by Alyson Hagy
“It’s not gonna be like it has been.” Hobbs spoke from the realm of the sorrel mare’s stall.
“What? What was that?” Adams’s ears felt like they were wadded with cotton.
“N-not to be like it was.”
“Okay, C.D. I think I got that.” But he didn’t. He realized he wasn’t getting anything. He swiped at the roan’s muscled shoulder with a soft brush, trying to organize the wariness that rippled through his legs and arms. C.D. was throwing down a fresh hand of cards. In fact, he seemed to be leading them into a whole new game, one where he was in charge of the rules. Hobbs in charge? Adams swallowed past his queasiness. He’d seen C.D. plunge into lopsided mental obsessions before. They always ended badly, especially for C.D. The man was never the last one standing.
Over the next week, Hobbs refitted the rear of the machine shed. He hung covered lights and tiered the orphaned tools and wired up a set of 120-volt outlets. He even got the old kerosene space heater working, though it looked to Adams like he neglected to take the heater into his room at night where it was needed. By the time he was finished, Hobbs had designed a workshop that was better than the one they’d had during their best days on the ranch.
“If you’re trying to make me look bad,” Adams joked, “it’s working too damn well.”
Hobbs asked if he needed permission.
“Permission for what?” Adams said. “You’ve never done a thing wrong when you’ve been fixing an item. Repairing. I doubt you’re about to start.”
Adams made himself assume that Hobbs wanted to fill his chilly February days by tinkering with the Trumpet Bell’s idle machinery. But there was something about the new space—its surgical cleanliness, its stark organization—that unsettled him.
That Friday, he was in the barn trimming the horse’s hooves when he heard the tenor whine of the grinder sing out from the cavern of the machine shed. He thought Hobbs might be shaping a new linchpin for the swather, a chore they’d discussed. After he stowed his tools and tossed the hoof scraps to the dogs, he yanked a gap in the shed’s roll doors and paused to let his eyes adjust to the boxcar light. Beyond the guardian hulk of the tractors, he could see Hobbs in goggles, the smudge of his high-and-tight haircut dark on his skull. Hobbs making sparks.
Adams edged along a section of aluminum wall hung with busted shearing blades and a prideless collection of coyote pelts. He moved carefully until he came up on Hobbs’s shoulder in a way only Rain, who was splayed on a folded tarp, noticed. He saw that Hobbs wasn’t grinding a pin. Something else was gaining shape under his gloved hands. The air smelled of heat and ore and the stale breath of a slept-in room. Ghostly rings of smoke circled the burning lights. Adams wondered if Hobbs had been talking to himself. Not that it mattered. A man had a right to the music in his own head.
He stepped back from the bright arc of Hobbs’s concentration and cleared his throat. He wasn’t an intruder. He would make his presence known. Then he saw that Hobbs had set up a pair of vise grips near the end of the workbench. The grips were screwed tight into the plywood surface of the bench. Something large and intricate was clamped between them.
It looked like an open-ended badger trap, or a queer, slotted basket. Adams wasn’t sure what it was. It might be the product of some therapeutic foolishness, though he had never known Hobbs to fool at a task when he wasn’t in a hospital. The contraption shimmered like it was supposed to be pretty, which it wasn’t. He sidled closer, lassoed by the flare and smoke of Hobbs’s devotion to the grinder’s wheel. The seams of Hobbs’s creation were smooth. They’d been expertly soldered. The interior surfaces were a starburst of aluminum scrap and chrome and broken glass. For a noisy moment Adams was reminded of Charlotte, how she had once wanted Hobbs settled on the ranch in just this way, indulgently, pacifically, believing that time and freedom and the tilted axis she called love could heal him. She’d been wrong. There’d been no healing. Yet Hobbs was here—when she wasn’t—and he had his freedom.
At that moment Hobbs killed the grinder. Adams froze, caught in the spotlight of his intrusion. But Hobbs didn’t seem at all surprised to see him. He pulled his goggles and gave Adams a blue-eyed look of such predictable sanity that it was as if the two of them had traded places. His coveralls glittered with the sheen of hot metal filings. He said “Hello, Fremont,” actually said the name, before he went to the far end of the workbench and nipped something between the greasy fingers of his doeskin gloves. He gave the thing to Adams. “Not done,” he said, and then he waited.
