Ride With Me, Mariah Montana

by Ivan Doig

  “Good idea,” Riley said.

  “Going on out to the Winnebago,” I said.

  “Yeah, fine,” he said.

  “Mariah’s already out there,” I said.

  “Is she,” he said.

  “Morning will be here before we know it,” I said.

  Riley, still considerably furrowed up himself, studied me. Then he glanced at Kimi, who was giving us both a smile we could almost see our reflections in. When Riley turned back to me, his frown was severe. But to my surprise, he closed up his notebook, said a regretful thanks to Kimi for her inspiration, and accompanied me out into the night and the Winnebago.

  • • •

  Sure enough, readers of the Montanian were treated to Riley’s dissertation about bartenders, that their wares were as integral to a citizenry such as ours as food and water, and that ever since the first saloons of Virginia City and the other goldstrike towns, a considerable portion of Montana’s history could be measured the way irrigation is, by the liquid acre-foot. And of course: These nights, if you hold your mouth right, the moisture of mercy may be dispensed to you by a Kimi Wyszynski . . . At least a Sloe Comfortable You Know What was nowhere in it.

  Mariah’s picture had caught the smiling countenance of Kimi in the beer glass where the top portion begins to bulge out of the slender base. The woozy distortion puffed Kimi’s cheeks out like a squirrel loaded for winter, made her teeth enormous, and squinched her eyes together. She resembled a nearsighted beaver looking at itself in a crazyhouse mirror.

  We were camped that night on the Jefferson River just out of Silver Star, bracing for Butte the next day. Riley was in the shower at the back of the Bago, singing over and over: “Oh, the moon still shines, on the moonshine stills, in the hills where the lupine twiiines!” Conspicuously ignoring the melody of Riley, Mariah was across the dinette table from me fussing with one camera after another, whisking invisible dust off their lenses with the daintiest brush I’d ever seen.

  I again studied the newsprint version of Kimi spread in front of me. I had to ask. “Mariah, is the newspaper really going to keep paying you and Riley for going around the state doing stuff like this?”

  Without looking up she said, “We’ll find out.”

  They named the place Butte, in the way that the night sky’s button of light acquired the round sound of moon or the wind took to itself its inner sigh of vowel. Butte was echoingly what it was: an abrupt upshoot of earth, with the namesake city climbing out of its slopes.

  Beneath Butte’s rind of sagebrush and rock lay copper ore.

  That red earth of Butte held industrial magic: telephone lines, radio innards, the wire ganglia of stoves and refrigerators, everything that made America electric began there in copper.

  The red copper earth drew other red to it. Bloody Butte, with its copper corpuscles. A dozen miners died underground in 1887, the early days of more muscle than machinery. In 1916, as the machine drill and the steam-hoisted shaft cage pressed the implacable power of technology against flesh and bone, Butte’s underground toll for the year was 65 miners. The next year, a fire in the Speculator Mine killed 164. All the while, the greater killer quietly destroyed men’s lungs: silicosis, 675 dead of it between 1907 and 1913.

  On its earth and its people of the mines, then, Butte’s history of scars. Badges of honor, too, as scars sometimes are? It depends on how much blood you mind having in your copper. Maybe less arguable is Butte’s history of chafe. “This beautiful copper collar, that the Company gave to me” became Butte’s—Montana’s—wry anthem of life under the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, a.k.a. William Rockefeller and Henry Rogers and others of Wall Street. The Butte miner was consistently the best paid workman in Montana. The ACM Company also saw to it that he was the most harnessed. Strikebreakers and Company police. The Company-imposed “rustling card” you had to carry to rustle up a job in the mines. The Montana National Guard stationed in the streets of Butte after dynamite punctuated the labor struggle in 1914. In its streets and its wallets and its caskets, Butte was its own kind of example of how a copperwired society works.

  Enormous above Riley’s words, Mariah’s Butte photo was of the Berkeley Pit, the almost unbelievable open-pit mine which took the copper role from the played-out mineshafts everywhere under the streets of the city: a bulldozed crater a mile wide and deeper than the Empire State Building is tall. Ex-mine, it too now was, having been abandoned in favor of cheaper digging in South America.

