Prairie Nocturne

by Ivan Doig

  The bull turned toward Monty faster than he wanted, and he backed off a step. Just that little half-dance set off titters of anticipation in the crowd. Audiences were the damnedest creatures.

  Some bulls stood there in confusion at the sight of the clown, some tamely turned away. This one lowered its head and looked like it meant business. “If you like the look of my tracks so much, I’ll make you some more,” Monty loudly chanted to the animal for the crowd’s benefit, then backpedaled until he had the barrel between him and the danger of the horns. When the bull charged one way, he dodged to the other side of the barrel. Back and forth, beast and man, like drunks trying to navigate past one another in a narrow space. This was another part the crowd ate up.

  He knew the time had come to hop into the barrel, the bull was getting good and mad. Hesitated a moment. He’d had enough rides in the barrel for one day. He bolted for the fence at the far side of the arena, sprinting as hard as he could.

  The bull blinked once at this turn of events and took off after him.

  Running for his life, Monty had the presence of mind to hold the red handkerchief out at arm’s length and daintily drop it, as if the bull were a suitor. The crowd howled. The arena fence was proving to be farther than he’d figured, but steadily drawing nearer. According to the bawling, so was the bull. Best advice I can give you is not to fall, the Calgary old-timer was cackling in his head.

  He aimed for a stout corral post—if you made your jump onto the middle of a section of plank fence and the bull plowed it out from under you, then you were in a hell of a fix—and leaped, grabbing for the post with both arms and pulling his legs up under him. The fence shuddered below him as the bull slammed into it, but he was high and dry, and at that moment full of complete joy at having pulled off the stunt. What could be better? the triumphant chorus in the loft of his brain sang all through the rest of him. The bull down there in a fit of snot and slobber and other fluids of rage, himself perched up here a bit out of breath but otherwise cozy, the big Helena crowd yowling in his favor: he’d take this a thousand times in a row.

  Dolph rode up to encourage the bull to the exit gate, then reined around to check on the puff-cheeked clown as he slid down off the fence. Hands on his thighs as he spent a minute getting his wind back, Monty admitted: “This is getting to be a long day.”

  “One more go-round and you can quit teasing the livestock,” Dolph commiserated.

  There was a break in the action now while the chutes were being reloaded, this time with broncs. Dolph dismounted and Monty swung up into the saddle and slumped there like the end-of-the-trail Indian while Dolph led the horse across the arena, another surefire act. The dried-up little cowboy walked as if his feet hated to touch the ground, which was not an act at all.

  When they got over by the chutes Monty slipped smoothly off the horse and Dolph tied the reins to the arena fence.

  “Monty?” The pickup man inclined his head in the direction of the bull pen. “You don’t want to run too many of them footraces with these bastards.”

  “I’ll have to remember that.”

  “It makes for quite a show, though,” Dolph granted with a chortle, “you lighting out across there with that bull’s horns tickling your hip pocket.” He sized up the riders and ropers and hangers-on clotted around the chutes. “Now’s a good a time as any to pass the hat for our hardworking rodeo clown, don’t you think?”

  “I been paid,” Monty said swiftly. “Mister Whit already—”

  Dolph looked as if he hadn’t heard right. “What’s that have to do with the price of peas in China? You got something against extra money?”

  “Not so I ever noticed,” Monty stalled. He’d known Dolph longer than he could remember; Dolph himself was a stray who was riding the grub line about the same time the Double W took in Monty’s mother as washerwoman. Yet he found he didn’t want to tell Dolph, right out, that there had been that run-in with the mouthy roper.

  “So how about it?” Dolph persisted. “Halvers?”

  Monty glanced again at the men along the chutes. Everybody looked to be in good cheer, beer-induced or otherwise, but you never knew. He drew out deciding until Dolph started giving him a funny look, then nodded. Go for broke, why not. Last show of the season, any hoodoos in the bunch will have all winter to get over me. “If you’re gonna be the one that does it, Dolphus, sure.”

