Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3

ISBN-13: 9781416571674

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Scribner

Publication Date: 09-08-2009

Pages: 240

Product Dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.58(h) x 0.59(d)

Annie Proulx is the author of eleven books, including the novels The Shipping News and Barkskins, and the story collection Close Range. Her many honors include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and a PEN/Faulkner award. Her story “Brokeback Mountain,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker, was made into an Academy Award–winning film. Fen, Bog, and Swamp is her second work of nonfiction. She lives in New Hampshire.

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The Mellowhorn Home was a rambling one-story log building identifying itself as western — the furniture upholstered in fabrics with geometric "Indian" designs, lampshades sporting buckskin fringe. On the walls hung Mr. Mellowhorn's mounted mule deer heads and a two-man crosscut saw.

It was the time of year when Berenice Pann became conscious of the earth's dark turning, not a good time, she thought, to be starting a job, especially one as depressing as caring for elderly ranch widows. But she took what she could get. There were not many men in the Mellowhorn Retirement Home, and those few were so set upon by the women that Berenice pitied them. She had believed the sex drive faded in the elderly, but these crones vied for the favors of palsied men with beef jerky arms. The men could take their pick of shapeless housecoats and flowery skeletons.

Three deceased and stuffed Mellowhorn dogs stood in strategic guard positions — near the front door, at the foot of the stairs, and beside the rustic bar made from old fence posts. Small signs, the product of the pyrographer's art, preserved their names: Joker, Bugs and Henry. At least, thought Berenice, patting Henry's head, the Home had a view of the enclosing mountains. It had rained all day and now, in the stiffening gloom, tufts of bunchgrass showed up like bleached hair. Down along an old irrigation ditch willows made a ragged line of somber maroon, and the stock pond at the bottom of the hill was as flat as zinc. She went to another window to look at coming weather. In the northwest a wedge of sky, milk-white and chill, herded the rain before it. An old man sat at the community room window staring out at the grey autumn. Berenice knew his name, knew all their names; Ray Forkenbrock.

"Get you something, Mr. Forkenbrock?" She made a point of prefacing the names of residents with the appropriate honorifics, something the rest of the staff did not do, slinging around first names as though they'd all grown up together. Deb Slaver was familiar to a fault, chumming up with "Sammy," and "Rita" and "Delia," punctuated with "Hon," "Sweetie" and "Babes."

"Yeah," he said. He spoke with long pauses between sentences, a slow unfurling of words that made Berenice want to jump in with word suggestions.

"Get me the hell out a here," he said.

"Get me a horse," he said.

"Get me seventy year back a ways," said Mr. Forkenbrock.

"I can't do that, but I can get you a nice cup of tea. And it'll be Social Hour in ten minutes," she said.

She couldn't quite meet his stare. He was something to look at, despite an ordinary face with infolded lips, a scrawny neck. It was the eyes. They were very large and wide open and of the palest, palest blue, the color of ice chipped with a pick, faint blue with crystalline rays. In photographs they appeared white like the eyes of Roman statues, saved from that blind stare only by the black dots of pupils. When he looked at you, thought Berenice, you could not understand a word he said for being fixed by those strange white eyes. She did not like him but pretended she did. Women had to pretend to like men and to admire the things they liked. Her own sister had married a man who was interested in rocks and now she had to drag around deserts and steep mountains with him.

At Social Hour the residents could have drinks and crackers smeared with cheese paste from the Super Wal-Mart where Cook shopped. They were all lushes, homing in on the whiskey bottle. Chauncey Mellowhorn, who had built the Mellowhorn Retirement Home and set all policy, believed that the last feeble years should be enjoyed, and promoted smoking, drinking, lascivious television programs and plenty of cheap food. Neither teetotalers nor bible thumpers signed up for the Mellowhorn Retirement Home.

Ray Forkenbrock said nothing. Berenice thought he looked sad and she wanted to cheer him up in some way.

"What did you used to do, Mr. Forkenbrock? Were you a rancher?"

The old man glared up at her. "No," he said. "I wasn't no goddamn rancher. I was a hand," he said.

"I worked for them sonsabitches. Cowboyed, ran wild horses, rodeoed, worked in the oil patch, sheared sheep, drove trucks, did whatever," he said. "Ended up broke.

"Now my granddaughter's husband pays the bills that keep me here in this nest of old women," he said. He often wished he had died out in the weather, alone and no trouble to anyone.

