Fine Just the Way It Is (5 page)

“Canada Revenue! We’ll let them play hockey, their national sport, down on Circle Nine’s ice.”

“Wouldn’t the IRS be better? More infamous?”

“Duane, the IRS is a babe in the woods compared to Canada Revenue. There is no agency on earth as contumacious, bureaucratized, power-obsessed, backhanded, gouging, red-taped, cavernous and carnivorous as Canada Revenue.”

“But if hockey is their national sport, won’t they take pleasure in playing it?”

“I think not. The blades will be inside the skates. And those blades will be warm.”

But the idea of a tenth circle haunted him. He might do it. It would have to be something utterly unexpected, a stunning surprise, a coup. As he steered the golf cart it came to him—an art museum. Not just a collection of works earthly museum directors wished to consign to Hell but depictions of himself through the millennia in every guise from monstrous yellow-eyed goats to satin-winged bats, the fabulous compartments of the Nether Regions and, of course, a catalog of human vices and evils, of plummeting sinners.

His ideas tumbled out. In one of the museum’s galleries he would set up the Musical Inferno which Hieronymus Bosch had painted so cleverly. He would have all of Goya’s witches and his stinking hordes, toothless, pierced, howling, wracked and terrified. He would have every piece of Satanic art even though many showed him as humbled by upward-gazing saints; he always had the last laugh there. Venusti showed a fatuous Saint Bernard holding him chained, but a moment later the chain had melted. The painter had not dared to show that. Michael Pacher had given him a fabulous frog-green skin, but the deer antlers and the buttocks-face were overdone. Gerard David’s portrait was finer. A special room for Gustave Doré, whose inventiveness he cherished. Very pleasant as well were the many harvest pictures where he tossed damned souls into his fireproof gunnysack. He would crowd the museum with all the Last Judgments, the damned dropping into the inferno like ripe figs from a tree. Signorelli—he couldn’t understand how Signorelli had known to give his demons green and grey and violet skins—a lucky guess perhaps. And surely one of Signorelli’s demons was Duane Fork biting at a man’s head? He might ask the painter—if he could find him. They had to start compiling a database of the damned and their particular niches; it was impossible to find anyone in Hell.

Still on the idea of the art museum, he planned a solitary room with no other paintings where he thought he would hang William Blake’s
Satan Instigating the Rebel Angels,
which showed him as the most beautiful angel of all, more handsome than any Greek god, before the rebellion failed and he was cast down and out. But thinking of that time made him morose and he decided to eschew the Blake; he’d have Rubens instead and Tiepolo. As he made his mental list of the paintings and sculptures he intended to gather, he realized what a terrific labor it would be to pry them away from the Prado, the Duomo, the Louvre, the Beaux-Arts, various art institutes and bibliothèques, private collections and monasteries, cathedrals and churches. The plan abruptly crashed. Well, well, there was the rub; he was not going into any monasteries or churches. And there the renovation plans stopped. His one-track mind could not get past the monasteries, cathedrals and churches.

He ought to have plucked some professional art thieves from their fiery labors and sent them up to do the job, but the story says nothing about that.

ARCHIE & ROSE, 1885

Archie and Rose McLaverty staked out a homestead where the Little Weed comes rattling down from the Sierra Madre, water named not for miniature and obnoxious flora but for P. H. Weed, a gold seeker who had starved near its source. Archie had a face as smooth as a skinned aspen, his lips barely incised on the surface as though scratched in with a knife. All his natural decoration was in his red cheeks and the springy waves of auburn hair that seemed charged with voltage. He usually lied about his age to anyone who asked—he was not twenty-one but sixteen. The first summer they lived in a tent while Archie worked on a small cabin. It took him a month of rounding up stray cows for Bunk Peck before he could afford two glass windows. The cabin was snug, built with eight-foot squared-off logs tenoned on the ends and dropped into mortised uprights, a size Archie could handle with a little help from their only neighbor, Tom Ackler, a leathery prospector with a summer shack up on the mountain. They chinked the cabin with heavy yellow clay. One day Archie dragged a huge flat stone to the house for their doorstep. It was pleasant to sit in the cool of the evening with their feet on the great stone and watch the deer come down to drink and, just before darkness, to see the herons flying upstream, their color matching the sky so closely they might have been eyes of wind. Archie dug into the side of the hill and built a stout meat house, sawed wood while Rose split kindling until they had four cords stacked high against the cabin, almost to the eaves, the pile immediately tenanted by a weasel.

