by Annie Proulx
“A little after nine this mornin when we saw him,” whispered the specialist, setting down the empty bottle. “How far is it?”
“Four, four and a half miles,” Mrs. Freeze said, tracing the distance in her mind, trying to count the hazards. Rattlesnake, gopher hole, spooked horse, heatstroke, heart attack, lightning bolt, willful departure, Car Scrope. “I better take the truck in case he’s throwed and hurt. Which way he went I don’t know—go out and scatter around until I cut sign, I suppose.”
“Car said he was goin a meet him at the house,” said Janey. “That’s what made him so mad, he had a keep goin out to the fence, see if Haul was there, and comin back to the house, see if Haul wasthere . And he weren’t. Said he’s just havin a yo-yo day.”
“I’ll go with you,” said the specialist. “Might take a man, lift him in the truck if he’s down.”
Mrs. Freeze said something to herself.
Mud-crusted from prying the truck out of sinks and gumbo washes they reached the high meadow. There was no sign of Haul Smith beyond the tracks his horse had made, heading straight down now to Bad Girl Creek, not toward the ranch bridge but in the direction of the ford.
“He didn’t get across that,” said Mrs. Freeze.
They skidded down the greasy slope. Bad Girl, a big, brindle, foaming torrent, bank full and over, was cutting a new route on the flats. The willow trees along the margin were in the water, some toppled into the current and filling the creek from bank to bank with tangled limbs, great strainers, others swept downstream to mass against the barbwire fence and at the place where the old railroad trestle had collapsed in the creek years before. The sun drove its glittering spurs through the wet branches.
“Scrope’s dirt dam must a broke.” She meant nobody had kept it in repair after she had left.
The bison man whispered, “You know, eighty-five percent a Wyomin’s stream water flows out a the state. It’s the so-called—there is somethin hung up in that tree on the bend.”
Mrs. Freeze knew damn well what it was. It was the crazy gelding, drowned, the reins streaming out in the current like insect feelers, no sign of Haul Smith. “There’s Texas sense for you. He didn’t need a cross water but he tried it anyway.”
They scouted the bank, made their way back to the ranch kitchen and the phone. As they came down into the yard the specialist said in his weak voice, “It won’t work to try and run bison with this horse operation.”
“I know it. Whole setup makes me puke.”
Haul Smith showed up when the water began to subside, wrapped and twisted in willow roots, half a mile below where they’d found the horse. His boots and shirt were gone, torn off by the force of the current. The three remaining Texans walked up and down the creek bank looking for the boots, saying the comet spurs would be a nice thing for his kids to have. They didn’t find them, for the weighted boots had lodged under a sunken steel beam of the old railroad trestle, the spurs seeking sister metal.
THERE’SSTILLWHISKEY
At the end of summer Fane was out of the ranch game, the Texans and the cutting horses were gone, and the Galaxy sold to a breakfast food mogul sworn to organically grown grains who said he wanted nothing more than to let the ranch “revert to a state of nature.” Mrs. Freeze, out of a job unless she wanted to take up the apron again and cook, drifted down to the Firehole and drank whiskey After a while a whiny voice beside her said, “Hello, Mrs. Freeze.”
“Old jailbird Benny,” looking out of the corners of her singeing eyes.
“Don’t say nothin like that. I’m goin straight now. In fact, I got your old job. I’m the foreman now out at Car Scrope’s place. Livin in that trailer.” Thready stars of foxtail barley seed hung from his sleeve.
“Jesus Christ.”
They watched golfers. The television sound was turned off. Mrs. Freeze swallowed her whiskey, asked for water and another shot. Benny revolved his finger in his beer, licked it.
“There’s somethin I want a know,” said Mrs. Freeze. “He don’t bother you?”
“Who? Car?”
’Yeah, son of a bitch Car.”
