Queens Wild

this!

Part One: Claim Stakes

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1.01

Come on, Baby! the driver sang to the truck.   Come on!   

It really ticked him that they sent him off with this bucket.   I mean, six hundred miles round trip in this thing was no joke.   Hot.   It was gonna be hotter than bloody hell by the time he got done, and no air-conditioning.   Oh, no.   Of course not.   He slewed the truck around the curve, squinting ahead to see where the hell the smooth part of the road might be.   As if there was one!   Hah! he said as the wheel dropped into the pothole.   Where’d that come from?   The truck bottomed out on the pothole’s edge.   Replace your divots, gentlemen! he shouted.   Replace your divots!

I would like, he thought, to get a run at that hill.   It would not hurt at all to do that.   He had to shade his eyes against the sun that was getting ready to pour over the lip of the ridge.   The road greyed out against its light.   Come on!   The truck slewed again, and he sent it to the far left side of the road, feeling for a way off the washboard, a place where the gravel splayed out into something at least half way smooth.

He would very much not like to lose those bales off the truck.   He glanced back through the rear window.   No, they weren’t going anywhere.   Still, he would like to not lose them.   Shit!   The light pounded into his eyes.   It wasn’t enough that he had to drive all night to get there.   Then he got there too early and had to wait.   No, that wasn’t enough.   He had to have the high-balls, didn’t he.   Well, he didn’t.   But he did.   And besides, whose fault was it if he got friggin’ bombed.   Anybody would be if they sat in the casino all night waiting for it to be time.   Anybody.   He got the job done, didn’t he?   Got things loaded without any help in the middle of friggin’ no where.   Hah!   Including help from himself.   Almost! he said.

The truck bottomed again, throwing him up toward the roof of the cab.   He jerked the wheel to the right.   He had done it just like last time:   sat up at the first real wide spot after the pass with his lights off.   Got there right on time anyhow, at 4 a.m.   Flashed his lights off and on once, then shut them off and just sat and waited for a friggin’ hour.   So at least this time he had brought a little something to have with the coffee he poured from the thermos.   Not like last time when he sat and froze his butt off in the middle of March.   

When he emptied the bottle, he tossed it in a long arc out into the last of the night.   Sit and look right toward the beacon that is off on the far southern horizon, his orders said.   Just keep looking at the darkness that is in line with it here, down in the valley.   Don’t look away because you better not miss the light.   It’s only going to shine once.   Then count ten and see if it shines again.   Then flash your own lights on and off if it does.   Then wait five and go.   Well, it friggin’ did.   He did.   He wound down off the pass and crossed the valley.   In something like half an hour -- no, less than that -- he got there.

The bales were where they were supposed to be: by the big pile of tumbled stones.   Looked like an old foundation of some kind, there among the trees.   He figured the light got flashed at him from some place up above this spot.   Must be a road up there a ways or something.   The thought that someone was looking down on him, breathing down his neck, made his scalp creep, even though he knew it was still too dark for anyone to really see.   Anyone human, that is.   But no one human would do this.   Not him; not me, he whispered.   He slapped at the mosquitoes that had closed in on him as soon as he got out of the cab and started bucking the bales up into the truck-bed.   He was the best meal -- the only meal -- they’d had for a while, he thought, and they came swarming up from some stale pond hidden off in the brush.   He thought he could even hear the splash of water off where the huge cottonwoods loomed in the half-light.   Weird waterhole in the middle of noplace.   He was glad to get out of there.

The truck’s right front tire crashed down into the little gully some storm’s runoff had cut into the edge of the road.   But he caught her back in line and stomped on it as the road tipped sharply up.   Serpentine Pass! he said to himself.   As the engine started to lug, he crammed it into third, into second, and laid his foot to the floorboard.

So, finally, for the first time in his life, he had hit a dollar slot for more than a hundred bucks.   The casino had been all but empty as he waited for it to be time to drive up and wait for his signals.   He had sat on that stool for at least an hour and not gone broke, which was in itself amazing.   The girl kept shilling him with drinks, but she didn’t have to.   He didn’t have anyplace to go in that godforsaken town except the casino.   Nothing else was even open.   But five hundred!   Hot dog!   That was all right.   He could think of it as a bonus.   And he really couldn’t complain, he guessed, about drawing dirty duty and having to drive all the way up there.   He could use five hundred.   He wasn’t above that yet.

