Brown-Eyed Girl

by Virginia Swift

  OK, Sally noted. Height, hair, and feminism ran in Meg’s family.

  At that picnic, Mac had noticed that Gertrude wore a purple and gold votes for women pin on the bodice of her starched white shirtwaist. He’d made a joke about it, and she’d let him have what-for. They loved to argue with each other, to match wits. Mac proposed in April, and Gert said she would marry him after graduation.

  They graduated in May, and married at her parents’ ranch on a brilliant June day in 1903. The next morning, they awoke to ten inches of snow. The lilac bushes in the ranchyard, heavy with blooms, were bowed to the ground. Gert got up, went out, shook the heavy white clumps off clusters of blossoms that sent out grateful bursts of perfume. Then she went inside, made coffee, woke her husband, dressed. There was no hope of getting a wagon to Laramie to catch the train that would take them, ultimately, to a new home in Texas. A week passed before they could leave.

  What was she thinking? What did he promise?

  Gert never learned to like flat, dry, dusty West Texas in the five years they were there, working on Mac’s fortune. His family were all dead. The young couple were on their own, a hard thing in a hard country. Wyoming was a hard place too, but she knew its bleaknesses as her own, and there were Parkers everywhere to lift some of the weight of the long cold time. Mac swore to Gert that once his wells came in, he’d take her back home to Wyoming and start buying up every pretty piece of property for sale in the entire state. They’d ranch some of it, and leave some of it for the deer and the elk and the moose.

  She must have loved him. Must have shared that dream. Watch it, Sally, you dim-witted romantic.

  They’d both seen Meg’s birth, barely a year after they’d married, as a blessing, but it had come at a cost. Gert had a hard time. The doctor told her that baby Margaret would be her last.

  A lonely way to be born, no?

  Meg had only one dim memory of her first years in Texas. She had later asked her mother if the remembered moment had actually happened, but her mother couldn’t say for sure. Meg couldn’t have been much more than three. It had been a typical West Texas summer day, windy, sere, no prospect of relief. Her mother had been doing the wash, hanging it up to dry. Meg remembered how hot and gritty her skin had felt, how she had toddled over to her mother and fallen beside the basket of heavy wet linen at her feet. Her mother had snatched her up, wrapped her in wet sheets, and stuck her in the shade of a lone spindly cottonwood tree, brought her a cool cup of water and held it to her dry mouth. She had grown cooler, drowsy, slept.

  Sally’s semidistracted thought: So that’s what they did before air-conditioning!

  Meg was awakened by her father’s voice, whooping in exultation. She opened her eyes to see him jumping up and down, covered with filthy sticky black stuff. His first well had come in.

  They were off to Wyoming within the year.

  Mac and Gert took out extended homestead claims on land shading up into his beloved Sierra Madres, not far from the town of Encampment. Though he had to spend time in Texas tending his oilfields, he bought up range land and mountain meadows scattered across Wyoming: in the Bighorn basin, on the south flank of the Absarokas, in the shadow of the Tetons. But the Woody D Ranch, just a day’s ride from Bridger Peak, was the place Mac determined to call home. He paid a neighbor to come in with a mule team and grade a dirt road in to the place he built his ranch, and started hounding the Carbon County commissioners to lay down gravel on the road to Baggs. He bought himself a 1908 Maxwell touring car, which sat idle in the barn nine months of the year, waiting for snow to melt, then mud to harden.

  The winters were just plain horrid, the summers ambrosial. Meg went to a one-room school, when she could get there, doing her lessons in a classroom where the ten pupils ranged in age from five to fifteen. By the time she was twelve, she had become the teacher.

  Gert knew that her daughter was far too bright to be deprived of a proper education, so for high school, Meg was sent to live with Parker cousins in Laramie. She loved the fine brick school building, the smart, strict teachers, the town kids who invited her over to bake gingerbread and throw snowballs. But she missed her mother and father and the nearness of the great, brooding mountains. As far as she was concerned, the Laramie Range to the east of town had some nice rock formations, but was really little more than an overeager hillock. The Snowies, to the west, were too far away to walk into in an afternoon. The minute the school year was over, she hurried back to Mac and Gert and the Woody D. Her home in the Sierra Madre was safety and sameness to her, even if, one year when she returned, she found they’d graveled the Baggs road.

