Ride With Me, Mariah Montana

by Ivan Doig

“The very guy,” Riley exhaled wearily. “He wants to see us back in Missoula again. Yet today.”

  Missoula was a whale of a drive from Chinook. What did this Beebe so-and-so think, that he could just reel us in whenever he felt like it? Or as I stated it now: “Can’t that guy ever say what he wants to say on the telephone?”

  Mariah and Riley exchanged cloudy looks. He was the one who at last said, “The BB is a Bunker Hill type of boss. He likes to see the whites of the eyes before he fires.”

  • • •

  Past lunchtime but still lunchless, the roadweary three of us trooped into the Montanian building.

  A ponytailed young man carrying camera gear similar to Mariah’s slouched out of the BB’s office as we approached it. He looked like he’d recently been pinched in a tender part. Mariah greeted him and asked how the BB’s mood was. Ponytail responded, “He’s chewing sand and shitting glass, if that gives you some idea,” and stalked off.

  So, braced is the basic description for the Montanian centennial task force as we entered the presence of Baxter Beebe. All during our drive from Chinook, Mariah and Riley had tried to think of how to save their skins this time. Without any result, for as Mariah put it, “We don’t even know if this is a fresh mad or the same one he was in last time.” I’d been bending my brain to the BB problem too, for the one thing I didn’t want now was Riley and Mariah cast loose into the world together, without a chance for me to somehow cure her of him. I mean, this just really frosted my ass; finally wanting the centennial trip to careen onward and here the BB was about to grant my original wish and X-out the expedition.

  The BB or Bax or whatever sent the two of them his average steely stare as we filed in, but in my case he bounced out of his chair and came and gave me the pump-handle handshake while declaring, “Great to see you again, Jiggs. I wanted you to hear this, too.” Huh. Maybe they were fired and I was hired.

  With that, Beebe circled back to his chair, seated himself again, clasped his hands as if glad to meet himself, and gazed at us ranked across the desk from him. When he figured enough time had passed, he pronounced:

  “I have bad news for us all.”

  He eyeballed the trio of us as if he’d always known three was an unlucky number. Then he shook his head gravely and said:

  “I lost out on a goat permit in the state drawing.”

  Mariah and Riley swallowed in chorus. For my part, I looked carefully around the tower walls at the dead menagerie again, trying to think of any other animal to ante in, but no luck.

  All three of us waited for the BB to lower the boom on the centennial series. Instead he again singled me out for his approximation of pleasantry.

  “But that’s all right. We can try again next year, Chick.”

  Now I didn’t know which to be more of, puzzled or alarmed. Nor it seemed did the pair beside me. If I was bonded to the BB as hunting crony for another year, where then did that leave Mariah and Riley? Did this mean he hadn’t even hauled us in here to ream out about—

  “The centennial series.”

  The depth of the BB’s tone dashed all hope there. “I have something to tell you about that.”

  He gave us another going-over with his gaze, one by one by one. Then intoned very deeply:

  “It’s a bull’s-eye.”

  The identical thought was in all three of us who heard this: hadn’t the BB gotten his mouth mixed up, actually intending to tell us the centennial series was some other bull stuff than the ocular part? But no, huh uh, he was going on and on about how Mariah and Riley were finding the true grit of Montana and what a service to readers to provide them something more flavorful than the usual newsprint diet.

  Now this was news. The letters to the editor that had been showing up in the Montanian were saying pretty much the same as when our buddy Bax here was chewing the inside of his mouth to tatters over them. Only a few days ago there’d been one that started off, Why does your so-called writer Riley Wright dig up old bones like the Dempsey-Gibbons prizefight when the Real Issue is taxes? and signed, Mad As The Dickens On Southwest Higgins. I noticed that Mariah and Riley, though both surprised within an inch of their capacity, were staying on their guard. Riley in a funny way even looked a little disappointed, I suppose at having his work so palatable to the BB.

  After a lot more salve of that sort, the BB focused on Mariah and, to my surprise again, me.

  “In other words, I just wanted you to know what a very good job you’ve been doing. Now, Mariah and Nick, if you would excuse us, there’s something I have to convey to Riley.”

