by Ivan Doig
A cavalcade of cars was approaching, every one of them slowing. Already we were being given the beepitybeepbeep by the next about-to-pull-over vehicle, an elderly purple Cadillac.
Funeral procession, maybe? No, I’d never seen a funeral procession where everybody was wearing a ballcap. By now the first of what seemed to be geezerville on wheels, the Corvette pilot, was gimping his way along the barrow pit to us. “Got some trouble?” he called out cheerfully.
“We do now,” muttered Riley. Click, I heard Mariah’s camera capture our Corvette samaritan.
“Just a flat,” I called back as the line of pulled-over vehicles built and built in front of us. “We appreciate your stopping and all. But honest, we can handle—”
“Aw hell, no problem,” I was assured by Corvette, “we’re plenty glad to help.”
“Gives us somethin’ to do,” sang out LeSabre coming up at a stiff but hurried pace behind him.
“Yeah,” I said slowly, looking at the long file of parked cars, each with its trouble blinkers winking on and off, like a line of Christmas lights. As if in rhythm with the trouble lights, Mariah’s camera was clicking quick and often. Old men were hobbling out of the dusk toward us, two here, three there—they seemed to be a total of seven.
A long-haul truck thundered past, its transcontinental hurry accentuating the reposeful roadside caravan. “What are you guys,” I felt the need to ask, “some kind of car club?”
“We’re the Baloney Express riders,” the Corvettier answered with a grin that transmitted wrinkles throughout his face.
“The who?”
“What happens, see, is that we ride around taking used cars where dealers need them,” the explanation arrived. “Say for instance a used-car lot in Great Falls has got more vehicles than it wants, but a dealer down in Butte or over in Billings or somewhere ain’t got enough. Well, see, the bunch of us drive a batch of cars down to the one who’s short of them, and then go back home to the Falls in the van there.” Sure enough, a windowed van such as is used for a small bus had ended up at the head of the parked procession. “Or like now,” my tutor continued, “it’s the other way around, the Butte guy got too many cars on hand and so he called up for us to come down and fetch these back to the Falls. The idea is, it’s cheaper for the car dealers than hiring trucks to pack these cars around and besides it gives us,” he jerked his head to indicate the further half dozen oldtimers now clustering around us like cattle at a salt lick, “a way to pass some time. Oh sure, we maybe like to gab a little, too, riding together in the van—one of our wives says the Pony Express had nothing on us, we’re the Baloney Express. But see, we’re all retired. If we wasn’t doing this, we’d just be setting around being ornery.”
Mariah was working her camera and Riley was staring at the ball-caps, all of which read I ??? bowling. Where else can you get a pair of shoes so cheap? and so the conversational role seemed to be up to me. “Quite the deal,” I more or less congratulated the assemblage on their roadlife-in-retirement. Now that I had a closer look at these geezers, most of them, although stove-up and workworn, didn’t appear as ancient as I’d originally thought; somewhere into their seventies. Which meant that these retired specimens weren’t that much older than me, I had to admit with a pang. The one exception was a stooped long-faced fellow, about half-familiar to me, who either was a lot farther along in years than the others or had led a more imaginative life. He in fact spoke up now.
“Only thing wrong with this car setup we got is that the speed limit needs an adjustment. What we figure, there ought to be a law that a person can’t drive faster than what age he is. If you’re nineteen, say, you could only go nineteen miles an hour. That’d give us a little leeway to try out our speedometers.”
I chuckled and admitted the plan sounded highly logical. Meanwhile a subdelegation of Baloney Expressers was curiously inspecting the caved-in nose of the Bago where the Moiese buffalo had butted it. “What happened to your grill, you hit a helluva big deer?”
“Uh, not exactly.”
“As much as I hate to break up this soiree,” Riley announced in a contrary tone, “that tire still needs changing. Against my better judgment, I’ll even pitch in. Jick, where’s the jack?”
“Right there in the rear compartment. The lug wrench is there too,” I tacked on as a hint.
Riley gave me a barbed look, then one at the motionless Baloney Express bunch, and off he stalked. The next sound out of him was as he began grunting away at loosening the lug nuts of the flat tire.
