Two Medicine (52 page)

“
Yea,” Ronnie said, “I’ll
pick you up at nine. I’ll get the beer.” He said he had to get back
to work, and couldn’t’ talk long.

“
Is Larry there?” I
asked.

“
Yea, why?”

“
No reason.”

I hung up the phone and went to get
dressed.

I spent the
first part of the day cleaning Greg and Dee's
kitchen, scrubbing the stove top till it gleamed, Windex on the
fridge inside, cleaning the shelves, and then I mopped the floor.
This was in part a penance and in part a payment for my stay, but
also, I think, a habit of working in the kitchen at the store. We
were forever cleaning that kitchen top to bottom. I felt like I had
to do it, to do something, during the day in the house – I couldn’t
just sit idle.

I made a simple lunch of
some bread and peanut butter I found, and then spent the rest of
the day down by the stream, cleaning out Larry's canoe, washing all
the mud and sand out and turning it over on its face to dry
out.

Greg and Dee got home later
and we grilled out again, and by nine p.m., Ronnie had pulled up in
his car, music blaring as of old, smoke pouring out the window. I
got in to the front passenger seat and saw with surprise that Katie
was sitting in the back seat.
Just like
old times
, I thought.

Ronnie was playing The
Doors as we drove down the road that led towards Browning. The
night was clear, thankfully, and I felt in good spirits, reunited
with my strange family, at least for the night. There was some
awkwardness between Ronnie and I still, of course, but it felt good
to be back in that car, after everything.

“You know I kinda miss you
guys, already,” I said, looking back at Katie. “How’s the store
without me?”

“You mean the whole two
days you been gone?” Katie asked, smirking at me. “The building
burnt down and the campers have rioted and looted us
out.”

“Very funny….”

“Actually,” she said,
“It’s pretty good. Larry is totally different. I don’t know what
got into him, but he’s actually nice now, kind of...”

“Yea,” Ronnie chimed in.
“I guess it was you that was bugging him all this time…” He winked
at me and reached down for a fresh cigarette.

I shook my head. “He’s
probably just worried you two might up and leave him too, and then
he’d be truly screwed.”

“
Don’t smoke yet,” Katie
said, as Ronnie stuck a cigarette in his mouth. “Not till we’re
outside.”

Ronnie stuck it behind his
ear. “Ok, mom.” We drove over to a small gas station, and turned
into the parking lot.

“Gotta pick somebody up,”
Ronnie said, turning into a parking space next to an old Jeep
Wrangler.

A girl stepped
out of the Jeep, and grabbed a large paper bag
from the passenger seat. She walked over to us and I saw that it
was Jamie.

“You back with her again?” I asked Ronnie as
she walked up.

“Something like that.”

Jamie got into the back seat next to Katie,
and we started off again. We said our “hellos” and she directed us
where to go as we got closer to Browning.

“So where
are
we going?” I
asked.

“This lady I know has a farm close to here,”
Jaime said. “And it’s the perfect place to see the meteor shower:
private, totally dark – no lights anywhere around. The lady is
actually a friend of Sky’s, that’s how I met her.”

A concerning thought that Jake may still be
out and about, lurking in the darkness still with his misfit gang
and viscous intentions. Would he pop up out of some field in the
darkness as the meteors shot overhead? We soon drove onto a dirt
road that offered huge bumps and potholes, which Ronnie carefully
steered around, peering into the dark beyond his weak head lights.
We saw a small farmhouse next to a barn and drove towards it.
Getting closer, I spotted a middle-aged lady standing outside near
her front porch, accompanied by two enormous shaggy dogs. A singe
flood light illuminated the front yard, but other than that the
property was perfectly dark, as Jamie had described.

We drove up and Jamie hopped out; the lady
came up and gave her a hug.

“This is Nancy, guys, this is her place,”
Jamie said to us, waving us over.

The two dogs were big Saint Bernards, I
noticed, and they came up lazily, sniffling at our hands. They both
were drooling an incredible amount of saliva.

“Hey guys,” Nancy said, “this is Bootsie and
Ranger. They’re friendly, won’t hurt ya.”

