Two Medicine (17 page)

There was now a simplicity
to my purpose that appealed to me, I realized, and I began to think
less and less about my past life in Georgia, and less about my
future too. I would wonder sometimes what my friends were up to
back home, what few I had had, but that old, cluttered, grey world
of my old life began to fade out of focus more and more each time I
thought about it over the days.

I’d think about Scott
mostly. I wondered if he was still drinking himself to death in
Coco Joe’s, sitting in the dim light with Stevie the bartender and
that parrot. Interestingly, I hadn’t thought about Holly hardly at
all since I had started working, and especially after running into
Alia. It wasn’t that I didn’t love her (I still did), and miss her
face and her voice (I still did), and she still felt a part of me,
but she also was so distant to me all of a sudden that she was
fading in comparison to all of the newness, and strangeness, the
clarity, of my new life.

And there definitely
was
strangeness… mostly
in the regulars to the camp sites who came every year, or even
lived nearby. The first such oddball I met was a large, long
haired, heavy set white guy who called himself
“Thunderbird.”

He made a point of telling
me, the first time I met him when he came into the store one
morning to buy supplies, that he was a member of the “tribe”
(meaning the Blackfoot) and that they had given him that name –
“Thunderbird.” He said, proudly, that he got that name because when
he would get up in the morning and walk out of his tent he would
yawn so loudly it sounded like thunder.

Thunderbird was
indeed
a big, loud, presence; but I kind of
doubted he figured in any way into the politics of the tribe on the
reservation. And he lived in Browning, but after a while he seemed
more homeless than anything else. He lived in this ratty old teepee
that he would set up when he was in Two Med’s campgrounds, and he
drove around on a battered Harley Davidson motorcycle with a
separate little trailer hitched to the back. He would stay for days
at a time at Two Med in that teepee, roaring around on his bike and
scaring the tourists, looking like a cross between a Hell’s Angel
biker and a chubby hippy.

The Blackfoot tribe in
Browning actually had a council of elders, I learned, as all
recognized Native American tribes do, and they were notoriously
secretive and hesitant to include outsiders or guys – especially
guys who claimed to be part Blackfoot but had no proof. I figured
Thunderbird was one of those “wannabe Indians.” White people were
always trying to associate themselves with one tribe or another,
Alia would tell me, always trying to worm into the lifestyle like
it was a club you could sign up and join. But, she told me that the
saying on the reservation was “Everyone wants to be an Indian, and
nobody wants to be an Indian.” And I would later travel onto
Browning and see what that meant – it was a desolate
place.

But anyway, Thunderbird
came in one day and introduced himself to me, dumping a bunch of
food and camp supplies on the snack bar counter for me to ring up.
He had on long earrings with feathers attached, and braided grey
and brown hair. He looked to be about fifty, and had on a black
t-shirt that was too tight for his round belly, and which had a
wolf howling at a moon depicted on it in garish neon colors. He
wore old denim jeans. He looked as if someone had tossed him into a
pile of thrift store clothes from ‘70s and ‘80s, and when he
emerged fully dressed then draped some Indian jewelry on him to
complete the look.

“Are you Will?” he asked
me at the counter with a big smile and loud voice, the first time I
met him.

“Yea,” I said, taken aback
that he knew my name.

“Ha! Alia told me she the
other day that she met a guy at Two Med named ‘Will,’” he laughed,
his eyes sparkling merrily.

“You know Alia?” I
couldn’t believe he could – he seemed like such a clown that I
couldn’t image her having anything to do with him. The very fact he
knew her bothered me; she was above that, existed on a higher
plane, too pure and beautiful to be in his world! But then again,
Browning was a small town...

“Sure! She’s part of my
tribe,” Thunderbird said, nodding his head emphatically. “She been
around lately?”

I began to get the sense
that he was somewhat mentally off, but I couldn’t quite detect how,
except that he seemed a bit overly-merry.

“No,” I said, “haven’t
seen her.” I resisted the urge to ask him if she had said anything
else about me. I began ringing up his stuff.

“
So where you from,
Thunderbird?”

“
Missouri. But I joined
the marines, and I saw combat!” he told me, nodding his head again.
“Yep. Saw combat and even took some grenade shrapnel in the leg.
I’ll show you the scars sometime, all spotted up like a cheetah.
Docs say I still have some metal in me.”

I frowned as I pictured
him dropping his pants and showing me some pasty white lumpy thigh.
I tried to ring his stuff up quicker.

“
Anyway,” he continued.
“When I got back to the states, the first thing I did was buy a
Harley and drive all over hell and back, crisscrossing all over the
place, just following the sprits, till I ended up here.” He waved a
hand around the store – meaning Glacier Park. “And I love this
place – Two Medicine – it really saved my life.”

I just nodded and bagged his stuff up for
him.

“
And the
tribe healed me up too – and I don’t mean my scars,” he narrowed
his gleaming, watery eyes and said, almost in a whisper. “They
healed
some
scars, though, my scars up here.” He jabbed a pudgy finger at
his temple.

He held me in such an
intense stare, drilling into my eyes, that I had to look
down.

“
Well that sounds
interesting, Thunderbird…” I said casually, hoping to give him a
cue to stop.

But he grew even quieter,
as if we were in a conspiracy, “I was in a sweat, I went to a
sweat, they sweated it out of me.” He staring without blinking at
me; it was almost like he was chanting it.

The hair stood up on the
back of my neck, and the rest of the store seemed to grow
completely quiet. I just stared at him, as if transfixed, but I
really just didn’t know what to say because I had no idea what they
hell he was talking about. Luckily, a big noisy family of campers
came up behind him to order some food, and he just nodded at me,
smiling, and moved on, not saying another word.

