Authors: Kevin Canty
Give me a hand, he said to the girl. Let’s clean up a little.
You don’t have to, Betsy said. Please don’t.
She really didn’t want him to, it embarrassed her someplace deep, and she owed him enough. For a moment he thought that he wouldn’t do it but then he saw Ann’s face, unreadable, gone inside, and knew that he had to. Somebody needed to take care of them.
Come on, he said to Adam. Give us a hand.
* * *
But the boy would not stir from his mother’s skirts. RL gave up on him, went to the sink and began to run hot water. He had not done this in some time. He did his own dishes with a machine, but here there was no machine. Ann, mute, went around the room collecting dirties, setting them on the stained and lifting parquet counter next to the sink. Parquet was a terrible choice for a countertop. RL could have told them that much. It would never last.
Drunk, June was coming home
after Red’s, Charlie’s, the Flame, the Turf, the I Don’t Know, Luke’s, the Stockman’s and the Silver Dollar closed and the Oxford quit serving liquor and went over entirely to poker, brains and eggs.
Or half drunk. June thought she had drunk herself sober, which the adult version of herself does not believe is possible but the June of that night (twenty with decent fake ID) had seen with her own eyes. The dark morning was cold enough to sober her up, anyway, somewhere around zero, with a smart stinging wind coming out of the canyon, a wind that would turn half her face numb when it picked up.
That night—it could have been any Friday, still in college, drunk and pretty, looking for something but looking in the bars where there was nothing but more of the same—if it hadn’t been
that one night she wouldn’t even remember who she was with, an array of the same faces. June ran with the clogs-and-wool-sweaters set, but on Friday night she put on her red boots, the ones with the white stars and stitching. Smart girl acting dumb, maybe. Maybe it wasn’t that bad. Who was that girl?
That night she was not going home with anybody but she was walking toward the Rattlesnake with Coy, Tiffany and Blackmore, three English majors and a Nez Percé Indian (Blackmore) who she never saw again in her life. That little duplex, so clean and so alone. Picture of her family and of sunflowers by van Gogh and a teapot and a cat. It was different then, alone but all right with it. Was she?
Crossing Pattee by the post office, a Mustang comes out of nowhere fast. The four of them are halfway across the street, talking about Van Morrison, and the red car brushes by so close that it shuts them all up, scares them, maybe six inches away from Coy, who turns on his heels as the Mustang passes and raises his fist and finger and yells,
Fuck you!
The red Mustang stops in a sideways plunge of tire squeal and tire smoke. The smell of rubber in the cold breeze. They stand there dumb as cows.
Then the Mustang does a standing-start made-for-TV 180 and then it’s coming straight at them and she’s up on the curb somehow and Blackmore and Tiff, but Coy is, like,
stuck
out there in the crosswalk with the Mustang coming faster than any of them can think, and then lightly he’s somehow up on the hood of the thing and the motor keeps winding up, faster as it passes with Coy up on the hood shouting,
Motherfucker, motherfucker stop
.
* * *
Which he does stop cold, a hundred feet down the street, and Coy launches off the hood and onto the dirt and dirty ice of the street, rolling over and over limp. Oh God, oh God, oh God, goes Tiffany, and Blackmore starts to curse and run down the block to where the Mustang sits still. He could fire it up and run Coy over where he sits. June stands there stuck to the sidewalk, not even cold. Down the block behind her, a girl is laughing loud. From somewhere comes the sound of breaking glass.
Then the Mustang is gone and Blackmore is kneeling by Coy and she and Tiffany are suddenly there and he might be all right or not. Motherfucker, Coy says quietly, with blood coming out of his nose. Not much blood.
Keep still, Blackmore says.
Then June’s up and running back toward Higgins.
Where are you going? says Blackmore.
Find a cop, she says. I’ll call one if I don’t see one.
Hurry, Tiff says. Hurry!
Nobody needs to tell her and there’s a cop car riding up Higgins when she gets there and she puts herself square in the middle of his lane in front of him and puts her arms out wide at her sides and yells,
Stop
, and he stops. June runs to his window and there he is.
There is Taylor, the man she will marry.
