Ride With Me, Mariah Montana Read online

  “Somewhere south of Browning, along Highway 89!

  Just another roadkill, beside life’s yellow line!

  But morning sends its angel

  in a hawk-quick flash of light!

  Guiding home forever

  another victim of the night!”

  Some angel, her. Leaving the music on but considerably toned down, I seated myself to do justice to my plateload of lunch and the question of what I was doing sitting here in a Missoula parking lot eating eggs a la baloney.

  Every family is a riddle, or at least any I have ever heard of. People on the outside can only glimpse enough to make them wonder what in the name of Jesus H. Christ is going on in there behind the doors of their neighbors and friends, while those inside the family have times, sometimes lifetimes, of being baffled with one another. “Can this one really be mine?” parent and child think back and forth, eyeing each other like foreign species. Knots in the bloodline. The oldest story there is, and ever the freshest.

  We McCaskills are far from immune. I still wished mightily that I had stuck with my original inclination and kept saying no, daughter or not, to Mariah’s big thee-and-me-and-he-in-a-Winnebago idea. If that daughter of mine didn’t want to ram around the countryside alone with Riley Wright while Montana went through its centennial commotion, let the newspaper dig down and hire her a bodyguard, why not. Preferably one with experience as a coyote hunter, so that he could recognize what he was dealing with in Riley.

  “Up along the High Line, on Route 2 east of Shelby!

  The guardian in action is Angel Number Three!

  Now chrome collides with pheasant,

  sending feathers in the air!

  But heaven’s breeze collects them

  with a whisper of a prayer!”

  “That was another oldie but goodie from Montana’s homegrown C-and-W group, The Roadkill Angels doing their theme song for you here on Melody Roundup,” the radio voice chirped. “The time now is eleven forty-seven. In the weather outlook, temperatures east of the Divide will hit the upper eighties the rest of this week, and in western Montana they’ll continue to climb into the nineties. So, hot hot HOT is going to be the word . . .”

  I shut the voice off. The hell with the radio guy and his word. I hate heat. Although, a week of scorchers would provide me a way to tackle Mariah about getting out of this trip, wouldn’t it: “Sorry, petunia, but I’m allergic to any weather over ninety above—it makes me break out in a sweat.”

  But when I came right down to it, I knew I could not call things off that easily. Digest all my reasoning along with the pan of lunch and there still was the fact of Mariah and myself alone with each other, so to speak, from here on. She and I are the only Montana McCaskills there are now. God, it happens quick. My other daughter, Lexa, lives up in Sitka, married to a fellow with the Fish and Game Department there, both of them as Alaskan as you can get without having been conceived in an igloo. And Marcella, my wife . . .

  I swallowed on the thought of her again and sat staring out the motorhome side window to Mount Sentinel and the University of Montana’s big pale M up there, branded onto the mountain’s grassy flank in white-painted rocks. Already the slope of Sentinel looked tan and crisp. By this time next week, wherever the Winnebago and I and Mariah and goddamn Riley might be, haying was going to have to get under way at my ranch by my hired couple, Kenny and Darleen. There was that whole situation, too. Even yet, in the worst of the nights when the question of what to do with the ranch was afire in my mind, I would turn in bed to where she ought to be and begin. “Marce . . .”

  Her at every window of my mind. Ghosts are not even necessary in this life. It is hard facts that truly haunt.

  I was not supposed to outlive Marcella. In just that many words, there is the history of my slough of mood, the brown trance that Mariah kept telling me and telling me I had to pull out of. But how do you, when the rest of a life together suddenly turns out backwards. Not that it ever can be a definite proposition, but any couple in a long marriage comes to have a kind of assumption, a shared hunch about who will die first, which is maybe never said out loud yet is thoroughly there. Our own fund of love, Marcella’s and mine, seemed to have its eventual sum clearly enough set. My father died at sixty-five, and his father must have been a whole lot younger than that when the labors of his Scotch Heaven homestead did him in. In both of them, the heart simply played out. So, you didn’t need to be much of a betting person to figure I’d go off the living list considerably before Marcella.

