11••••

“IT’S JUST NOT TRUE,” ROSIE SAID FOR THE FIFTH TIME.

“I’m sorry,” I repeated, “but I saw the death certificate and talked to the woman she was living with who saw the body. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.”

“No,” she said, and struck herself between the breasts, a hard, hollow blow that brought tears to her eyes. “Don’t you think I’d know in here if my baby girl had been dead all these years?”

It was an early afternoon again in Rosie’s, soft, dusty shadows cool inside, and outside a balmy spring day of gentle winds and sunshine. Even the distant buzz of the traffic seemed pleasant, like the hum of bees working a field of newly blossomed clover. After a quick visit to the emergency room for an X-ray and some painkiller, I had left Fort Collins and driven straight through on a diet of speed, codeine, beer, and Big Macs, and had arrived at Rosie’s dirty, unshaved, and drunk. My nerves felt as if their sheaths had been lined with grit and my guts with broken glass. Even bearing good news, I wouldn’t have looked like a messenger from the gods, and with bad tidings, I was clearly an aged delivery boy from Hell’s Western Union. I looked so bad that Oney hadn’t even asked me to sign the cast on his foot, and Lester expressed real concern. He even offered to buy me a beer. Fireball woke up long enough to slobber all over my pants, but when I didn’t give him any beer, he slunk over behind the door. Rosie wouldn’t look at me, though, not when I came in, not even when I told her the news.

“I’m sorry,” I said again, “but she’s dead.”

“Don’t say that anymore,” she said, not pausing as she furiously wiped off the bar one more time.

“She is,” I said, “and you’ll have to accept it.”

Finally, she stopped cleaning and looked at me. “Get out. Just get out.”

“What?”

“Out of here,” she said softly. “Get out.” “Aw now, Rosie …” Lester began, but she turned on him.

“You just shut your damned mouth, you worthless bastard. And get out. All of you get out. Especially you.” She pointed an angry finger at my face.

“I’ll get out, all right,” I said, then threw her eighty-seven dollars on the bar, “but you take your damned money back.”

“You keep it,” she said, her voice as flat and hard as a stove lid. “You earned it, you keep it.”

“You damned right I earned it,” I said as I picked it back up. “I’ve been lied to, run around, and beat up, by god, and I’ve driven four thousand goddamned miles and I’m still twelve hundred from home, and you’re damned right I earned it.”

“Nobody asked nothin’ extra of you, so don’.t come whinin’ to me,” she said. She couldn’t look at me, though. Her eyes faded to a brittle, metallic gray, like chips of slate. “Just get the hell away from me.”

“I’m going,” I said.

“And take that damned worthless dog with you too,” she added. “He ain’t been worth killin’ since you brought him back.”

I snapped my fingers and Fireball woke up and followed me out the door. Lester and Oney had beat us outside, and they were walking in aimless circles like children during a school fire drill.

“Woman’s got a temper on her,” Lester said, shaking his head.

“She’s got some grieving to do,” I said as I walked toward my pickup.

“Where’re you headed?” he asked.

“Home,” I answered, as if I knew where that was.

Home? Home is Moody County down in South Texas, where the blackland plain washes up against the caliche hills and the lightning cuts of the arroyos in the Brasada, the brush country. But I never go there anymore. Home is my apartment on the east side of Hell-Roaring Creek, three rooms where I have to open the closets and drawers to be sure I’m in the right place. Home? Try a motel bar at eleven o’clock on a Sunday night, my silence shared by a pretty barmaid who thinks I’m a creep and some asshole in a plastic jacket who thinks I’m his buddy. Like I told Traheame, home is where you hang your hangover. For folks like me, anyway. Sometimes. Other times home is my five acres up beyond Polebridge on the North Fork, thirty-nine dirtroad miles north of Columbia Falls and the nearest bar, ten miles south of the Canadian border. There’s an unfinished cabin there, a foundation and subflooring and a rock fireplace, and wherever home might be, I had been up on the North Fork for a week or so when Trahearne found me.

I was working. On my tan and my late afternoon buzz. It had been a dry spring, and I saw the plume of dust rising like a column of smoke ten minutes before I saw the VW beetle convertible that had caused it as it charged through the chugholes like a midget tank. It skidded into my road and braked to a stop about six inches from a stack of stripped logs. Through the beige fog of dust, Trahearne looked like a man wearing a bathtub that was too small for his butt.

“What the hell is that?” I asked as he pried himself from behind the wheel.

“Melinda’s idea of transportation,” he grumbled. “My car’s in the body shop.”

“Well, listen, old man, the next time you come up the road raising a cloud of dust like that,” I said, “one. of the natives is liable to shoot holes in the poor beast until it’s dead.”

“Spare me your country witticisms, Sughrue,” he said as he pounded dust from his khakies like a cowhand after a long drive. “Where the hell have you been?’.’ he demanded.

“Here and there,” I said.

“You’re the devil to find,” he said.

“I wasn’t hiding,” I said. “You just don’t know how

to look.”

“Cut that crap,” he said. He hadn’t shaved or changed clothes in several days, and he still limped, but he seemed reasonably sober.

