by Annie Proulx
I came in with that box of coffee and cookies, pushed the door open gently. He’d just finished, had just pulled out of her, back up on his feet. She was still lying on a hay bale, skinny kid’s legs bent open. I looked at him, the girl sat up. The light wasn’t good in there and he was trying to get it back in his pants in a hurry but I saw the blood on him. The heat of the coffee came through the cardboard box and I set it on the old bureau that held the calf pullers and rope and salve and suture material. I stood there while they pulled at their clothes. The girl was sniveling. Sure enough, she was on the road to becoming a sleazy little bitch, but she was only fifteen and it was the first time and her daddy worked for the man who’d done it to her.
He said to her, “Come on, I’m gettin you home,” and she said, “No,” and they went outside. Didn’t say anything to me. He was gone until the next afternoon, came back and said his few words, I said mine and the next day I left. The goddamn heifer had died with a dead calf still inside her.
Most things you never know what happened or why. Even Palma and Ruth and Barry who were there couldn’t say just how it came apart. From what they remembered and what the papers told it seems like they were on that street full of cars and trucks and Elk tried to get around a trailer loaded with calves. There wasn’t a vehicle on the highway until they turned onto Poplar, and then there was the backed-up traffic from the light that’s east of the exit ramp, traffic all around them and with it a world of trouble. While he was passing the trailer a blue pickup passed him, swerving into the oncoming traffic lane and forcing cars off the road. The blue pickup cut sharp in front of the trailer-load of calves. That trailer guy stepped on the brake and Elk hit the trailer pretty hard, hard enough, said Palma, to give her a nosebleed. Josanna was yelling about her truck and the baling wire on the hood latch loosened and the hood was lifting up and down a few inches like an alligator with a taste in its mouth. But Elk was raging, he didn’t stop, pulled around the calf trailer and went after the blue pickup which had turned onto 20-26 and belted off west. Josanna shouted at Elk who was so mad, Ruth said, blood was almost squirting out of his eyes. Right behind Elk came the calf trailer flicking his lights and leaning on the horn.
Elk caught the blue truck about eight miles out and ran him into the ditch, pulled in front and blocked him. Far back the lights of the calf hauler came on fast and steady. Elk jumped out and charged at the blue pickup. The driver was coked and smoked. His passenger, a thin girl in a pale dress, was out and yelling, throwing stones at Josanna’s truck. Elk and the driver fought, slipping on the highway, grunting, and Barry and Ruth and Palma stumbled around trying to get them apart. Then the calf hauler, Órnelas, screamed in from Mars.
Ornelas worked for Natrona Power Monday through Friday, had a second job nighttimes repairing saddles, and on his weekends tried to work the small ranch he’d inherited from his mother. When Elk clipped him he hadn’t slept for two nights, had just finished his eighth beer and opened the ninth. It’s legal to drink and drive in this state. You are supposed to use some judgment.
The cops said later that Ornelas was the catalyst because when he got out of his truck he was aiming a rifle in the general direction of Elk and the pickup driver, Fount Slinkard, and the first shot put a hole in Slinkard’s rear window. Slinkard screamed at his passenger to get him the .22 in his rack but she was crouching by the front tire with her hands clasping her head. Barry shouted, watch out cowboy, ran across the highway There was no traffic. Slinkard or Slinkard’s passenger had the .22 but dropped it. Ornelas fired again and in the noise and fright of the moment no one grasped causes or effects. Someone picked up Slinkard’s .22. Barry was drunk and in the ditch on the other side of the road and couldn’t see a thing but said he counted at least seven shots. One of the women was screaming. Someone pounded on a horn. The calves were bellowing and surging at the sides of the trailer, one of them hit and the smell of blood in there.
By the time the cops came Ornelas was shot through the throat and though he did not die he wasn’t much good for yodeling. Elk was already dead. Josanna was dead, the Black-hawk on the ground beneath her.
You know what I think? Like Riley might say, I think Josanna seen her chance and taken it. Friend, it’s easier than you think to yield up to the dark impulse.
The Governors of Wyoming
WADEWALLS
THE QUICK THUNDERSTORM WAS OVER, THE STREET WETand slices of tingling blue showing through bunched cloud. They waited in the truck. Roany had parked close to the newsstand, the stop for the Denver bus. A few final raindrops fell, hard as dice. At five thirty-five the bus pulled in, stinking, sighing. Eleven passengers descended, Wade Walls the last. He shot them a glance without turning his head when Roany put down the window and said his name. They watched him cross the street and go into the Ranger Bar.
“Is that him? Where is he going?” Renti chewed gum until it snapped for mercy. She was a small, grubby woman in black tights and construction worker boots, ingrained dirt on the backs of her arms, her face handsome and impatient. She stared after the man crossing the street, jumping a rill of water.
Her married sister, Roany Hamp, shrugged. Her hair, sleeked with rose oil, was twisted into a knot. Clean arcs divided the windshield into a diptych, and their faces flared through the glass.
