On the second and last night of the fair and rodeo the worst possible thing happened to Sarah short of fatal illness and death of which she was recently all too familiar.
She had been sleepwalking since the fair began and was angry at Lad during the “best-groomed horse” event because he misbehaved having developed a hatred for another horse. He was on a lead but advanced on the other horse with his ears laid back and clacking his teeth. It is not largely known that horses, like people, can develop instant hatreds. The judges asked her to get Lad out of the arena for which she needed the help of a cowboy, an embarrassment in itself. Winning the top blue ribbon for her vegetables helped though this was muted by the fact that the competition was dismal.
A good thing happened after the Lad mud bath when the cowboy who helped her said that Lad had probably been gelded late and thought he was still a fighting stud. She was still half in tears and eating a lukewarm hot dog when two girls approached. She had met the tall, rawboned girl with her father up at Tim’s two years before. The short one was feisty and pissed off after winning third in the barrel racing. The girls knew that Sarah was coming to their regional high school in the fall and wanted to know if she wanted to join their hunting club. There were two girls now and Sarah would make three. They could hunt elk near Sarah’s place and antelope five hours east near Forsyth where the tall girl, Marcia, had an uncle who owned a big ranch with plenty of antelope. Marcia herself had shot three since she was twelve and also a cow elk over near Lincoln. Sarah confessed that though she had gone hunting a dozen times with Tim she had yet to pull the trigger on an animal. Before doing so Tim wanted her to be able to fire five shots within a five-inch pattern at a hundred yards with either his .270 or .30-06. The girls agreed with this and said that there was plenty of time to practice before hunting season.
This meeting gave Sarah an expansive but brief relief from her sleepwalking mood which affects anyone who has experienced the recent death of a beloved. She had no one to turn to because her friend Priscilla was a pleasant nitwit and her father had emotional limitations. His own son was near death and he was flying back to South Carolina in a day but he couldn’t say a single thing about Tim or Brother.
She put the irritable Lad away in the horse barn with hay and water but no oats. It occurred to her that Lad had misbehaved in part because he wasn’t used to being around a crowd which only reminded her of her own stunted access to people. On the way to the 4-H heifer barn where the 4-H club camped out her mind flared in anger at the whole idea of homeschooling and that she had been a puppet of her parents’ daffy ideas that though you had to live within the culture you could minimize the bad effects by staying as remote as possible. Now she found herself quite happy that Peppy had run off with the rich rancher because finally she could join the human race.
In the box stall she and Priscilla had as a camping spot Sarah lay down on her sleeping bag spread on fresh alfalfa which had a sweet, haunting odor. Priscilla had been sent home by their leader Mrs. Lahren to get some different clothes to replace her very short short-shorts. “Young woman, your ass flaps are sticking out!” she said and everyone laughed. Sarah was thinking that everyone touches each other and hugs but she had mostly just petted Rover. She slid a hand in Priscilla’s pack feeling the usual condoms and then she reached what she wanted, a small rack of two-ounce shooters of Kahlúa. Sarah didn’t care for whiskey or beer but she liked the coffee-chocolate flavor of Kahlúa. Priscilla would ride to the liquor store in the county seat with her mother when she restocked the village tavern. While Giselle was choosing stock Priscilla would go into the walk-in cooler with the geeky clerk who was in his mid-thirties and let him suck her breasts for a minute in exchange for a dozen Kahlúa shooters. When she heard the story Sarah had said, “You’re so biological,” and Priscilla had answered, “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
Sarah lay splayed on her back listening to the Grateful Dead on her tape deck wondering how a tiny bottle of booze could make you feel that much better. She slept for two hours until dinnertime.
