by Ivan Doig
McCaskills, daughter and father, looked at each other over the utility hookups. We both were so taut that a breeze would have twanged notes out of us.
Mariah at last shook her head.
“Nice try, but this,” she indicated with a lift of her chin toward Leona’s chesty silhouette in the Bago sidewindow, “isn’t going to change anything between Riley and me.”
“Then you got nothing to worry about, do you,” I asserted back to her. “You and Riley can practice at marriage again by each having a beloved in-law around.”
• • •
In this promising outlook for disruption, that night after supper I figured a game of pitch might be just the thing to help matters along.
Remembering his trouncing when we’d played at Three Forks, Riley sent me a narrow look and stated: “Huh uh. I don’t participate in blood sports.”
But just as I’d hoped, Leona was not about to let him squirm out of it. “I don’t see any competing nightlife in Winnett, do you?”
It didn’t take much doing on my part to contrive the next, either.
“Why don’t you and me take them on, Leona? Show these heirs of ours how the game is played, why not.”
Riley of course had things so backwards he was actually relieved to be partnered with Mariah rather than me or his mother; it was Mariah who twitched at the generational pairing, but what could she say? No way around it for her, which T-totally suited me. If she figured she was going to remake life with this Wright guy, first let her consider the mess he could make of merely a hand of cards.
Pearl Harbor with playing cards instead of bombs, is the nearest description I can give of what ensued. Leona and I played circles around the other two. Mariah bid tersely and Riley extravagantly and by the end of the second hand we led them six to one in the hole. I had to start to worry a little that Leona and I would have the game won before Mariah’s agony of playing partners with Riley had been sufficiently prolonged.
Leona, though, helped. While Riley was deep in ponder of an untakable trick, she maternally observed to him:
“You must have left your luck outside tonight.”
“Hmm? Oh. Right, Mother.”
Riley’s problem was, he thought through the cards and out their other side. When he should have been calculating trump, he was off beyond in contemplation of whether the queen of diamonds had her hair in a wimple or a snood, and why jacks came to be called jacks instead of knaves, on and on until he was somewhere out in the forest that surrendered the woodpulp that the cards were made from. I suppose that is the literary mind, but it is pitiful to see in a game of pitch.
It was during the next hand, while we once again waited for Riley to play a card, that Leona remarked she had something she’d been wondering about.
“How do you two,” she coolly included Mariah in her inquiring gaze, “decide on what story you’re going to do?”
Riley stroked his mustache rapidly. “It varies, Mother,” he said and tried to run his jack of trumps past me, which I had saved my queen precisely for.
“I’ve been trying to watch how you work together,” Leona went on, “but I guess I don’t quite savvy it yet. Do you match the pictures to the words or the words to the pictures?”
Mariah blinked as if she’d been asked to explain nuclear physics. “Uhmm, both, kind of.”
And often neither, I felt like adding about their periodic dry spells on the centennial series. Instead I observed to Leona, “You know they warn a person about ever watching sausage being made. It’s a little bit like that with this newspaper stuff.”
Leona just smiled. I’d begun to notice, though, that she had different calibres of smiles. The broad beaming expression that seemed to welcome all of life—the Alectric smile, I thought of it as, for I had first seen it on her when she and Alec were sparking each other, that summer of fifty years ago—shined out most naturally. You could read a newspaper by the light of that facial glow. But there was also a Leona smile that her eyes didn’t quite manage to join in; the smile muscles performed by habit, but there was some brainwork going on behind that one. And then there was one that can only be called her foolkiller smile; when you got it, you wondered if you’d been eating steak with a spoon. Mariah got that one a lot.
With Mariah nicely on low boil, the next logical mission of the evening was to lend Riley some aggravation. As a former child and now an all-too-veteran parent, I pretty much instinctively knew what would do the job.
“I bet you’re like me, Leona—never imagined, when he was a snip of a kid, Riley would grow up to be such a leading citizen. I know with Mariah, there were times when I wondered how the world was ever going to be ready for her.” From the corner of my eye I knew Mariah was giving me a murderous stare, perfect to my purpose. Riley was just pulling his head out of his latest mystical contemplation of his hand of cards when I delivered the opening to Leona. “Funny to think back to what they put us through when they were little, huh?”
