by Brady Udall
I listen for as long as I can, but there is something so tight in my chest it almost hurts and I can’t listen anymore. I get up and throw off my clothes and jump with Robert into the river. The water is cold and deep; it comes from old glaciers close to the sky. The current is slow and pushes me slowly forward and down. Robert and me chase each other back and forth. I look over from time to time where Green and Wade are talking and laughing. They are discussing religious matters while I’m in the river with a dog.
After a while Green and Wade strip down to their underwear and dive in after us. Green’s skin is so white it is almost blue. Wade comes up, water rolling off him, sputtering like a kid. He takes Green in a bear hug and dunks him under. I whoop like a drunk Italian and jump on both of them. Robert gets ahold of my arm with his teeth and tries to pull me away. The water is so cold we all have to yell. Even Robert howls.
The sun is on the water in pieces, and blackbirds and june bugs zoom around our heads. Once we’re all in the river, gulping water and splashing around, I just don’t care that Green opened up to this kid he’s known less than a day after staying closed with me for so long. Green is free and easy, the happiest I’ve seen him for a long time and I can’t help but be happy too. I get him in a headlock and we wrestle like alligators.
The current pushes at our legs, dragging us slowly along to where the sun in going down. We stop struggling and let it take us; we let everything go in that river. I close my eyes and I am so numb it’s like I am floating on air toward some place full of light and quiet. I get out only when the pain between my legs reminds me what all this cold might do to the general health of my gonads.
I struggle up on the bank and see that the current has taken me farther than the others. Green is already under the tree trying to get his clothes on and not having much luck. When you’re one-handed and shivering to beat the band, putting on your clothes can be a pretty awkward process. I run over and help him get his legs in his pants.
Once we get his shirt buttoned up Green says, We should be on our way. It’s almost dark.
The peaceful look he had in the river is gone. Now he is back to his pinched, worried self. His hair is sopping wet and he looks like he’s just had the water squeezed out of him.
We need to get going if we’re ever going to make those construction jobs, he says. We can hitchhike if we have to.
Wade comes up from the river, tiptoeing among the weeds and sharp rocks with Robert right behind him. The cold water has turned Wade a bright pink. He is rubbing himself and saying, Oh mama, oh mama.
I stand there, a light breeze raising goose bumps all over me and say, This would be my only wish right now: a big fluffy towel, a hot bubble bath and massage afterwards, preferably at the hands of a female.
You guys are welcome to my apartment, Wade says. I can supply at least some of that. And I have a sleeping bag and some blankets. We’ll get some tickets and I’ll take you to the bus station in the morning. I look at Green who is putting our garbage into a paper sack. I don’t understand it, but I can tell that his only wish right now is to get out of here as quick as possible. He looks like he’s ready to bolt any second.
I think for a minute and say, Thanks a million, but we’ve got to keep moving. These construction jobs won’t wait forever.
Putting on his clothes, Wade says, Then let me take you to the bus station now. I’ll get the tickets. You did a hell of a job on my car.
You took us out here and gave us lunch, Green says, his face twisted and unreadable. You’ve been too nice already. If you can just drop us off some place we can get a ride.
Wade rubs his hand over his damp head and looks confused. I feel pretty much the same way. Not being the pushy type, Wade just shrugs a little and takes us to the other end of town where the main street turns into the highway that will take us to Salt Lake. He gives us forty dollars and tells us it’s the money for our car.
He says, tomorrow I’ll tow it over to the junk yard. LeRoy Dooley is a friend of my father. He’ll give me at least that much for it.
For some reason I want to give Wade a hug but I wouldn’t know how to go about it so instead I deliver the most sincere handshake possible. Green gives him a nervous handshake, thanking him for everything, and turns away. We both give Robert a scratch between the ears before Wade drives back into Logan.
We get a ride with an old couple as far as Salt Lake and just before dawn we get on with a trucker headed for Phoenix. Once we’re in the cab, the road moving away beneath us and the musty old guy next to us telling bad jokes one after the other, Green finally settles down a little. The wrinkles in his forehead smooth away and he puts his head against the window and closes his eyes. The light is just coming up, turning the snow on the mountains purple and orange. The sky is opening sharp and clear. I can’t be sure, but I think a place like this is just a little too beautiful for Green to stand.
