Bad Dirt

by Annie Proulx

  “No kiddin. Like learnin how to make movies?”

  “That’s right. I got ideas.”

  “Oh,” said Fiesta Punch, “we all gotthem .” Then, more kindly, “I hope you make it.”

  Deb Sipple was in Muddy’s Hole cutting the dust with his eleventh beer and seventh cigarette when Fiesta Punch came through the door and looked around, headed for him as if following a chalk line drawn across the floor.

  “Hello, Deb. That’s a filthy habit. Everbody else but you give up smokin. Anyways, I bought some hay up in Wisconsin and I want you to go pick it up as soon as possible. Tomorrow.”

  “Westconston! Hell, that’s halfway across the country. That’s the other side a the Mississippi. It’s almost in New York.”

  “Not quite. It’s in Disk, just over the Iowa line. As I think you know, so don’t play dumb.” She knew who the anonymous caller had been. “Speed is necessary. Your pal Björn wants to split and I need the hay. It’s a couple trips for you.”

  He put on a sly face. “You know I’m goin a bite your red rosy ass with a heavy price.”

  “That’s what I come to discuss.”

  “I got to ask two dollars fifty a ton.”

  “I’ll take it!” She could hardly believe her ears. She had been expecting to hear twenty or thirty dollars per ton.

  “Per mile,” said Deb Sipple.

  Fiesta Punch figured the damage rapidly. It was give or take nine hundred miles to Disk, Wisconsin. Eighty tons times two dollars and fifty cents was two hundred dollars per mile times give or take nine hundred miles was—no way.

  “That’s what I call a highway holdup. That’s over a hunderd eighty thousand dollars. That’s more’n the herd’s worth. I guess the spirit a Butch Cassidy ain’t dead yet.”

  “Fiesta, you could drive up there yourself in your pickup, bring it back a ton at a time. Or you could rent one a them U-Hauls. Shouldn’t take you more’n a few weeks a git her done if you work at it steady.”

  “You know I can’t do that. I got responsibilities here. I got bovines need lookin after. Tell you what, I’ll pay you fifty dollars a ton and no mileage charge. It comes to about four grand. I can afford that, just barely, and you will make out like a pig in a feather bed.”

  “Oink, oink,” said Deb Sipple. “Make it five.” Fiesta Punch nodded grimly.

  Someone put money in the jukebox, and Dwight Yoakam began to sing.

  The first trip was easy. Deb Sipple drank a beer with Björn, had the truck loaded and secured in two hours, the hay bales lined up to make two huge cylinders. On the way back he took a northern route, stopped in Albert Lea, Minnesota, a town whose crimson past has faded to pink but where Deb Sipple had no trouble finding the Electric Silo, a honky-tonk where he took on some personal freight that gave him a bad headache by 4:00 a.m. In South Dakota he stopped for four cups of coffee and a bison steak and, after a cigarette and a piece of apple pie, was feeling well enough to continue. Fiesta Punch had him unload the hay in the pasture near her main gate.

  “I’ll pay you for the whole run when you bring the second load,” she said, then relented under the force of his pitiable pleading and paid him a hundred on account.

  The second trip was notable in every way. He got off to a bad start by picking up a female hitchhiker who told him she’d been in prison in Florida with Aileen Wuornos, the serial killer, whom she counted as her best friend. He made an excuse to stop at a service station and when, at his suggestion, she got out to use the ladies’ room, he took off. To steady his nerves he visited Albert Lea again and so missed the weather report warning of windstorms in the coming days, and when he pulled into Björn’s it was well past midnight. The hay man was not pleased and told him to sleep in his truck until daylight.

  It was noon before he woke up. It took four hours to load the hay, partly because the wind was gusting to sixty, partly because Deb Sipple was distracted to find he had smoked all his cigarettes in Albert Lea and his host laughed cruelly when he asked for tobacco. Then he discovered he had forgotten to bring the tarp.

  “What the hell, it gets wet it gets wet, right?”

  It is no fun to drive a big rig loaded with round hay bales under a dark sky in high wind with a hangover and the cigarette fits, but that’s how it was for Deb Sipple. When once again he came to Albert Lea it was nightfall and natural to pull into the Electric Silo, a bar he ranked second only to the Pee Wee. He thought briefly about moving to Minnesota. He apologized to the comely bar girl (who remembered him by name) for drinking only four beers, explained that he was in a hurry, bought three packs of cigarettes for the road, and said good night. Outside the wind had lessened a little and he could see something like stars overhead. The weather was clearing.

  But the scanty number of beers left him with a gnawing, unsatisfied feeling, and in Rapid City he found Klipper’s Klip Joint, which had everything he wanted, from cheap shots to foaming on-tap to Dwight Yoakam songs. At some point two men carried him out to his truck and heaved him up into the seat, told him to sleep it off. But hardly had they gone back inside than he was bolt upright behind the wheel and fumbling for his cigarettes. A cigarette going, it was only natural to start up and drive, and in half an hour he’d found his way out of Rapid City with its crazy double street lamps and whirling traffic lights and was sailing west on I-90. The minute he hit the Wyoming line he felt better, opened the third pack, and lit another cigarette to celebrate a return to his home state. It was a jolt to find he already had a cigarette going, but he threw the half-smoked one out the window and rolled on. He got off the interstate as soon as he could, dimly aware that it would not be the best time for a conversation with a state trooper. By the time he turned onto the road for Sack, with Elk Tooth only forty miles beyond, he had tossed fourteen burning cigarettes out the window and many of them had nuzzled into hay bales.

