Gallatin Canyon

by Thomas McGuane

  Ruth came from Burnaby, British Columbia, a tough town whose greatest product was Joe Sakic, the Avalanche center. Her mother left her and her father, a millwright, when Ruth was just a child and Sakic was still playing for Lethbridge. Her father admitted that he didn’t know quite what to do with her, and she moved out at fourteen to skateboard, then waitress at Revelstoke, and finally develop her skiing to instructor competency, which provided a seasonal living yet made each year an uncertainty.

  Ruth, like Austin, was a heroin user; both would have been more entrenched if their income had been predictable. Their love of the outdoors and great physical enthusiasm sustained the long dry spells; but these always contained some component that led back to using, and that led back to Vancouver, that phenomenal aperture to the drugs of Asia.

  Their most reliable connection was a Sikh gallery owner, Sadhu Dhaliwal, who specialized in North Coast art above the table, drugs and protected antiquities under, the most honest junk dealer in Van with a clean business mind under his made-to-measure five-yard muslin turban. Ruth had put Austin on to him: you got a better shot with East Asians who were utterly paranoid about the immigration service and played it straight, at least in the details. There was nothing straight in the big picture, of course, but the big picture always spoiled everything for everybody.

  And they were wise; they never went to Vancouver unless, as a kind of enfranchisement, they were prepared to use. To land in that town with empty pockets hoping to improvise your way onto the golden thoroughfare was to risk terrible consequences, and they were far too smart for that. Hence this trip through a primeval forest known with surprising intimacy by Austin. In certain respects, it was a perfect life: you descended from some of the wildest country left on the planet, sunburned and hardmuscled after a season of gazing upon creation, straight down into the city of man where bliss came in a blue Pacific wave and the most beautiful hookers lined up around the cruise-ship terminals and chatted about the future.

  They were happy to be together and joked affectionately about how they’d met. “Whose futon is this, anyway?” And “You’re not my cat!”

  Several curious ravens were following, now so preoccupied that they blundered into trees and then croaked in dismay. They really did suggest mischief. Once, when he stayed for a week with the Gitxsan band near Kispiox, Austin heard a story about ravens meeting in the spring to discuss the tricks they’d play that year. He liked his stay with the natives, Christmas lights on the houses year-round. Perhaps they trusted him too much, but that was life. He saw ravens perform a kind of funeral on his lawn at Kamloops, when his cat was afraid to leave the house, the same lawn where they taught their young to fly after they’d been shoved from the nest. Though the neighbors complained about all these noisy birds, he loved them. He went down to Mexico with Ruth on some transaction, and when he got back the ravens were gone. The neighbors had done away with them. He and Ruth were not in such great shape after Mexico, and the raven thing got them so down they ran from it and didn’t light until they found another rented house, a trailer this time, in Penticton, where, right after getting his flu shot from the National Health Service, Austin briefly decided he was an American. They had started drinking, which was a feeble alternative though it led to the same place. It was time to go up-country again, this time with a plan that took them to this forest just north of the Skeena with his prized information from the natives.

  “Austin. I have to take a break.”

  They stopped and shrugged off their packs, which slumped to the ground, but as soon as they stood still the mosquitoes began to find them. Ruth could feel them against her hands as she tried to wave them away. They rose in clouds from beneath the ferns and forced the two to resume hiking. “We’re close,” said Austin, his voice betraying a slight impatience with Ruth. He had a GPS, which he took from his pocket while he walked, glancing at its small screen before putting it away. “I can’t tell; it’s in kilometers, but close.”

  “I don’t know how you ever found it in the first place.”

  “The old-fashioned way, work. Not a lot of people like to crash around in brush the grizzlies think they own. I had general stuff from the First Nations guys, but I still had to work my ass off.”

  “I hope we don’t see bears today.”

  “Squirt ’em.”

  “That’s pretty cold. I’m frightened.”

