Chapter 19
Dillon, Montana: Holy Cow
It was the tenth of June, one of those hazy summer days when the air is still and the sky burning blue. Outside the city limits of Dillon, Michael, Tabor, and Kyle were trying to get to Helena but were following dusty desolate roads that led nowhere. By midday, the only other signs of life in the heat-shimmering emptiness were a jackrabbit scurrying into scrubby brush and a pack of wild turkeys slinking out of the dried yellow grass to peck the ground.
They passed a lone red barn back on a quiet country lane with a rickety sign nailed to the gate: TRESPASSERS WILL BE CRUSHED TO DEATH.
Kyle laughed and said, “That’s a bit harsh.” He leaned his long, rangy frame against the gate, beads of sweat dripping down his face. “I can’t walk anymore. My feet are covered in blisters.”
Beyond the sign, the lane was overrun with scraggly brush and frilly, white clusters of giant hogweed. Past the barn was a rambling wreck of a farmhouse surrounded by cottonwood trees.
“C’mon,” Michael said, turning. “Just a few more steps until we find some shade trees.”
“No, I can’t,” Kyle moaned, slumping down on a patch of soft, cushiony green moss, exhausted from the heat and heaviness of his pack. “I feel like my feet are bleeding into my shoes.”
“Don’t touch the hogweed. It’ll give you a rash like poison ivy.”
Michael kept on moving, and finally Kyle got to his feet and followed, lagging behind, sulking and staring at the ground. They were both worn-out and irritable, but even when they argued they’d get over it a little while later. Kyle liked to say their friendship was like a river: you could throw stones in it causing a ripple, even a huge splash, but it would always keep flowing.
The cat was cranky, too, and had been complaining for a couple of miles from her perch on top of Michael’s backpack. “She needs lunch,” Michael said as they walked past the fields. “When she gets too hot and hungry, she gets into a temper like a tiger.”
Kyle froze midstride and his face turned bright red. “Oh, God!” he said.
Michael turned around, exasperated, “What’s wrong now? Has your foot fallen off?”
“There’s a huge snake crawling out of the grass.”
Michael stopped walking and looked back. “What shape is its head?”
“What? Triangle. And it’s hissing at me.”
“Poisonous snakes usually have triangular heads.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No, I’m deadly serious. But if it hasn’t attached itself to your leg, you’re all right. A few harmless snakes have triangular heads, too. And some of them mimic the poisonous ones.”
Michael walked back to see for himself, without getting himself or Tabor too close. The snake was beige with brown blotches. “It’s just a prairie rattler,” he said. “They’re not aggressive, you just startled it. Just stay calm and back away slowly.”
Kyle stepped backward, took a wide detour around the snake, and started running as if he were on hot coals.
“That snake looks small to me. It’s just a juvenile,” Michael said when he caught up to Kyle. “It’s the babies that are the deadliest if they bite you because they haven’t yet learned to regulate the venom in their bite.”
“Why does everything out here wanna kill you?”
“It doesn’t. There are actually very few animals that can kill you. It’s pretty straightforward: you leave them alone and they’ll leave you alone. Rattlesnakes are actually quite beautiful and vital members of the community.”
Kyle looked at Michael like he was insane. “I’m happy to never see another snake.”
They climbed over a fence and into a hilly meadow where Michael had camped the previous summer on his way to Walter’s house. Passing a stone cattle trough, Michael put Tabor down on the ground, then bent over the trough and splashed water on his face. Scooping a few handfuls, he then smoothed down Tabor’s coat to cool her off a little. She seemed to like it and calmly stood beside the trough, purring.
Michael led them to his secret place, a shady spot where they collapsed beneath a row of blossoming cottonwood trees whose silvery-white branches trailed down to the ground. He unpacked some of their gear and changed Tabor’s leash to the long lead, tethering it to the strap on his pack so she could roam a little but not run off.
A few hundred yards in the distance, a lone cow showed up on the crest of a hill. Then a couple more joined her. Every time Michael glanced up after digging through his bag for the cat’s dishes, a new one had appeared.