  Dolph already had his Stetson in one hand and was fishing into his jeans pocket with his other. “I’m the man what can.” He held up a fifty-cent piece as if to fix the specific coin into Monty’s memory. “We split halves after my four bits is out of the take, got that?”

  “You drive a hard bargain,” Monty laughed in spite of himself. He watched the skinny sawed-off cowboy gimp away on his collecting round.

  “DOLPH!”

  Frozen in his tracks, Dolph cast a look back over his shoulder. That voice on Monty; when he wanted to, he sounded like a church organ letting loose. “What?”

  “Be sure and trade the chicken feed in at the beer booth for silver dollars, would you?” Monty’s tone was shy now.

  Dolph snorted. “It all spends, on Clore Street. Don’t worry, Snowball, I’ll git you dollars.”

  As Dolph set to work with the hat, Monty stood there loose-jointed and private, the middle of him warming with anticipation of Clore Street. Silver dollars were definitely the ticket. Like in the blues he’d heard the last time he hit town. Flat to stack and round to roll / Silver dollar, lift my soul. Not that he had any use for the blues, but good sound cartwheel money, he most certainly did. Tied in the bottom of his side pocket right now was one of those little cloth sacks that Bull Durham tobacco came in, with the ten silver dollars Mister Whit had paid him. If Dolph did well with the chute crowd, as much as another ten might be added to the sack and that was a full Bull bag. Drop one of those on the wood of a bar and you could start to get somewhere in life. In his head he began parceling out the twenty lovely coins across town. The Zanzibar Club: the trick was to hit it early, not so many to buy drinks for. The trainmen came off shift at eight, the porters and brakemen from Chicago and Kansas City piling in to hear the music and have the company of other dark faces here in the white, white West. Things started happening in the Zanzibar then. Those KC boys made him nervous, though, calling him “Sticks” and “Montan” as though it was his fault he had been born out here instead of on the corner of Twelfth and Vine. And Montgomery Rathbun had as much name as anybody, if the world would ever use it.

  So, hoist a few in the Zanzibar before the KC boys hit town, then try to find that sporting girl from last time, the one who took it slow. Couldn’t pray for something that fine to happen every time, but it didn’t hurt to hope. When a man came to town all stored up, he didn’t want a hurrying woman. Then the fantan game, in the Chinese gambling place. He should have half his money left by the time he drifted into the game, and with a stake like that there was every chance he could win back what he spent at the Zanzibar and the cathouse. Head on home to the ranch with a good stake for next time, even.

  He watched Dolph passing the hat and saw with relief that the rodeo contestants each were chipping in their four bits, no complaints. Even the loudmouth roper tossed in when Dolph jawed at him. Monty felt like a man whose ship had come in. He hummed a snatch of “Silver Wings and a Golden Harp.”

  * * *

  By nightfall the Bull Durham sack was flat empty.

  GATES OF THE MOUNTAINS

  · 1924 ·

  “YOU’RE AWFULLY quiet, Susan.”

  “Such a place, there is everything in the world to be quiet about.” Even her declarative tone was rounded off by the murmur of the Missouri River. “I could pinch myself. Half my life I’ve spent in Helena, and I’ve never once been out here.”

  Wes yanked down on the brim of his hat one more notch. “We could do without this wind.” A sharper gust through the canyon buffeted the excursion boat as he spoke. “I hope it doesn’t snatch Monty’s breath away.”
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  In the sway of the bow, like a bundled statue being borne into a white-walled port, Susan stood braced as she gazed ahead to the Gates of the Mountains. Half the sky of her younger years had been the arching northern palisades of the Rockies, but here the mountains made fists. Precipice after precipice stood guard over these waters, pale limestone cliffs materializing straight up out of the river and lifting forests on their shields of stone and catching on their summits the fresh flags of snow. Every whiff of air held the scent of pine. Off to starboard—at least she still knew right from left—a stand of snow-flecked jackpines on the nearest clifftop filtered what there was of the early-spring sun through the shade of their branches, and she watched this lattice of the seasons until the river left it behind. As the boat puttered deeper into the corridor of channel, Wes kept himself propped against the deck railing near her, resting his leg and evidently his thoughts as well. Her own mind was a maddening merry-go-round, thanks to him. When she insisted on auditioning Monty in private, but someplace spacious to hear how his voice carried, Wes simply commandeered a mountain range.

