Bennett puts down a deposit for a post-office-box key and finds the box empty.
They walk a block over to Bozeman’s main drag and window-shop and eat their lunch in an overpriced café and wait for the day’s first-class mail to be sorted. When Bennett’s box is still empty they pull the trailer to a city park east of the P.O., and McEban steps Aruba out of the trailer and Bennett unhooks the trailer and sits on its tongue.
The park is heavily wooded, and the trees are beginning to turn. McEban leads the horse onto a slope of overgrown bluegrass and unsnaps the halter rope.
“What do you feel like next?” he asks.
“I feel like I’d be grateful if you drove back to Yellowstone,” Bennett tells him.
“You mean today?”
“I mean I just told them where to find the man. I’d like to know what they found.”
Rita and Paul sit at a picnic table. The girl spreads a set of dominoes between them and Paul shuffles the blocks.
“Why don’t you come with us?” McEban asks.
“I don’t believe I can.” Bennett leans into the tailgate. “I wouldn’t mind if you left Woody, though. If I’ve got him and Aruba for company I’ll be just fine.”
“There’s a creek at the bottom of this hill.” McEban lifts his chin toward the slope. “You could lead the horse down. It might be a nice place to sit.”
Bennett nods and drags the bag of dogfood out of the truckbed and stands with the bag against his hip. “Do you believe in evil?” he asks.
“You mean as a general thing?”
“Do you believe something could have got in me when I beat the ranger like I did?”
“No, I don’t. I believe you’ve got in you what you’ve got in you. From the get-go.”
Bennett looks to the picnic table. He watches Paul make a match and pluck up a new domino.
“Tell that poor son of bitch I’m sorry.” He looks back at McEban. “Tell him whatever seems right to you. If you want to, tell him I’m likely to go to hell.”
His grandmother lost fifty-three pounds between Valentine’s Day and the first day of spring, and her skin didn’t fit anymore. It draped like uncooked pastry from the backs of her arms, at her knees, at her throat, and when she hadn’t used the toilet for three mornings in a row his father decided she needed to go to Billings, Montana.
They put down the backseat of the station wagon and slid a single mattress in, and his grandmother lay on the mattress and slept most of the way. He had his learner’s permit and his father let him drive from the Ranchester turnoff to Lodge Grass.
They checked her into the Deaconess Hospital, and a nurse told them they might as well get something to eat.
“We’ve got tests to run,” she told them.
His grandmother was sitting up in the hospital bed, and the nurse was tying the hospital gown at the small of the old woman’s back.
“Hand me my purse,” his grandmother said.
He went to the closet and got her purse and brought it to her. She opened the purse and took out a freezer container. On a strip of masking tape stuck to the container’s top was written: SUGAR PLUMS.
“You shouldn’t have anything to eat,” the nurse told her.
“You aren’t going to ruin my whole day,” his grandmother said.
He and his father slept in the same soft bed at the Holiday Inn and were sitting in the waiting room at the hospital the next morning when the surgeon came in. The man appeared simply wearied, at a loss for where he might keep his hands. His hands were incredibly white. He finally folded his arms across his chest with a hand under each arm. He told them he’d cut her open and found cancer every place he looked. He told them he’d sewed her back up.
“How long?” his father asked.
“Not long.”
“Will she live till Mother’s Day?”
“You should tell her she’s a good mother now.”
“She knows it.”
“It wouldn’t hurt to tell her.”
“I should’ve told her before,” his father said. “If I told her now she’d think she’d done something wrong.”
He followed his father out of the waiting room and down the hall. They stood beside his grandmother’s bed. Tubes ran out of the backs of her hands, and there was a tube in her nose. Her hair was combed straight back from her face and lay flat against her skull.
She came awake slowly and coughed and worked her tongue around her mouth. She tried to ask for a drink of water, but she had to try three times before they understood. His father lifted her head away from the pillow and held a cup with a straw in it to her lips.
She sucked at the straw and swallowed hard and managed a thankyou when she was done.
“I’m sorry, Cleva,” his father said.
His grandmother lifted the sheet away and pinched up one corner of the surgical bandage. Her eyes were rheumy from the anesthetic.
“At least I won’t have to worry about whether this scar heals up pretty,” she said. “I doubt this will be the summer to try a bikini.”
“We’ll get you home,” his father said.
“Jock,” she whispered, and his father bent to her. His grandmother took her son’s hand. “I didn’t cry out,” she said. And then she fell back asleep.
Last night was a good time.” Rita kneels at the front of the truck’s seat and reaches out the window and turns the side mirror in and stares at the reflection of her face, seriously. “Good times sneak up on you,” she says. “A good time’s not something you can plan for.” She puckers her lips and kisses into the air, and so does her reflection. Paul looks at her and smiles. He sits between them, straddling the gearshift. They are on Interstate 90 backtracking east.
“Bennett says you’re a good dancer,” says McEban.
“I don’t think Bennett would know good dancing from swatting wasps.”
“He dance with you?”
“I don’t know. I dance with my eyes shut.”
