Free The Farmer's Daughter by Jim Harrison

Rebecca had sent a ticket for Sarah to come down for a visit and see if she might like to attend the University of Arizona. At first Sarah said no because she had intended to use spring vacation to do a reconnaissance on Karl over in Meeteetse. She changed her mind and said she would visit her aunt because she wanted to ride on a plane and she could always skip school when the snow melted and it would be easier to investigate Karl’s environs.
    Part III
    Chapter 11
1986
    Frank and Lolly drove her all the way to Bozeman which was three hours because Lolly wanted to shop for things unavailable in Butte. At the airport Sarah’s mind was a whirling dither and she seemed unable to take a full breath. Unlike in her home area the cars pulling up to the entry were new models and clean and shinier and inside many men wore suits and ties and had the general appearance of being rich though she knew that was unlikely to be true. These men were fresh-faced while the big ranchers back home might own thousands of acres of land and several thousand cows but were weathered and battered by their life in the elements.
    Once in her window seat Sarah found herself humming a song taught to her by Frank’s old father Antonio who had died when she was five. She remembered his wrinkled face next to hers on the piano stool as they sang together, “Off we go into the wild blue yonder, flying high into the sky . . .” She had loved this old man who always seemed to be laughing compared to her father Frank.
    The takeoff is shocking indeed for one who has never been on a plane but then she was quickly enmeshed in the somewhat cryptic design of the landscape below remembering a line in a poem, “Where the water goes is how the earth is shaped.” The man in the trim suit next to her was reading the Wall Street Journal and the smell of his aftershave was so strong it was enough to gag a maggot. She idly wondered how anyone could sleep with a man who smelled like that. For inscrutable reasons the mountains below her called the Spanish Peaks reminded her of Terry’s teasing to the effect that she was far too austere and prematurely old. She knew that this was also true before her attack and her consequent decision to kill Karl. Terry would mockingly say that she had “her lid screwed on too tight” and that she was a bit of an ideologue like her father. After that contretemps she wept on the way home in her pickup, lamely trying to excuse the obvious truth by the fact that Terry was drinking too much. She had gone down in their wine cellar when his mother was visiting Boston and she questioned why on earth anyone would want that much wine. There must have been thousands of bottles but then Terry said that Tessa averaged two bottles of wine a day.
    The plane ride was causing other unexpected thoughts as it does to many people, a free-floating anecdotage. On the way back from antelope hunting on Route 2 they had turned south on Interstate 15 in Shelby, then stopped in Great Falls for something to eat. Terry had been drinking wine and insisted that they try to get into a strip club he’d noticed. Occasionally Terry had the snotty boldness and sense of entitlement of a rich kid. He sent Sarah and Marcia ahead of him through the door. They made it but the bouncer wouldn’t let Terry in. In the brief moment she was in the club Sarah saw a pretty stripper rubbing a patron’s face into her pubis while the patron’s friend cheered. The sight so shocked her that it was a minute before she would flee. Outside Marcia laughingly told Terry what they had seen and he was angry having missed it. In the spring as a practical joke Terry had given Sarah a very naughty Erskine Caldwell novel which had itemized such behavior and once in Missoula when she and her dad were having lunch with other vegetable growers an old Italian at the table said that he wanted to kiss the waitress’s pretty ass. Frank spoke sharply to him