So the four of them celebrated at the Hunan Garden on Front Street just a block down from the pawn shop where Colton continued to do a pretty steady trade every month or two with his custom-made saddle or his cowboy boots or a gun. It was like he figured it was free money to hand over a couple of his belongings and walk out with cash.
“Check that out, kids,” said Colton, pointing to the Uinta Pawn shop, “‘Colton’s Closet’ is what they should name that place. Heck, it must smell like my boots in there by now.”
They ordered sweet-and-sour pork and dumplings, Szechuan beef with broccoli, and chicken chow mein washed down with refillable Mountain Dew and Diet Coke until Colton sighed and pushed himself back from the table and said, “If I have another bite, I’m gonna have to be carried out of here in one of them stretchers.”
“You got to eat your fortune cookie at least,” said Melissa.
“Read mine for me,” said Colton.
“Oh please Lord don’t tell me I married myself an illiterate,” said Melissa.
“Close enough,” said Jake.
Melissa cracked Colton’s fortune cookie then opened the piece of paper that fell out of it. She frowned and looked up.
“Go on,” said Colton, grinning, “what’d it say?”
“It’s blank,” said Melissa. “Look.” She showed Colton the plain white slip of paper.
There was a moment of silence and then Colton said, “It don’t matter. That way I get to write my own fortune.”
“Which is?” said Jake.
“Mind over matter,” said Colton.
Jake laughed. “I coulda told you that.”
“I don’t mind,” said Colton, “so it don’t matter.”
32
DRILLING
Two days after they were married, Colton drove the two hours back up to the man camp in Big Piney and by six o’clock that night he had caught a ride out across the high plains for his shift on the rig, which seemed tiny from afar, seen under the shadow of the Wind River Mountains. The high plains have a way of diminishing and distorting the scale of everything, and until you’ve climbed the stairs to the doghouse on a drilling rig, it’s difficult to imagine the height of it—fifteen stories, all told—or the sense of exposure out here; it’s as if the tower were anchored to a swell of water that might shift at any moment and set you adrift.
And it’s not just that a rig is vast, but it’s ingeniously brave. The courageous imagination it takes to bolt yourself onto the high plains and drill down day and night, following a map of the world no one can see, but that geologists can track and picture, plates and plates of everything this earth has been laying down, trapping natural gas in pockets like a cross section of a bowl of Pringle chips. The driller and the tool pusher coordinating the movement of six men, like some kind of rough man’s dance so that no one gets behind a fast-moving pipe, or a quick pair of tongs. The drill spins into the ground at such a speed that a driller’s helper in Gillette, poorly trained in a prisoners-to-work Volunteers of America program, caught his right hand in the drill, instinctively reached with his left hand to free himself, and had both arms ripped off at the sockets. He died on location.
Colton rubs his gloves together and breathes into his sleeves. He can’t feel his fingers. A deep, killing cold has settled onto the high plains. The snow veers off the scraped-over sage in shiny silver sheets, turning air to metal by an enchanted catalyst of winter, but Colton and the other men move with a kind of casual ease around the rig, so many grey shadows, tiny as sailors on a battleship, brave and competent and powerfully equipped. Twelve hours at a time, counted down in measurements of feet bored hotly into the reluctant ground. The wind, cold and picked up off the plains like this, is old news for Colton. The smell of the mud they use to lubricate the drilling bit reminds him of Bill’s greasers lying by the door on the front porch at home. For Colton, the oil and diesel and metal are childhood scents.
There’s a safety meeting in the doghouse before any drilling could start, routine as a morning prayer at a monastery that went something like this. “Let me explain something to you real simple, which is this. The quicker we get ’er drilled the less it costs. The less it costs, the more money is to be made. Drill it quick and drill it straight and don’t get blown up doin’ it. Get it?”
“Got it.”
“Okay, sign here, boys.”
Colton scribbles his initials on the bottom of a piece of paper.
“Time is a whole lot of bank.”
“Yep,” says Colton.
“Then get on with it, boys.”
“Yep,” says Colton.
