by Annie Proulx
There was no way he could know that he would outlive both of them, that in eighteen hours the two young adventurers would die when a FedEx semi sideswiped the trailer with the Jeep and sent it and the truck rolling down a steep embankment into a dry wash. It was a bitter piece of news, delivered by the accident investigation team, that had they been wearing seat belts—nonexistent in the pre-seat-belt truck—they would likely have survived. The truck itself, except for a few dents, was unharmed and still ran.
When Christina, back with Rose, heard the awful news, she blamed Bobcat. In cold anger she picked up the old teakettle and said, “I wish my brother would fall down the stairs and break his neck.”
And in Lusk, Wyoming, a retired lineman, Rich Hickey, the unknown, adulterous fruit of Max Stifle’s loins from a cattle-buying trip in 1928, tripped on his trailing bathrobe belt and flew headfirst down the stairs.
The teakettle played no favorites.
Florida Rental
THE THREEBIDSTRUP BROTHERS, TUG, BOBBY,AND June, entered the bar, their eyes going straight to Amanda Gribb, a sign, she knew, that they had bad news. The fence crew usually took their business to Muddy’s Hole, so their appearance in Pee Wee’s was something of an event. As they came in everyone in the bar glanced at them, but nobody stared. The patrons of Pee Wee’s prided themselves on their sangfroid. They stayed cool when strangers invaded the bar, but took in every nuance of outlandish behavior and speech for later dissection. No one had blinked when five Tibetan Buddhist monks in their blood orange robes came in and ordered tea. The monks were all small and catty and gave off an aura of muscular strength like rodeo riders. After they left, Hard Winter Ulph said, “Wouldn’t want a git on the wrong side a them boys.” And when two boisterous black couples in an old sedan with Louisiana plates came in and asked for tequila, a request Amanda got no more than twice a year, no one said anything nor looked directly at them, but when one of the women jokingly called to Amanda, who was rummaging at the back of the shelf where she kept the rarely used bottles, “Whip it, sister!” the remark registered.
The Bidstrups were burned almost black by long exposure to the sun, eyes red from alkali dust and wind, their clothes in tatters with hundreds of rips that, over time, had puffed into small blossoms of thread. Their hands were nicked and scabbed with the short red cuts that come from working with barbwire. They wore the stoutest of boots, and one still had on his snake gaiters. The hatband of the middle brother, Bobby, was a twist of class III electric fence wire.
“Tug!” shouted rancher Bob Utley, ever the jocular ballbuster. “Looks like your wife scratched you up.” The oldest Bidstrup smiled a little at the tired joke, but his eyes were fixed on Amanda.
“Three,” he said. “Bud and a shot.”
She set the boilermakers carefully on the bar in front of the fencers.
“Tough day?” She approached the bad news obliquely, leading them into it. They had been putting up fence for her.
“Normal. But you got yourself some neighbor.”
“Figures,” said Amanda. “Big corporation out a Denver. And Otis Wainwright Rench is the meanest manager in the state. So what’d he do today?”
“Last night. Fence we finished Friday?” said Bobby. “Cut last night.”
Tug swallowed his whiskey and belched. “Think it was the guy works for Howard, Brick something. Looks to me like he done time, all them tattoos. You must a had three hundred Triple J cows on your place.”
Bobby put his oar in again. “And them cows are wild. Like they are circus cows or whatever, can jump and run like deer, swim like fish, even the calves. Them cows show no mercy.”
The youngest brother, June, as usual said nothing.
A few years earlier June Bidstrup’s photograph had appeared on the cover ofWestern Cowboy . He was a rider in the reenactment of an old trail drive. A secretary at the Guy March Talent Agency in Los Angeles, which specialized in raw western talent, saw the picture of the trim, twenty-year-old June togged out in shotgun chaps, a calfskin vest, and an azure wild rag that picked up the color of his eyes; she caught her breath and showed the cover to Guy March, who immediately saw a new Robert Redford. He drove out to Elk Tooth himself and persuaded June his fortune was waiting in Hollywood.
