Two Medicine (5 page)

I thought this over, and
marveled, not for the first time, at Scott’s erratic philosophy of
life – a mix of a reckless, kind of “fuck it” fatalism, and a
stubborn, hopeful, bullet-proof optimism, all rolled in together
into a person who defied labeling.

“
And as for Holly…” he
continued, his voice slurring slightly, he crushed a peanut shell
in his hand as if to emphasis his point, “man, she wasn’t the one
for you. Don’t you see that?”

I just sat in silence, wondering if what he
was saying was in fact true.

He shook his head, “No,
you don’t.”

I was about to respond but
he wasn’t finished. “And you should remember one thing. You have
the entire world out there,” he pointed a finger back toward the
window covered with blinds which dimly let some light in. “A
whole
planet
that
you can take on. You have
nothing
at all holding you back. Nothing. I
wish
I had your freedom.
You could go anywhere.”

He drained the last of the
wine. “You not being a part of anything, means you got nothing to
keep you here, nothing keeping you.

You can go anywhere,” he
repeated quietly.

Scott had a little girl
with his ex-wife, a sweet little girl of two years old, named
McKenzie. She had some serious heart valve issue that was
constantly worrying him and that needed continual and costly
medical care. But Scott was lucky too, because she was a beautiful
girl, who was the only pure thing that Scott had left in his
life.

He got up from his chair,
patting his suit pockets for his pack of cigarettes, “You can go
anywhere.” He repeated a third time. I looked at him – he was
starting to sound strange.

“
Stevie! More wine!” he
suddenly shouted at the bar, the unlit cigarette dangling from his
lips.

It was unnerving, I
thought, Scott making serious statements about my life, my
situation, when his was life so erratic and on the edge. But some
people are just better at discerning what other people’s lives
need, rather than what their own life requires. That’s what made
him a good salesman, probably, knowing instinctively what people
need. And as I looked over through the blinds of the window out at
the street, I knew he was right, about me, about the whole
thing.

I remembered also, just
then, what had brought to the bar that day. I called over to him as
he walked towards the door, swaying a little bit. “What should I do
about Holly?” I asked. “What about all our plans, the engagement,
all that stuff? I’m supposed to just walk away from all
that?”

He paused by the door and
lit the cigarette, glancing over at Stevie – it was a non-smoking
bar. “Take all that as a lesson learned and experience
gained.”

And he shoved the door
open. He stood there for a moment and said, almost to himself,
“Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” and he walked out into the
stark sunlight.

What lesson was to be
learned by all of this? I wondered, as I sat back down by myself in
an empty bar. Maybe this was the last chain that needed to be
broken to snap me out of this place I was in – a job I hated and a
girl that dumped me. I loved Holly, but what good had the
relationship done me, really?

Maybe this was the shock I
needed to snap my heart back into beating, like a love
defibrillator. What
had
happened to me? Where was that guy Scott used to
know? I shook my head in a haze of doubt and fear, and finished my
beer alone.

I eventually left
Scott smoking outside the bar. He stood there
secreting little sips of wine on the sidewalk. I told him I had to
go figure out what to do as I left. He told me to come by his place
later to have dinner with him and Brooke.

I had a beer buzz as I
walked to my car.
Self-medicating,
I thought; Scott rubbing off on me. But he was
right, was he not? His words had an effect on me, even though I had
known him so long and knew pretty much every thought that came to
him before he said it; his words had hit me in a place that
registered deeply.

I had gotten soft; I had
grown weak, accepting, defeated, and hesitant. But when had I
become a victim?

Another favorite movie of
mine had always been
Smokey and the
Bandit,
not as ridiculous a movie as some
believed. The Bandit’s philosophy of life, his freedom, his
fearlessness, and his lack of concern about… anything, had seemed
the pure distillation of American swagger and adventurism, and had
always inspired me. Couched in a silly comedy with a trivial plot
was this iconic hero that represented so much of the American male,
at least what the American males wanted to be represented
as.

And one line in the movie
said it all. Bandit, when asked by his hitchhiker pal/love interest
played by Sally Fields, why he was doing what he was doing in the
movie, he simply responded, “For the hell of it.”

Unapologetically, without
sarcasm, or duplicity, or explanation. Simply. He then looked back
at her and asked her casually, “Haven’t you ever done anything just
for the hell of it?” A trivial brilliance I would say.

But on that lonely
afternoon as I staggered in misery to my car, not going back to
work, but not sure where I
was
going, with a beer buzz and Scott’s desperate
challenges swirling in my brain, I don’t think I’ve ever felt so
confused, alone and so sad. Not the careless Bandit at the moment
was I, not by any means... And I am a little ashamed to admit that
when I got into the car and drove off, I cried for a short
while.
Definitely not something the Bandit
would do either. I doubt the Bandit had ever cried in his
life.

The old me: taking changes,
living life, breaking chains, it sounded so
right
. But how long can a man live
for the moment? And what about love? What about marriage? I never
was such a victim before, and I had experienced loss and
disappointment– but I had always bounced back and kept looking for
the next good thing. What had happened to that? What was the next
good thing?

It was Holly the Red, I
realized, that had changed me. She was the only thing that was
different between the old and new me, the moment it all switched.
Before I met her, I didn’t have a care in the world, because I
didn’t really care for anything in the world and nothing really
cared for me. I had had girlfriends in the past, maybe had even
been in love once, but had never planned my life with any of them,
never had decided to unite with any of them. And, as so many men
before me throughout the long and troubled history of man had
realized, usually much too late, I realized that it was a
woman
that was really the
trouble after all…

I had always cared only
for playing music in a band, reading good literature, dabbling in
writing here and there, finding adventure, taking risks, feeling
the sun in the sky, earth under my feet, and approaching a new
horizon in front of me be it a new job or a plane ticket across the
ocean. Always with little money in the bank but rich in
experiences. Sure I was lonely plenty of times in those reckless
young days, but I was more alive.