In the evenings
we would close the store at seven. Ronnie and I,
and sometimes Katie, would dump some logs on the fire in the
enormous fireplace and sit around, sometimes drinking beer, and
talking about the people we were meeting, the places they were
from, the weirdness of the store, the things we planned on doing
after this job.

On one of these nights, we
got to talking a little late, around ten p.m., and suddenly Larry
came booming out his room upstairs. He glared down at us for a
moment, and then shouted, “Keep it down you!
Some
of us have to get up in the
morning!”

He slammed his bedroom
door shut again, shaking the wall. We just looked at each other and
laughed.

Most nights Katie stayed
in her room and read, or sat in the kitchen and sipped tea. But
Ronnie and I were hanging out almost every night – either building
a roaring fire in the store or staying up late playing cards, board
games, and sometimes watching a movie on a DVD player Ronnie had in
his room. We always asked Katie to join, but when she did I noticed
that she would keep her distance from Ronnie whenever we were
together. She was being careful around him, as if she expected
Ronnie to jump on her as she got near his bed. It occurred to me
that he had probably tried humping her in his room or something
before I had gotten there.

Sometimes in those late
evenings after we closed, our conversations steered towards where
we were from and why we had moved to the park, and I always felt a
little uncomfortable talking about my coming to Two Med like I had.
I felt like if it was all brought out into the open and exposed,
and if it was all described the way it actually happened, that I
would look like some kind of nut. Both Ronnie and Katie were still
in school, Katie in undergrad, and Ronnie was getting an MBA, at
least he said he was, until he took a “hiatus” as he said and came
out to Montana, so it was more natural that they would have taken
this seasonal job, than it was for me.

I didn’t tell them I hoped
to stay on with the park all year round, because it made it sound
like I had no place else to go as a second option if the park job
didn’t work out. From the sound of it, working in the winter doing
administrative stuff for the park was a long-shot at best, and I
didn’t even know if that was possible. I simply felt foolish, to be
honest, having come all this way to this place, even though I was
completely sure it was the right thing to do; so I didn’t like
talking about it.

Besides hanging around the
store, some nights Ronnie and I and once in a while Katie would
hike down the dirt road to the campsites and find a vacant one and
set up some chairs. We’d make a small bonfire and sit around it,
enjoying the darkness of the surrounding forest, the fiercely
bright stars that were innumerable in the sky. Invariably at these
times, Ronnie would remind all of us again about the Perseid meteor
shower’s imminent arrival in August, and how we had to get “out in
the clear” and watch it because ‘it would blow our fucking
minds!’”

One particular
evening
, about the fifth week into the job,
Ronnie happened to show me a large Ziploc bag of marijuana he had
shoved under his clothes in one of the drawers in his room. I had
never seen a bag of drugs that big, and asked him if he was
planning on just smoking it all.

“
Well of course I am,” he
laughed. “This baby will last me till the meteor shower, at least.”
He tossed it in his hand, feeling its weight proudly, like a new
father holding his newborn.

When I asked him where he
got that, out there in the middle of the national park, he said
that those two locals from the night of the bonfire had sold him
it.

“
Those
guys, Clayton and Jake, can get you
anything
, Will,” he said with
excitement as he shoved the bag back under his shirts. “Coke,
crack, heroin, pills, weed, hookers, guns, you name it! They live
in Browning, and the more I learn about that town the crazier it
seems. Like the Wild West and Vegas all in one.”

I thought of Alia, of
course, when he said that. I wondered if she was into drugs at all
– she could be a huge junkie for all I really knew! Even though I
barely knew here, I wondered what her future would be if she stayed
in such a desolate place, if she had a future, if she might end up
drugged out and living with some old dealer, having a couple of
kids that end up in foster care, perpetuating the cycle of poverty
and bad decisions that she grew up around and that she suffered
with.

Whenever she came to mind,
which was often, I felt a yearning for her. I missed her; and it
started to seem like our canoe date was a one off deal. I hoped she
would visit soon, but I was beginning to doubt I’d see her again. I
even thought of tracking down Thunderbird and seeing if he could
give me her number.

I didn’t mention her to
Ronnie at all because I had a sense that he would try to track her
down like some big game hunter and then screw her in his room or
something, despite our new friendship. He didn’t seem like the type
to respect boundaries. I don’t if he even knew what boundaries
were. In the first week alone after the bonfire, he had already
screwed Bridget, the redhead from the bonfire, in his room. Since
that night, she had become a regular at Two Med, and would
sometimes hang out with us by the fire late at night. He had also
slept with some random park employee, a pretty blonde girl from
Germany, a few nights before our conversation that night as well,
and a skinny Indian girl from Browning.

For my
part
, besides our night life at Two
Medicine, on my days off I would hike the trails around the lake,
and go as far as I could on the trails that led off into the park.
I was the only one in the store who hiked, which I still found
unbelievable. I think Katie was too used to the place, Ronnie too
bored, and Larry too old.

But I felt a special kind
of joy in the woods. I began to learn my way over the hills and
into the mountains, began to learn what plants were called and
where moose and mountain goats could be seen. And when I was out
among the vast stretches of mountains, I would feel a certainty
that I had come to the right place and that I was doing the right
thing, like I felt nowhere else.

From the Two Medicine
store, several hiking trails lead west and north. The day-hikers
and campers mostly hung around Two Medicine Lake and would hike the
easy trail that encircles it: about seven miles. I usually stayed
higher up, to some of the peaks of nearby mountains (which took all
day) or through some passes that led to other lakes and trail
further beyond the valley we were in. There was Running Eagle Falls
Trail, which took you over the shoulder of Mount Sinopah and to a
waterfall split in two; and the trail to Cobalt Lake, a distant
body of blue water that was hid in a small valley.