Читать книгу Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2 - Annie Proulx, Энни Пру - Страница 8

ONE SUMMER DAY AROUND THE TURN OF THE LAST century, two men in overalls, one holding a roofing hammer, stood in a Casper street and looked at a new building.

“I guess that’ll show the cow crowd who’s got the big sugar in this town,” said one.

The other man smiled as though testing his lips and said, “One or two, maybe. You should a went into lawyerin, Verge, it’d be your buildin we are puttin up.”

“Rather have a ranch. That’s where the real money lays.” “There he is right now,” said the man with the hammer, nodding at the tall frock-coated figure striding toward them with his scissory gait. He did not look at them but at the building.

“Well, well, boys,” said lawyer Gay G. Brawls. “That’s the queen of Casper, and we’re the ones put her up.”

In the decades after statehood every Wyoming town had to have at least one imposing building. These banks, courthouses, opera halls, hotels, railroad stations, and commercial buildings were constructed of local-quarry stone, of concrete blocks shaped to resemble stone, and some were iron-fronts ordered from catalogs. Few have held on to their original purpose and so today a cell phone company operates incongruously in a handsome opera house, and the ornate Sweetwater Brewery is occupied by a fence company.

The iron-front Brawls Commercial gave the impression of a kind of extravagant prosperity, surrounded as it was by flimsy false-front wood structures. The various parts of the building—handsome cornice, pilasters that separated windows and doors, a lintel stamped with Egyptian motifs separating the ground floor from the upper story—had all been shipped by railroad from St. Louis. A neoclassical entry with garlanded cornices and inset colored glass distinguished the front. On that summer day in 1900 lawyer Gay G. Brawls carried his own papers to his new office upstairs. The ground floor housed a dry-goods shop behind the town’s first plate-glass window and featured bolts of calico, fustian, and trimmings. In the back was an up-to-date selection of men’s suits, which the proprietor, Mr. Isaac Frasket, altered to fit the broad-shouldered, small-waisted cowboys who plunged for the outfits. He paid an extra rent to store hatboxes and millinery supplies in one of the rooms on the second floor, side by side with boxes of old depositions, wills, and case notes.

Brawls’ practice was busy and select. The best-known of his clients was William F. Cody—Buffalo Bill. Lawyer Brawls, in concert with other legal beagles, helped the showman teeter along the edges of his various bankruptcies occasioned by business dealings with the infamous Denver newspaper and circus entrepreneurs, Bonfils and Tammen.

Lawyer Brawls, thirty-three years old when his building went up, had long horseman’s legs, black hair as fine as cat fur, and a beard shadow like a mask. He was almost a handsome man, his appearance spoiled only by a reddish mole on his left eyelid, but the brilliant aquamarine color of his irises pulled attention away from that flaw. He seemed made for the saddle but suffered an allergy to horses at a time when horses were transportation. Even ten minutes in an open carriage set his eyes streaming and a clenching headache ricocheting behind his eyes, so he walked everywhere, and if a destination was too far to travel by shank’s mare he didn’t go. He owned one of the first motorcars in Casper.

In 1919 Mr. Frasket, the old dry-goods merchant, died and his corpse was shipped back east. An ice cream parlor rented the premises and became a popular gathering place. Seven months later Gay G. Brawls himself, on his way back up to his office after a lemon phosphate, dropped some business folders on the stairs, stumbled and slipped on them, cracked his head, and after a week in a coma, died at age fifty-three.

His son, Archibald Brawls, also a lawyer, and as tall and dark as his father and with the same blue eyes and born-to-the-saddle cowboy good looks except for a mouthful of bad teeth, moved into the second-floor offices. His hours in the dentist’s chair taught him something of pain.

“Mr. Brawls,” said the dentist, “I can make you a good set a nutcrackers, pull out these diseased teeth, and after she heals up, with the new plates you’ll be free from pain forever. And the new set will look good, not like these bad gappy ones.”

“Do it,” said Brawls, and within a month his bad old ivories had been replaced with dentures that seemed carved from a glacier.

Archibald Brawls’ business was lively in the 1920s, despite his youth. He acted for an important rancher north of Casper, a man with political connections whose deeded land abutted the Emergency Naval Oil Reserve No. 3, just then becoming infamous as Teapot Dome. The rancher, John Bucklin, had more than once dined with the Interior Secretary, Albert B. Fall, a political animal who wrested control of the reserve away from the Navy and then leased it to oilman Harry Sinclair in a classic sweetheart deal. Fall was a man who disdained the nascent conservation movement in favor of full-throttle resource exploitation, setting a certain tone for the future. Big money changed hands and Bucklin worried about being swept into the government’s dustpan of investigation. The accumulating legal paper crowded Brawls’ office. But, as he said, showing his icy smile, it’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow somebody a little good. The Teapot scandal was a turning point in his career, and after Fall went to prison, young lawyer Brawls’ interests shifted from petty affairs such as deeds and wills to representation of timber and oil interests, railroads, irrigation rights settlement, and the wonderfully cloudy law of mineral leases.

He increased his storage space, stacking his father’s papers and books in the back of a deep closet. He added his own legal junk, the boxes jammed high and tight.

He made money all through the Depression. Others in Natrona County got rich as well. While the rest of the country was suffering dust storms and bread lines, Casper enjoyed a flood of oil profits. It set off a building boom. The Brawls Commercial was no longer the premier structure in the town.

