Marly.
Lunatics. All of them. Thank god he’d soon enough be rid of them again. And he smiled. Thinking about the girl, Anne.
She certainly seemed to be her mother’s daughter.
THE ROOM WAS dark but for the rhythm of the amber traffic light, quiet but for Wade’s restless breathing. He lay next to Joe, stiff and unmoving, so not to keep Joe awake, but, with jagged streamers flashing in his eyes, head pounding, heart racing, it wasn’t easy.
“Wade?” The sound of Joe’s voice lighting up the darkness. “You ain’t asleep?”
“No,” Wade said weakly. Then, “I have sort of a headache.”
“Oh.” Some more silence. “I got one too. Probably the high altitude. Try and sleep; get used to it.”
“Yeah, okay.” Wade feeling a bit better just knowing he wasn’t the only one.
“Joe? You see don’t any flashing lights, do you?”
“Flashing lights?”
“Uh huh.”
“Yeah, I do.”
“You do? Really?”
“That traffic light, is all. Just close your eyes.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
Though Wade could hardly tell any difference, opened or shut.
More time passed. Faint light washing through the curtains. Wade rose, head spinning, and walked a twisted course to the bathroom. Shut the door. Quietly knocked his forehead against the tile. It helped. He dressed. He felt close to normal.
He stood at the bed. Joe groggily lifted on one elbow.
“What’re you doing, Wade?”
“Want to come outside with me? See what everything looks like?”
“It’s Meagher, Wade. It doesn’t look like anything.”
“Okay.”
Wade remained, shifting from foot to foot.
“Joe, but, you’ll get up, won’t you? To meet that girl for our ride.”
“Yeah. I know. We got some time.”
He fell back into his pillow, slept a few minutes, then got up. Out the window, a red glow etched the horizon, seared a few wispy clouds fiery pink. What looked like a storm became a front of black-blue mountains with flanks of sandy grasses, peaks glistening with snow. Town was still dark. No one about. Except. . .down the street, there was Wade, standing under the traffic light. Looking to the end of every street.
Time to face the music, Joe thought, and went down to join him. They waited a while, sitting on a bench under Major Thomas. F. Meagher. Sunlight began to slowly break across town. They watched the stone facade of the Grand brighten top to bottom, the high cornices, then the black windows, the rotted sashes caked with paint, and finally the granite cornerstone, glittering black and diamond. Having settled a little south, the building leaned like a plant looking for more light. They watched the statue gradually come to life, and the newly budding aspens surrounding it. They watched sunlight wash the chalk-red pickup parked outside The Grand, rust around its wheel wells began to shimmer, chrome blisters on the bumpers began to gleam silver, the bald tires and the few remaining lug nuts shone like new.
Wade looked in the cab. He saw a familiar looking tattered vest on the driver’s seat, feathers coming out of its seams.
The sign in the Mint Bar switched on with its own light. Wade, curious and impatient, got up and wandered inside. Marly was clattering pans in the kitchen. Two squinty-eyed ranchhands came in. An old woman with two kids. Four men, one with a badge and a gun, and one, a young guy with a large cowboy hat. The guy from the plane.
As they entered, Marly greeted no one, though her eyes kept coming back to Wade. She set four plates on the counter, then yelled over her shoulder.
“Annie? Serve these plates on your way out, will you?”
A voice from up the stairs, “I got work now, remember?”
“Honey, please; before they get cold.”
“I’m later’n hell already. Can’t they get their own damn plates?”
“Just do it, sweetheart. I’m too busy to argue today.”
Wade heard a ruckus above him, then clunking down the stairs. A disheveled girl stormed in, boot laces flying. She grabbed the plates, swore, blew on her fingers, snatched a towel and took them to the back, snapping, “Okay, who gets what here?”
Wade couldn’t believe it. Of all places, the girl from the plane. Anne. Annie. About to call out to her, he heard a snicker pass among the four men at the counter.
“You’d think she’d maybe at least wash up once’t.”
“Oh now be careful, Chuck. Squash here thinks she hung the moon, don’t you, kid?”
This man elbowed the guy in the cowboy hat, and Wade now remembered him too: Squash, the guy on the plane. Who wasn’t Anne’s boyfriend.
