by Alyson Hagy
“At C.D.’s request?”
“Much as he ever makes one,” Adams fibbed again. He told Buren a little about the kitchen repairs and nothing about the cut on Hobbs’s arm.
“Well. Yes. Do you know the myth of Tantalus? Perhaps C.D. has—”
“Shut up, Buren. I know you’ve been into the whiskey deep, that’s what I know. Name a day you’ll come out here and take a look at the ranch you still partly own so I can get the hell off the phone.”
“Ghosts,” Buren said.
Adams waited for the rest of a pronouncement that didn’t come. After a delay feather-dusted by music, he gave Buren a nudge. “You might want to fix yourself something with caffeine.”
“The reason C.D. is asking for me,” Buren said. “It’s always about phantoms with him, ghosts alive and dead. We know how he’s coping with the dead ones. They’re having a gala in your tractor shed. But the living….”
“Just name a day, Buren. Or call me back when you’re able.”
“… afraid he’ll see her. Charlotte.”
Adams felt the bull’s-eye strike under the shield of his sternum. He knew all too well which one of them was most afraid of his ghosts. “He’s already seen her,” he blurted. “Before he showed up here.”
The first noise he could distinguish sounded like the thin screaking of a wire against glass. He couldn’t imagine how his brother was making that noise.
“Did you hear me, Buren?” Adams couldn’t contain his shout.
“Yes. But no. He didn’t see Charlotte.” Buren cleared his throat. “Listen to me—he did not see her. It’s all part of the disintegration.”
“I believe him.”
“And you want me to come out there to celebrate that fact? Take a good look at yourself, Fremont. You’re calling me for assistance. Again. You’re asking for support because you know C.D. is pathetic and unsalvageable and, just like last time, you can’t take it anymore.”
“That’s not true,” Adams said, trying to separate his anger from a sob. “I got a idea. We’ll fix you a nice ranch dinner with the steaks you bring. We’ll talk about a few easy things, and C.D. will see we’re nothing he can’t manage.”
“That’s not how it’ll go, and you know it.”
“A day, Buren. Just name a god damn day.”
But there was no answer except a kind of low hissing that seemed intended as laughter.
“Fine,” Adams said. “I’ll take that as a vote for Saturday. Make sure you’re here by six.”
Adams told Hobbs that Buren was driving out for a meal, nothing more. They used Saturday afternoon to clean the house. Hobbs polished the parlor windows as it began to snow, a feathery, unhurried snow that wasn’t likely to foul the roads. Adams stacked wood on the porch as tightly as he might stack stones for a wall, then he mopped the kitchen floor, which didn’t need to be mopped. The preparations didn’t keep him from being nervous. When they were finished, standing together on the bright, foreign-smelling vinyl in their wool socks, Hobbs asked to borrow a clean shirt. Adams took his best red chamois from a hanger in his closet and gave it to Hobbs, who slipped into his fleece-lined boots to go to the shed where he would bathe himself with the lukewarm water he stored in a thermos. The ranch yard was purple with shadows cast by the same low clouds that cast their silent seeds of snow. Hobbs’s trek left black prints in that snow, and he was followed by the dogs who trailed easily behind him, their noses lifted into the muffled quiet.
Buren was punctual, his Buick rocking and whirring its way to the lee side of the horse corral. It was where he always parked. Hobbs was sweeping the porch steps clear of snow for a second time, and he met Buren with a broom in his hands and a shy duck of his uncovered head. Buren wore a tweed jacket and a string tie yoked by a small oval of jade he’d received in appreciation for his years of government lawyering in Cheyenne. If he had boots or an overcoat, he left them in the Buick. Adams met Buren at the door and took from him the paper bags that held steaks and scotch whisky and what felt like an unnecessary bottle of wine. His brother needed a haircut, he could see that much. Rusty white hair wisped over Buren’s ears and the high collar of his jacket. But he looked sober enough in the eyes, and his handshake was professionally determined. Adams wondered what it took out of Buren for him to gain control over his sloppiness.
