by Annie Proulx
“How the fuck’d you come to name him Umbrella Point?” The coffee was cold and the sun, streaming in hot and glittering, left him nowhere to look but at Kenneth, eating raw sausage from the package. The red light on the stove reflected in the double glass door behind Kenneth in a peculiar way that made it seem as if two intensely red berries were hanging in the disheveled forsythia shrub outside, poised somehow right above Kenneth’s hair. Vergil could make them shift by moving his head.
“You know, I was looking for a different kind of name, every goddamn name you pick for a registered horse, somebody’s used it already, it’s hard to find a original name, but Fay and me was sitting here in the kitchen trying to think up one and I looked over at Bette’s umbrella hanging on the hook over there and said, Umbrella, there’s a unique name, but you know, it wasn’t, somebody already named a horse that, so I says, Umbrella Handle, and son-of-a-bitch, that was already in use, so Fay come up with Umbrella Point and that was acceptable to the powers that be. And we never looked back. We had him until 1973, fifteen years, and he made our living, he built this ranch. National Grand Champion Stallion, Grand Champion Performance Horse. He sired Umbrella Point’s Boy, the grand champion at the Montana State Fair; Gunsight Babe who holds the world record for the four forty and three hundred yards; Chief Hardshell, grand champion at halter and racing, national champion rope race horse; Jot ’Em Down, over a hundred ribbons and awards, every kind of cutting, reining, stump race, pleasure riding award they give; Old Egypt, that was Josephine’s horse, but he won over one hundred and fifty trophies in the show ring; Pegasus, Poetry, Raisin Pudding, Target—I could go on all day.” He swallowed the rest of his coffee and poured more. Vergil tilted his head this way and that, forcing the berries to hop to different branches. The hectoring voice began again.
“And then it was over, in the most senseless act of violence. Josephine came out for a visit with her then husband, this silent, sulky bastard, Ults, she got tangled up with him at one of those goddamn communes down there in New Mexico, men growing their hair down to their ass and dressed up in them psychedelic rags, jewelry and junk all over him—Christ, it hurt to shake hands with the son-of-a-bitch he had so many rings on. He had braids and a rag around his head like he was expecting to sweat. We tried to bring her up decent, got her a horse when she was six, give her everything we could, and what does she do, goes off to one of them weed camps and wears a pioneer dress and gets tangled up with this Ults, his father’s a pipeline supplier, I think he was ashamed of his kid. Well, the son-of-a-bitch cracked, went crazy, got up one morning and took my thirty-thirty from over the door and went to the barn, led Umbrella out and shot him right outside the barn, started back in. Of course the shot woke me up and I looked out the window and saw Umbrella Point quivering on the ground and Ults walking away and carrying the rifle, this little smile on his face, you could tell he was all drugged up, not too hard to figure out what happened and what was going to happen, and I was down those stairs three at a time, I got to the back door just as he comes up on the porch, still holding the rifle, and he starts to bring it up—oh there’s no doubt in my mind he intended to shoot me, to shoot us all, kill Josephine, Bette, myself, the cat maybe—but my god, I don’t know how I did it to this day, surprise element, I think, but I grabbed that rifle out of his hands and shot him in the shoulder before he knew what was happening. He went right down the steps and laid there in the dirt hollering. I come back in and poured a glass of whiskey, drank it neat, ran outside to Umbrella Point—had to step right over Ults and I give him a good kick as I did—but my fine champion stallion was killed, and I called the sheriff’s office and said what happened and that if he didn’t come get Ults I might finish the job. Bette and Josephine was going nuts, they couldn’t understand it any more than I could. Josephine blamed me, said, you didn’t have to shoot him, did you? and we parted on bad terms, she drove off with him to the hospital or the dump, but you know, it wasn’t too long after that they got divorced. I never knew the details, don’t know them to this day, but they were divorced inside a year, that is if they was ever married. Could of been some damn hippie ceremony with dope and sitar music and tofu. I don’t know. Ask her about it.”
