Roughnecks
Page 40
“Then Mama died so suddenly. There is so much pain in the world Zak, it seems foolish, but one wonders why it isn’t just natural for people to spend every waking moment easing the pain of others.”
“Well you sure take a lot of the pain out of living in a place like Scobey, I mean, if not for you what would happen to Corey…”
“Corey is a very special case. I suppose I inherited Corey from Graham and Nora, along with the bar and the house and the car. Cheetle was a colonel in the war. Corey was a gunner, the kind who shoots at airplanes. It was in Sicily I think they said. The Americans were attacking with planes full of paratroopers in the middle of the night. They simply forgot to tell their gunners on the ground that they would be passing overhead. Idiots. Corey knew by the sound of their engines that they were ours. But the rest of the gunners did their job and they unknowingly murdered thousands of their own men that night. They found Corey the next day wandering about the wreckage of those planes, chattering and babbling. Colonel Cheetle took him under his wing, but he was broken.”
Zak sat back and stared at the ceiling as though seeing the entire battle. Corey losing his mind, pleading with the others to stop, and when he couldn’t stop them, dashing out into the night of fire and death.
“They said that Tommy Coster was on one of those planes. He died a year later from his wounds. Corey believed he had shot Tommy down, but everyone knew Corey didn’t fire a shot that night, they were going to court martial him for disobeying the orders to shoot, when Colonel Cheetle stepped in. Strange is the mind is it not, to carry such guilt for something you didn’t really do?”
“Strange indeed,” Zak said in a tiny voice. “Corey showed me a medal.”
“A Canadian boy in the sanitarium took the medal off his own chest and gave it to Corey for trying to stop the shooting of the planes. He was a hero to the shell-shocked lunatics.”
“There is something noble still about the man.”
“Yes, I am glad you can see that, Zak. It is part of what I love about you.”
“Tell me Simone, whatever became of your beautiful idiots?”
“They scattered, some were arrested, locked up, and the keys to their cells thrown away. Some were killed. I don’t know about the rest, perhaps they got on with their lives.
“And what about you, Zak, where were you in October 1970 while my Québécois were losing their minds?”
“I was at a small college in Colorado taking theology, comparative religions, with minors in theosophy…and banking.”
Simone threw her head back and laughed, “So you were going to be a priest!”
“No, far from it. But this was a Jesuit school and I wanted to learn philosophy, and they teach it pretty good. But you’re right, 1970 was a crazy year.”
They were letting the stew simmer, sipping plum wine. She took his hands in hers and turned them palms up.
“May I look?”
“Of course.”
“Your left hand shows the life you were born to lead. The right one, the actual life you are leading. They appear to be two remarkably different stories. Would you like to hear them?”
He nodded yes.
“Look at the left hand, all the lines are strong and bold, long life, deep in head and heart, the fate line intersects the head and heart lines with meaning and purpose. Now look at the right. The head line is strong, but not as much, the life line is weak here, here, early, and here, earlier still, and the heart line is broken, here, and again here, and further along the heart line seems coming apart, again and again, it even disappears here and here. Tell me Zak, has love been so indifferent to you?”
Zak’s face was open, his eyes transfixed on his open palms, two different lives passing before his eyes.
“The fate line,” Simone traced the line bisecting his head and heart lines, the fate line running south from between his first two fingers down and down. “Look, on the left, there is no doubt that this is a man who has every intention of fulfilling his purpose, whatever that may be. But here on the right, it has split in the middle, until now we find there are actually two faint lines where once there was one, running side by side. This, I have not seen.
“So, Zak,” she poured more wine, “You apparently decided not to be a priest…”
Zak sat back, pensive and serious.
“The last time someone read my palm I was a little boy. My father and I were traveling. The palm reader introduced himself as a magi or magus, from Somalia. The magi took my left hand and after just a glance he gave it back to me and said, ‘You trust the ones you love too much.’ You know, I thought he was stupid or crazy. It made me angry, I mean, who else should I trust? But what he said lingered in my mind. Later on that same trip, a woman read my tea leaves, and she said, ‘You give your love as freely as you give your trust, you should learn the difference.’ I was stunned, how in the world can two such things tell the same story? One clarifying the other! All I could think was, there’s a lot more here than meets the eye.”