She thrusts her head out the window and steadies herself against the windowframe and when she sits back in the cab appears satisfied—as though she’s heard something new in the wind. Something she didn’t know before.
“When it was hot,” she says, “my dad used to buy my mom a dollar bag of ice and she’d hold it on her lap on a long drive. I remember that and it’s not on the tape.”
“Is that the tape I heard this morning?”
“I just need it to get started. When I first wake up.”
“I don’t remember the ice,” Paul says.
He’s spread Rita’s sweatshirt across his legs and shaken the contents of his pouch on the sweatshirt. He’s sorting his treasures into two rows, one along each thigh.
“You weren’t born yet,” she tells him. “And the man was different.” She looks up at McEban. “We have different fathers.”
McEban nods and stares into the faultless autumn sky. The air tastes tart in his mouth and smells of sap and water.
There are stands of aspen bright as scraps of goldleaf, and in the hayfields leading down to the Yellowstone River the alfalfa is ripened and stacked into lumpish blocks and the horizons are littered with pairs of hunting ravens.
He shifts on the seat and Rita asks, “You think Bennett’ll be alright?”
“Sooner or later he will,” he says and then admits he doesn’t know it for a fact.
They turn south at Livingston and drive the broad sweep of Paradise Valley toward Yellowstone Park, back and forth over the narrowing river, gaining elevation.
They work up the switchbacks onto the Yellowstone Plateau and idle into Mammoth Hot Springs. McEban parks the truck in front of the Hamilton Store, and Rita stands out and up onto the front bumper. She shields her eyes from the sun and looks toward the hot springs. The boiling water falls away from a hill’s summit, gathering in pools, falling slowly, sheeting through the pastel terraces of travertine. The sun flashes against the water and sparkles in the steam that crowns the ridgeline.
“I’m going in to see Linderson now,” McEban says.
“I know you are.”
He leans into the bumper. “Do you want to come?”
She sits back on the hood. “Why should I give a shit if white people want to beat on each other?”
“I don’t think that ranger thought about what color he was. Or you either. He was just trying to help.”
“Alma’s favorite colors are mauve, indigo, and lavender.”
McEban kicks at the gravel with the side of his foot. “She just tell you that?”
“She says her favorite smell is sulfur.”
Paul reaches up and takes McEban’s hand and leans in against the man’s leg.
“What will they do if they catch us wading in the mineral pools?” Rita asks.
“Probably tell you to stop,” he says. “They probably won’t say anything to Alma at all.”
She slides off the truck’s hood and hikes up the waistband of her skirt and climbs into the truck’s bed. She bends over her backpack and comes up offering a book. It’s a worn paperback of Barry Lopez’s Field Notes.
“Linderson might like to look through this,” she says.
“Your idea or Alma’s?”
“Alma’s.”
She climbs down and steps out onto the blacktop toward the mineral springs. “Tell him I’ll want the book back when he gets done with it.”
His father and Ansel muscled the sofa into a corner of the living room and stacked the rest of the furniture behind it. Two dollars and sixty cents rattled from the sofa’s springs, and he took the coins up from the floorboards and held them in the palm of his hand. His father told him he could keep what he found.
Hospice brought a hospital bed and they squared it in front of the picture window. He walked out onto the porch and looked in through the window when they laid his grandmother on the bed. He didn’t think it made much of a picture.
When the nurse came he walked in with her and watched her hook up his grandmother to an I.V. and take her temperature and blood pressure, and check where the incision was oozing.
The nurse was thick through the hips and shoulders, and her breasts hung heavily against her gut and bounced as she worked, but she was gentle and precise and seemed to care. McEban turned away when she put the catheter tube in.
“I’ll come out three times a week,” the nurse told his father. She wiped her hands with a towelette and wrote down her home phone on a Hospice card and gave it to his father. “If you need me in the middle of the night I’ll come out then too. My name’s Janet.”
When his father didn’t say anything she patted his hand and took up her bag and left.
“Janet was a good draw,” Ansel said.
His father nodded.
“If you can’t keep her busy with me,” his grandmother said, “God knows she looks stout enough to stack up a pasture of alfalfa.”
McEban asks the receptionist at the infirmary’s desk where they can find Ranger Linderson.
“Family or friends?” She means the question to matter.
McEban takes Paul up under his armpits and holds him out toward the counter. The boy kicks his feet in the air. “His son,” McEban says.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.” She points to a hallway.
The door to Linderson’s room is stopped open. McEban and Paul stand together in the doorway. A catheter snakes out from under the sheets and empties into a half-filled plastic bag of orangish piss. The bag is buckled to the stainless bedframe. Paul stares at the thing in horror. He folds his arms across his chest and hugs himself and squeezes into the doorjamb.
The room is freshly painted and smells strongly of thinner and antiseptic. The bottom sash of its single window is raised open. McEban can hear the chatter of magpies.
Linderson’s right leg and arm are cast, and the cast leg is elevated in traction. His head is bandaged and his face and neck are bruised yellow, black, violet, and brick. He opens the only eye he can and stares at McEban. The open eye is shot through with blood.
