by Alyson Hagy
“It might be early, I know she hadn’t been here—”
“You want to marry Charlotte? Did she tell you to say that?” Adams was so shocked his choked-off words sounded firm and steady.
“I hadn’t asked her yet.” Hobbs ducked his head into the tight cotton collar of his shirt. They were standing in the truck bed and cleaning one of the silos for a delivery of seed cake. Both of them were covered in the beige grit of leftover feed. “I’m asking what you think I ought to do.”
“Is she pregnant?”
Hobbs swatted his wrench against a rusty leg of the silo. “God damn it, Fremont, don’t … don’t get nasty about your own sister. I feel bad enough. It ain’t right, how we’ve done things. Your mother would’ve killed me and run me off if—”
“Ma died when Charlotte was twenty-one. I would’ve killed you if you’d touched her then.” He kept an unmoving stare on Hobbs.
Hobbs ducked his head again. “There’s no baby yet, but Charlotte wants one. I hope you know how I feel about her. I feel like it’s all worth it. Every day of my life—even the bad ones—has been worth it to get to this point. I’ve known her forever. We can do all right together. We’ve talked about it enough.”
The hope in his eyes was fresh and killing. He believed in all of it—the love, the drowsy, paired talk, the perfection of family. Hobbs had pure faith, and he, Adams, no longer had any capacity for that word. And that’s what Hobbs really wanted from him, wasn’t it? His faith. The diamond ring was just a pretense.
“Listen to me, C.D. You’re the best man I know.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you’d seen—”
“Be quiet, damn it. Hear me out.” And he banged his own crescent wrench against the silo until it rang out like a giant bell. “I’m gonna say what I’m gonna say. You can be with Charlotte. You can do what you want, get married, settle down, and I won’t stand in your way. But you got to let me say a few things about my crazy god damn sister. She’s been talking plenty about me.”
Hobbs pawed at the mismatched skin of his neck, then covered it with a rumpled glove. His breathing was quick and shallow as if he was trying not to cry. “It’s not like that,” he said. “I wouldn’t let nothing I do get between you and Charlotte.”
“It is like that,” Adams said, leaning into his vehemence, “but it’s not your fault or mine. You remember that. Charlotte wants to rule the roost. She likes to be the boss, and that means taking me down a notch or two. She wants to run things. I want to make sure you understand what’s going on. Do you? Can we agree on that much right now?”
But Hobbs agreed to nothing. In fact, he stopped talking altogether, and when they finished their work at the silo, he signed to Adams that he’d rather walk back to the house with the collie, Sol, than share a ride in the truck. That suited Adams just fine. Watching Hobbs under the feeble autumn sun, seeing him hitch at the loose waist of his jeans made Adams want to hit something. He wanted to throw a punch. Tear something apart. How had he let himself be played for such an idiot? Why couldn’t his sister keep her god damn selfishness to her self?
Charlotte confronted him before he got inside the house. She seemed to have guessed what had happened at the silo, and she trembled with anger, her eyes violet and damp with the temper she never revealed to Hobbs. “You told him to end it, didn’t you?” she shouted. “You told him to dump me without knowing it wouldn’t work.”
Adams found himself watching the full maneuver of her lips. “He asked me about engagement rings.”
She went on as if she hadn’t heard him. “It’s because you think he isn’t grateful. You think he should be grateful and bow down in front of you every day because of everything you’ve done for him, and now he doesn’t do that.”
“I don’t think anybody should bow down to anybody else, Charlotte. C.D. needs to make sure he takes care of himself. I’m trying to do that. Some things are too much for him to handle.”
“No, we’re too much for you to handle. That’s the real problem.”
“Maybe. That could be part of what’s under my skin. I’m sure you’d like me out of the mix so you can speed on through your love.”
She was in jeans and wool socks with a new chambray shirt she’d bought for Hobbs knotted around her waist. Her hair was up in red-gold braids, which meant she planned to take one of the horses out for a ride. “I still own a third of this ranch, Fremont. C.D. and I can take it away from you whenever we want.”
