The Pioneer Woman (11 page)

Marlboro Man looked at me to make sure I wasn't kidding, then burst into laughter, covering his mouth to keep from spitting out his Scotch. Then, unexpectedly, he leaned over and planted a sweet, reassuring kiss on my cheek. “You're funny,” he said, as he rubbed his hand on my tragically damp back.

And just like that, all the horrors of the evening disappeared entirely from my mind. It didn't matter how stupid I was—how dumb, or awkward, or sweaty. It became clearer to me than ever, sitting on that ornate concrete bench, that Marlboro Man loved me. Really, really loved me. He loved me with a kind of love different from any I'd felt before, a kind of love I never knew existed. Other boys—at least, the boys I'd always bothered with—would have been embarrassed that I'd disappeared into the bathroom for half the night. Others would have been grossed out by my tale of sweaty woe or made jokes at my expense. Others might have looked at me blankly, unsure of what to say. But not Marlboro Man; none of it fazed him one bit. He simply laughed, kissed me, and went on. And my heart welled up in my soul as I realized that without question, I'd found the one perfect person for me.

Because more often than not, I was a mess. Embarrassing, clumsy things happened to me with some degree of regularity; this hadn't been the
first time and it sure wouldn't be the last. The truth was, despite my best efforts to appear normal and put together on the outside, I'd always felt more like one of the weird kids.

But at last, miraculously, I'd found the one man on earth who would actually love that about me. I'd found the one man on earth who would appreciate my spots of imperfection…and who wouldn't try to polish them all away.

I'
D NEVER
been with anyone like Marlboro Man. He was attentive—the polar opposite of aloof—and after my eighteen-month-long college relationship with my freshman love Collin, whose interest in me had been hampered by his then-unacknowledged sexual orientation, and my four-year run with less-than-affectionate J, attentive was just the drug I needed. Not a day passed that Marlboro Man—my new cowboy love—didn't call to say he was thinking of me, or he missed me already, or he couldn't wait to see me again. Oh, the beautiful, unbridled honesty.

We loved taking drives together. He knew every inch of the countryside: every fork in the road, every cattle guard, every fence, every acre. Ranchers know the country around them. They know who owns this pasture, who leases that one, whose land this county road passes through, whose cattle are on the road by the lake. It all looked the same to me, but I didn't care. I'd never been more content to ride in the passenger seat of a crew-cab pickup in all my life. I'd never
ridden
in a crew-cab pickup in all my life. Never once. In fact, I'd never personally known anyone who'd driven a pickup; the boys from my high school who drove pickups weren't part of my scene, most likely because their families had a farm or ranching operation, and in their spare time they were needed at home to contribute to the family business. Either that, or they were cowboy wannabes—the
kind that only wore cowboy hats to bars—and that wasn't really my type either. For whatever reason, pickup trucks and I had never once crossed paths. And now, with all the time I was spending with Marlboro Man, I practically lived in one.

The only thing I knew about pickups was this: growing up, I always inwardly mocked the couples I saw who drove around in them. The girl would be sitting in the middle seat right next to the boy, and the boy's right arm would be around her shoulders, and his left arm would be on the wheel. I'm not sure why, but there was something about my golf course upbringing that had always caused me to recoil at this sight.
Why is she sitting in the middle seat?
I'd wonder.
Why is it important that they press against each other as they drive down the road? Can't they wait until they get home?
I looked at it as a sign of weakness—something pitiable.
They need to get a life
may have even crossed my mind once or twice, as if their specific brand of public affection was somehow directly harming me. But that's what happens to people who, by virtue of the geography of their childhood, are deprived of the opportunity to ride in pickup trucks. They become really, really judgmental about otherwise benign things.

