Distinctly Montana Magazine

DISTINCTLY MONTANA MAGAZINE • WINTER 2022-23 70 I don't drink so much anymore, and anyway it dis- agrees with my stomach, so when I go to a bar, it isn't for the beer or the whiskey. Sure, I enjoy them, but my dread of the morning after seemed to get oversized about the time I turned seventy. No, I go to the bar for the conversation. Or rather, if I'm really go- ing to be honest with myself, I go to the bar to tell one of my stories. You see, I think I've got great stories. I take any opportunity I can to spin them. So much so that my family and the majority of my friends have heard them all five times—once with genuine appreciation and four times with mounting irritation. My chil- dren have long ago stopped protesting. They used to say, "Aw, come on, Dad, we've heard this one before," but now they just put their heads down, their eyes glaze over, and they wait it out. My wife just gets up and leaves the room. So about once every other month, I go to the Palace Bar. Step- ping inside, I plant myself next to whoever is lucky or unlucky enough to be on one of the stools. In this instance, it's a man about ten years my junior in a bomber jacket and a trucker hat. I've never seen him here before. So much the better. I sit down, order a beer, and turn to him. "Yeah, I think I saw an angel once. In the middle of the night. I wouldn't have thought an angel would smell bad, but the Lord works in mysterious ways." The guy looks at me as if to decide whether to bite. Finally, he takes a pull of his mug and drawls, "Oh yeah?" "Yeah," I continue without missing a beat. "It was 1982 or '83, and the train was stopped on a siding somewhere past Billings. The con- ductor had told me he thought we had a rider. Most of the time I let people ride, thinking what's the harm, but on this night, I felt compelled to check because it was cold. Cold, cold. Sure enough, as I was walking along a boxcar, snow up to here, I hear a voice behind me. I turn around, and I see this rangy guy standing there. Long hair, beard, the works. Gamy, too. You could smell him even in the cold. For a second, my hand went to my bowie knife. Sometimes you got to watch it with the kind that rides the rails." The man looks at me with brow slightly furrowed, as if he can't make out what I'm saying. "The bum was an angel?" "Don't say bum, that's a derogatory term. So this feller's stand- ing there, and I might add he's dressed basically in rags. An old jersey cut T-shirt, and a pair of filthy corduroy pants. I noticed that he only had one shoe, and the other foot was wrapped in rags. Finally, he speaks. He asks something about how far away the highway was, and I told him it was a few miles in that di- rection, pointing him toward the glow of a truck stop in the dis- tance. Then I says to him, 'But you look mighty hungry, buddy. You'd better take this,' and I hold out a twenty, right?" My captive audience runs his fingers through his hair and puts his hat back in place. "Yeah, okay, then what?" Now I know I've got him right where I want him: mildly curi- ous. At this point in the story, my youngest son would be rolling his eyes so hard I'd be afraid he would give himself a concussion. "The guy looks at the twenty, and then looks back at me like I had handed him a fish wrapped in a used athletic sock or something. 'I don't need that,' he says, kind of enigmatic. 'Sure you do,' I tell him. 'It's cold out, and this'll buy you a coffee and a hot meal up the road, so just take it.' Now he gives me this kind of eerie look, like a calm passes over his face, and the shivering and the grimacing against the cold just goes away, and he says, 'Give it to your children.'" My audience smirks and gestures to the barkeep for another beer. "What a line." "You like that?" I say. "You'll love this. Now I've got sons, but at that time I didn't have any kids yet, and there's some- thing about the way he says it to me that feels significant, you know? Weighty in some hard-to-define way. And then, for the first time, I begin to think—not to feature the idea, but to at least entertain the notion that this might be an angel." OLD BROKE RANCHER BY GARY SHELTON THE OLD BROKE RANCHER I S N O I S N O A N G E L A N G E L

• Cover