Big Bend

by Bill Roorbach

  He lit the joint and smoked it down, and after that the ride seemed like something astonishing, something out of a movie. He smoked cigarettes, failing to wait long between them, the first pack dwindling fast, the second all he’d have for five days if he rode fast. Okay, four cigs a day starting tomorrow. His legs felt all right where the blisters had started. He only wished he’d thought of saddle sores earlier and sat on his sweatshirt earlier or demanded that good saddle from Enzio. Piece of shit they made him ride on. If he rode seven miles this afternoon—a long way—if he rode that far he’d be at the cabin Enzio had pointed out, and maybe that would be a better night. Maybe a girl would be staying there with her flock of sheep or maybe there would be a girl in uniform, Forest Service, out checking on timber sales or something and lonely as Owen. And she’d be interested in the problem of religion and science because of a philosophy class she’d taken recently (Owen had written a paper on the very topic in the very class), and she’d be tall, so that when she sat down Indian-style in front of the little fireplace in the cabin her knees would rise almost above her head and she’d tell him in the firelight how much she loved this Forest Service job and they’d play poker and smoke her cigarettes (she had cartons and cartons) and drink whiskey and smoke pot and talk with their heads close together, and the little freckles on her nose would be like the freckles between her little ballerina breasts, which he’d kiss …

  He’d only just cracked the whiskey when he correctly judged himself close to the love-cabin, and would have passed the cabin if he were in charge, but Flake pulled up to a dense growth of small trees and wouldn’t move a step more. Looking around from up there in the saddle, Owen spotted the thing then. An old, old log cabin it was, with a door too low for someone even as tall as Nancy (who was short), the roof fallen in and little trees growing up out of the floorboards. The chimney was intact and the fireplace that had once been there was intact, too, right where the dream girl would have sat sweetly cursing and drinking before making love with him roughly.

  Down the hill slithered a little brook. Owen watered the horses and fed them their oats and tethered them loosely. Gathering the firewood he felt the blisters on the backs of his thighs, high up under his butt. Not too bad. But as he built the fire the blisters felt worse. He dropped his pants and sat on a rock and contorted himself so as to get a look. And it looked bad—just raw skin for two inches on each leg, and pink all around that. And not a Band-Aid or tube of cream or roll of tape, not a thing to doctor himself with. Even to pull his pants back up hurt. Oh, he was being hazed!

  He made rice and beans and Spam, since the creek was too small for any fish, he thought. He ate and believed truly that rice and beans and Spam were the best food he’d ever had. Rice and beans and Spam and cold creek water and the sun coming down and build up the fire. And whiskey. And half a pack more of cigarettes before he fell asleep, the backs of his thighs on fire.

  By light of dawn the cigarettes were gone and the whiskey was gone and Owen cracked his eyes to pure remorse. In England he could have gone to Stonehenge and seen castles and drunk beer in pubs and maybe found Darwin’s house. To Nancy he’d said, “We’ll see,” cool as ice, when she asked if he thought they were breaking up. “We’ll see,” he’d said, stupid fuck that he was.

  And now far off in London, middle of the night, was some bloke balling Nancy in his flat in Kensington Gardens? Some stiff-upperlip Brit? Balling her while Owen fretted in the night next to a cabin some tough customer had built by hand and furnished by hand and lived in through winters harder than anything Owen could ever imagine? An older fellow like that shithead she met once at the museum who’d asked her out and she’d almost gone? Like thirty years old and so polite, she said. An art historian, she said.

  Owen’s only profession was Junior in College. Beyond that it was all sores on his thighs and fresh out of cigs and no more whiskey and a whole mountain to go around.

  Flake wouldn’t go the way Owen picked, so Owen went the way Flake wanted, and they came on more cattle, just ten, no calves, with two from some other ranch. But Owen knew to count brands and not heads, and to write down the foreign brand. And carry on. He rode sidesaddle when the going was flat enough, and that relieved the sores on the backs of his thighs, but seemed to cause rubbing on one side of his butt, and hell if he was getting another sore. He sat on his sweatshirt and on one of his blankets, folded triple.

