Snake River Story.

Gildner, Gary

In the shade of a tall locust in Pioneer Park, sharing a blanket, Deena Lee was on her feet performing a stretch and Montgomery Bolt was on his back, in plaid Bermuda shorts, reading a book. His head lay on a small cardboard box; the words FRAGILE: THIS SIDE UP, along the side of the box, seemed at the perfect angle, Deena Lee mused, to have recently slipped from one of his unusually large ears. She must mention that to him later, when her stretch, calling for concentration, was completed. But she will leave out the unusually large ear part.

You knew that the young boy-size figure on the blanket with pretty Deena Lee was Montgomery Bolt, because no other male in Snake River would wear such a flamboyant hat--it was a wide-brimmed flamenco dancer's hat fixed at a rakish tilt--and no young boy in that part of Idaho would likely be reading Madame Bovary, and most certainly not in the language in which that novel was written. A French major, Montgomery had just finished his first year at Reed. Back home now in time for the town's annual three-day Fourth of July hoopla, beginning two days hence, he was preparing for it, as he would say, by relaxing in the park. His left leg, bent at the knee, was holding up the other one, which had been thrown over it. The leg on top, in a slow, rhythmic up-and-down motion, was for several minutes the only thing moving on the blanket.

Deena Lee, who had been keeping herself rigid in a kind of vertical single-wing airplane position, arms straight out, eyes straight ahead, feet together, finally brought her arms slowly to her sides and puffed out her cheeks to release any tension that might still be residing in her face. "Whew!" she said, letting her cheeks go normal. She wore a black leotard and pink tights and was barefoot. To dance in an important ballet company was her dream. But she had one more year of high school to finish first, her parents had decreed--they who understood nothing--and in the meantime, therefore, she was, to use her favorite word of that summer, languishing. She was seventeen.

Montgomery Bolt, a couple months younger, raised his eyebrows, glanced at her, then returned to Emma Bovary racing headlong into her first adulterous passion with the scoundrel Rodolphe.

Deena brought her flushed body down to the blanket in a movement she considered moderately graceful, then turned on her side and regarded Montgomery's profile. He not only had large ears; his head was also large, which of course she'd known since forever. Anyway, she decided that FRAGILE: THIS SIDE UP, slipping out of the ear closest to her, was no longer that funny and she would not mention it. What puzzled her about him, and his sisters, was that, unlike her, they were not terribly eager to leave home and, when they did go away, mainly to college--or, in Jonna's case now, to travel around Spain for months and months--they seemed happy to come right back. Was it because they were rich and could go anywhere they wanted at any time? But how could being rich and that free make them want to come back there?

"Would you like me to move my head," Montgomery suddenly said, without taking his eyes off his book, "so that you might achieve the other half of your Black Angus sandwich?" The Bolt cook, Carmen, had prepared a lunch for three and packed it in the cardboard box he was using for a pillow.

"No, thanks," Deena replied, "I'm fine."

"You're too excited to eat. Or to sit still. I try not to suffer from

such a tentative condition."

"But you are, too, excited!"

"Of course I am. See?" He quickened the bounce of his top leg to demonstrate.

"Rich was very calm about it, at lunch. I mean getting out tomorrow. Didn't you notice?"

"Incarceration will do that--or so I've read."

"Well, I thought he was acting strange."

"Perhaps planning a breakout?"

Deena let that piece of wit go by.

Earlier, she and Montgomery had taken their box lunch to the Snake River County Jail, to share it with Rich. If, Deena thought, you could call watching your brother on the other side of a thick glass wall sit and stare at the ceiling sharing. She rolled on her back and delivered a big sigh. But if it hadn't been for Montgomery's dad, things could have been worse.

Deena had known the Bolts all her life. They owned lots of cattle and lots of land--ranch and timber, plus a ski resort--which her parents called prime. Her parents owned a smallish real estate business. Compared to what they did before she was born--more or less a late surprise--it must have been boring showing people through empty houses all the time. Anyway, those zillions of acres of prime land had been in Bolt hands for three generations. According to Montgomery, his grandfather, John Bolt Junior, was the last Bolt to actually pull on boots and mount a horse to work his properties. Montgomery's dad, Alan, grew up to manage things--often still in pajamas--from an air-conditioned office, next to his bedroom, that Montgomery showed her one time when he wasn't around: it looked out on a sweeping bend of the Snake River that was truly magnificent. Montgomery's uncles--his dad's two older brothers--were far more suited to take over that vast operation in the rope-and-saddle tradition of JBJ, as his grandfather was regularly known, but they hadn't been able to escape their rowdy teens. Bart died during Operation Desert Storm, which he got into after nearly killing a man in a bar fight, and handsome Ty had his chest stomped by a rodeo bronc. "After negotiating," Montgomery said, "a tumultuous eight-second journey." Deena did like how Montgomery talked, although some people thought he could be weird that way.

