Gallatin Canyon (3 page)

It was a half-hour drive, and the serious ache and swelling commenced. He parked close to the emergency entrance, next to two old ambulances, and limped into the waiting room. The nurse, filling out forms, was a long time acknowledging him and when she did so it was by the mere raising of her head. When he explained what was wrong, she told him to have a seat. They must see a lot of snakebites, Briggs thought. The spot where he’d been bitten was now quite enlarged and had acquired a dusky cast that worried him.

Eventually, the nurse instructed him to fill out a form, which he did with growing awareness of the pain. Then she said, “I’ll take you to your room. You’ll be spending the night.” She turned and Briggs followed her down a brown corridor with the usual antiseptic smell and stainless-steel tables on wheels. She left him in the room. He propped one foot on the toe of the other to alleviate the rhythmic ache and found himself perspiring. He reached for the remote control, turned the TV on, and then turned it off immediately.

A few minutes later, Olivia entered in a nurse’s uniform. “Let’s get rid of those pants,” she said. As Briggs lay in his shorts, Olivia bent close over the wound and studied it in silence. “Right back,” she said, and left the room. When she returned a few minutes later, she had a metal tray with a syringe on it. “I don’t like this stuff,” she said, “but the poison has spread and we’ve got to use it. It will help with the pain. We’re talking pronto.” Briggs had planned a conversation designed to crack this mystery, but Olivia was leaning over him, studying his eyes as she pressed the hypodermic into him, and with the enveloping wave he was overcome. “Feels so good,” she said quietly. “Doesn’t it?” He nodded slowly, infinitely grateful for the bite of the rattlesnake. She held his face in her hands and gazed at him as he went under. “I just know it feels
so
good.”

When he awoke the next morning, he doubted everything he remembered. He checked his leg to see if he’d been bitten by a snake, and thank God he had. He noticed that the pain was gone. He rang the call button next to his bed. A nurse entered, a tall, peevish woman of fifty, carrying a copy of
Field & Stream.
“I’m better, and I’m going home.”

“Doctor will decide when you can go.”

With Briggs’s impatience growing, it was a blessing the doctor came soon. Close to retirement age, he was a well-groomed silver-haired man, exceedingly thin, in polished walking shoes, cuffed serge pants, and a sparkling white smock.

“How do you feel?”

“I feel fine, ready to go home. I suppose the nurse is off today.”

“What nurse?”

“The one who treated me last night.”

“I treated you last night. You were sound asleep, like you’d passed out. In any case, I couldn’t wake you: I went ahead and did what I thought best. I gave you a good slug of antivenin.”

“I clearly remember a woman coming in and treating me.”

“I hope she was pretty. It was a dream.”

“Let me ask you something. Is Dr. Halliday on duty today?”

The doctor looked startled and a little evasive. He said, “Dr. Halliday lost his license to practice a long time ago. Of course, we feel terrible about it. His daughter has stayed with us, and we hope that’s some help in a very regrettable situation.”

Briggs left the hospital in the same dirty clothes he’d worn to paint and clean his yard. He drove home, parked by the woodpile, and killed the snake with a hoe, then went up to the house to read his mail and check his phone messages. He felt an incongruous sadness about killing the snake, which had tried in vain to get away. The refrigerator was still well stocked, and he started a pot of spicy vegetable soup. He smelled mothballs and remembered the blankets he’d put in storage the day before.

On Wednesday, he took three shirts and a sport jacket to be dry-cleaned. He usually went to Arnold’s, where he had an account, but it was closed on Wednesdays so he drove a few extra miles and carried his things into Bright’s. The smell of cleaning fluid was a little stronger in Bright’s, and he wondered whether that meant they were more thorough or just harsher on the clothes. To the left of the long counter, a broad woman with her back to him operated the electrical revolving rack. She said, “Be just a sec,” and compared a slip with that on several garments going past. She found what she was looking for, a tuxedo, and took it down to hang on a rigid rack next to the cash register, before turning to Briggs: it was her, the woman who’d accosted him at the farmers’ market. She recognized him first and covered her mouth with her hands. “I wondered if I’d see you again. I so have to apologize to you! I completely and utterly thought you were someone else.”

