Steel, Stone and Shadow              

39,537 wds   20 chapters       

Chapter 1      Kathleen’s Mother

       Worse than losing, the deal broke even. The plan had not exactly fallen through; it shifted and she, the principle instigator, entrepreneur and investor, had become one of too many who shared profits. Sharing a cut; worse than losing. You learn from losing, nobody learns from breaking even. That’s the bright side; see the doughnut, not the hole, you idiot. Oh please, spare me the crap.

    ‘I must be losing my mind,’ the woman thought, ‘I just don’t understand.’

   She, principal mover-shaker who once held all the marbles, banked only one hundred and twenty-three thousand. It wasn’t worth the time; seven months. And now it wasn’t worth thinking about. Go upriver, move to higher ground. 

    Now it was time to rest. Most days she didn’t feel fifty years old, but this disappointment made her feel older. She turned fifty three months ago, and age was very much on her mind. The dream of children had vanished long ago, after the first and only and worst disaster. 

Watching the lights of the city go on below, she pondered what she had done and what she might do now. She sat on the terrace, her single-malt scotch beside her. The terrace was as long as the house; two hundred feet by twenty-five and curved along the curve of the two hundred feet of deck to cornice glass windows and sliding glass doors. And all around the house pine trees covered the side of the mountain. From the city it was difficult even in daylight to see the house. At night, like tonight with the lights off, there was no sign of it. Anyone who didn’t know the house was there saw only a dark wall of mountain. Only the brighter zig-zag slash of road crossing and re-crossing, meandering up the side of the mountain, divided the forest. 

From the terrace looking at Casper spread out below, she thought of how many of those lights she had turned on, how many she kept burning, how she had moved and shaped the city. What did she mean to the people who lived there? On party nights at her house twice a year when the terrace where she sat on now, alone, was crowded end to end and the liquor and laughter flowed and the lights of the house blazed out and could be seen thirty miles away on a clear, moonless night. What did they think of her? Was it envy, appreciation or, incredible to think it, love for her and her work?  Did they love her? Sometimes she didn’t care. On a night like this, a lost, unclear, neutral night, she certainly did care. And she could not stop herself from thinking.

“But i won’t admit it,” she said aloud. She took a drink and felt the strong, mellow scotch-bite. “I care but i won’t admit it.”

‘Let’s start from the beginning,’ she thought, ‘and go through the elements one by one.’ The fluid in her glass might yet fire up her stalled engine.

The north Casper land deal had been sidetracked several times by political forces. The question of land acquisition through the public domain was not supposed to be complicated. The reasons for taking it clearly benefited the city and the communities along the river tax-wise and more important, burnished the reputations of the city councilors who could claim job creation, long term prosperity and security (more lights, less crime) and community development (this pleased the liberals). Yet it too often stalled, profits bled down by those who had more to gain by going slow. They distrusted fast action and the money leaked away. Was it snatched by those who say they respect and admire her? Did her initial calculation of what she had to gain slither into the pockets of strangers, of people who were now flush with cash just because they happened to live there, because their parents or other relatives happened to buy properties and live there and suffer through the ordeal of hanging onto land frequently flooded by the river, over muddy access roads, near a malarial swamp swarming with mosquitoes until someone with ambition, brains and energy could see the value in it and move to improve it?  Whose pockets got it? How could this happen? She had worked through it all so thoroughly herself, but there were facts about who truly owned some of the property she could never know. It was impossible to say exactly how, but she would have to suspect too many people who, at the same time, coordinated with each other. How did they do it? She had leapt into a snake pit without knowing how full it was and it was writhing full. In a pit of vipers like that one would strike another and the next and the next and the whole thing would fall apart. But it didn’t fall apart. The vipers climbed up her legs and all over her belly and breasts and neck and bit her all over, a roiling mass of stinking snake flesh. But the scotch washed them down. 

I better have another drink. 

From this terrace high over the city, it boosted to her pride that she had been in the middle of it and survived and for some inexplicable reason she still wore her skin. But survival is not victory. ‘They robbed me,’ she thought, ‘I better admit it and get on with it. But hell, we took it from the goddam indians, someone might as easy steal it from us.’ 

Someday it would all be clear, all well understood. Wait, she would wait, had waited before, for her husband to get out of her way and was still waiting for her daughter to burn out and stop embarrassing her and costing bail money and legal fees. A woman in a town like Casper had to learn to wait, to wait here as much as women anywhere; even more so in this almost square block of Western territory calling itself ‘The Equality State.’ She laughed out loud, with too much force and jettisoned an ice cube she had been rolling around with her tongue. 

Her second drink of the evening had sunk low. ‘As low as i am,’ she thought holding the glass up before lights of the town and the prairie beyond, shimmering and glittering in the glass through ice and amber fluid.

Once a week she spent an evening completely alone. She said it was good for her nerves. You had to take care of the nerves, they are too close to instinct and the instinctive survive in nature and the unnatural. Nights alone also gave the socialites and her partners room to create rumor. Rumor is good; rumor is close to the source of legend. You are not ignored if you and your activities are the target of rumors. 

‘Me,’ she thought, ‘I alone survived to tell the tale.’

Now imagination and memory crosses in the mind and her father’s face appears. She thinks of Hamlet’s father on the castle wall and she says to her own father, “Tell me another story. I don’t like that one.” 

So he told her about the headless cowboy who terrorized the ranch and all the poor man wanted was water to pour down his oh-so-dry stub of neck. He couldn’t fetch it himself for without a head he had no eyes to see. They gave him no water so the cowboy murdered all but one and that one said, “I alone survived to tell the tale.”

They thought the headless cowboy would sneak into their tent and kill them. She crawled into her bedroll exited, listening, fearing naught. Let the others tremble and shake, she was unworried; her father had his pistol at the ready. Once again the headless cowboy had struck, this time robbing her in her land deal and she would fear naught. 

How she wished her father now lived or, like Hamlet’s father, appeared in ghostly form to tell her who betrayed her, who had taken the prize, for it was truly not the money that mattered, but the winner. Winning is the prize. Her father would know.

The telephone rang. 

Usually she didn’t answer the phone on her night alone, but listened to it ring out. This time, vaguely thinking it might be her father’s ghost, she picked up the receiver.

 “Yes, what is it?”

“Hi, can i talk to Kathleen?” A young man’s voice. 

“Kathleen’s not here,” she said. This was a lie and the truth at the same time. She herself was Kathleen. Kathleen was also her daughter. Her daughter no longer lived there, but in defiance of and to torment her mother, the young Kathleen often gave her mother’s phone number to young men she met and disliked. At the moment, Daughter Kathleen didn’t live anywhere and had no phone. For over a year she had been couch and bed surfing. Sometimes she rested in a city jail cell. Bailing her out, mother and daughter would briefly catch up. 

Usually Mother Kathleen very sweetly told the men Daughter Kathleen sent her way that she didn’t answer this number anymore, apologized for the inconvenience and hung up. Tonight she wanted to communicate with someone, to talk to someone, to hurt or help someone. 

Once, she made a date with one of these young men and stood him up. Another young man, Ernest, was her lover for a few months. The twenty-five year difference was eventually too great. Ernest surprised her by being so strong, purposeful and mature. He dutifully filled his role as lover/admirer/social ornament and perhaps even friend. Then Ernest was gone and the glass was empty. What surprised her most was her ability to feel passion of the romantic sort. 

Now on the phone this young man said, “You know when she’ll be back?”
He did not introduce himself; an uneducated working man, possibly without a job. Where has Kathleen been hanging out, who is she sucking up to now? ‘I must scrape this manure from my boot,’ she thought.

“No, sorry, Kathleen won’t be here for awhile.” Pause. “She went out to that place, i’m sure you know about it, let’s see, her favorite place, yes, The Meat Rack, yes, she went to The Meat Rack. She’ll be there all night; it’s where she hangs out.”

There was a pause flashing like a knife gleaming in the air. 

“The Meat Rack. Where is that?”A true innocent, this one.

“I don’t know but i don’t think you’ll have trouble finding it.”

It was going nowhere. She was angry and it wasn’t working. “Good luck, young man.” She hung up and turned the phone off. 

‘If i am going to be alone, she thought, ‘I’ll be goddam good and alone.’ 

Chapter 2    Call it Home 

The young man hung up the phone. Did that old biddy say The Meat Rack? He sat back on the couch clutching the phone.  ‘That’s a pretty rough name,’ he thought. ‘If Kathleen hangs there, she’s not the girl i think she is. Someone must have been drunk or. . . No, there’s no place of that name, no Meat Rack. It might be real, but they wouldn’t name it that anyway; they would never get a license, unless they pay off someone.’ 

‘That is a possibility,’ he thought, drifting into a hazy dreamland, ‘everything is possible. Selling sex is profitable, everyone does it; they use sex to sell cars and guns and tobacco. With an unending stream of women coming through The Meat Rack seeking pleasure, providing pleasure could be a service, even a life purpose.’

Thus holding the phone and looking at nothing, the young man went swimming through his own thoughts; ‘Nothing is certain. There was a college student who opened a bar instead of spending parental funds on tuition. He called the bar Mama’s Money. It was a good place to get loaded and the general assumption was that because their son had initiative and made massive money selling drinks the parents approved. ‘There’s no arguing with George.’(On the one dollar bill). The place became very popular for loud undergrads who liked to play pool and foosball. Could The Meat Rack be such a place, a singles bar with the motto, The Roughest Women in Casper? The owner might be a hypersexual who craves more women than the average male. He might have rooms in back for rent by the hour; call it the Notell Motel Room. No, not likely, and yet, more things had become possible in only one year.’ 

Since the young man still clutching the phone got out in the world this last year he had encountered death, love and the great philosophical questions; why, what, how, to what purpose if there is a purpose? 

The memory of female skin often paralyzed him. As usual, his mind returned to Lillian, the one he left behind, temporarily, he hoped. When she touched him in one place her touch went all over him. 

He thought, ‘How great to be Elvis. Elvis could have any woman he wanted, a new one each day, no, more. He could have a different woman morning, noon and night and another for a midnight snack. A lot of women wanted a baby Elvis and he could have had them all and paid for them all. In twenty years he could have had ten thousand kids and out of ten thousand at least a hundred would have talent as great as his. Didn’t Johan Sebastian Bach have a lot of kids? A lot of them made good in the music business. But Elvis was just a nice guy who loved his mother and respected women. But if i had a lot of money like Elvis i would feel a woman’s skin against mine all day and all night. 

“Earth to Jerry, come in Jerry, you lost in a daydream again?” Jerry heard and saw the snapping of fingers close to his face.

Another young man stood before the dreamer, a towel around his waist.

Jerry said, “Have you ever heard of a place called The Meat Rack?”

“The Meat Rack? No, can’t say as i have. It’s around here?”

“I guess.”

“Never heard of it. I’m sure i would remember that one. I don’t think i’d go into a place called The Meat Rack, sounds like your motorcycle mama hangs out there.”

The couch where Jerry Cooper sat with the phone in his hand was in the basement he shared with Craig Schmidt, now standing before him, one hand holding a towel around his waist, in his other hand a shampoo bottle and a hair brush. 

Craig turned to dress on the other side of the room. Jerry and Craig shared the basement with Craig’s younger brother, Max. The room was crowded with beds and dressers, sports equipment, a pool table and a ping pong table. Max had a regular daytime job and was not present. For these inhabitants, good housekeeping was unimportant. 

The Schmidt name was known all over Casper; the family had been in the hardware business for a hundred years so every working man, home owner and landlord knew the name. Except for a few years away at college, the boys had lived in the same house all their lives. Jerry was Craig’s guest and slept on the basement couch. It was cramped but free. 

That couch sat between the wall and the ping pong table. In this basement billiards was the preferred game so the ping pong table became storage, stacked with hunting and fishing gear and car parts. Max was cleaning and restoring a carburetor and the parts were spread out on oily towels. This table with the flimsy green net across the middle was now for work, not play. 

“Time for my warm-up game,” Craig said. He stepped up to the pool table to rack the balls. He wore no shirt or shoes. His body was lean from work on an oil rig. “A pool game first thing in the morning keeps the mind sharp,” he said.

“It’s not the first thing in the morning,” Jerry said.

“Okay, first thing in the evening.”

Jerry took a stick from the collection standing in a tall can by the wall, examined the tip and chalked up. He thought, ‘It is good to have a sharp mind and, as a guest in the house, accommodate the host.’  He stepped up to the table. 

Jerry and Craig, college pals, met playing pool at the Student Union in Laramie. Winning meant more to Craig; he liked to think and feel he was the best. “No,” he would say, “winning does not mean more to me, it means everything to me.” 

“What about eating and shitting and getting your rocks off, that mean anything?” Jerry said. 

“You make a good point.”

Jerry was less aggressive, more interested in the mathematics of revolution, refraction, rebound and speed or the lack of it; power and finesse. He often made a shot not merely to sink a ball but to see how many balls he could knock around the table and where they might stop. 

Craig’s desire to win produced more victories, but Jerry had more fun. This is how they were equally matched, equally skilled; the winner depending, by some as yet unwritten formula, on who was more alert and determined (Craig) or imaginative and flexible (Jerry). Craig focused so hard on the game his tension burdened him and he made mistakes. Jerry was relaxed, played for the beauty of the game and was careless of victory or defeat. Sometimes Jerry won because Craig made tension errors, sometimes Jerry lost because his mind strayed. Often thoughts of Lillian and her skin against his skin swept his mind clean of billiards. 

Craig’s brother Max was the man to beat on the felt. Max studied the game and owned his stroke, was the true professional in the family and probably would have taken over the family hardware business had it survived. 

Max would be working at an auto parts store all his life, Craig said, slow and steady. One of these days he would own every auto parts store in Casper, you watch. 

“That’s not what i’m after,” Craig said, “I couldn’t stand the monotony.”

“Yeah, take the money and run.”

“You bet.” 

Craig was working a steady job so he wasn’t taking the money and running just yet. Jerry, at the invitation of his friend, had come to Casper to stay in the Schmidt basement and work on a rig. As yet he had found no employment, so for now he would take the money if he could get it, not run and earn more. That was his plan.

Craig’s brother Max slept in the bed in the middle of the room and Craig in the other bed beyond, under the window. Another brother, Gary, slept in a room around the corner beside the bathroom. Gary drove an old yellow Highway Department surveyor’s van and was home only two or three nights a week. Gary had many female friends and it was said that many mornings he had to find his way to work or back home from a different part of town.

And tucked away in a corner by the stairs was Elaine’s room. She was fifteen and soon after Jerry arrived, Elaine’s mother sent her to live with an aunt in Sheridan.  Age fifty, the old woman worked for an insurance company and knew the schemes and desires of young men like Jerry Cooper. She held the family together now that her husband and his business were gone. 

Jerry was clearly in a daze and not focused on playing pool. Craig had invited him to come work in the oil fields, had told him he could make enough money in one summer, in three months of work, to pay tuition for a year.  With the oil field money in his pocket he wouldn’t have to work a part time job while in school. Now he was here, the job prospects looked good and he thought he had met an interesting woman; Kathleen.

“You were on the phone, did you get a date?” Craig said without looking up from aiming his pool stick.

“No, the woman, i guess it was Kathleen’s mom, said she had gone to a place called The Meat Rack.”

“That sounds like her mom, weird,” said Craig, “but she has plenty of money.”

He shot, a ball fell, he studied the table as he chalked his stick. “No one knows how much money she has but she owns half the town. For months of the year she hangs out in New York or Italy or someplace like that.”

He focused, another ball fell and he said, “I thought you had a girl in Laramie.”

“I do. I do, but i can get a side gal, can’t i?”

“If you can afford it. You got your eye on a pricey one.”

“How pricey is she?”

“I would say very,” Craig said, “and what i heard is those Jewish girls never have a real orgasm.”

“I can fix that,” Jerry said.

 Craig chuckled and shook his head. “What a dreamer.” 

“If they’re so rich, why was Kathleen hanging out at Mulligan’s?”

“Oh, mom and daughter hate each other, everyone knows it. That’s why young Kathleen is trying to spend the family fortune and sleeping with every guy she can find and getting arrested for all kinds of shit.  All to spite her mom, so they say.”

Jerry said, “She didn’t seem like that to me.”

“She starts that way, so i heard.”

“I better leave that one alone.”

“Good idea. Get yourself a simple country girl who knows when it’s ruttin’ time. That’s what you got, right? How about that Lillian?”

“She knows when it’s ruttin’ time.”

They didn’t talk about Kathleen again until the next day. Craig was home from work, Jerry from looking for work, they were drinking beer and again playing pool. 

Craig said, “She wants to be a singer. When Janis Joplin died she had a nervous breakdown at school.”

“Who, Kathleen?”

“Yep, the pitiful rich one. Her mother carted her off to Switzerland and they say she got electro shocked in a nut house there.”

“Is she a good singer?”

“She stinks. I heard she was really bad. She wails. But what do i know about music? I’m a lowly rig hand, a worm, a squirrel.”

“If she wants to be a famous singer and her family has money, what’s to stop her?”

“Beats the hell out of me. Probably her mother. Her mother runs the show, she runs a lot of things. All i know is i wouldn’t kick Kathleen out of bed for eating crackers.”

Soon after, they left to hit the bars. First was the Wunderbar for the twenty-five cent beer night and they stayed and played pool, then stopped into the nearby Rialto, smoky and old. With difficulty Jerry talked Craig into going home early. Jerry was looking for a job and wanted to start early the next day. He wanted to be fresh.

And thus the play and work of this particular day progressed to a comfortable, inconclusive end. 

Chapter 3   Daughter of the Queen

When Jerry met her at Mulligan’s that night, Kathleen had been quiet, interested and polite. The roar of the rock and roll and the jabbering crowd swirled around them at the table where Jerry, Kathleen and Kathleen’s friend huddled against the crowd. The name of that friend Jerry missed hearing for the noise and felt no need to know because she, the friend, said almost nothing, made no eye contact, grimaced, looked around the room and ignored conversation. A blonde without a smile ~ this seemed most peculiar to Jerry. Instead she appeared to wait for someone or something to set her ablaze. Looking at Kathleen’s friend Jerry thought, “All the lights are on, nobody’s home.” They sat together at the table for an hour.

Kathleen was precisely the opposite of her friend. Alert, fine-featured, dark haired and physically delicate, she leaned in to listen through the music, eyes intense on his, tilting her head from time to time, smiling slightly, nodding slowly and responding briefly. 

Jerry thought, ‘This is great. I’m making progress.’

When there was a break in the rock and roll, Jerry sought to summarize a point, say something witty, ask an important question and receive an answer while there was in the silence time for her to expand. When the music rose again they leaned in to talk loud and sharp. 

Kathleen appeared to take an interest in Jerry’s search for work on a rig, his opinions, study of journalism and geology at the university, his stories and jokes. She was detached from the chaos of Mulligan’s, a face of calm in a stormy sea. Jerry found it strange and refreshing to find in Casper, an oil town full of roughnecks, oil rig, engineering and money talk, a polite and learned conversation. Bright verbal interchanges happen in school among students, professors or other worldly, educated people; they are surprising to find in industrial Casper. 

Jerry did often think of Lillian. Kathleen was very different from Lillian who was also alert and intelligent. Lilian is strong, Kathleen is gentle, Jerry thought. With Lillian, Jerry had to be sure of himself, certain and definite, for there would be no, or very little, ‘laughing off’ an event or statement. Kathleen seemed capable of laughing off everything.  

He asked Kathleen if he could see her again and how. Not an experienced, night clubbing ladies man, Jerry had never before asked a woman in a loud bar (Mulligan’s) for her phone number. She listened, her smile giving him confidence, and wrote a telephone number on a napkin. He put it in his shirt pocket as and said, “It will be close to my heart.” She chuckled with a sweet smile, as he saw it, and he left to meet Craig at The Other Side. 

Craig was working the evening tower on an R L Valentine rig north of town. The drive from the rig would put him at the bar at about twelve thirty am. One of the hands from his rig would drop him there, they would have a few beers and Jerry would drive them home. Jerry glanced at his watch; that would be a few minutes from now. 

It was not unusual to see men in The Other Side with plenty of rig dirt/grime on work clothes and carrying a lunch bag or box. 

Jerry waited at the bar, still in a dream of Kathleen. Considering how quickly and eagerly she gave him her phone number, this one was in the bag, the bed bag and the campsite bedroll bag, yes. He wondered if she liked camping, delicate as she was. Jerry also thought he might have touched some of Casper’s upper crust through Kathleen, a bit of social quality. 

A troubling thought intruded. Jerry’s older brother, who had been in the army and there had real experience, advised Jerry not to “show your brains too quickly.” Now Jerry worried that he might have done just that and Kathleen would think he’s a dork. He would need to tighten up and hold himself steady. If this was real he had to be careful.

Measured in drinks, Jerry had been at Mulligan’s for four bottles of beer; two hours. Meeting Kathleen had increased his mental clarity. He now felt more ready to accept new personalities and ideas. At the same time, he would not let his imagination run so far ahead and for God’s sake “Don’t show your brains too quickly.”

On the way to The Other Side, thinking about her, he concluded this elegant, healthy-looking, pretty, intelligent woman was vulnerable in a way Lillian was not. Yes, Lillian was rough; she did, after all, study very old animals that had slowly turned into rocks. Before meeting Kathleen Jerry had never been so excited, hopeful and prepared to dedicate himself to anyone. ‘I have been in the presence of someone truly beautiful,’ he thought. ‘Truly, beautifully,’ he paused for the exact word, ‘needy.’

Jerry drove an old truck. He bought it for $1700 a few years before; it was almost fifteen years old and even though the body rattled and shook on smooth roads, was rusty and dented, it felt solid and reliable. There was a hole in the hood where someone broke off his hood ornament. The jagged, twisted up metal edge now stood where the base of the ornament was bolted. The theft occurred in the parking lot of the Beacon Club. Jerry was drinking beer with Craig at the Beacon Club the night the hood ornament was removed. He came out, got in the truck, started it up and was driving away when he could not find the road. He slowed down, he stopped. 

“What happened?” Craig asked.

“My swan is gone.”

Craig looked at Jerry and said nothing. Someone honked to get them out of the road.

Jerry pointed ahead, “See, i have no swan.”

Looking ahead, there was no center to the nose of his truck, the ornament, a swan in flight, was gone, someone had taken flight with it. Now, in his confusion, what would he follow home? 

