“You need your high-school diploma,” said Kaylee. “You won’t get work anywhere without a high-school diploma. Not even the rigs’ll take you now days without it.”
Tears ran down Colton’s face, “I know,” he said.
“What is it, Colton?”
“Nothin’.”
“Nothin’ doesn’t make a grown boy cry.”
Colton wiped his nose on his sleeve, “It ain’t nothin’, Mom.”
“C’mon, son. You gotta tell me.”
Colton swallowed and rubbed his knuckles in his eyes, “It’s the teasin’, Mom. They ride me all day and never let up. Never even once. I pretend like I don’t care, but I care. I care so much I can’t sleep at night.”
Kaylee made her hands into fists, “You just have to ignore what those kids say, Colton. You can’t let them ruin the whole rest of your life.”
Then Colton found out that for twenty-five dollars he could enroll at the special school where Jake had been sent, so he borrowed the money from Kaylee. “It’s a surprise,” he promised her, pocketing the check.
Kaylee wiped her hands on her jeans. “Don’t you be buying me more flowers, son, you had to pawn your boots last time you did that.”
“It ain’t flowers, Mom. It’s better’n flowers.”
An hour later, Colton came back with a certificate to say he would be starting school the next week. “I’ll get you that high-school diploma,” he told Kaylee. “Maybe I won’t be a rocket scientist, but I won’t be a nobody neither. You’ll be proud of me, Mom, just wait and see.”
So they were like a little club of dropouts. That’s how Jake explains it. With a few other boys whose names sound as if they complete the cast of characters in a modern Western—Cody, JR, Chase, Jake, Colton—they hunted and shot geese and Jake taught Colton to fish and they went camping and roasted just about a ton of marshmallows. They drove a lot too, filling up their tanks with the money they pooled from various part-time jobs at fast-food joints and car washes and the pawn shop. The boys didn’t think anything of driving three hundred miles or more just to see what was there and to buy a burger somewhere new. This was the nineteen nineties when the conquered West was barely a hundred years old and when it was still full of a kind of gunshot, hard-won innocence and broken promises and open roads. Sure, there was hardship that went along with all that, and drought and violence and what have you—there always was and there always will be—but there was also a sense of freedom back then, like the freedom of adolescence right before you have to grow up and get really damaged in ways that never, ever heal.
“Look, man,” Jake said, “we get through this stinkin’ book and then we can go fishin’.”
“Why can’t we go fishin’ now and read books later? I bet they’re jumping like crazy right now.”
“Because,” said Jake,” I promised you I was gonna get you through high school and I ain’t a promise-breaker.”
“So what? What’s the worst thing can happen?”
“Here man, have another Mountain Dew.”
So Colton cracked another soda and creased his forehead and said, “Sonofa…” and his mouth went tight with concentration. And Jake sat next to him playing video games and looking over once in a while at Colton’s books and saying, “No, Colt, it’s got to equal. That’s why it’s called an equation. So help me, are you trying to be stupid?”
“I ain’t nearly as stupid as this stupid book.”
Jake wrote some figures on the page. “Does that help?”
“Nope.”
“Yes it does, look,” and Jake wrote another few numbers and said, “See? It all adds up.”
“Cocoa’s going to be wild as a freakin’ cat if I don’t take her out for a ride, you know.”
“No she won’t.”
Colton sighed and went back to his studies for another half an hour and Jake kept on playing video games and correcting Colton’s mistakes and sending him back to do more work.
“I know,” said Colton suddenly, slamming the book shut and standing up. “I got a better idea.”
“What’s that?”
“Let’s go shoot bunnies.”
“No way, Colt. You finish this first.”
“Sonofa…” said Colton.
“Eight more questions,” said Jake, “then we can go shoot anything you like.”
“Sonofa…” said Colton again. He picked up a pencil. “When I’m dead everyone’ll be sorry they made me waste so many hours in school.”
“No they won’t,” said Jake.
