by Gerry Spence
“Can you win?”
“Don’t know the facts yet,” he said. “But before Sewell convicts you, he’ll have to kill me.”
CHAPTER 10
AFTER LILLY CAUGHT Billy Banister with the landlady, she asked her father to annul the marriage. He was only too happy to oblige. “Finally, you’ve come to your senses,” he said.
But Lilly also wanted out of Jackson Hole, out of its judgments, its memories, it barbed-wire borders, and its invisible ceiling that hurled back any who asked questions or embraced change. The message was clear: Do not step over this line. You know the line. Those on the other side of the line do not belong to us and will be banished.
She couldn’t walk down the street without meeting someone who knew about her past life with Billy Banister, who by this time had taken up residence with a cocktail waitress in Buffalo, Wyoming. Lillian had a “reputation,” and anywhere she went, her infamous past was never far behind. She was friendless.
One day standing in line at the grocery store, she heard some guy refer to her as “the mad bitch of Jackson Hole.” Her father, Jim Mortensen, told her that the only way out of hell was for her to get an education. She said she wanted to go into the design business. He asked her, “What do you mean, ‘design business’?”
“I want to make things. Pretty things. Things that people have never seen,” she said.
Jim Mortensen said, “Well, you can’t make a living just fluffin’ around. And don’t forget: Artists starve to death, and you always liked to eat,” and that’s all he had to say.
“Well, she’s different, Papa,” and that’s all her mother would say.
Judge Murray and Betsy grieved over her going. “She has to find her way,” the judge said. “If you try to hold her back, she’ll rebel and break loose. People could get hurt in the process.”
Betsy finally relented and gave Lillian her mother’s turquoise necklace—the one Betsy had worn when she and the judge were married.
“If you wear this, you’ll find yourself the love of your life,” Betsy told Lillian. “It’s got great power. Look what it brought me.” She nodded to the judge, holding back tears. He gave Lillian the hundred dollars he’d saved up for a new fly rod, and Jim Mortensen gave her another hundred from his pension, and then the Mortensens and the Murrays saw her off at the bus depot, and after that the four of them went down to the Ramshorn Saloon and had a beer in the middle of the day.
They didn’t know what to talk about or how to talk about it.
* * *
Lillian found work as a waitress in a small diner that put her in mind of the Big Chief Café in Jackson Hole. Sharing a room with a couple of other waitresses, she found better jobs in better restaurants, made friends, and eventually worked as a draftsperson at a several ad agencies, where her creative talents, including her ability with a paintbrush, were salable.
She took night courses at New York University in a curriculum she labeled “AAA”—art, advertising, and administration—and after seven years she’d worked her way up to the top rungs at the Belmont Advertising Agency on Madison Avenue. Management had its collective eyes on her as their next chief executive.
For years, beginning with Horace Adams II, the Horace Adams Brewing Company of Milwaukee had been one of the Belmont Advertising Agency’s major clients. Top management there proposed an ad campaign starring dancing bottles of Horace Adams beer, accompanied with bouncy, giggly music. When Ronald Summers, the agency’s president, presented the campaign to Horace Adams III, he responded, “Who this side of hell wants to watch beer bottles dance?”
But Ronald Summers argued that the ads told a subliminal story that sold. “It’s the reptilian brain that these ads stimulate—the most primitive part of the stem, which governs appetite, fear, lust, and aggression.” He twisted his mouth into an uneven smile. “The more recent parts of the cranium overlie the reptilian core, but the core is always in charge. ‘Give me what I want,’ it demands.”
“For Christ sakes,” Adams replied, “we’re selling beer to people, not to reptiles.”
Adams pulled his baseball cap down low. His face was a tangle of hard lines, but his nose was straight, his eyes were brown and clear, and there was a hint of humor tucked into the corner of his mouth.
