Scrawny and redheaded, a little savage with an early change of life, Inez Muddyman had been one of the Bibby girls and raised, as she said, on a horse from breakfast to bed; it was she who took the dudes up into the mountains where tilted slopes of wild iris aroused in them emotional displays and some altitude sickness. She had been a good barrel racer and roper as a girl, made a few points and a little cash on the weekend circuit but hung that up when she married Muddyman. Off a horse she was awkward and stave-legged, dressed always in jeans and plain round-collared cotton blouses stained light brown from the iron water. Her elbows were rough, and above her amorphous face frizzed bright hair. She didn’t own a pair of sunglasses, squinted through faded eyelashes. In the bathroom cabinet next to Sutton’s kidney pills stood a single tube of lipstick desiccated to chalk in the arid climate.
Three routes connected the Coffeepot and the Hammer-handle: a plank bridge over Bad Girl Creek—the joint property line—but that way involved opening and closing fourteen gates; a water crossing useable only in early spring and late summer; and the five-mile highway trip, one that Scrope avoided because of bad memories as it was at the highway bridge he had nearly killed his wife and broken so many of his own bones that he was now held together with dozens of steel pins, metal plates and lag screws.
SHOOTING
He wouldn’t give up. Still in casts and marked with hot pink scars he had telephoned Jeri at the midnight hour, ricocheting between sore anger and yearning. As he spoke he watched the naked woman on the television screen cock one leg and brandish an object that might have been a potato masher.
“Jeri, where’s your grit? Don’t you want a make the whistle? I know you think you’re ridin a dirty one but don’t you want a make the whistle? You ain’t a quitter.”
“This is the whistle. I had it.”
“We could have some kids. I wish we’d make some kids. We’d be o.k. then.” He heard himself whining. He turned his back on the potato masher woman.
“The needle’s on empty for that one,” she said. “I wouldn’t have a kid a yours for a million dollars.”
’You don’t come back to me and turn this damn divorce thing around I’m goin a have to shoot you.” The telephone sucked his words down like a drain.
“Car,” she said, “you leave me alone.”
“Hey woman. You don’t see it yet, do you? It’s me or nothin. You get your ass back out here or you’ll find out what real trouble is,” knowing that he was the one with trouble.
She began to cry, an angry weeping with a lot of spit in it. “You son of a bitch. Leave meALONE .”
“Look!” he shouted. “What you done with John Wrench is over and done. I forgive you!” He could almost lick her raw salt tears. Then he was sure she was not crying, but laughing.
She hung up. He tried to call back but got the rasp of the busy signal.Best one lost .
He drank some more, took his father’s shotgun out of the cabinet, drove to Signal’s only apartment building where her car was parked at the side, shot up the windows and tires of the vehicle he’d paid on for two years.
“Find the joke in that,” he said.
The act released vengeful thoughts and on the way home he detoured to the Wrench ranch. John Wrench’s pickup, the hood still warm, stood in the drive, curved metal naked under the moon. Scrope reloaded, blasted rubber and glass, fired into the dashboard shouting, have some popcorn, John!, threw his shirt on Wrench’s front seat as a calling card. For the first time he wanted to kill them both, to kill something, if only himself The upstairs lights glowed and he roared away, bare-torsoed, bottle to his mouth and drops of whiskey sparkling in his chest hair, hoping for a jackrabbit in the headlights.
When Jeri moved back to South Dakota he knew Inez had been in on it, the bowlegged old bitch, but they were neighbors and for Muddyman’s sake he was civil.
Wrench, that curly wolf, kept scarce after the truck-shoot and Scrope couldn’t stir up enough anger to file his teeth again. In younger days they had traded dozens of girls, fresh-used and still swimming with the other’s spermy juice—old steadies ready for the discard heap, new girls, Wrench’s sister Kaylee—sometimes back and forth and back again, easy trades with no rancor. But Wrench, never married, missed the difference between those girls and a wife.