Adams had been frying mushrooms in a skillet, so he went back to it, telling Buren he was welcome to take his jacket off if he saw fit. The kitchen—indeed, the whole house—was as warm as an oven. Buren kept his jacket. He admired the new floor before he stepped onto it with his wet wingtip shoes. “This looks worthy of a wife,” he said, a statement of mock praise Adams managed to ignore.
Hobbs asked Buren if he wanted to sit in the parlor, and Buren said yes, so they left Adams to the cooking. Hobbs came back into the kitchen to pour Buren four fingers of scotch over ice. He fixed himself a glass of tap water. Adams unwrapped the thick steaks and seasoned them, trying to eavesdrop on the talk in the parlor. He hadn’t thought about what he’d do if the other two started a real conversation without him. Until the sight of the two drinking glasses—one for whisky, one for water—he hadn’t thought it might be a possibility.
“He cut it on the mower blade,” he shouted, scraping his spatula through the pool of butter in the skillet. “He says he don’t need a new tetanus.”
There was murmuring from the parlor followed by Buren’s legislative voice. “That’s what he told me, Fremont. Twice. Now we’re talking about a quarter-crack on the roan horse. I didn’t know you still had the roan horse. It’s a lively time you have out here.”
“Yeah,” Adams said. “You better believe it.”
He tried to stay out of it. He scooped the shrivel of mushrooms onto paper towels and wiped the skillet clean for the steaks. Then he heard laughter. Buren’s chuckle was as smooth and deep as their father’s. The noise that came from Hobbs was hee-hawing and split. Adams hoped they were making fun of him, trading insults about how bossy and frugal he was, but he knew something else was going on when he made out the name “Shug.” He strained his ears until he was certain Buren had asked Hobbs about women, baiting his way up that trail with a series of bad jokes. Buren would latch onto anything Hobbs had to say about a woman. His obnoxious, obsessive loneliness would see to that. And talk about Shug would lead to talk about Charlotte, Adams was sure of it. Buren was definitely looking for trouble.
Adams stepped into the parlor, his spatula held upright so that it dripped steak fat onto his sleeve. He stared at Buren, just stared at him, until he got a response. “C.D. tells me he’s joined the inveterate veterans bureaucracy in Rawlins. I asked if he was on a mission to convert you.”
“Sounds like I’m missing all the good stories,” Adams said. “I sure hate to do that. Could you hold them back until we eat?”
“He knows Sugar,” Hobbs said, his water glass resting carefully on both knees. “From his lawyer work. She’s told me how proud she is of the protesting she’s done in Cheyenne.”
Adams knew Buren had never heard of Sugar. He was just trying to ferret out information. Adams wanted to throw his brother out the door, but he badly needed him. That need—which he’d been sanding smooth since he got the idea to invite Buren to dinner—trussed itself tight across his shoulders. He wished to hell he’d been a good enough man to keep the friends he’d once had. Instead, he’d cut them out, ignored them, pretended he only needed himself to be a man. It was a bad fact that Buren was the only person he could turn to for help in this current mess.
They ate at the chrome-legged kitchen table that Hobbs had covered with a square of red-checked oilcloth. Buren went into lecture mode. He talked about his house in Baggs and how it suffered from widely spaced joists and rotting eaves. He talked about the time the three of them had herded sheep together in the mountains as replacements for Francisco who’d been taken in a hay truck to Fort Collins for an emergency operation on a hernia in his balls. It was Uncle Gene’s idea to send three b
oys to replace one invalid man. Buren had not been much help. He was impatient with the sheep and the dogs even though all he had to do was tend camp. The whole topic was designed to make Buren look bad, and it did. Hobbs laughed without caution when Buren recalled the morning he’d lost the entire string of pack animals in the fog.
“That damn mule went off the edge of the trail and took two others with her. Lucky for me my knots didn’t hold. It was the only time that son-of-a-bitch Basque ever touched me.” Buren smiled, but not with pleasure.
Adams remembered none of it as funny. He and C.D. had stood over the downed mule in a slick black gully of shale, one rifle between them, trying to decide how best to shoot her. Adams had done it, pressing the barrel hard between the mule’s frantic eyes. He made himself study the neat hole in her skull and smell the scorched smell of powder and mule hair before they left the carcass for the ravens and the bears. When Old Etch arrived in camp with the week’s supplies, he listened to what each boy had to say, then he beat Buren across the ass with his thick belt of Spanish leather until Buren’s insolent mouth was out of words. It was the last time Buren went into the mountains.
