His uncle chased after him for six miles, pulled abreast, and shouted into the rushing wind, “Don’t you want the tripod?”
“Hell, yes, I only got the one engine hoist and I need it a hoist engines.”
Back in Elk Tooth he made some effort to put his prize in a secluded spot, but given the nature of his property, a narrow strip of ground between a sheer cliff and the road, crowded with the house trailer, the lumber piles, seven or eight defunct trucks (for parts), the four-board garage, the doghouse, a dozen dead lawn mowers, a pile of stone, another of gravel, and a single young cottonwood tree, there was no secluded spot.
“Fuck em,” said Willy Huson.
He off-loaded the enormous inch-thick cast-iron pot, three feet across and last used in 1912 by some unknown biscuit hurler in the long-ago Huson fall roundup. He jimmied it into place near the cottonwood, about five feet from the road. It swayed ponderously from the massive tripod chain.
After a search Willy found two cut lengths of hose and taped them together. The tape held long enough to fill the kettle halfway, which he thought, figuring displacement, would be about right. A flotsam of mouse droppings, straw chaff, and rust particles floated to the surface. Adhering to the bottom was a crust of ninety-year-old dried son of a bitch stew. He split a few sticks of kindling, started a fire beneath the pot with a curl of tar paper, added chunk wood. Smoke rose. While he waited for the water to heat he practiced shooting at the wasps’ nest in the cottonwood with his .22 pistol.
At last steam rose from the kettle. There was a heavy and peculiar smell. He raked the coals and smoking wood out from under the pot and stripped down, draping his clothes over the projecting ends of the boards in the nearby lumber pile. The remnant of the son of a bitch stew, the size of a cow pie, had loosened from the bottom and floated on top of the water. He scooped it out with his hand and sent it flying into the road. The water in the tub was plenty hot. He put in one foot, then the other. The water rose above his knees. The water was very hot but not as hot as the iron bottom of the pot, which roasted the soles of his feet. He got out, danced in the cool dirt, pulled on his boots. Now the boots were full of grit.
He felt the rim of the pot. It was warm but not searing. He decided on a different entry trajectory and lowered himself until his more tender parts hung over the water and there he paused, suspended, as Mr. and Mrs. Ulysses Bird (brother and sister-inlaw of Straw Bird) drove slowly by. Mrs. Bird started to wave, looked again, thought better of it.
Ulysses Bird walked into the Pee Wee Bar and said, “Goddamn, we just seen somethin. Willy Huson got hisself a cannibal pot hot tub. He looked like a missionary was goin a get boiled.” He described the tub, the closeness of it to the road, the agonized expression on Willy’s face as he sat hastily in the water, Mrs. Bird’s expression and exclamations as she thought of how she had almost waved.
Amanda Gribb, who was tending bar, listened closely. “Hey,” she said in her loud bartender voice. “Get on back there withthis .” She opened the refrigerator and took out a package of frozen corn, a half-empty jar of maraschino cherries, foraged in the cupboard for a can of chile powder. “Drop these in his damn cannibal hot tub. If he’s goin a cook hisself let’s get some flavor in there. Hell, I’ll come with you, shake that chile where it will do some good.”
They went as quickly as they could. But Willy Huson was gone, clothes, gravelly boots, truck, and all. The pot steamed. The water was still hot, and in it floated a wasps’ nest. A few puzzled wasps flew around the cottonwood tree. There were wet footprints in the dust. There was no sense in wasting the chile, corn, and cherries if Willy wasn’t in his soup pot. There would probably be another time.
As they turned to leave Ulysses Straw Bird stepped on the son of a bitch stew, which, under the influence of the hot water, had metamorphosed into a black jellyfish. It clung to his boot like tar. He scraped it off with a stick, got the stick pronged into it, and held it up. It swung, glistening.
“Seems like it’s fresh, whatever it is,” he said. “It got the right shape but I doubt it ever come out a the south end of a cow. Looks more like a platypus’ afterbirth.”
Amanda Gribb suddenly took the stick from his hand and flipped the blob into the hot tub. “There, let him findthat in his cannibal pot.”
Over the weeks the drought dried up the water in the cannibal hot tub and once again the son of a bitch stew lies dormant at the bottom.
It was only last month that Willy Huson reappeared driving a 1949 Land Rover and with a non-English-speaking Tibetan girlfriend at his side, two items which earned him towering status points in the Elk Tooth eccentricity race. He didn’t even glance at the cannibal pot; he had quit that.
Dump Junk
OLDLADYSTIFLE,WHO DIED THIS WINTER ,WAS BORN Vivian Lohoft in Shady Grove, Iowa, in 1901, married in 1915 to Maximilian Stifle of Firecracker, Fremont County, Wyoming. Her husband, Max, had passed on last year on the first warm day in January. They both were beyond the century mark; he was 102 and she was 101 when they picked up their laundry. The house was jammed with ancient and dusty junk—they saved it all—from the attic to the cellar.