“People don’t know why they buy what they buy, Mr. Adams,” Summers said. “Think of it this way: The bottles are empty. They bear the Horace Adams label. We cannot overtly claim that drinking beer makes you happy. The whole damn antibooze crowd would be down on us overnight. But the hidden story is that the bottles were once full, and even now that they’re empty, they’re still happy. It’s that simple. And bottles doing their dance thing is funny.”
“Our customers can get their laughs at the movies,” Adams said. “We’re selling beer, not bottles. My father had me working in the brewery from the time I was boy. I grew up alongside of the men, including summers during my time at Harvard. I hated Harvard students, their phony airs, their high-flying intellects. I went back to work at the brewery. I lived with our guys a lot of years. I laughed, cried, and sweated with them. I think I have some idea what workingmen want. And it’s not a bunch of beer bottles dancing.” He started for the door.
“Please wait a moment, Mr. Adams,” Summers said.
Adams’s hand was on the doorknob. “The price of bullshit has reached an all-time high here. I’m tired of it.”
“Well, I understand, but don’t judge us too quickly, Mr. Adams. I’d like you to talk to our motivational expert.” Before Adams could push the door open, Summers called on the intercom for Lillian Mortensen.
When she entered, she walked straight to Adams with the confidence of a burgeoning universe, in which he was but a wandering, solitary star.
“Miss Mortensen has been working on an entirely new campaign for Horace Adams beer,” Summers announced.
Adams took in the tall, admirably proportioned woman with jet black hair and bright blue eyes.
“You’re a busy man,” Lillian said. “Let me repeat what you already know. To sell anything, the buyer’s needs, real or imagined, must be satisfied. So the question is, Does your beer fill those needs on any level?”
What he saw got in the way of her question.
“So tell me,” she continued. “What would make Horace Adams beer number one?”
She waited for his response.
“No ideas?” she asked, prodding with a slightly forgiving smile. “If anyone should know why a Horace Adams beer should be preferred over every other beer in the world, wouldn’t that be you?”
Summers let out a muffled cough, a signal for Lillian to lighten up, but she charged on.
“Coors uses the Rocky Mountains to sell its—well, call it what you want. Horace Adams will open a brewery in Jackson, Wyoming, home of the Teton Mountains, the most magnificent mountains in America.”
“You want me to retreat to the boondocks?” Adams finally asked.
“You’re already trapped as the number-seven beer in the country, and you’ve been stuck there for a decade. You’re either happy there or you want to get the hell out,” she said. “How about advancing to numero uno? Or could you stand the shock?”
Summers stood up to further signal that she should wrap it up.
Lillian Mortensen cemented her focus on Adams. “The Tetons make the Rocky Mountains of Coors look like molehills,” she said. “Grand tétons is French for breasts—actually, big breasts. Men respond to that image. Or hadn’t you noticed?”
“I noticed,” he said, quickly lowering his eyes to her white silk blouse and holding them there an instant past an accidental glance.
“Studies show that seventy-three percent of adult males look at a woman’s chest first, then her face.”
“Women don’t have chests,” he said.
“And what do they have?”
“Tetons,” he said, and laughed.
“Exactly!” she said. “You’re a very fast study. The French trappers weren’t slow to na
me what they admired—and longed for.”
A hint of lust leaked through his smile.
“I can create an ad campaign that’ll rock the world. After my campaign for your beer, there’ll never be a woman’s breast seen or dreamed of that won’t bring on a thirst for a Horace Adams beer—‘the beer brewed under the shadow of the Tetons.’”
As if it had been his idea in the first place, he said, “We can probably build a plant in Jackson Hole in less than two years. It took us seven years to build our last one in Milwaukee, but we got caught up in a lot of local beer politics.”
“You made up your mind about my proposal in less than thirty seconds. Why did it take you so long?” She was laughing.
“You are a distraction, madam,” he said.
“You’ll find the Tetons to your liking,” she replied.