“Etch cared about mules,” Adams said. “Good ones were hard to replace.”
“That was his dream world, and he was welcome to it,” Buren said, his face heated pink by unexacted revenge. “He was just another of Gene’s pathetic projects.”
After his second drink and his T-bone steak, Buren told them about the book he was writing. He directed most of his commentary toward Hobbs who listened while Adams stacked dishes. The book was a narrative of the Laury family. It was based on a short, snobbish article Buren had published in a heritage-society magazine in the 1980s. He told them he needed to go to Scotland in order to finish the project. Maybe Ireland as well, if he could find the time. Adams thought about the throng of unfinished family stories he’d heard as a child, the agricultural mishaps and predictable scandals. These were what had attracted Buren’s gelid eye. Adams couldn’t make himself believe other people would be interested in those ancestral leftovers, but he hadn’t seen his poorly shaved brother this enthusiastic about a project since his failed attempt to resurrect the independent weekly newspaper in Baggs, an enterprise that had begun with exaggeration and ended with slander and a single, leaky mimeograph machine. Adams put a box of toothpicks on the wiped oilcloth and made fresh coffee as Buren regaled Hobbs with details of his archival research. Dull as shit, that’s what their talk had become. And dullness was the last visitor he’d expected.
Buren rose from the table after half a cup of coffee. The snow, which was accumulating in powdery drifts, gave him an excuse. Adams escorted his brother to the blanketed Buick, offering to sweep the car clean with the straw broom from the porch. As they faced each other under the humming disk of the yard light, which cast its planet rings over the barn and empty corrals, Adams realized that though they had looked nothing alike as boys, age was stamping them with more similarities than he cared to acknowledge. The bony height, the undermined proportions of their cheekbones, the Scots breadth of their hands—he recognized those features from his own bathroom mirror.
“I’ve never seen him better,” Buren said, his cinnamon-colored eyebrows beaded with moisture. “I’ll be honest—a trait I rarely favor even with family. I don’t believe in a cure for C.D.’s ailments. The state hospital is where he ought to be. Yet I can’t deny the efficacy of this.” He waved a hand over his jacketed shoulder, but Adams couldn’t tell if he was referring to the ranch or the dinner they’d just shared.
“You took a good poke at him, aiming the conversation toward women and Charlotte like that. That was a risk I don’t appreciate.”
“And you stepped right in like the protector you are, didn’t you? You’ve even made sure he’s had a chance to charm a new lady friend, that Sugar he talks about. I almost envy the man his fresh opportunities. But you don’t need to worry. I heard enough to convince myself that he hasn’t really spoken to Charlotte. I don’t ca—”
Adams interrupted. “I want some money.”
Buren slid his fingers under the flap of a tweed pocket, looking for cigarettes that weren’t there. He claimed he’d stopped smoking on President’s Day. “Don’t we all. Are you asking for my share of the property taxes? Early?”
“You need to listen to me,” Adams said. “I want serious money, like a loan without the bank slowdown and bullshit.”
“For what? You’ve already transformed the house into Ye Olde Comfort Home for Aged Gentlemen. I thought the plan was to put up your feet, admire the blank views.”
“Sheep,” Adams said, getting irritated. “I’ve given it a lot of thought since C.D. told me about seeing Charlotte. Maybe I was thinking about it even before then, I don’t know. But this ranch needs stock. I need stock. I got some help now. It’s time for me and the Trumpet Bell to get back into business.”
Buren shut his eyes for one extended moment. Adams found himself staring at the skin of his brother’s eyelids, which was slack and veined. Then Buren coughed into a phlegmy, knowing laugh, and he kept laughing for a long time as if the sound moving up and down his throat was a better drink than whisky. Adams cursed himself for rushing into his request. He should have gone slow and laid the groundwork. Instead, he’d given his brother a big chance to consider him ridiculous.