“What’s happening?”

“Not a thing,” he growled as he sat down on my steps and struck a kitchen match on the subftooring, “not a damned thing, and since you do nothing as well as anybody I know, I thought we could do it together. It’s not as dangerous or boring as when I do it alone.”

“Is that a compliment or an insult?”

“Just give me a beer and shut up,” he said, and I pitched him a can from the cooler I had been using as a footstool. “So what are you doing?” he asked out of a billow of beer foam and cigar smoke.

“Working on my retirement home.”

“Nice place you’ve got here,” he said, looking around.

“Thanks,” I said. “I like it better than cheap irony.” Actually, I liked it far better than that—enough so that finishing it seemed redundant. I had built the foundation and subflooring three summers before, and had helped with the fireplace and the chimney base the summer after that. Instead of walls and a roof, though, I had erected a wooden-framed surplus officer’s tent that faced the fireplace. Beyond the missing front wall, a small pine grove caught some of the road dust, and beyond the North Fork road, a range of soft, low mountains partially blocked the western sky. To the north, Red Meadows Creek scattered across a grassy flat, then gathered itself to plunge through a large culvert and on into the spring-thaw swollen waters of the North Fork. Across the river to the east, the towering spires of the peaks in Glacier Park rose into a sky as pristinely blue as an angel’s eye. To the south, however, the view, mundane on the best of days, was sullied by the dirty haze that still roiled and billowed in the road thermals.

“I guess it’s all right,” Traheame allowed, “but there’s no place to hang the Mondrian.” Then he chuckled and finished his beer.

“Abstract painting gives me—”

“Goddamn it,” he interrupted, “can I hole up here for a few days?”

“Be my guest,” I said.

“That’s what I had in mind,” he said. “Thanks.” He sat, waiting for me to ask him why, but when I didn’t he told me anyway. Traheame was dependable that way. “Nothing was happening at home. I couldn’t work. Not a lick. Goddamn it, sometimes I wonder if I haven’t topped the last good woman, had the last good drink out of the bottle, and written the last good line, you know, and I can’t seem to remember when it happened, can’t remember at all.” He glanced up at me, tears brimming his bleary eyes. “I can’t remember when it happened, where it went.”

“Try to relax,” I said.

“Don’t give me my own lines.”

“You shouldn’t have given itto me in the first place,” I said, as I pitched him another beer.

“You can be a real bastard, can’t you?” he muttered, his trembling fingers struggling with the pull tab.

“Want me to open that for you, old man?”

“I guess that’s why I came,” he said, smiling suddenly and brushing at his tears with fingers as thick as sausages, “for the quality of the sympathy. It’s got a sharp edge on it here, Sughrue, and I can deal with that.” He sounded like a man who got more sympathy than he wanted at home, but I wasn’t about to say that. He did it for me anyway. “I just can’t stand all that damned solicitude. It’s as if she was an intensive-care nurse and I was about to croak.” Then he paused. “I always go back to work eventually,” he said. “I just haven’t found the right moment yet.”

Since I didn’t have anything to say, he finally shut up, and we sat around enjoying the silence. A light wind rustled the lodgepole pines, clearing the road dust, and behind us the river roared mightily in its stony course. The afternoon drifted slowly toward dusk, lingering like wisps of feather ash in the air, and Fireball returned from his afternoon explorations, trotting down the road like a man returning from a serious mission. He nosed Traheame’s ankle, and the big man leapt up.

“What the hell’s he doing here?”

“Rosie said we had ruined him for polite company,” I answered.

“You’ve been back to California?”

“There and other places,” I said. “I’ve been on the road so much I think I’ve worn out my ass.”

“Looks like you’ve done considerable damage to some other parts, too,” he said, nodding toward the yellowed bruises on my abdomen. I hadn’t been working on my tan hard enough to hide them.

“I took second-best in a political discussion in Pinedale, Wyoming,” I lied. I still didn’t know what to think about the beating, and even if I had known, I didn’t want to talk about it.

“Did you find Rosie’s daughter?” he asked as he rummaged through the ice for another beer.

“Found out that she died some years ago,” I said.

“How?”

“Drowned after a car wreck.”

“That’s too bad,” he said. “How’d Rosie take it?”

“She ran me off her place,” I said.

“Why?”

“She didn’t believe me,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Said she knew in her heart that her daughter was still alive,” I said. “But I checked the death certificate and talked to a woman who identified the body.”

“That’s too bad,” he said again.

“Runaways get killed all the time,” I said. “For every three or four I find, one will be toes-up on a slab. Running away is not a good life. At least Rosie’s daughter had six good months before she died.” I stood up and struck a match and dropped it into the logs laid in the fireplace. The kerosene-soaked sawdust caught swiftly, and the logs began to crackle. Instead of a cheery fire, though, it seemed too much like a funeral pyre. “Six good months,” I repeated.

“Sometimes I think I’d give up the rest of my life for six good months,” he said softly.

“It doesn’t work that way.”

The flames rose without smoke, sparks flaring up the stubby chimney and into the velvet night waiting to the east.

