Anne, also undressed, stood at the edge but did not join him.
“Joe? Would you just look at me?”
No, he would not. No. He instead followed two large blue dragonflies, their wings clacking as they skated the hot skin of water.
“Come on. Am I attractive to you at all? I just wanna know.”
Sure she was. Obviously she was. Very much, very attractive. Everyone knew that. She knew that herself.
“Well of course you are, Anne.”
“Yeah? So would you mind tellin me again, only while you’re lookin at me?”
Joe shooed away the obstinate dragon flies.
“Anne. you’re a real pretty looking girl.”
“If you’d take a close look, asshole, you might notice there ain’t no girl anywhere around.”
The dragonflies returned, this time not as two but as one, an eight-winged, twin-torsoed double-blue buzzing mating dragonfly. Joe brushed to break them. . .it. . .apart. They, it, would not; it, they, the one thing of two, zipped like a flying motor toy in and out of reach.
A large rock kerplooshed in the pool at his feet, dousing him in heated mineral water.
“Well?”
Now, this time, Joe looked up, looked at this young unadorned woman, her leggy legs and shadowy thighs, rounded hips and breasts, her long strong arms and willowy hair. . .Anne’s robustly female figure, maybe a bit too white of skin and thin of flesh, maybe ribs a bit too disclosed, her pearly smooth female flesh stretched on the lanky structure that suggested another year’s maturation would fill it out to perfect softness, but for an average any age man, and particularly for Joe, she was a take-your-breath-away sight to see, a vivid reminder. . .how long since you felt the surge of that crushing desire. . .way too long. . .really not since the summer, so long gone, the summer of Marly, feeling that tingle in the chest, that boil in the loins, that heat of arousal when he heard water evaporate, heard the backs of his knees squeak, heard every throb of his pulse in every extremity, ears, fingers, toe-tips. Felt his legs quiver, galloping in place, which if he unbridled would bolt him right up to and onto her. How he would be beside himself, his steady incrementally thickening lust roiling the calm of the water.
“You say I’m pretty,” Anne pouted, looking down the length of her figure reflecting in the water, “but how come you don’t act that way?”
“Anne, I. . .you’re just, you know. . .”
“Just a girl, that’s what I’m just?”
His head shook no, his voice croaked something almost opposite.
“What’s wrong with me then?”
Waifish, piqued, peeved, Anne waved away the thick steam stepping into the water.
“No, nothing’s wrong with you. It’s almost that. . .”
She waded to him, petulant, way too attractive. He looked away, up, skyward. The sun risen almost to its zenith.
“That, you’re. . .you’re awful attractive. How could you ever think you aren’t. It’s only that. . .”
. . .that all those many afternoons with Marly, palms on her face, fingers tracing her lips, her cheek, the curl of each eyelash. Her smooth brow, the slope of her nose, the rim of her eye. How their lips wet-whet each other, how they kissed fingers, eyes, cheek, more, falling, lying the moss banks, arms in arms. Clasping her and she him, sharp intakes of breath, cheeks welded, pounding inside hearts each as anxious to cleave together as the other. His undulating hand up and down, her hip to waist and up and back, under and around, the meadow of fine hair in the small of her back, the warm oozing cleft between her thighs, the quiet secreting wetness, without fail his touch rediscovering the dark glistening woman tissue. Hard for her, eager for him, the disintegration of giving in to the oblivion of pleasure, plunging hands grazing her marshy labial flesh, widening the tab of vital tissue anxious for his lust, haunches bucking involuntarily, in reflexive pelvic union, consummating, afternoon sun putting amethyst in her widened pupils, making her rising breasts flare, dizzily squirting feral glands. How he would moan, her name, God’s name, any name, but barely, no longer able to hold on, when she would hotly whisper and beg him. . .
“Anne.” Anne floating on her back in the water. “I have my own name, Joe: ‘Anne’. Remember?”
Joe awash in memory realized he’d said something—not sure what—but had called her Marly.
