Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2. Annie Proulx
to live with them, Charlie Parrott told his widow-bride. A flash of distaste crossed her features. She covered up quickly with a grand smile.
“Well, it’ll be nice to have another woman on the place,” she said, but with some acid, as if remarking that it would be nice to have more rattlesnakes. Charlie Parrott wasn’t fooled and told Linny to walk softly. The girl’s name had been picked from a baby-name book which reflected a brief fashion of naming girls for expensive wedding gifts of an earlier time—Linen, Silver, Crystal, Ivory.
When Georgina told Decker Mell, who had become her confidant, of this new development he remarked that she was probably in for some trouble.
“You know, Georgina, I sort a wish you hadn’t married him. You should a hitched up with somebody in polo. I am guessin Charlie don’t have much feelin for polo.”
“Right,” she laughed, implying that her husband had an excellent feel for other, unspecified sports. “But you were already married, Decker, so I had to settle for Charlie.” They both laughed.
Linny arrived on an August weekend driving an old Land Rover with a bad muffler, the vehicle once painted with tiger stripes now faded to faint wiggles. She was wearing a skimpy green halter and the shortest skirt Georgina had ever seen. She was a big, good-looking girl, buxom and curvaceous, with dusty black hair (except for a fringe of bleached blond bangs) pulled into a ponytail that slapped her between the shoulder blades when she ran. She looked very Indian to Georgina, more Indian than Charlie. Her face contained enough material for two faces: a high brow, a long chin, wide cheekbones with fleshy cheeks like vehicle headrests, and a nose like a plowshare. Her eyes were black, double-size almonds, and her long teeth were perfect. Georgina saw that Linny’s eyes were marred by a slight strabismus in the left one which gave her a crazy appearance as though she might suddenly shriek and spring on someone. She yanked two huge duffel bags out of the Land Rover.
Georgina and Linny shook hands like men, eyeing each other as though looking for toeholds.
Linny said, “I sure appreciate it that you let me come here. It’s my plan to find a job and then get an apartment or something in town. I don’t want to get in your and Dad’s way.” She scratched her dark thigh with mint green nails.
“That sounds like a plan, Linny. I’m happy to help if I can. The job thing might be tough. Wyoming is not a great place for jobs. What kind a work have you been doin?”
“Mostly I been in school, little bit a film school in California, which I couldn’t hack after they showed us this nasty old Edison film, Electrocution of an Elephant. Then I worked in Reno at one of the casinos.”
“The elephant thing does sound ugly. But Reno?”
“Sure. My mother lives in Reno. She works in one a the casinos and I got a job in the gift shop. You know, waitin on customers. Somebody wins some money, first thing they want a do is spend it. And the gift shop had real expensive stuff. It was sort of a crappy job, though. But paid pretty good so the employees wouldn’t try to rip the shop off. That’s how I could afford the Land Rover. And I did other stuff. The usual, like, let’s see, I did waitressing, bartending, and the gift shop thing, then a summer as a fire spotter in this lookout tower for the Forest Service. Which was a headache—those horny USFS guys would come up there all the time to ‘help me out.’”
“Uh-huh,” said Georgina, biting back a remark that anyone who wore clothes as skimpy as Linny’s would always be bothered by men with horn colic, and went off to the kitchen to talk with the cook.
Doreen Gaines was a thin hypochondriac. She and her husband had worked for the Brawlses since 1978. After Sage’s death she stayed on, the main artery of news connecting the Brawlses to the town. Sage and Georgina had given the Gaineses an unvarying Christmas present—a hundred-dollar bill and a saddle blanket. They had twenty-four saddle blankets, most with the price stickers still on them, stacked on top of the freezer in their garage. While Sage Brawls was alive Doreen had recognized Georgina as the enemy, but now Charlie Parrott and his half-naked daughter had moved into the opponent’s corner.
“Dad,” said Linny to Charlie Parrott, “she’s too old to have kids, right?”
“Who, Georgina? I guess so. Never discussed it. Guess she’s over the line. Never thought about more kids, seeing how bad the first one turned out.” He winked at her, but there rose in his mind like a bubble elevating through beer the image of his first wife, whom he had not seen for years, her little razory face and dark-circled eyes. In his memory it was a very cold day so that he, coming out of a humid and overheated house, had taken in breaths of air that seemed slabs of clear, thin ice. The sunlight all around her flashed with snow crystals that emerged from the empty air rather than falling from clouds, for the sky was blue.
“I mean, she’s older than you—like, she must be fifty—well, like it’s a pretty nice ranch. Too bad it’s so far out from town.” And the girl squinted at the horizon. Her father was a good-looking man who had played the sexual attraction card well. She understood the game.
Charlie Parrott caught the drift of these remarks; Linny was figuring the odds on someday inheriting the Brawlses’ ranch but didn’t want to come right out and say it. He’d done the same figuring himself. They were a pair.
“What’s your mother do these days?”
“Workin. She got a chambermaid job at one a the casinos. The Big Lucky Palace.” “She still hit the bottle?” “What a you think? Why I’m here.”
After the dinner dishes were cleared Linny would fire up her old Land Rover and take off for Casper. She would drag in long after midnight, and sometimes, when it was very late, park down near the main road and walk in to the ranch house. The dogs never barked at her. At breakfast she always said she’d been job hunting, that the best place to find out about jobs was not in the newspapers but in the bars.
“You know,” said Georgina to Charlie in the night, “this trot-tin off to the bars every night is goin a end in number three.” “Number three what?”
“Number three knocked up,” said Georgina. “You pay for the other abortions?”
“Yeah. You know, I’m her father and all. She counts on me.” “I can see that.”
“All she needs is a job. She gets a job she’ll straighten out pretty fast. She’s a good girl.”
Georgina thought Linny was more of a ripe young slut, but she said nothing.
“Hey,” said Charlie Parrott. “Come on over here.” And he reached for her, his callused hands catching on the silk of her nightgown.
Georgina experienced a quick memory of the aging Sage Brawls trying to twist down and put his right hand on the floor behind his left heel.
A few days later Georgina cornered Linny at noon. The girl, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and sagging, blood-spotted briefs, was at the counter, fixing her breakfast, a plate of tortillas and beans with huge amounts of fiery salsa. Fighting a hangover, Georgina suspected. Doreen was kneading bread, shooting glances at Linny. Georgina waved her out into the garden, then, as Linny sat at the table, Georgina swung her bony behind onto a stool near the counter. Her rough heels scraped the rungs.
“Got a proposition for you. There’s this buildin down in Casper belonged to Mr. Brawls—the Brawls Commercial. They owned it for years and years. Now I get this notice that the city wants a condemn it, tear it down. They’ll pay somethin for it, but that’s not the point—they want it gone. Casper’s upgradin. So, we got a few weeks, a month, clean out the buildin. I went down there yesterday and took a look. The structure’s in bad shape. And there’s file cabinets full a papers, boxes a papers, rooms a boxes. Some a this paper might be important. The Brawlses had their hand in a lot a things. I talked to some a the State Archives people. They would like to know what’s there. They’ll probly take most of it off our hands. But I don’t just want a turn it over without knowin what we got. So, I need for somebody go through those boxes. Keep a eye out for letters from George Warshinton or whatever. See what turns up, make some