The Legend of Colton H Bryant

by Alexandra Fuller

  He didn’t need to.

  14

  LOOKING FOR COCOA

  So it would happen that they’d be sitting watching television or cleaning guns and Colton would suddenly say something like, “Maybe she’s out on the Hogsback. We haven’t looked out there yet.”

  And they’d pile into Merinda’s blue Ford Escort and drive out of town with halter ropes and head collars and .22s and fishing rods and whatever else it occurred to them to grab and someone might ask just before the door slammed, “Where you boys going?”

  And they’d shout back, “Looking for Cocoa.”

  So, two boys in September, barreling down a road that has never existed on any map, burning hours down watching for the shape of a red desert-colored mare against the shapelessness of the high plains and finding nothing in the silences between the spaces. There are tins of Copenhagen on the dash, a stash of Mountain Dew in back, Neil Diamond or Dolly Parton or Kenny Rogers on the sound system, jumping every time the car hits a pothole. To the ordinary eye, there’s not much to look at; the road ahead through sagebrush, a couple of pronghorn antelope Zen-mastering into a sky so big that this could go on for some time.

  But then Colton says, “Think I could catch one of those prongies?”

  “If that’s what you have to do,” says Jake.

  “Jake brake!” shouts Colton.

  So Jake pulls on the emergency brake and the blue Ford Escort with the little hula girl on the dash disappears sideways into its own cloud of desert pink. Colton unfolds himself out of the car, “Whee-haw!” and begins loping up the road. The antelope lift their heads and watch him placidly until he’s abreast with them, and then they run like water uphill and spill into the sun-dancing horizon. Colton bounds up the ridge after them, over old-growth sagebrush, knees coming up to his waist, arms beating time with eternity.

  Jake sighs, leans over and pulls Colton’s door shut. “Crazy freakin’ sonofa…” he says, ducking to see through the windshield. Colton’s already made it up to the top of the world and now he’s just an apostrophe against the sky. The antelope are long gone over the next ridge. The vastness of it all is dazzling and slow, there’s no way of catching up with them or of covering a space this endless so that if you were paying that kind of attention, this would be a heartbreaking world.

  By the time Colton gets back into the car Jake’s almost asleep against the window on the passenger side, cap pulled down over his eyes. Jake says, “Happy now?”

  “Born happy,” says Colton. He winds down the window, spits a stream of tobacco into the empty world, turns on the car, and sears a couple of doughnuts into the gravel road. A smell of hot sage and fresh dust and decades-old manure fills the air.

  “Oh crap,” yells Jake, coughing and waving his hand in front of his face, “would you stop driving like an idiot?”

  Colton yells back, “I’m not driving like an idiot.”

  “You are. I’m getting carsick over here, with you spinning doughnuts. Wind up your freakin’ window.”

  “I like fresh air.”

  “That ain’t fresh air, you retard. That’s dust you just put all over me. I don’t like dust.”

  “That’s because you’re a pussy.”

  “And you’re a retard.”

  “I ain’t a retard.”

  “Well, if you ain’t a retard, you sure drive like one.”

  And then Colton slams his fist across the seat and thumps Jake in the chest and Jake thumps Colton back and then Colton steps on the brakes and the hula girl on the dash is choked in a fresh layer of dust. After that, nothing happens for a few moments. Then Colton says, “I ain’t moving this car another inch until we both say we’re sorry for what we just said.”

  There is silence for quite some time inside the car. Outside, grasshoppers crackle hotly on the papery grass and the sun loops threads of heat into the ground. More antelope appear on the horizon. A tiny cloud pokes across the plains.

  Colton says, “I’m sorry. I don’t really think you’re a pussy, Jake.”

  And Jake says, “I’m sorry, Colton, I don’t really think you’re a retard.”

  “Okay then,” says Colton.

  “Okay,” says Jake.

  And the boys drive on in silence for another fair bit until Colton suddenly says, “You think I coulda catched one?”

