The Mammoth Book of Westerns

by Jon E. Lewis

  In Sheridan, a long hot strip, they stop, and they split a meat-loaf-and-gravy supper at a café and then he gives the baby a bath in the men’s room sink of a gas station next door. Grant has never before seen how that skin shines like silk; he traces a line down the flexing back and it feels like powder. Grant uses every muscle and nerve ending in his own body, as if keeping the baby from falling is the one job in his whole life that truly matters. He’s toweling him off on the curb outside when he breaks away, naked and roundbellied, to the front, and three high school girls who are gassing a big new Pontiac catch him and bring him back. All three are a little too heavy, and Grant thinks of them as pregnant. They’re giggling with the baby and he’s giggling back, but when they try to flirt with Grant they read something on his face that chills their laughter, and they hand the baby back to him and leave fast.

  That night they sleep in Montana under a few cottonwoods that have found water somewhere deep. He’s so tired when they pull in he doesn’t notice a small house not much more than a hundred yards away. In the low yellow light of morning an elderly Indian couple appears at his side, just as he and the baby are finishing breakfast. He’s made a kind of high chair out of rocks with a scrap of sheet iron as a table. The Indians don’t say anything, and Grant guesses this means they’re still inside the reservation. Off in the distance a dove is cooing and there is a flapping of laundry in the slight breeze. It’s a little chilly and Grant has on a sweatshirt, but the Indians are bundled up as if for winter, the man in an orange nylon parka shiny with dirt and the woman in a heavy blanket jacket over jeans. Grant wonders why they’re out at this early hour, but he straightens from his kneeling position in front of the baby when he notices them, and goes over to join the man at the truck while the woman comes over to the baby.

  The old man points with a stubby damaged finger toward the baby; the woman is poking at him, taunting him with a piece of bread in a way that is not cruel but not kind either, a test, more like, the first of many. The baby laughs, and the woman swats his head. Grant stiffens; any more of this and he’ll spring.

  “Yours?” asks the man, and it is as if they’re going to fight over the child, not because the Indians want him, but because he’s theirs anyway.

  Grant looks hard into the old man’s face. “That’s my boy, my youngest.”

  “Where’s his mama?” the Indian asks. “ Where’s his grandma?” It’s the right question to ask, Grant can’t fault it. By now, the baby has finished his breakfast. The woman has freed him from the pile of rocks and they’re pitching small pebbles at each other. She’s keeping him on the very edge between delight and fear, on the blade of some plan.

  Grant doesn’t answer; he looks over the Indian’s shoulder at the house. There’s an old tractor, a Ferguson or a Ford painted hunter green, and it’s plain it hasn’t run in years. A sprinkler is watering a brown patch of grass.

  “We’re going after his mama,” says Grant, finally. “I can’t tell you where she is.”

  The Indian nods, and then does something that takes Grant by surprise: he picks up Grant’s box of Frosted Flakes and eats a couple of large handfuls. Grant doesn’t know if he’s being robbed somehow, but it doesn’t seem necessary for him to say anything. The woman has taken the baby’s small hand, and she’s leading him down the road to the house. It’s flatter here than home, and drier; it’s sage country, not grass. On the horizon he can see a straight line of trees, aspens waving a silver flash of leaves, and he knows it’s the Bighorn, where the brown trout are big as salmon, where the rainbow males fight each other for the hook. Grant and the Indian follow along, because the woman’s in charge now. They go into the small house, two worn steps off the prairie, a shell of gray asbestos shingles, and it’s clean, spare, and dark. The baby lets out a squeal of joy when the woman shows him a toy box in one corner filled with trucks and alphabet blocks. They drink coffee.

  “How long you planning to look?” asks the man.

  “She’s headed for the mountains. I’m not far behind.”

  The woman holds out her arms toward the baby. Grant looks at her for a few seconds before he understands what she is saying: she thinks he’s going to leave the baby with them. She thinks it’s her duty; she thinks Grant hasn’t got the right to refuse.

  “We’ll be leaving now,” he says. He looks over at the baby in the corner and gets ready to cut off the woman’s approach.

  The man looks at his wife; this isn’t his affair, it’s up to her.

  Grant hears the laundry outside and thinks the pulse of his blood is pounding as loud. He knows he could leave the baby with these people. He’s lived his life believing that he could ask anything of Plains people, white or Indian, just the way he knows he’d do about anything if another asked him. He could leave the baby and know he was safe. But he also knows now he can’t go on alone. He’s too frightened of failing: how does he expect to find Lonnie, a single lungful of air in a sandstorm? How does he think he can do it alone?

  Grant pulls out his wallet and gives the woman a ten. He means “Thank you,” and he means “No thanks.” He’s not at all sure that she will take it, but she does, and then she and the man watch as he goes over and picks up the baby, who’s having fun with the blocks, and he starts to shriek, beating his arms and legs so fast that for a second Grant almost loses his grip. The baby is reaching out over Grant’s shoulder for the toys, he wants those more than anything in the world. The baby screams, “Want Mommy, want Mommy,” and Grant knows he’s just saying this as a way of getting the toys, but still, it helps, because that’s what they’re doing. They’re going to find Mommy. Grant jogs back down the road toward his truck without looking back for the Indians, and he has to fight hard, harder than he would have imagined, to get the baby buckled into his car seat. He’s still screaming; it’s been twenty minutes. If Grant tries to keep his children together by himself, it will be Leila, the oldest, who pays the price, but he hasn’t asked himself these questions yet. He’s only trying to figure out how he’ll bring their mother back.

