Brown-Eyed Girl (7 page)
Authors: Virginia Swift
As long as he'd hung around Laramie, there had been men of various ages milling around on the basketball courts, dribbling, shooting, lackadaisically checking each other out. Acting as if they weren't paying any attention, they formed into teams, half-court today, three-on-three. Hawk played on a team with a short, blocky, musclebound black guy who looked like he might once have been a leg-pumping running back, and a gangly, sweetfaced, green-eyed white guy whose specialty shot, could you believe it, was a Kareem sky hook! They played against three tanned, toned white boys whose combined height was about twenty feet and combined age probably didn't top sixty-five. Hawk was six-one and admitted to being forty-five years old, but he was sneaky. Twice he had dropped his special move on the opposition: Pick your spot, three slow dribbles, a head fake right, a quick crossover dribble left faking out the defender, elevate, sink the jumper. They even fell for it the second time. He shoots. He scores. They win! High fives.
“Haven't seen you around here before,” the green-eyed guy said, showing Hawk where to pick up a towel on the way into the locker room.
“It's been a while,” said Hawk, wiping off his glasses and stopping at a drinking fountain.
“Tom Youngblood,” said the guy, sticking out his hand.
“Joe Green,” said Hawk, shaking it. He'd been introducing himself that way forever. He hated “Josiah” and his father and Maria had called him Jody (so had one other person, intermittently, at particularly intimate moments). Only his friends from way back knew him by the nickname the preppies at college had given him: Hawk.
“Nice crossover dribble to the jumper,” said Tom.
“Nice Kareem,” said Hawk. Gosh, guys knew how to communicate.
They got cleaned up and ended up going to the student union to get plastic-wrapped ham sandwiches and sodas. They took their lunches out onto the broad green rectangle of Prexy's Pasture. Hawk learned that Tom taught American literature, a subject Hawk had studied in some detail, long ago when he had been an English major at Yale. Tom learned that Joe had just been hired as a professor of earth sciences, specializing in economic geology. But really he 'd been hired because they were trying to cash in on his experience as an exploration geologist. They evidently thought he could go out prospecting and dig up jobs for their graduates.
“And can you?” Tom asked, washing a desiccated bite of sandwich down with Minute Maid orange soda.
“If they're willing to move around, live in weird places, and get laid off a lot,” said Hawk.
“What kind of weird places?” Tom inquired.
“Oh, about everywhere from Pioche, Nevada to places in Peru that nobody's ever heard of,” Hawk said, flattening his Coke can.
“Try me,” said Tom. “I've been to Peru. Great climbing.”
They talked about the Andes. Tom had done technical climbing all over the world. Hawk offered the opinion that when you walked off-trail up and down mountains to make a living, you were less inclined to spend your weekends trying to die hanging off a precipice. But he didn't mind walking some to get a good view. Tom moved on to ask a number of personal questions. Hawk gave short answers. He'd been born in Connecticut. Gone to high school in Arizona. Gone east to college. Gone west to grad school. Worked exploration in South America and Europe and all over the West, including Wyoming.
Tom returned to familiar turf: basketball. He was a member of a perennially victorious city league team, which was made up of wily aging jocks who called the team “Old, But Slow.” He asked Hawk if he was interested in joining, and Hawk said he'd think about it.
Then Tom tried the personal angle one more time. “You married?”
“Nope.”
“Significant other?”
“No.”
“You free Saturday night?”
Hawk considered. “I could be.”
“My wife,” said Tom, “is the best cook in southern Wyoming, possibly the whole state. We're having some people over for dinner. You want to come?”
Hawk smiled a little. “Do I look like some kind of lonesome bachelor who'd do anything for a home-cooked meal?”
Tom put up his hands. “Hey, for all I know, you could be a psycho-killer, and I've just made a really stupid, indeed fatal mistake.”
“No,” said Hawk, “I'm a man of peace. And I'd do anything for a home-cooked meal.”
Sally had returned from El Conquistador to Margaret Dunwoodie's house full, nervous, and curious. When a mood like this came on, all she could do was read and write. She went to the office, sat down at the beautiful desk, put on her funky LA-hip reading glasses and opened the folder labeled dunwoodie foundation official bio. Candor and contrivance leapt out at her this time: Meg had written this brief account of her own long life in the third person. Sally read it, then opened the folder Edna had given her and read through the transcript of the interview. Then, checking against the transcript for discrepancies, backing the tape up to repeat things she couldn't quite make out, she listened to Margaret's surprisingly steady old-lady voice on tape, answering Edna's warm but pointed questions with an appearance of forthrightness that left much out. Sally paid close attention to the speed of Dunwoodie's words, the hesitations, the places where she laughed and where the phrases sounded canned.
Then she booted up her laptop, with the folders open in front of her on the desk. Sally opened a file she titled “Meg1” and began to construct her own first narrative of Margaret Dunwoodie's life story.
