“Don’t let me hit anything,” said Paul with a friendly trill in his voice.
“How far we goin’?”
“A long damn way.”
Sometime before sunup, waking from a restless nap, Bill said, “What’s the cargo?”
“It’s medicine, Pops. And it’s had a long trip: Afghanistan, Siberia, Alaska, the Yukon, Alberta, and next stop Montana. Once it hits the High Line, it goes all over, and a lot of sick folks are going to get well. It’ll be a new morning for a bunch of folks who right now are trying to remember their own names.”
At first light, Bill took over the rowing. A cold, black storm was forming to the west. Daybreak had given him infinite keenness, whereas Paul complained of backache from rowing. This, Bill wanted to tell him, was not going to be a problem.
When it was Paul’s turn to row again, he gave a great yawn and stood up clenching his fists behind his head, elbows out in a luxurious stretch. Rising silently behind him, Bill followed the outline of Paul’s face against the black current. Paul bent back from the waist, rotating this way and that, bent his head back for a long gasping yawn. With deceptive ease, Bill shoved him over the bow into the river.
Paul made a tremendous splash close alongside and surfaced with a shout at the shock of the cold. Bill stood with one of the oars and fended off his attempts to return to the boat.
“Let me in, Pops. Honest, I’m not mad at you!” Only Paul’s head showed among the shapes of floating ice. “I can help you get ahead!” The absurdity of this remark was not lost on its author, and he began to laugh.
Bill could hear the scream inside the laugh even before it dissolved into curses, and stood there, imperturbably trailing the oar by one hand, and sat down only when Paul’s head went under. Bill suddenly thought he was going to be sick. The boat began to drift unguided as he leaned on his knees with his head in his arms.
He didn’t know how long he’d been sitting when Paul’s voice brought him upright, not a word but a groan that came from deep within his chest.
Paul was crouched in the bow gasping, arms hanging at his sides, a length of pipe in one hand, his eyes fastened on Bill. As soon as his breath quieted, he said, “I need the clothes, Pops.”
He began to undress, throwing his clothes in a sodden heap onto the floor of the boat. Slowly, Bill took off his old stockman’s coat, folded it carefully and handed it to Paul, who gestured impatiently for the rest and put them on as fast as Bill could get them off, including the boots with the undershot heels that he could barely pull on. Sitting at the stern, the wind blowing snow against his bare body, Bill declined to shiver.
Paul took the oars and angled toward shore, crossing several streams of current before the boat ground softly onto the sand. “Here’s your stop,” he said, slumping at the oars. “I know you’re a religious person, Bill. Think of this as a rain check and curl up some place warm.”
Bill climbed out and waded barefoot through the thin sheet ice rimming the shore, then watched the boat move away from him, just a smudge on the silver of river and then not even that, only the river and its steady sound. He turned away from it and began to walk.
Watching him, Paul thought, I’m not a violent person like that old cowboy, I let God decide.
But he was not happy with these clothes. It was like being in a costume. He hated that everything had gotten so serious and his head hurt. He was comfortable with the idea of the old man walking into nowhere, though he felt this without great emotion because Bill had been, when you got right down to it, a worthy adversary. He knew how Bill saw him, had seen him from the beginning, and he had to hand it to him. At seventy-five, you’ve got to know something.
Whitelaw had thought of himself as tough, but he was crippled by his fanatical ideas about loyalty. Paul’s mother taught him long ago that we are acted upon by forces, period, and that imagining we go through life with those principles was just further evidence of the arrogance of man. Still, it was hard to avoid. Paul would deliver this load and take his reward down there to Evelyn and save the ranch, just as Whitelaw delivered all the bottles for half a million square miles and saved the ranch. Old Bill was heading into his last snowstorm to save the ranch. It’s as if, Paul thought, we’re all in some Gary Cooper movie and can’t get out! He hung on the oars and let his most genuine smile warm his face. Thank God I still have my sense of humor, he thought, then threw his old clothes into the river.
He was a new man.
The river wound on into a distance that was darkening under a winter storm, and Paul kept looking to the south for Devil’s Tower. But he was happy and continued to have thoughts like, I gotta find a better way to get to Great Falls!, which helped to pass the time. At last his monument appeared, just a stack of rocks, faintly lit by what light got through scudding clouds, and the river seemed to slow, making a deep bend to the east; the lantern appeared on the bank.
The three men dragged the boat ashore and the first thing Majub said was “Where’s the old guy?” The cat-face man lifted the lantern high over the boat, then peered under a corner of the tarpaulin. The others watched Paul as he stood up and stretched.
“He fell overboard,” Paul said blandly.
“Fell overboard! Didn’t you try to save him?”
“Not too much.”
This delighted Majub. “Not too much?” Then he turned to the other two and repeated it in French—“Pas beaucoup!”—which produced laughter all around until cat-face commented grimly, “Putain de merde, eh!”
Turning back to Paul, Majub said, “Well, that is how it is, isn’t it? If you dance with the devil, you don’t want to step on his toes. Unless you’re tired of living.”