* * *
This is his face at twenty-seven: round, a little soft, with a crawling caterpillar of a mustache across his upper lip, traces of baby fat that she finds endearing at first but later she will nag him, drag him to the gym, cook him skimpy meals and flatter him until he becomes most of the chiseled cowboy she wants him to be. This is him. June knows it in a second, in a tenth of a second, in the time it takes to see a face. This is it. He doesn’t even like her at first, drunk college chick, and then when he understands that this is
serious
, he’s all business and quick about it. Fuck you, let’s go. She points and he doesn’t wait for her, sprints off down Broadway with his lights on and his siren going for all of a block and a half. Two minutes later it looks like a cop convention, their faces bathed in twirling lights and Coy still out on the pavement but he’s OK—he’s moving and talking. Six, eight, ten police cars all around with their lights going and their radios barking. June tells her story to a uniformed cop and then ten minutes later to a cop in a suit, and all the while she’s looking for him but he’s always tied up talking to somebody or on the radio and then one minute she looks around and he’s just gone ….
All this in a moment, while she’s lying next to Howard—he’s sleeping, snoring sometimes. It’s November. It snowed hard last night and all through the day, and now her bedroom is full of snowy light, moonlight reflected off the low-hanging clouds and the white snow, it glows through the windows. She has to be at work in five hours, she ought to be asleep, she was sleeping a minute ago but then woke up with just the two words
flashing lights
in her brain and the whole thing in an instant. It’s not the whole memory, it’s just a point of memory, but then the whole thing unfolds in her mind to where she can taste the night air, the exhaust from all the cop cars. Things end and never end. Somewhere in her mind it’s still whole,
the twenty-year-old never gone but still living, the same year over and over …. Who is she? All these selves, this patchwork of scar tissue and bright moments, sex and sleeping and that one dinner they had at that restaurant by the ocean in California, the fresh peas picked from the garden, steamed for a minute and then served with butter and salt, nothing else.
How did it come to this?
Outside the window, out in the soft light of the snow and dampened moonlight, the deer move down to the river to drink, breaking through the crust of snow to graze on last year’s grass, stick-thin, slow-moving, deathly. What was it like? to live in the present, always, or in the never? … Dogs remembered, she was almost sure of it. Dogs dreamed, she knew it. But it wasn’t this kind of half here, half anywhere that she was, part memory and part desire and never exactly
here
except when she was asleep—and even then, the dreaming …
Snow on the ground, and more on the way. A stranger sleeping beside her. She could feel it coming.
To be whole, to be present, to be on horseback over the white fields and deadfall limbs at full gallop, fast, no time but the now, just the gesture, the line between horse and rider and running all blurry and nothing outside the moment, no dreams no memories no desire just the speed itself and the woman disappearing into the speed. To be the horse itself. To be nothing. To be the moment, the running itself and nothing more, not even a trace, like the breath on a mirror …
Forty-one degrees and the wind howling
out of Wolf Creek, blowing shifting corduroy lines across the gray water, water reflecting gray skies and hills, the occasional solitary ponderosa pine or juniper, a patch of blue sky sledding across the far edge of the sky, the morning lowering toward afternoon, the ten-minute project to get a cigar lit. This was fun.
This was something. Maybe just trying to prove something to somebody, maybe to himself. The cast was off now and this was what Edgar had always loved, alone and the river, trying to outsmart an animal whose brain was just a wide spot in its spinal column. Treachery and stealth and cunning, though, that all made it sound worse than it was. Mostly he threw them back. Today he had promised to bring one back for Amy. That was something, too, he thought, looking at the run edge of his cigar where the wind had
blown the ash uneven: the bloodlust of women, the way they wanted meat for themselves and their children. Layla was the only girl he knew who understood catch-and-release, and even then she seemed reluctant. All the little girls with blood on their lips and fingers, it gave him an idea for a drawing. Maybe a painting. Maybe a nice big painting that nobody would like and nobody would buy, the same as ever.
Nicotine and cynical, like a horse and carriage … He drew on the cigar again, but it burned hot and raw with the run down its side. Doused it in the water for a long half minute and then threw it up on the bank, as far as he could. It was only leaf, only poison. It would decompose.
