Accordion Crimes (48 page)

Vergil drove the interstate hard, past the trailer towns with two steps in front of every door, antennaed roofs, torn curtains and open windows close to the superhighway with its blur and roar, and beyond these trailers a hundred, a thousand other trailers, a yellow sign outside a trailer café,
JUMP INN
. Above, the clouds in holy knots and saturated colors that transcended neon hues. Stinging hot air from trucks, the smell of diesel and hot rubber; they were coming up on night and rain.

He pointed at a darkening bluff, said up there might be stenciled hands, marks of life, remembrance. Signs and mazes on the blackest rocks, a trail of bird feces adding a curve where nothing else was curved. Over there was baked white rock that should never have been touched, yet used as a military range, turned into a crusted landscape the texture of burned scrambled eggs but pierced with the deep holes of bomb craters, still strewn with wrecked trucks, some collapsed mowing machines and reapers, a bulldozer flaking into the pocked soil. Everything over there deliberately ruined, he said, to prove it could be ruined.

The next day they crossed the river. Plenty fucking deep, he said. The greasy khaki water gnawed a quarter of a mile down into the brown rock, pulling down slopes and cliffs, licking out caves, long horizons of limestone and fossil beds, thickened shells in white reeds like bird bones, sheets of stone. And the great dull bridge itself, a ruler road atop its red arches footed in concrete, the monotonous railings more of an idea than safety catchers.

Then it was the end of the day again, at a rest area above a sulfurous pool, a scummed shallow oval of alkali water studded with
beer cans, baby seats, wadded plastic, rocks. Slopes of hills around them, thirty-seven-degree slopes navy blue against a faint sky, the horizon unsettled a little. The lights on, every door open, the radio blaring, she got out and crouched on the dirt, feet wide but not wide enough to escape spatters on the ankles, and she stared at the car’s white fenders. In the looming darkness the car was as nostalgic as a lighted window in a northern village.

Bette Switch, in tight designer jeans and a man’s sweatshirt, opened the door, embraced Josephine, gave Vergil her hand. Her scent mingled bourbon and perfume and tuna fish. She led them into the living room, decorated in the western style with log furniture and a bearskin rug, parchment lampshades, the edges laced with plastic simulated rawhide.

“Is this your first time in the west, Vergil?” She didn’t look at him.

“No. I’ve been out here a dozen times. Worked on a fucking ranch a couple of summers when I was in college, the Briggins Triple-Y, about fifty miles west of here, over in the fucking Gaunt River country. Thirty-two thousand acres. Ocean of grass. And so forth.”

“Well, I think you’ll like the wide open spaces. It’s a very healthy rural life. Kenneth and I usually get away in the winter, leave it all in Fay’s hands, he’s our ranch hand, I’m sure Jo told you about him, they were great pals when she was a little girl. We were on Montserrat last winter, in the Caribbean—I could live there forever, that blue-green water and white sand. And this year we’re going to Samoa. Have you been in the South Seas, Vergil?”

“Yeah, I was in Western Samoa, on Upolu, two years ago.”

“If you get a chance you ought to go—it’s exquisite. The resort we’re going to has a black sand beach. Anyway, here we are in Montana, so let’s make the best of it. Cocktails at five after you two freshen up.”

“I don’t drink,” lied Vergil, crazy for a drink and with the same feeling a fireman gets when the burning stairs behind him collapse.

“That’s fine then, you can have fruit juice or mineral water, whatever. Just make yourself at home,” and she went upstairs.

In less than thirty seconds Kenneth came down, shook Vergil’s hand, kissed Josephine. She said, “Dad, this is Vergil. He was in Vietnam. In the marines.”

Kenneth said, “fine. I’ll let you show your friend around, babes. Your mother and I are having a little discussion,” and he was back up the stairs, two at a time, and in a minute they heard strident voices from above.

“It doesn’t sound so good,” said Josephine, flat-voiced. “Some things never change. Come on, let’s go see Fay. He’s the one who really counts.”

The first thing Fay told her was that Old Egypt had come back up the day before, her childhood horse, her good-hearted gelding.

