TOO MUCH HORSE by Otis Haschemeyer
Miles Anderson runs the ranch road toward the tipi circles while his daughter Zoey follows along on a rental horse. The grass is sun-beat and heavy snowflakes fall out of gray sky. Miles, not used to the altitude, breathes hard and sweats, hoping to force the flu out.
As he rises, he can see the red blush in the baked clay on the opposite side of the valley. Snowflakes wet his face and sneak down his jacket. He looks back at the valley drainage. Cleaved by the creek, the land drops away to marshy swales, to prairie grasses and silver sagebrush. Conical hills, flat-topped buttes, and coal-fired ridges rise on the other side of the valley. His foot slips into a rut. His other foot slips too. His sneakers cake with mud. He climbs up to the ridge.
The tipi circles are large round stones pressed into the dirt on a flat hill that overlooks the valley below. As he jogs by, he looks out and imagines for a moment the hills as the Indians saw them. This would have been a good place to watch migrating herds moving in, he thinks, a great place to plan a hunt. His eyes focus on the fences again and the methane gas boxes and he feels foolish for his romanticism.
He looks into the wind, his eyes tearing at the corners, and feels the cool sweat of fever under his collar. Over the sweep of yellow grass and snow, the black furrows and lightning-struck clinker hills, the snow peaks of the Bighorns cut teeth into the gray distance. Maybe it was more unspoiled then, but it is still beautiful, and he wishes Angie could see it.
Miles climbs further still, off the jeep trail and onto animal track. The horse, Sundancer, clomps along behind. In the switchback, he sees his daughter high on the back of the sorrel mare, the horse ambling through mud, her haunches swaying, pitching divots the size of tea plates as Zoey works her booted heels into the horse’s belly. Mule deer scare up from a gully and collect in a field above them and watch, craning their necks with cocked, black-tipped ears. A nerve pinches in Miles’s foot.
At the top of a high hill he does jumping jacks to keep warm. Below, the creek winds through the valley. The water is black frozen over, and snow-covered in spots. He waits for Zoey.
Sundancer, her three white socks muddied black, clops up. Mrs. Odecoven said the horse would sit on the couch and watch TV if it could, and that is why Zoey is allowed to ride her outside the practice ring. Breathing heavily, Zoey says, “You were faster today.”
“I’m feeling better,” Miles says.
Zoey, red-faced, her mother’s straw-blonde hair sticking out from her riding helmet, shifts in the saddle. She is getting longer and leaner. The grass all around is the same color as her hair, he notices. He pushes the thought out of his mind. Miles doesn’t want his sweat to cool. Sundancer puffs steam from her nostrils. Miles reaches out to stroke the horse, and the mare jerks her muzzle away.
“Shall we go back?” he says.
“I’m going to gallop in the field at the bottom, back to the barn, okay?” Zoey says. “If I can make her.”
“I don’t know,” Miles says. “I think you should do that with Mrs. Odecoven.”
* * *
Zoey sits out in the hallway across from her father’s classroom. “Please, Miss Anderson,” the principal says, trying to move her along. She buries her head deeper into her textbook.
“Ruff, ruff,” a boy in a striped shirt says. Zoey knows what the barking means, and buries her head deeper in her textbook. She can’t manipulate kids into feeling sorry for her the way she can adults.
The principal trails after the boy, and Zoey is left alone. She looks up at the green door and through the square of glass. From this angle, her view is of the classroom ceiling and the fluorescent lights. Under those, her father talking about history. Zoey doesn’t see any purpose in history. And he’s just so stupid to leave everything behind and move here where no one lives like they do and no one has the experiences they’ve had. She balls her hands into fists and presses them into her hips.
Then she wonders if he’s all right. She’s learned that if she thinks mean things they can come to pass. She puts her book down and stands, edges over so she can see him in the window. He’s there, sitting at the desk. He has his head down. He’s grading papers with a red pen. The class is taking a quiz. Students look at each other’s answers. One sees her and points at her. She’s stupid to get worried. Bad things don’t happen suddenly. They happen slowly, so slow you don’t notice. She sees the principal coming back down the hall, and she sits down, picks up her textbook. Her father sometimes called this “passive aggressive” behavior, but what could she do in the face of simply aggressive behavior?
