Fine Just the Way It Is (18 page)

His voice lifted. “And my chest didn’t hurt today the way it done yesterday.”

“Uh-huh.” She rinsed the potatoes and cubed them so they would cook faster.

“I supposed to go see her, that doctor, tomorrow mornin at ten minutes before eight. I don’t know if I should now. Seein it didn’t hurt today.”

“Well, Verl, it might a been a matter a luck, don’t you think? That it didn’t hurt and you workin so hard.”

He squinted at her, trying to tell if she was being sarcastic. “It’s just I don’t want a leave you all alone, and me dead of a heart attack,” he said sanctimoniously.

She said nothing.

“So I guess I better go.” It was what he’d intended to do from the beginning.

Wyatt Match thought Verl Lister’s dilapidated place gave Wyoming ranchers a slob name. He personally thanked heaven that Lister was not on the main road. He often quoted Robert Frost’s line “good fences make good neighbors” without understanding the poem or the differences of intent between those who made fences of stone and those who used barbed wire. He had picked the Listers to criticize, and whether it was Verl’s work habits or the way he never looked straight at anyone except in the left eye, or Bonita’s aqua rayon pantsuit, Wyatt Match made them out to be the county fools. In truth, Verl Lister’s cows were wild and rough because they were rarely worked; they suffered parasites, hoof rot, milk fever, prolapses and hernias; they were shot by rifle and bow and arrow, they fell on tee-posts, ate wire, coughed and snuffled, fell into streams and drowned. Verl referred to Match as “him and his click. Them bastards pretty much run things the way they want.” Yet if he met Match at a cattle sale or the feed store, he would smile and greet him cordially. And Match, in his turn, would say, “How’r you, Verl?” But if they crossed on the back roads in their trucks, Verl lifted three fingers in salute while Match, face bright with sun color, stared straight ahead. Pete Azkua, the grandson of a Basque sheep rancher, put it simply:
“Nahi bezala haundiak ahal bezala ttipiak,”
which he said meant the big boys do what they want, the small fry do what they can, which accounted for certain sour faces around town.

Verl resented Match, but it was Match’s second wife, Carol Shovel, whom he truly detested. She was a California woman with red eyebrows and foxy hair, clothed in revealing dresses and garnished with clanking bracelets. She considered herself an authority on everything. She was a smart-mouth. No one knew why she had married Match. Of course, they said, he did have money, not from ranching, but through the Cowboy Slim Program, his father’s patented weight-loss mail-order plan. Carol Match had endless recipes for Wyoming’s betterment: bring back the train or start up a bus line for public transportation; invite black people and Asians to move in and improve ethnic diversity; shift the capital to Cody; make the state attractive to moviemakers and computer commuters. It got around that she had said Wyoming people were lazy.
Lazy!
Verl was outraged. Although he himself avoided as much work as he could, it was because he was half-crippled and work was bad for his heart. The whole world, except this California bitch, knew that there were no more frugal, thrifty, tough and hardworking people on the face of the earth than those in Wyoming. Work was almost holy, good physical labor done cheerfully and for its own sake, the center of each day, the node of Wyoming life. That and toughing it out when adversity struck, accepting that it was not necessary to wear a seat belt because when it was time for you to go, you went. Not being constrained by a seat belt was the pioneer spirit of freedom.

“I’d sure tell
her
where to set her empties, but you can’t tell nobody like that nothin,” he said to Bonita. “She is too ignorant. It would just be water off a duck’s ass.”

One day in the auto parts store, where Carol Match was checking to see if their order for a side window sunscreen for the restored 1948 Chevy half-ton had come in, he listened to her talk to Chet Bree behind the counter. She was wearing a tiny blue skirt with a hem just below her fatty buttocks and a silky top that showed off her robust tanned breasts.

“They have
got
to put a traffic light at that intersection. Somebody is going to get killed one day.” Her bracelets rattled.

“Always been okay the way it is. Just got to be a little bit careful. People here never had no trouble with it.” Bree looked at her chest for a few seconds, then looked away, then again let his gaze slide down into the cleft. Verl almost had the view of her bum.

“The place needs some new people,” she said.

Verl understood that she didn’t just mean importing strangers. She meant an exchange. For every ignorant California fool she brought in, a Wyoming-born native would be…removed. He was sure she had a list and that he was on it. Bree said nothing, and that, thought Verl, had probably got him on the list.