“I don’t think so. You’d need Buren’s help to do that, and Buren is rarely inclined to help anybody. Besides, none of this is about taking anything away from me. Not if you really think about it.” He felt a blatant calm begin to take root in his body. It warmed him from head to heel. “Did C.D. really talk about Korea? Did he tell you about going cuckoo over there?”
His words froze her solid, just as he’d thought they would. His sister, he told himself, was a storm to be weathered. Outlasting her would take only resolve and a willingness to be battered.
“You were too young to know how bad the fighting was. He probably saved my life—that’s true. I’ll never forget it. But he wasn’t much better than a slobbering baby for a long time after, and not the kind of baby you seem to crave, either. It comes back on him now and again. It’s what he has to live with. You’d have to live with it, too.”
“You can’t scare me with that kind of talk.” She bent over him from the height of the porch, scolding him with bared teeth and looking for all the world like a marmot defending its cold castle of rocks.
“I won’t have to scare you. You’ll see it soon enough. Especially after I start asking questions like, ‘How many years can you stand to be this far from California?’”
He lifted his face, waiting for the hot string of curses to come. But Charlotte whisked herself into the house faster than he had imagined she could, her face blotchy and disarrayed. Had he really frightened her? He hoped to hell he had.
He went to his truck and reached under the seat for a shiny, unopened bottle of vodka. He cracked the seal on the bottle and drove to the trailer near Baggs and stayed all afternoon with the woman who lived there. He paid double her usual fee, though it took all of her backseat skill to rouse him even once. He emerged at twilight into a gloomy silence that was broken only by the harsh commands of a flock of migrating geese. The high, frail arrow of birds passed over him and over the trailer whose windows were becoming mirrored with the evening’s frost. He wished he had a shotgun. He wished he could disrupt the loud certainty of those birds. Instead, he could only watch them rise and fade into the approaching night like the rising and fading of windborne ash.
It was Buren who developed a scheme to break the logjam. But Adams knew he was using Buren’s deviousness for his own reasons. Because he was tired of the tension and the lack of sleep. Because he was tired of fighting about the alcohol and, now, the smell of marijuana that lingered in the machine shed in the mornings. Because Hobbs was red-eyed and losing weight and spending more and more time looking over his burned shoulder for things nobody else could see. Adams knew he had been wrong to challenge his sister’s fortitude. He had only inspired Charlotte to dig in her heels. There was no way she was going to leave the Trumpet Bell until the choice was hers to make. But he didn’t believe she really wanted to be a ranch wife. She just wanted to prove her independence. According to Buren, that meant C.D. Hobbs was the one they would have to pry loose first.
“Separation is the key,” Buren said, from his office in Cheyenne. “The supposed mutual love will vanish like smoke once they are apart.” Adams imagined his brother mincing out a gesture of separation with his uncallused hands. “I like your idea of getting him some medical help before he goes completely around the bend. Why don’t we arrange that? I could come over for a few days. We could work out the details. All it will take is clever timing and a dose of your killer marine instinct.”
“Please don’t talk about our time in uniform like that.” Adams’s words shot
away from him before he could cleanse them of doubt, but he didn’t care. Buren was like an epidemic with his attitudes. Buren lived to spread himself into every corner of other people’s lives.
“Rationing the guilt already, are we?”
“You go to hell.”
“That’s just what I mean,” Buren mused. “You’re right on the brink, little brother. Keep yourself there.”
So they did it like this on a Saturday in mid-October when the moon was a fish scale stranded in the lake of the sky. Adams acquired some dynamite and blasting caps in order to blow out a beaver dam on Ram Horn Creek. The dam wasn’t blocking much water. It would be a simple job, which was why Adams told Omero he could take the day off to visit his sick sister up in Hanna. Hobbs could help. Omero looked away when Adams said that. Omero knew it wasn’t possible to work with Hobbs and explosives. Hobbs couldn’t tolerate the noise.
