He wanted to be a pro. He was good in high school. He was
pretty big, he could bench two-ninety. Pretty strong and big. He put up the posters
and wore the jerseys, plus he did dips and taped his wrists. It was him and the
team in the halls between classes all booming suck my dick this and you pussy
that and carrying their books gripped that way, fingers vising the top edge
palm down faking casual. To show his strength. Girls carried them on their
hips. Skinny boys cradled them with their hand hooked below. The team gripped
them that casually strong way palm down. To be all cool but it took effort
carrying them that way.
He skipped classes. Who needs algebra. The Peloponnesian
war. Shit like that. He worked at Foot Locker and rebuilt the ’69 Camaro with
his dad. Painted it Wisconsin red and white. He graduated. Who doesn’t.
He did not get the call. He went to the walk-on tryout
senior year and got hit so hard by a farmboy a hundred pounds heavier he passed
out. They did not call him back. He stayed on at Foot Locker summer after
graduation. Stopped working out.
His uncle hired him on at NAPA. He drove a delivery truck
around Milwaukee. Parts warehouse, mechanics’ shops. Parts warehouse, mechanics’
shops. Then they promoted him to Counter. He put on 75, 80 pounds working Counter.
He did that for three, four years. Knew all the parts, pretty much. Knew all
the mechanics and the weekend DIY guys. Worked on the ’69 Camaro til it was
cherry, then sold it to some big high school kid’s dad.
His doctor said get exercise every day. Walk. Go to the gym.
Maybe lift. But if you don’t lose that weight you are going to die young. The
doctor reminded him of Coach, so he did what he was told. Every morning early
he walked. He lost the weight. He felt dynamite. 110%. He got a new girlfriend
that was way sexier than the other one. He dressed sharp. Tucked in his Charley
NAPA shirt. Got promoted to Warehouse Inventory Manager. Moved with the sexier
girlfriend to Atlanta and bought a house. That went pretty good for a few
years. He got promoted up through Inventory. She wanted to get married but he
had this stupid thing on the side with a girl at H.Q. and the girlfriend left.
He slept around for a while and focused on work.
He flew lots. Went from store to store all over the country,
implemented the new Inventory Control System. It was a big deal. He got lots of
recognition and got bumped up to Corporate. It was the role he was born for. He
never knew he could do Corporate. He wore a suit and made deals. He ended up Vice
President for Purchasing. Twenty five years out of high school they sent him to
get a BPA. He did it in evening classes. Then he retired, years early, on his
savings and did the MBA at the University of Colorado. Went to work for a
software company that did inventory control for the Fortune 500s. After that,
he found some investors and started his own business. He hired some programmers
and they did distribution optimization. Sold that and he was done. At 50. He
sold his house in Denver right before the recession. For a mint. The amount
startled him. Millions in assets. Real estate. Shares in the company that
bought his software.
He met a younger woman in Phoenix that winter. They were
golfing in Scottsdale, staying at the Loew’s. Real nice. They were drunk in the
hotel bar and she asked him up to her room and pretty soon they were married
with a kid on the way.
All these years he’d kept up the walking and the working
out. He was fit. Had this girl who helped him dress sharp. A personal shopper.
He got two expensive haircuts a month. Bought a nice house in North Scottsdale,
on the fairway with a pool and a view of the McDowell Preserve. Things were going
good.
Then he just couldn’t get it up anymore. Here he was with
his pretty younger wife and it just didn’t work. He tried Viagra, of course,
but no go. He just wasn’t that interested. Plus, he was pretty sure she was
sleeping around. A rumor she’d been in a downtown club with a big man her own age.
He didn’t really care.
He’d been taking the RV to the National Parks by himself.
Every couple months he’d take off for a week or so. Drive to a Park, do the
hikes. Went to Canyonlands, southeast Utah. It just felt like where he
belonged. Phoenix and his wife and the kid and all the shit with pool
maintenance and HOA meetings and drinks at the golf club and not getting it up
just sort of went away. He got his ducks in a barrel and had his attorney
deliver the house and car titles and a pile of stock certificates and a college
savings account for the kid and a bunch of other paper, including a petition
for divorce, to his wife. He left a package of MagnumExtra-sized Trojans on the
counter along with the spare keys to the Mercedes convertible and the ski-boat.
