Liz West

“Hey little lady, I want to bite your titty,” says Cody, one of two cowboys sent down the mountain to carry me back up as a cabin girl at the most remote resort in Colorado.

“Shut up, Cody” says Big Will, the other one. “We don’t talk to ladies like that.” To prove his point, Big Will puts on a Janis Joplin tape and Cody passes me a flask. I am thrilled to be sitting between two cowboys, whatever it is they want to bite. Because my dad always drove a pick up truck, I feel at home in the cab, but I am used to sitting in the passenger seat and wearing a seatbelt. I breathe in the pungent smell of sweat with an edge of horseshit and Old Spice and let the burn of whiskey flare my nostrils as I suck it down and stare at the trees flashing by the side of the road.

After a long, smooth stretch of highway, Big Will takes a sharp left onto Coffee Pot Road beginning our forty-mile ascent into the Flat Tops Wilderness Area. The sky becomes darker, the trees a flashing fortress of green as we continue to pass the flask between us, smoking and singing off key. I start to toss a lit butt out the window but Cody slaps my hand and for the rest of the summer I keep a collection of stubbed out cigarettes deep in the pockets of my Wranglers. “This is God’s country,” says Cody. “Don’t fuck it up.”

At the end of Coffee Pot Road, Big Will takes a sharp left, leaving government property for eight miles of cavernous dirt road characterized more by ditches and boulders than tire grooves. We bounce from seat to ceiling and I am glad to be wedged between these two wild, new men because their bodies won’t allow mine to fly out the window. When we finally we pull onto a smooth patch Big Will says, “We’re here” and I have to believe him because I can’t see anything but the truck sputtering into quiet. “Night y’all” says Cody ducking into blackness. Gravel clicks and scatters under his boots as Big Will grabs my army bags from the back of the truck and swings them onto his broad shoulders like they are two tiny feather pillows instead of the dense load of clothes and books I’ve packed to last these three months of summer.

“This way to the girl’s cabin,” says Big Will and I follow him, the outline of his shadow the only part of the night with edges. “Pick your feet up so you don’t fall on your face,” he says and I goose-step behind his silhouette until he stops in front of a small log cabin flanked by a creaky wooden railing. He heaves my bags onto a ratty pink armchair on the porch and says, “Night, Valley Girl,” tipping his hat me and giving me a wink like he knows something I couldn’t dream up.

 “You talk in your sleep,” says Kathy, gently shaking my shoulders the next morning. She is my cabin mate, half Lakota Sioux with a broad, tan face and sharp blue eyes. It is 5:30, before the light has crystallized and to wake up I splash ice water on my face from the cup of my hands at the small sink in the back room, next to a toilet and two wooden dressers. The front room, with its parallel twin beds piled high with old quilts, is reminiscent of my dorm room but without the antiseptic feel, cozy and rustic. After I pull on my jeans and t-shirt, Kathy gives me a medicine wheel on a leather chord to wear around my neck for protection, knowing better than I how much I’m going to need it.

Leaving the cabin that morning I get my first clear view of where I now live: the sky already electric blue, a huge meadow peppered with wildflowers and log cabins. I want to cry at the impossible beauty of a morning lodged firmly between two mountains, but instead I follow Kathy and learn how to make my first pot of Cowboy Coffee. Fill a 2-quart tin pot with six heaping tablespoons of coarse, raw grounds. Add water and bring to a boil atop a red-hot woodstove. When it’s roiling, throw in a cup of cold water and watch the gritty silt rush to the depths of the pot. Drink in the thick dankness and call it Day. 

**

“New York, huh?” asks Ethel, the matriarch of the lodge, greeting my credentials with a frown. She scurries after me in disgust, but as she is the pastry chef, creator of all breads, rolls, cakes, pies, muffins and endless pans of cornbread cooked with bacon grease, I, like the others, don’t give her lip.

