All along Shy had expected her shop to fail—then she would keep the Big Horse books, answer the telephone, handle the paperwork. It was working out the other way. She had paid for the new truck, the ranch house renovation, she was talking lap pool. He was not doing much with horse insurance. He took his customers at their word on the health, ancestry, value and prowess of their horses and steadily lost money. In a world of liars and cheats he believed in handshakes although he was himself an advanced dissembler with a vile and criminal habit.
Once he said to Roany, “I can’t get a holt on it. On anything.” She had no idea what he meant but made a soothing noise in her throat.
PORTUGEEPHILLIPS
When habits set fast in certain people they cannot be broken while breath is still drawn. Shy Hamp had a habit, tied to a journey in the back of Nikole Angermiller’s grandfather’s old sedan. For the rest of his life every nuance of touch, the feel of the scratchy velour seat, the fleering landscape, came vividly and instantly into his mind. It had been 1973 and he was twelve years old, Nikole Angermiller thirteen. They were in the seventh grade, research partners on a history project, the 1866 ride of Portugee Phillips from Fort Phil Kearny to Fort Laramie following the massacre of foolhardy Fetterman and his eighty misguided men.
“Granddad says it isn’t possible—unless Phillips had a iron butt and a magic horse—to ride two hundred and thirty-six miles in two days. Through blizzards.” She lived in town with her paternal grandparents. Her father, their only son, had died on the Ca Mau Peninsula in 1963 and her mother lived in Austin, Texas, with a sitar player whose name was unpronounceable.
“The horse died. He rode it to death. A thoroughbred horse.” He wanted it to be true, that Portugee Phillips had made the heroic journey.
Nikole Angermiller was dark, olive skin and high-colored cheeks and mouth, beautiful but not popular. The shanky girls with their stick arms and man-sized feet hated her for her looks and the wart-fingered boys were afraid of her. Robert Angermiller, the pharmacist, was her grandfather, jovial, boisterous. Her grandparents took her everywhere, spoiled her with clothes purchased in Fort Collins and Denver, and the grandfather cut her hair himself. Everything about her was taut. She was allowed to wear colorless nail polish and her pointed fingernails flashed as though made of tin. Three copper bracelets on her left wrist insured health.
Nikole’s grandfather said, “Sonny, you are growin so fast your head’s pushin up through your hair. How’s your folks?” Then, “Surprised you didn’t pick a different project considering what you got at your place.” There was a flash of gold from his mouth.
“What? What have we got?”
“Governors of Wyomin—photographs, all of them until your granddad died. You know, we got along good, your granddad and me. That’s a treasure on that wall. But your old man didn’t care much about it.”
“Well, the teacher just passed out the assignments. Ours was the only Wyoming one except for a couple a others. The other kids got good ones like Scott dying at the South Pole, and shark attacks. We got Portugee Phillips.”
He had barely noticed the photographs. He had been eight or nine years old when his grandfather died and the photographs had always been there, a kind of black-and-white wallpaper with sets of hooded eyes and thin lips. His grandfather’s teeth still waited in a bureau drawer, his jacket with its tobacco smell hung in the entryway The old man had pinned him and Dennis with his stories of the last wolf killed on the ranch, the neighbor woman who went blind when her eyes froze and who later burned to death in a grass fire, the buffalo powder horn he found in the creek, and how somebody in the family had gone to Brazil to ranch, and eating something called squeaks and rattles. They couldn’t wait to get away.
“And because it’s Wyomin it don’t seem so interestin to you?” Nikole’s grandfather drew a bottle from an inside pocket, unscrewed the cap.
“Yeah. I guess so.” The same grassy shadows, the same long wind, everlasting fence.
“Kid, let me tell you. Goddamn important things happened in this place.” The glutch of swallowing.
To crown the project her grandparents drove them on a Sunday to the historical markers at each end of the famous ride—the Thoroughbred Horse monument at Fort Laramie and the Portugee Phillips plaque on its rubble-stone column near Fort Kearney. He snapped photographs with his mother’s camera. None of them came out.
“I think it’s retarded they would put up a monument for a horse,” Nikole said.
“Christ, they got all kinds a monuments,” said the grandfather. “Peace pipes, dude ranches, rocks, coal mines, sundials, dead ranchers, vigilante hangins, Masonic lodges, Indians, tiehacks, firefighters, bath houses and little chirpin chickadees. There’s Babe, the Little Sweetheart of the Prairie, oldest horse in the world. Died when she was fifty years old. And, a course, one for that horse’s ass, the first woman governor of Wyomin.”
“Robert,” said the grandmother, for whom the barb was meant. She occasionally attended a women’s group that honored Mrs. Nellie Tayloe Ross, a governor’s widow elected in 1924 on the chivalric vote—though uneasy in her attendance because Mrs. Ross had been a Democrat.