“You need me to drive?” said Craig. “Hey, come on, let’s go.”

Jerry tried not to show it, but losing his swan upset him as much as someone stealing the whole truck. On late nights when drunk the outspread wings and stretched head and neck of the bird led him home, kept him rolling down the center of the road. Now there was only a gash of twisted up metal front and center on the hood, hard to see, but he followed it in anger and pain, remembering the days when grace and beauty shone the way forward. That light shone no more. 

Another damaged part of Jerry’s truck, the window on the passenger side door, was jammed an inch or two open so in the summer the cab could not be cooled and in the winter it could not be well heated. Yet the truck was his chariot, his wheels, his home on the road. Many times Jerry had slept in the cab.

“Why don’t you fix that window?” Craig said on a day when the temperature was below zero.

“Never got around to it.”

“Well it’s freezing over here. I’d like to stick something in it.”

“Here’s a towel.” Jerry pulled this out of his gym bag and Craig rolled it according to the size of the opening and wedged it in at the top of the window.

“There’s still a draft here, right on my neck.”

Jerry said nothing. If, like Craig, a man is born and raised in Wyoming, he can keep his mouth shut about winter.

When Jerry got home to his rooming house where he shared a kitchen and living room with five other students and an illegal from Panama who worked nearby unloading freight cars, the towel was frozen in the window. Knowing how dangerous jerking on safety glass might be (Jerking it up could have stressed the glass to the shatter point), Jerry left it wedged there and it stayed all winter. And it would still be there if it hadn’t thawed and dropped out. 

Turning his truck into the parking lot of The Other Side, his mind on two women, his heart joyful, Jerry saw a fistfight by the exit. He parked away from the action, on the opposite end of the building, and went around into the front door.

The Other Side was a collection of rough tables in an old warehouse. It was located on the wrong side of Casper, the prairie side of the tracks, and if it had a motto or slogan of defining purpose it would be “Shut up and drink.”  And to get it exactly right, one should slur the words. 

The heavy tables that crowded the cracked slab floor inside The Other Side had not benches but chairs. The management removed the benches and replaced them with an assortment of chairs of every type from folding to over-stuffed to straight-backed and swivel chairs on wheels. The management felt a bench required too much cooperation for three or four persons drinking to sit together on the same plane. The typical drinking man or woman wants elbow room to stay limber. Ladies prefer sitting in a chair. Few can pass out on a bench without toppling over. Even if sober; one can easily fall off a bench. The tables were heavy wood or steel and nearly impossible even for two men to turn over. For this reason tables were regularly turned over, it happened every month or two. A rig hand all alone could become a legend by turning over a table. At one time or another, every regular customer had seen it happen; a woman’s scream echoes through the tall rafters and roof struts of the old former warehouse, a near nuclear window rattling crash bounces off the walls, a cheer thunders upward and the building shakes with a riptide of clamorous joy. The table turner then receives his (it has never been a woman, feminists take note) accolades and drinks. 

But not so fast, roughneck; no matter how good you are, someday, someone will ride into town better than you are at turning over tables. Pard, there is always a faster gun just over that horizon.

The bar of The Other Side had only five or six stools along the short length of it. These were most often used by the staff at break time. If a customer should stray over to the bar they usually stood near or leaned against it long enough to get a drink instead of sitting even if a stool was available. 

Walking into The Other Side, Jerry quickly found Craig. His friend was talking to a big man in an insulated jump suit popular on rigs because it can be worn over street clothes. The man looked drunk, stupid or exhausted. He had a vacant, overwhelmed expression and did not appear to be following Craig’s conversation.

“Did you see the fight in the parking lot, Craig?”

“Fight in the parking lot? When?”

“Going on right now, by the exit.”

Saying nothing more, Craig   thrust his beer bottle among others onto a table nearby and rushed out. 

Chapter 4   The Devil’s Den 

“What did you say to him?” said Big Man.

“I told him there was a fight in the parking lot.”

“Shit, that happens all the time.”
Jerry had entered by the bar and picked up a bottle of Standard beer. He tipped it.

“Yeah, i been drinking Standard for twenty years,” Big Man said.

“You must be plenty drunk by now.”

Big Man looked at Jerry for a long moment before he laughed, held up his own bottle and admired the label ~ light house high above a raging sea tossing a sailboat, all in bold strokes, green and gold. The lighthouse and sailboat on Big Man’s bottle was half scraped away by his thumb.

“It’s good beer,” said Jerry. 

By then he had sensed the speed of understanding in this man and slowed his conversation to match it.  He raised his bottle and said, “Well, here’s to getting laid and getting on a rig.” Big Man and Jerry chinked bottles and drank.

“I could stand getting some cock,” Big Man said. Mention of the male sexual organ immediately put Jerry, a heterosexual, on edge. He had not yet learned that in the oilfields ‘cock’ was used for all forms of sexual fun. The source is believed by some to be unrelated to any sexual act, but instead to announcing an achievement, like a rooster crowing.  “And i’ve had it with my job,” Big Man also said. 

Jerry knew the man worked on a rig, not in a pipe, rail yard, refinery or as a mechanic or driver. There was a rig worker attitude not present in the manner of those other jobs. For example, when Gary Schmidt, Craig’s brother, who worked in a warehouse tracking inventory met Jerry he shook his hand and said, “Looking to work on a rig? That’s good. It means you got more hair on your ass than anyone else around here.” 

In The Other Side talking to Big Man, Jerry said, “Well i’m looking to get on a rig, anybody you know looking for a hand?” He spoke slowly and casually as if it were just another idea that popped into his head.

Big Man looked at him closely, silently, squinting. 

“Can’t say right now. You a derrick hand? Everybody’s looking for a good derrick hand. Shit, they’d settle for a lousy derrick hand.” He laughed.

Jerry wondered if he could claim to be a derrick hand and survive. Working halfway up the rig on a platform hauling in the ends of the drill pipe as they are removed or “tripped” back into the hole ~ Craig called it  hard and dangerous work, that is to say, harder and more dangerous than handling the tongs or throwing the chain on the drill table. Derrick hands more often lose hands and arms. Working the derrick is hard to do and very likely hard to fake.

“No, i’m just a back up tongsman,” Jerry said. “Worked on a rig in Texas. Johnson Oil,” Johnson Oil was Jerry and Craig’s company, their invention. Jerry had to have some rig experience somewhere and any company in Wyoming would be too easy to check out. They concocted up Johnson Oil because it’s a good Texas name and if there is a Johnson Oil Co. anywhere, it would be in Texas. In fact, there is probably more than one Johnson Oil in Texas. If anyone actually called one of them and asked, “Did Jerry Cooper work for your company?” the answer would be yes. The name Jerry Cooper is as common as Johnson Oil. 

Jerry did have experience in the oil business; the summer before the university newspaper, The Branding Iron, sent him at his own expense (which he gladly accepted) to Casper to find a story about petroleum engineering. The University of Wyoming is notable for its petroleum engineering instruction and research. His editor told him to “Work up a story on punching holes in rocks.” Jerry drove to Casper, asked questions, read old newspapers and tried to capture the grit and grime, but came back with a history, mostly, and newspapers do not print history. For Jerry, this glimpse of work in the oil field was tantalizing. He had started his college career studying geology, now he was interested in life and work on the rock of earth as well as inside it. 

Generally, in oil field work, men (and women if any have joined the crews) do not discuss books, films, politics, philosophy or abstract notions. It is the physical alteration of the earth and, Jerry thought, the most permanent and significant change humanity can make on the planet. In dreams he saw surface waters flowing down and away into caverns created by the drained-out petroleum. How much water might disappear into these caverns? 

Soon after his editor told him the student body wasn’t interested in the history of petroleum extraction , Jerry’s friend Craig Schmidt, born and raised in Casper, paused in his pool game long enough to say, “Yeah, it’s easy to get a job on a rig.”

And now Jerry was here among them in the grit and grime and it didn’t take long for him to become very selective in revealing his education or, as Craig said, “showing your brains.” Until he met Kathleen in Mulligan’s Jerry could easily believe no one in Casper had ever read or would admit to reading a book.

“If someone on the rig finds out you’ve read a book you’ll be an aighed or the professor from then on,” Craig said. 

“Hey you read a book, i saw you do it,” Jerry said. 

“Why sure, i read a book once,” said Craig. “Didn’t like it. Never read another.”

“Not enough pictures of nekkid women?”

“Oh hell no, no pictures a-tall.”

“We better not talk like this, it could become a habit.”

Craig and Jerry worked up this story about Johnson Oil so when he got work on a rig he would not be treated like a worm or squirrel, as new, inexperienced men are called. 

After Jerry spoke to Big Man in coveralls he looked around the room and tried to appear unconcerned. This action fit his idea of who he was or part of who he was, a man always on the lookout for a woman. Here at The Other Side he thought he would find creatures only vaguely female, so unlike those he left in school, or Kathleen. Of the few women in The Other Side there was less variety but more vitality, more strength and energy, less sophistication, more determination, less contemplation, more eagerness to act. Aside from not drinking beer, Lillian would fit in well at The Other Side. She had all the good qualities Jerry sought, was dynamic yet contemplative. Lillian worried Jerry in only one way; she didn’t always do what he wanted her to do. On this night in The Other Side, however, women were scarce. 

“If you’re looking to get on,” Big Man told Jerry, “Go to the Quade oil shop and ask for Roy Best. He’s looking for a hand.”

“Roy Best, Quade oil, i’ll remember that,” Jerry said in a flippant voice. To remember it, he was silent for a moment, saying roybestquade roybestquade roybestquade, sealing the names in memory, seeing the words before his eyes.

When he looked back up, Big Man’s gaze had withdrawn. Eyes blank, he seemed to look nowhere or past or through Jerry.

“Roy Best. I know where Quade Oil is, on the west side.” Jerry said this to Big Man as a way of restarting the conversation and wedging the man out of his daze. 

Big Man did not respond. His eyelids had fallen half over his eyes and although his mouth had not fallen open, his jaw was slack. Jerry moved to one side and the man’s eyes did not follow him. They followed nothing, no motion or person. Big Man had fallen asleep on his feet, eyes mostly open, the bottle of Standard beer secure in a calloused hand resting on his belly. 

Craig appeared. 

“Did you see the fight?” Jerry asked. 

“Shit no, it was over by the time i got there. They all quit and left by the time i got there or they got over it and were laughing and drinking together.” 

“That’s disgusting.”

Craig was jumpy, excited. “Then the cops came and everyone cleared out. A few of them were so drunk they lingered. One guy fought the cops, so they’re putting him up for the night. I never been that drunk.”

“Gives the cops something to do.”

Behind Jerry the Big Man’s voice startled him. “Surprised those boys ever survive a pay day.” He was awake now, not dozing on his feet yet not as clear eyed as one who had enjoyed a nap with pleasant dreams. 

They enjoyed another bottle of Standard and Craig and Jerry left in Jerry’s truck. 

“Your friend back there fell asleep on his feet while we were talking. Did you notice that?” asked Jerry.

“He does that. He’s worked doubles for almost this whole week now. One of the drillers can’t get a hand and his crew is paying for it. That driller’s an asshole; nobody wants to work for him.”

“Is his name Roy Best?”

“No, not Roy Best. You mean of Quade oil? No, this guy’s the driller who shot the antelope.”

The Antelope Story by Craig Schmidt; After evening tower this driller and his crew were coming back to town when the car headlights picked up the eyes of a dozen antelope. They were just standing in the sage brush beside the road. This was the gravel road over the prairie that rolled, curved and jittered washboard-style twenty miles north of Casper to the rig on the Sand Draw field. The crews often saw wildlife along the road. 

The driller slowed and stopped his car and the antelope remained frozen in the glare of the headlights. Moments before it was night, now they stood paralyzed by the dual suns that lighted the night but not the sky. The wind blew from them toward the car, so the animals did not smell the men or their engine exhaust. 

Very slowly so as not to enlarge the object in the strange light and rumbling engine sound, the driller told the crew, who were all hunters and didn’t need to be told, to stay quiet and motionless, not to leave the car. He opened his door only as much as was needed to slide out (difficult because he was a fat man) and move toward the trunk of the car. He opened the trunk just wide enough to remove his rifle and quietly work a cartridge into the chamber. He slid along close to the car. If the antelope no more than a hundred feet ahead, their eyes glowing red from the headlights, saw the strange shape bright as the one sun grow larger they might be shaken alert to danger and run. The driller crouched by the right tail light and sighted on the eye of one of the biggest animals, likely a buck. The driller breathed in and out steadily, evenly, and squeezed the trigger. 

With the explosion and flash the eye went out at once and the other animals bolted across the road. They were a flash of brown-white light and gone. The men in the car and the driller saw the shadow of the target lurch forward and fall. The driller shouted, “Got him.” The men got out to look, the driller ejected the spent cartridge and returned his to the trunk which he had opened wide. He got into the car and drove forward, stopping opposite his kill. The boys stood around the dead game. “Clean head shot, chief,” one said. It was a fine brain shot, as it turned out, so clean the animal took only one step forward and fell into the dust.

The driller and his men were in a hurry. Antelope was out of season and they didn’t want to be seen, even though the road was used only by the tool pusher and rig crews or maybe someone from the company who probably wouldn’t come around at night anyway, so they worked fast. The men respected the game laws most of the time and would feel guilty (until the first antelope steak was served up) for violating the law, and worse if they got caught.

They pulled the prize to the rear of the car to hoist it into the trunk. It was a tight fit. They had to move the rifle and a few other things out of the trunk and stow them in the seats of the car. The animal barely fit, a buck so heavy they had to twist its head around and force its legs in. 

With the animal now snug in the trunk, the derrick hand, a close friend of the driller, was curious as to why the driller now remained slumped over the animal. He touched his friend on the shoulder. It appeared the driller was whispering into the animal’s ear, a gruesome thought considering how half the creature’s head was blown away. But it was not love or perversity. The driller said, “My back!”

He had so much pain the derrick hand drove his car and the driller screamed and moaned on the bumpy road and the asphalt state road and then the city streets all the way to the hospital.

  The final outcome of the incident was a spinal operation that required time in the hospital, months off work in therapy, a drug regimen, a back brace and a new diet to reduce the size of his belly which stressed his lower back. 

“Here’s where it gets crazy,” Craig said. “He was compensated by the company and the state. He claimed the injury happened on the job. I think he still gets compensation from the company.” 

“That’s nuts.”

“How do you like it,” said Craig, “That pinhead gets a couple hundred a month for poaching. How’d you like to get that?”

“Sounds good on paper, Craig, but a back injury is pretty bad.”

“Yeah, some guys have all the luck.”

‘Some luck,’ thought Jerry but said nothing. They had returned to Craig’s house, to the basement, and being there often reminded Jerry of how much he owed Craig. A considerate guest, Jerry avoided discussing what might annoy, offend or anger his friend.

Chapter 5   Love and the Search

At his new home, reclining on the couch by the ping pong table, Jerry fell into a Lillian dream. He often dreamed of her, asleep or awake. Thoughts of her brought rest. One day they had fried chicken for their picnic lunch. They had driven out to the country and found a shaded place on a pile of flat stones, “Miocene Epoch pink granite,” Lillian said. 

“Yes, four hundred million years old,” Jerry replied.  

Settled in close together, still eating when Lillian cleaned a drumstick to the bone and crunched it between her teeth. Jerry was shocked; she was so beautiful and savage. 

“Why did you do that, Lillian?” he said sitting up, looking at her, “Those bone shards will get stuck in your throat.”

“No, i’m not a dog.”

Jerry had to pause and think. “If you are a dog you’re a good-looking one.”

“You have to break up the bone to get to the marrow.” 

This was raw, appealing and scary considering their first sex when she quickly and directly exposed the marrow. ‘She is so serious,’ he thought. ‘Why didn’t she smile?’ Lillian had a beautiful smile she didn’t use enough he thought, small ears that peeked out at the top and a small turned up nose, like a pixie. 

“Lillian, you’re a pixie.”

“I’ve heard that word before. What exactly is a pixie?”

“It is a creature that looks and sounds like the word pixie.”

Lillian looked at him in silence. This was another quality that Jerry sought; if she had nothing to say she said nothing. She contemplated, she thought about what was said. This is an unusual characteristic in a woman or a man.

Jerry studied journalism and geology. He thought writing about rocks would be interesting and it would involve a lot of research outdoors in fresh air. Lillian, who was studied paleontology and was very determined in her pursuit of a specific degree program, asked him, “Really, as a reporter, will you stay in Wyoming? What’s here to report about except rocks? And ranching? You’d have a tough job making those subjects interesting. Or keeping an interest in them yourself.” 

“I can write about rocks, or ranching, or anything,” Jerry said. “There are no boring subjects, only boring writers. John McPhee proved that years ago.”

“I’ll have to read John McPhee.”

By the look on Lillian’s face, Jerry thought it unlikely Lillian would read John McPhee. 

“Just wait, you’ll see what i mean, i mean, you’ll read what i mean.”

The next time Jerry saw Lillian she was reading a book by John McPhee and he thought, “I have to stick with this girl.”

If he becomes a geologist he certainly will stay in Wyoming. There is nothing more plentiful in Wyoming than rocks, some very old and beautiful, some formed by the bodies of reptiles. Snuggling among ordinary rocks are some called fossils, living creatures whose corpses were replaced cell by cell, by dirt and water mixing and hardening. These creatures of stone under the living surface are a vast unmoving society of wildlife, creatures who have surrendered their flesh to nourish and grow the skin of the earth. Rocks contain the deepest history and mirror the universe. Time has written the record of change in stone. This is what he wants to get to, the marrow of the earth. So what does he do? He goes to work in the oil fields and helps a group of men who appear completely unsympathetic to or unaware of the joy of thinking about the rocks they drill into. 

Lillian said, “If i study dinosaurs and you study geology we can be a team.”

“That’s a fact,” he said, “I like being a team. You study the dinos and i’ll study the rocks.

“Same thing.”

He kissed her, tasting from her lips and mouth the chicken bone marrow. 

Jerry also studied and loved Philosophy.  Philosophy is close to and as durable as rocks. Jerry was very fond of his philosophy professor, an exotic flower from the Garden State on the eastern edge of the North American plate. New Jersey, a place of mystery and corruption; it must be beautiful to be called the Garden State. The professor’s aura was a lavish perfume. 

Jerry desires women who prefer sober men. He wants Lillian and Kathleen and as many others as possible. He wants to be hard inside and furiously driving, not swamped in the fumes and darkness of alcohol. On this night, as on many others in the dark basement, Jerry fell asleep dreaming of holding onto one woman and then another and finding only himself to hold. 

Jerry had started looking for a job in the oil field the wrong way. He thought that, like finding work at the newspaper, as he did in high school, college or the ‘supper club’ outside of town, all he had to do was fill out an application and wait for a phone call. The morning he arrived in Casper, before he called Craig who was working at the time and unreachable anyway, he went to every oil company office he could find and filled out applications to work “throwing steel,” as Craig had called it, on a rig. That night they went to Mulligan’s and had more than a few beers and when Jerry told Craig about the various offices, good looking secretaries, some who were not so good looking or nice and his many applications, Craig laughed.

“What’s funny?”

“Let me tell you how the system works,” Craig said. “The drill pipe is hollow. You know that from visiting the pipe yards when you wrote about it.  The bit on the end of it when it’s in the hole is grinding away at the rock. Ok, how does that pulverized rock get out of the hole, where does it go so more rock can be ground away?”

Jerry nodded, he knew, go on.

“The bit has holes in it. Down the pipe, hollow, and through those holes mud is pumped, it goes into the hole. This mud picks up the sand that used to be rock and floats it up on the outside of the drill pipe that’s spinning into the ground. On the way up the mud and rock gets pushed aside and packed into and seals the stratified rock layers and if any makes it back up to the surface reaching the top of the hole it is drained off through a thing called the blow-out preventer and a hose caries into this big open pond, a big tank beside the rig. I told you about that mud hole, right?”

“Right, a big pit of mud beside the rig.”

“It’s drained off and it settles. Now this is the part you may not know about. Listen up. The mud gets thin so to make it thick before its pumped back in the hole, it’s a cycle, they add a lot of shredded paper to it, do you follow me?”

“Of course, mud thickened with shredded paper is pumped in to seal the hole. I think i know where this is going.”

“I’m sure you do. Before it’s pumped back in it’s thickened up, and where do you think they get the paper to thicken it with?”

“Shredded job applications thicken the mud.”

“Bingo. Paperpaperpaper and other thickening agents too, but mostly paper.” Craig raised his cup of beer. “A toast! To paperwork, where would we be without it?”

“Our mud would be thin, nothing is worse.”

They drank in silence for a few moments.

“So where do i apply? Jerry asked.

“Nowhere. No one ever applies for a job on a rig. You go talk to a driller or the tool pusher, they’re the ones who do the hiring. That office just keeps records and sends out the checks.”

“I guess i wasted a day.”

“You sure did,” said Craig, “but you gotta start somewhere.”

As they played pool Jerry brooded over his lost day. He again saw the secretaries smiling faces and maybe they smiled too much when they gave him the application. Leaving the offices, had he waited at the door and listened closely, he might have heard the laughter over the sound of the paper shredder, a sound of grinding obliteration. His fantasies about the proper order of business were shredded with his applications.

What Jerry knew, or thought he knew, about business was blown out; these companies  were not just slovenly, but devious. He had worked very hard on the applications, agonizing over how far he should expand and exaggerate his experience. And his lists of references carefully collected, corrected and organized, all for nothing. 

Light illuminated the mind of the applicant. For the next two days he cruised pipe yards and company machine shops looking for a driller needing a hand. When he told the men he met he had no experience on a rig but was willing to work hard and learn they all told him they didn’t want a worm or a squirrel, a green hand. This began an educational period in which Craig schooled Jerry on every detail of the work, tested him, quizzed him, told him everything about the composition of the rig, named the parts, wrote out the lingo and anything else he could think of. Craig had grown up in Casper where he heard about rig work before school age. He had classmates who cared nothing for readin, writin and rithmatic; like their fathers or brothers, they were looking to work on a rig. 

Jerry decided, as they drank and talked, first thing in the morning, even hungover, he would find Roy Best. 

“This guy Best is a driller for Quade. Know anything about him?”

“No idea. Haven’t heard anything bad about him. That’s a good sign.”

“Hope he’s not an asshole. I can work for an asshole but i don’t like it.”

“Who knows, he’s just a driller. If you don’t like him you move on.”

