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No Bull

Ray Kemble

    Nothing happens. Then something happens.
    From the cabin’s porch I can see all there is to see, from the pale green flatness of the Guinn Valley where this cabin sits, to the tumble of pine-forested hills at the valley’s far end, to the towering peaks of The Continental Divide some twenty miles distant. The cabin is our rented Heaven, the cabin and its prospect of the big Guinn Valley, our taste of the Genuine West. To this transplanted New Yorker’s eyes and to the eye’s of my life partner, this is the West the way it should be: wild, muscular, humbling in its vastness.
    Sitting on the weather-bleached wooden porch on this, a visit without my partner, I take mental snapshots of sights I am seeing for the first time. There, to the left, Mt. Neva, thirteen thousand feet. Neva, the southernmost summit of those visible, is a ragged mountain, displaying with seeming indifference a drape of early snow. And there, to the right, Mt. Bancroft. The northernmost of the big peaks in view, Bancroft is loftier than Neva by a few hundred feet, but round shouldered, blunt. Between Neva to the south and Bancroft to the north a half dozen sister summits vie for secondary dominance. Together they make a towering wall separating our piece of the Genuine West from the world beyond.
    I can see below the peaks that make up The Divide, in the middle distance, what seems an equally formidable barrier of forested hills. It is into this lush cul-de-sac of hills that the Guinn Valley vanishes, some ten miles from where I’m sitting. Before it vanishes, though, between here and the hills, the Guinn Valley narrows until at its last visible point it is no longer a valley but a tight-shouldered canyon.
    I look down from taking mental snaps of the peaks, hills and valley, and at the book on my lap, Patrick Kavanagh: Selected Poems. The book is one of those delicate Penguin paperbacks, its pages yellowed to a venerable frailness. I’m careful to protect the pages from the valley gusts that hit without warning. It even has, this old Penguin paperback, if you lift it to your nose, the scent of age.
    I’m reading Kavanagh’s “The Self-Slaved,” transfixed by the first eight lines:
    Me I will throw away.
    Me sufficient for the day
    The sticky self that clings
    Adhesions on the wings.
    To love and adventure,
    To go on the grand tour
    A man must be free
    From self-necessity.
    The poem throws me to the mat. Me I will throw away/Me sufficient for the day. Have I the courage to discard myself — my old self — to toss aside everything that’s held me together all of my adult life, to look for a new life? Recently retired, my insides are crawling with doubts about my ability to start over, my guts to start over. Am I sufficient for the day? I’m not so sure. To go on the grand tour/A man must be free/From self-necessity. But I’m filled with self-necessity. I’ve been stockpiling it for years. Can I possibly rid myself of self-necessity? Now, at 67, can I do it? A breeze pulls at the page and I look up.
    I spot the two snake-like features that follow the length of the Guinn Valley. One is nature-made, the other man-made.
    Jasper Creek is the nature-made feature. The creek claims headwaters high in the lap of Mt. Bancroft, dropping precipitously from its birth-pond, through the hills at the mountain’s feet and into the Guinn Valley near where the valley becomes a canyon. From there, Jasper Creek zigzags east, a roiling stream of virgin water carrying fragments of the Guinn Valley away forever.
    The man-made feature coursing through the valley is one-track Burlington Northern Santa Fe railway. Largely rusted-over, the track is relied on only when BNSF’s heavily trafficked mainline in the neighboring valley is overburdened.
    Both creek and track are “down the hill,” a few hundred yards from the cabin. Nearer of the two is the BNSF track, cutting a straight path through the tall valley grass. Just beyond and almost hidden in a rocky depression of its own making is the creek. Hidden through in may be, its bubbling Whoosh! is ever in the ear.
    We’ve rented this cabin, my partner and I, without a rental agreement, without even so much as having met the owner. My partner’s neighbor had been the previous renter, and when the neighbor found it necessary to move back to Iowa, she arranged with the owner, by letter, to have my partner and me take over the rental. So, as I sit here on this, a solo visit to the cabin (my partner having to stay in the city), I’ve yet to meet the owner.
    The owner is not only the owner of the cabin, but also the owner of ninety-nine percent of the Guinn Valley. In a larger sense, the owner is not an individual but the Carr family, one of the state’s patriarchal families, a cattle ranching family with roots in the 19th century, whose major acreage lies outside of the mountains. The Guinn Valley with its average elevation of 9,000 feet is the Carrs’ late summer pasturage, when grass in the high country is generally more plentiful than that down below.