On the way home from the Phillips monument, sun striking through the rearview window to color the backs of the grandparents’ heads as yellow as wild canary breasts, the sedan passed through banded cliffs and the sagebrush on strange fire. To the east lay a cherry red wall of cloud. The sun went down, the fluid dusk dimmed the car interior. The grandfather raised a little bottle now and then and drank from it, exhaling the smell of whiskey, held it out to his wife who shook her head. Shy leaned against the seat back, drowsy from the long day. The radio played “I Shot the Sheriff” and darkness pooled around them.
He was not asleep, yet not awake, and he felt the heat of her fingers before she touched him. She placed her hand, still and hot, in his crotch. It was utterly unprecedented, phenomenal. As though in response to his sudden erection she moved her fingers, an infinitesimal movement but enough to bring him to his first orgasm. Still she did not remove her hand and after a while it happened again. He made no effort to touch her or even shift his position for he believed her hand was innocent. The sticky mess in his shorts, the heat of her fingers through the denim, the droning of the car engine, the smoke from the grandfather’s cigarette made the backseat a cave, secret and sly. A tremendous feeling for Portugee Phillips and the thoroughbred horse overcame him. At the ranch he stumbled out of the car without looking at her and into the apron of light on the front porch, his hands beating at the storm of miller moths that struck him like soft bullets.
A long time later it occurred to him to wonder how she had known what she knew, for although when he was twelve he had believed her touch accidental, at thirty-seven he recognized the innocence had been his. She had hurled him into corruption, but who had thrown her into that pit?
FIDDLE ANDBOW
At daylight on the Fiddle and Bow ranch old lady Birch sat in a straight-backed wooden chair, her son Skipper, himself grey-headed and aging, gently brushing her thin white hair, so long it nearly touched the linoleum. He stood the brush, handle down, in a black jar and began the first braid.
“Where’s Hulse this mornin?” She wanted breakfast over and done with and it was a rule that they all ate together.
“They went out early, Mama.”
“It’s hard work, isn’t it, savin the world.” Now they’d have to wait for him. She could see someone moving around outside the corral, but too stout to be Hulse. “It’s not how Birches have ever ranched. Your father would be mortified to see you makin those crooked fences, was tin time with government men.”
“Showin results. Where we raked the hay into those little piles and left it—places where that hard old alkali ground’s been bare since Birches come into the territory—it’s softer, mellow. It’s makin grass. You want a know how much the land and water’s been run down, Mama, take a look at the county agricultural reports for back at the early part of th
e century—all the kinds a grass that growed here, all kinds a water. Now it’s brittle. Hard and brittle. The soil is crusted up. It’s the long run Hulse and me is thinkin about, seein that good grass bloom on the stock.”
“You can do all those fine things, Skipper, but I’ll tell you what—ranchers will do what they please. That’s your neighbors. And it’s not the long run that’s on their minds. The long run is a luxury. You can drive a nail on that.”
“Hulse and me come to feel the long run is the only thing that matters. Times change. You know better than anybody what a hard business this is, workin with a fingernail profit margin. We can’t afford a let our range run down no more. We got a do something. They are cuttin back our allotment, that federal rangeland reform is comin, we got irrigation problems. Comes right down a dollars and cents. I don’t want a say anything against Dad, but the things he done and his father way back when, drives what Hulse and me do now.”
“Is that Bonnie out there?”
“Yes.”
The first braid was smooth and hard, the end held with a red rubber band. He worked swiftly, seeing Bonnie turn toward the house. “She’s comin in now. She’ll get somethin goin. Get some fresh coffee goin anyway.”
“That’s all I want. And that dark bread. I hope we don’t have to sit and wait for Hulse.”
“We can go ahead. He won’t mind.”
“Well, I mind. We’ll wait. Hulse deserves that much courtesy.”
But they had not waited. At six-thirty Skipper pulled a ham slice from the pan, laid a piece of black bread on it and a fried egg, touched on a littlesalsa verde with a tiny spoon stampedAlberta, sat at the table with his book open before him. He read in his soft voice,
“I drown, my Lord. What though the Streames I’m in
Rosewater bee, or Ocean to its brinkes
of Aqua Vitae where the Ship doth Swim?”
Skipper had been married and a father himself years before but the two young sons, playing in the open trunk of the new car, had closed it on themselves while the parents carried in groceries. Cattle prices had been up that fall and they had paid cash for the sedan, meant for Ziona.
“Where are the boys?” she said. They ran here and there, calling, drove over the ranch shouting their names while the children suffocated. It had been the hottest day and afterwards he hoped they had quickly slipped into unconsciousness, unable to hear the anguished calling voices just a few feet away. Out there on the prairie something—the evasive turn of a harried bird with a motion like a convulsive kick?—had made him stop and open the trunk. In that airless oven they lay limp and blue. It was wrong what they said about grief. It augered inside you forever, boring fresh holes even when you were sieved. Ziona lived now in San Diego, remarried, and with other children, but he was still here seeing the places they had been every day. The pastor had given him—he who had never read a poem since grade school—an unlikely book, the meditations of a seventeenth-century metaphysical Calvinist in the wilderness of Massachusetts. The first lines he read began with the same burning question whose wick had flared when he raised the trunk lid.
