paisley rekdal

Please Avoid Wearing Your Spurs
Inside as They Damage the Floors
by Rose Marie London

Just past the fourth or fifth cluster of beehives, cordoned off by barbed wire strung between odd pieces of fence post, Chad Jones tells Mona about how the price of Copenhagen is up to $4.00. How he usually listens over his scanner to the local law enforcement track him through town on Saturday nights.

"But they only know my pick-up. I borrowed this KIA from my grandma."

Chad can intuit deer and other animals that flirt dangerously with the road. He brakes a few times for what Mona considers no reason at all, until she sees a young buck ice-skate across their way. Mona is suitably impressed at Chad's being prepared. Fox flit at the edge of the asphalt. They can because Chad gives them room. Mona wants to relate some anecdote, some proof of existence in her prior City-life which would show her skill. That while she and Chad are capable in entirely different ways, they share the same instinct toward comfort and survival. Over a rise, the dark becomes a universe of electric light. Chad drives up Coffeen.

"This is supposedly the most trafficked street in Wyoming."

Mona looks left to right. "Why?"

"It's smack between two interstates."

She smiles. "Why does it sound to me like you know this for some reason beside practical application?"

"I had to learn an historical aspect of the area." Chad straightens, having repeated something it sounds like he's memorized. "I chose Sheridan. It was my senior project."

Before Mona can open her mouth, Chad tells her that he'd originally gotten dressed in a pair of Silver Tabs and loafers.

"Wyoming ghetto?" Mona laughs. Chad makes a right on red cutting off an on coming Cummins diesel Ram two toned in mud.

"I'm just saying, I wore my hat tonight for you."

"Well, that was nice of you. However, I still feel like I'm aiding a minor's delinquency."

"I thought we straightened all that out."

It is Chad's first summer wrangling for Bee and Jeb at the Sky Cloud Guest Ranch, but he can handle the livestock so well that Jeb trusts him on trail rides where the others are instructed to go out in twos. Strings of pre-teen girls on horseback go pouting and squirming up the bluff behind Chad. Coming back down it's quite a different story. By then the girls have fallen in love--not with their horse, but with the cowboy. Before the loaded down Suburbans can pull back out onto the two-lane, Chad gets trapped in the cross-hairs of Sally-Sue's disposable camera; take-home evidence of a lasting crush. This happens so often, the other wranglers give Chad the nickname Flash.

On a slow day, Chad takes Mona out behind the ranch buildings, through the swift- moving Piney Creek and up the jagged edge of a bluff to show her some Crow teepee rings hidden in the brome. Mona hasn't been on a horse since Girl Scout camp, but she does all right. Even when it begins to hail. In the storm, Chad tells her to step off and brings their two horses' noses together with Mona in between. He closes the open end of the triangle with his back. Mona smells minerals rising in the steam off the ground, the simmering panic in the skittish horse Chad's given her to ride and the loam of his drooping hat.

"This is why most don't like cowboying in the winter," he tells her.

"This is winter?"

"Just about."

"And are you most?"

"Haven't decided. Probably."

Mona likes it here because, unlike where she comes from, people take their cues from instinct, not trends or Simon Says. No one asks questions here. No one cares where you came from, or which direction you're headed when you leave. Just about the job you do, that you do it well, and respect the men who've taught you how. For this reason, Mona likes it here--very much. She feels like she fits in, even if no one else seems to think so. But maybe she's wrong. She's over- heard Jeb tsking to his wife, "She's on the run. In between." Mona didn't mind so much this qualifier, and likes that they feel they've taken in a stray.

Mona isn't too sure what makes her agree to have a drink in town with Chad, exactly. Company. Curiosity. And that she doesn't want to disappoint Jeb, who's standing beside the corral when she and Chad come off the prairie, soaked to the bone.

"I'm thinking this is a good look for me," Mona calls out. Conversation keeps her teeth from chattering.

"Aw, you're pretty any which way. My wrangler here would owe you a shot or two if he were old enough to buy 'em." The old man slaps Chad on the ass the way he does his favorite head of stock. Laughing out the side of his mouth, he walks away, missing every mud-filled puddle, not giving much thought to the facility his bowleggedness provides.

Mona brings her horse to the barn door. "How old are you anyway?"