    I know that local spokesperson for the Carr family is the eldest son, Bob Carr, a man my partner and I are looking forward to one day meeting.
    The breeze subsides. I’m drawn back to the page. To go on the grand tour. Have I been on my grand tour? Is it all stay-in-place from here on out? And if I’ve already been on my grand tour, when was that? What was it like? Was it all it should have been?
    A mechanical sound distracts me. The sound of an engine, an internal combustion engine, not a smooth-running one. It seems out-of-place in the valley. I close the Kavanagh and look up.
    A pickup truck has entered my part of the valley. At first a long ways off, it continues to mow through the tough grasses, coming my way. Its driver is steering an evasive course, dodging concealed chuckholes, nonetheless, all the while coming closer. When within a hundred yards, the driver is visible, at first a silhouette, two hands on the steering wheel. I’m able to see him bounce with each undetected chuckhole, up and down, side to side. Closer still, I can see other silhouettes in the truck’s cab: dogs, two or three maybe, perched and lurching round and round on the cab’s bench seat. The truck now only a hundred feet off, the driver and his dogs distinct, I stand. With a metallic shudder and a long sigh from the engine, the truck stops. I’m waist-pressed against the porch rail.
    “Hello,” I call, as the truck’s door creaks open. “Hello there.”
    The driver emerges, awkwardly, carefully, one leg at a time. The dogs spit past him, bound, barking in my direction. “Stop it!” the driver, both feet on the ground, yells. His thumb adjusts his peaked cap. The dogs though pay no attention; they collect before the porch, barking their defiance. The driver takes a first few stiff steps toward them. His legs are acutely bowed, making even a few steps a careful movement. His face is tipped down, his whole head nods from side to side at each step. Then he turns about to face me. He laughs a shy man’s laugh, hesitant but friendly. “Yes’m,” he says, and then takes one more step toward me.
    “Bob? Bob Carr?”
    Again the laugh, “Yes’m,” with a quick side to side shuffle of his boots, an even quicker adjustment (imperceptible) of his peaked cap (the words “Tony’s Petroleum” embroidered on the crown), a tug of belt loops, a sweep of both hands down well-worn jeans, and in a half-second the extension of a friendly hand. “That’s me.”
    “I’m Ray. Glad to meet you, Bob. I was hoping we’d meet before too long.”
    “Yes’m, well, yes’m,” and after an earnest handshake, a second quick touch to the cap’s peak, this time with a slight lift, a gesture of howdy-do. “Me too, yes’m.”
    It looks to me Bob Carr is not a big talker. I decide to go first. “Would you like some coffee? It’s hot.” It’s hot? I felt like I’d said a stupid thing. Of course, the coffee is hot.
    Bob Carr shies, shuffles again, grins a grin. “Oh, thanks, no, I’ve had plenty.”
    The dogs are at my feet, ill-at-ease, two staring up at me, the third trying to insert its muzzle under my pants cuff.
    “Sure, okay. Well, let me say first off ‘thanks’ for leasing to us. This is going to be great fun. It’s beautiful up here. I mean, just look. Especially for us city folk.” I figure folk is the right word. “What wonderful country. What a change from home. We’re really going to enjoy it up here.”
    “Yes’m,” is all Carr says, although he pumps his head vigorously, in effect concurring: Yes, this is wonderful country.
    He doesn’t look back, though, at the country. He doesn’t need to. He knows this country. It is his backyard, his workshop. He knows it is beautiful, but working it every day — moving cattle from pasture to pasture, bringing in strays, restringing barbed wire fences — makes an extra look unnecessary.
    The dogs, too, are now displaying their nonchalance, having decided I’m not an intruder needing to be bitten hard. They’re exploring the ground immediately around the cabin in ever-widening, muzzle-down circles.
    “Yes, well, we’re really appreciative,” I say.
    “Any problems?” Bob Carr asks.
    Problems? What does he mean? Cattle rustlers? Marauding Indians? Dangerous banditos? “Problems?” I say. “No. No, I don’t think so. No, no, everything is just great. No problems.”
    “Good.”
    “How often are you up here, Bob? I mean, your main ranch is down on the ‘flats,’ isn’t it?”
