“That, and a fracture.”
“Fracture huh? Now that’s somethin I know about. Probly had one of those in every bone in my body. Cept where I need most: in my head.”
“Yeah. Well, that’s where Wade had his.”
“Poor goof ball. Hope they fixed it right up.”
Butter now back at Harlo, drooling with the stick in mouth. Harlo pushed him, Butter persisted, Harlo relented, patting his head.
“Turns out it wasn’t from the jeep accident after all,” Joe said. “That fracture was pre-existin. They said if we’d got him in too much later, it could’ve been. . .”
Joe sighed.
“So, yeah, it was close, but he’s going to be fine.”
“When’s he gettin out?”
Joe shrugged. “I said to keep him there till everyone’s a hundred and fifty percent positive he’s okay.”
“Too bad. I’d hoped to say good-bye to him.”
Once again, the dogs raised ears and stiffened. Harlo sat up straight almost immediately.
“That’d be Anne’s pickup. Busier’n hell up here today.”
He got himself to his feet.
“So I’m goin to skedaddle. Ain’t really no one else I feel like seein.”
“Especially Anne?”
“She ain’t here to see me, Joe. Better if I just duck out now.”
He stuck out his banged up hand.
“Good luck to you.”
Joe took it. Leveraged himself to standing.
“Thanks, Harlo.”
“Expect I’ll probly see you again soon enough.”
“Hope so.”
“Take care’a Wade for me.” He turned to go. “And yourself too. You ain’t all too good at that neither.”
He laughed, and left. Leaving Joe thinking how, though his limp seemed worse, he moved much faster going than coming.
HOPING ANNE, SEEING no one at the cabin, would turn and leave, while also hoping she’d stay, Joe clambered grappled up the boulder gravestone to where he was high enough to reach Harlo’s rusty plaque for Scotty. He took it down, then having done that, he felt unsure why, and asked himself, Did he think something would happen? Like the huge rock would roll aside and Scotty would come walking out.
So he put the plaque back. And as he did, it struck him then that no photographs of Scotty existed, none that he knew of, which meant that he, like his image, would never exist again, except in the chemistry of Joe’s memory.
A clatter of rock, and at once the dogs shot off barking and racing down the slope. Joe smoothed back his hair. Straightened his shirt. He rehearsed what to say once Anne got to him.
But it was not Anne.
It was Wade.
Both dogs poised to leap and lick his face, Wade pointed the walking stick he carried, first at the black, then at Butter. Both dogs sat. Tails flapping expectantly.
“They said it was okay, Joe,” Wade explained, heading off the inevitable reproach. “They said to just take it easy.”
“Wade, for cryin out loud, you call this taking it easy? Climbing all the way up here, alone? You know I oughta. . .”
“Brain me?”
“Yeah. Brain you.”
Joe smiled. He had to, Wade looking so well, so alive, so happy. Bushy sandy hair. Rosy blushed cheeks. Smiling lips. All enough to make Joe wonder, as he never had, where did such a boy come from. Which led him to wonder, as he never had, whether he himself could have looked so good at that age.
“It’s good to see you, Wade.”
Wade nodded, and sat, as Joe’s arms started to lift, to reach, to hug, to. . .he didn’t know what. To applaud.
Wade began to draw in the cool loamy soil, his walking stick his stylus; he petted one dog then the other in their turn.
“So you came all the way up here just to draw in the dirt?”
Wade continued his drawing, as he spoke.
“I was thinking, you know, about that school?”
“What about it?”
“I don’t even know where it is. Where I’m supposed to go. Or when I’m supposed to be there.”
“Minnesota, somewheres. Don’t worry, we’ll get you there.”
“But, like, you know, are they expecting me? Because, I mean, we didn’t get the ranch money. So how would we afford it?”
Joe bit his lip.
“Sounds like maybe, for all you were wantin not to, now you do want to go?” A moment of anger flashed through him, as a bitter thought took momentary hold: The minute you care about someone, you lose them. “I guess now I want him around, a certain someone wants to be out on his own.”
“What?”
Wade shielded his eyes up.
“Ah, never mind me. It’s all goin to be okay.”
Butter pestering him for attention, Wade relented, and turned to scratching him behind the ears how he loved.
“You know, Wade, I was thinkin. . .”
“What about?”
“I owe you a birthday present, don’t I, since I never did give you a proper one before.”
“You don’t need to. Plus you get another chance next year. And the year after that.”
Joe laughed now too, as he joined in scratching Butter’s ears.
“Look, Wade. You want to go that school, I’ll get you there. I be findin some kind of job soon enough. An we’ll get somethin out of the ranch—I don’t know what but somethin. We got that calf we could sell for starters. And your horse, what’s her name, she’d get a good price.”
“Sell Sorry?”
“Well, or not. I just mean. . .never mind. I’ll figure it out.”
