By the Fourth of July, Rossie was into the Flathead Valley of Montana, riding surveyed roads through barley fields turning from green to yellow in streaks. Men hauled cured field grasses over the slanted planks of beaver slides, building stacks of meadow hay to be doled out to the herds through the winter. Moving south above the shore of Flathead Lake, a vast glassy expanse speckled with timbered islands in the noontime stillness, he passed cherry orchards on the east shore where crews comprised mostly of women and children were harvesting the fruit. In the afternoon he reached the ranchlands south of the lake, which gave way to the cliffs and peaks of the Mission Range off to the east, its shadowed ravines glittering with summertime snowfields.
By sunset he was approaching the farmers’ settlement of Charlo, where someone was launching skyrockets from a hill beyond town, their sparks cascading against the darkening sky. Rossie's pinto stutter-stepped through a clamor of fireworks, barking dogs, and the rumble of a herd of boys running along the echoing plank sidewalks.
The stable manager was a stocky young woman with luminously blue eyes and muscular suntanned arms that showed under her rolled-up sleeves. Once Rossie had put up his horses and laid out his bed up in the hayloft, he asked if she knew someone named William Sweet.
“What you want with that asshole?” she asked.
“Bill Sweet? I suppose I can figure how you'd want to call him an asshole.”
“I know him pretty well,” she said. “Right now he's drinking up his paycheck, and after a while he'll come over here drunk and try to get his hands on me. Wouldn't you call him an asshole?”
“I'd call him a man with good sense.”
“I guess that's true,” she said. “My name is Margie, and he lives at my house. You ask, they'll say he's over with Margie if he's in town. But where you'll find him is in the Blind Pig. That's why I'm giving him hell behind his back.”
“The Blind Pig?”
“Used to be drinking was illegal and it was a hideout. Now it's just the tavern. I could lock these barn doors and walk you over there.”
The Blind Pig was underneath the hardware store, down a narrow, unmarked flight of concrete steps that echoed with a woman's howling laughter. This was a pool hall with tiny windows high up on the far wall, and it stank of sweat and booze. Cue balls clacked and the wash of voices went abruptly silent when Rossie and the girl from the stable appeared in the doorway.
The woman who'd been laughing wore a town-lady hat decorated with fake flowers over her gray hair. She turned to Rossie like he was a wonderful discovery. “Hello, cutie.”
“This fellow,” Margie said, “is with me. He's my new boyfriend.”
The bartender rested his hands on the bar, studying Rossie. “How long's that boyfriend shit been going on?” Huge, yellow teeth looked loose in his jaw.
“About ten minutes,” Margie said.
“Then I'll buy him a drink,” the bartender said.
“This here,” Margie said, “is Diamond. It's the name he claims.”
“All the name I can afford,” the bartender said.
“Diamond is on the run from Detroit. He won't tell us what he did.”
“Ran with the communists. We raised communist hell all over Detroit.” The bartender gave Rossie a loose-toothed grin. “The ruling class would like to lock me up until I'm in the grave. That's it.”
Bill Sweet was already stumping down from where he'd been at the end of the bar, his filthy cast thumping as he limped along. “Boyfriend, shit,” he said. “This fella is no boyfriend. He never had a girl. This is a son of a bitch I've rode with. He's bringing me my paycheck from last spring. Or I hope he is.”
“There you are,” Rossie said, handing over the paycheck from Clifford Dufferena.
“Don't get to thinking there's going to be money in town,” the bartender told Bill Sweet. “You're thinking you're going to have a ruling-class string of credit.”
“Well, set us up down the line,” the woman in the flowered hat shouted.
The bartender ignored her. “Going to take a week anyway to get that money. You go up to the bank in Polson and they telegraph to the bank in Reno and Reno telegraphs back to Polson and Polson takes its time about letting you know the money's waiting. Meanwhile, capitalists up and down the road are collecting interest. Banks and banks and more banks. Shit.” The bartender was spitting saliva. “So I am not running you no tab. You might never come back from Polson.”
“Well, I'll buy him and me and her some drinks,” Rossie said.
