Two Medicine (20 page)

“
I could see that,” I
said. “But how often do you read it?”

“
Not enough,” she said,
getting up and stretching her neck back and forth. “I grew up in a
real religious home, Will, very strict. My parents are both
missionaries, except they always worked in the U.S., teaching Bible
classes mostly, leading retreats.

“
If you want, you can go
to church with me this Sunday,” she said with a hesitant voice,
looking at me with some embarrassment.

“
Church?” I asked. The
idea seemed strange out there in the wilderness, like going to a
bowling alley. “Where? In Browning?”

She shook her head, “No,
there’s a service right here in the campground each Sunday morning.
The park has a pastor come out – it’s just one of the employees
from the lodge, some young guy like us – but the park always
provides one.”

I tried to picture a group
of campers sitting around a young preacher in the middle of the
woods, like some new cult leader brain washing his burgeoning
flock, deciding who among the crowd he would takes as his wives. I
had no objection to religious people, far from it actually, but the
scene left me with a vaguely unsettled feeling, out there in the
wild as we were.

“
We’ll see.” I said. Then,
to change the subject. “By the way, the reason I came down here is
Ronnie and I are going to get a fire going in a bit – thought you’d
like to join us.”

She thought for a moment,
“Why not?” She got up walked down the back porch stairs onto the
grass, and then looked back at me. “Will, what do you think of this
place now that you been here a little while?”

I thought about it a
minute, trying to examine my feelings and rehashing what I had gone
through thus far – I wanted to give an honest answer. Katie was the
type of person who you gave honest answers to because you had the
feeling, when you talked to her and she stared at you, that she
could tell when you were lying. And she had no tolerance for
phoniness – that was obvious.

She smiled, “If it’s taking that long, it
can’t be good.”

“
Honestly? I don’t know,”
I said, giving up after a moment. “It’s as beautiful a place as I
could imagine, and I love being up there in the mountains, hiking,
fishing...”

“
But?” she
added.

“
But…
I’m not sure
this
is what I came out here for – this job, the gift
shop, Larry – it’s all weird… out of place. I get the kitchen and
camp supplies thing we do, but all that crap in the front, and to
have such a buffoon as Larry running this place seems a
travesty.”

I looked around at the
woods beyond the porch. “I came here to try to start a new life,
really, because my old one wasn’t working out so good for me. The
job at the store was just a way to get up here, but sometimes I
wonder if I made the right choice after all.”

She laughed softly. “Yea,
but don’t let the store get you down, Will, that really would be a
shame.” She looked out over the lake at the mountain. “This place
has a special… power, a wonderful, special beauty that you need to
see before you leave.” She nodded back to the store, “The campers,
the tourists, Larry – these are all just distractions from what’s
really here.”

“
And what’s
that?”

She raised her eyebrows at
me. “God,” she said, holding up the Bible too me.

I thought she was joking
but she held a serious expression on her face. As I watched her for
a moment, I could hear steps crunching on the gravel as Ronnie made
his way towards the back of the store where we were.

“
And the devil, too,”
Katie said.

Ronnie walked up to us
nonchalantly. Again I wondered about the two of them, but I never
seemed to have the right moment to ask – either of them, yet. I
certainly could picture Ronnie sneaking into her room at three
a.m., with no one else on that whole side of the building, with
some excuse about sleep walking or something... his long lanky
frame stealing across her room in his tighty whities. A terrible
image…

“
What are you two scheming
about?” Ronnie asked. His arms were full of firewood, and behind
him walked Bridget, the red head from the big bonfire at the lodge.
She was carrying his cardboard box.

Katie shrugged, and I said
‘hi’ to Bridget and helped them gather some wood that was stacked
around the store. This was not the wood for the huge fireplace in
the store – those logs were greedily guarded under lock and key by
Larry – this was just wood left around by campers who had moved on,
which Ronnie went around and gathered every few days like a
scavenging coyote.

Whenever we had
a bonfire at Two Medicine, Ronnie was also the
unofficially finder-of-vacant-camp sites in addition to keeping the
firewood in steady supply, and this evening he had found a
beautiful spot – one right near the lake shore. Such spots were
usually taken and kept for days at a time by campers. Ronnie had
parked his car facing the other way and had lifted the trunk up,
facing us, to let the music flow in our direction. He popped in a
mix CD of classic rock, his favorite kind of music, and set up some
chairs.

We piled the wood up high
and soon had a roaring little inferno, which we sat around in
fold-out camp chairs. I had brought my guitar and was idly
strumming some tune quietly, under the stereo, as we stared into
flames and talked. Ronnie had taken a couple six packs from the
store – probably not paying for them – and we all drank them out of
the can. Ronnie had, of course, also brought a couple of
newly-rolled joints with him, and he passed it around. I took a
couple of little puffs; Katie declined.

“
So, Will,” Bridget said
to me, smiling, “Ronald tells me you and Alia are an
item.”

“
Well Ronald is full of
shit,” I said back to her, looking back down at the flames and
strumming my guitar some more.

I wondered as I stared
into the flames why I was so evasive; what did I care if they knew
I had fallen for a local? What did they care? When I thought about
it, I realized it had more to do with the fact that I felt so
strongly for her, that it was an almost holy thing that I couldn’t
joke about and didn’t want to speak openly about for fear of it
being tainted, and like my other, disappointing, past experiences
with women. I had to keep this person separate, treat Alia as a
special experience – which she definitely was in my heart – I had
no doubt she was.

Ronnie blew out a cloud of
smoke and sputtered and chocked for a second, then said, “Oh don’t
give us that
shit
Will, Katie and I could hear your bed a-rockin’ last night.”
He winked over at Katie, who rolled her eyes, shaking her
head.

