This Is What I Want (3 page)

THE MAYOR

John Swarthbeck led the petite woman and the trailing photographer a block north on Main Street, from his office to Kelvig’s Farm and Feed. Every few steps, he tossed a glance over his shoulder to make sure they were still following. When she’d come in, he’d spotted the heels right away: dead giveaway that she was an out-of-towner. Grandview women were many things, wearers of sensible shoes most of all. And damn, these reporters were getting younger all the time, it seemed—this one from the
New York Times
, no less.
She must be a firecracker,
he thought.

He checked on them again. “Just up here,” he said. “Sam Kelvig’s the man you want to talk to.”

“Mr. Mayor, we want to talk to you, too,” the reporter said, moving in double time to catch Swarthbeck’s long strides.

“Of course,” he said. “Call me John.”

Swarthbeck recognized the photographer, Larry Grubbs, from the
Billings Herald-Gleaner
, probably picking up some extra scratch by freelancing this assignment. He’d had a few laughs with Grubbs over the years, even one drunken night up in Plentywood when they fought their way out of a bar. But that was the ’80s, a long time ago. Everybody who lived that time had a story like that.

The mayor reached the door and stopped.

“What did you say your name was, again?”

She smirked. At least, he thought it was a smirk. By his reckoning, she couldn’t be north of twenty-four years old. Everybody that age seemed to be smirking.

“Wanda Perkins,” she said.
“New York Times.”

He pulled open the door and bowed deeply. “Well, come on in, Wanda Perkins,
New York Times
.” Grubbs cracked a grin at that as he passed, which made Swarthbeck feel better.

Swarthbeck cupped his hands around his mouth. “Where’s Kelvig?”

“You don’t have to shout.” The interlopers turned and watched as Doreen Smothers came up the aisle toward them. “He’s not here.”

“Get him,” Swarthbeck said.

“Actually, I’d just as soon—” the reporter began.

“
New York Times
here. Rude to keep this young lady waiting.”

Doreen held up a walkie-talkie and pressed the button. “Where are you, boss?”

Kelvig’s squelchy voice broke in. “Almost there.”

“Mayor’s here.”

“OK.”

Doreen threw a deadpan look at the mayor. “He’s on his way, your majesty.” She turned and headed back to her post at the cash register.

“OK, thanks, Doreen,” Swarthbeck said. Then, to Wanda Perkins, he said, “She loves me.”

The
Times
reporter filled the empty moments of waiting by slinging questions at Swarthbeck, who dropped his rump into a stack of bagged dry cement and feigned blitheness.

“Would you say Grandview is an odd place, Mr. Mayor?”

Swarthbeck chuckled. “Odd? No. It’s a great place. Odd compared to what?”

“Compared to what it used to be.”

“No. It’s always been a great place. We’re a progressive town. No time for sentimentality.”

“Really? Isn’t this whole weekend about sentimentality?” She kept her head down as she delivered the question. Swarthbeck frowned and remained silent.

Finally, the reporter looked up from her notebook and reframed the question. “What I mean is, how is it now versus before the oil boom?”

“Great then, great now, Miss Perkins. We’ve always had booms here, and busts. Booms are better. A lot more people coming through, and I guess you’ve seen that man camp just across the state line, else why would you be here. But jobs and money are coming through, too. Those are good things.”

Grubbs moved around them as they spoke, snapping images. Swarthbeck had been in this game before, although never with the
New York Friggin’ Times
. But the Minneapolis paper was no slouch, and it had been here, too, trying to draw a bead on What Oil Means. He could tell from the distances and angles Grubbs worked that this would be a feature piece, maybe even in the Sunday magazine. Wouldn’t that be a kick?

“What about you?” the reporter asked. “Do you consider yourself an unusual mayor?”

Swarthbeck leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head. The sleeveless plaid shirt he was wearing would give her a good look at his pits and his tattoo-festooned arms.
Soak it up
,
lady
.

“I have my peculiarities. Care to be specific?”

“He sucks at poker!” Doreen shouted across the store.

Swarthbeck kept his eyes on the reporter’s. “Sucking at poker ain’t unusual. And I don’t, by the way. At all.”

“What about keeping a grizzly bear cub on your property?”

