White Plains

by David Hicks

  No offense but we’re playing by my rules now.

  SUNDAY MORNING AT THE SILVERADO

  Casey’s home—and my new home, at least for the time being—was a stone’s throw from the Rio Grande, on the outskirts of Sanctuary, Colorado, an old silver-mining town. The town proper was only six blocks long and three blocks wide, so it was hard to believe that during the boom in the late 19th century as many as 10,000 people moved there, hastily erecting houses and shacks, at first all over town, then on the mountain slopes, then jammed into every available spot between dwellings, then even over the river (with floors made of slats stretched from bank to bank) when there was no more room left. Bat Masterson, Soapy Smith, “the dirty little coward who killed Jesse James”—at one time or another, they all made Sanctuary their home, living lawless lives at 9,000 feet. After the bust, everyone split, but two or three hundred stalwart souls kept it from becoming a ghost town, and that’s still the case today.

  The main street of Sanctuary was lined with establishments owned by folks who lived either right above them or close by: the True Value of Sanctuary hardware store, the Mane Event horsehair jewelry shop, the Big Bucking Deal saddlery, the Fat Brown Trout sporting goods store, the Eureka! silver gift shop (open only when its owner, Maybelle, was sober enough to stand), the Stumble Inn Motel and Bar, Sanctuary National Bank, no fewer than four art galleries, and the Silverado, my favorite place to get coffee.

  It was early April the last time I went there, and it was cold that day, as in high-altitude cold, as in so cold my face hurt. Casey and I had more or less worked out our differences after the disastrous ending to our “Welcome to the Wild West” camping trip; or more accurately I had decided to keep my feelings to myself, just as I had in my marriage, and that had made for a more harmonious relationship. What was going on in the bedroom was a different story. In the three months since the camping trip we hadn’t once made love, and when I pointed that out to her—more specifically, how we had rigorous and frequent sex when we had been visiting each other, but ever since I had moved out to Colorado we had done so only once, and that was for purely pragmatic reasons (to keep ourselves warm in the frigid desert)—she quietly explained that her therapist had advised her to abstain for a while, given that they were navigating the minefield of her father’s abusive behavior when she was a child, and I immediately chastised myself for expressing my adolescent needs and decided to be a good supportive partner from then on and keep such lustful yearnings to myself.

  In any case I had more or less settled into life on her gorgeous property, nestled in a curve of the Continental Divide, and since she had flown to England a week earlier to promote her latest book, I was on my own for a while, taking care of the horses and dogs while earning a little money waiting tables at the Sanctuary Hotel. My monthly income had dropped precipitously since leaving my teaching job back east, so I had recently petitioned the Broome County Child Support office in Binghamton (where Rachel had moved, to be closer to her family) to lower my support payments accordingly. This was bound to provoke anew the Wrath of Rachel, but what else could she do? She had already filed a petition to gain full custody soon after I had moved, and had spirited the children away “to an undisclosed location” when I had flown back for one of my scheduled visits.

  And this far away, in such a secluded place, it hardly seemed to matter. Her anger, I mean. Her vitriol. Her vengeance.

  The only vacant stool was the one closest to the door. Rosie, behind the counter as always, was wearing a John Deere hat and a white thermal shirt with an orange supermarket sticker on her left breast that said “Fresh.” (Her second job was at the Mac’s Groceries and Grub down the block, where residents shopped only out of desperation.) I hadn’t seen her in weeks—everyone tends to hole up over the winter, according to Casey—and even though she gave me a nod and a howdy as she reached under the counter for a clean coffee mug, she seemed to avoid looking me in the eye.