“There can’t be special privileges.”
Zoey looks up. “Why can’t I just stay here?”
“Do you see anyone else sitting in the hallway?”
She knows if she looks down the hallway, she won’t see anyone sitting like she is. Then, because she has to be like everyone else, she’ll have to get up. That’s the way adults ask questions. But she’s not like everyone else. Her dad is a professor, which was a big deal, and wrote a great book, and then took a medical leave even though nothing is wrong with him, and brought her here, to this place where they don’t even have a highway. Zoey sticks her face deep into her book.
The principal leans over. “Please, Miss Anderson,” he says. “Or I’ll have to talk to your father.”
She shuts her eyes, steals away to the place she goes, where she keeps her father’s promise, a place she’s made real with a grass field and a fence and a barn, with brushes and tack and a horse. “If you say yes, I’ll get you that horse,” he had said. When they get the horse, she believes he’ll see how right he was. He won’t look out the window like he’s looking at the glass, and she won’t be stuck on that fat, slow Sundancer, told when she can gallop and when she can’t. Zoey presses her forehead into the pages and wishes, wishes.
“Well, Miss Anderson.”
Zoey closer her eyes tighter. It will be okay to bring the horse up over lunch just one more time.
“Ruff, ruff,” a boy in a striped shirt barks as he passes back down the hall.
* * *
Once, as a child, Henry Berry and his friend, Allen Pingree, had been exploring the prairie when they saw a slow smoke rising out of the grass. “Stomp it,” Allen had said. Henry crouched to do so when it dawned on him that perhaps it wasn’t fire. A spark of knowledge like that can only be divine intervention.
Since that time, Henry Berry has had visions of the fateful leap he never took, imagining the spring and descent, his feet punching through the overgrown grass, his legs caught to the knee, himself overlooking the great plain, the only thing he’d ever known and the last thing he’d see, while nascent snakes, writhing in their nest, bite his ankle.
Now, as a favor to the principal, he finds himself in his truck driving the new teacher, Miles, up to old Clarkson’s to show him a cave that nobody’s heard or thought of for too long to remember. Henry Berry remembers, though, because his mom’s friend Ruthie had a café, the only eating place in town and where the Too Much Horse is now, and in that cafe on a shelf were flaked stones that Ruthie collected from the cave. They came from a time before cattle.
Henry Berry’s mother and Ruthie, since deceased, quilted together, and Henry knows Ruthie’s daughters, Nola and Sophia. Through them, not by choice, just keeping his ears open, Henry came to know which ridge the cave resided in, information he’d all but lost until he overheard the conversation between the principal and the new teacher, Mr. Anderson.
As he steers toward the ridge, he reflects that he seems never to learn to keep his mouth shut. Very soon he’ll have to decide whether he’ll walk with the teacher along the open fields or sit in his truck and watch him go.
The teacher talks, and though Berry can glean he is talking over the past, Berry also understands that it isn’t pre-cattle history at all that he seems interested in. Still he’s talking about history as if that were enough to countermand Berry’s persistent if tacit insinuation that this trip to the cave is no more than chasing a hare down a hole. The teacher says, “You see, my wife died.”
The truck tires spit gravel.
Berry, long divorced, says, “That right?”
“Cancer,” the teacher says.
“That right?” Berry says.
Everyone Berry knows dies violent deaths before their time, falling in the tub or from extension ladder, by hoof or machinery, through incompetence or bad luck, by way of stubbornness or boredom, all except his mother. No telling how she might go, or he himself since he escaped death as a child in a nest of immature snakes.
The 1/4 ton truck vibrates over a cattle guard as they drive further into the valley. The road ran along a shimmering black creek that slips among the cottonwood and patches of chokeberry, between drought-yellow grasses.
After several uphill miles, Henry Berry pulls next to a fence-gate still in place though much of the barbed wire fence line has fallen. A lever pulls the gate taut. “I’d step on through.”
