Gallatin Canyon

by Thomas McGuane

  “I’m told you’re their slave.”

  “They believe that,” she said complacently.

  “And it’s because you’re black?”

  At this, she stopped and gave voice to what was evidently dispassionate consideration. “How amusing I find this. I am a Seminole Indian. My great-grandfathers came to Red Bays in cayucos. Why else would the University of Florida send us so many anthropologists? We are all Indians in Red Bays. Why else would they bring us T-shirts from the Hard Rock Cafe and expensive tennis shoes to earn our trust, if we were not Indians?”

  The others nodded happily; they were enjoying her indignation and seemed to understand that it was based on a discussion of her slave status.

  “These disgraceful Spaniards don’t understand that they are blacks. They think their language protects them. How they’d love to be Indians!”

  “Were you captured?”

  Angela couldn’t control her mirth. She held the turban around her head with both hands and jiggled from head to toe with laughter. The others united in what seemed to be real pleasure, and she looked at them and rolled her eyes at the absurdity of the white man. This rather calmed things because, as his fellow whites, the Spanish-speaking blacks did not want to throw in their lot with their slave too emphatically. They wished to project that they were compassionate slaveholders who followed the dictates of humanity.

  The rum landed back in Errol’s hands, and all the others, including Angela, generously relished his enthusiasm as he raised it to his lips and kept it there for a long time, not fully understanding how ravenous he was. But when he lowered the bottle something in his gaze caused them to fall silent. The moment passed as interest turned to the turtle and plantains. Noticing that Angela sat by herself on the step of one of the driftwood shacks, Errol asked her if she thought of herself as a slave.

  She replied, “Don’t be a fool.”

  “Oh, well,” said Errol, in odd contentment. Confusion could be pleasant when you were drinking; it kept the mind whirring agreeably. He began to eat, taking pieces of turtle from spits over the sputtering buttonwood coals. The teenager with dreadlocks was wholly focused on the food and neither laughed with the others nor in any way seemed to know he was not alone. The only other woman, a heavyset Spanish-speaking black, watched Errol with sullen attention as though he were there to present a bill or a summons. The blind man staring with white eyes across the fire into the darkness cupped his hands in front of him, into which Adan and Catarino placed pieces of food. Catarino asked Errol if he was enjoying his meal.

  “I certainly am!”

  “And the rum suits you, does it not?”

  “Very agreeable.”

  “Sometimes it is more important than food, no?”

  “Sometimes,” said Errol.

  Adan smiled at his food and asked, “Sometimes?”

  Errol waited before answering. “I believe that is what I said.”

  Catarino gave Errol a jovial thump on the back and returned the bottle to him. The wind had shifted slightly, and Errol moved closer to the buttonwood smoke to be free of the vicious little mosquitoes. When he glanced at Angela, sitting away from the fire, Catarino explained that mosquitoes didn’t bother black people.

  “How is it that she is your slave?” Errol asked. At this, the blind man spoke in a surprisingly firm voice.

  “Her man drowned.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes, that is so,” said Adan. All except Angela seemed quite sad to reflect upon this event. “We didn’t take her back to her country. That would be against the law. Those blacks have laws no one can understand. With her man dead, she wished to throw in with us, but we were barely surviving as it was. You see how it is. We offered to let her come and be our slave, as that is entirely natural and appealing to blacks. As you see, she accepted.”

  “Which only proves our point,” Adan added.

  Errol took another slug of rum and gazed around at his companions, who seemed to him, as best as he could tell, to all be black. Then he thought of something. “What color do you think I am?” The three looked at each other. It was Catarino who finally spoke, his smile full of accommodation.

  He said, “We haven’t decided.”

  “I can’t take mosquitoes at all,” said Errol nervously. “Never could. They drive me nuts!”

  The blind man said, “Have some more of that aguardiente. To enjoy your meal, you must calm your nerves.”

