The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (148 page)
Authors: Elizabeth Gilbert
Tags: #Non-fiction
‘Gilbert is keen on seeing as many of her characters achieve redemption as possible–in the most creative ways possible … She achieves the enviable feat of telling her characters’ stories in their own words, on their own terms, without pomp or superciliousness’
New York Times Book Review
‘Rendered with care and airtight precision. And her sentences are built solid as a brick shithouse’
Time Out New York
‘An imaginative range, assured comic touch, and dead-on ear for dialogue that’s truly exceptional … A gifted fiction writer’s sympathy for an amusing, believable array of resolute searchers and a reporter’s thoroughness that never gets bogged down in detail … her nimble, sharp prose is like the finger of a gifted illusionist’
Philadelphia Inquirer
‘Each story is full of humour, strength, and strange experiences … Gilbert has taken her encounters with people of every past and place, and infused them with the light and longevity of her own imagination’
Chicago Tribune
‘Gilbert draws her characters beautifully, and her sentences are sharp and bright’
Los Angeles Times
‘Hopeful, deluded, intoxicated, amazed, Gilbert’s characters shoot across the sky, and she catches them like a skilled photographer just as they pop, before they crash, drown or grow dull and fade away…Her fiction, like the best reporting, bristles with sharp, startling details’
The Cleveland Plain Dealer
‘Reading this talented trickster is like watching an acrobat. The risks are cruel. The light-as-a-feather endings can charm. One waits with interest for more of this fabulist’
Hortense Calisher
‘This is a killer collection, a run in the bad part of town, a sideshow of the heart. Elizabeth Gilbert writes with fierce grace about people who are all wised up, beaten down, and still manage to hope and love and get on with it’
Frederick Barthelme, author of
Moon Deluxe
Contents
Come and Fetch These Stupid Kids
The Many Things That Denny Brown did not Know (Age Fifteen)
The Names of Flowers and Girls
At the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market
The Famous Torn and Restored Lit Cigarette Trick
FOR MOM AND DAD
WITH MUCH LOVE
Whan that April with his showres soote
The drought of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every vein in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flowr;
Whan Zephyrus, eek, with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tender croppes, and the yonge sunne
Hath in the Ram his halve course y-runne,
And smalle fowles maken melodye
That sleepen all the night with open ye
(So pricketh hem Nature in hir corages),
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages …
––G
EOFFREY
C
HAUCER
W
HEN MY OLD MAN
said he’d hired her, I said, “A girl?” A girl, when it wasn’t that long ago women couldn’t work on this ranch even as cooks, because the wranglers got shot over them too much. They got shot even over the ugly cooks. Even over the old ones.
I said, “A girl?”
“She’s from Pennsylvania,” my old man said. “She’ll be good at this.”
“She’s from what?”
When my brother Crosby found out, he said, “Time for me to find new work when a girl starts doing mine.”
My old man looked at him. “I heard you haven’t come over Dutch Oven Pass once this season you haven’t been asleep on your horse or reading a goddamn book. Maybe it’s time for you to find new work anyhow.”
He told us that she showed up somehow from Pennsylvania in the sorriest piece of shit car he’d ever seen in his life. She asked him for five minutes to ask for a job, but it didn’t take that long. She flexed her arm for him to feel, but he didn’t feel it. He liked her, he said, right away. He trusted his eye for that, he said, after all these years.
“You’ll like her, too,” he said. “She’s sexy like a horse is sexy. Nice and big. Strong.”
“Eighty-five of your own horses to feed, and you still think horse is sexy,” I said, and my brother Crosby said, “I think we got enough of that kind of sexy around here already.”
She was Martha Knox, nineteen years old and tall as me, thick-legged but not fat, with cowboy boots that anyone could see were new that week, the cheapest in the store and the first pair she’d ever owned. She had a big chin that worked only because her forehead and nose worked, too, and she had the kind of teeth that take over a face even when the mouth is closed. She had, most of all, a dark brown braid that hung down the center of her back, thick as a girl’s arm.
I danced with Martha Knox one night early in the season. It was a day off to go down the mountain, get drunk, make phone calls, do laundry, fight. Martha Knox was no dancer. She didn’t want to dance with me. She let me know this by saying a few times that she wasn’t going to dance with me, and then, when she finally agreed, she wouldn’t let go of her cigarette. She held it in one hand and let that hand fall and not be available. So I kept my beer bottle in one hand, to balance her out, and we held each other with one arm each. She was no dancer and she didn’t want to dance with me, but we found a good slow sway anyway, each of us with an arm hanging down, like a rodeo cowboy’s right arm, like the right arm of a bull rider, not reaching for anything. She wouldn’t look anywhere but over my left shoulder, like that part of her that was a good dancer with me was some part she had not ever met and didn’t feel like being introduced to.
My old man also said this about Martha Knox: “She’s not beautiful, but I think she knows how to sell it.”
Well, it’s true that I wanted to hold her braid. I always had wanted to from first seeing it and mostly I wanted to in that
dance, but I didn’t reach for it and I didn’t set down my beer bottle. Martha Knox wasn’t selling anything.
We didn’t dance again that night or again at all, because it was a long season and my old man worked all of us too hard. There were no more full days off for dancing or fighting. And when we would sometimes get an afternoon off in the middle of a hard week, we would all go to the bunkhouse and sleep; fast, dead tired sleep, in our own bunks, in our own boots, like firemen or soldiers.
Martha Knox asked me about rodeo. “Crosby says it’s a good way to get made dead,” she said.
“It’s the best way I know.”
