by Pam Houston
It was hunting season, and later that morning Homer and I found a deer by the side of the road that had been poached but not taken. The poacher must have seen headlights or heard a truck engine and gotten scared.
I lifted the back end of the animal into the truck while Homer picked up the antlers. It was a young buck, two and a half at the oldest, but it would have been a monster in a few years, and I knew Homer was taking the loss pretty hard.
We took it down to the performance center, where they weigh the organic calves. Homer attached a meat hook to its antlers and hauled it into the air above the pickup.
“Try and keep it from swinging,” he said. And I did my best, considering I wasn’t quite tall enough to get a good hold, and its blood was bubbling out of the bullet hole and dripping down on me.
That’s when the tall cowboy, the one from that morning, walked out of the holding pen behind me, took a long slow look at me trying to steady the back end of the dead deer, and settled himself against the fence across the driveway. I stepped back from the deer and pushed the hair out of my eyes. He raised one finger to call me over. I walked slow and didn’t look back at Homer.
“Nice buck,” he said. “Did you shoot it?”
“It’s a baby,” I said. “I don’t shoot animals. A poacher got it last night.”
“Who was the poacher?” he said, and tipped his hat just past my shoulder toward Homer.
“You’re wrong,” I said. “You can say a lot of things about him, but he wouldn’t poach a deer.”
“My name’s Montrose T. Coty,” he said. “Everyone calls me Monte.”
I shook his hand. “Everyone calls you Homer’s girlfriend,” he said, “but I bet that’s not your name.”
“You’re right,” I said, “it’s not.”
I turned to look at Homer. He was taking measurements off the hanging deer: antler length, body length, width at its girth.
“Tonight’s the Stockgrowers’ Ball in Grass Range,” Monte said. “I thought you might want to go with me.”
Homer was looking into the deer’s hardened eyeballs. He had its mouth open, and was pulling on its tongue.
“I have to cook dinner for Homer and David,” I said. “I’m sorry. It sounds like fun.”
In the car on the way back to the cabin, Homer said, “What was that all about?”
I said, “Nothing,” and then I said, “Monte asked me to the Stockgrowers’ Ball.”
“The Stockgrowers’ Ball?” he said. “Sounds like a great time. What do stockgrowers do at a ball?” he said. “Do they dance?”
I almost laughed with him until I remembered how much I loved to dance. I’d been with Homer chasing whitetail so long that I’d forgotten that dancing, like holidays, was something I loved. And I started to wonder just then what else being with Homer had made me forget. Hadn’t I, at one time, spent whole days listening to music? Wasn’t there a time when I wanted, more than anything, to buy a sailboat? And didn’t I love to be able to go outdoors and walk anywhere I wanted, and to make, if I wanted, all kinds of noise?
I wanted to blame Homer, but I realized then it was more my fault than his. Because even though I’d never let the woman in the chambray work shirt out of my mind I’d let her, in the last few years, become someone different, and she wasn’t living, anymore, in my painting. The painting she was living in, I saw, belonged to somebody else.
“So what did you tell him?” Homer said.
“I told him I’d see if you’d cook dinner,” I said.
I tried to talk to Homer before I left. First I told him that it wasn’t a real date, that I didn’t even know Monte, and really I was only going because I didn’t know if I’d ever have another chance to go to a Stockgrowers’ Ball. When he didn’t answer at all I worked up to saying that maybe it was a good idea for me to start seeing other people. That maybe we’d had two different ideas all along and we needed to find two other people who would better meet our needs. I told him that if he had any opinions I wished he’d express them to me, and he thought for a few minutes and then he said,
“Well, I guess we have Jimmy Carter to thank for all the trouble in Panama.”
I spent the rest of the day getting ready for the Stockgrowers’ Ball. All I’d brought with me was some of Homer’s camouflage and blue jeans, so I wound up borrowing a skirt that David’s ex-wife had left behind, some of the chicken woman’s dress shoes that looked ridiculous and made my feet huge, and a vest that David’s grandfather had been shot at in by the Plains Indians.
Monte had to go into town early to pick up ranch supplies, so I rode in with his friends Buck and Dawn, who spent the whole drive telling me what a great guy Monte was, how he quit the rodeo circuit to make a decent living for himself and his wife, how she’d left without saying goodbye not six months before.
They told me that he’d made two thousand dollars in one afternoon doing a Wrangler commercial. That he’d been in a laundromat on his day off and the director had seen him through the window, had gone in and said, “Hey, cowboy, you got an hour? You want to make two thousand bucks?”
“Ole Monte,” Buck said. “He’s the real thing.”
After an hour and a half of washboard road we pulled into the dance hall just on our edge of town. I had debated about wearing the cowboy hat I’d bought especially for my trip to Montana, and was thankful I’d decided against it. It was clear, once inside, that only the men wore hats, and only dress hats at that. The women wore high heels and stockings and in almost every case hair curled away from their faces in great airy rolls.
