Eve laughed. “She saw the light, obviously.”
“It took about five minutes.”
There was a short pause. They smiled at each other, and he realized he was staring too intently at her mouth.
“Can I get you a drink?” he said.
“No, I’m fine, thank you. But go ahead if you . . .”
“No. I’m fine too.”
They stood there for a few moments while Ben scanned for something to say. Everyone except them seemed to be laughing and talking. Eve was looking around as if she wanted to escape, then looked back and caught him staring at her.
“Sarah told me you’re an architect. Do you design houses or . . . ?”
“Sometimes. Not as often as I’d like. My partner gets to do most of the exciting stuff. I look after the boring business stuff, chase people who owe us money, that sort of thing. I do the occasional remodeling job to keep my hand in. And a new build every now and then. I’ve been working on one lately, as a matter of fact.”
“What is it?”
“Oh, just a little housing development. Out in the Hamptons.”
“I didn’t think anyone did ‘little’ in the Hamptons.”
“Well, strictly speaking it’s not quite the Hamptons. And the problem is, it’s not little enough. It’s a small plot, really pretty. Lots of trees, perfect for a couple of medium-size houses. But the developers now want to get rid of all the trees, double the number of houses, and make them twice as big. It’d be just another ridiculous bunch of McMansions.”
“McMansions. I like that.”
“You haven’t heard that before? They’re everywhere now. Actually, what these guys wanted was more Garage-Mahal.”
She laughed.
“Anyhow, it probably isn’t going to happen. At least, not with me. There was this colossal fight just before we came out here. I walked out of a meeting. You know, the prima donna architect. Just got up and left. Never done it before in my life, but I’m definitely going to do it a lot more.”
“It felt good?”
“It felt wonderful.”
“Sarah told me you designed your own house.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Tell me about it.”
Why she should be interested, he couldn’t imagine. He wondered for a moment if he was being patronized.
“Well, you know that amazing Frank Gehry building in Bilbao?”
She nodded eagerly. “The Guggenheim Museum?” “Well, it’s absolutely nothing like that.”
She laughed again and it seemed real. God, he felt witty.
“It’s tiered and white and has a big lawn in front with a wonderful Korean dogwood and a looped brick driveway. It’s got oak and limestone floors and a ridiculously over-the-top, kind of Audrey Hepburn sweep-down staircase, which was really just to impress my parents-in-law—”
“Did it?”
“Not at all. And a big studio for me out the back with slatted shutters I can close and fall asleep or watch TV without anyone catching me. And the garage is tucked away and covered with Virginia creeper so nobody can call it a Garage-Mahal.”
“It sounds beautiful.”
“Oh no. It’s a Frank Lloyd Wright rip-off, built on the cheap in the wrong place and I’d love to tear it down and start again. But it’s home and it kind of works.”
There was a loud blast of feedback from the sound system inside and then Ty’s mellow voice at the microphone, inviting everybody to roll up their sleeves and get back on the dance floor. Ben was about to ask Eve if she wanted to dance when someone grabbed him from behind by the elbows. He turned and saw that it was Sarah.
“Come on, birthday boy. You haven’t danced with me all evening.”
“I couldn’t get past all those young cowboys.”
“Well, buddy, now’s your chance.”
She rarely drank and never too much, but her cheeks were flushed and the exuberance seemed slightly strained. She turned to Eve and gave her a conspiratorial smile that Ben found puzzling.
“Will you excuse us?”
“Of course.”
“I hear you play tennis. Shall we play tomorrow?”
“I’d love to.”
“Good.”
Sarah hauled him by the hand toward the doorway to the dining room and just as he was about to follow her in, he turned and saw Eve still watching them. She smiled and he smiled back. And in that fleeting connection something happened inside him. It was only much later that he would come to acknowledge it for what it was and even then he would hesitate to give it so facile or slippery or grand a title as falling in love. But he knew it was a change, like the unlocking of a door or a footfall in an empty house.