  Back up out of the draw Flake walked, then along a high ridge for miles, Goshen Mountain implacable and unchanging and impossible to go around. A herd of antelope bounding away. A headache behind his eyes. The sky wide as the universe. No clouds. Sun on his shoulders, starting to burn. The wind in his face. He pulled his Yankees cap down over his forehead to stop the wind and pushed on. Nancy could easily be thinking of him right now. By the time he lay down tonight he’d have made thirty dollars.

  Owen pictured a tuna hoagie from the University Deli in New Haven. A hoagie and a bucket of fries and a huge Coke, that’s what he’d have. And play pinball. And go find Jack or Little Sam and get drunk all afternoon playing pool at Toad’s. Or up to Hammonasset Beach and just lie there on towels in the sun. Nancy was 100 percent right. He was going nowhere.

  He could have gone to London and now he knew why he hadn’t, just as Nancy said: he was afraid of being with her. Afraid of what? It was nothing bad to be afraid of giving up your whole life for someone who might not be just the woman for you, but Nancy was the right woman and Nancy was correct: no one was going to be perfect. He was worse than some little teenybopper dreaming of a knight on horseback. He was a knight on horseback and when the perfect girl did come along she’d see a man with no ambition and no direction, just as Nancy said. And if the perfect girl ever got his pants off she’d find horrible saddle sores in addition. Owen had been drawn to Nancy at first just because of how she expected more from him and praised his brains (of his brains he was confident, still confident) and his ideas (when had they stopped talking about his ideas?). And her body was great—jeez, what did he want? It wasn’t like he was James Bond.

  When would there be some water for the horses? That would be the time to stop. He could write a letter to Nancy right now. Or faster, a telegram. Or send flowers, which you could do by telegram, he thought. Oh, he loved that girl and wanted to … no, get a grip, not really. And anyway, you couldn’t ask by letter for someone to marry you. He’d have to fly over there and find her in math class and hand her a ring. With the thirty dollars he’d made so far. His folks weren’t flying him anywhere, that he knew. Though Mom loved Nancy. Of course Mom did, because Nancy was just like her, with the same worries for his future. Well, he’d be an art historian, ha ha.

  He tried to hurry Flake a little, kicking just lightly at the horse’s sides, the two of them and Mare-Rhea coming down from the bare ridge into the tree line, many gnarled pines. But Flake flung his head back in obvious anger and just stopped.

  Next morning the sores on the backs of Owen’s thighs were so bad he couldn’t get on Flake. Their camp was by a high tarn anyway, with a floe of ice still lingering. The water was so cold he yelled when he surfaced after each dive, but he kept diving in because the cold water soothed his sores. He and Flake and Mare-Rhea had found thirty-seven more of the ladies, and Owen had counted them. No foreign brands.

  After lunch he walked alongside Flake and they made terrible time. The horses seemed irritable with him walking like that, but Owen could not get back on without resting his thighs. And now his back hurt, too. And he’d smoked so much pot in the night (no cigarettes left, no more whiskey) that he’d convinced himself a bear was stalking the camp, that Flake was afraid in the night, too, that Mare-Rhea was about to bolt. He’d even spent an hour on a bad scenario: Nancy meeting an art historian with a smooth voice and big eyes and deep conversation. After that he’d thrown his bag of pot in the fire.

  He’d send flowers and letters and telegrams and go to London and out-talk the art historian and then he’d find himself marri
ed—and not with the girl in the love-cabin, see, here was the thing: he knew he’d cycle back to his old rotten self. Really, he shouldn’t send Nancy anything at all; he’d done her this huge favor of dumping her and all because he was jealous of her knowing so clearly what she wanted and not being afraid of being by herself in London. Among people. While he’d chosen Flake and Mare-Rhea and five hundred ten cows. Nancy was twice the person he was.

  At the point the map showed as farthest from the ranch, end of the day’s slow progress, about where Enzio had stubbed a finger, Flake showed Owen a huge gathering of cattle. Maybe hundreds. In the morning the counting would be hard because the brands were mixed—four brands, Owen could see just right off the bat. These he wrote down, drawing the shapes, trying to guess the ranch names. And calves in there and the whole lot of them pointed in one direction.

