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Executive Times |
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2005 Book Reviews |
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Bad Dirt:
Wyoming Stories 2 by Annie Proulx |
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Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Cowboys If, like me, you’ve read some of Annie Proulx’ earlier novels and stories, and finished a
sentence wondering in frustration, “What was that all about?” you’re likely
to enjoy her new story collection, Bad Dirt:
Wyoming Stories 2. The previous Here’s an excerpt,
all of the story titled, “Summer of the Hot Tubs,” pp. 179-185: Elk Tooth, The old tradition of pioneer wayside
eating houses—road ranches—hangs on as well. There is one of these north of
town which serves supper for three dollars although there is no menu choice
and Mrs. Polidora uses paper plates, unsatisfactory
if you like to hear your fork clink. Paper plates or not, Mrs. Polidora will put a platter of elk steaks on the table
flanked by a big green bowl of mashed potatoes, a pitcher of milk gravy, and
a saucer of chokecherry jelly. Somehow she can make that elk last a year. In Elk Tooth everyone tries to be a
character and with some success. There is little more to it than being broke,
proud, ingenious and setting your heels against civilized society’s pull. Mrs. Polidora’s
steady customer is Willy Huson, who fixes trucks
and lawn mowers in a minimal way. He was born and raised in Elk Tooth but for
years lived in distant cities in distant states working as a mechanic for
United Airlines. When questioned why he left a lucrative job to return to Elk
Tooth he says, “I couldn’t take it no more.” What “it” is no one asks, for
everyone in Willy Huson
has neither workshop nor garage but tinkers in the narrow dirt run in front
of his trailer. If the job is a big truck he parks it in the road and lies
under it after putting up a folding sign at the curve. The sign says SAND HER
DOWN, which is Willy’s way of saying “Go slow, mechanic in road.” Igor,
seeing Willy lying in the road, follows his example and has been hit twice. Sometimes, in a burst of energy, Willy
continues to work on a vehicle after the problem is repaired, putting in
salvaged hoses, running wires to buttons and switches. Deb Sipple, a character himself, once drove away in his 1983 At one time Willy Huson
had started to build a garage onto the side of his trailer and framed out a
lean-to with poles stolen from Forest Service buck fences—a pole here,
another there. He nailed on four boards selected randomly from his pile of
warped lumber, then quit. It is a point of pride in Elk Tooth to quit
whenever and whatever needs quitting. If Willy Huson
stops working on a lawn mower or skimobile or truck at a crucial time, it is
the owner’s tough luck. Nothing can bring him back to something he’s quit. He takes his time setting to work, and
some vehicles sit in front of the trailer for months before he lifts their
hoods. Bartender Amanda Gribb, who has once or
twice 86’d Willy from the Pee Wee, waited seventeen weeks for her 1956
Chevrolet truck and worked up a grudge while she waited. She had taken it to
him in the autumn. It was a spring day when she found a grimy postcard in her
mailbox. It said, “fixed. come get it.” She got a
lift out to the trailer with Sven Polidora, a
little drunk but on his way home seven miles west of Huson’s
trailer. The truck stood forlorn with one wheel
in the ditch. She called Willy’s name but there was no answer. She shrugged
and got into the truck. There was a note on the seat. “leave
money in mailbox.” She turned on the ignition first—no point in leaving money
if it still didn’t run—and two tremendous explosions shook the vehicle. Fire
spurted out the back end of the truck. The engine died. She looked in the
rearview mirror and saw dozens of small burning objects scattered on Willy Huson’s grass, setting it on fire. She got out. Once she
got beyond the idea of a terrorist attack the nuggets of fire looked
familiar; one or two that had escaped ignition were plainly dog kibble. She
scooped up the smoldering lumps with a tin can lying in the yard. She guessed
that during the winter some enterprising mouse had stolen dog food from
Igor’s dish and packed it away in the tailpipe of the truck. She put the
smoking can in Willy’s mailbox along with a nickel, restarted the truck, and
drove back to town trailing a stream of sparks and some coarse language. Last summer a kind of madness swept
through Elk Tooth, a passion for outdoor hot tubs. No one, of course, bought
one. All of them were fashioned from scrap metal, old stock tanks, and odds
and ends found at Donald’s Rawhide Cowboy Junkyard. The more fastidious built
plank boardwalks around the tub perimeters to keep dirt and cactus spines out
of the water. In a fuel pinch, sections of the walk could be tossed into the
firebox. All the hot tubs were heated by wood-fired stoves. Willy Huson,
who sets his heels not only against the outside world but against Elk Tooth’s
social leaders, was a holdout, full of scorn for outdoor bathing. “If I want
a soak my ass I’ll drive up to Thermop.” Thermopolis and its famed hot springs was 240 miles distant from Elk Tooth and clogged with
tourists. A willingness to go there, said Deb Sipple,
showed how Willy’s mind had been damaged by out-of-state residence. “Thing is,” said Sipple,
“I seen his expression when he was lookin at my hot
tub. He’d give his left nut a have one just like it.” Near the end of the summer Willy Huson visited his grandmother on the old family ranch
near Lingle, where the Husons
had run cows since 1872. Foraging through an equipment shed he came across an
object that screamed “hot tub.” Better than “hot tub” it screamed “weird and
unique hot tub unlike (and better than) any other.” With the help of his
uncle Doug and two of Doug’s boys, Pliers and Rammy,
he got it into Willy’s truck. He started back to Elk Tooth singing
“Wrong-Eyed Jesus” along with Jim White. His uncle chased after him for six
miles, pulled abreast, and shouted into the rushing wind, “Don’t you want the
tripod?” “Hell, yes, I only got the one engine
hoist and I need it a hoist engines.” Back in Elk Tooth he made some effort to
put his prize in a secluded spot, but given the nature of his property, a
narrow strip of ground between a sheer cliff and the road, crowded with the
house trailer, the lumber piles, seven or eight defunct trucks (for parts),
the four-board garage, the doghouse, a dozen dead lawn mowers, a pile of
stone, another of gravel, and a single young cottonwood tree, there was no
secluded spot. “Fuck em,”
said Willy Huson. He off-loaded the enormous inch-thick
cast-iron pot, three feet across and last used in 1912 by some unknown
biscuit hurler in the long-ago Huson fall roundup.