“I’d think she’d be more appreciative bout that, then,” the first man said. “Other’n Squash, most boys don’t think much of her but a quick roll in the hay.”
“Wonder where she gets that from?”
The older man with the badge and gun turned to them all. “Somethin wrong with that?”
That shutting up his companions, they all now fell to looking down at their food.
Anne grabbed a sweatshirt and pulled it over her head. Wade watched mother and daughter eyes meet eyes. Marly’s face darkened. Then Anne left, letting the door slam behind her.
Wade followed out. She’d stopped to tie her laces, lifting one boot then the other to the pickup running board, the soles of her boots as bald as her tires. Then she noticed Joe leaning against the cold stone of the Grand.
“Goddamn if it ain’t the burrhead from New York. So you’re the contractor goin to polish up all that old marble then.”
“Marble? This here? This ain’t. . .”
Anne yanked the door handle of her pickup. She yanked harder with no better luck. “This goddamn thing!” She threw her hip into the door and pulled a third time. Nothing.
“This isn’t marble.” Joe scratched his nail on the stone wall. “This’s quarried dolomite from up the Hellwater.”
“Okay, you’re the engineer, and me, I don’t give a damn. If some guy named Joe Meeks comes lookin for his ride up the Hellwater, tell him it left without him. I’m later’n shit.”
She kicked one last time and the door popped open. She jumped in.
“I’m him.” Joe ran up to the pickup. “Joe Meeks.”
She squinted at him. “Then either get in or stay here before you make me later still.”
Joe yanked the door handle on his side, expecting it to stick, but it didn’t; instead, it flew open and struck his knee. He yelped, but jumped in; Wade right behind him.
Anne turned the key; the engine merely clicked. She jumped out, calling out, “One a you get behind the wheel. When you hear it turn over, give it the gas.”
Wade, sensing urgency, jumped back out and raced around behind the wheel. Anne lifted the hood, grabbed a screwdriver sitting on the battery, set it across the starter contacts. The pickup roared. Wade, not sure which pedal was gas, pressed them all. “More!” He jammed down his right foot, and the pickup shook, surging against his feet, shuddering the steering wheel. “Pump it! Up and down!” Wade pumped his foot. Anne slammed the hood and came around; Wade slid to the middle, breathless. He had never felt such a thing.
“Wade, what’re. . .you aren’t going,” Joe exclaimed.
“But. . .why not?”
Anne hurled the pickup into gear and barreled out south on First Street.
“He’s goin now.”
THE PICKUP TWO-WHEELED in and out of the hard curves south of town, raining gravel and mud in its wake. The gearshift battered Wade between his knees, but he wasn’t aware of it. He was watching every shift she made, every pedal she pressed, wondering if someday he would ever know how to drive.
“You rotten sonuvabitch,” she yelled as she roared past the sod cabin of Sheepeater Croft in the cutbank below.
“Can you slow it down, please?” Joe said.
“Hey, I didn’t ask for driving lessons, did I?” She floored it
harder. “Ain’t you the one wantin to get to the Meeks place.”
“Yeah. In one piece.”
“Relax. You ain’t the one that’s late.”
“Well I wasn’t the one up all night drinking and tormenting a crazy old coot. Is why you’re late in the first place. Far as I can tell.”
She threw him a look, downshifting so hard gravel flew forward of the tires.
“What the hell d’you know about that?”
“Slow down!” Joe braced both arms against the dash. “You’re scarin Wade.”
“You, you mean; you’re as bad as you were on the plane, for Christ’s sake. Here, want to hold my hand again?”
“All right. That’s it! Stop it right here.”
“Sure thing.” Anne hit the brakes, and even before the pickup completely stopped, Joe had flung open his door and jumped out.
“Have a nice walk!” she called roaring off without him.
“Oh man, don’t say that,” Wade groaned as Joe vanished in a swirl of dust. In about a mile, Anne slowed down somewhat.
“You know, who’s he think he is, your old man, comin out actin like he knows everything. Big shot New Yorker, fuck him.”
“No but he grew up out here.”
“What? No way.”
“Yeah, he did. Can’t you tell?”
