Mountain time, p.14
Mountain Time, page 14
“I know you’re gonna think this is just another scatbrain idea of mine, but Mitch, I do need for you to promise. That you’ll do right by me, on this.”
“Okay, okay, okay.” Mitch turned around to him. “But I still don’t get it. How you can want to gravel up to the eyeteeth of the Bob, and at the same time want yourself sprinkled over the top of one of its mountains.”
It took obvious effort, but Lyle let that argument go by. He muttered instead:
“In memory of Ferragamo, let’s just say. Joe was on that fire tower work with me.”
Mitch pondered this. The last he could remember of Ferragamo and for that matter his notable wife was that final crew picnic. All right, the man did figure in that New Guinea blood-and-guts tale his father always used to tell. But that was long ago and far away. Particularly far from a Continental Divide fire tower. Nor was it like his father to turn sentimental. Stubborn, sly, exasperating and the rest, you bet, but—
Sounding satisfied on top of it all, Lyle now announced: “That’s probably about enough of a day.” He put his hands on his knees, pushed himself up off the running board and started his slow march toward the house. Mitch noticed he did not once look back at the mountains.
• • •
The burgundy VW van scrushed to an abrupt halt in the driveway the next day at what would have been suppertime if there was any supper in the house.
Mitch all but vaulted over his father to get out of the living room and welcome Lexa. He was surprised to hear Rin, who never barked, give a series of rusty yips.
“He won’t bite, but he might pull your tail feathers out,” Mitch called to the figure bent over into the back of the van.
The figure reversed out of the bay of the van and, looking bemused, stood holding a handful of cameras swaying at the end of their straps like a collection of shrunken heads. The dark red mane of hair barely interrupted by her Hard Rock Cafe—Beijing ball cap would have bought and paid for Lexa’s copper approximation several times over. From her lanky point of vantage she was now pensively regarding the off-key Rin at her ankles, and out of her came: “Ever hear the one about the dyslexic atheist who didn’t believe in dog?”
“Mariah hitchhiked along,” Lexa called out as if it wasn’t more than evident, popping around the other end of the van carrying the Kelty backpack she still used as a suitcase. “You know how it is with these world travelers, they can’t get enough of exotic locales.”
“This one comes with hot and cold running arguments,” Mitch said, a bit on guard although he didn’t yet know why. He jounced down off the porch steps and swept Lexa to him with a bearlike arm, extending his other hand. “Hi, Mariah. Been some time, right? You along on work or pleasure?”
Mariah gave him a grin. “Both if I can get them. How’s the hometown treating you, Mitch?”
“The Fuji jet-setter claims she has to get her newspaper shooting eye back,” Lexa reported dubiously. “But I still think she’s out of her mind to come here and target-practice on—”
“This town ought to be good for something besides going stir-crazy in.” The first smile in days cropped out on Mitch along with his journalistic instinct. “No shortage of run-down stuff for photo features around here.” Going to the van, he grabbed yet more of the photographic gear. “Need some room to spread out for a night or two while you’re on your shoot? The bunkhouse isn’t taken yet.” He steered them past Rin and said, “Come on in, before my father deals the ground out from under us.”
In the living room, Lyle stiffly arose out of his warren of a chair.
“Population’s up around here all of a sudden,” he observed. “Here’s one I know, anyhow. How’s the Lexa?” He said it with no inflection she could detect, leaving her to decide whether or not it was a greeting.
With no small effort she made nice and said back, “I thought the question is, How’s the Lyle?”
He just laughed.
Mariah was gamely introduced by Mitch and her habit of wearing cameras explained; indeed, it seemed probable that much of her photographic output for the Montanian across the years lay in the stacks of newspapers in this room.
Lyle appraised Mariah at length, then turned back to Lexa. “Come to help out?” He had all the approach of a kindly card cheat. “How are you at forging Mitch’s signature?”
“Let’s just put our crayons away awhile, Dad.”
“Mitch can’t seem to stand the thought of prosperity,” Lyle confided to the two women. “Makes it hard to leave him what he has coming to him.”