Berenice continued, making her voice cheery. "I had a lot a different jobs too since I graduated high school," she said. "Waitress, day care, housecleaning, Seven-Eleven store clerk, like that." She was engaged to Chad Grills; they were to be married in the spring and she planned to keep working only for a little while to supplement Chad's paycheck from Red Bank Power. But before the old man could say anything more Deb Slaver came pushing in, carrying a glass. Berenice could smell the dark whiskey. Deb's vigorous voice pumped out of her ample chest in jets.

"Here you go, honey-boy! A nice little drinkie for Ray!" she said. "Turn around from that dark old winder and have some fun!" She said, "Don't you want a watch Cops with Powder Face?" (Powder Face was Deb's nickname for a painted harridan with hazelnut knuckles and a set of tawny teeth.) "Or is it just one a them days when you want a look out the winder and feel blue? Think of some troubles? You retired folks don't know what trouble is, just setting here having a nice glass of whiskey and watching teevee," she said.

She punched the pillows on the settee. "We're the ones with troubles — bills, cheating husbands, sassy kids, tired feet," she said. "Trying to scrape up the money for winter tires! My husband says the witch with the green teeth is plaguing us," she said. "Come on, I'll set with you and Powder Face awhile," and she pulled Mr. Forkenbrock by his sweater, threw him onto the settee and sat beside him.

Berenice left the room and went to help in the kitchen, where the cook was smacking out turkey patties. A radio on the windowsill murmured.

"Looks like it is clearing up," Berenice said. She was a little afraid of the cook.

"Oh good, you're here. Get them French fry packages out of the freezer," she said. "Thought I was going to have to do everthing myself. Deb was supposed to help, but she rather tangle up with them old boys. She hopes they'll put her in their will. Some of them's got a little property or a mineral-rights check coming in," she said. "You ever meet her husband, Duck Slaver?" Now she was grating a cabbage into a stainless steel bowl.

Berenice knew only that Duck Slaver drove a tow truck for Ricochet Towing. The radio suddenly caught the cook's attention and she turned up the volume, hearing that it would be cloudy the next day with gradual clearing, the following day high winds and snow showers.

"We ought to be grateful for the rain in this drought. Know what Bench says?" Bench was the UPS driver, the source of Cook's information on everything from road conditions to family squabbles.

"No."

"Says we are in the beginning of turning into a desert. It's all going to blow away," she said.

When Berenice went to announce dinner — turkey patties, French fries (Mr. Mellowhorn still called them "freedom fries") with turkey patty gravy, cranberry relish, creamed corn and homemade rolls — she saw that Deb had worked Mr. Forkenbrock into the corner of the settee, and Powder Face was in the chair with the bad leg watching cops squash the faces of black men onto sidewalks. Mr. Forkenbrock was staring at the dark window, the coursing raindrops catching the blue television flicker. He gave off an aura of separateness. Deb and Powder Face might have been two more of Mellowhorn's stuffed dogs.

After dinner, on her way back to the kitchen to help the cook clean up, Berenice opened the door for a breath of fresh air. The eastern half of the sky was starry, the west a slab of basalt.

In the early morning darkness the rain began again. He did not know but would have understood the poet's line "I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day." Nothing in nature seemed more malign to Ray Forkenbrock than this invisible crawl of weather, the blunt-nosed cloud advancing under the lid of darkness. As the dim morning emerged, like a photograph in developing solution, the sound of the rain sharpened. That's sleet, he thought, remembering a long October ride in such weather when he was young, his denim jacket soaked through and sparkling with ice, remembered meeting up with that old horse catcher who lived out in the desert, must have been in his eighties, out there in the rattling precip limping along, heading for the nearest ranch bunkhouse, he said, to get out of the weather.

"That'd be Flying A," said Ray, squinting against the slanting ice.

"Ain't that Hawkins's place?"

"Naw. Hawkins sold out couple years ago. A fella named Fox owns it now," he said.

"Hell, I lose touch out here. Had a pretty good shack up until day before yesterday," the horse catcher said between clicking teeth and went on to tell that his place had burned down and he'd slept out in the sage for two nights but now his bedroll was soaked and he was out of food. Ray felt bad for him and at the same time wanted to get away. It seemed awkward to be mounted while the man was afoot, but then he always had that same uncomfortable, guilty itch when he rode past a pedestrian. Was it his fault the old man didn't have a horse? If he was any good at horse catching he should have had a hundred of them. He foraged through his pockets and found three or four stale peanuts mixed with lint.

