Peter Visser petervisser@mail.weber.edu about 3,700 words Mortality in the New West Washakie, in his youth and middle age, was a very mighty warrior. He was a wise chief and friendly to the white people. No white man’s scalp hung in this chief’s teepee. - Historical Marker at Crowheart Butte, Wyoming Chief Washakie, it is said, killed Chief Big Robber at Crowheart Butte with the promise that “When I win, I’m going to cut your heart out and eat it” (Dayton). It was a tribal dispute, between and the Shoshone and Crow, for the supremacy of hunting grounds in the Wind River Basin. Washakie offered himself in place of his people, challenging Big Robber one-on-one, man-to-man, to a duel in which the loser would pay their dues in Visser 2 blood. And Washakie won, and he kept his promise. He returned to his people carrying Big Robber’s heart on a lance; a trophy, loot, a symbol of the ultimate price and the frailty of mortal existence. Washakie, it is said, did not eat Big Robber’s heart as he promised, but his legend permeates the high plains. And the butte that rises sevenhundred feet above the prairie bears permanent reminder of the Shoshone chief who faced death and rode away with the heart of a Crow. I think of this story often, and every time I drive through the Wind River Basin I am reminded of Washakie and the heart he took from another man. There is poetry in this. It is as if he faced death itself, claimed victory, and rode away with death’s own heart on a stake as an arrogant signal of triumph. It is reminiscent of the West and of the tenacity of its inhabitants to face its wildness and to persist indefinitely. I think of this often. I think of this in the grand scheme of mortality, and I often reckon there seldom being a landmark in the American West (Devil’s Tower, Bighorn Medicine Wheel, Legend Rock to name a few) that does not involve some incredible story of conflict between man and nature, existing between historical fact and exaggerated tall tale. They are landmarks saturated with story, attempting to provide explanation to man’s persistence against the unrelenting forces of nature. The freezing winters, the blistering summers, and the wind that could rip the hide right off a wandering Hereford. These stories draw a clear line between life and death. Stories like The Battle of Crowheart Butte are woven into the tapestry of Wyoming and are reflective of a greater narrative Visser 3 tradition of the American West. And these are the stories that fascinate me; stories about the imminence of mortality and the gumption to stand against it, challenging nature, and perhaps even God himself, for a stake in wildness of the West. Here, mortality is a certainty, and the contemporary western falls flat without mortality’s dimension. The contemporary western, like the historical legends, is fixated on mortality. It is a fixation not so much on dying, but on the inevitability of death. Therefore, I define mortality as the state of being subject to death rather than simply death itself. And in the contemporary western, there is a discernible recognition of this facet of existence. Life, according to these works, is a matter of waiting for death, and it is the unconscious knowing of these ends that subjugates any one person’s actions. The authors of these works—Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy, Richard Ford, and Thomas McGuane, among others—have created a strong tradition of mortality, portraying human existence as vibrantly temporary and imminently terminal. And the narratives and characters depicted by these authors are equally temporary and terminal. These stories fascinate me too. They are modern retellings of Crowheart Butte, retellings of man’s hubris in the face of mortality, but they present cowboys and liquor, cars and guns, and morally gray characters and the never-ending pursuit to tame the West. It is to this tradition that I offer my own work, filing into these motifs and embellished with my own perspectives and philosophies on mortality. Visser 4 In the pages that follow, I introduce two of my own stories, “Sleeping at the Indigo Inn” and “Cloud Seeds,” belonging to a larger collection titled In Laramie County. These stories tell the lives and works of men hardened by the prairie, living and working in and around Cheyenne, Wyoming. There is a specific interest in mortality as it exists as a greater theme in the contemporary western, and these philosophies are told through the lilting drawls and sometimes backwards morals of these men. In this introduction, however, I intend not to offer a critical reading of my own writing, but instead to explain the function of mortality in the contemporary western and its influence on my work. As I see it, mortality in the contemporary western functions as so: a major and underlying conflict for the purpose of building narrative urgency, a frame of character or the unique circumstance in which a characters exist, and as symbolic and reciprocal of the harshness of the West as the environment itself exists as hostile. Using the works of other authors, I will demonstrate these functions while also describing their inclusion in my own work. Of course, these functions come as a result of my own critical reading of other author’s works and the same criticisms might be applied to my own work, but I offer these functions as tools of writing craft and not as critical interpretations, and I intend to discuss them as such; particularly as mortality’s ability to add an overarching sense of conflict and urgency to a piece of short fiction. Good writing needs conflict. It needs trouble. The continual antagonism of two opposing forces livens fiction and boils the human condition down to something Visser 5 tangible, something dichotomous with certain and recognizable boundaries. There are, of course, the traditional modes of narrative conflict, internal and external: person vs. self, person vs. person, person vs. nature, person vs. fate, and the list goes on for any imaginable point of conflict that the mind can conjure. These are the tangible dichotomies, and they are the propulsive elements of any story, driving the combustion that makes a story’s engine turn. As Benjamin Percy writes in Thrill Me, “These are the stakes of your story . . . they give your character a reason to go on their journey—and they give us a reason to follow. No stakes means no urgency means a stillborn story” (21-22). So my point stands: good writing needs conflict. Mortality is conflict. Maybe it’s person vs. nature, maybe it’s person vs. fate, maybe it’s something entirely different. But whatever it is, it makes for good, universally shared conflict. The contemporary western understands this, and mortality provides a deafening sense of urgency when it comes to conflict. “This is not a happy story. I warn you” (29), begins Richard Ford in “Great Falls,” a story about a boy in his early teenage years, teetering on the precipice of adolescence, who is thrust into the consequences of his mother’s infidelity. This opening line serves as a declarative prelude to the events to come, and it implies there to be some insurmountable calamity with an unfortunate ending. And it is not a happy story. And we read on to find the conflict threaded through the pages. It is a conflict about the impending loss of a loved one and of a life once known, bookended by termination, Visser 6 suggesting, much like mortality, that the characters be subject to an end, even if that end is an unexpected change. This, compounded with the external pressures of western living that push his mother to these ends, is the propulsive nature of mortality. It is an already known ending, but with the tension of not knowing what comes between. Admittedly, this is not a story about death or dying explicitly, but it does consider mortality as I have defined it as the state of being subject to death or an imminent end. The death this boy experiences is the death of his own boyhood. He is subject to those same urgencies. The opening line, and the conflicts that ensue, march forward towards life’s end, and the reader races to know how we get there. As Ford concludes, mortality is “like a border between two nothings, and makes us no more or less than animals who meet on the road—watchful, unforgiving, without patience or desire” (49). The urgency, the conflict, it lies on that border of mortality; the forward propulsion of existence. And though mortality is certain, lives are lived and pages are turned for the significance of the in-between, or that thrill of being subject to death. The same function might also be observed in McGuane’s “Cowboy,” in which a newly hired ranch hand skirts around the impending death of the ranch’s elderly owners. The stage is set in the simple fact that the ranch’s proprietors will die, and the immediacy of their mortality is something we might refer to as a ticking clock. This is the kind of urgency, Percy shares, that makes the pages “snap by with the speed of a second hand” (28). It’s not a question of if, but when. And when the old lady does die Visser 7 midway through the story, that initial conflict is resolved. Here, a new conflict arises: what to do in the vacuum of grief, what to do postmortem, and more specifically, what to do in the emptiness of the West when one’s only companion dies. “But once she’s gone,” McGuane writes, “he says he’s all that’s left of his family and he’s alone in life . . .” (107). Even after death, mortality continues applying stress to the story. And though the time may have come, it was always coming, the uncertainty that follows is just as gripping. It is this function of mortality, as urgency and conflict, that drives these stories forward, something I have applied to my own writing. In “Cloud Seeds,” mortality is the ticking clock, and it is the urgency and ultimate conflict that propels the story along its pages. However, like Ford and McGuane, I make no effort to conceal the ending, and I begin with the inevitability of death. Early in the story it is made clear that Stu will not survive to see its end. I even go as far as spoiling the events of his death and those final moments of the hay baling accident. But that does not detract from the story’s urgency and tension, rather it adds to it. Knowing the ending, the reader presses forward, looking for the answers and events that lead to his demise, knowing that it is only a matter of time before he dies. To heighten