On the ground, the man’s face was turned away. A frail ankle showed between the cuff of his pants and the top of a filthy sneaker. He remained still save for an occasional shuddering twitch.
“Is he crying?” one of the volleyball girls asked. As soon as she said it, Ruthie realized it was true, and a fog settled over the aisles of chips and juice and canned soup. The buff guy looked up at the ceiling. The body beneath him shook. Ruthie wanted to go and shove him off, but who knew, maybe he’d been right. Maybe the man was dangerous, unhinged. A shooter, as she’d thought only minutes before. But the sight of him pressed into the linoleum shuddering in his rags was like a portal opening in the ground through which the most terrible darkness streamed forth, and Ruthie had to look away.
ANGER. IT GREW IN RUTHIE’S CHEST as the police—two deputies nearly as young as Badger had been when he started—handcuffed the homeless man and yanked him to his feet. It grew as she watched them lead him from the store, gripping his arm above the elbow, forcing him to march quickly, his head down, the fluorescent light glinting off his tear-stained cheeks.
Ruthie wanted to apologize. Offer bail money, a place to stay. She could give him her entire house. He could sleep below Wild Woman with Tame Horses, clean himself in her shower, wear her old clothes, take over her job at the Montana Café. Flirt with the other old men and complain about the tourists to Cook. All while she slept in the mansion.
No longer the hero, the buff guy got back in line, sheepish but also defiant, his chest out, his recently activated muscles taut against his tan skin. If anyone had said anything he would’ve shouted back. But no one did. The three teenage girls stared at him with a mixture of attraction and revulsion.
Ruthie began to unload her cart, smacking each cold box onto the black conveyor. She had convinced herself Sitka was protecting her—that he’d only left so he wouldn’t hurt her—but she was starting to wonder whether any of it had been real. She was afraid he’d come to occupy the same part of her mind as the winged skeleton and the headless creature: fleeting visions that grew less trustworthy over time. She crammed more boxes on, dislodging the bar that separated her items from the girls’.
The checker glanced back disapprovingly. Beneath the shaggy hair, he was the kind of tall, skinny, twenty-year-old boy who always appears drowsy, as if he wouldn’t fully wake up for several more years. For some males, the emergence from the womb wasn’t complete until late in the third decade. Ruthie thought of several cutting things to say but they all involved residing in one’s parents’ basement, which was hardly even embarrassing anymore. Reluctantly, she pulled back the offending items, arranged them into rows, and waited for more conveyor real estate before adding the rest.
A poinsettia drooped atop the register. It reminded Ruthie not of Christmas but of her own loneliness. She pictured seizing the plant and hurling it at the table of cupcakes. The girls were huddled around the credit card reader, gazing at the checker as he rang up their soda and candy. He was ignoring them, instead casting glances at Kiley in the next lane. She had petite features, dark bags under her eyes, dyed maroon hair, and a lip ring. Ruthie touched the old hole in her lip with her tongue. At least kids were still doing the same stupid things: chasing each other around, getting piercings. She saw a gob of green spit on white sheets and wanted to laugh.
“I saw that guy here last week,” the checker said to Kiley, handing across the final girl’s receipt and continuing to ignore her as she hip-swayed out the door. “On the curb in front. I know it was him. He had a dog, though.”
Kiley nodded. “I saw him, too. He was there all afternoon. Bert even brought him some day-olds since it was so cold. There’s more and more of them.”
“It was big, like a pit bull. He had it tied to the bike rack with a piece of cardboard to sit on.”
“They probably bused him here from Bozeman. My dad says that’s what they do with all the crazies there.”
“No way. You can’t get a dog like that on a bus. Besides, he said he was from here.”
Kiley looked miffed at this rebuttal. “He said a lot of things.”
Ruthie listened with rising disbelief. She rapped her knuckles on the credit card reader. “Excuse me. I’m waiting here.”
“Hi, Ruthie,” Kiley said, and turned back to her next customer.
