From Third Coast
Although free to walk around, Anna Lee never left the island of brittle grass on which the cabin, barn, and bunkhouse sat. There was no point. She had been told more than once that a high steel fence surrounded the ranch, a fence wired to a series of iron rods planted up and down the spine of the Sierras. Hank had flipped open the encyclopedia and shown her just how often lightning struck the earth. Sometimes, the sky demonstrated this to her, and while she’d never seen the fence, not even through Hank’s spotting scope, during storms she thought she could hear the metal sizzling.
And even without the electricity to worry about, there were cougars beyond the fence, and bears. The ranch was too remote for television signals but there was a big-screen Sony and VCR and a stack of movies that grew every time Hank and his guests came up to hunt and fish. One of the movies was about a huge grizzly that wandered into a summer camp and devoured everyone except a beautiful blind girl and a counselor with bulging muscles not unlike Hank’s. Bullets could not stop the grizzly, as an unfortunate game warden discovered, but the counselor and the blind girl, both excellent swimmers, lured it into the river, into the rapids. The grizzly went over a waterfall and died, although Hank said it would probably turn up again, in a sequel. Bears similar to the one in the movie had been spotted trying to burrow under the fence, Hank added, and they had a preference for eating Indian girls.
So the safest place to be was in her quarters, in the old bunkhouse, with its heavy oak door and massive dead bolt for which only Hank had a key. The windows were small, up near the ceiling, designed more for venting the body heat of sleeping cowboys than adoring the view of the pasture, the dark screen of trees, the mountain peaks. To see out, Anna Lee had to stand on her rocking chair, on two encyclopedias, with her fingers curled over the sill for balance. Still, she was happy she didn’t live in an airy canvas tent, like those in the movie, vulnerable to sharp claws and teeth.
She stood in the doorway and watched Hank drive in, slowly, his tanned arm dangling from the window and bisecting the gold King Lumber Security star painted on the door. The star was lined with scratches from driving on narrow, brush-crowded dirt roads. For a while, Hank had been driving a new pickup every couple years, but this one, a battered Chevrolet with a deep crease in the rear bumper, had been around so long the other trucks appeared in Anna Lee’s memory as simple smears of color, like blurred faces from her past. The one time she’d asked when he was getting a new truck, after it wouldn’t start one chilly November morning, Hank had just laughed. “Not until they find a way to make big timber grow faster.”
He honked and waved. She waved back. She had known he was coming soon. She was down to only two Diner’s Delight microwave dinners, both macaroni and cheese, her least favorite, but Hank had never allowed her to run out of food. She was on a schedule: dinner, her big orange vitamin, the little white baby pill, and an hour with her exercise videotape before bathing and going to bed. If she skipped even part of the routine, Hank often warned her, everything would go to hell. The vitamin wouldn’t work without food, and without the exercise, the food would just sit in a pile in her stomach. She would die.
She started for the driveway, to help unload the pickup. Hank always came up a day or two before bringing guests, to stock the cabin and check things out. Sometimes he brought tools and lumber, and made repairs. Once in a while, though not often, he showed up very late at night, smelling of smoke and beer, and slept with her in the bunkhouse. On these strange nights she did not get much rest because Hank twitched, swore, jerked, and cried, snoring loudly through it all.
Without speaking, they carried in cases of Budweiser and Corona, frozen steaks, mesquite chicken breasts, Pepsi and coffee, milk and eggs. Toilet paper. For her, more microwave dinners. Her freshly laundered nightgown and underwear in a plastic bag. Kotex.
They sat on lawn chairs, on the porch. Hank smoked, watched a hawk wheeling in the sky far above the pasture. He turned his fingers into a pistol and shot it. He looked at her. “Anybody come around, last couple of weeks?”
“Yes,” she said. “A Jehovah’s Witness.” She recalled the dusty green sedan, the smiling, dark-skinned man ambling up the driveway clutching a brochure.
Hank laughed. “That’s ambition.” He squinted at her. “Anything you need to tell me about that?”