The band began to play a tune he didn’t know. Sarah led him to the dance floor and said something to him that got drowned in the music. He put his head close to hers.
“What was that?”
“I said, she’s lovely.”
“Who?”
“Eve.”
He’d known exactly who she meant. It was his first deception. He nodded and shrugged, as if he hadn’t until now considered it.
“Yeah,” he said. “She seems nice.”
Later, in bed, the lights out and his back turned in defensive rejection, he felt Sarah’s fingers brush the hairs at the base of his spine then stroke slowly upward to the nape of his neck. And he lay still and cold as marble and, even as his loins stirred, he cruelly considered ignoring her. Reject the rejector, show her how it felt. He had done it often before and even though he knew it punished him as much as her and would only prolong their mutual suffering, giving them another night, another day, another week of cold resentment, he nearly did it now again.
But he didn’t. Instead he turned and reached for her and found her, naked and cool and tentative. He held her for a while, the way he always held her, and she lifted her thigh, as she always did, and placed it across his. The ritual, the feel, the smell of her so utterly familiar, the slow quickening of her flesh that never failed to thrill him.
But then, as if with some new resolve, she hoisted herself upon him and lowered her head and kissed him deeply, shockingly, her hair curtaining their faces. He angled his hips and slid himself into her and she leaned back until it bent him and hurt him and he cried out and had to grasp her hips to stop her. There was an urgency in her that he had never before known and that, were it not for its melancholy undertow, he might have taken for plain desire.
In the darkness above him he could just discern her slender shape, her breasts a parchment gray, nippled in charcoal, her ribs beneath like rippled sand. Her face was in shadow but he saw the glint of her eyes and it startled him, for whenever they made love she kept them shut, as if unwilling to witness herself so wanton.
They came quickly and together and she called out in a voice so low and feral he didn’t recognize it. Then she went very still. For a long time she didn’t move, just sat like a sculpture upon him, while their breathing slowed and faded and the silence folded in around them. Her head was tilted back so he could no longer see her face, only the silhouette of her chin and the pale fall of her neck and shoulders. Then she quaked and it was so violent and abrupt that for a moment he mistook it for some final spasm of her coming. But she was weeping. He reached up and laid a hand on her shoulder.
“What is it?”
She shook her head and seemed unable to find her voice. He raised himself on his elbows and as he did so she swiveled her body away.
“Sweetheart? What is it?”
“Nothing,” she whispered.
He gently rolled her onto her side and tried to cradle her. And she started to sob. She had her arms tightly crossed, hugging herself, as if to stifle whatever private agony it was that came welling from her, convulsing her entire body. Ben had never heard a sound so dreadful.
“Tell me,” he said. “Please, tell me.”
“It’s nothing.”
EIGHT
They loped the horses through the sage and up
a low bluff gashed red along its side where the rock had crumbled with the wind and rain. From the brow Abbie could see the glint of the river through the cottonwoods that lined its banks and see their jetsam of fluff drifting slowly on the hot noon air. They stood the horses awhile, Ty on her right and his father on her left, and watched the shadows of the clouds pass like ships of doubt across the pasture below and the billowed landscape beyond. Ty’s father pointed east to where the river disappeared behind a distant shoulder of rock and said that this was where their land ended and their neighbor’s began.
“And what mountains are those?” Abbie asked.
“The Bighorn. And, farther north, the Rosebud.”
“It’s so beautiful.”
“It is.”
“How long have you lived here?”
“Three generations. Ty’s will be the fourth.”
He seemed about to say more but then to reconsider and instead just rubbed his chin and stared in silence out across the land. High beyond the sparkling breaks of the river a great bird was spiraling slowly upward in a thermal, calling as if in lament at some great loss. Abbie asked what it was and Ty said it was a golden eagle and that she was lucky, for they weren’t often to be seen hereabout. She already felt lucky. Earlier, riding higher in the hills, up where the forest began, they had seen a moose and some bighorn sheep and a black bear hustling her cub into the trees.
