Two Medicine (40 page)

Who would I
have there?
Dad?
Not near enough, I thought.

“
You know Will,” Scott
said, staring into the fire. “You’re really out here, doing it man,
whatever the hell you like – just like the Bandit.” He smiled at me
and then looked over at Brooke.

“
And I
think that's why we were able to finish things in Atlanta, it was
just
time,
man. You leaving was the last straw. It was
past
time,
really. I had reached a breaking point, just like
you. I just looked at Brooke and asked her to go, outta nowhere I
asked her. And you know what she said? She said: ‘No fucking way!’”
He laughed. “It took some convincing...”

“
My parents are still
horrified,” Brooke said.

I nodded sagely, and
looked at Scott. “You should of asked her: ‘Haven’t you ever done
anything just for the hell of it?’”

Under the sky which soon
cleared of dark clouds and revealed a star-pregnant vault, we sat
and laughed and talked and ate marshmallows, and it was the most
enjoyable night I had yet experienced in Two
Med.

Thirty
-Two

After eventually taking
leave of Scott and Brook and making plans to see them the next day
before they left, I returned to the store around 10 p.m. I noticed,
as I walked up to the rear porch to enter in through the kitchen’s
back door, that all the lights inside were still on, which was
unusual at that hour.

I stepped in through the
screen door quietly, and was greeted with a weird scene. Larry was
sitting by himself at the big kitchen table, with nothing in front
of him but a bottle of Wild Turkey whiskey (which we sold in the
store) and a glass, full almost to the brim, with the smooth, brown
swill. He had taken off his glasses and I saw that his face looked
much different without them on, partly because his eyes were much
smaller without the coke-bottle lenses, and made him look kind of
like a large, puffy mole. But it was looked strange too because he
was not a frequent drinker, and the whisky had made his face saggy
and bright red – as it can to rookies.

I walked in cautiously,
and looked past him into the store to see if anyone else was around
– no one was. “You ok, Larry?”

He looked up at me darkly,
seemingly trying to focus his beady eyes on me. He didn't respond
but reached down and put on his big glasses again, and then looked
down at his glass, as if silently pondering whether to take another
drink.

I watched him with a
concerned curiosity. Given his increasingly erratic antagonism of
late, I wondered if he had finally gone off the deep end, and would
maybe try to kill us all in some drunken frenzy. This remote store
was just the kind of setting for something that, wasn’t
it?

I quietly went over to the
large fridge to get some water, giving his smoldering and silent
presence a wide berth, like you would a sick bear.

When he suddenly spoke,
his voice sounded lower, gravelly, like he hadn't spoken in years
and had just picked it up the habit again. “When I was a lumberjack
in Alaska, up in the Yuke’, they used to always give me the
toughest jobs to do.”

He sluggishly took a small
sip from his whiskey glass. It stood by the fridge, holding the
handle, watching him. If it was another lumberjack story, it was
certainly sounding different that all the others he has brayed
about that summer.

“
I could down a two-foot
cedar tree in three cuts.” He paused, nodded his head slowly three
times, as if reliving the vigorous ax-swinging in his mind. He took
another sip of the whiskey.

“
Three Cuts,” he murmured.
“That’s what they used to call me. Used to always give me the
roughest jobs, the toughest woods. We had a competition… who could
fell a tree in three cuts…”

Suddenly he raised his
voice, and it was jarring to hear him heave out the ragged, slurred
words in the quiet kitchen. “Three Cuts!’ they used to call me,” he
shouted. “Large truck fouled in the brush? ‘Three Cuts?!’ Chainsaw
fouled fifty feet up in the air in the canopy? ‘Where’s Three
Cuts?!’ Stump won't budge with the backhoe? Three
Cuts!’”

He raised his head up to
the ceiling and uttered his last cry with vehemence, and then his
face broke into a tragic and gnarled smile, with tears in his eyes.
He chuckled to himself crazily and took another sip. I heard his
bedroom door open from the other side of the store, and I could
hear Phyllis’ hesitant steps down the creaky staircase. This was
what that poor woman had to deal with, I thought.