“How about me?” the old woman hollered.
“Too bad, you're on your own.”
“Well, rich boy. Fuck yourself.”
“Wish I could,” Rossie said, turning to the bartender. “Mr. Diamond, buy her a glass of beer on me.”
“Obliged.” The bartender set up the glasses.
“That's it,” Rossie said to the woman. “One beer. You know what? I've learned one thing. Don't let folks buffalo you around. So you lay off of me.”
The woman smiled in a way that resembled a semitoothless rat. “It'll be a goddamned pleasure.”
“I'm crippled up,” Bill Sweet said, after they'd sat at a table, “but I'm not one lick bitter, not so long as you are here and buying drinks.”
“Margie says you keep chasing her.”
“Good idea, don't you think?” Sweet said.
Rossie studied Margie. “I guess so. But I got bad news. I'm down in money, so I'm not buying many drinks.”
“You're buying tonight. I got two dollars total cash.”
“How much was that check?” Margie asked Bill Sweet.
“One hundred bucks.”
She tilted her head at both of them. “Lucky thing is, money isn't my problem. Girls drink, they don't buy.”
“Yeah,” Bill Sweet said, “they sell.”
Margie abruptly flushed, blue eyes electric. “What the fuck would you know?” She stood, pushed her way through the crowd and stomped out the door.
“Beautiful girl,” Bill Sweet mused. “Strong as a man. You headed back to Reno and your momma?”
“Going to the Bitterroot Valley. Hunting a pregnant woman. She's knocked up by an Indian.”
“You pick the dandies.”
Here we sit trying to talk like men, Rossie thought.
“They don't allow no Indians in this town,” Bill Sweet said. “This is the Flathead Reserve, but that don't make no difference. These people here, they don't put up with Indians.”
“You know how them Bloods in Canada would answer to that? They'd say bullshit and cut your dick off. Anyway, this one is a rich woman.”
“Well, you keep after her. Boy like you won't meet many rich ones.”
Rossie smiled, and the room was for an instant quiet. Rossie heard a voice from the poolroom say, “Wouldn't have to cheat to beat you.”
“Shit the bed,” the bartender muttered in his beard. “You want to fight,” he yelled, “get out in the street.”
But nothing happened, talk at the bar picked up, and the pool game progressed.
“That's what you see,” the bartender said, his voice calm. “Poor people want to beat up on one another because they're afraid of bankers. In Detroit we had organization, went on strikes, and we knew our enemies: industrialists and bankers, men who own steel mills. Out here they don't know shit so they just pound on each other.”
Bill Sweet gestured to Rossie. “This boy, he's going down to team up with some rich people.”
“Stevenson, in the Bitterroot,” Rossie said. “You heard of them?”
“Writes letters to the Missoula newspaper?” Diamond said, blowing up into a passion, just short of shouting. “The shame of it is, he's educated and writes freethinking letters to the Missoula newspaper, letters they wouldn't print if he wasn't educated and rich. But he don't understand action. I know about him. You won't see him giving away his educated shit to your kind.”
Rossie found himself going hostile. “What's my kind?”
“Working, if you're lucky. Digging ditches and herding cows. Things are going to stay the way they are for boys like you, busted and thieving and poor and drunk on the weekend.”
“Good idea,” Bill Sweet said. “One more drink.”
“Two or three,” Rossie said, and Diamond laughed, and hours got away. More drinks were ordered, and Margie reappeared, touching her fingers to Bill Sweet's hat where it sat on the table.
“We ought to get out of here,” she said, and Bill Sweet smiled.
“This is my poor girl,” he said to Rossie. “I don't know any rich ones.”
“That's how Bill Sweet pisses me off,” she said. “I don't sell nothing. I haven't got no price.”
Bill Sweet eyed the ceiling, then looked back at Rossie. “Tell you what. Pregnant or no, you marry that rich woman. We'll come visit.”
“Getting married?” Rossie said. “Marrying a rich woman sounds like a whorehouse deal, don't it?”
