High Country : A Novel (11 page)

After that day of sun the clouds closed in and stayed. No more big rain, but each day it was there or threatening, misting or drizzling, starting and stopping. They seemed to live in their slickers. When they moved camp Fenton packed under the big fly, keeping water off the gear. But the dampness was everywhere. They were clammy when they rode, clammy in their tents, even clammy around the fire. Only the fishing got better, the wranglers eating so much trout that Gus went to Tommy to complain.

“Take them where the trout ain’t. I’m about to grow fins.”“Keeps ’em happy,” Tommy said. “Don’t mind the wet when they wade in it. When there’s big cutthroats.”

Gus saw it was no use, watching glumly as one of the men came into camp, his creel full of two-pounders. Gus figured he’d steer clear of the kitchen, let Tommy and Buck do the eating. They were harder to fill.

Fenton was busy keeping people as dry as he could, and as happy. And watching his horses. That’s when he could think about Cody Jo— following clear tracks up some draw to find the horses quiet under a stand of timber, their bellies full, their tails to the weather as they waited out another rain.

One day he had to go far up the South Fork, picking up tracks early, following them through wet duff and across soaking meadows, thinking about Cody Jo: the way she touched him as she passed, brushed against him; the way she sat by him with her coffee, organizing the children for another day of dodging the rain, inventing games to play in the tents.

No matter the age, everyone looked to Cody Jo for diversion. She offered awards at the close of each day, got the children to put on skits, tricked Gus and Buck into telling their stories, even worked up a play that had everyone—even the actors—guessing who the villain was. And as they clamored around her she would look at Fenton, her gaze steady.

Her directness unsettled him. He was even more unsettled by how full of her he was. He would watch her with the children, sometimes his throat going so dry he dared not meet her eyes. He would turn away then, move on to more chores, gathering wood, checking tents, doctoring people—keeping his equipment covered, the bedrolls dry.

The weather broke two days before they would go out. Everyone took baths and dried out clothes, became excited all over again by the big country they’d traveled, climbing high on the canyon walls to look back at it, studying the maps, talking about where they would go the next time, and the next.

The last day they rode out under a cloudless sky, the Mission Range rising up across Swan Valley like a postcard. Cody Jo pulled away from the others and rode ahead of Fenton, Fenton leading his string, lightloaded now and easy to manage. She was a graceful rider, and he watched her movements with a concentration that made him ache.

He was scheduled to take another party in when this one got out. He would pick up the guests, turn the stock around, and climb back over the pass the next morning. But for the first time in his life he began to doubt why he did it, wonder if he had anything left to give these new people.

Cody Jo didn’t have any doubt at all, chiding him about his devotion to his mountains, her voice amused. Not until they were in the corrals sorting through the piles of duffle did she talk to him as she had at White River.

“You are going back into your mountains. Now I know why.” She looked up at him, her face smudged from helping Buck lift packs from the mules, her voice halting—as though it were hard to find just the right words. “Maybe I will be with you a little bit—in the night.” Her smile was crooked, uncertain. She reached out, straightening his collar, touching him. “I know you, Fenton.” She gave up on the smile, seemed to surrender everything. “I need you . . . to know me.”

