“I mean, they’ll let me know, I guess.”
“I’m not sure I’m following this,” said Jerry.
“I mean it’s anybody’s guess how these things turn out.”
“What I’m trying to say,” said Jerry, “is I hope you know the facts here, because they’re going to bang you around in court and you need to be ready.” I had the sense Jerry was lecturing me.
“I’m ready.”
“Well, good.” He got up and opened the glass louvers to let more air in. “Just be careful. There’s always bad shit waiting to get a guy. Deanne said she seen you,” he said again. I wondered if he meant to emphasize it particularly.
“That’s right, I—”
“I don’t suppose she’ll ever get over that punk.”
I thought for a minute, then said, “It’s tough.”
“He wasn’t but eight or nine when me and Deanne got together. He was a mean little punk then. I swear before God I did my best to knock it out of him.”
I was stumped but struggled to reply. “Not much luck?”
“I made him work at the elevator when he wasn’t at school. Had him load grain, cake, salt, whatever, in trucks. He could work like two men, I’ll give him that. He was just a little kid, but he worked like a Georgia mule. I don’t know what he wanted. I couldn’t stand the sight of him. Had to go. Can I get you something?”
“I’m fine, thanks. What do you mean he had to go? I thought he was a hard worker.”
“I told you: I couldn’t stand the sight of him. How did we get on this?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You seen Deanne at the boneyard. That was it. I knew you discovered the situation there with Clarice. What a mess. And she was a good kid. One of them kids gets beat up by every man she meets. You could just feel it around her. Spend an hour with Clarice and you’d want to boot her in the ass and never know why. It was something about her.”
I saw Clarice a lot and never felt any such thing, but I thought not to mention it. It was clear by now that my connection to the deaths was provoking Jerry to fill me in on the background, though I was growing less inclined to hear it, something he didn’t notice.
“What about a beer?”
“No.”
“Suit yourself. The deal is, I give up a lot for Deanne. I was married to a Callagy from up the Shields. They had ten sections of grass and a thousand acres under sprinklers. It was a money deal and I walked away from it because Deanne was good-looking and a ton of fun, but Cody come with the package. My ex had a good income at the courthouse and even though she weighed over two hundred she carried it well. Carried that suet like a champ. Everyone agreed she carried it well. Since Deanne married me she hadn’t done shit-all, but she’s exciting and keeps a great house and, hey, I love her to death, but the Cody years was an inch short of a deal breaker. I’d be lying if I told you I was sorry he’s gone. It’s too damn bad he took Clarice with him, but if it hadn’t been him it would’ve been someone else. She was that kind.”
This was making me sick. I was able to suppress an outburst because I knew I had business with Deanne. What business was that? I only knew it was connected to my own survival.
“I don’t want you to think I have any regrets about the ex, whatever that Callagy deal is. She was too serious. She was serious as lip cancer. A guy needs to have some fun every now and then. Which leads him to whatever bar where all the man-eaters live. And believe you me, I’m not bitter. I just wish Deanne would quit smoking and writing ‘thank you’ on my alimony checks. No need to be rubbing it in.”
19
WE YOUNGER DOCTORS had been substantially democratized by comparison with our older colleagues. The senior doctors seemed to bask in their original status as small-town aristocrats, content in their golf, cocktails, and domestic architecture, their thin but emblematic connoisseurship, and their eccentricities. Dr. Gallagher — now gone — wore his kilt to dinner parties, GP Boland Mercer exercised his wolfhound by tying bacon to the end of its tail, and dermatologist Joe Mariani tried year after year to interest the town in building a bocce court. When I first arrived, nearly all of them were former smokers who had greeted the surgeon general’s warning about tobacco use with unified astonishment.
We of the next generation have been all over the map and at one point indistinguishable from the rising tide of hippies. We prided ourselves on unexpected remarks and enthusiasms. At the first dinner party including most of us, I especially recall Jinx holding up an empty highball glass and declaring, “One more of these and somebody’s going to put out.” We occasionally partook of controlled medications by way of inducing artificial elation and when work prevented sleep, we might well have turned to pills for stimulation too. Generally, this was dispensed on an as-needed basis, but before Alan Hirsch took up cycling with such passion the pharmaceuticals rather got away from him and soon he had a child in Miles City. This produced if not pain for Alan, at best inconvenience, but he met his obligations and when the child grew up and led Miles City to the Class A football play-offs, Alan made no secret of being the father. He even showed some conviction about his own work by expressing his wish that Jared (“I didn’t name him, for Christ’s sakes”) go to medical school, while Jared taught his father how to ride a horse. Our lessons in the ways in which one generation succeedeth another were exceptionally diagrammatic.
I wasn’t sure what I had done to annoy Jocelyn, but whatever it was she seemed to have forgotten it. She was preoccupied with selling her father’s ranch. I took her around to the Realtors’ offices trying to get a sense of its value. It was too small to provide a living for a family and it had no recreational potential short of stargazing such as might have made it a vacation property. The land booms of the Rockies were in a down cycle; it was too far from the airport; the house was in disrepair. In the general national gloom, fewer people were investing in faraway follies in the West; it was enough to keep the roof on back in Westchester. When the last Realtor that Jocelyn approached suggested a test drill for coal bed methane, she decided to lease the grazing to a neighbor. We talked about bulldozing a landing strip for her airplane but decided against keeping fuel or building a small hangar. Facilities at White Sulphur and Harlowton were adequate. As it turned out, Womack was not a boyfriend, or no longer one, but an airplane mechanic. Hence his annoyance. I still didn’t understand why she needed her own mechanic, unless it was one per airplane. But then, I didn’t understand airplanes and flying. I didn’t even like going up a ladder to paint. Womack got a room in Martinsdale over a retired schoolteacher’s house, and we rarely saw him. I don’t know whether they were just talking about the flying facilities elsewhere for my benefit, at any rate Womack soon rented some equipment and bulldozed an airfield a quarter mile west of the old homestead.
Jocelyn said that since the place was going to be uninhabited and she didn’t want the expense of insurance, she thought she ought to get rid of the house. I suggested she insure it for a year to be certain, since this was where she had grown up, after all, the scene of her childhood. Maybe that was the point. On her instructions, Womack burned it to the ground, dug a hole with a backhoe, pushed all the wire, pipe, and ashes into it, and covered it up. I expected something valedictory from Jocelyn, but all she offered was “Womack can do anything he sets his mind to.” Pictures of the blaze made the paper with commentary about the loss of pioneer structures including a cavalry bunkhouse from the days of the Indian Wars. “Another reason not to join the cavalry,” said Jocelyn. It was a real inferno and left a very strong impression on people. I heard from Throckmorton, the all-knowing, that the Meagher County sheriff was so offended he tried to make an issue of it but Womack’s permits were entirely in order and none of the accelerants were illegal. Word had it, however, that the encounter left a bit of bad blood between the two.