The Legend of Colton H Bryant

by Alexandra Fuller

  Colton held a cold can of Mountain Dew on the back of his neck.

  The rest of the boys were lined up on the sofa, watching television. “Pinedale has got to be the boringest freakingest place in the entire nation,” said one of them. “Nothing to do.”

  “No one to do it with,” complained another.

  “No bowling alley,” said one.

  “No nothin’.”

  “They don’t even have a freakin’ stoplight.”

  “Who wants to go shooting?”

  “Shoot what?”

  “I dunno. Just shoot. They got prongies.”

  Colton didn’t look up from his game. “Out of season,” he said.

  “So?”

  Now Colton looked up. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Why not?” said one of the boys, winking.

  “Out of season? No tag? That’s the worst possible thing you can do.”

  “Worse than murder?”

  “It is murder,” said Colton.

  Everyone laughed, except Colton.

  “They need a shooting range, is what they need,” someone said.

  “They got a shooting range. What’d ya think a stop sign is?”

  Everyone laughed again.

  “They need a titty bar is what they really need,” said someone else.

  Then one of the boys sat up and slapped the back of the boy next to him and suggested that they go down to Rock Springs and get an Astro burger.

  “You ever had an Astro burger, Colton?” one of the boys asked.

  “No,” said Colton.

  “You ain’t never had an Astro burger?”

  “No,” said Colton, “but I’d drive three hundred miles for better food than they serve ’round here.”

  There was more laughter.

  And Colton said, “What? What I say?”

  Someone said, “You never heard of the Astro Lounge, Colton?”

  “Oh,” said Colton. He stuffed a wad of chew into his lip. “Sure,” he said. “Sure I heard tell of it.”

  The two-hour drive from Pinedale toward Rock Springs bleeds the landscape plainer and plainer, but, to be fair, after the gathering beauty of the Upper Green River Valley, anything would be dull. In the Upper Green, rivers and mountains, high plains, and the remains of the wilderness pile upon the eye until the soul hardly believes it isn’t in paradise. They say the untamed magnificence of this valley drove some of the early explorers and trappers wild. Mountain men fled into the foothills and people said they must have been bit and maddened by the glory of it all.

  But Rock Springs, as if compensating for the surpassing richness of the Upper Green River Valley, has never been a pretty place to make a living. The future wife of Alexander Graham Bell, Mabel Hubbard, wrote to her husband in 1887 of a trip through the early settlement, “We are stopping now at a coal station…. There are coal mines around…but the houses are all of the poorest description and look temporary. There is no appearance of home about them as there was in even cold and dreary Laramie. There, the land is cultivable and settlers have made homes. Here, the fetid waters make man’s stay one of necessity, never of choice.”

  And Rock Springs hasn’t recovered from being a dirty little town in the decades since then. A glittering, hard boom-and-bust settlement surrounded by beautiful layered pink and white desert dunes, which a 60 Minutes program in the 1970s contended was still stuck in the Wild West, and not in a good way. Boom or bust, there’s the breath of disappointment in the air. Like nothing ever turned out the way anyone thought it would, and everyone’s worst nightmares have come true. If La Barge or Wamsutter or any of the other little flash-in-the-pan towns in the West are like waking up the morning after the night before with a beer hangover, Rock Springs is like waking up after a weeklong methamphetamine binge. It looks like a town thrown together in the throes of a temporary fit of panic—cheap clapboard trailer parks and blowaway boomtime mansions confined by big-box stores. Even the people who love it, love it the way a parent protectively loves their roughest child—because no one else will.

  So the Astro Lounge on Pilot Butte Avenue in Rock Springs isn’t much to speak of either, even if you go in for that sort of thing. It’s just a dark drinking hole of a strip club—“crusty and unedifying” is the way one ex-bouncer describes it—but a lot of the boys on the oil patch in the Upper Green and all over Rock Springs know it like it’s heaven with a side of fries. It smells of stale cigarettes, spilled beer on rank carpet, old sweat, deep fried meals. The bathrooms have a hospital scent to them, antiseptic and vitamin B, which is what the dealers use to cut their meth. But the girls are friendly enough and some of them are downright gorgeous, especially to lonely men used to the rough company of other men and made hungry by Wyoming’s notorious lack of women.

