Wham! Something struck him on the head, right on the swollen eye, and he woke seeing pinholes of red, seeing black stars, seeing a thicket of wheat-colored hair and under it a lanky teenage girl. She had swung the satchel that had whomped him up into the overhead, and shoving it in, the back of her t-shirt hiked up, exposing the most woman flesh Wade had ever seen so close up: White skin taut around her ribs, the upslope of her hips, a triangular lace of blond hair in the small of her back; he knew without turning Joe was looking too. The girl, when she noticed, pulled the choppy bangs from her eyes and glared at them both. She had a surly lower lip, which was about to snarl something at them when the young guy behind her crowded up to intervene for her. She turned on him instead.
“Just sit, Squash, and let me be; Christ anyways.”
She pointed to the seat behind her, cheeks flushed, and the young guy Squash stepped back, gangly and awkward, as though the studs in his jeans were little bolts that held his clumsy assemblage of limbs together. He looked around, but their side of the little plane had only single seats, and he had no choice but to take one a few seats behind her.
“And you might take off your damn hat once,” she added.
His cowboy hat was scraping the low ceiling, cramming down over his head. When he took it off, stray flips of mouse brown hair fell across his forehead. Giving Wade and Joe his best mean look, he sat down.
As the girl sat down, a feather leaked from the old vest she wore, and landed on Wade’s cheek. He was about to hand it to her when a man in a business suit and silver-tipped cowboy boots rose out of the seat in front and bumped him in the head again.
“Sweetheart, it’s goin to be a bucky ride,” the man said, pouring liquor from a pocket flask into a plastic cup. “Let me offer you a little high altitude medicine,” he offered.
The young cowboy was back up in a flash, his fists sticking like unpruned shoots out of his jeans jacket.
“Anne, this man botherin you?”
“Squash, didn’t I tell just you to quit sheepdoggin me?”
Rebuffed again, Squash stumbled back as the propellers wound to a scream and the plane began to shimmy. The business man, feeling bolder, steadied himself and leaned further toward her, the seat of his pants right in Wade’s face.
“Where you headed for, honey?” he prodded. “Cody?”
She ignored him. He chuckled.
“Well then I guess it’s Billings, kitten, ‘cause those are the only stops. There’s a nice place in Billings, you and me could have a little. . .”
“Fistfight?”
She half rose out of her seat, and Wade saw tiny foam in the corners of her eyes. Taken aback, the business man fell into his seat, spilling his drink in his lap. He swore, fishing away the ice from between his legs.
The girl eased back into her seat and let her leg roll out. Wade was captivated. She seemed tough for a girl; though her cheeks were young and her pants too loose on her frame and the ragged legs crumpled up at the bottom and her cracked cowboy boots two sizes too big, you got the idea it was so she had room to swell up eight feet tall if she wanted. He feigned sleep as the stewardess requested everyone to fasten seat belts and the plane began to taxi. He watched her, eyes secretly parted, as they taxied, and though Joe, still thinking it was the arm rest, squeezed his arm even harder, Wade hardly noticed. As the plane sprang up airborne, he let his leg roll out, so when the plane jounced, his knee touched the girl’s, and he pretended to wake, radiating her with his best smile.
“Christ, you too?” she said, rolling her eyes and turning her back to him.
WHEN THEY WERE aloft, sunlight came streaking through the window, spangling the soda in the plastic glass the flight attendant had served. Wade, ravenous, devoured the flaky breakfast roll that came with it, and had his eye on Joe’s, who had his eye out the window, staring obliviously. Wade helped himself, stuffed it in his mouth, and sent flakes flying. The girl next to him blew air into her bangs, peeved, making a point of brushing his jetsam of crumbs off her leg.
Wade smiled.
“Hey,” she snarled, “how bout just keepin your eyes to yourself.”
Wade leaned closer. “‘Cause your boyfriend will get mad?”
“Boyfriend?” She glanced back at the cowboy looking guy who had fallen asleep. “Squash Maloney? He ain’t no boyfriend.”