He Becomes Deeply and Famously Drunk
I am a cowboy. There are others in this outfit who prefer to call themselves ranch hands or just “hands,” maybe they think cowboy is a little too flamboyant for this day and age, who knows, but shit, I herd cows, I vaccinate, brand, dehorn and castrate cows, more often than not I smell exactly like a cow—I am a cowboy. I’ve been at this for nine months now and I figure I’ve earned the right to call myself whatever in God’s name I please.
I am two months shy of eighteen years old, I’m covered with freckles and am quite good-looking if I can believe what the girls tell me. I am also a natural loudmouth which has caused me no end of grief and misery. Pretty much all my life I’ve been hearing the same thing: take it easy, Archie, put a lid on it Archie, pipe the hell down. You hear this enough it gets on your nerves.
One of the good things about this kind of work: I can really let loose, talking and shouting and singing—at the top of my lungs if I want to and out in the brush there’s no one to give a hooey but the cows. Something about my voice scares the cows, some of them are terrified of me, I swear it, when they hear me they get this rolling wild look in their eyes and start to running and climbing all over each other. My horse, Loaf, gets annoyed by all my talking and singing and every once in awhile she’ll reach back and bite the hell out of my leg. I don’t mind, I just hit her back, a good sock on the side of the head, and she won’t try anything like that again for at least a couple weeks.
Before I came to work here I had this idea that A & C Ranch would be this big beautiful spread, full of rivers and green rolling hills, like that TV show Big Valley. I imagined myself as Heath Barkley, riding around on a shiny roan, wearing a vest and a silk scarf, smoking a long cigarillo and shooting bad guys lurking in the bushes. The actual ranch, I was sorry to learn, is plain and relatively small: fifteen hundred acres of overgrazed scrub land that can’t support more than two hundred head at any one time. Mr. Platt, who is richer and more of a recluse than God, has his thousand-head herd spread out all over the place, on at least fourteen other pieces of land between here and the Navajo reservation, most of it government-owned. The sad truth is we spend more time zipping around in our pickup trucks than we do on our good and noble horses.
Today, for instance, we’ve got to go up around Sell’s Pasture, a good forty-five-minute drive, to fix a busted windmill, a rickety fifty-footer that is a horror to climb. Of course it will be me, the new guy, climbing to the top of the damn thing, risking my neck and reputation. It’s about five in the morning and I’m in the shower, singing the jingles to every TV commercial I can think of. Richard bangs on the bathroom door and shouts, “Archie, keep it down in there! Got-damn!”
This is exactly what I’m talking about. I can’t even take a shower without somebody having an opinion about it. Richard is one of the hands, he and I share a trailer out here on the ranch. He is the oldest of us, the veteran, and apparently his job is to keep an eye on me. Richard is short and middle-aged and one of these days I’m going to pick up his scrawny little body and break it over my knee if he is not caref
ul. This morning Richard woke me up at five a.m. the way he does every morning, by shouting right in my ear, Come to, you candy corn son of a bitch! He learned this particular wakeup call in the Army and inflicts it on me each and every day. This kind of thing makes Richard feel like the big enchilada, so I let him get away with it.
I yodel about six more jingles and then towel off and walk into the kitchen for a piece of toast, and Ted, the foreman, is there explaining to Richard how he wants to do things today. Ted lives in the old ranch house up on the hill with his wife and little girl. He had some serious childhood ailment and now he’s got a lumpy oversized head and hearing aids strapped to his big loose ears.
“Change of plans,” Ted says to me. “I’m taking Richard with me to help bring in the heifers from Copper Springs. I want you to pick up Jesus and get that windmill fixed. Take your time and fix it right. Take all day if you have to.”
“And put some pants on,” Richard says. Richard absolutely hates my guts because I am bigger, younger, handsomer, and a hell of a lot smarter than he is.
I lift up the towel and show him my bare butt: one of the attributes women enjoy most about me. I sing a line from “Moon Over Georgia” in a girlish falsetto and do a few soft-shoe shuffles on the kitchen linoleum.