Lips compressed, Mitch started clearing decades’ worth of National Geographics off a couple of chairs. As he did so, Lexa analyzed the pair of jousting men. Together, the family likeness of Lyle and Mitch was inescapable: they were same song, second verse. The wavy hair, still a full head of it in pewter shade on Lyle, Mitch’s black with wisps of gray around the ears. The faces like larger-than-life masks done by the same emphatic hand. How, she wondered, had they turned out so opposite inside those similar heads? And how am I supposed to pitch in anything useful when they can’t even get past hello without starting to fight?
Mariah had been scanning the room, familiarity tickling at her from somewhere. The story of her lens life, déjà voodoo. Twin crinkles of concentration appeared between her eyes as her mind tried to frame when she had seen this particular layout of Bad Housekeeping before; that logjam of clutter in the far corner, the tipsy angle at which it reposed; the globe of metal rods about ready to teeter off the crowded sideboard . . .
“The Kobe quake!” she blurted.
Realizing three curious stares were fastened on her, she alibied with a little laugh: “Nothing, nothing. Last little tag end of jet lag, is all.” Now it was going to have her photographic attention every time she walked in here, though, how much this hermit cave of a living room resembled the Japanese museum’s tumbled exhibits that she had shot in the trembling hours after the great earthquake there.
“Some of us around here were starting to think about supper,” Mitch issued to fill the conversation gap. Enlightened sharer of household chores or not, he had been deeply hoping Lexa would take charge of the forbidding kitchen. Instead she cast one glance into that disaster area and said, “Let’s eat out.”
He knew she did not have the Dairy Queen in mind, so that meant the Springhouse, downtown. “Dad, can we bring you something?”
Lyle the unbudgeable was reaching to where his hat was hung. “Thought I might step out with you,” he said in a tone of grandiloquent hurt. “If you don’t mind my company.”
• • •
The Springhouse Supper Club was somewhere between unfinished and deteriorating. It was also extensive and yawning and empty, but no sooner had the four of them taken what appeared to be the cleanest table than they were in a line of traffic as black-clad Hutterite men five or six at a time began to find their way to the banquet area dividered off at the rear.
“Beats the dickens out of me, what they’re doing in here,” Lyle had to admit when Mitch, Lexa and Mariah looked the question to him. A population all their own across Montana and the Dakotas and up into Canada, the Hutterites dwelled in their farm colonies of a hundred or so people, talking German among themselves and following their Anabaptist communal religion. They had kept their way of life by avoiding things of the world that might infect it—television, radio, the camera’s eye, public schools—and it might have been supposed that supper clubs would be prominent on that list. But the one thing the Hutterites were thoroughly modern about was their agriculture, and when the table of four saw a pair of civilians in knit shirts and high-belted trousers pushing video equipment into the banquet area where the Hutterite bearded legion was congregating, they caught the drift. Fertilizer salesmen or some such, come to preach the virtues of their product to an audience lured by a free supper.
“We may have to go in there and take religious vows”—Mitch resorted to yet another dry bread stick—“to get any food in this place.”
“Those guys really are out in force,” Lyle observed, recognizing white-bearded Pastor Jacob Stapfer from the Freezout colony east of town in the next covey of Hutterites trooping in. “How’s t’ings, Lyle?” the brethren elder sang out.
“How you doing, Pastor Jake?” Lyle called back. The Jehovahlike figure was plainly doing top-notch, cruising into the banquet area just as if a Hutterite in a supper club wasn’t as unlikely as soup du jour in the Old Testament.
“I can feel your trigger finger twitching from here, Mariah,” Lexa teased.
At long last, as it seemed to Mitch, the waitress emerged from the kitchen and with a harried look gave them menus and the bulletin: “The special is pork chops and applesauce.”
“Rib eye,” Lexa said without touching the menu.
“Just the salad bar for me,” Mariah decided just as fast.
“Milk shake,” Lyle said, “but I’ll live it up and have chocolate.”
Mitch had started through the menu, but realizing it was his turn told the waitress before she could get away: “I’d like the special and I’d like it now, please.”
“Rib eye,” Lexa warned.
