by Alyson Hagy
Adams gave no answer. He spat into the stained basin of his kitchen sink instead.
“If I thought you still cared about working, I’d guess you were outside moving hay or rebuilding one of your monumental engines. Not able to hear the damn phone.”
“It’s five in the morning, Buren.”
“Yes, yes, a sunrise not to be missed. But I know you haven’t been sleeping. We share that curse, you’ll remember.”
“I’ve got a woman here.”
The voice wheezed with pleasure for several breaths before it regained its bullying poise. “No, you haven’t. I know every willing female from here to Hanna. Not one of them lacks that much self-respect, drunk or sober. Especially on a Tuesday. But the joke is a good one. I admire a good joke.”
Adams poured his coffee, sloshing it across the face of his wristwatch. The dogs, except Rain, were scrabbling hard at the door, wanting in out of the cold. They’d heard the less forbidding notes of his voice.
“I called about some books. You’ll come to town in a day or two?”
“Maybe.”
“I thought you might bring me a treat. Not that I don’t want to come out, but your road and my Buick….”
“Are pieces of shit. Tell me what you need. I’ll get them to you sometime.”
Buren was a lawyer who’d retired to the tiny town of Baggs after years of conniving with various governors in the state capitol of Cheyenne. His current passion was the renovation of a nineteenth-century house that had once been a brothel, once a home to circuit-riding Presbyterians and their dry biscuits. Buren claimed to despise the hardpan ranch he’d grown up on. He still complained to Adams about the blat of its sheep, its tinged and bitter water, the dust that shrouded its sills. But he seemed to thrive on the ranch’s reputation, especially those worn threads of reputation that so cocooned his younger brother. Buren was forever raiding the small, leather-bound library assembled by their parents—the ledgers, the receipts, the boxed diaries kept by the young women of the family before they married. He claimed to be writing a book, though he refused to tell Adams what the book was about. Adams suspected Buren was merely doing everything he could to keep his schoolmarmish mind in balance. Drink and redecoration wouldn’t be enough.
“I’d like the green volumes on the second shelf. To the left of the door, please. Both of them.”
He always did it that way, described the books by color and location as if Adams couldn’t read the titles stamped on the flaking spines as well as he could. Adams was about to hang up the phone, his tolerance for insult reached, when he remembered. “Hobbs is back. I haven’t seen him yet, but he’s here.”
There was a rare moment of silence before Buren launched his response. “Her grief moves hitherward like an angry sea.”
Adams resisted the obvious question. Sipped his coffee.
“Medea,” Buren purred. “One of the plays you brought to me last month. It’s a Greek tragedy in which C.D. Hobbs might gladly take a part if he were that sort of vengeful man, which I know you believe he is not. Still, I think of our sister Charlotte.” He paused as if he expected Adams to fill the chasms around that name. Adams didn’t oblige. “How long has it been since he tried to hold a job with you? Five years? And three years before that? He ended up strapped to a bughouse bed both times, but I’ll wager you’re going to try to take care of him again. His madness always manages to draw you in. Is it because he’s never given up on you?”
Adams closed his eyes as his ears filled with a battery roar he hadn’t allowed himself to hear in a long time. It was the sound of howitzers hurling thunder and smoke at the black rock of Korea. He felt the splintering of a thousand past concussions along the eroded surfaces of his knees. He smelled the smell of bad things burning. “I’ve never known C.D. to give up on much of anything. He was always the other way, the loyal kind, a hanger-on. He’s been like that since we were boys. It’s just like you to think loyalty is a waste of time.” Adams rushed through the verbal stab he’d aimed at his brother. He felt now what he hadn’t allowed himself to feel during the night, a sheath of responsibility so tight it made his words taste heated in his mouth. “I’ll give him work, Buren, if he’s able. And I’ll keep him clear of you and your pissant sensitivities.”
He dropped the receiver into its cradle. Then he wiped up the coffee he’d spilled with a rag made from the sleeve of one of his old flannel shirts. He listened for the dogs, but he could no longer hear them. They had happily abandoned him for the daylight that was levering itself over Bell Butte and the calicoed roofs of his ranch.
Later that morning Adams opened the porch door to see Hobbs waiting for him like a delivered parcel.