Kyle got out the radio and a deck of cards to kill some time before they moved on. “How about playing a loser deal, five-card draw or something? Whoever loses deals the next hand. There’s no money or anything.”
“That’s handy ’cause I don’t have any,” said Michael. He scooped Tabor’s Fancy Feast chicken lunch into her bowl and started riffling for his tobacco pouch.
“Or we can play for pennies,” Kyle added, taking a handful of copper out of his bag. “Look, I found one with your birth date on it . . . 1916.”
But Michael was miles away, thinking back to the warm summer nights when he and Mercer held all-night poker games with a revolving group of regulars at their home in St. Louis. For a while, they shared their three-bedroom apartment with another guy, and sometimes the place was like a flophouse, with a bunch of others crashing and all sorts of drugs floating around. Michael liked to say he and Mercer were partners in grime.
“I’m gonna teach you how to play poker properly,” Michael said, rolling himself a cigarette.
“Cool,” Kyle said, half listening. He’d begun trying to make peanut butter sandwiches for them from the scrapings of a virtually empty Skippy jar. “Where’d you learn to play?”
“Montana.”
“From Walter?”
“Noooo,” Michael said, firing his roll-up. “I learned to play when I was sixteen. I was a dealer in a private game in someone’s house. It didn’t hurt that I could mix cocktails, too. When Mercer and I lived in St. Louis, we started a poker game every Sunday night. We had some famous people come by, one of the Hiltons. He was a friend of our old landlord, and he wasn’t a good player, either. We thought we’d make some money, but Hilton was a cheap motherfucker. He’d lose twenty-five dollars and get out of the game. I walked away from that table seven times out of ten a winner.”
“Were you hustling everybody?”
“No, I just knew how to play. When I was seventeen, I was dealing blackjack in a casino in Montana. And I knew how to figure out which ones were the weakest players.”
Michael started dealing the cards. As he paused to put out his cigarette, he looked back over his shoulder and noticed that even more cows had joined the herd on the hill.
But Tabor was the first to sense that the herd’s mood was changing. She looked up from her dish toward the hill, and her eyes widened and her ears flicked back and forth. Her tail swelled out into a brush, and the fur along her back stood up, making her look like a spiky porcupine, and she snarled. She was badly spooked and started growling and spitting like she was possessed.
“Holy shit,” Michael said when he looked over his shoulder again. The herd was big now and restless. The leaders in front were stabbing their horns downward and staring in their direction. It was early summer—calving season—when cows can be territorial and protective of their young. Michael knew, having worked on a dairy farm, that if cows were staring intensely in your direction, you could bet they were coming your way. And these were longhorns, not the more placid dairy cows he’d worked with.
Michael scrambled to his feet as the herd started moving down the hill toward them. He stepped on Tabor’s leash before she could bolt to the end of it, shrugged on his backpack and, in the next second, the cat went crazy. She tried to tear out of her collar, bit the leash, and threw herself on the ground, pulling, bucking, and kicking angrily like a tiny wild mustang. When Michael tried to pick her up, she latched her claws o
nto his forearm and tore a huge gash. He could barely keep hold of her.
“We’ve gotta make a run for it,” he shouted to Kyle, clutching the cat in his arms again. “Just pack up as fast as you can.”
“What the hell?” Kyle said, freezing momentarily, like a startled woodland creature. Their stuff was spilled out everywhere. He grabbed and packed frantically, wedging everything into his bag, but some items fell out as fast as he crammed them in.
Suddenly the ground shook. Dozens of rangy longhorns were scrambling down the hill through the trees, getting closer. A large, swelling herd was lowing and scraping, surging toward them, kicking up the earth.
Gripping Tabor protectively, Michael urged Kyle to hurry and then ran toward a dense grove of cottonwoods, thinking the cows wouldn’t want to risk getting tangled in the trees. Tabor was screaming and clawing, trying to escape his arms and jump up into the branches. Her little heart was racing. Terrified, she bit down on his wrist and then dug her claws into him again, raking both of his hands badly. But he felt no pain. He was too scared about dropping her and losing her under the trampling hooves.
