Two Medicine (10 page)

“
He’s mostly harmless…”
She stopped by a door the end of the hallway. “I worked in the
store here last year with him and Phyllis, and I survived. Here you
go!”

She opened the door to the
last room in the hall and walked in and I walked in behind her. I
was greeted with a room of small dimensions, about 20 feet long and
12 feet wide, completely made out of wooden boards – the floor,
walls and the ceiling. The wood was left unpainted or stained, and
was just covered with a think, clear varnish, so that the room was
actually pretty bright, shiny and airy – like a giant, dry, comfy
wooden box! A large, single window was set in the back wall and was
the only source of light besides a small lamp on a little table.
The only other furnishings were a twin bed, a chest of drawers, and
a full length mirror. I peeked into the closet and saw a few
hangers, some towels and some extra sheets and pillows piled
up.

My new home... I tossed
the suitcase on the bed and laid the guitar against the wall, and
took stock of my surroundings.

“
Not bad, kind of fits the
area,” I said.

Katie was watching me
again I noticed. This watchful and wary stare kept me off balance.
I could sense in her a lot of thinking was going on, but nothing
was being said. In her heart was a deep, locked-down well of
emotion, hidden, I surmised.

“
I’m wondering if you
belong here…” she suddenly said, as if in answer to my thoughts,
and then quickly she looked away, embarrassed. “I didn’t mean it
like that,” she said hurriedly. “I mean living in a log cabin like
this.”

“
I’ve seen worse,” I said,
again feeling a little sting of wounded pride. I had spent lots of
time in the outdoors, actually, but only on day hikes and weekend
camping trips, nothing to boast about.

“
Well now that you’re
here,’” she asked with more seriousness, turning back towards me,
“what do you think about it?”

“
You’re a two timer, what
do you think about it?”

She shrugged, “I thought I
did… I came out here because I was in love with the mountains…” She
looked down at the floor and shrugged again. “Jury’s still out
though.”

There was a momentary
silence. I looked around at my new home. “Is your room the same as
this one?”

“
Identical,” she said,
“but Ronnie’s is bigger, a bit. Has a big king-size bed too. He’s
here somewhere, probably out smoking.” She held the door open.
“You’ll meet him in a bit; he got here a couple days ago. Drove
this crappy car all the way from Michigan.”

“
What about Ronnie,” I
asked. “Does he belong here?”

She watched me for a
second, trying to read my thoughts again. “Larry’s waiting down
there to give you the tour,” she said with another coy smile, and
swung around and was out the door.

Eight

I liked the room. It was
the only thing I had seen yet that was as I had imagined – a rough,
rugged simple chamber hard and unadorned. I stood alone in the
center of it for a moment, and just looked around, trying to
picture myself living in this small space.
Yes, I like this place; at least this is where I can go to
escape the key chains, fridge magnets, and Larry.
Then I put my bags away and walked back down the
hall. As I made my way downstairs into the kitchen again, I saw
that Katie had left once more. Larry was on a phone attached to
wall, writing down some numbers, and Phyllis was spraying Windex on
the windows at the back of the kitchen, newly hung with her
curtains.

Larry looked up to me as
he finished his call and hung up the phone. “I sent Katie out to
get more supplies from the storage shed. I told her I needed you to
get to work A.S.A.P. The tour will have to wait. Grab some gloves
and help me mop this place. We got a big supply order coming in
tonight!”

He pointed towards a
bucket and a pile of cleaning supplies. Facing the prospect of a
summer of mopping, wondering if I had just screwed up my life
completely, I got started. As I worked helping him mop up grease
and film that developed over the previous summer and the long
winter when the place was boarded up, he told me about the
store.

“
The operation works like
this,” Larry grunted as he shoved the mop around in quick, jerking
swipes. “We open for business at 7 a.m., and close at 7 p.m. About
half of the customers are tourists just in for a day trip, passing
though in the jammers or in their own cars and campers, and the
other half are campers set up in the camp sites down the way, who
stay for a weekend or week or two.”