In a hall in the middle of the fairgrounds they had their annual beef barbecue. Outside there were a number of steer halves roasting on wood-fired grills. There were at least five hundred diners who drank beer and gorged on the meat. Whiskey was banned on the fairgrounds but most men carried their own bottles anyway. When dinner was over all the tables were pushed off to the side and a country band that had traveled over three hundred miles from Billings began setting up their equipment. Mrs. Lahren had insisted that Sarah do the warm-up for the band on an upright piano. Sarah had snuck off to the toilet to have another Kahlúa which she downed in a single gulp feeling her body suffused with warmth. Nearly all of the young people would have preferred a rock band but ranchers controlled the fair and at least Sarah’s ragtime and boogie-woogie was a compromise. She didn’t have to look to play and she exchanged glances with the country band fiddler who was plugging in amplifiers. Priscilla had told her all about the band. The fiddler who was big and mean-looking was in his twenties and hauled horses for his living with his partner, the bass player, because they couldn’t quite make it as a full-time band. They had taken fifth place in calf roping that day and were too erratic to be really good. She also knew that the fiddler’s name was Karl and he hailed originally from Meeteetse, Wyoming.
She played a half-hour set to everyone’s delight until the end when she snuck in a little Mendelssohn and Karl moved forward and played along with her beautifully to her surprise. Afterward he bowed to her in mock lust or maybe it wasn’t mock. She was jangled and exhausted and couldn’t wait to get out of there to have her third wonder-working Kahlúa.
“How old are you, cutie?” Karl said grabbing her arm way too tight.
“I’m fifteen, sir.” She always called older men sir.
“Fifteen will get you twenty,” Karl laughed and turned away.
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.
Part Two
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 the 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.
Part Three
“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 rage. 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?
The woman was there when they arrived. She was standing in a business suit looking in the door of the greenhouse. Her dad had said her name was Lolly and she was a third cousin by marriage, of Italian parentage, and in the truck-farm business. She had flown into Missoula and rented a car and Sarah noted she was clearly pissed off tiptoeing through the muddy yard on rather short legs. Lolly and her father passionately embraced and Sarah felt oddly pleased for him. He and Peppy had often been at odds but she knew that hadn’t included their sexuality from the night noises.
When they were introduced Lolly gave Sarah the hyperappraising look a shorter person often gives to a taller but she was smiling. Frank poured himself and Lolly drinks and they disappeared into the bedroom.
While putting baking potatoes in the oven and mixing the venison meat loaf Sarah was thinking about how puzzled Wallace Stevens’s poems made her feel but then the feeling of solution always gave her something to think about that she had never thought of before. At that point she recalled a troublesome dream from the night before just as it occurred to her that she had to keep expanding her life so that her trauma would grow smaller and smaller. In the dream she was teaching the handsome Mexican cowboy who had trailered the horse up to Lahren’s ranch how to ride. She caught him as he got off and he slid roughly down her body. It was a good feeling in the dream but when she half-awoke she was close to nausea. She had turned on the light and read a Hart Crane poem that sounded good but was incomprehensible. Terry had told her that Hart Crane had committed suicide, an option that she thought about herself, but then Tim had asked her if she ever had a baby to call it Tim even if it was a girl.
The dinner didn’t go so well for an absurd reason. Lolly said the stewed tomatoes were “wonderful” because Sarah used fresh thyme and plenty of garlic but then Lolly thought the beef in the meat loaf tasted “peculiar.” Sarah told her it was ground venison plus one-third pork and Lolly rushed to the toilet and spit it up. Marcia laughed loudly and Sarah frowned at her. Lolly came back to the table with tears in her eyes and apologized because “Bambi” was her favorite childhood book and movie. Marcia continued to giggle and ate like a horse. She was a big girl and did the work of a man. Except for the ritual of Sunday dinner their meals were ample and hurried. Marcia was talking about waking up at dawn and seeing a coyote out in the pasture chasing after a ewe with a bad leg.
“I somersaulted that son of a bitch with my .280 right out my bedroom window,” Marcia said.
Frank explained what she had said to Lolly who said, “Oh my goodness.”
