The Legend of Colton H Bryant

by Alexandra Fuller

  “How much that hat hold, cowboy? Twenty gallons?” the man had asked, fingering the brim.

  And before he could take another step, or say another ignorant word, or—God forbid—handle the hat any more intimately, Tabby was on his back, heels flailing, fists pounding. “Don’t you touch my daddy’s hat! Don’t you talk to him that way!”

  “Now girl,” Kaylee told her oldest daughter, once the dust had settled and the man had been sent on his way, straightened out in the matter of how, or when, if ever, a gentleman talks about another man’s cowboy hat, let alone touches it, “you got to learn. You can leave your daddy to fight any battles that need fighting.”

  “But he touched my daddy’s hat!” cried Tabby, unrepentant, a fresh surge of indignation welling up inside her so that she had second thoughts about giving in so easily and letting the man get off lightly. “And I didn’t even give him what he deserved. That man’s still walking, isn’t he?”

  All this adoration from his family for a man who was home only part-time the whole while the kids were growing up. “I’m not having my kids dragged around from patch to patch,” Bill told Kaylee early on. So the moment she was pregnant with Preston he told her, “Pick a town you like. You and the kids are staying put till they’re all grown. I’ll chase the rigs and be back as often as I can.”

  In 1973, just before Preston was born, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries announced that they would suspend shipment of oil to countries that had supported Israel against Syria and Egypt during the Yom Kippur War. That suspension included shipments of oil to the United States. At the same time, a reserve of oil and natural gas was discovered just outside Evanston in southwestern Wyoming. Almost overnight the town grew from a quiet ranching and railway stop of four thousand to a city of twenty thousand. The oil work seemed steady and close, so Kaylee chose to move there. It’s not usually smart to count on boomtowns to stay booming, but when the second oil crisis hit in 1979 (by which time Tabby had been born and Colton was on the way) Evanston solidified on the map: schools, a golf course, a recreation center, and a horse racetrack. And since then, through boom and bust, Evanston has always been less than a day’s drive from any oil patch Bill has ever had to work in whatever combination of shifts the oil companies can dream up.

  There have been some rigs Bill’s worked on where he was gone for a month, back for a week. He’s done two weeks on, two weeks off. He’s done a week at a time. He’s done flat out, day in, day out, until the hole was drilled. He’s done pretty much every variation of time you can think of. And in time, first Preston and then Colton followed him onto the rigs. What hasn’t changed is the company Bill’s drilled for—for over thirty years he’s drilled for the same company, but they still have him on their books as a part-time laborer, which makes it easier for them to fire him the moment he gets too old or too slow, or if he slips. And just recently, some kid out of the head office saw a ten-gallon discrepancy in a fuel tank filled by Bill and fired him on the spot. So the next week, Bill was back in Casper submitting himself to urine tests and physicals and safety talks so he could sign on with a new company.

  But none of this seems to bother Bill much. He looks at the terms of his employment much the way most men think of women or weather, as something beyond the power of his control. Or like the way a hitch will shift from under your feet; day to night, one week to a month, from a fortnight back to a week. It’s all down to someone with a computer in Houston or Casper or Cheyenne typing you into a drilling roster on a desert or a high plain they have never seen, and have no intention of seeing, as if you’re a megawatt.

  What always stayed routine for the Bryant family was Bill’s time at home. If Bill had been on the night shift, he could be back again in Evanston by early afternoon from Baggs, Big Piney, Farson, all over Utah. And if he had been on the day shift, he could be back at midnight or two in the morning and still up with the birds so as not to waste any daylight on sleep. He left his boots and his greasers on the porch by the front door and at some point during the week he’d take them to a Laundromat with his youngest daughter, Merinda. That was what they did for special time—sit together in the Laundromat, not talking much, with Merinda basking in the silence—while the work clothes fouled up the industrial washer and left black, indelible smears on the glass window.

  Meantime there would be Colton at home, ready and waiting. “I got the horses saddled, Dad.”

  “Let me get myself a cuppa coffee, son, and I’ll be right out,” said Bill, though it had been twenty-four hours since he had seen the inside of his eyelids for any length of time.