I pick out a soft blue apron that will come to represent to me all things female in this rough and tumble wilderness- and Kathy shows me how to cover the tables in white and red checked cloths, lay out the pewter, stir the frozen hunks of orange juice, prepare the nutmeg and egg mixture for the cook who will arrive to prepare a huge family-style breakfast for the wranglers and everyone else who’s made their way up the mountain to fish or hike or ride or like me, escape the city for a season’s worth of good, hard work.

After breakfast I light a cigarette on the back porch and try to guess what kind of trees I’m looking at. I know the soul of Dostoyevsky’s female protagonists and why Trickster turns himself from man to raven, but not how to keep myself from feeling like a poor, dirty girl from Virginia that can’t make a difference in New York or prove her grit in Colorado. I want to learn something useful and solid. I want to feel the true distance between theory and practice.

I stub out my cigarette and find Kathy in the outhouse loading her apron with spray bottles and scrub brushes. Our morning consists of washing dishes, packing bag lunches for the wranglers, brewing sun tea, mixing lemonade, hauling bundles of kindling to the cabins, washing the bedding, chilling 12 packs of beer in the creek, cleaning the soot from the oil lamps and divorcing spiders from their webs.

 After changing the bedding in the seven guest cabins, busting our knuckles on the steel framed bunk beds, hauling loads of dirty sheets and blankets across the fields like so many dead bodies, Kathy and I head to the kitchen to prep for lunch.

When the colossal mound of lunch dishes are scoured, dried and put away, Kathy and I scrub the wrangler’s bunkhouse bathroom on our hands and knees in preparation for an afternoon in the laundry room. Supposedly low-tech, the ringer-washer remains more mysterious to me than the works of Nietzsche. I struggle to master its machinations and fail- rusty hoses shoot from their moorings like snakes from Medusa’s head, pounding me in the face with streams of dirty bleach water.

**

I am scared of horses, but I want to live in the wild and play with the big boys so on the second day when Big Will asks if I’d like to go for a ride, I say sure, like it’s no big deal. Back in Denver I’d bought a shiny pair of hundred-dollar black leather boots that seem prissy and inadequate as I pull them on along with a second bra. I stuff my pockets with a lighter and cigarettes, knowing I am a fool to think Big Will go slow enough to sustain fire.

In the barn, he shows me how spread out the blankets and then saddle Hooker, a solid brown paint, beautiful and full of loud snorts and whinnies. She won’t look me in the eye and I am more intimidated by her than my most tenured professor. Big Will claims she’s tame, but I know she’s not and my heart pounds as I hoist myself up by the stirrups, throwing a leg over her broad back. Big Will waits patiently for me on Lightning, a horse reserved for the wranglers, as I try with every tensed muscle in my body to look natural.

“Don’t let her know you’re scared,” he says with a laugh. “And another thing,” he says, suddenly looking more like a boy than a man. “Hold on like hell.”

“GIDDYAP!” he shouts then, digging his heels into the meaty flesh of Lightning’s belly. Hooker doesn’t wait for any sign of encouragement from me and the two horses bolt like race stock out of the corral and into the meadow, filthy with purple and red and orange wildflowers. In seconds we are across a field that takes twenty minutes to walk, shooting across a creek coursing with turgid, black water, and then up and down the embankment and through the far pasture.

Big Will is a blur in front of me, bobbing up and down on his horse like he’s done this before every day of his life. Ears flat and head down, Hooker shoots past Lightning and I crouch low, closing my eyes and keeping myself looser than I’ve ever been, so closely attached to another living thing. When Hooker pulls us through a thicket of brambles, tiny thorns tear at the flimsy fabric covering my arms, branding me with a hundred little scratches and I finally forget how afraid I am and the danger and instructions and rules of riding shake free. Big Will hoots and whistles in front of and behind and beside me and I think, holy hell, I am fucking flying.

My inner thighs are sore for days. The power, the thrill, the loss of control, the adrenaline, the mount and the dismount of the horse remains in my flesh and muscle and skin, forcing me to consider for the first time since leaving home that I inhabit the body of a woman.

