by Alyson Hagy
Charlotte was in the kitchen stirring a pot of soup that had clearly been made by Maria Delores. Her presence at the stove was exaggerated proof of a truce that may or may not have been negotiated on both sides. She wore jeans with a long-sleeved gingham shirt and her old calfskin 4-H boots, and both Hobbs and Adams stopped in the doorway to look at her. She was backlit by the sifted light of evening. The sight of her in those clothes, standing in that place, threw them back into the first third of their lives. They had been her caretakers once. That ancient fact was almost impossible to reconcile with what they saw in front of them. Charlotte laughed at their hesitation and promised she hadn’t actually cooked the soup. “If you’re not ready to eat, let’s fire up some cigarettes and get to know each other again.”
They sat on the porch—on the steps rather than the pine bench, which was covered with tire chains and axe handles and other tools that kept themselves close at hand—and they talked for a long time while they smoked. The dogs settled intermittently at their feet, watchful of the newcomer as herd dogs always are. Charlotte told them about her life on the West Coast.
“I stayed with Elon as long as I could,” she said. “I still love his politics. He’s a rampaging idealist, and I like that because I’m not. But Elon is always raising the bar—on me and everybody else. When we were in Mexico, he told me he’d stopped believing in marriage.”
“You ain’t married?” Hobbs looked up from his seat on the lowest step.
“Not anymore.” Charlotte whistled a high note to herself. “Right now I’m as independent and unhindered as you boys. Hell, I might even be more ignorant.”
“You give up the school teaching?” Adams held the smoke from his cigarette tight in his mouth.
“For a while, maybe. But don’t worry, I got money.”
“Your money’s no good here,” Adams said. “No reason to mention it.”
“I got money,” Charlotte said again. “What I don’t have is friends. Not the ones in Frisco, not the ones south of the border. They all stayed with Elon or they split. Bullshitters. They didn’t stick to anything they said they believed in.”
Adams watched his sister’s foot patter into a nervous tap against the porch step. Charlotte’s friends hadn’t held up. Her life wasn’t holding up. He wondered if she’d come home to see if California was a world she could do without.
“What should they believe in, them friends who went away?” Hobbs’s voice skidded across its consonants the way it did when he talked to weaned lambs.
Charlotte chuckled, sharp and defensive. “They should believe in what I believe in—moving on. I believe in making things work for me. I took Red for a slow ride toward the Butte while you all were working. That old horse isn’t up to much, but it felt good to cross that land again.”
“Feels good to have you back,” Hobbs said, and he said it so fast and so without shading they all three laughed. The words should have been Adams’s.
“We’ll take you any way you come—”
“—as long as I do my share of chores. I know how your mind works, big brother. Don’t worry. I still remember how to hoist a shovel.” And they all laughed again. Charlotte held up a hand for another smoke, and Adams saw she’d taken the beaded jewelry off her wrist. He gave her the cigarette.
“You two amaze me,” she said, “living out here as if it’s the 1940s with Uncle Gene hounding your asses at every turn. It’s like nothing’s changed.”
“Ranching’s changed a lot.” Hobbs leaped in again, using his mouth for words that should have been Adams’s. “Margins is tight on sheep. Most of the good money these days is in cows.” Adams felt himself pull back from the conversation, sensing the razor edge of a need in Charlotte’s words. His sister was after something that had nothing to do with how dull he and Hobbs were or the dullness of the ranch. It seemed important that he figure out what that need was.
“The air still stinks the same. Nothing but dry rot and dust,” she said.
Hobbs responded to Charlotte’s comment as if she couldn’t be serious. He smiled in silence.
Adams decided to nudge his sister right back. “Maybe you’d like to tend camp for me in the Madres. I need somebody tough up there the last two weeks of this month.” He stood and stretched his arms above his head. It was his signal they should go inside.
“Fuck you, brother. Sheep are boring. You know how I feel about them. I can do more good by staying right here.” Charlotte gave him a grin laden with prankishness and irritation before she unfurled her palm for yet another smoke. He tossed her the pack and left the two of them on the porch.
