“Shhh,” said Colton. He spat and a yellow stream flew from his mouth. A bit of tobacco fell on his lip.
“What do we do?” asked Jake.
“Open fire, boys,” said Colton. He nodded at Jake and Cody. “Now.”
And then, all at once, the three boys had their guns to shoulders, unloading on those geese as if they thought it likely the birds would try to fire back. The geese startled up, struggling to get airborne on the thin, frigid air, skidding on the ice, everything heavy with a terrible kind of possibility and slowed up like time had snagged itself on the cold. The boys pumped shot after shot down onto the reservoir and when the smoke cleared there was just one goose left on the ice, every other bird airborne, honking distress into the pale grey evening. Jake lifted his gun and fired one more shot. That lonely icebound goose gave a startled jerk, but kept waddling toward the middle of the lake. A tiny black hole of open water gaped ready for it.
“Did I hit it?” asked Jake.
“Shoot again,” yelled Colton.
But at that moment the goose skidded one final step and fell over dead just within reach of the hole and there she floated.
Then Colton was on his toes dancing like someone suspended by ropes from the sky, all arms and legs. “Your first goose, man! It’s your first goose!” His knees pumped up and down. “It’s your first goose!” And then he stopped dancing suddenly and reached down his pant leg. “Sonofa, I forgot…” He fetched up a can of Mountain Dew.
“What were you doing with that in your rods?” asked Cody.
“So it won’t freeze.” Colton pulled the tab and took a sip. “Cheers, boys.”
“Holy cow,” said Jake, looking out at the dead creature floating in the little hole of water in the middle of the iced-up lake. “I wish I had a dog right now.”
“Here,” said Colton, handing the soda to Jake. “Hold this.”
“What you doing?”
“The redneck retriever.”
It was almost completely dark and Colton had already tried pushing logs across the reservoir after the goose, throwing rocks at it, and, finally, slogging into the water in Jake’s leaky extra-large waders, breaking ice with his chest as he went, the dinky little spin rod from the backseat of Cody’s pickup flailing ahead of him, trying to catch the goose on an oversized lure. From the Mazda, where they had their feet up against the heater, Cody and Jake shouted directions out the window, but whatever they said, the fishing line wasn’t very long and the lure kept landing close enough to Colton that the boys could hear the plunk as it hit the ice. Then as Colton got out to waist-deep water, “You can’t swim!” Jake reminded him.
“It’s not so deep,” Colton shouted back. But a few more steps and the water started to come over the top of the waders.
“You can’t swim!” Jake repeated.
“He can’t swim?” said Cody.
“Not so as you’d notice,” said Jake.
“Holy crap,” said Cody.
“Dog-paddle,” said Jake.
“This is how you see on television about people dying,” said Cody.
“He’ll certainly freeze,” observed Jake.
“Most definitely,” said Cody.
The two boys watched their friend for another few minutes. Then Jake said, “You hear about the kid they found up in Sublette?”
“Nope,” said Cody.
“Cops found him in the desert with his head in a badger hole.”
“Doing what?” asked Cody.
“Dead.”
“Holy crap,” said Cody.
“They say he’d been there for months. Sunbaked from the ass down.”
“With his head in a hole?” asked Cody.
“Yep.”
“Holy crap.”
“Yep.”
“Crazy freakin’ sonofabitch,” said Cody, looking out the window.
“Should we go fetch him?” said Jake after a few more minutes.
“Colton?” said Cody. “Fetch Colton? Since when do you think he’d listen to us?”
Colton tried a few more casts from chest-deep water, but he wasn’t even close to catching the goose. “Okay! I’m coming back,” he shouted at last.
By the time Colton climbed back into the pickup he was most definitely starting to lose higher functioning—his systems shutting down from hypothermia—and the way Jake tells it, Colton didn’t have an excess of higher functioning to lose in the first place.
“Man, you’re frozen like a frozen thing,” said Cody. “You coulda died out there.”
