Ride With Me, Mariah Montana

by Ivan Doig

  “Actually, the night is still a pup, isn’t it,” I resorted to, letting my gaze rest on Riley. “Where’s that drink you’re financing?”

  • • •

  The bar of this Lass in a Glass emporium was an average enough place. A Hamm’s clock above the cash register, Budweiser lampshades on the dangling overheads, other beer signs glowing here and there for general decor. The jukebox had Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings singing to each other about various toots they’d been on. Wherever the Labor Day crowd was, it wasn’t here; only a handful of customers in ballcaps and straw Stetsons, plus a wide young woman behind the bar who looked like she could handle any of them with one hand. Remembering the floor warriors of the Whoop-Up in Shelby, I hoped that was the case.

  Mariah and I each ordered our usual and Riley put in for his usual unusual, you might say, by summoning up a Harvey Wallbanger.

  “Whup, wait a minute here!” I jumped him triumphantly. “You already had one of those on the trip. In Ennis or Dillon or someplace back there.”

  “Jick, a man never wants to let himself get reliably unpredictable,” he told me, whatever that meant.

  No sooner were Willie and Waylon done songstering than a color television started droning in the corner. I wonder if someday somebody will invent silence.

  It for sure won’t be Riley. He started right in yammering to Mariah about what piece they—we, he kept phrasing it with what he must have figured was a generously inclusive glance at me—ought to press on to next, Fort Peck dam maybe? I’d for damn sure press him onward, I thought to myself, right out of the vicinity of the McCaskills if I but could.

  Fort Peck I knew a little something about from when I was a kid during the Depression and construction of that earthen dam across the Missouri River was a relief project which Montanans believed Franklin Delano Roosevelt had sent from heaven. Enough to inquire innocently, “Doesn’t the dam kind of look like a big ditch bank about four miles long?”

  Riley cut me a look, not the inclusive sort this time. “That’s one way of putting it.”

  “Sounds real photogenic,” Mariah met that with. “Riley, don’t you know any history that isn’t horizontal?”

  She said it in a way that could be taken as teasing, though, instead of lighting into him like I’d hoped she would. By the time the bar lady brought our fluids, Riley was right back to being his obstreperously curious self.

  “That’s some sign out front,” he broached to her. “How’d this place get its name?”

  “You don’t know the half of it. Everybody here in town calls her”—the bar lady indicated out into the night where the neon maiden was kicking up her heels—“The Lass with Her Ass in a Glass. Story is, the guy who opened this place was from back east somewhere. He liked his martinis and he liked a girl he met out here, so he put them together on his sign.”

  “Eat your heart out, Statue of Liberty,” Riley said over his shoulder eastward after the bar lady trod off.

  “Don’t ever say they aren’t poetic souls in this town,” Mariah reflected. “Anyway, on to celebration.” She hoisted her glass to me, and I automatically reciprocated with mine, and Riley had to clink in too. My daughter flashed the grin her mother customarily had at so many of my birthdays, but the words of her toast were Mariah’s own. “Mark this day with a bright stone.”

  All in all, then, as we settled into sipping and conversing—most of it back and forth between them, who seemed to have discovered they had a surprising amount to say to each other tonight—my evening of entry into senior citizenship could have been a whole lot worse thus far. I was going to have to cash us in early for the night to keep Mariah and Riley from getting too frisky with one another, and toward that end I yawned infectiously every so often. But all seemed under control until a funny impression came over me, the feeling that the three of us were about to be joined by somebody else, even though nobody had newly come into the bar. I could have sworn I kept hearing a half-familiar voice. None of the few partakers strung along the bar was anyone I recognized, though, nor did they look like logical discussants of . . .

  “ . . . eating dust and braving the elements,” a tone like that of God’s older brother resounded in a break in the bar conversation.

  Mariah and Riley and I swiveled simultaneous heads toward the corner television.

  Sure enough, Tonsil Vapor Purvis was in the tube in living color, not to mention a high-crowned cowboy hat.