  When I moved to Sanctuary, Rosie had been the first to welcome me, shaking my hand as if she were the mayor. She had come by the ranch to check on her horse, which she paid Casey to keep in her stable. At first, she seemed surprised to see me there all alone (Casey had driven down to Santa Fe for a reading), but then she walked me out to the stables and showed me how to soothe Cielo, Casey’s frisky Arabian, and how to administer a dietary supplement to her own horse, who was twenty-one years old. Rosie was lean and pretty, with starchy hair and tight jeans, and she looked right through me with her ice-blue eyes. The following weekend, when Casey was home, she and three other people (Maximilian Knox, an artist whose idea of fun was body-painting thong bikinis on livestock; Rosie’s best friend Belinda, who brought her husband’s skis for me to use, along with a six-pack of beer for the “after party”; and Eric Fretz, the only realtor in town) came by to cross-country ski across the hundred acres of Casey’s property and then upslope to the top of the Divide. The landscape was an undulating blanket of white, and it didn’t take me long to get the hang of skiing like that. Casey “broke trail” while Rosie lagged behind with me. She pointed out a bald eagle flying above us and showed me where to poke into the snow in order to find a glow of spectacular blue. We wound up on a ridge at 12,000 feet overlooking the valley, and when we looped back and skied downhill, I fell a few times, but Rosie again held back, offering encouragement, until I learned how to relax, bend my knees, and keep my balance. On my last downhill, the pine trees rushing past, I even tipped my head back and closed my eyes for a moment, feeling the sun on my neck and the crisp air on my face. “Atta boy!” Rosie shouted afterwards, and clapped me on the back.

  Casey had kept an eye on me the whole time, in a somewhat proprietary way. In general, she seemed happy with how things had been going between us. She’d been wary but kind, and we had settled into what passed for domesticity in the midst of the uncertainty and disruption in my life along with the comings and goings of hers. As for me, I still had my doubts, especially after the recent stunt she had pulled in Alamosa; but at the same time, I had fallen completely and utterly in love with Colorado. And maybe with Rosie. She had a big voice and a heart to match. She also had a boyfriend, and for that matter everyone knew I was Casey’s latest, and in a town this small, there was just no getting around any of that.

  Anyway, that day, the day of my last visit to the Silverado, I was in good spirits. My divorce had just been finalized (I had worked out a payment plan with my lawyer), and I hadn’t even bothered to fly back to New York for the event. My lawyer was royally pissed about that (all I heard from him afterwards was a text: “Well, it’s over”), and so apparently was the judge, but I didn’t have enough money to go, and even if I did, I’d have used it to see my kids, not to feed Rachel’s perpetual need for drama. (I heard she wore a pant suit with shoulder pads, and carried an attaché case into court.) Being in Sanctuary had shown me just how bad all that had been for me. I had changed so much since I’d moved. I had no desire to revert to the old Flynn, and that’s what would have happened if I had flown back for the trial—or at least that’s what Casey thought. Plus, I was starting to feel at home in Colorado. Even if it didn’t work out with Casey, I thought, maybe I could still live there—if not in Sanctuary, then somewhere else, somewhere closer to an airport perhaps. It had been months since I’d seen the kids, and I’d been pining for them (privately of course). I tried calling them every day, at different times, but to no avail—Rachel, who had caller ID, kept the volume off on her house phone, and she never answered her cell when she knew it was me.

  After breakfast at the Silverado, I was planning on stopping at the Fat Brown Trout to get the kids some fun Western gear (a sheriff’s badge and pop-gun for Nathan, some red plastic cowboy boots for Janey), then mail it off at the P.O. and hope for the best. (According to an email from Rachel, the kids “never received” the Valentine’s cards I sent them, nor the dozen or so post cards and letters—“They must have all gotten lost in the mail!”—n
or did they get the “very touching” letter I had left with our neighbor after trying to see them for my scheduled Christmas Eve visitation and finding the house empty.) When I got back to Casey’s, I’d give the horses some hot oatmeal to get them through the frigid day, then go inside, make a fire, and read over the court transcripts my lawyer had mailed me a few days earlier. My first official visit as a divorced dad—this much I knew—would be Memorial Day weekend, so I simply had to find a way to make that happen, and to enforce it if they were gone again once I arrived. But with all my debts and my maxed-out credit cards, it was hard for me to fathom how I’d come up with the four hundred dollars I would need for the flight, plus the hundred forty for two nights at the Binghamton Super 8.