McEban steps into the room and pulls a chair to the side of the bed and leans back in the chair and looks up at the rate of drip in the I.V. tube. He counts to seven between each drop. He watches the drops gather and fall.
“I saw the accident,” he says. “You remember me?”
Linderson nods just a little and winces against the effort.
“Hell of a wreck,” McEban says. He looks out the window and Linderson looks too. There’s a cow elk grazing on the sweep of lawn. “I guess you’re asking yourself why.”
Linderson doesn’t try to nod.
Linderson blinks. It forces a tear from the corner of his open eye.
“Do you have to see my lips move?” McEban asks.
Linderson blinks.
McEban leans forward in the chair. “It’s because he sells real estate.” He holds his voice just above a whisper.
Linderson doesn’t blink. He furrows his brow—or the strip of brow that’s not bandaged.
“And it’s probably because he married a woman who didn’t love him.” McEban looks over his shoulder at Paul. The boy still stands in the doorway staring at the bag of piss. McEban leans over his knees, closer to Linderson. “His wife took off with another man. She left just yesterday and a few days before she left I slept with her.” He straightens. He keeps his voice low but tries to speak each word clearly. “I’m his best friend.”
Linderson blinks twice.
“I’m sorry for what happened, and he says he’s sorry, too.”
Linderson blinks again and McEban can’t think of anything else to say, so he waits for a count of seven and stands and walks to the foot of the bed. He takes up Linderson’s chart and flips through the pages and hooks it back on the metal footboard.
“You’ll likely limp awhile,” he says. “Probably until after the holidays. And that right arm isn’t going to work the way you’ll want it to.” He steps away from the foot of the bed and extends his arms. “I’ve been busted up lots worse,” he says, “and look at me. I don’t look too bad.”
Linderson smiles around the open gap where his front teeth should be. And then he sucks at the air.
“Ribs too?”
Linderson blinks.
McEban walks behind the chair and leans into its back. “Maybe I’m not the best example of a full recovery.”
“Give him the book.” Paul is whispering.
McEban nods and pulls the book from his back pocket and steps forward and lays it beside Linderson’s unplastered arm. The ranger looks down at the book and then back at McEban.
“That’s from the girl,” McEban says. “She didn’t have anything to do with what happened. You understand?”
Linderson blinks.
“She was just like you. She was just there.” McEban looks up at the screen of a television mounted high in a corner of the room. Its tube is gray as polished slate. “I don’t imagine reception’s worth a shit up here.”
Linderson blinks and McEban puffs his cheeks and blows and widens his eyes for the exasperation of poor reception. He steps toward the boy and turns. “I am truly sorry,” he says, “but it could’ve been worse. I don’t know whether that’s something you’ve thought about.”
Linderson blinks.
He stood alone with his grandmother. She asked him to open a window and he did, and she breathed in deeply.
“I always hoped to die in the spring,” she said. She closed her eyes and sniffed at the cool air. “A spring death gives a family all summer long to work it out of their system,” she explained.
He asked her if he could get her anything to eat.
“You anxious to be on your way?” She opened her eyes.
“I just thought you might be hungry.”
“I’m hungry for love,” she told him, and he got up beside her on the bed and rested his head against her withered breasts and looked out the window with her.
When she fell asleep he stayed, pressed to her. There was the faint echo of her heartbeats in his ear, and his head rose and fell with her breathing. She smelled like soured leather.
He stared out the window—at his grandfather’s tombstone, and his brother’s too. The stones caught the sun at the ridgeline across the drive.
Rita is already back in the truck when McEban and Paul get in. Her socks are off and her feet are wet.
“How was he?” she asks.
“He was damaged.”
“Did he appreciate the book?”
“He was speechless.”
She brings up a foot and rubs it dry. “I know that’s supposed to be funny but it wasn’t my fault.”
“I told him it wasn’t your fault.”
“Alma wants to go hotpotting.”
McEban is thinking of how Linderson’s one good eye followed him from the room. “What’s hotpotting?” he asks. He starts the truck but doesn’t pull out into traffic.
“It’s where we find a hot spring that won’t scald us to death or where geyser water runs into a river so it’s body-warm.” She tucks her legs under her to sit higher on the seat. “We could get in and soak.”
McEban looks down at Paul. The boy has spilled his treasures onto his lap again. “You want to go hotpotting?” he asks.
“I don’t like to get wet,” Paul says without looking up.
McEban smiles at Rita. “Tell Alma she can take a bath when we get back to Bozeman.” He backs the truck out onto the highway.
“Hotpotting’s for fun.” She’s risen up on her knees. The sun flashes in her dark hair. “Haven’t you ever done something just for fun?”
“I’m having fun now. Besides, Bennett’s waiting for us.”
“Bennett’s waiting for the mail,” she says.
McEban looks to the west and thinks unexpectedly of laughter. He thinks of the sound of clear water over water-polished stones. The Gallatin Range stands treeless and stark against the horizon, and he knows that the Gardner River, Panther Creek, Indian Creek, Winter and Straight Creeks all fall away to the east. The sounds of water and laughter, he thinks. He shrugs and tries out a short measure of his own laughter and turns south, toward Old Faithful.
