Crybaby Ranch

by Tina Welling

  “There is no line, Caro.” Benj turns toward me and switches his smile on again. I begin to think about what happened when the rough father left town and the weak mother couldn’t do a thing about how her children spent their time together.

  The trouble with my new life since leaving the blandness of marriage with Erik and teaching school is that my newly awakened imagination soars out of bounds. Once I overheard someone discussing artificial legs in a restaurant, and my mind set off into picturing a policeman shooting somebody over and over in that artificial leg, trying to stop them from escaping a crime scene. Emptied his gun and still the guy kept walking away.

  Caro tries to overhear what Benj is saying to me while she gives her order. It’s nice someone is listening to him. I just want out of here. I gather up my belongings, jabber some polite words to Benj, wiggle fingers at Caro, and pull the door behind me before both my arms are in my coat sleeves. On the sidewalk I wrestle with my books and clothes. “Please,” I beg myself, “act normal.” From the counter they can easily see me out here. My coat half dragging on the ground, backpack spilling its contents. Lips moving, giving directions to myself. But I’m unnerved: Benj is Caro’s brother like Heathcliff was Catherine’s.

  seventeen

  This morning I cross-country ski around the base of Saddlestring Butte and encounter the heart-shaped tracks of elk, left like valentines in the snow. The name of Bo’s ranch, Crossing Elk, originated from this heavily used game trail, swagging down the butte to the creek bank below. Bo says by winter’s end the snowy trail will be paved a foot and a half wide in elk droppings. Right now droppings are still sparse, but definitely scattered along this particular route as if a herd of Hansels and Gretels was marking their way home.

  Alongside the creek I pole myself slowly, eyes on the ground looking for signs. I become hypnotized, puzzling out the prints and scat. By the time I turn back after one of these outings, I am filled with calm.

  Earlier this week, when I told my father on the phone about my new hobby, he said, “Hobby? That’s not how your mother and I thought of it when we caught you in your crib with your diapers off playing with your scat, as you like to call it.”

  “Caught me? You sound as if I’d been committing a criminal offense.”

  “It was pretty damn offensive to me,” he said.

  I bend low over a twist of coyote scat prickly with fur and hope I’ll come across prints of the chase. Farther up the creek, I see dirt heaped over the snow and realize there was no chase. The coyote just dug underground for his dinner last night. Vole, most likely.

  I’d meant to tell my father about my latest sighting: tiny paw prints in fresh snow that suddenly disappeared in a flutter of feathery wing impressions. The drama of a raptor capturing a small rodent. Sometimes, even though I may laugh at my father’s remarks, I feel him sucking out my psychic energy till I am nearly flat. The image of a vampire comes to mind.

  I was determined on the phone that night to be the one to end our call for a change. I said, “Dad, I have to go now, but I wanted to cheer you with the news that tracking has finally made something of a scientist of me.” He has accused me of being the enemy of rational thought with a one-sided interest in the arts.

  My father answered, “Yeah? You saying I should have been cheered about hosing down a baby scientist and her crib that Saturday morning?”

  I gave up, because he never does. I bet my father has no memory of talking to my mother in just that exact way. Now my mother doesn’t either.

  I ski to an area tamped flat by the many webbed prints of Canada geese. From reading descriptions of autopsies done on Alzheimer’s patients, I picture areas of my mother’s brain looking like this, pathways knotted into a tangle of webbed prints.

  I ski across the frozen creek and up the other side to a spot where a warm spring keeps ice from forming. A dozen mallards and the dazzling black-and-white of the Barrow’s goldeneye crowd the tiny pool. Once, I saw a family of four otters lunch on fish beside the creek here, crunching bones. Today, I notice the otters haven’t used their slide on the bank since the tiny hard pellets of graupel snow fell a few days ago. No fresh scat either. I worry about this family of otters and I worry about my own family. We are separating from one another in our various ways. What will become of us? What will hold us together?