Wade nodding.
“But Joe? What if I don’t go till fall? Couldn’t we could just stay here, like on the ranch, just till then? Like we first wanted?”
“Yeah Wade, we can stay till then. Sure. Like we first wanted.”
Wade’s earnest eyes, Joe couldn’t help smiling, and forgetting whatever had been weighing on him before.
“Why don’t we head down, then?”
“Okay.”
“Just take it slow; no more emergency rooms for you.”
The dogs trotting eccentric circles around them, two mountain goats, old and young, picking their way down the landscape of an aging softening landslide.
When the old cabin came into sight, Joe stopped for breath. He saw someone leaning on the wheelwell of Anne’s pickup.
“You didn’t drive up by yourself, I see.”
Wade shook his head. “Didn’t you know she was here too?”
“Nope. Not her, I didn’t.”
Marly’s hair was the reddest shade of red in the entire basin.
JOE VEERED AWAY from the cabin and instead clung to the water’s edge, where he stood, hands against his back, looking around, not wanting to face Marly. Behind him, the footprints along the lakeshore where he and Wade had approached. In front of him, a smooth rim of bright turquoise water, calmed by a blanket of summer air and the whistle of a million invisible insects, the only movement now a mountain butterfly flitting over the shimmering surface, and a fire orange leaf falling and drifting in the imperceptible air currents left to right against the backdrop of granite cliffs. Pine and spruce, rock and water. Despite, even in ways because of, the massive destruction of that long ago earthquake, this place was by now far and away the most serene of any he’d ever known.
“Brought you somethin, Joe.”
He hadn’t heard Marly come up. She stood alongside him at the water’s edge, holding an envelope.
“Evan gave this to me to give to you just before he left.”
“Evan left?”
“Back to L.A. Went late yesterday.”
Joe took the envelope. “He should’ve said somethin.”
“Maybe he did. Open it.”
Inside was a newspaper clipping, stapled neatly together. Joe read it, reread it, then folded it up and put it back in its envelope.
“Well? What’s it say?”
He stared at the wate
r.
“Joe?”
“Just a news article. About a building I worked on back in New York. He must’ve cut it out of one of those financial papers he reads.”
“So what about it?”
“Some controversy about it. Lot of trouble with how the building’s settled, upper floors buckling, stress-fractured windows falling to the street. Contractors suing each other all over the place. Guess Evan thought I’d be int’rested.”
“I s’pose that’s all your fault too?”
Joe looked up from the article, then cracked a laugh. “Marly, this here is probly the one thing I know for damn sure isn’t my fault.”
He crumpled the envelope, turned to throw it in the lake, then, deciding against it, stuffed it in his pocket.
“Brought you somethin else, too.”
Marly held out a bottle of whiskey.
“From Anne. She said it was for whichever of us wanted it more.”
Marly cracked it open, tasted it, knelt to cup her hands in the water and splash some on her face.
“When I heard the pickup,” Joe said, “I thought it was Anne coming up herself.”
“Not hardly. She’s down in Wyoming.”
“Wyoming?”
“Workin with Norman again. He’s got some pipeline project down there.”
“Well, good for her.”
“Yeah. Thought I’d never get her out of my hair.”
They shared a smile. Looked down over the water that blazed back their reflection, standing alongside one another. And Joe realized, then, there was at least one other person who carried Scotty inside her.
“Marly, remind me, will you, first thing back in Meagher, I need to buy a camera. I want plenty of pictures from now on.”
“Why’s that, Joe?”
He shrugged. “Everyone’s gettin out of town; seems like it anyway. Anne. Harlo. Evan. Wade.”
“Well they should. Here’s a toast for em all, then. I bet they all of em do just fine.”
“And a toast for you, Marly.”
Joe took a drink himself.
“Better be a long one. God knows I need it.”
Marly slipped her arm around his waist; Joe’s own arm dropped around her shoulders. They exchanged the bottle again, one to the other.
“I sometimes wonder, whatever became of that Vaughn Marlowe?” Joe said.
“No doubt still out somewhere nosin around, lookin for more geology. God knows there’s plenty to go around.”
They stood a while, Joe’s fingers spreading through the rich head hair cascading over his arm.
“Know what I could use now?” she asked.
Joe shook his head.
“A long soak in a hot pool.”
“That does have a certain appeal at that,” he smiled.
She moved her body, womanly warm, closer into his, her arm, her strong feminine arm, gripped him tighter. His own arm reflexively, with a will of its own, pulled her into him, as though to purge out any emptiness between them.
“Listen.”
The sound of dogs, Wade running them somewhere deep in the timber. Joe, looking behind them, noticed how Marly’s set of footprints had mingled with his own, all of them leading right to where they now stood.
“Marly?” he said quietly.
She leaned her head back, giving him all her hair.
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