She picked up her own breakfast roll.
“Where you from?”
Wade shrugged. “I don’t know. Nowhere, really.”
“Yeah. Tell me about it. What part of nowhere?”
“New York. The city, I mean.”
Her eyes brightened. “No shit?”
“Uh huh. Really.”
He felt important, pleased to be getting her full attention.
“So what’s he do?”
“Who?”
“Your dad, Mr. Burrhead there next to you.”
“He’s um. . .a construction engineer.” Wade lowered his voice. “We’re on vacation. What about you?”
“I went with Squash while he visited his uncle’s big fancy creamery outside Denver. I wanted to go along and see a big city. It was somethin else.”
She fell quiet, leaning back, looking dreamily into the ceiling, her knees splayed, brushing Wade’s.
“You like livin in New York. . .the city?”
“Yeah, it’s okay,” Wade bragged. “It’s just another town only bigger.”
She leaned up. “What happened to your forehead? Your dad brain you for bein a wiseass or somethin?”
“No.”
Again she looked from him to Joe and back again.
“Hair don’t grow any too long in your family, I guess.”
She zippered her vest, ducked under her hair, and turned into her seat like an animal bedding down.
THE PLANE LISTING up then down, he and his body seeming to separate, Joe fought to rise out of his semiconscious doze, his temples sweaty, his head pressed into the seat, his eyes like cold, weightless balls.
He did wake, when he felt his shoulder jostled by the person next to him; his eyes opened a slit, expecting Wade, but seeing it was not, it was the wheat-haired blond girl, he started. And realized his hand was entwined with hers.
“Bad dreams?”
Joe yanked his hand away. “Sorry,” he said, reddening, retracting his whole body from touching her.
“Your boy switched with me; wanted to sit by a window.”
She proffered Joe a flask.
“Drink?” She indicated the sleeping businessman. “It’s on him. I helped myself.”
Joe shook his head, then replanted his face in the window.
ENDLESS CLOUDS FORMING continents of their own, porcelain blue sky, soothing drone of propellers. The plane rising, falling, as it pierced the intermittent pockets of turbulence.
The captain announced that due to some weather smothering the entire northern Rockies, the Billings airport was socked in, the plane would need to circle ‘just a bit’ until the sun could burn off enough of the low-lying clouds, and he still anticipated an on-time landing.
On cue, turbulence increased. The businessman woke, looked irritably at his watch. Joe’s stomach tightened a little in, a little out, as the high altitude cross currents wafted the plane a little up, a little down. He wished he could at least see ground, suspended above a bank of clouds. Unmoored.
Joe closed his eyes.
He opened them. The girl was leaning across him, looking out the window. Her hair was thick in his face. He noticed how it rose with the plane, momentarily weightless, revealing her earlobe, a bud fleeced with tiny white hair. Then gone.
“Bet you could jump right off from this plane and land on that pile of snow.”
Joe followed her look. A mountain peak now loomed out of the clouds, so close the wing seemed to touch it. Further away, several other peaks stuck out; sunlight pointing them like needles.
“Can I see?”
Wade standing in the aisle, leaning in.
“Sure
thing.”
The girl rose and they changed back their original seats. Joe leaned back for Wade to see, noticing, on the window, the vaporous imprint of his cheek.
They took turns gazing out over the topography of cloud-studded mountain peaks, the weather as though swarmed over everything clear to every horizon.
“Do you recognize anything, Joe?”
Joe shook his head. “Not in this weather.”
He wanted it to clear, he said. And wanted it not to.
“Look at that one, wow.”
Joe leaned and looked out. The place was circling a tall ridge of a mountain, majestic, towering, but for its ruptured north face, a massive fault scarp. All so restful at this altitude, the sharp arêtes softened by the feathery blanket of weather.
“Mount Contact, must be. And that down below, that’d be Independence Basin.”
And Meeks land, somewhere underneath that.
And that one night, the earthquake, the massive landslide, and under it, the one victim.
“The gold mines? Where Peter Meeks worked?”
