by Tim Weed
“What’s your name?” I asked. The words came out in a hoarse whisper. The girl stood in her panties with her arms crossed self-consciously over her breasts, gazing at me in the flickering yellow light like some kind of beaming, attention-starved wood nymph.
“Hiawatha.”
“Hiawatha? Really?” I smiled sadly. Picking up the hardcover, I closed it and squinted at the spine: Pride and Prejudice, a well-thumbed Spanish translation. I rested the book on the windowsill.
Slowly, she let her arms drop to her sides and then opened them slightly, as if offering herself for my delectation. She was long-legged and as lithe as a gazelle, with dark-nippled breasts high and budding in the candlelight. I felt dizzy. “How old are you, Hiawatha?”
“Seventeen.”
“I don’t believe you. How old really?”
She frowned and shrugged.
“Fourteen.”
“Fourteen?” “Fourteen.” She raised her eyes and took a step toward me. “What does it matter? As you can see, I’m a woman already. And you are a man, no? An American?”
I fled that house like you would flee in one of those nightmares where you’ve committed a crime, and you don’t remember exactly what the crime was, but it doesn’t matter because you know it was bad, and the consequences will be bad, and there’s nothing you can do to make it better. On my way out I tossed a roll of twenties into a plastic bowl that was resting on the television. Whatever was in my pocket at the time, maybe a few hundred pesos.
Out on the porch, heart racing, I stopped short. Suddenly I could see myself clearly: the person the taxi driver saw, the person the people in the theater saw, the person Marisleysis saw. I thought about going back to get the money out of the bowl, but it was too late. There was no way to take it back.
SIX FEET UNDER THE PRAIRIE
SURELY I CAN BE FORGIVEN for misjudging Billy Hurley. I was only nineteen that summer, so it’s understandable that I didn’t see him for more than he appeared at first glance: a thirtyish Okie pretending to be something he wasn’t. He couldn’t have been a real cowboy anyway, not in the middle of the 1980s, even if he did look the part: the cowhide ropers, the alternating duo of threadbare western-cut shirts, the greasy, Custer-length hair, the straw-colored handlebar moustache of which he was obviously so proud. The crew gave him plenty of guff for his low-budget cowpoke look, but he wasn’t easily provoked; he would just shake his head and stare off into the distance, his undernourished face taking on an air of moonfaced sadness, like a saint in some old Spanish painting.
I’ll never forget the day I called him out. I don’t know exactly what drove me to it. I was the college boy, the summer help, still uneasy among the full-time journeymen electricians on the crew. I suppose I was eager to overcome my discomfort by joining in on the sarcastic workingmen’s banter. And though it shames me to think of it today, I must have seen Billy as a safe target.
From afar, the scene would have looked like this: two forest-green utility trucks at rest on a rolling yellow prairie among scattered pine glades and cottonwood gullies; beyond that, a band of green foothills; and beyond them, on the western horizon, the massive, blue-dun profile of the Colorado Front Range. Zoom in some and you would smell the air, clean and peppery with sage. Zoom in some more and you would see five men in hard hats, sprawled out around the two trucks in attitudes of insolent relaxation: an electrical line crew on lunch break, and the college kid sitting in one of the trucks leaning out of the open window to vocalize an unthinking insult.
In a surprisingly fluid series of motions Billy whipped off his hard hat, tossed his sandwich into it as he got up, and wiped his hands on his dirty boot-cut Wranglers as he strode over to the truck. “What’d you call me?”
“A cowboy-wannabe?”
“Step on out here and call me that, you little fuck.” His face was only a couple of feet away from mine, and though technically I was bigger, I couldn’t help noticing that the tendons under the freckled skin on his neck stood out like leather cords. His eyes—usually vague and bewildered, as if he’d gone to sleep beside a campfire and woken up beside a six-lane highway—had become small and mean, like one of those black-and-white archive photographs of Appalachian dirt farmers. Beyond him, arrayed on the ground and the fenders of the cable truck, were the other journeymen: Bruce, a middle-aged, ex-Navy man; and Mike and Ignacio, two Mexican-American cousins in their early thirties. Next to me, in the driver’s seat of the utility truck, was Buck Blackshere, the crew chief. I glanced at him for support, but he shrugged noncommittally, making it clear that I was on my own in this. I opened the door and slid down off the seat, letting my weight settle into the soles of my work boots on the hard-packed dirt. It was a cloudless summer day, and the sun was hot on my shoulders. I slammed the door of the truck. The sound rolled out over the prairie like a gunshot.
