Bad Dirt

by Annie Proulx

The girl’s face was black-red, and he was afraid she was going to start crying or shouting. But she said, “You wait,” and ran up the stairs to her room. In a few seconds she was back again with paper in her hands.

  “You can make fun,” she said, “but I been readin all that Buffalo Bill Cody stuff in Mr. Brawls’ boxes, there, all that stuff about the movie he was goin a make, that he did make, called itThe Indian Wars Refought, and they staged a couple a the important battles. Most a the movie was the reenactment of Wounded Knee. For the movie Buffalo Bill got all the survivors together, Indians

  and army soldiers, and had them do it again for the camera. Put himself in as a scout. The books say it was the first documentary. The guns was loaded with blanks and only passed out at the last minute because some a the Indians wanted a use real bullets and shoot the army. General Miles was ridin around orderin everbody do this and do that. It was all very realistic and exact, and guys who’d been there almost passed out when they saw it.”

  She took a deep breath and looked at him with red-faced sincerity. “Thebig thing is, that movie has totally disappeared and there are people would give a lot a money for that film. There are no copies anywhere. It was only showed a couple a times, then, after Buffalo Bill died in 1917 Essanay gave it another title and started showin it. But nobody paid much attention and now it’s lost. There’s some think the government got rid of it because it was too realistic, showed the U.S. Army in a bad light shootin women and babies with that big Hotchkiss machine gun cannon.”

  “No shit! That’s the film you found in them little cans?”

  “Yeah. Or I think, goin by the labels on the cans. Can’t really tell until somebody looks at them.”

  “Hell, let’s go see. Where are they?”

  “Dad, we can’t do that. They been sealed up in those airtight cans for ninety years. You open those cans and the film will disintegrate right before your eyes. They got to go to a special laboratory specializes in film preservation. Get opened underwater or something.”

  She rattled the paper. “Anyway, there’s a couple reviews in Mr. Brawls’ boxes from when it was first showed in 1914 and one guy thought it was the greatest movie ever made and most a them wrote how nothin like it had been ever done before. But I found somebody not so crazy about that movie. They had it at the library in a Buffalo Bill folder. This Chauncey Yellow Robe didn’t like Buffalo Bill’s movie. He was a Sioux, but it don’t say from where.”

  She stepped forward and by that motion made the kitchen space in front of the counter a stage. She began to recite, her voice deepening, impassioned, and for Charlie Parrott, leaning against the wall, his daughter, eyes narrowed and jaw outthrust, became the long-dead Yellow Robe, speaking with bitter scorn. His hair stirred.

  “‘You ask how to settle the Indian troubles. I have a suggestion. Let Buffalo Bill and General Miles take some soldiers and go around the reservations and shoot them down. That will settle his troubles. Let them do in earnest what they have been doing at the battlefield at Wounded Knee. These two, who were not even there when it happened, went back and became heroes for a moving picture machine.’”

  She had become the old orator, her eyes fixed on Charlie, her right hand extended, shaking, the nail of her index finger a glowing coal. She continued, her voice swollen with Yellow Robe’s contempt.

  “‘You laugh, but my heart does not laugh. Women and children and old men of my people, my relatives, were massacred with machine guns by soldiers of this Christian nation while the fighting men were away. It wasnot a glorious battle, and I should think these two men would be glad they were not there; but no, they want to be heroes for moving pictures. You will be able to see their bravery and their hairbreadth escapes soon in your theatres.’”

  She stopped, put her head down, chin on her chest. Gradually she became Linny again.

  “Hey, that was scary,” said her father. “It felt like old Yellow Robe was right here in the kitchen.”

  “At least his words were.” She spoke in her normal voice. Yellow Robe had gone back into the sky.

  But the recitation had moved Charlie Parrott. He wondered if his mother were still alive. A memory of the reservation came unbidden, a blistering day, the sky white and dry, heat waves trembling above the junk cars, one of them where a woman named Mona plied her trade. Nothing moved, no dogs, no people, no lift of wind stirring the dust and trash. He recalled the awful boredom of the place, the hopeless waiting for nothing. He shuddered.

  “Tell you what. Soon as Georgina gets back we’ll go down there. To Pine Ridge. I’ll find out who is still around. You can see for yourself. We’ll take that lousy Land Rover a yours—it’ll look good on the rez.”

  “What, today?”

  “You bet.”

  “Georgina will be pissed, a lot a those boxes and papers still got to be done. Because I probably won’t come back.”

  “I know that, but I bet she can hire somebody in town, some college kid finishing out the summer. It’s not the end a the world.”

  “And how about the film cans? Like, they really are valuable. They could be worth a hundred thousand dollars to the right people.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Well. By rights they belong to Georgina. I guess it’s your decision what to do with them. Now, what say we get packed up? Georgina comes back I need a talk to her. Maybe an hour.”