“I can explain it simply.” Simone sat back, considering him, her eyes twinkling; she sipped her wine. “You know, Zak, the scientists and mathematicians, the alchemists are correct when they suggest that you alter a thing when you touch it, which can only mean that you too will be altered when something touches you. So then, is it so hard to believe that a mere cup of tea, once you have consumed its contents, or the lines on your face or hand, cannot be read for the stories that they tell about you?”
“It makes sense to me now.”
“Does it yes Zak? Then tell me. Tell me about your own beautiful idiots.”
“I was the idiot, and not so beautiful it turned out. The youngest vice president the bank had ever recruited. One of the top bankers on the East Coast took me under his wing. I was so proud. I loved him the way you might love a surrogate father. Together we started piling up international accounts. Until one day I saw in the back of the newspaper a small AP report about a series of massacres carried out in small mountain villages. You see, it was at that moment I realized I had been recruited for my youth and naïveté. The loans purportedly were for schools. Books. Farm equipment. Food. But the money went to soldiers, guns, and the merciless liquidation of those whose only crime was to want to organize, to save their families. One little paragraph. I looked around those offices and I was suddenly—other.”
“And,” she held his right hand in her hands, studying that broken line of fate, “and that is when you stepped off the path?”
“At each turn, each step I take outside, my heart breaks again, and again.”
“And the pain of it, of those heartbreaks, is the badge of courage, or honor, that you carry.”
“I can do it,” he said quietly.
“You know you don’t have to, you can let it all go, yet you carry it anyway.”
“I know.”
“Look at me, Zak.”
Their eyes met.
“Are you aware that you are weeping?”
He reached his fingers to his face and felt the tears running down.
“No,” he laughed in embarrassment. “I never cry.”
“Boys and little girls cry, Zak, men and women weep, and always for good reason.”
THE NIGHT COVERED THE LITTLE cabin on the side of the hill like one of Simone’s quilts, and they made love, and sampled the stew, on and off, clear through till dawn. The candles burned down to flickering wicks. The early light reflected off the snow and brought that glow into their bed as they lay dozing, talking, and making love some more. Then, together, they plunged into a deep and satisfying sleep.
Zak awoke to eggs, ham, paprika, tomatoes, onions, peas, and sausage all baking in the oven, filling the little cabin with the most welcoming flavors. Wearing just a smock that fell to her thighs, Simone ladled her breakfast casserole out onto grilled homemade bread. He grabbed her long floral silk robe
from the back of a chair and put it on.
She poured some cognac into their coffee, and before they got cleaned up they made love again, long and lazy and slow.
HE HELPED HER PACKAGE THE stew, sausage, and eggs for Corey, and before they got into her Dodge to return to town she took him in her arms.
“Better to do this here,” she smiled, and kissed him long and hard. For several minutes they lingered over that kiss outside, she leaning against the door of her truck, the cold air in their lungs, snowflakes gently falling, their wet mouths still exploring, their final embrace trembling with want, a kiss to last forever, a kiss for remembering.
She dropped him at the hotel, but before they parted she said, “You know Zak, you and Corey have something in common.”
“Yes?”
“Neither of you are guilty, Zak.”
She blew him a kiss before leaving him there and continuing on to Corey Nightingale’s, and then to Simone’s Bar, formerly the Corkscrew Gulch Saloon, Scobey, Montana.
ZAK DROVE SLOWLY OUT OF town. From the comfortable old Pioneer Hotel, past the gray peculiar rectangles of the grain elevators by the ballfield and rodeo grounds, under the many shades of purple and blue that painted the early afternoon sky, and Zak took it all in.
Her perfume lingered on his clothes, her taste on his lips. If she had asked him to stay he would have, forever.
