Free Deadman by Jon A. Jackson Page B

alternated right-hand days and left-hand days, quick drawing)—but usually they took the AK-47s, or the Uzi, and always a few handguns. After shooting, one of them ran down to town for the paper and to check the mail. Later they might fish, or go to Butte for dinner, or even to Bozeman or Livingston. There were some good restaurants over that way.
    The one thing she loved without reservation was the hot springs, just over the ridge from the house. The hot springs almost made Montana a good deal. It was a sacred place, she'd decided. Lately she had come to resent Joe's presence in the hot springs, and Joe had seemed to recognize that. He liked her to do things on her own. He didn't mind if she traipsed off, naked as a jaybird, walking the four or five hundred yards over the ridge to the hot springs by herself.
    He was almost unobjectionable. He acceded to everything. But so what? The gritty little basic thing was that she had grown up in Detroit, in the city. She liked people. Joe didn't give a damn if he never saw another human being in his life. It wasn't true, of course; he was very outgoing and gregarious at times. But at other times he seemed totally indifferent to, or even hostile toward, people. Helen found this unbearable. She needed people, particularly other women. She couldn't live without friends. If he knew that she had been to Holy Trinity, the Serbian church in Butte, he would flip.
    As for Tinstar—well, it wasn't even a town, it was just appalling. A bar, a gas station that was also a post office, and a kind of conveniencestore that wasn't conveniently open—the hours depended on how the trout were hitting. And there was more poverty than she had expected: so many of the people on welfare, on some kind of assistance, living in shabby trailers. It didn't have the abject misery of Detroit, but misery was there just the same.
    And she couldn't go by her own name. At first she had found it amusing to ask Shawna in the Tinstar Saloon to call her “Buddy.” But lately she had found it disagreeable. She wanted Shawna to call her Helen. She wanted to be friends with Shawna, but Shawna was an awful hick, it turned out. She was also on aid, even though she was employed. Conversation with Shawna was like, “Did you watch Sally Jessy Raphael yesterday, she had a guy on there who admitted that he'd raped two hundred women, whyn't they cut his balls off?”
    Well, what did she expect from a bartender? The women available to her weren't equals, they were hairdressers and ranch wives, waitresses and unwed teenaged mothers. The milieu did not include upscale career women, lawyers and go-getters. About as close as it got was Milly, a realtor in the Ruby Valley, who sometimes came into the Tinstar Saloon. But Milly was in love with some redneck rancher and had a couple of kids. There were also a lady sheriff, whom Helen necessarily avoided, and a kind of interesting but somewhat aloof (or at least cool) single woman who had some kind of job with the irrigation district. And the old gal who ran the Garland Ranch, the XOX, who had sold Joe the property—she was not to be believed, a raw-boned, wind-rubbed cowgirl who evidently preferred the conversation of red cattle.
    Butte wasn't a hell of a lot better. A raggedy old falling down city, a kind of Flint-in-the-Rockies or maybe some time-warped decrepit burg from the Depression. She didn't find it nearly as interesting as Joe did. It looked trashy to Helen. She had been stunned to discover a Serbian Orthodox church there, of all places. Evidently, the Serbs had come to work the mines, and they made up one of thelargest Serbian communities in the West, but it was incongruous, and anyway, she'd never been much for church.
    Bozeman was a college town, deadly boring. Livingston was campy, tanned oldsters wearing Gucci bandannas. Missoula was also a college town; it had a couple of rock joints and some cultural offerings, but it was too far away and annoyingly self'important.