Adams’s first thought was of Christmas ornaments, for the object in his hand was silvery and frail with just that kind of cheap holiday profile. Then it came to him and his squinting eyes all at once—the trim field jacket, the careless angle of the shoulder-slung carbine, the purposeful O of the mouth. It was Sergeant Jonas Devlin, Easy Company, 7th Marines. Etched, incised, in posture. Adams swallowed an immediate liquid burning in his throat.
He gave Hobbs a pained, abandoned smile, a reaction that was honest if it was not much else. He returned the figure, hoping to get rid of it before his hand got shaky. Sergeant Devlin in effigy was defensible after all these years, maybe even desirable. The sergeant had led their platoon of gunners in Korea. He had made decisions that changed their lives. But Adams had only to survey the structure between the vise grips—it looked more cage-like to him now—to know that Hobbs wasn’t finished with his homemade rogue’s gallery, not by a long shot.
He wasn’t. Over the next few days he fashioned a navy doctor from the hospital in Hungnam and a stunned portrait of Pfc Ry Pilcher, which he crumpled underfoot. There was also a prone figure of Adams himself, belly down with his machine gun. There was an arm-waving wildcatter who Hobbs had drilled oil with in the 1960s. There were several sheep. Adams didn’t ask Hobbs why he was doing what he was doing—he didn’t dare—and he didn’t fail to drop by the shed every evening after the horses were settled. Not even when Hobbs showed him, with a skittish fear of failure in his wrists, a freshly snipped tin blank he somehow knew would come to represent his lost sister Charlotte.
“I should have known,” said Buren.
“It’s not like he’s calling me out, or showing how he might go down the tubes again. He’s just making these … things.” Adams felt compelled to contradict his brother, although he’d been the one to phone and lay out the situation, if that’s what it was.
“Life to me were misery …”
“You do me no damn good with your quotes, thank you. Not that you can do me much good anyhow. I just thought you ought to know. I’m thinking of calling Charlotte.”
He heard something that sounded like the stomp of a shoe against Buren’s refinished oak floor. “That, dear brother, would be a mistake. C.D. should remember her as he remembers her, which, from what you tell me, is a memory quite striking in its passion. Perhaps he’ll be content to create her likeness over and over again, in the tradition of the spurned and betrayed. We don’t need to bring Charlotte into this.”
“He’s the one brought her in. It’s like he’s leading up to saying—or doing—something that involves us all.”
“He hasn’t made a little statue of me, has he?”
Adams gave a sour chuckle. “No. Not yet. But you’re not free on this one, Buren. Don’t pretend. You done things, too.” He couldn’t believe how unshuttered the whole Hobbs thing made him feel. He’d never thought of himself as a man who judged other men’s deeds or cast any lines of blame.
“Yes, I have.” Adams listened for the catch of regret in his brother’s voice. He didn’t hear it. “I’m right on this, nevertheless. You don’t need to get in touch with Charlotte.”
“What if she shows up?”
“How? Why? Do you think C.D. can just conjure her with a bit of craft-fair handiwork? Nothing he does will make any difference. Charlotte is finished with the men of the Trumpet Bell. And the Trumpet Bell is finished with her. Her name is off the deed, which is what you said you wanted. She can’t get back at
you. But if you try to do something foolish that’s meant to absolve some of us—yourself, for instance—that’s a different story.”
“I’m not absolving myself of anything. I feel a kind of hell burn every day I see that man. I’m a big part of what ruined him. But I want to know how to handle this. Am I just supposed to wait for another one of his medical episodes?”
“No.” Buren’s voice was soothing, certain. “You should wait for an end. C.D. Hobbs has returned to our ranch to die, I’m sure of it. There are many good reasons for him to do so, not the least of which is he has no other home. You say he looks as healthy as a grain-fed steer. Maybe so. But he’s already died twice over, as you no doubt vividly recall. He’s a man of peculiar symmetries.”
“And I’m to stand by and let it happen.”
“You don’t whip the smolder into flames. That’s my advice. Let the poor, sick bastard direct his own encore.”
Adams suffered a pang, a hot slicing across his body. He wished Buren’s words didn’t sound so on the money. “I’d like to….”
