Bad Dirt

by Annie Proulx

  A week later Creel Zmundzinski had a rancorous run-in with two Texas lawyers and their friend, a California IRS agent, who swore Creel would be audited every year of his future life, and that his children and his children’s children would also be audited.

  “Another good reason not to git married,” said Creel.

  The lawyers said he would do hard time in a maximum-security cell.

  “I sure hope it won’t be in the cell next a yours,” he said, smiling.

  None of them had Wyoming hunting licenses, although two produced Texas licenses and claimed there was a reciprocal agreement between Texas and Wyoming to honor each other’s licenses. Creel laughed and said he didn’t think so. The men had cut off the heads of the five bull elk they had shot, abandoning the carcasses in an irrigation ditch, clogging it and causing it to overflow. He made them clean out the ditch, dig a pit, and bury the fly-blown carcasses, then drive ahead of him to the Pinchbutt pullout. He was careful to park near the road. It was a pullout to be approached with caution. He prodded them toward the far end.

  “Just stand over there,” he directed, pointing to where the gravel had a darker color.

  They slouched carelessly in the direction he was pointing. The faint circular depression was almost invisible, but he recognized it by the rock he had dropped after the Reverend Pecker’s quick exit and the darker gravel that marked the perimeter of the opening. He supposed it was soot that discolored the edges. He took up his citation book wondering how to get them to jump up and down or stamp. He didn’t even know if that would work. Maybe Preacher Pecker had been an isolated case. Maybe it only worked with backsliding ministers. Maybe some kind of cosmic forces had been in alignment. He pretended to ponder, putting his pen to his lips and tilting his head to one side.

  “Gentlemen, tell you what. I’ll let you go this time if you’ll take part in a silly little thing. For my own personal satisfaction, if I’m goin a let you go I want a see you look ridiculous first. I’d like you to give a little jump—like this”—and he demonstrated—“and then I’ll laugh, but I won’t write you up.”

  The three friends looked at one another and made faces indicating they were dealing with a lunatic.

  “Let’s humor the man,” said the IRS agent, and he gave a tiny jump, barely an inch. Nothing happened, but Creel saw a single faint tendril of smoke in the right place.

  “Come on, make it a good jump,” he said, leaping high himself to encourage them.

  One of the lawyers sprang into the air with a grace that Creel admired, and as the man landed, the ground opened beneath the trio and they dropped into the glowing borehole. The IRS man had been standing with one foot outside the circle, and for a moment it seemed he might escape, but the tunnel exerted a powerful suction. Creel could feel it from twenty feet away as he watched the IRS man whisk in like a fly into a vacuum cleaner nozzle.

  So, he thought, the trick was in getting them to jump. It was a wonderful discovery, and he wasted no time in telling his fellow wardens the secret of the Pinchbutt pullout. The Hellhole, as he called it, saved a great deal of tedious paperwork and became so popular that sometimes several Game & Fish trucks were lined up along the road waiting a turn at the facilities. Wardens drove many miles to get outlaws to the wonderful hole. One wrongdoer, after a three-hour drive, threatened to sue for cruel and inhuman detention as the interior of the warden’s truck reeked of wet dog, manure, offal, and sardine sandwiches. There is no record that such a suit was ever filed.

  They were all sworn to secrecy. Creel did not even tell his closest friend, Plato Bucklew.

  The next season Creel Zmundzinski clumped into his favorite bar, Pee Wee’s in Elk Tooth. He sat at a back table where Plato Bucklew sat drinking boilermakers and reading the lonely hearts columns in the paper. Creel sighed, ostentatiously. Plato looked up.

  “Matter with you? Didn’t get any bad guys today?”

  “Got plenty. My hand’s about wore out from writin tickets. Gimme the same thing,” he said to Amanda Gribb, waving his hand at Plato’s beverages.

  “So your hand is wore out—nothin unusual in that, is there?” He put a salacious twist on the question.

  “It’s goin a be like that the rest a the season, thanks to the goddamn Forest Circus.”

  “What’s that supposed a mean?”

  “It means the goddamn Forest Circus screwed up the best deal I ever had.” And he told him the complete story about the Hellhole, about the line of wardens waiting to use it, about the unearthly shrieks of malefactors as they slid down into the brimstone.

  “And? What’s Forest got a do with it?” Plato Bucklew worked for the Forest Service, and as much as he complained about his hardheaded, shortsighted bosses he did not like to hear a red-shirt, even Creel, put the organization down.

  “Tell you what, I got me a bad nasty one today, cocky little rat works in a bakery in Iron Mule, killed a doe. Then he drops his pants and gets down on the ground and proceeds to have sexual relations with the dead doe. And I’m standin about twenty feet away.”

  “Jesus!” Plato inhaled his whiskey the wrong way. “That’s”— he drew on his course in criminal psychology—“that’s like deviant bestial necrophilia! What’d you write him up for?”

  “Nothin, except he was in a buck-only area. Game laws don’t say a word about deviant hunter necrofoliage or whatever.”

