by Jim Harrison
Sarah had heard this before and knew it meant that if a man fooled with a fifteen-year-old girl he could do prison time at Deer Lodge though this was less likely out in the country than in the city. She felt curiously flattered that someone might want her though nearly every man did but she wasn’t conscious of it. It was different anyway from the day before when a hideous, dirty creep setting up the merry-go-round told her that he wanted to go down on her, an act she had heard about but did not yet comprehend.
After her drink in the dark and looking back at the yellow square of light made by the big open door of the dance hall she was overwhelmed by loneliness for Tim because the band was playing Bob Wills’s “San Antonio Rose” which was Tim’s favorite. She swallowed a sob and hurried to her campsite in the heifer barn, confused that the drink had made her forlorn rather than relaxed. Her bookish friend Terry had given her the novel Light in August and she had just begun the book but felt like the girl Lena standing on the side of the dirt road. She paused outside the barn to try to vomit up the last drink but couldn’t do it. She got in her sleeping bag and slept the sleep of the dead. In the middle of the night for a moment she heard Priscilla on the other side of the box stall with a boy but drifted back to sleep remembering back in Findlay one summer day when Brother had taught her to roller-skate.
At first light she was up and had saddled Lad. Her intention was to school him after his naughtiness. On the way out of the fairgrounds she paused seeing Karl the fiddler sleeping facedown in the dirt under a cottonwood near a travel trailer. She wondered how someone could get so wiped out on whatever, likely a combination, that he would collapse facedown in the dirt unable to make himself comfortable as an ordinary pig would. Tim had told her that such people are unhappy in their skin which was simple enough.
She rode in new country which exhilarated her, even letting Lad chase a jackrabbit on a sagebrush flat, something he had learned from Rover. It was a deliriously cool early morning on a day that was to be hot and she was amazed at the way the weather could change the mood. She turned up a two-track that led into a forested mountainside listening to the profusion of birds. It was all perfect except for a slight ball of fuzz in her head so she got off Lad and led him up the mountainside to see if her exertion would pump out the remains of alcohol. She thought of the old gossip she had heard before they left Findlay how the police had found her father’s first alcoholic wife naked in a public park at midnight with some teenage boys.
Her spirits were fairly high when she got back to the fairgrounds a couple hours later noting that Karl was still facedown under the cottonwood but his partner, the bass player, was drinking a morning beer on the trailer steps. This was the last day of the fair and they were breaking down the vegetable exhibits to avoid spoilage. Sarah gave her display to a woman who lived down the road near their home with her hired-hand husband and four children in a rickety pole barn.
She ran into her new acquaintances, Marcia and Noreen from the girls’ hunting club, and the three of them drove over to a stream a few miles away and went swimming. Marcia had a boom box that worked off the cigarette lighter, a couple of six-packs on ice, and some baloney sandwiches, a regular Montana picnic. It was very hot and Sarah came off the wagon she had decided on that morning and kept up with the other two girls in the beer drinking. They sang along with Jagger’s “Honky Tonk Women” while skinny-dipping. They finished the beer and went back to the fairgrounds where a local bluegrass band was playing. Sarah danced with a half dozen cowboys insistently pushing their hands off her bottom. She also had a few sips from whiskey bottles she didn’t need. Karl showed up not completely revived from whatever he had done the night before, his eyes cold and glittery. He was an amazingly good dancer but they became tired and went over to her camp spot to rest with Priscilla and the bass player who she seemed not to like. Everyone else was outside in the gathering dark waiting for the fireworks. Karl got fresh and despite his size she was able to push him away. The bass player was in the dimly lit corner of the box stall making drinks from his shoulder satchel. Sarah said she only wanted water and he drew some from a corner faucet. They toasted the first of the fireworks glowing through the dirty window. Within a minute Sarah was floating down a black hole which in her unconscious delirium she thought of as one of the uncovered abandoned mines in the area. One of the nicknames of ketamine is actually “black hole.” Karl had gotten the drug from a veterinarian to help subdue rank horses for hauling. A minute quantity and you could fuck any resistant girl. He couldn’t get a hard-on because of his drugs and alcohol but he thought a piece of ass is a piece of ass whatever happened. Going down is going down and is better than nothing. He actually chewed. He and the bass player made short work, as it were, then packed up and headed back to Billings.
