Bad Dirt Read online

  A month before his mother’s fall she had bought some brightly colored kitchen sponges. One of them was purple, and she had developed an affection for it, never using it on greasy pots or to wipe up nasty spills. He dribbled coffee on the counter one morning and began to mop at the spill with the distinguished sponge.

  “What are you doin! Don’t use that—take the pink one. You dunderhead, I’m savin that one.”

  “For what, Ma?”

  “For the good glasses.” She meant the crystal wineglasses with the gold rims that had been passed down from Granny Webb and had stood inverted in the china cupboard for as long as he could remember. He had never known them to be used. Inside the china cupboard next to the glasses was a photograph of his father’s mother in a black silk twill dress, looking freeze-dried and mournful.

  “Where is that stupid mailman?” his mother said, pulling back the curtain and looking for the plume of dust along the road.

  It was days before he had a chance to listen to the CD. It was on the way to the bank. The sounds of leaf susurration, cicadas, crickets, mortars, a calling bird with a voice like a kid hooting down a cardboard tube, snatches of talk, incoming fire, deafening helicopter fibrillation filled the truck. He was fascinated, listened to it again. And again.

  Saturday was grocery day, but his mother said, “I don’t feel up to it. You just get what we need, bread and eggs. Coffee. Whatever else you see that looks good. I don’t have much appetite these days anyhow. And I want a wait for the mail. I’m expectin mail.”

  He bought the groceries and on the way out of town passed the library. Two miles beyond it he thought of books—books on Vietnam—and he turned around. He came away with three, all they had, read them in bed that night and fell asleep with a book on his face. He awoke frightened and shouting, thinking something was smothering him. The exhaled moisture from his mouth had formed a round dimple in the page.

  It was not long after this that his mother began to give way. She would look at him and say, “Where’s Gilbert? Out playin, I bet. I want him to fill up that wood box.” And later she would tell him, “You’ll have to fend for yourself for supper. I can’t cook without no wood.” He felt a pang of guilt for there had been many times when he was a boy that he had dodged the wood box. But she kept asking if the mail had come until Gilbert, exasperated, said, “You expectin a letter from the president or what?” She shook her head and said nothing.

  In the year before the millennium, Gilbert’s son Monty, a big dark-haired fellow, still single, who worked as a roofer in Colorado, turned thirty-two. Gilbert hadn’t seen him in years. Rod, the younger one, lived in Sheridan a block away from his mother, worked in Buffalo in a video rental store. He was married and had two children, twin girls, whom Gilbert had only once seen and never had touched nor held. The little girls had never been to the ranch. The boy’s wife, Debra, worked too, answering the telephone at Equality Cowboy Travel. Gilbert sometimes dreamed that they would have more children—sons—and that these little grandsons would love the ranch, would grow up knowing what a beautiful place the Wolfscales owned. They would love it as he did and take it on when he went.

  Gilbert’s mother, though tottery and crotchety, was eighty-one with no sign of giving up. The purple sponge, though somewhat faded, was largely unchanged, not to be used. She took to rummaging through the desk looking for pencil and paper, settled on a little notebook spiral-bound at the top and with lined paper. She spent hours at the kitchen table bent over this notebook, thinking, occasionally scrawling something down or erasing everything, tearing out the spoiled sheet and crumpling it.

  “What are you writin, Ma? Your biography? Cowgirl poetry?”

  “No,” she said and put her arm around the notebook so he couldn’t see it, like a child protecting a test paper from a cheating neighbor.

  On a very cold March day he went into town to the ranch equipment center; the used aircraft tires he’d ordered for the bush hog were in. If the weather warmed up later in the week he’d work on pulling old sagebrush out of the three-mile pasture. In town the bank thermometer read –2 and a harsh wind made it seem like the freezing pits of hell. He ordered a pizza. Clouds were moving in as he drove back eating the cheesy slices, and as he turned into the ranch drive the first fine flakes drove through the air.

  The house was silent. He thought his mother might be napping and went out to the shop, where he worked on changing the bush hog’s tires. The days were growing longer, and he worked until twilight. Back in the house he was disturbed by the deep silence. Usually his mother watched crime programs on television at this hour. He went to her room and knocked on the door.

  “Ma! Ma, you O.K.? I’m goin a start supper now.” There was no answer. He opened the door and saw his mother would not again want any supper.

  It was a shock to learn that her bank account was at flat zero. He couldn’t understand what she had spent the money on. He remembered her telling him when she had broken her hip that she had over six thousand dollars set aside for “—youknow.” And he did know. For her funeral costs. He’d had to scratch to come up with the money for a decent coffin.