“Maybe he wants a beer,” said Renti, punching the radio buttons.
“He doesn’t drink. Maybe he wants a kick in the butt.” Roany turned the key and they heard the exhortations of a local announcer, the one who pronounced his own name as though he had discovered a diamond in his nostril.
“We supposed to wait for him or follow him in there?”
“Won’t hurt to sit in the truck for a few minutes.” She took a tube from her purse, squeezed a clot of unguent into her palm, scented and the color of bloodstained jelly. “Black hat, black hat blues…”
“He’s trying to pretend like he’s a spy or something.”
They watched people go in and out of the bar. The door swung, slowed, swung again. “Got those dirty old black hat blues…”
“Uh-huh,” said Roany, “doesn’t drink and doesn’t drive but he’s happy to blow up a dam for you. How he got Shy mixed in his business I can’t figure. Before I knew him. Shy is about as much of a—” The door latch clicked and Wade Walls slid into the crew seat. “Don’t put it on the bed…”
“For god’s sake. You gave me a heart attack,” said Roany, “creeping up like that.” She turned off the radio.
“I went out the back door and through the alley,” he said. The cab smelled of attar of roses, the fruity gum.
“My sister Renti,” she said. “Staying with us for a couple of weeks. From Taos. You think all this stealth is necessary, we’re in the movies? You think they’re following you or what?” She pulled into the traffic behind a pickup hauling a gooseneck trailer. They could hear his rapid breathing, like that of a dog, behind them. If it were a movie his signature music would be a huffed and spitty harmonica.
“I have been doing my deeds for seventeen years,” he said, “and out of a dozen people that started with me I am the only one left. Because I’m careful.”
“How come you went into the Ranger?”
“Bottled water. Drank about three of those little ones on the plane. Two more on the bus.”
There wasn’t much to say to that and they rode in silence. Wade Walls seemed to be in a coma until they turned onto the county road.
“It is dry,” he said, dazed, trying to seem awake, caught in a half-nightmare about this place as though still on the bus and coming over the border through a fringe of billboards, cheap gas stations, cigarette and fireworks stores, then a few wind-scoured towns, ranches scattered like a shovelful of gravel thrown on rough ground.
“Welcome to Wyoming,” said Roany in her arid voice. “Welcome to paradise.”
But he knew all about the place, the fiery column of the Cave Gulch flare-off in its vast junkyard field, refineries, disturbed land, uranium m
ines, coal mines, trona mines, pump jacks and drilling rigs, clear-cuts, tank farms, contaminated rivers, pipelines, methanol-processing plants, ruinous dams, the Amoco mess, railroads, all disguised by the deceptively empty landscape. It wasn’t his first trip. He knew about the state’s lie-back-and-take-it income from federal mineral royalties, severance andad valorem taxes, the old ranches bought up by country music stars and assorted billionaires acting roles in some imaginary cowboy revue, the bleed-out of brains and talent, and for common people no jobs and a tough life in a trailer house. It was a 97,000-square-mile dog’s breakfast of outside exploiters, Republican ranchers and scenery. The ranchers couldn’t see their game was over. They needed a hard lesson and he was here to give one. “It is dry. It’s been a bad drought.” Roany steered and the sister said nothing.
“Drought,” he said as though trying a new word, her intricate hair and creamy nape in front of him.
“Spot shower before the bus came. Not out here, but in town. Not a drop out here.”
The ranch was twenty-two miles south of Slope in mima mound country—what old men called biscuit land, low domes of earth cast up on the plain by ancient rodents or frost action, no one was sure—and to the west a fanged landscape that seemed to be coming at them. In this dry, heated year the grass was already yellow-bronze, the dusty earth quivering with grasshoppers in chirring flight, heads and thoraxes marbled hazel and drab. Cheatgrass crowded native bunchgrass, pernicious weeds grew. He knew before she made the turn that Roany would take the back way and the truck passed over metronomic shadows of telephone poles, then onto the washed-out gravel rut they called the Drunk Road.
Juniper Hamp had quarried the pale sandstone in 1882 and built the square, two-story ranch house with his six sons. There was a chimney at each corner rising above the mansard roof, tall windows and a high porch. The stone barn and springhouse, the stone-paved square courtyard at the back entrance had fairly well cleaned out the small quarry to the sons’ relief—they joked that he would have built corrals with it if the stone had held out. Roany had pulled out old partitions, replaced ceilings, gutted the kitchen. Only the parlor was as it had been, with its glass-fronted cabinet and green velvet lounge.
In the kitchen Renti looked Wade Walls over: face somehow thick as if the flesh was dense, lower lip jutting like that of a grouper fish. His courtesy smile showed yellow teeth all the same size. From a distance, holding his non-leather briefcase, he resembled a water rights lawyer. Close to, he seemed odd, legs tight as though ready to leap, his strange suit made from a coarse fabric, sewed with crooked seams.
