Two Medicine

by John Hansen

  “Need some help?” I offered to Larry, hesitantly. The placed looked already spotless to me, and I didn’t feel like scrubbing anything as my first job duty at Two Medicine.

  “Sure thing,” Larry said quickly, “you can mop the floor here when I’m done.” He jerked his head at the screen door. “Katie’ll show you upstairs to your room and get you situated, when she gets back.”

  I wondered how long she would be gone; was she taking a walk or something? I looked out the screen door into the sunshine. How long was I going to mop floors for? I was pretty hungry at this point as well, not having eaten at all yet that day, and I didn’t know the plan as far as meals were concerned. Were there regular meal times or was it every man for himself? Where did we get the food from?

  I felt more and more irritated about how this job was shaping up with each passing minute. Larry seemed to be treating Katie carefully, like some mildly-disturbed house guest that you didn’t want to upset, and Phyllis seemed more like one of the old appliances than a fellow employee. I looked back at Larry and he tossed me some steel wool and told me to help him on the machine he was cleaning, which was an aluminum meat slicer.

  As I walked over to him Katie came back in through the screen door. Larry said over his shoulder, “Katie, get Will settled and head back down and we’ll give him the official tour of the place.” His round shoulders went back to lurching over the sink and his whole body twitching as he scrubbed the main parts of the slicer.

  Katie looked at me and pursed her lips. “Ready to see your new digs?”

  I followed her with my odd suitcase and beat up guitar over to the right side of the kitchen, where there was a wooden staircase that led up to the 2nd floor room. As I mentioned the main store, where all the stuff was for sale, was one huge room reaching up to the A-frame ceiling. But on either side of the building, the front and the back where the kitchen was, there were rooms built like lofts above the main floor. Larry and his wife lived in the big upper room at the front of the building, and they had a second-floor porch they could walk out on and see people coming in the store. The rest of the staff, me, Katie and another person I had yet to meet, lived in the three smaller rooms in the back, above the kitchen, and shared the bathroom on our opposite end.

  Katie jogged up the stairs before me as we made our way to my room. I ignored her cute little butt that fit well in her tight, tan cotton pants – the store uniform that I’d soon be wearing, I surmised.

  “This place is ancient – and a little creepy at night,” she said as I topped the stairs. “That staircase over there,” she pointed across the kitchen to the other wall, where a wooden staircase started, identical to the one we were walking up, which led up to another entrance to the second floor, “I’ve never gone up that staircase – and never will – it just seems… eerie.”

  I glanced over at it. “How long did you say you’d been here?”

  “About two weeks. I got here early – just me and Larry and Phyllis.”

  “Was the park even open then?”

  “Yea, I had some other job to do,” she said vaguely, “some administrative stuff…” She was going to be really hard to read, I could see, a Mona-Lisa mix of coyness, hiddenness, seriousness, a typical woman in other words, all wrapped up in a young, dirty-blonde, pretty face.

  I couldn’t image what “administrative work” might be but she apparently didn’t want to talk about it, so I changed the subject. “So, what’s working for Larry like?”

  She smirked back at me, “What do you think of him?” At least she was kind of smiling now.

  “I don’t know enough about him to say yet,” I said carefully.

  “Well… Phyllis’s nice.”

  She led me down the hall but then stopped and looked back at me. “Larry’s fine, I suppose,” she continued walking after a moment, as if changing visibly trying to think of the right words.

  “He’s mostly harmless…” She stopped by a door the end of the hallway. “I worked in the store here last year with him and Phyllis, and I survived. Here you go!”

  She opened the door to the last room in the hall and walked in and I walked in behind her. I was greeted with a room of small dimensions, about 20 feet long and 12 feet wide, completely made out of wooden boards – the floor, walls and the ceiling. The wood was left unpainted or stained, and was just covered with a think, clear varnish, so that the room was actually pretty bright, shiny and airy – like a giant, dry, comfy wooden box! A large, single window was set in the back wall and was the only source of light besides a small lamp on a little table. The only other furnishings were a twin bed, a chest of drawers, and a full length mirror. I peeked into the closet and saw a few hangers, some towels and some extra sheets and pillows piled up.

