Crybaby Ranch

by Tina Welling

  “You snuck up on us.”

  “I just didn’t move away right off. Something has seemed so wrong all along.”

  “And you’ve decided I’m fucking my brother.”

  “That’s what I heard.” Bo looks up at Caro now, full of sorrow.

  “You jerk. You fucking crybaby jerk.” Caro dips low to borrow this insult from O.C.

  “I don’t have a right to be angry,” Bo says. “I should feel worried for you.”

  “Oh, you have a right to be angry,” Caro sneers. She folds her arms and glares accusingly at Bo, still on the floor.

  I counsel myself: About now, you should move out of here. It’s not like you are required to be in the room. Stalling, I argue back: But surely I am not expected to leave the house. The wind is up; whiteouts are brewing. I urge myself: At least go into the other room.

  I walk out of the kitchen and into the living room and stand at the far window, looking out. I feel as if I’m at the scene of a terrible accident and, though splattered by blood, have decided not to get involved. I feel sorry for everybody—Bo, Caro, Caro’s brother. I want to overhear what is said, hoping they will discover a familiar sign along the way that will point the way home for them all.

  Bo breaks the gap of silence. “Well, I am angry, Caro. I’ve been lied to.” Bo sounds as if he’s getting to his feet as he speaks. “You’re sick, I keep telling myself, but I’m goddamn furious anyway.”

  “He’s not my brother.”

  “Sure.”

  “He’s not.”

  “Go see somebody, Caro. A therapist.”

  “I didn’t lie about that part; I did fuck my therapist. My last two, in fact.”

  “Caro, please…get the hell out of here.” Bo sounds disgusted and weary and forlorn.

  “Benj is my ex-husband.”

  “You’re lying. Even Dickie told me. He’s your brother.”

  “Dickie thinks he’s my brother. I was still living with Benjamin when Dickie and I met. I introduced him as my brother.

  Benj and I quietly divorced right away, and soon after that, I married old Dickie.” By the sound of her voice, Caro is feeling cocky. A kitchen chair scrapes across the linoleum. “Find me a drink and I’ll tell you a story.”

  “Just the story, Caro.”

  I picture the two of them in a stare-down. At the window, I shiver from the shards of cold air that shatter the warmth surrounding the woodstove.

  “Start,” Bo says.

  “Can’t you at least sit down?”

  “Start.”

  “I don’t owe you this story. Just thought you might enjoy it.”

  “You owe me. Start.”

  “I don’t owe you cow cum. You were never in love with me. You loved yourself around me, and around Dickie. Don’t act like you have the monopoly on pure feeling here, Bo. You don’t. You were enjoying your John Wayne image. And, in the beginning, you fucked a rich man’s wife practically in front of his face. That usually gets the most jaded men aroused.”

  “Caro, I’m warning you…I’ve just about had it.”

  “You’re too curious to kick me out without hearing the rest of my story. Get me a drink.”

  “I know the rest of your story. You dumped dirt-poor Benjamin and hooked rich Dickie. Not such an original plot.”

  Now crammed tight into the sofa corner farthest from the kitchen in my attempt to hear without the guilt of overtly eavesdropping, I wonder why Caro is driven to explain herself to Bo. She does only what benefits her and has never shown the need to bare her soul or her history. In my anxiety I push back my cuticles with a thumbnail as I imagine Bo and Caro glaring at each other across my kitchen.

  “Here’s the thing,” Caro finally says. “I don’t want Dickie to know Benj is my ex-husband. I need your promise that you won’t tell him.”

  “I promise nothing.”

  “I’ll back Crybaby Ranch in return for that and for your promise that you won’t let Benj know about you and me.”

  “Your extramarital affairs aren’t going to shock an old ex like Benj. Not one dumped the same way.”

  “Benj was not dumped.”

  “I don’t get you.”

  “Benj and I agreed that I would marry Dickie for a couple years. In fact, Benj just parted from his last wife.”

  My heart sinks for Bo. Silence in the kitchen again. I know Caro is sitting in Bo’s usual seat. From the sound of Bo’s voice, I picture him leaning his hips against the sink. Arms tightly folded, to guess by his defensive tone.

