The Legend of Colton H Bryant

by Alexandra Fuller

  “You could have died out there.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Yes, you could.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So? What were you doing?”

  “Looking for jackrabbits, sir,” said Colton.

  Jake looked up and his mouth fell open. Then he quickly cleared his throat and looked back at his shoes.

  “Are you kidding me?” said the sheriff. “Jackrabbits?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s about the redneckest thing I ever heard,” said the sheriff. “And that’s up against some pretty stiff competition.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Colton, that’s not a compliment.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Oh what the heck. You boys just get outta here quick, before I change my mind and think of some of the nine hundred and ninety-nine laws you just broke.”

  “Yes, sir, thank you, sir.”

  “And that,” said Colton afterward when they were back at Jake’s apartment, “is how to stop a train.”

  Jake said, “Man we coulda died out there.”

  “Not as much as we coulda died back here of boredom watching your broken heart mend ’cos of whatser-freakin’-name.”

  “Yeah,” said Jake. “What was her freakin’ name?”

  “He-he-he,” said Colton.

  25

  COLTON AND CHASE

  Winter

  Colton is a native son, so the weather and mountains, horses and guns, pickup trucks and oil rigs are what he must use to measure himself against manhood. And year by year he’s growing up by this time-tested, rough-hewn method because there’s truly no easy rite of passage in Wyoming. It’s all bucking broncos and four-wheelers in the middle of nowhere and subzero and sheer ice and too fast everything and high, voracious winds. Sure, if you’re lucky or have choices and time, there are more careful ways to measure yourself against the land than this flat-out, balls-to-the-big-sky method, but Colton doesn’t see the benefit in pacing himself.

  Merinda says, “I wish you’d be more careful.”

  Colton says, “Of what?”

  “So you don’t get hurt.”

  “Only the good die young, Merinda. That’s me.”

  Merinda says, “Don’t be such a retard, Colt. Don’t say that.”

  Colton wraps Merinda’s neck in his arms and kisses the top of her head. “Don’t forget how much I love you, when I’m gone. Just remember that. You’ll have your very own tough angel.”

  “Oh Colton, you’re being a fool. You ain’t gettin’ out of it that easy.”

  “I’ll be dead before I’m twenty-five,” said Colton.

  “You freak Mom and Tabby out when you keep saying that.”

  “I wouldn’t keep saying it if it didn’t keep being true.”

  And you wouldn’t believe the cemeteries in Wyoming. How quickly snatched life is out here, like the sky was always too big for the earth in these high, square borders and so it inhales the breath of the living. Like the sky stopped being able to tell the difference between the wind on a gentle day and a person’s exhalation. Take Colton and the gang of kids with whom he fished and shot geese and with whom he went hunting for nothing and everything. Out of the five of them to begin with—Jake, Cody, JR, Colton and Chase—any way you look at it, all five of them could have died twenty times over before they were out of their teens by the way they lived.

  They were just ordinary, rough-broke Wyoming boys, friends through school, and then, instead of going their different ways, they all ended up on the oil patch. Even Cody, once he recovered from the realization that he wasn’t going to make a pro bull rider, started working in his dad’s trucking company moving water for the oil people. Then the boys—for most of them were still boys—phoned each other on their days or weeks back in Evanston and poached free nights on each other’s sofas, hoping to reconnect, not so much with each other, as with the careless, innocent camaraderie of the easy years gone by.

  Jake was mending his broken heart by then with a girl—a single mother of a toddler and a baby. He and Colton had known Tonya long before she got into the kind of small-town trouble that is often the burden of a pretty Wyoming girl, but it had only just occurred to Jake to fall in love with her. Their first date he said to Tonya, “Do you mind if I bring Colton?”

  “Colton Bryant?”

  “Yeah. I was supposed to hang out with him today.”

  “No,” said Tonya. “That’s fine.”