“High Noon,” I quipped, my attempt at a smile failing because my throat was clenched up with nervousness and I kept needing to swallow. It was the first time I’d seen anyone’s temper flare up on the crew, and it took me by surprise. I felt caught in the act, like a schoolboy who lobs a snowball at a passing car, and the brake lights go on, and the car fishtails to a stop, and both doors swing open.
Billy put his head down and came at me. I ducked, grabbed his arm, and leaned in—I grew up with an older brother, so my reflexes were good for that kind of thing—and he came flying over my shoulder and landed on his backside, his head bouncing against the front tire of the truck. I spun to face him, but he just sat there panting in the dust, as if that one lunge had used up all his energy. By now, the rest of the crew was having a good laugh at his expense.
My uncle was a vice president of the Public Service Company of Colorado. He arranged for me to work on a line construction crew that summer, but the idea was my own. I had two years of college behind me, and although this may sound like a cliché, I felt ready for a passage into manhood. Line crews have a reputation for toughness, and a summer of rugged manual labor struck me as exactly the kind of thing I needed, like boot camp without the crew cut or the long-term commitment.
I was assigned to Buck Blackshere’s crew. Buck was probably in his mid-sixties that summer, short and athletically built, with a handsome, leathery face, his silver hair cropped and slicked back like a 1940s film star’s. He was the kind of chief who inspired his men to hard work without ever raising his voice. I heard him tell jokes, and I heard him recite poetry from memory, but I never heard him bark out an order. If you studied his face, as I did, it was possible to detect a certain tiredness—as if he’d seen too much of life—but he kept up a jolly front. It was well known on the crew that in his youth he’d been the state bronc-riding champ for seven years running, and there was an aura of subdued grandeur about him. I could imagine him as the captain of a privateer, or the good-hearted ringleader of a gang of outlaws.
My first morning on the crew coincided with the first day of the crew’s main job that summer, which was laying down the power grid for the Highlands Ranch project, a big subdivision south of Denver. It was an important job, the vanguard of the suburban development that was then pressing southward over the prairie like the invasion of a fast-growing geometrical fungus. Before we left the PSCo warehouse, Buck unrolled the blueprints to show us the power grid, a spiderweb of pencil lines depicting the network of cables linking the transformers that would distribute the electricity to each new street and cul-de-sac. When he’d finished going over the plans, he asked if there were any questions. The only one came from Billy Hurley, who inquired about what type of transformer we’d be installing. Buck read some numbers off the blueprints. Billy spat tobacco juice into a Coke can and asked about the diameter of the cable. Buck read off a few more numbers, and Billy nodded solemnly, as if it made a difference. I noticed the other men exchange glances. Apparently this was a scenario they’d seen play out before.
The second confrontation came a few days after the first. It was one of those mornings along the Front Ran
ge when the outlines of the mountains are so crisp they could be painted on canvas, a flat backdrop of stone-gray peaks and wide bowls under a pure blue sky. We’d been digging trench, and as we did every day at ten o’clock, we broke for coffee. Preparing the coffee was the grunt’s job, so while everyone else relaxed around the utility trucks I hoisted myself up and lifted the industrial-grade orange-and-white thermos from its bracket and eased it down onto the open door of a side cabinet, which doubled as a worktable. I dropped to the ground, got out a sleeve of styrofoam coffee cups, and stood it on end beside the thermos.
“Coffee, your majesties.” Every day I’d been trying out new ways of announcing it, using different accents and titles and such. Billy usually grimaced, as if the sound of my voice made his ears ring.
“Pour me a cup, pin-dick.” He was reclining on a spent cable spool between the trucks and the newly dug trench. Everyone’s eyes came to rest on me.
“Get it yourself.”
“Nope, pin-dick. You get it for me.”
