The Loop (21 page)

‘Well, not “snooping”, but—’

‘Like hell, you can.’

‘Oh.’

‘You think I’m going to let the goddamn federal government go tramping over my property, poking their noses into my business?’

‘Well, I—’

‘You must be out of your goddamn mind.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Git out of here.’

The two dogs appeared around the side of the house. One of them gave a low growl and Abe told it to shut up. Out of the corner of her eye, Helen could see the two boys grinning on the other side of the kitchen screen. Helen smiled bravely at their father.

‘Well, I’m really sorry to have troubled you.’

‘Just git.’

She turned away and walked back toward the pickup. There was another roar of laughter from the TV set. Her knees were shaking. She hoped it didn’t show. Suddenly there was a scuffle behind her and, before she could turn, the first dog hit her. The impact sent her sprawling onto the dust.

Both of them were upon her, one at her thigh and the other at her ankle. They were snarling horribly, their teeth slashing at her hiking pants. She screamed and kicked out. Harding was running toward them, yelling, calling them off.

They stopped as suddenly as they started. They loped off guiltily. Harding picked up a rock and hurled it after them and one of them yelped as it hit. Helen lay for a moment, in shock. There was a rip in her pants but there didn’t seem to be any blood. She sat up.

‘You okay?’

The tone wasn’t exactly sympathetic. He was standing over her.

‘I think so.’

Helen got to her feet and brushed herself down.

‘You’ll be on your way then.’

‘Yeah. I think so.’

She walked to the pickup, all the way keeping an eye on the dogs. She didn’t feel safe until she’d opened the door. Her shoulders were shaking not just with shock but with anger now too.

‘I’d appreciate it if you’d tell whoever’s messing with my traps that they’d better watch out. They could end up in a lot of trouble.’

Even to her own ears the threat sounded feeble. Her voice betrayed how close she was to tears. Harding made no reply.

Helen climbed behind the wheel and slammed the door. It was nearly dark. Harding stood watching while she turned the pickup around. Her headlights panned briefly across him. And, with her heart banging and the tears starting to spill, she headed off down the driveway. She cried all the way home.

13

H
ope’s fairground had known better days. It lay in a dusty sprawl of pasture at the back end of town and for most of the year played host to cottontails, gophers and occasional parties of high school rebels who used it for illicit midnight drag racing.

The rails around the pens and the rodeo arena hadn’t seen a paintbrush in years and the bleachers were so rickety and splintered that only the most bolstered or reckless dared sit on them. Around the perimeter was a straggle of exhibit booths whose roofs had been warped to a matching tilt by winter winds, providing nesting space for various kinds of bird.

In times gone by, the place had been busy all around the calendar with craft markets, gun shows and various parades and rodeos. There used to be an annual Mountain Man Rendezvous, to which fantasists in beards and buckskin flocked from several neighboring states, and a Testicle Festival, which for awhile enjoyed even greater popularity, except perhaps with the calves who supplied the food, euphemistically served as ‘prairie oysters’. COME TO HOPE AND HAVE A BALL, the posters urged. But as the years went by, fewer and fewer did.

One by one, all these events had either petered out or sought more salubrious locations elsewhere. The only survivor of any consequence was the Hope Labor Day Fair and Rodeo and even this had now been forced, by dint of stronger competition elsewhere, to change its name and shift from Labor Day to mid-September, in the process shrinking from three days to a single Saturday.

The fair had always climaxed with a concert and a pitchfork fondue, in which hunks of beef the size of small dogs were speared and cooked in drums of boiling oil. In previous years, the concert had attracted some medium-to-big country music stars. This year, however, top of the bill were Rikki Rain and the Ragged Wranglers, who had come all the way from Billings and, for a few precarious moments, seemed set to go all the way back without playing a note.

They had parked their two customized black RVs by the cattle pens and as they climbed out, the first thing Rikki saw was a poster on which someone had scrawled
who?
right under her name.

