Sun House, page 71
Kale sighed, stood, and said, “Do me one favor, Max. I’m a lifer in this valley and get along with most everybody. When things get rough, as they’re sure to do, don’t be the strong silent type whose notion of strength withers his family. Reach out, and if there’s any way my posse or I can help, we will. Can we shake on that?”
The two men shook work-rough hands, went their separate ways, and if the world’s disenfranchised would only agree to live by the dictates of weazened corporate logic, NorBanCo was about to win big. But from the week of Risa’s 1997 arrival, steady on into the summer of 2003, a skein of cool unlikelihoods began to befall some like-minded people, their paths and dreams began to intertwine, and as Jervis McGraff likes to put it, “Ways began to lead unto ways.”
Unlikelihood #1: New Reasons to Say Lordy
Ida Craig strolled into a packed Loco Creek Steakhouse, took aim at Kale when he stood at their table, and snap-crackle-popped a half dozen cowboy cervicals as her Junoesque figure swept by on impossibly small turquoise-and-tan-booted feet.
Kale blushed as she closed all distance between their prows to give him a quick hug and peck on the cheek. Shooting a dark look at the oglers, Kale worked Ida’s chair. The instant she was seated a server named Callie—a whip-smart patron of Ida’s bookstore and espresso bar—appeared with Kale’s double Knob Creek on ice and Ida’s Oregon pinot gris, and no sooner did the drinks touch the table than Callie asked if they’d like Kale’s usual rare T-bone and Ida’s medium-rare grilled halibut. They nodded, thanked her, clinked glasses, took a first sip of their drinks, and Ida casually asked Kale how his day had gone. A pent-up Pope then burst out with this:
“I’ve whitewashed the topic of work since the day we met, Ida. It’s time you knew the score. I hired my cowboys to raise cattle. But once this Brokeback deal gets going they’ll be wanting lawn boys and busboys, not cowboys. That day’s a little ways off according to Tex, but it’s coming sure as death and taxes, and caused my best man, Max Bowler, to quit today. If I followed his example I could sell my inholdings to NorBanCo for a killing, move up valley, and not have to watch my home get turned into an all-hats-and-no-cowboys Disney diorama. But when I try to put a cash value on the view from Schoolhouse Bluff, or the home my barn gives Lou Roy’s cutting horse operation, or what forty years of every kind of bird feeder has done for the wild birds in my garden and yard, or what’d happen to Eddie, Rosalia, and Lou if NorBanCo lorded the land beneath their Airstreams, I can’t find it in me to sell. So let me put this plainly, Ida. I’m no ranch foreman. Not anymore. I’m more like a chess king on a board with one pawn left, name of Lou Roy, and all sixteen of my opponent’s pieces are coming at me like a storm.”
Ida set down her wineglass, laid a hand on Kale’s, turned her full femininity upon him, and her girl-voice was fiercer than he thought possible as she said, “You listen to every word I’m about to tell you. You’re your crew’s and cattle’s loyal foreman, the land’s true steward, and NorBanCo’s exact opposite. And there are good changes coming to this valley. I don’t just hope for that, Kale. I’m certain of it.”
“I wish I thought so,” he sighed. “But every change I see coming, I dread.”
Leaning so slow and deep into Kale’s air space she sucked the dark thoughts right out of him, Ida breathed, “Then it’s time to look right beside you, cowboy, ’cause there’s all kinds of change I’m capable of bringing to your valley all by myself. Changes that you in particular, alongside me in particular, are very likely to enjoy.”
When Kale recovered enough to burble, “Well! Say!” Ida giggled, moved his hand to her strong shapely thigh, and began toying with his digits in ways that caused Kale to wave down Callie and beg her to box their meals pronto no matter the degree of doneness. “We’ll heat it up at home,” he told her, then blushed at the double entendre. When Callie delivered the boxes with a puckish grin, Kale and Ida stood, he offered his arm, and they strode past the neck-popping cowpokes and out the door, forgetting their boxed dinners as completely as Kale had forgotten his double Knob Creek.
