Two Medicine (16 page)

I looked around at the
people in the lobby, some were families, arranging their bags and
parcels, others were older people milling through the restaurant
that was at one end. It was a crowd, definitely, and not one I
wanted to see since it was tarnishing my feeling of being in the
wilderness and was redefining what the idea of Glacier Park was to
me each minute I spent in that buys commercial hub.

So I was working with
Ronnie, the itinerant playboy, phobic of cops; and Katie, the
mysterious ingénue, phobic of… everybody else it seemed.

Yet as I looked around at
the big hotel I realized that I already missed Two Medicine, our
quiet and remote wilderness home; and I decided we needed to get
back sooner than later.

After a few minutes,
Ronnie found Katie and I and said, “Hey guys, there some people
hanging out near the dorms, behind the lodge, and they got a
bonfire and some booze going. I say we check it out. What say
you?”

Katie quickly objected,
“Larry told us specifically to be back by no later than 5. He knows
when the orientation is over.” She looked at me, as if seeking my
assistance.

“
Oh, don’t worry about
that fat bastard,” Ronnie said. “He’ll be just fine. We’ll just
tell him I got attacked by a bear or something... What do you say,
Will?” He raised his eyebrows a couple of times at me.

I was a bit torn between a
strong desire to resist Larry’s authority and break this feeling of
ridiculousness which being under his command brought out in me, and
a just as strong desire not to have him in my face when we get
back, angrily lecturing us on the “rules of the road” as he was
fond of saying, and yet another just as strong desire to not being
around this big hotel any longer than I had to.

“We’ll catch hell, but I
don’t really care,” I said, “but this place just bugs me – too
garish. So I say we just go back. Ronnie, you can hang out here
whenever you want.”

I looked at Katie, “If you
want to get back, I’ll take you – we’ll catch a jammer.”

“If there is one this
late,” Ronnie sighed, “look guys, there’s actually this girl out
there I need to meet, and you guys are kinda crampin’ my style, you
know? So…” He spread his hand out like a man next to broken-down
Mercedes, reluctantly asking for a ride. “Can’t you help a brother
out? I’ll make it up to you.”

Katie looked at me and
then back to Ronnie, critically.

“
Come on,” Ronnie pleaded.
“I didn’t come up here just to sit in that log cabin like some kind
of hermit – I came to meet some people. Didn’t you
guys?”

Katie rolled her eyes.
“She better be hotter than the last one.”

Ronnie slapped her on the
back. “That’s the spirit!”

We walked down
a pathway through some trees and past the main
lodge to a large clearing near the staff dorms. There were about
fifty people standing or sitting around a large roaring bonfire.
Sparks and embers shot up above the flames high into the dark above
our heads; it made the scene look primitive and wild. The sky was
clear and very full of stars – I pictured meteors shooting across
the field of stars and decided that it would be quite a sight out
here, as Ronnie had mentioned.

There was a spot near the
fire that the three of us wandered over to. Ronnie kept craning his
neck around, looking for that girl apparently – although it seemed
to me that he was in a rush, and more businesslike, tonight than
simply looking for another love conquest. Nearby to the right of
us, not too far from the fire, I saw a guy who was furiously
playing a 12-string guitar, with most of the people ignoring it
around him.

On the other side of us a
little ways to the left was a big, muscle-bound guy in a cowboy hat
sitting on the open tailgate of a pickup truck, next to small,
blonde girl. She was laughing hysterically as the guy was saying
something. He guzzled a beer and then tossed the can towards the
fire, where it fell short by a few feet. Somebody from the crowd
grumbled about that but the guy ignored it. He slid his arm around
the blonde.

It was true what Greg had
said – the whole scene had the look of a college dorm party, but
there were a few post-college age people like me around, and also a
strong influence of hippies and “granolas” – outdoor-types – that
lent a kind of mottled and confusing atmosphere to the
air.