“She don’t want to talk about it.”
“Can’t blame her, can you? I hate to talk about it myself. Fay was in town drunked up that weekend and when he heard what had happened he cried like a baby. The horse was buried by then, I did it myself.” He ate another raw sausage.
“About Fay? I was going to tell you about the cook we had then. Odella Hooky, some kind of vegetarian subsect of the Holy Rollers. She wouldn’t touch meat or nothing from a animal. No bacon, no steaks, no eggs, no lard biscuits, no butter. We tried to get her to cook with corn oil but she wouldn’t believe oil come from corn. She was OK on beans but they didn’t have much savor. Finally Fay comes into her kitchen and he’s carrying about a five-pound sirloin in one hand and a hot frying pan in the other, you can see the heat waves coming off that thing, and he says, ‘you cook this, by god, or I’ll cook you,’ and he holds her hand over that hot frying pan, about half an inch off the metal, and she’s trying to pull her hand up and he’s holding it down and she just hits it with the tips of her fingers and you could hear the sizzle across the room. Well, she cooked the steak, crying to beat the band, but the next morning she was gone and Fay had to do the cooking for six months which is how long it took us to find somebody else.”
Vergil and Fay
Josephine was out riding. No, he told her, I’ll polish your shoes and buy you Cadillacs but you don’t get me on a horse, I had the fucking horse radish years ago, fucking unpredictable insane animals. Fay came up to where he leaned on the fence, squinting through his cigarette smoke, the sunlight hitting the ironed-in crease of his jeans.
“I’m headin out for town. Wanna ride along?”
“Fucking right,” Vergil said, surprised. He didn’t want to go anywhere with old Fay but he’d go just for the somewhere of it, nothing to do but sit here in the living room with its skulls and antlers and Indian blankets and spurs, look at back issues of Western Horseman and Montana Wildlife. “Sure, I’ll go with you. Give you a hand if you’re picking up feed,” for he had heard Bette tell the old man not to forget the chicken feed again, they were more or less out.
“Never say no to a helping hand.” That flat nutcracker stare.
The floor of the truck was littered with rubbish—unopened mail trodden muddy, supermarket tabloids, 500-POUND MAN WINS RODEO PRIZE, a bottle of Hawbaker’s Red Fox Urine, beer bottles, snow chains, rope, old bridles, a crushed hat, a pair of galoshes with pointed toes to accommodate cowboy boots, candy wrappers and wadded-up empty cigarette packs. He was uncomfortable, the left foot higher than the right, up on the mound of chains. The stuffing hung out of the seat. The ashtray spilled butts and Fay was lighting another. The windshield displayed two smeared arcs in a field of streaked mud. It was forty-three miles to town and Fay only hummed and sang, “The clap-ridden slats in their ten-gallon hats ain’t worth a damn that I know,” grunting when Vergil set him a question or guessed at the depth of the snow on the distant mountains or wondered whose place that was with an old railroad boxcar for a house and seventy or eighty junk cars strewn around it like fragments from an explosion.
About halfway down the trip, he thought the hell with it and rolled a joint, the last of the weed. By the time they pulled up in front of Busree’s Hardware in town and Fay grabbed the list from the seat, finally opening his mouth to say, meet you here at four, Vergil was calm and pleased. He wandered around town, went into the drugstore and bought shaving cream and aspirin, in the café ordered coffee and a piece of gluey red pie the waitress said was strawberry-rhubarb, looked at western-cut shirts in the Kowboy Korner, tried on a pair of Larry Mahan boots, “handmade, hand lasted and pegged, extra-wide steel shank and a good thick sole, last you a few years,” said the clerk, grey stiff schnauzer hair, a red spot between his eyes, leaning against the w
all next to a framed paper like a diploma, the Patriotic Citizens Award Given in Grateful Appreciation for Unsolicited Inspirational Patriotic Service to the Community through the Daily Display of Our National Flag, and Vergil caught on that the cloth flapping outside the show window was the corner of an immense flag secured at windows on the upper level of the building; but the boots felt strange, he didn’t like that pushing arch under his foot, and the high heel embarrassed him.
