Selected Pages 5 Part III The Salter Cabin
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Three days after Thad’s urgent phone call, a white Ford compact turns off the highway and climbs the steep driveway up to the circular gravel drive in front of the ranch house. Thad walks out onto the porch and watches as Hank Pryor disentangles himself from the small car, extracting his tall frame from the driver seat with the athletic ease Thad recalls from as far back as Pleiku Province. Hank’s burnished blackness, all six foot four of him, wearing a rust red San Francisco 49ers jersey, rises up stark and imposing against the enamel pan whiteness of the rented Ford. He greets Thad with his languid Louisiana grin.
The evening is warm, soon to be another August twilight out on the open range brushing its phantasmagoria of gold and rose at the far edge of the world but with the ever present soggy dankness of cattle barns carried along on the breeze. Thad notices the peaks of the Wallowas twirling up some darkening thunder clouds to toss at them later and feels just a hint in the air of grayish winter. The distance and the openness in this part of Eastern Oregon made it possible to feel the first spit of rain on your skin even though it might yet be several hours before that first drop fell.
Thad attempts to fathom the sense of relief he feels at seeing his buddy, Hank. He could not push from his mind the image of the grimy chewing tobacco tin, now sacked in a plastic bag and hidden away in a drawer in the tool bench in the barn, or the nagging awareness that someone, almost assuredly that corrupt cop, had tried to shoot Rambo. This thought brings his anger to the surface again, so he pushes it from his mind. As he walks down the steps to help Hank with his bags, he questions his impulsive decision to summon him. But so clear to him in the fury of that moment standing in the spot where the shooter had hidden was his certainty that Hank would be integral, an essential part of any resolution to this dilemma.
“Hank,” he says shaking his outstretched hand. “They apparently don’t make a car in your size.”
“Not one that doesn’t cost a fortune,” Hank replies.
“How was your drive out?”
“Just follow the big trucks up that interstate that runs beside the Columbia River and on up the Gorge. Then this little ribbon of a road that seems to go on forever across open range land and suddenly you slam into these mountains. Jesus, man, no wonder you’re all nature lovers up here. And you know I have a small request, Thad.” Thad looks up puzzled. “Those mountains you got up there,” Hank says grinning and pointing up toward the cloud capped Wallowas, “can I take a couple of those back with me. Ellen and I have the perfect spot for them in our backyard.”
“They’re all yours,” Thad says reaching for Hank’s sports bag in the trunk. His friend does not look much different than he had the day they had parted on the tarmac at Firebase Delaware. “Look,” Thad says lowering his voice, “Maggie doesn’t……”
“Got that,” says Hank with a matter of fact shrug and rests one of his big paws on Thad’s shoulder for a moment before he takes the sports bag from him and tosses it over his shoulder. He hoists up his other suitcase by its grip.
As they turn to go inside, they encounter Maggie who has gotten up from the couch where she has been reading in the lazy warmth and come out onto the porch. Standing up there, jeans and a sweatshirt, strap sandals, sleepy eyed, still in transit back from whatever world she had been visiting in the book she still clutched at her side, she surveys the two of them and says, while casting a skeptical look at Thad and then looking beyond them to the car, “Hank, my god, big guy, what’ve you done with Ellen?”
“Ellen banished me,” Hank says walking up the stairs to greet her. “She’s got a big project going on and she kept tripping over me.” When Hank got to the porch, he sets down the suitcase, drapes his sports bag over it and lifts Maggie up in his arms where she dangles as though she were resting in tree limbs. “And how’s my Maggie been,” he teases her. “This old guy,” he flicks a look back at Thad, “still the same hard chore he’s always been.”
“He’s retired now, a gentlemen rancher,” Maggie says regarding Thad critically from her perch in Hank’s arms. “Mellow as an old house cat.”
In the early days when she and Thad first met, Hank, a good friend to them both, had been the vicarious romantic in their relationship when neither Thad nor Maggie had been ready for that role. In his starched Hawaiian shirt, he stood up as Thad’s best man at their blue jeans wedding in Portland.
Hank sets Maggie back on the porch, softly, as though she were made of glass. As they go into the house, Hank holds the screen door open for her making a great show of his gallantry. Thad follows them through the door having retrieved Hank’s bags. Maggie stops in the entryway, turns around and stands, hands on hips, eyeing skeptically her husband and his friend, sizing them up. “So, big guy,” she says to Hank, standing on tip toe to kiss him on the cheek, “tell me something.” Looking directly at Thad now, she says, “Should I be happy to see you?”
At that moment, Carolina swoops in from the back porch and wraps herself around Hank looking as though she had been blown there by a high wind. Hank responds with a laugh as he begins a storm trooper march, taking great high strides, in a circle around the living room, lifting the giggling girl up off the floor. Thad and Maggie stand back as Uncle Hank reunites with Carolina, scrubbing her with his knuckles, gently, on top of her head. He reaches down then and lifts her up, spins her around while she hollers and laughs. Letting her go, he stumbles backward onto the couch feigning dizziness.
