Fine Just the Way It Is (17 page)

She drank the downpour, feeling strength and reason return. When the storm moved away her head was clearer. The hard blue sky pressed down and the sun began to pull in the moisture like someone reeling in a hose. She managed to get her shirt off and by making a feeble toss at the water-filled declivity, which held several cups of water, landed one sleeve in the precious puddle. She pulled it toward her and sucked the moisture from the sleeve, repeating the gesture until she had swallowed it all. Not far away she could hear one of the tiny mountain streams rattling through the stones. Her mind was lucid enough to realize that the rain might have only postponed one of the eternal verities. She could see other thunderheads to the east, but nothing to the northwest, the direction of the prevailing wind. The grey jay was not in her sight line.

She had sopped the declivity dry with her shirt, and now she pulled it back on against the burning sun. The gravelly soil had swallowed the rain. There was nothing to do but squint against the glittering world. The cycle started once more. Within an hour her thirst, which, before the storm, had begun to dim, returned with ferocity. Her entire body, her fingernails, her inner ears, the ends of her greasy hair, screamed for water. She bored holes in the sky looking for more rain.

In the night lightning teased in the distance but no more rain fell. The top of the imprisoning rock became a radiant plain under a sliver of ancient moonlight.

By morning the temporary jolt of strength and clarity was gone. She felt as though electricity was shooting up through the rock and into her torso, needles and pins and the numbness that followed was almost welcome, although she dimly knew what it meant. Apparitions swarmed from the snowbanks above, fountains and dervishes, streaming spigots, a helicopter with a waterslide, a crowd of garishly dressed people reaching down, extending their hands to her. All day a desiccating hot wind blew and made her nearly blind. She could not close her eyes. The sun was horrible and her tongue hung in her mouth like a metal bell clapper, clacking against her teeth. Her hands and arms had changed to black and grey leather, a kind of lichen. Her ears swarmed with rattling and buzzing and her shirt seemed made of a stiff metal that chafed her lizard skin.

In the long struggle to get her painful shirt off, through the buzzing in her ears, through her cracking skin she heard Marc. He was wearing the hobnail boots and coming up the trail behind her. This was no illusion. She fought to clear her senses and heard it clearly, the hobnail boots sharply click-click-clicking up the granite section of trail. She tried to call his name, but “Marc” came out as a guttural roar, “
Maaaa
…,” a thick and frightening primeval sound. It startled the doe and her half-grown fawns behind her, and they clattered down the trail, black hooves clicking over the rock out of sight and out of hearing.

H
er mother had been knockout beautiful and no good and Dakotah had heard this from the time she recognized words. People said that Shaina Lister with aquamarine eyes and curls the shining maroon of waterbirch bark had won all the kiddie beauty contests and then had become the high school slut, knocked up when she was fifteen and cutting out the day after Dakotah was born, slinking and wincing, still in her hospital johnny, down the back stairs of Mercy Maternity to the street, where one of her greasy pals picked her up and headed west for Los Angeles. It was the same day television evangelist Jim Bakker, a found-out and confessed adulterer, resigned from his Praise the Lord money mill, his fall mourned by Bonita Lister, Shaina’s mother. Bonita’s husband, Verl, blamed the television for Shaina’s wildness and her hatred of the ranch.

“She seen it was okay on the teevee and so she done it.” He said he wanted to get rid of the set but Bonita said there was no sense in locking up the horse after the barn burned down. Although Verl deplored the corrupting influence of television he said that since he was paying for the electricity he might as well get some use out of the thing. And saw danger, mystery, secrets and humiliation.

Verl and Bonita Lister were in their late thirties and stuck with the baby. If it had been a boy, Verl said, letting the words squeeze out around his roll-yer-own, he could have helped with the chores when he got to size. And inherited the ranch, was the implied finish to the sentence. Verl had named Dakotah after his homesteading great-grandmother, born in the territory, married and widowed and married again only after she had proved up on the place and the deed was in her name and in her hand. Later she was known for ridding the family of fleas by boiling the wash in a mixture of sheep dip and kerosene. In a day when the mourning period for a husband was two or three years and for a wife was three months, she had worn black for her first husband an insulting six weeks, then taken up a homestead claim. Verl treasured a photograph showing her with the precious deed, standing in front of her neat clapboarded house, a frowsy white dog leaning against her checkered skirt. She held one hand behind her back, and Verl said this was because she smoked a pipe. Dakotah was almost sure she could see a wisp of smoke curling up, but Bonita said it was dust raised by the wind. Since that pioneer time the country had become trammeled and gnawed, stippled with cattle, coal mines, oil wells and gas rigs, striated with pipelines. The road to the ranch had been named Sixteen Mile, though no one was sure what that distance signified.