Still, every now and then, as Marlboro Man showed me the beauty of the country in his white Ford F250, I couldn't help but wonder…had he been one of those boys in high school? I knew he'd had a serious girlfriend back in his teenage years. Julie. A beautiful girl and the love of his adolescent life, in the same way Kev had been mine. And I wondered: had Julie scooched over to the middle seat when Marlboro Man picked her up every Friday night? Had he hooked his right arm around her neck, and had she then reached her left hand up and clasped his right hand with hers? Had they then dragged Main in this position? Our hometowns had been only forty miles apart; maybe he'd brought her to my city to see a movie. Was it remotely possible I'd actually seen Marlboro Man and Julie riding around in his pickup, sitting side by side? Was it possible this man, this beautiful, miraculous, perfect man who'd dropped so magically into my
life, had actually been one of the innocent recipients of my intolerant, shallow pickup-related condemnation?

And if he had done it, was it something he'd merely grown out of? How come
I
wasn't riding around in his middle seat? Was I supposed to initiate this? Was this expected of me? Because I probably should know early on. But wouldn't he have gestured in that direction if he'd wanted me to move over and sit next to him? Maybe, just maybe, he'd liked those girls better than he liked me. Maybe they'd had a closeness that warranted their riding side by side in a pickup, a closeness that he and I just don't share?
Please don't let that be the reason. I don't like that reason.
I had to ask him. I had to know.

“Can I ask you something?” I said as we drove down the road separating a neighboring ranch from his.

“Sure,” Marlboro Man answered. He reached over and touched my knee.

“Did you ever used to drive around in your pickup with a girl sitting in the middle seat right next to you?” I tried not to sound accusatory.

A grin formed in the corner of Marlboro Man's mouth. “Sure I did,” he said. His hand was still on my knee. “Why?”

“Oh, no reason. I was just curious,” I said. I wanted to leave it at that.

“What made you think of that?” he said.

“Oh, I was really just curious,” I repeated. “Growing up, I'd sometimes see boys and girls riding right next to each other in pickups, and I just wondered if you ever did. That's all.” I stopped short of telling him I never understood the whole thing or asking him why he loved Julie more than me.

“Yep. I did,” he said.

I looked out the window and thought for a minute.
What am I? Chopped liver? Is there some specific reason he never pulls me over close to him as we drive around the countryside? Why doesn't he hook his right arm affectionately around my neck and claim me as the woman of his pickup?
I never knew I had such a
yearning to ride right next to a man in a pickup, but apparently it had been a suppressed lifelong dream I knew nothing about. Suddenly, sitting in that pickup with Marlboro Man, I'd apparently never wanted anything so badly in my life.

I couldn't keep quiet about it any longer. “So…,” I began.
Was it just a high school thing? Or worse,
I imagined,
is it just that I'm not and never will be a country girl? Is it that country girls have some wild sense of abandon that I wasn't born with? A reckless side, a fun, adventurous side that makes them worthy of ding next to boys in pickups? Am I untouchable? Am I too prim? Too proper? I'm not! I'm really not! I'm fun and adventurous. Reckless, too! I have a pair of jeans: Anne Kleins! And I want to be Middle Seat Worthy. Please, Marlboro Man…please. I've never wanted anything this much.
“So, um…why don't you do it anymore?” I asked.

“Bucket seats,” Marlboro Man answered, his hand still resting on my leg.

Made sense. I settled in and relaxed a bit.

But I had another question I'd been mulling over.

“Mind if I ask you another question?” I said.

“Go ahead,” he replied.

I cleared my throat and sat up straight in my seat. “How come…how come it took you so long to call me?” I couldn't help but grin. It was one of the most direct questions I'd ever asked him.

He looked in my direction, then back toward the road.

“You don't have to tell me,” I said. And he didn't. But I'd wondered more than a handful of times, and as long as he was coming clean about bucket seats and other important matters, I thought it would be a good time to ask him why four months had passed between the first night we'd met in the smoky bar and the night he'd finally called to invite me to dinner. I remembered being knocked over by his magnetism that night during Christmas vacation. What had he thought of me? Had he forgotten me instantly, then remembered me in a flash that April night after my brother's
wedding? Or had he intentionally waited four months to call? Was it some kind of country boy protocol I didn't know about?

I was a girl. I simply had to know.

“I was…,” he began. “Well, I was dating someone else.”

I'll kill her with my bare hands. “Oh,” I said in return. It was all I could muster.

“Plus, I was running a herd of cows in Nebraska and having to drive up there every week,” he continued. “I just wasn't here enough to break things off with her in the right way…and I didn't want to call you and ask you out until that was all resolved.”

