For a Little While

by Rick Bass

  They stopped for gas at a Cenex convenience store. Her father still wouldn’t shop at an Exxon, for what they had done at Prince William Sound—not the spill so much as the cover-up—and while he went inside to get a cup of coffee, having decided they would drive on through the night, all the way to the Paradise Valley, Lilly looked out her window at the woman in the car parked next to them.

  She was sitting behind the wheel of an old red Cadillac, the paint so faded it was more of a salmon color, and the fender wells rusted out from decades of plowing through salty winter slush. It was a soft-top, with a once-crisp white vinyl roof crackled and stained a sickly greenish yellow by years of parking outdoors and under trees.

  Lilly noticed that the Caddy’s tires were not only balding but mismatched in size and style. Though the woman had not asked Lilly’s counsel, Lilly found herself recalling one of her father’s many strongly held opinions—always invest in the best tires possible—and she found herself wanting to tell the lady to replace them. The car was an eyesore, but the tires themselves, fraying steel wires sprung from the thin rubber, were an actual affront, and a hazard, her father would have said.

  The woman was perhaps in her early fifties, though possibly simply hard used and much younger—or, just as possible, much older and simply preserved, pickled somehow, by toxins. She had brittle orange hair, a sleeveless red T-shirt—what Lilly’s father called a wifebeater—and a weight lifter’s shoulders, though with pale, flabby arms. She wasn’t so much fat, Lilly recalls now—not really fat at all—as loose; as if once she had been hard but no longer and never again, and she was just sitting in her car smoking a cigarette, smoking it down to a nub. She labored at it a short while longer, then flicked it out the window in Lilly’s direction without even looking, or noticing that Lilly was looking, and then turned away from Lilly to murmur some endearment to her traveling companion, a nasty rat-colored Chihuahua.

  The woman lifted a pink ice cream cone—which must have been her reason for stopping—and held it up for the little dog to eat. He scampered into her lap and began licking at it, fastidiously at first, but then really gnawing at it, wolfing it down, and she continued to hold it for him, fascinated and charmed by his appetite, as the ice cream—bubblegum? strawberry?—began to froth around his muzzle. She was still murmuring her adoration to him, enchanted by what she clearly perceived to be his singular skill, when Lilly’s father came back out and got in the car.

  He barely glanced at the woman, and as they backed out and then pulled away, the Chihuahua was still attacking the ice cream cone, both sticky paws up on the woman’s chest now, laboring to get down into the cone, and still the woman beheld the little dog as if he were an amazement; and for all Lilly knew, when he had finished that cone, she was going to go in and get him another one. She appeared to have completely lost track of time and easily could have remained there all night, slumping a little lower in her seat, settling, seemingly intent upon going nowhere. It was terrifying in a fascinating way, and as they continued on through the night—satisfied for having simply gotten off the road briefly and having at least seen the fair, if not actually ridden any of the rides—Lilly ate her cotton candy leisurely, slumping down in her seat and pretending, for a moment, with a delicious thrill, that she was the woman in the Cadillac: that her life would or might end up there—lonely and lost, and needing to feed a nasty little dog ice cream to have even that friendship.

  As they drove, the stars blinked brightly above them—her father had cleaned the windshield again—and Lilly pulled little stray tendrils of her cotton candy and released them out the window, into the wind, where she imagined birds up from South America finding them and, not knowing they were edible, weaving them into their nests.

  She thought up stories about the woman with the dog: She had just gotten out of jail after serving twenty years and didn’t have a friend in the world, or her husband had just that day been sent to prison for life, or maybe her whole family. Or maybe she had found out that her little dog was going to have to be put down—maybe he had a tumor the size of a grapefruit, or at least a ping-pong ball, hidden in his stomach. Maybe the woman had been a great beauty once, in another life, another town, another state, thirty or more years ago—back when her car had been new—and maybe, at times, she still believed herself to be. Maybe…

  “What are you thinking?” her father asked.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  They rode, putting safe distance between themselves and the woman with the dog, with music playing from a cassette mix Lilly’s father had made. Lilly tries to remember, now, but can’t recall every song—Emmylou Harris and Neil Young, she knows—though if she were to hear one of the other songs it would come back to her in an instant.

  Driving on, peering forward into the night, and thinking about Yellowstone.

  When she woke up, they had crossed over the Divide. It was the middle of the night and they were in the Paradise Valley. They were driving slowly down a rain-slicked winding road, and hail was bouncing off their roof and windshield like marbles. Her first image, and the reason she had awakened, was of her father slowing to a stop, with the hail coming down so hard he couldn’t see far enough ahead to continue. The roar on the roof was so loud that even by shouting they could not hear each other.

  They sat there for a few minutes with the engine running, the hail streaming all around them, and then the storm began to ease off, loosening back into drumming rain, and the road ahead reappeared, steaming and hissing in their headlights, paved with hail three inches deep.

