Bad Dirt Read online

  Now came two horses, both bearing kids dressed as cowboys, heavy woolly chaps, pearl-button western shirts, limp bandannas, big hats, and boots. Both twirled guns on their fingers, aiming at friends in the crowd. They were followed by a stock outlaw and a sheriff’s posse, and behind them half the town’s women and small children in pioneer regalia—long dresses of calico, aprons and sunbonnets, big Nikes flashing incongruously with every step. One of these women was Patty Codenhead, and for a moment he was startled at how much she looked like his father’s mother’s photograph in the china cupboard. It was the costume, he thought. The parade came down to a few trick riders in neon satin, and Sedley Alwen, who crazy or not, was in every public procession showing his roping skills, stepping in and out of his fluid loops and somehow avoiding the horse manure that marked the path. The last of all was a CPC pickup, three hard-hatted methane gas workers sitting in back smoking cigarettes and joking with one another. Now he could go.

  He could go, but he found it difficult to step on the accelerator. The light turned green, red, and green again, yet he couldn’t move until drivers behind him began to sound their horns. There had been something wrong with the parade, something seriously wrong, but he couldn’t think what.

  Driving through the open country on the way back he forgot the parade and thought about Monty and what form his “sophistication” might take, about his embezzling wife, the other son who had not bothered to tell him that his youngest grandchild had cancer. He couldn’t tell the size of things. He was very thirsty and blamed the salty chicken.

  The buildings and traffic fell away and he was on the empty road, the dusty sage flying past, the white ground. The sky was a hard cheerful blue, empty but for a few torn contrails. Plastic bags impaled on the barb fences flapped in the hot wind. A small herd of antelope in the distance had their heads down. He saw his neighbor’s cattle spread out on the parched land, and it came to him that there had been no ranchers in the parade—it was all pioneers, outlaws, Indians, and gas.

  He knew what kind of furniture Jesus would pick for his place in Wyoming. He would choose a few small pines in the National Forest, go there at night, fell and limb them, debark the sappy rind with a spud, exposing the pale, worm-tunneled wood, and from the timbers he would make the simplest round-legged furniture, everything pegged, no nails nor screws.

  He wished his mother was still alive. He’d say to her, “One thing sure. He wouldn’t get hisself tangled up with no ranch.” It didn’t come close to saying what he meant, but it was all he could do.

  The Old Badger Game

  THIS HAPPENED LAST YEAR EAST OF THEPOWDERRIVERcountry, somewhere in the Wyoming breaks. It’s not much of a story, the kind of thing you might hear on a sluggish afternoon in Pee Wee’s.

  Three old bachelor badgers lived a certain distance from one another on a piece of rough ground in the back pasture of Frank Frink’s ranch. The badgers were concerned with food, sun-bathing, and property lines. Their territories came together in a stony outcrop that faced south and where the scenery flung out like an opened fan. Here, in the morning sunshine, the three badgers met, exchanged remarks on the vagaries of life and recent wind speeds in the whistles, grunts, and growls that pass for communication among them. One of the badgers had held down a teaching job at the university up in Bozeman for a few years— creative writing or barge navigation—but had retired to the ranch. Two of the trio, including the university badger, were stout and ordinary. The third had a reddish tinge to his fur but was as ignorant as a horseshoe.

  The Frink ranch started a hundred and fourteen years ago with some Texas longhorns and a restless pair of cowboys blackballed out of the Lone Star State for their sympathies with the LS cowboy strike of 1883. Since then the place had rolled through a dozen sets of hands until it came to Frink.

  Frank Frink took an interest in immortality and fountains of youth, eternal flames and the like, and because he had persuaded himself that he was going to live, if not forever, at least to be two hundred, he was conservation-minded and absolute death on overgrazing. He was constantly shifting his cattle to different pastures and had an immense and complex chart on the pantry door that showed the schedule of short-term grazing he had worked out. One delicate pasture with live water held cattle for no more than three hours before they were hustled off to coarser grass.

  Frink was always shorthanded. You ranchers know how hard it is to get good help. He found it just as hard to get bad help as he skimped on pay in favor of saving up for his long twilight years. At roundup time he was shorthanded and begged his wife to help drive.

  “Oh all right,” she said, “but I’m telling you right now that I need a new winter coat and after we ship the cattle I better get it.”

  “Haaah,” said Frink, who had heard of the coat before.

  On the circle drive the rancher’s wife came out of a draw, and as she trotted past a saltbush a badger appeared.

  “Good-looking badger,” she said aloud, imagining herself in a coat of the same red hue, not necessarily a fur coat—faux fur would do, or even tweed with a monkey-fur collar.

  Toward dawn the three badgers congregated at the stony outcrop.

  “Have a good hunt?” asked one of the ordinary badgers.

  “Not bad,” said the other. “You?”

  “Fair. How about you, Red?”

  “Well, Great Badger Almighty, the rancher’s wife has fell in love with me. I suppose she’ll be pesterin me all the time now.”

  “What? What are you sayin?”