Berry shifts his eyes up the field and past the draw about a mile and a half, to the red ridge of sandstone and a shadowy cave mouth. He thinks to himself, of all the things in this world that can get you killed, nothing, but nothing is as sure to do the job as a favor.
* * *
Mrs. Odecoven’s daughter, Amy, swings the saddle onto a sawhorse, tells Zoey to get on it. Light comes through slats and the one open door at the front of the barn. They are deep in the back, in thick, dank smells of fresh hay, manure, and bat guano.
Zoey helps out at the stable, but Mrs. Odecoven’s daughter, Amy, a year Zoey’s senior and Zoey’s overseer, is a master shirker. Only when it is absolutely necessary, when it seems at any moment Amy’s mother, Mrs. Odecoven, would come storming through, does Amy strike to work like the devil.
Amy says, “You’ve got to rock against the swell. When you feel the feeling, you got to keep doing exactly that.”
Zoey grips the horn and posts on the saddle. She doesn’t feel anything and certainly not a feeling, only that her legs are sore from fat Sundancer. But then as she rocks in the saddle, she remembers the past weekend when she’d gone out with Mrs. Odecoven to drop off a horse trailer down on the Powder Ranch. On Mr. Hatter’s spread, Zoey saw another kind of horse entirely.
Two horses had run along the fence line, white and black paints, but the one with the half black head and the black rump was the one she loved – ink black and paper white. On the way back up the dirt road, after dropping the trailer, the two paints kept pace with Mrs. Odecoven’s truck, the horse with the half black head and its sister, along the fence and the field beyond, the Powder River winding below. Zoey hadn’t asked Mrs. Odecoven what kind of horse it was because she knew it would be a cutter or a stallion, or, as Mrs. Odecoven would say, some other horse she’d have no business asking about.
“Sometimes it helps if you do this,” Amy says and she reaches out and pinches Zoey’s nipples.
“Hey,” Zoey says.
“Did that help?”
Zoey doesn’t think so. Maybe it did. She grips the horn. “Do that again,” she says.
* * *
Miles has covered half the distance to the cave when the sun drops below the ridge line and a cold wind bites through his thin cotton pants. Distances deceive. Miles’s pretty sure the school custodian thinks he’s a fool.
His friends thought he was a fool too, and tried to convince him that he wasn’t to blame for the years of hope and failure, the lies of technology, and the tortures Angie endured for him and her daughter. He’d always known that great love had to have a great cost. He knew that even in their happiest days together, those days when Zoey was first born, and those months that followed.
The clinker looms in blocks over the steep eroded slope of grass and crate-sized boulders. A hundred yards further, Miles turns from the cliffs to see Berry’s truck down by the gate, small and puffing exhaust, the same purple as the sagebrush on the opposite hills. Miles looks back up at the cave. He wonders what he could be looking for there. He doesn’t know the word for it. He knows it isn’t a foolish thing to want. But he is late to pick up Zoey, and he turns away from the cave and returns to Berry’s truck.
* * *
When he gets to Mrs. Odecoven’s, Zoey is having dinner. Mrs. Odecoven invites him to sit with them and he does. Only one dusty photo on the mantlepiece, an angular-faced man in a pea coat, speaks of Mr. Odecoven. Miles begs off a serving of casserole and then cobbler.
After Zoey helps clean up, Miles apologizes again for being late, wraps his daughter in her green coat. Only then does he find out business has already been concluded. Miles writes a check for two hundred dollars, and Mrs. Odecoven tosses the used saddle into his trunk.
In the weeks that follow, Miles hears Zoey riding her saddle in her room, sometimes late into the night. He knows female physiology well enough to understand what is going on. And psychology too. She is self-soothing. As much as Miles and Angie tried to give Zoey a normal life, Zoey grew up with her mother’s illness.