Buck Calder and several members of the fair’s organizing board who had turned out to welcome her had been treated to some vivid advice on where they could stick their godforsaken, horseshit apology for a fair. The offending poster had been rapidly removed and at last the late afternoon sunshine, a drifting smell of pitchforked steak and some serious Buck Calder sweet-talk seemed to have prevailed.

Eleanor sipped her iced tea beside one of the concession stands and watched her husband across the crowd. He had his arm around Rikki now and she was tossing back her peroxide curls and laughing raucously at something he’d said. She was wearing a black shirt, red cowboy boots and a pair of white jeans so tight that Eleanor feared for her circulation.

‘Finest set of dentures I ever did see,’ Hettie Millward said, following Eleanor’s gaze. ‘I reckon she looks a sight more ragged than the Wranglers.’

Eleanor smiled. ‘Hettie, you don’t need to say that.’

‘Well, doesn’t she? Anyhow, I didn’t think Buck was on the board this year.’

‘He isn’t. You know Buck, if ever there’s a damsel in distress. ’

‘Some damsel. Look at her shirt all unbuttoned there. Talk about mutton dressed as lamb.’

‘Undressed.’

They laughed. Hettie was her best friend, the only one who came close to understanding how it was between her and Buck. She was a big-hearted woman, constantly at war with her weight, though it was a war she seemed happy to lose. Doug, her husband, was a friend of Buck’s - and one of Hope’s most popular and respected ranchers.

Eleanor changed the subject and asked Hettie about her daughter’s wedding plans, which seemed to change every week. Lucy was getting married next spring and wanted it to be the ‘wedding of the millennium’. The whole of Hope was going to be invited. Hettie told her the latest idea, which she thought absolutely insane, was to have the whole ceremony conducted on horseback. Bride and groom, best man and bridesmaids, even the minister, for heavensakes, were going to be on horses. Hettie said it was a surefire recipe for disaster.

Then she looked at her watch and said she had better go and find her two boys, who had just won blue ribbons in the 4-H calf classes. Their animals were going to be auctioned and the parade was about to start in the main arena.

‘Charlie says he’s looking for at least three dollars a pound. I told him if he got three hundred it wouldn’t pay for all the misery those animals have put us through. I just want to be shot of them. I’ll see you later, honey.’

Eleanor finished her tea then strolled along the row of exhibit booths whose dilapidation was disguised by colored flags and streamers that fluttered in the breeze. There were booths selling anything from dogtags to jars of homemade chokecherry jelly. One had been transformed into a tepee outside which a group of teenage girls stood giggling while they waited to have their fortunes told by a ‘Genuine Indian Medicine Man’. Farther along, smaller and noisier children were throwing wet sponges at two volunteers from the town fire department, bravely smiling in cut-out faces of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett.

It had been many years since Eleanor had last come to the fair, though Buck, whose glory days were well remembered by older folk who watched the rodeo, never missed it. Eleanor had stopped coming after Henry’s accident, fearing she might glimpse her dead son’s face among the crowds of kids waiting to show their steers or clamoring for hot dogs and soda at the concession stands.

Nevertheless, it had been her idea that Paragon should take a booth and, making her way back toward it, she was relieved to have found no ambush of pain. In fact, she was proud that one of her first suggestions as Ruth’s new business partner had worked out so well. The warm weather had brought out the crowds. They had sold as much here in one day as they did in the shop in a whole week and had easily covered the fifty-dollar rental for the booth.

As she came up to the booth, she saw Ruth staring at something across the crowd. She had a strange, almost angry expression on her face. Eleanor followed her gaze and saw that it must be Buck she was looking at. He was still making a fool of himself with that singer woman.

It was touching, Eleanor thought, that Ruth should care.

 

Buck wished Rikki and the Wranglers all the best and said he’d see them after the show, although he wasn’t so sure he would. Rikki had looked a whole lot better from a distance than she did at close range and the wink she gave him as she went off to her van did little for him. With his wife and his mistress chatting away to each other like best buddies at the booth over there, life was complicated enough, thank you very much.