And Zachary Harper wept, quietly, happily almost, all the way back to Watford City, North Dakota.
XX
Hunting Season!” read the hand-scrawled sign, hoisted between two dinged-up thirty-foot drilling pipes that now straddled the entrance to the Watford City Park.
Where Zak and OK had parked Big Red had indeed formed a lane, like a major thoroughfare through the encampment as at least a dozen more RVs had established residence on either side.
When Zak and Tatonka pulled up alongside Big Red he saw Archer and OK just across the way standing in front of a beat-up old blue Mallard Goldeneye.
“Hey Zak, come meet the new neighbors!” Wellman called out.
“Me’n Skidder picked ’er up for next to nothing and hauled ’er down yesterday,” Archer said. “She’s a bit primitive compared to Big Red, but she’ll do.”
Archer pushed back the door and Zak poked his head inside. Old towels were pinned over the windows, muddy boots, dirty socks and underwear were strewn about, and the little sink was full of empties.
“Might get pretty ripe in there come spring,” OK said, and with a nod of his head directed Zak’s attention just a shade to his right.
“Hey, who’s got a new truck?” Zak strolled over to a big dusty black Chevy half-ton snuggled up to the Mallard, the words “Up North Auto Parts,” emblazoned on the sides.
“That’s Skidder’s,” Archer explained. “Seems he ordered a case of universal joints for his outfit a while back, and the distributer wanted to meet the man in person who made such an order. Now get this, he hires Skiddy to be his regional distributer and he has this new truck. So Skiddy, on about his third day making deliveries, goes and pokes a hole in the rad of his old beast, I mean, on purpose. The truck literally caught fire while we were having beers over in New Town. So he just phones his boss up and says, my fuckin’ truck is dead, you gotta send me down another right away! So his boss says, well what the fuck, here take this one!”
“Well, good for Skidder…I think!” Zak laughed.
Archer, Zak, and OK strolled back over to the Airstream.
Inside Big Red, Skidder was sitting at the table sipping a coffee and copying the names and numbers from all the business cards Zak had hauled in at the chamber meeting a week before onto a pad attached to a clipboard. Skidder had changed. He was wearing a fresh clean work shirt with the name “Skiddy” stitched in red on a white oval patch on his left breast. His huge mop of yellow hair had been cut back, like trimming a hedge, still only somewhat under control. He was wearing glasses.
“Here’s one we should call right now,” Skidder said, holding up a card. “‘Selwyn Clerk’s Handy Dandy Propane Service. They could start making the rounds tomorrow.” And then he whistled, “Whoa nelly! Lookee here! Let’s get this fucker dialed up right now!” he held up the next card. “‘Jeffrey Bowles, Field Butcher, All Season Long!’”
“Christ, there must be twenty trucks’ full of guys out huntin’ as we speak!” Archer said.
“Yeah,” OK said, catching on. “Jesus, there’s probably an army of gun-totin’ sons a bitches on their way here right now with enough game to feed and probably clothe the whole tribe!”
“Wow!” Zak jumped in. “Do you think that field dress butcher will know how to turn those pelts into anything useful?”
“Absolutely not, city boy,” Skidder laughed, “but, well, lemme think…”
“Indians,” OK said pensively.
“Indians?”
“Well, they’ve been into the tanning of hides for, oh, twenty thousand years?”
“Well good t’go, eh?” Skidder clinked his coffee cup to beer cans all around. “Leave Butcher Bowles to me and you go find some hide-tanning Apaches!”
“No Apaches around here, Skidder,” OK said to laughs all around.
“No? Shit, I love the name Apache, just sounds bad-ass as all fuck.”
Without realizing it, the men gathered that afternoon became the unspoken, unelected, committee of roughneck due diligence. And shit started getting done.
The next day, following Scott Becker’s suggestion, Zak tapped on every door, window, and pickup truck, politely interrupted every conversation and, in just a few hours, had collected seventeen hundred dollars in cash that he then took to the bank. He walked out with a cashier’s check for that amount that he then took to the Parks and Recreation Department at City Hall. They were stunned.
