Prairie Nocturne

by Ivan Doig

  Of course every stitch of a performance night interests me, even the straggly processional of the audience sorting itself into place, and we were going in to our seats early when Mrs. G. looked back over her shoulder and said, “The misters are here.”

  There was a last nimbus of sun going down behind Mount Helena and a moon like a globe lantern waiting to replace it as Wes and Whit climbed out of the big car. Lilacs bloomed, their color deepening with the day, in the hillside neighborhood across the street from the Marlow Theater. Summer on such an evening was slow to step down from the longest day, a week before; dusk and warmth would linger as if night had been temporarily postponed. Because of the time of year Monty’s performance was set for eight-thirty so people could do the necessary for their gardens and lawns, come in from fishing or porch-sitting, round up the musically inclined members of the family, and stroll down the gulch to the theater, men carrying their suit jackets carefully over their arms.

  Whit, though, lodged a complaint to the evening air that seemed to have come in on a tropical tradewind. “Damnedest weather. Still feels like the middle of the afternoon.”

  “Is there any weather you do like?” Wes inquired, genuinely wondering, while he gestured that Whit’s tie was riding cockeyed. “You came back from ten days of California sun complaining it didn’t give you anything to get your teeth into.”

  “This is about as balmy as it was there, and you can’t tell me that’s natural. Gus, I need to fix my choker. Would you—?” As Gustafson held the door of the Duesenberg open at an angle that provided enough reflection, Whit bent down and used the car window as a mirror to adjust his white tie.

  Waiting for him beneath the modernly elegant vertical marquee of the Marlow, Wes took the chance to scan the streets and was reassured to find policemen posted where they ought to be—some up at the corner of Broadway and Last Chance Gulch, others down here at the intersection by the theater—just conspicuous enough. Whit was in the Knights of Columbus with the Helena chief of police, and it had been decided that any dregs of the Klan who showed up to shout epithets were going to find themselves charged with spitting on the sidewalk. Privately Wes believed last summer’s crackdown had sent any of them who counted slinking off to safer climes, tails between their legs, but an extra shift of police should make Monty’s entourage feel better. Right then a lantern-jawed man stepped out of the lobby, took a look around, and nodded to him. One of Bailey’s. They probably were unnecessary too, but wouldn’t hurt either. “What do you think then,” Whit was asking as he gave a last tug at his tie and straightened up, “will Monty add ‘The Palm Trees Sway When You Say I May’ to his list tonight?”

  Wes looked at his brother in surprise. Whit getting off a thigh-slapper over a song of the day was about as likely as Al Jolson making a joke about Herefords. But Whit himself would have been the first to say he was an improved person since the North Fork was offered up. For his part, Wes had stuffed the lease papers into his attaché case before they left the ranch as if the document were any other transaction. Which, pretend to himself as he was trying, it in no way could ever be. He still was working on tomorrow, when the two of them were to meet with Susan in the morning and signatures were to go onto dotted lines. When they pulled up in front of the theater he had glimpsed her for a moment there in the lobby and knew he would be aware of her during every note of Monty’s performance and it still seemed beyond reckoning that a bumpy encounter in France had led all the way to this. And Monty at the heart of it. In tribute to that he started into the theater, but Whit rerouted him with a shoo of the hand.

  “Let’s hold on out here a minute—we’re in for more culture than I can usually sit through. Condemned man always is given a chance to roll a last one, isn’t he?” He pulled a tobacco pouch and pack of rolling papers out of the pocket of his evening wear, did a judicious sprinkle, and licked together a cigarette.

  While Wes withdrew into his thoughts, which he never seemed to want company on, Whit let out a silent whistle of smoke as he studied the theater placard studded with the most glowing phrases from the review in the New York World. Half the newspapers in Montana had picked up that review. He shook his head at having had so famous a choreboy. “Do it all over again, would you?”

  Wes chose to misunderstand. “What, every particle of my life?”

