Hell's Bottom, Colorado

by Laura Pritchett

  Billy’s loading his .22. “Yep. If she lasted till weaning time, she’d bring a few hundred bucks. But now she’s dying. Probably wandered too far from the windmill, trying to follow her mama. The cows went back to the water, and she couldn’t keep up. Maybe her mama will come back, maybe not. I’m sure, though, I’m sure she’s dying of thirst.”

  The calf bawls softly when he says that, like maybe she’s agreeing. Then she folds her front legs and lays down on the ground and stretches out on her side. Her little belly heaves up into the sun and her tail twitches. Some flies rise up for a second, then settle on her again. Now I can see the pebbles and dirt matted to the bloody hair on the base of each stub.

  She doesn’t move when Billy slides a bullet into the chamber. She just lies there breathing, even when Billy raises the rifle and points it right behind her ear.

  “You could get in a lot of trouble, Billy.”

  “Yeah,” he says and unlocks the safety.

  “Baxter knows she’s out here.”

  He just shrugs his shoulders at that, and I don’t want to be looking at him or his gun, so I look at her. The dirt in front of her pink nose springs into the air with each breath, her side heaves, an eyelid blinks slowly across a deep dark eye. She’s a silky, soft form surrounded by all this yucca and cactus and dry grass. We all wait, Billy and I holding our breath and watching these puffs of dirt rise from the earth beneath her nose.

  Billy lowers the gun. “I can’t.”

  Before I know it, I’m hitting him, hard. “You do it, you son of a bitch,” I hear myself yelling, and my fists are flying at him and Billy pushes me back and I fall into a yucca and scream as I scrape against needly barbs, and as I stand up the shot crashes out and the waves of sound splinter through me. Then everything’s silent. Even that meadowlark’s stopped singing.

  I don’t look at the calf’s face. But I stare at the ground beneath her nose. There’s blood streaming into it, dark and thick.

  We’re running toward our land, toward our trees. We fly alongside them and they scrape against our legs. Finally we stop and I’m trying to breathe, but I can’t, really, because I’m crying and tired from running so far. Billy sets the rifle on the ground, and he’s crying, too, but still he comes up and holds me. I press my forehead into his shirt and breathe in the warm air that smells like him. I want to stay like that for a long time, circled and protected by the arms of my brother, but all of a sudden, he jerks himself away. He raises his foot and stomps down on top of a tree, twists his foot and grinds the soft and brittle needles into dry ground. He reaches down and pulls at the tiny trunk. The tree stretches and then slowly gives way, followed by thin, curly roots pulling away from their home in the soil. Sandy grains of dirt sprinkle from their anchor and fall at our feet. The roots look like a bunch of tangled webs, and they’re already wilting in the sun.

  GRAYBLUE DAY

  JACK’S NERVOUS. HE PUTS in a plug of chew, rests his elbows on his knees and his chin on his hands, and looks down at his cowboy boots. He wore his good gray ropers today, with his black Wranglers and silver belt buckle. That’s how I can tell he’s tense—I’ve never seen him dress up like this, not even for our first date.

  This small park is surrounded by skyscrapers. In front of our bench is a water fountain, gurgling loud enough to compete with the traffic. The grass is cut low, the bushes are trimmed, and there are lines of marigolds shooting out in evenly spaced rows. I can appreciate this order; a grassy meadow with wildflowers and crooked paths would not do here. This city needs this park the way I need this city.

  The only thing cluttering the park up is a swarm of pigeons. Their soft gray-blue is nice, but there are too many, flapping their wings, strutting, pecking at the sidewalk.

  “We ain’t got nothing for you,” Jack says, looking at a few who have stepped close and cocked their heads. “Get gone.”

  This is what he says when he lets a cow out of the chute, or waves the horses into another pasture. “Get gone,” he’ll say, freeing a calf he’s just roped, or to the horse he’s just unsaddled. I imagine him leaning over me now and saying it to my stomach. “Get gone,” he’d whisper, running his fingers below my belly button.

  There’s an hour until our appointment. I told Jack we’d get here too early, and then we’d just have to sit around and get nervous. But he had objections: he didn’t know about parking, about rush hour, where the clinic was. The city, he said, was not his area of expertise.

