Authors: Annie Proulx
Postcards (36 page)
His third wife was rumored to be a transvestite.
A modest vein of coal was discovered on the property but efforts to mine it failed as oil flooded the coal and gas filled the shafts. An unlucky lightning strike started a fire which blew up the gas, burned off the oil and smoldered underground in the coal for ten years.
When the cattle failed he switched over to sheep. Because there wasn’t a herder to be hired for love nor money he let the sheep take care of themselves. With the sheep he bought a ready-made hatred of coyotes and believed his land was infested with them in unprecedented numbers, that they came from as far away as the Dakotas and Montana to plague his animals.
But Loyal never thought Cloves the comic figure of his reputation.
Saw him in a bar for the first time. Cloves walked into Bite the Dust. He drank a red beer, asked for another. Loyal looked out of the side of his eye. Took in the big, oversized head, thought he looked a little like Mussolini. Brown crinkled hair moving back from a bald front. Meaty nose. The chin a stubbled pillow. Head hunching forward, muscular torso, everything thick and short as if weights sat on the man at night. He kept looking up as if his neck was permanently crimped that way.
‘Anybody interested in trapping coyote I got a stock of the finest that ever lifted a leg.’ Snakeskin boots. The voice was low and harsh. He didn’t wait for an answer but turned and went out.
‘Who was that masked man,’ Loyal asked the jaw-wagging bartender.
‘Oh that’s old Whoop-Up Cloves, millionaire ten times over when he started, but got it down to about two or three million now. Spreads happiness wherever he goes. He just switched to sheep and to hear him say it the biggest assortment of coyotes in the US of A is on his place.’
Cloves had had the government trappers in all summer with traps, snares, shooting from planes, cyanide guns and poison baits. The carcasses, mostly young animals, had been dumped to rot in an old gravel pit near the creek. The survivors, Loyal thought, would know every trick in the book – older, smarter, bait-wise, trap-wise. What
the hell, he’d give it a try. Just for the hell of it. He’d get in touch with Cloves.
‘O.k.,’ said Cloves. ‘You’re on. Just one thing – stay out of the northwest end there goes up into the mountains. I got a project going on up there I don’t want any trapping around it.’ He winked at Loyal who guessed there were plots of wacky weed up there somewhere. Hell, coyotes would eat that, too.
But he had not even finished scouting the land before he knew something was going on. Pickups grinding up the steep mountain road in the night hours. Distant ride shots. Hounds baying.
Saturday night in Bite the Dust was Saturday night. Around four in the afternoon the parking lot started filling with mufflerless pickups. Dogs in the passenger seats, in the bed. When the aqua pickup, painted with leftover swimming pool paint, pulled in, every dog in the parking lot began to bark and strain forward. He’d seen it working up and down the mountain road on Cloves’s ranch.
‘What the hell you carry in that rig make ’em start up like that every time you drive up,’ asked Bubby sitting next to the runty rider. They rode their bar stools down at the end with practiced grace. The man coming through the door was a pyramid with sparkling yellow eyes and a brown beard parted in the middle and knotted to each side with a twist of annealed wire. Necklace of badger claws dripping over his chest. Loyal smelled musk, rotten bait, green hide and something else and knew he was a trapper. Out of season. Not coyote, not fox or bobcat.
‘Meow,’ said the hulk.
‘Lion? By god, I believe it. That’d set ’em going.’
‘Didn’t say that was it,’ said the trapper and asked for whiskey and beer. When he had them he walked over to Loyal and sat down across from him. Runty rider was quiet.
‘I seen you scouting around. Cloves says you’re going for coyote, huh!’
‘Price holds up. Prime brought seventy per, end of the season.’ Hell, he didn’t want to sit with this outlaw.
‘Get a hundred you’re doing excellent. Price drops, you’re in a world of shit, workin’ for twenty cents an hour.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Government trappers been working over that land all summer, you know.’
‘I know. It was sort of a challenge, see how good I can do in a troubled situation.’
‘Troubled is right. Know why the government guys left?’
‘No. Figured they were all done.’