    Answering takes second place to bringing in the dogs. “Red, get back here. Pecos, Rodeo, don’t go running off.” Bob calls his dogs. They pay no mind. They dart and sniff the rough pasture grass in ever far-reaching circles.
    “Oh, I’m up here a couple a days a week, I guess. Keeps a guy busy, yes’m.”
    “Lots of chores, I’ll bet.” Chores. Another good choice. “What’s got you busy today, Bob?” I’m curious, what does a man do when all he owns — land, livestock, roads, creeks — and dogs — seem to get along just fine without human interference.
    “Oh, this and that. Got a gate up that way,” he says, a snap of his thumb over his should. “Fixed it.” Just then he spots something behind me he doesn’t like. “Pecos, dammit!” Then to me, “Sorry,” he says. “Dogs. Can’t let them run wild.” He looks to his pickup. “I should leave you alone. Yes’m,” he says, and starts a slow turn.
    “Oh.” I’m at a loss. This is a true Western meeting, I imagine, a first meeting between property owner and property renter. I feel the need to say more, something, some closing flourish. “Say, Bob, look, if ever I can help you, you know, lend a hand — anything — you’ll ask, won’t you? I may not know much about this sort of work, you know, but I know I can do something. Anything. I’m willing to help. I’d like to help. I want you to know that.”
    Bob Carr stops shifting and turns back. No swipes of the peaked cap. His hands relax at his sides. He seems curiously touched. “Yes’m, well, thanks. Yes’m, thanks.”
    And with that he taps his cap’s peak and turns again to go. He calls his dogs. “Red, Rodeo, Pecos, come on, let’s go!” The dogs, somehow knowing he means business, snap up, look in Bob’s direction. They vault in unison across the meadow toward the pickup. Carr hobbles in the same direction. He opens his driver’s door, and, at that, one, two, three the dogs leap in. They snuffle to the passenger’s side.
    I am expecting Bob Carr to climb in and drive off. He doesn’t. He stands there beside the door. I see him lift his cap, rub his scalp, then resettle his cap and turn to me, his eyes downcast.
    “Well,” he says in a slow, shy way, “maybe there is.”
    “Yes?” I say. There’s a beat during which neither of us speaks.
    “I dunno,” Carr says.
    “No, really, anything,” I say. Another beat.
    “Well . . . “
    “Yes?” I say.
    “ If you have the time,” Carr says. “Maybe an hour?”
    “Heck, yes, Bob, I can give you an hour. I’m just sitting here. Just reading.”
    “Well, if you’re sure.” He remains looking down, shifting slightly. Accepting an offer of help, it appears, is a surrender of sorts. Then, “It wouldn’t take more’n an hour.”
    “That’s fine.” I’m honestly excited. “Should I lock up the place?” I ask. Without waiting for an answer, I turn back, pull the cabin door tight and snap the lock. Before I do, though, I place the Penguin Kavanagh safely inside. I leave the thermos on the porch. I’ll be back in an hour, after all, as Carr has said, maybe less. I divert to my car — I’m moving fast — and pull a pair of working gloves from the trunk. I’m not sure what Bob and I are off to do, but I figure working gloves, with working gloves I’ll be ready for anything.
    I approach Bob at his pickup. “So what are we going to do?”
    He looks at me squarely for what seems like the first time. “I’ve got this bull,” he says.
    “A bull?” I say, with an obvious question mark. A bull? I’m embarrassed for making it a question. “A bull,” I say with a good, solid downward inflection. To punctuate it, I slap my gloves against my leg.
    “He’s dead,” Carr says next.
    “Dead?” Dead? I’d done it again. I repeat myself, quickly, “dead.” Period.
    Bob steps back and perches sideways on the truck seat. “Yes’m, he been dead for a while. I been meaning to get up here and bury him. I could use a hand, if you’ve got the time.”
    “No problem,” I say with a snap, suggesting I’d buried bulls before. I point to my car. “Should I follow you?”
    “No,” Carr says, twisting into the truck. He gestures toward the passenger side. “Hop in.” He turns to the dogs, “Make room, dammit. Settle down.”
    Climbing up into the passenger’s seat, I slide into a near impenetrable tangle of dogs, machine manuals, parts catalogues, Styrofoam cups, lengths of rope, fast food sacks, and assorted tools. The dominant of the dogs insists on pride of place, climbing onto my lap. He watches through the dust-streaked windshield, panting hard, as if commanding, Let’s go!
