Black Bullet
Jeff Pearson
I have always considered myself a woman at home in the world of men. For this I credit my father, an uneducated rancher with a work ethic and a great love of the outdoors. Without conflict, he managed to instill in both his children the ability to take pleasure from a job well done. His one weakness may have been that he was too trusting. In this, as in all else, my brother and I are my father’s children.
Although Daddy passed away when I was fifteen, through the years I have been able to invoke his moral presence whenever I have needed it. I do not mean to suggest anything that partakes of the paranormal. Quite simply, I bring him up in my mind’s eye at will—a tall, gnarly, almost spaghetti-thin man with a comically lopsided grin and ears sticking way too far out from his head. Through the worn material of his tapered western work shirts, I see the red on the box of Winston’s in the left breast pocket, suggestive of an Amazon with a rectangular teat. Even today, when I hear the lid of someone’s stainless steel cigarette lighter click open, followed by the grating of the flint, I turn and expect to see Daddy.
When I arrived at Laramie for college, I was advised to pursue liberal arts, not engineering; engineering just wasn’t something girls “did.” I called on Daddy, who reminded me that on the ranch I had ridden, roped, mechanicked, hunted, worked cattle, heaved hay bales off the bed of a pickup. We agreed: I could hold my own with the engineers, even in Laramie.
It proved more arduous than we had forecast. Early in my first semester, a cute freshman engineer from Rock Springs caught my eye. We went out; we seemed to hit it off. One day I saw him in the cafeteria with two of his friends; I started over with my tray, but a girl from my dorm waved me down. As she and I sat chatting at an adjoining table, the boys, their backs to us, raised their voices. I began to color.
I am no prude. On account of my thick curly orange hair (a gift from Mother), I began to be the recipient of taunts with a sexual bounce as early as junior high school. What the cruder boys merely intuited, my girlfriends took it upon themselves to publicize, once we began to shower after gym class. Any doubts that remained were dispelled by the first of the two “steadies” I had in high school (both knew me in the Biblical sense). After I jilted him, he made my nether hair a subject for discussion by the general student body.
But still, when I overheard my Rock Springs friend vowing to his buddies that he would have “fire crotch” in bed in less than a week, I began to boil. What irked me more than the guy’s frat-house bravado, though, was the cold-blooded calculation. Once he got in my pants, he chuckled to his buddies, he’d get me to turn over my chem lab notes. They’d all be able to cut classes Friday afternoons and watch the football team on the road, anytime they wanted.
This incident led to a long colloquy with Daddy.
“Julie,” he lectured, “it’s a bad deal, but sometimes the male of the species ain’t much better’n ruminants. We both know there’s but one way to turn a bull calf’s mind from ass to grass. Darling, until you get this engineering deal behind you, keep a sharp knife at hand. Nothing a frisky college fella’s gonna like less than the idea of some gal changing him into a steer.”
And so, to survive the predations of male engineers, I honed my guile. Ball Buster, they now called me behind my back. Ice Maiden. Not pretty, but neither was Fire Crotch. And frankly, life became easier. When I wanted romance, I sought out boys from the liberal arts program. In engineering, I did everything I could to make sure my fellow students saw my posterior from a lower point on the grading curve. I flirted, I led them on, I dropped them, I called to apologize. I renewed the cycle. I sweetly promised to meet for study dates, then failed to show. I whined I didn’t understand a thing about linear algebra, then pulled down the only “A” in my section.
It never occurred to me that something might be wrong with this. If there had been professional feminists on campus, I doubt they could have recruited me if I’d walked up and asked. I was not a man-hating gal. I liked men. We were competing for grades, my fellow engineers and I; grades converted to jobs; jobs converted to income. No one in that program was above screwing his best friend. If most the guys wanted to screw me, literally, well, that was human nature. Try it, you might like it, I would murmur at the angry women I sometimes saw marching on television.
Perhaps this is the appropriate place to explain about Mother. Within a few months of Daddy’s death, she had put the ranch up for sale and moved to New York City, leaving my brother and me behind with her parents. She publicly declared her lesbianism, and turned to painting watercolors and writing essays about Wyoming; several of the latter have appeared in national magazines. She has shown her paintings at a co-op in SoHo.
In the essays, she formulates what critics call “conceits” about the vast land she left behind. I consider them cartoons. For example, she says that the state bird should be re-named for the working oil and gas wells that poke their steal beaks into the prairie. She says that the male idea of a good time is going out in the pickup with a .22 and a six-pack to shoot prairie dogs. She says that horses are treated better than women.
She once told me that the purpose of these essays was to educate Easterners. I said, “Who did you ever know that went out drinking and shooting prairie dogs?” She smiled slyly. I persisted, “Did Daddy treat you worse than his horses, or was it the other way around?” The smile vanished, and she left the room.