He kept the RV and enough money to last his remaining years.
She tried to get more from him, but her attorney told her it
was pointless. He’d already given her far more than the law required.
He bought a hacienda-style place in Moab. Got to know
Canyonlands pretty good. And Arches. Even made several trips deep into the
Maze. Bought a new pickup just for that.
He walked farther and farther into the wilderness. Went all
around the Colorado plateau, from the San Rafael to Chaco. One night about
sunset, deep in southern Utah, he hiked out of a remote canyon where he’d been
lost for two days. He was very hungry so he drove 80 miles up a dirt road in
the dark to a tiny town. The smallest dot on his map. Just a cluster of houses
and some outlying ranches in a narrow valley between the canyons and a huge
standalone mountain. In all the black night just a few lights out there. There
was this strange thing he saw. Like a vision. In that lonely place a big yellow
window floated in the perfect black and the window was full of people. Like
fish in a tank. It was like they were just bumping around in that glass
rectangle, drinking and laughing. In his headlights there was a handpainted sign
with an arrow pointing at the floating window. It said Be Merry Restaurant. He
parked the RV. He tucked in his shirt and dusted himself off as best he could.
He could hear music as the door swung open. Someone off in the dark smoking. He
walked around toward the door. In the back of the room three young people on upright
bass, banjo, and fiddle and an ancient scrawny woman on drums. A mix of people
dancing. Old ones and young ones and a few kids. The tables pushed back. Most
of the dishes cleared and people drinking wine and clapping to the music and
dancing and that yellow light and the music and laughing and clapping. It was a
restaurant, but it was also like a home party or something. He hesitated to go
in. Maybe it was a birthday, some private event. But he was hungry. Anyway, he
ate a steak. It was good. He hadn’t been drinking much in the last couple
years, but he got a glass of wine. Then a bottle. The waitress was cute. He
felt good. A young guy with a drowsy toddler on his lap talked to him in a
neighborly way. Big Charley with his now-gray crewcut and this kid in his
twenties with beaded braids in his beard talked like they were buddies. Like
the kid didn’t care who he might be as long as he was decent. Charley was
decent. He had a great time. Felt so good. The very long last couple days lost
in the desert, the long drive, the night black as ink and then this good meal
and this old-style music and the warm people and the wine. He felt like a
million bucks.
He slept in the RV in the parking lot. Early the sun came up
the valley over long hayfields and pastures. The view seemed a fiction.
Something ideal. The canyons and mesas ranked a hundred miles into the white
east. The sun coming to him through the spray of a hundred chugging handlines.
Angus cattle and the sawtoothed ripgut fence cutting the sunrise to his feet.
He sat in the door of the RV and watched the shadows back away and the colors
sharpen
.
The restaurant opened midmorning and he went in for coffee.
The sunlight on his table was harsh and the place was quiet and sober.
This is how Charley Cowary came to be in Kolob. It was what
he wanted, or what he imagined he wanted. Peace and quiet. Remnants of old
ways. Cowboys and conservative old Mormons. Friendly people. The magnificent
scenery. That’s what he thought about over the next several days as he looked
for a house to buy. He wanted nice neighbors but not too close. He wanted
enough land to have a horse. A barn he could convert to a woodshop. He though
he would spend his retirement being a woodworker. It felt right. A view out
over the canyons and pastures. Walking distance from this restaurant where he
could drink coffee mornings and wine nights. For the first time since high
school he had an exciting vision of the future. Before the week was over he
owned a house, a horse, tack, and a restored Ford tractor. He started the life
he’d never known he’d wanted.
* * *
This is how Charley Cowary came find a place in Kolob, and to
buy the horse and tack and the restored Ford tractor:
That first day in Kolob, after he had coffee at the Be
Merry, he took his morning walk right there in the middle of town. It was just
a crossroads, where the dirt road he’d driven out of the desert the night
before teed into a two-lane county highway that came out of the canyons and
went up to the mountain. The Be Merry was right there at the intersection.
