Excerpt of Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy
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Travis, B
Chet Moran grew up in Logan, Montana, at a time
when kids weren’t supposed to get polio anymore. In
Logan, they still did, and he had it before he was two. He recovered,
but his right hip never fit in the socket, and his
mother always thought he would die young.
When he was fourteen, he started riding spoiled and un-broke
horses, to prove to her that he was invincible. They
bucked and kicked and piled up on him, again and again. He
developed a theory that horses didn’t kick or shy because
they were wild; they kicked and shied because for millions
of years they’d had the instinct to move fast or be lion meat.
“You mean because they’re wild,” his father had said
when Chet advanced this theory.
He couldn’t explain, but he thought his father was wrong.
He thought there was a difference, and that what people
meant when they called a thing “wild” was not what he saw
in the green horses at all.
He was small and wiry, but his hip made it hard for him
to scramble out from under the horses, and he broke his
right kneecap, his right foot, and his left femur before he was
eighteen. His father drove him to Great Falls, where the
doctors put a steel rod in his good leg from hip to knee.
From then on, he walked as though he were turning to himself
to ask a question.
His size came from his mother, who was three-quarters
Cheyenne; his father was Irish and bullheaded. They had
vague dreams of improvement for their sons, but no ideas
about how to achieve them. His older brother joined the
army. Watching him board an eastbound train, handsome
and straight-limbed in his uniform, Chet wondered why
God or fate had so favored his brother. Why had the cards
been so unevenly dealt?
He left home at twenty and moved up north to the highline.
He got a job outside Havre feeding cows through the
winter, while the rancher’s family lived in town and the kids
were in school. Whenever the roads were clear, he rode to
the nearest neighbors’ for a game of pinochle, but mostly he
was snowed in and alone. He had plenty of food, and good
TV reception. He had some girlie magazines that he got to
know better than he’d ever known an actual person. He
spent his twenty-first birthday wearing long johns under
two flannel shirts and his winter coat, warming up soup on
the stove. He got afraid of himself that winter; he sensed
something dangerous that would break free if he kept so
much alone.
In the spring, he got a job in Billings, in an office with
friendly secretaries and coffee breaks spent talking about rodeos
and sports. They liked him there, and offered to send
him to the main office in Chicago. He went home to his
rented room and walked around on his stiff hip, and guessed
he’d be stove up in a wheelchair in three years if he kept sitting
around an office. He quit the job and bucked bales all
summer, for hardly any money, and the pain went out of his
hip, unless he stepped wrong.
That winter, he took another feeding job, outside Glendive,
on the North Dakota border. He thought if he went
east instead of north, there might not be so much snow. He
lived in an insulated room built into the barn, with a TV, a
couch, a hot plate, and an icebox, and he fed the cows with
a team and sled. He bought some new magazines, in which
the girls were strangers to him, and he watched Starsky and
Hutch and the local news. At night, he could hear the horses
moving in their stalls. But he’d been wrong about the snow;
by October it had already started. He made it through
Christmas, with packages and letters from his mother, but in
January he got afraid of himself again. The fear was not particular.
It began as a buzzing feeling around his spine, a restlessness
without a specific aim.
The rancher had left him a truck, with a headbolt heater
on an extension cord, and he warmed it up one night and
drove the snowy road into town. The café was open, but he
wasn’t hungry. The gas pumps stood in an island of bluish
light, but the truck’s tank was full. He knew no pinochle
players here, to help him pass the time. He turned off the
main street to loop through town, and he drove by the
school. A light was on at a side door and people were leaving
their cars in the lot and going inside. He slowed, parked on
the street, and watched them. He ran a hand around the
steering wheel and tugged at a loose thread on its worn
leather grip. Finally he got out of the truck, turned his collar
up against the cold, and followed the people inside.
Excerpted from Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It
by Maile Meloy Copyright © 2009 by Maile Meloy. Excerpted by
permission of Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Group, Inc. All rights
reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted
without permission in writing from the publisher.
