by Alyson Hagy
“You got that right,” Adams said, licking at his own blood. “Amen.”
When Hobbs sluiced himself with oil as he was trying to drain the engine, Adams led both of them into hoarse laughter. A fresh sense of accomplishment began to simmer between them. They were stockmen who still knew how to stay one step ahead of the game. Adams watched Hobbs amble toward the barn to retrieve a tool, and he couldn’t help but notice how efficiently the other man carried himself. His shoulders were slouched, but his arms were corded and strong. He walked like a man who knew how to pace himself for a long haul down an unkept road. It was the way Old Etchepare had walked.
Adams’s enthusiasm didn’t wane even as the sunlight did. “A good day like this,” he said, “just about deserves a party.”
Hobbs glanced up from the dusty tangle of the tractor’s ignition wires. His forehead looked as if it had been tattooed with grease.
“What do you say to a tall drink by the hot stove?” Adams continued. “Along with a few good-tasting cigarettes.”
Hobbs hesitated. “D-don’t know, Fremont. I been away from the drinking. D-doctors prefer me that way.”
Adams wanted to kick himself. Hobbs hadn’t said a single word about hospitals or medication since he’d returned, and Adams had been afraid to ask. But here he was—stepping right into the shit hole.
“How about you watch me empty a glass or two then?” He tried to make his request sound like a joke. “No pressure. We’ll just talk or not talk. Maybe daydream our way into some plans for this place.”
“P-plans. I like plans,” Hobbs said, prying his thin lips into a smile. “I been thinking about some of those on my own.”
“Okay. All right. We’ll have a little celebration after dinner.” Adams found that it was suddenly difficult for him to focus on the syllables of Hobbs’s words. His ears were thick with the current of a new momentum. He and Hobbs were onto something. He and the old boy were actually on a roll. He could feel the good speed of it in his veins.
Hobbs returned from gathering and feeding the horses at exactly 7 p.m. He removed his brown hunting cap and hung it with his quilted vest in the mudroom. Adams thought his friend was on the verge of some breed of laughter as he shooed the dogs back into the night, but Hobbs didn’t make any human noise. The dogs all followed him now, their marbled eyes wide with expectation. Both men avoided words until Hobbs began to scrub his hands at the sink as if for a meal. “I think,” he said, “I think my hands are very clean.” He spoke at a low volume, as if his throat had become raw and sore.
Adams had already inaugurated the scotch, just a small glass, so he offered Hobbs a mug of reheated coffee along with a paper napkin and a spoon. He took the lidded sugar bowl from its place on top of the refrigerator and watched as Hobbs stirred a single spoonful of sugar into his mug. Then he went back to the stove where he was trying to heat oil in a blackened pot for popcorn. He heard Hobbs reach for the glass jar of corn, purchased from the Stage Stop in Baggs. When he checked over his shoulder, Hobbs was peering at the jar’s labels as if he was trying to make the tiny-lettered sentences agree with him.
They’d had poached eggs for breakfast. The kitchen still smelled of bacon and Tabasco. “This,” Adams said, as the oil in the pot smoked and spat, “you’d think was easier than the poaching of hen’s eggs, but it’s not.”
“You done a good job with the eggs,” Hobbs said, still throaty. “I-I can’t keep the yellow part separate, have to pour on the ketchup to cover my mistake.”
“It’s nothing but luck and patience.”
“Your mother said it took the right tool. She had a spatula with a wood handle on it. M-maybe we should get one like that.”
Adams laughed, adding an even layer of corn to the black bottom of the pot. “Basilio did that up at summer camp. You remember how he cooked everything with that one knife and the spatula he never washed? Wore them stuck through his belt loops when he needed his hands free.”
“Made the biscuits dirt-colored,” Hobbs said. “They still tasted g-good as long as he had salt. To me, anyway.”
Adams laughed again at Hobbs’s idea of tasty food. Preferences were all right with him. How else did you tell one man from another? Some nights, such as this one, should be different from all the rest, just as men should be different from one another. That was his preference for the moment. He swirled the pot over the steady blue flame of the gas burner, barely touching the pot handles with his fingertips to keep from getting burned. He jumped when the first corn kernels exploded, his heels slipping upward in his boots. He was never quite ready for that sound.