  Excrement seems to be a family theme lately. I think of the adult diapers my dad has had to purchase recently for my mother. Perhaps this explains his inability to honor my interest in tracking. And Beckett, graduating midyear with his associate’s degree from LCCC, alerted me that all his classmates were depositing moose pellets into the dean’s palm when he shook their hands while passing out diplomas. By the end of the ceremony every pocket of Dean Coates’ suit bulged. He must have smelled a bit odd, too.

  Delinda promised to come but, typically, canceled at the last minute. Thinking now about Beck’s distance during my weekend visit, I wonder if he wanted to punish me for being more attentive than Delinda, because years ago I may have confused the issue in his young mind. Whenever Delinda failed to show up or call as promised, I offered treats—ice cream or a movie—to help fill the blank space in his life as if I were the one responsible for it.

  I ski back to the cabin and find Bo in the kitchen, fixing food for our “neighborhood potluck,” as he still calls it. “Been shit tracking again?” he asks by way of greeting.

  “Yep. What are you cooking? Smells good in here.”

  “Potato soup.”

  “Yum.”

  I haven’t talked to Bo since I saw Caro and her brother in town a couple days ago, except to phone with an apology for my bad behavior, which I blamed on my cold. As I strip off my gaiters and boots, the washer finishes its final spin cycle. I switch Bo’s load from the washer to the dryer. He has begun adding my laundry to his to make up a full load. I have mixed feelings about this blurring of our belongings. Mostly, I am so wrapped up in my jewelry designs these days that to be spared brushing my own teeth would be welcome.

  “Bo,” I call into the kitchen, “thanks for washing the blue bathroom rug.”

  He turns off the kitchen faucet. “I didn’t. I washed the white one.”

  I hear potato slices thud one by one as he slices them into the soup pot.

  “What else did you wash with it?” I holler back.

  “Flannel sheets. Your new blue plaid…” The hollow thumps of falling potato slices halt.

  Bo appears in the laundry room doorway. “I do the laundry. How come you’re in here?” Paring knife in hand, he defends his position in the household. My household.

  I never say the obvious. I never say because it’s my house, my laundry. It seems unfair to express the unequivocal in an argument.

  Bo picks up the rug, holds it by its fringe, and aims it toward the lightbulb overhead. “That’s not blue. That’s practically white.”

  “It’s blue. Once it was completely white.”

  “This is white with a shadow across it. The blue is a pigment of your imagination.”

  We never get any further than this. I laugh at his silly wit, marvel over his even, good nature—despite provoking him like I did the night of my cold—and it’s over. But I never quite get to any points about my rights around here, his lack of them. Yet, too, from the kitchen, the aroma of diced onions sautéed in butter breezes past my nose. It’s clouding up outside, the wood burning in the stove gives a wild whine, reminding me of the rough-legged hawk soaring earlier over the snowy butte. I don’t have to eat dinner alone. I don’t even have to think it up or cook it.

  My laughter winds down into a smile that matches Bo’s. We stand there and just grin. Really, I feel such contentment. Euphoria bubbles up, then simmers like Bo’s soup will soon, and I place the shadowy blue laundry on the back burner of my mind.

  Bo returns to slicing potatoes. I check the mail he brought and use his pocket knife to unwrap a box from Rishashay. Brand-new silver bead caps and fancy spacers. I carry them to my wo
rk table.

  During my marriage it never occurred to Erik or me that anyone but me would handle the laundry. Traditions change. Now even my father is doing laundry. Dad said he found a box of cookies in the tub of the washing machine last week, washed, rinsed, and spun. “But that’s okay,” he assured me, deeply tucked into his denial. “We’re doing fine.”

  I can’t document this, but I believe there was a plateau in my life at which I made a choice whether I, too, would fall sick, give up, and roll downhill or gather myself together and trudge on up. I remember one winter in Findlay, wishing I could stay in bed forever. For several weeks I carried a low-grade fever, vaguely ached from head to toe, and was smeared with a faint rash, like strawberry jam on white bread. The doctor said, “Maybe scarlatina. Maybe nothing.”

  Then it was over. I had begun to make jewelry. As I grew stronger, beadwork took over my life, as if it were a fierce disease itself. I got healthier, happier, even sharper in my thinking—I swear, my IQ rose twenty points.

