‘I can’t hack this. I’m taking off. I’d rather shovel coal in hell than do this. What the hell are you building this big place for?’ It was what they both had expected. There was no fire in their argument. Only the chewy satisfaction of mutual dislike.
After Kevin was gone the elderly stonemason, the color of stone himself, came to build the chimney. Witkin hired and hired. There was not enough time to do it done. A crew of carpenters hammering the skeleton of the addition, filling it with wood and glass, the trucks straining slowly up the hill with loads of gravel and sand, with turf and boards, flashing, nails, insulation, hinges and latches, wire, lights, drywall, tape and spackle, paint. Hurry.
When they were done Witkin started the stone patio himself. The cast iron benches had already come, shipped from South Carolina in pine crates that smelled of resin and enamel. He would use the garden tractor to move the stones from the old wall at the edge of the forest to the sand bed.
He started on the wall very early in the day. The sky poured blue light, the backhoe popped. Stones, molded with fine maps in lichen and moss came away growling and grinding, throwing off limbs and rotten branches. The backhoe teeth gouged the delicate verdigris patina. Ruffled edges of continents and islands tore away, the lapping moss seas bunched, showed the film of soil below. The smell of leaf mold made him sneeze. Was there no relief from that dark wildwoods stench?
The small flat stones in a pile. He would work those into the interstices once the big rocks were in place. The round and irregular shapes went into the rubble pit.
He uncovered a big stone, the black edge four inches thick, the corners neatly squared. He looped the chain around it, drew it to the patio. In its wake a crushed trail. He turned it over to see the other side. A flower of white mold spread across the dark slate, its spidery rays like a burst galaxy. Crushed spider cocoons. He turned it again so the good side was uppermost and, with the crowbar, jimmied the stone in place.
He worked the morning scratching at the sand where one side sloped more deeply than the other, prodding and settling the stone into the best lie. If he had a dozen stones like that, he thought. He hoped for at least one more, and went again to the wall.
The stone had bridged a cavity filled with leaves and a spill of seed husks from an old mouse nest. He stooped, swept at the curled leaves with his hand. And, in startled recognition, pulled back his hand from the white curve of skull.
Larry, he thought for a moment, somehow Larry had gotten out of the Bronx cemetery and under the wall.
But it was not Larry.
Carefully he took out the leaves in small handfuls until the crooked bones lay under his stare. The flawless teeth smiled up at him, but the small bones of the hands and feet were missing. The right arm was gone. The remaining arm and leg bones, marked and grooved by the chiseled gnawings of mice, were brown with leaf stain. A shoe sole, curled and twisted away from its heel, lay in the pelvis like an embryonic husk. Behind him he heard the idling garden tractor chuff.
A pioneer grave. Some early sender’s wife, exhausted by childbearing, or, perhaps, scalped and slain by Indians, or killed by typhoid or pneumonia or milk fever. He had blundered into the cool privacy of her grave.
‘Poor woman, I wonder who you were?’ he said. In respect he undid the clay’s work, dragged the stone back to the wall and levered it home again. He would not desecrate a grave.
44
The Runty Rider Curses Judges
SEVEN MONTHS LATER in northwest New Mexico he saw the runty rider in The White Pony, sitting at the end of the bar with his eyes on the mirror, wearing the same clothes, his turtle mouth hooking onto the edge of the beer can. Loyal sat down beside him, looked in the mirror.
‘You ever get those guys?’
The runty rider looked like hell; his eyes were bloodshot, the dirt around his neck was deep in the leathery skin. His hands had a tremor. Well, he didn’t look too good either. The runt stared at Loyal, grimaced.
‘Well I’m damned. The coyote trapper, isn’t it? What the hell you doing down here?’
‘Desert coyote’s got a different color fur – more of a red, sort of a pretty roan color. I like to move around, do a different kind of trapping. Long as it isn’t out-of-season bear.’
The runty rider growled, ‘That damn mess.’
‘Have to say, curious how you made out.’
