The Good Brother

12

On the third day Joe Tiller rose early and walked the wide streets of Missoula, his breath visible in the cold air. Many of the low buildings were made of stone, with broad alleys and parking lots behind. There was a spacious quality to the town that was absent in Kentucky. Mist lifted from the mountains to reveal giant white letters made of concrete — an L and an M. He wondered if there were so many mountains that they were coded rather than named. A herd of elk browsed the slopes above the town.

The only open business was the Wolf, its orange sign aglow. Just inside the door was a locked cabinet containing pints of liquor to go, and a long bar where a few men waited for the first drinks of the day. A rifle collection hung from pegs high on the wall. There was no clock. Most of the clientele looked as if they had long ago abandoned a life that revolved around being anywhere at a specific time. Beside the bar, several people were eating breakfast at a low counter. A man slept at a table. A dog slept by the door.

Joe ordered breakfast. As he ate, he dropped a slice of toast, and a grizzled man beside him grinned. “They put stuff on that to make it slippery,” he said. His voice held the jocular camaraderie shared by single men eating public meals alone. In that instant, Joe decided to stay in Missoula.

He looked through the local paper. Work was scarce and the classifieds had a section labeled “For Giveaway” that offered pets and furniture. The cheapest rates were sharing a house, but he knew he couldn’t live with anyone. He shoved the paper away and spilled his coffee, which flowed along the counter toward the man beside him. Joe apologized and the man shrugged.

“I can’t believe how much it costs to live here,” Joe said.

“Movie stars,” the man said. “They’re ruining it for the rest of us.”

He gave Joe a careful look.

“Don’t worry,” Joe said. “I don’t even like movies.”

“This used to be a working man’s town.”

“I’m looking for work, too.”

“I can’t help you there, partner. This is a bad time for it. Maybe in the spring.”

“Shoot, I got to find a place to live first.”

“How fancy you want it?”

“Not too.”

“Used to be, you could rent fishing cabins through the winter up some of these creeks. Might be cold.”

“What creeks?”

“Grant Creek’s out, it’s full of movie stars. Rattlesnake’s crammed with, houses, too. Even little old Lolo Creek’s got million-dollar log cabins on it now. About all that’s left is Rock Creek. Best thing is to drive up there and ask around.”

Joe thanked the man and left the Wolf. At a gas station he stopped behind a convoy that included a six-horse trailer and two pickups. One truck bed was filled with provisions and another held the remains of several elk. Rows of rifles blocked each rear window. The outfit reminded him of a military operation rather than a hunting party, and he thought of men at home emerging from the autumn woods with a rifle in one hand and a gutted deer slung over their shoulders.

He drove east along the river, found Rock Creek, and stopped at a bar. The female bartender told him about a cabin several miles up the road. He entered a hollow and was reminded of Kentucky — a narrow road that separated hillside from creek. The land opened to a wide bottom that offered summer campsites, RV hookups, and tipis you could sleep in for an appalling price.

Just beyond a bend, a man stood in water to his knees. He wore a short vest and rubber boots that ran past his armpits. He didn’t seem to have entered the creek so much as to have grown from it. Suddenly he snapped upright and a fishing rod flashed above his head, trailing a thick luminous line. He pulled the line with his free hand and Joe shook his head at the tangled mess that would surely surround him in the water.

The narrow road twisted with the water’s flow. Half the hollow lay in deep shadow cast by the mountaintop. Rock Creek glittered to Joe’s right, swift and wide, broken by vacant beds of stone. A small green sign announced his passage into Granite County. The road became dirt. He followed a turnoff to a small house beside a stack of firewood bigger than the house itself. The ground was hard and tipped by frost. There had been a light dusting of snow but wind had moved it, leaving patches of white against the earth. Winter lived here while town still held autumn.

A man stepped from the woods, wearing a flannel shirt with sleeves ripped away at each elbow. He carried an ax in a casual manner. Joe was chilly in his jacket, but the man seemed impervious to weather.

