Page 161

I set the empty mug on the counter. Put two dollars beside it. Picked up my clipboard from the stool where I’d set it when I came in.

“Have a good one, hon,” Marnie said from the far end of the counter.

“You too.”

The screen door complained on the way out. The morning hit me — bright, dry, the sky pulled tight from horizon to horizon, the kind of Montana morning that didn’t care what was in the newspaper. I stood on the boardwalk for three seconds with the clipboard under my arm and the sun on my face and the coffee sitting in my throat like a stone.

Then I walked to the truck.

***

The mineral order was on the clipboard — two tubs of cattle mineral, salt blocks, a bag of electrolyte powder for the horses. I’d written it in my left hand, the letters slanted and careful, the numbers double-checked against Wyatt’s inventory sheet from the barn office. The drive to Ennis took forty minutes and I spent it with the radio off and the window down and the wind pulling at the clipboard pages and the Courier article running through my head on a loop I couldn’t find the off switch for.

Ennis Feed & Supply sat at the end of Main Street, the awning faded, the parking lot half-full of pickups with horse trailers and gooseneck stock racks. I parked beside a flatbed loaded with hay bales and took the clipboard and walked inside.

The store smelled of mineral dust, leather oil, the sweet heaviness of alfalfa pellets. Pallets of bagged feed lined the aisles. A fan in the corner moved the air without cooling it. The light was fluorescent and buzzing and it caught the dust in slow columns above the shelving.

Petey was behind the counter, apron on, pencil behind his ear, already talking to a man in a stained baseball cap who was buying a single bag of chicken scratch and trying to leave.

“So I told her, I said, Donna, you can’t run a quarter horse on sweet feed in August, that’s just asking for founder, and she says — oh, hey there.” He spotted me over the man’s shoulder. “Give me one second, I’ll be right with you. — And she says, ‘He’s always had sweet feed.’ Well, he’s always been lame in July too, hasn’t he, but that’s none of my business. — That’ll be eighteen forty, and tell Donna I said hi.”

The man paid. He left. Petey was already reaching for the clipboard I hadn’t set down yet.

“Priya Nair, how are you? Let me guess, mineral tubs, salt blocks, and — is that electrolyte powder? Carrow Creek running low already? Well, it’s been hot. Let me just—” He pulled the order sheet toward him, squinted at it, and started keying numbers into the register while narrating the process in real time. “Two tubs, cattle mineral, that’s the twelve percent, right, not the eight, because Wyatt called last month and switched to the twelve — I’ve got it written down here somewhere, hold on — yes, twelve percent, good, and salt blocks, how many, four, and the electrolyte, that’s the five-pound bag, I’ve got three of those in the back, let me just—”

He disappeared through the stockroom door. His voice continued from behind it, addressing nobody, narrating his search for the electrolyte powder with the same energy he brought to everything.

I stood at the counter. The register was old, mechanical, the keys yellowed. Beside it, a community bulletin board held thumbtacked flyers — a 4-H meeting, a farrier school in Billings, a lost dog poster with a photo that had been there long enough to curl at the edges. Below the bulletin board, a stack of this week’s Courier sat in a wire rack. The headline was visible from where I stood.

Petey came back carrying the electrolyte powder and a tub of mineral, already talking.

“ — found it behind the alfalfa, somebody put it in the wrong spot, I keep telling Danny about the organization system but Danny’s got his own system, which is no system, which is why I’m back here hunting for — anyway. How’s the rodeo coming? I heard about the bull test, Tuck Ellery, right? My wife’s cousin’s boy went to school with Tuck, says he’s already home and complaining about the sling, so I guess he’s all right. Broken collarbone’s not the worst thing that happens to a kid that age. My nephew broke his falling off a hay wagon, and he was back pitching within — what? Three weeks? Something like that.”

He set the tub on the counter. Wiped his hands on his apron. Reached for the second tub.

“I heard about the paper, too,” he said. “The Courier piece.”

He said it the way he said everything — easily, without pause, the information inserted into the stream of narration as naturally as the mineral order or the weather. He came back with the second tub and the salt blocks and set them on the counter and kept going.

“Now, I don’t read the Courier myself — I mean, I read it, but I don’t read it, if you know what I mean. Marnie gets it at the Bluebird, and I hear about it from her, which is the same as reading it, only slower. But this one, everybody’s talking about it. The bench outside Harmon’s — you know the bench? — Dale sits out there with his coffee every morning, and Dale was telling me — this was Saturday, I think, or Friday — that somebody from the county called the store asking about the insurance for the rodeo. Not Wyatt’s insurance, not the ranch policy, but the event policy, the one you filed with the county. Asking whether it covers — what was the word — liability for prior incidents. I said, what prior incidents? And Dale said, you know, Denver. And I said, what about Denver? And he said—”

He rang up the salt blocks. The register dinged.

“ — well, I don’t know what all Dale said, because Dale says a lot of things, and half of them are his wife’s opinions, which are always stronger than his. But the gist was that people are wondering whether the rodeo’s safe, given — you know. Given the history.”

He said “the history” with the same cheerful emphasis he’d given “the twelve percent.” A fact. A data point. Something to be noted and entered into the register and set aside.

“My cousin’s wife — Donna, not the quarter horse Donna, the other Donna, Donna M. — she said she read the piece twice and she said it was very — what was the word — ‘concerning.’ She said, ‘That girl’s running a rodeo with that on her record?’ And I said, well, Donna, it’s not really a record, it’s a newspaper article, and newspaper articles are — well. You know. They’re articles.”

He totaled the register. The drawer opened. He counted my change.

“But people are talking, is what I’m saying. Not in a mean way. Just in a — well, Dale’s not mean. Donna M.’s not mean. They’re just — they read it, and they’re talking about it, and the talking goes where the talking goes. You know how it is.”

I knew how it was.

He handed me the receipt. His fingers were quick and his eyes were kind and his face held the uncomplicated goodwill of a man who repeated everything he heard because he genuinely believed that information wanted to be shared and that sharing it was the same as helping.

“Don’t let it bother you,” he said. “These things blow over. Remember when everybody was upset about the cell tower? Same thing. Two weeks and nobody remembers.”