On unspoiled vistas and animals she is excellent: sunsets, sleet storms, bounding herds of antelope, the horse. The colorist in her seems to kick in.
In the Big Horns west of Sheridan, there are horse ranches that since early in the century have belonged to descendants of English royalty; I am not sure what originally brought them, but each subsequent generation has apparently remained smitten with the terrain, for to the present day these fifth-string aristocrats sink major sums on upkeep.
During her childhood, my mother’s family was reasonably well-off in its own right, at least by local standards, her father being the proprietor of a mercantile business. She lived in town but boarded and trained show horses up at one of these fancy English horse farms. The venue continued to attract her after she married Daddy (a mismatch I will do my best to untangle in a moment), although by this time her father no longer had money.
Undoubtedly, she’d had liaisons before she married; it is no less certain they continued afterwards. By the time my brother and I were of elementary school age, it was an accepted condition of existence that Mother would disappear up into the Big Horns six or eight weeks each summer for the ostensible purpose of overseeing her equestrian investment. She hired a woman from town as a nanny to stay at the ranch with my brother and me. When the Brits left at the end of August with the deep tans they cherished, and the secret of Mother’s sexual preference, she rejoined us.
After she moved to New York, we saw her infrequently. She travelled, she wrote, she had her lovers, she painted. She instructed our grandfather to sell the breeding operation. She sent gifts at Christmas and sometimes for our birthdays, though many weeks late. I did not miss her. I missed Daddy horribly, of course; Mother had held herself back in so many ways, for so long, that not seeing the flume of bright orange hair, not hearing the occasional cascade of Briticisms, failed to evoke a sense of loss.
Until a year before he died, I do not believe Daddy suspected her double life. He was a professional rodeo cowboy when they met, by definition a stud with a big ego. They shared a mutual respect for one another’s knowledge of horses that bordered on the mystical. Daddy trusted Mother, loved her for the children she brought him, for the ranch she paid taxes on, for the freedom she gave him to work outside all day with stock. I suspect the big ego convinced him that he deserved it all.
She, I believe, never loved anyone but herself and hoofed creatures, but found Daddy’s lack of worldliness endearing, not to mention compatible with the construction of a conventional facade behind which to indulge her obsession with the two species of thoroughbred mare that seemed to afford her pleasure.
Stomach cancer did Daddy in, but I am one of those who believe that these malevolent diseases have psychological triggers. He had just learned of Mother’s unfaithfulness. One morning he woke up holding his belly, six months later he was gone. I visited her only once after that—over spring break during my second year at Laramie. She was living in a loft with a woman only a few years older than me, who said little and menaced around the unwalled space like a puma. Mother and I quickly found that we had nothing to say to each other; the day after I drove her from the room with my questions about her essayistic motives, I was on the plane back home.
I graduated third in my class. Straight out of college I went into the Oil Patch, near Casper, and when that petered out I went to Alaska and worked on the pipeline, and when that petered out I came home and worked for the local electric company, because I could find nothing better. As the slump dragged on, more and more guys I knew from college hired on with oil companies and went off to Saudi Arabia. Saudi was no option for a woman.
I rented a little trailer on the outskirts of town, where I lived alone, except for a few months when a guy I had met in Alaska shared the rent. With his clothes on, he was something of a cold fish. I think we both heaved a sigh of relief when he, too, went off to the Middle East. Occasionally I would spend an evening with what remained of the old crowd from high school, but usually I preferred to hole up in the trailer with a book, maybe have a beer or two, go to bed and rise early. It was the lack of an interesting job that eventually began to eat at me, not the lack of close friends, or of a man.
So when a position opened for Assistant Mine Engineer at Black Bullet, in the hills fifteen miles north of town, I hustled on up and applied. I had no idea what to expect, although I was ready to do almost anything to get my brain working again.
If I had not been so eager, I perhaps might have acted on the disturbing vibrations I picked up off Deke Wilhite, the Mine Manager, as soon as I walked into the interview. I at least would have had a long conversation with Daddy. Instead, I accepted Deke’s telephoned offer the next day.
But it was not simply over-eagerness. The grandeur of Black Bullet sucked me in.
To a non-engineer, it may sound bizarre to hear grandeur attributed to an open-pit mining operation. But when the works of man achieve a certain scale—whether in a mine or a dam or a Manhattan skyscraper—the sight jolts me like electricity through the bus bar. I have heard numerous engineers express this same reaction.
