by John Hansen
He glanced over at me and nodded, “Yea. Hey Will, this is Clayton Red Claw and his brother Jake, they live in Browning.”
“How you doin?” I asked and extended my hand.
“Good,” the one who was called ‘Clayton’ grunted, barely glancing at me, shaking my hand in a quick jerk. The one named Jake wore the sunglasses and didn’t say anything.
The one named Clayton turned back to Ronnie, “All right, dude, we’ll call you next week.”
“Yea, good deal,” Ronnie said, slapping Clayton on the back.
The two guys sauntered off, keeping to the edge of the crown on their way out. Ronnie and I made our way towards Katie.
“All these chicks here just waiting for you and you find the two roughest dudes here to talk to?” I asked Ronnie.
He looked at me and chuckled, “The locals are the ones to know.” We gathered up Katie and headed back to Ronnie’s car. Looking back as I got into the front seat, the fire still roared and embers spiraled up like lazy fireworks into the smoky dark. Twelve String Boogie was still playing, a more mellow tune now, slow notes wafting over to us from the haze of the fire. Bridget was opening another beer with a new group of kids, I saw, and the Cowboy still sat on this throne overlooking it all. His hat cast a large, flickering shadow behind him into the trees as the music grew quieter and we climbed the hill towards home.
Thirteen
I worked the rest of the week without seeing Alia again, but she was constantly on my mind. I had not gotten her number the last time I saw her, which struck me now as a potentially fatal mistake. But then again, I tried to remind myself, I had come out her for a fresh start, and didn’t need to be tied into some relationship the first month on the job. Too soon.
But as cool as I tried to be about her, to let things just go and happen on their own, if at all, the rest of the week as I worked the store, sometimes in the front area cash register and sometimes in the back by the kitchen, I would find myself glancing at the outside doors every time someone walked in. My mind betrayed me as I daydreamed about her, too, imagining me kissing her little neck as she sat next to me on my bed, her smile cocked sideways like she did; and I found myself unconsciously looking at a group of new customers for looking for my little, dark-haired, tan-skinned Alia to walk back in, despite my trying to be cool. I missed her.
I began to feel really at home in the store over that next week, too. Part of it had been going to the main lodge and seeing how it could have been had I been unlucky enough to get a job someplace else in the park. Despite Larry’s constant annoyances and the cheesiness of the trinkets and junk we sold, and despite some of the unpleasant tourists that clashed with the rugged beauty of the place, I started to feel like I was home, and it excited me to feel it.
There was now a simplicity to my purpose that appealed to me, I realized, and I began to think less and less about my past life in Georgia, and less about my future too. I would wonder sometimes what my friends were up to back home, what few I had had, but that old, cluttered, grey world of my old life began to fade out of focus more and more each time I thought about it over the days.
I’d think about Scott mostly. I wondered if he was still drinking himself to death in Coco Joe’s, sitting in the dim light with Stevie the bartender and that parrot. Interestingly, I hadn’t thought about Holly hardly at all since I had started working, and especially after running into Alia. It wasn’t that I didn’t love her (I still did), and miss her face and her voice (I still did), and she still felt a part of me, but she also was so distant to me all of a sudden that she was fading in comparison to all of the newness, and strangeness, the clarity, of my new life.
And there definitely was strangeness… mostly in the regulars to the camp sites who came every year, or even lived nearby. The first such oddball I met was a large, long haired, heavy set white guy who called himself “Thunderbird.”
He made a point of telling me, the first time I met him when he came into the store one morning to buy supplies, that he was a member of the “tribe” (meaning the Blackfoot) and that they had given him that name – “Thunderbird.” He said, proudly, that he got that name because when he would get up in the morning and walk out of his tent he would yawn so loudly it sounded like thunder.