  * * *

  Williamsons had always owned.

  Susan turned her head just enough to study him as he bent to coil a mooring rope that didn’t pass muster, seeing in the intent lines of his face the Wes Williamson she had seen the first time ever, eternally tending to details. At the time she was twelve and snippy and inseparable from her father, particularly on trips to town, and they had gone in to the stockyards at Conrad to settle up with the railroad agent on the shipping of their lambs. Commotion bawled out over the prairie from the loading pens. “Ninian Duff! And Ninian’s likeness!” the shout came from on high, the ringmaster of cattle himself, old Warren Williamson in the catbird perch above the cutting chute. “Come to see what real livestock looks like?” Susan’s father had begun with cattle and advanced to sheep, and along the way contended for every spear of grass with this range potentate and his bony-hipped Double W specimens. From day one Ninian Duff knew when to stand his ground, and now he barked a laugh and shouted back: “Livestock are those, Williamson? Here I thought the flea circus had come to town.” Taking their time about it, the two Duffs approached the corral, bearded scarecrow of a man and gangly girl in overalls, and climbed up to inspect the mooing mess. The cattle were being chuted into railroad cars: dogs worked at their heels, dismounted riders stamped around trying to look useful, the stockbuyer slapped the corral boards with a tasseled whip thin as a wand. The herd of brown-red backs was wound tight against the end of the corral, a rivulet of steers banging up the high-walled ramp into the railcar. Down there in the muck hazing his crew as they hazed the cattle was the next of the Williamson breed, Whit, being trained by his father to run the Double W ranch in the next valley over from the Duff homestead.

  At her father’s side above the milling cattle Susan fiercely took it all in, allotting grudge where she knew it was due—to the grabby Williamsons, high and low—and something like hunger toward every other face around her. The poor riders, unfit on foot. The stockbuyer, like a big gray jay in his suit of gabardine. The familiar thicket of dark whiskers that marked her father’s ever authoritative presence, at the near corner of her vision. Faces, she had decided, were the first letters of stories all around a person. So, she was at the stage of ravenous wondering about anyone within range of her eyes, and lately that included the father whom everybody said she was such a tracing of.

  “Ay, Williamson,” her father hooted across the corral to Warren as a steer broke back past his swearing son, “any cows ever I had could knit socks with their horns. These seem to be wanting in mentality, not to mention poundage.”

  Then and there she caught sight of Wes, his expression minted into her memory the way a likeness is stamped onto a fresh coin. He had been half-hidden next to the stockbuyer, flipping through the shipping papers, but her father’s gibe brought him immediately hand over hand to the top of the corral, still clutching the paperwork like a crumpled bouquet. She knew him without ever having laid eyes on him before: Whit’s brother, the citified member of the family, the one everyone said was the brains of the litter. She kept her gaze glued to him as he poised atop the corral across from her father and her. It had been drilled into Susan, as only recitative Scotch parents could drill, that it was rude to stare. But to really see you had to keep looking. To this day she could bring back that expression on Wes as he studied her father the way he would a wild creature. For her age Susan knew a substantial amount about life. She had grasped almost as soon as he did that her teacher at the South Fork was dreadfully in love with the new schoolma’am over on Noon Creek. She had deduced for herself that the drugstore owner Musgreave’s “vacations” to Minneapolis were to dry out from whiskey. She knew with the instinct of a child on a borrowing homestead that her father regarded banker Potter in Gros Ventre as a grabber second only to the Williamsons and that was why they did their banking here in the county seat instead. The Scotch Heaven neighbors, she had down cold—the Speddersons would exert themselves only to avoid work, the Frews were tight as ticks where money was involved, the Erskines would lend you the elbows out of their sleeves, the Barclays kept everything up their sleeves—and accepted the principle that each family had some exception that proved the rule. But whatever this look on Wesley Williamson’s face represented was beyond her.

