Bitterroot (20 page)

It was a moment that others might parody or ridicule, but I’ll never forget it. After my father and I had gotten into our pickup truck and were preparing to leave, the preacher leaned his head through the passenger’s window. His hair looked like it had been cut with sheep shears; his face was as long as a horse’s, his skin as rough as a wood shingle.

“You wasn’t scared, was you?” he asked.

“No, sir,” I lied.

“The papists got seven sacraments. We ain’t got but one. That’s why we really let ‘er rip. You’re river-baptized, son. From here on out, you take your church with you wherever you go, earth and sky and water and spirit, all of it burned forever into your soul. You ain’t never got to be afraid,” he said, his dark eyes bursting with certitude.

“WHAT ARE YOU doin’, slim?” a voice said behind me.

I turned and looked up at Temple Carrol, who stood on the down-sloping rock, her thumbs hooked in her back pockets.

“How’d you know I was here?” I asked.

“I saw you leaving the church, so I followed you.”

“What’s on your mind?” I said.

      She sat down, just a little higher on the rock than I was, her knees pulled up before her. She wore brown jeans and loafers and white socks and she crossed her hands on her knees. “Was I too hard on you the other day?”

“Not in the least,” I said. I picked up a pebble and tossed it into the current. The rock we sat on was pink and gray and dappled with the sunlight that shone through a cottonwood. I could see her shadow move next to me, then her fingers lifted a wet leaf off my shoulder and let it blow away in the breeze.

She moved her foot slightly and hit me in the thigh with the point of her shoe.

“Your feelings hurt?” she said.

“I thought I’d give you a couple of days’ rest. Don’t turn it into a production.”

Her foot moved and punched me again.

“Hey,” I said.

She poked me in the knee.

“Temple—” I turned around and looked directly in her face.

“What?” she said. Her hands looked small on top of her knees.

“With regularity I say the wrong things to you. I just don’t want to do that anymore,” I said.

“Come on, get off your butt. I’ll buy you lunch,” she said, rising to her feet, brushing the rock dust off her rump.

She seemed casual, pushing back her hair, looking at the trees puff with wind. But I could see her watching me out of the corner of her eye.

“Where we going?” I said.

She took a breath and cleared her throat and lifted her blouse off her skin as though the day were warm.

Because she stood higher on the rock than I, we were suddenly the same height. I looked at the milky greenness of her eyes and the color in her cheeks and the roundness of her arms and the way her mouth became like a small flower whenever there was an extended silence between us.

“Temple?” I said.

“Yes?”

“Where we going?”

She smelled like rain and leaves and there was a scent of raspberry soda on her breath. Her mouth was inches from mine and I saw her chest swell, the pulse quicken in her throat. Then she slipped on the rock and her weight fell against me.

Her hair touched my face and I felt her breasts and stomach and the tops of her thighs against me, and her ribs and the taper of her hips were like a gift suddenly placed in my palms when I helped her regain her balance. For just a moment, her mouth parted and her eyes looked into mine in such a way I never wanted to separate from her.

“It’s real slippery here,” I said, my face burning.

“Yes,” she said. “Did you want to go to the restaurant on the river. The pizza place?”

“Sure. That’s a grand place,” I said. “I’ll be right with you. I dropped some change a minute ago.”

She walked back up the rock through a stand of birch trees that were white-trunked and stiff and arching slightly in the wind, while I pretended to hunt for coins down below, my back turned to her to conceal a problem involving a form of male rigidity that made me wonder at my level of maturity.

MAISEY AND DOC VOSS’S Sunday evening began with an argument in the barn over a parrot, one Doc had just brought her from the pet store.

“You don’t keep birds in cages! I don’t want it!” she shouted.

“Then take it back. Or go feed it to an owl,” he replied.

“That’s a cruel and stupid thing to say!” They insulted and shouted at each other and slammed doors all over the house, breaking a bottle of milk in the sink, stepping on the cat’s tail, briefly pausing in opposite parts of the house to refocus their anger and then find the other and reopen every wound possible.

