Crybaby Ranch

by Tina Welling

  “Thought I’d drop by and check out your new boyfriend.”

  Though I am completely taken by surprise to hear Caro’s voice beneath the band’s music, I don’t react at all. She stands behind my right shoulder.

  “May I sit?”

  Without turning to look at her, I push out the chair across from me with my foot.

  Standing beside the chair facing Deak, she removes her gloves and coat as languidly as if she were doing a striptease for the band.

  “Yum,” Caro says once she finally sits down. “They all look juicy as chicken legs. Which one’s yours?”

  “None of them are mine. I date the lead singer.”

  “Can I have him when you’re done?” She grins. “Just gnaw him down to the bone and toss him my way.” She signals the waitress and orders a Scotch, then says, “Just kidding. Three men—I couldn’t handle.”

  “You mean four, don’t you?”

  “Whatever. Two men are ideal. They balance each other.”

  “So who are you cutting out?” I think I know the answer, but it wouldn’t hurt to hear it from her that Bo is out of her life. I take a sip of beer.

  “Benj.”

  “Benj?” My beer goes down the wrong way. I inhale some of it and cough. I repeat hoarsely, “Benj?”

  “He’s a loser.”

  “No. Bo is. I mean, I figured by your standards you would think…”

  “Bo’s going places. If he’d only listen to me. I’ve got these people back home in Oklahoma who want his sculpture. They’re building practically a damn plantation house, with gardens and terraces that go down to the river.”

  Caro’s drink arrives. She shovels items from her deep leather shoulder bag onto the table until she finds a pink plastic tampon holder, one of those that used to come free in the economy-sized box. She pulls its two ends apart and separates a hundred-dollar bill from a roll of others.

  “Anyway,” she says, dropping her change into her purse bottom, “these people have seen my photos of Bo’s work and want a few pieces for the terraces—his new work is stunning. But Bo is so prickly with me lately. I can’t get a deal going with him.” She scoops handfuls of stuff back into her soft, pouchy bag. Her final load includes a pair of purple silk underpants. “I was hoping you’d have some ideas.” She takes a sip of her drink and looks expectantly over the top of her glass.

  My head is tipped as I listen to Caro talk—a robin listening for a worm. Her purposes are always self-serving. I say, “He and I haven’t seen each other for several weeks.”

  “Oh, right. That’s one reason I’m here. I have orders to tell you that I know Bo is in love with you…cha-cha-cha. If I fulfill this little duty, Bo will not tell Dickie. Our deal.”

  Caro takes another sip, then looks around. Her gaze ends with the band. “God, your singer really is darling. I know you won’t tell me how he is in bed.”

  “You know me pretty well.”

  “I know you can help me out with Bo, if you want.”

  “Me?” I’ve got the fingers of both hands splayed across my chest. Is she a lunatic? “Caro, I don’t think so.”

  “Listen, Bo can get all the work he wants. These people have houses all over the world. And friends. He just needs to be spurred.” Caro pokes at her ice cubes with a coral-painted fingernail. “That’s the difference between Bo and Dickie. Bo has trouble getting started with work. Dickie can’t stop. Dickie needs to be lassoed and dragged in the dirt every once in a while just to get his attention. But with Bo you have to keep your rowels spinning.”

  “Rowels?”

  “Little pinwheel deals? On the spurs?”

  I tip my chin up as I catch on. I am dying to hear about Bo’s new work, but I’m afraid my need to know is too apparent. To cover up I say, “And Dickie dragged in the dirt?”

  “That’s how I get his attention. For instance, I’ll tell Dickie about Benj.”

  “You will? Everything?”

  “He’ll love it. He comes out the winner.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “If I don’t get a ring out of it, I’ll eat that mangy vest you’re wearing.”

  I look down. I’m wearing an old wool vest with four odd pockets across the front that Deak passed on to me because I took such a fancy to it, like O.C.’s beat-up hat.

  “We’ll probably go someplace for a second honeymoon.”

  “And Bo? How’s he feel about this?” I just need to say his name.

  “You two will end up together,” Caro flutters her fingers dismissively at Deak. “Eventually. But Dickie doesn’t need to find out.”

