The dancing was over now and the Body Choristers were all in a circle again, only this time they were sitting on the floor with their eyes closed, silently holding hands. Ben was holding hands with the whirling Taliban who seemed to have taken something of a shine to him. He was wondering where the guy had put his pepper.
After another twenty minutes or so, during which anybody who wanted to could share thoughts about how it had been for him or for her, the session broke up. Everybody put their shoes back on and Lori came over and gave Ben a hug and then Eve arrived and they both gave her a hug.
“Was that good?” she asked him nervously.
“Terrific.”
She gave him a skeptical look.
“No, honestly. I really enjoyed myself.”
He put an arm around her shoulders and she put hers around his waist. She smelled all warm and sweaty and delicious. Lori was standing there, assessing them, beaming at them.
“You know something?” she said. “You guys look so great together. You even look like each other.”
“Is that a compliment?” Ben and Eve said at the same time.
“Yes.”
Pablo had gone to stay with his father for the weekend, so they had the house to themselves. Ben lit a fire in the arched stone fireplace in the bedroom while Eve made them some green tea whose taste he was at last beginning to like. The late winter sun was angling onto the white quilt of the bed through the window and filling the room with a soft amber glow. They slowly undressed each other, nuzzling each other’s necks like cats as they did so, then lowered themselves onto the wedge of light that lay athwart the bed. Her skin tasted of salt and he kissed her shoulders and her breasts and beneath her arms and traveled the long hollowed curve of her belly with his hand and found her warm and open.
The fear that had blighted their first couplings was banished now, confined to a shadowed recess of his mind. There were times, still, when it would try to summon him, with whispers of inadequacy and plangent taunts of guilt and betrayal. But whereas once he would have paid heed and answered and wiltingly gone, now he could usually block the sound from his ears. Had Eve not been so patient with him, so forgiving and apparently unfazed by his early failures as a lover, he would long ago have crawled away in shame. But she seemed to understand and hushed the faltering self-pity of his efforts to explain.
Inside her now, a stranger still to her shape and feel, he watched the pale tilt of her chin, her parted lips, the shuttered lashes of her eyes beyond, her hair thrown like a spill of ink across the pillow and the shadow of their conjoined selves moving slowly, slowly, on the roseate rough plaster of the wall. He was here now, with her. He was here.
SIXTEEN
It was less than a year since she had last been here. But like so much else in Abbie’s life, during those months the place had been utterly transformed. She and Ty were standing their horses on the crest of the same bluff where they had ridden with his father two summers before and watched the golden eagle soaring above the river. They had ridden here by the same route, loping through the sage on the same two horses. But that was where any similarity ended. The landscape over which they now looked out belonged to a bleaker planet.
“My God,” she murmured.
“I said you wouldn’t know the place.”
Even the mountains, on this close, gray May morning, seemed altered, darker, more broodingly distant. The river was low and ashen and its banks looked as if they had been sluiced with whitewash. Downstream, where the breaks had once babbled and sparkled among the willow scrub, there was now a desert of shingle and baked mud, all patched with white where the salt water had dried. The water that had killed the Hawkinses’ colts and the cattle.
“See the cottonwoods down along there? By now they should all be in leaf. They’re dead. Every last one of them. We figured they might make it, but they haven’t. And down there? Where Dad took you to see those colts? This time of year those meadows would be so thick with flowers you couldn’t walk through without getting your clothes all yellow. Look at it now.”
It was arid and brown and crusted with salt, a few sorry tufts of bleached grass trying to cling on.
“Nothing’ll grow down along there now. The hay fields up along have gone too. The river’s poisoned and now the land is too. The water that’s released from the drilling kills everything.”
Abbie just sat there in the saddle, shaking her head.
“I can’t believe it.”
Ty laughed.
“Boy, you haven’t seen the half of it. Come on, I’ll show you.”