There was a store next door, mostly tourist stuff and an espresso machine and
snacks. Off to the side a small sawmill with the overhead door wide open but
nobody around, just drifts of pine dust blowing across the highway. Up a ways there
was a shabby two-pump gas station and a little motel straight out of the ‘50s. Other
than that, just a couple dozen houses scattered around back from the roads and
a post office and a fire station that was little more than a Quonset hut. He
walked by all this in a minute. A dirt lane went off the highway toward the
pastures, and he went that way. From around a bend he could see a cloud of dust
and soon a herd of a couple hundred pair of whiteface cattle came up between the
roadside fences. Behind them on either side rode two cowboys that from a
distance looked like straight out of a John Wayne. He stood off to the side to
let the cattle through. A rough and tattered heeler planted himself between
Charley and the cattle and watched him. Charley looked the old dog in the eye
and remembered a big purchasing deal he’d made with a Chinese manufacturer, how
the Chinese man played it like a poker game. Never blinked, never showed
nothing. Just kept his face blank as though to say Nothing personal Mr. Charley,
just business.
When the cowboys came up at the rear of the herd Charley
studied them, but they ignored him. He was disappointed to see that one of them
wore bright new Nike basketball shoes and was listening to an iPod. These
modern things jarred him, because otherwise the scene could have been the
1870s. The other cowboy was elderly. He wore dusty flannel and scarred leather
chaps and a sweatstained felt hat. He even had an old blued Colt revolver with
walnut grips. To Charley’s eye, the older man’s general dusty decrepitude, his
deeply-weathered face, and the rubbed-in grime in all his tack and gear spoke
of authenticity. He saw a no-bullshit manliness. He imagined the old man alone
on the mountainside in a howling blizzard, stoically tending a fire while his
massive quarterhorse dozed on a highline. In his imagination coyotes yipped in
the distance and cattle lowed in the frigid night. But the Nikes and the iPod
intruded on this pure vision, and Charley felt resentment rise in him. He also
felt a new certainty that he would live in Kolob and that his new life would be
authentic. That the pussified golfing and wine at the club and strategizing
with brokers and managing the pool boy and the wetback landscapers and the
mobile car-detailing service were over. That he would, from now on, live an
honest and manly life of independence and self-sufficiency. That he would meet
his future with stoic endurance. He knew all of this in the time it took the
cowboys to ride past.
As inconspicuously as he could, looking both ways, he took
his cell phone from his pocket and snapped a picture of the older cowboy,
pausing just long enough to frame the younger man, with his ridiculous white
basketball shoes, out of the picture.
He walked down the lane. Back from the highway the pastures
opened up to land that sloped away for miles down to the canyons. Dozens of
green and buff fenced fieldsand a few scattered houses and barns. The sun was
still low and cast a golden light on everything. Thick old cottonwoods lined
the lane, and here and there sections of the old juniper ripgut fence. He
thought he’d never seen prettier country anywhere. The prettiest farmland he’d
ever seen placed tightly into a wilderness of buff towering sandstone, like a
National Park you could buy and live in.
With his new excitement and certainty he walked down the
lane. It fell away from the town. He found a realtor’s sign, and went to call
the number, but there was no service. He felt a moment of irritation, but
quickly said to himself Well, here is a good sign. If there is no cell service
here, we’re not really in the ticky-tacky modern world, are we? A man could
escape to this place and live a genuine life. Without the intrusions. No
interruptions, just the man’s real life’s work to do, no excuses. Just an
honest day’s work and the pleasures afforded to such a man as can face that
work unblinking. He found the thought satisfying and true. He clicked a picture
of the barcode thingy on the realtor’s sign and walked on.
After a while, he came to a crossing lane, a sandy two-track
that climbed the slope back toward town. He crossed a cattle-guard and walked
up the hill. Some irrigated plants with purple flowers all around, and an
irrigation ditch running. As the lane fell out of sight behind him he found
himself in a sort of wide swale. A dog stood in the two-track a couple football
fields ahead and started barking. In a dense stand of cottonwoods a ratty old
shipping container sat on blocks. Other dogs came out from under it and the
pack trotted down the drive toward him. He stopped and stood his ground. The
dogs arrayed around him barking. A big man in a wide hat came out from behind
the container and stood and watched. Charley waived to him, but he didn’t waive
back. He just stood and looked. The dogs came in closer. Charley held his arms
out and shrugged in an exaggerated way as though to say What am I supposed to
do? Why don’t you call your dogs off? And the man finally whistled. Just one
sharp whistle and the dogs stood down. Like he’d thrown a switch. The man came
down the drive.