  “Find out. He has known about you and Bo for months.”

  “Find out that there’s no me and Bo.”

  “You want Dickie to think…?”

  “I see why you hooked up with a kid.” Caro arches her eyebrows. “Just your mental pace. Yes, I want Dickie to think Bo and I are still an item.”

  “But why?” I hope I’m not shouting.

  “Never mind. It works for us. All I ask is that you don’t set Dickie straight. I mean, go ahead and deny it. He’ll just think you’re stupid or something.” Another finger flutter. “Just don’t give me away. Oh, hell, you never would. You’re as bad as Bo. Two of a kind.”

  As bad as Bo. Two of a kind. Caro thinks she’s insulted me. Isn’t it just like her to ask for a favor and try to insult me at the same time? Oh, boy, and she’s not leaving Dickie. She’s not leaving Jackson Hole, and she’s not going back to Oklahoma. Just to be sure I’m stuck with her for life, I ask, “You’re not leaving Dickie? Not ever?”

  “How could I do better than Dickie?”

  While Deak sleeps in the motel room, I run hot water into the tub, spilling a capful of his shampoo in to make bubbles. Earlier, about three a.m., Deak and I skied. Just the two of us silently swishing the unplowed road to Jenny Lake at the base of the Tetons. Most of our times together are in the middle of the night when Deak’s work is done and his energy high.

  I squeeze the water out of my washcloth above my stomach and watch it make rivers down my skin, then dip the cloth to soak up more water. I’m not entirely clear why I’m not bored out of my mind after six weeks with Deak. Instead, I glow. I chime. I can’t wipe the grin off my face. Deak is good for me. Maybe Deak is me. Some young and playful maleness I’m only now allowing expression. Maybe I am Deak’s mature female self, accepting, approving. And maybe I’ve just been hanging around Tessa too long to come up with such theories.

  Part of me finds relief in the distraction of Deak; part of me feels a building anxiety about not calling home to check on my mother. I don’t work with my beads and have little time for the solitude I’ve come to treasure. One of these days I am going to miss my self.

  Soon birds will begin to stir in this last hour of darkness. I yank on the plug chain, stand, and reach for a towel. Like punctuation throughout my days and my nights, I think of Bo. As I tuck myself into my side of the motel bed, I recall the truck grinding up the ranch road, past my cabin, yesterday. Its bed was loaded down with peeled logs. Bo is beginning work on Crybaby Ranch.

  As Deak shifts position and groans into deeper sleep, I pick through the magazines on the floor beside the bed and browse an article in Outside comparing river sandals. Maybe I’ll buy a pair for the summer. I hear they are easy to stand in for long hours at the bookstore. Deak burrows deeper into the covers; his head disappears.

  I lift Deak’s wrist, lying alongside my hip, and look at his watch. Almost noon. I sit up higher on my pillows, bend my knees and prop the magazine against them for some intentional reading on hiking trails in Hawaii.

  Deak shifts beneath the covers. He is lying on his stomach halfway down the bed like a dog might. Now I feel his breath between my legs. Now his tongue.

  This makes me think of an old cartoon in which a bride-to-be was addressing envelopes for her wedding invitations while propped up on the sofa just as I am in bed. When she needed an envelope licked, she lowered it between her
legs for her future husband to include in his work.

  I have no envelopes for Deak to lick and wouldn’t want to distract him from his main project if I did, but I continue reading.

  In Hawaii you can hike cloud forests, wet, tree-covered slopes. Colorfully feathered birds flit among exotic varieties of moist, broad-leafed plants, like darts of light, like quick tongues. Deep into the dark foliage a distant waterfall crashes to earth from a high, craggy cliff. As you walk closer the force of its gushing vibrates the soles of your feet, travels up your thighs, and reverberates inside you as if your skin covers a drum. A throbbing drum.

  Abruptly, I throw the magazine in the air and scoot down lower on the bed.