  Deb Sipple’s return was the closest thing to a meteor ever seen in Elk Tooth, his truck a great fiery cylinder hurtling through the darkness. Those who missed seeing it have to depend on the reports of the fortunate few who were awake at that hour. The most vivid account will come from Fiesta Punch, who lost not only the burned cargo but the bales he’d delivered earlier, consumed in the myriad grass fires that followed him into town and laid waste the ranch country. The hundred-dollar bill Deb had begged from Fiesta Punch had gone to gasoline and the Electric Silo.

  “I guess they’re even,” said Amanda Gribb.

  What Kind of Furniture

  Would Jesus Pick?

  SAILING THE SAGEBRUSH OCEAN,A TRAVELER DISCOVERS isolated coves with trophy houses protected by electronic gates, or slanted trailers on waste ground, teetering rock formations and tilted cliffs, log houses unchanged from the nineteenth century except for the television dish.

  The Harp Ranch was one of eight or nine spreads in a small basin east of the Big Horns. All of these places had been cut from the holdings of a big Scots outfit that pulled out in 1897. Budgel Wolfscale, a telegraph clerk from Missouri, on his way to Montana to search for the yellow metal, stopped at a Wyoming road ranch for a supper of fried venison and coffee, heard there was good range. For the next week he rode around the country, finally staked a homestead claim where Scots cows had spent their brief time.

  A year-round stream, Bull Jump Creek, cut the property, fringed by cottonwoods and willows, the shining maroon branches of water birch. It was still open country, though barbwire was coming in with the nesters. He built a shotgun cabin of hauled-out lodgepole, married one of the girls from a distant Ham’s Fork whorehouse, and naming the ranch after the harp his mother had played, thought himself a Wyoming rancher. He wasn’t that, but his sons and grandsons were.

  The Harp skidded down the generations to Gilbert Wolfscale, born on the ranch in 1945, and still living a son’s life with his mother in the old house that had been gradually enlarged with telescoped additions until the structure resembled a giant spyglass built of logs. He ran a cow-calf operation, usually worked the place alone for
even inept help was hard to find. He was a tall man with heavy bones. His coarse skin seemed made of old leather upholstery, and instead of lips, a small seam opened and disclosed his cement-colored teeth. There were no horses that could match his stamina. Despite his muscle mass he moved with fluid quickness. He surrounded himself with an atmosphere of affronted hostility as if he’d just been insulted, but balanced it with a wild and boisterous laugh, which erupted at inappropriate times. He was addicted to what he called “hammer coffee,” strong enough to dissolve the handle, float the head.

  The old world was gone, he knew that. For some reason a day in the 1950s when all the ranchers and their hands had worked on the road rose often in his mind and with such vividness that he could smell the mud, the mineral odor of wet rock. It had been the last rainy spring before that decade’s drought sucked the marrow out of the state. The county road that ran between Kingring and Sheridan passed through seven ranches over a fifty-mile stretch. Under heavy melt from the mountains the road went to quagmire, became an impassable sump of greasy mud and standing water. The county had no money. The ranchers threw logs and scrap wood into the deepest ruts, but they sank out of sight in minutes. Some of the holes were three feet deep. If the ranchers wanted to get to town they would have to fix it themselves or wait until it dried. On a drizzling morning in April his father drank his coffee standing up.

  “What say, Gib? Want to come along?”

  They rode together on Butch, his father’s roan saddle mount. As they rode the rain stopped but heavy clouds moved with the bumping wind. Gilbert clutched the lard pail that held their lunch. They came to a place where men with shovels were strung out along the road. There was a section of an old corral still standing near the road, and here men had leaned their tools, lunch pails, and bottles. A few had thrown down their jackets on the ground. His father tethered Butch to a post.

  While the men cleaned the borrow ditches and culverts, cut new drainage channels, built water bars, and hauled gravel, Gilbert hacked manfully at the mud with a broken hoe, but he went to the weathered corral to play with sticks and rocks when Old Man Bunner told him to get out of his way or he’d chop off his legs. The rocks were wet. He built a play corral of mud and broken miner’s candle stems, and inside placed the rocks which were his horses. The wind cleared out the weather, and by noon it was broken blue sky.

  “Warmin up,” called one of the men, stretching his back. The sun shone behind his ears, which turned the color of chokecherry jelly.

  The lunch of cold pork and boiled eggs seemed the best thing Gilbert had ever eaten. There were two squares of his mother’s coarse white cake with peanut butter icing at the bottom of the pail. His father said Gilbert could have both pieces. He fell asleep on the way home, rocked by Butch’s easy walk. His mother groaned with rage when she saw the mud on his clothes. The next morning his father went to work on the road without him and he cried until his mother slapped him and told him to shut up. The work went on for a week, and when it ended a truck could get over the road. The first time they drove past the place he looked for his play corral. He could see one miner’s candle stem. The rest had blown away. The rock horses were still there. Fifty years later the road was graveled and graded by the county, but he still looked when he drove past the place, the old corral now nothing but a single post. The prairie had swallowed his horse rocks.

