Ride With Me, Mariah Montana

by Ivan Doig

  • • •

  “Jick?” Leona asked with surprising shyness when she and I were back in the Bago waiting for Mariah and Riley to finish rummaging Ekalaka for their piece. “Would you mind, do you think—could I practice my talk to the Sisters of Peace on you?”

  I assured her I didn’t overly mind. “As long as there’s nothing physical or mental to the job, I’m probably capable.” Besides, who knew, maybe some of her Centennial Day spiel to Moscow would rub off on me.

  Across the dinette table from me, Leona drew herself up, the piping across the chest of her yoke shirt squaring itself impressively, and gazing at me as if I was the video camera, she broke out with an international smile and spouted:

  “Zdrahstfooyte, Syohstrih Meerah! Greetings, Sisters of Peace. Mwih ochen rahdih bwit vahsheemee droozyahmee. We are very glad to be your friends. Myehnyah zahvoot Leeona Meekhylovna Riyt. My name is Leona Michaelovna Wright . . .” Gorbachev ought to have signed her up on the spot.

  During one of her pauses to linguistically regroup, I asked something I’d been curious about, even a little leery for Leona’s sake. “This sister group—I don’t imagine they’re ranch women, there in Moscow. So just who are they, do you know?”

  “They’re wives of soldiers killed in Afghanistan,” Leona said in a voice carefully level.

  My eyes followed hers, out and away from that mention of dying young in a war, to the hill with the big white C. Figuring we could contemplate the general landscape out around Ekalaka only so long without becoming too obviously oblivious to each other, I rose and headed for the jar of instant coffee and the microwave. “Get you something from the nuclear samovar here, can I?”

  Both Leona and I jumped when the motorhome’s side door opened and that son of hers yelped in, “Got it!”

  I appraised Riley as he bounded in but confined my response. “Yeah? Where?”

  “There.” He nodded to the window his mother and I had just been scrupulously attentive to.

  We swiveled to see what we’d missed.

  “The C hill,” said Riley. “The white alphabet.”

  White shadows of the towns, these initials on the nearest hill, trying to imprint community, constancy. To cry out in a single capital letter that these painted stones are not yet as abstractly abandoned as tepee rings. . . .

  And from that C hill I did see. In my mind, I saw all the way to white letters above English Creek, the outlines in painted rock on the benchland south of another hunkered town, my own town: GV, for Gros Ventre. For more than that. The devout abbreviation my grandfather Isaac Reese made sure to sprinkle through his letters to Denmark had been DV, the express wish of his world and time: Deo volente, God willing. These little towns of the land, the Ekalakas and the Gros Ventres, I believe are written onto time in letters that similarly say their hope and fate. GV. Geo volente, The earth willing.

  • • •

  Mariah was the next one to bollix up the departure plan. At least she spilled it right out:

  “Riley and I have to stay.”

  Leona and I looked at each other, then at our contributions to journalism. Mariah had brought it out, so I was the one to inject: “What, are you two going to take up residence here?”

  “Just overnight,” Mariah maintained and explained her desire for morning light tomorrow to shoot the best picture of the C hill. “But you two don’t have to stay just because we are,” she summed up, sweet reason personified. “We’ve got it all worked out, huh, Riley?”

  He now had the same cloud-of-bliss atmosphere he’d had throughout the nuptial event in the Holiday Inn. “Huh? Right, yeah, all worked out. Here’s the deal.”

  What it amounted to was that the local BLM man had to go into Billings for a bureaucrat meeting the next day and he’d gladly drop Riley and Mariah there, to continue their trip to Missoula by a rental. Twenty-four hours more or less, they claimed, probably wouldn’t make much difference one way or another with the BB at this late point in their Montanian careers. So, no problem, Leona and I could hit on down the road without them, right now.

  “But if Jick and I go in the Bago,” Leona lobbed into that, “where’ll you stay?”

  “There’s a, uh, place at the edge of town,” Mariah replied sunnily.

  A place. Right. You bet. Also known as a motel. Chinook, Ekalaka; these two were original in their romantic venues, at least.