  As soon as Mariah and I were out of the tower, I asked: “What the hell is that little scissorbill up to?”

  “Don’t I wish I knew,” said she is bewilderment. It wasn’t like Mariah to look left out, but right then she seemed the occupational equivalent of orphaned.

  “Maybe he just wanted us out of there so he could stuff Riley and put him on the wall,” I speculated. “Which would be the best use of—”

  “Why don’t you wait here,” she stated rapidly, “while I go check my mailbox,” and all but galloped off out of range of further conversation.

  Mariah was back a lot quicker than I expected, though, with one piece of mail sorted out of the sheaf of memos in her other hand. “For yoo-ou,” she singsonged, holding the envelope out to me with her pinky suggestively up.

  The handwriting with merry little o’s dotting all the i’s probably rated that, but I tried to make it look like a business matter as I thumbed open the flap thinking, what the hell now?

  It was one of those greeting cards showing two little creatures, mice or rodents of some kind, wearing great big sombreros and doing, what else, a goddamn hat dance. Inside, the printed message was:

  SO NOW YOU’RE A ‘SENIOR’ CITIZEN! COME JOIN THE FUN!

  The one in the giddy handwriting below was:

  Happy birthday, Jick! Everybody misses you! Affectionately, Althea.

  “So?” my snoopy daughter asked with an eyebrow up. “You got a secret admirer, birthday boy?”

  “Uh, Howard Stonesifer,” I alibied casually and jammed the card in my hip pocket.

  Mariah’s other eyebrow now was up too, just as if she’d never heard of an undertaker dispatching birthday greetings to prospective customers. Right then, though, the door of the BB’s office sprang open and out shot Riley grinning like a million dollars.

  By now even I was plenty curious, not merely about how the BB had taken a shine to Riley but how anybody could. The sly so-and-so warded off even Mariah’s intense questions, insisting “This is so terrific, we’ve got to go make an occasion of it. I’ll tell you over lunch. I’ll even buy. Even yours, Jick.”

  Depend on Riley, the lunch place was called Gyp’s and was just big enough for a counter and a fry grill. I ever so imperviously slid onto the stool that put me between Mariah and Riley. Behind the counter was a bony cook who, according to the wall’s autographed photos of him posing with Mike Mansfield and Kim Williams, was Gyp himself.

  “Ain’t seen you for a while, Riley,” Gyp said affably. “Been nice.”

  “Hi, Gyp. The Health Department hasn’t had you assassinated yet, hmm?” responded Riley as he plucked up a menu, opened it and slapped it closed without having looked at it. “White cheeseburger, fries, and an Oly.”

  “Same,” said Mariah, eyes fixed on Riley.

  “Same again,” I said, eyes fixed on her.

  Our beers came instantaneously, but before I could get mine lifted Mariah was leaning a bit in front of me to look with exceeding directness at Riley and he was peeking around me with a sweetheart grin at her. I felt like a sourball salesman at a Valentine party.

  Mariah broached it first. “Okay, Chessy cat. What was that all about, the BB wanting to see you alone?”

  Riley somehow increased that grin, his mustache almost tickling his earlobes. He announced:

  “They want me in California.”

  At first I thought it was sarcasm of some ki
nd. In the pause after Riley’s words, I took a drag of my beer and inquired in kind, “What for, rubber checks? Or just general personality flaws?”

  Then I noticed how utterly still Mariah had fallen, frozen in that same position of peering around me at him. As still as if gone brittle; as if the flick of a fingernail would crack her to smithereens.

  In a stunned tone she finally managed to say: “At the Glob, you mean.”

  “The Globe, yeah,” Riley responded.

  “A column?”

  “Yeah, a column.”

  Was it possibly so easy? Abracadabra or whatever the California equivalent is, and Riley vanishes off into the palm trees? A fatherly fraction of me felt bad about Mariah looking so stricken. But the overwhelming majority of me wanted to turn absolute handsprings.

  Gyp slapped down our cheeseburgers in front of us. I spooned piccalilli on mine in celebratory fashion while Riley began ingesting french fries.