  The boys ducked into the relieving, air-conditioned chill of the dark lounge and showed their driver’s licenses to the bouncer. The music was loud and repetitive like it was trying to drown out thought. They found a quiet table near the back and everyone ordered a beer except Colton, who said he’d have a Mountain Dew, please. The waitress was pretty in a desperate, worn-out sort of way with hair so bleached it had deconstructed into a mild frizz around her face and sad green eyes, but she had strong, childrearing arms and long muscled legs. Her voice was husky with smoking. She asked if anyone wanted to have anything to eat and people placed their orders and Colton asked for a double cheeseburger with fries and extra ketchup, please, and he looked up at the waitress in that way that he had, and she sucked in her breath with those eyes looking through her and she plain couldn’t help herself. She leaned right over him. “And anything else for you, blue eyes?” she asked.

  Colton looked down quickly and said, “No thank you, ma’am.”

  Up on the stage two women were thrusting their bits and pieces at the audience and at one another and their underwear looked unequal to the task. Colton didn’t know where to rest his eyes in the wait from now until the food appeared. He sucked down the last of his Mountain Dew and wished there was a window so he could look outside at the sky or the desert.

  “Hey Colton,” said one of the crew, “you like the show?”

  Colton frowned into his empty glass. “Girls look kinda cold to me.”

  Someone said, “Want to go warm them up, Colton?”

  Everyone laughed.

  Colton stuffed a wad of chew into his lip and scratched the back of his neck.

  And then the waitress came back with the food. The crew started flirting with her while she put their plates down on the table. But she said nothing until she put Colton’s plate in front of him and he thanked her. “Now boys,” the waitress said, “if any of you had half the manners of blue eyes over here I think you’d all get twice as lucky with the girls.”

  The boys hooted with laughter.

  The waitress kissed Colton on the top of the head. “I could just take you home and eat you,” she said.

  “Whee-haw!” the boys screamed.

  “Will that be all?” asked the waitress, resting her hip so close to Colton that he could smell her confusing mixture of scents, cigarettes and perfume and something like the leftover smell of a sweat-stained horse.

  “What else you got?” one of the boys shouted.

  “Nothin’ for you,” said the waitress, but she rested her hand on Colton’s shoulder for a moment longer. Then she laughed a smoky laugh and walked quickly away to another table.

  “Whee-haw!” the boys screamed again.

  “Holy crap,” said Colton, frowning at his double cheeseburger. “I sure hope my mom never finds out about this.”

  24

  TRAIN STOPPING

  In mid-January, six months after he’d fallen in love with her, the pretty girl in Colorado broke Jake’s heart.

  Colton tried everything he could think of to fix it. “Well,” he said at last, “I guess my happy dance is a bit wore out.”

  “Just a bit,” said Jake.

  “She weren’t a very nic
e girl in any case. Probably wouldn’t have let you go hunting. That sort of girl. I heard tell of ’em.”

  Jake sighed.

  “How about I buy us some all-we-can-eat at the Hunan Garden?”

  Jake shook his head.

  Jake’s little brother sat next to Jake absorbing Jake’s misery.

  “Movies?”

  Jake shook his head.

  “I wouldn’t mind seeing a movie,” said Jake’s little brother, perking up.

  “I don’t wanna see a freakin’ movie,” said Jake.

  “Ice fishing?” suggested Colton.

  Jake said, “I’ll be fine. Why don’t you boys go. Leave me here, for the love of crap.”

  “Fine? You don’t look as if you’ll be fine. You look like you need to be on 24/7 suicide watch.”