  Adan looked pensive. “They served wine at the Last Supper. If we had not been prepared to offer refreshment to our guests, perhaps the turtle would not have offered himself to us. All things are connected. Even you, sir, are connected to us, if only in that we share a clearing which we made of sufficient size with our machetes as to offer you a place at our meal.” He smiled pleasantly. “Surely we knew you were coming.”

  Errol’s expression of gratitude was interrupted by a burp, which brought a change of mood and all went about eating with a purpose, all except Angela, who paced about, desperately waving away the mosquitoes.

  The sun must have awakened Errol, balled up next to the extinguished fire, the sun that caused the mosquitoes to retreat into the mangroves. Errol didn’t seem to remember where he was, and indeed his body was disagreeably unfamiliar. No parts of it seemed to fit together any longer and all were consumed by burning and itching. He felt his face with swollen fingers. His lips were drum tight, his eyelids so thick he could see them, and his cheeks lumpy with bites. He had lost his shoes, then remembered they’d been laced. Someone had taken his shoes. In any case, his swollen feet would no longer be contained by them. He lay back, let his mouth fall open, and gazed at the sky.

  Once there was sufficient water in his boat, he could call it provisioned and begin the voyage home. He had hand lines and a shoebox full of diamond-shaped silver spoons: he would have fish and freshwater and that was enough. All this horror, this misshapen body, was temporary. Steps toward atonement had been taken; more could be promised. He remembered his mestizos and the groves. He tried reckoning how long he’d been away, but no exact answer was required. The cracker’s deadline had come and gone: he had broken his covenant with the mestizos and by now they were dispersed, thrown once again to fate, to wander the labor camps at Immokalee or Belle Glade, offering the days of their lives for sugar, citrus, and white men. His, like theirs, were the inconveniences of hell.

  Certainly it lay in his power to arise, thank his hosts, sail away, and, against the cadences of wind and sea, sort through his many failings and the invoices for atonement that accompanied them. There was no mess so great it could not be broken down into a manageable sequence, a bill of lading for debts to oblivion.

  As he stood, his buttocks abraded each other in special misery. My God, he wondered, how did they get in there? He began scratching himself all over. He hurried from one place to another as no sooner did he palliate some mad insistence than it appeared in another place. He was writhing and dancing without leaving his small spot in the dirt.

  Something caught his eye.

  Angela, arms wrapped around her sides, was lost in shaking, silent mirth. He stopped and stared at her through indignant, swollen eyes. He walked over to her, the pressure of edema squeezing up his calves with every step. She smiled at him when he arrived. She had unwound her turban and twisted it around her hands, allowing her hair to spring out in all directions. In his present condition, that hair struck him with its terrible vitality. There was something thrilling about it. She said, “I tink it will rain. And dis is my great day. Dey have freed me.”

  “That’s nice,” said Errol sarcastically. His disfigured lips distorted this offensive speech but Angela seemed not to notice. “Are they still sleeping?”

  “Oh, dey gone.”

  Errol could not lose his snide tone. “Where exactly is there to go?”

  Angela answered him imperturbably. “Miami.” Errol considered this for a remarkably short time.

  “They took my boat?”r />
  “Oh, yes.”

  Errol seemed unsurprised. He considered levelly that he was without choices. His despair was such that the possibility of solace could only lie in the evaporation of all his options. Never before had he sensed himself greeting his destiny with so little resistance. It was an odd luxury to contemplate this, pants unbuttoned to accommodate his itches, spread fingers hanging at his sides, and a face whose risibility could now be enjoyed only by Angela, who had the upper hand of observing him.

  An implement of sorts leaned against the shack. A corner of salvaged iron had been secured to a hardwood limb from which the branches had been removed with many wraps of rusting wire. Angela handed this to Errol and ordered him to follow her up the path through the mastic and wild palms. As they walked, Angela told him of the brothers’ dream of taking their father, the blind man, to Miami, where they had been told you could buy eyeballs on the black market. There had been much in the air about family values, but Errol had never imagined they’d be honored at his expense. Perhaps he didn’t really mind as he followed Angela with his new implement. Musing on the current arrangement, he wondered whether she was his owner and what color they each were, since the evidence of his eyes had proved insufficient.