I decided I would live for
those things alone, from now on. I decided that day sitting in the
car. Before, I had been locked down in life, trying to my ship up
to another ship that wasn’t going my direction. I was never really
bound to anyone, never attached so strongly. Until her.
I loved her so much, that I gave her all of my
heart.

I took a deep breath, and
smiled to myself bitterly.
Well that’s
over with; never again!
Immersed in a sea
of self-pity but now feeling a new, sudden, rebellious, vengeful
inspiration, a feeling of new-found clarity through a fog of doubt,
I jammed the gas pedal down and sped away from Coco
Joe’s.

Four

So often, enormous events
in our lives begin with small coincidences, if you believe in
coincidences. I do.

As I drove heedlessly down
the street, elated and confused, I decided to not call Holly back
anytime soon. I knew that calling her and trying to explain all
this right then would accomplish nothing, and I’d probably only
sound crazy, desperate, pathetic. I needed some time to decide what
to say anyway.

A sudden doubt:
Was not calling her and trying to salvage this
love actually the crazy, desperate, and pathetic thing?
I shoved the idea aside and switched on the car
stereo, turning it down low, though, to not interrupt my thoughts
completely.

I then picked up my phone
and called in sick to work, saying that I had food poisoning –
Greek pasta. I talked to Linda and told her to relay my message to
John. I knew she didn’t believe me, from the tone in her voice, but
I didn’t care a rip anymore. I drove on; feeling like every minute
that ticked away was a part of a new chapter in my life. And there
is nothing like a new chapter to fix what is broken in a persons’
life, I’ve found.

I also remembered that I
had a haircut appointment that evening, and I called the Laotian
lady who cut my hair, Nuyen, and moved the appointment up and drove
straight over to her salon. I just couldn’t go home and sit there,
not during the day, not now – I wanted to be occupied with
something as I thought all this through.

As I sat down in the
waiting area I noticed a magazine sitting on the coffee table. It
was an edition of the outdoor magazine
Outside,
and it had a glossy cover
photo of a range of soaring mountains, with sun-drenched, warm,
lush, green valleys spreading out between the rocky peaks. With the
unconscious eye of an assistant editor, I scanned over the
headlines and cover art.

“
Glacier National Park, Montana”
the
cover title read in big, white block letters, “
Where the ordinary stops… and the journey
begins
!”

I stared at the cover for
a moment. Montana… I picked up the magazine and began thumbing
through the pages until I found the article. I flipped the pages
slowly, and scanned the images, which were almost mocking me. Clear
blue lakes with a perfect mirror surfaces lay spread out in rich
colorful, panoramic shots. Sweeping mountains carved in rock and
clothed in evergreen pines, skirts of lush forests that stopped
hallway up at a line, snow-tipped peaks struck into the sky,
boiling clouds floating in a deep indigo heaven.

In one photo, an enormous
bear dully pondered a boiling stream, huge log-built lodges with a
Swiss-Alpine theme stood above tiny tourists in another photo
spread. Everything looked so fresh and wild, a majestic but harsh
and remote landscape – not too touristy or developed. I
inadvertently thought of my metal and glass desk, my plastic chair,
Linda and Jeffries, and Holly.

I brought the magazine
with me to the barber chair. As Nuyen snipped at my hair, she made
some small talk in her thick Laotian accent but I barely registered
it, answering with a few distracted grunts.

I went back to the
beginning of the article as I settled in the chair and I read every
word, poured over every picture. The article was really just a puff
piece describing only one small part of entire state: a place
called Glacier National Park, and one part of that Park in
particular stuck out to me. It was a small valley cradling a long
lake that stretched between three mountains, and which ended in a
camp store and campground. The place was called Two
Medicine
.
It was
in the southwestern part of the Park, not far though from the
border of Montana with Canada.

Very remote. But this
little valley had made the magazines’ feature and cover because it
was the “best kept secret of Glazier Park”– a place to hike and
camp that “put you back in time to an untouched western landscape
that defies history.”
Until everyone reads
this article,
I thought ruefully. As I
scanned the photos again I saw that
Two
Medicine
was the collective name of a deep
lake and several mountains surrounding it, along with some
campsites and a camp store.

As Nuyen’s tiny hands
worked the scissors, I decided to move to Montana. Somewhere,
between the first page of that article and the last, I had decided;
and I knew it was a done deal.

The article said
the Park needed staff to work the various lodges
and tourist spots, and someone in the article said that Two
Medicine Valley was almost always without enough staff members to
run it because of its unknown status and remote location. It
described how the 4-person staff of Two Medicine worked and lived
in a small camp store that sold camp supplies to through-hikers and
weekend campers who visited the area. And the store even had a
kitchen that cooked meals at the back. The staff would also manage
tours around the lake, Lake Sinopah, named for a mountain towering
above the lake and above the entire valley.

Two Medicine Valley,
that’s where I’m headed,
I thought with a
sudden wave of excited relief – relief at having a new direction. I
looked up from the magazine and into the mirror, watching Nuyen for
a moment. Her little fingers were working in some hair product now
that she was finished with the cut. This was normally my favorite
part of the whole process because she gave me a little massage as
she worked in the gel, but all I could think of at that moment was
moving across the country, to a beautiful and wild land I had only
just talked about for years, and never really imagined. It had been
more like the Land of Oz than a real destination, and now it was my
new home.