Bastard Tales

First draft of a true story I wrote. Details omitted to make it more palatable. Yes, I reuse the same paragraphs sometimes.

In my mind I am in Miami. Lightning bugs glow slowly in and out of existence. Here the sky and the sea are colored the same when the sunset settles its smoky pastels and the air swells so humid I am almost the same as the sea. Where does it end? The sea itself is buried between every grain of wet sucking sand. Littoral. Everything is a homophone. I am thinking about transition points and interstitial spaces and then I am back in the stock chutes in Wyoming, back when I was female, shoulder-deep in the black hole of a bull's asshole.

They are telling me how the neighbor lady was found dead under her truck out on a high table of BLM land. Gored, they say. Crawled under the truck but it was too late. It seems more myth than truth but I know better by now. This bull, though, stands patiently, trying to swish his tail while I scoop out the bull's shit so we can put a probe in and test his semen. Fat and muscle ripples between the bars of the squeeze chute. When the probe is done the vet scoffs. Shitdick, he says. He's been boinking the other bulls. The muted colors here run against each other into a haze.

Mud season one year finds a cow in a bog. The meadow turned spongey and springy, like walking on a water bed. The neighbor flushed too much ditch water through the prairie dogs' tubes to drown them in their underground kingdom. A taut tether anchored ankle and ankle to each end of each of us and we pulled and pulled and we hitched it to the tractor and we pulled and pulled but waist deep slipping in mud we couldn’t get her up so a .44 had to put her back down.

Stretched from one end of the universe to the other, taut as a tether forever running in both directions, never reaching the destination, never able to get back home. “Dead end trips” they call it in space. At some point you can have traveled so far away from where you began that the universe expands faster than the speed you’re traveling. You can’t return home, because it recedes faster than you’re able to travel. You can’t get to your destination, because it too recedes faster than you’re able to travel. No longer able to get anywhere, you get further from everything. You can’t reach any destination, even if you traveled forever.

My first ranching job was never a job because the guy saw my tattoos and short hair and decided I wasn't pretty enough. Then I spent a month sleeping on the couch in my sister’s ministry house living room, a place of pacing in-between for her roommates and a place of pacing in-between myself, getting my ass slapped and washing dishes until I had enough money to feed the 8pmg of my baby blue ‘82 Chevy K20. I drove against the wind that last flat stretch in between mountains and that Chevy was missing on so many cylinders the wind had me stuck in place, like an outstretched hand on the forehead of a toddler that's trying to punch you. Pushing and pushing, the engine revved and missed and I braced myself for the point when I'd just start rolling backwards.

The mountains were named after the blood of Christ and hung the background of that high-benched ranch, 9000 feet above sea level and made from dust and cholla. To the east were two peaks, the Huajatolla, Ute for “breasts of the earth.” The land itself a body and my body folded into that interstitial desert. I’m a cowboy, I’d say, not sure they even existed anymore, but a way of pinning myself down when I felt so stretched like a steer headed and heeled. Cowboygirl, he’d say.

Ropes hobbled the ankles of most of his horses until they were rubbed raw and oozing. They learned to pull back and rear up as you led them along, sometimes sitting down on their hindquarters, pulling the rope taut enough to take your thumb with it if you looped it wrong. He said he practiced "natural horsemanship" and that I was just afraid. I’m too soft, I thought. You're just a puppy, he says. Your callouses will come. 

I find an old Ralph Lauren ad in a decades-out-of-date magazine in his bathroom. It reads:

The West.

It's not just stagecoaches and sagebrush.

It's an image of men who are real and proud.

Of the freedom and independence we all would like to feel.

Now, Ralph Lauren has expressed these feelings, in Chaps, his new men's cologne.

Chaps is a cologne a man can put on as naturally as a worn leather jacket or a pair of jeans.

Chaps. It's the West. The West you would like to feel inside of yourself.

Chaps. The new men's cologne by Ralph Lauren.

I think about the shitdick bull and if that was the west he would like to feel inside himself.

A heavy snow fell in April and I remember how fresh the pacing mustangs were, like they knew something was coming. It came so fast and heavy and then suddenly everything seemed pillowy and snow-muffled and the mustangs were quiet. All that soft snow on top of that red dirt and yucca and dry cedar seemed like it shouldn’t belong. Quickly it all turned to water and made the ranch a whole mud pit and I felt like the cow I hadn’t yet met, stuck in a bog as I spun my wheels and tried to escape in that baby blue Chevy.