  Bright-hued birds flashed through the opening made by the path; near the flowers of tall vines, clouds of hummingbirds rose and sank, competing for nectar with surprising ferocity. A bananaquit, an urgent little yellow bird, danced down the path ahead of him, landed, and then scurried off like a mouse.

  The path opened atop what Angela said was an old burial mound, and there he saw a garden under the morning sun. Errol briefly wondered what sorts of people were buried here but doubted that Angela knew. She showed him how things were arranged, the peppers, the tomatoes, the staked gourds, the new melons concealed under dark leaves glistening with dew. A pleasant smell arose from the tilled ground. A tall palm hung over the scene, and from its crown of leaves the sound of parrot nestlings descended.

  At the still-shaded end of the garden, wild vegetation had encroached on the perimeter. She showed him where he must start.

  Gallatin Canyon

  The day we planned the trip, I told Louise that I didn’t like going to Idaho via the Gallatin Canyon. It’s too narrow, and while trucks don’t belong on this road, there they are, lots of them. Tourist pull-offs and wild animals on the highway complete the picture. We could have gone by way of Ennis, but Louise had learned that there were road repairs on Montana Highway 84—twelve miles of torn-up asphalt—in addition to its being rodeo weekend.

  “Do we have to go to Idaho?” she asked.

  I said I thought it was obvious. A lot rode on the success of our little jaunt, which was ostensibly to close the sale of a small car dealership I owned in the sleepy town of Rigby. But, since accepting the offer of a local buyer, I had received a far better one from elsewhere, which, my attorney said, I couldn’t take unless my original buyer backed out—and he would only back out if he got sufficiently angry at me. Said my attorney, Make him mad. So I was headed to Rigby, Idaho, expressly to piss off a small-town businessman, who was trying to give me American money for a going concern on the strip east of town, and thereby make room for a rich Atlanta investor, new to our landscape, who needed this dealership as a kind of flagship for his other intentions. The question was how to provoke Rigby without arousing his suspicions, and I might have collected my thoughts a little better had I not had to battle trucks and tourists in the Gallatin Canyon.

  Louise and I had spent a lot of time together in recent years, and we were both probably wondering where things would go from here. She had been married, briefly, long ago, and that fact, together with the relatively peaceful intervening years, gave a pleasant detachment to most of her relationships, including the one she had with me. In the past, that would have suited me perfectly; it did not seem to suit me now, and I was so powerfully attached to her it made me uncomfortable that she wasn’t interested in discussing our mutual future, though at least she had never suggested that we wouldn’t have one. With her thick blond hair pulled back in a barrette, her strong, shapely figure, and the direct fullness of her mouth, she was often noticed by other men. After ten years in Montana, she still had a strong Massachusetts accent. Louise was a lawyer, specializing in the adjudication of water rights between agricultural and municipal interests. In our rapidly changing world, she was much in demand. Though I wished we could spend more time together, Louise had taught me not to challenge her on this.

  No longer the country crossroads of recent memory, Four Corners was filled with dentists’ offices, fast-food and espresso shops, and large and somehow foreboding filling stations that looked, at night, like colonies in space; nevertheless, the intersection was true to its name, sending you north to a transcontinental interstate, east into town, west to the ranches of Madison County, and south, my reluctant choice, up the Gallatin Canyon to Yellowstone and the towns of southeast Idaho, one of which contained property with my name on the deed.

  We joined the stream of traffic heading south, the Gallatin River alongside and usually much below the roadway, a dashing high-gradient river with anglers in reflective stillness at the edges of its pools and bright rafts full of delighted tourists in flotation jackets and crash helmets sweeping through its white water. Gradually, the mountains pressed in on all this humanity, and I found myself behind a long line of cars trailing a cattle truck at well below the speed limit. This combination of cumbersome commercial traffic and impatient private cars was a lethal mixture that kept our canyon in the papers, as it regularly spat out corpses. In my rearview mirror, I could see a line behind me that was just as long as the one ahead, stretching back, thinning, and vanishing around a green bend. There was no passing lane for several miles. A single amorous elk could have turned us all into twisted, smoking metal.