“I guess it’s a compliment of some kind. Comin from you.”
Joe glanced at her, and as she began to laugh, he did as well, releasing it and letting it die down, an afterglow around the submerged nudity of their laughing bodies making a mosaic of intersecting steamy ripples on the surface.
After a while, Joe’s eyes rose up from there to a scrubby whitebark pine, clinging to a boulder pile, the same stunted pine where Scotty liked to sit petting his sheepdog while down below in the same mineral springwater Joe pressed Marly to let him press against her, leg to her leg, cheek to her cheek, hand to anywhere and everywhere she would let him, but with Scotty’s eyes on them she would guardedly rebuff his overtures, saying “no, not now, you,” whispering, “later, Joe.”
Those were special days, of living only to be close to and next to her, and he would often get annoyed about it.
“What’s he like that for?”
Marly moving his underwater hands off her underwater leg venturing that Scotty “never seen you bein fond of anybody before, he’s probly wantin to see if maybe you’ll be fond of him too.”
Joe laid back, hands behind his head, eyeing the mute young chaperone up on the rocks, wondering was she right and was that really what his brother might really want.
And they would sooner or later dress and walk up and sit with Scotty and pet his dog, and then all together return to the cabin. While Scotty poked around the mine tailings for chips of garnet or fool’s gold, they the two of them in the darkness of the back room poked with one another, for new ways to kiss, for fresh places to touch. Joe taking her thick red hair, fistfuls of it; Marly guiding and pressing his fingers into her. Hours until leaving time they lay and touched and felt and murmured, unformed words pouring out of them, unmeaningful words, cries and cackles, oohs and aahs, giddy laughter and rapacious demands, profane scatological nasty, shouting whispers, tell me this or that kinds of things, tell me you love me words, say it do it tell me tell me again words.
Then, stroking the back of an arm or a slope of waist, they napped in a tangle of spent limbs. They emerged, rosy, relieved; in the lee side of the lowering sun, they sat together and with Scotty, Marly running her fingers through the boy’s fine white-blond hair, eventually moving Joe to a desire to do so as well, and in time he did, and though tentative, it was good, petting Scotty’s hair.
So of course it was always too late by the time he would finally have to say it: “I don’t want to go.” When Marly would reciprocate that she didn’t want him to. When Scotty said the same, without words, since he couldn’t speak. Always there was the extended silence; always the foreboding. About the coming fall, about what was going to happen, about how would they ever be able to be together. One or the other would shake their head. They didn’t know.
“You’re dad’ll move back to town, right?”
“Even so, but still, we’ll get all hell from everyone. We’ll get in fights. We’ll hate them, then each other. Just like before.”
“No we won’t. We’re better’n any of em. They’ll see.”
“You’re the one who’ll see. See what they see. How I’m a wretch. A skank. You’ll change, they’ll make you. Sooner or later. An you’ll give up and go on and one day won’t have nothin to do with me.”
“I won’t ever want to have nothin to do with you.”
“It’s so goddamn awful in town. If only we could just stay up here.”
“And at least we’d freeze to death together come winter.”
Brooding, nodding, not speaking.
“What if we ran away then?”
“Ran away? Where to? We don’t know no one.”
J
oe looked at Scotty, as if he had the answer but couldn’t talk and couldn’t tell it to him.
Shadows fell.
“Gettin dark and you need to go, Joe; you’ll both get another whippin.”
“You know I don’t give a damn if I do, Marly.”
“But I do.”
Late in the summer, riding home, Joe thinking to himself out loud, worrying about the fall, what were they going to do. Asking Scotty, who didn’t know either. Coming down out of Sweetgrass Moraine, Joe stopped. He remembered Marly’s strange geologist friend.
“Hey now. You know, Scotty? We do know someone outside of Meagher, don’t we? We know Vaughn Marlowe, that’s who we know.”
He smiled at Scotty, who smiled back, then strapped his horse for home, eager to finish chores and get his whipping.