Removing the tarpaulin that covered the cargo revealed numerous small bricks wrapped in dark cloth and tied in bundles, and emitting the same sweet smell that had filled the rowboat. Paul helped move these to the truck, where they were covered by heavy bales of alfalfa and piled to the height of the cab’s rear window. The tarp from the boat went over the bales and was lashed down by its grommets to the stake pockets of the truck’s bed.
Majub looked closely at Paul and said, “Hey, your outfit is shrunk. You need to buy stuff in your own size.” Then he turned to his crew. “One more thing to do and we’re on our way.”
Paul and the other two followed a game trail into the brush and before long Paul got the feeling he was being escorted. He remembered what he’d learned in prison: Never let them see you sweat: That’s ignorant. Something was gnawing its way up his spine, and he knew he had to let it go right through and out. Peace was the goal: Easy Street. But Paul knew that he wasn’t going to make it.
There was a small clearing you couldn’t discern from twenty feet away; in the middle was a deep, rectangular hole, and the shovel used to dig it sticking up beside it in the ground. “Seems like a funny place to put an outhouse,” Paul said. It was his last joke but much appreciated both in its original form and in translation.
The three men found his sobs almost deafening. Afterward, Majub said to his companions, “The music has stopped. Let us return to our seats.”
Bill didn’t know where to go so he walked straight away from the North Star. The air was so cold it felt like heat. He ought to be running, he told himself, but he was too old to run so instead he imagined that he was walking toward his babies, Evelyn and Natalie, all the while doubting he would make it very far. In fact, no straight line worked long before it came up against a sandstone ledge or the base of a hoodoo that made him turn toward the North Star, and with every turn that way there seemed to be less of him able to go in any direction. At the same time, he was growing comfortable and the earth around him more accepting. Night birds flew off between his legs, and when he walked past a snowy owl perched at eye level, it merely rotated its head with his passing; but when he’d gone another while into the darkness, he noticed the owl was not far behind him, easily seen because of its terrible whiteness. Several coyotes returning from a hunt came downhill, and he ste
pped aside to let them pass, thinking that if they had anything to say to him, surely they would’ve stopped. They must have known he had his own appointment to keep. He did think about having a word with the owl, to make it clear that he didn’t mind company but being followed was an abomination. Otherwise, he was enjoying the new lightness in his step. He felt, even as he fell more and more frequently, that his lightness made every sort of contact a delicacy. Keeping a watchful eye on that owl would be a good thing. This far away, he may be the only fellow that can tell us anything, even if he don’t want to just now. The North Star had got in behind a cloud—a really good cloud all white and tongue-shaped and lit up at its edges by stars—that Bill thought to follow until he couldn’t make out which way he was pointing and turned back to the owl for advice.
There is a man there. I don’t think I can stand up no more. So I don’t and I get there where the ground can help me since I’m right on it and it wants to help. The man wears a straw cowboy hat and long sky-colored coat. It so happens I know this man quite well, John Red Wolf or, as he was known in the navy, John R. Wolf, my good friend. Even though we went from Montana to Alameda and then on to the Solomon Islands on the same cruiser, we only met after I rode half of a forty-millimeter gun mount over the side during a suicide attack. It was a low overcast day, and the Japs were coming out of the cloud cover. We never heard this one. At least I didn’t after what living between two five-inch guns had done to my eardrums. This plane dropped like a rock and blew up fifty yards in front of me and just tore my gun mount to pieces and I went over the side with a bunch of dead and dying guys who’d been passing shells from the ammunition bay. The minute I knew I was alive and floating in the big ground swell from the Philippines, I’m thinking about the sharks that shadowed us from mid-Pacific all the way to Saipan, looked like submarines. They got right into the dead guys and were cleaning them up when John Red Wolf pulled me into the lifeboat.
The next day we were playing catch on the stern. I’d loaned my glove to an officer who never gave it back. John just went up and retrieved it from his quarters so we could play catch, two guys from Montana anchored off a little island covered with abandoned bunkers and a blowed-up ammo dump that looked like a hole right in the middle of the world. He wasn’t particularly afraid of officers, old John.
We almost got used to the kamikazes, they was such a regular feature there toward the end when the emperor knew the score. Every now and then something would happen you couldn’t forget, like the Zero that came from between two little islands near Jolo and Tawi-Tawi about five feet off the water, weaving every which way until he elevated just enough to catch the stern catapult and blow up. Even before the firemen could move, this hand come whistling down the deck and stopped right next to the sick-bay ventilator. Me and John went over to look. That air show was right out of the Olympics, and here was this little brown Jap hand. Remember that, John?
When we started up the boxing matches on the fantail again for the first time since the New Hebrides, I went along with my new friend. This big farm kid from Indiana put on the gloves with a smaller but savvier Mexican from California. The Mexican danced around till some of the guys was booing, but he kept it up till the farm boy run out of gas and then started whaling on his head. It was no good. You’d see his face flatten, with hair all pointed one way and the sweat drops just flying out over the ocean. I remember, John, you saying, “Yes, sir, this makes a lot of sense.”