In 1939 Archibald Brawls bought a ranch north of Casper—the former property of Bucklin, whom he had counseled in the Teapot Dome affair—and on weekends began to live the life of a distinguished rancher. It pleased him to improve his herd with pedigreed stock. The property was mostly yardang and trough, the tops of the ridges shaved smooth by eons of westerlies. It lay just on the northern edge of the great wind corridor that sweeps the state from the Red Desert to the Nebraska border. But, although Brawls and his wife, Kate, a blond with a face she had clipped from a magazine and the caramel eyes of a lizard, entertained important politicians and ranchers, although their New Year’s galas and Fourth of July ranch barbecues were great events in Wyoming society, somehow their lives were tragic. Brawls wanted to build up a ranch kingdom with his boys, but his oldest son, Vivian, was killed in the Second World War. Basford, the second son, who was something of a drinker, steered his Ford into a fatal draw and died alone in the sagebrush. Then Kate sued for divorce, moved to Denver, and remarried a podiatrist. The third son, Sage, graduated from Boston University Law School in 1959 and joined his father’s practice. He always wore a suit, in contrast to his father’s boots, twill pants, and many-pocketed vest.

“Somebody in this outfit has to look like a lawyer,” he joked.

Archibald raised one eyebrow, exposed his cold teeth. “You still don’t know, even at your age, that it’s ranching interests run this state? They come to us because they recognize”—and here he hooked a thumb in his vest armhole, omnipresent cigarette dribbling ash down the front—“that we know their problems.” He adjusted his Stetson, which like a Texas sheriff, he always wore in the office.

Clients saw how strongly the Brawls men resembled one another, compared the framed photograph of Gay G. Brawls that hung in the anteroom with the living examples of Archibald and Sage. They were all rangy, all with heavy dark beards that showed immediately after they shaved, all too tall for doorways. When finally Archibald Brawls died of lung cancer in 1962, the year lightning demolished the stubby spout of Teapot Dome, his Sinclair stock and his holdings in the oil-rich Salt Creek fields north of Casper had made him wealthy. The son, Sage, inherited the ranch, the law practice, the money.

Sage Brawls, after a notorious period of wild-oats sowing, married Georgina Crawshaw of Wheatland, fifteen years younger than he. Her great-grandfather, Waile Crawshaw, had been known throughout the west as a sharp judge of horseflesh. In 1910 he had bought dozens of fine thoroughbreds for the proverbial song in New York when that state moved against horse racing and the thoroughbred market crashed. He shipped them to Wyoming and bred them to his polo ponies. His children continued the business, and Crawshaw mounts played on the polo fields of the world.

Georgina, raised on the family ranch, was as blond as Sage’s mother, but thin and athletic, with a body like that of a strong boy. She had big, wiry hands and bit her thumbnails. It was she who introduced Sage to polo and crossword puzzles.

They had no children, and perhaps this accounted for the ossification of Sage’s interests and character. As a child he had had an inquiring mind, had caught snowflakes on a piece of black velvet, wondered how many lodgepole pollen grains were in the yellow mountain clouds of summer, worked mathematical puzzles. But Georgina won him over to polo, and within a few years he thought of little else. The crosswords were too much for him.

Like many who admire horses, Sage Brawls let his affection become an obsession. He loved the sport, the gallop, the danger, the players’ athletic skills, the aggressive thrust of the riding-off maneuver, the heavy breathing, the smell of dust and torn grass, even the sight of the spectators, heads bent like those of treasure seekers after coins, replacing divots of turf between chukkas. Polo in Wyoming was not exclusively the sport of the wealthy but also the pleasure of ranch hands and working people. Individual riding skill counted for more than money, but as Sage sometimes remarked, it didn’t hurt if you had both. He was handicapped at 6 and Georgina, who was a ferociously expert horsewoman, at 7.

Sage’s clients became inured to the sight of their lawyer suddenly twisting around until he touched the ground behind his left heel with his right hand. When he rose in the morning he did other flexibility exercises that a later generation would have recognized as yoga. The Brawls had a polo pit built where they could practice difficult strokes. There were photographs throughout their house—Sage delivering a nearside forehand shot, an offside under-the-neck stroke, posing sweaty and triumphant with his team, and one of Georgina mounted on Quickstep, holding the Wyoming Cup.

The years rolled along, and little by little Sage neglected his law practice as it kept him from polo matches. Time and money went into their ponies, and they built a second house in Sheridan so they could be nearer the Big Horn Polo Club. On a seniors’ match trip to Omaha on the last day of June in 1994, when Sage was riding Cold Air, a new mount he was trying out, a spectator’s child, impatient for the Fourth of July, set off a forbidden bottle rocket that struck the animal on the flank. Now in his early sixties, Sage Brawls was no longer lithe and flexible. Arthritis had seized his hips and shoulders despite his exercises. A few years earlier he would have been able to spring free. The terrified animal reared and fell over backward, crushing the rider. Two days later he died, and that was that. The Brawls, as the dinosaurs, were gone from Wyoming.

Georgina, grieving and guilt-ridden, sold most of the ponies, donated Sage’s and her own tack and mallets to the polo club, and swore to leave the sport. Decker Mell, who played the number one position on her team, telephoned, Decker with his face like an arrowhead, eyes so pale a blue they looked turned inside out, and atop his lip a drizzly mustache. He was a brand inspector with a weakness for horseflesh.

“I had real mixed feelins when I heard you give your gear to the Club. Goddamn, Georgina, don’t do this, throw everthing away. Your friends, your family, your life is mixed right up with polo.”

“The sport didn’t do me any favors.” She could imagine him spitting into the telephone, the black pupils of those faded eyes like exclamation points.

