by Ivan Doig
“Fell off the rainbow on that one right enough,” Tollie was blaring. So that registered on me, and the point that the chute society, this once when they could have been useful out here in the arena, were dangling from various fence perches or peering from behind the calf chute. But the sprint Ray and I made through the loose arena dirt is marked in me only by the sound that reached us just as we reached Dode. The noise hit our ears from the far end of the arena: a tingling crack! like a tree breaking off and then crashing and thudding as it came down.
For a confused instant I truly thought a cottonwood had fallen. My mind tried to put together that with all else happening in this overcrowded space of time. But no, Coffee Nerves had slammed head-on into the gate of the catch pen, toppling not just the gate but the hefty gatepost, which crunched the hood of a parked car as it fell over. People who had been spectating along the fence were scattering from the prospect of having Coffee Nerves out among them.
The bronc however had rebounded into the arena. Piling into that gatepost finally had knocked some of the spunk out of Coffee Nerves. He now looked a little groggy and was wobbling somewhat, which gave Dill Egan time to lasso him and dally the rope around a corral post.
This was the scene as I will ever see it. Dode Withrow lying out there with the toes of his boots pointing up and Coffee Nerves woozy but defiant at the end of the lasso tether.
Quite a crowd encircled Dode, although Ray and I hung back at its outer edge; exactly what was not needed was any more people in the way. Doc Spence forged his way through, and I managed to see in past the arms and legs of all the men around him and Dode. And saw happen what I so desperately wanted to. When Doc held something under Dode’s nose, Dode’s head twitched.
Before long I heard Dode give a long mmmm, as if he was terrifically tired. After that his eyes came open and he showed that he was able to move, in fact would have tried to sit up if Doc Spence hadn’t stopped him. Doc told Dode to just take it easy, damn it, while he examined Dode’s right leg.
By now Midge and the Withrow girls had scurried out and Midge was down beside Dode demanding, “You ninny, are you all right?”
Dode fastened his look on her and made an mmmm again. Then burst out loud and clear, “Goddamn that stirrup anyway,” which lightened the mood of all of us around him, even Midge looking less warpath-like after that. I could just hear the razzing Dode was going to take from his herder Pat Hoy about this forced landing of his: “Didn’t know I was working for an apprentice bronc stomper, Dode. Want me to saddle up one of these big ewes, so’s you can practice staying on?”
Relief was all over my father as he went over to the grandstand fence to report to my mother and Marie and Toussaint. Ray and I tagged along, so we heard it as quick as anybody. “Doc thinks it’s a simple leg break,” my father relayed. “Could have been a hell of a lot worse. Doc’s going to take him to Conrad for overnight just to make sure.”
My mother at once called out to Midge an offer to ride with her to the hospital in Conrad. Midge, though, shook her head. “No, I’ll be all right. The girls’ll be with me, no sense in you coming.”
Then I noticed. Toussaint was paying no attention to any of this conversation, nor to the process of Dode being put on a stretcher over his protestations that he could walk or even foot-race if he had to, nor to Coffee Nerves being tugged into exit through what little was left of the catch pen gate. Instead he, Toussaint, was standing there gazing into the exact center of the arena, as if the extravaganza that Coffee Nerves and Dode had put on still was continuing out there. The walnut crinkles deepened in his face, his chuckle rippled out, and then the declaration: “That one. That one was a ride.”
• • •
There of course was more on the schedule of events beyond that. Tollie inevitably thought to proclaim, “Well, folks the show goes on.” But the only way for it to go after that performance by Coffee Nerves and Dode was downhill, and Ray and I retained our fence perch just through the next section of calf-roping to see whether Alec’s seventeen and a half seconds would hold up. Contestant after contestant rampaged out, flailed some air with a lariat, and came nowhere close to Alec’s time.
It had been a rodeo. English Creek had won both the saddle bronc riding and the calf-roping.
