by Annie Proulx
“I hate cookin,” said Ottaline. “I’ll help Dad.” It was a fallback position. She wanted to be away, wearing red sandals with cork soles, sitting in the passenger seat of a pearl-colored late-model pickup, drinking from a bottle shaped like a hula girl. When would someone come for her? She was not audacious, not like her younger sister. She knew her appalling self and there was no way to evade it.
Aladdin saw she was easy with the stock, where the boy Tyler whooped and whistled and rode like a messenger reporting a massacre.
“Had my way, ever hand’d be a woman. A woman got a nice disposition with animals.” He intended the remark to sting.
“Oh, Daddy,” said Tyler in comic falsetto. He was the horseman of the family, had slept out in the dilapidated bunkhouse since he was thirteen, Wauneta’s edict.
“My brothers slept in the bunkhouse.” There was in that flat remark all of Wauneta’s childhood, sequestered, alert, surrounded by menace.
This only son, Tyler, was a huge, kit-handed youth of nineteen stout enough to frighten any father except Aladdin. The kid stamped around in dirty jeans and a brown hat. He was slack-mouthed in reverie, sported a young man’s cat-fur mustache, cheeks marred by strings of tiny pimples. He was only one percent right about anything, alternated between despondency and quick fury. On Aladdin’s birthday Tyler presented him with two coyote ears, the result of weeks of cunning stalk. Aladdin unwrapped them, laid them on the tablecloth and said, “Aw, what am I supposed a do with two coyote ears?”
“By god,” screamed Tyler, “set one a them on your dick and say it won a fur hat in the church raffle. You are all against me.” He swept the ears to the floor and walked out.
“He will be back,” said Wauneta. “He will be back with dirty clothes and his pockets turned inside out. I know boys.”
“I was the wanderin boy,” old Red mumbled. “He won’t be back. Takes after me. I cowboyed. I killed hogs. I made it through. Worked like a man since I was fourteen. Ninety-six years young. Never knowed my father. Carry you all to hell and spit on you.” His finger dragged across the tablecloth, the long-ago self making a way. The old man showed a terrible smile, fumbled with his can of snoose.
Aladdin, face like a shield, curly hair springing, tipped his head toward the tablecloth, mumbled, “O bless this food.” Heavy beef slices, encircled by a chain of parsnips and boiled potatoes, slumped on the platter. He had discovered two long-dead cows that afternoon, one bogged, the other without a mark of cause. He lifted a small potato and transferred it to his father’s plate without looking at him, ignored the rattling of the old man’s fork, though Wauneta, pouring coffee into heavy cups, frowned and said, “Watch it, John Wayne.” A pastel envelope lay between her knife and a flat cake with sugar icing so thin it appeared blue.
“Somethin come from Shan.”
“She comin back?” Aladdin crushed his potatoes, flooded them with skim milk. Game and Fish would pay for stock killed by grizzlies or lions. He had not seen lion sign for a decade and grizzly, never.
“Didn’t open it yet,” she said, tearing the end. There was a short and vague letter that she read aloud and, clipped to it, an astonishing photograph. It showed this daughter in a black bikini, greased muscles starkly outlined, exhibiting bulging biceps and calves, spiky crewcut hair whitened with bleach, her rolling, apricot-size eyes frozen wide open. In the letter, she had written, “Got into body building. Alot of girls here do it!”
“Whatever she has done to her hair,” said Wauneta, “somebody talked her into it. I know Shan and that would not be her idea.” When Shan left she had been an ordinary young woman with thin arms, blondish chew-ended hair. Her glancing unlevel eyes ricked from face to face. When she spoke, her hands revolved, the fingers flung out. The yearbook had named her “most animated.”
“Bodybuildin.” Aladdin’s tone was neutral. He had the rancher’s expectation of disaster, never believed in happy endings. He was satisfied that she was alive, not building bombs nor winking at drive-by Johns.
Ottaline stared at her coffee. Floating on the surface was a spread-wing moth the shape of a tiny arrowhead. It pointed at her sister’s empty chair.
Aladdin wore boots and a big hat but rarely mounted a horse. He missed the Piper Cub, which had seemed to him very like a horse. Someone had stolen it two years earlier, had unbolted the wings and hauled it away on a flatbed while he slept. He suspected Mormons. Now he was welded to the driver’s seat of his truck, tearing over the dusty roll of land, and sometimes, drugged and fallen, he spent the night out in a draw, cramped on the front seat. The windshield glass, discolored by high-altitude light, threw down violet radiance. He had made the headache rack from poles cut on the ranch. He kept a bottle of whiskey, a rope behind the seat. The open glove compartment carried kindling, wrenches, bolts and nuts, several hundred loose fence staples, and a handleless hammer head. Wauneta tossed an old quilt in the cab and told him to wind up the windows when it rained.
“I know you,” she said. “You will let the weather get you.”
