Crybaby Ranch

by Tina Welling

  “Okay if I brush my teeth? Brought a toothbrush over this morning. Think I’ll go into town from here.”

  “Sure.”

  When he comes out of the bathroom, I’m sitting on the kitchen bench, leaning against the wall beneath the shelf, the lamp shining on a new bead catalog that I’m pretending to read.

  “You don’t want to know this,” Bo says, “but I’m telling you anyway. If her brother has left, I’m ending things with Caro right now. I’m doing it for me, not you.”

  He’s taken me by surprise. I could have sworn he wouldn’t have touched the subject of Caro again with me. Stalling, I ask, “What brother?”

  “Benj. He visits a lot.”

  “What’s he got to do with it?” I don’t care about her stupid brother. I just don’t know what else to say.

  “He sticks pretty close to her. I don’t like him much, and if he’s still in town…I’ll wait. I’m just telling you my intention.”

  I nod. Maybe this intention is just like the one about not drinking too much.

  “And…I’ll take you up on being friends.” He waits for a response, but I feel unable to speak without my voice breaking, so I nod again. He nods back. “Good luck with your new job Tuesday.”

  Once the sound of gravel bouncing off the underside of Bo’s Suburban fades, I pull all the shades down, turn on more lamps, and try to retrieve my sense of adventure in solitude. But I feel restless walking the tight trail of my own and Grandma Garrett’s single experiment in living alone. It’s just so…solitary.

  RESPITE

  OCTOBER 2-8

  Ducks and geese are moving south. Brown and brook trout are spawning in increasing numbers. Elk, moose, mule deer, and pronghorn are mating as narrow leaf cottonwoods continue dropping their leaves and fall colors generally fade. Bighorn sheep are grazing alpine meadows located close to cliff retreats, the rams and ewes still in separate bands.

  For Everything There Is a Season

  —Frank C. Craighead, Jr.

  thirteen

  Each day I am reminded that I am animal. Lately, my sense of smell has awakened. Outside, the aroma of sun on fallen aspen leaves, the freshness of the earth, and the mineral smell of wet creek stones fill me to overflowing. Inside, I smell wood smoke and ashes, the fragrance of ripening apples.

  Whereas once I was mainly aware of taste, now food presents a double delight, and so does Bo. Besides enjoying the sight of him, lately I notice he smells like the outdoors and saddle soap. Bo alerts all my senses. Half an hour ago, confined in the cabin with him during a fleeting hailstorm, I abruptly left him doing his laundry with what’s become our communal washer and dryer and grabbed a jacket and an old cowboy hat of O.C.’s as I passed through the mudroom on my way outside. The potency of Bo’s effect on me felt almost stifling.

  I headed for the creek. A surge of physical need compelled me to step off the trail to smooth the glossy bark of a willow, then lick a cattail as if it were a fuzzy Popsicle. I scooped mud from the creek bottom and smeared it like a potion on my inner wrists and watched the slush of softening hail balls rinse it off.

  While this icy rain tapers to mist, I sit in a dry spot beneath a cottonwood and try to see the aura around a chokecherry bush. Tessa claims all living things have auras. She warned me during the hectic summer whenever an angry tourist, aura throbbing, approached the register at the bookstore. The chokecherry’s aura evades me entirely, but my attention to my surroundings is rewarded, anyway, with a faint rainbow slicing through the Gros Ventres.

  Later, Bo and I are going into town to O.C.’s trailer to cook for him. Pork chops. “I’m a vegetarian only in my spare time,” Bo has said to explain why he cooks meat so often. He claims it takes longer to prepare meals without meat. Of course, that’s because he isn’t familiar with such a diet, which is natural for a rancher. Trouble is, Bo keeps buying enormous quantities of food for our once-a-week dinners together, as if we were a large Mormon family who took seriously the pledge to keep stores for a full year’s survival. He bought the “fiesta” size salsa today, a sixty-four-ounce jar that will take us half a year to use.