Fenton got his kerchief from his pocket and wiped at the smudge on her face, wanting to say something, too full of her to try.
Then they were calling her for their pictures. Fenton watched her go, wondering if there were any Kodak made that could catch the things he’d seen in her face.
It was a full summer for Fenton, and the fall just as busy, fishing and hunting parties overlapping seamlessly with his Forest Service packing. He seemed always in his saddle, or in his camps, or saying farewell to one party as he greeted the next. He didn’t pull his hunting camp out until late October, the snow falling hard then and this time staying. Even the pack station was covered when he finally reached it, unsaddled in the half-light of a gray afternoon, spreading his canvas all over the barn so it could melt where it had frozen to itself.
He didn’t get the shoes pulled and equipment oiled until December, when another storm came in and he turned to getting enough wood up on the porches to see him through it. A day into the storm Cody Jo came out of the woods, traveling all the way from Murphy’s on snowshoes.
“No school for a week,” she panted. “And I have gingerbread.”
Fenton shook the ice and snow from her coat in the shed off the porch. He put her by the fire and brought her pack in, fueled the stove to get her something warm. “I’ll make dinner,” she said as she took off her boots and warmed, stretching toward the fire. “I know what you like. For dessert . . .” She smiled up at him. “Gingerbread.”
“This storm might be getting worse,” Fenton said.
“That’s right.” Again she smiled. “It is.”
Fenton went out and started up the generator. He brought more wood in from the porch and poked up the fire. Cody Jo made him sit and tell her about each trip, who he liked, how Sugar did, and Buck and Tommy and the rest. She wanted to know if there were women. If they fell in love with him, talked him into going places he shouldn’t, doing things he shouldn’t.
It got dark, and she found Fenton’s bourbon and watched him sip it as she made dinner. And after dinner she found music on the radio and they danced, her body moving so easily with Fenton’s there seemed no separation at all between them and the music.
She put her head on his chest. “Later we’ll dance naked.” She looked up at him now. “Right here. With just the fire.”
Fenton could find no words. He held her closer, the music filling him now, the music and the way Cody Jo moved to it.
“There’s no hurry.” The tempo changed and they changed with it, as though it were in them. “I’ll be here for three days. At least.”
They made love and Fenton found himself spilling out of himself so quickly he despaired. She calmed him and loved him. They ate gingerbread and then slept, and in the night he came to her once more. In the morning he wanted her again. But she made him wait while she brought coffee and biscuits on a tray. They talked and laughed until they wanted each other too much to wait any longer. They had time now, and it was nothing Fenton had ever imagined. She came to him again and again, and he loved her so it left him wanting her still, even after he ached from loving her so much.
“I was so a part of you.” He kissed her shoulder, her neck, the hollows above her collarbones. “It made my old head hurt.”

For four days they lived in one another so completely they thought of little else. They would rise, do the chores together, then return to make love, playing with one another, taking in one another, slipping back into sleep when they were through. After a late lunch she would watch him and talk to him as he worked on his tack, cutting leather, replacing the old, splicing and patching, happy to lose himself in the sound of her voice.

They would have a drink as they made dinner, sit by the fire afterward and listen to the station, dance to the music and talk about what it meant, tell stories, hold each other with their memories, their words. And they would go upstairs and make love again, by lantern now, the generator off, going farther and farther, testing and exploring and freeing themselves in one another.

One night Cody Jo sat above him, brought herself to climax. She leaned over him, letting her breasts swing against his chest, watching his face with her wide eyes as she reached behind him, easing her finger into him, moving it, watching him. “I want,” her voice was low and steady and serious, “to be inside you, the way you are inside me.”

On the fifth day she had to go back. Fenton caught up Babe and Goose and took her on horseback through the drifts to Murphy’s. They had plowed that far and her little Ford was there, ready to take her on to her school.

Fenton led Goose back in a daze, letting Babe make her own way. He wondered how such good could come so quickly, not quite believing—even when he looked at the bed they had shared, the dishes washed and drying by the sink, the biscuits she had made—that it had really happened.

But it had, and it didn’t end there. A week after she left him, he heard something against his window and looked out to find her there, packing more snow, throwing it, laughing in the moonlight, taunting him to let her in. He called out that he had never locked any door. And before he was down the stairs she was beside him, warming against the length of him, reaching shamelessly down for him, bringing him to her, into her, Fenton realizing he had never wanted anything so completely.

She stayed until Sunday, and when they rode back through the drifts, crusted now from the thawing and freezing, he brought feed for Goose, leaving him in Murphy’s corral so Cody Jo would have something to ride back to him on—when she was ready.

And she would be. Never getting word to him, just being there, turning Goose out in the corral, letting herself through the unlocked door, arriving at one or two in the morning, once just at dawn, coming into his bed and taking him inside her, loving him, loving them together, even as he worried about how much he was coming to need her, how he would pace the nights away when she wasn’t there. He would wake to some noise and rise, thinking it might be Cody Jo, then not sleeping but pacing and poking up the fire and wanting her, hoping she would come to him before the dawn.