So, Miles ignores the creaking, flips pages of his book, marks papers, cleans, dusts. Dusting was something Angie said he never did, and sometimes, he and Angie have an internal dialogue, her voice, his, about dusting or something equally inconsequential. Other times, he looks out at the gray-yellow grass in the distance and the gray fence running up the hill and the cloud-gray hills further on, a light snow falling. The creaking goes on. Miles is dead-set against shaming Zoey.
* * *
The patriarch rancher, James Thurmond Hatter, who everyone calls Hat, invites Zoey out to the Powder Ranch for a day of ranch work because Amy, Zoey’s friend, is his great-niece. Hat believes he came up with the idea on his own.
At home, Miles cuts wood for a fence meant to keep deer out of their garden. Between whirs of the saw, he hears the phone. He sets the saw on a board stretched over sawhorses and goes inside.
The Powder Ranch is just-down-the-road, as locals say, which in this case means about seventy miles. Over those miles, Miles worries, though Mrs. Hatter has assured him that Zoey is fine. “Just emotional, is all.”
Along the roadside western yarrow grows at the fence line and in the sloping hills of the Clear Creek basin pronghorn antelope and whitetail deer stand motionless. Out at Arvada, he takes the left down the dirt track onto Lower Powder River Road.
As he drives down the long gravel road, Miles sees Zoey sitting with Amy on the steps of the house. When Miles arrives the patriarch’s wife leans in the swinging storm-door in saddle-worn jeans and a jean jacket, her fist affixed to her hip.
“Culling the herd. Can’t lose a day’s work,” she says.
Miles asks Amy if she needs a ride back home and she doesn’t.
The yellow buttes jut up in their odd shapes and the road curves along. Zoey’s shoulders shake with quiet crying. Miles pats her thigh and then he lets her alone, figuring she’ll cry it out. He knows there were older boys working at the ranch. Zoey curls up. She seems to sleep.
At home, he shakes her awake. She doesn’t say anything. He coaxes her out of the car. She’s too big to carry.
He unplugs the circular saw and wraps the cord around the handle. He spools his extension cord. He puts the tool in the shed along with the wood and chicken wire and steps inside when he is done. He realizes he expects the creaking he hears. He takes his place on the plaid couch and picks up his book about prehistoric man in the western United States. He reads about the flaked stones they used for hunting and zones of discovery. A box elder bug crawls across the pages of his book. The creaking stops.
“Zoey?” he calls out. He turns his head to her closed door. In a moment, the door hinge squeaks and she looks out. “Can you talk to me?” Her face is creased and puffy red from crying. “Come and sit by me,” he says. She sits next to him and soon she is crying again.
She says she was watching the ranch hands, the boys splitting off calves and roping them and loading them into trailers. Her voice squeaks between sobs. Miles gets an impression of the boys’ expert horsemanship, their adept rope handling, the dust, the cows lowing. Zoey’s face is a stain of red blotchy tears, and Miles wipes at her gently with his sleeve. “You know, it’s natural to be envious.”
She stops crying. Her shoulders become still. “Zoey?” he says. “What is it?” They’d been talking but now she’s as closed to him as ever.
Late that night Miles wakes to find his child standing by his bed. She sits first on the edge and then curls up beside him. She doesn’t speak. She could be sleepwalking. Miles believes he’s heard you should never wake a sleepwalker. He doesn’t know why. In the dark, listening to her shallow breath, Miles understands what she saw that day at Powder Ranch. Through the clopping hooves and sinuous turns of the cutting horses, Zoey saw calves wrestled from their mothers.
* * *
Mrs. Odecoven says she has a horse more suitable for Zoey, but even Mrs. Odecoven cannot stay the momentum, brought on by Zoey’s mother’s death, a new school, mean children, a father’s guilt, by cows and calves, the horse breeders and ranchers, even their industry, by Mrs. Odecoven herself, her resistance to the horse ringing convenient, her nature to calculate her advantage. In May, Miles buys the cutter from the rancher-patriarch, Mr. Hatter, and arranges to board it at Mrs. Odecoven’s stable.
