Bad Dirt

by Annie Proulx

  Eugenie found Mitchell in the attic one day rummaging through the boxes they had never unpacked—city clothes, old financial records that might be needed someday, a miscellany of odds and ends.

  “Whatare you looking for?”

  “My old golf shoes,” he said, straightening up under the purlins.

  “Golf shoes! Mitchell, you told me to get rid of all your golf stuff back when you had the transplant.”

  “Yes,” he said, “but I thought the shoes might have made it.”

  “Well, they didn’t. Why do you want them, anyway? I can’t believe you are thinking of taking up golf again.”

  “No.” He couldn’t say that it was because he had wanted to see how closely the golf shoes had resembled pronghorn. That first winter he mourned when he read in the local paper that in a snowstorm a semi had plowed into a small herd of pronghorn on I-80 and killed seventeen animals.

  Wyoming had seemed civilized when they first moved out, but gradually evidence appeared that forced them to recognize that they were in a place people in the east would regard as peripheral to the real world. There were disturbing proofs that the weight of a harsh past still bore down with force. Every few months something inexplicably rural happened: on a back road one man shot another with his great-grandfather’s 45.70 vintage buffalo gun; a newcomer from Iowa set out for an afternoon hike, and fell off a cliff as she descended Wringer Mountain. Black bears came down in September and smashed Eugenie’s bird feeders. A hawk hid under the potentilla bush and leaped suddenly on an overconfident prairie dog a little too far from its burrow. In Antler Spring, the town where they bought their liquor and groceries, a young woman expecting her first child was widowed when her husband, fighting summer wildfires in Colorado, was killed by a Pulaski tool that fell from a helicopter. Vacationers locked themselves out of their cars and were struck by lightning. Ranchers, their eyes on their cattle, drove off the road and overturned. Everything seemed to end in blood.

  Outside the Star Lily Ranch community Eleanora Figg was their nearest neighbor. She was an elderly widow rancher in her mid-seventies of the classic Republican, conservative, art-hating, right-wing, outspoken, flint-faced type. She ran both cattle and some sheep, drove an ancient black Jeep. She loathed environmentalists and people from somewhere else. Mitchell understood the bumper sticker on her Jeep—SHOOT,SHOVEL AND SHUT UP —to express her opinions on wolves. She had taken one look at the Fairs’ Infiniti and recognized them as sybarites who dined on camel heels and foreign olives. She herself lived on home-killed beef, boiled potatoes, and black coffee. She was always dressed in jeans, manure-caked boots, and a ragged barn coat. When they first met, Mitchell shook the old woman’s hand, feeling the coarse, hard fingers gripping his own with remarkable strength.

  “How’s your teeth?” she said. “Pretty sharp?”

  “I don’t know,” said Mitchell, nonplussed by the odd question. “Why?”

  “Always lookin for somebody help us castrate lambs.”

  At the post office the woman told him about Eleanora Figg.

  “Her and her boys Condor and Tommy just about run this place.” She added that there had been a third son, Cody, who had died of heatstroke hiking in the Grand Canyon on his first and only vacation.

  He had met Condor Figg. The first winter he learned the hard way that the truck he had bought was best as a summer truck. It skidded and slewed in the lightest snow. The inevitable happened, and while he was trying to call a tow truck on his cell phone, damning the hundreds of Wyoming dead spots that made smoke signals more practical than cell phones, a big flatbed truck carrying a thousand-pound roll of hay pulled up.

  “Got a chain?” yelled the driver, a big chunky man wearing a T-shirt despite the cold and snow. He had a curly black beard and eyes as narrow and darting as two fingerling trout.

  “No,” said Mitchell, and before his mouth closed the man was out of the truck and dragging a heavy chain with hook ends from it. In less than forty seconds he had the chain wrapped around Mitchell’s trailer hitch and the truck up on the road, pointed the wrong way.

  “My God,” said Mitchell, “how can I thank you?” He fumbled for money, looking at the hole in the snow where the truck had been. Beyond the fence thirty or forty pronghorn grazed with cool detachment. He rushed on, his voice fast out of his throat. “My name’s Mitchell Fair. We live in Star Lily Ranch.” And he held out a twenty-dollar bill.

  The man looked at him with hatred. “Yeah. I know. Keep your money. Where your house sets is where my folks had a stock tank. When old Dean Peraine had that truck you bought off a him he run it ever weather for damn near ten years. Had some weight to her. Never went off the road unless he wanted to.” He jumped in the big truck, stood on the gas, and was gone in a blast of blue smoke. But Mitchell put four hundred pounds of sandbags in the bed of his truck and his winter driving skills improved. He stayed on the road.

  There was another old woman in Swift Fox—Mrs. Conkle. She was also a rancher’s widow but lived in a decrepit trailer with a yellow stucco exterior. Over the years wind-driven dirt had discolored the structure as the stucco cracked and buckled into a leprous mass. Sometimes when the Fairs drove past they saw the old woman outside, struggling to hang some wet grey garments on a drooping clothesline.

  “That old thing,” said Eugenie. “You have to wonder how somebody gets to that state.”

