Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3

“One of the Farson ladies said she knew a Forkenbrock down in Dixon. She thought he had a ranch in the Snake River valley. Well, my ears perked up when I heard ‘ranch,’” he said.

“And Forkenbrock ain’t that common of a name. So I asked Mother if they were Dad’s relatives,” he said. “I would of liked it if we had ranch kin. I was already thinking about getting into cowboy ways. She said no, that Dad was an orphan, that it was just a coincidence. So she said.”

At dinner that night, once Forrie Wintka’s dramatic demise had been hashed through again, Church Bollinger began to describe his travels through the Canadian Rockies.

“What we’d do is fly, then rent a car instead of driving. Those interstates will kill you. The wife enjoyed staying at nice hotels. So we flew to San Francisco and decided to drive down the coast. We stopped in Hollywood. Figured we’d see what Hollywood was all about. They had these big concrete columns. Time came to leave, I got in and backed up and crunch, couldn’t get out. I finally got out but I had a bad scratched door on the rental car. Well, I bought some paint and I painted it and you could never tell. I drove to San Diego. Waited for a letter from the rental outfit but it never came. Another time I rented a car there was a crack in the windshield. I says, ‘Is this a safety problem?’ The guy looks at me and says ‘No.’ I drive off and it never was a problem. We did the same thing when we went to Europe. In Spain we went to the bullfights. We left after two. I wanted to experience that.”

“But are they wounded?” asked Powder Face.

Mr. Bollinger, thinking of rental cars, did not reply.

When Berenice told Chad Grills about old Mr. Forkenbrock who used to work for his grandparents, he was interested and said he would talk to them about it next time he went out to the ranch. He said he hoped Berenice liked ranch life because he was in line to inherit the place. He told Berenice to find out all she could about Forkenbrock’s working days. Some of those cagey old boys managed to get themselves situated to put a claim on a ranch through trumped-up charges of unpaid back wages. Whenever Beth came with her tape recorder, Berenice found something to do in the hall outside Ray Forkenbrock’s room, listening, expecting him to tell about the nice ranch he secretly owned. She didn’t know what Chad would do.

Ray said, “I think when she heard about the Dixon Forkenbrocks, Mother had a little feeling that something wasn’t right because she wrote back to the Farson lady thanking her for the nice lunch. I think she wanted to strike up a friendship so she could find out more about the Dixon people, but, far as I know, that didn’t happen. It stuck in my mind that we wasn’t the only Forkenbrock family.” Beth was glad he didn’t pause so often now that he was into the story, letting his life unreel.

“The last day of school was a trip and a big picnic. The whole outfit usually went on the picnic, since learning academies of the day was small and scattered. When I was twelve the seventh grade had only three kids—me, one of my sisters who skipped a grade and Dutchy Green. We was excited when we found out the trip was to the old Butch Cassidy outlaw cabin down near the Colorado border. Mrs. Ratus, the teacher, got the map of Wyoming hung up and showed us where it was. I seen the word ‘Dixon’ down near the bottom of the map. Dixon! That’s where the mystery Forkenbrocks lived. Dutchy was my best friend and I told him all about it and we tried to figure a way to get the bus to stop in Dixon. Maybe there’d be a sign for the Forkenbrock Ranch,” he said.

“As it turned out,” he said, “we stopped in Dixon anyways because there was something wrong with the bus.

“There was a pretty good service station in Dixon that had been an old blacksmith shop. The forge was still there and the big bellows, which us boys took turns working, pretending we had a horse in the stall. I asked the mechanic who was fixing the bus if he knew of any Forkenbrocks in town and he said he heard of them but didn’t know them. He said he had just moved down from Essex. Dutchy and me played blacksmith some more but we never got to Butch Cassidy’s cabin because they couldn’t fix the bus and another one had to come take us back. We ate the picnic on the bus on the way home. After that I kind of forgot about the Dixon Forkenbrocks,” he said. He was beginning to slow down again.

“I didn’t think about it until Dad died in an automobile accident on old route 30,” he said.

“He was taking a shortcut, driving on the railroad ties, and a train come along,” he said.

He said, “I’d been working for the Bledsoes for a year and hadn’t been home.”

At the mention of the Bledsoes, Berenice, out in the hallway, snapped her head up.

“Mr. Bledsoe drove me back so I could attend the funeral. They had it in Rawlins and the Pathfinders had took care of everything,” he said.

