Maud Streep
I MET JAKE working at a ghost town in western Montana the summer I turned twenty-two. I had just graduated from Yale and was “doing something different.” Jake played a cowboy, and my best friend Liza and I played whores. We leaned over wooden balconies to holler at the tourists, our white cotton chemises pulled low over corset-hoisted boobs. Every day at noon and four, Jake broke up a gunfight in the street while Liza and I fanned our jaded faces. We bunked in a long-stay motel at the edge of town and spent our nights drinking in our rooms, on the roof, in the parking lot out back. I’d sit by Jake and feel the space between us go live.
One night we hit an emergency: Liza ran out of cigarettes. Jake had bummed too many the night before. I told him I would come along for the ride. We were still in our work clothes, so after I’d backed him up against the door of his truck, and after he’d helped me into its bed, it took some concentration to lose the chaps and stays. And then, naked behind the gas station in the light-stained August twilight, free from all that, I thought: I could wear this sweat forever.
Liza headed for San Francisco when summer ended, but I loved Montana with the passion of a convert. Jake and I moved to Bozeman, got married, and bought a little clapboard house. My grandmother’s bequest took care of the down payment. He started the customer service position he’d lined up at Simms, the big fishing gear company in town, and I got hired as a receptionist at a doctor’s office. It turned out I was okay having a job that was just a job. His parents were happy to have us so close to them, and I was happy to be far from mine.
Here’s how we used to be: we drove all the way to Missoula just to go dancing. We went skinny-dipping in cold green swimming holes, and we drank cheap beer. We ate our trout fried with the salt and pepper we kept in little baggies tucked in our fly boxes. I tuned out all day at work, and when I got home, Jake poured our drinks and read books out loud. Even now my mother enjoys telling me we got married too young, as if that hadn’t been the idea all along.
BY THE TIME Jake took me hunting, we’d been married just over a year. Our first fall, he and his cousin Mike went as usual and split the elk they brought home. I learned to make elk burgers, elk steaks, elk chilies, elk stews. All winter, I’d throw on a sweater to root around in the mudroom’s big meat freezer and feel a little thrill of competence. If by summer I was ready to eat anything but elk, I kept it to myself.
Our second fall, Jake sent Mike his regrets. We agreed to call in sick one Friday in early November. We drove past Big Timber and didn’t stop for lunch. I’d packed sandwiches and pickles. Jake turned up a road he knew, and we bumped along past rich person ranches and real ranches. We listened to this tape we’d made with Loretta Lynn on one side and Gram Parsons on the other. I rolled down the window and smelled dung and cold air. Jake dropped a little sandwich meat on his jeans. The road got worse. Beside us I caught movement—a small bear. Jake slowed the truck, and I watched the animal’s weight move up and down. It looked like it was running in slow motion, the way the flesh fell under all that fur, but the bear kept pace with the truck. It scared me, how fast it was. It didn’t look clumsy or soft. It cut off to the right and disappeared into the tall dead grass.
“Go to sleep already, jeez,” I said. I ate another pickle.
We turned a corner and saw the face of Crazy Peak. It looked like a mountain in a textbook—a blunted gray triangle trailing into a ridge on one side. It had snow in its gullet. Out the window, past Jake, the meadow sloped gold down to dark trees and a creek. “Let’s move here,” I said. “Build me a shack.”
“You know, these used to be called the Crazy Woman Mountains,” Jake said. “That’s where the name comes from.”
“The name’s because they’re not part of the Rockies.”
“Nope. There was this pioneer lady. Her whole family was massacred. Every single one. She wandered around up here for years. People took care of her—mountain men, that kind of thing. They’d leave food. And the local tribes left her alone after that. She never talked, but folks around here say that even now you can hear her wailing at night.”
“Keening,” I said.
“Would you keen for me?” he said. “If I was brutally murdered?”
Jake had crooked teeth. His eyes were green, and he never fully lost his tan. That first summer, Liza and I had code-named him Dangerface.
“If you brutally stole someone else’s land, you mean? Hard to say.”
“You would,” he said, sliding his hand up my thigh.
I swatted him and said, “Watch the road, bud.” He slid his hand a little higher. We stopped off on the side of the road and he shimmied my jeans down in the front seat. I closed my eyes but kept seeing that bear, so I opened them and looked down to where Jake’s head moved between my legs, out to the blank sky beyond him. My mind wouldn’t empty. I pulled him up to me.
WE HIKED INTO the foothills. I didn’t pay much attention to where we were. In a high pasture, we saw some straggling cattle. There was nothing human around us. Even though fall was on its way out, it hadn’t really snowed yet. My pack hurt my shoulders.