Sarah woke up with a headache and nausea a few hours later, her shirt pushed up to her neck and her jeans and panties twisted around her ankles. Priscilla was crying in the corner her chest covered with vomit. Sarah pulled on her clothes and took out the big jackknife Priscilla kept for protection. It had begun to rain as she walked toward Karl’s trailer with the blade open. She was without doubt that she would kill him but the truck and trailer were gone. Her vagina felt raw and ached and her breasts mauled.
Chapter 6
She ran in the early mornings, never having run much before. It relieved her mind. Rover and Lad ran with her though Rover was obnoxious and forced Lad to run behind them in an orderly fashion.
She bought an upright piano for seven hundred bucks with some of Tim’s cash. Her father was upset that she had bought a piano without his permission and she asked why. “I don’t know,” he said. He wearied of her hours of playing so she had a group of 4-H boys move the piano up to Tim’s porch where it would stay until the late summer and early fall weather turned bad. There was a porch light for when she played in the dark but she only used the light when playing a piece she didn’t know well or learning a new one. Other than this she preferred to play in the dark where the music would envelope her pleasantly in the soft arms of the night.
The piano and running were the only things that lessened the intensity of the ache in her heart and mind. The first few days she couldn’t figure out the soreness of her pubis and then it occurred to her that Karl must have been chewing on her vulva. She checked in the mirror and saw that her hymen was intact and noted that many hairs had been uprooted. The last image she could remember before the ketamine totally hit was that Karl had forced her knees back against her chest and was fiddling with his large but limp penis, his face looked strangled. She planned without afflatus on shooting him one day but only when she could get away with it. She had no intention of further damaging her own life. Her gun club friend Marcia had a .22-250 she used for shooting prairie dogs which she could hit at four hundred yards. When the bullet hit the prairie dog’s head it was called “red mist.” She imagined the impact on Karl’s head with satisfaction. If he would do that to a girl he plainly deserved to die.
By the time school started she and Priscilla had drifted apart perhaps understandably because the shared pain was unbearable. Priscilla took to drinking in the mornings and her mother Giselle had to enter her in an alcohol rehabilitation clinic for teenagers in Helena. Sarah’s burgeoning friendship with Marcia helped. In lieu of the oncoming hunting season the three of them, Sarah, Marcia, and Marcia’s diminutive friend Noreen, who was moment by moment pissed off, would go out to the rifle range twice a week to practice. There was something mindlessly cleansing about shooting at a target that was an outline of a deer at varying distances from one hundred to three hundred yards.
Her other friend was the bookish young man with a clubfoot, Terry. For obvious reasons she no longer was interested in distinctly male writers and began reading Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, and Katherine Anne Porter but also the more modern Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro. She had long since decided that if she were to endure her secret she would have to summon up all her resources. She deviously joined th
e Bible Club. She knew all of the evangelical lingo from her mother Peppy but the sole reason was to throw off her scent for all of the high school boys. They quickly believed that she was “real religious” and that none of them was going to get close to her body. Her distance irritated them so they snubbed her.
There were certain friendship problems because Terry was infatuated with Sarah, and Marcia who was a half a foot taller than Terry was infatuated with him. Her affection seemed odd to Sarah but Marcia said that her dad and three brothers were “blowhard jerk-offs” and Terry was a gentleman. Marcia also said that she knew that all the young cowboys that bird-dogged her only did so because her dad had the biggest and best ranch in the county. Montana most certainly wasn’t the land of opportunity and if a young man or young woman attached themselves to a big ranch they shot up the social scale.
