Thomas Mcguane - Gallatin Canyon

The path opened atop what Angela said was an old burial mound, and there he saw a garden under the morning sun. Errol briefly wondered what sorts of people were buried here but doubted that Angela knew. She showed him how things were arranged, the peppers, the tomatoes, the staked gourds, the new melons concealed under dark leaves glistening with dew. A pleasant smell arose from the tilled ground. A tall palm hung over the scene, and from its crown of leaves the sound of parrot nestlings descended.

At the still-shaded end of the garden, wild vegetation had encroached on the perimeter. She showed him where he must start.

The day we planned the trip, I told Louise that I didn’t like going to Idaho via the Gallatin Canyon. It’s too narrow, and while trucks don’t belong on this road, there they are, lots of them. Tourist pull-offs and wild animals on the highway complete the picture. We could have gone by way of Ennis, but Louise had learned that there were road repairs on Montana Highway 84—twelve miles of torn-up asphalt — in addition to its being rodeo weekend.

“Do we have to go to Idaho?” she asked.

I said I thought it was obvious. A lot rode on the success of our little jaunt, which was ostensibly to close the sale of a small car dealership I owned in the sleepy town of Rigby. But, since accepting the offer of a local buyer, I had received a far better one from elsewhere, which, my attorney said, I couldn’t take unless my original buyer backed out — and he would only back out if he got sufficiently angry at me. Said my attorney, Make him mad. So I was headed to Rigby, Idaho, expressly to piss off a small-town businessman, who was trying to give me American money for a going concern on the strip east of town, and thereby make room for a rich Atlanta investor, new to our landscape, who needed this dealership as a kind of flagship for his other intentions. The question was how to provoke Rigby without arousing his suspicions, and I might have collected my thoughts a little better had I not had to battle trucks and tourists in the Gallatin Canyon.

Louise and I had spent a lot of time together in recent years, and we were both probably wondering where things would go from here. She had been married, briefly, long ago, and that fact, together with the relatively peaceful intervening years, gave a pleasant detachment to most of her relationships, including the one she had with me. In the past, that would have suited me perfectly; it did not seem to suit me now, and I was so powerfully attached to her it made me uncomfortable that she wasn’t interested in discussing our mutual future, though at least she had never suggested that we wouldn’t have one. With her thick blond hair pulled back in a barrette, her strong, shapely figure, and the direct fullness of her mouth, she was often noticed by other men. After ten years in Montana, she still had a strong Massachusetts accent. Louise was a lawyer, specializing in the adjudication of water rights between agricultural and municipal interests. In our rapidly changing world, she was much in demand. Though I wished we could spend more time together, Louise had taught me not to challenge her on this.

No longer the country crossroads of recent memory, Four Corners was filled with dentists’ offices, fast-food and espresso shops, and large and somehow foreboding filling stations that looked, at night, like colonies in space; nevertheless, the intersection was true to its name, sending you north to a transcontinental interstate, east into town, west to the ranches of Madison County, and south, my reluctant choice, up the Gallatin Canyon to Yellowstone and the towns of southeast Idaho, one of which contained property with my name on the deed.

We joined the stream of traffic heading south, the Gallatin River alongside and usually much below the roadway, a dashing high-gradient river with anglers in reflective stillness at the edges of its pools and bright rafts full of delighted tourists in flotation jackets and crash helmets sweeping through its white water. Gradually, the mountains pressed in on all this humanity, and I found myself behind a long line of cars trailing a cattle truck at well below the speed limit. This combination of cumbersome commercial traffic and impatient private cars was a lethal mixture that kept our canyon in the papers, as it regularly spat out corpses. In my rearview mirror, I could see a line behind me that was just as long as the one ahead, stretching back, thinning, and vanishing around a green bend. There was no passing lane for several miles. A single amorous elk could have turned us all into twisted, smoking metal.

“You might have been right,” Louise said. “It doesn’t look good.”

She almost certainly had better things to do. But, looking down the line of cars, I felt my blood pressure rising. Her hands rested quietly in her lap. I couldn’t possibly have rivaled such serenity.

“How do you plan to anger this guy in Rigby?” she asked.

“I’m going to try haughtiness. If I suggest that he bought the dealership cheap, he might tell me to keep the damn thing. The Atlanta guy just wants to start somewhere. All these people have a sort of parlay mentality, and they need to get on the playing field before they can start running it up. I’m a trader. It all happens for me in the transition. The moment of liquidation is the essence of capitalism.”

“What about the man in Rigby?”

“He’s an end user. He wants to keep it.”

I reflected on the pathos of ownership and the way it could bog you down.

“You should be in my world,” Louise said. “According to the law, water has no reality except its use. In Montana, water isn’t even wet. Every time some misguided soul suggests that fish need it, it ends up in the state supreme court.”

Birds were fleeing the advance of automobiles. I was elsewhere, trying to imagine my buyer, red-faced, storming out of the closing. I’d offer to let bygones be bygones, I’d take him to dinner, I’d throw a steak into him, for Christ’s sake. In the end, he’d be glad he wasn’t stuck with the lot.

Traffic headed toward us, far down the road. We were all packed together to make sure no one tried to pass. The rules had to be enforced. Occasionally, someone drifted out for a better look, but not far enough that someone else could close his space and possibly seal his fate.

This trip had its risks. I had only recently admitted to myself that I would like to make more of my situation with Louise than currently existed. Though ours was hardly a chaste relationship, real intimacy was relatively scarce. People in relationships nowadays seemed to retain their secrets like bank deposits — they always set some aside, in case they might need them to spend on someone new. I found it unpleasant to think that Louise could be withholding anything.

But I thought I was more presentable than I had been. When Louise and I first met, I was just coming off two and a half years of peddling satellite dishes in towns where a couple of dogs doing the wild thing in the middle of the road amounted to the high point of a year, and the highest-grossing business was a methamphetamine tent camp out in the sagebrush. Now I had caught the upswing in our local economy: cars, storage, tool rental, and mortgage discounting. I had a pretty home, debt-free, out on Sourdough. I owned a few things. I could be okay. I asked Louise what she thought of the new prosperity around us. She said wearily, “I’m not sure it’s such a good thing, living in a boomtown. It’s basically a high-end carny atmosphere.”

We were just passing Storm Castle and Garnet Mountain. When I glanced in the mirror, I saw a low red car with a scoop in its hood pull out to pass. I must have reacted somehow, because Louise asked me if I would like her to drive.