“Came about the cabin,” Joe said.

The man led Joe through open woods to a twin-rut road that ended at a small cabin made of log. A stove flue poked from the roof. “Door’s open,” the man said. His voice was low and thick, as if unaccustomed to speech.

The inside air was much cooler than outdoors. The cabin was one large room and a bath with pine walls that soaked up light. The furnishings consisted of a bed, a table, two chairs, a couch, and a bureau. There was a woodstove with a metal thermometer attached to the flue. From the window Joe could hear the rash of water over rocks. Another thermometer was visible through the glass.

Outside, the landlord removed a tube of lip balm, uncapped it, gave his mouth a coat, recapped the tube, and slid it into his pocket. He performed the entire process with one hand.

“Looks good to me,” Joe said. “How warm is it?”

“It’s a summer cabin, insulated with sawdust and newspaper. You’ll need plenty of firewood.”

“Can I get it off you?”

The man shook his head. He gave Joe a scrap of paper with a name and phone number for wood. He told him the rent.

“If I pay in advance, will you lower it?”

“Now you’re talking my language,” the man said. “I’m Ty Skinner.”

He offered his hand and Joe hesitated before taking it. He wanted to get the words right. He should have practiced.

“I’m Joe Tiller.” It sounded hollow and thin.

“Proud to know you. I’ll be your neighbor, but you won’t hear a sound out of me. Nearest phone’s at the tavern by the interstate. You can get your mail there. It’s got the only TV for miles. Only people, too.”

“I’m here for peace and quiet.”

“You’ll fit in, then. But you got to be out by May. Rent triples for tourists.”

“Tourists?”

“This is the best fly-fishing stream in the world. It’s famous. Canyon fills up with boneheads all summer.”

Joe understood that a canyon was the same as a hollow.

“Think I’ll need snow tires?” he said.

“They just mean you travel further before you get stuck. Then you got a longer walk back.”

“I never thought of it that way.”

“Most of you southern boys don’t.”

“How’d you know that?”

“You got an accent. Don’t worry, I like southerners. It’s the Californians I’d like to shoot. They think blue’s the same color everywhere. Out here it’s not.”

Joe nodded. He was confused by Ty’s words, but didn’t want to show any affinity to a Californian.

“Is that them standing in the water back there?”

“No,” Ty said, “They’re locals. Fish all winter. Best thing about Alaska was no Californians.”

“You lived up there?”

“Ten years.”

“Like it?”

“Fucking loved it, man.”

“Then why leave?”

“Got lonely. I came down to Montana for the social life.”

“I heard it’s beautiful up there.”

“You can’t eat the scenery.”

Ty looked at him briefly and walked into the woods. The tall pines took him swift as sudden dusk.

Joe went inside his house. He turned the faucets on and off and tested the shower. He plugged in the refrigerator and listened to the hum. He sat on the couch. He moved to the chair. He lay on the bed, which sagged. He opened each drawer of the bureau and lifted the windows to flush a stale smell. There was nothing on the walls. He went outside and sat on a stump. The cabin was half the size of his trailer, and the mountain rose behind it like a fortress wall He was Joe Tiller and this was where he lived.

He returned to Missoula, where he called the wood man and arranged for a delivery the next day. The treeless mountains surrounded the town in pale green humps that seemed to be set in place rather than rising from the land. Higgins Street ended at a large red sculpture of the letter X repeated four times. Joe wondered why the town emphasized the alphabet.

The midday air warmed him. He thought vaguely of buying a calendar, but time had ceased to be important. Beside a bar was a pawnshop filled with knives, CD players, leather coats, and guns. The proprietor wore a pistol on his hip and moved with an athlete’s grace. His pale eyes were flat and hard. On a glass display case was a stack of bumper stickers, each of which said FEAR THE GOVERNMENT THAT FEARS YOUR GUN.