The mayor leaned forward, hands on his knees now, closing the distance. “That would be unusual. Not me, though.”

“I’ve heard stories.”

Swarthbeck smiled. “Lots of stories out there. I planted most of them.”

Doreen had crept in close, peering at the mayor from around an end cap. He shot her a hard look, and she retreated.

Wanda Perkins, however, only moved forward. “What about selling moonshine?”

“Who, me?”

“Again, stories. Did you?”

“Moonshine’s illegal. You know that.”

“So is harboring a protected species.”

“There you go.”

“I see.” She jotted some notes.

“What kind of a story is this, anyway?” he asked.

“Same as I told you before. I just want to talk about how the people in these small towns on the edge of the oil play are faring.”

The mayor pulled his sunglasses from the top of his head and set them across his nose. He didn’t want Wanda Perkins looking into his eyes anymore. “Sounds like it’s about me. Or, you know, allegedly me.”

Wanda Perkins glanced up. She smiled and closed her notebook, as if to say,
look, no more questions
.

“Well, that’s the thing,” she said. “You’re one of them, aren’t you?”

Swarthbeck broke into a wide grin. He liked this girl. He might have even told her so had Sam Kelvig not come through his own front door.

“Sammy!” Swarthbeck stood, clamping a meaty hand onto Kelvig’s shoulder.

“What’s up, John?”

Swarthbeck pulled him closer. “Sam, I’d like you to meet—”

Wanda Perkins stepped forward. “If you don’t mind, Mr. Mayor, I’d just as soon handle my own introduction.” She offered her right hand to Sam. “Wanda Perkins,
New York Times
.”

“—Wanda Perkins,
New York Times
,” Swarthbeck repeated.

Sam looked to the reporter, then to the mayor, then back again. He shook her hand. “Pleasure.”

“She’s here—” Swarthbeck started.

“Really, Mr. Mayor,” she said. “I’ll be by to talk to you later, OK?”

“OK.” The mayor’s words came out half reply, half question. At once, Swarthbeck wondered where he’d lost control of this thing.

“Leave me to Mr. Kelvig now,” she said.

“OK.”

“OK,” Sam said.

“OK,” Swarthbeck said again. He looked at Grubbs, who looked at the floor.

“OK,” the mayor said for the last time. He backed out the door, found the sidewalk, and tried to remember his bearings, and then he walked back the way he’d come.

MAMA

In recent years, Blanche Kelvig had given a lot of thought to the way she wanted to die, and the contemplations had achieved a critical mass in the past week or so. She’d come to the hard-won conclusion that timing (soon) and pain level (minimal) were more important than method. As to the latter: The safe money would have been on the pulmonary obstruction that had kept her tethered to an oxygen source for the past five years. That could be a long exit, though. Blanche had come to favor a stroke or a massive heart attack in her slumber. Whatever it took to do the job cleanly and without her active knowledge.

She sat in her threadbare recliner in the living room of the house Herschel had built them, and she thought about this, even as her eyes followed the pacing of Henrik, who blotted out her preferred view of that sassy-mouthed TV judge from New York. Such an unexpected visit, and yet such a predictable rant from her elder son.

“He’s up there on Telegraph Hill, like he’s the damn king of the county,” Henrik said. He came to a stop in front of the TV. She looked up at him, stone-faced and silent. Nothing she could say. Nothing she wanted to say. Not about this. Not anymore. Advancing age hadn’t been good for much—the wisdom overblown, the bodily breakdown undersold—but she figured she had at least earned some peace on this topic.

Henrik dropped to his knees and moved toward Blanche. It disgusted her, this hard veer between defiance and wallowing, but she let him take her hands, his thumbs rubbing across the paper-thin skin on her knuckles. She shuddered.

“I’m sorry I’ve been so long in seeing you, Mama.”

Blanche licked her chapped lips.
Lord, come and get me
. “It’s good to see you now,” she said. She drew in breath, as much as she could in her compromised state. When Henrik seemed pleased with that declaration, she exhaled, light-headed until the regulator on her tank filled her nostrils again.

Henrik stood, and she gathered in her hands, intertwining the fingers.