‘Forty people worked their asses off on that operation for almost three years. Florida, Wyoming, Maine, Montana, North Carolina, New York. We had it all – slides, videotapes, photographs, witnesses, admissions, evidence – two hundred black bear gallbladders packed for shipment, a warehouse of hides, a couple of cartons of claws, we had pictures of them with their radio collar dogs, pictures of a rotten heap of dead bear carcasses, we had statements from a Japanese end buyer and a Connecticut insurance agent middleman. We had six hundred pages of statements. We had their scent recipes – beaver oil, beaver castor, muskrat musk, oil of asafoetida and honey – you know what a black bear gallbladder is worth on the oriental market? Five K – five thousand bucks. The claws are worth another K. The Japanese got money to burn – they don’t care how much it costs, got to have the stuff. You multiply two hundred gallbladders by five K each and you understand we are talking serious money. More value than cocaine. Bear gallbladders bring more money than cocaine! We are talking a million dollars. Another quarter of a million for the claws. We had all this. We had fucking confessions! The biggest wildlife enforcement investigation there’s ever been. All those goddamn states working together. A miracle in itself.’ A muscle jumped in the runty rider’s jaw.
‘So what happened? They get away?’
‘Get away! Hell no, they didn’t get away! Well, a couple of them might of got away, but not many. We run coordinated 5 A.M. Sunday morning raids in three states and got eleven guys, the trappers and one middleman and three buyers. Those two rancid objects used to sit with you were still so drunk they weren’t hung over yet. They thought we wanted to go out for more bear. They kept hollering for their flashlights and they couldn’t understand about the handcuffs.’ He swallowed his beer in gassy gulps. ‘Yes, we got them.’ The voice was ironic, bitter.
‘You don’t seem happy. I’d think a successful operation would set a lawman right up.’
‘Yeah, you’d think so, wouldn’t you. Success is defined by the end result. You know where these scum are now? Every one of them?’
‘I’ll bite.’
‘Right where they were a year ago. Doing the same thing. Illegally trapping bear, taking the claws and gallbladders, selling to the Japanese and making a fortune. You know why? You know why all that work is down the tubes? Judges. Fucking, two-bit, smug, dumb, egocentric, stuck-up, ignorant and stupid judges who cannot tell their ass from a jelly doughnut. You be interested to know those stinking humps that sat with you got fines of one hundred dollars each for “practicing taxidermy without a license.” They peeled it off a rod as big a ham and paid up with a smile. The heaviest penalty went to a guy in North Carolina. Five-hundred-dollar fine and a thirty-day jail sentence suspended for “hunting out of season.”’ He drank in silence. He looked at Loyal in the mirror.
‘The judges think it’s funny. They don’t take any of it serious. That’s the trouble. They don’t know. And. They. Don’t. Care. We are going to see the end of the bears in our lifetime.’
‘So what are you doing down here?’
‘Down here?’ The runty rider laughed. ‘More of the same, only not bears. Don’t know why I’m telling any of this to a professional trapper. I must be around the corner. I don’t know, maybe I should get myself a bunch of traps and start in. There’s so much money in the illegal it surprises me anybody’s still on the decent side of the fence. Hell, it surprises me I am. There’s been quite a few law officers switch over. They know all the tricks, all the loopholes, all the exits and do they make money. I could be rich in a couple months. I could be back home with my wife and kids, swimming pool in the backya
rd, drive a Mercedes, instead of working undercover on a goddamn ranch posing as a general hand.’
‘You got kids?’
‘Yes, I got kids. Two of ’em. I don’t see ’em all that much but I talk to them on the phone three, four times a week. A pain in the ass, the boy, wants to be a rock star, screaming and moaning all the time out in the garage, the girl, Aggie, sixteen and into feminist politics, women’s rights, all that shit.’
‘You got pictures?’
‘No.’ Wary now. Is this some kind of vicious trappers’ plot to find out the names and appearances of his children? Children have been kidnapped before. Who the hell is this old coyote trapper, anyway?
45
The Lone One
THE RANCH LOOKED DIFFERENT as soon as he turned off the highway and ran parallel to Jack’s fence. It was the fence – half a mile of square-wire sheep fence. Since when did Jack run sheep. He looked out across the bunchgrass. None of jack’s Brahmas were in sight but neither were any damn sheep. That’s what happened when you missed a season or two. Things changed.
