Mountain time, p.28
Mountain Time, page 28
As rapidly as he could maneuver his cast, he climbed out of the car.
“Fritz, hi there. Mitch Rozier, remember?”
“Mitch, old kid!”
Fritz Mannion instantly sounded like the closest pal imaginable, honorary uncle in the bunkhouse. Midway through the handshake he already was peeking down in wrinkled concern at Mitch’s walking cast. “You look kind of bunged up.”
“Missed a step,” Mitch said minimally, waiting for the conversation to go the way he knew it would.
Fritz didn’t disappoint, shuffling into a stance as if appraising a historical tapestry. “Don’t I recall one other time you were hobbling around with something like that on?” He all too solemnly wagged his head. “You don’t want to let that get to be a habit.”
The inevitable about the weather and how different this country around here was from Mitch’s neck of the woods. Then as if on cue Fritz gave a lopsided chummy smile. “How’s that dad of yours, how’s Lyle?”
Dead but still making trouble, Mitch wanted to say but didn’t. “Passed away, about a month ago.”
“No! Hate to hear that. What of?”
Mitch told him, watching the face that had aged so radically yet had the rubbery lineaments of those past summers. The old man listened as if he knew how to assess death; New Guinea had given him at least that.
“That’s hell, when that happens.” Fritz shook his head at leukemia. Then nodded over his shoulder toward the Vets’ Home and said confidentially: “See people go to the marble farm every kind of way in that place.”
Mitch said nothing, waiting him out.
Starting to fidget, Fritz nonetheless hesitated before asking:
“What do I owe this pleasure to?”
“Brought something to show you.” Mitch reached in the backseat of the car and drew out the daybook from 1962, spreading it open on the hood of the Honda.
Fritz glanced toward the Oasis, where the door had opened and the earlier two thirst cases had charged in, then peered uncertainly down at the daybook pages. “Been goin’ through your dad’s stuff, is this? Get my cheaters on.” He fumbled reading glasses out of his shirt pocket.
The penmanship caught his eye instantly. He glanced up at Mitch as if they were allies against forgery. “Too nice a writing for your dad. What, Mitch, did your mother keep the days some? Funny, I never knew her to handle any of the book side of things.”
This was like pulling hens’ teeth, but Mitch recited with patience: “That was my bookkeeper summer, because I was in bed with a cast on, wasn’t I.”
“Oh, yeah. Dimly remember.”
His forefinger a slightly shaking guide, Fritz examined the names of the crew and the crosshatched record of their hayfield days as if it gave him every pleasure to do so. “Hadn’t thought about some of these guys in years.” After a little, his finger found its way across the page to what the mens’ labor ultimately added up to, the tonnage of the bale stacks.
“We were fiends on that haying when things’d go right,” he vouched. “Godamighty, look at this run of days—two hundred tons put up, that week. That’s going some.”
“The week of the Fourth of July,” Mitch prompted. “Take a look at that.”
With due deliberation Fritz turned the page and studied the three-day gap. “I see I got docked some days, in there. Must’ve been laid up some way.”
“Actually you hung on to those days,” Mitch came back with, “but it wasn’t because I didn’t try.”
Every wrinkle on that face wrote out innocent amazement. “What, did we have some kind of little disagreement? Old stuff like this, it’s hard to bring back.”
Not for one of them, it wasn’t. As distinct as a recording Mitch could hear his younger self saying, You know you’re lying, and this man saying back, Just ask your dad.
Mitch went through it all like a prompter feeding lines to a soured actor, how Fritz’s spree began on the Fourth and lapped over the next two days when the rest of the crew was back in the hayfield. “I marked you for showing up for work again on the seventh, and when everybody got paid off at the end of the summer you bitched like crazy on those two docked days. And my father backed you on it instead of his own kid. Sat there and lied right along with you. How come?”
Fritz moved his bowed shoulders an inch apiece. “If Lyle’d wanted you to know, he’d have told you.”