Throughout that effort and then as he undertook to jack up the motorhome so the tire could come off, Riley’s every move was watched by our clot of visitors, the whole bunch of them bent over intently with hands on knees like a superannuated football huddle. They in turn were watched by Mariah through her camera as she moved in behind them, sighted, frowned at the line of hunched-over backs, dropped to one knee, grinned and shot.
Evidently irked by his silent jury, none of whom yet had done a tap of work in the changing of the tire, Riley now indicated a nearby NO STOPPING roadsign and pointed out, “If a highway cop comes along and finds this congregation, he’ll write tickets on you characters all night.”
“No problem,” Riley was assured by ’83 Ford Fairlane, a scrawny guy about shoulder-high to the rest of us. “My nephew’s the highway patrol along this stretch of road. If he comes along we’ll just have him turn his siren on and make things official.”
The Baloney Expressers all considered that a hilarious prospect, and a number of them gandered up and down the highway in hope of Fairlane’s patrolman nephew.
I have to say, I was beginning to enjoy this myself, Riley doing all the work and these guys providing me sevenfold company. My original partner in conversation introduced himself, Jerome Walker, and cited among the spectators one who resembled him—“My brother Julius; he’s older and smarter but I got the good looks”—and then the scrawny guy—“Another thing we call ourselves is The Magnificent Six and a Half, on account of Bill here”—and I handshook my way on down the line. The final guy Roger Tate, the stooped elderly-looking one, thought I looked as familiar as I thought he did. In Montana you only have to talk to a person for two minutes before you find you know them some way or another. But I wasn’t able to place Roger, nor he me, until we both admitted lifetimes in the sheep business. Then he broke out with:
“By the God, now I know you! That herder I found up under Roman Reef that time, he was yours! What was his name again?”
Pat Hoy. Pat the pastor of pasture, Pat the supreme pilot of sheep, unfazed by mountain timber and bear and coyotes and July snowstorms, who in a dozen years of herding for me always grazed his band in the exact same slowgoing scatter-them-twice-as-wide-as-you-think-you-dare-to style which he enunciated as: “Sheep don’t eat with their feet, so running will never fatten them.” I had inherited him, so to speak, from my father-in-law Dode Withrow when Dode at last declared himself too old for the sheepraising life. Thus I acquired not only a matchless herder but Pat’s twice a year migrations into spree as well. How many times I made that journey to First Avenue South in Great Falls and fetched Pat out of one saloon or another, flat broke and shakily winding down from his two-week binge of at first whiskey and then beer and at last cheap wine. But for all the aggravation his semi-annual thirsts provided, how much I would give to wipe out the day when I arrived to tend his camp and saw that Pat’s sheepdog was there at the wagon but Pat and sheep were nowhere in sight. That sent an instant icicle through me, dog but no herder, and while I found the sheep scattered over half of Roman Reef, there still was no sign of Pat. The next day a Forest Service crew and ranchers from English Creek and Noon Creek and the Teton country helped me to search, and so it came to be Roger Tate of the Teton contingent who rode onto the scene of Pat’s corpse near a big lone rock outcropping, the kind that draws down lightning. The lightning bolt had struck Pat in the head and followed the zipper of his coat down the body, searing as it went.
> I remembered staring down at Pat before we loaded him onto the packhorse. Since the time of my boyhood, lightning has always been one of my dreads, and here was what it looked like.
“Right you are. Pat Boyd. That was the fellow,” Roger Tate was saying over Riley’s lug wrench grunts. “Sure was a terrible thing. But it happens.”
What also happens, I realized, is a second obliteration, the slower kind that was occurring now. Pat Hoy had been as good at what he did as any of us ever can be. But Dode Withrow, who knew that and joyously testified to it at the drop of a hat in his countless yarns about Pat, Dode too was dead. Pat’s favorite denizens of First Avenue South, Bouncing Betty and Million Volt Millie and other companions of his sprees and megaphones of his reputation betweentimes, were gone to time now too. Even Roger here, original witness of Pat passing into the past, by now was losing grasp of that struck-down sheepherder’s name; and Roger’s remaining years as a memory carrier of any sort could not be many. It hit me out of nowhere, that I very nearly was the last who knew anything of the wonders of Pat Hoy.
