Breaking Clean Page 9

  The twins and I formed a tripod out of sight and downwind from the buildings, our heads touching as we crouched to shelter the matches I struck, one after another, over the sun-cured grass. When the fire caught, we nursed it along, offering it tender bites of dried moss until the flame grew large enough to feed on its own heat. The game was on. The burlap sacks had been selected for size and heft from the pile in the shop, dipped deep in the water tank and held until they no longer tried to float. We stood back now, armed with the sacks, learning the creep of flames through blue grama grass, the jagged spread of fire picking its way over sod, around hardpan, the sudden dart upward at the taste of tall bunchgrass. Still we watched, stepping in only to steer it shy of hard fuel, woody sagebrush that burned hot enough to light the green leaves and raise smoke, waiting until a matter of seconds separated game from emergency.

  The adrenaline rush that followed was real. Fanning out, we formed a line of attack, slapping out flames with two-fisted overhead swings, nailing the fire to the ground in a matter of seconds. Mop-up took longer for these play fires than it might have for a genuine lightning strike. We started at the point of ignition and scrubbed the prairie with our sacks, blending the black ash into dirt and stubble, until the fire site could pass for a patch of short-clipped grass.

  In the aftermath, the twins and I sat in the shade of the old pull-style combine, puffing on contraband cigarettes and passing a bottle of rank booze we'd concocted from supplies on hand: equal jiggers of any real whiskey we could scrounge, chokecherry wine, lots of lemon and vanilla extracts, Listerine and Aqua Velva aftershave. The recipe amounts were guesswork, but the ingredients we knew from stories of the neighbors' hired men who came home off a week's drunk and chased the snakes and shakes with anything they could find in the boss lady's cupboards. The resulting brew was swill, but we didn't have to swallow it. For the purposes of the game, tipping the bottle and numbing a small spot on the tongue was real enough. The rest we acted out with staggering, slurring, backslapping abandon.

  The only honest swigs of our home brew went down my father and a couple of neighbors, who discovered it while robbing scrap iron from the jumble of old machinery. They carried our bottle to the house. The twins and I formed a trio of round-eyed innocents, exchanging sly glances as the bottle went around, thrilling to the adjectives and expletives that graced the sniff test; each adult touched the bottle to his nose, then tipped it up. Dad brought it down with a shudder. "Christ!" he wheezed. The three of us beamed at each other. High praise, indeed! The bottle circled the table a second time, and Mom tried some, too, rolling it around in her mouth, sorting flavors. Lemon extract and aftershave. The work of old Marvin Rice, they agreed, although it was strange, out of character you might say, for old Marvin Rice to have abandoned such a bottle 99 percent full.

  Marvin's stint in our hayfield one year had been brief, sober and uneventful, but legend held sway. Some years before, he had shambled into every bar on Main Street at the tail end of a monthlong binge, pleading with bartenders until one took pity and let him hock his false teeth for one last quart of Jim Beam. If the story was true, he never got them back. I had observed him at our table—a slow, polite eater, face collapsing around each bite, the toughest steak going down on nothing but gums. As speculation circled the kitchen, the twins and I ourselves came close to believing he was guilty. Legends make anything possible.

  We never replaced the bottle—in fact, by the time Dad ran across it, we had nearly forgotten it was there. We had quit playing Fire by then, though not from any inborn burst of maturity or responsibility. It had taken a strong dose of reality to cure us. Our last fire was a camp for traveling cowpokes set in the duff of rotten hay by the corrals, a less-than-brilliant location, but perhaps we had become complacent. We were not ignorant of the consequences of fire. We could point virtuously to the many precautions we took, forgoing our games when range conditions were dangerously dry or windy, using a coffee can or a circle of rocks to contain the flames of a cook-fire, keeping water, a shovel, wet sacks within arm's reach. But the midsummer day was hot and windy enough for us to seek the shade and shelter of the windbreak and barn, a convenient setting for cowboy games. We imagined our story line through the first campflre without incident, smothering it and scattering the remains through our fingers to make sure the ashes were cold.