  “How about one or two of the main chunks here lately?” Whit invited.

  “What’s turned you philosophical?”

  “Ahh, who knows. Told you it’s funny weather.” Whit tossed down his cigarette and demolished it under his patent leather shoe. “All right, let’s go get music in our ears. Here’s hoping his Montana debut turns out better than his mother’s.”

  Wes said flatly, “It’s bound to.”

  You can sometimes tell what an audience is like beforehand. This one was curious, perhaps a bit—Susan waited, pen nib poised, for the right sharpening of word—anxious. Monty’s songs would be as new to them as an underground stream suddenly pouring up out of the ground. My sense was that they wanted Monty to be the real thing, to be someone who had made it to on high, from their midst.

  There was the curtain motion, the flutter, that happens not long before a performance.

  “Five minutes, Mister Rathbun,” came the call and short rapid tattoo of rap on his dressing room door that seemed to be delivered by the same set of vocal cords and knuckles in every theater in the land.

  “Be right there, thanks,” Monty responded and checked in the mirror one last time. Meeting there a version of himself so fitted out in distinction and determination that the apparition looked primed to perform the concert from that spot in the dressing room and be heard in the dusk-curtained canyons of the Rockies all the way to the Two Medicine country. Out across the reach of prairie, bounded only by the moon, to Fort Assinniboine. Into the winding country of memory, where his mother lifts from her laundress chores and prepares herself to sing at the statehood celebration, in a yesterday that never came, three dozen years ago. He nodded satisfaction at the personage in the looking-glass as if catching up with him after all this time.

  Exultant, he went on out to the back of the stage and around to the wing and the stage manager’s roost. Even yet he didn’t care much for the feel of backstage, it amounted to about the same as the chute area in a rodeo: you hoped nobody did anything back here that would have untoward consequences to you out front. But he thought of how Susan loved every guy rope, dust mote, and gizmo trunk of it, and had an abrupt word with himself for not working it out to invite her to watch from the wings tonight. Could have asked the Gustafsons and she’d have been included as if attached to them, that would have been the way. Can’t get it all right all the time.

  Within whispering range of the stage manager, J.J. was at his usual perch on a high stool too big for him, like a natty flagpole sitter. A figure planted in the shadows beyond J.J. and the stage manager and a couple of stagehands was as unmoving as a costume mannequin, but the set of its hat identified it as Bailey. Monty knew that one of the bruisers was stationed at the back door, and if all this didn’t reassure J.J. and Cecil, he didn’t know what would.

  “Good house tonight,” J.J. recited to Monty as he always did, whatever the audience size.

  Monty stepped out onto the curtained stage to check that his music stand was on the mark, then made a beeline for the stage manager’s peephole.

  J.J. was not stretching it tonight; a sellout crowd, packed from the front row to standees along the farthest wall. What seemed to be Clore Street intact filled one entire balcony. He spotted Susan beside the Gustafsons. A row behind and a few seats over, the Major and Whit Williamson in full evening regalia, one slick and one mussed but otherwise drawn by the same hand.

  “One minute,” the stage manager called, nervously watching Cecil, who was still fussing with his music sheets in the rack for them on the piano, moving them an inch one way and then the other, although Monty seriously doubted music racks differed very much from piano to
piano. But as he always did, with seconds to spare Cecil sashayed over into the wing alongside the rest of them as if the curtain could not rise without his elevating presence, the first bow of the evening deliciously his.

  The accompanist sopped up applause somewhat overlong, Susan jabbed the comma in as if it were a thumb in Cecil’s ribs, bobbing like one of those toy birds that dips its beak in a glass of water. But then Monty made his appearance, and the real applause started.

  As he came out I saw that he had been right to resist my attempts to cure his walk—that cowboy saunter of his lets the audience know this is a person who has come an extreme way to reach this point. He handles himself notably in every other way that counts, too. It has been long years since I sang on the Marlow stage myself, but I thought I remembered its particularities, and Monty did me proud when he took his mark exactly where I had guessed. As if the stage belonged to him. As if he had inherited it from the most royal line of singers.