Jerry said, “I’ve got to figure out which questions not to ask.”

Despite drinking eight to ten beers at Mulligan’s (an estimate; after six he lost count) Jerry had trouble sleeping. Nervous, he struggled to reassure himself all would go well even if he found no one named Roy Best. He lay studying the basement ceiling tiles imagining a tool room or standing in a bay in the smell of oil, solvents and diesel and a man saying, “Roy Best? Hey you fellas know Roy Best?” and a group of men coming around to smile and say Roy Best, no, Roy Best, never heard of him and then the first man saying, “I’ll tell you what, worm (or squirrel), i got your Roy Best right here” and grab his crotch. Everybody laughs, someone says “That’s the third fool this week looking for Roy Best.” So Roy Best is the Big Joke on a worm looking to get on a rig. 

Maybe you’d better stick to paper and ink.

He could, after all, call his parents in a real emergency, get money and for the rest of his life feel ashamed. When sleep carried him away at last he dreamed of Lillian and kissed her serious face, held her stout body and when his dreams went deeper he again saw Chris Nelson. 

Chapter 6        Chris Nelson

His first year in college Jerry’s parents paid his tuition, room and board included. They were optimistic enough to give him extra, “fun money.” When they saw his second semester report card (the first semester report was “lost somewhere”) they avoided making that mistake again. No more tuition, no more room and board; Jerry was on his own. His father told him, again, what he wanted he had to work for and this thought was foremost in mind as he looked for summer work. He made enough money for some expenses but not enough for the whole year. Reviewing his bank and college financial records, which Jerry sent them, his parents added the extra bump in funds to get Jerry back in. It was a very tense wait for the money. 

“Not again, Jerry,” his father said. “I want to retire before i’m dead.”

Having to work for a living was a form of penance for his neglect. The low grades resulted from a combination of Jerry having an interest in alcohol, women and too many subjects unrelated to his specific degree curriculum. At the same time more interesting than books or bottles, was Lillian. Intellectual stimulation is supposed to be primary in college and his father had warned him against losing study time by, buttering up some split tail.” Fortunately for him, Lillian was more than a good time. She knew about rocks, she paid attention, they found much to talk about with their clothes on. 

Jerry was lucky; in a college town swarming with students just as capable and experienced, he landed a job at a supper club south of town. It took a week of frustration but he had no choice. The job at The Plainsman supper club paid well and the owner/hostess and employees were agreeable. He thought they might not like their jobs on some days, but mostly they all loved the place. Jerry didn’t have to ask questions to know this; it was in the way they talked, in the general attitude. It was a place and job they enjoyed. 

Jerry had never earned a living before. It surprised him; he was required to listen to people he had, before then, safely ignored, never noticed or thought about. He was not as valuable as he thought he was.  

Looking for a job was mostly humiliation. In submitting his applications and talking to the owners and managers, he thought the people behind the desk or at the cash register or in the garage should instantly understand and agree; yes, he can learn to do any job given time and proper instruction. He started out thinking he deserved a job because he was who he was; available, capable, intelligent and willing, all plain to see, yes? Moreover, Jerry was a nice guy and smart no matter how a lot of old university baldies had graded him. The numbers they attached to his name, his academic record, were positively uncomplimentary. This, however, had nothing to do with Jerry finding the job at The Plainsman. From all those of whom he asked for employment not one asked to see his academic record. 

All this was why it felt so good when Betsy, accompanied by her tight hand man, the bartender at the Plainsman, asked him to come in, if he was available, to work in the kitchen the following evening. 

If you’re new to the small town that is the site of the state university, you need a map to find The Plainsman. It is a large building resembling a lodge on a plain south of town shielded from the North wind by a pine forest. Surrounded on the three unforested sides by out buildings, corrals, pens for beef and pork, a long, low storage shed, chicken coops and a large parking lot, the central building with steeply pitched roof faces south, the windows open to the sun.  From the highway looking east, you might think it’s a ranch. And it is a ranch. The sign arching over the entrance gate is small, lettered with surprising elegance and easy to miss. 

The Plainsman was open to the public although Betsy, owner and hostess, called it a club. She was rumored to be over eighty, tall and handsome with a long, tan face. She called herself sixty to seventy and most were inclined to believe her. Even on the frontier a woman’s age is a delicate subject. Betsy looked that young or younger, her manner was direct, she listened well and winter was her favorite season. The cook told Jerry the story; this young woman of an advanced age lived five miles east of the Plainsman in a small house in a fold of the prairie and in the winter she skied to work every day. In summer she rode a horse. 

Jerry paused to think about an old woman skiing five miles to work, ten miles total coming and going. Listening to the head chef, Anne, tell him all this as he scrubs potatoes at the slop sink, his hand with the brush slows. “How does she get home after work, at quitting time?”

Annie answers with a slow nod. When Jerry’s face registers no comprehension she says, “A shot of bourbon and she skis home.” In the snowless seasons (short in Wyoming) Betsy rides a horse.

‘I need to find a woman like Betsy,’ Jerry thought, ‘but fifty years younger.’

Before Frank, her husband for around sixty years, died, The Plainsman was the best and most popular place in that part of the country. Cheaper places opened over the years. The Silver Dollar north of town was popular with young people because o f the dance floor. 

Without Frank beside her rumors grew that Betsy would sell out. When she opened again after a five day period of mourning (paid days off for all employees), so many people came out just to see the lights on in the enormous dining room with oak-raftered cathedral ceiling and walls with western murals, customers could find no place to park and if they did the crowd at the door was so deep few got in before closing time. Some of them waited for hours. So many came to The Plainsman Betsy stayed open well beyond the normal closing time. Tradition endured. 

Rumors of the widow selling or closing vanished like the muzzle flash of a six gun. She was on her feet, at her best and if anyone was bold to ask, as many did with a smile and glance at the crowd, if she would sell she said, “Frank wouldn’t forgive me.” It was never said but well known that a small portion of Laramie society dined at The Plainsman whether they liked the place or not. 

The head cook at the Plainsman, Anne, small, energetic, age fifty, unrolled for Jerry as they worked, a complete history of The Plainsman, Betsy and more. At the Plainsman there were never any breaks, there were only long pauses. During one of these Annie and Jerry talked movies. 

“When they came out here from Hollywood to shoot movies my husband always got in,” she said. “He’s tall; they always like the tall ones for extras.”

“What films was he in, i’ll look for him.”

“He was in a lot of the ones with John Wayne. He knew the Duke, but a lot of people knew the Duke. He was easy to talk to, especially if you had a gun on your hip.”

“Let me write down the films and i’ll look for him.”

“You’ll never see him, he’s always in a crowd,” said Annie. “We go to the movies and he points out where he is oh right there at this place of that and i look and then the scene changes. You really have to know where to look.”

“And i don’t even know what he looks like.”

“He’s just a regular cowboy.”

“Is he really? Does he work on a ranch?”

“Not now, he did when he was young.” 

That first evening at work, on the six pm to two am shift, one of the young men working beside Jerry in The Plainsman kitchen was Chris Nelson. 

Most of the kitchen help were teenagers like Chris Nelson. They stayed in the kitchen through the evening; night and into the morning scrubbing, trimming and wrapping potatoes in foil, making onion soup and salads and washing dishes. These side dishes were unimportant; the principle interest was the steak prepared by Anne at her enormous gas stove. 

Jerry and the others, the kitchen help, worked on alternating nights. Two other teenagers working there looked down on Jerry and Chris. They had been working two months longer and were in training to bus tables and later work as waiters. 

Annie confided in Jerry who, being a few years older than the others, displayed more maturity, more even than her temperamental apprentice chef. This apprentice was simply too dramatic, enhanced by a superior attitude the source of (and reason for) mystified Jerry. The boy talked very fast and often muttered and when he did speak clearly he was peevish, silly or brooding. Few in the kitchen liked him but deferred to him because his parents where friends of Betsy. 

Annie was cool under fire. Often she said, “Enough drama, get back to work.”

Observing how Anne managed the kitchen staff Jerry said, “Anne, you drive this kitchen like a team of eight.” 

The work was continuous, fast and easy. Two of the waitresses (now called servers) who passed through the swinging kitchen doors were pretty, twin daughters, their mother also a waitress. To Jerry mom looked very good for a woman of forty. The twins were very pretty blondes in high school. Their mother was as attractive, indicating how good her daughters would look in twenty years. Still very fine women, Jerry thought. They were Betsy’s daughter-in-law and nieces. Jerry thought about them, it was soon after he met Lillian who was then only a “possibility.” 

But the twins were too young. Was their mother more domineering at home than at work? Her approval would be required. She would influence their thinking. Knowing that accommodation is necessary even in love, Jerry did not feel comfortable imagining what the twins or their mother would demand. Yet sometimes he imagined what they would be like together, their skin pressing his. Finding himself held by this dream, he had, sometimes, to lean in closer to the sink or turn away to hide the bulge of his excitement. Or when he came out of the throbbing dream alone in his room he would do what he had to do to satisfy his desire. Then he would feel listless and ashamed. After Jerry and Lillian became lovers all such problems vanished. 

Chris Nelson, of all Plainsman employees young or old was most agreeable to Jerry. They worked well together, not one attempting to get in the way of or dominate the other, neither contriving to make the other work more or take the blame for a mistake. They were the newest employees so all the others, feeling more permanent, could flaunt their higher rank. Chris and Jerry were scrubbing potatoes, plates and pans so they cared nothing for rank.

Chris Nelson had one ambition. He worked, he told Jerry, for money for a motorcycle.  He had it now and was paying for gas and insurance. After he got the insurance he would need, “leathers,” new clothes. Leather jacket, pants and boots were as important as gas. When asked if that was all he needed he said, “That and the road. Asphalt, man, it’s all about asphalt.” He was a kid on the go, the original kid a-go-go ~ to California most likely. He never got there.

Chapter 7     So Long, Been Good to Know Ya

After the investigation was over ~ almost two months, work at The Plainsman was back to normal, that is to say, tense, guarded, determined to live with it. Jerry eventually slept without nightmares and stopped looking over his shoulder at every stranger’s face. What happened to Chris Nelson hardened Jerry’s determination to “confront my destiny” or “accept the world as it is,” or “do what a man has to do,” as he wrote in his pocket notebook.

It was this notebook his friend Craig Schmidt picked up off the Union pool hall floor. 

“Is this your’s?” he asked.

“That is, it must have fallen out of my pocket.”

“Pretty deep philosophy you got there.”

“Yeah, it’s for my class,” Jerry said. It had nothing, directly, to do with Philo 101.

“A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do,” said Craig, “That’s Western Philosophy.”

“That’s straight shootin part.” 

Later that evening as they were drinking beer Jerry couldn’t help telling Craig where the notebook ruminations came from. It was about Chris Nelson. 

“I heard about that. Jesus, were you there when it happened?”

“No, that was my night off, but it could have been me. I was there the night before while i was working and the same people came around. That kid was a good kid. He was seventeen.” 

“Man that’s crazy. What exactly happened to him?”

Jerry Says Goodbye to Chris:     

  Chris Nelson parked his motorcycle behind The Plainsman near the two dumpsters where he could see it from a window of the kitchen. This was on the edge of the wide gravel parking lot that curved around three sides of The Plainsman. 

Of the two dumpsters one was for garbage and the other for food waste later fed to the pigs and chickens or composted.

Monday night the small green car drove around the building the first time. The supper club had closed half an hour before, the last customer had departed down the long road to the highway and the prairie all around was dark. The busboy was finished wiping the tables and Jerry was stacking dishes in the shelves in the back hall and afterwards would bundle the trash and food waste and carry it out.  Next morning the rancher who worked the livestock could slop the hogs. He was Betsy’s nephew.

Taking out the garbage and food waste was the last chore. Many times Jerry had taken out both bags, one in each hand down the stairs and through the door and down more stairs ten feet to the first dumpster. 

But this night Annie the cook looked out the window and said, “Someone’s stopped out there.”

“Call Floyd,” said Betsy. Floyd was the sheriff. Several people went for a phone. The bartender came in and said, “Where do you want me, Betsy?” His apron gone, a revolver quivered in the belt of his trousers as his large belly quivered.

“They’ve stopped but i can’t see the plates,” Annie said.

“Go watch the front door. Be careful to stay clear of the windows.”

(At this point in the story Jerry told Craig he thought these people were making a mountain of a molehill. That bartender with the revolver in his belt was really, are you serious?)

Jerry said, “I’ll go out and ask them what they want.”

“No you won’t,” said Betsy.

“Well, i’m going to dump the trash anyway.”

“You go out that door you won’t work here another minute.” Her face was hard as granite.

Jerry had thought of suggesting she calm down, they were probably only lost, but the ferocity in the old woman’s eyes stuck him and there could be no misinterpretation of that tone. All the people in the kitchen watched them. Jerry nodded and said, “Yes ma’am.” They waited, looking out the window at the car on the gravel, no one visible in the rolled up windows. 

By the time the sheriff arrived the car was gone. 

Jerry didn’t work the next night. He heard about what happened on the radio the next morning, went out and picked up a paper. 

Chris Nelson was outside with a bag of garbage in one hand, the slop in the other. He was turning to go back inside when the car rolled around the corner of the building. Chris turned to see the window open and someone called him. The others watched from inside and Annie the cook called and rapped on the window. Two yards from the car, having paused upon hearing Annie rap the glass, Chris turned back to the car and the man or woman in the passenger seat fired, hitting Chris Nelson twice in the chest. It was a large caliber pistol. One bullet destroyed the heart and half of the right lung.  A bullet ricocheted off the steel trash dumpster. The other bullet was also lost. The coroner said Chris was dead before he hit the ground. 

Two detectives came to Jerry’s rooming house and talked to him for forty minutes. He told them where he was the night before and all he knew of Chris Nelson, the people at The Plainsman and he didn’t believe his friend had any enemies. The kid was completely innocent; all he cared about were his wheels. He vaguely expected the detectives to follow the model seen in movies; to be good cop/bad cop types. These two were both bad cops. They even got mad at each other. In a way that is understandable. It’s a small town; it looked like a tough case that could endanger the community by compelling people to carry guns and be quick to shoot. 

For months the mood at The Plainsman was dark with forced jollity. The bartender was the most disturbed, felt although he got out the front door with his weapon out and fired at the car speeding away, there was no indication he hit it.

“That’s messed up,” said Craig. “All that kid wanted was the open road.”

It was now Jerry grew serious, determined to decide what kind of work he would do and get serious about it, and Lillian. Or serious about someone else. In his notebook he wrote; ‘I have to be conscious of Time.’ 

Chris Nelson was a victim Jerry would never forget. Jerry could have been Chris Nelson, so now in a vague way he had to get what his co-worker had missed; a full life.

As his fear and tension diminished Lillian felt Jerry needed her to come out occasionally and see him at work at The Plainsman. 

“What, and watch me wash dishes?” he laughed. She said nothing. 

“No really, Lillian, i work in the kitchen. I don’t come out in the dining hall at all. You would probably be wasting a trip.” 

 She remained silent and Jerry felt a grip at the throat. 

Though round bodied, short and plump, the body type one expects to sit and ooze a leisurely calm, Lillian could talk so fast Jerry didn’t understand her. She got so excited her words ran over each other. Or at times like this, silent, looking at him directly, Jerry wondered if he knew anything at all about her. 

Often Jerry was uneasy with Lillian among friends, not knowing what she would say or do. She was so determined and, he found no better word, bossy, though in other ways, as when they first made love, sweet and, with reluctance in using the word, delightful. 

Contemplating who she might be at heart, Jerry reflected on her opinions.  On a camping trip resting on a bedroll spread out before the campfire, she said people from the east coast were trying to take over the west. 

“What would they do to the west if they took it over?” Jerry asked.

“Dirty the air, buy up all the land.”

“Dig subways?”

“Probably.”

“Are people from the west coast trying to take over the east?”

“I seriously doubt that. Who would want a place like that? All the crime and dirt.” Jerry thought, she must not have a humor gland. In a psych 101 lecture the professor said one of the worst things one could say of another, aside from labeling them with an outright obscenity, is to say they lack a sense of humor. Jerry thought this of Lillian and then tried not to think it. 

“Is that what they teach you in your natural history classes at UW, that easterners are our enemies?”

The dancing flames warmed them just enough to make the cool breeze winding through the trees pleasant.

“No, not consciously an enemy, but they just don’t know what they’re doing. It is true that city living degrades a person’s sense of health-balance and that effects a sense of humanity. High levels of lead and asbestos and other pollutants do make school children score low on tests. The pollution makes people susceptible to primal behavior, bestial acts and absurd political ideas. Some go completely nuts. What’s in social media? A lot of those people are lunatics.”

“Oh, come on, Lillian, you can’t believe that’s the majority. I mean, there are crazy people, but most people are okay.”

“Well, that’s probably true. But people shouldn’t live like that, cut off from the world.”

“Yep, better to get near a campfire,” Jerry said. He pulled her to him and kissed her cheek and neck.

“People from big cities have brought down on themselves more than birth defects and cancer; they have changed fundamentals of humanity, they can no longer make rational decisions because they have so much toxicity in their bloodstreams and nervous systems.”

Lillian paused, her face hot in the firelight, thoughtful and fierce. She said,” In China there is a strange phenomenon, partly physical, partly psychological. The Chinese have gone so long without contact with nature that they as a people have lost an appreciation for wildness, for open, free, untrampled wild land. They long ago killed off most of the native wildlife, all their mega-fauna, so now their whole attitude toward nature is limited. They no longer see themselves as part of nature, of the cycle of life. They don’t even like dogs in China.” 

“That is truly deprived, and depraved. Can you imagine what Christmas would be like without those dogs barking out ‘Jingle Bells’ on the radio?”

“Come on, Jerry, i’m serious. A culture that dislikes dogs is way out of balance. Liking a dog is serious,” Lillian said. “I mean, the Chinese have no community with animals, with nature.”

“Of course i agree. If you don’t like dogs you can’t like anything else. Is that like what you want to say?”

“It is, but the creeping cutting off is slow and you don’t notice it. The destruction of wildlife in China crept up on them. After the wildness was gone it took biologists from other countries to go over there and teach them what they lost. We can’t let that happen here.”

“But what did they really lose besides something to stalk through the woods and shoot? Something pretty to look at?”

Lillian drew her face closer to Jerry and looked directly into his fire lit eyes. “I think you’re messing with me. Are you messing with me?”

“No, not at all, i want to know what you think, really. What value has wildlife besides being food?”

“Well, i don’t know what deeper value it has, but i know i would be really upset without it. I love them, just looking at them.”

She turned away to stare into the fire. Before sitting by the fire she had taken off a bracelet she often nervously spun on her wrist. The bracelet and her worry stone and keys were in her backpack in the tent. Without these playthings her hands fumbled and grappled with each other, the nails cleaning each other, the fingers intertwined and twisted. Her anxiety worried him.

“It is sad,” she said. “It’s like everyplace has gotten so crowded and dirty.”

This was the moment he came closest to truly loving her. She was genuinely concerned and caring and yet he thought people in cities and the Chinese do care about nature and are not so degraded. The world is a filthy place made so by people, not by there being too many people, but too many dirty people. 

Lillian and Jerry had met after a class and he was immediately drawn to her by her intelligence.   

 “Are you studying geology?” she asked him. 

“Yes, and you?” 

“I am, or paleontology, i haven’t decided yet. Maybe both.”

“About the same.”

“Oh no, not at all.” And she outlined the difference in the two scientific disciplines.

She asked him if he liked camping, hiking and getting out in the wilderness and was candid in telling him she had few friends in school and thought many of the other students were silly and frivolous and what were they here for if not to learn?

And so it started, not with the intent to establish a romantic relationship but with a common interest. When Lillian described the difference between geology and paleontology, which Jerry was aware of, and her explication (his word for it) was so vivid and passionate “the rocks came alive,” as he later said. Her enthusiasm for stones and bones first interested him. Later they got around to sex. 

Lillian was a practical lover. Alone for the first time, she aske him if he thought sex was a way of “getting it out;” a method of “expunging fluids, of relieving pressure.” 

Stunned, he said, “Sure, why not?”

“Okay then.”

At the same time her attitude was serious, her physique was comic. Her breasts were small and pointed to the sides so, as Jerry thought, they didn’t make good eye contact, and although their bodies would fit together well, her belly in passion ballooned out convulsively in a way that made Jerry want to laugh. 

Sex seemed not to surprise Lillian at all. As with all else, she was direct and definite after their first experience together, calling it “non-genitalial.” 

It started like this; both of them resented the prohibition of men in the women’s dormitory. This prohibition was an example of the university administration treating students like children.  One night Lillian sneaked him into her room. Sitting on her bed, they discovered they had the same physical interests. Once they started they didn’t want to stop so Lillian, ever practical, pushed him away at the important moment and said, “I don’t want to have a baby, but i’ll take care of you.” 

He also took care of her; they took each other in hand. 

Sex was not a completely new experience for Jerry. Her ease and confidence were very new to him. 

They continued this way for several months. They took showers together where their non-genitalial relationship flourished clean. When Jerry suggested they go further by using a condom she said, “Not yet, that’s a big change.” 

“I’m worried about the toxic residue in the spermicide and lubricating gel,” she said. “They add some nasty stuff to most condoms.”

Jerry assumed Lillian remained a virgin and their romance strictly non genitalial until Chris Nelson was murdered. It wasn’t forced or required, she just felt he needed her. Jerry was smart enough to accept her love without asking why she gave it. 

Love was not a distraction; what he learned in class Jerry brought home to Lillian. 

“Why don’t you get a job on a rig this summer? That’s good money,” Craig asked. 

Among job prospects Jerry and Craig talked about while playing pool, working on a rig outside of Casper was first. Jerry had been there on a reporting assignment ~ ‘A Looksee at Wyoming Industry’ was the title in the Branding Iron, the university newspaper, and thought about really doing the work, not just reporting on it. Later he could write about it and this time from a personal, inside point of view. Craig told him he could live for little rent at the Schmidt home, they had plenty of room. As it turned out, Jerry paid no rent at all. 

That coming summer, he told Lillian, he would work in Casper. They would be apart for only three months. 

“That would be a long three months,” she said.

“For both of us.”

She gave him one of her serious looks that made him wonder if he was telling the truth. 

