High Country : A Novel

by Willard Wyman

  Everyone was having such a good time Ty hadn’t even noticed that Knots Malloy was in the bar, hadn’t noticed until Knots came over and put a big boot in the chair they were saving for Jasper.

  “Hear you near got yourself froze in up there below Bench Lake.”

  He leaned on his outsized leg and looked down at Ty. “Doubt old man Kittle would appreciate his mules gettin’ in a tight like that.”

  “Didn’t want to come out till I had to. That’s pretty country.”

  “Under snow it ain’t.Your ass-man could tell you that.”

  “Sugar’s pretty handy about weather.” Ty looked up at Knots. “I believe he’s struck an arrangement with whoever makes it.”

  “Hear you like to get caught up there too,” Knots said to Sugar. “Don’t sound like such a good arrangement to me.”

  “My burros got other ways out from where I was,” Sugar said. “A little snow’s no problem.”

  Buck and Angie got up to put some music on the jukebox. Sugar and Maria joined them.

  “Ain’t you askin’ me to sit?” Knots said. “Got all them chairs here.”

  “Taken,” Ty said. “When the music stops and everyone comes back.”

  “I could turn a step or two myself.” Knots looked out at the dancers. “With one of your lively ones.”

  But he didn’t do anything about it, walking over to get another beer instead, joining the others to watch the cowboy play the bowling game.

  Ty was glad Nina wasn’t with them. He didn’t want her anywhere around Knots. She had grown up to be as pretty as her mother and so in bloom when she went off to the university that she’d hardly had a chance to think about law school. Ty had trouble keeping up with all the college boys who courted her, both he and Sugar relieved when she finally married a rancher’s son from Marysville. The boy had studied ranch management, but Ty doubted he needed to. The family place was so perfectly managed it was hard for Ty to understand how it worked. He’d left the others and looked it all over with Nina the day before the wedding, thinking how little it had to do with the scratchy place he’d known. The Bitterroot seemed another world as he walked through the clean barns, the tidy corrals, liking everything he saw but liking most of all Nina, who’d hardly changed.

  “First a family, Ty Hardin. Then law school,” she’d said in her serious way as they looked at the machinery. It seemed to Ty there was more machinery around than horses, and no mules at all. Nina watched him, smiling. “And even when I’m in law school,” she’d said, “we can still dance. They dance differently now. I like the way you taught me best.”

  Ty was thinking about what a beautiful bride Nina had been when someone put still another beer in front of him. He didn’t know how much he’d had to drink that night, the music too good to keep track. But Buck always claimed he’d been sober, that it was Knots Malloy who had too much to drink. Knots Malloy who had started everything....Ty wasn’t clear on that either.

  He did remember Knots dancing once with Angie, remembered Buck keeping Angie pretty much to himself after that. And he remembered Maria smiling at Knots and shaking her head to say no, Knots saying something back that rubbed them all the wrong way. But he’d been having such a good time dancing with Cody Jo he couldn’t be sure what set things off. All he knew was that Lars had some of Cody Jo’s favorites in his jukebox. It was like old times hearing that music, dancing with Cody Jo again.

  Cody Jo was nearly sixty then, but she was still Cody Jo, feeling the music, knowing steps that surprised Ty, never missing a beat when she came back into the circle of his arms.

  Buck smiled as he watched them. It seemed like old times to him too. Cody Jo was still tall and slender, even if she’d spread a little around the middle. He thought the gray in her hair made her look even prettier. And Ty looked almost the same as he had looked when he came back from the war. Still lean as a rail, still moving to the music in that quiet way, just enough to stay with it, letting Cody Jo do most of the moving for both of them.

  Suddenly Buck saw Knots was there, tapping Ty on the shoulder.

  “Ain’t havin’ too much luck with them others.” There was a beery grin on Knot’s face. “Let’s have a spin with your grannie here.”

  He reached for Cody Jo’s hand and was startled to find himself going backward, his weight tipped back so far from the jolt Ty gave him that only the jukebox saved him. And not for long.

