Postcards

by Annie Proulx

  ‘Ray. She’s not in somebody’s spare room.’ He said nothing but folded his long hard arms around her, pulled her up close so her ear pressed against his bare chest. His heartbeat thudded, his chest rose and fell with his warm breathing, a sleepy, vanilla smell came from him.

  ‘Ah, Ray, don’t know what I’d do …’ But, folded in the sweet circle, she imagined Jewell in the drifts, one arm stretched out rigid before her, the other folded across her breast as if to pull an arrow from her throat. Snow crackled in her hair and drifted into the cold shell of her ear.

  ‘Ray, poor Ma,’ she sobbed. And he stroked and stroked the fine hair until it rose in the darkness to meet his descending hand.

  By midmorning the temperature was fifteen below. The snow drifted in hissing knife edges. A fresh search party had started out at seven with the first slow light. Mernelle talked to Dub in his Florida office. The connection was bad as though ice were forming in the lines.

  They sat on plastic chairs in the dispatcher’s office in maddening idleness. They strained to understand the coded, crackling messages. Men came in and went out. The room smoked with cold. Smoke rankened the air. Ray began to think about the pipes under the sink at home, the heat of the house dying away.

  ‘It’s no good both of us waiting here. They could freeze up. What about if I go back and take care of the pipes and you stay here. I’ll come back as soon as I can. And if they find a trace, you call me and I’ll come right along.’

  On the next day, glittering cold, Ray came back but they had not found her, and on the third day the snow began again. The search was finished. Mernelle and Ray sat in their car in the play of heated air staring at the gas station where Jewell’s orange bug, dented along the bottom panel, muffler gone, spattered with congealed mud and oil, stood off to the side. As the new snow filmed the dirty metal Mernelle said she’d never see it run again.

  ‘This family,’ she said. ‘This family has got a habit of disappearing. Every one of this family is gone except me. And I’m the end of it.’

  ‘Don’t say that, honey. We might still get lucky.’

  ‘The luck was used up long ago, Ray. Bloods been running on empty since Loyal lit out. Damn him, sends his damn postcards every year or so but never lets us know where to write. You realize he don’t even know Pa’s dead? He don’t know about the barn or what happened to Pa, he don’t know Ma moved into the trailer or that you and me been married almost ten years or that Dub is rich in Miami. Don’t know that Ma is lost. Sends his dumb bear postcards. How many of those bears have we got to see? What makes him think I want to hear from him? I don’t care about his damn postcards. What now? Put some kind of notice in every paper in the country, “To Whom It May Concern. Jewell Blood lost in the snow on Riddle Mountain in New Hampshire, will her oldest son who hasn’t been heard from for twenty years call home”? Is that what I should do? At least I know where to get hold of Dub. At least I can call him up. I got an address. I don’t need to wait for a postcard.’

  IV

  40

  The Gallbladders of Black Bears

  HE HAD IT STRAIGHT NOW; there were special roads and paths across the country that he could travel, but many more roads were closed to him. Permanently closed. He’d trained himself by now to need and want little. The unsecured scaffolding of his life rested on forgetting. Spare in eating habits, thin, alone, restless. His hair had gone mostly white. Damn near sixty years old.

  Cowboy bars were his living rooms and he had a thousand from Arizona to Montana – Two Silver Bullets, The Red Spur, Cal’s Corral, Little Wrangler, Spotted Horse Café, The Moose Rack, Rustlers’ Roost, White Pony & His Friends, Sundance, Bronco Billy’s Hangout, The Yellow Steer, Boot Hill, The Sage Brush Inn. He was quick to find his corner in each, the uneven table near the kitchen swing door, the booth with the cracked back, the bar stool that wouldn’t crank up because the screw was stripped.

  They were all the same and all different, the smell a blend of ugly coffee, frying meat, beer, cigarette smoke, skunky bodies, spilled whiskey, musk, candy bars, manure, bad plumbing, fresh-baked bread. The same stale light in each, whether dim or glaring, neon or, in the lonesome two-table Walrus Club at the top of Ounce Pass, yellow kerosene. These sounds were home sounds for him: jukebox, click of cues, cooler door slamming, chair leg scrape, talk, spinning coins, squeaking bar stools, hiss of beer, wandering door keening on its hinges. And around him, like the faces of relatives, men’s faces – lean, prematurely old. A few girls with pocked faces and hair the color of skin, but mostly slat-built men who came from all points to this convergence like deer from the woods to a salt lick. Some were dirty. You had to watch out who you sat next to or risk picking up pants rats and seam squirrels.