  The Silverado was packed. It was a Sunday, as I recall. There were three Texans wearing orange hunter caps (their truck at the curb, a dead elk in the bed), some rancher types bellyaching about the soaring price of alfalfa, and Samantha Leeds, the pretty bank teller, sitting next to the girl who worked at the Conoco. Trey Cross, who had been Casey’s boyfriend before I came into the picture (apparently she’d kicked him out of her house the day before I arrived), was sitting at the opposite end of the counter, near the cook stove, where Belinda had six things going at once—eggs, bacon, sausage, and potatoes on one side, flapjacks on the other, and cinnamon rolls warming in the oven. The whole counter area was about the size of a living room, with about a dozen stools in a semicircle so that no matter where you sat, you couldn’t help but look at Rosie.

  After she poured me some coffee (all the while talking with Samantha about the lost snowshoers who had descended the mountains the day before and shown up on Main Street with frostbitten toes and fingers), the hunters got up, paid their tab, and headed out, and I was about to move to their seats to get closer to the heat, but just then a gaggle of artists burst through the door, on break from a weekend workshop being run by Maximilian Knox. You could spot them a mile away, either from the paint in their hair or their fancy glasses, even though the lone male, a longhaired New Englander, had bought himself some cowboy boots at the saddlery in an obvious effort to fit in. It was clearly their first time at the Silverado, so they settled on the hunters’ stools and immediately started reading the signs on the walls:

  Never kick a cow chip on a hot day.

  Always drink upstream from the herd.

  Don’t squat with your spurs on.

  The one seated next to me, with long black hair and a loose-fitting shirt, picked up a menu and asked Rosie how big the breakfast burritos were, and Rosie informed her that as a matter of fact nobody’d ever taken a tape-measure to it or set one on a scale, but let’s just say she’d never seen a lone female eat the entire thing. “When I started working here,” she said, “I liked them so much I started to look like one.” She patted her belly when she said that, and ordinarily there would have been a lot more laughing—Rosie’s voice projected as if she was on stage—but that’s when we all noticed the pooch in her abdomen.

  Manure happens.

  She took my order, and the artists’ drink orders, and when she turned to slap mine on Belinda’s counter, we all saw another orange sticker on the back pocket of her jeans: “Boneless.”

  While I waited for my huevos rancheros (something else I was enjoying about Colorado: Mexican food) and Rosie chatted up the artists, I checked out the county newspaper’s police blotter: a motorist who had sustained head wounds from a buck crashing through his windshield, a three a.m. investigation of “an incessantly barking dog,” a reported domestic dispute that turned out to be old Todd Mattson yelling at the liberals on the TV, and a drunk man found “near frozen” near the river. Then, at the bottom: Dale Cross, hospitalized with a heart attack.

  Trey’s dad. One of those guys with a beer belly and no ass, the type you never see without a cowboy hat. I checked the date of the paper—last week—and looked over at Trey, but he didn’t look like a guy whose old man had just kicked the bucket, and I hadn’t heard anybody offering condolences.

  “How’s the old man doing?” I called out to Trey, but he either didn’t hear me or was pretending not to. You might think he would see me as a rival, but no, he’d been friendly to me right from the get-go; we’d even had a few beers together at the Stumble Inn. But maybe that was only because he didn’t think I’d last through the winter.

  When Rosie delivered my breakfast, she took the opportunity to refill my coffee cup and slide over the ketchup. “For drowning your taters,” she said, and this time I got a good look, and yes, she was indeed “with foal,” as they said in these parts. I shook my head. She and her boyfriend hadn’t been together very long; they certainly didn’t know each other well enough to have a baby together. But who was I to talk?

  “Now Trey over there,” Rosie said to the artists as she pulled out her order pad, “he doesn’t tolerate ketchup on his taters; he just unscrews the salt shaker and coats them with hoar frost”—to which Trey responded by lifting the shaker in salute and sprinkling on a little extra. He was rail-thin, with a rust-colored Fu Manchu, weather-worn already even though he was only around my age—a recovering alcoholic who had never really recovered. Rumor was he’d been married once, but his wife had walked out on him after he refused to talk to her for three straight months. Scary, right? Three months! And yet there was something I admired about someone who could be so . . . resolute.