“How about yourself?” one of the group in the barrow pit asked me. I blinked at that until I managed to backtrack and savvy that he meant what was the purpose of my own travels in the motorhome here.
“Just, uh, out seeing the country.” All I’d need would be to tell these guys what Riley and Mariah were up to, and there’d doubtless be a long choirsing from them about what was wrong with newspapers these days. Mariah by now had moved off into the sagebrush and was shooting shots of the whole blinking fleet of vehicles. “My daughter there kind of likes to take pictures. And the other one”—how was I going to put this? that Riley was her ex-husband but still tagging around with her?—“is a guy in the paper business we been letting ride with us. Kind of a glorified hitchhiker.”
Riley by now had the spare tire on and the Bago jacked back down. All that remained was for him to take the lug wrench and reef down hard in a final tighten of the lug nuts, but his audience showed no sign of dispersing until the performance was utterly over. Mariah materialized at my side, camera still busy, just as the voice of Roger the van driver resumed what must have been a perpetual conversation among the Baloney Express riders.
“By the God, you just never know about these cars. Back in 1958 I paid a guy to haul away five Model T’s just to get them off the place, paid the guy! And now what the hell wouldn’t they be worth, the way people are fixing old cars up and using them in these centennial parades and all.”
Riley did a final contortion over a lug nut, then headed stormily over to Mariah and me. “Okay, the goddamn tire’s changed,” he muttered, “let’s abandon the Grandpa Club and—” then he went oomp as Mariah nudged him ungently in the ribs with her elbow. “Mariah, what the f—”
“Riley,” she half-whispered, “will you shut your face long enough to look at what we’ve got here?”
“So you figure we just better hang onto these clunkers instead of turning them over to the dealer, do you, Rog?” one of the others was responding to the saga of the lost treasure of Model T’s. “Make rich guys out of ourselves at the next centennial, huh?”
“Sounds good to me,” chimed in another voice. “A hundred years from now, I’ll still only be thirty-nine by then.”
A round of laughter, which multiplied when somebody else put in on him. “Nick, we’re talking age here, not IQ.”
By now Riley had his notebook out. “Five hundred years’ worth of geezers in one bunch,” his mutter changed to murmur. “Could work,” he acknowledged, almost as much to himself as to Mariah. He turned to her, doubtless to ask if she had a decent picture for the piece, thought better of it from the expression on her face, and headed over to talk the Baloney Expressers into more talking.
They listened silent as fenceposts as Riley told them who he and Mariah were and what they were up to, Mariah backing him with an encouraging encompassing grin. Then the seven oldsters cast glances at each other without a word. Incipient fame seemed to have taken their tongues.
Finally one of them broached: “You gonna put all of us in the paper? It wouldn’t be too good if just some of us was in and not others, if you see what we mean.”
“Every mother’s child,” Riley grandly assured them of inclusion. “Now here’s how we’re going to have to do this.” He scooted off into the Bago and was back immediately with his mini tape recorder. I was wondering myself how Riley was going to conduct a sevenway interview. We couldn’t stay camped on the shoulder of the highway forever; every couple of minutes now a pickup or car was pulling in at the head of the line of ferried cars and a voice calling down the barrow pit in the dusk, “Everything okay there?” and one or the other of the Baloney Expressers would cup his hands to his mouth and cheerfully shout back, “No problem.”
Riley’s program turned out to be as simple as leapfrog. He would ride with the first driver at the head of the cavalcade for ten minutes, then that car would pull over and he would hop back to the second car, which in turn would become the lead car and interviewee for ten minutes, and on back through the seven drivers that way by the time we all reached Helena. “You guys are going to have to tell fast,” Riley warned as he set the beeper on his wristwatch. “No room for hooey.” The Baloney Expressers looked collectively offended at that word, but tagteam storytelling plainly appealed to them. They didn’t budge yet, though, all standing trying to look innocently hopeful in regard to a certain red-headed young woman.
