“Hey Joe! It’s already past six and it takes almost an hour to get up there. Hurry it up. I’m already late coming by to pick you up.”
He hadn’t noticed the station wagon parked alongside the fence, he wondered how long it had been there as he watched Art’s smiling face poke around in the space of the lowered window, throwing its words out across the yard at him. He walked over to the car and leaned against the wood paneling of the side, he never missed the opportunity to touch Art’s car because it seemed to him the greatest waste to build a car of steel and then slap wood on the outside. “What time is it?”
“Six to six. On the dot.”
He moved around the back of the car, tracing his finger on the waxed wood and over the word cut right into the tailgate itself, the red letters spelled FORD. The word was carried all over the valley; stamped on the back of almost every tailgate of every pickup was FORD. Even when driving with Odus to Tahoe they would pass car after car and written on the side in solid chrome was FORD. He liked the word. He didn’t know why, it didn’t sound like the name of a car, or the name of a man, it didn’t sound like the name of any living thing he had ever seen or ever heard of, but when he saw the word it stopped his eye and grew into something he couldn’t explain but only feel. Coming up close to another pickup at night the headlights would finally hit the tailgate and the red letter F flared, alone, isolated until the light focused and fired up the whole word FORD, as if the word was always there, waiting in the dark, waiting to expose itself to all who had eyes to see. And it could be seen in the rain with the water slipping off the slick red letters as if they were impossible to penetrate and when the snow drove down on everything in the valley, burying, steeping in ice, on some road some truck would still be moving, going steady and slow with the word FORD stamped on the tailgate, blazing in the white, and through the mountain roads the full weight of a cattle truck would pull itself up a hill, the cramped feareyed cattle listening to the pulse of the engine drive them forward, the letters penning them in loomed the size of a man’s arm, cut clean and straight, FORD. And the people in the cars moving behind the truck up the grade had to look at the word, to read it, but find no definition for it, to follow it. There wasn’t any place they could go without following the word. The word could be passed but there was always another one in front of it. There was no way to avoid it and no one tried. The word was cut into almost every moving machine. There was in the letters a fierce motion, its blood color burned across the landscape in every direction, and the people neither feared it nor ignored it. FORD was so common to their experience they simple accepted it, for even though they had to follow it, it eventually took them where they had planned to go from the beginning.
Art swung in his seat as Birdsong slammed the door behind him, “You set? Sure, sure you’re set. I’d like you to meet my brother-in-law, Timothy, came up all the way from San Jose.” Art turned his smile to the backseat.
“It’s a pleasure pal, heard a lot about you. Art here seems to know just about everyone in this valley,” the man in the backseat with his hair shaved down to knife-blade height of bristles leaned forward and squeezed Birdsong’s hand. “This fellow next to me is Dick Dolis, he’s one of my bowling buddies.”
The other man with his hair shaved down to the same height but with a nose that cut out of his face like a pressed piece of red plastic threw his hand out, knocking his fingers against the glass of the overhead light. “Goddam these FORDS” he shook the hand like a wet blanket until the fingers were pumped with blood. “Most uncomfortable cars I ever rode in, don’t leave a man room to move like in a CHEVY.” He extended his hand again, “Pleasure, buddy,” then let the width of his back settle against the seat. “Where’s your bow,” he looked across the thick knees of his heavy legs jammed up in front of him.
“Joe’s not going to hunt,” Art started the engine and flashed his smile in the rearview mirror. “He’s one of the guides.”
“You mean you ain’t going to bow-hunt buddy, shit,” he flicked the red nose sticking from his face and drew up some air into the nostrils that came slicing back out with a little wheeze. “Goddamdest thing I ever heard, a guy with your background who’s going to pass up a chance to bow-hunt. I bet you’re pretty good at it though, huh. I bet that’s why you ain’t gonna shoot, afraid you’ll show all us white sonsabitches up. I’ll bet you pull a mean string when you want to. I just bet you can.”
“Isn’t that Ben Dora’s girl up ahead, Joe,” Art asked before Birdsong had a chance to answer the man in the back. “I wonder what she’s doing at this time of morning?”
“She’s running her father’s five milkcows up to the Handy field behind the dump, Dora’s leasing it off Dixel.”
Art slowed the car as he approached the rhythm of the cows and the girl locked onto the horse, he was always alert when there were loose cattle next to the road, although he had never seen one move in any direction but forward as long as there was a rider behind, he still didn’t trust them, and especially when their heads were bent so low he couldn’t see their eyes.
“Holy Jesus, buddy!” Dick slapped Timothy on the knee and pointed through the window. “That girl’s almost naked! Look at it bump, umph, umph, damn, I bet that’s one old horse who is feeling his oats this morning!”
“It’s a pretty piece alright,” Timothy pressed his face to the window, the sun splintering through the spikes of his hair.
“Holy Jesus, buddy, how would you like to have that slidin’ up and down the banister all day keeping it warm for you until you got home!”
“Look’s like somebody’s beat hell out of that kid,” Timothy jerked his face back from the window, not being able to stop himself from pulling away at the sight of wounds he just discovered.
