“Even when we did a good job, he never said so.”
“He was genetically incapable of giving a compliment,” says Jackie.
“Remember that hike we’d always take up to Mount Baldy after haying season? I think that was the only full day he’d take off all year.”
“I can’t believe he’s gone.” Jackie looks across the seat at Susan’s familiar profile.
“I know. Me too.” Susan stares out at the sky, her fingers anxiously tapping the steering wheel.
Jackie puts her hand over Susan’s hand, feels the thrum of her sister, and waits until her fingers still. Night starts its slide down off the mesa to settle on the clover. Jackie stares out the window at the perfect row of fence posts and the wind in the fields, moving anywhere it wants, and she wants to punch the glass, which of course is something she would never do.
“Let’s go home,” says Jackie. Her fist slackens; her jaw relaxes. The dark sky falls around them. “I’ve seen enough.”
In the morning Jackie climbs into the tub, steam rising, and lets her bones float. The water comes direct from the creek, run through some carbon filter Dad rigged in the pump house. It smells of sweet and loam, the smell of something that never needs fixing.
She closes her eyes, breathes in the smell of outside. Ray will push the cows across the snow-free fields to drink the creek. In the three weeks since her accident, with the help of the neighbors and between Ray and Sue, the rest of the babies got born without incident. The animals will be huddled close now, their separate shapes merged into one. She takes the memory of the gruff of their breath and the lap of them drinking and tucks it into herself. A part of her own sound.
This morning she had pulled a thin brown thread out of her belly button. She’d thrown the suture thread onto the floor and tried and failed to avoid looking at it. She still can’t walk more than two hundred feet at a time. Then she needs a glass of water. And a nap. It hurts like hell to cough or sneeze. She tries to study, she reads and rereads paragraphs, but she can’t concentrate. She has never been so useless in her entire life.
The first female doctor she ever saw was the lady with the white coat, a rose embroidered on the pocket, who patched up Susan’s cuts after the accident. Mama was in the morgue, but Jackie didn’t know that yet, just that something bad had happened, was happening. The doctor, an ER doc she must have been, was unsurprised, full of calm and kindness. Her eyes were the color of blueberries. Jackie went home and made a stethoscope out of a ribbon and a button, put it around her neck and tucked it under her shirt. She wore it for the rest of third grade. Throughout high school and college, she had been sure that if she worked hard enough, if she joined science club and the mathletes, if she studied more than anyone else, she could be just like that lady doctor with the blueberry eyes.
Jackie rubs the oatmeal soap into the hollow under her arms. She’s lost too much weight; her ribs jut out, in a perfect example of a deconditioned patient. The contusions on her legs have faded from purple and blue to an ugly yellow with blurry crescents of brown, hoof-sized, across her abdomen, arms, and chest. At the costochondral junction, she presses into cartilage until there is a dull, painful ache.
She makes a fist and raises her arm over her head, one side and then the next. She’ll walk the hallway twenty-five times today. She’ll eat every two hours. She visualizes herself running.
Eyes squeezed, she ducks underwater. Susan went to town; the house is empty. Her fingers find the coarse hair between her legs and she presses into herself, longing for relief in the quicksand of circling. She arches her back so her mouth finds the surface. But her body doesn’t give. She presses harder into herself, but there is nothing. She gives up, disgusted. The water has gone cold.
She is drying off when she hears the knocking, and then Tim’s voice, calling her name.
When she finally gets dressed, gets down the hall, and opens the door, Tim is on the front porch, holding an aluminum casserole dish with a CD on top. He looks nice in his jeans; she reminds herself that she doesn’t need any of that right now.
“This is lasagna and this is the best new band in the West.” He holds out his offerings, an odd apologetic smile on his face.
“Thanks. How nice.” The dish is heavy and it strains her ribs to hold it. She sets it down inside, out of sight.
“Nice to see you.” He awkwardly sets his hand on her arm and squeezes it. “You look good.”