  He made himself a trapping wagon that he could haul around with his pickup, based on the Basque sheepherders’ double-axled, fat-bellied, canvas-topped rigs. Inside, a built-in bed, a plank table that folded up against the wall when he didn’t want it, a right little stove. He sat on a lidded bench packed with gear.

  Liked getting up in the morning and opening the door onto the back places. Bad Route Road. Whoopup Creek Road. Cracker Box Road. He could drag the wagon into almost any country, unhitch it from the truck and peg down. Wherever he stood the rest of it was far away. There, in the taut distances, he could go months alone, immunized from going ‘Basaria’ or ‘sheeped’ like the crazy Bascos he’d see now and then stumbling through the streets, insane from isolation.

  He stayed on the slow move. In the spring, coming down from the fur auction he’d look over the country. Beehives on every ranch, use the honey on the morning biscuits. At night the skunks would come and scratch delicately on the hives until the sleepy bees crawled out, then eat them.

  Loyal would pull into a little town in Montana or Wyoming or on his way southwest to the desert, get some of them at the bar started talking fur and game, strike up a conversation with some likely sheepman. He liked the ranchers better, but the sheepmen, with their land-killing dumb woolies were the ones that screamed coyote. Sometimes he hit on a young guy with a family, got to see the children on their horses or running around, as bright and beautiful as ornaments. Christ, he said, he liked to see little kids. He’d look the country over, listen before he knocked on somebody’s door. There were plenty of sheepmen around, too many boiled-out alkies, but he liked what he heard about Jack Sagine, drove out one evening and knocked on the door.

  Starr asked him in, gave him a cup of coffee and plate of cinnamon toast. He had not had cinnamon toast since he was on the farm. Trying to eat with decent manners he choked on a mouthful of toast and coffee.

  ‘I hope I don’t hear you complaining that the coffee’s muddy,’ she said. ‘We only started boiling it last week.’

  It took him a minute to get it. He wasn’t used to a joking woman. He laughed too hard and too long. He told them he was looking for a place to do a season’s trapping.

  ‘Coyote. Fox. Bobcat.’

  Jack tipped his pearl Stetson back a little with his thumb. Black hair on his arms, shirtsleeves buttoned at the cuff, the first two fingers of the left hand clubby, trimmed by a boyhood axe and healed in two stubs.

  ‘Government trapper?’

  ‘Christ, no. I’m no exterminator, just do seasonal trapping, move on so I don’t make a big dent in the furbearer population. I take my share and move on. Make a living at it, such as it is. Leave the place clean, traps up, collect all my stakes, run the line with the guy that owns the land when I’m done so he can see for himself how I left things. No complaints yet.’

  ‘I done a little trapping. Tough way to make a living.’

  ‘Once you get the hang of it, it’s decent enough. You get used to it.’

  ‘Yeah. Well, I won’t say I haven’t let fellers trap here before, but I had trouble with a couple of so-called trappers couple of seasons ago. Sons a bitches ate fresh meat all winter and I come up missing cows in the spring. Something the coyotes never done to me. These fellers
baited. Guess I’d like to hear how you go about it.’

  ‘Generally park the wagon in a good camp, settle in, walk the land good in early fall after the coyotes moved onto their winter range. Take note of sign until I feel like I know what’s there and how much, lay out the lines in my mind, get my traps and stretchers ready. Come your cold trapping weather and prime fur time and I’m out there – November until January. Used to be rabbit, skunk, chunk bait, dead stock were all useful to me, but I didn’t go shooting cows for bait. But the coyotes in this country is different now. They’re smarter than what they was. You got a dead animal, I can’t use it. They’re wise to bait, so I use blind sets and that’s all. I run my line every day. I’m all done in February – coyote’ll start hip rubbing and shedding, you can start to see hair singe in late January. Come February I’m gone. Bring them up to Soudack auction in Winnipeg or sell ’em through the Fur Combine.’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you what. You don’t often have coyote trouble with Brahmas. I been raising Brahmas for seventeen years – they think I’m crazy around here in this whiteface country – and I haven’t never lost a animal to coyotes. And I hate poison and I hate the government slobs come on the public lands that been sheeped out and poison everything – we lost a beautiful dog, little border collie, to poison. Best dog we ever had, smart, good-natured. But I’m not opposed to hunting or trapping. It’s hard to do what your neighbors ain’t. You want to trap here, you’ll do all right. I don’t know how many coyotes there is on this place, but I’d tell you, though, I’m not one of those thinks the wild animals ought to be cleared right off the land. That’s the sheepmen, because they don’t bother to herd no more. Just shove two hundred thousand sheep out there and scream bloody murder if they don’t all come home. Most of your cattlemen know damn well the coyote controls the rodents eat the grass – a couple of coyotes’ll eat hundreds of mice and prairie dogs in a week. We got twenty-four thousand acres here. There’s a place for everything. It’s just there’s too much coyotes, they say, and not enough place.’

