Mountain time, p.11
Mountain Time, page 11
1962 was inked on the spine of one in a hand different from the rest. For that matter, the teenage boy’s hand that had so carefully written those numbers was different from the grown Mitch’s now, was it not?
He felt the urge to pull out the daybook and flip through its pages, but why start that again. Names of crews, marching down the ledger lines, and their days of work tallied across the wide double pages of each month, that was all the thing held. Fritz and Ferragamo both were in there. Hayfield warriors, that indelible summer, still serving under old Sarge Lyle Rozier.
In spite of himself, Mitch drew down the daybook and opened it to the first crew of that year. April: rock picking recorded in his father’s neat hand. Unlike everything else, the bookkeeping in the Rozier household had always been meticulous. Except.
He heard a vehicle crunching into the driveway. The pickup that ground to a halt outside the bay window was the latest in his father’s succession of faded Smokey the Bear green rigs, bought every few years when the U.S. Forest Service auctioned off used surplus. Lyle Rozier despised the Forest Service and all other government agencies that kept people like him away from the big piñata of natural resources in this country, but the pickups were a bargain he couldn’t pass up.
Mitch watched his father step from the pickup cab as if measuring the distance down to earth from his preferred automotive eminence, then hold the door open for his passenger, his deaf border collie Rin. Next, a groove of behavior Mitch would have recognized from a dozen blocks away—Lyle turned, lifted his head a notch and took a deep, deep sniff. So far as Mitch had ever known there was no physical reason for that habit, nothing wrong with his father’s magisterial nose; he simply seemed to feel entitled to an extra share of the air every so often.
Looking around as if he had all the time in the world, Lyle eased back, propped himself against the fender, lit a cigarette, and took a deep drag. Mitch realized his father was going to wait there for him.
As he stepped out the kitchen door, Lyle peered up from under his battered brown Stetson. “You made it.”
“Looks that way, doesn’t it. How you doing, Dad?”
“Not bad for the shape I’m in.” The identical answer he had been giving for the half a century Mitch personally knew of.
They shook hands, still awkward at it as if they had mittens on.
Of Lyle Rozier, many would have said big-headed, but to put it as neutrally as possible, his hat had a great plenty to rest on. The Rozier box of face, as his son all too ruefully knew, could not be called distinguished but certainly qualified as distinctive, full of surprising promontories. There was such a thing as a Rozier jaw, blunt and stubborn as the plows of the French peasants who passed it on; and definitely a Rozier nose; and cheekbones broad enough to substantiate the rest of the foursquare proportions. This one-man Mount Rushmore face had been Lyle’s asset, if not yet his fortune. The worn lines even improved it, the way an Anasazi cliff dwelling seems more natural because it’s ancient. (Not that his father was ancient, Mitch reminded himself. There could be an exhausting number of years of Lyle left to deal with.) The problem of the eyes, though.
The bluesteel eyes which Mitch met again, now as always, with a stir of resentment at the weight of presumption under those Roman senatorial lids. His father’s drill-bit way of looking at you as if he had seen you before you put your clothes on this morning and knew just what you were covering up.
• • •
Crutches and a snowy new walking cast had been unexpectedly useful to Mitch as camouflage, that distant evening of the picnic supper in the park. After the monumental broken leg had kept him in bed all summer he at last was up and around and giddily aware of the new reaches of his body. Mitch did not yet know enough to put it this way, but he was finding it intriguing to be around himself: the growth spurt that would change him so hard he sometimes would ache out loud—change him from a sixteen-year-old inadvertent cripple into a seventeen-year-old who threatened the dimensions of doorways—was in full spate. And still thrumming in him too was the somewhat scary sense of apprehension (it all had happened too quick to be called fright; mortal instillment of awe, more like) at the fashion in which fate had idly snapped his leg in two places. But that was almost overridden now by this steady amazing tide of growing up: every day a strength of some kind that he hadn’t known he had. The crutches of course were bastards to handle at first, but he had overpowered even them in a hurry, his shoulders and arms mastering the swing that carried the plaster weight of the leg along with ease, his hands calloused enough from the relentless squeezing exercises he’d done on the bedpost knobs to not be bothered by the harsh wood of the crutch grips.