    I know I’m safe in Bob Carr’s care, yet there is this odd feeling of being kidnapped. I watch the cabin drift away in the sideview mirror. I have this queasiness knowing I’ve given myself over to a stranger. A cowboy, no less. A cowboy who I’m sure has a couple guns in the truck. Six-shooters. Loaded six-shooters. An armed cowboy who travels in the company of feisty dogs. Dogs who are traveling with their first New Yorker — and who probably don’t like my scent.
    I dig through my brain for something to say. “Where is this bull, Bob?” I look at Carr. He doesn’t answer. He continues to smile, though, watching the meadow ahead for hidden drops. The truck’s engine is a deafening growl. I try again, louder. “WHERE IS THIS BULL, BOB?”
    He flicks his head, a neck spasm, but still doesn’t look at me. I think he knows I said something, though, because, still grinning as he watches the ground approaching us, he calls out, “WHAT?”
    “THE BULL?” I yell.
    “OH, YES’M,” he yells back. “HE’S DEAD.” He grips the knob of floor shift and fights the transmission into an angry gear.
    “YES, BOB, I KNOW,” I yell. “BUT WHERE?”
    “WHAT?”
    “THE BULL, BOB,” I repeat. “WHERE?”
    “HE’S DEAD.”
    We go on like this until we’ve reached the meadow’s terminus, to where the Guinn Valley begins to narrow down. The two dogs at my feet have curled into a breathing, shifting pile. The one called Red, though, keeps his muzzle pressed to the dash, his wiggling rump in my lap. Reaching the end of the meadow, we arrive at a double-gate. Bill climbs out, undoes the double-gate. Proceeding, we rock into the grooved tracks of an old valley road. The going is easier now. I can still see our cabin in the rearward distance, now a Monopoly cube against its backdrop of spruce and pine. The Divide is still up ahead, appearing not much nearer.
    The valley is now seriously narrowing down, the hills encroaching. The BNSF track and Jasper Creek, which farther back had paralleled one another at a respectable distance, are taking turns crossing one another. Along with our road, we make a three-strand braid, track over creek, creek under road, road over track. As the landscape is becoming more restricted, I’m thinking we’ve fewer good places for burying a bull.
    One more bridging of Jasper Creek and one more thump-thump over the BNSF track and Bob pulls the truck into a mere trace of side road and gears down. We move now at a slower pace. A quieter pace.
    “We must be getting close, yes, Bob?” I can say now without yelling.
    “Just ahead.”
    I begin to imagine the scene: a massive carcass, lying on its side (its back?), the disturbing realization of rigor mortis, legs stiffened at grotesque angles; the onset of corruption, vast sunken patches of bull-flesh, with the tissue ripped in choice places (coyotes?), the exposed meat fetid, gray. Above and around and everywhere, a cloud of flies. And the stench! I’d almost forgotten the stench. I prepare myself for the worst.
    Bad as this experience may prove to be, I smile to myself: less than an hour ago I was at our cabin reading poetry, musing on my self-worth, wondering if I was up to the challenge of the years ahead. And now look at me: in a truck driven by a cowboy-stranger, nearing what I’m sure will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience: burying a bull.
    “Well . . .” Bob says; then a long, long pause, before “ . . . this is it.” He crushes the brake pedal, twists the ignition key, and with a last bounce we stop. The dogs spring to life: Red down from his crow’s nest with a deep Bring it on! bark; Pecos and Rodeo up, doing cramped circles at my feet. “Dammit, dogs!” Bob shouts, while reaching for a pair of cracked, dirty calfskin gloves. With a rude kick of his elbow he pops open the creaky driver’s door. “Over there,” he points with his chin, then twists out onto the grass.
    We’re at a high place, a grassy dike dividing the north bank of Jasper Creek from what little remains of the meadow. The side road disappears here, washed level and overgrown. Ahead is yet another gate, this one looking as though it hasn’t been opened in centuries. The two of us, clutching our working gloves and skipped about by the three dogs, walk forward. Bob undoes the gate latch, an antique affair made of wire and odd shapes of rusted metal, and we go through. Beyond the gate, the ground falls off, the dike is channeled through left-to-right—an arroyo, according to Bob.
    “I got ‘im this far,” he says.
    I’m guessing the bull is just ahead, in the depression. The arroyo, I mean.