  There are two ways to argue with a woman, and neither one works.

  “To each his own,” Rosie said.

  Since she seemed disinclined to speak to me directly, I raised my hand to get her attention and asked, with a friendly smile, about any “new developments” in her life since I’d last seen her. And even though I’d asked quietly, she broadcasted the answer.

  “You mean this?” she said, pointing at her belly. “Honey this is the way we trap our husbands around here!” Which gave everyone a good laugh.

  “Remember,” she said when the black-haired artist ended up ordering the burrito on a dare from her friends, “no female, ever. But this gentleman,” she said, jerking her pencil at me, “he’ll finish it for ya if you need him to, once he minds his own beeswax and settles into his huevos. I haven’t once picked up his plate but it was wiped clean.”

  I smiled gamely and forked my eggs as the black-haired artist gave me a friendly look. I could tell she saw me as a local. I was wearing my corduroy coat (flaked with straw and hay, and smelling of horses), dirty jeans, and the old pair of Sorel boots I had picked up from a neighbor of Casey’s whose husband had recently passed. Meanwhile Rosie took the other artists’ orders, told the Connecticut Yankee with Cowboy Boots “Honey there’s no such thing as decaf ’round these parts!” (but then winked and put on a fresh pot for him), advised Belinda to make the next burrito “a big’un,” then slapped both hands on the counter in front of the newbies. “It’s been a rough stretch, artistas,” she said. She tipped her head towards me. “While the professor and his famous girlfriend were off on yet another tour of the Wild West, we were suffering back here on the home front. Nearly lost Trey’s old man last week, and then”—she held up three fingers—“three customers in five days.” Across the counter, the locals nodded with grim faces. “Two of our high-schoolers killed themselves,” she said. “One day they’re in here after drinking all night, next thing you know they’re dead.”

  The artists clammed up at that, as did everyone else. I hadn’t heard; Casey and I had camped at the Great Sand Dunes, then Mesa Verde, followed by a three-day sneak-on, sneak-off rafting trip on the Dolores River—one of the most blissful things I’d ever done. Rosie told the artists it was the high-school salutatorian and his girlfriend, one-third of the graduating class. Some sort of weird joint suicide. “The third was Big Toby Weiler,” she said. “The diabetic.” She pointed at my stool. “Dropped dead right where the professor is sitting, in the middle of a big-as-your-face cinnamon roll.” She sighed and snapped her
gum. “Everything goes,” she said, then turned to Trey and rapped on the counter. “Not your pa, though, thank goodness.”

  “Good man,” I said, raising my cup to Trey and catching his eye, but to be honest, I didn’t know his father at all. I’d only seen him a few times, mostly in the hardware store, complaining about Obama and taxes and lazy teachers. But no matter: Trey was still acting as if he had just lost his hearing.

  Indeed the whole place had grown quiet. Maybe we were all thinking the same thing: that it could all go, that we could all go, at any moment. I suppose you could say it was an honor then, a privilege really, to be alive, and I should feel fortunate to have such a strong, beautiful woman as my companion in this strong, beautiful part of the country. But that’s not what I was feeling. What I was feeling was forlorn without my children—everywhere I went, I wished they could be there with me, could witness along with me the bald eagles, the majestic elk, the mountain peaks blanketed with fresh snow—and I wouldn’t even be in these parts were it not for Casey’s tearful phone call in December, which now felt like a manipulative ruse. I’d been living in something of a daze, traveling to beautiful places without a dime in my pocket, waiting tables for visiting Oklahomans who left pocket change for tips, taking care of someone else’s horses and dogs while pretending it was my 100-acre ranch I was gazing out on every morning. It had been all right for a while, but now that my divorce was final and there was no more baby on the way, I needed to set about restructuring my life. I mean, this was it, right? This was the only life I had. I needed to live it. I needed to show the world who was boss, live wherever I chose to live, make some honest money doing something I loved, and above all see my kids when I was supposed to see them. But how to meet my life and live it with such a gaping hole in my heart? With such a gaping hole in my checking account?