  But cancer.

  Only a year or so ago the two of us thought we were on the verge of getting life pretty well solved. By then we had adjusted, as much as parents ever do, to the breakup of Mariah and Riley’s marriage. We’d hired a young couple from down at Choteau, Kenny and Darleen Rice, to take the worst of the ranch work off our hands from here on. And we’d bought the Winnebago, secondhand but with under fifty thousand miles on it, to do the traveling we had always promised ourselves—Alaska to see Lexa and Travis, and then somewhere away from Montana winter, maybe Arizona or New Mexico or even California. The brunt of our forty years of effort daylight to dark on the ranch seemed to be lifted at last, is what I am saying. And so when Marcella went in to the Columbus Hospital in Great Falls for that examination and there on the X-rays was the mortal spot on not just one lung but both, it was one of those can’t-happen situations that a person knows all too well is actual. Six months before this Missoula forenoon—six months and six days, now—the air of life went out of my wife, and the future out of me. Her death was as if I’d been gutted, the way a rainbow trout is when you slit his underside all the way to the gills and run your thumbnail like a cruel little plow the length of the cut to shove the insides out.

  An eruption of light where the side door of the Winnebago had been. I jerked back, blinking and squinting into the bright of noon.

  “Hi, how many days you been here?” swept in Mariah’s voice and swiftly the rest of the swirl of her, led by the ever present camera bag she hoisted with both hands. “You’re the only person left in America who’s always early.”

  “Gives people something to say about me, at least,” I fended.

  “You’ve got this place like an icebox, you know that?” As usual, her attention was in several directions at once, roving the inside of the motorhome as if she only had sixty seconds to memorize it. Today she was equipped with two or three more cameras and other gizmos than usual slung across her shadowplaid blouse, evidently loaded for the road. None of it seemed to weight her down any. A mark of Mariah was that she always held herself so straight, as if parting a current with her breastbone.

  Her flying inspection lit on the frying pan with its evidence of recent scrambled eggs, and that brought out her grin. Which is to say, it brought Marcella into human face suddenly again, as if my thoughts of her were rendered visible. In most other ways Mariah was built McCaskill, but like her mother she grinned Withrow. So many times I saw it originate on old Dode Withrow whenever he and my father talked sheep in the high summer pastures of the Two Medicine National Forest, and it awaited me on his daughter Marcella my first day in the first grade with her at the South Fork schoolhouse—that grin, one hundred percent pure, which seemed to reach out from all the way behind the eyes, to tell the world Pretty good so far, what else you got up your sleeve?

  Trying desperately to get myself off that remembering train of thought, I put into voice: “I wasn’t actually all that hungry, but—”

  “—you figured you’d better eat before you got that way,” Mariah melodically finished for me with a laugh. With a quick step she closed the distance between us and leaned down and provided me a kiss on the cheek. Another of the things about Mariah was that she closed her eyes to kiss. I always thought it was uncharacteristic of her, but I suppose kissing has all its own set of behavior.

  Her lips sampled my cheek only an instant. She pulled back and stared at me.

  After considerable scrutiny of the scis
sor-eyed kind only a daughter or wife can deliver, she asked: “What, did you fall face down on a porcupine?”

  “You never seen a beard before?” I said in innocence. I suppose maybe that was a generous description of the not quite week of snowy stubble on my face; but I was growing the whiskers as fast as I could.

  “Beard?!? Jick, beard has always been next thing to a cussword with you! What brought this on?”

  “What do you think did, the centennial, of course. They’re having a beard contest for it, up home. I figured I’d get in the spirit of things.” Actually I didn’t know why, after 643/4 years, I suddenly was letting my face grow wild. All I can report is that the morning after the Fourth of July I took stock at the mirror and thought to myself, hell with it, let her sprout.

  “Jick, you look like what’s left of a wire brush.”

  “It’ll get to looking better.”