She looks down at the orange T-shirt, knit skirt, and leggings she has been wearing for days. “You’re insane.”
“Well, you look better than you deserve.”
“Amazing what a person can do without a spleen.”
“I’m really glad you’re OK.” His eyes are soft.
“I should’ve called you back.”
“I understand. Can I come in? Coffee?”
Does coffee mean coffee, in a cup? Or is it something else? Something else, even if it’s just conversation, is something she’s not at all capable of at the moment. Her body aches all over. Her dad must’ve felt like this and been beset with all manner of visitors and she hadn’t been there to fend them off.
“I’m not good company right now, Tim.” She tries to smile, to act normal, to pretend that she doesn’t need to sit down. “I know I said this before, last time you were here, but how about a rain check? I really do mean it this time.”
His smile turns strange; he shifts his feet.
“There’s something I need to talk to you about.” He looks behind him and then past the house. His right eye twitches. “I meant to bring it up when I was here a couple weeks ago, but then it wasn’t the right time.”
She holds herself perfectly still. He has herpes. He’s married.
“Go on.”
Tim takes a big breath. “My company wants to drill some exploratory wells on your lower field. We expect that you’re sitting on a mega amount of natural gas.”
The white envelope he takes from his back pocket is thick. Tim talks about the Mancos Shale formation versus the Mesa Verde. He uses the word strata. He says something about $50,000.
“But if they find gas, which they probably will since Johnson’s wells have always been big producers, you get a percentage.” Tim’s face is lit up; he’s using his hands. “Could be tens of thousands of dollars over the life of the wells. Could be more.”
The envelope is too heavy; she drops it onto the front step.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Say yes.” He picks up the envelope, brushes it off, and hands it back. “We’d want to punch that first well pretty soon, maybe early summer.”
She opens the envelope and reads the contract, quickly, skimming for the pertinent details. Her heart slows and the land around her seems to disappear. There is just the concrete stairs and Tim framed in the door. Good news, at very long last. Her eyes pool with tears and she presses her fingers against her eyelids, damming up the water.
“You could’ve just brought enchiladas like everyone else.”
“Just doing my job.”
“Thank you. This is a big deal.”
“I don’t want this to be weird after what happened the other day. That was fun.” There’s a freckle just north of his lip. Thousands of cells could fit in a dot that size. “You’re fun.”
Smart, stubborn, brave, these are the correct adjectives to describe her. Never has anyone described her as fun. She sways, just slightly, but enough for him to notice and he reaches out to steady her. With his other hand he touches her cheek. His touch rolls through her arms and legs and she stiffens. Any tenderness puts her at risk to all pain. The sound of the cow as it ran over her chest. The moment when she was too tired to drag herself any farther across the field.
“Listen, I’m grateful for this.” She nods at the contract. “Really I am, but it’s not a good idea for something to happen between us again. I mean, I just got out of the hospital. My skin looks like Rainbow Sherbet.”
“I’ve been thinking abo
ut you.”
“There’s no reason for that.”
“I’m not so sure. I’d like to get to know you again.”
“Come on. You just want to fool around.”
He smiles and shrugs. “Nothing wrong with that. What is it you want?”
The question fills the entire sky. She sighs. “Probably nothing. Probably too much.”
“Can I give you a hug?”
“Don’t hold too tight.” She stands there, arms pinned to her sides. “My ribs.” Her words muffle against his shirt. They stand that way for a long time.
13
SUSAN ALMOST HITS THEM with the front door. Jackie jumps out of the arms of a short guy, average-looking in every way. Jackie introduces him, expects Susan to remember him from high school. Jackie’s cheeks are red. Then she hands Susan a white envelope.
“Tim just solved our money problems.”
Limitation of Forfeiture. Shut-in Payments. Surface Rights. All lessee this and lessor that. Jackie keeps talking and Tim Layton, landman, keeps talking. And Susan reads and reads and doesn’t understand a damn thing except that she wants to take Dad’s Ruger from the red holster in the hallway and point it at them both.