He jimmied it into place near the cottonwood, about five feet from the road.
It swayed ponderously from the massive tripod chain. After a search Willy found two cut
lengths of hose and taped them together. The tape held long enough to fill
the kettle halfway, which he thought, figuring displacement, would be about
right. A flotsam of mouse droppings, straw chaff, and rust particles floated
to the surface. Adhering to the bottom was a crust of ninety-year-old dried
son of a bitch stew. He split a few sticks of kindling, started a fire
beneath the pot with a curl of tar paper, added chunk wood. Smoke rose. While
he waited for the water to heat he practiced shooting at the wasps’ nest in
the cottonwood with his .22 pistol. At last steam rose from the kettle.
There was a heavy and peculiar smell. He raked the coals and smoking wood out
from under the pot and stripped down, draping his clothes over the projecting
ends of the boards in the nearby lumber pile. The remnant of the son of a
bitch stew, the size of a cow pie, had loosened from the bottom and floated
on top of the water. He scooped it out with his hand and sent it flying into
the road. The water in the tub was plenty hot. He put in one foot, then the
other. The water rose above his knees. The water was very hot but not as hot
as the iron bottom of the pot, which roasted the soles of his feet. He got
out, danced in the cool dirt, pulled on his boots. Now the boots were full of
grit. He felt the rim of the pot. It was warm
but not searing. He decided on a different entry trajectory and lowered
himself until his more tender parts hung over the water and there he paused,
suspended, as Mr. and Mrs. Ulysses Bird (brother and sister-in-law of Straw
Bird) drove slowly by. Mrs. Bird started to wave, looked again, thought better of it. Ulysses Bird walked into the Pee Wee
Bar and said, “Goddamn, we just seen somethin.
Willy Huson got hisself a
cannibal pot hot tub. He looked like a missionary was goin
a get boiled.” He described the tub, the closeness of it to the road, the
agonized expression on Willy’s face as he sat hastily in the water, Mrs.
Bird’s expression and exclamations as she thought of how she had almost
waved. Amanda Gribb,
who was tending bar, listened closely. “Hey,” she said in her loud bartender
voice. “Get on back there with this.” She opened the refrigerator and took
out a package of frozen corn, a half-empty jar of maraschino cherries,
foraged in the cupboard for a can of chile powder.
“Drop these in his damn cannibal hot tub. If he’s goin
a cook hisself let’s get some flavor in there.
Hell, I’ll come with you, shake that chile where it will do some good.” They went as quickly as they could. But
Willy Huson was gone, clothes, gravelly boots,
truck, and all. The pot steamed. The water was still hot, and in it floated a
wasps’ nest. A few puzzled wasps flew around the cottonwood tree. There were
wet footprints in the dust. There was no sense in wasting the chile, corn, and cherries if Willy wasn’t in his soup
pot. There would proba¬bly be another time. As they turned to leave Ulysses Straw
Bird stepped on the son of a bitch stew, which, under the influence of the
hot water, had metamorphosed into a black jellyfish. It clung to his boot
like tar. He scraped it off with a stick, got the stick pronged into it, and
held it up. It swung, glistening. “Seems like it’s
fresh, whatever it is,” he said. “It got the right shape but I doubt it ever
come out a the south end of a cow. Looks more like a
platypus’ afterbirth.” Amanda Gribb
suddenly took the stick from his hand and flipped the blob into the hot tub.
“There, let him find that in his cannibal pot.” Over the weeks the drought dried up the
water in the cannibal hot tub and once again the son of a bitch stew lies
dormant at the bottom. It was only last month that Willy Huson reappeared driving a 1949 Land Rover and with a
non-English-speaking Tibetan girlfriend at his side, two items which earned
him towering status points in the Elk Tooth eccentricity race. He didn’t even
glance at the cannibal pot; he had quit that. Each story in Bad Dirt
has something commendable about it. Some have a poignancy,
some pitch-perfect humor. Finally, Proulx has
captured rural cowboy life with a clear voice. Steve Hopkins,
January 25, 2005 |
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ã 2005 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the February 2005
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Bad
Dirt.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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