  Sometimes the rancher would be a son of a bitch with sweet land. Frank Cloves.

  But Jack and Starr Sagine were a pair of good ones, and their lean-looking range butted up against the Black Cloud National Forest. Remember the ice storm, Loyal thought, him and Little Girl, when he still had her, sleeping in Jack and Starr’s kitchen. Couldn’t remember why – was that the time he had to have the engine in the truck replaced? Jack’s grandfather had scorned a low-dung ranch house and built a three-story building with towers and dormers and festoons of fretwork along the eaves like something from Victorian Ohio. The wind was hard on a house that stuck up that high. After the storm great twenty-foot peels of ice slid down the tin roof, curled in and crashed against the house with their fading. Glass broke. The wind bent trees, swung their bifurcated branches until they threw rinds of ice off the limbs. The pines, matted with ice, hunkered like dogs. Traps were all iced under. He saw a coyote slipping on the shining stuff, the blunt claws no use, and the animal sensing his amusement, humiliated.

  The light, silvery-flecked coyotes of the high plains and dry mountain ranges, and the roan coyotes of the desert land were what he liked. Smartest animal on the face of the earth, he’d say in the bars. No one denied it.

  ‘You can fool him once, but you won’t fool him twice.’

  ‘Hell, a coyote can smell the exhaust from your vehicle a hundred yards downwind three days after you come through. They can see like a goddamn eagle and they’re smart enough to write you a sarcastic note in the dirt.’ The bartender knew all about coyotes. Down at the end of the bar a runty rider with coyote-colored sideburns listened.

  ‘They’d eat anything. I mean anything, watermelon, grass, wheat on the stalk, somebody’s little pet doggy, grasshoppers, earthworms, skunk. It’ll eat skunk, you know that?’ The bartender leaned into it, his mouth snapping down on the words. ‘Your coyote will eat a rattlesnake. He’ll eat it after the snake bit him, too. The poison don’t bother him. He’ll eat bark and leaves, prickly pear, spines and all, juniper berries if there’s nothing else. He’ll take birds, he’ll take eggs, mice, rats, squirrels, prairie dogs, pronghorn fawns, elk, deer, old sandwiches, watermelons, garbage. He’ll go for rabbits. He’ll eat frogs and he’ll eat ducks, he’ll eat your big herons and your little beetles. He’ll help himself to calves and lambs and if you wonder where all the pheasant or quail has gone, guess who’s et it. And the old dog coyote, he’ll eat on his own pups if he gets a chance. The coyote’s just wrecked the hunting.’

  The runty rider talked out of the side of his mouth. ‘Yeah, I hear there wasn’t any game at all back when the Indians owned it and the coyote had his way.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right,’ said the bartender, not listening. ‘You start trapping heavy into a coyote population and they’d start breeding heavy. You start trapping in the sandy washes they’ll move into gumbo hardpan where you’ll never see a print. Shoot ’em from aircraft they’ll dig holes all over and the minute they hear a plane they’d be gone or change their hunting times to when the plane don’t fly. Mister, they are a durable varmint, the killing machine of the west.’

  Coyote, little wolf of the plains, thought Loyal.

  He saw beyond the ravenous appetite and the knowing mind to a shifting world of coyotes staking out their territories, coyotes in love, courting, raising families, playing cards, visiting each other. Coyote territories like nations. He’d listened to their yipping talk for almost thirty years, and felt he knew some of the language. He understood a coyote’s night runs to the howl stations.