Granny, straight-backed on her white horse Pinky, used to trot off across the lower fields into the woods to hunt mushrooms. Jackie walking through waist-high clover. The scratch of it threading Susan’s fingers as she followed. There is Dad at the kitchen table, oxygen tank by his side, telling Jon Amick not to sign a lease. Those wells make the land less yours. Telling him not to double down on a bad bet. Jackie was busy at medical school; she doesn’t know.
Tim Layton is talking about how the lease money is keeping ranchers afloat all over the valley when Susan interrupts him.
“I don’t know anything about you or your company. Do you work up in the Jonah Field?”
“We don’t work in Wyoming.” He looks way too nervous for a guy who has given this spiel many, many times.
“Susie, this is a lot of money,” says Jackie, talking slow as if English wasn’t Susan’s first language.
Jackie always thinks she’s right. She always thinks she knows. She might not be the type to lose her wallet but she misses things all the time. People who don’t make mistakes are not trampled by a cow.
“What about the fire the other night down Dry Hollow? I heard one of Amick’s wells blew up. A kickdown, they’re calling it. They could’ve died. How do we know that wouldn’t happen here?”
Tim Layton talks very fast, explaining how the fire wasn’t as big a deal as it might seem. Something about the percussion being louder than normal. Something about the pressure building up higher when a choke was plugged, so they had to flare the gas longer.
A good reporter always carries a pen. Where is a pen? She needs to write all of this down.
“That kind of thing rarely happens, and in a way it’s good news,” he says, jazz hands at the ready. “Means there’s so much gas in the seam, it’s eager to flow out. But that was wasted money. You’ll want to get in on things before it’s all gone.”
“What about Tina Krest’s goats? Three of them were born stills the day after that kick. Kickdown. Whatever.”
“That wouldn’t have anything to do with us.”
“And the things I saw in Wyoming, the crap in the air and the kids with nosebleeds, the traffic and the noise, that doesn’t have anything to do with you either?”
“Listen, I get your concerns. I mean let’s be honest, extractive industries always have some things associated with them. Your cows crap near the rivers and that makes it tough for the fish. Logging changes the forest ecology. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ranch or log. Honestly, I appreciate that you care about the environment. I believe this company cares too. We just won an award for stewardship.”
There are more questions to ask, more fine print to go over but this Tim, this classic example of a male human, has to explain it all to Susan.
“You have to think of it this way, Sue. You’re a rancher. My family is in forestry. We all work the land, we all take our living from it. Our great-grandparents understood this; it’s why they moved to the West. Cross my heart, I really believe they’d be proud of us for helping develop homegrown sources of energy.”
The guy keeps talking, unaware that a conversation should involve both parties.
“Let’s have dinner,” says Jackie, her face red. She tries to steer Susan into the kitchen. “I’ll heat up this lasagna Tim brought.”
“I ate in town.”
Susan shoves the contract under her shirt and leaves them to whatever it is they think they’re doing.
A few days later, Susan and Ray are driving into town, him for baling wire, her to get milk, to get away from her sister. She and Jackie have gone rounds about the gas deal and the more they talk, the less Susan feels heard.
“How’s your home life?” she asks.
“Whoa there, Sue, don’t hold back.” Ray turns up the hip-hop on the radio.
“Well I don’t want to talk about the gas deal anymore.”
“That’s all I got to pick from? Marriage or the gas deal?”
“I’m curious. You seem like the kind of guy who could make marriage easy.”
“You’d best ask Camila about all that.” He leans his head back against the headrest. “Actually, don’t. You ever think about dating again?”
“Oh, God. Not really. I mean I’m basically middle-aged.”
“You sure aren’t planning to live very long then.”
“I feel old.”
“I know what you mean.”
It’s quiet between them while the music pours into the car. Raindrops fall onto the windshield but she’s dry and warm inside. She focuses on the contrast of that, on the thin glass of the window that makes the difference between discomfort and ease. Grace can be afforded in the smallest places.
