The Miseducation of Cameron Post

by Emily M. Danforth

  Coley jumped up when she saw us, ran around the table, and hugged us both like we hadn’t been together less than twelve hours before. She could pull off that kind of thing, but when someone like Ruth did the same, it didn’t work at all.

  “This is a little like torture,” she said in my ear, smelling like Old Spice and cigarette smoke, which must have been left over on Ty’s shirt. She handed me the Coke and I took a long swallow, met Jamie’s stare, offered him the cup, but he turned away.

  “How much longer do you have?” I asked.

  “Half an hour, forty minutes, something like that,” she said, squeezing my arm. “Wait for me?” Then she considered us both again, went back to my ear. “Are you two high already?”

  “Not already,” I said. “Already finished.”

  “A big morning, was it?” She smiled, the signature Coley wink.

  “Hardly,” Jamie said. “Cameron couldn’t wait to get over here to see you. She’s been thinking about you for hours.”

  I jumped in fast. “Jamie’s playing the role of baby right now because I wouldn’t go with him to Taco John’s.”

  “Oh, you poor thing,” Coley said, now grabbing Jamie’s arm. “They have pacos at the concession booth. Is that an acceptable stand-in? I’ll treat you. Well, I’ll get my mom to treat you; she’s working over there right now.” Coley had the knack for smoothing things over, making people smile and go along, but I guess it didn’t always work.

  “I don’t think so,” Jamie said. “I’m gonna head out. See if I can find Travis.” He still hadn’t looked at me since Coley had offered me her drink.

  “You’re coming back, though?” I asked.

  “Depends,” he said. “I’m sure you can man up without me.” He walked off into the clatter of the hall.

  “What’s the deal?” Coley asked, both of us watching his long stride and black shirt weave through the crowd around the tangles of cowboys, standing out as he went, mostly because of the shorts and his half-bare legs in all those stems of denim.

  “Just a bad high,” I said. “He’s been cranky since we smoked.”

  “You fool kids and your drugs,” Coley said. “When will you ever learn?”

  Coley wasn’t crowned Queen of Bucking Horse Sale 1992. It went to Rainy Oschen, just like Coley claimed it should, though some people seemed scandalized by the election process and there were murmurings that it was fixed, that if ballots had indeed been counted properly, Coley would have landslided it.

  “Whatever,” she said after the dusty crowning ceremony held out in the center of the arena, the bull riding just finished, the calf roping up next. (Even the runners-up got crowns, albeit of the smaller, silver variety.) “I’d honestly rather win as a senior, or as a junior. If I even get nominated again.”

  “Are you kidding?” Brett said, putting his arm around her. “It’s in the bag.”

  We were grouped together at one of the entrances to the grandstands blocking traffic, but we didn’t care. The night was just chilly enough to remind us that it was still technically spring, and the place was packed, everybody too loud and too drunk and high on Bucking Horse fever. I’d been scanning for Jamie for most of the evening and hadn’t found him. And hadn’t necessarily expected to.

  “How many more days of this?” Coley asked us, pulling off her crown and sticking it on my head. “It already feels like forever.”

  “No way,” Brett said, taking the just-placed crown off my head and putting it back on Coley’s. “You don’t get to tire out on my last night of Bucking Horse.”

  Brett had been selected as one of two Miles Citian players to compete in a statewide soccer match to determine the all-stars who would represent Montana in some national high school soccer league taking place in the summer. The match was in Bozeman on Sunday, and so he was heading there with his parents promptly the next morning, right during the parade.

  “Don’t remind me,” Coley said, now putting the crown on Brett’s head. “I wish I could skip and go with you.”

  “Not a chance,” he said, kissing her hand. “You’re part of the royal brigade.”

  We moved outside the arena, where it was less crowded and the smell of grilling burgers was smoking the air. We parked ourselves as near to the beer booth as we thought permissible, hoping to spot someone to buy for us, or at the very least let us sip from their can. A round ended and the beer line swelled into a lake of thirsty patrons waving their tens at the beefy ladies working the booth. Two of those patrons were Ruth and Ray, hand in hand, Ruth wearing a denim skirt and a red scarf with brown boots and hats printed on it.

