Gallatin Canyon

by Thomas McGuane

  “My husband lived here one winter,” Louise said. “He sold his pharmacy after we divorced, not that he had to, and set out to change his life. He became a mountain man, wore buckskin clothes. He tried living off the land one day a week, with the idea that he would build up. But then he just stuck with one day a week—he’d shoot a rabbit or something, more of a diet, really. He’s a real-estate agent now, at Big Sky. I think he’s doing well. At least he’s quit killing rabbits.”

  “Remarried?”

  “Yes.”

  As soon as we hit the open country around West Yellowstone, Louise called her office. When her secretary put her on hold, Louise covered the mouthpiece and said, “He married a super gal. Minnesota, I think. She should be good for Bob, and he’s not easy. Bob’s from the South. For men, it’s a full-time job being Southern. It just wears them out. It wore me out too. I developed doubtful behaviors. I pulled out my eyelashes and ate twenty-eight hundred dollars’ worth of macadamia nuts.”

  Her secretary came back on the line, and Louise began editing her schedule with impressive precision, mouthing the word sorry to me when the conversation dragged on. I began musing about my capacity to live successfully with someone as competent as Louise. There was no implied hierarchy of status between us, but I wondered if, in the long run, something would have to give.

  West Yellowstone seemed entirely given over to the well-being of the snowmobile, and the billboards dedicated to it were anomalous on a sunny day like today. By winter, schoolchildren would be petitioning futilely to control the noise at night so they could do their schoolwork, and the town would turn a blind eye as a cloud of smoke arose to gas residents, travelers, and park rangers alike. It seemed incredible to me that recreation could acquire this level of social momentum, that it could be seen as an inalienable right.

  We came down Targhee Pass to Idaho, into a wasteland of spindly pines that had replaced the former forest, and Louise gave voice to the thoughts she’d been having for the past few miles. “Why don’t you just let this deal close? You really have no guarantees from the man from Atlanta. And there’s a good-faith issue here too, I think.”

  “A lawyerly notation.”

  “So be it, but it’s true. Are you trying to get every last cent out of this sale?”

  “That’s second. The first priority is to be done with it. It was meant to be a passive investment, and it has turned out not to be. I get twenty calls a day from the dealership, most with questions I can’t answer. It’s turning me into a giant bullshit machine.”

  “No investments are really passive.”

  “Mutual funds are close.”

  “That’s why they don’t pay.”

  “Some of them pay, or they would cease to exist.”

  “You make a poor libertarian, my darling. You sound like that little puke David Stockman.”

  “Stockman was right about everything. Reagan just didn’t have the guts to take his advice.”

  “Reagan. Give me a break.”

  I didn’t mind equal billing in a relationship, but I did dread the idea of parties speaking strictly from their entitlements across a chasm. Inevitably, sex would make chaos of much of this, but you couldn’t, despite Benjamin Franklin’s suggestion, “use venery” as a management tool.

  Louise adjusted her seat back and folded her arms, gazing at the sunny side of the road. The light through the windshield accentuated the shape of her face, now in repose. I found her beautiful. I adored her when she was a noun and was alarmed when she was a verb, which was usually the case. I understood that this was not the best thing I could say about myself. When her hand drifted over to my leg, I hardly knew what to do with this reference to the other life we led. I knew it was an excellent thing to be reminded of how inconsequential my worldly concerns were, but one warm hand, rested casually, and my interest traveled to the basics of the species.

  Ashton, St. Anthony, Sugar City: Mormon hamlets, small farms, and the furious reordering of watersheds into industrial canals. Irrigation haze hung over the valley of the Snake, and the skies were less bright than they had been just a few miles back, in Montana. Many locals had been killed when the Teton Dam burst, and despite that they wanted to build it again: the relationship to water here was like a war, and in war lives are lost. These were the folk to whom I’d sold many a plain car; ostentation was thoroughly unacceptable hereabouts. The four-door sedan with a six-cylinder engine was the desired item, an identical one with a hundred and fifty thousand miles on it generally taken in trade at zero value, thanks to the manipulation of rebates against the manufacturer’s suggested retail. Appearances were foremost, and the salesman who could leave a customer’s smugness undisturbed flourished in this atmosphere. I had two of them, potato-fattened bland opportunists with nine kids between them. They were the asset I was selling; the rest was little more than bricks and mortar.