"Twenty this past July." He nods at her horse. "You can give him to me." He takes the reins out of her hand. "Oh, come on." Chad punctures the silence. "What does it matter?" Mona watches him disappear into the shadows; she waits for something else, but only hears the clacking of the horses' feet on dirt so dry and compact it's like concrete.

Mona has dinner in the dining room with the guests of the ranch. The BBQ buffalo burgers and corn on the cob fresh from Bee's garden are too much of a temptation. The Wyoming sky holds no grudge against the mid-afternoon storm and streaks of sunlight cross the long farm table that Bee lays each night with family linen. A wiry father of three asks Mona to pass the whipped butter. He tacks his curiosity to the end of his request. "So, where you from?"

Mona tells him that she's been in Wyoming three weeks. "But I'm originally from New York City."

"Well, I'm originally from Milwaukee, but I live in Chicago," he asserts. "You live in Wyoming? Then you're from Wyoming."

Mona thinks for a minute about picking a fight. "You have some corn in your teeth," she points with her fork, and slightly longer than a heart beat, holds it in the air between them before steadying a corner of the burger for her knife.

Dinners in Wyoming end early. No one lingers. Mona isn't an unpleasant guest. She's willing, though not anxious to make friends, so the click of her car door doesn't much offend. It is still day when Mona drives around back to her room to change. She doesn't want Chad to have to come publicly hunting for her in a common area.

Before they even get to the bar, Mona staves off the impulse to congratulate Flash for his- -what--nerve is the only word she can think of. They trust each other, somehow, both aware they are taking dissimilar yet equal risks. She finds some of the other wranglers too edgy. Wick in particular, whose scars seem layered, bespeaking of rusty fences and unbroken stock, barrooms and other men's wives. His forearms are a canvas of hand-poked tattoos depicting poorly rendered skulls and rattle snakes. The barbed wire that wraps from shoulder to wrist has been beaten to a sea-slime green by his proximity to the sun. Wick, pushing his sleeve up past his bronze shoulder--scissored in two then healed--tells Mona about the five-hour session with a guitar string and a concoction of toothpaste and cigarette ash. "All that work, and it washed out in three days. Right down the drain."

"You couldn't have guessed?" Mona says.

He shrugs off his half-assed attempt to impress her. "Two guys and a case of piss water. Had nothing better to do."

Wick's the one who handles the calf castration, the de-horning. On the ranch, Mona's learned that some jobs lend themselves well to a particular personality. Mona's seen Chad be nothing more than cordial to his fellow hand. And being cordial means being quiet.

Chad makes a turn off the strip with an eye to show her something and then changes his mind. Swinging grandma's KIA into a closed bank drive-through and out again into Saturday night traffic, he sees someone he knows, honks the horn, but they drive by. His friends, too, only know his truck. Like some kind of futuristic centaur, its box is a blue Isuzu and its cab a mustard yellow Toyota. A Browning 30-06 in the rack, he tells her when she asks.

"Where are they going?" Mona asks.

"Don't know." Chad pulls against the curb, close, two tires in the gutter. Mona knows the landmark of the neon cowboy hanging over the door of the bar from before she ever thought twice about Wyoming. She has to laugh a little that she's here, walking around Chad, who holds open the door.

"This place is confused," he says, looking in.

"What do you mean?" Mona stops just inside to wait for him to catch up and pass her.

"It's both a tourist trap and a local hang-out. Depends on where you sit."

Mona lifts her hip onto a stool. "And what you order, I suspect."

They sit at the very end of the bar. Across from the jukebox. Mona hooks her heels over the brass and leans over the lip of the bar that has been smoothed by the underside of generations of forearms, to apprize the bartender of her thirst. Chad's eyes stay down. The bartender is a head again taller than Chad and deep in conversation with a narrow man in a J.B. Hunt baseball cap. Mona doesn't notice until then the string of amber lights that outline a Peterbilt across the street. The bartender leans in, rapt until the man finishes what tale he's telling, even while he takes long drags off his Camel where all the commas are. Chad's playing with his dingy belt buckle. "Where'd you get that anyway?" Mona says.

He scoots back, away from where she's reached. "The usual way, I won it."

"Doing what?"

"Cleaning up horse s---."

"Be that way." Mona turns her head and looks again down the length of the bar.

"Naw, riding bulls. I quit though. Made a mess of my bladder. You'll see, I have to piss every--"

"Eight seconds?" Mona laughs.

