Bad Dirt Read online

  A few miles beyond blustery Elk Mountain, Mitchell said, “Look at that.”

  “What?”

  “The smoke that damn semi’s making.” He pointed his chin in the direction of the east-bound lane and she saw it a mile ahead, one of thousands of eighteen-wheeled trucks on the road, differing only in the billows of diesel smoke pouring from it. But as they drew abreast enormous orange flames shot into the air. The truck pulled over on the shoulder and they could see that a tarpaulin rolled up behind the cab was on fire. The driver jumped out and ran in front of his truck shouting into a cell phone.

  “Hah!” said Mitchell with something like satisfaction. “It’ll be an hour before anybody gets here.”

  The stench of smoke penetrated the Infiniti and they both thought of New York.

  In midafternoon Mitchell turned north. It was five o’clock when they hit the familiar dirt road after theFIREWORKS sign. They crossed the tracks and the terrain began to rise, a little rumpled and showing bits of dark red ledge beyond the fences. A dozen pronghorn grazed a mile away and he slowed, watching the guard duty animal throw up its head suspiciously. As they drove a billow of dust rose behind them. It was a hopeless chore, trying to keep the car clean. A small stream, known locally as a river and faced with flattened junk cars to prevent erosion in the spring floods, threaded down from the rough foothills. They could see the dark ridge, the aspen grove that marked Star Lily Ranch in the distance. A mile beyond the cattle guard they crossed the railroad tracks again, the Infiniti thumping painfully. At the fork he bore right and the road climbed, took its most beautiful turn through the heart of dappling aspen, then opened out into a series of folded meadows.

  Their house was in one of the meadows, sheltered to the southeast by a broad band of aspen which someone had told him were mysteriously dying. When he mentioned this to Eugenie she had said “Oh no,” for she had a reverence for trees, the sycamore tree in Brooklyn, the beech and maple of Vermont, and here, where trees were lacking, she immediately elevated aspen to high rank.

  In the aspen grove he had come upon the old wrought-iron sign that had once crowned the entrance to the ranch from which their lot had been sliced. It read simplyPANAMA . The original owner of the place had worked in his youth on the Isthmus of Panama as an express shipment clerk for Wells Fargo. Now the metal arch lay facedown in the dirt. Mitchell dug it up, cleaned the leaf mold from it with a stick, and leaned it against an aspen. It was too heavy to carry. He would come one day with the truck and get it.

  A mile farther on and they could see the dark mass of lodgepole pine and Engelmann spruce curved around their meadow like an encircling arm. The chimney was just visible, and Eugenie knew that the first thing Mitchell would do was light a fire in the fire-place, pour a drink, and sit in front of the fire, mesmerizing himself with the twisting flames while she defrosted two steaks. They were both on the diet that went for red meat and salad.

  At the bottom of the hill they saw there had been a change in the village while they were gone.

  “Look,” said Eugenie. “It’s the old woman. She’s not dead and she’s got a new house.”

  Mrs. Conkle’s scabrous trailer was gone. In its place was a small log cabin. The old woman was outside, smacking a stick at a sagebrush. She seemed made from sagebrush and rock herself.

  Mitchell had met Eugenie Prower in the mid-1970s at Bennington College in Vermont and they had married in a round barn. The farmer who owned the barn had asked—and received—a thousand dollars in rental. Eugenie had then had the face of Pallas Athena, with a straight nose, a small chiseled mouth, and black hair pulled into a low knot at the nape of her neck. She was big-boned with a full bosom and comfortable hips. There was no indication that she would slowly change into a full-jawed Queen of Diamonds decked in ornate chokers and turtlenecked Peruvian sweaters. Back in those early days she told him she loved classical music, and only gradually did he realize that she meant some syrupy string ensemble that played popular medleys. It hadn’t mattered because he thought she would learn to like the real music.