this sense of urgency, I chose to use a non-linear, braided form. And jumping between characters, time, and events, the reader gleans pieces to the puzzle, completing it when the penultimate scene reveals Stu’s mangled remains. There are, of course, limitation to the non-linear form (I have long held the opinion that a monkey with a Visser 8 pair of scissors could construct a non-linear narrative), but there is a great deal of urgency here, and when underscored by mortality, the conflict becomes universal and circumstantial to a character’s diegesis. Good writing needs a frame of reference. It needs lived in, recognizable experience to ground characters, applying a shape and form in which characters can flourish or wilt. I refer to this as a frame of character, or the unique circumstances that a character encounters that forms their depth and dimension. The duty of the writer, then, is to create these circumstances in which the particulars of a character can arise. To this, Lee Martin shares, “It’s not my job to judge my characters. It’s my job to give them free will, to watch them get themselves into trouble, and to see what they’ll do to try to redeem themselves. It’s my job to understand the sources of my characters’ behaviors” (59). The circumstances that free-willing characters encounter, and their aptitude to handle those circumstances, are what add realism to a character. It is how Martin understands the source of a character’s behavior, and how readers will also come to know a character. In the contemporary western, mortality is the frame of character. And because of the universality of impending death, it is the recognizable experience that forces characters to act in interesting and unexpected ways, or at times, exactly as one might expect. Certainly all are in a state of being subject to dying, and to my knowledge, there has yet to be a man to escape death—aside from, perhaps fictionally, Judge Holden in Blood Meridian. Therefore, mortality operates functionally as a Visser 9 universal encounter, something universally understood and accepted by humanity. The imminence of mortality has an indisputable effect on the actions of characters, providing the necessary framework for intriguing characters and attractive storytelling. The characters of Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist in Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” are deeply flawed and equally of interest, existing on the very point of fiction and realism, administering a recognizable human dimension to this figment of western romance. They are, without doubt, one of the strongest elements of this story. And the strength of their character comes as a result of their circumstance: a rapidly approaching mortality due in part to their romance. In the story, Ennis tells of two queer men on his father’s ranch and how his father brutalized one of the men with a tire iron to make a statement of their sexual compulsion. “‘Dad made sure I seen it,’” Ennis says, “‘If he was alive and was to put his head in that door right now you bet he’d go get his tire iron’” (270). Ennis’s upbringing and this morbid memory are the circumstances in which his character exists. He knows the dangers that come with his feelings toward Jack, acknowledging that his father would do the same to him as he did to that ranch hand, yet he persists. His character is made all the more interesting when this trauma is exposed. He knows the risk, Jack knows the risk, but they continue on regardless. And when Ennis does die at the stories conclusion, which Jack speculates to be the result of the tire iron (282), the frame of mortality makes their character more poignant, more relatable, because death could not be escaped. It is this frame of character that deepens Visser 10 the readers understanding of Jack and Ennis, something accomplished through the immediacy of mortality and the ultimate tragedy of death. This function is also present in McGuane’s “River Camp,” where the death of their river guide leaves Tony Capoletto and Jack Spear stranded with bears and impassible rapids. Again, the presence of mortality frames these characters. It is mortality that creates the circumstances that guide their character, drafting their individuality and realism. With the guide’s death comes an immediate urgency for survival. And despite their professional competencies, both Tony and Jack prove to be wholly ineffective in a survival scenario. Now it is not only the guide’s death, but the possibility of their own deaths that overshadows their character, something neither are prepared to confront. Ultimately, Tony and Jack perish in the river. “Carrying these distinct views, their boat was swept into the wave, and under; Jack and Tony were never seen again” (439), the story concludes. Framed in mortality, Jack and Tony fail to evade death. Unhappy circumstances for the unhappy ending of two men who were unhappy from their outset. I considered character frames in my creation of Beau Ritter in “Sleeping at the Indigo Inn.” As a lifelong drifter and womanizer, Ritter approaches the end of his life with regret, but with no means to make serious reparations to his past. Instead, Ritter chooses not to cause any more harm, or at least to try to. His aging character is the result of the circumstances of an eventual death. In the words of Martin, Ritter is using Visser 11 his free will to redeem himself from the trouble his life has caused. At the story’s end, Ritter meets an untimely death when he takes a knife to the gut. There is no jubilation, no revelry, just a road-hardened man bleeding out on a motel mattress. It is the frame of character that brings Ritter to his end, and these circumstances are what elicit his rich traits on the page. One could certainly assign these traits, but there is something intrinsic and organic in the natural acquisition of character through circumstance. And in the contemporary western, mortality is often the framing event that allows these earned character traits; a process both symbolic and reciprocal of the harshness of the West. Good writing needs an anchor, something resistant to abstraction, something to stake its contents firmly in palpable, concrete detail. I mention this before my discussion of a topic that itself leans towards the abstract and ambiguous, but I do so with the hope of illustrating the identity of mortality in contemporary western fiction. That idea is as follows: mortality functions as a symbol of the West and its unrelenting barbarism while the West itself reciprocates and perpetuates the presence of mortality. It is paradoxical, and mortality feeds the image of the West and the West feeds the presence of mortality. This is where specificity comes into play. Percy writes that “Abstraction sucks. Good writing relies on the particulars,” and that the same concrete details a writer might use for a character description are necessary for place and setting (118). With a concept as complex and abstract as mortality, and the paradox I just presented, there is a necessity Visser 12 to rely on the anchor of place. And it is the particular details of the West that allow for the distribution of a symbolic mortality that is reciprocal of those same particulars. Take, for example, the entirety of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Through all of its gore and violence, concentrated pondering of life and death and the mortal existence between these two ends, and the historical tragedies it depicts, there is a corresponding line to environment and setting. The harshness of the deserts of Mexico and the southwestern United States are reflective of the actions of the Glanton Gang. It is as if such travesty could happen only in such a hellish environment, and as if the environment itself inspires these actions. Place substantiates these abstractions, supplying realism and specificity to otherwise unfathomable events. Similarly, in All the Pretty Horses, Jimmy Blevins represents this association in his naïveté and fascination with the cowboy image. “Cause I’m an American” (45), Blevins proclaims, as if his nationality allows some automatic association with the West and its conquest. Blevin’s character is lost in the abstraction of the West, but its harshness and concrete detail slowly wither him from gung-ho cowboy to weathered child abused by its violence, just as the winds have weathered the sands on which they ride that were once stones and before that mountains. And when Blevins dies at the hands of the corrupt Mexican police, the West completes its march toward mortality, smothering the cowboy’s image in the firmament of its reality. Visser 13 In “55 Miles to the Gas Pump,” Proulx makes explicit mention of this relationship. She writes, “When you live a long way out you make your own fun” (252). This line ends a very brief piece about a man who hides bodies in his attic only because the desolation of his home on the Wyoming prairie leaves him with nothing better to do. The setting, the vast emptiness, the nothingness, allows these actions to happen. And in turn, these actions, the murders, are a reflection of the environment and its unwillingness to be settled. The details of this setting, the particulars, qualify this interaction between concrete and abstract, and between setting and mortality. My own work is fascinated by place and the tactile details that turn it from setpiece to a character of its own. I recognize how mortality reciprocates the harshness of the West and how the West provides a means for such hostility to exist. “Sleeping at the Indigo Inn” is hollow without the empty highways that Ritter travels, or the shabby motel rooms found beside the highways in which he conducts his life. The windrows and fields of alfalfa, the blue clouded skies, are the makeup of “Cloud Seeds.” And without these places, without their specificity, there is no motivation to propel these stories. Stu does not die, nor does Ritter, without place. Their mortality and subjection to death is a result of the West. And in return, their mortality is itself symbolic of the West and its wildness. To conclude, I must return to Chief Washakie and Crowheart Butte. There is, in this story, a definitive link between the certainty of death and the presence of man in the Visser 14 West. Washakie had to confront death, taking its heart, to earn his keep. And in the contemporary western, this holds true. Mortality, as it functions as conflict, characterization, and representative of the West, allows these stories, like Crowheart Butte, to earn their place in the canon of the American West. And perhaps there is something in the western, something larger than man’s failed attempts at conquering the West and the stories that tell of their flaws, something that supersedes historical fact or reasonable doubt, something whisked in the wind and parceled in bits and pieces by the writer. Something larger than life, but equally as important to understanding the human experience. After all, Washakie never did eat Big Robber’s heart. Visser 15 Works Cited Dayton, Kelsey. “The Battle of Crowheart Butte.” WyoFile, WyoFile, 2018, https:// wyofile.com/battle-crowheart-butte/. Ford, Richard. “Great Falls.” Rock Springs. Grove Press, 1987, pp. 29-49. Martin, Lee. Telling Stories: The Craft of Narrative and the Writing Life. University of Nebraska Press, 2017. McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West. Penguin Random House LLC, 1985. McGuane, Thomas. “Cowboys.” Cloudbursts. Vintage Books, 2018, pp. 100-109. McGuane, Thomas. “River Camp.” Cloudbursts. Vintage Books, 2018, pp. 418-439. Percy, Benjamin. Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction. Graywolf Press, 2016. Proulx, Annie. “Brokeback Mountain.” Close Range: Wyoming Stories. Scribner Paperback Fiction, 2000, pp. 255-285. Proulx, Annie. “55 Miles to the Gas Pump.” Close Range: Wyoming Stories. Scribner Paperback Fiction, 2000, pp. 251-252. Peter Visser petervisser@mail.weber.edu about 6,900 words Sleeping at the Indigo Inn by Peter Visser Beau Ritter had just turned fty-one when he blew into Cheyenne on the course of the tumbleweed, heeding the winds across the prairie and making a brief residence in every frontier town along the way. He came from New Mexico, a place along the Rio Grande called Truth or Consequences, where he left his crooked doublewide, cheating second wife, and any hope for recompense. And it was on his fty- rst birthday when she served him his favorite cherries jubilee and a petition for divorce. “Happy birthday, you fi fi fi stiff-legged son of a bitch,” she had said. It wasn’t much of a happy birthday, and Ritter Visser/Indigo Inn/2 didn’t see much sense in hanging around, so he set off north to nd what he called a proper living. And he would carry on until the money ran out, or until his legs gave out; until something gave out. He drove north and he thought of this and of his aching legs and of the reasons for which his legs ached. And his legs ached because, in his youth, he laid bricks for a living. He built churches and schools and courtrooms and other structures of common decency. But that was before he devised the plan. It was a plan that was, according to him, of immeasurable genius, requiring only a set of scaffolding and an obvious misstep. And when he fell the distance of two honest stories, breaking up all the bones in his feet and his shins, he never needed to work another day in his life. He coasted on in a leisurely way, cashing government checks and limping about on screwed up legs. It was a good living. Good enough for Ritter. Good enough until his second wife grew tired of the welfare money. So his legs ached like hell as he rode up Interstate Twenty-Five in his 1972 Cadillac Eldorado, cream with chrome trim and wire-spoke wheels, and he didn’t think much about where he was headed or his second wife or why she had left him for the third most popular dentist in the Jordana Del Muerto. He didn’t much like the idea of being outdone by a common tooth-puller, and in Albuquerque a Navajo man told him not to read into it beyond the actual act of her leaving; so he didn’t. But his second wife fi had good reason for leaving. She cited drunkenness, gambling, and a general lack of Visser/Indigo Inn/3 initiative for a grown ass man, but Ritter had also known many women in their stint of matrimony. Some his second wife knew of, but most she did not. And most of the women he had known were married, sad old bags tired of their husbands’ apathy, and Ritter gured he was doing them a favor. But others were young things caught up in the wrong story; for these, Ritter felt sorry, and he knew it was he who condemned them to that pit of indecency. He was the jurist, a practitioner of plains law, and his actions awarded these girls a life sentence. He thought of these things as he drove, and he got good and drunk in Santa Fe, Wagon Mound, Springer, Raton, Pueblo, Colorado Springs, and Denver. He would get good and drunk in Cheyenne too. When Ritter exited the highway on the south side of town, his New Mexico plates were veiled in snow and hanging on by half a thread. They rattled a bit when he crossed the Union Paci c rails and turned up Capitol, eyes wide, searching for the rst watering hole with more than a rusty pickup or two parked out front. As he drove, he passed glass store fronts and western out tters, and there were local eateries and an antique general store, but at a place called Bennion’s he found some cattle punchers and bargirls milling about, smoking cigarettes and kicking rocks. It was a quarter past noon, and as he reckoned, it was about time for lunch. He wheeled the Cadillac into the lot and slammed the gear selector to park beneath a big vinyl sign of a Guernsey cow and fi fi fi fi the words BAR AND GRILL. Visser/Indigo Inn/4 The punchers looked wary at the stranger in the Cadillac wearing a quilted jacket and short-brimmed hat, and the bargirls coughed and spat and smoked but did not take their eyes off Ritter as he willed his legs out of the car and hobbled toward them. He tipped his hat as he passed, and a puncher choked on his cigarette. “Long ways from New Mexico, ain’t you,” said one of the girls in a dark denim skirt with braided tassels hanging just below her knees. Her friend, a fair bit fatter and uglier but wearing a nearly identical out t, slugged her in the arm. “Leave it, Charlene. He ain’t nothin but highway litter.” “I ain’t doin a thing but showin a little Wyomin hospitality. Ain’t that right, darlin.” She winked at Ritter and pursed her red lips, licking up that last word: darlin. “She don’t mean it,” the ugly one said. “Charlene’s man don’t take kindly to strangers feelin up her skirt.” Ritter removed his hat and held it over his heart, and he spoke real polite. “I didn’t mean to start any trouble, ladies. No ma’am, I’m just a traveler looking for a bite to eat and a strong drink to quench my thirst.” The punchers heard this and they balled up their sts and stamped out their cigarettes, preparing to knock this stranger square on his ass. Ritter stood his ground. “They ain’t got drinks where you come from?” The ugly one said. “Not like they have here.” Ritter eyed the one called Charlene. She was fragile fi fi looking, thin in the waist and bird-boned. It wouldn’t take much effort for him to toss Visser/Indigo Inn/5 her over his shoulder and carry her off. “Nope,” he said. “There’s no drinks like this where I come from.” At this, Charlene smiled a bit, and when she did her missing front teeth showed. And when she turned her head and the light caught her eye right, it was blued and obviously bruised. Ritter saw this, and he stroked his chin, and he considered her injuries and reckoned that she was in no position for courting. The ugly one looked to Charlene and shook her head. “Well you ain’t drinkin none of this.” She wagged her fat ngers in front of Ritter’s face, and they were sort of red and swelled at the tips from her turquoise rings. Ritter imagined they’d likely pop if she ailed them around with any more vigor. He could taste little bits of phalanges on his tongue like party confetti. It tasted like hell. Then one of the punchers stepped forward, wringing his dirty hands around his neck and making a huf ng sound or words that Ritter couldn’t quite make sense of. Ritter took this as his sign to get a move on, and he nodded and returned his hat to his head. “Thank you kindly, ladies,” he said, turning for the bar’s entrance. He opened the door and a deep warmth seeped out, smelling of tobacco smoke and stove coal. It drew him in from the cold, and he closed the door tight behind him. He gured that Bennion’s was a real cowboy’s bar. The stools were upholstered with rawhide and their brass legs had a ne patina earned from the rest of a thousand bootprints. The neon beer signs hung between black and white photos of Frontier Days fi fi fi fi fl champions, broncs that never could be busted, and home-mounted jackalopes. There Visser/Indigo Inn/6 was a big woman with a glass eye that tended the place and a rack of unlabeled spirits against a foggy mirror. He sat at the bar and waved to the big tender, and he asked for something dark and strong, and he regarded her bad eye and the skill with which she poured. It was early, and Ritter didn’t expect much company, and Bennion’s was mostly empty aside from Ritter and the big tender. But in the far corner under a stained glass lamp, and sitting alone was a girl, and she poked at a can of domestic and didn’t give much attention to anything but the can and the way she held it with both hands. Ritter tipped his hat, but she did not acknowledge his greeting. He stood, asked the big tender for one more of the same, and carried the glasses to the far corner and to the girl who sat alone. She was small and her dark hair was like ruf ed polyester and cut just above the waist. At an arms length, she looked older than Ritter had guessed, and she carried bags under her eyes and the weight of exhaustion in her manner. Her boot-cut denim ooded a pair of two-hundred dollar boots, and she wore a paisley halter top that was inappropriate for the season. She was a press-steel copy of all the others Ritter had known. They were the same in every town. He cleared his throat, and when she looked up, he winked, holding out a glass for her to take. “Here all alone?” fl fl She nodded. Visser/Indigo Inn/7 “Me too,” he said. “And I’d love to make your acquaintance.” She reached out and accepted the glass, but she did not drink from it. It sat on there on the table, under the lamp light, and sweat. “I’m in from New Mexico. I had all the sun and fun I could handle, and my legs have about gone to shit. So I’m traveling as the crow ies. Thought I’d cruise on up north, nd out if there’s a life to be had out in God’s country.” He pulled out a chair and sat, taking a long pull from his glass. “That is what you folks