"It ain't much but it's all I got," he said, holding them out.

The old boy had never made it to the Flying A. He was discovered days later sitting with his back against a rock. Roy remembered the uncomfortable feeling he'd had exchanging a few words with him, thinking how old he was. Now he was the same age, and he had reached the Flying A — the warmth and dry shelter of the Mellowhorn Home. But the old horse catcher's death, braced against a rock, seemed more honorable.

It was six-thirty and there was nothing to get up for, but he put on his jeans and shirt, added an old man's sweater as the dining room could be chilly in the morning before the heat got going, left his boots in the closet and shuffled down the hall in red felt slippers, too soft to deliver a kick to stuffed Bugs with the googly eyes at the foot of the stairs. The slippers were a gift from his only granddaughter, Beth, married to Kevin Bead. Beth was important to him. He had made up his mind to tell her the ugly family secret. He would not leave his descendants to grapple with shameful uncertainties. He was going to clear the air. Beth was coming on Saturday afternoon with her tape recorder to help him get it said. During the week she would type it into her computer and bring him the crisp printed pages. He might have been nothing more than a ranch hand in his life, but he knew a few things.

Beth was dark-haired with very red cheeks that looked freshly slapped. It was the Irish in her he supposed. She bit her fingernails, an unsightly habit in a grown woman. Her husband, Kevin, worked in the loan department of the High Plains Bank. He complained that his job was stupid, tossing money and credit cards to people who could never pay up.

"Used to be to get a card you had to work hard and have good credit. Now the worse your credit the easier it is to get a dozen of them," he said to his wife's grandfather. Ray, who had never had a credit card, couldn't follow the barrage of expository information that followed about changing bank rules, debt. These information sessions always ended with Kevin sighing and saying in a dark tone that the day was coming.

Ray Forkenbrock guessed Beth would use the computer at the real estate office where she worked to transcribe his words.

"Oh no, Grandpa, we've got a computer and printer at home. Rosalyn wouldn't like for me to do it in the office," she said. Rosalyn was her boss, a woman Ray had never seen but felt he knew well because Beth talked often about her. She was very, very fat and had financial trouble. Scam artists several times stole her identity. Every few months she spent hours filling out fraud affidavits. And, said Beth, she wore XXXL blue jeans and a belt with a silver buckle as big as a pie tin that she had won at a bingo game.

Ray snorted. "A buckle used to mean something," he said. "A rodeo buckle, best part of the prize. The money was nothing in them days," he said. "We didn't care about the money. We cared about the buckle," he said, "and now fat gals win them at bingo games?" He twisted his head around and looked at the closet door. Beth knew he must have a belt with a rodeo buckle in there.

"Do you watch the National Finals on television?" she said. "Or the bull-riding championship?"

"Hell, no," he said. "The old hens here wouldn't put up with it. They got that teevee lined out from dawn to midnight — crime, that reality shit, fashion and python shows, dog and cat programs. Watch rodeo? Not a chance," he said.

He glared at the empty hall beyond the open door. "You wouldn't never guess the most of them lived on ranches all their life," he added sourly.

Beth spoke to Mr. Mellowhorn and said she thought her grandfather could at least watch the National Finals or the PBR rodeos considering what they were paying for his keep. Mr. Mellowhorn agreed.

"But I like to keep out of residents' television choices, you know, democracy rules at the Mellowhorn Home, and if your grandfather wants to watch rodeo all he has to do is persuade a majority of the inhabitants to sign a petition and — "

"Do you have any objection if my husband and I get him a television set for his room?"

"Well, no, of course not, but I should just mention that the less fortunate residents might see him as privileged, even a little high-hat if he holes up in his room and watches rodeo instead of joining the community choice — "

"Fine," said Beth, cutting past the social tyranny of the Mellowhorn Home. "That's what we'll do, then. Get him a snooty, high-hat television. Family counts with me and Kevin," she said. "I don't suppose you have a satellite hookup, do you?" she asked.

"Well, no. We've discussed it, but — maybe next year — "

She brought Ray a small television set with a DVD player and three or four discs of recent years' rodeo events. That got him going.

