James Burke: Bitterroot

I looked back over my shoulder at the stone rigidity of the hotel and its scrolled-iron colonnade, a huge cloud of orange dust billowing up behind it against the sunset, and I wondered if cattle and railroad barons had hosted champagne dinners in the hotel dining room, or if cowboys off the Goodnight.

Loving Trail had knocked back busthead whiskey in the saloon and shot holes in the ceiling with their six-shooters. Or if the town had never been more than a dusty, wind-blown place on the edge of a stockyard where the most memorable event in its history was a public hanging.

But I think it was all of the above, truly the West, unappealing to those who have seen only its facsimile, found in no tourist brochure, the old buildings creaking with heat and decay, awaiting the arrival one day of those children of John Calvin who saw down forests and poison rivers with cyanide as votive acts and reconstruct the very places they have just fled.

"Why so quiet?" Lucas asked.

"Was I?" I said.

"We thought maybe we should take a pulse beat," Temple said.

"It's been a hot day," I said, and wiped my forehead on my sleeve.

"Time for some ice cream," Lucas said.

"That's a fine idea," I said.

The three of us walked on down the street to a small grocery store. The bell on the screen door rang when we went inside. An elderly Mexican man was reading a newspaper in front of a television set with a cracked screen. His skin was creased and brown as chewing tobacco and his eyes pale to the point of having no color, like those of a person who has spent most of his life outdoors in harsh light.

He folded his newspaper loosely on a chair and walked behind the counter and looked at us expectantly, bemused by our presence in his store, perhaps embarrassed by the paucity of his goods and the little he might have to offer.

It's funny the places you end up.