  “I got your coffee for you right here,” said Colton, handing Bill an orange mug, thirty-two ounces from the Maverick Gas Station.

  So all year, every year after he learned to ride and saddle a horse, as long as the snow was still shallow enough that a horse could clear its belly over it, Colton and Bill headed up into the hills on Bill’s time off the oil patch, sometimes for a few days at a time. That August, after he’d had her a couple of months, Colton persuaded Bill to take a video camera along to show what a good trail horse Cocoa had become, but Colton wasn’t counting on Bill’s gelding blowing up at a spooky herd of elk, leg-crashing through the aspen tree deadfall, eerie as ghost-creatures the way they vanished.

  Not that the gelding could unhorse Bill, who, after all, has a saddle-bronc rider’s sense of balance, but the video doesn’t show too much of Cocoa. You can see her and Colton disappear into a grove of trees, Colton all camera-silly and blowing his nose loudly enough to blast his brains out, and then there’s an elk’s rump and another elk in the shadows, and after that the video shows what it’s like to be on a bolting, bucking horse from the rider’s point of view. The soundtrack is pretty telling too. No one says much of anything but you can hear Bill say, in a calm drawl, “Dang horse.”

  And you can hear Colton laughing, “He-he-he,” like he just caught the punch line to a joke, which, in this country, a wreck off a horse almost always is.

  6

  IN THE BEGINNING

  Wyoming and the West

  So Colton was born with horses and oil in his blood like his father before him and his grandfather before that and maybe his grandfather’s father before that. Who knows, because Wyoming is repeopled every time there is another oil boom, transience refreshed and history forgotten. People arrive in Wyoming on their last tank of gas, no way to chicken out at the last moment and go back to whatever it is they were running away from, weighed down with a new heartload of all the old reasons for starting fresh. And then the boom’s over and the brokenhearted leave, and it’s all unpeopled trailer parks and motels with their peeling backs to the long set of the afternoon sun. The wind blows the same anyhow, boom or bust, although more hollow with less people there to hear it.

  One time, Bill Bryant’s mother helped him count up all the places they had lived while he was growing up and they figured thirty-two places in fifteen years all over New Mexico, Wyoming, Utah, North and South Dakota, Colorado, chasing down oil pays, one trailer park or motel room at a time, four shabby walls between them and all the bad-tempered weather the West has to offer, and then someone would hang a sign on the edge of town, “Last one to leave, turn out the lights,” and they’d be off to somewhere new until it all started to look like one place and a new year felt a lot like the old one.

  Even in the good times, it was a struggle because the price of everything went through the roof during a boom. A hundred bucks a month for a room, instead of twenty, a bag of groceries worth more than a bag of cash, that kind of thing (ten times that, these days). And people didn’t and don’t seem much happier than they had been before. Campers and trailers settle with an air of temporariness on the sagebrush desert; bars without windows so you can drink all day and night without being reprimanded by sunlight. A fair number of people show up with Oklahoma, Ohio, or Louisiana plates, fail the first piss test they take, and swell the numbers at the food bank worse than in a bus
t. There’s a lot of what keeps you up and enough of what puts you down: methamphetamine, drive-thru liquor stores, a few strip clubs and plenty of porn. Even the names of the places hosting the booms have a jokey, ghost-town-like quality to them: Rock Springs, Wamsutter, La Barge, Casper.

  By the late sixties, when he was just fifteen, Bill left his parents and was on his own, breaking colts for a rancher and riding saddle broncs at weekend rodeos for a little extra cash, walking away with more than the occasional belt buckle. Barely man enough to grow a stain of mustache on his upper lip, he was ropey, not yet fully grown into his body, but what he lacked in bulk and strength he made up for with a tolerance for pain and an uncanny, you might say physical, understanding of time. He knew in his body—the way blood started to pool in his neck, the way air was already leaving his lungs, the way his weight was being lifted out of his ankles—the exact shape of eight seconds. Eight seconds is all a bronc rider has from the moment the chute blows open until the bell, until the pickup man comes galloping up behind you and you can lean across the air, wrap your arms around the pickup man’s waist, and allow the bronc to buck free away from your legs.

