by Tim Sandlin
Evangeline grew even more affectionate in her actions toward me after we were married than she’d been before. How many men can say that of purely white wives?
And in New York City, where we stayed in the Iroquois Hotel—next door to the Algonquin—our lovemaking was tender. She came to me without restraint. It was as if there was the whole world of people way over on the horizon where we could see them gathered but not hear or smell them, and over here, by ourselves, was me and Evangeline. We mattered, and everybody else didn’t.
***
By New York, the Flathead sisters weren’t chirping at each other any longer. Moccasin Woman, who was the bigger of the two, cut the crown off Flower’s favorite hat. Flower retaliated by filling Moccasin Woman’s moccasins with oatmeal that set hard as concrete. After more than seventy years of inseparability, they’d fallen out over a male, i.e., Samuel the deaf Navajo. Old women will carry on that way. I myself have witnessed it in the purgatory they call a nursing home. Hell, men will too, only men tend to die before the schism turns long-term ugly.
Samuel himself didn’t seem to notice. When the old biddies got to screaming at one another over his affections, he closed up like a possum on a telegraph line.
“I wondered where you learned that trick,” Lydia said from the driver’s seat.
“I know not of what you speak.”
“You go catatonic in social situations.”
“That is a damnable lie. I am known for my outgoing ways. Ask the crones at the home. Ask What’s-her-Name Dukakis. I am as alert as an antelope in hunting season. Where was I?”
“New York.”
Samuel ditched the party on the train ride west. In Marion, Ohio, we were seated in the Union Station lobby, awaiting the Northern Pacific, when Samuel stood up, pronounced a short speech in Navajo, and gave me the silver-and-turquoise collar corners he’d been wearing since the day we met. Then, with grand dignity, he walked off, out the double station doors.
I held the corners in the palm of my hand. “What’d he do that for?”
Evangeline took them and leaned in to clip them on to my collar points. With her up close like that, I felt her sage breath lightly on my face, and I could smell the natural fragrance of her body. It made me heady.
She said, “Samuel wished to pay his debt to you. For bringing him back to his home nation.”
I looked across Evangeline’s hair to where he’d disappeared through the doorways. “Where’s he going?”
She moved back to admire my shirt and me. “New Mexico, I imagine. Or Arizona. Samuel probably doesn’t know the name of the state his tribe calls home.”
The Flathead girls broke into wails you could hear clean across the lobby. They were singing their native death chants, and most tribes, when they’re dying, sing loud. Only white folks die with a whimper. People setting nearby gave us a wide berth and pretended we were invisible. Those far away stared at us. I pleaded the sudden urge to vacate my bowels—even though I didn’t have such an urge—and made tracks across the lobby, away from my traveling companions.
Marriage to one woman can be a joy beyond abandon, but I advise against taking on her people.
***
I hadn’t realized when we bought the cross-country tickets that the train stopped in Billings, Montana. I should have known. There’s no other way across to the Flathead rez, except the Union Pacific through Salt Lake and up, but that’s way out of the way.
We had a sleeping berth and I stayed in it with the curtain pulled the whole eight hours. While I’d never promised Agatha I wouldn’t come to Billings, she had assumed as much. My great fear was running into her. She no doubt had babies by now. And a car. Probably a large house with a veranda.
Evangeline knew I was hiding from Agatha. She said, “You don’t want your former beloved one to see me.”
“I don’t want her to see me.”
“You are ashamed. You wish to hide your Indian wife from your friends and family.”
“Honey, I got no friends or family.”
“Then why do you conceal yourself when we are in a town where you might be recognized?”
Evangeline was disappointed in me. I loved her so much it upset me no end to disappoint her, but still I stayed in my berth. I was proud of Evangeline. She was sweeter than Agatha could ever have been. I just didn’t want the two of them meeting and comparing notes.
