by Alyson Hagy
It occurred to Adams that a change of scenery might be just the ticket. A trip to Rawlins and exposure to other people, regular people, might be better than chores when it came to taking Hobbs’s mind off his little doll workshop. He said, “It’s something to think about. I’d be willing to chauffeur you to the VFW for all the sliced roast beef and gossip you can stand. But I won’t come in. I’ll find my own way to waste time.”
Tuesday morning broke with clouds as low as the barn roof. Adams could feel the knife edge of a hovering cold front in his knees. But the drive north on the two-lane to Creston Junction was uneventful. Kerchiefs of snow wrapped themselves around the truck and turned the interior blue with shadow, but the visibility stayed good. On the interstate, they passed several semis that had been blown over on their sides by high wind the night before. They didn’t worry. The pavement was clear. Even an eighty-mile-an-hour gust wasn’t going to roll the heavy Ford.
The city of Rawlins looked hunkered down to Adams. Its plowed streets were the same gravel beige color as the surrounding hills. He could remember when Rawlins felt striving and expectant, when it was more than enough town for him and everybody he knew. These days Rawlins was more about hanging on than striving.
“Sure you won’t come in?” Hobbs asked as Adams swung onto Cedar Street.
“Not in a million, buddy. You have a good time.”
Hobbs stepped out of the heated cab into the nail taps of fresh, hard sleet. The way he hefted his shoulders into the weather gave Adams a jolt. Why was his friend so energized by the prospect of eating lunch in a windowless, sauerkraut-smelling hall with a bunch of strangers? Surely Hobbs wasn’t going to the post to drink. Drinking was easy there, and cheap, and there was always company. He cursed himself for not considering the possibility earlier. How stupid could he be? It would be a hell of a time for them both if Hobbs slipped into that tunnel.
He lit a cigarette and mulled over his options. He could follow Hobbs like a mother hen. He could park across from the VFW and pretend to keep an eye on things. He could go for his own hot lunch at Rose’s, where the Mexican food was worth the hour drive from home. Or he could give Hobbs some rope and head to the lumberyard and buy the supplies he needed to replace the kitchen floor. The old floor, with its buckled corners and cigarette burns, had become a recent source of embarrassment to him. Despite the weird moments, Hobbs’s reappearance on the ranch was changing how he saw the things in his life and the way he lived among them. He’d been squatting in the cave of his bachelorhood for too long. It was time to crawl out of that cave. Young Sam Gunderson had laid the current kitchen linoleum twenty years before as part of a barter deal for hay. Replacing it was just the sort of thing he and C.D. should do.
The do-it-yourself center at the lumberyard, which heralded budget optimism at every turn, was the sort of place he hated. But it had what he needed—backing paper, adhesive, scrapers, trowels, and too many patterns of vinyl flooring to choose from. He selected a pattern that was lighter and simpler than the corn-colored mosaic Sam Gunderson had installed. He didn’t ask many questions, and he didn’t leave much room for the sales clerk, an acned young man with fox-red hair, to offer advice, though he thanked him for his help as they loaded his purchases into the open bed of the Ford. He drove to the parking lot of the VFW with the truck’s exhaust rising and twitching behind him like the tail of an impatient animal. He was late.
Hobbs was waiting for him in the recessed door of the veterans post. His hands were jammed into the pockets of his caramel jacket, and he was stomping his work boots to keep his feet warm. There was a woman with him, undoubtedly the so-called Sugar. Sugar, Adams soon found out, had lost a brother in Vietnam and was married to a guy who’d done twenty solid years in the navy. She organized social events for the post. Hobbs started talking about her as soon as he got into the truck. He talked while Adams scrutinized the woman through the windshield. Sugar, sometimes called Shug, was small and stubbornly underdressed in Wranglers and a denim jacket embroidered with a POW/MIA flag. Her face, what he could see of it, was lived in but not unattractive. She had short, black, overdyed hair, and he could track the sashay of her eyes even from a distance. Adams guessed she was a good dancer, the kind he’d spun in and out of his arms many times in the past. She wore lots of rings on her fingers. Her lipstick was as orange as a highway flare. For a moment, Adams was sure he knew Sugar from somewhere—she was that familiar. When she lifted both hands to wave good-bye to Hobbs, he knew he recognized her only as a kind of ghost. It had been that long since he’d looked at a woman with interest. The realization made him laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Hobbs asked.