“It was lightning, Jo, done it. Two weeks ago, big old thunderheads come up, just acrack with lightning. I’m nailing up some loose shingles on the barn—them damn things flake off bad as dandruff—and I seen Egypt grazing over by the wagon (you know Kenneth bought a old Conestoga wagon from a guy in Oregon State and hauled it home a few years back). The wind come up blowing dust and I seen him turn around and get his ass to the wind. He could of gone into the barn, the door was open, but you know he liked rain—he was a horse that sure liked rain. I’m trying to finish up before the
storm hit full, but as it was, hail was bouncing off my hat and there was a god-awful crash and a big stroke, I thought I was blind, this blue glary light and a thing like a big blue rat run across the ground sizzling and hissing and setting the grass afire and I seen Old Egypt is down and his legs going like he’s running away. He must of thought he was running away pretty good. And here come another one, split Kenneth’s pear tree in half, so I duck into the barn and wait until the lightning gets to a more comfortable distance and I go over to Old Egypt. He wasn’t moving but he wasn’t dead, not yet. You could smell burned hair and there was a burn from his right ear down his nose, and all down his neck, his mane frizzled up. He was cold to touch and his eyes rolled up. I tried to get him up but he was past getting, and he give one big shudder and quit. The Conestoga wagon was smoking. What I don’t understand is why he come back up now. We dug one hell of a hole with the backhoe and it don’t make sense. I think he wanted to see you one more time.”

He drove his little finger into his left ear, gouging for wax, added, “anyway, what they say, ‘death to the horse, life to the crow.’”

“It’s too sad to think about,” said Josephine, “we brought you something.”

“You’re a sweetheart, Jo, a darlin sweetheart.”

Josephine was embarrassed at his gratitude—what was he expecting, a leather jacket, a set of imported steak knives? “It’s actually junk, more like a joke than a present. We stopped at all these yard sales on the way out. I got Kenneth and Bette a saltshaker in the shape of the atom bomb. So Vergil got you this old accordion. I remembered you used to play a little accordion kind of thing. And I remember all those raunchy songs.”

“Concertina,” he said. “I still play it. It come to me by way of an old bronc buster and another one had it before him. They’ll last your life if you treat them fair. But I always wanted a accordion, you know. Been hoping to find a good little B/C two-row one of these days; that’s your man for the good Irish tunes. Let’s take a look.”

Vergil got the bedraggled instrument from the back seat, the bellows smeared with crayon scribbles, the lacquer chipped and scarred, leather straps hanging loose. Fay took it gently, looked at its sad rows of buttons and worked the bellows, loosing a C chord rotund and authoritative, a gibbering flash of sound, a stumble of stuck buttons and sour wheeze that set Vergil’s teeth on edge.

“Well, it’s a two-row,” Fay said and began to sing against a scribble of notes. “
She’s a dancing young beauty, she’s a rose in full bloom, and she fucks for five dollars in the Buckskin Saloon
…There’s some life in it. I can get it shaped up again, maybe. It’s got a kind of chesty sound.”

He threw his arm around Josephine, said thanks, but Vergil saw he was disappointed, recollected himself as a child expecting a fucking kaleidoscope—the hints had pointed in that direction—and receiving his grandfather’s milky-lensed telescope covered in torn and rotting leather, through which nothing could be seen but swarming blurs.

He thought Fay resembled the seedy man at the end of the bar in any Dublin pub, straggled hair unsuccessfully combed, the flat ear, wax yellow, the bony, high-colored face, muscular strength concentrated in the lips which could extend powerfully toward a glass of bitter, wet blue eyes, though instead of the boozer’s stained jacket and tie askew around a thin neck, Fay was decked in frayed shirt and drooping jeans held up by a gimcrack belt studded with glass jewels, most of
them missing from the metal settings, scuffed boots and a hat so torn and blackened it could be worn only aggressively. When Vergil put out his hand Fay crushed it in a cruel grip and looked expressionlessly into his eyes, a direct stare of the sort a dog gives before it bites.

“What do you think of Fay?” Josephine asked later. “Isn’t he the real thing?” She implied that Kenneth and Bette were not, that they were impostors and the Appaloosa ranch a fraud and that everything would collapse as it had twice before if it were not for Fay who held it all together through the strength of his hat.

“
Yeah,
he is,” said Vergil. “I think he’s a fucking nutcracker.”

“Nut Cracker? That was the name of a crooked sunfisher, a bucking bronco as mean as they get, and it was a woman, an Indian woman, Red Bird, up in Oregon, who rode him to a standstill back in 1916,” came Kenneth’s voice from the next room.

