by Callan Wink
August turned back to the bar. “Let’s do more shots,” he said.
* * *
—
By the time August finally punched fuchsia shirt, the Blue Goose had long been a carnival fun house of faces and hats, belt buckles and barstools; he’d already been to the bathroom and heaved the contents of his stomach. He swished his mouth out at the sink and wiped his face with paper towels. He stumbled through the crowd and saw Maya leaning into fuchsia shirt at the bar. He had his arm around her. He was saying something into her ear and she was laughing, and August pulled him around by his shoulder. Fuchsia shirt said something like, “Hey, dick, watch out.” August saw Maya’s look of surprise, and then he tried to give fuchsia shirt everything he had to the side of the head.
August’s aim was slightly off and his fist only glanced off the back of fuchsia shirt’s head, sending his hat flying. Fuchsia shirt still went down, dazed, hands on knees, and August was going for the choke hold when someone hit him from behind. He crashed into fuchsia shirt, and they went down in a heap. He saw the pale yellow of Maya’s dress sprawling toward the floor and then it was a melee of faceless limbs, disembodied fists. He took a knee to the face and there was an immediate spill of blood from his nose. His eyes puddled and blurred with tears. Someone was punching him repeatedly in the ribs, and then that person was gone and August got his forearm around fuchsia shirt’s neck and he could clearly feel the coarse stubble of his jaw through the silk and he was trying to get a deeper purchase when there were hands on his shoulders pulling him back and Tim’s voice saying, “We’re done, we’re done. Stop, August, you fucker.”
He let Tim yank him to his feet, and together they stumbled out through the overturned barstools and spilled drinks, August trying to wipe his face, spitting blood.
* * *
—
They sat in August’s truck, Tim behind the wheel. “Well, that got Western,” Tim said. “You’re shit-faced, aren’t you?”
August didn’t say anything. Pressed his face to the cool glass of the truck window.
“I was out back having a cigarette with Christi and then we come inside and it’s a free-for-all. What did that asshole say to you, anyway?”
“I don’t know. It was all just stupid. Maya was there, and I punched him.”
“I see. It was that kind of deal. I did notice them dancing. I’d like to be able to tell you that getting in a brawl will impress her, but I honestly don’t really think that’s going to be the case, Hoss.”
“It was stupid.”
“You were trying to squeeze that dude’s head off. Bunch of frat boys. That one that was whaling on you from behind—I dotted him good. He’s probably in there looking for his teeth.” Tim sucked on the bleeding knuckles of his right hand. “Well, I suppose we should get out of here before those assholes regroup. Or the cops show up. Keys?”
“I can drive.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I’m fine.”
“Keys.” Tim stretched out his hand, palm up. “Come on, cough ’em up, Rocky.” August gave him the keys and they were starting to pull away when the girls appeared in the headlights. Maya was at the window. “What’s your problem, August?” she said.
“Sorry,” August said. “I don’t know.”
“I think everyone’s a little drunk,” Tim said.
“I’m not drunk at all. Look at my leg,” Maya raised her leg and even in the dim streetlight glow the large bruise on her thigh was already visible. “Who gets in fights over dancing? What are you, twelve? Say something.”
“Sorry. I don’t know.”
“God. You’re so weird.” Maya turned and strode away, pulling Christi with her by the hand.
* * *
—
Tim drove the winding road through Yankee Jim Canyon, the big river down there—a churning mass of boulder-strewn rapids. The headlights lit the white memorial crosses on the curves—a deadly stretch of road—and Tim drove with two fingers on the wheel. He’d procured a beer somewhere, and he had it jammed between his legs, swigging occasionally. No music on, just the rush of air from the lowered windows. August pressed his nose on either side, feeling the crusted blood there.
“That thing broken?” Tim said.
“Not sure. Doesn’t feel good.”
“I think if it’s broken you know in a hurry. I think you might need an alignment.”