Midsummer, after Zoey’s Saturday morning riding lesson, Zoey says Mrs. Odecoven told her she’s ready to take Emma Flynn out on her own, so long as someone is with her. Shouldn’t they take lunch and some things and wouldn’t he like to do that, just the three of them? Miles feels the hot part of morning on his neck. He looks out at the few cows in the pen and a gas pump box further on. Zoey’s voice is bright as a bell.
Driving with Mrs. Odecoven’s trailer behind their car, Miles takes the road the custodian Henry Berry drove him down. He tries to recall the cliff face and the fence line. Zoey sits beside him holding their bag of sandwiches.
At the base of Coal Creek Road, Miles parks. He turns the hasp and shoots the bolt back, and they unload Emma Flynn. It is past midday, the very hottest part of the day, but at least it will be cooling. Zoey cinches a leather strap around Emma Flynn while Miles stretches.
They begin, Miles running, Emma Flynn jolty, compressing her muscle but shy of unloading that spring. They head down the creek road, between the west and east facing drainages. The sun is hot, radiating through the clear air and off the road. When Miles has the opportunity to take some double track into the hills and avoid the hot red dirt, he turns that way, into clover so dry it crackles.
Once, before Zoey was born, out on Point Reyes, Miles and Angie had sprinted along the beach naked, first one then the other. Angie was a remarkable athlete, compulsively so, and Miles remembers the muscles in her legs, in her hips, her stomach and shoulders and arms, all contracting and loosing to a single purpose. He calls back to Zoey, “You go ahead. I want to watch you.”
Zoey nudges Emma Flynn and Emma coils her haunches and kicks ahead.
The horse leads for several miles, and when the road swoops up and over the ridge, away from the creek road, he, Zoey, and Emma Flynn stay in the valley by turning onto the prairie. They run over cattle tracks, between sage and cactus, uphill and down, through dried wetland, and marsh, up toward ridges on the other side.
The white-yellow hills shine like corn silk. By the western bluff, they run past first a few, then dozens, of sandstone boulders that stand like well-fed bodies on the side of a hill. In the boulder field, they stop and rest. Miles drinks from the water Zoey carries and hands it back. Miles holds Emma Flynn’s reins, and Zoey dismounts.
She tries to climb the boulders only to find the rock breaks off in her hands. Miles enjoys watching her spirit until she grows frustrated and wipes the dusty sand on the sides of her jeans.
In the depression of one boulder they find a circle, about an arm’s length across, made of quartz rocks – white, yellow, and blood red stones. Miles thinks of the tipi circles on another ridge. These circles neither look old nor useful.
Emma Flynn nudges Miles. “Stop that,” Miles says.
Zoey asks, “What do you think that is?”
Miles knows that all this was a sea, and that they are running on the bottom of that sea, on sediment. The stone in this area was either glazed by lightning and some, the clinker, baked to hard clay by the coal fires the lightning ignited. Some stone, like these sandstone boulders, were compacted under pressure. “There’s no quartz stone here,” said Miles. “It had to be brought from somewhere else, and that means it was made by people, for some purpose. Probably it has to do with magic.”
“What kind of magic?” Zoey asks.
The wind dries the sweat on Miles’s forehead. “Hard to say. It’s magical thinking. That’s what I mean.”
Miles turns away from the quartz circle and looks out over the hills and to the mountains in the distance when the geology all around seems to rush in, that this was a sea, that the water was filled with life, that all that life was buried and fermented to gas, while the land rose, is still rising, the water draining away, creating all this beauty. He looks to the side and sees dry afternoon wind making waves in the bending grass.
“So it might be like keeping something in the ground? Like a spirit?”
Miles turns back to Zoey, who is squatting and touching the stones. It is an anthropological find of some kind. For some reason, Miles does not want Zoey to disturb it. “It could be that.”
“What kind of spirit? A good one? A bad one? Something evil?” She picks up a quartz stone, holds it to the sun.
“Whatever you want. It could be good or bad. Whatever you want.” Miles watches her put the stone back, not quite in the same place, but chocked against another stone.
“You want to know what it is?” Zoey says. She kneels and reaches to the center stone, cleft on one end and tapered at the other like a Valentine’s Day heart. She puts her hand over it.