“H-hello, Fremont. D-didn’t want to disturb you, knocking on the door after dark like …”
“… like bad news.” Adams tried a smile.
“Sorry if it weren’t the proper thing. I knew where to bunk.”
“It’s all dandy and fine,” Adams said. “The dogs got you figured better than I do. They knew the score. Why don’t you come on in?”
“You don’t mind?” Always that question, brief and coiled. This time it was accompanied by a depleted squeeze of the blue eyes.
“Nobody’s crowded with company around here.” Adams gazed at the unpainted lathe that roofed his porch, its knots and gaps. Then he extended his right hand toward Hobbs, and they shook. Adams tried to ignore the flush of blood that surged across his face. He always felt more on edge when Hobbs was around, sharper about some things but also needled with worry. Even when things were going well, the two of them had a way of complicating each other. “I could use some help if you’re willing.”
“Th-thank you so v-very…. I prayed th-that….” Hobbs’s voice narrowed into a wordless creak. He drew his neck down into his collar in a kind of ranch hand’s bow, then composed himself enough to speak. “I prayed to work on the Trumpet Bell again. Your family has always b-b-been good to me.”
It was the first fresh lie to fall between them. Adams felt something like a screw turn deep in his belly, but he said nothing.
Adams made their first breakfast together, and Hobbs cleaned up, putting pots in cupboards where they didn’t belong just as he always had. Adams noticed that Hobbs had changed some since they’d last seen each other. He still had the tremor in his left hand. And his right ear was still no more than a remnant stalk of burned and twisted skin. Seeing the old burns made Adams want to scratch at the side of his own head. He’d never gotten used to Hobbs’s wounds. Now, however, there were new pads of flesh above and below Hobbs’s belt buckle. Age had drawn whatever was still malleable in him toward the place below his ribs and heart. His face remained familiar—Adams would have known him anywhere—yet it wasn’t the same. It was younger and fresher around the blue filament eyes, if that was possible in a man who’d worked on ranches and oil rigs every moment he’d had his health.
After breakfast, they convened in the parlor where they considered the vagaries of the weather.
“Do you b-believe it’ll snow?” Hobbs asked. “Looks like you could use more snow.”
Adams said he thought it would snow before the end of the week.
“Still lose your electric out here during a g-good storm?” Hobbs’s selected memories of the Trumpet Bell were so pleasant, so eager, they caused his face to shine with sweat.
Adams said, “I keep plenty of candles.” He could feel how right it was that they both knew the choruses of ranch life. Each note. Every refrain. The two of them were safe, even after fifty years, in the haltered pleasures of those habits.
As safe, Adams thought, as they could ever be.
Adams folded his body into the false leather recliner that was angled to catch heat from the stove. Hobbs perched himself on the straight-backed desk chair that had been made by Blue Pete Tosh after he went completely blind. Neither of them used the cabbage-rose settee that faced the windows to the west. They could have viewed two thousand of the Trumpet Bell’s thirty-six t
housand acres from the settee, but it was left empty, cleared of books and the thin pages of the Rawlins Daily Times. The settee was reserved for company, should they ever have any.
“I c-c-can’t quite believe in it all,” Hobbs said. “Things look the same, but they ain’t. This house smells the s-same, but it can’t be.” Adams watched Hobbs stroke the surface of the walnut writing desk with the oily edge of his palm. It was a solemn, distracted thing Adams’s mother had done while she labored to balance the ranch accounts at that very same desk.
“I don’t know,” Adams said. “I been here so long it all seems logjammed to me. I might have to use my imagination to keep us busy.”
Hobbs continued to buff the desktop. Adams wondered if Hobbs was aware of what he was doing. Maybe he’d just absorbed the gesture like he’d absorbed so many of the other behaviors—good and bad—he’d witnessed on the Trumpet Bell.
“Do what you must, Fremont. Make your decisions count.” The declaration was a surprise. And it came toward Adams in a voice that wasn’t Hobbs’s. There was no hesitation, no stutter. Adams heard his mother’s particular and gentle lilt in Hobbs’s words, the tune of a voice that had been silent for more than thirty years. He checked to make sure his mouth wasn’t hanging open. He shut, then reopened his eyes. It was too early in Hobbs’s visit to get spooked; he told himself that. Hobbs had always been a kind of mockingbird. It was only natural—wasn’t it?—that he could recall every pose and posture of the Adams clan, heartening or not.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, out of reflex. “You know I will.”