  Though on Bo’s good side, I should list his excellent bathroom habits. It’s good to know what it takes to instill them in a man, and, apparently, it’s two mothers. Bo refers to our weekly dinners as “neighborhood potlucks,” as if the rest of the people didn’t show up, just forgot we did this every Friday—his way of making me feel less threatened about planned time together.

  I feel an uncanny delight wearing this old hat, smudged and stained, that I found discarded in the shed. Once I wouldn’t have touched it with a stick, but I’ve changed. During the summer, I sometimes removed my boots and hiked barefoot. I don’t wash my hands as many times as I used to each day. I wipe them on my khakis, instead. Maybe I’m going native the way British officers sometimes did in Africa when they let their hair grow and cast off their uniforms for native dress.

  I rise from beneath the shelter of the cottonwood and move along the trail. I pick a handful of late-ripening Oregon grapes and, without washing them first, eat the berries while I walk, even though the notion flits through my mind that a moose could have urinated on this very bush.

  The sun glides into a slot between gray clouds and warms my cheekbones. The atmosphere pulses so purely just now. The glance of a raven above me in the cottonwood cuts through the air like flame does smoke.

  At work the other day, I told Tessa that weather for me has become an ongoing drama of greater meaning than merely how to dress for it. Lately, it determines my activities and my moods. And I described my feelings of deliciousness while falling asleep lately and then again when waking up. Tessa said, “Your chakras have been cleansed. They’re like circular fans and pull energy from the universe into the body. Yours, girl, are spinning to beat the band.”

  It’s true I don’t remember feeling awake like this before. But I suppose it’s simply that I’ve found my spot on earth and I have come home to my self. I spend many hours outside each day and the rest at an opened window, when once I could go a week without a breath of unprocessed air. Now I check the sky for the first snow clouds, search the butte for mule deer, trace the siren calls of red-tailed hawks. Through these acts I feel as if I am touching the beads of an invisible rosary that remind me where I am and who I am.

  “Your trouble is that you’re stuck in that cow town in Wyoming,” my dad said shortly after I left Erik and sounded low one phone call. “You should have taken yourself to a big city in the East where you had more choices.” But when I left Erik, I wasn’t looking for the kind of choices my dad had in mind: entertainment and opportunities and careers. I was looking for life itself. Here, where the land thrusts upward and the wild animals bound, the world pulses with aliveness. I needed majestic doses to stun me into wakefulness after marriage to Erik.

  But waking comes with its own demands. Since autumn began I have wanted to stock food and firewood and candles for winter. I have wanted more sleep, more fats, warm creamy drinks, and baked cakes. Mostly I have wanted to scratch out a den, circle three times, and lie down with my mate.

  Whether my mind and emotions feel ready or not, my body is looking for a mate. But it’s just winter coming, I remind myself. It’s just Bo hanging around my kitchen.

  Erik sold our house in Findlay, paid off the mortgage, and sent me my share of the profit, but he doesn’t respond to my phone messages or notes. Beckett said that his dad moved into a new town house complex with its own gym and that he works out regularly with weights. I was glad to replace the image of Erik standing alone on the stoop as I pulled out the drive with the image of Erik working up a healthy sweat.

  My eyes follow the curve of land rising high against the sky, some peaks frosty with fresh snow that fell as rain and hail down here on the valley floor, and I feel I have completed a cycle in my new life. I arrived as last winter’s snowmelt first trickled, then crashed down this mountain stream. I have watched bison calves grow from ovals cur
led in the meadows like golden eggs into rusty creatures half the size of their mothers. And I myself have burst through a placenta of misconceptions and fears that had held me both protectively and restrictively balled into myself.

  The picture of Erik framed by my rearview mirror, alone on the porch stoop, has kept me twisting in and out of the covers many nights, entangled by the concern that I sacrificed him for my own life. I hear him calling to me as I bump down the sidewalk with my suitcase full of books, “If you’re going to Florida, keep to the expressway.” At the time I didn’t hear these words or respond to them. Now something sounds off to me as the memory replays once again. Why did he assume I was going to Florida? Did Erik intend for his behavior to prompt me into going away without him for spring break? Or for the rest of his life? This was how Erik accomplished what he wanted. He got me to feel the emotions and express them for both of us. He did nothing that could be traced.