June, who had never known he was good-looking, said he guessed he’d give it a try. But, once June was on the west coast, Guy March could see his tough little prize did not entirely fit the current ideal of masculine beauty: June’s mouth was too thin. Like all the Bidstrups he had a small, nearly lipless mouth that did well enough for eating, talking, and an occasional half smile. Guy March said there was a great role coming up in a movie based on the Johnson County War but with a new angle—rather than a protest against big rancher greed and dominance, a tornado would force the homesteaders’ revolt. The part of the young homesteader who gets wiped out by the tornado, loses his family, and turns bad, he said, was perfect for June. He persuaded him that collagen injections would give him the right kind of mouth to cinch the part. So sure of this was he, said Guy March, that he would pay for the procedure himself. The results were unfortunate. The youngest Bidstrup ended up with a mouth that resembled two short night crawlers jockeying for position on his face, which now appeared pouty and deformed. In a few months he was back in Elk Tooth, fence building with his brothers, rarely speaking, avoiding mirrors, and as shy as a spanked cat.
“We chased most a them back across the crick,” said Tug. “But they trashed your garden pretty good. We didn’t get them all. There’s still some there.”
Amanda poured a new round. Her hand trembled a little from the weight of the bottle.
“Worst of it is,” said Tug, “Rench offered us a big job on the Fishhooks. We’d make enough workin for him to carry us right into next year.”
“Oh God,” said Amanda, overcome.
Elk Tooth lies high in the Dog Ear Creek valley, on the west slope of the Angle Iron range. Forty miles down the valley is the larger town of Sack, with its Wal-Mart superstore that draws in what little money makes it to the region, with one exception. The three Elk Tooth bars are superior to any in Sack and attract a profitable clientele, some coming from as far away as Big Piney and even Thermop. Of the three bars Pee Wee’s, with its nineteenth-century atmosphere of beer, manure, whiskey, sweaty hatbands, a hot stove, dusty rafters, and a kind of incense falsely labeled Dwarf Pine that bartender Amanda Gribb burned, was the most popular. The other bars, Muddy’s Hole and the Silvertip, had their dependable regulars, but Pee Wee’s drew the crowds.
Amanda Gribb had been tending bar at Pee Wee’s for eight years. She lived in a single-wide she had fixed up, set on a quarter section, once part of the big Gribb ranch that broke up in the 1960s. She had a garden, a sickly apple tree she kept alive with buckets of water from Dog Ear Creek, a fairly sizable stream that would have been called a river anywhere else in the state. Amanda Gribb, surrounded by ranches and the beef mentality, was a secret vegetarian with a strong dislike for cows. Her own mother, who still ran a few, did not guess. The calendar that hung beside the cash register at Pee Wee’s constantly irked with its glossy photos of cattle breeds. On her days off Amanda was very happy in the garden working her rows of tomatoes and snap beans. The air, rolling down from the granite notch of Angle Iron Pass, tasted clean and flinty after the body odors and smoke of the Pee Wee.
The land on the other side of Dog Ear Creek had belonged to Frank Frink of the Red Crayon ranch, but Frink had sold out the year before to a corporation that ran their ranching investments as the J J J Ranches with holdings in Texas, California, Montana, New Mexico, and Wyoming. Locally they were called the Triple J or the Fishhooks. The manager, Otis Wainwright Rench, was an ectomorph with great black circles around his eyes, as though perpetually recovering from a double shiner. Rench was dedicated to the bottom line, and his hands followed his lead, even when it meant turning the Triple J cows onto other people’s land by leaving gates open or cutting a little wire. As the J J J land was heav
ily overgrazed sagebrush and greasewood, Amanda Gribb’s grassy quarter section was a prize worth any rumpus. And because Amanda was a woman, Rench and his men held her in contempt and did not expect any serious resistance beyond a few hen squawks. For her part, Amanda decided to poison Rench or any of his ex-con hands if they came into Pee Wee’s and ordered a drink. This was not likely, for the Fishhooks gang patronized Muddy’s Hole or drank in the squalid solitude of their trucks.
