Postcards

by Annie Proulx

  They’d made camp after a long favorite argument, relishing the lack of proof for either side. It boiled down to a shouting match with Bullet, who had grown up in South Dakota, and imagined himself an authority on prairie grasses, slamming on the brakes and rushing at the roadside where he tore up tufts of grass to make his point.

  ‘Look here, Blood, this is needle-and-thread grass, it’s a cool season bunchgrass and I seen it all my life, and this is porcupine grass. See them long, long awns look like porcupine quills?’

  ‘I don’t know, Bullet, those’re the ones look like needles with a little thread in the eye to me. This other one here looks like the porcupine quill.’

  ‘I like you, Blood, but you are ignorant. And stubborn. I’m not going to forget in a hurry what you said about the prairie chicken, either. It is practically the national bird here and you come along and dispute the way it sounds. I can find you hundreds of people that know it sounds just like blowing across the neck of a bottle, but you come out here from wherever the hell you come out from and bull your way in and won’t listen to reason. “Sounds like a ocarina.” Who the hell even knows what a ocarina is?’

  ‘Anybody wasn’t raised in a South Dakota hen coop and sent to the Badlands for finishing school knows that the ocarina started out as a prairie chicken call. Roy Orbison invented it with the prairie chicken in mind. Why’nt you ask your smart little girl that plays the piano there, little Barbara, what she thinks about it? That’ll settle it once and for all.’

  ‘By God, I will, don’t you think I won’t.’

  But Barbara had never heard the prairie chickens boom, had never seen the cock run forward on his bit of ground, frown, puff up his orange air bladders and throw out a call like a stroked balloon. When Bullet dragged her, protesting, out onto the March prairie to look for booming chickens she was glad he didn’t live with them all year. He felt her resentment, and for five or six minutes they sat silently in the cold jeep, the wind gliding over the shining grasses spiked through the snow. Bullet cleared his throat.

  ‘You know, I’m not made to get along comfortable with most people.’ He scratched at the back of his neck. ‘I seem to comb their hair the wrong way.’

  Barbara said nothing and they drove back to town. As they pulled up in front of the blue ranch house Bullet said sadly, ‘Just the same, you ought to manage one of these days to hear the prairie chickens.’

  ‘Yeah, Daddy. ’Bye.’

  27

  Crazy Eyes

  HORSLEY AND HIS WIFE Emma met them in Medicine Bow. Emma drove the Land Rover. Three students dumped like dogs in the backseat. Horsley lay in the passenger seat, one foot, in a dusty engineer boot, thrust out the window. He straightened, opened his peppercorn eyes as the Rover dewed to a gravel-spattering stop. Emma, tanned almost black from two months of digging in Arizona, was decorated to her knobby elbows with silver and turquoise. Finger rings rayed, eyes glittered in the cocoa-colored face. Horsley and the students were the academic color of wet rice.

  ‘You old son of a bitch!’ Horsley jumped out, came close enough to caress Bullet’s arm. His plastic spectacles reflected like paper discs. ‘O.k., everybody, this guy here’s got the answers to everything you want to know. And he makes good coffee.’ Horsley brayed, jumped around like a goddamn fool, thought Loyal. Look at him. Dust flew from his sleeves. Bullet seemed glad, but Loyal couldn’t stand any of them.

  They ate chili in the Corner Cookhouse. Loyal cracked down on a small red stone. A tooth throbbed. Bullet would take Horsley, Emma and two of the students to Lance Creek. Loyal got the other student, the one interested in the fossil footprint sequences. Emma smiled when Bullet talked about the footprints. Her fingers slid over the enameled red cigarette lighter. A mechanical pencil drew the pocket of her silk shirt to a point over her left breast.

  Loyal knew the one he was going to get, the fat kid with ringlets and cold, crazy eyes behind wire glasses. A shaft of light fell through the window and across the back of his neck like a bandage. The eyes were like bone buttons.

  He didn’t have to do this baby-sitting shit.

  Crazy Eyes looked away from the landscape as they bumped along the white roads. An eagle pivoted over the creek bottom. They climbed into the Basque sheep country under the violet sky. Loyal pointed to the shuddering mass of sheep far out, the racing dot that was the dog. They could see the shepherd’s sheep wagon high in the boulders. The student said nothing, but jerked through his notes. Sand gritted in the heat-curled paper.