It fell the lot of their two children, Christina, small and silvery in her late sixties, and “Bobcat,” eighty, but still as straight as a metal fence post, to sort what was good and valuable from the junk. Bobcat’s twin daughters, Patsy Snow and Wendy Dobson, both with their mother’s dimpled cheeks but beginning to grey, came to help. The youngest generation, Wendy’s son, Jacky, and Patsy’s boy, Ringold, both strapping hulks in their twenties, agreed to haul the heavy stuff out and cart it to the dump.
“I just hope we can get that old truck started,” said Bobcat.
“We’ll get it going,” said Jacky with the confidence of a young car thief with many successes behind him.
Neither Bobcat nor Christina had stayed in Wyoming, nor had they been in contact with each other beyond Christmas cards, so the sorting out was something of a macabre family reunion. It was also a trip into another time, a Paleozoic experience. Although Christina and Bobcat had not seen each other for forty years, the old animosities flared up immediately. As children they had punched and fought, and Bobcat had several times choked Christina until she passed out. The name-calling was perhaps worse than the physical abuse, for he had taunted her constantly, telling her she was ugly, that she smelled bad, that she would do the world a service if she shot herself in the brain. He sometimes pointed his .22 at her and said“POW!” To dodge their mutual raw dislike, which rose to the top like toxic cream, Christina suggested that the women tackle the house interior and the men take care of the garage and haulage.
“If you think that’s where you belong, Christina,” said Bobcat with a sneer. “If you change your mind you can come out and work with the boys.”
Christina said nothing.
“Look at this mess,” said Bobcat, standing with Jacky and Ringold in old Max’s toolshed. His father had been partial to empty boxes, nails and brads, including bent ones which he planned to someday straighten, broken tools waiting to be mended, traps of all kinds, cracked glass, dented buckets, fried electrical connectors, and cans of time-stiffened oils and lubricants. A confusion of ugly feelings roiled Bobcat’s interior. Just the smell of the oily cold mess made him feel fourteen again and chastised. And yet there were odd and expensive objects in the garage, like the almost new riding mower, a beautiful table saw, and a mahogany box that, when opened, disclosed a set of antique chisels.
Sometime during the Depression his father had given up on ranching and become a shop teacher at the high school, taking dozens of clumsy boys through the intricacies of mitered joints, accurate measuring, wood burning, and wallet making. Nearly every year there had been an accident in which one or more students severed or mangled a digit. Over the years it became a weary joke to remark to any scarred or crippled person, “See you took shop with Mr. Stifle.”
When he was ten Bobcat had been proud that his father was a teacher. But by t
he time he reached high school he was in a frenzy of embarrassment. His father was a walking joke, maimer of youth, his class a kind of ritual passage, for few escaped without cuts, nicks, serious grindings. A locally famous story had circulated for years about Edward Neacock, the son of a doctor, a wimpy boy who had been depantsed and abraded by the sander while Mr. Stifle was in the teachers’ lavatory, as he very often was. The enlarged story ran that one or two boys had put something—precisely what was never specified—up Edward’s rear end. Dr. Neacock had called for the participating students to be arrested and for Maximilian to be fired, but it all blew over and the Neacocks moved to California.
Shop had been a requirement and its only teacher Mr. Stifle. Bobcat had suffered and made a daily show of defiance that earned him thrashings and severe beatings. He ran away at seventeen without graduating, worked at lunch counter jobs for a year, joined the Navy in 1943, and saw action in the South Pacific. After he came back from the war he went home, clad in his new civvies, a pair of tan slacks, a polo shirt, and a decent tweed jacket.
“You look very nice,” said his mother. “Like a successful businessman.”
“That’s what I aim to be, if I can raise the start-up money,” he said and outlined his plans for starting up a religious bookstore (for he had “seen the light,” as he put it, during his tour of duty). It was a surprise when his mother asked him how much he needed, and when he said two thousand dollars she smiled and said she thought she could help him out. They had said no more about it, but when he left the following day his mother handed him a manila envelope and told him not to open it until he was on the train. Inside he found two thousand dollars. But the bookstore had not made the grade, nor had the diner, the collection agency, the antiques store, though his mother supplied start-up cash for each of these ventures. He had finally given up the idea of being an independent businessman and settled in Albuquerque working for a chain of dry cleaning outlets.
“Jeez, look at this.” Jacky held up a paintbrush glued to a piece of wood by a clot of old varnish.
“Toss it,” said Bobcat, nodding at the waiting trash can. He said the same words more than a hundred times that morning, and by noon Jacky and Ringold had made a mountain of junk in the driveway. In between dragging the stuff out of the garage they took turns trying to start the old Chevy truck. They drank beer through the morning and were a little drunk, their bladders under strain despite frequent trips into the house, threading the way through canyons of weird saved trash to the only bathroom.
In the house Christina, Patsy, and Wendy struggled with the mass of folded paper sacks.
“There are just hundreds! NowI save some of the plastic bags, but these—they’re all mouse droppings and dust.” The paper bags stuck to one another in great chunks as though they were trying to return to their earlier incarnation as trees.
“Watch out, Aunt Christina, you can get hantavirus messing with mouse droppings.”