"Christ, I remember when the finals was in Oklahoma City, not goddamn Las Vegas," he said. "Of course bull riding has pushed out all the other events now, good-bye saddle bronc and bareback. I was there when Freckles Brown rode Tornado in 1962," he said. "Forty-six year old, and the ones they got now bull riding are children! Make a million dollars. It's all show business now," he said. "The old boys was a rough crew. Heavy drinkers, most of them. You want to know what pain is, try bull riding with a bad hangover."

"So I guess you did a lot of rodeo riding when you were young?"

"No, not a lot, but enough to get broke up some. And earned a buckle," he said. "You heal fast when you're young, but the broke places sort of come back to life when you are old. I busted my left leg in three places. Hurts now when it rains," he said.

"How come you cowboyed for a living, Grandpa Ray? Your daddy wasn't a rancher or a cowboy, was he?" She turned the volume knob down. The riders came out of a chute, again and again, monotonously, all apparently wearing the same dirty hat.

"Hell no, he wasn't. He was a coal miner. Rove Forkenbrock," he said. "My mother's name was Alice Grand Forkenbrock. Dad worked in the Union Pacific coal mines. Something happened to him and he quit. Moved into running errands for different outfits, Texaco, California Petroleum, big outfits.

"Anyway, don't exactly know what the old man did. Drove a dusty old Model T. He'd get fired and then he had to scratch around for another job. Even though he drank — that's what got him fired usually — he always seemed to get another job pretty quick." He swallowed a little whiskey.

"Anymore I wouldn't go near the mines. I liked horses almost as much as I liked arithmetic, liked the cow business, so after I graduated eighth grade and Dad said better forget high school, things were tough and I had to find work," he said. "At the time I didn't mind. What my dad said I generally didn't fuss over. I respected him. I respected and honored my father. I believed him to be a good and fair man." He thought, unaccountably, of weeds.

"I tried for a job and got took on at Bledsoe's Double B," he said. "The bunkhouse life. The Bledsoes more or less raised me to voting age. At that point I sure didn't want nothing to do with my family," he said and fell into an old man's reverie. Weeds, weeds and wildness.

Beth was quiet for a few minutes, then chatted about her boys. Syl had acted the part of an eagle in a school play and what a job, making the costume! Just before she left she said offhandedly, "You know, I want my boys to know about their great-granddad. What do you think if I bring my recorder and get it on tape and then type it up? It would be like a book of your life — something for the future generations of the family to read and know about."

He laughed in derision.

"Some of it ain't so nice to know. Every family got its dirty laundry and we got ours." But after a week of thinking about it, of wondering why he'd kept it bottled up for so long, he told Beth to bring on her machine.

They sat in his little room with the door closed.

"'Antisocial,' they'll say. Everybody else sits with the door open hollering at each other's folks as if they was all related somehow. A regional family, they call it here. I like my privacy."

She put a glass of whiskey, another of water and the tape recorder, smaller than a pack of cigarettes, on the table near his elbow and said, "It's on, Grandpa. Tell me how it was growing up in the old days. Just talk any time you are ready."

He cleared his throat and began slowly, watching the spiky volume meter jump. "I'm eighty-four years old and most of them involved in the early days has gone on before, so it don't make much difference what I tell." He took a nervous swallow of the whiskey and nodded.

"I was fourteen year old in nineteen and thirty-three and there wasn't a nickel in the world." The silence of that time before traffic and leaf blowers and the boisterous shouting of television was embedded in his character, and he spoke little, finding it hard to drag out the story. The noiselessness of his youth except for the natural sound of wind, hoofbeats, the snap of the old house logs splitting in winter cold, wild herons crying their way downriver was forever lost. How silent men and women had been in those times, trusting to observational powers. There had been days when a few little mustache clouds moved, and he could imagine them making no more sound than dragging a feather across a wire. The wind got them and the sky was alone.

"When I was a kid we lived hard, let me tell you. Coalie Town, about eight miles from Superior. It's all gone now," he said. "Three-room shack, no insulation, kids always sick. My baby sister Goldie died of meningitis in that shack," he said.

Now he was warming up to his sorry tale. "No water. A truck used to come every week and fill up a couple barrels we had. Mama paid a quarter a barrel. No indoor plumbing. People make jokes about it now but it was miserable to go out there to that outhouse on a bitter morning with the wind screaming up the hole. Christ," he said. He was silent for so long Beth backed up the tape and pressed the pause button on the recorder. He lit a cigarette, sighed, abruptly started talking again. Beth lost a sentence or two before she got the recorder restarted.

