Crow Fair (17 page)

Szabo didn’t like to call the land he owned and lived on a ranch—a word that was now widely abused by developers. He preferred to call it his property, or “the property,” but it did require a good bit of physical effort from him in the small window of time after he finished at the office, raced home, and got on the tractor or, if he was hauling a load of irrigation dams, on the ATV. Sometimes he was so eager to get started that he left his car running. His activity on the property, which had led, over the years, to arthroscopic surgery on his left knee, one vertebral fusion, and mild hearing loss, thanks to his diesel tractor, yielded very little income at all and some years not even that—a fact that he did not care to dwell on.

He produced racehorse-quality alfalfa hay for a handful of grateful buyers, who privately thought he was nuts but were careful to treat his operation with respect, because almost no one else was still producing the small bales that they needed to feed their own follies. They were, most of them, habitués of small rural tracks in places such as Lewistown or Miles City, owners of one horse, whose exercise rider was either a daughter or a neighbor girl who put herself in the way of serious injury as
the price of the owner’s dream. Hadn’t Seattle Slew made kings of a couple of hapless bozos?

Szabo was not nuts. He had long understood that he needed to do something with his hands to compensate for the work that he did indoors, and it was not going to be golf or woodworking. He wanted to grow something and sell it, and he wanted to use the property to do this. In fact, the work that he now did indoors had begun as manual labor. He had machined precision parts for wind generators for a company that subcontracted all the components, a company that sold an idea and actually made nothing. Szabo had long known that this approach was the wave of the future, without understanding that it was the wave of his future. He had worked very hard, and his hard work had led him into the cerebral ether of his new workplace: now, at forty-five, he took orders in an office in a pleasant town in Montana, while his esteemed products were all manufactured in other countries. It was still a small, if prosperous, business, and it would likely stay small, because of Szabo’s enthusiasm for what he declined to call his ranch.

It wasn’t that he was proud of the John Deere tractor that he was still paying for and that he circled with a grease gun and washed down like a teenager’s car. He wasn’t proud of it: he loved it. There were times when he stood by his kitchen window with his first cup of coffee and gazed at the gleaming machine in the morning light. Even the unblemished hills of his property looked better through its windshield. The fact that he couldn’t wait to climb into it was the cause of the accident.

The hay, swathed, lay in windrows, slowly drying in the Saturday-morning sun. Szabo had gone out to the meadows in his bathrobe to probe the hay for moisture and knew that it
was close to ready for baling. The beloved tractor was parked at the foot of the driveway, as though a Le Mans start would be required once the hour came around and the moisture in the tender shoots of alfalfa had subsided, so that the hay would not spoil in the stacks. Szabo, now in jeans, tennis shoes, hooded sweatshirt, and baseball cap, felt the significance of each step as he walked toward the tractor, marveling at the sunlight on its green paint, its tires nearly his own height, its baler pert and ready. He reached for the handhold next to the door of the cab, stepped onto the ridged footstep, and pulled himself up, raising his left hand to open the door. Here his foot slid off the step, leaving him briefly dangling from the handhold. A searing pain informed him that he had done something awful to his shoulder. Releasing his grip, he fell to the driveway in a heap. The usually ambrosial smell of tractor fuel repelled him, and the towering green shape above him now seemed reproachful. Gravel pressed into his cheek.

As he lay in recovery, the morphine drip only prolonged his obsession with the unbaled hay, since it allowed him to forget about his shoulder, which he had come to think of not as his but as a kind of alien planet fastened to his torso, which glowed red like Mars, whirling with agony, as soon as the morphine ran low. It was a fine line: when he wheedled extra narcotic, his singing caused complaints, and he got dialed back down to the red planet. Within a day, he grew practical and managed to call his secretary.

“Melinda, I’m going to have to find somebody for the property. I’ve got hay down and—”

“A ranch hand?”

“But just for a month or so.”

“Why don’t I call around?”

“That’s the idea. But not too long commitment-wise, okay? I may have to overpay for such a limited time.”

“It is what it is,” Melinda remarked, producing a mystification in Szabo that he ascribed to the morphine.

“Yes, sure,” Szabo said. “But time is of the essence.”

“You can say that again. Things are piling up. The guy in Germany calls every day.”

“I mean with the hay.”

Melinda was remarkably efficient, and she knew everyone in town. Her steadiness was indispensable to Szabo, who kept her salary well above temptation from other employers. By the next day, she had found a few prospects for him.