***
After we dropped off the sisters, I got a job rangering in Yellowstone Park. Dropping off the sisters was no simple task, in its ownself, but we pulled it off, so I won’t delve into that saga, other than to point out there’d been a reason they left the Flathead Reservation for the Wild West Show in the first place, and there were individuals on the res who remembered that reason and didn’t want the old girls back. Evangeline finally found a grandson of one of them—Flower, maybe—who was willing to take them if they’d work his farm, for the Flatheads were farming back then. I later heard they lasted a month before jumping a train for Arizona.
Enough with those two. I’d thought when Evangeline asked me to take her home, she had a specific location and family in mind—wherever she came from, for example. But Evangeline wasn’t homesick for family. She missed the high mountains—the flowing of waters, the radiant light, the silence of the Rockies. She didn’t care where we lived, so long as no one lived upstream, and Lord knows, I didn’t yearn for a Western metropolis like Billings or Denver. When I heard they were hiring rangers in Yellowstone, I jumped for it.
The only qualification was you had to be able to ride a Harley-Davidson motorbike, which I couldn’t. I told the Park superintendent I’d been a messenger in the war, and he didn’t ask what I’d been up to since. He sent me to the motorcycle barn, where I would have been unmasked as a fraud, except Snuffy Bowlin, the man in charge of the motorcycle rangers, had been an American volunteer in the Canadian Expeditionary Force like me. Those men kept each other’s backs for years after the war, primarily from a sense of superiority over the American veterans who came to France three years late. I was never out of a job, so long as any of my comrades were alive and hiring.
First time I set a motorcycle, Snuffy showed me how to kick the starter and pop the clutch. She reared up and left my ass in the dirt, which turned out for the best, when she sailed full throttle into a limber pine.
Second time, I crashed in the creek, and third, I hit a horse. Snuffy stayed with me until soon enough I was a genuine national park motorcycle ranger.
In the main, that meant traffic control. The speed limit was twenty-five on the flats and twelve on the hills and curves. The major cause for citations was drivers not honking their horns before going around a curve. They don’t ticket for that now. Most, but not all, Yellowstone roads went one way part of the day and then back the other way the other part, except us on motorcycles could go either direction, so long as we dismounted and leaned our machines against the inside wall when we met cars on the passes.
Yellowstone had a tame buffalo herd and a wild buffalo herd, and it behooved a ranger to remember which he was dealing with. Our job was to haze the tame herd past visiting dignitaries that swarmed on the park that summer. We also hazed elk, antelope, and bear for tourists’ entertainment. Try hazing antelope by motorcycle sometime. It’s a richly rewarding pastime.
President Harding came through the end of June, on his way to Alaska. We paraded every form of wildlife imaginable past the presidential entourage. A bear that took food from his hand made the Secret Service antsy. Little did they know, Warren Harding would be dead a month later while still on the same vacation where I saw him. Most of us rangers, as well as the journalists traveling with the president, figured Harding’s wife poisoned him for rampant adultery. He did die after a bout of food poisoning, and he was the only one in the party who got it, and Mrs. Harding did refuse to allow an autopsy, but that doesn’t prove a woman got away
with killing the president. Other presidents—most presidents, so far as I can tell—practice rampant adultery, but you don’t see their wives poisoning them. Seems a harsh punishment, even for a Republican.
The only serious crime we investigated was elk-tooth poaching. Elk ivory cuff links were coveted by members of a national organization called the Elks Lodge. The ivories are the eyeteeth of an elk, like elephant ivories, only smaller. Poachers killed the elk, ripped out their eyeteeth, and then left the carcass for scavenger animals. It was awful to come upon. All those who weren’t elk tooth poachers hated those that were. In the West, there’s a public-relations gap between meat poachers and trophy poachers. You won’t find much sympathy for trophy poachers.
***
The Park Service placed me and Evangeline in a little cabin behind the Fountain Ranger Station, along the rim of the geyser basin there. I know when people tell their oral histories, the most boring part corresponds to the happiest part, because that’s the way stories work. Good times are interesting to live, but worthless to tell about. Suffice it to say, there was a summer in my hundred years on Earth when life was worth the trouble.