Kenneth and Bette Switch had come out to Montana from Boston in 1953 with a little money that Bette thought Kenneth had inherited (he had embezzled it from the credit union where he worked after the board refused him a raise), bought an old run-down ranch near the Crow Reservation. The ranch adjoined the reservation bison-project land. Kenneth liked to say years later that when they started their little cow and calf operation, they were “too ignorant to breathe without getting a lungful of dirt.” They thrilled, driving down the red road, to rise up the crest and see the country furled out sixty miles and butting up against the Big Horns, and there in the foreground
beasts from the west’s indecent past, immense heads down and the small glittering eyes rolling; then, a mile farther on, their own black baldies absurd as painted plywood.

It took only a few years before they were in trouble, with brucellosis in their herd; the county agent told them it might be the bison carried it; they would have to destroy their animals, then after a few years they could start again, maybe.

“Anyways,” the agent said, “if you don’t get it bad once in a while, how do you know when you get it good? You got to learn things the hard way sometimes.” It was clear he had them pegged as fool easterners with more money than sense who could afford to start over every few years in the college of experiential ranching.

While they waited for the infected land to cure itself, Bette got a gal Friday job at the county courthouse and Kenneth found something with a local horse auctioneer, Gibby Amacker, at first just tallying, bookkeeping and paperwork, but he began to learn something about horses, every kind and color, duns and buckskins, grullos, bayo coyotes and bayo blancos, moros and flea-bitten greys, medicine hats and war bonnets, claybanks, bays and greys, blacks, chestnuts, browns, paints and palominos, blue corns, pintos, sorrels, paint overos, tobianos and toveros, calicoes, esabellas, skewbalds, piebalds and calicoes, roans and strawberry roans; Appaloosas with white and spotted blankets, leopard and tiger coats, snowflaked, frosted and marbled, marked with handprints or two-tone peacock spots, mottled and varnished; horses with blazes, strips, snips, raindrops, dollar spots, splashes and stars, apron-faced, bonnet-faced and bald-faced horses; saw every breed led in and out of the sale ring week after week, Paints, Morgans, Arabians, Half-Arabians, Anglo-Arabians, Appaloosas, Quarter Horses.

He found himself watching the Appaloosas with something like impatience and longing. He began to notice how their prices were moving up, had been moving up since he started working for Gibby, from thirty or so rock-bottom dollars a head to where sometimes they were bringing a hundred if they came from one of the ranchers, like Peewee Loveless, interested in restoring the breed, as Peewee said, to its old glory as the great hunting and war horse of the plains, ruined by immigrant clodhoppers and know-nothing easterners who bought up those survivors of the famous Nez Percé “palousies” of the northwest, with their striped hooves and white-rimmed eyes, the herd confiscated by the U.S. government and sold at a dispersal sale after Chief Joseph and his band took them on an eleven-hundred-mile journey across the flooding Snake River, through brutal Lolo Pass of the Bitterroots, through thirteen battles and skirmishes with ten different commands of U.S. troops, every time defeating or fighting the federal enemy to a standstill because of their superior mounts, only to arrive at the last place, the Lapwai Reservation in Idaho, where their horses were taken from them and replaced with bibles. The lucky but fool purchasers of these extraordinary horses bred them to anything that walked on four legs and had a mane, and in twenty or thirty years the spotted horses of the plains, descendants of the ice-age horses painted on the cave walls of France, of the fabled horses of Ferghana, between the Syrdarya and the Amudarya rivers on the steppes of Central Asia in Uzbekistan, of Rakush, the spotted horse of the warrior hero Rustam, celebrated in Persian miniatures and in Firdousi’s epic poem the
Shah Namah,
of the Chinese Celestial Horses from the Extreme West, the Blood-Sweating horses, of the galloping mounts of the Mongol Horde and Attila the Hun, of the Andalusian horses of Spain shipped to Mexico for
the conquistadors’ savage forays, of a shipload of spotted horses from the Trieste Lippizan herd landed on Vera Cruz around 1620, of the horses abandoned by the terrified Spaniards after the Pueblo revolt of sixty years later and traded north by an agricultural people more interested in sheep, to the Shoshone, Cayuse, Nez Percé, Blackfeet, Blood, Arikara, Sioux, Cree, Crow of the North American steppes known as the Great Plains, had been bred down to dog meat.