by Robert Greer
For Acota, those things were small potatoes. What they were after, as everyone at the table but Spoon knew all too well, was the chance to extract the ranch’s thousands of acres of coal. Ours was one of the few remaining large-parcel
ranches in the valley whose landowner also owned the bulk of the mineral rights. I’d seen documents and maps that my dad kept in a safe-deposit box at the First Interstate Bank of Hardin attesting to the fact. The documents, signed decades earlier by President Warren G. Harding, gave us ownership to what some considered to be the equivalent of gold in an energy-rich state like Montana. Although the government owned the rights to lesser coal deposits surrounding us for untold square miles on Bureau of Land Management land, we, like a handful of other ranchers in the Willow Creek valley, could not only dictate what happened to our own coal reserves, but to some extent controlled access to the politically significant BLM lands.
The largest coal-rich private lands highlighted in green on my dad’s sequestered maps included six thousand acres of our ranch and five thousand acres of Willard Johnson’s Flying Diamond spread immediately north of us. Johnson, a hot-tempered, no-nonsense, sixty-one-year-old confirmed
bachelor who’d had irrigation battles with everyone in the valley, had as little use for Easy Ed Koffman as we did. The ranch adjacent to Johnson’s to the south, which abutted both our ranch and the Flying Diamond at one corner, belonged to Beatrice and Rulon Demaster, a land-
speculating husband-and-wife team out of New Jersey. When they’d purchased the nine thousand acres five years earlier, the Demasters, at least according to my mom, had no idea that it would be their coal rights that would potentially float their speculative financial boat to its high-water mark, not their oil and gas rights. All three ranches and a fourth, smaller ranch owned by Dale Turpin came together much like the states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona at a place we called Four Corners.
Finished with his pie, Koffman mashed the remaining crust fragments onto the bottom of his fork and licked the assembled crumbs. Turning his attention to me and smiling, he said, “So what are you gonna do with yourself now that you’re out of school, TJ? Smart young man like you, salutatorian of your high school class, college has to be in the future somewhere.”
“I guess,” I said with a shrug. “But I figured I’d take a year or so off and help out here at the ranch.”
“Reasonable.” Koffman said, stroking his chin. “Just don’t get yourself imprisoned by the sirens of this land. They have beautiful voices that can be awfully enticing. Could be they might entice you to stay forever.”
“Something wrong with that?” my dad asked pointedly.
“No, no. Nothing at all,” Koffman said, very obviously backpedaling. “But a man needs to keep his options open where it concerns the future, wouldn’t you say, TJ?”
“What TJ does with his life will be his doing.” There was a note of obvious irritation in my dad’s response, one that as much as said, Butt out, fat boy. Glancing across the table at me, he said, “Barrister or bronc buster, scientist or farrier, his future’s up to him.” He shot me a supportive wink. “And right at this moment, notwithstanding the boy’s future, he and Spoon have half a dozen horses to corral up and grain.”
The authoritative look he flashed let the two of us know that our time at the supper table was over. As we rose from our seats, I glanced at my mom, hoping she’d offer an excuse for us to stay, but the expression on her face, tense and expectant, told me that the conversation was likely to turn in an unpleasant direction.
I was almost to the back door with Spoon close on my heels when my dad called out, “Check Smokey’s right hind leg for me, Spoon. He was favorin’ it again today.” Glancing back at Koffman rather than my dad and with his head cocked, cobralike, Spoon nodded and followed me out the door.
As we walked through a misty drizzle, down a boggy strip of land that earlier in the day had been crusted hard, to round up the horses, Spoon said, “I told you a change was comin’.”
“Koffman or the weather?” I asked smugly.
“You know which one,” Spoon said, sounding annoyed.
“My dad’s handled Koffman before,” I said, aware that he’d sent Koffman packing on more than one occasion.
“Yeah, but this time there’s a chink in your Willow Creek valley armor.”
