A River Runs Through It and Other Stories

by Norman Maclean

  According to the sergeant’s report to me, Paul and his girl had gone into Weiss’s restaurant for a midnight sandwich—a popular place at midnight since it had booths in the rear where you and your girl could sit and draw the curtains. “The girl,” the sergeant said, “was that half-breed Indian girl he goes with. You know the one,” he added, as if to implicate me.

  Paul and his girl were evidently looking for an empty booth when a guy in a booth they had passed stuck his head out of the curtain and yelled, “Wahoo.” Paul hit the head, separating the head from two teeth and knocking the body back on the table, which overturned, cutting the guy and his girl with broken dishes. The sergeant said, “The guy said to me, ‘Jesus, all I meant is that it’s funny to go out with an Indian. It was just a joke.’”

  I said to the sergeant, “It’s not very funny,” and the sergeant said, “No, not very funny, but it’s going to cost your brother a lot of money and time to get out of it. What really isn’t funny is that he’s behind in the game at Hot Springs. Can’t you help him straighten out?”

  “I don’t know what to do,” I confessed to the sergeant.

  “I know what you mean,” the sergeant confessed to me. Desk sergeants at this time were still Irish. “I have a young brother,” he said, “who is a wonderful kid, but he’s always in trouble. He’s what we call ‘Black Irish.’”

  “What do you do to help him?” I asked. After a long pause, he said, “I take him fishing.”

  “And when that doesn’t work?” I asked.

  “You better go and see your own brother,” he answered.

  Wanting to see him in perspective when I saw him, I stood still until I could again see the woman in bib overalls marveling at his shadow casting. Then I opened the door to the room where they toss the drunks until they can walk a crack in the floor. “His girl is with him,” the sergeant said.

  He was standing in front of a window, but he could not have been looking out of it, because there was a heavy screen between the bars, and he could not have seen me because his enlarged casting hand was over his face. Were it not for the lasting compassion I felt for his hand, I might have doubted afterwards that I had seen him.

  His girl was sitting on the floor at his feet. When her black hair glistened, she was one of my favorite women. Her mother was a Northern Cheyenne, so when her black hair glistened she was handsome, more Algonkian and Romanlike than Mongolian in profile, and very warlike, especially after a few drinks. At least one of her great grandmothers had been with the Northern Cheyennes when they and the Sioux destroyed General Custer and the Seventh Cavalry, and, since it was the Cheyennes who were camped on the Little Bighorn just opposite to the hill they were about to immortalize, the Cheyenne squaws were among the first to work the field over after the battle. At least one of her ancestors, then, had spent a late afternoon happily cutting off the testicles of the Seventh Cavalry, the cutting often occurring before death.

  This paleface who had stuck his head out of the booth in Weiss’s cafe and yelled “Wahoo” was lucky to be missing only two teeth.

  Even I couldn’t walk down the street beside her without her getting me into trouble. She liked to hold Paul with one arm and me with the other and walk down Last Chance Gulch on Saturday night, forcing people into the gutter to get around us, and when they wouldn’t give up the sidewalk she would shove Paul or me into them. You didn’t have to go very far down Last Chance Gulch on Saturday night shoving people into the gutter before you were into a hell of a big fight, but she always felt that she had a disappointing evening and had not been appreciated if the guy who took her out didn’t get into a big fight over her.

  When her hair glistened, though, she was worth it. She was one of the most beautiful dancers I have ever seen. She made her partner feel as if he were about to be left behind, or already had been.

  It is a strange and wonderful and somewhat embarrassing feeling to hold someone in your arms who is trying to detach you from the earth and you aren’t good enough to follow her.

  I called her Mo-nah-se-tah, the name of the beautiful daughter of the Cheyenne chief, Little Rock. At first, she didn’t particularly care for the name, which means, “the young grass that shoots in the spring,” but after I explained to her that Mo-nah-se-tah was supposed to have had an illegitimate son by General George Armstrong Custer she took to the name like a duck to water.