From the oiled highway, you would have no idea. You turn onto a rough road of red scoria. I was driving my brother’s pickup at the time, he was on a job in Texas; the tools and pipe in the back bounced around like steel popcorn. After the enormous spoil pile, you pass Pit Number One, a circle in hell with coal fires smoldering on the benches, day and night; they should have been in reclamation, but Deke was playing games with the state. Before you realize it, you are sliding down off the ridge, and as far as you can see the operation stretches through the valley, down to the loadout and tipple beside the cement silos along the railroad track. The crisscrossing bands of red scoria roadbed are wide enough to handle yellow front-loaders as big as townhouses, and 75-ton Wabco trucks shake the ground for five miles when they are rolling full. There is a complex of prefab shops and office buildings laid out in a jumble north of the loadout. The dirty haze from the drill-and-shoot at Pit Number Four hangs in the distance.
They called me the Bugs and Bunnies Lady, for the job—environmental compliance—was to keep the outfit’s nose clean with the state. The way Deke conducted business, this was no easy task. I do not believe he considered what he did as breaking the aw. He was an aggressive, production-oriented manager, who thought he could snow any pencil pusher the state sent his way. It seemed that every time I turned my head, he was up to something new with the potential to get the mine shut down, should the wrong person choose to make an issue.
As I say, the moment I walked in his office I felt vibrations: Deke Wilhite had plans for me beyond environmental compliance. I felt it, I could see it in his needy eyes, which were of a nutmeg hue that complemented his flamboyant mustache (the hair dove from the corners of his mouth to the tip of his chin, then curled up his jowls, thick and bushy). He had sharp, pointy teeth, and brown freckles the shape of large snowflakes along the shiny slope of pale scalp that his receding hair laid bare. He was a type I pigeonhole as garden variety born-to-be-God’s-gift-to-woman delusional.
I told myself I could handle him, but as the days rolled by at Black Bullet, handling him became a source of increasing stress and unpleasantness. I talked at length with Daddy about it.
“I know you ain’t a tattle, darling, but maybe you got no choice, maybe you got to talk to Mr. Deke’s superiors,” Daddy suggested one morning, as I sipped coffee at the west window of the trailer. A November storm had left its mark on the Big Horns. The breaking sun pinked up the clouds, they slid over the peaks like a valence. Up the ridge line north of the trailer, a herd of antelope loitered at the cedar break, taking breakfast.
I sighed and told Daddy that the idea had crossed my mind, but I didn’t think it would work. I described Deke’s practice of calling me into his office—a crude little box with barely enough room for two chairs and a desk. He would lean back in his swivel and tell me to close the door. Click, went the top of his stainless steel lighter (I could feel Daddy wince in sympathy). He blew a white cloud across the stacks of overlays and blue-lines on the desk. The cuff buttons of his cowboy shirts would be unsnapped, the top button as well; he was hairy as a baboon, and proud of it.
“Julie,” he might say, “I’d like to take you to Mary’s tonight for a nice steak dinner.”
”I’m sorry, Deke, I don’t think so.”
“You don’t care for steak dinners, Julie?”
“I told you, Deke, I don’t mix work and socializing.”
“I talked to the bosses in Omaha, Julie, they wanted to know how my new Assistant Mine Engineer was working out. I had to tell them, honest, ‘She does her work just fine, but she’s been leaving early, and taking extra long for lunch.’”
“That’s bull, Deke, and you know it.”
“Lookee here, Julie.” He opened a file in front of him and removed several loose sheets of paper.
“I got reports from my foreman over at Pit Four, and from Mrs. Williams in Purchasing”. He shrugged.” They seen you, Julie; it’s all written up. What am I going to do?”
“If you want to get rid of me, Deke, why’d you take me on?”
“Hell’s bells, Julie, I’d like to promote you, not fire you. But I need a more cooperative attitude. If we got to know each other, these little problems would disappear.”
He stood and dangled the file over the wastebasket, symbolically. He whirled. “I got this terrible itch on my back where I can’t reach, Julie. Would you mind?”
“That was last week,” I told Daddy. “He plays endless variations.”
“Well, quit him,” Daddy said.
“I like this job better than anything I’ve ever done. Except for Deke, Daddy, I love Black Bullet.”
I could never see Daddy’s face clearly in these conversations, but I was almost certain he frowned. “Maybe you need something in your life that you love more, darling.”
I told myself that the Deke problem would take care of itself in time, if I hung in. The man would eventually tire. A month and a half went by, and, indeed, there were stretches during which he left me completely alone. But when I was least expecting it, suddenly there would come another summons to his office; it was as if we were starting over.
About then I met Tom Mallori at a one-day conference in Gillette on updates to the reclamation code. We exchanged business cards at lunch, and I have to confess that the spelling of the last name made more of a first impression than the man. He had come over and asked if he could sit with us—me and a couple of guys who had been ahead of me in the program at Laramie. Tom said he had recently arrived from Ohio to work at the mother mine of Aster Minerals in Campbell County, 100 miles east of Black Bullet.