Margie leaned in close to him. “You been to a whorehouse, not like a kid, but to get in some fucking?”
“Never had to.”
“You sit in some little dress, trying to sell your cunt,” she said. “Them whiskery old boys come in the door, and they are drunk and you're trying to think, Come fuck me please so I can make some money, but you're really thinking, Get on out of here, go drown in piss.” Margie studied Rossie with her head tilted sideways, studying to make sure there was no chance he was going to laugh. “All night long, between fucks and mopping off, you are thinking about running away. I came to Montana from Carson City as a hired-out whore in Missoula where there was good pickings. But I was the pickings, so I run away.”
According to Margie, Missoula was cobbled streets, trolleys on steel rails, and hundreds of automobiles honking downtown past brick buildings—a place to be avoided by a man traveling with horses.
“I don't ever go back to Missoula nor do any whoring,” she said. “So long as you aren't whoring you can do what you please. What I do is keep a list of things I'll never do, like fuck a dog or beat a baby's head on a doorjamb. A man in this town killed a baby that way last year. If I don't whore I can do any whichever things I want.” Her eyes gleamed as she stood at the door, and then she was gone again.
“If she's not a beauty,” Bill Sweet said.
“I'm not going down there after any rich woman with my hat in my hand,” Rossie announced. But Bill Sweet was gone out the door, trailing Margie to wherever they slept.
THE SKY WAS STAINED WITH SMOKE FROM TEPEE BURNERS WHERE the timber mills outside Missoula burned their scrap. After crossing railroad tracks, Rossie came onto a camp in cottonwoods along the Clark Fork of the Columbia, which even in that dry season was a hundred shallow yards wide. Scatterings of men, some asleep on blankets, surrounded fires on the gravel bars. A few were shirtless and in the river washing or hanging laundry on bushes, while others dove from boulders into deep swirling water, most of them lean and nude and stark white in the water and afternoon sunlight, except for what looked to be three Indians.
Rossie leaned from his horse to talk to a skinny old man sipping from a tin-can cup. “Where you fellows going?”
“Went east last year,” the man said. “Traveling after justice. But there isn't none. Two years ago last month that General Douglas MacArthur brought tanks and tear gas and fixed bayonets against men like me—veterans of the Great War. We was there at the Anacostia Flats outside D.C., in an army of our own. There was white men and niggers in the same camps, women and their childrens. MacArthur scattered us like vermin. That was the ruin. This America never heard of justice. That part is over.”
Rossie shook his head, uncomprehending.
“You ever read a newspaper?” the man asked. “You ought to get down off that horse and come to town. You could find a library and read up.”
“Not meaning to disagree with you,” Rossie said.
“Good thing. There's nothing to disagree with.”
A fat, dark man playing guitar sat on a fallen cottonwood log, his music sliding and haunting over the warm shallows like nothing Rossie had heard before. The man was weeping long tears as he played. He was Hawaiian and blind, and only his music was his. “Enough to cry over,” one of the men said after telling Rossie the story.
“Shit,” another said. “He's earning a handout. Son of a bitch is no more blind than I am.”
“Sounds pretty fucking blind,” the other said.
Rossie rode off across the Clark Fork with the Hawaiian's music strumming in the distance and camped a few more miles south along the Bitterroot Valley on a ridge up away from the mosquitoes. Dreaming of Eliza, he woke thinking about the tilt of her head when she was pissed off, and her eyes narrowing. He thought, how did this come on so fast that she's what you're after?
The Bitterroot Valley was a sixty-mile river swale of ranch and farmland with creeks working down from east and west to join the shallow Bitterroot River that rose in the south and meandered north through groves of aspen and cottonwood to join the Clark's Fork of the Columbia near Missoula. On the western skyline, the stony Bitterroot Mountains hovered above open fields that in late July lay before Rossie like a promise.
He swam his horses across the river twice, then tied them to a hitch rail out front of a six-stool café in the town of Victor. Rossie was the only customer, and after serving his eggs and sausage, the tall, ruined-looking woman, who doubled as waitress and cook, lit up a Camel cigarette and asked where he was heading.