“Fritz, I want to know. He had thirty-five years and never got around to it. I didn’t come here to jump on you about whatever you were up to, okay?” Mitch watched the face in front of him, but not even the eyelids moved. What did it take to make a mark on these old men? “But it played hell between my father and me when he let you screw over the daybook the way you did and then told me your word on it was better than mine. Everything went wrong between us after that. Help me out on this, Fritz. Just tell me what that was about, back there.”
“Wish I could help you out.”
From somewhere in memory another saying of his father’s came to Mitch: That Fritz, he’ll fill you so full of it it your eyes’ll be brown.
Mitch kept watch on the old man, then closed the buckram cover on the daybook. “Tell you what. Climb in the car with me, let’s take the load off our feet. We can drive around a little, while we catch up on those days.”
“Another time maybe, Mitch. Been nice, but I got something needs doing downtown.”
“Really? Not much open this time of day except the cafe and the Oasis. And I imagine they give you breakfast there in the Vets’ Home, don’t they?” He gazed down at Fritz’s feet. They were in sandals.
Watching the flushed old man, desire for the first drink of the day hanging out all over him, Mitch hardened himself to say:
“Come on, let’s get in the car, Fritz.”
• • •
Fritz was chattering out the not many sights of greater Hydropolis when he noticed that Mitch had turned onto the access road that led back out to the freeway. He clammed up, but the looks he gave Mitch out of the corner of his eye said worlds.
Controlling his voice, Mitch said like the least time-conscious of tour guides: “I thought we’d just see some country. Mosey over to Billings and back, maybe.” He punched the cruise control, the speed set at fifty. It didn’t take a minute before a bread truck passed them as if they were parked. Billings and back would be an all-day trip at this anemic speed.
“You’re meaner than Lyle ever thought of being.”
Mitch clenched his teeth, on the hope that if it was true it was temporary.
“This car has got reverse in it,” he said. Then forced the next sentence out: “Help me straighten out that daybook, and we’ll turn around.”
Fritz’s eyes were watering.
Mitch did not know how far he could bear to push the man or his own revulsion for this. But he was determined to see. He had played by the rules of their generation, back then, and been run over by his headlong father and blindsided by this remorseless liar as his rewards. Do things back somewhere count, or don’t they? Time stalled on Interstate 90. Each in his own way, the old hayhand and the boy now middle-aged sat there in the slowly gliding car sweating it out. They rode five miles in silence, fence posts creeping past, before Fritz Mannion used his hands to lift one leg over the other, the way a cripple would. Hands, legs, knees still twisted together, he said with a wince:
“Ferragamo’s wife.”
Immediately Mitch punched the cruise control off and whipped the Honda around on a highway patrol crossover, aiming back toward Hydropolis. But he put the car on fifty again to remind his passenger not to get too relieved.
“Say more.”
Fritz rubbed the veiny back of a hand across his mouth.
“Those trips Lyle kept making into Great Falls—remember how much we was broke down all that summer? Radiator hose kept blowing out on his buckrake. This’d happen, that’d happen, time or two a week away he’d have to go to the Falls to get parts, wouldn’t he. What he was mainly getting was sack time with Janine.”
Fritz glanced nervously across the car. “Mitch, I don’t know that your mother ever found out. If she did, not from me. I made sure she wasn’t even around when we got into it over my days.”
Mitch kept his eyes fixed to the road ahead, as though down its unrolling lane of time he could see them form again, the people at that picnic—the creamy Mrs. Ferragamo, and his father with that sergeant stare, and his mother whose life was all potluck, and the good Joe: picnickers and more. “I caught on,” now Fritz swallowed audibly, “I don’t even remember how. It started out as kidding, was all. Just me saying something to Lyle about it sure being a hard summer on a certain kind of hose. He reddened right up, you know that way he would? And next thing gave me one of his goddamn winks.” Fritz paused. Wiped an eye, then his nose. “I just wanted him to know that I knew he was getting his dong polished regularly by Janine, those little trips down to the Falls for ‘parts.’ ”
Then climbing upstairs to his son who was keeping the days, to hand him the expenses of cheating.