  At the end of their barn wedding ceremony Mitchell had had a sudden and awful vision of his new wife, naked and down on all fours, looking beseechingly at the farmer, who was coming at her with a milking machine. As if Eugenie had read Mitchell’s thought she fired a hard glance that struck him like a hurled shot glass. For her part, Eugenie saw him as a weird stranger, his narrow head and smooth Nordic features startlingly similar to a photograph she had seen of a preserved corpse pulled from a Scandinavian bog. There had been a braided leather rope around the ancient neck, the man choked in ritual death. She wanted to shout “No!” But in a few minutes they were running through the rice gauntlet, on their way to married life with no thoughts of milking machines or leathery bog men.

  Through the childless years they had been tolerably content with each other, perhaps because early on they had bought an old farmhouse in Vermont, which served as a cooling-off retreat for one or the other when they quarreled. Mitchell was an architect with Dyer, Foxcap and Waigwa in Manhattan, and Eugenie one of several designers at her family’s kitchen and bath design business, Prower and Baggs. Her mother had started the business in the 1950s designing country kitchens with gingham curtains, geraniums, and sunny breakfast nooks styled after some mythical Bucks County farmhouse. Now everything was sleek, grey, and German.

  Their house in Brooklyn Heights was a brownstone whose feature was a sycamore at the back filling the summer space with luxurious rustling shade. In the winter Eugenie, who took a class at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in ways to attract birds to the backyard, hung out feeders and kept a journal on the avian fauna that came to them. These were the years before the snake entered the garden.

  Then Mitchell had an affair with an architectural graduate student intern. Eugenie did not confront him but waited it out, her emotions and thoughts a puree of insult and anger. When it was finished, she had a vengeful affair of her own with a handsome assistant cabinet liaison named Taylor. He was six years younger than she and the role of an experienced older woman initiating an innocent into the pleasures of love gratified her ego. They took long, long lunch hours, extending into late afternoon, to rush to “their” hotel, where Eugenie paid. But her affection for Taylor curdled overnight when, following the long Presidents’ Day weekend, he told her he did not want to go on with the stolen meetings. He had gone to Mount Tremblant with friends and, as he put it, had met someone for whom he “cared very deeply.”

  “What, in forty-eight hours you developed this deep emotion?”

  “Yes,” he said stubbornly, his face flaming.

  “Fine,” she said. “Fine.” But back at the office she had remarked privily to key people that she did not think Taylor was cut out for the kitchen and bath business, that he had poor design sense, that his three-hour lunches were meetings with Downtown Kitchens (DTK), to whom he was spilling his guts about the new suede-covered cabinets, that he was plotting to go over to DTK and God knew what clients he would try to take with him. But already it was too late; already the moment had arrived as when the woodman’s arms reach the apogee of the swing and the ax begins its irrevocable descent, the moment at which, for the tree, everything changes. Eugenie was pregnant.

  They had named the baby Honor because Eugenie had been moved by Honoré de Balzac’sLe Père Goriot in her French class. Mitchell believed their daughter had been conceived in their five-legged bed, the supernumerary leg a wizened center-positioned stick with a metal glide foot. It was meant to give extra support but failed and beat counterpoint against the floor when they made love. Worse than the rapping leg was Eugenie’s assortment of plans, blueprints, and new design books. She studied them for hours while Mitchell flopped and sighed ostentatiously, yanking pillows and covers over his head. In the morning they would both wake with the marks of books and bound plans on them. And the blueprints were often damaged, creased and torn.

  One morning Mitchell fell asleep on the subway, transported
back and forth for hours until groping fingers inside his jacket woke him. This happened, he said, because Eugenie’s lamp and the crackling papers had kept him awake all night. That evening he made up a bed on the sofa and the next morning said he had not had such a good sleep in years. Eugenie too had enjoyed the extra space, shoved sketches and elevations onto Mitchell’s side of the bed. It was a relief not to hear him mumbling in his sleep as he rowed through his gluey ocean of dreams.