Richard just sits there, red-faced, shoveling plain oatmeal into his mouth, unable to come up with anything to say. He is one of these literal types who simply cannot comprehend sarcasm or humor of any sort. He reaches over and grabs the Volume A encyclopedia from the kitchen counter and begins studying it, his nose inches from the page. About six months ago Richard decided that he was going to get himself educated. Instead of wasting all that time and money on a college education, he decided to read the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica, the whole blasted thing, from A to Z.
Richard is terribly proud of himself for coming up with a way to become a genius and a scholar for only $99.95 in twelve easy monthly installments. Problem is, it’s been over half a year now and Richard is only about a third of the way through the first volume. He is now an authority on aardvarks, acupuncture, and John Adams, but he’ll be collecting social security before he could tell you what a zygote is.
I go back to the laundry room and take Doug off his perch. He acts happy to see me, bobs his head and hunches his shoulders. I get a piece of dog kibble from a bag in the cupboard and he snatches it out of my hand so quick you’d think he’s dying of starvation.
Doug is an eight year-old male turkey vulture. Because he doesn’t get much exercise, he’s a little overweight, but he is a good bird, and I’ve become attached to him; some nights when he has trouble sleeping, I’ll take him to bed with me and hold him against my chest until he gets drowsy enough to go to sleep perched on my bedpost. He used to belong to one R. L. Ledbetter, who worked for Mr. Platt and lived in this trailer with Richard until one early morning a couple of years ago when R.L. got run over by a garbage truck crossing the road. R.L. had worked for a few years as a rodeo clown and used Doug (short for Douglas Fairbanks) in one of his acts. In this rodeo act, R.L. would act like he got shot by a villain, and Doug would come flying in out of nowhere, land on his chest and start picking at him. R.L. trained Doug to do this by hiding a Corn Nut somewhere on his person and Doug would go picking around until he found it, R.L. squirming and cringing whenever Doug got too near his crotch. Apparently rodeo crowds found this hilarious.
Even though Richard doesn’t enjoy Doug’s company all that much, he is convinced he can teach Doug to talk. Sometimes I’ll come home and find Richard at the kitchen table, with Doug perched on the back of a chair and Richard saying something like, “Come on, Doug, say ‘bazooka.’ Bazoo-ka.” And Doug sitting there mum as a fence post, watching barn swallows buzzing past the window. Richard says he read somewhere that vultures have the same vocal apparatus as parrots, and with enough persistence he thinks Doug could become a talking vulture. So far, Doug hasn’t said a word.
I go back into my room where I put on jeans, a T-shirt—it’s going to be a hot son of a bitch out there today—and a pair of workboots. I have to wear these run-of-the-mill clodhoppers because I’ve yet to find a pair of cowboy boots that will fit my splayed feet. When I go outside and fire up the old Ford the sun is just coming up and long shadows stretch out under the sage and creosote. I let the engine run for a minute, then I lay on the accelerator like Richard Petty in his prime, spraying dust and gravel everywhere, and head out on Witchicume Road, on my way to pick up Jesus.
I came out to the A & C to get my life turned around. My mother made the arrangements, did all the sweet-talking to get me out here and her theory goes something like this: you take your loudmouth juvenile delinquent with bad table manners, stick him out in the middle of nowhere, bust his balls with honest hard labor, and maybe, just maybe, he will turn out to be the upstanding citizen you hoped for all along. I’m pretty certain the folks out here weren’t all that hot to hire a city kid with no ranch experience and a history with the law, but Ted was an old acquaintance of my father, and finally he gave in.
The truth is I’ve always wanted to come back, always harbored secret desires about strapping on the chaps and riding fences. I was born only forty miles from here, in Holbrook, and I lived on the ranch the first four and a half years of my life until my father was killed and my mother took me to live in Stillwater, Oklahoma, her hometown. My father was the ranch foreman and we lived in the old house where Ted and his family live now. Even though I can’t remember anything at all about living here, I did some work on this ranch, in my own way, all those years ago. My mother told me that the winter I turned four, my father would take me out on the feed runs, put the old International into compound and let me steer, kneeling on the seat, while he stood in the back, breaking bales and pitching hay to the cows standing in the snow.