  “Aw, she seen me over in the saltbush draw, says, ‘That’s the handsomest badger I ever seen, I’m crazy about him.’”

  The other badgers laughed and made coarse jokes about possible and impossible sexual conjunctions between the red-haired badger and the rancher’s wife. Inevitably the talk turned to the story that went back to the 1880s of a desperate cowboy who forced himself on an ill-tempered grandmother badger and the violent consequences, which still tickled a low sense of humor.

  “I haven’t got time to lay around,” said Red, and he ambled away, taking a route through a deep draw where a number of noxious exotics, including a monstrous teasel plant, grew. He dragged himself through the teasel bush until his fur was sleek and shining.

  “She should see me now,” he said to the teasel.

  Frank Frink and two of his cronies came out of the kitchen door, their hands full of ginger cookies shaped like steer heads with frosting eyes. The rancher stopped dead.

  “Look at that. There it is again.”

  “What?” said Crisp Braid, scanning near and far, seeing nothing unusual.

  “In the ditch. The biggest goddamn badger I have yet saw. Make a rug half as big as a steer hide. This is about the tenth time I’ve sawn the bastard. Havin coffee the other mornin and I look out the window over the sink, there’s this bugger layin on a rock all spraddled out takin its ease and airin its balls like it was in a hammock. I went for the .30-06, took a shot, and missed. Know what he done? Kicked dirt at me. Damn these cookies or I’d run get the 06 now.” He ate two steer heads at once and choked a little, the sound enough to send the badger into the weeds.

  “How’s that love affair, Red?” asked one of the dull badgers a few weeks later. “Got her down yet?”

  “No. Rancher caught on and he’s crazy jealous. Can’t get near her he’s jumpin up after a gun.”

  The university badger remarked that that was how the old badger game went—what seemed imminent somehow never came to pass. Life, in short, was a shuck. But then, he’d been denied tenure and was a little sour on things.

  Man Crawling Out of Trees

  MITCHELLFIR AND HIS WIFE, EUGENIE,SPED OVER THE whiskey-colored plains in their aging Infiniti, “cutting prairie,” said Mitchell under his breath, thinking it sounded western. In an hour they had covered the same ground that would have taken the old oxcart emigrants, trailing a wake of graves, almost a week. It was September, and they were on their way back to Wyoming after a visit
to Maine, where their daughter, Honor, lived with her boyfriend and a new baby boy. The road was wet from a thunderstorm, and under the late afternoon sun the asphalt gleamed as though drenched with oil. The indigo cloud from which the rain had fallen packed the sky behind them, and on the hood of the car the wind scrolled beads of water into strings of minuscule droplets, like the dotted lines cartoonists use to indicate trumpet blasts.

  It had been a shock to Mitchell, after several years in Wyoming, to see New England again—its maddening choked roads, tangled brush, the trees absorbing light, all drenched in shadow. The tepid air, unmoved by wind, seemed stifling. The house in which their daughter lived was a log heap built sometime in the 1930s, a copy of an Adirondack lodge but with decaying sills and warped doors. It perched at the edge of a lake rich with algae, and was the property of their daughter’s boyfriend’s aunt, who called it a “cottage.” The lake gave off a gassy smell. They approached the house on an uneven flagstone walk through tall and uncut grass. The neighboring cottages, which huddled around the shoreline like wet hens, showed garish plastic toys in their yards, and Eugenie guessed these were summer rentals. While they stayed in the house Eugenie sneezed with the regularity of a perpetual motion machine, plagued by her old allergy to molds.

  Honor and Chaz called their baby Hal, a mercy, for they had named him Halyard, the namesake, said Mitchell in a disgusted voice, of a rope on a sailboat.

  “Why would they do that?” he asked that night as they lay in the dank twin beds.

  Eugenie said nothing, but she knew the importance of giving a baby a distinctive name, whether for a rope, a French novelist, or even an empress.

  Their daughter’s boyfriend, Chaz, was as old as Mitchell, his hair well in retreat and accentuated by a compensatory ponytail. He was vaguely handsome and evasive with questions on the nature of his income, muttering something about consulting work. He made light conversation about golf with Mitchell, and to Eugenie he chattered about restaurants and wine.

  Honor worked three afternoons a week as a dispatcher for Pine Tree Security, a roster of retired urban policemen patrolling millionaires’ second homes on the pond, imitating shivering loon calls as they drove, in practice for an annual contest. The contest began in 1987 after the last pair of real loons on the lake disappeared. Eugenie tried to worm Chaz’s occupational information out of Honor, who turned silent and then said meanly, “I’ll tell you about Chaz when you tell me who my real father is.” After that remark Eugenie went out on the porch to light a cigarette and shoot streams of smoke into the hazy air. She rarely smoked and had to ask Honor for the cigarette—awkward in the extreme.

  At the end of the week Eugenie told her daughter she should come out to Wyoming for a visit, bring the baby.

  “Wewill talk.” It was her way of making peace. She didn’t mention Chaz. Honor smiled a little, lightly touched her mother’s hand. But beneath the tranquil moment throbbed their shared knowledge, as discordant as when a pause comes during a piano sonata and the raucous monotone of a nearby radio rapper seeps in like blood in water.