It went on into the spring that way, the Murphys watching as Cody Jo caught up Goose, rode him into the dark of the woods. They said nothing—not to Cody Jo, not to Fenton, whom they saw seldom. Not to anyone. Cody Jo hid nothing, but she told them little. What she was doing they hardly acknowledged to each other. But Fenton’s happiness, when they saw him, was clear. They just didn’t see where it would go. How it would end.

When summer came Cody Jo left to see her father in Kansas, her aunt in Chicago. Fenton went back into his mountains, packing mostly for fire crews but also for the fishermen and hunters who came in from New York and Washington and San Francisco. Now and then Tommy Yellowtail or Buck would bring in a letter from Cody Jo and Fenton would go off alone to read it. But he talked little about her. They were surprised to see, when he brought a hunting party out in the early fall and found her standing there at the corrals as though she’d never been away, the relief on his face, the pleasure he took in just seeing her there.

He was back across the passes the next day, but knowing she was back made it different. There were no more long silences. He joshed the fire crews until he had them laughing, no matter how tired they were. He argued with Tommy Yellowtail about tracking and with Buck about his crazy ideas for campsites. Sometimes he wouldn’t set up the canvas until the first raindrops fell, telling everyone it would clear if they’d just quit shaking their heads, swearing, telling each other how bad it could get.

It wasn’t long after the snows drove them from the mountains that she came back to him. He was startled by the difference she made, the hungry way he took her in, began planning his days around her, his trips to Murphy’s, to Missoula, even reasons to stop at the schoolhouse.

Happy as it made him, something about it worried him too. It wasn’t that she was so young, but that she made everything seem so right, no matter the time of day or night or whether the Murphys, or anyone else for that matter, were there to watch them. She put her arm through his at the little Thanksgiving rodeo, touching him so lightly it seemed no weight at all, but the air rich with the sense of her. They were watching her students whip their big, slow horses around the barrels. She looked up at him, slowly started singing the same song they’d danced to the night before, dancing easily in front of his fire as she had unbuttoned his shirt, undone his belt, watched him watch her as she moved. She’d looked at him steadily as she danced, teasing him and wanting him just as hungrily as he wanted her. And now she sang to him with that same look on her face, watching him there in the cold by the long corral where the big horses labored, the children on them pounding at their sides and flapping at them with their reins as though it might actually make a difference. Listening, feeling the touch of her arm through his, Fenton felt dizzy with his need for her.

She told him about going off to the college in Massachusetts when she was seventeen, learning from the New York girls how to smoke, do the new dances, tempt the boys into driving up from New Haven or taking the train out from Boston. It was all new to her, and she liked it more than she should have. She’d paid little attention to her classes when her mother, sickish ever since she could remember, died. Her father brought her home then, kept her home after the funeral to help in his doctor’s office there in the Virginia horse country of her mother’s people.

But the young men from the hunt clubs wouldn’t leave her alone any more than the boys from the colleges had. So he sent her to his own family in Michigan, sensible people who had sent their sons and their daughter off to the university. But they saw all that life in her, knew she should be back in the college where she’d started. So she went back, soon finding she could do her studies with hardly any effort. She thought maybe she was smarter than the others. She wasn’t sure, though she knew she was wilder.

After her mother died, her father signed with the Medical Corps. They sent him to Fort Riley, and after the war ended he stayed on. When college was over she went to be with him, stopping to see her father’s sister in Chicago, where she taught at the university, going on to St. Louis and then to Kansas City, where her father met her and drove her back to Junction City. Young men from the Virginia hunt crowd were still at Fort Riley, taking to the cavalry as naturally as they took to the hard riding and hard drinking of the regular officers. And soon they were bringing the regular officers to meet Cody Jo, to dance with her, drink with her—the men taken by this new breed of college girl who came so alive at the officers club and the horse breeders’ parties outside Junction City.