Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (2 page)

“Are you going to the café?” he finally asked.

“For about five minutes,” she said.

In the café, she asked the waitress for the fastest thing on the menu. The waitress brought her a bowl of soup with bread, coffee to go, and the check.

When the waitress left, she said, “I don’t even know your name.”

“Chet Moran.”

She nodded, as if that were the right answer. “Do you know anyone in town who could teach this class?”

“I don’t know anyone at all.”

“Can I ask what happened to your leg?”

He was surprised by the question, but he thought she could ask him just about anything. He told her the simplest version: the polio, the horses, the broken bones.

“And you still ride?”

He said that if he didn’t ride, he’d end up in a wheelchair or a loony bin or both.

She nodded, as if that were the right answer, too, and looked out the window at the dark street. “I was so afraid I’d finish law school and be selling shoes,” she said. “I’m sorry to keep talking about it. All I can think about is that drive.”

THAT WEEKEND
was the longest one he’d had. He fed the cows and cleaned the tack for the team. He curried the horses until they gleamed and stamped, watching him, suspicious of what he intended.

Inside, he sat on the couch, flipped through the channels, and finally turned the TV off. He wondered how he might court a girl who was older, and a lawyer, a girl who lived clear across the state and couldn’t think about anything but that distance. He felt a strange sensation in his chest, but it wasn’t the restlessness he had felt before.

On Tuesday, he saddled one of the horses and rode it into town, leaving the truck. There was a chinook wind, and the night was warm, for January, and the sky clear. The plains spread out dark and flat in every direction, except where the lights glowed from town. He watched the stars as he rode.

At the school, he tethered the horse to the bike rack, out of sight of the side door and the lot where the teachers would park. He took the fat plastic bag of oats from his jacket pocket and held it open. The horse sniffed at it, then worked the oats out of the bag with his lips.

“That’s all I got,” he said, shoving the empty plastic bag back in his pocket.

The horse lifted its head to sniff at the strange town smells.

“Don’t get yourself stolen,” Chet said.

When half the teachers had arrived, he went in and took his seat. Everyone sat in the same seat as they had the week before. They talked about the chinook and whether it would melt the snow. Finally Beth Travis came in, with her puffy coat and her briefcase. He was even happier to see her than he had expected, and she was wearing jeans again, which was good. He’d been afraid she might wear the narrow wool skirt. She looked harassed and unhappy to be there. The teachers chattered on.

When the class was over and the teachers had cleared out, he asked, “Can I give you a ride to the café?”

“Oh—” she said, and she looked away.

“Not in the truck,” he said quickly, and he wondered why a truck might seem more dangerous to a woman. He guessed because it was like a room. “Come outside,” he said.

She waited in the parking lot while he untied the horse and mounted up. He rode it around from the bike rack—aware that he could seem like a fool, but elated with the feeling of sitting a horse as well as anyone did—to where Beth Travis stood hugging her briefcase.

“Oh, my God,” she said.

“Don’t think about it,” he said. “Give me your briefcase. Now give me your hand. Left foot in the stirrup. Now swing the other leg over.” She did it, awkwardly, and he pulled her up behind him. He held her briefcase against the pommel, and she held tightly to his jacket, her legs against his. He couldn’t think of anything except how warm she was, pressed against the base of his spine. He rode the back way, through the dark streets, before cutting out toward the main drag and stopping short of it, behind the café. He helped her down, swung to the ground after her, gave her the briefcase, and tied the horse. She looked at him and laughed, and he realized he hadn’t seen her laugh before. Her eyebrows went up and her eyes got wide, instead of crinkling up like most people’s did. She looked amazed.

In the café, the waitress slid a burger and fries in front of Beth Travis and said, “The cook wants to know if that’s your horse out back.”

Chet said it was.

“Can he give it some water?”

He said he’d appreciate it.

“Truck break down?” the waitress asked.

He said no, his truck was all right, and the waitress went away.

Beth Travis turned the long end of the oval plate in his direction, and took up the burger. “Have some fries,” she said. “How come you never eat anything?”

He wanted to say that he wasn’t hungry when he was around her, but he feared the look on her face if he said it, the way she would shy away.