• • •
While the rodeo grounds emptied of crowd Ray and I stretched our attendance as long as we could. We watched the wrangling crew unpen the broncs and steers and calves. Listened to as much of the chute society’s post mortem as we could stand. Had ourselves another bottle of pop apiece before the beer booth closed. Then I proposed that we might as well take a horse tour of Gros Ventre. Ray thought that sounded dandy enough, so I fetched Mouse and swung into the saddle, and Ray climbed on behind.
We had sightseen most of the town before wandering back past the Medicine Lodge, which by now had its front door propped open with a beer keg, probably so the accumulating fume of cigarette smoke and alcoholic breath wouldn’t pop the windows out of the place. As Dode Withrow would have said, it sounded like hell changing shifts in there. The jabber and laughter and sheer concentration of humanity beyond that saloon doorway of course had Ray and me gazing in as we rode past, and that gaze was what made me abruptly halt Mouse.
Ray didn’t ask anything, but I could feel his curiosity as to why we were stalled in the middle of the street. Nor was it anything I could put into words for him. Instead I offered: “How about you riding Mouse down to your place? I’ll be along in a little. There’s somebody I got to go see.”
Ray’s look toward the Medicine Lodge wondered “In there?” but his voice only conveyed, “Sure, glad to,” and he lifted himself ahead into the saddle after I climbed down. Best of both worlds for him. Chance to be an unquestioning friend and get a horse to ride as well.
I went into the blue air of the saloon and stopped by the figure sitting on the second bar stool inside the doorway. The Medicine Lodge was getting itself uncorked for the night ahead. Above the general jabber somebody toward the middle of the bar was relating in a semi-shout: “So I told that sonofabitch he just better watch his step around me or there’s gonna be a new face in hell for breakfast.” My interest, though, was entirely here at the seated figure.
The brown hat moved around as he became aware of me.
“ ’Lo, Stanley,” I began, still not knowing where I was going next with any of this.
“Well, there, Jick.” The crowfoot lines clutched deeper at the corners of Stanley Meixell’s eyes as he focused on me. He didn’t look really tanked up, but on the other hand couldn’t be called church-sober either. Someplace in between, as he’d been so much of our time together on the mountain. “Haven’t seen you,” he continued in all pleasantness, “since you started living aboveground.”
Good Christ, Stanley had noticed my ducking act that day I was digging the outhouse hole and he rode by. Was my every moment visible to people anymore, like a planet being perpetually studied by one of those California telescopes?
“Yeah, well. How you been?”
“Fine as snoose. And yourself?”
“What I mean, how’s your hand doing?”
Stanley looked down at it as if I was the first to ever point out its existence. He still had some doozies of scabs and major bruises there on the injury site, but Stanley didn’t seem to regard this as anything but ordinary health. “It ain’t bad.” He picked up the bottle of beer from the counter before him. “Works good enough for the basics, anyway.” And tipped down the last of that particular beer. “Can I buy you a snort?”
“No, no thanks.”
“On the wagon, huh? I’ve clumb on it some times myself. All else considered, though, I’d just as soon be down off.”
It occurred to me that since I was in this place anyway it didn’t cost any more to be cordial. The stool between Stanley and the doorway was vacant—an empty mixed-drink glass testified that its occupant had traveled on—so I straddled the seat and amended: “Actually I would take a bottle of
orange, though.”
Stanley indicated his empty beer bottle to Tom Harry, the nearest of the three bartenders trying to cope with the crowd’s liquid wants. “When you get time, professor. And a sunjuice for my nurse, here.”
Tom Harry studied me. “He with you?” he asked Stanley.
“Closer than kin, him and me,” Stanley solemnly vouched to the barman. “We have rode millions of miles together.”
“None of it aged him that much,” Tom Harry observed, nonetheless setting up a bottle of orange in front of me and a fresh beer for Stanley.
“Stanley,” I started again. He was pushing coins out of a little pile, to pay for the latest round. Fishing up a five-cent piece, he held it toward me between his thumb and forefinger. “Know what this is?”
“Sure, a nickel.”
“Naw, it’s a dollar a Scotchman’s been squeezing.” The fresh beer got a gulp of attention. For the sake of the conversation I intended I’d like to have known how many predecessors that bottle had had, but of course Tom Harry’s style of bartending was to swoop empties out of sight so no such incriminating count could be taken.