Eventually Joe would need a weapon, but he couldn’t yet bear the notion of handling a gun. Instead, he bought a snakeskin belt and a leather buckle imprinted with a royal flush in diamonds.

“I’ll be back for a pistol,” he said.

“You need a Montana driver’s license. Plus there’s a five-day wait. Government sticks its beak in all our business.”

“Why’s that?”

“Can’t take care of its own, I guess.”

“Don’t make much sense.”

“No. They forgot it wasn’t too long back, we used guns out here for protection. I been here four generations. My grandfather killed off wolves that bothered his stock, and now they’re putting wolves back and taking our guns. I’m glad he’s not around to see it. Here, take this.”

He handed Joe a leaflet printed on a single sheet of paper, folded in thirds. On the front panel were the words LIBERTY TEETH and a crudely drawn American flag. Joe opened the paper to a drawing of two crossed rifles and the words “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed — UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION.”

The third panel showed a blurry picture of George Washington with a word balloon above his head: “Firearms stand next in importance to the Constitution itself. They are the American people’s liberty teeth and keystone under independence.”

“George Washington,” Joe said. “Think he really said that?”

“He was a soldier, wasn’t he?”

“Reckon so.”

On the wall behind the man hung a prosthetic leg. It was old and heavy, with exposed springs and cracked leather straps, Joe figured it was an antique. It was colored to resemble flesh but had faded to the hue of a terrible burn. Joe pointed to it.

“Guess ITI know where to come if I need one.”

“I thought he’d be back the next day.”

“How long you had it?”

“Two years,” the man said.

“He must have been hard up,”

A small girl pushed the door open, carrying a man’s jacket over her arm. She placed the jacket on the counter and stared at the floor. She was very thin.

“Your daddy send you in?” the man said.

She nodded.

“He in the bar next door?”

She nodded again.

“Tell him I can’t take it today.”

She left with the jacket. The man’s expression returned to its hardened cast.

“That ain’t right,” Joe said. “Her coming in here that way.”

“It’s a free country.”

Joe went outside and threaded the belt through the loops of his pants, feeling closer to belonging in the West. The sun poured heat into the town. A tall woman wearing a fur coat and high heels emerged from an espresso shop. She sat sideways in a sports car, swiveled her legs into its plush interior, and drove away. Seconds later, a young man holding a straight razor backed out of a bar, forced by an older man who gripped the kid’s wrist. In a deft motion, the man disarmed the kid and sent him stumbling against a parked car. The man returned to the bar, which released a stream of laughter before the door shut again. The kid skulked away as if kicked. It occurred to Joe that a snakeskin belt didn’t make him belong here at all.

At a secondhand store he bought clothes, a sleeping bag, several blankets, and kitchen supplies. Many of the customers were Indians and he was careful not to stare. They appeared sad, rather than fierce, reminding him of people from the deepest hollows in Kentucky. They dressed the same, too — quilted flannel shirts, jeans, and boots.

He stopped for groceries and drove east on the interstate, past a sawmill pumping thick smoke into the pristine air. At the mouth of Rock Creek he headed south toward the Sapphire Mountains. Half the canyon was deep in shadow.

Outfitting the cabin required less than half an hour, and he washed the kitchen supplies twice to draw out the chore. He spent several minutes arranging his pillow and sleeping bag on the bed. In the kitchenette he changed the order of food along the shelves, stacking the cans in descending order of size. He distributed the clothes among the bureau drawers. On a nail by the door he hung a heavy coat with a phony sheepskin collar. His mother had always had a junk drawer in her kitchen, and he designated one as such, except he had nothing to put in it.

He granted the possum a place of honor on top of the refrigerator. Dust fell from, its pale fur. One eye was gone. He stroked its back. The bare walls made him sad, and he went outside and sat on a stump. The enormity of the decisions he’d made crashed against him like surf.