  “You might have been right,” Louise said. “It doesn’t look good.”

  She almost certainly had better things to do. But, looking down the line of cars, I felt my blood pressure rising. Her hands rested quietly in her lap. I couldn’t possibly have rivaled such serenity.

  “How do you plan to anger this guy in Rigby?” she asked.

  “I’m going to try haughtiness. If I suggest that he bought the dealership cheap, he might tell me to keep the damn thing. The Atlanta guy just wants to start somewhere. All these people have a sort of parlay mentality, and they need to get on the playing field before they can start running it up. I’m a trader. It all happens for me in the transition. The moment of liquidation is the essence of capitalism.”

  “What about the man in Rigby?”

  “He’s an end user. He wants to keep it.”

  I reflected on the pathos of ownership and the way it could bog you down.

  “You should be in my world,” Louise said. “According to the law, water has no reality except its use. In Montana, water isn’t even wet. Every time some misguided soul suggests that fish need it, it ends up in the state supreme court.”

  Birds were fleeing the advance of automobiles. I was elsewhere, trying to imagine my buyer, red-faced, storming out of the closing. I’d offer to let bygones be bygones, I’d take him to dinner, I’d throw a steak into him, for Christ’s sake. In the end, he’d be glad he wasn’t stuck with the lot.

  Traffic headed toward us, far down the road. We were all packed together to make sure no one tried to pass. The rules had to be enforced. Occasionally, someone drifted out for a better look, but not far enough that someone else could close his space and possibly seal his fate.

  This trip had its risks. I had only recently admitted to myself that I would like to make more of my situation with Louise than currently existed. Though ours was hardly a chaste relationship, real intimacy was relatively scarce. People in relationships nowadays seemed to retain their secrets like bank deposits—they always set some aside, in case they might need them to spend on someone new. I found it unpleasant to think that Louise could be withholding anything
.

  But I thought I was more presentable than I had been. When Louise and I first met, I was just coming off two and a half years of peddling satellite dishes in towns where a couple of dogs doing the wild thing in the middle of the road amounted to the high point of a year, and the highest-grossing business was a methamphetamine tent camp out in the sagebrush. Now I had caught the upswing in our local economy: cars, storage, tool rental, and mortgage discounting. I had a pretty home, debt-free, out on Sourdough. I owned a few things. I could be okay. I asked Louise what she thought of the new prosperity around us. She said wearily, “I’m not sure it’s such a good thing, living in a boomtown. It’s basically a high-end carny atmosphere.”

  We were just passing Storm Castle and Garnet Mountain. When I glanced in the mirror, I saw a low red car with a scoop in its hood pull out to pass. I must have reacted somehow, because Louise asked me if I would like her to drive.

  “No, that’s fine. Things are getting a bit lively back there.”

  “Drive defensively.”

  “Not much choice, is there?”

  I had been mentally rehearsing the closing in Rigby, and I wasn’t getting anywhere. I had this sort of absurd picture of myself strutting into the meeting. I tried again to picture the buyer looking seriously annoyed, but I’d met him before and he seemed pretty levelheaded. I suspected I’d have to be really outlandish to get a rise out of him. He was a fourth-generation resident of Rigby, so I could always urge him to get to know his neighbors, I decided. Or, since he had come up through the service department, I could try emphasizing the need to study how the cars actually ran. I’d use hand signals to fend off objections. I felt more secure.

  Some elk had wandered into the parking lot at Buck’s T4 and were grazing indifferently as people pulled off the highway to admire them. I don’t know if it was the great unmarred blue sky overhead or the balsamic zephyr that poured down the mountainside, but I found myself momentarily buoyed by all this idleness, people out of their cars. I am always encouraged when I see animals doing something other than running for their lives. In any case, the stream of traffic ahead of us had been much reduced by the pedestrian rubbernecking.