  They proceeded, the mist clearing in tatters like smoke from a battlefield, and with the road untraveled before them. They crossed the Yellowstone River, which was still running muddy and was frothy already with the quick runoff from the storm. Green boughs of cottonwoods drifted past crazily, bobbing and pitching, so that Lilly knew the storm must have originated farther upstream, earlier in the evening—the high snowy mountains attracting lightning as soon as the evening began to cool—and as they cracked their windows in order to clear the fog from the windshield, the summery scent of hail-crushed mint from along the riverbanks was intense, as was that of the shredded cottonwood leaves and black riverside earth, loam-ripped by the rushing waters.

  The grass was tall on either side of the narrow road, taller than the roof of their car. Bright white fences lined both sides, and more cottonwoods grew close along the road, forming a canopy above. The road was covered with a mix of hail and leaves, some of the leaves with their bright green sides up and others with the pale silvery undersides showing.

  Several times her father had to stop and get out and clear the road of limbs downed by the storm. He dragged them to the side as if pulling a canoe, his breath leaping in clouds, his tracks crisp and precise in the fresh hail.

  For a while it rained lightly, with a south wind sending the fallen green leaves skittering across the top of the hail. They turned up a gravel side road and drove past a series of old red barns. Her father seemed surprised to see them, stopped and looked for a minute, then gestured toward one and said he and Lilly’s mother had slept in it once when they first visited this part of the state, but there had been an owl living in there, and it had kept them awake most of the night.

  Farther on, the road came to its end at a trailhead, where there was barely room in the tall summer grass for the car to turn around; and when they did—the neatness and solitude of their tracks revealing them to be the only travelers out in such a storm, and in such a world—the effect was profound: as if all of the mountains, and all of the valley through which they had driven, were theirs and theirs alone. As though they were not exploring lands that had already been traversed many times over but instead territories not yet dreamed of or discovered.

  The rain had picked up and was drumming and blowing past them now in curtains and sheets, and Lilly stayed in the car while her father set up the tent in the steaming blaze cast by their headlights. The rain appeared to be drifting in a curtain onl
y along the foothills because she could see now in the valley below them a few faint and scattered lights, farmhouses and ranches spaced far apart but with their infrequent lights defining the shape of the valley and the course of the river. When her father finished putting the tent up, he unrolled their sleeping bags, and Lilly raced from the car to the tent, crawled into her bag, as warm and dry as she could remember feeling, and slept without dreams or recollections of the day.

  The valley was gilded with light when they awoke in the morning. The air was cool and scrubbed clean from the storm, and the hail had already melted. Other than the downed limbs and branches and leaves, there was no evidence the hail had been there in the first place. The sound sleepers in the valley would awaken and look out and think they had slept through a thunderstorm, and would know nothing of the winter scene they had missed completely.

  There was a rainbow over the valley and steam rising from the river far below. Lilly turned and looked behind them and was stunned to see the Beartooths right at their feet. She could feel the cold emanating from their glaciers, as when one opens a freezer or refrigerator door. It made her laugh out loud to see such immense and jagged mountains rising right before them and for her to have been standing there with her back to them, unknowing, as she stared out at the green valley.

  She and her father were at the front gate of the mountains, next to the trailhead leading up into the crags and ice fields. Lilly kept looking back out at the valley, then turning and looking up at the Beartooths. How could any traveler decide? She chose both, and stared out at the Paradise Valley for a while, and then at the Beartooths, as her father stowed the sleeping bags and shook the water from the tent fly before spreading it in the back windshield of the car to dry in the morning sun as they drove.

  They got in the car and traveled down the winding road, away from the mountains and down into the lush summer valley, puddles splashing beneath them.

  They drove down to a diner with some little guest cabins along one of the side creeks that fed into the fast and broad Yellowstone River. A series of tiny log cottages, painted dark brown, lined the edges of the rushing, noisy creek—Lilly’s father and mother had stayed there a few nights when they were young, exploring and wandering around.

  A garish 1950s-style faux-neon sign above the diner—hugely oversize and illuminated by bright rows of painted lightbulbs—was welded to an immense steel post to hold its weight: the kind of sign one might see outside a lounge advertising itself as the Thunderbird or the Wagon Wheel, but would generally not expect to encounter back in a quiet grove of trees far off the beaten track in southern Montana. Pine Creek Lodge.

  It pleased her father to see that the sign was still there, by the rushing creek, and he got out and took a picture of it to show her mother, though he said that to appreciate it fully one needed to see it at night.

  A cardboard sign hung on the door said that the restaurant was closed for the day. As they left, they saw that the other side of the marquee, visible only to northbound traffic, advertised an upcoming outdoor concert the very next night—Martha Scanlan and the Revelators—and it was strange to see how quiet and isolated the hidden little grove was in contrast to the garish ambition of the sign. Lilly felt bad for Martha Scanlan, whoever she was, and her Revelators. No one would ever find this place, and no one would ever see the spectacular illumination of her name in the colorful lights. Perhaps a few cows from the pasture across the road, and the horses on the other side of the creek. At least Martha would maybe get to eat breakfast in the diner. Lilly found herself loving the name Martha, loving the musician herself.