Hobbs was standing at the center of the parlor’s oval braided rug when Adams entered with a bowl of popcorn in one hand, the now buttery swirl of scotch in the other. Hobbs was standing, not sitting, and he hadn’t lit his cigarette. He wasn’t pacing, but he looked spring-wound to do something of the sort. His collarbones bowed forward under the light and dark fabrics of his layered shirts. His left hand swung outward from his hip and vibrated with its untransmittable palsy. The shaking was as bad as Adams had ever seen it. Hobbs faced the framed, un-glassed picture that hung above the cabbage-rose settee, a pasteboard reproduction of Thomas Moran’s painting of the Tetons. Adams’s father had cherished that picture as a panorama of grandeur where he had none.
Adams saw how he’d drawn his own clear line across the room. His recliner, the woodstove, and the television were in a tight triangle of space near the door. The rest of it—the towers of books and ledgers, his mother’s proud and settled furniture, the filing cabinet stuffed with lease records and receipts, the unused computer, the undusted lamps, the spiraling rug—floated free of his private island. He wondered how Hobbs could look so lost in a room that crowded and small.
“Let’s eat while it’s hot,” he said. “I’ve done a sloppy job with the buttering as it is.”
Hobbs shifted his weight from one leg to the other, jittery, but he went to his straight-backed chair and sat. He looked across the room in a way that exposed the pale skin of his throat. The slick, ropey scars below his ear were not visible. He didn’t speak. Adams thought of how he’d imagined these moments: friendly talk, an hour or two of fellowship followed by sleep and long, questing dreams ushered in by the scotch. He’d had his hopes. But something had tied a sudden, unslippable knot inside Hobbs. He’d seen it before. Oh, he had. Such knots could be untied, if the people around Hobbs were careful. He believed he was willing to be careful.
“Here’s to good times,” he said, offering a spontaneous toast with his glass. He realized too late that he’d forgotten to make sure Hobbs’s coffee mug was near at hand—he couldn’t see it on the desk—and he’d spoken, even raised his own glass, while displaying the bowl of popcorn as if he were a restaurant waiter burdened by haste and false cheer. He stepped forward and put the heavy, steaming bowl on top of the blind box of the television. He tried again. “Good days ahead.” But Hobbs didn’t respond except to lower his shaved chin until his eyes no longer reflected the distant kitchen light. Adams wondered if those eyes were splintering with panic. There was that feeling in the air. Maybe he should have allowed the dogs to come inside. Or asked Hobbs to refill the stove with wood, gotten him to participate in that way. Maybe if he’d done one thing different.
“Well, if you aren’t hungry after that poor show of a stew I put on for dinner, I don’t need the extra calories any more than you do. Probably needs more salt on it, anyway, like those biscuits.” He waved at the popcorn. Slurped at his drink a little, trying to convey a casual sloppiness he didn’t feel. Hobbs didn’t move. Adams stood silent for some time, waiting, and then he began to talk as if to himself. It was the kind of stubborn rehearsal often witnessed by the high-ceilinged parlor when he was the only one in it.
“It might help us both, C.D., if you gave me a reason for quitting on me here. I thought we were on some sort of track until a minute ago. We had a good day today. I had a fine feeling. I’d rather not waste this kind of ti
me down the road.”
He was suddenly angry, and he wanted to cow Hobbs with the noise of that anger. He knew if he kept himself mad he’d be able to weld a heavy hatch over his growing fear.
“What’s the deal with you, really? Why can’t you come inside and eat a snack with me like a normal man? We have one high minute going on about eggs, then you balk. And why don’t you sleep in this house at night? It’s not like I said you couldn’t. You don’t have to stay out there like one of the damn dogs.” He watched Hobbs’s chest and shoulders absorb the punching flurry of his questions. He was shocked, dizzied even, by how quickly he’d unleashed his forbidden feelings. His jaw muscles had become knots. His hands were like mallets. He’d meant to keep the past behind them. He’d meant to be patient and cautious, not blame Hobbs for anything. But a powerful, rekindled fury was hurling him backwards, back toward the man he’d sworn he’d never be again.