  “I guess it’s bound to.” She gave me another stare almost strong enough to wipe whiskers away, then shook her head and said, “Listen, I just came to say I’m not really here yet.” My impulse was to retort that I knew she wasn’t all here or the two of us wouldn’t be about to go gallivanting around the state of Montana with that Riley dingbob, but I abstained. “To stay, that is,” she more or less explained. “I’ve got a shoot I have to do. The Rotary Club speaker. Big fun,” she droned in a contrary voice. By now she was fiddling with the middle camera around her neck as if the orator already was barreled in her lens. “How about if you stock us up on food while I’m doing that, okay? Riley’s finishing up another of those thumbsucker columns of his and he’s supposed to be done about the time I am. He better be, the turkey.” Mariah hefted her photographic warbag and spun for the door. “See you.”

  Off she vanished Rotaryward, and I drove the Winnebago over to the big Buttrey’s store at the east end of town. One thing about having spent a lifetime tending camp for sheepherders is that you don’t dillydally in the presence of acres of groceries. Pushing the cart up one aisle and down the next, I tossed in whatever I came to that I figured we might conceivably need in Bago living. Supper of course was closest on my mind, and at the meat counter I contemplated pig liver until I remembered Mariah’s golden words: “The whole trip gets charged off to the newspaper.” I threw back the liver in favor of the three biggest ribeye steaks I could find.

  All the checkout lines were busy—I guessed this was city living, people buying scads of stuff in the middle of the day—so I parked my cart at the end of a line of four other carts at least as heaped as mine and settled to wait.

  I didn’t stay settled long.

  Only the moment or so it took to study idly along my neighbors in front of me in the grocery line until my eyes arrived at the woman, about my age, being waited on by the clerk at the cash register. I was viewing her in profile and that snub nose told me with a jolt.

  Holy H. Hell, it couldn’t be her, out of a past that seemed a thousand years distant. But yet it indubitably was. I mean, I know what is said about why coincidences so often happen: that there actually are only twelve people in the world and the rest is done with mirrors. But magic dozen or no, this was her for real. Shirley. My first wife.

  For the next several eternal seconds I wondered if I was having some kind of attack. My knees went flimsy, as if something was pushing into them from behind, so that I had to put a hand to the grocery cart to steady myself. Simultaneously my heart seemed stopped yet I could almost hear it butting against my breastbone. My guts felt snaky, my blood watery. Normally I do not consider myself easy to spook. But where was there any normal in this, coinciding in a checkout line hundreds of miles from home with somebody you mistakenly barged into marriage with so long ago?

  That marriage had been committed right here in Missoula. I was at the university on the GI bill, my last year in forestry school when Shirley and I connected. Shirley Havely, as she was then, from the town of Hamilton down toward the south end of the Bitterroot Valley. In that college time her figure was more on the tidy side than generous and her head was actually a bit big for the rest of her, but it was such a terrific head no male ever cared: a black cloud of hair that began unusually high on her forehead, creating a perfectly straight line across there like the top of a full-face mask; then black eyebrows that curved winningly over her bluebird-blue eyes; then that perky nose; then a smile like a lipstick advertisement. She was a Theta and a theater major and ordinarily our paths would not have crossed in a hundred years, but Shirley had a taste for life on the edge of campus. As did I, in those afterwar years. I hung around with some of the married veterans who lived and partied in prefab housing called Splinterville and at one Saturday night get-together there the two of us found ourselves at the keg of Highlander beer at the same time and she tested me out in a voice as frisky as the rest of her, “You’re the smokejumper, aren’t you.” I surprised myself by smiling a smile as old as creation and giving her back, “Yeah, but that ain’t all I’m up to.” It happened fast after that, beginning with an indelible weekend when a Splinterville buddy and his wife were away and Shirley and I had the privacy of their place. Then the day after graduation in 1949, we were married. We stayed on in Missoula while I smokejumped that summer, that wicked fire season; on the Mann Gulch blowup in August, thirteen smokejumpers burned to death when the flames ran them down one after another on a tinder-dry grassy slope; and ever after I carried the thought that I could have been one of them if I hadn’t been out of reach of the muster telephone on a trail maintenance project that day. Whether it was the fever of living with danger or it simply was the temperature of being young, whenever I got home from a parachute trip to a forest fire, whatever time of day, Shirley and I plunged straight to bed.