Bottle-blond Bonita (her great-grandfather had been a squaw man and black hair was in the genes) made an early grandmother. Ranch-raised and trained, she counted the grandchild as a difficulty that had to be met. She was used to praising thankless work as the right and good way, but what she was going to do without Jim Bakker’s exhortation and encouragement she didn’t know. First, an impaired husband, the endless labor and (sometimes forced) good humor that was expected of women, then a bad-girl daughter, and now the bad girl’s baby to raise. Verl Lister was burden enough. He could not run the ranch alone and they often had to ask their neighbors to throw together and help out. Of course it was because he had been a wild boy in his youth, had rodeoed hard, a bareback rider who suffered falls, hyperextensions and breaks that had bloomed into arthritis and aches as he aged. A trampling had broken his pelvis and legs so that now he walked with the slinking crouch of a bagpipe player. She could not fault him for ancient injuries, and remembered him as the straight-backed, curly-headed young man with beautiful eyes sitting on his horse, back straight as a metal fence post. But a man, she thought, was supposed to endure pain silently, cowboy up and not bitch about it all day long. She, too, had arthritis in her left knee, but she suffered in silence.

Throughout the 1980s it was a puzzle where all the able-bodied labor had gone. During the energy boom, oil companies had sucked up Wyoming boys, offering high wages that no rancher, not even Wyatt Match, the county’s richest cattleman, could pay. When the bust came there were still no ranch hands for hire. “You’d think,” said Verl, “with all them oil companies pullin out there’d be fifty guys on every corner lookin for work.” But the hands, after their taste of roustabout money, had followed the dollar away from Wyoming.

Verl was a trash rancher, said Wyatt Match, oyster eyes sliding around behind his gold-rimmed lenses that darkened in sunlight, and not so much because his land was overgrazed, but because there were fences down and gates hanging by one hinge, binder twine everywhere, rusting machinery in the pastures, and because the Listers’ kitchen table was covered with a vinyl tablecloth showing the Last Supper. There was an old sedan with the hood up in one of the irrigation ditches. A defunct electric stove rested on the front porch. The Lister cows roamed the roads, constantly suffered accidents, drowning in the creek in spring flood, bogging in mud pots that came from nowhere.

Spring was the hardest time, the weather alternating between blizzards and Saharan heat. On a snow-whipped evening, Dakotah setting the table for supper, Verl said a cow who had tried to climb a steep, wet slope that apparently slid out from under her, had landed on her back in the ditch.

“Had me some luck today. Goddamn cow got herself tits-up in the ditch couple days ago. Dead, time I found her,” he said in a curiously satisfied tone, squinting through faded lashes, winking his eyes, the same aquamarine color as those of the wayward Shaina.

“Not every man would say that is luck,” said Bonita wearily. She pulled at a stray thread protruding from the leg seam of her pink slacks. It was an impractical color but she believed pastels projected freshness and youth. She went to the sink, stepping over Bum, Verl’s ancient heeler crippled by cow kicks, and began scrubbing out the only pot large enough to boil potatoes in quantity, a pot she used several times a day.

“It is, in a way of speakin.”

She couldn’t puzzle that one out, even if she had had the time. With Verl it was one thing after another. He went into the national forest to cut wood every fall, and she knew that he someday would cut himself in half with the cranky old chain saw. She almost hoped he would.

For Verl Lister everything turned on luck, and he had experienced very little of the good kind. His secret boyhood dream had been to become a charismatic radio man meeting singing personalities, giving the news, announcing songs, describing the weather. All of this grew from a small, cheap radio he had earned as a boy selling Rosebud salve, riding ranch to ranch on an aged mare. At night, forbidden to listen past nine o’clock, he put it under the covers and turned it whisper low, listening to honey-voiced Paul Kallinger on a high-watt border station, the lonely hearts club ads, pitches for tonics and elixirs, yodeling cowboys, and, by the time he was in his teens, Wolfman Jack of scandalous sex talk and panting and howls. Yet he never wanted to be like Wolfman Jack. Kallinger was his ideal.

He had no idea how to get into the radio game, as he thought of it, and the plan faded as he grew into work on the home ranch. For fun he rode broncs, the source of his present miseries. He still kept the radio in his truck on constantly, had a radio in every room of the house despite the region’s bad reception. Mostly he listened to the stations that featured songs about lost love and drinking, used car sales ads, church doings and auctions, stations that were pale imitations of the old border blasters of his youth. When NPR came to Wyoming in the 1960s, he judged it dull and hoity-toity. For him television was never as good as radio. He found that screen images were inferior to those in his mind.

Growing up, Wyatt Match had been given every advantage. He had good horses from the time he could walk, trips abroad, hand-tooled boots. He went to an eastern prep school and then the University of Pennsylvania. After graduation he came back to Wyoming with one or two ideas about agricultural progress and tried too soon to get into the legislature when the times favored conservative, frugal ranchers as political leaders, not spendthrift rich men, a label his father’s private golf course had burned into an envious population. Over the years he had become a sharp-horned archconservative with a hard little mind like a diamond chip. After his youthful start flirting with useless ideas sown by the eastern professors, he had dedicated himself to maintaining the romantic heritage of the nineteenth-century ranch, Wyoming’s golden time. Descended from Irish stock, he had a milky skin that flamed with sunburn, and his ginger hair had turned a saintly white. His pride was a blue neon sign—
MATCH RANCH
—near his monstrous post-and-lintel gate large enough to be the torii of a Shinto shrine. After years of trying he had finally made it into the state legislature. Local people were used to seeing his dusty Silverado bulge out onto the road and pass them on the right, throwing up a storm of gravel.

