Crybaby Ranch (6 page)

“Get rested up from your divorce…. Did you get a divorce?”

“It's, um, in the works.”

Bo gets up and begins to carry away the used dishes. “When it's over, I think you should give me a whirl.” He grins as if he's making fun of himself. I laugh and discard my nervousness for good. We got it all out in the open.

“For now,” he says, rinsing his plate, “let's walk up Saddlestring Butte.”

The early-spring forest surrounding Bo's Crossing Elk Ranch crackles beneath our feet as Bo leads the way up the path after dinner. New grasses poke through last year's brown flattened weeds.

Bo points out a warbler's nest that has fallen during the winter from a narrow-leafed cottonwood. Something about birds' nests intrigues me. The intentional gathering of supplies, for one. The deliberate downiness of its interior. I am reminded of my connectedness to other living things as I, too, prepare a home. I pack the nest along to place on a shelf beside my books.

The path leads down near a stream, which exposes mostly dry rocks this early in the season. Spring melt off won't begin until the nights warm up, according to Bo. The path forks and climbs uphill as it leaves the creek bed.

“To find my house, follow the trail south. I'll show you another time.”

I don't say so, but I've seen his house already. From this slope, higher up behind my cabin, I spotted a good-sized clapboard house, painted gray many years back, one barn and three outbuildings, also a house trailer parked in the drive. Today, we are taking the north trail uphill to his favorite site for watching the sun set or the moon rise.

I wonder where his cattle graze, and I ask.

“I don't own any cattle.”

By his tone of voice, I know I've touched a sore spot. He walks on ahead, increasing the distance between us. I figure the problem must involve money—a shortage of it—to guess by the quick sale of my cabin.

After a while Bo waits for me to catch up. He says, “Myrna Loy tells me you're a jeweler. Is that so?”

“I'm not a jeweler,” I say, “I just like to make jewelry.”

“That's what I used to say. I'm not a cattleman. I just like to have cows. But my reasons were the opposite of yours.”

I don't understand what he means, but I counsel myself to allow Bo his own pace toward the subject of cows. We approach a bench of land on Saddlestring Butte where our trail levels off and we step out of the trees. The spread of valley lies to the east, north, and south. We'd have to climb higher, to the top where the snow is still deep, to watch the sun set. Tonight, Bo says, we'll view the alpenglow on the Gros Ventre Range across the valley floor. He pushes through sagebrush to a group of boulders and sets his butt against one, crossing his boots. He plucks off a piece of sage, rolls it between his hands, then brings his hands up to cup his nose.

“I keep thinking that someday I'll stuff a pillow with sage and sleep on it all winter.”

I decide right here that I like this man. I feel impatient to know more about him. Against my better judgment, I introduce the touchy subject again. “But you don't have cows.”

“Sold them. So I don't have to say my line anymore about having cows, but that I'm not a cattleman. I'm really a welder.”

“Welder? Like at Wedco Manufacturing?” I drove around the place twice looking for the Pamida store.

“I weld metal sculpture.” He looks away from me as he says this, over toward the pale cloud blossoms of lavender and rose drifting in an airy float across the eastern sky.

Sculpture. It takes me a second to put it together, I'm so stuck on picturing the fiery equipment and the face mask and heavy gloves. “Oh, you're a sculptor.”

“No,” he says, teasing me, “I'm not a sculptor. I just like to sculpt.”

I laugh.

A gallery in town represents him, he tells me when I press for more information. They've given him two shows; one last winter, another scheduled for the fall. Recently a piece of his was purchased by a local hotel and is exhibited in the lobby.

But what kind of cowboy doesn't own cows? All this time I pictured a huge cattle herd grazing somewhere, soon to be trailed up Togwotee Pass for the summer. Beck and I used to be thrilled when traffic was stopped for cattle drives during our vacations here. “So you sold your cows.”

“To help pay off a bank loan on the ranch. That sale and my hay last summer almost set me free.”

“Selling the cabin fits in here, I bet.”

“That, too. I'm going to give this a shot.”

Dramatic life changes once furnished the main theme for my fantasies. Now the enthusiasm I feel for Bo's plans helps assure me I've done the right thing in making a big change in my own life.

