from the tyranny of stratigraphy
The month of March is a difficult one in that small high desert valley. It is partly because it is so often holed-in during that month. The mountains to the north and west can be quick covered with heavy wet snow and the road to the east isn’t paved and a small covering of night snow, once melted, will leave it too slick to travel. There never has been a way south. And March lingers so close to April which is the best month there.
March is cold on most days and hot on a very few. It is cold every night and is lonely because, contrary to what is said, the winter is long and lonely there.
He felt a little raw. He kind of liked it; feeling sticky; a way to remember for a little while. Sometimes they had that effect on him. Some sort of allergy or something. It was a sweet itch and he wanted to scratch it, but he couldn’t. He was waiting in a fancy place. Wanted to smoke a cigarette too, but couldn’t. Couldn’t be seen doing that. He was thinking about the big moon from the night before, and drinking a fancy coffee. The moon on the way to the ranch was full and low in the west. The drainage that ran parallel and beneath the road was still covered with snow. The moon lit the drainage brighter than the road. The snow glowed with a strange metallic violet. The little pinyon in the drainage cast long purple shadows across it.
A raven followed him up close all of the way home. He saw it now and then in the rear view mirror. He would see a piece of a wing gliding. Or the belly with two black legs and claws hanging down. He noticed again that it was surprising how, even though the raven was black during the day, in the right light from the moon it was more of a silver and stood out against the dark sky because of it. When he stopped to piss, the raven stopped too and sat in the low branch of a ponderosa. When he started again the raven was still there behind him. He caught glimpses of it now and then. Fragments of the dark bird shining in the black sky. When for a long time he didn’t see it, he just knew it was there.
He’d come in early as he did almost every day for Mrs. McGregory. She had him drive into town after breakfast and before doing any work at the ranch or out in the allotments. He collected the mail, every day when the front doors to the post office were first opened, and returned to the ranch before the sun was very high. But today there were six certified letters and he had to wait to pick up the certified letters. So he’d had breakfast and walked around a little. When he started working at the ranch, she didn’t get any certified letters. Now it was a few a week. Never this many.
Mrs. McGregory figured he’d been out late the night before. She caught him coming in. She didn’t say anything. She just looked at him a long time out of her second story window. He didn’t see her face but he heard the old wooden window slide open a little and saw the lace curtains, fluttering out and in again, while he played with one and then another key in the lock on the bunkhouse door under the bug-light. He knew that her torn sad face was up there somewhere behind his own reflection. He found the right key.
Trap woke up and sat and looked at the door as Tyler opened it and came in. Trap was sleeping on the big tattered blue sofa in the middle of the large room in the bunkhouse. Trap was still wearing his clothes, still wearing one boot. Trap had crawled in through the side window and onto the sofa. Trap rubbed his eyes with one hand.
“Get what she come for?” Trap said.
“Reckon,” Tyler said.
“Good and sassy?”
“Reckon,” he said again.
“Satisfied all round?”
“S’pose, get some sleep Trap.”
“Just curious is all.”
“Night.”
Tyler walked through that bigger room, past the bed-sheet curtain that was the bedroom door and into his own bedroom which wasn’t much more than a large closet with a bed in it. He pulled off his boots and lay on the bed with his clothes still on. They both slept just a couple of hours before Mrs. McGregory started ringing the bell and calling. The bell was a black iron bell that hung next to the back door of the main house.
Trap sometimes called it the liberty bell because it looked a little like it. But Tyler said there wasn’t a single bit of liberty about that bell. She swung a rope that hung down from the middle of it. They heard it, Clank, Clank. And they heard her,
“Boys, Morning Boys.”
Tyler told Mrs. McGregory that he was needing to be back early and couldn’t stay for breakfast. He took Trap’s pick-up back to town. His pick-up was nearly out of gas and he was still remembering the way the raven had followed him.
He felt Mrs. McGregory watching him as he drove away. It felt solid and burned at the back of his neck, the way she looked at him. He didn’t look back. He didn’t like her.
As he drove, he thought about the girl he’d done the night before. She was short but pretty. Nothing to put in a magazine. Nice little tits. Pretty green eyes. What was her name? Elaine or something with an E, he thought. She was a college kid, a student nurse or some such from someplace in Cali on her way to Moab for a raft trip. Good solid legs too. Left him walking funny instead of the other way around. He could still smell her some when the wind was right and still.
