Praise for The Legend of Colton H. Bryant
‘If you ever doubted that there are still heroic, big-hearted men in the world, look no further than Colton H. Bryant’ The Times
‘With the force of an emotional novel, this dramatised biography is a polemic against the energy industry’s spoilation of the high plains of Wyoming and the dangerous exploitation of the men who drill there for oil and gas…Having got to know Colton so well in this colourfully written case history, the reader will deplore any industrial attempt to dismiss him as a mere statistic’ The Spectator
‘I found this book in some ways hard to read, because I had a lump in my throat almost the entire way through. It is very effectively written and it reminds me, in terms of the polemic, of Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn, which is a polemic against slavery but it doesn’t ever say that up front: it tells the story of someone with whom you feel such intense sympathy’ Start the Week, Phillip Bobbit, author of Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century
‘The life story of this soulful, blue-eyed boy with a gentle heart inspired this moving, poignant tale that explores big themes such as hardship, friendship, prejudice and the sad lot of the misfit. If you fancy a change from your usual holiday reads, this will lend some much-needed colour’ Glamour
‘The Legend of Colton H. Bryant tells of the life and death of Colton, a sweet-natured kid from Wyoming whose inherent goodness overcomes the withering taunts thrown at him because of his learning difficulties. He lives a short, kind life, and dies a preventable death on one of the oil rigs that are disfiguring Wyoming’s pristine wilderness. It reads like a brilliant novel but it’s all true’ Herald
‘This modern Western is a true story…But The Legend of Colton H. Bryant must be read as fiction. The pain of this story–and especially of its beautifully executed ending–is best told as a traditional Western, where it and its landscape can be given some sort of reassuring order’ Times Literary Supplement
‘Fuller makes us feel as if at first hand the fragility of bodies pitched against Wyoming’s fearful winters and the hellish drills and derricks of the oil fields’ Evening Standard
‘Through long interviews with Colton’s family and friends, Fuller has created a version of his life. It’s tough but lyrical, personal but anthropological, in the tradition of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood’ Daily Telegraph
‘Alexandra Fuller’s wonderful biography The Legend of Colton H. Bryant tells how Colton started work as a drill on a rig, despite his young wife begging him to quit–but all the big heart in the world can’t save him from the new unkind greed that has possessed Wyoming during this latest mineral boom…A poignant tribute to one of the world’s good people’ Belfast Telegraph
ALSO BY ALEXANDRA FULLER
Scribbling the Cat:
Travels with an African Soldier
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight:
An African Childhood
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2008
This edition first published by Pocket Books, 2009
An imprint of Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © 2008 by Alexandra Fuller
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
The right of Alexandra Fuller to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
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Simon & Schuster Australia
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Excerpt from “Feed Jake” by Danny Bear Mayo. © 1990 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, Tennessee 37203.
All rights reserved. Used by permission.
A CIP catalogue for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-84739-869-7
ISBN-10: 1-84739-869-3
For Dakota and Nathanial
Because of C.H.B.
From Justice to Forgiveness
Feed Jake
I’m standing at the crossroads in life, and I don’t know where to go.
You know you’ve got my heart babe, but my music’s got my soul.
Let me play it one more time, I’ll tell the truth and make it rhyme,
And hope they understand me.
Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I die before I wake, feed Jake, he’s been a good dog,
My best friend right through it all, if I die before I wake,
Feed Jake.
Now Broadway’s like a sewer, bums and hookers everywhere.
Winos passed out on the sidewalk, doesn’t anybody care?
Some say he’s worthless, just let him be.
But I for one would have to disagree.
And so would his mama.
Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I die before I wake, feed Jake, he’s been a good dog,
My best friend right through it all, if I die before I wake,
Feed Jake.
If you get an ear pierced, some will call you gay.
But if you drive a pickup, they’ll say “No, he must be straight.”
What we are and what we ain’t, what we can and what we can’t,
Does it really matter?
Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I die before I wake, feed Jake, he’s been a good dog,
My best friend right through it all, if I die before I wake,
Feed Jake.
If I die before I wake, feed Jake.
