by Annie Proulx
As twilight advanced she cried angrily, raging at the tiny misstep that might cost her everything. Her tongue stuck to the roof of her dry mouth. Eventually, leaning against the cooling rock, she fell into a half doze, starting awake many times. Her trapped leg was numb. Thirst and the cold mountain air fastened onto her like leeches. Her neck ached, and she pulled her shoulders forward. She shivered, wrapped her arm around herself, but the shivering intensified until she was racked with deep, clenching shudders. Possible scenes rolled through her head. Could she get so cold the trapped leg would shrink enough to let her pull it out? She pulled again, the fiftieth time, and could feel the edge of the huge stone pressing down on the top of her kneecap. Could she summon the strength to pull the leg relentlessly up even if the edge of the rock cut or crushed the kneecap? She tried until the pain overwhelmed. The effort eased the shuddering for a few minutes, but soon her muscles were clenching violently again. She prayed for morning, remembered how hot it had been every day. She thought if she could just get warm she would get back some strength, and if she had water, after she drank, surely she could get the leg out. She could pour water—if she had it—down her leg and perhaps the water would provide enough lubrication to let her get free. As she thought about this she realized that urine might both warm her and lubricate the trapped leg. But the warmth was fleeting and any lubrication went unnoticed by the rock, which had now passed from inanimate object to malevolent personality.
Between shuddering spasms she fell into tiny snatches of sleep just a few seconds in duration. Finally the stars paled and the sky turned the color of crabapple jelly.
“Come on, come on,” she begged the sun, which rose with interminable slowness. At last sunlight struck the ridge to the west, but she was still in cold shadow. An hour passed. She could hear birds. One perched on the edge of the cruel rock just out of her reach. If she could seize it she would bite its head off and drink the blood. But the air was slowly warming even if the sun rays were still not touching the rock. Her leg felt like a great pounding column. At last the blessed sun fell across her body, and gradually the shuddering slowed. The wonderful heat relaxed her and she nodded off for long minutes. But each time she snapped awake her thirst was a disease, enflaming every pore of her body, swelling her throat. She could feel her fat tongue thickening.
The sun’s warmth, so pleasant and grateful, became heat, burning her exposed arms, her neck and face. The eagles screamed overhead. By noon her smarting skin and clamorous thirst overshadowed the injured leg. Her eyes were scratchy and hot, and she had to blink to see the distant scree cones that seemed to pulse in the heat. By sunset those naked peaks had changed to heaps of glowing metal shavings. Several times throughout the day she imagined Marc’s approach and called out to him. A fox ran up toward the snowbank with something in its mouth.
Now she took new stock of the object that was imprisoning her. It was an irregularly shaped block of granite roughly three feet long and two feet high, the top a sloping table with a scooped declivity a foot or so long and perhaps two inches deep in the center. She could just reach the declivity with her fingers.
The sun notched down the sky, changing the rock shadows. A curious marmot ran to the top of the adjacent rock and stared at her, ran down beneath it, reappeared from a different direction. Johnson, the grey jay, flew in and out of her vision so often he seemed a floater. There was nothing to see but Johnson, the marmot, the dots of black lichen, the eagles in the sky. There was only one thing to think about. Then, as the sun declined, there was another: night and cold.
The rock lost its heat slowly but with cruel inevitability. The sun crashed below the horizon and immediately a stream of chill air flowed down from the snow slopes. At first the coolness felt good on her burned skin, but within the hour she was shivering. She knew what was coming and so did her body, which seemed to brace itself. Far overhead she heard the drone of a small plane engine. Her mind raced to think of a way she could signal a plane the next day. She had a reflecting mirror in her backpack. If only she had worn her watch; if only she had brought the cell phone. If only she was not alone. If only she and Marc had not quarreled. If only he would come. Now. She thought that the sounds of his approach she had imagined during the day must have been a fox raiding her backpack. The night dragged and she dozed woozily for longer periods, minutes instead of seconds, bent over at the waist, for the rock made a kind of slanting table at just the height to cripple cotton pickers and short-row hoers. The leg alternated between numbness and throbbing.