  • • •

  The C hill and our theoretically adult children behind us, Leona and I scooted for home. Eyebrows had gone up a notch, Leona’s among them, when I said before leaving that I guessed she and I might as well head west out of Ekalaka on the back road to Broadus and on across the Northern Cheyenne and Crow reservations instead of retracing all the way north to Wibaux and the freeway. Mariah and Riley of course had to put in their combined four bits’ worth that driving back up to Wibaux was maybe longer but definitely a more major road, but Leona rose to the occasion. “If Jick wants to go this other way, that’s jake with me,” and that settled that.

  West we went, then, for once in this centennial trip traveling in as straight a line as possible instead of a journalistic curlicue, across country new to Leona and so far into my past as to be almost new. When we pretty soon passed by a parcel of the Custer National Forest that consisted of chalk buttes and some scattered ponderosa pine, something telling did come back to me from that early time of mine as a shavetail assistant ranger in this corner of the world: how those of us stationed out here used to joke that maybe the Custer wasn’t the biggest national forest we could be on but it sure as hell was the longest. Across about seven hundred miles, from the Beartooth District midway in Montana to the Sheyenne District on the far side of North Dakota, the Custer was a scatter of administrative islands of dry stands of forest or grasslands. This afternoon in the Bago, with the teeny Ekalaka swatch of federal forest fading behind us and sixty or seventy prairie miles ahead of us to the next district of the Custer, that joke seemed still valid.

  You might think Leona and I would be talked out, after a couple of months of motorhome life together. But we did find things to say, whenever one or the other felt like it. She was good to visit with that way. I let her know that Mariah and Riley now had, if not my blessing, at least my buttoned lip. She smiled and said that was probably as much as they had a right to expect. After a while she wondered how I was coming on my centennial morn speech and I said fine, except for not knowing what the hell I was going to say. “‘Ostahlos nahchahts, dah koncheets,’ the Russian saying is,” she provided me. “ ‘All there is left to do is begin and finish.’ ”

  That first hour or so went that way, nicely, on the surface. But after we buzzed through Broadus, Leona seemed to sense that my mind was on something else than talk and we let conversation lapse. I drove remembering. Places coming back to me, places over here—communities that now probably were ghosts of themselves—that I’d never even heard of in my Two country upbringing, and I’d always thought I was good in geography. Sonnette, Otter, Quietus. The look of this terrain odd to me too in comparison with the Two Medicine land. No real elevation here but constant little rises. Bumpy country, it still seemed to me. The road, the arid hills; probably the lives of the people around.

  I recognized King Mountain, ten or a dozen miles to the southwest, its hatcrown summit in the middle of flattish timbered ridges. It was all I could do to keep the Bago on the galloping highway and gawk at that odd but remembered country. Ever since the four of us headed into eastern Montana, I had hoped Mariah and Riley would not zero in on this particular area for one of their pieces. More of the fact is, I hadn’t known how I could handle myself if they dropped a finger onto the map just here and said, let’s go. And so, now that I was free of that, how do I account for having chosen this route myself? For what I all at once blurted?

  “Leona, would you mind a little sidetrip? Just down the country here a ways. It won’t take long.”

  Leona looked at me from the passenger seat as if wondering whe
re in an outback like this it was possible to go on a sidetrip. Whatever was in my voice must have said more than my words. She immediately answered, “If you want to, Jick, that’d be fine.”

  I recognized the turnoff surprisingly well, although I remembered not a single one of the rancher names on their signboard that soberly listed extensive mileages to their places. The road south off the highway was another plummet-line route, cleaving across the terrain as straight and quick as possible.

  Leona stayed quiet as we drove. My mind did not. The young man I had been, I met here behind my eyes, seeing again with him. The badlands here along Otter Creek had always spooked him, me. Dry gulches and stark buttes and the odd reddish tone of the ground might be expected in the honest deserts of Arizona or New Mexico, but to find country of that kind here, showing through the grass like the bones of the earth, made the younger me feel like a stranger in my home state.