In Oklahoma I spent my energy talking too much, getting into fights, drinking booze, smashing mailboxes, pretty much being obnoxious however and wherever I could. I have something wrong with me, something bad inside that builds up until I have to let it out by talking, shouting, raging, letting it all loose, even if there is no one there to listen. (I even thrash and holler in my sleep sometimes—one more thing Richard holds against me.) But there are times when the only way I can get back to feeling normal again is by beating the shit out of someone who may not even deserve it, or by destroying something, it doesn’t really matter what. When I feel this way, I get to punching or smashing or kicking and I can feel this blackness pouring out of me and I just keep going, it’s a great feeling, just letting go, flailing away, until I feel empty and clean again. I’ve hurt some people and wrecked a lot of perfectly innocent cars, dishware, phone booths, electronic goods, what have you. Even though a lot of my teachers called me gifted (over and over again: unlimited potential! a diamond in the rough!), I never finished high school because they finally kicked me out once and for all. I’ve been arrested for battery, disorderly conduct, theft, vandalism, disturbing the peace, assaulting a police officer. I’ve been on probation since I was eleven years old.
I’ve seen therapists, psychiatrists, clergymen, even a hypnotist. My mother had high hopes for the hypnotist, but for some reason in my second session with the poor old guy I came out of my trance and sucker-punched him a good one right in the face. I don’t remember doing it, only remember waking up and seeing him sitting on the carpet, his nose spattered on his face like a piece of rotten watermelon.
I have a probation officer, Ms. Condley, who calls Ted every week to make sure I haven’t busted anyone’s lip or committed an act of debauchery. Ms. Condley calls me every week, too, and asks me about my feelings, about my dreams and aspirations, it’s all very sensitive, but she never says goodbye without reminding me that if I break my probation, if I slip up even a little, get even a little drunk or involve myself in some minor fisticuffs, I’ll be sent off to boot camp and won’t get out till I’m twenty-nine. So far I have been able to keep my ass clean. My only serious difficulty is keeping my
self from beating the daylights out of Richard.
A few weeks before I moved back out here I went to the public library and stole the only book I could find on cowboys. I wanted to get some general how-to information (how to put on a saddle, how to make a lasso, how to mount a horse) so that when I got here I wouldn’t look like a complete fool. The book didn’t give tips or anything like that, it was just a lot of quaint old bullshit about the cowboys of yore. I read the whole thing anyway. Under a pen and ink drawing of a couple of dirty cowpunchers weaving down Main Street, arm in arm, clutching half-empty whiskey bottles, was this caption:
After a mythic cattle drive or a bone-wearying spring roundup, the cowboy, looking for release and diversion, commonly finds his way to the nearest saloon where he becomes deeply and famously drunk.
I remember this because it describes to a T my father and the way he died. Like the cowboys in the picture, he liked to celebrate after a big job by getting himself good and hammered. It was his only vice and the one thing my mother could not stand about him. The day he died, they had finished getting the herd down off the mountain for the winter (nearly a two-week job) and he went into town to throw a few down with his crew at the Sure Seldom. He was two solid hours into his drinking when Calfred Pulsipher, a piece-of-shit well-digger with a lazy eyeball, came around to pick a fight. Calfred and my father had been good friends in their younger years, but Calfred had carried a grudge against my father ever since he lost his starting quarterback job to him on the Salado Wildcats eight-man football team. Apparently, Calfred said some terrible things about my mother, right there in front of my father’s crew—sick, perverted things—and finally my father invited Calfred outside to settle it. Calfred went outside first and in the thirty seconds or so it took my drunk father to find the door, Calfred had time to pick up an industrial jack from the back of his pickup. When my father stepped out into the cold night air, ready to whip Calfred’s sorry ass and be done with it, Calfred brought down the jack full force, right on top of his head. My father went down, stayed face down in the gravel for a minute or so, dead still, and suddenly got up punching with everything he had, as if the blow not only sobered him up but also lit a fire under his ass. He got some fine licks in on Calfred before one of the sheriff’s deputies came and arrested them both.
