Two Medicine

by John Hansen

  I took my meal out onto the back porch in the back of the store, which also had some chairs on it, and sat down to get a look at the distant mountains surrounding the valley and our lake, called Two Medicine Lake.

  I felt better being outside and seeing that, despite the store’s cheap, retail garishness, I was nonetheless living in a stunning and uninhabited place. Two Medicine was what the magazine had promised: the little-traveled heart of a little-known National Park, in the middle of nowhere, and I was surrounded by some of the most stunning outdoor scenes I had ever seen.

  I tried to buoy up my feelings by reminding myself that I would soon be out hiking in those hills and mountains, encountering nature in its rawest and most vivid forms – even if no one else I worked with was interested in it. There was an old map framed and hanging on the wall in the store that had all the hiking trails lined in various colors and meandering through the mountains and around the lake. As I rocked back and forth on the back porch in my rocking chair, staring up at the hills across the lake, I told myself that I had done the right thing. Yes, this was going to be an incredible place, one I would never forget.

  I thought of Scott back home, my plastic chair and my desk in my office, and of Holly, as I sat there. The rocking chair creaked back and forth on its old legs. It felt like years since I had seen them.

  That night I crawled into bed exhausted. Despite being nervous about starting the actual job the next morning and not knowing what was in store, I fell asleep pretty quickly. The traveling had mostly done me in. I couldn’t believe, as I lay there, staring up at the wooden ceiling with a little lamp on beside my bed, that I had been in Atlanta just the morning before. It seemed weeks ago.

  I thought of Holly, again, as I lay there, staring up at the boards in the ceiling; she would have liked this room with its rustic charm. I noticed to black spots in the ceiling by the window, and first thought they were knots in the wood or burn marks, but after getting up out of bed and making a close inspection, I saw they were two little black bats, balled up and sleeping. How they got in and out of that room to fly around outside I couldn’t tell – the window was closed. I left them to their sleep, and returned to bed to find mine.

  Nine

  I slept like a rock until sometime in the middle of the night or very early morning. A loud crash of thunder woke me, and I saw a flash of lighting out of the window that lit up the pitch-dark room for a fraction of a second. I heard a scraping noise coming from the window, like somebody’s fingernails scraping along the wooden windowsills and hitting the glass, which startled me out of bed. But as I looked out the window I saw that it was just a branch from a small tree that grew alongside the store by my room. The bats were gone too, I noticed. I returned to bed to get a fitful few hours of sleep after that.

  Later in the morning at 6:30 a.m., I woke up to an alarm clock that had been provided by Larry, not surprisingly. Sunlight shone in from the window and cast a rectangle of light on the opposite wall’s wooden boards. I looked up at the ceiling for a few minutes, thinking about my first morning in this new world. It felt strange to be lying in that little bed hearing sounds of others moving around downstairs, strangers that I was now living with, seeing parts of those mountains out past my window.

  I got up and stretched, and then walked over to the windows. I found that you could push them open – they opened from the sides and swung out like car doors, and there were no screens. I was shocked to see a very light dusting of snow on the ground and the shrubs around the store – it was summertime in June, after all. But apparently that storm had brought in some snow from the north up high in the Rockies and had powdered everything a bit in a final reminder that a savage winter was never very far away.

  After showering and then dressing, for the first time in my new burgundy polo shirt with a logo of Glacier Park on it and my requisite khakis, I headed out to start my new job.

  I heard a cough in Ronnie’s room and walked over to his door, curious to see how his room looked. I saw him smoking in his room, leaning out of the windows that were identical to mine. He was shirtless still, wearing only the work khakis and sneakers. He looked me up and down and smirked.

  “Well, how was your first night buddy?” He snapped the cigarette out the window and grabbed a wrinkled polo from off the bed.

  “Not bad. That storm freaked me out for a second, a lot of banging on the window.”