  The next day Mitchell and Eugenie left for Wyoming. At the car Honor spun and suddenly kissed Mitchell goodbye full on the mouth, an undaughterly kiss from which Mitchell broke away in confusion.

  “Now where did she findhim, ” said Mitchell, wiping at his lips as though to remove the raw flavor of his daughter’s mouth as they crept along the narrow road. The sullen sky sagged lower and it began to rain. This landscape was no longer big enough for him. The long sight lines and rearing mountains of Wyoming had got into his bones.

  “Oh God,” said Eugenie. “Poor Honor. Those dark circles. She just doesn’t get any rest, taking care of the baby and working too.”

  “Like to know whathe does. Nothing, I bet. He’s got that look. Probably lived off women all his life. She’ll dump him, I hope. God, these lousy roads.” A front tire thumped into a pothole, and ahead of them, as far as the eye could see, was a wavering parade of more holes gleaming with rainwater. A logging truck passed them, and beneath its weighted wheels Mitchell could almost see the ragged asphalt crumbling. The Infiniti seemed to crawl through the gloom.

  “He’s sort of the kind of guy you meet in line at the deli,” said Eugenie, “and you both say how good the imported olives are.” She was glad the visit was over, relieved to be away from her daughter’s accusing eye. Honor had held the grudge for more than three years, thanks to bigmouthed Dr. Playfire. It seemed she wasn’t going to get over it.

  They emerged from New England’s lowering trees and overloaded roads and several days later reached the end of endless Nebraska, crossed the Wyoming border. Mitchell, who had been irritable on the whole trip, brightened despite the scruffy dandruff of billboards and signs that marred the approach to Cheyenne. A quarter of a mile to their right a cattle train labored. Eugenie punched the CD tracks back to her favorite, Jimmie Dale Gilmore singing nasally about Dallas and a DC-9. Mitchell, who preferred classical music, tried to remember what a DC-9 had looked like, could only come up with a hazy recollection of a short, fat plane with propellers, of scratchy seats and a dismal bus-station smell. He doubted there was still a DC-9 in operation anywhere on the continent. Well, maybe in Canada. And Jimmie Dale Gilmore, or whoever had written the song, must now be embarrassed that he had ever been awed by either a DC-9 or Dallas.

  The train tracks veered south, and the train swung away from the highway, taking the cows to slaughterhouses. They could see the dark bodies through the perforated metal sides of the cars. Eugenie waved at the disappearing train. Mitchell glanced at her. As she had aged, the classic profile had thickened, the delicate cheeks became slabs of rouged flesh, the chin lost its clean line, and her nose coarsened. At the sides of her mouth were tiny curved lines like the bends in fishhooks. But the black hair was the same, a few tendrils curling in front of her ears like inked drawings of a scrolled fiddle neck, and to strangers she presented the dramatic look of a woman with a story.

  A semi, tyrannosaurus of the interstate, passed them, swaying. “Doing ninety anyway,” he said. “I’m right on seventy-five.” Mitchell hated semis and usually Eugenie made a noise in her throat to indicate that she, too, disliked the big trucks, a pretense that arose from the deeper pretense of wifely subordination to a husband’s opinions. This time she didn’t answer, thumbing through the CDs in the zippered carrying case. There was nothing she wanted to hear, hadn’t heard over and over on the way east. They should have bought some books on tape. At least she hadn’t had to listen to Mitchell’s lugubrious quartets and motets and symphonies. Before they left Wyoming she had caught him going through his precious CD collection.

  “Don’t bring that stuff,” she said flatly. Now she switched the console to radio and caughtCar Talk . Both brothers were laughing hysterically and a third laugher was adding to the din. Mitchell pointed to a multicolored herd of horses beyond a fence.

  “How did it go again? Come on, Bawb, make the sound your car made….”

  An incredible series of wheezes, gurgles, snorts, and panting sounds issued from the radio, accompanied by soaring laughter. Eugenie laughed with the whooping brothers.

  “Shut it off, will you?”

  “I thought you likedCar Talk . It’s about cars.”

  “Iknow it’s about cars. Maybe ten percent of it. The rest is hyena howling and asking women how they spell their names.”

  In the silence that followed he became aware of a faint wheezing sound from the Infiniti. As he listened he heard other abnormal sounds. Everything suddenly began to rattle and shimmy. In the backseat the box containing truffled walnut oil, jars of French cornichons, juniper berries, the tins of Eugenie’s favoritemacarons de Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and a few bottles of Graham’s 2000 vintage port, all things they could not find in Wyoming, clinked and knocked. He stretched out his arm and turned the radio back on.

  “How do you spell that, T-h-e-r-e-s-a or T-e-r-e-s-a…”Eugenie turned the radio off.

  “What did
you do that for?”

  “I didn’t want to hear them doing the name-spelling thing either.”

  The Infiniti was running smoothly again, and he remembered there was a rough patch somewhere along this stretch of high-way—that must have been it.