As I was getting into the pickup to start home at the end of the day, I heard him call. I wedged the toe of my boot in the pickup’s sprung door and watched him amble across the parking lot. He had a slight limp, yet the long stride and flow of a finesse athlete: a track man, maybe, or a swimmer. He said he had heard there were some horse farms belonging to English royalty in the Big Horns; it was my territory, did I have any interest in giving a tour to a guy from Ohio who loved his horses?
Sorry, buster, it crossed my mind to say, you need my mom’s number in New York City. Because of the recent big snows, I told him instead, a trip into the Big Horns would not be advisable until late spring. If he liked horses, my brother kept a mare and a gelding at a stable outside town, we could load them in the gooseneck some Saturday and head out to ranch country for a ride. He said, why not this Saturday? Why not? I shrugged. We arranged to meet at a cafe in downtown Sheridan.
We ran the horses some, but mostly walked and talked. After several hours, the January sun had cooked up the air enough that we could peel off parkas. At the air’s warm touch on my arms and neck, I stopped feeling the need to fill every silence with nervous babble.
It was as if Tom had been waiting for me to shut up. He quietly volunteered that he was an orphan, that after bouncing around foster homes in Cleveland for twelve years he had been selected one summer to work on a farm in southern Ohio as part of a program for kids from the homes. It was funded by a wealthy Cleveland couple with no children of their own. Tom’s unassuming, almost self-deprecating delivery was punctuated by occasional long, deep silences. He was not handsome in any conventional sense, but there was a quiet intensity in his dark eyes that made you forgive the snub nose, the over-long jaw. I began to wait on his words with the sense of magical tension that had gripped me as a child, when I listened to chapter books unfold in the skillful reading voice of our nanny.
He had a natural affinity for horses, Tom said of himself in his matter-of-fact way, and this had caught the eye of the foreman at the farm. On the foreman’s recommendation, the Cleveland couple arranged for him to stay on, eventually they took him into their Cleveland home and adopted him. They sent him to prep school, then to college. The husband was a scion of the founder of Aster Minerals. Although both adoptive parents had died several years earlier, they had arranged his future. He moved about the world, learning the company’s multinational business. This assignment in Wyoming could last a year, maybe two; then he would be sent to the Philippines or South America. By the time he was forty, he would be running a big part of the business.
It was so like a fairy story that I was nearly moved to tears. Some instinct bade me not reveal this, though; I turned my horse and raced for a nearby ridge. A town with an official population of twelve lay on the other side, but it had a road house that served half-pound hamburgers to hungry cowboys from all over the western half of the county.
In retrospect, I am not sure how or why things moved as quickly as they did. When the sun had gone down and the horses were back in the stable, I found myself passionately kissing Tom Mallori in the front seat of the pickup. At the time, it felt natural. His penetrating dark eyes and his deep silences, the gratifying story of his miraculous rescue from a life of dead ends and abandonment, kindled tender desire such as I had rarely experienced. Neither of us said a word. I drove past the cafe where we had left his pickup. At the trailer, I went straight to the bathroom to take measures of self-protection. I emerged wearing only my boots and hat.
We got dressed once around midnight—to drive into town for his pickup and for snacks from the convenience store. We did not leave the trailer again until Sunday night, when I kissed him at the door and watched his taillights streak out of sight down the hill. When the sun came up the next morning, I was so sore, tired and happy that, for the first time since I’d started at Black Bullet, I was tempted to play hooky.
Deke left me alone all that week, and Tom and I talked by phone. Friday after work he was on the trailer doorstep at six-thirty. Saturday we went for a ride, but by mutual consent cut it short early in the afternoon in favor of saddle-and-stirrup back at the trailer. About seven that night we decided we were really hungry. Tom said a rare steak was required, purely, if I expected him to keep this up. There was no question. It had to be Mary’s.
Although the ingredients seemed to call up every cliché in the book—wine, candlelight, soft music, snow flurries outside—I am unashamed to admit that this was the most romantic evening of my life. Time and again, I had to wave off Daddy; I sensed him on the other side of the window pane, wanting to be summoned. But I was afraid of what he might say, and I did not intend to slow down.
Of course it was an evening waiting to be doused with cold water. The torrent arrived when Deke Wilhite sidled in from the bar as we were paying out—with what looked like a double-whiskey in his fist.
“Well, Julie, this is a surprise.” He switched the drink and stuck out his hand to Tom, exhibiting pointy teeth and demanding to be introduced. “Hey, here we are at Mary’s together, after all,” he winked broadly.