  Lilly could imagine the cigarette smoke, and the dusty display case of Certs breath mints by the ancient cash register. She imagined Martha Scanlan tuning her guitar, beginning to prepare already, days ahead of time, for this bad idea of a concert. A barbecue was advertised to go along with it. Perhaps Martha was in one of the Dakotas at this very moment, hurrying on toward Pine Creek Lodge in an old Volkswagen bus, imagining a throng awaiting her, and a buzzing building, rather than this quiet, secret little grove of seven cabins. Perhaps the same storm that had washed over Lilly and her father the night before was now lashing Martha, out on the prairie somewhere, out in the Badlands.

  They stopped instead at a KOA along the river, where an elderly couple was just opening their store, still a few minutes before seven. Lilly and her father saw them walking over together, holding hands, to unlock the building. There were pink and yellow rosebushes blooming by the log-cabin storefront—back home, the roses would not bloom for another week or two—and the storm had torn loose numerous petals, which were cast onto the damp pavement like alms. The bushes had surely been planted and tended by the old lady or perhaps both her and the old man, but they appeared not to notice the spoilage, or, if they noticed, not to mind. Their breath rose in clouds as they spoke quietly to each other, and perhaps they simply thought the storm’s residue was pretty.

  There were no other residents up and about. Perhaps a dozen or more behemoths—Winnebangos, her father called them—rested back among the old cottonwoods, their silver sides as shiny as salmon, but not even a generator was stirring. Lilly imagined it must have been a pretty rough night for all the old folks, no more able to sleep through the storm than had they been in a giant popcorn popper. After the storm had passed through, they must have wandered outside to inspect the damage, hoping for the best: that if the hail had caused any blemishes to their beloved, shiny homes, the damage would not be visible to the larger world, but would be confined to the roofs, unseen by anyone or anything but the birds passing overhead.

  Lilly and her father gave the old couple a minute or two to get the lights turned on and the cash register opened up, and then they went inside and bought a breakfast bar each, some dry and unsatisfactory crumbly little thing. Her father got a coffee and added cream to it, which surprised her—she’d never seen him do that before—while she got an orange juice, and then they were on the road again, driving early, through the greenest part of the summer.

  They were just riding, she and her father. She didn’t know then that something was wrong with him, and that he wasn’t going to get better—though she did know that there was something wonderfully right with her, something gloriously good. She didn’t know then, though she suspects now, that he had a clue what was up. That he must have.

  They had not traveled five miles before they saw the faded red Cadillac broken down on the side of the road, its hood elevated like the maw of a shark. Despite the chill of the morning, smoke and steam boiled out from the engine’s interior. It was not the simple white steam of a boiling radiator, but instead a writhing column of black smoke from burning oil. One of her father’s many great gifts to Lilly was to make sure she understood how engines worked, and, looking at the car, Lilly saw the smoke of an expensive repair bill, or maybe no repair bill at all.

  The woman with the dog was sitting on the side of the road next to the car. The dog, clutched in her arms like a teddy bear, appeared to be concerned by the situation, occasionally writhing and struggling, but the woman herself was the picture of reflective calm, save for the half-empty bottle of vodka sitting in the gravel beside her. She seemed resigned, so accustomed to this type of situation that her relaxed demeanor could almost be viewed, Lilly supposed, as a form of confidence.

  Lilly’s father hesitated—Lilly thought she detected a quick burst of annoyance, and she understood: there was now a complication to their perfect day, this unwelcome challenge or summons to Good Samaritanhood—but she was surprised by the flare of something almost like anger in him.

  He looked straight ahead then and drove on past the woman, not so much deliberating—she and her father both knew he was going to stop and turn around and go back—as allowing himself, she thinks now, the brief luxury of believing he could keep going. Of believing he was free to keep on going.

  The woman watched him pass but made no gesture, no outreach or call for help other than to make a sour
face briefly as she confirmed once again that she understood how the world was—that there was no mercy in it for her, and that people could not be expected to do the right things and could in fact be counted upon to do the wrong things—but then she quickly settled back into her I-don’t-give-a-fuck serenity, just sitting there and watching the western skies and holding tightly to the dog.

  She was surprised, Lilly could tell, when her father pulled over and, checking for traffic, made a wide loop of a turnaround and headed back. The woman was already drunk and a little unsteady as she labored to rise from her cross-legged position, still gripping the dog, and whether her inebriation was the result of new efforts in that direction already begun that morning or left over from the previous night, Lilly had no way of knowing.

  Where had she spent the night during the storm, Lilly wondered, and what had she thought of it? Had she even noticed?

  Lilly stayed in the car but with her window rolled down while her father got out and walked over to assess the woman’s smoking car. Even over the scent of the burning oil, she could smell the woman now—old sweat and salt and above all else stale alcohol—and Lilly heard her ask her father in a raspy growl if he would like a sip, holding the bottle up to him as if it were a particularly fine vintage.

  “I was going to Yellowstone,” the woman said, staggering a bit. The dog in her arms like a sailor in a crow’s nest was ready to leap free should she topple, but with the practiced familiarity also of a veteran who had weathered many such tempests. “I wanted to go see the buffalo,” she said. She made a small flapping motion with one hand. “Wooves, and all that shit.” Danger. Excitement. Now she looked at the dying car, her pride and freedom, her other self. Her better self. “I don’t reckon you can fix it,” she said to Lilly’s father.