“I sure did luck out on that deal,” my brother Elias said, reaching over to take one of the Glenfiddichs on the rocks I’d poured for him and Richard. Elias is two years older than I am and still looking for the right girl, whom we all suspect he may have found in my secretary. “I hear Alma looks sort of like a big old wrinkled hog now. But you’re not completely right about Wade. He’s a nice guy, and he did serve in ’Nam.”
“What? You’re kidding.” I poured myself a Jameson’s as the Wyoming hill country raced beneath us. We clinked our yellow plastic mugs.
We used to stock dozens of bright red mugs emblazoned with the Circle B brand all over the ranch, wherever people might conceivably be drinking outdoors, which was basically everywhere, as well as in the helicopter, the jets, the barns, the trucks, and the wagons. But the customized cups became collectors’ items for people we’d never heard of (and some we had) and disappeared quicker than we could order them. Finally, when my mother came upon a boozed-up, toothless, unwashed derelict who made his home in a series of Maytag appliance boxes beneath a viaduct by the Wind River in downtown Roundup and who had a dozen Bennett family Circle B Ranch mugs hanging by a thong from his suspenders like a gigantic, noisy, gaudy, red plastic charm bracelet, she called Christian, who she evidently felt wasn’t busy enough running the newspaper and the railroad, and told him to handle it. None of us ever asked Mother what she was doing down there under the viaduct having a conversation with the fellow in the first place—some Junior League do-gooder deal probably, handing out toothbrushes and dental floss as though that would solve all his problems—we just took her word for it.
“Yeah, he went in about the same time I did; of course, he was in the Air Force.” Elias, now a general in the Marine Corps Reserve, paused, giving us time to reflect upon what torpid louts the Marines found the boys in blue, although they seldom came out and said so. “And I ran into him a couple of times in Saigon. He was some general’s aide. Last I heard, he was ending up his tour as the golf pro at Clark in the Philippines until he got caught in some motel in Angeles City in bed with the commandant’s wife. Immediate honorable discharge. No scandal, just mercy boocoo and ore vore.” Elias gave me a conspiratorial look over the tops of his dark glasses. “Sound familiar?”
I knew he was referring to the judge.
“Sounds pretty smart to me,” Richard said. He stretched his long blue pinstripes across the aisle and crossed them at the ankles. The well-worn leather of his black dress cowboy boots glowed with such patina, Holbein the Younger could have painted them onto his feet. They creaked comfortably. How come my boots never look like that? I wondered vaguely. Mine always look dried out and cracked and caked with dusty, straw-sprung manure, sort of like I’d just dragged my saddle all the way across Oklahoma. He brushed an invisible speck from the knee of his trousers.
A Manhattan-born Morgan Guaranty banker who’d turned just as gray and gaunt and frantic and feral as all the rest of those poor suckers who have to live in that town, Richard had finally cashed it all in and moved West to run the Roundup Opera, one of the world’s top companies. He’s also a champion team roper, champion lover, and serious get-down cowboy party guy. And rich.
Every time I look down at my ring finger, I can’t believe it. That diamond is so big, if I had two, I could shoot craps. It sat there on my hand like a beacon in a lighthouse. I’d waited so long to get the right ring from the right guy, I hadn’t taken it off since he’d put it there three months before.
All my life I’ve accepted only the best. And when it comes to love, the real thing—and I’m speaking character, integrity, passion, and chemistry here, not diamonds—I’d been willing to wait forever, which it was beginning to look as if I was going to have to do, until Richard showed up last year and things simply fell into place.
“We’re about there,” I told them as I looked out the window and watched the green links of the Wind River Country Club unroll beneath us like a high-speed golf documentary. We came to a dipping pause above the whopper of a concoction the Gilhoolys had constructed on the edge of the tenth fairway.