“Georgina, think a the history. It’s more than the team and the matches, it’s more than playing, and you are a wonderful athlete.”

“Startin a feel my age, Deck. Sage wouldn’t quit, even when he stiffened up. You see what it got him?”

“O.K., I can understand that, but remember that your people been connected for generations to polo—they knew the Moncreiffs, the Wallops, and wasn’t your great-granddaddy related by marriage to the Gallatins? I mean, there’s history there. You got a responsibility.” “Yeah, but—”

“Crawshaw is one a the great names in western polo. I personally won’t let you get out. We need you, we need a keep the Crawshaw name alive in polo.”

They met for lunch, and Georgina said that while she would not play again, she could become an involved spectator, a keeper of records and local polo history. The connections would live on.

“You could be an umpire, Georgina.”

“You think so? I cannot see that happening,” she said. “There are no women umpires that I ever heard of.”

“First time for everthing,” he said. “Or you could be the timekeeper.” That was more like it. She could be a timekeeper.

Then, suddenly, she remarried, her surprise choice the ranch foreman, Charlie Parrott, considerably younger than she and part Oglala Sioux, or so he claimed, though she figured Mexican and something else was in there but what of it? Parrott, with a tight, hard body and buttocks like cantaloupes, had a long swatch of black hair, glittering black eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. His sad, big face and frog-wide mouth did not go with his body, but the low voice pulled things together. He had hired on only weeks before Sage’s death. Charlie was not a great fan of polo, but horses liked him for his quiet, slow movements, his silence, his affection, felt more than observed. Georgina liked him for some of the same reasons. If Sage had known of his lack of interest in polo he would have told the man to move on. But Georgina didn’t care.

“Anyhow, I don’t have to play polo to manage a horse ranch,” said Charlie Parrott. “That’s what you got Elwyn for.” Elwyn Gaines, middle-aged and spattered with transparent freckles, was the soft-spoken trainer and married to the Brawlses’ cook, Doreen Gaines. Their son, Press, worked as a groom, cleaning tack and mucking out stalls. Georgina said she would rather have her head shaved than lose any of the Gaineses.

Georgina found Charlie Parrott more than attractive. There had not been much sex with Sage in the last years, but once Charlie got going he was insatiable and she found herself heated to the point of abandoned vulgarity.

“Look at this,” she would say and haul up her nightgown.

“Take that damn thing off.” And he was on her like a falling I-beam.

He had been married twice before, the first time to a woman who now lived in Nevada and with her had had one daughter, Linny. The second wife, he said, was a California cop, and they broke up after five months of screaming. End of story. In his slow, easy voice he gave his daughter Linny’s history; she was in her early twenties and apparently a pure Nevada hellcat who had already been the recipient of two unwanted pregnancies. Linny was coming to live with them, Charlie Parrott told his widow-bride. A flash of distaste crossed her features. She covered up quickly with a grand smile.

“Well, it’ll be nice to have another woman on the place,” she said, but with some acid, as if remarking that it would be nice to have more rattlesnakes. Charlie Parrott wasn’t fooled and told Linny to walk softly. The girl’s name had been picked from a baby-name book which reflected a brief fashion of naming girls for expensive wedding gifts of an earlier time—Linen, Silver, Crystal, Ivory.

When Georgina told Decker Mell, who had become her confidant, of this new development he remarked that she was probably in for some trouble.

“You know, Georgina, I sort a wish you hadn’t married him. You should a hitched up with somebody in polo. I am guessin Charlie don’t have much feelin for polo.”

“Right,” she laughed, implying that her husband had an excellent feel for other, unspecified sports. “But you were already married, Decker, so I had to settle for Charlie.” They both laughed.

Linny arrived on an August weekend driving an old Land Rover with a bad muffler, the vehicle once painted with tiger stripes now faded to faint wiggles. She was wearing a skimpy green halter and the shortest skirt Georgina had ever seen. She was a big, good-looking girl, buxom and curvaceous, with dusty black hair (except for a fringe of bleached blond bangs) pulled into a ponytail that slapped her between the shoulder blades when she ran. She looked very Indian to Georgina, more Indian than Charlie. Her face contained enough material for two faces: a high brow, a long chin, wide cheekbones with fleshy cheeks like vehicle headrests, and a nose like a plowshare. Her eyes were black, double-size almonds, and her long teeth were perfect. Georgina saw that Linny’s eyes were marred by a slight strabismus in the left one which gave her a crazy appearance as though she might suddenly shriek and spring on someone. She yanked two huge duffel bags out of the Land Rover.

Georgina and Linny shook hands like men, eyeing each other as though looking for toeholds.

Linny said, “I sure appreciate it that you let me come here. It’s my plan to find a job and then get an apartment or something in town. I don’t want to get in your and Dad’s way.” She scratched her dark thigh with mint green nails.

“That sounds like a plan, Linny. I’m happy to help if I can. The job thing might be tough. Wyoming is not a great place for jobs. What kind a work have you been doin?”

“Mostly I been in school, little bit a film school in California, which I couldn’t hack after they showed us this nasty old Edison film, Electrocution of an Elephant. Then I worked in Reno at one of the casinos.”

“The elephant thing does sound ugly. But Reno?”

