Ride With Me, Mariah Montana

by Ivan Doig

  “It says what? I never heard of no such thing.” “Take a look for yourself, would you.” “Let me get my reading specs on here. Any more I can’t tell whether I’m on page nine or it’s something by Paganini.” “Suppose the guy who wrote this is on the level? What do you think, Bill?” “What am I, the expert on lying? Don’t answer that.” More reading, to the accompaniment of assorted trickles. “Hell if I know. Funny damn kind of a situation he claims he’s got himself into.” “I can see how it could happen.” “I don’t.” “There’s this much for sure. These days, anybody’d who’d pick up a hitchhiker ought to know better.” “Ought to, yeah, but maybe he was trying to do somebody some good. You can’t fault a man on that, can you?”

  I emerged from the stall into the debating group. There in a cluster, seven familiar faces and I gawked at each other.

  “We come across you in the goddamnedest places!” exclaimed Roger Tate, who I remembered was the seniormost of the Baloney Express car corps. “How you doing, Jick?” All the others heartily chimed in their greetings, old home week to the point where little Bill Bradley gestured in the pertinent direction and asked, “You seen this note on the wall here?”

  “No,” I admitted, “but I been hearing a lot about it.” I moved up close enough to take my turn at examining the document.

  BROKE AND BAREFOOT

  Mine is a long story, but to put it short as can be, I picked up a hitchhiker yesterday when I left Coeur d’Alene, and after we reached here, and I got too sleepy to drive any more, I told him he had to get out, and go on on his own, while I caught some sleep. He did, get out that is, and I locked myself in the pickup, and stretched out on the seat, but when I woke up this morning, my shoes that I had taken off, and all my money, were gone. I am stuck here, until somebody can help me out. Any money you can loan me, would help me buy gas and food to get home to Fargo, and I will take your name, and address, and mail it back to you, quick as I can. I am in the GMC pickup, red in color, at the east end of the parking lot. Thank you.

  You hear all kinds of stories of people begging in wheelchairs or whatever, then as soon as you’re out of sight they hop up and stroll off to buy drugs with the money you just gave them. Evidently what people won’t resort to hasn’t been thought of yet. Naturally my mental question was the same as the Baloney Expressers: was this broke-and-barefoot note the newest kind of cheat?

  Another round of democratic Roger-Bill-Nick-Bud-Julius-Jerome-Dale debate produced the idea of actually going and taking a look at the guy in the red pickup. I was either born curious or became that way a minute later, so off I set with the investigating committee.

  As we were cutting across the parking lot past the fleet of clunkers my companions were ferrying to a used car lot in Billings, Riley popped around the hood of an idling Continental Freightways semi. “The women were starting to wonder if you fell in,” the knothead loudly addressed to me as he strode up. Then he recognized the company I was in. “Don’t tell me. The Methuselah Hot Rod Club is on the loose again. Watch out, world.”

  Inevitably the Baloney Express gang greeted Riley with verdicts on his piece about them that, coming from them, he regarded as high praise. Then I explained to him our mission to the east end of the parking lot and he glanced nervously over his shoulder in the direction where his mother and Mariah were waiting for us in the Bago, precisely as the two women emerged around the semi in search of the searcher they’d sent scouting for me.

  The sight of the seven geezers whose collective rumps she had presented to the reading public made it Mariah’s turn for wariness, but they unanimously assured her that photograph of hers had presented their best side to the world. Her first grin of the past forty-eight hours broke out on Mariah as she asked what the occasion here was. Leona meanwhile was in an all-purpose smile while trying to get a handle on any of this, and after the Baloney Expressers’ sevenfold explanation about the Broke and Barefoot note and I’d introduced Leona to each of them in gallant turn and the entire general scrimmage of us had started moving toward the pickup in question, she dropped back beside me and wondered in a whisper, “Jick, do you know everybody in Montana?”

  “That’s pretty much getting to be the case,” I acknowledged.

  “You want to watch out,” she whispered again, “or you’ll end up as Governor.”