We were facing each other across the short pine fire, just us, drinking. In the tent behind Martha Knox were five hunters from Chicago, asleep or tired, mad at me for not being able to make them good enough shots to kill any of the elk we’d seen that week. In the tent behind me were the cook stoves and the food and two foam pads with a sleeping bag for each of us. She slept under horse blankets to be warmer, and we both slept on the jeans we’d be wearing the next day, to keep them from freezing. It was the middle of October, the last hunt of the season, and ice hung in long needles off the muzzles of the horses every morning when we saddled.
“Are you drunk?” I asked her.
“I’ll tell you something,” she said. “That’s a pretty damn good question.”
She was looking at her hands. They were clean, with all the expected cuts and burns, but they were clean hands.
“You rode rodeo, right?” she asked.
“One time too many,” I said.
“Bulls?”
“Broncs.”
“Is that why you get called Buck?”
“I get called Buck because I stabbed myself in the leg with my buck knife when I was a kid.”
“Ever get nailed in rodeo?”
“I got on this bronc one night and knew right away, right in the chute, that it wasn’t going to have me. It wanted me gone and dead for trying. Never was so scared on a horse as on that son of a bitch.”
“You think it knew?”
“Knew? How could it know?”
“Crosby says the first job of a horse is to figure out who’s riding it and who’s in charge.”
“That’s my old man’s line. He says it to scare dudes. If horses were that smart, they’d be riding us.”
“That’s Crosby’s line.”
“No.” I took another drink. “That’s my old man’s line, too.”
“So you got thrown.”
“But my wrist got caught in the rigging and I got dragged around the ring three times under the son of a bitch’s belly. Crowd loved it. Horse loved it. Put me in the hospital almost a year.”
“Give me that?” She reached for the bottle. “I want to ride broncs,” she said. “I want to ride rodeo.”
“That’s what I meant to do,” I said. “I meant to talk you into it with that story.”
“Was your dad mad?”
I didn’t answer that. I stood up and walked over to the tree where all the pack gear was hung up in the branches, like food hung away from bears. I unzipped my fly and said, “Shield your eyes, Martha Knox, I’m about to unleash the biggest thing in the Wyoming Rockies.”
She didn’t say anything while I pissed, but when I got back to the fire she said, “That’s Crosby’s line.”
I found a can of tobacco in my pocket. “No, it’s not,” I said. “That’s my old man’s line, too.”
I tapped the can against my leg to pack the chew, then took some. It was my last can of tobacco, almost empty.
“My old man bought that bronc,” I said. “He found the owner and gave him twice what the bastard was worth. Then he took it out back of the cook shack, shot it in the head, and buried it in the compost pile.”
“You’re kidding me,” Martha Knox said.
“Don’t bring it up with him.”
“Hell no. No way.”
“He came to see me every day in the hospital. We never even talked because he was so goddamn beat. He just smoked. He’d flick the cigarette butts over my head and they’d land in the toilet and hiss out. I was in a neck brace for a bunch of months and I couldn’t even turn my head and see him. So damn bored. Just about the only thing I lived for was seeing those butts go flying over my face to the toilet.”
“That’s bored,” Martha Knox said.
“My brother Crosby showed up sometimes, too, with pictures of girls.”
“Sure.”
“Well, that was okay to look at, too.”
“Sure. Everyone had a butt for you to look at.”
She drank. I took the bottle, passed it back, and she drank more. There was snow around us. There’d been hail on the day we rode in and snow almost every night. In the afternoons big patches of it would melt off in the meadow and leave small white piles like laundry, and the horses would walk through these. The grass was almost gone, and the horses had started leaving at night, looking for better food. We hung cowbells around their necks, and these rang flat and loud while they grazed. It was a good noise. I was used to it, and I only noticed
it when it was gone. That quiet of no bells meant no horses, and it could wake me up in the middle of the night. We’d have to go out after the horses then, but I knew where they usually went, and we’d head that way. Martha Knox was figuring them out, too, and she didn’t complain about having to get dressed in the middle of the night in the cold and go listen for bells in the dark. She liked it. She was getting it.
“You know something about your brother Crosby?” Martha Knox asked. “He really thinks he knows his way around a girl.”
I didn’t say anything, and she went on. “Now how can that be, Buck, when there aren’t any girls around?”
“Crosby knows girls,” I said. “He lived in towns.”
“What towns? Casper? Cheyenne?”
“Denver. Crosby lived in Denver.”
“Okay, Denver.”
“Well, there’s a girl or two in Denver.”
“Sure.” She yawned.
“So he could have learned his way around girls in Denver.”
“I see that, Buck.”
“Girls love Crosby.”
“I bet.”
“They do. Me and Crosby are going down to Florida one of these winters and wreck every marriage we can. There’s a lot of rich women down there. A lot of rich, bored women.”
“They’d have to be pretty bored,” Martha Knox said, and laughed. “They’d have to be bored to goddamn tears.”
“You don’t like my brother Crosby?”
“I love your brother Crosby. Why wouldn’t I like Crosby? I think Crosby’s the greatest.”
“Good for you.”
“But he thinks he knows his way around a girl, and that’s a pain in the ass.”
“Girls love Crosby.”
“I showed him a picture of my sister one time. He told me she looked like she’d been on the wrong side of a lot of bad dick. What kind of a thing to say is that?”
“You have a sister?”
“Agnes. She works in Missoula.”
“On a ranch?”
“Not on a ranch, no. She’s a stripper, actually. She hates it because it’s a college town. She says college boys don’t tip, no matter what you stick in their faces.”
“Did you ever fool around with my brother Crosby?” I asked.