Margaret Parker Dunwoodie was born in Odessa, Texas, in 1904. Her father, McGregor “Mac” Dunwoodie, had been a wild West Texas cowboy who rode the range and the rails into Wyoming as the twentieth century bashed into life. Mac Dunwoodie found himself working cattle in the Saratoga and Centennial Valleys, and on his rare days off rode high into the Sierra Madres and Medicine Bows of southern Wyoming. He liked the wide sage basins, the switchback trails, the solitude, the feeling of thin, cold air and the look of frozen gray peaks. But he also liked the company he found in noisy barrooms, the prospect of greater comfort than a bedroll on the ground next to a fire that died long before dawn. He mended Wyoming fences, branded Hereford cattle, and resolved to find a way to make a fortune.
So he took the stake he'd squirrelled away and went to the town of Laramie, to the infant state university. He'd decided to take a bachelor's degree in science. He figured he'd learn enough about geology to go back to Texas and find himself a big old oil field. He could come back to Wyoming a rich man, have his pick of beautiful valleys, and spend the best years of his life as a gentleman rancher.
Sally made herself a note: This was Mac's Young Man Dream. As a rich old man, they said, he'd gone bitter and paranoid. How did he change along the way, if he did? When? What changed him?
Gertrude Parker fit right into Mac Dunwoodie's plan. She was a ranch girl with eyes as wide and blue as the Wyoming sky. Her folks had a place out south of Albany. Mac had seen her at the college, but never much talked to her until a box lunch picnic the first week of his last year at the University. She was finishing up, too, taking courses in history and political economy, tall and straight and smart and blond and fired with the cause of woman suffrage.
OK, Sally noted. Height, hair, and feminism ran in Meg's family.
At that picnic, Mac had noticed that Gertrude wore a purple and gold votes for women pin on the bodice of her starched white shirtwaist. He'd made a joke about it, and she'd let him have what-for. They loved to argue with each other, to match wits. Mac proposed in April, and Gert said she would marry him after graduation.
They graduated in May, and married at her parents' ranch on a brilliant June day in 1903. The next morning, they awoke to ten inches of snow. The lilac bushes in the ranchyard, heavy with blooms, were bowed to the ground. Gert got up, went out, shook the heavy white clumps off clusters of blossoms that sent out grateful bursts of perfume. Then she went inside, made coffee, woke her husband, dressed. There was no hope of getting a wagon to Laramie to catch the train that would take them, ultimately, to a new home in Texas. A week passed before they could leave.
What was she thinking? What did he promise?
Gert never learned to like flat, dry, dusty West Texas in the five years they were there, working on Mac's fortune. His family were all dead. The young couple were on their own, a hard thing in a hard country. Wyoming was a hard place too, but she knew its bleaknesses as her own, and there were Parkers everywhere to lift some of the weight of the long cold time. Mac swore to Gert that once his wells came in, he'd take her back home to Wyoming and start buying up every pretty piece of property for sale in the entire state. They'd ranch some of it, and leave some of it for the deer and the elk and the moose.
She must have loved him. Must have shared that dream. Watch it, Sally, you dim-witted romantic.
They'd both seen Meg's birth, barely a year after they'd married, as a blessing, but it had come at a cost. Gert had a hard time. The doctor told her that baby Margaret would be her last.
A lonely way to be born, no?
Meg had only one dim memory of her first years in Texas. She had later asked her mother if the remembered moment had actually happened, but her mother couldn't say for sure. Meg couldn't have been much more than three. It had been a typical West Texas summer day, windy, sere, no prospect of relief. Her mother had been doing the wash, hanging it up to dry. Meg remembered how hot and gritty her skin had felt, how she had toddled over to her mother and fallen beside the basket of heavy wet linen at her feet. Her mother had snatched her up, wrapped her in wet sheets, and stuck her in the shade of a lone spindly cottonwood tree, brought her a cool cup of water and held it to her dry mouth. She had grown cooler, drowsy, slept.
Sally's semidistracted thought: So that's what they did before air-conditioning!
Meg was awakened by her father's voice, whooping in exultation. She opened her eyes to see him jumping up and down, covered with filthy sticky black stuff. His first well had come in.
They were off to Wyoming within the year.
Mac and Gert took out extended homestead claims on land shading up into his beloved Sierra Madres, not far from the town of Encampment. Though he had to spend time in Texas tending his oilfields, he bought up range land and mountain meadows scattered across Wyoming: in the Bighorn basin, on the south flank of the Absarokas, in the shadow of the Tetons. But the Woody D Ranch, just a day's ride from Bridger Peak, was the place Mac determined to call home. He paid a neighbor to come in with a mule team and grade a dirt road in to the place he built his ranch, and started hounding the Carbon County commissioners to lay down gravel on the road to Baggs. He bought himself a 1908 Maxwell touring car, which sat idle in the barn nine months of the year, waiting for snow to melt, then mud to harden.
The winters were just plain horrid, the summers ambrosial. Meg went to a one-room school, when she could get there, doing her lessons in a classroom where the ten pupils ranged in age from five to fifteen. By the time she was twelve, she had become the teacher.