We found Monte at a table in the corner, and the first thing he did was give me a corsage, a pink one, mostly roses that couldn’t have clashed more with my rust-colored blouse. Dawn pinned it on me, and I blushed, I suppose, over my first corsage in ten years, and a little old woman in spike heels leaned over and said, “Somebody loves you!” just loud enough for Monte and Buck and Dawn to hear.
During dinner they showed a movie about a cattle drive. After dinner a young enthusiastic couple danced and sang for over an hour about cattle and ranch life and the Big Sky, a phrase which since I’d been in Montana had seemed perpetually on the tip of everybody’s tongue.
After dinner the dancing started, and Monte asked me if I knew how to do the Montana two-step. He was more than a foot taller than me, and his hat added another several inches to that. When we stood on the dance floor my eyes came right to the place where his silk scarf disappeared into the shirt buttons on his chest. His big hands were strangely light on me and my feet went the right direction even though my mind couldn’t remember the two-step’s simple form.
“That’s it,” he said into the part in my hair. “Don’t think. Just let yourself move with me.”
And we were moving together, in turns that got tighter and tighter each time we circled the dance floor. The songs got faster and so did our motion until there wasn’t time for anything but the picking up and putting down of feet, for the swirling colors of Carmen’s ugly skirt, for breath and sweat and rhythm.
I was farther west than I’d ever imagined, and in the strange, nearly flawless synchronization on the dance floor I knew I could be a Montana ranch woman, and I knew I could make Monte my man. It had taken me ten years, and an incredible sequence of accidents, but that night I thought I’d finally gotten where I’d set out to go.
The band played till two and we danced till three to the jukebox. Then there was nothing left to do but get in the car and begin the two-hour drive home.
First we talked about our horses. It was the logical choice, the only thing we really had in common, but it only lasted twenty minutes.
I tried to get his opinion on music and sailing, but just like a cowboy, he was too polite for me to tell anything for sure.
Then we talked about the hole in my vest that the Indians shot, which I was counting on, and half the reason I wore it.
The rest of the time we just looked at the stars.
I had spent a good port
ion of the night worrying about what I was going to say when Monte asked me to go to bed with him. When he pulled up between our two cabins he looked at me sideways and said,
“I’d love to give you a great big kiss, but I’ve got a mouthful of chew.”
I could hear Homer snoring before I got past the kitchen.
Partly because I didn’t like the way Monte and Homer eyed each other, but mostly because I couldn’t bear to spend Thanksgiving watching does in heat, I loaded my gear in my truck and got ready to go back to Colorado.
On the morning I left, Homer told me that he had decided that I was the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with after all, and that he planned to go to town and buy a ring just as soon as the rut ended.
He was sweet on my last morning on the ranch, generous and attentive in a way I’d never seen. He packed me a sack lunch of chicken salad he mixed himself, and he went out to my car and dusted off the inch of snow that had fallen in our first brush with winter, overnight. He told me to call when I got to Fort Collins, he even said to call collect, but I suppose one of life’s big tricks is to give us precisely the thing we want, two weeks after we’ve stopped wanting it, and I couldn’t take Homer seriously, even when I tried.
When I went to say goodbye to David he hugged me hard, said I was welcome back on the ranch anytime. He said he enjoyed my company and appreciated my insight. Then he said he liked my perfume and I wondered where my taste in men had come from, I wondered whoever taught me to be so stupid about men.
I knew Monte was out riding the range, so I left a note on his car thanking him again for the dancing and saying I’d be back one day and we could dance again. I put my hat on, that Monte had never got to see, and rolled out of headquarters. It was the middle of the day, but I saw seven bucks in the first five miles, a couple of them giants, and when I slowed down they just stood and stared at the truck. It was the height of the rut and Homer said that’s how they’d be, love-crazed and fearless as bears.
About a mile before the edge of ranch property, I saw something that looked like a lone antelope running across the skyline, but antelope are almost never alone, so I stopped the car to watch. As the figure came closer I saw it was a horse, a big chestnut, and it was carrying a rider at a full gallop, and it was coming right for the car.
I knew it could have been any one of fifty cowboys employed on the ranch, and yet I’ve learned to expect more from life than that, and so in my heart I knew it was Monte. I got out of the car and waited, pleased that he’d see my hat most of all, wondering what he’d say when I said I was leaving.
He didn’t get off his horse, which was sweating and shaking so hard I thought it might die while we talked.
“You on your way?” he said.
I smiled and nodded. His chaps were sweat-soaked, his leather gloves worn white.
“Will you write me a letter?” he said.
“Sure,” I said.
“Think you’ll be back this way?” he asked.
“If I come back,” I said, “will you take me dancing?”
“Damn right,” he said, and a smile that seemed like the smile I’d been waiting for my whole life spread wide across his face.
“Then it’ll be sooner than later,” I said.
He winked and touched the horse’s flank with his spurs and it hopped a little on the takeoff and then there was just dirt flying while the high grass swallowed the horse’s legs. I leaned against the door of my pickup truck watching my new cowboy riding off toward where the sun was already low in the sky and the grass shimmering like nothing I’d ever seen in the mountains. And for a minute I thought we were living inside my painting, but he was riding away too fast to tell. And I wondered then why I had always imagined my cowboy’s truck as it was leaving. I wondered why I hadn’t turned the truck around and painted my cowboy coming home.