   While her father kicked an empty bucket over a fence in the yard and ground the starter on the truck, only to find, after starting the engine, that he had a flat tire, Maisey locked herself in her bedroom and changed into black panties and a black silk bra and loose khakis and a white blouse that exposed her navel and cleavage, and put on hoop earrings and rouged her cheeks and lipsticked her mouth and went to work on her eyes with liquid eyeliner and mascara and eye shadow.

When she flung open the bedroom door she looked out the front window and saw her father’s truck lights disappearing in the dusk. A strange sense of disappointment and abandonment flooded through her, although she could not explain the Sense of desertion and fear that she felt.

She telephoned Steve, the boy down the road, and lit a cigarette over the sink and opened one of her father’s bottles of beer and drank it on the front porch while she waited for her friend, her heart pounding without explanation.

The evening sky had turned yellow with dust and wind whipped the trees on the ridge above the house, and she could smell the rain that floated like a lavender vapor on the hills to the north. But whatever portent the evening held, whatever misadventure might wait for her down the road, she told herself she would shape and master it, that the martial energy beating in her temples would vanquish all the adversaries that invaded her sleep and degraded her person, that were made incarnate in the waking day by the sting of her father’s words and the way he tried to control her.

That’s
what he couldn’t understand, she thought. Every word of chastisement he used was like the probing fingers and tongue and phallus of the each of the faceless men who had raped her. It had never been so clear to her. Why couldn’t her father see it? She wanted to scream the question in his face.

She and Steve drove in his car to a nightclub in Mis-soula, on a street that had once housed bordellos, then workingmen’s bars, before it had been absorbed into the gentrification of the town as the town lost its blue-collar ways and gave itself over to art galleries and boutiques.

But there was still one nightclub on the street that shook with noise every night of the week. When Maisey and Steve walked to the entrance, the foothills had turned red in the sun’s afterglow, and the bowl of sky above the valley was filled with plumes of yellow and purple cloud, as though they had been scoured out of the valley floor, and the dust that blew in the wind was cold and mixed with rain and as hard as grains of sand against her skin.

But even though a storm threatened the valley, the evening was nonetheless a grand one, and the smell of the air was so good and clean inside her lungs she didn’t want to disconnect from it.

Maybe she and Steve should just drive out on the river someplace, maybe watch the deer drift down out of the trees to drink, maybe just eat hamburgers in a brightly lit restaurant full of family people and go to a movie afterward.

No, that’s exactly what her father would want her to do, the kind of anal-retentive agenda he might as well write out on a clipboard for her.

She hesitated at the doorway. Men who wore motorcycle boots and gold earrings and leather vests without shirts stood at the bar, knocking back shots with beer chasers, their arms blue from the wrists to the armpits with tattoos. But young women, not much older than she, were in the club, too, and a rock ‘n’ roll band was belting it out on the stage, and three college boys who looked like football players were taking a breath of air at the entrance, grinning good-naturedly at her.

She smiled back at them, as though they were all old friends, and went inside, with Steve in front of her, his shirt hanging out of his pants, his flip-flops slapping on the floor, his face as trusting and vulnerable as a fawn’s. But the football players never even glanced at him. Instead, she felt their eyes light on her mouth and rouged cheeks, her blouse, which hung on the tops of her breasts, the crease in her exposed hips when she walked. Unconsciously she slipped one hand in her back pocket to cover the elastic edge of her panties, which she believed had worked its way above the beltline of her khakis.

She and Steve sat in back, and when he was in the rest room she used her forged ID to order him a draft beer and a vodka collins for herself.

“There’re some biker guys at the bar, Maisey. One of them just barfed in the washbasin, then mopped the puke off his mouth on the roller towel, and went back outside like nothing happened,” Steve said when he came back to the table.

“Thanks for describing that, Steve,” she said.

“Why’d you want to come here? It’s full of losers,” he said, surveying the other tables.

“Stop staring at people,” she said.