Whoever it was who was backing this deal was a piker, though.   It bugged him to see himself go hat in hand, begging for jobs like this one.   He should have more pride than it took to sell out his talents for this crummy job.   All because of a crummy license -- or the lack thereof.   Crummy!

It really hardly registered that the wheel went off the road.   He hadn’t seen any hole or ditch or gully or anything.   The last thing he thought as the truck started to tip was that the goddam bales were gonna go down the goddam ravine.   Then the lights went out.

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When the light blazed into his eye he thought it was the sun again.   But then the light went away and came back in just his other eye.   He heard the silence.

Still there, he thought the voice said, and it was as if he were swimming up, up through layers of water toward the light.   

He could make out the lower part of a face.   Sunglasses.   The brim of a hat.   He let the bubbles of air out onto the water’s surface, felt the cool air wash over his soaking brow.   The rest was buoyant, suspended in water, weightless, feeling nothing.   But his head felt, felt the white sundering pain down the right side of his neck, to the place where….   Where what?   Where he felt nothing?   When he felt for his hands, they weren’t there.   He couldn’t feel for his hands to feel for himself.   He didn’t have any feet.   He could sense his face, and the searing that was his jaw, that ran part way down his neck.   And his head, his lips, his tongue: all of them there.   He must have been in water, he told himself, suspended, the rest of him floating.   But he wasn’t.   There was no rest of him, and there was no water.   There was the truck door, but he was looking up at it, sort of, wasn’t he?   If he could have a moment to put this all together…, but he couldn’t.

The other hand, not his, came toward his face.   He tried to focus.   Tried to make out what that vague, shimmery stuff, that clear material was that the hand held toward him, what ministrations the hand might provide.   It settled firmly on his nose and jaw, cupping the gossamer to his face.   He would have asked, but when he tried to take a breath, he could not.   The stuff sucked against his nostrils and lips, secured there by the inrush of air, the steady and unyielding hand.   He could not free himself from it, for he was only a head wedged against the doorpost and the truck seat.   He would have fought to gain one breath, but he was no shoulders, no arms, no torso.   He had become only the growing pressure in his ears, his eyes, his skull; only a pounding heart in the spaces of the roar that issued from his throat, forsaken by his body, his head now drowning in panic.   And still the hand held firm, fastened on him, even through the greying.

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1.02

Randy slipped his left hand through the woven rope handle, laid it palm-up just back of the mounding muscle between the animal’s shoulders.   Al yanked up hard on the belly-rope, passing it over to him so he could finish.   The bull had Randy’s left knee jammed against the gate slat, and with every lurch of the creature, he could feel its pent force waiting to explode into the freedom of the arena.

Whoa down there!   Randy said.   He whipped the flat rope across his opened left hand, whipped it again behind his wrist, then back through his palm, pulling it tight, tighter.   With his right hand he folded his gloved left fingers down across the rope.   Then he pounded on them, forcing them into a fist that would hold.   He lifted the last two feet of rope, gently laid it out of the way, a delicate ‘s’ snaking up the bull’s neck.

Al was all but on the bull with him, straddling above and behind, one foot on the side of the loading chute, one on the inside of the gate, ready to help shove it open when Randy gave the word to go ahead, unleash the eight long seconds.

Under him, the bull blistered to be free.   One last suck of air, and Randy jerked his head forward, signing the chute man to cinch up the haunch strap.   Toes out, he spit the word:   "Now!"     Al pounded him on the back as the blue pipe gate swung out into the arena.