  Three Mile Creek we passed, then Ten Mile, then Fifteen Mile, with cattleguards marketing the trafficless road between those streams. Then with a last brrrump the Bago rumbled across the cattleguard just before our destination, and I pulled into the driveway and shut the engine off.

  The Fort Howes Ranger Station was little changed. The stockade-fence of pointed posts that had been out front was gone, replaced by a rail fence that looked more peaceable but less like the place’s historic namesake, and some equipment sheds had been added, but the main buildings were the same as forty years ago, the ranger station like a shingle-sided cottage, the house its longer but similar mate. Their low-held roofs still were covered with fist-size rocks to absorb the heat of the sun, for it could get utterly broiling here in summertime.

  Leona took it all in, the huddle of buildings each painted with the same federal red brush, the surrounding badlands with gray lopped-off slopes that duned down almost into the back doors. The rockfield roofs that even in the November afternoon chill looked like beds of rosy coals. “Different country,” she said, with extreme curiosity in the gaze she turned toward me.

  “Different guy, I guess I was, the last time I was here.” She knew none of the particulars of my three-year career in the Forest Service here; nor, gone from the Two Medicine country into her own life with Herb Wright, had she ‘ever heard of my first marriage. I told her it all. Of myself and Shirley, when I was assigned as assistant ranger here at the Fort Howes station and Shirley found herself in the unexpected role of Forest Service wife in what seemed the bare middle of nowhere—two Missoula campus hotshots abruptly out into the real world of rocks and routine. Of how, despite my determination to stand up under whatever job the Forest Service saddled me with, I never for a minute felt at home here; to me then, these encompassing buttes and rimrocks were as if the land had been cut down and these were the stumps. And of how, if I was uneasy here at Fort Howes, Shirley was entirely unhinged. Quo vadis, hell, was her reaction to my being assigned here.

  Leona was listening as intently as I was telling it. I went on to the finale:

  “As I remember it, Shirley and I passed the time by fighting. In those days we didn’t have air conditioning and everything, and it could get pretty tough here in summer. I know the last time we got to arguing, Shirley pointed straight up at the roof and shouted at the top of her voice, ‘Only snakes and bugs were meant to live under rocks!’ ”

  It had taken forty years, but I laughed at that memory. Leona gave a kind of elegant giggle as if trying to contain herself, but then burst into outright laughing too. Which set me off all the more, happy with the surprise that I was at last able to do so, and that really got us going, a genuine fit of laughing, Leona and I infectious back and forth, snorting to each other and then at the hilarious accused rocks atop the ranger house and convulsing off into new gales. Rollicking applause, four decades overdue, for Shirley for that exit line from our marriage.

  “And I can’t say I blame her,” I brought out when Leona and I at last managed to slow our chortling enough to get some breath back. “Not one damn bit. It was a case of double behavior. Both of us flung our way into that marriage. It wasn’t just her doing.”

  In record time Leona’s face went from the glee we’d been sharing to deathly sober.

  She gazed at me, her eyes working to take in the recognition as they’d done that first full moment of look at me in the yard of the Wright ranch. I could see how much it took for her now to manage the words:

  “You’re saying that about another case too, aren’t you.”

  “Yeah, I am.” I made a half-fist and gently tapped the steering wheel of the Bago as I thought of just how to put it. “It’s probably past time I should’ve said something of the sort about you and Alec. But that old stuff dies hard, doesn’t it.” I studied the ranger house, the now-quiet combat zone of Shirley and my younger self, for a moment more and then shifted around to face Leona. “I don’t know what the hell it is, whether it’s just easier to keep on being half mad than it is to ever get over it, or what. But anyway, I need you to know, Leona—I don’t hold you responsible any more for what happened between Alec and the rest of us in the family.” For both her and me, I lightened it as much as I possibly could. “Probably you didn’t have to hold a gun on him to keep him occupied with you.”

  She took her eyes from me and looked off at the chalk butte beyond the ranger station. Even yet, even sad, Leona’s face fully hinted of the beautiful girl she was in those days. “No,” she said as if from a distance. “No, I didn’t have to.”

