This trip had its risks. I had only recently admitted to myself that I would like to make more of my situation with Louise than currently existed. Though ours was hardly a chaste relationship, real intimacy was relatively scarce. People in relationships nowadays seemed to retain their secrets like bank deposits — they always set some aside, in case they might need them to spend on someone new. I found it unpleasant to think that Louise could be withholding anything.
But I thought I was more presentable than I had been. When Louise and I first met, I was just coming off two and a half years of peddling satellite dishes in towns where a couple of dogs doing the wild thing in the middle of the road amounted to the high point of a year, and the highest-grossing business was a methamphetamine tent camp out in the sagebrush. Now I had caught the upswing in our local economy: cars, storage, tool rental, and mortgage discounting. I had a pretty home, debt-free, out on Sourdough. I owned a few things. I could be okay. I asked Louise what she thought of the new prosperity around us. She said wearily, “I’m not sure it’s such a good thing, living in a boomtown. It’s basically a high-end carny atmosphere.”
We were just passing Storm Castle and Garnet Mountain. When I glanced in the mirror, I saw a low red car with a scoop in its hood pull out to pass. I must have reacted somehow, because Louise asked me if I would like her to drive.
“No, that’s fine. Things are getting a bit lively back there.”
“Drive defensively.”
“Not much choice, is there?”
I had been mentally rehearsing the closing in Rigby, and I wasn’t getting anywhere. I had this sort of absurd picture of myself strutting into the meeting. I tried again to picture the buyer looking seriously annoyed, but I’d met him before and he seemed pretty levelheaded. I suspected I’d have to be really outlandish to get a rise out of him. He was a fourth-generation resident of Rigby, so I could always urge him to get to know his neighbors, I decided. Or, since he had come up through the service department, I could try emphasizing the need to study how the cars actually ran. I’d use hand signals to fend off objections. I felt more secure.
Some elk had wandered into the parking lot at Buck’s T4 and were grazing indifferently as people pulled off the highway to admire them. I don’t know if it was the great unmarred blue sky overhead or the balsamic zephyr that poured down the mountainside, but I found myself momentarily buoyed by all this idleness, people out of their cars. I am always encouraged when I see animals doing something other than running for their lives. In any case, the stream of traffic ahead of us had been much reduced by the pedestrian rubbernecking.
“My husband lived here one winter,” Louise said. “He sold his pharmacy after we divorced, not that he had to, and set out to change his life. He became a mountain man, wore buckskin clothes. He tried living off the land one day a week, with the idea that he would build up. But then he just stuck with one day a week — he’d shoot a rabbit or something, more of a diet, really. He’s a real-estate agent now, at Big Sky. I think he’s doing well. At least he’s quit killing rabbits.”
“Remarried?”
“Yes.”
As soon as we hit the open country around West Yellowstone, Louise called her office. When her secretary put her on hold, Louise covered the mouthpiece and said, “He married a super gal. Minnesota, I think. She should be good for Bob, and he’s not easy. Bob’s from the South. For men, it’s a full-time job being Southern. It just wears them out. It wore me out too. I developed doubtful behaviors. I pulled out my eyelashes and ate twenty-eight hundred dollars’ worth of macadamia nuts.”
Her secretary came back on the line, and Louise began editing her schedule with impressive precision, mouthing the word sorry to me when the conversation dragged on. I began musing about my capacity to live successfully with someone as competent as Louise. There was no implied hierarchy of status between us, but I wondered if, in the long run, something would have to give.
West Yellowstone seemed entirely given over to the well-being of the snowmobile, and the billboards dedicated to it were anomalous on a sunny day like today. By winter, schoolchildren would be petitioning futilely to control the noise at night so they could do their schoolwork, and the town would turn a blind eye as a cloud of smoke arose to gas residents, travelers, and park rangers alike. It seemed incredible to me that recreation could acquire this level of social momentum, that it could be seen as an inalienable right.
We came down Targhee Pass to Idaho, into a wasteland of spindly pines that had replaced the former forest, and Louise gave voice to the thoughts she’d been having for the past few miles. “Why don’t you just let this deal close? You really have no guarantees from the man from Atlanta. And there’s a good-faith issue here too, I think.”
“A lawyerly notation.”
“So be it, but it’s true. Are you trying to get every last cent out of this sale?”
“That’s second. The first priority is to be done with it. It was meant to be a passive investment, and it has turned out not to be. I get twenty calls a day from the dealership, most with questions I can’t answer. It’s turning me into a giant bullshit machine.”
“No investments are really passive.”
“Mutual funds are close.”
“That’s why they don’t pay.”
“Some of them pay, or they would cease to exist.”
“You make a poor libertarian, my darling. You sound like that little puke David Stockman.”
“Stockman was right about everything. Reagan just didn’t have the guts to take his advice.”
“Reagan. Give me a break.”
I didn’t mind equal billing in a relationship, but I did dread the idea of parties speaking strictly from their entitlements across a chasm. Inevitably, sex would make chaos of much of this, but you couldn’t, despite Benjamin Franklin’s suggestion, “use venery” as a management tool.
Louise adjusted her seat back and folded her arms, gazing at the sunny side of the road. The light through the windshield accentuated the shape of her face, now in repose. I found her beautiful. I adored her when she was a noun and was alarmed when she was a verb, which was usually the case. I understood that this was not the best thing I could say about myself. When her hand drifted over to my leg, I hardly knew what to do with this reference to the other life we led. I knew it was an excellent thing to be reminded of how inconsequential my worldly concerns were, but one warm hand, rested casually, and my interest traveled to the basics of the species.
Ashton, St. Anthony, Sugar City: Mormon hamlets, small farms, and the furious reordering of watersheds into industrial canals. Irrigation haze hung over the valley of the Snake, and the skies were less bright than they had been just a few miles back, in Montana. Many locals had been killed when the Teton Dam burst, and despite that they wanted to build it again: the relationship to water here was like a war, and in war lives are lost. These were the folk to whom I’d sold many a plain car; ostentation was thoroughly unacceptable hereabouts. The four-door sedan with a six-cylinder engine was the desired item, an identical one with a hundred and fifty thousand miles on it generally taken in trade at zero value, thanks to the manipulation of rebates against the manufacturer’s suggested retail. Appearances were foremost, and the salesman who could leave a customer’s smugness undisturbed flourished in this atmosphere. I had two of them, potato-fattened bland opportunists with nine kids between them. They were the asset I was selling; the rest was little more than bricks and mortar.
We pressed on toward Rexburg, and amid the turnoffs for Wilford, Newdale, Hibbard, and Moody the only thing that had any flavor was Hog Hollow Road, which was a shortcut to France — not the one in Europe but the one just a hop, skip, and a jump south of Squirrel, Idaho. There were license-plate holders with my name on them in Squirrel, and I was oddly vain about that.