“I know Alia,” Bridget
said, taking the joint from Ronnie’s hand carefully as she spoke.
“Be careful is all I would say.”

“What the hell do you
mean?” I snapped.

“She’s a little hellion,
is what I mean. She just broke up with the biggest drug dealer in
Browning a couple months ago, but before that they lived together a
while – and this is one bad dude.” Bridget tentatively tried to
coax a couple of puffs from the disintegrating joint in between her
fingers. Ronnie gave her a sharp look, and nudged her elbow. She
ignored him.

I knew that Alia had had a
rough background, but she seemed so young and innocent to me that I
wondered if Bridget was talking about the same person.

“Alia Reynolds?” I
asked.

“Oh it’s her, William,
don’t worry,” Bridget said, smiling at me and winking. “I saw her
up here at the store a week ago, giving you that ‘come hither’
look.”

“
Don’t sweat it bro, just
be careful,” Ronnie said, flicking the tiny ember of the joint into
the fire.

“Who’s the biggest drug
dealer in Browning?” Katie asked. We all looked over at her; she
was sitting on the ground, hugging her knees. “Tony Montana?” she
asked.

Ronnie gave a warning look
to Bridget, who still ignored him.

“You met him,” Bridget
said, looking at me. “He was at the lodge bonfire.”

“He was with me,” Ronnie
interrupted. “That guy Clayton, Will. But don’t listen to Bridget –
Clayton’s a nobody.”

“Oh, don’t be so sure,”
Bridget said, shaking her head.

“Just fucking drop it!”
Ronnie barked at her. “He’s fucking trailer trash!”

Bridget looked over at me,
raising her eyebrows in mock surprise, and then down at the
fire.

As if to lighten the mood,
Ronnie looked up into the stars, now speaking in a tone of apparent
wonder. “Did you guys know that the Perseid meteor shower is called
‘The Tears of Saint Lawrence,” and comes every year in August? And…
did you know that the meteors are actually meteors from the tail of
a comet….”

Katie and I both groaned
and told him to shut up, and it had the desired effect – we all
relaxed a bit. I still wondered about Alia, why she had lived with
a drug dealer, whether or not Clayton was dangerous, and what she
saw in me, and when I would see her again. Maybe she was avoiding
me because I’d be in danger if Clayton found out, but it could have
been anything that was keeping her away.
Why hadn’t I gotten at least a phone number?

I wished she was sitting
beside me at the fire – roasting a marshmallow and talking with us.
I’d risk a little danger to lay beside her in my bed that night, I
decided.

Ronnie produced his
cardboard box and shook it again for us, a roguish look on his
face. He set the box down and slowly opened it, reaching in for its
contents. We all sat watching him. Katie looked over at me and
shook her head.

“Viola!” Ronnie said as he
revealed a set of huge fireworks. They were actual mortar tubes
with baseball-sized fireworks shells that you light and drop in the
tubes. There were about six of the shells lined up in the plastic
holder. Ronnie held them up for us to see delicately, with
fascination, pride and a bit of fear.

“Jesus! Those look like
the real deal,” I said.

“Not ‘like’ the real deal –
these
are
the real
deal,” Ronnie said, as he unwrapped the big tube. “They’re from
Clayton and Jake’s stash, actually.”

He got a bucket out of his
car, struggling with the weight, and I saw that it was full of
sand. He jammed the big tube down deep in the sand, to anchor it,
and then looked around at us with childlike excitement, “Who wants
to light the first one?”

We shot off all of the
huge firework mortars, one by one. They flew up to a great height
and produced the big, colorful balls of explosions that one sees on
July fourth. They were incredibly close to us though – so close and
so loud that I figured the rangers would surely have to show up and
arrest us all on the spot. None did, although a few campers
wandered over to watch the show. I wondered what Larry would make
of the spectacle and the deafening noise.

Each time Ronnie dropped a
lit mortar he’d run over to our camp like a kid with a sparkler. I
tried to enjoy the moment, the show, but I couldn’t shake a worried
feeling about Alia now, and I hoped she was safe, wherever she was.
And I wished, as I watched the Two Medicine sky explode, that I was
going back to my room later and was going to find her lying in bed
again. We would cuddle up, I could hold her firm little body in my
hands, and talk as I fell asleep to the smell of her.

Later that night
I lay in bed alone, staring up at the two little
bats that had yet to fly out of my window to hunt for the night.
What did
they
think of the firework cacophony? Had they noticed Alia and I
making love? I had named them Siegfried and Roy, and had come to
think of them as pets, although not the kind of pets that provided
any affection or even entertainment.

As I lay there I heard
someone fumbling with the lock outside the kitchen door downstairs,
and then the door slammed open and shut again. I assumed it was
Ronnie, coming back from some late night romp with Bridget, but
then I heard heavy steps lead across the store over to the front,
then the distant creaking of someone walking through the store
below, and finally up the wooden steps that led to Larry and
Phyllis’s master room on the other end. I rolled over and looked at
the clock and it said three a.m.

I heard their door close
softly, and then I didn’t hear anything more. I lay back down and
imagined Alia’s little steps up my staircase and a soft knock at
the door. No such luck, however. I was soon asleep in the silence
of the early morning.

Seventeen

The next morning I was on
kitchen duty and we were busy. Larry was not at work, for the first
morning ever since I had been there, and Phyllis said he was in bed
sick. She seemed a little frazzled about it after Katie and Ronnie
asked about him, so we all just dropped it, glad in any event not
to have him lurking around. As I got the front doors of the store
wedged open to let in the campers, I listed above me where Larry’s
room was, but didn’t hear a sound. He was never sick, never went
out at night, never drank, and didn’t have any friends to see. What
had that old bastard gotten into then?