  At sixteen, Meg graduated from high school, and it was clear she should go to college. She had grown tall and lanky, nearly six feet, with a diamondshaped face and Gert’s cascading blond hair and big blue eyes. She had inherited her mother’s insistence on looking a man in the eye, and boys found her too formidable to court. It was 1920, and she was full of life but the furthest thing from a flapper, sturdy and studious and incapable of flirting.

  As her mother had, she went to UW. And much to Gert’s delight, many of Meg’s university teachers were women, some of whom had been there back in Mama’s time. She took classes on the Civil War from the serious Laura White, in political economy from the outspoken and controversial feminist, Grace Raymond Hebard. Both encouraged her to pursue a teaching career, or perhaps to enter social work. Meg wanted to be useful, above all, and earnestly joined the Red Cross and the League of Women Voters, the Society for the Prevention of War. But her inner rhythms thrilled not to reform, but to create. She was a superb student in all her classes. In Professor McIntyre’s class on British poetry, her mind sang.

  Clara McIntyre and Laura White shared a twostory frame house near the campus. Each fall when the students returned, they hosted a tea for women students in their spectacular gardens. Meg ached to please them with her knowledge and her imagination. She would be invited again, in the barebranched snowclad days of winter, for hot apple cider and conversations on poetry.

  The year Meg graduated, they invited her over for a chat about her future. Meg admitted she wanted, well, to write. “You should write,” Miss McIntyre agreed. “You have the brains and the courage to do it. But if you want to write, you’ve got to get out of here, Margaret. You simply have to leave,” she told Meg, sipping sweet tea from an eggshell china cup. “And I can help.”

  The computer screen offered only faint light in the dusky office. Sally couldn’t read the pages in the folders. She looked up, dazed, and realized that she’d written through the purpling blaze of a sunset. Now it was time to turn on a light and keep going, or call it a day. She switched on the lamp on the desk, and decided to stop working anyway. She knew where to start in the morning; a good time to quit. She saved the file, backed it up on a diskette, closed it, tap tap tap and out. Took off her reading glasses, rubbed her eyes, and stretched. The job was begun.

  She realized that she was starving. Thought about what she had to eat in the house. Blessed Mary Langham had sent her home from dinner the other night with some leftover lasagna. She had a cold bottle of California sauvignon blanc in the fridge. She could heat up dinner, have a glass of wine, turn on the television and watch summer reruns of shows she’d never been that excited about in the first place. Sounded like another monster night in the life of the artist formerly known as Mustang Sally.

  After making themselves a frozen pizza for dinner, Josh Langham and his cousin Jerry Jeff Davis had ridden their bicycles from Jerry Jeff’s house to the Diamond Shamrock on north Fourth Street to rent videos. They were currently working their way through the collected film work of John Candy, and tonight they were taking on Volunteers, which neither had ever seen, and Wagons East, the fateful last Candy movie. They cut south on Eleventh Street, pedaling hard, with the videos and more than four pounds of junk food, soda, and candy in Josh’s backpack.

  Jerry Jeff was in the lead; his bike was newer. Josh had his sister’s old hand-me-down
bike. As he puffed along, Josh saw the light go on upstairs in the Dunwoodie house, the one that was supposed to be haunted, or at least to be full of cool stuff including a map to buried treasure. Jerry Jeff saw it too, slowing as they passed and pulling alongside Josh. “Josh, look!” he stage-whispered. “A light just went on in the haunted house. What the heck?”

  “Aw, it’s just that friend of Dad and your mom’s,” Josh explained. “That Professor Alder. She probably just got home or something. J.J., you don’t really believe in ghosts, do you?” he scoffed, shaming his cousin.

  “’Course not,” said Jerry Jeff.