Along the Gibbon River there are swaths of burned timber on both sides of the highway. It’s been twelve years since the Yellowstone fires, and the trunks and branches of the needleless pines stand gray and charred and naked above the new-growth timber and plush of wild grasses.
He slows the truck in the meadows along the Gibbon. A dozen buffalo churn the riverbank to mud. The spring’s calves are nubby-eared and raucous.
Rita spreads a park map open on Paul’s lap, and the boy helps hold it open. She points to a canyon south of Madison Junction.
“It’s the Firehole River,” she says. “I don’t think they’d call it the Firehole if it isn’t.”
Ansel slept on the couch and McEban slept on the floor in front of the couch.
His father had volunteered to stay through the nights, but his grandmother told him cancer shouldn’t kill more than one of them at a time.
“I’ll not have you in here to watch me rot,” was exactly what she said. “I’m not prepared for that too.”
“What would you have me do?”
He’d been out irrigating and had slipped his boots off on the front porch. He stood beside her bed in his stocking feet, looking down, his thumbs hooked in the back pockets of his jeans. He smelled like the pastures he worked.
“I’d have you stay out in weather.” She looked up at her son, and then turned to the window. “Ansel’s old enough to want to be here, and the boy’s too young to think it can happen to him.”
“I’ll come in when the work’s done.”
“You let this place slip and you’ll have me for a ghost.”
“I won’t.”
“I know you won’t,” she told him.
His father got down on one knee and took the old woman’s hand in both of his and shut his eyes and pressed his forehead to her hand, and she let him keep it there. She didn’t pull away.
Ansel got up every two hours through the night and turned on the bedside lamp and drew an unneedled syringe full of the morphine solution and squirted it under her tongue. When she gagged he cupped his hands in front of her face, and walked to the bathroom with his hands still cupped, and washed them, and came back, and did it over again.
When she needed to use the bedpan Ansel helped her then too.
They spoke in whispers, and sometimes laughed, and McEban lay awake to hear what they said.
“I want to be buried on the hill out front,” she whispered. “Between Angus and Bailey.”
Ansel drew a chair to her bedside. “What did you think we were going to do with you?”
“Just so you know.” She rested a hand against his knee. “What day is it now?”
“It’s Good Friday.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t die on a holiday. I won’t leave you with that.”
“I wasn’t worried,” Ansel said.
She lived through Easter and by the end of April was light enough for Ansel to pick up and hold in his arms while McEban ducked under them and changed the sheets. Her chin and cheeks and shoulders all came up sharply against her gray skin. When she slept she moaned in her sleep, and cursed, and ground her teeth.
On a still, moonless night she gripped Ansel’s shirtfront and pulled him close. He sat on the chair by her bed. Her voice came harsh, high up in her chest. “You could put an end to this,” she said.
“No, I couldn’t, Cleva.”
“You’re a low coward.” She still held Ansel close. Pulled down to her face. Her teeth were clenched against the pain. “I’d do it for you,” she told him.
“No, you wouldn’t.”
“Then I’ll ask the boy.”
“You wouldn’t do that to the boy.”
She dropped back in her bed and let her hand fall away and Ansel straightened. He dipped a washrag in a bowl he kept by the bed and wiped the sweat and tears from her face.
“That wasn’t like me,” she said.
“Can I kiss you?”
She blinked hard to clear her mind. Her eyes held a flash of fright. “Have you always wanted to?”
“I want to now.”
She nodded and Ansel kissed her on the forehead, and she blinked into the gauzy light thrown up from the nightlamp, but the fear had fallen out of her eyes.
“I remember who I am now.” She tried to smile. “Now, I’ll be just fine.”
“You’ve never been anything but fine,” Ansel said.
It was before dawn when his mother came in. She came in every other day. She wore just a nightgown. No robe. No slippers. Her hair fallen about her face. She always came in after Ansel lay down for a little sleep on the couch.
She crept in on the balls of her feet and carried a bucket of sudsy water and a brush and fistful of rags. She got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed the pineboard floor, and the walls as high as she could reach, and wiped the chrome bedparts, and the tending tables, and took out the trash.
She worked fast, and sometimes she hummed while she worked, and he and Ansel watched her through the slits of their eyes and pretended to sleep.
When she was done, and the room smelled of detergent and Lysol, she knelt at the foot of his grandmother’s bed and pressed her palms together in front of her face and prayed. He watched his mother’s lips move while she prayed but couldn’t hear the words she whispered.
When she was gone, Ansel would rise and squeeze the morphine under his grandmother’s tongue, and, if she was bloated with fluid, inject a drug into one of her tubes that made her kidneys bleed the fluid off.
Once his grandmother nodded to the hallway, the way his mother had gone. “That poor woman would’ve been good at any work other than this ranch.”
Ansel said, “I guess you and I got lucky we weren’t stuck in the wrong kind of life.”