Traheame stayed sober that night, easing by on slow beers, and the next day he stayed dry. The third morning he limped the five miles down and back to the

Polebridge store to buy of box of pencils and a Big Chief school tablet. The fourth morning he went to work at the picnic table beside the tent. After that, for more than a week, our days and nights became as orderly and measured as the rising and falling of the sun, the gentle waxing and waning of the fickle moon.

In the mornings, I jogged up the North Fork road, heading for the border and dodging logging trucks. I never made it, of course, but the walk back was always nice. Until I stopped at the creek for a heart-stopping plunge into the shallow pool below the culvert. When I got back to the cabin, Trahearne would close his tablet, boil another pot of cowboy coffee and fix breakfast on a Coleman stove while I sat on the steps with a cup of coffee and my first cigarette of the day, coughing and spitting up phlegm and what felt like scraps of lung tissue.

One morning as he stroked a fluffy pile of scrambled eggs in the skillet, he asked, “What’s all that running about?”

“It makes me feel so good.” I choked, then coughed and spit again.

“Boy, I guess I’m the lucky one,” he said, grinning. “Why’s that?”

“I can feel like shit without doing all that work,” he said, then laughed like a man full of himself and empty of cares.

In the afternoons and evenings, we talked about things—our wars, our runaway fathers, the nature of things—then we crawled into sleeping bags to wait for the next day, wait for it to begin all over again.

Then one morning I came back to find a note nailed to the steps. Sorry, it read. Back in a few days. I thought about the bars myself but went fishing instead.

Two nights later, about three A.M., he roared back, crunched the right front fender of the VW on the pile of

logs, then stumbled into bed, muttering about his life and hard times. I acted like a dead man until he finally went to sleep. He stayed in bed the next day, rising only to piss, guzzle water, and gobble aspirins and Rolaids. The next day he wasted bitching about the weather: it was too nice to suit him. Then he went back to work.

This time he only lasted four days. On the fifth morning, when I showed up dripping cold water, he had the whiskey bottle sitting on the tablet like a child’s dare. In the fireplace wads of crumpled paper huddled like the scat of some odd nocturnal beast.

“How long do you think you can stand this goddamned solitude?” he asked peevishly as he splashed Wild Turkey into his cup.

“What solitude is that?”

“Goddamn it, Sughrue, has anybody ever talked to you about your hospitality?” “Never twice,” I said.

As I dried on a dirty sweat shirt, he grunted to his feet andhuffed over to the VW convertible, then raced away on a cloud of dust. Perhaps the same one he had ridden in upon.

That evening, as I used the scraps of poetic paper to start a fire, I found one that seemed longer than the others, and I smoothed it out on the table.

It read:

Once you flew sleeping in sunshine, amber limbs

locked in flight. Now you lie there rocky

still beyond the black chop, your chains

blue light. Dark water holds you

down. Whales sound deep into the glacier’s

trace, tender flukes tease your hair,

your eyes dream silver scales.

Lie still,

wait. This long summer must break before 164

endless winter returns with tombstone glaciers singing ice.

I will not mourn. When next the world rises warm, men will chip arrowheads from your heart …

His large, childish scrawl raced across the page, breaking at times into an almost indecipherable frenzy. I didn’t know what he meant by the poem, but the handwriting was that of an insane child. For a moment, I felt sorry for him. I folded the poem and slipped it into my wallet. It seemed mannered and stilted to me, but for reasons I wouldn’t think about, I wanted to keep it.

Later that evening, I took a tin cup full of his whiskey down by the river. A new moon burnished the rough waters. The river was rotten with the stink of old snow, cold and brackish green, roaring like a runaway freight, an avalanche of molten snow.

Once, when I summered with my father in that basement on the Colorado plains, he had come home drunk and awakened me to take me to see my first snow. He lashed me behind him on his motorcycle, an old surplus Harley with a suicide shift, and drove across the midnight plains toward the mountains, flying as if he were being pursued by fiends, the rear wheel spitting gravel on the twisting curves. He found snow, finally, on the northern face of a cut bank, and he stopped and we took off our clothes under a slice of moon to bath in the snow. He meant something mystic, I think, but like me, he was a ftatlander who had grown up without knowing snow, and within minutes the two of us were engaged in a furious snowball fight, laughing and screaming at the stars, wrestling in the shallow skim of frozen snow. On the way home, tied once more to his back with baling twine, I slept, my cold skin like fire, and dreamed of blizzards and frozen lakes, a landscape sheathed in ice, but I was warm somehow, wrapped in the furs of bears and beaver and lynx, dreaming of ice as the motorcycle split the night.

As I thought of that and sipped the smoky whiskey, I heard Traheame return, more slowly than he had departed. He parked by the cabin and left the engine running, grinding like teeth in the darkness, as he gathered his gear, stumbling about like a drunken bear. I waited by the river until I heard liis car door slam, then I walked back to the cabin. He drove away slowly, jammed into the tiny car, slow and almost stately, like a funeral barge loosed on a black, deep-flowing, silent river. The embers of his taillights grew pale in the dust.

It wasn’t until the next morning that I missed the bulldog.