Following Ida’s white Audi home in the white F-250, he squeezed truck next to car in the driveway, gossip be damned, walked Ida into the cornflower Victorian, wove uneasily through the boutique and bookstore, and endured stupendous loop-de-loops as he followed six voluptuous feet of Ida up two flights of skinny stairs to her third-floor boudoir. In that eyrie, exactly as promised, Ida then brought earthshaking changes home to the Elkmoon’s last best foreman. Swept into intertwinings and swoons he had never dreamed possible, the Pope showed his quality. His strongest oath all night was an occasional, “Lordy, Ida! Oh, Ida! Lordy!”
Unlikelihood #2: The City Lights of Elsewhere
At dawn the day after Kale, Lou Roy, and Risa shared a campfire in the Glory Meadow, Kale freed Lou Roy from exile and Lou moved back to his Airstream on Schoolhouse Bluff for a day of unpacking, resettling, and tending his horses.
The next morning, early, Lou Roy picked Risa up at her motel for a tour of the Elkmoon Valley. When she climbed onto the bench seat of Lou’s faded yellow and rusted Cheyenne, iPooch broke the Montana State Tail Whumping Speed Record in greeting her. “Come sit in my lap before you turn me into a soufflé!” Risa told her, and up she hopped.
“Best way to learn a valley,” Lou opined as they left E City, “is start at the top, turn back around, an’ follow the river down checkin’ out side valleys, tribs, tiny towns, historic sites, an’ cool little secrets as we go.”
“Mind if I take notes?” Risa asked. “I want to learn this valley inside and out.”
“Scribble away,” said Lou Roy. “An’ here’s a tip will help. Pine forest has a way of all lookin’ the same, an’ lots o’ these places you’ll want to find again. So each time we turn off Downriver Road, write the nearest milepost marker. I’ll help you spot ’em.”
Lou Roy’s style as tour guide was to pull up to a feature of interest, park the old Cheyenne, down his window, roll a smoke, light up, and say next to nothing. “Too much talk scribbles over what’s callin’ to the eye,” he said.
Risa liked his spare commentary just fine. Treating the valley like a Skrit Lit classic, she took copious notes, adding sketches, maps, bird and animal sightings, personal observations, and a few crazy dumbsaint notes too. A few of the morning’s highlights:
Downstream of the Glory Meadow the valley spread out over a surprisingly level floor, most of it forested with four species of conifers. Downriver Road cut straight lines through the trees but the river meandered, sometimes near the highway, sometimes as much as a mile away from it. Near milepost 66 Lou turned onto an unmarked track, jounced through pines to river’s edge, downed his window, rolled his smoke, and waited to see what Risa would see.
Across the river was a cliff with strata that fanned out like the tail of a turkey gobbler. “Betcha five bucks I can name that cliff in five tries,” Risa said.
“No bet,” Lou Roy said. “Gobbler Rock. A name so obvious it’s dumb, an’ that’s what I like about it. Folks drive in, gawk at the tail, maybe shoot it a couple times, an’ leave without noticing the creek tricklin’ outta the willows just downstream. See it?” Lou looked over and saw that Risa was already sketching the shiny-rocked hint of creek leaking out of the willows. “Cross that tail-out, stand in the outflow, an’ you’ll feel Gobbler Creek is warm. Steams like a locomotive in winter, but the track we just drove is under eight, ten feet of snow then. Come summer, bring a friend, follow Gobbler two miles up, an’ the sweetest hot spring in the Elkmoon’s likely to be nobody but yours.”
A quarter mile past milepost 65, Lou Roy’s secret was a hanging valley into which he would climb in November. “With luck I’ll down an elk, lower it in quarters down the cliff there, an’ Grey an’ Goober, hobbled at the bottom, will tote my elk an’ me out in one go.”
Between posts 60 and 59 Lou Roy eased into a pullout and pointed crossriver to the mouth of a trib. In the crown of a larch towering over the creek perched two bald eagles. “Ospreys leave in September, so brown trout on the spawn timed that right,” he said. “But eagles winter over. You’re lookin’ at Two Pound Creek. Can you guess why?”
An inch into Lou Roy’s cigarette an eagle went into a dive, sank its talons in the riffle at the mouth, lifted off with a good brown, landed on a gravel bar, the eagles made sushi of it, and Risa said, “Two pounds is the average size of the creek’s spawning browns.”
“Bingo.” Lou and his glacier-silt-green eyes gave her a glance of approval.
