by John Hansen
A hundred other blooms that I didn’t know yet were sprinkled all over these sun-lit meadows I would occasionally cross in between the woods, and sometimes further up where the trees didn’t grow. I would sit on the trail side, next to patches of stinging nettles that would itch your exposed ankles for the next five minutes only if you walk through them, and just absorb the light and warmth and fragrance of those fields. The path that led up the mountain was dry and rocky, but on either sides of the trail was a riot of plant life and towering firs that drew one along as if through an ancient trance. A scurry of rocks and dust said that a fat marmot had just scampered underground; and bees lazily, drunkenly, flew around the flower blossoms in no particular hurry.
And if one looked down the steep slope below one could see Two Med Lake stretched out in dark blue far down in the bottom of the valley, and at the far end of the lake one could even spot the store, my home, with the parking lot gravel-grey seeming small and fragile, like a toy train-set house or a little wooden matchbox that a small stone could easily crush if thrown far enough.
Hiking always centered my mind to where it should be. On the way up I stopped for a small lunch of a Snickers bar and some granola, and I gazed a long time down in the valley and thought, not for the first time, of my previous life back in Georgia. How strange that old life already seemed, or, rather, how strange to have been so recently in that life, and now just a few weeks later sitting on a mountain, looking down at a new home. This was the rugged beauty that I had imagined, had hoped for, as I was packing my bags that crazy night in Atlanta. I also thought of Scott and Holly, and even wondered how the magazine was getting on… in spite of myself.
Then the wind blew across the meadow as I repacked my bag on the trail. I smelled the huckleberry blossoms and sun-dried grass, and I could hear the wind in the distant trees and feel the sun warming my face, and I thought that it would be nice if Alia came walking out of those trees, into the meadow. I stood for a moment just watching the wind play with the flower blossoms, and then I turned and trudged on up the slope.
I finally reached Sky Lake around three p.m. It was quicker going down so I knew I would be ok on time, as far as getting back was concerned. There was no way I was going to reach Sinopah’s peak again, of course – not after my leisurely stroll up the mountain after my lunch.
As I crested the ridge that protected the little lake from view, I looked down the slope towards the small bowl-shaped valley below, of which Sky Lake was the centerpiece. Above, Sinopah’s peak looked like a huge stone skyscraper, rough and unfinished, brown and cracked and crumbling – yet iron strong.
Sky Lake was truly what is called an “alpine lake” – deep blue, small, and untouched; and I reasoned it must have gotten its name by the way it reflected the sky is such clarity, with no breeze disturbing its mirror surface most of the time.
I trudged down the rocky trail that led down to the lake. I passed through patches of trees, but mostly the trail here was grassy and rocky, as the valley got less sun than other parts of the mountain. As I got closer I saw that the lake was so clear that I could see, even from a short distance, the blurry profile of some spotted-pink lake trout sliding effortlessly along a few feet below the surface, and also some just sitting motionless at certain depths. I saw a couple of bald eagles perched on tall scraggly pines near the lake as well – they frequented the park in summer – being up here for the trout, I presumed. Other than another marmot rooting around in the brush and many birds, I didn’t see any other wildlife about.
I did see a figure walking towards me on the wide trail, however, or rather he was walking but at a wandering angle, sort of meandering over the trail. It was hard to make out what he was wearing, but as I got closer I noticed he wasn’t wearing anything at all, except for a brown leather or deer-skin loincloth – an actual Tarzan-like loincloth. That was all he had on – he wasn’t even wearing any shoes. He stepped along the stones barefoot at a very careful, delicate pace, watching the ground and lightly placing his feet here and there, and making slow progress.
He had long flowing brown hair, but it was a light brown and he was obviously a white guy – not Blackfoot. A wild looking leather necklace with little shells laced into it hung around his neck.
“How’s it going?” I called to him as I walked up. It was plenty warm enough to be almost naked like that, if you wanted to be; but I wondered what he’d do by nightfall, if he didn’t get back to a camp somewhere – the nights were still chilled at this time in the early summer. And where was his food, or at least some water?
He looked up at me from the rocks he was daintily stepping over, and nodded, smiling warmly, giving me a short wave.
“Hi,” he said, and looking up the hill to the top of the ridge where I had come. He asked, “How far is it to Two Medicine?”
“About four hours, downhill,” I said, following his gaze to where the trail crested the ridge again. “Where’d you start from?” I asked.
“Oh… I’m not sure,” he said, smiling. “Just been bushwhacking mostly, been out for three days.”
“Three days, on Sinopah?” I asked, surprised and impressed. “Bushwhacking” was the hiker’s term for avoiding the trails, striking out in the wilderness to make your own way. Whacking bushes out of your way as you went, I suppose.
He just nodded and smiled, and I wondered if maybe he was mentally off or something. I looked him over; he was athletic and well-built, but in a natural kind of way, not in the gym or lifting-weights kind of way. And the loincloth was weird, of course, but as I mentioned before, in Glacier you met weird people all the time, very eccentric types with odd habits and strange demeanors, those who led a different kind of life – they were drawn to wild places like Glacier and Two Med.