  “Catched one what?”

  “A prongie.”

  “Nope.”

  “But I came close.”

  “No you didn’t.”

  “Close for me, I did.”

  “Yeah but,” says Jake, “that’s not saying much for a retard.”

  Colton laughs, “He-he-he.”

  Then they drive some more until Colton says, “You want to know what?”

  Jake doesn’t say anything.

  Colton insists, “Seriously. Do you want to know what?”

  So Jake says, “Sure.”

  “I’ve decided I’ve got two ambitions left in this life.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah,” says Colton. “Number one is, I’ve gotta find me a good woman.”

  Jake waits. He waits a little longer. Then he asks, “That it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “What’s your other one?”

  “Other one what?”

  “Other ambition. You said you had two ambitions in this life.”

  “Oh,” says Colton. “Holy cow, I forget now. He-he-he.”

  15

  FIREWOOD

  The ax came down over Colton’s head, wood fell apart. He picked up the log, set it on end, brought the ax down again. Over and over. It was like listening to the repetitive work of a machine, something inured to boredom. They say Colton didn’t so much chop firewood as he made toothpicks. Sweat started to trickle down his face so he took his hat off and stuffed it into his pocket, then he opened his coveralls to let the cold in and you could see part of the words on his favorite T-shirt, i put ketchup on my ketchup.

  Colton split firewood like the ax was language for whatever he didn’t have the vocabulary to say and all the time he was chopping wood he was thinking of a girl. And less specifically, he was thinking of a horse. And although he wasn’t thinking it exactly in this way, he was wondering what it would be to possess a girl the way you could possess a horse. Not in the crude, manhandling way, but in the wordless miraculous way, where there was no end to either of you and the possibilities of you, together, were more than double of what they were of you, apart.

  Just the other day, he’d asked Merinda, “What does love feel like?”

  And she’d said, “Colt, if you gotta ask, you ain’t there yet.” And anyway, she’d asked him, what kind of boy wants to know about love before they want to know about…about, you know?

  And Colton had said, “It ain’t right to talk about that,” shocked. “We don’t talk about that.”

  “Holy cow, Colton,” said Merinda.

  And that was when Colton’s rhythm came to pieces and the next time he brought the ax down it cleaved his left foot in quarter, right through the boot, “Sonofa!” He waited for something more to happen because it seemed there should be more to it than this. You chop the side of your left foot through to the bone and that’s it? There’s not as much as you’d think to a person, Colton was thinking. And then a hot chug of blood started to gush out of the side of the boot and to pool on the ground so Colton felt reassured. “That’s alright then.” No pain that he couldn’t handle and blood doing what blood, in the circumstances, is supposed to do. Colton picked the ax up again, leveled a log on top of the block, brought the ax down, the log split. He set one half upright again, his rhythm back.

  He tells himself, “The trouble with love is you get careless and lose your rhythm, that’s the trouble with love. You forget where your feet are.”

  Then he goes inside and takes off his boot and says, “Sonofa!” and puts his boot back on in a hurry. Then he limps across the field, under one barbed wire fence, across another field and
under another barbed wire fence, to the neighbor’s house and knocks on the door and when a man standing six-foot six in his socks comes to the door Colton ducks and weaves a little, hands shoved into the pockets of his Carhartts.

  “Hi Stretch,” he says.

  Stretch grins, “Well hello there, Colton,” he says.

  “I was just wondering if you’d mind taking a look at something here.” Colton points to his foot and the black pool gathering below his jeans. “I cut my foot a little bit.”

  And Stretch says, “Dang, Colton. You better come inside.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  Colton says, “I’ll make a mess on your carpet and I don’t think your wife will be very happy with that.”

  Stretch looks over Colton’s shoulder. “You walked all the way from your house like this? Where’s your Mom?”

  “She’s gone to Salt Lake.”

  “Where are Preston and Tabby?”

  “Bowlin’.”