  Colton sat down next to Jake and that’s how things stayed for a couple of hours. Colton and Jake’s little brother on either side of Jake on the sofa and all three of them staring ahead, as if at a television screen. But there was no television and the only thing playing was Jake’s heartbreak, on replay, over and over in his head. When it was dark, Colton sent Jake’s little brother out for pizza and Mountain Dew. Colton and Jake’s little brother ate but Jake said he didn’t feel like anything.

  “I’ll have your half,” Colton offered.

  Jake’s sad thoughts got noisier.

  “Sorry,” said Colton, pushing a slice of pizza at Jake. “Here.”

  Jake ate like he was being forced to chew cardboard. Then there was another hour of watching Jake’s misery grow blacker. Colton started to jiggle his knees up and down. He cracked his knuckles. He bit his fingernails. He balled a wad of chew into his lower lip and spat. “Holy crap,” he said at last, “watching your broken heart mend is like watching freakin’ paint dry.”

  “You don’t have to be here,” said Jake.

  “I do got to be here,” said Colton. “In case you die of boring yourself to death.”

  Jake sighed more deeply than before.

  Colton said, “You know what? You need to go shooting. What’s in season?”

  “Girlfriends?” Jake’s little brother suggested.

  “He-he-he,” said Colton.

  “Not funny,” said Jake.

  “No,” said Jake’s little brother. “Sorry.”

  There was more silence and more of Jake’s humid sighs.

  Then, “Jackrabbits!” said Colton. “They’re always in season. Let’s go shoot some bunnies.”

  “Oh crap,” said Jake.

  “C’mon,” said Colton. “It’ll fix you.”

  So they piled into Colton’s white F150 (now that he was working on the oil patch and earning like a man, he didn’t have to borrow Merinda’s Escort anymore, which was nice, although, truth be told, all the boys missed the hula girl on the dash more than a little bit). They drove clear out of town and up north and turned off somewhere near the Cumberland Cemetery and then they left the road altogether and flew along in two feet of fresh white snow, the cold glittering back at the boys in the beam of their headlights.

  “Holy cow,” said Jake. “There’s a lot of snow out here. Do you have a clue where we are?”

  “Sure,” said Colton.

  Jake’s little brother said he stopped having a clue about pretty much everything from the time they turned off the last plowed road. Snow disguised the contours of the land, heaping itself into false hills, creating a sense of solidness where there was none. “We’re lost as crap,” he said.

  “Watch your mouth,” said Jake.

  “No we’re not,” said Colton. “Here’s where all the bunnies in all the southwest of Wyoming live.”

  Colton kept driving and once in a while Jake or his little brother took a potshot out the window at a jackrabbit zigzagging across the crusting snow but they missed everything.

  “You’ve lost your touch,” said Colton.

  Then, close to midnight, Jake suggested again that maybe it was time to go back and Colton countersuggested jumping one more drift. He said you never knew what you’d find if only you kept going and anyway it was embarrassing to go home without having hit a single bunny.

  “It’s late, Colt,” shouted Jake over the roar of the engine.

  “You’re not a pussy are you?” said Colton and he gave Jake that look.

  “Holy crap,” said Jake’s little brother.

  “Here we go!” said Colton.

  “Are you sure we’re on high ground?” shouted Jake.

  But Colton had already gunned it. The pickup caught air—the engine making a high, singing noise—and then came down up to its doors in snow. The engine stalled immediately and the boys bounced up, hit the roof, landed hard, and then there was a sense of having come to a dead standstill.

  “Holy cow,” said Jake. “We’re not on high ground.”

  Colton started the engine again and tried to rock the pickup out of there, forward, backward, but nothing would give. “Okay boys, time to push.”

  “It’s freakin’ freezing out there,” said Jake. He looked at what they had with them in the pickup: a couple of work gloves, denim jackets, three cans of Mountain Dew, two .22s. “We’re gonna freeze to death, Colt.”

  Colton started singing, “If I should die before I wake, feed Jake. He’s been a good dog, my best friend through it all…”

  Jake’s little brother looked white with fright. “It’s not funny, Colt,” he said, “who’s gonna find us out here?”

