When the passengers' crusade to slaughter animals lost a bit of its initial steam, the man across the aisle leaned toward me.
"So…what would you want for an epitaph?"
He was bundled up like a shut-in some negligent caregiver had forgotten to unwrap, and he had said almost nothing the entire trip, choosing instead to expend his energy holding together the collar of his red fleece, itself sadly out of place on this mild October afternoon. Prozac or Zoloft or something like that had smoothed him quite nicely; he had in fact offered me a pill as soon as we began ascending the mountains, but I told him I was trying to steer clear of others' prescriptions, a refusal he took with prescribed serenity.
Apparently the swerving bus had helped him forget my initial rejection and he held the uncapped amber bottle toward me again.
"They'll calm you," he said.
Again I declined. He capped the bottle and put it in his bag.
"So," he said, taking my refusal in stride, "What would you want on your tombstone?"
"I don't know."
"Never thought of it?"
"Nope."
"I'm going to be buried with my cat," he said, then began nodding like a dinghy on a choppy lake. I nodded too, as if his plan were completely logical and not just a second-rate horror movie waiting for crowdfunding: dead man, live cat, casket, six-feet under, clawing and scratching and mutilation. How could it miss?
I didn't want to seem unfriendly or insensitive, though, so I asked him how old his cat was.
He glared at me. Either he couldn't face the prospect of his cat getting old and dying, or—and I'm afraid this is more likely—the cat was already dead and vacuum-sealed in the guy's freezer: a somewhat different horror movie with just a bit more insanity.
For the next few moments I fussed with the bus schedule to avoid eye contact as he mumbled sporadically about Easterners and, if I heard correctly, vegetarians, though it may have been veterinarians with the cat and all—maybe he held some vet responsible for the cadaver in his freezer. I was enjoying my imagined scenario more than his voice, but mellowed out as he was, he returned to that epitaph question.
I made a nondescript sound which could have passed for dunno. I wasn't trying to be unfriendly, but I've read too much eloquence to settle for only one tawdry line on a marble slab, and I couldn't imagine anyone I knew springing for multiple grave markers. My ex, maybe—but only because there'd be more room for dancing. Prozac man seemed to accept my evasive response, retrieved a different bottle from his bag, and shook out another pill. He didn't offer me that one. Must have been the good stuff and he wasn't sharing.
One thing about my ex—she isn't really my ex. We had never gotten as far as the altar, but calling her my former girlfriend makes me sound twelve. And she won't really be dancing on my grave—she'll be far too busy ironing her current husband's large wardrobe of straitjackets to attend my funeral. If that sounds bitter, it's because I am bitter, though that doesn't make the statement any less true and she's not the reason I came to Sage. There's hardly ever one reason why we do anything, and sometimes trying to get to the bottom of things is a waste of time and energy. That doesn't mean I don't do it, and it doesn't mean that the time I would spend in Sage would not be devoted to trying to get to the bottom of something—of several somethings.
Bottom line: when the bus finally rolled to a stop on that dark and glossy street, and when the driver said we had fifteen minutes to stretch our legs, and when Prozac man asked me pointedly "What the fuck are we supposed to do with fifteen minutes in this hell hole?" I was in Sage. I got up from my seat, rolled my Billings newspaper into a defensive weapon, and trudged quietly, but not unobtrusively, toward the front.
I almost made it, too.
"Hey!" It was Prozac man, his tone not one of a man embarrassed by an inappropriate outburst. I turned around.
"Your jacket!"
It was hanging by the collar on his middle finger, nice and high. It was my jacket all right: I had draped it over the empty seat back next to me so that I couldn't possibly forget it. Now there was more trudging—trudging is actually worse when people can see your face—and when I got within a few feet of him, he tossed the jacket to me, leaving his finger in the upright position. The symbolism did not escape me.
"Thanks," I said.
He nodded, the finger still extended. It wasn't the most eloquent gesture I'd ever seen, but I'm pretty sure he encapsulated the thoughts of just about everyone on that bus.
This time I made it off, and once outside in the welcoming glow of the running lights, watched the driver uncover my tan canvas carry-on in the baggage compartment. The rain was falling lightly, but driven sideways by a gale that surely tested what I knew from research to be some very old buildings.
"Rough weather," the driver said. "Wet for this time of year."
I agreed. I had done a little climatological homework a few hours before. October is a dry month in the northern Rockies. It's also the last month people expect precipitation to fall as rain. A storm like this one, a daylong event that drives people indoors for hours at a time, is rare. But even as we spoke, conditions were changing.
Off to the west, the sky seemed to lift, revealing the vague contour of a mountain range. Unfortunately, much of my view was blocked by a dimly lit jury-rigged billboard that portrayed, in chipped and faded paint, a cowboy on a rearing white horse. Across the base was written "Welcome to the Old West. Sage, Montana, Population 150" in oversized yellow script against a background of scrub pine and cactus. If it had been a postcard, there'd have been a jackalope in it and you'd have sent it to a friend as a joke—it was that bad. I backed away a little: I was sure the next gust would topple it, killing both the bus driver and me in a frighteningly humorous fashion.
"More than that now," she said. "Nobody wants to get up and change the number."
"Of what?"
"Population. Probably double that, less in the winter. Bet it's already snowing on the tooth," she said.
"What?"
"Beartooth—the pass we just came over. If we'd left Billings an hour later, we'd have spent the winter up there."
"Like the goat," I said.
"Don't you worry, that goat'll be fine," she said, sloughing off my concern. "I hardly grazed it."
"You what?"
"Doesn't matter—that goat won't have any buses to bother him for the next six months. Sorry I gave you all a little scare."
"Just a little," I said. It was her first admission that the death skid an hour or so before was not part of the regular itinerary.
"Haven't had an accident yet," she said. "Of course on that road your first and last would probably be the same."
She glanced back toward the mountains. "That's probably it for this season," she said. "Once it starts snowing up there, it doesn't stop. I'll bet they're already lowering the gates. I wouldn't be surprised if we were the last ones through."
If she took any pleasure in that knowledge, I couldn't find it. To her it was just a job, a route to drive. High above us and many miles back, those glaciers we had passed—the ones that had survived the summer and been veiled by fog only an hour before—they, too, would be effaced by newer snows. In a matter of days skis and snow machines would supplant buses and cars and RV's: winter would lock down the northern Rockies. I pulled my jacket up around my neck to shield a gust of wind and my cap blew off. Fortunately it didn't go very far, landing in a nearby puddle and sticking fast.
"It's