Close Range

by Annie Proulx

  Scrope had to limp over, touch a rowel. He craned up at Inez, opened his mouth to say something smart, stopped, scratched the back of his welted neck. A mixed buzz like radio static got in his head.

  “Sutton give em to me for my birthday about two weeks after the fact.” Inez dismounted and followed them into the confused kitchen. “Figured I’d get out while it’s quiet. Box elder bugs all over the dudes’ cabins and I said to Janey she could get em with the vacuum if she wants to. Gives me a queasy feelin to hear them bugs rattlin up the hose, no way out. What they must be thinkin—end of the world, I guess.” She looked over the kitchen, noticed one table leg shored up with a boot heel.

  Scrope began to grind coffee beans in an old mill that threw up a cloud of fine dust. His head ached ferociously but he kept looking at her, somehow excited, forgetting his grievance over Jeri.

  Inez regarded the cast-iron skillet half-filled with congealed bacon grease, evidence of innumerable fryings. There were sacks, empty and half-full, of curls, crackers, crunches, triangular corn chips, empty pots of dip, lumpish stale pastry rinds, gnawed tarts, empty pudding cans. Car Scrope might not have had a hot meal in the two years since Jeri left. A bluebird flew angrily at the window, defending territory from its own reflection. “Car, you ought a let me get Janey Bucks over here and clean this place up for you. She gets ten an hour but she’s worth it.” The floor was spotted with mashed food, the whole place an old boar’s nest. She wondered how Mrs. Freeze could crush womanly concerns so thoroughly that it didn’t bother her.

  Scrope produced his strangled laugh. “She’d die a shock.” He wouldn’t explain the lonesome gnaw a clean kitchen brought him, worst when wholesome wheat cereal was cooking, the sun hitting a white plate—he could howl. “So, what d’you want a do Saturday? Make noon at Dirty Water or Mud Suck, which? There’s about fifty head loose out there should a been shipped, we held off the fall market it was so bad. Worse now. They got this new Northern Plains beef co-op they’re startin up but I doubt it’s goin a help. If we could put themEAT BEEF signs up right across the country, New York to San Francisco, it’d call people’s attention a beef What a you say, Mrs. F.? O.k. with you for Saturday?” He shook a handful of objects like orange larvae from a plastic bag and chewed them, mustache absorbing the color.

  Inez hardly knew where to look there were so many things wrong with the room and the people in it, settled her gaze on a dog in the yard beyond the window, murmured, “Dirty Water’s better. Got a nicer view.”

  She thought Car Scrope was on his way downhill. He could end like that crazy old bristle on All Night Creek when she was a kid. She’d ridden out with her father and brothers, and miles from home they had come on a tumbledown place along the creek. A wild man came out of the door and confronted them, food-plastered whiskers sprouting stiff, his eyes crusted, and a stink coming off him that hit thirty feet away. Her father began to say who they were, the old guy mumbling eh? eh? and they all saw his pants suddenly glisten to the knees with fresh wet. Her father wheeled around and led them up a hill but the day was spoiled. “Jeez, did you see that,” said her brother Sammy, “he just let go right in his pants. Smells like he poops in em, too.”

  “He used a be a pretty good rancher, but his wife died and he’s a dirty old boar in a boar’s nest now,” their father had said. “Stay away from there.” Men had that flaw in them, Inez thought, to go over the cliff of events and fall precipitously into moral ruin.

  “My god,” said Scrope. “I got a bear of a headache.” He reached on top of the dish cupboard and fumbled for the aspirin bottle, dry-swallowed four, stubbed out his cigarette in a dirty saucepan. A cloud of steam rose from the coffeepot as he poured the boiling water over the grounds. He rinsed out stained cups under the faucet and filled them with the fresh coffee. His head pounded and he felt hot and strange as though a djinn had flown out of the kettle spout and up his nose. He gripped the back of a chair as if it could help him.

  They went outside again to watch the grass grow, stood with their backs against the warm barn logs, a few early flies roaring around. Cody Joe drifted away toward the stack-yard with his coffee cup, stepping high over invisible furrows. Car shifted close to Inez, talk racing out of his mouth about the heavy snow-pack in the mountains, saying Bad Girl Creek was up and likely to run over its banks if the warm weather held. The titanium plates holding his bones together were hot.

  “It’ll hold and it’ll flood,” said Mrs. Freeze, striking a kitchen match on her thumbnail. She disliked idle chatter.

  The coffee was too strong, bitter and scalding. “Whoa!” Inez said. “That’scoffee!”

  “Ain’t it the truth,” said Mrs. Freeze, setting her half-empty cup on the upturned box. “That coffee’ll clean you out better than a chimney brush.” She headed toward her house trailer.

  As soon as she was out of sight Scrope seized Inez’s hand, pressed it against what Jeri had called a dead sardine that night in the truck, comparing it, he thought then, to John Wrench’s equipment, but when he had suggested that might be the case she had answered, don’t say that scum’s name.