“Bless you for … for your thick-skinned innocence, Fremont. You maintain it well. I was sure you wanted me to orchestrate a way to pry C.D. out of here, but no, you have positive ideas. You still think you’re a landowner with chattel you can organize around you. You still think you’ve got some sort of family.” The cheerful scorn humiliated Adams who hadn’t realized until that very moment how much he really wanted the cash for a small herd of sheep and everything it might give him. “Money—the sinew of love as well as war. Is this supposed to salve my conscience about what happened with the dynamite and all the rest?”
Adams didn’t answer. His hands were laced tight around the polished wood of the broom handle.
“Our dear, departed uncle Gene Laury would cut your tendons like a fatted wether for such impulsive planning. Your fiscal track record is lousy. There’s not a bank in the Rockies that would lend you a thin dime.”
Adams tried not to look away.
“Money is the only thing I’ve ever had that you didn’t.” Buren dropped his voice until its pitch was slow and savage. The phlegm and humor were gone. “You got the ranch and the man-sized character that supposedly goes with it because most of the Stetson heads out here believe that one is absolutely linked to the other. You got the courage because courage is what our mother insisted it took for you to handle Korea, though I suspect you haven’t handled a thing about it. You got the love and devotion of our sister, and you treated her like scum, but who could blame you for that, she is an Adams, after all—a person a little too unfettered. You got the community respect, the halo of managing water rights, and you fiddled while Rome went dry because you never learned how to look beyond your own nose. Now, what you ought to do is step aside and let C.D.’s crooked nature run its course. But you can’t do it. You won’t. So, yes. I’m a lifelong student of tragedy. I’ll pay to see the final act.”
He kicked the snow off the toes of his wingtips as if it was the worst sort of dust. “Is ten thousand dollars enough for me to throw into the winter wind? It’s worth it to me—every penny—just to have you suggest that one of us believes in something beyond the purgatory of this place where we grew up.” Something like a chuckle came back into Buren’s mouth. “Grew up. That’s the wrong phrase for the Adams legacy. We have grown nothing. I suspect it’s a proper blessing that neither of us ever had children.”
He went straight to the barn. Buren, for all his manners and calculation, was a sack of pure shit. It took a while to clean up after a talk with Buren. He had asked his brother for one thing—it wasn’t like he’d gone to his knees in desperation—but Buren had still gotten his claws in. He had promised to tra
nsfer the money to Adams’s bank account even though, he said, they both knew money wasn’t really what Adams needed.
The horses were in their stalls, each covered with a quilted blanket. The sorrel was off her feet when Adams came in, but the old roan was awake and alert. He swung his whitened head over his stall door and waited, drawing long breaths through his nostrils. The roan’s eyes weren’t good, but he knew Adams as soon as he smelled him. The smell made him lift his head higher. Adams went into the tack room, moving through the dark by touch, and he took the heavy lid off the feed barrel and scooped up a measure of feed. He gave each horse a half scoop and stood between their narrow, straw-bedded stalls to listen to them eat. The sorrel stood up and downed the molasses-rinsed grain and cracked corn as fast as she could. She wasn’t an animal who savored much. The roan, who was older, and a descendant of fine Texas horses, ate slowly. The noises of his pleasure took some of the heat out of Adams’s frustrations. Horses were direct. He’d always liked that about them. The ones he’d loved the most, like the dun colt Jackson he’d trained with the dedication of a master sergeant after his return from Korea, were the ones that were the most predictable.
He could use some of that predictability right now.
Buren was wrong. There wasn’t a tin roof nailed over the top of his life. Hell yes, he was sixty-four years old and somewhat bad in the back and constantly plagued by arthritis in the feet he’d frozen in Korea. And there were other weaknesses, like how his belly was bulldogging the steak and scotch he’d had for dinner. Things didn’t go down easy like they once had. But whatever future he had was still going to be a future he chose—not one that C.D. Hobbs or Buren chose for him. The rest of his days weren’t going to be about sniffing the thin smoke of a purpose he’d given up somewhere along the line. He was going to put sheep back in his corrals. They might be merinos, the delicate boutique kind of animal he used to laugh about, but they would still be sheep. He understood their limits. He should never have given up on sheep in the first place. They were the only safe thing he had ever wanted.