  “Yea? Well I slept like a stone – and now we’re off to our first day serving the campers of Glacier National Park…” He said, rolling his eyes as he looked himself over in the mirror, running his fingers through his short, brown hair, and then slapping himself on the face a bit to wake himself up.

  We walked down the creaking wooden stairs together and I could hear Larry already going on about something down below. Down in the kitchen, he was standing by the metal kitchen table and Katie was already sitting there – not looking at Larry but reading a book, ignoring him apparently. Phyllis was cooking breakfast, and I hoped it was for us. Smells of pancakes and sausage cooking filled my senses. We said our hellos and Ronnie and I sat at the table next to Katie. Larry stood before us; those burgundy shirts he wore were too small for him! His huge belly and flabby pectorals were emphasized by the tight fabric – why Phyllis didn’t try to get him fitted right I couldn’t imagine – but she probably couldn’t tell him to do anything he didn’t want to do. He was wearing his thick glasses with black frames and white sneakers. Phyllis was dressed in the park uniform too.

  As Phyllis set pancakes and syrup in front of us three, Larry cleared his throat. “All right people,” he rumbled, “get ready. Today is a big day – we’re opening for the first time this year, and I want it to go perfectly. It’s easy to get flustered out there the first few days; you can get a lot of kooks and oddballs coming at you, among all the decent folk. So, first rule – any problems, find me!”

  Ronnie and I began to eat. Katie just sipped some tea and read her book. I wondered how busy it could possibly be since I had seen nobody around whatsoever the day before when I had arrived, no tourists or anyone.

  Larry continued, “Katie, you’ll be on the cash register in gifts. Ronnie you’ll be cooking with Phyllis,” he nodded his head in Phyllis’s direction as she dumped the scrambled eggs from a steaming pot into a large bowl. “And Will, you’ll run the register in the snack bar.”

  Larry went on for about 20 minutes about handling money, answering the phone, answering shopper’s questions, especially questions about the park and Two Medicine, which Larry said he’d rather answer personally, and other notes about the operation in general.

  The snack bar served only lunch and dinner, I found out, and the menu consisted mainly of burgers, fries, chili, chicken “fingers,” roast beef sandwiches, macaroni salad, and a final item that was a unique Two Medicine original – a creation called “The Mountain” – which was an odd assortment of ingredients. It would start with rolling out pizza dough into a flat disc, dropping that into our fat fryer – which was where most of the things we cooked ended up, then pouring chili onto the fried dough, then lettuce, cheese, peppers, and a festive dollop of sour cream. It wasn’t bad, actually, I eventually discovered after trying one. A bit heavy, but definitely filled you up after a day of hard climbing. Customers ordered it constantly. Also, we sold shakes, and one of them was made with a famous local berry – the huckleberry – that made the shake purple; those were good too.

  I watched Phyllis as she stepped around Larry to clean up the breakfast. She struck me as the mother of some childhood friend who always treated you like you were one of her kids – warmly, naturally. She was so dominated by Larry though, that I doubted if I would ever actually get to know her. He barely regarded her as he spoke that morning – and seemed to consider her one more employee, although one who knew the operation up and down, like him.

  The two of them were Kansas through and through, and had that kind of simple, homey, awkward, “out-of-placeness” that Midwesterner
s have, especially in such a vivid landscape as our little valley in the Rockies.

  Larry guided me through the store after breakfast for my delayed “official tour,” before we officially opened the doors – which was going to be at 9 a.m., that day since it was our first day open. He would re-position a hat here and tweak a post card stand there as we meandered around, him talking in a steady Kansas monotone, and me just listening with my eyes wandering around the store.

  “This building was built in 1914,” he explained, “and it’s the oldest structure still standing in the entire Park.” He pointed up to the ceiling. “These logs were taken right from the ground where the building sits, and around it. President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave a national radio address from this building on August 5, 1934, while on a visit to Glacier.

  “The actual national park is vast,” he continued. “It extends over the Canadian border, actually, although that part of it is called ‘Waterton Park,’ but it’s the same park, looks a little different up there though.”

