Her eyes widened, bugging out of the folds of flesh surrounding them.
“Furthermore, this fee has never been paid,” she said menacingly. “You may not leave, not until we have payment for this birth.”
Wade walked to the door.
“Young man!” she cried, clutching the phone in her meaty fist, “I warn you I’ll have Sheriff McComb here before you can spit.”
Wade ducked out the door and walked quickly away, hearing her chairs clatter frantically, hearing her shrill voice yelling into the phone that she had discovered another possible felon for the sheriff to apprehend right away.
WADE FOLLOWED SECOND Street out to where it narrowed to a lane lined with wooden fence. The lane led him to a bluff and a gate built of river rock. He was resting there when a pickup drove up, Meagher County Sheriff Department stenciled on the door, and a man, an older man, with silver stubble and a sinewy neck, got out. He was quite slender and wore his cowboy shirt skin tight. He had a badge pinned to his hat, and the handle of a revolver stuck out of his pants.
“Lo,” he said.
“Lo,” Wade said back.
“Seen any young trouble makers here abouts?”
“Just me.”
The sheriff nodded, looking around like he expected bandits to appear at any time. “Got business here in the cemetery?”
“Cemetery?”
Just beyond the gate, in the sage brush and chest high weeds, Wade saw a sign marked Meagher County Cemetery.
“I came to see my grandfather,” Wade said. The sheriff nodded again. He leaned next to Wade and picked some tall wild wheat to chew.
“What’s with your head there?”
“Oh yeah. I walked into a wall.”
The sheriff tugged at the fabric around his armpit.
“Spaced out, no doubt,” he deduced. “I figured you for a soft-headed city type right off. From now on, pay more attention and you won’t be walkin into any walls.” He hiked up his pants several times as he spoke. “Well I see now you got some sense, comin out here, at least,” he concluded. “Hard to run into much of anything here.”
He swung back up into his sheriff’s pickup.
“Excuse me,” Wade said, “Do you know where the Meeks graves are?”
“Oh, well let’s see. I think Meeks they got over that way. Yeah, see where they’re diggin a new one? That’s for the old one just died.” He pointed to a backhoe scooping new dirt from the ground. “Never thought either of them Meeks women’d ever die. Now with her gone and that dam comin, I bet old Frances ain’t far behind; that place means more’n life itself to that woman.”
He drove off. Wade walked toward the backhoe.
Close by the new grave for Emma Meeks was a mound of new grass and dirt, a less recent grave. To the head of it lay a headstone. The name: Leonard Meeks.
Wow, Wade thought. Below him lay a grandfather, a grandfather until a month ago he didn’t even know he’d never known. Wade felt lucky that, even though he was dead, he had finally met his real grandfather. He picked up a small chunk of earth to put in his pocket and turned to leave.
“You’re new to this hamlet,” a voice called. The man in the minister’s clothes stood out in the sage brush. “You’re Wade Meeks, I assume; my name is. . .”
“Father Sterling.”
“Well, well; youth knows, of course.”
“I read it in the Meagher paper that had Leonard Meeks’s death in it.”
“Indeed.” Father Sterling picked a branch from the tall sage and held it to his nose. He inhaled.
“You have headaches, I understand.”
Wade nodded.
“The bane of adolescence, headaches,” he said. “You know what causes them?”
“What?” Wade said, interested.
“Hormones. Toxins fouling the young corporeal vessel, the unrelenting onslaught of adulthood. I had them too, you know.”
“Toxins?”
“Headaches.”
“The flashing kind?”
“God awful ones. Blinding visions. Bile in my eyes. Knives of light stabbing my brain. Good Christ if I wouldn’t retch and reel so bad I passed out. Even now, I have remnants in my eyes, black globules floating across my sight, clouding my vision.” His dark eyes flicked back and forth. “But you adjust. Over time, they abate. Now here, breathe deeply.”
He handed Wade a sprig of the sage.
“Clears the mind, I should hope. Now then, the import of all this. I have a question for you.”
“What question?”
“An easy one. As congregations have increasingly become liberal with their conservatism, my calls have inversely become abbreviated. By now a maverick reputation for unorthodoxy precedes me everywhere, and parishes will no longer accept me.”