His father and even his mother were determinedly socializing with the crew at the picnic supper that Saturday before haying was over; a Rozier family tradition, and there weren’t many. The customary crowd of a dozen had the park to themselves there in the late-summer dusk and were visiting with one another almost as if they had not had every day of the haying season together to do so. But wives of the crew always came too, welcome additions, jolly Mabel Tourniere down from Gros Ventre, and up from Great Falls, Janine Ferragamo, a peaches-and-cream redhead beside her dark quiet husband Joe. The unmarried men were on their best behavior, handling everything like eggshells; as far as Mitch could remember, even Fritz Mannion stayed heroically sober for the duration of the picnic.
His walking cast, still fresh, invited everybody’s autograph. “Private Mannion!” his father teased Fritz. “Still remember how to make your X, do you?” Fritz whinnied a laugh, protested to his old sergeant that he was entirely capable of providing name, rank and serial number, and with laborious penmanship did so.
When it came her turn, Mrs. Ferragamo thoughtfully leaned over and scanned for an untaken place to write her name on the plaster. Mitch without even trying could see way down her summer dress to—surprise, surprise—twin treats of forbidden skin playing peekaboo with him from where they were barely hidden in a turquoise blue brassiere.
The time it took Janine Ferragamo to sign her name was all too soon over, and everybody began sitting up to the fried chicken and three-bean salad and all the rest. Each table had space for half a dozen, so his father joined in with the unmarried men and his mother presided at the table where Mitch sat.
His mother was at her best in a crowd like this. She always took care to ask each of the crew wives to bring a potluck dish of some kind, so they would feel in on the occasion, and she laughed readily, instead of seeming to examine every conversation for booby traps the way she did at home. Now she simultaneously kidded about how starved Mitch was all the time and made sure he did justice to his food. In the natural way of things, then, he could sit there propping his leg along the bench and look like he was following the yakking of Tom Tourniere and Joe Ferragamo beside him, and his mother’s chitchat with Mrs. Tourniere next to her, all the while able to drift his gaze catercorner across table toward Mrs. Ferragamo.
Until this day he had not known there was such a thing as a brassiere the color of turquoise.
Here was another talent he hadn’t known he had, these innocent tumbleweed glances, while he worked on the matter of how good-looking Mrs. Ferragamo—the rest of Mrs. Ferragamo—really was. Beyond pretty, he knew that much. Although he didn’t think beautiful; Julie Christie in whatever the name of that foreign movie was, that constituted beautiful. No, Mrs. Ferragamo was, how could he classify it, cuter than was to be expected, sort of the way a cheerleader’s looks improved when you realized she was a cheerleader, even though in Mrs. Ferragamo’s case she had to be almost his mother’s age and with Joe, of course, on the scene, very much a married woman.
All at once Mitch felt something riding him piggyback.
He turned half around to the load of his father’s eyes on him. No frown behind them, no wink. Simply letting his son know that he had been caught at it. Mitch was pretty sure that look of his father’s had brought him those sergeant stripes in the war.
He felt himself redden, and redden some more, burn from the knowledge of that gaze.
• • •
Unblushing toward his father all the years since, Mitch said now:
“So here I am, heir to the fortune in gravel. What’s this about a buyer for”—he cast a glance around the ramshackle place—“the Rozier chateau and grounds?”
Lyle cleared his throat. “Kind of keep your voice down, okay? Not just everybody knows about this gravel deal.”
“Like, say, Donald Brainerd?”
“Already met the improvement to the neighborhood, did you.” Lyle tossed down his cigarette and ground it into the driveway. It always surprised Mitch to see work shoes on his father. His type of strut you would think could only spring from cowboy boots.
“Lexa said to tell you she’s sorry she couldn’t come and watch the gravel fly.”
“I bet.”
At last Lyle unmoored from the pickup fender. “Let me show you a little something interesting.” Off he marched to the nearby shed. He was moving more slowly and stiffly than the last time Mitch had seen him, but he still went as arrowstraight as if on a parade ground.