Jake set up the winter tent. I liked it because it was orange. It made us look like an Arctic expedition. I started a fire and wrapped potatoes in tinfoil to stick down in the coals.
Jake took out my rifle and made me show him that I remembered how to use it. We’d shot cans and bottles in the summer. I loved the rifle’s heft in my arms, its clockwork insides, the way the bullet’s force echoed back into my shoulder. I didn’t tell my mother how much I liked the gun or how much it frightened me. I just told her I was a good shot.
Now I loaded it and checked the safety and aimed it and unloaded it. When Jake was satisfied, he opened the whiskey. “We can go in the early morning or the late afternoon,” he said, passing the bottle. “Your call. I’ve had luck in the valley just over the ridge.”
“How’re we going to get the meat out of here? Aren’t they huge?” I had never seen an up-close elk that wasn’t freezer ready or a head on a wall.
“It’ll take a couple trips.” He picked up his knife and waggled it at me. “Don’t worry, I’ll handle the gross part. But yeah, they’re huge. And smart. We’ll need to go slow and be really, really quiet. You keep one in the chamber—any little sound is gonna spook them.”
“Let’s go in the afternoon,” I said. “Let’s sleep late and make out.”
“You don’t have to come if you don’t want,” he said. “You can hang out in camp. Look at the trees.”
“Sing to the birds. Talk to the foxes.”
“No guns necessary.” He wrapped his arms around me.
I shook him off. “We’re teaching me to hunt.”
WE WENT IN the afternoon. I walked the way Jake showed me, slow and steady, with bent knees. The gun was heavy, though, and I knew I wasn’t as quiet as I should be. I tried to look around and see the signs that Jake was reading, but all I could think about was the rifle across my chest. I had this fear that I hadn’t really put the safety on, like when I don’t believe I locked the front door, even though I remember locking it, and then when I go back to check it, I have to unlock it and lock it all over again. Now I knew that somehow the gun would go off and I would accidentally murder my husband and no matter what I pressed into the wound the blood would keep coming and Jake would fade out and his eyes would go still and I would be alone in the woods with bears and the ghost of a mourning woman. That’s where my head was; I wasn’t thinking about elk. I kept my eyes on Jake’s orange back or on the ground in front of my feet.
We came over the ridge and the air turned cloying. Jake raised a hand to slow me. He nodded. I wasn’t looking at the ground anymore. We slowed even further. Through the trees, I was pretty sure I could see something moving. The smell closed in again, musky and physical. My body remembered we were here to kill.
The blood in my ears drummed me forward. My limbs went light; each step landed without sound.
When I try to pin down this feeling now, three things come to mind. I remember the first time Jake took me fishing, the recognition in my arm as I hit a perfect cast. I remember the purpose with which I held my grandmother’s paper-thin Dresden teacup above my head, my delight in its fall. I remember kicking a boy in the face.
I felt clear. I was made for this.
But then Jake waved me forward, the smallest tug of a finger on air, a trigger pull. I panicked: I didn’t want to know more. I wanted out of the woods, back in the truck, ten minutes, two days earlier, anything to scrub the blood before it hit my hands. I looked for a root at the base of the nearest pine and tripped myself as hard as I could.
I said, “Ow, ow, ow.”
I wasn’t quiet.
Any nearby animal would be gone now. I felt a funny mix of relief and shame. Jake jogged back to me and crouched to inspect. My knee bled through my pants, so I rolled up the leg. The scrape was shallow but a gusher. He tilted his flask, and whiskey hit the open skin.
“Jesus, no more falling with loaded guns, huh?” he said. He looked rattled, which scared me. I could have shot open his skull. I could have shot off my foot. This was how I’d call the ghost—not by accident but because of a dumb mistake. I hadn’t even checked the safety.
“I’m sorry I ruined everything,” I said. “I’m an idiot. I’m sorry.”
He sat down on the dirt next to me. He kissed my hand and rubbed my fingers to warm them up.
“I didn’t really think we’d get lucky today. The wind’s shifting around a lot. I’m sure they smelled us coming.”
We picked our way down to the valley anyway. The ground was pocked with the elks’ wide beds. The scent was inescapable, with a new sourness layered in. I looked at the wallows and tried to fill in the bodies that had lain there.
We spent another night in camp. When dawn broke, I made a fire and some coffee, and Jake broke down the tent. The wind was cold and fierce, and we didn’t see a reason to linger. In the car, I tried to gauge the disappointment in Jake’s face until I got bored of that and looked out the window instead. I had wanted to be the kind of wife who’d bring down an elk one day and cook it the next, in lingerie and a flannel shirt. I thought, This is a test and you are getting through it. I am myself and that self will be okay.
