A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition

by Norman Maclean

  At first I tried to find out about myself, but before long the surroundings forced themselves upon my attention—not, however, until I realized this must be early morning of Saturday night in Hamilton. It was still too early in the morning to know how I would feel about the night when it got here, but I felt very bad about the night before when I fell in front of the cash register with toothpicks in my hair. As far as I knew, no one ever before had fainted except women and then only in books. I had actually never known a person who had fainted. Suddenly, I felt one of those great waves of sadness that rarely come over me. I had made it clear from Elk Summit only to lie down on the floor of a Chinese restaurant. Now nothing was left that could be mentioned to Bill about a day fourteen miles up and fourteen miles down with five or six miles still left to go. The coming night would be the last night when the ranger and the cook and the crew and I would be together. I got hold of myself and said, “I'd better be good tonight and that damn cook had better faint.” I explored myself a little further: “I wish I felt a little better—I'm not feeling bad, but I'd be afraid to get up and walk down the hall and find out.”

  About here the surroundings took over. A big ass pushed the wall next to my bed and gave me a nudge. As the books would say, I sat bolt upright. It had to be an ass, but how the hell did it come through the wall? It was half-light in my room and I studied the wall. So help me, it was made of canvas. Likewise the other wall, but once in a while the wall beside my bed bulged as if the glacier that had made Blodgett Canyon was at work next door. Suddenly, I remembered things that aged Mr. Smith and Mr. McBride had told me. “This is just like an old-time western whorehouse,” I thought, “with canvas partitions between the cribs.” I watched and listened, and, after I saw and heard what was happening in the next room and was extending into part of mine, I said, “What the hell do I mean, like an old-time western whorehouse? This is the thing itself.”

  At first I thought that there had to be several people in the crib next door, but I finally added up everything and settled for a pimp and a whore screwing up and down the bed, occasionally swerving out of their course and then returning to leave peaks and pinnacles on my wall. It was only his ass that took the scenic route, unfortunately; hers must have kept on a straight course, and never nudged me, and I eventually came to understand why. She talked all the time in a monotone, and while they screwed she talked about how he had been out screwing other whores. I happened to be very sensitive to rhythm that year and I finally realized that I could scan what she was saying. If I allowed for understandable cæsuras, she was speaking blank verse.

  That year I had taken an English course from the most famous teacher in our high school. She was very good, but perhaps was a little overwrought about poetry and students. Anyway, by early winter she decided her juniors could write a sonnet, so she assigned one. At that time, high school juniors in Montana could tell where a cinch ended and a latigo began, but had no such knowledge about an octave and a sestet, so after feeling steadily worse for several days I approached my mother with my problem, who looked at me carefully to be sure I had a problem, and then said, “After dishes, I will help you.” So we sat down at a table and I held her left hand and she wrote the sonnet with her right hand, while her left hand trembled. Her sonnet was “On Milton's Blindness,” something I had never heard of before. The poem was regarded as very good by the English teachers of Missoula County High School, and in May received the prize as the best poem of the year and was published in the school annual with a sterilized photograph of me adjoining it. My mother was very proud of me, but quietly insisted that I stay in after supper until I at least learned to scan, so again we sat at the table, this time with Milton or Shakespeare between us, and again I held her left hand and with her right hand she would beat out the accented syllables. Then we would write lines of our own iambic pentameter, and our blank verse, unlike Milton's or Shakespeare's, never had any little odds or ends left over. We wrote: “

  ” and other such lines that all Montana high school juniors could scan and tell was poetry. At least, if they could count to five.

  At first I hadn't picked up the rhythm next door. Evidently she was just warming up and she spoke in just ordinary irritable profanity. “You lousy bastard,” and so on. But then she started to dedicate a stave to each time he had double-crossed her, and each stave she ended with: “

  ” She liked this line and used it as a kind of refrain, and from it I picked up the scansion and realized for the first time that she was speaking iambic pentameter, but with skips and jumps here and there, more like Milton and Shakespeare than mother or me. Evidently her man not only had done her wrong but had gone around talking about it, because she had another set of staves she always ended with, “

  ” I couldn't verify what she said about his mouth, because he was too busy ever to open it, but all you had to do to check his big ass was to watch my wall. It went down my wall like a wave, and back up it like a Rainbow trout.

  I was about to consider her imagery when I must have fallen asleep, possibly lulled by her rhythms, and when I woke up, certainly much later, there was not a stir next door. I was nervous for having fallen asleep and wondered whether this business about a pimp and a whore and especially iambic pentameter wasn't a dream, a distorted continuation of my rhythm in my sickness. Outside in the hall a kind of marching was going on that faded and returned. I waited until it was in a fading cycle before sticking out my head, and, sure enough, it had to be him, though all that could be seen clearly was a hairy ass that could be recognized even by gaslight. When he turned at the end of the hall, there she was in his arms, with her little ass and knees draped in a V. Evidently, they were out for a stroll, taking a breather before the real work of the night began. They came up the hall toward me, and somehow I couldn't pull my neck in. They went right by my immovable nose and then made for their room. He was a man with his toes turned up and too much in love with his work to notice me, but she was just as nasty-looking a little whore as you will ever see, and, whatever she and this big ape were doing, clearly she could think of two or three other things at the same time, including me. She half twisted her neck off her shoulders just to give me the once over. Then, adding a twist to the twist, she said, “Go fuck yourself,” so she still scanned, although no one will give her grade points in originality for declaiming one of the most famous lines in the English language.

