Jackie spits and steps back to the cow and again lowers the brand, and again the calf yowls and kicks. There is more shit and flies and dust. The brand makes black tar of the skin. The DCR for Divide Creek Ranch a brownish-red line into the hide.
It takes six hours for them to run through the rest of the calves. A few more times, Jackie doesn’t push the iron in hard enough and has to redo. And once she lets a calf run through the squeeze chute, out into the corral, they have to herd it back and do the whole thing again. Susan gets kicked twice in the shin. It could’ve been worse, probably should’ve been.
Afterward, they let the calves join their mothers in the lower field to nurse and graze. Reunited, they all quiet down. There is only the sound of flies buzzing, of water trucks headed to or from gas wells down below on Dry Hollow, and the irrigation, gogogogogogo. Sitting in the dirt and shade, their backs against the posts, the Dunbars drink bottled water. A thin line of black ash edges Jackie’s lips. Susan doesn’t mention it. It’s too hot for May. There’s no wind, and even in the shade the heat is suffocating.
Jackie tells Susan that her landman friend has given them an extension on signing the gas contract. She tells her this as if she has won a blue ribbon. She is eager for praise.
Susan turns her head away from her sister and stares at the empty corral.
“Why do you trust that guy? He works for a multinational corporation. We are like ants on the bottom of their shoe for how much they care about us.”
“Tim’s a good guy. I’ve known him a long time.”
Jackie blushes and smiles awkwardly, which isn’t a thing she does easily or often.
“I don’t believe it. You never fall for anyone.”
“I wouldn’t say I’m falling for him. I mean I like him but I’m thinking straight about it.”
Implicit in Jackie’s comment is a critique of Susan: that she has always leapt for love, every time, into the chute.
“You know, Jackson, you can’t control everything.” Her nostrils flare.
“I know.”
“Dad would be proud of you; I’m proud of you.”
“I haven’t done anything, Susie.”
“You realize how stupid your plan was, right?”
“What?”
“No one goes to medical school to save the family ranch. It was totally inappropriate of Dad to encourage that idea.”
“It was?” Jackie’s voice is scarcely audible. “Why didn’t you ever say something to Dad?”
“I want to sell the ranch,” says Susan quietly, staring at the cows suckling at their mother’s tits.
“You’re joking.”
“They’re going to deliver bottled water for what, a few weeks? It won’t be forever. They put diesel fuel down those wells to frack. That shit causes cancer, Jackie. There’s probably all sorts of chemicals in our water, things that hurt the brain and nervous system.”
“Come off it, Susan. You know the levels are normal in our creek.”
“I’ve been reading. I have a stack of things for you to read. The gas company should buy us out, and we should leave.”
“How can you even consider that? Dad would disown us.”
“Dad is gone. And we can’t afford this place. And we can’t do this by ourselves.” Susan folds her bandana in half; she folds it into thirds. She pushes each of her fingertips into the dirt until the skin below the nail turns white. “I don’t want to. You won’t admit it, but neither do you.”
“You want to give away the only thing Dad gave us.” Jackie keeps herself contained, unemotional. “Because it’s hard?” She has always dressed up fear to look like righteousness.
Susan sits very still. She bites the tip of her tongue between her teeth. Jackie has never been told off. She has never taken a real risk, with men or otherwise. Sure, she has worked hard, but only within a structure of benchmarks—get good grades, get into medical school, pass a certain test, feed the cows, irrigate—none of it an idea she had to create.
Susan’s fist hits the bottle of water and it skitters away. She sits up, and then she stands up.
“Hard? You want to talk about hard?” Susan’s words bounce off the posts. “Ask me one goddamn time how all of this is for me. Ask me one goddamn question, Jackie.”
“Susie, you matter more to me than anyone. If you don’t get better, my life doesn’t get better either.”
Tears slide off Susan’s cheeks. Her heart pounds. She can’t swallow. “You don’t really care about this place. You just need to be Dad’s favorite.”
“This land is all we have. I’ve given up everything to be here.”
“But I haven’t?”
“You didn’t have anything to give up. You came here to get away from your life.”
