Mero had kicked down thoughts of the place where he began, a so-called ranch on strange ground at the south hinge of the Big Horns. He’d got himself out of there in 1936, had gone to a war and come back, married and married again (and again), made money in boilers and air-duct cleaning and smart investments, retired, got into local politics and out again without scandal, never circled back to see the old man and Rollo bankrupt and ruined because he knew they were.
They called it a ranch and it had been, but one day the old man said it was impossible to run cows in such tough country where they fell off cliffs, disappeared into sinkholes … where hay couldn’t grow but leafy spurge and Canada thistle throve … The old man wangled a job delivering mail, but looked guilty fumbling bills into his neighbors’ mailboxes.
Mero and Rollo saw the mail route as a defection from the work of the ranch, work that fell on them.
He heard the amazement in her voice, knew she was plotting his age, figuring he had to be eighty-three, a year or so older than Rollo, figuring he must be dotting around on a cane too, drooling the tiny days away, she was probably touching her own faded hair. He flexed his muscular arms, bent his knees, thought he could dodge an emu. He would see his brother dropped in a red Wyoming hole. That event could jerk him back …
The old man’s hair was falling out, Mero was twenty-three and Rollo twenty and she played them all like a deck of cards. If you admired horses you’d go for her with her arched neck and horsy buttocks, so high and haunchy you’d want to clap her on the rear. The wind bellowed around the house, driving crystals of snow through the cracks of the warped log door and all of them in the kitchen seemed charged with some intensity of purpose.
Mero had thrashed all that ancient night, dreamed of horse breeding or hoarse breathing, whether the act of sex or bloody, cut-throat gasps he didn’t know. The next morning he woke up drenched in stinking sweat, looked at the ceiling and said aloud, it could go on like this for some time. He meant cows and weather as much as anything, and what might be his chances two or three states over in any direction. In Woolfoot, riding the Exercycle, he thought the truth was somewhat different: he’d wanted a woman of his own without scrounging the old man’s leftovers.
I’ll tell you, on Tin Head’s ranch things went wrong. Chickens changed color overnight, calves was born with three legs, his kids was piebald and his wife always crying for blue dishes. Tin Head never finished nothing he started, quit halfway through a job every time … He was a mess with the galvy plate eating at his brain and his ranch and his family was a mess. But … they had to eat, didn’t they, just like anybody else?
He missed the westbound ramp and got into torn-up muddy streets, swung right and right again, using the motel’s SLEEP sign as a landmark, but he was on the wrong side of the interstate and the sign belonged to a different motel … Halfway around the hoop he spied the interstate entrance ramp, veered for it, collided with a panel truck … was rammed from behind by a stretch limo, the limo in its turn rear-ended by a yawning hydroblast operator in a company pickup … His first thought was to blame Iowa and those who lived in it.
He crossed the state line, hit Cheyenne for the second time in sixty years … That other time he had been painfully hungry, had gone into the restaurant in the Union Pacific station although he was not used to restaurants and ordered a steak, but when the woman brought it and he cut into the meat the blood spread across the white plate and he couldn’t help it, he saw the beast, mouth agape in mute bawling, saw the comic aspects of his revulsion as well, a cattleman gone wrong.
Every year Tin Head butchers one of his steers, and that’s what they’d eat all winter long … he hits the steer a good one with the axe and it drops stun down. He ties up the back legs, hoists it up and sticks it, shoves the tub under to catch the blood. When it’s bled out pretty good he … starts skinning it … and he gets the hide off about halfway and starts thinking about dinner. So he leaves the steer half-skinned there on the ground … but first he cuts out the tongue which is his favorite dish.
Yet everything was as it had been, the shape of the road achingly familiar, sentinel rocks looming as they had in his youth. There was an eerie dream quality in seeing the deserted Farrier place leaning east as it had leaned sixty years ago, the Banner ranch gate, where the companionable tracks he had been following turned off, the gate ghostly in the snow but still flying its wrought iron flag, unmarked by the injuries of weather, and the taut five-strand fences and dim shifting forms of cattle.
Tin Head is just startled to pieces when he don’t see that steer … but way over there in the west on the side of the mountain he sees something moving stiff and slow, stumbling along … it was the steer, never making no sound. And just then it stops and it looks back … Tin Head can see the raw meat of the head and the shoulder muscles … and its red eyes glaring at him, pure teetotal hate like arrows coming at him, and he knows he is done for and all of his kids and their kids is done for.
Now he remembered that the main entrance gate was on a side road that branched off well before the Banner place … the map of the ranch in his memory was not as bright now, but scuffed and obliterated as though trodden. The remembered gates collapsed, fences wavered, while the badland features swelled into massive prominence. The cliffs bulged into the sky, lions snarled, the river corkscrewed through a stone hole at a tremendous rate and boulders cascaded from the heights. Beyond the barbwire something moved.
He walked against the wind, his shoes filled with snow, feeling as easy to tear as a man cut from paper. As he walked he noticed one from the herd inside the fence was keeping pace with him. He walked more slowly and the animal lagged. He stopped and turned. It stopped as well, huffing vapor, regarding him, a strip of snow on its back like a linen runner. It tossed its head and in the howling, wintry light he saw he’d been wrong again, that the half-skinned steer’s red eye had been watching for him all this time.