  “That’s Cody Jo.” Ty watched Knots stumbling backward, trying to keep his legs under him. “And lay off Sugar.” Knots hit the jukebox hard. There was the lifting and falling sound of a needle crossing a record, then the crash—lights popping and smoking, the music stopping altogether.

  The screech of the needle, the records spilling out across Knots, Cody Jo standing there beside him—all of it seemed to snap something in Ty. Buck had never seen him look that way. He was afraid Ty was going to kick Knots to death right there behind the jukebox. Before he had time to think he’d jumped on Ty and tried to hold him back. It didn’t seem to slow Ty down at all. He kept moving toward Knots, his eyes wild.

  Jasper, who’d crouched down beside the bar when the jukebox went, was startled to see Buck up there on Ty’s back. Then he saw Knots get up from behind the jukebox, looking desperate as Ty came at him. Knots grabbed a chair and brought it down as hard as he could, the chair splintering over Buck’s head as Ty moved in under it and brought the butt of his hand up under Knots’s nose so hard blood squirted away as though he’d squashed a tomato.

  There was blood coming from Buck’s head too, the chair opening a long chunk of his scalp. But he kept clinging to Ty, helped now by the cowboy who’d left his bowling machine and grabbed one of Ty’s arms. Lars got hold of the other, the three of them knowing they had to calm Ty before he killed Knots outright.

  Years of lifting packs had given Ty a strength even greater than when he’d turned the broom handle on the troop ship. He flung Lars and the cowboy away, shucking Buck like a coat as he drove the butt of his hand into Knots’s Adam’s apple, cramming it back so far the big man’s eyes popped. He drove his hand into Knots again, the noise dense as all the wind left the big body. Knots, clawing at his windpipe, staggered back and fell across the bowling table, drawing his knees up as he fought for air. The bowling table splintered and he rolled away, struggling for the door, going out in a crouch, blood and mucus spewing from him.

  The cowboy and Lars had Ty again. It took him a moment to shake free and follow. But only Harvey Kittle was there, his white shirt bluish in the stark light Lars had rigged above the door.

  “What’s up?” he asked. “Heard you beat that storm . . .”

  He saw what was in Ty’s face and pointed at the outhouse Lars used when the well-pump wasn’t working. “In there,” he said. “Crippled some by the looks of him.”

  The outhouse was framed with four-by-fours and weighted down with boulders. Ty hit it so hard some boulders came free. It went up, rocked back down, and Ty hit it with his shoulder again. It went all the way over and there Knots was, curled at the base of the two seater, bubbles of orangey mucus lifting from his face, eyes bulging. Blood covered his shirt and ran down into his pants. Ty looked at him and felt his anger draining away.

  “Shouldn’t talk to her that way.” He sounded almost thoughtful. “Sugar either. They don’t like it.”

  Harvey Kittle was still trying to make out what had happened. Buck and Lars joined him, Buck holding paper napkins to his head to staunch the blood. Others came out of the bar too.

  “Never did put a lock on that door,” Lars finally said. “Why’d he have to knock the whole thing over?”

  The next morning Ty stopped by to ask Lars about damages. Lars gave him coffee and made up a figure. Ty paid up right there, surprised it wasn’t more but too embarrassed to talk about it.

  A few days later Lars learned that wouldn’t begin to cover the new jukebox, never mind the bowling machine. But he didn’t worry. He put a jar out for donations. People dropped a
little in when they stopped by to hear about the fight—or to tell their version of it. In less than a month Lars had more than enough to pay for everything.

  After Ty left that first morning, Lars got four men to tip the outhouse up so he could get a rope around it. They pulled it upright with a pickup and walked it into place. It was put together so solidly Lars only had to tack a few boards on to keep things straight. They anchored it again with the rocks.

  Lars still uses it when his well-pump quits.

  40

  Fast Water

  “Hate to think what would of happened if he’d thought to double up his fist,” Harvey Kittle said, putting a few dollars in the jar.

  “Did most of it with Buck on his back.” Lars wiped at the bar. “Buck’s over two hundred pounds. Maybe more. Ty didn’t seem to notice.”