  We climbed into his truck while the sun was still rising. We wanted a full day in the city, is what I told my parents. A full day to shop, see the sights, go to the zoo, walk through a park eating a hotdog from one of those stands. In this imaginary day, the hours fly by. But this hour is holding on to each second before letting it go.

  Jack spits. “Heard Marty Hibbs is selling out,” he says. “Gonna get rid of his pigs. I might offer him eighty cents a pound for a few. Start a little business of my own.”

  “He’s going to have an auction,” I say, even though Jack already knows this. “Mom and I are going to look for antiques.”

  “Winnie, antique tractors is all he’s likely to have.”

  “Maybe a dresser. Or a chest for my room.”

  Jack is not interested in dressers or chests, so he says, “Look at these folks.” He nods at the fast-walking people on the sidewalk across the park. They’re in business suits, mostly. No summer dresses, no jeans, no tanks and shorts here. I like watching the women’s feet, their shoes. I like looking at their hair. Short cuts, or long but pulled up. Mine suddenly feels silly. But I consider: back home, just a few hours from here, it’s not silly. Most every girl has long hair like mine, halfway down my back, pulled back with a silver barrette, and curled bangs. I realize I’m touching them now, and when I take my hand away my fingers feel sticky with hairspray.

  “Different world,” he says. He’s being generous. In another mood, he would not be so kind. “Idiots,” he’d say. “Don’t know oatmeal comes from oats. Couldn’t tell soybeans from alfalfa. Think hamburger just shows up in cellophane-wrapped chunks.” That sort of thing. But not today. Today he looks at them with a kindness in his eye. Maybe because he’s worn out from thinking about this thing. Or maybe because they’re the ones with the clinic. We can grow good alfalfa, but we don’t do certain medical procedures.

  Jack runs his palms over his black Wranglers, and I look at my soft sweatpants and blue flannel shirt. I was going to dress up—it seemed somehow that I should. But at the last minute my hand just reached out for these. They’re comfortable and soft and familiar.

  I pick a thread off the shirt and scratch my knees. Jack spits again and rubs his chin. We wait, staring out into this big city with light glinting off walls of glass and smooth granite stone, and then a small patch of red catches my eye. There, in the midst of all those pecking birds, is one that’s got a piece of red string caught around its legs. Cinnamon-flavored dental floss, is what it looks like, tangled around both legs with just a small length in between. The bird can walk, but only in tiny, shuffling hop-steps. The pigeon looks like a shackled prisoner, walking all awkward like that.

  I point and Jack grunts as he sees it, too. The pigeon is looking for bugs or crumbs right where the sidewalk meets grass. Each time it steps, it strains against the string, which is probably how the red tangle got so tightly wrapped in the first place. Occasionally it gets chased away by other birds and hobbles off, and sometimes pecks at its feet, flinging its head in the air. But I can see it’s no use. That bird is never going to unwind all that string. We watch it hop and flutter and struggle for what seems like a very long time.

  “Twenty minutes,” I say finally. “Maybe we should start walking.”

  Jack nods, but he doesn’t move. He spits his chew, leans back, and tilts his face toward the sun. “It’s noisy here.”

  There’s a plane overhead and an ambulance siren, the bellow of traffic, this sputtering fountain. He can’t think here, is what he means. There�
��s no wind, no meadowlark, no tractor engine.

  “Twenty minutes,” I say. I feel sick all of a sudden. Too much noise, too much color.

  Jack stands, so I stand, but he says, “Wait a minute,” and pushes me gently back down onto the bench.

  We can’t wait, I’m about to tell him. I’m getting too far along. It’s time to get gone. I think he’s about to face me, and we’ll have this conversation all over again, weighing our choices, trying to be certain, talking and hoping all our talk will reveal an answer that isn’t there. But instead Jack turns away from me and walks, real slow, up to that bird.

  The other pigeons shuffle or flutter away, making room for him in a lazy kind of way. The shackled bird hops out of the way along with the others. But Jack’s hand darts out at the last minute and catches it, right above the wings. I’ve seen him catch a chicken that way: slow, slow, and then one fast dart.