  “Well, look at the bright side. It could a been a lot more writin. At least it wasn’t a buck—then it would a been homosexual deviant bestial necrophilia. So what did you do?”

  “So I tell him to get his pants up and I take him to that certain pulloff and things sure look different. Looks like the Forest Service had a convention a road scrapers and backhoes in there. It’s all opened up, room for fifty cars, fancy trailhead signs, posts, two a the new shitters, garbage can, trail maps, the works. But I can’t figure out where the sweet spot was. I walked all over that place, smackin the ground with a fence post Forest left layin on the bank, and nothin. Nothin! I got the guy standin there watchin me. He must a thought I was nuts. In the end I had a write him a regular ticket. I told the other wardens, and at lunch we was all there, jumpin around, pokin at the gravel, tryin a find that sweet, sweet spot. Totalnada . It’s gone.”

  “Kind a hard a believe it was ever there. You didn’t say nothin about it last year. Sounds like hyperactive imagination. Or mass hypnosis.”

  “I wish you’d never took that damn criminal psychology course. It was asecret . Couldn’t tell anybody.”

  “Suppose so? There was a memo come in late last fall to Jumbo Nottage about a lot a traffic out there at that pulloff. Parkin problem. I guess he thought maybe it was a good place for multiple use enlargement. He probly thought the traffic was tourists and day-trippers. Didn’t occur to him that Game & Fish was roastin citizens in there like ears a corn.” He signaled Amanda Gribb.

  “Amanda? Ain’t there a mix drink called the Devil’s Somethinor-Other?”

  “I’ll look in the book.” Amanda had been trying to hear the low-voiced conversation but missed everything except “bestial necrophilia,” which Plato had pronounced in a rather loud voice.

  “Yep, there’s somethin called a Devil’s Tail. It’s made with vodka, rum, and apricot brandy.”

  “That’s it. Give us two a those. Doubles. In honor a my friend, Warden Creel, who pulled the devil’s tail all last year and wants a do it again.”

  The Indian Wars Refought

  ONE SUMMER DAY AROUND THE TURN OF THE LASTcentury, two men in overalls, one holding a roofing hammer, stood in a Casper street and looked at a new building.

  “I guess that’ll show the cow crowd who’s got the big sugar in this town,” said one.

  The other man smiled as though testing his lips and said, “One or two, maybe. You should a went into lawyerin, Verge, it’d beyour buildin we are puttin up.”

  “Rather have a ranch. That’s where the real money lays.”

  “There he is right now,” said
the man with the hammer, nodding at the tall frock-coated figure striding toward them with his scissory gait. He did not look at them but at the building.

  “Well, well, boys,” said lawyer Gay G. Brawls. “That’s the queen of Casper, and we’re the ones put her up.”

  In the decades after statehood every Wyoming town had to have at least one imposing building. These banks, courthouses, opera halls, hotels, railroad stations, and commercial buildings were constructed of local-quarry stone, of concrete blocks shaped to resemble stone, and some were iron-fronts ordered from catalogs. Few have held on to their original purpose and so today a cell phone company operates incongruously in a handsome opera house, and the ornate Sweetwater Brewery is occupied by a fence company.

  The iron-front Brawls Commercial gave the impression of a kind of extravagant prosperity, surrounded as it was by flimsy false-front wood structures. The various parts of the building— a handsome cornice, pilasters that separated windows and doors, a lintel stamped with Egyptian motifs separating the ground floor from the upper story—had all been shipped by railroad from St. Louis. A neoclassical entry with garlanded cornices and inset colored glass distinguished the front. On that summer day in 1900 lawyer Gay G. Brawls carried his own papers to his new office upstairs. The ground floor housed a dry-goods shop behind the town’s first plate-glass window and featured bolts of calico, fustian, and trimmings. In the back was an up-to-date selection of men’s suits, which the proprietor, Mr. Isaac Frasket, altered to fit the broad-shouldered, small-waisted cowboys who plunged for the outfits. He paid an extra rent to store hatboxes and millinery supplies in one of the rooms on the second floor, side by side with boxes of old depositions, wills, and case notes.

  Brawls’ practice was busy and select. The best-known of his clients was William F. Cody—Buffalo Bill. Lawyer Brawls, in concert with other legal beagles, helped the showman teeter along the edges of his various bankruptcies occasioned by business dealings with the infamous Denver newspaper and circus entrepreneurs, Bonfils and Tammen.

  Lawyer Brawls, thirty-three years old when his building went up, had long horseman’s legs, black hair as fine as cat fur, and a beard shadow like a mask. He was almost a handsome man, his appearance spoiled only by a reddish mole on his left eyelid, but the brilliant aquamarine color of his irises pulled attention away from that flaw. He seemed made for the saddle but suffered an allergy to horses at a time when horses were transportation. Even ten minutes in an open carriage set his eyes streaming and a clenching headache ricocheting behind his eyes, so he walked everywhere, and if a destination was too far to travel by shank’s mare he didn’t go. He owned one of the first motorcars in Casper.

