Ride With Me, Mariah Montana by Ivan Doig

Author:Ivan Doig [Doig, Ivan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781476745152
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2013-07-01T07:00:00+00:00

EAST OF CRAZY

. . . Wind is the ventriloquism of Montana’s seasons. In utter summer it can blow in from the west, the mountains, and convince you November is here. The other way around, the truly world-changing recital: the chinook breathing springtime into deadest winter. In just such a toasting wind-from-another-time we found my father, slumped onto the steering wheel of his pickup after the exertion of putting on chains to navigate the instant new mud from the Shields River calving shed to home. . . .

—RILEY WRIGHT’S NOTES, EN ROUTE TO CLYDE PARK, SEPTEMBER 6, 1989

IT HIT ME LIKE a kick in the heart.

What is the saying?—life is one damn thing after another, and love is two damned things after each other. Both parts pertained in the instant after Riley’s double-barreled ambush, oh, did they ever. Bad enough to me, the prospect of Mariah going into marriage misadventure with Riley again. But on top of that, the searing feeling of simply her going. California is the American word for away, and I knew perfectly well the declension of it. As if by rote, a time or two a year a visit would be staged, daughter dutifully back for some ration of days or father descending south to clutter up the routine there for a mutually uncomfortable span. Periodic phone calls, Hi there, how you doing?—Good enough, how about yourself?, because letters are not habit any more. But beyond such dabs of keeping in touch, absence across distance. The formula of the young for moving a life from what it came into the world attached to. No parent can say it is anything but the history of the race, tidally repeating, yet each time the pain comes new.

At least I wasn’t alone in being caught off guard in the cardio quadrant. Mariah stared lidlessly past me and my strangled cheeseburger at the author of this remarriage proposal or marriage reproprosal or whatever it constituted.

“I suppose this is a little bit of a surprise,” Riley said around me to her in his ever sensitive fashion. Still leaning far forward onto the counter, he seemed poised to plunge as far as it would take to convince Mariah. Cupid’s own daredevil, all of a goddamn sudden. “But why wait with it?” he charged onward. “Mariah, this Globe job is just what we want to make a fresh go at life. It’s like winning the lottery when we didn’t even know we had a ticket.”

Blinking at last, Mariah made herself respond. “Quite a change of geography you’ve got in mind.” Quite, yeah. Somehow Mariah California didn’t have the same ring to it.

“But don’t you see, that’s just exactly why we ought to do it,” Riley hurried to expound. “New territory, new jobs. New—”

“Jobuh,” she placed into the record to rectify the s he’d plotched onto the word. “You’re forgetting, the Glob only invited you.”

“A shooter like you,” Riley assured her in revivalist style but obviously also meant it, “can latch on in no time, at the Globe or somewhere else if you want.

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