Improbable Fortunes

by Jeffrey Price

  “Jimmy.”

  Jimmy poured him a slug of whiskey and handed it to him. He quickly gulped it.

  “Ah’m awful sorry.”

  Jimmy refilled his cup and slipped into the chair facing him.

  “We don’t ev’r haveta menchun this ag’in,” she said, lighting a cigarette.

  “That’d be jes fahn by me,” Buster said. And they sat at the table in silence, not leaving until the whiskey was finished.

  b

  In the weeks and months that were to follow, Buster’s familiarity with this strange character began to breed a litter of contempt between both of them. Buster never considered Jimmy’s gangrene material about Mexicans, Afro-Americans, the Jews, and the government funny, but at first, he let it slide. Maybe something had happened to her to make her like this. Whatever it was, he figured her enmity was the fire in her belly that kept her alive. If that had been true, it was failing her now. Jimmy’s skin stubbornly remained gray—no matter how much time she spent with the horses under the blazing sun. Buster didn’t have to be a doctor to know she was sick, something serious. But whenever he asked her about it, she wouldn’t give him a straight answer. All he knew was she took a lot of medicine and drove to the hospital two times a month for treatments. Exposure to her toxic pronouncements about people—people with whom she had no first hand knowledge—began to weaken Buster—as if he was the one having the hospital treatments, not her. No dummy, she could tell from the sour expression on Buster’s face that he didn’t approve of her, but she persisted anyway. Buster began to suspect that her slurs were really meant for him—finger pokes at a softness in him she could not abide.

  By the end of May, he dreaded every evening with her. There were only two ways to escape her company—a well-worn muddy path to the corral to feed the horses and the well-worn muddy path to the putrid outhouse. His room was not an option for sanctuary—it being only six by nine. That left the workshop—where they both converged every night.

  Jimmy wasn’t lazy; he could say that for her. She always had a project. Those projects unfortunately involved the killing or maiming of poor animals that had managed to get on her bad side. She referred to these hapless “critters”—skunks, weasels, opossums, raccoons, beavers—as “needin’ fixin’”—as if she was graciously filling a request, by the animals themselves, for their own mutilation or demise. She would patiently explain to Buster that these animals couldn’t help being the way they were. They couldn’t be talked out of stinking under the shack. They couldn’t be convinced to stop chewing down her trees. They couldn’t be cajoled out of slaughtering her chickens. And so, she was left with no other choice than to “fix” these immutable defects in the animal’s very nature. Confusing Buster’s silence with acceptance, she cannily presented him with the logical follow up.

  “People ain’t much diff’rint, ya know.”

  “How ya mean?” asked Buster.

  “Off’n times there’s a prollem with a feller’s very nature.”

  “Not much you can do ’bout that,” Buster said.

  “Maybe. Maybe not,” was all Jimmy said, as she completed a wire noose made from fishhooks for the weasel living under the loafing shed. She dangled it proudly for Buster to see, but was chagrined to find him, once again, scribbling away in a child’s spiral notebook—his tongue stuck out in concentration. She took a deep drag on her cigarette, the smoke forcing its way through gummy alveoli.

  “Thought ’bout whatcher gonna do ’bout Cookie Dominguez?”

  “Ah ain’t gonna do nothin’.”

  “Why not?”

  “Cause ah ain’t.”

  “Ah b’lieve that sonofabitch is gettin’ up a head a steam to kill you.”

  “Ol’ Cookie’s allus been like that. He’s jes unhappy with the way he looks. That’s what Momma Dominguez used to say.”

  “That’s right. An he won’t be happy ’til he sees you dead.”

  Buster laughed.

  “Next yor gonna tell me he needs fixin’, too.”

  Jimmy swelled with expectation. The fabled horse had been led to water. Buster looked up from his notebook.

  “Hey…that’s what you are sayin.’”

  “Nev’r say nothin’ that can be used agin’ ya in a courta law,” she cackled proudly while liberating some bloody lung matter that she spat into a shop rag. “Ah jes hope yer not makin’ notes of this conversation!” she said, when she caught her breath.

  “I’m writin’ Destiny a letter.”

  “Not ’nother goddamn letter!” Jimmy just threw her head back and laughed. “You weak godamn tittie!”

