The Willow Field

by William Kittredge

  Katrina lifted her porcelain cup, and snapped it down. The handle broke and coffee splashed onto her hand. “Mattie, that's her stupid name.”

  “Good thing that cup was empty,” Oscar said, pushing back from the table.

  Katrina smiled to Rossie. “I'll send you letters,” she said, “to General Delivery, in Calgary. I'll tell you everything.”

  THEY PASSED WHOREHOUSES ALONG THE TRUCKEE—ROWS OF one-room cribs where women lived under cottonwood and Lombardy poplar—and white-painted gazebos on vast lawns, made for outdoor cooking, drinking, and afternoon dancing. Neither of them said a thing until they were on the road into the Paiute reservation town of Nixon, where the river—or what was left after most of the flow was diverted into canals for the Federal Irrigation District in the deserts near Fallon—drizzled into Pyramid Lake. Rossie fell into recalling Katrina's stories of the ranch her father had owned on Fifty Mile Creek, south of Carson City. The Paiutes there, she said, lived in a tin-roofed house in sagebrush alongside the meadows. The last of them, a man named Sam Juniper, too old to care for himself after the women died and the children left, came to this reservation. The tin-roofed house and the willow ramada at Fifty Mile Creek had been burned. She told of playing war with the Indian kids on her father's horses, “galloping after one another like movie actors.” When she was sixteen she fell in love with one of the boys, Truman Juniper, who had a basketball scholarship to the University of Nevada. But the summer before his freshman year, while he was pitching hay to horses, his eye was stabbed out with a pitchfork—pure accident, but the end of basketball—and he went off to hang around this town, Nixon. Katrina offered no sense that she'd grieved over him. It was pointless to imagine his mother married to an Indian, but Rossie wondered if that Truman Juniper, the man his mother loved when she was a girl, was at this moment in one of these rundown houses alongside Pyramid Lake. “It's a cockeyed story,” he said, after telling it to Oscar.

  “Sure as hell is,” Oscar said. “They found bones of three-toed horses along about here.”

  Pyramid Lake, a thirty-mile trough between the desert mountains, was what remained of an inland sea called Lake Lahontan, glassy water which had been drying up for thousands of years under a white sky, leaving pyramid-shaped stacks of minerals, called tufa, fifty feet above the water.

  “More toes than a cow,” Rossie said.

  “We could get you a homestead,” Oscar said. “You could hunt three-toed horses and help out down in Nixon, in the Indian store. You and old Mattie.”

  They traveled across an elevation of brush-covered dunes into the dry valley known as Winnemucca Lake, then over the swell dividing the Limbo Range from the San Emido Mountains, black in the far distance with lava and thickets of gin-smelling juniper. Dust ghosted up behind as they fell to greasewood flatlands toward the playa of the Black Rock Desert.

  “There's nobody out toward the Smoke Creek Desert but for one ranch,” Oscar said, and he went on about a place called Shoshone Meadows at the mouth of “a little toy canyon” where year-round cold water bubbled up from a field of massive basalt boulders and fell through a lava-rock rift where no one, not even old-timers, would ever go because of rattlesnakes, not even to fish for the landlocked cutthroat trout that had been there since the beginning of time. “We should have bought beer but I thought we'd hold out until we hit the Jersey Lily.” Oscar twisted his head like he was stretching his neck. “It was a piss-poor idea.” He commenced tapping his fingers on the steering wheel to some internal music, and whistled.

  Rossie's hangover was settling in. What was the Jersey Lily? “Oscar, how about if you shut up with the whistling?”

  “You'll be whistling soon enough. We're coming up on Malinda. She'll cure your shit.”

  A wagon road fell from the sagebrush hills to the west, and a Model T touring car, back end cut off and rebuilt into a hardwood utility box, was waiting at the intersection. Rossie mistook the woman leaning against the Model T for a man. “Malinda Harrison,” Oscar said. “She lives out at Shoshone Meadows. Malinda says she has to travel.”

  When they coasted up, this Malinda Harrison had her white hat in her hand, a ranch woman with money, if snake-hide boots and silver conches on her belt meant anything. Her black hair was cut short, waved in a way that revealed a precise line of white scalp.

  “This is Malinda. She's on a runoff,” Oscar said.

  “Time number two hundred,” she said, smiling at Rossie in a quick, ironic way, as if they were already friends. Her tone was soft, a drawl, but also impatient, Rossie thought, the voice of a woman who could get bored and turn mean. “My husband don't care what I'm doing so long as I'm not doing it to him. I'll tell him I was down to Reno, gambling. He won't give a shit.”