“Why were you afraid of selling shoes?” he asked.

“Have you ever sold shoes? It’s hell.”

“I mean, why were you afraid you couldn’t get anything else?”

She looked at the burger as if the answer was in there. Her eyes were almost the same color as her hair, and ringed with pale lashes. He wondered if she thought of him as an Indian boy, with his mother’s dark hair. “I don’t know,” she said. “Yes, I do know. Because my mother works in a school cafeteria, and my sister works in a hospital laundry, and selling shoes is the nicest job a girl from my family is supposed to get.”

“What about your father?”

“I don’t know him.”

“That’s a sad story.”

“No, it’s not,” she said. “It’s a happy story. I’m a lawyer, see, with a wonderful job driving to fucking Glendive every fifteen minutes until I lose my mind.” She put down the burger and pressed the backs of her hands into her eyes. Her fingers were greasy and one had ketchup on it. She took her hands away from her face and looked at her watch. “It’s ten o’clock,” she said. “I won’t get home before seven-thirty in the morning. There are deer on the road, and there’s black ice outside of   Three Forks along the river. If I make it past there, I get to take a shower and go to work at eight, and do all the crap no one else wants to do. Then learn more school law tomorrow night, then leave work the next day before lunch and drive back here with my eyes twitching. It’s better than a hospital laundry, maybe, but it’s not a whole fucking lot better.”

“I’m from near  Three Forks,” he said.

“So you know the ice.”

He nodded.

She dipped her napkin in her water glass and washed off her fingers, then finished her coffee. “It was nice of you, to bring the horse,” she said. “Will you take me back to my car?”

Outside, he swung her up onto the horse again, and she put her arms around his waist. She seemed to fit to his body like a puzzle piece. He rode slowly back to the school parking lot, not wanting to let her go. Next to the yellow Datsun, he held her hand tight while she climbed down, and then he dismounted, too. She tugged her puffy coat where it had ridden up from sliding off the horse, and they stood looking at each other.

“Thank you,” she said.

He nodded. He wanted to kiss her but couldn’t see any clear path to that happening. He wished he had practiced, with the high school girls or the friendly secretaries, just to be ready for this moment.

She started to say something, but in his nervousness he cut her off. “See you Thursday,” he said.

She paused before nodding, and he took this for encouragement. He caught up her hand again and kissed it, because he had wanted to do that, and it was soft and cold. Then he leaned over and kissed her cheek, because he had wanted to do that, too. She didn’t move, not an inch, and he was about to kiss her for real when she seemed to snap out of a trance, and stepped away from him. She took her hand back. “I have to go,” she said, and she went around to the driver’s side of the Datsun.

He held the horse while she drove out of the parking lot, and he kicked at the snow. The horse sidestepped away. He felt like jumping up and down, in excitement and anxiety and anguish. He had run her off. He shouldn’t have kissed her. He should have kissed her more. He should have let her say what she wanted to say. He mounted up and rode home.

THURSDAY NIGHT
he drove the truck in, no cowboy antics; he was on a serious mission. He was going to answer her questions honestly, such as the one about why he didn’t eat. He was going to let her say the things she intended to say. He didn’t wait for the crowd to arrive before going into the classroom; he went in early and took his seat in the back. The class filled up, and then a tall man in a gray suit with a bowling-ball gut came in and stood behind the teacher’s desk.

“Miss Travis,” he said, “found the drive from Missoula too arduous, so I will take over the class for the rest of the term. I practice law here in town. As some of you know, and the rest of you would find out soon enough, I’m recently divorced and have some time on my hands. That’s why I’m here.”

While the man talked on, Chet got up from his seat and made his way up the aisle to the door. Outside he stood breathing the cold air into his lungs. He let the lights of town swim in his eyes until he blinked them clear again and climbed into the rancher’s truck. He gave it enough gas so the engine wouldn’t quit, and it coughed and steadied itself and ran.

He knew Beth Travis lived in Missoula, six hundred miles west, over the mountains, but he didn’t know where. He didn’t know where she worked, or if she was listed in the phone book. He didn’t know if it was he who had scared her off or the drive. He didn’t know if the truck would make it all that way, or what the rancher would do when he found out he’d gone.