“Three days….” I marveled, more to myself than to Tarzan. Then I asked him, “Where’s your camp, your gear?”
He shrugged and pointed a thumb behind him vaguely, “Oh I got a blanket by the lake, slept there last night. Don’t have anything else, just been living off the land.”
“You must have been freezing…” I said.
He shook his head and gave another of his shrugs. “It’s a good blanket. I just like to keep it pure, man, feel the earth under me. Connect with nature and she’ll take care of you.”
Apparently finished with our conversation, he gave me a quick nod and then began stepping along the trail, tenderly walking on the stones again. I watched him go for a minute, in fascination, and not a little awe, and then I headed down to Sky Lake’s shore.
As odd as he was, those kinds of brief conversations on the trail with people you suddenly came across were often like that – no names exchanged, some short chit chat, mostly “where you from” and “how ‘bout this weather” exchanged, along with some directions and notes about the trails, but none I met were so exotic as the loincloth guy – not even Thunderbird.
I was impressed with him, despite the ridiculous, over-doing-it loincloth; and I respected his extreme stripping away of all technology and trappings of modern civilization. Guys like that sometimes came to bad ends in the wilderness, especially up in the higher elevations, where a sudden thunderstorm of chilling rain and hail can come down the mountain with only a few minutes’ notice, and soak and then freeze you to the core. Or they’d get lost and end up starving or getting attacked by a moose or grizzly. Guys like The Loincloth did it their own way, though, and gave a middle finger to all the rules of backcountry hiking and camping (what would Greg make of this guy?), but they also were some of the statistics that made up the deaths in the park each season.
I had liked the guy though – he seemed genuinely friendly and real, even in his outlandishness and obvious image-consciousness. And I hoped, as I sat by the lake and watched the mirror surface reflect the clouds above in the deep sky, that I’d see him again.
I didn’t see him on the way down to the valley, however, but he was “bushwhacking,” I reminded myself – not the stamped out, well-traveled
hiking trail for him! So who knew where he had struck off to after gathering his blanket and heading down the slope? I wished him well, and trudged at a fast pace back home that evening.
Twenty
A strange atmosphere had for some reason settled into the store the next day. It was a Wednesday, and I was on gift-shop duty on the register. Ronnie and Katie worked the kitchen. We were pretty busy, as the season was now picking up; and I worked non-stop all day ringing up peoples’ gifts, answering questions about the store and Two Med, and restocking the shelves with Larry as things were being bought up and starting to run low. When Katie was on the grill and Ronnie on the snack shop register, things always got backed up there because Katie was a very slow cooker.
She took a long time grilling burgers and making tacos, because she had to have everything cooked perfectly, and, I think, because she was scared of making people ill or something. Ronnie was always patient with her, and never lost his cool – even when the line for food got way backed up.
Larry, however, would rush back to the snack area and openly scold her for being behind, in front of the customers, rudely, and yell at her to get things moving or he’d “damn well cook everything himself!” But Katie took his berating with a grain of salt it seemed, in her stoic and quiet way, and just kept up her slow, steady pace of grilling the perfect hamburger patty and blending the perfect Huckleberry shake.
I always marveled at Katie’s patience with Larry, because she never lost her temper with him that I saw, and had a Phyllis-like, long-suffering patience for his blustering and meanness; and I wondered, yet again, why she would come back to work at this particular place a second season, despite its beauty, after dealing with Larry for one year already. But she seemed at peace at the store and impervious to Larry; and when Larry wasn’t around, and even sometimes when he was, she seemed at home there too. Maybe she had had other Larrys in her life and was immune.
That evening Ronnie, Katie and I had another fire in the big fireplace in the store, using about three large tree-trunk logs that Larry watched like a hawk during business hours. After joking around and laughing too loudly at one point, Larry again stormed out of his room around eleven p.m., screaming at us to “stop this racket or there’d be hell to pay!” and slamming his bedroom door again even louder than any noise we could have made. We had actually been playing poker, which Ronnie had been trying to convince us to make strip poker, for Katie’s benefit he said, when Larry boomed out of his room. I glanced up at him and pictured Phyllis cowering in the bed, under the covers, waiting for that hairy old beast to come back into the bed grumbling and swearing. I felt terrible for her at those times.
Katie wouldn’t agree to strip poker however, so Ronnie and I said we would and she could just play “regular.” I admit I had been eyeing Katie’s tight little body and shapely, heavy breasts under her pajama pants and little t-shirt, with an irresistible hunger. But we had a good joke with the male-only poker game anyway, until Ronnie actually took off his pants after losing a big hand (with about $50 in the pot on that bet,) and he wasn’t wearing his classic “tighty whiteys” after losing big on a hand. Katie laughed and Larry shouted something again from his room without opening the door, and we gave up the rest of the game. We put out the fire after that and trudged upstairs to our respective rooms.
I had peeked into Katie’s room one once when she was gone (she always kept her door closed) and had noticed how much of a home she had made, as only women can. It was much more intrusive to look into her private room with her pictures of her travels and her friends set up here and there, with her posters and art, with her bed covers she had brought and little reading lamps she had for decorated her room with, than it was to look in Ronnie’s or my rooms, which pretty much still appeared as they did the day we moved in, except for our clothes on the floor here and there, and my guitar and some books. Men traveled light in this world, not leaving much of a mark from place to place and room to room, I’ve always noticed; but women carry their lives with them everywhere. They know how to make a home of a place, even with barely anything to work with. A woman could make a submarine look like a home.
After Katie went upstairs, Ronnie knocked on my door and invited me to drink down in the kitchen with him, apparently not yet ready to call it a night. He had grabbed a six pack of Miller from the store’s fridge out front, and we sat at the big kitchen table.
“So are you still mourning that girl – what was her name, Alia?” He asked, glancing at me with half closed eyes and taking a long swig of beer.
“Yes.” I said.
“Is that why you wear that necklace twenty-four-seven?”
I reached up and felt the arrowhead. “I guess so,” I said, unconsciously resisting his intrusion into this area, as usual.
He nodded. “Ranger Greg seems to be very interested, even though it’s out of his jurisdiction.”
“What do you know about Greg’s jurisdiction?” I asked him, suddenly annoyed with his tiring dislike of Greg, and with his broaching the subject of Alia in this casual way at all.
“I know he should be stamping out forest fires or something, rather than acting like a big homicide detective,” Ronnie said.
“Who says he’s been acting like homicide detective?” I asked. My voice betrayed my anger.
Ronnie noticed it and tried to cool things off a bit by shaking his head dismissively and clinking out beer cans together in a fake toast. “Sorry man, I don’t mean to stir things up; I know you cared about her.”
But I wouldn’t let his comments drop – not this time. “But who said he’s been acting like a detective? What do you know about it?” I asked. I knew that I was sounding a little frazzled and manic now, but I had been feeling that nobody anywhere was acting like any kind of detective when it came to her murder, that it was being swept under a rug as far as I knew, and Ronnie’s weird suggestion was just another frustrating joke.
Ronnie shrugged and pursed his lips together, his small mustache wrinkling up under his nose, “Well, Clayton says he’s been snooping around Browning all week.”
“Clayton?” I asked. “What does that loser know about anything?”
Ronnie looked at me for a moment, hiding a smile, “Well he knew Alia – longer than you did.”
“Clayton probably did the deed himself, that fucking degenerate,” I said, offended by Ronnie’s smile, and not wanting to actually name Alia or the murder out loud – not wanting to expose such a raw wound and hidden pain – not with a guy like Ronnie.
Ronnie’s half-smile fell when I said that. He shook his head. “You better stay away from Clayton – and his brother Jake,” he said, growing seriousness immediately. “They’re no murderers, at least not that I know of, but they don’t fuck around and they won’t take too kindly if someone’s going around saying they killed Alia. You could be in trouble with that shit, Will,” he said, sounding actually concerned about my safety.
“Did Clayton saying anything to you about Alia’s death?” I asked him.
Ronnie shook his head. “Of course not,” he said. “But I rarely talk to him.”
“What’s really your connection with Clayton and Jake, Ronnie?”
“Connection?” he asked, smiling again. “I’d say the only connection was that I bought some weed off them. But so does everybody around here.”
I frowned at him, thinking of Alia living with Clayton in Browning; and then I looked over the screen door and out past the porch light into the darkness. It was perfectly dark out there, and I couldn’t see any more than what was illuminated by the cone of light from the single lamp above the porch. Moths flung themselves around erratically on wing around the lamps. Again, I pictured her little body trampled and beaten, her small arms and legs bloodied, that pretty little face with her smart and emotional eyes shoved down into the mud. That little body tramped like trash. It made me sick to picture it.
Ronnie suddenly let out a long and deep belch that sounded like some monstrous creature roaring
, and then her muttered darkly, “That old bastard up stairs…” meaning Larry, of course. “We oughta teach him a lesson. Acting like he owns the place…” I knew Ronnie was trying to change the subject and the mood, trying to cheer me up and move past it; and I tried to shake off the dark feeling that had come over me as he spoke as well.
The idea of Ronnie teaching Larry a “lesson,” whatever that really meant, appealed to me; and Ronnie was certainly the right guy for a job like that – a man who did not just have bad morals, but really had no morals at all – no ethics either way.
Suddenly Ronnie hopped up from the kitchen bench and walked over to one of the metal kitchen counters, over to where Larry kept a large pitcher made of pottery with a clay lid on it. In that pitcher was Larry’s prized concoction of sourdough, fermenting for days at room temperature. Larry was always going on about how his sour dough had won awards in Kansas and about how it was this “secret recipe” that he’d “die,” before giving up, as if any of us wanted it.
Larry would make pancakes for him and Phyllis on Sunday mornings from this batch. And now, I watched with fascination as Ronnie hopped up and stood on the metal counter, flipped off the lid of the pitcher, dropped his pants, looked over at me and said, “What do you think, chiefy?” And then peed straight into the sour dough, letting about half the stream pour into the picture and then squeezing back the rest while he jumped down to finish on the back porch, shooting a long stream out into the darkness of the back yard.