“You watch,” said Colton. “They most certainly will. Someone will mention it at my funeral. They’ll say, ‘We never should have made the poor boy do so much school. What a freakin’ waste of his time it was.’”
12
RUNNING FREE
Near Evanston
All school year, Colton spent hours staring out of the school’s windows at the mountains. From October until February, he watched the snow pile up, the dark close in sooner and sooner, and then he watched the bright spring sun come and the days lengthen and winter recede, and he started planning where he was going to take everyone camping as soon as the snow crept back off the peaks. By mid-March he was already telling everyone that what he wanted for his eighteenth birthday was a proper canvas hunting tent, six-man, with room to stand up in and swing an elk if he liked.
School got out a few days before Colton’s birthday in June and he was a wreck of anticipation. On the morning of the tenth, he was up before it was light and sitting in the dining room when his family got up for breakfast, and within five minutes of getting the tent—better and bigger than he had imagined, with canvas pockets to serve as little storage areas and tall enough for even Colton to stand up in—he had arranged a camping trip, and by late afternoon Bill, Jake, and Colton were in the mountains with the tent and the horses and the marshmallows, just exactly as Colton had been imagining for the last six months.
Before dark, Jake and Bill fetched buckets of water from the lake for the horses and Colton stayed in camp to put the pegs in the new tent, and, since he could always be counted on to burn down half the neighborhood given half a chance, Bill put him in charge of making the fire. “See if you can do it with a little less tinder than you did last time, son,” said Bill.
“Yeah, you pyro,” said Jake.
A couple of years back, on a hunting trip, Colton had got back to camp before the others, having not seen anything but the flashing tail end of an elk since before the first river crossing. He waited in camp alone for a few hours—until after dark—and then he got to thinking and he decided maybe the others had got lost and it might be useful if he built a fire to guide everyone back, and by the time Bill and Preston found him, Colton was running around a wildfire with green branches torn off a baby pine and a good half an acre burned. “Holy cow,” said Colton when he saw his brother and father.
“Keeping warm enough, son?” said Bill.
Jake and Bill came back from watering the horses and Bill put stones in a circle around the edge of the fire to boil water. “Nice to see you left some wood for the rest of the world,” said Bill to Colton. The boys pierced sausages and then marshmallows on the ends of sharpened sticks and Bill made cups of strong black coffee. They ate their meal on tin plates on their knees, propped up against saddles, saddle blankets shrugged over shoulders, hats pulled down over eyes, cups of coffee by their feet. The heat from the fire released last summer’s scents—sun and sweat, green grass and manure, elk and old blood. Coyotes were shouting victory and love across the valleys to one another. An owl asked, “Who? Who-who?” The boys didn’t say very much, mostly because Bill didn’t talk much, and the boys wanted to be as much like Bill as possible.
But at last Colton wanted to find a way to say how happy he was so he said, “Too bad you can’t do this for a living.”
“Wouldn’t earn much,” said Jake.
Colton leaned forward and poked his stick into the fire so that a shower of little sparks
lit up around his face. “I reckon I’ll be out on the rigs soon enough.” He speared a marshmallow onto his stick. “Meantime I’ll be out here roasting marshmallows.” He looked up and grinned. “How’s that for a plan?”
“You’ll get eaten by a stray grizzly,” said Jake.
“If I should die before I wake,” sang Colton, “feed Jake…”
“Oh brother,” said Jake.
Colton gathered the tin plates then and washed them in cold lake water and put everything that had been used for cooking in a bag and slung it up between two trees out of reach of bears. Bill stood up and stretched and tipped his hat back to look at the stars one more time. “You’ll want to hobble her tonight before you turn in,” he said to Colton.
“She ties regular,” said Colton.
“She’s not a regular horse.”
Colton smiled. “Well I guess I know that.”
Bill spat and pulled his cowboy hat down over his eyes.
Colton said, “You’ll see. She’ll be fine.”