He could sense the femaleness of the house. “Where’s Shy?” When he spoke his stiff face jerked as though moved with hooks and wires.
“I wish I knew. He took off early Tuesday. Didn’t say where to.”
“What do you mean?” They were standing in the kitchen and like cartoon figures only their mouths moved.
“I think maybe he’s in Montana. He said something about Montana, I think. They’re killing the bison up there.” She might have said they were mowing lawns.
“That was two years ago. The remaining bison are alive and well so far. Until winter.”
“Well, I don’t know. He’s got a thousand things. He’s always sounding off about land swaps and ferrets, I don’t know what else. Besides that crap he’s got his business to run—I mean the horse insurance—and I’ve got mine. He does not sign out when he goes. There’s times I only see him once a week.” A fragment of her voice broke off.
“This sure sounds like fun,” said Renti, hair crisscross, missing the sharp Taos nights, even the milling tourists half-blind from staring at silver jewelry, most of them oldies—matched pairs—traveling together, the men in the front seat where they could see everything, the women in back like dogs, getting flat side views of guardrails and roadside trash.
She had worked jobs: highway construction flagger, running a candle-wrapping machine, art sales in the lesser galleries, step-and-fetchit for a designer of stained glass, summer theatre stage-hand, before Muleshoe Gallery took her on. There she glued muslin onto the backs of yellowed maps, replaced spring rollers and draw rods on old roll-ups, one slack afternoon climbed up on the map table with Pan, the manager, and copulated. There was enough to it to keep them going and in a month Pan wondered, bringing a present of two cold bottles and a plate ofchiles rellenos, if they didn’t have a relationship; she was raw, unbeautiful, but a stopper in a skinny long dress with a deep border of red. Twenty miles out toward Angel Fire they found a one-room adobe house with a trailer grafted onto the north wall. He dragged big orange pots onto the patio, she grew herbs, they took in an abandoned Alsatian wolfhound. The dog was obedient and mild, a backseat dog. There was nothing wrong, but after a year Renti had packed a bag, told him she would be back in a few weeks. She was going to Wyoming to see her sister. The next night she had suffered a terrible dream in which she stood a Chihuahua in a pot of boiling broth and when she ladled the broth into her bowl the burned animal spoke humbly, asking if it might be taken to the doctor, perhaps in the afternoon if she had time.
For a few days it was fine, all blood affection and the old familiar, then everything had been said. They’d reached the point in reminiscence where their lives had diverged and superficial accounts rather than shared intimacies were the most that could be expected. Renti said that the thing with Pan was turning a little gummy. Her fault, she was stone-hearted, didn’t want what she got. Roany said Shy was two steps up from an idiot, but sweet, and though he slowed her down in every way, divorce wasn’t worth the misery and he was too damn beautiful to lose. In a week they began to fight as they had when they were children and about the same things: which of them the parents had favored over the other, and why she, Renti, was such a dirty bird.
’You’re like a greasy old crow,” Roany said, “dressed in black all the time. You’d be good-looking if—“
“Dear sister, do not try to remodel me.” In truth they were both slovenly, Roany, not in her person nor her shop, but in housekeeping. Though Shy Hamp, her husband, was, like many ranch-grown men, obsessively neat. The greasy sinks, the dust! He waited until she left for the shop, ignored his horse insurance business to attack the filth. Now, two sisters in the house, a knife clotted with orange jam as though used to crush some monstrous insect, dead flies on the bathtub surround, a window streaked with bird excreta seemed squalid evidence of his private longings.
Renti had looked forward to Wade Walls, supposed he would have arms as hard as wood, a menacing glint, but he was slump-shouldered, seemed to come from nowhere and belong to no one.
“It’s not about fun.” He sat in the chair, his hands folded across his stomach. It had been made into a kitchen from a magazine, copper pans dangling from beams, a forest of arty vinegar and oil flasks.
Roany took a half-empty bottle of chardonnay from the refrigerator and poured a little in two wineglasses.
“He knows you’re here. He’s coming back today. Or tonight. Sometime today, right? I don’t have any idea what you are doing and I don’t want to know. I’m just the damn chauffeur.” She drank some of the wine, threw another sentence his way. “You’re in the room you had before, the cowboy room.”
He went upstairs with his briefcase. This room was tricked out with cow skulls, grimy lariats, a digital reproduction of a chromolithograph showing a rustler caught in the act. Most of the furniture was stumpy wildwood. There was one Molesworth chest with painted longhorns marching across the drawer panels. Someone had tried to chisel off one of the longhorns, leaving a splintery scar.
Renti and Roany heard the toilet flush.
“Little bottles of water still coming through,” said Renti.
He came down the back stair, clearing his throat. “I hate to trouble you girls but do you have anything to eat?”
“Didn’t they give you something on the plane?”
“I don’t eat airlines food—” He laughed a little, trying to hide his irritation
. The two of them sat there drinking wine, making no dinner preparations.
