Gallatin Canyon (7 page)

“But you don’t have to cook—”

“Oh, I can’t have a day with missing pieces.” She cast a brilliant smile at him and held it just long enough to suggest he’d missed the boat. Erik wouldn’t be getting up for breakfast because, she explained, he had an upset tummy. She held the spatula in the air while she said this, suggesting by a jotting motion that she was only reciting facts as they had been given her. Then she made a tummy-upset face. Marjorie reminded John of teachers he’d had—punctilious, too ready to use physical gestures to explain the obvious, a hint of the scold. They ate together with the unexpected comfort of strangers at a diner. She paid absolute attention to her food, looking up at him intermittently. She raised a forefinger.

“First thing he said to me was, ‘You’re amazing.’ I have learned that when they tell you you’re amazing, it’s over before it starts.”

“Just as well. Neither of you was feeling any pain.”

“I never have any idea what will happen when I get drunk. But why would you get drunk if you knew what was going to happen?” she said. “
You
probably get off just watching people make mistakes. That’s not a nice trait, Mr. Briggs!”

She smoothed her skirt and checked it for crumbs. “I’m out of here,” she said, as she stood up. “What’s it like?” She went to the window and craned to see the sky. “Not too bad. Okay, bye.”

Their boarding school was modeled on English public schools and built with iron ore and taconite dollars. In four years, the boys were made to see America through some British fantasy and believe that the true work of the nation fell to pencil-wristed Episcopalians who sang their babies to sleep with Blake’s “Jerusalem” or uttered mild orotundities like
great good fortune
and
safe as
houses.
Their hostility toward each other was such that dormitory reassignment was considered, but they seemed always to find a reason to mend their differences. They kept up a sort of friendship at college, but when Erik moved into a rented place on Whitney Avenue with an Italian girl from Quinnipiac, they lost track again. After college, each had been in the other’s wedding, and they had, for a short time, lived in the same New Haven neighborhood while they attempted to launch their careers. Then, as John was less and less in the country and Faucher relocated to Boston, they became part of each other’s memories, and certainly not ones either enjoyed revisiting, though they continued to make sentimental phone calls on holidays, euphorically recreating soccer triumphs on the rare occasions they were actually together. John Briggs didn’t know quite why Erik Faucher was visiting him now. Surely this would be a dumb place to hide; he must want something.

When Briggs heard the shower start upstairs, he went outside and smelled the new morning wind coming through the fields. There were a few small white clouds gathering in the east, and a quarter mile off he could see a harrier working its way just over the surface of the hills. From time to time it swung up to pivot on a wingtip and then resumed its search.

The window of the upstairs bathroom opened and a wisp of steam came out, followed by the head of Erik Faucher. “John! What a morning!” Briggs was swept by a sudden and unexplained fondness. But when Erik began singing in the shower, Briggs found his voice insufferable.

Erik appeared in the yard wearing light cotton pleated pants, a hemp belt, and a long-sleeved blue cotton shirt. Though his hair was uniformly gunmetal gray, he still had the eyebrows that John associated with his French blood. John did not expect much accurate detail about the previous night’s bacchanal, as it was clear he held his liquor less well than he used to. It was Erik who’d said that a Yale education consisted of learning to conceal the fact that you were drunk. He raised his vigorous black eyebrows. The wordless greeting made Briggs impatient, and he relinquished the pleasant sense that he could drink better than Erik.

“This is my first day in the American West. Of course I hope to start a successful new life here.” Erik claimed to have flown from Boston, only less convenient than Kazakhstan, now that centralized air routes had made Montana oddly more remote. He didn’t seem tired or hungover, and his frame looked well exercised.

“I see Marge made off with the rental car,” he said.

Briggs made him some coffee and a piece of toast, which he nibbled cautiously while reading the obituaries from a week-old
Billings Gazette.