call it, ain’t it?” The girl laughed. “There ain’t no God in this country,” she said. “We’re closer to hell than we are to Sioux Falls.” “I reckon the devil isn’t without charm.” “There ain’t no devil here either,” she said. Ritter crossed his arms and thumbed his nose. “Buddha?” “The only thing Cheyenne got is you, me, and a few other sorry suckers with nowhere better to be and nothing better to do.” “Fine company,” he said. “We few will carry on getting drunk and being merry until God himself stakes a claim in this land.” Ritter raised his glass, toasting himself and his own wisdom. “Or until the devil drags us back to hell.” The girl raised her glass. She smiled. “Amen!” At Bennion’s, Ritter’s lunch consisted of getting good and drunk on rye whiskey, fl fi as did the girl’s. They drank and talked and got real familiar. And Ritter told tales from Visser/Indigo Inn/8 his days in the rodeo, and he lied because he never had been in the rodeo or rode anything more than the aluminum horses on a carousel, but she didn’t seem to mind and got a kick out of his stories regardless. And the more Ritter drank, the more he told. But never was a name exchanged, and the two existed on that plain, improperly acquainted and content to remain as such. So he told of his second wife and the third best dentist, and of his many affairs and the guilt he felt for tarnishing all those young souls, but she didn’t seem to mind that either, and she consoled him and commended him for his honesty. Later she told Ritter that if she could, she would take all the bellyaching away and give him a good life without anymore hardship. That was a laugh, and they both knew it, but on some register it resonated, somewhere along a low vertebrae and at a frequency that could not be discerned from the effects of hard liquor. Ritter said it was a nice thought. Then lunchtime became dinnertime, and the sun began its retreat below the horizon, turning the port-windows on Bennion’s west wall into ripe oranges, supple and ready to be peeled. At that time the evening crowd began to lter in: cattlemen in continental suits with eye-candy half their age, railroaders smeared in coal and hog grease, congressional assistants in black ties, kids from the college and their phony IDs. The bar lled quickly and Ritter and the girl no longer found themselves alone, and in all the commotion they felt good and loose and not so sorry about it all. And when the fi fi needle dropped on an old Hank tune, they danced. Ritter swung the girl about, dipping Visser/Indigo Inn/9 and do-si-doing, spinning and twisting their bodies in a rhythmic twine and coming undone again. Ritter was a poor dancer, on account of his legs, but she didn’t mind. So they drank and danced into the night. And sometime after eleven the girl lost her paisley halter top that was inappropriate for the season, and it was left strewn across the back of a chair on the side of the room. She carried on dancing half-naked, and no one seemed to mind much. One of the railroad men mentioned it, but only to comment, in jealousy, on her freedom. “It’s a bare-breasted cowgirl,” he said, and that was all. Ritter heard this, and he liked it. The Bare-Breasted Cowgirl. There was an anonymity that superseded any proper moniker. To him, that’s who she was, and all she needed to be. And with her he danced until the drink left him agitated and until the two of them ed out the door to Ritter’s Cadillac, leaving her top on that chair and challenging the night for a place of refuge. *** Beau Ritter crashed his 1972 Cadillac Eldorado into the lobby of the Indigo Inn because it was dark and he had astigmatism. He was also piss-eye drunk. The Bare-Breasted Cowgirl was sitting in Ritter’s lap, and she stopped making love to his left earlobe when the wall came down. They were caught up in the dust and plaster and the lobby’s cold lights barred in the haze, and all was whisked out of a fl Cadillac-shaped hole in the wall and into the latent chill of a February night. The desk- Visser/Indigo Inn/10 boy worked the night shift to cover his tuition at the community college, and he huddled beneath the till while the lights shuddered and died. Ritter and the cowgirl sat in the dark, bellied in that whale of a car. And there, beached on the lobby oor, it spewed from its blowhole and heaved and hissed and leaked all over the carpet. The desk-boy rose and stood timid, bringing his hands above his head as if he was the target of some midnight raid. He backed away slowly and slipped out the side door, lost to winter’s swell and not seen again. Ritter fumbled at the keys in the ignition and the cowgirl’s teeth chattered. “Dammit. You ran us through the wall,” Ritter said, shoving her aside and swinging the driver’s door open. He landed his boots on the oral carpet and shuf ed the length of the hood, running his hand along the crumpled lines and feeling the sharp edge of broken headlight glass. “This shit’s busted, you know. A total loss. And put a shirt on. There’s a cold about.” She sat a moment more, and her eyes were buggy and savage and the deepest shade of emerald, and she didn’t put a shirt on but just pulled her arms tight around her chest. “Are we gettin a room?” She asked. “A big one with a king bed and a television?” “We’ll get whatever’s left.” Ritter was behind the desk, taking his pick of the key rack. “Sign out front says there’s a color TV in every room.” He chose the one marked fl fl fl #17. “Hell of a place.” Visser/Indigo Inn/11 “What about the bed? Get a big one. A big, warm bed.” “I don’t know. We’ll see when we get there.” “Well I won’t sleep in no little bed. I need a big one.” “You’ll get what you get. All I know is that there’s beds.” “You think we got a suite?” “I don’t know. I don’t know anything about beds or suites or anything,” he said. “But there’s a color TV in every room.” The cowgirl nodded. “I bet it’ll be a big bed.” Together they walked through the lobby door and below the second story balcony towards room seventeen at the Indigo Inn. Ritter wrapped his arm around the cowgirl’s neck, and she rooted her hand deep in Ritter’s right ass pocket. He walked with a wide, hitched step that let his boot heels click real loud. She tramped along with a drunken scuttle not quite quick enough to match Ritter’s gait. She had to skip every third step to make the distance. “I used to never go out with strangers,” she said, and her lips were cold and her words slithered out of her mouth and entwined each other and could not be separated. “But I never used to go out with nobody anyhow.” “Am I stranger to you?” Ritter said. “Sure.” “Does it trouble you?” Visser/Indigo Inn/12 “No,” she said. “Not for now.” They walked and Ritter slowed at every window, peering into the rooms through sheer curtains. Some were dark, some yellow in lamp light, others ickered blue from the late night television broadcast. He thought of himself, if it were himself in those rooms, looking back through those same curtains and wondering what a drunk and a half-naked woman were doing outside in the snow. The cowgirl tugged at his elbow. “Come on, Peepin Tom. What’s the hold up?” “Just looking,” he said. He thought of these rooms and considered the pieces of himself that he had left in every roadside motel and with every one-night stand, and these rooms were an assurance that his pieces might still be there, at places like this, watching and waiting to be collected, making Ritter whole. But it was only a thought. “You’re lookin to get your ass kicked, that’s what you’re lookin for.” “I’s just seeing if there were any familiars.” “Are you seein any?” “No, but it’d be nice to see a familiar face in a town full of strangers.” “A strange man in a strange town. Sounds like a movie.” “Cheyenne isn’t all that strange.” “I wish it was,” she said. “How bout we leave come morning. Me and you. Go to fl Alaska or something. Somewhere real strange. We could get new identities and then Visser/Indigo Inn/13 we’d always be strangers. We’d never know who the other really was. Now that sounds like a movie.” “How about it,” Ritter said. They came to room number seventeen, and the brass numbers hung crooked on the door frame. There was no light on and the blackout curtains were drawn shut. Ritter took the #17 key from his pocket and slid it into the door handle. The mechanisms were sticky and he had to jiggle the knob before it turned. The cowgirl blew thick clouds of breath under the overhead lights and hugged herself tight, shifting her weight between her feet. It was cold and her eyes watered and smeared mascara down her cheeks. And she may have been crying if it weren’t for the slack-jaw grin plastered to her face. Ritter turned the knob, and the door’s hinges croaked open. He poked his head in and waited for his eyes to adjust, knowing the room was empty but not wanting to interrupt the sleep of a paying customer. That would be a sorry sight, he knew, to wake dreaming of a drunk and a half-naked woman. “What’s the hold up? I’m freezin my tits right off.” “Just checking for squatters,” Ritter said. “Well is there any?” “Not by my count.” Visser/Indigo Inn/14 “Good.” The cowgirl pushed past Ritter and ipped the light switch as she passed. Blinded in the new brightness, they squinted, hands held to their brows. And the cowgirl cut straight for the bed and started at powering on the television. The room was cheap and smelled of cigarettes and mildew. A place for hookers and drug deals. A hole in the far wall was patched over with hunks of two-by-four nailed to the sheetrock and the white paint and white sheets were yellowed from the tar deposits of other’s bad habits. Places like these were littered all over the West. All of them the same, with the same spring beds and the same patterned carpets and the same disoriented men and broken women sharing the quarters. It was places like this that Ritter had become accustomed. These highway homes were what Ritter knew as familiar, and he had for some time. He stood in the doorway and considered this, and the cowgirl was watching the twenty-four hour news in full color. “The girls on TV are always the prettiest.” She was lying in a prone position with her chin propped up on her hands. “Once I wanted to be one of them,” she said. Ritter closed the door behind him and peeked out the curtains on the adjacent window. “Why aren’t you?” “There’s no TV in Cheyenne, and heaven knows it’d take two miracles to get me out of this hole.” She rolled