3
I FOUND STRONG FEELINGS for my town to be always at hand. I loved its situation in the sweep of a great western river, even the steady, subdued clangor of its railroad yard, the faint but omnipresent background of our lives. And the violent weather kept everyone on their toes. My strongest impressions seem to have originated in summertime, when my life was out-of-doors and the towering clouds were like the castles in which I lived. When Gladys and Wiley didn’t need my help, I spent my days mowing lawns and watching. I say “watching” because the peculiarity of my family and of my own personality gave me the vigilance of an outsider. Remember, we had only recently come in from the road as itinerant rug cleaners, and my education at the loins of Aunt Silbie had exempted me from the pubescent twittering of my classmates. When I finally had a girlfriend, she turned out to be the true Crow maiden Debbie Stands Ahead, who confined our ardor to kisses that, lasting an hour and expressing teen love, were more powerful than the somewhat abrupt gymnastics with my aunt. I always felt in the arms of Debbie a sort of peace of a kind I would be surprised to feel years later when one of my colleagues, Jinx Mayhall, inexplicably embraced me in my hospital bed after I had been stabbed. What on earth could Jinx have been thinking? I had hoped she was embarrassed; I know I was. Years ago when I learned that Debbie had married a dentist I fondly hoped she was denying him coitus: I was still jealous. As for Jinx, I just didn’t know.
I mowed lawns all over town. I mowed Dr. Burchfield’s, my precursor in the emergency room. That he spent the weekend in his bathrobe should have told me something. Mrs. Hetherington, whose brick house was built before Montana statehood, always made me iced tea and a sandwich. She was a lonely old widow who sat by herself at a white painted table in her backyard arranging flowers from her garden. She knew I was seeing Debbie Stands Ahead. “She’s a fine young lady,” said Mrs. Hetherington. “This all used to be theirs.” After Debbie was gone I read the most god-awful books about the frontier, in which the Indian girls appeared as “dusky maidens.” For some reason I embraced this ghastly phrase and was heartbroken that my own dusky maiden was gone (to college). Debbie, forsake your dentist and his half-breed progeny, and come back to me!
Earl Clancy’s yard was almost too small for me to trifle with and he barely paid me. Earl, now retired, had been a supervisor at the waterworks, and I worked for him to hear his stories. Once a hobo, he esteemed those years as the best of his life. He had the same skinny frame and hangdog face he had probably acquired during his days riding the rails. He followed the seasons like a bird of passage and accepted adventures as they befell him. He had some skill as an orchardist and could bring his talents to McIntosh apples and Indian River oranges alike. In Florida, he was arrested for vagrancy and spent a month on a chain gang. When released, he wandered penniless down a dirt road, trying to think how to get back to Montana (it was hot). Passing a Holy Roller church, he heard the pandemonium within and a huge woman stepped out and called to him, “Come in and be saved!” Earl soon found himself rolling around on the floor, where he discovered a wallet with enough money to get him home. The stint on the chain gang had brought him to his senses, such as they were, and he went on to spend the rest of his working life at the waterworks. Because of his special understanding of the operations of the system, Earl was forgiven the very occasional summer binges that took him on sentimental journeys to pick cherries on the shores of Flathead Lake. He was the first of the innately talented, hardworking, somewhat visionary and out-of-control men I have known. I might have been one of them at heart. I hoped not, because all were bachelors and I was in search of the love of my life.
My summertime lawn mowing introduced me to the class system that burdens every community for the simple reason that east of Main Street, people mowed their own lawns. Mowing lawns in the humid summertime could be such grueling work that I began mentally aligning myself with that class of people who had others do it for them. There was a lingering contradiction here in that Dr. Olsson, who set me on my path, mowed his own lawn. But he was from out East, and that could have explained it. Still, here was another of my ambivalences: I seemed unwilling to rise to that class whose lawns were mowed by others. I wouldn’t like being called “Doctor” if that became appropriate: it would embarrass me, though I expected to love the work. Maybe that was why I drove my troublesome old car. The last mechanic who worked on it said, “Doc, you need to shit-can this rust bucket before it shit-cans you.” But I went on pouring money into it. I even lost my desire for money and developed some kind of sentimental attachment to the poverty of our early days.
I mowed lawns for nuns and priests. We had a priest from Ireland for a while, Father Noonan, a tall, somber man known to be an extremely bad-tempered golfer. The many Irish associated with the railroad in our town thought that Noonan gave them a bad name by being so humorless. They had a point. Noonan was never happy with my work and demanded that I use an edger, which he didn’t own. When he presented me with one and pointed out the work it was meant to do, I quit. Father Noonan called me a bum and chased me off the rectory grounds as though I’d been fired. I got dirty looks from some Catholics, but that died down.
I wasn’t the only lawn boy in town, and we all liked the Dairy Queen for lunch and ogling. We had the best tans, which drew some girls, including sophomore Edna Sedlicky, who made it clear she was available for whatever we might have in mind, which scared us to death, sending Edna elsewhere for fulfillment. School threw us together arbitrarily, but meeting at the DQ as boys of common labor seemed to produce more-enduring friendships. This was how I met Chong Wells and Second Hand Smoke. The three of us were fascinated by Louis Echeverria, a Basque-Cheyenne mixed-blood burglar who told us stories of his derring-do without quite tempting us, though the allure of creeping around where we had no business was attractive. Another Indian who worked at the Conoco station, Gary American Horse, known as “Walkman” because of his omnipresent audio device, told us that Louis was known on the reservation as “Louie Crooked-Fucker,” and when we tried addressing him by this name, he fled, assuming his reputation pursued him. We never saw him again, though we learned that he moved to Billings to pimp and sell meth. At a football game in Great Falls, Chong saw him driving a new Eldorado with tinted windows. He was later arrested together with our mayor, Todd Bakesly, father of seven, for soliciting a prostitute. Louie went to jail, the possibility of which he once described to his admirers at the Dairy Queen as “the price you pay” and “the choice is yours.” He had a philosophical streak.
One summer I traveled back and forth to Wild Horse Island on Flathead Lake, where T. Sam Vaughn, the owner of our town’s bank, kept his big Chris-Craft with its cocktail bar and white Naugahyde interior. I had scraped and painted its bottom in the spring and twice touched up its varnish during the summer, after which Vaughn put me on a Greyhound for home with a check in my pocket and on my lap a nice lunch, made with his own hands. But by far my sharpest memory is of T. Sam, his wife elsewhere, a cocktail in one hand, the marine gas nozzle in the other while fumes arose around the cigarette dangling from his lips. I was sure we would go down as one of America’s regular cabin cruiser explosions, but as you see it never happened. Once T. Sam allowed me to bring Debbie Stands Ahead as my guest; he chaperoned us in separate cabins and joined Debbie in preparing meals. At midday when my work was done and Debbie had tired of sunbathing on the deck, we would swim in water so cold that those who drowned in it were never seen again. Our banker was our lifeguard, watching vigilantly from the helm as we swam furiously to keep warm. Debbie and I always watched the sunrise over the Mission Range where Debbie had Kootenai-Salish relatives. When Debbie got out of the sun to study her schoolbooks, T. Sam would wink at me and nod: this is the girl for you. In middle age, I still found myself yearning, and Debbie’s marriage to a dentist made me a lifelong connoisseur of anti-dentist commentary.