  My new home... I tossed the suitcase on the bed and laid the guitar against the wall, and took stock of my surroundings.

  “Not bad, kind of fits the area,” I said.

  Katie was watching me again I noticed. This watchful and wary stare kept me off balance. I could sense in her a lot of thinking was going on, but nothing was being said. In her heart was a deep, locked-down well of emotion, hidden, I surmised.

  “I’m wondering if you belong here…” she suddenly said, as if in answer to my thoughts, and then quickly she looked away, embarrassed. “I didn’t mean it like that,” she said hurriedly. “I mean living in a log cabin like this.”

  “I’ve seen worse,” I said, again feeling a little sting of wounded pride. I had spent lots of time in the outdoors, actually, but only on day hikes and weekend camping trips, nothing to boast about.

  “Well now that you’re here,’” she asked with more seriousness, turning back towards me, “what do you think about it?”

  “You’re a two timer, what do you think about it?”

  She shrugged, “I thought I did… I came out here because I was in love with the mountains…” She looked down at the floor and shrugged again. “Jury’s still out though.”

  There was a momentary silence. I looked around at my new home. “Is your room the same as this one?”

  “Identical,” she said, “but Ronnie’s is bigger, a bit. Has a big king-size bed too. He’s here somewhere, probably out smoking.” She held the door open. “You’ll meet him in a bit; he got here a couple days ago. Drove this crappy car all the way from Michigan.”

  “What about Ronnie,” I asked. “Does he belong here?”

  She watched me for a second, trying to read my thoughts again. “Larry’s waiting down there to give you the tour,” she said with another coy smile, and swung around and was out the door.

  Eight

  I liked the room. It was the only thing I had seen yet that was as I had imagined – a rough, rugged simple chamber hard and unadorned. I stood alone in the center of it for a moment, and just looked around, trying to picture myself living in this small space. Yes, I like this place; at least this is where I can go to escape the key chains, fridge magnets, and Larry. Then I put my bags away and walked back down the hall. As I made my way downstairs into the kitchen again, I saw that Katie had left once more. Larry was on a phone attached to wall, writing down some numbers, and Phyllis was spraying Windex on the windows at the back of the kitchen, newly hung with her curtains.

  Larry looked up to me as he finished his call and hung up the phone. “I sent Katie out to get more supplies from the storage shed. I told her I needed you to get to work A.S.A.P. The tour will have to wait. Grab some gloves and help me mop this place. We got a big supply order coming in tonight!”

  He pointed towards a bucket and a pile of cleaning supplies. Facing the prospect of a summer of mopping, wondering if I had just screwed up my life completely, I got started. As I worked helping him mop up grease and film that developed over the previous summer and the long winter when the place was boarded up, he told me about the store.

  “The operation works like this,” Larry grunted as he shoved the mop around in quick, jerking swipes. “We open for business at 7
a.m., and close at 7 p.m. About half of the customers are tourists just in for a day trip, passing though in the jammers or in their own cars and campers, and the other half are campers set up in the camp sites down the way, who stay for a weekend or week or two.”

  He continued, “You three,” meaning me, Katie and the third employee I’d yet to meet, “work the store and snack bar in shifts, and I work out the schedule. Open seven days a week – but only half a day on Sunday. One person runs the cash register in gifts, the other runs the register in the snack bar, and the other employee cooks. Phyllis cooks too. I fill in for anyone in any department on their days off – and I manage the operation, the books, and the customers.”

  “Sounds simple enough,” I said, dipping the mop in the bucket at my feet.

  “It’s not,” Larry said, shaking his head. “I’ve been managing this store for seven years, and I’ve seen a lot of crazies come and go. But I run a tight ship.

  “We live in Missoula during the winter, Phyllis and me, but we go back to Kansas more often than not most winters.”