He rose abruptly, as if motion would blot the past, and looked around for somewhere to go. The woods at home had always served as solace and he decided to see Rock Creek. A faint path wove through the cottonwood and pine. Trees grew farther apart than in Kentucky, and groundcover was thin. The creek had no bank. The land ended and the water began. Orange moss shimmered on the bark of a cottonwood, the biggest tree along the stream, and at its base was a necklace of gnaw marks left by a beaver. Joe admired the beaver’s ambition, the boldness necessary to make such an attempt. He wondered if it was a bad sign to envy animals.

The water sparkled in the sun, running swift and black in the shade. The sun receded behind the mountain peak like an eye that abruptly closed and doused the canyon’s light. Joe remained by the water, soothed by its motion, as darkness moved through the valley like wind. The air became cold. Stars were bright and very close. A high-pitched yip echoed through the woods, trailing away in a mournful call. It came again, rising and falling in a lilt, repeating itself, and though he’d never heard the sound before, he knew it was a coyote. When it stopped, the woods seemed more silent than before. Full night had arrived. Joe headed for the cabin, quickened by a faint fear of losing his way. He undressed and went to bed.

He woke in a fetal ball, watching his breath turn white in the glimmer of dawn. His face was cold. Inside the sleeping bag, and beneath several blankets, his body was very warm. The thermometer attached to the woodstove read thirty-eight degrees, and the outside thermometer said forty-five. Joe gathered his clothes, stepped outside, and dressed in the sun. Larch flared in lines like candles along the higher slopes.

He fixed coffee and sat on the stump. A magpie’s black-and-white wings made a pattern that reminded him of rowing rather than flight. He washed his cup, then washed all the dishes he’d bought the previous day. He made his bed. He adjusted the possum. He felt the urge to tidy the cabin but there was nothing out of place. He sat on the stump and tried not to think of Rodale. His mind skipped to Abigail, then to his mother, Sara, Marlon, and Rundell Day. He didn’t want to think about them.

He went in the house and stood before the bathroom mirror, which framed his face in metal strips.

“Hi, I’m Joe Tiller,” he said.

He shrugged. It didn’t sound right.

“Name’s Joe,” he said. “Joe Tiller.”

“Nice to meet you. They call me Joe.”

“I’m Joe. Joe Tiller.”

“Just call me Joe.”

He looked over the cramped room, the narrow shower, the single nail for his towel, Sheetrock tape showed through the plaster where the corners met.

“I’m Joe Tiller,” he said, “and this is where I live.”

He walked around the cabin, checking sightlines. Anyone could easily see inside. He’d have to keep the curtains closed. Under the porch he found a shovel with, a split handle. The land glowed beneath a clean sky. He ate lunch. He wished he smoked for something to do.

A man arrived in the afternoon with two cords of firewood. His dump truck held dents on every surface, including the roof, as if it had been batted about by a giant bear. The side mirrors were fixed in place with wire. A small boy sat in the passenger seat. The man eased to the ground, talking before he got the door shut. An eye was gone and the skin sagged over the hole like a slack drape.

“You’re lucky,” he said. “I had wood left over. Not much call for a load this size. Demand’s went down in Missoula since that new law.”

“Which one was that?”

“It won’t let them burn wood half the winter.”

Joe laughed.

“I’m serious as a heart attack,” the man said. “New houses can’t put a woodstove in. They got an anonymous phone line to report your neighbor for heating his house with wood. About like a tip line for poaching.”

“What for?”

“Damn air’s no good. The same air stays in the valley till spring. Everybody just breathes each other’s old breath, about like being in the joint. I was at Deer Lodge for thirty-two months and ten days. You ever do any time?”

“No,” Joe said. “Why?”

“You got a look is all. I seen it before. Down the road from Deer Lodge is the old territorial prison from a hundred years ago. You know it’s a tourist place now. People pay good money to go in there.”

“I can’t see that.”

“Tell you something else I don’t get is being a guard. Every damn one was a registered son of a bitch. They spent all day in the same place as me, only difference was they went home to eat and sleep.”

