Later that night she amazed us all by conquering the mechanical bull. This had never been done.
She whispered to me before falling into dreams. She whispered, “Goodnight, sweet baby.” The way she said it sounded like poetry. Earlier that day, she might have half-nelsoned me, she might have spit and clawed my body all over, burned me with lit cigarettes, but when it was time for bed, she always sweetened. She said her mother, who was also a bearded lady by trade, taught her one thing and one thing only: never go to bed angry.
Had you been there, had you heard her sweet voice, I am certain you would love her also. I could not predict much about her behavior, but I knew this: every night, without exception, she would bring her mouth to my ear and whisper, “Goodnight, sweet baby.”
Then came a bad time. She and George officially became lovers. I discovered a damp spot on the sheets. I put my nose to it and it smelled of mushrooms, the bottom of a well. It was man juice. I asked George if he had anything to tell me and he said no and I did not press the matter. We went about our chores, and he offered me so many smiles, perhaps trying to tooth away any suspicions.
I allowed The Bearded Lady to ride the tamer paints and bays in the holding pen. She would wear a dress and smoke her cigarettes and grip the saddle horn with her meaty hands and dig in her high heels like spurs and say, “Yaw! Yaw now!” and around and around she would go, the smoke streaming from her nostrils like tusks, her beard filling with dust. She said it reminded her of the carousel.
Sometimes George and the Mexicans came and watched.
A horse can only get going so fast in a pen. “I want to gallop,” she said. No, I said. “I want to ride Oregon’s Organ.” No, I said. She had a hankering for Oregon’s Organ, a terrible hankering.
After an hour in the pen she would go home and draw a cold bath. This was her antidote to both the summer heat and her sexual frustrations. I would set up a rocking chair next to the tub and watch her, naked and beautiful, shampooing her beard, her nipples tightened into points, her bathing sounds sounding like a music I was unfamiliar with.
She would say, “Dear, dear, dear,” pressing me to the walls and floors, her beard tickling my cheeks. She would say, “Goodnight, sweet baby,” when we stared at each other across the pillows. One minute I would feel like the luckiest man alive, the next minute, not so much.
She would go bananas, wearing me out, hollering about how she didn’t have a thing—not one thing—to wear. Hollering about how she wanted to ride old Oregon’s Organ, about how I didn’t respect and satisfy her needs as a lady. When we quarreled, it was usually me saying how sorry I was without knowing why.
Then I caught her surrendering to George.
I walked in and there they were. She was splayed out over the couch with her rear up in the air. He was really going to town on her and, from the sound of her cries, she seemed pretty thrilled about the whole thing. I stood there a while and observed their joined condition. George brought his teeth down and raked them across her back as if her back was the cream center of an Oreo cookie.
I had seen enough. I slammed the door behind me. They stopped moving, but did not look my way. They did not even separate, but remained tangled together and breathing heavy and trying to figure out what to do, what to say.
I never could have predicted what happened next. George came after me. He was naked save for a pair of white tube socks pulled up to his knees. His gonad stood at attention. I thought he would stab me with it. I dodged him and brought my fist to his mouth. His teeth cut me to the bone. I still bear scars.
I believe he meant to kill me.
Again he charged, scepter at the fore. Fighting a naked man is not difficult. This time I tripped him. He fell upon himself. There was a sound not unlike the snap of a bite of celery. I will not go into the details, but know this: George will never be the same.
She looked at me. It was a look of terrific shame. Her mouth opened with what was probably an apology. I raised up my hand like an Indian chief. Only my hand wasn’t saying hello. My hand was saying shut up. My hand was saying something about hate. She understood this. Her beard shivered when she closed her mouth. Here was her most vulnerable moment.
I didn’t stick around. I stepped over George and drove straight to the Wounded Soldier and drank my way through a keg of beer. At some point, later that night, The Bearded Lady drew a cold bath, lowered her body into it, and died. The water got her heart rate up, something burst at the top of her neck. Her brain drowned above water. She died in and out of love.
The mortician did something awful. First, he revealed to me that The Bearded Lady was pregnant, four weeks with child. Second, he shaved off her beard. Said it would make her more presentable for the funeral.