  We pressed on toward Rexburg, and amid the turnoffs for Wilford, Newdale, Hibbard, and Moody the only thing that had any flavor was Hog Hollow Road, which was a shortcut to France—not the one in Europe but the one just a hop, skip, and a jump south of Squirrel, Idaho. There were license-plate holders with my name on them in Squirrel, and I was oddly vain about that.

  “Sure seems lonesome around here,” Louise said.

  “Oh, boy.”

  “The houses are like little forts.”

  “The winters are hard.” But it was less that the small neat dwellings around us appeared defensive than that they seemed to be trying to avoid attracting the wrath of some inattentive god.

  “It looks like government housing for Eskimos. They just sit inside, waiting for a whale or something.”

  This banter had the peculiar effect of making me want to cleave to Louise, and desperately, too—to build a warm new civilization, possibly in a foolish house with turrets. The road stretched before me like an arrow. There was only enough of it left before Rigby for me to say, perhaps involuntarily, “I wonder if we shouldn’t just get married.”

  Louise quickly looked away. Her silence conferred a certain seriousness on my question.

  But there was Rigby, and, in the parlance of all who have extracted funds from locals, Rigby had been good to me. Main Street was lined with ambitious and beautiful stone buildings, old for this part of the world. Their second and third floors were now affordable housing, and their street levels were occupied by businesses hanging on by their fingernails. You could still detect the hopes of the dead, their dreams, even, though it seemed to be only a matter of time before the wind carried them away, once and for all.

  I drove past the car lot at 200 East Fremont without comment and—considering the amount of difficulty it had caused me in the years before I got it stabilized and began to enjoy its very modest yields—without much feeling. I remembered the day, sometime earlier, when I had tried to help park the cars in the front row and got everything so crooked that the salesmen, not concealing their contempt, had to do it all over again. The title company where we were heading was on the same street, and it was a livelier place, from the row of perky evergreens out front to the merry receptionist who greeted us, a handsome young woman, probably a farm girl only moments before, enjoying the clothes, makeup, and perquisites of the new world that her firm was helping to build.

  We were shown into a spacious conference room with a long table and chairs, freshly sharpened pencils, and crisp notepads bearing the company letterhead. “Shall I stay?” Louise asked, the first thing she’d said since my earlier inadvertent remark, which I intuited had not been altogether rejected.

  “Please,” I said, gesturing toward a chair next to the one I meant to take. At that moment, the escrow agent entered and, standing very close to us, introduced himself as Brent Colby. Then he went to the far end of the table, where he spread his documents around in an orderly fan. Colby was around fifty, with iron gray hair and a deeply lined face. He wore pressed jeans, a brilliant white snap-button shirt, cowboy boots, and a belt buckle with a steer head
on it. He had thick, hairy hands and a gleaming wedding band. Just as he raised his left wrist to check his watch, the door opened and Oren Johnson, the buyer, entered. He went straight to Louise and, taking her hand in both of his, introduced himself. It occurred to me that, in trying to be suave, Oren Johnson had revealed himself to be a clodhopper, but I was probably just experiencing the mild hostility that emanates from every sale of property. Oren wore a suit, though it suggested less a costume for business than one for church. He had a gold tooth and a cautious pompadour. He too bore an investment-grade wedding band, and I noted that there was plenty of room in his black-laced shoes for his toes. He turned and said it was good to see me again after so long. The time had come for me to go into my act. With grotesque hauteur, I said I didn’t realize we had ever met. This was work.