SECONDHAND LIGHT from the store weakly illuminated the sidewalk. A group of ragged men stood shivering and smoking in the shadowed corner by the street. Hunched together in tattered coats, they looked identical to the one who’d been taken away. A chain of carts pointed toward them below Super 1’s ad-plastered windows. No dog, at least not that Ruthie could see. Maybe the cops had taken it. It would do Badger some good. He still hadn’t been able to impregnate Janine, and people whispered that she was ready to leave him. He looked more slumped and dispirited than ever. Ruthie carried her bags into the darkness of the lot.
The air was freezing with the faint, crisp smell of distant snow. In her peripheral vision, Ruthie saw one of the men toss his cigarette onto the pavement and break away from the group. The moon shone overhead like a pale commandment. Instinctively, Ruthie sped up. She scanned the shadowed edges of the lot for the shape of a dog. She remembered Moses running down the hill from Happel’s after the earthquake. Multiple dog generations ago. An entire testament. Her truck was two rows over and a half dozen back amid an unbroken line of cars.
People, people everywhere.
Spindly, new-planted maples ringed the lot and lined the dirt divider in the center. All the new construction seemed rushed and shoddy, as if the developers were racing against a crash. The man moved between the saplings without seeming to move at all. A gliding shadow, visible yet spectral. He was making for the woods behind the store—not following her—but still she felt her palms grow clammy holding the grocery bags. What if all the homeless men were rising up? They had every right. Ruthie couldn’t remember ever helping one of them.
The Bitterroot Mountains were cut black from the western sky. The clouds drifting around their peaks had a vaporous, ethereal cast, as if they were seeping from a cosmic swamp. She stopped at the door of her truck. She thought of the kindness around Sitka’s eyes, and how he’d set his palm on her cheek when she was upset. Sometimes when she woke up in his bed in the mansion she still felt him there, the weight of his arm across her chest. She clung to these precious seconds in the dark. She set the bags down and dug through her pocket for her keys, glancing to the side to see the man passing out of the lot. She felt a presence behind her and knew it wasn’t Sitka but imagined it was, his figure hulking over the pavement, his tree-trunk arms reaching out to her.
Slowly, she turned around.
The pit bull looked up cautiously. His head was lowered and his hindquarters were raised, asking if his presence in Darby, Montana, Planet Earth, was acceptable. A small scar marked the white fur beneath his left eye. The right was surrounded by the short brown fur that covered the rest of his body. Ribs showed on his sides. His stump tail wagged.
Without thinking, Ruthie fell into a crouch and held out her arms. “Here, boy,” she said. The dog raised his head happily and stepped forward. His mouth fell open, his pink tongue fell out. “Who are you?”
He slapped her cheek with his tongue’s wetness. It was the first smile she’d registered in months.
33.
That spring, mountain goats came down to lick salt from the highway in Darby. They stopped traffic all the way to the Lake Como turn. The old men gathered to squint and hock in the morning sun, as if summoned. Ruthie watched in her apron from inside the Montana Café. She’d only ever seen the goats in the high country. They were more handsome than the men. White shaggy heads bent, winter coats falling out, patchy, near-ragged, determined pink tongues. A great patience for licking. Strange, cracked-agate eyes hunting out the particles amid the viscous shimmer of gasoline.
Trapped behind the counter, with her pad, pen, and a familiar dryness in her throat, Ruthie wished she were home wi
th Pharaoh. She’d brought him to the police station the day after she found him, but the homeless man was gone and hadn’t said anything about a dog, so she’d adopted him and named him in tribute to Moses. He’d taken over Sitka’s mansion completely: bounding down the long hallways, scratching the wood floor, nudging all the throw pillows into a nest on the couch, covering everything in fine brown hairs. Filling the long, quiet evenings with rambunctious sound.
Customers chattered back and forth about why the goats were here. The usual, everyday apocalypses. Her father claimed there was a time when no traffic of any kind passed through Darby. Ruthie longed for it. She longed to walk among the goats. Speak goat. Spread salt by the fistful. Lead them like a shepherd back up into the mountains.
“Wouldn’t catch me licking no road,” Pip said, from the counter. She’d appeared along with the goats that morning, after a weeklong absence. Ruthie tried to picture it. Pip’s bony rump skyward, her tongue extending. Finding its tender place among the gravel. Tasting salt, pavement, and Indian bones. Diners shifted. Pip’s eyes flicked around. Ruthie wondered where she’d been. It was unlike her friend to leave town for so long without telling her where she was going. The old men stared on, sucking their teeth, belt buckles glinting, eyes screwed with suspicion. On the other side of the order window, Cook observed his daily prayer to the deep fryer. Only Terry and Billy French, leaning together at the table by the window, seemed to find humor in the situation. They grinned back and forth over their scrambled eggs.