  He continued as he swashed the mop around some more. “Trash goes out in Wednesdays, stock deliveries on Fridays, ahead of the weekends. Weekends are busy – and I do mean busy.” He emphasized with a dumping of the mop head into the bucket, splashing water around in the yellow bucket.

  He explained about how the staff would cook our own meals in the kitchen with food brought in by the park along with all the other supplies; we didn’t have to shop for groceries and didn’t have to get toiletries, all that was provided. There was one question answered, I thought as I slopped the mop around in one corner of the kitchen. Sometimes Phyllis would cook for everyone, he told me. I could image her preparing some big dinner like we were all a family – she seemed like the type that would like to do that.

  But then Larry’s voice all of a sudden got a lower, and had a warning edge. “You gotta watch out for free loaders though buddy, and shoplifters. Kids from res, Indians.” He stared at me gravely. “You see any funny business, you let me know ASAP.”

  “The ‘res?’” I asked.

  “Reservation – the Indians – Native Americans. The Blackfoot. Troublemakers.” He shrugged as if all the terms were one and the same thing. “You’d be wise to stay away all together from them.”

  “Why?” I asked him, holding my mop and looking at him dubiously. But before he could answer a tall younger man walked in through the back screen door in into the kitchen.

  He was tall and lanky, and had a light brown mustache, which was odd for someone in their late 20s and not in fashion at that time by any means. He looked a bit dorky, but ironically sported an Asian-style, big shoulder tattoo which showed a Japanese Geisha girl in fine detail, surrounded by billowing clouds of red, blue and black. It was a bold, colorful piece that stood out awkwardly from his otherwise inkless body and seemed contradictory. He was shirtless, for some reason, as he walked in from outside, and had on jeans and no shoes. He was drinking coffee and I could smell the leftover cigarette aroma which he must have just finished as he walked in.

  He smiled warmly at me. “Will? How ya doing? I’m Ronnie. Katie told me you were in here so I came to meetcha.”

  We shook hands and I said it was good to meet him too.

  “Where ya from?” he asked. I noticed that Larry had stopped mopping and was watching us.

  “Atlanta.”

  “Oh yea? I was down there last year on business. Fuckin’ great town.”

  “I asked you not to use profanity, Ronnie,” Larry said flatly. “It’s your day off; don’t you have anywhere to be?”

  Ronnie smirked at Larry. “Sure it’s my day off, but I was beginning to miss you, Dad.” He winked at me, sitting down at a large kitchen table in the middle of the room, and propping his bare feet up on the table as he sat back in the chair, smiling broadly at Larry. The undersides of his feet were dirty and had a couple blades of grass stuck on them. “I can’t tear myself away from this store, boss... Gotta cleanup for these Brady Bunchers coming to see us soon, right Will?”

  Larry led out a purposefully loud sigh, shook his head and returned to his work.

  “So Atlanta, huh?” he said. “I’m from Detroit, I’m embarrassed to say. Never going back, I hope. That’s why I came out here.”

  “What kind of work did you do in Detroit?” I asked, beginning to mop some more as we spoke.

  “Well, for a while I was working for UPS – as a corporate guy not a driver – made good money but worked like eighty hours a week. I left that and started my own consulting business, which is on a temporary hiatus...”

  Larry snorted as he dipped his mop again. Ronnie continued, pretending not to notice. “I’m up here to get away from the dregs of the Detroit business scene – absolutely no momentum there, not a dime to be made, my friend.” He took a sip of his coffee.

  “Basically I was broke. My uncle was a rancher up here but died a couple years ago. I hope to get situated in Montana and maybe get into the ranching business soon.”

  “You told me yesterday you were studying to be a veterinarian,” Larry grunted.

  “Did I?” Was all Ronnie said, and he actually seemed genuinely surprised. Turning back to me. “What brought you up here Will?”

  It took me a second to figure out what to say. I should have already expected and prepared an answer for just this question, but I had only uncovered part of the answer myself, and only partially. “Just heard it was a beautiful place; I just wanted to live somewhere different.”