"People thought they was doing all right if they was alive. You can learn to eat dust instead of bread, my mother said many a time. She had a lot a old sayings. Is that thing on?" he said.

"Yes, Grandpa," she said. "It is on. Just talk."

"Bacon," he said. "She'd say if bacon curls in the pan the hog was butchered wrong side of the moon. We didn't see bacon very often and it could of done corkscrews in the pan, would have been okay with us long as we could eat it," he said.

"There was a whole bunch a shacks out there near the mines. They called it Coalie Town. Lot of foreigners.

"As I come up," he said, "I got a pretty good education in fighting, screwing — pardon my French — and more fighting. Every problem was solved with a fight. I remember all them people. Pattersons, Bob Hokker, the Grainblewer twins, Alex Sugar, Forrie Wintka, Harry and Joe Dolan...We had a lot of fun. Kids always have fun," he said.

"They sure do," said Beth.

"Kids don't get all sour thinking about the indoor toilets they don't have, or moaning because there ain't no fresh butter. For us everthing was fine the way it was. I had a happy childhood. When we got bigger there was certain girls. Forrie Wintka. Really good looking, long black hair and black eyes," he said, looking to see if he had shocked her.

"She finally married old man Dolan after his wife died. The Dolan boys was something else. They hated each other, fought, really had bad fights, slugged each other with boards with nails in the end, heaved rocks."

Beth tried to shift him to a description of his own family, but he went on about the Dolans.

"I'm pretty set in my ways," he said. She nodded.

"One time Joe knocked Harry out, kicked him into the Platte. He could of drowned, probably would of but Dave Arthur was riding along the river, seen this bundle of rags snarled up in a cottonwood sweeper — it had fell in the river and caught up all sorts of river trash. He thought maybe some clothes. Went to see and pulled Harry out," he said.

"Harry was about three-quarters dead, never was right after that, neither. But right enough to know that his own brother had meant to kill him. Joe couldn't never tell if Harry was going to be around the next corner with a chunk of wood or a gun." There was a long pause after the word "gun."

"Nervous wreck," he said. He watched the tape revolve for long seconds.

"Dutchy Green was my best friend in grade school. He was killed when he was twenty-five, twenty-six, shooting at some of them old Indian rock carvings. The ricochet got him through the right temple," he said.

He took a swallow of whiskey. "Yep, our family. There was my mother. She was tempery, too much to do and no money to do it. Me, the oldest. There was a big brother, Sonny, but he drowned in an irrigation ditch before I come along," he said.

"Weren't there girls in the family?" asked Beth. Not content with two sons, she craved a daughter.

"My sisters, Irene and Daisy. Irene lives in Greybull and Daisy is still alive out in California. And I mentioned, the baby Goldie died when I was around six or seven. The youngest survivor was Roger. Mama's last baby. He went the wrong way. Did time for robbing," he said. "No idea what happened to him." Under the weeds, damned and dark.

Abruptly he veered away from the burglar brother. "You got to understand that I loved my dad. We all did. Him and Mother was always kissing and hugging and laughing when he was home. He was a wonderful man with kids, always a big smile and a hug, remembered all your interests, lots of times brought home special little presents. I still got every one he give me." His voice trembled like that of the old horse catcher in the antique sleet.

"Remembering this stuff makes me tired. I guess I better stop," he said. "Anymore two new people come in today and the new ones always makes me damn tired."

"Women or men?" asked Beth, relieved to turn the recorder off as she could see her only tape was on short time. She remembered now she had recorded the junior choir practice.

"Don't know," he said. "Find out at supper."

"I'll come next week. I think what you are saying is important for this family." She kissed his dry old man's forehead, brown age spots.

"Just wait," he said.

After she left he started talking again as if the tape were still running. "He died age forty-seven. I thought that was real old. Why didn't he jump?" he said.

Berenice Pann, bearing a still-warm chocolate cupcake, paused outside his door when she heard his voice. She had seen Beth leave a few minutes earlier. Maybe she had forgotten something and come back. Berenice heard something like a strangled sob from Mr. Forkenbrock. "God, it was lousy," he said. "So we could work. Hell, I liked school. No chance when you start work at thirteen," he said. "Wasn't for the Bledsoes I'd ended up a bum," he said to himself. "Or worse."

