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“What promise?”
“That I wouldn’t be here if you tried to hurt that man.”
“You talking about Jimmy Dale Greenwood?”
“I don’t want you to even use his name to me. Don’t say it. Don’t tell me why he’s so important to you, don’t tell me any of your lies. You make me resent myself, Troyce. That’s the worst thing somebody can do to somebody else.”
He looked at her, the pickup drifting across the center stripe, his face clouding. “’Cause of a guy like that, you’d throw everything we got out the window?”
She stared at the long tunnel of shadow and light and pines and fir trees and cottonwoods that seemed to be racing past the truck. She didn’t know if Troyce was being disingenuous or if he truly could not understand what she was saying to him. She rolled down the window and let the road’s trapped heat blow into her face, whipping her hair, stinging her skin with invisible pieces of grit.
Her adolescent and adult life had been spent proving her lack of dependence on others — hustling as a street kid in Portland, body-blocking other women senseless on the roller-derby circuit, cooking at hunting lodges for corporate executives who made jokes about learning from the Indians, namely how to do it dog-style in the great outdoors, wheezing while they told their jokes, their faces flushed and porcine above their drinks.
But the truth about Candace’s relationship with the world was otherwise. The defining moment in her life, the passageway that forever changed her, one that was like an arc of dark light across the sky, was the day Smilin’ Jack left her behind and entered the Cascades, his head full of dreams about the mother lode buried somewhere inside the clouds, his whole body full of love and energy and physical courage, smelling of aftershave lotion and pipe tobacco and the Lifebuoy soap he bathed in, full of everything except concern for the little girl he had abandoned.
Candace and Troyce spoke about little of consequence during the ride through Bigfork and down the two-lane that bordered the eastern shore of Flathead Lake. The day was bright, the wind drowsy and warm, the surface of the lake a hot blue, the highway full of vacationers on their way to Glacier Park.
“I think maybe you ought to drop me at the bus depot,” she said. “Time I fired myself as your number one douche bag and box of Valium.”
“Okay, here it is, little darlin’. I told you that bartender was a Judas of some kind, that he put me in mind of an egg-sucking dog hanging around a brooder house?” he said. “I followed him yesterday and today and was about to give up. Then I went into the café at the lake and had coffee. This waitress in there who tried to come on to me before says, ‘You still want to drive me home, Tex?’ I go, ‘I thought the bartender or your husband drove you home.’ She goes, ‘My husband is drunk, and Harold is running errands for Ms. Wellstone down at Arlee or something.’”
“You’re telling me you tried to pick up a waitress?” Candace said.
“Nooo,” he said, drawing
out the word. “I’m not saying that at all. I was trying to get information from her. The waitress told me this guy Harold Waxman — that’s the bartender — was delivering a car to a bar in Arlee this afternoon, and she didn’t have a ride home from work. That car is for Jimmy Dale Greenwood. He’s blowing the country, and maybe he’s taking the Wellstone woman and his kid with him.”
“So all this time you’ve been talking about Glacier Park and the Cascades and starting up our café, you’ve really been planning on getting even with this guy? I think this pretty much does it for me, Troyce.”
“You’re not listening,” he said. “I’m going down to Arlee for one reason. It’s to look Jimmy Dale in the face and tell him I wouldn’t dirty my hands by giving him the beating he deserves. If I don’t do that, I’ll never have no peace.”
“You’re not gonna have any peace till you admit something else, either.”
“Like what?”
“That you made that guy’s life awful.”
“You still want to go to the depot?”
“Maybe,” she replied.
He glanced sideways at her, the right front wheel of the truck skidding rocks off the embankment into the water far below.
“No, I don’t want to go to the depot. You have a cinder block for a head, but you’re a good man. Your problem is, you don’t believe in the one person who tells you that,” she said. “That’s how come you hurt me.”
She saw the confusion in his expression. Then his face emptied and he looked straight ahead at the road, as though a solitary thought dominated all his senses and gave him a respite from the sounds constantly grinding inside his head. “People like us ain’t supposed to be apart, Candace. If you ever run off from me, I won’t never be the same, and I won’t never find nobody like you. That’s the way it is. After today, we’re gonna have the perfect life. I promise. I ain’t gonna hurt that man. You’ll see.”
MOLLY HAD PICKED a bouquet of lupine, Indian paintbrush, asters, harebells, wild roses, and mock orange and placed them in a glass pitcher of water in the kitchen window. She was washing her hands at the sink, and the wind was blowing across the meadow, swelling the curtains, tousling her hair. She dried her hands and turned around. “Why are you looking at me like that?” she said.
“It’s a strange day. There’re locusts all over the pasture. I could hear them hitting on the screens this morning,” I replied.
“July is a dry month,” she said.
“Maybe,” I said. But how do you tell someone the light is wrong, that it’s too bright, that the glare is of a kind you associate with a desert, with heat that dries mud bricks into powder and makes rocks sharper than they should be and burning to the touch?
“You want to go downtown today? The street market is open by the train station,” she said.
“If you’d like to,” I said.