“Huh?”
“Your truck. It’s pulling a little left. I think it’s out of alignment.”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“When’s the last time you rotated your tires?”
“I have no idea.”
“Sometimes they do it when you get an oil change. When did you get an oil change last?”
“I can’t remember right now.”
“Don’t you put the receipt in your glove box? We could probably figure it out.”
“Tim, I don’t really give a shit.”
“Okay, fine. I’m just trying to make conversation.”
“Well, don’t feel like you have to on my account.”
“Okay. Fine.”
They were silent for a few miles. And then August said, “You ever see a buffalo jump?”
“I thought we weren’t talking.”
“Have you?”
“Jump over what? Like, have I seen a buffalo jump over a fence?”
“No, I mean an old Indian buffalo jump. A place where they used to run them over a cliff. I found one way back in the hills on a place I used to work. Bunch of broken skulls and stuff. You could see where they’d come over the edge and then where they’d land on the rocks below. Must have been a hell of a thing to see. A whole herd coming over like that.”
“Yeah? And?”
“And, that’s it. I was just thinking about it. Buffalo herds have a lead bull and the Indians would get that one spooked and running and the rest would just follow him right over the edge.”
“Dumb animals if you ask me. You probably couldn’t get cattle to stampede over a hill. And they’re plenty dumb, so that’s saying something.”
“I was thinking that when there’s a stampede going, at some point, the buffalo have to realize what’s going on. Most of them just follow blindly, but then when enough of them have jumped off into space, one of the guys in the back must be kind of like, Well, wait a minute, I see what’s going on here. Maybe I’ll just run in a different direction. And then, when he starts off, some of the others start following him and then just like that they’re all running behind him and he’s leading them off to safety. And since the old lead bull is down at the bottom of a ravine getting butchered, does that mean the new guy takes his spot?”
“I don’t think buffalo hold elections or anything like that. So yeah, probably he’s the man now.”
“What I was thinking was that at some point in the future, the Indians will come up on them again and get the stampede going and the new lead bull will do the same damn thing as the one before him. See what I mean? It’s just a cycle of stampedes. One animal following another, off the cliff or to safety, it doesn’t really matter. No heroes. We go around all day on the earth, one direction to the next, just following the ass in front of us. Like with women. Right about when you start thinking you’re the lead bull, that’s when the earth comes out from under your feet. You’d think we’d learn, but there hasn’t been an original idea in the world since Adam first stuck it to Eve. Probably the best way to go about things is to just live out your days solitary and then, when it’s time, go wander off into the brush to die.”
“Sounds lonely.”
“At least it’s dignified.”
“This is getting pretty metaphysical. You got your cage rattled, didn’t you?”
“Sorry I got blood all over your shirt.”
Tim looked over at Aug
ust. He flicked on the dome light and shook his head. “It’s ruined. How could you?” he said. “That was my last link to my beloved dead brother and now I have nothing to remember him by. I used to smell it every night before saying my prayers.” He flicked off the dome light and laughed. “No heroes? You’re just now coming to that conclusion? Welcome to the planet the rest of us have been living on, pal.”
It was early evening when August drove the four-wheeler into the shop. He’d been out setting new fence posts on the high ground above the ranch house. Jimmy Buffett was blaring from the fly-specked stereo. To be a cheeseburger in paradise / I’m just a cheeseburger in paradise. Ancient was there, ducked up under the cowl of the round baler.
“Fuck,” he said. “Fucking cunt-nut. Get the fuck on there, you motherfucking fuck.” He pulled his head out, nodded at August, and threw the wrench he’d been holding so it banged hollowly on the sheet metal on the opposite side of the shed. He wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve. “How’d your day go?” he said quietly.
“All right,” August said. “Got a few more posts to set tomorrow and then I can start stringing up the new wire.” August topped off the four-wheeler with gas. Ancient, watching him, raised his eyebrows at the sight of August’s still-swollen nose and cheek, but didn’t say anything. “That hill is steep up there,” August said. “I feel like one of my legs is shorter than the other.”