Berenice Pann's boyfriend, Chad Grills, was the great-grandson of the old Bledsoes. They were still on the ranch where Ray Forkenbrock had worked in his early days, both of them over the century mark. Berenice became an avid eavesdropper, feeling that in a way she was related to Mr. Forkenbrock through the Bledsoes. She owed it to herself and Chad to hear as much as she could about the Bledsoes, good or bad. Inside the room there was silence, then the door flung open.

"Uh!" cried Berenice, the cupcake sliding on its saucer. "I was just bringing you this — "

"That so?" said Mr. Forkenbrock. He took the cupcake from the saucer and instead of taking a sample bite crammed the whole thing into his mouth, paper cup and all. The paper massed behind his dentures.

At the Social Hour, Mr. Mellowhorn arrived to introduce the new "guests." Church Bollinger was a younger man, barely sixty-five, but Roy could tell he was a real slacker. He'd obviously come into the Home because he couldn't get up the gumption to make his own bed or wash his dishes. The other one, Mrs. Terry Taylor, was around his age, early eighties despite the dyed red hair and carmine fingernails. She seemed soft and sagging, somehow like a candle standing in the sun. She kept looking at Ray. Her eyes were khaki-colored, the lashes sparse and short, her thin old lips greased up with enough lipstick to leave red on her buttered roll. Finally he could take her staring no longer.

"Got a question?" he said.

"Are you Ray Forkenknife?" she said.

"Forkenbrock," he said, startled.

"Oh, right. Forkenbrock. You don't remember me? Theresa Worley? From Coalie Town? Me and you went to school together except you was a couple grades ahead."

But he did not remember her.

The next morning, fork poised over the poached egg reclining like a houri on a bed of soggy toast, he glanced up to meet her intense gaze. Her red-slick lips parted to show ocher teeth that were certainly her own, for no dentist would make dentures that looked as though they had been dredged from a sewage pit.

"Don't you remember Mrs. Wilson?" she said. "The teacher that got froze in a blizzard looking for her cat? The Skeltcher kids that got killed when they fell in a old mine shaft?"

He did remember something about a schoolteacher frozen in a June blizzard but thought it had happened somewhere else, down around Cold Mountain. As for the Skeltcher kids, he denied them and shook his head.

On Saturday Beth came again, and again set out the glass of water, the glass of whiskey and the tape recorder. He had been thinking what he wanted to say. It was clear enough in his head, but putting it into words was difficult. The whole thing had been so subtle and painful it was impossible to present it without sounding like a fool. And Mrs. Terry Taylor, a.k.a. Theresa Worley, had sidelined him. He strove to remember the frozen teacher, the Skeltcher kids in the mine shaft, how Mr. Baker had shot Mr. Dennison over a bushel of potatoes and a dozen other tragedies she had laid out as mnemonic bait. He remembered very different events. He remembered walking to the top of Irish Hill with Dutchy Green to meet Forrie Wintka, who was going to show them her private parts in exchange for a nickel each. It was late autumn, the cottonwoods leafless along the grim trickle of Coal Creek, warm weather holding. They could see Forrie Wintka toiling up from the shacks below. Dutchy said it would be easy, not only would she show them, they could do it to her, even her brother did it to her.

Dutchy whispered as though she could hear them. "Even her stepfather. He got killed by a mountain line last year."

And now, seventy-one years later, it hit him. Her father had been Worley, Wintka was the stepfather who had carried the mail horseback and in Snakeroot Canyon had been dragged into the rocks by a lion. The first female he had ever plowed, a coal-town slut, was sharing final days with him at the Mellowhorn Home.

"Beth," he said to his granddaughter. "I can't talk about nothing today. There's some stuff come to mind just now that I got to think my way through. The new woman who come here last week. I knew her and it wasn't under the best circumstances," he said. That was the trouble with Wyoming; everything you ever did or said kept pace with you right to the end. The regional family again.

Mr. Mellowhorn started a series of overnight outings he dubbed "Weekend Adventures." The first one had been to the Medicine Wheel up in the Big Horns. Mrs. Wallace Kimes had fallen and scraped her knees on the crushed stone in the parking lot. Then came the dude ranch weekend where the Mellowhorn group found itself sharing the premises with seven elk hunters from Colorado, most of them drunk and disorderly and given over to senseless laughter topping 110 decibels. Powder Face laughed