Thunderbird was indeed a big, loud, presence; but I kind of doubted he figured in any way into the politics of the tribe on the reservation. And he lived in Browning, but after a while he seemed more homeless than anything else. He lived in this ratty old teepee that he would set up when he was in Two Med’s campgrounds, and he drove around on a battered Harley Davidson motorcycle with a separate little trailer hitched to the back. He would stay for days at a time at Two Med in that teepee, roaring around on his bike and scaring the tourists, looking like a cross between a Hell’s Angel biker and a chubby hippy.
The Blackfoot tribe in Browning actually had a council of elders, I learned, as all recognized Native American tribes do, and they were notoriously secretive and hesitant to include outsiders or guys – especially guys who claimed to be part Blackfoot but had no proof. I figured Thunderbird was one of those “wannabe Indians.” White people were always trying to associate themselves with one tribe or another, Alia would tell me, always trying to worm into the lifestyle like it was a club you could sign up and join. But, she told me that the saying on the reservation was “Everyone wants to be an Indian, and nobody wants to be an Indian.” And I would later travel onto Browning and see what that meant – it was a desolate place.
But anyway, Thunderbird came in one day and introduced himself to me, dumping a bunch of food and camp supplies on the snack bar counter for me to ring up. He had on long earrings with feathers attached, and braided grey and brown hair. He looked to be about fifty, and had on a black t-shirt that was too tight for his round belly, and which had a wolf howling at a moon depicted on it in garish neon colors. He wore old denim jeans. He looked as if someone had tossed him into a pile of thrift store clothes from ‘70s and ‘80s, and when he emerged fully dressed then draped some Indian jewelry on him to complete the look.
“Are you Will?” he asked me at the counter with a big smile and loud voice, the first time I met him.
“Yea,” I said, taken aback that he knew my name.
“Ha! Alia told me she the other day that she met a guy at Two Med named ‘Will,’” he laughed, his eyes sparkling merrily.
“You know Alia?” I couldn’t believe he could – he seemed like such a clown that I couldn’t image her having anything to do with him. The very fact he knew her bothered me; she was above that, existed on a higher plane, too pure and beautiful to be in his world! But then again, Browning was a small town...
“Sure! She’s part of my tribe,” Thunderbird said, nodding his head emphatically. “She been around lately?”
I began to get the sense that he was somewhat mentally off, but I couldn’t quite detect how, except that he seemed a bit overly-merry.
“No,” I said, “haven’t seen her.” I resisted the urge to ask him if she had said anything else about me. I began ringing up his stuff.
“So where you from, Thunderbird?”
“Missouri. But I joined the marines, and I saw combat!” he told me, nodding his head again. “Yep. Saw combat and even took some grenade shrapnel in the leg. I’ll show you the scars sometime, all spotted up like a cheetah. Docs say I still have some metal in me.”
I frowned as I pictured him dropping his pants and showing me some pasty white lumpy thigh. I tried to ring his stuff up quicker.
“Anyway,” he continued. “When I got back to the states, the first thing I did was buy a Harley and drive all over hell and back, crisscrossing all over the place, just following the sprits, till I ended up here.” He waved a hand around the store – meaning Glacier Park. “And I love this place – Two Medicine – it really saved my life.”
I just nodded and bagged his stuff up for him.
“And the tribe healed me up too – and I don’t mean my sca
rs,” he narrowed his gleaming, watery eyes and said, almost in a whisper. “They healed some scars, though, my scars up here.” He jabbed a pudgy finger at his temple.
He held me in such an intense stare, drilling into my eyes, that I had to look down.
“Well that sounds interesting, Thunderbird…” I said casually, hoping to give him a cue to stop.
But he grew even quieter, as if we were in a conspiracy, “I was in a sweat, I went to a sweat, they sweated it out of me.” He staring without blinking at me; it was almost like he was chanting it.
The hair stood up on the back of my neck, and the rest of the store seemed to grow completely quiet. I just stared at him, as if transfixed, but I really just didn’t know what to say because I had no idea what they hell he was talking about. Luckily, a big noisy family of campers came up behind him to order some food, and he just nodded at me, smiling, and moved on, not saying another word.