TREES CREAKED. CLOUDS skirted Mount Contact. Now and then rock clattered down on other rock. Joe, taking a full big breath of sky, hazy valley, and dry pine-flavored wind, said, “Whew!”
Anne lifted hot wet hair off her neck. They had dressed and now were basking in sun and heat.
“Whew what?”
“Scotty.”
“Who?”
“I half expected to look up and there he’d be again.”
“Oh. Scotty, your little brother?”
“Hard not to think you couldn’t just roll away the boulders and there he’d be and out he’d walk. Back from. . .”
Anne shielded her eyes to him.
“What made you think of that?”
“I donno. I was thinking about why Norman was let go, too.”
“Yeah. An here I thought he was so good at what he did. And givin me such good trainin.”
“He was.”
“How could it be, Joe. Else why would they of fired him.”
“Probly wasn’t for not bein good. I’m wonderin was it the other way round.”
“What other way round?”
“That he was too good. Too thorough. It could be that. . .”
“That what?”
Joe sighed. “Forget it. I’m probly just, you know. . .I’m just like, here I go again, conjuring up mountains out of molehills, getting concoctions into my head, just like I always do, then how I can’t leave it alone, I got to worry on it and worry on it.”
“On what? For Christ’s sake, Joe. ”
“On. . .how maybe Norman, and me, we were actually on to something.”
Anne sat up.
“So maybe you are onto something. He seemed to think you were, right?”
“I don’t know. Maybe, but maybe not. . .”
“But, so what was it?”
Joe shook his head.
“If I only knew.”
ASSUMING JOE MEEKS’S imminent decision, the joint venture of Hellwater Reservoir Corporation and Arapahoe Oil Incorporated had begun in earnest, with plans to be off the drawing board and under construction by the end of July, and as summer settled in, Meagher began to teem with activity. In the Mint, dawn brought down new faces showered and ready for breakfast; evening brought new diners and drinkers at all hours of the night. On any given day the Grand was home to a bank officer or an oil technician, a geologist or a commissioner. Sales reps for contractors and engineering firms came and went. A planning conference took over the Grand for an entire week; the board of HRC, the R&D department for Arapahoe Oil, multiple state water resources agencies, and even the lieutenant governor, attended. The booths in the cafe were crammed with cost-accounting and project management teams. Problems arose, problems were hammered out, all of it attracting a variety of secondary business.
On the bluff south of town, the state highway department arrived to widen and pave the windswept field that on occasion had served as an airstrip. For the first time, charters and corporate jets would be able to land in Meagher.
A real estate company out of Denver signed Evan to a retainer as a consultant on an extravagant proposal to build a multipurpose ski-resort/mountain sports complex.
A delegation representing the nation’s snowmobilers arrived to investigate Meagher as a site for their winter festival. Three hunting and fishing magazines sent reporters for features on the area. The state chapter of a national rodeo circuit came to solicit support for a special regional event, with a calf-cutting tournament, a pack horse competition, and a sheepdog contest.
The Loomises expanded the Chronicle to four bi-weekly pages with regularly occurring special editions. A photographer-writer team sent by a travel magazine to do an article on the newest most undiscovered town in America was unable to even find it. An organization for arthritis sufferers visited one of the abandoned Independence mines believing that the radioactive properties of the trapped radon would alleviate and possibly cure the affliction.
Along the ruts of Second Street, stumped Meagherites clustered around imported vehicles with license plates from unfamiliar states; some residents, never having ever been far from home, didn’t know the country had so many.
One of several movie stars who visited, shopping for just the right ranch to be seen getting away from it all, was at a loss. Even without sunglasses, and no hat, not one fan accosted him. . .not one person at all even knew his name. “Everyone everywhere knows me,” he complained to the men in McCauley’s barber shop, “anyone who’s ever turned on a TV or watched a movie.” The men looked at him earnestly, wanting terribly to recognize him, but they just did not. It was the same in the Mint, the Timber, even Goosey’s Drug, where the actor went in a vain search for celebrity magazines to prove his case. Finding none, he declared he would open Meagher’s first movie theater just to show them all. After he left, the three women at the fountain asked the fat O’Donnell boy behind the counter about the strange good-looking man. He didn’t know, he thought the man was an artificial inseminator Tyler had hired.