  Mariah, though, pressed the question that I figured Riley had as much as answered with his proud announcement of California’s desire for him. She choked it out as, “So what did you tell the BB?” Really, it was a crying shame she had to be put through this from the absconder, but how else would it ever get hammered home to her that Riley Wright’s only lasting partner in passion was himself?

  “This seems to be getting kind of personal,” I noted. “Do you two want me out of here?”

  “Sure do, just like always,” vouched Riley in what was maybe a half-assed attempt to be funny.

  “No,” said Mariah in her same tight voice.

  “Tie vote,” I interpreted to Riley. “Guess I’m staying.”

  “Suit yourself.” He took his time about eating a fry, then washed it down with a long guzzle from his beer. “I told the BB yes, naturally, but that we don’t want to until after the centennial series is done. He phoned down there and the Globe agreed to stagger along until then.”

  “Who’s ‘we’? You got a frog in your pocket?” It was the most elderly of jokes, but the way Mariah said it, it carried all the seriousness in the world. And not just for her. I put my swissburger down on the plate and began wiping away the piccalilli I’d squeezed out all over my hand when I heard that pronoun of Riley’s.

  The incipient Californian was gazing steadily back at her, past me. “Mariah Montana, my notion is for you to come too. As my wife again.”

  EAST OF CRAZY

  . . . Wind is the ventriloquism of Montana’s seasons. In utter summer it can blow in from the west, the mountains, and convince you November is here. The other way around, the truly world-changing recital: the chinook breathing springtime into deadest winter. In just such a toasting wind-from-another-time we found my father, slumped onto the steering wheel of his pickup after the exertion of putting on chains to navigate the instant new mud from the Shields River calving shed to home. . . .

  —RILEY WRIGHT’S NOTES, EN ROUTE TO CLYDE PARK, SEPTEMBER 6, 1989

  IT HIT ME LIKE a kick in the heart.

  What is the saying?—life is one damn thing after another, and love is two damned things after each other. Both parts pertained in the instant after Riley’s double-barreled ambush, oh, did they ever. Bad enough to me, the prospect of Mariah going into marriage misadventure with Riley again. But on top of that, the searing feeling of simply her going. California is the American word for away, and I knew perfectly well the declension of it. As if by rote, a time or two a year a visit would be staged, daughter dutifully back for some ration of days or father descending south to clutter up the routine there for a mutually uncomfortable span. Periodic phone calls, Hi there, how you doing?—Good enough, how about yourself?, because letters are not habit any more. But beyond such dabs of keeping in touch, absence across distance. The formula of the young for moving a life from what it came into the world attached to. No parent can say it is anything but the history of the race, tidally repeating, yet each time the pain comes new.

  At least I wasn’t alone in being caught off guard in the cardio quadrant. Mariah stared lidlessly past me and my strangled cheeseburger at the author of this remarriage proposal or marriage reproprosal or whatever it constituted.

  “I suppose this is a little bit of a surprise,” Riley said around me to her in his ever sensitive fashion. Still leaning far forward onto the counter, he seemed poised to plunge as far as it would take to convince Mariah. Cupid’s own daredevil, all of a goddamn sudden. “But why wait with it?” he charged onward. “Mariah, this Globe job is just what we want to make a fresh go at life. It’s like winning the lottery when we didn’t even know we had a ticket.”

  Blinking at last, Mariah made herself respond. “Quite a change of geography you’ve got in mind.” Quite, yeah. Somehow Mariah California didn’t have the same ring to it.

  “But don’t you see, that’s just exactly why we ought to do it,” Riley hurried to expound. “New territory, new jobs. New—”

  “Jobuh,” she placed into the record to rectify the s he’d plotched onto the word. “You’re forgetting, the Glob only invited you.”

  “A shooter like you,” Riley assured her in revivalist style but obviously also meant it, “can latch on in no time, at the Globe or somewhere else if you want. Or if you want a chance to freelance, or to just do your photography for the sheer utter fun of it for a change, that’s in the cards now too. Bless their sunglassed little heads, the Globe’s going to be paying me more than enough for both of us to live on. How’s that for a deal, hmm?”