From the bunkhouse, she’d watched the Jehovah knock on the cabin door, then peek in the windows through cupped hands before coming toward her. Because of the angle she’d lost sight of him, but with her ear pressed against the heavy door heard him whistling, heard the scuffing of his shoes on the steps. The Jehovah had rattled the latch. Later, back at her window, she’d seen him going to his car, pausing to urinate on the dry grass with his head tilted back, his eyes closed.
“No,” she said. “He wasn’t here very long.”
“Good.”
“Was he a test?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Hank said, reaching down to squash his cigarette butt under his cowboy boot heel.
“You never tell me. I wish I knew when it was a test.”
“No, you don’t. You get that grill cleaned up like I told you? All that grease?”
“Yes,” she said. “We need more propane, I think. The tank was easy to lift.”
Hank nodded. “Be three of us coming up tomorrow. Me plus two.”
“Is Grant coming?”
Hank stared at her. His eyes were watery blue, the corners webbed with lines. She had told him once, after they watched Cool Hand Luke, that he looked like Paul Newman, only older. “Well, he’s Jewish,” Hank had said, but seemed pleased. Now he grinned. “You liked that boy, didn’t you? Grant.”
She nodded. Grant had not fucked her. He’d asked only for a pencil, and on the sheet rock wall above her bureau drew a picture of her while she sat on the floor with her legs straight out and her hands planted behind her. From time to time he’d walked over to rearrange her long hair, or tilt her head. She still remembered the feel of his smooth, warm hands under her chin. Grant had a wife, he’d said, and a baby named Paige. He didn’t like working for King Lumber. He wanted to teach high school art, something he’d gone to college for. Anna Lee had broken a rule, then, one of Hank’s big rules: Never talk about yourself, even if they ask. She’d told Grant about an art project in seventh grade, a vase she made for her aunty on the pottery wheel, one of only a few pieces in the class to survive the kiln firing. While carefully penciling in her eyes, Grant asked where she’d gone to school and Anna Lee froze up, suddenly afraid it might be one of Hank’s tests. But Grant hadn’t pressed the matter. “Have you ever seen the ocean?” he’d asked. She hadn’t, except in movies. So Grant drew the Pacific Ocean on the wall, too, along with a sailboat and gulls. She was worried Hank would make her wash it off, but so far, he hadn’t.
“Well,” Hank said. “Grant won’t be coming back.”
“He won’t?”
“He’s not with the company anymore. Be me and Pink and another guy—”
“Is he teaching high school?” she asked.
Hank shrugged, stood abruptly. “Come inside. I need to be getting back pretty soon.”
After, she stood naked before him, hands down at her sides. Hank reached out from the edge of the bed and pinched her hip. “What is this shit?”
She looked down. Her hip bore his fingerprints, a trail of fading white circles on her brown skin.
“You been doing your tape?”
“Every night,” she said.
“Getting too easy for you?”
“No. I burn.”
“You bored with the Fonda? They got new ones now. All kinds.”
“I like Jane.”
“Well.” Hank motioned with his finger for her to turn around. “Someday I’ll enlighten you about Hanoi Jane. Tighten up now.”
She tensed her muscles. Felt his rough hands on her rear, poking, squeezing. He turned her sideways, leaned back, sighted along her belly. Lifted her breasts, let them flop down. He sighed. “Anna Lee, you’re getting old. No doubt about it.”
“I am?”
“You are.” He pushed himself up from the mattress, slapped his own belly, mounding over the waistband of his boxers. “We all are.”
She laughed and squeezed his bicep. It was hard, the skin over his Navy tattoo still taut although the color had faded even in the ten years she’d known him. Hank regarded her fingers. The room was very quiet; the low afternoon sun striped them both in shadows from the trees in the yard beyond the big picture window. He covered her hand with his own. Their eyes met and he looked away. “Try to fix those nails up before tomorrow night.”
On cool evenings, whenever she made a fire in the tiny sheep-herder’s stove in the bunkhouse, Anna Lee remembered, saw her uncle Raymond whirling her aunt Aletha in a sweeping circle, throwing her against the orange-hot stove in their company house on Indian Hill. Saw her aunty flopping on the metal, arching her back, her lips pulled back in a smile that wasn’t a smile, saw Raymond stomping his wife with his knobby logging boots, hitting the floor half the time because he was sloppy drunk, shaking the house, vibrating the windows, knocking Anna Lee’s vase from the shelf, sending ceramic puppies toppling over the edge. She remembered reaching out from her hiding place under the coffee table to rescue them, her uncle grabbing her thin arm. Saw herself slipping past him, out the door, almost running into Hank’s pickup as he churned up the muddy road from the mill. Hank pulling her into the backseat, saying down, down, down. Hank taking her away, up to the ranch, while she stayed on the floor like he’d told her. “Good girl,” he’d said. “Good girl.”