Spoon stopped short, right in the middle of a mud puddle. I stood there with him as water seeped into my boots, looking skyward through the mist. Stroking one sideburn as if to coalesce his thoughts, Spoon said, “And what’s worse than that nick in your breastplate is the fact that Koffman’s gonna be bringin’ in reinforcements.”
I didn’t fully understand Spoon’s reference to the chink in our Willow Creek armor, nor did I appreciate what he was getting at with his talk about reinforcements. What I did understand, suddenly shivering, with ice water knifing its way between my toes, was that Spoon had been dead on about the rain.
Five
I’m not quite sure why my folks and Koffman didn’t get to the meat of their discussion until after I returned from helping Spoon corral the horses to eavesdrop on their conversation from our mudroom. It may have been because Koffman, as my dad was fond of saying, liked to coil a little, rattlesnake-like, before striking. Or maybe he’d opted for another slice of pie while my mom cleared the dishes. Whatever the case, the mudroom turned out to be a perfect box seat for listening.
The room sat catty-corner from the dining room, protected from view by a three-foot-deep archway. It had once been Jimmy’s bedroom, and the doorway still had notches in it documenting his height from ages five to fifteen. I sat at the east end of the archway, feeling guilty as I listened in on an echoey conversation that carried along the Spanish-tile floors right through the open mudroom door.
The clink of glassware and china and the smell of cigar smoke, Koffman’s for certain, rattled me. I imagined the burly oil, gas, and coal man toying with his cigar, preparing to torture my parents. When words were finally spoken, they were Koffman’s.
“Things like that get exaggerated, Marva,” he said. “It’s common around these parts. I never told Willard Johnson that the Demasters had signed anything related to the lease of their coal rights, or that by holding out he’d lose the same good price. Nor did I switch stories for the Demasters. Let’s just say that I provided the two parties with the incentive they needed to make a choice. To in fact do what they were already inclined to do. The Demasters made the prudent choice. As for Johnson, he’ll come around.”
“And by inference, I’m guessin’ you think we will as well,” my dad said.
There was no immediate answer. I could almost feel Koffman taking a long drag on his cigar and smiling slyly. The discussion took a sharp turn when he finally spoke.
“Listen a little more carefully, Bill. Be a bit more objective, and you’ll see that my offer makes sound economic and, from your point of view, environmental sense. You’ve got top-grade, low-sulfur coal beneath the overburden of dirt you’re so intent on running a dying cattle empire on. The kind of coal that doesn’t choke the environment. You have a chance to make a defining sensible statement, one that says, ‘I care about the land,’ and that can also be quite profitable. I showed you the figures last spring. It’s been almost a year. We need some movement here. You know as well as I do that only a small portion of your land can be mined. No more than a tenth of the entire fourteen thousand acres. But that tenth contains a considerable amount of coal.” Koffman paused as if to allow his words to gather steam. “While we’re mining and increasing your bank account, you of course can keep on ranching.”
My eyes widened, and I flinched as Koffman cleared his throat. I had the urge to charge into the dining room and shove his cigar down that throat, but having been taught that patience generally trumps haste and intolerance, I adjusted my weight onto my right knee, leaned against the wall, slapped a damper on my anger, and continued listening.
“I’ve been told that no
matter how beautiful or ripe the land out here appears from a distance in any given year, it nonetheless takes thirty to thirty-five acres of grass to fatten a calf,” said Koffman. “That’s a lot of land per animal. You could do a whole lot better. My geologists tell me that you and your missus own land with a seam of coal that can easily earn you royalties in the neighborhood of a hundred eighty thousand dollars every twenty-four months. More than you make on any amount of beef you run, I’d wager.”
