English Creek - Ivan Doig

by Ivan Doig

  We viewed the pool, which took no time at all, and then thrashed on along in the creek brush for awhile, just to be doing anything. It was semi-swampy going, so at least we could concentrate on jumping across the wet holes. Ray was dressed in what I suppose his mother thought were old enough clothes to go into the country with, but his old clothes were so noticeably ritzier than my everyday ones that he maybe was embarrassed about that. Anyway, for whatever reason, he put up with this brushwhacking venture of mine.

  Whacked was what he got. My mind was on something else, likely how much of the day still gaped ahead of us, and without thinking I let a willow spring back as I pushed past it. It whipped Ray across the left side of his face and drew a real yelp from him. Also a comment to me:

  "Watch out with those, beetle brain."

  "Didn’t mean to," I apologized. Which most likely would have buried the issue, except for what I felt honor bound to add next: "Sparrow head."

  You wonder afterwards how two reasonably sane people descend into a slanging match like that.

  "Slobberguts," Ray upped the ante with.

  "Booger eater," I promptly gave him back.

  “Pus gut."

  “Turd bird."

  As I remember it, I held myself in admirable rein until Ray came out with "turkey dink."

  For some reason that one did it. I swung on Ray and caught him just in front of the left ear. Unluckily, not quite hard enough to knock him down.

  He popped me back, alongside the neck. We each got in a few more swings, then the fisticuffs degenerated into a wrestle. More accurately, a mud wallow.

  We each were strong enough, and outraged enough, to be able to tip the other, so neither one of us ended up permanently on top. Simply, at some point we wore out on wanting to maul one another any further, and got to our feet. Ray’s clothes looked as if he’d been rolled the length of a pig pen. Mine I guess weren’t much better, but they hadn’t started off as fancy and so I figured my muss didn’t matter as much. Of course, try convince my mother of that. Come noon we had to straggle in to get any dinner, and when she laid eyes on us, we were in for a scouring in more ways than one. Ray she made change into a set of my clothes—funny, how improved he looked when he was out of that town gear—and sat us at opposite ends of the table while we ate, then immediately afterward she issued two decrees: "Jick, I believe you would like To Read in the Other Room. Ray, I think you would like To Put Together the Jigsaw Puzzle I Am Going to Put Here on the Table for You."

  When I started high school in Gros Ventre, Ray came over to me at noon hour the first day. He planted himself just out of arm’s reach from me and offered: "Horse apple."

  I balled up both my fists, and my tongue got ready the words which would fan our creekside battle to life again: "Beaver tooth." Yet the direction of Ray’s remark caught my notice. "Horse apple" was pretty far back down the scale from "turkey dink."

  For once in my life I latched on to a possibility. I held my stance and tendered back to Ray: "Mud minnow."

  It started a grin on him while he thought up: "Slough rat."

  “Gumbo gopher," I provided, barely managing to get it out before we were both laughing.

  Within the week I was asking my mother whether I could stay in town overnight with Ray, and after that I made many a stay-over at the Heaneys’ throughout the school year. Not only did I gain the value of Ray and me being the best of friends; it was always interesting to me that the Heaneys were a family as different from ours as crochet from oil cloth. For one thing they were Catholic, although they really didn’t display it all that much. Just through a grace before every meal and a saint here and there on the wall and eating fish on Friday, which eventually occurred to me as the reason Ray had looked at me suspiciously there at the creek when I asked him about fishing. For another, in almost every imaginable way the Heaney family was as tidy as spats on a rooster. (The “almost" was this : Ray and his sister Mary Ellen, three years younger, were allowed liberties with their food that I’d never dreamt of. Take hotcakes as an example. Ray and Mary Ellen poured some syrup on, then rolled each hotcake up, then syruped the outside and began eating. A kind of maple syrup tamale, I now know enough to realize. When I first began overnighting with them they urged me to try mine that way, but the thought of my mother’s response to something like that made me figure I might as well not get converted. At other meals too Ray and Mary Ellen squooged their food around in remarkable ways and ate only as much of it as they felt like. I tell you, it shocked me: people my own age leaving plates that looked more as if they’d been walked through than eaten from.) Ray’s mother, Genevieve, kept that big two-story house dusted and doilied to a faretheewell. Mary Ellen already had her mind set on being a nurse—she was a kind of starchy kid anyway, so it was a good enough idea—and you couldn’t scratch a finger around there without her wanting to daub it with Mercurochrome and wrap you up like a mummy.

  Then there was Ray’s father, Ed. You could hang your hat on Ed Heaney’s habits. Every evening he clicked the lock on the door of the lumber yard office as if it was the final stroke needed to complete six o’clock, and if he wasn’t walking in the kitchen door at five minutes after six, Genevieve started peering out the kitchen window to see what had happened to him. Another five minutes, Ed washing up and toweling down, and supper began. As soon as supper was over Ed sat at the kitchen table going through the Falls Leader and visiting with Genevieve while she did the dishes, his deep voice and her twinkly one, back and forth, back and forth. Then at seven straight up, Ed strode into the living room, planted himself in his rocking chair and clicked on the big Silvertone floor radio. He listened straight through until ten o’clock—if somebody spouting Abyssinian had come on the air, Ed would have sat there and listened—and then went up to bed.

  Thus everything in the Heaney household in the evening was done against the backdrop of Ed’s Silvertone, and Genevieve and Ray and Mary Ellen had become so used to tuning out sound that you often had to say something to them a couple of times to make it register. In Ray, there was an opposite kind of consequence, too. Ray had heard so much radio he could mimic just about any of it, Eddie Cantor and Walter Winchell and Kaltenborn giving the news and all those. But Ed, I was telling about. You couldn’t know it to look at Ed Heaney, because the lumber yard life had put a middle on him, and he was bald as a jug, but he served in France during the war. In fact spent I don’t know how much time in the trenches. Enough that he didn’t want to squander one further minute of his life talking about it, evidently. Just once did I ever manage to get him going on that topic. That Ed won some medals over there I knew because Ray once sneaked them out of a dresser drawer in Ed and Genevieve’s bedroom and showed them to me. You wouldn’t expect medal-winning about Ed either. In any case, though, one Heaney suppertime when I was in to stay with Ray some topic came up that emboldened me to outright ask Ed what he remembered most about being in the war. Figuring, of course, I might hear tales that led to the medals.

  “Shaving."

  After a while Ed glanced up from his eating and realized that Ray and Mary Ellen and Genevieve and I were all regarding him in astymied way.

  "We had to shave every day," he elaborated. "Wherever we were. Belleau Wood, we only got a canteen of water per man per day. But we still used some of it to shave. The gas masks they gave us were a French kind. Sort of a sack that went over your face like this." Ed ran a hand around his chinline. "If you had whiskers it didn’t fit tight enough. Gas would get in. You’d be a goner."

  Ed began to take another bite of his supper, but instead repeated:

  "Belleau Wood. About midday there we’d be in our foxholes—graves, we called them—all of us shaving, or holding our shirts up to read them for lice. Thousands of us, all doing one or the other." The other four of us waited, dumbstruck, to see where this sudden hallway of Ed’s memory led.

  But all he said more was “Pass the stringbeans, please."

  Now that we were established atop the a
rena corral, I reported to Ray my chin session with Dode Withrow at the beer booth. Ray took what might be called a spectator interest in the Withrow family. He never came right out and said so, but his eye was on the middle Withrow girl, Marcella, who was in the same high school class we were. Marcella was trim in figure like Midge and had a world-by-the-tail grin like Dode’s usual one. So far Ray’s approach to Marcella was distant admiration, but I had the feeling he was trying to figure out how to narrow the distance.

  Maybe the day would come when I was more interested in a Leona or a Marcella than in perching up there above general humanity, but right then I doubted it. I considered that the top-pole perch Ray and I had there next to the bucking chutes was the prime site of the whole rodeo grounds. We had clear view of every inch of the arena, the dirt oval like a small dry lake bed before us. And all the event action would originate right beside us, where even now the broncs for the first section of bareback riding were being hazed into the chutes alongside my corral spot. The particular Gros Ventre bucking chute setup was that as six broncs at a time were hazed in for their set of riders, pole panels were retracted between each chute, leaving what had been the half-dozen chutes as one long narrow pen. Then as the horses crowded in in single file, the panels were shoved in place behind them one by one, penning each bronc into the chute it would buck into the arena from. As slick a system as there is for handling rodeo broncs, I suppose. But what is memorable to me about it is the instant before the pole panels were shoved into place to serve as chute dividers: when the horses came swarming into the open chute pen, flanks heaving, heads up and eyes glittering. From my perch, it was like looking down through a transom into a long hallway suddenly filled with big

  perplexed animals. Not many sights are its equal.

  Above and to the left of Ray and me was the announcing booth and its inhabitants, a nice proximity which added to the feeling that we were part of the inside happenings of the rodeo. To look at, the booth resembled a little woodshed up on stilts, situated there above and just in back of the middle of the bucking chutes. It held elbow room for maybe six people, although only three of the booth crowd did any actual rodeo work. Tollie Zane, if you could call his announcing work. Tollie evidently was in residence at the far end of the booth, angled out of view from us but a large round microphone like a waffle iron standing on end indicated his site. Then nearest to us was the scorekeeper, Bill Reinking, editor of the Gleaner, prominent with his ginger mustache and silver-wire eyeglasses. I suppose he did the scorekeeping on the principle that the only sure way for the Gleaner to get any accuracy on the rodeo results was for him to originate the arithmetic. Between Bill and Tollie was the space for the timekeeper, who ran the stopwatch to time the events and blew the whistle to signal when a bronc rider had lasted eight seconds atop a bareback or ten in a saddle ride. The timekeeper’s spot in the booth was empty, but this was about to be remedied.

  "Wup wup wup," some Paul Revere among the chute society cried.

  “Here she comes, boys! Just starting up the ladder !"

  Heads swiveled like weathervanes hit by a tornado. And yes, Ray and I also sent our eyes around to the little ladder along the side of the announcing booth and the hypnotizing progress up it of Velma

  Simms.

  "Tighter than last year, I swear to God," someone below us was contending.

  "Like the paper fits the wall," testified another.

  And yet another, "But I still need to know, how the hell does she get herself into those britches ?"

  Velma Simms came of Eastern money. Plumbing equipment I believe was its source; I have seen her family name, Croake, on hot-and-cold spigots. And in a community and era which considered divorce usually more grievous than manslaughter, she had been through three husbands. That we knew of. Only the first was local, the lawyer Paul Bogan. They met in Helena when he got himself elected to the legislature, and if my count is right, it was at the end of his second term when Velma arrived back to Gros Ventre and Paul stayed over there at the capital in some kind of state job. Her next husband was a fellow named Sutter, who’d had an automobile agency in Spokane. In Gros Ventre he was like a trout out of water, and quickly went. After him came Simms, an actor Velma happened across in some summer performance at one of the Glacier Park lodges. By February of his first Two country winter Simms was hightailing his way to California, although he eventually did show up back in Gros Ventre, so to speak, as one of the cattle rustlers in a Gene Autry movie at the Odeon. Lately Velma seemed to have given up marrying and instead emerged each Fourth with a current beau tagging along. They tended to be like the scissorbill following her up the ladder now, in a gabardine stockman’s suit and a too clean cream Stetson, probably a bank officer from Great Falls. I cite all this because Paul Bogan, the first in the genealogy, always had served as rodeo timekeeper, and the next Fourth of July after his change of residence, here Velma presented herself, bold as new paint, to take up his stopwatch and whistle. It was her only instance of what might be called civic participation, and quite why she did it nobody had a clue. But Velma’s ascension to the booth now was part of every Gros Ventre rodeo. Particularly for the male portion of the audience. For as you may have gathered, Velma on her Fourth appearances was encased in annual new slacks of stunning snugness. One of the theoreticians in the chute society just now was postulating a fresh concept, that maybe Velma heated them with an iron, put them on hot, and let them shrink down on her like the rim onto a wagon wheel.