  Some men ended their marriages by bringing home floozies, expensive cars, drunken friends, empty pay envelopes. My husband brought home pineapple pizza. I feel both freshly enraged and suddenly relieved. I did not single-handedly end a long-term marriage. Erik, in his passive way, also carries responsibility. How many times before had he done similar things and I disappointed him by forgiving, swallowing my anger—choking down pineapple pizza?

  The sun has dropped behind Saddlestring Butte and only the dark hulk of the butte is contoured against the late-afternoon sky. From this, the dark silhouettes of Canada geese fly out of shadow and split off in a jagged V, looking as if the side of the hill has exploded into pieces.

  It’s time to return home.

  O.C. twisted his knee. Dr. Goldy prescribed that he stay off his feet, which is why Bo and I are having our weekly dinner there tonight. We’ll stock groceries and cook for O.C. and exercise his new puppy—the cause of the accident. Five months old and Pet of the Week at the pound, she has the bad habit of tearing around in a frenzy of joy and, in passing, bumping full speed into the back of O.C.’s knee with her head. O.C.’s knee collapses and down he goes. This has happened twice, twisting the same leg.

  “Look at this,” Bo says now. He cuts the engine and dips his head to get the full view of O.C.’s trailer out the windshield. “Have you ever seen such mess?”

  I laugh in relief that Bo has said something first. Decades’ worth of orange Wyoming license plates with the bucking bronco and county number twenty-two stamped on them cover the short end of O.C.’s trailer, which faces the street. Dozens of moose, elk, and deer skulls are mounted on the front side of his trailer beneath the roof of the deck, which is supported by highly varnished burled pine posts. That’s not all. The yard, which Bo and I enter through an archway constructed of stacked elk antlers, is the size of two large lots and is enclosed by a cement wall with pale river stones and brightly colored pieces of glass embedded in it.

  “Oh,” I say. I spread my arms. “Look at all these…sculptures.”

  “O.C. says they’re totems. He doesn’t like them called sculptures.”

  The totems are built from the same mix of stone, glass, and cement as the wall and are scattered about the lawn. There’s a giant cowboy boot, a sunflower, a fishing dory, a moose with a pair of antlers rooted in the cement, a jackrabbit with antelope horns, and a prairie schooner. I turn around and see a tall glittering cactus, a windmill, and an unfinished project that may be a doghouse.

  Suddenly, the trailer door flies open. I spin around in surprise, and to cover up being stupefied, I bubble extravagantly, “All this…creativity. It’s just…amazing. Such profuse amounts of…artwork.”

  While I search for words, O.C. hobbles along the deck hanging on to the burled railing. Every foot or so a colorfully painted wooden whirligig spins in the breeze: a man saws wood; a rooster bobs at a corncob; a woman hangs laundry; a little boy…the little boy, I believe, is shaking his penis after peeing in some wooden tulips.

  I can’t stop jabbering. “I admire your work. I didn’t know you were an artist.”

  “I’m not a goddamn artist.” Now I become aware of O.C.’s grim expression. He squints at me, raises disgusted eyebrows at Bo, then spits over the railing. “So,” he says accusingly to me, “I guess you’re his first one.” He cocks his head sharply toward Bo.

  “I doubt that,” I say before thinking.

  Bo disguises a grin by stretching his neck upward to take a puckered surveillance of the gathering clouds, of which an assortment of shapes and colors holds council low over the valley, behind O.C.’s head.

  “I hear this one’s a crybaby,” O.C. says.

  A prickly warmth flushes my underarms. My glance floats in forced casualness to Bo. I plan on denying this accusation, so I can’t express outrage just yet that Bo would talk about me to anyone.

  “I don’t know what…I am not a crybaby,” I say to O.C. Mentally, I add, Except for that one night you’re probably talking about, but your grandson didn’t act so damn mature either. Then I pull myself together and realize O.C. must be referring to something entirely different. Still, he is rude.

  “I don’t like the way you’re talking to me,” I say to him. O.C. says, “I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to my grandson.” Then he turns toward Bo and says, “Snippy little gal.”