  • • •

  The rest of the ride with Leona was a cruise across silk, as far as I was concerned. Ahead of me from Fort Howes, the landscapes and the moments unrolled as if carrying the Bago, bearing us like first guests across the miles, the autumn afternoon. Beyond the Tongue River and then the redstone hills of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation; at Lame Deer an Indian father in a down vest and big black hat was loping his horse in the barrow pit beside the pony of his maybe eight-year-old daughter, this evidently her saddleback lesson, the two of them watching each other without seeming to as they kept their easy but steady gait. Then mountains beginning to the south, the Rosebud and Bighorn ranges. Another hour of quiltpatch road and we were passing the Custer Battlefield, monument, straggle of Seventh Cavalry graves, wrought-iron cemetery fence. Studying the terrain chopped up by small coulees—you would have to go some to invent worse country for cavalry—Leona shook her head and said she never would understand what all the fuss over Custer was about. “A lot of better people have died in wars.” I only made an agreeing noise in my throat, those World War Two storms of thought behind me too on the trip now, and headed us on. After Crow Agency the road sledding down into nice irrigated bottomland, sudden treeline at the far side of it, the Bighorn River hugging below benchland in a way to remind me of the valley of English Creek. Now through the western half of the Crow Reservation, long rolling miles toward Pryor while daylight went, before long the Bago’s headlights picking out plywood signs with the spray-painted message CATTLE AT LARGE ON ROAD. No more so than me. Into full night before ever reaching the freeway at Laurel and then the twin lanes beside the Yellowstone River again, the motorhome and I and our passenger as if on comfortable automatic now, until Big Timber where we late-suppered in the Country Pride cafe. From there we had only the easy last hour home for Leona.

  • • •

  So I was surprised, to say the least, at how she spoke up after we were onto the ridge road from Clyde Park out toward the Crazy Mountains, minutes from the Wright ranch.

  “Jick,” she said in a strained voice. “Pull over. Please.”

  What, could she be carsick, now after damn near two months of Bago motion? Dashlight was all I had to diagnose by, but my instant glance across at her told me Leona most definitely looked peaked.

  Making the best version of emergency landing I could, I nosed the motorhome onto an approach leading into a field and cut the motor.

  She did not open the passenger door and bail out into the night air for recupera
tion as I expected she was going to. Instead Leona faced around to me and spoke beyond the capacity of expectations.

  “That time. The night of that supper with your folks and you.”

  Of my brother Alec declaring as if it was the world’s newest faith, We got something to tell you, we’re going to get married. Of Leona wielding her smile that proclaimed And nothing can dent us, we’re magical at this age. Of my mother and father as unmoving as the supper plates, more than half knowing the next to come, that Alec was going to say a college ladder into the future was not for him, now that he’d have a wife to support. I sat startled to be simultaneously at that supper scene again and in the halted motorhome. The woman of silver here who had been that invincibly smiling girl said:

  “I’d told Alec I was pregnant.”

  “But then—”

  “I . . . I wasn’t.”

  She was having hard going, her voice throatier than in the most straining Russian lesson.

  “But a girl could say that then and be believed,” she managed to get it out, “before the pill and the foam and the whatever else they have these days. Men then didn’t much understand female plumbing. Whether they do now, I wouldn’t know.”

  Leona turned her head toward the windshield, as if the reflections of each of us in the night-backed glass needed to hear this too.

  “In those days, we counted the days of the month,” she kept on. At least that much I knew. Shirley and I had our own few months of calendar nerves, that long ago springtime in Missoula before we got married. “We’d been meeting out along the creeks, Alec and I,” Leona’s words remembered. “The old Ben English place right there across English Creek was standing empty then, that was one we met at. But it was awfully close to town, we had to be too careful there. Noon Creek was better for our purpose, all those ranches standing empty after the Double W bought them up—Fain’s, the Eiseley place, the Nansen place. Alec and I both lived on horseback in those days and there wasn’t any shortage of places to ride to and make love.” Still facing ahead, she stopped and swallowed. Then resumed. “So it fit with—the way we’d been with each other, my telling him the calendar had played a surprise on us.”