  Mitchell slept on the sofa for weeks until Eugenie noticed that the living room had absorbed his stale odor. That Saturday they flipped a coin for the spare room, more of a storage place than a guest room, and it had come up tails. Mitchell took their old bedroom and bought a new CD player for himself. Eugenie got the spare room, cleared out the boxes and plastic storage bins of winter clothes, repainted the walls a melon color, and spent a small fortune for dark blue tailored drapes that gave the space a slightly masculine flavor. There was a niche where she put the baby’s cot. She put a luggage rack at the foot of the bed and on it a gilded Italian lacquer tray. In two days the tray was stacked with notebooks of ideas for dream kitchens glittering with copper in which no one would ever cook.

  Eugenie and Honor sat together on a red leather sofa when Dr. Playfire said Honor could not be a kidney donor for Mitchell because neither her DNA nor her blood type matched. Eugenie felt the blood rise in her face, her heart thrummed with hatred for the pink-chopped doctor, whose eyes were bright with malice and who obviously relished the news he was breaking. She said nothing.

  In the elevator Honor burst out. “My God! Whois my father?”

  “Someone else, obviously,” said Eugenie.

  “But who? What happened? Were you married to someone else?”

  “I don’t intend to discuss it,” said Eugenie in a glacier voice.

  The elevator stopped and a man in a wheelchair pushed by a young woman got on. They rode in vibrating silence to the ground floor, Honor clenching her fists and glaring at her mother. In the car Eugenie held her silence while Honor wept, shouted, and demanded until she was hoarse and choking. Neither of them told Mitchell what Dr. Playfire had said—that Mitchell was not Honor’s biological father—and Mitchell’s youngest sister, Paula, became his kidney donor.

  Honor left home while Mitchell was still in the hospital. New York changed and Eugenie was afraid and talked with Mitchell about getting out of the city. By then they could no longer go to the farmhouse in Vermont, for they had sold it in 1997. Mitchell, who had been thinking about Montana during his recuperation, read an article inPersonal Finance that named Wyoming as a state with low property taxes and no income tax at all. It seemed a safe haven as well—an unlikely target as the state’s entire population could fit into a phone booth. He recalled a childhood summer camp in the Tetons, singing around a campfire, fishing on Jenny Lake, and exploring Yellowstone trails on horseback.

  Gradually Eugenie and Mitchell began to think Wyoming might be both an adventure and a sensible move. Mitchell, recovered from his kidney transplant, asked for semiretirement—he would fly from Wyoming to New York every two months, stay a few days. Eugenie said she could finally start on the two books she wanted to write:The RealUrban Kitchen —Takeout & DeliandGlobal Kitchen.

  They made a trip out to scout around. Mitchell was stunned by the beauty of the place, not the overphotographed jags of the Grand Tetons but the high prairie and the luminous yellow distance, which pleased his sense of spatial arrangement. He felt as though he had stumbled into a landscape never before seen on the earth and at the same time that he had been transported to theur -landscape before human beginnings. The mountains crouched at every horizon like dark sleeping animals, their backs whitened by snow. He trod on wildflowers, glistening quartz crystals, on agate and jade, brilliant lichens. The unfamiliar grasses vibrated with light, their incandescent stalks lighting the huge ground. Distance reduced a herd of cattle to a handful of tossed cloves. His heart squeezed in, and he wished for a celestial eraser to remove the fences, the crude houses, the one he bought included, from this place. Even the sinewy, braided currents of the wind, which made Eugenie irritable, pleased him.

  Before they looked for a house they outfitted themselves at a Western Wear store, Eugenie buying two fringed suede skirts, some high-necked Cattle Kate blouses, and a pair of Rocket-buster boots featuring turquoise skeletons. Mitchell got into jeans, a western-cut shirt with pearl buttons. He bought a butter-colored pair of Olathe boots that slammed like a trip-hammer wherever he walked. He stumbled a lot, unable to get used to high heels, especially as he’d just got his first pair of bifocals. He bought a twenty-year-old pickup with four-wheel drive, dark green and dented, something he had always wanted, had a CD player installed, and took to driving around with his elbow out the window. He marveled at the truck’s lack of rust.