  But when he was twenty-two, the ranch he was working on sold and Bill had to look for other work. Then as now, the best-paying jobs in the West for someone without a college degree were out on the oil patch. So Bill packed up his saddle and belt buckles and folded up his mattress and sleeping bag and followed his father onto the rigs. But he kept with him the impeccable timing he’d learned riding saddle broncs, and he never lost his horse sense, moving deliberately around that massive, sometimes unpredictable equipment like he didn’t want to startle something or get kicked. What he passed on to his son was a desire to be just like him. What he could never teach Colton was a saddle-bronc rider’s trick of slowing down time until you knew the shape of it, until you could possess it, until it was yours to stretch out or shrink—knowing that eight seconds is both short enough to hold on to and long enough to get yourself killed. That’s the full, fat poetry of eight seconds.

  7

  CATTLE DRIVE

  Near Evanston

  At dawn, in mid-September—the fall equinox—it’s seventeen degrees in the valley a few miles west of Evanston. If there had been enough moisture for a frost, there would surely be a crisping of white over everything now. As it is, the cold is just dry as dust, settling on cattle and sagebrush, earth and skin, cracking everything. Colton and Bill are heading into the heart of the valley with a pickup and horse trailer. Behind a wind-battered banner that advertises a fall bull sale, testicle festival, it says, there’s a ranch that follows a broken, eroded creek. On either side of the creek there is a flush relief of cottonwoods and a green vein of vegetation follows the wetlands up and up, eventually swelling into the Salt River Range. It’s an old ranch for around here—a hundred years of permanent settlement or more—and as such, it’s the kind of ranch that has stories creaking out of the walls of the old barn that start with the words, “It was the year the snow came up over the roofs…”

  They unload Cocoa and Bill’s hotfooted gelding, already puffing himself up with imaginary enemies for all the world like a Texan politician. The sun is just making long-fingered shadows through the sage on the hills. Colton’s whistling to Cocoa while he checks her hooves, puts her bridle on.

  “What you got there?” asks the rancher, thumbing his cowboy hat toward Cocoa. The rancher is a very tall man, and wind-whipped thin, compensating for his height with an apologetic hunch of his shoulders.

  “You like her?” asks Colton. “I got her for my birthday in June.”

  “It’s got four legs, anyhow,” the rancher agrees. He steps into his stirrup and lowers himself into the saddle, rolls a little paper cigarette that he sticks onto his lower lip.

  “She’s a mustang off the Red Desert,” says Colton.

  The rancher lifts his left eyebrow a fraction. “That a fact?” He lights his cigarette and squints at Cocoa through the smoke. “Well, I’ll be…” he says.

  Bill is already in the saddle. He turns his gelding to face in on Cocoa, cowboy style, to catch anything that blows up. Colton vaults up onto the mare. “You’ll see,” he tells the rancher.

  “No doubt,” says the rancher, gripping the end of his cigarette between his teeth. He pulls the brim of his hat down another fraction of an inch and then he lopes ahead. “Watch for badger holes,” he shouts over his shoulder.

  By midafternoon it’s over seventy degrees and the sun is unfiltered. The horses are sweating and there’s a sting of salty heat coming off their coats. The rancher is working his mount right up into the herd and shouting, “Hup! Hup!” and the cows are bawling and the dust tastes of manure and sweat. The tags in the cows’ ears shake blue, yellow, orange, like wind chimes. Most of the six hundred head are moving complainingly toward the home paddocks along a red dirt road but a few are trying to thread their way back to their old grazing grounds with the dogs worrying at their feet.

  From the sky, this little cattle drive would look like an ants’ parade with a child’s careless stick drawn through the middle. The rancher, Bill, and Colton are all small and beetling and nothing, hardly moving at all, and the cattle are in rivers of stupid confusion milling mostly forward. From the sky, against the immense, witnessing bulk of the Salt River Range, all this seems pointless. All this work, this noon-flattened light of unreasonable cows and dust and sweat seems as if the riders have come nowhere at all and as if they can never go anywhere.

  When they come to the end of the spring, Bill nods at Colton. “Go back and make sure we didn’t leave anyone up there.”

