Free Montana 1948 by Larry Watson

those boots.’ Wouldn’t stop.”

    â€œShhh. Watch your language. David can hear you.”
    â€œJust reporting. That’s all. Just saying how it was. Finally Pop says, ‘You don’t let up, I’m going to stick one of these boots up your ass. Then I’m going to track your shit all over this bar.’”
    â€œOh, Wesley!”
    He laughed. Giggled would be more accurate. “I’ve got to say what happened, don’t I? This city fellow thinks he’s heard enough. He plops his hat down on the bar, takes off his glasses and sets them down too. He starts for our table. But by the time he gets there Pop has pulled out that little .32 revolver of his. Chrome-plated so it’s the shiniest thing in the place. Hell, I didn’t know he had it with him. Anyway, he’s got that gun right in the fella’s face, and the guy goes white. He’s just white as a sheet. Pop holds it there for a minute, and then he says, ‘Out in Montana you wouldn’t be worth dirtying a man’s hands on. Or his boots. So we’d handle him this way. Nice and clean.’ And he keeps holding the gun on him. I thought maybe I should say something, but Frank reaches over and puts his hand on my arm. Frank’s laughing to beat the band, so he must know something. Finally Pop says, ‘Now you head on out of here and you better hope the snow covers your tracks because I’m going to finish this whiskey and then I’m coming after you.’ By God, Gail, you should have seen that fella hightail it out of there! Left without his hat and glasses. And Pop just sits back down and finishes his whiskey. Doesn’t say a word. Meanwhile Frank’s laughing so hard he gets me going and then neither one of us can stop. People
are leaving the bar right and left—probably afraid of these wild and woolly cowboys from Montana—and Frank and I are howling our heads off. Then when we leave we notice that Minneapolis hasn’t even got any snow. And that sets Frank and me off all over again. Oh, Gail, I wish you could’ve been there. The Hayden boys all over again. The Hayden boys and their old man.”
    By that time, my mother had gotten him into bed and was covering him. “I don’t think you’ll find this so funny tomorrow morning. You’re lucky you weren’t all arrested.”
    â€œThey couldn’t arrest us—we are the law!” My father found that idea hilarious. He started laughing so hard he could barely breathe. Soon he was coughing and choking, and then he had to rush to the bathroom. The next thing I heard was my father vomiting. He was in there so long I fell asleep before he came out.
    After the wedding the next day on the train going back to Montana, my grandfather offered a box of chocolates to my mother, Grandmother, and me. My father couldn’t even look at them, a fact that my grandfather found amusing. My grandfather had a sweet tooth, and he insisted those were the best chocolates in the world, available only from a small confectionary in downtown Minneapolis.
    Soon they were all talking about Frank and Gloria and the wedding, how nice the ceremony was, what a lovely woman Gloria was, how they hoped for a happy life for the two of them. Then Grandfather said, “Now he’s got himself
a good-looking white woman for a wife. That better keep him off the reservation.”
    No one said another word. Every one of us turned to the window as if there were actually something to look at besides wind-whipped, snow-covered prairies.

    At dinner I sat between my grandmother and Aunt Gloria. My grandmother, a thin, nervous woman who seldom spoke when my grandfather was present, concentrated during the meal on cutting her ham into small perfect triangles before she ate them. Whenever she passed a dish to me she asked quietly, “Do you like this, David?” and her questions seemed so eager and pathetic that I said yes to