The important issue was making and saving enough money to purchase the time to focus on his degree program. The summer could also be a cooling off period. They might be getting too serious. As a famous novelist who was married four times once wrote, “If you don’t think about a woman you won’t need one.” Jerry believed he could go the entire summer without a woman and any fluid release, if he didn’t think about one. Jerry saw himself as very honest, in touch with the truth, so when he began to think he might not truly love Lillian and that he had fallen out of love with her, if he ever was in love with her, he didn’t immediately say so for fear of hurting her feelings. And then he felt dishonest for keeping secrets. 

“And anyway,” he said, “we can get together on weekends.”

She persisted, wanted to live with him in Casper.

“And stay in a basement with a bunch of guys?”

“Oh, well that’s not good, but maybe we can get a place there?” 

“Sure, it’s only three months and could you give up your apartment here?”

“Okay, just promise me you won’t hook up with any of those oil field wenches.”

“Not a chance.”

They laughed and kissed. No, not that night, definitely no chance of that. 

Chapter 8        A Job of Work  

Jerry planned to drive out to the Quade Oil shop the next morning and talk to Roy Best, if he found him. The first obstacle to overcome was getting out of bed. 

Jerry and Craig had stayed up late playing pool with Craig’s brother and a friend who appeared with a case of beer and some whiskey to finish off. They finished it off. 

When Jerry woke the first thing he saw was a bottle of Standard beer on a corner of the ping pong table beside his couch/bed. The sailing ship and the lighthouse by the rocky shore in green and gold called him to the adventure. He slowly sat up and momentarily remained still until sufficient blood flow returned to the inside of his skull.  

That last empty bottle was a final triumph, for he drained it and placed it there before passing out. Now he recalled the effort and glorious success, as the bottle stood, a beacon of his victory. How his head met the pillow and the bed-roll arrived around his shoulders he remembered not.

In the warm early morning, in the dusty basement he muttered, “I have got to stop doing that.” Max was gone to work; Craig’s bed was empty and then Jerry noticed the sound of the shower.  He launched up with vigor and walked into the laundry room. There at the slop sink he drank water from his cupped hands and washed his face, running his wet fingers through his hair. The twisted up feeling in his stomach eased.

Back on his couch, he was writing a brief note of the events of the previous evening, the shreds of his memory still intact, when Craig walked in from his shower with a towel around his waist.

“Best thing for a hangover is a shower,” he said. “What are you writing, a newspaper story about getting drunk?”

“Oh hell no, i couldn’t remember enough about what happened anyway. I just keep track of the days generally.”

“That’s a good idea.”

Jerry showered; starting hot, ending cold as he had read that’s how James Bond preferred to bathe. Clean, he dressed and went upstairs to breakfast. Craig was there at the kitchen table before a cereal bowl, a spoon in one hand and the newspaper in the other. He did not look up as Jerry came in. 

“Going out to Quade?” Craig asked, his eyes on the paper.

“Right after breakfast, want to go?”

“Sure. Haven’t been to that part of town in years.”

They went to Quade Oil in Jerry’s truck and Craig sat in the parking lot reading the paper.  Jerry went looking for Roy Best.   

He started fuzzy-headed and nervous. The clear, crisp morning air of the parking lot cleared his mind as he walked into the yard the sight and sound of machinery moving and diesel crossing the air and canvas covered material and supplies stacked around the fences roused him with the prospect of work. His energy rose. It was sunny and warm and he felt himself capable.

Inside the tall metal building the thick smell of oil and solvents, burnt metal and acetylene floated. He said hello to a skinny man in a work shirt with an oval patch above a breast pocket with the name Milton in cursive lettering embroidered in it.

“Excuse me, Milton” Jerry said smiling

Milton looked at him and did not smile.

“Whereabouts can i find Roy Best?”

“Fuck if i know, ain’t my day to watch him.” As he spoke Milton reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a filterless cigarette by the butt end and put the other end between his lips. “Somewheres around here.” With a cigarette lighter he motioned in an arch, lighting his cigarette when the sweep of his hand returned. He lit the cigarette smoothly and snapped the lighter shut, turning away. 

‘Milton has been smoking a long time,’ Jerry thought and was glad the conversation was short. He thanked Milton, who had turned away, and looked around the shop for another face. 

Now at least Jerry knew Best was there, somewhere, or had been there. This is good luck, he thought, a good sign, if not now then later or on another day. A driller could be there at any time, no telling which tower he was working and it could take days to find him. Here is the beginning. 

Jerry wandered around the shop studying and smelling, thinking about what the equipment, some known, some new to him, was used for. 

“Excuse me,” he said to a man passing. “Could you tell me where i can find Roy Best?”

“You just found him.”

Jerry was stunned by the speedy answer. Roy Best was tall, lean and squinty. His lined face was tan, age fifty.

“Oh good, i heard you were looking for a hand.”

“Who told you?”

“A guy named Floyd, he is on the R L Anderson rig.”  

“Yeah i know that guy, big. Yeah, i’m looking for a derrick hand.”

“Oh well, i’ve only worked as back-up tongs-man.”

“I need one of those too.” 

As Craig would say, Jerry “revelationated” that Roy Best had been around awhile and knew who, what and when the job was all about; nothing was new to him. 

“That’s great if you’ll have me. I’ll work my ass off.”

Roy Best laughed, his face remaining tight. “Okay you’re on, but keep your ass where it is. We‘re on morning tower now. Here’s my address.”

As he spoke he picked up a piece of scrap paper and wrote his address and handed it to Jerry. “Be there at 6:30.”

“Why so early?”

Morning tower generally started at 8am.

“We’re on a rig outside Douglas, an hour drive right into the goddam sun every morning.”

Jerry read the address aloud to make sure he got it right, thanked Roy Best and left the Quade Oil shop.

Craig was asleep in the truck, his newspaper over his head. Jerry got in and left the door open and sat looking around the yard. He had to breathe in and out for a few minutes close his eyes and relax. I have a job! When a few minutes passed and he felt collected, he started the engine. 

The cough and sputter of the rattling engine woke Craig. He pulled the newspaper off his face. He looked at Jerry and said nothing. As they pulled out of the Quade parking lot he kept his eyes on Jerry for a time, then looked around the muddy gravel lot. They bumped through the gate and onto the street. 

He said, “You look mad, you must have found him and you didn’t get the job.”

“I did get the job. 6:30 am tomorrow.” After a long pause he said, “He was tough, but i talked him right into it.”

Craig laughed. “I think you might work out in this oil field business after all. Lying is about half the job.”

“I didn’t tell a single lie. Of course i didn’t tell the whole truth, either.”

“That’s it, that’s the whole ball of fat right there.”

“I’ll treat you to a beer,” Jerry said. 

“No, i’ll treat you, you earned it.”

They stopped at a drive up liquor store, bought a six-pack. Jerry wanted to find the address Roy Best gave him and be sure to arrive the next morning at the right place and on time. They found the house, small, ranch style, a  silver and turquoise trailer parked in the driveway. By that time they had finished most of the beer and drove back to the house. 

Jerry had stopped thinking of Chris Nelson. ‘Get real,’ Jerry thought, ‘tell yourself the truth. You can lie to everybody else but always, always tell yourself the truth.’’ He made a mental note to write down that sentence. 

‘Chris Nelson had bad luck, that’s not your luck. But something else can happen to you. You have to watch out and stay steady and that’s all you can do.’

Like an athlete in training, Jerry intended to have a good dinner, get plenty of sleep and be ready the next morning to make his first day on the job exceptional.

Craig had other plans. Craig had the next two days off and it was time to do something about it. They fixed hot dogs and a pot of chili at home, then went out to Mulligan’s, The Other Side and possibly several other places. As this drunk grew Jerry talked less and less. He knew how drunk he was and part of his mind came back to him in spots to say it was time to walk away steady and withdraw. About one in the morning he went out to his truck. He wanted to drive home to his couch but Craig was still inside. He could not leave his friend stranded. The last, clear part of his mind told him it was unsafe to drive.  He curled up in the cab of his truck and slept. 

Chapter 9    Play and Work

Shaking, rocking and banging woke him. His truck cab was shaking, the door and window by his head rattling.

“Hey, what the heller you doing?” someone shouted.

Jerry sat up. He swiveled up and around and looked out the window, failing at first to see through the foggy glass, seeing only the neon and street lights dancing in a haze. A face formed behind the sheen of lights on the driver’s side window and the mouth opened and closed and then opened and there were few teeth in it. 

“Why the hell are you sleeping?  Sleep when you’re dead!” the mouth shouted. 

The face was now clear; a pair of drunken eyes, a punched-in nose, long, curly blonde hair and a rubbery mouth.  

Jerry sat up and cried, “Who the hell are you?” a few inches from the glass.

“Get the hell out of bed!”

The other door, on the passenger side, flew open. Craig was there, he pulled a tire iron from under the seat. He said nothing.  He ran around to the other side of the truck. Jerry turned, looked behind as Craig circled the truck. The face from the driver’s side window was gone. Jerry stepped out of his truck and stood in the open door. 

He watched Craig run around the truck and look under it. No one was there, or in the truck bed. Craig looked under and around the vehicles parked near Jerry’s truck and came back panting and said, “I lost him, that’s one slippery son-of-a- bitch.”

The parking lot was crowded with shouting and glass breaking and moving vehicles; closing time and noise from all sides. 

“Flies bothering you?” someone said. Jerry turned and saw a woman standing beside Craig.

“Yeah, flies,” Jerry said.

“You ready to head home?”

“Yeah, been ready to head home.” Jerry climbed up, sat behind the wheel and closed his door. Craig shoved the tire iron under the seat. 

  “Let’s hit the road.”

Craig and the woman, the woman first, climbed into the truck. She was attractive though too thin. 

“We want to go to the river, i gotta place there,” she shouted directly into Jerry’s ear.

His response was louder. “Why don’t you get in a car and go?”

“Wait a minute, Jerry, we only need a ride there. Michelle has her car there and all.”

It was only a half hour drive

through the neighborhoods on the north side and then west until they came to the river and then on a dirt road along the river until the road ended at a house. It was more shack than house but, as Craig described it, “The lights and the toilet work and the roof don’t leak.” 

On the way there Michelle pulled out pint of vodka and they all drank from it.

“This piece of junk have a radio?” Michelle asked.

“I know you brought the vodka and thank you,” Jerry said. “But if you can’t be more lady-like Craig will have to carry you home.”

“Ladylike, imagine that, me ladylike!”

“Don’t fuck with me, woman,” Jerry shouted. Jerry slowed the truck. 

Michelle said nothing. Craig directed Jerry as to the roads to take.  At last he said, “Turn right into the dirt road there and up to the house.” 

At the house Jerry saw no other parked car. At the beginning of this drive, Jerry knew, as drunk as he was, he had to pay attention getting there so he could get back. Getting home to his couch was all he cared about.

His passengers tumbled out of the truck for the shack. Michelle said nothing, Craig said, “Thanks Jerry, i’ll see you tomorrow. Good luck on the job.”

“You too, Craig.”

They were gone. 

“Looks like you have your work cut out for you, old friend,” Jerry said as he watched them stumble into the house. 

Jerry returned to town very slowly, at first to stop from driving into the trees along the river and then creeping through town to avoid the police. He was too mad and worried to pass out, holding steady and missing the hood ornament he so often followed home. 

Not until he was turned around and through the trees and on city streets did his mind clear and produce a shaft, a witty barb he could have delivered as they left the truck; “Craig, don’t let her charge you too much!”

He said it again, shouted it, rolled down the window (the driver’s side window still worked) and shouted into the night, “Don’t let her charge you too much!”

But it was too late. ‘Shit, thought Jerry, ‘I’m always too late.’

And that was all he remembered until jolted awake three and a half hours later. His dreams had taken him to a place more familiar and comfortable than the Schmidt basement. When he opened his eyes in the basement he reached without thinking about anything to stop with a smack the piercing whine of the clock. He didn’t know where he was and was unsure of who he was. A form in the bed in the center of the room sat up. “Thanks for turning off the alarm,” the form said.

For a moment Jerry didn’t know who had spoken. Then he remembered where he was and Max, Craig’s brother. 

“I set it ahead and put it off over here last night, eh, this morning,” Jerry said.

Max was sitting up in the middle of the bed and looking up at the windows high in the walls.

“It’s still dark outside.”

“Go back to sleep. I’ll reset the alarm at your regular rime.”

“Why are you getting up? Wait, you got a job?” Max tuned toward him.

“Yeah, today’s my first day.”

 “Great, good luck with it,” Max said and turned back to his pillows, pulled the blanker up to his chin and said, “You buy the next round.” In ten seconds he was back to sleep. 

Jerry set the alarm to wake Max at his regular hour and crawled and fell off the couch. His stomach felt like it would tip over and spill acids and in a moment the sinews that connected his head to his shoulders might snap. As he showered he drank deeply from the nozzle and urinated as he drank. This gave his flimsy body weight and stability. He dressed and left the house quickly, taking several apples for breakfast and the bag of lunch he had prepared the day before. The thought that he had anticipated a need and made this lunch pleased him, gave him confidence. 

Chapter 10    Rig Time

On the way to meet Roy Best he bought a cup of coffee and had his thermos filled. The young woman at the Stop N Shop was very pretty and very heavy. She smiled. Jerry smiled, thanked her and wondering what she would be like; would she move, could he encompass all that heft? He thought of Lillian; her serious nature and jolly figure. He thought of Kathleen, a wisp, sensitive and delicate. 

At the house where the silver and turquoise trailer was chocked and leveled in the driveway of the small ranch style house, Jerry rattled his truck to the curb. He was early, it was six twenty three. Roy Best came out of the trailer silent and approached Jerry. His mahogany dark skin was as motionless as the face of an ancient bog corpse. Only his eyes moved. He looked at Jerry as if for the first time. A steaming cup filled his hand. 

“Good morning, Mr. Best.”

“Yeah.”

The air was clear and fresh. Jerry and Roy stood around the driveway quiet in the morning light. In the distance the mountain that bore the name of the city was slowly lit on top by the rising sun. 

Gradually the silence was broken by the ratcheting of a motorcycle growing unsteadily nearer and clearer. 

“That’s Danny,” Roy Best said. “He pushes that thing more than he rides it.”

“And he probably thinks it’s the best cycle in Casper.”

“Oh, you know Danny?”He looked at Jerry for a long moment and Jerry said, “He sounds familiar,” thinking of Chris Nelson. He looked in the direction of the clattering machine now rounding a corner. 

Danny appeared topped by a mass of floating, flashing blond hair. He wore no helmet.

Even from a block away Jerry began to feel he had seen that face before. As Danny approached he was certain. The long hair, flat nose and empty eyes and most of all the overlarge rubbery mouth with few teeth, was the face in his truck window the night before, the face hollering him awake at closing time. Craig, infuriated, could not run him down, so was he as dumb as he looked?

Never quick to anger, Jerry rarely held a grudge. Now this face and storm of hair on the racketing machine puzzled him. Even Danny’s serious expression was somehow funny, silly and pitiful. Although he was on time he apologized for being late. Roy Best smiled slightly and shook his head.

Roy Best drove a twin rear-wheel king cab diesel. They climbed in the truck and headed into the sun. If Danny didn’t remember the old Ford parked over yonder or yelling at the man sleeping in the cab five hours before, Jerry would not remind him. He began to think of the incident in the parking lot as tragic. Danny was young, Jerry’s age judging by the abundance of hair that a young girl would envy, but the face told a different story. Looking at Danny, it was clear he had run into a lot of walls. 

Before they were a block away from the Roy Best trailer Danny vaulted into describing all he could do on his bike. 

“Sure can hear it comin,” Roy Best said. 

“Yeah, it’s great.”

Determined to say as little as possible, Jerry fell asleep. He slouched down in the back seat, rested his head and drifted away.

Lillian returned to him. Her legs were against him, her small, pointed breasts looking away to each side. She rocked against him, her thighs flexing. She had captured him. He didn’t prefer making love this way, vaguely feeling trapped beneath her but she liked it and later he would have his way. With patience, waiting, serving her desires, he always had his way except the one way he didn’t care about anyway. About that one way she said, “I will never do that,” and the way she said never meant never. He was surprised, pleased because he did very much enjoy kissing her, and later recalled it as a moment when his respect for her deepened. 

It took hours to completely please her and just a few minutes for him. Please her, that is the secret, and she will always come back for more. Satisfying her took so long; he could review the fine points of a lecture or required reading in a textbook ~ thinking of rocks was appropriate for the activity, and if he slackened, softened, he opened his eyes, caressed her, watched Lillian revolving and heaving and his physical capability re-stiffened. Often he reviewed the history of Argentina (he loved his Latin American history class) from the brutal dictatorship of Bernard de las Casas to the brutal dictatorship and return of Juan Peron, rumored at the time to have brought home with him the hands of his late, lamented wife, Eva. 

The dream of Lillian merged with the dream of Peron and Lillian’s hands were on his chest squeezing and pulling. At that moment Jerry felt himself shaken awake and there was Danny’s face, his half empty smile and his eyes happy. Somehow this person had something to do with Argentina, the Pampas and Lillian. Did he know Lillian? Was he a gaucho?

“Looks like this kid was in a good dream,” Danny shouted. Roy Best glanced to the right, then quickly back to the road.

“Settle down, Danny.”

Jerry realized he had an obvious sexual interest.

“Ohshit, i guess so.” He sat up quickly. 

“This hand is ready for action,” Danny said.

“None of that on my rig, save it for the house,” said Roy Best. 

They had arrived at the rig. Roy Best and Danny were out fast, lunches and thermos in hand, and walking to the doghouse at the base of the platform, the drawworks rumbling, some faces of the other crew up on the platform watching them approach. Jerry got out of the truck. ‘What a way to start a job,’ he thought, ‘hungover and mocked by an idiot.’

His erection vanished, Jerry climbed out into the bright, clear air. 

Roy Best had parked his truck beside the rig on a plateau of dirt and gravel plowed up, shored up, packed and leveled. Beyond this level ground, the brown grass and sage brush of the prairie rolled, swelled and fell away like the sea. The air tainted with diesel fumes echoed with the sound of the rig’s drawworks motors.

Jerry, alert and nervous, aware that he had never done the work before, had never seen a rig before, hurried into the doghouse. Craig had briefed him on all the details and had been quite stern and complete in his instruction. Jerry was told but hardly felt like he knew what was most important. It was, in fact, a matter of life and death as the work was very dangerous. The only job more dangerous, Craig told him, was being a cop.

“And when you’re a cop at least you have a gun and can shoot back.”

Craig had made a list of the names of the parts of the rig, the routines and what to call everything. 

“Listen closely Jerry, keep your mouth shut and in a few days you’ll know all you need to know,” Craig told his student.

“Is that the way you did it?”

“Oh hell no, my uncle took me out one day, we went out a couple of times when i was a kid and then i got on a rig the summer after high school.” 

He told Jerry about the mud pits and the basic function of pumping mud, a very loose, watery mud, into the hole through the drill pipe. He even told him which jokes were old and new. Jerry took notes and reviewed them. They stood in the basement and pretended to put tongs on the pipe end coming out of the hole to break it loose and the opposite, clamping the tongs to hold the lower pipe in the hole while the lead tongsman throws the chain and tightens the connection; “makes up the joint.” Then to remove the slips, lower the pipe into the hole and pull up more sections of pipe, or to do the opposite; unscrew the section of pipe and stack it on the ‘alligator tails’ and store it in rows in the tower. Up on a small platform above the table, a derrick hand maneuvers the other pipe end into a slot. 

“It sounds complicated,” said Craig, “but once you see it, it all makes sense. Just be careful not to lose your fingers, or a hand. Or your head.”

“Someone got his head crushed?”

“Everything has happened on a rig.”

Now Jerry was on the rig. He was conscious of the danger and careful not to look too wide eyed, as if he had never been here before. He wished he had reviewed those notes one more time instead of reviewing the label on a bottle of Standard. He had a headache and drank some coffee as he changed into work clothes in the doghouse. The other crew had just worked the midnight to 8am tour (pronounced tower) and came in as Jerry was leaving to go up on the drill table. 

“You guys have an easy day of it,” one of the men said.

Jerry could not tell if he meant good or bad easy, sarcastic or sincere. Everything on this morning was like a dream. 

“They just finished tripping in,” Jerry said to Roy Best. “Want me to do anything in particular?”

“Take a look around. Shake the sperm out your pant leg.”

The drawworks, the drilling table, the tongs to clamp or tighten the drill pipe hanging from steel cables were all familiar although he had never seen them before. He stuffed his gloves, used and grimy, borrowed from Craig to make him look experienced, in his back pocket and walked back to look at the drawworks, four enormous diesel engines constantly running. These powered the lights as well as the draw works. He strolled down to the ground by the fuel tanks and around to the mud pit, about two acres of brown sludge divined by a low earthen dam. 

‘So this is where it all comes from,’ thought Jerry, ‘The driving force of modern civilization: oil.’

“The whole operation is very simple,” Craig had said, “it will only take a day before you are up with the best of them.” 

But now that possibility seemed remote. Jerry had nothing to do. By turns, he wished he was back in school, a moment later glad to be on the rig.

Immediately Jerry suspected this might, in fact, be a very hard day. How often things happen in exactly opposite, unforeseen ways. That is what is meant by the word ‘unexpected’ and it is often a source of the word ‘accident.’ And now he was involved in an activity he knew something about but did he know enough about it? In this situation there was an element of irony or a paradox and he had not been on the job or in school long enough to learn the difference.  

He said nothing. He needed a paycheck. Most of all, he needed adventure. Long ago he decided that was why he came here. He could not live in a library. Only a lucky few can live in a library and even they must sometimes look out the window and say, “I’d like to climb that mountain, or that tree, or cut it down.”

Because he was an exceptional person and exceptional people do hard things, he placed himself in the way of exceptional experience. At times he felt like a coward and he had to show he had courage. The nightmares waking him after Chris Nelson was murdered plagued him with the question. Make the most of each day; it could be your last, his logical daytime mind echoed. Confront what you fear most, at least see it and understand it. He had a sun mind, a bright, burning, illuminating mind and at night in dreams he had a moon mind; gray, airless, rocky and pitted with craters, unseen torments and hazards. That is what it said in the book on Zen philosophy and pondering the clouds in the classroom window, it was all fit and fascinating but here now he wished he had never read the damn book. 

Strolling back up to the table, looking around, into the noise from the drawworks and the diesel fumes, Jerry decided he would have to do his best, ‘a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do,’ he thought. ‘That’s western philosophy. I’ll just engage my goddam sun mind.’ The engines that ran the whole operation and made hearing difficult, at any rate, would make it hard to hear him scream. 

