Through a mouthful of pie, she said, “Do you know anything about Barclay Macqueen?”
“You’d know more than I would,” he said. Marian knew he worried about her job, though he liked that they now had money to buy treats and movie tickets. For Christmas she had given him a pair of field glasses and a watercolor set. “Why?”
“I met him. Sort of. I ran into him.” She wanted to explain how some disturbance had moved through the air between them, rolling off him, breaking against her, but she knew in describing it she would make the encounter seem like nothing, or like too much.
“Where?”
“Miss Dolly’s.”
He flushed. “It doesn’t look right, you going into places like that.”
“No one sees me. Not unless they’re already there, in which case, they shouldn’t be on any high horses.”
“People talk.”
She looked up. “What do they say?”
“That you work for a moonshiner.”
“That’s true, anyway.”
“What is that around your eyes? You look like a raccoon.”
Savagely, she scraped up the last of her chicken pie. He wouldn’t have understood even if she could have explained. She said, “I don’t care what they say.”
Great white flakes big as moths were swooping and fluttering when she went out to the cottage. She tried to read, but she kept floating out of herself, back to Miss Dolly’s. Sitting in the armchair, she was perfectly still, but the memory of Barclay Macqueen wound through her like a serpent. She put on her coat and went out again into the night, the snow. As she made her way toward Caleb’s cabin, wading through the snow, her heart was beating so hard she could feel her pulse jumping in her neck. A blurred thrumming surrounded her, invisible hummingbird wings. But his window was dark, and when she tapped on the glass, he didn’t come.
Missoula
May–July 1929
Two months after Marian met Barclay Macqueen
One Sunday morning, Jamie was dozing in his cot, enjoying the cool early breeze in his hair and the sunshine slanting onto his blanketed legs when the dogs sprang up barking and pushed out through the screen door, bustling to greet Wallace, who was walking up the driveway. Jamie watched Wallace stagger through the swirl of animals without seeming to notice them, as a man intent on drowning himself might plow heedlessly through the waves. His collar was open; his hat was pushed back on his head. He’d gone out the night before in the car, so he must have run out of gas somewhere or driven into a ditch. On such mornings, he was unpredictable. He might wordlessly retreat to bed and not emerge until dinner, or he might regale Jamie with lengthy, jolly, disjointed tales, or he might complain bitterly about some small injustice at the card table, or he might beg forgiveness for some obscure offense, or some combination. There was no telling.
Wallace yanked open the screen door and collapsed on Marian’s cot, releasing a stale gust of sweat and booze. One dog slipped through with him, but the others were trapped outside and milled around whining until Jamie got up to let them in. “Where’s your sister?” Wallace asked.
He didn’t sound as drunk as he looked. “Driving for Stanley,” Jamie said, getting back under his covers.
“I know it’s for Stanley,” Wallace said morosely. “She couldn’t very well be driving my car.”
“Did it break down somewhere?”
Wallace waved the question away. “Do you know Lena? The trapper?”
“Lena?”
“She’s as burly as a man and wears men’s clothes. She smokes a cigar.”
Jamie knew who he meant, although he had not known her name. “I’ve seen her.”
“She’s ugly as sin.”
Jamie remembered her face well enough: heavy and jowly, thickly browed, her nose mottled like pink granite. She was ugly, but saying so seemed cruel. Wallace went on: “There’s something so offensive about an ugly woman. An ugly man—that’s unfortunate, but there still could be aesthetic interest there. An ugly woman is disturbing.” One latecoming dog was still wagging outside the screen door. “Oh, for Christ’s sake.” Wallace flung himself to his feet and let it in. “There, happy?” He lay back down. “Last night Lena was saying she’s out with the rifle now, not traps. Spokane Fred was at the table—this was that boxcar place near Lolo. You know it?” Jamie nodded, understanding Wallace meant a certain roadhouse to the south, cobbled together from two boxcars. “You know Spokane Fred?” Jamie nodded again. He had a passing familiarity with most of the dissolute gamblers around Missoula. They’d replaced Wallace’s old friends from the university, the ones who used to come over and argue when Jamie and Marian were little but had, at some unnoticed moment, stopped visiting.