  The old lumberjacks used to talk about “a walking whorehouse,” and now what they meant became clearer. I was about to say next, “All night whores flitted around the hotel,” but I remembered in time that whores don't flit. One whore almost came through the other side of my wall. She came so close to coming through that somebody must have tried to throw her through.

  You know, I wasn't very well while all this was happening, and eventually I fell asleep, not to waken until late in the morning, when, I thought, I was much refreshed. Anyway, I was all full of rhythms. To my quitting-time rhythm were permanently added those of my next-door neighbor. These were all iambic. But the one that now was pounding loudest was “Saturday night in Hamilton.” I didn't know the name of this rhythm but it sounded something like “This is the forest primeval.”

  After dressing a little more shakily than expected, I took a tryout down the hall, and lay down again. Finally, I went out for breakfast and looked for some place that wasn't the Chinese restaurant for fear the waitress I fell in love with last night might not look any better in the daylight than I felt. I found a Greek restaurant, and never again went back to the Chinese restaurant in order to preserve my first feelings about the waitress there. With a menu in front of me, I thought for a long time and finally ordered tea and toast. The expression on this new waitress's face suggested that she hadn't fallen in love with me at first sight and that this workmen's restaurant didn't welcome short orders, especially when they included tea instead of coffee. To make matters worse, I managed to put away the tea but not the toast.

  Then I went looking fo
r the doctor's office and found it in a building a block off Main Street where the rents were lower. The office was small and crowded and the air around which it had been built must have been the air which was still there. People sat on the exposed springs of couches, and the name of the doctor was Charles Richey, M.D., spelled backward on the window.

  Dr. Richey did not practice a complicated branch of medicine. He wore his black Stetson in the office and spent about five minutes with each patient. He would stick his Stetson out of the inner office, point his finger at a patient and wiggle his finger. When it came my turn, he had his earphones on before I got through his door. He never said a word and he worried me when he went back to listen to the same spot on my chest. Finally, he jerked the phones out of his ears, and, like the night before, he tried to say something cheerful as soon as he was sure. He said, “You're all right.” Then he asked me where I lived, and I told him Missoula and he told me I had better stay in Hamilton for another night. “Take it easy a little longer,” he said, “and don't get in any fights.”

  I was an especially uncomplicated case and he had only one more thing to say to me. He said, “It was those God damn ice-cream sodas. After this, never drink anything but good whiskey.”

  It seemed like good advice and besides it came free, so, by way of expressing my gratitude, I have followed it ever since.

  I tried to thank him but he was already wiggling his finger at another patient.

  On the way back to my room, I kept an eye open for a different hotel, and saw one that said it was Deluxe at 25* per night (double that with bath). Just as I was to enter my old room to pack up, I noted that my neighbor's room was wide open and she was standing naked in front of a mirror trying on a hat. She was adding to her stature by wearing high-heeled shoes and tilting a very large hat this way and that, but when she saw me, she took off her hat so as not to impede her vision. What she said to me she had said once before, and so of course it still scanned. After I got into my own room, I had to lie down again. I lay there hoping that some day my next-door neighbor and the cook would meet socially. Concerning the outcome, I didn't care which one lost.

  Later, I collected myself and my stuff, went downstairs and couldn't find anybody to pay. In that hotel they probably didn't charge by the room. I don't remember whether it was from the exertion of moving, but when I got to my new room I had to stretch out again. I rolled over and for the first time since I'd left home in the spring I felt the security of rubbing shoulders with a plaster wall and for the first time in several days I almost overslept. As I woke I knew I'd no time to enjoy in waking. I knew, even before looking at my watch, that Bill and the crew should be arriving or already had arrived from what should have been the camp on Big Sand Lake near the divide. I washed my face from a pitcher, but the water was stale, just like the knowledge that I would have nothing to say about walking from Elk Summit in a day.

  By the time I got to the corral on the road to Blodgett Canyon that the Forest Service used to hold the stock, Bill was already unloading the string, and the cook and the Canadian were sitting in the shade of a deserted cabin that the Service had turned into a warehouse. Since the rest of the crew hadn't arrived, it was clear that the cook and the Canadian had ridden in and the rest of the crew, including Mr. Smith with tiny aged steps, were somewhere behind on foot. No one could kick about the Canadian riding and then just sitting there and not helping Bill unload—he was lucky to be alive after a horse had brought him down that canyon. As for the cook, you might feel like kicking him on to his feet but you'd restrain yourself if you knew anything about the woods. In the woods, the cooks are known as the kings of the camps, and they sit on the throne, because in the woods eating is what counts most in life. In the woods you work so damn hard you have to spend most of the rest of the time taking on fuel, and besides, if you're looking for your just rewards in the Forest Service, which has never been noted for wages, you'd better eat all you can while you're there and enjoy it, if possible.