He reined his horse around and urged it forward and they loped back the way they had come, past the gash of red rock and down through the sage. Instead of turning left to the ranch, they bore right and headed toward the mountains, up a winding valley, dotted on either side with boulders and gnarled limber pine, some of which, Ty’s father had told her, were more than a thousand years old.
As they rode up the valley she could hear a rumbling sound that got louder and louder until they came around a bend and Ty eased his horse to a standstill and she rode slowly up alongside and stopped too.
“Well, there you go,” he said. “Used to be good pasture. Now the topsoil’s gone, nothing’s going to grow here, even when they’re gone.”
Up ahead of them, a wide dirt road had been gouged across the entire width of the valley and the far side of it was a sea of dried-out mud, churned and rutted with tire tracks. There were power lines and pipes and a cluster of white-topped cement plinths that Ty said were the wellheads.
The rumbling noise was coming from some low white-walled buildings with generators and drilling rigs and some strange-looking trucks parked beside them, all surrounded by a chain-link fence, posted with signs saying Danger and Keep Out. Ty said this was a compressor station and that there were others farther on, and tanks too, where the water released by the drilling was supposed to be contained. Which was a joke, he said, because they were always leaking and overflowing. And they were poorly fenced too, so that keeping horses and livestock away was a nightmare. Just one of many, he added wryly.
It was the weekend, so there was nobody about. But any other day, he said, they would be dodging trucks every few minutes and wouldn’t be able to see the place for dust.
“This is where Daddy used to hold his horse clinics. He always said, with the mountains up yonder and the forest and all, it was the prettiest place on the ranch and if ever anyone started moaning about how much he was charging, as soon as they got up here, they’d stop. One woman once said she’d pay that much for the view alone.”
He looked away and went quiet for a while. Abbie could guess what he was thinking about.
She had been able to tell from his tone of voice on the phone two days ago that something was wrong. At first she assumed he was just acting all hurt because it had been so long since she had last called him. The truth was that the only person she ever called these days was her mom. Since going back to school after that god-awful trip to Mustique, she had become something of a hermit. She never went out and her friends, all except Mel, had by now virtually given up on her. She had buried herself in her studies, holed up day after day in her room or in the college library, reading about how the world was being ruined. Getting angry seemed to help her feel less sorry for herself. But hearing what Ty had been through made her feel selfish and guilty. On the phone, when she’d asked him what was wrong, there was a long pause and then he told her quietly that his father had suffered a stroke.
Abbie had bought a used car with the money her grandpa had given her for that very purpose for Christmas, a little dark blue Toyota, and she drove it to Sheridan the very next day to see him. She knew she wouldn’t remember the way on the gravel roads out to the ranch so they arranged to meet at the Best Western. He looked pale and drawn and hugged her so hard and for such a long time that she knew he was at the very edge of himself.
He said he ought to tell her what had happened before they went o
ut to the ranch, because he didn’t want his mom to have to hear it, so they walked along Main Street and found a little plaza and sat together on a bench. There was a bronze statue of a cowboy there, with long hair and chaps and a rifle resting across his shoulder, as if he might at any moment have cause to use it, and Ty stared at him while he told her what had happened.
It was in February, he said. Just a couple of weeks after the bulldozers moved in and started cutting the road. His mom and dad had refused to sign the surface-damage agreement that McGuigan Gas & Oil had sent them. Instead they had hired an attorney and were asking for further assurances about putting the land back the way it was.
Then one morning, unannounced, two guys drove up to the ranch house and said the diggers would be arriving the following day and that within the week they’d be drilling. The attorney did what he could but it was hopeless, Ty said. Like talking to the deaf. The gas company just didn’t want to know. Next day, as promised, in came the bulldozers and soon the whole place was a quagmire.
“They had these guys working up there, ten or twelve of them, some crew they’d brought up from Mexico, all of them illegal. And McGuigan didn’t bring in any kind of backup, not even portable toilets, so these guys were up there, just doing their business out in the meadow. Dirty toilet paper blowing all over the place, even down at the house. It was just plain revolting.