Nancy looked like she was in her late
forties, had nice blonde and brownish hair, large glasses and a
kind of soft, comfortable-looking body. She looked like your
friend’s mother from down the street – friendly, approachable, with
a slightly sexual allure.

“Hi, Bootsie and Ranger,” I said, letting
the dogs sniff around my legs.

“Nancy breeds St. Bernards,” Jamie told the
group.

“That and run this farm,” Nancy said. “But
these guys are a full time job, for sure.”

“Easy, Cujo,” Ronnie said, leaning back
against his car and lighting his cigarette, keeping his
distance.

“Some veterinarian you’d make,” Katie said
to him. “They’re adorable.” She bent down and gave one of the dogs
a big hug around its neck. She ignored the strings of drool
swinging below the dog’s mouth.

“Adorable and for sale,” Nancy said,
smiling. “Although I doubt you could keep one at Two Medicine.”

“They’d be so nice to cuddle up with…” Katie
said, giving the dog a last hug while the other one sniffed at her
feet.

We packed into the cars again, and Nancy led
us down the dirt road again in her truck, the two dogs sitting in
the back of the truck bed. She eventually turned off the road and
drove straight up a grassy hill to the top, where she stopped and
got out, leaving the truck running.

“This is a good spot,” Nancy said to us,
pointing out a grassy clearing up on the hill.

“You’re not watching with us?” Jamie asked,
getting out of the car.

“No, I got work to do. Besides, I’ve been
seeing it for years.”

We said our goodbyes as she got back into
the old truck and bounded down the hill, the dogs trying to stay
balanced in the back of the truck. Katie and I set out the large
blanket she had brought, and Jamie and Ronnie got the beer cooler
from the back of the car. Ronnie left the music playing on his car
stereo, with his door open to amplify the sound.

“
What kind of work does
Nancy have to do this late at night?” I asked Jamie.

Jamie looked at Ronnie and they laughed for
a second.

“
Not farming, that’s for
sure,” Ronnie said.

“
You see those Christmas
lights down there, on her porch?” Jamie asked me, pointing off down
in the dark towards the farmhouse. “When they’re on, she’s open for
business.”

“
Open for what?” I
asked.

“
What do you think?”
Ronnie asked me, smiling wryly.

“
She’s a prostitute?”
Katie stopped and stared at us.

“
Yep,” Ronnie
said.

I thought back to what Larry had said. This
must have been the place he came to.

“Have
you
been to her?” Katie asked
Ronnie, horrified.

“
Hell no,” he laughed,
“I’ve never paid for it in my life.”

I tried to picture Larry making love with
Nancy, and the image was disturbing, gross and ungraspable, like
two large potatoes shoved together, one on top of the other… It
made me angry for a moment that he would have hit Alia after coming
here, and I had a momentary doubt about what I was doing, letting
him go; but I took a deep breath and let the feeling go.

Ronnie snapped me out of my reverie. “But
we’re getting off topic, that’s not why we’re here, to talk about
my sex life.”

“
Thank God,” Katie
said.

We settled down
onto the large blanket spread out on the thick
grass. Ronnie and Jamie had fold out chairs, but Katie and I just
lay on our backs on the blanket, a jacked stuffed under my head for
a pillow as I carefully sipped a beer.

The sky above was so clear
and the darkness around us so deep and undisturbed, that you could
see the ghostly line of an arm of the Milky Way stretching out over
us at an angle, southeast to northwest. Thousands of stars… but no
streaking meteors had passed overhead yet.

“By the way, Will,” Jamie
said over to me from her chair. “I think I have a job lined up for
you for the winter.”

“Really?”

“Yep,” she nodded. “With
the administration in Kalispell. You’d be working with me. A lot of
PR stuff and some writing – right up your alley, I
hear.”

“Sounds perfect.”

“We’ll talk more soon.
Come by the office, and I think you’ll be pleased.”

“I don’t think I can be
too picky at this point, anyway,” I said. “But thanks a lot; you
may have just saved me from going back to Georgia.”

