Crybaby Ranch

by Tina Welling

  “Born feet-first—just what you’d expect,” says Violet.

  About the time I decide Maizie is Bo’s birth mother, because she seems perhaps a bit more nutty, and I reason that is accounted for by her actually giving birth and carrying the full load of the secret rather than just being an accomplice, Violet offers a mother’s particular perspective, and I switch sides.

  “The sequentially disabled,” Maizie says.

  “Serially afflicted. Consecutively dysfunctional. Successively dis…” I can’t think of any more.

  Bo pops his head in to check on how well I’m coping with the segregation of chores; hearing our laughter, he rests a shoulder against the doorjamb. “This hilarity has to do with me, doesn’t it?”

  Bo leans into the steering wheel. We are inching along the highway in whiteout conditions. Once we left Violet’s house in town and hit open road, wind complicated the heavy snowfall that began just as we were packing up our Christmas-dinner leftovers. No other tire tracks are visible on the snowy pavement, no lights ahead or behind us. Since this is the only road north out of town, it feels eerie, as if everybody got word the world was coming to an end, except us.

  “But, Bo, didn’t you ever see your aunts naked?” I ask this as if the private mystery solving inside my head has involved him all along. “Ever look for stretch marks? Maybe one of them nursed you.”

  “They both tell stories about nursing, and they both have white, stretchy tracings across their hips. Violet has saggier breasts, but Maizie has small gathers around her navel. I know, because when I was little, we’d soak nude in the Boiling River. Drive the few hours up to Yellowstone at four in the morning with breakfast in our picnic basket.”

  I see by the dashboard lights that he’s smiling at the memory. Clearly, his childhood was rich and loving. Listening to Bo makes me believe we should all have two mothers. Rather than being a hotbed for psychic disorder, for him the maternal duality evoked a double umbilical cord of nourishment and security.

  Those two. Are they crazy, eccentric old ladies? Or just having fun? Sporting their silly selves like they once sported on the rocks inside the steamy breezes of the hot springs in Yellowstone? Or perhaps it is like the theory I carry about my own mother: seemingly harmless personality traits that have exaggerated over the decades into a form of insanity. Bo said once that calling each other sister began when the aunts were making fun of a family in town who referred to one another by their titles instead of their names: Tell brother we’re ready for dinner, and get sister in here, too. The aunts thought it was hokey and very funny to emulate. Along the way that part got forgotten, and now they sound quite serious calling each other sister, just as serious as they sound calling each other Bo’s mother.

  “Why won’t they tell you?” I ask Bo, frustrated by the secret.

  “They probably would.”

  “What?” I’m stunned. My curiosity has peaked to a knife point inside my skull; I assumed his curiosity was a longtime festering wound.

  “They said to ask when I got older.”

  “And you never have?” I can’t believe this.

  “How can I do that? The older I get, the more I become aware of what they have done for each other and for me. I cannot devalue one of them because of what is now a technicality. What’s nine months compared to almost forty years?”

  “You’re right.” I sigh with the effort of raising my viewpoint to match Bo’s loving perspective. Then get pricked by the mystery of it all again and add, “I guess.”

  Finally we have company on the road; up ahead two sets of pink dots stain the dense snowfall, one set above another; the two cars must be approaching a hill.

  I think of my friend in Findlay who was adopted as an infant and the fact was kept from her until recently. She feels her entire foundation, as she knew it, has shifted beneath her. But I acknowledge a difference here. We are not talking about a different culture, family history, genetic makeup. Bo knows his mother. Was, in fact, mothered by her.

  “Since I was a kid, I’ve told most people that I do know, but have sworn never to tell.” Bo laughs beside me in the dark. “Because I’ve never told, everybody trusts me with their secrets. I know the damnedest stuff.”

  “What?” I grin with encouragement.

  “Can’t tell.” Bo doesn’t even smirk; he’s easy with his dark burdens. “Glad to see we have a couple cars to follow now. This stuff is getting serious.”

  I watch the two sets of taillights and try to remember such a long incline on the way home. These streams of snowfall shining into the cones of our headlights, like prisms, unsettle me. I feel transfixed staring into them.

