Chapter Seven
Last Bid
“Starting at three dollars a pound. So give me four four four, Okay! Five, then, five and a quarter.” The auctioneer barks a slur into the cold, his voice loud and deep enough to carry over the bawling calves and the drone of conversations and the dusty shuffle of boots up concrete steps and, she hopes, the wobbly way air is coming out of her nose and the tap-tap-tapping of her stubby fingernail on her knee, neither of which she can stop.
“Who’ll give me five? Beautiful Angus calves here.”
A bidder nods, his ball cap dipping down and then up. The auctioneer jumps to five and a half, and then six six six, and the calves churn in the dirt arena, milling together in their nervous-ness, bawling and nuzzling each other as they pace.
Violet watches another man lift a finger to bid. He wears a sweat-stained ball cap advertising Erase, a chemical that kills corn rootworms. No, no, no, she thinks in unison with the auctioneer’s six, six, six. No, he’s not the one. She smooths her bangs down with her palms and presses her lips together to even out the peach lipstick and pulls her jacket closer. It would be so much easier if he would find her, but if he doesn’t, she’s prepared, this time, to find him.
The room is too big and too cold, and she’s tired of feeling that way. This winter has been tough and she would like to go to Mexico for the whole rest of it, she would like to heal somewhere else, go a little bit nuts, but there is always the ranch, the damn ranch, which even with the help of their ranch hand, Lillie, is always too much work to leave. So instead she’s going to do this, by god, and at the Last Chance Auction House, no less.
Violet watches as the calves are chased out and a new group is chased in. They cluster, backing into one another. A few brave ones stand on the edges, their front legs braced, staring up into the bleachers that surround them. It’s not so crowded today, and the benches are only spotted with bidders. Sunlight slants through a high window and lights up the floating dust and hay bits and cigarette smoke, and for a moment, it’s almost quiet. Then the auctioneer’s husky voice starts up again. “Got a group of Hereford-cross here,” he drawls, then changes to a speedy staccato. “Start with four, four, four, who’s gonna give me four?”
She’s watching one calf in particular, a soft, ruddy-red bull with a white face. He stands frozen, blinking at the crowd, and then takes a few galloping steps, kicking his hind legs into the air. He mounts another calf, his front legs gripping and slipping on her hindquarters. As she moves away, he follows, stumbling on his two hind legs. He falls off, then jumps on her again. The female bucks away and kicks at him, but he mounts her anyway, clasping her back and lurching after her.
“Got an ornery one here.” The auctioneer chuckles and slows his voice and momentarily stops the bidding. “Not quite old enough, but darn ready for when he is. He’ll get the job done for you. So someone gimme five, five, five.”
A man takes a bite from his doughnut and tips his hat, and another spits tobacco into his cup and gives a nod, and the auctioneer goes back and forth, goading out an extra three cents per pound as the young bull calf gives up and stands panting, flaring his nostrils with his nose pointed up in the air, sniffing.
It’s been a long time since she’s been here. It’s been years, which is why she recognizes no one. And no one, she hopes, knows her, although it would be easy enough to explain why she’s way down here, in town, way east of town, in fact, at the only remaining live auction around, the only way to acquire new animals and meet people at the same time, the only way to get the hell away from her ranch and her grocery store and her grief and her life.
For a long time she stares at the ear of a man sitting several seats in front of her and to the right. His blond sideburn comes down to the middle of his ear and then is cleanly shaven off, leaving red, tough skin. She can see he has a mustache, Western-style. She’s never kissed a man with a mustache before. She has been faithful for her entire marriage, faithful to their daughter, faithful to her community, faithful to showing up for her job at the grocery, faithful to the belief in the stretch of time before her—and all this has been good. But then a friend of hers died in a horrible way no person ever should, and something about that has scattered her apart. She can’t tell what she is doing, but she thinks she should perhaps not miss out on kissing a mustached man.
This particular man runs his hand down his cheek as he watches the calves, then scratches his ear—perhaps because she is looking at it, she thinks. But he does not look in her direction. Instead, he takes a sip out of a cup and spills some coffee on his denim shirt. He ducks his chin to look at the spill and brushes it away with the tips of his fingers, shaking his head slightly, and she thinks, He’s the one.
She grabs her purse and walks up the bleacher steps. In the bathroom, she tightens her face against the faint smell of urine and menstrual blood, puts a peppermint breath mint in her mouth, and leans forward over the sink to stare at her face in the mirror. She is still pretty. Still has her trademark smile, lovely and genuine, and even though her ponytailed gray hair and eye wrinkles suggest a certain age, it’s her smile that has always made people feel good, has softened and encouraged and cheered them. She has been, on the whole, a person who used that smile to good end. Benevolent manipulation, her husband calls it, teasing her for her ability to cheer. She smiles at herself, now, shyly. “I hope this works for you, kid,” she says. “Good luck.”