  “Right boys,” said Colton, getting out of the pickup. He dug around in the back. “Look! A shovel,” he shouted. “And Cocoa’s halter. Look, and a rope.”

  The boys set to it. They put Jake’s little brother in the driver’s seat. “Gun it when we push,” shouted Colton. Then they tried digging, pushing, more digging and more pushing. Jake’s little brother sat up in the cab shivering with his head out the window and saying, “Holy crap, we’re gonna die,” over and over and pressing on the accelerator when Colton shouted, “Now!” But the wheels only made smooth, slick grooves in the snow, and the pickup sank lower into dead winter.

  “Man, we’re here for the night,” said Jake. “We’ll have to sleep in the cab.”

  The two boys climbed back into the cab next to Jake’s little brother and warmed their hands. “Holy cow,” said Jake.

  “We’re gonna die out here,” said Jake’s little brother.

  “No we ain’t,” said Colton, “we’re not even close to gonna die.”

  Then there was a long silence, except for the boys breathing into their hands and making squeaks of pain as the blood crept back into frozen capillaries.

  At last Colton said, “I know what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna find the railway line.” He got out of the cab. “You two stay put.”

  “Stay with the vehicle, you freakin’ idiot,” said Jake.

  But Colton was already plowing away from the pickup in the thigh-high snow. “The railway line is close by here,” he shouted over his shoulder. “I know it.”

  “What are you going to do?” shouted Jake out the window. “Walk to Evanston?”

  “No,” Colton shouted back. “I’m gonna stop the next train.”

  “You retard! Trains don’t stop for nothin’.”

  But Colton had already started up the false hill of a snow-bank.

  “That’s how you read about people dying,” said Jake’s little brother.

  “Come back!” shouted Jake.

  Colton kept slogging up and up and away until he had walked beyond the range of the headlights and there was only a faint sense of his shape against the snow.

  “I wonder if I should go after him,” said Jake.

  “And leave me to die here alone? Mom’ll kill you,” said Jake’s little brother.

  The brothers sat in the car, turning the pickup on for heat and then off to conserve fuel. They went through half of Dolly Parton’s greatest hits that way and then suddenly there was Colton coming down the ridge again, leaping through the snow, knees com
ing up halfway to his chin, waving his hands and shouting, “I found the railway line! I found the freakin’ railway line.” He jumped back into the cab and rubbed his hands together. “It’s just up there. There’s a train coming. Want me to show you how to stop a train?”

  “Trains don’t stop for nothing,” said Jake, “you freakin’ retard.”

  “Oh yeah? You watch.”

  Colton started to flash the brights on the pickup, flash-flash-flash in S.O.S. pattern.

  A train bore through the night, steady as a heartbeat, not slowing down, not speeding up, just da-dum, da-dum, like it was the vein that ran blood into the middle of the snow-covered plains.

  “I told you,” said Jake.

  But then came the scream of brakes. The train’s slowing. Da-dum, da-dum. Da-dum. Da-dum. Da. Dum. Da. Silence.

  “Holy crap,” said Jake’s little brother.

  “I already told you,” said Jake, “watch your mouth.”

  The engine driver said he was sorry, but he needed to call the sheriff. Stopping the train to give a ride to three boys on the Union Pacific was, he said, highly irregular, even though he was happy to do it and it had been a pleasure meeting them and in all his years he’d never thought to find three boys stranded out here in the middle of nowhere, Wyoming. Still, the sheriff would need to be notified. So by the time the train pulled into the train station in Evanston, the sheriff was waiting. The boys got off the train into the search of his flashlight under the calmer pools of the station floodlights.

  “Colton Bryant,” the sheriff said. “I should have known.” He shook his head. “You better tell me alcohol was involved in this little incident.”

  “No alcohol, sir,” said Jake.

  “We don’t drink, sir,” said Colton.

  “Oh please, don’t tell me you stopped a Union Pacific train in the middle of the night sober.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then what were you boys doing? And you’d better have a good story for me.”

  Colton was grinning and shifting from one foot to another. “Yes, sir.”