“One of these Indians dies, they list every relative in the world. This one has three columns of kinfolks: Falls Down, Bird in Ground, Spotted Bear, Tall Enemy, Pretty on Top. Where does it end? And all their affiliations! The True Cross Evangelical Church, the Whistling Water Clan, the Bad War Deeds Clan. All I ever belonged to was Skull and Bones, and I ain’t too proud of that! So please don’t list it when I go. I’m no Indian.”

Briggs reflected that he could read the paper perfectly well and spare himself the nonsequiturs. He eyed the bright prairie sun working across the window behind the sink. He treasured his solitary spells, infrequent as they were, and wasted very few minutes of them. This one, it seemed, was doomed.

“Look at us, John, two lone middle-aged guys.”

“Filled with blind hope.”

“Not me, John. But I’m expecting Montana will change all that. What a thrill that the bad times are behind me and the real delights are but inches away!”

Briggs wasn’t falling for this one. He said, “I hope you’re right.”

“One of my great regrets,” said Erik solemnly, “is that when we were young, married, and almost always drunk, we didn’t just take a little time out to fuck each other’s beautiful wives.”

“That time has come and gone,” Briggs said.

“A fellow should smell the roses once in a while. Now those two are servicing others. Perhaps, in intimate moments, they tell those faceless new men how unsatisfactory we were, possibly including baseless allusions to physical shortcomings.”

“Very plausible.”

Their wives had despised each other. Carol was a classic but now extinct type of Mount Holyoke girl from Cold Spring Harbor, New York, a legacy whose mission it was to bear forward to new generations the Mount Holyoke worldview. When their daughter, Elizabeth, was expelled from the college for drug use, Erik’s insistence that there were other, possibly more forgiving institutions had placed him permanently outside the wall that sheltered his wife and child. When, even with certified rehabilitation, Elizabeth failed to be reinstated at Mount Holyoke, she lost interest in college altogether and joined the navy, where she was immediately happy as a machinist’s mate. Faucher was bankrupt by then, a result of habitual overextension, and his inability to support Carol in the style to which she had been accustomed led to divorce and Carol’s current position as a receptionist at a hearing-aid outlet on Route 90 between Boston and Natick. Very few years had brought them to this, and neither quite understood how.

Briggs had always been quite uncomfortable with Carol, and he had been greatly relieved when it was no longer necessary for them to speak. His own wife, Irena, was a beauty, a big-eyed russet-haired trilingual girl from Ljubljana whom he’d met at a trade conference in Milan, where she was translating and he was negotiating for a Yugoslav American businessman whose family’s property had been nationalized by the Communists. John and Irena were married for only a few years, long enough for her to know and loathe the Fauchers. Briggs wasn’t sure what else went wrong, except that Irena hadn’t much liked America and had been continually exasperated by Americans’ assumption that Briggs had rescued her. With John flying all over the world, she was stuck with the Fauchers. In the end, aroused by the independence of Slovenia, she grew homesick and left, remarking that Carol was a pig and Erik was a goat.

All of this lent Erik’s wife-swapping lament its own particular comedy.

Faucher was surveying the hills to the east. “Don’t worry about me overstaying my welcome,” he said. “I’m quite considerate that way.”

“Farthest thing from my mind,” Briggs said.

“Do you have an answering machine?”

“Yes, and I’ve turned it on.”

“A walk would be good,” Faucher said. “We’ll teach those fools to wait for the beep.”

“I want you to see the homestead cemetery. It’s been fenced for eighty years and still has all the old prairie flowers that are gone everywhere else. I have some forebears there.”

They followed a seasonal creek toward the low hills in the west where the late-morning sun illuminated towering white clouds whose tops tipped off in identical angles. The air was so clear that their shadows appeared like birthmarks on the grass hillsides. Faucher seemed happier.

“I was glad to get out of Boston,” he said. “It was unbelievably muggy. There was a four-day teachers’ demonstration across from my apartment, you know, where they go
Hey, hey, ho, ho,
we don’t want to
—whatever. Four days, sweating and listening to those turds chant.”