“Let’s go find those colts,” Ty’s father said.
He nudged his horse forward and Abbie followed the swish of the gray mare’s tail down through the boulders and the sage with Ty behind her. They had saddled her a smart bay gelding, his flanks now slick with sweat. Ty was riding a young strawberry roan he had started himself. They rode, all three, not with bits but with hackamores, a way Abbie had never ridden before. Never had she found a horse so easy yet so alive and utterly in tune. They were in a different league from those at The Divide, but then breeding and raising such horses was how Ty’s father made his living. A Ray Hawkins quarter horse, she later discovered, would always fetch a premium.
Ray was probably about the same age as her father, Abbie figured, though too much weather had leathered his skin and made him look older. His eyes were the same pale blue as Ty’s and when he smiled they all but vanished in the furrows of his face. He had that same quiet serenity she sometimes saw in Ty when he was concentrating on his work. In fact, so did Ty’s mother and the horses and dogs and just about every living creature on the ranch. It was just a little bit spooky, as if they were in on some special secret. Maybe it was simply from living in such a wondrous place.
It had been a long drive the previous evening from The Divide. In Ty’s old pale-green pickup, with the lowering sun behind them turning the plains and mountain peaks to gold, they had trundled east for hours along the interstate, past Billings and Hardin and Little Bighorn, then south and over the state line into Wyoming and the Powder River Basin. They talked a lot but were comfortable enough with each other by now to be silent too. Ty played her some of his favorite music, obscure country bands that Abbie had never heard of. She curled up beside him and slept and when she woke they were in Sheridan, bumping across the railroad and past an old steam engine, proudly parked beside it.
The Hawkins ranch sat in a cleft of hills some five miles out of town and was reached by a tortuous network of gravel road. It was dark when they got there and so it wasn’t until morning that Abbie got to see what a spectacular setting it was. Ty’s parents had waited up to greet them and though Abbie would rather have gone straight to bed, they insisted on serving an epic supper of cold ham and turkey, coleslaw, and baked potatoes, followed by blueberry pie and ice cream, all of which Ty devoured as if he’d been starved for weeks. And all the while, Ray and Martha, who had eaten earlier, sat by and watched and smiled and sipped their mugs of hot milk, saying barely a word, just listening as their son recounted between mouthfuls what had been going on at The Divide.
He was their only child and the pride shone from them. His mother looked like one of those Scandinavian women Abbie recalled from photographs of the early pioneers, freckled and blond and buttoned to the neck, women who could with equal resolve and dexterity embroider a sampler or shoot a coyote between the eyes at fifty yards.
The colts they were now going to see had been turned loose in the last of the linked meadows that fringed the river. There were a dozen of them, and they lifted their heads and pricked their ears and watched while the three riders came closer. When he was still a hundred yards away, Ray stopped and left his horse to graze and went on foot toward them. The colts lowered their heads and shambled to meet him like a gang of blissed-out teenagers.
Ray stopped and let them come and when they reached him they circled around and nuzzled him and he stroked their necks and muzzles and rubbed their backs and spoke to them. He called to Abbie to come and both she and Ty got off their horses and joined him. And though a little shier with her than with Ty and his father, they let her put her hands on them and blow into their noses and savor their warm, sweet breath.
Back at the house over lunch, another sumptuous spread of cold meats and salad and home-baked bread, Abbie declared that she had never seen such a heavenly place in all her life. Ty’s father smiled and nodded but his wife, pouring Abbie some more water, sighed and shrugged.
“It is now,” she said. “How long it’ll stay that way is another matter.”
“What do you mean?” Abbie said.
Martha looked at Ray, as if asking his permission to go on. He didn’t seem too keen. Ty looked as puzzled as Abbie was.
“What is it?” he said.