The next morning, after the horses had been turned out and breakfast had been scraped off the gold-trimmed plates from the 1964 World’s Fair, Hobbs asked for the keys to the truck.
“What for?” Adams assumed Hobbs had groceries in mind. They’d spent the day before wandering the fence lines and creek beds of the Trumpet Bell’s deeded land. But neither of them had given much thought to supplies.
“Wednesday.” Hobbs’s eyes twitched into a steady series of blinks. “I believe it’s W-wednesday. I still get lost on that sometimes. Don’t you ride Mesa ditch on a Wednesday?”
Adams hadn’t told Hobbs that he was no longer a manager for the water conservation district. He’d been able to deflect Hobbs’s early questions about sheep by implying his spring ewes were scheduled to ship in. But Adams hadn’t owned sheep in four years. These days the only way he could enjoy their good, lanolin stink was after a hard rain. And this past summer, after more than twenty years of service, the water board had given him the boot. They wanted somebody with more irrigated land to his name, more spark. Adams had left the position without a word, although Buren had been wry, even caustic, on his behalf. Buren had planted a large sign in his front yard in Baggs that read Et tu, Compton, a reference to the backstabbing board president.
But Adams still had all his gate keys, for god’s sake, the whole heavy ring of them. What difference would an explanation of his forced retirement make? Hobbs hadn’t asked for a pissed-off update of Adams’s life. He hadn’t asked about losses or failures. He’d just asked to ride a damn ditch.
“All right. Let’s do it,” Adams said. “I’ll show you how bad the spread of leafy spurge has got.”
They drove in by way of Cheet Tuttle’s leased pastureland. The sky over the snow-crowned Sierra Madres was blockaded by a fleet of smooth-sailing clouds. The morning sunlight surged ahead of the clouds like a rising silver tide. At the pasture gate, tire tracks from the new district manager’s truck had congealed into ochre braids of soil. Adams resisted the urge to erase every trace of his replacement with his spinning tires. Hobbs looked at the tracks as though he ought to recognize them, then he stepped out of the truck to untangle the gate’s iron hook and chain.
The conservation district had thoroughly renovated First Mesa since Hobbs’s last stay in the valley. As they drove along the clean, graded berm that sheltered the main irrigation ditch, Hobbs couldn’t contain his enthusiasm. Several times he signaled Adams to stop. He got out of the truck and ambled the sloped clay banks while a steady, icy wind teased at his coat collar. He pinched various grades of gravel between his fingers. He pushed his salted black cap above his hairline in admiration of the unchoked plumes and weirs. Dozens of fallen cotton-woods had been dragged clear and cut up for firewood. Several tons of riprap had been dumped into the curves of the ditch to reduce summer erosion when the water was high. They had never had the money to upgrade this ditch, the two of them. They’d had only their manpower, a tandem gift as scavengers, to keep the water flowing as well as they could.
“You done good out here,” Hobbs said.
Adams responded with a plastic smile.
He remembered Hobbs using a tricycle-wheeled tractor to shove the rusted body of a 1927 Reo truck into a steep corner of that very ditch. In the old days they’d used junk—anything they could find—to stabilize those cutbanks. But these were better times. They drove on across young Gil Gunderson’s parcel and the land Annie Els had just sold to a realtor out of Denver. Adams, massaging the clutch of his Ford pickup, watched Hobbs leap onto the wing of a slide gate near Dutch Joe Draw, the sky bird empty above him. He thought about how Hobbs had jury-rigged that very gate through thankless years of drought and low pay. God damn, they’d made a whole lot of something out of nothing in those days. They could have been real engineers. They could have gone to college, flung up dams in Arizona or Egypt or anywhere they pleased. If things had been just a little different, he and C.D. Hobbs might not have spent a thousand dusk hours cleaning thistle and beaver bone from sorry ditches carrying water to sorrier fields.
