Distinctly Montana Magazine

Literary Lode DEPARTMENT S OME MILES WEST of Jimtown Bar, Nathan Bel- lastar traveled hard on a thin gravel road that divided the wheat fields. The wind was loud in the cab, and dust curled and billowed in his wake. Driving, he remembered what his mother said when he had failed again the very week his child was born. He'd been arrested in Colstrip for letting his truck roll through a stop sign and travel the sidewalk for fifty feet. "Admit it," she'd said when he'd made it home the next morning. "You're just a cheap drunk like all the rest." She was sitting in the recliner he'd bought for himself, in the living room of his own trailer, and she'd said it in front of his wife and newborn. She was supposed to be here to help with the child, but he'd counted it against her—the grey weight of her skin, her unwashed hair, the fat coil of her face—he had hated her. way home THE Beneath the openness of sky and moon and stars, the gold of the fields lay dimly illumined. Here, when the day died, the heaviness was always the worst. He pictured a large, oblong stone lodged deep back in his chest cavity beneath his shoulder blades. The slope of his back felt rock hard. His ribcage had become constricted and he disliked the shallow breaths he had to take. Breathing shouldn't be something a man has to work at, he thought. He reminded himself to forget his friends, the men wait- ing for him up ahead. He could nearly taste the bite of the alcohol in his mouth, the hot spiral in his throat as the whiskey went down. He tried to remember his daughter, the baby smell of her breath, the way she touched at his eyes with her tiny fingers. But as he sped onward the need in him outgrew his will and rapidly he got to where he could hardly recall his daughter's face. In the rearview mirror he found his own face bony and thin. EARLIER, JEDIDIAH had cut into him when they threw the last bales of the evening. Jed was a big man with thick hands and a pocked face, gritty at the hair- line. A dirty ring lined the collar of his denim shirt. "You gonna come with us tonight or not?" Jed said. Nathan watched Jed's manner, the way he jerked each bale from the ground as if he were in a fight. He noted this, but said nothing and kept working. "I figured as much," said Jed, and he stood and squinted at Nathan. "You been pretty much cutting out on your friends lately." Jed spit snuice on the ground. 38 BY SHANN RAY Nathan kept hoisting bales while Jed stood waiting, staring darkly at him. Nathan felt it and didn't like it, but he knew Jed wouldn't understand. Jed would just undercut him like he had before, slapping him on the back, shouting, "Come on! You got time for one. A man deserves something for a day's work." And Nathan would give in like a fool, like there was nothing but straw in his spine. Nathan turned his back to him now. "Yeah," said Jed, "just like I figured," and he spit again. He muscled bales and said nothing, just grunted and stopped once to spit out his chaw, then stepped in front of Nathan to grab the last few bales and hurl them onto the stack. Watching Jed drive off in his beat up Ford sedan, Nathan felt the burden begin in the upper part of his shoulders, then down and inward until it was embedded again, directly under the shoul- der blades. The severity of the feeling made him wince. Immediately he desired to cover it over, dull it away with hard drinking. He'd heard others talk of phantom things like this, weird pains that came when you tried to stop. He forced himself to wait until the boys had all gone, Jed and the others, not just follow blindly as he desired. He wished the weight would die out, but it kept on. Nathan noticed the line at the horizon, dark, distinct. He rubbed the pad of his thumb along the smoothness of his lips, a ritual that always commenced when he started a self-imposed drought. He knew he'd been touching his thumb to his lips all day now, like a kid that couldn't con- trol himself. Hiding his hand in his pocket, he told himself to stop being such an idiot. He walked aimlessly for a time, half-inspecting the line of the bales, kicking or pushing at a few, but when he had straightened all he could, gassed and parked the machines along the south fence, and checked the northern gate, there was nothing left but to turn his truck to the road home. At first as he drove the dark sky had been clear, while off to the west an arm of sun re- mained, outstretched low and still on the land. But as the sunlight gave way, clouds came in from the north and cloaked the earth and pushed back the stars. The land became bulky, hard to see but for the shoulders of the road and the earthen embankments that rose and fell from view almost before he noticed. Hardly distin- guishable now, the track of the moon lay in the southern quadrant of the sky. Darkness had taken up the largest part of his surroundings, but in glimpses across open DISTINCTLY MONTANA • WINTER 2011

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