While the cashier contended with a glitch in the system they used to verify credit cards, I fidgeted like a child in need of the potty. Deke remained all smiles and conviviality. Ignoring me, he turned his beady eyes on Tom and began to draw him out about his assignment at Aster Minerals. When at last Tom signed the receipt, I took his arm and tugged. As the door closed behind us, Deke raised his drink. “See you Monday, Julie”.
The summons came three minutes after I punched in.
“How’s Tom from Ohio?” he gestured for me to take a seat. Out came a cigarette and lighter (click!); he leaned back in his swivel chair. “You giving him everything he wants?”
I shot to my feet. “Damn it, Deke, that does it. My private life is none of your damn business. I’ve had enough of your crap.” I shucked my identification badge onto the stack of blue-lines.
“Sit down, Julie.”
“Don’t tell me to sit down, Deke Wilhite. I don’t work for you.” Spinning, I yanked the door from its warped frame.
“Julie, I did not mean it the way you’re taking it.”
I was trembling. Trembling. Blood thundering in my temples, and the image of a baby robin, fallen from the nest, floating before my mind’s eye. As a child, I’d taken such a bird into my hands, and as the beat of its tiny heart made it quiver uncontrollably, carried it into the house, only to have my mother turn me out with instructions to be rid of it. I left the tiny creature beneath the tree where I’d found it, and the next morning it was gone. My brother insisted the cats had eaten it, but I preferred to believe its mother had rescued it to the nest. Was it rage making me tremble now? Panic like the baby bird’s? Did I sense that my destiny lay in hands I did not control?
I released the door. “What exactly did you mean, Deke?”
“I shouldn’t have to remind you, Julie. Aster Minerals and Black Bullet are at war. Mr. Tom from Ohio may be picking your brain. I’ve got a call in to Omaha to see what we do.”
I expected Deke to smile, wink, do something to let me know it was a joke, or at least code—another pretext for him to continue harassing me. I saw nothing but tense, earnest concern.
“Are you suggesting, Deke, that I’d pass information to Tom Mallori concerning that fight over the Tongue?”
You did not have to be in coal to know the story. Black Bullet controlled the only right-of-way over the Tongue River to two hundred million tons of prime reserves that were under lease to Aster Minerals. The coal was permitted and ready to mine. In return for the right-of-way, Black Bullet wanted a share of the resource. For Aster, it was a matter of life and death, as the recoverable coal at their current site would be exhausted in another few years. But Aster so far had refused to part with a single ton. So Black Bullet said, well, Aster, you can’t use our right-of-way. You can sit on your coal leases until they time out.
It was the kind of Mexican standoff that coal was famous for. But recently the federal government had told Aster either to get the coal across the Tongue into production, or to forfeit the leases. Unless one of the two giant companies blinked, a couple hundred million tons of permitted reserves would go undug.
Deke stared at me grimly, the ash on his cigarette chewing silently toward the filter. “I’m not suggesting you’d intentionally hurt Black Bullet, Julie. But you have access to a hell of a lot of confidential information.” He raised the cigarette toward his mouth; the ash dropped to the floor. “I’m just warning you. Omaha may say, Choose him or us.”
I told Tom that night. Over the tinny connection, I could almost hear his brain begin to work. When he spoke, the deepness I liked seemed to have grown murky.
“Yeah, well, I suppose it could look suspicious.”
“Give me a break, Tom. You and I have been as intimate as two people can get. We haven’t talked shop once. What the hell is suspicious about that? And who the hell’s business is it?”
He sighed. “Unfortunately, it’s probably Deke Wilhite’s.”
“Wait a second. You agree with him?”
I could hear the brain working again. “What I mean, Julie, I can see why your management might be concerned. I’m not just a casual employee over here at Aster. And you’re in a sensitive position at Black Bullet.” He hesitated. “My management might be concerned, too.”
“Your management? How so, Tom?”
“The Tongue right-of-way issue is one of the reasons I’m here, Julie. I’m trying to solve it.”
At first to my amazement, then to my annoyance, finally to my anger, Tom said he was going to talk to his home office about what he should do.
I resisted the impulse to scream. “Tom, are you saying you’d stop seeing me, if the company told you to?”
“I’m not sure, Julie.”
“And what about this weekend?”
I had made reservations at a resort up past Red Lodge. They had private cabins, a restaurant, a Nordic ski course—and the snow was supposed to be fantastic.
“Let’s see what happens, Julie.”
I did not hear from Tom for several days, during which I had ample opportunity to think things over, and to talk with Daddy. I was relieved to hear him second the decision I’d already made—to quit if Black Bullet tried to dictate to me.
“But what about him?” I demanded. “What if Aster Minerals tells Tom not to see me, and he goes along with it?”