  “No salt on the roads here,” he crowed.

  Eugenie gave him a look as though he’d said he preferred his morning egg raw.

  They stayed in Jackson while they looked for a house and property. Eugenie wanted to be near the Tetons, Yellowstone Park, and the national forests, but the cheapest places cost millions. Wyoming’s easy taxes were almost negated by the extraordinarily high prices for property; scruffy sagebrush with bad water nine hundred feet down priced at breathtaking amounts if there was a mountain range in view. Mitchell began to think of these properties as widows’ windfalls. He imagined poor old ranchers working themselves into early graves holding on to their places. And when they died the widows dumped the cows and called up the real estate brokers, who sketched out thirty-five-acre ranchettes. The widows then hightailed it to condos in Boca Raton—with the exception of Eleanora Figg.

  The Fairs bought one of these ex-pasture plots thirty miles from Pinedale in a gated cluster of “estates” named Star Lily Ranch. They were three miles from the tiny town of Swift Fox, population seventy-three, fitted out with a general store and the Sagebrush Café. At dusk a globe of light like an incandescent jellyfish formed above Swift Fox and stained the mountainy darkness the weak orange of civilization.

  The house stood on a sunny slope of wildflowers and silver sage with a view of the Bachelor range, which even in summer resembled a monstrous slab of halvah veined with mauve chocolate. In the distance the Wind Rivers lay against the horizon like crumpled envelopes.

  The house, like every other house in Star Lily Ranch, was constructed of enormous pine logs. It was not the timber castle of some of their neighbors, but still, with 4,200 square feet, the largest house of their lives. The interior, designed in the grandrancho style of the 1980s, featured a gargantuan living room, intricate log notches, the distant mountains fitted artfully into the vast window, against which birds broke their heads.

  Eugenie pronounced the kitchen a mess of cracked tile, greasy walls, tiny sink. She hated the elderly refrigerator’s menacing snarl. Brown nylon carpet covered the living room and bedroom floors, the history of the former occupants written in its stains and chair-leg dents. The five bedrooms were tiny and dark. Eugenie set to work remaking the place with a loan from her mother.

  “We’ll take out these walls,” she said, gesturing at the narrow dining room, the kitchen, the oversize living room. “We’ll make a Great Room, so the space flows from the kitchen end to the dining space to the relaxation area.”

  “This one and that one are load-bearing walls,” said Mitchell, squinting at the ceiling. “You can’t take those out.”

  “We’ll see. I’ll get a builder in next week and go over the whole place with him. And those grim little bedrooms. If we knock out a couple of walls we’ll have two good-size rooms. And put in some decent bay windows. There should be a terrific view of the mountains from the bedrooms.”

  The real estate agent, deeply tanned and wearing an expensive hat with a buckaroo telescope crease, had suggested that one of the bedrooms would make a nice home theater. Eugenie noticed that his tan had an orange cast, and beneath his strong cologne she detected the charre
d smell of chemical tanning lotion.

  “You know,” he said, “you’re the first people from New York I ever sold a house to. We don’t get New Yorkers here. Not their kind a place, I guess.”

  “My God,” said Mitchell sotto voce to Eugenie, “all of this to look at”—he gestured at the tawny landscape, the distant mountains—“and he says ‘home theater’?”

  They both marveled at the astonishing wildlife, but for Eugenie the animals and birds were a decorative novelty. Mitchell, on the other hand, fell deeply in love with the pronghorn, those supreme athletes of the animal world which had evolved on the high plains over 20 million years along with wolves and bison. He called them “antelope.” Their coloration—a reddish brown accented by sparkling white—reminded him of a pair of golf shoes he had once owned.