  • • •

  “Quite the Butte story,” I observed to the newspaper hotshots shortly after perusing it in that day’s Montanian. “Who’s going to deal?”

  “I will,” stated Mariah, plucking up the deck of cards and shuffling them with a fluent riffle which drew her a glance from Riley. We had pulled in at the Missouri Headwaters RV Park in Three Forks for the night. By now it had been most of a week since the Virginia City situation got so drastically Kimied, but conversation between Mariah and Riley still was only on the scale of “pass the ketchup, would you” and “here, take it.” Thus an evening of playing pitch was my bright idea for cheering up Bago life. Of course I’d had to bribe Riley into it by letting him off the dishwashing for the next three nights, but well worth it.

  “The Butte piece was just a thumbsucker,” Riley took care to let me know as Mariah whizzed out six cards apiece to us.

  I can put up with a lot while playing pitch, which to my way of thinking is the only card game worth sitting up to, and so I responded to Riley’s latest codegram: “How do you mean? What’s a thumbsucker?”

  “A think piece. When a writer sticks a thumb in his mouth and thinks he’s on the tit of wisdom,” Riley said moodily.

  “No way was that Butte story of his a thumbsucker,” Mariah informed me past Riley as if he was not at the table with us. “He wrote what needed saying. Now he’s just having one of those oh-my-God-I-shot-my-wad spasms writers get.”

  Damned with faint praise or praised with a faint damn or wherever it was Mariah’s backhanded defense had left him, Riley only snorted and concentrated fiercely on the cards in his hand.

  Mariah fanned her own cards out, gave them a quick pinched appraisal and asked, “Who dealt this mess?”

  “You did, butterfly,” I informed her.

  “Oh. Then it’s up to you to bid first.”

  “I know. I am. Give a person time.” I mulled what I held, primarily the king and jack of diamonds and then a bunch of junk like the seven of hearts and three even littler clubs. “I’ll say two.”

  “Three,” Riley grandly upped.

  Mariah passed, and Riley led out with the queen of hearts, which she unhappily had to top with her king, and now it was my play. This is what’s nice about pitch: the strategy needed right from the first card. By making hearts trump, Riley transformed my jack of diamonds into the jick, which is to say, the off card of the same color as the jack of trump. That, incidentally, is where my nickname springs from, the pronouncement by a family friend back when my folks were trying to fit the solemn given name John and then the equally unright Jack onto the child me that “He looks to me more like the jick of this family.” Nomenclature aside, though, the rule in pitch is that jack takes jick but jick takes joker, and so here I could either mandatorily follow suit, hearts, with my seven and hope to take some later trick and maybe even somebody’s joker or tenspot with my jick, or, since Mariah’s king was taking this trick, I could forthwith sluff the jick to her so she would gain the point instead of the bidder, Riley. See what I mean about what a strategic marvel pitch is?

  I sluffed my jick, drawing me a grin from Mariah and a dirty look from Riley. Which got another load of topsoil added to it after he trumped in on the next trick to regain the lead, led back with his invincible ace of hearts and instead of capturing a jack or joker or even a tenspot to count toward game, received an out-of-trump spade from Mariah and my seven of hearts, equally worthless to him.

  Of his three bid, Riley so far only had one, that un
losable trump ace he’d just played. He now was pondering so deep you could almost hear his brain throb. His choices were perfectly clear, really—lead with his next strongest card and try to clean us out of any nontrump face cards or tens that would count toward game, or lead something weak and keep back his strong card to capture any of our face ones etcetera on the final trick—and so I helped him employ his time by asking him, “Well, then, Wordsworth, what kind of a Butte story would you rather have done than the one you did?”

  “You saw those faces in the M & M yesterday,” Mariah enlightened me as Riley tried to glower at each of us and study his cards at the same time. “What the scribbler wants is for those old Butte guys to read his stuff and fall off their barstools backwards and kick their legs in the air while they shout, ‘That’s me! Riley Wright told my whole life in that piece of his!’ ”

  Riley clutched his cards rigidly and asked her with heat, “What the fuck’s wrong with that?”

  “Not a thing,” she told him as if surprised at his utter density. “Don’t you know a fucking compliment when you get one?”