“How dare you. You have no idea about my life. You never ask.”
Jackie blinks. Her look of superiority falls to dirt. She leans her head back to look at the sky, her shoulders slumped. Susan presses a smile between her lips, considering the headline: Spineless Sister Takes a Stand.
“Where would you go?” Jackie asks. “If we sold the ranch, where would you want to go?”
It’s so obvious a thing to ask, but it takes Susan by surprise. She stares blankly at Jackie.
There is Pinedale, where Heidi Hooten is probably naked in Susan’s old bed. There is Grand Junction, where she had her first and only studio apartment. A place with a red kitchen, her dad’s old record player, a futon on the floor. It had been a half-mile from the newspaper, which was where she really lived. It had been perfect. But Grand Junction is full of ghosts, old newsroom pals who she’d be embarrassed to see. There are cities she’s wanted to visit, Oahu, Juneau, New York, but it’s impossible to imagine them as anything more than a two-page magazine spread.
A forced, harsh laugh leaves her chest. “That’s a good question.”
Jackie stands up and offers her bottle of water to Susan. It’s not a hug, it’s not a kindred-spirit, Anne Of Green Gables moment, but Susan does take the water, and Jackie does sit down beside her, their sleeves almost touching. The pounding of Susan’s heart slows. The sun falls out of the sky and rolls across her body. They stay like that for a long time, not talking and it reminds her just a little of the way she often came upon her Dad and Uncle Ellis. On the other side of the corral, the mothers and their calves stay close together now, light breaking around the pairs.
30
JACKIE IS ALREADY HALFWAY toward town, toward Tim and a beer, before she realizes that she still smells of soot and burnt hair. Her dad would say she smells like hard work; Susan would probably say she smells like trying too hard. She turns the radio up. She turns the radio off. Her heart is pounding. Susan would sell the ranch. What heresy.
When Jackie was thirteen years old, she found a faded picture in the attic, a woman with a tiny waist, smoking a cigarette, a big sombrero on her head. Fay Henry, her dad had explained, her great-grandmother, the first white child born on this land. A midwife, and good with numbers, and what Dad described as fun, not in the usual way. But why, Jackie had wanted to know, why did the imprint on the picture say California?
Fay left the ranch one fall, after, Dad made sure to point out, the cows had gone to market. She drove to California with her three young daughters, to visit her sister. He didn’t say why Fay went all that way without her husband. Jackie knew even as a teenager, especially as a teenager, that the ranch could not be left alone. After two months, Fay came back. With her were a lace cape and a Chinese marble figurine, not the sorts of things one needs to work with cows. Fay never left again, not even for Wyoming. Jackie, even then, had understood the moral of the story. She had understood the bottom line: Dunbars always choose the land.
That Susan doesn’t know this, or that she knows this and doesn’t care, makes her a stranger, someone with no shared DNA. Jackie rolls down the window and screams at the wind and empty road. By the time she rolls into the Skyline parking lot, she is hollowed out.
Of all the peo
ple who might possibly have something helpful to say in this moment, Shorty Lee isn’t one of them. But it is Shorty, wearing a pink leather jacket so new it squeaks when she walks, who makes a beeline across the cracked concrete to Jackie.
The first Christmas Jackie came home from college, Shorty, a middle-aged widow with a push-up bra and purple lipstick, had draped herself all over their dad as if she were tinsel. But by summer, Shorty was living with Mike Miller, the banker, the owner of a hot tub. Her dad hadn’t wanted to talk about it.
“I’ve been wanting to talk to you, honey,” says Shorty, standing far too close. Her chest is wrinkled, too tan.
Jackie stares at Shorty’s cleavage, breasts her dad must have touched, and freezes.
“We have a phone.” Jackie backs up until she is wedged against the side mirror of her truck.
Shorty pauses, smiles.
“I hear your sister is writing some big story.” Shorty fingers a diamond cuff on her left earlobe. “I hear she been talking to lots of guys.”
Jackie spots the new blue Cadillac with the SHORTE plates a few feet away. Natural gas royalties seem to have thrown up all over her dad’s ex-girlfriend.