“Lexa, will you quit? I’m about starved. I want fast food, I mean, quick food.” Mitch turned to the waitress to check. “The special is ready, right, sitting there cozy on the steam table?”
“Always is.”
“Then bring it on.”
Away the waitress went, and Mitch settled himself to determinedly not taking the last bread stick, while Lexa ragged Mariah about the brown lettuce and petrified carrot sticks she was doomed to at the salad bar and Mariah maintained she had eaten far worse specimens during her wanderyear. Through the divider between them and the Hutterite-filled banquet area an amplified voice took over:
“Those of us at Biotic Betterment are just real happy that you farm animal people could join us here tonight and listen to our message and get a free supper out of the deal, too.”
Bacterial additives for health and heft in livestock, the sales pitch proved to be, or as it was intoned more than once, good bacteria used against bad bacteria.
Lyle sounded reflective as he swizzled the final bread stick, then put it down without tasting it. “It’s getting so you need to be a scientist just to grow ham and eggs.”
“In just a minute here we’re going to be showing you a video on what our bug can do for your four-legged creatures,” the knitwear voice was confiding. “But first we’ll draw for the door prize we promised you gentlemen. Here it is, right here. This lovely mantel clock. Battery-run, no need for a cord. Terry, draw a name out of the hat, would you? There you go, thank you kindly, Terry. And the winning name is . . . Peter Zorn!”
There was a moment of collective contemplation among the Hutterites. Then a voice:
“So, vich Peter Zorn is t’at?”
The four eavesdroppers had to grin.
The microphone maestro, though, sounded unamused. “How do you mean, which?”
“Vell, I’m Peter Zorn from t’e Seven Block colony,” the Hutterite voice answered.
“And I’m Peter Zorn from t’e New Alberta colony,” another voice attested.
“And I’m Peter Zorn from t’e Kipp Creek colony,” chimed in a third.
It plainly had escaped the bug prophets that the Hutterites get by with only a handful of family names—of the sixty black-garbed men in the banquet room, probably twenty were Stapfers, twenty were Liebknechts and twenty were Zorns.
“Umm.” The microphone handler could be heard working his brain about the problem of the repeat Petes. “What I guess we better do is, umm, put the names of you three gentlemen and your colonies onto slips of paper and draw again.”
“But t’at vill mean two Peter Zorns von’t vin a prize. And you said t’e vinning name is Peter Zorn.”
“Oh, for—Terry, go out to the van and bring in two more clocks.”
Amid the tableful of chuckles, Lyle was practically bursting with neighborly pride at the Hutterites’ ability to drive a bargain. “If we could cash in on our place like they do on farming, we’d be sitting pretty. Don’t you think, Mitch?”
A clamped expression came over Mitch.
Lexa chipped in, “I’d sure never make it as a Hutterite”—she stopped hard, then finished the thought—“wife.”
Another uncomfortable faceload overcame Mitch, but Lexa hurried right on:
“Those old bearded coots run everything except potato peelings and dirty diapers.”
“They’re tough sonsofguns, men or women, either one,” Lyle maintained. “Look how they stick to that way of life of theirs. They raise a kid, that kid listens to them. They pass along what they can to that kid, that kid knows what to do with it. Mitch and I have been having a conversation along those lines the last couple of days, and I’d be interested to hear your take on it, Lexa and Mariah. You ladies have had parents. Don’t you think then when they make you their heir, you ought to—”
“Dad, can’t you drop this long enough to—”
“Hey, I think this isn’t our war,” Lexa spoke up, with a meaningful glance at Mariah.
“I’m just along for the ride,” Mariah claimed. Then made a guilty U-turn out loud. “No, I’m not. Am I ever not.”
Two sets of male curiosity and one of sisterly foreboding settled on Mariah. She looked Lyle in the face, then turned toward Mitch, then full-on at Lyle again. “I’ve got a humongous favor to ask you.”
Lexa, Mitch noticed, was industriously chewing a corner of her mouth.
His father, on the other hand, sat back with crossed arms and waited for Mariah as if he had all the time in the world.