“No. Don’t tell me.” Miles says. Softer he says, “That ruins it.”
“Why?”
He could say, those are the rules. He shrugs. Whether Zoey notices or not, he doesn’t know. She seems to think it over. She says, “Okay. I have something.”
Then Zoey picks up the center rock. She turns toward Emma Flynn with the stone. Miles is certain Zoey is going to put the stone into her saddle bag.
“Leave it here,” Miles barks. Emma Flynn snorts and shakes her head.
“What did you say?” Zoey says. “You don’t talk to me like that.”
“Leave it. In the center. Where you found it.”
Zoey squints at him. Emma Flynn shakes off flies. Zoey drops the stone back in place.
Miles says, “That way we can believe in it.”
* * *
Running ahead, Miles sees the mouth of the cave. He hasn’t thought of it once, since those many months ago, but now here it is. He calls to Zoey and points to the cones of rock. They run on, and below the cave, Zoey dismounts, says Emma Flynn can’t climb the steep slope to the cave. “I’m not interested.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Pretty sure.”
“OK,” he says, and he knows she’s saying that she isn’t interested in him or his life, but he’s got to put that out of his mind. He turns away from her and steps up the slope.
He wedges his toes into the scree. She’s pouting. That’s okay. His psychiatrist told him he needs to believe that Zoey will be all right. So, Miles climbs up alone and reaches the entrance, a yawn in the rock.
He looks in, feels the cool air, glances back at Zoey. She looks down at the ground and holds Emma Flynn’s bridle, and he tells himself that it’s okay for Zoey to be sad or angry, and that he doesn’t have to make everything better. He crouches and steps into the semi-darkness.
Just inside, the roof rises. Miles carefully stands, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. The air of the cave feels like velvet against his skin. Toward the back, the roof slops down. Miles shuffles back and crouches to peer into a low hollow filled with silt. Miles considers that nine thousand years ago human beings huddled there, lying close, embracing. They must have been cold. They must have been cold and hungry all the time.
He reaches out a hand and places it in a horizontal crack, jostling something cold and slow to move. He knows what he’s done. The snake, bothered from sleep, strikes Miles in the face.
In the second that follows, Miles imagines the snake will drop away. Amazing that it doesn’t. He rips it away, the fangs tearing his cheek. The snake falls at his feet. He thinks, “My God.”
* * *
Zoey sees her father stagger backward from the cave. Emma Flynn pulls, and Zoey’s grip constricts the rein. Her father lurches down a few steps, his legs hinging suddenly at the knees. He falls, skids down the scree. He rights himself and sits. He holds a hand against his face which is swelling. Something streams from that side. He calls down, “Zoey, honey, I’m going to tell you exactly what to do.”
Zoey tosses the water as best she can up the hill. She hates to leave her father, hates to get on the horse, hates Emma Flynn. She doesn’t want any of it. She hates Emma Flynn and the High Plains and even her father. She hates everything. And in that hatred, she fires hard, her every action set in perfect execution. She melds to the saddle, fuses with the horse, her thoughts, her hands, her legs with Emma Flynn’s shoulders and mane, her haunches and hooves, pounding into the slope, through the swales, and toward the road. Zoey knows. She has the feeling. Everything is going to be all right because she is going to make it all right.
And then the horse begins to move in a new way in the field that opens before her.
Miles has a lot of pain. His neck pinches up toward the bite. He can see in all directions, over the hills and toward the mountains, a few gas pumps in the far valley. On the southern slope antelope gather. In the distance a large bird loops in and out of a thermal. It hurts for him to move the smallest amount. The water is about ten feet down the slope. He can’t imagine getting to it. “I am a fool,” he offers.
He and Angie had run on the beach. After the run they’d had sex in the tent. It was a happy time and they’d had many happy moments, camping, trips, but they’d had other kinds of times too. Once Miles had thought, “The cancer is the least of it.” It was the worst thought he’d ever had. He’d buried himself in his book. He had medical costs. He wanted the security of tenure.