Ronnie had gotten up and
was soon chatting with a couple of people by the fire. I saw he had
gotten a beer somewhere, and Katie was sitting by me with her knees
up to her chest, just staring into the flames. She looked so
distant that I got the impression that I shouldn’t disturb her, so
I moved a little over to the group by the fire near the
twelve-string guitar player for lack of any better
option.

“We should turn the truck
radio down for him,” a girl said to me as I sat down near her
blanket. She nodded over to the guitar. “He’s being trying to put
on a little show and everybody’s ignoring him.”

I glanced over to the
truck with the cowboy, and then back to her. She looked about
twenty-five, or even a bit older, had long, wavy, shockingly
bright-red hair, and was sitting cross-legged with a beer bottle in
the middle in between her legs. She had the light skin and freckles
of a true redhead, with red-brown light eyebrows and hazel eyes.
She was fairly attractive, but plain, and not as strikingly so as
Holly the Redhead had been. I still reacted with wariness,
nonetheless, as one would a red-colored snake that one had been
trained to sense was probably dangerous to handle.

“That guy on the truck?” I
asked her. “I don’t think he’s gonna turn that country music down
anytime soon. He looks like he’d maybe grab the guitar and smash
it.”

She laughed and offered me
a beer.

“
Do all of you guys here
work at the lodge?” I asked.

“Yea,” she said. “We hang
out here about every other night or so. There’s not a whole lot
else to do. Where do you work?”

“Two Medicine.”

“Oh!” she said, raising
her eyebrows. “Out there in the boondocks? It’s beautiful out
there.”

“That it is,” I
agreed.

I took a long sip of beer
and looked around at the crowd. Mostly white and a few
Native-American kids hanging around.

“I’m Bridget, by the way,”
the redhead said, offering a hand.

“Will, and that’s Katie
over there, sitting by herself, and Ronnie…” I looked around but
couldn’t see Ronnie anywhere. “Well he’s here somewhere. The three
of us run the store; you should come by and see us. Get yourself a
coffee mug, or a keychain…”

“I’m actually a full time
employee of the Park,” Bridget said, “and I work in the
administration and I have a place in town, but my office just
happens to be here at the lodge, so I like to hang out here with
these goofballs.” She said tilted her head towards the
fire.

“Definitely a random
assortment,” I said. “White guys, cowboys, and Indians – guess
nothing much has changed – like Greg said.”

Bridget laughed and nodded
over to the pickup truck. “Everybody calls him ‘Cowboy,’ so I guess
you’re right.”

The guy with the guitar,
who had long hair and a thick Native-American-style beaded headband
on, suddenly stopped playing and asked loudly, to no one in
particular, “You guys wanna hear an original?”

Many of us who were
chatting around him quieted down, out of an awkward politeness more
than interest, and Bridget called out over to the truck, “Hey
Cowboy! Turn the radio down for a sec and let him play
one.”

The big Cowboy looked at
the guitar guy for a moment as if considering whether it was worth
it or not to get up and toss the guitar into the fire, then he
frowned and heaved himself off of the tail gate and stomped over to
the driver’s side door and reached in to shut the radio
off.

The guitar kid smiled
nervously at the attention he now had, even though a few groups
were still talking among themselves here and there, and the fire
was cracking and popping loudly. He suddenly blurted out, “This
one’s called
Twelve String
Boogie
!” and he began to feverishly playing
tune that sounded like a blues song sped up to twelve times the
speed that it should have been.

He was bending notes and
pounding out chords frantically all over the guitar neck, and after
about 30 seconds of it, a few of the kids around the fire resumed
chatting over the guitar cacophony. As a final
coup de grace
, Cowboy then got up
again and switched on his radio again, turning it up even louder
now. The boy kept plowing through the song with determination for a
while.

Bridget turned back to me
and shook her head, “Definitely a ‘random group.’ It’s like this
every year. Keeps life interesting.”

I watched as Twelve String
Boogie finished his song; someone handed him a beer.

“
Keeping life interesting
was what brought me here,” I murmured.