Joe nodded, almost seeing like infrared traces the footsteps of his past, faint but visible after all this time. The yearly hunting trips, all of them—his father, his uncle, his brother—on the frozen dirt of the old sheepherder’s cabin, breathing the breath of sleep, shivering, wintry gusts lashing the cracks in the timber logs. Wearing all your clothes in your sleeping bag, little warmth against the below zero cold, the night air frosting your breath, breathing in and out, in and out, and outside, the snap of the icy brook, the trickling wintry source of the Hellwater. The cold. The cluster of rifles, his own stacked among the others. Lying awake, thinking of morning, how he’d spot the first elk, fire the first shot. Take the first kill. . .
. . .The quiet. Then movement. Scotty, slow silent brother, who everyone said got Emma’s half-wit genes, with a mind of his own nevertheless, only ten at that point, curling his legs out of his bag. Soundlessly lifting the iron shank of the door. Sneaking outside. Like the night before.
Only this time, Joe out after him. Scotty nowhere to be seen, under high black stars popping with arctic cold, fastening his parka, Joe began to walk, breath-cloud in front of him, eyes inventing light. Radiant starlight infused snow powdering his steps. Air so bone-cold you could hear sound with your cheeks.
Reaching the blackened abandoned buildings, fallen down sluices, snowed over tailings of the Independence mine. Ghosted with the rough men of the mining camp, years before, among them Peter Meeks, his bushy moustache, dirty black bowler. Only that one picture of him, circled in ink, the company photograph of the camp and its men.
No Scotty, but not far beyond, Joe walked into a field of slow boiling geysers sweltering with hot mist. Picking his way between the sulfurous pools. Carefully; the travertine crust could cave in, boiling your feet. Engulfed in the heat, gazing up through the swirls of steam to the pulsing of stars and all around the large black outline of the Absaroka range.
He felt more than heard it. And again. A large sound; a sibilant jet of air. A wild smell curled his nostrils. The feeling of sudden fear. He turned back, and directly before him, a few yards away, was a mammoth-sized bull bison.
It snorted, snorted again, lowering its head. Joe petrified and motionless, but the animal did nothing. Then it turned, its profile etched in the steam, and took a tenuous step. Something strange. Another tentative step, and immediately Joe realized: blind. The old bull had sought out the treacherous grounds for warmth but now couldn’t find its way out.
A wispy shape. Scotty. Slowly walking to the animal. Face to face with it. A long time that way, then reaching out his hand onto the bull’s massive flat forehead. A step backward. The bison, after a great shudder, took a step ahead. Then another, then another, following Scotty, his little hand. In some time, they reached the safety of the trees. The bull disappeared.
The next morning, Joe walking a ridge, Scotty tagging at his heels, his father and Harlo working the timber. They met up at the divide emptying into Independence Basin.
“Looks like we’re goin back empty,” Leonard said.
They had seen no elk, but now Joe didn’t care. Glad the hunt was about over.
“What the hell?”
Harlo lowering his field glasses. He pointed to a large dark shape on the slope below.
“I’ll be damned. Thing must of strayed out of the park.”
Scotty fiddling with his toy binoculars.
“Acts blind or somethin,” Harlo said after a few minutes.
“What do you think? He ain’t inside the park.”
“Rangers won’t never come up here.”
“If it’s blind, maybe we oughta take it.”
“Maybe so.”
“Joe?” Leonard turning to his son. “You got first shot. If you want it.”
Scotty made a high-pitched squeak when Joe shouldered his 30-06. As he took aim, he was aware of Scotty churning the snow, whimpering. He unshouldered his rifle.
“Here now, Scotty,” Leonard said, “Harlo, get Scotty calmed down while Joe gets his nerves together. Joe, take your damn shot now before you lose it.”
Joe reshouldered his rifle, closed one eye to sight with the other, and held his breath, squeezing slack from the trigger. In the crosshairs he saw the mighty forehead. He counted. His finger trembled.
“Hell,” his father said, “Guess I need to take the damn thing myself.”