In fact, she, her brother Rich, and Montgomery's oldest sister Jonna were probably the three people on earth who spoke up for him no matter what. After his mother, of course. And his two other sisters, Georgia and Pom-Pom, if things came down to the wire. The girls were all born and, according to Rich, Alan and Maize had pretty much given up on having any more when, oops, here comes a surprise! It was the boy that old Alan had been seeking from the beginning, Rich said, and Rich would know. Alan Bolt poured out practically his whole history to her brother, to judge from the handful of very strange examples he passed on to her.

Anyway, one surprise begat another. When the doctors determined that Montgomery would probably not grow any taller than four feet, if that, Alan accused the hospital--named for his grandfather, John Bolt Senior, or JBS--of presenting him with the wrong child. He demanded DNA testing, which he would pay for, on all the male babies who had shared the nursery with Montgomery. There were four. Considerable legal wrangling and name-calling ensued--the other parents, perfectly satisfied with their young boys, were outraged at Alan Bolt's violent and characteristically imperial position and told him what they thought, mincing nothing.

Alan countered by announcing that he and his wife would be tested first. The result was that Montgomery John was found to be exactly who his birth certificate said he was--a Bolt. A dwarf. A word the father could not bring himself to say, although it must have shouted in his brain.

Depressed, Alan could not entertain--simply could not believe--that Maize might have been fooling around behind his back with some tainted jackal. Instead of any confrontation with her in that ugly area, he hired genealogy experts and forensic experts to inspect her family for genetic flaws. Maize, the daughter of a big-time Washington lumberman, was a tall woman who could saddle her own horse from the age of seven; she moved out of their bedroom and stopped speaking to him. The three daughters, all in their teens, refused to speak to him as well. Jonna, The Vocal Chord, Rich liked to call her, left her father a letter, which she let Rich read before rolling it tight as a pencil and inserting it in the barrel of the pistol the bastard kept by his bed. The letter declared that she had "worked my sweet ass" through a number of her father's cowboys--she lost count--and "at the moment, FYI, I am fucking the brains out of Manny Sanchez"--one of his veterinarians--"since you are so interested in 'flaws.'" The ambiguity of this phrasing, which she intended, gave the angry Jonna particular joy. Her ambition was to be a writer, which was also Rich's ambition and why they were so close. It was Jonna, an auburn-haired tall beauty like her mother, who would later be saved by Rich from a beating and likely a rape in a totally different context.

But before that deadly event, Alan Bolt continued his search for the why of Montgomery's condition. He even had the assumed grave of JBS measured for excavation, to get at the remains for a DNA sample. He apparently needed to prove that his bloodline at least was clean, whatever clean meant; but it was the word he probably used in his head to counter that other word.

What stopped him from digging JBS up was an order issued by Federal Judge Albertus McNeely, who pointed out that the deceased had been buried, either through ignorance or a cavalier impudence, on public land; and since the grandson could not establish that that gravesite--located on a particularly stunning shelf of mountain--was in fact his grandfather's no permission to exhume would be granted. Also and more significantly, the judge said, digging in that specific area would disturb the tranquility of the breeding ground of Spermophilius brunneus, the Northern Idaho ground squirrel, which was on the endangered species list. Judge McNeely had a framed photo on his wall of himself as a short, skinny kid looking up at, and shaking hands with, Senator Frank Church--Saint Frank Church, to the few old liberals still around Idaho. On certain days this photo would bring tears to the judge's eyes. How Rich got all that photo information, Deena had no idea; maybe he made it up--he could do that. On the other hand he was, hands down, a bulldog when he wanted to learn something. Anyway, Judge McNeely was a crusty Democrat and Alan Bolt, most vocally, was not.

Time passed. Rich and Jonna graduated from Snake River High School one year apart--he first. She put in a year at UCLA before calling it quits and joining her mother in going around to hunter-jumper competitions. Rich managed to finish two years at the university in Moscow, then returned to Snake River and signed on as a full-time cowboy at the Bolt ranch. He also became, little by little, young Montgomery's de facto guardian, especially when Jonna and Maize were away. When by and by Jonna grew bored with jumping horses, she joined Rich and later Deena in what became a kind of loose threesome looking out for, and/or trying to keep up with, this most recent Bolt, who seemed to be some kind of genius. He was borrowing books like Candide and The Stranger from Rich when his age was still in single digits; and as he approached twelve he was checking out college catalogs. Four years later he had acceptances from Stanford, Michigan, Chicago, and Reed, the only four he had applied to.