  The story might have ended there, but for something that separated us, a squabble, perhaps, as Gail and I grew bored with the game, or maybe a voice cutting through the wind, calling us girls back to the house. Alone, Gary lit a second campflre. This one went underground.

  I imagine his panic as the fire began to sink through the packed brown compost of ancient hay that we had all mistaken for dirt, flames crawling into earth and springing up out of reach as he stomped and dug and tried to bury it deep enough to die. Whatever terror he may have felt, when the moment of decision came, that instant when both he and the fire crossed over and quit pretending, he was man enough to run for the house. Smoke roiled over the windbreak by the time we formed a human chain to the well, Mom and four of us children running water to my father, who stood on the smoldering hay and tossed it, bucketful by bucketful, against the east wall of the barn.

  I remember that fire best by its sounds: wind whipping flames through the gaps in a board fence; milk pen calves bawling inside the barn; the rush of fire in hay, like static or wasps, and the snap where it hit dry wood. And like a roar in the background, I remember the absence of human voices. No one yelled or screamed. No one called the neighbors. And even when the fire was finally out and we gathered in the house, the enormity of this error, the obvious shame of the charred windbreak and blackened barn wall, made words superfluous.

  "You understand what you did." My father's voice broke and drew thin over the last word. His huge shoulders stuck in mid-lunge just over Gary's head, his arms pulled straight on either side. At that point Gary could have folded and spread the blame. We wouldn't have faulted him. The rules of sibling loyalty were foolish in the face of this father whose legs still trembled from exertion. Had it been me, I would have confessed on the spot, every illicit match. Gail and I held our breath and waited. We could not volunteer, we would not deny. Gary never flinched. He owned up with one bloodless nod, so far beyond sorry that the beating we all expected would have been welcome. Instead, there was silence, a dismissal.

  I think Dad could have forgiven Gail or me had one of us taken the blame for that fire, girls with too much time on their hands, girls whose stupidity and carelessness were explainable, but there were no words to excuse any son of a cattleman who would willfully, deliberately, betray his land. For months, Gary followed Dad with his eyes, and for months, Dad focused an identical blue gaze on a spot just above Gary's head.

  By the time I hit twelve a couple of years later, I had given up questioning why it was different to be a girl and fought to separate the biological fact of being female from the roles that went with the plumbing. I had no quarrel with the God-given facts. I was fascinated with babies and birth, curious about sex, in love with James Arness and the young Clint Eastwood. The roles went like this: Every rancher who stepped out the door scratching a full belly through a clean shirt had a partner who was willing to stay indoors and wash another load. "Someone to make the mess, and someone to clean it up," as my mother put it.

  Most of the women in my community were like my mother—strong, capable women whose names were listed on the ranch deeds alongside their husbands', but who accepted second say in the business of it. On the fringe of their wifely example lay stories spawned in days of the penny dreadful and beyond, the Calamity Jane-type of mythology that held just enough truth to be dangerous. In these stories, landowning women were admired for their staunch independence and toughness—the sort of women who hired cooks and ran their own ranches. They were in books. They had their own TV shows. And every ranch wife I knew crossed over just enough to make the stories seem possible, if not practical. In a book, when myth met reali
ty and crashed, I simply skirted the wreckage, taking what I wanted from the opening chapters and flipping through marry-the-foreman-and-turn-over-the-reins scenes two pages at a time. To my great dissatisfaction as a young reader, these outwardly strong characters routinely made foolish decisions and took on more than they could handle, were taught a good lesson in "what's really important," and in the end fell in love with the patient, indulgent men who rescued them from themselves.

  In my real-life, out-west community, the depressing sequel was being written as I watched, and the weak parts were harder to skip. I knew women savvy to the working of cattle and horses, women who rode the hay rake in June and took to the fields at harvest. But without exception, they picked up a thank-you and walked back to tackle the work that was theirs alone. Woman's work. If I learned nothing else in my early years, I learned the scorn that twisted those words into insults.