  He brings the bird back and holds it against his thigh with one hand while he leans to the side and reaches into his pocket for his knife with his other. He unfolds the small blade with his thumb, turns the bird on its back, and cuts the string between the bird’s legs. He unravels each side till he’s got two red tangles on his lap. The pigeon lies still under Jack’s hand, still except for its chest moving up and down and fast blinks of its deep dark eye.

  Jack tosses the bird into the air. The pigeon flutters down a few feet ahead of us and stands for a moment. It takes a few small steps, tilts to the side as if it might stumble, and then starts walking around, calm as can be.

  “Get gone,” I say. But I say it more to what’s just flooded into my mind: I wouldn’t have thought of saving that bird. Maybe I couldn’t have caught it, but I didn’t even try. Didn’t even think of trying. Blank, I am. Blank and cold and nothing, and that’s something to fear. My mind doesn’t have such things occur to it, much less see the options.

  Jack did, though. Jack saw and considered. So I grab on to his hand, the one that was just holding the bird, and I squeeze. If only I can hear from him one more time that this is right.

  “Look at that bird,” he says. “It’s walking around like normal, as if it’s already forgotten that trouble.”

  It’s true. The bird shows no sign that it’s stretching its legs for the first time in a long time. Already, it has returned to pecking for crumbs.

  “That was a nice thing you did, Jack,” I say. “Now nothing is holding it back.”

  To prove this to us, maybe, the pigeon lifts and flies away. We watch as it darts up and around the corner of a building made of glinting glass.

  “You ready?” There’s a tightness in Jack’s voice, one that tells me he’s not. He’d be content to go back home, to face it all.

  I’m still holding on to his hand, and I think of how fast that hand moved, charging out and covering that bird. I realize there wasn’t much consideration or deliberation after all. Just a quick act. Slow, slow, one fast dart—it’s the only way some things get done.

  RATTLESNAKE FIRE

  THE WILDFIRE TURNED UNEXPECTEDLY and in the opposite direction predicted. This left the ranchers up high with barely enough time to spraypaint their phone numbers on their horses. They cut fences, opened gates, and whooped the cattle and horses out, trying to direct them into the roads and creek beds that would guide them down the mountain. Stock trailers were loaded with the best belongings, and as men and women and children abandoned their ranches and drove away, they sent sparks of wishes into the air: that unbranded calves would stay with their mamas, that instinct would lead the animals down to safety, that nature would show some pity and preserve all that they had worked for.

  Those downslope, the ones who had more time, put out a call for help. This call was repeated on the radio and was what Ben heard instead of the usual morning farm report. He sat at his kitchen table waiting for his sister, Anita, to come out of the guest bedroom, which she might not do for a couple of hours, and listened to the plea for anyone with a stock trailer to meet at the school parking lot to help evacuate animals. As he stared into his coffee, he decided that he would not go.

  “What I’d like to see is a stream of stock trailers, one right after the other, climbing up that mountain pass,” the radio announcer said. “Every time I hear the national anthem, my heart jumps up and salutes. That’s how I’d feel to see such a sight. You know that feeling, I’m sure you do, so get out there and lend a helping hand. There’s an estimated one thousand head up there, so it’s gonna take nearly a hundred trips to get those animals out.”

  Ben sipped his coffee. He figured Eddie was on his way up there already. They’d spoken of the fire this morning over at the donut shop, shrugging off the most recent tally of how many structures were lost and wincing at the report that a cluster of cattle had been engulfed in flames.

  “I know whatcha mean,” the waitress had said to their response. “A cow worth a couple a hundred bucks is harder to take than all them million-dollar houses being burnt up, isn’t it?”

  You bet it is, they agreed. The livestock and wild game—well, that was a shame. So was the plight of the ranchers, with all that fence to rebuild, outbuildings and ranch homes and corrals—Jesus, all that work—as if ranching wasn’t hard enough. Also, they felt sorry for the hippies, the ones that lived up the canyon in small A-frames they built themselves to escape the rest of humankind, which was something Ben and Eddie could surely sympathize with. What they didn’t find hard to take was the loss of the glass-and-wood cabins cluttering up the mountainside for the rich folks’ weekends away from Denver. Ben wasn’t sorry to see those houses burnt to a crisp. Serves ’em right, he said, to which Eddie agreed, adding that those folks probably needed some trauma and heartbreak in what he imagined were their otherwise soft-hand lives. That’s what Eddie called folk like that, Soft-Hands.