Adams finessed the truck to a halt. He was opposite the cone-roofed gauge house he and a neighbor’s son had built two years before. He could see new bullet holes in the siding, up to a dozen of them. The culprits were usually local joy riders or drunk, out-of-state elk hunters who got lost looking for access to Battle Mountain. But sometimes the target practice was more thematic. Charles McNamee, or somebody who worked for him, had blasted the lock off the gauge house twice because they’d been sure the Bar Diamond D outfit upstream was stealing their precious acre-feet of water. Adams had smoothed those ruffled rancher feathers many times during his twenty years of irrigation work, but the quarrels remained. Somebody had pumped lead into his gauge house.
He took his keys from the truck’s ignition, feeling righteous and peeved and blood hot before he realized the gauge house was no longer his responsibility. He paused a second before he let the feelings run on just the same. It had been a long while since he’d owned a good aggravation. If Hobbs was going to have a high time surveying the old territory, then so was he. He looked for C.D. and saw him sidling off the small Dutch Joe dam. Hobbs loved tasks. He always had. He could find joy in a bent nail as long as it was within reach of a hammer. Adams waved him back.
“Why don’t you check the diversion? See it’s clear.”
Hobbs nodded.
Then Adams opened the padlock and the gauge-house door and saw that the meters and power line to the solar cell were intact. He flicked the test switch to make sure. Up close the bullet holes didn’t appear so fresh. There were collars of rust where the paint had been blasted away. The holes had been made after the first of September; he was god damn sure of that. He wouldn’t have missed them when he was still on the job.
He had been good at irrigating. Good at more than a few things, once. He wished he didn’t have to remind himself of that.
He banged the gauge-house door shut and hip-chucked it until the warped latch fit over the U-bolt. The hinges needed to be replaced—that was a problem for the new manager. He looked for Hobbs again, found him on the narrow catwalk of the dam. Hold on, Hobbs signaled. Almost done. He had spread his spindly jean-clad legs and was gripping the red-painted hand wheel that regulated the flow of water during irrigation season. His elbows were at the level of his mismatched ears.
There was nothing below the guillotine gate but ice
and defeated leaves, the ditches were empty, but Hobbs always had to handle a thing to see how it worked, if it was working. He was torquing the wheel to make sure the gears were properly greased for cold weather. Yet the motions he made pincered Adams in a vivid, unsought memory: C.D. Hobbs at fifteen or sixteen, child of a mother with no gumption, a father never mentioned, forging the raging snowmelt of Savery Creek on his own. He held a panicked, bawling lamb in his arms; his elbows were exactly that high. The fast water festooned his shoulders like lace.
Adams squeezed his eyes shut. Was it a lamb Hobbs had carried to safety through the flood that day or a piece of camping equipment they’d forgotten during a foolish fishing trip to the other side? Suddenly, he couldn’t be sure. So much time had passed, so many unpleasant memories had been culled and starved. He turned his face away from the beckoning sun, hoping to corral the restlessness that was too often in his head these days. He thought back. He tried to put the pieces together in a way that would satisfy him. Tried to remember. But he couldn’t recall the exact circumstances of that long-ago adventure on Savery Creek. He cursed himself as he gimped back to the Ford, his feet paining him as they always did in winter. What good was a good memory you couldn’t trust? And what did it mean—for himself, for his companion—if he could no longer reconstruct C.D. Hobbs’s one sure moment among the brave?
Hobbs thought the first thing they should do was overhaul the smaller of the ranch’s two tractors. Adams had postponed the task because he couldn’t lift the engine block alone and, as Buren so often reminded him, he could no longer afford to hire help. But Hobbs’s presence had become a kind of sputtering inspiration.
It took most of an afternoon to clear a proper space in the machine shed. Then they had to erect the tripod and re-rig the rusty block and tackle. The winter sky lapped at the stone-dark edges of a few clouds, but the temperature was mild enough to work bare-handed, and the steady sunlight lured a small band of sparrows into the ranch yard to peck for seeds. When Adams barked the knuckles of both hands trying to seat the tractor engine in the cradle, his loud string of curses led Hobbs to ease into a rare curse of his own. “Shit,” he said, sounding remarkably like his watery-eyed friend. “Damn it to h-hell, and shit.”