  My mother despised the repetitious and thankless nature of housework and was an expert horsewoman, characteristics that brought her closer to my ideal than most. The downside was her unshakable sense of duty. I was a daughter, and must be pinned to my seat with threats until I learned to cook and sew and butcher chickens and can green beans. But it was also Mom who hazed for me the first time I left the corral on my green-broke bronc, Sunny, riding up to turn him from the barbed wire fence as we bolted across the pasture. "Stay with him!" she cheered, and I did, until the front cinch broke and Sunny bucked straight through the reservoir with her good saddle hanging upside down on his belly. I dusted off my pride while Mom rode after the colt, leaning sideways at a full gallop to jerk the buckle on the flank cinch and snub the hackamore rein to her saddle horn. Womanly arts be damned. I wanted the ease, the power, of my mother, horseback. I wanted the real myth, and I set out to get it.

  That fall, as I turned twelve, the sole member of my peer group defected. My cousin Lois turned thirteen, and despite our blood-sister oath forbidding such things, she put on a bra, ratted her hair into haystacks and kissed the hired man. I worked on my own appearance with grim determination. I spit and crossed my legs like a field hand. I peeled my nails off with my teeth, and kept my hair bobbed away from my face. I preferred stacking bales and working cattle, and ducked house chores when I could. I climbed trees, rode the milk pen steers to a standstill and strung frogs ten-deep on a willow spear. Come winter, I read myself into the strongest characters of half the Malta library. I made it last a year. And when, in the inexorable process of time, my body betrayed me, my rage was terrible.

  That spring I stood exposed to the cold draft of the bathroom, one ear tuned to the night sounds that crept through the locked door, my father's rumbling snore, the shifting squeak of the double bed my brothers shared. My sister slept just inches away through a thin partition. I steadied my hands against the sink and leaned forward, recording the changes I saw in the medicine chest mirror. Dark brown hair, sun-faded to the color of old hay, ear length and shaggy, needing a wash. A big, raw-boned girl, my mother said. Tall for twelve. A square, horsy face, I thought, eyes hidden by owlish glasses, chin jutting like a shoehorn, my father's chin and his wolfish teeth wrangling for space behind the tight lips.

  Hands shaking, I shrugged into my pajama top, giving up, finally, on the buttons, then lowered the lid on the toilet with exaggerated care and sat down, waiting for the rubbery, queasy feeling to subside. The lump on my chest throbbed like a heartbeat, movable under my fingers but still firm, despite a tiny trickle of blood. The rest of me felt numb with dread. I hadn't expected a permanent cure. I just wanted a little more time, a few months, maybe a year.

  My idea was a product of bad pasture. With Kenny gone to Malta for high school, I'd been called on to help Dad work half a dozen cows with abscessed jaws. Sharp-pronged seeds of cheatgrass or foxtail barley had drilled through the lining of their mouths, infecting the flesh. We hazed each cow into the chute and caught her lopsided head in the squeeze gate. Some of the abscesses were fist-sized, others filled the jawline from chin to throat, tight and ripe as watermelons. Dipping the thin second blade of his jackknife in iodine, Dad slit each swelling, standing to one side so the first geyser of pus and blood would miss him. I worked the vaccine gun, pumping a dose of penicillin into the meaty part of each rump as it passed through the chute. Dad explained, as he cut along the bottom of a lump, how gravity kept the wound open and draining until it healed from the inside out; cut too high, and the abscess would form again.

  In the months that followed, I thought about the sure jab of his knife, the slick sideways cut, the gritty sound of the blade slicing tough skin, the immediate release of pressure. I thought it through, modifying any steps that appeared unreasonable. I suspected the procedure was painful, though with cows you couldn't tell. That night I tiptoed to the bathroom, selected a clean sock from the laundry basket and gripped it in my teeth, just in case. After dabbing my bare chest with alcohol, I attempted to lance my breast buds with a darning needle.

  My first bid to become sexless left no scars, aside from the mental anguish I suffered when the punctured breast actually swelled larger for a little while. But it marked my last quest for an easy answer.