  The applause poured over him until he steepled his fingers in a gesture of thanks and readiness. He had decided against saying anything first, just hit them with the first song. Now he nodded ever so slightly to Cecil, who piously unclasped his fingers from his lap as if raveling out a prayer, and the piano music rippled out with a paradeground prance.

  “Forty miles a day

  on beans and hay.

  Scenery all the way

  on cavalry pay.

  When I was young and in my prime—”

  Monty with controlled power held the note on the last consonant, setting it up to chime with the even more resounding one in the next line—

  “I dabbed my X on the Medicine Line.”

  As he hit that note, round and perfect, the chandelier above the crowd began to sway.

  He froze, the cut-glass constellation in motion even more now. Cecil shot him a confused look, trying to decide whether to keep playing so Monty could pick the melody back up or wash the tune out and start over—and then his hands halted on the keys as if a message was coming up through them. The music stilled, the only sound now the gentle tinkling of the chandelier. Then a rumble, like thunder down in the ground.

  The theater floor vibrated as if it were the deck of a steamship leaving the dock. Pell-mell, the crowd came to its feet and started piling toward the doors, not a stampede yet but definitely a clogged surge.

  An earthquake gives a person a jolt in more ways than one. It causes your basic assumption of life, the ground on which you exist, to quiver. I had been through one before, the time I took Samuel to Yellowstone Park. But we were outdoors there, the sway of the trees like fishing rods in truth rather interesting. Here the question was whether the theater would shake to pieces with us in it. I thought something already had fallen and bruised my arm when I realized it was Mrs. Gus’s grip on me.

  Willing his bad leg to match his good one in the effort, Wes was up and clambering into the next aisle, fighting past eddying audience members to reach Susan and Mrs. Gustafson. He always hated pandemonium, he would rather take his chances in a shellhole. Now he banged over seats until he was within reach of Susan, a vexed expression on her that seemed to wonder why people needed to be so contrary, as she tried to make her way toward the stage. His instinct supported that: “The stage steps! Out that way!” No sooner did he have Susan and Mrs. Gustafson plunging that direction with him than the Marlow Theater gave another shudder and the lights went out. In the sudden interior dusk, plaster dust making them all cough, he muscled a path for the women to follow him. Whit and Gustafson, each puffing harder than the other, caught up with them.

  At the first ripple of motion under the stage Monty had bolted for the shelter of the nearest wall, in case the roof was coming down. He hung on there, peering out into the spilling aisles of the theater, in spite of Bailey tugging at him and J.J. and Cecil shouting at him from the backstage door. When Susan and the rest of the group came stumbling up the steps in the dimness he grabbed her by her free arm, and between them he and Wes, and Bailey somewhere in there, too, half-shielded and half-levitated her in a crablike scramble.

  It is the nearest I will experience to traveling by sedan chair. Behind me Mrs. Gus was similarly scooped up by Whit and Gus and the bruiser.

  A chunk of plaster the size of a garage door fell and shattered on the stage. They heard a rain of glass as windows rattled to pieces. As they ran the obstacle course of backstage, the building seemed to think it over, whether to settle back from its restlessness or curtsy to the mastering earth.

  We came out in the sidestreet. The quake seemed to have shaken the clock mechanism of the universe, it had been only a few minutes yet it was as if we had passed through some entire season of life.

  J.J. and Cecil were there to lend a hand when they flooded out the door. The rumbling and shaking quit as abruptly as it had started and that was disorienting too, not knowing when the earth’s case of the quivers might start up again. The group of them clambered away from the back of the theater, Wes counting heads as they skittered out into the sidestreet like a handful of dropped marbles. He halted everybody when they were safely out of range of walls that might crumble. Dazed, they peered around as if surprised that the moon still hung in place, that there was the same air to breathe as before the thundershake of the earth. Except for the population out in its streets, most of whom would spend the night in their cars, downtown Helena at the intersection a block away from them appeared remarkably unchanged. “Gus, if the car is in one piece, bring it around here, quick,” Wes directed. Bailey said the same to his man, then sprinted up to the corner to see if the streets were passable out of the Gulch.