“Too much traffic to get to work,” Terry said, when Ruthie refilled his coffee.
“They followed me through town on my way here,” Billy said. “Like I was some kind of salt lick. Kept bumping my ass.” He clinked his wedding ring against the edge of the table, a proud habit ever since his marriage to Dawn.
In the road, Sheriff Badger arrived. Recently elected, rumored impotent—his popularity tied to people feeling sorry for him. Don Kima had retired to his cabin in the Absarokas. Badger clambered heavily from his angled cruiser and surveyed the goats. Slump-shouldered, planless. He took off his hat and waved it. Stamped his boots. Shooing the goats as if they were flies. Sunlight a tragic burst on his bald spot. His heavy frame paltry before the line of cars. Ruthie was surprised to find a soft place for him again, after all the years. The shiny patch on his head, his desperate consternation. She saw the boy on the threshold of her father’s room with his fists clenched at his sides. He flapped his arms. Shouted. Finally, a large female goat spooked and the rest of the herd bolted after her. To the gap in the high school fence. They funneled through, stopped on the baseball diamond, and clustered around the kids, looking back wistfully at a fine meal lost.
Badger replaced his hat, turned in a circle, caught Ruthie’s eye, and looked quickly away. The old men in the street hitched their belts and spat, unimpressed. Why hadn’t one of them done the shooing? They’d aged into pure judgment. Remembering their own fathers, who could knock a duck out of the air with a whiskey bottle. Cars began to move. A lone honk. Tourists craned from passenger seats, cell phones held aloft. Children screamed from the backseat, “Let me see, let me see.” The last time Darby had standstill traffic was two years before, when Happel’s cow trailer tipped, full of heifers. M. Happel still unlucky: his wife gone to Europe, his trailer upside down in a ditch.
The hooked finger of Trapper Peak beckoned as it had since Ruthie was a girl. Pip motioned her over to the counter. She glanced around furtively, guarding a secret. All the other customers were engrossed in the continuing tide of goat talk. Satisfied, Pip rose from her stool. She cupped her hand over Ruthie’s ear and whispered, “I’m pregnant.”
All other sounds in the diner ceased. Ruthie nearly dropped the dirty plates in her hand.
“I went to Delilah’s clinic in Spokane to make sure.”
Ruthie had assumed she was off in the mountains. Her mind stumbled over itself with questions and possibilities. She felt overwhelmed. She’d known Pip wanted a child, but hadn’t thought she’d actually do it. “Whose is it?” she whispered back.
Pip smiled. “It’s mine,” she said. “All mine.”
A MAN AT THE SAWMILL BAR told Ruthie once about a button. You push it and half the world dies. Asked: Do you push it? She’d answered yes so quick it froze him, openmouthed. A new wariness in his eyes. Men always think they’re the tough ones until they realize they aren’t. Then they scramble around for their boots, underwear, mothers.
Cook rang the kitchen bell. He hummed to himself as he worked, as if goat-clogged roads and snowless mountains were common to his experience. Still dazed, Ruthie collected the dish of Denver omelet, bacon, and useless orange slice from the order window. Pregnant? She was surprised by how hurt she felt. Sitka had left, and now Pip was leaving, too, in her own way. Pushing a tiny, helpless version of herself out into the world, then leaving Ruthie behind to look after it for eighteen years.
The old men lined in through the café door. They tipped their puckered heads at the SPECIALS board: taco omelet and turkey chili, same as every other Friday. The streams of monosyllables issuing from their gummy mouths ran into one another. “Hep no snow for ’em don’t know the last time I saw it. Bud’s dog drug up warm clay.” Blindly yapping, they took the long table in the center. “Warm clay? Caught Len’s sheep at a phone pole licking sweat.”
Ruthie felt like she was treading water. Remembering to breathe.