“What d’you mean, can’t I tell? And move over, we ain’t on a date. How could he of grew up here?”
Wade shrugged. “Well, I mean, you know Leonard Meeks? That’s his dad.”
“You lie.”
“No. Really. That’s why we’re going up to see Frances. And maybe Joe can save the ranch from being undulated and she won’t have to sell it. We only just found out.”
“Old Frances Meeks is his grandma?” Anne slowing down even more. “No wonder he’s such an asshole.”
She stopped. The pickup idled. Anne went silent, thinking.
“He sure does act like a Meeks, give him that.”
“Do I act like one?”
She seemed not to hear. The road stretched ahead ribboning through fields of yesterday’s evaporating snow.
Anne finally sighed, slowly letting out the clutch, and turning around.
When they spotted Joe again, she pulled around and slowed alongside Joe as he walked straight ahead. Wade rolled down his window.
“Just get in, okay?” Anne called.
He ignored her.
“C’mon, dammit. Okay, I’ll drive slower.”
Joe kept walking; she kept pace.
“C’mon. Or I’ll get fired.”
“I’ll get there on my own.”
“No way. That’ll take you forever.”
“Let it.”
“Yeah? What I think is, you don’t even really want to see her at all. You’re scared a her.”
Joe continued walking, then stopped. He looked back behind, then ahead, then, without a word, got back in. Anne pulled out, a little more gently. The bickering ended, as abruptly as it began.
No one spoke as mile after mile, gravel clattered pleasantly against the wheel wells. The valley deepening the grassy hummocks of the bench where Hereford steers grazed the lush green timothy and purpling alfalfa. Tractors already summer fallowing the river-lining hay fields. These lower valley ranches had not only survived but clearly had prospered. Lanes paved with red clay, lined with poplars and scotch pines led to modern split-level houses with fancy mailboxes: the Tylers, McKenzies, Moores. These were the HRC ranchers, thirsty for irrigation, to add third and maybe fourth cuttings to their haying season, to add oats and barley and rye and soy to their crops, dairy cattle and hogs to their livestock. It wasn’t hard to understand. All this fertile alluvial soil, a promised land of richer and richer crops, given enough water. It all made sense: Dam up the upper valley, with its plentiful water, but where no amount of irrigation would ever generate bounty out of the sparse grass, rocky meadows and dense timber thickets. Land that was nothing but a boulder strewn purchase for immigrants like the Meeks. Who had arrived last and who would only ever have least.
“Tell me one thing,” Joe breaking the long silence, “what are you surveying for when the dam site’s already been filed and approved?”
“Don’t ask me. I just started. Ask Norman; he’d know.”
“That’s your boss? Norman who?”
“God, I’m later’n hell again, ain’t I?” Anne biting her pouty lip. “Well so what? If they fire me, least it’ll make mom happy, her and her big ideas for me at the Grand.”
Joe looking out the window, not answering, so Wade did. “But seems like you like survey work though?”
“Yeah, maybe I would, if surveyin’s what I was doin. But all Norman lets me do is lug chain and tape for those asswipes from Roscoe. They sure don’t work any harder’n me, and I know I could learn how to do what they do, but he only gives me stupid work, probly ‘cause I’m just a girl and from Meagher to boot. He’s such an asshole he shits sideways. I oughta just quit anyway.”
“Quit? A job on a survey team, though, and specially young as you are?”
“I’m eighteen. That ain’t young. Least out here it ain’t. Maybe back east. . .”
Joe ignored her. “There’s worse things than bein late. Instead of sulking in like you are now, you could show up all ready and eager to work. Attitude goes a long way.”
Wade saw Anne about to erupt, but whatever she was going to say, she thought better of it.
Joe went on. “Ten to one your boss don’t even know you’re int’rested.”
Anne grunted, focused on threading Twenty Mile bridge, its silvered girders bristling with rusting old rivets, shaking from the choppy meltwater. Once across, she geared down, beginning the steep climb up Bitterroot Gap.
“Joe, you could help her learn, maybe. You could teach engineering. Couldn’t you?”
Wade didn’t see why neither of them seemed to get what a good idea that was. They just went all quiet.