To give her father privacy the girls drove up to Tim’s cabin and started a fire in the woodstove. Sarah had drained the pipes for winter but still used the cabin for general solace. She would talk to Tim as if he were in the kitchen making the chicken-fried steaks she loved.
In the last light of the early November evening Sarah threw out cracked corn for her magpies, a quarrelsome but playful member of the Corvidae family. As a child in the second grade in Ohio she was fascinated with birds and Peppy would take her for walks in wooded acres so she could try to identify them. Peppy didn’t know the names of any birds except “robin” but declared that they were “God’s choir.”
They went over their trip list and Marcia announced that irritable Noreen, the other member of the hunting club, couldn’t come along because her mom had to start chemo, so she had invited Terry. Marcia hoped Sarah wouldn’t mind and Sarah didn’t say anything because it was a done deal. She just hoped that Terry wouldn’t whine too much about the world in general, a habit that could drive anyone batty. And then Marcia said something that appalled Sarah to the effect that she intended to try to seduce Terry. She blushed which she never did. Sarah said that since she knew that Marcia was infatuated with Terry and since he was also horny as a toad maybe she could bring him to her side with sex. “Why not?” said Sarah, embarrassed.
When Marcia left Sarah decided to stay at the cabin for the night. Rover was pleased and they sat before the hot woodstove listening to the cold, blustery November wind. She thought of Tim but her mind was insufficient to imagine raising a son or daughter named Tim. Right now the first step, making love to someone, seemed forever out of the question. If anyone could be her patron saint it was Tim. A number of times she had been reminded that Tim would wish her to kill Karl—not, certainly, herself.
Rover growled but Sarah suspected it was the little bear she had seen her playing with from a distance. The bear was a year and a half and had likely been pushed away by its mother in favor of new cubs. She had heard of dogs and coyotes playing but never a dog and a bear. Rover was so relentlessly mean and protective that she wondered why she had made an exception for a little bear.
Having read so many stories and novels it unnerved her that she, in essence, was writing her own story day by day. Drifting toward sleep she recalled going with Terry to Priscilla’s birthday party because Giselle had called to say that Priscilla was depressed and drinking too much and needed company. Giselle had a fancy satellite TV hookup a rich boyfriend had given her for her double-wide house trailer. Way up the valley at Sarah’s house their TV reception was hopelessly fuzzy but Frank would sit there on Sunday watching pro football especially if it was the Cleveland Browns. It was Labor Day weekend and Terry was watching U.S. Open tennis and talking about Thomas Wolfe, the novelist. They had both enjoyed “Look Homeward, Angel” but less so the other novels by Wolfe which Terry pointed out were mostly the writer talking about himself. Sarah began to say something then stopped when the screen showed the New York City skyline which she found totally unimaginable, then she said that not much happened in Wolfe’s life except writing so that’s what he had to write about. Why was it that a big terrible thing had to happen in her otherwise uneventful life? Was it fate or chance? She couldn’t free herself to believe in fate or destiny. Such concepts were for the important and famous people the camera showed at the U.S. Open. In bad novels lots of stuff happened but in the good ones this was far less so. She asked Terry if it upset him to watch tennis when he couldn’t play it, meaning his clubfoot prevented his playing such games. “No, life has set me aside as an observer,” he said.
Part Four
They left before daylight and reached Livingston in four hours with four more hours to go for their destination whereupon the police closed I-90 because the snowstorm had grown in force and the wind was so high between Livingston and Big Timber that a semi had tipped over. They rather nervously checked into a room at the Murray Hotel that had two double beds. Terry in particular was giddy opening his suitcase and showed the girls six bottles of fine French wine he had swiped from his mother’s cellar. It wasn’t quite noon and they agreed it was a little early for wine. Marcia called her uncle over past Forsyth to say they’d be delayed, and then they abandoned the sack of baloney sandwiches they were going to eat for lunch and went across the street to Martin’s Cafe. After lunch Marcia winked at Sarah so Sarah went off to Sax & Fryer’s to look at the new books for sale and Marcia virtually led Terry back to the hotel. Sarah thought that to be on the safe side she’d give Marcia an hour to manage her seduction.