“Your mom’s just talking about the drilling, that’s all.”
“Why, what’s happened?”
“It’s nothing. It won’t happen.”
“For heaven’s sake, Ray. Tell him about the letter.”
“What letter?” Ty said.
Abbie felt that she was intruding on some private family matter and wondered if she ought to excuse herself and pretend she wanted to go to the bathroom. Ty’s father sighed and when he spoke it was to Abbie.
“There’s a lot of drilling going on around here.”
“For oil?”
“Gas. Coalbed methane. The land around here is full of it, all across the Powder River Basin. The gas gets trapped in the coal seams. Nobody bothered too much with it until fairly recently. But now they’ve found this real cheap way of drilling for it.”
“You’re not going to drill for it here?” Abbie said.
Ray gave a rueful laugh.
“No, Abbie, we’re not. And even if we wanted to, we couldn’t. Like most ranchers around these parts, when my granddaddy bought this land, the government only sold him the surface rights. They kept the mineral rights themselves and lately they’ve been leasing them off. We just found out somebody leased our land.”
“Show Ty the letter,” Martha said.
“Not now.”
“Ray, he’s got a right to—”
“Mom, it’s okay. I’ll read it later. Who bought the lease?”
“Some little outfit in Denver.”
“And what do they plan on doing?”
Ty’s father shrugged. “I guess we’ll find out next week. They’re sending a team to check things out.”
“Don’t let them.”
“That’s what I’ve been telling him,” Ty’s mother said.
Ray smiled. “You can’t stop them. The law’s on their side. They can drive around, dig, drill, do whatever they like. They give you a so-called ‘surface damage agreement, ’ which everybody around here knows isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. But if we don’t sign it, they can just go ahead anyhow.”
“That’s terrible,” Abbie said.
“It probably won’t come to much. A lot of these folks just buy the lease then just sit on it and don’t do a thing.”
He didn’t sound as if he’d even convinced himself of this but he changed the subject and asked Abbie w
hat it was like living in New York. She said it was okay and that she used to like it more than she did now. The problem was, the more time she spent out West, where there was so much space, the harder it was to go home.
“Ty says you want to go to college out here,” Martha said.
“Definitely.”
“That’s great. How do your mom and dad feel about that?”
“I haven’t told them yet. I think my dad’ll be okay with it.”
“Well, I’ll tell you something, young lady,” Ray said. “The way you handle a horse, I’d say it’s where you belong.”
It was the middle of the afternoon when they set off back to The Divide. As they drove out of Sheridan, Ty said he wanted to show her something and turned off the highway onto a winding gravel road. Ahead of them a great cloud of red dust rose into the sky and as they came around a bend they saw two giant yellow excavators hacking a crater into the hillside.
“They’re digging a pit for the water,” Ty said. “When they drill into the coal seam, it releases this huge amount of water. Which you’d think, in a place as dry as this, would be a good thing. But it’s salt water and where it floods onto the land nothing can grow. Kills everything. See down yonder?”
He pointed down into the valley.
“Those white patches there, down by the creek? That’s salt. Those were prime hay meadows, about a hundred acres. Friend of my daddy owns them. Now they’re good for nothing. Used to be good trout fishing there too, but now there’s not a single fish. All died. The gas companies line these big holes with plastic, like they’re doing here. But they leak and spill, and they don’t fix them because, basically, they don’t give a damn.”
They drove on and every so often Ty would point things out to her—wellheads, compressor stations, power-and pipelines, dirt roads gashed across the virgin landscape. They crossed over and down into another valley and stopped by a low wooden bridge where the water of another creek bubbled with methane released by the drilling. Ty told her how a friend of his had put a match to it one day and set the whole creek ablaze.
In other places, like the deserted ranch house he showed her on the way back to the highway, artesian wells that had functioned happily for forty years had suddenly started to bubble gas or run dry because some idiot gas drillers had ruptured the aquifer five miles away.