The most promising one, an experienced ranch hand from Wyoming, wore a monitoring ankle bracelet that he declined to explain, so he was eliminated. The next most promising, a disgruntled nursery worker, wanted permanent employment, so Szabo crossed him off the list, ignoring Melinda’s suggestion that he just fire him when he was through. That left a man called Barney, overqualified and looking for other work but happy to take something temporary. He told Melinda that he was extremely well educated but “identified with the workingman” and thought a month or so in Szabo’s bunkhouse would do him a world of good. Szabo called Barney’s references from his hospital bed. He managed to reach only one, the wife of a dentist who ran a llama operation in Bozeman. Barney was completely reliable, she said, and meticulous: he had reshingled the toolshed and restacked their large woodpile in an intricate pattern—almost
like a church window—and swept the sidewalk. “You could eat off it!” she said. Szabo got the feeling that Mrs. Dentist had been day-drinking. Her final remark confused him. “Nobody ever did a better job than Barney!” she said, laughing wildly. “He drove us right up the wall!”

Szabo took a leap of faith and hired him over the phone. The news seemed not to excite Barney. “When do you want me to start?” he droned. After the call, Szabo gazed at his phone for a moment, then flipped it shut. His arm in a sling, his shoulder radiating signals with every beat of his heart, he returned to his office and stirred the things on his desk with his left hand. Eventually, he had pushed the papers into two piles: “urgent” and “not urgent.” Then there was a painful reshuffle into “urgent,” “not that urgent,” and “not urgent.” Melinda stood next to him. “Does that make sense?” he asked.

Melinda said, “I think so.”

“I’m going home.”

Barney, who looked to be about forty, with a pronounced widow’s peak in his blondish hair and a deep dimple in his chin, was a quick study, though it took Szabo a while to figure out how much of his instruction the man was absorbing. Barney was remarkably without affect, gazing at Szabo as he spoke as if marveling at the physical apparatus that permitted Szabo’s chin to move so smoothly. At first, Szabo was annoyed by this, and when Barney’s arm rose slowly to his mouth to place a toothpick there, he had a momentary urge to ask him to refrain from chewing it while he was listening. It was the sense of a concealed smirk behind the toothpick that bothered Szabo the most. But once he’d observed Barney’s efficiency, Szabo quickly trained himself not to indulge such thoughts. Some of the hay had been
rained on, but Barney raked it dry, and soon the shiny green tractor was flying around the meadows making beautiful bales for the racehorses of Montana. This gave Szabo something of a heartache, but he praised Barney for the job he had done so well. Barney replied, “That’s not enough hay to pay for the fuel.”

Szabo tried to ride his old gelding, Moon, a tall chestnut half-thoroughbred he had been riding for thirteen of the horse’s sixteen years. One armed, he had to be helped into the saddle. He could get the bridle over Moon’s head and pull himself up from the saddle horn, barely, but the jogging aroused the pain in his shoulder so sharply that he quickly gave up. Barney looked on without expression.

Szabo said, “I really need to ride him regularly. He’s getting old.”

“I’ll ride him.”

“That would be nice, but it’s not necessary.”

“I’ll ride him. There’s not much else to do.”

Barney rode confidently but without grace of any kind. Moon’s long trot produced a lurching sway in Barney’s torso, exaggerated by the suspenders he always wore, that was hard for Szabo to watch. And it was clear from Moon’s sidelong glances that he, too, was wondering what kind of burden he was carrying. But the sight of Barney’s lurching exercise rides seemed a small price to pay for the skilled work he provided: repairing fences, servicing stock waterers, pruning the orchard, and even doing some painting on the outbuildings. One day, as he rode Moon down the driveway, Barney said to Szabo, who had just pulled up, “By the time you get the sling off, I’ll have your horse safe for you to ride.” From the window of his car, Szabo said,
resisting the impulse to raise his voice, “As I recall, he’s been safe for me to ride since he was a three-year-old colt.” Barney just looked down and smiled.

When Barney restacked the woodpile, Szabo decided to treat it as an absolute surprise. He stood before the remarkable lattice of firewood and, while his mind wandered, praised it lavishly. He was reluctant to admit to himself that he was trying to get on Barney’s good side. “It’s one of a kind,” he said.

Szabo’s mother lived in a ground-floor apartment across the street from a pleasant assisted-living facility. She had stayed in her own apartment because she smoked cigarettes, which was also what seemed to have preserved her vitality over her many years. Further, she didn’t want to risk the family silver in an institution, or her real treasure: a painting that had come down through her family for nearly a century, a night stampede by the cowboy artist Charlie Russell, one of very few Russell night pictures in existence, which would likely fetch a couple of million dollars at auction. The old people across the street would just take it down and spill food on it, she said. When Szabo was growing up as an only child, his mother’s strong opinions, her decisive nature, had made him feel oppressed; now those qualities were what he most liked, even loved, about her. He recognized that when he was irresolute it was in response to his upbringing, but caution, in general, paid off for him.