“Did Uncle Hank bring you something,” he says scratching at his head as though that might induce the lost memory and grinning at the excited girl. “No. Nope I think he forgot.” But Carolina does not believe for a second that her Uncle Hank would have forgotten to bring her a present.
“What, what, what,” she chants while trying to catch her own little hand in Hank’s gargantuan paw.
Thad ferries Hank’s bags to the guest room upstairs, actually a study with a converting couch where Thad, when in those certain moods, went to read and muse. Hank leads the eager Carolina to his car to retrieve her present. As Thad folds out the sleeper from inside the couch, he listens to the laughter bubble up from outside. He listens as Hank teases his daughter. ‘Oh, wait a minute, I might have brought you something after all. Let’s go see if I did. Well, what do you know. Look at this. What do you think might be in this sack?’
“What, what, what,” Carolina now sings.
The presence of strange men out at the Salter Cabin, the ominous unexplained goings on at the far edge of his property, the sudden menace and the threat, had taken up residence in his home as a dark unspoken fear. During his less rational moments, he believed his wraiths had been resurrected in human form, that the soul creatures of those men lost so long agio in the jungle had resurfaced. But either way, wraiths or not, he felt responsible for dispelling the fear that had gripped his household. But he had no plan beyond confiding his worry in Hank and sharing with him exhibit A: the empty chewing tobacco tin that implicated the town cop as the shooter. He needed to confide in someone and although it would in most circumstances be his wife, for this situation Maggie was not the one who could understand his dilemma. Thad needed to talk this out with someone who knew about all those archived stirrings, his predilection to react to any threat with a furious violence. He needed to explain to the only other person who knew anything about his private pledge thirty years ago, knew anything about the drowning of his wraiths in Lake Wallowa, that he had the sense that those very drowned demons had returned in human form, and returned with a vengeance.
When Thad joins Maggie in the kitchen to help her prepare dinner, he finds her at her favorite chore, chopping up her own garden vegetables for a salad. After they moved to Joseph, Maggie devoured books on gardening. She now grew radishes, carrots, green beans, even some corn and, of course, her biggest prize, ripe red tomatoes; all of which she, smelling of fresh dirt, carried into the kitchen, washed under a cold stream from the faucet, and sliced up with a flourish on the thick oak cutting slab to make their dinner salad. Thad walks across and kisses her on the shoulder as he goes by to pull the pork chops from the refrigerator.
Without turning away from her salad making, Maggie says, “What the hell do you think you’re up to, Thad?”
“I’m fixing the pork chops, Mags,” Thad answers.
“Don’t even,” she goes on with an anxiety in her voice, a stridency that causes Thad to immediately relent.
“Maggie, look, I talked to Hank. He wanted to see the ranch, so I invited him up for a visit. Nothing more sinister than that.”
“Promise me right now.” Maggie says as she turns, leans against the cutting table and waits until Thad looks at her. He sees that her cheeks are flushed, an umber rose blush she had inherited from her Irish forbearers, a blush he knows to appear in moments of anger and in moments of passion. “Promise me you two will not go off on some screwball vigilante nonsense with those men out at the cabin.”
“I don’t know what to do about that,” says Thad with a shrug, returning to his pork chops.
“That is not a promise, Thad,” insists Maggie.
Thad walks to the pantry to retrieve some potatoes. He feels he needed to stay in motion, be busy at something. “Those men are living on our property. And…..”
“And what? What are you plotting, Thad?”
“Nothing,” he says, deciding she cannot be told about the tin of chewing tobacco, the attempt to shoot Rambo, his suspicions about the deputy or Prescott’s dead cattle. “You and Hank are both right,” he concedes to create some distance from the subject. “I’m jumping to conclusions here because I’m royally pissed off. I talked to those men out at the Salter Cabin. I explained to them they were trespassing, that the cabin,…anyway….I asked them to leave the property. When they were still there two days later I went to the cops. You know that. Damn Deputy Culp did everything but welcome the bastards with balloons and a marching band. Whatever they’re up to, he’s got his nose in it, too, I’m sure of that. He started badgering me, fer chrissakes. Wanted to get into a debate about whether the Salter Cabin was actually on our property.”
“Then go to the authorities outside Wallowa County if you have to,” Maggie offers reasonably, somewhat reassured. “Culp has got a boss. Go to Bend or all the way to Portland. Get a good lawyer. Don’t you get it, Thad? Baby,” she says getting up and coming around the table to rub his shoulders, “this is not Vietnam.”
“I get it, Mags,” Thad replies and returns to flopping the pork chops around in the seasoning pan. “I get it, okay.”