* * *
Adams hired Lillian Mortensen away from the Belmont Advertising Agency to supervise the advance work for his new brewery in Jackson Hole. They both moved to that nearly vacant valley under the Tetons. She was coming home. People knew she’d “made it big-time,” and people have a way of altering their memories when a person makes it big-time. He would trust no one but Lillian to manage his latest project. Along the way, she authored the slogan for the new Horace Adams beer: “Under the Tetons, the beer that knows what you want.”
Lillian and Horace worked out of the company’s temporary Jackson Hole office, a twenty-foot mobile home. They spent their days on the construction site and their evenings together in a local café, or at one or the other’s apartment, planning the work for the next day. He was in charge of the construction crew. She was generous with her advice, kept the inventory of construction materials, and made sure that the specialists as well as the workingmen were available as needed. “This little gem in the Tetons is going to put to shame our home brewery in Milwaukee,” Horace said.
Sometimes, Lillian was gone for several weeks at a time, solving material hang-ups or working out agreements with the subcontractors who provided the multiple systems of a modern brewery—the grinding system, the heating system, and the brewhouse system, the fermentation system, the cooling system, the cleaning system, and the control system, all of which included endless tanks, pumps, fixtures, and fittings, not to mention the establishment of fuel sources and storage.
Once, Lillian remarked, “I could build a rocket to the moon easier than putting together a goddamned brewery.” But she was quick to admit she loved the work, and she soon became an expert at the fabrication of a brewery.
They wanted their new beer to embody the reflected excitement of the Tetons. Adams ordered the brewmaster in Milwaukee to join in their search for a perfect flavor, and every two or three weeks the brewmaster air-shipped his latest recipe to Horace and Lillian for their responses. A sample might be “too tart,” or “too bitter,” or “too sweet,” or “not crystal like fresh snow,” or “too flat,” or it didn’t have that “little pop at the end of a swallow,” whatever that meant.
“We can call our new beer ‘Horace’s Teton High,’” he said. “‘Give me a Horace’s High’ will become the cry of America!”
“Great!” she exclaimed. “It’s the beer that made Jackson Hole famous.”
“I trust your taste,” Horace said. “We’ll not be satisfied until our recipe makes you swoon.”
“I’m already swooning,” she said, and they drank another round.
“I wish I could bottle up how I feel about you,” he said one night. And on that night, Horace burst open the door to the outside porch and whispered in her ear, “Let us swoon to the moon.”
One evening under the persuasion of the brewmaster’s latest recipe, Horace said, “Imagine the power! We can sit here and adjust the taste of beer for millions.” Then suddenly, he grew serious. “What if we had the power to change the souls of people instead of their taste for beer?”
“For God’s sake,” Lillian said. “We’re selling beer, not Jesus.”
“Jesus would have liked our beer,” he said. “He would have served it at the Last Supper.”
* * *
Before Lillian, Horace had lived a solitary life in Milwaukee. “Weren’t you lonely living up there all by yourself in that city?” Lillian asked.
“How could I be lonely? I lived every day with the most interesting person I know.”
“Who would that be?”
He pointed to himself. He opened a couple more bottles of the latest recipe for Horace’s High and handed one to Lillian. “After years of being alone, loneliness gets lonely and flees.”
“Where does it go?” she asked.
“It disappears into the cosmos and becomes a star.”
“There must have been a lot of lonely people. I’ve never been lonely,” she said.
Horace wondered why he’d ended up marrying Rebecca Jordan Jones—“Cupcake,” he called her. Something had amused him about her childlike innocence—the way she wrapped up in her imitation of worldly sophistication. And she was a true performer in bed. After the daily, depleting drudgery of running a brewery and the cutthroat competition for the “beer dollar,” he’d sought simple pleasure and release. Cupcake had provided that, but he’d never felt loved.
One morning, Horace woke to take stock of his marriage. Cupcake insisted she was a direct descendant of John Paul Jones, the American Revolution’s naval hero. He realized that his entertainment from her predictable but laudable accomplishments under the covers had already become old hat. And after he’d listened to the same war stories about John Paul Jones over and over, yes, over and over, he decided that John Paul as well as Cupcake were history, and he wasn’t a history buff.
