Two Medicine (6 page)

I pushed aside my
already-formed doubts as to the logistics of moving so suddenly and
so far, and closed my eyes and let her fingers massage the top of
my head, then she pulled them slowly and strongly down to the base
of my neck, rolling my head around and working out the stiffness in
the tendons of my neck.

How hard can it be to get
things ready to move there?
Just pack it
up and move,
I told myself. But a nagging
practicality kept inserting little questions and uncertainties into
my plan as I sat there, my head gently rolling around.
It’s too late maybe in the season
maybe
. I opened an eye and glanced down at
the magazine cover, looking for a date.
February! Damn! When’s the hiring season being for Glacier
Park?

The article had mentioned
that the Park actually opened for business June 1.
That’s two weeks away!
I
scanned over the entire article again as Nuyen brushed off the hair
on my shoulders.
This was just a summer
job. What will you do up there after the summer season ends, smart
guy?

I’d lose everything I
had.

But what did I have here
that I’d be losing anyway? An apartment and some stuff, a couple of
friends, an engagement ring but with no one to give it to, a job I
couldn’t stand. There was Scott, of course, but I
had
to find this new life
or I would be no good to him or anybody.

But the remembrance of the
sudden bomb going off this morning on the phone, a confirmation of
my fears over the weeks that the one thing I was grasping to for
happiness, this love I thought I had, was not what I thought it
was, that remembrance suddenly drove me rebelliously into the
decision to immediately move to Montana again, with new conviction.
To hell with it. NO.
For the hell of
it!

I was suddenly giddy with
excitement. “Haven’t you ever done anything just for the hell of
it?” I asked Nuyen, as I signed the receipt for the payment. She
indicated by her blank expression that she had not. As I walked out
of the salon I begin methodically calculating the effects of such a
move…
First quit my job, what will
Jeffries say? To hell with Jeffries, what is dad going to say?
He’ll think I’m crazy… What will Holly think when she finds out?
The Bandit wouldn’t care! Scott? He’ll be for it of course… and
he’ll also think I’m crazy all the same though. Do I have enough
money? They can’t pay much at this place… What about my
lease?

My heart began to sink back
down again as I got back into my car, not sure where to even go. I
began to feel dragged down under the monolithic force of
practicality, that dreaded, unavoidable adult disparagement that
had broken so many a dream for so many a people in the past, people
who listened too much to their doubts, their fears – people who
lived to avoid risk. My world of offices, bars, flat screens and
fitness centers in downtown Atlanta, Georgia, was as far from that
as the desert was to the bottom of the ocean, or so it felt as I
glanced out the salon’s windows to the parking lot outside. But the
bottom of the ocean and the desert were kind of the same, weren’t
they? W
hat had practicality gotten me so
far that I couldn’t walk away from?

“
Nothing is certain either way I go
…”
I muttered to myself as I started
the car, “so I better just go.” I jammed the gas pedal down and
sped away from Nuyen’s.

Five

I didn’t call Holly that
night, and I turned my phone off completely. My mind constantly
churned over the logistics and variables of the move, still
throwing up objections one moment and then slapping them back down
in rebellion to practicality the next.

Later, I couldn’t sleep.
Lying in bed, shifting over and laying for another hour or so in a
different position, I was wide awake. I gave up and spent the rest
of the night at my computer, researching everything I could about
Two Medicine Valley in Glacier. I found more info on the Park’s
website, but there really wasn’t much more than what that magazine
article had said. I did, however, find a lot more pictures, with
the same kind of almost unbelievable beauty, mostly from websites
where people had posted their vacation photos. I thought back to my
Boy Scout trip slide show photos, and a small smile of excitement
appeared on my monitor-lit face.

I felt guilty for not
calling Holly, however.
What was she
thinking, since we hadn’t spoken since the call?
Part of my avoiding it was that my secret new plan
was building in my mind in a thrilling way, a way that brought a
feeling that I hadn’t felt in a long time – a reckless
anything-can-happen feeling. It was a new found bright optimism on
which every positive feeling I had at the moment depended, and I
didn’t want it ruined or altered in the least, not yet, not so
soon, and not while I was still figuring it all out. I didn’t want
to break the spell.

Slowly the doubt and
practicality were fading away – the Bandit was winning the debate.
However, part of what kept me up that night was knowing that I was
going to have to deal with work and my father and Holly and all
that eventually, perhaps as early as that next morning. I shoved
the ideas aside all night and continued plotting my
escape.

I again called in sick to
work, and then sat down at my desk after a quick breakfast. There
was a downloadable application for employment to the Two Medicine
Store produced by the Park Administration, and I printed it out. I
read over the whole thing before filling it out. It was pretty
vague as to what the compensation was, and the starts dates for the
job, and even what the jobs were exactly, other than to show that I
would be living in the camp store building and working the store by
day. Not an ostentatious position, no doubt, but it would get me
there and that’s all I wanted to start with. The paperwork also
said that the deadline to apply was June 1, and that was the next
day. So I jotted down all the particulars, signed it, and scanned
the thing back onto my computer in order to email it to the HR
office for the National Park.

Before I hit “send” on the
email, I paused. I got up and walked over to the window by my desk
and pulled down some of the blinds. Cars drove by my building;
people walked to a bus stop going to work in the early morning fog,
a mailman drove his jeep around the corner – all people going
towards some purpose, or so it seemed on the surface. Were they
happy? Would any of them do something like this if they thought
about it? All of the movement and intentional activity outside the
window made me restless, and the monotony of what looked like such
ordinariness repelled me at the same time.