Bill sharpened his shoulders to the sky and disappeared into the tent.
Colton woke up next morning, rubbed his hands over his face and pulled on his ball cap. Jake was still asleep with his sleeping bag pulled up to his eyes. Bill’s sleeping bag had been rolled up and left at the end of the sleeping mat. Colton looked around for his boots and tugged them on over his socks and then poked his head out of the tent. That morning was brightly frostbitten and clear all the way from here to as far as the eye could see. There was a lacy netting of mist coming off the lake, all secretive with what it knew about water and air and the difference between the two. The redwing blackbirds were shrilling, frogs had started chorusing, squirrels were chastising each other. A raven was making a noise as if two pebbles were dropping around in its throat. Colton threw a stone at it. “Keep it down, would ya?” he said. The raven gargled. Colton cocked his fore and middle finger at it. “Pah!” he said. “You’re dead.”
Just the other day, Colton had walked into the kitchen all strapped about with ammo and rifles and handguns, grinning like a dog on a hot day. “You look like Rambo, you know that?” his mother told him.
And Colton, hands loose by his sides, cupping the air around two holstered pistols on his hips had said, “You think?” pleased with the idea.
“Colton,” said Kaylee, “son, that’s not necessarily a good thing.”
But judging from the portraits Kaylee made him sit for, Colton was built more along the lines of a very young Sean Penn, if you’re talking any kind of movie star, right down to Sean Penn’s impression of deep hurt lodged early somewhere far behind the eyes. Although it’s hard to be completely sure because Colton didn’t photograph well—maybe it was a combination of the scowl he liked to give cameras and the nose, too long to begin with, broken four times by Preston in sibling dust-ups settled with fists. “It’s great to be able to wake up and smell the coffee…in Brazil,” he used to say. And he had a goatee, the kind that has no authority on a face, and it gave Colton, even as a man, an impression of eternal adolescence. But in life he was six foot two in his bare feet, six four in cowboy boots, built whippy as baling twine but with wide shoulders and with a walk like he had never really found the difference between sky and earth, paddling all of it underfoot. And he took your breath away with those eyes so unnaturally blue they went straight through you and came out the other side knowing more than when they went in.
It must have been something in those eyes and that loping walk and his unnaturally optimistic nature on top of the fact that they put him in those special ed classes that got the Kmart cowboy kids going. “Re-tard,” they called him everywhere he went. And then they started on the bus every morning, “Re-tard!” and Colton just sat looking through his schoolmates with his cornflower blue eyes, forgiving as Jesus, like he truly couldn’t feel the pain. It was as if the wiring for pain was faulty in Colton, like he could keep loading up on it forever and ever without ever shorting that fuse. “I don’t mind, so it don’t matter,” he said over and over. By the time he was fifteen, he had learned to swallow pain so deep, you’d never know he could feel it—any kind of pain all sucked up inside of him. But Merinda, eighteen months younger than Colton, couldn’t take it. She stood up one day on the school bus and cold-cocked the worst offender. “Leave my brother alone, you little piece of crap,” she said, and was suspended off the bus for a week.
Now Colton kicked a log onto the fire and threw a match onto a handful of dead grass, letting the little flames search around for a grip on the wood. He sank down on his haunches and blew into the smoke, coaxing the warmth into life, and when the fire caught good and strong he put on a pot of water to boil and tucked a wad of chew into his lip. There was woodsmoke in his face, the promise of coffee and bacon and a good day riding ahead of him. He shut his eyes and grinned.
Then Bill came out of the morning and stretched out his hands to the fire.
“Mornin’, Dad,” Colton said.
“Son.”
“Everything okay?”
“Pretty good,” said Bill, spitting.
Colton said, “Oh no.”
“Yep,” said Bill, tugging his hat over his eyes.
Colton was running even before he got out of a crouch, lifting himself off the ground with his fingers, scrabbling for purchase on the flinty soil, like a skater taking a tight corner.