After their dinner, after Carolina is carted off to bed, her protests soothed by the 49ers sweatshirt Uncle Hank brought her, the three of them retire to the living room to drink the California burgundy Hank brought with him. Maggie sets out the stem wine glasses she saved for such special gatherings and curls up in the overstuffed divan, with her feet pulled under her, as she liked to do when she was reading. Even though only early August, the night had the crisp edge of autumn, so Thad takes a chunk of split oak from the iron tray, fits it on top of the kindling in the stone fireplace and starts a fire. Hank, rubbing his eyes, sits back on the couch, lifts his wine glass in salute to his friends, and, without speaking further, stares into the fire. They all listen to the silence of the dark outside so profound and reassuring in this open empty country.
Maggie sits in the overstuffed divan not ten feet from him but Thad could see that she was worlds away. She holds her wine glass before her in both hands regarding it as though it were some ancient relic with mysteries to reveal. She has drawn a dark coverlet up over her legs which at a glance made her appear to be hovering above the chair rather than sitting in it. The flicker of light from the fireplace glowed on her skin making it seem as though it is she who glowed with a buttery inner light. He found her as always a distracting beauty, his sensible formidable wife who could float away on a wisp. As he remembers their earlier exchange in the kitchen, he wanted to reach out, touch her, assure her. Instead, he gets up from where he sat on the hearth and opens a wooden cabinet, selects a record album. He slides the vinyl record from the album sleeve and sets it carefully on the turntable spindle. As he replaces the cover back on the turntable, the first guitar chords of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘All Along The Watchtower’ drift from the speakers.
“Is that a turntable? Where does someone find turntables anymore,” Hank says coming out of his reverie. “Went the way of glow tube radios ages ago. I suppose you got an eight track player in that Jeep, you old dog.”
“Start the Jeep with a hand crank out here in the wilds,” says Thad as he thumbs through the record albums in the cabinet.
‘….there must be some kinda way outta here, said the Joker to the Thief….’
“You’re both lovable throwbacks,” says Maggie with a quick yawn. She sets her wine glass on the end table and shoves the coverlet off onto the floor. “You both could have ridden on burros behind Don Quixote. The last of the romantics, quixotic, that’s my boys.”
“I for one am going to take that as a compliment, I think,” replies Hank.
‘….there are many here among us who think that life is but a joke….’
“Tilting at windmills, you think, Maggie,” says Thad finding more of an edge to the question than he had intended.
“Always,” replies Maggie, “my sweetly mad Thad.”
To cover a certain irritation he was feeling, Thad walks over to her with Dylan’s ‘Hard Rain’ album in his hands and presents it to her for her approval which she enthusiastically gives.
“Maggie’s Farm”, she requests with a smile, touching his hand.
‘…..so let us stop talking falsely now, for the hour’s getting late….’
At that moment, the weather breaks that had been promised in the mountains earlier. They hear a dense and steady downpour beat against the eves of the house. Above the Hendrix guitar chords, the rumble of thunder from the direction of the Wallows.
‘…..two riders were approaching and the wind began to howl….’
“The gods disapprove,” hums Maggie sipping her wine.
“I’d love to wander all the way back down memory lane with you two,” says Hank rising from the couch and arching his back in a stretch as if to underscore his weariness. “Maybe tomorrow night.” He flashes them his slow grin and shakes himself like a waking animal. “But between the flight and the drive this poor soul and bones is soggy tired. Seems like I was in that rattling Ford for a week or more. Don’t show me. I’ll find it,” this last he directs to Thad who got up to show him to his room.
“Maybe tomorrow I’ll give you a tour of the place”, Thad offers. “Eighty acres of untended forest and meadowland,” he continues with a boastful pride he reserved for the ranch.
“Yeh, that would be good,” replies Hank heading off toward the stairway, lumbering off like a big black bear ready to hibernate all winter. “Night, Maggie,” he says as he goes up the stairs.
After he had gone, Maggie says, “I think I’ll save Dylan for tomorrow night myself.” They both listened to the rain on the roof for a moment. She got up from the divan and gave Thad a light kiss on the lips. “Are you coming to bed?”
“Going to clear the glasses, put stuff away, then I’ll be up.”
“Will tomorrow’s tour include the Salter cabin?” Only the most distant flash comes into her olive eyes, a barely perceptible downturn to the eyebrows, as though she were daring him to deceive her.
“Don’t go on about that, Mags,” he says trying not to be too dismissive as that would only prolong the argument. “I was thinking Hank and I would take the Jeep and drive up that old hunting track west of here that leads to Shoshone Shelf. We’ve been up there before. You remember? With the kid.” Maggie nods that she did remember. “One of the best views of the property,” Thad goes on a bit too quickly. “From there looks as though you could stuff the Wallowas in your back pocket.”
“Should be another clear day for it. But please, Thad, don’t sit down here and brood. Come to bed soon.”
“I will,” Thad promises and gives her another quick kiss.
He switches off the turntable and puts the records back in the cabinet. He damps down the fire and secures the wire mesh screen against sparks. Gathering up the wine glasses, he looks down the dark hall where Maggie had vanished just a few minutes before. The gods disapprove, she had said. He wonders how she always knows when he was lying - even those times he was not clear about that himself.