  This would be Buster’s thirty-fifth letter. The previous thirty-four were written with the conceit that he was still in Utah pursuing his bona fide ancestry—even though a Vanadium postal stamp would have indicated otherwise. Those early letters, while he recuperated, were written in the style of a foreign correspondent’s reportage: what it was like inside the Mormon Tabernacle, how the Chinese buffet restaurants charge by the age of Mormon kids in a “combined” family, how a teenage Mormon girl snuck up to him at a gas station in Colorado City and asked that he help her escape from her polygamous marriage and how those folks stopped his truck and had Buster arrested for interfering with a minor—and all the interesting people he met in jail! How he had run out of money and what lizards and roadrunners taste like. Things like that. Some of the letters asked for news of home. How was Maple’s foal and if she would like him to train it when he got back? How he missed her pancakes. How were her parents? How were Doc and Ned Gigglehorn? Things like that. But letter number thirty-five was a full-blown love letter.

  In this letter, he came clean and admitted that he’d been in Vanadium all this time and that he’d been in a fight and didn’t want her to see what he looked like until his face healed. He told her that, wherever he had been, he thought of her every day and every night before he went to sleep and how he wished he could hold her in his arms. He told her how he remembered every detail of their lovemaking. He told her he imagined touching her and kissing her all over her body and shyly asked if she thought of him that way. He congratulated her on her new profession and told her to keep an eye out for a piece of land that he could buy for raising their family one day. He ended the letter by pledging his undying love for her and including a piece of the catgut from his face—a poetic gesture, he thought, to say that their two hearts would be stitched together as one. Maybe including a bloody piece of string wasn’t such a good idea, but he’d already licked the envelope closed.

  “Woodja mail’er fer me?”

  Buster held out the envelope.

  “Why don’t you jes give it to her yorsef, ya damn pussy?”

  “Ah don’t wanner to see me lookin’ like this.”

  “If you en-sest on it,” she said, sourly taking possession of it.

  “Don’t read it, though,” Buster said.

  “Why the hell would ah?”

  That night, after reading it, Jimmy burned number thirty-five in the same oil drum she had burned all previous thirty-four.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Mr. M

  The mud season that kept Buster and Jimmy from getting any outside work done was now over. The rush was on to get the place ready—to transform it from its muddy derelict state to something resembling a set in a John Ford movie—which was what the tourists liked. Horses were curried, washed, and re-shod. The gravel parking lot was dragged level, potholes filled. Dust and mites were beaten out of old Navajo blankets and were laid across the chairs on the porch in case a customer wanted to put his feet up while toking on a Cubano Esplendido. Buster could stick his nose up all he wanted at the pony ride industry, but Jimmy had a sweet little deal on Lame Horse Mesa. Telluride’s second homeowners, many escaping the summer heat of Chicago, New York, Dallas, and Houston provided her with steady business from June to October. These
people, many of whom suffered awkward and fearful childhoods, found themselves emboldened by their success in later life, eager to remediate their past teenage intimidations. Jimmy’s hokey ad in the area’s yellow pages “for an Authentic Western Experience” dog whistled to that. The Trail Ride package came with a grilled chicken dinner and cowboy singing for one hundred twenty-five bucks a head. For the fly fishermen, she led pack trips to not-so-remote mountain lakes that she personally stocked with her favorite named fish—cutthroat. An overnight belly-boat trip cost five hundred per and she never had an empty slot on the calendar—not just because the fishing was great, but Jimmy’s odd character and foul mouth were the stuff of legend at Telluride Mountain Village dinner parties. She didn’t accept credit cards. It was an all-cash deal, and Jimmy took great pride in the fact that she had never paid federal income tax and only took 40 percent from Buster’s tips jar for herself.

  Buster’s knowledge of every plant, flower, bird, and animal—stemming from his time with Ned Gigglehorn and Doc Solitcz—held him in good stead with Jimmy’s clients. Despite the fact that Jimmy had guided these horse rides all her adult life and fielded thousands of questions from snotty-nosed rich kids, she took great pride in never having bothered to know the real name of any bird or plant in Colorado. She preferred to make them up on the fly.

  “That there is a Speckle-assed Pudsucker,” she would tell a precocious seven year-old boy from San Antonio. “That there is a Periwinkled Pipewiper. We cowboys use it for toilet paper in a pinch,” she would tell a five year-old girl from Darien, Connecticut. “That there is a Feral Nutlicker,” she once informed the wife of the retired CEO of Exxon when asked to identify a coyote.