Lyle threw open the double doors to the machine shed, which held a maze of metal but not a bit of it machinery. Skinny rods each about three feet long with exotic bends at their ends were in tangled iron pyres on the floor, in rust-streaked downpours on one wall and in dangling black stalactites from the rafters. The place looked like a case history of ferrous extrusion gone mad.
By the opposite wall stood a cheerful red barbecue grill, half a sack of charcoal beside it; into that wall were burned hundreds of sets of the hieroglyphics that once had been seared onto herds of cattle and horses, Tumbling T’s and Walking 7’s, Barbed Y’s and Rocking O’s, Dice 8’s and Rafter S’s and all the rest of what was evidently an entire capering glossary of this menagerie.
“Branding irons,” Lyle pronounced in a remnant of his sergeant voice.
“I see they are.” Mitch picked up a couple of the brands waiting to be heated in the grill, clattering a Quarter-Circle R against a Lazy A. “You’ve been hard up for a hobby, I guess.”
“Hobby!” Lyle’s voice cracked from indignation. “These’re business. I sell them. Every guy new to this country is gonna want one, you just watch and see.”
“And they’re going to do what with them, swat snakes?”
“Mitch. It’s not just the iron,” Lyle said with terrible patience. “Think about it. I sell the whole brand, registration and all. Gives guys the right to call their ranchettes the Bar BQ or whatever the heck if they buy the brand, now doesn’t it. They can legally put it on the kid’s pony, paint it on their Jeep Cherokee, all that.”
A familiar dread filled Mitch. “But you’ve been the county brand inspector, right?”
“Sure have. And I know just what you’re going to yip about next. But this isn’t whatchacallit, conflict of interest.”
“Maybe not, but you can pretty easily see it from here.” Mitch gaped around again at the metal mess, with an equal legal tangle doubtless somewhere behind it. “There can’t be much of a living in selling branding irons.”
Lyle’s expression turned hedgy. “Sort of one.”
Mitch gestured violently at the collection. “Where’d you come up with all these? What’d you use for money?”
“Oh, I see what you’re driving at,” Lyle said, lowering his voice. “Took out a mortgage on the place. And the property, of course,” with a pleased nod in the direction of the benchland. “See, though, that’s the beauty of selling the Bench. Pay off the mortgage and hang on to the branding iron collateral and still come out ahead.” He studied the expression on his son, then admitted: “It’s a little complicated.”
Mitch could almost feel tentacle after tentacle of litigation and forfeiture wrapping around his knees. Lawyer, banker, gravel man, grief.
“Dad, the paperwork you want me in on.” He was trying to fight off the perverse hope that his father was certifiably losing his mind; dementia might be the best defense, the way the case of Lyle Rozier versus the contractual world seemed to be going. “Don’t you think I ought to start looking that over?”
“Sure, sure. Head on into the house, make yourself at home if you remember how. I have to detour by the pickup a minute.”
Again in that first-floor attic that was the living room, Mitch gazed around for some spot clear enough to work. After the helter-skelter cargo of branding irons and the general strew outside, his father’s desk looked more than ever like the unnaturally tidy bridge on a tramp freighter.
“I can still keep book, anyway,” Lyle’s voice came. He unhurriedly followed that commentary in from the doorway, hanging up his hat on one of the already full coat hooks without looking as he passed.
Mitch gave a grudging grin, or a grimace.
Lyle fussed around at the desk, moving this ream and that. Mitch watched this uncharacteristic bout of squint and dither, then glanced once more at the television set so suspiciously close to his father’s easy chair. He had the sudden inspiration that maybe a lawyer could prove that his father had worn out his eyes on that electronic additive atop the TV, hundreds of video viewings of The Sands of Iwo Jima, most likely. Eyesight, Your Honor. He couldn’t see well enough to read the fine print; our defense is this eye chart.
“Getting a lot of use out of your VCR?” Mitch casually asked.
Lyle seemed delighted to contradict him. “VCR, nothing. Ever heard of the Web?”
Gingerly he crossed the room and picked up the WebTV remote control, poised over it as if trying to remember the fingering on an accordion, then hit enough buttons to bring up a display of icons on the screen of the television.
