Authors: Virginia Swift
“As I recall, their fingernails were so dirty they could write their names on a bar napkin without a pen,” Nattie said, grimacing. “Scary. Somehow they had a whole lot of money sometimes, and they’d go get a big bunch of blow and party it all away as fast as they could.”
Sally didn’t admit it, but she’d once—very briefly— visited the hobos’ crash pad with Dickie, who’d been making a delivery. What was left of the floor was littered with paraphernalia, including a syringe. They were getting set to shoot up. Sally had fled at a run at the sight of the needle.
“Well, Tanya liked to hang out with them. So you see, maybe she could have done worse than Bone Bandy. At least he wasn’t a junkie, and at that time he had a job. Probably she thought he was the best she could do. Tanya wasn’t exactly the queen of the prom at Laramie High.”
Since Sally, unlike Nattie and Delice and Mary and Tanya, hadn’t grown up in Laramie, this was news to her. “Did she have a tough time?”
“Let’s put it this way,” said Nattie, “she was famous for being ugly, but putting out. You know all those high school awards—‘Miss Congeniality’ and ‘Best Dressed’ and all that?”
“Sure,” said Sally, who had, in fact, been voted “Most Likely to Succeed” but had never admitted the fact to anyone, ever. At the time, she had thought that success would mean getting into a good enough college to latch on to the richest possible husband. Talk about your lifelong learning.
Nattie shot Sally a deadpan look. “Tanya was voted ‘Miss Barnyard.’ ”
Horrible. “Were they actually rotten enough to put it in the yearbook?” Sally asked, dreading the answer.
“Of course not—it wasn’t official or anything. They announced the real awards at the spring formal. Tanya got hers afterward. One of the football players lived out west of town, on a little hay farm. There was a party out there, and the story was that Tanya took the whole team on, out behind the barn, that night.”
Hot as she was, Sally shivered. “What a world for women.”
The thought of her lingerie cut to ribbons, of the terrifying note on the mirror, intruded. IT WASN’T GOD WHO MADE HONKY-TONK ANGELS. She shuddered again.
And then she looked at Nattie. “If you think about it,” she said, “you and Delice and I weren’t that different from Tanya, or Monette, for that matter. We took a million drugs, drank our nights away, slept with losers, killed half the brain cells God gave us, and thought we’d live forever. You’re right. It’s a damn wonder most of us made it. If ever there were a bunch of pathetic sinners begging for their just deserts, it’s us.”
No! Get a grip, Mustang old thing. There were differences too. For example, Sally had lost her taste for drugs (except Jim Beam, Budweiser, snooty California wine, and Peet’s coffee, but nobody was perfect). She had long stopped believing that snagging some guy was the answer to everything. Not that she was against marriage, and in fact she would have loved a kid or two. She liked a good romance as much as the next woman, and as it had happened, her taste ran to men. But during the years in which she might have thought about settling down, she hadn’t come across a man she wanted to marry and have babies with.
She felt a hard pang of regret for all those years Hawk had been out of her life. That long summer of love had an even longer winter of discontent.
Still. She was pretty pleased with what she had managed to achieve. She’d made a life for herself in her chosen profession, and done work she was proud of. She loved her friends and tried to be worthy of them. She’d kept her music alive. And after all that time, when she’d made her bones on her own, fate or the Force or whatever had brought Hawk back to her. He was her partner, not her master or her meal ticket. “Sometimes I think the women’s movement saved my soul,” she mused.
For a fraction of a moment Nattie looked thoughtful—troubled, even. But then her usual sulky, self-important expression returned. “Just like you to come up with some feminist moral-of-the-story. You know something, Sally?” she asked. “You’ve got your problems, I’ve got mine. Life bites. But I figure on some level, we all make our own chances. I grew up with nothing— a mother who worked all the time, a father who didn’t give a good goddamn if my brothers and I were dead or alive. I’m making something of myself, and I don’t owe anybody one fucking thing. Everything I’ve got, I earned with hard work and planning.”
So much for their moment of sisterly bonding. This was, after all, Nattie Langham she was talking to, state champion at the game of studs and duds. If sleazing around anything in pants, hooking a rich husband, and then cheating on said husband counted as hard work and planning, Nattie was a regular Andrew Carnegie.
Nothing pissed Sally Alder off more than canting hypocrisy. “Well, if I were you, Nattie, I wouldn’t be planning on working too hard on Marsh Carhart. He’s not half the man Dwayne Langham is.” Jesus, now who was Miss Self-Righteous of the Millennium?