Roy Best shouted, “Last crew changed the bit and tripped all the way in, we’ll have a slow day.” 

“Great.”

“I want you to go down and check the spark plugs on the number three diesel, it sounds rough,” Roy Best told Jerry. 

‘Plugs on a diesel?’ Jerry thought. He said okay and went to check out number three. 

‘He must be suggesting i go kill some time,’ Jerry thought, ‘or he’s crazy.’ 

Behind the drawworks he met Danny and asked him for a cigarette. In a book he read that tobacco created rapport between man and man, even if you ask for a cigarette from someone. 

“I don’t smoke,” said Danny. “That derrick hand is working a double shift, he’s sleeping in the doghouse, i think he smokes.” 

“That’s okay. The driller sent me down to check the spark plugs on number thee,” Jerry said to Danny, “is he crazy or does he want me out of his sight?”

“Don’t matter, you can’t check them since they ain’t got them. So how about giving me a hand with these bags of seal?”

For the next two hours Jerry helped Danny cut open and dump bags of shredded paper into the mud mixing tanks, the two ponds divided by a low levy across the middle. In addition to this, a steel tank about eight feet deep and wide ran the length of the rig for the transfer from the mud pits to the pumps going into the hole. The mud coming out of the hole went into these pits. 

Danny and Jerry also strengthened the levy across the middle of the pond. It was a leisurely two hours, until Roy called from the drill table.

“Time to work!” shouted Danny. He was a man, Jerry reflected, who loved to work as much as play. He liked that in Danny, there was something worthwhile in this weird man-boy.

Roy Best had stopped the drilling block and was waiting for Danny and Jerry to throw the slips into the revolving socket, now motionless, in the middle of the drill table. The derrick hand, unseen until then, was up in his perch in the tower looking down at them.  Another length of pipe prepared by Roy Best and the derrick hand before he had climbed up the tower, would be dragged up the ‘beaver slide’ from the pipe racks below and screwed onto the stack in the hole. Jerry would back up the pipe while Danny threw the chain and cinch up the joint. 

Roy was looking up to the derrick hand in the platform. He went back to the drawworks control buttons and levers and shouted to Jerry and Danny “That idiot’s in place. Let’s go.”

Danny had told Jerry that Roy didn’t get along with the derrick hand and was forced to work with him. Jerry foolishly said, “Can’t he do that, just get rid of him?”

Danny laughed, “Yeah, you and me too. Then who’s he gonna get?”

After placing the slips they pulled up the length of pipe, clamped it on the elevators and hoisted it into place, slathered up the threads with joint dope and screwed it into the stack already extending a mile down into the earth. Thus they added thirty feet to it. 

This was where Jerry had to think and remember what Craig taught him and to respond in such a way that the others there would think he was experienced. It was easy. Everything made sense. He clamped his tongs on the lower pipe end and locked them. He leaned into them while Danny threw the chain and spun the joint tight. Then he released the tongs, let them spring aside and hang on the cables and prepared to remove the slips. The slips had handles on the sides of each of the three wedges hinged together that fit into the drill table out of which the pipe extended. These pieces of steel with handles fit neatly around the pipe and held it snug. The new pipe in place, the slips removed, the drilling continued. 

In two hours they did this again and in two hours once more. It was a very easy day and Jerry was lucky, hungover and tired as he was at the beginning of the day. By the end of the day he felt he knew everything there was to know about rough-necking, but he would never call it that. Craig had told him, nobody who knows anything calls it rough-necking.

At a few minutes before four pm the evening tower crew arrived and went into the doghouse to put on their work clothes. 

“Well, you made it through your first day,” Roy Best said over his shoulder to Jerry as they drove away from the rig.

“My first day, pretty easy,” Jerry said. Then he wondered if he had given himself away. Did they know it was his first day on any rig, anywhere, that he was a worm or squirrel? Roy had often given Jerry the squint eye, but he seemed to give the squint eye to everyone and everything. Danny squinted at him funny, too, but that was alright because now Jerry liked Danny. 

On the way home they bought a six pack and it tasted very good though Jerry was still nervous until they reached Roy’s house with the silver and turquoise trailer in the driveway. Roy didn’t fire him so he must have found Jerry qualified enough for the work, liar or not.  Nothing was said about his employment status, just, “See you in the morning.”

On the way home Jerry bought two sixes and prepared to celebrate with Craig and Max. 

At home, as he was getting out of the shower he heard them outside the door. He stepped out and toweled the water from his skin and pulled on his clothing. 

Then he stepped out into a clean, new world. 

Chapter 11     More and Better Days 

Craig and Max had arrived and were drinking Jerry’s beer. There were two other men with the brothers all sitting on the beds and Jerry’s couch in the basement. Jerry didn’t care if they were drinking his beer or sitting on his bed. He felt strong and fresh.

“Did you get home from Michelle’s without any trouble?” he asked Craig.

“No, she didn’t give me up until five. Had a nice sunrise walk home,” said Craig.

“She must have worn it down to a nubin.”

“You bet. She was high on mescaline, she was a mescaline machine.” 

One of the men said, “You went to Michelle’s place on the river? Everyone else has been there with her, did you have to stand in line?”

“How was your first day, Jerry?”

Conscious of the possible job-related importance of the two men there Jerry was nonchalant. “A breeze,” he said. “Midnight tower had just changed the bit and tripped all the way back in when we showed. In eight hours we added five sections.”

Leaving it there, Jerry observed the reaction of the two strangers. Both nodded and smiled, knowing what an easy shift is.

The tall one said, “That’s as good as it gets.”

Craig directly introduced the two; Hurley and Jake. Hurley, taller and ruddy, thanked Jerry “for leaving your beer where i could find it.” Jake was smaller, more pale but not by much, physically compact and silent. They drank beer and played pool for an hour and when Jerry lay down on his couch to close his eyes for a few minutes, he said, before we go celebrate,” and fell asleep. He didn’t wake when they left the house. The last thing he remembered was someone saying, “We’ll get you up if anyone wants to play ping pong.”  

 Max snoring woke Jerry. He thought for moment it was Lillian snoring. She did snore gently, wheezily, not so loud. Max’s snorting rattled the windows. Jerry thought, ‘has Lillian’ throat started to fill with thick phlegm?’ Jerry sat up quickly. The room took shape in shadows and light from the basement windows soon revealed the lumpy domestic landscape. Beyond Max, Craig slept in silence. 

Jerry loved the morning, the air and his thoughts new and clear. In one hour he had to be at work, so he got up and stretched, quietly went upstairs and ate two bowls of cereal (having missed dinner the previous evening), fixed a sandwich and left the house as quietly as possible. 

Again he stopped at the Stop N Shop and filled his thermos. The pretty clerk smiled again and he wondered about her and being involved here with her and Lillian, two women, one in each city. But no, that pretty clerk would never go camping. Considering her heft, they would have to haul an enormous load of food, under refrigeration as she clearly loves ice cream, and the trails trodden would have to be short and all downhill. 

As Jerry rolled through Casper streets touched by the dawn, he also saw the hills he and Lillian had hiked through and the various places along the trail; niches in rocks or open places between clusters of trees where they stopped to hold each other and eat raisins and peanuts. 

   Turning into sight of the Roy Best trailer parked in the driveway, the camping dream vanished. 

On this second day Jerry was calm and confident working for Roy Best and Quade Oil. On the way to the rig this time, they stopped at a house on the edge of Douglas to pick up a new hand. 

Roy Best stopped his truck in front of a long, wood frame, two story house with a huge yard. Immediately a small man of about thirty came out with a lunch pail and a cooler. 

Danny said, “Great, he’s got the cooler.”

Roy Best got out from behind the wheel, cranked his seat forward and let the man get in. This was Jim Peck, as Jerry would learn, the new derrick hand getting into the backseat of the truck with Jerry.

“I’m Jerry.” He extended his hand.

“Glad to meetcha, Peck.”

“That your first name?”

“Close enough.”

Roy Best turned to talk to Jerry. He said, “Peck here doesn’t like to talk about anything but beer and junk.”

As Peck smiled and shook his head, Danny laughed.

Eventually Jerry would learn the derrick hand worked to get enough money to open an automobile junk yard.

“There are so many good parts of a car that people just throw away,” he said when Jerry asked. “It’s not the whole car that’s broken, just one part. The rest of the car’s still good and all you gotta do is take ‘em apart and label the parts and put them on the shelf. People pay good money.” 

Danny from the front seat said, “And we know there ain’t no bad money.”

Jerry’s second day was easier; he was relaxed, not hungover. They were busier adding more pipe to the stack but staying busy helped pass the time.   

Only Roy Best smoked cigarettes so Jerry was not inclined to ask him for one and test the author of the theory that tobacco builds rapport between men. 

At the end of the day, on the way back to Douglas, Jim Peck opened the second compartment in his cooler and handed Jerry a bottle of beer. The bottle had a strange, hand drawn label.

Jerry too k the bottle and read the label. A crudely drawn figure of a nude woman filled the frame above a name, Honeybutt Pure. Jim Peck said, “Brewed it myself.” 

Danny turned in the front seat and said, “It’s great stuff.”

“Should be, i been at it long enough.” Jim reached out, an opener in his palm, and opened Jerry’s beer with a twist.

“Well, it’s cold anyway,” Jerry said and took a drink. The beer was strong and good. Roy Best did not drink. Too soon they were in Douglas. Jim took the empty bottle from Jerry, put it back in his cooler and did not offer him another.

The beer appeared to cheer up Jim Peck until they turned a corner and stopped at the curb. In the wide open lot of grass beside the long, wood frame, two story house, two women were throwing a baseball back and forth. One of the women was tall and stout, dressed in white; the other was small and shabbier. When Jim Peck saw them he shouted, “Hey, what the fuck is going on here?” 

Roy Best was out of the truck cab pulling the driver’s seat up to release his derrick hand. Jim leapt out and started walking toward the women.

“Get back in the house. What the hell are you doing out here?”

The women made no reply. The tall one in white turned and fled into the house, the other disappeared through a hedge. 

Jim came back to the truck to get his lunch and cooler.

“Jesus Christ, what the hell is that woman doing? Shit!” None of the men in the truck spoke. Jim with his hands full said, “See you tomorrow,” and turned toward the house. 

They rode on in silence toward Casper. 

“That guy brews good beer,” Jerry said at last.

“His old man was a bootlegger,” said Danny.

“He only drinks beer,” said Roy Best. “Can’t stand moonshine, he says, because it makes him dizzy and that ain’t good for a derrick hand.”

The next day on the rig there was almost an accident. In connecting a new section of pipe Jerry almost caught his foot in one to the slip handles. He jerked his foot loose just in time and then behind him heard Roy Best shout, “Keep your feet clear!” The same thing came close to happening again a few hours later. Jerry then made sure to keep his feet back from the spinning table with the revolving slip handles. An impression remained; did Roy Best try and snag Jerry’s foot? It looked that way, like the boss had lurked and waited for the chance, then jerked the table around and tried to catch his foot. It wouldn’t happen again, Jerry had learned his lesson, but did Roy Best try to teach him or was he cruel and trying to injure him? 

This provided Jerry with much later contemplation. If the boss is a sadistic bastard and wants to injure men on his crew, a drilling rig is a good place to find a victim. 

Chapter 12     Time Off

Every night or morning Lillian called. She was looking for a summer job which, in a college town, a meager labor market like Laramie, is a struggle. But she was determined to make money though she didn’t need it. “If you have to work i have to work,” she said. This comforted him and also made him uneasy, thinking she might be too dedicated or was trying to prove something. If she were less severe, less serious about everything, Jerry would believe her sincere. Did she see a potential husband and father in him, a partner in the making of a home and family? Jerry hoped so and welcomed the prospect, but was that all she wanted? He loved Lillian; sex fun started it and then she comforted him when Chris Nelson was killed. Except one day she said, “You’re a keeper,” her face too serious. So he’s a keeper, a good catch and ready for the filet blade.   Yes, the sex is good, the best, but she is the assertive partner. Can he trust her?  

Some days on the Quade rig were slow and Jerry had time to think of Lillian. At other times it was “balls to the wall” without contemplation. The steel punching down into the stone took his mind away; he became muscle, a physical force.  

At the end of the first six-day week with Quade Oil, Jerry was ready for days off. Remembering the night under the moon when he and Lillian ran naked through the woods, he packed his camping gear. Now in the summer the air would be warm and her skin so smooth. 

“Has anyone ever written a song called ‘Moonlight Love’?” he asked Craig.

“Not that i know of, you might have to do that.” then Craig looked at him for a long moment as if to say, “Why do you ask?”

“I just might do that.”  Jerry hoisted his backpack onto the bed of his truck and went into the house to call Lillian.

“I got a job,” Lillian told him, “I’m working this weekend.”

Jerry met her at work. He arrived in time for lunch at the Country Kitchen. Lillian brought his sandwich and stood by the table. Level with Jerry’s eyes on her frilled apron was a drawing of a hen wearing a frilled apron upon which a tiny hen wore a frilled apron etc.   

“They don’t approve of us sitting with customers,” she said. “I’m off in a few hours.”

That gave Jerry time to think and roam around town. First he went to the rooming house where he used to live in an attempt to find old neighbors and friends. They were all gone, moved out. The landlady, Mrs. Jensen, said, “Auch, they are all gone now, they come back in fall, i think.” 

In response to Jerry’s question, “Any idea where they got off to?” the gray haired woman probably three times Jerry’s age or more looked puzzled and shrugged, “I am only landlady here.” Jerry thanked her and left, wondering if Mrs. Jenson remembered he had lived there. 

A bookstore across the street flashed with a neon sign over the door. The sign being neon was suggestive enough but the name, ‘Books-a-go-go’ sealed the scorn of the rooming house philosophers. This even though textbooks were sold in Books-a-go-go, including classical works of literature side by side light reading entertainment. Brazen Temptress and heavier pornographic volumes, for example, filled shelves one aisle away from In Praise of Folly and Spinoza, a fact often noted. This gave the guys in the rooming house across the street plenty for speculation. Obvious to all was the depth of their existential angst. A frequent moan: “I’m feeling some angst and at the same time, ennui,” 

A frequent response: “Have a beer, wash it down.”  

The man who ran Books-a-go-go was young ~ just over thirty, smoked a pipe, had a PhD in European Literature and believed the letters of Theo and Vincent Van Gogh stood the equal in genius of any letters ever written. Reading was what he did all day sitting behind his counter. Jerry sometimes thought this could be an ideal job for him if he didn’t have to sit so much. 

He drove out on the prairie, passed the old jail house where Tom Horne was held before his execution, stopped on the roadside with nothing but the wide open tan rolling grassland around him and walked. Calculating the time he had before Lillian got off and he was to pick her up, he walked toward the mountains. In half the estimated time he returned. When he arrived at the Country Kitchen she was standing by the front door in her bright waitress dress now without the apron. 

On the way to Lillian’s apartment they made plans. He barely heard them for thinking of getting her home and onto the bed. She was to work the next day but the day following she had off. This was the day Jerry was due in Casper to work the ‘evening tower’ at Quade from 4pm to midnight. He had to be at the Roy Best trailer at 2:30. They would spend most of the morning together, but there would be no camping. 

At her apartment the first thing they did was take a shower to remove the drive from Casper to Laramie and Country Kitchen odor from Lillian’s skin. They made love in the shower and several more times for the next hour, then lay around reading and talking. 

Jerry remembered seeing an announcement that an alternative film would be shown in the Student Union.  

Lillian had no interest in Cuba, but went to see the film. As language was one of his interests, Jerry wanted to hear Spanish.

At the door to Union Hall where the film was to be shown, a man handed Jerry a leaflet and said, “This film coddles the communists, our enemies, these are the facts.”

Jerry thanked the man and they continued walking, but at the door Lillian paused and asked him, “are you sure you want to see this thing?”

“Why not?”

“It might be subversive.” 

“That it might be,” said Jerry. “All the more reason to see it.”

Lillian said nothing.

“I don’t know, that guy looked weird, so you think we should trust him?”

“He did look weird.”

“We’ll see the film and if we feel it coddles communism, we’ll thank him.”

The film was a satire on government beaurocracy; a loyal revolutionary who working many years in a factory producing busts of Fidel Castro is sucked into and killed by the machine spitting out the busts and is soon buried. His family then discovers his ID card is buried with him and without the card they can’t receive his government benefits. The deceased must be disinterred and the card retrieved. But no disinterment can be done, according to regulations, for two years. By that time the card, like the lost, beloved one, will have deteriorated. The family must dig up the patriarch themselves secretly, at night. The transformation of this average, normal, desperate family ~ mother, sons and daughters, into grave robbers is where the fun begins.

Leaving the Union, Jerry had planned to tell the man who warning them about the communists that he had nothing to fear, but the man was gone. 

“Too bad we missed our chance.”

“You gotta seize the opportunity when you get it,” said Lillian. She looked at Jerry, he thought, very directly. 

Over the next two days Jerry thought it might be a good idea for Lillian to come up to Casper and live with him, now that he had a job and could afford his own place. They would not have to live in Craig’s basement. But Lillian said, “Well, now i have this job, we can let it go until September. Why not stick to the plan and make the money you need.”

“I must have satisfied you,” Jerry said, “But you know you’ll need me again soon and i won’t be here.” 

She laughed. “You have satisfied me, but not completely. You better get busy and finish the job,” she said and gave him that direct look again.   

As often happened, Jerry was frightened and thrilled by the look on her face. 

Chapter 13       The Road Home is Never Straight

Jerry stayed until the last minute to return to Casper. The one thing he did not calculate was the time lost when he slid off the road near Orin Junction. 

Some cattle trucks have a long, horizontal hatch on the rear of the bed, down low, and should the trucker think too much bovine fecal waste has accumulated in his rig he can open this long hatch and the manure will slide out onto the road, a long, slippery tongue of fertile waste. It was on a bend in the road that Jerry, driving too fast, hit a newly deposited patch of offal and spun off the road. He was lucky, the roadside borrow pit was shallow and he didn’t roll, but he was off at a steep angle and his tires spun uselessly; he could not get out on his own. He had to wait and it was half an hour before a jeep driver with a winch stopped to pull him out. 

Jerry was pacing back and forth on the shoulder without a plan when a jeep pulled up and honked. A lanky form bounced out of the driver’s seat and strode toward him. 

“Hello Tim, how’re you doing?” Jerry cried. 

The man stopped and looked at Jerry, then said, “Hey, it’s you, what’s going on here?”

“Slid off the road, someone put me in the shit for real.”

“Wow, it does stink around here.”

They had not been close friends in school. Jerry thought Tim was odd because he had lots of gold and silver in his big smile, yet he did not maintain good eye contact. In fact, one of his eyes was higher ~ or lower ~ not on the same level ~ as the other. This gave Tim’s face a leaning look, and under one eye, to deepen the mystery, was a small crescent shaped scar. How getting this scar might have pitched his eyes out of level was never clear. 

“Lucky you didn’t get deeper in the shit,” Tim, smiling all gold and silver, said.  He turned back to his jeep and at this moment Jerry noticed the winch on the front bumper of the jeep. As the jeep rolled toward the front bumper of Jerry’s truck Tim put his arm out the window and gave a fist pumping of the air and shouted, “Hook ‘er up!”

A few yards from the front of Jerry’s truck the jeep stopped and the winch began to grind. From the cab Tim cried, “Pull her out and hook ‘er up!”

Jerry did as he was told, leapt into his truck and put the transmission in neutral and soon man and truck stood on the stinking shoulder of the road. It was quick work and soon Jerry was reaching into his pocket.

“Twenty enough for the job?” he said with the bill in his hand.

“Keep your money.”

“Really?” Well, here’s a piece of luck, Jerry thought.

“Naw, happy to help.”

“Lemme buy you a beer.” 

“Not on the road, man.” Tim looked away into the distance. “And i gotta go. But you can do this for me, you can get a better piece of junk to drive around in.” Tim laughed. He made no eye contact.  

Jerry paused, wondered if this was an insult or rough joking and chose to laugh. 

All in all, Jerry thought when back on the road, old Tim made it easy for me. 

He stopped to call Roy Best. No one answered. He left a note on the trailer door, thinking he might drive to the rig, but he was tired. 

“You probably lost your job,” Craig said. “You’ll know tomorrow.”

The next day Roy Best said, “I got me another hand.”  

No motorcycle with Danny aboard stopped at the curb. 

“Where’s Danny? What happened to Danny?” Jerry asked. 

Roy Best looked at him for a long moment and said, “Same thing happened to you.” As Jerry drove away, a truck with several men arrived.

At home in the basement Craig said, “That’s the way they work, if you can’t cut it they get another hand. It costs the company a lot of money because they have to have guys work a lot of doubles.” 

“I guess it’s back to cruising the machine shops.”

“I’ll give you a list. You might try Valentine (the shop for Craig’s company) too.” 

 “I’ll go anywhere and everywhere.”

Jerry did not call Lillian with the news of the lost job. He didn’t want her taking the blame by spending their last hour together making love. He was glad his calls were, for two days, unanswered and then he started worrying about why she didn’t answer.  

A few days later, standing around The Other Side with a bottle of Standard beer in his hand Craig said, “You could get on my rig. I think we’re going to lose a tongsman.” 

 “When?”

“Hard to say. You met them, goofy fuckers, we call them Mutt and Jeff. Remember them? 

“Those guys we were drinking with the other night, are they on your rig?”

“One of them is and the other one maybe won’t be,” said Craig.

 Two days later Jerry got on Craig’s crew. They were working the midnight tower and left for the rig in Jerry’s truck at eleven pm. 

The other men on the crew were Johnny Hart, a small, intense derrick hand, and Len Thomas, the driller. They met at a shopping center parking lot and got into Len Thomas’ four-door sedan. 

On the way to the rig none of them spoke. Long ago Jerry had learned to keep his mouth shut and, if spoken to, answer short. Johnny Hart was missing one front tooth and wore a short brimmed leather hat. Safety regulations required him to wear a hard hat and he did wear it but only in his small perch midway up the derrick. He left the hard hat up there and at the end of the tower when he rode the elevators to the drill table he wore that short brimmed leather hat pulled halfway over his forehead.

Len Thomas was short but wider than Johnny Hart and as grim looking as Roy Best. This worried Jerry. Craig told him about Thomas. 