  So the three of them went to the movies, Tonya between the two boys, and then out to dinner and Tonya got into a heated discussion with Colton about the relative merits of Chevrolets (Tonya’s truck of choice) versus Fords (Colton’s truck of choice) while Jake built a miniature house using the salt and pepper shakers, ketchup packets, and a handful of toothpicks. That is how Jake knew he’d marry Tonya—not because she preferred a Chevy over a Ford, but because she could argue transmissions and axles with Colton until Jake said, only half joking, “Should I just leave you two here and come back in the morning when you’ve settled it?”

  But then Jake and Tonya fell seriously in love. Now when you called Jake’s cell phone it played, “Lord have mercy, baby’s got her blue jeans on,” while you waited for his voice to announce, “You’ve reached Jake. If you leave your name and number I’ll git back to ya.” And he spent a great deal of time with Tonya’s two little children and that put Jake out of the foolin’ around with his friends stakes so Colton came home on his days off and he ate some of Kaylee’s meatloaf and he checked the snow to make doubly sure it was way too deep to take Cocoa out for a ride and then he wore out the bowling alley and after that, when it was good and dark, he grooved a dent in the sofa playing video games.

  One evening in February, Chase phoned and said, “Colton? Don’t you wanna come out and play?”

  “Play what?”

  “With the big boys.”

  “Not particularly,” said Colton.

  “There’s a party tonight on the other side of town.”

  “Uh-huh.” Colton tucked the phone under his chin and went back to his video game.

  “Tell me you wanna drive me there.”

  “I don’t,” said Colton.

  “There’ll be girls for you to look at.”

  “I done my fill of them lately.”

  “There’ll be beer.”

  “I don’t drink,” said Colton.

  “That’s why you’re the perfect driver.”

  “Nope.”

  “I’ll play with you at recess and give you half my lunch.”

  Colton said, “Nope.”

  “Pretty women,” said Chase. “C’mon, Colton, give me a lift.”

  “I gotta go,” said Colton.

  “Okay, well, don’t say I didn’t try to show you a good time.”

  “I won’t,” said Colton.

  “Jeez, Colton, you’re gonna be sorry when I tell you what a good time I had.”

  Colton hung up.

  The next morning Colton woke up with a panic in his chest, like there was something or someone really important that he should have remembered. He jumped out of bed and pulled a T-shirt over his head. He went into the kitchen and phoned Tabby, “Tabby, is there something I am supposed to know about today?”

  “Colton?”

  “I got a bad feeling I forgot something.”

  “Nothing I know of.”

  It wasn’t until lunchtime that the news got back to him. Chase had froze down walking back to his house from the party, pretty drunk in all likelihood, and he slipped and fell maybe, or stopped to rest, and the cold wind stealing in under his skin and stalling his blood and fingering its deadly way to the boy’s heart so that he was solid by the time the cops got to him in the morning. It was too late for anyone to do anything by then.

  And so there was Colton, driving through the icy streets of Evanston like every demon in hell was after his soul with tears pouring down his cheeks until he got to Tabby’s work and
he was out of the truck before it was even at a proper standstill and in front of her with his face such a pathetic mess that Tabby felt the blood leave her skin.

  “Colt? What happened?”

  “I should have been there,” Colton sobbed. “I messed up. Oh holy crap, Tabby, I messed up. It was what I was supposed to do, and I let him down.”

  And nothing anyone could say to him ever persuaded Colton otherwise.

  26

  KAYLEE’S PHILOSOPHY OF DRUGS

  Like the way architecture has evolved differently in different parts of the world to shelter the body from a particular climate, maybe religion is the same thing for the human soul. Maybe religion is something we have constructed—like a spiritual umbrella—to shelter ourselves from the elements in which we find ourselves. So the damp politeness of Episcopalians is best suited to drizzling English summers, the Dutch Reformed Church with its bulldog chin stubbornly facing down the southern tip of Africa, Hinduism all spice and fire in the East. Maybe, in this way, Mormonism evolved out in the western United States (even though started on the East Coast) to suit a place where it is all too easy for relative newcomers to let go of the earth and blow away with the wind, a land where it makes sense to set food stores aside in case of a likely emergency, a sky where a person can feel as if they have already stared down all eternity before they even get through breakfast.