  “You set a match to me,” he said now to Inez. “Let’s go do it.”

  “For god’s sake, Car. You out a your mind?” Her neck and cheeks flamed, she wrestled her hand loose. It was almost noon. Their shadows slid beneath their feet like spilled paint.

  “Come on, come on,” he said, pulling her toward an open door. The rank animal was out of him and in the open.

  “Get ahold a yourself.”

  “Youget ahold,” and he was rubbing her flat buttocks, pressing against her, the breath whistling in his nose. “Come on.”

  She jabbed her chapped elbow into his throat, twisted up his arm, ducked and ran for the mare.

  “I’m not quittin,” he shouted after her. “I’m goin a get you. I’m goin a get in there before you can say ‘sheep shit.’” Standing in her cloud of dust he knew something iron had thrown a lever while he poured the coffee.

  Mrs. Freeze came back from the trailer, jamming her shirt into her jeans. “Where’s Inez?” she said in her rough voice. Scrope smelled the drift of fresh-swallowed whiskey.

  “She had a go.” He stared south, colorless eyes watering from the pain of the headache. He could feel every piece of metal in his body straining after the ringing spurs.

  “Probly the coffee,” said Mrs. Freeze. “Hope she makes it.”

  “Tell you somethin, I could go for that.” And he cupped his hands under two imaginary breasts and jiggled them.

  Mrs. Freeze wrinkled her face. “Inez? A wall got more tit than Inez.”

  “Anyway, them’s pretty spurs.”

  “You got that right. Beauts.”

  THEWOLF

  Car Scrope became a nuisance to her, plotting her day and appearing whenever Sutton was somewhere else; he telephoned at strategic hours. He followed her into town, once or twice got on a horse and angled his ride to coincide with the dudes and Inez on the trail to Rabbitheels. And at those times he stared at her with lustful, white-eyed gaze and talked filthsotto voce .

  “You keep it up and I am goin a say somethin to Sutton. I don’t believe you’d like that. He seems to you like maybe just a good old fella you knew for years but when Sutton gets mad he’s mean.”

  “I can’t help it,” he said. “Inez, I don’t hardly even like you when you ain’t around but when you are around I feel like somebody shoveled hot coals in my shorts. You make my head ache I want it so bad. Come on, send these dudes ahead and let’s you and me get up behind them rocks and fuck.” He pursed his mouth and made kissing noises under the platinum mustache.

  She shuddered. “I could rope you,” she said, “and drag you to a dishrag. Maybe that’d get the message across. Maybe you’d like that.”

  “What I’d like,” he said, “is a good, juicy bareback ride. What I’d like is to put my dick right where it wants to go. What I’d like is to bounce you until your eyes cross. What I’d like—”

/>   She started on Sutton the next morning when he came in for daybreak breakfast, their early hour before the dudes winced across the porch in their new boots, stretching their arms and saying how good the air smelled. Outside the wind was slapping the faded grass. She knew better than to tell him what to do in the morning but couldn’t keep it back.

  “I hate to say this, Sutton, but Car Scrope’s been makin passes and ugly remarks to me for two weeks. I thought he’d calm down and quit, why I didn’t say anything, but he keeps on.”

  He laid a bloody patch of wool on the table. “Somethin’s at the sheep. Two dead and one mostly eat, one dragged off and one crippled.” He picked up his coffee cup, blew and sucked at it as though it were hot solder, smell of sage rising from his hands.

  “You hear what I said about Car Scrope? About what he’s been tryin a do to me? He’s just as rammy as he can be.”

  “I think dogs. The prints are twict the size of a coyote’s.”

  “I told him I was goin a tell you, you’d straighten him out. But he don’t seem to get the message.”

  “I hope to Jesus it ain’t our dogs. I don’t see Posy last couple days.”

  “I got a hard enough life I don’t need a put up with a sex maniac neighbor comin at me. I expect my husband a take the matter in hand pronto.”

  He got up, went to the porch, came back to the table. “Well, it’s not Posy. She’s on the porch with that infected leg. I forgot that leg. Wasn’t her.” The dog had looked at him and yawned, one ear up, one down, left eye catching the sun as a glassy red ball.

  “You need a go up there and give him what-for. You need a put some steel in sight, he knows you mean it. How you think I feel with him rubbin his wrinkly old thing up against me?”

  “Yeah. I could go up to Car’s, find if he seen anything, had any calf loss.”

  “You do that,” said Inez. “You do that,” voice like that of a shot crane, recalling it had sometimes been a trio in the old days, Wrench, Scrope and Muddyman out having themselves a high-heeled time, the rotten pigs.

  In the late morning a trio of New York women lawyer dudes called on the cell phone that Sutton said they must carry when they went walking, that or hold on to a long string attached to the porch rail, a rule laid down in the wake of a grass fire set by a strayed guest who had depended on smoke signals to show his whereabouts.

  “Inez, we are lost,” said a cross voice as though she had set them wandering. “And there’s wolves out here.” Fast breathing came through the receiver. Sutton scratched sums on his Big Chief tablet.