  Bo hunches up closer to the windshield. Visibility grows worse as the snowfall thickens. “I don’t get it. One car disappeared. Watch for it down off the road.”

  This, I remind myself, is why we load Sorel Pacs and shovels into the car even for a drive around the ranch. You never know when you might meet unexpected trouble. And the peanut butter and blankets are because you don’t know how long you might have to wait out that trouble.

  “Shit,” Bo says and at the same time I gasp.

  In a momentary clearing of the snowfall, we see that we are smack up against the backside of a truck. We have not been following two sets of taillights on two different cars climbing uphill, but two sets, one above the other, on a truck. The lower set of lights disappeared beneath clumps of snow—the car we thought had gone off the road. Only the higher set above the truck’s loading doors—the car we thought was farther up the hill—is visible. We are close enough to the truck to lock bumpers.

  My heart thuds so hard I swear the seat is bouncing.

  “Hold on, Zann. Hold on.”

  Bo touches the brakes. The car swims viciously. Rear tires skitter across white glaze. I know Bo is determining our chances of going off the road without rolling. I know they are slim. The greatest percentage of road deaths across Wyoming are caused by rollovers. In these scant moments my future is reduced to becoming part of the lettering on this semi’s backside…or not. Bo taps the brakes once again. The Suburban fishtails. He controls the swerves, and taps again. We fishtail, but gain distance from the truck. Another tap and we breathe easier. We have space.

  “Goddamn stupid,” Bo says.

  “Who could have guessed?”

  “The hill. There’s no hill until farther up the road. Shit, my joints feel like fast-melting Jell-O.”

  I know what he means. I would be incapable of driving. The shock of that pale truck looming suddenly in front of us makes me suspicious of all my senses.

  “Talk,” Bo says.

  What an innovative suggestion from a man. “About what?”

  “I don’t care…your kid…Beckett. He’s got two mothers himself, doesn’t he?”

  “Oh, I guess he does.” Too unhinged to organize my thoughts, I babble the story of becoming Beck’s second mother. Eventually, my stomach muscles stop quivering, and my breathing smoothes. “How are you doing?” I ask Bo.

  “Fine.”

  As dramatically as the whiteout began, it now ends. The road still feels treacherously slick, but visibility is excellent. The sky prickles with stars, except for a line of small round clouds rising from Sleeping Indian Mountain, right behind the feathers of the headdress, as if the Indian had a hidden pipe and took covert puffs when I looked away.

  When Bo pulls up to my cabin, he keeps the engine running while he helps me carry the aunts’ food packages to my kitchen table. I follow him back out the door. On the stoop, I say, “Merry Christmas.” And I reach up on my toes and kiss him, right on the mouth. Reflexively, Bo’s arms come around me. Then I feel him correct himself, and he turns the act into a casual pat on my back as if he is matching my own casual manner. Casual, hah! My deodorant is so sudsed up I fear bubbles will waft out from under my arms.

  “Merry Christmas to you,” he says.

  Back in my warm cabin, I nibble on leftover turkey and gaudy Christmas cookies as I put
them away. I feel so sleepy I can hardly take myself to bed.

  Yet now that I am lying here, I can’t sleep. Maybe it’s the adrenaline surge from the frightful drive in the storm or the kiss under the stars. Insomnia is unusual for me, though it’s Caro’s drug of choice. She sleeps an average of three to four hours a night and jokes that it keeps her thin. She stays up late and reads hardcover trash, usually falling asleep at six when Dickie wakes up. Small families could live on the resale of the books Caro purchases from the bookstore each week.

  A close call with death may blur such things, but I can’t remember, just now, how I meant to experience life. I can’t remember what else there is besides achievement. If I’m not accomplishing something I can report to another, how do I know I’ve lived the moments of my day? I give up falling asleep and scoot upright and prop my knees. Lamplight syphons amber beads from the old log walls, and I feel high and full of something…myself, I think.

  The effortless awareness I experience might be exactly what I’m after. Then again it is so effortless, so flowing, I almost seem to miss it. This question plagues me tonight: Am I living my life fully or sleeping through it soundly?