  The vehicular description “red in color” proved to be a wishful memory of the beat-up pickup’s faded appearance, and the young guy in it didn’t look like much either. When our delegation drew up around him and he cranked down the window on the driver’s side, the face framed there was one of those misfitting ones with not enough chin or mouth but a long thin nose and a wispy blond mustache, scraggly, really. His eyes were red-rimmed and darted around miserably among what must have looked to him like a posse from an old folks’ home. Treed in a sapling about to snap, was the impression he gave.

  But any con man worth the name would know precisely how to appear so simultaneously victimized and embarrassed, wouldn’t he. The Baloney Expressers clustered around the driver’s side window, as attentive a jury as they had been while watching Riley wrestle the Bago tire two months ago.

  Roger Tate spoke the doubt of everybody. “One thing that’s hard to savvy, Mister, is how somebody could get at you that way in a locked pickup.”

  “For the longest time I couldn’t figure that out either,” the young guy confessed tiredly. “I knew goddamn good and well I’d locked both doors. But what the bastard did, I finally caught on, was he unlocked his wing window while I wasn’t looking”—the pickup was so old it did have those vent windows with a little catchlock that moved about half an inch for opening them—“and after I fell asleep he must’ve snuck back and reached in through it and got that door open. And took off with my money and shoes.” The guy swallowed and looked like he was about to bawl, but seemed to feel he had to tell it all: “Didn’t even leave me my socks.”

  The congress mulled that testimony. One of the Walker brothers, Julius, remarked: “You’re quite a sleeper.”

  “Mister, I know it sounds fishy. I almost can’t believe it myself, what happened. And nobody until you guys would even come near me to hear about it. But jeez, it’s the truth,” he concluded, his face saying the awful realization of how much predicament his life’s quota was.

  Nor was his situation eased any when two or three Expressers simultaneously asked whether he’d called the highway patrol or sheriff yet. The young guy squirmed and looked away from all our eyes, down at the steering wheel. “Can’t do that. My license plates are out of date. Couldn’t afford this year’s.” A majority of the Baloney Expressers at once investigated at the rear of the pickup and verified that the North Dakota Peace Garden State license plate was 1988’s.

  In the kind of tone a district attorney would use on a pickup thief, Bill Bradley wanted to know: “You say you’re from Fargo, what were you doing all the way over in Coeur d’Alene?”

  “Looking for work. I come from Coeur d’Alene originally. When there wasn’t any jobs there, I got on driving tractor for my wife’s uncle outside of Fargo. But he got droughted out again this summer, same like last summer, and he had to let me go.” This chapter of his story poured out of him, either well-rehearsed or from the heart. “I hoped something maybe’d opened up, back home there. But jeez, all there is in Coeur d’Alene any more is changing bedsheets for tourists and they don’t want people like me for that. Logging’s down. Mining’s gone to hell. Farmers and ranchers can’t afford to hire. What am I supposed to do?” That last word broke out as a rising note toward wail, dooo?

  I stood staring past the silent elderly heads at the wispy-whiskered specimen of woe and his faded illegitimate pickup. Curious no longer, I now was furious. When I was not much younger than him, other pickups were on the road, passing through the Two Medicine country from the droughted-out farms of the High Line with the bitter farewell GOODBY OLD DRY painted across their boxboards, and families of the Depression crammed aboard with w
hatever last desperate possessions they had managed to hang on to. The human landslide set loose by auction hammers cracking down. Two rages balanced in me: that here fifty years later there still was no goodbye to that grief of being driven from the land, or that a clever beggar would play on that memory of misery to coax money from us.

  Out of that bloodsurge of the past, I called sharply to the pitiful or conniving face in the pickup window:

  “There in Coeur d’Alene, did you ever know somebody named Heaney?” Leona was a little distance from me, and out the side of my eye I saw her stir at that remembered name.

  “Mister Heaney? Sure.” The young guy lost a little of his complexion of despair as he found something definite to offer. “I used to mow his lawn. Ray Heaney? In the insurance business?”