America’s Mountain West—Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah—has no look of its own beyond log cabins and tepees. And unlike downtown Roundup, a structural free-for-all, architects have recently developed and assigned us a residential style, which we locals refer to as Santa Fe Gumdrop Yodel. It is taught in architectural schools as a joke, as one more hilarious example of what gullible, tasteless Neanderthals we are here in the provinces. Gumdrop Yodel characteristics include high, heavy, thick-lipped archways for all windows and doors, except for those in the shapes of circles and octagons and triangles; universal grayness in a maximum of three shades of stucco (the gray is evidently to remind us of cloudy days, which we seldom have); and rough wooden beams shooting out here and there around the roof line like straw stuck in a board during a tornado, to provide the Southwestern touch. All topped off with gray, glazed-tile roofs. It’s a silly, graceless style, but the people who move here from the East don’t know any better and think it’s great because they can see the sky for the first time in their lives.
Alma and Wade had taken Gumdrop as far as it could conceivably go in their twelve-thousand-square-foot, one-story sprawl that squatted in the sun like a dirty plaster of paris model. And, as the chopper began its shuddering descent, Alma stood with a hand shading her eyes at the edge of the flat, emerald lake of a lawn, between the putting green and the lap pool. The windy wash plastered her shiny pink caftan to her big, sturdy body. Wade was nowhere in sight. Probably in the powder room banging one of the guests.
THREE
A number of dressy couples chatted in small groups by the pool among gigantic pots of red geraniums, and Alma, who already seemed a little bombed, took Richard and me around to make certain we met some, but not all of them. I assumed the ones she wasn’t introducing us to were on the other side of the Rutherford Oil proxy issue. The stockholders included a gaggle of oil people, RV dealers, Wall Street types, golf junkies, former U.S. senator Duke Fletcher, media time salesmen, and the Russians. Six of them.
“I’d like you to meet Sergei and …” it sounded as if she said Sergei five more times. She kissed each one familiarly on the cheek as she presented them. They reminded me of Steve Martin in The Jerk. Gucci thugs. Hairy-pawed yetis, sasquatch siblings from the Far North with slanted brows and bad teeth, who rocked and rolled as they spoke and eyed the women as if they were sausages in the local GUM, or whatever they call their markets.
“You visit Siberia?” Sergei One inquired as his hand headed for my bottom. “Furs are very beautiful there. You like lynx? You like vodka?”
What did he think? That we lived in gangster television shows? That “American Justice” on A&E was real life, that all American women were round-heeled mob girls you could buy at cocktail parties?
“Sergei, my dear.” I removed his hand. “Let me explain something to you. Life in America is not one big Bill Kurtis gangster documentary. Do not handle the women, particularly this one, or you will find your family jewels hanging out the back instead of the front.”
He smiled sheepishly, showing off his teeth, each one rimmed in gold as precisely as an expensive dinner plate. “Sorry, we just arrive America today. Want to be friendly.” His voice was thick and guttural, as though he needed to clear his head and throat and spit, and the Rs rolled off his tongue as if from a stutter machine. “You man’s secretary maybe, or wife?”
“No, I’m a federal police officer.” That got him to back up a little farther. “Are you really from Siberia?” I asked.
“Da.” He nodded and indicated the rest of his contingent. “We let Rutherford Oil come in and do some business. Big project. Bigger than North Slope. We build pipeline to Manily, very beautiful. I am chief petroleum engineer for Magadan, my province. You come visit.”
“Well,” I said—Richard had taken my arm and was pulling me away—“good luck. Enjoy your visit. Mind your manners. The police are w
atching.”
“Da.” He laughed. “That I understand.”
“Aren’t they a scream?” Alma asked as she steered us across the room. “I never thought Siberia could be so much fun. And the vodka is to die for. Have you met Johnny and Shanna Bourbon?”
Johnny Bourbon is Roundup’s one and only world-famous televangelist. His ministry, Johnny Bourbon’s Christian Cowboys, had miraculously managed to survive his thirty-six months in the federal clink for selling each timeshare condo in his Christian retreat/theme park—Christ’s Corral—a remarkable twelve times.
I could tell that most of the guests found the Bourbons as exotic as Martians. They circled the get-down, ex-con, high-roller, high-country preacher and his show-business wife as if they were the fat man and bearded lady at the circus, but never actually got close enough to talk.