“Funny is the word for it,” Leona brightly informed us as Riley uneasily held his cards in front of him like a tiny shield. “He was a holy terror when he was little. The summer he was four, his dad started taking him with, out to the cattle. Here the next thing I knew, Riley was refusing to pee in the bathroom. The only way he’d go was outside—his little legs spraddled like he’d seen his dad do out on the range.” She looked fondly at Riley as if exhibiting him at the county fair. “He killed off my entire bed of daisies that summer.”
“Mother, will you for God’s sake lay off my urinary history and—”
“Must be something about their generation, Leona,” I put in remorselessly. “Maybe the doctors in those days fed them orneriness pills before they sent them home with us as babies from the hospital, you suppose? Mariah now, the story on her is—” and I of course proceeded to tell about the time she was in grade school and every recess Orson Zane would pester the daylights out of her but always was sneaky enough to get away with it until finally the day Mariah carefully spit down the front of her own dress, presented the damp evidence to the teacher as Orson’s, and got him the curative spanking he was overdue for.
Leona laughed as mightily over that as I had over Riley taking a cowboy pee in the posies, our offspring meanwhile stewing in silence. Eventually, though, Riley glumly thought out loud for our benefit: “You know, folklorists just put numbers on stories that crop up time and again. Number 368, The-Chihuahua-Who-Took-One-Nap-Too-Many-in-the-Microwave-Oven. Parents ought to do that. Just call out the numbers. Save yourselves the trouble of doing the telling.”
“But Riley, hon, the telling is the fun of it,” Leona told him instructively.
“Besides, numbers don’t go high enough for all the stories parents save up as blackmail,” Mariah noted with a censorious glance my direction.
“Speaking of numbers,” I glided to, for we’d played out the hand in the course of the conversation, “what’d we make, partner?”
Leona turned over the tricks she and I had taken and counted out high, low, and jack. “Tree,” she reported with satisfaction, which by now we all knew was Russian for three.
“We treed them again, did we?” I thought that was pretty good, but nobody else seemed to catch it. Mariah was intent on my scorekeeping from the treasury of kitchen matches, to see how bad her and Riley’s situation was by now. They’d actually scored a point, which wiped out their deficit—Leona’s and my total now had reached nine—and I congratulated Mariah on their advance up to nothing.
“Gosh, Dad, just what I always wanted, a goose egg,” she said in a dripping voice. “When I get done with it, what part of the goose do I stick it back in?”
Riley had gravitated off to the refrigerator and fetched a can of beer for each of us, plus his latest inspiration. “You ever hear that old Country-and-Western sermon about how a deck of cards stands for life?” He dropped into a deep drawl. “Thurr’re fifty-two cards in the deck, don’t yuh see, one fer every week a the year. The four suits, hearts a
n’ diamonds an’ clubs an’ spades, reperzents the four seasons a the year. They also mean the seasons a the human heart, love an’ wealth an’ war an’ death. Add up all the spots a all the cards, along with the ever-prezent joker of life, an’ they come out to three hundred sixty-five, one fer every day a the . . .”
He paused at the expression on the other three of us. “You heard it?”
“Yes,” stated Leona.
“Lots and lots of times,” said I.
“Mmm hmm,” even Mariah put in delicately.
“Oh.” Riley busied himself picking up the cards he’d long since been dealt. “Whose bid?”
• • •
Now that there were four of us, commotion kicked off each morning in the Bago. The minute there was enough dawn, Riley was Spandexed up and out running the ridgeline. Mariah got down and Janed on the floor between the cab and the kitchen nook. Leona tucked herself behind the table there in the dinette, put her headset on like a tiara, and ingested Russian. I meanwhile did breakfast duty and tried to stay out of the various lines of fire.