“That gal,” Adams said. “Looks like she’s got voltage.”
“She’s m-married,” Hobbs said.
“’Course she’s married, that’s part of what makes it funny. I’m finally old enough to enjoy being reminded I’m a fool.”
“You want me to call her over here?”
“No. She looks as good as she ever will from this distance. I’m glad she’s friendly.”
“You’d like her. I hadn’t thought about it, b-but you would. I d-do.”
“I know,” Adams said, and he kept some of the resonance of his remark to himself, for himself.
They made good time on the highway as part of a trickle of vehicles hoping to reach the desert promise of Nevada or California despite the lousy forecast. The horizon was a spume of cloud the color of burning oil. Adams reckoned it had been more than five years since he’d been farther west than Salt Lake City, though he felt no regret about that fact. Hobbs asked him what was loaded in the back of the truck, and he told him.
“I might need some help on the floor job. It’s straight grunt work, but the scraping and measuring will make me more of a S.O.B. than usual.”
“I been a grunt.”
“Yeah, you have, but you’re top hand now, C.D. I mean it. This is my own kind of house thing. I’ve neglected that house. You don’t have to pitch in.”
Hobbs dropped his chin toward his chest.
“I don’t mean to leave you out, if you’re willing,” Adams continued. “I’d be lying if I said I couldn’t use you.”
Hobbs sat bolt upright in his seat, as if he’d been called to attention. The prospect of a shared project pleased him. He asked if Adams wanted to hear about the meeting at the post, and Adams said he did as long as the telling was worth a cigarette. Adams looped the truck off the interstate at the Baggs exit without much reduction in speed, driving one-handed the way they’d both learned from Uncle Gene. Hobbs lit them Winstons, not his regular brand.
“It was nice,” Hobbs said. “Hot f-food, plenty of that. Beef—like you said—and beans and salad. You could have white b-bread or brown. No beer. That’s a lunch rule they’ve just started. I met two guys who guard at the prison. They served in th-that Desert Storm.”
“See anybody you know?” Adams didn’t want to hear about some dogface’s vacation in the Gulf.
“Ruth Colbert’s brother. Remember how he b-broke his leg in the wild-horse race at county fair? He d-don’t even have a limp.” Hobbs paused, tugged his pants down over his boot tops. “The Nam guys is getting old. That’s part of what Shug wants to t-talk to me about, if I had advice.”
“She think you were Vietnam?” Most of the gray hair Hobbs had was crowded at his temples. And people never remembered Korea. The Korean War was more forgotten than the Vietnam one they’d lost.
“Naw. I told her I was full-scale senior citizen. She’s only fifty-three.”
“Whoa. You got that far with her?”
Hobbs lathed up a grin. “Going to t-town brings out the devil in you, Fremont.”
“And that ain’t news, is it?”
“Guess not,” Hobbs said, shaking his head. “N-not if we count all the past times.” Then he got quiet like he was about to summon up a longer speech.
“Don’t even think it,” Adams said. “I told you I don’t go to the post, a
nd I don’t. Drive to town whenever you want. You can take this truck. Say howdy to Sugar and all the rest. But I’m not in the mix. If you bother me about it again, I’ll ask a question you don’t want to answer.”
“What’s that?” Hobbs swung his head in Adams’s direction. His eyes had a filmy, condensed look.
Adams thought of winged spirits and spaceships, but he suddenly couldn’t bring himself to take his own bait. It seemed wrong to bring up the stories Hobbs was trying to retell with his little figurines. The whole point of going to Rawlins was to ease the pressure of those stories. “Well, for instance, just for speculation, I could ask for a complete list of all the ladies in your life.”
Hobbs clamped his lips and stared at the wet end of his half-smoked cigarette. He didn’t seem to know whether Adams’s comment was meant to be funny or mean. Adams didn’t know, either. He’d dodged one pit only to fall into another.