The shouting, red stands lurched downward and to the side as the beast climbed.   With his free hand Randy pointed to the sun. "Eight! he said to the back of the bull’s head, as it dropped toward the ground.   It slashed toward him, knotting the neck sinews as the rump came around and up.   There Seven! was Sam, the pickup man, circling his horse, off at a distance. Save my ass! Randy hissed.   For less than a moment all noise was sucked from the air, all Six! color from the sky, but they came back blue and hot as the creature slammed upward, wrenching, throwing his great head back toward the rider.     Randy Five! grunted.   Spit from the bull’s snout arched over its skull, a silver thread against the red neck.   At the orange barrel the clown crouched down, waved his hand.   His Four! main man, his rescue team, and at that moment, Randy loved him.   Half ridden!   It was half ridden!   Now count down to the buzzer!   Three! Randy said into the bull’s ear.   To sal-va-tion and safety away from this beast.   While Two! the whole body twisted, gnarled between Randy’s knees and insulting spurs, nose-down, tail-down, crouched, uncoiled One!"   Damned bull! and damned buzzer! Where was the damned uncoiled into the sky buzzer?!

There! "Zzzeee-ro!" just as Randy’s head whipped forward and the wetblood salted his mouth.

Damned horn! Damned bull!   He opened his left hand and the flat rope caught for a moment, pinioned him to the bull’s back, then slipped, half pulling his glove off, relenting at the last moment as Randy hit the ground and staggered for the fence.   The arcing bull turned in midair to crash down on him, but the clown was there, waving, waving, whistling, and the bull lowered its head, turned aside just in time, and the clown was in the barrel and Randy was running for the fence and onto and over it, now licking with his tongue at the split in his lip, spitting.   The bull led with its right horn, hooked it against the careening barrel, then ran a little past the watching, soon-to-be rider.   It stopped, tossed its head while the stripping chute gate opened and the chute man waved and drew it in, reaching to loosen the haunch strap cinched around the bull’s middle as it ran by.

Poor cowboy!   Let’s hear it for him! said the loudspeaker, and the shouts and whistles came into focus.   "Looks like we got us a head-slinger in here today.   Split the man’s lip there on the bull’s horn.   Might almost call that bull un-satisfactory.   But the buzzer got there first.   Yes-sir!

"Now let me see here.   The judges tell me that little ride got you seventy-five of them ‘style points.’   Nothing extra for the split lip.   A little colorful there, Randy, but nothing serious.   That happens.   Little scar there to give your face character!

"Let’s give him a big hand.   Good second go-round by Mr. Randy Birkhofer from the Circle B over at Keno and out of the University of Nevada!   That gives him a one-forty-eight all told, according to my calculation.   Maybe we’ll get the young fellow some tu-ition after all, or just pocket money.   Only time will tell.

"Now here’s our next rider, the last one, who’d like to have it for himself, on ‘Dia-blito,’ coming out of the center gate, the one all painted up to remind you folks about your friendly Carson City Chevy dealer.   Turn your eyes on it while I remind you that, after him, right at four o’clock, there will be that raffle of that shiny new truck you saw parked in the entrance.

Okay.   This here is LeRoy James from right here in Beckwith.   See if he can chase Randy out of that there lead.

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1.03

All the way from Beckwith, Randy kept the plastic bag with the ice pressed to his lip, till he couldn’t feel it any more and the bleeding stopped.   But whenever he took the bag away and his lip warmed up, the blood started to ooze again.   He could feel that his lip had thickened, and when he glanced down, he could see it swelling out.   

Looks great! Al said about every five minutes, meaning the opposite.   In between times he kept the commentary coming:   Now it’s blue.   Now it’s spreading to the other side.

Al kept both his hands on the steering wheel of the pickup and turned his head to inspect the wound.

Keep yur eyes on the road, Randy slurred.   I’ll take care of this myself.

Al snorted.

Well, I won, didn’t I?

Sure, but you should have gotten that stitched up.

Then I wouldn’t have the money, right?   The doctor would.

Right, Al said.   Now it’s spreading over this way.   He pointed toward Randy’s left ear.

Randy wrenched the rear-view mirror so that it focused on himself.   Is not, he said.   Quit lying.

My mom can fix it, Al said.   Trouble is, she’ll just do it the Indian way.   But the price will be right.

Right, Randy echoed, and tipped back to survey the road ahead, the improvised icebag pressed to his mouth.

