There would have been drinking, certainly. Holes chopped through the ice with iron spuds. A bonfire. Hooks baited with bullheads and rods tilted above the holes. A whiskey bottle going around, faster and faster. An escalation of laughter. Reels that jerked and sputtered. Fish pulled out onto the ice to freeze mid-flop. Finally, the grumble of a motor. The ice was certainly thick enough. It should have been thick enough. There were tracks of previous cars spinning doughnuts. Skids and circles like the fisted doodlings of a child, the orbits of lopsided planets. Laughter, the rumble of the engine. One of the men tossed a whiskey bottle from the window. It began to snow—a twilight gray unfeathering in every direction, erasing the meridian between ice and sky. It must have been beautiful. But they finally ventured out too far, driving over a bubble of warm spring water. The front wheels punched through first, forced by the weight of the engine. The men jerked forward, engine revving, rear tires sizzling. Then they were floating, leaning. It would have happened very fast. Shards of ice splashed against the windshield. The doors were jammed. Within a final, insulated silence, the car sank, tilting gently toward the bottom, coming finally to rest in a settling cloud of silt. They found the car, and three of the bodies, but not my father. He had managed to roll down his window and kick away. I imagine his eyes going black with the spots of his final breath. He’s lurching, clawing through the water, finally to smack his fists against a glowing membrane of sky. They never found his body.
No insurance, and he left us with not quite enough money in the bank for a good used car.
My mother was not well equipped to handle the loss. She wasn’t fully capable of raising her children, not by herself. We learn these things in retrospect. Of our early years in Billings, I remember most how she and my sister circled each other in a series of fragile, overly-polite truces punctuated by ugly scenes of slamming doors, shouted accusations. Mother had been married less than six months when Emma was born. “You were a mistake, Emma. I’ve told you that, haven’t I?”
There weren’t many jobs for women in Montana in the seventies. Nurse or school teacher, hair stylist or housekeeper. Our mother cut hair. Standing at her station Tuesdays through Saturdays, ten to six, she winced over her lower back, shifted on fallen arches. Growing up in Butte, she’d wanted most of all to be an artist. “Georgia O’Keefe, only without the porn.” She’d had a talent for sketching, and still kept scrapbooks. Sunset over the pit. A mule deer. Studies of a housecat.
In retribution, or perhaps out of jealousy (as Emma aged and began attracting glances), my mother put her foot down. “I ever catch you alone in a house with a grown man, girly? You’ll be out on the street before you can say two-bit whore.” My mother was in her early thirties, an age when some women struggle against their fading youth. At a time when miniskirts were all the rage, when hot-curled, Farrah-Fawcett hair was de rigueur, Mother dressed Emma in floral-print prairie skirts and forced her into the braids of a sixties folk singer. “You’re still young enough, I’ll send you to the children’s farm. Don’t think I won’t.” The children’s farm was a theme throughout our childhoods, her persistent threat.
Emma said, “I don’t think there is such a place.”
“A lot you know, missy.”
Once or twice a month (Mother’s snores rising from the next room), Emma would open her window and unclip the screen, straddle the sill, reach across to the lattice of dead ivy and slip away. An hour later, smelling of cigarettes, she would return to wake me up, sit Indian-wise on my floor, sorting through shoplifted tubes of lipstick, tiny jars of eyeliner. She’d hand me candy bars—“This is for you”—which I would eat in impressed silence. I was the last person in the world who wanted to see her in trouble. I was the conciliator, the peacemaker. I told lies on behalf of an imagined peace.
Mother had her moments of generosity. We would sometimes climb into our station wagon and drive up to the rims to watch the planes land. This was, at least in part, a reflection of our financial condition, of a time when even the fifty cents for a matinee sent us digging through the couch cushions. But in some ways the airport was better than a movie. We stared through finger-smudged windows as cathedrals of silver left the earth in defiance of gravity and reason. Mother ignored the planes, opting instead for the discarded magazines and newspapers, reading the horoscopes with an avidity that drew attention to itself. Scoffing, laughing in delight. She sat with her shoes kicked off and her legs curled up, glancing at the arriving passengers. The elaborate grins and waiting hugs. The dropped luggage and rush to Grandma. And while the delight my sister and I found in airports was of the sort that could be had under any big top (elaborate miracles for small fees), the attractions my mother felt were almost certainly familial, the envy of homecomings. Not yet as old as we thought her, not unattractive, when the cycles of her depression gave way to frivolity, she would spend at least one evening a week out dancing. She would model for us her nicest dresses, ask our opinions. She had a small record player in a pink case, and on these good evenings she would play Allman Brothers 45s and dance from one dress to another. During a brief period—after babysitters, but before the loss of incredulity—Emma and I would sit and applaud or make expressions of distaste that were meant only to exaggerate her laughter. More than a few of these nights, of course, ended with Mother fumbling at the front door, giggling; a strange man snatching at her from behind.
Given her fondness for horoscopes, newspapers, it’s maybe appropriate that she found our new lives in a classified ad. Lost in a wad of packaging, twisted around a thrift store lamp, half an inch of understated hope and subsumed loneliness. She cut it out and kept it by the phone for a week before calling for an interview: “Housekeeper wanted, Rattletrap Ranch, Jordan. Rm & Brd included. Good pay. Kids (especially Boys) okay.” In later years, I would try to imagine Buddy at his off-kilter kitchen table, scribbling different versions of this ad. All the time he would have been feeling his mother’s disapproval. What an effort, what a great effort it must have been.
I’m sure it was difficult for Mother, too. Her last day in the hair salon. A scattering of clippings on tile, the soothing odors of sprays and gels, the balloons they’d brought to her station. It had not been a happy place for her but it did have the comfort of habit.
When she drove us north, everything we owned fit into the back of the wagon. Three hours on pavement, another on gravel. Like sailing or swimming, our progress was so slow as to seem nonexistent. The horizon remained at a constant remove. Gradually, however, the farm ground crumbled away, folding into a pine-furzed jumble of eroded hills, knobs and coulees.
In late afternoon, we came to a split in the road. There was a view. She stopped the car, sitting for a moment gripping the wheel. Our contrail of dust caught up to us, sending pale clouds past the windows. To the north, a double-wide trailer house, a rusty swingset. She said, “That’s where you’ll be going to school.”
What had seemed quaint suddenly turned squalid.
Was my mother uncertain? She turned off the engine and stepped outside to smoke a cigarette. Was she questioning herself? Reassessing those stars and star alignments that had brought us to this pass? While she smoked, Emma and I kicked through the weeds beside the road. Emma said, “There’s arrowheads all through this country.” Eventually, my mother flicked her cigarette away and, with small motions of her fingers, brought us into a hug, clutching us hard, kissing our cheeks, one and then the other. “My soldiers, my dear brave little soldiers.”
Despite everything, this was, I think, a good day for her.
Everybody’s got too much time on their hands. That’s what it comes down to. Twelve hundred people in this county. Three preachers, ten bartenders, a couple dozen top-notch diesel mechanics. A courthouse stuffed full of file clerks and rubber stampers. And all of us busiest when we’re minding each other’s affairs.
History here is only a century thick. Telling a story, you can start at the beginning. A lifetime of wind and drought, childbirth and suicide. Here’s where it warps you, here’s where it strengthens you. When those hunters found Pete Fahler’s body, it made things awful quiet for a while. Quiet, then considerably louder. Allegiances shifted, blame was reconsidered. Pete was not the sonofabitch they had believed him to be.
Pete’s