Colton was too bunched with cold to speak, his lips pressed together and blue.
“We got to get these waders off you,” said Jake. “You’re soaking, man.” So Colton was wrestled out of the waders. Then Jake sat rubbing Colton’s hands and Cody turned the heat up and complained about the pickup getting so steamy it was like the freakin’ Amazonian jungle—all they needed was them snakes and bugs and freakin’ Injuns with them bones through the noses—and this went on until Colton started singing between chattering teeth, “If I should die before I wake, feed Jake…”
“Oh brother,” said Jake. He looked at Cody. “His brain must be turning back on. He’s being a retard.”
“Think,” Colton said, wringing his socks out with shaking, white hands. “How we gonna get that goose?”
“Can we forget the goose?” said Jake. “You’re about froze to a standstill.”
“I ain’t gonna forget your goose, man. It’s your first goose. And anyway, my dad’s gonna tan my hide if he hears I left a dead goose out there.”
So the boys sat in the truck listening to Cozy Country 106.1 FM for another twenty minutes. Then Cody said, “Happy yet, Colton? It’s completely freakin’ dark. Can we go home now?”
“Can we come back tomorrow with a bigger rod?” asked Colton. “Maybe if I just had a bigger rod.”
“Whatever you need to do.”
“It’s Jake’s first goose, man.”
“I know,” said Jake. “But there’s no sense drowning for a dead goose.”
Colton gave Jake a look like he was thinking maybe there was.
9
JAKE
Utah
One afternoon when Jake was twelve years old, living with his parents and five siblings on the family ranch in Utah, he pumped three shots into his father’s shotgun and held the barrel up to his elder brother’s head—the brother’s teasing had been getting on Jake’s nerves—and he said, “You touch me again and I’m going to blow you away and chop you up and put you in a salad and eat you and no one’s gonna know where you’ve gone.” This was after he’d already called the teacher in first grade a kootchie-snatcher, flipped the bird at the lunch lady every schoolday for six years, threatened half the kids in his class with acts of such imaginative violence that his parents said to the teachers, “We don’t know where he’s getting this stuff.”
Eventually a shrink in Salt Lake City got it out of the boy. There had been something bad going on for some time. It had to do with some people Jake and his siblings called “Aunt” and “Uncle.” And whatever it was they’d done, it was bad enough to make an attempting murderer out of a twelve-year-old boy. When Jake’s father found out the extent of it, he held a pistol up “Uncle’s” rear and told him, “You come near my family again as long as any of us shall live and I swear I’ll unload this right into the middle of your world. You get me?”
But you can’t shoot the ass out of everything bad that happens to your family, and by the time four of their six kids had gone to a psychiatrist for a couple of years to recover from what it was “Uncle” and “Aunt” had done to them, Jake’s family had lost their ranch. This was in the early nineties, when beef prices went from something like a buck ten to eighty-three cents a pound overnight. And on top of that, Jake’s dad had been all but paralyzed in a combination of accidents; he’d broken his back falling off a semi truck when he was loading feed bags and then rebroken it in a more recent horse accident. Plus, he’d bust h
is heart over everything that had happened to his kids and there wasn’t a decent heart doctor for five hundred miles. It was scenic here, true, with the canyons nearby, red and impressive, but scenery doesn’t feed the cows and even if it did, cows don’t hardly pay for the groceries let alone the specialists’ bills.
Jake eats under pressure and the pressure of everything that had happened so far just about killed him at an early age. He was fourteen years old and he weighed nearly three hundred pounds. So it was not surprising that one morning Jake’s dad looked over the breakfast table at his family and said he hated to see it come to this, but the ranch had to go. Within a month, he sold the place to a man who could afford scenery and didn’t much mind about beef prices. And with the money from the ranch, Jake’s father bought a Subway franchise in Evanston.