  No whiskey, no pot, no cigarettes, sick from lack of nicotine, the hole in him filled with Spam and rice and beans and fruit cocktail, nothing to help him sleep but his thoughts. A lot of work to do on himself. He made a list in his mind. He’d stolen from the record store where he worked weekends. He’d wrecked his father’s boat trailer and hadn’t even told him yet. He didn’t want to think about that.

  Owen barely slept, afraid that the cows would trample him. He held Flake’s tether at his solar plexis all night, and talked out loud to the horse. And slept in stretches of mere minutes, and woke, horrible dreams, a cow coughing not far enough away, or was that the cough of a man?

  Sores or not, Owen got in the saddle. Every roll across every bump in the trail and every rock the big horse stepped over felt like it stripped the skin from the back of his thighs and pulled every hair out of his ass, even though he was sitting up on two folded blankets now. He had counted two hundred nineteen Bar Double Zero brands in the big herd, walking slowly in among them on Flake’s broad back, Flake really leading the way acre by acre. Flake had done this for years and years and years, Owen suddenly knew. He talked to the horse all day. “I’m not so tough,” he said several times. And “I love Nancy.” Flake did listen. Mare-Rhea followed along behind docilely, carrying all the food. They were a nice pair, these horses, and did their hard jobs well. Owen felt that Flake judged him a little for not riding the afternoon before. And he told Flake, “I wanted to give you a break.” But in a hundred steps he corrected himself, got rid of the lie: “My legs were too sore. I’m not tough. I couldn’t ride yesterday. I didn’t even care if you got a break or not.”

  Anthropology. That’s what he wanted to do. He couldn’t wait to write Nancy and tell her. She’d agree: he’d done really well in two anthropology courses now, both of his As to date. He loved to think about people and societies and history and tools and customs and specialized language. His best paper ever was an ethnography of a local rock band back in New Haven called Them Apples. He’d recorded their meals and their slang and their work habits and their crazy hours and their songs and their family lives and really liked the work. They had seemed so cool to him until he got to know them all and realized each cool guy had his troubles and his quirks and his ways that weren’t cool at all, but fucked up and alone and tender. Anthropology. He could declare a major. His trip here could be a project. Enzio might be an anthropological study in himself. What was his story, culturally speaking? What made him come to America? How did a guy like that get to Montana anyway? Anthropology! He’d have a great job and live on an island like Margaret Mead, only he wouldn’t marry into any tribe because he’d be true to Nancy.

  “Anthropology,” he said to Flake. Flake walked right to a spot mysteriously off the trail and there before them was a dead cow. The sight took Owen a few seconds to decipher. A heap that resolved itself into a cow, not long dead, brand of Bar Double Zero ranch, lying on her side, eyes pecked out. He stopped there a long time and just looked.

  In the afternoon they found a hundred and eleven more cattle. And now they were two-thirds around Goshen Mountain, about. So. He would get back to the ranch with all the cattle counted in six days, and Enzio and Dr. Clark would be pretty impressed. He’d say nothing whatsoever about his sores.

  After rice and beans and Spam he shot the rifle a while, the Spam can at fifty paces. He hit it ten times out of a lot of tries, so many tries that he stopped shooting, wanting to save the remaining bullets just in case. He wouldn’t buy any cigarettes when he got back, even if there were a town to buy them in. He wouldn’t even bum one from Enzio, even if Enzio smoked.

  In the morning in one group after the next along a creek (Bulletin Creek, the map said), they found all the rest of the cows, the full count of five hundred ten. Add fourteen calves. Subtract one dead. Call it a success. Owen wasn’t tough, as it turned out, but he was capable of counting cows, which he’d come to learn wasn’t about numbers so much as checking in.

  There would be one more night, he figured. And he rode on Flake, Mare-Rhea following. The horses knew the job was done. Something different in their steps. He gave them oats and watered them at a stony pond as they got higher up the flank of the mountain and into pine forest, very beautiful with gray jays squawking through and chickadees and a brilliant blue kind of jay he didn’t know but would look up. The pond was clear as pure glass, right to the bottom, a whole pine skeleton down there. Owen pictured Blackfeet Indians around this pond and thought about what it was they would eat and how they’d have to structure their society to make things work best and thought about how men and women have roles that are partly learned and partly determined by relative biology (he could hear Professor Erlach say in her kindly voice, maybe the only teacher who ever really, really understood him). Archeology was very cool, too, right up there with anthropology, and Erlach taught both.