Help you?
Just out walking, looking around.
Private property.
I apologize. I didn’t see a sign.
Never needed one.
Charley Cowary, he said, and held out his hand.
The man paused. Jasper Lyman. His hand was huge and hard,
but he barely squeezed Charley’s hand, and looked away as they shook.
Well, the way back to town is the way you come.
Maybe you can tell me about that property for sale? With the
sign?
You lookin to buy?
Maybe. Just looking. Who’s the seller?
I am. It int any kind of vacation place or cabin or nothin.
Is there a house on it? Just land?
There’s the linehouse and some rock foundations is all. It’s
good pasture.
Can you show me it?
Was gonna let the realtor do that bit.
But Jasper started walking along the fence. At the top of
the rise he pointed down into another broad swale. Below them another cluster
of cottonwoods and willows, and the two-room line-house and an acre of rusted
machinery, clots of rusting fence, a bottle dump, a white refrigerator listing
beside a Willy’s jeep lying on its side. A dump. Charley looked. Didn’t say
anything for fear of offending Jasper. He stood with his arms crossed. A horse
walked out from behind a low barn. The horse reminded him of his new commitment
to the authentic life and the scene of redneck squalor shifted somehow, and
Charley saw beneath the surface of appearances to the many years of hardship
the people here must have endured. The junk took on a history then. A history
of authentic survival in a harsh western desert. He looked again, and he
thought All this junk, these things, they must have kept because on the
frontier you don’t throw things away. You keep them in case you’ll need them.
Spare parts. Clever ways to re-use machines. That old rusted pickup down there,
for example, could be converted to a grain mill, or some such useful device. He
looked and looked til he became conscious that Jasper was shifting on his feet,
waiting for some response.
How many acres in the parcel?
That’s the original forty.
Forty? Charley asked, with some astonishment, then
immediately regretted the sound of enthusiasm in his voice. He thought it
betrayed some suburban innocence, and he wished to sound savvier, more familiar
with rural western ways. I was lookin for closer to eighty, he said, on an
impulse. He cursed himself. Now what was that? he said to himself. You wake up
wanting a nice place not too close to neighbors and now you’re asking for
eighty acres.
Jasper’s expression didn’t change. Well, I can’t spare
eighty, but I bet we could work something out, less you need eighty exact.
They went down to the line-house. The dirt there was
hardpacked and lifeless, and stained here and there with motor oil and trampled
by cattle. The linehouse was a shambles. Windows boarded, old yellowed and
brittle vinyl siding hanging off in strips. Charley silently noted the
dovetailed squared timbers exposed there. The roof was just asphalt roll with
the mastic seams mopped on. But a chimney of hand-squared sandstone stood
through the roof. He went to the front door.
Nothin to see in there, Jasper said, with a dismissive waive
of his hand. Just a wore-out old linehouse the packrats took over.
Charley feigned indifference.
They walked among the rusted detritus of a hundred years of
cattle ranching. Back in the trees Jasper took him to the barn. The horse stood
off. The barn looked solid. Old and weathered, but with siding repaired and the
doors newly built. Inside was neat and dry. There were rolling chests of
mechanics’ tools along the wall. Crescent and Snap-On, Charley noted with
approval. In the middle of the floor stood a gleaming red tractor, an old Ford.
What year is that?
Fifty-eight.
You did the restoration.
Yes. Sort of my winter money-making business, except for the
money part.
Charley smiled. Walked around the tractor and looked it over
with admiration. That’s some fine work, he said.
I do what I can. Hard to get parts here.
They talked about the auto-parts business a while. Then
Charley said he’d call the realtor and they shook and he left.
He bought sixty-six acres, the tractor, the horse, and tack.
Before Charley left Kolob to close down his life in Moab, he contracted with
Jasper to haul all the junk, and he hired a builder to start on the linehouse.