Hobbs tried an explanation. “The d-dogs … I like the d-dogs. And … and she said to do it this way. Sh-she said.”
She? That response, with its brackets of pleading, inflamed Adams even more. She? How dare he. How dare C.D. Hobbs skulk his way back onto this ranch, back into Adams’s own life, and mewl out a mention of Charlotte, his estranged sister. They were not going to discuss Charlotte. No one was going to drag her back into this house like the dead carcass she was.
“Don’t bring up my sister. I got nothing to say about her. This is about you and me. What I see is you coming back—again—but being afraid to make something of the situation. I try to make things different for us, and you won’t let me. So why don’t you tell me why the hell you’re here? I want to know what I’m supposed to do.”
Hobbs gave a flat-browed look as though Adams had just answered his own questions. He said, “It’s not gonna be like it has been,” then he began to polish the top of the walnut desk with his hand, rubbing circles inside of circles. Adams turned toward the two eight-paned windows with their vista of Powder Rim. There was no night sky to be seen, no flaw in the tight-woven skirts of the dark. Wind sifted past the high corners of his house, hissing like sand.
“Do you hear loud talking in your head again, C.D? Is it like … the hospital times?” Forming those words broke something flintlike loose from behind his tongue, an erosion below the sure sounds of his words.
“No. Uh-uh.” Hobbs’s voice was soft, but clear. “I don’t hear what’s visiting me. I-I just feel it sometimes. It’s mostly all feeling, Fremont, if you want the truth. But I know what you’re saying. You say it every time we g-get together, it’s your job. Recognize recognize recognize recognize. That’s your part. I have to … I do the managing. I-I’m not afraid of nothing, though. I’d rather you didn’t say I was the one afraid.”
Adams flinched, then drove a shaky hand through his unwashed hair. He tasted a bitterness in his mouth unstaunched by the scotch. “What else I got to go on?”
“I’m just … here. That’s all it is right n-now.”
Hobbs stood up then, bojangled and released. He eased around Adams who lifted his smeared glass to his lips as the man passed by. What could he do but toast old mistakes and their results? He’d gotten exactly what he deserved. He’d toppled all the skeletons right out of the closet. Korea. Charlotte. Hospitals. The failed and useless ranch. And he’d strangled his own best intentions as if they were infant children.
He listened to the scrapes and motions of Rain and the other dogs as Hobbs met them at the porch door, the hasty greetings there. Why hadn’t he been able to say what he’d planned to say ever since they’d both gone up to their elbows in the slick guts of the tractor? We used to be good together. We can still be good. Instead, he’d ruined his chance. His dreams wouldn’t be slow and riverlike tonight, not now. They would be hard and frescoed inside his skull. He tasted the thick slab of intruding cold as the door closed behind Hobbs and the dogs. He listened as his house fell silent except for the collapse of the stove’s fading fire.
The next morning Hobbs was gone with both horses. Adams wasn’t surprised. He had expected a reaction to his stupid tantrum. But he kept himself from visiting Hobbs’s room to see if the bedroll and change of clothes had also disappeared because he knew he wasn’t ready for that disappointment. The horses were unshod and cold-backed from neglect, yet he trusted Hobbs. Hobbs wouldn’t abuse an animal no matter how bad things got.
He stayed busy patching a leak in a wagon tire because it afforded him a choreography that kept him outdoors. The dawn had been swept clean by a quick, nagging breeze. He fixed an eye on the scrubbed hearth of the horizon as the light warmed itself from pebble gray to the color of a grouse’s egg, and he thought about what he’d do if he were C.D. Hobbs, wanted and unwanted, trying to live with another old man who didn’t know his future.
If he were choosing an escape route, he’d pack up food and water and ride a horse west into Windmill Draw. He’d follow Willow Creek into the vast nothing of Sand Creek, then turn south onto the old, unfenced grazing route used by every sheep man in the region during the years before the Taylor Grazing Act. At some point he’d pause and recall bouncing on the buckboard of Old Etchepare’s bright green sheep wagon as they drove a thousand dirty Rambouillet asses down the split, waterless braid of Sand Creek. He’d listen for the militant bark of dogs and remember how incessantly the flimsy lambs had butted at their mothers’ shorn flanks for milk. He’d try to spot the driftwood-colored vault of his house from the height of Antler Knob. Then he’d ride over the rusty spur of Skull Creek Rim toward the empty clarity of the mountains where he’d raise a canvas tent and heat it with a tin-sided stove. He would remember the country and all the uses it once had for him. What he’d do after that he didn’t know. It didn’t seem important to finish the journey, just to start it.