Beth looked puzzled. “Pathfinders?”

“That organization they belonged to. Pathfinders. All we had to do with it was show up. Which we done. Preacher, casket, flowers, Pathfinder flags and mottoes, grave plot, headstone—all fixed up by the Pathfinders.” He coughed and took a sip of whiskey, thinking of cemetery weeds and beyond the headstones the yellow wild pastures.

Berenice couldn’t listen anymore because the chime for Cook’s Treats rang. It was part of her job to bring the sweets to the residents, the high point in their day trumped only by the alcoholic Social Hour. Cook was sliding triangles of hot apple pie onto plates.

“You hear about Deb’s husband? Had a heart attack while he was hitching the tow bar to some tourist. He’s in the hospital. It’s pretty serious, touch and go. So we won’t be seeing Deb for a little while. Maybe ever. I bet she’s got a million insurance on him. If he dies and Deb gets a pile a money, I’m going to take out a policy on my old man.”

When Berenice carried out the tray of pie, Mr. Forkenbrock’s door stood open and Beth was gone.

Sundays Berenice and Chad Grills drove out on the back roads in Chad’s almost-new truck. Going for a ride was their kind of date. The dust was bad, churned up by the fast-moving energy company trucks. Chad got lost because of all the new, unmarked roads the companies had put in. Time after time they turned onto a good road only to end up at a dead-end compression station or well pad. Getting lost where you had been born, brought up and never left was embarrassing, and Chad cursed the gas outfits. Finally he took a sight line on Doty Peak and steered toward it, picking the bad roads as the true way. Always his mind seized on a mountain. In a flinty section they had a flat tire. They came out at last near the ghost town of Dad. Chad said it hadn’t been a good ride and she had to agree, though it hadn’t been the worst.

Deb Slaver did not come in all the next week, and the extra work fell on Berenice. She hated changing Mr. Harrell’s bandage and skipped the chore several times. She was glad when on Wednesday, Doc Nelson’s visit day, he said Mr. Harrell had to go into the hospital. On Saturday, Beth’s day to visit Mr. Forkenbrock, Berenice got through her chores in a hurry so she could lean on a dust mop outside the door and listen. Impossible to know what he’d say next with all the side stories about his mother’s garden, long-ago horses, old friends. He hardly ever mentioned the Bledsoes who had been so good to him.

“Grandpa,” said Beth. “You look tired. Not sleeping enough? What time do you go to bed?” She handed him the printout of his discourse.

“My age you don’t need sleep so much as a rest. Permanent rest. I feel fine,” he said. “This looks pretty good—reads easy as a book.” He was pleased. “Where did we leave off,” he said, turning the pages.

“Your dad’s funeral,” said Beth.

“Oh boy,” he said. “That was the day I think Mother begin to put two and two together. I sort of got it, at least I got it that something ugly had happened, but I didn’t really understand until years later. I loved my dad so I didn’t want to understand. I still got a little Buck knife he give me and I wouldn’t part with it for anything in this world,” he said.

There was a pause while he got up to look for the knife, found it, showed it to Beth and carefully put it away in his top drawer.

“So there we all were, filing out of the church on our way to the cars that take us to the graveyard, me holding Mother’s arm, when some lady calls out, “Mrs. Forkenbrock! Oh, Mrs. Forkenbrock!” Mother turns around and we see this big fat lady in black with a wilted lilac pinned on her coat heading for us,” he said.

“But she sails right past, goes over to a thin, homely woman with a boy around my age and offers her condolences. And then she says, looking at the kid, ‘Oh, Ray, you’ll have to be the man of the house now and help your mother every way you can,’” he said. He paused to pour into the whiskey glass.

“I want you to think about that, Beth,” he said. “You are so strong on family ties. I want you to imagine that you are at your father’s funeral with your mother and sisters and somebody calls your mother, then walks right over to another person. And that other person has a kid with her and that kid has your name. I was—all I could think was that they had to be the Dixon Forkenbrocks and that they was related to us after all. Mother didn’t say a word, but I could feel her arm jerk,” he said. He illustrated this by jerking his own elbow.

“At the cemetery I went over to the kid with my name and asked him if they lived in Dixon and if they had a ranch and was they related to my father who we was burying. He gives me a look and says they don’t have a ranch, they don’t live in Dixon but in LaBarge, and that it is his father we are burying. I was so mixed up at this point that I just said ‘You’re crazy!’ and went back to Mother’s side. She never mentioned the incident and finally we went home and got along like usual although with damn little money. Mother got work cooking at the Sump ranch. It was only when she died in 1975 that I put the pieces together,” he said. “All the pieces.”