  But now they are out on the road, gathering speed. That’s all the baby wanted, just some action, something to see or do. Grant feels light, as if they have made an escape, have weathered a close call together.

  “You and me, boy, almost got scalped.”

  There’s something about those words that sets the baby off, laughing and laughing. The sound fills the cab, and for a moment they’re not in a Ford truck anymore, but Grant doesn’t know what it is; he’s into his fourth day beyond tired, but he’s sharp. He knows he can find her. He feels low and close to the ground, the way a hunter wants to feel when he’s caught up at last to the buck in the brush. There’s a voice in the deer that tells you where he’s going, said his father; it’s the way of nature. Close your eyes and listen, that’s what his father said, reminded him, on cold fall mornings. But be wary: there are voices outside that are not to be trusted. His father did not say this, but gave witness to it.

  Lonnie is running to the north-west; she’s a creature of hills and mountains and trees, doing anything not to get caught flat-footed on the plains where the dogs, those endless nameless dogs, can pull her down by the hamstrings. Grant pushes down on the accelerator and the Ford buckles and gulps. He wonders about the old Buick; how long before it dies? He’s been looking for it already by the side of the road, in the repair yards of the gas stations, behind the bait-and-tackle shops. He can picture it halfway into the parking lot of a bar just at a place where the men fan out to give her advice, with their eyes all over her ass and crotch, and he knows she feels them looking and it gives her a dot of pleasure and a line of wetness. Maybe she’ll decide, Screw it, and they will all head back in, and even the last of the men funneling in the door six, seven behind feels as if he’s got something loose on the line. Grant can picture all that because he’s never known anything in his life better than Lonnie asking him to turn off the radio and come in and fuck her.

  He’s looking for her al
ready; when her face comes out to him he won’t be surprised. She’s stopped running, he knows that because he feels the tiredness in his own body. They come into Billings, past the refineries and tank farms. There is a whole yard full of silver tank trucks, and he says to the baby, “ Trucks. See the bi-ig trucks.” Grant looks over and sees a wide smile, pure wonderment on that tiny face, and he cannot resist rubbing the backs of his fingers on that round cheek. He thinks if he finds Lonnie, and she comes back with him, looping around through Nebraska to pick up Scott and Pete and then up to Muellers’ for Leila and then home, if they all come back to that empty house tired but glad to be off the road, everyone will have won.

  They come to a stoplight in the corner of town and now he’s got to make up his mind: west or north? He could head west on Route 90 and hit Bozeman and Butte and Deer Lodge and Missoula, one after another. For this reason Lonnie might have taken this route, but the voice inside him says, No, she went north, and anyway, if she has a plan, it’s to get up to Glacier and look for a waitressing job where they wouldn’t suspect or care that she’d run out on a husband and family. That’s what she was doing nine years ago when she stopped in Pierre, running out on her parents on the way to Glacier, and the thought never died.

  So he heads north out of Billings toward Roundup, and in a few minutes he knows he’s done the right thing, because the road’s begun to climb, not steep and quick like the push over the Black Hills, but patiently, cutting through the choppy sides of the buttes and the caked bottoms of the valleys. He’s crossing the Musselshell and the Flatwillow, and he sees they’re faster and cleaner than the rivers of South Dakota, and he feels their tug back to the east. He is so glad now that the baby is with him that he starts singing “Wheels on the Bus” to him. He doesn’t know any of the words, but he’s listened to Lonnie sing this song to four different babies and he’s got a general idea how it goes. The baby falls asleep. He drives past the town of Grassrange and sees three women tending thrift shop tables in the swirling red dust of the roadside. Each hill rising carries them away from the real earth. Grant feels no mystery in this land, just danger. And when finally, about eleven in the morning, he turns west from Lewistown, he thinks first that it’s clouds he’s seeing, or a streak of grime cutting across his windshield, but it’s neither. He follows the shadows to the left, and to the right, and they’re everywhere, mountains beginning to rise out of his life on walls a thousand feet high. They are immense, a shattered warning. He feels the pain the mountains cause, and he knows now that he must find her soon.

  He pulls over and slides out of his seat onto the narrow shoulder. The road is high here; before him the foothills swell and mound. There is no traffic, no sound of engines, nothing around except for a gusting wind that pulls at his shirttails and chills the moisture of his sweaty T-shirt. He starts to eat a sandwich he bought in Billings, but he is suddenly too tired to chew. He moves around to sit on the front bumper, out of the wind, and stares west. Maybe Lewis and Clark sat on this spot. They too would have been afraid, because in all this thrusting rock what they had to find was a single drop of water, a single drop that would become two, a puddle, a pool, a stream, a creek, a tributary, and finally a river flowing west. They found it, Grant knows, because they listened to their fear, and the sound that came to them was a waterfall.