  In 1919 Mr. Frasket, the old dry-goods merchant, died and his corpse was shipped back east. An ice cream parlor rented the premises and became a popular gathering place. Seven months later Gay G. Brawls himself, on his way back up to his office after a lemon phosphate, dropped some business folders on the stairs, stumbled and slipped on them, cracked his head, and after a week in a coma, died at age fifty-three.

  His son, Archibald Brawls, also a lawyer, and as tall and dark as his father and with the same blue eyes and born-to-the-saddle cowboy good looks except for a mouthful of bad teeth, moved into the second-floor offices. His hours in the dentist’s chair taught him something of pain.

  “Mr. Brawls,” said the dentist, “I can make you a good set a nut-crackers, pull out these diseased teeth, and after she heals up, with the new plates you’ll be free from pain forever. And the new set will look good, not like these bad gappy ones.”

  “Do it,” said Brawls, and within a month his bad old ivories had been replaced with dentures that seemed carved from a glacier.

  Archibald Brawls’ business was lively in the 1920s, despite his youth. He acted for an important rancher north of Casper, a man with political connections whose deeded land abutted the Emergency Naval Oil Reserve No. 3, just then becoming infamous as Teapot Dome. The rancher, John Bucklin, had more than once dined with the Interior Secretary, Albert B. Fall, a political animal who wrested control of the reserve away from the Navy and then leased it to oilman Harry Sinclair in a classic sweetheart deal. Fall was a man who disdained the nascent conservation movement in favor of full-throttle resource exploitation, setting a certain tone for the future. Big money changed hands and Bucklin worried about being swept into the government’s dust-pan of investigation. The accumulating legal paper crowded Brawls’ office. But, as he said, showing his icy smile, it’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow somebody a little good. The Teapot scandal was a turning point in his career, and after Fall went to prison, young lawyer Brawls’ interests shifted from petty affairs such as deeds and wills to representation of timber and oil interests, railroads, irrigation rights settlement, and the wonderfully cloudy law of mineral leases.

  He increased his storage space, stacking his father’s papers and books in the back of a deep closet. He added his own legal junk, the boxes jammed high and tight.

  He made money all through the Depression. Others in Natrona County got rich as well. While the rest of the country was suffering dust storms and bread lines, Casper enjoyed a flood of oil profits. It set off a building boom. The Brawls Commercial was no longer the premier structure in the town.

  In 1939 Archibald Brawls bought a ranch north of Casper—the former property of Bucklin, whom he had counseled in the Teapot Dome affair—and on weekends began to live the life of a distinguished rancher. It pleased him to improve his herd with pedigreed stock. The property was mostly yardang and trough, the tops of the ridges shaved smooth by eons of westerlies. It lay just on the northern edge of the great wind corridor that sweeps the state from the Red Desert to the Nebraska border. But, although Brawls and his wife, Kate, a blond with a face she had clipped from a magazine and the caramel eyes of a lizard, entertained important politicians and ranchers, although their New Year’s galas and Fourth of July ranch barbecues were great events in Wyoming society, somehow their lives were tragic. Brawls wanted to build up a ranch kingdom with his boys, but his oldest son, Vivian, was killed in the Second World War. Basford, the second son, who was something of a drinker, steered his Ford into a fatal draw and died alone in the sagebrush. Then Kate sued for divorce, moved to Denver, and remarried a podiatrist. The third son, Sage, graduated from Boston University Law School in 1959 and joined his father’s practice. He always wore a suit, in contrast to his father’s boots, twill pants, and many-pocketed vest.

  “Somebody in this outfit has to look like a lawyer,” he joked.

  Archibald raised one eyebrow, exposed his cold teeth. “You still don’t know, even at your age, that it’s ranching interests run this state? They come to us because they recognize”—and here he hooked a thumb in his vest armhole, omnipresent cigarette dribbling ash down the front—“that weknow their problems.” He adjusted his Stetson, which like a Texas sheriff, he always wore in the office.

  Clients saw how strongly the Brawls men resembled one another, compared the framed photograph of Gay G. Brawls that hung in the anteroom with the living examples of Archibald and Sage. They were all rangy, all with heavy dark beards that showed immediately after they shaved, all too tall for doorways. When finally Archibald Brawls died of lung cancer in 1962, the year lightning demolished the stubby spout of Teapot Dome, his Sinclair stock and his holdings in the oil-rich Salt Creek fields north of Casper had made him wealthy. The son, Sage, inherited the ranch, the law practice, the money.

  Sage Brawls, after a notorious period of wild-oats sowing, married Georgina Crawshaw of Wheatland, fifteen years younger than he. Her great-grandfather, Waile Crawshaw, had been known throughout the west as a sharp judge of horseflesh. In 1910 he had bought dozens of fine thoroughbreds for the proverbial song in New York when that state moved against horse racing and the thoroughbred market crashed. He shipped them to Wyoming and bred them to his polo ponies. His children continued the business, and Crawshaw mounts played on the polo fields of the world. />
  Georgina, raised on the family ranch, was as blond as Sage’s mother, but thin and athletic, with a body like that of a strong boy. She had big, wiry hands and bit her thumbnails. It was she who introduced Sage to polo and crossword puzzles.