Authors: Stanley Gordon West
Rip, the oldest resident in Willow Creek, shuffled along the street toward Sam. The skeletal-looking man’s suspenders appeared to be pulling him further and further down into his pants.
“Hello, Rip,” Sam said, slowing as they passed.
“Hey, Coach,” Rip said, flashing a toothless smile. “We’re gonna do it this year, by golly, ain’t we?”
“Yeah, sure,” Sam said, trying to keep the sarcasm out of his voice.
It still amazed Sam that Willow Creek—with an entire high school enrollment of eighteen or nineteen students, and with a senior class last year consisting of three—somehow managed to maintain a basketball team and compete in the state-sanctioned conference. The school, whose greatest athletic achievement was fielding five standing, breathing boys, hadn’t won a basketball game in over five years, spreading a pall over the lives of those who identified with the community and its team. It was a virtual blood-letting, sanctioned by the Montana High School Association.
He turned in at the walkway to his house, mentally planning the evening ahead: run and walk the loop over the Jefferson River bridge, shower, supper, an hour of television, read until he fell asleep. He stepped onto the creaking porch, shoved the ill-fitting door open, and prayed he could hold off the afternoon’s vision until he escaped into the murky shadows of sleep.
Though he hated to admit it to himself, he was afraid to go to sleep, and he dreaded waking up in the morning to the memory of his relentless dreams. Somewhere in his mind, Amy’s voice played back at random times throughout the day and night.
He was also haunted by the Indian legend he first heard when he came to Montana. Members of the Crow tribe were camped along the Yellowstone River near present-day Billings. Warriors, returning from a long hunting trip, found the camp decimated by smallpox. Their wives, mothers, children, were all dead. So overcome with grief, sure they would join their loved ones in another world, they blinded their ponies and rode them off a sixty-foot cliff.
Five years after losing Amy, Sam still identified with those Crow warriors who couldn’t bear life without their loved ones. He would never admit to anyone that, on a daily basis, he entertained the thought of blinding his pony and riding off the cliff to be with her.
Peter Strong waited for his Grandma Chapman in front of the café that doubled as the bus depot in Three Forks, Montana. The family-shattering detonation of his parents’ divorce had been followed by the anguish of leaving his girlfriend and the comfort zone he knew in St. Paul, Minnesota, and heading by Greyhound to eastern Montana, where he’d spend one dreaded school year in Willow Creek.
“Hey, Grandma. How are you?” Peter said as he watched his mother’s mother amble toward him from her faded green VW bus.
“I’m cookin’, sweetheart, I’m cookin’.”
Having already noticed the comfortable temperature, without a touch of Midwest humidity, he figured she wasn’t referring to the weather and that it must be some kind of Western-speak. She hugged him and then held him at arm’s length, eyeing him like she might a newborn pup, checking to see if it had all its parts. He hadn’t seen his grandmother in several years and was taken aback by her appearance and bluster. She had no left hand, but he already knew that. No, it was the clothes. Dressed in Levis, and wearing a white sweatshirt with black lettering, beat-up Reeboks, red-framed glasses, and a man’s brown felt hat perched on her snow-gray hair, she reminded him of the street people he saw in Saint Paul, and he couldn’t decide if he should laugh or hand her a dollar.
“Welcome to Montana!” she half shouted.
“Welcome to the end of the world,” he said under his breath, glancing at the three blocks that made up Three Forks’ depressed business district. “Willow Creek is bigger, right?” he asked.
“Smaller.”
“That’s impossible,” he said, trying to swallow a sudden rush of panic and loneliness.
“You’ve gone and growed up,” she said, hugging him and then stepping
back to look at his hair. “That how the young lions wear their mane in the big city?”
“Yeah, some.”
She rubbed her hand over his blond hair, cut short along the sides, long on top and back. “Looks like the barber got started and you ran out of cash. Reminds me of the bushmen in
National Geographic.”
She smiled—sadly he thought—and her face took on the look of a worn leather glove. Her figureless body slumped toward the middle: no hips, no curves, just legs and arms and a head sprouting from a slightly bent and twisted trunk. Her sweatshirt read:
This package is sold by weight, not volume.
Some settling of contents may have occurred
during shipment and handling.