It was past midnight when Amanda Gribb got home. She parked in front of her trailer and got out, stepping into a fresh cow pie. Something lumbered and moved at the corner of the trailer. She turned on the porch light and saw five black baldies, the remains of her precious peony plant dangling from the jaws of the closest one. She seized the broom and ran shrieking at them, and they turned and strolled into the darkness, leaving her with a turned ankle and a bad temper.
In the first light of morning she got a full look at the ruined garden, pocked with huge hoofprints that had mashed the young tomato plants into paste, torn the plastic watering pipes. The apple tree had snapped and was trodden into stringy fibers. Almost nothing could be salvaged. She chased cows all the early morning, limping because of her painful ankle, cursing the cows that, as soon as they forded the creek, turned back from their barren home acres and headed once again for Amanda’s place. She knew they could be back through new nighttime cuts in the fence. When she had driven the last cow across the creek she sat on the top step of her trailer and looked at the mess. She had found a gap in the fence, the cut ends of the wire winking brightly. But at eight a plume of dust advancing along the road brought relief. It was the Bidstrup brothers.
“I thought you was workin for Fishhooks?”
“We told him no. Plenty a work around. We don’t need his.” In ten minutes the cut fence was mended. Tug stood on the trailer-house steps and called to Amanda, who was inside, getting ready for work.
“Manda? I heard about a possible deal, if you can swing it. Guy over in Wheatland got some five-foot chain-link fence he could let go on a deal. I don’t know how much. But it might slow down them fence cutters. Chain-link is pretty gnarly. I got a phone number, you want a call the guy. Me and the boys could pick it up for you if that works out.”
She wrote down the number and headed for Pee Wee’s. What the Bidstrup brothers didn’t know was that she was scraping the bottom of her bank account and unless the price of the chain-link was virtually nothing it wasn’t going to fly. Still she called and got the owner of the fencing, who said he had fifteen hundred feet of the stuff and wanted three thousand for it. It might as well have been three million.
That night several hundred Triple J cows surged onto Amanda’s place. She wakened to something shaking the single-wide—not an earthquake but cows rubbing their itches on the corners, cows swaggering in their own manure, scuffing bare dirt. One big ginger cow had a way of scraping her hooves as though whetting them. Chasing them with a broom was futile. The cows dodged and spun as though playing a wonderful game. In frustration she got her old plaid umbrella, unused for the five years of drought, walked slowly toward the ginger cow with crafty, wet-chestnut eyes, and when she was five feet away, the cow’s attention deeply fixed, she popped the umbrella open with a screech and a lunge. The startled cow leapt into the air and ran, but in half an hour they were all bored with the umbrella. On her way to work Amanda detoured to Sack and picked up fifty bottle rockets at the fireworks kiosk. The next morning the cows were treated to a barrage and most of them ran into the creek, but some stood their ground and those who had run took heart and returned, flinching only when Amanda scored direct hits—truly devil cows.
It seemed trouble never came evenly spaced out. Now, despite her protests that she didn’t want to work in a sports bar, Pee Wee’s owner, Lewis McCusky, donated the bar’s soundless old black-and-white television to the volunteer fire department fund-raiser and brought in an enormous color set. He mounted it over the cash register. He said he had subscribed to a satellite service and they would be able to get more than a hundred stations.
“Hundred stations a junk,” said Amanda. “Hundred stations a football.”