Before noon, Jeffrey Bowles was setting up a butcher shop in a big open space yet to be claimed by incoming roughnecks, and already had a few deer hanging upside-down. It seemed like every half hour another vehicle came rumbling into camp with antlers and hooves sticking up from the back and roughnecks hootin’ and a-hollerin’. There were deer strapped across the hood or across the roof of every kind of jalopy; ring-necked pheasants, sharp-tailed grouse, Hungarian partridges, and prong-horn sheep galore. Bowles had some boys rig up an even bigger structure to hang the larger beasts on, and still they kept comin.’ An eighteen-point elk, easily a thousand pounds of meat, was the prize of the lot.
Along about dawn OK shook Zak awake. He was off to meet some guys over at the Fort Berthold Indian Reserve, but needed a ride. Zak had a full day planned, so tossed OK the keys and went back to sleep.
That was the day Zak found Freddy Fifer back at his trailer. During the course of their visit, Zak returned his pistol and coffee pot.
“Jeezey Christey! I’d forgotten all about’m!”
During those precious weeks before winter’s all hell broke loose, good old Freddy could be seen in a lawn chair by the small bonfire that sprang up then, or hobbling about on one crutch looking for folks to pass the time with. That bonfire was tended by squads of roughnecks on a twenty-four-hour basis, and became the center of social life for a while. If you wanted to find someone who wasn’t in his trailer, that was a good place to look for him.
JON AND MARY ELLEN ARRIVED with what Mary Ellen called their Can of Ham; a small round two-wheel Mallard that did, indeed resemble a can of ham. Jon had rigged it up for winter and they pulled it into camp behind a new used ’75 Chevy Caprice. Zak and OK guided them through the camp to a discreet little cubby-like elbow around behind a thicket of trailers to set up in. It took Mary Ellen one afternoon to find a job at the McKenzie Inn doing everything from making the beds to manning the office. She also took a lunch shift over at the PDQ Club three times a week, and they were good to go.
The countdown to Tiger Mike was under way, winter had yet to set in, but y
ou could sure feel it, and taste it, on the wind. The temperature was now constantly below freezing with the mercury slowly going down and down.
“Ass-biting cold!” Skidder was already saying.
OK returned with Zak’s Jeep and several Indians who cut a deal with Bowles and the rest of the committee. The Indians would take whatever hides the hunters didn’t want and return with half of them turned into usable blankets of leather and fur. The other half they could keep and sell on their own. They even got Bowles making winter pemmican: thin strips of meat scored and put on tall handmade cottonwood racks, tall enough that critters, bugs, and roughnecks wouldn’t disturb them, just downwind from the bonfire, to dry. Within a week they had a ton of the stuff, enough for the Indians to take a third and everyone else to nibble on all winter long.
Two nights before Tiger arrived and everyone went back to work, a bunch of boys attached another handmade sign to the hunting season banner over the park’s entrance:
“Ruff Neck Jam Bo Ree!”
As the meat was packaged up and doled out to their rightful claimants, those unclaimed goods would go toward a giant cook-off. When most roughneck hunters heard this, they gladly turned over a portion, if not all, of their kill to the cause.
Late that afternoon, two half-ton pickups were placed on either side of the little bonfire, their back gates open and facing in. Big speakers were hooked up to cassette decks blasting country music that could be heard throughout the town.
“Too bad we can’t set up a rig platform right here and have a chain-throwin’ contest, eh?” Skidder joked as he sipped his beer and reveled in the near pandemonium of the place. “Listen?”
One truck was blasting Johnny Paycheck’s “Take This Job and Shove It!” while the other blared Waylon & Willie’s “Good Hearted Woman.” It was madness.
Archer had an idea. He went scouting around and came up with two cassettes of Merle Haggard’s Mama Tried album, and using CB radios for ship-to-ship communication, counted down “Three, two, one, push play!”