“Right here,” Rossie answered.
The waitress blew a slow string of smoke from her thin nostrils. “Poor idea. People are broke around here.”
“You got a job,” Rossie said.
When she smiled, Rossie saw that she must have once been a considerable looker, and that she remembered. “Hope you isn't after my job,” she said.
“Never know what I'm hunting. But mostly I'm hunting a man named Stevenson. Met one of his relatives.”
The waitress frowned. “What you got on him? Nobody's got a thing on him.”
Bernard Stevenson, Rossie learned, was a Scottish businessman from Chicago. In the past decade this Stevenson had bought up— cheap, after a decade of dried-up years—acreages of pasture where he ran dairy cows. And he owned a creamery in Florence. He'd once considered raising racehorses but gave it up when the New York money market fell apart.
The waitress lit another cigarette. “You got to hand him that. Horses are a fine thing in the morning, if you catch them running. Salish ran thousands of horses in this valley before they was cheated out, first by the smallpox then by U. S. Grant.” She went on to describe Stevenson's creamery, his milk and butter and cheese in grocery stores from Butte to Spokane, and grazing lands on benches east of the valley. “He don't run stock over there. Says he's resting the elk and the mule deer, like they was overworked. But the spotlighting sons of bitches around here are out there killing and butchering under his nose. You tell me, I'm trying to guess. What do you want with Stevenson?”
“I ran across his daughter up in Canada.”
“Sounds right,” she said. “Looking for girls is nature. But I wouldn't go up there, not even if I was invited. Nobody has much to do with them since Eliza ran off with her war whoop. But shit, I like that girl. I might run off if the right guy came along. I'd go have fun. What would I be losing?” She began wiping down the counter, which was already immaculate, then snubbed out her Camel. “People around here can't stand the idea that it was that Charlie Cooper, halfway Indian who wouldn't cut his hair. It's trying to think about what happens at night with white women and Indians that gets people's goat. That's what you hear said.”
“Where would you ask about working there?”
“At the office. But it won't do you no good. Nobody's hiring, and anyway you wouldn't want to try your life in that big house around those people.”
“Where's that office?”
“Highway toward Hamilton.”
Rossie found an old schoolhouse bui
lding with a sign that read Kanaka Creek Ranch, and under that, Stevenson Enterprises. But it was empty, doors locked. So he turned onto a road alongside a shallow canyon, figuring that the stream coursing through it had to be Kanaka Creek and that the Stevenson house had to be upstream. Ahead, he could hear the rattling of a steel-wheeled steam tractor and soon saw that it was towing three hitched-up wagons loaded with timothy hay, which he followed through a cottonwood grove and into an open field.
The man on the tractor parked below the hayloft of an elegant, yellow-and-red brickwork barn with dormers and a roof that supported pigeon-roost cupolas.
“Anything I could do for you?” the man shouted, approaching Rossie on foot. “You been following me. There's nobody but me. This barn is empty. It's never seen horseshit.”
“Empty?” Rossie said. “That's a handsome barn for empty. What I could do is help unload your hay. That's a two-man job.”
“No,” the man said. “You couldn't.”
“Why's that?”
“If you did, you'd be working for Stevenson—this is Stevenson's high-assed horse barn—and you isn't working here. Nobody is but me, and I don't work here. I'm just on contract for this hay.”
“That's fine horse hay,” Rossie said.
“Pure timothy. Stevenson is talking about boarding horses. But you isn't supposed to be here. You don't work here.”
“Where's the redwood house?” The waitress in Victor had told him about the house, its lumber shipped up from the California coast on railroad cars.
“Around the corner there, four or five hundred yards. But they isn't hiring.”
“You sure of that?”
“Perfect sure.”
The road curved to reveal a parkland with fire-scarred yellow pine, their lowest limbs fifty or so feet off the ground, the crowns blunted by lightning strikes. On a slab-faced ridge above the creek stood an ancient barn with cottonwood log walls, and a plank-sided cookhouse attached. The logs had long since gone punky and rotten and needed tearing down, Rossie thought.
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