I poured a cup, carefully added the non-dairy creamer and a packet of sugar, stirred, and took a sip, all the while staring coolly at Billy, whose lean, freckled face had gone a deep crimson.
“Last chance, college boy. Final warning.”
“Ease off, men,” Buck said mildly. He was studying a clipboard that he held on his thigh with his elbow, one foot up on the bumper of the truck.
Billy glanced at the crew chief and let out his breath in a long exhalation, the low-drooping sidebars of his moustache trembling like prairie grass. With a kind of full-body shrug he made to get up, but the spool tipped over, pitching him on his backside in the dirt. The big spindle rolled away, seeming to pause for effect at the edge of the trench before it rolled in. There was a moment of dead silence. Then the whole crew burst out hooting and snorting.
Billy sat with his legs splayed on the dirt. The sun was inching higher, and in the heat-shimmer, his scrawny body seemed to quiver and blur, as if it might evaporate or burst suddenly into flame.
I kept an eye on him in case he came at me again, but his expression was more sad than angry, and he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at Buck Blackshere, who was still studying the clipboard, his face hidden in shadow under the brim of his hard hat.
When I was a boy, my grandfather used to take me out to Highlands Ranch to see the West as it used to be. He knew Mr. Carlson, the old rancher whose family had settled the area along Cherry Creek that would later become Denver way back during the Gold Rush. On a good day out at the ranch, you could see deer, antelope, coyote, red-tailed hawks, two kinds of falcon, and the occasional golden eagle. There was a horse-path that started from the old stone mansion and wound along a sandy-bottomed gulch through glades of scrub oak and juniper into the open prairie. After a fall rain, the smell of sage was strong in the air, a sharp, immaculate wilderness scent that will always be linked in my imagination to Arapaho hunting parties and leather-skinned cowboys riding the unfenced plain.
One day—I was probably twelve or thirteen at the time—my grandfather and I came upon a dying calf in a meadow at the edge of a ponderosa glade. We heard it before we saw it; it was caught like the prey of some huge, malignant spider in a length of barbed wire, crying out in hoarse, panicked bleats as it slowly strangled itself, the wire looped around its neck in such a way that the more it struggled, the tighter the wire became.
“Hold it steady while I try to free it,” my grandfather said. I still remember the fragrant warmth of its flanks and the labored heave of its rib cage as I leaned into it and hugged.
We got it loose, but it was bleeding badly from the neck. It tried to run away, but one of its legs was broken or dislocated, and it sank to its knees in the buffalo grass, wild-eyed and softly moaning. My grandfather walked over to his horse and unstrapped his .22 rifle from the saddle.
“Do we have to kill it?” I asked.
The old man pursed his lips. He’d been a large-animal veterinarian, and although he was already retired by then, if there was anyone who could do something to save the calf, it was him.
“But there must be something we can do,” I pleaded.
He put his hand on my shoulder. “Sometimes death is the only kindness we can offer, Tommy.”
He held the barrel to the animal’s forehead. It stopped moaning and gazed up at us, its sad eyes seeming to comprehend what was in store. I averted my gaze, but the shot rang out and I heard the bullet puncture the animal’s skull with a fleshy pop, like cutting into a pumpkin. I turned back in time to see a tremor pass through the calf’s body. Then it lay still. We rode on in silence, in a light drizzle, with the perfume of sage in our nostrils.
After that, my grandfather and I came out to the ranch less often. We would talk about it all the time, but somehow it became harder and harder to arrange. Soon I was a teenager, with plenty of other things on my mind.
My grandfather became ill the summer I worked on the line crew. When I visited him in the hospital, he asked me what I’d been doing with myself, and when I told him I’d been working out at Highlands Ranch, the light came back into his face for a moment. But then he must have realized the nature of the work—falling beef prices and skyrocketing property taxes had forced the Carlsons to sell out several years earlier—and his eyes dimmed as he let his head sink back into the hospital pillow. I had a strange sensation, as though I was sitting on the edge of a precipice and he was tumbling slowly away from me into the dark void below.
When my mother told me he’d died, the nature of my grief surprised me. It wasn’t sadness so much as an overpowering emptiness. And there was something else worrying the edges of that emptiness, a gnawing sense of guilt that I didn’t fully recognize at the time, but that has since grown as familiar as the ache of an ill-fitting pair of boots.
