“If you don’t sign with the football people, what then?” Otis had asked, knowing the boy had few options in this life and not liking it much that being paid to play football was the best.
“More work at the university,” Walker said, and Ty knew he’d settled on something. “There’s a professor. He wants me to stay. He’ll help.”
“At what? Reading more damn books?”
“There’s more I want to know. Ty ...he understands.”
Walker had looked at Ty just as he’d looked at him across so many campfires, as though Ty had answers to questions he wasn’t sure how to ask. Ty had turned to Cody Jo, but she’d looked away. All he could do was look back at Otis. Nod. Say it was all right. Walker should stay. There was nothing else he could think of to do.
And so Walker had gone on to graduate school in search of his past, and Ty had gone back to the mountains to make sure his past counted. And now Lilly’s songs were somehow bridging that difference. Walker was watching Ty’s fires again, as moved by the girl’s songs as Ty—who did not yet know he’d fallen in love.
That was the year Lilly dropped her last pretensions about lawyering and took the job at the Tahoe lodge, singing each night for an audience as enchanted by the girl as by old songs she sang. After he came out of the mountains Ty caved in to his need to hear her do what she did better than anyone he could imagine. He called Cody Jo and asked to go to Tahoe with him. But she decided that was a trip she didn’t want to make.
“I’m too tired,” she said. “And old. Ask her to sing ‘Have Mercy.’ No one sings it anymore but Lilly . . . and no one should.You’ll see why.”
So he went alone, arriving late, but the big lodge easy to find on the shore of the silent lake.
“I’ll take it, man.” A tall boy with lank blond hair opened the pickup’s door, as welcoming to Ty as though he’d driven up in a Mercedes.
“Wait’ll you hear Lilly.” The boy put it in gear, stuck a long arm out the window, and rapped a beat on the roof. “Great pipes!”
Then he was gone. Ty was a little startled by how quickly it had happened. He was more surprised by what he found inside: dark panels and diminished lights, the room hushed to concentrate on Lilly.
He went to the bar and whispered his order. A single light isolated Lilly, crowning her hair, revealing her slenderness. But her singing took her so far beyond that the whole room seemed hers. Nothing about her looks, the moonlight on the lake behind her, the piano, spare and direct, could touch the way she sang.
She finished to applause almost reserved, as though it might break some mood. She sang “It Never Entered My Mind,” the room quiet as the lake, and “But Not for Me.” Then her eyes found Ty, alone at the bar, as still as the rest, as unable to take his eyes away.
She talked into the microphone as though talking with old friends. “We have a special guest. If this set is longer than usual, I’m sorry.” She looked around the room. “I’d like to sing the songs he knows.”
Ty thought it must be someone else in the room she was talking about, but he couldn’t look away. And then he didn’t need to look away. She began singing those songs he would sing a few bars of around the campfire, trying to get her to sing them herself. Wishing she would sing them herself.
She seemed to remember them all. She sang “I Remember You” and “You Go to My Head” and “What’s New?” She sang “I Can’t Get Started” and “Teach Me Tonight.” She sang songs Ty hadn’t heard all the way through for years, sang them the same way he’d heard them when he danced with Cody Jo, when he’d stood with Willie watching the snow outside the Helena hotel. It was as though Lilly had some direct line into his life, into the music he loved. Only this time everything came from Lilly.
She finished with “Have Mercy.”
“That’s an old song,” he said. The bartender slid a glass of soda to Lilly, bubbles rising around a slice of lime. “You make it . . . different.”
And it was a different Lilly standing there, her legs long in the flared pants, the blouse white and sheer. Nothing left of the law-school student at all.
“Cody Jo said you’d like it.” She turned, thanking people as they stopped, complimented her, asked if she’d recorded this song or that.
“When did she say that?”
“Tonight. She called just before I went on.”
The trio was playing, and Lilly led Ty onto the floor. “Cody Jo tells me you aren’t at all like a packer when you dance.”