“Maybe get a little fresh air.”

“Not if they lived in Missoula. Some days you’re supposed to stay indoors.”

“How do you know when?”

“It’s in the paper.”

“Well,” Joe said.

“Indians wouldn’t camp there in the old days. The fire smoke didn’t go nowhere. Then the white man came along and built a town.”

The man was becoming agitated. Joe jerked his head to indicate the child in the truck.

“Looks like you got you a helper.”

“My boy,” the man said.

“Family business?”

“Dad owns the land we log.”

“Must be nice to work together like that.”

“Right now I live half a mile from my folks,” the man said. “Sometimes I wish it was more like five or six,”

Joe paid in cash and the truck bed rose on its hydraulic stem, dumping the wood. The man drove in little jerks to dislodge the last of the load, leaving deep grooves in the grass. He circled the cabin and Joe waited for him to return and stack the wood. The sound of the truck’s engine faded through the woods and after a while he realized that the man was not coming back. Joe studied the wood, dismayed to find it was all the same — thin pine. There were no big chunks of hardwood for overnight, no hot-burning ash to take the morning chill off the house. The timber business was better in Montana than Kentucky. The wood cost more and weighed less, and the customer stacked it himself.

Inside, he stroked the possum’s back, wondering if they lived in the West, He wished he’d asked Morgan what had possessed him to stuff the ugliest animal in the woods. The cabin was dark. The walls seemed to be closing in on Joe like a cardboard box that was slowly being crushed. He hurried to his car and drove to town. Mountains ringed Missoula like the sloping sides of a giant bowl. A layer of gray clouds made a Ed that clamped in car exhaust and chimney smoke. His eyes stung. His throat hurt.

At the Department of Motor Vehicles he took a written test for switching to a Montana driver’s license. The majority of the people in line were newcomers from California who wore western shirts with button-down collars. Joe passed the test but decided to grow a beard before the photograph. He wanted the picture to look nothing like his face at home.

At the edge of town he stopped beside the mountain where he’d seen the herd of elk. He followed their trail as it wound through the saddle of a gap, then left it for the summit. Hard snow lay like web in the crevice of shade made by rock. At the top he rested, his breath gusting in the chilly air. Sweat cooled inside his clothes. He’d penetrated the haze that draped the town, as if he’d risen above a high-water mark left by flood. The air was clean, the light pure. Missoula sat below the surface like a city beneath the sea.

Joe lay on his back and remembered a boy he’d grown up with who couldn’t wait to leave the hills. He’d gone to Detroit and worked in the auto plants for ten years, and finally returned. He bought an old house on his home hill and put a mail-order skylight in the roof. Neighbors came to see it, astounded at the thought of someone cutting a hole in his own roof. After nine months the man left again, as if being gone had poisoned him for living in the hills.

Joe began walking down the mountain. Two hawks spiraled a thermal, rising in a column to the darker blue above. He wondered if he’d ever love this land strongly enough to be ruined by living away from it. Montana was similar to Kentucky except the mountains were higher and there was no oak. At home the poor people lived in the hills and the rich people lived in town. Here it was the other way around.

On his way out of town, he stopped at a used-car lot. He looked at a four-door pickup with twin tires in the rear and heavy bumpers. Another truck had aluminum siding over a plywood topper with a chimney flue protruding from its pitched roof. He bypassed the late model cars for an old Jeep Wagoneer. It reminded him of a station wagon crossed with a track, jacked high all around. The locking front hubs were alien to Joe, but it was the kind of vehicle a man wearing a snakeskin belt might drive. He traded for it, paving a little boot.

He drove home and sat on his stump. A zigzag shadow cast by the mountain split the canyon. The land was as alien to him as the inside of his cabin. The air turned gray, then black. The coyote called. Snow began to fall.

He had food but wasn’t hungry. He had a Jeep but nowhere to go. He had a new name and no one to call him.