On Sunday Berenice and Chad went for their weekly ride. Berenice brought her new digital camera. For some reason Chad insisted on going back to the tangle of energy roads, and it was almost the same as before—a spiderweb of wrong-turn gravel roads without signs. Far ahead of them they could see trucks at the side of the road. There was a deep ditch with black pipe in it big enough for a dog to stroll through. They came around a corner and men were feeding a section of pipe into a massive machine that welded the sections together. Berenice thought the machine was interesting and put her camera up. Behind the machine a truck idled, a grubby kid in dark glasses behind the wheel. Thirty feet away another man was filling in the ditch with a backhoe. Chad put his window down, grinned and, in an easy voice, asked the kid how the machine worked.

The kid looked at Berenice’s camera. “What the fuck do you care?” he said. “What are you doin out here anyway?”

“County road,” said Chad, flaring up, “and I live in this county. I was born here. I got more rights to be on this road than you do.”

The kid gave a nasty laugh. “Hey, I don’t care if you was born on top of a flagpole, you got no rights interferin with this work and takin pictures.”

“Interfering?” But before he could say any more the man inside the pipe machine got out and the two who had been handling the pipe walked over. The backhoe driver jumped down. They all looked salty and in good shape. “Hell,” said Chad, “we’re just out for a Sunday ride. Didn’t expect to see anybody working on Sunday. Thought it was just us ranch types got to do that. Have a good day,” and he trod on the accelerator, peeling out in a burst of dust. Gravel pinged the undercarriage.

Berenice started to say “What was that all about?” but Chad snapped “Shut up” and drove too fast until they got to the blacktop and then he floored it, looking in the rearview all the way. They didn’t speak until they were back at Berenice’s. Chad got out and walked around the truck, looking it over.

“Chad, how come you to let them throw off on you like that?” said Berenice.

“Berenice,” he said carefully, “I guess that you didn’t see one a them guys had a.44 on him and he was taking it out of the holster. It is not a good idea to have a fight on the edge of a ditch with five roustabouts in a remote area. Loser goes in the ditch and the backhoe guy puts in five more minutes of work. Take a look at this,” he said, and he pulled her around to the back of the truck. There was a hole in the tailgate.

“That’s Buddy’s .44 done that,” he said. “Good thing the road was rough. I could be dead and you could still be out there entertaining them.” Berenice shuddered. “Probably,” said Chad, “they thought we were some kind of environmentalists. That camera of yours. Leave it home next time.”

Right then Berenice began to cool toward Chad. He seemed less manly. And she would take her camera wherever she wanted.

On Monday Berenice was in the kitchen looking for the ice cream freezer which hadn’t been used for two years. Mr. Mellowhorn had just come back from Jackson with a recipe for apple pie ice cream and he was anxious for everyone to share his delight. As she fumbled in the dark cupboard Deb Slaver banged in, bumping the cupboard door.

“Ow!” said Berenice.

“Serves you right,” snarled Deb, sweeping out again. There was a sound in the hall as of someone kicking a stuffed dog.

“She’s pretty mad,” said Cook. “Duck didn’t die so she don’t get the million-dollar insurance, but even worse, he’s going to need dedicated care for the rest of his life—hand and foot waiting on, nice smooth pillows. She’s got to take care of him forever. I don’t know if she’ll keep working and try to get an aide to come in or what. Or maybe Mr. Mellowhorn will let him stay here. Then we’ll all get to wait on him hand and foot.”

Saturday came, and out of habit, because she had broken up with Chad and no longer really cared about the Bledsoes or their ranch, Berenice hung around in the hall outside Mr. Forkenbrock’s room. Beth had brought him a dish of chocolate pudding. He said it was good but not as good as whiskey and she poured out his usual glass.

“So,” said Beth. “At the funeral you met the other Forkenbrocks but they didn’t live in Dixon anymore?”

“No. No, no,” he said. “You ain’t heard a thing. The ones at the funeral were not the Dixon Forkenbrocks. They was the LaBarge Forkenbrocks. There was another set in Dixon. When Mother died, me and my sisters had a go through her stuff and sort it all out,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” said Beth. “I guess I misunderstood.”