  Ray saw me before Ruth did, and I nodded at him and wondered if that could maybe be that, but he pointed me out to her and she walked right over, gaining some appreciative glances, I noticed, as she went.

  “There you are,” she said. “I was starting to think we weren’t going to see you before Monday.”

  “Blame my brother,” Coley said, as if letting Ruth in on something, which was exactly the kind of thing Ruth loved. “He appointed Cam my official keeper for the weekend.”

  Ray joined us, handing a beer to Ruth, which I sensed wasn’t her first of the evening, and after I cleared spending the next couple of nights at Coley’s (contingent upon mandatory church attendance Sunday morning), and we heard about the Sally-Q booth’s success (Seventeen new hostesses planning to open up their living rooms for hardware demonstrations!), Ruth told me she wanted a word in private, so we moved a few feet away from the little knot, found a space wedged in so close to one of the big barbecue grills that my right side was all sizzling heat.

  “Honey, this might upset you, but I want you to know that Ray and I saw Jamie tonight,” she said, taking my hand and quieting her voice as much as the crowd would allow. “He’s ahead of us a few rows in the bleachers and he and that Burrel boy are being pretty darned disgusting with a couple of girls they have with them.” When I didn’t say anything, she added, “I don’t think they’re Custer girls. Ray thinks maybe they’re from Glendive.” And when I still didn’t say anything, she said, “I just wanted you to hear from someone who loved you.”

  “Okay,” I said, trying to picture what these girls looked like and liking the slightly chunky, bleach blonde with black roots and too much makeup version the best. And even though I was surprised by the little bit of jealousy I felt, there was some relief in it too—as if the pressure was off me.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” Ruth asked, even as some dustup disturbed the already-impatient beer line and the shouts of the crowd grew louder around us.

  “Not really,” I said. “Jamie can do whatever he wants.” But then I added, “Thanks for telling me, though, Aunt Ruth.” And she gave me a quick hug and a sad-Ruth half smile and went off with Ray.

  “Did you get a talking-to?” Coley asked me, drifting over to the grill and leaving Brett with some of our classmates.

  “Sort of,” I said. “Jamie’s in the bleachers with his tongue down some Glendive girl’s throat.”

  “Ruth said that?”

  “In a Ruthian kind of way.”

  “That slimy son of a bitch,” Coley said, putting her arm around me. “Let’s get Ty to kick his ass.”

  “Not worth it,” I said, and that I meant, even though I knew that Coley didn’t believe me. “Let’s just go get really, really drunk.”

  “Don’t you want to see what she looks like?” Coley asked, and I told her that I guessed I did just to humor her. From the closest arena entryway Coley spotted Ruth and Ray climbing the stairs, and when I couldn’t find them in the stands, she actually took her hand and turned my head until it was facing the right direction, both of us tight together against the pull of the crowd, watching as they returned to their seats, and sure enough, there was Jamie just a few rows down. And I suppose we were sort of far away, but even so I could tell these girls were much prettier than the ones I’d put in my head. And Jamie was indeed all over one of them.

  “They’re beasty
,” Coley said. “Authentically vile. You can tell they’re trampy from here.”

  “Can you?” I asked, smelling Coley’s apple-scented shampoo, her soft hair brushing the side of my face. “Are they wearing the scarlet letter?”

  “How are you being so cool about this?” She turned to look at me, our faces so, so close. “Is that what happened this morning before I saw you—you broke up? Is that it?”

  “I’ve told you twenty times. There wasn’t anything to break up.”

  “I know, but I thought that was just you being you.”

  “I don’t even know what that means,” I said. But I did know, and she was right; I had been totally arch about Jamie and me, just not in the way she was reading it. “Jamie and I are just better as friends,” I said, trying again.

  She started to say something and then didn’t. We watched Jamie and his Glendive girl kiss, and then watched Ruth make faces at those kisses, shake her head for an audience of Ray, which made us both laugh.

  “The good thing about it happening tonight is that it’s Bucking Horse,” Coley said, taking my arm and walking us out of there. “We can find you a cowboy in no time. Or two cowboys. Twelve cowboys.”