  The truck skidded around washboard corners. Crazy Eyes braced his hand on the dash. Pronghorns raced inside the fence, unable to get over or under.

  ‘Damn sheep ranchers,’ shouted Loyal over the grind of the engine. The parching air pulled the moisture from his mouth.

  In the afternoon they pulled up at the mouth of a wash. Bullet’s pile of beer cans marked the place. Heat ricocheted off the colorless rocks. Nothing moved. The sky leaned on them, the earth pressed upward. The tooth was a wolf in Loyal’s jaw. He walked up the wash, pointing at the tracks. Fifty feet of tracks suddenly plunged under the rock as though the ancient beast had thundered into the hollow earth.

  Crazy Eyes came along. He stooped. Sweat streaked his yellow cheeks. The carpenter’s rule rattled on the stone as he measured the footprints, the longitudinal distance between the imprints, the width of the track. He mixed the plaster, poured casts, his camera whined and reeled. He knelt, set his fingers in the tracks as if to gauge their freshness. But did not speak or look at Loyal.

  ‘All right, what’s next?’

  They moved from site to site, Crazy Eyes shoving at his wire glasses, Loyal’s tooth a drum now in concert with his puking blood.

  ‘All right, what’s next?’ The student balanced his notebooks on his stained knee, swiping at his neck with a wad of toilet paper.

  ‘Too far to get to what’s next today. Drive for a couple of hours, make camp, start early tomorrow. It’s about a five-mile hike in. Duckbill tracks.’

  ‘How do you know what they are?’ Crazy Eye’s arm braced in the window, his fingers hung onto the burning rain gutter over the door. The truck jounced southwest over the floury roads.

  ‘I’m not entirely dumb about what I been doing the last three years.’ He was fed up. ‘Bullet says they’re duckbill tracks. Couple of other people say they’re duckbill tracks. I seen a few books on the subject now, including Howell, Swinnerton and Clemens. Clemens was out here in the Lance formation with us two years ago. Most of your so-called experts been out here with us. They all know Bullet.’

  ‘What do you mean, “so-called”? Those are the major guys in the field.’

  ‘There’s something that don’t match up between the experts, the books and the tracks. And they don’t see the problem.’ He had the punk’s attention now. Crazy Eyes swiveled in his seat, the light turning his dustcoated face to a gargoyle’s grimace.

  ‘Like what? Like what’s the problem? In your opinion.’

  ‘Like the duckbill. All the pictures show the sucker with his legs hung out at his side like a lizard. All the experts say the animal just waddled along, dragging himself from one mudhole to another. But I look at those tracks and I can see the width between the track lines doesn’t match up with that idea. Looks to me like the animal’s weight was under it, that the legs wasn’t hung out at the sides at all. Christ, measure the lateral distance between the tracks. If the suckers’d had lizard legs the tracks would be two feet farther out on each side. And there’s no tail drag marks. And there’s a kind of feeling of quickness that you get from the pace of the tracks that don’t match up with a sowbelly swamp-dragger.’

  Crazy Eyes ripped through his notebooks. Papers flew, slid to the floor.

  ‘Stop! For Chrissakes, stop the truck.’ Crazy Eyes pounded Loyal’s shoulder. ‘That’s my theory. That’s what I’m trying to show.’ He pounded on the seat. ‘That’s what I came out here to look for. That’s exactly my idea. That’s why I’m taking these meas
urements. O.k., you want to see something, look at this!’

  He rattled a drawing done in ballpoint pen on lined paper. The animal, drawn in nervous strokes, looked vigorous. A duckbill, and sprinting over a dry plain. The powerful legs worked beneath it like the legs of a horse. Its muscular tail stretched out level.

  ‘What do you think of that?’ The hot wind came through the window. The throb of Loyal’s tooth shook the truck. Another abscess for sure. He wrenched two beers from the cooler in the back, passed one to Crazy Eyes. Would have to dig out the whiskey to make it through the night.

  ‘It’s better sense than Old Mudhole Charley. I think it’s right on the money. Tell you, I thought you were a little lame when I seen you back in Medicine Bow, but I take it back. You must’ve done some hunting or trapping.’

  ‘Duck hunting. Geese. I grew up in Iowa and my daddy was a puddle shooter.’