  Looking down on her now I could see only the spread of her hair on her shoulders and the spread of her legs on the floor. Her hair did not glisten and I had never seen her legs when they were just things lying on a floor. Knowing that I was looking down on her, she struggled to get to her feet, but her long legs buckled and her stockings slipped down on her legs and she spread out on the floor again until the tops of her stockings and her garters showed.

  The two of them smelled worse than the jail. They smelled just like what they were—a couple of drunks whose stomachs had been injected with whatever it is the body makes when it feels cold and full of booze and knows something bad has happened and doesn’t want tomorrow to come.

  Neither one ever looked at me, and he never spoke. She said, “Take me home.” I said, “That’s why I’m here.” She said, “Take him, too.”

  She was as beautiful a dancer as he was a fly caster. I carried her with her toes dragging behind her. Paul turned and, without seeing or speaking, followed. His overdeveloped right wrist held his right hand over his eyes so that in some drunken way he thought I could not see him and he may also have thought that he could not see himself.

  As we went by the desk, the sergeant said, “Why don’t you all go fishing?”

  I did not take Paul’s girl to her home. In those days, Indians who did not live on reservations had to live out by the city limits and generally they pitched camp near either the slaughterhouse or the city dump. I took them back to Paul’s apartment. I put him in his bed, and I put her in the bed where I had been sleeping, but not until I had changed it so that the fresh sheets would feel smooth to her legs.

  As I covered her, she said, “He should have killed the bastard.”

  I said, “Maybe he did,” whereupon she rolled over and went to sleep, believing, as she always did, anything I told her, especially if it involved heavy casualties.

  By then, dawn was coming out of a mountain across the Missouri, so I drove to Wolf Creek.

  In those days it took about an hour to drive the forty miles of rough road from Helena to Wolf Creek. While the sun came out of the Big Belt Mountains and the Missouri and left them behind in light, I tried to find something I already knew about life that might help me reach out and touch my brother and get him to look at me and himself. For a while, I even thought what the desk sergeant first told me was useful. As a desk sergeant, he had to know a lot about life and he had told me Paul was the Scottish equivalent of “Black Irish.” Without doubt, in my father’s family there were “Black Scots” occupying various outposts all the way from the original family home on the Isle of Mull in the southern Hebrides to Fairbanks, Alaska, 110 or 115 miles south of the Arctic Circle, which was about as far as a Scot could go then to get out of range of sheriffs with warrants and husbands with shotguns. I had learned about them from my aunts, not my uncles, who were all Masons and believed in secret societies for males. My aunts, though, talked gaily about them and told me they were all big men and funny and had been wonderful to them when they were little girls. From my uncles’ letters, it was clear that they still thought of my aunts as little girls. Every Christmas until they died in distant lands these hastily departed brothers sent their once-little sisters loving Christmas cards scrawled with assurances that they would soon “return to the States and help them hang stockings on Christmas eve.”

  Seeing that I was relying on women to explain to myself what I didn’t understand about men, I remembered a couple of girls I had dated who had uncles with some resemblances to my brother. The uncles were fairly expert at some art that was really a hobby—one uncle was a waterc
olorist and the other the club champion golfer—and each had selected a profession that would allow him to spend most of his time at his hobby. Both were charming, but you didn’t quite know what if anything you knew when you had finished talking to them. Since they did not earn enough money from business to make life a hobby, their families had to meet from time to time with the county attorney to keep things quiet.

  Sunrise is the time to feel that you will be able to find out how to help somebody close to you who you think needs help even if he doesn’t think so. At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.

  Then about twelve miles before Wolf Creek the road drops into the Little Prickly Pear Canyon, where dawn is long in coming. In the suddenly returning semidarkness, I watched the road carefully, saying to myself, hell, my brother is not like anybody else. He’s not my gal’s uncle or a brother of my aunts. He is my brother and an artist and when a four-and-a-half-ounce rod is in his hand he is a major artist. He doesn’t piddle around with a paint brush or take lessons to improve his short game and he won’t take money even when he must need it and he won’t run anywhere from anyone, least of all to the Arctic Circle. It is a shame I do not understand him.

  Yet even in the loneliness of the canyon I knew there were others like me who had brothers they did not understand but wanted to help. We are probably those referred to as “our brothers’ keepers,” possessed of one of the oldest and possibly one of the most futile and certainly one of the most haunting of instincts. It will not let us go.