  No one else moved much, as though the surface under them was delicate. Susan had taken to gripping Mrs. Gustafson’s considerable biceps reassuringly rather than have that muscle applied to Mrs. Gustafson’s gripping of her. All the while, the only sound besides everybody’s tentative breathing was Mrs. Gustafson softly moaning in a hiccuping way. The cluster of them stood waiting there, dressed like aristocratic refugees amid the tipped ashcans and broken windowglass. The night was staying warm. “Earthquake weather,” Whit accused, from his familiarity with California. “Damn it, I knew it was up to no good.”

  Monty numbly stared around at the city pocketed now in the moonlit mountainscape. What does it take, the thought came at him from every direction, a million tries? Rodeo getup or tuxedo, this place was determined to leave him in the dirt. Two more shakes and every one of them would have been buried in bricks, all because he had been determined to put the postponed anthems of his family into the air here.

  Watching the look on Monty with apprehension, J.J. cursed under his breath. He edged up to Susan and whispered, “Can you do anything with him?”

  No longer holding back, she was at his side in an instant. “Monty, you can’t let this get you down,” she heard herself saying, something they both knew the words to. She rummaged desperately for anything that might count as consolation. “Caruso was in San Francisco in that earthquake, and he went on to—”

  “I’m no kind of a Ca—”

  Just then the Duesenberg nosed into sight, Bailey riding its runningboard. He jumped off before the car drew to a complete halt.

  “I grabbed onto a newspaperman who’s on the line to his office,” he reported. “Most of this was around Three Forks, Sixteenmile Canyon, in through there. Streets look like we can get through.” Wes nodded along as he worked on the logistics of delivering everyone out of this. While Bailey was speaking, Gustafson climbed out and planted himself beside a fender, evidently wanting his feet on the ground until the other car got there and things were sorted out.

  Whit came over to draw Wes’s attention. “Maybe we’ve lucked out. This far away, any aftershock might not amount to—”

  “HARM!” Gustafson shouted, startling them all. He broke from beside the car, making a run at the danger he could not name.

  Wes whirled, but saw he was too far away. The man had charged out from behind the lilacs he
re on the residential side of the street. He targeted Monty before the others saw him as anything but a blur detaching from the dark, swinging the ax handle with both hands, like a baseball bat. Monty tried to duck while Bailey pushed Susan out of the way and kicked at the assailant.

  Wildly the ax handle swished in the air as the man bulled in on Monty like a crazed woodchopper. Just before Gustafson barreled into the attacker and upended him, a backswing caught Monty as he tried to turn his head away, the blade-end of the wood cracking him across the base of the collarbone and up onto that side of the throat with a terrible sound. He fell backward to the street with one hand splayed toward where he had been hit.

  The other men boiled around the pinned-down attacker as Wes tried to minister to Monty and Whit chucked his rolled-up tuxedo jacket beneath his head for a pillow. There over them, Susan stared, sickened unto stupefaction, at the Williamsons with all their powers and Monty on the ground like something slaughtered.

  Wes looked up at her when he had Monty’s tie undone and his shirt plucked open. “The collarbone took it worst. But the throat, along that side—”

  J.J. and Cecil and Bailey scrambled over to help lift Monty to the car. Bailey’s men frog-marched the assailant off to turn him in to the police. “Ned recognizes him,” Bailey choked out, near tears, “hanger-on who didn’t even make it into Potter’s bunch. He’s the dimwit brother of somebody Whit’s boys gave a going-over. I guess that’s why an ax handle instead of a gun.”