He had found her at the pizza place with two of her friends. He’d bought them, her and her friend a few beers and told her that he was a cowboy. He didn’t tell her what it was to be a cowboy.
He didn’t tell her he slept in a closet behind a sheet or that he spent most days driving a cattle truck around the desert, moving a few at a time from worse grass to bad grass. He told her he was a cowboy and he leaned back and smiled casual. He looked a little like James Dean, he thought he did anyway, but his face was heavier and his blonde hair was longer. His body was young and solid. He’d practiced that cowboy lean and the way he could look in a girls eyes and say that he didn’t give a shit about anything without speaking. Some would go with him then. He wasn’t picky.
There were some that came with an attitude. College and money that he didn’t have. The same type of girl who’d ignored him when he was in school. They would be high-minded and moral about silly things like cattle in the desert or dams that were put up almost a hundred years ago. And at the same time they were laying back for him with a man at home or around the corner. Those he’d treat bad. He’d take them quick and mean without asking and then do it again. He’d leave them all in the middle of the night and he never checked but he knew that they were all out of town before the end of the next morning. One older one called him the best vacation she’d ever had. She had a wedding ring that she took off when she took everything else off. He liked that. It was the only good thing that came from working for Mrs. McGregory. He only took from those ladies just what he needed. It always freed up his mind a little bit.
He was sitting at a little round wooden table beneath big clear pictures of the scenery in the canyons. He had the certified letters now. He should be getting back. But he had seen the tall well-built woman with the red dress come in. He followed her in and sat down at the table next to her. He knew her type. He feathered the letters in one hand, with the other. He was supposed to open them because sometimes they told Mrs. McGregory to do things that he could do right there in town. Lately, with so many certified letters, Mrs. McGregory liked to know that whatever requests, in as many of the letters as possible, had been accomplished, before he came back the to ranch.
She worried when he didn’t come back right away because that meant he had certified letters and those letters were always bad news. He sipped the coffee. He knew that Mrs. McGregory was worrying and that made him a little happy. While opening the letters he watched the old ladies come in one at a time and sit down with the woman in the red dress. The woman in the red dress pulled more and more little round tables together as the old ladies arrived. Finally they had six tables and there were about twenty of the ladies. Tyler knew some of them, three or four, from town. The others were new and dressed cleaner and whiter. Two ladies had canes hanging from the back of their chairs.
Tyler ended up being almost a part of their little gathering because he had sat down right next to the woman in red and as more and more old ladies came in they moved the tables together with his table sort of indented into the group. The woman in red had been looking at him, wanting him to move out of the way, whenever she moved another table.
But he hadn’t moved, knowing that he was a source of frustration to the woman in red. Something he enjoyed. They all talked at the same time in the beginning. Then the woman in the red dress shut them up just by holding up one hand and after that they only talked one at a time. They looked at the woman in the red dress no matter who was talking.
Occasionally they would look at Tyler and almost get stuck in the position of looking at him, in a way which old ladies do, until he looked at them. Then they would quickly look away. The woman in the red dress had a folio full of papers and she pulled them out one at a time and talked about them and then put them back. After she talked each time she let the ladies say things. But she never let them talk for long and she only let a couple or three of them talk each time. She had a list of things to cover and when any of the ladies got side-tracked and started talking about anything which wasn’t on her list, she got anxious in a way that looked like she was angry but was polite. Just one glance from the woman in red over at one of the old ladies would shut the lady up and all of them would look back at her.
He watched all this while pretending to read the letters. He held them up one at a time and looked across the top of each at the woman in red. She had large dark eyes and black hair that hung loose just above her shoulders. It was cut neat and hung straight with it longer at the front around her face and shorter at the back of her neck.
What a bitch? Tyler thought while he watched the way she could stop the old ladies from talking or make them say or think whatever she wanted them to say or think just with a glance, a shot from her black eyes. He noticed the way her hair moved when she turned her head. It was very stiff but also it was fluid and graceful. He hadn’t seen a woman with hair quite like that before. He remembered earlier in the morning following her up the stairs and into the coffee shop, the way her dress hung down loose but just tight enough to show the hollow curve of each cheek of her ass.