  “Coyotes. Describe what’s around you and we’ll figure out where you’re at,” and listened to the voice saying big orange rocks, barbwire fence and empty space.

  “Fence in good shape or is it all wrecked?”

  “Well, it just looks like a fence.” A whistling sigh, or was it the wind? Bills and letters and tax information brochures covered the table, a month’s work and all in red.

  “Big rocks. They’re big.”

  “I think they’re out on the edge a Car’s hoodoos,” she said Sutton. “I’ll ride out and point them back. But ifhe’s out there I ought a take the .30-.30.”

  “Take the truck. If the ladies’re walkin, it’s four miles back.” The feed bill glaredPAST DUE .

  “Teach em a lesson.” But she knew it wouldn’t and said Muddyman could drive out there himself if he wanted, pack in the front seat with three women, be a treat for him, take them to see Car Scrope, maybe he’d fix on one and get off her case. She wanted to ride and she would. She touched the feed bill, said, lucky we got that tax return.

  The women swore wolves. They were dressed in stiff, stacked jeans and roper boots, Santa Fe jackets and silk neckrags. The wind tangled their hair into mops.

  “I know what I’m talking about,” said lawyer Glacken. “I’ve seen hundreds of hours of wolf tapes in a case I had where a man was keeping a wolf in his walkup and trying to pass it off as a seeing-eye dog. DNA, the whole bit. Iknow . We saw a wolf.”

  “Well, the ranch is that way. See the smoke blowin up? That’s the fireplace chimney. You’ll come on the ranch road, walk south, close the gates behind you. Sutton’ll be along with the truck. Remember about the gates.”

  She rode up the wash. To her right in a clump of rabbitbrush a large female wolf appeared, watching her with yellow cross-eyes. Its fur shivered in erratic gusts. Without thinking she uncoiled her rope, made a loop and threw. As she took a few dallies around the horn the wolf leaped straight up into the air and the dun mare reared. The wolf hauled back, squatting on its haunches, and the mare reared a second time, walked backward on her hind feet like a circus horse, dropped, put her head down and bucked violently; Inez went through the windshield, landed on her chin and skidded, neck broken, mouth open, lower teeth plowing red dirt. The dallied rope pulled free and the wolf bolted away through sagebrush that wagged stiffly in the wind.

  The week after the funeral Sutton Muddyman put the ranch on the market and made ready to move to Oregon near his daughter. His sister and her husband drove up from Rock Springs to help him pack and sort out things for the auction.

  “What about these spoons, this red pillow, these spurs, Sutty? They’re real handsome with the little comets on them. Though muddy.”

  “She was wearin them goddamn things when it happened. They’re bad luck.” His voice shook, thickened in his throat. “I don’t want a see em. Put em with the rest a the auction stuff.” It had been Sutton, truck full of dude women, who’d found his wife, her teeth dug into the state of Wyoming. He’d shot the mare in front of them.

  Local opinion discounted the dudes’ identification of a wolf as eastern hysteria; it was no wolf but a dog loose from some tourist’s camper and how pleased the owner must have been when he saw Inez’s nice grass rope.

  TEXASBOYS

  The Muddyman place was renamed Galaxy Ranch. Frank Fane, the new owner, played a Jupiterean warlord in a science-fiction television series but preferred the western theme in private life. He stocked the place with cutting horses and hired a crew of Texans headed up by the snuff-dipping, pole-legged, stretched-out foreman, Haul Smith, face decorated with a frothy beard, ringlets the size and color of ginger ale bubbles.

  Smith came into the Firehole bar in Signal one Saturday night with a few of his Texas brush-poppers, called drinks for the house on him, said they were looking to shoot a little eight ball, and they stayed until closing time showing whatever they knew about horses, and that was not a little, might be secondary to what they knew about green felt and cue balls. Haul’s style was a slow walk around the table while he fluffed his beard, bending and scrutinizing, then making a difficult yet showy shot that rarely failed. When he missed he slammed the butt of the cue on the floor once,bang .

  “You play Cowboy here?” said Haul. “Nice game. Little change a pace. Play to a hunderd points and hunderd and one wins but the last shot got a be the cue ball on a carom off the one ball into a called pocket and no nickin no other ball.”

  Serious play had come to Signal and after a while there was some talk of a winter-long tournament and maybe some good prizes, something better than a six-pack or a can of Copenhagen. There were a few sullen remarks from the unemployed about Frank Fane bringing in Texas men when he could have had a heart’s pick of Wyoming, or at least that part of it.

  “Mr. Fane didn’t know nobody here and he known me from when he come out to Texas on a film shoot. They picked Texas for Mars. But as these boys”—jerking his thumb at his crew—“drops off and goes home we’re replacin with local guys. Things’ll work out.”

  They’d have to wait and see if that was true. At the moment it didn’t look like any of the weasel-headed Texans were missing their flatland southern home, roiled as it was with whirlwinds and secessionists.