At the Jim Bridger: Stories Read Online Free Page B

Bridger for days, building it up, playing the expert the way he did with everything. She was on his turf, and he tried to make each moment a ritual with all of his talking. He had more words than anyone she knew. Around the campfires at night, which he built with too muchcare, he’d make soup and fry fish and offer her a little of the special brandy in a special glass, measured exactly, and he would talk about what night means and what this food before them would allow them to do and how odd it would be to sit in a chair in the Jim Bridger the night of their wacky end-of-season New Year’s Eve party and order the big T-bone steak and eat it with a baked potato, which he would also describe in detail.
    It was September and they’d gone in twelve miles, backpacking from the trailhead at Valentine Lake. A quarter mile from his truck, he’d stopped and put a burlap bag of Pacifico bottles in the stream that fed Valentine. “We’ll be glad to see those on Friday,” he told her. “That is my favorite bag in the world; I’ve pulled it out of twenty creeks, and every time it was full of cold beer.”
    And that is what they had done today in the late afternoon, their legs sore. They’d walked through the sunny pines for two hours, no speaking, and then he’d stopped and when she caught him, he knelt and pulled the dripping bag and its treasure into the sunlight. They sat on the bank and he opened the bottles with his knife. The cold brown bottles were slippery in their hands, the labels washed off, and they were like two people having their first beer on earth. She put her hand on the wet burlap. It was all as good as he’d said it would be.
    They were both changed from the trip in ways they didn’t understand. He was fighting a kind of terror that had grown, and now as he ran his hand under Scout’s collar and scratched the animal, the feeling rose and tightened his throat.
    “I know somebody in here,” he said to her.
    “I know you do,” she said. “Happy New Year.” She kissed him. She had given herself over to him sometime at midweek and was not even fighting the love that had taken her.
    “No,” he said, “really. I know this guy.” He indicated the big truck. “I know this dog, Scout.”
    “Scout?” She’d heard about this dog.
    “Right,” he said. “The dog from the story.”
    She put both arms around him and asked, “Does this mean we don’t get our steak?”
    With the euphoric bravado that had infected the whole adventure, he put his cold hand under her sweatshirt and pulled her up and kissed her in front of the dog. Then he took her hand and led her into the big log tavern he’d been talking about for five days. The two windows in front were lined with tiny celebration lights and foil letters read
Happy New Year!
The season always ended this weekend at the Jim Bridger: they pulled the dock up onto the shore of Long Pond behind the place and packed all the patio tables and chairs in a barn off to one side, and celebrated New Year’s Eve a hundred and twenty days early.
    Inside there were two little rooms, the small barroom with eight stools and, past a kind of narrow passage, the dining room, which held a scattering of tables, each with a red checked tablecloth, just as he had told her. A dozen trophy heads protruded from the walls, twelve- and fourteen-point deer and over the fireplace a bull elk that would have gone a thousand pounds. There was no one in the bar, though there were oil-field and hunting jackets on every stool, and bottles and glasses standing all along the wooden surface, as if everyone had left suddenly mid-drink. Brenda Lee sang from the jukebox, “Fool Number One.” It was full of scratch friction as if coming across the decades to find the room. The dining hall, too, was empty, though there were steak dinners on two of the tables and coats on some of the chairs. Donner sat the woman at a table, and then he saw something through the big back windows. They were