“Sure got your mother’s eyes; the gals’ll be fluttering over you.”
“I have a girlfriend.”
“So I’ve heard. Well, better pull the shades on those gorgeous blue peepers, then. I don’t want you breaking any hearts.”
With the dull ache in his chest he’d carried all the way from Saint Paul, he picked up his suitcase and duffel. At least there was one good thing, he thought: he liked his kooky grandmother.
“How’s your mom doing?” she asked as they walked toward her bus.
“I don’t know.” He wanted her to ask how he was doing. He was the one who got shipped out! “Divorce sucks.”
“Don’t suppose it’s a picnic for you,” she said.
“Some people wait until their kids are grown up—why can’t they?”
“Got no answer for that.”
“I can take care of myself when Mom has to travel. She’s only gone for a week at a time. She thinks I’m a baby or something.”
“Wants you to get the care you deserve.”
“They just don’t want a snot-nosed kid around anymore.”
“Well, that’s my good fortune then, because I’ll love having you around.”
A dusty red pickup rattled to the curb and stopped a short distance from them.
“Oh, Peter, come here,” his grandmother said.
She walked to the passenger side of the truck. He followed and found a girl with wide blue eyes sitting beside the somber woman driver.
“Hello, Sally. Want you to meet my grandson, Peter,” his grandmother said through the open window. “Peter, this is Sally Cutter.” She nodded at the driver. “And this is her girl, Denise. How are you, honey?”
“Hello,” the woman said without turning her eyes on Peter. He regarded the girl for a moment. Her lively eyes seemed to pick up on everything, even though her head teetered gently and a string of drool hung from the corner of her mouth. Strapped into the pickup with some special kind of seat belt, she made a guttural sound.
“Hello,” Peter said and smiled. He sensed the mother was embarrassed by her girl.
Feeling uneasy, he picked up his suitcase and duffel and tossed them into the VW bus. A road-worn bumper sticker clung to the back bumper: “
DO IT IN WILLOW CREEK, MONTANA
,” it read. Feeling ill at ease, he climbed into the passenger seat and waited while the women visited. In a minute his grandmother pulled herself up behind the wheel and turned the key. Nothing happened.
“Wouldn’t you know,” she said, grabbing a screwdriver out of the glove box.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“Nothing I can’t fix.”
In moments she was out the door, around behind the bus and out of sight. Peter climbed out and found her lying in the street on her back, only her jeans and tennis shoes sticking out from under the bumper. He knelt to peer under the bus when suddenly the engine kicked over and started. She slid out, stood up, and brushed herself off.
“Happens now and then.”
They climbed in and roared down the main drag, the engine sounding as if they were doing eighty, although he knew they couldn’t be doing more than twenty-five.
“What did you do?” he asked.
“Jumped it, like a hot-wire.”
He had no idea what that meant, but he didn’t let on, didn’t want her thinking he was a stupid city kid.
“Two of Willow Creek’s heroes,” she said, by which, Peter finally realized, she was referring to the mother and daughter he had just met.
“They live in Willow Creek?”
“Few miles south of town, in the hills where the soil is pretty thin.”
His loneliness slid up into his throat; the mother and daughter rattled him. “Why heroes?”
“ ’Cause they keep playin’ with the hand they were dealt, not like some people I know.”
“How old is she, the girl?”
“Sixteen, seventeen, about your age.”
He wanted to tell her it scared the hell out of him to see someone his age like that, knowing it could be him, but he’d learned from painful experience not to share such things with anyone.
“Got a driver’s license?” his grandmother asked.
“Yeah.”
“Ever drive a stick shift?”
“No, we have automatic.”
“Trilobite is nearly automatic,” she said while laying her right hand atop the stick shift.
“Trilobite?”
“A fossil they find in rocks. As vehicles go, she’s about as much a fossil as I am, so we respect each other. She’s a sixty-five, twenty-five years old, so I’ll expect you to drive her with respect.”
“Dad says only hippies drive VW buses,” he said.
“That so … what else does your dad say?”
“He thinks you’re kind of a screwball, says you’re a ‘refried hippie.’”
“Well, coming from my distant son-in-law I’ll take that as a compliment.” They laughed.