Under thy Rod, my God, thy smarting Rod,
That hath off broke my James, that Primrose, Why?
The minister’s three-hundred-year-old grief and his bony kneeling on it, grief like gravel under his kneecaps, gave Skipper’s smarting heart if not ease, then company, united his vague thoughts on the conjunction of God and Nature into belief. In the years since, he had read the meditations many times, coming from them with the sense of divine order in a chaotic universe. It could not be otherwise.
Old lady Birch sipped at her black coffee and watched the gate.
“There he is. There’s Hulse. Get a cup for your husband, Bonnie, he likes his coffee scalding.”
Hulse, his leather jaw clean-shaven, came in with a handful of wild chives for Bonnie, said, “Why in hell didn’t you wait for me?” He tipped his hat back on his round, close-shorn head. The thick neck sloped into colossal shoulders and arms so developed in muscle that they could not hang straight. His face seemed compressed into heavy cheeks and a blunt nose, a serious man with a tight smile. His enemies knew him to be a curly-headed, rank son of a bitch with severe ways.
The two cowboys, Rick Fissler, straight out of the box and needing assembly, and Noyce Hair, right half of his face puckered with scars, followed him in, washed at the kitchen sink. Skipper had hired them on when they changed the way they ranched. The new way meant keeping the stock moving so they would not overgraze nor bunch for long weeks at water points and shade, meant drifting small bunches instead of driving the big herd up into the Forest allotment. They needed cowboys, were surprised to find them a scarce commodity.
“Hell,” said Skipper. “Maybe we can train one.” He went to the local high school’s Career Day, set up a card table and a sign:
LEARN TO BE A COWBOY,
ROPE AND RIDE ON THE FIDDLE&BOW .
THIS IS THE REAL THING
DAYWORK OR AUTHENTIC BUNKHOUSE.
3SQUARES AND A STRING OF HORSES .
SUPPLY YOUR OWN SADDLE.
RANCH BACKGROUND PREFERRED.
It brought him a lot of laughs and Rick Fissler, an emaciated kid from the trailer slums out by the mines.
“You ride?”
“No. I was goin a try out for the navy but I rather be a—do this.” He pointed at the sign. “You can’t git a chance at a horse you don’t grow up on a ranch.”
Skipper took the kid’s name, told him to show up on Saturday morning but doubted he’d see him. Fissler rode up on a kid’s bicycle, knees out like a grasshopper, multicolored streamers at the handle grips. Skipper sent him in to breakfast.
“That poor Rick is half-starved,” Bonnie said after supper when the new hand had gone down to the bunkhouse. “He ate just everythin this mornin. Seven or eight pieces a toast, three eggs and bacon, home fries. He drank a quart a milk. And look what he put away tonight—six helpins a potatoes.”
“He fell off his goddamn horse about six times, too,” said Hulse. “It’s goin a be a long time makin him a hand.”
Hulse stood as thousands of men in the west, braced against the forces bending him, pressing him into a narrow chute. He was in a hurry. He struggled with the semiarid climate, the violent weather, government rules and dense bankers, alien weeds, the quixotic beef market, water problems, ornery fellow ranchers. There was not much give in him. He could make it work if things would clear out of his way.
“What did you see this mornin, Hulse,” asked his mother. “Did you see if the eagles are nestin on the butte again?”
“I didn’t look. But I doubt it because the sheep is up there. Hazy from them fires in Oregon. Didn’t get to see much because I spent the whole damn time listenin to Shot Matzke. His brother-in-law down Tie Sidin just sold out a some corporation for two and a half million dollars. That’s a lot a money but not as much as it’s worth. Goddamn pirates’re subdividin, stockin ‘the common land’ with tame elk. Half the people buyin into it are telecommuters. That’s your New West. Christ, they’re not even suitcase ranchers. They don’t need a run no cattle, make more money just settin on their ass than we’ll ever see. Drinkin cappuccino while they watch the elk. Shot said his brother-in-law had plastic diaper trouble quite a few times last year. Buggers threw them over the fence where the cows got them. Lost seventeen head. Wouldn’t be surprised if it was goons hired by the corporation a force a sale. By god, I could use another cup a coffee. Rick and Noyce, you guys want coffee?” But Noyce wanted grapefruit juice and Rick went for cola with ice. The men sat together at the south end of the table.
“Grinning at you with his butter teeth, that Shot Matzke. You know,” said old lady Birch, “I am coming to believe that there is a conspiracy. There is a powerful international group of men who want to control the ranchers and the farmers—to control the food supply of the world. Ultimately they will decide who lives and who dies.”