How that ship stank! The captain didn’t want submarines following our garbage so we kept it all and the ship smelled like a city dump. Red Wolf says, “I’ll take the subs.” It was hot. We slept on deck with sea bags for pillows and swapped theories about the stars that swarmed right into the ocean. Sometimes it got too hot to sleep, like on our way down to Borneo, so we just talked about home. I told you I ranched a little and you told me you was a diesel mechanic and medicine man. I have to admit I didn’t much care for it when you said that your people were the real owners of my ranch. That kind of talk was so much like the talk we had with the southern boys on the ship, about the War Between the States, and I’m glad we dropped it. At first, guys would show off, reciting every state of the union and its capital, but that give out long before the equator. By Subic Bay, the only country we had was that light cruiser.
One of the last things our task force took on was shelling a bunch of islands near New Georgia, if I remember right, where we set off a Jap ammunition dump, better than any fireworks display. That’s when Red Wolf showed once and for all what kind of stuff he was made out of. A five-inch shell hung fire in the gun, and the whole crew waited for it to discharge and blow a hole in the side of our ship, but John worked that shell free and dumped it over the side. Said it wasn’t nothing, that he had extra powers.
Sometimes, when Roosevelt broadcast to all hands over the loudspeakers, John and me would find a quiet spot to visit about things that was so amazing to young fellows from the sagebrush. Like when a torpedo bomber hit us in ’43 and we had to seal off a flooded compartment with seventeen of our buddies still inside. Funny thing was, we shot that plane down after he cut his torpedo loose. The pilot bailed out and we turned him to hamburger with the twenty-millimeter. Later we find out that’s against the rules of war. Tell it to those seventeen boys. Or close calls, like seeing a periscope on a moonlit night and zigzagging all over the ocean to keep from getting sunk. We talked about the guys that couldn’t take the heat and concussion and boredom and finally went Asiatic and had to be shipped home. We looked out there at all the flying death and told each other it was like a movie. Or the big powder magazine that went up on Tarawa, a rolling ball of smoke and flame, jam-packed with dead Japs. You start to get the picture about the human race, that most of it’s dead. Other stuff going up all the time: pill boxes, assembly areas, truck depots. Never a dull moment. How about Magicienne Bay when Jap shore batteries opened up on the California? We watched those dark hills with little tongues of light from the flamethrowers. That’s how some of them boys went out, at the wrong end of a flamethrower. Bodies always floating past us, Jap and American both, just bobbing meatballs that used to have mothers and hometowns. I’ll bet you’ll never forget the day the ship got caught in the gigantic oceanic whirlpool with Bing Crosby on the air from Radio Tokyo, the ship swinging in smaller circles like it was headed down a giant drain and we’re listening to this crooner. Wasn’t that war something? Like we always said, never a dull moment. But the world has changed, John, and guys like you and me don’t really exist.
The last time was when that suicide plane lost its bombs and the canopy peels away, then a wing, and it comes over the stern bouncing sideways. The motor tore loose and slid across the ship, killing the mount captain on the other forty-millimeter. They found his earphones wrapped around a roll of his scalp about a hundred feet away. Remember him? He’s the one tried to show us how to play chess. By then, we were gettin’ pretty squirrelly every time they called general quarters, having to be good in the clutch whenever the Japs felt like playin’ ball. Lord, it was stormy out there. Like you said, enough wind to blow the monkeys right out of the trees.
It didn’t matter though, did it? The war was over. Truman said so on the radio. You and me heard his voice on the loudspeaker while we stood on the fantail, two nobodies from the boonies, waving good-bye to the dead. Now John, here is how I remember the rest of it: We get discharged at the navy receiving station in San Diego and ride a bus all the way home, but when we crossed the Montana line the only thing you said was, “Looks better with a few hills,” and when I asked if I’d see you again, you said, “Yes.” I got to my ranch and there was nothing there, cows gone, machinery rusted into the ground, saddle horses stolen or eaten. But fifty years comes and goes and you wait for a time like this. The Gazette ran a picture of a battleship graveyard around Mobile, Alabama, and I seen our little cruiser in the pack of wrecked ships but I ain’t seen you.
Well here I am, said Red Wolf, and I followed him into the canyon
where the sky was upside down and we could walk straight into the stars.
A Note About the Author
Thomas McGuane lives in Sweet Grass County, Montana. He is the author of eight previous novels—The Sporting Club, The Bushwacked Piano, Ninety-two in the Shade, Panama, Nobody’s Angel, Something to Be Desired, Keep the Change, and Nothing but Blue Skies—and a collection of stories, To Skin a Cat, as well as two collections of essays, Some Horses and The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing.
Also by Thomas McGuane
The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing
Some Horses
Nothing but Blue Skies
Keep the Change
To Skin a Cat
Something to Be Desired
Nobody’s Angel
The Cadence of Grass Page 22