It’s like the time I met the comedienne, Joan Rivers, and we were laughing about the horse races at the state fair in Montana—the Midland Empire State Fair—and the fact that the track at the fairgrounds was so short, the horses had to go around it eight times to make a mile and a quarter. And she said, “I was booked there very early in my career, and I think I was the first Jew ever to visit Montana. People kept sending their children up to touch me for luck.”
That’s what the Bourbons brought, maybe a little touch of the forbidden.
I’d never met Johnny Bourbon, but now I could see that he had it. His eyes were as fiery blue and intense as cattle prods, and I felt their power instantly when we shook hands and he turned those eyes on, burning them into mine. But mine are Bennett eyes, the color of Bisbee turquoise, and immune to unsought charms. I also saw in him the wariness that no former prisoner ever can hide around law-enforcement officers. That flicker of animal fear and longing and begging that comes from the horror of incarceration, the personal knowledge that a stranger can exercise absolute, impersonal control over your life. Even the deepest faith cannot erase that memory.
“I’ve heard your name for years and years from Alma,” Johnny said, holding my hand in a powerful grip.
“Really?” I asked, trying to imagine why Alma would ever have any reason to mention me to anyone.
“I know you’re her oldest friend.”
“Really?”
“God bless you.” He was medium-tall, in good, trim shape, had a black moustache and short beard, and was decked out in a snow-white Western-cut suit, white shirt, white string bow tie, and white cowboy hat with a silver coinband. His boots were shiny gray eel-skin. “I’m awful pleased to meet you. And you,” he turned to Richard. “You both look like you know what you’re doing, getting hitched. It’s a great state of being, marriage. Shanna and I”—he slung his arm around his wife’s wasp waist and drew her close in a brusque sort of yank—“have been married for twenty-five years. Haven’t we, darlin’?”
“Sure enough have, sugar darlin’.” Shanna’s enthusiasm sounded to me as if it had a “you idiot” hanging at the end of it. Her rodeo-queen hair—as black as midnight—exploded like a Clairol commercial from beneath a white beaver Stetson, and her sleeveless baby-blue doeskin dress draped her curvy body like soft butter. Long strips of fringe fell from beaded emblems across her back, and bracelets of downy eagle feathers circled her wrists. She had on false eyelashes, television makeup with the flawless sheen and smoothness of fondant icing, and her teeth were so shiny they looked as if they’d been capped with mirrors. I remembered that she played the guitar and sang her own Christian compositions on the daily television show she and Johnny broadcast all over the world from their own studio. Shanna and her husband looked a little more like brother and sister than I thought was quite right or healthy.
“Shanna’s going to sing for us a little later,” explained Alma, who hadn’t taken her hand off Johnny Bourbon’s forearm. An edge had crept into her voice.
“Great. I’ll look forward to it.”
“Come on,” Alma suddenly ordered me. “There’s something I want to show you.”
“God bless you,” Johnny said again as Alma seized my arm in a painful clench and pulled me away.
“That miserable motherfucking son of a bitch,” she muttered.
Wow. I turned to see if Richard had heard, but he’d vanished in the direction of the bar and my brothers.
On Alma’s neck, ears, and arms, masses of gold jewelry flashed in the setting sun like signs at a truck stop as she marched me double-time through a narrow, twenty-foot-high archway into a vast solarium. There were eight or ten seating areas of natural bamboo armchairs with yellow and green palm-leaf-patterned cushions and glass coffee tables, each with an arrangement of wide, floral scented candles of different heights and what looked like black teak African fertility artifacts. But the artifacts weren’t what made the room memorable. It was the fact that actual zebra-, tiger-, and leopard-skin rugs covered the gray terrazzo beneath the tables and chairs, and hundreds of stuffed heads of rare, beautiful African game stared out blindly from the walls. It made me sick at my stomach.
We stopped at a black-lacquered sideboard where a number of pictures were displayed in black-lacquered frames.
“We used to go to Africa every year on safari,” a calmer Alma explained. She tapped her fingernail on a photograph of herself leaning against the neck of a dead elephant; a long Weatherby elephant rifle rose from between her legs in case anyone missed just what a macho-girl she really was. “Got a Grand Slam in cats.”