  He paused to see how that went down with her. I eyed her too, but with a different question in mind. How Mariah could even entertain the notion of retying the knot with Riley was beyond me. I mean, after our too-green marriage blew up, you could not have paid me enough to get me to marry Shirley a second time. Talk about double jeopardy. Yet here was this otherwise unfoolable daughter of mine, sitting there not saying no to this human bad penny, which pretty much amounted to a second yes by default.

  By now Riley had backtracked to where he’d been heading before her reminder of job singularity. He could get wound up when he half tried.

  “New us again, Mariah, and I don’t only mean being married another time. By the time we get through with this series we’ll have done about everything we can, and maybe then some, at the Montanian. First thing it’ll be right back to me trying not to write the identical columns I did a year ago or five years ago or ten, and you’ll be back at shooting Rotarians and traffic lights being fixed. The Zombies Return to the Dead Zone, is what it’ll be.”

  A would-be luncher came in the door, took one look at the madly gesticulating figure with a different color in each eye, and went right back out.

  “You know as well as I do it’s a fucking wonder that the BB and the bean counters let us do something like these centennial pieces even once in a hundred years,” Riley resumed. “I’ve—”

  “What about your perpetual book about Montana?” I thrust in on him.

  “I was coming to that. I’ve finally savvied there isn’t going to be any book. Every motherloving thing I know how to say about Montana, I’ve already put into the column or will put into this series.” Back to his main audience, Mariah. “Okay, I grant that it’s not quite the same for you and your camera. The one thing this state is always good for is to sit and have its picture taken. Photogenic as a baby’s butt, that’s ol’ Montan’. But think what a change of scene would do for your work too, Mariah, hmm? Everygoddamnwhere we look here,” Riley made a wild arms-wide gesture as if to grasp Montana at each end and hold it steady for us to see, “somebody or someplace is just trying to hang on by the fingernails, trying to figure out how to make some kind of a go of it against all the odds—a climate that’s forever too cold or too hot or too dry or too fucking something else, and never enough jobs and wages that’re always too low and somebody else always setting the prices on crops and livestock, and the place full of bigshot assholes like the BB who think the state is their personal shooting gallery, and people like us can’
t even do our work right without having to beg help from our relatives, and—”

  The expression on me stopped him. “Look, Jick, if you don’t want to hear this—”

  “Who says I don’t want to hear it? Rant on.”

  He did worse, though. He looked squarely at Mariah and as if breaking the news to her said quietly:

  “Montana is a great place to live, but it’s no place to spend a life.”

  I couldn’t just sit there and take that. “What, you for Christ’s sake think California is the—”

  “California,” Riley overrode me, “is America as it goddamn is, like it or don’t. Nutso one minute and not so the next. Mariah, this is a chance to go on up, in what we do. I know you want to be all the shooter you can, just as I want to be all the writer I can. To do that we’ve got to get out of a place that has as many lids on it as this one does.” Ardent as a smitten schoolboy, he reached for what to say and found: “There’s just more, well, hell, more California than there is Montana to the world any more.”

  “We’ll count up after the earthquake and see,” I put in just as rabidly.

  Riley’s eyes and mine held. Good God Almighty, how had I misread him yet again these past weeks? All the while I was fretting about Mariah drifting toward him, he was cascading back into infatuation with her. He hadn’t been just having a randy night in Chinook, he was all too genuinely putting himself into that motel prance with Mariah. This goddamn Wright. You couldn’t even rely on him to be deceitful.

  From my other hemisphere Mariah was saying: “Riley, are you really sure about all this, I mean, California and . . . all? An hour ago we were both scared to a dry pucker that the BB was going to can us, and now you’re—we’re the ones deciding to pack up and pull out?”

  “Life happens fast when it gets rolling,” Riley coined. “And we can’t possibly go as wrong the second time married as we did the first, right?” He must have noticed me opening my mouth to say not necessarily—World War Two had followed World War One, hadn’t it?—for he rapidly resorted to: “Or maybe let’s just start the count from now instead of then.” He dropped his voice into the rich tone of an announcer: “Together again, for the first time!”