The next day, Big Will sidles up to the laundry room, a little smile on his lips as I use my entire body to wrestle the tentacles of the washer back into the drainage holes in the floor. “I’ll pay you twenty bucks to do my laundry,” he says. He is taller than my Dad, six foot five, with the build and presence of a bull. He has a light brown crew cut and blue eyes widely spaced in his broad, pale face. On the mountain the wranglers do their own clothes, which is why they usually smell like shit.

“OK,” I agree. “Show me the dough.” He hauls a pillowcase of mud and sweat caked jeans onto the sudsy platform and hands me a twenty, which I fold into my pocket. There is no such thing as too much extra cash for cigarettes and beer.

Still more at home with book than a washer, I use the same method to clean his jeans as the sheets, adding two cups of bleach that streak acid through each square inch of his dark blue wranglers. But because I’m one of the only girls for a very large circumference, Big Will forgives me this, and by the end of the summer, a lot of other things too.

**

At the end of the third week, the cook quits, driving down the mountain in the middle of the night in the tradition of a dozen other cooks before him. He is sure someone has stolen $300 from his wallet and refuses to answer the culinary demands of the cowboys. “What a bunch of sexist pigs,” he says and I feel like I should agree with him, but I don’t. I want to be a little lady and I like knowing exactly what sort of animal I have to contend with.

Two months ago, I graduated from the second most expensive private college in the country, with a bachelor of arts in heartbreak and hard drinking. I was on scholarship, sold popcorn at the local movie theatre and in the course of my studies, demoted myself from winning fiction contests to sobbing hysterically alone in my dorm room. The boy I loved was a millionaire who wore silk scarves and borrowed my money. When I showed him my stories, he looked up at me and said, “Valley, you really ought to travel.” In Colorado, I don’t want to meet intellectuals. I don’t want to hear about philosophy or religion or politics. I want to see what you can break with your hands.

I use the afternoons to hike, draw, write letters and listen to garbled mix tapes on my Walkman. I seek out the solace of rocks in the far pasture, tying the arms of a shirt around my head to protect my eyes and ears from the thick swarms of mosquitoes, filling my notebook with stories of the mountain. Or, if the wranglers are chopping wood, I perch close enough to the lodge for an unobstructed view. Cody cranks up the new country station on the stereo of his truck, leaving the doors open to maximize the twang. I pull out my charcoals and attempt to capture the curve of their sweat-streaked backs in the motion of a swing, the combustible heat of metal meeting log, chiseled arms connected to axe. I draw smoky lines and the wood sings when it is cleaved in two.

**

One afternoon, changing into a clean black v-neck t-shirt for dinner, I hear a high-pitched scream coming from the showers.

“What the hell is that?” I ask.

“The Pussy Posse,” says Kathy, frowning.

“The what?”

“Cowgirls,” she says. “They come every July to ride hard and screw wranglers.”

Disgusting, I think and scrounge around in the bottom of my dresser for the only tube of lipstick I’ve brought with me to Colorado. At dinner, five women with teased blonde hair, goopy blue eye shadow and shiny pink lips suck iceberg lettuce from their forks and instead of straggling in one by one, the wranglers show up before the dinner bell, with combed hair and ironed jeans.

I scowl into the fire, singing my own version of Crazy by Patsy Cline. These women seem whorish but they know what they want and how to get it. When I finally slept with the millionaire, he’d refused to touch me above the neck. It was just like breaking up.

“May I have this dance?” asks Cody as I stare into the bleached halos of hair.

“Yes,” I say and allow him to take my hand and draw me up against his red checked flannel shirt. He smells musky and sweet and I inhale him like smelling salts. My hands clasp around his shoulders as we sway to Desperado and although I know he has a girlfriend back home, I don’t care. He’s from California and looks exactly like Brad Pitt.

“Well, aren’t you a city girl with a country kick,” he whispers into my ear, returning me to my place by the fire as the song ends. Maybe he’s ready to stop building fences? My poetry class last year offered up nothing more moving than Desperado. I glow from the closeness and the heat.