THAT NIGHT AT the bar, I made us sit across from the elk mount: I faced my failure head-on.
“Stop apologizing. It’s never a sure thing. And I can always try again next weekend with Mike,” Jake said. “You look cute with a gun, though.”
“Ew.” I kicked him a little under the table. He grabbed my leg. He seemed so unbothered—I wondered if the trip had been a trial run all along.
Nearby, someone said, “Pretty late for a fire.”
We looked up. The television behind the bar filled with flames and milky night sky. The silhouette of a house shifted and danced. White lettering read Fire in the Crazies. I stood up.
“Where are you going?” Jake said.
The television said “driving winds” and “fighting for control.” It showed men in fire hats, black smudges against the pale red. It said “foothills near Big Timber.”
“I guess we got lucky after all,” Jake said. “Could have been a gnarly exit.”
“Wind conditions,” the television said again. It showed an old man looking dazed. The image switched to a newscaster in a studio and then back to a high school basketball game.
I made Jake take me home. In the car, I scanned the radio for more news.
“Fires happen out here,” he said. “Let it go.”
That morning, we’d left behind an ember that kindled a fire that burned sixteen thousand acres, two homes, thirteen outbuildings, and a small historical society. We killed seventy-two cows and countless small animals. I’ll always believe this.
IT TOOK TWO days to get the fire under control. I stayed up late, checking the Billings Gazette website for their slow updates and watching the estimates change: the acreage shrank while the building count climbed. When they announced the historical society on Monday morning, I took another sick day. The news of the cattle came later that afternoon. The paper ran some lines from a woman who said, “I wish it had taken the house.”
When Jake came home that night, I was sitting with my knees pulled up at the kitchen table. A topographical map draped over some plates. The radio was on. I felt drawn and sallow in the glow of the computer. I was wearing his robe. “Is everything okay?” he said.
I closed my laptop. “It’s snowing at least. They think that’s going to help.”
“Did you go to work today?” He walked over slow and quiet, like we were back out hunting.
“We have to tell the police or someone.”
“Tell them what?” He set his bag down and drew out the chair across from me.
I should have fixed my hair. It occurred to me I was unconvincing with it greasy and pulled up on top of my head like that. I could see in his face what I looked like.
“They’re trying to figure out what started the fire,” I said.
“You think we did.”
“Yes, Jake, we obviously started it.”
I’d spent all day reconstructing that morning coffee at the camp. I hadn’t made a big fire, just one to get some warmth in us before we began the long way out. I could see it, the little square cabin I’d built from the night’s leftover kindling and a few small logs. I was proud of how fast I got it going, as if that could make up for my ineptitude the day before. I remembered dumping the coffee grounds over the hissing coals. The rest was like whether I’d locked the front door: the more I went over it, the more artificial the whole thing became. Had I mixed it with dirt, stirred it till it was good and cold and dead? I could picture myself doing it, but the picture looked false.
Jake put both his hands on the table and stretched out his fingers and closed them up again. He took a breath as if he were dealing with a little kid.
“That seems like a big leap,” he said. “Did they say it was human-caused?”
“It’s still under investigation. But come on, did you notice any lightning out there? It’s November.”
“I think we should let them investigate. We don’t want to confuse things.”
“It seems like relevant information that we were in the area the day the fire started, and you know, had a fire going.”
“Everybody’s hunting right now. I seriously doubt we were the only people up there,” Jake said. “Did they get more specific about where it started?”
Outside the window, snow blew by. I wondered if it melted down to water when it neared the flames or went straight to steam.
I said, “I don’t understand why we shouldn’t at least tell them we were in the area.”
Jake chewed the skin by his thumbnail. “What’s the damage looking like?”
I tried to keep my voice even as I told him about the historical society. I like old things. I like people trying to preserve what’s past. We’d driven by it on our way back, and I’d wanted to stop. It was a beat-up, whitewashed, one-room schoolhouse, worn and Western in exactly the way that used to catch me up. The real-life evidence of our costume drama. The papers said some photographs had been on loan to the neighboring library, so at least they were saved.
Jake came around the table. He held my head against his belly and stroked my hair. I let him take me upstairs.
I WOKE IN the night, surprised I had fallen asleep at all. The maple out back banged against the house, and the moon was white across our bed. The wind had carried the snow to someplace else. Jake pushed himself up next to me. We sat side by side, cross-legged under our bright comforter.
“I can’t remember putting out the fire,” I said.
“You did. I saw you.” He rubbed his face. “Listen, it’s like this out here. Things burn.”
