Close Range

  “Cowboy up,” said the doctor sardonically.

  Pake Bitts walked in, looked at him with interest.

  “Got hung up, hah? I didn’t see it but they said you got hung up pretty good. Twenty-eight seconds. They’ll put you on the videos. Thunderstorm out there.” He was damp from the shower, last week’s scab still riding his upper lip and a fresh raw scrape on the side of his jaw. He spoke to the doctor. “Thow his shoulder out? Can he drive? It’s his turn a drive. We got a be in south Texas two o’clock tomorrow afternoon.”

  The doctor finished wrapping the cast, lit another cigarette. “Iwouldn’t want to do it—right hand’s all he’s got. Dislocated shoulder, it’s not just a question of pop it back in and away you go. He could need surgery. There’s injured ligaments, internal bleeding, swelling, pain, could be some nerve or blood vessel damage. He’s hurting. He’s going to be eating aspirin by the handful. He’s going to be in the cast for a month. If he’s going to drive, one-handed or with his teeth, I can’t give him codeine and you’d better not let him take any either. Call your insurance company, make sure you’re covered for injury-impaired driving.”

  “What insurance?” said Pake, then, “You ought a quit off smokin,” and to Diamond, “Well, the Good Lord spared you. When can we get out a here? Hey you see how they spelled my name? Good Lord.” He yawned hugely, had driven all the last night coming down from Idaho.

  “Give me ten. Let me get in the shower, steady up. You get my rope and war bag. I’ll be o.k. to drive. I just need ten.”

  The doctor said, “On your way, pal.”

  Someone else was coming in, a deep cut over his left eyebrow, finger pressed below the cut to keep the blood out of his rapidly swelling eyes and he was saying, just tape it up, tape the fuckin eyes open, I’m gettin on one.

  He undressed one-handed in the grimy concrete shower room having trouble with the four-buckle chaps and his bootstraps. The pain came in long ocean rollers. He couldn’t get on the other side of it. There was someone in one of the shower stalls, leaning his forehead against the concrete, hands flat against the wall and taking hot water on the back of his neck.

  Diamond saw himself in the spotted mirror, two black eyes, bloody nostrils, his abraded right cheek, his hair dark with sweat, bull hairs stuck to his dirty, tear-streaked face, a bruise from armpit to buttocks. He was dizzy with the pain and a huge weariness overtook him. The euphoric charge had never kicked in this time. If he were dead this might be hell—smoking doctors and rank bulls, eight hundred miles of night road ahead, hurting all the way.

  The cascade of water stopped and Tee Dove came out of the shower, hair plastered flat. He was ancient, Diamond knew, thirty-six, an old man for bullriding but still doing it. His sallow-cheeked face was a map of surgical repair and he carried enough body scars to open a store. A few months earlier Diamond had seen him, broken nose draining dark blood, take two yellow pencils and push one into each nostril, maneuvering them until the smashed cartilage and nasal bones were forced back into position.

  Dove rubbed his scarred torso with his ragged but lucky towel, showed his fox teeth to Diamond, said, “Ain’t it a bone game, bro.”

  Outside the rain had stopped, the truck gleamed wet, gutters flooded with runoff. Pake Bitts was in the passenger seat, already asleep and snoring gently. He woke when Diamond, bare-chested, barefooted, pulled the seat forward, threw in the cut shirt, fumbled one-handed in his duffel bag for an oversize sweatshirt he could get over the cast, jammed into his old athletic shoes, got in and started the engine.

  “You o.k. to drive? You hold out two, three hours while I get some sleep I’ll take it the rest a the way. You drive the whole road is not a necessity by no means.”

  “It’s o.k. How did they spell your name?”

  “C-A-K-E. Cake Bitts. Nance’ll laugh her head off over that one. Burn a rag, brother, we’re runnin late.” And he was asleep again, calloused hand resting on his thigh palm up and a little open as though to receive something in it.

  Just over the Texas border he pulled into an all-night truck stop and filled the tank, bought two high-caffeine colas and drank them, washing down his keep-awakes and pain-stoppers. He walked past the cash registers and aisles of junk food to the telephones, fumbled the phone card from his wallet and dialed. It would be two-thirty in Redsled.

  She answered on the first ring. Her voice was clear. She was awake.

  “It’s me,” he said. “Diamond.”

  “Shorty?” she said. “What?”

  “Listen, there’s no way I can put this that’s gentle or polite. Who was my father?”

  “What do you mean? Shirley Custer Felts. You know that.”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t know that.” He told her what Shirley Custer Felts had said getting into his car ten years earlier.

  “That dirty man,” she said. “He set you up like a time bomb. He knew the kind of kid you were, that you’d brood and sull over it and then blow up.”

  “I’m not blowing up. I’m asking you; who was he?”

  “I told you.” As she spoke he heard a deep smothered cough over the wire.

  “I don’t believe you. Third time, who was my father?”

  He waited.

  “Who you got there, Momma? The big slob with the black hat?”

  “Nobody,” she said and hung up. He didn’t know which question she’d answered.

