Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3. Annie Proulx

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СКАЧАТЬ the Social Hour, Mr. Mellowhorn arrived to introduce the new “guests.” Church Bollinger was a younger man, barely sixty-five, but Roy could tell he was a real slacker. He’d obviously come into the Home because he couldn’t get up the gumption to make his own bed or wash his dishes. The other one, Mrs. Terry Taylor, was around his age, early eighties despite the dyed red hair and carmine fingernails. She seemed soft and sagging, somehow like a candle standing in the sun. She kept looking at Ray. Her eyes were khaki-colored, the lashes sparse and short, her thin old lips greased up with enough lipstick to leave red on her buttered roll. Finally he could take her staring no longer.

      “Got a question?” he said.

      “Are you Ray Forkenknife?” she said.

      “Forkenbrock,” he said, startled.

      “Oh, right. Forkenbrock. You don’t remember me? Theresa Worley? From Coalie Town? Me and you went to school together except you was a couple grades ahead.”

      But he did not remember her.

      The next morning, fork poised over the poached egg reclining like a houri on a bed of soggy toast, he glanced up to meet her intense gaze. Her red-slick lips parted to show ocher teeth that were certainly her own, for no dentist would make dentures that looked as though they had been dredged from a sewage pit.

      “Don’t you remember Mrs. Wilson?” she said. “The teacher that got froze in a blizzard looking for her cat? The Skeltcher kids that got killed when they fell in a old mine shaft?”

      He did remember something about a schoolteacher frozen in a June blizzard but thought it had happened somewhere else, down around Cold Mountain. As for the Skeltcher kids, he denied them and shook his head.

      On Saturday Beth came again, and again set out the glass of water, the glass of whiskey and the tape recorder. He had been thinking what he wanted to say. It was clear enough in his head, but putting it into words was difficult. The whole thing had been so subtle and painful it was impossible to present it without sounding like a fool. And Mrs. Terry Taylor, a.k.a. Theresa Worley, had sidelined him. He strove to remember the frozen teacher, the Skeltcher kids in the mine shaft, how Mr. Baker had shot Mr. Dennison over a bushel of potatoes and a dozen other tragedies she had laid out as mnemonic bait. He remembered very different events. He remembered walking to the top of Irish Hill with Dutchy Green to meet Forrie Wintka, who was going to show them her private parts in exchange for a nickel each. It was late autumn, the cottonwoods leafless along the grim trickle of Coal Creek, warm weather holding. They could see Forrie Wintka toiling up from the shacks below. Dutchy said it would be easy, not only would she show them, they could do it to her, even her brother did it to her.

      Dutchy whispered as though she could hear them. “Even her stepfather. He got killed by a mountain line last year.”

      And now, seventy-one years later, it hit him. Her father had been Worley, Wintka was the stepfather who had carried the mail horseback and in Snakeroot Canyon had been dragged into the rocks by a lion. The first female he had ever plowed, a coal-town slut, was sharing final days with him at the Mellowhorn Home.

      “Beth,” he said to his granddaughter. “I can’t talk about nothing today. There’s some stuff come to mind just now that I got to think my way through. The new woman who come here last week. I knew her and it wasn’t under the best circumstances,” he said. That was the trouble with Wyoming; everything you ever did or said kept pace with you right to the end. The regional family again.

      Mr. Mellowhorn started a series of overnight outings he dubbed “Weekend Adventures.” The first one had been to the Medicine Wheel up in the Big Horns. Mrs. Wallace Kimes had fallen and scraped her knees on the crushed stone in the parking lot. Then came the dude ranch weekend where the Mellowhorn group found itself sharing the premises with seven elk hunters from Colorado, most of them drunk and disorderly and given over to senseless laughter topping 110 decibels. Powder Face laughed senselessly with them. The third trip was more ambitious; a five-day excursion to the Grand Canyon where no one at the Mellowhorn Home had ever been. Twelve people signed up despite the hefty fee to pay for lodging and transportation.

      “You only live once!” cried Powder Face.

      The group included newcomer Church Bollinger and Forrie Wintka, a.k.a. Theresa Worley, a.k.a. Terry Dolan and, finally, as Terry Taylor. Forrie and Bollinger sat together in the van, had drinks together in the bar of El Tovar, ate dinner at a table for two and planned a trail-ride expedition for the next morning. But before the mule train left, Forrie asked Bollinger to take some photographs she could send to her granddaughters. She stood on the parapet with the famous view behind her. She posed with one hand holding her floppy new straw hat purchased in the hotel gift shop. She took off the hat and turned, shading her eyes with her hand, and pretended to be peering into the depths like a stage character of yore. She clowned, pretending she was unsteady and losing her balance. There was a stifled “Oh!” and she disappeared. A park ranger rushed to the parapet and saw her on the slope ten feet below, clutching at a small plant. Her hat lay to one side. Even as he climbed over the parapet and reached for her, the plant trembled and loosened. Forrie dug her fingers into the gravel as she began to slide toward the edge. The ranger thrust his foot toward her, shouting for her to grab on. But his saving kick connected with Forrie’s hand. She shot down the slope as one on a waterslide, leaving ten deep grooves to mark her trail, then, in a last desperate effort, reached for and almost seized her new straw hat.

      The subdued group returned to Wyoming the next day. Again and again they told each other that she had not even cried out as she fell, something they believed denoted strong character.

      * * *

      Ray Forkenbrock resumed his memoir the next weekend. Berenice waited a few minutes after Beth arrived before taking up a listening post outside the room. Mr. Forkenbrock had a monotonous but loud voice, and she could hear every word.

      “So, things was better for the family after he got the jobs driving machine parts around to the oil rigs,” he said. “The money was pretty good and he joined some one of them fraternal organizations, the Pathfinders. And they had a ladies’ auxiliary, which my mother got into; they called it ‘The Ladies,’ like it was a restroom or something. They both got real caught up in Pathfinders, the ceremonies, the lodge, the good deeds and oaths of allegiance to whatever.

      “Mother was always baking something for them,” he said. “And there was kid stuff for us, fishing derbies and picnics and sack races. It was like Boy Scouts, or so they said. Boy Scouts with a ranch twist, because there was always some class in hackamore braiding or raising a calf. Sort of a kind of a mix of Scouts and 4-H which we did not belong to.”

      Berenice found this all rather boring. When would he say something about the Bledsoes? She saw Deb Slaver at the far end of the hall coming out of Mr. Harrell’s room with a tray of bandages. Mr. Harrell had a sore on his shin that wouldn’t heal and the dressing had to be changed twice a day.

      “Now don’t you pick at it, you bad boy!” yelled Deb, disappearing around the corner.

      “Anyway, Mother was probably more into it than Dad. She liked company and hadn’t had much luck with neighbors there in Coalie Town. The Ladies got up a program of history tours to various massacre sites and old logging flumes. Mother loved those trips. She had a little taste for what had happened in the long ago. She’d come home all excited and carrying a pretty rock. She had about a dozen rocks from those trips when she died,” he said.

      In the hall Berenice thought of her sister toiling up rocky slopes, trying to please her rock hound husband, carrying his canvas sack of stones.

      “The СКАЧАТЬ