They came to the table a few minutes later, and Adams stopped eating long enough to serve them from the soup pot and a plate of sliced bread. He watched as Charlotte made a point of pretending she was conspiring with Hobbs. She whispered and gestured to C.D. in an attempt to continue the conversation they’d begun outside, but Hobbs didn’t return the whispers. He didn’t know how to primp and scheme. He was so happy to have Charlotte in the house where they’d been kids together that he failed to follow her lead.
So Charlotte tried a different tack. “Tell me about what you’ve done since I saw you last, C.D. Where you’ve been.”
“Well.” Hobbs hesitated, sneaking a sideways glance at Adams. “Well. I got fired by this manager for Portaco. He didn’t like me.”
“That was near Tulsa,” Adams added, though he didn’t tell Charlotte the Portaco oil-field incident had in fact occurred several years before. Hobbs had lost a lot of jobs over the years, and he had trouble with timelines when he got nervous.
“Tulsa,” Hobbs nodded. “In Oklahoma. I never have much luck in Oklahoma. They got a excellent hospital there, though. I have been in that hospital.”
Adams watched Charlotte roll her blue eyes with manufactured sympathy as if she knew the hell and drudgery of hospitals. Which she most certainly did not. Charlotte had never visited Hobbs in the musty, cackling veterans ward where he’d had to spend a great deal of time after the war. She’d been too young. Their mother thought the experience would upset her.
“But you’re not in a hospital now,” she said, smiling expansively. “You look good to me. What’s the best thing that’s happened to you recently? What’s been exciting?”
Hobbs pretended to rub his unshaved jaw in complete concentration. Then he winked at Charlotte as if he finally understood her game. “Fremont,” he said. “Everything the way it is right here.”
Charlotte’s cheeks flushed pink. “Oh, come on. There’s got to be more than that.”
“There’s not,” insisted Hobbs, and Adams watched him push his shaky left hand out onto the table, a thing he did when he became agitated.
“I don’t get it, C.D. You just about waste your whole life by getting killed in Korea, which nobody would do now because they don’t buy that U.S. imperial crap. Then you get better, and you keep wasting your life. Why don’t you elevate yourself a few million feet above where you’re stuck in my brother’s sheep shit and see what you’re really about, what’s happening in the real world? Hanoi? Do you know what we did there? Watergate? This is not the real world. Look at what they fucking did to you and your face in that pathetic ‘police action.’ You ought to be in court demanding compensation.”
Hobbs drew his hands to his sides and took on the tense, hunched posture of a prey animal that was somehow compelled to wait for its attacker to strike again. For Adams, the room became airless, choking. He knew Charlotte could be bossy and dramatic, but he had failed to see this coming, this ricocheting quest for pain. He had been sure Charlotte would respect the twenty-five-year-old rule of not talking about the war. Everybody else did. He’d allowed her to lecture him and Hobbs about their bachelor isolation on the ranch. That was tolerable. Charlotte was dislocated and young and hungry for more interesting prospects, which she would surely find. But to talk about Hobbs’s wounds in any way other than the way she’d talked about them in 1951 was a serious betrayal. Eleven-year-ol
d Charlotte Adams had written C.D. Hobbs at least one cheerful letter a week while he was having his surgeries in Japan. She had greeted him—and his disturbing scars—with simple affection when he was finally shipped home. She had not seen Hobbs regularly after that, no one had, but she had always accepted him. She had always been a comfort. To change her tune now, to suggest that Hobbs had indeed been disfigured, was beyond forgiveness.
“Charlotte.” Adams tried not to shout as he felt something anchor itself among his tightened ribs, a thing with talons and jaws. “You need to put a lid on it right now. You need to recall what the situation is here.”
Charlotte half-raised herself from her chair, stopped, then raised herself completely to push away from the chrome-legged table. She stood as Hobbs’s red mouth wrestled with the syllables no no no of a black and private denial. She stepped backward as his spasmed hand tore at the scarred stump of his ear. Adams, too, witnessed the familiar signs of stress. They made his skin prickle and burn. “Oh … no,” Charlotte said in a high echo of Hobbs’s own cries. “Oh god, C. D…. I was just trying to … I didn’t mean … I’m so sorry.” And she fled the table for the empty rooms upstairs where Adams heard the hard pacing of her boots against the ceiling for a long time before there was silence.
