Of course, she already knew that and said, “Yeah, I was just teasing ya. I heard that Ted Brescoe went out there and caused a big stink. What are you going to do about that?”
I took the three keys she had placed on the counter. “Nothing for me to do,” I told her. “I’ll leave that to Jeanette and the dinosaur hunters.”
“We all got a big laugh about it here in town,” she said. “There’s nobody more puffed up than Ted. When he doesn’t get his way, his lower lip starts to tremble, then he cries. Of course, I’m remembering him that way from grade school.”
That was another thing about the county. Most of the folks out there of the same age had gone to school together from the first grade through high school. Ted Brescoe apparently had been a whiny brat. This did not surprise me.
I asked Mori about Titus and the children, then picked out a room and went in and took a shower. Refreshed and wearing clean clothes I’d brought with me—jeans, plaid shirt, boots, and my town cowboy hat—I sought out Laura to give her a key to one of the rooms. I found her holding court with Tanya in the Hell Creek Bar, both of them knocking back beers as fast as Joe the bartender could deliver them. There were a half dozen empty Rainiers on their table and one each in their hands. Both Laura and Tanya gave me surreptitious winks when I handed over the key for the room they were to share. I thought I might be in trouble—too-many-women trouble—but it was kind of thrilling trouble so I sat down, had a beer with the ladies, then went looking for Jeanette.
I found her where she said she was going to be, in an upstairs conference room of the county courthouse with the other Independence Day organizers. The courthouse was built of stone around the turn of the last century and it’s quite an impressive structure, reflecting the certainty of that era of a solid future based on cows and petroleum. Only the cows were still around, the oil fields played out, so the courthouse was now a monument to another time. Pick’s ideas of deep time rattled a bit through my brain as I climbed the steps of the now mostly empty building. It represented a busy, prosperous future the men who built it had expected but that had not occurred. In their heads, they had gone to a time that did not exist but was very real to them, else they wouldn’t have bothered building such a fine and expensive courthouse. In our time, we saw they were wrong but since they never knew, what difference did it make to them? They had enjoyed our time, in effect, a lot better than we were.
Anyway, I found Jeanette in a conference room, naturally sitting at the head of a table and running the show. Edith was there, too, and gave me a bland smile and a nod. Jeanette accepted the motel key to her room and kept talking. She was holding forth on the subject of vendors and where they were going to set up. She looked across the table, her eyes landing on Al Cunningham who had once been a professor at Montana State University but now owned a ranch on the far eastern border of the county. “Al, I hope you’ve got the signs up so the vendors know where to go,” she said.
“All taken care of, Jeanette,” Al said and I escaped before Jeanette thought of something for me to do.
In fact, I had something to do but it didn’t have anything to do with the Independence Day celebration. I walked across town and stopped at the county library, a wood-frame building built back in the 1950s but kept in tip-top condition, mostly by volunteer book-lovers in the county, meaning just about everybody.
I went inside and inhaled one my favorite scents, that of hard-cover books. Fillmore County had a good collection of them, both new and old, and there ordinarily was a steady stream of customers. This being the day before the big celebratory day, however, everyone was apparently staying home and resting. The only person other than me in the library sat at the reception desk. She was Mary Dutton Parker, the librarian and the wife of a rancher down south where the grass was greener and lusher than along Ranchers Road. It didn’t make the ranching any easier but it did allow for fatter cows, always a good thing.
Mary was also one of those pretty Fillmore County girls, though she was actually born and raised in an adjoining county where they made them about the same—that is lean, pretty, in this case blonde, and perfectly capable of kicking my butt when it came to cowboying. I’d seen Mary on a horse one time when Jeanette and I visited the Parker ranch to consider a tractor they had for sale. While we talked to her husband, Wade, Mary was out on her horse working the cattle. I saw her cut into the herd and she and her horse moved those cows around like they were on wheels and glued together. Me? I cut into a herd and they scatter in every direction until I wise up and let the horse do the work. More wisdom from Bill Coulter: When in doubt, let your horse do the thinkin’.