“He don’t bother nobody. Well, in a way he does. I mean, you’re right, he is crazy, but it ain’t wild or nothin. He just sets down by the creek all day long eatin tater chips. Goes down by the old railroad trestle right after breakfast with five, six little bags a chips and a bottle a aspirin. Got a kitchen chair in the willows. I have to bring him a sandwich at supper. And he comes back up around dark. He’s got a headache ever day. Ask me he’s got a brain tuber. Yesterday he gets a old range tent he found somewheres and he been tryin to set it up by the creek except some a the poles is missin.”
“What the hell does he do down there?”
“Nothin. I told you. Don’t do no work. It wasn’t for me and Cody Joe that ranch’d go down the hole. He just sets there and stares at the water. Sometimes he dabbles his hand in it. Stuck his head down in it the other day. He don’t fish, nothin like that. It’s kind a funny. I don’t know what he’s goin a do when the cold weather comes.”
“Nobody got a answer on that one,” said Mrs. Freeze. She signaled for another glass of whiskey, something to hold on to, even in an apron, and that was more than Car Scrope had, ill-balanced on his sloping mudbank.
A Lonely Coast
YOU EVER SEE A HOUSE BURNING UP IN THE NIGHT, WAYto hell and gone out there on the plains? Nothing but blackness and your headlights cutting a little wedge into it, could be the middle of the ocean for all you can see. And in that big dark a crown of flame the size of your thumbnail trembles. You’ll drive for an hour seeing it until it burns out or you do, until you pull off the road to close your eyes or look up at sky punched with bullet holes. And you might think about the people in the burning house, see them trying for the stairs, but mostly you don’t give a damn. They are too far away, like everything else.
The year I lived in that junk trailer in the Crazy Woman Creek drainage I thought Josanna Skiles was like that, the house on fire in the night that you could only watch. The reason for it seemed to be the strung-out, buzzed country and the little running grass fires of the heart, the kind that usually die out on their own but in some people soar into uncontrollable conflagration.
I was having my own troubles then, a problem with Riley, my old boy, something that couldn’t get fixed. There was a feeling of coming heat and whirlwind. I didn’t have a grip on much.
The house trailer I rented was old. It was more of a camper you’d tow behind a car, so small you couldn’t cuss the cat without getting fur in your mouth. When the wind blew I’d hear parts coming off it and banging along the ground. I rented it from Oakal Roy. He said he’d been in the big time back in the 1950s, been a stunt man out in Hollywood. He was drinking himself down. A rack-sided dog hung around—I guess it was his—and once I drove in late at night and saw it crouched and gnawing at a long, bloody cow bone. He needed to shoot that dog.
I had a junior college certificate in craft supply merchandising-silk flowers, macramé, jewelry findings, beads, quills, fabric paints, that stuff. Like a magpie I was attracted to small bright objects. But I’d married Riley the day after graduation and never worked at the beads and buttons. Never would, because there weren’t any craft shops in a radius of 300 miles and I wasn’t going to leave Wyoming. You don’t leave until you have to. So two nights a week I waitressed at the Wig-Wag Lodge, weekends tended bar at the Gold Buckle, and the other nights I sat in the trailer doing crossword puzzles and trying to sleep, waking always at the same hour the alarm went off at the ranch, the time when Riley would be rolling out and reaching for his shirt, and in the window the hard little dot of Venus rising and below it the thin morning.
Josanna Skiles cooked at the Wig-Wag. She’d had the job for seven or eight months. Most people quit after a few weeks. You had to learn how to make sushi and some kind of sticky rice. The owner was Jimmy Shimazo. Fifty years ago in World War II he was a kid in the internment camp at Heart Mountain, and he sa
id that when his family went back to California with its cars and money and the bright coast, he missed Wyoming, its hardness imprinted on him. He came back years later with enough money to buy the Wig-Wag, maybe suffering some perverse need for animosity which he did find here. None of the others came back and who can blame them? All his guests were Japanese tourists who wandered through the lodge looking at the old saddles and cow skulls, in the gift shop buying little six-guns and plastic chaps for their kids, braided horsehair key rings made at the state pen. Jimmy was a tough one to work for, short-fused, but careful to pick women to yell at after the maintenance man, an ex-ranch hand from Spotted Horse, beat the piss out of him with a fence post and left him half dead next to the dumpster. Josanna never had a run-in with him until the end, but she was good at cooking that Jap food and out here everybody knows to leave the cook alone.