“You can’t get a job?”
“I see not only brevity but also youth is the soul of wit. No, I can’t keep a job, to be more precise.”
“Why not? Do you cause trouble?”
Wade wondered if he had a problem like Joe.
“I’ll be glad to share my philosophies with you at the appropriate time. As for the matter at hand, I have been reprieved to this remote Shangri-La to begin a parish, only because no one else was indigent enough. Thus I, like you, am new here myself. I am alone in this missionary endeavor, and therefore have need of an assistant. An acolyte. Someone to accompany me in my services, someone like. . .”
“The guy in the clinic?”
“Perhaps. My question to you, however, is whether you might not be interested yourself?”
“Does it pay?”
“Blunt. That’s good. Pay? If it must.”
Wade brightened. Though his immediate obligation was to Marly, it was good to have alternatives.
“It kind of depends.”
“Of course,” Father Sterling said. “Give it some thought, take your forty days, wrestle your devils. Afterwards, come find me; more than likely I’ll be in the Mint. In the absence of a congregation, I go there frequently. To rest and resuscitate my soul.”
Father Sterling then went further out into the sage brush, hands clasped behind his back. He walked slowly because he had on no shoes.
OH NO, NOT again. The sidewalk reeling under his tired feet. His vision fraying; whispers chorusing in his ears. Back at the Grand, Wade sunk down into the swirling lobby sofa, its corduroy fabric speckled by years of cigarette burns. He closed his eyes, breathing air musty from the chill stone walls.
Someone walking the floorboards upstairs. Wade went up and found Marly in one of the rooms, smoothing clean sheets and whipping a worn white bedspread across the mattress. He silently began to help; she silently let him. They went to one room, then another.
Marly first seemed to have things on her mind, then she became more conversational. She asked if he had got Edna to help. He nodded. She asked him how he liked Meagher. He liked it. How much? He’d rather stay here than get sent to boarding school.
“Boarding school?”
Where you get your kids taken care of if you can’t do it yourself, Wade explained. That’s why Joe wanted the ranch money.
“Hell, why not just go to school in Meagher?”
Wade admitted that was a good idea. But he wasn’t sure about Joe.
Marly fell silent again. “You father ought to quit driftin through life and settle down,” she said after a while.
Wade didn’t answer. He felt far away. She asked was he alright, he looked a little peaked. He told her he had a headache coming on. She said she’d run him a bath, which had always helped her feel better.
He lay naked in the tub, listening to the water softly rise. The light was off; the door open. Marly changed bedding in the adjoining bedroom.
“Why didn’t you ever get married?” he asked the darkness.
“No reason to.”
“But so who’s Anne’s dad?” his own voice said.
“Oh that don’t matter.” Marly believed what mattered was a good home and a decent upbri
nging. Then they stopped talking a while.
Wade slid down in the tub; water submerged all of him but his head. He looked up. Marly leaned against the bathroom door, her red hair backlit and radiant. She could see all of him, but he wasn’t ashamed.
“What was your mother like, honey? If you don’t mind my askin.”
Wade said she was okay. Not very happy.
Marly supposed he missed her quite a bit?
Not anymore. Nor more than he should. Especially since he had a dad now.
Wade sinking further in the tub, letting the hot water ease over the pounding in his eyes, and soothe the echolocating in his ears.
Marly sitting on the toilet now. He asked if she knew what happened to Joe Meeks’s mother.
“She was a frail thing, I realize now; pretty much a ghost.” Her words muted by the water over his ears. “Barely surviving ranch life to begin with, then Scotty came and turned out simple like Emma, she went over the edge herself. Eventually, not long after Joe left, her heart gave out.”
“What about Scotty?” Wade’s own voice sounding submarine.
“Oh he got buried in the avalanche from that big earthquake. You mean Joe never told you?”
“Was that why Joe ran away from home?”
“You probly ought to ask Joe about that, Wade. It’s not for me to say. Anyway, it’s time to go check on Squash.”
Her departing footsteps echoed in the water. Wade got out, his head steamy. He moved down to the lobby, where, as a few guests came and went, he felt less alone. He lay on the sofa, his long body shivering.