“Straight and quick like you mean it.”
And Colton is gone like a shot.
33
THANKSGIVING
Evanston/Rawlins
There aren’t, but there should be, a hundred different words for wind in Wyoming; crop-burner, roof-lifter, barn-raiser, widow-maker. They say that one summer, in 1968, up near Chugwater, the wind stopped blowing for a few moments and spooked the horses. And every year somewhere between Rawlins and Laramie, the wind flicks over a couple of freight cars on the Union Pacific line. Wind, day and night, taking the names of men, women, and children—you and you and you, the wind says—and picking them off, one at a time. Off snowmobiles and oil rigs, off icy roads, it’s the wind. And it’s the wind blowing them over into cold water or pasting them onto the high plains in midsummer. At other times, the wind upsets forklifts or unloads guns, opens up a badger hole in front of a horse or sends down a bolt of lightning. Surely, to be born to such a wind is to be born half-given back to the earth. Untethered from the get-go.
That day, the day before Thanksgiving in 2003, the wind seemed to have Jake and Tonya’s names picked out. They were on their way to Denver—Tonya had a job hot-shotting a drill bit from here to the airport en route to an oil company in Italy—when the wind came in busting a gut, tunneled just here into more than ordinary fury. It came from behind and caught the back of Jake’s pickup truck and flicked it right about. The front wheels touched black ice and the pickup came off the road and tumbled like a toy. In eight separate frames, slow as it takes to think about life and dying, Jake saw a billboard that advertised thirty-five-cent cones with a picture of an ice cream and the name of a hotel in Cheyenne and he was thinking, “That’s some cheap ice cream.” What he said aloud was, “Holy crap. Hold on, Tonya! Holy shit, oh shit!”
And then he felt the truck hit the ground on the driver’s side and his head connected with the gun rack and after that he didn’t know anything else for quite some time. Tonya counted the truck rolling five times. And then she lost count of almost everything except the world spinning and spinning. And then, at last, the violent velocity rocked silent. Here was Tonya’s heart stopped too, and the blood pooled in her neck like a crashing rodeo rider and she found she couldn’t breathe. And then there really was silence, and the two of them hanging upside down from their seatbelts.
Jake’s eyes were closed and blood was pouring from the top of his head. Tonya tried to reach over to him but her seatbelt stopped her and she couldn’t unbuckle. Jake opened his eyes and looked over.
“You’re alive,” she said.
“Looks that way.”
“Your truck,” said Tonya.
“We’d better find the cell phone and get ourselves outta here,” said Jake.
“Are you gonna kill me?”
“Why?”
“Your truck,” said Tonya. “I rolled it.”
“It don’t matter. It’s just a stupid truck.”
“It’s your baby.”
“No,” said Jake. “You’re my baby. Okay? You gonna be okay. I’m gonna take care of you.”
“Jake,” said Tonya, starting to cry. “Holy cow, Jake.”
“Where you bleeding, girl?”
“I ain’t bleeding.”
“Then where’s all this blood coming from?”
“Jake,” said Tonya. “It isn’t me. It’s you.”
<
br /> And then there was a Mexican couple and a trucker trying to wrench the door open and when they got Tonya and Jake out, the Mexican man had a Saint Christopher held up, as if in blessing, over the two of them. He was grey and his hands were shaking as he was praying, but then the woman pushed him to one side. “You’re not helping,” she told him, and she threw a blanket over Tonya’s shoulders and held on to her and led her to the side of the road and another woman had Jake sitting down on a winter jacket and the trucker was trying to stop the bleeding on Jake’s head with a T-shirt.
“You gonna be fine, man,” said the trucker. “The ambulance is gonna be here.” He looked up at the sky and said, “We could do without the wind, though.” He was shaking too.
“Yeah, this wind,” the Mexican man agreed. “It’ll make you crazy.”
“What you carrying in the box?” the trucker asked Tonya.
“A drill bit,” said Tonya.
“It looks like a bomb,” said the Mexican.
“It’s a drill bit,” said Tonya.