  Being from the West, Kaylee and Bill were raised Mormon, and although they are very private about the extent of their faith, some of the basic tenets of the church seem evident in their everyday life. An ethos of self-reliance, for example, and a strong belief in the importance of family. Also, a godly use of language and an unholy horror of intoxication. To this end, Kaylee made it very clear, if the kids ever did drugs or got themselves all drunked up beyond the hand of angels, she’d kick them in the pants so hard they’d be orbiting the earth for a good long while, begging not to come back down. And if Bill were to ever sit down and pour himself a liberal dose of whiskey, Kaylee wouldn’t be likely to be so tolerant of that either.

  But even a good rule is often better if it’s broken or bent occasionally. So once a year, Bill has not whiskey, but three beers—no more or less—at the end of the hunting season. He drinks them all in one shot the night he comes home with an elk. “Where’s my beer?” he asks the kids, feigning tough-guy booziness.

  And Merinda and Tabby—thrilled with the novelty of it—run to the fridge and come back with three cans of Bud Light.

  “One for the elk,” says Bill, swallowing it down. “One for my horse,” he says, drinking another. “And one for me,” he says, throwing down the third. Then he takes a running start and skids across the floor on his heels, raking the wood with his spurs, straight into the kitchen where Kaylee is making supper. He pulls her away from the stove and leans her back over his arm like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and kisses her full on the lips. “How’d you like your groceries delivered, ma’am? With or without the antlers?”

  “William Justus Bryant!” Kaylee says.

  “He-he-he,” says Bill, which the kids take as a sure sign he must be drunker than a piebald judge. Then he takes a shower and goes to bed. And the next morning they eye him over their cornflakes for signs of moral deterioration. Disappointingly he is, as always, rock steady in his cowboy boots.

  When they were younger, Kaylee told the kids a story about some distant cousin, or maybe (as Tabby suspects) no relation at all, but someone Kaylee had seen on television, who had dropped acid and then jumped off the roof of a multistory building to her very messy death. This death was described and redescribed in some detail by Kaylee. “Just a mess of blood and guts on the sidewalk all because she was made crazy by the drugs,” she says. “And can you imagine how her family felt after that? The sadness and the shame of it would be enough to kill ’em too.”

  And Kaylee fixes each of her children with her steady blue eyes until they nod solemnly, the fear of God branded onto their souls forever.

  27

  FIREWORKS

  Evanston, Wyoming

  It’s true that everyone has a defining tragedy for their lives, but some people are unlucky enough to have a defining tragedy for every year of their lives and one tragedy bumps another out of the way to make way for more and more tragedies until the oases of calm between the hurt are what start to be definitive, everything else an inoculation against luck. For Melissa, it had started with her father, and the way he didn’t have the sense to know where he ended and where she began in any of the important, obvious ways. So when Melissa was four, Melissa’s mother took her and kept three months between herself and whatever other plans Melissa’s father might have for his daughter, doing the best she could with a heart-breaking situation.

  In the end, Melissa’s father took the old Wyoming way out with a coward’s twist—Wild Turkey and a bottle of Valium—all undone by the wind and the endlessness of it all, and maybe sick about what he’d done to his daughter or maybe just sick. But still Melissa’s mother kept moving out of restless habit and working three or four underpaid jobs at once, as a registered nurse and whatever else she could find, always trying to stay one step ahead of nothing at all. It isn’t just plain poverty—an ordinary lack of money—that keeps you on the wrong side of despair. It’s a whole raft of poverties—a poverty of choice and a poverty of support and a poverty that comes with the certain knowledge that no one’s going to take you seriously when you’re invisibly decked out in an apron, working the night-shift.