Mitch was still staring at the pixelated portholes of the Internet when his father let drop:
“I talk with Ritz on there quite a lot.”
My Ritz? Laurits? The vagabond of Jakarta? A pang shot through Mitch and quivered there, but he tried not to give his father the satisfaction of seeing it. “Is that a fact. What about?”
“Been keeping him up to date whenever I sell a branding iron. He seems to get a kick out of it. Way we got started, I just was curious what he thought of that part of the world—you know, I was out in some of those islands during the war. I thought it was sort of interesting he’s over there, too.” Noticing the look on Mitch, he further reported: “Can’t seem to get connected with Jocelyn, though, at that advertising outfit.”
“That was twenty minutes ago. She’s, shall we say, rolled along. Then tell me”—you’re the expert on the far-flung Rozier family all of a cybernetic sudden—“how Ritz is doing.”
“He sounds real good on the E-mail. Busy, teaching and all. Turned vegetarian, but I guess that happens anymore?”
Now Lyle hesitated, evidently trying to shape his next news. “Mitch? These days you can do a search on there, you know. Find just about anybody anywhere. Matthew helped me with it on Ritz. Brainerd’s kid, although you can hardly tell it.”
• • •
Of the making of terrifying contracts there was almost no end, Mitch found as he immersed himself in his father’s accumulated sheafs. The stacks of gilt-edged conveyances of cattle brands to aforesaid Lyle Rozier appeared dismally irrevocable, Mitch finally deciding he would have to lug the whole smear off to the county seat, Choteau, and throw it all to the mercy of a lawyer. (Lyle meanwhile had done some reflecting on his claim of nonconflict of interest: “Most of those brands, Mitch, I bought outside this county. Some, anyway.”) The proposed deal on the proportion of his father’s worldly possessions that weren’t branding irons took him a good while longer to parse through, but the half-inch-thick set of papers indeed seemed to add up to an offer from Aggregate Construction Materials, Inc., to buy the benchland and what was called concomitant residential property. The money wasn’t great, but it was better than might be expected for a rock pile and this badger den of a house.
Mitch sat back. As much as he hated to go near the legal jungle with anything as blunt-edged as logic, there was this to be asked:
“And what are they going to do with your glorious gravel?”
“Roads.”
The Alzheimer’s-has-got-your-daddy alarm went off in Mitch again. He took a long hard look at Lyle, then leaned around him to peer out at the trafficless street.
“Naw, not around town here.” Lyle waved away his son’s quizzical frown. “Up there.” He inclined his head in the direction of the mountains, watching Mitch. “Aggregate’s betting there’s going to be gas and oil wells. Those leases along the reefs, you know. Could happen.”
Mitch felt like he’d hit an air pocket.
“Can’t pave into that country,” Lyle was going on. “But they can lay down some gravel. Keep them from cutting ruts four feet deep, look at it that way.”
“In the Bob? They’re going to drill in a wilderness area? How the hell can they get away with that?”
“Of course not in,” Lyle stipulated. “Next to, up against, I guess you could say. Alongside.” Mitch goggled at his father, this walking dictionary of helpful locutions when it came to draining the life out of wilderness.
“Listen, Dad. Those so-called energy leases, don’t get your hopes up. There’s Forest Service hearings and environmental impact statements and fifty kinds of bureaucratic decisions to be made before anything like that can even begin to—”
“Those’re being made. Else why is Aggregate so hot for our gravel?”
Point taken. Somebody besides Lyle Rozier was counting on gas and oil rigs trundling into the Rocky Mountain Front, or there wouldn’t be this half an inch of legalistic blandishment sitting here on the table, would there. Every reporting hair on Mitch was standing at attention. He knew this was a “Coastwatch” natural, although geography would need a little amending—the Rocky Mountains as the sister shores of Malibu. But you think about it and that’s absolutely what they once were, in glacial times: inland seas comparable to the Great Lakes pooled up on both sides of the Rockies in that era of massive freeze and melt. And where there had been vastnesses of water like that, of course there had also been reefs, the rock enfoldments up there along the Bob that had trapped the oil and gas deposits which Aggregate and the energy speculators now were doing their damnable best to tap.