  Once, Erik and I made love during a long Sunday afternoon while Beckett napped in his crib. Afterward Erik said to me, “I love you.” Those words, at that moment, served to separate him and me. I remember the wash of cool thought that rippled between our oneness, as when one lover moves his warm body at a distance from the other’s. His profession of love was discordant, inappropriate for the intensity of union I was experiencing. He threw us back into separation, built a bridge of words where no gulf of space had existed—until his sentiment created one.

  So I wonder now if I need to separate myself from the flow of time in order to experience it safely in the same way Erik needed to refrain from submerging himself in the flow of intimacy with me. When I’m caring for Mom, each repetitive question of hers nails me to the clock and its agonizing creep through the day. I never need to evaluate how I used my time at the end of it. I fall with relief and exhaustion to my pillow.

  I grew up justifying to my father how I spent my allowance each week, wore through the toes of my socks, used my free time. I might remember I am venturing into a different realm of values by pursuing a creative field and choosing to live in the place I do.

  nineteen

  In February North American biologists monitor hibernating bears. They crawl into the dens and stick rectal thermometers into the sleeping bears to get a quick reading on their metabolism. Quick, because bears rouse easily this time of year, and they are not happy about the waking or the method used.

  Bo reads the bear story out loud from the Sunday Casper Star while sitting on the other end of the sofa from me. Out the window snow is falling again. This was fun in November, but by February it’s getting old.

  “There’s a grizzly job,” he says.

  I laugh and tell him about the hotel owner in Bear Claw, Wyoming, from the section I’m reading. Photographs show walls and walls covered with mounted animals from all over the planet.

  Bo says, “I know that guy, Gardiner Finch. He’s a serial killer.”

  “What?”

  “He’s got more dead animals in that hotel than I can stomach. You should try to eat in his restaurant with all that carnage on the walls.” Bo turns the page and refolds his section of newspaper. “He should be stopped.”

  Interesting words from a hunting guide. Bo has been in the business off and on for most his adult life. He took Dickie and Caro and some of their wealthy friends out last fall. Dickie hung the mounted elk head in his foyer and had salami made to send as business gifts. “What makes the hotel owner different than you?”

  “Not a thing, other than the size of our egos.”

  I look out the window over the top of my paper, and I swear there are times when the snow doesn’t fall in Wyoming—it just goes blowing by. Right now thick lines of snow are streaming past my window, as horizontally as the lines of print I’m reading. It’s thickening by the second and suddenly the butte outside my window disappears. Still, this is a good sign. The earth here is warming. No more forty-below-zero days. This kind of snowfall doesn’t occur during frigid temperatures. We have a long time to go before winter’s end, but the worst is over.

  As I watch the storm blow in, I feel as if I met a challenge in surviving January in Jackson Hole. Bitterly cold short days, deeply frozen long nights. During January it snowed without a cloud in the sky—orographic snow. The cold temperature pulled moisture upward to become fog, which crystallized and fell in flakes. When my own breathing produced snowfall, I worried I had chosen the wrong place to call home.

  I alert Bo to the storm. Then I say, “My first joke as a child was about winter. A play on words. My mother huddled into her red wool coat as we waited for a bus in downtown Cincinnati and said, ‘Brrr.’ I said, ‘It’s burry cold, isn’t it, Momma?’ I was three.”

  “You were an adorable child.” Bo gets up and heads toward the kitchen.

  “That was my point,” I call after him.

  We’re a bit dopey. We skied all day and are stupidly tired. I’m more tired than Bo—I fall often. It takes incredible energy to be a poor skier. Today I skied slopes at the ski village I’d normally be afraid to scoot down on my butt. Following close behind Bo, I felt I was inside the magnetic circle of his expertise and somehow had more courage and skill than on my own. We had fun, but Bo has seemed out of sorts all day.

  He hollers now from the kitchen, “You never have any goddamn ketchup.”

  “I don’t like ketchup,” I holler back.

  “Yeah, well, I do and I’d appreciate some around here once in a while.”

  I get up and answer from the kitchen doorway. “So divorce me.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “Go yourself.”