“Wyomin is fine just the way it is,” said Verl to Bonita. “They come in here and…”

For Dakotah, kindergarten was packed with revelations. On the first day the teacher, a fat woman with a pink, hairy sweater, asked each child for a birthday date.

“We’ll have a party each time it is somebody’s birthday,” she said with false excitement. One by one the children named dates, but Dakotah, who had never had or heard of a birthday party, was confused. The boy next to her said, “December nine.”

The teacher looked expectantly at Dakotah.

“December nine,” she whispered.

“Oh, class! Did you hear that? Dakotah has the same birthday as Billy! That’s so wonderful! We’ll have a double birthday party! Two children have the same birthday! We’ll have two cakes!”

Riding home in the truck with Bonita, Dakotah asked if she had a birthday and if it was December nine.

“Well of course. Everbody has a birthday! Yours is April first, April Fools’ Day. That’s when you play mean tricks on somebody. Like the April Fool trick your mother pulled on us. Why do you want to know?”

Dakotah explained that the teacher wanted to make many parties at school for birthdays with cakes and games. And she didn’t know her birthday. And there was a song.

“Well, we never went in for that birthday stuff. We don’t do such foolishness. No wonder the school is always runnin out a money if they spend it on cakes.”

She knew she could not tell the teacher her birthday was an April Fool.

In school she learned again what she already knew; that she was different from others, unworthy of friends.

The Listers did their duty, raising Dakotah, Bonita making peanut butter sandwiches for her school lunch while listening to
Morning Glory,
the pre-sunrise program of advertisements, a little news of the sensational kind, prayer and weather reports. The radio voices roared in the bathroom where Verl crouched on the toilet with chronic constipation. His chest pain, which often migrated to some remote interior organ where it pulsed and gnawed, had long baffled the young woman doctor from India who tried to fit into the rural life by uncomprehendingly attending the local amusements of fishing derbies, calcuttas, poker runs and darts tournaments.

“You see Jimmy Mint catch that three-hundred-dollar fish?” she asked to put him at ease. He preferred to describe his torments in exquisite detail, drawing the devious path of a pain with his finger, tracking across his chest, down to his groin, around to the side and back again, rising to the throat.

At last the doctor sent Verl to Salt Lake City for advanced tests. Bonita went with him after arranging for Dakotah to stay with Pastor Alf Crashbee and his wife, Marva.

Dakotah, then seven years old, stood shyly in the hallway while Bonita and Marva Crashbee talked. Mrs. Crashbee spoke in emphatic phrases to set up her salient points. She puffed her cheeks and her nostrils flared. As Dakotah waited to be told where to go and what to do, she fell in love with a candy dish. The single piece of furniture in the hallway was a long, narrow table. On its gleaming surface rested Mrs. Crashbee’s car keys. On the farthest end was a small blue plate, close to a saucer in size, and shaped like a fish. On it were seven or eight watermelon-flavored Jolly Rancher candies. It was the amusing shape and color of the dish that entranced, variegated blues ranging from cobalt to flushes of teal. Mrs. Crashbee noticed her gaping and told her to help herself to Jolly Ranchers, thinking that the poor thing probably never had much candy. After Bonita left she said it again in a spasm of urging.

“Go
ahead
! Help your
self
.”

Dakotah took one and unwrapped it, not sure where to put the wrapper. The pastor’s wife led the way into the kitchen and pointed at a chrome can. When Dakotah tried to lift the lid, the pastor’s wife motioned her away, trod on a foot pedal, and the lid flew open. This, too, was novel. She blushed with shame because she had not known about the foot pedal. At her grandparents’ house, trash went into a paper grocery bag sitting on a newspaper, and when it was full, the sides grease-stained, the bottom often weakened by wet coffee grounds, it was her job to carry the bag out to the burn barrel. This was the only time she was allowed to light matches, which she did with the gravity of one lighting a vestal hearth, then ran from the stinking smoke.

Bonita came alone to pick her up. She told Mrs. Crashbee that Verl’s tests showed serious arthritis in his joints and lumps of bone where old breaks had healed badly, but that not much could be done. He needed a whole new skeleton and his heart was weak. A bull had stepped on his chest when he was twenty and bruised his heart. They told him to take it easy.