Evangeline and I lived by the Firehole River in a snug cabin with a woodstove for cooking and a double bed for creating love. She’d learned to cook in Austria, before the food ran out, so we ate in a more exotic fashion than your typical park ranger. In the evenings, after dessert and coffee, me and Evangeline would walk arm in arm about the geyser basin. The level of beauty with the forest bathed by alpenglow as seen through the mists of hot springs would take my breath way.
Elk appeared on the banks of the Firehole to drink and the birds chose that time of day to sing for the joy of singing. Evangeline pointed out the various small mammals that crossed the flats, and she knew the names of all the waterfowl. The sun seemed to hang on forever that summer, before finally setting in a carnival of pink and orange. We walked back to our cabin in the faltering darkness and lay in each other’s grasp, so peaceful neither of us wanted to sleep, for fear of missing a moment together.
***
Of course I knew the days of being all right would end, and sure enough, they did. The difference between this and other times of somewhat fun was that in the other times, I fretted so much over losing what I had that I never enjoyed having it. With Evangeline, I didn’t dread the oncoming disaster. I simply went about each day, living as full as I might, without thinking about the next. I recommend that attitude, should you ever find yourself happy.
Still and all, I do wish the peaceful times of summer could have lasted a bit longer.
The sole rangering duty I didn’t relish was predator control. In those days, Yellowstone’s upper-level bureaucrats ordered us employees to trap, poison, or plain old shoot every coyote and wolf in the park. In 1923, we killed eight wolves and almost three hundred coyotes, which may not sound like a lot of wolves, but there were only nine to start. The Bechler Station ranger got the ninth in 1924.
When I say we killed, I mean them. I’d had my fill of violent death in France, and I wasn’t about to continue the pattern back home in the Rockies. Evangeline used to tease me, on account of I wouldn’t trap mice in the cabin. I said they had as much right to keep going as I did. So I never shot a coyote or wolf, and whenever it was required that I set out a trap or poison bait, I urinated on it.
Which brings us to late August, when Snuffy sent me up past Gibbon Meadows to check a trap line.
***
The day was warmish and clear blue, with a hint of autumn. The air was almost too sparkling for summer. Birds and plants had a shimmer of anticipation you don’t see during the hot days of July. I rode up an old wagon track from God knows when. Maybe a prospector cut it, or the Army back in the ’80s. In 1923, the Park didn’t have rules concerning where a man could drive a motorcycle.
I rolled through a stand of lodgepole pine down into aspen that gave way to willows along a soggy creek bottom and turned into a pretty meadow where I came up on two men on horseback roped to a grizzly sow. A yearling cub huffed to and fro in a nervous fit off to one side while the mother grizzly charged one horse and then wheeled on the other. The men—Bill Cox and Shadrach Pierce, by God—whooped and hollered and flailed hats at their horses, making a mess of the peaceful afternoon.
Any fool who’s ever roped so much as a fence post knows it takes three men, three ropes, and three well-trained mounts to subdue a full-grown grizzly bear. You triangulate—offer resistance from two sides when she makes a run at the third. There’s no sense in two men alone attempting the stunt. Even if you choose a sickly bear and your horses are powerful, what are you going to use for an exit plan?
The grizzly reared up on her hind legs and paused a moment to gather her wits, then she dropped, bounced off her front feet, and charged Shad. Bill’s noose had her by the right hindfoot, while Shad’s was cinched around her neck. The sow was dark brown with a dusty gray hump and a flat face. One ear had been notched in a fight or by a bullet. Dragging Bill’s horse with her, she made ragged progress on Shad, whose appaloosa shied sidewise, snorting and circling to avoid those awful claws. Shad dug at his scabbard, but she was coming so quick he had to reel in rope with both hands, like playing a really big trout, or she would shake off his necktie and be clear to finish him without restraint.