It occurred to her that this was a good time to do some research on Meeteetse and hard thinking on how to exterminate Karl. Pop goes the muskmelon, she thought, or she could aim lower since she clearly remembered what the big exit wound of a .30-06 looked like on an elk that Tim shot a half mile from his cabin. The elk was so large it took two trips to get it back to the cabin in the dark on a packhorse, at which point Tim fried up part of the delicious liver with onions. Sarah had read how many people these days were squeamish about hunting but where she lived it was merely a fact of life.
She spoke at length with the proprietor of the bookstore who was kindly and rather handsome. He knew a lot about the country south of Cody and said the main fact of Meeteetse was the huge Pitchfork Ranch. His cousin cowboyed there. Sarah flushed because this man reminded her of Tim and was not at all repellent. As a future murderer she lost some caution and asked about the Burkhardt spread because that was Karl’s last name. He said, “Those people are rapscallions,” and she said she was unsure what that meant and he answered, “Real rough people.” The father was a mean old goat, one of the boys was in prison in Deer Lodge for repeated assaults, one was an itinerant musician who had done time for selling coke and meth, and one was fine having left with the mother years ago for Boise. When the man was curious about why she wanted to know Sarah said a friend of hers had gotten mixed up with the musician and it was unpleasant. “I bet it was,” the man said, then he pointed out the public library down the street where she might find solid information about that area of Wyoming. She bought the new novel of a regional writer named Thomas McGuane whom Terry was very fond of but she had found a bit abrasive.
The snow seemed to be lifting but the fierce wind continued from the northwest so that she raised a hand to protect her eyes while walking to the library. Karl had it coming, that’s for sure, she thought. Shooting him would be a public service. The point was to make certain that she got away with it.
The library was grand and a librarian helpful and she soon had a stack of books about Wyoming on the table before her but then she drifted. Even so, once in a while she had a microsecond glimmer that she might be insane. Conjoined to this was the brief flash from her unconscious of a physical memory of the hairs of her pubis being uprooted. If there’s a God why can’t we control our minds? she thought. She’d talked to Terry about this and he had read some Oriental literature and quoted, “How can the mind control the mind?” This boggled her. In her weakest moments she found herself wishing she had an actual mother to talk to. Or anyone she could trust like Tim.
She ended up sitting at the library table for a couple of hours and wished her area had such a library. She even studied topographical maps of the location of the Burkhardt ranch which included two-tracks to get on and make a good departure. She would have to call first to make sure he was there and not on the road playing music. Perhaps for relief her mind flittered away in a comic reverie of the little boy who’d lived next door in Findlay when she was seven. He was homely with buckteeth and people would yell at him when he walked around the neighborhood picking flowers which he would pass to her through the fence between their yards. Sometimes she would press her cheek to the fence and he would kiss it. Maybe that was love at its best she thought.
On the way back to the hotel the snow had stopped and the wind had subsided. She overheard in front of the post office that the interstate had been reopened which meant that they could reach Marcia’s uncle’s ranch well before midnight. She stood outside their room door listening for signs of life, looking down the dark hall toward the south where a window squared the waning but glistening light off the snow-covered Absaroka Mountains. Her skin prickled with the beauty of it and she walked down the hall seeing the winter sun palpably losing its power. She couldn’t imagine a life without mountains and thought that whatever happens to me I’m lucky to live inside beauty.
She heard muttering when she knocked on the door and when she opened it Terry was asleep but Marcia was smiling beside him. She laughed and gave Sarah the thumbsup sign. There was a slight animal smell to the room and Sarah opened the window to the cold air then brewed a pot in the coffeemaker on the dresser. She sat down and pulled a book about the human genome out of her duffel thinking that someday they might find evil in the genes of certain people. She noticed that Terry and Marcia had finished a bottle of wine with the peculiar name of Échézeaux and thought she would take the first stint driving.