He’d seen Eleanor go off to the concession stand and had been about to head over to grab a quiet word with Ruth, when he’d gotten waylaid sorting out Rikki Rain’s ego problem. Now he’d missed his chance. Being a pillar of the community was tough sometimes. He felt Eleanor’s eyes on him and headed off in the opposite direction.

Buck loved the fair and rodeo, though it wasn’t half the show it had been when he was a kid. In those days the whole county used to turn out, as well as hordes of people from far and wide. Winning a rodeo event back then really counted for something. Some of these kids nowadays hardly knew which end of a horse the hay went in. There was a bigger crowd here today than there had been in years, but it still wasn’t the same.

He followed his nose to one of the long trestle tables where the meat from the pitchfork fondue was being carved. As he walked past the arena he noticed a huddle of youngsters, mainly girls, gathered around a tall man in a pale blue shirt and a tanned young woman in a tight white dress.

Both seemed to be signing autographs and, with their backs to him, Buck didn’t recognize them. A photographer he recognized from the local newspaper was taking pictures. The man in the blue shirt said something Buck couldn’t make out but which was obviously hilarious because all the folk gathered around him roared with laughter. As the couple turned to go, all smiles and little waves, Buck saw it was that TV anchorman fellow, Jordan Townsend, who had bought the Nielsen place for a small fortune two summers ago.

Townsend had his own show on one of the networks (though Buck had never seen it) and apparently flew himself up here now and again from LA, parking his personal jet in Great Falls and helicoptering himself out to the ranch, which some other outsider had been brought in to manage.

He had knocked Jim and Judy Nielsen’s nice old house down and replaced it with something ten times the size. It had a huge hot tub overlooking the mountains and a proper thirty-seat movie theater in the basement.

Buck joined the end of the line waiting for food. In the old days the folk dishing it out would have noticed him and brought him a plate stacked high, for free. Not today though. It was being served by two spotty kids he didn’t know.

He waited his turn and watched while Jordan Townsend and his cute little wife processed like royalty through the crowd. Townsend was doing his Hollywood best to pass as a cowboy. With his carefully faded workshirt and Wranglers, he was wearing a new Stetson and a pair of handtooled boots which must have cost a thousand dollars or more.

His wife (number three, according to Kathy) had a pair too, but it was her only western concession. Otherwise, in her designer sunglasses and that little white dress she was almost wearing, she was every inch the movie star. Which, by all accounts, was what she was, though no one Buck knew had seen any of her movies. Apparently she had two names: one she was known as professionally and one she liked to go under when incognito in Montana. Buck couldn’t remember either.

Rumor had it that she was twenty-seven, exactly half her husband’s age, but Kathy said you had to take this with a pinch of salt because most actresses spent several years being twenty-seven. The only other thing Buck knew about her (though, if he tried, he could imagine more) was that her Christmas present from Townsend last year was a small herd of bison.

Buck reached the head of the line and paid one of the spotty kids his three dollars for a plate of steak and chili beans. He stood to one side and took a mouthful while the golden couple glided by, nodding and smiling at the natives, Buck included.

‘Hi, how’re you doing?’ Townsend said. Buck knew the guy had no idea who he was.

‘Good. How are you doing?’

‘Great. Good to see you.’

And he breezed on past. Asshole, thought Buck.

The steak was tough and greasy and Buck chewed it balefully, watching the sway of the actress’s cute little ass as she and Townsend processed toward the parking lot with the righteous glow of local duty done.

It seemed wrong to hate people you hadn’t met, but Buck couldn’t help it. They and their type were buying up the whole damn state. There were some places you could hardly move for all the millionaires, moguls and movie stars. It seemed you were nobody in Hollywood or New York City unless you had a ranch and a slice of Big Sky country.

The result was that real estate prices had gone so far through the roof that decent, young, born-and-bred Montanans didn’t stand a chance. Some of the newcomers kept the land working, or tried to, but most either didn’t have a clue or else didn’t care. It was just somewhere they could play cowboys and impress fancy friends they invited from the city.