  Cleaning out her room, he came across the spiral-bound notebook. It was filled with plaintive letters to the California State Allocation Department, asking when her inheritance would come. Folded in the front of the notebook was the original letter. He telephoned the number at the bottom of the page but got a message that the number had been disconnected. Gilbert began to guess there was some sort of scam. He called Sheriff Brant Smich, asked him if he knew anything about California State Allocation.

  “Hell, yes. You get a letter from them sayin about you inherited some money and askin for your bank account numbers? Don’t believe none of it. Don’t answer them. Bring the letter to the post office. They’re after that outfit for mail fraud.”

  With his mother gone, civilization began to fall away from him as feathers from a molting hen. In a matter of weeks he was eating straight from the frying pan.

  As is usual in the ranch world, things went from bad to worse. The drought settled deeper, like a lamprey eel sucking at the region’s vitals. He had half-seen the scores of trucks emblazonedCPC speeding along the dusty road for the last year, and knew that they were drilling for coal bed methane on BLM land adjacent to his ranch. They pumped the saline wastewater laden with mineral toxins into huge containment pits. The water was no good, he knew that, and it seemed a terrible irony that in such arid country water could be worthless. He had always voted Republican and supported energy development as the best way to make jobs in the rural hinterlands. But when the poison wastewater seeped from the containment pits into the ground water, into Bull Jump Creek, into his alfalfa irrigation ditches, even into the household well water, he saw it was killing the ranch.

  He fought back. Like other ranchers who once again felt betrayed by state and federal government, he wrote letters and went to meetings protesting coal bed methane drilling, protesting the hundreds of service roads and drill rigs and heavy trucks that were tearing up the country. The meetings were strange, for ecological conservationists and crusty ranchers came together in the same room, in agreement for once. He noted with satisfaction that the schoolteacher, Dan Moorhen, a bleeding heart liberal ecology-minded freak, admitted that ranchers were the best defense against developers chopping up the land, that ranches and ranchers kept the old west alive. When the gas company reps or politicians came, the meetings were rancorous and loud, and at the end people signed petitions with such force their pens ripped the paper, but it all meant nothing. The drilling continued, the poison water seeped, the grass and sage and alfalfa on his land died. All he could do was hang on to the place.

  He was unprepared for the telephone call from a neighbor, Fran Bangharmer. It was the morning of the Fourth of July.

  “Too bad about Suzzy, all that right on the front page, too.”

  “What do you mean?” he said. “What was on the front page?”

  “Arrest
ed for embezzlin. Monday’s paper.”

  “What!” He barely listened to her subtly triumphant voice, tinged with schadenfreude, but hung up as soon as he could and drove into town to find a three-day-old paper and read for himself that his ex-wife had, for years, been siphoning tax money into a private bank account by a complex series of computer sleights of hand he could not understand.

  He went to the county jail and tried to see her but was turned away.

  “She don’t want to see you, Gib, and she’s got that right.”

  Half of the stores in town were closed for the holiday. Already there were clusters of people along the sidewalk although the parade didn’t start until one o’clock. In despair he drove down to Buffalo to the video store where Rod worked. It was open, the windows draped in red, white, and blue ribbons. A huge poster read:

  RODEO DAYS! JULY 4 TO 10!

  He found his younger son stocking the shelves with gaudy boxes. Standing behind him the father noticed the son’s thinning hair and felt the hot breath of passing time.

  “Rod?” he said, and the young man turned around.

  “Dad.” They looked at each other, and the son dropped his eyes. Gilbert could smell his son’s aftershave lotion. He had never used the stuff in his life.

  “I came to—I want to—well. Your mother?”

  “Yeah. Do you want a have lunch?”

  “You mean dinner?”

  The son flushed at the old-fashioned word. “Yeah. ‘Dinner.’ Go down the KFC and eat in the car.”

  “I come in the truck. Come on, let’s go.”

  “I got a tell somebody I’m goin.”

  That’s what it was like, thought Gilbert, working for somebody else. You had to tell them whatever you did or were going to do and they could say no.

  He drove to the fast food strip at the north end of town, shouted into the drive-through order box intercom. Sitting in the truck, the windows down and the hot sun burning their arms, they gnawed at the salty, overspiced chicken, huge crumbs falling. They both sucked on straws in vanilla milk shakes.

  “I tried a see her,” said Gilbert. “She wouldn’t see me.”

  “She’s still pretty bitter, you know. Feels like her life was wasted, or at least some years of it. She’s that way. She takes a position and that’s it. You can’t argue her out of nothin. She’s stubborn.”

  “I know that pretty well. How’s it affectinyou that your mother is a crook and a jailbird?” He glanced sideways at Rod, seeing the pale, indoor complexion, the dark, thick hair, clerk’s shirt with creases ironed into the sleeves. The boy had the heavy Wolfscale jaw and beaky nose.

