Postcards

  ‘So, what do you think of my singing. Loyal?’

  This was the kind of question he couldn’t answer.

  ‘It’s fine. I like it fine.’

  Sour face. She poured coffee while his fingers pinched up crumbs in the quiche dish. All of Jack’s things were scattered around as if he’d just stepped out. Well, that’s what he’d done, just stepped out. The rope he knotted while they watched television on a peg by the door, a pair of boots, stiff now from disuse. Bills still on the Victorian spindle. The gray rancher’s hat, the band stained with Jack’s sweat, on top of the sideboard where he always slung it when he came in for dinner.

  ‘Think you might go back to Wisconsin, see your kids? Must be all growed up now.’

  ‘Them ties was cut too long ago. With blunt scissors.’ She said the milk was on the turn. He smelled it and said he’d take his coffee without.

  ‘I know I’m not going to sing at any rodeo, Loyal. My voice is weak, I’m too old. Old ladies don’t sing at rodeos. But you know, I don’t feel old. I feel like I’ve got the liveliest part of my life still ahead. I could stay on the ranch, Loyal, but not alone. A man is needed.’ She couldn’t say it much clearer.

  The coffee. Its blackness in the familiar blue cups. He stirred in sugar. Her spoon clinked.

  Then all at once the awkwardness was gone. Stories of things he had seen began to pour out, the words firing from between his loosened and gapped teeth. He told her about Cucumber drowning in a mine, midnight driving with Bullet over dangerous passes when the headlights failed, the mountain lion. He, who had talked little, talked much, swelled to a glowing huckster selling stories of his life. At two in the morning, Starr nodding off, wanting nothing but sleep and silence, he stopped. They were tired of each other, each longed for the relief of solitude. He said he would sleep on the daybed beside the stove. The kitchen sunk of cigarettes.

  In the morning she gave him Jack’s pearl gray cowboy hat.

  46

  What I See

  A booth in Dot’s Place. The plastic owl’s head on the wall glows. He’s reading the local paper, arms folded on the plywood table. There is the smell of grease dissolver. Dot squats and wipes at the encrusted stove. The coffee is the color of river bottom dirt. Elk, big horns, whitetail, moose heads on the walls, coated with grease from Dot’s cooking. French fries. Eggs over easy. Dot’s old man, Harry S. Furman, shot them. In the right light anybody can see the dull crust of grease on the glass eyes.

  He turns the pages of the paper, glances at a photograph of a Basque family posing with relatives from South America. Some of the men squat in the front row, their knees straining their polyester trousers, their sports coats hunched. There is the grand matriarch of the group, Celestina Falxa, from the House of Little Children, Tripinonia, unsmiling, stout and bowlegged, the little eyes staring straight into the camera. She wears a rayon dress printed in squares, grips a handbag. Eighty-four and flies a single-engine plane over the flaring distances says the caption. Never learned to drive.

  He studies the picture, the direction of their eyes. No one else looks into the camera. An elderly woman with harlequin glasses smiles tentatively and looks at Celestina. The three South American cousins have matching hair and delicate smiles. They, too, gaze at Celestina. The men in the back row stand on chairs. Their foreheads gleam white, their faces are sunblackened. Three of the men are missing front teeth. To the side stands a woman in a plaid pantsuit. The pants stand away from her legs like culvert tubes, the vest has been cut and sewn in a way that makes the plaid stagger. In the background is a television set near the ceiling, the plastic walls of the Holiday Inn, a chrome chair, a soiled nylon carpet.

  ‘What the hell you got there, Mr. Blood, clue to the secret of the ages?’ Dot titters. She grips a tub of frozen meat patties. ‘You scrutinizing it so hard I thought you found your long-lost brother.’

  This is what it comes down to, the study of photographs of strangers.

  47

  The Red-Haired Coyote

  HE DIDN’T THINK there would be anything under the rabbitbrush. But as he came in to pull the trap and stake he saw her, a late-season coyote with a strong red color, stronger on her face, chest and haunches. The hot spring sun reflecting off the late snow had frizzled and burned her pelt like a cheap permanent. She pulled back from him with a gape that showed her teeth, she cringed and twisted in submissive posture, the yellow eyes fixed his. She looked at him. The crimped red hair, the extraordinary expression on the animal’s face, in her body language, mingling appeasement, fear, anger, threat, resignation, pain, horror, and more, the terrible and thrilling sense of her life’s imminent end.

  Billy.

  The fur was no good. Red, yes, but singed and rubbed. The foot didn’t look too bad. She hadn’t been chewing on it anyway. Quickly he threw the kneeling tarp over her head, twisted it tight so she couldn’t lunge at him, and pried the trap open. The foot was swollen, but still warm, there was still circulation. He got up and pulled the tarp away in almost one motion. She was gone.

  V

  48

  The Hat Man

  IN THE GARDEN Kosti and Paula threw sheets over the tomato plants to protect them from the night frost, old sheets Paula’s mother had given her years ago, and patched in all the hues of white, marble, ivory, milk-silver, snow, chalk, pearl, birchbark, ghost, moonflower, cloud, ash, quartz. The teeth of autumn gnawed at the light. They trampled back and forth over the silvered clods, working together, the only ones left on the mountain farm now. Leopard Lady, Inks, the three sisters with the trunk of antique dresses, the Grass Man and his hundreds of friends, all pulled out and gone. Some of their funky rags still in the empty rooms, posters of Bob Dylan gone magenta, stacks of paperback books, Brautigan, Hoffman, Kesey, Wolfe, Fariña, McLuhan, the covers curled by summer heat, the sentiments outmoded, the ideas betrayed.

  The tomato plants reared in creamy columns against the black trees beyond the clearing. Their numb hands seized new sheets, snapped them open. They could feel the soil stiffening with cold. The smell of burning grass replaced the summer scent of wet grass. The air seemed banded as sharply as jasper with cold.

  ‘Gonna be hard frost tonight. These old tomatoes ain’t never gonna make it any farther than they already are with nights like this,’ said Kosti. ‘Do better to pick them green and put them in the woodshed.’

  ‘If it looks like frost again tomorrow we’ll pick them. I’ll make four hundred quarts of piccalilli. What the hell, I don’t care. I’ll fry green tomatoes until spring. “Johnson boys ate green tomatoes, they have eat them all their life,”’ she sang. There were streaks of gray hair at her temples. Kosti swatted her across the rump with a dried flower stalk from the rhubarb. As they went into the warm kitchen they heard the barred owl throw her voice, fixing hunched crows to their branches with a glue of fear.

  ‘After supper want to go down and see the old Hat Man? We could bring him down some green tomatoes.’

  ‘Bring him down some of the gingersnaps. Last time he was around he ate damn near the whole jar full.’ They called him the Hat Man, old Mr. Blood, because he always wore a hat, sometimes a cowboy hat, usually a farm cap, his white hair sticking out the arched hole at the back.

  He had come in his rust-scabbed truck the spring before with an ancient dog who let no one near him without showing her teeth. He made a deal to rent a couple of acres of a fallow potato field and backed his humpbacked wagon onto the level ground.

  One day there was nothing there but weeds and scrub brush, and a week later the Hat Man was anchored down, surrounded by a chicken wire fence strung on flimsy posts, meant, perhaps, to give a boundary to his life or keep the dog in. He turned over a garden with a rented tiller and as soon as the seeds were in he got some kind of a job at the sawmill. Something an old guy could do, tallying, maybe. Maybe Bricker had took pity on him, said Kosti.

  In a month it looked like he had been there forever. He bought or found an old Dodge truck for parts
and stowed it in the weeds, picking away at it to keep the truck he drove running.

  From the first week Kosti got the habit of stopping by at the end of the day, leaning on the truck’s fender and drinking beer in the long summer light while the Hat Man worked on his greasy internal mechanics and talked and talked around his persistent cough. It was like punctuation, a few words, a couple of coughs, a sentence or two, more coughing. Or they sat on the wagon steps in a human pyramid, like they were waiting for a bad game to begin. But they were only enjoying the evening. Listening. Nobody could get a word past the Hat Man. He had the talking cornered, sitting on the highest step coughing and spitting into the darkness in the pauses of his wandering talk. He was a rank old man, grease and dirt and dog, hard face under the scarred forehead, hat brim tipped over the eyes. You could see he’d been good-looking though, said Paula. One of the tough old ones, said Kosti, never mind how he looked. He wished he could wander around the country like the old Hat Man.

  He kept peculiar time. Sometimes weeded his potatoes at ten o’clock at night, the trouble light he used to illumine the oily guts of the engine hanging on a post in the garden, casting enormous shadows of potato leaves on the bleached sod and throwing down the shapes of gargoyles from his hunched shoulders and cowboy hat. While he worked the dog watched him like a new apprentice, snapping moths out of the air with a wet chop.

  Once, in the rain, the three of them cramped inside the Hat Man’s rolling house. Kosti and Paula sat on the bench. The Hat Man sat on his bunk. Everywhere objects hung and dangled, frying pans, ropes, coil of wire, a coffee can with a wire bail, filled with nails. The only clear place was on the back of the door where Mr. Blood had pasted a creased cowboy movie poster that Kosti coveted.

  CARL LAEMMLE

  PRESENTS

  HOOT GIBSON

  IN

  ‘CHIP OF THE FLYING U’

  It showed a peach-faced man with blue idiot eyes, gap teeth and red, red lips in a smiling Cupid’s bow.

  In the corner was the Hat Man’s television. Looked like the dog had been licking the screen. Cupboards and shelves and hooks, magazines, deer horns. Hats. He had some hats he never wore.

  ‘This one,’ he said to Kosti, turning a wilted black brim around and around in his cracked hands like a prayer wheel, ‘this one might be valuable. This might be Paul Revere’s hat that he wore the night he done his ride. It might be valued at a thousand dollars.’ Paula noticed the smell of moldering wool and fur and old sweatbands that filled the trailer like invisible gas.

  ‘See this one?’ He held up a brown cap, the rotting crown so soft it lay flat on the brim. ‘Belonged to Dillinger. You know I can’t get insurance on this hat collection. I started out to collect them about three years ago. The widow of a friend gave me the first one, but I’ve worn hats most of my life on account of I got a few scars. You want to know why?’ he said, voice racing between coughs. He picked up a white cowboy hat with a snakeskin band, I bought this off somebody out in California. He had a sign nailed up on the telephone pole, “Good cowboy hat, been in the movies, too big for me, $20.” I took one look and paid him what he was asking, didn’t even try to bring his price down. You know who wore that hat? Hoot Gibson, up on that poster, that’s who, Hoot Gibson in The Bearcat in 1922. They made Hoot Gibson into some kind of hero, but he was just a knock-around when he got started, just a guy bumming around from one rodeo to another, doing stunts, picking up small change by fooling around. Drifted to the movies. Got hired as a stuntman after somebody rented him for a day to handle some rough horseflesh. Couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag. Movie stars was smaller in the old days. Their heads was bigger. That’s my hobby, the old movie cowboys. Two years ago I watched most of them on TV. I was hooked up to some good electricity. Bought that TV set.’ He pointed to the corner. ‘Never paid attention to movies before then. But I’ll tell you, I could go on one of those trivia shows now. J. Warren Kerrigan in Covered Wagon, Antonio Moreno in The Trail of the Lonesome Pine and The Border Legion, Christ, I know a lot of them. Tom Mix in anything he done. You know who used to stand all stiff and puffed up like those old boys? Mussolini. World War Two. Like the old movie cowboys. You know what else is funny about them?’ They waited through a storm of coughing, waited until he had his breath back and wiped his wet eyes. ‘Where their waists are. They all got their waists right up there, their pants’re hauled up, up to their chests, gives a short look to their bodies. These are the silents I’m talking about. You can’t see them at movie houses. I see The Bearcat every time I get a chance. Watch the TV listings. Film festivals sometimes, so I read the papers. I have seen this same hat right here that I’m holding on the head of Hoot Gibson in that movie. Gives you a funny feeling to look at a hat you own up on the television. It’s like he’s dead, but the hat’s still alive.

  ‘The reason I can’t get the insurance on my collection is because I don’t stay put. A few months here, then move on. I have to keep moving along. Got my house-wagon, got my truck, got my dog, I can find work anywhere because I am not too proud. I’ll run a garbage truck. I’ll carpenter. I’ll build you a wall or a doghouse or a observatory. I’m not in that social security system, though. Never paid a penny of it, never collected a penny of it. Made my own way through thick and thin.’ Paula looked half asleep, leaning back against the wall. Her knees glittered with fish scales.

  ‘I got good hats that way, not out of the garbage, but asking people, “You got any old hats you’d like to part with?” That’s how I got this ski hat, a lady’s husband was goin’ down the street in Dog Boil, Manitoba where I was for the wheat harvest once. The husband was going to the hardware store to get window caulking. A geode rolled off a windowsill of the hotel room of a geologist who was doing oil exploration and the geode hit the husband on the head. This hat saved his life. You wouldn’t think to look at me that I could build a observatory, would you?’ But Kosti and Paula were tired. They’d split wood all day and now sleep was coming down like a numbing spell.

  On Saturday night they were back again with green tomato pie. It tasted a little like apple pie, but that was because of the spices, Paula said. The same spices, cinnamon and cloves. Green tomatoes had no taste of their own. The Hat Man boiled water for coffee, Paula got out their tea flask, pineapple weed and dried strawberry leaves. A healthy drink.

  ‘The biggest trouble with building an observatory,’ old Blood said, ‘was in deciding where to put it. There’s things you wouldn’t even think about. You don’t want it near a big city or even a shopping mall. Light pollution, dirty air. Find some place that’s dark at night. Like around here. Not many places left that’s pure dark. I used to sleep out on the prairie at night, see those stars. Highway lights, streetlamps, yard lights, they all throw their light up on the bellies of airplanes. Ruin the sky.’ He coughed. ‘This would be a good place to put an observatory.’ Paula looked at the black window, clouded on the inside with a film of moisture.

  ‘A dark spot’s only the first thing. Any fool could think of that.’ He shuffled his chair closer, looked into their faces to see if they were getting this. Ticked off the points on cracked fingers.

  ‘You can’t pick a cloudy place. So, number two, the sky has to be clear most nights. Here you got your dark, all right, but you also got cloudy nights. But even if there wasn’t clouds, then, see, your atmosphere has to be steady. The air is like a river, like a thousand rivers stacked on top of each other, and the way the currents of the air rivers run, smooth or rough, depends on the shape of the ground below.’ He could hear Ben telling him in the mountain night. ‘See, it’s like stones in a river. Hills and canyons and valleys and mountains make the air up over us rough. Like river stones rough up the water. The more stones in the river the rougher the water gets. And you go out to your observatory that’s built up in the mountains, say, like here, to look at the stars, and it’s all twinkly and bleary and you can’t see dog-shit on a plate. It’s better to set your observatory up on the top of a lone m
ountain. Even better if the mountain’s on an island or along the coast. Air smooths out when it crosses water. Oh, there’s a lot to know,’ he said, looking Kosti straight in the eye. ‘Haven’t even begun to tell you. I’ve seen it when it was fine. We’ll get to it some other time. I got to change the bandage on the dog’s back.’

  Paula spoke in the sad voice she used for crying babies and conversations with her bad-news sisters, the words drawn out mournfully in the vowels. ‘Poor old thing, what’s the matter with her?’

  ‘I believe she had a fight with what used to be my winter income. You hear that?’ Outside under the wavering starlight a coyote pack called with pitched short cries like the cries of hens running for lettuce leaves. Paula leaned against Kosti. Presently an exquisite thin note rose off the hill across the road.

  ‘That was my getaway money in yesteryear,’ said the Hat Man. ‘Oh, fur prices were good once. They’ll probably come back up. Maybe this season. I might try it around here. I might trap some this winter, maybe, get enough money to move on. There used to be good money in trapping. But it’s rough on you. A rough life.’

  Paula’s face was cold. She thought of innocent animals cruelly pinned, their mouths dry with fear while this old man with the hard blue eyes crept toward them, talking, talking, but carrying a bloodstained stick.

  But he was already in new stories, a prospecting story where in the dark he stepped on a rattlesnake in his bare feet, jumped in the air and landed on the snake again. She did not want him to tell the story about the wild ducks with the string through their guts, the trailing ends tied together so that they jerked against each other, the string sawing at raw tissue, or the pack rats thrown alive into the campfire.