  “What’d you do before you got here?”

  “Existed,” I said without even thinking about it, almost involuntarily.

  Ronnie smiled, as if for the first time in the conversation he had heard something he thought worth hearing.

  Larry would later tell me that Ronnie came from a wealthy family, who owned a nation-wide busing company. His last name I recognized, since it is splayed on the front and back of privately owned luxury tour busses and RVs I have seen driving down the highways all the time. I was impressed by that, and even more confused as to his job history he related to me, which was spotty and aimless. He seemed to have no real discernable trade, other than a “glorified” this or that, and he certainly didn’t appear to be wealthy at all. More like a suburban middle class kid with the gift of gab and the curse of apathy.

  One of his talents, though, was an easy confidence that drew people to him, a social ease that made you friends instantly, effortlessly. When you meet someone who is truly comfortable in their own skin, it is a subtle and irresistible quality. He didn’t have to try at it, he was just a fun guy to be around. I liked him.

  He also had a talent for simply enjoying himself, and I began to feel that this was his only real motivation, not all the grandiose business ideas he kept coming up with. Almost every night he was either drinking beer, which he would buy (or just take) from the grocery store below, or smoking marijuana which some friend of his FedEx’d him a few days into the summer, or screwing some random park employee girl, or all three at once. Where he met the girls he slept with was a mystery to me, considering our location, because they weren’t campers or tourists, they were locals and employees from other places. He would just show up with a new, usually very pretty girl at night at a bonfire we’d make, or at the lake, or in his room. I told him early on into the summer that he should go into politics, run for office somewhere – it seemed the perfect career for him, but he just nodded at the suggestion.

  Ronnie’s excess of booze and the rest was different than my friend Scott’s, I would soon realize. Scott would lose control of himself in his drunken states, but Ronnie was always the same cool, calm, collected dude, even after hours of drinking beer. He never lost his control; he managed it all easily, naturally. He seemed primarily just to want to have fun, to find a place where his talents for being with people would be employed to some profit. He seemed to be looking for something, like me, but his “something” was not a place, but more a mome
nt, or a collection of moments.

  There was one single-minded subject, though, that Ronnie talked about almost daily that summer – the Perseid meteor shower, a yearly event, otherwise known as “The Tears of Saint Lawrence” – since it fell on that Roman saint’s day. It came and streaked the night sky (in dark enough places to see it) with colorful missiles of space rock, hurling, burning meteors leaving sparkling tails with near light-speed. He described it with a strange, childlike glee. Ronnie was forever talking about how the meteor shower was going to appear in August as it did every year, and that we would be able to see it like nowhere else “out here in the boondocks.” And to hear him describe the spectacle you would think that it was to see heaven itself burning and the night sky rent in two.

  Ronnie eventually wandered upstairs to his room, but not before inviting me later to join him and some girl he found to watch a DVD. He told me to bring some beer. I glanced at Larry as Ronnie left, but he didn’t seem to hear or notice.

  I helped Larry the rest of the afternoon and we left off around 4 pm, Larry advising me to get a good night’s sleep to be ready to “take on the day” tomorrow. He said he was going to have all of us working the next day, and that Katie and Ronnie were off today because of them helping him out the last couple of days.

  He also told me as we finished cleaning that if I got up by 5 a.m., I could see the most amazing sun rises hitting the face of Mount Sinopah on most mornings. I said “ok” but knew I’d never make it that early, ever, for anything. I was a night owl and always had been. Hopefully the sunsets would be just as good, I thought to myself.

  I finally had a meal, a sandwich heaping with cold roast beef and cheddar cheese I cut from a big block in that late afternoon, and sat at the kitchen table alone, thinking about what I had seen so far. Not a single person I had met thus far had seemed to be “the outdoor type,” or seemed to even be that interested in the distant mountains and beautiful wilderness beyond. You could have lifted the entire store and its staff, in fact, and dropped it down into a shopping mall anywhere in the suburbs of a city and it would have fit right in, more or less.