‘Hell no. Cloves drives out one day all hopped up on something and starts shooting at them. Says, “I’d teach you to kill my sheep. I’m gonna wipe every motherfucker coyote off the face of the earth.” Thought they were the coyotes. They did look kind of mangy, but hell, I could always tell they had two legs. So you want to watch out. Got a crazy streak. Usually he ain’t around in the winter, or so I hear. I only been here three months myself so I ain’t seen his winter habits yet. Say he goes to Mexico to stay warm. What the hell, wish I had a nice cush of money to do that, don’t you?’ He winked. At the bar the runty rider was watching them in the mirror. Loyal had an absurd thought about him. The dogs barked their brains out.
‘Wanna park your truck downwind so we can have a little peace and quiet in here?’ The bartender was polite, but his voice bored in. The trapper went out and shifted the truck to the other side of the building. But he was irritable when he came back in and Loyal thought there would be trouble later on. He finished his whiskey and left.
At the door he glanced back and caught the runty rider’s eyes just sliding away. Before he fell asleep he tried to pin down the stink on the trapper. Pine marten? Lion?
It wasn’t lion.
A week later he sat at the table reading a three-day-old paper. The bar was empty. The bartender messed with a jar of pickled eggs, taking them out with stainless steel tongs, fussily arranging them in a bowl.
The wind sang around and around. He rattled the pages. The bartender opened his mouth only to yawn.
‘Here comes your friend,’ he said after an hour, hearing something Loyal didn’t. He didn’t catch the blatting exhaust note until the swimming pool pickup was in sight.
‘He’s unknown to me. Last Sat’day the only time I ever set eyes on him. I get about as much fun out of his company as I do out of a wet dog’s.’
‘Well, he’s been in and out of here since September. Claims he come over from Maine or on the
Mayflower
or something like that.’ The truck peeled in. The door dammed.
‘Well son of a gun, look who’s here. Run off on me last time and missed all the fun, didn’t he? Gimmee the usual, Robert.’
‘There you go. Want a pickled egg?’
‘I wouldn’t eat one of them stinking things if you fed it to me dipped in cunt honey and rolled in sugar.’
‘Some like them. In fact I remember seeing you eat damn near the whole bowl the night we threw you out. So I thought you were partial to them. Maybe if you don’t eat any you’d stay nice and we won’t have to work the magic trick on you any more.’
‘Hey, what’s over is over, right? I never carry a chip around.’ He looked at Loyal as if at a brother. He made Loyal uneasy. He put up his paper and rattled it a little, even though he had read everything except the FOR RENT classifieds. The trapper stayed at the bar and from there he didn’t whiff so bad. Loyal thought he must have cleaned up.
In an hour the place was swarming with the same big-hatted rats, the runty rider on the stool at the end, getting his backward view of the world from the mirror. Another man, looked like the outlaw’s partner, called him ‘Sylvester’ and clapped him on the back. Smaller and dirtier, a soupstrainer mustache, wore an Orion sweater under a pair of overalls that gave him a hippie freak look. Something about the sloping head and screwed-up features that was like old Roseboy in the antique chill of his grandfather’s apple room. The smell of cold, fresh apples ticked up, faded. The partner wore a woodsman’s tuque that didn’t go well with the rolled Stetsons and high-heel boots around
him. Even Robert behind the bar wore his cowboy hat. A couple of mavericks, like Loyal, had on tractor caps,
NOTHING RUNS LIKE A DEERE, CAT
erpillar. No tuques. The partner had a southern accent. The poker tabletop leaned against the back wall. A few kids were shooting pool. Loyal ordered a steak with pickles and fried potatoes.
He was startled when the trapper sat down across the table from him, jarring it so the steak juice slopped over the rim of the plate. The son of a bitch didn’t know when to be scarce.
‘Hey, old-timer, I got something important I wanna talk to you about.’
‘Important comes in two sizes – yours and mine,’ said Loyal through a mouthful of tough meat.
‘No, seriously, how you doing with the coyotes? Caught any yet?’
‘Umhm,’ said Loyal.
‘Yeah? How many? Three or four?’ The partner came over, carrying a wooden chair. He sat down. The chair jutted into the room.