  He wasn’t cold, really; he’d already heard the distinctive woof of a bear but declined to worry Ruth about it. He kept his eyes on the lighted swatch of huckleberries near their path and saw the moving furrow in the bushes, but an encounter never came.

  He was thinking that if he’d had this GPS with him on the first trip he wouldn’t have brought Ruth here at all. They’d be back in Van on the yellow brick road like the time they were so loaded looking at war canoes in the Museum of Anthropology. The security guards kicked them out and they ended up crashing in broad daylight in Stanley Park after being expelled from the Ted and Mary Grieg Memorial Garden for falling on the rhododendrons. Ruth was troubled that they’d found themselves among so many homeless and saw it as a sign. Austin was amused by her love of portents, her belief in symbols, and almost wished he could share it. He considered himself too literal-minded, though he also felt that if he’d been no more practical than Ruth they’d both be doing shitwork around ski resorts the rest of their lives, never really having the merest glimpse of the great beyond.

  A couple of times it had gotten away from them. The most humiliating, of course, was when they’d had to move back in with Ruth’s dad, the millwright, holed up sick in his basement, but at least they weren’t in a program. That had been a close call; yet it seemed after each of their grand voyages they’d moved a little closer to a program. The old guy was off making plywood like the good automaton he was and thought Austin and Ruth just kept getting the flu. That’s why, when Austin thought about his dual citizenship, he concluded that Canada still had a little innocence left. If you could look at a forest and see plywood you were still innocent.

  Austin found the clearing and waited at its edge, in the manner of a host, for Ruth to catch up.

  “Here it is.”

  The totem pole lay stretched out in ferns and moss, strikingly distinct from the forest around it. Shafts of light entered the canopy and illuminated the clearing in pools of brightness. Austin and Ruth moved along its length, staring at the details of the carving, strangely mixed parts of animals, birds, humans, salmon.

  Ruth gave a huge sigh, and Austin said, “What’d I tell you?”

  Then he walked to the head of the pole, where a fearsome animal head raised fangs toward the canopy. He took out a cell phone and dialed. After a moment he said, “You want me to start at the top? Okay, it looks like a wolf. Is there a wolf clan? Well, it looks like a wolf. Ruth, what’s the next one? Ruth says mosquito turning into a human. If I recall my Gitxsan, that’s Fireweed Clan. And she says, yes, Wolf’s a clan too. Then frog with hawk’s beak, followed by another mosquito with a frog on its head, then it looks like a beaver dancing with a raven, and last is two bear cubs, one of which is turning into a boy. They’re pretty well separated; I know you could cut them up. I mean, the fucking thing is forty feet long. You’ll be happy, Sadhu, and if we’re good to go on the you-know-what, I’ll just give you the coordinates, and Ruth and I will see you in Van.” He stopped talking and took the GPS out of his pocket again. “Hold on, Sadhu, it’s finding satellites now. All I gotta do is push MAN OVERBOARD, then I can give you the numbers. . . . ” Austin recited the position, longitude and latitude down to minutes of degrees, and then hung up. He turned to Ruth with a huge grin.

  She asked, “Is there a lot?”

  “Is there a lot!” He thought, We’re going to have to pace ourselves or we’ll be dead inside a year. “Yeah, Ruth, there’s a lot.”

  The Zombie

  Irval Jones, a widower, had a big green willow tree he was very proud of. This thing sat out on their lawn like a skyscraper
, and Jones bragged about all the free air-conditioning he got out of it. The neighbors, almost to Harnell Creek, were a Cheyenne family, always working on their cars, whom Jones referred to as “dump bears.” After the Indians, the road kept going but in reduced condition until it was just a pair of ruts that turned to impassable gumbo at the first rain shower but finally led to an old ranch graveyard in a grove of straggling hackberry and box elder.