“Yeah, stony-faced but guess what he did, he took the other driller’s glove you know that he left behind in the drill shack, and he cut short a couple of fingers and then spray painted the cut off finger ends red and put the gloves back.”

“So you suppose he’s got more slack than Roy fucking Best?”

“Well, i wouldn’t count on that, either.”

“I guess i’ll have to be on time no matter what.”

“Good idea.”

“Well, just so i can stay on,” said Jerry. Craig had got him on the crew for a dollar more an hour and Jerry had calculated that working the rest of the summer would get him tuition, room and board for almost his entire next year. He would take a part-time job anyway, since now he had a woman, but for this summer he was intent on money and reaching the goal; paying for school. And he decided the first place he would ask for work would be The Plainsman. He felt closer to the supper club since the death of Chris Nelson, he knew all about the place and what happened there and in a way he did not fully understand, he owed them something; Betsy, Annie and the rest of them.

Driving north of town, they turned off the two lane road, crossed the metal grill of a cattle guard through a gate and onto a gravel road. The headlights of Len Thomas' car picked out clusters of antelope eyes bright red as they ran off into the darkness. Len Thomas slowed down until they passed and then sped up as they faded into the night. Craig, who had fallen asleep, woke on the jittering washboard road. Jerry could not sleep and wondered how Craig could sleep or if, in fact, he was pretending to sleep to cut off everyone and simplify his relations with society. Jerry found it more relaxing with the other men when Craig was asleep. Craig was too clever for them; they were uncomfortable with someone who was always on the lookout, always alert and thinking, planning, possibly scheming. 

Close to the rig Len Thomas broke the silence by telling his crew about how Max, a driller on another crew, shot an antelope going back to town. He got a nice big buck with one clean shot and only had to carry it fifty feet or so to the car. One of the young guys on the crew helped him. The older ones laughed and said they didn’t want to be an accessory to poaching. But then when Max went to lift his fresh meat into the trunk of his car he threw out his back. He couldn’t even drive. They took him to the hospital (Thomas called it a ‘horse pistol’) and there he stayed for the next few days. Max claimed he was injured on the job so the company health plan picked up the tab and the company gave him a small disability stipend.  All for poaching. 

Jerry, who had heard the story before, pretended to be surprised by it.

Later Craig told the rest of the story; while Max was in the hospital his wife ran off with one of the men on the crew, a close friend who had been most helpful dragging the antelope to the trunk. And this guy not only ran off with Max’s woman, he got the antelope meat too. You win some, you lose some. 

Between trips into the hole Craig and Jerry had plenty of time to talk. 

“Yeah, one time that old fucker (Len Thomas) handed me an ax,” said Craig, “and told me to follow him to the outhouse. I asked why and he said, “If i shit a bear i want you to kill it.”

The outhouse was perched on the edge of the site which was four or five acres on a raised and leveled berm beside a mud pit and beyond and all around it the prairie and rolling sage hills. There was a story going around, Craig said, that someone backed into that port-a-john and knocked it rolling down the hill while a man was in it. 

“Who was it, who got rolled in the shitter?”

“Nobody knows,” said Craig. “Probably didn’t happen at all. If it really happened, the guy’s not around now for sure.”

“Yeah, that’s the kind of story people like to tell. They stand around between connections looking out at the country and imagine that kind of stuff.”

On that first morning tower (midnight to eight am) they added six sections of pipe to the stack. It was an easy morning. Jerry watched the sun rise over the sage brush hills. 

At the end of their shift they changed their clothes and headed for town. In town Jerry woke Craig and they followed the routine Craig said was the best for working morning tower; breakfast and a few beers, maybe some pool. After being awake all night it is best to stay awake for a few hours so as to drain off the last of the work energy, get good and tired so you can sleep all afternoon no matter what and wake just a few hours before the next shift.  A few beers would help getting to sleep in the light. What could be better for a man who has worked hard than cold beer and sweet sleep?

Jerry thought of Lillian; well, now i can call her when she’s at home.

They had breakfast at a cafe and the waitress had a polyester dress and cotton apron just like Lillian’s. Jerry thought Lillian was probably wearing her own apron at that moment. 

“This is the end of this week’s money,” Jerry told Craig. “There will be no drinking and whoring for me this week.”

“That’s rough when you run out. Did you spend it all on the little woman?”

“Mostly,” said Jerry, though it wasn’t true. He had money, he was just not going to spend any more until he had enough for school, but he couldn’t tell Craig. His friend was cavalier about money and time, especially when there was beer to drink and pool to play and Jerry was too weak to say no.  Jerry knew he had to take a hard line for his education, his career and his woman. Lillian was not the type to accept an indecisive, weak-willed man. 

Jerry left school, he told some of his friends, because there wasn’t enough action, pure physical action there. He needed experience in the oil fields if he was to understand geology “all the way into the earth.” He was adventurous, but also needed the money. Who does something just for the money?  He emphasized his need for adventure and if the money comes with the thrills, that’s great! There’s no harm in using a little fiction to make your life more interesting. 

Getting an education and a good job with it was why Jerry went to college. At the same time, more women are found at the University of Wyoming than anywhere else in the state. The big question, the only question, was what will he do with his time and life, work in the world or study it? Either way, he needed money. At the moment, making money in the oil fields would serve any purpose. 

Craig was definitely going back to school. He was studying business accountancy.  “This is a great job,” he said, “but you can’t do it for long. You can lose an arm and a leg, really,” his face brightened as if he had discovered a new cliché.  “And you can really lose  an arm and a leg.” He laughed. “No, the money is good but it’s not good enough.”

The rest of the week was dry. In the morning off the rig they had breakfast and went back to the house, to the basement, without beer. Jerry successfully avoided Craig when his friend wanted to go to The Other Side or Mulligan’s. This was progress, and he was getting bored with it. 

Chapter 14   Doubles 

On a night when work slowed Len Thomas found Jerry looking at the drill chart. He showed Jerry how to follow the speed and depth of the bit.  

“This is the strata of rock the bit is going through?” he asked the driller. 

“That’s it,” Len Thomas said and pointed to the bottom of the page. “We have about a thousand feet to go.”

“Then what happens?”

“What do you think?”

“Yeah, that was a dumb question. We pull out.”

“We pull up and pack out after the casing crew comes in. The pump crew follows them and we go west to another site on the rim.”

“The rim of the dome? I studied this in school. It’s the teapot dome, isn’t it?”

“That’s what they call it. This site is for a water pump station. They pump water under the dome and the oil comes up to the top, floats on the water up to the higher elevation and a higher pump jack.”

“How long will it last?”

“Nobody knows. If the price of gas keeps up it will last.”

“I mean,” said Jerry, “how long will the oil keep coming out of the ground? How deep is the lake of oil down there?”

“Oh hell, i don’t know. Don’t really care; i got my trailer paid for,” said Len Thomas. 

“I hope i can make enough to pay for school,” Jerry said.

“Are you going back in September?”

“I think so.”

“That’s good. That’s the smart way to go.”

A small photo of a woman standing on the stairs of a trailer was stuck to the wall above the chart. The first thing Len Thomas upon arriving at the rig was to wedge the photo into an edge of trim above the rig monitor on the watch table. At the close of the shift he took it down and put it in his pocket.

“That your trailer there,” Jerry asked.

“Yep, it’s all i need.”

“And the lady, don’t leave her out,” said Jerry. 

Len Thomas said nothing and continued to say nothing until Jerry understood that the lady would not be a subject of discussion.

“I was looking at this,” Jerry hastened to say. “At the depth we are now the dinosaurs are pretty old already.”  The movement of the needle drawing a middle line on the unrolling scroll of the chart was so slow it was hard to see it. “And we won’t drill deep enough to get to the beginning of them, will we?” 

“Couldn’t tell ya. Nobodies got a reason to go that far.” 

“And we’re right on the top.”

“Right on the top, the thinnest layer,” said Len Thomas. “That’s us.”

In the middle of a six day work week Jerry pulled his first double.

 When Len Thomas saw the crew arriving just before eight am to work the morning shift or ‘daylights’ he sent his crew off the table. While he conferred in the doghouse with the new driller the men came onto the table. They were a man short. 

“Hurly’s on a drunk or locked up,” the first man said. They needed one of the men from Len Thomas’s crew to work a double, to stay working for another eight hours. This would be fine if the double arrived at the end of the work week but if, as now, in the middle of it, the one who worked the double would have only eight hours to return to town, sleep a few hours and return to the rig when the next tower begins. And if Hurly was not sober or free by the next day or no new man found, another double might be necessary. A hand could earn a lot of overtime pay by working one or many doubles. He could pay his way through college, buy a trailer or pay for a dandy coffin.

Hearing this, Jerry volunteered to work the double. He knew what was involved and agreed quickly because for the next eight hours he had nothing else to do. He felt energetic and by working he would avoid hanging out with a beer in his hand for god knows how long.  

Seeing the other crew show up gave all of them the quick step. Normally Craig would seize the opportunity to make more money, this time he hesitated. Why? He and his brothers were supposed to go out to their family property west of town and meet with the sheep man leasing it for the summer. 

“Well, Craig’s got to go run his Montana blonds out there on the family place so i better do it,” Jerry said.  

In addition to this, Jerry was curious to work with another crew.

Nine hours later, Jerry arrived at Craig’s house hoping no one was home and he could go directly to his couch in the basement. No one was home. He ate an apple and some bread, showered and went to sleep. 

And seven hours after falling asleep Craig’s vice was in his ear, “Up, Jerry, time to go, we have to leave in five minutes.”

Craig had fixed coffee and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and they were off to meet Len Thomas and Johnny Hart in the shopping center parking lot. 

At the rig they learned Hurley was still on a drunk or locked up and the other crew had not found a new man. 

“Somebody want to work another double?” 

“Your call, Craig,” Jerry said.

“I can do it, but you need the money more than i do.”

“Sure i do, but two doubles in a row, is it against regulations?”

The word regulations got a laugh and a puzzled stare.

Jerry said, “Hey, just kidding!” and hoped he hadn’t fatally revealed his lack of experience. “Okay, i do the double.”

It was the same for the next two days. Hurley gone, Craig saying Jerry needed the money and a diet of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and coffee. Jerry’s strength surprised him. The work was very regular, which kept him awake. If the crew had slow nights he would have felt more tired. At home in the basement his couch felt better than a king sized bed with satin sheets, not that he had ever slept on a king size bed with satin sheets. All he really missed was Lillian. In his dreams he heard her; “I’ll take care of you.”

One very early morning when Jerry was the most exhausted and no amount of coffee perked him up, he imagined having fallen into the mud pit. He thought of faking a fall, to see how the crew would react. Why, to impress or amuse the crew, or did he feel like taking a mud bath? A mud bath was supposed to be food for the skin. He and Lillian should take a mud bath, but how and where? Could they get a sandbox-like enclosure someplace and fill it with dirt and water? Dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return was inaccurate, very likely. More likely it was mud thou art and to mud thou shalt return. Water is the key, the booster of life. Those old Jews who wrote that dusty Good Book were living in the desert and they must have missed the most vital clue, missed the benefits of irrigation.  

Jerry would fake a plunge into the mud pit and then spring out of a niche in the drawworks and cry, “Surprise! You thought i drowned didn’t you?” So addled was his mind he thought this would be funny. He put his hard hat on top of the mud and it rested there without sinking. He imagined the depth, visualized the soggy bottom of the pit. The hard hat would be the only sign that he had fallen in and sunk to the bottom. He would have to scream and throw something big into the mud pit, get out of the way, toss his hat on the roiled surface of the mud before dashing away. His timing had to be perfect. And what large heavy object could he find to throw into the pit? 

Len Thomas saw him putting his hat on the mud and asked him why he did that. “I wanted to see what it looked like,” Jerry said, “In case i fell in.”

 “Go on down into the doghouse and set for awhile, close your eyes,” Len Thomas told him. “You better take it easy.” 

“Hey, i’m okay.”

“Go on down there. I’ll get you for the next connection.”

There was no mistaking his tone, so jerry nodded and left the rail where they stood. 

Vaguely Jerry worried that the driller of the crew with which he worked the doubles would hire Danny. Danny troubled Jerry only because he saw a worthy person in Danny and that worthy person was destroying himself. At the same time, thinking in the slack times waiting to make or unmake the next connection, he recalled what Lillian said about sympathy. “Sometimes you help someone and then they need help again and again. When do you say whoa?”

After six days the crew took two off. Following morning tower the next would be ‘daylights’ from eight am to four pm, so the Len Thomas crew had three days of sunlight; the morning they got off, the next day and one more. Returning, they would work from eight am to four pm.  It was called the ‘long change’ ~ three days to play. 

Craig mentioned this and suggested they go camping up in Yellowstone Park. 

“I know a woman up there who lives near Cody,” Craig said. “Haven’t seen her in a while.”  Craig had such a lilting, wistful tone to his voice Jerry, not thinking at all of Lillian lonely in Laramie, said, “Let’s go.”

He called Lillian and she was surprised and sounded a little hurt (“Sounds like fun, fun with the bears.”) but bounced back with her own plan of working more through their break from each other. 

“Trout fishing, that’s the main thing.” Jerry didn’t tell her about the woman Craig hadn’t seen in awhile. 

Jerry soon saw the woman through a haze of weariness, for they left immediately after work and a shower, driving in Craig’s small car which was too cramped to sleep in and besides, Jerry didn’t trust a driver who, like himself, had no sleep. Add to this Craig’s driving style, always too fast. Sleep was impossible. Jerry in a daze watched the rugged rolling landscape pass. Tipping on the edge of sleep, he expected to see dinosaurs.

Chapter 15   Is Fishing More Work Than a Woman?

She was level-eyed, pale, a few years older than Craig and she often said, “Is that what you think.” her tone level in response to his jokes, plans, enthusiasm and everything else he said. Jerry wanted to get out to the campsite inside the park a short drive to the west. He fumbled and stumbled and tripped on his tongue trying to speed getting there while Craig was full of fun and small talk, frisky as a pup. They arrived at her small house in a new section near town and talked until Jerry lost patience and threatened to shoulder his gear and hitchhike to the park. 

“After we set up camp, then you can go back and lay some pipe,” Jerry said.  

They found a campsite just inside the park near the Shoshone dam. Craig pulled the gear out of the car for Jerry as fast as he could and drove back to Cody. Jerry made the camp, hung up the food stuffs from a limb, ate an apple and put together his rod. He chose a flashy spinner from his tackle box, thought he could first use an hour of rest and fell asleep looking up at the sun on the warm tent fabric. 

Six hours later he opened his eyes and the fabric was dark. 

Craig was supposed to return in the evening. He didn’t. Jerry walked down to fish in the dying light, without enthusiasm,  just to do what he had decided to do, caught nothing, returned and ate a sandwich. He made a fire and fell asleep watching it, crawled into his tent and lay thinking of Lillian. He wanted her so much he thought he might need to release the pressure in the sage brush, but no, that’s not what a man does; he saves himself for his woman. That is the part of him she deals with, that is her domain and a man has to have plenty of pep to keep the lady interested. And by refraining from wasting himself in the sage brush he would know he had the gumption and gas to give her a go. Where did he read that, “give it a go?” It must have been some English chap. Wandering through the library picking up this and that, you don’t remember where you read it and then it comes back. It’s like a closet or an old footlocker you rummage through, this is the mind, and who knows what lurks there?

In the morning he waited and Craig did not arrive. They had packed nothing for breakfast so Jerry hitchhiked into Cody. He stopped at the Irma Hotel bar where wild Bill Cody once stood and had a glass of beer in honor of the legend. For a cowboy Wild Bill was not the lean, grizzled sort.  No herding cattle this fancy man, he was in business. Bill had a round belly and lots of leather frills and his facial hair was neatly cultivated. This man had spent plenty of mirror time. Wild Bill was a showboy, not a cowboy, but Jerry was not going to say anything like that to anyone at the Irma Hotel.  

The next place Jerry went, after breakfast, was the Charlie Russell museum where he spent two hours with the real thing. 

Not wanting to embarrass Craig, he avoided the house where the woman lived and strolled around town, thinking he might meet Craig on the street without her. No Craig showed so he bought enough food to last a few days and hitchhiked back to his camp. 

When Craig did show up at about sundown he was carrying two cases of beer. Neither one said anything about anything, but it was clear the beer was a form of apology and it was accepted. 

The first question Jerry wanted to ask, “How was the woman?” felt wrong, dangerous. They talked about nothing until Jerry said, “You gonna tell me how it went?”

“No.”

Upon the observation of an attractive female one of Craig’s favorite expressions was “I wouldn’t kick her out of bed for eating crackers.” 

Obviously Craig would kick this one out of bed for eating crackers. Likely she kicked him out first.

At this moment Jerry, on seeing how Craig looked mean and tight lipped, how he glowered hard and bitter into the fire, risked their friendship by saying, “Maybe she didn’t like you eating crackers in bed.”

Craig jerked up, looking at his friend in the campfire light, an angry, confused look. They stared at each other for a few seconds as the light of understanding came to Craig. 

“I won’t make that mistake again,” he said.  

Jerry caught no fish, not in that evening or the next day when he woke at sunrise and wet his line for another hour. They left the park at noon and finished the second case of beer on the way home. They stopped in Thermopolis to smell the hot springs and get more beer and finished the day in the Schmidt basement playing pool. 

Back on the rig, Jerry volunteered to work more doubles. He informed Len Thomas that he would be available on any day. It looked like the driller that followed Len Thomas’s crew was not popular; he had trouble keeping a full crew. Working for him, Jerry soon knew why. He was a round, jolly man but accident prone. Rumor was he injured a man every six months but this being a rumor, it was likely he had injured a man once or twice and the number of injuries grew with the story. 

Jerry saw it this way; the driller wore a back brace and sometimes, in flashes, had a hard, unpleasant look. He was like Santa Claus in reverse, a jovial, rosy-cheeked Satanic Santa, from whom every happiness had been taken, a man blinded by pain, still loving the world and all in it and possibly hating himself, so he wants everyone taken down with him. And still the life force within him stops him from taking outright action, meaning suicide. 

That’s how Jerry thought of the man. Jerry thought like a student who often defined perceived phenomenon in terms of metaphysical or symbolic representation, a habit acquired by reading philosophical works beyond his level of life experience which nevertheless had style and imbued his perceptions with rhythm and melody. Often, in such works, sound matters more than sense. In other words, Jerry, at times, was a Sophist. Whereas Jerry thought of the driller in more sophisticated, philosophical terms, most men would call him a jerk. On a drilling rig complex delineation, that is to say, contemplation of anything except the work is not done because it could be hazardous. 

At his age, Jerry had not yet grown to understand himself enough to stand aside his own way of thinking. And so on nights when he was idle and could stand by the drilling table and look out on the rolling prairie around the rig, he thought of his philosophy teacher, an attractive older woman, thirty six, from New Jersey who charmed her students with her accent and worldly observations.  Most of her students were local so New Jersey was as exotic and dangerous as Siberia or the Amazon. Jerry heard her voice come from the darkness when the lights of the rig and the roar of the drawworks rose as the sun set. Then the complexity of her language would recombine in his mind. Without work to keep him moving and thinking, he turned to interpretation. 

Or Lillian, always in his deepest fatigue he thought of Lillian. Was it love or fear, want or need?

On their first night camping they had rested by the fire awhile, made love in the tent and as they were still on the time schedule of the city, lay awake for many hours into the darkness. The night was warm so they went out into it. They put on only their boots and at first, stealthily crept around the camp site. While in the tent the fire had burned down. The air was still and quiet, as soothing as a soft, caressing hand. 

On the rig as he stared out at the quiet land, this quiet warm dream returned to Jerry, the warm dream of home, the concept that a man is home only when he is inside a woman, back inside as he was at birth for a brief flash of pain and joy as he was the moment he was shucked out. So it was with sex, the moment of climax being a shucking back in, or a re-shucking; a realization and definition that creates understanding. Is this the knowledge of good and evil, forbidden to our first parents? Ah, the seed is released and at the same time the man gains new knowledge. Yet is it good or evil?

Running up behind some rocks near the tent, they paused to kiss and hold each other, and then went on exploring. Jerry wanted to go down to the stream that ran through the meadow below their camp but Lillian said no, someone might see them and besides, that water is cold. So they stayed in the gnarled red pines that grew in clumps among the rocks. At one place lust overcame them and they stopped and Jerry started to caress Lillian. 

“Where is the rubber?” Lillian asked.

“I didn’t bring one.”

“Why not?”

“How could i?” said the man without a pocket.

“We have to have it,” she said and her voice was edged with fear and fury.

“We can do it this once.”

“No, we can’t, we have to have it.” Maybe her voice was too shrill and she felt he needed a gentler tone so she pulled him close and said, “We are on dangerous ground here.”

In the dim light Jerry saw her face, her eyes shining out of the darkness.

“I can take care of you,” Lillian said and pushed him back. 

It was like the first time they made love in her dorm room, the first night they took care of each other. 

And it angered and pleased him. First, a man should not need a woman to take care of him. Second, he didn’t want to lose her, he wanted her to take care of him and he wanted to take care of her.

This is what he missed by camping in the Yellowstone with Craig. A person should not waste an opportunity. Standing around looking at the country, Jerry counted his losses. Then above the roar of the drawworks came the faint voice; “Heads up, let’s make a connection.”

Chapter 16   Deliberate or Accidental?

One night after daylights when Craig insisted they go to The Other Side he saw Kathleen, the delicate woman he had taken an interest in and whose mother he had called not long after arriving in Casper. She was standing around with a drink in her hand, listening to other people with drinks in their hands. Jerry approached her and said hello. 

“Do i know you?” she said.

“Yes, but maybe you don’t remember me.”

“I doubt it.” Her downbeat tone dismissed him.  

Later Jerry would think of an appropriate, stinging reply, a burning shaft, a razor-sharp rebuke, but at the moment he turned away, stunned. Craig had seen the interchange and said, “You’re lucky you got away from that one.”

“Water off a duck’s back.”

But her scorn soaked in. When it came time for another round Jerry said, “This is the last one for me.”

“The night is still young, we don’t have to get up until seven,” said Craig.

“I gotta save some money.”

“Oh, that’s right, school,” said Crag in a lower voice so none of the men around him could hear it. 

Jerry bought that round and then someone else bought the next and by the time it got back to Jerry he had forgotten about saving money.