Every ten days or so Ottaline reared up and said she wanted to go to town and look for a job. Aladdin would not take her. Her weight, he said, ruined the springs on the passenger side. Anyway, there were no jobs, she knew that. She had better stay on the ranch where she didn’t know how good she had it.
“I don’t know why you would want a leave this ranch.”
She said he should let her drive in alone.
“I will tell you when I am ready for advice,” he said. “I am steerin my own truck for now. If you want a drive a truck then buy one.”
“I am about a million dollars short.” It was all hopeless.
“What a you want me a do, rob a bank for you?” he said. “Anyway, you’re comin a the bull sale. And I’ll give you a pointer you don’t want a forget. Scrotal circumference is damn important.”
What was there for Ottaline when the work slacked off? Stare at indigo slants of hail forty miles east, regard the tumbled clouds like mechanics’ rags, count out he loves me, he loves me not, in nervous lightning crooked as branchwood through all quarters of the sky.
That summer the horses were always wet. It rained uncommonly, the southwest monsoon sweeping in. The shining horses stood out on the prairie, withers streaming, manes dripping, and one would suddenly start off, a fan of droplets coming off its shoulders like a cape. Ottaline and Aladdin wore slickers from morning coffee to goodnight yawn. Wauneta watched the television weather while she ironed shirts and sheets. Old Red called it drip and dribble, stayed in his room chewing tobacco, reading Zane Grey in large-print editions, his curved fingernail creasing the page under every line. On the Fourth of July they sat together on the porch watching a distant storm, pretending the thick, ruddy legs of lightning and thunder were fireworks.
Ottaline had seen most of what there was to see around her with nothing new in sight. Brilliant events burst open not in the future but in the imagination. The room she had shared with Shan was a room within a room. In the unshaded moonlight her eyes shone oily white. The calfskin rug on the floor seemed to move, to hunch and crawl a fraction of an inch at a time. The dark frame of the mirror sank into the wall, a rectangular trench. From her bed she saw the moon-bleached grain elevator and behind it immeasurable range flecked with cows like small black seeds. She was no one but Ottaline in that peppery, disturbing light that made her want everything there was to want. The raw loneliness then, the silences of the day, the longing flesh led her to press her mouth into the crook of her own hot elbow. She pinched and pummeled her fat flanks, rolled on the bed, twisted, went to the window a dozen times, heels striking the floor until old Red in his pantry below called out, “What is it? You got a sailor up there?”
Her only chance seemed the semiliterate, off-again, on-again hired man, Hal Bloom, tall legs like chopsticks, T-shirt emblazonedAggressive by Nature, Cowboy by Choice . He worked for Aladdin in short bursts between rodeo roping, could not often be pried off his horse (for he cherish
ed a vision of himself as an 1870s cowboy just in from an Oregon cattle drive). Ottaline had gone with him down into the willows a dozen times, to the damp soil and nests of stinging nettles, where he pulled a pale condom over his small, hard penis and crawled silently onto her. His warm neck smelled of soap and horse.
But then, when Ottaline began working on the ranch for hard money, Aladdin told Hal Bloom to go spin his rope.
“Yeah, well, it’s too shit-fire long a haul out here anyways,” Bloom said, and was gone. That was that.
Ottaline was dissolving. It was too far to anything. Someone had to come for her. There was not even the solace of television, for old Red dominated the controls, always choosing Westerns, calling out to the film horses in his broken voice, “Buck him off, kick his brains out!”
Ottaline went up to her room, listened to cell-phone conversations on the scanner.
“The balance on account number seven three five five nine is minus two hundred and oh four….”
“Yes, I can see that, maybe. Are you drinkin beer already?” “Ha-ha. Yes.”
“I guess maybe you didn’t notice.” “It wasn’t all smashed flat like that, all soft. I took it out of the bag and it was—you goin a carve it?” “Not that one. It’s nasty.”
“Hey, is it rainin there yet?”
“Is it rainin yet?” she repeated. It was raining everywhere and people were alive in it except in the Red Wall country.
Ottaline studied Shan’s photograph, said to her mother, “If it kills me I am goin a walk it off.”
“Haven’t I heard that before?” said Wauneta. “I know you.”
Ottaline marched around outside the house for a few days, then widened the loop to take in the corrals, the toolshed, the root cellar, circumambulated the defunct gravel quarry where Aladdin dragged worn-out equipment, a sample of tractors, one a 1928 blue Rumely OilPull tractor on steel with a chokecherry tree growing through the frame, beside it old Red’s secondhand 1935 AC with the four-cylinder overhead valve engine, paint sun-scalded white. Half buried at the foot of a caving bank lay the remains of a stripped Fordson Major, grille and radiator shroud smashed in, and next to a ruined stock tank stood the treacherous John Deere 4030.
She was walking through the rain-slick wrecks when a voice spoke, barely audible. “Sweetheart, lady-girl.”
The low sun poured slanting light under the edge of a cloud mass so dark it seemed charred, the prairie, the tractors, her hand beyond the wrist hem of the yellow slicker, all gilded with saffron brilliance. Colors of otherworld intensity blazed in the washed air, the distant Red Wall a bed of coals.
