Close Range

by Annie Proulx

  “Tomato soup, eggs, grapefruit juice, bread.” Roany waited a beat or two. The devil stirred in her. “There’s some steaks in the freezer.” That would wind him up.

  “I don’t eat meat. You know I don’t eat meat. You’re fighting the cattlemen but you support them by eating their beef?”

  “I’m not fighting the cattlemen,” said Roany. “That’s you and Shy.”

  “It’s in the freezer,” said Renti. “It’ll get freezer burn if nobody eats it.” She had quickly hated him when he said “you girls.”

  “That makes it all right?”

  “Look,” said Roany. “It’s not beef, Wade. It’s buffalo. Nobody here eats beef. Anyway, what we eat hasn’t got anything to do with whatever you and Shy have going.”

  “It has everything to do with it. These subsidized ranchers and their gas-bag cows destroying public range, riparian habitat, wiping out rare plants, trampling stream banks, creating ozone-destroying methane gas, ruining the National Forests that belong to the people, to all of us, stinking, polluting, stupid, world-destroying cows—and for what? A pitiful three percent of this state’s gross income. So a few can live a nineteenth-century lifestyle.” He stopped in a kind of despair. To have to explain it here. He looked down. The skinny dark one was wearing leather boots. He noticed now that they smelled of meat, the house stank of it. He opened the refrigerator with a wide exposing motion, saw two dark carrots, broccoli turning yellow, bottles of tonic and wine and beer, a basket of shriveled chilies, in the meat drawer packages wrapped in butcher paper, maroon blood on them.

  “I’m not into cooking tonight,” said Roany. “Everybody make their own.”

  He drank a glass of water while he waited for the soup to heat.

  “I remember,” he said to Roany in an almost tender voice, “the artichokes. Last year? You grilled those big California artichokes. I didn’t know you could cook them like that. They were wonderful. All of us out on the deck watching the moon rise?” He had known she was drunk. The only time people liked him was when they were drunk.

  ’Yes,” she said disinterestedly. “We can’t get those artichokes now. I don’t know why.” An enormous heaviness was settling in the kitchen. That night a year ago, over the artichokes he had told Roany he had sewn the brown suit himself from New Zealand hemp. It would last forever. She had swallowed so much wine the suit seemed beautiful and Wade Walls a kind of hero. In the headachy morning he was just a man in a wrinkled jacket.

  “So,” he said, very quietly, “Shy went back to meat.” Once, when Shy Hamp was a kid running cows in sorrow and frustration, he’d set him right. But that was a long time ago.

  “He didn’t ‘go back to meat.’ He never quit meat, only beef. And he said buffalo was different, it was o.k.”

  “Not o.k.” He did not try to keep savagery out of his voice. “The domestication of livestock was the single most terrible act the human species ever perpetrated. It dooms everything living. The future of the earth is inescapable, a harsh, waterless desert littered with bones if we cannot stop—”

  ’Your broth is boiling, Wade,” said Roany. She folded her lips in tightly, stood uncertain and half-turned from him, then, as though confronted with problems whose postulates changed constantly, gave up, poured wine into her sister’s glass and into her own. She carried her wine out to the deck, sat in a canvas chair and smoked a cigarette. There she lounged beyond the open door, smoke pouring from her nose, red glass in hand.

  “Wade,” said Renti, “do you work for a real estate developer?”

  “For god’s sake, no. What gave you that idea?”

  ’You want to get rid of the cows, right? I mean, isn’t that what it comes down to, cows or subdivisions? I mean, what happens to a ranch once the stock is gone? Development, right? What else is there? I mean, what are you trying to do?” Contempt came out of her like water from a firehose.

  “I want to bring it back,” he said. His voice swelled with professional passion. “I want it to be like it was, all the fences and cows gone. I want the native grasses to come back, the wildflowers. I want the dried-up streams to run clear, the springs to flow again and the big rivers run hard. I want the water table restored. I want the antelope and the elk and the bison and the mountain sheep and the wolves to reclaim the country. I want the ranchers and feedlot operators and processors and meat distributors to go down the greased pole straight to hell. If I ran the west I’d sweep them all away, leave the wind and the grasses to the hands of the gods. Let it be the empty place.”

  ’Yeah. Why don’t you blow up a meatpacker then instead of hammering ranchers? Why don’t you wreck Florida ranchers? I bet there’s more beef comes out of Florida than the west.”

  She walked out of the room with a haunchy slouch, not waiting to hear him say that western beef was the pivot point on which it all turned, that the battleground was the ruined land that belonged to the People.

  BADBEEF

  They were the daughters of Tucson lawyers, Slinger & Slinger, brought up in comfortable style. Renti had majored in art at school in California, Roany in business at the University of Wyoming where she found Shy Hamp. He was a novelty; her mistake was in taking the possibilities all the way.

  She knew she had business acumen and superior taste.

  “They don’t get it here,” she said to Shy after Delong Teleger in the hardware store asked her to go back to the shelves and check the price of four Phillips-head screws she was trying to buy. She had dropped the screws and walked out.