herself up in the sheets. “It’s damn cold in here.” There was a thermostat on the wall, and Ritter switched it over to heat and fl turned the dial around seventy. “Did you ever try?” Visser/Indigo Inn/15 “No.” “Why not?” “I don’t know.” “It’s not too late to try.” “Sure.” “Why don’t you try?” “It’s easier just watching them anyhow.” She sighed and stretched and scratched her nose, and she was comfortable where she was. Ritter walked to the bedside and tucked his hat under his arm and watched the pretty girls on the television. They were much prettier than the cowgirl, and they’d never seen the inside of the Indigo Inn. But the cowgirl had. Too many times. There weren’t many places for girls like her, and Cheyenne would chew her up, spit her out, and do it all over again. And that was where she belonged, and Ritter played a part in that, somewhere along the way. “I gotta piss,” he said, stepping between the television and the cowgirl. But she did not lift her gaze from the program, and miniature pictures danced in the darks of her eyes. “I hear too much television melts your brain,” he said. And he turned at the bathroom door and faced the cowgirl who shook her head slow, and she would not believe him. Visser/Indigo Inn/16 “Go piss, old man,” she said. And he entered the bathroom and did not bother to close the door behind him. In the bathroom it was cold and the white light was harsh and sterile, and there was a puddle of brown water beneath the sink where the trap leaked and a soiled towel full of the stinking water. The mirror was cracked across the top right and in it Ritter’s face was at and blue. He thought no one looked stranger than himself at that moment, and he recognized little of the man in the mirror but the scar across his nose. And surely it was him. And on the other side of the wall, the cowgirl started singing something that could have been Loretta Lynn, telling Ritter not to come home drinking with loving on his mind. Her voice was almost good enough, though she couldn’t carry a tune and sort of droned on in a singular tone. But maybe with some practice, Ritter thought, she could’ve made it big in the karaoke bars. Hell, he’d listen to it. She quit her singing and called out to Ritter. “That’s just an old wives’ tale anyhow, you know. Television won’t melt your brain.” Then she laughed. “But going around with mysterious cowboys might.” Ritter laughed too. “Keep singing. You’ve got a pretty voice.” And she did, picking up right where she left off. She sang, and he watched the mirror. And he saw a much older man with sunken eyes and a crooked nose. And he yawned as he spoke, “Mysterious cowboys and drinking at bars and smoking cigarettes and staying up past fl your bedtime. Hell, I think your brain just melts from dreaming too big.” He reached Visser/Indigo Inn/17 and felt the mirror, and it was smooth. He then felt his own face, like suede leather. “Or you just get old,” he said. “Not me. I ain’t ever gettin old.” The television crackled and, for a moment, lost signal. “Do you bring strangers around often?” “Just the pretty ones.” Ritter undid his belt and sized up the toilet bowl. “Yup. Only the lookers.” The cowgirl sang one last line. Ritter pissed all over the bathroom oor. “Is that why you brought me here? Because I’m so beautiful?” “That and because you girls keep me young.” Ritter fell out of the bathroom with his jeans unbuttoned and piss dribbling down his leg. “Goddammit. I pissed myself.” He looked up and the cowgirl’s attention was on the television, all wrapped up in the bedsheets and still wearing her two-hundred dollar boots. She was quiet then and didn’t say much of anything else, and Ritter went and sat on the edge of the bed and kicked off his own boots and tossed them in the corner. The man on the television read the bulletin. A short, literate guy with a pencil mustache and a houndstooth tie that looked to be crawling up his chest. Watching it made Ritter’s head spin and he decided instead to watch the cracks in the ceiling for a while. “Shit’s making me sicker’n hell,” he said after a bit, and he rolled over to face the fl cowgirl. Her eyes were closed and her chest lifted slow and heavy. Ritter sat up in the bed real careful so not to wake her, resting his back against the headboard. She slept soundly and with no knowledge of his watching, and her hair, spread across the pillow, was a dark and encroaching dye, pulsing black veins springing up from the soiled linens and anchoring themselves rmly in her scalp. Ritter reached to touch her, but he could not. Instead he searched for her name, counting on his ngertips and recalling faces. Cheryl, Susanne, Evelyn, Lila-Jean, Rosemary. He counted until he ran out of ngers, but he could not place a name on the cowgirl. She did not have a name. Not a name that he knew. They were strangers in the highest degree, and there was not much reason for them to be otherwise. Night would depart, and without much more than a hurried goodbye, so would their acquaintance. He reached for the lamp and switched off, counting names and faces until sleep brought him under. In his sleep, he was in New Mexico. He drove his Cadillac along a sun-baked highway that extended without end and beyond the boundaries of horizon, continuing with full conviction and an assumption of destination at the road’s terminus. He passed creosote bushes at great speed and they blended with the cholla cactus and yucca, painting splotches of greens and yellows and browns on blue canvas. The tachometer was pressed to the far limit, but the car hummed along with no signs of serious exertion. He drove at this clip and covered many miles, believing this to be a journey of leisure and perhaps the beginnings of a proper life. But as he descended into the ats of fl fi a broad valley, he came across an arroyo, and the arroyo had taken the road with it on fi fi Visser/Indigo Inn/18 Visser/Indigo Inn/19 its path through the desert. The car slowed and stopped, and Ritter stepped onto the pavement and walked to the road’s edge where it crumbled into the earth. It was deep, some fteen feet, and wide enough to sink a small home. He reasoned with the possibility of continuing down the road, crossing the arroyo and driving again at those high speeds. But there was no obvious solution. And at the bottom, pressed in mud, there was a man, and he lay face down. He wore a quilted jacket and a short-brimmed hat, but he was younger than Ritter. Much younger. There was no indication of his arrival, or any reason for him being there, and it was only clear that he was dead. To these questions of his being there were no answers. There was no need to know. And Ritter stood there and knew that he would not cross the arroyo. He woke and his head ran wide circles around the room, and there was a dull buzz in his legs because the liquor was wearing off and the pain was returning. The television was still on and the volume was low and irritating with its drum of incomprehensible murmurs. The blue strobe hurt his eyes and left his brow pounding as they dilated. He laid there and his mouth tasted sour and he cared not to acknowledge the cowgirl who was awake and had been for some time. She was lost in the television, and her eyes were swollen and teary. Watermarks glistened down her cheeks, and she snif ed on her inhales and convulsed on her exhales. Ritter pretended fl fi to sleep, but lost patience with her whimpering and threw his pillow across the room in frustration. That shut her up for a minute or two, but her crying began again for the fact the Ritter was upset with her. She cried louder then. When Ritter could no longer take it, he rolled out of bed and found his pillow beside the window. With much effort he stooped to pick it up and felt the coolness below the curtains and determined that the glass did little in the way of insulating. So he stood and threw the curtains open, and on the glass was his face, it frightened him, oating translucent and re ecting hollow and pale like the spectral premonition of a dead man. He stood there and considered this visitation and wondered how soon he might become the dead man he saw in the window. But he had already buried himself. And behind him, smaller in the re ection, was the cowgirl. Her image was full, and with the light from the television, she was radiant and full of youth. And though she had lived well past the precipice of regular morality, she carried an innocence that bled beyond her depravity. She was not beyond redemption. Ritter observed these things, and he observed the inch or two of fresh snow that had accumulated in the parking lot. It lay on the ground undisturbed and untouched, and it appeared as white linen drawn over the earth. He then looked upward and the storm had passed, and the sky was clear and speckled with a great number of stars. And the stars seemed as pinholes in God’s own satin curtain, a shroud to his hidden glory and brightness, a thing no man was to fl witness but in cosmic teasings. And he looked to the lobby where the Cadillac was fl fl Visser/Indigo Inn/20 Visser/Indigo Inn/21 parked, lit as if it were on display on the showroom oor at the dealership, but facing inwards instead of out and blanketed in plaster and sheetrock. Behind him, the cowgirl stirred. She rustled around in the sheets and had since stopped her crying. “If you leave, take me to my girlfriend’s by St. Mary’s.” Ritter turned, and she icked tears from her cheeks, and her eyes were red and swollen. “I don’t intend to leave,” he said. “Not now. Not until morning at least.” “But when you do, take me to my girlfriend’s by St. Mary’s.” He pulled the curtains closed and spoke stern. “I’m not leaving.” “Sure you are. They always do. When you do, take me to my girlfriend’s by St. Mary’s.” He staggered to the bed and sat on its corner. The television was just loud enough so his indignation could not be discerned. “I’ll take you to your girlfriend’s by St. Mary’s. And why don’t you turn that thing off and go to sleep?” She shook her head, bringing the bedsheet below her chin and clenching it tight with her hand so that it left wrinkles.