“Ferragamo”—Mitch put a voice together—“he was always the one in that story—”
“—spotted the Jap in the bushes, saved Lyle’s life, yeah, yeah. He did that. More than likely saved mine, too.” Fritz stopped again to gather his next words. “Your dad came out of that with the notion he wasn’t as much of a man as Joe, is what I think. And when he couldn’t be, he . . . what would you say? Tried to whittle Ferragamo down. Those summer jobs, bossing him around with the rest of us. Sneaking off and laying Janine.”
And last of all, getting it into his head to smudge away the man’s time on a mountain, sift himself into that place. In memory of Ferragamo, let’s just say: back there in the running-board conclave, Lyle Rozier saying it as though it were just the epitaph of a Divide summer. Mitch gripped the Honda’s steering wheel as unrelentingly as if he had the box of ashes in hand again.
“I always figured Lyle was getting set to fight it out with Joe over her, that next summer. Your mother gone, Janine’d have to choose, wouldn’t she?” Fritz’s voice had loosened, soft with gratitude at the sight of the Oasis now. “But right before haying, Ferragamo took her and moved to Oregon. Never said a word to Lyle, just up and did it. That’s what really got to your dad. Joe dropped him like he was just nothing.”
Five
THEY WERE EATING IT UP, the wedding-goers, whuffling right through the hors d’oeuvres and munching, munching, munching onward into the big food.
Nervously she circled off from the groom a little, wanting the reception to be perfect, the most mouthwatering page in nuptial history.
“We’re out of the salmon pâté, Lexa,” Jaci of her crew came up and whispered.
Lexa pulled out the couple of emergency fifties she always kept in the pocket under her apron. “Run over to Gretchen’s and beg some, quick.”
She monitored the room trying to recognize the next incipient emergency. Now groom and bride were whooping it up with another champagne-brandishing phalanx of friends. He owned a chain of sunglasses shops and she was concertmaster of a chamber orchestra; they had met in one of the hiking/biking/caring/sharing chat rooms on the Internet. Lexa nibbled her lip. Those champagne glasses were emptying fast, and she swung around to check on the level of traffic over by the bar and Mitch.
Mitch?
She was over there in a flash. Absence and the heart and all that notwithstanding, she was purely panicked by his materialization here.
“Where’d—what’re you—”
Giving the roomful a broken-field runner’s alert scan, he appraised the wedding reception: “Not bad as these things go, hmm?”
She couldn’t say the same for him. Unshaven for a couple of days, clothes that all too obviously had been slept in for at least that long, the giant black glob of his cast sticking out alongside the bar table, he looked like something a very large cat had dragged in off the road. To her outrage, he was perusing her companionably. There he loomed, a winning grin hung on him, damn him. As much as she wanted to whale into him with her fists for this derisive bye-bye or whatever he thought it was, she had to keep frantic watch over her shoulder for the mother of the bride, big mama of the universe at these events. All it would take was enough disturbance of the peace to bring the Matriarch of the Day over with the pronouncement You’ll never fix food in this town again. In a fierce whisper Lexa demanded to know: “What did you do with Brad?”
“He slipped out to his car to listen to his Kenny G instructional CD.”
“How’d you find—” She shut up and stood in front of as much of Mitch as she could while he dispensed champagne into the next covey of thrust glasses. When those guests moved off, he turned to her as if surprised she had to ask.
“Went to the house for some things and read the refrigerator door, how else?”
That was it, then. He had come for his stuff. Packing it all up, to add to the permanent houseload in the Springs. Roziers. A penchant for mess ran in the family. For almost three weeks she had been fuming about having to live with his belongings and now she found herself equally ticked off that the house was going to look half empty. One pang after another going through her, she tried to keep her mind on the point that he had no business playing around with her business.
“The house is one thing, but where I’m trying to do my work is another. Why’d you bother to slip in here?”