Now about fifty yards away, the cows were rapidly closing in on them. Michael worried that they wouldn’t make it to the fence and out of the pasture. Kyle was catching up to them and was almost on his heels when Michael remembered the fat guy who had charged the bear in Yosemite. He yelled back to Kyle: “Run at them and wave your arms and scream at the top of your lungs. Keep doing it until they back off.”
Kyle didn’t like the idea, but he made a short run at the cows, waving his arms back and forth and shouting halfheartedly. The herd stopped short. Some even retreated long enough for Michael and Tabor to run from the grove to the fence. Then the herd started moving toward Kyle again.
“These frickin’ cows won’t stop!” Kyle shouted.
“Just keep doing it!” Michael yelled back. “When they back off, move to the edge of the field, and then run like hell.”
Kyle continued shouting and screaming until the cows dispersed, little by little.
Michael threw his pack over the fence and then climbed over with Tabor. “Come on, hurry,” he called out to Kyle, a blur of flying hair and limbs, now barreling through the grove.
Kyle reached the fence, dropped his pack, and wriggled through a hole in the fence. He didn’t have time to struggle to climb over it. He got scratched up by the thorny blackberry brambles and nettles, but reached back to pull his pack through, too. As he stumbled into the road, he staggered beneath the weight of his heavy pack and fell over.
Some of the larger cows were still agitated and had followed them all the way to the fence. They were now angrily pushing against it, determined to get to them for invading their territory. Michael stood back from the fence, Tabor clinging to his chest like a burr. He wiped his bleeding hands on his olive-green T-shirt and beige canvas trousers, which were already smudged with beer, dirt, and grass stains.
Slumping over to catch his breath, Kyle was flushed and shaking. A city kid, he’d rarely left Portland.
“Here, hold Tabor for a sec,” Michael said, pushing the cat into Kyle’s arms. “I don’t wanna mess up her fur.” He took out his water bottle and washed the blood and dirt off his hands. Then he went to a nearby pine tree and scraped goopy, honey-colored liquid from its bark and smeared it all over his arm and hands.
“Whaddaya doing?” Kyle asked.
“You’ll never be cut out for country life,” Michael said, grinning. “It’s pine sap to stanch the bleeding and disinfect the wounds. It’s what injured trees produce to protect themselves from infection and insect invasions. You can also make moonshine out of it.”
Looking at the slash that ran the length of Michael’s arm from his wrist all the way up to his elbow, Kyle said, “That looks really nasty.”
“Man, oh, man, does it hurt!”
“Those cows were so close I could’ve touched them.”
“Yeah, that was a close call,” Michael said, taking Tabor back.
“Poor Tabor,” Kyle said. She was panting hard and drooling, still trembling in Michael’s arms. “I didn’t know cows could be that angry. What was that, Groundscore?”
“That was a stampede if I ever saw one. Lesson learned. If you see cow pies, head to another field.” The cows could’ve easily killed them. In that moment Michael knew he would’ve laid down his life for Tabor in a heartbeat.
As they walked along the road to look for another field to camp in safely overnight, the cows kept pace with them on the other side of the fence.
The morning after the stampede, Michael, Kyle, and Tabor got a ride into downtown Helena. They arrived just as the sun was cresting the ridge of the Big Belt Mountains, lighting the empty streets’ vintage storefronts in glimmers of pale-gold light. Last Chance Gulch, the main street and heart of town, was unchanged after decades, including the Parrot Confectionery with its century-old soda fountain, Dave’s Pawn shop sparkling with antique gems and pistols, and the Fire Tower Coffee House with its glowing art deco Rock-Ola jukebox in the window.
Seeing all his old haunts, Michael was kind of excited to be back in his adopted hometown with his two best friends. Every building, every corner, and every little pathway along the four-block boulevard held memories, both good and bad. They passed the Montana Flea Market, where he had bought used paperbacks and which still had the same old sign from the ’80s: LIFE’S TOO SHORT TO DRINK BAD WINE.
As they walked by Rock’s Western Bar, Michael lifted Tabor to the window so she could look inside. “This is where I used to live,” he said to her. “I used to go for a late-night beer and a game of pool after a long day’s work and stay there until they chucked me out.”