  When that wore off, so did our marriage. After I passed the U.S. Forest Service exam and was assigned onto the Custer National Forest over in eastern Montana, Shirley did not last out our first summer there. It tore us both up pretty bad. Divorce was no everyday thing then.

  That was then and this was now, me standing in the land of groceries gaping at some grayhaired lady with whom I’d once popped into bed whenever it crossed either of our minds. I still was totally unlaced by coinciding with Shirley here. What was going through me was like—like a storm of time. A kind of brainfade, I can only say, in and out, strong and soft, like the surprise warm gusts that a chinook wind hurls down from the mountains of the Two Medicine country: a far-off roar, a change in atmosphere, a surge of thaw where solid winter had been minutes ago, but the entire chinook rush taking place inside me, forcing through the canyon country of the mind. Right then and there, I’d have stopped all remembering that the sight of Shirley was setting off in me if I could have; don’t think I didn’t try. But I couldn’t make my brain perform that at all, not at all. Even the familiar way she was monitoring the clerk at his tillwork, keenly counting her change as he drew it out before he in turn would count it into her hand, I recognized all the way to my bones. Shirley always not only dotted every i and crossed every t, she crossed every i and dotted every t, too, just in case. With but one monumental exception; me.

  I caught my breath and tried to think of anything adult to step forward and say to her. Remember me? logically invited some response along the lines of I sure do, you parachuting sonofabitch. Or How you been? was equally meaningless, for although Shirley was still attractive in a stringent way it was plain that the same total of forty years had happened to her as to me since that altar mistake we’d made with each other. No, search as I did in myself, there seemed nothing fitting to parley to each other now. While I was gawking and trying not to seem to be, Shirley did give me one rapid wondering glance; but with my everyday Stetson on and sunglasses and the struggling whiskers, I must have looked more like a blind bum wanting to sell her a pencil than like anybody she’d ever been at all interested in.

  “There you go, Mrs. Nellis,” the clerk said cheerily as he positioned the final sack of groceries in her cart, and away Shirley went, one more time.
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  “Get everything at Buttrey’s?” Mariah asked when she and I reconvened in the Montanian parking lot.

  “Uh, yeah.” Plenty. My mind still racing with it all as I stowed canned goods and other belly ammunition in the Bago’s warren of compartments. Why were those married youngsters, Shirley and me, back into my life? It wasn’t as if I hadn’t had better sense since. After I found my way out of the Forest Service and into ranching on the same land where I was born, after I mustered myself and married Marcella in the springtime of 1953, I put that failed first try with Shirley out of memory. But now right here within sight of where that mutual wrong guess began, where education took on a darker meaning than a dramatic girl or a green punk of a smokejumper ever bargained for, that long-ago error insisted on preening its profile to me. What right, even, did that episode have to come swarming back at me again? Doesn’t time know any statute of limitations, for Christ’s sake?

  Out of memory. Suddenly it chilled me, there in the blaze of that Missoula day, suddenly to be aware that there may be no such place.

  “I can tell by looking that you’re antsy to get going,” Mariah was saying over her shoulder as she busily stacked film into the refrigerator. I admit I was about half tempted to respond, just to see the effect on her beaverish activity, By the way, I just met up with the woman who could have been your mother.

  But the day had already had sufficient complication and so I kept on with my storekeeping and just conversed, “How was your Rotary shoot?”

  “Same as a kabillion others. God, I can’t wait to get going on the centennial. Something realer than lunch faces.”

  This time she had shown up loaded for bear, equipmentally speaking. As she continued to move gear in—black hard-sided cases somewhat like those that hold musical instruments but in this instance I knew contained her camera lights and stands, then a suitcase-looking deal that she said was a Leafax negative transmitter, which told me nothing, and another case with portable “soup,” as she called her stuff for developing proof sheets of her pictures, then a cargo of ditty bags which must have held all other possible photographic dealies—I was starting to wonder whether there was going to be room in the motorhome for human occupancy.