“Don’t give it a thought,” Briggs said with reserve. He added, “I gather you took a number of other people for someone else.”

This puzzled her. “No, just you.”

“I was led to think otherwise. Guess it’s my turn to apologize.”

“Can we call it even-Steven?”

He hoped to have a chance to speak to Olivia about this. So, later in the fall, when he received an invitation to her wedding, his first thought was, Of course I’ll go.

In the receiving line, Olivia, jubilant and tipsy, hung around the neck of her new husband, a glass of champagne in her hand. The wedding party was clamorous, gathered under the old trees behind the house with the red shutters. The husband was a specimen of tidy manhood, with black, tightly clipped hair, blue eyes, and ears like little seashells; he wore a perfectly tailored dark summer suit and a colorful tie that spelled out the word
Montana
—not the state but Claude, the French couturier. Briggs wondered if he was wrong in thinking the groom wore eyeliner. Olivia touched the champagne glass to the tip of her nose and giggled when Briggs appeared. He knew right away that he wouldn’t be able to ask his questions. He pumped the husband’s hand and wished them all the luck in the world. He meant it, even though he felt the same queer longing on seeing Olivia. It was her husband’s turn to go for a ride.

During the ceremony, rain clouds had grumbled overhead and now the shower began. The wedding party rushed to the house with hilarity, and Briggs decided this would be a good time for him to leave, but Olivia detained him, resting her outspread fingers on his shirt while the rain fell on them both. She was remarkably heedless in her beautiful wedding gown, and Briggs caught sight of the groom’s face in the hall window. “You were so good to me that time and so patient with my father,” she said.

“Where is your father?”

“We got him out of here.” She was close to him as she spoke. He felt her breath on his face and his heart was racing. “I’m glad I had the chance to”—she smiled—“to give you a lift when you were in the hospital.”

The rain redoubled, sweeping down through the canopy of leaves, and they fled to the house, Olivia disappearing into the happy crowd. Briggs didn’t know quite what to do with himself. He made his way back to the kitchen where he’d dined with Dr. Halliday. It was empty. He went to the sink and ran the tap until the water was cold, filled a glass, and drank it down. The pandemonium outside elevated for an instant as the kitchen door opened behind him. When he put the glass down and turned around, he was looking into the face of the groom, aggressively close to his own. He stared at Briggs in silence. “I hope you understand that you will never put your nasty hands on her again,” he said. “Get over it.”

Briggs looked at this handsome well-cared-for man. “It will be hard to give up,” Briggs said.

“But you will, won’t you?”

“I suppose. It was so intense, the last time, in my car, the air bags deployed. But, yes, you have my word.”

The groom reached out his hand and Briggs took it. The hand was so clammy that Briggs had an instant of sympathy. In the groom’s face nothing changed. “Have we got a deal?” the groom asked, and Briggs pretended to agonize over the decision. He let the conflicts play themselves out on his face, then heaved a great sigh.

“We’ve got a deal,” he said, his voice resigned.

As they strolled back to the party together, Briggs decided that spicing things up in this way was absolutely the last favor he would do for Olivia. He watched the groom go to her and whisper in her ear. Olivia looked over at Briggs, smiled at him sadly, he thought, and waved. Hello? Goodbye? He wasn’t sure.

The rain had stopped, and something caused the wedding party to gravitate to the stately elm shading the lawn, its leaves just starting to change color. Briggs followed until he was part of the half circle of celebrants facing Olivia, who stood on a small dais, placed there, he supposed, for this purpose. “I’d like to propose a toast!” she called out, in a voice that carried remarkably. He barely heard her words but stared, spellbound, at her wide, confident smile, the steady movement of her head as she took in all the guests, and the hand gestures that would have been clear from the nearby mountains. Her voice rang out expressively, each syllable occupying its own time and space. At the end of her toast, she clasped her hands to her chest and bowed modestly to the admiring applause and, without looking, reached out a regal hand to her new husband.