“Sweet,” the voice breathed.
She was alone, there were no alien spacecraft in the sky. She stood quite still. She had eaten from a plateful of misery since childhood, suffered avoirdupois, unfeeling parents, the hard circumstances of the place. Looniness was possible, it could happen to anyone. Her mother’s brother Mapston Hipsag had contracted a case of lumpy jaw from the stock and the disease took him by stages from depressive rancher to sniggering maniac. The light glided down to a dying hue and the wrecked machines sank into their own coffee-brown shadows. She heard nothing but mosquito whine, small wind that comes with approaching darkness.
That night, listening to the ramble of talk on the scanner, she wondered if hunger had prompted an invisible voice, went to the kitchen and ate all of the leftover pork roast.
“I’m worried about you. I hope nobody tries to kill you or something.” “Don’t miss me too much.”
“Nothin been hit.” “It just rained like a bastard up here.” “Rained like shit, here too.” “No point stayin here.”
Nothing happened for weeks, common enough in that part of the state. On a roaring noon she went again to the gravel pit.
“Hello, sweetheart. Come here, come here.” It was the 4030, Aladdin’s old green tractor, burly but with forward-raking lines that falsely indicated an eagerness to run. The machine had killed a ranch hand years earlier in a rollover accident at the weed-filled irrigation ditch—Maurice Ramblewood, or what? Rambletree, Bramblefood, Rumbleseat, Tumbleflood? She was a kid but he always flashed her a smile, asked her what was cooking, and on the fatal day tossed her a candy bar, pliable and warm from his shirt pocket, said she could borrow his sunglasses that turned the world orange. In late afternoon he was dead in bristle grass and spiny clotbur. His ghost.
“Maurice? That you?”
“No. No. It ain’t him. That boy’s a cinder.”
“Who is talkin?”
“Two steps closer.”
She stretched out her hand to the side grille. Yellowjackets had built a nest in it and were creeping in and out of the grille’s interstices, palping the air suspiciously. She stared fixedly at the insects.
“That is good,” said the voice inside the tractor. “Get you a little stick and scratch where all that paint is blistered up.” But she backed off.
“I’m just scared to pieces,” she said, looking at the sky, the rise and fall of crested prairie, the bunchgrass edge of the world that flared like burning threads.
“Naw, now, don’t be. This old world is full a wonders, ain’t it? Come on, get up in the cab. Plenty a bounce left. The seat’s still good. Pretend you’re drivin right through LA.” The voice was hoarse and plangent, just above an injured whisper, a movie gangster’s voice.
“No,” she said. “I don’t like this. I already got enough problems, not makin it worse by gettin in a old tractor cab that’s ready to collapse.”
“Aw, you think you got problems? Look at me, sweetheart, settin out here in the bakin sun, blizzards and lizards, not even a tarpolean over me, brakes wrecked, battery gone, workin parts seized up, no gas, surrounded by deadheads, covered with bird-shit and rust. Here you are at last, won’t even give me the time a day.”
“It’s six-twelve,” she said and walked off, fingertips pressing her eyebrows. This was hallucination.
The voice called after her, “Sweetheart, lady-girl, don’t go.”
She craved to know something of the world, but there was only the scanner.
“Broken, threads stripped, had to take it up and get it welded. You know that fucker used a do that shit but he don’t hang around here no more.”
“—horns off the steers. I stopped by to see her.” “Yeah? They told me you left before three.” “I was there at three to change my clothes.” “You know you’re full a bullshit.”
“It’sfuckin pourin here, man.” “I don’t know what else. It was like—Whoa! Oh my god that was a big lightnin! Whoa! I got a get off the fuckin phone.”
“I want a be with you, but I look at reality and I say to myself this fuckin woman wants a fuck everbody, I can’t even get it on the couch, got a go in the fuckin bedroom.” “Yeah, it’s all my fault, right?”
It made her sick, it made her jealous to hear those quarrelsome but coupled voices.
She went again to the gravel pit. The choking rasp began when she was twenty feet distant.
“Maurice Stumblebum? Just forget him. Wrench your steerin wheel, jam the brakes, rev, rev, rev. Never change oil or filter, never check brake fluid, never got the ballast right, didn’t bother a check the front-wheel toe-in, used a ride the clutch unmerciful, run in heavy mud and never think a the front wheel bearins. They’re ground a dust. Jump around in the seat until it made me crazy. Aw, don’t drum your fingers like that, take me serious.”
She looked away to the Red Wall, something best kept at a distance. It was not a place to go. The distant highway flashed, the reflection from a bottle pitched out of a tourist’s car.
“But that ain’t why I killed him.”
“Then why?”
“Over you,” said the tractor. “Over you. I saved you from him. He was goin a get you.”
“I could a saved myself,” she said, “if I’d a wanted to.”
At supper Wauneta opened a pink envelope from Shan.