Jake lost fifty pounds in the first six months after leaving the ranch. This was all before Jared Fogle, the “Subway Guy,” lost two hundred and forty-five pounds in one year eating a small turkey and a large veggie sub every day with a diet soda and a bag of baked potato chips. In any case, it wasn’t a Subway diet that lost those pounds. It was the fact that Jake didn’t have to wake up and go to bed right in the rotten heart of the memory of what had been done to him. He still weighed two hundred and fifty pounds, though, and that’s a fat kid, no matter how you look at it. And how to explain to his classmates that childhood trauma made him eat? You try getting sympathy in Wyoming for trauma—childhood or otherwise. Cowboy up, cupcake, everyone has their freakin’ problems.
So outside of the shrink’s office in Salt Lake City, Jake kept his mouth shut about what had happened to him and he tried not to think about it too much. And pretty soon he took up deer hunting.
10
JAKE
Evanston, Wyoming
And then, a few years after the family moved to Evanston, “Uncle” showed up in town, with who knows what on his mind, driving back and forth past the Subway shop where Jake’s sister was working the counter. “Uncle” phoned the shop and when she answered, he said, “You can’t hide from me. I can see where you are.”
Jake’s sister screamed.
“I’m right in front of your eyes,” said “Uncle.”
Jake’s sister looked out of the window, saw “Uncle” driving slowly by the spring-crusty banks of snow. Then she looked around for the quickest exit and came to the panicked conclusion it might be in her own hands. By the time Jake and Jake’s father got to the scene—locked and loaded—“Uncle” was gone but Jake’s sister had red stripes on her neck from where she’d tried to strangle herself with the phone cord.
Jake put his hands on her shoulders and made her look at him. “You listen to me,” he said. “I’m gonna take care of this for you. You won’t ever have to worry about him again after today. Okay?”
Jake’s sister nodded.
“I mean it,” said Jake.
Jake’s father said, “I warned him.”
He and Jake piled back into the pickup and drove around the streets of Evanston for some time with rifles across their laps, ducking down alleys, stalling up on dead ends where the plow had left icy, grit-crunching banks of snow, circling up by the state mental hospital where sure as hell the sonofabitch belonged. Then they took their search out of town, but what existed outside city limits was so much of everything wide open, a person could evaporate out here, hide in the snow-blown creases that make up the endless quality of Wyoming’s open spaces. You might look all your life and never find a man, which is what makes it such perfect outlaw country. So eventually they turned around and came back into town.
“I guess he won’t be coming back,” said Jake’s father.
Jake didn’t say anything.
“I think we showed him,” said Jake’s father.
“He ain’t a coyote,” said Jake. “He ain’t that smart.”
By the time Colton got to Jake’s house, Jake had made up his mind.
“You missed school,” Colton said.
“I know,” said Jake, sliding a fistful of ammo into a duffle. He had two guns on his bed.
Colton said, “What you doing?”
“Nothin’.”
“Going hunting?”
“You might say that,” said Jake.
“Without me?”
“Yep.”
Colton thought about it for a moment. “What’s in season?”
“A couple of assholes,” said Jake.
“People?”
“Yep.”
Colton jumped to his feet. “What are you doing?”
“I said already, I ain’t telling you.”
Colton watched Jake stuff a camouflage jacket and a black T-shirt into the duffle. “You got to tell me,” he said.
“It’s nothing you want to know.”
“It is.”
“No it ain’t.”
“Okay. Then I’m coming with you.”
“No you’re not.”
“Jake, if you’re gonna kill a man, at least tell me what he did to you.”
Jake sighed. Then he said, “Alright, but you’re not gonna like it. You’re not gonna want to know me after this.”
“Sure I will.”
So Jake told Colton and Colton sat on the end of the bed getting whiter and whiter and with his hands over his head as though he was afraid it would blow off, and when Jake had finished he said, “Holy crap, Jake.”
“See, I told you.”
“See what?”
“You wouldn’t want to know me.”