Edgar turned his attention to the water again. Under the wind-ripple he could sense a seam, a place where water came together with slower water, where a big fish could fin easy in the current. He would be a foot or eighteen inches deep or maybe deeper or maybe anywhere or completely imaginary. His mind felt like a typewriter turning over the possibilities, something automatic. This was what he loved. He had to remind himself.
This hypothetical big fish would be feeding on what? On anything—it was impossible to say. A mayfly nymph in late autumn. A take-out cheeseburger. Edgar found it hard to concentrate.
Marriage was the thing he would not think about.
A bead-head lightning bug on the point and a pink scud on the dropper. The wind tried to blow his hat off. It wasn’t just chilly but cold, the coming winter, or maybe the winter just arriving. The long grass whipping in the breeze. He tied a yarn strike indicator,
pink and orange like a clown wig, and tried a cast with the wind at his back. He could feel his back cast sucking as it hit the air and then his forward cast came whizzing by his ear completely out of control and landed the whole apparatus in the water, line, flies and bozo wig, with the grace of a full set of plumber’s tools. The hypothetical fish took off for New Orleans.
Edgar considered the possibility that his life was not tragic but instead comic, that he was just another joker making a mess of things, an example for others. In his clown suit, his waders and boots, his many-pocketed vest with the many objects dangling and his humorous fingerless gloves …
The lines of her face. The line of her jaw. He remembered tracing it in the soft light of the shop. Now he couldn’t seem to stop himself; by now he had made two dozen small drawings of her face, and a few paintings as well. Mostly they looked like her, though a few devolved into geometry, color fields. But mainly just her face when she told him about Russia, about the siege, about the cannibal markets and sawdust bread and the corpses left to freeze in the streets from October right up into May. Also her face in repose and even in happiness and mockery when a man from New Jersey came into the rainy shop and wanted to know where the fishin’ was hot. Her happiness in quiet: a cup of tea, rain on the window glass, the swish of passing traffic, Edgar’s company. She could make him happy. Edgar knew it, hip-deep in the Missouri. He could make Layla happy as well.
This is what is meant to be a man, he thought: to suffer, to be steadfast, to be stoic in the face of happiness. Not happiness, just possibility. Baby girl, little Olive, another baby on the way, that was the real joy—and it was, he wasn’t talking himself into anything.
And if things had been a little slow, a little sad with Amy, that was just the way things were.
Postpartum
, there was even a name for it. He wasn’t talking himself into anything. Olive, her little face shining up at him. Nothing artificial about that, nothing sentimental, a good solid ax-handle feeling, well-worn and well used. And if he didn’t exactly know where things were with Amy, that wasn’t the end of the world. They had time to work things out. They would have this next baby and then, when things settled out a little, maybe they would go on a nice trip. Amy’s mother could watch the babies—she’d offered a dozen times.
He looked at the water, flat and gray in the gray light. Winter was here, not hard winter yet but still the flat light and cold wind. They could go to Mexico, to somewhere on the ocean, drink beer and get a sunburn. They could be together and be happy. Him and Amy, is what he meant to say. Edgar and his wife.
Dorris MacKintyre raised sheep
up by Ovando for fifty years. He bought a cabin and seventy-five hundred acres for a dollar an acre when he inherited money from his father in the 1930s, mountain land and high sage flats, not good for much. Later the federals came and bought the mountain half of it back from him and that was now part of the Bob Marshall Wilderness. Any time you drove over to Great Falls and you looked up at the mountains, that was his land. Used to be his.
Got married to a gal he met at a nightclub in Black Eagle at the 3 D Ballroom where they used to have Negro bands. Good girl. She was just out with her friends for a good time.
Had four kids, all girls. Every time he had another girl, he added another room onto the cabin, one for the marriage and one
each for the girls, so now that little cabin was halfway to a hillbilly mansion. Never had any money. Land-rich and cash-poor. Not that the land was ever worth that much, up at forty-five hundred feet and no moisture to speak of. Frozen up half the time. Just getting the girls off to school was an adventure. Getting them and Trudy to church. They had a service in Ovando, but they had it at the bar and Trudy couldn’t go along with that, so they drove to Lincoln every Sunday.