She sprayed a cloud of Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds into the air and walked briskly through it, something she’d seen done in a movie. She put on her black kimono and perched on the edge of the bed, and waited. She knew it could be ten minutes or it could be an hour. Or not at all. Sometimes, Hank said, men weren’t interested. People were complicated, he said. That would explain the men who sometimes broke into tears afterward, or the men who kept their eyes closed the whole time, or men like Grant who drew pictures on the wall.
She picked up an encyclopedia but put it down right away. She studied her freshly painted fingernails. China Rose, the color was called. She looked around the room. She wished that she smoked, so she would have something to do while Hank and Pink and the other man, whom she hadn’t seen yet, sat on the front porch drinking and talking about hunting, lumber, Japan, Sacramento, Washington. It was always the same talk. The other man was new so he would be first. Pink would be tomorrow night. She was glad. She didn’t like Pink. Pink was mean, called her names the whole time.
The door opened. A fat man wearing a floppy camouflage hat with a snap-brim came inside. He dropped his duffel bag. Blinked. Took off his glasses, wiped his sweaty face with his sleeve. Turned to look back outside. Hank and Pink were laughing, the sound fading out as they walked back to the cabin.
“My, my,” the fat man said. He took a long drink from his Corona. “Hank said the bunkhouse wasn’t such a bad place to sleep.”
Anna Lee smiled, patted the bed.
Under mounds of flab, through the grunting, the stink of nervous sweat and alcohol, Anna Lee found a shaft of fresh air drafting through an ancient nail hole in the wall. She thought of Bridge on the River Kwai, William Holden breathing through a reed. Or was it another movie? She couldn’t remember. The fat man was having trouble. This had happened more times with more men than she could remember and she had learned ways to help, “rope tricks,” Hank called them, but the fat man pushed her away. He lowered his heavy feet to the floor and leaned forward as if his belly hurt. Anna Lee turned on the bedside lamp. Sometimes it helped if they could see her.
The fat man kept his eyes on his knees. “What are you looking at?” he hissed.
Another rule: Never give up. She smiled, crawled over to him, ran her fingernails along his thigh. Nothing. He grabbed his Corona from the nightstand and stood, walked over to the wall. The fat man regarded Grant’s picture, licked his thumb, rubbed at one of the gulls until it was a black smudge, a dead raven. “Piece of shit,” he said. “Where did Hank find you, anyway?”
Anna Lee sprang from the bed, came up behind him, gripped his puffy, pale shoulders. She pressed her cheek against his back. “Want a massage? Loosen you up.”
He spun around, slapped her ear. She hit the floor. He moved fast for someone his size. He grabbed her hair, jerked her up to the bed, pushed her face into the pillow. She felt the rim of his Corona bottle, icy wet, running down her back. She shivered. The fat man was panting. His entire weight seemed to be on his left forearm, against the back of her neck. The bottle went lower. The fat man grunted, screwed it into her roughly. Lightning bolts flashed in her skull. A rule was being broken, though not by her. She thought of Jane Fonda and pushed up mightily. The forearm slipped and the fat man began to roll. He clawed wildly at the air and toppled from the bed. His head struck the corner of the sheepherder’s stove with a sound like an ax blade burying itself in green wood. His great, fleshy body shook wildly. The Corona bottle dropped from Anna Lee and rolled across the floor.
“Well, this is a problem,” Hank said. He sat on her rocking chair, smoking. He studied the tip of his Salem. “Cover him up, will you?”
It hurt to move, but she dragged her sheet over the fat man. Her blood was on the sheet.
“This motherfucker is a state legislator,” Hank said. “Was a state legislator.”
“What’s that?”
“A big-time mucky-muck. Get dressed now.”
“A boss?”
“What? Yes. Big boss.”