The morning was bitterly familiar. She felt she had been trapped here since infancy. Nothing before the rock was real. She was a mouse in a mousetrap. Everything was the same, the brightening sky, the yearning for the sun’s heat. Her tongue filled her mouth and her fingers were stiff. She mistook the grey jay, Johnson, standing two feet away from her on the far edge of the rock, for a wolf. The dull peaks at the height of land were very like monstrous ocean waves, and she could see them swell and roll. The surface of the rock holding her in its grasp was fine-grained, lustrous, dotted with pinprick lichens. The sky bent over the rock. Something smelled bad. Was it her leg or her urine-soaked jeans. Again her drying eyes went to the ocean waves, back down to the rock, to Johnson, who had now taken the guise of the sleeve of her grey chenille bathrobe, to the surface of the rock, to her cramping hands and back again to the naked scree slopes. She had not known that dying could be so boring. She fell asleep for moments and dreamed about the granite mousetrap, built with such care by an unknown stonemason. She dreamed that her father had pulled up a chair nearby. He said that her leg was going to wither and drop off, but that she could make a nice crutch from a small pine and hop back down the trail. She dreamed that a rare butterfly landed on the rock and an entomologist who looked like Marc came for it, easily lifting the stone from her leg and showing her the special mountain wheelchair he had brought to get her down the slopes.
When she snapped back to consciousness the sky hunched over the rock, the slopes, the high snowbanks oozed and sagged, undulating in rhythm with the bald knobs. Time itself writhed and fluttered. Johnson the jay was making thick booming sounds such as no bird had ever before produced. He was a drum, an empty oil barrel on which someone was beating a message, a talking drum. She almost understood. The sun seemed to go up and down like a yo-yo, splitting her eyes with light, then disappearing. Something was happening. She could just make out tiny lichens, transparent, hopping on the stone, on the backs of her hands, on her head and arms. She opened her mouth and the lichens became rain falling on her roasted tongue. Immediately she felt a surge of gratification and pleasure. She cupped her hands to catch the rain but they were too stiff. The rain poured off her hair, dripped from the end of her nose, soaked her shirt, filled the declivity in the top of the rock with blessed water that she could not quite reach.
She drank the downpour, feeling strength and reason return. When the storm moved away her head was clearer. The hard blue sky pressed down and the sun began to pull in the moisture like someone reeling in a hose. She managed to get her shirt off and by making a feeble toss at the water-filled declivity, which held several cups of water, landed one sleeve in the precious puddle. She pulled it toward her and sucked the moisture from the sleeve, repeating the gesture until she had swallowed it all. Not far away she could hear one of the tiny mountain streams rattling through the stones. Her mind was lucid enough to realize that the rain might have only postponed one of the eternal verities. She could see other thunderheads to the east, but nothing to the northwest, the direction of the prevailing wind. The grey jay was not in her sight line.
She had sopped the declivity dry with her shirt, and now she pulled it back on against the burning sun. The gravelly soil had swallowed the rain. There was nothing to do but squint against the glittering world. The cycle started once more. Within an hour her thirst, which, before the storm, had begun to dim, returned with ferocity. Her entire body, her fingernails, her inner ears, the ends of he
r greasy hair, screamed for water. She bored holes in the sky looking for more rain.
In the night lightning teased in the distance but no more rain fell. The top of the imprisoning rock became a radiant plain under a sliver of ancient moonlight.