At milepost 44, with nothing but forest in sight from the highway, a road sign read:
ELSEWHERE, MT
POP 40
ELEV 4385
Lou turned right, followed a gravel road riverward, and before they reached water they entered a pine-forested hamlet of thirty-some cottages and modest board-and-batten buildings. Lou parked by one of the buildings, downed his window, and again said nothing. But Risa was quick. Spotting a weathered board that faintly read, ELSEWHERE BAR & GRILL, she cried, “My dad loved this place!”
“Makes two of us,” Lou said. “Four tables an’ five barstools, same as forever. Trout risin’ off the back deck. Opens at five, closes at nine, so we’re six hours early, dang it. Big pours on drinks. Great steaks. Folks tell Mitt Gruneau, the owner, he’d triple his business if he’d put a billboard on the highway an’ improve his sign. ‘Why would I do that,’ Mitt says, ‘when a crappy sign an’ no billboard pulls in just the number I like to serve?’”
Risa was making a note to return, look Mitt up, and ask if he remembered Dave when Lou Roy’s face brightened and iPooch began to cry with excitement. Lou opened his door, the dog flew over him, and Risa climbed out and joined them peering skyward. “There we go!” Lou said, pointing directly overhead.
Risa gasped. A half mile up, against a pure blue so dark their bodies and white wings shone like the lights of a celestial city, their black wingtips causing the lights to spark on and off, six thousand? eight thousand?—she couldn’t even guess how many snow geese trumpeted as they flew.
“Hard to beat that,” Lou Roy said. “Let’s save the rest of the valley for next time an’ go check out NorBanCo’s big doings, Kale’s inholdings, an’ the lands your family once owned.”
Unlikelihood #3: Risa Gives the Concierge Nothing
Nine miles shy of E City Lou Roy turned onto a heavily oiled gravel thoroughfare as wide as two lanes of an interstate freeway. “What’s with the oil?” Risa asked. “Isn’t it toxic?”
“NorBanCo’s man Tex likes toxic,” Lou muttered. “What he hates is dust in his lodge.”
A six-by-sixteen-foot sheet of steel hung under the enormous log arch they drove under, with two-foot-tall letters plasma-arced clean through the steel proclaiming, VALLEY LAND & BEEF INC. They drove slow past a cavernous metal warehouse in which Risa glimpsed a huge snowplow and two even bigger road graders. Next came an enormous gravel pit with a loader and four dump trucks in its depths, the source of the oiled high road.
Suddenly iPooch let out a string of high-pitched dog words. They’d reached the stockyard loading docks where Land & Beef cattle shipped out. No cattle present, but the odor kept iPooch singing till Lou Roy barked, “Squirrel!” which made her fall silent and peer madly in all directions. Eyeing her antics, Lou turned talkative. “Kelpies are great herders, but it’s sheep they’re geared to, so I keep iPooch distracted around cattle. The breed’s famous trick is called ‘backing.’ When a gob of spooked sheep jam into a fenced corner, a kelpie’ll charge like a maniac, jump right up over their faces onto their backs, run atop ’em to the fence, drop to the ground, an’ raise enough hell to force ’em out to where a horseman can slide in an’ move ’em forward from behind. Trouble is, iPooch sees cattle same as sheep. First time she tries backin’ a herd of Angus, she’ll be the one ends up hamburger.”
Beyond the cluster of industrial buildings they came upon an anomaly: an old-fashioned white-washed clapboard Grange Hall. “Your McKeig forebears used this building for three generations,” Lou Roy said. “Weddings, wakes, place to vote, square dances, every kind o’ meeting. Now Doty Nolan an’ our new man, Buford Raines, bunk here. A calf roper, Buford just turned twenty-four. Replaced Max Bowler, best man we had, but it could be we come out good. Kale says Buford’s the best all-round cowboy he’s ever hired, an’ Max, who I like despite losin’ teeth to him for bein’ a dumb shit, found a woman, their own place, an’ a foreign breed o’ health food cattle he hopes to market.”
They drove out onto rolling grasslands pretty as a picture, but as fast as iPooch relaxed Risa grew tense. The beauty of the open country made it all the more troubling to see hundreds of survey stakes laying out the impending ranchettes, condos, golf course, and mall. “With the ad campaign going I’m surprised building hasn’t started,” Risa said.
“They’ll wait till a percentage buys in, Kale says, then poop out the whole deal in one spring, summer, an’ fall. If you hope the hordes aren’t comin’, take a look over this next rise.”