  “What for? Let’s just go. Leave her a note.”

  “Unmannerly. I got a tell her what I’m doin, what the scene is. So she don’t worry.”

  “Goddammit!”

  “Linny, grow up. She means somethin a me. I’m not just walkin out without a word. And remember that all you been reading happened a long time ago—more than a hunderd years ago.”

  “No, Dad. To me it happened last week. I never knew any a that stuff. They don’t teach it in school. It gets me—” And she slammed her chest with a theatrical thump.

  “You’ll have to work it out yourself. We all do.” He knew nothing he said would be heard. She would get involved, and after a few years of passionate activism she might fall away from it and end up on urban sidewalks in the company of street chiefs and hookers. He went into the storage room off the kitchen, where she heard him shoving suitcases around.

  She understood finally that her father was weak, that all of his choices had been made passively because he let things go and go and go, waiting until situations crested, until the move was made for him. Her mother had left him, made her own way. He had ended up working on ranches even though he was smart because he didn’t have any ambition. She bet Georgina had picked him and he’d just gone along with it. She bit at her nails, an old habit from childhood. He was the classic irresponsible, passive guy, no Crazy Horse or Sitting Bull fired with resistance, but letting the whites push him around, believing that he had some kind of decent life. And, she believed, he couldn’t stand to kiss Georgina’s money goodbye—probably his last chance at real money, seeing he was in his forties. She despised his weakness but didn’t blame him. She would let him take her around the rez, introduce the relatives, and then he could go back to Georgina and the money. She’d find out the rest of it by herself.

  She packed rapidly, sorting through her clothes, cramming the short skirts and halter tops into the wastebasket. She was through with those clothes. She pulled on jeans and an overlarge T-shirt as long as a nightgown. She heard Georgina’s car pull up outside, the kitchen door slam, and the rumble of her father’s voice. The duffel bags were full. She was ready. Downstairs she heard the freezer door open and shut. She guessed Charlie was mixing Georgina a drink. He himself never drank. His voice rose and fell. What was he telling Georgina? The woman could never understand any of this. Linny sat on the edge of the bed and waited.

  After a long time her father’s voice ballooned up the stairwell.

  “Linny! You ready? Let’s roll.”

  She dragged the duffel bags out onto the landing and kicked them down the stairs.

  �
��O.K.,” she yelled. “Great.”

  She took three steps down, then turned and rushed back to the bedroom. The cans of film sat on the dresser. It was difficult getting the lids off the first two. Inside the first one the coils of old nitrate film were clotted and welded together in a solid mass. The next deteriorated before her eyes to nitrate dandruff. She knocked one film out onto the bed. It had a nasty smell, and as it uncoiled and broke apart she could see that the center of each frame had been burned through by the acidic gases that had attacked the emulsion.

  Then she was down the stairs, dragging the duffel bags.

  “Bye,” she called to Georgina, who stood on the porch, face expressionless, staring at Charlie.

  As they pulled out onto the main road he said, “What did you do about the film?”

  “Oh, I left it for her.”

  “Good girl,” he said, and he patted her still unwounded knee.

  The Trickle Down Effect

  DEBSIPPLE HAD HAD IT BOTH WAYS—EASY AND HARD. It had been easy when he was a kid lording it over his two sisters, enjoying the run of the ranch he’d believed would someday be his, getting first pick of the horses, hacking chunks off the don’t-touch devil’s food cake the cook had made for dinner. But as he moved into his mid-twenties the easy edges fell off. The ranch had gone to the Elk Tooth bank, his sisters lived in Oregon, there were no more good horses left, and he’d developed an allergy to chocolate. In a search for the famous solace of open spaces he’d built up a drinking habit. By the weary age of thirty he’d been married twice, and it hadn’t taken permanently either time despite the fact that he had small feet and a big pecker. Modern women had different standards than their grandmothers. Both wives had named alcohol abuse and Deb’s lack of steady income as crucial factors in the breakups. He smoked, too, but not much was made of that. Jeanine called him a sorry shit; Paula cried large round tears, said she loved him still but would be leaving him for a sheep rancher the coming weekend.

  “What. You are runnin off with some mangy sheepherder.”

  “Not a sheepherder. Rancher. He owns a sheep ranch.”

  “Sure he does. And if you are goin, don’t do me no favors to wait for the weekend, get the hell outright now .” And he helped her pack by throwing her clothes, makeup pots and jars, sewing machine, and other female accoutrements into the yard.