  Rossie tried his pretty-boy smile on her. “I'd give a shit.”

  “This here is Rossie Benasco,” Oscar said. “He's going off to be aman.”

  “Let's hope it works.” Malinda bit at her lower lip with those good, big teeth. “You're Nito Benasco's boy?”

  “You know him?”

  “Yeah, I did. We don't know each other any more.”

  With her canvas-covered suitcase strapped down on the rear of the Packard, Malinda rode between Oscar and Rossie. The dust of their going was strung out for miles across the sagebrush flats as Malinda told her story. She wasn't married to anybody named Harrison, but to Bobby Cahill, a laconic man known for his rudeness with fools and his soft hands and patience as he trained roping horses. Cahill horses were renowned in Nevada for being quicker off the mark and smarter than ordinary. Them Bobby Cahill fellows, it was said, can do algebra.

  “I kept my girlhood name. You start marrying these boys and pretty soon you got six names. Who are you going to be then?” Malinda dropped a hand onto Rossie's knee, and gave him a big cockeyed smile.

  Rossie wondered how fuck-minded she meant to be with this feeling his knee.

  “Bobby talks to horses in his sleep. He keeps Morgan studs for strength and those long-legged mares for travel. I tell him I'm one of the long-legged mares, built for travel. We live a hundred miles from anybody in country so fine it can lead you to crying. I get tired of the cooking for nobody but me and him. Bobby is out with his mares and those colts, so I'm feeling sorry for myself. This traveling gets me over it. I'd be total cured if we was drinking a beer.” All the while she was acting like her hand wasn't there on Rossie's knee.

  “Gerlach,” Oscar said. They were speeding beside a cinder-bed rail line up from Reno that serviced the salt mines. In the distance Rossie could see a loaf of black basalt amid heat waves. Before it, Gerlach was no trees, no grass, and low buildings with whitewash stripped by the Nevada winds to bare boards except for those that had been tinned-over.

  “Nothing to do around here but wear out your life,” Malinda said.

  The Jersey Lily was a line of shacks towed together with doorways cut between. A lot of the off-duty wearing out took place here.

  “Strange as the moon in there.” Oscar parked the Packard in front. “You keep it quiet,” he said to Rossie. “There might be a man in here who'd love to beat the dogshit out of a kid like you just because you never had to live in Gerlach. You got a ride and a meal ticket and he don't. What they got is mining for salt.”

  “You're with Bobby Cahill's woman,” Malinda said. “So don't worry about nothing. Nobody fucks with Bobby Cahill's woman. That would be a way to get your ass handed to you on a platter.” Malinda stated this as a matter of fact, her hand on Rossie's arm, eyes burning slate gray. Rossie felt her fingernails.

  The interior was like a cavern, each surface beaten as if with clubs, a battered maze with a bar running in haphazard angles along the wall and out of sight into other rooms. Windows, crusted with salty yellow filth, hummed with swamp coolers. An enormously fat man in a home-sewn, flour sack shirt came shuffling and wheezing from the far depth of the interior, mopping at his face with a towel and regarding them silently, small reddish eyes sunk in his cheeks.
<
br />   “Benji,” Oscar said, “where is your drinkers? You finally drive ‘em all away?”

  “Shit.” The man's voice was high and tremulous. “You read a newspaper? We got a depression in this country. People can't be playing around. Everybody is working or getting ready to move out, the ones that are left. The playboys is gone from this town.”

  “Well, that's poor news,” Oscar said. “No wonder I don't read newspapers. What we want is a case of Acme beer. Iced down, ready to travel.” The twenty-four bottles of Acme came in a burlap sack rustling with cracked ice. Oscar departed from the depths of the Jersey Lily with the sack over his shoulder, limping on his bad leg. “Ice costs more than beer. But you got to have it.”

  The road continued north, winding through steep curves in Ger-lach Canyon and over the top of the Buffalo hills. Beyond, they crossed an utterly dry flatland known as Duck Lake, with the Warner Mountains dim and a timbered pale blue on the western horizon. Rossie snapped off the second round of bottle caps. They were getting there, the Packard ghosting along on a two-track road.

  “Right then,” Oscar said, talking to what he'd been thinking about, “with old Bunky dead and blank-eyed, it got into me that I'd be staring down the sun all my life, and that I'd better get used to it if I was going to be a man because there was no going back to being a kid.”

  “You don't make sense,” Rossie said.