After a while, Anne eased up on her grip. “So. . .Wade told me you grew up out here, I guess.”
Joe looked at Wade. Wade shrugged. She went on.
“Kind of hard for me to believe.”
“Why’s that?”
“I just never knew anyone to ever leave, let alone come back.”
“I didn’t ‘come back’”. Joe’s voice rising. “It’s only to get Frances to sign over, like everybody else is doin, get a halfway decent price so for once make that land pay for all that got put into it, then—I don’t know about anyone else, but I leave. First chance I get.”
In the narrows of Bitterroot Gap, the previously placid river, high with spring runoff, was now a thundering whitewater torrent.
Wade looked to see what Joe was looking at. In the blue above them, three red-tailed hawks hovered in a heat thermal. He watched them too, then noticed Anne stealing a look Joe’s way.
“Joe knew your mom from before too, you know. Right, Joe? You knew Marly?”
Joe, not listening, or looking like it, eyes fixed above on the lazily soaring hawks.
“Well, did you or not?” Anne asked.
“I knew of her, yeah.”
Joe turned in his seat. The road had opened into the Upper Hellwater headlands. Sun streaks between the broken clouds fell on the acres of wet sage brush turning it a gleaming mint. From this vantage, at the crest of the Gap’s hard limestone ridge, the delineation of upper from lower valley was stark: Below, verdant and fertile; above; sparse and rocky. Little of it arable. Through this the road continued up the elongated bowl of valley, stretched miles beyond, capped by a field of glacial debris called Sweetgrass Moraine. Above that, the wilderness of Independence Basin, uninhabitable in the extreme, of value only to hunters, mineralogists, and sheepherders, at least in the warmer summer months. Above it all, the remnant skirts of yesterday’s storm, the occasional grumble of thunder, vapor laden clouds snagged trying to rise over the Beartooth peaks.
They passed the surviving ranches, the Burchard’s, the Gusta
fsen’s, and on toward, at the high end of the valley, the Meeks. Marked by the field where the first homestead burned down. The charred stone chimney standing like some archeological site in the middle of nowhere.
Middle of nowhere, Joe thought. Where people who aren’t from anywhere are from. From nowhere you left and to nowhere you return.
At the Meeks turnoff Anne stopped.
“Changed much?”
“How could it?” Joe opened his door. “Wasn’t much when I left. Thanks for the lift.”
“Stay put; I’ll drive you down.”
“You’ll be late.”
“Yeah, maybe. But for the last time.”
Seeing her smile, Joe noticed, in the coral of her cheek, a constellation of small moles in the flat next to her ear. A smile formed in response. Anne turned onto the road; Joe turned his face into the cool clean air rushing in his window. The lane, grooved with ruts and gullies, bounced the pickup and passengers, and along with that, the storms in Joe’s head. Somehow clearing them up; all the worries—people, places, things that had happened—it was all past, all behind him.
What was there to really be worried about?
What could go wrong?
JOE STOOD ON the platform bridge, the swollen Hellwater roaring underneath. He hadn’t set foot on its rough planks since. . .since the morning he’d left.
Across the bridge, the rambling timber farm house, sheltered under several old cottonwoods. No sign of Frances. No sign of anyone. Just bleating livestock in the fields out back.
He imagined, in the rampaging waters, his father returning home, late, drunk, raging at his obdurate mother, and her tight-fisted grip on his life, plunging his car headlong off the bridge into freezing cascades. And in imagining that, Joe felt another wave of reluctance to cross. Felt fear of making the same mistake.
Wade, waiting alongside, watching back up the road where Anne, having dropped them off, was racing to work.
“Hey Joe? I think Anne. . .”
“What, likes me? You on about that again?”
“Well, yeah, but I mean, I think she does. Don’t you?”
Joe picked a blade of grass somehow growing out of a split in one of the bridge planks.
“Come on; let’s get it over with. You finally get to meet you a real Meeks.”
Once across, a pair of dogs, a large golden and a smaller black, pushed off their hind legs and came up barking, but for all their bravado, they were quickly curling at Joe’s feet, then Wade’s, pawing and sniffing and rolling between his legs until he couldn’t walk.
Return to Independence Basin Page 7
