Ride With Me, Mariah Montana

by Ivan Doig

  The wedding was almost to climax in rings and kisses before I realized. I leaned toward Riley and whispered, “What became of Mariah?”

  He murmured back, “She’s shooting this.”

  I inspected every farflung corner of the atrium and behind the potted trees and even cast a glance under the grand piano, but no Mariah.

  I whispered again, “Where the hell from?”

  This time Riley’s murmur was forceful. “You don’t want to know.”

  With that I did know, though. Which is why, in the Montanian’s photo of the Darcy-Jason wedding taken from overhead, the bride a white blossom and the groom a plum sprig beside her and the minister’s open book and the dot rows of the heads of the wedding-goers as if seen from the ceiling of a cathedral, the solo face gaping directly upward six stories to the atrium skylight—and Mariah and her camera—is my bearded one.

  • • •

  That was Billings, and the day directly after the wedding experience our trend was east again, one last time, another three-hundred-miler to somewhere that hadn’t realized it’d been waiting a century for Mariah and Riley.

  And so even after we had reversed the long angling freeway journey along the Yellowstone River all the way to Glendive, this time we still continued east, as if pellmell to see North Dakota.

  Shortly before the Dakota line, though, at Wibaux, behind me Riley announced “Make a right here and keep on going until you hit the South Pole” and although he overstated it a bit, I aimed us down the quantity of miles ahead to Montana’s southeastern corner.

  Away from the green settled valley of the Yellowstone, counties in this part of the state are whopping maps with a single pin of town in each. The fact was, this was almost off the map of any of the four of us. I was the only one who had ever been anywhere into this emptiest corner, and that a long time ago. We might as well have been a carload of Swiss trying to sightsee Mongolia. Grassland with sage low and thin on it ran to all the horizons—cattle in specks of herds here and there—and a surprising number of attempts had been made to scratch some farming into this barebone plain, but what grew here mostly was distance. Except for an occasional gumbo butte or a gully full of tumbleweeds, out here there were no interruptions of the earth extending itself until bent by the weight of the sky.

  Really pretty quiet all four of us stayed, throughout this long country. Leona spent time cramming Russian through her headset. Mariah mostly appraised the horizontal endlessness outside, occasionally fiddling with an earring, today white daisies as if this vicinity could stand a bit of bouquet. I idly wondered how I’d gotten so expert at miscalculation; if anything, Mariah and Riley acted more allied, alloyed, whatever, than before I’d applied Leona to this journey to split them. Mariah’s only rival in the cosmos seemed to be Riley’s word processor, going pucka pucka now but only sporadically, none of his long runs that said he was getting somewhere with the words.

  The terrasphere now . . . space travel, this, except it’s on the ground . . . the highway the orbit . . .

  Running down, maybe we all were. The centennial was only a handful of days away now. This had to be Mariah and Riley’s last piece until they hit Gros Ventre for our dawn ceremony. Between now and then, once they finished in this final reach of the state, I was to drop them in Billings so they could rent a car and scoot to Missoula to begin closing down their lives there, then I’d leave Leona off at her ranch and hustle myself home to the Two country. Humongous agenda, as Mariah would have put it. So, maybe ahead preoccupied us. Maybe we were each a little hypnotized by the capacities of the plains; the full eighty miles down from the Wibaux turnoff, this road lined away as straight as the drop of a plumb bob. The only hint of deviation came after we passed through Baker, when the land began to rumple just enough to make the ride like a long slow roller coaster.

  Even the roadkills were different from what we four mountain Montanans were used to; over the crest of any of the little rolly humps, the Bago was apt to intersect the angular length of a run-over rattlesnake.

  • • •

  Ekalaka has had to declare itself as best it can in such a circle of horizon. The little town is beside as much of a hill as it could find and has put a big definitive white letter of initial on that promontory. But what interested me as we gradually—everything out here seemed gradual—drew closer to our destination was that instead of the E a person would naturally expect for some place named Ekalaka, this civic monogram unmistakably read C.