  Tessa said that was my Saturn return. “How old were you?” she asked.

  “Thirty-five,” I told her.

  Like a game-show host, she congratulated me for giving the right answer. “Exactly.”

  An ego crisis, she explained. We each get one. We reach the peak of our ego’s arc—usually between thirty-five and forty—and decide there and then whether we rip through outer dressings and soar on upward or follow the curve back down to death.

  Bo’s soup pours into my bowl like ladles of ivory velvet. It’s speckled with fresh dill and parsley. He bought baguettes from the Bunnery. Split, buttered, and toasted them beneath the broiler. Lettuce this time of year is not green; our salad looks more as if Bo just laundered the white leaves with a green sheet. For dessert, I baked lemon bars. Our dinner is monochromatic, like the view out my windows: all shades of white.

  “I met Caro’s brother the other day,” I say, once I come up for air from my potato soup. “You felt something wasn’t right….”

  “Never mind,” Bo says. “It wasn’t anything.”

  He begins clearing our dishes off the table and carrying them to the sink. What’s his rush? He didn’t even finish his soup. I grab another piece of bread as the plate flies past. Bo has a heavy hand with butter, which I love.

  “When Dickie’s on these long trips, we usually see a lot more of—”

  Bo interrupts. “Caro made reservations for the two of us at Chico Hot Springs this weekend.” He crosses to the stove.

  “I’ve never been to Montana.” For one wild moment, I misunderstand. I think “the two of us” means Bo and me. Really, I need a fuller social life. Sometimes I lose my place in this odd triangle Caro and Bo and I have going.

  “She wants to check out some cutting horses in Livingston.” Bo stands with his back to me, spooning soup into his mouth. I knew he couldn’t have eaten enough.

  I keep picturing how Caro acted as if Benj were a daddy, safe to flirt with, yet looking at him worriedly for approval. Kind of flirty, kind of anxious. Perhaps I can offer Caro a wider cushion of tolerance now, knowing there’s complications in her life. Still, reservations at a hot-springs resort just to buy horses?

  I brush buttery toast crumbs from my fingers and tune into Bo, who is talking about O.C.’s upcoming knee surgery.

  “Trouble is, O.C.’s surgery is scheduled this week and he won’t be able to take care of Hazer. So I told O.C. I’d ask you how you felt about having a pup around a few days.” Bo is pouring the leftover soup from the pot into a plastic storage bowl.

  “Why doesn’t O.C. ask me himself?” I knew O.C.’s knee was giving him trouble and surgery was a possibility. He never quite recovered from his pup knocking him down.

  “You mean a direct one-on-one, face-to-face interaction?” Bo looks at me wide-eyed over his shoulder. “How the hell you think a family can keep any ties going that way? I’m a little worried about Pop not phoning one of the aunts first to ask me to ask you.”

  “Books call that codependent behavior.” I walk to the sink with my soup bowl and silverware. Bo seems to feel he has to be chatty for a bit longer until he’s certain I’m not going to break into the first available space with my version of things between Caro and Benj.

  “Codependent behavior defines a family. You think Pop and I would have anything at all going on between us if we didn’t take on each other’s business? You think I’d choose to talk to the old coot for fun?” Bo scrapes the last of the soup from the sides of the pot with a spatula to get every last drop. When he’s finished, the soup reaches the very top of the bowl; if there had been another spoonful, Bo would’ve had to eat it.

  I start the water for tea and rinse the bowls.

  “We make up stuff like this to keep us hanging together.” Bo rummages in a drawer for a plastic lid. “See, you’ll give me an answer, I’ll pass it on to O.C., he’ll have another message for you, maybe one for the aunts so I get to call them, too, then call O.C. again.”

  “Triangling, the books call that.” Slow times at the bookstore I educate myself in the relationships section and try to figure out my life.

  “You bet. The family that triangles together, hangs together.” Bo snaps the lid on the plastic bowl. I admire his genius for finding the exact size bowl to fit leftovers. I usually have to dirty two because I’ve guessed wrong.

  Bo brings over the salad bowl and dumps the leftovers in the sink. He pushes the lettuce down the drain, while I gather potato skins, left on the counter, and toss those into the sink.