  Deb’s only asset was his flatbed truck. Most of what little money he made with occasional hauling funneled straight into Elk Tooth’s three bars, what bartender Amanda Gribb called the Wyoming trickle down effect. He would run up a big tab at the Pee Wee, and when Amanda leaned on him he switched to the Silvertip and the Pee Wee saw him not. When the Silvertip debt began to be mentioned he favored Muddy’s Hole and dropped hints that he was looking for a job or two. Everyone understood that he wasn’t interested in a real job but in a few days’ work. Sooner or later something came up, and when he collected he’d hit the Pee Wee, pay off his tab, and start a new one. So went the cycle of Deb Sipple’s years measured in bar bills and small work.

  Wyoming had been dry as a quart of sand for three years and Elk Tooth was in the heart of the drought disaster zone. Those ranchers who had held on to their herds hoping for rain were caught like mice. As the summer drew to its stove-lid end, the most precious commodity to those in the cow business was hay, and the prices demanded for it matched the prices for rubies. Ranchers spent hours on the telephone and searching the Internet for reasonably priced hay. No flimsy or wild rumor could be ignored. If a rancher heard of hay up in Saskatchewan that a seller described simply as “not moldy” she’d try for it.

  Most of the desperate ranchers were women, for in Elk Tooth lady ranchers abound, some who had stepped into ownership when a husband rancher died, some the mature daughters of men who had sired no male heirs, some ex-CEOs who had tossed up everything and headed for the high country, as close to Jackson as they could get.

  One of the ranchers was Fiesta Punch, a good horsewoman, but rough on the hired help. She ran Red Cheerios, a weird brand of exotics with white rings around their eyes her grandfather had bred up, but this summer their range was so badly gnawed it resembled the surface of an antique billiard table in an attic heavily populated by moths. There was no point in selling. The market was glutted and prices lower than breakeven. And she wanted to hold on to what was probably the only herd of Red Cheerios in existence. She had to get her hands on enough hay to carry them through the fall and winter. She owed that much to family heritage.

  The double trouble with scarce hay was that in addition to paying through the nose for the stuff, when she finally located some, she would have to face fearsome transport charges. The only decent hay grew in distant parts, and hay transporters knew a penned turkey when they saw one. Hauling the hay from Farmer X to Rancher Z could double the cost of the precious bales. Fiesta Punch was in a position to lose her shirt. On the other pan of the scale Deb Sipple, with his big flatbed truck, could almost guarantee himself several years of elbow security at the Pee Wee.

  Ms. Punch was hunched over her account books one night alternately adding figures and cracking her knuckles when the phone rang.

  “Fiesta?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t know me but this is the friend of a friend.”

  “Friend of a friend?” She could hear country and western music—Dwight Yoakam’s rock-drill voice—in the background. “What is it? You want to talk about urban legends?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. What can I do for you? I’m kind a busy.”

  “I know where you can git you some hay. Good hay.”

  “Where might that be? Shangsi Province? The Upper Volta region?”

  “No, just up there in Westconston. I got a friend in Cooke City and his cousin Björn got hay. It’s not so drouthy up there.”

  “Two or three bales, right?”

  “Wrong. He got eighty bales. Them big round ones, them thousand-pound ones you need a bale fork to lift.”

  “Let me see if I got this straight. Your friend is in Cooke City, Montana, and his cousin with the hay is in Wisconsin.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What kind a money does he want for it?” Wisconsin hay was expensive.

  The caller named a ridiculously low figure, seventy dollars a ton, the cost of hay three years earlier.

  “Must be full a weeds and thistles.”

  “It’s good hay. You can drive up there, look at it. But you better be fast, he won’t have it long. So far you’re the only one knows about it.” He gave her Björn’s phone number in Disk, Wisconsin.

  “So how come I’m the lucky rancher gets to hear about this great hay?” she said, but her question fell on a dead connection.

  She flew up to La Crosse, rented the airport’s last available car, and drove out to Disk. Björn Smith was a thready blond in his forties with a round head and beaky orange nose that gave him the look of a seagull. He showed her the hay, stowed in a capacious, fragrant barn. It was prime alfalfa hay, holding green. She pulled out a handful and looked at it—there was a high proportion of leaf to stem, it was pliable and clean. She noticed it had been cut when in the bud stage. There was nothing like Wisconsin alfalfa hay.

  “First cutting?” she asked.

  Björn nodded. “I could a sold it at the hay auction for more but Deb said you was a friend and needed hay bad. I guess you got a mean drought over there in Wyoming?”

  She twisted her mouth in sardonic agreement, paid him on the spot. There goes almost six grand, she thought.

  “I’ll get Deb come pick it up soon’s I can,” she said, folding the bill of sale into her wallet.

  “Sooner the better. I want a get out a here.”

  “Givin up farmin?”

  “Yeah. Goin a film school at UCLA.”