Herschel, Lord rest him, had told her it would come to this, or something like it. Their first child, delivered on the coldest day of winter, 1959, had come into the world sour. They’d had such high hopes, had bestowed the name of Herschel’s father on him, had imagined endless horizons for the boy and for the family they yet hoped to build. It wasn’t to be, not with Henrik. Herschel had been the one to peg Henrik’s erratic nature, saying it reminded him of Jhalmer, his father’s brother, who’d unraveled publicly for years before dying, drunken and without clothes, in a snowbank.

It was Sam, arriving twenty-seven months after Henrik, who showed all the promise. He was eager to work the fields with his father, and earned good grades in school as well as praise from teachers, pastors, and neighbors in abundance. With Henrik, it was continual crisis management. He bit a girl in the first grade, and tore a chunk of flesh out of her arm. Skinned the neighbor’s cat at thirteen. A night in the drunk tank at sixteen. The Marines and dishonorable discharge at twenty-one. After that embarrassment, Herschel welcomed him back to the farm. What else could he do? That blew up as well, as they might have predicted had they been the kind of people who spoke their doubts aloud.

“It’s not right, what Sam did to me.” Henrik was calling to her from the kitchen now, as he fixed himself a bologna sandwich and chugged her last can of Coca-Cola. “He pushed me out and nobody said anything.”

“I’m not going to yell across this house with you,” Blanche said. The force of the words sapped her. She dropped her head back into the chair and waited for oxygenated relief.

“I’m sorry, Mama.” Henrik came back into the living room and lowered himself into the chair opposite her. “Mind if I eat?”

Blanche brushed her hand at him, and he tore into the sandwich.

“The thing is—” he started, his words mushy.

“Eat,” Blanche said softly. “Don’t talk with your mouth full.”

When Blanche’s husband passed on, she let the boys split the two hundred acres on the farm. Herschel wanted it that way. He wasn’t usually given over to sentimental pap, but in those last days, his voice gone and his body withering, he wrote a few notes to Blanche expressing hope that their boys would bond and keep carrying the family forward, together. Soon enough, though, the old patterns played out. Sam made a tidy haying venture of his acres, while Henrik went chasing some scheme—cattle, maybe? Real estate? Blanche couldn’t remember. Anyway, he ended up flat busted and owing everybody and his dog, and Sam rode in with some cash to bail him out, demanding Henrik’s land as security.

Henrik licked mustard from his fingers. “As I was saying, the thing is, I shouldn’t be pushed out like this. Nobody says anything because Sam is so smart and so dedicated.” Blanche closed her eyes. She hated this singsong mockery. She’d always hated it. “Well, this is my legacy, too, Mama.”

Blanche opened her eyes and found her son staring at her. “It is,” he said.

“Nobody’s denying you anything that’s yours. Sam says you have a debt.” She closed her eyes again. Shut them tight. She knew as soon as the words slipped her lips that she’d chosen the wrong ones. It wasn’t her fight, and she had no fire for it, anyway.

“Sam says, Sam says,”
Henrik mocked.

Henrik found his knees again in front of her.

Lord, I’ve been faithful.

He wrenched one of her hands free and held it between his own calloused fingers.

I’ve never asked for much.

“I’m sorry, Mama. I shouldn’t have said that.”

I’ve tried to do right.

“But Sam is pushing me aside. He is. You have to see that.”

Blanche Kelvig let her hand go limp, and her son held it still. She closed her eyes tight, trying to hold back what was coming. A fresh blast of oxygen pushed into her nose, and she let go of her breath, and then she sucked it back in.

“This is my home, too, Mama.”

Lord, hear my prayer
.

SAM

For the second time in just a few hours, Sam stood in his particular spot atop Telegraph Hill and looked down on Grandview and the broad valley that cradled the town. He hadn’t planned on another visit today. The reporter—“Just call me Wanda,” she’d said—and the photographer had piled affably into the cab of his pickup for the ride up. Once there, and as Sam settled into his spiel, he grew more comfortable with the audience. Wanda didn’t seem intent on busting his balls the way she had with the mayor.

“I’ve been coming up here before the third weekend in July since 1964,” he said. “That’s when my daddy started Jamboree, and that’s what he did. He came up here, scoped things out, made his plan, and then spent a few days pushing it through.”