CONTENTS
PART ONE
1. A WESTERN
2. COLTON AND THE KMART COWBOYS
Evanston, Wyoming
3. PRESTON AND COLTON, HUNTING
4. BILL’S PHILOSOPHY OF HORSE BREAKING
Evanston, Wyoming
5. BILL AND COLTON
Evanston, Wyoming
6. IN THE BEGINNING
Wyoming and the West
7. CATTLE DRIVE
Near Evanston
8. GOOSE HUNTING WITH JAKE, COLTON, AND CODY
Near Evanston
9. JAKE
Utah
10. JAKE
Evanston, Wyoming
11. JAKE AND COLTON
Evanston, Wyoming
12. RUNNING FREE
Near Evanston
13. BILL’S PHILOSOPHY OF HUNTING
14. LOOKING FOR COCOA
15. FIREWOOD
16. COCOA
June
17. GRADUATION
18. BULL RIDING
All Over the West
19. PARADISE ROAD
Upper Green River Valley
20. DRILLING ON THE RIGS
Utah
21. ANATOMY OF AN OIL PATCH
Upper Green River Valley
22. FLOW TESTING
Upper Green River Valley
23. THE ASTRO LOUNGE
Rock Springs
24. TRAIN STOPPING
25. COLTON AND CHASE
Winter
26. KAYLEE’S PHILOSOPHY OF DRUGS
27. FIREWORKS
Evanston, Wyoming
28. DRIVING ALL DAY
Wyoming/Utah/Arizona
29. PATTERSON-UTI DRILLING
Upper Green River Valley
30. DRIVING ALL DAY AND NIGHT
; Wyoming/Utah/Arizona
31. MARRIED
Evanston, Wyoming
32. DRILLING
33. THANKSGIVING
Evanston/Rawlins
34. A SERIOUS LIFE
35. MARRIAGE AND ROUGHNECKING
Evanston, Wyoming
36. THE DEATH OF LEROY FRIED
Upper Green River Valley
37. DAKOTA JUSTUS BRYANT
38. COLTON QUITS
39. COLTON WORKS IN EVANSTON
40. MINUS THIRTY-FIVE
PART TWO
41. THE DAY BEFORE VALENTINE’S DAY
Evanston, Wyoming
42. CUMBERLAND CEMETERY
43. VALENTINE’S EVENING
Jake and Tonya
44. FREE FALL
45. JAKE DRIVING ALL DAY
46. PATTERSON-UTI DRILLING
47.
TOUGH ANGEL
48. RAINBOW
Upper Green River Valley
49. A MILLION-DOLLAR PERSONALITY
50. EVANSTON CEMETERY
Evanston, Wyoming
51. COLT
52. JAKE AND COLTON
Afterwards
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Colton H. Bryant—Wyoming boy
Melissa—Colton’s wife
Nathanial—Melissa and Colton’s son
Dakota Justus—Melissa and Colton’s son
William Justus Bryant (Bill)—Colton’s father
Kaylee Bryant—Colton’s mother
Preston—Colton’s older brother
Mandi—Preston’s wife
Tabby—Colton’s older sister
Tony—Tabby’s husband
Merinda—Colton’s younger sister
Shad—Merinda’s boyfriend
Jake—Colton’s best friend
Tonya—Jake’s wife
Cocoa—Colton’s horse
THE LEGEND OF COLTON H. BRYANT
PART ONE
1
A WESTERN
This is the story of Colton H. Bryant and of the land that grew him. And since this is Wyoming, this story is a Western with a full cast of gun-toting boy heroes from the outskirts of town and city-shoddy villains from head office. There is a runaway mustang and crafty broncos. There are men worn as driftwood and salted women and broken-hearted oil rigs. And in this story, the wind is more or less incessant and the light is distilled to its final brightness because of all the hundreds of miles it must cross to hit the great high plains. And the great high plains themselves, dry as the grave in these drought years, give more of an impression of open sea than of anything you could dig a spade into. A beautiful drowning dryness of oil.
But like all Westerns, this story is a tragedy before it even starts because there was never a way for anyone to win against all the odds out here. There’s no denying that like the high seas, the high plains of Wyoming make for a hungry place, meanly guarding life, carelessly taking it back. No crosses count. Ground blizzards in the winter and dust storms and wildfire smoke in the summer, everything turning into a sameness of grey so that between the edge of the road and the rest of Wyoming, between earth and sky—there are times a person has no way to tell the difference.
And in this story…Well, someone is always dying to make room for the next wave of people who are trying to find a way to get rich on all this impression of endlessness out here. Therefore, in this story there is death. Which is nothing new or old in Wyoming and eventually we too—the storytellers and storytold—will go the way of the Indians, the buffalo, the cowboys, and the oil men. We too will make room for someone or something new. An unpeopled silence, perhaps.
2
COLTON AND THE KMART COWBOYS
Evanston, Wyoming
Here is Colton H. Bryant at eight years old pedaling so pitiful fast through the streets of Evanston, Wyoming, that his legs look like eggbeaters. He has white-blond hair and he’s tanned the color of stained pine and even at this speed—even at a distance—you can see the color of those eyes. They’re such a stunning shade of blue that they register as an absence, like a washed, empty sky. But right now there are tears flooding from those eyes and streaking down Colton’s cheeks as he leaps curbs and ducks into side streets, his heart going like a piston, like it would keep beating even if it were torn out of his chest and left alone in all these wide, high plains.
“Retard!”
Colton rides with more sense of panic than direction. He is sawing back and forth across town, past the Dairy Queen and the Taco Bell, up Sage Street, down Summit, over the patch of sunburned grass behind the old railway station. But everywhere he goes is cluttered with its quota of bored little Kmart cowboys, so called because maybe they docked a lamb’s tail for 4-H once a year and maybe they’ll grow up to wreck a groin muscle riding the odd bull at a small-time rodeo, but these boys aren’t cowboys now and they won’t grow up to be cowboys either. You have to have a heart for that, and these boys are bred heartless and made more heartless by the poverty of their imaginations.