“If I were you, I’d mind my own damn business,” Nattie replied, and that was it for conversation. They climbed on in silence, the sweat pouring off them. Eventually Sally put her headphones back on, cranked up the volume, and let Janis, the queen of the honky-tonky angels, obliterate all thought.
When she got back home, feeling somewhat the better for the sweat if not for the conversation, she found Hawk sitting at the kitchen table, reading the
Boomerang
and drinking his coffee. She could hear the washer and dryer running, out in the mudroom off the back porch. He looked up with a piece of a smile. “You know, Sal, you need to work on your laundry habits. You’re a real washer hog. I went to do a load and found you’d left your wash in the machine yesterday. I moved it over to the dryer.”
Her wash? She had underwear? “You didn’t put my bras in the dryer, did you?” Speaking of sin.
He was offended. “What do you take me for? I hung the flimsy stuff out on the line.”
She looked out the window. Bras and underpants, even a nightie, flapping happily in the morning breeze. She’d never seen a prettier sight.
“Have I mentioned that you’re the ideal man?” she told him, wrapping her arms around him and giving him a kiss on the ear.
“Get away from me, you’re all sweaty,” he said, swatting her off with the newspaper. “But don’t forget about the love slave thing. So what’re your plans today?” he asked.
“I told Delice I’d go out to Centennial to help her pick up stuff for the white elephant sale on Saturday.”
“Are you really up for this?” He looked worried.
“Yes, I am really up for this,” she said. “I’m not going to lock the doors and hunker down in the house, Hawk. Life has to go on.”
“Where in Centennial?” Hawk asked, hearing something in her voice.
“Wood’s Hole. Actually, we are going to get things for the sale, but Delice thinks it might be a good idea to have a little talk with Mrs. Wood about that land swap Nattie and Dwayne are trying to get her to do.”
“Land swap? Is that the one your Carhart guy’s working on?” Hawk put the paper down. “Is this really any of your business?”
“He’s not ‘my’ Carhart guy, and it’s probably not my business,” she admitted. “But look at it this way. You’re always complaining about all those deals around Tucson, where the developers trade a parking lot for some mountain range, and then they scrape off all the saguaros and ocotillos and turn it into Levittown in the Desert. Your father’s ready to run off to Mexico to get away from the ranchette crowd in the Tortolitas. Could you just let the same thing happen in the Centennial Valley?”
Hawk thought about it. “Maybe you guys need a hand with the more elephantine white elephants,” he said at last.
“We’re taking Brit along,” said Sally. “We can probably manage.”
“Yeah, Brit’s a real Charles Atlas.”
“Don’t you have work to do?” she asked.
“Hey, I’m a college professor. Everyone knows we sit around all summer long and eat bonbons.” Now his eyes turned serious. “Look, I know I’m not supposed to act like this,” he said, “but after what happened last night, I just feel like keeping an eye on you for a while. It’ll wear off soon enough, but for the moment, that’s the way it is.”
She swallowed once, twice. And finally managed, “Oh well. If that’s the way it is.”
Delice was happy to have Hawk’s help. If he was willing to drive his truck, between that and her Explorer, everything would fit. She could cancel the U-Haul trailer she’d rented and save twenty-five bucks. She insisted that Sally ride with her, and Hawk follow along with Brit. They had, she said, things to discuss. “Tell me about Mr. Personality,” Delice demanded, before they’d even gotten out of the driveway.
“Carhart?” Sally asked. “You got a good demonstration. He’s insensitive, boorish, egotistical, sexist, and pompous.”
“The hell of it is,” said Delice, “he’s tolerable on the eyes.”
“And agony on the brain,” Sally retorted.
“Maybe I could just stuff a sock in his mouth,” Delice mused.
“Oh shit,” Sally exclaimed, “don’t tell me . . .”
“You have to admit, he does bear a resemblance to Robert Redford,” Delice persisted.
“Which has served him well over the years. I’m all for Robert Redford of course, but don’t be deceived. Marsh Carhart makes me puke.”
“And he’s had that effect since when?” Delice asked.
“Always. Back in Berkeley, there were a bunch of young hotwires who were going to prevent environmental meltdown with something they called ‘appropriate technology.’ Everything from solar food dryers and composting toilets to personal computers and bioengineering.