  Mitchell, who talked with local people more than she did, had heard a tale of hard luck and swindle.

  The day the Fairs left Swift Fox on their journey to Maine they had passed Mrs. Conkle’s ugly trailer. The yard was full of trucks, and men were coming from the trailer carrying a bureau, a box of canning jars, a rocking chair.

  “Ah,” said Eugenie. “There must have been a fire. Or maybe the poor old lady died and the relatives are going through her things.”

  Mitchell didn’t think so. As they neared the bottom of the hill, coming toward them was Condor Figg’s flatbed loaded with lumber and logs. In the side mirror Mitchell saw him turn in to Mrs. Conkle’s yard.

  Mitchell was glad to be back in Wyoming, far from Maine, and in a way Eugenie was not displeased though the place seemed as alien as ever. The air was clear and the sunlight so fierce that the subtle colors of lichen and rock, of dusty sage leaf burned with an intensity the clouded east could never know. A few days after their return the first storm flailed a few yellow leaves from the aspen and beat down the summer grasses. Weeds collapsed under the hard frost that followed. Then came ten days of flawless clarity, radiantly golden days in the shimmering aspen groves. From the lodgepole pine on the slopes above twisted ribbons of resinous scent.

  “Itis beautiful,” Eugenie agreed. She walked out on the forest trail near the house several times where the odor was of dry duff, of earth scratched about by bears raiding squirrel hoards. Her walks stopped abruptly when she met a hunter. He looked wretched and tough, bowlegged, his face smeared with blacking, a trickle of blood in front of his ear where a branch had pierced the skin. He carried a powerful-looking bow, and the razor points of his arrows glittered. He glared at her with his wolfish eyes. She could smell a sharp odor.

  “You ought a be wearin orange. Get yourself shot in that getup.”

  She was wearing her brown suede jacket and suddenly realized that from a distance, to someone peering through the trees, she might briefly resemble a deer. Perhaps this man had even trained an arrow on her. She could not speak. She turned and began walking rapidly toward the trailhead. At a bend in the trail she turned around and was frightened to see him following. She ran then for the parking lot, expecting to feel an arrow in her back or a hand clamped over her mouth. She said nothing to Mitchell because he had remarked several times that it was hunting season and they ought to get orange vests.

  In late October the first snowstorms arrived and steady cold began building the drifts. A few deer came to Eugenie’s bird feeders and she put out pie pans of sunflower seed for them. In less than a week there was a herd
of fifty mule deer in their yard at dusk and Eugenie thought of the bow hunter and was glad the deer were safe from him. The wind blew the pie pans away, and she got Mitchell to pour the contents of the twenty-pound bags directly on the ground near a clump of rabbitbrush. The deer ate all of the seed each night, and soon they were spending seventy dollars a week on sunflower seed. Foxes also came for the seed, and magpies, Steller’s jays, even a northern flicker, which seemed the wrong kind of bird to patronize a feeder. Mitchell said he should buy a rifle as one deer would be a good investment on their birdseed expenses.

  “God,” said Eugenie disgustedly.

  “You will never see anything like this back east,” she wrote to Honor. “Fantastic wildlife, although Mitchell now wants to start killing it.” She was careful not to write “your father.” The daughter, who never wrote letters, telephoned and said she had moved out of the cottage and into an apartment in Brooklyn, that Hal was cutting teeth and was awful with crying and fussing, that he was at day care because Honor had found a wonderful job with a group that made socially responsible documentary films for television.

  “Still, it’s not easy,” she said.

  “Do you need some money?” asked Eugenie. She was so glad to talk to Honor she nearly cried. Until that moment she had not realized how miserable she was in Wyoming with only Mitchell. She knew people talked about them. When she went into the Swift Fox store for eggs silence fell. If she remarked that it was a beautiful day there was a pause, then some hearty voice said it sure was and the silence came again. As she shut the door behind her she could hear the sudden babble of voices inside. The woman at the post office, herself an outsider, said, “Oh, they’ll accept you up to the fence, but they’ll never let you open the gate.”

  “Money?” said Honor. “Well, I could use it. Rent day seems to come around pretty fast. The job doesn’t pay much, but there’s a good chance that it will if I can stick with it.” Her voice sounded cheery and confident, and Eugenie suddenly missed her own old job and smart, good New York talk, missed noon-hour shopping and being able to find anything she needed or wanted, missed the restaurants and the museums. Honor didn’t mention Chaz and Eugenie didn’t ask. She assumed Chaz was out of the picture. She sent a check and asked Honor to send her a supply of her special hand cream that she could not find in Wyoming.

  Mitchell had learned that Star Lily Ranch encroached on an ancient elk, deer, and pronghorn migration corridor and that the animals now had to thread their way through a maze of towns, ranches, fences, and roads to reach their traditional summer grazing range in the Bachelors. The effect of the big log houses, each with its yapping dogs, was as pernicious as any trashy trailer park. A sense of guilt began to dye his time in the house. He could almost glimpse Condor Figg’s hatred of these houses choking the passage and the old landscape, although the Figgs themselves had sold the land and their livestock fences stopped everything but the wind.