  He was still standing there when Pake Bitts came in, shuffling and yawning.

  ’You wont me a drive now?” He pounded the heel of his hand on his forehead.

  “No, get you some sleep.”

  “Aw, yeah. Piss on the fire, boy, and let’s go.”

  He was o.k. to drive. He would drive all the way. He could do it now, this time, many more times to come. Yet it was as though some bearing had seized up inside him and burned out. It had not been the phone call but the flat minute pressed against the rail, when he could not walk out of the arena.

  He pulled back onto the empty road. There were a few ranch lights miles away, the black sky against the black terrain drawing them into the hem of the starry curtain. As he drove toward the clangor and flash of the noon arena he considered the old saddle bronc rider rubbing leather for thirty-seven years, Leecil riding off into the mosquito-clouded Canadian sunset, the ranch hand bent over a calf, slitting the scrotal sac. The course of life’s events seemed slower than the knife but not less thorough.

  There was more to it than that, he supposed, and heard again her hoarse, charged voice saying “Everything.” It was all a hard, fast ride that ended in the mud. He passed a coal train in the dark, the dense rectangles that were the cars gliding against indigo night, another, and another, and another. Very slowly, as slowly as light comes on a clouded morning, the euphoric heat flushed through him, or maybe just the memory of it.

  Job History

  LEELANDLEE IS BORN AT HOME INCORA, WYOMING, November 17, 1947, the youngest of six. In the 1950s his parents move to Unique when his mother inherits a small dog-bone ranch. The ranch lies a few miles outside town. They raise sheep, a few chickens and some hogs. The father is irascible and, as soon as they can, the older children disperse. Leeland can sing “That Doggie in the Window” all the way through. His father strikes him with a flyswatter and tells him to shut up. There is no news on the radio. A blizzard has knocked out the power.

  Leeland’s face shows heavy bone from his mother’s side. His neck is thick and his red-gold hair plastered down in bangs. Even as a child his eyes are as pouchy as those of a middle-aged alcoholic, the brows rod-straight above wandering, out-of-line eyes. His nose lies broad and close to his face, his mouth seems to have been cut with a single chisel blow into easy flesh. In the fifth grade, horsing around with friends, he falls off the school’s fire escape and breaks his pelvis. He is in a body cast for three months. On the news an announcer says that the average American eats 8.6 pounds of margarine a year but only 8.3 pounds of butter. He never forgets this statistic.

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sp; When Leeland is seventeen he marries Lori Bovee. They quit school. Lori is pregnant and Leeland is proud of this. His pelvis gives him no trouble. She is a year younger than he, with an undistinguished, oval face, hair of medium length. She is a little stout but looks a confection in pastel sweater sets. Leeland and his mother fight over this marriage and Leeland leaves the ranch. He takes a job pumping gas at Egge’s Service Station. Ed Egge says, “You may fire when ready, Gridley” and laughs. The station stands at the junction of highway 16 and a county road. Highway 16 is the main tourist road to Yellowstone. Leeland buys Lori’s father’s old truck for fifty dollars and Ed rebuilds the engine. Vietnam and Selma, Alabama, are on the news.

  The federal highway program puts through the new four-lane interstate forty miles south of highway 16 and parallel with it. Overnight the tourist business in Unique falls flat. One day a hundred cars stop for gas and oil, hamburgers, cold soda. The next day only two cars pull in, both driven by locals asking how business is. In a few months there is aFOR SALE sign on the inside window of the service station. Ed Egge gets drunk and, driving at speed, hits two steers on the county road.

  Leeland joins the army, puts in for the motor pool. He is stationed in Germany for six years and never learns a word of the language. He comes back to Wyoming heavier, moodier. He works with a snow-fence crew during spring and summer, then moves Lori and the children—the boy and a new baby girl—to Casper where he drives oil trucks. They live in a house trailer on Poison Spider Road, jammed between two rioting neighbors. On the news they hear that an enormous diamond has been discovered somewhere. The second girl is born. Leeland can’t seem to get along with the oil company dispatcher. After a year they move back to Unique. Leeland and his mother make up their differences.

  Lori is good at saving money and she has put aside a small nest egg. They set up in business for themselves. Leeland believes people will be glad to trade at a local ranch supply store that saves a long drive into town. He rents the service station from Mrs. Egge who has not been able to sell it after Ed’s death. They spruce it up, Leeland doing all the carpenter work, Lori painting the interior and exterior. On the side Leeland raises hogs with his father. His father was born and raised in Iowa and knows hogs.

  It becomes clear that people relish the long drive to a bigger town where they can see something different, buy fancy groceries, clothing, bakery goods as well as ranch supplies. One intensely cold winter when everything freezes from God to gizzard, Leeland and his father lose 112 hogs. They sell out. Eighteen months later the ranch supply business goes under. The new color television set goes back to the store.