I didn’t have long to dwell on Stanley’s possible intake, for some out-of-town guy wearing a panama hat zigged when he meant to zag on his way toward the door and lurched into the pair of us. Abruptly the guy was being gripped just above the elbow by Stanley—his right hand evidently had recuperated enough from Bubbles for this, too—and was retargeted toward the door with advice from Stanley: “Step easy, buddy, so you don’t get yourself hurt. In this county there’s a five-dollar fine for drawing blood on a fool.”
Mr. Panama Hat hastily left our company, and Stanley’s handling of the incident reminded me to ask something. “How you getting along with Canada Dan these days?”
“Better,” Stanley allowed. “Yeah, just a whole lot better.” He paid recognition to his beer bottle again. “Last I heard, Dan was up in Cut Bank. Doing some town herding.”
Cut Bank? Town herding? “What, did the Busby boys can him?”
“I got them to give Dan a kind of vacation.” Then, in afterthought: “Permanent.”
I considered this. Up there in the Two with Stanley those weeks ago, I would not have bet a pin that he was capable of rousing himself to do justice to Canada Dan. Yet he had.
“Stanley—”
“I can tell you got something on your mind, Jick. Might as well unload it.”
If I could grapple it into position, that was exactly what I intended. To ask: what was that all about, when we first met you there on the mountain, the skittishness between you and my father? Why, when I ask anyone in this family of mine about Stanley Meixell, is there never a straight answer? Just who are you to us? How did you cross paths with the McCaskills in the past, and why are you back crisscrossing with us again?
Somebody just beyond Stanley let out a whoop, then started in on a twangy rendition of the song that goes: “I’m a calico dog, I’m a razorback hog, I’m a cowboy on the loose! I can drink towns dry, I can all but fly, I flavor my beans with snoose!” In an instant Tom Harry was there leaning over the bar and categorically informing the songster that he didn’t care if the guy hooted, howled, or for that matter blew smoke rings out his butt, but no singing.
This, Stanley shook his head over. “What’s the world coming to when a man can’t offer up a tune? They ruin everything these days.”
First Dode, now Stanley. It seemed my mission in life this Fourth of July to steer morose beer drinkers away from even deeper gloom. At least I knew which direction I wanted to point Stanley: back into history.
“I been trying to figure something out,” I undertook honestly enough, one more time. “Stanley, why was it you quit rangering on the Two?”
Stanley did some more demolition on his beer, then cast a visiting glance around the walls at Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the stuffed herd, and eventually had to look at me and ask as if verifying:
“Me?”
“Uh huh, you.”
“No special reason.”
“Run it by me anyway.”
“Naw, you’d be bored fast.”
“Whyn’t you let me judge that.”
“You got better use for your ears.”
“Jesus, Stanley—”
All this while I was attempting to pry sense out of Stanley, the tail of my eye was trying to tell me something again. Someone had come up behind me. Which wasn’t particular news in the Medicine Lodge throng, except this someone evidently had no other site in mind; his presence stayed steadily there, close enough to make me edgy about it, sitting half braced as I was in case this guy too was going to crash in our direction.
I turned on the bar stool to cope with the interloper and gazed full into the face, not all that many inches away, of Velma Simms.
I must tell you, it was like opening a kitchen drawer to reach in for a jelly spoon and finding instead the crown jewels of England. For I had never been close enough, head-on, to Velma to learn that her eyes were gray. Gray! Like mine! Possibly our four were the world’s only. And to garner further that her lipstick, on the very lips that ruled the rodeo whistle, was the beautiful dark-beyond-red of ripe cherries. And that she was wearing tiny pearl earrings, below the chestnut hair, as if her ears could be unbuttoned to further secrets even there. And that while the male population of northern Montana was focusing on the backside of Velma’s renowned slacks, they were missing important announcements up front. Sure, there could be found a few lines at the corners of her eyes and across her forehead. But to me right then, they simply seemed to be affidavits of how imaginative a life this lady had led.
