Crybaby Ranch Read online

  “Do you have salt and pepper?” I ask, stupidly forgetting he’s the guest, not me in my nightgown. Or am I the guest in his grandmother’s old kitchen, his old childhood haunt, bought by me for a song?

  “Left it on the stove.” He gets up again.

  I take a bite of the baked eggs. Bo’s a good cook, and I tell him so. He tells me that first his grandmother cooked for him; later, when she became frail with age and osteoporosis, he cooked for her.

  We eat quietly for a few moments; then Bo says, “I can sand down this table and chairs when you’re ready to refinish them. Got a sander.” I tell him it took me five hours to paint it this way, and he says, “Oh, shit, I’m sorry.”

  “So you’re friends of the helicopter people.” I can’t remember their last name, but we have to move on to a less-awkward topic of conversation.

  “Caro and I spend time together.”

  His use of a nickname makes me think I have the wrong idea. “Oh, I thought she was married to Dick.”

  “Right. Dickie’s her husband.”

  “He doesn’t…?” I don’t know what I mean to ask.

  “No,” Bo says, “he doesn’t.” He smiles at my discomfort, takes a sip of coffee, then fills in the blanks. “Dickie travels a lot on business. I’m buying their stock for them—horses, some cattle.”

  I try too hard at conversations. Nobody is allowed to feel awkward in my presence. I won’t allow it. Quickly I reply, “I hear they recently moved here.”

  “Right. Couple months ago.”

  It’s eight thirty in the morning and I’m already worn-out. I rest my fork and my company manners. “Are you sorry you sold this place?” I fear his answer. I have rubbed my cheek along every square inch of log and chinking and have murmured endearments to the sagebrush surrounding it. All the while I have wondered if this man has sobered up and regretted the fast sale.

  “Not anymore,” Bo says.

  “Then why are you here?” I wave to encompass our plates.

  “Flirting with you.” He looks surprised at my density.

  “Look, I just got out of a marriage. I need…I can’t…” I keep shaking my head no. It takes all I’ve got not to scrape the chair back and tear off.

  Bo holds up an arresting hand. “Never mind the particulars. Just eat with me. I’ll cook. You clean up. I’ve got a ham in the oven for dinner.” He’s trying to soothe me, I can tell.

  “My oven?” I thought I’d smelled something I wasn’t quite eating; the bacon fooled me.

  “Sort of your oven. Appliances weren’t included in the sale.”

  “They weren’t?” My spirits plummet. There’s nothing left over in the budget for new appliances.

  “No, but I’ll let you borrow them…when I’m not using them.”

  Right now, he tells me, he has to take off. He stands and fills his mug with coffee. He’ll bring my cup back later. “Suz?”

  I’m staring at my plate, hands on my lap. Who is this guy? What’s he doing in my kitchen? Why am I watching to see if he leaves this last piece of bacon? I look up, disturbed.

  He thinks I’m upset because he shortened my name, and he finishes it, “Zannah.” He pauses, then says, “I’m a nice guy, you know?”

  That’s true according to Myrna Loy, but she also suggested Bo stopped off at a bar instead of the bank for the closing last Friday. His drive past my cabin that night with his headlights off backs up the idea. But that’s no crime. So I nod and Bo reaches for the doorknob.

  Before he leaves I ask, “About the ham, should I take it out of the oven in a couple hours?”

  “No,” he says. “I’m trying an experiment.” He turned the oven to five hundred degrees for thirty minutes, then turned the oven off. If all goes well, the ham will be baked in five hours.

  “But you can’t open the oven door,” he warns. “Not once.” He says this sternly. Like I might sneak in there and brush a mustard glaze on his ham without permission.

  In the late afternoon, Bo returns. He brings more groceries, three bags full. I’m showered and dressed and know to expect him, but all this works against me. I act so self-conscious it must be painful for him to watch. He’s very attractive and offers his complete attention each time I speak. He rests his activity, turns his whole body, faces my way, and watches my eyes. I’m not used to this. I’ve picked up a halted rhythm to my talk, and seconds pass with us staring at each other. As a defense I begin to ask him questions while he unpacks the groceries.

  “Does your, um, your family—” They should sell a contact lens the color of his eyes—or the many colors of his eyes. Blue and green with wedges of copper, outlined in black. I glance down at the bag of onions Bo holds. “Tell me about your family.”