“He’ll keep the mice down,” said Rose.

“Yeah, if the bastard don’t bite somebody,” said Archie, flexing his right forefinger. “And you’ll wear them windows out, warshin em so much,” but he liked the way the south glass caught Barrel Mountain in its frame. A faint brogue flavored his sentences, for he had been conceived in Ireland, born in 1868 in Dakota Territory of parents arrived from Bantry Bay, his father to spike ties for the Union Pacific Railroad. His mother’s death from cholera when he was seven was followed a few weeks later by that of his father, who had whole-hog guzzled an entire bottle of strychnine-laced patent medicine guaranteed to ward off cholera and measles if taken in teaspoon quantities. Before his mother died she had taught him dozens of old songs and the rudiments of music structure by painting a plank with black and white piano keys, sitting him before it and encouraging him to touch the keys with the correct fingers. She sang the single notes he touched in her tone-pure voice. The family wipeout removed the Irish influence. Mrs. Sarah Peck, a warmhearted Missouri Methodist widow, raised the young orphan to the great resentment of her son, Bunk.

A parade of saddle bums drifted through the Peck bunkhouse and from an early age Archie listened to the songs they sang. He was a quick study for a tune, had a memory for rhymes, verses and intonations. When Mrs. Peck went to the land of no breakfast forever, caught in a grass conflagration she started while singeing slaughtered chickens, Archie was fourteen and Bunk in his early twenties. Without Mrs. Peck as buffer, the relationship became one of hired hand and boss. There had never been any sense of kinship, fictive or otherwise, between them. Especially did Bunk Peck burn over the hundred dollars his mother left Archie in her will.

Everyone in the sparsely settled country was noted for some salty dog quirk or talent. Chay Sump had a way with the Utes, and it was to him people went when they needed fine tanned hides. Lightning Willy, after incessant practice, shot both pistol and carbine accurately from the waist, seemingly without aiming. Bible Bob possessed a nose for gold on the strength of his discovery of promising color high on the slope of Singlebit Peak. And Archie McLaverty had a singing voice that once heard was never forgotten. It was a straight, hard voice, the words falling out halfway between a shout and a song. Sad and flat and without ornamentation, it expressed things felt but unsayable. He sang plain and square-cut, “Brandy’s brandy, any way you mix it, a Texian’s a Texian any way you fix it,” and the listeners laughed at the droll way he rolled out “fix it,” the words surely meaning castration. And when he moved into “The Old North Trail,” laconic and a little hoarse, people got set for half an hour of the true history they all knew as he made his way through countless verses. He could sing every song—“Go Long Blue Dog,” and “When the Green Grass Comes,” “Don’t Pull off My Boots,” and “Two Quarts of Whiskey,” and at all-male roundup nights he had endless verses of “The Stinkin Cow,” “The Buckskin Shirt” and “Cousin Harry.” He courted Rose singing “never marry no good-for-nothin boy,” the boy understood to be himself, the “good-for-nothin” a disclaimer. Later, with winks and innuendo, he sang, “Little girl, for safety you better get branded…”