"You're funny, Mona." He tries a serious look. "Hey, did you know that when a bull rider starts out, he fills his mouth with marbles and every ride he spits one out, until he's completely lost his marbles and then he knows he's good."

The bartender is wiping her hands on a rag. "What can I get you?" She has a look like she's ready to be amused.

"Bud Light," Chad says from under his misshapen hat.

"I'll have a Beam and Coke. Tall."

The bartender reaches for a glass. Filling it with ice she says, "Hey cowboy, I'll need to see some ID."

Mona takes out her wallet while Chad pretends to search all the places where his might be. A bottle of Jim Beam hovers longingly over Mona's glass, the bartender holds her other hand on her hip. Mona's mouth begins to water as she pushes her driver's license across the bar.

"I must have forgot my wallet," says Chad.

"Uh, huh," says the bartender. She's through pouring Mona's drink and is interested now in the pale pink license. "New York City!" she announces. A couple of people near the front window acknowledge the occasion. It takes her a moment to find Mona's birth date. Chad's grateful for the distraction. "Lord, girl," she whoops. "You're older than I am."

Mona holds out her hand, for her license or her drink. At this point she doesn't care which. The bartender is genuinely curious, turning the card over to examine the other side before handing it back.

"Thanks," Mona says and stuffs her wallet into her jacket. You're on your own, Chad, she thinks.

"They call me Big Texas, by the way." She slides Mona her drink and extends a hand that's once again damp.

After a long draw on her drink, Mona says, "Nice to meet you." The bartender reaches into a cooler and yanks back the top of Chad's beer. She's still holding it when she says, "So tell me. How does a kid from Buffalo find a gal from New York City."

Chad says with a little bit of knowing in his voice, "I work at a guest ranch."

"Well here, cowboy." She passes him the can. "I wouldn't want to be the one to deny either of you the experience."

"I don't know how I feel about that," Mona says.

"I'm all right with it." Chad tells her tipping his head back. The beer does not wash away the bit of chew caught near his gumline.

"No wallet. I guess this means I have to pay your tab."

"I'll buy you breakfast."

"Isn't that past your curfew?" Mona lifts off the stool to check out the jukebox. "So how does Big Texas know you live in Buffalo?"

"Town's real small. Hadn't you noticed?"

Mona sets up a couple of dollars' worth of Eagles and Marshall Tucker.

"Who's this?" Chad asks as the music starts. He's got the can to his mouth.

Mona leans against the jukebox glass and crosses her arms. "Touche."

"I mean it." They don't speak for a minute. "You know, you should get yourself a pair of Rockies. You've got the best kind of ass for jeans with no hip pockets."

"Haven't any of your friends warned you that someday someone might just make you put your money where your mouth is."

"I've got a leg up on my friends. It's just my mother, my sister and me. I've spent my whole life around the habits of two crazy women. I know when to duck."

"The real secret is to not be so cocky about it."

Wick breaks out of a group playing pool in the back and purposely strides between Mona and Chad. He shouts, "See ya later, Big Texas" raising a hand that he stuffs into a pocket.

"See ya around, Wick," Big Texas answers, passing him in the other direction on her way to check the level of Mona's glass. Mona doesn't undervalue the intuition of a bartender. She agrees to have another. The friends-with-everyone practice to Big Texas's voice seems not without some resolve. But Mona can't be sure. Even so, it's what raises the small hairs. She's not happy Wick's had some advantage of seeing them without their having known, but she doesn't know why. And if it bothers Chad, he's not showing.

"Friend of yours?" Big Texas asks.

"Same ranch," Chad tells her.

"Small town," Mona says.

The diner's the only thing in this part of town with its lights still on. Chad goes to the men's room and Mona is seated by a waitress who doesn't bother to hide that she's missing a few important teeth. Her hospital-blue uniform hangs from her bony shoulders. Mona slides across a banquette, keeping her hands below the table so that she won't have to touch the sticky surface. The waitress slaps a couple of menus against the formica. Her section is empty otherwise. She's standing in the way when Chad finds where Mona's gone. He knows what he wants. Mona agrees to have the same, though she is sure she won't eat considering the brew of things Chad's asked to have added to his eggs.