  December was wretchedly cold, made worse by violent winds. When Eugenie went outside spicules of snow stung her face and rattled against her windproof jacket. The roads were treacherous, and day after day she was trapped in the house. Somehow Mitchell continued his drives in the bad weather, relishing the difficulties. The snow stopped but the wind increased. The wind exhausted her. Dry and bitterly cold wind built the snow into small private dunes on the lee side of each sage plant, polished the remaining snow into tight, glossy sculptures. The few clouds drew out as fine and long as needle threads and the wind-damaged sky showed the same chill blue as a gas flame. The wind set its teeth into the heavy log house and shook it with terrific gusts. In the early mornings it ceased for a few hours, then as the sun climbed over the aspen, it returned, brutal and avid, sweeping into the air what little loose snow remained. It never really stopped. Steadily conditions shifted into the worst winter they had yet experienced.

  One afternoon she sat at the English elm table reading a new book—Tropical Motifs in Contemporary Bath Design—that featured ferns and orchids cascading down the walls. Mitchell was out of the house on one of his interminable drives. She noticed a flicker of movement on the slope where the Engelmann spruce grew that did not seem to be wind-driven. There it was again, something moving in the snow. She got the bird binoculars and looked. A man was crawling through the trees.

  He wallowed in the snow, thrusting ever closer. She watched him from her desk, her heart beating hard and fast. She thought of the hunter she had seen in the autumn. When the man came within fifty feet of the house she expected to see him get up and come crouching forward, a knife or bow and arrow in his hands. But he threw back his head and made a ferocious face. Perhaps he even howled. His face was intensely red, and even from a distance she could see the sheen of moisture on it despite the snow and cold. He looked like a maniac. She called the sheriff’s department in Antler Spring and reported a prowler, then waited, anxious and frightened. She tried to call Mitchell on his cell phone but there was no answer. There were so many dead spots he rarely turned it on. Nearly an hour went by and still no one came. She peeped out every few minutes to see if the man was still there. He was wriggling through the snow like a caterpillar, crawling toward the front of the house. When he turned the corner she could no longer see him without going outside. She thought she could hear him grunting and repeating some words. A crazy man. A horror of the situation built up in her.

  Finally she saw the sheriff’s patrol car cresting the long hill and behind the car a familiar black Jeep. Both vehicles pulled into the drive. She stood at the kitchen window. She could no longer see the crawling man but imagined she heard him hunching toward the door.

  The driver of the sheriff’s car, a uniformed fat woman with red hair, waited for the Jeep to pull up. Eleanora Figg jumped out of it spryly. Both women went to the far side of the porch, and she heard their voices.

  “Upsy-daisy,” someone said. The two of them shoulder-carried the man to the sheriff’s car and helped him into it. Eleanora Figg leaned through the window and talked to him. The redhaired woman came to Eugenie’s door.

  “Skier. Busted his leg up there.” She pointed to the steep slopes behind the aspen. “He was hurt,” she said accusingly. “Crawled all the way here lookin for help. He could see you peekin out the window but you never open the door.”

  “I didn’t know what he was up to,” said Eugenie defensively. “He could have been—anyone. There was no way to tell what he intended. He could have been a murderer or an escaped criminal. I didn’t know he was hurt.”

  “Well, you seen him layin there. He wasn’t doin nothin bad, was he?”

  “It could have been a trick,” said Eugenie. The big woman said nothing, strode to her vehicle, touched Eleanora Figg on the shoulder, said something. They drove away.

  Eugenie said nothing about any of this to Mitchell when he came in at dusk.

  Almost from the beginning Mitchell had taken to driving deep distances through the state. He had never known such driving pleasure, clear roads empty of traffic, and on all sides the vast basin and range landscapes. He drove greasy back roads, through red canyons trickling dirt from slides, over prairie cresting in slow waves. He climbed mountains with passes open only four months of the year. He moved steadily over black ice and through white-outs, feeling the truck shake with the punching wind. Once or twice he was stranded on dirt roads made slippery as lard by rain swelling the bentonite in the soil. There was nothing to do but sit and wait until the road dried out enough for the tires to grip. And through all his driving he played the classical CDs Eugenie so much disliked, feeling the landscape through the music.

  He had discovered the ideal music for these drives by accident. He and Eugenie had argued about something—an hour later he had no idea what had so irritated them. He had hastily snatched up a handful of CDs and rushed out to the truck. It was bad for both of them to be trapped in the house together all day. It had been better with Eugenie in the city when they came together at the end of the day, tired of other people,
finding solace in each other’s company. They enjoyed a drink and offered the brighter scraps of office gossip. Sometimes they went out to dinner, more often they ordered hot dishes in from Casserole Chef. Now there was no office gossip and he couldn’t proffer his descriptions of rock mass and trembling snow. They were more and more two cranky people under each other’s feet. He suspected Eugenie wanted to go back to New York, and he half-hoped she would go. Why couldn’t she say it? It was impossible for him to bring up the subject. He had had enough of something, but not the place. He would stay, no matter what happened.