  ‘That’s the thing. Most of these guys, these experts come out here, are experts on bone identification, they know the literature, they got minds like Einstein, but they never hunted or trapped and they don’t have the feel for the way animals think and move. It’s something you got to be brought up with.’

  ‘Hey,’ said Crazy Eyes. A sparkle of spit flew out of his teeth, ‘I got a hundred other farfetched ideas.’

  ‘I’ll drive. You talk. Got to cover some ground before we lose the light.’ It would be all right if it wasn’t for the tooth. Crazy Eyes had ideas. But was he any good with a pair of pliers?

  ‘You ever pull a tooth?’

  The student wrenched around in his seat and glared. ‘Horsley told you, didn’t he. The son of a bitch.’

  ‘Told me what?’

  ‘About dental school. That I was in dental school until I switched to paleontology. It was the teeth that got me interested in this.’

  ‘He didn’t tell me, but it’s the best news I heard today. I got a son of a bitch thumpin’ in my jaw.’

  ‘How tough are you?’

  ‘Oh, I had ’em pulled before with pliers. That what you mean?’

  ‘Nah. They showed us this movie in dental school. Some tribe that knocks out boys’ teeth with a big stick as the highlight of a puberty rite. I always wanted to try it.’

  28

  The Kernel of life

  ‘I COULDN’T LIVE without this place.’ Larry, the half brother, Larry, sitting on a stump in the twilight, drinking a tumbler of black wine like an Italian. Impossible the place could mean that much to Larry. He exaggerated. He was emotional. Everyone in the art world was emotional. The western cone of zodiacal light faded. The dog lay in front of them, waiting for a bowl of water. Too stupid, thought Witkin, to walk to the spring and lap up water from the overflow. There was a feather in his chop whiskers.

  Witkin, sitting on the porch boards, picked the birds. He grimaced as he worked, his curved teeth exposed, face bent over the half-naked bird, never able to release himself from the knowledge that he was handling flesh. It was as if some part of him believed in a confused way that the birds were tiny patients. The feathers clumped in his reeking fingers. Today there were woodcock as well. The autumn flights moving through. They had not expected them, little birds with long bids and great eyes flitting through the leaves, there, then gone, one, another, two more, the rest. But they had killed three, Larry had killed three. The first woodcock either of them had ever shot. He held the fragile bodies, looked into the chilled eyes. Robins too, there had been, moving through, thousands of birds in the air like gnats, like specks of pepper in a bowl of milk.

  ‘They ate robins once,’ Larry had said after the dog sent a flock wheepling into the softwoods. ‘They ate them in the best restaurants at the turn of the century. Delmonico’s. Served them on toast. Thrush. All the thrushes are supposed to be delicious. Delicious, delicious morsels.’

  The moon slipped up, showing a scorched edge like a dime in fireplace ashes. Its light coated Larry’s hand, his glasses, the dog’s enamel eye.

  ‘Do you like shooting them? The birds, hunting for birds, I mean, do you like it?’ Witkin could not imagine why he had asked the question. He did not like to hear people say how they felt. Tedium.

  The half brother answered ambiguously. ‘This is a hunting camp. We bought the shotguns, the brush pants and game vests for bird hunting. We wanted to be bird hunters. The dog. Expensive training, the dog expensive. You walk through, the dog runs out in front. He points, he holds, you get ready. You are ready, you take a step. Keyed up. They startle you when they go up.’

  ‘But when you shoot and hit them, when they thrash their bloody wings and try to get up. Then what?’ Their intimacy had advanced to such a point. Yet he was bored by the reply before he heard it.

  ‘Several things almost simultaneously. Exultant, exultancy because I hit a bird, because I have killed this elusive – thing – that I hunted. I am glad, you see, triumphant, in a small way. And of course I feel sorrow too, that this fine being, with its private life and pleasures is dead. I feel guilt that it is I who has terrified it, who has killed it. And I feel anger, anger against a possible someone who might say to me, “That was a despicable act. Couldn’t you let the bird live? Couldn’t you sublimate your blood lust with a camera or a sketch pad?” No one has said this to me yet, but I am preparing my response, you see. Then too, I feel anticipation for the dinner and the praise of the dinner guests, “Oh, you have shot this wiry bird all by yourself? How intense!” And let me ask you, how do you feel about shooting birds?’

