Missoula
May–July 1929
Two months after Marian met Barclay Macqueen
One Sunday morning, Jamie was dozing in his cot, enjoying the cool early breeze in his hair and the sunshine slanting onto his blanketed legs when the dogs sprang up barking and pushed out through the screen door, bustling to greet Wallace, who was walking up the driveway. Jamie watched Wallace stagger through the swirl of animals without seeming to notice them, as a man intent on drowning himself might plow heedlessly through the waves. His collar was open; his hat was pushed back on his head. He'd gone out the night before in the car, so he must have run out of gas somewhere or driven into a ditch. On such mornings, he was unpredictable. He might wordlessly retreat to bed and not emerge until dinner, or he might regale Jamie with lengthy, jolly, disjointed tales, or he might complain bitterly about some small injustice at the card table, or he might beg forgiveness for some obscure offense, or some combination. There was no telling.
Wallace yanked open the screen door and collapsed on Marian's cot, releasing a stale gust of sweat and booze. One dog slipped through with him, but the others were trapped outside and milled around whining until Jamie got up to let them in. "Where's your sister?" Wallace asked.
He didn't sound as drunk as he looked. "Driving for Stanley," Jamie said, getting back under his covers.
"I know it's for Stanley," Wallace said morosely. "She couldn't very well be driving my car."
"Did it break down somewhere?"
Wallace waved the question away. "Do you know Lena? The trapper?"
"Lena?"
"She's as burly as a man and wears men's clothes. She smokes a cigar."
Jamie knew who he meant, although he had not known her name. "I've seen her."
"She's ugly as sin."
Jamie remembered her face well enough: heavy and jowly, thickly browed, her nose mottled like pink granite. She was ugly, but saying so seemed cruel. Wallace went on: "There's something so offensive about an ugly woman. An ugly man—that's unfortunate, but there still could be aesthetic interest there. An ugly woman is disturbing." One latecoming dog was still wagging outside the screen door. "Oh, for Christ's sake." Wallace flung himself to his feet and let it in. "There, happy?" He lay back down. "Last night Lena was saying she's out with the rifle now, not traps. Spokane Fred was at the table—this was that boxcar place near Lolo. You know it?" Jamie nodded, understanding Wallace meant a certain roadhouse to the south, cobbled together from two boxcars. "You know Spokane Fred?" Jamie nodded again. He had a passing familiarity with most of the dissolute gamblers around Missoula. They'd replaced Wallace's old friends from the university, the ones who used to come over and argue when Jamie and Marian were little but had, at some unnoticed moment, stopped visiting.
"Fred asked why, and Lena said because she doesn't like to get nursing mothers by mistake in the spring. Then this stranger who was in the game said, 'Must be expensive to have a heart.' And Lena said if the babies die now she can't trap them later."
Jamie was too puzzled by the line of conversation even to feel his usual burst of aversion to trapping. "Seems like more foresight than most people have. Is that where the car is? Lolo?"
Wallace stared up at the porch's ceiling, hands behind his head. "Do you think if Marian were to become a pilot she'd end up like Lena?"
"You mean ugly?"
"Yes, I suppose. Tough and alone, with a cigar stuck in her face. I imagine Lena's raw material was rougher stuff than Marian's, but Marian…I already have trouble picturing her in a dress. Can you imagine Marian as a bride?" His laugh stumbled over itself, became a cough.
 "We're only fourteen," Jamie pointed out.
"I know," Wallace said. "I know. It's not too late." He propped himself on his elbow, looked at Jamie. "Maybe you could have a word with her?"
"She'd punch me."
"Mmm." Wallace subsided onto his back. "You're probably right. I wish Berit were still around."
He'd been late paying Berit so many times she'd finally taken a job for a professor's wife in a big house south of the Clark Fork, though not without shedding a few rare Norwegian tears when she embraced the twins goodbye. Before she left, she'd taught Jamie to cook a few things. He refused to cook meat, of course, but he didn't mind frying up fish if someone else did the catching and gutting. So Caleb brought trout sometimes, or Marian did. She got bread from Stanley's, too, and when the housekeeping money Jamie extracted from Wallace wasn't enough, she made up the rest. Jamie tended a vegetable garden modeled on the one Caleb kept. Sometimes a gift shop in a hotel downtown sold one of his drawings, though that money he put away for himself. He tried to keep the house clean, but because neither Marian nor Wallace seemed to notice or mind the creeping grime and disarray, he was gradually surrendering.
"Berit was always trying to get Marian to wear dresses," Jamie said. "It's impossible."
Wallace didn't say anything but covered his face with his hands.
"Wallace?"
"I need you to do something," Wallace said, his voice hollow against his palms. "I need you to tell Marian when she comes home. I can't do it."
"Tell her what?"
"I lost the car."
"What do you mean lost it? Where?"
"I lost it. I bet it in the card game last night."