She had two women friends, Palma Gratt and Ruth Wolfe, both of them burning at a slower rate than Josanna, but in their own desperate ways also disintegrating into drifts of ash. Friday night was what they called girls’ night out, margaritas and buffalo wings at the Gold Buckle while they read through the personal ads in the paper. Then they went to the Stockman for ribs. Sometimes Palma brought her kid along. The kid would sit in the corner and tear up paper napkins. After the praline cake and coffee they saw the movie at the Silver Wing, and they might come back to the Buckle or not. But Saturday night was their big night when they got into tight jeans and what Josanna called dead nigger shirts, met at the Rawhide or Bud’s or Double Shot or Gold Buckle and acted wild.
They thought they were living then, drank, smoked, shouted to friends, and they didn’t so much dance as straddle a man’s thigh and lean in. Palma once stripped off her blouse to bare tits, Josanna swung at some drunk who’d said the wrong thing and she got slugged back, cussing pure blue through a split lip, kicking at the cowboy held tight by five or six of his delighted friends who urged her on. Nothing was too bold, nothing not worth the risk, they’d be sieving the men at the bar and cutting out the best three head, doing whatever drugs were going in the parking lot, maybe climb on some guy’s lap in the cab of his truck. If Josanna was still around at two in the a.m. she looked like what she was, a woman coming into middle age, lipstick gnawed off, plain face and thickening flesh, yawning, departing into the fresh night alone and sorry. When Elk came along she had somebody to go home with, and I thought that was the point.
Every month or so she went up to the Skiles ranch south of Sundance with a long-shot view of Black Buttes. She had a boy there, sixteen, seventeen years old, in and out of the detention home. Her folks had come through rocky times. She told me that their herd had carried the gene for dwarfism since her grandparents’ day, back in the forties. They’d been trying to clean the snorters out for two generations, little by little. They should have sold every one of them for beef, started over, but somehow couldn’t do it. The gene had showed up while her grandmother was running the ranch, the grandfather off to World War II with the Powder River Cavalry, the famous 115th. The government took their horses away and gave them trucks, sent those good horsemen to desks and motor pools. He came back home to stumpy-leg calves and did his best. In 1960 he drowned in the Belle Fourche River, not easy to do, but, Josanna said, her people had always taken the gritty way.
She brought me ajar of honey from their hives. Every ranch keeps bees. Me and Riley, we had twenty hives and I told her one time I missed the honey.
“Here,” she said. “Not much but it’s something. I go up there,” she said. “That damn kind a life. Clayton wants a get out—he’s talkin about goin down to Texas but I don’t know. They need him. They’d take it wrong, I suppose, give me the blame if he went. Hell, he’s pretty much growed up, let him do what he wants. He’s headed for trouble anyway. Pain-in-the-ass kid.”
Riley and me never had any kids, I don’t know why. Neither one of us would go to a doctor and find out. We didn’t talk about it. I thought it was probably something to do with the abortion I’d had before I knew him. They say it can mess you up. He didn’t know about that and I suppose he had his own ideas.
Riley couldn’t see blame in what he’d done. He said, “Look, I seen my chance and I taken it,” reverting to Sweetwater home talk, where he comes from, and that was his last word on the subject.