Larry looked back down at
his glass, then at me. “You don't know what life is like. Not yet…
You don't
understand
what my life is like.”

He trailed off as Phyllis
came into the kitchen, a stricken look on her face turning into a
fresh fear as she saw the half-empty bottle.

“
Oh my dear! What
happened?” She sounded so mournful that it seemed to jar Larry back
into the moment, as if arousing the last wisp of take-charge
blustering that Larry could muster. The man-in-charge-from-Kansas
reemerged, and roused the drunken man and drunkenly rose to his
feet.

“
Nothing’s happening,” he
grunted. “Just making sure Will locked up tonight. Lock up, Will.”
He staggered back and then caught himself in the doorway leading
out of the kitchen. Phyllis glanced at me with a worried
expression, but didn’t say a word.

My last view of Larry that
evening was his bulky form walking unsteadily with his arm over
little Phyllis’ shoulders, as she stepped slowly and awkwardly
under his weight towards their room.

“So much for ‘Three
Cuts,’” I whispered to myself. I switched off the lights and headed
to bed.

Thirty-Three

The next morning I woke up
and went downstairs to get the kitchen prepped for the day’s
customers. After a little while, Scott and Brooke came in and sat
at one of the tables for customers in the snack shop area. They
spread out a very European-looking early lunch: a loaf of French
bread sliced in small pieces, with grapes, cheese and crackers.
Brooke was drinking a dark red wine and Scott was sipping
Coke.

Ronnie was on cooking duty
with me on the cash register, so I was able to sit with them a
while as I watched for customers that late morning. The sun was
streaming through the large skylight overhead, stabbing down
through the dusty air of the store onto the concrete floor. As I
sat with them at the table, I watched through one of the large
windows the clouds roll over the lake and push up against the peak
of Mount Sinopah like smoke from a fire.

Scott and Brooke planned
on hiking up one of the higher trails that afternoon, and I decided
to go with them. It wasn’t easy since it left Ronnie on his own,
but I asked Phyllis to help me out, explaining that I had friends
from out of town, and she agreed. It still wouldn’t have worked if
Larry had been downstairs, but he hadn’t come out of his room that
day yet at all, and I knew why. He was surely feeling the whiskey
and hunkering in bed, partly out of shame I was sure.

Soon, the three of us,
Scott, Brooke and I, were crunching along a rocky dirt path up
through the trees near the lake. After some time we eventually
climbed into the higher parts of the trail. As we climbed even
higher, the trees began thinning out and the patches of flowers and
grass grew thicker in the spread out places, where sunlight reached
them more. We were bathed in heavy, warm sunshine, actually, during
our hike, and within an hour we were high enough to see the entire
lake, with a miniature store resting at the far end opposite of our
side.

As we stood there and took
in the view, Scott looked around and suddenly noticed a patch of
brown in the distance behind us, way up in the higher, treeless,
rock-strewn sides of the mountain.

“Bear!” he called out,
just shouting the one word and pointing up at the small brown
patch.

Brooke and I turned around
and shielding the sun from our eyes with our hands tried to spot
the beast. I had seen a couple of bears before during the summer
there – it wasn’t hard to notice them because a crowd of campers
and tourists would inevitably gather down by the lake or by the
store and start pointing way up into the hills at a tiny speck of
brown. Some eagle-eyed patron would first spot it, and then slowly
a crowd would form to watch the oblivious bear meander around high
above.

Larry mounted a telescope
onto the back porch of the store earlier in the summer, and we used
to watch the bears from that too. The bears I saw were always
alone, a single bear now and then and always very, very far off. I
never saw them come down near the store, despite all the food and
garbage stowed away near the kitchen. But even so far, just brown
patches on the hillsides, they were grizzlies, and that was
special.