  She’s frightened now, and so is he. He imagines the deer, steamy yellow froth dripping from its sharp lips. He listens for the voice through the whimpering of the grass, through the deep pounding of his heart. She’s tired now, he knows that; Lonnie’s getting to where she thought she wanted to be, and she’s missing her babies, and she knows she lost part of her mind back there on the plains and can’t trust what’s left. He stands up. He shouts, the words breaking off from the very bottom of his throat, “Where is she?” but this time there is no sound from the grass, just a steady wind. “Where are you?” he yells. The shout is cut off clean; it doesn’t even stir the baby. Grant is in the hills now, listening only to the fear that he may have lost Lonnie for good.

  Lonnie’s purse and wallet are emptied into a small pile in the center of a stained, knobby bedspread. Outside her motel window there is a gas station, and then a lube shop, and then the whole long studded string of 10th Avenue. It’s Great Falls, and she cannot believe she has come so far for this, a baked island of neon. The boys she saw last night, bunched into small packs outside the bars, wore the look and hair of the Air Force. Some of them spoke to her as she walked into what was left of the old cow town, past nameless markers and corners that were nothing but numbers. She could get work here; tonight she can be inside some bar wearing a white cowboy hat and fringed hot pants, and if that’s all she does, it will last for two or three months, until one late afternoon the satin waistband no longer closes at the snaps. Already she feels the force inside her: sooner, more powerful, more demanding than any of the others, so strong that it pushes the others aside, her real babies whose soft skin and voices she misses so badly that her arms ache.

  She could get work here, and she’d ask the other waitresses who to talk to about fixing everything; maybe it wouldn’t cost anything, maybe the state would pay for it. She could do this, it’s what she planned. All the way from home, eyes on the mirror for the growing red dot of Grant’s truck, she pictured the nurse, bored maybe and unforgiving, working through a list of questions as if it were a driver’s-license renewal or one of those customer-service people doing interviews in the I.G.A. And then there would be a white room, and a white sleep, and it would be done. It wouldn’t be so bad, really. In a few days it would all be over, and then, then she might think about going back.

  She counts sixty-four dollars, and change. She has a full tank of gas, and even though the Buick has started to skip a little and lose power, she knows enough to guess it is just the altitude, the thin air. Her clothes are clean; earlier that morning she met a woman at the motel’s coin-op, a tourist from Oklahoma washing out a few kids’ T-shirts, and she offered to let Lonnie throw in her things because the machine wasn’t hardly full. She was the kind of person Lonnie had often wished could be her neighbor, in a house that didn’t exist and would never, she knew, have a reason to be built.

  Grant may still be back home; if he is, she hopes he’s thought of Tillie Mueller to help him, but it’s all just wishing. He’s hunting her because he thinks it’s his duty, and she’s not afraid of what would happen if he finds her, she’s just afraid of being hunted, the seeker already tugging on her from the other side of the plains.

  She leaves her motel and begins to walk. She tries not to see what she’s seeing, to see any landmarks through her own eyes, because Grant will see them too; she tries not to say the name of this city, because Grant will hear it. When she married him she didn’t ask for this, except maybe by wanting something different as a teenager, something with mystery. He has powers; people laugh at her when she tells them that, but it’s true, it’s always been true. Grant is so thin and blond that people think he’s nothing but a kid, until they look him in the eye.

  She has lunch, a salad at Burger King. It’s her first meal of the day, and the memory of the morning sickness she endured with Leila, and then less with Scott, churns at her stomach. If she wants to find work tonight she’ll have to start in a couple of hours, by four at the latest. She doesn’t doubt that he knows where she was headed; when she left him she turned without even thinking, and didn’t realize she’d gone west until she began to see the signs for Rapid City. She told him she was headed west the night they met in the Elkhorn Bar; her boyfriend got scared and turned back after a last beer together, and then, at that second, the goodbye wave she gave to the old boyfriend turned into a hello to Grant as the two boys passed in the bar doorway. But even if he knows she is in Montana, where will he start? Even if he knows she is in the city whose name she doesn’t want to say out loud, can he find her? Even if he knows what block she is on, a block made of avenues and streets that are just numbers, no names at all, what is th
e chance he’ll spot her?

  She looks up from the counter in a sudden fright and quickly scans the restaurant. She has to stop thinking these thoughts, they’re energy flowing out of her, a beacon for him. She’s giving herself away. She runs outside and cuts off 10th Avenue back toward the old city. She walks until she comes to the Missouri, and she reads a sign that says gibson park. She brings her hands to her face, because now those words are out on the line and maybe he knows them, maybe he’s heard of this place. The grass is green here, and there are children in the play yard and a few old men pitching horseshoes. She doesn’t think of the trees or the statue she’s standing in front of, or the white, freshly painted bench she has to sit on for a minute or two, because her legs are fluttering. Why wouldn’t he let her be? Why couldn’t he give her some time, such a small amount of time?