“Sure. My mother lives in Reno. She works in one a the casinos and I got a job in the gift shop. You know, waitin on customers. Somebody wins some money, first thing they want a do is spend it. And the gift shop had real expensive stuff. It was sort of a crappy job, though. But paid pretty good so the employees wouldn’t try to rip the shop off. That’s how I could afford the Land Rover. And I did other stuff. The usual, like, let’s see, I did waitressing, bartending, and the gift shop thing, then a summer as a fire spotter in this lookout tower for the Forest Service. Which was a headache—those horny USFS guys would come up there all the time to ‘help me out.’”

“Uh-huh,” said Georgina, biting back a remark that anyone who wore clothes as skimpy as Linny’s would always be bothered by men with horn colic, and went off to the kitchen to talk with the cook.

Doreen Gaines was a thin hypochondriac. She and her husband had worked for the Brawlses since 1978. After Sage’s death she stayed on, the main artery of news connecting the Brawlses to the town. Sage and Georgina had given the Gaineses an unvarying Christmas present—a hundred-dollar bill and a saddle blanket. They had twenty-four saddle blankets, most with the price stickers still on them, stacked on top of the freezer in their garage. While Sage Brawls was alive Doreen had recognized Georgina as the enemy, but now Charlie Parrott and his half-naked daughter had moved into the opponent’s corner.

“Dad,” said Linny to Charlie Parrott, “she’s too old to have kids, right?”

“Who, Georgina? I guess so. Never discussed it. Guess she’s over the line. Never thought about more kids, seeing how bad the first one turned out.” He winked at her, but there rose in his mind like a bubble elevating through beer the image of his first wife, whom he had not seen for years, her little razory face and dark-circled eyes. In his memory it was a very cold day so that he, coming out of a humid and overheated house, had taken in breaths of air that seemed slabs of clear, thin ice. The sunlight all around her flashed with snow crystals that emerged from the empty air rather than falling from clouds, for the sky was blue.

“I mean, she’s older than you—like, she must be fifty—well, like it’s a pretty nice ranch. Too bad it’s so far out from town.” And the girl squinted at the horizon. Her father was a good-looking man who had played the sexual attraction card well. She understood the game.

Charlie Parrott caught the drift of these remarks; Linny was figuring the odds on someday inheriting the Brawlses’ ranch but didn’t want to come right out and say it. He’d done the same figuring himself. They were a pair.

“What’s your mother do these days?”

“Workin. She got a chambermaid job at one a the casinos. The Big Lucky Palace.” “She still hit the bottle?” “What a you think? Why I’m here.”

After the dinner dishes were cleared Linny would fire up her old Land Rover and take off for Casper. She would drag in long after midnight, and sometimes, when it was very late, park down near the main road and walk in to the ranch house. The dogs never barked at her. At breakfast she always said she’d been job hunting, that the best place to find out about jobs was not in the newspapers but in the bars.

“You know,” said Georgina to Charlie in the night, “this trot-tin off to the bars every night is goin a end in number three.” “Number three what?”

“Number three knocked up,” said Georgina. “You pay for the other abortions?”

“Yeah. You know, I’m her father and all. She counts on me.” “I can see that.”

“All she needs is a job. She gets a job she’ll straighten out pretty fast. She’s a good girl.”

Georgina thought Linny was more of a ripe young slut, but she said nothing.

“Hey,” said Charlie Parrott. “Come on over here.” And he reached for her, his callused hands catching on the silk of her nightgown.

Georgina experienced a quick memory of the aging Sage Brawls trying to twist down and put his right hand on the floor behind his left heel.

A few days later Georgina cornered Linny at noon. The girl, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and sagging, blood-spotted briefs, was at the counter, fixing her breakfast, a plate of tortillas and beans with huge amounts of fiery salsa. Fighting a hangover, Georgina suspected. Doreen was kneading bread, shooting glances at Linny. Georgina waved her out into the garden, then, as Linny sat at the table, Georgina swung her bony behind onto a stool near the counter. Her rough heels scraped the rungs.

“Got a proposition for you. There’s this buildin down in Casper belonged to Mr. Brawls—the Brawls Commercial. They owned it for years and years. Now I get this notice that the city wants a condemn it, tear it down. They’ll pay somethin for it, but that’s not the point—they want it gone. Casper’s upgradin. So, we got a few weeks, a month, clean out the buildin. I went down there yesterday and took a look. The structure’s in bad shape. And there’s file cabinets full a papers, boxes a papers, rooms a boxes. Some a this paper might be important. The Brawlses had their hand in a lot a things. I talked to some a the State Archives people. They would like to know what’s there. They’ll probly take most of it off our hands. But I don’t just want a turn it over without knowin what we got. So, I need for somebody go through those boxes. Keep a eye out for letters from George Warshinton or whatever. See what turns up, make some kind a list. You want the job?”

“How’s the pay?”

She named a good figure, enough money for Linny to pack her suitcases and head for California or Phoenix and lead her own life when the job was done.

“Works for me,” said the girl, sticking out her hot, dry hand.

“We’ll go down this afternoon, look it over, make you a key. And you might want a change your underwear.”

“O.K. if I came in now?” said Doreen at the door in an aggrieved voice. “I got to get that bread goin.”

The Brawls Commercial building stood slumped and weary, its foundation breached. The interior stank. Even though it was downtown it smelled as if several skunks had got under the floor and died. The plaster, wet and dried for years from a growing leak in the roof, added its own tongue-curling flavor. Dust, peeling wallpaper, dry rot, and rodent tenants gave off an effluvium that made Linny retch.

“It’s worse than it was yesterday,” Georgina said. “If that’s possible. We’ll get some windows open. Bring some room freshener in. The electricity don’t work so a fan don’t work neither.”