“No, you wouldn’t. You don’t have what it takes to help him. He doesn’t need help—not from you, or any of us. Don’t lie to yourself about that. But if it makes you feel better,” his brother continued, “I’ll pray to the best of my Episcopalian ability that your dear friend doesn’t take you with him when he goes.”
The next afternoon, during the kind of warm, still hour that bribed stockmen to hope for spring, Hobbs drove the Ford truck to the head of Ram Horn Creek. It was a change of routine, but Adams decided it didn’t mean much. He didn’t believe Buren was right about Hobbs wanting to die, so he preferred to imagine that most of Hobbs’s motives, except for the ones he exercised in the machine shed, were still the equivalent of his own. This meant C.D. had probably gone to eyeball the ranch’s dwindled ditches and aslant fences, the happenstance things a man does to seal himself to fallow land. He’d taken Adams’s .30-06 in case he saw coyotes. And the dog, Rain.
Adams went to the shed. He couldn’t kindle much desire to work on his unworkable ranch. He felt rooted in observation instead, drawn to watch over Hobbs’s shrunken, flat-eyed cast of characters as they seemed to watch over him. He sat on the seat of the grinder—not too close, not too far away. The wind rose and fell over his solitude, and he listened to the eaves of the shed moan in imitation of far-flung human voices. Even when the Trumpet Bell had been failing all around him, the victim of low wool prices, high feed prices, busted cooperatives, foreign subsidies—the whole damn avalanche—Adams had made that failure into something he understood, something he could live with. He’d been raised to want the land, and he still had the land—ball and chain that it was. But his failures with Hobbs, large and small, were something he still didn’t understand. How could somebody who loomed like drought, like a sky-blotting storm of locusts, keep settling into his life as the closest person he’d ever known?
Hobbs was unruffled when he returned to the shed, casual in the unsnapping of his caramel-colored coat. He seemed pleased to find Adams waiting in his place. In one sense, they had much to say to each other, men who had first learned the brutal weightlessness of words in the worthless foxholes of Chosin. Yet they hadn’t spoken about those lost, forsaken days—not for decades. Adams knew all too well that relief wasn’t a feeling either of them trusted.
“Your … project is going along good, C.D. Looks like you’re making headway.” Adams spoke from the powdered seat of the grinder. Rain crept to his spot on the tarpaulin.
But Hobbs misdirected Adams’s words, the first sign things wouldn’t go as they usually did. “The pasture out there needs a lot a work. Seeding. Fence. Healthy pronghorn, though. One buck tried to stand me off.”
“Did you mention you’d be back in the fall with a license?”
“I did. Then I shot him where he stood.”
Adams counted in his mind the number of times C.D. Hobbs had borne the authority he bore that moment beneath the black cowl of the shed. There weren’t many. He didn’t believe Hobbs had shot anything dead. But how did you ask a man about his lies or what he meant by trimming out people as paper dolls? Adams had spent some time studying the figure of Sergeant Devlin and the ever larger, glossier versions of Charlotte. He’d surveyed his own likeness with its unjammed machine gun. He’d stared at the oil-patch roughnecks with nail-scratched grins that Hobbs seemed to both love and hate. He’d stared at the ewes and the lambs and the dwarfish, weak-chinned doctors. They leaned against the walls of their small stage. They dangled from loops of scrounged-up twine; they gathered in unbalanced groups near the tin snips—every last one of them.
“F-fremont,” Hobbs said, his voice raveling under the red kerchief he wore around his neck, “you seen it all.”
And he had, hadn’t he? The rock-ice hell of Hill 1281 at Chosin. The lowing calf love for Charlotte. That had been the worst of it—how his sister had tornadoed the feelings of a kind and vulnerable man. Then there was the infernal prank he and Buren had played to keep from being tainted by Hobbs’s besotted craziness, a thing they claimed to have done to save the Trumpet Bell. Yet the man kept coming back, no matter how soiled the memories. And now there was this: grooved, silver-scaled puppets without a puppeteer. Or a story to tell that might satisfy.