“I wish I hadn’t left you alone that night. I wish I’d had my father’s .357. My father says the welfare system is producing armies of subhumans that are moving into the Northwest.”

His presumption that he was responsible for her fate, that his presence could have prevented it, infuriated her and somehow diminished the level of injury that had been visited upon her. Steve twisted around and hooked one arm on the back of his chair and stared at the bikers as though he were visiting a zoo.

“Steve, until somebody puts his penis in your ass and comes in your mouth, don’t tell me about subhumans,” she said.

“That’s sick,” he said.

“I think if you say another word I’m going to slap your
face,”
she said.

“Excuse me for telling you this, your attitude not only sucks, you look deeply weird in those clothes and that Frankenstein makeup,” he said, and got up from the table and went through the front door onto the street.

The noise from the bandstand seemed to envelope her. She was alone now and suddenly regretted the rashness of her words. She looked around to see if anyone was watching her. But the people at the other tables, the crowd at the bar, the couples on the dance floor, were all involved with themselves and their drinks and their own conversations. It was dumb to think anyone cared what Maisey Voss was doing.

Through the open front door she saw Steve’s car drive away, the neon glow from the nightclub rippling across his profile.

She would have to call her father for a ride home. She couldn’t bear to think about it. She opened her purse and took out the money for another vodka collins.

The vodka was both cold and warm inside her at the same time. She chewed the cherries and orange slices on her molars and drank the sugar and melted ice in the bottom of the glass and went to the bar and ordered another drink and watched the bartender while he made it. A biker’s arm brushed hers, but before she could react the biker turned and apologized, then resumed his conversation with his girlfriend, as though Maisey were not there.

The bartender wrapped a napkin around her drink and set it in front of her. She began counting out the money from her purse to pay for it but the bartender said, “Man down at the end’s already got it.”

“Which man?” she said, looking past the bikers into the haze of cigarette smoke.

But the bartender only shrugged and walked away.

She drank her vodka collins at the table and tried not to think about the phone booth in the corner, the one she would eventually walk to, almost like entering a Catholic confessional, where she would shut herself inside and drop the coins into the slot and admit to her father she couldn’t get home by herself.

But the three college boys she had passed at the entrance were using it. Their upper torsos looked huge in their short-sleeve workout jerseys, and she decided the boys were part of the group she had seen running plays in pads and sweat shorts on the university practice field by the river.

Somehow their presence made her feel more at ease. In spite of their size there was nothing aggressive or mean-spirited about them. In fact, their buzzed haircuts, the youthfulness in their faces, the shine of cologne on their freshly shaved jaws, made her think of country boys back home who could twist a steer into the ground by its horns but who wouldn’t get on a dance floor at gunpoint.

One of them nodded at her, then turned his attention back to his friends.

“You want another drink, hon?” the waitress asked.

“Yeah. Let me pay you now, though,” Maisey said.

“That’s a new one,” the waitress said.

After Maisey finished her drink, she went to the rest room. When she came back, the waitress was picking up her empty glass and setting down another vodka collins on a napkin.

“Who paid for this?” Maisey said.

“Some guy at the bar,” the waitress replied.

“Which guy?”

“Honey, this is a dump. One of these bozos buys you a drink, marry him,” the waitress said, and walked away, her short skirt swishing across the tops of her fishnet stockings.

Maisey slid another cigarette from her pack, then realized she didn’t have matches to light it. Her face was hot, her ears humming with the noise in the room. The electronic feedback in the band’s speaker system was beginning to affect her like fingernails on a blackboard. She took a long swallow out of her glass and felt the coldness of the vodka flow through her like wind blowing across snow.

One more drink and she would call her father. By that time his silence and the depression he would wear like a mantle on the long ride home, the acknowledged failure of their relationship that would almost form a third presence in the car, the echoes of all the insults they had hurled at each other earlier, would be lost in fatigue and the ennui that always followed their arguments and the residual numbness of the vodka that now nestled in her system like an old friend.