  Yesterday’s Butte faces, yes. We’d begun on Butte by stopping in the old uptown area for lunch at the M & M, an enterprise which is hard to pin down but basically includes a fry kitchen and counter on one side and a serious bar along the other and sporting paraphernalia such as electronic poker machines in the entire back half of the building, and within it all a grizzled clientele who appeared to be familiar with most of life’s afflictions, plus a few younger people evidently in the process of undergoing that same set of travails. All my life until actually coming there with the newspaper pair I had been leery of Butte. Of its molelike livelihood, as mining seemed to us surface-of-the-earth types. Of THE COMPANY, as the Anaconda Copper Mining Company was known in big letters in the Montana of my younger days, because Butte and its ore wealth were why THE COMPANY took the trouble to run everything it could think of in the state. Of, yes, younger incarnations of the rugged clientele around the three of us at that moment, for in its heyday of nine thousand miners Butte was famously a drinking whoring fistfighting place; when you met up with someone apt to give you trouble from his knuckles, the automatic evaluation was “too much Butte in him.” But now with the M & M as a kind of comfortable warehouse of so much that had been Butte, and replete with the highly delicious lunch—a pork chop sandwich and a side dish of boiled cabbage with apricot pie for dessert had done nicely for me—I’d been quite taken with the hard-used old city. Until I happened to glance at the latest case of thirst barging in the door of the M & M, and it was the ghost of Ed Heaney nodding hello to me.

  Bald as glass, with middle age living up to its name by accumulating on his middle, Ed was owner of the lumber yard in Gros Ventre and the father of my best friend in my growing-up years. An untalkative man whose habits were grooves of behavior the town could have told time by, nonetheless he had pieces of life that spoke fascination to me; his own boyhood in unimaginable Butte, his medals from Belleau Wood and other battles of the First World War tucked away in a dresser drawer. As I stared across the M & M at Ed’s reincarnation, there where I’d been sure that the past could find no reason to swoosh out all over me, my mind split again. The everyday part knowing full well that Ed Heaney was many years gone to the grave and that probably half of male Butte resembled Ed. The remembering remnant of me, though, abruptly seeing a front lawn at dusk, during a town trip when I had swung by to quick-visit my friend Ray, and as we gab there on the grass the front porch screen door swings open and Ed Heaney stands in its surprise frame of light, as his lookalike did now in this Butte doorway, the radio news a murmur steady as a rumor behind Ed. “Ray, Mary Ellen,” Ed calling out into the yard to his son and small daughter that first evening of September of 1939, “you better come in the house now. They’ve started another war in Europe.”

  The whap of Riley’s finally chosen card on the table brought me back from Butte and beyond. He’d decided to lead an inconsequential five of clubs, which Mariah nonchalantly stayed under with the trey, so I ended up taking the trick with my mere six of clubs. I at once led back with my king of diamonds, which sent Riley into ponder again.

  Mariah decided to employ this waiting period by working on me. “You know, you’d have plenty of time to shave before Riverboat Wright here plays his next card.”

  Before I could come up with a dignified reply, Riley surprised me by rapping out to her on my behalf: “What the hell, the beard gives him a hobby where there’s not much danger he’ll saw his fingers off.”

  I knew, though, he wasn’t so much sticking up for me and my whisker project as he was jabbing it to Mariah. He could have chosen a better time to do it; when he finally played he still didn’t use his strong card, whatever it was, and merely followed suit on my king with a lowly diamond. Mariah immediately gave him a wicked grin and sluffed me the ten of spades. Hoo hoo. Riley was a screwed monkey, and by now even he knew it. Sure enough, for the final trick he’d been saving the jack of hearts, the highest trump card left, but all it earned him was my deuce of clubs and Mariah’s eight of spades, neither worth anything.

  I cheerfully scorekept. One wooden match to Mariah for the jick I’d sluffed her, two to myself—besides my having the highest count for game, courtesy of the tenspot she’d sluffed me, my seven of hearts proved to be the low of trump—and three broken-backed matches to Riley to indicate he’d gone set and now was three points in the hole.

  “My God!” he uttered when the game concluded several hands later with me at twenty-one, Mariah hot behind me at nineteen, and him still three in the hole. “Playing pitch with you two is like trying to eat a hamburger in the middle of a wolfpack.”

  Nor, despite being called a quitter every way Mariah and I could think of, and between us, that was quite a few, would Riley risk his neck any further in more pitch that evening. He took his mood off to bed at the back of the Bago, and while he got himself installed there I helped Mariah make up her couch bed per usual. Per usual she gave me a goodnight-in-spite-of-the-stickery-on-your-face kiss. Per usual I headed back to scrunch into bed beside Riley and speculate.

  Nights with Riley were an ordeal. He dropped off to dreamville the moment he was horizontal, but before long the commotion would begin. There alongside of me he’d start to shimmy in his sleep, little jerky motions of his shoulders and arms and spasmy tiny kicks of his legs and ungodly noises from his throat. Hnng. Nnhnng. Nnguhh! Actually it was kind of fascinating in a way, like watching a spirited dog napping beside a stove, whimpering and twitching as he runs a dream rabbit. But as Riley’s bed fuss went on and on I’d need eventually to whisper sharply, “hey, come out of it!” Mmm, he would acknowledge, almost agreeably, and I would try to rush to sleep before his next conniption.

  I do my dreaming awake, and so the uproar going on in Riley in his zoo of sleep I could not really savvy. Was he writing, his mind restlessly sorting words there in the dark? Or yearning, his body at least, for the Kimies of the world . . . or remembering when Mariah’s was the warm form beside him? Or was this merely something like an electrical storm in the night of the brain? Whatever was occurring, Riley Wright evidently paid for his days in the quivering of his nights.

  • • •

  Lewis and Clark had preceded Riley and Mariah a bit to this Three Forks area, discovering here in 1805 that a trio of rivers came together to make the source of the Missouri. Grandly christening every trickle of water they encountered all the way across the Dakotas and Montana, those original explorers nonetheless were smart enough to save up the names of their bosses, Jefferson, Madison and Gallatin, for these main tributaries, which I thought was more than passingly interesting. It didn’t register so with the subsequent newspaper pair, however, and after a fruitless day of traipsing around the headwaters area they decided they wanted to go on to Helena for the night—but by backtracking through Butte instead of the only-half-as-long route through Townsend.

  “Butte? Hold on a minute here. You did
Butte.”

  “Our Lady of the Rockies,” explained Mariah abstractedly.

  “Who’s she?”

  “Jesus’s mom,” Riley put in with equal unhelpfulness.

  “Riddle me no newspaper lingo riddles, you two. All I want to know is—”

  “The Mary statue,” Riley intoned with awful patience. “Up on the Divide, over Butte. Ninety feet tall, shiny white. Maybe you happened to notice it?”

  “Oh. That Lady of the Rockies.”

  But even the Madonna, giant robed figure who seemed to have popped over the mountaintop and stopped short in surprise at the sight of Butte, didn’t provide any miracle for these two. Or as they of course put it to one another: “Doesn’t work.”

  Thus we were finally Helena-bound on the freeway, just getting rolling atop the rise north of Butte, when the steering wheel wobbled significantly in my hands. I gave the news, “We’ve got ourselves a flat,” and pulled the Winnebago off onto the shoulder of the freeway.

  “At least this goes real nice with the rest of the day,” Riley groused as we all three climbed forth into the dusk and I went to get the spare tire out. “Stuff it, Riley,” Mariah told him, and from her tone she quite possibly meant the entire spare tire.

  “Do you suppose you two could manage to quit the bloodletting long enough to—” I began, but was interrupted by a car horn’s merry beep beepitybeepbeep beep beep!

  Shave and a haircut, six bits, my rosy rear end. I irritatedly waved the approaching car past us but no, here it gaily pulled off onto the side of the road in front of us, an ’84 ketchup-red Corvette driven by an old guy wearing a ballcap. As I was about to shout to him that we had the situation under control, thanks anyway, there came the winding-down sound of another slowing car, and an ’81 white Buick LeSabre, another ballcapped grayhead at the wheel, beeped past and ground to a stop on the shoulder gravel in front of the Corvette.

  Riley and Mariah and I turned our heads to the highway behind us as if we were on one swivel.