The Yellowstone Conundrum (33 page)

 
She looked at them again, strikingly beautiful with blond hair but Native American features, both children, one a little girl, the other a little boy. Beautiful children.  Apparently they didn’t speak English.

  “Hello,” she said, simply.
Two sets of wide eyes. “My name is Penny,” she patted her chest as she said the words.  Wide eyes blinked but remained wide. She tried it again.  “Penny”, then pointed to the little boy. 

 
“Jason,” he replied, shocking Penny.

 
Well knock me up and call me Betty
.

 
“Jason?” she asked. 

  His mouth contorted.
“Yes.”

  Penny laughed.
“Well, Jason, I’m Penny,” she reached out her right hand and touched his small hand. “Who’s this?” she nodded to the little girl, who turned to Jason, then back to Penny.

 
“Amanda,” Jason replied simply.

  “Sure, Amanda.
That would have been my second guess,” Penny smiled. Penny looked around to make sure she wasn’t in an alternate universe. She had two adorable three-year olds in her borrowed truck that she’d just saved from being wolf chow.

  Penny slowed to a stop.
Southern Montana was rugged territory. She looked around at the mountains, the bare macadam highway she was on, the Death Cloud in the distance; took a deep breath and realized she wasn’t on a game show with cameras on her. 

 
OK. You have two kids
.
You’re not going to leave the kids like you’ve left everthing else
. The Black Cloud to her right had crossed over the mountain range and hung there with no apparent momentum to go further north. Red Lodge probably was in trouble.

 
Penny smoothly shifted into second, then third, as if she’d driven a stick shift all her life instead of three hours. There were only a handful of trailer homes, all of which were off their cinderblocks, mostly destroyed; that may or may not have people inside.  

 
Ahead, Edgar didn’t have much promise. Maybe in Pryor, which was inside the Crow Indian Reservation, she’d find the answer. The town was named for Nathaniel Hale Pryor, a sergant in the Lewis and Clark Expedition; but was more known as the burial site for Chief Plenty Coups, a Crow visionary who once said:

“Education is your greatest weapon.  With education you are the white man’s equal, without education you are his victim and so shall remain all of your lives.  Study, learn, help one another always.  Remember, there is only poverty and misery in idleness and dreams---but in work there is self-respect and independence.”

Chief Plenty Coups, Chief of the Mountain Crows, or Apsaalooke, of the Crow Nation.  Named chief at age 28, he was a fierce and respected warrior.  Covering himself with a wolf hide, he would sneak into enemy camp and scout; touching his enemy with his coup stick, he would return to his home with a plan of attack.  Plenty Coups became chief of the Crows in 1876, the same year as the Battle of Little Bighorn; his scouts worked for Custer at the time and were aligned with the white man against their natural enemies; the Lakota, Sioux and Cheyenne. His vision was cooperation with the white man.

 
“Where’s your mother?” Penny asked little Jason.

 
“Pam’s,” he replied.

 
Bump-de-bump she went across the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad tracks, which if you were a steer meant that eventually your field trip from southern Montana would end up at the stockyards in Cheyenne and Laramie and you’d have your head cut off. 

 
“Where does Pam live?” she asked. Jason shrugged his little shoulders.

 
Edgar was a pathetic, hard scrabble town with a world-class view. 

 
How the hell am I going to find Pam?

  The parts of Edgar that weren’t down and out were instead simply destroyed by the earthquakes.

 
All except Pam’s Bar and Grille. The Pepsi sign—put there in 2002 when there had been hope for some tourism in the area, now hung wopperjaw as if saying
all you drunks, come on in!

 
“Is this where Pam lives?” Penny asked.  Jason nodded yes, silently.

 
The only building left standing in this shity little town was the bar. The brick façade above the building had collapsed onto the sidewalk, but the building itself was OK. 
Sure, that made sense
. It was probably the only business that made any money; right next to the Indian Reservation where there would be no liquor for sale.  People would drive for miles just for a cold Coors or a shot of Jack.

 
“Don’t get out of this truck,” she ordered the children, parking the beat-up Toyota and getting out.

  
It was one in the afternoon when pretty Penny walked into Pam’s Bar and Grille in Edgar, Montana.