Cowboy

The old feller made me go into the big house in my stocking feet. The old lady’s in a big chair next to the window. In fact, the whole room’s full of big chairs, but she’s only in one of them, though as big as she is she could of filled up several. The old man said, “I found this one in the loose-horse pen at the sale yard.”

She says, “What’s he supposed to be?”

He says, “Supposed to be a cowboy.”

“What’s he doin in the loose horses?”

I says, “I was lookin for one that would ride.”

“You was in the wrong pen, son,” says the old man. “Them’s canners. They’re goin to France in cardboard boxes.”

“Once they get a steel bolt in the head.” The big old gal in the chair laughed.

Now I’m sore. “There’s five in there broke to death. I rode em with nothin but binder twine.”

“It don’t make a shit,” says the old man. “Ever one of them is goin to France.”

The old lady didn’t believe me. “How’d you get near them loose horses to ride?”

“I went in there at night.”

The old lady says, “You one crazy cowboy go in there in the dark. Them broncs kick your teeth down your throat. I suppose you tried bareback.”

“Naw, I drug the saddle I usually ride at the Rose Bowl Parade.”

“You got a horse for that?”

“I got Trigger. We unstuffed him.”

She turns to the old man. “He’s got a mouth on him. This much we know.”

“Maybe he can tell us what good he is.”

I says, “I’m a cowboy.”

“You’re a outta work cowboy.”

“It’s a dyin way of life.”

“She’s about like me. She’s wondering if this ranch supposed to be some welfare agency for cowboys.”

I’ve had enough. “You’re the dumb honyocker drove me out here.”

I thought that was the end, but the old lady said, “Don’t get huffy. You got the job. You against conversation or somethin?”

We get outside and the old sumbitch says, “You drawed lucky there, son. That last deal could of pissed her off.”

“It didn’t make me no never mind if it did or didn’t.”

“Anymore, she hasn’t been well. Used to she was sweet as pudding.”

“I’m sorry for that. We don’t have health, we don’t have nothin.”

She must of been afflicted something terrible, because she was ugly mornin, noon, and night for as long as she lasted, pick a fight over nothin, and the old sumbitch bound to got the worst of it. I felt sorry for him, little slack as he ever cut me.

Had a hundred seventy-five sweet-tempered horned Herefords and fifteen sleepy bulls. Shipped the calves all over for hybrid vigor, mostly to the south. Had some go clear to Florida. A Hereford still had its horns was a walkin miracle and the old sumbitch had him a smart little deal goin. I soon learned to give him credit for such things, and the old lady barking commands off the sofa weren’t no slouch neither. Anybody else seen their books might say they could be winterin in Phoenix.

They didn’t have no bunkhouse, just a LeisureLife mobile home that had lost its wheels about thirty years ago, and they had it positioned by the door of the barn so it’d be convenient for the hired man to stagger out at all hours and fight breech birth and scours and any other disorder sent down by the cow gods. We had some doozies. One heifer had got pregnant and her calf was near as big as she was. Had to reach in and take it out in pieces. When we threw the head out on the ground she turned to it and lowed like it was her baby. Everything a cow does is to make itself into meat as fast as it can so somebody can eat it. It’s a terrible life, and a cowboy is its little helper.

The old sumbitch and I got along good. We got through calvin and got to see them pairs and bulls run out onto the new grass. Nothin like seeing all that meat feel a little temporary joy. Then we bladed out the corrals and watched em dry under the spring sun at long last. Only mishap was the manure spreader threw a rock and knocked me senseless and I drove the rig into an irrigation ditch. The old sumbitch never said a word but chained up and pulled us out with his Ford.

We led his cavvy out of the hills afoot with two buckets of sweet feed. Had a little of everything, including a blue roan I fancied, but he said it was a Hancock and bucked like the National Finals in Las Vegas, kicking out behind and squalling, and was just a man-killer. “Stick to the bays,” he said. “The West was won on a bay horse.”