They’d been high ace in each other’s hand since baby days when Scrope’s mother took care of infant Wrench. They had shared a playpen, Scrope’s brother Train making faces at them through the bars or lying under the table within their eyeshot and fooling with his plastic horses. Jeri had been Scrope’s little South Dakota bird who’d perched a while and flown off, but John Wrench went back to the beginning and one of them would hoist the other’s coffin.
THESPUR-MAKER
A few Californians drifted into Signal, including cranky Harold Batts, his receding hairline eked out in a thin ponytail, and his wife, Sonia, who had been a car saleswoman until the salesmen got the better of her with jibes and innuendo. In his coastal days Batts had been a metallurgical engineer for Pacific Wings, suddenly pink-slipped with five hundred others in a company downsize. He became interested in prophecies, signs that the end was near and other eschatological fancies, told Sonia that until the final trump they were going to live a simple life in a simple place. He thought of blacksmithing, said he wanted to be useful to society as long as it lasted; the millenarian farrier’s life would suit. He shied at the last minute and apprenticed to a spur-maker up in Oregon for a year, spent his weekends in retreat with a coming-end sect known as Final Daze.
In Signal—a town Batts chose by stabbing a fork into a road map—he opened his shop. In the workroom at his sparking grinding wheel or in the dark corner of the forge working adversarial steel, sweaty face reflecting the hot light as a chrome mask, he illustrated metal with coiled snakes and kissing birds. He scavenged scrap from abandoned ranches: old gates, rusted buggy leaf springs, coil springs, harrow teeth, odds and ends. Most of his work was in mild or high carbon tool steels but he experimented with unorthodox admixtures of nickel, chromium, copper, tungsten; played with molybdenum, vanadium, cobalt; set rich low brass, bronze, nickel silver against duller metal. Those who favored silver-crusted acanthus leaves and florid carving eschewed his work as “too modren.” His best work was spurs, no design ever repeated, his distinctive style recognizable from a distance and costing the moon.
That late, hard spring he finished a pair of spurs with half-drop shanks in steel blued to the iridescent flush of ripe plums. The line was severe and elegant. The silver buttons, the silver-overlaid blunt-star rowels and shank tips held the same pale gleam as twilight water. Silver comets whose tails flowed into the shanks ornamented the heel bands. He added a playful note in a pair of jinglebob stars pendant from the rowel pins, the source of a shivering metal music pleasing to horse and rider.
“There’s some power in these,” he said to Sonia’s cat, sleeping on top of the shop radio. “Somebody’s going to Connect.” He went home then, counting at the side of the road a dead deer, and on the road a dead coyote, a dead rabbit, another, another, dead rattlesnake, live rattlesnake in the sun soon to be dead, smear of blood, half a dead antelope.
NOSURPRISE
Scrope walked in on them, a day of violent wind, willows along the creek in lashing motion, heaving themselves out of the soil.
He and Mrs. Freeze and the two hands, Benny Horn and Cody Joe Bibby had ridden out early to drive two hundred animals north to Scrope’s BLM lease. The undulating grass made the plain shudder as an animal’s hide rolls in fly season. On the way Benny Horn lost his jacket and his teeth rattled.
“Good thing your balls is in a bag,” said Mrs. Freeze, “or you’d a lost them.”
A few things had gone wrong; hats blew off, dust irritated their eyes. Jeri did not meet them with sandwiches and beer at Johnson’s place on Pass Water Creek. Scrope said she probably couldn’t get the truck started. At one o’clock Kyle Johnson and his youngest son, Pleasant, comfortably belching hot beef and hor
se-radish fumes, joined them for the drive across Johnson property, but the cows spooked when a tourist van blared through, spooked again at the bridge and the hollow clopping of their own hooves on it and ran in twelve directions, crisscrossing the freshly tarred highway, so deep a black the yellow stripes seemed to float above the surface; it stank of asphalt and yielded unpleasantly beneath hooves. When they had them bunched and moving again Cody Joe started one of his fits and went off his horse.