  The band rehearses for another hour this afternoon; then Deak and I will drive into town for an early dinner. Meanwhile, I sit at the bar sipping apple juice while Delta sits next to me talking about her work as a florist back in Louisville. She says someday she and Don, the bass player, are going back to Kentucky to get married and open their own flower shop. I had hoped to write in my journal during the wait; instead I am hearing so many details about flower arranging, I feel as if I’m being trained as a future employee. As O.C. said about one of the aunts: “She talks so much she gets chin splints.”

  “Always use odd numbers of flowers when they’re the same kind or color,” Delta says.

  I check the Bud Dry clock above the bar. STAGGER UP FOR ANOTHER. How can the company’s conscience allow that kind of promotion? Beyond Delta two construction workers tell a third about the house they’re working on. “You could set up six yurts in the living room.”

  “Darker colors below and bigger blossoms below. Little blossoms or buds at the top, along with your lighter shades.” Delta’s hands describe a bouffant spray that she imagines takes up the width of the bar top.

  On the other side of me, at the end of the bar, two old ranchers are sitting with beers, talking about a friend hospitalized down in Denver. “They cut into him and found something the size of a melon in there.”

  “It’s all them doughnuts Harold ate ever morning. You know he had himself two, three ever’day over at the Sip ’N’ Dunk. What they found in there was a dough ball.”

  “Sixty years of eating them doughnuts sure would make a good-sized dough ball. He don’t weigh but a hundred and ninety or so now.”

  “Must have been the dough ball. He sure weighed more than that before he headed to Denver.”

  “Lots of greens in the vase,” says Delta, “then stick in flowers. Flowers should be, oh, about two and a half times taller than the container.”

  “I better hold back on the doughnuts myself. I don’t need me no dough ball.”

  “You want your roses to bloom, take the guard petals off. And always make fresh cuts on the stems.”

  Finally, Deak finishes with the group. We push through the gloom of the bar and climb into my Subaru. Soon we are acting giddy as schoolkids released into sunshine. Deak is slumped low in the passenger seat as we approach a full view of the Tetons. “They’re big,” he says.

  “Yep,” I agree. “And majestic. That’s what they could have named them instead of the Tetons. The Majestics.”

  Deak says, “That’s already been taken. It’s the name of a rock group.”

  “That’s what this is, a rock group.”

  We laugh.

  I’m tired of always smelling cigarette smoke in my clothes and my hair; I roll down the window partway in hopes of getting rid of it. As a matter of fact, I’m tired of the bar. Period. The smells, the aimlessness of the people, the stupid talk. That reminds me of my afternoon eavesdropping, and I tell Deak about the dough ball.

  Dirty piles of snow are exposed along the roadside like winter’s discarded long underwear. Like diapers sopping up the runoff. The thaw begins.

  Though skiing felt like trying to maneuver in mashed potatoes, I toured alone to the hot springs this morning and spotted the first signs of spring. Spotty patches of snow and brown melted areas made the slopes beside the trail look like the rumps of Appaloosa ponies. Swans floated like feathered chunks of ice between the snowy banks of a pond.

  I start to tell Deak, but I see that he’s fallen asleep.

  A cliff rose several stories high beside the pond, and a ram, curled horns sketching commas in the stretch of blue sky behind him, surveyed the rocky drop below. I stabbed my poles into the snow, stopping to watch the bighorn, and suddenly we locked eyes. His awareness of me was a vibrating line of attention between us. I felt as though I was in the presence of a good listener, one whose full reception of me mirrored back a greater actuality of myself, as when I’m talking to Bo. The ram and I stared at each other long moments. I felt like Bambi in the presence of the Great Stag of the Forest: “He stopped and looked at me.”

  While I drive I recall the applause of the river rock as snowmelt rushed shallowly in the creek bed. A flock of geese flew over, sounding like a pack of bloodhounds treeing the sun. Spring, by Rocky Mountain standards, is almost here.

  “It’s time you call Bo.”

  “What? My God, I thought you were sleeping.” I don’t know what made me jump the most: the sound of Deak’s voice or the sound of Bo’s name.

  “I’m leaving in a couple days now.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, you better patch things up with him before I go.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “I mean it, Suzannah. You miss him, don’t you?”

  “I like being with you.”

  “I know that. But call him.”