“Yep,” Ancient said. “That’ll happen.” He’d ducked under the baler again, and then he came up suddenly with another wrench that he gave the same treatment as the first. After hitting the side of the shed it clinked to the cement floor and Ancient shook his head. Wiped the grease from his hands on a rag. He punched a button on the radio, silencing Buffett. “That has to be the stupidest song in the world. You look like you could use a beer, and this baler is shortening my life expectancy every time I look at it. I’m sick of feeling sober. Let’s go to town.”
As Ancient drove he thwacked his chew can on his thigh and packed a large dip in his lower lip. “Grass is looking decent,” he said, nodding at the glistening-wet field, a rainbow forming in the spray of the big irrigation pivot. “We’ll be doing first cutting before you know it.”
“Looks like it.”
“You ever go to the Big Hole Valley? Down by Wisdom?”
“Wisdom?”
“Yeah, that’s the town name. Wisdom. Hardly anything there. A bar. Maybe a post office. They still do hay the old way over there, with a beaver slide. You ever see that? Crazy thing. They’ve got this wooden contraption, kind of like a big scaffold ramp with a sliding platform. Some of the old boys still use horses with a buck rake. They push the hay onto the platform, and then they have another team that’s hooked up to pull the platform. The hay goes up the ramp, and when it hits the top all the hay flips off onto the pile. There’s a couple guys up on top with hayforks tamping everything down and evening it out.”
“So, no bales?”
“Nope. You just get a giant stack, like thirty feet high. Only works in real dry places, because a big pile like that is prone to rot. But just think of it—no goddamn baling machines to ruin your life.”
“You’d have to deal with horses, though.”
“Some guys just use tractors to run the slide.”
“Well, maybe we should build one and give it a try.”
Ancient laughed and shook his head. “Wouldn’t that be funny? The looks I’d get from the old codgers around here if I threw up a giant haystack.”
“It’s dry enough up here, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, but when the wind gets going in the winter that whole stack would vaporize.”
“I hadn’t considered that.”
“It’s nice to think about, though. Just hooking up the team and going to work. Of course, it would take about four people and a couple days to finish a field that a single guy with a tractor and baler could do in a few hours.” Ancient parked across the street from the Mint and shut the truck off, the diesel ticking. “The good old days,” he said, shaking his head. “Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.”
* * *
—
Ancient was drinking his beers two to one ahead of August. He put five bucks in a keno machine and won fifty, and so then they were doing shots of whiskey. He loaded up the jukebox and came back to his stool next to August. “I haven’t tied on a daytime buzz in a long time,” he said. “Can’t even remember when. Pre-Kim, that’s for sure.”
“How’s that going, anyway? Kim?”
Ancient shrugged. “She’s down in Billings. She’s got it in her head that she can’t live up here, it’s too small, nothing for her to do.”
“But didn’t she know that going in? You own a ranch. Wasn’t like you pulled a bait and switch on her.”
“I guess. Truth be told, it’s not so much that she doesn’t like the ranch. When we were first dating we’d go on hikes all over, and she’d go on and on about how beautiful it was and how she’d love to just live in a place away from everything else. She likes the ranch. And she likes me well enough. Me and the ranch aren’t the problem.”
“What’s the problem, then?”
Ancient took his hat off and scratched his head, settled it back down, spun his bottle on the bar a few times. “There’s some people around here that just can’t mind their own business. People that have some kind of grudge against me for one reason or another, and instead of approaching me about it man to man, they decide to slander my fiancée and leave shitty little notes in the mailbox and things like that.”
“Notes in the mailbox?”
“Yeah, can you believe it? How can you call yourself a man if you’re going around slipping notes to people in their mailboxes?”
“What kind of notes?”