  So in the woods the rest of us do everything that has to be done, but the damn cook only cooks, and talks to the boss.

  Without saying a word, Bill and I unloaded and unsaddled the string, and carried the packs, saddles, and drenched saddle blankets into the warehouse, right past the cook who sat in the shade swatting flies.

  Finally, Bill and I had a conversation. In the Forest Service very few sentences are completed, either because you have to grunt or catch your breath or because guys who work in the woods aren't the kind who go running around finishing sentences. Bill was taking off the pack on one side of a mule and I was taking off the other.

  He asked, “How did you…?”

  And, as the pack slipped on my shoulders, I grunted, “I made…”

  Which, if we had the air and inclination to finish, would probably have sounded something like this. Question: “How did you make it walking from Elk Summit?” Answer: “I made it, but don't ask anything more.”

  We must have understood each other without finishing, because nothing further was said until the crew came straggling into the corral. They crawled through the corral bars and sat down in the shade near the cook and Canadian; then all of them together said nothing. I especially cared for Mr. Smith who cared for me, and it was painful to see how short his steps were and how white with perspiration his neck was above his bandanna handkerchief where it was usually dark with old veins.

  While the crew rested, Bill and I fed the stock oats. It was September, and you can't pack animals all summer over the Bitterroot divide and expect them to survive on the grass they pass on the way. Bill didn't say he was proud of them, but he slapped each one on its rump as it snorted into its feed. At the end of the summer, they looked fine.

  After he finished with the animals, he turned to the men. He and Mr. Smith did all the talking, although I don't think they'd worked things out beforehand. Bill said, “We're one crew, but don't let's hang together in one bunch until we get to the Oxford. It would look bad.”

  Mr. Smith asked, “When do you want us, Bill?”

  Bill said, “Drift into this Oxford place between nine-thirty and ten.”

  Mr. Smith was showing remarkable recuperative powers for his age. He took off the bandanna handkerchief and wiped his neck. He seemed to be talking always to Bill and not to us. “Bill,” he said, “you take charge of the inside of that poker room and I'll stand at the door and take care of whatever tries to get in from the poolroom.”

  Bill said to me, “You're to get the money if anything goes wrong.” And then he added, as he always did, “I'll cover you.”

  Mr. McBride had something to say to Bill, and he had a point. “Be sure we play for money and not for chips. We may not be able to cash in any chips on the way out.”

  Bill said, “The rest of you help where we're hurting. You're a good crew and we don't want too many plans.”

  Mr. Smith agreed, “That's right. For what we're doing, we don't want too many plans.”

  Then the cook spoke up and added one of his stately speeches. “You must realize,” he said, “that I rarely make a tricky deal. If I won only when I dealt I would have been dead long ago. Except for one or two hands a night I am a percentage player” (which was the first time I had ever heard this phrase). “I am a very good percentage player, and I should be ahead. But, if I am not, don't lose patience. There will come one big hand and be ready.”

  So the cook had the last word, as I am sure he had planned. He liked being the center of the drama, and he liked being Bill's favorite. Mr. Smith and I exchanged our dislike of him by a glance. Then we soon broke up, as directed, and on the way back to my room I stopped at my new restaurant where I was not well liked and asked the waitress if they had a small flour sack they could spare. She seemed to like me better and came back from the kitchen and said, no, they didn't have a flour sack but they had a ten-pound sugar sack and she showed it to me and the word SUGAR had not yet faded from being washed. I said, “That's fine. That's better than flour
.” In fact, SUGAR seemed just right, since I wanted the sack to put our big winnings in. It's funny how many non-funny jokes we make to ourselves.

  I had been gone from my room for a long time, so when I got back I lay down on the bed and was still amused by my sugar sack when all of a sudden things fell apart. I say “all of a sudden,” but for a long time I had only been pretending not to know that I was going to take a hell of a beating when I reached across the table to pick up the money. I always suspected that Bill was looking for trouble more than for money, but from time to time I would cheer myself up by underestimating the crew and thinking they were just greedy, not fighty, and would take their winnings and go off and get drunk. I had not fully realized how I was doomed until I had seen that the oldest men in the crew, Mr. Smith and Mr. McBride, were counting on a fight just as much as Bill was and, independently, had worked out an almost identical plan. In fact, when I said a temporary good-bye to Mr. Smith at the corral I discovered that the crew's fighting plans didn't stop with the tin-horn gamblers. He said, “We're going to clean out the town. First we'll take those tin-horn gamblers, then the ranch hands, and then the whores.”

  If we did all that we sure as hell would clean out the town as we knew it. As we knew the town, there were houses in it, but we weren't sure what if anything was inside them. The establishments open to us were inhabited by gamblers, ranch hands, and whores. Add a Chinese and a Greek restaurant and you have what the town was to us. You will note that Mr. Smith and I both said “ranch hands” and not “cowboys"—in the Forest Service we called cowboys ranch hands to show what we thought of them. I said to Mr. Smith, “The whores may be the toughest of all.” He laughed through his moustache that was darker than his white hair; he was hoping this would be the case.