Funny, what will bug a person. So as not to fill the ears of the rest of us with constant Moscowese, Leona performed silent recitation; that is, simply moved her lips in Russian to answer the headset questions. Myself, I considered it downright thoughtful of her and probably so would have Mariah, if she hadn’t had to pop up in her exercise repetitions and every time see Leona wordlessly mouthing something—one exertion by Mariah would meet with a mute appeal about the way to the train station, her next contortion would have as backdrop a request to pass the salt. I noticed Mariah’s workouts grow grimmer until she finally had to stop in midtummywork and ask:
“Mmm—Leona?”
The older woman blinked down at her, lifted off the headset and automatically palavered: “Puhzhahlistah, puhftuhreetyeh vahpros yeshcho ras. ‘Please repeat the question again.’ ”
“Uh huh, right,” Mariah said with a careful breath. “What I’m wondering is, how can you learn to say a word without saying it?”
Leona smiled interestedly while she considered. Then unloaded: “I suppose the same way you can put yourself through Jane Fonda’s exercises without being Jane Fonda.”
. . . The voices remember and remember. It was the second summer on the homestead, one of the early innocent years before the dry part of the weather cycle scythed across these arid plains, and the June rain had granted them a blue lake of crop, the blossoming flax that homesteaders sometimes resorted to until they could work the sod sufficiently to attempt wheat on it. The husband was out and away on some chore, as he always seemed to be, and the wife was at the stove, as she always seemed to be, when the three-year-old daughter called from just outside the door of the shanty.
“See my snake, mommy.”
“Janie, hon, I don’t have ti— See what? Janie, show me!”
“My snake. He mine. I killded him.”
There in the yard the child had taken the garden hoe and hoed the rattlesnake in half. . . .
Road, road, and more road was the menu of this day as we headed east toward Jordan.
We passed prairie creeks in their deep troughs of flood-cut banks.
Dome formations poked up on the horizon like clay bowls upside down.
Fenceposts became more spindly and makeshift, crooked and thin as canes out here so far from forest.
Between Mosby and Sand Springs we met a Bluebird Wanderlodge with Minnesota plates and I could imagine that motorhome coming on a straight line, on cruise control, the 750 miles from the Twin Cities.
“A jackrabbit must have to pack a lunch through this country,” I eventually couldn’t help but observe as we went on through more miles of scantness.
“Those bunnies better put on their helmets and flak jackets,” Riley said from his perch behind me. “The latest notion of what to do with this out here is to bombard the living shit out of it.”
“Why’s that?” I asked in honest surprise. A glance over my shoulder showed Leona looking at him with her eyebrows raised, too. “Montana isn’t at war with anybody I know of.”
“Tell it to the Pentagon, Jick.” I heard him flipping in his notebook. “The military wants eight million more acres in the western states for tank maneuvers and artillery and bombing ranges. A million of those acres are up here around Glasgow. The other day an Undersecretary of Defense said—how’s this for using the language bass ackwards?—these open spaces out here are ‘a national treasure.’ What he means is, they’ll make terrific target practice.”
The slap of Riley closing his notebook was the only sound for a while. His news about forthcoming bombs and tanks and artillery shells bugged the hell out of me. This country of the Big Dry did not appeal to me personally. Yet why couldn’t it be left alone? Left be empty? Instead of the human creature finding one more way to beat up on the land.
• • •
Gas stations had grown so scarce that I pulled in at the one at Sand Springs—the gas station pretty much was Sand Springs—and crammed every drop of fuel I could into the Bago and religiously checked the tires and the air in the spare. Out on these extreme empty roads, you could die of car trouble.
The station attendant and I had been gabbing wholeheartedly—people out here in eastern Montana were as open as their plains—and while we did he noticed Mariah and Leona and Riley one after another emerge from the motorhome to stretch their legs or utilize the restroom or, in Mariah’s case, just unlimber her camera on Sand Springs. When we settled up, along with my change he handed me:
“Traveling with your whole family, eh? That’s nice to see, these days.”
It surprised the daylights out of me, the notion of the four of us as a brood. I was briefly tempted to tell the stationman that yeah, we were just your normal vanilla American household these days; the silver-haired lady and I weren’t married, at least to each other, but she’d once almost married my brother before thinking better of it, whereas the younger two, she mine (by my second wife) and him hers, had been married to one another but weren’t any more, although they intended to be again. Family tree, hell. We were our own jungle.