The highway crested the hill then headed for the defile between the blank red hills.   This part of the road always got to him:   in a bleak land, these miles were the most austere.   As it passed the scattering of buildings and few trees that was Dry Creek, it followed along a valley that was almost entirely destitute of green, except for the barest fringe along the edge of the river.   Two steps away from it on either side and you were on the moon -- or Mars.   Probably Mars was more like it, because the color seemed right.   The hills on both sides crowded toward each other, squeezing out the narrowest valley, absolutely flat and not more than three miles wide.   Then when the road had climbed a bit, suddenly the cobalt blue lake was there, crammed in and with the highway sidling along its west shore.   Then was when you realized how blue the sky could get.   Randy always liked the picture.   He could summon it in the middle of the night in the middle of the winter in the middle of a white-out snowstorm:   livid hills, a silver ribbon of river, the sky and the improbable lake both so flawlessly blue that they seemed all one thing.   No trees, no bushes to speak of.   Rocks, hills, water, sky.   It was the simplest picture he could think of.   On a hot day in the middle of summer, the whole thing just throbbed.   It was doing it now, or else his lip was.

We could always stop at Doctor Rock, Al offered.   In fact, Mom will want to know why we didn’t.

No thanks, Randy said.

You could drop a penny in the crack, or your button, and say a prayer.   If we just knew which rock it was.   Used to be my folks would do that on the way to Dry Creek to gamble....

I know, Randy said.   

...til the rock got bulldozed when they widened the highway, Al went on.   Guess you’ll just have to be out of luck now, let my Mom fix it.

Randy mumbled his rejection of the idea, but he knew Mary would be all over him as soon as they got there.   This was her kind of thing.   Down at the far end of the lake he could make out the beginning of the ammo dump.   The rows of evenly spaced bunkers off to the east and south were still just tiny flecks marching toward the hills, but they filled the landscape pretty well.   This was a god-forsaken ravine, this gash cutting north and south for fifty miles through the western Nevada rock and sand.   Even if the dump blew sky high, no one would know it, so enclosed it was in earthen terraces and dikes of stone that seemed as ancient as any on earth.   The remains of the great western lake that had once run three hundred miles on a side, one-hundred and fifty at each end had retreated to this.   It was hard to think of an ice-age on a day such as this, but there had been one, and this blue, blue water was but the brackish remains of that now-shrunken inland sea.   Not much left, but it seemed a lot in its own way in the midst of this desiccation.   It stirred Randy, reminding him he was almost half way home.

Randy regarded Al, his stocky chest, the soft face, straight black eyelashes.   His compact hands draped through the steering wheel, his wrists doing the actual driving as the miles rolled by.   This was really his country, not Randy’s.   When they were kids, when their play turned too rough, they used to fight about it.   Their scuffles usually ended when the resentment got too serious.   One or the other of them would break it off and walk away.   Al could never answer the taunt that the Paiutes had been whipped by the ranchers.   Randy could never justify the fact that only whites owned the ranches -- and the mines -- and the town.   Both he and Al silently knew that no one was going to give anything back.   So they would stop wrestling, the one on top stalking off to the house, to Mary’s house or to the ranch house, depending on where they were.   After while they would be back together doing something, nothing settled, because it couldn’t be, the subject dropped so that they could play or fish or hunt -- or just lie around together in one of their yards and read comic books.   Now that they were older, those subjects just never came up.

So what’s going on with Fish and Game? Randy asked.

Al flipped his palms up.   Nothin.’   They’re supposed to be done interviewing.   Now we just wait, I guess.   Al’s degree in zoology and the fact that he was an Indian made him the odds-on favorite to get hired down at the DFG hatchery, Randy thought, but Al was not accustomed to letting himself think so optimistically.

Till when? Randy asked.

Till they decide.

Which is when?

I dunno.   Soon, I guess, Al said.

Didn’t you ask?   Randy knew the answer.   Al wouldn’t ask, and if they turned him down, he wouldn’t want to inquire why.   If he didn’t get the job, the two of them probably wouldn’t talk about it, and neither would Al’s mother, Mary.   Well, I think you’ll get it.