By morning the temporary jolt of strength and clarity was gone. She felt as though electricity was shooting up through the rock and into her torso, needles and pins and the numbness that followed was almost welcome, although she dimly knew what it meant. Apparitions swarmed from the snowbanks above, fountains and dervishes, streaming spigots, a helicopter with a waterslide, a crowd of garishly dressed people reaching down, extending their hands to her. All day a desiccating hot wind blew and made her nearly blind. She could not close her eyes. The sun was horrible and her tongue hung in her mouth like a metal bell clapper, clacking against her teeth. Her hands and arms had changed to black and grey leather, a kind of lichen. Her ears swarmed with rattling and buzzing and her shirt seemed made of a stiff metal that chafed her lizard skin.
In the long struggle to get her painful shirt off, through the buzzing in her ears, through her cracking skin she heard Marc. He was wearing the hobnail boots and coming up the trail behind her. This was no illusion. She fought to clear her senses and heard it clearly, the hobnail boots sharply click-click-clicking up the granite section of trail. She tried to call his name, but “Marc” came out as a guttural roar, “Maaaa…,” a thick and frightening primeval sound. It startled the doe and her half-grown fawns behind her, and they clattered down the trail, black hooves clicking over the rock out of sight and out of hearing.
Tits-Up in a Ditch
Her mother had been knockout beautiful and no good and Dakotah had heard this from the time she recognized words. People said that Shaina Lister with aquamarine eyes and curls the shining maroon of waterbirch bark had won all the kiddie beauty contests and then had become the high school slut, knocked up when she was fifteen and cutting out the day after Dakotah was born, slinking and wincing, still in her hospital johnny, down the back stairs of Mercy Maternity to the street, where one of her greasy pals picked her up and headed west for Los Angeles. It was the same day television evangelist Jim Bakker, a found-out and confessed adulterer, resigned from his Praise the Lord money mill, his fall mourned by Bonita Lister, Shaina’s mother. Bonita’s husband, Verl, blamed the television for Shaina’s wildness and her hatred of the ranch.
“She seen it was okay on the teevee and so she done it.” He said he wanted to get rid of the set but Bonita said there was no sense in locking up the horse after the barn burned down. Although Verl deplored the corrupting influence of television he said that since he was paying for the electricity he might as well get some use out of the thing. And saw danger, mystery, secrets and humiliation.
Verl and Bonita Lister were in their late thirties and stuck with the baby. If it had been a boy, Verl said, letting the words squeeze out around his roll-yer-own, he could have helped with the chores when he got to size. And inherited the ranch, was the implied finish to the sentence. Verl had named Dakotah after his homesteading great-grandmother, born in the territory, married and widowed and married again only after she had proved up on the place and the deed was in her name and in her hand. Later she was known for ridding the family of fleas by boiling the wash in a mixture of sheep dip and kerosene. In a day when the mourning period for a husband was two or three years and for a wife was three months, she had worn black for her first husband an insulting six weeks, then taken up a homestead claim. Verl treasured a photograph showing her with the precious deed, standing in front of her neat clapboarded house, a frowsy white dog leaning against her checkered skirt. She held one hand behind her back, and Verl said this was because she smoked a pipe. Dakotah was almost sure she could see a wisp of smoke curling up, but Bonita said it was dust raised by the wind. Since that pioneer time the country had become trammeled and gnawed, stippled with cattle, coal mines, oil wells and gas rigs, striated with pipelines. The road to the ranch had been named Sixteen Mile, though no one was sure what that distance signified.
Bottle-blond Bonita (her great-grandfather had been a squaw man and black hair was in the genes) made an early grandmother. Ranch-raised and trained, she counted the grandchild as a difficulty that had to be met. She was used to praising thankless work as the right and good way, but what she was going to do without Jim Bakker’s exhortation and encouragement she didn’t know. First, an impaired husband, the endless labor and (sometimes forced) good humor that was expected of women, then a bad-girl daughter, and now the bad girl’s baby to raise. Verl Lister was burden enough. He could not run the ranch alone and they often had to ask their neighbors to throw together and help out. Of course it was because he had been a wild boy in his youth, had rodeoed hard, a bareback rider who suffered falls, hyperextensions and breaks that had bloomed into arthritis and aches as he aged. A trampling had broken his pelvis and legs so that now he walked with the slinking crouch of a bagpipe player. She could not fault him for ancient injuries, and remembered him as the straight-backed, curly-headed young man with beautiful eyes sitting on his horse, back straight as a metal fence post. But a man, she thought, was supposed to endure pain silently, cowboy up and not bitch about it all day long. She, too, had arthritis in her left knee, but she suffered in silence.
