Free Two Medicine by John Hansen Page B

that trade
– who called themselves “loggers” – and I met a few who did that
summer. But Larry would often tell us proudly of his first job in
his late teens in Alaska and then Canada any chance he got –
traveling around with a railroad lumber mill operation where he was
hired to hack away at huge tree trunks for twelve hours a day, for
months at a time. This was before the common use of chain-saws,
which he said were too expensive and didn’t work well back then –
an apparent golden era when axes and two-man saws were primarily
the tools of the trade.
    Whenever he mentioned this
story I kept trying to picture him against a backdrop of some
majestic, timber-covered mountain, wearing a red-plaid, flannel
shirt tucked into blue jeans with suspenders, leaning on the handle
of an enormous ax. I tried to imagine this fat, old pudgy man as
healthy and whole and strong in the wild outdoors, braving the
elements as he chopped down the towering giants with nothing but
his broad axe.
    But no, I could never
really picture it, Larry huffing and puffing as he swung his ax
over and over into some enormous cedar, wood chips flying wildly
all around him, the trunk beginning to creak as it began fall… no
way. But Larry routinely told us of those days with a stern pride.
It got to be so common for him to mention it and so unlikely for it
to be true that I thought maybe he was losing his mind and had just
imagined it all. Phyllis never mentioned it. In any event, he
seemed to want us to know that he was more than a broken down store
manager, that at one time in his life he was a man to be reckoned
with.
    But, true or not, as the
story went, it was those wilderness years as a lumberjack that had
apparently caused Larry to have taken a fancy to visiting Glacier
Park decades ago, and he and Phyllis had traveled every inch of it
in an old RV (of which he still had a picture mounted in the store
– it was a boxy model of RV called “The Executive,”) driving around
with his family, until eventually getting a seasonal job “to keep
the moss from growing under my feet after I retired,” as he
said.
    He was now a man of
limited vision, however; his world was inside this store, my new
home, and his vision was one of accomplishing chores and tasks, and
in turn deriding those who avoided accomplishing chores and tasks
with the same drone-like determination, and finally avoiding those
who couldn’t accomplish chores and tasks, and he liked
bowling.
    Also, he was the only
person I had ever met who actually said he didn’t “care for music.”
Phyllis for her part would continue to remain very quiet almost the
entire summer, and she took a subservient back step to Larry
whenever he was around. She was the silent partner in the
management of the store, literally and figuratively, and seemed
happiest in the kitchen where she was endlessly busy.
    Larry was, I would come to
find out, a very early riser and an early-to-bed goer. Also,
despite his past trips to every corner of the vast expanse of
Glacier Park, it was evident that he didn’t care for going out into
the actual wilderness, and never ventured beyond the gravel foot
paths that wandered through the nearby campsite. His “off to work
we go” whistling attitude and his commonplace suburban lifestyle
offended me once I got a sense of it, in the same way the cheap
trinkets and stuffed animal grizzly bears in the front of the store
offended me. They were grossly out of place in this wild Eden to
which I had escaped, and for which I had risked it all.
    “ Need some help?” I
offered to Larry, hesitantly. The placed looked already spotless to
me, and I didn’t feel like scrubbing anything as my first job duty
at Two Medicine.
    “ Sure thing,” Larry said
quickly, “you can mop the floor here when I’m done.” He jerked his
head at the screen door. “Katie’ll show you upstairs to your room
and get you situated, when she gets back.”
    I wondered how long she
would be gone; was