“Dammit!” shouts Cody then, standing up tall and surveying the view. “I want to bite all your titties!” I’m drunk enough not to walk straight and Big Will helps me into the back of the truck, gunning the engine to haul us back to our cabins. I stretch out on the cold, ridged steel of the metal bed and stare at a million stars offering me the sky.

 The next morning Big Will tips his cowboy hat at the Pussy Posse, giving them a low bow and a whistle before ordering his eggs. “You should be ashamed!” I whisper and snatch his plate away before he’s finished. “What? I didn’t do anything!” he says and turns around, nodding at Cody, who is sauntering through the door. “Not like he did.”

Cody’s in the same flannel and jeans as last night. He winks at me from across the room before sliding in between two Pussies who giggle and kiss him on each cheek and then sweetly turn to me. “I love that apron, honey,” says one ordering a poached egg and two slices of wheat bread toasted and dry.

 **

On my twenty-second birthday, Ethel bakes me a chocolate cake and Big Will brings me a bundle of wildflowers wrapped up in a bandana. There is a small card attached to the fabric with twine that says, “Happy Birthday, Vally Girl.” He’s spelled my name wrong, but I don’t care because he’s also painstakingly drawn a whole field of sunflowers under a bright yellow sun with little birds flying into clouds. “They call that a cowboy rose,” says Cody winking at Big Will and chucking him on the shoulder. Then Cody gives me a leather bracelet hammered into a handsome braid that I put on my wrist and leave on for the rest of the summer.

 **

After twenty-eight days of working nonstop, I get my first break: two solid days to spend any way I please. In Denver, I drink pints of beer at the Grizzly Rose Saloon and Dance Emporium and slow dance with a real estate agent who laces his thumbs through my belt loops and grazes my neck with kisses. I pull back only when he asks if I want to spend the next day with him and his nine-month old son. I’m tired of kissing men who are halfway somewhere else.

I felt restless and discontent in the city, annoyed by the traffic and congestion. Even coffee without big chunks of floating grounds is unappealing and I am overwhelmed by the too big selection of soda and cereal at the grocery store. I buy myself a black velvet dress flanked with denim and a bottle of bourbon to carry back up the mountain.

The second time up Coffee Pot Road is a much sweeter ride, but when I join Kathy and the wranglers playing poker in the lodge, my cheeks are hot and my throat is raw. Kathy puts her hand on my forehead, sends me to bed and Big Will brings me steaming cups of rose hip tea and clear hot broth. For the next three days, he does my share of the dishes and the laundry as I toss and moan in my bed, burning with fever like a baby.

 I am still hot and weak when Cody pushes open my cabin door to tell me they’ve blindfolded Hooker, who’s come down with moon blindness and given herself six nasty gashes in her chest and hind legs trying to escape from the lower corral. “Take her apples and carrots for me,” I tell him, wondering why such a beautiful animal would continue to injure herself when she was already down, above and beyond what was absolutely necessary.

When I’m finally well enough to return to work, Big Will brings me monk’s hood and elephant’s head to put on the windowsill above the sink. I hang the laundry on the line in a fine misty rain that makes my hair curl in ribbons around my head. On the afternoon that Big Will brings me a single cardinal feather, a leather satchel full of rose hips, a bushel of yellow snapdragons and a birdhouse with a big yellow sunflower painted on the side, I tell him thank you with a long, slow kiss. His hands are twice the size of mine and it is that night he stops calling me Girl and starts to call me Baby.

 **

After the first time, slow and exploratory and tentative, we give ourselves to each other everywhere there is a surface. In the tack shed, the guest cabins, the back of the pick up trucks, the bunk house, the showers that run too hot and too cold, the meadow on a picnic blanket as two horses, tethered to the trees, gobble away at the tall grass. We are like starving children, hungry all the time for each other’s bruised and eager bodies.

 **

I am scrubbing the public showers when Big Will bends down before me on one knee. “Valley baby,” he says. “Will you marry me?”