Charlotte was as good as her word when it came to ranch work. She woke up early. She helped Maria fix breakfast and lunch. She was a bale-lifting maniac in the hay fields. She even went up the road to help the neighbors, Steve and Nod Barnheisel, take in their hay when the Trumpet Bell’s was all stored. Nod Barnheisel offered to sell her his quarter-horse colt because Redrock had gotten so old, but Charlotte told Nod that she didn’t expect to be on the ranch long enough to do justice to a good colt. It was the same reason she gave when she refused Nod’s invitation to dinner and a movie. Adams decided his little sister had been shocked into good behavior. He didn’t believe it was in her nature to be mean to people as she’d been mean to Hobbs. California might have accustomed her to a brand of ferocity that was less common in Wyoming, but it was his experience that summer at the Trumpet Bell brought out the best in people. The long, bright days, the redeeming scents of grass and water—these always made his life seem as vivid and whole as the spinning blue disc of the sky.
Charlotte also did other deeds that impressed her brother. She attended services at the old church in Savery. She called on their neighbors, most of whom still lived in the log and plank houses where they had raised their families. Charlotte didn’t say much about these visits except to list the gifts she’d been given by Portia Adams’s grateful friends—the dripping honeycombs, the wine-bright jars of chokecherry jam, the bouquets of sunflowers. She took pains not to exhibit the righteousness that had flamed within her when she first arrived home. Adams suspected the focus and efficiency he now saw in his sister was what her students in California saw: Charlotte was a woman of sure, gripping affections. And she had energy to spare. He began to imagine what the next few months would be like, the interesting times they might have, if she decided to stay on the ranch through the winter.
Buren was the one who broke the news, a task he performed with exacting pleasure. It was a Sunday morning, late. Buren, long divorced from his first and only wife, had driven over from Cheyenne where he now worked for the governor to see Charlotte, whom he regarded with the world-weary detachment of a distant cousin. He and Adams were drinking coffee in the ranch yard. Buren wore a borrowed pair of irrigator boots to preserve the cuffs of his trousers. They, in turn, were watched by a pair of bead-eyed magpies that sat on the corral fence ready to scavenge anything the brothers might throw their way.
“You do know what they’re doing, don’t you?” Buren spoke without prelude. He held his lit cigarette at the end of his fingers, its tip sheltered from a light breeze by the pillar of his thigh. His face was lean and angular in the morning sun, almost handsome except for the sallow tinge of his eyes. “I caught them in flagrante, as they say—quite early this morning. They’ve been using your shed.”
Adams didn’t dare look at his brother. He stared at the stark plumage of the magpies instead, suddenly peeved by the cockade elegance of their long tails. They were useless birds. They enjoyed pecking the eyes out of his sick lambs when they could beat the ravens to the job.
“So?” He tried to throw Buren’s superior indifference back in his face. He hoped a display of false impatience would cover his panic.
“So, we’re all too old to suggest the act is actually indecent even though C.D. is the next best thing to a … brother.”
“You’re a sick bastard, if you don’t mind my saying.” Adams tried to focus on his brother’s ramrod posture and the absence of sympathy that hoisted his words onto a high platform of gloating. He told himself, not for the first time, that there was no reason he had to like this man.
“This is more than a joke. Or it will be. You’ll understand that soon.” Buren drew on his cigarette until it flared and died. He flicked the butt into the mud for the investigation of the magpies. “They’ve apparently discovered a most insidious pleasure,” he continued. “I wouldn’t have thought it of C.D., but Charlotte sounded like she was being fucked by a bull.”
“Shut up, Buren.”
“That is a typically inadequate response. Just what I’d expect from you.”
“Shut up.”
“You really didn’t know, did you?” Buren clapped his hands together in silent applause. “You pay so much attention to this sinkhole ranch you don’t even recognize the true threats to it.”
“I’m not interested in your predictions of disaster,” he said, gathering himself. “You need to haul that load of poison back with you to Cheyenne. C.D. and Charlotte can take care of themselves.”
“They’ll take care of themselves and more,” Buren said, amused. “You’ll be picking up the pieces until Christmas.”