  “This centennial cattle drive is a true taste of the Old West,” Tonsil Vapor was declaiming. “Twenty-seven hundred head of cattle are being driven by twenty-four hundred riders on horseback, while the world watches.” The television picture changed from the mob of beeves and drovers to a traffic jam of communications ordnance, rigs with TV uplinks on top and all-terrain vehicles ridden by cameramen and reporters jabbering into cellular telephones. Abruptly the screen filled with a close-up of a bandannaed rider going hyaah!, either at a recalcitrant longhorn or Tonsil Vapor. The next instant, though, our news host was back, full-face-and-hat. “This trail drive means long hours in the saddle for these hardy cowpokes, but—”

  At least Riley and Mariah’s two-member reunion had been put on hold while they gawked disbelievingly at Tonsil Vapor in his buckaroo regalia and the rest. Indeed, I figured this was a heaven-sent, or at least beamed down by satellite, chance to further divert.

  “Somebody tell me this,” I postulated. “One sheepherder can handle a thousand sheep easy, but here they got a cowboy for every cow and a fraction. So if they call sheepherders dumb, where does that leave cowboys?”

  “Now, now,” Mariah purred as if running over with sympathy for television’s mounted horde. “Don’t be mean to those poor cowpokers.”

  “Hey, better to be a poker than a pokee,” Riley got into the spirit by drawling in a croaky trailhand voice.

  Mariah returned him a mock sultry grin, or maybe not so mock. “Oh, I don’t know. We pokees figure there’s a lot less strain involved for us.”

  Really great job there, Jick, of heading off the flirty-flirty stuff. Curfew seemed the only recourse. I cleared my throat and said, “If you two are done talking nasty, how about we head out to the Bago?”

  “Jesus Christ!” Riley let out and sat straight up, gawking at the Hamm’s clock and then back at Tonsil Vapor, who was going on and on. “They’re giving him half an hour of airtime on this cattle drive! It’s the War and Peace of cows’ asses!”

  “Horses’, too,” Mariah pointed out with photographic precision as Tonsil Vapor’s visage again filled the screen, and I couldn’t help but hoot along with my two tablemates.

  Then before I could bring up the matter of adjournment again, the bar lady was serving us a reload on the drinks. “Who ordered these?” I inquired at large.

  “I did,” Mariah flourished a ten-dollar bill. “Anesthesia for watching Tonsil Vapor.”

  “You know, maybe this actually is a historic event,” marveled Riley, critically cocking an ear as Tonsil Vapor intoned over pictures of cows, horseback riders, more cows, more horseback riders. “The biggest herd of clichés that ever trampled the mind. Bet you a jukebox tune he even manages to get in ridin’ ’em hard and puttin’ ’em away wet before he’s done.”

  “You’re on,” Mariah took him up on it quick as that. I couldn’t blame her. There wasn’t much any of us would put past T. V. Purvis, but even he would need to outdo himself to call what was on the television screen heated cowboying. The way the mass of animals was strolling along through its media coverage, the only sweat that could pop out on the riders’ ponies would have to be from stage fright.

  So of course we had to watch the whole thing, during which another round of drinks evolved out of the residue of Mariah’s ten-dollar bill, and wouldn’t you know, just before the half hour was up and Tonsil Vapor was due to vanish into a blip, out spieled his observation that these Big Sky cowhands were ridin’ ’em you-know-how and puttin’ ’em away you-know-what.

  “Hey, have yo
u been moonlighting scripts for that bozo?” Mariah demanded of Riley with a nudge, although not as suspiciously as I would have.

  “Faith is justified once every hundred years, is all that proves,” Riley murmured becomingly of his powers of prediction. “Somebody owes me a serenade, though. Something besides Willin’ and Waily for a change, okay?”

  Mariah swigged the last of her current Calvert, fished out of her pile of change whatever coin a jukebox takes these days, and started to slide out of the booth to go pay off. But at the edge she paused, as if needing to make sure. “Vocal only?”

  Riley blinked. Then said as if it was a new thought: “Doesn’t have to be, far as I’m concerned.”

  I sat right there and watched as Mariah motated across the room to the jukebox and Riley unlimbered out of the booth after her and called over to the bar, “Okay if we dance, is it?”

  The wide bar lady shrugged. “A lot worse than that’s happened in here.”

  Mariah punched a button on the jukebox. Steel guitars reported. But after an overture or whatever it was, voice rode equal to the sound of the instruments, a slow song yet urgent, the woman singer of the Roadkill Angels confiding into the world’s every ear.