  As he moves up and down the kitchen counter and between the stove and refrigerator, Bo tells me that his grandparents had two daughters, just one year apart. In order to save trips into town, both girls started school the same year and graduated from high school together, a common practice for ranching families. As a graduation present, his grandparents sent the two sisters to visit relatives in Ireland. A year later the girls returned home with a present for them: Bo.

  “They wouldn’t tell which one got into trouble,” Bo says. “Still won’t.”

  “They’ve never told you?”

  “Nope.” He sticks romaine lettuce, minus a few leaves, into the crisper, then tries to wedge in a bag of carrots and celery, too.

  I ask, “But which one do you call mother?”

  “Both. Neither. I call them my aunts, usually.”

  Maybe it’s Bo’s casual dismissal of the importance of his heritage, or maybe it’s the dark side of my euphoric scrubbing binge of the past couple days, but I am so caught up in his story, I relax and even become argumentative. My next words imply he can’t be in the best mental health with a family life based on a lie.

  He falls right in with my familiar manner. He says, “Suzannah, everybody is messed up. It’s a matter of degree. They were terrific mothers. They’re nuts, but very loving. All during my childhood, I had two mothers telling me I was the best little guy in the world. That goes far.”

  He’s right, of course. It was my own saving grace. My mother borrowed my mind, my ears, my patience from the time I was a toddler, yet she was always right there building me up. It wasn’t entirely to strengthen me as a pillar for her own support. And even if it often was, I believed her and I grew to feel capable and loved. Still, the trouble I’m having suspecting she is not well-minded…everything has to be reevaluated.

  I take over putting the groceries away, and Bo doctors up a can of black beans with lots of cumin, garlic, and red onion. We both work on the salad, then sit down to Bo’s ham dinner.

  “When you grew older and realized your mothers’ unusualness, did you lose confidence in yourself?” I ask Bo, thinking about my own loss lately.

  “They told me they were odd. Around my high school years, they said, ‘Bartholomew, we think we’re getting odd. We don’t mind so much, sister and I, but we worry about your little friends.’” Bo and I laugh at his high-voiced rendition, but it’s sad.

  When the sisters were eighteen and nineteen and their adult lives just beginning, they stepped into “otherness.” And I imagine to be “other” in a small isolated valley like Jackson Hole some forty years ago demanded toughness. But with Bo’s help, I understand that to drift into oddness was for them easier than to fight it. The sisters’ only choice was to follow their bold bid to differentness through to the end.

  “My aunts have made a career out of being strange and they’re quite successful at it,” Bo says.

  I smile. “You admire them.” This is not an accusal—this is a compliment. Something about the way he says this makes the place between my eyes sting. He loves his aunts, I can tell. Makes me long to see my mother.

  I also compliment his cooking. Bo’s experiment turned out well. The ham is juicy and tender. When we’re finished eating, I watch Bo knot his cloth napkin t
o the back of his chair. He did this same thing this morning. I wonder whether he plans on coming back again for breakfast. I worry that I have let him move into my life too far, too soon. As if the napkin drooping from his chair post resembles the plastic ribbons waving from the survey posts around my lone acre, marking off an acquisition. And I fear the paint of my newly won boundary lines is still fresh enough to be smeared, perhaps by any passing stranger.

  Bo seems comfortable with the silence that’s spread. He watches me eat and sips his coffee. Perhaps I don’t have to entertain him to keep his company. Erik flipped on the television even in the middle of my well-rehearsed stories about his own baby boy. Bo seems easy with himself. Thank God he’s got a major fault—drinking. Which reminds me, I didn’t see him unpack any beer.

  “Did you bring beer?”

  “No, sorry. I didn’t think of it. You like beer?”

  “No. Thought you did.” Now I’ve stepped into it. “I mean, I like it…. I just don’t drink often.”

  Bo sets his mug down. “But you heard I did?”

  “Umm. What? Like it?”

  “Drink often.”

  I decide to come clean. “I saw you drive past Friday night.”

  “And you heard things.” He tightens his jaw muscles and looks practically inside me. “Well, I deserve that talk. I used to drink quite a bit.” He watches me a moment. “Friday night was the exception, not the rule. But that kind of talk takes a while to die down in the valley.”

  Especially when you break your own rule. I nod.

  “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 bot
h 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.

  nine

  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.