  The Baloney Express totality swiveled to watch my reaction. In my mind now was the Heaney house on St. Ignatius Street in Gros Ventre, Ray and I sprawled beneath tall cottonwoods on that lawn of another time, our boyhood best friendship now thinned to lines jotted on Christmas cards exchanged from his insurance agency to my ranch . . .

  I nodded, which brought a chorus of “Well, hell, okay then” and “Good enough” from the group awaiting my verdict. Roger Tate swung around and told the young guy, “We got to have a little conference over here. You just sit tight.”

  Eagle-beaked old Dale Starr proved to be the fiscal lobe of Baloney Express. While the others looked to him to decree a sum that would get a man enough gasoline and meals to carry him from the middle of Montana all the way across North Dakota to Fargo, plus putting something on his feet, Dale in turn squinted at Riley and asked, “You in, Shakespeare?” Riley said he supposed he was. It seemed to be just assumed I was a donor, so Dale inquired next: “Ladies?” Without looking at each other, Mariah and Leona each nodded inclusion into the ante. Dale promptly announced, “Okay then, nine bucks a head.”

  After we’d all dug down in wallets or pockets or purses for Dale, he in turn riffle-counted the sheaf of bills, nodded, and handed the money to Roger Tate. Who led us back to the pickup and told the young guy, “Here’s $99 to see you home. Take care.”

  The guy choked out several versions of thanks and promises to repay, then started the clattery pickup and headed out onto the Interstate. None of the eleven of us said anything as we watched him go. He had a lot of miles ahead of him yet to Fargo, and still faced walking into a shoe store in Billings barefoot.

  • • •

  After that not particularly restful stop, we let the freeway go on to Boston while we sideroaded north. Naturally I reverted to watching our retread lovers deal with Leona’s flagship presence. Jangled but not yet to the point of disintegration, was my reading of Mariah and Riley’s mutual mood so far. They were taking refuge in their work insofar as they could. True, no Montanian piece came to light from our excursioning through Rapelje and Harlowtown and Shawmut and Judith Gap. But shooter and scribbler kept reminding each other in earnest that they absolutely utterly just could not afford to flummox around the way they had at the outset of the trip; as one or the other of them phrased it at least once a day, “We don’t have time for a scavenger hunt.” And it sounded to me as if both Mariah and Riley actually grasped that, this time; these two were educable about anything but themselves.

  It wasn’t many days into this Leona phase of the trip before we came to an intersection, close to the exact middle of the state, where the sign pointing south said one hundred miles to Billings and the sign pointing east said one hundred miles to Jordan. The Montanian twosome chose east, and so we Bagoed onward into country where a hundred miles to anywhere seemed a highly conservative estimate.

  • • •

  Keep your eyes on the horizawn was in a song that came around fairly often on Melody Roundup on the Bago’s radio and the landscape surrounding us now was much like that, a kind of combination of horizon hypnotically the same and the earth letting out a stretching yawn as it drew its edgeline against the sky. The Big Dry, this prairie region out ahead of us was called, partly because Big Dry Creek traces across it but also for the general precipitation picture. Not this year, though. After the drought of the past couple of summers, even this gaunt midriff of the state had received decent rain this year. I would bet that it was green years of this sort which fooled the homesteaders into settling out here in the first place. This was a neighborhood where I had never set foot but yet felt I knew something of. When I was a kid during the Depression, one of the country school systems somewhere out east here got so strapped for funds that the only musical instruments that could be afforded were harmonicas, and so harmonica bands were formed. Fourth of July solemnity, graduation day, any of those type of functions featured mouth organ musicians en masse and for a few years there I devoutly wished our own Gros Ventre high school would either go broke enough or sensible enough to forget about stuff like trumpets and put us all on harmonicas. I mean, wouldn’t it be something to hear Pompous Circumstances, as my father called it, orchestrated by a schoolful of harmonica kids?

  People were not many out here any more. Now that it was after Labor Day, as we drove we regularly saw the bumblebee colors of schoolbuses moving along rural roads. But even that scene scarcened here at the onset of the Big Dry country.

  Pucka pucka pucka, Riley’s wordbox began to tune up as we rolled on.