The practical side of me
told myself that ordinary lives of ordinary people can have
profound moments, and that those people had many hopes and dreams
that they were fighting towards. But even knowing that, to my eyes
it all looked to me outside that window as grey and uninviting and
useless as a discarded old newspaper – dried up, wrinkled and
irrelevant. A waste of a life.

I walked over and hit the
“send” button, and my application was submitted. I looked around my
apartment for a moment and wondered about what to do with all my
stuff.

I called the
park’s human resources office up after the email
went through to verify that I had done everything I needed to. The
lady on the other end said I’d need to send them a copy of my
driver’s license, a history of immunization shots, some tax form,
and a letter of “fitness” from a doctor. I pressed her a bit on the
position at the camp store, what I would be doing exactly, the
living conditions and so forth, but she didn’t know anything about
it at all, she worked in Missoula, she said. So I spent the rest of
the morning lining up getting the records and visiting a doctor; I
hadn’t been to a doctor in years, so it took some doing.

A concerning new thought
crept into my mind as I drove to the doctor’s office, however, what
if I didn’t
get
this job for some reason? I knew they needed staff at the camp
store, but anything could happen – there was no guarantee. Maybe I
was too late… What the hell was I going to do if I didn’t get it?
When with each passing moment it became a certainty that I was
going to move to Montana to work a job in the mountains. With each
passing moment, I couldn’t even conceive of an alternative to my
giddy plan now; I couldn’t even picture staying in town and going
back to the office. As I drove around town, it worried me
greatly.
God, let me get this
job.

24 hours before I was
sitting at a Deli eating Greek pasta and reading a text from Holly
the Red. What a difference a day makes.

The doctor visit
was brief and I had my records and my letter. I
called the HR lady again, and she said they would let me know in a
week or so after they received the rest of my stuff. I thought she
sounded nice, and I hoped the rest of the folks I’d soon be meeting
would be just as folksy and approachable.

A week didn’t sound too
bad… and it gave me time to wind up my affairs. I was already
wanting to get on a plane that night, and I didn’t even know
anything about that place, not really – a place over a thousand
miles away.

Was this fate, this sudden
decision to uproot my life? Or was this some crazy impulse that
would end up with me homeless or God knows where… I pushed that
negative feeling back down. This was no impulse, no sudden whim.
This was as needed and obvious a necessity as turning the page when
you get to the end of a chapter in a book, or stepping up the next
stair to get to the higher floor. It was as simple as
that.

That night I called my
father and told him what I was doing. I didn’t even
have
the job, but I told
him anyway. I just wanted to make it more real, I suppose, to lock
it in, and to cut away the last moorings to the pier. He was always
a serious guy, my father, a successful and respected man who didn’t
show much emotion, anger or joy, not even to me. He had been so
formal in his career for so long, that he basically behaved
formally to everyone now, even close family. He had had his tender
moments, very few, and only when I had been very young, a little
boy, and they were brief. Being a father just wasn’t in his nature;
being a formal man was. He fulfilled his fatherly duties as a coach
prepares a key player, long enough to get him performing
successfully and then sending him on his way when the game was
done.

He wasn’t angry, didn’t
ask a lot of questions, for which I was very grateful. He was at
first shocked, and asked me if something had gone wrong at work. I
told him no, that I just wasn’t happy and I needed a change. He
then sounded doubtful as he spoke, like someone trying to figure
out if they were speaking to a mentally off person or
not.

He told me in a stern
voice that he thought I was making a mistake, that the Gannett job
was a “solid start,” but then, in a very subtle change in his
voice, said he remembered being young, (I had seen pictures of him
young and he had looked stiff and formal even then) and he said he
remembered feeling the temptation of “going where the grass is
greener on the other side.”

I paused as he said this,
taken aback by his shift in tone. I then listened with disbelief as
he described a story about how he and a friend had decided to drive
from New York to Mexico City in 1963, to see his friend off to a
graduate school program. I tried picturing the young version of my
father riding shotgun in a VW bus, hair grown longer and a beard,
listening to Bob Dylan or
The
Carpenters
… I couldn’t square
it.

“
But,” he continued, his
voice still softer and less commanding, “you’re young, and the
world will be waiting for you when you come back. But just know
that eventually you have to settle in one place and ignore the
temptations to go for the next hill.”

Before I hung up he told
me to make sure I had enough money. He never gave me money over the
years, believing it was character building to support one’s self –
and I had never asked him for any, even though he was wealthy I had
no financial safety net, with him or anybody – net even a
grandmother in Florida! I was on my own; and I would sink or swim
with no life raft but my own ambition.

As I thought about my
father’s words, I realized that I had just heard him drop his
shield for a moment, and show a personal, intimate side. And
however brief it had been, I never forgot that feeling I had when
his voice shifted for a moment.

Holly’s call I made late –
at midnight.

“Hello?” she
said.

Such a sweet voice. I
closed my eyes and shook my head slowly, sadly, as I held the
phone. I always loved listening to that lilt in her
voice.

“Hey baby,” I said
quietly. “Sorry I haven’t called you back. I’ve been doing a lot of
thinking.”

“I know, I figured,” she
said. “You must think I’m totally crazy.”

“No, I don’t. I get why
you said it; it just hit me hard and took a lot out of
me.”

She paused for a moment.
“I still love you, Will. I really do love you. I just don’t see us
as really right for each other. I don’t know; do you know what I’m
talking about?”