But he put the truck in gear and pulled out of town in the direction he had three times watched the yellow Datsun go. The road was flat and straight and seemed to roll underneath the truck, dark and silent, through a dark and silent expanse of snow-covered land. He stopped outside of Miles City, and again outside of Billings, to hobble around on his stiffened-up leg until he could drive again. Near Big Timber, the plains ended and the mountains began, black shapes rising up against the stars. He stopped in Bozeman for coffee and gas, and drove the white line on the empty road past Three Forks and Logan, to stay out of the ice that spread from the shoulder in black sheets. Somewhere off to his right in the dark, his parents were sleeping.

It was still dark when he reached Missoula, and he stopped at a gas station and looked up “Travis” in the phone book. There was a “Travis, B.” with a phone number, but no address. He wrote down the number, but didn’t call it. He asked the kid at the cash register where the law offices were in town, and the kid shrugged and said, “Maybe downtown.”

“Where’s that?”

The kid stared at him. “It’s downtown,” he said, and he pointed off to his left.

Downtown, Chet found himself in dawn light among shops and old brick buildings and one-way streets. He parked and got out to stretch his hip. The mountains were so close they made him feel claustrophobic. When he found a carved wooden sign saying “Attorneys at Law,” he asked the secretary who came to open the office if she knew a lawyer named Beth Travis.

The secretary looked at his twisted leg, his boots, and his coat and shook her head.

In the next law office, the secretary was friendlier. She called the law school and asked where Beth Travis had gone to work, then cupped her hand over the receiver. “She took a teaching job in Glendive.”

“She has another job, too. Here.”

The secretary relayed this information on the phone, then wrote something down on a piece of paper and handed it to him.

“Down by the old railroad depot,” she said, pointing toward the window with her pencil.

He pulled up at the address on the piece of paper at eight-thirty, just as Beth Travis’s yellow Datsun pulled into the same parking lot. He got out of the truck, feeling jittery. She was rummaging in her briefcase and didn’t see him right away. Then she looked up. She looked at the truck behind him, then back at him again.

“I drove over,” he said.

“I thought I was in the wrong place,” she said. She let the briefcase hang at her side. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to see you.”

She nodded, slowly. He stood as straight as he could. She lived in another world from him. You could fly to Hawaii or France in less time than it took to do that drive. Her world had lawyers, downtowns, and mountains in it. His world had horses that woke hungry, and cows waiting in the snow, and it was going to be ten hours before he could get back to get them fed.

“I was sorry you stopped teaching the class,” he said. “I looked forward to it, those nights.”

“It wasn’t because—” she said. “I meant to tell you on Tuesday. I’d already asked for a replacement, because of the drive. They found one yesterday.”

“Okay,” he said. “That drive is pretty bad.”

“You see?”

A man in a dark suit got out of a silver car and looked over at them, sizing Chet up. Beth Travis waved and smiled. The man nodded, looked at Chet again, and went into the building; the door closed. Chet suddenly wished that she had quit teaching the class because of him, that he’d had any effect on her at all. He shifted his weight. She pushed her hair back and he thought he could step forward and touch her hand, touch the back of her neck where the hair grew darker. Instead he shoved his hands into his jeans pockets. She seemed to scan the parking lot before looking at him again.

“I don’t mean any harm,” he said.

“Okay.”

“I have to go feed now,” he said. “I just knew that if I didn’t start driving, I wasn’t going to see you again, and I didn’t want that. That’s all.”

She nodded. He stood there waiting, thinking she might say something, meet him halfway. He wanted to hear her voice again. He wanted to touch her, any part of her, just her arms maybe, just her waist. She stood out of reach, waiting for him to go.

Finally he climbed up into the truck and started the engine. She was still watching him from the parking lot as he drove away, and he got on the freeway and left town. For the first half hour he gripped the steering wheel so hard his knuckles turned white, and glared at the road as the truck swallowed it up. Then he was too tired to be angry, and his eyes started to close and jerk open. He nearly drove off the road. In Butte he bought a cup of black coffee, and drank it standing next to the truck. He wished he hadn’t seen her right away, in the parking lot. He wished he’d had a minute to prepare. He crushed the paper coffee cup and threw it away.