The builder, a solid, clean, silent man used to working on vacation cabins,
looked the linehouse over. Looked neither encouraging nor skeptical. Charley
struggled to convey his ideas about the linehouse. He felt self-conscious. He
didn’t want to say aloud what he felt about authenticity and manly stoicism and
how to attain these ideals in the refurbishment of a decaying linehouse, but
the builder, name of Fielding, saved him the trouble.
What I suggest, if I may, is we strip off everything modern.
Get down to the underlying structure. See how those logs are holding up. Have a
look at the foundation. Give you a report when you get back from Moab so you
can make informed decisions about how to proceed.
Charley felt a swelling of gratitude. Not only did Fielding
speak like a man of business and seem so competent and ready to work, but the
man had perfectly read Charley’s mind concerning the construction work. Get rid
of all the defilements of modern life. Strip away the artificial, man-made
siding and get to the thick, handhewn timbers beneath. Clean the place of all
signs of the new world of commerce and hurry and makeshift cheapness.
Two weeks later Charley drove back into Kolob pulling just a
small trailer containing all of his old life he cared to keep. He’d sold the RV
and donated his nice suits and ties to the Mormon Church. He’d appraised every
last item for its authenticity and manliness and culled what didn’t fit his new
standard. He left the Moab house furnished to rent. In the trailer, along with
an old oak rocker and a narrow twin bed and a set of cast-iron Dutch ovens he’d
found in the antique store in Moab, was a set of old battered steamer trunks
full of his new clothes. In a kind of fever of lust for his new life on the
frontier he had gone online and bought hats and boots, chaps and a Navajo
saddle blanket, flannel shirts and an oilcloth slicker and a shearling coat. He
outfitted himself for riding his new horse, for fly-fishing, for hunting deer
and elk. He ordered checked wool blankets and shirts from Pendleton, and
lapelled wool vests from Filson. He ordered matching leather belt, holster, and
saddle scabbard from a craftsman in New Mexico. With some input from his
personal shopper, he outfitted his new life to perfection.
He stayed in the motel on the highway. The Lazy Daze. Run by
a young couple who were always agreeably stoned. Every day he spent at the new
property, working as though he were one of Fielding’s employees. The linehouse
progressed quickly, despite many setbacks. Fielding just about disassembled the
entire structure, placed a new foundation that Charley had him veneer with
sandstone, to match the chimney. He tore down the old chimney and rebuilt it with
the original stones over a core of reinforced concrete blocks. They replaced
many of the logs. Fielding himself used a hewing axe to surface the new
timbers, to match the old ones. A specialized painter came down from Salt Lake
for a week to stain and antique the new timbers to match the old ones. Almost
black with age. They rechinked. They roofed with a special steel designed to
rust evenly. They framed a new floor and planked it with wide pegged oak,
scrub-planed to a perfect unevenness. Fielding bored the peg holes square, for
authenticity, he said. Charley appreciated this conscientious attention to
detail, and Fielding’s knowledge about the old ways of building. They added a
wing out back so that Charley could have a kitchen and bath in his house. They added
plumbing and power, and a furnace. Charley wanted only a woodstove, but Fielding
gently insisted on the furnace, just in case.
Some months into the job Charley went to talk with his neighbor
Jasper about getting the junk cleaned up. He hadn’t even started. Jasper’s
brother told him Jasper was probably in Vegas and he had no idea when he’d come
back. So, at considerable expense, Charley hired a company from Grand Junction
to clear the area.
It was a long winter, bitter cold. Charley hadn’t expected
the cold. It scared him sometimes the way it blew a plume of powder-dry snow
off the mountain and threw weighted sheets of plywood across the pastures. But spring
came as Fielding put meticulous finishing touches on the house. They’d added a
long porch with battered stone piers and heavy columns of nearblack timbers. Charley
showed up one morning and found his rocker set just so on the porch with his
Navajo blanket across the armrests and the keys and Fielding’s last,
breathtaking, invoice. The way the chair was set triggered in Charley a deep
uneasiness. Meadowlarks sang, and a warm breeze came up from the canyons, but a
cold dread reaching way back came over him. He shook it off and went inside,
leaving the heavy plank door open to air out the stink of polyurethane and
paint.