Gert knew that her daughter was far too bright to be deprived of a proper education, so for high school, Meg was sent to live with Parker cousins in Laramie. She loved the fine brick school building, the smart, strict teachers, the town kids who invited her over to bake gingerbread and throw snowballs. But she missed her mother and father and the nearness of the great, brooding mountains. As far as she was concerned, the Laramie Range to the east of town had some nice rock formations, but was really little more than an overeager hillock. The Snowies, to the west, were too far away to walk into in an afternoon. The minute the school year was over, she hurried back to Mac and Gert and the Woody D. Her home in the Sierra Madre was safety and sameness to her, even if, one year when she returned, she found they'd graveled the Baggs road.
At sixteen, Meg graduated from high school, and it was clear she should go to college. She had grown tall and lanky, nearly six feet, with a diamondshaped face and Gert's cascading blond hair and big blue eyes. She had inherited her mother's insistence on looking a man in the eye, and boys found her too formidable to court. It was 1920, and she was full of life but the furthest thing from a flapper, sturdy and studious and incapable of flirting.
As her mother had, she went to UW. And much to Gert's delight, many of Meg's university teachers were women, some of whom had been there back in Mama's time. She took classes on the Civil War from the serious Laura White, in political economy from the outspoken and controversial feminist, Grace Raymond Hebard. Both encouraged her to pursue a teaching career, or perhaps to enter social work. Meg wanted to be useful, above all, and earnestly joined the Red Cross and the League of Women Voters, the Society for the Prevention of War. But her inner rhythms thrilled not to reform, but to create. She was a superb student in all her classes. In Professor McIntyre's class on British poetry, her mind sang.
Clara McIntyre and Laura White shared a twostory frame house near the campus. Each fall when the students returned, they hosted a tea for women students in their spectacular gardens. Meg ached to please them with her knowledge and her imagination. She would be invited again, in the barebranched snowclad days of winter, for hot apple cider and conversations on poetry.
The year Meg graduated, they invited her over for a chat about her future. Meg admitted she wanted, well, to write. “You should write,” Miss McIntyre agreed. “You have the brains and the courage to do it. But if you want to write, you've got to get out of here, Margaret. You simply have to leave,” she told Meg, sipping sweet tea from an eggshell china cup. “And I can help.”
The computer screen offered only faint light in the dusky office. Sally couldn't read the pages in the folders. She looked up, dazed, and realized that she'd written through the purpling blaze of a sunset. Now it was time to turn on a light and keep going, or call it a day. She switched on the lamp on the desk, and decided to stop working anyway. She knew where to start in the morning; a good time to quit. She saved the file, backed it up on a diskette, closed it, tap tap tap and out. Took off her reading glasses, rubbed her eyes, and stretched. The job was begun.
She realized that she was starving. Thought about what she had to eat in the house. Blessed Mary Langham had sent her home from dinner the other night with some leftover lasagna. She had a cold bottle of California sauvignon blanc in the fridge. She could heat up dinner, have a glass of wine, turn on the television and watch summer reruns of shows she'd never been that excited about in the first place. Sounded like another monster night in the life of the artist formerly known as Mustang Sally.
After making themselves a frozen pizza for dinner, Josh Langham and his cousin Jerry Jeff Davis had ridden their bicycles from Jerry Jeff's house to the Diamond Shamrock on north Fourth Street to rent videos. They were currently working their way through the collected film work of John Candy, and tonight they were taking on
Volunteers
, which neither had ever seen, and
Wagons East
, the fateful last Candy movie. They cut south on Eleventh Street, pedaling hard, with the videos and more than four pounds of junk food, soda, and candy in Josh's backpack.
Jerry Jeff was in the lead; his bike was newer. Josh had his sister's old hand-me-down bike. As he puffed along, Josh saw the light go on upstairs in the Dunwoodie house, the one that was supposed to be haunted, or at least to be full of cool stuff including a map to buried treasure. Jerry Jeff saw it too, slowing as they passed and pulling alongside Josh. “Josh, look!” he stage-whispered. “A light just went on in the haunted house. What the heck?”
“Aw, it's just that friend of Dad and your mom's,” Josh explained. “That Professor Alder. She probably just got home or something. J.J., you don't really believe in ghosts, do you?” he scoffed, shaming his cousin.
“'Course not,” said Jerry Jeff.
Neither did Josh. But as the son of a police officer, he did believe in noticing odd things. He also knew his dad had busted people trying to break into the old lady's onceempty house. The light in the window wasn't particularly odd, but the guy sitting in a parked car, across the street from Meg Dunwoodie's house, was a bit out of the ordinary. Creepy. Josh glanced in the car as he pedaled past, registering a twenty-something guy with a shaved head lighting a cigarette. He didn't dare circle back to check the make and model of the car, but knew it was some kind of big old shark of a sedan, maybe late sixties, early seventies, dark color. In-state plates.
Jerry Jeff, reassured, was powering those pedals for home, inspired by the prospect of popping open a Pepsi or two, slamming bigtime junk food, and video-vegging. Josh decided he'd call his dad as soon as he got to his Aunt Delice's house and tell him somebody might be casing the Dunwoodie place. His dad would probably want to know.