I had made a joke about him being a pig and he threw a beer can at me across the dinner table. His face red, he made little horns with wiggling fingers at the top of his head, like the devil or a bull. It was funny, I thought. I was funny. The next day he tells my quiet friend to take Festus the rangey old mule on a ride, down a dry arroyo. You'll find the trail, he says, but she never did, and when she came back a couple hours later I am crying in the bunkhouse. I tell her how he took me inside and said You feministas need to be knocked down a notch. I did not think people still used the word feminista. I told her how he told me he was the big dog and I was a lost puppy. How I cried and how he took me into his bedroom and made me take off my clothes before he beat me, menstrual blood running down my legs while he made me stand with my nose in the corner for I don't know how long. How he made me sit on his lap still naked and give him a kiss for giving that to me because, after all, I deserved it. I don't know if I tell her I believed him but before I know it my quiet friend is suddenly loud and wielding a broom threateningly and telling him to get the fuck away from us. The sheriff brings pizza to us at the ramshackle motel later that night. I look in the mirror and see impressions where my flesh rippled between his fingers like a squeeze chute. On a porch on the outskirts of town as I leave, three wolves hang heavy like sacks, runs of old blood through greased fur. Clouds weigh down like the heifers we call heavies before they burst with calves.

The next February I am in Montana and I will hear about a calf that was born inside-out, how it suckled the finger of the neighbor when he stuck his hand inside its mama when he saw she was having trouble. Raccoons will stare at me with glowing eyes when my flashlight sweeps across them in the corral when I check the pregnant heifers in the cold middle of the night. -23 degrees but a warm chinook wind blows like a spirit. The dark and sleep deprivation take their toll and after a while I can't tell the difference between flesh and blood and hooves and monsters.

In April, I'll pin a thick-necked steer between the blunt point of the tractor's pin and the center of the rolling round bale. I'm text-arguing with my girlfriend as I drive, thinking about how I don't want to kiss her because though she is very pretty her breath is always acrid and humid, like steamed bok choi gone tepid and rotten. I do not think about how she forces herself on me because girls can't do that, especially pretty ones. Later I will find myself unaware that I am repeating to the woman I actually do love some of the same words and I will never forgive myself. But right then I am only unaware of the steer being dragged behind me. I don't know how long it's been when I finally notice and try to plug the hole in its neck.

Another day I'll hear the chugging of a tractor echoing across the river all damn day. My boss goes to investigate and when he returns he tells me his cousin's ranch hand must have walked under the bale on the front loader at the moment it dropped. I wonder what fifteen hundred pounds of hay feels like coming down on you. Does time slow down and you feel yourself folding inch by inch under the weight, or are you flat before you even notice? They were always having problems with the hydraulics on that thing, he says. I take the flatbed to be welded and meet a roughneck woman in black Carhartt overalls named Barbie who says she's got a couple of squirrels loose up there as she points to her head. I've heard of spiders crawling in ears but never squirrels. I think about how tiny they must be and who would set them loose like that, nails scritching and scrabbling across the floorboards of her brain.

Years later in Wyoming I am on a hot high desert cattle drive and I watched a man break his horse off from the herd to run her far off into the distance and back. Working her back and forth, whipping her sides and stinging her eyes with the tail of his rope. Does it matter that he was gay? When we finally got to the first water source after seven hours I never seen a horse literally jump straight into a river like that, halfway to her withers. It was funny, I thought, her getting him back like that. She waded in further and he called her a bitch as he stung her in the eyes with his rope again. She waded in deeper and deeper until he floated off her, still tugging on the reins when she rolled on her side and all I could see was the saddle as she floated down the river. It wasn’t him she was trying to kill, I realized. When I finally left I looked down the bank of the river and just saw a huge mass of wet roan hair and heard him somewhere downstream screaming something about a son of a bitch.

I used to be a bitch, but now I am a bastard. A girl, but now I am a short man, whose too-tall tales tower over him. In fiction, though, trapped animals caught around the ankles get free. I would write myself a different story but I am afraid some gems will be lost in all the junk, never to be seen again. Or nothing will ever be finished and I will puke it up and move on because the horror of looking back is too great. Experiences carve wrinkles and ruts the way water writes on land and sometimes I am that land stretching from one horizon to another, filled with dust and mosquitoes. What scales of color and sound and time do the cattle and the grass live in? A shrub of sage is just a slow-moving animal, and grazing slow-moving sculpting. When it rains, mosquitoes get swallowed into the raindrops that fall just right, pulling out just before the drop hits the ground. On a horse I watch the mountains change as each tree exhales its colors. My own empty chest expanding with every swell of the horse’s cage between my calves, and nature breathes back, my exhale its inhale. How do you hold onto the beauty of a land and fathom its edges so you can contain it within you in all its complexity? Inside people are landscapes. Something you can’t catch or grasp or hold, something you will never know the entire shape of but you can be in it and it in you and just let that mountain range open up inside you and swallow you whole. 

Here is where I am, but in my mind I am there, on a beach in Miami. The one pricked with the slow glow of fireflies. I call one to my finger like a tiny falcon, and pinch it between my fingers to show you the dead can still glow.