It is broad daylight and I have on sneakers, my ratty blue apron, my hair pulled back tight in a shoelace. My hands are stuffed in yellow rubber gloves that come up to my elbows.

“Seriously?” I whisper.

“Yes,” he says. “And if you say no today, I’ll ask again tomorrow.”

“Okay, then. No,” I say. The night before he dreamt we were homeless on the beach picking seashells and then I was running just past him through the trees. I want to marry at least three men in my lifetime but not before I collect a hundred lifetimes worth of experiences first.

True to his word, Big Will asks me again the next day at breakfast. I kiss him on the mouth and tell him he’s crazy.

 **

After a rowdy night of singing around the campfire and drinking whiskey, Big Will and I make our way back to our cabin, burrowing deep into each other, his huge body like my own mountain to climb again and again. We finally sleep, tangled in the new terrain of our bodies, and it is from these depths that Big Will shouts, “Can you breathe?”

“No!” I yell back, my nose and eyes thick with smoke. He leaps out of bed and throws open the door, waves of black smoke billowing past him into the night air. I scream and point to a pile of smoldering embers on the table next to the woodstove.

He grabs the fiery mass and runs like a football player with a ball of flames past the door. As it hits the ground, it explodes and we watch as our jeans, coats, bras, flannels and my new denim and black velvet dress burn to ash. “Forgot to shut the fire door,” says Big Will with a laugh. He saved me, I think, but he almost killed me too. The only thing that doesn’t burn is his bronze “Jack Daniels” belt buckle.

The next morning, elbow-deep in dishes, Big Will stands behind me at the, sink pressing his body, huge and warm, into mine. “How about today?” he asks and I turn my face into his chest. “OK,” I say. “On one condition.”

“Anything,” he says

“We can’t tell anybody.”

“You got it, Baby,” he says and before he leaves for a three-day pack trip, he gives me the wedding ring from his first marriage that I wrap with tape so that it won’t slip off my finger.

 **

September is hunting season and we have to be in the kitchen by 4 am to start the fire for the hunters. The mornings are raw and cumbersome and I move into the bunkhouse with Big Will for heat, comfort and because we are secretly engaged. Kathy won’t speak to me when I pack up my remaining belongings from our cabin, causing a rift between us I can’t mend or explain. At night the wranglers snore, dogs pee on the floor and there is so little room in the top bunk with Will that I can’t roll over.

Big Will is sent on longer pack trips and I am lonely without Kathy, so I spend my afternoons drinking beer and playing poker with the wranglers, tromping through the fields with miniature candy bars stashed in my apron, relishing the sun and the precious little time where I don’t have to clean up someone else’s mess.

 **

One morning while I am sweeping out the lodge and Will is on a pack trip with a group of hunters and a string of mules. Cody lays his hand on my shoulder. “City Girl,” he says, “They shot Hooker. She’s in the far pasture.” Tears prick at my eyes behind the lids and I say “No.” Cody reaches out to hug me and I hug him back, hard. I was the last person to ride her, that first time with Will. I pack my apron with cans of beer and begin to hike through the tall, marshy grass to a pasture I’ve only ridden to before.

The sky rumbles and rolls like all of Colorado is in danger of tumbling down on my head. I pop open a can and slug it as I walk. Massive gray clouds darken the sky and my head feels hot and woozy but I keep going, making up songs to sing to myself. It starts to rain lightly and then lets up and then comes down harder and I am soaking wet and chilled but I keep going and by the time I find Hooker I’m out of breath and soggy with rain and sweat.

There is a small clearing in the middle of a grove of trees and everything is like a picture. I bend to my knees on the ground and feel the days that have recently passed between these mountains spread out and then collapse within me like a fan. The massive horse that was stronger than me, that I learned to ride, that kept me from being a stranger to this experience, is already starting to rot, her ribs poking out like the foundation of an ark, rounded but not whole, and I start to cry, feeling my own belly with my hands, pushing the dead weight of the ring around my finger into my skin, sensing and then certain for the first time that even as this horse is becoming earth, my body is the home of a new and very uncertain life.