‘Twelve. Any of your business.’
‘Well, it might be. We thought you might like to make some real money. We thought you might want to make a real killing instead of farting around with coyotes. We could use some semi-experienced help. Trapping help. The money’s out of sight.’ He laughed, and Loyal realized he had been whispering.
‘What are you taking?’ said Loyal.
‘Ah-ah-ah! That would be telling. You tell him, Sam.’
‘This is going to sound a little weird, man, but there is a market in Japan and Korea and China for certain substances. Aphrodisiacs.’
‘What the hell is that?’ They were all whispering.
‘Stuff that the Japanese guys think will double the size of their prick and give ’em a three-day hard-on. Sex stuff. You heard of it. Like Spanish fly, only they don’t want Spanish fly. They want rhinoceros horn. They want powdered elk teeth. They want saber-toothed tiger fossil paste. They want the gallbladders of black bears.’ Bear. That was the smell. The partner talked while Sylvester the bear trapper nodded.
‘They will pay big big big bucks for this stuff. Plus we got a market for the hides. We are making money like you wouldn’t believe. Been working Maine and Florida, up in Canada. It’s real hard with only
two. We had another guy, but he pulled out and retired to Hawaii. Could use somebody to work with us. Three’s better. Cloves says you’re a good trapper.’ Loyal wanted to look up at the mirror and see if the runt rider was taking in this huddle.
‘Damn, boys, it sounds lucrative, but I’ve got a bad ticker. Can’t do any heavy work. Bears sounds like heavy work to me.’
‘You wouldn’t have to do the heavy stuff, just set out the traps. We’d deal with the bear, man. It’s not that heavy a work, just cut them open and take out the gallbladder, cut out the claws. Hell, most of the time we don’t even bother with the hides. We don’t have the time. The hides, the skinning. That would be your share.’
‘I lifted a bear trap or two in my time. They weigh damn near fifty pound each and that is a lot of weight. Besides, I don’t care for this country. Pulling out next week.’ He hadn’t known until then that he was heading back to the Sagine ranch. He’d have to go that night. These weren’t the kind you turned down after they dumped their dirty secrets on you. He saw himself pulling up at the fur auction with twenty ratty, clawless bearskins. That would start a little talk.
‘Obliged for you asking me. I’ll just say good-by.’ He handed the steak plate to the bartender.
‘Wonder if you’d wrap that up in a plastic bag for me. Us toothless old dogs have to chew careful.’ As he took the bag he looked in the mirror at the runty rider. But didn’t want any part of him, either.
DUB, FAT IN WHITE LINEN in the peacock chair, having breakfast beside the pool before sunrise. The chilled mimosa, the opal-fleshed melon with a twist of green-tangerine juice, then the country ham and the quail eggs flown in from Japan, blackhearted coffee that wired you for the day. He’d drink twenty cups of it until his hands shook.
His hands were steady when Mernelle called, her northern voice asking what he thought about burying Ma’s wedding ring next to Da. Because that’s all they had. It would ease their minds. She’d come across the ring a few weeks ago tidying boxes and drawers. She thought Ma had taken it off when Da had —
‘Sure, why not?’ he said.
She read him the inscription. ‘“JSB Forever Thine MMB June, 1915.” At least it’s something that was hers, something that ties them together,’ she said.
‘That’s right,’ he said.
He loved the rotten tropical smell, the heat, kept the air conditioners at lukewarm. ‘Turn that thing down, reminds me of ‘Winter on the Farm,’ famous painting by Frosty the Snowman. What the hell you think I live in Florida for?’ But laughing.
A good-looking man despite the bulked chest and jowled face and the glowing bald head. Clients fell into his smiling eyes. In the mirror he saw he still had the fine mouth and, of course, he had the money. Manicured nails (on the good hand) and custom-made suits don’t come without it. He had Pala, or she had him. The pirate, a little heavier, wore beige and ecru linen suits, gold chains knotted with medallions and charms hung around her neck. Smarter than anyone he knew. Secretive. He thought there might have been an abortion but could not ask. The properties were her children now.