  Neither did Josh. But as the son of a police officer, he did believe in noticing odd things. He also knew his dad had busted people trying to break into the old lady’s onceempty house. The light in the window wasn’t particularly odd, but the guy sitting in a parked car, across the street from Meg Dunwoodie’s house, was a bit out of the ordinary. Creepy. Josh glanced in the car as he pedaled past, registering a twenty-something guy with a shaved head lighting a cigarette. He didn’t dare circle back to check the make and model of the car, but knew it was some kind of big old shark of a sedan, maybe late sixties, early seventies, dark color. In-state plates.

  Jerry Jeff, reassured, was powering those pedals for home, inspired by the prospect of popping open a Pepsi or two, slamming bigtime junk food, and video-vegging. Josh decided he’d call his dad as soon as he got to his Aunt Delice’s house and tell him somebody might be casing the Dunwoodie place. His dad would probably want to know.

  Chapter 9

  All You Care to Eat

  Delice had always made sure that no matter how bad the food at the Wrangler was, at least the canned music was good. You could be sitting there eating a soggy BLT on Wonder bread with Miracle Whip, but you’d still be listening to Hank and Patsy and the Amazing Rhythm Aces, if you wanted to listen. El Conquistador didn’t bother to change the one tape they played all the time, which was a greatest hits thing by the Texas Tornadoes (“Hey Baby, Que Paso?”). Instead, El Conquistador relied on the food.

  Most Laramie restaurants weren’t particular about either the food or the ambience, so the places that pretended, vainly, to either were especially disappointing. The ones that claimed both and delivered neither, and had the balls to charge a fortune for spewing up a good case of entrée poisoning, rated a special narrow-eyed negative star or two on the Hawk Green scale.

  The former Mudflaps had closed down when the owners torched the kitchen for the insurance money. In its place now was a pseudo-Italian place called Hasta La Pasta! which had an unpromising sign out front that said, best lunch buffet in laramie, all you care to eat, $8.95. Bad omen number one. Sally was no novice. She knew you should never eat at an Italian place that has an exclamation point in the name. But this was where she was supposed to meet Egan Crain for lunch.

  Bad omen number two slammed her in the ears the minute she entered the dim, smoky entryway. The Muzak was the Hollyridge Strings, assassinating “Light My Fire.” Bad omen number three followed quickly. She turned into the dining room and saw Sam Branch, a man she had once tried to run over with a truck, sitting at a black Formica table, having lunch with a big man in a pinstriped suit. If she had still been a die-hard baseball fan, she would have thought the count had gone to three strikes, and retired to the dugout, cursing perhaps. In the past two decades, she’d switched to football (even if it was the Broncos). No mercy. After three downs, you were supposed to punt.

  She pretended she hadn’t seen Sam, and strode up to the hostess’s station to say she was looking for the Crain party. The hostess, who was doing her nails and talking on the phone, didn’t even look up: time to punt. But Egan saved her the trouble of announcing herself, hollering from a table with one of his patented “I say, Sally, over here!” fake-Brit remarks. She went to his table, hard by the pasta and salad bar (so convenient for refills!) and thought instantly about ordering an alcoholic beverage. For almost sixteen years in California she hadn’t drunk booze at lunch more than a couple of dozen times, and now here she was, back in Laramie, going on two for two. Maybe this endowed chair thing wasn’t such a good idea. “Iced tea,” she told the pierced-nosed waitress, feeling careful.

  Sam acted as if he’d just noticed that she happened to be in the room, a ludicrous sham given that he was sitting approximately eight feet away from her, pretending not to stare at her over the rim of his Heineken bottle.

  Sam looked good. Still had the sandy hair falling over one blue eye, still had the guileless, lying smile. He was wearing a denim shirt and Dockers. He’d obviously taken up working out. But then he’d always had a nice hard body, a miracle of biological design when you thought about what he’d done to it.

  He waved, grinned. She mouthed a little “Hi, Sam” and flickered limp fingers.

  Egan tittered at her obvious discomfort. “Guess you can’t go far in this town without running into old chums, eh wot, Sal?” he chortled. “Isn’t it just jolly, though, that we’ve all come up in the world so? Why, who would ever have thought that we’d live to see the day a chap like Sam Branch would be having his elevenses with the governor of Wyoming!”