Buren asked Hobbs to take a slow walk along the creek so they could discuss insurance and licenses, the things a lawyer understands when it comes to marriage. The collies, Nan and Sol, accompanied them, casting ahead at great distances into the nubbed fabric of greasewood and sage. The brothers didn’t even arrange a signal. Adams had buried two charges at the base of the dam. He waited until he heard the sermonizing of Buren’s voice, then he lit the green twist of fuses. Buren would later recall the uncolored fire of the falling sun and the complete absence of wind. “Everything was at a pause,” he told Adams, “just waiting for you.”
Swish, boom. Swish, boom. The explosions sounded so much like mortar fire that Adams himself went clammy with sweat. The two geysers of sound were followed by a dark rain of willow twigs and mud. Adams had sheltered himself behind some deadfall timber. He emerged when he heard what he thought was a genial shout from his brother. Sure enough, Buren and Hobbs were a safe distance from the blast site. They looked startled, but not injured. Yet once Hobbs saw his old gun-crew leader scuttle from the shadows, Adams’s arms and legs slick with mud, his body in a military charge, he swung all the way back on his pendulum. He fell to his knees and began to tear at one of his eyeballs with both hands. He screamed that the eye was burning into his brain like a brand.
They had to restrain him. They had to tie his hands and feet together with their belts. Buren seemed hypnotized by the symphonic madness that seized Hobbs, the way the famously reticent Hobbs shrieked about needing the bright lights turned off, needing to know. Adams was not hypnotized. The suffering scalded him just as it had twenty-five years before. He had trouble catching his breath. His ears drummed with his pulse. What the hell had he done? At Chosin, he had cradled Hobbs in his arms as a bloody-fisted corpsman stuck him with one last ampule of morphine. He’d fought, with Spoonhauer and the few men from Easy Company who hadn’t died or disappeared, for ten more snow-blind days to keep from falling into the hands of the Chinese. And for what? So he and Hobbs could relive that past hell moment when their souls had first gone to cinder? He pinned Hobbs’s head between his muddy knees to keep him from pounding it to pulp.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s going to be okay.” But it wasn’t okay. His hands stank from handling the dynamite, from pressing the detonating caps into its cake-like flesh. The smell of his hands made him want to vomit.
No, howled Hobbs. No no nobody live no.
Buren’s face looked as dented as a water pail. “Well, I never…. This is … dramatic. What do we do?”
“It’s what we should have done in the first place,” Adams croaked as Hobbs’s lower legs wriggled against the ground like a smashed fly’s. “Jesus. Don’t you see it? We’re the real cowards here. I swear to god we are. Honest men, real men, would have killed him straight out.”
Charlotte didn’t allow for the high arcing of grief. She went right to the marrow of blame, whole years of it. They couldn’t quiet Hobbs enough to drive him to the hospital in Rawlins, so Charlotte saw all too well what they’d wrought after they hauled Hobbs to the ranch yard in the back of Adams’s truck where they waited for the volunteer ambulance from Baggs.
“He’ll be fine,” Buren told her after she rushed from the house. “There was a little accident, but there aren’t any wounds. He just needs to be tranquilized.” Charlotte scrambled into the truck bed where Adams was still holding Hobbs’s head in his lap. Hobbs’s bound legs struggled to run, and the veins in his neck were bruise-colored from the pressure of the terror in his blood. The open eye was maybe the worst. It rolled cloudy and blind like the eye of a wild horse Adams had once found trapped in barbed wire near Mexican Flats. The horse had been tangled in the wire for days. The fly eggs in its torn hide had cycled into feeding maggots.
“I heard an explosion.” There was a careful query in Charlotte’s voice. “Did a charge go off early?”
But Adams had no more lies to seal over his lips. He took the dish towel his sister held in her hands and tried to soak up the urine that stained the front of Hobbs’s jeans.
“It was a little accident,” Buren repeated.
“Nothing about you has ever been an accident,” she sneered. And as the realization of how far gone Hobbs was began to sink in, Charlotte began to curse them both. She screamed at Buren about impotence and his insipid worship of money. She called him a faggot and a foul, Nixon-loving soul. But Adams was the one she struck, lashing at his unaverted face with the palm of her hand again and again while he knelt over the trembling Hobbs.