“You know, your dad always had both feet on the ground.” Shorty touches her tongue to her purple-stained upper lip. “He was sensible, if nothing else. Commonsensical. You girls ought to keep that in mind.”
The air is corn syrup. Sweat drips down the backs of Jackie’s legs.
“We’re doing great.”
Shorty puts her pale, clean hand on Jackie’s arm. She leans in. She smells like bubblegum and Febreze, like something manufactured to pass as sweet. “Your dad ever tell you he was hoping to retire someday? Wanted to get an RV and drive to Florida. Can’t you just imagine him on a surfboard?”
Jackie can’t remember once seeing her dad in a swimsuit.
“Aren’t you hot with that jacket on?”
“You know, if you don’t sign, all that gas will just flow to your neighbors. You’ll just be lining their pockets with your money.”
The back of Jackie’s throat is dust.
“I’ve got to go, Shorty. I’m meeting someone.”
“Would that be Tim Layton by chance? Now that boy is someone with his head on straight.” Shorty reaches over and tucks Jackie’s hair behind her ear. “You sure look like your dad.” She pats her arm. “See you inside.”
Jackie blinks dumbly. She is fairly certain her dad wouldn’t follow that woman into a dark place on a sunny day, but then, what the hell does she know. Slowly, she walks into the bar; the air conditioning disconnects the room from all outside realities. A few old guys sit at the bar, watching baseball on television. The place has an appeal.
Tim is in the back, in a booth, staring at an empty pint glass. Repeatedly, he picks up a crumpled cocktail napkin and sets it down.
“You look about as crap as I feel.” She sets two beers on the table and sits down across from him. He looks up, surprised, and in a flash, his face is bright, smiling, his pathological good cheer returned.
“Hey you.” He reaches across the table and grabs her hand. “I’m glad you called.”
Across the room Shorty is tucked into some new man, giggling into the booth’s imitation leather. Shorty would’ve giggled like that with Dad. They might’ve gone and picked out bathing suits together. Jackie pulls her hand away and downs half her beer. At some point on the drive into town she had imagined telling Tim what Susan had said, but she glances at Shorty and realizes that’s a bad idea.
“Have I asked you any questions?” Jackie looks at Tim. “Do you feel like I ask how you are?”
“You want to know about my life?” Tim looks at her uncertainly. Then he does a startling thing and answers her. “Well, I didn’t go to church this morning because I don’t see the point, but I went to my folks’ for lunch, to be with the family. And anyways, I told my dad I couldn’t go hunting next weekend, that I had to work, and really, why go hunting anymore? There’s a grocery store across the street. But he got really upset. He thinks I don’t spend enough time with them. And then he told me that it’s my fault the mill went under.”
“That’s not fair.” She looks across at Tim, at the beer foam on his upper lip. “I’m so sorry. After lying to you for your entire childhood, you’d think he’d feel grateful that you still talk to him.”
“Well, I don’t know that he lied. He didn’t tell us something, that’s different.”
“Omission of truth is a lie.”
“You think so?” He shifts uncomfortably in his seat.
“You’re not like your dad.” She says.
“Thanks.” Tim chews on the side of his lip. He stares at his empty beer.
“Families are brutal,” Jackie says. “I’m sure my sister would tell you the same thing.”
“She loves you.”
“You barely know her. We just had a terrible fight.”
“My job depends on my ability to read people quickly and that gal of yours is fierce and loyal. Trust me. She’s in your corner.”
Jackie stares across the table at Tim for a long minute, startled. Susan had in fact acted with spirit. She had in fact been fierce. Jackie touches the thought gently as if with a stick, afraid and hopeful both.
“Did I say the wrong thing?” he asks, his eye twitching.
She shakes her head at him, smiling.
“I guess with families you have to grade on a curve.” She walks around the table, careful not to look over at Shorty and sits down beside Tim. He winds his fingers into hers and kisses her. A light buzz settles on her skin and it could be the beer but Jackie hopes it’s something else. She holds onto him, glad for him, trusting in it. Unlike whatever it is that Shorty is doing on the other side of the bar, this is something real.