  In late August the prairie hills rippled in the wind, bunchgrass grown tall in a late, wet spring, sun-cured by July, six weeks of heat with no rain. The excitement started before noon, the first call coming in as a dry lightning storm, all wind and no rain, still popped to the east and the phone bristled with static electricity. One bolt had hit the face of a dam on Bill Knight's reservoir, a few miles south of us, a small fire they had slapped out within minutes. Dad and Bill stood in the lee of a pickup cab for a while, trading gossip as they watched the dead burn for signs of resurrection. Later, the day would be told as a story, and it would start with this red-herring fire, a fire the size of a kitchen table, the ease with which two men soaked a gunnysack and smacked it out in an ocean of knee-high grass. "We were still congratulating each other," my dad would say, "when Bill looked over his shoulder." To the northwest, a knot of smoke hovered at the skyline.

  The community fell together. Wives grabbed the phones, husbands and older boys jerk-started rickety fire trucks and aimed for the smoke, picking up speed on the fencing trails heading west. Younger kids stood out of the way, absorbed by one of the rarest scenes played out in our community: visible panic. Grown men ran. Rules were broken without pause— fences cut, gates pitched open and left. In the seconds before it pulled away, I stood beside our pickup, working the zipper on my fuzzy coat, trying without success to catch my father's eye as he topped off the gas tank. To distract him by begging to go along would be shameful in the heat of an emergency. Kenny threw an armload of burlap sacks over the tailgate, Dad jammed them into the water barrel and the two of them swung into the cab, a team working in tandem. A team. My chest thickened with unspecified resentments. I hadn't expected to go, really, but I had changed my sneakers for boots and stuffed my leather gloves into my coat pockets, just in case.

  After they left, I wandered back to the general uproar around the house. News was routed to our place as the fire closed in. Pickups bounded into the yard, pulled up and revved once while the screen door banged and Mom dashed into shouting distance, pointing, directing, watching as they pulled out in a spray of dust. On guard inside, I waited for the phone to ring, ready to fly through the same screen door and screech "Telephone!" then dart back in to watch the receiver until she got there. It was an important job, like keeping tabs on a snake until she fetched a hoe, but one that was quickly taken over. The house began to fill with neighbor women who rode along as far as the yard and leaped out with whatever they had grabbed from their own kitchens—a sack of cookies, a loaf of bread, a jug of Kool-Aid. Black plumes in the lighter-gray grass smoke were reported breathlessly upon arrival, and the kitchen conversation turned to tense speculation. Was it the Nesbits' garbage dump, or their house? Could corner posts treated with creosote burn that black, that big? Or perhaps a truck overtaken by the fire, cut off, someone's
husband or son.

  By three o'clock pickups began to break through the haze and roll toward our well to get water; boys too young for the fire line raced to string hoses and fill buckets from the stock tank. When our outfit pulled up and my mother emerged from the house for an update, I trotted behind her to the pump house. Dad's jeans were filthy with soot, and sweat traced clean stripes from his hat line down each cheek to the point of his jaw A red rash dotted the vee of bare skin at his collar. Mom followed him with phone messages, while he pulled off his gloves, wet his bandanna and bent over the tank to rinse his face. I fidgeted and eyed the door of the pickup.

  "The fire passed the Nesbit place," he said, voice muffled and urgent through the hankie, "came a stone's throw from the barn and corrals." I edged around the nose of the pickup. Wind held the driver's door open, dirt swirled along the floorboards.

  "When the fire got close, Grace came out with a broom," Dad was saying, "a wet broom."

  "I tried to call. I thought she'd gone," Mom said. "I wondered." Their voices closed in, talking fast. I slithered under the steering wheel to the far side of the bench seat, eased my gloves on and tried to breathe the fine dust quietly. The hose thumped against the back window.

  "Hey!" Gary scrambled out of the back end, whining. "Why does she get to go?" The voices died away.

  I settled deeper in the seat. Clenching my teeth, I called up the familiar shape of Gary's head and placed it in the center of my mind. Blond crew cut, crooked grin, wide blue eyes. Perfect. I squeezed my right fist and his face exploded in slow motion, pattering against the windshield. Behind me I could still hear his voice. I rewound the tape and played it again, depressing the plunger slowly, deliberately. Ka-boom!

  "Dad, can I go? Why does she get to go?" The pickup rocked as the tailgate slammed. Ka-blooey! Dad slid into the cab, the smell of sweat and burnt grass. The engine roared up. I looked at him sideways. His eyes were bloodshot and watery, not unkind.