We fall silent as the sundown flares on the stone headdress feathers of Sleeping Indian Mountain and the peaks of the Gros Ventre Range behind it. I picture the dozen or two galleries that line the boardwalks near the town square. Jackson Hole is becoming a major center for Western art…. Oh,
Western
art. God, he's probably one of those artists who sculpt little Sacajaweas and Sitting Bulls. Maybe bronc riders or mountain men.

“Welding exactly what?” I ask, trying to imagine his work.

“Found objects, lately. Parts from old ranching machines…plows, spring harrows, hay rakes.”

This sounds promising, yet there's still a possibility of elk with massive antler racks—made, in this case, of hay-rake prongs. An outdoor man's delight. “Western realism dominates the market in Jackson,” I say in order to get him pinned down better.

“That's true. My work leans more toward the abstract and contemporary, so I have to look farther for an audience. My roots are here though.” Bo opens his palms, exposing the rumpled sage sprig. “I love those old machines abandoned in the sagebrush. And I like it that when I've begged some tightfisted rancher into letting me cart them off, that rancher can appreciate what's become of them. He sees my roots, and the people from the coasts who buy most of the sculptures see—”

“Your blossoms,” I finish for him.

Both of us are loaded down with treasures I've found by the time we've returned to the cabin. Bo carries one fistful of tall dried weeds, beige blossoms down turned like little bells, seeds rattling inside them. In the other fist, slender, curvy pieces of wood, weathered smooth and twisted like driftwood, which I'll set by my door and use for walking sticks. I've filled the pockets of both our jackets with rocks I like the shapes or colors of. Sitting in Bo's upturned cowboy hat, crooked under one arm, is his barn cat, Tolly, who began stalking us on our way back. Bo has suggested I borrow her for that mouse I heard in the mudroom.

I
don't really like cats too much. They remind me of New Yorkers: They only acknowledge your presence if you can do something to specifically elevate their position in life. Two days with Tolly haven't altered that opinion. This afternoon, I'm fooling around with my beads at the kitchen table, and Bo stops by. I complain to him that Tolly is drinking out of my toilet, leaving tiny, muddy paw prints on the seat. And, worse, she used my bathroom sink as her toilet last night.

“How would you like to bend down to brush your teeth early in the morning and smell cat urine?” I ask him.

He picks up Tolly and smoothes her long tortoiseshell coat.

“How would you like to have to drink out of your toilet?” he responds.

Reluctantly, I laugh.

Bo glances out the kitchen window, then crooks his head to see past the trees hiding a curve in the road.

I get up and look, too. Maybe the moose I saw my first day here has returned to the neighborhood. A flash of sleek metallic red slips between green pine boughs.

Bo sets Tolly on the floor. “Caro. She mentioned she wanted to get to know you better.”

“You should have told me.” I look around the kitchen, not feeling ready for company in my new home. Failed bead projects are strewn across the kitchen table, where I've flung them in disgust. Either I've lost my touch or my expectations have risen in response to all the time I've got to work on pieces now. I'll have to lower my standards, just to have some fun.

“I didn't know she was coming. Really,” Bo says, “I've been discouraging this visit until you were more settled.”

I start gathering up half-finished coil bracelets, multistrand necklaces, tools, and supplies. If she's accustomed to private helicopters, she's accustomed to classier jewelry than I'm capable of creating.

Caro's ruby Buick glides soundlessly into my side yard. Bo seems irked to see her here and doesn't go to the door to welcome her with me. Instead, he leans against the kitchen sink and watches Caro and me blunder through stiff greetings to each other. Caro is dressed in black English riding pants tucked into shiny boots with a silky man-styled shirt blousing from her belted waist. The purple shirt looks good with her long auburn hair and argent eyes. She is taller than I am but smaller-boned or maybe just thinner. I feel solid and grounded beside her, as if her bones were hollow, like a bird's.

I finish packing my beads to get it all out of sight quickly as I can, but she is asking the dreaded questions anyway: What are you making? Is this your hobby? She picks up my container of Balinese silver bead spacers.

“I never wear anything but gold. Do you?”

Because of the way she stands looking around my kitchen, at the black gummy spots rubbed through on the linoleum, and the way Bo observes the two of us as if he's bought a ticket for this show and has no responsibility for its success, I answer her question rudely.

“I don't like to support gold mines, like the one trying to destroy Yellowstone up in Cooke City.” I've become an instant environmentalist. If she's read more than the single article I've read in the local weekly, I'm in big trouble.