He continued, “You three,”
meaning me, Katie and the third employee I’d yet to meet, “work the
store and snack bar in shifts, and I work out the schedule. Open
seven days a week – but only half a day on Sunday. One person runs
the cash register in gifts, the other runs the register in the
snack bar, and the other employee cooks. Phyllis cooks too. I fill
in for anyone in any department on their days off – and I manage
the operation, the books, and the customers.”

“
Sounds simple enough,” I
said, dipping the mop in the bucket at my feet.

“
It’s not,” Larry said,
shaking his head. “I’ve been managing this store for seven years,
and I’ve seen a lot of crazies come and go. But I run a tight
ship.

“
We live in Missoula
during the winter, Phyllis and me, but we go back to Kansas more
often than not most winters.”

He continued as he swashed
the mop around some more. “Trash goes out in Wednesdays, stock
deliveries on Fridays, ahead of the weekends. Weekends are busy –
and I
do mean busy.”
He emphasized with a dumping of the mop head into the bucket,
splashing water around in the yellow bucket.

He explained about how the
staff would cook our own meals in the kitchen with food brought in
by the park along with all the other supplies; we didn’t have to
shop for groceries and didn’t have to get toiletries, all that was
provided. There was one question answered, I thought as I slopped
the mop around in one corner of the kitchen. Sometimes Phyllis
would cook for everyone, he told me. I could image her preparing
some big dinner like we were all a family – she seemed like the
type that would like to do that.

But then Larry’s voice all
of a sudden got a lower, and had a warning edge. “You gotta watch
out for free loaders though buddy, and shoplifters. Kids from
res,
Indians
.” He
stared at me gravely. “You see any funny business, you let me know
ASAP.”

“
The ‘res?’” I
asked.

“
Reservation – the Indians – Native Americans. The Blackfoot.
Troublemakers.” He shrugged as if all the terms were one and the
same thing. “You’d be wise to stay away all together
from
them.
”

“
Why?” I asked him,
holding my mop and looking at him dubiously. But before he could
answer a tall younger man walked in through the back screen door in
into the kitchen.

He was tall and lanky, and
had a light brown mustache, which was odd for someone in their late
20s and not in fashion at that time by any means. He looked a bit
dorky, but ironically sported an Asian-style, big shoulder tattoo
which showed a Japanese Geisha girl in fine detail, surrounded by
billowing clouds of red, blue and black. It was a bold, colorful
piece that stood out awkwardly from his otherwise inkless body and
seemed contradictory. He was shirtless, for some reason, as he
walked in from outside, and had on jeans and no shoes. He was
drinking coffee and I could smell the leftover cigarette aroma
which he must have just finished as he walked in.

He smiled warmly at me.
“Will? How ya doing? I’m Ronnie. Katie told me you were in here so
I came to meetcha.”

We shook hands and I said it was good to
meet him too.

“
Where ya from?” he asked.
I noticed that Larry had stopped mopping and was watching
us.

“
Atlanta.”

“
Oh yea? I was down there
last year on business. Fuckin’ great town.”

“
I
asked
you not to use profanity, Ronnie,” Larry said flatly. “It’s
your day off; don’t you have anywhere to be?”

Ronnie smirked at Larry.
“Sure it’s my day off, but I was beginning to miss you, Dad.” He
winked at me, sitting down at a large kitchen table in the middle
of the room, and propping his bare feet up on the table as he sat
back in the chair, smiling broadly at Larry. The undersides of his
feet were dirty and had a couple blades of grass stuck on them. “I
can’t tear myself away from this store, boss... Gotta cleanup for
these Brady Bunchers coming to see us soon, right Will?”

Larry led out a
purposefully loud sigh, shook his head and returned to his
work.

“
So Atlanta, huh?” he
said. “I’m from Detroit, I’m embarrassed to say. Never going back,
I hope. That’s why I came out here.”