  Here’s how patterns repeat, like your mind has wandered and you’re left staring at the wallpaper in a roadside motel room, shapes going on forever until it’s hard to imagine that all you need to do is get up off the crazy motif of the bedspread, open the door, and keep walking away from the sameness: Melissa pregnant at nineteen and the boy that got her into that condition halfway out the door, barely zipped up, and denying he had anything to do with it and Melissa facing part-time jobs and not much of a way to keep food in the fridge and hopelessness that looks like circles but feels more like a noose. And then one day in late June 2003 the pattern changed so suddenly that Melissa didn’t realize what had happened until it was too late.

  That day, Colton walked into a friend’s living room and found Melissa. He took one look at her and was undone by the way she was beautiful and dark-haired and tiny and brokenhearted. So then there was a moment the size of all the sky, Colton staring at her and feeling as if someone had released an entire season’s worth of geese below his ribs and Melissa thinking, “Well?”

  And she may have even said it because Colton said, “What?”

  “I’m Melissa.”

  “Colton,” said Colton, snatching his ball cap off his head. “I was…looking for Ruth…”

  “She’s gone to get some hot dogs,” said Melissa.

  “Oh,” said Colton.

  Melissa lit a cigarette and smiled at him a little, most of the smile going into her eyes. Nathanial got up from where he had been lying in front of the television and wrapped himself around her leg.

  “Hi there, half-pint,” said Colton.

  Nathanial pushed his stomach out at Colton.

  “He yours?” Colton asked Melissa.

  Melissa nodded. “It’s just him and me,” she said.

  “Ah,” said Colton.

  Nathanial started to spin around with his arms out on either side. “I’m busy, I’m busy.”

  “You’re dizzy,” said Melissa, “silly cowboy.”

  Colton folded himself down. “Want to know something, little dude?”

  Nathanial stopped spinning and frowned.

  “I had a real wild horse one time,” Colton said, “and I called her Cocoa and I trained her all by myself. But she ran away.”

  Nathanial crossed his arms over his chest and summoned up a look of deep concentration.

  “I looked all over for her. Then one day she fetched up in Freedom, Wyoming.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” said Meliss
a.

  “I ain’t kidding.” Colton stood up. “Fetched up at an auction. Some guy trying to sell her as his own.”

  “Horsey!” said Nathanial.

  “Brand inspector called my mom and said he’d found her registered to us. Saw her BLM brand.”

  “Horsey!” said Nathanial.

  “She was gone a whole year,” Colton said. “I nearly killed myself and my best friend trying to find her and all along she’s in a domestic herd out there.” Colton waved north. “Fat as butter by the time Mom brought her home.”

  Nathanial lost interest and went back to the television.

  Melissa took a drag off her cigarette and eyed Colton through the smoke. She said, “She should be back any minute.”

  Colton frowned.

  “Ruth,” said Melissa. “She just went down to the Loaf ’N Jug.”

  “Oh,” said Colton. “Oh.”

  “Yeah.” Melissa smiled and smoked.

  There was a long pause.

  “She’s a great horse,” said Colton then.

  “Oh?”

  “I mean, I’d put a kid on her.”

  “That’s nice.”

  Colton looked at his hands, his nails bitten down to flat nibs. “I don’t think I’ve seen you before,” he said.

  “I’ve moved around.” Melissa put her cigarette out.

  “Not me,” said Colton. “Aside from I’ve been three years in the Upper Green flow testing.”

  “Flow testing?”

  “Yeah, but I’m gonna drill again someday soon. You know, out on the rigs.”

  Melissa smiled. “Yeah,” she said, “I know what out on the rigs is.”

  “Yep,” said Colton. He stared at Melissa for a few moments more. Then he cleared his throat. “Look, do you want to come and shoot fireworks with me?” he said.

  “What?”

  “And Jake.”

  “Who?”

  “We’ve got artillery shells and cannons…We went to Porter’s and bought half the store. It’ll be better than the fireworks show in Vegas. You’ll see…”