  “Rich wife?” Bo asks. He’s figured something out. I’m not caught up. I feel left out suddenly, as if part of the story were scribbled on a napkin and shoved mutely across the table for Bo’s eyes only.

  “Right. Very rich. Almost as rich as Dickie.”

  “And Benjamin got a hefty settlement.”

  “Right, again.”

  Bo asks, “And now?”

  “Now it’s my turn.”

  Another silence. I feel as if I’m weighed down with emotion, emotion rightfully belonging to Bo. And Bo, knowing I’m in the living room feeling his weighted sadness, his own mind unencumbered with emotion, can dart ahead, flashing light into the dusky seams of Caro’s life.

  “So Benj has come to Wyoming to try to convince you to divorce Dickie.”

  “God. I thought you were with me here.” Caro sighs dramatically. “Benj doesn’t have to convince me. That was our plan. Marry poor, divorce rich, and do it in two years or less. We’re a bit off schedule. It’ll be three years in April.”

  I let out an audible gasp. The sofa springs screech as I lurch to my knees and face the kitchen door in my shock. An arrangement. I hate her. I hate her. The screwdriver is lying beside me and I pick it up. I’ll take it back in to Bo. I’ll offer to help cover up the bloody evidence. The horror of that image shocks me, and I toss the screwdriver to the other side of the sofa.

  “And me?” Bo asks. “What role was I assigned in your scam?”

  I hear him getting a glass, running the water faucet. He has needed to turn his back to her. But did Bo forget? The drain pipe has been removed. I listen for splashing on the floor, though thankfully only hear water go into a glass. Does Bo want what most men would: to hear that he bummed up the works? That Caro unexpectedly fell hard for him and neither man can compare? Flashes of Caro and Benj, stripped of their snowmobile suits, would intrude on such hopes. Besides, Caro has admitted that she’s only telling him the truth because she wants something from him. She needs Bo’s cooperation in keeping Benj’s true identity from Dickie, and she needs her romantic games with Bo kept from Benj.

  Caro must realize that Bo hopes their earlier affair and friendship were important to her in some way. She scrapes her chair across the floor. I hear her take steps toward the back door, halt there, and let Bo’s need for an answer stretch.

  Does Caro know she is playing a dangerous game? The last three years of effort could be sucked down a hole with one slip from one lover.

  Way out here in the other room, I feel Bo waiting. Caro has to answer. But how? She can’t dismiss Bo and she can’t give him any leverage either.

  “Bo,” she begins, “I don’t know. You thought I was better than I really was. I guess I enjoyed that. I know I can’t bribe you with backing Crybaby Ranch, and I know that played no part in our times together. But it’s just that…Benj may as well be my brother: We are kin under it all. I don’t like myself as well with him as I have with you, but Benj and I share a lot of history together. He knows who I really am. There’s relief in that.”

  “What about Dickie?” Bo has turned to face Caro again sometime during her answer; his voice carries into the living room clearly, and he sounds strong again.

  “Dickie.” Caro emits a soft snort. “I’ll have to stay with him another year now—or give this deal up altogether. He’ll think I’m leaving him for you, and I won’t get one red cent.” Caro pauses, then drawls out, “So, my beautiful cowboy, you have branded your mark on m
y life after all. I gambled something for you. Cheered?” she asks almost playfully.

  I hear no response from Bo.

  Caro continues. “I signed a prenuptial. That’s the only condition under which I lose entirely—leaving old Dickie for love or lust of another man. That’s why he’s so liberal with me, you see. Knows I won’t stray all that far. He likes to watch, old Dickie does. All the while holding tight to the leash.”

  How can I find this more sickening than even incest? I ask myself.

  “Maybe he’d like to watch you with your brother.” Bo sounds repulsed.

  Caro barks a short laugh. “That would spruce up an old routine. Unless you blow it up in our faces.”

  What’s Bo going to do? I feel him computing his response.

  In a moment he says, “Get out of this valley, don’t return, and I won’t have the chance.”

  “Sweetie, you forget.” I hear Caro lean against my back door. “You used me as much as I used you. Didn’t I provide plenty of excuses to play and not do your work? Isn’t that what you needed? Most importantly, didn’t I come in handy with your neighbor in there?”