EVENING.
Marly walked up the stairs, hitting the loose tread.
“There’s that bright stair,” a quiet voice said.
“Wade?”
She came back down. He stirred. His eyelashes were shaking, his face glistened.
“Smells dark in here,” he said. “Could we turn off the lights?”
“There’s none on, sweetheart. Are you alright?”
“Maybe I should lie down.”
“You are lyin down. Why don’t you move up to your room?”
“No, I like the company.”
“You’re cold though. Want me to bring you something hot? Soup?”
He said no to soup—the notion of food turned his stomach—but said he might like some coffee.
Marly put her hand on his chest, listening to his breath. In. Out. Then on his forehead.
“No temperature. Or no feeling in my hand.” She stood. “Don’t worry, Wade; Evan’ll get things worked and Joe’ll be back soon. You sure I can’t get you anything?”
“No. That’s plenty.”
Wade smiled his wet face. Liking the sound of his voice.
MARLY’S EYES WENT to the gold plate wallclock. Only Father Sterling remained, edifying her on the finer points of his doctoral dissertation on Kierkegaard and ruing the golden days of seminary glory, while she thumbed her restaurant magazines and um-hmmmed, interrupting occasionally to ask whether he liked this or that decor.
Squash Maloney came out of the kitchen. Unexpectedly, Squash had taken to kitchen work with a vengeance; though it was well after midnight, he was only now finishing up with the stoves which, on his own, he had undertaken to clean. As he went by, Father Sterling, getting an idea, beckoned him near with an offering of gin.
“I don’t drink,” Squash said. And left.
“Ah well, never mind.” To Father Sterling, that disqualified anyone as a possible acolyte.
Marly looked up from her magazine. Sheriff McComb sauntered in.
“Lo, churchman. Marly.”
He took a seat next to Marly. McComb, a life-long loner, had only late in life developed a regularly blossoming desire to lavish all his never used affections on someone, and to such purpose, once a month, he came to visit Marly. He liked to put his arm around her waist and smell her hair and enjoy being in love with someone.
McComb took the dice cup and rolled for a drink. Marly bettered his six and one with two fives. He slapped down four bits and she pulled his beer.
“You read in the Gazette about that Arapahoe Oil buyin in on the new dam, Marly?”
She murmured she had.
“Like that Evan Gallantine’s been sayin, looks like Meagher’s goin on the map after all.”
“Especially if they upgrade that Hellwater road over into Yellowstone Park. We’ll be up to our eyeballs in tourists.”
“That road? It ain’t had hardly anyone but sheepherders on it since the Independence mines give out, has it?”
He began to finger her ear, which usually she allowed, but tonight her mind was in a hundred other places. She batted him away.
“McComb, I have so many ideas but meanwhile, just look at it.” Her glossy imagination faded into dusty moldings and splintered floorboards. “If you could only see how it looks in my wishes.”
“I will do.” McComb ran his finger along the back of her arm. “Whyn’t you send this priest character packin, Marly? No offense, churchman.”
“And none taken.”
Father Sterling was busy translating a Hank Williams line about lonesome whippoorwills into Greek, testing his gin hazed memory.
“I think you both should go,” Marly decided, “I feel like closin up for some reason.”
“I hope it ain’t your notion of progress,” McComb grumbled, scratching his stubble. He stood and tossed back his drink. Father Sterling drunkenly clasped an arm around him.
“Constable, the night’s young and we’ve still got four legs between us. Let’s us good shepherds go partake of some homebrewed vitamin A.”
“What do I need vitamin A for?”
“A for alcohol, sirrah. I have a sacristy full of it, every drop guaranteed holy and fully consecrated. Avanti.”
McComb let himself be weaved out. “Guess you’re better company than none,” he said, with a parting glance at Marly, who was staring at her ceiling like she could see the stars through it. “Civilized man like you oughta get him some shoes, churchman,” he said as they went out.
Marly sat a while, her mind running, then closed up. In the lobby she found her daughter under the desk lamp absorbed in her book. Too late to hide it, Anne closed it shut and walked wordlessly to her room. Her door closed. Her light went on.