“You’re afraid of everything that matters,” she spit. “I can’t believe it. I’d believe anything of that turd,” she said, meaning Buren, “but you, there are a million ways you could have been better. You’re not even normal anymore, Fremont. You’re afraid of love—mine and everybody else’s. You’re afraid of what C.D. and I might build out here on your Dead Sea of nothing. You hate women and happiness and every damn thing that’s different from you.” She paused, her eyes and nose streaming with tears and snot, her breathing throttled by deep, vibrating sobs. Her quarantined eyes focused on his face, and she struck him again, more bone than palm this time. He wanted to grab her small, freckled hand and hold it safe in his own like he’d once held the small, panicked sparrows that fell from their nests among the willows by the creek. But he didn’t do it. Charlotte was punishment. C.D. Hobbs was not the only test he’d failed.
When the ambulance arrived, a paramedic shot up Hobbs with a sedative. Buren told the paramedic, without interruption, about Hobbs’s mental history and made the suggestion that he be bound over to the veterans hospital in Salt Lake once the doctors in Rawlins got him stable. Adams said only that he would follow the ambulance in his own truck. Charlotte, to his surprise, declined to make the journey even in the ambulance. When Adams returned to the Trumpet Bell at two in the morning he found Buren trying to read a book in the parlor. The rims of Buren’s eyes were red and pooled with self-pity. He was also weak-kneed from borrowed vodka. Charlotte, he said, was gone. She’d taken her sea bag out the door before sunset. She claimed she’d called a man from Wamsutter to come get her, and Buren could confirm that she had climbed into somebody’s covered pickup not long after she reached the end of the driveway. He had watched her with binoculars. She’d left them both a message, Buren said. Adams asked to hear it.
“She says she’s off to sow ruin in the world since that’s all she’s ever learned from her brothers.” Buren was still wearing the binoculars. He smeared at the lenses with his fingers. “She says we’ve left her with nothing but bad memories and the ability to spread her legs.”
Adams stared at his older brother who sat in the dim aura of a shaded lamp. Buren had somehow managed to shower and shave before his communion with the vodka. The effort struck Adams as despicable.
“Is there a baby?” Adams asked.
“She didn’t say.” Buren sucked on his pickled lips in a way that made him look fussy and old. “We may never know. She said she was remaking our mother’s wedding dress. She took the fabric with her. The one thing we can state with certainty is that those tw
o were long on fantasy and hope.”
“And we’re not?” Adams heaved the question at his brother like it was a heavy piece of furniture. “We don’t live that way anymore? Is she right? Is Charlotte god damn right?”
Buren looked at him with a sliver left to each drunken eye. “I think you should select an answer to those questions you can live with, Fremont. I have. I don’t expect you and I will imitate each other’s mistakes quite this way again.”
Trumpet Bell Land & Sheep Company
Baggs, Wyoming
1995
HOBBS SPENT HOURS SNIPPING METAL AT HIS WORKBENCH. This devotion spooked Adams. He thought it might be better for them both if they focused on less eccentric behaviors, so he was in the house, trying to register them for a weed-and-seed seminar, when the phone rang. The call was from a woman who said she was with the veterans post in Rawlins. She called herself Sugar. Adams had never heard of her. The VFW had stopped calling him years ago because he’d asked them to leave him out of things. When the woman asked for Hobbs, Adams was startled. He still thought of Hobbs as a man who rarely left footprints in the world. But he took a message. He gave the message to Hobbs, who didn’t look surprised even though he never got phone calls.
“W-we could go to town on Tuesday,” Hobbs said. “Get up there. Have some lunch.”
“We could. But I don’t go to the post. The boys out of Vietnam talk too much.”
“Maybe I could borrow the F-f-ford,” Hobbs said, referring to the only vehicle they had that was dependable enough to make the trip. “If you thought that was a option.”