“Thought it was time I did a little shopping.” He studied the reception room again. “Might need one of these someday.”
“You really are determined to be a sonofabitch about this, aren’t you. Mitch, I don’t care how terminally peed off you are at me over the ashes and what happened at the tower and whatever else you’ve managed to come up with to add to the list. I don’t deserve this. You and Mariah can go off into the wedding sunset if you goddamn want, but—”
“Lexa—”
“—I don’t have to have that picture painted for me.” She stood there seething at the future. McCaskill family reunions were going to be a real case of the jollies, weren’t they, with him on hand as Mariah’s hubby and Lexa’s ex-you-name-it.
“Lexa, listen—”
“And I don’t have to listen to any of your—”
“Lexa, Mariah and I are not in the marrying picture. We’ve never even tried the sample of that.”
She shot a suspicious gaze at him all the way up. True, his hair was not standing up in sulphur spikes.
He caught her look and smiled. “Think about it. How could I go in the water with this cast?”
By then it didn’t take thinking. It only took erasing the blackboard of her mind, and then their bodies were colliding in a desperate hug and more.
• • •
Coming into the empty house, Mariah deposited the sack with a Dairy Queen hamburger in one direction and her camera bag in another. How damnably quiet. Price of peace, she told herself, and went to the kitchen for one of Lyle’s beers to help prop up supper.
When Mitch had come back from Hydropolis yesterday with the goods on Lyle and told her he was going right on to Seattle, he’d asked if she didn’t think she should come along and start making her own mend with Lexa. “How convincing is that?” she had pointed out. “We come trotting into Seattle, joined at the hip, to tell her we’re not an item together? You go alone. Give her me to be mad at.”
Mitch had touched her on the shoulder. “We are an item together. Just not the household kind.”
“Second thoughts. Story of my date book.”
Standing there, they drew new assessments of each other, a daily occupation since their time in the fire tower. He saw a woman who cut trails through life as brisk as a comet, and as unfollowable. Steady eyes on his, she was looking back at a route not taken, not takable, running as it did between the sisters McCaskill. She and he traded those appraisals with self-conscious attempts at grins, and Mitch went out the door.
Someone at that door now. She opened it to a pair of men all in black, including hats and beards, who peered at her as if a beautiful redheaded woman in a Hard Rock Cafe—Beijing ball cap and a bottle of beer in her hand had not been their expectation.
“Is t’e mister here?” inquired the older Hutterite.
“We’re fresh out of misters. Can I do anything for you?”
“T’ose brands of Lyle’s, ve vant to buy vun.” The older Hutterite locked eyes with her to avoid the temptation of straying into the rest of her scenery, then decided to confide, the other man nodding grave accompaniment: “Ve are hiving.”
Mariah stepped back a little. “Is that a fact.” It took her a few seconds to recall the Hutterite custom of hiving off into new colonies, entire families resettling on the next communal farm whenever an old one reached a certain population. A new dairy herd would need a new brand; maybe Lyle’s iron menagerie was worthwhile after all. “Congratulations, I think. Come on out to the shed with me.”
The branding irons appeared to have been busy learning from their clothes-hanger cousins how to multiply in the equivalent of a closet. There were angular heaps of them, wall-climbing squads of them, corner congregations of them. Mariah gestured at everything with what she figured was businesslike aplomb.
“Help yourself, gentlemen.”
The Hutterite pair looked at her. The elder one said:
“Ve vant a T Cross.”
Mariah blinked. Half of the iron in the known world, wrought into fancy combinations of who knew how many kinds in this shed, and they wanted a specific one? “Well, we can look, I guess. See if you can find it burned into the wall there while I scout around in the irons themselves.”
The Hutterites read along the wall while she tried to figure out any system Lyle might have had to this. It wasn’t numerical, it wasn’t alphabetical, it wasn’t even brandabetical. Under no approach did it seem to want to divulge an iron stem with a T and a cross on the end of it. After much murmuring from the men and much clattering from her, Mariah announced:
