A little after ten the Redhill Bio Transport pulled into the big rig parking lot in the back. The driver, an elderly man with curly mustachios, jumped out.
“Miz Gribb?”
“Yep. Call me Amanda. Preciate your doin this.”
“Happy to help. That your truck?” He looked disapprovingly at her pickup. “Hope it’s big enough. Two good-sized boxes. You got somebody can help me unload them?”
“Me,” said Amanda, flexing her biceps.
But the first box was very heavy and after a severe struggle not to drop it, the truck driver, who said his name was Neal, excused himself, went into the restaurant, and came out with two gorillas in cowboy boots. In less than a minute both boxes were in her truck, lashed fast with heavy rope. Amanda gave each of the helpers a ten and to Neal she gave the hundred-dollar bill rolled up into a little cylinder. Her bank account was flat until payday.
She drove back to Elk Tooth very slowly, easing the truck along. The deer were bad on the road in the early morning when it was too dark to turn off the headlights, but not dark enough for them to be effective.
She could see only two cows when she pulled into her own driveway, but across the stream the herd was gathering for an assault. She tugged at the top box in the pickup but couldn’t move it. The ginger cow stood on the far bank rolling her head around as though limbering up with yoga exercises. Amanda stopped straining at the boxes, ran into her single-wide, and dialed an old, familiar number from two years earlier when she and Creel Zmundzinski had been going out.
“Move some boxes? Amanda, it’s six oh four a.m. I’m not up. I’m not awake. I haven’t had any coffee, I’m not dressed—you got twowhat ? This I got a see. I’m on my way. Make some coffee.”
The two boxes lay side by side in the sharp Wyoming morning. Amanda with a nail puller and Creel with a claw hammer removed the last nails from the ends of the boxes and drew out the long and heavy canvas bags. They dragged the bags to the edge of Dog Ear Creek. The ginger cow, her calf, and black minions were drawn up in a phalanx, wading into the creek.
“Untie your bag,” said Amanda in a low, tense voice. Almost simultaneously two long snouts emerged from the canvas bags and the first alligators to swim in Wyoming waters in thousands of years plunged into the creek and headed for the ginger cow, ripples veeing out from their armored sides.
“Man, look at that,” said Creel.
The long ride from Florida had pitched the reptiles’ appetites to the extreme. Although the ginger cow had never seen an alligator before, the sight and smell of these two awakened some deep atavistic terror. These were no umbrellas! She turned and swam for home, raced up the bank, and burst through the Fishhooks fence like a locomotive.
“Whip it, sister!” screamed Amanda.
“Jeez,” said Creel, almost falling in love with her all over again, “that was worth gettin waked up for. But what about when winter comes? Bring them in your trailer house?”
She laughed. “These arerental alligators. They go back to Florida in September. I got a trucker acquaintance who’s goin a pick them up. Ready for coffee?”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Annie Proulx is the acclaimed author ofThe Shipping News and three other novels,That Old Ace in the Hole, Postcards, andAccordion Crimes, and the story collectionsHeart Songs andClose Range . Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, theIrish Times International Fiction Prize, two O. Henry Prizes, and a PEN/Faulkner Award, she lives in Wyoming and Newfoundland.
Contents
Acknowledgments
The Hellhole
The Indian Wars Refought
The Trickle Down Effect
What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?
The Old Badger Game
Man Crawling Out of Trees
The Contest
The Wamsutter Wolf
Summer of the Hot Tubs
Dump Junk
Florida Rental
About the Author
*Terry Allen, “The Great Joe Bob (A Regional Tragedy),”Lubbock (on Everything) (Green Shoes Publishing, BMI, 1978).
Annie Proulx, Bad Dirt
(Series: Wyoming Stories # 2)
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