  Oren Johnson bustled with inchoate energy; he was the kind of small-town leader who sets an example by silently getting things done. He suggested this just by arranging his pencils and notepad and repositioning his chair with rough precision. Locking eyes with me, he stated that he was a man of his word. I didn’t know what he was getting at, but took it to mean that the formalities of a closing were superfluous to the old-time handshake with which Oren Johnson customarily did business. I smiled and quizzically cocked my head as if to say that the newfangled arrangements with well-attested documents promptly conveyed to the courthouse suited me just fine, that deals made on handshakes were strictly for the pious or the picturesque. My message was clear enough that Louise shifted uncomfortably in her chair, and Brent Colby knocked his documents edgewise on the desk to align them. As far as Oren Johnson was concerned, I was beginning to feel that anyone who strayed from the basic patterns of farm life to sell cars bore watching. Like a Method actor, I already believed my part.

  “You’re an awfully lucky man, Oren Johnson,” I said to him, leaning back in my chair. I could see Louise openmouthed two seats away from Brent Colby, and observing myself through her eyes gave me a sudden burst of panic.

  “Oh?” Oren Johnson said. “How’s that?”

  “How’s that?” I did a precise job of replicating his inflection. “I am permitting you to purchase my car lot. You’ve seen the books: how often does a man get a shot at a business where all the work’s been done for him?”

  Brent Colby was doing an incomplete job of concealing his distaste; he was enough of a tinhorn to clear his throat theatrically. But Oren Johnson treated this as a colossal interruption and cast a firm glance his way.

  “It doesn’t look all that automatic to me,” he said.

  “Aw, hell, you’re just going to coin it. Pull the lever and relax!”

  “What about the illegal oil dump? I wish I had a nickel for every crankcaseful that went into that hole. Then I wouldn’t worry about what’s going to happen when the D.E.Q. lowers the boom.”

  “Maybe you ought to ride your potato harvester another year or two, if you’re so risk-averse. Cars are the future. They’re not for everybody.”

  Oren Johnson’s face reddened. He pushed his pencils and notepad almost out of reach in the middle of the conference table. He contemplated these supplies a moment before raising his eyes to mine. “I suppose you could put this car lot where the sun don’t shine, if that suits you.”

  Johnson having taken a stand, I immediately felt unsure that I even had another buyer. Had I ever acknowledged how much I longed to get rid of this business and put an end to all those embarrassing phone calls? I wanted to hand the moment off to someone else while I collected my thoughts, but as I looked around the room I found no one who was interested in rescuing me—least of all Louise, who had raised one eyebrow at the vast peculiarity of my performance. Suddenly, I was desperate to keep the deal from falling apart. I gave my head a little twist to free my neck from the constrictions of my collar. I performed this gesture too vigorously, and I had the feeling that it might seem like the first movement of some sort of dance filled with sensual flourishes and bordering on the moronic. I had lost my grip.

  “Oren,” I said, and the familiarity seemed inappropriate. “I was attached to this little enterprise. I wanted to be sure you valued it.”

  The deal closed, and I had my check. I tipped back in my chair to think of a few commemorative words for the new owner, but the two men left the room without giving me the chance to speak. I shrugged at Louise and she, too, rose to go, pausing a moment beneath an enormous Kodachrome of a bugling elk. I was aware of her distance, and I sensed that my waffling hadn’t gone over particularly well. I concluded that at no time in the future would I act out a role to accomplish anything. This decision quickly evaporated with the realization that that is practically all we do in life. Comedy failed, too. When I told Louise that I had been within an inch of opening a can of whup-ass on the buyer, I barely got a smile. There’s nothing more desolating than having a phrase like that die on your lips.

  It was dark when we got back to Targhee Pass. Leaving town, we passed the Beehive assisted-living facility and the Riot Zone, a “family fun park.” Most of the citizens we spotted there seemed unlikely rioters. I drove past a huge neon steak, its blue T-bone flashing above a restaurant that was closed and dark. There were deer on the road, and once, as we passed through a murky section of forest, we saw the pale faces of children waiting to cross.

  “What are they doing out at this hour?”

  “I don’t know,” Louise said.