  “Hell, I don’t know. I don’t think of it that way. People look at me kind a funny but they don’t say nothin. Except Deb. She is gettin a lot a snide comment down at the travel agency. It’s no fun for her. It’s my girls I worry about, if some kid at school this fall is goin a taunt them. You know, ‘Your granny stole money…’”

  “Kids got short memories. By the time school starts they won’t recall it. What do you think they’ll do to her?”

  “Probly go pretty light. She’s got a good lawyer. You know she made restitution of about twelve grand. That’ll count for a lot. They already got a lien on the house, repossessed her car. That’s what she used the most a the money for, buy the house and fix it up. That house was everthing to her. She put in a swimmin pool two years ago.”

  “I used a wonder how she could afford it. I doubted clerks make that much money. And I heard a couple years ago that she went out to Las Vegas?” He couldn’t believe he’d found a packet of salt beneath the flabby biscuit. Did anyone ever think their chicken not salty enough?

  “It was a whole bunch a them that work at the county offices. They all went. She won four thousand bucks.”

  For some reason this remark incensed Gilbert. Rod said it in a tone of pride that his lying, cheating, stealing, double-dealing mother won some money gambling. He changed the subject abruptly. “What do you hear from your brother?”

  “Aw, he calls up now and then. We get together with him when we take Arlene down to Denver for her treatment. You know she’s had that cancer. It’s in remission now and you’d never know she’d been sick a day.”

  Gilbert did not know she’d been sick a day. He shuddered. In the distance he could hear the high school marching band. The parade was starting early, or maybe just warming up.

  “Is he still workin for that roofin contractor?”

  “Well, no. He’s workin in a restaurant. He’s workin in a Jap restaurant. But he’s healthy enough, thank God, considerin his— lifestyle.”

  “What does that mean, ‘his lifestyle’?” Gilbert wiped his hands of the chicken, wadded the flimsy napkin, and thrust it into the grease-stained box.

  “Well, he’s—you know.”

  “I know what?”

  “Dad, it’s not up to me to say nothin about Monty.” Rod was folding and crushing the chicken box. He wiped his right hand on his pants leg.

  “I ain’t heard or seen him for quite a few years. Not likely to. Now what the hell is this about ‘his lifestyle’?”

  “For Christ sake, Dad. It’s nothin. Just he’s sort a—more— sophisticated. He likes a different kind a stuff than most people come from Wyomin.”

  “I hear you talkin but I don’t know what you’re sayin.”

  But he did. As a child Monty had hung around the kitchen and his mother constantly, and getting him to help with chores had been more labor than doing the jobs himself. That is until Myrl Otter came to work on the ranch on weekends. Myrl was a big blond Scandinavian type, muscular and good-looking. The man’s wife had her work cut out for her keeping an eye on him as girls flirted with Myrl and he reciprocated willingly. After he came to work on the ranch Monty began to tag after the fellow like a yellowjacket after pears. Gilbert noticed, but as the boy was only seven or eight, it seemed just a little kid’s fancy, nothing much. Kids got attached to dogs and blankets and maybe even hired men. He thought nothing of it, and within a few months Myrl Otter, in the way of so many ranch hands, didn’t show up for work and Gilbert forgot him until now. The marching music, carried by the light wind, seemed nearer.

  “I better get goin. Don’t want a get tied up in that damn parade.” He got out, threw his chicken box at the trash can. Rod, too, tossed his crumpled box, but it hit the side of the can and sprayed chicken bones.

  “Forget it,” said Gilbert. “They get paid a pick up.”

  He dropped Rod back at the video store and headed north, thinking to beat the parade by taking a side street, but he was too late. He stopped for a red light that wouldn’t change and the parade came surging around a corner, passing in front of him, and he had to wait. A section of the high school band straggled past, sweaty kids, many of them obese, their white marching trousers bunched in the crotch. He remembered schoolmates in his own childhood, skinny quick ranch kids, no one fat and sweaty, Pete Kitchen looking like he was made of kindling wood and some insulation wire, Willis McNitt small enough to shit behind a sagebrush and never be noticed.

  Behind the band came two teenage boys dressed as Indians, breechclouts over swim trunks, a load of beads around their necks, black wigs with braids and feathers. One carried a bongo drum, striking it irregularly with his hand. Their skins had been darkened with some streaky substance. Then two men whom he recognized as Sheridan car mechanics slouched along in buckskin suits and fur hats, carrying antique flintlocks. One had a demijohn, which he lifted to his lips every thirty seconds, crying “Yee-haw!” and the other had a few shiny No. 2 traps over his shoulder. Gilbert could see the hardware store price tags on them. Gilbert despaired. He knew he was going to get the whole hokey Wild West treatment before he could move.