“Busted his collarbone,” said Mrs. Freeze, easing him up, hearing the bone ends grate.
Johnson had business in town, said he would drive Cody Joe to the Knife & Gun Club. ‘You want,” he said, “leave your animals until mornin. Give you a chance a rustle up some help.” Scrope hated to take him up on the offer—there would be weighty payback.
Nothing to do but ride to the Coffeepot and get on the phone. Benny yammered, Scrope said, shut up, let me think. The wind made their ears ache, stirred up the horses’ tails. It was getting colder. Half a mile from the house they saw something blue and small caught on the barbwire fence, jerking in the wind. The peacock blue color was familiar to Scrope. He rode up and pulled it from the barbs—Jeri’s fancy panties—they’d had a fight over them, seventy-five dollars for a scrap of silk. Benny and Mrs. Freeze looked away to spare him embarrassment. Scrope knew the garment had not blown off any clothesline—he was still paying for the dryer. He unbraided the possibilities in the time it took to reach the house.
It wasn’t much of a surprise to see John Wrench’s truck in the yard, driver’s door open, and, given that, no surprise at all to find him in the bed, working hard at the cowboy wiggle. He heard his wife say, keep goin, don’t stop, and then she saw him. He didn’t say anything, backed out and went down to the kitchen and tilted the whiskey bottle while he listened to Jeri wailing and John Wrench getting dressed, coming downstairs. From the door Wrench said, Car, it’s not like you think, nosir.
Scrope did not feel much at first, and when feeling came suffered the flashing cuts of betrayal, swallowed the jealous acids, but Jeri, afire with guilt, called a showdown, screamed divorce. Scrope said that was a crazy thing to say. In the half hour since he’d walked into the bedroom he’d never thought they were at the end of anything, just at a washout in the road, get through the ditch and go on. His blue-white eyes watered. He wanted to tell her that it was only John Wrench. Look, he wanted to say but could not, I done it a few times on the side too. Where would that get him? He thought nothing had to change, did not yet know it was impossible to dodge torment; like a heat-seeking missile it finds the radiant core.
“Let’s talk about it,” he said, “let’s just drive around and talk about it,” slugging whiskey fast and straight, his shirtfront drenched with it, and finally prodded his wife into the truck where all he said was let’s talk and all she said was divorce. They couldn’t get past that. Somehow they had ended up beneath the highway bridge, the truck wheels in the air and Scrope broken and crushed into a painful space the size of a footlocker, Jeri calling for help which he couldn’t give.
By the time he was out of the hospital and able to lift a spoon again she had moved to Signal and the divorce kettle was on high boil, nothing of hers left in the house but a half-empty box of tampons on the bathroom shelf and a pair of snow boots in the entryway.
PAIR ASPURS
Sutton Muddyman brewed his own beer in the cellar and on a dust-shot day he went to town to pick up a few cans of malt. He slouched along the sidewalk, his 4-X cattleman crease pointed against the gritty wind, past the computer store with its sun-faded boxes of obsolete software, past the lawyer’s office with the blue shade drawn. He stopped in front of Batts’s window and gazed at the spurs artfully laid out on a weathered plank: an unornamented pair of saddle bronc rider’s spurs with wide heel bands and the shanks set off-center at a fifteen-degree angle, pure and functional in line; a pair of gal-leg spurs, the shanks ornate Victorian whore’s stockings and high-buttoned shoes; another pair in bronze featuring straight shanks inlaid with turquoise chevrons, the rowel spokes in the shapes of tiny kicking boots. Nice, nice, nice, said Muddyman. He stepped inside, told himself he would get Inez a keychain for her birthday—the same thing he had given her two years running.
Sour Harold Batts stood behind the counter reading the Casper paper, mug of herb tea at his hand. Muddyman drifted along the showcase taking in the smell of oil and metal and leather, hibiscus and vanilla, stopped at the comet spurs.
“What do you want?” said Batts.