“Packers dance,” Ty said. “To music like this.”
They were playing “Blue Moon,” and dancing to it with Lilly was almost like listening to Lilly sing it, the music moving them, connecting them.
They played “Mood Indigo” and “Paper Moon” and “Daybreak,” Lilly singing softly “. . . another new day,” her cheek on his shoulder.
“Take me home, Ty,” she said finally, her breath warm on his neck. “It’s time we went home.”
The boy with the long hair was playing his radio, rock music loud and insistent, the beat heavy. He turned it down when he saw Lilly.
“Just mine, Tommy,” Lilly said to him. “We’ll leave Ty’s here.”
Her Volvo was there in a moment, the motor running as Tommy opened the door for her, looked at Ty.
“Lilly told me about you. Packing up there. I dig that, man. The higher you get, the higher you get.” He smiled. “A blast, man.”
“Gotta be careful.” Ty held out a tip. “Gets cold up there.”
Tommy pushed the money away. “It’s on me when you’re with Lilly.” He looked at Ty through the window. “No wheels for me to park without Lilly.”
He went to his radio and turned up the volume. “Later, man. Ciao.”
Lilly’s place, tidy and spare, was high above the lake. Ty felt a little lost being there alone with her.
“I’m going to make drinks,” she said. “We’re going to sit and talk. Talk all night if we want to.”
She put on a tape, Red Garland playing “It Might As Well Be Spring.” Got drinks and they sat on the couch. She tucked her legs under her and watched him.
“You see it now, Ty. I’m a singer, not a lawyer.”
“ Ye s.” Ty was relieved to have the drink. He was shaken by how she moved him. “Anyone who heard you would know.”
“It’s like what makes you who you are.Your mountains.” She brushed his hair from his forehead. “I think I knew it when Gretta died . . . when you lived.” She dipped a finger into her bourbon, touched his lips with it. “But it doesn’t matter when I knew....It happened.”
She leaned forward, her face close to his.
“Didn’t it? . . .” Her lips were almost on his as she spoke. “Hasn’t it?”
“ Ye s.” Ty tried to collect himself. “And I don’t have a notion in the world of what to make of it. What to do.”
“Accept it.” Her eyes held him. “It’s easy.”
“It’s not that easy. The world you live in . . . is different.”
“How?” Lilly touched his hair again. “How different?”
He thought about it. How comfortable she was—with everything. The people in the club. The bartender. The parking-lot boy with his flowing hair and loud music. There was almost too much to say about their differences.
“Your people don’t really know my music,” he said, hoping to sum it all up somehow. “What it means.”
“I do.You know I do.” She touched his lips with her finger again, her voice just a whisper as she sang “...let’s have no controversy, moments like these were meant for kissing, lend your lips to hear. Have mercy, dear.”
Then, her voice still low but something sure in it now, “It isn’t just that I know your songs, Ty.” She watched him. “...I know you.”
Lilly had no illusions about Ty. Nina had told her about the nights he would drink too much at the Deerlodge, talking late into the night with Lars, sometimes going home with some woman he’d danced with.
But she knew what he was
like in the high country too. He was always steady there. Knew things: where to ford the streams and to free his horses. The peaks first light would reach. Places to camp. How to keep people dry and warm, safe. He was at home in his mountains. That was good enough.
What surprised her was how much Ty wanted her after that night high above the lake. It went beyond making love. He wanted to be a part of her rhythms, her comings and goings, in the flow of her blood. It didn’t surprise her how much she wanted to be with him. She’d known that from the moment he showed up, alive, at Junction Meadows.
And she’d understood how hard it was going to be.
“What do you mean the past haunts us?” he would ask. “We’ll leave it behind. Start from here. Together.”
“We can’t. We are our past. Listen to those songs you love.”
“I do . . . when you sing them.”
“They’re all about sadness. How things don’t work out.” She would hold him, fit herself to him, her head on his chest. “You have it, Ty. Sadness. From a place I can’t know. Maybe I have it too.”