In the evenings we would close the store at seven. Ronnie and I, and sometimes Katie, would dump some logs on the fire in the enormous fireplace and sit around, sometimes drinking beer, and talking about the people we were meeting, the places they were from, the weirdness of the store, the things we planned on doing after this job.
On one of these nights, we got to talking a little late, around ten p.m., and suddenly Larry came booming out his room upstairs. He glared down at us for a moment, and then shouted, “Keep it down you! Some of us have to get up in the morning!”
He slammed his bedroom door shut again, shaking the wall. We just looked at each other and laughed.
Most nights Katie stayed in her room and read, or sat in the kitchen and sipped tea. But Ronnie and I were hanging out almost every night – either building a roaring fire in the store or staying up late playing cards, board games, and sometimes watching a movie on a DVD player Ronnie had in his room. We always asked Katie to join, but when she did I noticed that she would keep her distance from Ronnie whenever we were together. She was being careful around him, as if she expected Ronnie to jump on her as she got near his bed. It occurred to me that he had probably tried humping her in his room or something before I had gotten there.
Sometimes in those late evenings after we closed, our conversations steered towards where we were from and why we had moved to the park, and I always felt a little uncomfortable talking about my coming to Two Med like I had. I felt like if it was all brought out into the open and exposed, and if it was all described the way it actually happened, that I would look like some kind of nut. Both Ronnie and Katie were still in school, Katie in undergrad, and Ronnie was getting an MBA, at least he said he was, until he took a “hiatus” as he said and came out to Montana, so it was more natural that they would have taken this seasonal job, than it was for me.
I didn’t tell them I hoped to stay on with the park all year round, because it made it sound like I had no place else to go as a second option if the park job didn’t work out. From the sound of it, working in the winter doing administrative stuff for the park was a long-shot at best, and I didn’t even know if that was possible. I simply felt foolish, to be honest, having come all this way to this place, even though I was completely sure it was the right thing to do; so I didn’t like talking about it.
Besides hanging around the store, some nights Ronnie and I and once in a while Katie would hike down the dirt road to the campsites and find a vacant one and set up some chairs. We’d make a small bonfire and sit around it, enjoying the darkness of the surrounding forest, the fiercely bright stars that were innumerable in the sky. Invariably at these times, Ronnie would remind all of us again about the Perseid meteor shower’s imminent arrival in August, and how we had to get “out in the clear” and watch it because ‘it would blow our fucking minds!’”
One particular evening, about the fifth week into the job, Ronnie happened to show me a large Ziploc bag of marijuana he had shoved under his clothes in one of the drawers in his room. I had never seen a bag of drugs that big, and asked him if he was planning on just smoking it all.
“Well of course I am,” he laughed. “This baby will last me till the meteor shower, at least.” He tossed it in his hand, feeling its weight proudly, like a new father holding his newborn.
When I asked him where he got that, out there in the middle of the national park, he said that those two locals from the night of the bonfire had sold him it.
“Those guys, Clayton and Jake, can get you anything, Will,” he said with excitement as he shoved the bag back under his shirts. “Coke, crack, heroin, pills, weed, hookers, guns, you name it! They live in Browning, and the more I learn about that town the crazier it seems. Like the Wild West and Vegas all in one.”
I thought of Alia, of course, when he said that. I wondered if she was into drugs at all – she could be a huge junkie for all I really knew! Even though I barely knew here, I wondered what her future would be if she stayed in such a desolate place, if she had a future, if she might end up drugged out and living with some old dealer, having a couple of kids that end up in foster care, perpetuating the cycle of poverty and bad decisions that she grew up around and that she suffered with.
Whenever she came to mind, which was often, I felt a yearning for her. I missed her; and it started to seem like our canoe date was a one off deal. I hoped she would visit soon, but I was beginning to doubt I’d see her again. I even thought of tracking down Thunderbird and seeing if he could give me her number.