  In the red schoolhouse of his head, Jefferson, great Tom, calculated the doubling of America westward. He knew that miles in chunks could be whittled into dreams, farms, nation, and out of that Jeffersonian box of mind came an orderly arithmetical survey system which put the pattern of mile-square sections on the land; came his 1803 bargain with France for the Louisiana Purchase, the frontier expanse all the way from the Mississippi Valley to the western side of what is now Montana; came his instructions to his enigmatic young personal secretary Meriwether Lewis to find a cohort—the steady William Clark, he turned out to be—and explore up the Missouri River into this new dreamscape.

  In the presidency of Lincoln, Abe who had built farm fences, came the Homestead Act. That broadstroke of legislation in 1862 and its cousin laws proclaimed: come west, come into the Jeffersonian vision, come gain yourself a piece of the earth by putting your labor—your life—into it for this little sum of years.

  Into Montana, mostly in the first fraction of the twentieth century, came scores of thousands of homesteaders in the greatest single spate of agricultural migration in American history. . . .

  We pulled into Winnett for the night. A grocery store. A couple of bars, one doubling as a cafe. A gas station out by the highway. Highway sheds, grain elevator. A school, nice and modern. Some houses that were being lived in, but not as many as there were empty ones and vacant lots. What was saddest to see, though, was not just the proverbial grass growing in the street but little jungles of morning glory vines snaking out.

  And that was pretty much the town except for the courthouse. You might not ever think so if you didn’t know, but Winnett, population two hundred, is the county seat of Petroleum County.

  “Which,” Riley announced out of the books he’d been looking stuff up in as I drove us along the scanty main street, “has a total population of—brace yourselves, gang—six hundred, in an area, hmm, bigger than the Los Angeles Basin.”

  “There he is on California again, Jick,” Leona shared with me as if we were on a mutual quest for an antidote. She had taken off her Walkperson headset that had been reciting Russian into her and was gazing around Winnett as if she’d always been meaning to pay it a visit.

  “Maybe you two want to put some of this elbow room in your suitcases for Globland,” I in turn suggested to Mariah and Riley as I aimed the Bago into the otherwise empty Petrolia RV Park. “Sounds like you could sell it by the inch down there.”

  The Montanian team ignored our parental remarks and scanned out the window at trafficless and pedestrianless Winnett. “Let me guess,” Mariah eventually intoned to Riley. “What we need here is a photo of Jefferson rollin
g over in his grave, right?”

  I will say for Riley that he was bright enough to immediately pack himself off uptown, so to speak, out of range of Mariah’s photo-thinking mood. Myself, I figured she and her camera would charge right out and tackle the challenge of Winnett, but this daughter of mine could still surprise me. When Leona offered to come out and help me hook up the utilities, Mariah slick as a wink told her no, no, she’d be more than glad to help me at that herself, she knew Leona had lots and lots of Russian to pipe into her head yet.

  So out we went, Mariah and I, around to the side compartments of the Bago. She had been waiting her chance to get hold of me alone. “Thanks a whole hell of a bunch, Daddio,” she let me know in a tone that would have peeled paint.

  “What, for my general sainthood or something specific?”

  “You know goddamn good and well,” she said, yanking the electrical hook-up cable out of its cubbyhole a mile a minute. “For inviting the Duchess of Moscow along.”

  “Figured you’d appreciate having some female company on the trip for a change,” I responded with an extreme poker face. “The benefit of an older wiser woman and all that.”

  “Benefit, sure, you bet,” Mariah bobbed her head as if bouncing each word at me. “Now any time I get a craving for it I’ll know how to order borscht.”

  “In California,” I cautioned, “they probably call it liquid essence of beet.”

  That headed her off on Leona, at least. Mariah eyed me as if debating whether this next issue was worth taking to war. “You really don’t want me to go to California, do you.”

  I bent to fasten the Bago’s water intake hose into the campground spigot. Not that I’d entirely intended it, but this left Mariah with the honey hose—the toilet drain—to gingerly drag out and handle.

  “What I really don’t want, Mariah, is for you and Riley to carve grief into each other, the way you did the first time. California is only the wrapper that comes in.”