    We come to the edge where the ground slides away in a tumble of round stones. What I see is not what I expect. The bull has been dead for a long, long time. What I see are bones, big bones, overlain in places with dried hide, heaped in an elongated mound such that shape and features of a living bull can’t be easily made out. No flies. No stench. Just a motionless pile of old death. “That’s it,” I say, softly—not a question, really, because I know that’s it.
    “Yes’m,” Bob Carr says. “He got kinda busted up, me dragging him here, then animals done the rest.”
    He eases down the slope toward the pile, using his heels to keep from sliding. I do the same.
    “That’s the head,” he says, his toe lifting a plait of dried hide. I see the skull beneath. It’s pitched to one side, the lower jaw gone; a long row of thick upper teeth, an eye socket, empty but for some black detritus. “The rest’s under there,” Bob says, pointing with his boot toward the mound’s high point. “Shoulder, ribs, backbone, legs — we got a whole bull here.”
    An honest question grows in my mind. I look at the loneliness of this place, the distance from human traffic, the protection afforded by the arroyo. I consider, too, how long this bull’s been dead. “How come, Bob, you want to bury this bull?” I ask. I’m wondering why here, why now.
    Bob nods. He seems to see my question a fair one. He doesn’t answer, though, not right away. He pulls on his gloves and squints around, not at anything in particular — at the far side of the arroyo, at the sky, at his boots. I follow Bob’s eyes to his boots. It’s then I see how the world is slipping into late afternoon, how we’re losing light fast. I’m sure Bob is thinking this, too, that we’d better get on with the work at hand.
    I’m thinking this when Bob says, in a measured way, “I bury this bull because I do.” He pauses, then adds, “All we got to do is cover him.” He swings a gloved hand to show the scraps of ranching debris lying in the arroyo, scraps I’d not paid attention to until now: old timbers, sheets of warped plywood, tatters of tarpaper. “We give him a good cover, that’s all,” he says.
    The burying goes fast. The scraps make it easy. It seems this particular depression has been a dump-hole for years. We drag worm-tunneled fence posts, mummified lengths of finish lumber, old bleached plywood, discarded hewn beams — every remnant of junked ranch structure we can, singly or together, pull and heft over the bull. We finish with an arrangement of good-sized stones, for weight, a defense against the land-lashing winds that scour the valley. The job, from the first scrap set in place to our tired retreat back to the pickup, takes the short side of an hour.
    I reach the pickup a few steps ahead of Bob, whose bent legs make the uphill going a slow pick-and-place affair, one boot here, one boot there. I go right to the passenger door and stop. I look back. Bob has stopped in front of the pickup. He pulls off his gloves, then his cap (I see his buzz-cut hair for the first time). He massages his scalp and then reseats his cap with comical vigor. We stand there, me at the passenger door, Bob at the pickup’s nose, neither of us speaking.
    Bob finally breaks the spell with a laugh and a smile. His smile grows until it’s valley-wide. “You done good,” he says. He holds the pose, looks at me squarely, steadily, not shifting about in his usual shy way. “Yes’m, you done good.”
    The drive back to the cabin goes fast, or so it seems it does. There’s a residue of daylight — although the setting sun, resting now only inches above the glaciated hump of Mt. Neva, is throwing mile-long shadows over the meadow grass, long dark premonitions of night in the direction we’re heading. We’ve only Red in the cab, a breathing, quiet curl on the seat between us; Pecos and Rodeo have taken to the bed of the pickup for the ride back.
    By the time we reach the cabin the sun has sunk below the Divide where it has refracted into a concealed orb of burnt orange light. In a quarter hour the whole of the Guinn Valley is awash in this light. The cabin itself, when we pull up alongside, its west-facing wall is glistening orange. Us, too, as we take leave of one another, we’re awash in orange light. A handshake. A Thanks from Bob, a No problem and See you from me. I climb out. Bob and the dogs roll away. The day’s work done.
    When the pickup has cleared the farther gate and disappeared behind a wall of tall scrub, I go about checking things, readying nighttime things so I’ll not have to search about in the dark. When I have supper laid out, my lantern primed with fuel, and my sleeping bag spread in a smooth place, I see I’ve still some daylight left; so, I retrieve the Penguin Kavanagh and settle back on the porch. I have to zip up my vest as the temperature is sinking. I know I’ll not be able to remain outside for long. I return to the page, to “The Self-Slaved,” and read again:
    Me I will throw away.
    Me sufficient for the day

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