  “You gonna bleed to death, boy.”

  “That would most certainly be an inconvenience,” says Colton.

  “Get in the truck, we’re going to the hospital,” says Stretch.

  “I can’t do that,” says Colton.

  “Holy cow, Colt. You get in that truck.”

  Colton shook his head. “I ain’t gonna do it.”

  So Stretch calls Preston and Tabby and tells them that Colton is in the process of bleeding to death on his front porch and could they please come and take him away. Preston drives like a cat with its tail on fire all through town with Tabby shouting, “Slow down!” and “Hurry up!” in about equal measure until they get to Stretch’s house. Stretch and Colton are still on the porch in an increasing pool of Colton’s blood.

  “You better hurry,” says Stretch, “he’s been standing here bleedin’ for about half an hour. Refused to go with me, refused to go in the house. Twice as stubborn as a mule and about half as intelligent.”

  Preston tells Colton, “Get in the truck.”

  Colton hops to the truck and Tabby helps pull him into the passenger seat.

  Stretch hangs through the window and tells Colton, “Cowboy up, cupcake. No crying at the hospital now.”

  Preston slams the door and pulls himself into the driver’s seat.

  “You idiot!” Tabby tells Colton as they burn out back onto the main road, “you coulda bled to death. Why didn’t you let Stretch drive you to the hospital?”

  Colton shrugs.

  “What were you thinking?” says Tabby.

  “I figured I didn’t want to get blood all over his truck.”

  “Oh Lordy,” says Tabby.

  “It don’t wash out of carpet so easy,” says Colton.

  Which is how Colton ends up in the emergency room where the staff treat him in a way that makes everyone seem like family in Wyoming. “What is it this time, Colton?” says the nurse.

  Colton says, “I was distracted.”

  “Distracted?”

  “I was chopping wood and I got to thinking about love.”

  “Love? My goodness, Colton, you about chopped your foot clean off.”

  “It won’t happen again.”

  “How many stitches have we put in you over the years?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, it’s twice as many as any other kid in this town.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Okay.” The nurse had the bottle of antiseptic in one hand and a scrubbing brush in the other. “This is gonna sting a little bit but we got to get ’er clean before the doctor puts stitches in. You want painkillers or you gonna cowboy up?”

  “I’ll cowboy up,” says Colton, trying not to let tears squeeze out of the corners of his eyes.

  “Good boy,” says the nurse and bends over his foot.

  “Sonofabitch!” thinks Colton loudly.

  “Are we doin’ okay?” says the nurse.

  “Yes thank you, ma’am,” says Colton.

  “Colton?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Next time you get to thinking about love can you make sure you’re standing well away from anything sharp or hot or twenty-six feet high?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “Good boy. Okay now, here comes another sting.”

  “Sonofa-freakin’-bitch!” Colton thinks.

  16

  COCOA

  June

  A week to the year that Cocoa ran away, Kaylee got a phone call from the Bureau of Land Management regional office to say that a mare with a BLM brand signed over to Bill and Kaylee Bryant had fetched up near Freedom, Wyoming. A horse trader had tried to push her into an auction with a few of his yearlings. So Kaylee phoned the horse trader and he said he didn’t know how the mare had ended up in his herd. He swore up and down he’d never have tried to sell her if he’d known she belonged to someone else, and so help him, he must of not counted so good when he was loading his herd up off the range last fall and he hadn’t noticed her then and by the time he got to noticing her he coulda sworn she was just like a mare he used to have, so maybe he got a little confused. “Straight up,” he said, “I coulda swore she was one of mine.”

  “Well, we’d sure like her back.”

  The horse trader thought for a moment and said, “Then you gotta pay me for her keep over the winter.”