  NIGHT MALL

  MAY 15-21

  When robins are incubating eggs Canada geese reach their peak of hatching, the first arrow leaf balsamroot and Nelson’s larkspur bloom. You can start looking for morels when cottonwoods start to green. Cow moose are giving birth to calves when common snipe are incubating eggs. Ground squirrels are giving birth, young badgers can be seen near den entrances. Calliope hummingbirds are mating. Goshawks are laying eggs, red-tailed hawk eggs are hatching, and mourning cloak butterflies are relatively more numerous.

  For Everything There Is a Season

  —Frank C. Craighead, Jr.

  twenty-three

  This morning another truck loaded with logs chugged past my cabin. I felt an urge to chase after it, barking gleefully at its rear tires like an excited dog. Just a short hike along the butte, through the sage and aspens, I can see stacks of new lumber glistening in view of the main ranch house and barns. Often during the past two weeks, since my farewell dinner with Deak, I sat high on a slope and watched smoke curl out of Bo’s studio chimney down below, as if I were reading a coded message from the Vatican. Except this smoke doesn’t announce the naming of a pope, but rather announces the presence of an artist at work. Something has shifted with Bo, and I long to participate in the pump of energy I feel emanating from him now.

  I haven’t acted on my promise to Deak that I would call Bo. An innocence resides in men—men like Deak and Bo anyway—that is both endearing and irksome. Relationships are hardly ever as simple as they’d like to believe. But it is true that with Deak, pleasure rippled through the shallow waters of my body but did not reach the deep places of my heart. I miss Bo.

  I have enjoyed my time alone. I’ve resumed my schedule, caught up on my life, and read new spring releases, which I TROUT from the bookstore—our shorthand for “transferring out” books off the shelves. I haven’t called home yet; guilt blunts the urgency I feel to connect with my parents.

  I remember Bo answers the phone as if he knows he will like whoever is calling him—not Hello as a question with uncertainty in his voice, like I do. Though quite late for making a call, I stand beside the phone daring myself.

  I pick up the receiver and dial his number. My chest thuds raucously; if I were wearing beads, they’d rattle. The phone rings and rings again. Then Bo answers.

  “Hello,” he says.

  I hang up. Arms weak, legs shaky.

  He says Hello, and
I am undone.

  Twenty, maybe thirty seconds pass. I’m still standing next to the phone, vibrating with the sound of him in my ear. The phone rings.

  “Hello?”

  The caller hangs up.

  Tears come to my eyes. I picture him standing like me, staring at the phone, a smile spreading across his face. Between us the knowledge of our phone calls zips back and forth, dazzling the night with sparks. I’m unwilling to leave the vicinity of the telephone, to move away from this power spot, where we have just connected so well.

  After a few minutes it occurs to me that Bo can’t be absolutely certain that I phoned him first. I grab my coat. I want him to know he was right. I run out the door, my head down, fingering buttonholes for my coat buttons, and plow into a canvas jacket.

  “Hey.” He catches me with both arms.

  “Bo.” I move deeper into the circle of his arms. “Bo, I’ve missed you.”

  “Not half as much as I’ve missed you, Zann.”

  “Could we argue about that tonight?” I say. All the lost pieces of myself and all the newly found ones snuggle into place inside me and call it home. My face is pushing into the warmth of his neck when the muffled ring of my phone interrupts. Who else but Bo would call me this late? I feel a sense of alarm.

  Bo’s jaw muscles tighten. “Deak?”

  “Oh, no. We stopped seeing each other.” The phone still rings, five rings, six. Abruptly, I break away from Bo and dash through the mudroom. I have a terrible image of my mother falling into Bessie Creek. Her balance has gone all to hell this past year. “Bo,” I holler over my shoulder, “come in. It must be an emergency.”

  I answer breathlessly, “Hello?”

  “Am I all right?”

  That voice. “Momma.” Though my mother’s well-being leapt immediately to mind when the phone rang, I didn’t expect her on the other end of the line. “Momma, it’s me, Suzannah.” I haven’t heard her voice over the phone late at night for years. And then she was drinking and smoking. Last I heard she had forgotten what to do with a cigarette.