  “What, are they working their way up through the alphabet?” I prodded Riley, as my chances to do so were about to run out.

  Ever clever, he explained the landmark C had to be for Carter County. Indeed, Ekalaka as we pulled in demonstrated itself even more as a conscientious county seat. Unusual for a Montana community, it possessed a town square, made up of a white-painted wooden courthouse, a jail, and a funeral parlor. Maybe you had to travel a ton of miles to reach this town but basics were here when you needed them.

  So were three bars, not bad for a populace of 632, and a couple of grocery stores, and a hospital, and a small motel, and a Wagon Wheel Cafe, and an enterprise that declared it was a clothing store and a liquor store, and a bank and a propane plant and so on. By description alone, I know it does not sound like enough of a place to willingly make a six-hundred-mile roundtrip to visit. But not so, at least for me. I couldn’t have said why, because Ekalaka tucked as it was into the southeast corner of the state was literally the farthest remove from Gros Ventre, and the two communities didn’t bear any ready resemblance. But something about this hunkered little town quite appealed to me in the same way that Gros Ventre’s concentrated this-is-what-there-is-of-it-and-we-think-it’s-enough presence always had.

  Now what? was always the question after Mariah and Riley hit a locale, and after a cruise of town and figuring out where to site the motorhome overnight—anywhere—we held a four-way conference on strategy for the rest of the day. Riley had spotted a Bureau of Land Management office and said he’d better get up there before closing time and find somebody to talk to about this area’s yawning surpluses of, well, land. Leona said she wanted to stretch her legs and so she’d go with him and shop around town some while he gabbed. Mariah had her camera eye on the courthouse with its cupola that sat atop like a little party hat, but would stay and take stock of things until the afternoon light deepened better for shooting. For my part, I sighed and decided I’d better stay planted in the Bago too, needing to get myself organized toward my now not very distant centennial oration. So off Riley and Leona went, Mariah and I warning them not to get lost in the six-block-square expanse of Ekalaka.

  For the first time in a long time, then, we were separated into the Wrights and the McCaskills, and maybe it was this almost inadvertent siding up into families that finally did it.

  • • •

  I admit I was a bit keyed up, with a speech to put together and all. It didn’t take much of that to give me a sneaking admiration for Riley, even; this jotting stuff down wasn’t as simple as it looked. Still, if Mariah hadn’t done what she did, I would not have flown off the handle, now would I? All in the world I intended was to take a little break and administer some caffeine for inspiration. So, as I was about to nuke a cup of coffee in the microwave, I turned my head to ask if she wanted one too and found myself gazing into an all too familiar click.

  “Mariah, goddamn that camera! You’ve about worn the face off me with it! You must have a jillion sonofabitching pictures of me by now, what the hell do you keep shooting them for?”

  She of course could not resist snapping yet another one while I was right in the middle of that. Probably she captured me looking mad as a wet hen: white-bearded kid in a tantrum.

  But then the camera did come down from her eye, and Mariah was giving me her own straight gaze. But through a glisten.

  I blinked, dumbfounded. There was no mistaking. Her gray eyes were verging on tears.

  Then Mariah said:

  “Becaus
e I won’t always have you.”

  That dropped on me like a Belgian brick. It had never occurred to me—how could it?—to regard myself as some kind of memory album for Mariah. Photographic shadows of myself that would pattern across her days after I no longer do.

  I managed to say, “Petunia, I don’t figure on checking out of life for a while yet.”

  “No, and don’t you dare,” she instructed me fiercely. Like mine, her voice was having trouble finding footing in the throat.

  Talk about earthquakes being abrupt. Daughter and father, we this suddenly stared across the shaken up air between us.

  “Mariah. I didn’t know, it just never occurred to me that—that was on your mind.” The way her mother was on mine; the way the ones we love ever are.

  “I suppose really that’s why I dragged you into this trip,” she said with an alarming quiver in her voice. “And now we’re about out of trip, aren’t we.”