  After Gilbert Wolfscale inherited the ranch he enlarged the two irrigated alfalfa fields, which made it possible, in bad years, to feed the cattle through the winter, and in good years to sell hay to less fortunate outfits. These two fields kept the ledger ink black. He came up with ideas to increase the income. He thought of butchering and packing the beef himself to bypass the middlemen, who took the money while the rancher did the work, but the local stores preferred to stay with the chain suppliers. So he started his own butcher shop and built a refrigerated slaughterhouse with storage facility. He put an ad in the paper looking for private customers and found half a dozen, but they didn’t eat enough beef to make the venture pay and a woman from town complained that there were bone splinters in the ground beef. He raised turkeys, thinking surefire Thanksgiving and Christmas markets, but never sold very many, even when he put strings of cranberries around their necks. His mother spent days making the cranberry necklaces, but people wanted the plastic-wrapped, prebasted Safeway turkeys with breasts like Las Vegas strippers. They ate the turkeys themselves, his mother canning most of the meat. They were sick of the smell of turkey soup by spring.

  Some of the original chock-and-log fence—built not of split rails or slender poles but big logs—still stood in the high pastures nearest the forest, but much had been replaced with five-strand barbwire. He could almost see the ground compressing under the heavy log weight. How many men had helped his grandfather put up that fence of entire tree trunks? Gilbert put in his time working on the barb fences, which no longer had the tensile strength of fresh wire but were patched and mended with short lengths of various gauge. In an earlier decade, struggling to finish the job on a hot afternoon, he had cast about for a stick or something to twist tight a diagonal cross-brace wire, but the only thing at hand was a cow’s bleached leg bone with its useful trochlea head, which seemed made to jam fence wire tight. It worked so well that he collected and used cow bones in dozens of places. These bony fences and the coyote skulls nailed to the corner posts gave the Harp a murderous air.

  He was a model of rancher stubbornness, savagely possessive of his property. He did everything in an odd, deliberate way, Gilbert Wolfscale’s way, and never retreated once he had taken a position. Neighbors said he was self-reliant, but there was a way they said it that meant something else.

  Seven miles north of the Harp on the Stump Hole Road lived May and Jim Codenhead of his generation. He had gone to grade school with May—she was then May Alwen—in the old century during the postwar fifties, the Eisenhower era of interstate highway construction that changed Wyoming forever by letting in the outside. May’s brother, Sedley Alwen, a big, good-natured kid with stringy arms, had been Gilbert’s best friend. Gilbert courted May for a year, had taken it for granted that Sedley would be his brother-in-law, but she strung him along and then, in a sudden move on Christmas Day in 1966, married Jim Codenhead. Jim was then nothing more than an illiterate Montana hand working on the Alwen place. May taught him to read until he could fumble through the newspaper.

  “That’s the shits, man,” said Sedley sympathetically and took Gilbert on a two-day drunk that was as much a salute to his draft notice as balm for Gilbert’s disappointment.

  The marriage wasn’t unprecedented. For those who took the long view and had patience, it was the classic route for a lowly cowhand to own his own spread—marry the rancher’s daughter. In retaliation Gilbert went to a New Year’s dance, found Suzzy New, and in ten days pressured her into a fast marriage.

  Suzzy New was slender and small-boned, something French about her child-size wrists, a contrast to Gilbert, six foot four, bullnecked with heavy shoulders. She was nimble-fingered and a talented embroiderer. In the flush of their first months together Gilbert bragged that she was so handy she could make a pair of chaps for a hummingbird. She was quiet, disliked arguments and shouting. She held herself tensely and had a way of retreating into her thoughts. She believed herself to be a very private person. She slept badly, sensitive to the slightest abnormal sound—the creak of an attic timber, the rising wind, a raccoon forcing its way through the skirting of the house and under the kitchen floor-boards. She had let herself be bullied into marrying Gilbert, and within days of the ruinous act bitterly regretted it.

  All her life she had heard and felt the Wyoming wind and took it for granted. There had even been a day when she was a young girl standing by the road waiting for the school bus when a spring wind, fresh and warm and perfumed with pine resin, had caused a bolt of wild happiness to surge through her, its liveliness promising glinting chances. She had loved the wind that day. But out at the ranch it w
as different and she became aware of moving air’s erratic, inimical character. The house lay directly in line with a gap in the encircling hills to the northwest, and through this notch the prevailing wind poured, falling on the house with ferocity. The house shuddered as the wind punched it, slid along its sides like a released torrent from a broken dam. Week after week in winter it sank and rose, attacked and feinted. When she put her head down and went out to the truck, it yanked at her clothing, shot up her sleeves, whisked her hair into raveled fright wigs. Gilbert seemed not to notice, but then, she thought, he probably regarded it ashis wind, and no doubt took pleasure in such a powerful possession.