  Oscar was recalling the spring he was sixteen and running wild horses up in Oregon with a man named Bunky Wilson. One morning he'd found Bunky dead in his bedroll beside Sagehen Springs. “It was his turn to cook breakfast,” Oscar said. “He didn't get up, I was bitching at him, and there he was dead. Bunky and I was going to get rich with horses and he was dead. Until then I'd been a fucking squirrel-assed kid.” He took a pull from his bottle of Acme, and glanced at Rossie. “Your mom said a grown man don't leave a girl he's been fucking. Only a kid would do that. She was hot on the topic. Nito got pissed off.”

  Rossie listened to the rumble of the Packard and kept quiet. Oscar didn't know all there was to know about anything. Finally he said, “That don't make sense either.”

  “What does make sense,” Malinda said, “is going to Montana. The prettiest country you are ever going to see. You won't come back to Nevada, not after the Bitterroot. I'm sorry for which woman you're talking about but you won't come back for a woman.”

  Oscar looked across to Malinda like she was probably lying. “You been to Montana?”

  “Born there. Wish I was there right this minute, in the tavern that my daddy owned on Railroad Street, by the switchyard in Missoula. My momma died before I remember seeing her, so I had the run of the bar. Grew up with switchmen and drifters and they taught me to keep my knees together. My share of that bar when daddy died came out to six thousand dollars so I shook the dust and come down to Reno the fall of 1923. Married three times—can't stop liking men—but Bobby Cahill, he's the one that counts.”

  “So you was a princess in the Railroad Tavern,” Oscar said. “And now you're true blue to Bobby Cahill.”

  “You can kiss my big true-blue ass. You are a mean son of a bitch.” She rubbed her dark hand on Rossie's knee. “This sweetie is going to Montana,” she said, turning a hard smile on Oscar. “That's a damned shame. The wrong sweetie is leaving.”

  “Calgary,” Rossie said. “It's Canada where I'm going.”

  A reef of dry thunderstorm was building over the Warner Range, lightning flaring at great distance. The road, dusty but smooth before it fell into a break in a lava-flow rim, became a jostling run of stone along the floor of a narrow canyon. The next miles were slow and jolting until the ridges opened to Surprise Valley—meadows and willows along native sloughs and rows of Lombardy poplar and cottonwood boxing white houses with their gardens and apple orchards, and their red barns and willow-thatch corrals out behind. The borrow pits were thick with tules. Fenced and graveled, the roadway was ungraded, like a washboard. Silver-black magpies and redheaded blackbirds flared up.

  “Here you got it,” Oscar said.

  “No surprise to me,” Rossie said. “I smelled it for miles. You can smell water from far off if you been enough time on the desert.” The ice was melted from the burlap sack and the melt was puddled on the floorboards. Rossie pitched his Acme bottle into a culvert. His head was buzzing.

  “Seventeen miles an hour,” Malinda said. “You afraid you're going to shake this outfit to pieces? You ought to get it up and sailing.”

  “You bet I'm afraid,” Oscar said. “This Packard goes down, I'm done, looking for work and afoot. This valley is nowhere to be afoot. Man ought to be happy enough in Surprise Valley. But I'm not.” He reached across and slapped Malinda's thigh, where her Levi's were tight.

  She jumped. “Damn you! What's wrong with you?”

  “Horseflies.”

  “You are the goddamned horsefly.”

  These had to be the horses for Calgary. Nobody would have this herd otherwise. Most were reddish bay, a few with white stockings and blazes; spotted red roans and a blue one; buckskins and three red-and-white pintos. They were nervous and thrilled by the storm over the Warner Mountains. The late afternoon was going electric with early-season lightning as the horses drifted through corridors in the willows, from one island of meadow to another. These two hundred and fifty-seven three-year-old geldings plus one bell mare were the most horses Rossie had ever seen in one field.

  “Quick and spooky,” Oscar said.

  Eagleville was mainly the Sunrise Hotel, a two-story affair with a false front and a covered veranda on three sides. Across the road a general store, which looked to be the usual combination grocery and hardware, was tucked into a collapsing log building. Shingle-sided houses, surrounded by lilacs and tulips and hollyhocks, straggled off beyond.

  Oscar parked alongside a dusty, black, two-door Model A Ford and smiled a big, fake smile. “Well, buckaroo. Here you are.”

  “Shit,” Rossie said. He didn't move.

  “What he's thinking,” Malinda said to Oscar after they'd sat a long moment, “is you're kicking him out. That seems sudden.”

  “The whole goddamned world is sudden,” Oscar said.

  Rossie finished his beer and tossed the bottle under the wheels of the Model A.