The front door opened before he turned off the ignition key. Starr stood on the porch. Her arms hung down, the palms of her hands turned outward. Her face contorted and he saw the wet tracks from where he sat. He knew.
As he came around the front of the truck she plunged down the steps and threw herself against him. His hands leapt to her shoulders and he pressed her away. She was so close he could smell the rank tobacco, see the yellowed texture of her eyes, enlarged pores of her cheeks. She was too close to look at and he wanted to shove her back onto the porch. But stood there, fingers clamped into her fleshy arms, concentrating on balance. There was nothing else. He could not think, his mind flew apart. She felt his shock and drew back, went to the steps and stood there.
‘I’m all alone now, Loyal. Jack’s gone.’ Snorting into the handkerchief. Salt tears in the corners of her mouth, ‘I would have told you but I didn’t know how to get in touch. We didn’t know where you were.’ An accusation. She lit a cigarette, threw the match down. He coughed.
‘What happened? Jack.’ He could still feel the heat of her in the cups of his hands. But saying Jack’s name restored his balance. He said it again.
‘In May. The damnedest thing. He was fine, Loyal, he was just fine.’ The tears were drying. ‘Not a thing in this world wrong with him. He was always a healthy man, just a little trouble sleeping at night sometimes. Real early he went out to talk with Rudy about drift fencing and a cattle guard on the allotment, they were going to pick up the materials in Cheyenne. When he come back in the coffee was ready. He had the hiccoughs. I laughed and told him to drink some water to get rid of ’em before he had his coffee. He drank the water, Loyal, and for a few minutes they stopped, then I poured him out his coffee and he got hiccoughs again. They went on all through breakfast.’ An empty grain bag was wedged half under the steps. She spoke as though she had rehearsed for this. The words tumbled without inflection.
‘At first we joked, but pretty quick it got so it wasn’t a joke, he couldn’t hardly eat. Tried all the home remedies we knew about, breathing in and out of a brown paper bag, drink water while you’re bending over, eat a cube of sugar dipped in brandy, he took a glass of whiskey, drank more water, I tried to scare him by coming up behind him and clapping my hands. Finally he went out, said the ride down to Cheyenne would take his mind off the damn hiccoughs, and if they didn’t quit pretty soon he’d see a doctor down there about them.’ How different she was, he thought. The sheen had gone off her, the lively, smart answers and the quick movement. Awkward as a cow.
‘They come back around three o’clock. Truck’s full of fencing and I look out and see Rudy’s driving. I know we got a problem, because I can see Jack’s profile bob every few seconds.’ She was imitating now, showing how Jack had sat in the truck, jerked by his body’s mad will. ‘He still had the hiccoughs. He come in carrying some prescription that was supposed to quiet them down, some kind of sleeping pill, I think. Loyal he took those things, and can you believe he had the hiccoughs all night long, even while he was half knocked out from the pills. I had to get up and go deep on the couch in the living room the bed would shake so hard each time he’d spasm, but then I got real worried about him, whether he would swallow his tongue or what because he was dozing real heavy, so I’m up all night drinking coffee, pacing the floor and hearing that damn “hic, hic, hic!”’ As if she had only noticed the weeds around the porch she began to pull at them, let them drop where they fell.
‘In the morning he was a wreck, he could hardly talk, his face was grey and he couldn’t take anything or keep anything down. He was suffering, Loyal. I got on the phone to the doctor and he said, “Bring him in.” I brought him in and they put him in the hospital, tried a hundred damn things, tried to sedate him out of it again, but nothing worked. Nothing worked! I couldn’t believe it. The miracles of modem medicine, they can remake you with heart and lung transplants and new arms and plastic surgery and they cannot stop the hiccoughs. I was screaming at the doctors.
‘I think Jack knew then nothing was going to work. He says “Starr, the pulley’s dipped off the drive shaft.” That was more or less his last words. He lasted until the next morning, and then his heart just quit. You could tell he wanted to die just so’s the hiccoughs would stop.’
He wanted to get back in the truck and light out, but Starr brought him into the kitchen, then troubled the cupboards and refrigerator, getting out eggs and flour, dropping the measuring spoons. Her talk veered around the compass, the thing she was making, of course he’d stay to supper, it wasn’t cheese souffle but even better, a keesh, and the rain that was slow to come, what she might do now. They seemed to be through talking about Jack.
