by Alyson Hagy
Charlotte grinned, her corn-silk hair blowing loose from its braids and whipping across her mouth. “It’s a wonder we’re not more superstitious than we are, growing up around Etch and Basilio and Blue Pete.”
“Maybe we should be,” he said, thinking of his years of Korean nightmares, their chaos and cold.
“No. Those men were better than any church when it came to spinning out beliefs. They had it all woven together like a rug. But we’re not like that. At least I’m not, though it’s no fault of San Francisco’s that I don’t believe in much. That’s a city full of lit candles.”
“The noise of a big city would get to me,” he said.
“No, it wouldn’t. It’s the options that would drive you crazy, Fremont. The way a person can choose who she wants to be. You actually like your lack of choices.”
“Maybe so.”
“There’s no maybe about it. You’ve got more crust than a loaf of petrified bread.”
Adams paused, trying to decide whether Charlotte really wanted to quarrel with him. Certain things—certain placid responsibilities—were easy for him. He had only to look at Buren and Charlotte across the vast gulfs of their differences to see that. He was made to be predictable, to see the advantages of a rigorous, marginal life. He was made to breed animals that thrived on lousy grass and to cajole trickles of water into dusty fields. Agricultural failure didn’t faze him much. Bad weather and bad luck with livestock wasn’t something a man should take personally. But Charlotte and Buren—they took the episodes of the Trumpet Bell very personally. Buren said he looked forward to the day when the three of them would agree to sell the whole damn opera. Charlotte, whom they rarely saw and almost never heard from, was the opposite. She wanted the Trumpet Bell to remain in the family, but it was to remain as she chose to remember it: vital, comic, independent, and enviable. Their home place was the permanent shelter for her ideals, no matter how far from those ideals she traveled.
Charlotte’s voice intruded on his scattered thoughts. “What?” he said, giving her his attention. “Did you want to pick on me again?”
Charlotte leaned back in her saddle. “I asked if you ever thought about getting married.”
“Oh, damn. Here we go.”
“I sort of liked that Patterson girl from town. What was her name?”
“Julie. And you sure didn’t seem to like her at the time.”
“Well, maybe I wasn’t so neutral back then. Maybe I thought you were trying to replace Ma with a teenage tramp.”
He thought about Julie Patterson, how he’d hauled her off to elk camps and hunters’ motels just to find some relief. She would have married him if he’d had the decency to ask. Her father, who knew Adams’s motives better than he knew them himself, finally sent Julie to live with a cousin in Rapid City. “Hobbs got married once.” He raised his voice to cover the distance between them. “About three weeks after our mother’s funeral.”
“You’re kidding.” Charlotte reined the buckskin to a quick halt. “You’re just saying that to change the subject.”
Adams kept his head low so Charlotte couldn’t see his bitter grin. “He hasn’t told you about it, has he? It was a neighbor of his aunt’s down in Craig, what you could call a tramp. She smoked and drank C.D.’s wages, then asked for a divorce after he found her on top of her real boyfriend.”
“Don’t be rude.”
“I’m sorry.” He nudged Redrock ahead of the stalled buckskin on the narrow trail. “Well, maybe I’m not really sorry. Maybe I do have a point. You need to know that Hobbs sometimes … well, he reacts in big ways when he gets emotional. He doesn’t have a regular governor on him like most of us. He don’t talk about what he’ll do, he just does it.”
“And you think I need to be warned about that? You think being emotional is bad?” Exasperation crackled into Charlotte’s voice.
“I don’t know what I think. Maybe you don’t either. Which is probably why we’re both out here.”
They rode in silence for several long minutes. The terrain became steeper, threaded with winding game trails, pocked by the burrows of nocturnal animals. Adams took note of the fresh scraps of fur and skin that were all that remained of an unlucky rabbit. Owl, he thought. The owls had always hunted hard through here.