“What it is,” Mariah resumed, gesturing too casually with her water glass and slopping a little, “I’d like to—could I kind of hang around, do you suppose, and take pictures while you, mmm, go through”—she took a hard swallow of water and let the words out in a tumble—“whatever you’re going to go through?”
Lyle squinted one eye as if peering through a rifle sight, then translated:
“While I gradually kick the bucket, you mean?”
“That’s the idea,” Mariah said fast. “I know it sounds a little gruesome.”
“A deathwatch photo essay?” Mitch bit out. “You want to use him as a poster child for that?” By now he was casting a dumfounded look in Lexa’s direction.
What can I tell you? She pulled into Seattle, her mood up and down like a yo-yo, we were just sistering away like we’ve always done, and then you called, and Mariah had to get back to Montana somehow anyway, so we hop in the van and along about Coeur d’Alene she comes up with this idea of wouldn’t it be something to shoot Mitch’s dad’s last days. I had four hundred miles of telling her huh-uh. Your turn.
The majority of this he could divine just from the expression on Lexa. Mariah meanwhile was heard from again. “My editor gave the idea a shit-hot go, Mitch.”
“Well, I give it—”
“These’d be in that newspaper of yours?” Lyle asked, frowning along with his squint.
“You bet, but after,” Mariah specified delicately.
“Listen, shooter, points for effort, okay?” Mitch started in on Mariah. “But we’re going to have more than enough to handle around here while—”
“Rib eye,” the waitress sang out as she slid a sizzling platter past him to Lexa. Conscientiously waiting for the rest of the food to land before further batting down Mariah’s scenario, it took Mitch a minute to realize the meal deliveries had ended with Lexa’s. He shot a look for the waitress in vain, then at Lexa. She dug into her steak.
Lyle’s granitic head thrust a couple of inches closer to Mariah.
“What do they pay, on something like that?”
“Probably not as much as you have in mind. Nothing, actually.”
Lyle was taken aback. “Hell of a note,” he muttered, “when you can’t even make a living out of dying.”
“Lyle, you’d be—it’s news, see. The story of”—Mariah took a breath—“how you face death is worth telling readers. There’s this aging population, and a bazillion of us lint-free Baby Boomers who’ve never had to deal with anything more serious than burying the class hamster, back in first grade. I hate to say it, but people need to see your kind of situation.” She stopped for a moment. “Lexa and I have been through this with our mother. Haven’t we, kiddo.” She laid a quick hand on Lexa’s arm. “Lung cancer, that was. We didn’t have a clue, before we had to watch her go. I guarandamntee you, my photo piece on you won’t leave anybody clueless about life’s last dance, Lyle.”
“Wouldn’t exactly be my best side, though, would it,” came his dry objection.
“And the newspaper can pay Mitch,” Mariah skipped right on. Mitch’s head snapped around to her. What, for my father? Like a bounty on coyotes? “Not much, but some,” she was explaining, as close to apologetic as she evidently could get. “It’d be on a freelance basis for caption stuff of what I shoot. Oh, and the paper can put you on as Teton County stringer as well. The regular one in Choteau needs time off for a hip replacement.”
“Just what I’ve tried to work my way up to in twenty-five years of journalism.” Mitch spoke with ominous calm. “Second-string stringer. Such a deal, Mariah.” He turned to his father. The silence from that quarter was saying all too much.
“Dad. You’re not going to do this.”
Lyle went back to his folded-arms pose. Then gazed off as if calculating and said:
“Ohhh, I think maybe so. Yeah.”
The thought of his father being allowed to grandstand his way out of life, winking tragically at the camera eye in front of a statewide readership, appalled Mitch.
“Forty-eight hours ago I had to pry the fact of your sickness out of you! Now you’re ready to parade it in front of a camera?”
“Hey, parade isn’t a very nice way to put it,” Mariah chided.
“Guess maybe I’m forty-eight hours older and wiser,” Lyle speculated.
“You heard Mariah.” Mitch could hear his own voice rising. “There’s nothing halfway financial in this for you. You’ll be giving yourself away.” Although he wouldn’t, would he, in the way that really counted.