“I’m not messing. I’ve got on my rubber gloves and I’m just putting these awful old sacks into a big trash bag. She must have seen she wasn’t getting any use out of them after a few years, but she just kept on saving them.”
“I don’t think so.” Patsy pulled a grocery receipt from one of the sacks on top of the pile. “Actually I think she stopped some where along the line. Look at the date—it’s 1954. She must have stopped back then.” She pulled out a sack near the bottom and found a handwritten grocery slip for a hundred pounds each of flour and sugar dated 1924. The amount paid was small as there was a notation that she had brought in six dozen fresh eggs to trade against her purchases.
“I remember those chickens,” said Christina. “There were quite a few and she was very particular about them. I always believed she thought more of her chickens than her children.”
“I’d feel better if we had some dust masks, handling this stuff,” said Wendy, who was the fussier of Bobcat’s daughters.
The old lady had gone in for jars, fabric scraps, and old clothing that might be used in a quilt, and, of course, recipes. She was a tireless clipper of recipes for Golden Raisin Hermits, Devil’s Food cake, pickles, leftovers masquerading under such names as “Pigs in Potatoes” (leftover sausages and cold mashed potatoes), “Roman Holiday” (leftover spaghetti with chopped string beans), “Salmon Loaf” (canned salmon, more leftover spaghetti). For decades Vivian Stifle had pasted the recipes in notebooks, account books, novels, and books of instruction, each collection dated on the flyleaf. There were dozens of them lined up in the parlor glass-fronted bookcase. The recipes disclosed that the Stifles’ diet was dominated by a sweet tooth of enormous proportions. The old lady must have used ten pounds of sugar a week on chocolate cream pie, “Filled Cookies from Oklahoma,” and cream cake. She made her own maraschino cherries, too, and ketchup, the old kind of mincemeat that called for chopped beef, suet, and leftover pickle juice steeped in a crock—food that nobody now knew how to make. Still, the corporate food purveyors had been making headway, for many of the recipes featured Crisco, Borden evaporated milk, Kingsford cornstarch, and other mass-produced foodstuffs. Sometime in the 1950s she had stopped collecting recipes. The last book on the shelf was dated 1955, and there were only a few recipes pasted onto the pages of aReader’s Digest condensed book.
“Shame to ruin perfectly good books pasting them up with these awful old recipes.” Patsy leafed throughThe Improved Farmer’s Record and Account Book . A sheet of paper fell out. It was a formal application for membership in the Farm Bureau, partially filled out. The county named was Fremont, the community Firecracker, but it was neither signed nor dated, perhaps because at the bottom of the page was the reminder that the application had to be accompanied by a check for ten dollars.
“Look at that. They couldn’t even afford to join the Farm Bureau. Ten dollars was a lot of money in the 1920s,” said Patsy. On the back of the application form was a partial recipe for Strawberry Sunshine.
A second piece of paper was evidence that the young Stifles had been hard up in the early years of their marriage. It was a dunning letter torn halfway across, and in spiky handwriting were the words “We trust that you will not compel us to take action on this check.” Below the signature were several printed paragraphs outlining the penalties for forgery, drawing checks without funds, passing fictitious bills.
“Oh,” said Christina at this proof of her parents’ poverty. “The poor old things.”
There had never been any money for new clothes or candy. She had a dim memory of walking beside her mother a long distance down a dirt road. She must have been very young, perhaps only two or three. There in the pantry with the paper bags she could still remember the gravel hurting her bare feet. She must not have had any shoes. They came to some kind of wasteland, a draw filled with a bizarre tangle of old car parts, worn tires, rags, shifting paper. There was a nasty smell and she realized now that it must have been the local dump. Her mother descended into the debris, picking up items and dropping them again or tossing them up to where Christina waited. Something came sailing through the air to land near Christina with a hollow clop, a doll with no arms. The unfortunate toy had landed on a rock and its head showed a fresh crack that ran between the eyes from forehead to chin. Yet the hair, though dirty, was a lovely fine gold and the eyes still opened and almost closed. She had played with the doll, had loved it. Only a long time later did she connect the washed and mended clothes she and her brother wore with her mother’s dump searches. She could not recall her mother actually fishing ragged garments from the odorous piles, but certainly she came away from the dump with things stuffed in her burlap sack.
Christina glanced over at the stove and saw the ancient teakettle. There it was, her inheritance. Her mother’s will had left the house and land to Bobcat, and to Christina she had left the old iron teakettle, whatever house contents she wanted, the rest to be sold and the proceeds all hers. There had been an odd sentence appended to the teakettle bequest: “Less is more.” How many times had
she heard her mother say that? Hundreds. She was quite positive her mother had found the teakettle in the dump, a monstrously heavy old cast-iron thing that someone had probably tossed out for a shiny new aluminum model. It had been one of her mother’s pet possessions, and she did not like others to use the kettle, insisting on filling it herself. Christina had not paid much attention to her mother’s jealous protection of the stupid thing when she was a child and occupied with her own interests. She did remember that it had come on the scene around the same time their misfortunes eased. She dimly pictured her mother scrubbing and cleaning the kettle while she had whined about how badly she needed a new dress for the first day of school.