There’s a story—that isn’t true—that I tell about myself when I first meet someone, about riding a mechanical bull in a bar. In the story, I stay on through the first eight levels of difficulty, getting thrown on level nine only after dislocating my thumb and winning my boyfriend, who was betting on me, a big pile of money. It was something I said in a bar one night, and I liked the way it sounded so much I kept telling it. I’ve been telling it for so many years now, and in such scrupulous detail, that it has become a memory and it’s hard for me to remember that it isn’t true. I can smell the smoke and beer-soaked carpets, I can hear the cheers of all the men. I can see the bar lights blur and spin, and I can feel the cold iron buck between my thighs, the painted saddle slam against my tailbone, the surprise and pain when my thumb extends too far and I let go. It’s a good story, a story that holds my listeners’ attention, and although I consider myself almost pathologically honest, I have somehow allowed myself this one small lie.
And watching Monte ride off through the long grains, I thought about the way we invent ourselves through our stories, and in a similar way, how the stories we tell put walls around our lives. And I think that may be true about cowboys. That there really isn’t much truth in my saying cowboys are my weakness; maybe, after all this time, it’s just something I’ve learned how to say.
I felt the hoofbeats in the ground long after Monte’s white shirt and ratty hat melded with the sun. When I couldn’t even pretend to feel them anymore, I got in the car and headed for the hard road.
I listened to country music the whole way to Cody, Wyoming. The men in the songs were all either brutal or inexpressive and always sorry later. The women were victims, every one. I started to think about coming back to the ranch to visit Monte, about another night dancing, about another night wanting the impossible love of a country song, and I thought:
This is not my happy ending.
This is not my story.
JACKSON IS ONLY ONE OF MY DOGS
I have a dog named Jackson, who between the ages of four and five, in people years, became suicidal. In a period of less than twelve months, Jackson jumped out of the back of a speeding pickup truck, ate a fourteen-pound bag of nonorganic garden fertilizer, and threw himself between the jaws of a hundred-and-fifty-pound Russian wolfhound. Similarly, when I turned twenty-eight years old, I started to date a man whose favorite song was “Desperado.”
He was an outdoorsman, in his heart, but for a living he rebuilt old homes with a passion that was uncanny, and never wasted on me. He had skin stretched so tight across his muscles I sometimes thought his legs would pop. He was smart and selfish and lied by omission. I was addicted to him like cough syrup, and I didn’t respect his mind.
My friend Debra said, “He’s not an altogether bad person. He just has no imagination, and of course, that has made him a little mean.”
For two whole years I danced around my lover like a top, like wheat grass, like light. I stripped the linoleum off all his hardwood floors. I learned to snowshoe and fly-fish and box. He would finger the rose-colored trout that I caught, he would run his hand along the wood’s fine grain, he would look through me at a window that needed painting, and through it to a meadow, a mountain, some sport he hadn’t yet tried.
I told Debra about the passion, the hours in bed, the best (I actually said this) sex I had ever had, and as I said the words I believed them to be true. I didn’t tell her about the time he got out of bed during foreplay and I found him, twenty minutes later, naked and caulking the bathtub. I didn’t tell her that in all the times he’s been inside me, he’s never once met my eyes.
Jackson is only one of my dogs. The other dog, the good dog, whose name is Hailey, passed through her early adulthood without any discernible personality changes. Hailey is matronly and brindle-colored, with a rear end that is slightly out of alignment. Jackson is shaggy and blond, all ears and feathers.
While Jackson is clearly a human being trapped in a dog’s body (one day he lost his senses and buried a bone in the yard and I was no more embarrassed for him than he was for himself), Hailey knows what she is and is proud of it. What she like
s to do, more than anything, is to get her belly wet and then lie around in the dirt. Jackson is athletic, graceful, obnoxious, and filled with conceit, while Hailey is slow, a little fat, and gentle to her bones.
Jackson also has a truck neurosis. His whole life is centered around making sure that the truck I drive doesn’t leave without him. When he is in the house he keeps one eye on it in the driveway, when we’re on the road I never have to tell him to stay. It’s where he likes to eat and drink, where he wants to spend his afternoons; it’s the only place he’ll let himself sleep soundly. Sometimes, when we are backpacking, and thirty miles from anywhere, I’ll say, “Go get in the truck, Jackson,” just to play with his mind.
By the time I turned twenty-eight years old I had broken five major bones in my body. The only appendage that is still straight is my right arm.
People say, “Are your bones particularly brittle?” They say, “Did you drink enough milk as a child?” But it’s my life-style, the sports I push myself into, whitewater rafting and stadium show jumping and backcountry skiing, the kinds of good times broken bones are made of.
Debra says it’s because of my lover, but I was like this before he came along and I know it’s something more basic than love. The only list that’s longer than the things I’ve done is the list of things I’ve yet to do: kayak, hang glide, parachute; I think I want to learn how to fly.