“Guys like you pull me around like a tractor plow, have your way with me, and dump me off in the morning like I’m some sort of common whore. I ain’t a whore.” She stuttered over those words and cried. Long, blubbering fl fl sobs. “I ain’t no whore,” she said. “I ain’t no whore.” Visser/Indigo Inn/22 To this, Ritter had no answer. What she said was true, and he too would leave her come morning. And he offered what condolences he could muster. “Sure you’re not. You’ve got to pay for a whore.” She wailed, and Ritter scrunched up his nose at this, bracing against her cries. “That’s not what I meant. You know that. I know you’re not a whore.” Her nose ran and she snif ed between sentences, wiping tears along the way. “Some whore I am. I ain’t even worth a dime. Not even a scaly bag of leather like you would pay for me. This is all I ever been and it’s all I’ll ever be. I always known it.” Ritter groaned. “Goddammit. Quit your yammering,” he said, lying back into the bed. “And slide over, will you. You’re taking up the whole bed.” The cowgirl wriggled her way to the far edge, and the bed springs squeaked and moaned with her movement. Ritter rolled over to face her. She could not look Ritter in the eye, and he did not bother to console her, and he lay there because he had no better plan to calm her. There he considered the many women he had known, and he thought there were none that he could call a whore. None deserving of that nasty title. He gured that whores were stagnant creatures with no locomotion or serious ambition. Instead they just oated around with the rest of the scum and undesirables, washing about and hoping life might dispose of them. He also considered the cowgirl, and he knew she fi fl fl was not a whore. She was pinned under circumstance, and if she could, she would Visser/Indigo Inn/23 change her circumstance without a tear or inkling of nostalgia. The cowgirl was not a whore. This Ritter knew for certain. And he said, “You’re not a whore.” But she pretended not to hear him. At that time it was nearing dawn, and the news stories looped around on the television for what had to have been the third or fourth time. The current one was about a burned up elementary school and the lunch lady who left the stove on. She had been arrested for her negligence. The cowgirl watched with mascara running down her face. And she smiled, a sad kind of smile, and said, “I’d like to be a teacher one day.” This surprised Ritter. “A teacher?” She nodded. “That’s a ne plan,” Ritter said. “I guess.” “Well go on and do it.” She shrugged. “I don’t see there being anything to stop you.” “It seems like a lot of work.” “That’s no excuse.” She shrugged again. “That’s a ne plan. A damn ne plan.” fi fi fi “I don’t know.” Visser/Indigo Inn/24 Ritter mumbled. “I think it’s the best idea you’ve ever had.” “Besides,” she said, “There’s a color TV in every room. And I like that.” Ritter had no response for this, so he stood and walked crooked on his kinked up legs to the television. “There’ll always be color TVs,” he said, and he switched it off. And it was dark and quiet, and the night returned and was unfamiliar without the television light. “I was watching that.” “Go to sleep,” he said, crawling back in bed. And the cowgirl did not cry, and Ritter slept without interruption. *** Beau Ritter’s drunkenness had made him a chronic snorer, and his breathing could be mistaken as a large-scale seismic event by those in close proximity to his sleep. He snored when the sun pressed through the window of room number seventeen at the Indigo Inn, and he didn’t wake until there was a practiced and forceful knock behind the door. He lay there for a minute more, letting the haze leave his conscious mind. Then there was another series of knocks, these ones harder. “For hell’s sake, hold your horses. I’m coming.” Ritter fell from the bed and wrestled his jeans over his stiff legs, and he didn’t bother to do them up. His belt buckle clanked along as he made his way to the door and squinted through the peephole. On the other side was the motel manager. He was a short, round guy and his face was red Visser/Indigo Inn/25 and puffy. He wore an ear ap cap and a parka with the collar pulled up around his chin, and he stood there cross and huf ng. Ritter let him knock one more time before opening the door. The manager shoved in. “Do you know anything about the car parked in my lobby?” He said, breathing hard. Ritter poked his head out the door and looked down the row of rooms to the lobby and to his Cadillac parked there. “That car?” He thumbed in its direction. “Don’t be a jackass. Of course it’s that car.” “Hell of a parking job. I’d envy a man that could park like that.” “Is it or is it not your car.” Ritter coughed and spat out the door and near the manager’s winter boots. “No, sir,” he said. “I don’t know anything about any cars parked in your lobby.” The manager mumbled something that Ritter couldn’t quite hear, and then he grumbled off and knocked on the next door down. The cowgirl rose and rubbed her eyes and yawned sweetly, and she looked good in the morning. “What was that all about?” She said. “Valet services. Said my car’s ready.” “Already?” fi fl Ritter shook his head. Visser/Indigo Inn/26 They waited until the manager was out of sight, and then they ran out of room number seventeen and beneath the second oor balcony to the lobby of the Indigo Inn. Ritter opened the driver’s door of the Cadillac and the cowgirl dove in. Ritter followed, closed the door, cranked over the engine, and adjusted the rearview before dropping the transmission into reverse and peeling out of the Cadillac-shaped hole in the wall. They drove at speed away from Indigo Inn, and Ritter reckoned with the thought of returning, making some claim about accident and letting the insurance deal with the expense. But it was easier to leave it as it was, there was no fault that way. Back on Capitol, they passed Bennion’s and continued on to St. Mary’s and to the cowgirl’s girlfriend’s who lived nearby. St. Mary’s was built in the style of watereddown Gothic Revival, a towering achievement in the plainsman’s aspirations towards God. And yet, it t right in with the pink and green duplexes it shared the block with. Even God offered affordable housing. Ritter stopped the car by the pink one, the one the cowgirl said belonged to her girlfriend. “Thanks, I guess,” she said, sitting there for a breath or two and not saying anything else. Then she opened the door and stepped onto the street. “Hold up.” Ritter held out his quilted jacket. “Put this on. There’s a cold about.” She accepted the jacket and slipped it over her bony shoulders and zipped away her breasts. fl fi “You really think I sing good?” She said. Visser/Indigo Inn/27 He nodded. She smiled and turned, waddling up the icy walk-way and wearing Ritter’s quilted jacket. She was singing Patsy Cline, and she was at the whole way through. Ritter tipped his hat and waited until she reached the door. The cowgirl was home, close to home, this was her only home. There was comfort in that. Comfort in the notion that her trajectory had long since been decided. There was little that could be done to alter her path, and she was hellbent, one way or the other, to remain as she was, careening at highway speeds to that place of despondency. She would get there on her own time. And she would arrive dried up and scabbed, like Ritter already had. That was the inevitable tragedy of it all, and Ritter drove away slowly and decided that he was no more than a pothole along that journey. And he didn’t feel so bad about it all. He continued on to Interstate Twenty-Five, and he drove north, carrying on through Wyoming’s no-man’s land and its heartland and everything in between. He had no preference of destination, but thought he might go to Montana. The highway ended in Billings, and it seemed tting to ride the road to its end. But he never made it. And in Casper, the money ran out. There he got into it with a railman over a gambling debt and took a buck knife to the gut. He didn’t feel too bad about that either, so he retired to his room at the Ramada and soaked his mattress through, his own worn- fl fi down innards leaking out, and died. Peter Visser petervisser@mail.weber.edu about 4,300 words Cloud Seeds by Peter Visser It was July and nearing the end of Kit Bringhurst’s fteenth year, and the summer’s third crop of alfalfa was cut and raked and waiting to be baled. Kit lay in the elds, between the windrows, watching the clouds that were great billowy meringues sailing above the prairie and carrying on north. He lay there and felt a weighty sorrow and considered the possibility of rain, and it seemed unlikely, so he stayed put and instead remembered arrowheads and the big Indians who hunted bison on a clouded steppe. It was then that Kit and Stu had walked the elds, picking rocks turned up by the fi fi fi tiller. This was a never ending task, and every spring there were more rocks than the Visser/Cloud Seeds/2 last. They sprouted from the ground like potatoes, but they were no good to eat; otherwise they’d be rich. That’s what Stu had said. Stu believed the rocks reproduced asexually, and it didn’t take but one rock to become one million rocks. To this, Kit complained with no end, and he believed the only explanation to their being was that they fell from the sky during thunderstorms. But, no matter where they came from, the rocks had to be picked before the elds could be seeded. It was slow going, and made slower by Stu who made a point of stopping anytime he found something interesting, telling Kit about fossils he had found and his growing collection of arrowheads. “Big Indians,” Stu had said. He was crouched and holding a int arrowhead the size of his palm and dulled at the edges. He held it skyward and closed one eye, examining its luster and how it looked like wax and not stone. “Big Indians in the sky.” “Big Indians?” Kit said. Stu stashed the arrowhead in his coveralls and wiped the dirt from his hands. He spat and spoke low, like a secret. “It’s a curse. This land is cursed because once we wagered with the Indians. Told them this land was ours if we could drag a plow through it. They said it couldn’t be done, that this land couldn’t be tamed. And they were right. Hell, why do you think we’re out here pickin rocks all the time?” Kit shrugged, and his hands were deep in his pockets. “We brought our cattle and our fences and our big-time machinery and we went fl fi to work, trying to conquer this land. But the cattle ate all the grass, and that killed the Visser/Cloud Seeds/3 rest of the buffalo, the ones we hadn’t already chased on up to the sky. And the Indians, I guess they just followed the buffalo, right on up there into the sky.” “I think you should’ve payed more attention