Two horses stood against the trailer, heads hanging, lips loose, eyes shut, ears back and tails swinging against the season’s first suck of mosquitoes that had floated in on that morning’s early sun. They lifted their heads when they heard Colton coming and Bill’s gelding snickered a greeting. “Cocoa!” Colton shouted, but where Cocoa had been there was everything but the mare—a halter, a rope, a rubber bucket. She’d seemingly spirited herself away from the trailer and into the great skirts of the mountains that reached from here to as far as man could hope to walk in a week. Colton spun around on his heels a couple of times. “Crap!” he said. He snatched his baseball hat off his head and flung it onto the ground. “Oh holy crap!”
And then Jake was there, half dressed, pulling jeans over his long underwear. “Colton?”
“Cocoa ran away,” said Colton. “Stupid horse! She ran away!”
The boys took Bill’s rig and started driving away from the lake toward the heart of the mountains on rough tracks that dead-ended in someone’s old campfire or on old logging trails or against the edge of impenetrable deadfall. “You think she’d head home?” Jake asked.
“I think she’d run into the mountains.”
“Why?”
“Oh heck, I don’t know,” said Colton. “She can run wild for all I care.” He wiped a thumb down his cheek. “Stupid horse,” he said. “If I saw her now, I’d shoot her.”
All day they drove back and forth over those ridges, following her trail easily near water, but then her spoor dried up on the rocky soil high up. Colton got out of the pickup and walked slowly ahead, bent over, as if trying to smell the ground. He stopped once in a while to shout, “Cocoa!”
“She ain’t gonna come if you call her,” said Jake. “She ain’t a dog.”
“I know that. She’s a crappy horse, is what she is,” said Colton.
“It’s getting dark.”
“Some bear’s gonna get her, or a lion. There’s no way…” Colton looked around. “Or she’s gonna starve to death. There’s nothing going on up here. What’s she gonna do?”
“She lived wild till you got her,” Jake said.
“I know, but that was two years ago. She won’t be able to handle it out here.”
“She’ll handle herself fine,” said Jake.
Colton said, “You don’t know her.” He turned his back on Jake and scrubbed his knuckles under his eyes. “She’s very soft. You don’t know how soft she’s grown.”
“By the looks of things,” said Jake, “she ain’t the only one.”
13
BILL’S PHILOSOPHY OF HUNTING
Bil
l Bryant had made it clear to Preston and Colton almost to this extreme: if you shoot a skunk, he’d better find you eating skunk steak for the better part of the next week and wearing a skunk hat all winter. If you shoot a goose, you’d better be eating the whole goose, not just the parts most people would say are edible. If you shoot a jackrabbit you’d better be up for rabbit stew and rabbit-skin carpets and rabbit-foot key rings. If you cut a tree for firewood, you’d better check its pulse and make sure it’s a dead tree before you get your chain saw into its bark. Bill has the utmost respect for anything that can make an honest living in this climate, in part because you can pretty much count on drought, wind, and women to take care of early, accidental death without carelessly contributing to the toll yourself.
Bill Bryant also made it clear to his boys that if you brought something into this hard, short-summered, scarcely covered world, or if you were lucky enough to be put in charge of land or a hunting permit, it was yours to take double care of. This wasn’t fat city like California or New York where some welfare group was going to come along and rescue your responsibilities if you didn’t take care of them. That went for kids and cats and horses just as much as it went for soil and wives and wildlife. And if you fail to secure your horse properly and she gets away in the middle of the night, she’s yours for the rest of your life to find. Not that Bill ever said this explicitly, but since he is the kind of man who can say more in an hour of silence than most men can say in a year of talking nonstop, he didn’t actually need to say anything explicitly. It just was. And Cocoa being a wild horse, like that, made her even more of a responsibility than an ordinary horse. But Bill didn’t say anything, not even, “I told you so.”
The Legend of Colton H Bryant Page 5