He felt a sense of pride about his work in Helena. “I used to deliver milk here. I was about your age,” he told Kyle as they walked through the wide boulevard between Victorian gas lamps and turn-of-the-century rose-stone buildings, many built by gold and ranching money. “Wouldn’t you have liked to know me back then,” he said to the cat on his shoulder.
Tabor looked around curiously, peering at everything. Michael showed her and Kyle the federal courthouse, where Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, was tried after the FBI nabbed him in his hideout in a cabin out in the Montana woods.
Kyle wasn’t familiar with that history, so Michael explained: “He was an American terrorist. He killed and crippled a load of people in the nineties. But he was smart. He wrote about how technology was dehumanizing people. And now you can see the old bastard was right.”
When they reached the next block, Michael said, “Every spring I planted marigolds and dusty millers that spelled out ‘Montana’ outside the statehouse, which is not too far from here. I made enough money doing that to go camping pretty much all summer.”
“You were a gardener?”
“Yeah . . . I had a business card that read MICHAEL KING, THE ROYAL GARDENER: ROYAL WORK FOR A MERE PITTANCE.”
“Cool. Guess I always think of you as a city guy.”
“I’ve always had a thing for plants and nature. When I was seven years old, I used to pull up the tiger lilies that grew along the railway tracks and then replant them in our backyard.”
Michael paused and pointed at the gargoyles and winged lizards perched on top of the imposing gray-stone building on the next corner. “See that? That’s a magic salamander that can’t be destroyed by fire. The two dragons beside it protect it. The town has burned to the ground many times. So the city included those symbols to ward off fires. The salamander, in the occult, is thought to be an alchemical creature that can live in fire. And see the statue of the man on the building? That’s the Titan Atlas, the Greek god who carried the world on his back.”
Leaving downtown, they wandered along Euclid Avenue past low wood-frame houses in neat little rows that all looked the same. They turned onto a side street and walked a few blocks over to Walter’s house. They were in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, below Helena’s historic Mansion Distric
t, a five-mile stretch of graceful Victorian mansions along a hillside, which overlooked downtown Helena. When they reached a modest yellow-and-white clapboard cottage, Walter’s place, at the corner of a peaceful cul-de-sac, Michael started around to the back door, and Kyle followed. Behind a square sliver of yard, a fleet of old cars and a rusting pickup blocked the patchy grass and weedy dirt alleyway. As Michael crossed the backyard, he noticed that the sunflowers he had planted last summer in a border on one side of the chain-link fence had grown into giants. Their lovely, lionlike heads were turned skyward.
“Walter,” he shouted, letting himself in the screen door and holding it for Kyle. Country music drifted from the stereo.
Tall and stooping, Walter stepped from the living room into the kitchen. Now in his seventies, he had a shock of white hair, silver-rimmed eyeglasses, and a permanent frown on his face. Retired and living alone, he had the heavy look of a kindhearted man worn down by life. When he saw Michael with the cat clinging on to his shoulder like a caterpillar, he couldn’t believe his eyes.
“Is that a cat?” he asked, looking at Michael as though he’d grown two heads. “You walked across America with a cat on your back? That’s crazy. Just plain crazy.”
“I found her on the street. She was hurt and starving.”
Walter looked him up and down—the dirt, blood, grass stains on his clothes and his crusty, scarred, scratched-up arms that looked as if he’d been clawed by a grizzly. “You look like shit,” he said, and walked out of the room.
“Thanks,” Michael said, gazing after him.
Setting Tabor down on the kitchen floor, Michael looked at Kyle and sighed. “I’m sorry, Walter’s in one of his moods. And don’t call me Groundscore in front of Walter. He hates it. To him it just means being homeless, drunken, and sleeping under a tree.” Though Walter could be grumpy he had a sharp sense of humor. Once, when Michael posted a picture of himself on Facebook, panhandling, with his cardboard sign: COULD USE A LITTLE HELP TODAY, Walter commented, MICHAEL YOU NEED MORE THAN A LITTLE HELP. YOU NEED A LOT OF HELP!
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