“Dad and I would go up and try and reason with them but most of them didn’t even speak English and even the ones that did said it had nothing to do with them and we should call the office, but nobody there wanted to talk to us either. And all the while Mom’s just, you know, crying her eyes out, breaking her heart. . . .
“Anyhow. Eventually, Dad managed to get hold of J. T. McGuigan himself on the phone, the CEO or president or whatever the hell he calls himself. Down in Denver. And this guy starts yelling and saying Dad only has himself to blame, that he should have signed the goddamn surface-damage agreement.
“He flew up two days later and there was this meeting at the attorney’s office and McGuigan, who turns out to be this big bull of a fella, ex-Marine or some such, starts hollering and poking his finger at Mom and Dad . . . Hell, Abbie, I should have been there, but I had to be in Bozeman that week.
“So, Mom’s real upset and Dad’s trying to calm her down and all. And she keeps saying to McGuigan, You can’t do this, you can’t do this to us. And it all goes quiet and he walks right up to her and points his finger in her face and says, Listen lady, let me try and explain. It’s like you and I are married. I can do whatever the hell I like to you, whenever or wherever I choose, and you just have to go along with it.
“And that same night, Dad had his stroke.”
As they walked back to their vehicles Ty told her that his father had come home from the hospital about a month ago but that he had lost the power of speech and was pretty well paralyzed.
“Just sits there all day in front of the TV. He never used to watch it but it’s hard to know what else to do with him. We talk to him, read him things. We reckon he knows what we’re saying and that he’s still in there somewhere, locked up inside himself, though sometimes . . .” Ty stopped for a moment and swallowed. “Sometimes, I kind of hope he isn’t.”
“How’s your mom?” Abbie asked softly, realizing as she said it what a dumb question it was.
“Kind of how you’d expect.”
Just as Ty had said, when they got up to the ranch house, his father was slumped in his chair, staring at the TV. Abbie said hello but his eyes didn’t even flicker. It was a wildlife documentary film. A pack of hyenas was trying to snatch a little warthog from its mother. Martha gave Abbie a big hug and welled up but managed not to cry. Over supper they kept up a brave and brittle cheeriness, Martha asking Abbie all kinds of questions about college and telling her how bad she felt that Ty had given up his studies at Montana State. Maybe Abbie could persuade him to go back, she said.
“Oh, Mom,” Ty said wearily. On the TV, the hyenas were having their supper too now.
“The thing is, Abbie, he thinks he’s indispensable and that his poor old mother can’t run this place without him.”
“I do not.”
They changed the subject. Then Martha delicately asked after Abbie’s mom. Ty had obviously kept her up to speed.
“She’s okay, thanks. Doing a little better. She’s started smoking, which is kind of strange. Hasn’t done it for more than twenty years.”
“Don’t give her too much of a hard time.”
“I’m not. It’s her life.”
“And your dad. How’s he doing?”
“Okay, I guess. I don’t really know.”
Abbie nearly added that she didn’t care either, but didn’t.
Benjamin e-mailed her the whole time and though to begin with she had sent him short, mostly vitriolic replies, she now didn’t bother. Three or four times a week he would call her cell phone but she usually just let it ring and then listened to his message, which was always the same bullshit. How much he loved her and missed her and wanted to talk with her and could he fly up and see her, maybe next weekend or the weekend after or any time that suited? And sometimes, just to get him off her back, she would take the call and say coldly that she was really busy and no, sorry, but it wasn’t convenient for him to come, not that weekend nor any other foreseeable. She didn’t know how long it would be before she would stop wanting to punish him. Maybe when the sound of his voice no longer made her seethe with a resentful anger. The fact that she missed him terribly only stoked it further. He had always been there for her, ever her staunchest supporter and mentor. And she loathed how weak and rudderless she felt without him.