The dress was cut straight down in back and splayed open when she walked with him coming up right behind her. Her calves were
full and sleek. Her ankles were small. She wore a fragile gold bracelet around one ankle. He could see a little of the thighs. They looked strong. They were tan. He noticed then that she was looking at him while she was talking to the old ladies. He held the letter up higher and looked at it. It was from the Forest Service and said that they’d been contacted by a lawyer in Phoenix who wanted to bid on Mrs. McGregory’s smallest grazing allotment behind the little reservoir. It said that they were thinking of letting the lawyer bid, even though he didn’t run cattle or want to run cattle.
They wanted a letter from her saying what she thought about it. He knew that this was a serious thing for Mrs. McGregory because she had him bring a lot of the cattle there in the hottest part of the summer because the fence wasn’t in good shape and hadn’t been for a long time and the cattle could move down to the reservoir and drink and eat the long grass which stayed green there even when the sage was starting to go gray everywhere else.
The same lawyer had threatened to sue to the Forest Service about the fence two or three years before. The Forest Service sent Mrs. McGregory a slew of certified letters and she’d sent Trap up and he fixed the right fence in the wrong place. She sent the Forest Service pictures of the fence all fixed up in the wrong place and that was the end of it for a while. Nobody ever figured why the lawyer cared so much about the grass around the back side of that little reservoir. The reservoir was just for flood control and the water from it just ran into the canyons where there was nobody and never would be.
The woman in red sat up stiff and looked out over the ladies and she clinked her fork against the side of her water glass. Then they all looked at her and shut up and even Tyler looked at her. She looked back at him and smiled a bitchy-woman sort of smile.
“I’ve very exciting news,” she said.
He put down the letter and he and all the old ladies continued to look at her.
“I’ve spoken with Carl Trotter and Scott Peasdale,”
“Who?” one of the old ladies interrupted and the woman in red kept talking as if she hadn’t heard.
“Of Wild Justice. They are the same group that helped us over in Telluride.”
Tyler knew Carl Trotter. He’d never shook his hand. But he saw him a few times at public meetings. Mrs. McGregory sent Tyler to listen to the meetings and tell her about what was said and who said it. This Trotter was a tall and mangy, curly-headed lawyer. He had light red hair, a red face like it was starting to decompose just a little at the edges from maybe a little too much sun, and a long beak of a nose. His hands were large and always were sun-burnt, or something that looked to Tyler like sun-burnt, even in Winter. He wore gray suits and colorful ties with his top shirt button open and his tie hung in a loose knot a few inches down below where it should be. Carl Trotter spoke slowly for a lawyer. Tyler remembered that once in the middle of the Winter while it was snowing outside, Carl Trotter was lecturing to Chad Bringham from the Forest Service at a meeting where it
was only Tyler, Chad, Carl and an old lady reporter from Moab. Carl was saying that a new fence should go around an allotment that no one would ever bid on; it being so dry. He said that what they needed was both a belt and a pair of suspenders. Three days later Tyler was driving the cattle truck through a big blow of dust when it came to him what Trotter was saying.
The woman in red pursed her lips into a funny small smile whenever she spoke about Carl Trotter. Tyler knew that Trotter was a drinker and wondered if maybe that was the reason for her smiling. Tyler figured that all of those new people who were changing things knew each other better than they actually did.
What Tyler couldn’t see in the woman in red was the sense of purpose. She called it a level of commitment and it meant everything to her. She was from Pittsburgh and had gone to college there. She had a law degree but hadn’t taken, or even studied for the bar exam in any State. She thought that, someday, that too would come. She waited for many things. Held them off. Pushed them continually in front of her, really. She collected proposals of marriage. There were six now. Two from men whom she could have loved, given a little time. Three were from wealthy men who would have exchanged their money and power for her good looks. She lived in Denver. Because she was so often gone, she kept a small place, an apartment downtown, on the east-side of downtown. She had a cat once, but even such a small thing as that demanded too much of her time. Her commitment, so she would have told him if he were to ask, was restoration of the public lands to a condition that theoretically existed before the settlement of the west. She’d read, continuously, the literature of the west and the environmental movement. She intended to bring back the grasses to the prairies and deserts, to reforest the mountains, to restore it all to a condition that she understood must have existed in the west before the toying with the public lands by the crude hands of the men of manifest destiny. She was raised a Protestant. But the Protestants were behind her in Pittsburgh. This, the restoration of the public lands, was her religion now. Perhaps, someday, down the road, she would take another look at that sort of thing. Perhaps, someday, there would be a small white house with green shutters and a broad porch with rocking chairs; a husband, two children, a job which paid well and allowed her to go home to her family every day.