He hadn’t known. Or had he? Charlotte and Hobbs each tended to their own chores on the ranch, working in the meshed silence he preferred. It was true they’d both begun coming to him with new ideas, small ideas, about how he might change something with the horses or feed storage or the furnace in the house. They gave off prospects for change like sparks. But they never came to him together. They avoided each other when he was around. He had noticed that. He’d just misconstrued the reasons why.
He tried to work some feeling into his suddenly numb fingers. All right. It was a fact. Charlotte had seduced Hobbs. Although he didn’t like to consider the details, it was hard to see the problem there except for the inevitable one of how Hobbs would handle things when Charlotte decided to leave. She would never settle down on the Trumpet Bell. Buren was wrong to think so.
Buren left for Cheyenne without another word, and the afternoon filled itself with a host of remembered sighs and glances. Once Adams admitted the truth of the situation, he couldn’t get the evidence out of his mind. He recalled how he’d helped Hobbs Sheetrock the tiny room at the back of the machine shed that had been framed out for the storage of bottled sheep dips. Hobbs hadn’t slept in the house since Charlotte’s arrival, a choice that seemed practical at the time. He’d swept out the shed room, gotten himself a mattress from a church sale and said nothing about comfort or discomfort. The dogs slept with Hobbs on most nights; that was all Adams knew. Now, he couldn’t get the image of his sister washing the breakfast dishes, her shirt covered with black and white collie hair, out of his roiling head. God damn attention-getting Charlotte. He needed to have a serious talk with his sister.
He found Charlotte in the barn, putting a halter on the plate-footed buckskin gelding that supposedly belonged to him although he hadn’t ridden the animal since Charlotte had come back home. His sister looked contained and ordinary, if her kind of stubborn beauty could ever be called ordinary. Her face was flushed. Her light blue eyes were wholly focused on the buckskin because she needed his attention. She was gentle in her movements, offhandedly graceful. But he still couldn’t picture her as Hobbs’s full-fled
ged lover. Jesus. What a turn. His sister was sleeping with his misfit friend. The thought should have filled him with sly laughter, but it didn’t.
“Buren is one big black cloud. I don’t know why he bothered to come out here.” Charlotte winked at him after she buckled the halter on the horse.
“I’m sure he wouldn’t say it was family duty.”
“I’m sure he wouldn’t,” she said. “You’re the only one of us afflicted with that.”
It wasn’t what he had expected her to say. He waited to see if she would push at him again.
“You know what I want, Fremont? Really?”
He had no idea, but he opened the stall door for her so she could bring out the buckskin. When she was absolutely young, Charlotte had wanted everything.
“Privacy?” It was a word that took a lot for him to say.
“You shit.” Charlotte burst into a loud, happy laugh, one that showed her teeth. She led the gelding past him, still laughing, and he smelled the slight sweetness of her washed hair as it mixed with horse dander and sweat. “Buren tattled on me, didn’t he? He was always like that, taking secrets to people he thought were in charge. No wonder he works for the governor. He’s a snake. You’re not a snake.”
“It’s probably not my business, whatever you’re doing.”
“No, it’s not. But it might take you awhile to get used to that fact. Leave it alone, okay?”
He started to agree that he would leave it alone, but a persistent vision of Hobbs—shivering in shock and pain—stopped him. It had been a long, long time since he’d left Hobbs purely alone. There were obligations. He’d never been able to quite explain them, even to himself, but they were there.
Charlotte glanced at him, her face proud with affection. She held out a striped saddle blanket, and he could see the sore, bitten nails of her hand. “That’s not the favor I’m asking for, Fremont. You’ll have to trust C.D. and me. What I really want is for you to ride up the butte with me. Let’s take some time off. Let’s go see the petroglyphs and those caves where we used to hunt for bobcat. They’re still there, aren’t they? They haven’t disappeared? I’d like to spend some time poking around in the old places. It brings back good memories of when Ma and Dad were alive.” She paused to slip the blanket across the buckskin’s bony withers. “Don’t make fun of the idea, either. And don’t pretend your frozen-off toes make it hard to keep your feet in the stirrups. That’s a fake excuse. You’re not as old and washed up as you want to pretend. Neither of you are. Just come with me for a little while. That’s all you’ve got to do.”