Upstairs Linny heaved at the windows, finally got a crossdraft whose hot, dry air began sucking the stink away. Sage Brawls’ desk was still littered with his brittle papers. The dust that lay on the arms and back of his chair like fur strips shuddered in the fresh breeze.

“God knows what the clients did. He didn’t have so many there at the end, I guess.”

Linny went into the next room, pulling open wooden filing cabinet drawers that stuck and squalled like wildcats when forced. She opened a closet and saw boxes of more papers. None of the boxes were labeled beyond small Roman numerals in the lower left hand corners.

“They are sort of numbered,” said Linny. “How much is IIC? I hate those old Roman numerals. How did they ever multiply or divide?”

“Who knows?” said Georgina, who had dropped out of school early and to whom “Latin” meant Tito Puente and margaritas.

Georgina wanted to stay and watch Linny, tell her what to do, but throttled the urge to control.

“O.K.,” she said. “I’ll leave you to it.”

Late that afternoon the old Land Rover rolled in. Charlie Parrott was just closing the tack room door and looked over at his daughter.

“What the hell you been doin?” he said. “Christ, look at you.” The girl was streaked with sweat-runneled dirt and dust. Her damp hair straggled. There were cuts on her arms, and she sneezed.

“Dust.” She wept. “Cleanin up the old Brawls files for Georgina. That fuckin buildin’s got more dust and rat turds in it and dead moths and mice glued onto the floor than Nevada’s got sand.”

“She payin you?”

“You bet. Good pay, but a stinkin job.”

“She didn’t say nothing a me about it.” He moved his jaw from side to side, pushed up on his glasses. “What’s them cuts on your arms? Look like hunderd and elevens.”

“From those old file folders. They’re all dried out and sharp on the edges. What’s hundred and elevens?”

“Old-timers used a call the spur marks on a hard-rode horse ‘hunderd and elevens.’” He drew the marks /// in the dust to illustrate. “Well, hell, why not bring the vacuum cleaner down there and get rid a that dirt? If you’re goin a do this? Simple enough.”

“No electricity. Buildin’s dead. They’re gettin ready a tear it down. Pretty soon.”

“Baby girl, they invented a thing called a generator. Tomorrow mornin I’ll come down and set up a genny for you. Get that dust out anyway. We’ll take the Shop-Vac, not upset the household arrangements. What all is down there anyhow?”

“Dad, those old Brawlses never threw a thing away. It is letters of all kinds to about ever person in the world, court stuff, law books. Hard a know where to begin. Mr. Gay Brawls. What a name!”

“It didn’t use to mean what it means now. Plenty were named Gay. Even in Nevada. Was old Gay Pitch had a gas station in Winnemucca. Nobody thought nothin about it and he raised a railroad car a kids. So, O.K., tomorrow morning I’ll drop in.”

Whatever it was, they were in it together.

The next day they spent the forenoon vacuuming and cleaning. Charlie Parrott lugged several pails of water up the stairs and sloshed them over the floor to lay the dust. It was another day before Linny got at the closet where Gay G. Brawls’ working life was stored.

Georgina had seen Charlie loading the generator into the truck and, when he said he had to go to town, immediately guessed its purpose. She telephoned Decker Mell.

“He’s takin the generator down to town. Bet you he is goin a clean up all the dust in that building for her. She come home yesterday some mess a dirt.”

“That seems kind a sensible,” said Decker. “What’s the problem?”

“Oh, no problem yet, but he didn’t say nothin about it to me. You’d think he’d a mentioned it. He babies that girl too much.”

But that night at dinner Charlie remarked in his offhand way that he had cleaned up the dust for Linny and that she was ripping through the old papers with a sense of determination that amazed him.

“She’s a good kid,” he said, and the parent and daughter smiled at each other.

“You ought a told me she was doin this job,” he said in an offhand way to Georgina, who did not reply but cut savagely at the meat on her plate.

Linny opened another of Gay G. Brawls’ boxes. Inside she found a sheaf of letters, many from someone who signed himself “Bill,” and at the bottom of the box, half a dozen cans of film marked with Roman numerals. What, she wondered, was the appeal of Roman numerals to those old dead lawyers? She read several letters, one dated October 1913 from “Wounded Knee Battlefield.” The writer, whose name she could not make out, had a spiky black hand, and addressed lawyer Brawls as “Gay.”

We left Chicago 13 days ago and are here to reproduce the battle of Wounded Knee for the moving picture machine. It is Col. Cody’s big project and he has high hopes that it will relieve him of debt. I am a little concerned about this as Messers. Bonfils and Tammen are backing the affair which will be filmed and produced by Essanay—the Chicago film company—and the Colonel seems only to fall behind in these partnerships. We must hope for the best. He will do other battles—Summit Springs, the Mission, last stand of the Cheyennes, etc. We are surrounded by Indians and their teepees and the soldiers of the 7th Cav. from Fort Robinson. The Indians are always here with an interpreter powwowing about the rations they are to get or the acting pay or something or other. It’s been really cold.

Another letter, in the same handwriting:

General Miles, who is the advisor, is very fussy about accuracy, insisted that as there were 11,000 U.S. troops under his command back then, that many must be shown. It was amusing that while Col. Cody agreed to this, the same 300 troops marched around and around until 11,000 were shown! The moving picture machine had no film in it!

There was a yellowed newspaper clipping, so dry and weak the edges crumbled when she touched it. She laid it on a chair and read the remaining portions of a rave review headlined: “Great Audience Held in Tense Wonder by Indian War Pictures.”