The canyon is steep and shaded and the sound of the Firehole River swells up from its bottom. Rita sits at the edge, where the level ground drops away. They can smell the water.
“I’m not going down there,” Paul says.
“Alma says it’s a good spot.”
The boy steps forward and looks down the slope. “I don’t care what Alma says.”
“It’s too bad we didn’t have the same father,” Rita tells him and pushes off and slides out of sight on her heels and butt.
McEban and the boy stare over the side. They can hear her giggles, the snapping of branches, a single scream, more giggles.
From the bottom she calls, “I’m fine.”
“You going?” McEban asks.
The boy still looks over the side. “I said I wasn’t.”
“Remember that movie where Butch Cassidy says to the Sundance Kid, ‘Hell, the fall will probably kill you’?”
“I haven’t gone to a movie yet.”
“Well, that’s what he said.”
“I’m fine up here,” the boy says.
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure not going down there.”
McEban sits on the spot where Rita had pushed away and digs his bootheels into the sidehill below him. “I bought a bag of groceries before we left Bozeman. It’s in the toolbox,” he tells the boy. “There’s bread and cheese and milk if it’s not spoiled. You want me to make you a sandwich?”
Paul gets in behind the steering wheel. He sits sideways on the truck’s seat. The door stands open. “I don’t eat a lot,” he says.
McEban nods and looks down the chute Rita’s made through the duff and scree and rosehips. He takes a deep breath and holds it as long as he can, and when he can’t hold it any longer he closes his eyes and pushes off.
He hits the canyon’s floor and rolls once before he needs another big breath. He stands and brushes off his backside and takes a step to make sure he can. He wishes he’d kept his eyes open. The heel of his right hand is skinned. Rita calls to him, ahead in the trees.
He cups his hands to either side of his mouth. “I’m all the way down,” he calls. He turns around to face the upslope. “I’m down,” he calls again.
He weaves through a dark stand of pine and finds Rita squatting by a pool at the river’s edge. The main current is beyond the backwash and broken into rapids. The rush of water is loud in the air and the air is damp and cool. She sweeps a hand across the surface of the pool and stands.
“It’s perfect,” she says.
She crosses her arms to the bottom of her T-shirt and pulls it over her head. She steps out of her skirt and panties and wades into the still water. McEban watches the map of the Rocky Mountains flood, and she turns at the far end of the pool. “Aren’t you coming?”
There’s a stretch of mud and mud-covered river rocks between them. “I don’t want to get my boots wet,” he says.
“Then take your boots off.”
He sits on a fallen lodgepole and works off the boots and peels his socks off and drops them in the boots and stands the boots together beneath the log.
When he reaches the river he’s limping badly. Without support his clubbed foot has suffered on the uneven stones. He stands on an apron of sand with his weight shifted to his right leg. He holds his left foot away from the sand.
“Those feet shouldn’t earn the same wage,” she says.
“A horse fell on this bad one.”
“Maybe you should get it cut off.”
“I’m thinking about that now.”
He looks into the pool. The bottom is sandy and broken into hundreds of effervescent fumaroles.
“Alma says that foot has bad karma.”
“Is she in there?”
The surface of the pool is pricked alive with the rising gas.
“She’s in the hottest part.” Rita sweeps her hands through the water. “She says in a past life you tripped Christ with that foot.”
McEban hasn’t thought about living more than one life at a time. “Why’d it take him two thousand years to even the score?”
Rita smiles. “He thought he’d let you sweat it awhile. You coming in or not?”
McEban looks down at his mud-splattered jeans. A pocket is torn and hangs from the front of his shirt. “I don’t look as good naked as you do.”
“Did a horse fall on the rest of you?”
“Different horses fell on different parts.”
“Bet I’ve seen worse.”
He thinks he’d like a rest before he walks back over the mud-slick stones, and is tired of standing, so he strips his clothes off and wades in quickly and sits and wriggles his ass in the sand. It takes a minute for the pleasure to register. The steam venting through the water tickles his legs and ribs and back. He imagines the sensation to be the same as falling through pine boughs. Just the tips of their soft needles pricking his skin. Or that’s the way he’ll explain it to Bennett, whether Bennett asks or not. He relaxes his hands from where he’s cupped them over his genitals and his arms float to the surface.
“Maybe you should have kept your clothes on,” Rita says. She’s staring down at her breasts. They’re just barely submerged and fuzzed with bubbles.
He looks into the timber. “I thought you said you’d seen worse.”
“I thought I had. Alma says you look like guys did coming home from the Crusades.” She still stares at her breasts. “Don’t you think they look bigger?”
“About a third bigger,” he says.
“You didn’t even look.”
“I didn’t have to.” The Saint Christopher medal lifts and settles against his chest and catches gold as an aspen leaf. “Everything looks bigger under water.”
“Rodney always loved these guys.” She rolls her shoulders and her breasts bounce and the bubbles shake free and rise.
“Who’s Rodney?”
“My boyfriend.” She looks up smiling. “Alma thinks he’ll kill me. That’s why I’m on the road.” She presses her palms against the bottom to lift her butt away, and brings her knees up against her breasts. “You’d probably like to fuck me, wouldn’t you?” she asks.
