It didn’t take long, only a few minutes. Already it seemed impossible that Pete should be down there, legless and dumb.
I watched, surprised, as Buddy next unbuttoned his trousers, dug through his layers of long johns. Finally stood taking a heavy piss into the half-filled hole. Steam rose as if from a crack in the earth. As he turned back, tucking himself in, I expected a grin, a joke. But he only looked old; he looked tired.
Later he handed me the pocketknife he had taken from Pete’s trousers. A little deer horn, lock-blade Buck. “Put that in your pocket. You’ll need you a remembrance.”
As if I would ever be able to forget anything about that night. Or what came before.
THREE THOUSAND FEET OVER Billings, she revisited her uncertainty, touched it like a loose tooth. Why Montana, of all places? Jesus. Montana? It seemed deeply incongruous. Ears popping with altitude loss, she scribbled across her crossword: Childlessness. Last year’s breast cancer scare. She wrote, “Because I can.” She was twenty-eight, and it had been far too long since she had astonished herself.
Three weeks ago, a bad breakup had ripped all the usual holes in her heart. He’d been too self-confident, too wealthy. Publishing never mixes well with Wall Street. Armani suits and Pollini loafers, and while no one could find a better restaurant, he’d had no notion of how to replace a heating element, fix a faucet. She was still attached to certain stereotypes. They should be able to open a jar, for instance. In July, he’d disappeared for a week. No phone, no texts. Turns out, he’d been visiting an old flame in Milan. “There’s no big deal here. You’re still number one on the hit list.”
So that, of course, had been that.
Studying the green-fringed ribbon of the Yellowstone River a thousand feet below, she thought, Mistake? Her father (remembering his death still emptied her heart) had argued that impetuousness kept a person young. In addition to his tight little ears and green eyes, maybe she inherited his flippancy. Not counting phone calls, she’d only met Eli Singer once. He was too old for her. How much did that matter? Just about this much.
They’d met a little over a year ago. She’d been coming from the break room dipping a tea bag, passing Leslie Gordon’s office. An up-and-coming agent, gay as a parade, hungry as a cruising shark, he’d called out, “Chloe? Sweetheart? You’re from out West, right? Someone you have to meet. Eli? Chloe’s in foreign rights. She’ll be shopping your book around London here in a few months.”
Singer stood to meet her. Only an inch or so taller than Chloe (and she’s not especially tall), she noted the long torso, narrow hips. His hair had been inexpertly cut, and still carried the indentation of the cowboy hat he’d left on the arm of his chair. Shaking hands, his palm was thick as a phone book, rough as the flip side of a carpet.
She said, “Sorry, what was your name again?”
A cowboy, twenty-three floors above midtown. He winced slightly as they shook hands, and she noted a split thumbnail. He caught her look. “Missed my dally.” As if anyone else in this entire building would know what that meant. But she did. And how had he recognized her?
He had these blue, blue eyes. She admitted an interest. She said, “I can’t wait to read your work.”
At Leslie’s encouragement (what was he doing representing a poet for Chrissakes?), she’d gone first to Singer’s most recent book. Fifty-eight poems, gentle and self-effacing but with odd, sporadic eruptions of brutality. He favored a short line, his verses tight as bread pressed into bricks (his own imagery). How could a guy who chewed Skoal come up with this? She began to see what Leslie saw. Leslie, who had a weakness for award winners. This guy could be another Wendell Berry. Or maybe Berry meets Bukowski. In a poem about Sitting Bull’s flight from General Miles, Singer described the old Indian finding a fossilized tooth in the eroded face of a clay bank: “A granite canine red and ancient / glittering dark as coals.” In fear and frustration, the Indian attacks the bluff, using the tooth to slash and stab at the clay, “biting into fleshless skin.” If Eli Singer wasn’t famous (as she’d written him in an early e-mail) it was only because he stood outside the circle jerk of gatekeeper academics. “You’d like to think that poetry could stand on its own two legs but it can’t.” The e-mails led to late night phone calls, both of them drinking. “You know what I love about your work? How you know things. Nobody else knows anything.” The suction slip of intestines from a deer, the hot wash of amniotic fluid from a heifer, the weighty obligations of an unfixed fence. “Christ, Singer. If you’d gone to grad school, no way could you be writing this shit.”
She was a profane woman. She made no apologies.
For instance: Coming off the plane now, walking down the stairs into the Billings terminal, she opened her arms. “Goddamn. Singer!”
He had a complicated odor about him. She detected truck transmissions, hay fields, horse shit. He stood hip cocked, hat thumbed back, lower lip surreptitiously filled with chew. “Don’t know what it is about the Billings airport, how they always takes their time with luggage. Union labor, I suppose.” He studied the airport crowd: the businessmen glancing at watches, young lovers holding hands, fathers crouching low for a hug. “Should be any minute now.”
She kept sneaking glances, fighting the urge to stare. Alone in this crowd, Singer was the one you might say was too skinny. A thumb hooked in one pocket, he had the over-large hands and swollen knuckles of a day laborer. It felt odd, hearing the familiar voice coming from this stranger’s mouth. Over so many phone conversations, she’d recited the menu of her dating catastrophes, the love/hate thing with her job, talked about her dad. Singer had mumbled assent or denial, rarely offered equivalent asides about himself. She still had only the vaguest outlines of his life. He lived alone, he’d never married. He’d done a tour in Desert Storm (“You know that John Prine song? ‘Used to bust my knuckles on a monkey wrench.’ I had that goddamn song in my head for two years”). He drove a Dodge; raised Angus-Braunvieh hybrids. “Not so hardy as a Angus but they keep a good weight.” He had theories about marbling, fertility. He kept file drawers full of breeding schedules and birth weights. “Biggest problem with most ranches, the way their dad did it is still by god the only way they should do it.” But there was so much he’d kept from her.
Her luggage trundled around on the conveyor. A single gray bag with a red ribbon. He grabbed it first. “We’re parked a good ways away,” he said, “be easier if I carry it.” She added outdated chivalry to the list of things she knew about him.
An hour later, driving past Roundup, he turned on the radio. “You mind?” He found an AM station, and sang along softly to Patsy Cline. “South of the buh-order, down Mexico wuh-ay.” She turned her face to the window. Yes, this was better. Just his voice.
Past the cracked windshield, the dusty and cluttered dashboard, nothing but flat landscape. “Everything is so brown.”
“I’ve been telling folks, we’re seven years into a twelve-year drought.”
“I see what you mean, about the ancient aboriginal steppe.”
He gave her a startled, sidelong glance.
She recited, “The ancient aboriginal steppe, thrumming still with forgotten migrations.”
He shifted. “That hadn’t happened to me before. Somebody reciting my own stuff back to me.”
“How’s it make you feel?”
“Let me think about it.” He fiddled with the radio. “Yeah, no. I don’t care for it.”
The bed of his truck was loaded with Costco boxes, industrial-sized bags of flour and sugar, canned beans, a great brick of toilet paper. But as they came into the dusty little town of Jordan—two gas stations, a pair of bars, a squat, glass-fronted IGA—he said, “Need to pick up a few things, you don’t mind. Couple gallons of milk.”
Inside