“Plenty of men around here.” Ray looks at her sidewise and shrugs.
“I mean, maybe, if someone asked me out. But isn’t everyone in this town married or drunk or both?”
Ray laughs. She said something funny. She used to be funny. She once made Jackie pee from something she said, but she can’t remember now what it was.
“What about Ken Fontaine?”
“Oh, Ray. He’s old. I saw him at Don’s last week and he had suppositories in his cart. He didn’t even try to hide them.”
“Good point. And he does complain. He cornered me to talk about his ingrown toenails for a fucking long time. Doug Magee’s single. He owns a house. Got a manager job at Dumo’s. And he’s good-looking, right?”
“If he hadn’t smoked his whole life. And he’s so ashamed about being from South Dakota, which is actually kind of interesting. Why does he pause for so long before he answers a question?”
“Well, there’s Stu Allen. He’s a nice guy. High school quarterback. Owns a business.”
“He never talks to me. And anyways, he has a stomach like pudding.”
“I think his meds make him fat. He overdosed on lithium a couple years back. Only reason he’s not dead is Jack Casey went over to buy a cord and found him passed out in the bathroom.”
“Sounds perfect for me.”
Her throat catches on the sentence. She didn’t mean it to be funny but it is, sort of, and she can’t help it, she snorts into the window. Ray smiles at her, his eyes big, like he’s impressed she’s remembered how to laugh at herself. She can tell he’s studying her, thinking things through with his thoughtful mind, and if it were anyone else she might panic a little, but it’s Ray.
“Wyatt Olson was back in town for a while.”
“He always liked Jackie.”
“Well shit, Susie, I guess it’s not that promising. But you’ll find someone good one of these days.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“Sure. You’re a good one.”
She doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t mean it. But even so. How nice. The nicest thing anyone has
said in a long time.
Her eyes burn. The fields out the window blur. She hasn’t cried in weeks. Exactly seven weeks.
“Thanks, Ray.”
He starts to talk about the ranch and what he wants to do later in the upper field and his grammar is terrible, full of all the ruralisms she worked so hard to purge from her speech when she got to college. The bent language made her ashamed, made her feel like she didn’t belong, but the way Ray sounds is honest. It makes her unafraid to trust him. The rain falls lightly outside the warm car and it makes the green of the fields pop, and she’s noticing all that when she sees a brown paper bag in the middle of the road and Ray hits the gas.
“Holy fuck. Get down. Get down.” He’s yelling, while she is thrown back against the headrest.
“Stop. Ray, stop.”
His face is red and his jaw is clenched and they’re going close to 60. Susan braces her body with her feet on the floor.
“Ray, what’s going on? Slow down. Stop.”
Finally he does. Pulls over. His hands shake. And he shuts his eyes.
“What was it?”
“Damn, Sue. I’m sorry. I got confused. The war. I don’t know.”
“It’s OK.” She puts her hand on his shoulder. “I understand.”
And maybe she does.
“Want to talk about it?” she asks.
“Nope. But thanks.”
People used to tell her things just because she asked. Personal, hard things. And she used to think the listening helped. But maybe it was the writing it down, the publishing, that mattered.
Ray rests his head on the wheel and doesn’t move. She wants to ask if he’s breathing, but that’s stupid. Of course he is.
“Ray?”
“Sorry, Sue. I just need a minute.”
“Do you want me to drive?”
“Well. That sounds good.”
The rest of the way into town, Ray looks out the window, chewing on his thoughts. Poor guy. Nice guy. Not everyone gets the same share of hurt in this world. Watch the big turn. Ease on the gas. She puts her hand on his arm and pats it.
“We’re almost there, Ray. You don’t need to worry.”
Late that night, in the dark, she walks outside to feel the stillness all around. In the front, near the rotting chicken coop, is an old garden bed long gone to bindweed. Her mom used to sit on the railroad tie, a cigarette in her mouth, a pile of dead weeds at her side. She’d had a deep voice for a woman and she was strict—not in an unkind way, just the type with expectation.
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