Archie, advised by an ex-homesteader working for Bunk Peck, used his inheritance from Mrs. Peck to buy eighty acres of private land. It would have cost nothing if they had filed for a homestead twice that size on public land, or eight times larger on desert land, but Archie feared the government would discover he was a minor, nor did he want a five-year burden of obligatory cultivation and irrigation. Since he had never expected anything from Mrs. Peck, buying the land with the surprise legacy seemed like getting it for free. And it was immediately theirs with no strings attached. Archie, thrilled to be a landowner, told Rose he had to sing the metes and bounds. He started on the southwest corner and headed east. It was something he reckoned had to be done. Rose walked along with him at the beginning and even tried to sing with him but got out of breath from walking so fast and singing at the same time. Nor did she know the words to many of his songs. Archie kept going. It took him hours. Late in the afternoon he was on the west line, drawing near and still singing though his voice was raspy, “an we’ll go downtown, an we’ll buy some shirts…,” and slouching down the slope the last hundred feet in the evening dusk so worn of voice she could hardly hear him breathily half-chant “never had a nickel and I don’t give a shit.”

There is no happiness like that of a young couple in a little house they have built themselves in a place of beauty and solitude. Archie had hammered together a table with sapling legs and two benches. At the evening meal, their faces lit by the yellow shine of the coal oil lamp whose light threw wild shadows on the ceiling, their world seemed in order until moths flew at the lamp and finally thrashed themselves to sticky death on the plates.

Rose was not pretty, but warmhearted and quick to laugh. She had grown up at the Jackrabbit stage station, the daughter of kettle-bellied Sundown Mealor, who dreamed of plunging steeds but because of his bottle habit drove a freight wagon. The station was on a north-south trail connecting hardscrabble ranches with the blowout railroad town of Rawlins after the Union Pacific line went through. Rose’s mother was grey with some wasting disease that kept her to her bed, sinking slowly out of life. She wept over Rose’s early marriage but gave her a family treasure, a large silver spoon that had come across the Atlantic.

The stationmaster was the politically minded Robert F. Dorgan, affable and jowly, yearning to be appointed to a position of importance and seeing the station as a brief stop not only for freight wagons but for himself. His second wife, Flora, stepmother to his daughter, Queeda, went to Denver every winter with Queeda, and so they became authorities on fashion and style. They were as close as a natural mother and daughter. In Denver, Mrs. Dorgan sought out important people who could help her husband climb to success. Many political men spent the winter in Denver, and one of them, Rufus Clatter, with connections to Washington, hinted there was a chance for Dorgan to be appointed as territorial surveyor.

“I’m sure he knows a good deal about surveying,” he said with a wink.

“Considerable,” she said, thinking that Dorgan could find some stripling surveyor to do the work for a few dollars.

“I’ll see what I can do,” said Clatter, pressing heavily against her thigh, but tensed to step back if she took offense. She allowed him a few seconds, smiled and turned away.

“Should such an appointment come to pass, you will find me grateful.”

In the spring, back at the station, where her rings and metallic dress trim cast a golden aura, she bossed the local gossip saying that Archie Laverty had ruined Rose, precipitating their youthful marriage, Rose barely fourteen, but what could you expect from a girl with a drunkard father, an uncontrolled girl who’d had the run of the station, sassing rough drivers and exchanging low repartee with bumpkin cowhands, among them Archie Laverty, a lowlife who sang vulgar songs. She whisked her hands together as though ridding them of filth.

The other inhabitant of the station was an old bachelor—the country was rich in bachelors—Harp Daft, the telegraph key operator. His face and neck formed a visor of scars, moles, wens, boils and acne. One leg was shorter than the other and his voice twanged with catarrh. His window faced the Dorgan house, and a black circle which Rose knew to be a telescope sometimes showed in it.