As I stood there squinting
besides Scott, I thought I could detect movement from the brown
spot, now probably about thousand feet away. Often, bear sightings
were just rocks or dead pine boughs matching the cinnamon color of
the grizzlies and moving in the shimmer of heat; but this looked
like the real deal to me.

“I’m going up for a closer
look,” Scott suddenly announced. “Who’s with me?” He fumbled in his
pack and brought out a camera, looking at Brooke and me with
eyebrows raised.

“Are you serious?” Brooke
asked, squinting up at the bear. “Is it
safe
, Will?”

“No,’ I said. “But he can
get up closer and not really cause any trouble. It’s so far off
it’ll be ok.” I set my pack down and sat in front of it, resting my
feet out in front of me. “Bears usually high-tail it when they see
humans coming, anyhow.”

“Some mountain man you
are,” Scott said sarcastically, and began tromping up the slope,
walking perpendicular from the path. He stepped around tall grass
tufts and the thick huckleberry bushes that dotted the area –
“bushwhacking” his way up the slope.

After a minute of watching
him, Brooke sat down beside me and took a deep breath, taking in
our view. The lake was a deep cobalt blue, and a small boat was
cutting through the very middle of it, leaving being a perfect,
white, V-shaped wake. Brooke’s dark hair was lit by the sun and
moved in the breeze that brought with it the smell of warmed earth
and sugary flowers.

She scanned me with a
thoughtful expression. “You seem different, Will.”

“How so?”

She nodded and studied me,
as if assuring herself. “You’re more serious, quieter, but somehow…
I don’t know…. More steady.”

I looked back out over the
lake, and then across it to the mountains stretching into the hazy
distance. “Steady...” I mused over the word. It was an odd term and
I wasn’t sure if it fit me.

The sun warmed our backs
as we heard Scott tramping up the hill behind us. I turned my head
and looked back up the slope and saw him standing next to a
boulder, resting his camera on it to steady his shots of the bear,
which had already moved off away from us towards the far side of
the slope.

Brooke suddenly reached
over and felt the beads wrapped around my wrist. She didn’t ask
about it, and I liked that. Brooke had always been a thinker rather
than a “sayer.” She viewed the world through her own lenses, I had
learned, and she made internal notes as to what she saw. I liked
her because she made sense of things around her before speaking
about them.

She let her hand drop from
her eyes and looked at me. “Scott wasn’t sure we should come visit
you on our drive out to Cali. He said you might not want us
here.”

“Really?” I looked back
and watched him in the distance. “Actually I’m really glad he came,
and you too – you’re both like family to me. And family is the one
thing missing.”

“I know, Scott says you’re
his brother. But I think he was talking about you being out here in
the wilderness, and that you may not want us up here ruining it –
you know, reminding you of the past – Georgia and
everything.”

“The past can’t ruin this
place,” I shook my head. “It’s too much a place of its
own.”

I looked at Brooke, trying
to put my feeling into words. “There’s a… uniqueness to this place,
Brooke – maybe you see it, a savage beauty… that I’ve never seen
elsewhere. I like the hugeness and… permanence of the mountains,
immovable, you know? And I like the strangeness of living and
working in that store – believe it or not.”

I thought further beyond
Two Med, to the oddness of the tourists, to Browning, to the pride
and also hopelessness of some of the Blackfoot, to the strip club,
VFW and cops.

“It does seem to be
unique.” Brook said, interrupting my thoughts. “But what about this
Alia girl, Will? You said you fell for her and she then was killed
up here. Didn’t that change it for you?”

“Alia?” I said back to
Brooke, at her face hidden in shadow behind the sun. “She actually
defined this place for me. She made it more real than any…. than
any mountain or town.”

I pictured Alia walking up
to me along the rocky lake shore when I was fishing in a cloud of
mosquitoes. “She was actually all those things combined, now that I
think about it – beautiful, strange, sad, proud… and savage and
desperate too.”