 
Her father had died accidentally wind surfing on a stormy night coming down Mt. Hood. If he had been alive and had followed his daughter’s career in skiing, he would have been proud. At some point in time he, not her mother, would have given her a pearl of advice, most likely after a few beers or a couple of cocktails. 

 
Never get in a bar fight with a drunk.

 
Very simply, drunks don’t feel pain. You have to beat them into submission, which is difficult to do.

 
Penny parked the Toyota in front of Pam’s Bar and Grille.  There were no lights on in the town. Buildings had collapsed. The single-thick layer of brick façade in the building housing the bar and other “establishments” had been ripped by the earthquake; but, like drunks, the bar was virtually untouched. Except inside.

 
It was obviously whoopie time at Pam’s.

 
It was like walking into the back set of a 50’s western movie after the bar fight. The huge ten by six glass window behind the bar had been shattered; only a W-shaped wedge of very sharp glass remained. The rest had come down probably in a single fell swoop, taking the front line of bourbons and scotches with them. Entering the bar, one was immediately confronted with a u-shaped padded bar with dated high-style chairs. To the right were the quiet seats, to the left the small dance floor, dirty with eons of dust, peanut shells, spilled drinks and stuff you just don’t want to know about. 

  
Penny took two steps back and scanned the road back and forth. 

 
“Baby, come right over here and suck my dick!”

 
This was followed by a smattering of woo-hoos and “Right down here, honeys,” followed by pants getting unzipped.

 
Nobody stood up because they were all so loaded; been drinking since 7:25 this morning when the earthquake hit, the down destroyed all but their favorite watering hole, the pit that it was.

 
Penny lasered a look to the cheering crowd that drew some
oooohs
. One geezer actually pulled out his limp dick and started rubbing it like Aladin’s lamp. Penny didn’t exactly look like Little Miss Buttercup. She was dirty, covered once by the Black Cloud, sweaty, not just damp but sweaty, and if the hornballs looked carefully, the ski pants she wore were taut with muscled legs. Naked, which they all wanted her to be, she’d be an awesome sight, firm shoulders and arms, tight chest muscles with small breasts and a 24-inch waist.

 
Shaking off the leud comments, Penny approached what she assumed was the owner who slowly continued to clean up the mess the mirror had made when it snapped in two. The word “grizzled” normally was associated with a worn, scruffy man, 60ish, faded hairline, thin, perhaps a moustache, but certainly sprouting two weeks of unshaven whiskers, or more. But grizzled was the word that popped into Penny’s brain as she approched the bar.

 
“You Pam?” she asked, which was followed by gafaws of laughter from the peanut gallery.

 
“Get out of here,” Pam ordered, dismissing the much younger woman. Pam was indeed in her early 60s—63 to be exact, and worn at every edge of her body like she’d been carrying barbells. There wasn’t part of her body that seemed soft, difficult for a woman. Look up the word “hardscrabble” and the picture would be Pam Hastings looking back at you with dark eyes, wrinkles on her leather-tanned face, and a trace of lipstick on lips that just weren’t there any more.

 
“No, fuck you,” Penny looked her dead in the eyes, then turned to the assholes in the lounge, “and fuck you.” 

  Mouths dropped in surprise.
Penny’s mouth would have dropped in surprise at what she’d said if she had been in the real universe instead of the alternate universe along with Captain Kirk.

 
“I’m looking for the mother of these two children,” she turned to the open front door. Parked in front was the raggedy Toyota with cute-as-a-button Jason and Amanda in the front seat, both on top of each other looking out the passenger side window.

 
Taken aback at the push-back from the young woman, who was obviously very agitated, Pam turned to her left.

 
Seated at the far end of the bar, her reflection odd and jagged in the remaining glass, was a 30-something woman, blond-ish, 5-6, 160 with flabby features that could have been pretty.  She wore a red man-sized shirt to cover up her tummy rolls so she could move and flirt and make herself more attractive. Everyone knew she’d fuck any man for anything he’d give her. The woman had tough-tittie written all over her. She had her head on the bar, her body slumped in a sitting-while-sleeping position.