I scoop up the last of my beads and watch Caro think how she'd like to tell me that I'm obviously too poor to buy gold. I know right off I'm outside the curve of Caro's lens. She is here because Bo is, and the refracted light rays of her focus do not converge on my image. Like Tolly the cat, she is merely wondering what use or hindrance I might be.

Behind a thumb pressing against his lower lip, Bo smiles at my answer, but doesn't look directly at either Caro or me.

I carry my bead case into the other room. I'm not usually bold enough to be rude. I have always needed approval too much. But something has shifted in me lately. As if I'm discovering some inner family of friends who will take the place of those lately dropped by the roadside: my mother; my husband; my stepson off at school; my father, whose narrow vision and dark negativity has become narrower and darker witnessing my mother's slow, unstoppable fade.

I pause before the woodstove, warm my hands, and realize that somewhere along the way I have inwardly acknowledged that my mother has indeed begun an irreversible decline, if for no other reason than once begun she has not the personal power or will to alter much of anything. Never has. To be honest, she began to back out of life years ago. That's what alcoholism is all about.

I return to the kitchen and see Caro sauntering around it. Several times she reaches out to touch things of mine, but repeatedly draws her hand back, as if she's fearful mites will jump out on her. The kitchen looks great, if you ask me. It's the one room I feel at home in. I sit at the table on a bench I found weathering behind my shed, and I read by the pin-up lamp on the wall, hung just below the shelf that holds my books and the bird's nest and a jar of wildflowers. I write in my journal at this table and sip my coffee.

But my contentment with this cozy log room isn't entrenched firmly enough to be safe from someone's disapproval. I struggle against the vision of this room flipping from my cocky celebration of color and the outdoors brought inside to the shabbiness Caro sees. It seems that if I key my look before me to the watery colors of the table and chairs and on toward the red geranium on the windowsill over the sink, it stays mine. If I focus on the bleak green coverings of the floor and the countertops or the once-white refrigerator now yellowing, the chrome flaking off the door handle, it becomes the room she sees.

“So”—Caro looks for a place to sit—“I guess I should have brought something to drink.”

“Oh.” I jump to action. “I've made some lemon bread. We can have tea.” I dart around for the tea bags and cups, I reach for the bread, still cooling in the pan, leaping from one task before it's completed to the other. Tossing over my shoulder to Caroline that she should have a seat.

Bo takes the bread pan from me. “You fix the tea, Suz,” he says. He misinterprets my look of panic. “—Zannah,” he finishes.

Caroline brushes nonexistent crumbs or dust from a kitchen chair.

I calm myself while water runs into the kettle. I remember to be grateful that I have something to offer a guest. Bo cooks—he fixed scalloped potatoes and Mexican pea soup from the leftover ham—but says he never bakes, so I figured that could be my contribution. And I love baking breads and desserts. I take a deep breath. The kitchen aromas are a good mix of warm lemon bread and pine boughs from the open window.

Finally seated, Caroline says, “Tea?” As in “I don't think so.”

I look. She is smiling benevolently. “Blackberry,” I announce, trying to arouse interest.

“I'll just have…water, I guess.”

I bring her a glass of water. “Ice cubes,” she reminds me quietly, as if I'm a maid who has forgotten her training.

I don't have any ice cubes. Water comes out of the tap cold enough to hurt your teeth. I use the tiny freezer for Eskimo Bars and a bag of frozen baby limas.

“Bo?” Caro says.

Bo looks at me. “I'll just run to the house and get some Scotch for Caro. Be back before your water boils.”

Oh God, he's leaving me alone with her. “No,” I say, “I'll get the Scotch. You tell me where.”

I'm acting silly. I've never even been to Bo's house. But Bo doesn't point that out. He simply says I'll find the liquor in the cupboard above the sink and thanks me, as if
I'm
saving
him
from an ordeal. On my way out the door, car keys in hand, I realize I may be painting a picture of neighborliness that will cause unease for him with Caroline. I'm beginning to wonder what exactly is going on between them. So I ask if he lives in the house I've seen from the hill or the trailer beside it.

“The house,” he answers. He hands me a plastic bag. “Get some ice cubes, too.”

On the short drive over, I have to admit more than the fear of being alone with Caroline propelled me out of the house. I feel off-balance wondering about their possible involvement. All she says is
Bo?
and he knows what she wants. I practice out loud in the car. “Bo?” Haughtier. “Bo?” And the really irksome part: He jumps to meet her desires.