In the spirit of the new euphoria around town, Meagher’s adults themselves held a reunion at the hatchery up Castle Creek; it was easily the most enjoyable time any could recall. Rejuvenated by the mirth and the unending fountain of beer, many diehards danced their odd dances late into the nights that week, around a never-dying bonfire blazing in the river rock fireplace. The two bald McNaulty twins, who had glued sheep shearings to their heads, got so drunk they somehow got their brass belt buckles entangled and like dueling elk could not get separated. Drunken wives called for a no-clothes dance and then those same women, who had castrated hundreds of steers, were surprised so many of their men were uncircumcised. One afternoon midweek, Walt Braughten, who hadn’t stopped shuffling in place day after day, suddenly did, shouting that he couldn’t feel anything. “Nothing at all,” he laughed raucously, whereupon his sister Louise, taking bets on whether ‘he’d feel this,’ put a hot branding iron to Walt’s naked buttocks. Walt jerked his head. Those who bet on him to feel it instantly chorused victory, but then Walt cried out that he smelled fire, and shouted imperatives for somebody to throw beer on it, wherever it was, then resumed his shuffling, to hurrahs so jubilant that thereafter the branding iron test was administered liberally, and any person flinching was served a mandatory drink.
At night the dark box elder brush surrounding the hatchery was, as it was with their teenagers, replete with copulating oldsters. Jim Decker, out to relieve himself under the stars, stumbled across an eagerly humping couple whose backside he did not recognize. He lay down beside them. “Pardon me, Bub, I don’t believe I know your lady friend here,” he said in his gentlemanly manner to the man on top. “Hell, Jim, you two oughta get acquainted then.” Bud buttoned up while Decker and the lusty woman picked up where he’d left off. Flesh flew, and afterward, on the way inside, Jim and the woman remarked drunkenly that they seemed familiar to one another, and by the time they reached the door had begun to recollect that they were husband and wife.
A shower of sparks shot continually from the chimney into the night sky, and on the last night of festivities, one of them ignited a fire. Jumping crown to crown, it was well on the way to becoming a thermal
inferno that would have razed the northern Absarokas had it not been suddenly extinguished by a torrential cloudburst.
Of all the revivified Meagherites straggling back to town that last morning, only Marly was not among them. She had not attended. She rarely attended anything or went anywhere at all. Her business ran invisibly while she sat in her room, avoiding the guests and the nuisance of progress. Though her Grand was in ever-increasing demand, she agonized over the most tentative upgrade, unwilling to sign for any loan or commit to any contractor.
She wished she knew what to do. She wished she had a partner. She wished she could stop feeling sad about Joe. She had no reason to miss him, yet she did. She had every reason to feel angry, yet she didn’t. Once he signed with Evan, losing the ranch, what would keep him here? What brought him here in the first place would now force him away, so the flurry of development was for her a hard reminder that she and Joe would be subject to a doubly cruel fate; for the second time in their lives, when their horizons seemed about to align and the world come closer to their doorstep, they would be thrown apart.
Not much of anything could ease the sadness, the helplessness, the despair. The hell with her big plans. What was so wrong with life as it was? Look what she had made of herself: A motherless urchin shivering night after night under a corner of a wool army blanket hogged by a half-wit shell-shocked vet and his mangy sheepdogs, yet she had become a respectable self-sustaining businesswoman, a hotelier for crying out loud, already a hundred times beyond what she had any reason to expect of her future. Wasn’t it enough she was a good mother? Sparing her daughter her own experiences. Giving her everything. What was so wrong with that, that after all she had worked for, Anne didn’t want it? Did that make Marly’s life all a waste? No. It didn’t. And Anne would realize that, one day she would. It was just taking her a long time.