Ty came to her room that night and though their lovemaking was laced with a mutual sorrow, it brought at least an obliterating comfort. Yet afterward she found she couldn’t sleep and lay with her head on his chest listening to his soft snoring and, somewhere off in the darkness, the distant yipping of a coyote.
One of the ranch dogs had had a litter of puppies. Ty had found homes for all but three who were now some twelve weeks old. One of them, a scraggy little mutt with three white paws and a kink in his tail, took a shine to Abbie, just trailed around after her and wouldn’t leave her alone. None had names, so Abbie called him Sox. Ty said she should take him back to Missoula with her but though she was tempted, she said no, she couldn’t possibly.
She stayed for two days and on the second, when the gas men were back at work, she witnessed for herself the constant passage of trucks up the valley and the clouds of dust they churned. Ty said they were going to try to file suit against the company even though their attorney said they didn’t stand a chance and might as well instead just sit there setting fire to hundred-dollar bills for the next two years.
The morning she left, Abbie said good-bye to Ray and kissed him on the forehead and he made a little noise as she did so, but she figured he was probably just trying to clear his throat. Martha made her promise to come back soon. Ty led the way in his old pickup back down into Sheridan and they parked up just short of the interstate to say good-bye.
From the passenger-side footwell of his truck he gently lifted out a cardboard box containing the puppy and a blanket and he put them on the backseat of the Toyota. Abbie tried to protest but he knew her too well and wouldn’t take no for an answer. If it didn’t work out, he said, all she had to do was bring the little critter back. He asked about her plans for the summer and Abbie said she hadn’t really made any. She was probably going to hang around for a while in Missoula, find a job of some kind. Maybe go back home for a week or two to spend some time with her mom. Except, with Sox now, how exactly that was going to work out, she had no idea.
“Our kennel rates are pretty reasonable,” Ty said.
He put his arms around her and held her awhile, neither of them speaking, just the roar of the trucks going by.
“I love you, Abbie.”
It was the first time he’d said it to her, the first time
anyone, except her mom and dad, had ever said it. And she nearly burst into tears but didn’t, just hugged him and gave him a kiss. She felt bad for not saying she loved him too, but it wasn’t true and she didn’t want to lie. As she drove away, she saw him in the mirror, standing sadly by his truck, watching her leave. The puppy was already asleep.
The UM campus had that lazy, school’s out and summer is a-coming feel about it. Even though the semester was officially over, nobody seemed to be in too much of a hurry to leave. The cottonwoods along the Clark Fork were in their best vibrant green, the weather clear and balmy, the very air abrim with promise. Students pedaled the dappled shade on bicycles or strolled the few blocks to Rockin’ Rudy’s to browse the records or to Bernice’s Bakery or Break Espresso for iced mochas and bagels or simply sprawled in the sun on the lush spring grass of The Oval, chilling out and making plans.
Mel and Abbie had cleared all their stuff from their room in Knowles Hall and dumped most of it at Todd and Eric’s house on Fourth Street, where Abbie was staying until she figured out what she was going to do for the summer. Everybody else had made their plans weeks, even months, ago.
Mel and Scott had already left for Peru. They’d tried to persuade Abbie to join them but she wasn’t going anywhere without Sox. Eric and Todd would any day now be heading down to Idaho where they had fixed themselves jobs as white-water raft guides on the Salmon River. After six weeks in plaster, Eric’s hip had mended well and though he limped a little, he figured he would still be able to handle a raft with half a dozen people on it. Hell, he said, if Meryl Streep could do it, so could he. To torture the guests around the campfire, he was taking his new accordion.
Thus, by the beginning of June, Abbie and Sox had the house to themselves. The place clearly hadn’t been cleaned in years, the windows so filthy you could barely see out. There wasn’t even a vacuum cleaner, so Abbie borrowed one and spent the next three days cleaning and scrubbing. It made her feel like her mother but at least it kept her mind off things. On the third morning, just after Sox had discovered an entire fossilized pizza under the living-room couch, her phone rang. The caller’s number was local, but one she didn’t recognize.