Throughout the 1980s it was a puzzle where all the able-bodied labor had gone. During the energy boom, oil companies had sucked up Wyoming boys, offering high wages that no rancher, not even Wyatt Match, the county’s richest cattleman, could pay. When the bust came there were still no ranch hands for hire. “You’d think,” said Verl, “with all them oil companies pullin out there’d be fifty guys on every corner lookin for work.” But the hands, after their taste of roustabout money, had followed the dollar away from Wyoming.
Verl was a trash rancher, said Wyatt Match, oyster eyes sliding around behind his gold-rimmed lenses that darkened in sunlight, and not so much because his land was overgrazed, but because there were fences down and gates hanging by one hinge, binder twine everywhere, rusting machinery in the pastures, and because the Listers’ kitchen table was covered with a vinyl tablecloth showing the Last Supper. There was an old sedan with the hood up in one of the irrigation ditches. A defunct electric stove rested on the front porch. The Lister cows roamed the roads, constantly suffered accidents, drowning in the creek in spring flood, bogging in mud pots that came from nowhere.
Spring was the hardest time, the weather alternating between blizzards and Saharan heat. On a snow-whipped evening, Dakotah setting the table for supper, Verl said a cow who had tried to climb a steep, wet slope that apparently slid out from under her, had landed on her back in the ditch.
“Had me some luck today. Goddamn cow got herself tits-up in the ditch couple days ago. Dead, time I found her,” he said in a curiously satisfied tone, squinting through faded lashes, winking his eyes, the same aquamarine color as those of the wayward Shaina.
“Not every man would say that is luck,” said Bonita wearily. She pulled at a stray thread protruding from the leg seam of her pink slacks. It was an impractical color but she believed pastels projected freshness and youth. She went to the sink, stepping over Bum, Verl’s ancient heeler crippled by cow kicks, and began scrubbing out the only pot large enough to boil potatoes in quantity, a pot she used several times a day.
“It is, in a way of speakin.”
She couldn’t puzzle that one out, even if she had had the time. With Verl it was one thing after another. He went into the national forest to cut wood every fall, and she knew that he someday would cut himself in half with the cranky old chain saw. She almost hoped he would.
For Verl Lister everything turned on luck, and he had experienced very little of the good kind. His secret boyhood dream had been to become a charismatic radio man meeting singing personalities, giving the news, announcing songs, describing the weather. All of this grew from a small, cheap radio he had earned as a boy selling Rosebud salve, riding ranch to ran
ch on an aged mare. At night, forbidden to listen past nine o’clock, he put it under the covers and turned it whisper low, listening to honey-voiced Paul Kallinger on a high-watt border station, the lonely hearts club ads, pitches for tonics and elixirs, yodeling cowboys, and, by the time he was in his teens, Wolfman Jack of scandalous sex talk and panting and howls. Yet he never wanted to be like Wolfman Jack. Kallinger was his ideal.
He had no idea how to get into the radio game, as he thought of it, and the plan faded as he grew into work on the home ranch. For fun he rode broncs, the source of his present miseries. He still kept the radio in his truck on constantly, had a radio in every room of the house despite the region’s bad reception. Mostly he listened to the stations that featured songs about lost love and drinking, used car sales ads, church doings and auctions, stations that were pale imitations of the old border blasters of his youth. When NPR came to Wyoming in the 1960s, he judged it dull and hoity-toity. For him television was never as good as radio. He found that screen images were inferior to those in his mind.