“He’s at home resting this very minute,” said Bonita.

In some way Dakotah’s coat sleeve brushed the blue dish off the hall table. Jolly Ranchers skittered along the floor like pale red nuts.

“For pity’s sake,” said Bonita, bending down to pick up the pieces, “clumsy as a calf.” Mrs. Crashbee, shaking her head and thrusting out her chin, said, “It is
noth
ing, just an
old cheap dish,
” but her tone implied it had been part of a set of Royal Worcester. Bonita gave Dakotah a good leg whipping when they got home.

Mrs. Crashbee had a microwave oven that had magically heated the soup for lunch. When Dakotah described this marvel to Bonita a few days later, Verl, who was listening from his chair in the living room, snorted and shouted that he guessed he would stick with the good old kitchen stove. It was a way of saying there would be no microwave oven for Bonita, who had shown some interest in Dakotah’s description.

Thin and with colorless brown-grey hair and greyish eyes, yet with a boy-size nose and chin, no trace of her mother’s vivid beauty, in school Dakotah hunched over and kept to herself, considered somewhat stupid by her teachers.

In the fourth grade Sherri Match brought four kittens to school.

“They’re for free,” she said. “You can choose.”

Dakotah instantly wanted the tiny black one with white paws and a diminutive tail that stood straight up. She smoothed him and he purred.

“You can have him,” said Sherri grandly, the dispenser of munificence.

Dakotah brought the kitten home under her sweater, where he scratched and wriggled, terribly strong for such a small creature. In Bonita’s kitchen she gave him a doll’s saucer of milk. He sneezed, then drank greedily. Bonita said nothing, but her expression was chill.

“Where’d that cat come from?” demanded Verl at supper.

“Sherri Match was givin kitties away.”

“I bet she was,” said Verl grimly. “Well it can’t stay here. Cats give me asthma. I’ll take it back to them goddamn Matches,” and he picked up the kitten and strode out to the truck.

At school the next day Dakotah mumbled to Sherri that she was sorry her granddad had brought the kitten back. “He said cats give him asmar.”

Sherri looked at her. “He didn’t bring it back. He didn’t come to our house. What’s asmar?”

As she approached her teens the leg whippings stopped. Bonita seemed to soften through time or remorse. Yet as Dakotah filled out her grandparents became very watchful. She was not allowed to go to anyone’s house, or to walk to and from school. Social nights were out, and Bonita told her there would be no dating, as that was the way her mother had been ruined. All around them the gas fields opened up and Verl squinted down the road to see if EnCana or British Petroleum was coming to free him from poverty.

Dakotah was curious about her mother. “Didn’t you save any of her stuff?” she asked Bonita after a secret rummage through the attic.

“No, I didn’t. I burned those whorish clothes and the stupid pictures she pasted on the walls. She was kind of crazy is what I come to figure. Always makin some mess or doin some outlandish thing. She never did nothin in the kitchen except one time she cooked a whole pot a Minute rice, caught a trout in the stock pond and cut off a piece a that raw trout and laid it on the rice and
ate it. Raw.
I about gagged. That’s the kind a thing she did. Crazy stuff.”

Dakotah, knowing herself to be unattractive, was too eager to please, hungry beyond measure for affection. She was ready to love anyone. Sash Hicks, a skinny boy dressed perpetually in camouflage clothing, with a face and body that seemed to have been broken and then realigned, noticed her, attracted to her shy silence. She responded with long, intense stares when she thought he wasn’t looking and daydreams that never went farther than swooning kisses. One day Mr. Lewksberry, the history teacher, in an effort to make his despised subject more interesting, pandered to the local definition of history by assigning his students an essay on western outlaws. In the school library, turning the pages of the
Encyclopedia of Western Badmen,
Dakotah came on a photograph of Billy the Kid. It seemed Sash Hicks was looking up from the page, the same smirky triumph in the face, the slouched posture and dirty pants. Sash immediately gained a lustrous aura of outlawry and gun expertise. Now in her daydreams they rode away together, Sash twisting back in the saddle to shoot at their pursuers, Verl and Bonita. In real life Dakotah and Sash began to think of themselves as a couple, meeting in hallways, sitting near each other in classes, exchanging notes. She felt he was her only chance to get away from Bonita and Verl, that the distance between them could be bridged by grappling. She loved him. At home she kept Sash a secret.