  They weren’t naive enough to discount the fact that they felt sorrier for the people most like themselves—humans are apt to do that, is what Ben said to Eddie, who nodded and said, “Ain’t that the truth.” But no matter what they thought, he added, nature had more rights than people and their too-fancy homes—more rights than anybody, in fact—and it was good of her to give a reminder once in a while, to put humans in their place.

  Well, he wouldn’t go. Heck with it all, he thought, which was the same thing he’d been thinking a lot recently. He didn’t feel good, for one thing, and only in the last few months had it become clear that it’s nearly impossible to care about anything when the body aches. He knows that his aches are minor on the scale of human suffering, and yet they’re enough to make him feel drained. His stomach’s been bothering him, and not the little sort of tummyache the idiot doctor thinks he’s talking about, but the serious unbearable pain of a heavy weight lodged beneath his ribs.

  Anita thinks it’s cancer, and he’s relieved that his sister, at least, takes his complaints seriously—Renny and everyone else advise Turns, which makes him want to shake them by the neck. But it’s not cancer; he’s been checked for that. Just a failing of the stomach, a weakening of the muscle. He’s supposed to eat bland foods and sip at tea and forgo the alcohol. These are not changes he’s prepared to make, but he soon will in order to get some relief. He needs to remove the physical pain crushing him and claw himself out of this stupor.

  Ben pulled the morning paper and a pen toward him. In the margin he meant to make a list of the things he should do. Instead he stared at the fringe of the thin paper until he heard Anita, who was stirring in the extra bedroom. She shuffled into the kitchen in her white robe and slumped into a chair beside him.

  The fact that she got up so late every morning was the cause of a sheepishness she projected until he said what she wanted him to, which was, “What the hell, it’s your vacation.” So he said it, and she perked up, her head lifted with the poise and aloofness he was used to.

  She’d told him she’d flown out to Colorado to see her big brother, but it was clear the visit had more to do with escaping something in Boston. A tin
y part of him hoped that was the case; he admitted he was glad to see her suffer a bit. But no, maybe such a wish was just the result of his hurt feelings. She’d never had much interest in the brother who stayed home and ranched instead of going to an east-coast college, who hadn’t married rich (Anita’s husband was the king of the Soft-Hands, Ben told Eddie), the misfit brother who didn’t care much about fashion or the conveniences of life.

  She’d only written a handful of times in all the years she’d been gone, never acknowledged the birthday cards he sent her, and only made a brief and quiet appearance at his daughter’s funeral. Only once, soon after she’d moved back east, had she called and invited him to come visit. He’d gone, even though he knew what she wanted, which was the chance to show off her beautiful, clean, fancy home. To show him she’d come quite a way, with which he could only agree. She wanted something more from him, then, some recognition that she was the better person for the life she had made. This he refused to give. In his comments and compliments, he refused to say that she and her life were superior to his, that days spent in an office were better than those on a tractor, that a new leather couch was better than a dog-hair-covered old one. He refused to say this because although she hoped it to be true, he knew it was not.

  She was here because she wanted something again, though he wasn’t sure what. He suspected something had worn thin in her life, that the heat that prodded her on was dissipating. And he couldn’t help suspecting that she’d come to comfort herself with his discomfort, to measure the distance between them again.

  He wasn’t all that interested in obliging her this time either. But he slid a coffee cup over to her and filled it. She mumbled a thank-you, and they sat quiet for a while, until Anita said, “Oh,” and tilted her head toward the radio. He hadn’t been listening any longer, but he realized she had been, and her face had taken on a look of concern. He scowled and looked away. He was disgusted with her, with the radio announcer, with the whole human race for this fake concern. She felt nothing for these ranchers and animals, and why should she? It was a rare case when people cared about things they were unconnected to.