“It wouldn’t be the end of the world, sweetheart. You only just met the guy.”
“I think I may love Tom, Daddy. It’s never felt like this.”
“Then you’ll find a way to make it work. This little freshet will pass.”
“It’s not a freshet, Daddy. Not if Tom refuses to stand tall.”
In response, Daddy seemed unable to do anything but nod.
“And you know what else, Daddy? I’m thinking, this wouldn’t happen to a man. Deke and Tom could become best friends, and no one would give a damn. They could go hunting, drinking, whoring, any damn bonding-type thing they pleased. It would be assumed they were following a code. No one would say a word. But a woman gets involved, suddenly there’s the smell of treason.”
Daddy started to speak, but checked himself. Instead, he nodded again—gravely.
On Thursday, Deke called me in.
“The official word, Julie, is that Black Bullet could care less about you and Tom Mallori.”
I let out a sigh.
“But unofficially, we’d like you to tell us anything you can about what Aster has in mind for them two hundred million tons.”
He leaned back in his swivel chair, took a long drag on his cigarette, sent out a contribution to the bank of blue on the ceiling. The toothy, simian smirk never took a break.
“Julie Stillman, double-agent, is that it, Deke?”
“Like I say, officially, it’s none of Black Bullet’s business.”
I got up. “I’m supposed to meet somebody over at Pit Four about those sodium chloride readings in the sump.” My legs shook. “When I get back, I think I better write something up for Omaha. Let them know how things got out of hand over there.” I jammed on my hard hat. “Unofficially, Deke, you know what I mean?”
Tom called Friday morning before I left for work. Guarded, short, he said it did not look as if anything at his end would be resolved before the following week. He did not think we should go off to Red Lodge together. I refused to make it easy for him. I did not mention my conversation with Deke. Before I hung up, I told him not to bother calling again until he had a decision, one way or the other.
Friday after work I threw my cross-country skis in the pickup, bought a six-pack and a bag of groceries and headed for Red Lodge. Once ensconced in the cabin I had reserved, I drank half the six-pack; without dinner, I fell into a lonely bed. Saturday morning, I consoled myself with a big breakfast before I strapped on the boards.
I had not skied cross-country since a self-funded layoff before I started at the electric company, two seasons earlier. The sounds, the sights, the old physical sensations crept back one by one, like a litter of lost kittens returning home. The partially plowed Nordic course was deserted. On the descents, there was no sound but the furious buzzing of my fish-scale ski bottoms in the grooved tracks. On the flats, my kicking sounded more like someone sucking up a milkshake.
The sun was hot, the light blue sky an endless rooftop ocean that lapped against the shores of the mountain tops. They were less jagged here than in the Big Horns, and draped with spruce and fir that turned black in the direct sunlight. In gullies and bottoms, sprigs of sage poked out of the blinding snow, brown and spindly; after a few hours in the sun, the sage gave off a scent so thick it tickled your lungs.
Of course I would have preferred it the way I had planned, but under the circumstances it beat moping alone back at the trailer. I was out of shape; at 9,000 feet this began to show. I pushed myself. I ate lunch out of my fanny pack on the trail—a sandwich, an apple, trail mix. When the sun began to dip below the mountains, I kicked back to the cabin, started a fire, popped open a beer. About an hour after it got dark, I put on a pot of water for spaghetti.
As I opened the refrigerator for the second-to-last beer, a headlight beam shot through the window over the sink, climbed the wall by the stove and hopped over to the flagstone fireplace mantel, where it expired. I went to the front window; in the glass, all I could see was the reflected bouquet of my wild orange hair and the galaxy of indoor lights. I opened the door.
Coming up the steps with his skis, Tom glanced at me worriedly. He stood the skis against the railing. In the faint yellow halo cast into the darkness by the inside lights, his irregular features seemed tense. One hand held the other in front, like a mendicant’s.
“I don’t care what Aster says, Julie. Or Black Bullet.” He stared at the deck, shoulders poured forward; like a child, he turned out his heels and balanced awkwardly. “Will you forgive me?”
Does a bear puddle in the woods?
Given the late start, we decided we would both take Monday as a sick day in order to extend the trip. The next forty-eight hours, every time I looked around, I noticed how alike we were. Physically, we both pushed ourselves. Tom sometimes skated and, despite his slight gimp (which he attributed to a fall from a horse), went faster; but my old-fashioned kick-glide never left me far behind. We paced each other well. We laughed. The sex, already good, improved with each reprise. We had pulled the bedding down onto the floor in front of the fire. The sleeping that went on consisted of catnaps, lasting only until one of us awoke and tried to get something going again.