“He was one of them. Marsh is a sociobiologist, which means he’s one step away from just making things up as he goes along. He did his dissertation work on birds—sooty terns, to be precise. Evidently, everybody thought these terns mated for life, but Marsh watched them go at it for about six months and then wrote a paper saying that the males snuck off and ‘committed adultery’ with younger females. He concluded that adultery was adaptive behavior for males of all species— those who were most successful at getting their sperm around were improving the gene pool and doing the species a favor.”
“Huh? Adultery?” said Delice. “Do the girl sooty terns go out and get nasty little birdie divorce lawyers? This sounds like total bullshit.”
“Ten-four. At the time his then-wife was booting him out after catching him in the back of their VW van with one of the girls who scooped ice cream at Swensen’s,” Sally said.
“He gets away with this stuff?” Delice was confused.
“What can I say? But he’s the king of headlines. The Redford thing doesn’t hurt when it comes to media coverage, or the fact that he’s marketed himself as a defender of the earth.”
“While porking everything in sight?” Delice asked.
“Especially the young ones, but of course, anything for the species. And then, of course, there’s that stupid book on rape. I hate to think what kind of participant-observer research he did on that one.”
Delice’s eyes went cold. “I doubt that what happened to Monette was a matter of natural selection. Okay, the guy’s a slimeball. He sounds like he and Nattie were made for each other. But my brother will put up with him, if he’s good for their business. I’m just amazed that people aren’t on to him. From what I saw last night it doesn’t take a lot of Stoli to get him talking.”
“Not about business. On the land thing, he was very coy. It’s not that surprising. He’s made some money. He bet large on Microsoft when it was just a couple of dudes with two tin cans and a string, so he must know a good thing when he sees it. I don’t care what kind of crap he slings about not getting involved in the financial end of these deals. If Nattie and Dwayne stand to make some bucks, Marsh probably has a piece of the action somewhere.”
“Maybe he just wasn’t interested in talking to you,” Delice said.
“And with good reason. Trust me, Dee, he does his talking with his wanger.”
“Oh, I believe it. He thinks I ‘run with the wolves.’ Maybe I can use that.” Delice fancied herself a Mata Hari when she needed to be.
“And if that fails,” said Sally, “you’ve got that bag of quarters.”
They fell silent as they passed the West Laramie Fly Store, heading out for the Snowy Range Road. The valley opened up before them, the Snowies looming ahead under the huge blue sky. Black-eyed susans nodded by the roadside, and Sally spotted half a dozen antelope, scattered over a hill. The windows were open, and the smell of sage and clean air enveloped them. The tension of the previous two days began, somehow, to fade. There were so many beautiful spots in Wyoming. It was a sad and amazing thing that somebody like Monette Bandy could have spent her whole life in such a place, and never learned to see or to care. “You know,” said Sally, “this is one of my favorite places in the whole world. If I had a piece of this, I’d never, ever let it go.”
“I’m with you,” said Delice. “And from what I’ve heard, Molly Wood is of the same opinion. That’s why I can’t understand how this deal’s gotten this far. Wood’s Hole is just about the biggest ranch in the valley. There can’t be a piece of property up in the Laramies that’s even close to the size, so there’s gotta be a bunch of cash involved. She must be under heavy pressure to be even considering this swap. And she’s the type to handle pressure. Wait until you meet her.”
As they neared the picturesque town of Centennial, nestled at the foot of the Snowy Range, Delice turned right on a gravel road, Hawk’s truck following behind her. Horned larks shot up out of the ditches as they rolled past. They took the road until it forked, bore left over a rise, and swept down, on a dirt driveway now, curving along the contour of the hill. A row of cottonwoods at the bottom marked a winding creek. Not far from the streambed, a grove of trees sheltered a cluster of weathered outbuildings and a sprawling white clapboard house with green shutters.
“A little bit of New England in the Rockies,” Sally remarked.
“That’d be Molly’s doing,” said Delice. “She’s not from here originally—came out from the East during World War II, to teach school.”
“How’d she come by the ranch?” Sally asked.
“Married money. Zeke Wood was a builder who got a nice chunk of the government contracts that turned Fort Warren, over in Cheyenne, into F. E. Warren Air Force Base, during World War II. And after that, well, let’s say they invested wisely.”
As Sally knew, FDR and his boys hadn’t been too scrupulous about cost overruns in the service of whipping Hitler and Hirohito. But then federal boondoggles during wartime were a time-honored way of getting rich in America. You didn’t have to be a corrupt profiteer to end up seeing some nice returns from government work. Westerners loved to bash Washington and then cash the checks.