  “You better pick that up,” Oscar said. “This is a settler town. They don't want cowhands throwing beer bottles.”

  Rossie fished in the wet burlap sack for another beer, jerked off the top and took a long pull.

  “Besides that, you work for Clifford Dufferena, who owns that Model A Ford. For sure he won't want hired hands throwing beer bottles under it. But it's not my ass.” Oscar climbed out of the Packard, swinging his braced leg before him, and gimped off into the hotel.

  “Find me another beer,” Malinda said. “Then get out and pick up that bottle. Or you might be fired before you start.”

  Rossie went through the whole act of opening the last Acme, then picked up the bottle he'd thrown and dropped it over onto the back floorboard of the Packard.

  “You're acting sick, and sick won't get you no pity.”

  “What I'm thinking is where in hell have I sent myself?”

  Oscar came out of the hotel. “It's going to rain,” he announced. “Roll up my windows and get inside. You got people to meet.”

  Rossie claimed his new, white hat from the backseat and thought he at least looked good as anybody in Eagleville. But as soon as he stepped into the shadowy dimness of the Sunrise Hotel he realized showing up halfway drunk wasn't a hot idea.

  The dusty Model A outside did indeed belong to the man who owned the horses, who would also be paying Rossie's wages. Clifford Dufferena had been a force with open-range cows and sheep on Great Basin deserts since before the trench war in France. He was known for claiming he never wanted to own an acre of property. “You got your money in land you are crippled. Got to keep money dancing, and crippled money can't dance. Animals is where the profit is. Land is fine if you need to admire the
view.” He lived out of the Model A, traveling ranch to ranch and hotel to hotel, and everybody knew about him, saying he couldn't be beat trading livestock—he wouldn't cheat but you couldn't beat him. With the high-top, lace-up, leather shoes he wore both walking and horseback, he didn't look like a rancher, though he'd been trading cows and sheep and horses for fifty years. Lots of people thought he was rich even if he never lived in like a wealthy man. “Old Man Dufferena could buy a dozen ranches if he wanted them,” Slivers Flynn had told Rossie. Nobody needed to wonder if this fellow could pay his bills.

  Now, in the combination lobby and dining room and tavern of the hotel, Clifford Dufferena was resting on a red-and-black Indian blanket spread on a worn leather couch. His fingers were woven into a steeple before him as he studied Rossie. “Them other boys come yesterday. Horseback. You don't even got a horse. But you have a new hat. Hell of a hat.” The old man smiled at his joke.

  “Thought I'd be riding your horses. You got horses. That's what Slivers told me.” It was a good thing, Rossie thought, that he'd had a few beers. Otherwise he'd be letting this man pick on him.

  “You drunk?” Dufferena said, his teeth huge and white and no doubt false. “But you're right. Horses go with the job. Slivers told me you were all right for a kid. And that is a hell of a new hat.” Dufferena clacked those teeth and gazed up toward the ceiling. “He told me he had to get you on the road so you and his girl could calm down.”

  “Women,” Malinda said, sticking a forefinger at Dufferena, “are the reason for things.”

  “What I wanted,” the old man said, “was to hire Slivers Flynn. But nobody can hire Slivers Flynn. Man like that don't hire out on a horse drive to Canada. So I got Jap Hardy, he's the boss. You'll be all right if you listen to Jap Hardy.” Dufferena stared into the steeple of his fingers again. “Here's the deal. Five of you on horseback and Louis Clair, the cook, in a truck. And a wrango boy, I forget his name. You horseback fellows got four horses in your string, a four-day rotation. Take care of your horses and they'll take care of you. Jap Hardy is from Red Bluff. He's done the bossing on horse drives before. Last year he took four hundred horses to the U.S. military in Grand Forks, all through Wyoming and the Rocky Mountains and across the Nebraska sand hills. He scouted our route to Calgary in a motorcar. This trip is nothing to him. But you're a kid that don't know a thing except how to eat dinner so you listen to every word Jap Hardy says. You listen like it was the Lord speaking. You spur your horse and you jump.” The old man dropped his hands and looked straight at Rossie. “The rest of the deal, for a kid like you, is one hundred dollars cash in Calgary. You'll sew your saddle in a burlap sack and ship it home with you on the railroad, traveling at my own expense, Calgary to Vancouver to San Francisco to Reno. Man who don't ride the railroad gets two horses to travel with and be his own.” The old man smiled. “I want to see that hat dirty and frazzled in Calgary. I want you in the market for a new one. That's it. You go pick the horses on your string. You go down there and talk to Jap Hardy. Them other boys don't have nothing to say about these things.”