Charlotte broke the moody quiet. “You ever consider how easy things would have been for us if Dad had stayed alive?” It was a pinprick of a question for her to ask, and she knew it. She rode right up on Redrock’s flank in order to catch Adams’s eye. Her lips looked flaky and pale. “He would have found more money. He would have made better choices than Gene. He always did.” Charlotte had been very young—no more than twelve—when David Keith MacGregor Adams was killed. She had always carried a torch for his memory, and she had never tolerated criticism of his faults or eccentric behaviors. But David Adams had been killed—or had pretty much killed himself, as Buren put it—when he was blown off a wellhead being set by a feckless neighbor. The death had brought the family something the Trumpet Bell sorely needed at the time: an infusion of cash.
“He did have his resources,” Adams said, smiling at a memory of his father in a dapper houndstooth suit. David Adams had stepped off the train at Fort Steele in 1920 with nothing more than a cardboard suitcase and a good head for numbers. A few years later he married the Dixon schoolteacher, Portia Laury, and began buying tracts of abandoned land with her brother Gene. David Adams should not have been much of a rancher. There wasn’t anything ruthless or wind-burned about him. He merely acquired mortgages and paid them off. Yet that, and a sky-high tolerance for unforgiving weather, was really all it took.
“He would have taken care of us,” Charlotte said, fiercely. “You know Ma believed that.” Adams reckoned that their mother had believed in nothing more than their father’s gregariousness. It was David Adams’s enthusiasm that caused him to stop when he saw Sock Jarvis on that fresh well pad with a roustabout crew. Nobody who knew David Adams had ever seen him turn away in the face of another’s need. He had removed his jacket and climbed the derrick with a wrench stuck deep in his waistband. Sock Jarvis was sheltered by the flatbed of a truck when it happened. He lived through the blast, losing David Adams and two Texans he’d hired in a Rawlins bar. Sock Jarvis visited with Portia Adams after the funeral and put her in touch with a Denver banker, but Portia Adams never told anybody the details of what Jarvis said to her, how he had tried to put things right.
“Ma believed a lot of things,” he said, steering Redrock across a gully along the neckline of Bell Butte. “She was good that way.”
“And neither of us has that capacity? Is that what you’re suggesting?”
“I’m not suggesting anything, Charlotte. You just got done telling me how I’m not ever curious. And you remember Dad different than I do. That’s your right. I like how you see us all in your own particular way. I’m just saying neither of us is exactly like our mother. We’re different, times are different. That’s just how it works.”
“Well, I am.” His sister turned again in her saddle. Her squinting eyes were fractured with a clear, insistent light. “I am more like her than you or Buren or anybody else. Portia Adams was a female ass kicker, way before her time. She had guts and smarts and loyalty. You aren’t going to deny that.”
He wasn’t. He also wasn’t going to suggest that Portia Adams would never have done something as manipulative and self-serving as making love to C.D. Hobbs.
When they got to the dead juniper tree that marked the farthest point the horses could climb, Adams told Charlotte to go on ahead. He didn’t feel the need to scramble to the top of Bell Butte. He said, “I think I’m in the right frame of mind to enjoy this tree and its shade.” Charlotte didn’t hesitate. She was energized by his weakness or laziness, whichever it was, and she headed up the boulder-strewn trail alone, at a run. “Ass kicker,” she shouted as she sped around a switchback thirty feet above him. “I kick. You lose.”
She was still agile enough to negotiate the
tricky, peeling rock of the butte’s single spire. Before long, he saw her far above him, searching for old handholds and footholds as she climbed higher and higher. As she grappled her way across the wide, copper-colored rib lines of stone, she gestured at him with the occasional free hand, laughing, probably taunting. Her face was white and bud-shaped in the glare of the sun. She looked like a clinging spar of bone to him, like a reed of impetuousness and cloth. Charlotte Adams. She was back. She was happy. She wanted to frolic on the ranch with her brother, and she wanted to remake both the ranch and brother in her own image. It was a recipe for disaster. He knew that now. He removed the saddles from both horses, pleased to engage in a task he could actually manage. The two geldings hung their heads and quietly fought the flies with patient switches of their tails. What the hell was he going to do with his livewire sister? This was the question he was forced to ask himself. And what the hell was she going to do to him and C.D. Hobbs?