“Lucky for you it didn’t go off,” said the trucker.
“Be quiet, you. You aren’t helping,” said the Mexican woman. She tugged the blanket around Tonya’s shoulders a little tighter. “You don’t talk or nothing, lady,” she told her. “You take it nice and easy.”
This being Wyoming, by the time the story hopped its way through the nervous crackling of bad cell phone connections to Evanston it got to Colton (playing video games on Cody’s sofa) that Jake and Tonya were in the Rawlins emergency room and he had been decapitated and she had broken her neck. That was all he needed to hear. Colton was off Cody’s sofa and into Merinda’s Ford Escort in seconds. He burned home doing about ninety and ran into the house.
“Hey,” said Melissa, “where’s the fire?”
“Jake,” said Colton.
“What?”
Colton’s face was completely wet with tears. He snatched money off the dresser. “Jake’s been hurt.”
“But…”
“I gotta go!” shouted Colton.
“Holy cow,” said Melissa. She stood up. “I’ll come with…”
But Colton had already run out the door, tunnel vision for Rawlins. He made that drive, from Evanston to Rawlins, in an hour and fifteen minutes instead of three, and he would have been even faster but the governor on the Escort kept kicking him back every time the needle on the speedometer went past the end of where the numbers are written. So the needle quivered over to the extreme right, the governor kicked in, the needle sank back to about forty. Colton gripped the steering wheel. “Come on,” he told the car, “you crappy little piece of shit, don’t slow me down.”
Colton left the car running, the door open, made it across the parking lot in about eight strides, and ran into the waiting room at the Rawlins hospital and there were Jake and Tonya sitting on orange plastic chairs facing the parking lot, not knowing who was going to pick them up. Jake had a big bandage on his head, like a mummy. Tonya was in a neck brace. Colton ran down the corridor, tears streaming down both his cheeks.
Jake stood up. “Colt?”
Colton slid the last few feet on the heels of his cowboy boots. “Come here, you two,” he said. “I thought I’d lost you.” And then he had Jake and Tonya in his arms. “You’re alive, you sons-a-guns. You’re alive.” He looked at the bandage on top of Jake’s head. “Man, you ain’t been decapitated. You just been scalped.”
“I’m fine,” said Jake.
“Man, I heard you was dead.” Colton kissed the top of Tonya’s head. “But you’re okay, ain’t ya?” And then he kissed Jake’s bandages. “And they told me you was dead,” said Colton. “Man, I thought I’d lost you.”
Aside from being the site of Jake and Tonya’s accident, Rawlins is home to the Wyoming State Penitentiary, historic and modern. The old facility shut down in 1980 after more than a hundred years of service. Butch Cassidy did time there for horse theft and Big Nose George was hanged from a streetlamp out front by a group of citizens who broke him out of the place to give him a taste of Wyoming justice. The small-time outlaw had made the mistake of killing and dismembering both the popular sheriff and the popular deputy sheriff of Rawlins in the late 1870s and then of attacking the jailer. The Rawlins doctor, John Osborne, who pronounced Big Nose George dead, had the corpse skinned and sent the resulting hide down to Colorado to have it tanned, out of which he had a pair of shoes, a doctor’s valise, a vest, and a purse made for himself. An ashtray was made out of the top of the outlaw’s skull. The doctor went on to become Wyoming’s first Democratic governor and he wore the shoes made out of Big Nose George’s hide to his inauguration ball. The governor’s shoes lie under glass to this day at the Rawlins Museum where you can also see Big Nose George’s death mask and other fantastic exhibits.
So Rawlins’s economy is tied hard to the incarceration business, and imagine a prison in the long, sweeping openness of Wyoming. All that big sky and accumulating miles of sage piling space upon space, the trains running through here screaming freedom every time they stop and go. But there’s nowhere to hide, even if you could get out, the sentries can see as far as eagles from their lookouts. Rows of low, heartbroken hotels accommodate the relatives of inmates and the restaurants cater to the summer Outlaw Trail tourists and it’s all as if a high wind might blow the place back into the Old West days of gunsmoke and high noon shootouts.