  Dulcie Jones came home to introduce her boyfriend to her father, who had trained her in the values of law and order and so understood her difficult and sometimes perilous work. She was twenty-four, a pretty dishwater blonde with a glum heart-shaped face and a distinctive V separating her upper incisors. She held a cigarette between the ends of the first two fingers of her right hand, the arm extended stiffly as though to keep the cigarette at bay. She wore gold earrings with a baseball hat. Beside her stood Neville Smithwick, sly as a ferret in his pale goatee and sloping hairdo. Dulcie was an escort girl and sometime police informant, though her father was aware of only the latter portion of her résumé as well as her day job at an optometrist’s office. All-knowing Neville was her dupe. As a fool, he had made her work easier. Under ordinary circumstances, Dulcie served her customers as they expected. If she should suspect they were impecunious, however, she turned them over to the police, who saw to it their names appeared in the paper with varying results: laughter at the office, families ruined, and so on. In such referrals, she got paid by the fuzz. No tips.

  Smithwick’s father, Neville Senior, had hired Dulcie to do away with his son’s virginity on the pretext of Neville Junior’s interviewing her for a job, during which exchange Junior was meant to succumb to her erotic overtures. This scheme Neville Junior absorbed but dimly. Rather than be frustrated by his obtuseness, Dulcie quite sensibly went about her day, with Neville in tow so that, should the project collapse, she’d at least get a few errands out of the way.

  When she introduced Neville to her father, her father said in a not particularly friendly, half-joshing way, “I may have to give Neville a haircut.”

  “You and what army?” said Neville.

  Orval seemed to sober up. He was pushing sixty but still wore pointed underslung cowboy boots that aggravated his arthritic gait. The snap buttons on his polyester Western shirt were undone around the melon of his small, protruding stomach, the underside of which was cut into by the large old buckle he’d won snowmobiling. He gave off an intense tobacco smell, and his gaze seemed to bounce off Neville to a row of trees in the distance.

  “Well. Come in and set, then. If you get hungry, I’ll bet you Dulcie’d cook something up.”

  “I don’t eat anything with a central nervous system.”

  “You what?”

  Mr. Jones twisted the front doorknob and kneed the door over its high spot as they went indoors. Dulcie was pleased to have caught her father early. It was only a matter of time before he would begin asking, “Will this day never end?”

  Orval brought Neville a Grain Belt and Neville thanked him politely. “You seem like a well-brought-up feller,” said Orval Jones.

  “I’m a virgin,” said Neville. This remarkable statement was true. But Neville had developed expectations, based on some exceedingly provocative suggestions by Dulcie, which were not so completely lost on him as Dulcie had imagined. From his vast store of secondhand information, he had concluded that he was about to hit pay dirt—3D adult programming. In fact, she told him he’d need a condom and, in the resulting confusion, stopped at Roundup to help him pick one. But, once inside the drugstore, he embarrassed her by asking if they were one-size-fits-all, like a baseball hat, and then balked when the clerk explained he had to buy them as a three pack. Neville told him that the thought made him light-headed.

  Orval was on the sofa and seemed defeated by Neville’s very existence. Nevertheless, he made a wan attempt at conversation. His jeans had ridden up over the top of his boots to reveal spindly white legs that seemed to take up little room in the boots, just sticks is all they were. The terrible bags under his eyes gave the impression that he could see beyond the present situation.

  “Neville, you say you come from a banking background.”

  “Foreground.”

  “Ha-ha. You’ve got a point. And do you—uh, actually work at the bank too?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “Hell, no. I see. And what do you do?”

  “TV.”

  “TV sales?”

  “I watch TV. Ever heard of it?”

  “I suppose that should’ve been my first guess.”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  Neville had learned from television that remorseless repartee was the basis of genial relations with the public. He really meant no harm, but not having any friends might have alerted him to the dangers of this approach. The appearance of harmlessness disguised the violence he had inside him and would save him from ever being held accountable for its consequences, when he quite soon gave it such full expression. “He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  Neville Senior managed the Southeast and Central Montana Bank; he was a genuinely upright and conventional individual who worked hard and played golf. His wife had died some years ago, so he had had charge of Neville Junior from early on. In the winter, he went once a month to St. George, Utah, fighting Mormons for tee times, and returned refreshed for work. He was a happy, well-balanced, thoughtful man who had accepted the work ethic he’d been raised with and which caused him to spend too little time with his only child. Their prosperous life was such that there were no duties that his son could be assigned that would instill the father’s decent values. And he didn’t want him on the golf course with his various hairdos. Walking down North 27th in Billings with his tax attorney, he once passed a youth with pink, blue, and green hair not so different from Neville Junior’s. “When I was in the navy,” the attorney said, “I had sex with a parrot. Could that be my child?”