Hobbs and Charlotte allowed what was between them to grow and test itself against every hard surface they could find. Charlotte came for Hobbs in the middle of the day and took him upstairs into the room that had been hers since birth, leading him away from the workbench or the fence line or the seat of Adams’s truck. He went shyly, at first, but always without resistance. Charlotte made love to him—Adams didn’t care to know the details—then sent him back to his tasks. She sometimes walked with him into the ranch yard wearing nothing more than panties and an unbuttoned shirt. She would hang on him a little at those moments, filching reluctant kisses from his lips, though this only occurred when Maria Delores was safely out of sight.
They spent their nights in the machine shed. At first, there wasn’t any drinking, at least not during the day, and the worst Adams could make of the situation was the inconvenience of losing Hobbs’s help for an hour, though Hobbs was always good for any job once he got back to it. But Charlotte wasn’t interested in arrangements or limits. She and Hobbs began to stay in the house, heaving and moaning into the night, bathing in the one tub together at unpredictable times, staggering to breakfast in a parade of bare haunches and yawns. Adams knew Charlotte was just waiting, waiting, waiting for him to complain, so he didn’t. It would all spill over soon—the extra feeling would spill over—he kept telling himself that. There would be equilibrium. What he was dealing with was a temporary human intoxication.
But some nights the coils of wet towel on the bathroom floor and the smell of riven woman drove him toward Baggs and the trailer home of a woman who charged him a few dollars for her time. She had two young children, and Adams was shocked by the constancy of his lust in the face of their simple entreaties and the inane sounds of the television shows that leaked through every wall of the trailer. He hadn’t been so filled with need since he was a nineteen-year-old marine waiting for combat assignment in Japan. He began to wonder what unseen carcass they were all feeding on.
“She will suck him dry,” Buren said. Buren relished his weekly phone calls from Cheyenne. They allowed him to castigate his younger brother from a comfortable distance. “She will suck him dry every way you can imagine because she is easily bored and can’t help herself. And she’ll suck you dry, too, because that’s what she’s really after.”
“It’s not like that,” Adams said. He tried to talk about how good Hobbs looked and how much work they were getting done together. He did not mention that he felt pushed out of his own house.
“You wait,” Buren said. “The next grand item on the agenda will be a baby or money. Mark my words. When you hear those sweet notes, my brother, you will realize which piper is calling the tune.”
Then Charlotte brought drink into it, though he would never know why. Bottles of fruit wine were opened at dinner, before dinner, and after dinner when they all smoked their silent cigarettes. Bottles of vodka appeared to celebrate meteor showers or the birth of Nan’s pups. Omero, in his most solicitous way, asked Adams if he would need his help after the end of October. This was how he let Adams know he and Maria Delores were prepared to leave their jobs. Adams asked Omero to stay on, but he continued to drink vodka with Hobbs and Charlotte, and sometimes without them, because he didn’t care for the sweetness of fruit wine. He kept a separate bottle for his drives to the woman he paid for sex, emptying the bottle with her while they were naked in the bedroom that was only large enough for a bed. He smashed the bottles on the road as he drove back to the ranch, hurling them into the black nothingness torn open by the roar of his truck.
One evening, Hobbs didn’t come to the house for dinner. Adams ate his antelope sausage and rice in silence, waiting for an explanation from Charlotte that never came. He washed and dried the dishes before his impatience got the best of him.
“Is your friend sleeping one off?” he asked.
“No. C.D.’s sick, since you’re asking. His head aches. He said he might not be able to ride the ditches tomorrow morning.”
The two of them were on the porch, looking into the rough glitter of the night. Charlotte poured him a jelly glass of apple wine, and he took it. Her hair was down, mussed and uncombed. Her lips were so dark with color they looked like glazed shadows. He wanted her to say more because as far as he knew Hobbs had never been physically too sick to work a day in his life.
“He’ll be fine,” she continued. “I think he’s just tired.”