Pink had come in right behind Hank. Now he was out in the yard, vomiting. Anna Lee pulled on her panties, her jeans. She found her King Lumber sweatshirt but Hank shook his head. “Not that shirt. Wear a plain one.”
She put on one of Hank’s old white T-shirts. He nodded. They listened for a few moments to Pink retching, swearing, coughing. Hank looked at her and rolled his eyes.
“Is Pink a boss, too?” she asked.
Hank groaned, stood. “Right now, everybody is my boss. The whole goddamn world is Hank’s boss, right about now.” He prodded the fat man’s belly with the toe of his cowboy boot. “Son of a bitch. A beer bottle. What gets into people, anyhow?”
Pink appeared in the doorway. The skin that had given him his nickname was gray now, the color of the weathered antlers mounted above the bunkhouse door. Pink did not look at Anna Lee or the fat man. He glared at Hank. “We’re fucked, you know that?”
Hank squatted by the Corona bottle. It looked smaller than it had felt, Anna Lee thought. On the floor, in a pool of beer, it seemed innocent. Incapable of harming anyone. She watched Hank pick it up delicately, with two fingers, and examine it briefly before placing it on the fat man, in a deep crevice in the sheet. “Just relax,” he said quietly.
For a moment Anna Lee thought he was talking to the fat man, but then Pink spoke up. “Relax? Are you kidding me?”
“Go inside, have a drink. I’ll take care of this.”
“You fucking yokel,” Pink said. He wiped a string of vomit from his cheek. “You have any idea what’s going to happen when this gets out?”
Hank straightened up. His knees popped. “So this drunk bastard took a spill and banged his head. So what?”
“You really believe it’s that simple.”
“He fell down,” Hank said. “End of story.”
“You’re forgetting about something, Flynn. Someone.”
“There is no someone.” Hank glanced at her. “Someone doesn’t exist. Hasn’t for ten years.”
Pink’s bald head went from gray to pink to red. He jabbed a finger at Hank. “You won’t exist. I won’t exist. King fucking Lumber won’t exist if your little Paiute whore ever gets tired of country life.”
Anna Lee gazed down at the fat man. “I didn’t mean for it to happen.”
The men ignored her. Pink threw up his hands. “You swore that when the time came, you’d deal with things.”
“I will. I’ll move her for a while.”
“No.”
“You’re in this too,” Hank said. “It shouldn’t all be on me.”
“It is on you. You brought her up here. You have the gold star on your truck. Your hands have never been that clean, anyway. What’s a little more dirt?”
Hank lit another cigarette, glared at Pink. Pink glared back. A long time passed. Anna Lee stared at the wall, at herself, pretty on the beach, smiling at the ocean.
“I’ll drive,” Pink said.
It was cool in the yard. The sky was clear, the ranch illuminated by stars, the full moon. Hank gripped her by the arm and they followed Pink to the cabin. “When we get back,” Pink was saying, “we’ll clean everything up and haul that fat fucker down the hill.”
“Whatever,” Hank said. His fingers tightened on her arm. He yanked her close and for a few steps they walked as one. She smelled his breath, smoky, sweet from brandy. When Pink opened the screen door and went inside, Hank’s lips brushed her ear. “Run,” he whispered. “Go and keep going.”
She ran. Headed for the trees beyond the pasture. She heard Hank cursing, heard the screen door screech open, slam shut. Her rear end was on fire but she bit her lip and kept going. She reached the pasture, tripped on the ragged fringe of weeds, rolled on the ground. She looked back as she scrambled to her feet. Pink was in the yard, with his deer rifle, striding toward her.
Close to the jungle-thick trees, she remembered the fence, ten feet high, the current so strong at times, according to Hank, that birds landing on it burst into flames. She slowed down. Her stomach hurt. Everything hurt. She stopped, turned around. Pink was almost across the pasture. Farther back, Hank was walking in tight circles, hands on his hips, looking up at the sky. Bears, she thought. A grizzly could outrun a horse in a quarter mile stretch. She tried to step into the trees but her legs wouldn’t allow it. She did not want to be eaten alive. She closed her eyes and listened to the footsteps getting closer. Maybe, she thought, brightening a little, maybe it was only a test.