  “That man thinks because he’s the only hardware store in town people have to buy from him. And then he whines when all the business goes to Denver or Billings or Salt Lake City.”

  “Well, Delong’s got a bad hip. I bet he thought you could get to the shelf there and back quicker’n he could. And he sure knows you’re not goin a Denver for four screws.”

  “He should have had the price in his head or on a computer. He is still writing everything down on a little pad. With carbon copies.”

  “Don’t get all hard-breathin, Roany. Ease off.”

  Later, at a chain store in the mall, she bought inferior screws packaged in clear plastic and bearing a price sticker.

  She intended to show them how to do it right. There was money in western goods—aromatic sage bath oil, yucca soap, the fragrant seeds of wild columbine, dried flowers of ladies’ tresses, cedar potpourri for tourists who sniggered at drugstore lavender and cordovan hair dye. She’d carry hitched horsehair bracelets and keychains, a few hides and coyote pelts. The central business would be adaptations of antique western clothing—twill serge walking skirts, ranchers’ vests, and a line of custom-made rodeo shirts. She would hire two or three women to sew. Minimum wage. And for the fun of it she would stock a cabinet with Cowboy Curls mane detangler, packets of wild bergamot the Cheyenne had used to perfume favorite horses, cans of herb chew, funky stuff nobody needed but that they would buy because it was funky stuff, as she had taken on Shy Hamp. He was champion of nothing, a kind of tame cowboy without the horse sweat and grit. What she loved was his sweet slowness.

  “The customers are there,” she told him, sharp and defiant, “but if you are going to mess with that ranch it won’t be me keeping the books and calling the feed store. I’ve got my own life.” Later, she wilted, went moody, despised her own furious impatience. “I don’t know what’s wrong. I get crazy,” she said. “I can’t—”

  “It’s all right,” he said. Then, as if they had been talking of something else, “Don’t worry, you big old pretty girl, I’ll always make it back home.” To say something like that he might have been planning a voyage to the Bellingshausen Sea. “Come on over here,” he murmured, “little old crazy girl.” But he was miles and miles back of home range. He was double-riding a ghostly thoroughbred from years ago, couldn’t help it.

  Shy Hamp had wanted not to ranch but to go to college—his nimble-blooded brother Dennis was the cowboy and welcome to it. It puzzled the family. Dennis was the s
mart one. Shy had struggled all the way through school and here he was, wanting more of it.

  ’You dipshit,” his father said, “you couldn’t pound nails in mud. Go get you some business education but I expect you will be back on the ranch one a these days.”

  They didn’t know him, had never known him. From earliest childhood he had recognized his distance from them, embarrassed by his disinterest in land and stock.

  He was not swift with the books but had stumbled along, no quitter. Then, halfway through his final year and engaged to Roany Slinger, the fatal snow brought everything down, knocked him off his feet and threw him back into ranch life.

  The morning after the funeral he was throwing bales of hay off the back of the truck. There was no one else to do it. He looked up at the furious sky marked with a row of wave clouds in measured, curling peaks, shear layers near the jet stream, evidence of great turbulence aloft. The ranch was on the lee side of the range and all day the violent wind raged. If it had been that way on Saturday his people might have kept on playing cribbage, they might have lived. It was the sweet days that took you down, the bright square of sunlight that burned you alive.

  After a few weeks on the ranch sidling through the interstices between grief and work, he went to the university to ask for a tuition refund, the dry socket of his heart choked. A woman with a wart between her eyes told him there was no hope of getting the money back.

  “They got killed,” he said, “my folks. I’m out there on my own, I’m busted and I can’t get back to school.”

  ’You’d be surprised,” she said, “how many boys work a ranch, take their classes and make good grades. You’d be surprised how many go right on to Harvard and Yale.” Raised on sour milk and showing every spoonful.

  ’You bet I would be surprised.” He closed the door with some force.

  He put off starting the long drive to the ranch, dreading the house, silent and vague, the wind rustling dry snow through the grass, and drifted with a crowd to a public lecture billed provocatively asBad Beef . The visiting speaker was Wade Walls. The audience interrupted constantly, hooting and razzing. Shy turned and said to the man beside him, a heavy-shouldered rancher who kept a stained hat on and a wad of tobacco in his cheek, “He’s got a point.” The rancher said nothing, got up and moved as though apostasy, like blackleg, was contagious.

  After the lecture he was the only one who went up to the table where the speaker sat, bought a signed copy of the man’s book and asked him to come have a drink at the Lariat.

  “I don’t drink alcohol but I’ll take coffee.” Walls was wound up. Shy drank two beers, switched to whiskey. Something in Walls’s opinionated voice, something in the way the man leaned at him made him throw down his trouble.

  “I’m tore up over my folks. Third a February. Dennis had a new machine. Beautiful day. Cold but no wind. Not a cloud. You couldn’t get a better day. They told me it looks like about fourteen, fifteen miles from the pass they crossed a open slope, triggered a slab avalanche. That thing run them down into a aspen grove. The snow packed up as hard as cement. My family is gone, I’m out a school, I’m running cattle on the old ranch, I’m strapped for money, there’s a hundred and fifty first-calf heifers coming due. I can’t get no help. What the fuck am I supposed a do? What?”