‘I been thinking I might go back to singing. Bet you didn’t know I used to sing, Loyal.’
‘No, I sure didn’t.’ His image in the steel bowl on the table, his face crushed and drawn sideways, mouth a rubber band tied behind his head, hat brim like a pie plate.
‘Oh yes! Used to sing at the intermission at the rodeo in Cheyenne. Of course it was a long time ago, fifteen, eighteen years. But I got to practicing one day. Oh, it used to be a lot of fun – the crowd, good-looking men. That’s how I met Jack, at the rodeo.’ She rocked a curve of wires through the flour and butter. ‘God sake, I got to do something.’
He didn’t know how to talk to her. She had been Jack’s wife, fixed in that character. Now she was a person he had never known, the crying, talk about doing something, singing. A woman, a solitary woman – what the hell to say to her?
‘What’s the story on the sheep fence out by the turn?’ He tried to sound like he wanted to know. Hell, he wanted to know.
‘Oh that. Well, you know Jack didn’t leave me too well fixed for cash. Like most ranchers, land rich and cash poor. Course he didn’t expect he was going to go so sudden. I had to do something. I tried to find a buyer for the Brahmas. Nobody around here would touch them. You find out who your friends are, Loyal. All Jack’s rancher pals. Finally, a feller came up from Texas and bought them. I’d written to the feller down there where Jack had bought them in the first place, and he told this guy. So they’re down where they started out. Texas.’ She rolled the yellow dough with an empty wine bottle. A cat came out from under the table and ate a fragment that fell to the floor.
‘I didn’t make anything on that sale. Fact, we took something of a loss. Then Bob Emswiller asked if he could lease part of the ranch for sheep range. Summer range. Promised he’d watch they didn’t graze it down too heavy. That’s his fence.’
‘Didn’t see any sheep.’
‘Yeah.’ Her neck was red, maybe the heat of the oven. The oven was set high, a smell of scorching came from it. ‘He didn’t pay what he said he would so I told him to take his sheep and skedaddle. No sheep this year. He said he wouldn’t pay, either, that the fence was enough, I ought to be glad of it. After I told him no more sheep, there was a few shots Bred at the house
one night. Broke the spare-room window. A woman wants to learn what kind of neighbors she’s got, let her husband die. They always thought I was an outsider here.’
‘So you took a loss on the cattle, got skunked on your range lease.’
‘That’s only the beginning. I got to sell the ranch. I know Jack loved this place, and I did, too, but I don’t any more. They’ve done that to me.’ She gestured with her chin, her old woman’s chin, downy and soft with fat. ‘I want to do something with the rest of my life. If I sell the ranch I can get away from here.’ She poured the egg onto the cheese and bacon in the dish, slid it into the oven. She turned to him. God knows what she saw. She was playing in her own movie.
‘How’d you like to hear me sing, Loyal?’ The voice suddenly bright and silly.
She put a record on the turntable. The record player was still on the sideboard where it had been for years. Loyal studied the album cover; five men in musician’s chairs, a swirl of yellow color coming from their hands to the top of the cover and red letters bursting, ‘MUSIC TO SING ALONG WITH • Volume 7 • Country Ballads.’
The record rotated, double-stop fiddle harmonies of a sentimental country song filled the room. Starr stood in front of the oven, feet side by side, hands folded in a knot of fingers, held in front of her crotch. Middle-aged, in wrinkled whipcords and a sweatshirt, but something of the old vulnerable beauty persisting. Perhaps she knew it.
She counted silently, then sang ‘He was just passing through, I was all alone and blue.’ The words forced themselves up into her nose, she reached for the cheap sadness. Loyal couldn’t help it, felt the barroom tears jerking out of his eyes. That song always got to him, but here he had to sit in a damn kitchen chair, couldn’t even hunch over a beer. So he closed his eyes and wished Jack had lived.
The quiche was good, and they ate all of it. It was easier now, no talking, the food on the plates, the forks spearing and lifting. She put a paper napkin near his hand. Jack’s chair was empty. Pickles. The coffee perked. How many times had he sat here?