I pull my Subaru into the drive and go in the back door. Bo's kitchen looks immaculate. I'm impressed. But then he's been busy the past few days making
mine
a mess, not his. The real test would be the bathroom, but I'm not going to snoop around. In situations like this, I act as though cameras are aimed at me, tape recorders are counting footfalls. I do exactly what I'm sent to do and barely let myself see anything between back door and liquor cupboard.

On the drive back to my cabin I reprimand myself for feeling threatened by Caroline. Maybe she stopped by to get to know me, just as Bo said. After all, she's new in the valley, too. Why did I get so defensive about my cabin and my jewelry? Why did I get as slitty eyed as a high school girl about a competitor for Bo's attentions?

The fact is I need to ease up on the time Bo and I spend together. Though I savor his attention and care, I'm sending the wrong signals by accepting both. I've lived here little more than a week, and we've eaten half our dinners together. It just happens without my noticing. We're also sharing his post-office box—he got a second key for me—because the waiting list is so long. Last night, as we walked up the butte again after dinner, I wondered out loud why Lower Valley Power and Light said I didn't need to make a deposit for electricity like everybody else does and learned from Bo that the cabin's electricity is included in his bill.

“It is? What's that mean?”

“It means I haven't gotten around to separating the two places into having their own meters.”

“Hmm,” I said. “I don't know about this.”

“We're wired together,” he joked. “And you can't get wired to any other man until I cut you loose first.”

“You're flirting with me again,” I warned.

“Damn right and I'm sorry as hell.” He was grinning hugely.

“How come you don't ask me about my divorce?”

“How come you don't talk to me about it?”

“Not ready yet, I guess.”

“That's why I don't ask.”

And then there's that deal about Bo letting me borrow his appliances. Unless I've got that wrong and he's really borrowing mine. To make matters worse, his washer and dryer don't work, so he's bringing laundry over one of these days—at my invitation.

When I return with the Scotch, Caroline rises to get something from her car. Bo fixes her drink and one for himself. I stick with tea. Caroline returns with a fancy gift bag, silky ribbons streaming from its handles, and presents it to me.

“Welcome to the valley,” she says. “I hope we can be friends.”

I am awash with guilt for my suspicions and unfriendliness. I gush over the beautiful wrapping and hope Caroline is disclaiming her first impressions of me as fast as I am disclaiming my first impressions of her. Lime green and purple tissue paper whisper secrets as I rustle around inside the bag. I pull out a fat pillar candle with glittery glass beads and old rhinestone buttons embedded in the ivory wax, spiraled around the candle as if a many-stranded necklace were buried inside.

“Oh, it's beautiful.” I pull out three balls of soap that match. “Thank you so much. My bathroom will cower in embarrassment at the sight of such elegance.”

Caroline laughs. “Only an artist could picture a bathroom cowering.”

No one has ever called me an artist before. I look to see if she's being sarcastic. There's a quality to her voice that lacks warmth, but her smile is a dazzle of beautiful teeth and friendliness. “I envy you, to tell the truth,” she says.

“I can't imagine why. Unless it's because I have this beautiful candle and soap.” I lift a ball of soap to my nose. I smell almonds and lilies and beneath that moss.

Bo hasn't joined us at the table. He's leaning against the sink, a spectator, sipping his drink.

Caroline says, “I'd love to move to a place of my own and do something creative…but I'd be afraid to.”

“Well, I've just gotten out of a long, sad marriage, and I needed a scary adventure to get me back into life. Moving here is as brave as I get.”

I remember back in Ohio, thinking that if I dropped myself into the most exciting situation I could dream of, which to me was a cabin of my own in the Tetons, life would happen to me just as a result of what that act triggered. I look at Bo with this memory and think: fast start. There were a lot of reasons to believe that I would have been better off to move back to Cincinnati, where my family used to live and where Erik and I started out together. Yet I haven't been sorry so far.

I ask Caroline, “What part would make you afraid?”

“No money,” she says immediately. Then adds, “No man. No…money,” she says again. “I've gotten used to things I won't give up now.”

Caro looks at Bo. “I'm trying to talk Bo into letting me make him rich.” She turns to me. “Don't you think he's a wonderful artist?” I agree. I've seen some of his work now and I think Bo goes into the best of himself to produce it. His sculpture makes my heart pound with its earthy curves winging into space as if grasping at something in the clouds.