And she would tell him things about St. Louis, about her father, a church-going lawyer whose practice was filled by the congregation but his heart with the bluesy music from the riverfront. He would take her to the clubs along the river, listen to the jazzmen up from New Orleans. He would drink—listening to the music, talking to the people.
She liked it in those smoky rooms, watching him with his drinks— the drinks that would end all his nights too soon. She liked the music, the words, the rhythms. The singers would make over her and she would sing along with them from her table, taking in their sadness.
“Those songs could be so blue it hurt,” she told Ty one night. “All kinds of music came together in those places. Bittersweet songs. All of us in love with some sorrow.”
“Maybe it was you.” Ty said. “The sadness was in you.” When she talked that way, remembered those times, he always found himself wanting to touch the places where she’d lived.
“No.” Lilly kissed his neck. “It was in them. It was just there. This piano player told me one night, ‘Blues,’ he said, ‘is about things gone bad. About women . . . and whiskey.’”
“How old were you then?
“Ten. Twelve. I’m not even sure I got it. Not even sure I got it when my father died. After the whiskey got him.”
“I think you did.” Ty held her.
He held her close for a long time, confused by how much he wanted her in one way, how much he wanted to protect her in another.
Lilly confused him in other ways too, but he loved her so it didn’t matter. He thought his heart would break when she talked about growing up, watching her father, the drinking, the singers. And then she could talk another way, so hard and unconsidered it sent a chill through him. She would rail about her agent, a record contract, a cabal she knew was behind the killing of JFK and Bobby and Martin Luther King. She was sure there were powerful people out there who killed.
It didn’t make sense to Ty. It was beyond him to imagine anyone out to get anyone. His life was decisions made, consequences lived with. Hard times were like winter storms:You just got through them.
But for Lilly there could be demons everywhere. Sometimes she would go to church, trying to shake them. It didn’t help. Nothing did. It wasn’t long before Ty saw he couldn’t help when she was that way either. That’s when he would find his heart breaking not so much because he wanted to touch her as because he couldn’t.
But those times would pass. Most of their time together was so easy they seemed to touch each other without touching, hardly needing words. From that first night the lovemaking was right, warm and open and unaffected. She was never afraid to let him know she wanted him, fulfilling him as if she knew the secrets of his body better than he—her fingers rimming the old scar, tracing the ropes of muscle that led from it, liking where they took her.
And from that first night they were in one another’s mind and heart steadily, talking often on the telephone and driving long hours to be with one another. Lilly found ways to go into the mountains for at least one trip each summer, and when he could, Ty would find a way to hear her sing, his nights at the Deerlodge fewer and fewer.
Lars and Buck had mixed feelings about that. They were pleased to see Ty happy but sad he wasn’t with them, drinking late and explaining why some took to the high country; others found it only something to endure.
“Lilly’s what Ty needs,” Angie would tell them when they complained. “It’s a cold country up there. It never could love him back.”
“You and Cody Jo just want him to love some old girl instead of his mountains,” Buck would answer. “Want your side to win.”
Angie would never take the bait. “All of us worried about him. But we never could see what he needed.”
It wasn’t long before Lilly signed a contract to make a record with all those tunes Ty loved. The recording people saw what a following she had and began sending her off to sing: San Francisco and Seattle, even St. Louis. Ty joined her when he could. He loved to hear her and needed her closeness in ways that surprised him.... And she was glad. She knew she was better when he was in the room.
When they booked her in Sun Valley for the holiday season, she got Ty to drive her there. They even decided to leave early so they could visit Jasper in the rest home in Missoula.
Lilly was as charmed by the stories about Jasper’s cooking sherry as she was by Jasper’s anxieties about bears. She liked the other stories about Montana too, stories about Spec and Fenton and the way Cody Jo taught Ty to dance up in the Swan, about how he came to take the Haslams on their honeymoon.