  When I drove out of the canyon, it was ordinary daylight. I went to bed and had no trouble not going to sleep until my wife called me. “Don’t forget,” Jessie said, “you’re going with Florence and me to meet Neal at the train.” The truth was I had forgotten, but when I thought about him I felt relieved. It was good to remember that there was someone in my wife’s family they worried about, and it was even better to remember that to me he was a little bit funny. I was in need of relief, and comic relief seemed about as good as any.

  My wife kept standing at the door, waiting for me to roll over and try to go to sleep again. To her surprise, I jumped out of bed and started dressing. “It will be a pleasure,” I told her. Jessie said to me, “You’re funny,” and I asked, “What’s funny about me?” And Jessie said, “I know you don’t like him.” I said, “I do not like him,” saying “do not” instead of “don’t” in case my voice was blurred in waking up. Jessie said, “You’re funny,” and closed the door, then opened a crack of it and said, “You are not funny,” and my wife’s “not” was also distinct.

  He was last off the train, and he came down the platform trying to remember what he thought an international-cup tennis player looked like. He undoubtedly was the first and last passenger ever to step off a Great Northern coach car at Wolf Creek, Montana, wearing white flannels and two sweaters. All this was in the days when the fancy Dans wore red-white-and-blue tennis sweaters, and he had a red-white-and-blue V-neck sweater over a red-white-and-blue turtle-neck sweater. When he recognized us as relatives and realized that he couldn’t be Bill Tilden or F. Scott Fitzgerald, he put down his suitcase and said, “Oh,” except when he saw me he said nothing. Then he turned his profile, and waited to be kissed. While the women took turns, I had a good look at his suitcase. It rested next to his elegant black-and-white shoes, and its straw sides had started to break open and one of its locks did not lock. Between its handles were the initials F. M., his mother’s initials before she had married. When his mother saw the suitcase, she cried.

  So he came home with about what he had when he left Montana, because he still had his mother’s suitcase and his own conception of himself as a Davis Cup player, which had first come to the surface in Wolf Creek where you couldn’t jump over a net without landing in cactus.

  It was not until eight-thirty or nine that night that he tried to reduce himself in size so he could squeeze out of the door without being seen, but Florence and Jessie were waiting for him. My wife was barren of double-talk, so, to avoid being told, I got up and accompanied him to Black Jack’s Bar, sometimes although rarely called a tavern.

  Black Jack’s was a freight car taken off its wheels and set on gravel at the other end of the bridge crossing the Little Prickly Pear. On the side of the box car was the sign of the Great Northern Railroad, a mountain goat gazing through a white beard on a world painted red. This is the only goat that ever saw the bottom of his world constantly occupied by a bottle of bar whiskey labeled “3-7-77,” the number the Vigilantes pinned on the road agents they hanged in order to represent probably the dimensions of a grave. (The numbers are thought to mean three feet wide, seven feet long, and seventy-seven inches deep.) The bar was a log split in two by someone who wasn’t much good with an ax, maybe Black Jack himself, but his customers had done a much better job in greasing it with their elbows. Black Jack was short, trembled, and never got far from a revolver and a blackjack that lay behind the greased log. His teeth were bad, probably the result of drinking his own whiskey, which was made somewhere up Sheep Gulch.

  The stools in front of the bar were reconstructed grocery crates. When Neal and I walked in, two of the crates were occupied, both by characters long familiar to the Great Northern goat. On the first was a bar character called Long Bow, because in this once Indian country anyone making an art of telling big lies about his hunting and shooting was said “to pull the long bow.”

  Having seen him shoot once, though, I myself never acted on the assumption that he lied about what he could do with firearms. I had seen a friend of his throw five aspirin tablets in the air which bloomed into five small white flowers immediately following five shots that sounded like one.