At work it was a dry, hungover day.  And it was a busy day tripping out, replacing the bit and tripping back in, “balls to the wall for a solid eight,” according to Craig.

Len Thomas knew they had had a late night and little sleep; he saw it and smelled it and on the drive to and from the rig he heard it, Craig snoring and Jerry awake but mentally absent. In the front seat Johnny Hart said to Len, “They ain’t too perky.” Len merely nodded.

To save money and avoid Craig and his love for low society, Jerry began to avoid Craig by accepting every double he could possibly work. He had about three quarters of the money he needed to pay for a year at the university and was pushing to reach the goal. 

“I’m in the home stretch,” he told Craig. “Two, maybe three paychecks and i’m there.” The memory of Chris Nelson drove him; if he fell short he would have to have a part time job at some place like The Plainsman. 

In addition to this, the camping trip to the Yellowstone showed Jerry that Craig was not always or very often interested in his, Jerry’s, education and career advancement. Craig had decided where he was going, knew what he wanted and how to get it. If Jerry was not similarly determined and sufficiently intent on the same Craig would not carry him over the finish line. What a pity; he might fall away. That’s life.

One thought that bothered Jerry was using Craig’s friendship for advantage, living in his house for free. Craig had mentioned rent once and once only. When Jerry had the money, was Craig going to come to him and say, “Old friend, how about that rent?” Yes, Craig approved of the arrangement, for how long? On a night of bleary, energetic loud beer drinking until early morning Craig had introduced Jerry as “my brother from another mother.”The living arrangement saved a lot of money, and using his contacts familial, social and commercial also helped Jerry. He decided they could go their separate ways if necessary but for now they were good for each other, the arrangement was working. Let it work until it ends, then fix or nix it. This thought made it possible for Jerry to turn away Craig’s enthusiasm for the night life with self-confidence. But he rarely did. 

Jerry was well on his way to his financial goal when two accidents happened. The first pushed Jerry into the second. 

It happened to his fifteen year old truck. As he was driving back after his shift, leaving the crew at the shopping center, the transmission seized up. It went into a lower gear, then it jammed and the engine stalled. Jerry stopped on the shoulder of the road. 

“What the hell’s going on here?” Jerry said. He jerked on the gear shift. It stayed stuck.

“You got a seized-up transmission. All the gears in that thing are probably like a bag of rocks.”

“Shit.”

“Don’t worry, i got a car.” Craig got out and as he left said, “I’ll call a tow truck,” leaving without saying more.

Jerry sat behind the wheel of his broken truck and watched Craig walk away toward a convenience store. Fifteen minutes later Craig returned with a paper bag and a smile on his face.  “Tow truck will be here in ten minutes they said. More likely twenty minutes.” 

Since Craig knew every mechanic in a town full of mechanics, sometimes women who loved to work on cars, they soon had the truck towed and evaluated. That was the good news. The bad news was the bill for a transmission job; over five hundred. Jerry’s truck at age fifteen was worth about five hundred, however, nothing this expensive had happened to it before. Were the care-free days of low maintenance beginning to end? He purchased the truck cheap from a friend of his father’s who said, “Let’s give the boy a leg up,” in a conversation Jerry never heard. The bill for the good, cheap ride might now be coming due. Should he junk the truck and walk or pay and ride for how long, maybe?

It also meant Jerry had no wheels to go to Laramie to see Lillian. He called to tell her and she was puzzled. “Why not rent a car?”

“I would need a credit card.”

“You don’t have a credit card?”

“No, i’ve never had one.”

The Laramie end of the line was silent.

“Do you love me anyway?”

“Of course i do,” she said.  “You’re so good to me. You know, i deal with these customers every day and i give them food and try to be nice and still they are, some of them, like really jerks. Well, try to borrow a car or something and if you can’t.  . .”

“I’ll save money; i’m five hundred down now. I’ll do what i have to do.” He was sorry to cut her off, but it was time to get tough. 

For the last two days of the shift they rode in Craig’s two- door. When they arrived at the shopping mall meeting place Len Thomas watched them arrive, and as they left in his car for the rig he told Craig, “I didn’t know you drove Jap junk.”

“My transmission still works.”

They told Len Thomas what had happened to Jerry’s truck.

“I think it’s all right, Mr. Thomas, i just have to work every double i can to make up the loss.”

Two days later, their shift over, Craig’s brother Max loaned Jerry a car. Working at an auto parts store, Max had contacts and owned several cars of his own. Selling parts put him in the loop so he often bought a car and drove it around just to see if he liked it. So Jerry called Lillian to tell her he would see her soon. 

   Now events combined and coagulated in a way to produce the second accident. He called several times but she didn’t answer. He hoped she was at work where she couldn’t answer. He drove south anyway, stopping to call again. It was early morning so she was asleep or at work, had to be. 

He drove to her apartment to ring the bell, wanting to find her there, wanting to make love immediately as an antidote to bad luck. Thinking of her all week at work or play, she became a cure, a refuge from his fears. 

 The last time they talked she said it was fine if he didn’t come see her, he needed to get his truck fixed and save money. “You need to be frugal if that’s what you know you need to do.” He thought she might be mad at him for going to Cody and Yellowstone with Craig. That trip was impulsive. Impulsive was not Lillian.

At her apartment in Laramie a dual wheel diesel king cab was parked in the space allotted to her. He stopped and studied it, parked at the curb in front of her building. He looked at it for a long time. Only people who lived in the building are supposed to park in those numbered slots and you know Lillian has no dual wheel diesel king cab. She has no car at all, not even a bicycle. Is it a friend? Where did Lillian find a friend who drives a big diesel? ‘Someone is in there with her now,’ Jerry thought.

He waited awhile watching, then went to the Country Kitchen and parked and waited, watching the front door. He waited for over an hour until, sure enough, the dual diesel king cab arrived.

It was the same truck, no doubt, had the plates, the tool box in the bed behind the cab and patterns of dirt. It stopped at the sidewalk to the front door and Jerry saw the forms within the cab lean together for a moment and then the passenger door opened and Lillian jumped out. She had to make a small leap because the truck was high off the asphalt. A man was behind the wheel, of course, Jerry couldn’t see the man clearly but no woman would drive a truck so masculine, and he obviously gave her a big dog slobbery wet goodbye goddam smooch. 

Jerry had heard somewhere that those we love stab us in the front. At that moment he felt she had stabbed him back and front at the same time.

‘The cheat,’ he thought. ‘The lying, slutting, whore cheat, pleading with me to come see her more, tears in her bitch throat, the complete and total bitch.’ 

Jerry’s mind tumbled into black confusion. Drive away? Never speak to her again, never acknowledge her slimy existence? Confront her now? Confront her later? Get a gun and catch them together and blow their goddam brains out all over the curtains and the moist bed and blast his pecker to shreds and blow that sweet smile into scattered teeth?

He took a deep breath, ‘No, calm down, breathe deep, calm down, think.’ After a few minutes he knew he could not continue without confronting her. ‘No, fix it now, fix it now or you can’t move. Act now, do it now, confront her right now, this instant, break it off and tell the lying scheming whore who she is and she does not shit on Jerry Cooper and live.’ 

Chapter  17     Confrontation  and Connection    

Jerry walked into the Country Kitchen just as Lillian in polyester with the frilly edged white apron came out from behind the counter.

The moment she saw him and looked into his eyes she knew something was wrong. She trembled. 

“Who is he? How can you do this to me?” he cried. People looked at them. 

Lillian understood. She was pleased; he was mad, jealous, he cared.

“Jerry, quick come out here,” she said, her voice soft, as she led him by the elbow out between the inside and outside doors. He was commanded, he followed. 

In the foyer she said, “That was Paul, Paul my brother in the truck, he just came down from Mateettsee for a DNR meeting. He came to see me, my brother.”

Jerry stepped back from her direct, strong eyes. “I forgot you have a brother.” Jerry had never met her brother, a hydrologist for the state.

“How do i know that’s true?’”

“It is true, don’t be crazy. You can meet him later; he’s in town for a few days.”  

He stood looking at her, silent.

“Can you trust me this time, Jerry? Just don’t think or worry or do anything until you meet Paul. I showed you his picture. Jerry, no one has ever meant as much to me as you do, please.”

He reached for her and held her and almost cried but stopped the tears. He tried to kiss her but she pushed him away, “No, don’t kiss me, you’ll discombobulate me. Come and have a cup of coffee.”

Back in Casper the first thing Craig asked was, “Well, did you get it wet?” 

“What did you say?”

“Oh, i didn’t mean to say, to say anything offensive, sorry.”

“That’s okay. I guess i didn’t hear you right.” Jerry was, in fact, offended and then surprised at being so sensitive. ‘I guess Lillian made me go soft,’ he thought, ‘Yeah, in more ways than one.’ 

“We had a great time,” Jerry said. “Just lying around mostly.”

“That’s all it takes.”

“And i met her brother. He’s about four feet tall and drives this enormous truck that stands so high off the ground he needs a ladder to get in and out, but of course he doesn’t carry a ladder because that would look wimpy so he has to jump. Works for the state, a real egghead.”

“Yeah, sucking down our tax dollars.”

“Let’s get a beer.”

And so began another week, this time of evening tower, following daylights. Jerry’s truck, fixed up with a new transmission, sounded better than before. All that rattling and clanking must have been the old transmission.  Now if the rest of the rust bucket held up. 

When Jerry and Craig arrived at the shopping mall rendezvous in the more appropriate vehicle, Jerry’s truck, Len Thomas asked Craig if he had rid himself of his ‘Jap junk.’

“I parked that piece of shit forever,” Craig said.  

Jerry later took him aside and asked if he planned to get rid of his Japanese car and Craig said, “Sure, in about ten years.” 

The truck repair cost Jerry a sixth of his school money. Instead of calculating precisely how much money he needed and how many hours of work it would take to get it, he determined to work as much as possible and strive to recover it. Fortunately, the driller that normally followed Len Thomas’s crew was still having trouble getting a hand to stick, so in that one week Jerry worked three doubles. Craig didn’t volunteer to work any of them. Jerry came right out and told him he didn’t need to take the weight off. 

“I got what i need for school so far,” Craig said. “I’m cruising until September.”

“What if something happens?”

“Something might happen, that’s true.”

That was all he said. Jerry wanted to remind him that they were friends and so obligated to share personal information. Craig must not have seen it that way or was intent on getting out of the oil field and into a lecture hall. 

“Ever think of keeping working and not go back to school?” jerry asked him.

“Stay here and work? You’re kidding.”

“The money’s good,” said Jerry.

“Sure it’s good, but i’m not going to be twenty-three forever. It’s not enough. The real money’s downtown.”

At that moment Len Thomas called them back to work.

A few days later, before leaving for their shift, they got in Craig’s car and drove downtown. 

“I want to see a guy i knew in high school. He was almost on the Olympic ski team but he pulled or broke something and couldn’t qualify; now he works at a brokerage firm.”

Immediately Jerry understood why, before he told him they were going into an office downtown, Craig had put on a new, clean shirt and his good shoes. 

“This guy knows everything about investments, that’s all he does all day.”

“Are you thinking of investing someplace?”

“Someday. Right now i just have a house.”

“You own a house? Where?”

“In Casper. It’s a little place. I rent out.”

The office of the brokerage firm was on a fourth floor with a clear view of the mountain. Craig’s friend was surprised to see him, greeting them amiably. Craig introduced Jerry and said, “I might have a client here for you.” 

Quinton Winterson was very tall, bent forward and had a round face, a clean, straight smile.

“That’s good, what were you interested in, Jerry?”

For a moment Jerry was speechless. He had not until that moment any interest in investments, nor had he expected a question or to have his name remembered.

“Tell me what’s good,” he said after a long pause. “Craig says you’re the pro.”

“Well, maybe not the best. Right now. But now, your best bet is utilities, especially here. This is Wyoming, you know.” Quinton continued along the basic theory that one should invest in a range of options both risky and traditionally safe. In all, he really didn’t say anything Jerry couldn’t figure out. It all, made sense, like the old saying; “Invest only in stocks that will go up; if they won’t go up, don’t invest in them.”

Craig wanted more specific information but Quinton’s responses to his precise inquiries were evasive. For the most part, in summation, his answer was no one knew what would happen until it happened so let’s ride! That’s the market, that’s the game and it’s safer (Craig: “but not by much.”) than investing money in a Vegas slot machine.

Meeting Quinton, standing in the clean, quiet office, the air full of coffee and perfume, the carpet soft beneath his shoes was refreshing. Jerry was grateful; Craig was getting him into an affluent, interesting place; it was why Jerry valued his friendship. Craig may not work any doubles or make an offer out of politeness and take the load off Jerry and he may make Jerry drink too much beer and stay out late, but in all, in the most important aspects, he was a real friend. And more. In this, the introduction of new faces and a lucrative investment opportunity as well as work in the oil fields, Craig was an asset. 

Chapter 18   Rig Moving

That night, Jerry worked another double and felt shaky standing around between connections but solid as soon as he clamped the tongs on the end of the drill pipe and leaned into them. They tripped out before the casing crew was soon to arrive to set up and line the hole with a shaft of steel tubing secured in place with the human created, that hand’s most long-lasting creation, the stone called concrete. Then the crew would finish drilling through the last stretch to the oil filled cavity below. This casing is secured twenty or thirty feet from the easily permeable salt layer above the vast dome. This deep salt dome is one third the size of the state. The casing crew would come in the next day while all the other crews together would begin moving the rig to a new location.

Before Len Thomas left the doghouse he took Jerry aside and said, “Since you’re working a double tonight i don’t want you out here working to move the rig in the morning. So don’t come in. You stay at home and rest. I’ll put you down on the time sheet anyway so you won’t miss getting a day’s pay for tomorrow.”

“Hey, thanks, that’s nice of you.”

“Nothing nice about it, you deserve it.”

Two days later, as they were setting up the rig in a new location on the edge of the Sand Draw, Jerry saw a one armed man from another crew working on the draw works. He was middle-aged, lean and quick. He wedged a nut in the creased stump of his right arm, cut off at mid-forearm and with his remaining hand slipped the bolt through a hole in the steel drive belt cover of the draw woks. He then fitted the stump-held nut to the bolt. Before thinking, Jerry stepped up and said, “Do you need a hand?” The man looked up over his shoulder at Jerry, a puzzled, hard look that paralyzed Jerry 

“Oh shit. I’m sorry man, i didn’t mean to say that,” Jerry said, “i didn’t see . . .”

“It’s okay.” The man turned back to his work. “Don’t need any help, thanks,” he said over his shoulder, the ratchet in his remaining hand. He had fastened a crescent wrench on the nut inside the steel belt cover and, with the crescent handle resting on the floor of the compartment, torqued the nut and bolt together tight.

Jerry stepped back and fled. He was ashamed and at the same time full of admiration for the man. Here he was twenty years older, or more, with one hand and still working  

The rig was moved west to punch another hole in the edge of the dome so more water could be pumped in. The remaining oil, the decomposed, pressed and concentrated energy-rich fluid of millions of years of plant growth would float on top of the water, be sucked up by pump jacks at the highest elevation thousands of feet above the dome and then recomposed into the gasoline that got them to the rig. It is this simple liquid, this fuel and lubricant of fire and flexibility, that makes the pitiful (all they can do is scream and shout) weak (they can’t run, have no fangs or talons) and naked (bodies so hairless and skin so thin they have to cover themselves with cloth or the skin of other animals) modern human beings, the species homo sapiens, the bosses, head studs, lords of life on earth. For some, this gift of power too soon begins to feel like the birthright of a chosen species and won, not given. Jerry Cooper, working on a rig north of Casper, Wyoming, felt like one of them, but he also had a talent for math and, being conscious of the size of the earth, pondered how long it would take these naked weak ones to run out of gas.

When they continued the regular shifts at the new site, Len Thomas’s crew was put back on morning tower for a reason not even he, the driller, could say why or explain or understand. They made a new connection every hour so those very early morning hours were slow. Jerry had a chance to read in the doghouse, an activity that was frowned upon. He would read for ten minutes, get an idea, stash the book in his locker and go up to the table, look around and stand at the rail, look out at the darkness and think. He knew the routine now, knew when he would hear the call to work. 

Len Thomas, always standing at the drawworks controls or in the shack beside the table, noticed Jerry coming and going and asked him, “Getting your exercise walking those stairs?”

“Oh, no, i just read a few pages now and then.”

Len Thomas gave him a stern look and said, “Good, so you ain’t drinking?”

“No. I might go back to school. Thinking about it.”

“Plenty of work around here.”

“I’m thinking about it.”

Pondering life, Jerry recalled his philosophy professor saying, “Is that not just like life?” This was her standard response to any idea or observation capable of distracting her students, a way of bringing their attention back to philosophy which, she said many times in many ways, is the balance and interplay of life and thought.  

Originally from New Jersey, this professor was educated, in part, in England, had lived in France and spent several years in Japan. When her education was revealed, her distance from Wyoming increased a hundred fold. So far away, close to the sun, the source, exotic lands, people and concepts of life, how could the rocky Wyoming mind encompass her essence? At first her students felt New Jersey was the most exotic place on earth until they discovered how she had circled the globe. 

“Is that not just like life?” 

Of course a western man would shorten and unsophisticate the phrase to “Yep, like life.”

Contemplating the undulant, rolling prairie hills of Wyoming and visualizing beyond them the vast blue planet ball rolling through the infinite darkness of space prompts a young man to ask, “Where is my place? What is my purpose? Wither goest me?”And it was appropriate that as the young man gazed into the darkness, thinking, behind him four diesel engines he no longer heard because they were roaring all the time, were turning a column of steel pipe into the earth, boring through layers of rock millions of years old toward a lost and alien age. His question; am i on the earth or of the earth?

Then Len Thomas cried, “Trip in, come on, let’s go!”

At the end of the week Craig said, “Next week’s my last week. I’m outta here.” 

“There’s still a month of summer,” said Jerry.

“I don’t care, i got the money,” Craig said, “now i’m just going to cruise.”

“You’re not going back to Cody are you?”

“Could do that.”

“Is that what you think?”

Craig gave Jerry a puzzled glance and said, “I guess that’s what i might think.”

Jerry was about to say that the woman in Cody had often asked that question, but he didn’t want to upset Craig, who already seemed disturbed for an undisclosed reason.  Mostly Jerry was concerned that if Craig took off for Cody or someplace else, he would no longer be welcome in the Schmidt family basement. Sure, Max and the others would say he could stay but that good feeling may not last. Jerry started looking for a rooming house to stay in for a month.

About Craig giving the boss a one week notice, Len Thomas said, “He didn’t have to tell me that.” It surprised Jerry. A moment later Len Thomas said, “Are you going back to school, too?”

Jerry had decided to go back to school but when the driller asked the question he knew Len Thomas wanted him to stay, was asking him to stay and work into the fall. 

Jerry said, “Haven’t decided yet.” Until that moment he didn’t know he hadn’t decided. He thought he might have but didn’t know for sure. 

 Len Thomas had told Jerry the drilling schedule would encompass the entire southern rim of the dome and work on the series of sites might take three years. At the end of three years Jerry would have enough money saved to get a dozen Ph.ds. If he decided to study geology, three years of oil field experience would be a deep asset. 

When he called Lillian and said he might continue working in the oil field she said, “Jerry, i can’t promise anything. I need you here, i need someone here.”

“That’s an easy one, lover. I’ll come get you in my new truck, take you out on the town every week.”

“Oh, that’s what i need, an uneducated man with lots of money.”

“Okay, let me think about it.”

Now Jerry had to decide if he would please Lillian or Len Thomas. And if he did please her this time what would she ask, or demand, of him the next time and the next and the next? Working for Len Thomas was easy to understand. It was a formal agreement. These appeared to be his choices; he loved Lillian and could be a poor student with her now or later a comfortable student without her. 

Jerry looked out at the prairie, at beautiful, rocky, dry land, and knew love; he loved it there on the rig amid the noise and smell of the diesel engines. Inhale! That is progress, security, advancement. And he loved it at home with Lillian and books, rows of books, each a window to the world.  And more, all doorways into sunlight. 

Chapter 19     Pain We Obey

The man Len Thomas hired to take Craig’s place was tall, husky and bald, named Ole. Ole was almost forty but looked older. He didn’t smile much and as they talked one night, Jerry mentioned how much he liked the work and all he missed was his girl in Laramie. 

“Call yourself goddam lucky for that, Jerry.”

“Why lucky?”

Ole turned, glaring. “Well, if you want to spend every goddam cent you got on a goddam woman go ahead.”

Ole had a dangerous tone, better leave it alone. 

On an inner wall of the outhouse perched on the edge of the drill site plateau someone had written, “Oly oughta be canned.” This was a reference to Ole the rig hand but also to Olympia beer, a Washington State product sold in Wyoming with the slogan, “It’s the water, and a lot more.” Late at night or early in the morning consumers of Olympia beer are often heard to sing, “It’s the water, but mostly the price.” 

When Jerry mentioned the “Oly ought to be canned” graffiti to Ole the big man said, “I saw that shit. Some son-of-a-bitch is going to get it when i find out who did it.”

Jerry wondered how he could ease the man’s mind while avoiding his anger. No way coming clear to him, he said nothing. 

One night Len Thomas and his crew tripped back in after changing the bit. They were adding three more of the heavy drill collars to give the stack weight, an addition of heavier pipe meant to keep the stack straight. Two of the thirty foot lengths now stood in the tower and Thomas was throttling the third up the beaver slide. It was coming up too fast. Jerry tried to slow the collar by throwing his arm around it. It did not slow as he wrapped an arm around it and held the rope rail at the edge of the beaver slide. The steel post swung up and he felt himself losing his balance. He clutched the guard rail rope tighter and it broke and Jerry was pulled off his feet. Ole, the angry man, was standing near and as Jerry was pulled back toward the other sections of drill collar and pipe standing on the alligator tails, Ole shouted, “Your arm,” lunged forward and pulled Jerry back. 

The drill collar slammed into the standing pipe and bounced away. Jerry cried out in pain. 

“Holy shit,” Ole said, “It got your hand.”

Len Thomas locked the drill works in neutral and rushed forward. He saw the blood on Jerry’s hand and grabbed his arm and lifted him. “Get in the shack and sit down.” 

Jerry stood up, holding his right wrist.  The pain in his fingers was throbbing up his arm into his neck. In the shack he sat on the bench opposite the chart table. Len Thomas said, “Let’s see this,” and gently held his right wrist. Blood poured dripped and ran out of the ends o the fingers of Jerry’s mashed glove. 

