'I gave it back to him,' she said. 'We didn't completely break the engagement. I just need to step away for a while.'
'How'd he take it?'
'He was very understanding. Hurt, but he knows it's not about him. It's my own problems, that I've been having all along. Then on top of that comes this crazy situation with my father.'
I was relieved. I had feared that Ian was the one who had broken the engagement because she'd confessed our affair or he suspected it, and that her regret might be growing.
'Does he still think you'll come to your senses?' I said.
'I guess so. He's the one who asked not to break things off. But he might change his mind. And let's face it, there'd be women standing in line for a nice young doctor.'
'I hardly know Ian, but I suspect he's not going to change his mind unless he has to.'
She gave me a quick grateful smile. 'I hope I don't sound heartless. I feel guilty, of course.'
I felt bad for him, too. But if I'd been him, I sure wouldn't have wanted to be on a marriage track with a woman who felt anxiety instead of anticipation.
Renee settled back and turned her attention to the roadside scenery, while I concentrated on negotiating the steep tight turns of the pass. Coming up it was one thing; going down was another, especially in an old rig like mine. This truck was built for work, and though it handled well and soundly, it didn't have the correction buffers built into modern vehicles. If you went into a curve a few miles per hour too fast or a few feet too far to one side, pulling out would be hairy at best. Then again, she was still running as strong as ever after forty years-well worth the extra effort-and she'd never let me down.
As the terrain leveled out the road continued to wind through a particularly lovely area approaching the Blackfoot highway. West of the Divide, the ground cover of snow mostly disappeared except in the distant higher mountains, and the crisp blue of the sky segued into a softer gray. The weather over here tended to be warmer and wetter anyway, and now it looked like a front was moving in from the Pacific. A fine drizzle began as we followed the Blackfoot, fat and roiling with spring runoff. The last few miles into Missoula took us through Hellgate Canyon, a narrow cliff-lined stretch that had been a favorite place for hostile Native tribes to ambush each other. According to one theory, this was the origin of the city's name-a Salish Indian word meaning 'horrible.'
We splurged on a good hotel, a sedate older place near downtown, and got a third-floor room with a little balcony overlooking the Clark Fork River. After lunch, we still had a couple of hours to while away before meeting with Buddy Pertwee. We decided to stay home and rest up-get ready for the reason we'd come here.
There's a special quality to a situation like that. With the door closed, the room was our sanctuary, cozy and private, and nobody knew or cared that we were there. We stretched out on top of the bed and bundled up together in the comforter, achieved a satisfactory arrangement of limbs, exchanged one brief chaste kiss, and slipped into a delicious trance soothed by the murmur of the river below and the fingers of rain streaking the hazy windows.
43
I called Buddy Pertwee just after five o'clock that afternoon; he suggested meeting at an old downtown bar called Knuckles. I was slightly hesitant about taking Renee there. I hadn't done much partying in Missoula for quite a few years, but back then Knuckles had been the watering hole of choice for local bikers and a lot of other hard- edged individuals.
But there were leavening elements of old hippies, blue-collar working people, college students, and other young folks groping their way up the perilous ladder of life, and rowdy as it was, real trouble was rare and usually happened later in the evenings when enthusiasm was running high. It was also a good-sized place, so we'd be able to get off by ourselves and have a private conversation. And I wanted Buddy to feel comfortable, on turf of his own choosing.
Downtown was only a few blocks away, so Renee and I walked. She carried one of those little traveler's umbrellas that she offered to share, but the rain had lightened to a drizzle and I enjoyed feeling it against my face. I liked rain, at least when I didn't have to stay outside working in it all day-maybe a throwback to my Celtic heritage, a gloomy, gene-deep love for a misty land where I had never gone.
Still, the damp weather enhanced the neon-lit welcome of Knuckles when we stepped inside. The main room was a long rectangle, with an L-shaped bar running most of its length and a fine old hand-carved backbar. The first thing that struck you when you walked in was a unique and stellar portrait collection, by a renowned local photographer, of old-time cowboys, railroad men, and drifters who had frequented this place. The way that he had caught their faces was magic; their eyes, their creased, weathered skin, and their broken smiles were windows into their hard and sometimes desperate lives. A gold star pasted in a bottom corner meant that they were dead. There were a lot of those.
We paused to order drinks from the bartender, a pretty young woman with multiple body piercings. When she turned away and crouched to pull a beer out of a cooler, the scallop between her top and her low-cut jeans revealed what looked like a snake tattooed down her spine. It must have been a fairly big snake, a green one. In general, the body art motif spoke loud. I saw one guy shrug off his jacket and sling it over a barstool, and I thought at first that he was wearing a striped shirt. In fact, his arms were bare.
Renee leaned close to me and whispered, 'I almost got a tramp stamp once, but I chickened out.'
'Tramp stamp?'
'You know. A butterfly or something, up high on a girl's behind, so you can just see it above her whale tail.'
'Whale tail?'
'Thong, The back part,' she said, giving me her patient-teacher look again.
After several seconds, it registered. 'Oh. Because that's the shape. Like the tail of an actual whale, sort of, uh, rising up out of the ocean of her womanhood.'
She patted my hand approvingly. 'What a quick study you are. Did you ever think about it? A tattoo?'
'I never had the money.'
We took a booth toward the rear. The crowd was moderate-a few regulars who'd probably been there all day, several men bullshitting over their after-work beers, and a couple more playing desultory eight-ball-but there was a steady trickle of newcomers, mostly of the younger set. I watched them as they came through the door; I didn't know what Buddy looked like, but I'd given him a brief description of Renee and me, and she, at least, wouldn't be hard to spot in here.
When he did come walking over to us, I liked the immediate hit I got. He had the knobby look of a guy who was accustomed to using his body; banged-up hands and scraped forearms spoke to the landscaping work he did. His face had the kind of wary, tough look that came from taking some hard shots in life, like the time he'd done in the state prison in Deer Lodge.
I stood up, shook his hand, and told him the drinks were on me. He said my own setup, a bottle of Pabst and a shot of Knob Creek bourbon, looked pretty good. Renee sat him down beside her and turned on her quiet charm; as I waited at the bar, I could see her listening attentively and nodding. By the time I got back to the booth, he had lit a cigarette and seemed to be relaxing.
'Buddy used to live in Phosphor before he moved here,' Renee said to me. 'He was telling me about what happened to Astrid's cabin. Remember, the roof was half-gone?' She turned back to him inquiringly.
'What I heard was, her family wanted to get rid of it, so they found a guy who was going to take it apart and reuse the logs somewhere else.' He spoke in a raspy voice, with his gaze constantly shifting. 'But he walked off before he got too far. Didn't like the feel of it.'
I had no trouble understanding that.
'And they just left it?' Renee said.
'Guess so. I haven't been over that way for a long time.' He took a swig of beer, then returned to his posture of hunching over the table with his forearms encircling his drinks. I'd read somewhere that that protectiveness was a habit men picked up in prison.
'Bad memories?' she prompted.
'Worse than memories. I'd get stomped.' His quick gaze flicked back and forth between her and me. 'I was a