My dad’s response started as a low rumble that slowly rose to a higher, aggravated pitch. “You’re slick, Koffman. Slick as rain-drenched claystone. Although you were a mite too obvious earlier, aimin’ your words at Marva rather than me. Could be that on your ride out here you came to the conclusion that she might be a little easier to sell, but you’re wrong. We’re a solid block of granite, me, her, and TJ. You’re wrong about us makin’ a living at running cattle. Wrong thinkin’ we have your thirst for money and wrong about what would happen to that fourteen hundred acres of our land you’d end up mining. My guess is that Acota’s a very hungry beast. Hungry for more than a mere tenth of fourteen thousand acres. You’d start off small, all right, but the beast’s appetite would increase, and soon you’d want a twenty-acre staging area for your loaders and graders. Next, ten or fifteen more for your trucks and your cuttin’ machines. And then another fifty for a gasification plant when you figured out there was oil under the land as well. Eventually you’d expand your operations to include a pig-ugly two- or three-hundred-acre trailer town.
“Believe me, I know the drill. In the end you’d hope to wear us down, thinkin’ we’d eventually figure it would be easier to go along to get along. Easier still to ignore the eyesore you were creating. You’d bet on the fact that I’d come over to your way of thinkin’ because I’d get so exasperated and in love with money. That in the end I’d give up a quarter of the ranch and then another quarter until our solitude and sense of place were lost and we retreated somewhere else, away from a place of beauty that no longer looked or even smelled like it did at the start. I’d bet a prize bull that briefcase you carried in contains a new version of the contract you waved at me last spring. But whether it does or not, you’ll never get the chance to strip-mine my land. Not now, not ever!”
Koffman suppressed a cough. “You’re a hard sell, Bill. As tough a nut as I’ve ever run into. Have you ever considered the fact that our country and our way of life demand coal? We’ve got an energy problem on our hands here in the U-S-of-A, in case you’ve missed it. One that’s not going away anytime soon.”
This time it was my mom who responded. “Put away your flag, Mr. Koffman. You’re talking to a Korean War veteran, in case you didn’t know it. One who earned not one, but a couple of Purple Hearts.”
“So I am. And my company and I appreciate your service. But what about your son? Where does he fit in all this?”
The hairs on the back of my neck bristled. Gritting my teeth and thinking, You arrogant, condescending asshole, I cupped my hand to my ear, determined not to miss a single word.
“More importantly,” Koffman challenged, “what about your legacy and your responsibility—no, your obligation to your son?”
My mom’s gasp failed to stop Koffman.
“As you well know, we at Acota are in this for the long haul, and in the long run, governments, fortunately for us and perhaps unfortunately for you, usually side with the interests of energy. So your decision, although you may see it as an independent or perhaps even a misguided libertarian one, will ultimately be of consequence to your son. It could be that he would prefer security to ranching.”
“And that would be his choice,” my dad shot back. “Always will be. Unlike my cattle herd, I don’t own TJ.”
“Then perhaps I should have a talk with him. Don’t you think he’s old enough to have earned a say in this?”
“Don’t you dare!” my mom said. Her words came out one by one, harsh and steely.
I rose to a sprinter’s squat, prepared to race into the dining room and knock Koffman out of his chair. But before I could, my dad said in a calm but authoritative voice, the kind of voice that carried a sledgehammer of meaning in every word, “Bother TJ and we’ll tangle, Koffman. Tangle in the ugly, primitive, animalistic sense of the word. There’ll be no politeness, just a battle. One I guarantee you won’t win.”
“You sound very certain of yourself.”
“As certain as I am that escortin’ you to the door and telling you to never set foot on my doorstep again will, in a most civilized way, serve to bring total severance to these discussions. There’ll be no more polite cat-and-mouse talk around a dinner table if you return. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been to war. It’s a place that no one but a fool wants to be, but I’ll go there again, and gladly, if you press the issue or ever have the nerve to try to talk to TJ.”
The shuffle of feet and the sound of chairs sliding across the dining room hardwood told me that the conversation was over.
“So you say,” Koffman said with an air of certainty that sent a chill down my spine. “But in the end, someone named Darley will talk with me. It’s the way of the world.”
“You may leave now, Mr. Koffman,” my mom said pointedly.
Within seconds I heard the heavy clump of booted footsteps moving across the dining room toward the front door. When the front door creaked open and then slammed, I hoped that Easy Ed Koffman was gone from our lives forever. My dad’s easily discernible long, heavy-hitting strides had him back in the dining room quickly.