  And I wanted so much to say “Or how about a cowgirl?” Just say it, right then, in the moment, put it out there and let it stay and make Coley deal with it. But of course I didn’t. No way.

  After Coley’s stint as runner-up on a crepe papered flatbed float in Saturday’s parade, the two of us decided that we were officially tired of Bucking Horse. Brett was off to play in his big soccer match, Jamie was still dodging me in favor of a girl who might actually put out, and a bunch of thunderheads rolled in by noon, the way they always do at least once during the festivities, making everything gray and soggy and more than a little deflated.

  Coley drove us out to her ranch and we spent the afternoon frocked in Ty’s gigantic sweatshirts, drinking sugary mugs of Constant Comment (Coley’s favorite) and watching MTV, hiding out from the social obligations of Bucking Horse. It was only the second or third time I’d been out at her house without Brett, and I was predictably anxious about that. Coley’s mom made us grilled cheese with tomato soup before she headed into town to work her twelve-hour shift as an ER nurse. She’d told me to call her Terry probably half a dozen times, but I couldn’t stop with the “Mrs. Taylor.”

  “Coley, honey, wouldya be sure and feed before it gets too late?” Mrs. Taylor said, standing by the front door in maroon scrubs, an umbrella in hand, an older, more worn version of Coley but still really pretty. “I have no idea when Ty will show his face.” She kept checking her reflection in a mirror above their coat hooks, flicking the side of her hair a few times. “It’s chicken-fried-steak night at the cafeteria. You girls want to come in and eat with me before you go out?”

  “We’re not going out,” Coley said, and then she turned to me. “What is it you said about Bucking Horse, Cam?”

  “That it’s a bitter mistress,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Coley said, laughing, though her mom was not. “We’ve decided that Bucking Horse is a bitter mistress and we’d rather eat ice cream and avoid it.”

  “That doesn’t sound a bit like you,” Mrs. Taylor said, looking from Coley to me, not necessarily unkindly but not kindly, either. “I thought you’d be downtown in the thick of things for sure.”

  “We’re just gonna stay in and do nothing,” Coley said, checking her own reflection in the coat-hook mirror and then pulling the hood of her sweatshirt over her head and backing up until she fell over the arm of the couch and sprawled with her head and trunk on the cushions and her legs in the air.

  “Call me at work if you change your mind and head in,” Mrs. Taylor said. And then from the stoop she added, “And tell Ty to call me too—if you see him.”

  We did see Ty not half an hour later, a dirty and busted-up version with a big cut under one eye and, as he put it, a “hitch in his giddy-up.”

  “I didn’t think you were supposed to ride until tonight,” Coley said, helping him off with his jean jacket.

  “I’m not,” he told us, putting on a big grin. “This is from one ornery son of a bitch named Thad. I shit you not. The fucker’s named Thad. Now he’s the one looks like he got trampled by a bull.”

  “Nice, Ty,” Coley said, inspecting the dried blood on the jacket’s collar. “I thought we were trying to preserve the family name.”

  “That’s exactly what I was doing, kiddo,” he said, his head buried in the freezer. He emerged with a bag of frozen broccoli as his ice pack.

  He drove off again after a shower, a serving of scrambled eggs and toast, and a clothing change: stiff jeans, a different hat, a fresh cigarette behind his ear. Coley was asleep next to me on the couch. The rain had mostly stopped and there were sunbeams spotlighting through the remaining clouds and lighting up sections of the hills outside their big living-room window. Next to that window was a framed family picture taken before Mr. Taylor had died. They were out somewhere on the prairie. Coley was maybe nine, in pigtails, all of them wearing soft denim shirts tucked into jeans. The picture had sort of faded somehow in the processing, almost a black-and- white but just tinged with color. Mr. Taylor, his mustache hiding part of his smile, had his arms around Mrs. Taylor and Ty, Coley was sort of perched in the middle, and Ty had his thumb hooked in his belt. They looked happy, which is the point in those kinds of photos, I know. But they did.