Late Monday night, in the glow of the embers, I heard Tom far away, speaking of a world forgotten. “Doesn’t it strike you as strange that Deke Wilhite would worry about you betraying Black Bullet?” the faraway voice inquired. “Wouldn’t it be at least as likely that I’d betray Aster?”
The words did not quite sink in; perhaps I did not wish them to. “You work for a mine or something?” I said.
“Julie, Deke Wilhite’s been having secret talks with our management the last couple of months about coming to work for Aster.”
I sat up.
“He’s devised another way to get Aster into those reserves. He says Black Bullet is finished. He wants to manage the new mine across the Tongue. He wants to be on the winning team. Aster’s made him an offer.”
“What is happening, Tom? Why are you telling me this?”
“Julie, do you care about me?”
I reached for the long, sloping jaw, gentling it in my fingers. “Tom, I more than care about you.” But looking into his eyes, I sensed something not right, that murkiness again. I removed my hand.
“I did a lot of thinking last week, Julie. About all that’s happened in my life the last twenty years, about what the next twenty may look like.” He reached over and took my hand. “I’ve never had feelings about a woman like I’m having now. I don’t want to seem too eager, Julie, I don’t want to drive you away, but I know these feelings will last.” He sighed. “I want to settle down.” He turned those deep, dark eyes directly on me. “Here, Julie. With you.”
The only way I could give expression to the surge of happiness that pulsed through my heart right then was to squeeze his hand.
“And I want you to run the new mine for Aster, Julie. Not Deke Wilhite.”
“Tom,” I started to protest.
He shook his head. “I want children, Julie. A family. “I want to spend the rest of my life with you. We could live up in the hills, or get ourselves a ranch”. He paused. “What do you think?”
“I think I would like that.”
He looked at me hard. “Will you give me something on Deke Wilhite, so I can knock him out of the picture? No one would know it came from you.”
I wanted to say yes, I wanted everything that he was offering to come to pass, but questions shot through my brain like streaking meteors across a black void, beyond my ability to capture or organize. Where was the happiness that had pulsed in me a moment ago?
Beyond the drawn curtains, I could sense Daddy shifting foot to foot, like one of his horses before a storm. Yes, Daddy, I know. But I have to handle this on my own.
“It’s just Deke you’re after, right?”
Tom nodded.
“We’re not talking about another round in the Hundred Years War between the House of Aster and the House of Black Bullet?”
He smiled. “Julie, this is about you and me. I don’t like the idea of hurting another human being, even Deke Wilhite. But it’s important.” He took my hand again. “If you don’t want to, Julie, I understand.”
The shooting stars stopped, my brain cleared. I loved this man. I wanted to trust him. I wanted his children. I wanted a ranch. I wanted to run a new mine for him.
“Tom, I’ve probably only seen the tip of the iceberg, but what I know about Deke Wilhite’s shenanigans could shut the mine down tomorrow. It could put Deke in jail.”
“Tell me.”
As I talked, my stomach turned sour, and I had to will away a tide of nausea. I was so exhausted by the time I finished that I fell against Tom and closed my eyes. Vaguely, I was aware of his kisses, of his hand between my thighs, of his thumb and index finger kneading one of my nipples. Awareness refused to convert to arousal. But before my world collapsed in darkness, I reminded myself I would awake in the arms of my husband-to-be.
We started back before dawn the next morning, travelling in caravan until, north of Sheridan, Tom headed east toward Gillette. I reached the trailer and unloaded my skis with time to spare to make it to the mine, but I could not bring myself to go. I still felt depleted from the night before. Empty but not purged. And in a strange way vulnerable, ashamed. It was like the one time in college I had awakened hungover in a strange bed, with no idea who the guy beside me was. Once more, instead of heading up to Black Bullet, I called in sick. I slept until three that afternoon.
The rest of the week, Tom failed to call, but I did not expect him to. He had told me he would be taking a trip back to Ohio, and would return the following weekend. Wednesday morning, I returned to Black Bullet. There were no questions. Deke left me alone. The responsibilities of the job soon preoccupied my brain again. Daddy kept a respectful distance. I knew he desired to talk, but I wasn’t ready. This was my life.
The weekend arrived, and I failed to hear from Tom. I kept my cell on all day Saturday, Saturday night. Sunday, I kept it on until noon; I had long since stopped leaving oral love notes on his phone. I decided that he must have been required to stay over in Ohio. When he returned, I consoled myself, we would have a heart-to-heart about the wonderful uses to which long-distance telecommunications technology could be put.
He didn’t leave a message Sunday. Monday, I checked with the Aster mine in Campbell County. There was nothing wrong, I was told; Tom was out of town, he would check messages. I left another one. Monday night, I went to a coffee shop in town with Internet. There were no listings in Cleveland under his uniquely spelled last name. I realized I had never asked whether it was his adoptive one, or the one with which he had been born.