Two guys take a table behind them. Their arrival distracts Chad from the path down which he is about to drag their conversation. Mona is sure that he is preparing to ask her why she's come out. He is suddenly overly occupied with flooding his plate in Tabasco. He uses extreme concentration. Mona looks on. It is the waitress who provides evidence that the boys are acquainted. Standing between the two booths, she tries to orchestrate a conversation where apparently on some other night it had left off. Evidently there's a debate about where to buy the cheapest pellets this season.

"Billings," one says. His head is shrouded in the heavy smoke he is able to produce from one cigarette. The perfectly formed bill of his Hilfiger baseball cap is trapping most of it. Over her eggs Mona can smell their cologne. Soapy sweet like the inside of her mailbox when she gets her Vogue. His companion sits sideways in the banquette, an arm resting on the back of the bench just behind Chad's head. One knee is up near his chin and he agrees, "Yeah, and there's that place just over the state line. They're selling for a dollar less a pound."

"But you're gonna spend ten dollars in diesel there and back." Chad says this without looking up.

Mona asks for more coffee. The waitress stops chewing the side of her thumb long enough to give her a look that describes the whole of what her job truly is. Mona does not feel sorry.

"Hey, Chad," they chorus. "What's with the get-up?"

He tells Mona quietly, "Don't listen to them." And then raises his voice. "Tim's father owns about a thousand head of stock. He's probably been out all day working on the fence line at five bucks an hour."

"That's fine, Chad. I realize the insult is actually directed at me."

"Aw, now that's not right," the louder one says.

"Oh, but I think it is."

The boy's food arrives, along with Mona's refill, which splashes out of the cup. Mona drops her voice. "No winter off for him, huh?"

Flash smiles, but he knows how friends can reflect and that Mona's just seen something she can't unsee.

Mona drives twenty-six miles out the other side of Buffalo. She practically stands on her throttle as her four-cylinder fights the pitch of Highway 16. She's slightly hung over but in an adventurous mood and has just a hand-drawn map with her. She is, in fact, surprised to find the subtle wooden sign pointing into Crazy Woman Canyon that the overly Xeroxed map suggests will be there. Without hesitation, Mona follows. The road, though gravel, is level and wide. Still she pulls aside to allow a dusty old Ford the right of way. Though even with the driver's door handle, she sees him shaking his head as she starts to pull into the space in the road he leaves behind him. It's a shortcut, an emergency egress of sorts, out of the Big Horn National Forest and back toward Buffalo. Once inside the canyon, which she is immediately, all Mona sees is a steep drop into the running Crazy Woman Creek to her right and a granite wall of sky- scraper proportion. The road--gravel and dust--twists, invisible again and again every few yards. Her tires slip. Mona's still laughing here, yanking on her emergency brake to help her stop, which works somewhat, though the car is at a dangerous angle and begins to slide. All she can do is try to keep it centered in the road as it releases itself to the pull of the earth. It is very hot, even in the canyon. An open window invites a plague of August grasshoppers and the vents spit dust into her lap. Mona has to be happy with the charged recycled air of her testing herself.

The paragraph of type-written directions, with their broken o's and shattered e's tells her that the canyon road re-joins Highway 196 ten miles south of Buffalo. Mona takes comfort in that last bit of wording. But she's still dropping into the crack in the topography, even as she reads the directions over and over again, looking at the road and to the page with dizzying concentration. She is soothed by the leveling of her tires. Now she hears the rush of water she can no longer see, for it has cut an even deeper groove in its insistence. And the wind harmonizes. Mona wants to get out of her car--there is nowhere to pull over--she's simply paused where gravity has temporarily released its grip. In spite of the fact that it is Labor Day weekend, Mona doesn't see a soul. Now that she's stopped she considers the ability to climb back out that her little convertible might just lack. She has no idea how long it is through the canyon. A flirtatious sun casts magnificent shadows and prisms through the leaves of the spindly Aspen that defy the odds. Mona steps out of her car. The wind and water are intensely reboant and they swallow the sound of her slamming her door. Slightly enervated, but also pleased with herself, Mona is smiling in the stupid, self-satisfied way no one ever wants to get caught doing. She stoops back into her car to look for a bottle of water she might have forgotten was there. She backs out, empty handed and catches her breath. In the hook in the road behind her she sees the glint of chrome and sunlight.