  In new country he went with his maps and the Indian’s book, charting the scent posts, noting the trails, seeing tracks in washes, in the thin scrub brush. He had pages of scribbles about summer and winter ranges of certain coyote clans he’d been trapping for years. The Indian’s book was mostly coyotes now, what he saw of tracks, scratchings, droppings. He’d pick up coyote scat, see what was in it, the seedy red prickly pear, the hair-stiff turds, the dark meat droppings, the carapaces of beetles. The killing meant nothing to him; it was over in a minute.

  On Jack Sagine’s place he’d watched through the binoculars and seen coyotes on a big playground on the sandy flats. The young coyotes, yipping and barking, leaped over the low brush and rolled. They galloped, tongues lolling, eyes yellow and hot with excitement, skidded in sprays of sand. One pale coyote dug into the sand like a badger, and three ran in circles, suddenly reversing or shooting out and away only to roll and roll. But when he brought Jack and Starr out to see the coyotes play the coyotes didn’t show and a heavy rain had smoothed their tracks. Jack looked at the sky, gauging wasted time.

  ‘Real educational. Loyal,’ said Starr in her sarcastic, joking voice.

  He could tolerate Starr. He could be in the kitchen with her, sit drinking coffee and talk, joke with her like she was a man. He could like her. Nothing happened. His chest did not tighten, his breath came as easily as when he leaned on the fence with Jack. Maybe it was over. Maybe that part of the problem was over. Maybe because he was so goddamn old now, and Starr was old, with white curly hair and a broad beam, but her deep-breasted pouter pigeon look and dark-fringed blue eyes were pretty and womanly. It wasn’t that she was dried up or looked like a man. He could even think of lying her down in the buffalo grass and covering her, as he sat talking in the kitchen, but no heat rose in his loins and he kept on breathing. So maybe it was over. Wasn’t that a sad relief.

  For six seasons he trapped Jack’s land, most of it not Jack’s but leased by him from the Bureau of Land Management. He knew this land so well he could go blindfolded to the scent posts and scratches along the rim of the red mesa, on the crest of the ridge, at the corner post where the mesa trail started to rise, at the place where the coyotes crossed Jack’s jeep trail, at the edge of the canyon, even at old sites of good kills where the carcasses of cattle or elk had decayed into stink and bones, and two years later when nothing was left but memory and white
fragments.

  A winter storm on Jack’s place almost finished him. He stepped out into the dry cold, the December morning ominously still. The sky was dirty. Loose snow feathered at his feet, rising up to his ankles in sly billows, lapping across the ground, the whole plain shuddering like a great sleeping animal tormented by dreams. He hesitated, watched the heaving snow. Elbows whined, rolled her sorrowful eyes longingly at the wagon. He planned to run the line, be back by three in the early winter twilight, go eat supper at the ranch house with Jack and Starr. He did that once a week to get the flavor of a different cooking. Starr sometimes made a cheese souffle. It seemed he could not get enough of this thing.

  He strapped on the snowshoes, twisted into the pack and set out. The dog trudged reluctantly at his heels, looking back often, half-turning every time he slowed or stopped. The eerie pulsing snow rose halfway up his shins. He could not see his snowshoes in the hissing swirl, yet half a mile ahead the Howling Rock stood out clear, a buff-colored shelf of stone that projected from the mesa wall like a cigarette from a smoker’s mouth.

  The air against his face was dead, but spinning snow rose up to his knees, a churning that dizzied him. The sky droned, the dog was drowning in snow fume. He felt it sting his legs, and all at once saw what was going to happen. He’d heard about them for years, but had never been in a bad ground blizzard before. A little frightened, he turned back. Elbows kept running up on the tails of the snowshoes, tripping him. He half-ran, eyes fixed on the wagon, a grey hump against the dissolving sky.

  Less than five hundred feet from the wagon the ground blizzard boiled up over his head, obliterated everything in a scream of wind. The wind jammed his mouth and nose with crystal-filled air. He could not see. Snow caked his eyelashes, filled his nose, buffeted him from every side. The erased world tilted on edge. He shuffled forward, wondering how soon his steps would start bending off, by how far he would miss the wagon, inches or feet. He could feel the dog tread on the snowshoe heels, knew she was following blind.