  I made good time on the pine flats north of the Snowmobile Capital of the World, and I wondered what it would be like to live in a town that was the world capital of a mechanical gadget. In Rigby, we had seen a homely museum dedicated to Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of television, which featured displays of Farnsworth’s funky assemblages of tubes and wire and, apparently, coat hangers—stuff his wife was probably always attempting to throw out, a goal Louise supported. “Too bad Mama Farnsworth didn’t take all that stuff to the dump,” she said.

  We had the highway to ourselves, and clouds of stars seemed to rise up from the wilderness, lighting the treetops in a cool fire. Slowly, the canyon closed in around us, and we entered its dark flowing space.

  The idyll ended just past the ranger station at Black Butte, when a car pulled in behind us abruptly enough that I checked my speed to see if I was violating the limit, but I wasn’t. When the car was very close, the driver shifted his lights to a high beam so intense that I could see our shadows on the dashboard, my knuckles on the steering wheel glaringly white. I was nearly blinded by my own mirrors, which I hastily adjusted.

  I said, “What’s with this guy?”

  “Just let him pass.”

  “I don’t know that he wants to.”

  I softened my pressure on the gas pedal. I thought that by easing my already moderate speed I would politely suggest that he might go by me. I even hugged the shoulder, but he remained glued to our bumper. There was something about this that reminded me strongly of my feeling of failure back in Rigby, but I was unable to put my finger on it. Maybe it was the hot light of liquidation, in the glare of which all motives seem laid bare. I slowed down even more without managing to persuade my tormentor to pass. “Jesus,” Louise said. “Pull over.” In her accent, it came out as “pull ovah.”

  I moved off to the side of the road slowly and predictably, but although I had stopped, the incandescent globes persisted in our rearview mirror. “This is very strange,” Louise said.

  “Shall I go back and speak to him?”

  After considering for a moment, she said, “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this is not normal.”

  I put the car in gear again and pulled back onto the highway. The last reasonable thought I had was that I would proceed to Bozeman as though nothing were going on; once I was back in civilization my tormentor’s behavior would be visible to all, and I could, if necessary, simply drive to the police station with him in tow.

  Our blinding, syncopated journey continued another mile before we reache
d a sweeping eastward bend, closely guarded by the canyon walls. I knew that just beyond the bend there was a scenic pull-off, and that the approaching curve was acute enough for a small lead to put me out of sight. Whether or not this was plausible, I had no idea: I was exhilarated to be taking a firm hand in my own affairs. And a firm foot! As we entered the narrows, I pinned the accelerator, and we shot into the dark. Louise grabbed the front edges of her seat and stared at the road twisting in front of us. She emitted something like a moan, which I had heard before in a very different context. Halfway around the curve, my tormentor vanished behind us, and although my car seemed only marginally under control, the absence of blinding light was a relief as we fled into darkness.

  When we emerged and the road straightened, I turned off my lights. I was going so fast I felt light-headed, but the road was visible under the stars, and I was able to brake hard and drop down into the scenic turn-off. Seconds later, our new friend shot past, lights blazing into nowhere. He was clearly determined to catch us; his progress up the canyon was rapid and increasingly erratic. We watched in fascination until the lights suddenly jerked sideways, shining in white cones across the river, turned downward, then disappeared.

  I heard Louise say, in a tone of reasonable observation, “He went in.”

  I had an urgent feeling that took a long time to turn into words. “Did I do that?”

  She shook her head, and I pulled out onto the highway, my own headlights on once more. I drove in an odd, measured way, as if bound for an undesired destination, pulled along by something outside myself, thinking: liquidation. We could see where he’d gone through the guardrail. We pulled over and got out. Any hope we might have had for the driver—and we shall be a long time determining if we had any—was gone the minute we looked down from the riverbank. The car was submerged, its lights still burning freakishly, illuminating a bulge of crystalline water, a boulder in the exuberance of a mountain watershed. Presently, the lights sank into blackness, and only the silver sheen of river in starlight remained.