Tyler moved quickly through the next two letters. He saw that they were from the law firm in Phoenix. They only restated what the Forest Service letter said. They were dated ten days apart but were postmarked at the same time at the same post office. Tyler saved the letters with the envelopes. The woman in red was speaking in an animated way now. He watched her describing the details of the law suit which was being planned. It was to force all cattle out of the new National Monument. When the Monument was created, it was some part of a deal that Tyler didn’t understand. There were two things different about it. One was that they would allow grazing of cattle. The other was that it would be administered by the BLM and not the Park Service.
He understood what that meant but he didn’t understand why they did it, or why they made the Monument to begin with. It was an oddly shaped thing and didn’t include much of the best country which was already taken up by other things: the National Recreation Area, some Natural Resource Areas, two State Parks and couple of Wilderness Areas. It seemed to him that the making of the Monument would just popularize the place and bring a lot of new tourists and eventually people who would want to build and sell condominiums. He’d seen that sort of thing happen before. Tyler figured that cattle were better for the landscape than condominiums.
When the woman in red first presented the lawsuit to the old ladies she put both of her hands flat on the table and she pressed herself a little out of her seat and leaned forward and said in a tough way,
“You, your organization, ladies, intend to sue the United States Bureau of Land Management, she emphasized each word which made it sound very important, on the grounds that cattle grazing constitutes an unacceptable risk of permanent harm to lands now preserved as National Monument.”
She smiled when she said this and looked, one at a time, at all the women at the tables and then at Tyler. She sat back down and one of the ladies said,
“Oh my.”
Another said, “That is exciting. I’m excited by that sort of thing. We’ll sure get ’em.”‘
One of the oldest ones said, “I don’t know.”
She was beginning to say something else and the woman in red turned to her and flashed her black eyes at her. The woman in red started to speak but the older one interrupted her.
“I don’t know about this,” she said. “On some level, it doesn’t seem fair. They were promised something at the beginning of all this.”
That women looked at Tyler just for a moment after she said this.
“Those were political promises,” said the woman in red. “For strictly political purposes. Take my word for it no one would believe in that sort of promise. Besides we’ve learned a great deal in the interim. Since the inception of the Monument.”
“A promise is a promise, I suppose,” the older woman said.
“Yes it is,” another said.
The woman in red backed her chair away from the table and looked at each of the other women one at a time. They looked at her as if she were an angry father. She did not look at Tyler then and he looked directly at her and he was smiling openly and a little too vibrantly.
She looked around the table again and paused when she came to the woman who had spoken first after her announcement.
“Mrs. Wilkins, what is our purpose? What is the purpose of your organization? I am here at some expense to assist you. I did not ask to come. You asked me. We must remember our purpose.”
“I’m all for it,” the woman said, removing and replacing her glasses for emphasis, “as I said before, this is exciting. It promises to put a real monkey-wrench in the whole works. Their works, mind you. It’s exciting.”
And this women and the older woman looked at each other. “Think about it Rachel, this is our chance to really change things, to make a difference.”
“I can’t get beyond it, a promise is a promise. It would dishonor our cause to do this. Should we vote? I think we should put it to a debate and then a vote. That’s what I have to say. Now everyone should have a say and we should vote.”
The woman in red looked carefully at each of the women again. She pursed her lips. Tyler continued smiling and looking at her. She did not look back at him but adjusted her position in the chair. Her arms were tight down at her sides and pressed against the base of her chair. Her breasts were squeezed between them as she pushed herself only slightly forward.
Tyler watched this with his mouth open. He felt saliva flowing and building in his mouth. She became gravely serious. “This is a very significant matter,” she said. “I’m not sure we can be cavalier in our addressing this. Chad Trotter is a significant man, a powerful man. My father was in livestock. I know how they think. I know that they will only respond to a push from us if it is a very hard push”.