  “Saw him tack a shoe on a rank mule one day.” Harvey sipped his beer, remembering. “Mule let Ty hold up a good half of him while he rested up for the next round.”

  They went out into the sunlight and looked at the outhouse. It was settled back in its place at the edge of the lot.

  “Near give us all a hernia gettin’ it back,” Lars said. “Still don’t know why Ty had to knock the whole thing over.”

  And so Ty’s strength was settled in the minds of all those who knew the Deerlodge, which meant pretty much everyone, those not knowing it getting the story from those who did. The size of Knots Malloy grew in their minds too, partly because Knots was no longer around to prove anyone wrong. After the fight he took up work for a guest ranch in Arizona. It must have satisfied him. No one ever saw him in the valley again.

  None of it meant much to Ty. He didn’t listen to the talk, and he tried not to think about Knots. He knew something had gone terribly wrong in him that night. He’d seen men get that way with mules, sometimes with horses. To him it was a sickness: no good for the man, a disaster for the animal.

  It made him feel more alone than ever—though it might have seemed the opposite. People certainly paid more attention to him— they just began treating him differently, parting to make a place for him at the Deerlodge, wanting to buy his drinks, pay for his coffee. It was better in the mountains, but even there the rangers would stop by his camps for no reason, offer help he didn’t need. More and more he felt separate—growing more distant as the years slid by.

  Higher roads, lighter gear, fast-talking environmentalists brought more and more hikers into the high country. The regulations that caused drove many of the old packers out, though somehow Ty’s business kept improving. Harvey Kittle realized it and pretty much let Ty run everything—despite how choosy Ty seemed to be getting.

  Ty even gave up packing for the big Sierra Club trips. “Too damn many people,” he told Harvey. “Camping up under the cliffs so they can swing on their ropes. No feed up there for the mules. No room for all their stuff.” And if some of the guests brought too many amenities, Ty would back away. “Said I’d show you these mountains,” he’d say mildly, returning their deposits. “Not turn them into a trailer park.”

  Harvey saw no reason to complain. No matter how many people Ty turned away, his pack strings were busy all summer and into the fall. The Haslam family would always take a long trip, sometimes with Jeb Walker, sometimes with others. Their friends seemed to come back too, arranging trips on their own schedules. And when some official from the Park Service or some politician in Washington wanted to see the Sierra, it was Ty they turned to, Ty who picked the routes and chose the horses, decided on the camps.

  Angie arranged things on the outside, organized gear and food and people. And after Jasper went to the rest home, it was Angie who found the cooks—cooking herself if she had to or enlisting Nina, one of Nina’s friends, or one of the Haslam children—all of them wanting to work with Ty, spend their summers in the Sierra with Ty.

  The winters went more slowly, though ranchers from Lone Pine all the way up to Bishop seemed to count on Ty for one thing or another. He knew how to doctor their cattle and straighten their fences and gentle their horses. He even had a way with their children—the boys listening as they could not to their fathers, the girls liking his way with animals. Their parents were different. They didn’t have much to say to Ty unless they were asking for help, advice about some problem with a horse or a lame mule or a sickness keeping weight off their cattle. And then they seemed shy about asking, as though they should know what to do themselves.

  More and more Ty would find himself drinking too late in the Deerlodge. Many nights hardly talking at all, sometimes talking too much. “No need to tell him you heard that story before,” Buck would tell Lars, who was always partial to Montana stories. “It’s good for him to do some talkin’.”

  Most of Ty’s stories were about Fenton and Spec. Sometimes they were about Cody Jo, the way she was with Fenton. Sometimes about Etta and Horace or Rosie and Dan Murphy. He didn’t need to talk about himself. Or Willie.

  Lars was bothered by that, always wanting to learn more about Ty. But it was hard to do. He could only get hints from the secondary roles Ty played in his own stories, or from things Buck and Angie said, or Jasper—before Etta and Horace found him the rest home back in Missoula.

  “Fenton knew one thing about that bear,” Ty told Lars one night. “To let him go his own way. That bear let Fenton go his too.” Ty finished his beer and looked at Lars. “But Spec was interested in more. Where that bear lived. What he needed and ate. Where he slept.”