  After the bankruptcy proceedings Leeland finds work on a road construction crew. He is always out of town, it seems, but back often enough for what he calls “a good ride” and so makes Lori pregnant again. Before the baby is born he quits the road crew. He can’t seem to get along with the foreman. No one can, and turnover is high. On his truck radio he hears that hundreds of religious cult members have swallowed Kool-Aid and cyanide.

  Leeland takes a job at Tongue River Meat Locker and Processing. Old Man Brose owns the business. Leeland is the only employee. He has an aptitude for sizing up and cutting large animals. He likes wrapping the tidy packages, the smell of damp bone and chill. He can throw his cleaver unerringly and when mice run along the wall they do not run far if Leeland is there. After months of discussion with Old Man Brose, Leeland and Lori sign a ten-year lease on the meat locker operation. Their oldest boy graduates from high school, the first in the family to do so, and joins the army. He signs up for six years. There is something on the news about school lunches and ketchup is classed as a vegetable. Old Man Brose moves to Albuquerque.

  The economy takes a dive. The news is full of talk about recession and unemployment. Thrifty owners of small ranches go back to doing their own butchering, cutting and freezing. The meat locker lease payments are high and electricity jumps up. Leeland and Lori have to give up the business. Old man Brose returns from Albuquerque. There are bad feelings. It didn’t work out, Leeland says, and that’s the truth of it.

  It seems like a good time to try another place. The family moves to Thermopolis where Leeland finds a temporary job at a local meat locker during hunting season. A hunter from Des Moines, not far from where Leeland’s father was born, tips him $100 when he loads packages of frozen elk and the elk’s head onto the man’s single-engine plane. The man has been drinking. The plane goes down in the Medicine Bow range to the southeast.

  During this long winter Leeland is out of work and stays home with the baby. Lori works in the school cafeteria. The baby is a real crier and Leeland quiets him down with spoonsful of beer.

  In the spring they move back to Unique and Leeland tries truck driving again, this time in long-distance rigs on coast-to-coast journeys that take him away two and three months at a time. He travels all over the continent, to Texas, Alaska, Montreal and Corpus Christi. He says every place is the same. Lori works now in the kitchen of the Hi-Lo Café in Unique. The ownership of the café changes three times in two years. West Klinker, an elderly rancher, eats three meals a day at the Hi-Lo. He is sweet on Lori. He reads her an article from the newspaper—a strange hole has appeared in the ozone layer. He confuses ozone with oxygen.

  One night while Leeland is somewhere on the east coast the baby goes into convulsions following a week’s illness of fever and cough. Lori makes a frightening drive over icy roads to the distant hospital. The baby survives but he is slow. Lori starts a medical emergency response group in Unique. Three women and two men sign up to take the first aid course. They drive a hundred miles to the first aid classes. Only two of them pass the test on the first try. Lori is one of the two. The other is Stuttering Bob, an old bachelor. One of the failed students says Stuttering Bob has nothing to do but study the first aid manual as he enjoys the leisured life that goes with a monthly social security check.

  Leeland quits driving trucks and again tries raising hogs with his father on the old ranch. He becomes a volunteer fireman and is at the bad February fire that kills two children. It takes the fire truck three hours to get in to the ranch through the wind-drifted snow. The family is related to Lori. When something inside explodes, Leeland tells, an object flies out of the house and strikes the fire engine hood. It is a Nintendo player and not even charred.

  Stuttering Bob has cousins in Muncie, Indiana. One of the cousins works at the Muncie Medical Center. The cousin arranges for the Medical Center to donate an old ambulance to the Unique Rescue Squad although they had intended to give it to a group in Mississippi. Bob’s cousin, who has been to Unique, persuades them. Bob is afraid to drive through congested cities so Leeland and Lori take a series of buses to Muncie to pick up the vehicle. It is their first vacation. They take the youngest boy with them. On the return trip Lori leaves her purse on a chair in a restaurant. The gas money for the return trip is in the purse. They go back to the restaurant, wild with anxiety. The purse has been turned in and nothing is missing. Lori and Leeland talk about the goodness of people, even strangers. In their absence Stuttering Bob is elected president of the rescue squad.

  A husband and wife from California move to Unique and open a taxidermy business. They say they are artists and arrange the animals in unusual poses. Lori gets work cleaning their workshop. The locals make jokes about the coyote in their window, posed lifting a leg against sagebrush where a trap is set. The taxidermists hold out for almost two years, then move to Oregon. Leeland’s and Lori’s oldest son telephones from overseas. He is making a career of the service.

  Leeland’s father dies and they discover the hog business is deeply in debt, the ranch twice-mortgaged. The ranch is sold to pay off debts. Leeland’s mother moves in with them. Leeland continues long-distance truck driving. His mother watches television all day. Sometimes she sits in Lori’s kitchen, saying almost nothing, picking small stones from dried beans.

  The youngest daughter baby-sits. One night, on the way home, her em
ployer feels her small breasts and asks her to squeeze his penis, because, he says, she ate the piece of chocolate cake he was saving. She does it but runs crying into the house and tells Lori who advises her to keep quiet and stay home from now on. The man is Leeland’s friend; they hunt elk and antelope together.