Tyler swallowed and opened another letter. The woman in red often mentioned her father: his being in livestock. She also occasionally claimed him to have held interests in the logging industry. The truth of it was that he was a metallurgist by profession and he raised a few horses on a small piece of land outside of Pittsburgh. That was the livestock interest. He also held a modicum of paper company stock which allowed for her less frequent reference to his foray into the logging industry.
Her father did push hard. He pushed her very hard. A normal childhood was unacceptable. She would forever carry, inside her, the way he looked from her to her report card when she was a little girl. Every grade that was less than outstanding was a long discussion that began with his saying, “About this,” and ended with her thinking, “he doesn’t care about anything, but how I perform.” She felt like a show-horse. She needed to be beautiful and smart. She needed to be seeing only the right boys. He’d already pushed her mother away to a world of cleaning things: dishes
and clothes and toilets. Once, only once, she brought home a report card with a D on it. Her father looked at the report card for a long time with her sitting across from him at the kitchen table and the smoke from his cigarette rising between them. He had a flush red face. His hair was going gray and cut short and flat. He was never affectionate. He showed his caring in other ways. Indirectly, vaguely it could be construed as a hope for her future. In reality, it was a striving, kicking, forceful directness.
“About this D in chemistry,” he had said. “Do you want to be like your mother?”
She was offended for her mother. But she knew that she couldn’t be what her mother had become. The mother and daughter, in a strange unstated kind of way, parted company when she heard her father say this. She had to live her life in a way that mattered. Anything that didn’t matter was cleaning toilets. She knew, or thought, that her father was right and she nodded yes and apologized. “It will never happen again,” she said. “Never.” He didn’t smile. He looked at her with an intensity that she had always known in his dark eyes. When she left him she walked into the hallway and found her mother scrubbing the base of the handrail of the front stairs. She passed her without speaking.
The next letter, wasn’t certified, it was from Spencer Warner, Mrs. McGregory’s Congressman. It was a request for money to maintain the fight against the environmentalist extremists. It listed all of the actions that were being taken to eliminate “industry” from “your Federal” land. It said that Warner was there to stop it or to, at least, try. It didn’t say but it certainly implied that, without the requested money, the campaign money, Mrs. McGregory would probably lose the ranch.
Another letter was from a tax lawyer in Salt Lake City. It was about the taxes due after Mr. McGregory had passed away. It was a complicated letter that boiled down to her owing the government fifteen-thousand dollars and the lawyer two-thousand. Sometimes Tyler felt a little sorry for Mrs. McGregory. She was not that old, probably fifty-five.
She had run the ranch since Mr. McGregory died. Alan McGregory had hired Tyler and then he’d come down with a fast cancer. Mrs. McGregory paid Tyler not much more than the minimum wage and that was for the hours that were counted. He spent long hours driving around or working on tack at that ranch for which he wasn’t paid. Whenever he complained or was a little obstinate about cleaning the stalls, Mrs. McGregory would say to him,
“Do you have any idea how many ranch hands there are out there? Do you know how little you matter to this ranch with all of the other crap I have to worry about? Do you know?”
He’d leave it at that. He wouldn’t answer.
“Well what is it?” the woman in red said. She said this suddenly and very directly. The other women did not look back at her. She said it again.
“I suppose we should go ahead then,” one of them said. “We should finish what we started,” another said. Those two could look at her again. The really old one, who had given her trouble, looked first at the others who didn’t look back at her and then at the ground and for a moment at Tyler.
She finally said, “That is true. It is what we started. I suppose it is.”
The woman in red smiled then and her gaze wandered around the group of tables stopping at each of the women and asking each in tum what they would prefer.
They each said, “Yes, we should proceed with the suit,” or simply “Yes”, the older one, who had resisted only nodded in the affirmative.
The woman in red smiled in response to each, looking them directly in the eye. She was pleased.
Tyler threw all of the letters away including the last without having opened it as he walked to the door. He glanced back at the woman in red and she was casually watching him. He smiled back at her recognizing just a hint of something which he knew very well. It wasn’t the soft flirtatious look that he saw so often. That was repellent to him.
It was a slight thing, but he knew it was everything. She only took from the good ladies exactly what she needed.