“I’ll think about it,” he said to the disappointed clerk, glanced at the hats—god, he’d love to buy a big fucking cowboy hat, he wished he’d had one in Nam, but went outside again, looked up at the flag which was dirty and ragged. The sign in the window read BUY AMERICAN. By four o’clock he’d been in and out of every store, the tiny grocery store with the hand-lettered placard THE WORLD’S NOT WORTH A FIG. WE HAVE GOOD RAISINS FOR SAYING SO, the town clerk’s office, the clinic, the post office. An old guy wearing a filthy hat, nose like a chicken’s snuffbox, walked past, a placard around his neck: WOLVES. Let’s Don’t Breed Them. We Don’t Need Them.
Fay wasn’t in the truck and there weren’t any sacks or boxes in it either, and he sat on the lumpy front seat for half an hour waiting and looking up aslant, seeing the whole sky driving north, long ribs of cloud curving over the land, studying a movie poster for The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai.
He tried the clerk at the feedstore, one cheek larger than the other and hard to tell where his mouth left off and his face began, who said, nope, Fay ain’t been in, try across the street.
He didn’t see him at first, then he did. He was there, straight-backed at the end of the bar, his beer glass weighting down the shopping list, bending the ear of a nut-brown geezer who stank of sheep. Everybody in the place was wearing a message, words and images on belt buckles, t-shirts, leather labels on their jeaned rumps, names woven into hatbands, billed caps stamped KING ROPES. Vergil signaled for a beer, sat down beside Fay who swung around at once and said, “you get it all done?”
“I didn’t have very much to get. Toothpaste. Some fucking stamps.”
“‘You remember the chicken feed?’” His voice, in uncanny imitation of Bette.
“I thought you were going to get it.”
“Well Jeezus, ‘I thought you was going to get it,’” he mimicked. “No! YOU was going to get it while I caught up on a few things.”
“I didn’t fucking know you wanted me to get the stuff, Fay. How much does she want? I’ll get it now.”
“It’s on the goddamn list, heads up the whole goddamn list, every week chicken feed, chicken feed—them chickens the size of mules the feed they eat.”
“You got the fucking list, Fay. Give me the list and I’ll pick up the chicken feed.”
“There’s more than chicken feed on that list. There’s booger-pickers and Tampax-pullers and a cure for Texas itch.”
He took the sopping list from the bar. Half of it was unreadable, the ink blurred with beer. “Get what I can.”
“You do that, you do that.” And Fay started to sing in his slippery tenor, “each range breeds its own brand of bastard, boozefighter, bugger or bum…”
Out in the street Vergil headed for the fucking truck hoping the fucking keys were in it. Quarter of fucking five. If everything closed at five he was fucked. First the damn fucking chicken feed. Goddamn fucking Fay.
The feedstore clerk was glad enough to see him again, swung at a fly with a plastic bag of dried beans.
“Chicken feed.”
“Layin mash? Cracked corn?”
“What the fuck does Fay usually get?”
“He don’t usually get none.” A crackling laugh like static.
“Use your phone? I’ll call the fucking ranch.”
There wasn’t any answer and he half remembered them talking about going up to the big wash in the north section. They fucking all said “warsh,” even Josephine. They must be up there, maybe they had ridden out on the fucking horses. He looked at the list again, what he could make out. Chicken feed. Matches. Powdered Milk. T-post braces. Supplement. Hog ring. Keys. Popcorn. And six or fucking seven other items he could not grasp—raisins or razors, vaccine or vaseline, slicker or sugar, rump steak or rope clamp.
“I’ll take a bag of each.”
“Fifty pound?”
“Yeah. You got any fucking T-post braces?”
“What size and how many?”