  I tried to get up from the couch to look at it closer without waking Coley, moving only an inch or two and then waiting, trying not to shift the cushions, but I hadn’t even put all my weight on my feet before she said, “Did it stop raining?”

  “Yeah,” I said, feeling like I’d been caught doing something when I hadn’t, really.

  “We should go feed, then,” she said in a yawn, stretching wide her arms.

  I grinned at her. “You think I’m gonna help you do your chores? You play the cowgirl, not me.”

  “Only because you could never hack it as a cowgirl, townie,” Coley said, sitting up fast and gripping the hem of my sweatshirt, pulling me back onto the couch, which I didn’t fight at all. She threw the fleece blanket she’d been wrapped in over my head and put a couch cushion on top of that, climbing atop the pile and staying there. I struggled halfheartedly, Coley resisted, I struggled more, the two of us eventually on the carpet between the couch and coffee table, the blanket still covering most of me and so it was between our bodies; but when a corner of it got pinned beneath my knee and pulled away and I could see how those too-big sweatshirts had twisted around us, leaving my stomach and Coley’s back bare, I stopped pretending to struggle and actually pulled away from her, stood up, shook out my legs as if I was Rocky at the top of the stairs in Philadelphia.

  “Retreat means defeat,” Coley said, pulling her hair out of her face and lifting her arms for me to help her up, so I did but then backed off again.

  “I didn’t want to hurt you with my advanced physical prowess,” I said, all jangly energy.

  “Of course not. Wanna see if Ty has any booze in his room as payment for our labor?”

  He did. Half a bottle of Southern Comfort, which we mixed with what was left of two liters of semiflat Coca-Cola stored in the door of the fridge. We drank some. We changed into jeans. I borrowed a pair of Ty’s also-too-big boots, which reminded me of trips to the Klausons’. Outside it was muddy and smelled like grass and wild flowering crabapple trees and just-after-rain, the smell that laundry detergents and soap try to imitate with their “spring meadow” varieties but can never pull off. We loaded heavy bags of range cake into the slippery bed of the truck. Coley found a pocketknife and cut each bag open at the top. She ran back into the house and emerged with a cassette, which she put into the truck’s player, hit Rewind. The tape was a Tom Petty mix, also once belonging to Ty. I’d sent a similar mix of Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers tunes to Lindsey as a kind of thank-you for all the artists she’d mixed up for me, but when I’d asked her what she though
t of it during one of our phone conversations, she’d told me that Tom Petty was a male chauvinist and that his role as an Alice-eating Mad Hatter in the video for “Don’t Come Around Here No More” was just additional fuel to a fire already started by what Lindsey claimed were lyrics showcasing his “limited abilities as a songwriter and his prurient interest in teenage girls.”

  I didn’t share any of this with Coley, and it didn’t change Petty’s appeal for me, either. That afternoon in the truck Coley turned the volume up loud. We rolled down the windows, manual, not electric. We drank from our big plastic bottle. She’d rewound to the first song on side B, “The Waiting,” which was our mutual favorite. She sang one line.

  Oh baby don’t it feel like heaven right now?

  I sang the next.

  Don’t it feel like something from a dream?

  Coley bounced us over the hills, down rutted roads of crumbly sandstone and shale, through trenches of fresh mud as thick and oily as modeling clay, and then cross-country, crunching wet sagebrush when it was in our path, which it often was.

  In between verses we passed the bottle, noticed the purple crocuses that dotted some of the hillsides, their petals so thin they were nearly transparent, the sunlight cast through them, and those hillsides greener than they’d be for the rest of the summer. We listened to a few more tracks and then Coley rewound and it was “The Waiting” again, and then again, each time louder, each time better.

  We found most of the herd through gate seven, down in a grove of juniper, one of those beams of sunlight warming their wet and tangled hides. The Taylors raised Red Angus. They were due to calve in a couple of weeks, and several of the way-pregnant heifers looked like hairy boxcars on legs. Their calves, I knew, would be velvety red-brown teddy bears with big, soft eyes: completely adorable. I moved to the bed of the truck and poured cake while Coley drove us in a zigzagging line, trying to spread out the cows for their meal.