“Beat hell out of her! Hell, so would I. She’s got somebody treating her right you can bet. I bet she loves every minute of it. Your mountain girls are like that. I’d beat her. Let her beat me too, beat me to a toothpick. Honk your horn at her Art. Let her know there are some men about.” He jumped forward, shoving his hand across Art’s shoulder and pressed a bleat from the horn that yanked the horse up on its hind legs and brought it down stamping hooves in the center of the road, throwing the blanket off the girl and forcing Art to make a decision he wasn’t prepared to make; he spun the wheel in the wrong direction, swerving the car into the lane where the horse was turned around facing him. He slammed on the brakes almost throwing everyone through the glass of the windows as the girl leaned down and shouted at his face frozen in its smile, “Goddam you bastard!” The words released Art from his moment of decision that had already passed and he punched the gaspedal, sending the car past the cows, speeding down the road between the track of barbwire lining both sides. When they reached Highway 89 Dick finally stopped laughing enough to remember his thermos full of whiskey, “Man I didn’t see them long, but they’ll live in my memory forever, those were the prettiest pair of tits a man would ever want to lay his head on, whoever beat her knew just what he was about, he didn’t leave a mark on those young suckin’ milk bags. Here Art, you take a drink of that and pass it over to Joe.”
“You sure got some set-up here brother-in-law,” Timothy leaned on the seat behind Art and slapped him on the back. “You sure knew what you were doing when you moved way the hell up here pal. Wild naked mountain gals running all over the place. You sure know where to find it brother-in-law. What about you Joe,” he slid the weight of his arms along the edge of the seat and nudged the back of Birdsong’s head. “I’ll put money on it you’re into that stuff all the time, pretty regular I think, being redblooded and all. I think they’re crawling all over you, getting a little tommy-hawk.”
“Tommiehawak, whew! Buddy you said it,” Dick grabbed his thermos back and tipped it up along the red blade of his nose. “I’d like to scalp me a piece of that back there,” he wedged the thermos in the jeans between the bulge of thighs and ran his tongue out along the ridge of wet hanging lip. “Hey! You ever seen t
hat de-kal some of the big Semi’s have on the back, shows a big titted Indian gal with her knees pressed together and her spread hands flattened over her pussy and down beneath it says I’VE BEEN SCALPED! Goddam, everytime I see that I laugh so hard I almost wreck up the CHEVY. I’ve been scalped, shit, imagine that, that’s goddam funny. I bet that’s the way they did it too, some of them Indian bucks. Ain’t that right. I bet you could educate hell out of us along those lines, hey Joe.”
“I guess so.”
“You guess so!” Dick poked the thermos like a stick, knocking Birdsong’s shoulder forward. “Ain’t you modest as hell buddy. Why you’ve had more ass than Tim and me could dream of in a lifetime even if we was sleeping in the same bed. Ain’t he modest Tim?”
“I agree with you, he probably sees more ass than a toiletseat, but he’s a modest boy alright. He’s what you call one of your shy, quiet ones, thinking all the time he is. Still waters run deep.”
“Joe’s not much of a talker,” Art made certain his smile was level with the rearview mirror and flicked the radio on, thinking the full weight of his statement deserved a serenade. The music filled the car, and behind them in the complete morning light the valley was shrinking as they ascended the highway wrapping its way up to the last height of the mountain.
“I can smell venison cookin’ already,” Timothy mixed his words in with the music “There’s nothing on this earth better tasting than a venison steak, soaked in sauce with a thick layer of pepper over the top. Worth its weight in gold. Venison’s got a taste to it that man-fed beef can’t touch. Something wild in it. Something … hell, I don’t know, it’s like eating something natural, something fed off the wild of the land itself, it taste just like it looks, just like you think a deer would taste. Beef is different, it tastes like the butcher who sells it to me looks.”
“Makes good jerky too, deer does, the best,” Dick passed him the thermos. “That’s why I like to hunt deer, it makes good jerky. But you know sometimes I think it really doesn’t matter if I get my buck or not, and goddam don’t I like to forget all the times I ended up after the season with nothing to eat but a deertag sandwich, but you know what I mean is that it’s the huntin’ itself is important, it’s the anticipation, in a way I guess you’re feeling the same thing the animal is, it goes both ways. That’s why I switched to bow-hunting, evens things out, takes the edge off. I like a little sport when I hunt I guess that’s what I’m saying, what it is I like is the sport of the kill, and that always takes place before the animal goes down.”
“I know what you mean by that,” Timothy rubbed his palm over the stubble of his hair. “The sport’s the thing. That’s why I quit hunting with my Magnum. When I’d get that shot off it was like a cannon going off at my shoulder, made too much goddam noise and I couldn’t enjoy the kill. But the rifle does have its advantages, hell, now that I think about it, maybe I like the rifle just as much. I like it both ways.”
“Hey Art,” Dick tapped the low slump of the shoulders in front of him. “How do these people get away with holding this hunt out of season, shit, they’re a good ten weeks too early.”
“All this land on both sides of us is owned by Sierramonte Mills. The State owns everything on both sides of the road for a mile back, everything beyond that is lumber property. The Mill isn’t registered with Fish and Game as a hunt club, they hunt the year round as they see fit,” he turned the car off the highway onto a dirt road rutted down the middle by yardwide tracks. Alongside the Giant Sequoia grew thick into the sky, cutting off the sun from above. The station-wagon fell into the groove of the tracks and bounced like a buggy, kicking up a stream of fine dust that rose and hung on the already dirtweighted lower branches of the trees.
Dick watched out his window as the car moved beneath the shadow of the trees in its own dust, traveling deeper and higher into the forest, “They say some of those trees was here before Christ even. Goddam, what they could say if they could talk. It’s hard to believe something’s being around so long, before Christ even, maybe that’s why they don’t seem real, seem like freaks almost, being as big as they are. I’ve got a Ben Pearson bow with an eighty pound pull to it, can drop a deer at one hundred and fifty yards, I bet I could split it through one of these trunks with one of those special steel arrows.”
Rabbit Boss Page 18