Staring at her freshly shaven, freshly makeupped corpse, I felt little in the way of emotion. I looked at her clean upper lip, her cheeks like slabs of pink stone, and felt nothing. Because this was not The Bearded Lady. It was the beard that made her such a woman. It was the beard that made her both fragile and venomous, somehow.
Strange as it sounds, this woman laid out cold before me looked more than ever like a man. A man who looked like he knew how to chop firewood and clean a shotgun and cook a steak so it was nice and pink on the inside. Except for that lipstick, except for those terrific breasts, I might have bought this man a beer and shaken his hand.
I didn’t want a thing to do with a funeral. No open caskets. No words. No next of kin. Just close up the casket and nail it tight and for crying out loud put her in the ground.
I keep a still life in the living room. On the coffee table there is a woman’s magazine, and an old apple, dried-up and wrinkled like some animal’s heart, and an ashtray full of lipstick-stained cigarettes. All this helps me imagine she is just in the other room, maybe visiting the toilet, maybe still soaking in a cold bath.
I know George is a good man. I can’t blame him. He has suffered duly. We still drink at Wounded Soldier, work at the Lazy H, though there is an awkwardness between us now, and he spends most of his time with the Mexicans. Says he’s more suited for stable and fieldwork these days.
I have taken over all duties involving Oregon’s Organ.
Oregon’s Organ is getting famous by the minute. This August he was named West Coast Reserve Champion. The promise of his get makes most salivate—that golden color, the beauty of his architecture. He is a grand machine. We breed him like crazy.
Practically every day he goes to work on one of the local mares or else a fluid shipment heads off for Texas or Montana. I suspect he is happy. I take him out sometimes and his hooves divot the pasture and we ride so hard and long that my eyes burn from the wind and my body trembles with gratitude. He does exactly what he is told and my tame control of this power beneath me is wonderful and exotic thing.
I think I know how she felt.
I think I am beginning to know what it means to wear a beard.
The Language of Elk
Evenings, when the sky pinkens and the shadows thicken among the trees, you’ll hear them. One will call out—a sharp, sad, frightening sound, like a rusted bassoon blown too hard—and another will answer, and then another, then another. This is the language of elk.
I listen nightly. Come sunset, I peel off my socks and dry my feet on the splintery porch boards, drinking a Coors or three between sucks of pipe while enjoying the rumbling sounds of my beasts, my elk. I own them. They are mine.
Inside, Willow fills the sink, bangs pots together. The smell of supper still clings to the air—tortillas wrapped around grilled poblano stuffed with burger—soon fading into the piney breeze. If I ask, she will bring me another beer. She is good in this way and many others, but still we are not right. Way back, we used to be a beautiful piece of marriage—you’d look at us and smile and want to rub our bodies for luck. Now a daughter bleeds a wound between us.
To the west the Cascade Mountains make a starless space in the sky, toothy and black, their glaciers glowing in the moonlight.
When my thumbnail scrapes away the skins of three or four beer labels—which I stack neatly on my thigh—when the sky goes dark, when a yawn stretches my mouth, I know it is time to say goodnight to the elk. While they bugle all around me, I stand and raise my arms as if in benediction.
“Welcome to Foder Ranch,” I say. “I’m Pete Foder.”
If they are too clean and look like the city—Portland—I will heighten my twang, crush their hands in a handshake. We’ll pull away from each other and stand a moment in awkward silence. Maybe I’ll comment on the weather and they’ll look to the sky. From the trunks of their cars we will drag backpacks, duffel bags, rifles zipped or buckled into their cases. I will tour them through the cabins, the dining hall, the pole barn—this is where you sleep, this is where you eat, this is where we butcher your kill.
Then I nod and square my hat and say I’ll see them at supper.
Ask me about my daughter, Sonora. Ask why she crouches in her room all day and rocks on her heels. Ask why she won’t make words. Ask about drool. Ask about her slack face, her faraway eyes. Ask all you want, I don’t have any answers.
My wife has Mexican blood in her. You can see it in her cheekbones, in her ink-black hair, in her broad and thoughtful forehead. We named our daughter Sonora. Sonora is a Spanish word. It means pretty sound. She brings a hiccup to my heart, tugs me in and out of love.
