English Creek - Ivan Doig by Ivan Doig

Author:Ivan Doig [Doig, Ivan]
Format: epub
Published: 2011-05-01T01:04:04.210234+00:00

I mounted up and cleared out of there; Alec and Leona all too soon would be mooning over each other like I didn’t exist anyway; and as promptly as I was out of eyeshot behind the catch pen at the far end of the arena I gave Mouse a jab in the ribs that made him woof in surprise. Chief Joseph, my rosy hind end.

But I suppose my actual target was life. This situation of being old enough to be on the edge of everything and too young to get to the middle of any of it.

* * *

"Hi," Ray Heaney greeted as I climbed onto the arena fence beside him. The grin-cuts were deep into his face and the big front teeth were out on parade. Ray could make you feel that your arrival was the central event in his recent life. "What’ve you been up to?"

“Oh"—summary seemed so far out of the question, I chose neutrality—“about the usual. You ?"

"Pilot again." So saying, Ray held up his hands to show his calluses. One hard oblong bump across the base of each finger, like sets of knuckles on his palms. I nodded in commendation. My shovel calluses were mosquito bites in comparison. This made the second summer Ray was stacking lumber in his father’s lumber yard—the “pile it here, pile it there" nature of that job was what produced the "pilot" joke—and his hands and forearms were gaining real heft.

Now Ray thrust his right mitt across to within reach of mine.

“Shake the hand that shook the hand?" he challenged. It was a term we had picked up from his father—Ray could even rumble it just like Ed Heaney’s bass-drum voice—who remembered it from his own boyhood in Butte when guys still went around saying "Shake the hand that shook the hand of John L. Sullivan," the heavyweight boxing champ of then.

I took Ray up on the hand duel, even though I pretty well knew how this contest of ours was going to turn out from now on. We made a careful fit of the handshake grip; then Ray chanted the start, "One, two, three."

After about a minute of mutual grunted squeezing, I admitted: "Okay. I’m out-squoze."

“You’ll get me next time," Ray said. “Didn’t I see Alec riding around acting like a calf roper?"

Some years before, Ed Heaney had driven out from Gros Ventre to the ranger station one summer Saturday to talk forest business with my father. And with him, to my surprise and no little consternation, came his son my age, Ray. I could see perfectly damn well what was intended here, and that’s the way it did happen. Off up the South Fork our fathers rode to eyeball a stand of timber which interested Ed for buckrake teeth he could sell at his lumber yard, and Ray and I were left to entertain one another.

Living out there at English Creek I always was stumped about what of my existence would interest any other boy in the world.

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