Barney enjoyed tobacco, too, smoke and smokeless. One afternoon, Szabo sent a shoebox of pictures and two much-annotated family cookbooks to his mother by way of Barney,
who was heading into town to pick up a fuel filter for the tractor. Later, Szabo cried out more than once, “I have only myself to blame!”

In a matter of weeks, Szabo was able to discard the sling and to exercise his shoulder with light weights and elastic strips that he held with one foot while feebly pulling and releasing, sweat pouring down his face. The next morning, three bird-watchers entered the property without stopping at the house for permission and were all but assaulted by Barney, who chased them to their car, hurling vulgar epithets until they disappeared down the road with their life lists and binoculars.

“But, Barney, I don’t mind them coming around,” Szabo said.

“Did they have permission, yes or no?”

There was no time for Szabo to explain that this didn’t matter to him, as Barney had gone back to work. At what, Szabo was unsure, but he seemed busy.

Szabo had to be in Denver by the afternoon. He took an overnight bag and drove to town, past Barney, lurching from side to side on Moon, who bore, Szabo thought, a fresh look of resignation. He stopped on the way to the airport to see his mother, who sat in her living room doing sudoku in front of a muted television, a cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth. On a stand next to her chair, her cockatiel, Toni, hunched in the drifting smoke.

“I’m off to Denver till tomorrow, Ma. I’ll have my cell if you need anything.” She looked up, put down her stub of pencil, and moved the cigarette from her mouth to the ashtray.

“Nothing to worry about here. I’ve got a million things to do.”

“Well, in case you think of something while I’m—”

“Lunch with Barney, maybe drive around.”

“Okay!” Luckily his mother couldn’t see his face.

Melinda had things well in hand, had even reduced some of the piles on his desk by thoughtful intervention where his specific attention was less than necessary. She was a vigorous mother of four, barely forty years old, happily married to a highway patrolman she’d grown up with. They were unironic enthusiasts for all the mass pleasures the culture offered: television, NASCAR, cruises, Disney World, sports, celebrity gossip, and local politics. Szabo often wished that he could be as well adjusted as Melinda’s family, but he would have had to be medicated to pursue her list of pleasures. And yet she was not just an employee but a cherished friend.

It was a tested friendship with a peculiar intimacy: Szabo’s former wife, Karen, an accomplished ironist, had made several stays at the Rimrock Foundation for what ended up as a successful treatment for alcoholism—successful in that she had given up alcohol altogether. Unfortunately, she had replaced it with other compulsions, including an online-trading habit that had bankrupted Szabo for a time. Once it was clear that Szabo was broke, she had divorced him, sold the house, remarried, and moved to San Diego, where she was, by the reports of their grown son, David, happy and not at all compulsive. What does this say about me? Szabo wondered obsessively. Maybe she was now on a short leash. Szabo had met her husband, Cliff: stocky, bald, and authoritarian—a forensic accountant, busy and prosperous in the SoCal free-for-all. His dour affect seemed to subdue Karen. In any case, Szabo had loved her, hadn’t wanted a divorce, and had felt disgraced at undergoing bankruptcy in a town of this size. He’d sunk into depression and discovered that there was no other illness so brutal, so profound, so inescapable,
that made an enemy of consciousness itself. Nevertheless, he had plodded to the office, day after day, an alarming, ashen figure, and there he had fallen into the hands of Melinda, who dragged him to family picnics and to the dentist, forged his signature whenever necessary, placed him between her and her husband at high-school basketball games as though he might otherwise tip over, taught him to cheer for her children, and occasionally fed him at her house in the uproar of family life. When, once, as she stood by his desk in the office, he raised a hand to her breast, she amiably removed it and redirected his attention to his work. By inches, she had restored his old self, and solvency seemed to follow. He began to see himself as someone who had returned from the brink. He liked making money. He liked visiting his little group of suppliers in faraway places. He liked having Melinda as a friend, and her husband, Mike, the highway patrolman, too. Mike was the same straight-ahead type as his wife: he once gave Szabo a well-deserved speeding ticket. Now Szabo’s only argument with his ex-wife’s contentment in San Diego was that it seemed to prove to David that it had been Szabo who drove her crazy.