  “All good things must you-know-what,” I tried, to see if I could jack her out of this choked-up mood. And won the booby prize at consoling, for now two distinct tears carried the glistening down Mariah’s cheeks.

  This was the exact pain I had wanted to keep her from. Loss. The gouge it tears through you. What I had been so sure would be incurred in her by Riley Wright, incurring instead from me.

  Hard to know, though, how to be reassuring about your own time ahead in the green bed. I knew nothing to do but gulp and try from a new direction.

  “I’ll tell you what. When the time comes for me to go to the marble farm, you and Lexa just give me the Scotch epitaph, how about. The one I read about in trying to come up with something for this goddamn centennial speech. They used it there in the old country when somebody special to them went out of the picture ahead of time, so to speak. What they’d do was put on the stone: ‘Here lies all of him that could die.’ ”

  The words hung as clear between us as if spelled out in sharpest black and white of one of Mariah’s photos. Our eyes held. After a bit I was able to provide what I knew from the storms of memory these past months. “Mariah. Just because I’m going to be dead someday doesn’t mean I won’t be available.”

  Mariah blinked hard, then gave a shaky grin. “You’ve got a deal, Daddio. I’ll scratch that epitaph of yours into the rock with my finger-nails if I have to.” Her voice firmed as she went into stipulations: “But not until a long time from now, you hear? You at least have to match that old fart Good Help Hebner.”

  “Gives me something to shoot for,” I agreed with an answering grin and figured we had come out of it to the good. Mariah, though, gave her hair a toss and looked at me in her considering-the-picture way—her eyes were thinking—but without her camera in between and I knew better.

  “That’s in the long run,” she delineated. “Now what about your immediate future, Mister Jick.”

  “Well,” I said in what I hoped she would think was earnest, “I was going to have a cup of coffee and then try to write a speech.”

  “I don’t mean this very minute,” she overinformed me. “What I do mean is the ranch and you and your mood when you get back to the Two country for good in a couple of days. The deciding you’ve got to do about things.” Things, yeah. She hadn’t even counted Althea Frew into the enumeration.

  “Depends.”

  “On what?”

  “Lots of things.”

  “Name a few.”

  “Don’t you have something to go take a picture of?”

  “That can wait. Right now I’m trying to talk to my father about the rest of his life.”

  “Let’s find some prettier topic.”

  “No, let’s don’t. For a change, let’s try to look at Jick McCaskill after this trip is over. After you make your speech. After you decide about the ranch.”

  “If you’re going to be in the business of afters, Mariah, don’t leave out the main one.”

  That threw her off, for a few seconds. Then she took a monumental breath. “All right then. After Riley and I—”

  “Mariah, it’s okay.” I had to attempt this, finally, even if I didn’t know how to say it, maybe never would know the right words for it. Nothing ever prepares you for speaking what you most need to, does it. “What I mean, it’s all right about Riley and you. About you and him and marrying again and California, the whole works. It’s okay with me now.”

  “Since when?” shot out of her in astonishment.

  “If it needs a birth certificate, how about from right now,” I told her and more than meant it.

  It cost me a lot of my heart, but this needed doing. No time like—when you’re about to run out of time. Minutes ago I had tried my utmost to show Mariah how to make loss into change, to accept that they for a while will seem to be the same, until a healing, a scarring over, whatever works, can manage to happen. Now to make it begin on myself, where my unholdable daughter was concerned.

  “Christ knows, I can’t guarantee I can always act as if Riley as a retread son-in-law is just fine and dandy with me,” I set forth to her. “But I’ve played out the calendar on trying to change your mind or his. People can regulate each other only so far, huh?” And then they must do what I was now, gaze acceptingly at Mariah in what she chose for herself and tell myself without flinch, This is how she is.