“Not true,” said Colton. “It’s just,” he said, “I mean, I guess I’ve had a pretty sheltered life. You know. Nothing like that ever happened to me.” Colton tried to think of something that had happened to him and came up with nothing much. “Worst thing that ever happened was when I nearly froze to death getting your goose…Oh, and another time when I was a kid I put my fist through the living room window on Merinda’s birthday ’cos I didn’t like that she was getting all the presents and I wasn’t getting nothing. That most definitely hurt. And…”
“Colt?”
“Yeah?”
“You finished?”
“Sorry.”
“Okay.”
Colton bit his nails and frowned. “It’s just,” he said. “I just don’t know…I don’t know what to do.”
“I do,” said Jake. “I know where they live. I’m gonna drive out there and I’m gonna put an end to this.”
“Oh,” said Colton.
“What do you suggest?” said Jake.
Colton said, “Most definitely that’s a good question.”
“Exactly.”
“But I don’t think blowing them away is gonna fix nothin’.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.” Colton looked down at his hands. “I mean, I’d shoot the sonsofbitches for you myself if I thought it would help. But it ain’t gonna help, Jake. What they hurt, I don’t think you can fix it with guns.”
“It’s worth a try.”
Colton shook his head. “No, it ain’t. It ain’t worth going to prison for ’em, Jake.”
Jake gave Colton a look like he thought maybe it was.
“No,” said Colton.
Jake sat down on the end of his bed. “So what? I sit here doin’ nothin’ like a great big pussy?”
“Yep,” said Colton.
“Since when were you all about forgive and forget?”
“I dunno,” said Colton. “Since forever, I guess.”
“And what if he comes back into town again like he just did?”
“Then,” said Colton, “we’ll deal with that when the time comes.”
Jake looked at Colton long and steady and then he buried his face in his hands and cried until tears poured through his fingers. Colton sat where he was watching for about as many minutes as he could stand it then he said the only thing that would come to him: “Don’t make me have to do my happy dance, Jake. You’re gonna make me have to do my happy dance.” And then he jumped up and sta
rted jerking around the room like a puppet controlled from the sky, knees lifting halfway to his ears, turning his back on his friend so he could wipe his eyes.
“Oh crap,” said Jake. “Holy crap, Colt.”
“He-he-he,” said Colton.
After that, nothing much was ever said about the matter, though Colton knew, and once in a while if he caught a certain look on Jake’s face he’d say, “You gonna make me have to do my happy dance,” and it made no difference if they were in Ace Hardware or Porter’s Fireworks or the middle of the rodeo or a restaurant, he’d up and dance, his knees coming up to his waist, his hands all around his ears.
And Jake would say, “I’m happy now, Colt. Would you quit it? I’m very happy now, you crazy freakin’ sonofabitch.”
11
JAKE AND COLTON
Evanston, Wyoming
The fall after “Uncle” came to town, the fall that Colton was seventeen, the educational authorities in Uinta County put Jake in a special school for dropouts in a last-ditch effort to get him through high school. Jake’s problem was that he had taken so much of his early education getting into fights with the other kids and flipping the bird at the lunch lady and abusing his teachers and generally being disruptive that he hadn’t absorbed as much as he needed in order to graduate. Colton had dropped out already, just plain quit going to school one day. Colton’s problem was that he couldn’t take the Kmart cowboys and their incessant teasing for one more day. “Retard!” they still called him and all because he couldn’t seem to keep his brain still long enough to keep caring about a sentence from its beginning to its end. “I lose interest,” he told his mother. “I sit down and the book is all open and everything and then I look at the words and I can read them alright, but what’s the point? They ain’t doing anything. So I get to thinking about camping and hunting and Cocoa and the other one hundred and one thousand other things I’d rather be doing than sitting down staring at a bunch of words and I just about hop clear outta my skin it makes me so crazy. I want to be up and doing and outside.”
The Legend of Colton H Bryant Page 4