“
What kind of work did you
do in Detroit?” I asked, beginning to mop some more as we
spoke.

“
Well, for a while I was
working for UPS – as a corporate guy not a driver – made good money
but worked like eighty hours a week. I left that and started my own
consulting business, which is on a temporary hiatus...”

Larry snorted as he dipped
his mop again. Ronnie continued, pretending not to notice. “I’m up
here to get away from the dregs of the Detroit business scene –
absolutely no momentum there, not a dime to be made, my friend.” He
took a sip of his coffee.

“
Basically I was broke. My
uncle was a rancher up here but died a couple years ago. I hope to
get situated in Montana and maybe get into the ranching business
soon.”

“
You told me yesterday you
were studying to be a veterinarian,” Larry grunted.

“
Did I?” Was all Ronnie
said, and he actually seemed genuinely surprised. Turning back to
me. “What brought you up here Will?”

It took me a second to
figure out what to say. I should have already expected and prepared
an answer for just this question, but I had only uncovered part of
the answer myself, and only partially. “Just heard it was a
beautiful place; I just wanted to live somewhere
different.”

“
What’d you do before you
got here?”

“
Existed,” I said without
even thinking about it, almost involuntarily.

Ronnie smiled, as if for
the first time in the conversation he had heard something he
thought worth hearing.

Larry would later tell me
that Ronnie came from a wealthy family, who owned a nation-wide
busing company. His last name I recognized, since it is splayed on
the front and back of privately owned luxury tour busses and RVs I
have seen driving down the highways all the time. I was impressed
by that, and even more confused as to his job history he related to
me, which was spotty and aimless. He seemed to have no real
discernable trade, other than a “glorified” this or that, and he
certainly didn’t appear to be wealthy at all. More like a suburban
middle class kid with the gift of gab and the curse of
apathy.

One of his talents,
though, was an easy confidence that drew people to him, a social
ease that made you friends instantly, effortlessly. When you meet
someone who is truly comfortable in their own skin, it is a subtle
and irresistible quality. He didn’t have to try at it, he was just
a fun guy to be around. I liked him.

He also had a talent for
simply enjoying himself, and I began to feel that this was his only
real motivation, not all the grandiose business ideas he kept
coming up with. Almost every night he was either drinking beer,
which he would buy (or just take) from the grocery store below, or
smoking marijuana which some friend of his FedEx’d him a few days
into the summer, or screwing some random park employee girl, or all
three at once. Where he met the girls he slept with was a mystery
to me, considering our location, because they weren’t campers or
tourists, they were locals and employees from other places. He
would just show up with a new, usually very pretty girl at night at
a bonfire we’d make, or at the lake, or in his room. I told him
early on into the summer that he should go into politics, run for
office somewhere – it seemed the perfect career for him, but he
just nodded at the suggestion.

Ronnie’s excess of booze
and the rest was different than my friend Scott’s, I would soon
realize. Scott would lose control of himself in his drunken states,
but Ronnie was always the same cool, calm, collected dude, even
after hours of drinking beer. He never lost his control; he managed
it all easily, naturally. He seemed primarily just to want to have
fun, to find a place where his talents for being with people would
be employed to some profit. He seemed to be looking for something,
like me, but his “something” was not a place, but more a moment, or
a collection of moments.

There was one
single-minded subject, though, that Ronnie talked about almost
daily that summer – the Perseid meteor shower, a yearly event,
otherwise known as “The Tears of Saint Lawrence” – since it fell on
that Roman saint’s day. It came and streaked the night sky (in dark
enough places to see it) with colorful missiles of space rock,
hurling, burning meteors leaving sparkling tails with near
light-speed. He described it with a strange, childlike glee. Ronnie
was forever talking about how the meteor shower was going to appear
in August as it did every year, and that we would be able to see it
like nowhere else “out here in the boondocks.” And to hear him
describe the spectacle you would think that it was to see heaven
itself burning and the night sky rent in two.