He looks back at her. “I don’t believe I would.”
She straightens her legs and lets her arms float to her sides. “Practically everyone I’ve ever met wants to.”
“I don’t.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
McEban bows his head to study the uneven reflection of his face. “I don’t know,” he says.
“I wouldn’t let you, anyway. I just wanted to make sure there wasn’t any ugly energy out here. You have any brothers or sisters?”
He looks up at her, blinking. “I wasn’t listening.”
“Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
“I had a brother.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s dead.”
“I’ll tell Alma. She gets lonely for other dead people. What’s his name?”
“His name was Bailey.”
“What’s your first name?”
“Barnum.”
“That figures.”
“My dad went on vacation once to Denver,” he tells her. “The circus was in town.”
He closes his eyes and lets the water work into him, work his sins away. Or that is what he’ll tell Bennett.
Just before dark they stand steaming out of the pool and get into their clothes and scrabble up the slope to the pickup. They grip themselves up hand over hand, pulling themselves from one needled bough to the next. They sit in the bed of the truck in the gathering dusk and smell their hands and rub the pitch from their palms and eat cheese sandwiches and drink from the carton of milk. Paul has found two Mounds bars in the glovebox. The candy’s so stale McEban has to saw it into pieces with the blade of his pocketknife, and they hold the pieces in their mouths until they’re soft enough to chew.
They spread out McEban’s sleeping bag on the truckbed and lie down and cover themselves with a tarp. They stare into the press of stars.
“How was the water?” Paul asks.
“Like sitting on those stars,” Rita says.
He stood beside his grandmother’s bed and dug in his pocket and brought out a rose-colored stone. It was only as big as his thumbnail. He turned it and they watched it catch the evening light.
He sat on the side of the bed, and when he offered it to his grandmother she took it between her thumb and forefinger.
“Is it candy?” she asked.
“It’s just a stone.”
“A stone?”
“I found it,” he said. “And other ones too. I leave ’em in the rock tumbler Ansel helped me build. I put in some rockgrit and after a few weeks of tumbling, the edges and rinds wear off and they’re polished.”
His grandmother touched the rose-colored stone to her tongue. “It could be candy.”
“It’s the prettiest one I have.”
She took his hand and laid the stone in his palm and closed his fingers around it.
“Don’t you like it?” he asked.
“Of course I like it.”
“I made it for you.”
“I can’t take it with me,” she said.
“You could keep it until then.” He opened his hand and looked down at the stone. “Until you can’t take it with you.”
“And then what?”
“Then I’ll keep it,” his father said. He had come in off the porch. He picked the stone out of his son’s hand. “I’ll keep it in my pocket.” He looked down at the old woman. “You won’t catch me without it.”
The Hospice nurse came out of the bathroom and closed up her bag and folded her wind jacket over her arm. She nodded to his father and he followed her into the kitchen, and McEban went to the end of the hallway where he could watch them and still keep out of the way.
The nurse ran a glass of water and drank it and set the glass on the counter. “It won’t be long,” she told his father.
“You said that a week ago.”
“She’s a tough old woman.”
“You should have been here when she was on her feet.”
“Do you have a picture of her?” the nurse asked. “Besides that wedding photo on the mantel?”
“I don’t have a camera.”
“You don’t have a picture of your mother?”
“I don’t need one.”
She rolled her sleeves down over her forearms and buttoned her shirtcuffs. “I’d like a picture of her,” she said. “I’d like to keep her fresh in my mind.”
“You come around whenever you like,” his father said. “I can tell you every inch of her.”
The nurse crossed her arms over her breasts and looked into the hallway at McEban and lowered her voice. “I think you need some counseling,” she whispered.
“For what?” his father asked. His voice was too loud.
“For the grief.” She looked back at his father. Her arms were still crossed. “The counseling’s free.”
“What I need is help branding my calves in a couple of weeks.”
She stared down at her soft white shoes. “Maybe someone to talk to the boy then. Or your wife.”
“I talk to them. If I’m not around they can talk to each other.”
She looked up squarely into his father’s face. “Cleva says she doesn’t want a memorial service.”
“That’s not something we do.”
“A service helps.”
“Who does it help?”
“It brings a sense of closure.”
“I don’t know what that means,” his father said.
In the morning they make a second round of cheese sandwiches and finish the milk and start back to Bozeman.
Rita sits quietly, cross-legged on the truckseat, with her eyes closed. She plays her taped biography, and then she plays it again.
It begins to drizzle in Gardiner and they stop briefly to buy groceries, and cups of coffee for McEban and Rita, and a soda for the boy.
By Livingston the day has turned to a steady rain. The wipers struggle and squeal. Water stands on the interstate and hisses against the truck’s undercarriage. The sky presses down dark and bruised and storm-glutted to the horizons.