Part Five
Marcia’s uncle Lester woke them in the bunkhouse at five A.M. by hammering at the door and yelling, “Off your ass and on your feet.” He was far more jovial than Marcia’s father and even larger. They had made it to the ranch at ten-thirty in the evening because the snow had given out by Custer which was east of Billings. When they reached Lester’s his wife Lena, who couldn’t speak because of a stroke, served them a pinto-bean-and-short-rib stew and now at short of six in the morning Sarah was looking at a chicken-fried steak with cream gravy, fried eggs, and potatoes. No wonder these people are so big she thought but in truth they were rangy rather than fat.
Terry had drunk another bottle of wine in the truck and refused to get up. Sarah had pushed him and Marcia off into a small corner bedroom of the bunkhouse to soften the sound effects of love. She slept in a small daybed by the woodstove which she fed several times in the night during which she dreamt of hunting mule deer with Tim and her butt was cold because she had forgotten to put on her blue jeans and was only wearing hunter-orange panties. She questioned what this might mean and decided on nothing.
Lester drove her and Marcia on a lumpy two-track a couple of miles toward the back of the ranch near a series of small buttes overlooking the Yellowstone River. He dropped them off a mile apart and said he would check on them at noon. Sarah sat down near a juniper bush and watched the landscape to the east slowly reveal itself, the moon set and Venus disappear. The sun rose reddishly and streaks of cirrus clouds meant it would likely be a windy day. She cradled the .30-06 across her knees pleased that she had brought a small space blanket along to sit on, a buffer against the frozen earth. Way to the north she could see Lester’s alfalfa fields and to the east there were thousands of flat acres of wheatland that reminded her of Willa Cather. She meant to visit Nebraska someday because of Cather but she intended to visit a lot of places and had been nowhere to speak of except western Montana. Sitting there glassing the landscape with her binoculars for antelope she felt a sharp pang of loneliness beneath her breastbone. Who did she know? She recalled a few childhood friends from six years ago. Her grandmother who was her piano teacher was insensate in a rest home. Priscilla had drifted away. Terry was pretty much buried alive in his own mind. Marcia had felt the mating call early as do many country girls in Montana where the passage between girl and woman is a short voyage. Her solid friends were the spirit of Tim and books.
At about nine-thirty she heard a rifle shot off to the northeast and suspected Marcia had scored. Sarah glassed a group of about fifteen antelope running toward the south that unfortunately would not be coming close to her. The wind rose and she backed into the juniper bush for shelter looking down at a jackrabbit skull and part of its skeleton. After a while during which she gutted the animal Marcia was visible heading toward Sarah alternately carrying the antelope for a hundred yards then dragging it a hundred yards. That was true Marcia, Sarah thought. How many fifteen-year-old girls can carry a hundred-pound antelope? She knew that at her family’s request Marcia had shot a young doe favored for its tender and delicious meat, including the liver and heart. Readily available elk and venison were one thing in their area but not antelope.
Marcia dragged her antelope up the hill to Sarah’s juniper then laughed at herself for doing so because Lester was coming by with the pickup at noon. Marcia backed into the juniper and Sarah could feel the heat of her exertion off her body. Marcia splashed water from her canteen and washed the dry blood off her hands saying that the “girl” had only required a fifty-yard shot. They chatted for a while with Marcia talking comically about Terry and her losing their virginity at the hotel, then Marcia tapped her on the shoulder and pointed. There upwind about two hundred yards to the west a young male antelope was picking its way along a thicket of buck brush at the bottom of a butte. Marcia had Sarah use her shoulder as a rest and Sarah chose a neck shot. The antelope bucked straight up like a horse then landed on its side. “You blew that sucker out of his shoes,” Marcia said. Sarah immediately thought, I shot one mammal and I can shoot another. It was unpleasant when she gutted the animal and the steamy rank-smelling heat of the innards rose against her face in the cold air.