“Guess we’re sticking,” said my mom.
“Until they scrape us off with the buffalo grass, sweet clover, and sage,” my dad said defiantly.
“I don’t like Koffman, Bill. There’s something not just disingenuous, but darkly clever and calculating about him.
And the way he lit up that cigar without asking permission—
he’s unbelievably arrogant as well.”
“You’ll get no argument from me, but those aren’t the things that worry me.”
“Then what does? That he’ll talk to TJ?”
“No. TJ’s you and me put together, and in a lot of ways he’s a harder rock than either of us.”
“Then what?”
Dad’s voice trailed off to a whisper. “Koffman’s the tip of an iceberg, Marva. The sharp point of a knife that Acota would like to bury in us to the hilt. What I’m worried about is that, like the North Koreans at Chosen and the Vietcong at Tet, Koffman’s got an army of reinforcements waitin’ in the wings.”
I knew my dad’s words could only serve to upset my mom. They always did when he mentioned Korea or the war her youngest brother had been killed in, Vietnam. His assessment, however, had me thinking about what Spoon had said about our family being tested. I felt decidedly unsteady as I stood.
“Do you think it’ll get messy, Bill?” Mom asked.
I pictured dad smiling and draping his arm reassuringly over her shoulder as he answered, “Not really, Marva. Not really.”
But I knew as I retreated silently from the mudroom and stepped out into the backyard to head for Spoon’s quarters that, all reassurances aside, we were in for a battle. Uncertain whether to tell Spoon all of what I’d overheard, I paused in the darkness to collect my thoughts.
As I crossed Koffman’s fresh bootprints in the soil, I had the strange sense that Spoon already knew what had happened and that his lights were on simply to let me know that he’d been patiently waiting.
Six
I don’t know how on earth Spoon knew I was about to knock on his door. I couldn’t be sure whether he’d heard me tiptoe up to the tack room, watched my approach from a window, or simply felt my presence, but as I prepared to knock, the door swung open, and Spoon, standing barefoot in the doorway, wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and faded jeans that looked as if they’d been washed a thousand times, smiled and said, “Come on in.”
I’d never really paid attention to how muscular his upper body was,
but for some reason he looked less coiled and wiry than usual, and a lot more physically powerful.
“What’s got you scurryin’ around here this time of night?” he asked, waving me in.
Shaking my head, I said, “A problem.”
“Can’t be all that bad. You’re still upright.” His coarse, jet-black, nearly shoulder-length hair moved as if the wind was in it as we walked across the once-disordered room that was now as neat as a pin and Spoon’s home. I eyed the antelope head mounted on the wall above the room’s potbellied stove. Jimmy had shot the five-point buck late one fall. Dad had had the head stuffed and mounted in Billings, but after Jimmy’s death he’d tossed the trophy into a corner of our machine shop, where it had remained for years among coffee cans full of nuts and bolts and discarded shop rags. Spoon had discovered it one spring day. Recognizing something special about the neglected old buck, he’d spent hours cleaning it and combing it out, eventually bringing it back to its original lifelike, taxidermic state.
“You and old Malcolm there seem to be communicatin’.” Spoon reached up, patted the antelope head, smiled, and took a seat. “Could be you knew each other in another life. Now, tell me about your problem.”
“It’s not my problem, really. It’s actually a problem for my folks.”
“Any problem of theirs is ultimately gonna be yours, TJ. You’re savvy enough to know that.”
“Guess so.”
“Guessin’s for stockbrokers and politicians, son, not for us cattle-ranchin’ types. When you’re facin’ a real problem, it’s best to steer clear of guesswork.”
“I didn’t say the problem had to do with the ranch.”
“You didn’t have to.” Spoon sucked a stream of air through the gap between his top two front teeth. “I saw your problem when he arrived. All blustery and wind driven, and in a rainstorm to make matters worse. Who was he?”