“Maybe you could give him a break. He is forty-four years old.” He tried to make the suggestion without malice.
“That doesn’t seem to stop you any.” She giggled, and he wondered what, if anything, he could hide from Charlotte. All of them—brothers and sister—had the awful gift of seeing right through one another. She’d been visiting friends and neighbors, and had somehow found out about the woman in Baggs. She’d no doubt also heard plenty of talk about the other places his dick had been over the last fifteen years.
“We’re not talking about me. I still get to work in the morning.”
“He wants to try for a baby.”
When he heard those words his fingers went as cold as the captured light of the stars above them. He tried not to let Buren’s acid voice into his head, but it was there anyway, telling him to bolt the gates and bar the doors. “Are you saying you want a baby?”
She shrugged. It was a loose-jointed, wanton gesture meant to gouge him. “No, C.D. wants one. I’m just going along with the world.”
Adams shook his head, trying to clear it. “You’ve never gone along with anything for the hell of it. That’s not your style. I’m sorry things didn’t work out with Elon the way you wanted, but you shouldn’t play helpless with Hobbs.”
Another giggle. It was hard to tell how much wine was in her talk. “Take it easy, Fremont. Go with the flow. I give him something. He gives me something. We aren’t signing on some permanent dotted line.”
“How about C.D. gives you something and you take it? You didn’t see him when he showed up here this spring, Charlotte. I did. I don’t know where he’d been, or what was chasing him, but he was in bad shape. He looked like a lamb with scabies. He couldn’t talk with regular sentences. He’s not a regular person. You need to go easy on him.”
“No, I don’t. That’s your bullshit, your guilt bullshit you never cleaned up. You think he’s as fragile as a butterfly.” She wasn’t shouting, but her voice was high, and it worked its way into his ears like a barbed instrument. “He told me what happened in Korea. Everything you never talk about. Everything bad. I know, okay? So don’t get all high and mighty with me.”
The shame that was always in him rose and ate at his tongue, but he fought it down and swallowed its biting juices. Charlotte couldn’t know what had happened at Chosin because Hobbs couldn’t remember it. She was guessing. Prodding at him like he was a caged bear. “You shouldn’t talk about what you don’t understand,” he said. “C.D. and me understand each other and how certain things have to be left alone. We don’t go digging inside each other for everything that’s there. So I’m telling—not asking—I�
�m telling you not to dig inside his head. Hump him all you want. Tie an apron on and have his baby. Put up a life on this ranch. There will always be a place for you here.” He heard her breathing get short. He’d called her bluff, and the comment about the apron had made her mad. “But you need to stop with your failed ambitions and whatnot,” he continued. “Don’t bring that California garbage out here. Don’t dump that stuff on a simple man like C.D. Hobbs.”
“Simple? When I tell him you—”
“He won’t do a thing. He knows exactly who he is, unlike the rest of us. And I know he’s better than us both.”
She threw the wine bottle first. It hit him in the chest with no real force, but her glass caught him on the cheekbone and cut him and irrigated his eye with the burn of cheap alcohol. She was gone, off the porch in a dervish of hair and skirts, before he could wipe his face clean. He watched her flee to the small room in the back of the machine shed where Hobbs was apparently resting. Despite how good it felt, he knew he’d been stupid. It was never smart to go to war against somebody like Charlotte. But she’d given him the opportunity, and he’d reached right for it.
What he didn’t expect: the way Charlotte went to battle with no rules and no dignity except the perceived dignity of her own opinions. Because he did bear a heavy burden of shame about the past, and she sensed it, and she was shameless. She dispatched Hobbs to plead with him. And Hobbs didn’t even know what his role in the dispute was. He and Adams hadn’t talked about Charlotte, not since she’d shown up and replaced all the kid stories they told about her with her real self. They took refuge in what was always the same about each other—the agreed-upon silences, the routine humor, the words and tools that solved familiar problems of water and soil. There had never been a morning in their whole lives when they couldn’t meet up in the barn or the kitchen and hit their stride together. Now Hobbs wanted to talk to him about engagement rings.