Of course, Colton knows the burgers anywhere within about a five-hundred-mile radius of Evanston, even in Rawlins. So he takes Jake and Tonya to a joint that sells the Outlaw (a one-pound burger, fresh Angus ground beef), the Lifer (a double cheeseburger), the Sheriff (same as the Outlaw except with bacon and jalapeños), and so on.
“My best friend here got decapitated,” Colton tells the waitress.
But, being from Wyoming, and especially being from Rawlins, she’s heard it all. “Is that right?” she says, bored. “And you want fries, baked potato, or coleslaw with that?”
And then they get on the road back west and they putt along going about sixty so as not to freak out the accident victims, no one saying much of anything until at last Colton says, “How are my little people doing?”
Jake says, “Head aches like a sonofa.”
“Did they give you something at the hospital?”
“I wouldn’t take it.”
“Sheesh,” says Colton, “even I’m not that much of a retard.”
“I don’t like pills.”
“Me neither, but, there’s a time or two a body just needs a little help.”
“You’re one to talk.”
“We’ll stop and get you some Tylenol next gas station.”
So at the next gas station Colton and Tonya left Jake in the car and Colton led her conspiratorially to the medicine aisle and searched around for a bit until he found what he was looking for. “Let’s slip him one of these things,” he said, holding up a bottle of Tylenol PM.
“Tylenol PM?”
“Man, these things will knock your lights out. But we’ll pretend it’s ordinary Tylenol.”
“Okay,” says Tonya.
So they gave Jake a Tylenol PM. “Some people eat these by the handful,” says Colton. “So you can take two.”
“One’ll do her,” says Jake. He takes it and Colton winks at Tonya. They bump back onto the highway and before Wamsutter, Jake is passed out and he sleeps the whole way back to Evanston.
“What did I tell you?” Colton says to Tonya. “Knock you on your ass, that Tylenol PM stuff.”
34
A SERIOUS LIFE
Colton called and said, “You wanna go out shootin’ bunnies with me?”
“Are you kidding?” said Merinda.
“Nope.”
It was January and the town was blustered half to death with blown-out, raggedy Christmas decorations and everything was glutted and hungover with the holiday season and still the bigger part of winter had to be faced. Nights were coming early and dirty, staining streetlights, cast
ing no shadows into the disappointment of itself. Days hung low and short, like they could barely stand to be here at all and there was nothing for a body to do except wait until the days grew longer and the sky lifted and the sun came back from the south.
“Bunnies?” said Merinda.
“Yep,” said Colton.
Merinda sighed. “What is it, Colt? It’s blowing sideways out there.”
“That’s because this ain’t Florida,” said Colton.
“Can’t you tell me on the phone?”
“Nope.”
“Okay,” said Merinda. “I’ll meet you at the Maverick.”
“I’m already there,” said Colton.
Sure enough, Colton was standing up against his white F150 in the parking lot of the Maverick, the snow blowing off his Carhartt jacket, chin down against the wind, cowboy boots heel-dug into the ice-covered asphalt. Merinda pulled up in her little blue Escort with the hula girl on the dash. She switched off the engine and got into the passenger seat of the pickup truck. Colton climbed in behind the wheel and they were out of the parking lot before Merinda had her feet all the way pulled up into the cab. “Don’t worry if you run over my feet,” said Merinda.
“I won’t,” said Colton.
And that was all that was said all the way out to the Cumberland Flats. Then Colton switched off the truck, reached back for his .22, and put the gun across his lap.
“There aren’t any bunnies out here,” said Merinda.
“Nope,” said Colton.
Merinda looked out the window at the way the snow-covered ground reflected brighter than the sky, turning the world into a silver basin, the odd star poking feeble winter light down from the filthy sky. And that’s how the world stayed for some time—no bunnies and all the silence a person could stand—a careless, unpeopled silence that went back to before there were words for it.
Then, “She’s pregnant,” said Colton.
The Legend of Colton H Bryant Page 12