The next morning when I arrived at the mine, a number of late-model American compact cars were pulled up at the headquarters building. The plates identified the owners as the United States Government and the State of Wyoming. As I passed the open door to Deke Wilhite’s office, I saw two men in suits holding up the wall; a third was in the chair that I considered the hot seat. Deke, sucking on a cigarette, shot arrows at me with his eyes.
Men in suits crawled all over: two were in my office, going through files. One introduced himself and explained what was going on.
To make a long story short, this was, for me, the quick bloom of those much talked about fifteen minutes of celebrity, the seeds of which every life is said to bear. During the lead story that night on local television news, I tapped my foot to the cadences of the female anchor’s voice, while on the screen Tom Mallori, his limp appearing to bother him, climbed out of a private Aster Minerals jet at the Gillette airport. “According to the affidavit of Mr. Mallori, lodged with state and federal authorities, Miss Stillman disclosed a pattern of rampant and extremely hazardous environmental violations at the Black Bullet Mine, located north of Sheridan, that have caused authorities to impose an indefinite closure of the giant concern.”
I vacated the trailer and moved in with my grandparents in town. Black Bullet kept a skeletal staff at the mine. Needless to say, I was not asked to be part of it. My official status was on leave with pay. The tempo of my life was dictated by the appointment calendar of the local attorney with whom my grandfather linked me up. There were lawsuits and countersuits, documents to review, hearings, depositions, interrogatories to answer. I figured in most of them.
Daddy was the only person I could talk to in non-legal terms about the situation. Being Daddy, of course, he never rubbed my nose in the fact that, had I afforded him the opportunity, he might have helped me avoid this mess.
“I set out to raise me a gal who could do anything a man can do,” he said. “And dad-gummit, I did. But there’s no way to train the human heart, sweetheart.” He paused; I could imagine a sorrowful look drifting over the leathery face. “That goes for men as well as women, Julie Stillman. Don’t you ever think different.”
I found myself wondering. Coal was sufficient, but gender was necessary for what happened. Had a woman not been in the equation—had Deke not hired me as his Bugs and Bunnies Lady—Black Bullet and Aster Minerals would have postured down to the day the leases were to be forfeited, then hurriedly reached a compromise in the offices of their lawyers.
As it happened, coal was too important to the local economy for them to do much different in the final analysis, anyway. The two companies reached a settlement. Aster got the essential right-of-way from Black Bullet over the Tongue—Tom had lied when he said Deke had devised an alternative—in return for which Black Bullet got deferred rights in some of those two hundred million tons. Aster would keep Black Bullet’s customers in coal when production at Pit Number Four ran out. The state and the Feds scaled back their penalties. Deke resumed day-to-day responsibility for the operations at Black Bullet.
As for me, you will find me now, some days moderately composed, in the desert on the Nevada side of the California-Nevada line. The location is fifty miles from Vegas off I-15, no big deal to run in for rest and relaxation, if the R&R of Vegas are to your liking. They are not to mine. On my days off, I prefer a frame pack and a backcountry permit in Death Valley or Zion, equally within striking distance.
The gold mine that employs me is another new experience. Accommodations for the workforce of fifteen are a dumpy little motel along the interstate. The job will only last a year: enough time, I am hoping, for me to regain some perspective. It can be lonely—I’m the only female—but I enjoy the work.
Sometimes at night I drive out under the dome of the desert sky. It seems to sparkle with billions of troy ounces of the precious metal we leach from the ground each day. I stop the car, I howl at the moon like a lady coyote. The emptiness sucks up my cries, the dry air my tears, while inside I boil. Although Mother’s sexual path holds no appeal, I imagine that life for me would be easier if I were a celibate loner. I ponder Mother’s “conceits” about the war between the sexes. Were they just cartoons? Or did men break horses more gently than women’s hearts?
I drive back to the motel, swim into the stuffiness of the room, undress, lie on the lumpy bed as the A.C. begins to spew stale, cool air. I always feel better after a good scream and cry. In the morning, over coffee, I’ll summon Daddy. Don’t fret, darling, he’ll say. There are still good horse-loving men out there. Men worthy of Julie Stillman, men you can trust.
Suddenly I’m trembling—it’s probably just a chill from the A.C., but I’m imagining that tiny robin that Mother made me take back outdoors. I am certain it was rescued to the nest. I know it was. I tell myself that. And I tell myself I will sleep now.
Jeff Pearson lives in Denver, Colorado. His short fiction has recently appeared in Mount Hope and The Concho River Review. He has published a non-fiction book about life in the modern American Dust Bowl, “No Time But Place.”