• • •
Mariah found her picture that afternoon. Leona was the one, as we roved down from Jordan toward Cohagen, who noticed that some of the sheds on the ranches we were passing had chimneys and window sashes and for that matter, regular front doors: homestead houses that had been jacked up and moved after the sodbuster families “took the cure” and abandoned their claims in some final dry year. Mariah pored over one of those old shanties for what must have been an hour, and the photo she finally chose was a close-up of its siding, the wood weathered to the rich brown of a relic.
• • •
As long a day as it had been, prowling around the Big Dry country for Mariah and Riley to work on their piece, that night after we pulled into the campground on the outskirts of Jordan, pop. 450, I simply nuked up some frozen dinners.
Leona tasted the first forkful of hers and asked clinically:
“Excuse my asking, but what is this guck?”
Mariah was in her absent rhythm of tackling the food with a utensil in one hand while she messed around in a stack of proof sheets with the other, and Riley and I pretty much per usual were mauling away at our plates without much thought either, I suppose.
“Soybeans Incognito, would be my best guess,” I theorized to Leona, although the label announced veal patties a la something-or-other.
“You people,” she uttered more in sorrow than in anger, “eat like Gypsies.”
“That’s funny,” Riley answered and gawked out at bare gray hills beyond the campground, ashen distance surrounding us everywhere. This will sound like I’m pouring it on, but honest to God, out there at the side of the road was a sign that read: HELL CREEK, 15 MILES. “You suppose maybe it might be because we live like Gypsies, Mother?”
Protocol when four people are packed into a motorhome and none of them are married to any of the others is tricky. Leon
a was up to it, though. She smiled from Riley to Mariah to me, then simply proposed it at large:
“Would anybody mind overly much if I took on the cooking?”
• • •
Our next encampment was at Circle, which Riley couldn’t resist pointing out was a bigger dot on the map than we were used to; the town had about 800 population. This particular morning, while Leona and I held the fort at the Redwater RV Park, he and Mariah had gone downtown to the Big Sheep Mountains Retirement Home in search of more rememberers for their homestead piece. Old folks’ home, such places used to be called. I wondered if I was going to end up in one of those. I hoped not. I hoped to Christ not.
For the time being, I actually had the Bago to myself while Leona was out doing her daily walk for exercise. The motorhome seemed suddenly expanded, big as an empty bus. Just me and a third cup of coffee and the rattle of the pages of the day’s Montanian I had settled down with. EASTERN EUROPE in one headline, COCAINE in another. What the news seemed to add up to was that people were evaporating out of East Germany as fast as they could, leaving everything behind to bravely try to better their lives, while a sizable proportion of this country sat around trying to figure new ways to put conniption powder up its collective nose. I don’t know. I try to be as American as anybody, but the balance of behavior looked pretty far out of whack at our end.
It was a relief, then, when Leona came back in from her constitutional and mentioned that she’d stopped by the phone box and called Morgan to see how things were at the ranch, and I said yeah, I was going to have to do the same to Noon Creek pretty quick, and we made conversation along that line for a while.
Leona hesitated, but then brought it up.
“Riley tells me you’re thinking about selling your ranch.”
I managed not to say he’d be the one to know, he was a major reason for that. Instead: “Thinking about is as far as I seem to get.”
“It’s always hard, isn’t it,” she answered. “When Herb and I married in ’44 he’d already taken over the place from his folks, so all those years until Herb died, our ranch just always seemed to me as permanent as the Crazy Mountains. But that’s not really the case any more. Morgan will run the place until his last breath. But after him, I just don’t know. Jeff”—by now I knew that was her only grandchild, in college at Bozeman—“doesn’t seem that interested. He’s a quiet boy. So far, he won’t even look at a girl.” Leona turned aside to glance at her reflection in the window above the nook table, as if the answer to young Jeff might be there. “No, I’m not at all sure the ranch is in his future. He maybe takes after Riley.” She swung a smile my way. “Don’t even say it, Jick.”