Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2. Annie Proulx
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She understood finally that her father was weak, that all of his choices had been made passively because he let things go and go and go, waiting until situations crested, until the move was made for him. Her mother had left him, made her own way. He had ended up working on ranches even though he was smart because he didn’t have any ambition. She bet Georgina had picked him and he’d just gone along with it. She bit at her nails, an old habit from childhood. He was the classic irresponsible, passive guy, no Crazy Horse or Sitting Bull fired with resistance, but letting the whites push him around, believing that he had some kind of decent life. And, she believed, he couldn’t stand to kiss Georgina’s money goodbye—probably his last chance at real money, seeing he was in his forties. She despised his weakness but didn’t blame him. She would let him take her around the rez, introduce the relatives, and then he could go back to Georgina and the money. She’d find out the rest of it by herself.
She packed rapidly, sorting through her clothes, cramming the short skirts and halter tops into the wastebasket. She was through with those clothes. She pulled on jeans and an overlarge T-shirt as long as a nightgown. She heard Georgina’s car pull up outside, the kitchen door slam, and the rumble of her father’s voice. The duffel bags were full. She was ready. Downstairs she heard the freezer door open and shut. She guessed Charlie was mixing Georgina a drink. He himself never drank. His voice rose and fell. What was he telling Georgina? The woman could never understand any of this. Linny sat on the edge of the bed and waited.
After a long time her father’s voice ballooned up the stairwell. “Linny! You ready? Let’s roll.”
She dragged the duffel bags out onto the landing and kicked them down the stairs.
“O.K.,” she yelled. “Great.”
She took three steps down, then turned and rushed back to the bedroom. The cans of film sat on the dresser. It was difficult getting the lids off the first two. Inside the first one the coils of old nitrate film were clotted and welded together in a solid mass. The next deteriorated before her eyes to nitrate dandruff She knocked one film out onto the bed. It had a nasty smell, and as it uncoiled and broke apart she could see that the center of each frame had been burned through by the acidic gases that had attacked the emulsion.
Then she was down the stairs, dragging the duffel bags.
“Bye,” she called to Georgina, who stood on the porch, face expressionless, staring at Charlie.
As they pulled out onto the main road he said, “What did you do about the film?”
“Oh, I left it for her.”
“Good girl,” he said, and he patted her still unwounded knee.
DEB SIPPLE HAD HAD IT BOTH WAYS—EASY AND HARD. It had been easy when he was a kid lording it over his two sisters, enjoying the run of the ranch he’d believed would someday be his, getting first pick of the horses, hacking chunks off the don’t-touch devil’s food cake the cook had made for dinner. But as he moved into his mid-twenties the easy edges fell off The ranch had gone to the Elk Tooth bank, his sisters lived in Oregon, there were no more good horses left, and he’d developed an allergy to chocolate. In a search for the famous solace of open spaces he’d built up a drinking habit. By the weary age of thirty he’d been married twice, and it hadn’t taken permanently either time despite the fact that he had small feet and a big pecker. Modern women had different standards than their grandmothers. Both wives had named alcohol abuse and Deb’s lack of steady income as crucial factors in the breakups. He smoked, too, but not much was made of that. Jeanine called him a sorry shit; Paula cried large round tears, said she loved him still but would be leaving him for a sheep rancher the coming weekend.
“What. You are runnin off with some mangy sheepherder.”
“Not a sheepherder. Rancher. He owns a sheep ranch.”
“Sure he does. And if you are goin, don’t do me no favors to wait for the weekend, get the hell out right now.” And he helped her pack by throwing her clothes, makeup pots and jars, sewing machine, and other female accoutrements into the yard.
Deb’s only asset was his flatbed truck. Most of what little money he made with occasional hauling funneled straight into Elk Tooth’s three bars, what bartender Amanda Gribb called the Wyoming trickle down effect. He would run up a big tab at the Pee Wee, and when Amanda leaned on him he switched to the Silvertip and the Pee Wee saw him not. When the Silvertip debt began to be mentioned he favored Muddy’s Hole and dropped hints that he was looking for a job or two. Everyone understood that he wasn’t interested in a real job but in a few days’ work. Sooner or later something came up, and when he collected he’d hit the Pee Wee, pay off his tab, and start a new one. So went the cycle of Deb Sipple’s years measured in bar bills and small work.
Wyoming had been dry as a quart of sand for three years and Elk Tooth was in the heart of the drought disaster zone. Those ranchers who had held on to their herds hoping for rain were caught like mice. As the summer drew to its stove-lid end, the most precious commodity to those in the cow business was hay, and the prices demanded for it matched the prices for rubies. Ranchers spent hours on the telephone and searching the Internet for reasonably priced hay. No flimsy or wild rumor could be ignored. If a rancher heard of hay up in Saskatchewan that a seller described simply as “not moldy” she’d try for it.
Most of the desperate ranchers were women, for in Elk Tooth lady ranchers abound, some who had stepped into ownership when a husband rancher died, some the mature daughters of men who had sired no male heirs, some ex-CEOs who had tossed up everything and headed for the high country, as close to Jackson as they could get.
One of the ranchers was Fiesta Punch, a good horsewoman, but rough on the hired help. She ran Red Cheerios, a weird brand of exotics with white rings around their eyes her grandfather had bred up, but this summer their range was so badly gnawed it resembled the surface of an antique billiard table in an attic heavily populated by moths. There was no point in selling. The market was glutted and prices lower than breakeven. And she wanted to hold on to what was probably the only herd of Red Cheerios in existence. She had to get her hands on enough hay to carry them through the fall and winter. She owed that much to family heritage.
The double trouble with scarce hay was that in addition to paying through the nose for the stuff, when she finally located some, she would have to face fearsome transport charges. The only decent hay grew in distant parts, and hay transporters knew a penned turkey when they saw one. Hauling the hay from Farmer X to Rancher Z could double the cost of the precious bales. Fiesta Punch was in a position to lose her shirt. On the other pan of the scale Deb Sipple, with his big flatbed truck, could almost guarantee himself several years of elbow security at the Pee Wee.
Ms. Punch was hunched over her account books one night alternately adding figures and cracking her knuckles when the phone rang.
“Fiesta?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t know me but this is the friend of a friend.”
“Friend of a friend?” She could hear country and western music—Dwight Yoakam’s rock-drill voice—in the background. “What is it? You want to talk about urban legends?”
“What?”
“Never mind. What can I do for you? I’m kind a busy.”
“I know where you can git you some hay. Good hay.”
“Where might that be? Shangsi Province? The Upper Volta region?”
“No, just up there in Westconston. I got a friend in Cooke City and his cousin Björn got hay. It’s not so drouthy up there.”
“Two or three bales, right?”
“Wrong. He got eighty bales. Them big round ones, them thousand-pound ones you need a bale fork to lift.”
“Let