What bothered Sarah most was that her personality began to develop in fixed ways. She had lost her whimsy she thought, and her imagination was dullish except when it was carried away by music and even then it wasn’t as expansive as before the rape. One Sunday afternoon on a lovely Indian summer day she ran up to her secret canyon with Lad and Rover in tow, sat down on a boulder, and wept. This was the first time she had wept since the event some ninety days before and as she cried she felt her insides convulse over the ugliness in people. She wondered how she could possibly accommodate what had happened to her life. She had no choice but to live around it. Rover was upset with her weeping and pranced around as if to coax her out of it. She spoke sharply to the dog which she never did and Rover sulked away and settled under a juniper. She yelled, “Goddamn God,” and ran as fast as she could on a steep trail up the mountain until she was sure her hurt would burst and then she would be done with it.
She began inevitably to look at males as another species. And not that she could summon up any special admiration for women. Her mother, for instance. She would get postcards from Peppy that were relentlessly inane. “It looks like Clyde and me are going to shop for a condo in Maui” or “The governor came to dinner and I was proud as punch to be sitting at the table with this great Republican.” Peppy was a virtual parody of a nitwit but then perhaps she was better than nothing because Sarah’s father was bitterly lonely.
Sarah took to rating men and few could pass through the eye of her cultural needle. Of course there was her hyperliterate pal Terry and her biology teacher, an eager young recent graduate of Montana State University in Bozeman. His enthusiasm for botany, chemistry, and biology was infective for even his simplest-minded students of which there were many. She knew that he had a fresh eye for her but that was merely a fact of life and didn’t mean he was a rapist. And then there was her taciturn father who was an acceptable taciturn father.
One Saturday she went over to Terry’s for lunch. The pump shed and kitchen were normal but the rest of the house was rather grand as if transplanted from New England. His father and brother were away for the fall cattle sale but Terry wanted her to meet his mother. Her name was Tessa and she came from Duxbury, Massachusetts, had gone to Smith College, and had met Terry’s father who was a wrangler at a dude ranch she had visited with her parents. Sarah had heard the gossip that it was her money that thirty years ago had bought the present ranch, a wedding gift from her father.
It was the library that dumbfounded Sarah. There were thousands of books, floor to ceiling, and a moving ladder to get at the upper shelves. She misted her eyes so that all the muted-colored book jackets looked like a landscape painting. Tessa never attended any school or 4-H functions so Sarah heard her voice and its rather alien eastern accent as if she were from a foreign country. She had seen her from a distance jumping a horse over a wooden corral fence in an English saddle which was breathtaking. As Sarah stood in the library Tessa rattled on while Terry was off in a corner looking embarrassed and pretending to search for something. Tessa’s voice was slightly slurred like Priscilla’s mother Giselle when she was taking tranqs to get over a boyfriend. “Excuse my vulgarity but Montana is a dick place and my response is reading but then it was also my peculiar response in Massachusetts.” She held out her hands as if helpless and Sarah reflected that maybe all the women she knew talked the same way because they had the same things to say. “I spend a month a year in San Francisco with my sister and a month in Boston just to keep tuned to the actual world. Out here it’s all staring at cow’s asses. I know Terry never gives you any poetry to read because around this country deep feelings are an embarrassment.”
When Sarah left her head was a knot of pleasant confusion. In this remote part of Montana it was easy to forget there were all kinds of people that you only knew from reading or listening to NPR. She hadn’t been able to relate to television since her childhood Sesame Street, Lassie, and Walt Disney. When she left the lunch which had been comically dismal she carried Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium and Hart Crane’s The Bridge. Tessa had told her that she was welcome to use the library when she wished and that way she wouldn’t be guided by Terry’s taste. Terry, for instance, loathed Jane Austen. The next day, Sunday, she would go riding with Tessa who wanted to show her a spring creek at the back of their ranch. When Terry walked her out to her truck he apologized for his mother’s eccentricities saying she drank too much wine and took too many pills. This irritated Sarah who said she thought his mother was fine. He became downcast so she gave his hand a squeeze.
