This House of Sky - Ivan Doig [113]
The train hours were the enforced pause in time when all this marshalled in my mind. When I stepped down again to a Montana depot platform, Dad or Grandma would ask, as ever, How was your trip? I would begin one telling or another— There was a herd of antelope, forty-fifty of them, on the flats a bit ago or We were held up a helluva time in Miles City waiting for a freight —any answer but the private truth which said what a headlong striding time those journeys were.
When I returned to Montana in early June of 1958 for the summer between my first and second years at Northwestern, I came, for a change, into a season which was creamy with luck. Dad and Grandma still were at the McTaggart ranch, and as content for the moment as the pair of them were likely to be. I at once found a farming job, this time on the irrigated flatland near Valier. The farmer proved the easiest-going of men, interested in my college career and admiring me for it; the fields I worked sprung grain high and golden against the ripsaw-horizon of the Rockies; and a hailstorm, as we watched from the front window of the farmhouse like spectators at a race, went shaving past without touching a kernel of crop.
And the evening, a week or so before my nineteenth birthday, when I hurried to Valier to cash my first paycheck of the summer and then drove on, slower now, trying to think through the steps of the matter, north into the oil-field town of Shelby. Years of rumor had rough-sketched the location of the house for me, but I found I couldn't pick it from among several along a hilly street. Swallowing back the flutters which winged up from deepest in me, I veered downtown, singled out the busiest saloon. Inside, I sipped at a bottle of beer, nervously and intently watched the crowd along the bar. When a burly drinker clopped away toward the toilet, I swung off my bar stool after him.
He already was spraddled at the urinal trough, humming purposefully, when I joined him. He looked over at me cheerily: Beer 11 do it to you, don't it? I gulped what I hoped was grinning agreement— Sure slides through —and faked around at the front of myself until he zipped and turned away. My zipping a fast echo of his, I spun after him: Ah, say, I was wonderin' if you could tell me, ah, where the place up on the hill is. I don't know this town yet.
Oh hell yeah, buddy, he began: You take this street down to the corner 'n go left. ... I imprinted the directions on my brain like commandments as he mapped them in the air for me. ...'n when you get there, there'll be a black gal, kind of a maid, she'll let you in 'n ask who you want. He paused like a clerk switching lists of inventory: I ain't sayin' this is your first visit, but if it happens to be, ask for Estelle. She's got legs sweet as a preacher's dream, squeeze the last ounce right out o' you. Estelle and her talent branded in atop the street directions.
Thanks-buddy-Jesus-thanks, I breathed out, as if tons had been swung off me, and tried to fumble a silver dollar into his hand. Here, let me buy you a couple beers....
Naw, hell. He pushed the mid-air money back to me as if he were a croupier paying off. Spend it up on the hill.
Comin' through, Ivory, dishes comin' through! I snap myself away from watching the co-ed in the silken blouse choose her salad. Let 'er come, Arch. Grunting, Archie pushes rack after rack of dishes into the metal tunnel of machine between us. Soap is fogged on, cogs lurch the cargo into drenches of hot water; the last scald billows its dragon's-snort of steam around me. The first rack jostles from the machine, breathes heat from its eighteen dinner plates glistening upright in twin rows. Do 'em pretty, calls Mister Hurd behind me over the machine's watery roar. I fork my fingers, pull five plates at once with my right hand, four in my left, flip them together into a stack with a clattering riffle as if having shuffled a giant deck of cards made of china, pivot and slap the fat pile of dishware onto the cart behind me. My second grab empties