“You’ve never looked better,” said Natalie.
“I’ve never felt better.”
“This is the pretty part. Next, an avalanche of birdshit if anyone startles them. They can’t fly, so they express themselves with a big number two.”
“Can you believe Mama and Bill Champion?” Evelyn said. The sisters faced each other like two caciques from the Orinoco, heads and shoulders covered with birds.
“No, and I can barely picture the implications.”
“Is this a romantic story?”
“I won’t be steamrollered by that if it is. We don’t have any idea who we are anymore if we’ve been so ignorant about our own mother, assuming she is our mother; or our father, assuming that was our father. Ouch! The little sonofabitch just bit me!”
An intense clerk in green surgeon’s scrubs appeared and impatiently wanted to know if they were going to buy a bird.
“We’re unsure,” Evelyn said.
“We’re just test-driving them,” said Natalie. “How’re you fixed for hamsters?” When the clerk left without a word, she added, “We check the fish.”
Glittering creatures sailed through a bubbling world, a price list fastened to the glass currently being scoured clean by a morose catfish whose industry Natalie found “demented.” “You’d be surprised how much company even one fish is,” she said, “Just in case you’re thinking you might be alone for a long time. For vim and vigor, I always recommend an aquarium. They’ve proven effective in keeping mature women from jumping at the wrong guys.”
Suddenly a look of alarm crossed Natalie’s face. With a conspiratorial widening of her eyes, she subtly indicated a new customer with a gesture of her chin. Evelyn saw a rather pretty brunette examining a revolving rack of pet-care pamphlets, and was trying to recognize her when Natalie leaned over and whispered, “That’s Paul’s parole officer. They’re having them a big time. You’re only young once,” she added, giving a tower of sacked cat food a sardonic hump.
Evelyn handled this revelation with minimal falsehood; at every stop in the pet store, she stole evaluative glances and would have had a lighter heart if Geraldine had been as ugly as a mud fence.
Outside, the snow hit them in the face. The wind abated briefly and the snow descended in clouds. At the car Natalie nearly spoiled everything by saying, “You know, I hope, that Paul really loves you. With all his heart.”
“It’s sad when someone like Paul elects to go on living.”
“He must have his reasons,” said Natalie. “Just give him another chance to be a husband.”
“Paul does great on the side. It’s when he’s in the middle of your life that his real deficiencies emerge.”
Natalie just looked mournful. “I struggle to make a life with a very strange man, yet I have plenty of bounce left. I want a cockatiel.”
“I just wish I could recover the years I spent in the arms of Mr. Rent-a-Dick.”
“I wish you could too. Now, who gets to talk to Mama?”
“You take her. I’ll talk to Bill.”
Evelyn didn’t go to the ranch until the snow quit and a low, lead-colored ceiling descended halfway down the Gallatin Range; the Crazies were completely obscured, but the Bridgers stuck clear through the top like Shangri-la. Finding Bill wouldn’t be hard. All he had to do was roll out feed with the Hydrabed truck, spooling last summer’s hay a half ton at a time. Or if he had cattle in farther pastures, he would haul the bales with the tractor, cut the strings and roll them down the hill. Evelyn liked to be there for that, liked watching the cows form in along the luscious scroll of green, vivid and anomalous against the winter landscape. Once a few calves came, the ravens could begin their late-winter stroll, maintaining a discriminatory air even as they poked about in the afterbirth. As the season progressed, calved-out cows, bags swinging, shadowed by new offspring, joined the line up behind the truck, several green-headed from crowding the unraveling bounty of alfalfa.
A snow fence protected the last of the road into the house, and a berm of packed and drifted snow rose to the west. The road itself was dry, as were bands of ground in the ranch yard where the spruces blocked the wind. The cows lay down in the afternoon sun behind the shelter belt and a flash of moving water could be seen in the watergap behind them. High above, on a ridge of sagebrush and prickly pear, deer trails spiderwebbed toward the river. All life was submerged, but there.
Evelyn found Bill in the corrals working on a waterer. He had the float out of it and was rewiring the heating element. He knelt on the concrete slab surrounded by tape, screwdrivers, sidecutters and insulated pliers. Knowing Bill, the breaker was still on and he was dodging various shocks while he worked.
“Oh, golly,” he said and stood up, not all the way at first, and smacked his hands against each other. His coveralls were unzipped to his chest, and his face was mottled with exertion.
Evelyn reached out and gave his sleeve a little tug.
“Evelyn,” he said.
“Who fed while you were gone?”
“I seen to it.”
“I could’ve done that.”
This didn’t warrant, and perhaps didn’t deserve, any reply at all. “Well, you could throw in now, Evelyn. Had a panel go over during the night where I’d put some first-calf heifers that was springin’. Then the waterer boiled over and made just an ice stump here where I had to beat half it off with a tire tool to fix it. Still ain’t fixed.”
“I should look for those heifers.”
“Don’t like that sky.” It was low and gloomy, and off to the west hung a ragged curtain of something darker.
“How long has this thing with Mama been going on?”
Bill inspected the band inside his hat. Evelyn knew it said Ajax Western, Clayton, New Mexico. “Fifty years,” said Bill. Evelyn found this news dizzying. What else had she not noticed? What else was she wrong about?
She thought for a long moment, then asked, “Who’s shod?” She could at least do the work in front of her.
She was going for these heifers; some wouldn’t be able to have their calves without help, and the idea of them torn open by their own offspring in a winter storm was terrible. Besides, Bill would head off for them in the dark if something didn’t happen now.
“Cree and Scram. Scram’s got borium stickers. He’d be better on the ice. Don’t even think about taking Cree. He’s far too green.”
“Fifty years.”
“Fifty-one at the end of next month.”
Scram, a big claybank gelding with withers like a fighting bull and the rather primitive head of a Civil War cavalry horse, was twelve hundred and thirteen pounds of plain suspicion. No matter how many times he’d seen a saddle or bridle, he snorted like a locomotive all over again. Evelyn once asked if he was a bronc, and Bill said, “He thinks he’s a bronc.” He would stand humped up under the old Connolly saddle, ears backed alongside his head, front feet skittering from side to side and the lead-shank bone tight to the hitching rack. From the time he broke him, Bill said he’d never be a falling-down or rearing-over horse. “Once I seen that, I knowed he’s foolin’ with me.” The few times he blew up, it was all in one place, never bogged his head, never spun. Bill let it run through him, fed him eleven miles of hill and now, he “couldn’t buck a straw hat off the saddlehorn.” Nevertheless, Evelyn always noticed the concussion of his coal black hooves on the pounded earth when he was trying.