in school, Uncle Stu.” “This is what they don’t teach in school. See, they’re gone now and all we got for it was this Godforsaken earth and dirt that’s too rocky to do much of anything with but piss in. We lost the wager. Earned this curse. But sometimes they drop things down, little reminders from that great prairie in the sky, sometimes arrowheads or that whisper in the wind, and they tell us that they’re there, waiting. And when we run out of time, they’ll be back. And the buffalo too. When we’re gone things will return to the way they were.” Kit kicked around in the dirt, and he had never heard these things before, and he could not believe them. “But that’s just an arrowhead,” he said. “And we just uncovered it with the plow. And we have houses and stores and restaurants. We can’t leave. We’ve tamed this land. That’s why we won.” “Surely,” Stu said, “there’s more to it than that.” And now, Kit lay in the elds, remembering these things. And he watched the clouds and thought they were too thin to support the buffalo and the big Indians. But the Indians and the buffalo were gone, they were the clouds themselves, and Stu had meant dead when he said gone. And now Stu was gone, tilling the great prairie in the fi sky, or trying to. He was happy there, Kit knew, because there are no rocks to pick in the Visser/Cloud Seeds/4 clouds. The rocks fell through the bottom. And Kit lay there and he considered the rocks and the Indians and the buffalo, and he hoped one of those rocks would fall and strike him right on the head. He might not feel so sorry then. *** Kit had rst seen the Chevy Corvair in a classi ed advertisement in the State Tribune. The ad claimed it to be pale blue and in good condition, though it didn’t run and would need considerable work to do so. The retired brakeman who posted the ad lived in Chugwater, and he asked two-hundred dollars for the car. Kit had a hair over twohundred dollars stuffed under his mattress, and he was soon due for a driver’s license. The only reasonable thing to do was to buy the Corvair. With the help of his father, Kit dragged the Corvair down to Cheyenne on a tow strap, leaving it on Stu’s lot where he planned to do the xing. It looked good in the evening, there on Stu’s lot. That is if the rusted body panels and rodent-chewed interior were ignored. But from a distance, it looked like a car. A running, driving, freedom inspiring car. Kit pictured himself cruising Capitol with Esther Brown at his side. In the Corvair, he had the courage to put his arm around her shoulders and draw her close. This, he thought, was why he needed a car. Stu was not so impressed. “This here is a dilapidating jalopy of the feeblest proportions. I believe I’m watching it rust just standing here,” he said. “Where did you fi fi fi ever buy that car?” Visser/Cloud Seeds/5 “This is the best two-hundred bucks I ever spent.” Kit was admiring his purchase with his arms folded, whistling the sort of catcall a man makes towards machinery. “You’re jealous.” Stu walked the Corvair’s perimeter, kicking the tires, jostling the suspension, opening and closing doors, and knuckling rust patches. “Tires are at, suspension’s busted, she’s got more holes than Swiss cheese, and the seats have been eaten through by rats. Do you even have the keys?” “Well no. But if you use a screwdriver just right the ignition will turn.” Stu popped the hood and found no engine, but a weathered spare tire. “Hell. It doesn’t even have an engine.” “It’s in the back,” Kit said. “Like a real sports car.” Stu nodded, and he was uncertain, and he walked to Kit’s side and placed his st under his chin. Together they eyed the Corvair and didn’t speak, and from that angle the chrome accents glistened and the Chevrolet emblem could have been foreign, like a real sports car’s. “I guess when you’re not standing so close she looks pretty good,” Stu said. “I’d say. Pretty good indeed.” “I think I know just the place for her.” Kit steered while Stu pushed from behind. It rolled easy despite the at tires, and fi fl fl they tucked it away in an empty corner of the barn. Stu said Kit could work on the car Visser/Cloud Seeds/6 between moving lines, and Kit said it was a ne idea. They looked it over once more, and then Stu gave Kit a ride home in the seed truck. Kit talked about his plans for the car the whole way there. Stu said they were ne ideas. *** For the rst time since striking off on his own, Stu would grow enough alfalfa to cut a pro t. It was a success due in part to a generous weather cycle, but no less the result of his obstinance and inherent obligation to conquer anything he deemed encumbering. His land was barren, surviving as a reminder of the dust bowl farmer’s gluttony. But it was his land, and he nurtured it and coaxed it back into production. And for what little it produced he was proud. And he was proud because it was something he created, and it was all his own. Pro t would allow him to get ahead. He would make his payments to the bank and to the creditors at Ford and International Harvester. He would settle up with Mr. Garrison at the feed store. He would buy a new tedder, one that he wouldn’t need to weld after every use. He would mend fences and patch irrigation lines and put a new roof on the barn. He might build a new barn with room for all the equipment he would buy. And he would buy a new tractor. He would do that rst. But this was years down the line, and this rst pro t would cover little more than his regular expenses. But it would be pro t. And it would be the hopeful beginnings of many seasons of pro t. fi fi fi fi fi fi fi fi fi fi Then might he afford those things. Visser/Cloud Seeds/7 But for now, he would be closer to the full ownership of those things he created. And for now, that would be suf cient. *** In the summer, when there was no school, Kit had worked for Stu. He moved irrigation pipe and wore black rubber pipe boots and last year’s Levi’s, riding between the lines on a beat up Honda dirt bike and opening and closing the risers with a length of steel tubing. He rode line to line, closing one riser, disassembling sections of the pipe, moving it to the next riser, and repeating that over until he had reassembled the pipe some thirty yards across the eld. It was tedious work, and he passed the days thinking of cars and girls and the freedom that cars bring to go out with girls, and he thought that those were the things that made his work worthwhile. Once he got the Corvair running, he would know a lot more about freedom and girls. He was thinking about cars and girls, leaning against his dirt bike and watching for leaks in the line, when Esther Brown came by in her pa’s pickup. She was a year older than Kit, damn pretty too, and Kit always found himself privy to the brown hair that she cut just above her shoulders and the way she walked with a skip because she was always happy. He liked how she smiled at him when she passed, and it made him long to be near her. And in Ms. Maggie’s algebra class, they had become friends. And they talked between classes and would laugh at the wannabe cowboys clopping along fi fi the halls with their brass buckles and hats. She had said rodeo cowboys weren’t worth a Visser/Cloud Seeds/8 minute of her time. Kit agreed. But their relationship was casual and eeting, and Kit never could nd the courage to tell her how he felt, so he prayed often that she would act rst. She stopped the pickup in a cloud of dust and waited for it to settle before rolling down the window. And Kit wiped his brow and tried to look cool and busy. “I didn’t know you could get any dirtier,” she said. “That is, I guess, I’ve really only seen you at school. I suppose you’re usually pretty clean. I don’t really know why I said that.” His face reddened and he stumbled over his tongue. “These are just my work clothes. I’m working.” He held up his hands to show the mud on them and the dirt beneath his ngernails. “I’m normally not this dirty.” Esther laughed. “I know, silly. You don’t just stand around watching sprinklers, do you? That’d be weird.” “No. Not normally. Unless I’m working. That’s kind of my job. To watch sprinklers. But I move them too.” “Of course you do,” she said, leaning out of the open window with her hair falling in her face. She brushed it away and smiled at Kit. “So do you just work all the time or what?” “I nish around three or four most days.” “Perfect,” she said. “There’s this thing. It’s not anything really, just some friends. fl fi fi fi fi But it’d be totally cool if you could come.” Visser/Cloud Seeds/9 Kit stepped back and caught his foot on the grass, nearly falling. He steadied himself on the dirt bike. She laughed. “Don’t fall.” “Sure,” he said. “I’d like that.” Esther turned back to the wheel and shifted the pickup out of park. “Friday night,” she said. And she drove away. There was a wheel line in the next eld over that needed moving, and Kit didn’t dwell on the invitation too long. But he continued his work with greater conviction and with the satisfaction that there was a signi cance to his labor. Esther liked that he was working, and maybe that meant that she also liked him. The possibilities were exciting, and Kit gured it wouldn’t be long before they were married with children. Those were nice things to picture when moving irrigation pipe. *** The weatherman had called for rain, and the cut and raked alfalfa was not yet dry enough to bale, but Stu had hopes of planting a fourth crop. There was not time to wait out the rain, or to wait for an even wetter crop to dry, and he had only the option to bale before the moisture was compounded. The sun rose in the east, and the presence of water vapor, cloud seeds, coated the sky in a deep vermillion. Stu remembered an old rhyme about the sky and sailors and warnings. And he was unsure if it only applied to fi fi fi the sea. But he didn’t worry on it and hitched the baler to the Farmall tractor that he Visser/Cloud Seeds/10 had nearly drove the wheels off, gave the equipment a brief once-over, trusting that all was in order, and went plunking into the elds. He liked working in the mornings. He liked rising with the sun, lacing up his boots, and completing his tasks before the rest of the world stirred from their beds. He knew this to be a marker of a simple life, and he liked a simple life. And that particular morning, the beauty of the sky and the scent of diesel fuel, the burning of the same organics he grew but millions of years older, were