Al didn’t reply.   His wrists still draped loosely over the top of the wheel.   Randy watched to see if Al changed his expression, but he didn’t.   By the time they got to Mary’s, the sun had gotten below the western hills, and the brightness was abandoning the ravine.   The heat was still trapped down there, probably would be all that night and for the next week or so.   By August, things settle down to a serious hotness that only subsides in the few hours before dawn.   You could feel the rocks reradiating the sun’s warmth, but they weren’t going to be able to cool all the way down before the next day’s cycle started things over again.

When Al switched off the engine, the sound of crickets took up the noise.   ’Rain.’   They’re saying ‘Rain,’ he said.   Mary had told the boys that some time too far in the past for Randy to recall when. That’s how they pray.   

I know, Randy said, but thinking that they mustn’t be very good at praying.   Or someone wasn’t listening to what was wanting here at Thorpe.

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We better eat first, she had said when they came in.   I don’t want you messin’ up my bandage job.   They had sat down in the kitchen and had eaten what Mary always prepared when Randy was showing up:   trout, corn pudding, fry-bread, peach pie -- his favorites.   He knew he could expect it: the fish fresh from the lake, piles of them; the peaches from among the gleaming jars of fruit she had stashed in her cellar.   Tonight, in honor of his coming she had set out the first bowl of the summer of buckberry sauce.   Its tartness had made him wince when some of it got onto his lip.   That’ll cure you all by itself, she had decreed.     At last she pushed back from the table and gestured to Al to start clearing.   You better let me at that lip now.

Al smirked at Randy’s protestations while he piled the dishes in the sink.   Randy watched as her square brown hands laid out the ointment, the tape, the scissors, the alcohol bottle, the button of red clay.   

You’re not going to use that on me, Randy declared, as she dropped some water onto the clay and mixed it up into a little paste.

She didn’t answer, just kept on with her preparations, the way she always did.   Randy knew not to expect a response from her.   Never, when she had been raising him at the Circle B after his mother died, did she pause to argue with him.   She just moved steadily forward, bearing him and all objections before her, pressed to her ample breasts and belly.   She surrounded him now, tipped his head back, squinted at the lip.

You not going to be able to shave for a while, she said.

Ouch, he winced.   She brought her square face down to his and he looked into the brown eyes that focused on his lip.   The lines, deepening with time, cut her face into dark, simple planes now.   The wide mouth pursed a little as she dabbed at him.   A serious, kind, scarcely mobile face.   He had often seen it thus as she bent to set him straight in some way.   Ouch! he repeated.

You shoulda had this stitched, she said.   You waited too long.

I didn’t have time, he mumbled.

Sss-h, she said.   Her deft hands prodded at the lip.   He watched as she fashioned a butterfly from the tape.   This is gonna pull your mouth funny for a little, she said.   But you gotta leave it alone.   You gonna have a scar.

That’s what the announcer said at the rodeo.   Said it would make my face less boring.

She pulled back and squinted at him for a moment.   That’s right, she said.   Anything would make it better.   

Al snickered behind him and rattled the dishes around in the sink.

That night, as he and Al lay in the cramped dark bedroom, listening to the still-insistent crickets, Al said, She’s buggin’ me now about gettin’ married.   Thinks its time.

Anyone in particular?   Randy asked the blank dark air.

Probably.   But she isn’t sayin’.   Yet. Al said.   

Well, you better ask her before she gets her mind made up.   Otherwise it will be too late.

She says I should marry two sisters.   Says that’s what her grandfather did.   I told her I’d probably get locked up.   I said I didn’t know she thought marrying was so good.   She said it was.   Said she tried it twice and liked it.     First time, it got her me.   Second time she got George, and she liked us both.

Randy smiled into the dark, remembering the woman who had fed him, washed him, rounded him up into the trailer where she had come to live with her own baby, Al.   She had stuck it out at the Circle B for his father Jeb’s sake for as long as she could, until George came to take her away to Thorpe when Randy was five.

She’s quite a lady, Randy said into the night.