  Bo tosses his eyes sideways like stones and they land on my face. “I’m a jerk. Sorry.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Caro’s brother is back in town.”

  “Again?”

  “Again.” He looks at me as if hoping I’ll name his difficulty.

  “Counting her money?”

  “Snowmobiling. I lent them a couple of mine.” He wipes a hand down his face. “I’m heading home, Zann. I’m taking this bologna to go with my ketchup, okay? I’ll come over in the morning and we’ll get that garbage disposal installed.”

  A Cowboy Junkies tape blares in the kitchen. Bo and I have our heads stuck beneath the kitchen sink—Bo, holding the flashlight once again, me, unscrewing the slip nut once again. At our feet lies the new garbage disposal I’ve been saving for since Christmas.

  Suddenly, “Blue Moon” slashes to silence and Caro’s voice says, “Is this a special ritual with you two? Honestly, if you’d just come out of the closet with your sexual interest in each other, Suzannah wouldn’t need to stuff banana peels down the drain and, Bo, you could just buy a bottle of Drno to fix this sink like everybody else does.”

  “Hello, Caro,” I say, a deliberate yawn in my voice to cover up my share of the guilt she so aptly describes. My pleasure at lying shoulder to shoulder with Bo in the semidark, “Blue Moon” weeping in the background, thrives on being a secret thing, and I hate her a little bit right now for dragging it through her eutrophic pond of a mind. Sometimes Caro’s intuitiveness is irksome.

  Bo stays put, grabs the retainer ring, locknut, and washers before they fall on top of me. “How the hell can we do that, Caro, with you popping in unannounced all the time?” He responds with real venom in his voice. “Just about the time we zip out of our snowmobile suits and head for the bedroom, dropping our underwear behind us, you come walking in and catch us.”

  What? My head swivels toward Bo. What? From where I’m lying, I can see the ceiling through the drain hole; I wish Caro would bend over the sink so I could see her reaction to Bo’s words. Bo scrapes off old sealant around the drain with a screwdriver as intently as any plumber taking refuge
under a sink to announce his forty-dollar hourly wage.

  “I’m leaving,” Caro says.

  “Do that, Caro. Leave. Get yourself some help.”

  “I don’t need any help, thank you.”

  “No, wait,” I butt in. “I’ll leave.” I scoot out from inside the cupboard, knocking over the flashlight. I set it back upright to shine a small moon on the black painted sink bottom. Bo chips away at old putty. I get to my feet.

  “I need you down here, Suzannah.” Bo sounds like somebody’s father.

  “Caro can help.”

  “Caro can’t do anything but fuck people.”

  “Bo,” I warn, “don’t do this.”

  He says, “I’m dealing with this stinking mess right now.”

  I’m talking about addressing Caro like this in front of me, but he must think I’m talking about the garbage disposal. I start to explain, but he overrides my attempt.

  “Caro, you fuck your brother. I think you should see a therapist.”

  “I saw a therapist. I fucked him, too.”

  “Caro…I can’t manage this.” Bo’s arms drop; he crawls out from beneath the sink. “I just want to hurt you, and that’s not right.”

  I lean over and take the screwdriver out of Bo’s loose grip even though he looks fully defeated, not at all ready to hurt someone. He sits on the floor with his back against the center board, where the cupboard doors latch.

  “You can get help with this,” he says, but doesn’t look up at Caro, just down between his propped knees to where his empty hands dangle.

  “You walked in on us,” Caro says.

  “Yes.”

  A long, shapeless pause spreads. I am as immobile as either of them. I feel sick to my stomach and my legs shake. I can’t imagine how Bo and Caro can possibly discuss this. Like hiking across the slope of a boulder field during earth tremors, each footfall might dislodge crushing rock and hurl the two of them downhill.

  Still keeping his eyes cast down, Bo says, “I came over to drop off a new windscreen for the older snow machine and to adjust the throttles for you. I thought you were waiting till the afternoon to go out. I came in from the garage. When I saw the machines were snowy already, I opened the door to holler hello. Your helmets and gloves were strewn on the hallway floor…. I don’t know. I—”