  My breathing halts.

  “You lied to her, too,” Bo says. “She’s been a good friend to you.”

  “Yeah, well. We do what we have to when times are tough. I’d feel worse about it all, but I was used by her as well.”

  I’m back on my knees again. What the hell does she mean?

  Bo says, “I don’t follow.”

  “We’re all working our own stuff here. Suzannah was happy to use me to stall whatever was brewing between the two of you—if she was honest about it. You stopped sleeping with me when she moved in.” Caro laughs. “But then you got cold feet, didn’t you? I’ve seen a lot of you lately; soon you’d become available to me again. I was looking forward to it.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I know exactly what I’m talking about. Now you know my story, and it really isn’t all that different from yours and Suzannah’s, is it?”

  Bo doesn’t answer.

  Did Caro shrug resignedly? Did she smile at Bo sadly? All I hear is the storm door bounce shut. Then car tires crunch gravel and snow.

  I fall with exhaustion to the sofa cushions and bury my face in the maroon serape that’s fallen in a heap from the back. Caro’s story is different from mine and from Bo’s. But I have to admit she’s right in recognizing a similar pattern. The difference is like the difference between me momentarily flashing rage with a screwdriver in my hand and me carrying out premeditated murder. Still, I feel guilty, I feel used, and I feel in need of a shower. I have been unconsciously in cahoots with her—for her benefit and for my own.

  Bo has slung himself over the back of a kitchen chair, head hanging and arms braced low on the seat, when I come into the kitchen behind him. I put my arms around his chest and lay my face against his back. He straightens upward, turns, and holds on to me tightly. His chest throbs with heat and dampness. If he weren’t so much bigger than me, I’d rock him.

  “I’m too goddamn embarrassed to even look at you.”

  I pull back and face him. “Don’t be. Honest people don’t expect dishonesty in others.”

  “According to Caro, I’m not all that honest. She’s right.”

  “People without morals always like to believe everyone else shares their value system. But I guess she’s got my number, too.” I’m not at all ready to say anything decent about Caro. I feel tainted by her accusation and angry at her, too.

  Bo drops his arms from around me and walks to the kitchen window, keeping his back to me. I begin to pull out lunch stuff from the refrigerator. Leftover roast beef, mustard, horseradish sauce. I don’t know what else to do, and it seems Bo has been doing this for me since I arrived here ten months ago, as injured and lost as he looks now.

  “Sit,” I order him.

  Bo minds, and I begin to carve the cold roast into thin slivers. He rests his elbows on the table and leans his forehead on the heels of his palms. “I feel like shit.”

  He falls silent and I continue to carve the roast. Then Bo says, “At first, I don’t know…. Caro helped remind me I was an artist. Nobody around here saw me that way. I found it irresistible.”

  I open a bottle of beer and set it before him, then get the dill pickles out and a bag of potato chips. A sudden thought strikes. Doesn’t Caro still need Bo in her life to fool Dickie a while longer? Didn’t she practically spell that out?

  “I’ve been so stupid. I’ve gone against everything I believed in.” Bo watches my hands plaster horseradish sauce on a piece of bread. “Right when I meet you. The worst and the best crashing together…practically in the same damn week.”

  “It happens like that for some reason,” I say, arrested by the thought. I halt my work and think out loud. “When an opening occurs in a life, both the good and the bad can rush right in.” Tessa could probably explain it astrologically. I go to the stove to get the salt and recall all the stories I’ve heard about how people turn their lives around, become model citizens, and then the cops arrest them for a crime from their past, or a life-threatening accident or illness occurs. Smack on the heels of the good they’ve just done.

  Bo is chipping at the beer label with his thumbnail. “I’ve lost my instincts. She took me totally by surprise. All along, I never guessed.” He speaks as if he were replaying the scene with Caro in his mind and not registering a word I just said. “I’ve never gone after another man’s woman in my life. I was just waiting for you,” he accuses.

  “There are other ways to wait for a woman. I wasn’t ready.”

  “Are you ready now?”

  “Ready?”

  “For me.”