It was while Montgomery was spending his first Saturday night on the Reed campus that Jonna, at a party, got colorfully mouthy to the son of another wealthy Idaho landowner--"colorfully mouthy" being a phrase she took a liking to the instant she first said it at the trial and would repeat, from time to time, after all the dust had settled. Among other things, she told "this large tan-and-waxed son of privilege" (she admitted on the stand to calling him that several times on the night in question, and the more she said it--"fully aware of the irony"--the more it pleased her)--anyway, she told Adam Brand that she was no longer interested in sharing his bed, because he was dull and would always be dull. He was congenitally dull!

He slapped her, causing her to scream out. He was still slapping her when Rich came to her rescue, from another part of the party. Jonna contributed a tactic to help Rich--a fact of the rescue he made her swear not to mention. She had got on all fours behind the large, now rock-wielding Adam Brand so that Rich could rush him and push him over. Once down on the groomed lawn of his summer house, this erstwhile semi-amusing date of Jonna's was toast. Reversing the direction of the decorative rock he was aiming to crown Rich with did the trick. Unfortunately, he died from the blow.

Alan Bolt's attention abruptly shifted. When Rich was arrested and charged with manslaughter, Alan called his dad offering to help. He and J.D. Lee were not friends, exactly, although they and their wives did some socializing--the annual benefit dance for the JBS Memorial Hospital, Fourth of July rodeo committee dinner, an occasional wave and have-a-drink at the golf club. J.D. the old jock played eighteen holes often, of course; Alan didn't play--at all--but he and Maize dropped by now and then because the chef could grill a decent tenderloin. Their main connection was Rich.

"You know I'm fond of the young man," Alan said. "And how much I admire his work ethic at the ranch. This asinine charge--voluntary manslaughter--needs to be kicked square in the balls. I'd appreciate it, J.D., if you'd let me get my lawyers right on it. Besides everything else, it's my duty to a valued employee."

What Alan Bolt would never say to J.D. Lee--though, astonishingly, he would say it to the son--was that in high school he had formed a painful crush on the girl who would become Rich's mother. And he really, honest to God, still brooded over losing her. Pam Kovacik--those four syllables--could carry his heart across the western sunset, never mind having it pass her without beating in the hall. However, the truth was, he confessed to Rich, only he knew of his pain. There was no "losing her" because Pam Kovacik had barely noticed him. She knew his brothers, knew them well, but Alan was only the kid brother keeping his head down as he scooted to class. Pam pledged herself first to Ty in the fall of his senior year, her freshman. After he died exactly nine months later under Ruffian's hooves at the July Fourth rodeo, the oldest one in Idaho, she was taken up, a sophomore and still grieving, by the brawler Bart. J.D. Lee, the school's glamorous triple-threat tailback--he could run, kick, and throw--took over for keeps when Bart joined the Marines. For her part in gathering notice, Pam was Homecoming Queen, Miss Snake River County, and, her second year at the university in Moscow, a runner-up to Miss Idaho.

J.D. also enrolled at the university, as did Alan Bolt, still keeping his head down. J.D., however, performed his football skills well enough over four years to be drafted by the Vikings. FROM VANDAL TO VIKING, at least one headline read. (Not too many years later, a clipping of this headline, along with others, hung framed on a wall of Lee Real Estate in Snake River.) After signing his pro contract, he and Pam got married. Rich was born. Turned into a defensive back, J.D. became a phenom that first year at intercepting passes; a great pro career was predicted.

Back on the Bolt ranch in the Idaho panhandle. JBJ was knocked off his favorite cutting horse, Maxamillion, by a massive fatal heart attack and young Alan, who never took to riding, took over. He never liked horses, people figured, because of what happened to Ty. Which he witnessed, from the front row, and every time that he saw Ruffian come down on his brother, he thought it was a trick. "I really did think that," he told Rich.

But what Alan Bolt could do well, if he couldn't sit a horse, was stand and turn and speak in a surprisingly manly fashion. He'd learned how to do these things even before becoming head of the whole Bolt outfit, largely by carefully watching and imitating his father. Also--and oddly--he was the tallest of JBJ's three sons, even taller by one-half inch than the old man; but he knew that, to many, he seemed the shortest. This impression no longer mattered to him since he was now the only one left standing. "Except, sometimes, it mattered at night," he said to Rich. "Why is that?"

Anyway, moving on, he found somebody. On a business trip to Spokane he met Maize, the equestrian hunter-jumper red-haired daughter of the owner of Thunder Lumber; and after two more trips up there, specifically to see her, he proposed. He proposed because she reminded him of Pam Kovacik. "That's the God's truth," he said, and laughed, it seemed at himself, for realizing it just that moment. Maize's response to the large diamond ring he brought forth from his pocket, however, was, "Whoa, let me think about that." Which made him start to love her. Or so he told Deena's brother, who he wished, he said, was his own son. A comment, by now, that didn't surprise Rich.