  So Colton turns Cocoa back and trots up the stream one more time and Bill keeps going forward with his puffed-out gelding. Then a noise erupts behind him. Bill looks back and sees Cocoa coming at him at a flat-out neck-stretched gallop, the reins flapping loose on her neck. Colton’s leaning all the way back in the saddle, arms outstretched, face thrown toward the sky, the back of his head connecting with Cocoa’s rear. The sun is behind them and the air is shocked golden. Colton like a crucified Jesus on a horse. “The Injuns are coming! The Injuns are coming!” he shouts. “I’ve been shot in the heart.”

  Bill’s gelding frights itself half to death in a tangle of willows and Bill says, “Dang horse…” and spits. He needs to wipe his eyes. “You could get yourself hurt like that,” he tells Colton.

  Colton picks up the reins again and puts his ball cap on straight. “Maybe they’ll put me in the movies.”

  “As a dang fool?”

  “As one of them cowboys that gets shot in the heart.”

  “With a nose like that?” says Bill. “They’ll need a pretty wide screen. Make that a wide-as-all-heck wide screen.”

  “He-he-he,” says Colton.

  “He-he-he,” says Bill. He pulls his cowboy hat down over his eyes and spits. “C’mon, son, we got some cows to move.”

  8

  GOOSE HUNTING WITH JAKE, COLTON, AND CODY

  Near Evanston

  When they weren’t messing around with horses or guns or video games or whatever else snagged their flighty attention, Colton, Jake, and Cody had spent a great deal of that summer and a good part of the fall messing about with Cody’s little Mazda pickup. They’d stripped it and straight-piped the thing and put a glass pack on the tail but that little Mazda still didn’t sound any louder than a pissed-off lawn mower. Nonetheless, there they were, trying to muscle up an impression of invincibility on the dirty-iced streets of Evanston, the three of them packed in the front seat, shotguns and a dinky beat-up spinning rod in back, cans of Copenhagen on the dash. Under their legs, they’d stashed skinning knives and Jake’s swamp-rotten waders, the latter of which were now giving up scents of old frog and last season’s mud. Neil Diamond was on the player like it was summer forever and no one was ever going to grow old and luck and love were on the side of all God-fearing boys in blue jeans.

  Almost none of this was true:

  It was ea
rly November and the yellow light was sickly with whatever was coming to them. Town, stripped of summer ice-cone stalls and fall leaves and not yet covered with snow or Christmas lights, was depressing the way a hangover is depressing, a low-grade headache of a place that must have seemed like a good idea at the time. The old railway buildings and Chinese laundries just north of downtown seemed bewildered, unwanted from another age. The low new buildings in town—EZ-tanning and payday loan-type joints so tenuous that they hung their names out on plastic banners instead of anything permanent—looked cheap and too thin for the weather. But none of this mattered to the boys. They had guns and Mountain Dew and southwestern Wyoming seemed to be there for whoever was alive enough to take it.

  The reservoir isn’t much to speak of, unless you love that sort of thing. Just a big dirty hole of water on the outskirts of town, but the boys knew it like it was heaven with a side of freedom. “Money talks, but it don’t sing and dance and it don’t walk,” the boys sang.

  “Honey’s sweet, but it ain’t nothing next to baby’s treat.”

  “Money talks, but it don’t…”

  They bounced into the parking lot at the reservoir. There were no other cars around. The outhouses had been closed for the season, garbage cans turned upside down against the anticipation of inevitable snow, the picnic sites scraped up. A sign asking visitors not to litter had been buckshot in the belly. The boys piled out of the Mazda, Cody and Colton ahead of Jake, all of them crouched low, soldierly, shotguns across their chests as they jogged toward the reservoir on a thin layer of crunchy snow. The sun had given up trying to break through the dull press of sky and had slid into someone else’s tomorrow. The cold had settled on the land like an endurance test. I don’t suppose the boys really believed the geese would be roosting on the ice-covered reservoir, or that there would be so many of them this late in the year, but there they were—dozens of geese balanced as still as decoys on a half inch of ice. “Holy crap,” said Cody.