Briggs could see the grove of ash and alders at the cemetery just emerging from the horizon as they hiked. About twice a summer, very old people with California or Washington plates came, mowed the grass, and otherwise tended to the few graves: most homesteaders had starved out before they’d had time to die. These were the witnesses.

As they came over a slight rise, a sheet of standing rainwater was revealed in an old buffalo wallow; a coyote lit out across the water with unbelievable speed, leaving fifteen yards of pluming rooster tails behind him. Erik gazed for a moment, and said, “That was no dog. You could run a hundred of them by me and I’d never say it was a dog. Not me.”

At the little graveyard, John said, “All screwed by the government.” He was standing in front of his family graves, just like all the others: names, dates, nothing else. No amount of nostalgia would land him in this sad spot. “Cattle haven’t been able to get in here since the thirties. The plants are here, the old heritage flowers and grasses. Surely you think that’s interesting.”

“I’m going to have to take your word for it.”

“Erik, look at what’s in front of you,” Briggs said, more sharply than he intended, but Faucher just stared off, not seeming to hear him.

Needle and thread, buffalo, and orchard grass spread like a billowing counterpane around the small headstones, but shining through in the grass were shooting stars, pasqueflowers, prairie smoke, arrowleaf balsam, wild roses, streaks of violet, white, pink, and egg yolk, small clouds of bees, and darting blue butterflies. A huge cottonwood sheltered it all. Off to one side was a vigorous bull thistle that had passed unnoticed by the people in battered sedans; hard old people who didn’t talk, taking turns with the scythe. They looked into cellar holes and said, “We grew up here.” No sense conveying this to Erik, who mooned into the middle distance by the old fence.

“I could stand a nap,” he said.

“Then that’s what you shall have. But in the meanwhile, please try to get something out of these beautiful surroundings. It’s tiresome just towing you around.”

“I was imagining laying my weary bones among these dead. In the words of Chief Joseph, ‘From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.’ Who was in the house last night? I hope they weren’t looking for me.”

“That was my neighbor and his wife. They stopped by for a beer.”

“Well, you know your own society. This would seem very strange in Boston.”

From the alcove off his bedroom, which served as his office and which contained a small safe, a desk, a telephone, and a portable computer, he could look through the old glass windows with their bubbles and imperfections and see Erik sitting on the lawn, arms propped behind him, face angled into the sun like a girl in a Coppertone ad. Briggs was negotiating for a tiny community in Delaware that was being blackmailed by a flag manufacturer for tax abatement against purported operating costs, absent which they threatened to close and strand 251 minimum-wage workers. A North Carolina village that had lost its pulp mill wanted the company, and if Briggs worked as hard as he should, one town would die.

He explained this to Faucher as they drove to town for dinner. Faucher made a bye-bye movement with his hand and said
Hasta
la vista
to whichever town it was that had to disappear. But it was otherwise a nice ride down the valley, mountains emerging below fair-weather altocumulus clouds, small ranches on either side at the heads of sparkling creeks. A self-propelled swather followed by ravens moved down a field, pivoting nimbly at the end of each row, while in the next meadow, already gleaned, its stubble shining just above the ground, a wheel line sprinkler emitted a low fog on the regrowth. A boy in a straw hat stood at a concrete head gate and, turning a wheel, let a flood of irrigation water race down a dusty ditch.

Town was three churches, a row of bars, a hotel, and a filling station. Each church had a glassed frame standing in front, the Catholic with Mass schedules, the Lutheran with a passage from the Bible, and the Evangelical a warning. The bars, likewise, had bright signs inviting ranchers, families, sportsmen, and motorcyclists respectively. Different kinds of vehicles were parked in front of each; old sedans in front of the ranchers’ bar and pickup trucks in front of the local videogaming youth; and in front of the hotel some foreign models from Bozeman and Livingston. The clouds were moving fast now because of high-altitude winds, and when Briggs parked and got out of the car, the hotel towering over him looked like the prow of a ship crossing a pale blue ocean.