “Why did you miss such obvious mistakes…”
I tuned out the rest of her heaving voice and typed meaningless words again on the screen. But it kept going; she was in rare form that morning – even for her. When I couldn’t take anymore I suddenly slammed my fist down on the desk, almost involuntarily, and she stopped and gaped at me.
She almost spoke again, but then with a worried expression she finally turned around muttering something about professionalism and standards, heaving her bulk into the hall and rolling off, no doubt looking for something else crucial.
I let go a long, long sigh, and my head slowly sank to my chest. This can’t be what I was meant for, I thought. Is this where you end up if you love reading the classics?? Do those damn Free Lancers have ‘Lindas’ to deal with?
Worst of all, and ironically, I actually felt a little guilty about my hatred of Linda, too, not only because of the disgust she brought out in me, which was not altogether deserved, and of which I was always ashamed, but also because for all her blustering, her heaving bulk, her terrible “people skills,” she was just doing her job, and was actually a good editor, and even a good writer. She had shown me some of her work in fiction when I had started the job – in those few heady early days in my office – and her writing was good, with a kind of intensity to it.
It was all a very bad business, this whole mess of a job in Atlanta, a very bad business indeed.
That morning after Linda left, I finally began editing my first article of the day, something about new, nitrogen-powered, off-road shocks for jeeps. None of the words made any sense to me though, and the pictures of the parts could have been parts of some alien spaceship for all I comprehended.
As I printed out the article I wondered about John Jeffries, my true boss at the magazine. As I mentioned, I wasn’t worried about him firing me – he would never let me go, no matter how bad it got, at least I didn’t think he would. This was not just because he didn’t really care about the articles in the magazine, and not just because of my father was (and that was part of it), but because Jeffries had been buildin
g me up as some kind of pet project. He knew I plainly didn’t like my job, and he was, for some reason, intent on making “a publisher out of me,” as he often said. I think he simply just liked me, just liked me being there at the magazine, and I think he probably felt like it was his fault for some reason that I had lost my feel for the job, like a salesman seeing interest dying in a customer’s eyes, like a father who realizes his son is bored with their camping trip.
John was constantly giving me special projects to work on, articles to work over that he thought I’d like, some “cool stuff” to “exercise my literary muscles.” But the attention was wasted on me, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him.
So it came down to this, I told myself that morning as I stared at my keyboard: I was simply not meant to edit – but to create! To give something to other people to edit, be it music, writing, something was what I needed… That’s what I believed, and the belief grew and smoldered every day.
I had only been there a few months and I already felt like I had wasted years in the wrong life, like I had was missing out on some fabulous life somewhere else – and “missing out” is a feeling I never have been able to stand – not for long. I simply had to get out of that job, out of that business, once and for all.
Later after Linda left I went to lunch at a nearby deli that I frequented. I sat down to eat a plate of my favorite dish there - the Greek pasta salad - and set my cell phone on the table. It was then that I saw a text from Holly, the redhead, my sweet little girlfriend who I had been dating for three years now, and who at that time was my one solace in an otherwise grey existence, this bad business of mine.