“You asked what I want to do,” Hobbs continued. “It’s a g-good question. I’ve thought it through day and night, without the doctors into it now. It’s been fortysome years since you and me signed up in Cheyenne, all years of knowing and n-not knowing because sometimes my brain was mixed up and sometimes it weren’t.” He moved closer to his shantied crèche. He pointed at it happily, his head cocked to one side like a proud father above a crib. “You know all of them, that helps me. But you mightn’t know this.” He reached into the sections of soldered one-inch pipe that raftered the cage and freed a misshapen silhouette from its noose, slipped it to Adams.
Adams stared at the clotted figure that lay across his palm. He thought he understood the story here, and it was an ugly one. “Napalm,” he croaked. “The captain called in the wrong coordinates for the ridge. He didn’t mean to….”
“Naw,” Hobbs said, suddenly, horribly laughing. “This guy ain’t from Lloyd Brewer’s fried squad, though I remember that. The screaming. The smoke like off a barbecue. That was a mistake like only a man can make. N-no, this guy ain’t Brewer. He ain’t even from what you call our world. Our dimension. Somebody … different … was with us that night in Korea. I know it was a messed-up time, but I’m thinking you might have seen him on that hill and never told n-nobody. To be nice.”
Adams felt a dangerous numbness spread through his chest, a numbness he knew from experience would reduce Hobbs to a putty he could store on a low, unimportant shelf. He remembered what Buren had said about encores. “We didn’t see Chinese soon enough, that’s what we didn’t see.”
“I recall the Chinese,” Hobbs said calmly. “He was there, though. Or it. I h-hadn’t quite got it all worked out. Boy or woman or what. I never saw no wings. Or a spaceship. The fellow I roomed with on the ward at Evanston said there had to be a sp-spaceship.”
Adams sat ham-handed.
“I understand his purpose for the most part.” Hobbs was solemn, searching Adams’s dry, blinking eyes for an equal solemnity. “He’ll come for me here again, like he did that time I was with Ch-Charlotte. He needs to finish his business. You’re good that way, too. You know how to finish your business. You’re off the irrigating, I finally figured that. But I can see the lambs coming. A new kind of lambs is coming, no matter what you say to me. We got important preparations to make. So I begun all this—“and he raised his arms like a conductor above the workbench and the tractors and the dog “—to get us ready.”
Chosin Reservoir
Korean Peninsula
1950
THEY WERE TWO DAYS NORTH OF HUNGNAM, THE weather thinning into a high altitude cold he recognized. Morning had arrived with a formation of gull-winged Corsairs that p
assed over the rattling, coughing camp before turning to scan the hills for North Koreans. The glass bulbs of the planes’ cockpits burned with the fire of the rising sun. It was a good day to fly, Adams thought. The sky was clear and unclouded, the color of quartz. It was a damn freezing day to move a war into the mountains.
He was at the roadblock with his squad. Hobbs was there. And Devlin. And everybody else except Fryberg who’d been sent to the aid tent with his fever and pink, weepy eyes. They were supposed to control the flow of refugees, which they’d been trying to do since 0400. Nobody liked strong-arming the farmers and their families, especially when it meant shaking down the old mama-sans and children. In Seoul, where he and Hobbs had gotten their assignment three weeks earlier, the boys and girls had smiled at the marines and begged for gum and candy. Not here. Here the Communists hid among the peasants, so every native who wanted to go behind U.S. lines to Hungnam, where the Red Cross was passing out food and blankets, had to be searched. And questioned.
Just now Sergeant Devlin had Ry Pilcher stirring through the refugees’ rice bags with his bayonet while Hobbs stood guard over half a dozen men who’d been stripped naked by marines looking for grenades and guns. The squatting men were lethargic from starvation and fear. The shadows among their ribs were as blue as bruises. The rest of the refugees crowded the barriers of the roadblock, anxious to get out of the path of the converging armies. Adams could tell Hobbs hated his assignment. His knees were locked tight above the buckled canvas of his leggings. His mouth was a thin, set line. There was no opportunity to play the good guy because he was out of chocolate. They all were. They had nothing to give the bony, whey-faced kids whose cheeks were aflame with exposure. All they could do was stand duty in their jackets and heavy boots while the greasy smell of their well-fed bodies mixed with the stink of pickled cabbage and shit that clung to the few rags of clothing the natives still had.