Rose both admired and despised Queeda Dorgan. She greedily took in every detail of the beautiful dresses, the fire opal brooch, satin shoes and saucy hats so exquisitely out of place at the dusty station, but she knew that Miss Dainty had to wash out her bloody menstrual rags like every woman, although she tried to hide them by hanging them on the line at night or inside pillow slips. Beneath the silk skirts she too had to put up with sopping pads torn from old sheets, the crusted edges chafing her thighs and pulling at the pubic hairs. At those times of the month the animal smell seeped through Queeda’s perfumed defenses. Rose saw Mrs. Dorgan as an iron-boned two-faced enemy, the public sweetness offset by private coarseness. She had seen the woman spit on the ground like a drover, had seen her scratch her crotch on the corner of the table when she thought no one was looking. In her belief that she was a superior creature, Mrs. Dorgan never spoke to the Mealors or to the despicable bachelor pawing his telegraph key, or, as he said, seeking out constellations.

Every morning in the little cabin Rose braided her straight brown hair, dabbed it with drops of lilac water from the blue bottle Archie had presented her on the day of their wedding and wound it around her head in a coronet, the way Queeda Dorgan bound up her hair. At night she let it fall loose, releasing the fragrance. She did not want to become like a homestead woman, skunky armpits and greasy hair yanked into a bun. Archie had crimpy auburn locks, and she hoped that their children would get those waves and his red-cheeked handsome face. She trimmed his hair with a pair of embroidery scissors dropped in the dust by some stagecoach lady passenger at the station years before, the silver handles in the shape of bent-necked cranes. But it was hard, keeping clean. Queeda Dorgan, for example, had little to do at the station but primp and wash and flounce, but Rose, in her cabin, lifted heavy kettles, split kindling, baked bread, scrubbed pots and hacked the stone-filled ground for a garden, hauled water when Archie was not there. They were lucky their first winter that the river did not freeze. Her personal wash and the dishes and floor took four daily buckets of water lugged up from the Little Weed, each trip disturbing the ducks who favored the nearby setback for their business meetings. She tried to keep Archie clean as well. He rode in from days of chasing Peck’s cows or running wild horses on the desert, stubbled face, mosquito-bitten neck and grimed hands, cut, cracked nails and stinking feet. She pulled off his boots and washed his feet in the enamel dishpan, patting them dry with a clean feed sack towel.

“If you had stockins, it wouldn’t be so bad,” she said. “If I could get me some knittin needles and yarn I could make stockins.”

“Mrs. Peck made some. Once. Took about a hour before they was holed. No point to it and they clamber around in your boots. Hell with stockins.”

Supper was venison hash or a platter of fried sage hen she had shot, rose-hip jelly and fresh bread, but not beans, which Archie said had been and still were the main provender at Peck’s. Occasionally neighbor Tom Ackler rode down for supper, sometimes with his yellow cat, Gold Dust, riding behind him on the saddle. While Tom talked, Gold Dust set to work to claw the weasel out of the woodpile. Rose liked the black-eyed, balding prospector and asked him about the gold earring in his left ear.

“Used a sail the world, girlie. That’s my port ear and that ring tells them as knows that I been east round Cape Horn. And if you been east, you been west, first. Been all over the world.” He had a rich collection of stories of storms, violent williwaws and southerly busters, of waterspouts and whales leaping like trout, icebergs and doldrums and enmeshing seaweed, of wild times in distant ports.

“How come you to leave the sailor-boy life?” asked Rose.

“No way to get rich, girlie. And this fella wanted a snug harbor after the pitchin deck.”

Archie asked about maritime songs, and the next visit Tom Ackler brought his concertina with him and for hours sea chanteys and sailors’ verses filled the cabin, Archie asking for a repeat of some and often chiming in after a single hearing.

Rose was an eager lover when Archie called “put your ass up like a whippoorwill,” and an expert at shifting his occasional glum moods into pleased laughter. She seemed unaware that she lived in a time when love killed women. One summer evening, their bed spread on the floor among the chips and splinters in the half-finished cabin, they fell to kissing. Rose, in some kind of transport began to bite her kisses, lickings and sharp nips along his neck, his shoulder, in the musky crevice between his arm and torso, his nipples until she felt him shaking and looked up to see his eyes closed, tears in his lashes, face contorted in a grimace.