“Let’s see them comet spurs,” he said, pointing. Batts wrenched his lips, laid the spurs on the counter and began to twirl the end of his ponytail around a scarred finger.
“Pretty can openers,” said Muddyman, pleased to see Batts clench and unclench his fist.
“That’s the Hale-Bopp. I spent hours watching it that year—slept out on the deck. Cold, but I’d wake up and there was this thing up there. Beautiful. Terrible. The position of the earth in space is going to shift. There are forces coming that will make iron swim, cause a five-hundred-foot tsunami. We live in the final times—it’s right in your face, the millennium, global warming, wars, horrible pestilences, storms and floods. The comet was the sign. Used one of those new little rotary chisels from Hines and Roddy over in Casper to cut the detail here.”
Muddyman looked at the price tag. Three hundred—he guessed the end wasn’t quite in sight. He hadn’t planned to spend more than twenty on his wife’s present and said so. Said he’d read in the paper that comets, crammed with rich chemical molecules, were not signs of destruction but the seeds of life sowed through space.
“That’s whatthey want you to believe,” said Batts, smoldering, tapping his finger on the newspaper face of a woman politician as well known for her wild-eyed rants as for her stupidity. “So, don’t buy them. Somebody will.” The light from the street falling through the front window metalized strands of his hair. With his arms bent akimbo he was beginning to take on the shape of a pair of spurs himself.
His indifference goaded Muddyman. He wrote a check, cleaned out their tax return money.
It was almost worth it. Inez said, “Guess I will wear them to bed tonight,” and she did until cold steel touched him and, laughing, he pulled off her boots, threw them jingling into the corner.
“He he he,” said Muddyman, “here comes the comet.” But afterwards lay awake wondering how to cook the books and keep her from finding out.
On Wednesday, the strong heat of the sun soaking into cold bones, wind flat and distant grass showing young green, Inez rode to Car Scrope’s place. For years they had brought horseback dudes over to the Coffeepot for a fake roundup and a chuckwagon plate of beans and that was on her mind. A tractor passed her at the turn-in, Mrs. Freeze in the cab and driving; on the long flatbed bounced Cody Joe Bibby and a few empty mineral supplement tubs. Cody Joe was her cousin, smart enough once, once of sweet disposition, but his brains scrambled four or five years before when a thousand-pound hay bale tipped off a stack onto him and his horse. He was strong, bull-shouldered like all the Bibbys, yet good for nothing now but simple jobs. She waved and there was no recognition in his scarred face, the stringy hair badly cut at home by his wife and whipping in the wind. He had been the best-looking boy in the world when they were kids, she thought, stiff, wheat-colored hair and darkest blue eyes. Look at him now, though she couldn’t stand to do so.
When she rode up Cody Joe was dropping the tubs off the flatbed and Mrs. Freeze telling Scrope they had a bull with hoof rot in the creek pasture, too lame to be driven in for treatment, they’d have to go out with the truck and get him.
Scrope looked up at Inez, his expression in neutral.
“How you doin, Car?” Her red hair was whichaway hat on the rack at home.
“Good enough. You?”
“We’re good. Sutton wanted me come by ask you if Saturday be o.k. for us a bring the dudes over instead a Friday? He got a sit down with the tax man on Friday. They don’
t give you a choice a days. They are callin our place a entertainment ranch.”
“Way it’s goin, might as well call them all entertainment ranches. I’m sure entertained. We was just goin in, have a shot a coffee,” said Car. “Park your horse.”
“Beaut spurs,” Mrs. Freeze said. She had the lean of an old fence post, had to be close to seventy years old, Inez figured, grey hair chopped short, hands as calloused and corded as any old cowpuncher’s. Car said that what the old girl didn’t know about stock could be written on a cigarette paper with room left over for Bible verses. Nobody knew where Mr. Freeze was—killed and kicked under the rug, maybe. There was something about Mrs. Freeze that Inez didn’t like and never had; the hard old woman was like a rope stretched until there was no give left.