She raised a cigarette to her glossy pink lips, making her heavy gold bracelets clank into a solid stack on her strong, tanned forearm, and inhaled deeply. Her face was thickly made up and evenly taut, what looked to be the result of a recent face-lift that had turned the jowly pouches on either side of her mouth into smooth, slightly swollen balls about the size of chestnuts. And although her lips were plumped by collagen, tiny lines around them deepened into cracks as she dragged on her cigarette. She had wide, square hands and feet, stubby fingers and toes, and all her nails gleamed with the same bright pink as her lipstick and caftan. “But now they won’t let you shoot anything, so we just go to Scotland and Nebraska and Texas bird-hunting. Last year I bagged two hundred quail in one afternoon.”
“What do you do with that many birds?” I asked.
Alma shrugged. “They give them to the Mexicans or something. I don’t know. We give away lots of stuff.”
I bit my tongue and followed her through more vaulted, cold, dead rooms. I’d been in friendlier morgues. Alma’s high-heeled sandals slapped against her callused feet like hands methodically slapping a face. One slap. Two slap. One slap. Two slap. One slap. Two slap. The sound was so cheap, it made me want to scream.
Alma’s mother’s lovely Danish country antiques—not the knife-edged Danish Modern junk everyone fell in love with in the late fifties, but graceful, pale pine pieces with clean, simple lines—were everywhere. But they’d been trampled, killed with the gray by Alma, or her decorator, and seemed to struggle for air. Even the animals in the large painting that had hung in her parents’ living room, of Denmark’s wild ponies racing along the banks of a swollen river beneath an endless threatening sky—a work so easy to confuse with our own wild mustangs dashing through the Wind River—looked as if they’d turned into one more herd trying to escape the Gilhooly slaughterhouse.
God. The whole place was gruesome and depressing, overwhelmingly dreary. And in spite of all its height and open space, it made me want to hunch over, as though I were walking through a dark tunnel.
“This is Wade’s room.” Alma punctuated the words matter-of-factly with exhaled smoke, as though she were saying, “And this is where we keep the dog.”
We walked along a gray-leather sectional sofa that snaked through a grown-up boy’s ultimate playroom, where one wall danced with images on twelve television monitors. Another wall held framed photographs of models wearing little more than lip gloss and posing with high-speed Harley-Davidson and BMW motorcycles between their legs. What I would consider to be a serious gun co
llection, ranging from antique dueling pistols to plastic Glock handguns, was mounted above the bar. Below, a glass-fronted refrigerator displayed countless brands of beer, canned margaritas, and piña coladas.
“Where is Wade?” I asked.
Alma, who’d been flicking ashes onto the floor the whole time, now ground out her cigarette in an ashtray set in the inlaid edge of what looked like a brand-new pool table. A few live sparks jumped onto the smooth green felt and burned tiny holes, but she didn’t seem to notice or, more probably, didn’t care. Alma was just a complete pig.
She looked me in the eyes for the first time, and the toughness and cynicism I saw there said it all. “He was so upset. He got an emergency call from one of the dealerships and had to run up to Billings. He’s going to try to get back, at least in time for dessert.”
We both knew she was lying. He wasn’t upset, and he wouldn’t be back.
“Too bad,” I said.
“Oh, what the heck, I can’t lie to you, Lilly. You’re my oldest friend and you know me better than anyone.” She removed a gold case from her pocket, lit a fresh cigarette, and, once she got a coughing fit behind her, continued. “The truth is that ever since I found Jesus, I’ve been able to forgive Wade for the life he leads. I know he strays, but he can’t help himself. I have trouble staying on the straight and narrow myself from time to time. Besides, I love him too much to let him go, and as the Lord says, ‘People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.’ ”
I half-smiled at her, not trusting myself to speak for a moment or two. Where was all this best-and-oldest-friend stuff coming from? Johnny had said it, and now Alma. We hadn’t seen each other for twenty-five years and didn’t know each other at all, not even a little bit; only those fading memories of early acquaintance and our parents’ close friendship connected us. And how can anyone who falls in love with Jesus rationalize—with pride, I might add—killing two hundred birds in one afternoon just for fun? Once you’ve been a cop, it’s tough to rationalize killing anything for fun. A soul can take only so much carnage.
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