I didn’t mention her to Ronnie at all because I had a sense that he would try to track her down like some big game hunter and then screw her in his room or something, despite our new friendship. He didn’t seem like the type to respect boundaries. I don’t if he even knew what boundaries were. In the first week alone after the bonfire, he had already screwed Bridget, the redhead from the bonfire, in his room. Since that night, she had become a regular at Two Med, and would sometimes hang out with us by the fire late at night. He had also slept with some random park employee, a pretty blonde girl from Germany, a few nights before our conversation that night as well, and a skinny Indian girl from Browning.
For my part, besides our night life at Two Medicine, on my days off I would hike the trails around the lake, and go as far as I could on the trails that led off into the park. I was the only one in the store who hiked, which I still found unbelievable. I think Katie was too used to the place, Ronnie too bored, and Larry too old.
But I felt a special kind of joy in the woods. I began to learn my way over the hills and into the mountains, began to learn what plants were called and where moose and mountain goats could be seen. And when I was out among the vast stretches of mountains, I would feel a certainty that I had come to the right place and that I was doing the right thing, like I felt nowhere else.
From the Two Medicine store, several hiking trails lead west and north. The day-hikers and campers mostly hung around Two Medicine Lake and would hike the easy trail that encircles it: about seven miles. I usually stayed higher up, to some of the peaks of nearby mountains (which took all day) or through some passes that led to other lakes and trail further beyond the valley we were in. There was Running Eagle Falls Trail, which took you over the shoulder of Mount Sinopah and to a waterfall split in two; and the trail to Cobalt Lake, a distant body of blue water that was hid in a small valley.
Sometimes I would go off trail, and just meander up into the mountains, always on the lookout for bears who avoided the trails, and I’d take photos of the landscapes with my cheap camera I had bought from the store. I never hiked with anyone else except with Katie a couple of times, since we all worked different shifts or covered each other when we were off, and I knew no one else in the park. But I liked being alone on the hikes the best, anyway.
The views from the trails were often breathtakingly beautiful – like walking into a postcard – especially from the higher elevation points, which gave you a wide panorama of sheer rock mountains and almost dyed-blue lakes, surrounded by thick evergreen forests. Sometimes I would
sit for hours in the sun, listening to the sounds of pigeon-like ptarmigans clucking in the bushes, or watching eagles floating overheard, probably eyeing the ptarmigans. Sometimes I’d write in a journal I also bought in the store about my days. Sometimes I would just stare out at the distant mountain peaks and do nothing at all.
Around Two Medicine Lake three main mountains dominated. Foremost in front was of course Mount Sinopah, pointed out to me by the jammer bus driver on my first day, rising above the far shore of the lake, perfectly framed from our view out the windows of the store. To its left was Painted Tepee Mountain, which had a cone-shaped top that got its name. And to Sinopah’s right was Rising Wolf Mountain, a big, hulking, angry-looking mass of rock jutting up in the air, crowned with snow throughout the warm summer days. Sinopah was the king, for sure, and it dominated every view.
On these hikes I would sometimes feel a spiritual-like reverence come over me, while following a trail that wandered between tall cedars and short, scrubby hemlocks, or while high up in the grassy shoulders of the mountains. The land was dryer and dustier than I expected, and most of the trees were the kind that liked the dry: bushy Douglas firs where it was rockier; tall and spindly lodgepole pines where they could get a deep foothold. But there hardwoods too, in the shadier, moist areas near the lake, big, lush trees with roots down to the center of the earth – the only thing deeper were the mountains’ roots.
More than all of that, I loved best to walk through the aspens, tall and naked in their thin white bark, standing meekly and pristine next to the dark and rough pines that surrounded then like predators. I also sought out the groves of their cousins the birch trees, which were harder to find – strong too, but growing not so straight as the Aspen, yet strikingly beautiful with white-paper bark peeling off in perfect cuts, streaked with black cracks and woodpecker holes.