“Really, a Bud?”
“Are you crying about a free beer, Tar Heel? It’s expired. We gotta get rid of it.”
The night went like that, with her dipping in and out of conversation.
“Just a warning: This guy does not like you.” She bobbed her head quickly at Cowboy Hat.
“Are you getting me in a bar fight?”
“Only cowards throw punches.” Then she spun away to douse four shot glasses in Jameson.
Over the next three hours while I nursed free beers, I learned about her in this piecemeal way. She breezed by to ask, “So where in North Carolina?” “Why Jackson?” “What have you hiked so far?” In turn, I got all those crucial biographical details. From Phoenix originally but moved with her mom to Portland at age thirteen when her parents divorced. She’d studied philosophy at Oregon and graduated two years ago. Her dad used to bring her to Jackson in the summers. She came to the mountains right out of college to ski, hike, climb, raft, and “do activist shit” and now worked for a group called the Bison Project.
“What’s that?”
She gave me an astonished look. “It’s a buffalo, dude.”
“No,” I laughed. “What’s the Bison Project?”
“The cattle ranchers have a lot of political pull in these parts, and they claim the bison have brucellosis and that if they don’t slaughter them by the thousands, it’ll spread to the cattle. But that’s bullshit—the truth is it’s about grazing rights. The bison graze on land the ranchers want. So a bunch of dumb, beautiful, amazing creatures get their throats cut. It’s a real playback of what the US Army did when they were getting their asses handed to them by the tribes back in the day and they had to eradicate the enemy’s food supply to make way for settler capitalism. Violence against nature always goes hand in hand with violence against people.”
She blew by like she now had to deliver that same monologue to the other end of the bar.
An hour later, the lights brightened for last call. Cowboy Hat waved goodbye to her and departed.
“If you wanna stick around while I close, I’ll walk you home after,” she said.
Later, we stepped into a pleasantly cool Jackson Hole night, lit by the garish glow of the Cowboy Bar. Walking beside her, I could almost feel her internal heat radiating to the back of my hand.
“So the cowboy hat guy?”
“That’s Trent. I keep telling him I don’t date cowboys, especially Trump-voting ones, but he hasn’t gotten the picture.”
She led me south down Cache Street. We passed a neon-lit motel where a group of drunk cowboys and cowgirls stood outside smoking cigarettes and guffawing. One of them whooped as we went by.
“But he knows you’re taken?”
“Huh?” She curled a lip in semi-mock horror. “Taken?”
“You have a girlfriend.”
“What?”
“The woman at the lake.”
“Lucy?” She pshawed. “Please. Queer New Agey ski bums make for the worst dating material. We’re just friends. I mean, yeah, we fuck, but dating would mean I’d have to listen to her theories on my astrological chart or get my tarot cards read or whatever. Honestly, I’d rather go back to fucking Trent.”
I navigated some steep and rough emotional switchbacks during this explanation.
“You’re an interesting chick,” I said.
“Am I? An interesting chick? Okay. Well, on paper, you sound really dull, but I’m optimistic.”
I laughed and got self-conscious. “Does that mean we can hang out again? Maybe when you’re not running around on your job?”
“Depends on what ‘hang out’ means.”
She pulled the hair tie from her bun and slipped out a couple of bobby pins. The blond mess spilled across her shoulders, and she corralled it back.
“How about dinner? I’ve been meaning to try that Thai place everyone raves about.”
“Ugh, dinner?” she moaned. “You are going to be a total cornball, aren’t you?”
Before I could fire back, she stopped, grabbed my face, and brought her lips to mine. I wasn’t prepared, and her open mouth locked over my closed one. Then I got with the program, and her tongue corkscrewed through the tunnel of our lips.
She pulled away and said, “Phone.” Numbly, I handed it over.
She punched her number in and slapped it back in my palm. “This is me,” she said, nodding her head toward a house of separate units behind a white picket fence.
She was up the stairs before I could think of anything to say.
Though I arrived at Teton Thai fifteen minutes early, Kate was already sitting outside under an umbrella reading a book. Wearing an airy white dress and her hair down for the first time, she looked altered, like the bartender and day at the marina had been different women, which is to say each incarnation felt like a fresh season—beautiful in its own way. She spent dinner kicking off a sandal and picking it up again with her foot.
We ordered drinks, and I asked her what she was reading.
“Rereading. Some Hannah Arendt.”
“What’s that?”
“Philosophy, I guess you could say. Suddenly she seems pretty motherfucking apropos.”
The title was Men in Dark Times. It would not be the last instance of feeling out of my depth around her. On the walk over I’d cycled through every interesting thing I’d ever thought or done. I had “studied in Paris for a summer,” “volunteered five weekends for Habitat for Humanity in high school,” and “the collected works of Jack Kerouac” in my back pocket.
“So philosophy? That’s your bag.”
“I don’t know about my bag. I was kind of one of those people just taking classes that sounded interesting, and a few of them happened to be in philosophy. It’s like I majored in a hobby. Toward the end, when you’ve had four years of ‘What is reality?’ ‘There is no reality!’ ‘Everyone just creates their own reality and nothing means anything!’—that bullshit—it got old and I kind of wished I’d done something else.”
“Like what?”
“Environmental science, probably. If I’d just gone full granola from the start.” The waiter approached. “Speaking of which, I’m also one of these militant vegans that basically can’t stand to sit across from people eating meat. I’m not saying you can’t get meat, but it’s going to make me want to stab you.”
I handed the menu to the waiter. “Vegetarian pad thai for me.”
She laughed and ordered the pad gar pow with tofu.
We went on to talk about her Left Coast upbringing: the daughter of teachers and activists trying to gut it out during the Clinton years. After her parents’ divorce, her father moved back to teach on the Navajo reservation where he’d grown up with his new wife. Kate rarely saw him more than once a year. Her mother was originally from Sweden and now worked for an Oregon nonprofit protecting the Columbia River and other waterways. Her folks had met doing antinuclear activism, and she’d grown up surrounded by heated discussions about intersectionality and the rights of nature. She also had a Jamaican grandfather, who’d been a prominent civil rights attorney. She joked that she would have rebelled by going to work for the Republican National Committee, but she doubted they served a whole lot of vegan fare.
“I’m sorry—I’m not a full-fledged PETA psycho, I swear.” She laughed with her mouth wide open so I could see the back of her throat. “Let me say, I kill flies all the time. I’m a genocidal maniac when it comes to killing flies. We can pull their wings off if you want. Wow, what a weirdo. Okay, what’s your deal, Matthew?”
I elided my family’s story, which was that my father designed and built golf courses all over the South and Mid-Atlantic. Instead, I talked about majoring in English. To my dad, who was a booster of UNC’s business school, this had been borderline mad. “I explained it to him as a stepping-stone to law school or an MBA, but I ended up falling in love with writing. That’s kind of why I came out here.” This sounded notably lame even as I said it. “To find something to write about.”