Who knew better than me that he had a love spot on his body? She might have touched it. If she did he couldn’t help it. Riley is just slat and bone, he has a thin, mean face, one of those mouths like a paper cut and he doesn’t say much. But you touch that love spot, you get him turned on, you lie down with him, his mouth would get real swollen, I’d just come apart with those thick, wet kisses and how big he got. Out of his clothes, horse and dog and oil and dirt, out of his clothes his true scent lay on his skin, something dry like the pith of a cottonwood twig when you break it at the joint disclosing the roan star at the center. Anyway, there’s something wrong with everybody and it’s up to you to know what you can handle.
In nine years married we had only one vacation, to Oregon where my brother lived. We went out on a rocky point and watched the rollers come in. It was foggy and cold, there wasn’t anybody there but us watching the rollers. It was dusk and the watery curls held light as though it was inside them. Up the lonely coast a stuttering blink warned ships away. I said to Riley that was what we needed in Wyoming—lighthouses. He said no, what we needed was a wall around the state and turrets with machine guns in them.
Once Josanna gave me a ride in her brother’s truck—he was down for a few days to pick up pump parts and some pipe—and it was sure enough a down-home truck, pair of chaps hanging over the seat back, chain, beat-up hat on the floor, a filthy Carhartt jacket, seven or eight torn-up gloves, dog hairs and dust, empty beer cans, .30-.06 in the rear window rack and on the seat between us in a snarl of wire, rope, and old mail unopened, a .44 Ruger Blackhawk half out of the holster. Let me tell you that truck made me homesick. I said something about her brother had enough firepower, didn’t he, and she laughed and said the Black-hawk was hers, she kept it in the glove compartment of her own truck but it was in the shop again that day with the ongoing compression problem they couldn’t seem to fix; it was on the seat because she didn’t want to forget it when her brother went back.
Long hair, frizzled and hanging down, was the fashion, and in the tangled cascades women’s faces seemed narrow and vulnerable. Palma’s hair was neon orange. Her brows were plucked and arched, the eyes set wide, the skin below dark and hurt-looking. Her daughter lived with her, a mournful kid ten or eleven years old with a sad mug and straight brown hair, the way Palma’s would be if she didn’t fix it up. The kid was always tearing at something.
The other one, Ruth, had the shadow of a mustache, and in summer heavy stubble showed under her arms. She paid forty-five dollars twice a month to have her legs waxed. She had a huge laugh, like a man’s.
Josanna was muscular like most country women, tried to hide it under fuss-ruffle clothes with keyhole necklines. Her hair was strawberry roan, coarse and thick and full of electricity. She had a somewhat rank odor, a family odor because the brother had it too, musky and a little sour, and that truck of his smelled the same way. With Josanna it was faint and you might mistake it for strange Jap spices, but the aroma that came off the brother was strong enough to flatten a horse. He was an old bachelor. They called him Woody because, said Josanna, he’d come strutting out into the kitchen raw naked when he was four or five years old showing a baby hard-on and their old man had laughed until he choked and called him Woody and the name persisted forevermore and brought him local fame. You just couldn’t help but look once you heard that, and he’d smile.
All three women had been married, rough marriages full of fighting and black eyes and sobbing imprecations, all of them knew the trouble that came with drinking men and hair-trigger tempers. Wyos are touchers, hot-blooded and quick, and physically yearning. Maybe it’s because they spend so much time handling livestock, but pe
ople here are always handshaking, patting, smoothing, caressing, enfolding. This instinct extends to anger, the lightning backhand slap, the hip-shot to throw you off balance, the elbow, a jerk and wrench, the swat, and then the serious stuff that’s meant to kill and sometimes does. The story about Josanna was that when she broke up with her ex-husband she shot at him, creased his shoulder before he jumped her and took the gun away. You couldn’t push her around. It gave her a dangerous allure that attracted some men, the latest, Elk Nelson, whom she’d found in the newspaper. When they set up together he collected all the cartridges in the house and hid them at his mother’s place in Wyodak, as if Josanna couldn’t buy more. But that old bold Josanna got buried somewhere when Elk came around.