  They were near enough to Warren Williamson on his cutting-chute throne that he didn’t need to shout, but he shouted anyway:

  “I’ll tell you again, Duff, I want you Scotch Heaven lamb lickers off that Roman Reef range. We’ve always grazed up in through there.”

  Her father leveled a stare across the backs of the cattle to the elder Williamson. Then said in his biblical timbre:

  “You ought to know by now Scotch Heaven hangs its hat wherever it pleases.”

  In that exchange of thunders Susan had seen something, and if she had, the young man so intent across the corral surely must have: in the contest of the fathers there at the stockyard, Warren Williamson looked away first.

  * * *

  Aboard the touring boat, the ancient impatience of water moving them steadily into the mountains, she scrutinized Wes as he placed the coil of rope where it belonged. A quarter of a century and then some, on the visage across that corral; the same Wes but more so, if that was conceivable. The boxer’s jawline. The philosophical eyes. Jack Dempsey met the jack of spades in that face. After all her trying, in love and its opposite, this was still the greatest of puzzles to her, the different ways of adding up Wes.

  He met her gaze for a moment, smiled but kept the silence, then they both turned again to the Gates of the Mountains.

  * * *

  “Have I got it right, that we’re out here freezing our tails so’s you can sing to us?” the boatman, Harris, was asking Monty.

  “This is a new one on me, but that’s about the size of it,” Monty responded, only half there in conversation but by habit trying to keep his end up, even with this sour looker. He warmed his hands over the boat engine. “Probably the Major didn’t order this wind. Throw it in free, did you?”

  Harris hunched farther into his mackinaw and steered toward the middle of the river, giving plenty of leeway to the blunt set of cliffs rearing at the next bend.

  Exhilarated, apprehensive, and all the rest, Monty took a gulp of the spring air, to clear his thinking as much as he could. There ain’t much I can’t do some of, by now. But this? The most he had been counting on was to-the-point advice from the Major, or possibly a word put in somewhere, or if he really hit it lucky, a nice dab of loan. (Draw some wages ahead was always the way you wanted to put that.) So he could have been knocked over with a feather when the Major proclaimed, “I know just the medicine,” and produced the music teacher and this dizzying excursion. But then the Major wasn’t someone whose thinking a person could always follow.

  “Say, how many horses you got going on this pirate ship?” Monty threw out, to get the boatman to talking again. Aro
und somebody like him, best way to be was to listen more than you spoke.

  “About a dozen. Who wants to know?” Harris eyed him as if he resented the challenge to the boat’s horsepower.

  The Duesenberg had ninety. “Just wondering. I been around engines quite a little bit myself.” Deciding this was one of those times when there was something to be said for silence after all, Monty clammed up and warmed his hands again in the radiated heat from the cylinder block. Fingers long and tapered but strong from years of milking cows; pinkish palms that had known their share of calluses—these hands had been his ticket to chauffeuring, that time during his recuperation when he took it upon himself to tinker Mister Whit’s junked Model T back to life, handling each part of the stripped-down engine until he could have assembled them in bed under the covers. “Handy” was one thing that meant what it said. With all due satisfaction he recalled washing these hands over and over at the end of each day spent in the grease, carefully cleaning under the fingernails with the point of his jackknife blade, to look slick as a whistle when he sat up to the Double W supper table with the hard-used riders and haying crews. Done their job, too, these hands; flagged the Major’s attention when he looked around for someone new to be his car man after Frenchy went on one drinking spree too many. Monty kept on rubbing them here for circulation and luck. Now to see what his voicebox could manage.

  The hum came without his even inviting it.

  You know how you get at the end of the road,

  Trying to stand up under life’s load.

  The memory voice came along with it. “Can you sing that one by yourself, Monty? Momma’s momma taught me it, when I was little like you. Here, I’ll help you with it.”

  Done in and done up and down to a speck.

  That’s when the right word will lighten your trek.