A couple of tabbies lived in that greenhouse, but the Big Cat stood outside. It was an old D6 bulldozer with a shovel, and Jesse stoked it up from time to time. Mostly it just sat there. In summers, it provided shade for Jesse’s dogs: Potato was brown and fat and not too bright, while Chip was little and fuzzy. Sometimes they rode with Jesse, and sometimes stayed home. Me or Mike Tarbush fed them. When anything big happened, you could count on those two dogs to get underfoot. Except for me, they were the only ones who attended the funeral.
“If we gotta do it,” Jesse said mournfully, “we gotta.” He wound up the Cat, turned on the headlights, and headed for the grave site, which was an embankment overlooking Highway 2. Back in those days, Jesse’s hair still shone black, and it was even blacker in the darkness. It dangled around a face that carried an Indian forehead and a Scotsman’s nose. Denim stretched across most of the six feet of him, and he wasn’t rangy; he was thin. He had feet to match his height, and his hands seemed bigger than his feet; but the man could skin a Cat.
I stood in moonlight and watched him work. A little puff of flame dwelt in the stack of the bulldozer. It flashed against the darkness of those distant mountains. It burbled hot in the cold spring moonlight. Jesse made rough cuts pretty quick, moved a lot of soil, then started getting delicate. He shaped and reshaped that grave. He carved a little from one side, backed the dozer, found his cut not satisfactory. He took a spoonful of earth to straighten things, then fussed with the grade leading into the grave. You could tell he wanted a slight elevation, so the Hudson’s nose would be sniffing toward the road. Old Potato dog had a hound’s ears but not a hound’s good sense. He started baying at the moon.
It came to me that I was scared. Then it came to me that I was scared most of the time anyway. I was nineteen, and folks talked about having a war across the sea. I didn’t want to hear about it. On top of the war talk, women were driving me crazy: the ones who said “no” and the ones who said “yes.” It got downright mystifying just trying to figure out which was worse. At nineteen, it’s hard to know how to act. There were whole weeks when I could pass myself off as a hellion, then something would go sour. I’d get hit by a streak of conscience and start acting like a missionary.
“Jed,” Jesse told me from the seat of the dozer, “go rig a tow on Miss Molly.” In the headlights the grave now looked like a garage dug into the side of that little slope. Brother Jesse eased the Cat back in there to fuss with the grade. I stepped slow toward the Hudson, wiggled under, and fetched the towing cable around the frame. Potato howled. Chip danced like a fuzzy fury, and started chewing on my boot like he was trying to drag me from under the Hudson. I was on my back trying to kick Chip away and secure the cable. Then I like to died from fright.
Nothing else in the world sounds anywhere near like a Hudson starter. It’s a combination of whine and clatter and growl. If I’d been dead a thousand years, you could stand me right up with a Hudson starter. There’s threat in that sound. There’s also the promise that things can get pretty rowdy, pretty quick.
The starter went off. The Hudson jiggled. In the one-half second it took to get from under that car, I thought of every bad thing I ever did in my life. I was headed for Hell, certain sure. By the time I was on my feet, there wasn’t an ounce of blood showing anywhere on me. When the old folks say “white as a sheet,” they’re talking about a guy under a Hudson.
Brother Jesse climbed from the Cat and gave me a couple of shakes.
“She ain’t dead,” I stuttered. “The engine turned over. Miss Molly’s still thinking speedy.” From Highway 2 came the wail of Mike Tarbush’s ’48 Roadmaster. Mike loved and cussed that car. It always flattened out at around eighty.
“There’s still some sap left in the batt’ry,” Jesse said about the Hudson. “You probably caused a short.” He dropped the cable around the hitch on the dozer. “Steer her,” he said.
The steering wheel still felt alive, despite what Jesse said. I crouched behind the wheel as the Hudson got dragged toward the grave. Its brakes locked twice, but the towing cable held. The locked brakes caused the car to sideslip. Each time, Jesse cussed. Cold spring moonlight made the shadowed grave look like a cave of darkness.
The Hudson bided its time. We got it lined up, then pushed it backward into the grave. The hunched front fenders spread beside the snarly grille. The front bumper was the only thing about that car that still showed clean and uncluttered. I could swear Miss Molly moved in the darkness of the grave, about to come charging onto Highway 2. Then she seemed to make some kind of decision, and sort of settled down. Jesse gave the eulogy.
“This here car never did nothing bad,” he said. “I must have seen a million crap crates, but this car wasn’t one of them. She had a second gear like Hydra-Matic, and you could wind to seventy before you dropped to third. There wasn’t no top end to her—at least I never had the guts to find it. This here was a hundred-mile-an-hour car on a bad night, and God knows what on a good’n.” From Highway 2, you could hear the purr of Matt Simons’s ’56 Dodge, five speeds, what with the overdrive, and Matt was scorching.
Potato howled long and mournful. Chip whined. Jesse scratched his head, trying to figure a way to end the eulogy. It came to him like a blessing.
“I can’t prove it,” he said, “‘cause no one could. But I expect this car has passed The Road Dog maybe a couple of hundred times.” He made like he was going to cross himself, then remembered he was Methodist. “Rest in peace,” he said, and he said it with eyes full of tears. “There ain’t that many who can comprehend The Dog.” He climbed back on the Cat and began to fill the grave.
Next day, Jesse mounded the grave with real care, He erected a marker, although the marker was more like a little signboard:
Montana roads are long and lonesome, and Highway 2 is lonesomest. You pick it up over on the Idaho border where the land is mountains. Bear and cougar still live pretty good, and beaver still build dams. The highway runs beside some pretty lakes. Canada is no more than a jump away; it hangs at your left shoulder when you’re headed east.
And can you roll those mountains? Yes, yes. It’s two-lane all the way across, and twisty in the hills. From Libby, you ride down to Kalispell, then pop back north. The hills last till the Blackfoot reservation. It’s rangeland into Cut Bank, then to Havre. That’s just about the center of the state.
Just let the engine howl from town to town. The road goes through a dozen, then swings south. And there you are at Glasgow and the river. By Wolf Point, you’re in cropland, and it’s flat from there until Chicago.
I almost hate to tell about this road, because easterners may want to come and visit. Then they’ll do something dumb at a blind entry. The state will erect more metal crosses. Enough folks die up here already. And it’s sure no place for rice grinders, or tacky Swedish station wagons, or high-priced German crap crates. This was always a V-8 road, and V-12 if you had ’em. In the old, old days there were even a few V-16s up here. The top end on those things came when friction stripped the tires from too much speed.
Speed or not, brakes sure sounded as cars passed Miss Molly’s grave. Pickup trucks fishtailed as men snapped them to the shoulder. The men would sit in their trucks for a minute, scratching their heads like they couldn’t believe what they’d just seen. Then they’d climb from the truck, walk back to the grave, and read the marker. About half of them would start holding their sides. One guy even rolled around on the ground, he was laughing so much.