The reporter stepped forward, even with him. “Back then, what did things look like down there?”

Sam chuckled. “I couldn’t rightly say, ma’am. I was three years old. But the town’s changed for sure. Maybe not fast enough for some, and maybe too fast for others, but it’s changed.”

He traced Main Street with his eyes as he spoke, and he conjured a mental image of pieces moving in and out. Where the Country Basket was now, the old Egyptian Theater used to stand, giving Grandview kids their last hometown picture show in 1977—
Star Wars
, not a bad way to go out. Three spots down, in the main downtown district, Barry Bristow’s real estate office occupied the building that once housed the
Grandview Gabber
, quite possibly the most undistinguished newspaper in all of Montana. Across the street, the IGA wobbled on its last legs, headed for an August closure, a victim of the megagrocery stores moving into Sidney just twelve miles south.

“So you’re the director of the Jamboree?” the reporter said.

“Just Jamboree.” Sam smiled at her. “And yes.”

“And on the town council?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And president of the school board?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She raised her head and returned the smile. “I guess I have just one question: How?”

Sam laughed. “Lots of coffee.”

“Seriously, though.”

He doffed his ball cap and held it at his side as he raked the gathering perspiration on his head with his bandanna. Nobody had ever come out and asked him so bluntly, and he didn’t like not having a pat answer.

“I guess,” he said, “my daddy instilled in me a love of where I’m from. He used to say, ‘Grandview ain’t known for anything worth knowing, except for what we know about ourselves.
’ ”

“That’s a little cryptic,” she said.

“Not to me. His point was that we’re sitting out here on this edge of the state, pretty much all alone, and we get ourselves along just fine. Sidney is bigger, Billings is where nearly everybody goes to see a dentist or a specialty doctor, and Bozeman and Missoula seem to pull our kids away from us—those places, or the smell of oil—but we just keep on keeping on. So I figure it’s my duty to do what my daddy did, to be there for my town the way he was.”

Sam glanced to his left and for the first time realized that the photographer was snapping shots as he spoke. He turned the other way, his back to the camera. “I’ve probably said enough.”

“You were great,” Wanda said. She reached out and grasped his elbow, and Sam felt a silly fluttering through his chest and stomach.

“I have just one more question,” she said.

“OK.”

“What worries you most about the future of Grandview?”

She turned to face him after asking the question, and Sam suddenly felt a gravity that hadn’t been in the conversation before. He took his hat off again and held it in front of him, caressing the bill between his thumbs and forefingers.

“We’re getting old,” he said. “The mayor, he’s been in office thirty-three years. I’m fifty-three. We had thirty-one graduates in May, but just twenty-one the year before. Most of those kids are gone, and they aren’t gonna be coming back, except maybe to visit for something like Jamboree. The lady who runs our museum, Myrtle Davis, she’s eighty-three. Who’s going to run this town? Some oil-stained rig jockey? I don’t see any of them interested in that.

“Meanwhile, Sidney’s growing. They’d love to have our tax base. We’re probably going to need their water treatment capacity sooner or later. Are they just going to swallow us up? A lot of people think so. I can’t help but think we’d be losing more than we know if that happens.”

He turned back to the view. The photographer’s camera fired off clicks.

“Do you have kids, Sam?”

“Two.”

“What about them?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why aren’t they following you the way you followed your father?”

It was a hell of an audacious question, yet delivered so dispassionately that Sam didn’t take it in the hard way he might have had, say, Patricia dropped it at his feet. But then, he didn’t have any history with this Wanda Perkins person, and he and the missus had history enough to fill a dozen coal trains. What struck him even more is that he hadn’t considered it. The kids’ hard break with the place—Denise living there in Billings like she was born to it, Samuel just a whisper in their lives—had made it clear that they wouldn’t move the chains even before Sam had acknowledged his own limitations.

“They have their own things going on,” he said.

The sun had turned now, making its downward rappel toward the western horizon. It backlit the scene, casting the yonder badlands in alternating shadows and fresh splashes of color.

“It’s a lovely town,” Wanda Perkins said. “Not what I expected.”

Sam put his cap back on, mindful of the sun and of the tender skin under his fast-thinning hair.

“Best place in the world,” he said.