“Ten of each size. Charge it to the Switch ranch. How about supplement?”
“Ken Switch?” He sniggered. “How’s his love life these days? He want horse, cow, sheep, goat, cat, dog or human supplement? Ten each kind?”
“How the fuck do I know?” At least he had the chicken feed.
Fay wasn’t in a mood to leave the bar, laughing and smoking and drinking boilermakers with the sheepherder, talking about a third person, a man called High Nuts, “a bastard’s bastard” and “so dumb he couldn’t pull the plug and let the piss out of the sink,” a man with “a head full of boiled gravel.”
Well, thought Vergil, he fucking doesn’t work for me and I’m not his fucking relative. He asked for and got a shot of Shark Snot and another or two. At least he had the chicken feed. He listened to what they had to say around him.
“The only good he ever done was with that rattlesnake. You know that one? He always had a plug a tobacca in his cheek. This rattler’s down by the gate, he comes riding up, don’t think twice, lets loose a stream a juice, it goes straight in ol’ rattler’s mouth, dead shot, that snake like to twistated itself inside out and finally died.”
On the other side sat a pair of ranch hands, one with his head on the bar.
“I told him, I said no problem.”
“’At’s the trouble. Try to talk, says I can’t, but no problem, but he says stop. I says you told me to stop.”
“I never used it. I got my own way of doing it. Short, sweet and never sober.”
The bartender leaned over the counter and spoke to Vergil in a slow voice, saying, “why does a Basco carry shit in his wallet?”
“I don’t know, does he?”
“For identification.”
Drunk driving
It was some unknown black hour when they steered out of the bar and climbed in the truck.
“What time is it,” said Vergil.
“How the hell do I know? Don’t wear no watch nor rings nor golden chains. I tell you the time my daddy got a watch? Got a watch and a bathtub and a toilet and a warshing machine with a gas engine on the same day. High point of his life, fuckin miserable Irishman. Sold his cows, heavy and solid, at the right time, price up, the only time in his life. Next year the government tore the heart of him out and he lost the ranch. Well, this day I’m talking about, he’s gonna use the bathtub first. Put the bathtub and the toilet—‘can’t say we hasn’t got a pot to piss in now’—in a corner of the kitchen and hung a blanket cattercorner acrost. Blanket stops short of the floor about eighteen inches. All us kids sitting there like you see kids watching TV nowadays. Old lady heats up water on the stove, every pot and pan in the house, pours it in, he’s got a big perfume bar of soap, and we hear him behind the blanket singing ‘Rose of Tralee’ and getting undressed, see his boots come off, then he pisses in the toilet. We can see his feet. He spreads a towel on the floor beside the bathtub. Takes his watch off—Jesus and Joseph, he’s proud of that watch; never had one before—and we hear him put it on the shelf, there’s a little shelf on the wall. He gets in the tub, wallows, lolls, sings, we can smell the perfume soap and hear the water, he calls for a saucepan, dips up the water and pours it over his head, he slides down and goes under, makes a noise like a coyote in the well. After an hour he gets out. We see his feet on the towel, two big old boiled ham hocks. He’s got the other towel to dry hisself, and he gives it a playful little snap, all clean and pure as he is from the first bath of his life in a bathtub, and the end of the towel snakes out and she catches the watch on the shelf, flips it straight into the toilet. Which he hadn’t fl
ushed. Christ, the language that tore out of his mouth, a howl like a banshee. He reaches down in the pissy toilet to get the watch but it’s no good, it’s ruint. They didn’t have no pissproof watches then. He keeps that goddamn thing in a cigar box for a couple of years until Donnell, my kid brother that was, takes it apart and a spring in it uncoils like a rattlesnake and gets him in the right eye and he’s blind in one eye the rest of his days, which wasn’t very long. So I never wanted no watch seeing how much trouble they caused. Oh I’m a jolly baker and I bake my bread brown, I got the biggest rolling pin of any man in town…”