There was a pause.
“Close the door,” Conor said.
“Shut the door. Close the door. Yes, that’s right,” James said. “Two different words can do the same job. You’re smart about words, aren’t you?”
“Yes, that’s right,” Conor replied and James suspected it wasn’t an echo.
“What’s so depressing to me,” Alan said at the start of his session, “is that I’ve already fucked up one marriage. I’ve been through all the shit of fighting with an ex, of losing kids, of not getting to see them grow up. Been there, done that. So I can’t see how, for the life of me, I’ve ended up here again. I so thought I had it right this time.”
“What about your life before Laura?” James asked.
“I come from a family of high flyers who’ve been out in Wyoming since early pioneer days. My great-granddad founded the first bank in Gillette. When he retired, his son – my granddad – became the bank president. Then when the time came, it passed to my dad, who was his son. So, of course, it was just assumed that I’d go into banking too.
“I did try. I went to college and got the necessary business degree. I found my trophy wife in Fran. We got married in June the year I graduated and she was pregnant with our first daughter by July. I was in the bank by August. I did everything I should. But I hated my life. The world of banking just seemed so hideously dull and dusty to me. I was crap at it because I just didn’t care.
“It was through the bank, though, that I got into dealing cattle. Started out by giving loans. That’s part of why I was so bad at it, because I kept lending money to these dirt poor ranchers who wanted to do something stupid like go buy some fancy continental bull like a Charolais that was completely inappropriate for Wyoming conditions. Pretty soon I was going out to see the cattle. Just checking out our investment in the beginning, but I liked going. I liked getting out of the bank. Before I knew it, I’d bought a few myself. And then I bought a small ranch to keep them on. That’s what did it. Up until that point I could keep up the pretence that I was really a banker. But I was good at cattle. I could do with cattle what my dad could do with numbers, and I loved it. That was a new feeling for me – doing something I loved – and I loved everything about it. The sounds, the smells, being outdoors. Being successful.
“When my father found out about the ranch, he went cold as the North Pole towards me. To him it was all about the legacy, about who was going to take over the bank after him, who was going to keep the McLachlan name on the office door and I was letting him down. I wasn’t living up to my obligations. I hadn’t even managed to produce a son, just three daughters.
“To Fran, the ranch was an insult. It was blue-collar work in her eyes. She kept saying ‘But I married a banker,’ as if by buying the ranch, I had reneged on some deal we had. She absolutely refused to move out to the country, which was, of course, all I wanted to do. And what I needed to do, if I was going to make a decent business of it.
“I stood my ground. I was almost thirty by then. Old enough to understand you can only go so far in fulfilling other people’s dreams, no matter how much you want to make them happy. But I lost a lot while learning that lesson. My relationship with my dad never did recover. And Fran and I only lasted about a year more. Then she met someone else and that was that. Which gutted me, because I had three gorgeous little girls and I hardly got to see them after that.
“So it was a lot different this time around. I went into this marriage with my eyes open and have really tried to avoid making the mistakes I made the first time out.”
“How did you meet Laura?” James asked.
Unexpectedly, Alan laughed. “I ran over her foot at the gas station!” And he laughed again, a deep, full-throated guffaw. “Really. I did. I’d stopped at this place out on the Pine Ridge reservation for gas. She was already there, but she’d driven up on the wrong side of the pump. So she was trying to pull the hose around to her gas tank. I was thinking, ‘Stupid woman driver’, because she’d blocked the way to the other pump. I tried to squeeze my truck by and I ran over her damned foot.”
James’s eyes widened.
“Broke it too,” he said cheerfully. “So it only seemed gentlemanly to ask her out to dinner.”
“It’s surprising she went after you did that!”
He laughed again. “Yeah, I thought so too. But she did. Whatever else you might say about her, she’s a good sport, is Laura.”
A small, wistful silence drifted in. “I can still remember our first date, that night I took her out to dinner. We went to this place called the Mill. She had the cast on her foot, so we couldn’t dance or anything. We just had a meal and talked, but it was really noisy in there, so I said, ‘Let’s go somewhere else.’ I was thinking of the Bear Butte Lounge over on the highway, because that’s a nice quiet spot, but when we got in the car, Laura says, ‘Let’s go out to the Badlands.’ That sounded a pretty strange idea to me, but I thought, ‘What the hell? Why not?’ It was a nice spring night. All starry. So, we went out past Wall and we parked at one of the overlooks and just sat in the car and talked.
“We talked and talked.” His smile grew inward. “And you want to know what happened? We actually talked all night long. About the Black Hills mostly. I remember telling her about the ranch and my cattle, and she started telling me all these stories about how the land where the ranch was had been sacred ground to the Sioux. She was working out on the reservation at the time, so she was really well-informed on all this Indian stuff. And Laura can be such a fantastic storyteller, if you get her going.”
He laughed. “I was bowled over. All I could think of was that here was somebody who thought about the land just like I did, who loved this country, you know, right into her soul. So we talked and talked and never did anything else. Never even kissed that night. Not once, which makes us sound like a couple of real squares, but it was so good to talk like that with someone.
“Anyway, next thing I knew, it was five thirty in the morning and we were still sitting at the overlook in Badlands, and I thought, ‘Oh my god, what the hell am I going to say to Patsy?’ Patsy’s my middle daughter, and she was home from college for the Easter break and staying at the ranch with me. I just knew she was going to go back and tell my ex-wife I was staying out all night with women! I didn’t get home until after eight, because the Badlands are a good ninety minutes away from the ranch, and there’s Patsy in the kitchen when I came in. ‘Good date?’ she asks. And I said, ‘It’s all right, Pats, it’s not what it looks like.’ And she laughs. I could tell she didn’t believe a word I said. She says, ‘Don’t worry, Dad. I understand.’ But I knew she didn’t.
“I felt protective of Laura. I didn’t want Patsy to think Laura was the kind of woman you’d just take out and get it off with on the first date. So, I said, ‘Pats, if you’re going to tell your mother about all this, you might as well know I’m going to marry her. You can tell your mother that too.’” Alan laughed heartily. “So, that’s the point when I decided I was going to make Laura my wife, although it was almost two more years before I informed Laura of it!”
“It sounds as if your attraction was pretty instantaneous,” James said.
“It was. I just knew it was the right thing. Straight off.” Alan looked over at James. “So now I keep asking myself: how did it all go so wrong?”
Conor’s strange relationship with speech made James think of Laura, as he watched the boy moving around the room. Wind Dreamer’s eerie world still haunted James, hanging like cobwebs in the quiet corners of his mind to catch his thoughts at unexpected moments, pulling them back into the ghostly realm of the Badlands and the young man’s quest experiences. Interesting, James thought, how she could