  “Jasper told me about Spec in the woods.” Lars mopped at his bar. Not mopping down the bar from one conversation to another but sticking with Ty, listening, hoping to get something new for the picture of Ty he carried around in his head.

  “It wasn’t so much that Spec knew the woods.” Ty accepted another beer. “He was part of them. I think he watched that bear,” Ty looked across his beer at Lars, “to learn more about himself.”

  He didn’t need to tell those stories in the summers. And he hardly ever drank too much in the summers. His trips were enough. And more often than not there were emergencies: tracking down horses, finding lost climbers, packing out the sick or the injured, sometimes the dead. They were glad to have Ty handle those things, until the helicopters came. Even then, it was Ty they called on when the weather closed in, when the busy planes couldn’t find their way over the passes and down into the canyons.

  By then Gretta Haslam was cooking for Ty’s trips—had been since high school. She was the first of the Haslam children to work for Ty. And the best. A project at the university had delayed her this time. Nina’s friend—the singer Lilly Bird—had taken over until Gretta could cross the snow-choked passes to catch them at Junction Meadows.

  “You reckon Gretta can handle that snow?” Buck and Ty were watching the roiling river, the runoff from the snowfields chewing under its banks. “No way we could get here but to ride up the Kern. The trail mostly underwater at that.”

  “She’s got her ice axe. Clyde said she’s better than a man with it.”

  That’s just how Norman Clyde had said it, too, Ty thought, missing the hard-bitten mountaineer. His winter cabin had become a ruin only months after he died. The windows broken, the books vandalized, the shade vines dead. It was just what Norman Clyde said would happen. Ty was sad to think he’d been right about that too.

  “She’d better show up soon.” The amused voice of Lilly Bird startled them. Lilly looked mischievous and pretty all at once. “Singers aren’t cut out to be head cooks.”

  Nina had befriended Lilly Bird in law school, Nina finally getting there after her own children were in school themselves. They’d met on the first day of classes, Nina more than ten years older but the two of them cut from the same cloth. In fact Lilly was so determined to get through law school herself that she’d enrolled before she had enough money, meaning she had to keep singing the old songs with her trio each night so she could study the new laws with Nina each day.

  Ty knew Lilly was being funny. Cooking was hardl
y a chore on this trip. The Haslams did almost everything themselves, and Jeb Walker, still ramrod straight after ten years of retirement, was as considerate of Lilly as any man could be—and as ready to tell his stories to her as he’d once been to Jasper. The truth was that the general was as taken by Lilly Bird as the rest of them, amused that she was so determined to keep Ty in his place.

  “You packers,” she’d scolded Ty the first morning. “Act like it’s a federal case just to find your silly horses.”

  And she’d just laughed when he asked her to sing by the fire. “Don’t be silly. You don’t even know the songs I sing.” She’d turned away, giving everyone marshmallows and willow sticks, getting Jeb Walker to tell them more stories about the cavalry.

  But Ty did know the songs she sang. What he didn’t know was how someone so young could sing them the way she did. He’d been won over by her singing the first night he’d heard her.

  “Her soul certainly comes up through those lyrics,” Cody Jo had said after Lilly Bird’s first number. The two of them had driven all the way to Sacramento to listen to Nina’s friend sing at the club. “But how?” Ty wanted to know. “How does she make them hers?” “Family, maybe. Records around the house. In her blood somehow.”

  Cody Jo looked at Ty. “Apples don’t drop far from the tree. Didn’t Will and Mary love the country the way you do?”

  “No.” Ty looked at Cody Jo. “No, they didn’t. They fought it. I believe I’m an apple that rolled.”

  “Maybe.” Cody Jo watched Ty’s eyes go back to the singer. “You do love this music.” She smiled. “Or is it the girl?”

  Ty wanted to say something to deflect that look on Cody Jo’s face. But he could only say what was true.

  “I think it’s both. She is those words.”

  Ty took Cody Jo’s hand and they went out onto the dance floor.