Marly started up too, then in the quiet, she heard short pffts of sleep. Looking down from the banister, she saw Wade asleep on the sofa again. Waiting up for Joe, in case he came back. He’d been days up at the Meeks ranch—his ranch now—and all the business that came with Emma’s dying.
Marly continued up but then down the dark hall toward the guest rooms, not toward her own. And found herself in Joe’s room, on his bed, her weight rippling the nappy bedspread. Her thoughts continued turning, endlessly. . .
. . .about Annie, about her wanting all this. . .whatever it was, it wasn’t ‘this’. . .when it was everything she needed. Right over her head. If she only knew. How much she had. How much she’d been spared.
. . .about Meagher. All the impending changes; the dam, the visitors, Joe. About what it meant now that he owned the ranch? About whether there might be any change in him? A strange coincidence, how what was to come had brought back what was long past. And thinking of that, and her own past, it hardly seemed her own anymore. So far back in time, that summer high up Independence Basin, herding sheep, milking ewes tethered to the wagon wheels, slaughtering lambs and cooking stews. So alone, rattling pails to scare away black bears and singing songs to charm grizzlies, since not much anything scared them away, yet, after all that mayhem at town school, the relief of the solitude of high altitude wilderness. No one to make fun of her, taunt her, provoke her into fights. The companionship of a wet lamb when it rained; the trifling fantasies of her own unencumbered mind. Where (other than grizzlies) her only fear was impending imminent intolerable autumn, when they would head down, when she would live again outside town, when she would endure the hooting gangs of teenagers and the rants and raves of her shel
l-shocked father, reeking in his skin of discolored long underwear father, crazed by his impoundment in the habitats of other people. When high up high here she had her pick of many drafty cabins of the abandoned ghost town remnants, where even demented war veterans were at peace, free of their fear of other people’s habitats. When their wild untamed daughters could be freely alone in a paradise of high sunny meadows and cool shady buildings as the thriving herd grazed on silky lupine and stoneseed and brome grass. Here Marly made house, made it the way she otherwise wouldn’t down in Meagher, scouring empty jars and burning tin can refuse left by unknown elk hunters, breaking out boarded windows so that sunlight sparkled on the decaying timbers, covering rusty bed springs with wagon canvas for a bed, picking bouquets of Indian paintbrush and pasqueflower and mountain laurel, assembling a dining set from chipped pottery strewn among the ruins with which she set a table of goose berries and cattail root tea for Joe who, in her daydreaming, came to search for her, or—sometimes, for variety—a handsome stranger who had strayed from his hiking tour of Yellowstone and, lost, and, finding her, grateful for the luncheons she would graciously serve, who, every time he strayed, every time became lost, would come to adore her.
In one old building she found a battered piano with a few wires still strung, so in the evenings, while her mad father outside his sheep wagon home across the basin howled old Scottish ballads and sucked on his canteen of Everclear, she plucked the heavy piano wire, hummed plaintively with the vibrating rust, and—occasionally—imagined: if only Joe Meeks could only see her now.
In the slough above the mine she discovered a mineral hot springs pooled in kettle holes of glacier-gouged travertine, hard as porcelain, where she could discard her rough, floursack clothing, bathe for hours, then sun herself in the tufts of surrounding moss. It wasn’t long before she started and ended every day walking naked to her pool, and it was there, after plunging into her private spa, that she first encountered Vaughn Marlowe.
It was late afternoon. A strange man was soaking himself in the reeds. With only his head above water, and in the lengthening shadows, Marly didn’t notice him at first. She performed her regimen, scooping the mineral sand from the bottom, pressing it to her face, letting it leech her skin clean, lingering in it, smelling its hot sulfurous aroma. When she did notice him, she froze, mistaking him for a wild animal, then a madman, but she didn’t cry out. He was also naked; she could see in the limpid water his body hair swaying like dark algae. He had curly dark locks and a beard, that could not conceal his florid cheeks nor the fiery tint of his eyes. Eyes—now that he’d spotted her too—smiling at her, and looking at her, and she looked where they looked, which was at her breasts. They swelled, buoyed by the gaseous velvety water, flanked by the tips of her wet red hair, and she was astonished by the fullness of her own womanhood.