Leaning against his truck, Wick smokes one of his skinny hand-rolled cigarettes. Mona instantly feels a fuzzy layer of sweat on her skin. The sun is avid for her black t-shirt. Mona relaxes. He can't get past her, the road's too narrow. He can push her if she needs it. Mona shifts her weight, about to shout to him. That he has not moved. The haughty way his shoulders are set. It puts Mona back behind the wheel without a word. Her mouth is dry. The inside of the car is an inferno. She turns the key and moves on. Her convertible is low to the ground. In her rearview all she sees is the taupe dust kicked up by her tires. She is going uphill. She's self- conscious when she brakes around hairpin turns or negotiates planks of wood set across holes where the road has fallen away, as though her tail lights advertise a lack of experience.

Mona recalls taking part in boisterous cocktail party debates about whether or not the fanny pack worn by the young tourist who lay in a coma after being clubbed in the head by a homeless man, with what the Post reported as being a large chunk of concrete, when crossing the busy uptown intersection of Madison and 43rd at noon-time, made her a target. The man was clearly a lunatic, but why not pick a native off the crowded sidewalk.

The creek is on her left now, moving swiftly beneath a shelf of smooth stone. Mona spots the royal blue and white of a cooler sitting on a rock in the middle of a riffle. Since there's no place to park a vehicle, she thinks she must be near the top. Wick's truck crunches the earth behind her and the broken frame where his license plate should be fills her back window. Mona drops her foot onto the gas with a familiar determination. She takes few precautions the rest of the way. The grade and the light increase as she reaches the top and she swerves to miss hitting two girls on horse back coming out of the dude ranch at the mouth of the canyon.

This side of the canyon the land is so flat, so empty, that Mona can see the distinct curve at the horizon line. And little else. She can see that in a short distance she will come to a T. There are no ranch buildings, trucks, consoling green and white road signs, nothing but ground and sky and glare. No Route 196.

Mona keeps the sun to her left and zeros out her trip meter. Four miles later the road is still not paved and there is no distant sound of spinning wheels across the seams of a smooth road. She's convinced she's gone the wrong way because. . .where the f--- is Wick? She's sure she's on the back end of private property and expects to get shot. She thinks about Chad's invitation to the drive-in movie marathon and wonders, would it have been so bad?

Coming up the narrow ribbon that stretches out before her are two widely spaced headlights, brilliant in their artificiality against the droning sunlight. Mona sees them before she hears the death rattle of a diesel engine. She cuts her wheel and puts her car in the way. If nothing else, at least this is one person if later interviewed, who might recall seeing her.

The empty logging truck rattles and shakes, skidding a long time before it squeals to a tentative stop. Mona's convinced by the look on the driver's face that he's weighed his other option. Mona has to crank her head all the way back to look into the cab. She shades her eyes in an awkward salute. She licks her chapped lips and tastes the last of the lipstick.

"I'm looking for 196. Am I going the right way?"

The driver has wild red curls that wing out from beneath a dirty green baseball cap. He looks down at her and then out his windshield as if he were contemplating her as food. Finally he burps, "Yup."

"Can you tell me how much farther I have to go?"

"A ways."

"Is it just straight ahead?"

"Not really." The driver stops talking as if he's suddenly forgotten how. "It's there."

Mona backs away from the cab, "Thanks." She drops into her car and pulls away as quickly as she can. The logging truck wrenches into gear and jostles off. Mona drives on. She crosses a one-lane bridge marked by a sign that has recently been driven into: Crazy Woman Creek North Fork.

Mona stops in at the White Buffalo for a Beam and Coke and the ladies' room. She's served by a cocky ex-rodeo star from Cheyenne by way of Las Vegas. He's working hard on a handlebar moustache. He offers up his name with Mona's drink. Mona hands him a ten dollar bill in reply. No one in the place is without a cowboy hat. Most are worn and sweat-stained. None of them is Wick's, as far as she can see. Down the bar is a woman screeching and hollering playing dice with a man twice her age. She's accusing him of cheating her out of the free round she's won "fair and square."

"Hey, Brad," Mona calls. "I'd like another and some advice, if you please."

Brad empties a bottle into her glass. "Last of the bottle and the drinks' on the house."

"Nice."

"What can I do you for?" he asks and leans against the bar like he's in a movie.

"Where around here can a City-girl learn to fire a 30-06?"

Contents Copyright 2001, National Public Radio