“Ride with me, Mariah, would you?” I asked, breaking seven geezer hearts simultaneously. Away the Expressers gimped to their vehicles, Riley heading for the lead van with its driver.
They have seen the majority of Montana’s century, each of these seven men old in everything but their restlessness, and as their carefully strewn line of taillights burns a route into the night their stories ember through the decades.
“I’m Roger Tate. I seem to be the oldest of this gang, if the truth be told. Maybe that’s why they let me drive the van. Or maybe it’s the fact that it’s my van. Anyway, what I’d tell you about is my dad and those Model T’s. Back in the twenties we raised sheep out a hell of a ways from town, west from Choteau there, and when my dad bought his first Model T he figured it was a wonderful advance, you know. Any time he wanted now he could scoot into town and get lit up. Only thing was, every time he came home from a spree like that he’d never bother to open a gate. Drive right through all the barbwire gates between town and our place, four of them. I was misfortunate enough to be the only boy in the family, so the next day he’d send me out to fix those doggone gates. I must have mended those four gates forty times apiece. That habit of his was kind of hard on cars, too, which was how we ended up with five Model T’s. Eventually my dad gave out before the world supply of whiskey did, and it fell to me to build the ranch back up. But I’ve often thought, you know, thank the Lord that the old boy had gone into sheep instead of anything else. Not even he could entirely drink up the wool money each year before the lamb money came.”
This spell of driving time alone with Mariah I figured I had better make use of. I started off conversationally, “These pictures you’re breaking your fanny on, petunia. What is it you’re trying to do in them, that inside-the-turtle kind of stuff Riley was talking about?”
From the corner of my eye I saw her give that little toss of head, her hair surging back over her shoulder. “Something like, I suppose. But the way I think of it is that I’m trying to do cave paintings.”
I nodded and mmhmmed. She’d taken the next summer after she and Riley split up, and gone to Europe to get over him. When her mother and I asked what she’d seen, her answer was caves. In France and Spain she had crouched and crawled through tunnel after tunnel into the past to see those deep walls with their paintings of bison and horses and so on from Stone Age times. Maybe ten thousand years, she said, those bison had been grazing and those horses running there in the stone dark.
The warning wink of brake lights. Like a flex
ible creature of the night, the chain of cars compresses itself to a halt on the shoulder of the freeway, then moves on.
“Bill Bradley, I am. Not the long tall basketball senator, as you maybe already noticed. I guess I would want to tell about the grasshoppers. My folks and I was farming over towards Malta there in the Depression and just when we figured things couldn’t get any worse, here came those ’hoppers and cleaned us out of our crop worse than any hailstorm ever could of. An absolute cloud of grasshoppers. You just can’t believe how those buggers were. They sounded bad enough in the air, that sort of whirring noise the way sage chickens make when they take off, only a thousand times louder. But on the ground was worse. You could actually hear those things eating. Millions of grasshoppers and every last one of them chewing through a stem of wheat. I left my coat hanging on the door handle of the pickup and they even ate that to shreds. It still makes me about half sick to remember the sound of those grasshoppers eating, eating, eating.”
“Lascaux and Altamira,” Mariah spoke the cave names as if talking of friends we both knew. “That’s what I want my work to be like.” Her voice came low and lovely, remembered tone of another woman I had loved, her mother.
“Do you see what I mean, Jick?” This next part she seemed to want me to particularly understand. “Something people can look back at, whenever, and get a grasp of our time. Another hundred years from now, or a hundred thousand—the amount of time between shouldn’t make any difference. If my pictures are done right, people whenever ought to be able to say, ‘oh, that’s what was on their minds then.’ ”
And I think I did savvy what Mariah was getting at, that in a way—the waiting, the watching, the arrowing moment—she with her camera was in that cavewall lineage of portrait-painting hunters as patient as stone.
Down the long slope ahead of us, the car at the front of the cavalcade delivered its brakelight signal of stopping, blink blinketyblinkblink blink blink.