They park at the back of the horse trailer and get out and hold their jackets over their heads, and McEban swings the trailergate open. They stand in the downpour and stare in at Bennett. He sits against the manger with Woody curled in his lap. Aruba is haltered and tied in the lefthand stall. There’s a pile of fresh horseshit at the horse’s heels and it steams. Aruba turns to the sound of the gate opening and then back to the manger.
Bennett offers up a scrap of stationery, waving it above his head, and McEban steps into the trailer and takes it from him. The noise of the rain on the trailer’s roof is deafening. He can see Bennett speak but cannot hear what he says. McEban leans closer. “Trailer me to Jackson Hole,” Bennett screams and hugs Woody up against his chest and bows his head and draws up his knees.
McEban shuts up the trailer and gets into the truck and Rita straddles the trailer’s tongue and guides him back under it and drops the tongue over the ballhitch and snaps the safety chain in place and runs to the cab. They’re wet enough in the cab, McEban and Rita and Paul, that the windows fog. McEban hands Rita the letter and clears the inside of the windshield with his sleeve and turns on the heater and pulls into traffic.
“What’s she say?” Rita asks. She holds the letter in one hand and combs the other back through her wet hair.
“I don’t know yet,” he says. “Read it out loud.”
Rita wipes her face with the belly of her T-shirt and smoothes the letter against her wet skirt and holds it up close to her face.
“‘Dear Bennett,’” she reads.
I never thought I’d die in a motel room but last night I woke and there was an angel at the foot of my bed. She stood to the ceiling, with the standard white wings, but had a face that was fierce and sad. I asked her to open the window a little and she said I was just dreaming. And then she told me that God deplores staleness, and that any person’s specific meltdown—mine, or yours—is seen as tragic only in the short view. She said it doesn’t mean they don’t care for us. It’s just they expect some evolution for their care. She said souls who refuse to change are lumped into the same category as crocodiles and sharks, and are generally believed to need another billion years, or so, to evolve into animals worth cuddling. She said animals who don’t change are the ones who take your hand off when you try to pet them. She said I was that kind of animal and then she left. She was right, and I’m sorry, and none of this is true. There was no angel. There is only my guilt, and the stories I make up to try to live with that guilt. I cannot remember my dreams.
Rita looks up from the letter. “I don’t feel good about Bennett being back there by himself,” she says.
“You want him up here?” McEban asks.
They’re stopped for a light on Bozeman’s main street. She stares out the window—at the people squeezed against the Baxter Hotel, out of the weather—and bends over the letter again.
Certainly, it must feel familiar for you to be after me. I’ve made you search for me most of our lives together without letting you find me. It’s not something you could have planned against. When we were young I came to you. I begged you to take me in. I begged you with my body and my laughter. I thought if I could convince you to adore me that it would be enough. That’s how young we were. I am so sorry.
I’m crying again. Harder than the morning when I left and it doesn’t feel good this time. This time I’m crying for my crimes. I hated you for your gratitude. I punished you because you were easy to punish. I let you ruin yourself under the weight of my punishment. In time I saw our life together for what it was and did nothing. I was a crocodile. I was afraid to change and fear is the root of all evil. I don’t need dreams or angels to tell me about fear. That’s what my life has shown me. I ask for your forgiveness. I pray you know what a decent man you are. I pray you may forgive me for never learning to love you and trying to convince you it was your fault. The angel inside me knows the loneliness she’s caused. She knows it’s not a long fall from wonder to despair.
Paul curls down on the seat between them with his head in McEban’s lap. Rita stops reading long enough to pull off his wet shoes and socks and tuck his feet under her leg. For a long time she stares out at the storm-soaked valley they are passing through. And then she reads the last of the letter.
I hear you making excuses for me. I hear you saying that we’re all only human. I think we only trot out our humanness to make sense of our cruelties. It’s what we fall back on to forget we are angels and believe we are crocodiles. It’s what I’ve said to relinquish my responsibility for having fallen. I pray my absence will allow you to heal. I’ll write again in Jackson.
Gretchen
Rita folds the letter and places it in the glovebox and laces her fingers together and stretches her arms before her, palms out. Her knuckles crack. She looks through the back window to the small curved window in the trailer’s nose.
She leans forward and shakes her arms over her knees. “There’s a lot of electricity in that thing,” she says. “I feel like if you plugged me in I could light up Billings.”
“They were together a long time.” McEban cracks his window and still can’t get the air to the bottom of his chest. “We all were.”
“This is the kind of thing that gets somebody killed.”
He breathes in deeply and holds his breath. “It’s just a sad letter.”
She takes the letter out of the glovebox and reads it again, silently to herself, and folds it back into the glovebox and shakes her arms loosely from her shoulders. “Pull over when you find a good place.” She shudders and shakes just her hands. “Pull over now.”
“I will when I find a wide spot.”
“It’s wide enough here.” Her voice is shrill and her eyes are wild in her face.
Paul sits up in the seat and McEban coasts onto the highway’s shoulder and stops the truck. They’ve just turned south toward Gallatin Gateway.
Rita springs out into the borrow ditch and runs as hard as she can for several hundred yards away from them and turns and runs back just as hard.
“She needs to do that sometimes,” Paul says.