  I glance down to my lunch plate, then look up and say with certainty, “I’m ready.”

  Bo sets his beer bottle aside and zeros in on my eyes.

  Before he can speak, I say, “You need to take time to sort out this deal with Caro. Don’t use what we’ve got between us to distract yourself from that job.”

  Bo nods. He pushes away from the table and stands. “The best and worst—it’s enough to make a grown man head home and…I don’t know.”

  “Get drunk?”

  “Cry, I think.”

  twenty

  On the chairlift, Bo and I dangle high over snowy slopes, mountain ranges rippling far into the distance, the sky blue as ice. We are traveling on a double lift to the top of Apres Vous in Teton Village, so there is time for sightseeing and reverie. Bo and I hold hands. This is our first day together after spending two weeks apart.

  Three ingredients make up the formula for fire: fuel, oxygen, and heat. Remove one of them, the fire is out. I worried about this, about how much a role Caro played in the attraction between Bo and me.

  Triangles are inflammable.

  Often I am struck with the image of Bo flung over the back of my kitchen chair as Caro’s Buick glided past the kitchen window that day, the wind kicked out of him. I found Bo’s deeply felt response to the scene with Caro reassuring after Erik’s inability to engage in heated emotion.

  I twist slightly in the lift and scan the valley floor behind me. Is Caro preparing to leave someone? If so, who will she leave, Benj or Dickie?

  Triangles help people engage with one another without needing to come any closer than the third side allows. I know, because Caro was right. I used the device myself for this exact reason. Perhaps we all did.

  When I straighten up in my seat, Bo wordlessly points to the slope directly below us where a moose nibbles stems in a clump of aspen. Skiers careen past on each side, unaware of an animal that could stomp the powder out of them.

  I smile at Bo. He’d planned to put a woodstove in his studio today so he could start work in there, but he called me instead. He may not follow through on his intentions very well in some areas of his life, but he followed through with me. He has used the past couple weeks to address his issues with Caro before phoning me as
he’d promised he would. He said that he’d moved past his anger with Caro, that it wasn’t so difficult once he understood who she was, what her goals were. He says he carries as much blame as anyone. Just a bad deal all around.

  Bo smiles back to me now and lifts my hand. As slowly and deliciously as if it were my dress and beneath it my lacy slip, Bo removes my ski glove, then my ski-glove liner. It’s both silly and erotic, and we acknowledge that with a long, silky stare that erupts in laughter, but that does not halt his heated romancing of my fingers. He pushes up the cuff of my down jacket and exposes my wrist to the snap of cold air. We’re probably imitating some Edith Wharton novel or old Bette Davis movie; our laughter acknowledges that, too. Still, this is our own movie, and though the temperature is only eight degrees outside, with a wind chill of minus thirty, my wrist throbs with heat.

  Suddenly, I look down and see the disembarking ramp glide past my ski boots.

  “Bo, watch out.” I make an abrupt decision and leap out of the chair to the packed snow five or six feet below me. I land on my skis, then lose balance and fall on my butt. I’m okay. I know that right away. But what prompted me to do this crazy thing? I’m not the type to leap out into the air, not knowing where I’ll land or how. Bo has that kind of confidence and courage. This is exactly what Bo would do. Where is he?

  First, I scoot out of the path of oncoming skiers disembarking the proper way on the ramp behind me. I look overhead, and spot Bo still riding the chair. The cable climbs higher, then turns. I see he is headed toward a safety net, a huge blue plastic net. The net drapes the end of the cable just before it takes the empty chairs back down to base. Bo looks wrong up there. He sits primly face forward, legs dangling, and he knows what is coming up. A shrill alarm screeches overhead.

  I burst into a kind of nervous laughter. That should be me up there. I am the one that would normally choose to stay put and become entangled by the safety net, triggering alarms and halting the lift for everyone down the line. The attendant, who is sunning himself, jumps up and runs into the hut. The screeching comes to a halt. I watch Bo wrestle with the blue netting. All the people sitting in the stopped lift behind the off ramp watch him also. He has to remove his skis, poking his arms and legs through the holes of the net to get to them, then struggle with the net for capture of his poles. He does all this with patient resignation.