Delice parked next to a brand-new Ford Expedition, in a turnaround between the barn and the house. Hawk pulled in beside her and jumped out. “Pretty place,” he said. “I like the house.” Hawk had spent his earliest years in Connecticut, with his grandparents, before his father and stepmother claimed him and took him to Tucson. He’d gone to college at Yale. He had a love-hate thing with New England. After all those years in Arizona, the ancient architecture still called to his Yankee blood.
“When I phoned this morning to tell her we’d be coming, she said she’d be down by the stock pond. I guess she’s a regular with the bird count for the Audubon Society, and she’s putting in a morning down there.”
“Cool,” said Hawk. He’d once confided to Sally that the finest thing his grandparents had ever given him was his first pair of binoculars. The Venerables, as he called them, hadn’t been much for showing affection, but they’d shown him how to look at birds, how to read field guides, how to use his eyes and his head to see the world more clearly. With his mother dead and his father gone, the birds of the Connecticut woodlands had provided little Josiah Green with a lot of company.
Hawk headed around to the toolbox in the back of his truck and pulled out his binocular case. “Check out those redwings and yellow-headed blackbirds, staking out their territory in the willows along the creek. Maybe I can become her assistant. I should have brought a six-pack.”
“She’d probably have appreciated it. Come on,” Delice told them.
They walked along the watercourse, on a path beaten through tall grass, weaving through sagebrush and trees to the pond. Not far along the shoreline, a small, compact woman in a straw hat sat in a folding lawn chair, leaning over a large bird-spotting telescope, mounted on a tripod. As they approached, she straightened, put on reading glasses that hung from a chain around her neck, wrote something in a notebook, took the glasses off and let them dangle, and turned on them a gaze so penetrating, Sally suddenly knew how those long-ago students of Molly Wood’s must have felt when they’d done something to call the teacher’s attention to themselves. Ahem.
Her expression wasn’t unfriendly. It was alert. Her eyes, strikingly blue, were relentless even as she smiled. Straight, short, silver-white hair framed her sturdy, beautiful face. She wore a button-down oxford shirt, pressed to crisp perfection, a pair of equally immaculate cotton pants, and a combination Sally had seldom seen since her fifties childhood: Keds with peds. “Hello there,” she drawled, the music of autumn, and apple cider, and sleigh rides in her voice. Sally instantly wished she could hear Molly Wood reading aloud. Edward Lear, or Thoreau, or
Goodnight Moon
. “So awfully nice of you to come and pick up all my old stuff.”
“I brought some folks to help,” said Delice, introducing them.
“Oh yes,” said Molly Wood. “I knew Meg Dunwoodie, Dr. Alder—may I call you Sally? I look forward to your biography. And in fact, Dr. Green—did you say Hawk, Delice? I’d thought it was Josiah—I attended your lecture last fall on southern Wyoming mineral deposits. A fascinating subject.”
“Glad to hear you think so,” said Hawk. “Most people don’t.” He swung his eyes to the edge of the pond, where birds with long, slim necks and stilt legs, red heads, white chests, and black and white wings pecked about in the tules. “Avocets,” he said. “Nice. What have you got out there in the way of ducks?”
“Take a look for yourself,” said Molly, gesturing at the scope.
Hawk leaned down and peered in the angled eyepiece.
“Mallards, teal, a couple of pintails,” he chanted. “Coots. Eared grebes. Long-billed curlews. White-faced ibises.” He swung the scope over to look at the tules again. “Some yellowlegs over there too.” He stood a moment and listened, silently. Now Sally was aware of the rustling of the wind in the leaves, the twittering of birds. “Do I hear a chestnut-collared longspur?”
Now Molly smiled broadly. “There’s a Wilson’s phalarope nest over there too. Come back this fall. We get great ducks here then.”
Hawk looked at her and grinned back. “If my grandmother were here, she’d have me down in the rushes, stomping around trying to flush rails.”
“I’m hardly old enough to be your grandmother!” Molly sniffed.
“I never exactly had a mother,” Hawk told her.
“Oh,” she said, taken aback. “Well then.”
“I should’ve brought Jerry Jeff.” Delice tried a diversionary tactic. “He’s very good at stomping.”
“He’s a teenager, yes? I’m sure he is. Teenage boys have feet of lead.” Molly seemed grateful for the shift, but she couldn’t help one sympathetic glance at Hawk. “I’m pretty much done here,” said Molly. “I’ll just pack up my stuff and come up to the house with you.”