She buys a cup of coffee and then returns to the auction pit, this time descending by a different set of stairs. She pretends interest in the cows that have just been chased in, but really she is aiming toward the blond man, who has taken off his cap, revealing a line across his head where the hair is matted, and she stares at that line until she’s right beside him. “Excuse me,” she says, and shuffles past his knees and down a few paces and then sits. She drops her purse to the cement floor and sets the coffee cup on the aluminum seat beside her. It will be too hard to start a conversation later, so she’s got to do it now. Now, now, now, she thinks, and then turns to him and smiles and says, “It’s cold in here. Looking to buy some calves?”
He turns to her, jolted out of his thoughts, but not angry, not intruded upon. “No,” he says. “I’m here for the sheep. Guess I got here early.”
“Well, they should be up soon.”
He nods and turns his attention back to the calves. He’s being friendly, nothing more, and she thinks she should just let it go, and besides, her hands are shaking. But she sits on her hands and promises herself she’ll quit after one more try: “I had a sheep when I was a little girl,” she says, “and I remember how we tied a rubber band around its tail so it would fall off. How do you do that, anyway, with a big herd?”
He considers her question for a moment, then scoots over across the smooth seat so that they won’t have to strain to hear, and she lets out a long, shaky breath and fills her lungs again before he is beside her.
“Well, sometimes they dock them with bands, or they just cut the tails off when they’re castrating.”
“I’ve heard the men castrate, you know . . . with their teeth.”
“Well, there’s that.”
“Some sort of prove-yourself-a-man ritual.”
“Not partial to it myself.”
“But you’ve seen it done?”
“Sure. It’s very fast.”
“I just can’t picture it.”
“I’m not sure you’d want to.”
“You have a herd?”
“I work for a sheep rancher in Wyoming. I had to bring a horse down here for a cousin of his, so he asked me to see if I could bring back a trailer full of good ewes. Plus I’m snowed in, more or less. Lotta snow up north. Although I see you have plenty here too. Not sure what I’m going to do, exactly. How about you?”
She hesitates, because she cannot remember the response she has practiced. Once the words start, they come out all wrong, in a jumble, and she speeds up to find the end of t
he sentence. “We, my husband Ollie and I, own a small cattle ranch up west of town, Angus and Herefords mostly, up on Blue Moon Mountain. My husband is gone for a few days, he up and took our daughter on a vacation, one last father-daughter trip before she leaves for college, which is fine, they could use that time together, and I stayed behind to manage the store and the ranch and because they need to be alone, and so do I. But I got a little lonely today, really lonely, so I thought I’d head down here to see if any old friends were around, but they’re not. Not today, I guess.”
She presses her fingertips to her forehead, alarmed that she might have revealed something, but also hoping that she has. After all, she no longer knows how to proceed. How can she convey to him that she has not kissed another man besides her husband in twenty-five years, and that she’s kissed only three others in her life, and that she’s not even sure how a first kiss is supposed to feel anymore? But now she’s got to know; she’s got to kiss someone soon, now, now, now, and she needs to feel something new so that she can hold it inside her.
So could he please help her out with this? she wants to ask. If she could, she would tell him, I know I’m not beautiful, I’m not young, and you don’t have to adore me the way I imagined a lover would, the way I thought it would be for all these years—you admiring my back while I’m asleep, naked, in your sheets; holding me to you because you don’t want to lose me. No, you don’t have to do any of that. But if you could just find something I say funny or clever, or see something special in my face and tell me about it and then kiss me, it would be enough, it would be enough.
He surprises her, suddenly, with a torrent of his own words. He lives in a trailer, he says, in the middle of nowhere, with his horse, Blue, and his dog, also named Blue. It’s the last place, that dry open prairie, where a man like him can go. In the winter he moves to town, but he doesn’t like it. He feels strange now, in this crowded room, in this Colorado town. But it’s good for him, he knows. He’s got to stay in touch with this other world every once in a while and—he says, looking at her with a tilt of his head—it’s nice to be talking to someone other than Blue and Blue.
He is genuine and soft, not flirting or wanting anything, and his kindness drains her. But it also sends her a wave of courage; his honesty has made way for hers, and she will try to get as close as she can to saying what cannot quite be said.
So she says, “I heard once that getting old is the loss of desire. Desire for something in the present, or the future, and not just reliving the desires of the past. So I’ve been thinking lately, What is it in the present that I desire? Because I don’t want to be growing old.” She laughs, trying to make it light, but he’s looking at her with serious gray eyes, so she continues, her voice barely above a whisper. “And I was just wondering if there’s anything, up there in that flat, quiet place, that you find yourself, well . . . desiring.”
His eyes drift from hers to the center of the arena, where a large bull is pacing around the edge of the pen, waving his head in the air, as if trying to catch something in his horns, snorting at some invisible foe.
“There is plenty I desire,” he finally says. “And not all of it I could put into words, even if I were going to tell you.” He bats her knee with his palm, a playful, innocent movement. “I didn’t realize that folks at auctions talked about more than the weather. It’s nice to meet you. I’m Jack.”
“Violet,” she says, holding out her hand and curling her fingers tightly around his as they shake.