  Owen searched for arrowheads an hour, resting his thighs, and suddenly wasn’t in a hurry anymore and poked around the pond and then remembered the fishing rod and clumsily cast it with no fly for a full hour just over dirt till he felt he was getting somewhere, then really thought about it hard and remembered the way Uncle Dick would let a fly sit on the surface of the water and how a fish would take it. So he tied on the biggest fly in the little box, something that looked like a grasshopper, and flung it out over the pond in a perfect, lucky cast, the thin, thin end of the silk line playing all the way out for the first time and the grasshopper-fly hitting the water with a smack as if it were real and had just made a fatal hop into water, small ripples. And he let it sit, wondering if the Blackfeet had ever fished and how they did it without hooks. He’d learn about them. Library in Helena, which must be full of books on Indians. And he could ride out here when his thighs were healed and find artifacts based on what he learned. And Nancy would be in London true to him and he here true to her and they would be reunited at the end of summer when he’d go to London and study anthropology on his own (too late for semester abroad, fool that he was) and go to Stonehenge, and easily get independent-study credits from Professor Erlach, who said he was one of the best writers and thinkers she’d ever encountered, said this in her cramped note on his A+ paper about Them Apples, a paper he’d written high on speed. No more black beauties, though. He was done with all that.

  Splash, and boom, and his line was taut and the rod bent and his heart beat in his chest and he had some enormous fish pulling at his arms. He remembered Uncle Dick playing fish and so played this fish, just let it get tired, it pulling against the rod, wily, trying to pull the line over to break it on rocks, then swimming at Owen, then leaping out of the water in spray.

  Let me get this fish, he thought. To get this fish means it will all come true—Nancy, career, the whole life till we’re ninety-nine, all comes true.

  The fish grew tired slowly and Owen did get it to shore. He had to run up onto the rocks so the fish came out of the water. It was huge, a huge fish, spotted and glorious and pink and red and angrily alive. Owen didn’t want to kill this fish—a huge rainbow—and he quickly got the hook free and tossed the fish back. It hovered in shallow water a full minute, flicki
ng its fins, resting, then swam off in a burst, healthy and alive.

  Owen tried the grasshopper again, many bad casts, then a good one or two, but dinner that night was Spam and rice and beans by a big fire with the horses looking on.

  In the morning Owen rode high up on three blankets of padding, the blue-striped cliffs in sight on Goshen Mountain, high, thin, cirrus clouds coming in from the west behind him meaning rain, he knew.

  Back at the Bar Double Zero, Enzio was a different person. He greeted Owen with a great smile under his mustache, reached up to help him down from Flake, shook his hand. But Enzio was the same person, Owen understood. He understood that what he’d made of Enzio at first impression was wrong, that Enzio was steady, that he himself was the unsteady one. And then there was Dr. Clark, who slammed out of the house and limped over and shook Owen’s hand, too, looking nothing but kindly. “Flake!” the doctor cried. “Muriel!” So that was her name! And then the doctor cried, “Owen Andrews!” A good joke, greeting the horses first.

  The doctor and Enzio, they had known Owen wasn’t tough from the start. And they were glad—really happy—to see him well and successful. And he said, “My ass is roasted.”

  And Dr. Clark and Enzio knew that Owen meant saddle sores by the way he said it, and the doctor bid Owen take his pants down, once in the house (a nice house, when you looked at it, neat and well kept, Indian artifacts everywhere, and old photographs, even a buffalo head; Dr. Clark would help him start his study of the Indians) and had a look. Said he’d seen worse. Said, “Get a shower and I’ll dress those for you.”

  And then there was the letter. A light-blue aerogramme from England. Enzio handed it over, and Owen’s heart pounded yet again. He brought the aerogramme into the bathroom with him and opened it impatiently and incorrectly so that the letter got ripped in half. And read it anyway, fast: Nancy loved him and missed him, but she had met an Irish boy from Dublin and felt that since as far as she could tell Owen had broken it off she was within reason in dating a nice Irish boy who was interested in biology and was premed at Oxford. Oh, Oxford, where else?