“Retard!” they call him because Colton’s in special ed and that’s on account of the way his brain works, like a saddle bronc, fired up for eight seconds maximum and then bolting around the rails looking for a way out of the arena. Even on Ritalin, Colton has a way of tearing out of the chute, firing with all hooves at once. Colton doesn’t have the gear between flat out and stopped. He doesn’t have speed perception—the way other people feel alarmed when they’re going too fast, Colton feels alarmed when he isn’t moving fast enough.
Colton puts his hand up in class one day.
“Yes, Colton?” says his teacher. “You have a question?”
“No, ma’am,” says Colton. “It’s more of a suggestion.”
“Yes?”
“Well, ma’am, I was just wondering if you could talk twice as fast and then we’ll get ’er done twice as quick and then we can get out of here in half the time.”
And all the other kids start laughing and Colton looks around. “What? What’d I say?”
And the teacher says, “Colton H. Bryant, would you take a deep breath and count to ten and hold your horses?”
Colton keeps pedaling.
“You’re a retard!” comes the shout from a lookout post near the laundry where Colton’s dad takes his greasers when he comes back every other week off the rigs so he doesn’t clog up the machine at home with all the mud and oil from work. And for a moment Colton pictures Bill at the door of the laundry, all immovable in his broad black cowboy hat, and a lump hurts the front of Colton’s throat, but then the light shifts and the image of Bill shifts too, taking with it all that rough Wyoming justice.
“Retard!”
Colton takes one hand off the handlebars long enough to wipe his nose. Evanston is getting kind of blurry. He starts to weave his way recklessly in and out of the streetlights like they were barrels to clear, leaping the curb right in front of cars. Horns blow and in an hour Kaylee will get another phone call from a neighbor telling her that Colton was seen riding recklessly through town. But Colton doesn’t care.
“What a freakin’ retard!” is what he hears.
Colton’s chest fills up with something—he’s not sure what it is—because he isn’t angry and he’s beyond feeling sad and he’s too young to know what forgiveness feels like. Then suddenly, “It’s okay,” he shouts over his shoulder, his voice all high and broken with tears. “Mind over matter. I don’t mind so it don’t matter.” Colton heard that somewhere once, on television maybe, and he likes the magical ring of it. It’s like an invisible cloak, the power of not minding anything. Colton’s legs whip around and around, “Mind-over-matter; mind-over-matter; mind-over-matter” is the rhythm.
He soars below the underpass and up into the part of town where the hooty-tooty-almighty folk live. His pockets are full of knuckle-sized rocks painted by Merinda and Tabby. Colton is supposed to be selling them for a quarter each, fifty cents i
f the folk look rich enough. A buck if they seem really stinkin’, rollin’, filthy. But now his sisters are gonna give him a hard time for not selling rocks and his brother, Preston, is probably just gonna plain give him a beating with no good excuse. “I’m dead,” thinks Colton and when he thinks about being dead that makes him think of cowboys and when he thinks of cowboys his mind skips straight to mustangs, which is part of the beauty of Colton’s mind. It hardly ever sticks around in one place long enough to get too sad or stay too mad.
“Whee-haw,” says Colton, letting his bike have her head. “The Injuns are coming! The Injuns are coming!” he yells, scaring himself for real a little bit at the thought of all those bloodthirsty braves on his tail. And now, under his very seat, the bike transforms itself into a mustang, barely broke, stretching her head across the prairie faster than any other horse in the whole wide West and no one can catch Colton now, not Injuns, not Kmart cowboys, not Merinda and Tabby, not Preston, not anybody. “Come on girl,” Colton tells his bike, “let’s get outta here.”
3
PRESTON AND COLTON, HUNTING
So when they were young—Preston was five years older than Colton—Preston could do any amount of damage to Colton and Colton just smiled right on through it. For example, Preston threw Colton down the stairs with a cushion tied to his waist and Colton laughed all the way down and came running back up for more. Another time, a couple of years later, Preston roped Colton and dragged him all over the yard until the seat of his pants was worn clear through to his boxers and all the time Colton giggling, “He-he-he!” And he was still laughing after Kaylee came home and gave them both a whupping for ruining new clothes. “I got two tons of trouble,” she used to say. “Prest-ton and Colt-ton.” And every year after Christmas lunch, Bill would pull his boys with ropes behind the pickup on an icy road so that they could ski on the heels of their cowboy boots, and that was always funny, although Preston was trying to trip up his brother. And even when a fight would get out of control and result in a broken nose, Colton’s reaction was always the same. “Mind over matter,” he said, his eyes swollen shut and his nose all wrapped in gauze.
The Legend of Colton H Bryant Page 1
