Out of work, I took an extreme interest in the newspaper. I spent extraordinary time in one surmise after another based on the minutes of the commissioners’ meetings or the most opaque remarks of the mayor or, best of all, the “courthouse blotter,” where all things human from burglary to skunk removal to missing cats could be found on any given day. And with almost fatal gravity I was drawn as I had not been in many years to the classified ads and finally to that grim, black river of type labeled “Employment Opportunities.” Here was where I discovered Mr. and Mrs. Haines, who wished to have their house painted but, as I learned, had a limited budget to do so. Here also was where I imagined plunging into my own past, since the future was currently impaired.
As I looked the house over while awaiting an answer to the doorbell, I estimated it had not been painted since it was built, and it was a very old house. Mrs. Haines came to the door, opening it just wide enough to see out, then invited me in upon learning my business. She was a tiny white-haired woman, in her seventies I guessed, and quite excited to have a guest. I soon met her husband, a more phlegmatic type, who sat next to his ashtray in the breakfast nook that looked into the small backyard, which contained several well-tended raised flower beds. The house seemed to have had all the care that money couldn’t buy — clean, worn, and orderly — a small sequestered homebody’s niche.
Mrs. Haines did all the talking. Mr. Haines occasionally lifted a hand to add something but seemed to forget or change his mind, and the hand dropped to the table. Luckily, neither of the Haineses seemed to know who I was. I summarized what painting experience I could remember from long ago days and applied myself to winning their confidence. Within an hour, I was back with paint chips and insincerely applauded the good taste of the Haineses as they selected Chantilly Pearl with Spicy Chrysanthemum for the trim. I declined a deposit. Mrs. Haines was clear about what they were willing to pay. I accepted immediately because, euphoric about the prospect of scraping and painting their house, I was fretful that something beyond my control, like the weather, would delay me.
About a week later, Jocelyn called and asked if I wanted to see her place. I said that I did. It turned out she was already in town, and so she picked me up in her truck. I’m not sure why she wanted me to see it, although I began to suspect that it was to give her some advice about selling it. More than once she said, “You’re from around here.” We went through Big Timber, where the wind was blowing hard and the pedestrians were not only holding on to their hats but clutching themselves with a free hand to keep their coats from blowing open. Some students from the university were working in a vacant lot, what had been the Chinatown in the days of building the railroad. “I love this road to Harlowton,” Jocelyn said as we headed north. “Everything so open. Once you get used to seeing a long way it’s hard to accept anything less.” There was little activity on the ranches — wheel line sprinklers idled in cropped meadows, cows alone, bulls sequestered in corrals now that breeding season was over. I knew the calves were in the Midwest bloating on corn and antibiotics, quite offensive to a doctor accustomed to watching the corn lobby’s assault on American health.
We turned west up the Musselshell Valley toward Martinsdale and Two Dot. It was more tucked-away country, and Jocelyn drove slowly, seeming to examine every hill, every watercourse. She sighed and looked troubled. She reached over and held my hand. I can hardly say how I felt: I stared straight through the windshield and the empty sagebrush hills and sensed my breath was leaving me. She released my hand and returned hers to the wheel. I asked what she was thinking about and she said, “Riding the school bus.”
The road into the ranch left the pavement between two small hills, marked by a rusty mailbox with a cattle brand painted on its side. Once leaving the highway, it descended toward the river bottom, and a sprawl of buildings and worn-out farm machinery was visible around a grove of cottonwoods. An old railroad flatcar served as a bridge across the small river, and beyond was seemingly endless rangeland. She pulled up in front of the house. “I grew up here.”
It was a poor excuse for a single-story house, once white and now something else. On its small and uncovered porch sat an old TV with a kicked-in screen. A large farm thermometer with the profile of a cow gave anyone using the front door the bad news. Several sagging wires led to the house from nearby poles.
As soon as we had parked, the door opened and a lanky male in his thirties stepped out next to the TV and proclaimed that there wasn’t a damn thing to eat in the house except half a jar of peanut butter and one egg and that he hoped Jocelyn had brought groceries “or either” he’d like the car keys now. He wore Wrangler jeans, scuffed boots, and a black T-shirt, and his straight hair hung down to his collarbone. Despite oddly flat lips, he was a distinctive-looking character with a riveting set of crooked teeth.
Jocelyn said in a low voice, “That’d be your average Womack. If I’d taken better care of Womack, he might not be so whiney, but that’s water under the bridge now. And of course he’s got a point: you can’t do much with peanut butter and an egg.” Now Womack was among us.
Womack said to me, not altogether warmly, “You must be the doctor.”
“I must be.”
He extended a limp but calloused hand and said, “I hadn’t had the pleasure.”
Jocelyn said, “There’s groceries in the back, Crybaby. You want to get them?”
I followed Jocelyn into the house. I believe this was the first house I’d ever seen with standing ashtrays like those of an old-time hotel lobby. On the floor was a large parti-colored hide rug, which Jocelyn explained was Rags, her father’s boyhood horse. Newspapers and magazines were stacked nearly to the sill of the window that looked into the yard and through which I could see Womack coming in with the groceries.
Jocelyn bade me follow her into a room whose door was shut. She held it for me and I went into a small space with a pipe-frame bed, walls covered with children’s drawings of flowers, horses, deer, dogs, and cats — in a kind of evolution that included posters for Kiss, Guns N’ Roses and the big red lips of the Rolling Stones. I said, “This was your room?”
Jocelyn pulled open the closet door, and on its inside was a collection of aircraft pictures. I thought of the picture my father kept of him standing next to a captured ME-109 just inside the Westwall. You could see the Dragon’s Teeth of the Siegfried Line in the background. My father often got it out to look at, which caused him to drift off and sort of glaze over. Jocelyn’s pictures were all domestic aircraft, including several like the spray plane she had crashed.
Womack was looking me over from the doorway; I never heard him arrive.
From the window of Jocelyn’s bedroom, as I learned of other rooms in the house, the view was entirely given to abandoned machinery and deer hides of various vintage. The wind was a continuous background sound, never steady but punctuated by the slap of rope against the iron flagpole in the front yard. I had noticed that nothing was designated as a place to park; rather, you kept driving until you got as close to the front door as possible, maybe in deference to weather, but it was surprising to see the front grille of the truck so close to the glass of the living-room window.
When Jocelyn went into the kitchen to put the groceries away, Womack stayed close to me. With one finger, he moved his hair behind an ear and said, “Where you from?”