Unbelievable but so. Out of all the crowded flesh in the Medicine Lodge just then, solely onto me was fixed this attention of Velma Simms.
She just stood there eyeing me while I gaped, until the point of her attention finally prodded through to me.
“Oh. Oh, hello, Mrs.—uh, Velma. Have I got your seat?” I scrambled off the bar stool as if it was suddenly red-hot.
“Now that you mention it,” she replied, and even just saying that, her words were one promissory note after another. Velma floated past me and snuggled onto the stool. A little extra of that snuggle went in Stanley’s direction.
“Saw you there at the announcing booth,” I reminisced brightly.
“Did you,” said she.
I may be a slow starter, but eventually I catch up with the situation. My quick gawp around the saloon confirmed what had been trying to dawn on me. This year’s beau in the gabardine suit was nowhere.
“Yeah, well,” I began to extricate myself. “I got to be getting.”
“Don’t feel you need to rush off,” said Stanley. As if God’s gift to the male race wasn’t enthroned right there beside him. “The night’s still a pup.”
“Uh huh. That’s true, but—”
“When you got to go,” put in Velma, twirling the empty mixed-drink glass to catch Tom Harry’s attention for a refill, “you got to go.”
“Right,” I affirmed. “And like I say, I, uh, got to go.”
What made me add to the total of my footprints already in my mouth I can’t truly account for. Maybe the blockade I had hit again in wanting to ask all the questions of Stanley. In any case, the parting I now blurted out was:
“You two in a dancing mood tonight? What I mean, see you at the dance, will I?”
Stanley simply passed that inquiry to Velma with a look. In theory, Velma then spoke her answer to me, although she didn’t unlock her gaze from him at all as she said it: “Stanley and I will have to see whether we have any spare time.”
• • •
So. One more topic clambering aboard my already bent-over brain. Stanley Meixell and Velma Croake Bogan Sutter Simms.
• • •
“Ray? What kind of a summer are you having?”
We were up in the double window of his bedroom, each of us propped within the sill. A nice breeze came in on us there, the leaves of the big cottonwood i
n the Heaneys’ front yard seeming to flutter the air our way. Downstairs the radio had just been turned on by Ed Heaney, so it was seven o’clock. The dance wouldn’t get under way for an hour or so yet, and as long as Ray and I were going to be window sitting anyway for the next while, I figured I’d broach to him some of all that was on my mind.
“Didn’t I tell you? Pilot.”
“No, I don’t mean that. What it is, do things seem to you kind of unsettled?”
“How?”
“Well, Christ, I don’t know. Just in general. People behaving like they don’t know whether to include you in or out of things.”
“What kind of things?”
“Things that went on years ago. Say there was an argument or a fight or something, people fell out over it. Why can’t they just say, here’s what it was about, it’s over and done with? Get it out of their systems?”
“That’s just grownups. They’re not going to let a kid in on anything, until they figure it’s too late to do him any good.”
“But why is that? What is it that’s so goddamn important back there that they have to keep it to themselves?”
“Jick, sometimes—”
“What?”
“Sometimes maybe you think too much.”
I thought that over briefly. “What am I supposed to do about that? Christ, Ray, it’s not like poking your finger up your nose in public, some kind of habit you can remind yourself not to do. Thinking is thinking. It happens in spite of a person.”
“Yeah, but you maybe encourage it more than it needs.”
“I what?”
“See, maybe it’s like this.” Ray’s eyes squinched more than ever as he worked on his notion, and the big front teeth nipped his lower lip in concentration. Then: “Maybe, let’s say maybe a thought comes into your head, it’s only about what you’re going to do next. Saddle up Mouse and take a ride, say. That’s all the thought it really needs. Then put on the saddle and climb on. But the mood you’re in, Jick, you’d stop first and think some more. ‘But if I go for a ride, where am I going to go?’ ” Ray here went into one of his radio voices, the words coming clippity-clippity like old Kaltenborn’s. “ ‘What is it I’ll see when I get there? Did anybody else ever see it? And if anybody did, is it going to look the same to me as it did to them? And old Mouse here, is it going to look the same to Mouse as it does to me?’ ”