  I was just as sure he could challenge the champion sheep-herder of the Sieben ranch at his own game. The Sieben ranch is one of the finest in western Montana, spreading all the way from the Helena valley to Lincoln and beyond. Its owners, Jean and John Baucus, tell about a favorite sheepherder they once had to take to the hospital where his condition rapidly changed for the worse. They couldn’t get his underwear off—it had been on him so long his hair had grown through it. Finally, they had to pluck him like a chicken, and when his underwear finally came off, pieces of skin came with it. At the opening of Long Bow’s shirt, which wasn’t buttoned for quite a way down, you could see hair sprouting out of his underwear.

  On the crate at the other end of the bar was a female character known as Old Rawhide to the goats up and down the Great Northern line. About ten years before, at a Fourth of July celebration she had been elected beauty queen of Wolf Creek. She had ridden bareback standing up through the 111 inhabitants, mostly male, who had lined one of Wolf Creek’s two streets. Her skirts flew high, and she won the contest. But, since she didn’t quite have what it takes to become a professional rider, she did the next best thing. However, she still wore the divided skirts of a western horsewoman of the day, although they must have been a handicap in her new profession.

  For a small town, Wolf Creek loomed large upon the map. It had two almost national celebrities, one a steer wrestler and the other a fancy roper. These two local artists spent their summers at county fairs and were good enough to come out five or six hundred dollars ahead for the season, less, of course, their hospital expenses. Old Rawhide did not intend to spend the rest of her life as a disappointed athlete, so she would shack up one winter with the fancy roper and the next winter with the steer wrestler. Occasionally, in late autumn when it looked as if it were going to be an especially hard winter, she would marry one of them, but marriage wasn’t Old Rawhide’s natural state of bliss, and before spring she would be shacked up with the other one. Shacking up brought out Old Rawhide’s most enduring and durable qualities, and, unlike marriage, could be counted on to last all winter.

  In the summers, while her artists were living off hot dogs at county fairs and rupturing their intestines while twisting the necks of steers, Old Rawhide inhabited Black Jack’s Bar, reduced to picking up stray fishermen, mo
st of them bait and hardware fishermen from Great Falls, so for her, as for the rest of the world, life had its ups and downs. However, she didn’t show much the effects of life’s gravitational pulls. Like many fancy riders, she was rather small and very tough and very strong, especially in the legs. She had weathered enough to deserve her name, but she didn’t look much older than her thirty years spent mostly with horses and horsemen and the sporting element of Great Falls.

  Even when she and Long Bow were at the bar, they sat at opposite ends so that itinerant fishermen had to sit between them and buy the drinks.

  That’s where Neal and I sat when we came in.

  “Hi, Long Bow,” Neal said, and overshook his hand. Long Bow did not like to be called Long Bow, although he knew he was called Long Bow behind his back, but to Neal he was just plain old Long Bow, and after a couple of shots of 3-7-77 Neal was outshooting, outhunting, and outtrapping the government trapper.

  There was something deep in Neal that compelled him to lie to experts, even though they knew best that he was lying. He was one of those who need to be caught telling a lie while he is telling it.

  As for Old Rawhide, Neal hadn’t looked at her yet. I was already wise to the fact that Neal’s opening ploy with women was to ignore them, and indeed was beginning to recognize what a good opening it is.

  The mirror behind the bar looked like a polished Precambrian mudstone with ripples on it. Neal watched it constantly, evidently fascinated by the dark distorted image of himself living automatically—buying all the drinks and doing all the talking and none of the listening. I tried to break the monopoly by talking to Old Rawhide who was sitting next to me, but she was aware only of being ignored so she ignored me.

  Finally, I listened, since no one would listen to me, although I didn’t go so far as to buy the drinks. Neal had trailed an otter and her pups up to Rogers Pass, where the thermometer officially recorded 69.7 degrees below zero. While he trailed this otter, I tried to trace its lineage from his description of it. “I had a hard time following it,” he said, “because it had turned white in the winter,” so it must have been part ermine. After he treed her, he said, “She stretched out on the lower branch ready to pounce on the first deer that came along,” so she had to have a strain of mountain lion in her. She also must have been part otter, because she was jokey and smiled at him. But mostly she was 3-7-77, because she was the only animal in western Montana besides man that had pups in the winter. “They snuggled up right in my shirt,” he said, showing us a shirt under his two red-white-and-blue sweaters.