The reviewer wrote that the pictures were “very wonderful in their realism. It is quite impossible to describe them. They are something we can never see again.” On and on the review went, conjuring flying snow, the barking of the machine guns, dying Indians, drifting smoke. Finally, wrote the deeply moved reporter,

… we were recalled to the fact that we were sitting in the Tabor Opera house looking at the moving picture reproduction of the last fight of the Indians of North America against the army of the United States. Hillsides, the plains, the moving troops, the dying Indians, the coughing Hotchkiss were no more. Instead there were the lights of the theatre and the white screen and a thousand people awaking to the realization of having witnessed the most wonderful spectacle ever produced since moving pictures were invented…. Nothing like this has ever been done before. Nothing to equal it will perhaps, ever be done again.

Linny sighed and carefully laid the fragile paper in a folder. She picked up one of the film canisters. “War Bonnet #II,” read the faded label. Roman numerals again. “Rebellion/Reel No. I” was another. There were five Rebellion canisters. But what rebellion? She had only a hazy idea of the Indian wars. Perhaps she would go to the library. She knew better than to open any film canisters.

That evening, watching the news, when Georgina left the room to go to the bathroom, she said to Charlie Parrott, “I found somethin today might be interestin.” “What?”

“Cans a film. Letters from Buffalo Bill. Seems like he was makin a movie of the Indians and the U.S. Army fights. I guess maybe that’s the film in those cans.”

“Yeah? First I heard about a movie like that.”

“It was way back in 1913 he made it. I got a check it out at the library, see what I can find out. Might be valuable.”

“The letters probly worth somethin. What’d they say?” He turned the television sound off.

“Just legal stuff, stuff about debts and payments and some letters about the film, about them being in some place called Wounded Knee. Weird name. In South Dakota?”

Charlie Parrott snapped his head up. “Wounded Knee! My God, did that old fraud have anything to do with Wounded Knee?”

“I guess so. What about it? What was Wounded Knee, anyway?”

But Georgina came into the room and made a face at their conversation, turned the television sound back on.

“I’ll tell you tomorrow. It’s a long story.”

“What’s a long story?” asked Georgina.

“Indian history,” said Charlie Parrott. “A long, sad story that makes you want a puke.”

Charlie spent the next day sorting out the neighboring ranch’s cattle that had found a weak section of fence and breached it. When he got back at dusk, dirty and tired, Linny and Georgina had eaten and cleared the table. There was a place for him set in the kitchen.

“Georgina said keep your supper warm,” said Doreen. “But it ain’t the kind a supper that keeps good. Kind a dried out,” she said, taking a plate of steak and baked potato out of the oven. The potato had the feel of a deflated football, though smaller. The steak had curled up on the edges and showed the reticulate grain of an osprey’s leg.

Doreen talked on. “And Georgina went up to some polo meetin in Sheridan. Said she might stay over. Said she would call you around ten.” He nodded. He preferred she stay over than drive at night, when all the raging drunks were on the highway looking for something to hit.

“Anyway,” said Doreen, “I’m out a here.”

Linny came in, dressed in her bar clothes—short skirt, pee-wee boots, and a tiny halter.

“I was goin a tell you about Indian stuff?” he said. It was the ideal time with Georgina out and the long evening stretching ahead.

“Don’t bother,” she said. “I went to the library and got a stack a books.” She gestured at the counter where several books lay. He could see the library call numbers. “I’m just goin downtown for a hour. I’ll start readin when I get back.”

After she left he looked at the books. The top one was Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. “She won’t read that one easy,” he said to himself remembering his own heart-bruising time with the book years earlier.

He was surprised to hear the old Land Rover roar in a little after ten, while he was still on the telephone with Georgina telling her about chasing down Chummy King’s cows.

“I hear Linny’s truck,” he said. “Better hang up. See you tomorrow noon then? O.K., love you, honey. Drive careful.”

“You want a talk?” he called to Linny, hearing the screen door squeak.

“Yeah, but first I want a read the books and get the background. Then I will know what questions to ask. O.K.?”

“Well,” he said. “That makes sense.” But he felt a twist of disappointment. His thoughts on the subject had surfaced, his mind like a tongue probing an infected tooth. He wanted to get into the nickel misery of those crushed ancestors, measure his schizoid self against the submerged past.

“You let me know when.”

“You bet,” she said and pounded up the stairs with the books.

The next morning in the kitchen her face was swollen, both eyes red slits. “Up all night?”

“Just about.” Her voice was rough and cold. She poured a cup of coffee. He asked no more questions.

It was almost a week before they talked. The days had gone by, Linny down in the old building sorting papers and making lists, but at night, instead of heading for the bars she stayed in her room. Georgina said it was a sign the girl was settling down. Charlie thought she was reading the bitter books. On Thursday, Georgina said she had to go up to Sheridan again. There was an important match, some South American polo players of note, a gala dinner.

“I’ll stay over with Nora Bible,” she said, naming a ranch wife who ran the refreshment tables at all the polo events. “Not so many people bring their picnic baskets like in the old days when it was tailgate city. Don’t one a you want a come up for the match? Charlie, you haven’t seen one for a year, anyway. Be nice. And, Linny, I bet you never even been to a polo match.”

“Oh, I got too many things goin on right here,” said Charlie. “Take some snaps for me and tell me about it.”

Linny shook her head at Georgina and went upstairs.