This was not the first big bar television set in Elk Tooth. The Silvertip had had a monster flat-profile television for more than a year, but the only time the owners, Jacques and Martine Rondelle, who had somehow strayed from Quebec to Elk Tooth, turned it on were for hockey games and French bicycle races. It was the only bar in Wyoming where one could watch the Tour de France. Erwin Hungate actually abandoned Pee Wee’s the entire month of July to follow the great race. For weeks afterward his conversation flourished with Frenchy words and references to l’Alpe d’Huez and the Galibier and other places unknown to anyone in Elk Tooth. Willy Huson, who looked in once or twice, was disgusted. “They keep talkin about the ‘pelican,’ which I don’t get.”
But it was a program on the new television that gave Amanda her great idea. She called her mother straight from the bar.
“Ma, don’t we got some cousins or somethin in Florida?”
“Uh-huh, my sister Nina runs a little hotel near Key West. Why?”
“I don’t know, just thought I might take a vacation to Florida, maybe look them up.”
“That’s a wonderful idea. When do you want a go? I need a get out a here for a week myself. It would be nice seein Nina again and I bet she’d put us up for nothin.”
“Oh, well, I was just thinkin about it. I can’t actually afford a go.” She did not want to go to Florida with her mother. “But just in case I could do it next year, what’s their address? And is she married and got kids and all?”
“She married a man got a ice cream shop there. There’s a lot a tourists and it is hot so there’s quite a bit a money in ice cream. And they’ve got three children, all grown now, a course. The oldest is Walter, sells insurance, and then was Marni, lives in Fort Lauderdale. I can’t recall the name of the youngest one, the one that was always in trouble. I’ll think of it.”
She called back later to say that the youngest one was Don and he was a heavy equipment operator, still single but staying out of trouble. She had telephone numbers for all of them and said her sister was thrilled to think they would visit next year—they could certainly stay at the little hotel gratis. “That’s what she said,‘gratis.’ It means ‘for free.’”
Amanda called her Florida cousin Don, who sounded the most interesting, on the weekend, introduced herself, described Elk Tooth, her problem with the Fishhooks cows, and told him her idea. He laughed, said it could be done, that transportation would be the expensive part but that he would ask around and see if any truckers—he knew two or three truckers who were on the grapevine—were coming out her way. Something, maybe, could be worked out.
He called back that night. “I was surprised,” he said, “how easy it turned out to be. There is actually a shipment of related items going to Calgary and the driver says he can cut through Wyoming if you can meet him someplace so he don’t lose too much time. Says how about the truck stop at—don’t know how to pronounce it, G-I-L-L-E-T-T-E?”
“Jillette,” said Amanda. “Like Jack and Jill went up the hill.”
“He says there’s a big Truck Heaven there. Says he can be there Sunday night around ten-thirty. His rig’s a big stainless and jewel-tone iridescent purple Peterbilt, says ‘Redhill Bio Transport’ on the side, picture a dolphins. He probably expects a little sweetening, say a hundred or so.”
“I’ll be there,” said Amanda, thinking frantically how she could get Sunday night off. Lewis McCusky would not like it.
But he did like it. One of the volunteer firemen had a new DVD featuring remastered classic football games of the 1950s, grainy old black-and-white films that Lewis wanted badly to see. The new television set had come with a disk player. A closed-door night without Amanda to distract by constantly wiping down the bar and tables would be nice. A guys’ night out. He called his fire department cronies, then dialed Patty’s Perky Pizza
in Sack and ordered twelve pepperoni and onion for the orgy, no delivery, somebody would pick up the pies.
It was a long way to Gillette, a six-hour drive of back roads and mountain passes before she hit I-90 in Buffalo. She had cleaned out the back of her pickup and, thinking of her cargo, put on the camper top to reduce windchill. She pulled into Truck Heaven at nine, went inside, and ate the day’s special, a huge platter of French fries flanked by fried catfish, lemon wedges, and a plastic packet of mayonnaise mixed with relish masquerading as tartar sauce. The place was crowded with truckers swilling coffee and eating pie. Amanda ordered pie too, lemon meringue, which tasted like tartar sauce with sugar.