  “King’s X,” you said the last time

  we played this lovers’ game.

  Mariah and Riley fashioned themselves to each other as those who’ve danced together do, her thumb hooked in a remembered kidding way into one of his rear belt loops, his spread hand in the natural place low in the narrow of her back.

  “Time out,” you called just when

  I’d chosen you by name.

  Both tall, both more lithe-legged than you’d expect of a lanky couple, they circled together in the slow repeating spin of the song.

  “No fair,” I called out after

  you changed the loving rules.

  Mariah’s shoulder-long hair moved with the action of their bodies, now touching one blade of her back, now the other. Riley held his head in slightly tilted orbit as if accommodating down to hers.

  “Don’t cheat,” you heard the warning,

  that’s just the game of fools.

  What true dancers know is to never forget each other’s eyes. Mariah and Riley read there as if they’d been to the same school for it as they drifted with the music.

  Marcella in my arms. Not many years into the past, yet forever ago. We had just finished whirling the night away, the Labor Day dance at the old Sedgwick House hotel in Gros Ventre. Now we were home after the early a.m. drive to the ranch, the dark already beginning to thin toward dawn. The music or the delicious sense of each other—perhaps it is the same flame—still had hot hold of us, wrapping us to one another as we reached our bedroom. Marcella moved first, as soon as my fingers alit at her top button; snap buttons, they sassily proved to be, her western shirt pulling all the way open plick plick plick plick plick when my glorious wife laughed and took that single slow essential half-step backward as if dancing yet. Then Marce moved to me again.

  This time when we cross our fingers

  Let’s make it for luck,

  Let’s break the old hex,

  Let’s take back those words, “King’s X.”

  With the tune’s conclusion, Mariah and Riley separated orderly enough, but there still was a kind of cling between them as they came back to the booth. She startled me with a wink and the avowal, “I promise you the next dance, birthday kid,” but established herself in the booth somewhat closer to Riley than she was before. He in the meantime was enthusiastically summoning to the bar for yet another visit by Lord Calvert and Harvey Wallbanger and Johnny Walker.

  Talk about wanting to call time out. I’d have crossed all my fingers and toes too if that would have put a King’s X of delay into the way this pair was romping. They showed every sign of spending the night on the town, cozier and cozier with each other, and where that led I didn’t even want to—

  The bar lady sang out, “Anybody named Wright Riley? Phone call.”

  “Can’t the world let a man enjoy his Wallbanger in peace?” Riley said plaintively, but took himself off to the phone in the lobby.

  He was back quick, with an odd expression on his face. “Actually it’s for you, Jick.”

  Oh, swell. I figured it had to be Kenny, telling me some catastrophe on the ranch. Even the phone earpiece didn’t sound good, full of those frying sounds of distance. Apprehensively I said into the mouth part, “ ’Lo?”

  “Hi, Dad. Happy birthday! If you’d stay home once in a while instead of gallivanting around, I’d have sent you a salmon.”

  “Lexa! Christamighty, petunia, it’s good to hear you!” What I could hear of my younger daughter, that is, through all the swooshes and whishes across the miles to Sitka. “How’d you track me down?”

  “I figured the newspaper would be keeping an eye on Riley wherever he was. Just where are you, anyway?”

  I had to think a moment, which town by now. “In Chinook. In The Lass with Her A—uh, kind of an everything place. Riley broke down and bought me a birthday drink, would you believe.”

  Lexa gave a short snort of laughter, the proper response from a McCaskill at any notion of civility in the Wright brigade. Not that the one of us where it counted most, Mariah, was showing any similar sign of recognizing the ridiculous; from the phone I could see to the booth where she and Riley were paying each other necky attention. What differentiates how our children become? Take Lexa at the distant end of this phone line. Smaller, built more along her mother’s lines than the lankiness of Mariah and me. Her hair more coppery than Mariah’s, her face not so slimly intent, her chosen life more snug, moored. Yet those were the idlest of differences between my two daughters, they did not even begin to describe the distinction. I had not seen Lexa since she and Travis flew down for Marcella’s funeral in February, yet I knew if she stepped out of that phone mouthpiece right then I would be surer of her actions than I was of any of Mariah’s even after spending night and day of the last two months in her immediate vicinity.

