In the living room, he knelt behind the big floral wing chair that faced the fireplace and its still-dying embers. From here he could see the intruders as silhouettes, moving around the kitchen, briefly illuminated by the refrigerator light. He lifted the gun and, resting it on the back of the chair, leveled it at the closer figure. Only then did he recognize the man as his nearest neighbor, with whom he shared a water right from the irrigation ditch and a relationship that strained to be pleasant; the other intruder was the man’s wife, a snappish, leanly attractive farm woman who was less diplomatic in concealing her distaste for Briggs. Listening to their conversation, Briggs understood that they expected him to be out of town and were raiding his refrigerator for beer. Briggs decided that confronting them would create waves of difficulty for him in the future and that this episode was best forgotten or set aside for use another time. So he put the gun away and crept back to bed. The neighbors departed a short time later with a farewell fling of beer cans into his roses.
Faucher’s voice came from the top of the stairs. “Were those people looking for me?”
“No, Erik, go back to sleep. They’ve gone.”
Marjorie was the first up: she had a remedial geometry class to teach. “Always a challenge after a long night,” she explained to John. She wore a pleated blue skirt and a pale green sweater that buttoned at the throat. Her hair was drawn back from a prettily modeled forehead. She was at the stove, one hand on her hip, the other managing a spatula. “Potatoes O’Brien and eggs. Then I’ve got to run.”
“But you don’t have to cook—”
“Oh, I can’t have a day with missing pieces.” She cast a brilliant smile at him and held it just long enough to suggest he’d missed the boat. Erik wouldn’t be getting up for breakfast because, she explained, he had an upset tummy. She held the spatula in the air while she said this, suggesting by a jotting motion that she was only reciting facts as they had been given her. Then she made a tummy-upset face. Marjorie reminded John of teachers he’d had — punctilious, too ready to use physical gestures to explain the obvious, a hint of the scold. They ate together with the unexpected comfort of strangers at a diner. She paid absolute attention to her food, looking up at him intermittently. She raised a forefinger.
“First thing he said to me was, ‘You’re amazing.’ I have learned that when they tell you you’re amazing, it’s over before it starts.”
“Just as well. Neither of you was feeling any pain.”
“I never have any idea what will happen when I get drunk. But why would you get drunk if you knew what was going to happen?” she said. “You probably get off just watching people make mistakes. That’s not a nice trait, Mr. Briggs!”
She smoothed her skirt and checked it for crumbs. “I’m out of here,” she said, as she stood up. “What’s it like?” She went to the window and craned to see the sky. “Not too bad. Okay, bye.”
Their boarding school was modeled on English public schools and built with iron ore and taconite dollars. In four years, the boys were made to see America through some British fantasy and believe that the true work of the nation fell to pencil-wristed Episcopalians who sang their babies to sleep with Blake’s “Jerusalem” or uttered mild orotundities like great good fortune and safe as houses. Their hostility toward each other was such that dormitory reassignment was considered, but they seemed always to find a reason to mend their differences. They kept up a sort of friendship at college, but when Erik moved into a rented place on Whitney Avenue with an Italian girl from Quinnipiac, they lost track again. After college, each had been in the other’s wedding, and they had, for a short time, lived in the same New Haven neighborhood while they attempted to launch their careers. Then, as John was less and less in the country and Faucher relocated to Boston, they became part of each other’s memories, and certainly not ones either enjoyed revisiting, though they continued to make sentimental phone calls on holidays, euphorically recreating soccer triumphs on the rare occasions they were actually together. John Briggs didn’t know quite why Erik Faucher was visiting him now. Surely this would be a dumb place to hide; he must want something.
When Briggs heard the shower start upstairs, he went outside and smelled the new morning wind coming through the fields. There were a few small white clouds gathering in the east, and a quarter mile off he could see a harrier working its way just over the surface of the hills. From time to time it swung up to pivot on a wingtip and then resumed its search.
The window of the upstairs bathroom opened and a wisp of steam came out, followed by the head of Erik Faucher. “John! What a morning!” Briggs was swept by a sudden and unexplained fondness. But when Erik began singing in the shower, Briggs found his voice insufferable.
Erik appeared in the yard wearing light cotton pleated pants, a hemp belt, and a long-sleeved blue cotton shirt. Though his hair was uniformly gunmetal gray, he still had the eyebrows that John associated with his French blood. John did not expect much accurate detail about the previous night’s bacchanal, as it was clear he held his liquor less well than he used to. It was Erik who’d said that a Yale education consisted of learning to conceal the fact that you were drunk. He raised his vigorous black eyebrows. The wordless greeting made Briggs impatient, and he relinquished the pleasant sense that he could drink better than Erik.
“This is my first day in the American West. Of course I hope to start a successful new life here.” Erik claimed to have flown from Boston, only less convenient than Kazakhstan, now that centralized air routes had made Montana oddly more remote. He didn’t seem tired or hungover, and his frame looked well exercised.
“I see Marge made off with the rental car,” he said.
Briggs made him some coffee and a piece of toast, which he nibbled cautiously while reading the obituaries from a week-old Billings Gazette.
“One of these Indians dies, they list every relative in the world. This one has three columns of kinfolks: Falls Down, Bird in Ground, Spotted Bear, Tall Enemy, Pretty on Top. Where does it end? And all their affiliations! The True Cross Evangelical Church, the Whistling Water Clan, the Bad War Deeds Clan. All I ever belonged to was Skull and Bones, and I ain’t too proud of that! So please don’t list it when I go. I’m no Indian.”
Briggs reflected that he could read the paper perfectly well and spare himself the nonsequiturs. He eyed the bright prairie sun working across the window behind the sink. He treasured his solitary spells, infrequent as they were, and wasted very few minutes of them. This one, it seemed, was doomed.
“Look at us, John, two lone middle-aged guys.”
“Filled with blind hope.”
“Not me, John. But I’m expecting Montana will change all that. What a thrill that the bad times are behind me and the real delights are but inches away!”
Briggs wasn’t falling for this one. He said, “I hope you’re right.”
“One of my great regrets,” said Erik solemnly, “is that when we were young, married, and almost always drunk, we didn’t just take a little time out to fuck each other’s beautiful wives.”
“That time has come and gone,” Briggs said.
“A fellow should smell the roses once in a while. Now those two are servicing others. Perhaps, in intimate moments, they tell those faceless new men how unsatisfactory we were, possibly including baseless allusions to physical shortcomings.”
“Very plausible.”
Their wives had despised each other. Carol was a classic but now extinct type of Mount Holyoke girl from Cold Spring Harbor, New York, a legacy whose mission it was to bear forward to new generations the Mount Holyoke worldview. When their daughter, Elizabeth, was expelled from the college for drug use, Erik’s insistence that there were other, possibly more forgiving institutions had placed him permanently outside the wall that sheltered his wife and child. When, even with certified rehabilitation, Elizabeth failed to be reinstated at Mount Holyoke, she lost interest in college altogether and joined the navy, where she was immediately happy as a machinist’s mate. Faucher was bankrupt by then, a result of habitual overextension, and his inability to support Carol in the style to which she had been accustomed led to divorce and Carol’s current position as a receptionist at a hearing-aid outlet on Route 90 between Boston and Natick. Very few years had brought them to this, and neither quite understood how.