  Neville Junior worried him. The boy had been raised by a television set, as his father readily admitted. It was bad enough that his language and attitudes came directly from shows he’d seen; he seemed to have found sufficient like-minded companions to keep him from questioning his way of life. What was unsettling was that long after his age would have made it appropriate, Neville Junior had failed to show any interest in girls. As the nice-looking son of a bank president, he should have been cutting a wide swath. Girls liked him and came around to watch TV with him; girls that sent his father’s mind meandering in ways inappropriate to his age and state. His frequent attempts to catch his son in flagrante delicto resulted only in an invitation to join the couple innocently watching the late movie. It was not so many years ago that he himself had boogied under the strobes of big cow-town discos where today’s dowagers once wriggled in precopulatory abandon.

  For a banker, Neville Senior was remarkably free of malice, and his great wish was to overcome the gap of loneliness that lay between him and his heir. It’s possible that he imagined that bringing Neville Junior into the randy orbit that seemed to include everyone but Neville Junior would have the effect of giving the two some ordinary common ground upon which they could begin to talk like a couple of guys. Boning up on TV Guide, as he had once done, proved futile. Real watchers like Neville Junior had a subtle language not easily penetrated by poseurs. He just stared when his father asked if there was anything good on tonight.

  “Neville,” said the father, “two things: I wish I’d been a better parent.”

  “You’ve been all right. Don’t sweat it. What’s the second?”

  “Sex,” barked Senior. “Why aren’t you interested in sex?”

  “Don’t get your panties in a wad, Dad. Virginity is no disgrace. At least it keeps you from weighing sixty pounds and being covered with giant sores.”

  “It doesn’t have to be that way.”

  “It only has to be that way once, and you can count me out.”

  “It should be seen as a gift, a gift of love and joy that perpetuates
the race.”

  “Perpetuates the race? Are people still in favor of that?”

  “I don’t know how you’ve become so cynical at your age.”

  “You can’t accept that I’m happy, can you?”

  “Are you?”

  “Considering the cards I’ve been dealt.”

  “Have they been such bad cards?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I guess I can’t.”

  “Just because you named me after yourself doesn’t mean I have to turn out like you.”

  “No, I suppose that wouldn’t be any good.”

  “I’m not saying that. Different isn’t good or bad. It’s different is all it is. Get it?”

  “You could change your name. I’d understand.”

  “I’ve thought about it. I’ve never thought of myself as Neville.”

  “What have you thought of yourself as?”

  “Karl.”

  “With a C?”

  “With a K.”

  Much later, when Neville Senior had decided that life was not worth living, he would give this Karl-with-a-K idea a final thought.

  From his suite at the Northern Hotel, as a summer sun descended on city streets blue with heat, pressed in upon by angular store-fronts and shade-hunting pedestrians, Neville Senior called an escort service. Given that the city police had been recruiting undercover officers lately to nab concupiscent johns, this was risky business, but Neville Senior believed the scrutiny was directed at streetwalkers and so he felt relatively safe, if a bit frightened. Anyway, when it came to your own flesh and blood, risk was unavoidable. He had cash, plenty of it, and he intended to buy Neville Junior out of his dubious virginity and joyless view of things. More than that, he wanted to buy him the high road to the human race, which in his view was bound together more by fornication than anything else. In his life, courtship was fornication, life was fornication, and grief revealed but one road back to the light of day and that was fornication. The only answer to life’s complexity: fornication.