  The sink fills with murky water. Potato skins and lettuce begin to float.

  “Well, shit,” Bo says. “Look what we’ve done again.”

  “Oh, heck.”

  Bo uses the ladle to bail out water from the sink into the soup pan. Then grabs handfuls of lettuce and potato skins.

  “I would love to have Hazer here, but I think O.C. should have asked me himself.”

  Bo runs to his car for his toolbox. I convince him when he returns to let the sink go until we finish dessert. “Our tea’s ready.”

  We sit back down at the table. I relate Tessa’s theory about Saturn returns and ask Bo what he thinks while I cut the lemon bars into generous squares.

  “I think Tessa’s one of the nicest nuts I’ve met.”

  “Really, there might be something to this. Right now you’re in the process of deciding whether to go on as before or climb to a new level and live more intensely.”

  “I’ve already decided. That’s what selling the cattle was all about,” Bo says.

  “I know, but…” I want to say but you haven’t acted on this new life much. I’m thinking about his lack of artwork—he had to cancel his gallery show this fall because he wasn’t ready—and his apparent increase in seeing Caro. In fact, he continues to use his ranching skills for her now instead of himself. It seems to me like Bo might be sliding downhill. Though it could be just me. I’m finally feeling ready for an increase in Bo’s presence in my life and perhaps feeling threatened by a fear of not getting the man I’ve been expecting.

  I say, “Maybe you’re stalled in your creativity because you don’t confront your grandfather about anything, even his dog’s care. You are an artist. It’s time to make O.C. honor that.” I let the delicate crust of the lemon bar melt on my tongue and pick up a fallen crumb with a licked finger. “Of course, that’s exactly what I need to demand from my father, who’s spent his life managing me, rather than enjoying me.” I add this just in case my personal remarks sound intrusive.

  “That’s the trouble with you, Suzannah….”

  “Oh, good. Let me get cozy here first, shoes off, tea poured.” I slouch back in my chair dramatically and look at Bo. “Now tell me all about the trouble with me.”

  “Smart-ass.” Bo gets up to see if the sink is draining yet. Then, leaning against the counter he crosses his arms and faces me. “I wasn’t going to find fault with you.”

  “Then say the wonderful thing about you, Suzannah in
stead of the trouble with.”

  Bo releases a breath of exasperation, then jumps right in. “The wonderful thing about you, Suzannah, is your intent—no, determination—to reach the deepest inside yourself that you can imagine. Now the trouble”—he catches himself—“other people have is that you demand they, too, reach deep down and offer you their insides, knowing all the while that you’re way more experienced in this. And whatever they can offer won’t be good enough to interest you.”

  “Are you talking about yourself here?”

  “Your father was the guy I had in mind. Why not back off? Relax a bit and stop demanding an intimacy from him that he doesn’t know a damn thing about.”

  “You are talking about yourself.”

  “No.” Bo pulls his kitchen chair out again and sits. He lifts his mug of hot tea and holds it with both hands under his chin. If he wore glasses they’d be all steamed up by now. He’s not looking at me. His eyes study an area near his left elbow, propped on the table. “No. I’d actually like to try to follow you there.”

  My eyes fill instantly. My throat clogs fast as the gooseneck pipe beneath the kitchen sink. I pull my cup close and look into the depths of my tea. All my life I have wanted this. A companion diver. Someone not easily scared spelunking the watery abyss of togetherness. Two grown-ups, consciously individual, each with his own headlamp and oxygen tank, holding hands for the sheer love of sharing the adventure. Is this what Bo is offering?

  Of course not, he just reported he and Caro are going off to Chico this weekend to slither around each other in the hot springs. I give the lump in my throat a minute to dissolve.

  “You would not.” I speak softly but even so my voice gives me away with its raspy vulnerability. I take a long sip of my hot tea. We do fine talking about my insides; we get to Bo’s insides and he cloaks the topic with my father’s feelings.

  “Things don’t happen overnight.” Bo sets his mug down. “I’m just saying you ask a lot from people and that’s okay, but…expect to twiddle your thumbs while everybody is catching up.”