“Violet,” he repeats, and she holds the sound of his voice saying her name in her head.
The drive back was startling in its contradiction, how river and road offered two parallel winding black paths free of snow in a world that was otherwise variations of white: trees, mountainsides, fences, fields. She watched him in the rearview mirror as he followed her west, up the mountain, she in her truck and he in his old truck and trailer.
The sheep he bought are now in her corral. Even from inside her house, she can hear them bleating. But they have access to hay and water, so their scared bawling, after Jack whooped them out of the trailer, has disappeared. She’ll explain their droppings to Ollie and Korina by telling them that a stranger from Wyoming stayed the night so he wouldn’t have to make that long drive back so late in the day, with the roads being so iffy up north and all. She was offering kindness to a stranger. It is the truth, so far. But she hopes there will be more, another truth, which she will also tell her husband if he asks her.
She will say to him: I am greedy for something new. And I felt guilty because of that greed, because I love you. But I don’t have time for guilt anymore. I’m sorry.
She hopes her husband will forgive her. His kindness has always prevented her from justifying what she is about to do. But after all, it isn’t about greed, she tells herself. It is a chance to understand and recognize desire. There is plenty of desire in her, more than can be embraced in whatever time she has left, and the only way to survive this winter is to do this crazy thing.
So much desire. Desire not only for a kiss, or the tingle spreading from her pelvis to her spine, or the feel of a tongue against her lower arm and circling her breast, but also for warm days and the smell of wheat drying in the fields and the chance to be alive in someone else.
Greed and desire. They are, she thinks now, not separate things; they are the same, and they are good. Why couldn’t Sy hold on to that?
She pours Jack a cup of coffee and sets out a plate of crackers. She wishes she had put the dishes in the dishwasher and wiped the countertops before she left this morning, but she must not have believed then that a man would be sitting in the kitchen with her now. She did change the sheets, though, and they will smell clean, and maybe that will remind him of his Wyoming nights, and he will be pleased and roll over and touch her shoulder and speak of stars and remember her that way.
He’s quirkier than she first thought; she sees that now. “I like to think about beautiful words,” he is saying. “What if you could taste turquoise?”
She doesn’t know what to say to that. Finally, she says, “I thought Wyoming sheep people thought about words like beer and poker and sex.”
“Well, that too.” His grin reveals a chipped tooth.
“Is it enough?” she blurts.
He leans forward and looks into her eyes. “I don’t know. It’s enough for the usual day. But the usual days aren’t what really make up a life, are they?” He says this as if he’s not quite sure himself, and then he stands up and walks to the kitchen sink and looks out the window toward the snowy mountains in all directions.
“Do they make you claustrophobic?” she asks him.
“Yes.”
“They make me feel grounded and protected.”
“I can see that.”
“The mountains hide things. Two months ago, I came across a couple making love in the woods. It was the sweetest thing I ever saw. I want something like that.” She looks at him, then, stands, moves toward him, leans in toward him, all the time an auctioneer’s voice murmuring in her head—five five five decades and a quarter, who wants to bid?—and without a trace of embarrassment, she tilts her head and touches his lips with hers.
The kiss is clumsy. Her teeth knock against his lips, and the two of them bump foreheads, and he pulls away. But she leans toward him again, before he has time to move very far, and their lips meet in a soft way until he moves his hands across her back and presses her hips to him. Then the kisses are hard and compact, much as she always thought they would be. Only more scary and more grand, because they are real.
She leads him to the bedroom and pulls back the clean sheets. In the instant before flesh touches clean cotton, she knows that this moment was impossible in her life until now, that it might be wrong, might turn out wrong. But still, she sends a thank-you up to all the lonely souls, for giving her the courage, for the flash of something new, for this moment she can hold inside her.
She imagine
s the end will come someday, as she lies on this bed, loving her husband and her daughter, the mountains hovering above their land, the flat meadows stretching from the foothills to their door. And now she will also have this: a sudden rise in the earth, this small outcropping of rocks that breaks up the landscape.
Chapter Eight
This Imaginary Me
Daydreaming is all I can seem to do this winter. My feet are propped up on the dash of the truck, my eyes directed out to snow-draped pines and granite sky, and I’m imagining a man falling for me, so very in love with me, and that’s why I barely see Sergio’s face, how it contorts and pulls back into a grimace, as he shouts, “Oh, fuck, wait, what?” and while he is gunning his truck to pass a white junker he’s been cussing for a mile he is also breaking to slow down to be next to the white junker, all this at once, or nearly at once, and it jolts me back to here, though mostly I have been elsewhere, daydreaming of an alternate me in a nonexistent life. I am looking ahead to see what we’ll crash into, how our lives are about to end. My eyes search down the mountain—a deer? the snow? what danger?—and my mouth starts up a Hail Mary, an old reflex from my Believing Days. It’s only a split second but it is also forever. I see what he does. Which is. In the white car we are passing, a man drives with one hand and punches the woman next to him with his other.
The Blue Hour Page 9