When we bought the house, Jake told me settlers had planted the maples to remind their East Coast wives of home. I suspected the men holding the money planted the trees for their own benefit, and I didn’t see why they were the settlers while their wives were just wives, but I hadn’t asked questions. I liked his story, the snug nesting boxes he built for us.
“Show me exactly where we were on the map.” I swung my legs out of bed, but Jake put a hand to my back.
“You know they fine like a million dollars for this kind of thing? Is your inheritance gonna cover that too?”
“Seventy-two cows,” I said.
“Jesus, what an overdeveloped sense of guilt. I bet you’ve eaten that many in your lifetime anyway.” His mouth stayed tight but his eyes lit for a moment, pleased at his own humor.
“There’s something wrong with you,” I said. “You’re morally deficient.”
Jake chewed at his thumb. The maple drew wild, shifting lines across our legs. From the beginning, I’d believed that when we peeled back the cowboy and the whore, the waders and Wranglers and whiskey, at the center we’d be there, together, outlines bold and clear.
Here we were.
“Let’s go away,” he said. “Let’s get drunk in some motel room out in the middle of nowhere.”
I went downstairs to look at the map alone.
IN THE MORNING, I showered and dried my hair, put on a nice sweater, and drove to work at the doctor’s office. I parked in the lot but left the engine running. When I called Debbie, the other receptionist, to say this fever was still going and would she be willing to cover for me again, she said, “Oh, honey. You bet.”
I drove with the heat on and the windows cracked, winter hitting my face. A few miles out of Big Timber, I smelled it. Since moving out west, I’d gotten used to the summer fire season, the heavy air and blurred sun, the headaches and the lethargy. Hanging in the cold sky, this smoke smelled different. It smelled cleaner, more benevolent, like campfire. I followed the haze up the smaller highway that Jake had taken. It got thicker, and the smell did too. Near Melville, I stopped the car and pushed open the door to watch ash fall around me, like snow.
No one was at the spot where the historical society used to be. Its charred stubs rested on charred ground, protected by yellow tape and a fine white dusting. I’d expected crowds and urgency, something I could help with, maybe. A ranger to tell me they’d found the culprit and guess what, it wasn’t me. I picked at the loose threads of my coat cuffs. My throat got small. I wondered how long it would be before the tall grass moved back in, remembered gold stalks closing behind that bear. I took a little burnt-up stick and put it in my pocket.
THE DIVORCE WAS about as cut-and-dried as those things get. He’d wanted to drive to Reno, pull some Merle Haggard if-we’re-not-back-in-love-by-Monday stunt, but I insisted we file in Bozeman: I was done with country romance. He kept the house, and I kept what was left of my inheritance. I flew to San Francisco, stayed with Liza until I got my feet on the ground.
THIS WAS ALL years ago. My second husband and I live down in L.A. now. Is that what I ought to call him? Current husband? Forever husband? We have good friends, a 1920s cottage, a garden filled with drought-resistant plants. He’s a screenwriter, and I’m a specialist at an auction house. I got the long-intended art history degree, fulfilled the familial destiny. I never became a vegetarian. When the forever husband asks me for a Montana story, I know what he’s looking for. He wants horses and high plains. He wants me in Dale Evans drag, suede skirt swinging.
I tell him about a DMV where everyone is pleasant and the entire errand, whatever the errand may be, takes only half an hour.
That winter—after the fire, before the divorce—I retreated indoors. I spent hours googling wildfires, negligence, fines, then made sure to clear the search history so Jake wouldn’t see. I could feel him tugging and pushing at my edges, trying so hard to fit us back into the people we thought we were. By the time the rivers melted, he settled on his official response—talking points about the lodgepole pine and fire-dependent ecosystems—and I stopped bringing up the fire.
Once, I drove to the police station and sat outside in my car. I told myself I’d follow the first person I saw go in, then the third, then the fifth. I watched people move in and out until my fingers went bloodless and yellow on the wheel. When I started the engine, I believed it was for Jake.
Once, I put an anonymous tip in an envelope and stood in our kitchen with the glue’s dry sweetness on my tongue. Out in the yard, matted grass showed through the thaw. Bear, ground squirrels, artifacts, cattle. I lit the envelope in our sink. Fire shot up so fast I had to jump back, and my fingertips felt hot and solid where I’d held on too close. I smelled the match, but no smoke. The flames ate the paper down to a curled ghost.
Maud Streep is from Nyack, New York, and lives in Brooklyn. A 2017 NYC Emerging Writers Fellow at the Center for Fiction, she has received scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Lighthouse Works, VCCA, Djerassi, and Yaddo. She holds an MFA from the University of Montana.