  I wonder if O.C. always talks to one person while he looks at the other when he feels mean. Perhaps that habit allows him comfort with his harsh language.

  Bo, I notice, is looking at his grandfather as if he’d like to reach up and stuff one of those rag brown clouds down O.C.’s throat. He says to me, “He calls artists crybabies.” To O.C. he says, “Don’t start on her.”

  O.C. ignores his grandson. “The girls tell me you make some kind of baubles.”

  Every time O.C. refers to the aunts as the girls, which he often did at the barbecue last spring, I get thrown for a second. I picture teenage twins, for some reason. Could it be because that’s the image stuck in O.C.’s mind and somehow gets projected with his words? His daughters when they last made sense to him? Say fourteen and fifteen, before adulthood, before driving rights, illegitimate baby boys? Since Violet was held back a year, both girls, like twins, would have been in the eighth grade then.

  “Pop…not yet. Okay?” Bo sounds like he knows what’s coming.

  “Hell to hope, she’s a crybaby or she ain’t. Let’s get it out.” O.C. spreads his spindly short legs—the left with a removable plastic cast around the knee—one step apart and challenges me. “You one of them God-farting artsy whiners? Expect to get your food from the government because you like to daydream on paper and doodle in colored paints and nobody in their hardworking honest mind is going to pay you to do that crap instead of working like the rest of us?”

  “What?” I say.

  “She works, you old coot. Nobody in government pays her. She creates things for free,” Bo says.

  I look at Bo, unsure whether he’s defending or insulting me.

  “Haven’t learned the ropes yet, have you, little missy? Let Bo tell you how to get government handouts for putting pretty pebbles on string just like he did for screwing rusty junk together.”

  “All right. Shit. Suzannah, get the hell in the car.”

  “What?”

  “Move. That way.” Bo tosses his head toward the gate and guides me with one hand on the back of my neck toward his car.

  “What?” I have lost track of the emotion erupting, yet somehow feel responsible for it all. Clearly, I have stirred up something.

  “Boohoo,” O.C. catcalls after us. “Give me a handout. I’m an artiste.” He stretches out the word to a snaky hiss.

  Bo stuffs me into the car and swings himself behind the wheel. We make a murky cloud of our own in the dirt drive to match the clumpy clouds, darkening above us, as Bo wheels sharply to the left backing up, then wrenches the gear into first and spins around O.C.’s arc of a drive.

  “Run on back to Crybaby Ranch,” O.C. hollers after us as we circle behind the trailer. O.C. scr
ambles to the other side of the deck and yells, “Go ahead, skedaddle. Crybabies! Boohoo.”

  Bo alternately grips his eyes to the road in front of him and ducks his head to the lower left, glancing out his side window to his mirror, as if checking to see if O.C. is chasing us. Crybaby Ranch. What does O.C. mean? One thing: I won’t inwardly cringe anymore whenever Bo calls his grandfather Old Coot. I wouldn’t mind letting Bo know I think his grandfather is a sly stinker, hiding his cruelty behind a good ole boy persona.

  I maintain my silence and let Bo flex his jaw muscles. We reach the north edge of town, about to pick up speed to head out on the highway toward home. I notice Bo’s glance stick to the rearview mirror. He slackens his press on the gas and slows into the pullout that overlooks the elk refuge and he parks.

  “We got his goddamn groceries in the backseat.” Bo stares at a family of trumpeter swans, dazzling white parents and two dirty gray cygnets, floating in the near curve of Flat Creek. “Ought to let the old coot starve.”

  I think back to my first impression of O.C. at Bo’s party. I was in the kitchen helping guests find room in the refrigerator and oven for their potluck dishes when I heard a man’s irksome voice say, “We can see through that girl’s skirt.”

  “I’m wearing stretch pants under my skirt,” I said over my shoulder while bent half inside the oven door.

  “Long underwear,” the troublemaker said. “We can see that, too.”

  Before I could retort, Bo broke in and made introductions. “That’s all he wanted,” Bo said in an aside to me. To be introduced, I suppose he meant, and I thought then O.C. could have found a gentler way to accomplish that.