Late that night, the two sisters sit at the kitchen table, eating quesadillas. The clock ticks. Chicken snores under the table. A fan pushes hot air around the room.
Susan sucks on a piece of ice, reading that same endless novel. Jackie considers what it would be like to be alone at the table, if there had never been a Susan.
When they were young, after their mom died, Susan used to soak Jackie’s feet in Epsom salts in an old turkey pan. She used to read Jackie stories about brave pioneers. When Jackie got her period, it was Susan, not Dad, who explained how to use a tampon. It was Susan who had made it OK for Jackie to leave. Where their dad was concerned, in life and in dying, it was Susan who had done most of the heavy lifting.
“How about I wash your hair in the sink?” Jackie says. “I’ll use the bottled water.”
Susan doesn’t bother looking up from her book. “There’s no one I’m looking to impress.” She glances down at her faded green swimsuit, at the rip in its side. “Clearly.”
“I’ll massage your head. You know I’m good at that.”
Susan raises an eyebrow. “You gotta stop trying to fix me.”
“I just want to do something nice. I thought it would be nice if we could be nice to each other.”
“Why?”
The kitchen light above the sink is behind Susan, and with her back lit like that, it’s hard to make out the expression on her sister’s face.
“I have no idea what Dad would want us to do about the ranch. I don’t know anything. Really. I’m sorry about earlier.”
She gets up and busies herself, scrapes the dishes into the garbage, fills a plastic tub with bottled water and dish soap. Fills another tub for rinsing. Susan comes and stands on the other side of the sink with a dry towel. They wash and pass and dry, a familiar rhythm and pace to a chore they have done together forever.
“Did Dad ever tell you he wanted to move to Florida?” Jackie asks.
“What, like to drink piña coladas on the beach?”
“Shorty seems to think Dad wanted to move.”
“Shorty’s got her angle.”
“Shorty’s a bitch.”
Susan laughs. “Dad did surprise me there. He must’ve been lone
ly.”
“It freaks me out. It makes me feel like I didn’t really know him at all.”
“You did. But who the hell knows what anyone else really thinks?”
“I’m not as controlling as you think I am.” Jackie’s voice was not meant to tremble. She scrubs the counter with a clean sponge.
“Oh, girl. You’re the strongest person I know.” Susan stands behind her sister and rests her head against Jackie’s back.
Jackie’s eyes soften. Feeling unspools inside her body. Her shoulders slump.
“How about I wash your hair?” Susan sets her hand on Jackie’s shoulder. Her hands are cool. “You don’t look so fancy yourself.”
“You’d want to do that for me? After everything?” Jackie turns around to look at Susan. The familiar shape of her body stands in relief against the fresh darkness pooling outside the window.
“I’ve been trying to tell you for months,” says Susan. “I’d do so much more.”
31
“HONEY, PASS JOYCE THE petition,” says Camila, speaking to Ray over her shoulder, a crowd growing around her. “It’s there on the chair.”
He does as he’s told. They’ve come to the Elks Lodge early so that Camila can collect signatures for her moratorium on gas drilling. He stands at her side while she does all the talking. Out the wide window, the sky is streaked orange and pink. A sunset that looks like a painting of a sunset.
When Ray had said he’d like to go with her to the community meeting, Camila had laughed and said, “Since when do you care?”
For nine days, Ray has worked hard to not think about Susan Dunbar. He’s scrubbed forty-seven pots at his brother-in-law’s restaurant. He’s made three spaghetti dinners and nine batches of scrambled eggs with cheese. Twice he’s called Sheriff to try and schedule a meeting about getting probation lifted. He hasn’t had one drink, except for a few beers. He’s tuned his guitar and tuned it again and tried to remember how to play the songs he used to know, the ones Camila liked and asked for. He’s taken the kids fishing up on the mesa and taken them to the park and taken them to see their grandparents. The tools in the garage are all put away. The oil is now clean in both of his vehicles, his brother-in-law’s Ford, and his mother-in-law’s Civic. He hopes that enough good deeds will make up for the bad.
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