“Let me ask you a question. Do you feel anything at all about taking from everything around you no matter what it costs other people who have nothing to do with your life?”
I walked in my socks to the stove and poured more coffee and a flash of whiskey in her cup and sat back down. She had pulled back her mackinaw, and her breasts were stiff against her shirt as she breathed. Her full thighs were tight inside her blue jeans and spread open indifferently on the corner of the chair. I had to hold the anger down in my chest, and at the same time she disturbed me sexually.
“Let me hang this one on you, Pearl, and you can do with it what you want to,” I said. “I didn’t take anything from anybody, and any problem they have isn’t of my making. It was already there.”
She moved herself slightly in the chair, just enough so that her thighs widened an inch and her buttocks flattened.
“That must be a convenient way to think,” she said.
“It’s better than that. It’s the truth. And I don’t like anyone trying to make me take somebody else’s fall.”
“That must be some of your prison terminology.”
“You better believe it is. I paid my dues, and straight people don’t con a con.” I felt my heart beating and my words start to run away with themselves.
“Maybe all people don’t behave toward one another with a frame of reference they learned in jail.”
“Well, the next time you want to talk about people’s problems, come down here again and I’ll help you solve a couple of yours.”
She didn’t say anything. She just buttoned up her mackinaw, tied her scarf around her damp hair with the remote manner of a lady leaving a distasteful situation, and walked out the door to the truck. She left the door open, and the wind drove the snow into the room.
I didn’t even bother to shut it for ten minutes. I felt a red anger at myself for my loss of control that left me trembling. Talk about a con not being conned, I thought. You are a fish who just got conned into thinking he was a con who could not be conned. And for somebody who thought he had touched all the bases over the years, this was no mean thing to consider.
The two weeks finally passed, and it was a bright, cold day with the snow banked high on the lawns in Missoula when I knocked on Beth’s door. The boys were at school, and we made love on the couch, in her bed, and finally, in a last heated moment, on the floor. Her soft stomach and large, white breasts seemed to burn with her blood, and when she pressed her hands into the small of my back, I felt the fifteen days in jail and the two weeks of aching early morning hours drain away as in a dream.
Each morning I helped Mr. Riordan put in the stall partitions in the barn and feed the birds in the aviary; then after lunch I hitched a ride or flagged down the bus into Missoula. Beth and I whitefished in the broken ice along the banks of the Clark, a fire of driftwood roaring in the wind with the coffeepot set among the coals. We ate bleeding steaks by the stone fireplace in the German restaurant and explored ghost towns and mining camps up logging roads and drainages where the trees rang with the tangle of ice in their limbs. I had forgotten how fine it was to simply be with someone you love.
We drove up a graded log road off Rock Creek, high up the side of the mountain, to a mining camp that had been abandoned in the 1870s. The cabins were still there along the frozen creek, where they used to mine placer gold that washed down from the mother lod
e, and the old sluices and rocker boxes were covered with undergrowth, the rusted square nails and bits of chain encased in ice. But if you blinked for just a minute, and let your imagination have its way, you could almost see those old-timers of a century ago bent sweatily into their futile dream of a Comstock or Alder Gulch or Tombstone. They always knew that wealth and the fulfillment of American promise was in that next shovel-load of sand.
“What are you thinking so hard about?” Beth said, her face bright with the cold wind that blew down the drainage.
“Those old-timers must have really believed in it. Can you imagine what it was like to pull the winter up here in the 1870s when they had to haul everything up the side of the mountain on mules? Before they could even go to work, they had to do something minor, like build those cabins. I bet they didn’t even think about it. They just did it. And I bet you couldn’t tear those logs apart with a prizing bar.”
She put her hands inside my arm and pressed against my coat.
“You’re a strange mixture of men,” she said.
“Well, none of that analysis crap. You see that house down there with the elk droppings by the door? Think of some veteran from Cold Harbor in there, drunk every night on whiskey just to stay warm until the next day, and not sure that an Indian wouldn’t set his place afire after he passed out. Those must have been pretty formidable people.”
She pulled the bill of my fur cap and laughed and squeezed herself against my arm.
“I thought you believed Montana people were barbarians,” she said.
“Only those who burn up trucks and guitars that belong to me.”
“I guess destroying half of a parking lot at the mill doesn’t count,” she said, and laughed again.
I built a fire in the snow and boiled a can of stew on a piece of tin from one of the cabins, and as the snow melted away in a widening circle from the heat, I looked over at her and wanted her again. We went into her car and made love on the backseat, with the doors open and the wind blowing snow in the sunlight and the distant sound of a gyppo logger’s truck grinding up the next hill.
We went grouse hunting up Rattlesnake Creek for blues and ruffs with an old dogleg twenty-gauge that I borrowed from Buddy’s little brother, and we knocked six down in a stand of pines on the lip of a huge canyon and cooked them at her house in wine sauce, onion, and wild mushrooms. The next day I bought a resident deer tag, and we drove into the Swan Valley, which was so white and blinding under the sun that you had to look at the green of the timberline to keep from losing the horizon. We crossed two hills of lodge pine in deep snow, pulling her boys’ sled in blue tracks behind us, our lungs aching in the thin air, her Enfield rifle slung by its leather strap on my shoulder.
We found a place on the edge of the trees that overlooked a long valley where they would probably cross at sunset. I took the folded tarpaulin off the sled, spread it in the snow between the pine trunks, and set down the big coffee thermos and ham-and-turkey sandwiches. The air was clean and sharp, with the sweet scent of the pines, and the far side of the valley seemed to grow and recede in the sunlight over the mountain. I unscrewed the thermos top, and the steam and the smell of the coffee blew around us in the wind.
I hadn’t hunted for deer, or any animal for that matter, since I was discharged from the army. At home after the war, I had shot ducks and certainly fished a lot, but I wouldn’t go out with my father any more after coons or shoot deer with him in east Texas. Once, he asked me why I would take the lives of fish and knock birds out of the air with a double-barrel when I wouldn’t drop an animal running across the ground. I didn’t have an answer for him, because I had thought until his question that it was just a general reaction to killing things, and he said: “You don’t want to bust something living on the land because it’s just like you. You know it hurts him just like it does a man.”
Regardless of my father’s explanation about the lack of ethical difference in taking the lives of wild things, I wasn’t up to busting a deer or an elk that might work down through that snowfield in the sun’s last red rays over the mountains. Also, I had hunted enough deer at home to know that anything that came out of that distant stand of pine on the far side of the valley would be either a doe or an elk cow, because the males always kicked them out into the open before they would cross themselves.