  “I suppose I’ve had some help realizing that, lately,” I had to go on, my voice thinner than I wanted it to be. If I forced myself to do this I could. I would. I did. “Leona wouldn’t give you the sweat off her saddle, yet it’s fine by her for Riley to marry you again as many goddamn times as he can manage to. So if she can think that way from her side of things, why can’t I from mine, right?”

  Now Mariah really blinked. “You keep on and you’re going to have me telling her thanks. Spassyveebo or whatever the cockeyed Russian for it is.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re maybe better off in English.”

  My daughter studied me. She said at last: “What I can tell you is, I appreciate this. All of it. Even the hard time you gave me over Riley. I can see why you did it. Riley and I aren’t exactly a prescription pair, are we.”

  “No, but I guess there are other kinds to be.”

  She pulled her camera to her abruptly, but just when I was resigned to being fired away at, she went to the side door of the Bago instead and peered out. “The light’s nice now,” she reported huskily. “I’d better go get shots of the courthouse.”

  “Before you do,” I said. “What you were asking about me in—the short run. I’m working on it all, Mariah. Honest to Christ, I am working on it.”

  “I figured you were,” she said and now gave me the full grin, the Mariah and Marcella grin. “You’re entitled to a cup of coffee first, though.”

  • • •

  Morning brought the next. Morning and Riley.

  We were supposed to pull out of Ekalaka by midmorning, which would just get us to where we each were supposed to be that night; Mariah and Riley relaying on into Missoula from Billings by rental car, myself home to the Two country after dropping Leona off at her ranch. Quite a number of miles ahead for all involved and no time for dillydallying. Which Riley now came down with a severe case of.

  He broke out with it to Mariah when we were amid breakfast in the Wagon Wheel Cafe, first putting down his coffee cup as delicately as if it contained nitroglycerin. “Got a little confession to make, shooter. I don’t have my part of the piece yet.”

  “Mmm,” she responded and stabbed up a next bite of hotcake. “Well, that’s okay, isn’t it? There’s time yet. You can finish it up before we pull out.” Leona and I attended to our food. Actually the listening I wanted to do was to the next table, where a habitual bunch of town guys were gabbing and coffeeing up for the day. “This Eastern Europe thing is a growing thing, I’m telling you,” one with a Sic ’em, Carter County Bulldogs ballcap told the others. “See, what I’m saying is, what the hell is old Gorbachev gonna do if those countries keep this up, if you see what I’m saying.” Even locution
s seemed long in this stretched part of the state.

  Not Riley’s. “I don’t have the piece started yet.”

  Mariah and Leona and I all looked at him.

  “You mean,” Mariah said as you would to an invalid, “really not started yet, not even anything jotted down?”

  “Oh fuck yes,” he responded, drawing a wince out of his mother. “I’ve got stuff jotted down until it won’t quit. But I don’t have the piece. The idea.” He reflected. “Even any idea about the idea.”

  At any point in the trip until then I would have lit into Riley unmercifully. I mean, Christamighty, he had picked one hell of a place to be skunked. It was just about shorter to the moon than what we had to drive yet that day, and for him to do any dithering would just royally screw—but I kept my peace.

  For a mother with a California-bound son who didn’t seem to know how to aim himself out of downtown Ekalaka, Leona too was comparatively restrained. “Are we talking hours or days, that it’s going to take you to think up something?”

  But Mariah still was Riley’s point of focus.

  “I want to get this piece right,” he said quite quietly to her. “This last couple of pieces, here and Gros Ventre, before we quit Montana—I want to do them up the way they deserve to be.” He gave Mariah the diamond-assessing look he’d done in Helena when he saw her fresh print of the Baloney Express bunch and asked, How good are you going to get, shooter?

  Breakfast dishes between and spectating parents on either side notwithstanding, I more than half expected Mariah to go straight across the table and kiss him his reward. The way Riley would tackle anything and anybody in his work was something terrific, even I had to admit. Mariah as much as said so with the savvying grin she gave him now, but she only reached for her camera bag and agreed in teammate fashion, “Okay, word guy, let’s go find out how good there is.”