He polished this imaginary ride away from his guilt for many hours.
Hobbs was back by late afternoon. He was astride the age-bleached roan. The sorrel trailed behind wearing a cinched but empty packsaddle. Hobbs had never been a natural on horseback, not like Adams or his sister Charlotte. His posture was all elbows and knees. But both horses were sound, and their liquid eyes held the disinterest of the adequately fed and watered. Adams took the reins to the roan as Hobbs clambered off.
“Here we are. Blowed right back to where we started.” Hobbs grinned around his overlapped front teeth. “I should have known that’s how it would end, but you can’t tell exactly what any day might bring to you because if you could you’d be G-god or dead.”
“They give you any trouble?” Adams asked. He realized that despite the white burn of relief he felt at seeing Hobbs, he wasn’t ready to face him. Not yet. “This one has a hard mouth and a harder head. I haven’t ridden them like they need.”
“They did good, considering. They was working real smooth by the time we got to Barrel Springs, even when a big pump truck come blasting by. I wondered if I knew the driver, but he got past me too quick.”
Adams was certain Hobbs didn’t know the truck driver. Hobbs hadn’t worked the Barrel Springs oil field for twenty years.
“This gelding tongues the bit more than he should. I’d say he needs his teeth filed. I seen that done once. Animal doctor from Laramie that Charlotte called. She was good with animals. Real careful about things like that.” He gave the roan a rub across the muzzle with the back of his hand. “I was thinking to take them over to Robber’s Gulch for the exercise, see the buffalo jump that’s out that way. I hadn’t been there for a long time.”
Adams filtered some air through his nose. Stalled. He hadn’t seen Hobbs parade after an impulse since the days of Charlotte and only then because he was properly coaxed. Now he’d said her name and talked about her like he expected to see her at Sunday dinner. Why was C.D. putting Charlotte back into the picture? And how had he gotten all the way to Robber’s Gulch? The Gulch was a pure seventeen miles southwest of the Trumpet Bell as the falcon flew. Hobbs would have needed to leave the ranch right after their standoff ov
er the popcorn to get there and back.
“We didn’t make it, though.” Hobbs no longer grinned or showed any lip at all as he talked to the broad side of the sorrel. The packsaddle, which he was beginning to unlash, had been nicely wiped and oiled. “We stopped short. I put up at the old cattle shed by the crossroads when the wind got to deviling the dust. Tried again at dawn, but finally had to reverse the wagon train.”
He might have been counting in Greek as much sense as the inflections of his voice made, though his hands worked carefully, step by step, easy on the mare. He seemed to be on some kind of teeter-totter. Clear, then unclear. Focused, then faltering. Adams loosened the cinch on the roan gelding and thought about Robber’s Gulch. There were some old hunting blinds out that way, the work of Ute Indians or sheep men, nobody much cared to distinguish. Uncle Gene had shown them quite a few Indian pictures in that area, some of them painted in colors, some of them chipped right into the overhanging bellies of sandstone with sharp-pointed rocks. In one place a wiseass herdsman had added big-tit chiquitas to some of the scenes, but many of the pictures were untouched. Like they spooked even the wiseasses. Old Etchepare, who had handled sheep plenty in that part of the basin, swore those ancient pictures were older than Jesus himself, older than everything useful in the world except the Basques. They were not to be trusted.
Adams had never heard of a buffalo jump anywhere near the Gulch.
He led the gelding to his stall in the barn, the saddle loose but still on his back. Hobbs followed with the sorrel mare. Both horses had steam rising from their flanks. They smelled of sweat and mud. It was part crazy to ride out into the basin during the winter, but only part. A local jawboner hearing about Hobbs’s trek would top the story with one of his own. That’s the way it was out here: extremity as entertainment.