“
She okay?” Bridget asked
with a furrowed brow, pointing over at Katie.

“
Yea, she’s fine,” I said,
looking over at her; she was poking around in the fire with a long
stick. “I barely even know her yet, but she’s just shy in crowds.
This isn’t her kinda scene.”

“
Is this your kind of
scene?”

“
I’d say probably not.” I
looked around for Ronnie and spotted him on the edge of the
crowd.

“
I think I will come visit
you guys at Two Med,” she said. “I’d like one of those huckleberry
shakes you people make.”

I wondered if she was
coming on to me, but it seemed like she was just being chummy. I
didn’t get any warning bells from her tone.

“
You got it,” I said.
“Listen I gotta go talk to Ronnie, who’s my ride. If I don’t run
into you again tonight, I’ll see you soon.”

I got up
and stepped through the crowd and walked over to
Ronnie, who was talking to two guys I hadn’t seen before. They were
standing away from the main group by the fire. The two guys did not
look like the college types, they looked like locals from Browning
– from the reservation – it was just something you could tell, in
their dress: which was shabby and poor, and their faces: angular,
Asian, sullen. Long brown hair completed the image, and one of them
wore mirror-finish, aviator sunglasses, even though it was the dead
of night. They both turned and looked at me as I stepped
up.

“
Ronnie, what’s the plan
man? We heading back soon?” I asked him.

He glanced over at me and
nodded, “Yea. Hey Will, this is Clayton Red Claw and his brother
Jake, they live in Browning.”

“
How you doin?” I asked
and extended my hand.

“
Good,” the one who was
called ‘Clayton’ grunted, barely glancing at me, shaking my hand in
a quick jerk. The one named Jake wore the sunglasses and didn’t say
anything.

The one named Clayton
turned back to Ronnie, “All right, dude, we’ll call you next
week.”

“
Yea, good deal,” Ronnie
said, slapping Clayton on the back.

The two guys sauntered
off, keeping to the edge of the crown on their way out. Ronnie and
I made our way towards Katie.

“
All these chicks here
just waiting for you and you find the two roughest dudes here to
talk to?” I asked Ronnie.

He looked at me and
chuckled, “The locals are the ones to know.” We gathered up Katie
and headed back to Ronnie’s car. Looking back as I got into the
front seat, the fire still roared and embers spiraled up like lazy
fireworks into the smoky dark. Twelve String Boogie was still
playing, a more mellow tune now, slow notes wafting over to us from
the haze of the fire. Bridget was opening another beer with a new
group of kids, I saw, and the Cowboy still sat on this throne
overlooking it all. His hat cast a large, flickering shadow behind
him into the trees as the music grew quieter and we climbed the
hill towards home.

Thirteen

I worked the rest of the
week without seeing Alia again, but she was constantly on my mind.
I had not gotten her number the last time I saw her, which struck
me now as a potentially fatal mistake. But then again, I tried to
remind myself, I had come out her for a fresh start, and didn’t
need to be tied into some relationship the first month on the job.
Too soon.

But as cool as I tried to
be about her, to let things just go and happen on their own, if at
all, the rest of the week as I worked the store, sometimes in the
front area cash register and sometimes in the back by the kitchen,
I would find myself glancing at the outside doors every time
someone walked in. My mind betrayed me as I daydreamed about her,
too, imagining me kissing her little neck as she sat next to me on
my bed, her smile cocked sideways like she did; and I found myself
unconsciously looking at a group of new customers for looking for
my little, dark-haired, tan-skinned Alia to walk back in, despite
my trying to be cool. I missed her.

I began to feel really at
home in the store over that next week, too. Part of it had been
going to the main lodge and seeing how it could have been had I
been unlucky enough to get a job someplace else in the park.
Despite Larry’s constant annoyances and the cheesiness of the
trinkets and junk we sold, and despite some of the unpleasant
tourists that clashed with the rugged beauty of the place, I
started to feel like I was home, and it excited me to feel
it.