by John Hansen
“Open for what?” I asked.
“What do you think?” Ronnie asked me, smiling wryly.
“She’s a prostitute?” Katie stopped and stared at us.
“Yep,” Ronnie said.
I thought back to what Larry had said. This must have been the place he came to.
“Have you been to her?” Katie asked Ronnie, horrified.
“Hell no,” he laughed, “I’ve never paid for it in my life.”
I tried to picture Larry making love with Nancy, and the image was disturbing, gross and ungraspable, like two large potatoes shoved together, one on top of the other… It made me angry for a moment that he would have hit Alia after coming here, and I had a momentary doubt about what I was doing, letting him go; but I took a deep breath and let the feeling go.
Ronnie snapped me out of my reverie. “But we’re getting off topic, that’s not why we’re here, to talk about my sex life.”
“Thank God,” Katie said.
We settled down onto the large blanket spread out on the thick grass. Ronnie and Jamie had fold out chairs, but Katie and I just lay on our backs on the blanket, a jacked stuffed under my head for a pillow as I carefully sipped a beer.
The sky above was so clear and the darkness around us so deep and undisturbed, that you could see the ghostly line of an arm of the Milky Way stretching out over us at an angle, southeast to northwest. Thousands of stars… but no streaking meteors had passed overhead yet.
“By the way, Will,” Jamie said over to me from her chair. “I think I have a job lined up for you for the winter.”
“Really?”
“Yep,” she nodded. “With the administration in Kalispell. You’d be working with me. A lot of PR stuff and some writing – right up your alley, I hear.”
“Sounds perfect.”
“We’ll talk more soon. Come by the office, and I think you’ll be pleased.”
“I don’t think I can be too picky at this point, anyway,” I said. “But thanks a lot; you may have just saved me from going back to Georgia.”
“Screw that,” Ronnie said from his chair as he scanned the night sky for his meteors. “Don’t leave, buddy, stick around and become a Montananite like me.”
“It’s ‘Montanan’ you retard,” Jamie said, kicking him.
Just then a pair of headlights popped over the end of the grassy plain and a small Toyota drove up close to Ronnie’s car. Jake’s car?
“That must be Sky,” Jamie said. “She said she’d probably stop by.”
It was Sky; and she exited the car and came over with a bottle of wine and some plastic cups in her hands. “Save room for me?” she asked us.
“Sure,” Ronnie piped up, and stood up to help her with her stuff. Jamie rolled her eyes and said, “Sky we’ve got a spot for you over by Katie and Will.”
Sky sat down next to me and Katie and poured herself a glass of wine.
“How’s it going?” I asked her as she settled in.
“Ok, overall.” She offered me a glass of red wine. It was a large glass and I took a large swig, to feel the effects. I neck was hurting and I wanted to deaden the pain a bit, and to get lost in the night and the darkness, the music and the shooting stars, in the midst of my strange family.
“How’s Clayton?” Jamie asked. “I heard he got picked up.”
Ronnie looked over at us. “He got arrested? When?”
Sky nodded. “Last night. Him and Jake both got picked up. Not sure on what charges.” She said, looking for a moment at me. “We won’t know until they get in front of a judge Monday in Kalispell, probably.”
“I’m sorry Sky,” Jamie said softly, and reached over to grasp her hand. Sky reached back and held it for a moment. “It’s ok. It wasn’t totally unexpected. Jake was always threatening to drag Clayton into his shit again.”
Ronnie stared for a moment at her, and then looked back at the stars again.
The song “The End” by The Doors came over the stereo then. The melodic, haunting guitar refrain that begins the song drifted over us like a slow, exotic wind. The music lent a mystical feel to the night scene: us lying on the blanket, nothing overhead but a giant dome of darkness and lights, nothing around but the old farmhouse in the distance, below in the valley.
The Doors tune wafted over the grass to our blanket. “This is the End, my only friend… the End.” A streak of light shot across the sky overhead, gold-colored with a small trail of sparks glittering for a fraction of a second behind.
“There’s one!” Ronnie shouted. “Everyone SHUT UP!” He commanded even though no one had been talking at that moment.
The song played on as we all kept quiet and stared up into the sky. Another streak after a couple of minutes, then two others a second later. Ronnie had told me before, in one of his lectures, that the meteors were the remains of a long-disintegrated comet. I wondered how far the comet fragments had traveled, and for how long they had been traveling.
I took a drink of wine and looked back at Sky, the one behind me, not above me. She wasn’t looking up, but back at me. We couldn’t see each other’s faces in the growing dark, but our faces met nonetheless and I stared back at her for a moment, then up at the other sky again.
A silver-colored meteor shot across the expanse. The meteors all were coming from right to left, more or less, burning off in the same direction.
Jim Morison sang his wailing verse: “Lost in a Roman…. wilderness of pain.” The guitar trilled the mystic notes. I felt the tune lift my mind up and carry it into the sky a ways.
“The point where the meteors are coming from,” Ronnie said to us, “over from the right, is called ‘The Radiant.’ The meteors come from near where the constellation Perseus is, hence the name.”
In Greek mythology, I had once read, Perseus was sent to take the head of Medusa – whose face caused all who gazed upon her to turn to stone. Perseus slew Medusa, and then rescued the princess Andromeda from the kraken by turning it to stone with Medusa's head.
A lesson in creativity, I considered. Perseus came up with an idea that no one had considered, and had risked his life to get the job done. I wondered where the story had come from, what, or who, had originally inspired it to begin with. The ancient Greeks also believed that women were created as a punishment to man. I thought back over my summer, and even before, to Holly and others, and realized that all such myths have their origin in truth. A punishment, and a blessing. Had I found Alia’s killer, or had he found me?
“Ride the snake, ride the snake…” The Doors played on from Ronnie’s car. “To the lake, the ancient lake…”
More meteors, more music, more wine. Saint Lawrence was crying indeed, but, for what, I could not tell. As I lay there, shooting stars streaking overhead intermittently, I pictured Alia lying beside me, watching with me, holding my hand. She was wearing her now-eternal outfit – the clothes I had last seen her in: white t-shirt, thin, barely hiding her light-tan skin, little jean shorts, smooth legs ending in bare feet. Her fragrance lifted and passed over me; her hair brushed against me in the night breeze.
I took a deep breath, but smelled nothing now, nothing but the grass and smell of dirt far off. I looked around me in the dim shimmer of moon light, and I decided to let Alia go. I spun the leather string around my wrist, feeling the beads between my fingers. I took pulled the leather string off my wrist and placed it next to me on the grass. Keep her there, I decided, but no longer in my head. As the music played I let her go, maybe up into the stars.
The moon had come out now, low over the horizon, and it cast a thin silvery light onto us, barely noticeable. I looked over at Katie, who lay motionless, blinking slowly up at the sky.
The song ended and started again. Ronnie had put it on repeat.
“So I heard you quit Two Med,” Sky said. I looked over at her.
“Unfortunately.”
“Why?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Because you were attacked?”
I shook my head, glancing at her for a moment to see her expression, which was mute.
“Because I was saved.”
I expected her to ask what I meant, but she didn’t. I watched the sky for a moment, but the meteors seemed to be on pause.
“Why were you out in the woods looking for Clayton that night, Sky?” I asked her.
“You never get tired of that question, do you?”
“No.”
She paused a moment. A sliver meteor with a sparkling tail shot across the sky so fast that I hardly saw it. “Clayton was looking for Alia. He knew she had spent the night at the store, with you, and he was in a rage. He was still in love with her – I didn’t know what he may do, so I followed him in my car.”
She stopped and didn’t continue, but she had already gotten too far.
“So how did you find Alia off in the woods?”
“I was driving real slow towards Two Med, and I saw somebody with a flashlight run off in the woods to a truck and then take off like a madman.”
I listened for her to finish but she stopped again.
“Did you see who it was? Would you recognize the truck again?”
“No,” she said, “it was too dark and they did a u turn and took off the other way.”
“But I saw where he had been, and I turned my car in the road in that direction, and saw the body off in the middle of the trees. I knew it was her from the clothes, and I…”
She stopped again. I heard her breathing change and grow harsher. “I drove off and called the police after I got back home. I didn’t even follow the truck – I panicked and fucked everything over.”
I heard her breathing slow down after a moment, and leaned back to watch the sky. “You told the police all of that?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Then you did everything you could have. The truck would have lost you anyway.”
She sighed deeply, and I could hear her pour more wine in her glass.
“Where are you going to live?” she asked after a minute or two. Her voice seemed changed, bolder. “Where are you living now?”
“With a friend. But I think Jamie may be getting me a job, so I’m going to look for a place tomorrow.”
“Those park jobs don’t start till October though. What are you going to do till then?”
“I’m up for ideas,” I said, taking a sip of my wine.
Sky didn’t say anything for a while. The wind picked up, and the moon rose stronger overhead. The overhead sky was misting up with a thin layer of clouds.
Ronnie stood up and stretched, yawning loudly. “Well,” he said, “time to pack up, kids. See you next year.”
As we got up and began to gather our stuff, Sky walked up to me. “You can work at the diner with me, Will, till you start the park job.” She gave me a piece of paper with a phone number on it. “That’s the owner’s number, Susan. Call her tomorrow and tell her you need a job; tell her I sent you.”
I thanked her and she walked off and said her goodbyes to Jamie and got in her car. She honked as she drove off. I was a bit wary about Sky’s sudden warmness towards me, not because of any possible ill will or intent, but more so because I wanted to avoid getting close to any woman for a while – a long while. But I was surrounded by women in Montana, of all places; and I couldn’t live with Greg forever…
Katie came up to me and said, “Ok, boy, help me with this crap. I’m tired.” I helped her pack the things into Ronnie’s trunk.
So ended the Tears of Saint Lawrence; his weeping done, he could rest at peace in the heavens, at least until next summer. Ronnie got us back into his car and drove us towards Two Med. I got dropped off at Greg’s, and then they drove off into the darkness. I snuck into the house as quietly as possible, since it was about two a.m., and went to sleep in the guest room, thinking of Sky and my new job prospects.
Forty-Four
The next morning Ronnie and I drove over to Browning and I went in to see Susan at the Sunrise Diner. I had seen her before, and she had already talked to Sky before we got there, so lining up the job wasn’t difficult. I had never waited tables before, but being close to the end of the summer she only needed help about for a short while, so she wasn’t looking for any stellar performance.
Ronnie and I stayed to have breakfast, and Sky dropped by to eat with us. She told me she had found a nice two-bedroom place that she was moving into, and that I was welcome to check it out and move in, if it fit what I was looking for.
On the way back to Greg’s, Ronnie congratulated me sarcastically on my “new squeeze” but I told him he had it wrong.
“She’s not gunning for a new boyfriend,” I told him. “Just a new roommate. Clayton and Jake are still in jail, and facing some serious shit. She wants a dependable roommate now, after all that unrest.”
“We’ll see…” Ronnie said.
He dropped me off at Greg’s and I spent the rest of the day helping Dee and Ophie take up some vegetables they had planted in a small garden on the side of the house. We were harvesting onions and potatoes, when I heard a loud motorcycle drive up.
I walked over to the front of the house and saw Thunderbird setting the bike on its kickstand. Ophie came running over but then stopped next to me, curious, amazed and afraid all at the same time, I imagined, at the spectacle of Thunderbird in the flesh. He had on a sleeveless black t-shirt with a red bandana holding back his long flowing grey hair, which added to his wild appearance.
“Big Will!” Thunderbird thundered cheerily. “What’s happening’?”
I smiled at him welcomingly. “Thunderbird, this is Ophelia.” I gestured down to the little girl, and she stared wide eyed up at him like he was some grizzled super hero sprung out of a strange comic book. She had warmed up to me since I was living at the house.
“Hey Ophelia!” Thunderbird said to her, and then he walked over and bent down to her level. He was wearing jeans and black leather chaps ending in big, gnarled old black leather boots. He reached out to her and held his hand out for her to shake. She stood like a statue.
“She’s kinda shy,” I told him.
“Wait!” He said and went over to his bike. He reached into one of his saddle bags and drew out a wrinkled, brown paper bag. He unfolded it and drew out a small dream catcher, a circle with woven string in the middle, with some small feathers hanging below the circle on strings of beads.
He came back and bent down and offered it to her. Dee had walked up and was smiling at him as he held it out. Ophie bit her lip and looked back at her mom, then reached out and took the catcher out of his hand carefully. She looked at Thunderbird and then back at the catcher.
“She likes it, Thunderbird,” I said. I reached down and ruffled her curly brown hair. She walked back over to her mom to show her. Dee said it was beautiful and thanked him.
Dee and Ophie went to go hang her catcher in her room, and Thunderbird and I walked over to the back porch. “I came to talk to you, Will,” he said, “I’m really sorry about what happened.”
“It’s not your fault.” I reflexively ran a finger over the scar on my neck, now healed enough to have no bandage. The puncture wound on my check was almost healed and barely visible.
“I shouldn’t have left you there – not without some protection,” he said sadly.
“Why did you take off like that?”
He stared down at his boots and crossed his legs, hooking his thumbs through the belt loops on his jeans. “Floyd Crow asked me to go; he said he needed me to take back the money from the entrance fees and put it in the safe back at the council office.”
I remembered the grizzled, slow-talking tribe chief who seemed to be so interested in my connection to all that was happening to the tribe. I hadn’t heard from him since the attack, however.
“He wanted me to pay him a visit after the powwow,” I said. “Thunderbird, have they asked you to run the money back like that in years past?”
“Nope,” Thunderbird said, shaking his head. “But it’s a
big deal; and I was honored.” He wiped his nose with the back of his hand and looked at me. “Will, I heard about Jake and that stuff he was involved in – everybody knew about it, in the tribe.
“But,” he continued, “I wanted you at the powwow so bad, I didn’t worry about all that. I knew you had to go, because of Alia’s spirit on you. It was really important that you went to the sweat – the spirits told me!”
He nodded with a serious expression on his big face as he looked me over. “And it worked! She’s at peace, and not struggling with your spirit, I think.”
“She is at peace,” I said. “And I’m glad I went, Thunderbird, even with the scars. Because of all that happened, I can put her to rest. I would have gone through any amount of trauma, to get that.”
Thunderbird smiled at me, a big goofy grin spreading across his bearded face.
“What’s so funny?” I asked, smiling back at him.
“I just thought back to when I first met you, at the store, at the snack bar. You’re a different man now.”
I definitely agreed.
We chatted a while more, but eventually Thunderbird had to get back to Browning to get some things ready for a big road trip he was taking, which was going to end up on the coast in California. I figured it would be the last time I would see him in a while, maybe forever, so I shook his hand and thanked him for everything, before he got back on his bike. He kept smiling as he got his bike situated and cranked it up – and he waved wildly back at me as he took off down the road.
I realized I missed Thunderbird as he drove off. I think it was because he was so simple and honest. The two often go together, unfortunately, as the sophisticated among us often lack honesty. Also, Thunderbird’s face always told the truth, he didn’t hide anything. It was refreshing.
Forty-Five
Two days later I moved in with Sky, into a three-bedroom little house with a couple acres of land, a few miles from Browning proper. It wasn’t the apartment she had originally found because that place didn’t allow pets. She had, unannounced to me, bought a Saint Bernard puppy from Nancy, and moved him in with us.