  “What’s it like traveling with those two,” Lexa was asking now, “the Civil War?”

  “More like watching a bad dream start itself all over.”

  Distance hummed to itself while Lexa took in my news. Then she was exclaiming: “Mariah isn’t falling for that mophead again? After the way they tore each other up in that divorce? She can’t be.”

  “Honey, I wish you were right. But she shows every sign of doing just that.”

  “Tell her for me she needs her brain looked at. Tell her to go take up with the nearest sheepherder instead. I can’t believe anybody, even that sister of mine, would—” Lexa’s incredulity made way for a logical suspicion. “Dad, how many of those birthday drinks have you had?”

  “I’m sober. All too.”

  And then wordlessness hung on the line between us, the audible ache of the miles between Montana and Alaska. Not just measurable distance was between us, but Mariah and Riley, the capacity for catastrophe the two of them represented. I remembered the expression on Riley when he said the call was for me. “Lexa, what was it you said to Riley when he answered the phone?”

  “I just asked if he still was carrying a turkey around under his arm for spare parts.”

  Why couldn’t that skeptical attitude toward Riley Wright be grafted onto Mariah? Judging from the ever closer conversation they were having in the booth, the sooner the better.

  “I’m going to have to tackle Mariah in the morning about this Riley situation,” I concluded to Lexa. “I’ll keep you posted.” I remembered that my son-in-law who hadn’t turned out to be a dud was on the cleanup of last spring’s Exxon Valdez oilspill. “How’s Travis doing?”

  “Sick at heart,” Lexa reported in her own pained tone. “The whole wildlife crew at Prince William Sound is. New dead species all the time—the oil is up the food chain into the eagles now.”

  “I wish that surprised me.” Where wouldn’t that oilspill spread to, before things were done.


  “Mm. Know what you get when you cross an oil executive and a pig?”

  “No, what?”

  “Nothing. There are some things a pig won’t do.”

  Her bitter joke wasn’t the best note to end on, but I didn’t have any better. “Well, this is your nickel. Lexa, thanks for calling. It helps.”

  “Love you plenty. So long, Dad.”

  When I got back to the spooning booth, matters had quieted down, I was thankful to find. Mariah’s arms were crossed in front of her with one hand up at the throat of her blouse, contemplatively fingering the point of her collar there. Riley was ever so lightly tapping the edge of the table with just the tips of his fingers, as if patting out some rhythm softly enough not to be heard. I had a moment of wondering how far gone they were; they’d each disposed of the drinks they were working on when I went to the phone, yet really neither one looked swacked. Quite the reverse. They both suddenly seemed keyed up and super attentive as I plunked myself down and passed along a few words of report about the Alaska wing of the family. What do they call a chance like this any more, window of opportunity? In any case, right now appeared to be the propitious opening for herding my birthday party-givers back to the Bago and letting things settle down overnight, and so I drank up fast before another round could happen or more dancing and carrying on, and gave the evening as casual an amen as I could.

  “I’m gonna call it a day. You two look like you could stand to turn in, too. Ready?”

  The gaping silence answered that before Mariah began to try.

  “Jick. You go ahead. We, Riley and I, we’re not going to be back at the Bago tonight.”

  I had a furious flaring instant of wanting to ask her, demand of her, where they were going to be instead; but that was senseless. I all too well knew. It was right out front, up in neon: M-o-t-e-l.

  • • •

  Once the desiring begins, all other laws fall. You know that whether you are fifteen or sixty-five or both added together. There in the motorhome the remainder of that night, I tried to fight through to longer thoughts than that first alarm about Mariah and Riley’s craving for each other. Judiciousness. Forbearance. Parental declaration of neutrality. All had hearings with me, chorused their verdict over and over that whosever’s affair this coupling night was, it was not mine. My stiff exit from the supper club had been correct deportment, giving the pair of them something to think over yet not making too much of what I was leaving behind. Definitely those two were adults, not to say veterans of each other. So what, if Riley was horny. All right, so what if Mariah was in that same condition. This happens and ever will, wherever people grasp enough about one another to fit onto and into.