His grandma’s faded white-frame house sat on Main Street, halfway between the Blue Willow Inn and the school, where—Grandma explained—the teachers attempted to enlighten kindergarten through senior high students, and the school board annually took its stand against the inevitable, like fighting gravity, hanging onto the high school for one more year.
She introduced him to her family: a motley green parrot named Parrot—whose
cage she quickly covered before he could speak—and her three-legged cat, Tripod.
“Found him in the backyard a year ago, a stray no one’d claim. Sick and dying, his right front leg shredded by some beast or machine or steel-jawed trap. Nursed him back to life after the vet amputated his bum leg. Ever since he sticks to me like panty hose.” She led him into the cozy and cluttered kitchen. “You can call him One Chance if you like.”
“Why One Chance?”
“When I took him to the vet he said the cat had one chance in a million and maybe we should just put him to sleep. I told him no, that if he had one chance, let’s go for it.”
Peter sat in a chair by the kitchen table, and the apricot-and-white cat came to him as if with some instinctual understanding that they were orphaned kin. His grandmother slipped larger eyeglasses over the pair she wore, and stuck a piece of a jigsaw puzzle in place in the half-finished depiction of a sailing ship that sprawled across part of the table.
“I play bingo on Tuesdays and Thursdays, go bowling Wednesday afternoons, do aerobics most mornings in front of the TV, hit the garage sales on Saturday mornings with Hazel Brown, have coffee at the Blue Willow once or twice a day—that was the joint we passed comin’ into town—watch
The Waltons
reruns, and we get up a game of hearts or whist whenever we’ve a mind to, but generally I’m just hanging around.”
She found another puzzle piece that fit and thumbed it into place. “Landsakes.” She looked at him. “What’s the matter with me? You must be starving.”
She pulled off the top pair of glasses.
“Oh, darn, forgot again.” She opened a prescription bottle near the sink and popped a capsule in her mouth, washing it down with a glass of water. “I have to keep gettin’ a new doc,” she said.
“Why?”
“They keep dyin’ on me.”
His grandmother laughed and fetched a carton of milk from the refrigerator. He noticed a small hand-lettered poster on the wall: “
AS LONG AS SHE SWIMS I WILL COOK
.” It made no sense to Peter.
She poured a glass and set it in front of him. “What kind of milk do you like?”
“Two percent,” he said. “Are you sick?”
“Landsakes, no. This doc keeps wanting me to come in for checkups. Fussy old fool. Thinks my blood pressure is high.” She hooted. “Just never seen a seventy-four-year-old who’s still alive.”
They hadn’t been in the house a half hour—enough time to stuff him with milk and uncounted Oreos—when his grandmother challenged him to a game of Horse.
“What do you mean?” Peter asked, startled.
“A game of Horse. You play Horse in Saint Paul, don’t you?”
“Yeah … but—”
“Then quit your stammering and get on your playing shoes.” She opened a closet and produced a shiny new basketball, firing a snappy pass that he caught more with reflex than skill.
Somewhat astonished, he followed silently as they walked the two blocks up Main Street to the school grounds. Looking about, he realized it appeared to be the only street.
“Where’s the rest of the town?” he said.
“You’re lookin’ at it.”
“We have shopping malls bigger than this.”
“Minus the Tobacco Roots,” she said, waving a hand at the massive mountain range to the west, “and clean air and cutthroat trout.” Attached to an old three-story brick building—which Pete at first thought must be the grade school—stood a more recently built gymnasium with
HOME OF THE BRONCS AND THE BLUE PONIES
lettered in weather-beaten blue on its east wall.
“Who are the Blue Ponies?” he asked.
“Girls’ basketball … haven’t had enough players for a team the past few years, though. You might say the Blue Ponies are temporarily, if not permanently, out to pasture.” She nodded at the gym. “Seeing as the boys’ nickname is the Broncs, some of the nasty folks around here refer to this as the glue factory.”
In front of the school there was an asphalt basketball court with four baskets. His grandmother promptly made a free throw and tossed the ball at Pete. He tried a shot and missed, and she hooted with delight.
“ ‘H’! You got an ‘H,’ boy!”
His grandmother actually won the first game by methodically throwing a spastic sort of hook shot, but when Peter got his bearings, he began hitting baskets, and eventually had to hold back, feeling guilty for beating her so badly.