Once a week, sometimes twice, for an hour, Alan and Rich spoke on the phone connecting the visitor's small stall with the inmate's even smaller stall at the Snake River County Jail. Alan did almost all the talking, usually with his head down. When he did glance up at Rich on the other side of the thick glass divide, Rich was often just gazing at the bare wall in front of him, where his feet would be planted to keep his tilted chair steady. From time to time he would make noises of acknowledgment into his mouthpiece, unhuh, yep, but beyond "Hello, Mr. Bolt" at the beginning of the hour and "Thanks for coming by, Mr. Bolt" at the end, he said very little to his visitor. Except for that one time, early on, when Alan asked him, "Are you mad at me, son? Tell me if you are."

"No, sir. Not at all."

"Because I tried to help."

"I know you did. We're all grateful. My mom and dad, Deena-- all of us."

"People--some--don't like me much. They took it out on you." "Don't worry about it. Six months will go by fast. I'll probably get out after five, maybe four, according to your lawyer. Especially if the public disturbance population hereabouts keeps growing, taking all the beds."

Alan Bolt did not smile. In a moment he shook his head. "A rotten sentence," he said. "Rotten, unfair--a disgrace! Besides, that Brand boy had it coming. God damn, what a useless family."

"At least I'm not over in Orofino, where the mean guys are."

"I will make this up to you, Rich."

"Hey, I'm getting some pretty' good material."

This last remark seemed to go by Alan Bolt, who was grieving. His attorneys had not been able to get this fine, smart, hard-working young cowboy off.

"Anyway, Mr. Bolt, you've been great." Rich added, though it was a stretch, "Jonna thinks so too." What she had said to him, in a recent letter, was "Well, could be he is only half a bastard. DNA testing may give us a clue."

After the sentence had been handed down, she declared she would spend every God damn ignorant minute he was locked up as close to him as possible. "Do I have to point out, again, that I am the cause of all this? And a party to it?"

Rich said she was crazy and even the half dozen most rabid anti-tax Patriot types hiding out in Snake River County who had never heard of the crazy Bolts knew that.

He said, "Tell you what. Why don't you get out of Snake River while I'm in jail."

She said, "Nope. I'll be up to see you every day."

He said, "If you don't scram, your chances of ever getting laid by me are nil."

"Is that, finally, a proposal?"

"Sure. But only to get laid."

For years, this was how they talked. Deena suspected that deep down a lot more was going on--for both of them--but for some reason they just couldn't reach that far. With real feeling. The closest they could come was this show-off cowboy banter. Which, if you asked her, she was tired of. They were--what? One pushing thirty, for God's sake, the other breathing hard behind. And maybe both stuck forever in Snake River.

Jonna flew to Spain. "Cruising the Madrid bars," she wrote, "with lust in my loins for one of those bullfighter studs like Lady Brett Ashley got."

It turned out that Deena wanted the other half of her steak sandwich, after all. She was still nervous-excited, even with all her stretching exercises. Rich--getting out--tomorrow!

"Gloriously in time for our great blustery show of fireworks," Montgomery said.

As for Rich, what with all his regular visitors, not to mention those private visits Alan Bolt arranged by working out some deal with the sheriff--probably for some contribution that was borderline illegal--the time had gone by so fast he barely got a dozen pages of notes down for the story he wanted to write. Which seemed to be the case for most of the stories he wanted to write. And this one was going to be especially hard. All that stuff he'd heard from Alan Bolt about his mom ... how she was on his mind, to this day, like a song.

Why was the man unloading these pathetic yearnings on him? His mom, Jesus. She knew how to dress nice, how to flatter people. She was personable. Sold real estate because--what else? Rich could say almost the exact same things about his dad. One pretty promising year of pro football, then just so-so for a couple more, then quit. Ended up back in Snake River to sell houses and empty lots, because the pair of them could still trade on their high school fame. Put fame in quotes. Put Alan Bolt in some kind of quotes too.

"All right," he said, his last visit, head down, "I will patch things up. I will try to be nicer to Montgomery John, though Christ on the cross knows he irritates hell out of me. Usually. Also," he sighed, "I will come to a decision about selling my beef to the Japanese. Exclusively. They want organic meat--no hormones or any of that. I can be a pussy and give it to them."

Rich, his feet on the wall, was thinking: a zoo really. He ought to go to Alaska, clear his head. He knew some people in Bristol Bay who did okay catching salmon. He could fish, save his money, and maybe stay there. If anyone wanted to come look for him, he wouldn't stop her.