  I saw once, in recent years at the Gros Ventre rodeo, a young bronc rider and his ladyfriend watching the action through the pole arena gate. They each held a can of beer in one hand, and the rider’s other hand was around the girl’s shoulders. Her other hand, though, was down resting lightly on his rump, the tips of her fingers just touching the inseam of his Levis back there. I’ll admit to you, it made my heart turn around and face north. That the women now can and will do such a thing seems to me an advance like radio. My awe of it is tempered only by the regret that I am not that young man, or any other. But let that go. My point here is just that in the earlier time, only rare

  self-advertised rumps such as that of Velma Simms were targets of public interest, and then only by what my father and the other rangers called ocular examination.

  It registered on me there had been a comment from Ray’s direction. “Come again?" I apologized.

  "No hitch in Velma’s gitalong," Ray offered one more time. I said something equally bright in agreement, but I was surprised at Ray making an open evaluation of Velma Simms, even so tame a

  one as that. The matter of Marcella maybe was on his mind more than I figured.

  Just then an ungodly noise somewhere between a howl and a yowl issued above us. A sort of high HHHRUNGHHH like a cat was being skinned alive. I was startled as hell, but Ray knew its source.

  "You see Tollie’s loudspeaking getup?" he inquired with a nod toward the top of the announcer’s booth. I couldn’t help but have noticed such a rig. The contraption was a pyramid of rods, which held at its peak a half-dozen big metal cones like those morning-glory horns on old phonographs, pointing to various points of the compass. Just in case those didn’t cover the territory, there was a second set of four more ’glory horns a couple of feet beneath. "He sent off to Billings for it," informed Ray, who had overheard this information when Tollie came to the lumber yard for a number of two-by-fours to help brace the contraption into place. “The guy who makes them down there told him it’s the real deal to announce with."

  We were not the only ones contemplating Tol]ie’s new announcing machinery. "What the goddamn hell’s Tollie going to do," I heard somebody say below us, “tell them all about it in Choteau?" Choteau was thirty-three miles down the highway.

  “WELCOME !" crackled a thunderblast of voice over our heads. "To the Gros Ventre rodeo! Our fifteenth annual show! You folks are wise as hooty owls to roost with us here today. Yes sir! Some of everything is liable to happen here today and—" Tollie Zane, f
ather of the famous Earl, held the job of announcing the Gros Ventre rodeo on the basis by which a lot of positions of authority seem to get filled: nobody else would be caught dead doing it. But before this year, all that the announcing amounted to was shouting through a megaphone the name of each bucking horse and its rider. The shiny new ’glory horns evidently had gone to Tollie’s head, or at least his tonsils. "The Fourth of July is called the cowboys’ Christmas and our festivities here today will get under way in just—"

  “Called what?" somebody yelled from the chute society. “That’s Tollie for you, sweat running down his face and he thinks it’s snowflakes."

  "Santy Claus must have brought him that goddamn talking contraption," guessed somebody else.

  "Naw, you guys, lay off now," a third one put in. "Tollie’s maybe right. It’d explain why he’s as full of shit as a Christmas goose."

  Everybody below us hee-heeed at that while Tollie roared on about the splendiferous tradition of rodeo and what heart-stopping excitement we were going to view in this arena today. Tollie was a kind of plodding talker anyway, and now with him slowed down either out of respect for the new sound system or because he was translating his remarks from paper—this July Christmas stuff was originating from somewhere; had a kit come with the ’glory horns and microphone you could about soft-boil an egg between parts of his sentences.

  "Anybody here from Great Falls ?"

  Quite a number of people yelled and waved their hands.

  “Welcome to America !"

  Out in the crowd there were laughs and groans. And most likely some flinching in the Rotary beer booth; a real boon to business, Tollie cracking wise at the expense of people who’d had ninety miles of driving time to wonder whether this rodeo was worth coming to. But this seemed to be a day when Tollie, armed with amplification, was ready to take on the world. "How about North Dakota? Who’s here from North Dakota ?"