Miles looks south where his daughter slipped out of sight. His throat tightens. Dusk comes on. He is thirsty. The hills and grasses ease themselves into darkness. His cheek balloons with swelling. His hamstrings are tight. Truth is, he’s always been a poor runner, awkward gait, bad feet. A lonely sport. Why he kept it up all these years, he couldn’t guess. Miles knows a quarter mile down the valley, the sandstone boulders look out west toward the Bighorn just like he does. He believes in Zoey.
* * *
Henry Berry sits at the Too Much Horse drinking a can of Miller. He’ll have to pay with a check. He doesn’t mention this to Nola, the proprietress, or the two other women playing cards, Sophia, Nola’s sister, and a friend, both big-boned, blonde women. They sit in the bay window that looks out over the parked cars and road and the co-op’s diesel tanks across the street. He certainly doesn’t mention it to the large boy, Nola’s son Brian, only fourteen and already 220 pounds. Henry Berry knows the boy from the middle school hallways. Last year the boy went on to the high school where he plays football.
They don’t much care what he has to say anyway, he’s come to think. He said one day that the white man destroys nature because he hates it. They looked at him. Berry, one-eigth Shoshone, stands by the statement, but what did he expect? Nola’s father, and therefore Nola, her son, and her sister, all benefit from the land lease to the gas company.
Berry’s friend Allen comes in, gray stubble on his jowly cheeks, the sheepskin cap he wears, regardless of the hot weather, aslant over his eyebrows, a soiled shirt that reads Recluse Wyoming. He tells about a good-looking paint found out on the road and a girl up on Coal Creek. “Smashed to pieces. Taking her to Sheridan.”
“That right?” Berry says.
“Riding Coal Creek, and we found her car and trailer. Ugly little girl.”
Berry orders a beer for Allen because he’s paying with a check anyway. Allen’s an old friend and they have a long history. They sit at the round table by the photos and the small side window. Henry Berry has been to Coal Creek within the last year, but he can’t remember what on earth would have drawn him up there. Berry drinks from the beer can. “She from around here?”
Allen adjusts his cap down tighter on his head.
“Round here?” Berry asks again.
Allen doesn’t know.
“We’ll hear the story soon enough,” Allen says.
“Apache Oil land up river?” Nola says. “Not BLM?”
Allen says, “That’s right,” which starts the talk about the Bureau of Land Management. Berry knows to keep his mouth shut about that.
Turns out the girl did get pretty banged up. At the hospital they understand well enough from her where her father is. Search and Rescue find him early the next day, dehydrated, hypothermia, in bad shape.
When Berry hears they found him snake-bit, Berry thinks back to that time on the prairie he’d had. Thing was, rattlesnakes are a good snake. They cull rodents and stay away from trouble, unless you fall in their hole.
“Allen, do you recall?” Henry Berry asks. “Up there and the steam?”
Allen shifts his sheepskin cap on his head. “Steam? Don’t recall it.”
“Out of the ground?”
Allen shakes his head. “Nope.”
Outside, a drill fractures the sedimentary rock with toxic fluid.
Later, Berry hears they went back to California or wherever it was they’d come from. He’ll lose money on that paint, Berry thinks, and on their house too, in the forced sale. Berry hears about a dispute over stable fees with Mrs. Odecoven down the road and that a lawyer in town’s been called in. They say at the school they lost a good teacher.
Still later, Henry Berry hears the ranch he once worked, over 1,000 acres, one that had been part his by marriage, had sold for over four million dollars and not one in the family got a penny for it, not even his ex-wife, which he wouldn’t have expected, but none of the others either, though their people homesteaded the property and built the house out of hewn stone that still stood through winter and drought. He hears a movie producer bought it.
Henry Berry drinks from a can of Miller beer. He wonders whether he’ll meet any famous people, what they’ll do, and what they might say. He wonders whether folks around here will make them welcome.
Otis Haschemeyer’s stories have appeared in The Missouri Review, Fourteen Hills, Louisiana Literature, and Best New American Voices. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.