Bill screamed profane words at his horse whose eyes bulged in panic. The bay bucked and spun, causing Bill to hang up on the rope looped around his pommel. The cub was bleating like a castrated sheep and the mama roared. She’d straightened out her confusion. Now, she was single-mindedly set on killing Shad.
I said something along the lines of “I knew it would be those two.” Something like that. What I meant was I’d been braced for months, waiting for the event that would explode my life, and I’d always suspected when that event arrived, Shad and Bill would be close by.
Then I shouted, “Holy shit!” or “Hellfire!”—I can’t recall which—gunned the beJesus out of my motorcycle, popped the clutch, and charged the bear. I spun dirt clear across the meadow, making as much noise as possible on a Harley-Davidson. Which is a lot of noise.
The bear glanced at me but kept after Shad. I suppose she’d decided to tear him apart first, then deal with the rest of us one at a time. I passed so close to her I could have kicked her backside, and only swerved at the last moment to keep from flipping over Bill’s rope.
I came in for a second pass, but she ignored that one too. Shad’s horse was circling so fast I was about to get my neck wrung. So, instead of making another run at the mother, I turned to the cub.
As I said before, this was a yearling cub, so he wasn’t cuddly as a Teddy bear. He was big enough to cause damage in his own right if he got angry, only so far, the cub was more frightened than dangerous. He stood on two legs, looking altogether like a hunchbacked teenager, while I spun a 360-degree, dirt-kicking slide around him there. He couldn’t swivel quick enough to face me clear around. He just stood there, bleating, disoriented by so much sound.
You want to get a female grizzly bear’s attention, go after her cub. Only once you’ve got her diverted, I’d advise moving away with haste. The bear left off Shad and came across the clearing like a freight train jumping the tracks. She yanked Bill backwards from his saddle and the saddle frontward from the horse. The bear ran, dragging the saddle twenty feet to the rear. Shad’s horse ran with her, the alternative being broke legs.
I saw Shad and Bill were safe for the moment and the time had come to clear out, but it was too late. Grizzlies can outrun any horse, and believe me, this one could catch a motorcycle spinning in dirt. She came up fast and big and swatted me off the motorcycle, tearing my shoulder. I flipped in midair and landed on my back, and she was on me like a dog on a bone. There was this moment of me looking up into that grizzly’s eyes. It was a moment I’ll remember long after I’m dead.
“Wait a minute,” Lydia said.
/> “You face down an enraged grizzly and tell me I’m wrong,” Oly said. “Till then, I don’t want to hear another word.”
“That works for me.”
Her mouth opened. I saw drips of spittle hanging off her teeth. Smelled the stench of her breath. I thought then about Evangeline, how sweet she was and how short our time together had been. I thought dying here was better than dying in the trenches, because I’d known her, and dying before I met Evangeline would have meant my life was wasted, whereas dying now meant I’d amounted to something. You’d be amazed and awestruck to know how much a man can think in the heartbeat before oblivion. Time stretches. That’s how I figure it. You can have three minutes worth of thought process in a single second.
A nickel-sized hole appeared in the bear’s forehead and blood gurgled out. I heard the loudest shot I’d ever heard, louder than the shell that wounded me in France. Another hole appeared in the roof of her mouth. She made a sound like gargling salt water, then she collapsed.
Leroy punched out the bottom right pane on Lydia’s back door. He reached through the glass shards, opened the door, and entered her utility room. He moved past the washer and dryer, into the kitchen, where he crossed to the refrigerator and drank his fill of vanilla soy milk straight from the bottle, until milk ran down his chin and dribbled onto the floor.
He set the milk on the counter next to the telephone and left the kitchen for the living room, where he found Zelda standing by the open front door.
“It wasn’t locked,” she said.
“Shut it.”
“What?”
“The neighbors know the old lady is out of town. We don’t want them seeing the door open and calling the pigs, now do we, you dumb twat?”
“Okay.” Zelda closed the door. “I’m going to find some new clothes. These I’ve got on are starting to smell like you.”