Late at night, I sometimes stand over her bed. She doesn’t like to be touched when awake, so I visit her when she sleeps. My hand hovers over her mouth and catches the heat of her breath. She might be wild, sometimes seemingly inhuman, but she belongs to me. She is my blood. I want to her hug her, but know she will wake and flail against me, resist my love.
So I stand there with my hand trembling over her—and then retire to my own bed, where my wife rolls away from me and I am left to hug my pillow. I have little dreams about how happy we could be, picnicking in meadows slashed red with Indian paintbrush.
It is Saturday, dawn. The sky is as red as the bark of a ponderosa. The air tastes clean and cold. My footsteps whisper through the fallen pine needles like broom strokes. The water from my shower still chills my hair but my jeans fit warm from resting on the stove. I carry a chipped coffee mug that reads “Pete’s Joe.” In fifteen minutes, at 6:30, I will rattle the iron triangle and herd my clients into the dining hall. This, the iron triangle, makes them feel like real cowboys.
In the meantime I knock on cabin doors, say rise and shine. My clients grunt and shuffle around, rolling out of bed to stir the stove’s embers, to toss on another log and struggle into their wool socks and blue jeans. I imagine them making their beds and then laying down their rifles on the rough Pendleton blanket.
How slick and beautiful the rifle looks to them, its barrel creasing the pillow, bleeding a drop of oil on white. These men, with their soft hands and soft bellies, crouch down as if in prayer and smile and stretch out their fingers to caress the gunmetal slowly, delicately, like a lover—the pucker of the bore, big enough to stick their pinky inside. Still hazy from sleep, their eyes shutter closed as they whisper luck into their bullets, imagining a trophy rack to hang in their den, something to brag about to the neighbors while sipping cocktails next to elk-steaks sizzling on the barbeque.
Six-thirty comes and I rattle the iron triangle—so startling in the morning hush—and my clients rub the dreams from their eyes and step into the cold and stamp their boots and slap each other on the back and talk loudly about what they might kill today and their breath steams the air like something boiling over.
Breakfast is huckleberries and bananas, butter-sogged muffins, biscuits drowned in gray gravy, crisp bacon, hot coffee, cold orange juice. Willow stands behind the steam of the buffet line, halfway flirting with a man who is as black as a blackbird and wearing a gold watch. She says, “If there’s anything you need…” and flashes a smile.
It has been a long time since I kissed that smile, months maybe. Somewhere along the line, sometime after Sonora was born, love got pushed in the closet, food for the moths.
Our dining hall is famous. Discovery Channel has been here, along with Outdoor Life, Field and Stream, Guns and Ammo, even Better Homes and Gardens, Better Homes and Gardens referring to it as “Neo-gothic” in their October issue featuring America’s creepiest buildings. This is the Oregon equivalent of George Washington Slept Here.
Willow and I built it mostly from logs but the skeletons are what make it special. Take for instance the shaved elk-bone rods fitted into tables, dead lumber, their heavily lacquered surface grayish and uneven so you got to be careful not to set down a glass in a hurry. Molars and fangs braiding the pillars and crossbeams. Along the west wall—dividing the kitchen from the dining area—is a counter made entirely of vertebrae, fitted together like some morbid puzzle. There are antler chandeliers and bullhorn chairs. A cougar mounted on a log. Five pheasants. A collection of signal horns and powder horns and antique rifles and hunting knives with elk-foot handles. Nearly fifty skull-and-rack mounts of deer and elk and antelope, one boar, two moose. The cinnamon-colored hide of a grizzly, with its claws and its head attached, hangs from the wall, as if it were hurled there at a great velocity and flattened like in the cartoons.
In the corner stands its skeleton. For two weeks I wired and bolted and glued its bones together in a pose meant to be frightening. It balances on its haunches with its forelegs stretched above its skull as if to scratch the ceiling. A brass plate on its foundation details the Boone and Crockett Club score of 550.35. No record-breaker but damn big.