Joe fired. The concussion walloped his ears, and through the flames that filled his scope, he saw the old bull buffalo sink to its front knees. He ejected and reloaded, but felt Harlo’s arm hold down his barrel. Leonard fired. One shot to the head. The animal moved no more.
“Nice shootin, Joe,” his father said.
“Damn lot of work to dress a buffalo, though.”
Harlo started down the hill. Leonard started after him.
“Joe, get your brother there.”
Scotty had flung himself down and was thrashing in the snow.
“He’s pretty upset.”
“Scotty don’t understand these kind of things. Bring him along; he’ll be all right.”
Joe went to his brother. Glad at least that Scotty couldn’t speak. He didn’t want to know what he was thinking.
THE CAPTAIN ANNOUNCING preparations to land, Joe realized that the cloud-cover had parted. Below, though still only early May, he saw ground, and on it, snow. A sprinkling, enough to make the earth wet brown. Freshets of runoff cut into the tawny grasslands, ribboned with white. Land and nothing but for miles. In it, Joe searched for Meagher, the two street town along the Hellwater below where it spilled out of Independence Basin. For the scratch of road leading high up to the Meeks place. For the lane, the bridge, the barn, measuring his approach, unhurried at first, faster and faster as his thoughts hardened, Leonard shrinking back, Joe towering over him, his blood pounding, raising a hammer-like fist to drive him to his knees with one single. . .
“Joe? You all right?”
Joe sat up. Sweating profusely. His shirt sticky against his chest. They were streaking down into a thick swirl of clouds. The vast blue sky turned quickly black. He gripped the armrest.
“What am I doing? I oughta get on the first plane back.”
As much as he hated flying, he hated even more what lay ahead.
“Go back?” Wade asked. “Why?”
“Better to let sleeping dogs lie, that’s why.”
The wheels jumped onto the runway.
As the passengers deplaned, Joe made no attempt to get up. Wade, eager to get out and see everything, nervously hoping Joe wasn’t really going to turn right around and go back.
“Have a good vacation, burrhead.”
The wheat-haired girl, Anne, leaving with the guy who was not her boyfriend. The last to deplane.
“Joe, shouldn’t we go? Before Evan leaves without us.”
“Don’t give me ideas.”
Joe exhaled, and stood, and bumped his head on the low ceiling o
f the plane.
WADE SAT BETWEEN Evan and Joe in the pickup Evan had rented. True to his word, Evan was right there to pick them up when they landed, and now, several hours after leaving all the farm equipment lots of Billings behind them, he turned onto a gravel road heading into the mountains. A stinking odor filled the air.
“Man,” Wade exclaimed, “What is that?”
“Mineral pots,” Joe said, “It’s why they call it Hellwater, Wade.”
“It sure does reek. How do they stand it?”
“Don’t worry, it’s clears up before Meagher.”
“How far is that?”
“Long ways yet.”
“Especially in this,” Evan said.
The sleet that had locked in the airport had turned to snow as they gained elevation, and heavy snow, burying everything but the newly leafing cottonwoods lining the Hellwater River and the spring grasses along the knolls of red rimrock. Ahead, the road vanished in an ocean of white; the same in back, except for the twin tracks behind them, their own. Clearly few people had any reason to drive to or from Meagher, even in the best of weather.
Evan looked at Joe staring glumly out the window, looking for something, some sign, some landmark, but there was only white, only old fence posts lining the road, a bead of fine snow running along each strand.
“Look familiar, Joe?”
“Can’t tell.”
Evan nodded.
“Where we staying tonight, anyway?”
“The Grand.”
“That run-down old dump?”
“Oh, you’d be surprised. Marly Croft? I don’t know if you remember her, but she’s getting it a lot different than what you might remember.”
Joe shot him a look. “What’s Marly got to do with it?”
“Marly owns it now.”
The pickup swerved; Evan took the wheel with both hands, the snow a constant pull on the wheels toward the road edge.
“I understand you and Marly were something of an item back in the day. Have you even seen her since you. . .left?”
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