Preempting their five-million-dollar prenuptial agreement, he wrote a check to Cupcake for seven million. “Peanuts,” he told Lillian. “Besides, she deserved it, having to live with the likes of me.” He shook his head, amused at himself. “Maybe I’d been testing my beer too often when I decided to marry her.”
“Maybe we’d better lay off our beer tasting,” Lillian said.
“That woman,” Horace said, referring to Rebecca Jordan Jones, “loved to parade her skinny rump on the ramp of the Junior Women’s Club style show they put on for the poor girls of Milwaukee. Thank God for Milwaukee’s poor little girls. If it weren’t for them, the country club women couldn’t show off their bony butts to raise money for those poor little girls. I offered to give them twice the net that the style show was collecting for poor girls if the rich women would stop their obscene parading for the poor, but Cupcake said I was too stodgy to understand.”
Horace was growing on Lillian. Yes, he was shamefully wealthy, but his values sharply detoured from those of the imperial moneyed society.
“And those women all have perfect snow white teeth,” he said. “Yours aren’t perfect.”
“I hoped you hadn’t noticed. My folks couldn’t afford an orthodontist. My teeth got straight on their own, all except this canine tooth on the right, which is a metaphor for my life.”
He was too busy in his reverie to ask what she meant.
“Do you want any more children?” he suddenly asked one evening.
She didn’t answer.
He continued, as if her silence had been her answer. “Think of all the politicians and movie and sports types who lay it all down for a little sex on the side, and it ends up destroying ’em.”
“You sound like a preacher, not a beer salesman.”
“Sex makes even the most ardent atheist a believer. Otherwise, why, at that precise moment of orgasm, do they always holler for God? ‘Oh God, oh God!’”
He laughed.
She laughed.
Then she asked, “Why are you talking about other women? Am I so boring?”
Finally, he said, “I don’t know how to talk about us.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know how to talk to somebody like you about…”
“You don’t need to talk,” Lillian said. She too
k one of his hands in each of hers and with her tongue lightly kissed their palms. Then she pulled them to her breasts. “Tetons,” she whispered, and at first she only brushed his mouth with her lips.
CHAPTER 11
“PRAISE GOD YOU’RE finally here,” Jenny Winkley said like a mother whose lost child had just returned home. “They’ve been waiting for you in there for hours, and they’re hollering so loud at each other, I thought I’d have to call the sheriff.”
Judge Murray handed his old mackinaw to his secretary, a middle-aged woman who looked like a rounded-out retired rodeo queen with a bunch of red hair piled up on her head. She wore those rhinestone-framed cat’s-eye glasses and an off-red long-sleeved cotton dress imprinted with images of white roses and other posies. Her dress hung well below her knees. Still in her mother mode, she inspected the judge as if he were her child about to march off to his first day in school.
She opened the door to Judge Murray’s small inner office, referred to in the profession as his “chambers.” Both lawyers jumped to their feet. The judge spoke without looking at either of the lawyers. “I understand you gentlemen are engaged in an attempt to settle all pending matters in a professional manner. What concessions have you been able to make?”
“Sewell won’t even agree to the standard ‘reasonable doubt’ instruction,” Coker said. He was red-faced in anger and sweating, as if he’d just survived the fifteenth round of a championship boxing match.
“I’m perfectly willing to agree to the standard ‘reasonable doubt’ instruction,” Haskins Sewell replied. “But Coker won’t agree we can introduce evidence of Lillian Adams’s past violent conduct under Rule 404b.”
“I filed a motion in Limine this morning against that irrelevant and prejudicial evidence,” Coker snarled. He handed a copy of his motion to the judge.
“Keep it down, gentlemen. My hearing aids are working perfectly. Let’s get to business.” The judge leaned back in his worn leather chair to listen.