  “Get out of ranching. Think of your children,” Walls said. “They’ll know their father was a rancher, one of the men destroying the west. They’ll blame you for it.”

  “I’m not even married yet. I don’t have any kids. That I know of.”

  For his part, Wade Walls announced himself to Shy as a monkey-wrencher, a hard man who would hammer a spike into a tree without hesitation. “You know what Abbey said about cows, don’t you—‘stinking, fly-covered, shit-smeared, disease-spreading brutes.’ But it’s not the way they are that matters, it’s what they do to the land. They’ve wrecked the west, they’re wrecking the world. Look at Argentina, India. Look at the Amazon.” He talked against cows for a long time.

  “Listen,” he said in his intense monotone, sloshing his coffee. “When kindness fails and persuasion doesn’t persuade, you fight fire with fire. It’s the only thing these people understand—force. Listen,” he said, “we could use you.” “We” was some complex acronym. In truth, there was no acronym; he was a solitary avenger, and maybe that was what drew Shy to him.

  “Count me,” said Shy, “count me in. I’ll get rid a the fuckin cows.” He was very drunk, getting close to the floor.

  A LIVING

  The summer after the accident he married Roany Slinger.

  It had been a western wedding with a reception at the Hitching Post Motel in Cheyenne, Roany in her handmade silk dress holding a bouquet of wilting wild roses, Shy ragged out in a wool frock coat that came to the knees. His cousin Huey said, “You look like General Sherman, yes suh.” They drank champagne from glasses etched with ropes spelling out the words “Shyland & Roany.” The two families sat apart, at different tables, talked among themselves. Huey and Hulse Birch drank themselves wolfish, filled a trash sack with motel forks and knives, tied the sack under the getaway car.

  Hulse Birch had been his friend in the early grades. They rode their horses to the back of the Birch place where Pinhead Creek pooled, camped out for three or four days in the summers, living off half-roasted potatoes and trout. When they were eleven they discovered three or four caves up in the brittle limestone outcrops. In one, thick with dust, three saddles and bridles waited inside, the leather curled and hard.

  “Train robbers,” said Hulse, who aspired to be one himself. “They must a hid these saddles here. They’d steal some horses and come up here for the saddles and get away. I bet they tried a steal our horses and my dad or grandpa shot them dead as dirt.”

  They looked then for the cave where the robbers might have cached banknotes and bars of gold. Hulse’s father got excited when he saw that one of the saddles was an old Cheyenne Meanea; it was stampedWYOMING TERRITORY , and the crooked initialsB.W. had been punched with an awl on the edge of one fender. King Ropes in Sheridan offered them high money for it, but Hulse begged to keep it. After that it seemed they did nothing but look for caves until Shy got sick of bat-guano’d holes.

  The plastic bag tore open on Interstate 80 with a sound that convinced him the engine had fallen out. His mustache was long, the ends waxed to needle-points, and the cake frosting had got into it. He stood at the side of the highway staring at the curving trail of utensils behind them, and Roany pointed at his sugary mustache, laughed herself wet.

  “Looks like bird shit,” she gasped.

  He shaved it off a week after the wedding, about the time he gave up feeding cows and started killing them.

  “At least I can make us a livin,” he told Roany. He used part of the herd sale money to finish up his business degree, kicked a little into Roany’s shop. He graduated, took a two-month course in Colorado in equestrian underwriting. His business cards read:

  SHY W. HAMP

  BIG HORSE EQUINE INSURANCE

  FOR RANCH&FARM

  SLOPE, WYOMING

  A recorded message on his telephone began with a horse’s whinny, and then his tense voice said, “Big Horse is dedicated to insuring your horse against mortality, fertility loss, barn fire, earthquake, lightning. Let us help you work out a equine health plan.”

  “I’ll sell off the cattle,” he told Roany. “But I won’t never sell the ranch. We been on the place seventy-five years. We’ll damn well live on it even if we don’t run cows. I’ll lease it, sheep, maybe, but not cattle. Keep a few horses, only thing I ever liked about the ranch was the horses.” Yet he had come up through 4-H, pledging Head, Heart, Hands and Health to something, to destruction, it seemed. Once or twice a year Wade Walls arrived and together they did harm where Walls said it would do the most good.

  It was easy enough to lease out the land. Old Edmund Shanks, weasel-shrewd, took it up. His philosophy was well-known: why own anything when you can lease and contro
l it for less than you’d pay in taxes.

  The horse insurance game was slow going. Roany’s shop put the crackers in the soup. He couldn’t believe there were that many women anxious to spend good money on potions and pony-skin vests, that many cowboys who needed three-hundred-dollar shirts. She couldn’t keep ahead of orders for the custom-made shirts. A famous calf-roper ordered a new one every month. Yet hadn’t a penny of insurance on his horses.