They crested a swell. A half mile ahead, atop tableland fifty or sixty feet above the river, stood the most ostentatious log structure Risa had ever seen. “What do they call that?”
“The Grand Lodge on the Elkmoon,” Lou muttered. “Four stories and thirty-thousand square feet o’ what Tex calls ‘Old West luxury.’ Every dead log old-growth Montana ponderosa, yet every tree Tex plants is as nonnative as he is. Even the lawn’s trucked in from Oregon, same as the golf course’ll be. Montana-grown grass idn’t phony enough to suit ’em.”
Everywhere Risa looked the aura was mega-corporate, and the bustle suggested NorBanCo was taking the valley by storm. A heliport with three parked choppers included a behemoth with front and rear blades. An asphalt parking lot sported thirty or more high-end SUVs and pickups, with parking space for a hundred more.
Four hundred yards shy of the lodge the road dipped into a stand of cottonwoods, and Risa had a notion. “Could you hold up, Lou? Seeing we’ve reached the enemy fortress, I’d like to do some recon solo, so I don’t incriminate you or Kale. I won’t be twenty minutes.”
Lou Roy parked under the trees and checked his pocket watch. “Make it fifteen an’ we’re on time for the good lunch the Pope’s making us.”
“Deal,” Risa said, and took off at a fast trot toward the Grand Lodge bustle. She wove through service people in electric carts and delivery vehicles driving to and fro among a multitude of outbuildings. Men were using a compressor to blow the water out of the lawn’s sprinkler system to winterize it. The lawn itself must have covered twenty acres. Six men in formation were swinging around leaf blowers so loud it seemed they were trying to scare the leaves back up onto the trees. Risa slowed to a walk, tied back her hair, strode up the eight massive stone steps onto the lodge’s wraparound roofed veranda, reminded herself to look self-important, and entered the gigantic main doors.
The first four people she encountered were maids. When Risa smiled, all four dropped their gaze as if lack of eye contact was mandatory. Executive types passed by, many of whom did the opposite of drop their gaze, some of them dressed like golfers despite the lack of golf course, others like fly-fishers or hunters so unconvincing they seemed to be playing dress-up.
At the entrance to the lodge’s Great Room, Risa snatched a brochure from a display table and strolled in. To her surprise the room was empty, but the look of it made her mutter, “Whoa! Our Lady of the Hostile Merger Cathedral!” Massive log roof beams and trusses loomed so high overhead it seemed the owner might be a fairy-tale giant. Above the beams the subdued light from recessed skylights might have generated a feeling of reverence had the ninety-seven-key Bösendorfer Imperial grand piano, gaudy Ahab Gilhooley glasswork, Charlie Russell rip-off paintings, and Nouveau Manifest Destiny decor not been designed to induce abject envy over the room’s cost. “Our second and third stories,” the brochure crooned, “offer luxury suites with twelve-foot ceilings, private Jacuzzis, fully stocked kitchenettes and bars, bear and bison skin rugs, and—” Risa tossed the brochure onto the strings of the Bösendorfer in disgust.
At the room’s far end she spied a ten-by-six-foot wood and ironwork door, noticed a small sculpture affixed to it, and realized she was seeing Tex Schiller’s Sitting Bull door knocker. Feeling instantly furious, she had a furious idea. Why not “knock” on Tex’s door by kicking the crap out of it with her boots, impersonate a Brokeback client in love with one of the luxury ranchettes, then tell Schiller that his outrageous door knocker changed her mind, convincing her that the whole Brokeback development was a scam?
En route to Schiller’s door, however, she lost momentum. An ambient sense of suffering hung heavy in the air. When she stopped walking and tried to determine the source, her attention fell on ten enormous ponderosa-pine boles, thirty feet tall, deployed as pillars to support the enormous crossbeams and trusses. Stripped of their bark, lacquered, and spotlit to create dramatic shine, the boles bore a disturbing resemblance to sweat-slicked human torsos. Their sunwise straining was so muscular it felt alive. Torn from their forests, bound by massive black bolts and ironwork, the pillars fairly wept that they’d been ten of the most magnificent trees left in Montana, and what was left of them was in torment. Risa’s eyes filled. “Organ of speech departed,” she whispered. “Eyes gone. Ears extinguished. Mind snuffed out.”