  He indicated the aisles of shirts and other souvenirs by the front doors. “You have your park stuff up there.” He waved his a hand vaguely around the aisles to our left and right. “More knick knacks around here; and groceries and the snack bar way back there. I don’t like that we sell that booze, but you have campers who want to drink and the park lets them, for some damned reason.”

  I followed along with his tour quietly, wondering if many people actually bought the souvenirs we had up front. I looked over at the shelves of liquor and saw a variety of colors and sizes of wines, cheap liquor like “Mad Dog 20/20,” and more expensive, high-quality whiskeys, beers and some other boozy selections.

  “Employees of my store shouldn’t be allowed to drink either,” he said looking at me sourly, “but a couple years ago the park chastised me trying to fire the whole lot of them for a bonfire party they threw nearby and got drunk at – with our booze!” He shook his head as we walked up to the front doors. “Didn’t even pay for it. So it’s allowed, but technically it is frowned up,” he said, frowning upon it as he spoke.

  “It can definitely make things more complicated,” I said.

  He showed me how to work the giant fireplace flue, and admonished me against using too much wood during the day. “Loafers like to sit in the rocking chairs and just vegetate – they aren’t buying anything if they are sitting here,” he muttered.

  The fire logs were enormous, about four feet long, and weighed a great deal, and they would burn all day. We would usually keep a fire going, even in the summer, but it would be kept small, tamed. But at night the place was ours – the staff’s – and Ronnie, Katie and I would often get it going pretty good and sit around enjoying the ambiance, enjoying the fun of burning up Larry’s big logs.

  Larry finished my tour by bringing me up to the front door, where I had first come in. He drew out a keychain from his pocket with about 50 keys on it and unlocked the swinging, wooden doors. Sunlight poured in like white gold when he opened them both up wide, jamming wooden blocks under them with his white sneaker to keep them open. I liked that there were no screen doors, just an open threshold to let all the nature air in. I would find out later that screen doors would be eventually used – for a very good reason.

  A cool and clean-smelling air blew into my face as the doors were set wide, and I smelled a faint aroma of pine needles and sun-warmed earth, and some grassy and flowery smells I didn’t recognize at all. I noticed also that outside the dusting of snow was almost all melted away.

  For some reason the coolness of the breeze caused a shock of excitement to hit me. I felt a kind of anticipation that made me feel, for the first time, that something good would happen in this place, and that I had done the right thing.

  “Let’s go!” Larry called over to me from inside the store, and I walked back towards him with a new, confident sense of purpose. Day one of building my new life had begun.

  Ten

  Not long after opening the doors tourists and campers began to wander in through the front doors. Customers would mill around the aisles and stare at the fireplace. Some would buy groceries and order a random meal before heading out into the woods to hike. I could see Katie up front running the gifts area register, wrapping up peoples purchases in brown paper if they were breakable, and shoving sweatshirts and hats in paper bags. I found it unsettling to be running a cash register in a snack shop, taking orders for burgers and salad; it was a menial job to be sure, and I felt a little undignified. But I reminded myself probably a dozen times that day, that it was all for a good cause – I was getting settled in Montana. I wouldn’t work the store forever, and I’d look for permanent work as the summer ended, but for now I would get the lay of the land, learn the place, and, as a part of it, hand people their huckleberry shakes and Mountain chili tacos.

  Ronnie seemed at home in the kitchen, joking with Phyllis who I didn’t hear speak at all, and lounging around the back porch when orders weren’t in. Larry stayed up front with Katie in gifts, always the busiest part of the store for most of the day. He came by to my station only twice that first day, to count out the register.

  For the most part, we would see a tourist’s face maybe once or twice in the store, and then never again, since the campers didn’t stay long. Most visitors to Glacier stayed at several locations and drove all over the Park during their trips.