“I can see she does.”
“You look sad,” the boy says.
McEban’s eyes brim and he sucks at a noseful of snot. “It was just a sad letter,” he says.
Rita glares in through the side window and stomps past the cab and walks to the back of the trailer. They can hear the trailergate open, and after a minute, close.
“Maybe you need to take a run too,” the boy says.
The sky is clearing to the west and the rain has stopped. McEban pulls a dry denim jacket from behind the seat and covers Paul’s legs and works a cotton handkerchief out of his back pocket and blows his nose.
“I’m no good at running.” He watches Rita return along the side of the truck. “If I don’t feel better in a while,” he tells the boy, “I might get out and hop around a little.”
Paul smiles and pats McEban’s leg and Rita gets in and rolls down her window. “It smells good out,” she says.
“What did Bennett say?”
“He said he needs a drink.”
“He say anything else?”
“He said he’d feel better if Alma rode with him.”
McEban waits for a semi to pass and pulls into the big truck’s wake.
“We’ll get him a whiskey in West Yellowstone.”
“Don’t let me read that letter for a while,” she tells him.
The semi throws up a rooster tail of spray and McEban turns the wipers on high. “Do you think she’ll be happy?” he asks. His eyes have damped again and he turns his face slightly away. “Do you think she’s happy now?”
Rita draws her knees up against her chest and circles them with her arms. “I think she believes in her new man,” she says. “I think she has to.” She rests her chin on the caps of her knees. “If she couldn’t believe in something I think dying in a motel room would seem just right.”
By the middle of May his grandmother couldn’t eat, and he went into the root cellar and brought out a jar of plums, and one of peaches, and one of pears. He lined them in a row according to their color—darkest to the right.
He dipped tablespoons of the syrupy juice out of the jars and held the spoon to her lips, and when she could part her lips he dribbled the juice into her mouth and wiped away what came out the corners of her mouth.
“I love you, boyo,” she told him.
He nodded. Her cannula whistled and she blinked slowly and stared at the ceiling with her clouded eyes.
She lifted her hand and tickled the back of his forearm. He looked down at her hand, at the yellowed nails. It was easy to imagine the hand as just bone. Goosebumps rose on his arm.
His father and Ansel stood behind him, against the big window.
“Make sure you just visit,” his grandmother said, and when he looked puzzled she rolled her head toward the window.
“She means up the hill,” his father said.
He looked past his father, out the window to the stone markers at his brother’s and grandfather’s graves. They stood silhouetted against the skyline on the rise.
His grandmother let her hand come to rest against his arm and tucked her chin to have a look at him. “It’s not where you belong.” She smiled. “You are our fruit.” She was still smiling. “The fruit of stone.”
In West Yellowstone they stop for a light and hear Bennett pounding against the side of the trailer. McEban honks once and the pounding stops and when the light changes he pulls through.
At the corner of the next block there’s a liquor store, and McEban idles past the drive-up window and evens the trailer with the window.
“There was a man I knew in Cut Bank who’s like Bennett,” Rita says. She kneels backwards on the seat, watching the trailer.
McEban watches the trailer in the rearview mirror. The trailer rocks on its springs, and they can hear the stamp of Aruba’s hooves against the floorboards.
“What was his name?”
“Louie,” she says. “He had tantrums. Nobody could tell when he was ready to pop. He just popped.”
McEban watches a red-haired man in the side mirror. He leans out the store window and mouths a conversation into the side of the trailer.
“One afternoon in the spring Louie threw a tantrum and couldn’t stop. The force of it punched a hole in the Hi-Line and a tornado twisted in to fill up the hole. I saw it from start to finish. I was about ten. We were staying with my uncle.”
McEban nods. He watches Bennett’s arm poke out between the metal slats in the trailer’s side with a twenty-dollar bill slotted between his index finger and the next. The red-haired man takes the twenty and pulls his head and arm back into the store.
“The tornado snatched up a Hereford calf and tossed it into a backyard in Browning. That’s a thirty-mile toss,” she says. “It wasn’t a normal tantrum.”
The barman reaches a bagged bottle out the window, and they watch Bennett grasp the bottle and pull it into the trailer.
“Keep the change,” McEban says.
“What?” Rita asks.
McEban starts the truck. “That’s what Bennett just said. He said, ‘Keep the change.’ What happened to the calf?”
“There wasn’t enough of him left to make an eighty-cent hamburger,” she says. She turns on the seat and fishes the seatbelt out and buckles herself in.
In the dream her hair falls to either side of her face and over her face. Her eyes are dark and flat and struck indistinct. There is the odor of her breath. Her breathing smells as his hands smell after he’s worked in a garden, of a rich and sugary soil. She is that close.
She wets the lids of his eyes with the tip of her tongue, just that, and rests the length of her wet body against his. Her breasts roll against his chest, cushioning. Her nipples come hard as stones. There is the damp, electric brush of her cunt-hair striking against the smooth skin below his navel. The slip and skid of skin upon skin.
And then she pushes away from his chest and tilts her hips and arches her back and takes him into her. All at once.