There was a tinge of superiority in all that he said, even in meaningless comments about weather. Match seemed to indicate that blizzards, windstorms, icy roads and punishing hail were for other people; he moved in a cloud of different, special weather. In the days when he was trying to push his way into the legislature with his radical ideas, a well-respected older rancher took him aside and told him, stressing his words, that Wyoming was
fine just the way it was
. Gradually he learned the truth of that statement.

His political value increased after he married Debra Gale Sunchley, a fifth-generation Wyoming ranch woman, a hard worker with a built-in capacity for endurance who dressed in crease-ironed jeans, boots and an old Carhartt jacket. The first Sunchley had come to Wyoming with the 11th Ohio Volunteers to fight Indians after the Civil War. Stationed at Post Greasewood on the North Platte, he deserted, hid out with a Finn coal mining family in Carbon and eventually married one of the daughters, Johanna Haapakoski.

Debra Gale Sunchley Match was secretary-treasurer of the Cow Belles, and member of the Christian Women’s Book Circle. The Book Circle, always striving to do good and become better, favored memoirs by old cowboys and ranchers who personified grit and endurance. Debra Gale had read no more than ten books in her life but knew she had as much right as anyone to give her opinion. After Wyatt divorced her to marry Carol Shovel, whom he had met on a California golf vacation, Debra Gale and her brother Tuffy Sunchley stayed on as joint ranch managers. Match built his ex-wife her own house on the property, a simple one-story ranch with a big shed for her nine dogs. He paid her a wage. She was a good worker and he wasn’t going to let her go.

As Dakotah grew up the Lister ranch staggered along, Bonita making ends meet, worrying about money and Verl’s health. The only free time she had was kneeling at the side of the bed saying her prayers, asking for strength to go on and for her husband’s well-being.

“Don’t let yourself get old before your time,” she said impatiently to Verl who seemed to look forward to old age. It took half an hour in the morning for him to limber up his joints. It irritated her that the child, Dakotah, had little interest in riding or rodeo, resisted 4-H meetings. Bonita could always think of some task or job for the girl, whether collecting eggs, picking over beans or discovering the section of broken fence where the cows got out. Scraping the burned toast for Verl was the most hated task. Verl insisted on toast but would not part with the money for a toaster.

“My mother made good toast on the griddle. It come already buttered,” he said. Bonita often burned the toast as she tried to cook eggs and hash, forgetting the smoking bread. Dakotah rasped the charcoal into the sink with a table knife.

Once, moved by some filament of need for affection, Dakotah tried to hug Bonita, who was scrubbing potatoes in the sink. Bonita briskly shoved her away. Once in a while Dakotah wandered around the ranch on foot, usually heading for the steep pine slope with a tiny spring, the ground littered with old grey bones from a time when a mountain lion had her den beneath a fallen tree. Bonita herself never went for a walk, a wasteful dereliction of duty. She worked spring branding with the men and still managed dinner for all hands, was again on a horse at November sale time overseeing the cows prodded into cattle trucks with Swiss-cheese sides while Verl cut winter wood in the forest. Verl walked nowhere, was always in his truck when he wasn’t in the reclining chair he favored. He would come into the house and sigh.

“Well, I had me some luck today,” he would say in his plaintive voice.

She waited. This might be one of his slow unwinding stories that went nowhere, wasted her time.

“Filled up the gas can, got up there in the woods and damned if the can hadn’t tipped over and spilled out all the gas.”

Yes, it was. He was speaking in his portentous, I’ve-got-grave-news voice. She nodded, scraped carrots, making the orange fiber fly. She was still in her red pajama bottoms, had pushed the heifers out of the east pasture, mended a broken section of fence, got the mail, fed the bum lambs and was now cooking dinner. There had been no time to pull on a pair of jeans. She wasn’t going to town anyway.

“And then I got to workin awhile and the chain broke.”

“Well, you surely had problems.” Once, oppressed by Verl’s self-pitying complaints, she had considered poisoning him. But they carried no insurance and how she could manage alone she didn’t know and gave up the idea. Then, too, she never forgot the joyous winter when they were courting, the long freezing drive in from the ranch in a truck with a broken heater to meet him at the Double Arrow Café. Her teeth chattering, she would walk from the snowy street into the wonderfully hot and noisy bar, Russ Eftink punching G5 again and again to make “Blue Bayou” play continuously, and Verl, the tough handsome cowboy, slouching across the room toward her and pulling her into the music. Into the pot went the carrots and she started on potatoes with an ancient peeler that had been in the kitchen since Verl’s great-grandmother’s day. The wood handle had broken away decades earlier. Most of her kitchen tools were old or broken—an eggbeater with a loose handle bolt that fell into the mixture, a chipped and rusted enamel colander, warped frying pans and spoons worn to the quick.