The morning was overcast and gray, a rarity on the Front Range in summer. The peaks were hidden by a dull billow of clouds, and we could have been in Kansas for all the featurelessness of the landscape. Bruce and the Mexicans had gone back to the warehouse to load a new spool of cable, and Buck was pacing out the day’s work. I was shoveling out the bottom of the trench while Billy used the backhoe to open the ground ahead. I couldn’t see the main body of the machine or the man in the cockpit, just the rusted hydraulic arm with its toothed steel bucket as it dipped to scoop a fresh load of dirt, rose and disappeared in the slot of gray sky over the trench, and returned empty a few minutes later.
My job was to square the bottom of the trench so that the cable would lie flat. The dirt was brittle and hard, shot through with rocks ranging from pebbles to boulders the size of anvils; when I came upon one of these bigger rocks I had to use the blade of my shovel to pry it loose. I was concentrating on an especially stubborn slab when I felt the trench walls shudder. I jerked straight, alert to danger, and saw that Billy had let the bucket come to rest, teeth down, on the dirt-pile just above my head. There was a hissing in my ears, and I remember the cascading dirt giving off a rich, metallic odor, like blood.
Then my world went black.
Next thing I knew I was laid out beside the trench, with Billy’s narrow face peering down into mine. His eyes were inscrutable slits, and the sidebars of his stringy moustache trembled with every breath. “Cripes, kid, I thought you was a goner.”
My head throbbed. I seemed to have lost the power of speech.
“Rock slid off the pile and clobbered you on the head. I came down and brung you out.” Pokerfaced, he spat a long stream of tobacco juice, then resumed staring at me. Perhaps it was my imagination, but his voice seemed remarkably unconcerned, and to my ears the words sounded artificial, as if he might have been rehearsing them while I was unconscious. I sat up and felt my head. My hair was sticky and full of grit, matted with blood and dirt. In the corner of my eye I saw Buck’s compact, athletic frame striding briskly toward us with the rolled-up blueprints in one hand. I felt a hot bubble of rage welling up in my esophagus.
“You lads taking coffee b
reak already?” the crew chief called out good-humoredly, but as he got close he must have sensed something wrong, because by the time he came up to us his expression was stern. “What happened here?”
I glanced up at him and shrugged. “Ask Billy.”
The crew chief turned to the wiry journeyman squatting on the dirt pile beside me. Billy twitched nervously. “Rock slid off the pile and hit him in the head, Buck. And, well, he wasn’t wearing his hard hat.”
Bruce and the Mexicans drove up in the other truck. Buck helped me to my feet and led me by the elbow to his truck, where I sat in a kind of daze.
After they’d unloaded the new spool I watched Buck take Billy aside to reprimand him. From my vantage point inside the truck I couldn’t tell what he was saying, but I could see by the way he was jabbing his finger in the air that he was giving the Oklahoman a good dressing down. Billy was shaking his head, and every once in a while he would try to stammer out some kind of defense, but Buck wasn’t brooking interruptions. Eventually Billy stopped trying to argue, and his face took on the pale gray shade of poured cement before it sets. The crew chief made a final angry point, and Billy spun and strode over to the backhoe, kicking dirt as he went. He hoisted himself into the cockpit of the big yellow machine and slouched in the seat, pulling his hard hat down over his eyes as if he wanted to take a cowboy-style nap.
Buck insisted on driving me in to the medical department, though I insisted that the bump on my head was nothing serious. We took the high road, a dirt track along an elevated ridge with a view of the whole area. As I gazed out at that landscape, it dawned on me that our work was having quite an impact on the prairie. The Highlands Ranch my grandfather and I had known was barely recognizable beneath the maze-like ridges of dry clotted earth piled up beside the trenches and foundation holes. I wondered where all the wildlife had gone. South, probably, although before long it would run up against Colorado Springs, which was undergoing its own sprawl northward. To the east was farm and feedlot country, where the soil was mostly used up, eroded by wind and rain, or saturated with chemical fertilizers. All of it had been prairie once. I closed my eyes and imagined the rolling hills, the herds of buffalo, the tall grass nodding in the wind.