Sarah knew that her main struggle had to be against a specific dullness that kept creeping into her mind which she knew was an incipient depression. The good thing about meeting Tessa was that it opened up ways to be like her rarely seen aunt Rebecca who was an astronomer in Arizona. She knew at fifteen that if there was a place for her in the world she would have to determine it as opposed to certain characters in fiction and Tessa whose place was determined by their family’s wealth. Of the thirteen girls in her class only three hoped to go to college and four wanted to be stewardesses because they wanted to travel. The other six wanted to marry and stay right where they were.
Chapter 7
“You’ve been so quiet. What are you thinking about?” Tessa asked.
“Shooting someone,” Sarah said blankly before she could catch herself.
“We’ve all killed others in our minds,” Tessa laughed, “but they don’t serve wine in American prisons. How horrid.”
They sat down on a shelf rock near the spring and watched small brook trout swim lazily around the pool. She had left Rover at home and a ride without Rover didn’t seem right. Tessa was prattling about how Sarah should go east to college to a place like Smith and she was sure scholarships were available. Sarah, meanwhile, was thinking she couldn’t go anywhere to college without her dog and horse. She also thought that she would shoot Karl during hunting season when gunshots wouldn’t be out of the ordinary.
Things began to come in a rush a few days before the antelope-hunting trip. Terry desperately wanted to go along and the girls couldn’t make up their minds. Sarah and her father Frank were called in for a meeting with the school principal and the guidance counselor who both felt the school was holding Sarah back. They had never had a student like her and proposed to graduate her the following spring. She would be sixteen the following summer and that was likely old enough to go off to college.
They were in the principal’s office and the man shoved a term paper across the desk. The principal was a pleasant man but was a bachelor with a singsongy voice and many of the high school boys joked that he might be “light in his loafers.” The term paper had emerged from the usual banal high school assignment but Sarah’s, “Why I Intend to Become a Metallurgist Rather Than a Novelist,” was certainly one of a kind locally. Frank looked at it hastily noting with approval his daughter’s excitement about the nature of metals got from his own beginning textbook on metallurgy from Purdue and also her quote from Bell’s Men of Mathematics. He quickly passed over the material about becoming a novelist because he never read fiction and even nonfiction could sink him into a r
age. Caputo’s A Rumor of War was one of the main reasons he moved from Findlay to Montana, the thought of his boyhood friend dying in vain in Vietnam driving him close to the edge. Sarah wrote that she loved reading novels because the emotional lives of characters “supplanted” her concern for her own. Many days she felt unable to carry the weight of her own life and it was wonderful to take refuge in books. She couldn’t become a novelist like her friend Terry intended because every day is the end of life as we know it and she needed the solidity of the sciences to endure it.
The guidance counselor said that Sarah might need counseling for this melancholy way of thinking and the principal said, “Nonsense.” The room was cool with a November wind rattling the windows but Sarah felt hollow with sweat rising on her forehead. She had finally made it into public school and now they were bent on getting rid of her. The rule of thumb of older people was to relentlessly manipulate those who were younger. The other day the homely guidance counselor who was in her thirties and thin on top and heavy on the bottom had said to her that it was “hard to be pretty and smart” because “you got it all.” Sarah didn’t bother asking this woman to explain because she disliked her generally patronizing attitude.
On the drive home Frank mused aloud that though he loved Montana because it felt like the 1950s it could be a little difficult for a young person to get ready for the real world unless they were going to stay in Montana. Then he mentioned that a woman was coming to visit him and said he hoped Sarah wouldn’t mind. Of course she minded but why say so? One more discordant item in her mental stew pot would scarcely help but then right now in her father’s truck she was rehearsing the venison meat loaf she was cooking for dinner. Marcia was coming over for dinner to make last-minute plans for the antelope-hunting trip. Sarah’s feeling of hollowness had entered her head and looking at her father she wondered if he had those empty cold spaces in his mind full of metallic question marks or was his mind full and smooth?