Pip swiveled toward the old men in her short pants, her white thighs beaming. She seemed emboldened, in a new fullness of herself. Ruthie felt a pang of jealousy. Pip nodded out at the goats now milling in the playground. “Gum their teeth down to nubs on the rocks,” she said. “It kills them in the end.” A flash of sadness darkened her eyes. “I saw one once, toothless on St. Mary’s Peak, looking around for a place to die.” The old men humphed and nodded, not wanting to glimpse themselves in this recollection.
Ruthie poured their coffee. Kept her attention on the cups. Aware of sliding glances, sweaty hat band indentations, dandruff. Suntanned wrists, upper arms white as cream, occasional turquoise jewelry. Gnarled fingers longing to nip her on the buns. Just a pinch, enough to get an old man through the long, hot afternoon. She fought to hold her face blank. A mother, she thought.
The goats had assembled by the jungle gym, oblivious. Licking the shining red paint. Searching for old palm prints and sweaty finger holds. A summer-come-early treat beneath the snowless mountains. Ruthie wondered if she could have lured them down, as she had with the otters when she was a girl.
THE TOURISTS HAD CLEARED, old men cleared, even Pip had gone on home. Only Badger persisted. Ruthie had left the coffeepot on the table at his elbow twenty minutes before, to go cold. But he’d been staring into the same cup. One arm hooked over his chair, hat on the table across from him, his sleeves rumpled, a digital watch that you couldn’t buy anymore. He should’ve been out shooting road signs and pulling over blondes, like any other Montana cop.
“We could switch,” Ruthie said, from her stool by the cash register. “You give me the badge and gun, I give you the apron. Sit there as long as you want. Just stick your ass out if anybody comes in. Cook’ll do the rest.”
He blinked at her. Rumpier than she remembered, and the bald spot growing. There’d been so much more of him in the chest back when, but his face had softened. Janine—with her suitcases full of Mary Kay makeup, pink bobbed hair, and endless projects—was turning him to mush. The type you’d find weeping between snowmobiles in the garage at night.
“I’m on goat patrol,” Badger said. “You going to make me sit in the car?”
“You’re the one with the gun.”
He sighed, his mind stuck. “They shouldn’t be down here, Ruthie.” He bunched his lips and looked at her, trembly. “Think they’re starving up there in the high country? Got no food left?”
Ruthie had her own problems. “Go on and check. See if the Goat-Mart closed. The Goat Bell, Goat Wendy’s.”
“Oh, you’
re a hard one.” Badger lowered his head.
“Tell you what, I’ll go as soon as you clear out. Bring them egg scraps and bacon fat, a whole bushel of salt. Whatever Cook allows.” She kicked her heel back against the metal leg of the stool. A dull ringing sound. “Hear that? Catch the goat bus now.”
“Oh sure,” he said, unfolding himself from his chair. “A hard one, Ruthie Fear. You’ll outlive us all.” He reached for the crumpled hat and straightened his gun. Chucked a burr from his sleeve. Left a dollar and several dimes on the table and headed out to the goats.
WHITE TUFTS OF HAIR twitched on the gravel. Riddled up against the curb, effluvium of invisible tide. Goat smell, too, a deep musk. Not entirely unpleasant. Ruthie lifted her chin to the sun and let it wash over her. She looked up at the hitch of Squaw Ridge like a belt cinched against the belly of blue sky. How could she be mad at Pip? She wanted her to be happy. To have a love inexhaustible and never-ending. Something Ruthie had never found. A hawk knifed across the hills, caught an updraft, slowed to a float, and was carried up, up, up above the snowless peaks.
Her friend moving on while her own life stayed still.
Badger slumped in his cruiser across the road, fiddling with the radar gun. Cook came outside and stood beside Ruthie. He fished a crumpled pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his apron. Lit one and handed it to her. The thin curl of smoke was a comfort; the dry bitter taste. I have a dog and a mansion, she told herself, but it didn’t help. Sitka had left a hole she didn’t know how to fill. She exhaled, considering Badger’s words. Was she hard? Did hard people feel soft?
She took another drag. Saw in the smoke a foggy mirror of the hair below. Hardly any snow, but enough pale things to go around.
“Perhaps they aren’t starving,” Cook said. “Go to the salt for the minerals.”
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