They didn’t speak for nearly twenty miles. Hobbs eventually recovered enough to count the steers he could see in the rubbed-out pastures owned by the absentee Coloradan who’d bought the Barnheisel spread after Steve cashed out to live with his daughter in Casper. The black fang of Battle Mountain came into view to the south, drawing them over the Continental Divide and into the open mouth of home. Adams welcomed the sight of his ice-stitched pastures and the rusty stanchion of Bell Butte. He felt bad about what he’d said to Hobbs. He hadn’t meant to pour cold water on the man’s enthusiasms; he just wanted Hobbs to stay connected to the real world. He wondered again if the VFW might be a bad idea. What if Sugar or somebody sprayed with the same kind of sweet perfume asked Hobbs the wrong kind of questions about his war?
When they got back to the Trumpet Bell, Hobbs went onto the porch to release the dogs from the mudroom where Adams had allowed them to stay because of the cold. The young dogs, Zeke and Dan, bolted from the house and leaped into the truck bed, their sinewy, thick-furred bodies taut with frustration because they’d been left behind. Rain ambled onto the porch and stretched his dappled legs in a slash of sunlight before he joined in a long moment of communion with Hobbs.
As Adams carried his smaller purchases into the house, he smelled the hot salt smell of dog urine. It came from the corner of the mudroom where he’d left the dogs a pair of old blankets. Surely the piss came from Rain, and surely it was a bad sign. A dog that couldn’t control himself was a dog you had to take behind the barn and shoot. The idea of losing Rain rifled across Adams’s heart. He dreaded that day. Rain had been with him a long time. But it was the way of this country to kill a creature when it could no longer take care of itself.
They tore up the old kitchen floor and hauled the pieces to the trash pit behind the barn. They scraped at the tarlike adhesive, and while they were doing that, Adams decided to re-floor the mudroom as well. He suspected he was rolling down a steep slope because a new floor would make the kitchen cabinets look dingy, and if they repainted the cabinets, the walls and battered gas stove would look like shit. But what the hell? He and Hobbs needed the challenge. He reminded himself of that.
Hobbs did a meticulous job measuring sections of new floor with a T square and pencil. He made himself a kind of bible-school necklace from knotted fishing line and lead sinkers, and he liked to wear the long strands of the necklace even though it sometimes got in his way as they worked. He seemed mostly calm and unprophetic, though he did talk to himself quite a bit. The conversations were animated and, in Hobbs’s mind, two-sided.
“He likes what we’re doing,” he said to Adams after they glued down the first shiny square of linoleum.
“What? Who?”
“You know. H-him.” Hobbs glanced up at the ceiling. “He approves of everything you do.”
Adams decided to play along. “Good. That satisfies me. I could use some approval.”
Hobbs nodded. “I know.”
“Give him my thanks, will you?” Adams pressed his hands onto the new piece of flooring to make sure it was set.
Hobbs nodded again. “I already have.”
Hobbs had stopped manufacturing his little people. This was a relief to Adams. The workbench looked the same each morning—dusty, half populated, on hiatus. He peered out his uncurtained kitchen windows into a depthless blue sky, and he felt something akin to hope. The air was varnished with the sheer and brittle light he’d known all his life, a promised heat that once again awakened desires he’d learned to lift out of himself and examine. He thought he understood brittleness now, how a man could crack and piece himself back together. There were ways to blend permanence and pain—he truly believed that.
Late one afternoon, when he scraped his knuckles working under the toe kick of the cabinets, Adams glimpsed an old memory that hurdled itself away from him like a startled pheasant. The memory came into focus as he sucked on the raw ooze of his own skin, tasting salt. Something to do with a pair of lambs and an overhang of scrub juniper near Mount Zirkel. Something almost forgotten. He had yanked the twin lambs to safety that day as their sag-bellied mother bawled from the top of the cliff. He was lucky he hadn’t dropped them or dislocated their shoulders. It was a maneuver that cost him the skin on the back of his hands. He was thirteen, and it was the last time he left summer camp without his gloves. Old Etchepare hadn’t bothered to praise him or tell him he was stupid as they sat together next to the cook’s tent. Adams soaked his hands in a stew pot of soapy water to get the sting out of them, and the boss herder never spoke. Old Etch didn’t believe judgment came with words.
“There is this one thing with the sheep,” Old Etch told him. It was later in both their lives, Adams back from his war, Old Etchepare carrying a tumor in his gut that rode in front of him like an unborn child. “A man who move the band, he go out in the world like you know. He walk, see a thing around him here and around him there.” Etch spread his gnarled fingers. “Man who beds sheep at end of the day, the world come to that man. Sometime, he find what other ones never wait for.”