  A black Land Rover pulled into the parking lot. Jimmy slung her portable oxygen tank over her shoulder and got up from her desk to meet her nine o’clock—the Mallomars of New York. It was serendipity that Marvin and Dana Mallomar had found their way here. The couple had considered Aspen, Steamboat, and Santa Fe. She liked Aspen, but he didn’t like competing socially with the film people. He liked Steamboat, but she didn’t like the fact that there were only two Chinese restaurants in town and both of them were Mandarin. She liked Santa Fe, but he got “a vibe” that the local Hispanic population had, what he called, a “hard-on” for Anglos. That led them to undiscovered Vanadium. Perusing a real estate brochure that only seemed to highlight the limited activities in the area, Mallomar spotted Jimmy’s already-mentioned ad for an “Authentic Western Experience.” Once assured that horses didn’t carry Lyme disease and that his wife could have their picnic food prepared by a caterer, Mallomar signed on for opening day.

  Jimmy’s fast draw was only second to her “fast take” on people, and there was no one faster from the hip or more deadly than Jimmy. Under the wide brim of her sombrero, she snuck sly peeks at the Mallomars and, in an instant, had all the information she needed to trap her unwitting subjects in the amber of her misanthropy.

  To Jimmy’s lights, the mister was overweight. That meant he indulged himself and was slothful—two more things Jimmy could not abide. He also wore Levis. People around here wore Wranglers. And cinching his flabby waist was an expensive hand-tooled silver belt, “the kind they sold in Aspen and Santa Fe to faggots,” she explained later to Buster. Jimmy didn’t abide with ostentation, either. When he took off his hat to wipe away the perspiration, she noticed a D-Day formation of tiny circles where he’d had hair seedlings punched into his head. Men around here were compliant with their baldness. Vanity was another thing Jimmy could not abide. Then there was the matter of his face. It reminded her of a horse she once knew with a “Roman nose.” A nag with a Roman nose meant it had a stubborn or obstinate personality—two more things that Jimmy could not abide.

  As for the wife, she was attractive and a lot younger than Mallomar. That probably meant she married him for his money. Jimmy did not abide women who married men for their money. Women who married men for their money lowered men’s opinions of all regular workingwomen. And Mrs. Mallomar didn’t wear underwear under her tight-fitting Hermes riding breeches—the outline of her genitalia showed through, like the track of a young antelope in a dry streambed. Jimmy did not abide with immodesty in dress and deportment. And she did not abide with Mrs. Mallomar trying to catch her husband’s eye so they could have a private little laugh at her manly expense. But as far as these Mallomars were concerned, she would bear their effrontery with absolutely no visible sign of indignation, for they were just visiting. Tourism, she intuited, had the potential for being Vanadium’s second act after mining.

  Jimmy unplugged her oxygen, wrinkled up her brown parchment face into a smile and extended her hand to shake.

  “Good mornin to ya’ll! Ah’m Jimmy.”

  At the sound of Jimmy’s mannish voice, Mrs. Mallomar let loose a little snort through her nose like a stupid third grade girl. Mallomar looked at his wife sternly and turned to Jimmy.

  “She’s a little nervous. Never been on a horse before,” Mallomar said, covering.

  “Don’t you worry, honey. We got a horse for ya’ll that’s like sittin’ on a rockin’ chair,” she rasped. “Or like sittin on a vibrator if that’s more to yor likin’,” she camouflaged with an emphysemic hack and a phlegmy spit as she walked away from them to the corral. “Hey, Buster!” Jimmy bellowed. “Come over here and meet your clients!”

  Buster was in the corral lifting a pannier onto a mule that held their ’88 Grgich Chardonnay, fresh baked baguettes, a marinated eggplant with tarragon chicken, arugula with shaved parmesan, and some brownies—all demanded by the Mallomars and created by Mary Boyle—who, after finally losing the Buttered Roll, was now the head cook at the High Grade. Buster swung himself up on Stinker and rode over to meet the man who was going to change his life.

  “Buster, this here’s Mr. Mallomar and his missus, Mrs. Mallomar.”

  “Mornin’ ma’am,” Buster said tipping his hat to Mrs. Mallomar, who ever so slightly arched her back. Mrs. Mallomar deigned not to reply, letting her body do all the talking. Buster struggled, but maintained steady eye contact—unaware that Mallomar was watching to see where his eyes went. “Mornin’, sir.”

  “Mornin’,” Mallomar grunted, dropping the g because he was in the West.