“I’m glad we’re going,” she’d said after her last set at the lodge. “It’s where you started. It’ll have things to tell you.”
“I might not like what it has to say.”
“That doesn’t matter.You are what it has to say.”
“You might not like that.”
“I will. That’s why you love me. I’m not afraid of your past.”
They talked and laughed their way through the high desert, stopping at a hotel in Elko with a huge stuffed bear in the lobby, laughing even more when Lilly played twenty-one for half the night and came away five dollars ahead. Everything seemed funny until they crossed Lost Trail Pass and dropped into the Bitterroot. Ty grew quiet then, watchful, though he almost drove past the Missouri Bar, a grocery store now with a “Special of the Week” sign and paved parking.
But he remembered the country, and when they came to the Hardins’ turnoff he drove out across the rutted road to look at the house. He was almost on the site before he realized it was gone, had been for so long that the foundation was hard to find. He tried to remember where the rooms had been, the kitchen and the porch and the cold bedrooms. But it was hard to tell. After awhile he led Lilly down the weed-choked path to the barn. The roof had caved in over the shed, all the shingles blown off by winter storms. The corrals were gone too, the rails collapsed and tangled in the same rusted baling wire that once held them up.
A solemn-looking boy came by on a tractor. Ty learned from him that they’d taken the old house, board by board, up to the big outfit’s headquarters, put it back together to use as a saddle shed.
“He says things changed a lot when they started dude ranching,” the boy said.
“Who says?”
“Granddad.” The boy studied them. “We keep a few cows. To look at.”
Missoula had changed too. The outfitters’ shops were fly-fishing stores now, with sign-up lists for float trips and llama trips and guided hikes in the Bitterroot. Ty saw hardly any old-timers along the streets or in the stores. Mostly he saw young people, boys in short pants riding bikes, ponytails flying out behind them. Girls in shorts too, or little skirts, coming out of the stores and hurrying along the street with day packs full of books.
Ty wanted to stay in the old Wilma Hotel, right on the river, but it was for students. A girl with her arms full of bo
oks sent them off to a motel on the outskirts of town. Ty put their things in and took Lilly to the cemetery. He wanted to show her where Willie was buried right away so it would fade behind whatever else they did. Willie’s death, the child’s death, might spiral Lilly down into one of her moods.
They put flowers on the grave, on his mother’s too, Will buried there with her now. He tried to picture them, but all he could remember was their talking about how to make it through one winter so they could get ready for the next. He even had a hard time picturing Willie, the tombstone blotting out all that energy she brought to life.
Ty was glad to have Lilly holding his arm, and glad to hurry off to find Jasper, both of them amused that the home was called “The Grizzly Den.”
Jasper seemed to take it right in stride. “Bout as likely to find a bear here as somethin’ to drink.” He examined the bottle of sherry Ty had bought him. “Like old times, Ty. Reminds me of when you stayed out in the woods most all night.” Jasper turned the bottle in his hands, the past moving in.
“Could have brought a little more.” Jasper’s eyes got watery. “Buck would of. Or visit more. It’s been almost a year.”
Jasper was well into his nineties, but confusion about the years— and being cold most of the time—were the only sure signs of it. It was more like fifteen years since Ty had seen him, and that was back in the Deerlodge when they had to get him drunk so he’d get on the bus for Missoula. Jasper unwrapped the scarf around his neck, wrapped it still tighter.
“Truth is it ain’t so bad, Ty.” He patted the scarf to get it settled. “She does right good for me. Pours me a glass or two each night.” He looked around his little room, only one chair there, pulled close to a tiny and silent television set where a host with perfectly combed hair talked with two earnest-looking teenagers. “Sometimes she even takes me down to the Elkhorn. Some of them boys still bend an elbow.” “Who’s she?”
“Her.” Jasper motioned at a round woman who’d suddenly appeared in the doorway. Ty thought she might actually be as wide as she was tall.
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