The cans of film stood in a row on the dresser. She knew a great deal now about what they might show—an Indian dragging a soldier from a horse, some fake hand-to-hand fighting, Indians poking two white captive women with a stick, the Gatling and Hotchkiss guns spraying, and everywhere Buffalo Bill peering into the distance, riding at the front, his white showman’s goatee wriggling in the wind like an albino eel. She did not open any of the cans. She knew also that nothing in the film could possibly equal the tragic power of the single still photograph of Big Foot wrapped in rags lying dead on his back in the snow, his long frozen arms half-raised as if to ward off the bullets, his open ice-glazed eyes fixed forever on anyone who cared to look at him.

Charlie and Linny rinsed the dishes and arranged them in the dishwasher. Charlie never went near the machine without thinking of his mother sloshing chipped plates in an old grey enamel dishpan.

“Dad, can we talk about the Indian stuff now?” She rubbed furiously at the clean counter with a sponge. “The Indian stuff,” he said.

“Yeah. We’re Sioux, you always told me, but I don’t know what kind a Sioux, and you always said you were born on a rez, but what rez?”

“Oglala Sioux, and I was born at Wazi Ahanhan, Pine Ridge, next a Rosebud. That’s where they pushed old Red Cloud’s people after they got them out a the Powder River country. That Powder River country was the last a the old, old ways. Red Cloud ought a see it now, all full a methane gas pads and roads.”

“So Red Cloud could be a relation? I mean, we could be connected to him, right?”

“We might be.”

“Then what are we doin here with this—with Georgina?” She waved at the dishwasher, the poppies in a blue vase on the kitchen table. “Why aren’t we with our own people? Don’t I got cousins and grandparents and all?”

He’d known these questions would be coming, but the answers were still floating around in the blue sky.

“Linny, I’m sorry, baby girl—I been de-Indianized. I been out workin in the wide world since I was fourteen. The rez didn’t have anything for me. And I never kept in touch with any a them.” But even as he spoke it was as though he were a tall kettle boiling away and his daughter had just raised the lid. The steam rushed forth. Linny stood there, rigid, brimming with anguish and the sense of isolation that she had breathed in from the books all the week long.

“I bet you never been on a rez, have you?” he said. She shook her head.

“There’s more to it than deciding whether you want a live on the rez or in the world. Remember that Indians did not invent therez. They were the white man’s prisons to get the Indians off the good land. Linny, there’s no virtue in choosin the rez. You can lock yourself into a corner with no way out.”

The girl made an impatient face, little more than a twist of the lips but discounting all he was saying.

He knew it was hopeless but went on. “I’m guessin you want a do the whole thing, don’t you—sweat lodge, beaded moccasins, get yourself a pretty Indian name, find a good-lookin Indian stud, and get into the rez life? I see that brain goin a million miles a hour. Just so you know, I had those same feelins long ago. I went back, met your mother, got you started, and so forth. Romance. To me, now, the romance is wherever you find it, but not very likely on a rez.”

“Why didn’t you guys give me a Indian name?”

“We did.” He smiled. “Little Bedbug.”

“Dad! Goddammit, I’ll pick my own name. Something nice. Like Red Deer or Jade Blossom.”

“You got your cultures mixed up.”

“Well, what’s your name? They didn’t name you Charlie, did they?”

“Yeah, they did. They saw how the world was, so they named me Charlie. I suppose you want me to go around bein called Stands Lookin Sideways or Big Dick?”

The girl’s face was black-red, and he was afraid she was going to start crying or shouting. But she said, “You wait,” and ran up the stairs to her room. In a few seconds she was back again with paper in her hands.

“You can make fun,” she said, “but I been readin all that Buffalo Bill Cody stuff in Mr. Brawls’ boxes, there, all that stuff about the movie he was goin a make, that he did make, called it The Indian Wars Refought, and they staged a couple a the important battles. Most a the movie was the reenactment of Wounded Knee. For the movie Buffalo Bill got all the survivors together, Indians and army soldiers, and had them do it again for the camera. Put himself in as a scout. The books say it was the first documentary. The guns was loaded with blanks and only passed out at the last minute because some a the Indians wanted a use real bullets and shoot the army. General Miles was ridin around orderin everbody do this and do that. It was all very realistic and exact, and guys who’d been there almost passed out when they saw it.”

She took a deep breath and looked at him with red-faced sincerity. “The big thing is, that movie has totally disappeared and there are people would give a lot a money for that film. There are no copies anywhere. It was only showed a couple a times, then, after Buffalo Bill died in 1917 Essanay gave it another title and started showin it. But nobody paid much attention and now it’s lost. There’s some think the government got rid of it because it was too realistic, showed the U.S. Army in a bad light shootin women and babies with that big Hotchkiss machine gun cannon.”

“No shit! That’s the film you found in them little cans?”

“Yeah. Or I think, goin by the labels on the cans. Can’t really tell until somebody looks at them.”

“Hell, let’s go see. Where are they?”

“Dad, we can’t do that. They been sealed up in those airtight cans for ninety years. You open those cans and the film will disintegrate right before your eyes. They got to go to a special laboratory specializes in film preservation. Get opened underwater or something.”

She rattled the paper. “Anyway, there’s a couple reviews in Mr. Brawls’ boxes from when it was first showed in 1914 and one guy thought it was the greatest movie ever made and most a them wrote how nothin like it had been ever done before. But I found somebody not so crazy about that movie. They had it at the library in a Buffalo Bill folder. This Chauncey Yellow Robe didn’t like Buffalo Bill’s movie. He was a Sioux, but it don’t say from where.”