  ‘Nothing. I feel nothing.’ His sense was for the place, and the birds meant as much to him as wild mushrooms, nothing in their singularity, everything as a part of the whole. A cold confusion was invading him against his will. A coldness toward his life.

  He no longer cared for his family. Here, here at the hunting camp was the kernel of things. Here was Larry who knew of the violated cities, the packed trains, those other kinds of hunting camps as well as he. The places for killing. It was Larry who found the way through miles of brush, who kept his senses while cutting obliquely across the stone-mangled ridges. Witkin was off-balance with every step.

  He caught his breath at the raw brown of fungus, the radiant bark, at shattered quartz, leathery flap of leaves, split husks. O gone, he thought, gone the constricted world of metal table and desk and human integument, the breath foul with fear, the nose swelling with cancer, Mrs. MacReady’s toes humped inside her white shoes, treading the carpet. He shuddered at himself, at his cold self, his dulled tone, his hands in the sink like two hairless animals crawling over one another, the antiseptic soap jetting out, the sleek pages of medical texts, the photographs of deliquescing flesh, the dinner table, the vacuity of Matitia and the children like the children of someone else, their features and habits drawn from some other source than himself.

  Only the half brother understood the atavistic yearning that swept him when he stood beneath the trees, when a branch in the wind made the sound of an oboe. He had only to walk into the woods far enough to lose the camp, and he was in an ancient time that lured him but which he could not understand in any way. No explanation for his sense of belonging here. He stared, numb with loss, into bark crevices, scrabbled in the curling leaves for a sign, turned and turned until the saplings heaved their branches and the trunks tilted away from him. He could hear a little drum, a chant. But what could it mean? The kernel of life, tiny, heavy, deep red in color, was secreted in these gabbling woods. How could he understand it?

  29

  Dazed and Confused

  BULLET SAID THAT that the student with the wire-rimmed glasses had choked to death on his own vomit. Horsley had written a letter about it.

  ‘Yessir. Wind blew his pilot light out, that’s for sure. He got running with a rock-and-roll dope crowd, dress up in dirty tablecloths and beat on tambourines all night. Got drugged out, layin’ on his back, throwed up and choked to death, says Horsley. Dirty hippies, ought to shoot ’em, every one. But you know what, Professor Alton Cruller wants to com
e out and dig swamps for duckbills this summer. Cruller is big. He’s very, very big. Got an idea about a death star that could have wiped ’em out at the end of the Cretaceous.’

  Why the hell, thought Loyal, did it always turn into a mess? His tongue went to the place where the abscessed tooth had been. He’d liked Crazy Eyes, liked his intensity and his peculiar humor. The plan to work together on the big projects, mapping all the known track sequences, taking casts and photographs that would prove dinosaur agility and speed – the hell, it was down the drain now. The closest he’d ever come to doing something of value. He didn’t give a shit about Cruller.

  And after two weeks out with Bullet it seemed he’d had enough of the bones. It had gone flat. Bullet wanted skulls and femurs. It was the tracks that excited Loyal and without Crazy Eyes the search didn’t have a focus. He was restless, as if the news of the student’s death had triggered some migratory urge.

  ‘I guess it’s time, Bullet. I was thinking about it last year. I’m going to move on, do something else for a while.’

  ‘What the hell for? We’re just getting good. What the hell you gonna do that can beat this? Your own hours, good money, most interesting work there is. You love it, I always knew you loved it. We’re a good team, you bastard.’

  ‘I know it.’ But he wouldn’t miss Bullet the same way he missed Crazy Eyes. He had hardly known him, but he still had the drawing of the duckbill running over the creased paper. Not a swamp in sight.

  30

  The Troubles of Celestial Bodies

  THE CABIN, eighteen miles north of the ranch they’d bought in the fifties, was where he came, Ben said, to drink. So Vernita would be spared the sight of the crawling sot she had married.

  The sot was short with broad shoulders and a chest like a kettledrum. On his head a springy mass of white hair. The dulled eyes in their heavy hammocks of flesh were as incurious as those of a street musician, yet Ben’s face still held a young man’s freshness, perhaps because of the red smiling mouth. There were the pointed arches of the upper lip, the curving nostril with its thready veins. Anyone could tell. His voice was hypnotic, Russian in its darkness.