“Hold yourself steady.”

Taking a pair of scissors from a drawer below the chart table, Len Thomas cut the grime smeared glove from the wrist over the palm to the base of the fingers. “This will hurt,” he said, and cut along a finger to near a fingertip. Jerry winced. Len Thomas cut up another finger and the glove began to fall away. He made a final cut ant the glove fell away. 

“Over there, get the first aid kit,” Thomas said and Ole pulled it out and opened it. 

As Thomas shucked the canvas glove away, Jerry’s fingers oozed blood, a steady drool, and the mashed bones and nails shone in the dark red blood. Jerry flinched as the glove fabric detached from his fingers, then calmed as they examined the wound. Jerry held his arm steady, the pain pulsing up into his shoulders and neck. He squeezed his wrist harder to stop the pain. 

“Looks like it crunched your fingertips. That’s some kind of luck.”

Ole, looking over Len Thomas’s shoulder said, “You’re lucky you didn’t lose your whole goddam fucking arm. That was the dumbest shit i seen anybody do, you coulda . . . “

  “That’s enough, Ole!” Len Thomas said. 

Thomas pulled antiseptic envelopes from the first aid kit, sprinkled the powder on Jerry’s fingertips. The three prominent tips were crushed into a ragged mass askew and bleeding.  “That’s all i can do,” said Len Thomas, “I’ll wrap this up and you leave it like that until we get to the hospital.”

Johnny Hart had been looking down from his derrick platform and waited until Jerry was led away before coming down the ladder. Now he stood in the door watching Len Thomas bandage Jerry’s hand. He smoked. 

“That antiseptic powder is supposed to ease the pain but it might get pretty strong anyway. You just sit here and hold on for a minute.”

“Thanks, i can hold on.”

Johnny Hart said, “We gonna drive him into town?”

“Tower ends shortly,” Ole said, 

“I can wait. This won’t kill me.” 

“Won’t kill you,” the derrick hand said. “You’ll just have to pick your nose with your other hand.”

No one laughed out loud but they all relaxed. 

“He’s just goddam lucky,” Ole said.

“We go to town,” Len Thomas said, “Something might happen. A blood infection can happen. I’ll drive him into town, you two watch the rig. I’ll come back after i get him to the hospital.” 

“How about waiting to see?” Jerry said. “I can hold on. I’m sure i can.”

The other crew would show up within an hour. Jerry thought he could hold himself steady that long, no one would have to drive him all the way into town and then back to pick up the remaining men. Jerry started feeling dizzy.

“No, we’re going to town,” Len Thomas said. “I’m not taking any chances.”

“Really, i can hold on.”

“Shut up and do as you’re told. Help me get him down to the car.” 

“You can do one thing right now,” said Ole, “you can shut the fuck up. You can’t make decisions now.”

“You don’t have to talk no more, Ole. Help him up.”

Ole and Len Thomas stood on each side of Jerry and held his arms as he stood up. 

 “He’s not sweating much,” Ole said, “that’s a good sign.”

“What do you mean by that?” Len Thomas asked.

“Sweating and shaking means it’s real bad.”

They turned to the door and the stairs down.

“Are you a doctor now?”

“No, but i seen it before,” said Ole. “I seen worse.”

“Nothing is worse than when it happens to you.”

“Oh, he’s lucky.”

“Knock it off Ole,” Len Thomas said. “We got enough of it.” 

As they led Jerry down the stairs and into Len Thomas’s car, Johnny Hart got Jerry’s clothes and bag out of the doghouse. 

“I’ll be back soon’s i can.” 

“Take your time,” said Johnny Hart. 

On the way into town Jerry, holding his bandaged hand in his lap said, “I hate to inconvenience those guys. I guess somebody has to stay at the rig.” 

Len Thomas said, “Inconvenience hell, they’re sitting on their asses having a smoke, that Johnny has a bottle out by now and they‘ll be getting overtime. They’ll appreciate that..”

Halfway into town Jerry more than dizzy and lay back. The sun was up as they arrived at the emergency room. The anesthetic further dimmed him. Laying on a gurney, the last thing he remembered was the florescent light in his eyes and someone saying, “Tell me if you feel any pain.” He didn’t answer.  

Prior to his release he called Lillian and could feel her worry, but she didn’t lose control or cry. She asked him too many questions, the most important one obviously, “How much of your fingers did you lose?”

“Just to the first joint, they tell me. Now my fingers are all the same length.”Then he told her he felt good and it was really, now, easy to bear.

“I expect you’ll be okay,” she told him.  “You’re that kind of guy.”

“What i want most is to hold you and kiss you.”

“I want that too.”

“I’m sure i’ll still be able to put my arms around you,” he said. “I’ve got another hand all for you.”

For the first time in his life he heard her giggle.

“I’ll come see you tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll rent a car.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I know, but that’s what i’m going to do.”

Among many odd twists Jerry pondered as he recovered was that he was saved by a guy he didn’t like. He now respected Ole even as he found him irritating. Jerry had to wonder now if he could be a journalist. Typing  with shortened fingers might be too difficult. Aside from this, could there be more important work for the hands?

From Craig’s point of view, and they had plenty of time to discuss everything until Jerry’s bandages came off, this was an omen, a big one.

“You can make more money as a lawyer or a broker and you can’t do rig work all your life,’ Craig said. Yet nowhere else could he make as much money now, the thought, and is there something more to it? Jerry didn’t know if he wanted to go back to school or stay and work on the rig; the advantages and disadvantages of both sides of the question balanced so well. 

Lillian arrived and pampered him. The hand healed and Jerry pondered possibilities. He would have to return to work for a time to keep paying bills and, most important to his own sense of self-worth, to show he could “get back on the horse and ride it,” as Len Thomas said.   He wanted to go back to school as well, feeling this would be where he found his better talents and career. Lillian agreed; he should go for the long term career. 

With his right arm in a sling, though he didn’t need it, Jerry with Craig driving went to Mulligan’s and The Other Side and listened to rig injury stories. All were worse than losing mere fingertips. Enjoying a minor celebrity in this night life, he thought he might meet Kathleen, his delicate snooty friend, the frustrated singer and poor rich girl. Now she would find him more experienced, more interesting, more worthy of her attention, yes?

“No, she was killed in an accident,” Craig told him. “It happened just south of Gillette about the time you were in the hospital. No, she’s long gone.”

“What exactly happened to her?”

“Hell, i don’t know.”

Craig had wanted to leave, to go someplace while he still had some summer left, but stayed in Casper while Jerry recovered. They sat talking in the basement and drank beer. Jerry’s bandaged hand was like a totem or sculpture or a crystal ball of pure white predicting the future. 

“You’re going to get an injury benefit from the company,” Craig said, “You might as well take it and go.”

“A hundred or so a month, that’s not much.”

“Yeah, that’s fun money, but better than nothing.”

In two weeks and a few days the hand healed sufficient to remove the bandage and in another week Jerry felt confident to do work with it. There was still slight pain in moving his fingers. 

As he could now drive, he went to stay with Lillian in Laramie. His stay there didn’t last long.

“I’m going back,” he told her. 

She said little, knowing what he decided he needed to do and he returned to work on Len Thomas’s crew. Often reflecting on the injury later, he concluded losing the fingertips of one hand wasn’t his worst day. Pondering it from all sides, he continu9ously wondered why it felt like one of his best days. 

Dear Lillian,                                    Casper, Aug 30

I have to put this in a letter, a phone call won’t do. I want you to keep it, for my sake, just so i can accurately get what i want to say. 

I did hear the sadness in your voice ~ it is true ~ and i respect it, but i’m staying here to do what i know how to do now. This is what i study for. My hand hardly hurts at all now when i grip it even when i turn it. 

These people i am among i belong with, for now anyway, at this time. You and i, we can have our time together. For now i must do this. You said what we have is bigger than us and i’m sure it will last longer than anything else. I feel certain of it. I am sure we can be a long time together. I just want to hold you always. Here i am getting everything together to do that for us. At dawn recently, working morning tower, i had time to look out at the hills and thought, i just don’t want to be looking out a window someday and wonder what i missed. I want to know for sure, i want this thing settled. 

I will see you again soon and we will talk it over. 

                        Love, Jerry

ps ~ when i told you so often i feel stretched between two sides or in limbo ~ i don’t feel so anymore. Please note my new address.

Lillian called to say she would be there in two hours. He put down the phone and returned to bed, but didn’t sleep. It was mid-morning, he had returned from morning tower, showered and went to bed, and then the phone rang. 

He lay awake thinking, wound there be an argument. Lillian was not the type to cry and rarely to shout. What was going to happen, he knew, would mean big changes for him, or maybe, no change at all. As far as a conclusion, his mind was completely blank. 

There was no small talk, no chatter when she arrived. Lillian was exceptionally direct.    

“I just came to tell you i accept your decision and i hope it goes well for you.”

“Thank you.”

“I have to get back,” she said, ”I don’t have much time and i know you’re tired.”

Before he could answer she pushed him back on the bed. The ferocity of her love-making astonished him. Before she left, after he watched her dress, she placed a small square of folded paper on the bedside table. 

“Please don’t read this until i’m gone,” she said.

Jerry was suddenly too frightened to speak. He nodded. 

The door closed, Lillian was gone. He stared at the square of paper, thinking, she is ending me, no, how can she? Or it’s an ultimatum, be home with me or forget it, bubba, you lost me. Or i’m pregnant. 

He didn’t want to read it.

He read it.

“I’ll wait for you.”

Chapter 20   Live the Spirit

Her life followed a clear straight line from beginning to end, unseen until the end. This must be as true as we can see it. Poor broken reed that would not sing; i slept, in dreams my sister slipped away.

Between them something was so often missing. Her mother succeeded with a method; think everything out, plan, and plan again. She missed the mark in targeting her daughter, the inheritor, the living legacy of the method. Or the daughter failed the mother. Objective study and consideration of the facts may reveal how and why, or why it matters.

Twenty miles south of Gillette on a two lane road less used since the four-lane by-passed it, a Husky Oil truck cruised south at 80 miles an hour. The road straight, the driver had made this run so many times it was nothing new to him; he could drive it alseep. After a heavy breakfast he had left Gillette in the dark. Now the sun rose on the prairie to his left. He was good for the day making the rounds delivering fuel oil and gas to the dozen or so ranches in the area. They fed him, some gave him a beer or a shot of hooch, always coffee and once a rancher’s wife gave him a pie, an entire pie she had baked that morning. Some folks know how to live. It was his regular monthly route and he knew it better than anyplace on earth. He could drive it with his eyes closed and that’s almost what he was doing; the eye doctor had tried to shut him down. It was macrel degeneration, a spot of fog in the middle of the eyes that he now has to look around. But hell, he knew the road so well, no problem.

That is why the driver didn’t slow down when he saw a distant form in the road. It was like a reed or thick blade of grass and it appeared to be swaying on the asphalt. Then it appeared to be a rag on a stick, floating above the road and there were two appendages, one to a each side wavering as in a mirage. The glare of the sun momentarily confused the driver. This new item; a quivering, undulating form on the highway puzzled him so much he made no move to slow until the grill of his truck was twenty feet from it. 

As the sun rose, their small car hit a slick spot and spun off the road. Fifty miles from nowhere, they rolled into the borrow ditch along the road. The young man driving was killed, crushed, his body hanging half out the window, the automobile on top of him. His only passenger, a young woman, was thrown from the vehicle and bruised, her right elbow badly sprained. She lay nearby looking up at the brightening sky. 

They had been at a party in Gillette mixing alcohol and pot with a new batch of organic mescaline fresh from LA. As the party wound down and people passed out or left, the couple decided to go to LA and get more of that primo mescaline. First they had to pick up a few things and stop at a bank in Casper. 

 Now she lay dazed and disoriented. The sky was pale blue. She sat up and looked at the prairie all around. As she sat in the dist of the ditch strangely elated with having suddenly taken flight she observed over yonder a square metal form with an aura of dust cooling, smoke rising. 

Flying was fun. 

For half an hour the young woman sat and half reclined in the grass and gravel of the roadside. She was waiting. At this time someone should have spoken to her. No vehicles of any kind passed on the road nearby. She stared up at the wide sky brightened by the rising sun into a cloudless blue.  A mild pain in her head and arm grew as she tried to stand. There was pain all through her body. 

A trail cut in the ground led away and at the end of it the squarish cooling metal. She rolled up, rose slowly and approached it. Something with a head and arms in a yellow shirt stuck out from under it. Whoever that was looked very uncomfortable, judging by the look on his face.  

Moving arms and legs through grit and dryness, her mouth was too crusty to close. Stepping forward, waiting to feel stronger, she stumbled toward the car. Such a small car, but heavy and how did that guy get under it? What was his name? He was the one who gave her a hit and bent her on the bed to do his squirting thing, now why was he laying around here under a car? She thought it strange that his eyes were open, unblinking, growing dusty; he appeared to see nothing. She smelled dust and oil and gas fumes. 

Well, a girl a-g0-go has got to get going now. 

She walked up to the highway. The sun was up and the prairie stretched far to the new horizon, on all sides the rolling prairie grass, dusty, bright and tan. She held her sore elbow as she walked with her eyes following the lines of the various gullies and the gentle undulation of the higher ridges above the gullies. She thought, this is where the dinosaurs lived, high and dry. Man, those dinos are so yesterday, about as yesterday as you can get.

I need to leave here, i need to get on an airplane and fly to the sea, to the beach to lie in the sun and laugh and talk to faces, i need places, i need faces. 

She was gaining strength in her new dream, which was really an old dream often recurring. She walked out in the road and spread out her arms airplane style and was flying along and making motor sound with her crusty lips so she didn’t hear the truck roaring up behind her. 

Although the day was clear and visibility excellent no one would expect to see a young woman flying down the road. In addition to this, there are few highway patrol cars on the roads because the state is large and the population small so drivers speed with impunity. In this country a man can really feel his machine on the road. And so the driver of the gas and fuel oil delivery truck did not see the woman, slim, dressed in soiled but elegant blue and off white knits, her arms reaching out to horizons. 

The driver had no time to lift his foot and crush the brake pedal before striking the woman. His windshield was sprinkled with dots; red, yellow and white.

In twenty feet the truck stopped and a cloud of burnt tire smoke rushed forward. The driver slowly released his grip on the steering wheel. He paused, he shouted, an explosive gasp in an ancient language. Pausing again, knowing it was very bad, not wanting to see it, his stomach began to spasm. 

The first place he looked was the front of the truck. Embedded in the grill was a damp red fabric, but most of the woman was under the truck. Her body had spread out from the front bumper to the middle of the tank under the frame. She was so spread out she was hardly recognizable as a human form. The driver stood back; stood up and tried to think but his body shook and commanded him. In war this happens; high explosives spread a soldier out; he had seen it, had forgotten it until how. And this was not a soldier. He rushed to the side of the road, away, out of the odor and sight and heaved out his breakfast in the dry grass and gravel, then sat down and said, “Goddam goddam goddam what the hell is this?” 

Twenty six hours later, a mother in Casper received a phone call. She was a person who looked directly at facts without hesitation. This woman’s father, whom she revered, had taught her to directly advance, her mother, whom she admired for her persistence and survival skills, had taught her to swerve to press a flank attack. She preferred a frontal assault to solve problems quick. Get used to it, the situation might be bad but avoiding it is always worse.

“The body is where?”

The voice on the phone told her.

“Why is it there?”

The voice told her it was recovered near there. And before she asked if it can be brought to Casper the voice told her it would not be moved until positively identified. Now she had to go to Gillette.  

The call came between meetings. She thought, ‘Well, she’s done it again.’ But the policeman had a different tone. They “strongly suspected” it was her. No ID and can’t be sure, not even by looking at her? Someone standing near spoke to her but she did not hear them. 

“Was there no identification on the body?” 

“Well, none was found, no purse was found.”

Some identification had been found in a wrecked vehicle a mile distant with a man’s body under it, possibly a companion. 

“A man’s body under it?” Can this get worse? The officer mentioned the man’s name. She did not recognize it. 

Assuming it was her, she asked for more details. The subject had been wandering along the highway (in the middle of it) intoxicated, it was determined, when struck at high speed by a delivery truck. Officers on the scene are certain she died instantly. For a positive identification dental records will be necessary.  

“So you need dental records?” 

“Yes.” 

   “How about visual identification?” 

“That might not be entirely accurate.” 

Why would looking at the body not be entirely accurate? She wanted to ask but didn’t ask.

The officer, sensing she was losing her grip, said, “I’m very sorry, i know this must be very difficult for you, do you want some time to assimilate this?”

Her mind cleared. ‘Assimilate this?’ she thought, ‘what kind of cop is this?’

“I can deal with it now. What do i do? Where do i go?”

She cleared out her schedule, called her driver and her dentist. However the situation unfolded, she would need all her strength to get to the end of it. Push all aside; go right at the middle of it. As she made these arrangements it all felt predestined to her. What surprised her was the feeling, which no one expressed, that all who knew her and her daughter also expected it. 

It was a distracted ride. It is a wonder why women go through all the trouble of having children. She had one to fit in and that one was a constant bother. It is a beautiful county passing there; simple and desolate, and it is also a distraction. The woman in the back seat with her briefcase open and papers beside her on the seat, turned her thoughts back to her work again and again with difficulty until at last she knew to focus was impossible. She let her mind drift. Her purpose in going was to identify the remains of a body that may be the body of her wayward, footloose and always foolish daughter, or a stranger. 

‘what’s the difference?’ she thought.

All they wanted were dental records, useful assuming the body had enough teeth left in the mouth; she didn’t have to look at the body. She insisted she see the body, identify it and get back on the road. 

She didn’t have to ask why the body was zipped up in a bag instead of covered with a sheet. That’s how they bagged it up in the field. The clouded cellophane kept the body together. The head was disfigured, flattened, but the nose, an ear and hair was familiar as were several of her remaining front teeth. Dazed, not looking away, she thought, ‘she’s so very small, is that all that’s left of her?’ 

“Yes, that’s her.”

“Are you sure?”

“A mother is always sure.”

 Though scrambled and bloody, enough of her smile remained; the only spark in her that could be called infectious, the particle of joy that made for wonder and hope.  

As the two men stood near, looking at her, the living woman, not the dead one, Kathleen’s mother at last stepped back. The men zipped the bag and pushed the long metal drawer into the row of lockers. Her eyes remained on the door that clicked shut. They let her stand for a moment and when she didn’t move one said, “Will you come into the office? We have refreshments if you like” 

Half of her was gone, she felt, the collapsed length of her youth, the drawn out and desiccated youth she did not understand, was powerless to move, to shape, the willful life that was her’s had spun away to the infinite horizon. We create life, it is taken from us, she thought. I am myself alone. 

   Yet she felt comfort that twenty four years of travail had finally ended. 

Long ago the love parted and faded. It was like a smoke thinning, a ghost gone, a burden lifted. The thought that she didn’t care, that she could finally admit that she had created a life she hadn’t cared for and was glad to see it gone, surprised her. Why not? If billions of people died right now, why should i care?

Oh Lord, how we treat each other, like animals. No, we treat each other worse than animals. Well then, show me a new way. 

She remembered seeing a very large dog, a mastiff that certainly weighed well over a hundred pounds struck on the road. The animal’s body was torn open and strung out on the road. In those days she was still driving herself. It happened right in front of her and she had to swerve almost off the road to avoid the torn open hound’s stretched out viscera. In the following days trucks passed over it (it happened just west of Mills) until it was nothing but a long red streak on the asphalt. The snow came and the rain came and washed it all away. For weeks this dog’s image came into her mind and she had to push it out, pause and push it aside.   

“She is so disfigured,” she said to the coroner. “The driver must have been going very fast.”

“He reported that he had no time to brake at all,” the coroner said. “And she was in the middle of the road. He was going pretty fast, you know how they do.” 

“I know.”

“I doubt if she felt any pain.”

“Oh, i know, she felt no pain.”

For many hours, later, Kathleen’s mother pondered that statement. Did she feel any pain? Yes she did, she felt pain all the way up to that moment her pain ended. 

Back in Casper she felt distracted, scattered. At lunch the next day her friend in the stock brokerage house gave her some advice. “Go away. You don’t think you need to but you do. Find some warm place on a beach. You can look out on the water and pretend you don’t exist. Among strangers we don’t exist, you know, strangers give us this marvelous gift; among strangers we can make ourselves new.”  

“I believe it, i don’t want to go anyplace i’ve been, Quinton, i need someplace new,” she said.

“Now i think you’ve got it; just put her aside,” Quinton said. “We (he and his wife) know a perfect place where you will find it very easy going. You can start thinking right again.” 

A thought passed through to her lips but she stopped it. She almost said, “I wasn’t thinking of my daughter.”

She said, “First i’ll go visit my parents, then i’ll be on my way.”

Memo; I found it in this wine, the joy it brings, spirit to spirit. My little girl, now i see i could only keep her briefly. She got in the way and i pushed her aside. Time is short. Time was what she wanted, to increase the length of her misery with all this craziness and waste. I wanted to keep her and she wanted to fly. I told her and i made her listen and made sure she heard me; i didn’t get ahead in the game by playing crazy. I got ahead by figuring out more than i had to figure out. Now she is gone and is only in my heart.

What crap. All this heart stuff is crap, wormy as an old cow pie in the sun. The heart is a muscle that does its job, pumps blood without feeling. Then where do we locate emotion? Some of it is in this glass, truly. Or is it in the pituitary gland? What is the pituitary gland? Will the real pituitary gland please stand up? If this gland, this nubin in the cerebral center is the seat of joy or sorrow i would have it removed. Tear it out, rip it asunder. 

Oh to hell with all of it. In wine is our only joy. Everybody in Casper loves me when i drink wine; everyone in Agrigento loves me when i drink wine. Wine is our only joy, our only joy is wine. 

Yet even in this nice place, who woulda thunk it, in Sicily, with all their cozy families and traditions, something is missing. My own people? Hardly so, they know only themselves, each one locked up in their own thoughts, they regard me with awe or respect, but they know and can love only themselves. The home folks are just like the Sicily people, each enthusiastic but you know, after all, they only love themselves.

And what is there for me? I have money. I can go anywhere in the whole goddam world i want to go and do anything i want to do. I have money, i have freedom. Who needs love?

End of “Steel, Stone and Shadow.”                 The wastebasket is a writer's best friend. Ernest Hemingway