  We’d get locals from Kalispell from the west (which some locals called “Cattlesmell,” because of the vast cattle ranches) and Native Americans – the Blackfoot – off the reservation from the East, from a little town called Browning, which was at the heart of the reservation, about fifteen miles from Two Medicine Valley.

  The first couple of days I stayed at the snack bar cash register, taking orders, ripping off order tickets and walking them back to Ronnie or Katie who were learning to cook the menu from Phyllis. As I’d done the first day, I’d hand the food over to guests and they’d sit at the little tables around the snack bar, or head back outside to eat somewhere else. Then I’d ring up people buying groceries and camp supplies near the back of the store. I learned to cook the menu eventually too, and became pretty good at making “The Mountain,” if I do say so myself.

  Working the front register was trickier, because for one, you’d get a lot of questions about the park, the local flora and fauna, the mountains, the history of the store, and a million other queries for which I had no real answer. Ronnie told me after a while that he just started answering “bear grass” when asked what this flower or this bush was called. There was an actual flowering grass on the mountains called “bear grass,” but I couldn’t argue with his simple solution.

  The other reason it was trickier is because the front of the store was, as I mentioned, Larry’s turf; he would stalk around and re-arrange the goods, keeping an eye scanning the customers, watching me or whoever was working up front make change during sales, and generally just make a nuisance of himself. Larry particularly watched the Blackfoot Indians that would come in from Browning, casting an obvious and awkward glare at them whenever they ventured into the store. They were always younger people, the Blackfoot that came to visit, teens and some in their 20s, and they mostly bought candy, CDs, sometimes booze, or they’d get shakes at the snack bar.

  One such visitor from Browning was a girl named Alia Reynolds. I noticed her immediately as she came in through the main doors on a day soon after we opened. I was re-folding some shirts near the front and noticed her glance at me as she walked in. She was small, really pretty, and looked about eighteen or nineteen. She had straight dark hair, of course, but also a cute little pixie face with a slightly Asian caste. She had a little upturned nose and large brown, slightly Oriental eyes that gave her a fairy-like, coquettish look. She had a perfect little figure, a small frame but with the voluptuous curviness of grown woman. Tan legs led up to tight white shorts. She wore a black t-shirt with some rock band’s name on it I couldn’t make out, and her hair was partly up in a puffy bun,
which revealed a little neckline with a small necklace encircling and partly hidden by the t-shirt.

  I absolutely couldn’t take my eyes off her as she meandered around the aisles. She had come in with a couple of other girls who went off to the snack bar, where Ronnie was working the register. Despite my recent vow to be done with the opposite sex for a while, I moved over to the aisle she was at, which displayed posters and framed pictures of Two Medicine and other parts of the Park. It had always been difficult for me to just walk up and try to meet a girl I was attracted to – it felt so awkward and… off. And I would always build it up to such a big deal, too, before I would try. But with her I felt hesitation but never considered for a moment not walking over to her – I had to be closer.

  I started arranging some picture frames down the aisle from her, glancing over to her clandestinely, hoping she’d need my help for something. I was at a loss of what to say to try to break the ice, and the longer I just stood there the harder it was becoming.

  She was definitely the most beautiful girl I had seen in a very long time. Every inch of her attracted me, each facet of her, from her way of standing with one foot back on its toe, to her expression that looked amused and also skeptical. I felt physically pulled to her in a way I had never felt before, not even with Holly, and the entire rest of the store, the rest of the world, was distant and out of focus when I stole glances at her.

  I noticed her glance back at me a couple times as she meandered around. It made my heart beat faster. Come on Will, say something damn it. I looked around for Larry with a sudden fear that he was stalking her already, hidden somewhere, thinking her a shoplifter, but he was for once nowhere in sight, thank God. Then the thought occurred to me that she may actually be a shoplifter, not because she was an Indian but because anyone could be – and what would I do if she shoved some little knickknack into her shorts? Probably nothing! That could be the icebreaker; I’d let her do her thing and then it’d be “our little secret!”