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Get up, now, Mary said.   Bathroom’s clear.   George went to work.

Randy could hear the sound of George’s truck revving and coughing, revving and coughing.   I see he got it tuned, Randy said.

Never mind, Mary said.   Come on out in the kitchen when you’re ready.   She handed him a clean towel.

Al snored once, then rolled over, the sheet wrapping itself around his hips and legs, one foot extending over the edge of the bed.   Randy could make out the big bunches of red roses in the wallpaper.   Beyond the gauze of the curtain, the day was already turning yellow, the grey of dawn long gone.   He gathered up his clothes and eased out the door, leaving Al asleep.   In the bathroom, he touched his lip.   Under the white streak of tape, it did look less swollen, he would have to admit.   He rummaged through Al’s drawer, looking for a fresh razor, but there was none.   Looked like now would be the time to let his beard grow.   He rubbed his hand along the stubble on his jaw and wondered what his beard was looking like.   Last time he had tried to grow it, he had been seventeen, and the result was not all he had hoped for.   To say the least!   Tom had shamed him about it until he went and shaved the humiliation away.   That had been five long years ago.   He reckoned things would be different by now.

In the kitchen, Mary had set his place, and as he came in and sat down at the formica-top table, she unloaded a hot plate from her apron-wrapped hand.

Ham.   Eggs, bacon, biscuits.   The catsup bottle and butter and jam were lined up before him, hot coffee in the cup at his elbow.   

How’s the lip? she asked.   Let’s see.   She grabbed his chin and tilted his head from side to side, nodding her approval, saying nothing, then sat down with a cup of coffee to join him.

So Al tells me you’re going to get him married, Randy said.   That right?

Sure, Mary said.   He’s gettin’ old enough now.   No more school.   What’s he waitin’ for?   Besides, I’m tired of feedin’ him.   Time he got a place of his own.   It could be right here.   We could use another woman around this place, and some kids.

Randy worked his way through the eggs.

You, too, Mary said.   Both you guys could do a little looking around now.   Might take a while for you to find something, you know.

Whoa! said Randy.   What did I do to deserve this?

Well, she said, I get to tell you these things because there’s no one else to do it.   Dwayne’s wife maybe.   Rachel.   But she’s not going to say anything.   There’s no other women to remind you about certain things.   You and Al are just the same.   If somebody doesn’t tell you to do somethin’, you might not think of it.   

We’ll think of it, Mary.   Don’t worry, he said.

I’m not worryin’ yet.   But pretty soon it will be time.   I can see it.   She sat looking him over: the taped lip, the plaid shirt and jeans, the dusty boots.     You’re lookin’ pretty good, I can tell you.

Randy couldn’t think of what to say to the usually reserved woman who had just turned so talkative on him.   She must have been thinking about this a lot to have stepped across her threshold of quiet.   Suddenly unnerved by his silence and her unaccustomed foray into his privacy, she got up from the table and started working on the dishes.

Listen, she said, There’s some stuff there that I want you to take over to your dad for me.   Some peaches and stuff.   He likes them and he hasn’t had any for a while.

Okay, Randy said.

And then in October or November you can come along when we go for pine nuts.

The remark was so unexpected it startled both of them.   She was talking about the big trip all the band made each fall to gather nuts for the winter.   The piñons dotted the flanks of some of the hills over to the west when you climbed up out of the valley.   They got really plentiful as you approached the slopes of the mountains behind the Circle B all the way on to the eastern slopes of the Sierra range.   It used to be that the Paiutes would gather huge batches of the nuts each autumn, enough to get them through the winter.   But that was long ago, and now the only memories of those times occurred when the people packed up in their trucks and cars and went for a day or two of collecting.   It was a social time now, though everybody knew that once it had been sacred.

Well, sure, Randy said, flattered.   But that’s a ways off.

Yes, she said.   But it’ll be here soon enough.   Come on.   You better get out of here.   It’s already ten of seven.

Yeah, Randy said, and I still have to get gas.

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1.04

The road over Serpentine Pass cuts about seventy miles off the trip from Thorpe to Keno Springs.   In general, there is nothing wrong