the pleasures of a man whose life’s work was only work. He thought of this, how old grass made way for new grass, how it was the sacri ce and decomposition of what came before that paved way for what was new. His tractor, for one, was just a reimagining of the natural world, amalgamated into a tool for progress. What came before paved the way for what was new. He thought of these things and monitored the baler as it sucked in the windrows and spat out cubes of hay tied up in orange twine. He was carrying on like this, paying little mind to his work and whistling a tune about two-dollar bills and hotrod Fords, when the baler jammed. The twine arm had entangled itself and a half tied bale fell out of the back. “Blast,” Stu said, climbing down from the tractor and cursing Kit for his ignorance and neglect. “This,” he said aloud, “is why we can never get ahead.” And he went about poking around at the twine arm and the internals of the baler. fi fi *** Visser/Cloud Seeds/11 In the elds, on his back, Kit reasoned with the evidences of mortality. It was a blue day and the windrows smelled sweet and green. The air was still and it was an oddity for there to be no wind, and the calm was likely the bated breaths of phantasmic observers who already knew of his wrongdoing. Under him, the hard stalks of the cut grass were a bed of nails. But it was a punishment he accepted because it was his own ignorance that had caused this sorrow. And if the earth opened in that moment and engulfed him entirely, he would go willingly and with no gripe or nal wish. He wished the earth would open at that moment and engulf him entirely. And Mom said there was no such thing as an accident and everything happened for a reason because the Good Lord knew best. That’s what mom had said, and Kit didn’t like this but he felt it to be true. *** She scrubbed the dishes with such vigor that Kit wondered if the plates were thinner now than when they were new, and mom’s washing had the habit of breaking a dish or two. They were certainly more fragile than when they were new. Mom was tough on everything, and nothing seemed to last as long as it should. She was tough on love, and she offered it in meager doses because she did not have much to give. But that was mom, and mom never was any good with sentiment, even if it was her own brother that was dead. Kit knew this, and he knew that life on the prairie was hard and that many fi fi years of scarcity had caused mom to act this way. But still, he could use some affection. Visser/Cloud Seeds/12 She stood at the sink in a blue house dress with peonies printed on it, wearing her yellow rubber washing gloves and scrubbing until the water ran cold or another household duty pilfered her attention. Kit sat at the dining table and his eyes were vacant and his mouth hung open, and the shock of it all still pulsed in bones like a wretched and persistent tuning fork. “Give me a hand with these dishes please, Kit,” she said. But Kit did not move, and he gave no indication of comprehension or recognition to her request. Mom turned off the faucet and faced Kit, and soapy water dripped from her gloves and collected on the oor at her feet. “I need you to start pulling your own weight around here, mister.” She pulled off the gloves and made a show of tossing them in the sink, and she went to his side and sat in the chair to his right. “You think you can do that?” Kit shrugged. Mom sighed, bracing herself for a conversation she was not prepared to have. One that she would have preferred to avoid. “It’s not your fault,” she said. “I know you feel that way, but it’s not your fault.” fl Kit shrugged. Visser/Cloud Seeds/13 “It was pro t, that’s what killed him. Farmers were never meant to get ahead in life, and they should only ever get by, skinning their teeth on bank loans and government subsidy. It was an act of God. God returned the farmer to his place.” Kit could not understand why God would kill a man for the beginnings of success, or why God would allow Kit to kill a man for those same reasons. He twisted his legs about the chair’s and tried not to lose patience with mom’s reasoning. “You know I don’t believe in accidents,” she said. “Everything happens for a reason, and God knows best. Everything happens according to his plan. And you know, I think you’re blessed. You were an instrument in God’s hands. You should thank him for that.” Her lips turned up into a smile, and she pointed her chin towards the ceiling and towards the heavens. Kit could not understand this. He stood, and his chair toppled over behind him. Then he ran for the door, and he ran for the elds and away from mom. And he cared not to hear her speak again, and he knew that was not a possibility. And instead he went to the elds where she could not be heard, and maybe there God would strike him down too. And mom called out as he ran, “But it wasn’t your fault.” Kit did not slow to hear her and hoped that the clouds on the prairie’s edge carried lightning. *** fi fi fi “The twine arm needs to be sorted,” Stu had said. Visser/Cloud Seeds/14 Kit was elbows deep in the engine bay of the Corvair, sorting out an issue with the serpentine belt. “On the baler. I need you to see about the tensioner on the twine arm. It’s been throwing loose bales.” “I heard you,” Kit said. “I’ll get to it before I leave.” “I’m planning on baling in the morning. I want that thing running good before I start.” “Hand me that big crescent wrench, will you.” Stu stooped to the constellation of tools Kit had laid across the oor and took up the big crescent wrench, loosened its jaws, and handed it to Kit. “It shouldn’t take but a minute.” “I hear you. Check the twine arm. I’ll do it.” “I’m headed out to the feed store.” Kit pulled a blackened hand from the engine and waved Stu off. “Yeah, yeah. I’ll catch you later.” And he went back to work on the car. “And while you’re there,” he said, “would you mind picking me up some fuel line? A few feet would do.” Stu checked his pockets for his wallet and his keys. “I’ll see what I can nd.” And he left for the feed store. For sometime longer, Kit fooled around with the Covair. He had since given up fi fl on the serpentine belt and turned his attention to the fuel system. He disassembled the Visser/Cloud Seeds/15 carburetor, reassembled the carburetor, and disassembled it again because he didn’t put it together right the rst time. And when he had it in pieces on the oor, he decided he was bored and tired of ddling around with mechanics, and he decided it was about time to head home. So he left the carburetor in pieces and the baler and the twine arm untouched, and he soon forgot about all of it. Instead he remembered once when Esther had touched his arm, and he wondered if it had been on purpose. He liked to think it was on purpose. *** On Friday, Esther Brown skipped up the steps to Kit’s front door. She had come in her pa’s pickup and left it idling in the driveway. Dusk settled slow on the prairie, and the sky descended from orange to purple, and soon it would all be black. There were crickets in the ditch that hid from roaming chickens, and there were chirps and clucks and wind in the sage. Esther wore her best jeans and her expensive perfume. She had colored her eyes and brushed and pulled back her hair. She knocked on the door and was nervous that Kit may have changed his mind. The oorboards creaked inside the home that was built before the plows had turned the earth to silt. Mom answered the door with a smile that said thanks for stopping by but don’t stay long, and it attened when she saw it was a girl. “Can I help you?” She said. fl fl fi fi fi fl “Is Kit home?” She said, ring back her own smile, the one Kit liked. Visser/Cloud Seeds/16 Mom glanced into the house, down the long hallway that went from front door to back. “I’m sorry, hon. He just stepped out.” Behind Esther, the elds ran with no end and the bales that lined their interiors looked like a great labyrinth. And she looked to them, to where someone could get lost and never return. “Is he coming back?” “Sometime,” she said. “He’ll come back sometime.” “Do you know where I can nd him?” “No.” “I see.” Esther put her hands in her pockets and kicked at the concrete step that crumbled beneath her feet. Her chest ached a bit and she felt sorry for herself and for what she gured was Kit’s rejection. “Sorry to bother you,” she said, and she turned and plodded back to the pickup and gave no mind to mom and her goodbye wave. “I don’t think he’s much in the mood for visitors,” mom said. “But I’ll tell him you dropped by.” Esther put the pickup in drive and pulled away from Kit’s place, and she drove the county road between the elds and the bales and to the place she knew where her friends waited. And in the elds she passed was Kit, and he lay there still and remembered many things, but they were just memories and held no relevance in the present. They were, to him, no more real than the Indians in the clouds and the fi fi fi fi fi fabrications of an active mind. *** Kit found Stu neck deep in the baler. The tractor was running and the power take-off was whirring, and the baler whined and gnashed its teeth. He was dead, and he had been for sometime. Kit knew not what to do and stood there and watched because there was nothing he could do. And Stu didn’t look much like Stu because his face had swelled from the pressure, and Kit thought he looked much nicer when he was alive, but even dead he was smiling, and he was happy where he was. Kit stood there, and there was nothing to do but to wait for the cycle to run its course. *** Beyond Cheyenne’s city limits, and up a potholed road that would wash into the ditch, was Stu’s place. There, a steel barn would rest crooked with its roof caved in and thistles pressing up its sides, and there would be an old Farmall tractor and a rusted out baler, and a pile of bent up wheel lines and hand lines and broken sprinkler heads, and a barbed wire fence with a corral panel gate that swung on one hinge. And past the gate, a Chevrolet Corvair would be buried in the tallgrass with its wheels sunk so that the chassis sat ush with the ground. And the grass would grow through the oorboards and through the seats that a family of eld mice call home. And the left headlight would be busted out, and in its place would be a bird’s nest and ve blue fi fi fi eggs sheltered and waiting to hatch. It would all be there, out there, in the elds. fl fl Visser/Cloud Seeds/17