On the third afternoon of floor work, Adams drove down to Baggs to buy vitamins for the horses. The stink of vinyl and adhesive had gotten to him, making his head feel empty and light. He wanted a break. He left Hobbs sharpening the teeth of the mower blade on the grinder in the shed. Baggs was the same as ever—good for postage stamps and a paint-stripping cup of coffee. When he drove back into the ranch yard, the collies, Dan and Zeke, streaked right for him. He saw the porch door slam itself against the blistered gray siding of the house. The dogs shouldn’t have been indoors. They kept their heads low and obedient as he greeted them. Strangely, their flanks were trembling. Inside, Adams found Hobbs sitting on the bright new kitchen floor, his belly and thighs ribboned with blood. Rain was huddled against him.
“You,” Hobbs gasped, the whites of his eyes huge and skittish, “you didn’t want dogs in here.”
Adams chose the slow approach because he knew something about the scene was very bad. He set the jar of vitamins on the countertop and closed the door between the mudroom and kitchen, damming the icy flow of air. He could see the fog of his breath, and the rising breath of Hobbs and the panting Rain. When he first approached Hobbs, Rain growled deep in his throat and showed his teeth, but Adams put a stop to that with a quiet word. Hobbs had both hands cradled against his gut. Adams could see blood that was both dry and wet.
“How bad is it? You lose a finger on the mower?”
“N … no.”
Adams didn’t like the fish belly color of Hobbs’s face or the way he couldn’t seem to fill his lungs. He wondered about a heart attack. “Let me see.”
Hobbs lifted his left arm and rotated it from front to back as if it was on a skewer.
The damage ran from the center of the palm up toward the elbow. Above the wrist was a dark line of exposed meat shaped like a hook. If arteries had been cut, Adams couldn’t see the pulsing. One of the curved linoleum knives was on the floor near the refrigerator. It was smeared with blood that had turned thick and brown in the cold.
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��Try … try to help. Then … h-he came so fast … and Rain goes….” The words were short and shallow. Panicked.
“Slow yourself down. We don’t got a train to catch. Does it hurt much?”
Hobbs nodded. Portions of the cut were deep, but it wasn’t going to kill anybody, so Adams stayed with his worry about Hobbs’s heart.
“I want to wrap it in something clean, take you to town to see the doc.”
Hobbs’s left leg went rigid. The other leg flexed as if something was snaking inside it. Adams knelt closer, touching Hobbs’s elbow with both hands, feeling how cold his skin was against Hobbs’s. “I don’t mean a hospital, C.D., not like that. Just stitches and a antibiotic.”
“You do it.” The blued eyes rolled upward in their sockets, spooked and unforgiving at the same time. Adams had to look away.
“Oh, hell. Don’t make me—” But what could he promise that Hobbs would believe when it came to doctors? He’d burned that damn bridge a long time ago. “What were you doing, C.D.? You didn’t have to work in here without me. We’re not in a hurry, and you—”
“P-please.”
“Jesus, then. Jesus Christ. Can you move your fingers, all five of them, because if you can’t move your fingers, I’m not touching you.” He knew he’d turned the corner as soon as he opened his mouth. He couldn’t say exactly what had taken him around the turn, but it was happening. He was going to do whatever it took to keep Hobbs from going off the deep end. He held Hobbs’s arm at the bicep and watched the flat, glistening sheath of a tendon slide under the gap of the wound. It reminded him of a ewe he’d once found in Lame Jack Gulch. Coyotes had ripped at her right hind Achilles until you could see exactly how it worked.
Hobbs slumped against the kitchen wall. He appeared exhausted. And grateful. There was dried spit at the corners of his mouth. “I got to get the kit from the barn,” Adams said. “You be all right for a minute?”
Hobbs gave half a nod. His eyelids were closed, but Adams could see that his eyes were moving left, then right, as if they were tracking something small and slow in the distance. “Is there anything else going on, C.D? Does your chest hurt? Your head? Did you see something that made you….” He paused to lick at his lips. “Shit, did you cut yourself without meaning to? I don’t want to make a mistake here.”