“Screw that,” Ronnie said
from his chair as he scanned the night sky for his meteors. “Don’t
leave, buddy, stick around and become a Montananite like
me.”

“It’s ‘Montanan’ you
retard,” Jamie said, kicking him.

Just then a pair of
headlights popped over the end of the grassy plain and a small
Toyota drove up close to Ronnie’s car.
Jake’s car?

“
That must be Sky,” Jamie
said. “She said she’d probably stop by.”

It was Sky; and she exited
the car and came over with a bottle of wine and some plastic cups
in her hands. “Save room for me?” she asked us.

“
Sure,” Ronnie piped up,
and stood up to help her with her stuff. Jamie rolled her eyes and
said, “Sky we’ve got a spot for you over by Katie and
Will.”

Sky sat down next to me
and Katie and poured herself a glass of wine.

“How’s it going?” I asked
her as she settled in.

“Ok, overall.” She offered
me a glass of red wine. It was a large glass and I took a large
swig, to feel the effects. I neck was hurting and I wanted to
deaden the pain a bit, and to get lost in the night and the
darkness, the music and the shooting stars, in the midst of my
strange family.

“How’s Clayton?” Jamie
asked. “I heard he got picked up.”

Ronnie looked over at us.
“He got arrested? When?”

Sky nodded. “Last night.
Him and Jake both got picked up. Not sure on what charges.” She
said, looking for a moment at me. “We won’t know until they get in
front of a judge Monday in Kalispell, probably.”

“I’m sorry Sky,” Jamie
said softly, and reached over to grasp her hand. Sky reached back
and held it for a moment. “It’s ok. It wasn’t totally unexpected.
Jake was always threatening to drag Clayton into his shit
again.”

Ronnie stared for a moment
at her, and then looked back at the stars again.

The song
“
The End”
by The
Doors came over the stereo then. The melodic, haunting guitar
refrain that begins the song drifted over us like a slow, exotic
wind. The music lent a mystical feel to the night scene: us lying
on the blanket, nothing overhead but a giant dome of darkness and
lights, nothing around but the old farmhouse in the distance, below
in the valley.

The Doors tune
wafted over the grass to our blanket.
“This is the End, my only friend… the
End.”
A streak of light shot across the sky
overhead, gold-colored with a small trail of sparks glittering for
a fraction of a second behind.

“There’s one!” Ronnie
shouted. “Everyone SHUT UP!” He commanded even though no one had
been talking at that moment.

The song played on as we
all kept quiet and stared up into the sky. Another streak after a
couple of minutes, then two others a second later. Ronnie had told
me before, in one of his lectures, that the meteors were the
remains of a long-disintegrated comet. I wondered how far the comet
fragments had traveled, and for how long they had been
traveling.

I took a drink of wine and
looked back at Sky, the one behind me, not above me. She wasn’t
looking up, but back at me. We couldn’t see each other’s faces in
the growing dark, but our faces met nonetheless and I stared back
at her for a moment, then up at the other sky again.

A silver-colored meteor
shot across the expanse. The meteors all were coming from right to
left, more or less, burning off in the same direction.

Jim Morison sang his
wailing verse:
“Lost in a Roman….
wilderness of pain.”
The guitar trilled the
mystic notes. I felt the tune lift my mind up and carry it into the
sky a ways.

“The point where the
meteors are coming from,” Ronnie said to us, “over from the right,
is called ‘The Radiant.’ The meteors come from near where the
constellation Perseus is, hence the name.”

In Greek mythology, I had once read, Perseus
was sent to take the head of Medusa – whose face caused all who
gazed upon her to turn to stone. Perseus slew Medusa, and then
rescued the princess Andromeda from the kraken by turning it to
stone with Medusa's head.

A lesson in creativity, I considered.
Perseus came up with an idea that no one had considered, and had
risked his life to get the job done. I wondered where the story had
come from, what, or who, had originally inspired it to begin with.
The ancient Greeks also believed that women were created as a
punishment to man. I thought back over my summer, and even before,
to Holly and others, and realized that all such myths have their
origin in truth. A punishment, and a blessing. Had I found Alia’s
killer, or had he found me?