I killed these things. I built this place. It is mine. My hands pulled the trigger and forked the meat and reconstructed the skeleton. My hands put all this together and could just as easily take it apart. Sometimes, in this life, you question your worth. Knowing that you built something—something you can run your hand across, something more stable than a marriage—helps.
I walk among my clients with cowboy swagger, my thumbs hooked in my belt and my boots thudding the floor. I feel their eyes crawling all over me, these three businessmen in pristine Stetsons. One of them is trying to grow a ridiculous mustache. He grabs my wrist and asks a bunch of questions—I say, “Nine hundred acres, six hundred elk, a pond, a river, horses, and enough woods to choke every beaver in Oregon.”
They want stories, so I develop a dramatic deepness to my voice and say, “See this coat? I’ll tell you about this coat. Shot and skinned and tanned some three years ago.” I explain how I humped the deer, a six-point mule, from a canyon deep in the Ochoco wilderness. They want to touch the leather—as if to draw some power from it—and I let them.
They say, “Tell us about after you shoot, Pete. The cleaning part.”
I say, “You want to know about cleaning? I’ll tell you about cleaning.”
I unsheathe my bowie knife and lay it on the table, its silver blade oranged by the sunlight leaking through the window. I lean my face real close and detail taking apart an animal. First puncture behind the hamstring and hang the elk high from a sturdy juniper branch. Now listen while I surgeon with words, sawing from ass to sternum, the incision so neat. Step back and watch unzipped veins bleed the ground muddy. Now put your fingers in the wound, the pocket of it slippery and warm, and peel back the hide with an electrical noise. Inside the animal, guts spiral, colored and bound like bloody balls of yarn. Place them aside for the flies and yellow jackets. The hatchets of bladebones, a joint’s rubbery ligature, I dig deeper and deeper through the red strata, detailing the archaeology of gore.
Their eyes widen, their forks hover forgotten before their mouths.
I pick up my knife and cut the air and say this is how you flay the muscle into small red strips, and if the day is warm and the flies are out, you must hurry or they’ll make maggots. Stack the meat into pyramids for later, for salting and smoking, and after many hours, after your hands cramp and your vision wobbles, only a loose hide will remain, which you will clean and tan and oil and if you were an Indian make soft
by chewing.
When I finish my speech I reach out and stab a banana off the black guy’s plate. I eye it a second, balanced on the blade, before my teeth bite down and the men look at me sideways as if I am something naked and dangerous. None of them says a word. The black guy pokes at his biscuit.
Outside the day is bright and wonderful.
I sit on the porch—drinking Coors, lighting and relighting a pipe that goes dead—while off toward the cabins my clients celebrate around a campfire. The flames shoot high, eating the dry November wood. Sparks swirl into the night sky. They pass and suckle a whiskey bottle.
They live in neighborhoods called Horse Back Butte, Aubrey Glen, Swan Hollow, cultivated places that don’t live up to the promise of their wild names. They have momentarily forgotten about home. They have forgotten about their makeupped wives, grubless lawns, golf clubs, the patio furniture they’re considering in the Pottery Barn catalogue. The day has changed them, as if something were birthed and aborted by the same lead prick. They hoot like apes. They slap each other high-fives. They came here happy in that special middle-aged succeeded-at-everything kind of way, but now they are happier.
I wash beer down my throat and massage my hands—cramped from butchering—my fingernails rimmed rusty with blood. I consider calling it a night when I hear my name. I lean forward in my chair and they begin to talk about me in hushed tones, the way I hauled a hundred-pound hindquarter over my shoulder, grinning under the lacquered red as if it were hard candy. The black guy calls me A True American Man.
An elk bugles. They go quiet. The sound comes from nearby, one of the corrals, an ear-scraping cry that fills up the night, shivering under my skin to make it pimple. This is Mangold, my stud bull, the breeder of my darlings, the granddaddy elk of Foder Ranch, with a rack that branches upward like so many fingers.
Late summer into fall, one by one, I march the cows through the gate, into his corral, where they sniff the air and flutter their ears. Mangold wastes no time with pillow talk. For a second or two, he climbs on their backs and grunts and pulses and then the deed is done—and then the cow pulls away and turns to look at him as if curious what just happened.
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