  Colton was working a double at the burger joint that day, so Kaylee drove up alone to Freedom with the horse trailer the next afternoon. When she reached the horse trader’s house, there was no one around. Kaylee knocked on the door, rang the bell, peered through the kitchen window, but the horse trader had obviously thought the better of the merits of meeting with the owners of the desert-colored mare. Kaylee walked around the back of the house. A knot of thin cats untangled off a woodpile and streaked into the dark corners of a barn. And then Kaylee heard Cocoa’s husky call. She was standing at the rails in a field near the barn and she had gone stiff and alert with recognition.

  Kaylee laughed. “My goodness, Cocoa Bean,” she said. “There you are.”

  She came up to the fence and the mare stretched her neck toward her, breathing hard, her nostrils wide, for a waft of familiar scent. “You’re looking fat enough,” said Kaylee. She dug in her pocket for slices of apple and fed them to Cocoa over the fence. “They didn’t starve you, none, huh? My angel.” The horse picked the slices of apple up and crunched them wetly. “Colton was looking for you everywhere,” said Kaylee. “You just about had him giving up on you.” She ducked under the fence and put a halter on the mare. Cocoa stood solid while Kaylee buckled it up for the first and only time in her life. “That makes a change,” said Kaylee, stroking the mare’s neck. “Ready to come home now?”

  Then she loaded the horse on the trailer and left a hundred and fifty dollars under a stone on the front doorstep for the horse trader’s trouble, water, and feed and drove home. Colton was waiting on a fence by the house when she drove up. He followed the trailer around as Kaylee pulled it into the yard and was unlatching the ramp before she had even switched off the engine.

  Cocoa backed into the yard and Colton took the end of her halter rope. “Stupid horse,” he said.

  “You’re more alike than you know,” said Kaylee.

  “Eh?” said Colton.

  “Scaring a body half to death,” said Kaylee.

  17

  GRADUATION

  Jake, Cody, and Colton went cliff-diving in Utah to celebrate the unlikely miracle of their having made it through high school with a certificate to prove it—Colton with a B minus average, helped along by an A plus in Hunter Safety. They drove Merinda’s Escort out of Evanston singing Neil Diamond loud enough to ruin paint and Colton so full of himself he would turn down the music every so often to say, “Next thing I’m gonna do is be a rocket scientist,” or “I think I’ll try a little brain surgery next,” or “Those fools didn’t find a cure for cancer yet, did they?”

  Until Jake said, “Easy there
, Colt. It was just high school.”

  “I know,” said Colton, but his knees were hopping up and down. “Who’d ever have thought it? I’m a freakin’ genius.”

  “I guess by your standards,” said Cody.

  “I’d much rather be Reverend Blue Jeans,” sang Colton.

  “Holy cow, Colt, you don’t even know the words to Neil Diamond by now, how you gonna fly a freakin’ rocket?” said Jake.

  “It’s, ‘I’d much rather be forever in blue jeans,’” said Cody.

  “He-he-he,” said Colton. “I like it better my way.”

  Then they listened to the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band for a while and the land got redder and harder and the trees shrank into plump green cones no taller than a man and there didn’t seem to be much for a cow to eat. But it was beautiful and otherworldly and you could see how a place like this might inspire fanatical, half-crazy religion in a person. It smelled different too, without Wyoming sage all minty sweet on the air. Now the air smelled of sun and rock and ancient ritual.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever leave Wyoming,” said Colton, staring out of the window.

  “Why not?” said Cody.

  “I dunno,” said Colton, frowning, “it just seems as if Wyoming likes me.”

  “Don’t be a retard,” said Cody. “What are you now? A freakin’ poet?”

  “Eh?”

  “‘Wyoming likes me.’ Now that sounds exactly like a whiny-assed, poet-fairy thing to say.”

  “He-he-he,” said Colton.

  When they got to the cliff, Colton was first out the car. “Here we go, boys! Time to swim!” He had his shirt off and was swinging it around his head. “Whee-haw!”

  “Holy crap,” said Cody.

  “You can’t swim,” shouted Jake out of the window.

  “He still can’t swim?” asked Cody.