  Mallomar had begged his wife to be more conservative in her choice of clothes, especially her blouses and sweaters. But she had a beautiful body and didn’t care if everybody knew it. It was all hers—if one didn’t count the little lift she had for her thirty-fifth birthday. Dana’s appearance, which had once been a source of pride for Mallomar, was now his bane. When they were together, people seemed to forget that he was the one who gave twenty million dollars to Cedars Sinai for the Children’s Burn Unit, or that he was the one who scooped Modigliani’s “Nude on a Divan” out from under the noses of the Bass Brothers at Sotheby’s for the Met, or that he was the one who brought a secret message to the Pope from Catholic venture capitalists meeting in Montenegro during the UN occupation—get rid of Milosevic and we’re in. No one ever remembered his being there if she was there. Wherever they went together, all eyes followed her beautiful breasts like they had an important message for the world.

  “All right then, trail ho!” Jimmy said, in her most fake upbeat. Jimmy grabbed Buster as they mounted up and hissed. “The missus is allergic to wheat. Don’t let her eat any, or she’ll swell up like a Spanish wine bag.”

  And with that, stirrups were adjusted, liability releases were signed, and the three headed out on the ten-mile trail to Hope Lake, which was a real place and not a metaphor for anything. Mr. and Mrs. Mallomar bickered most of the way up.

  “I don’t know how comfortable this saddle is,” Mrs. Mallomar whinged.

  “It’s a saddle. It’s not a lounge chair,” Mr. Mallomar snidely shot back.

  Then there was the difference of opinion as to how the mountains were formed. Mrs. Mallomar felt that they had been pushed up from plat
es under the surface. Mallomar didn’t agree.

  “These peaks are old volcanoes, for Chrissake. And these valleys you see here were scoured by receding glaciers.”

  “What fucking Discovery Show did you watch? The volcanoes are in Maui.”

  “Okay, let’s ask somebody who lives here,” Mallomar said. “What do you say, Clem?”

  Buster turned around in his saddle to answer. The volcano answer sounded good. He sort of remembered somebody saying something about that. But it would be a long day if he aggravated the missus so early in the ride, so he replied in the way Mrs. Stumplehorst might have if she were sitting in his saddle at this moment.

  “Ah b’lieve the good Lord cr’ated ’em.” Buster smiled sweetly and turned back around in his saddle. Mrs. Mallomar didn’t use any more four-letter words after that. As a matter of fact, the ride went smoothly for the rest of the way. Buster was able to lean back in his saddle and enjoy himself. He puckered up and whistled to a lark bunting perched in a juniper, he warbled to a mountain chickadee and screeched teasingly to a pine Grosbeak. Mrs. Mallomar was at it again—rolling her eyes to her husband—as if to say, “Get a load a him.” Mallomar refused to be a co-conspirator in his wife’s snobbery and wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of a response.

  Mallomar had taken five hundred milligrams of Elavil and a Percocet with his egg white omelet that morning and really didn’t feel like tilting the little bubble in his psychoneural carpenter’s level. The Mallomars had been having marital problems as of late and dabbled in many kinds of therapy. Like much of life, things boiled down to “the chicken or the egg” concept of cause and effect. Was Mrs. Mallomar a substance abuser because their marriage was in trouble, or was their marriage in trouble because Dana was a substance abuser? Was Mallomar’s uncontrollable anger a result of a troubled marriage or was the troubled marriage the reason for his uncontrollable anger? After a combined four hundred man-hours of therapy discussing these things and much more, they were still at an impasse. To be fair to their psychiatrist, despite a great deal of shouting, accusing, and soul baring, Mallomar never told the complete truth about himself. Even though his tax return had him listed in prosaic terms as a venture capitalist, he was really an accomplished actor. This was the secret to his success—the roles he had performed to the world: The Great Charging Bull, The Humble Before the Great, The Hale Fellow Well Met, and the award-winning Sentimentalist. How convincing he could be as that character when speaking of the Truly Important Things in Life: Family, Health, and the Belief in a Greater Power. Mallomar didn’t personally believe in any of it himself, but the performance he offered to the world, standing upstage and bellowing to the cheap seats until his lungs burned, had so much conviction that no one ever had the impertinence or cynicism to call him on it. That is, except Mrs. Mallomar. She knew him for the emotional fraud that he was—no matter how he tried to convince her otherwise. The fact that she didn’t believe in him anymore was particularly galling. Angered by this inner dialogue, Mallomar wrapped the reins tightly around his fist and gave his horse a commanding giddy-yap and went ahead of his wife, making her gag in a cloud of his dust.