Ancient looked at August narrowing his eyes. “Are you telling me you have no idea what I’m talking about? You haven’t heard anything about Kim? You’ve been hanging out with Timmy. I have a real hard time believing that he hasn’t talked some shit.”
August scratched at the label on his beer. “I don’t know.”
“What don’t you know?”
“I don’t know.”
“I know you know. You acting like you don’t know is just going to set me off. Tell me what you heard and then we can go from there.” Ancient had both his hands balled on his thighs. He was leaning back on his stool, not taking his eyes from August.
“Tim told me one time that I ought to check out the sex offender registry in Meagher County. That’s it.”
“He just told you to check it out, didn’t tell you why?”
“He said he wasn’t going to talk about anyone behind their back.”
“And you went and looked.”
August shrugged.
“Did you go and look it up or not? Tell me flat out.”
“I looked.”
“You were curious.”
“I guess.”
“Sure, a guy tells you to check out the sex offender list and doesn’t tell you why—of course you’re going to look. It’s human nature. Hey.” Ancient reached over and slapped August’s leg. “I’m not pissed at you. You’re a good guy and you mind your business, I know that. But you read what you read in that registry, and now you’ve got questions.”
“You don’t have to tell me anything.”
Ancient finished his beer and set it down hard on the bar top. “Hell, I know that,” he said. “I don’t need you telling me what I don’t have to tell you.”
“Okay then.”
“Okay then. Look at you, Mr. Cool. Acting like you weren’t foaming at the mouth to find out just who was the pervert on the list. Were you surprised it was Kim? Did you think it was going to be me?”
“I didn’t think anything. It was Tim that brought it up.”
“That I don’t doubt. That little shit.
I don’t know who did it, him or his dad, but I guarantee it was one of those two. My bet is on Big Tim, because he’s twisted and he spends all his time looking up conspiracy theories on the Internet when he should be out handling his business. He’s a piss-poor cattleman, always was. I bought that chunk of pasture from him at a fair price rather than let the bank take it from him, and he acts like I stole it. And then Kim finds a little anonymous note in the mailbox. Calling her a pervert and a pedophile and a dyke and whatever. She moved up here in the first place to get away from all that noise. She thought this was a place where she could go about her life and people would leave her alone. You know what she did? Her big crime? I’ll just tell you flat out. She was a student teacher—”
“I really don’t care. I don’t even really want to know.”
“You don’t want to know?” Ancient laughed and shook his head. “I could almost believe that’s true. You’ve been working for me for a while now, and I pretty much don’t know a damn thing about you. I get the sense that’s how you want it, and that’s all well and good. But Kim and I are decent people and you’re going to know the root of this thing whether you want it or not, because I’m going to tell you and you’re going to listen. Kim was a student teacher. Twenty-three years old, at a high school in Boise. She was also helping out with the girls’ volleyball team and one of the girls got infatuated with her. Fifteen or sixteen years old, a high school junior.
“Now, Kim is the first person to admit that she showed some bad judgment. Okay? She knows she messed up, but Jesus Christ, she’s been branded some kind of predator for the rest of her life. She and this girl got close and they took a couple showers together, or whatever. Doesn’t really matter. Kim realized it had gone a little too far and so she cut it off, and then the girl got all mental. She acted like a jilted lover. Started calling Kim and showing up at her house at all hours, and then when Kim kept turning her away she went to her parents and said that her teacher had touched her inappropriately in the shower, and of course one thing led to another. You’re trying to tell me that a twenty-three-year-old woman soaping up with a very consenting fifteen-year-old girl is the same thing as some defect molesting his ten-year-old niece? It’s ridiculous. And then to have a puke like Duncan putting his little notes in your mailbox when you’re just trying to live your life? I don’t really blame her for taking off. Anyway, let me pay for these.” Ancient looked at his watch. “Feed-n-Need will still be open if we hustle. I’ve got a purchase I’ve been meaning to make.”