  Hey, thought Sally, she’d had an elevenses or twelveses or more often two a.m.-ses with one or two Wyoming governors along the way, as had most musicians who ever made a buck playing bar gigs in the state. Twenty years ago, the best place to see the governor, as anyone knew, was a bar. Sally had personally seen one governor at the airport bar in Cheyenne at two o’clock in the afternoon, and at the Holiday Inn twice when she was playing happy hours, and even once at the Wrangler, though, thankfully, never at the Gallery. Some things were just beneath a governor, no matter how devoted to bars.

  This governor, a Republican, she recalled, was drinking something clear in a glass. She couldn’t remember if he was born-again or not, so she couldn’t decide whether he was loading up on water or vodka. Sam said something that made the governor laugh. She should have known he’d eventually be yukking it up with Republicans. Hell, he was probably a member of the NRA. He probably belonged to the militia.

  The waitress finally returned and took their lunch orders. Sally ordered a caesar salad, a mental lapse she regretted almost immediately but was unable to correct, since the waitress fled quickly and didn’t show up again for some time. (She imagined Hawk explaining that they should have spelled that salad “Seize Her,” as in the first two words of a sentence that ended “before she orders something that stupid again!”) Egan ordered the Pavarottiburger (menu: “It’s a BIG ONE.” It oughta be, Sally thought, for eleven bucks!)

  It took forty-five minutes for their lunches to come, by which time they’d nearly exhausted their store of reminiscence and innocent current gossip. The waitress, who obviously had something more important to do, nearly dropped the plate in Sally’s lap. Rescuing her lunch, Sally looked down at a mound of browning romaine lettuce, drenched in bottled dressing and blanketed with stale industrial bread cubes. Egan dug into his huge burger, but judging from the vigorous way his undershot jaw was working, it had the consistency, if not the actual taste, of Styrofoam pellets.

  “So do we have business to do, Egan?” she asked, wanting to get to the point of the lunch and get the hell out of there.

  Egan swallowed a bite of his burger and drank half a glass of water. “Since you’re supposed to be advising us on special collections we might purchase with Dunwoodie legacy funds, I thought it’d be a good idea if I brought you up to date on our plans for the archival acquisitions,” he began. “We’ve identified a number of donors around the state whose collections would be superb contributions to the archive. They include papers from some of the first ranching families in the state, really top-drawer stuff. I’ve a list right here,” he said, digging in his briefcase and coming up with a typed sheet. “You’ll see that they’re all over the place—Pinedale, Gillette, Green River, Torrington, what have you. Not all of the donors have agreed to give their collections to us, yet. We’d r
eally like to have the Flanders papers, but of course the family is so distraught, what with Walter having that tragic hunting accident last fall—”

  “Egan,” Sally said testily, sensing a major digression coming on. Time to show him who was sitting in the endowed chair. She pushed aside her untouched plate and got her reading glasses out of her big leather bag. Egan’s list featured the names of ranching families she’d heard of, including his own.

  “Let me get this straight,” she said. “You’re proposing to use Dunwoodie money to acquire, transport, catalogue, take care of, and store these collections, and you want me to help you get them nailed down?”

  Egan’s face fell. She’d deliberately started right up by using the word money—it made everything seem so tawdry. “Righto,” he answered brightly, as if she must surely see what a fine idea this was.

  “But Egan, these look like Wyoming collections you guys would have wanted anyway. They may be interesting from the point of view of ranch life, but they’re not especially pertinent to women’s history—”

  “Come on, Sally. Families have women in them!” he sputtered, setting his teeth so that his jaw receded even more than usual. “Why, none of the great ranches could survive without strong, determined women keeping the home fires burning ...”

  She waxed him with a brown-eyed glare. “Spare me the hearth-and-home routine, Egan. You’re trying to scam the Foundation to pay for stuff you already wanted. I’m not saying that Dunwoodie money shouldn’t go to acquiring materials on Wyoming women—that’s reasonable. There could be some interesting stuff in the collections you’ve listed. But I would advise you to think more carefully before you start going around spending Dunwoodie money.” She took a sip of iced tea to cool herself down. She nearly choked on a lump of undissolved instant tea powder.