Montana on the east side of the Rocky Mountains is an ancient sea bed which is why it is sedimentary and embedded with the remains of ancient sea creatures like baculites, which seem to be little buffalo when they segment and fall apart. When you see patches of white, you’re looking at alkali and salt once dissolved in the water. It was a shallow sea, maybe four feet deep in a lot of places, and had many coral atolls which now show up as buttes and ridges. John McPhee wrote what I know about it. When the Rockies rose up from the basement of the world, the continent creased at the Mississippi River and all the water ran out to the Gulf of Mexico.
After we had been married a while and after he had had a heart attack that nearly killed him, Bob Scriver began to ask me to make long trips to pick up or deliver things. He said there was no one else he could trust, which might have been true, but he also knew that saying such a thing would guarantee I’d make the trip. The first trip really was a kind of emergency: we’d left the wax version of the heroic-sized (life-size plus one-fifth) portrait of Bill Linderman at a homemade foundry north of Regina but the guy wasn’t getting the job done and the PRCA head, Gene Pickett, was coming to see how much progress we’d made. Bob was terrified that the commission would be canceled if Pickett were irritated with us. So I made him a big roast and a mixing bowl of Jello, even knowing that as soon as I was out the door his mother, his true lover, would be bringing in food.
I drove our little red 1960 Ford van, which had already been to Alaska and back twice. Bob had barely taught me to drive when we bought it in Conrad and I drove it back in the dark because he had to drive the pickup. I was terrified and he followed closely, honking me over to give me instructions now and then. I drove right in the middle on the yellow line and he said I’d get a ticket for sure. I wobbled and wove and squeezed all the blood out of my hands by gripping the wheel. Somewhere along in there I hit that point one comes to when trying to do something hard, and all of a sudden I was really driving. It all smoothed out.
In “Bronze Inside and Out” I told about how I got to Regina okay but came back on what had seemed the smoothest road on the Canadian side so I could cross at a reservation port of entry where the officers would be sympathetic because of knowing us. The wax began to crack and shake apart and I kept stopping to buy electrical tape (no duct tape then) to keep it together. I didn’t get much gratitude when I reached home.
The next big trip was the worst. A load of bronzes and the hand-painted three-foot-across sculpture of the Thunder Pipe Bundle Opening had to get to Cody by May 1. I had had nightmares about a huge blizzard, which everyone laughed at. On the morning I was to leave, the blizzard hit. I wanted to postpone, Bob was afraid Harold McCracken would be angry, so off I went in slush up to the hubcaps. The only thing that kept me on the road was the enormous weight of my load, which was at the top limit of the carrying capacity of the little red van.
By the time I got to Great Falls, the motor was flickering out now and then, so I pulled into Bison Ford. The foreman took a look: the slush was packing up around the motor and shorting it as well as paralyzing the belts. The motor was under a sort of table between the two seats, so I went on with a stick in my hand and the lid up -- punching the snow back out when it built up. If I got the slightest bit out of the ruts, the van threatened to turn sideways. South of Great Falls there were drop-offs on both sides of the road. Every time a semi passed me, the slush wave nearly took me off the road and blinded me for a few hundred feet. Luckily the road was mostly straight. Finally there stopped being any semis.
It was dark, the snow was heavier, I could barely see and was struggling along at about ten miles an hour when I came to something solid I couldn’t interpret. While I squinted at it, someone knocked on the side window. It was the driver of the plow in the road, which was supposed to be closed. He made me follow him into Custer and stay for the night in an old boarding house reopened as emergency housing. It was packed with truckers. No eating place was open but I found some cough drops in the bottom of my purse. The next morning the storm was over and it was simply a matter of waiting for plows to clear away eight foot drifts.
On the way home the drive shaft fell out of the van. When I called Bob to tell him, he was angry that I would be late getting back, but I had some awareness that his anger came from worry. Still, when I got home, he had company. Not a woman this time, but an Indian artifact dealer I didn’t approve of.
Over the years there have been many long drives across this continent. I’ve broken-down, gone into the ditch, never been hurt or rolled or totaled a vehicle. When Bob and I were at war and I could hardly bear the anguish and loneliness, I just about drove that little red van to pieces on the gravel back roads of the reservation. It was best in the dark in a thunderstorm. Once I fled to Portland where my mother wouldn’t let me stay, went down the valley to my brother who got a job elsewhere and left, went down farther to stay with an aunt, hoping that someone would say something enlightening that would turn the tide. She said, “Go home. All men are children. They don’t know what they want.”
I took her advice and caught Bob with another woman. By this time he was beginning to be famous and they were lining up. He’d always had a reputation as a lover and they figured this was their chance to find out. But this time Bob was glad to see me and so were all his parts. The indiscreet detail I have never told before is that I was wearing a sunsuit with a long zipper down the front. In his haste, he nicked himself on the zipper teeth (oh, that vagina dentata image!) and the resultant howling, laughter, and blood squirts were cathartic enough to keep us intimate for months.
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