She stepped forward and by that motion made the kitchen space in front of the counter a stage. She began to recite, her voice deepening, impassioned, and for Charlie Parrott, leaning against the wall, his daughter, eyes narrowed and jaw outthrust, became the long-dead Yellow Robe, speaking with bitter scorn. His hair stirred.

“‘You ask how to settle the Indian troubles. I have a suggestion. Let Buffalo Bill and General Miles take some soldiers and go around the reservations and shoot them down. That will settle his troubles. Let them do in earnest what they have been doing at the battlefield at Wounded Knee. These two, who were not even there when it happened, went back and became heroes for a moving picture machine.’”

She had become the old orator, her eyes fixed on Charlie, her right hand extended, shaking, the nail of her index finger a glowing coal. She continued, her voice swollen with Yellow Robe’s contempt.

“‘You laugh, but my heart does not laugh. Women and children and old men of my people, my relatives, were massacred with machine guns by soldiers of this Christian nation while the fighting men were away. It was not a glorious battle, and I should think these two men would be glad they were not there; but no, they want to be heroes for moving pictures. You will be able to see their bravery and their hairbreadth escapes soon in your theatres.’”

She stopped, put her head down, chin on her chest. Gradually she became Linny again.

“Hey, that was scary,” said her father. “It felt like old Yellow Robe was right here in the kitchen.”

“At least his words were.” She spoke in her normal voice. Yellow Robe had gone back into the sky.

But the recitation had moved Charlie Parrott. He wondered if his mother were still alive. A memory of the reservation came unbidden, a blistering day, the sky white and dry, heat waves trembling above the junk cars, one of them where a woman named Mona plied her trade. Nothing moved, no dogs, no people, no lift of wind stirring the dust and trash. He recalled the awful boredom of the place, the hopeless waiting for nothing. He shuddered.

“Tell you what. Soon as Georgina gets back we’ll go down there. To Pine Ridge. I’ll find out who is still around. You can see for yourself. We’ll take that lousy Land Rover a yours—it’ll look good on the rez.”

“What, today?”

“You bet.”

“Georgina will be pissed, a lot a those boxes and papers still got to be done. Because I probably won’t come back.”

“I know that, but I bet she can hire somebody in town, some college kid finishing out the summer. It’s not the end a the world.”

“And how about the film cans? Like, they really are valuable. They could be worth a hundred thousand dollars to the right people.”

There was a long silence.

“Well. By rights they belong to Georgina. I guess it’s your decision what to do with them. Now, what say we get packed up? Georgina comes back I need a talk to her. Maybe an hour.”

“What for? Let’s just go. Leave her a note.”

“Unmannerly. I got a tell her what I’m doin, what the scene is. So she don’t worry.”

“Goddammit!”

“Linny, grow up. She means somethin a me. I’m not just walkin out without a word. And remember that all you been reading happened a long time ago—more than a hunderd years ago.”

“No, Dad. To me it happened last week. I never knew any a that stuff. They don’t teach it in school. It gets me—” And she slammed her chest with a theatrical thump.

“You’ll have to work it out yourself. We all do.” He knew nothing he said would be heard. She would get involved, and after a few years of passionate activism she might fall away from it and end up on urban sidewalks in the company of street chiefs and hookers. He went into the storage room off the kitchen, where she heard him shoving suitcases around.

She understood finally that her father was weak, that all of his choices had been made passively because he let things go and go and go, waiting until situations crested, until the move was made for him. Her mother had left him, made her own way. He had ended up working on ranches even though he was smart because he didn’t have any ambition. She bet Georgina had picked him and he’d just gone along with it. She bit at her nails, an old habit from childhood. He was the classic irresponsible, passive guy, no Crazy Horse or Sitting Bull fired with resistance, but letting the whites push him around, believing that he had some kind of decent life. And, she believed, he couldn’t stand to kiss Georgina’s money goodbye—probably his last chance at real money, seeing he was in his forties. She despised his weakness but didn’t blame him. She would let him take her around the rez, introduce the relatives, and then he could go back to Georgina and the money. She’d find out the rest of it by herself.

She packed rapidly, sorting through her clothes, cramming the short skirts and halter tops into the wastebasket. She was through with those clothes. She pulled on jeans and an overlarge T-shirt as long as a nightgown. She heard Georgina’s car pull up outside, the kitchen door slam, and the rumble of her father’s voice. The duffel bags were full. She was ready. Downstairs she heard the freezer door open and shut. She guessed Charlie was mixing Georgina a drink. He himself never drank. His voice rose and fell. What was he telling Georgina? The woman could never understand any of this. Linny sat on the edge of the bed and waited.

After a long time her father’s voice ballooned up the stairwell. “Linny! You ready? Let’s roll.”

She dragged the duffel bags out onto the landing and kicked them down the stairs.

“O.K.,” she yelled. “Great.”

She took three steps down, then turned and rushed back to the bedroom. The cans of film sat on the dresser. It was difficult getting the lids off the first two. Inside the first one the coils of old nitrate film were clotted and welded together in a solid mass. The next deteriorated before her eyes to nitrate dandruff She knocked one film out onto the bed. It had a nasty smell, and as it uncoiled and broke apart she could see that the center of each frame had been burned through by the acidic gases that had attacked the emulsion.

Then she was down the stairs, dragging the duffel bags.

“Bye,” she called to Georgina, who stood on the porch, face expressionless, staring at Charlie.

As they pulled out onto the main road he said, “What did you do about the film?”

“Oh, I left it for her.”

“Good girl,” he said, and he patted her still unwounded knee.