Jamie couldn't help himself. "Why?" he burst out. "Of all the things to bet!"
Wallace sat up, swung his legs to the floor. His hands dangled between his knees. "I was winning—well, first I was losing." Then he'd felt his luck turn, like wind knocking a weather vane. He'd won a small pot on three of a kind. Then he won again, kings, a bigger pot, and again, on a flush. Besides Lena and Spokane Fred, there'd been a stranger at the table, a red-haired fellow in a swank overcoat with a fur collar. The stranger had pulled out a bottle of Canadian whiskey—"The real stuff," Wallace said—and poured a toast. A lightness had come into Wallace. "I wasn't likely to win the next hand, but I knew I would. And I did. I knew I should lose a couple of times for form and get out of there, but I couldn't even lose when I tried." The chips, flocking around the table like wayward birds, had homed for him. "Then this stranger said, wasn't I the uncle of the girl who delivered booze for Stanley? I said I didn't know what he was talking about. He said, you're Wallace Graves, aren't you? He knew Marian's name."
Wallace paused. "He got under my skin. I started thinking about Marian, about how when you were little I only cared that you came home eventually and with all your limbs but now I'm supposed to worry about her reputation. I should have left. I knew my luck was gone."
But he'd stayed and lost, and lost, and lost. Spitefully, sullenly, determinedly. He lost all his chips, and several IOUs, and then he'd lost the gray Cadillac. The red-haired stranger in the fur-collared coat won it. The car was ancient now, the last remnant besides the house of the Great Winning Streak of 1913, kept running only by Marian's devoted ministrations, and maybe that was why he'd allowed himself to bet it: out of vindictiveness, because the car was the loss Marian would feel most acutely. Bad luck, Wallace believed, was no more than a kind of gloomy mood that welled from an internal spring, and Marian—the way Lena had reminded him of her, the stranger's unsettling mention—was the cause of his mood and therefore of his losing streak, too. "There's no money for another," he said. He wiped his nose with his cuff. "Will you tell her? I need to go to bed now, but you'll tell her?"
***
When Marian came home, Jamie dutifully told her about Wallace losing the car, absorbed her initial fury, stopped her from rousting their wretched uncle out of bed to be excoriated. She demanded why he wasn't angry, and he said they couldn't both rage. "So if I weren't angry, you would be?" she asked.
"Maybe," he said. "I don't know."
It was true they'd always been like two adjacent locks in a canal, one opening into the other, pouring off excess feeling, seeking equilibrium, though she was usually the lock in danger of overflowing and he the one who absorbed excess, rose up as she sank down. People thought being twins made them the same, but it was balance, not sameness, she felt with him.
That night in their cots on the sleeping porch, she asked, "Why do you think he gambles? We'd be fine for money if only he wouldn't."
"I don't think he means to," came Jamie's voice in the dark. "I don't think he can help it."
"You wouldn't think it'd be so hard to stop throwing your money away."
"I think he's after the thrill."
"What thrill? He never wins."
"And if he quits he never will, either. I think he likes to hope."
"Hope shouldn't be so expensive."
"You know he's sorry."
Marian's cot creaked as she turned over.
"Yes," she said. "He even cried a little when he finally stopped hiding from me. He kept saying he'd gotten into a tough spot. That's all he'd say. He wouldn't tell me who'd won the car, just said a stranger."
"Doesn't matter, does it? Better not to know. Maybe you'll see it around."
"Probably not, because no one but me would take the trouble to keep it running."
After a hesitation, Jamie said, "The car was Wallace's, though. He owned it. He could bet it if he wanted to."
"But he bet it for nothing. For no good reason. He was just losing something for the sake of losing it."
***
The next day from her hiding spots in the cottage she collected most of her flying money, earned bottle by bottle, basket by basket, and went into town and bought a used Ford from a mechanic she knew. He was a customer of Stanley's. His wife was a lush, and he gave her a good deal. People treated her differently now she knew their secrets.
She informed Wallace that he could drive the Ford to the U, but if he was going out gambling or drinking he'd have to walk or find a ride or buy his own damn car. If he lied, they both knew she'd find out. And she told him she would only pay three dollars a week in room and board now. The rest would be his rent on her car.
The sadness of the cottage, an emptied treasure box, outweighed the pleasure of the jaunty black Ford, her own wheeled and engined thing. On the bright side, her debt to Wallace seemed eased slightly, made bearable. She and Jamie might have been foisted on him, but Wallace had a way of acquiring burdens for himself, too. Without the twins around, he might have ruined himself long ago. Perhaps they had kept him just far enough from the precipice.
The model airplanes hanging in the cottage had come to seem forlorn: the tender relics of a child's fantasy. Flight, the reason for all her labor, was almost forgotten as she worked to make back what had been spent. The money was slow in returning. Mr. Stanley's business had stagnated.