I repeated myself. “Oh.”
What was her name? She's dead to me.

“I liked you, though,” he said, flashing me a smile. “I thought about you.”

I couldn't help but smile back. “You did?” I asked quietly, still wondering what the girl's name was. I wouldn't rest till I knew.

“I did,” he said sweetly, stroking my leg with his hand. “You were different.”

I stopped short of interrogating him further, of asking him to specify what he meant by “different.” And it didn't take much imagination to figure it out. As he drove me around his familiar homeland, it was obvious what he would have considered “different” about me.

I didn't know anything about the country.

 

I
LOVED DRIVING
with Marlboro Man. I saw things I'd never seen before, things I'd never even considered in my two and a half decades of city life. For the first time ever, I began to grasp the concept of north, south, east, and west, though I imagine it would take another twenty-five years before I got them straight. I saw fence lines and gates made of welded iron pipe, and miles upon miles of barbed wire. I saw
creeks—rocky, woodsy creeks that made the silly water hazard in my backyard seem like a little mud puddle. And I saw wide open land as far as the eye could see. I'd never known such beauty.

Marlboro Man loved showing me everything, pointing at pastures and signs and draws and lakes and giving me the story behind everything we saw. The land, both on his family's ranch and on the ranches surrounding it, made sense to him: he saw it not as one wide open, never-ending space, but as neatly organized parcels, each with its own purpose and history. “Betty Smith used to own this part of our ranch with her husband,” he'd say. “They never had kids and were best friends with my grandparents.” Then he'd tell some legend of Betty Smith's husband's grandfather, remembering such vivid details, you'd think he'd been there himself. I absorbed it all, every word of it. The land around him pulsated with the heartbeats of all who'd lived there before…and as if it were his duty to pay honor to each and every one of them, he told me their names, their stories, their relationship, their histories.

I loved that he knew all those things.

One late afternoon, we crossed a creek and came upon a thicket of trees in the middle of a pasture quite a ways from Marlboro Man's homestead. As I looked more closely, I saw that the trees were shrouding a small white house. A white picket fence surrounded the lot, and as we drove closer to the property, I noticed movement in the yard. It was a large, middle-aged woman, with long, gray hair cascading down her shoulders. She was pushing a lawn mower around her yard, and two wagtail dogs yipped and followed her every step. Most notably, she was wearing only underwear and what appeared to be a late model Playtex bra. And as we passed by her house, she glanced up at us for a moment…then kept on mowing.

Trying to appear nonchalant, I asked Marlboro Man, “So…who was that?” Maybe this could be the start of another story.

He looked at me and replied, “I have absolutely no idea.”

We never spoke of her again.

A
FTER OUR
drives, we made dinner together in his kitchen. I cooked my pasta primavera, which burst with the bright colors of zucchini, carrots, and peas. Marlboro Man grilled medium-rare rib eye steaks that sizzled in melted butter and garlic. I prepared my favorite Spago-inspired pizza: a thin, chewy crust topped with tomatoes, basil, and fresh mozzarella, which I had to order by mail from a mom-and-pop outfit in Dallas, since no Oklahoma shops carried it. He showed me the art of making white gravy in an iron skillet, how important it was to brown the roux to a deep golden brown before pouring in the milk. We discovered each other's histories while cooking in his kitchen in the country, me whipping out my arsenal of L.A. vegetarian delights with the same pride and enthusiasm that Marlboro Man shared his carnivorous ones. Our two worlds collided in rich, calorie-laden dinners. I began doing step aerobics at my hometown YMCA every morning to keep from growing out of my Anne Kleins. Now was the time for love, not jiggle.

Meanwhile, back in my hometown, my parents' marriage was crumbling before my eyes. I loved my parents, loved them dearly. But as an adult, watching the thirty-year marriage of your mother and father implode and disintegrate is like watching a train wreck happen in slow motion. And your parents are the conductors, and the passengers on the train are family, and
many lifelong friends, and all the future grandchildren, and a community, and memories and hopes and dreams. And they're all about to die in a fiery, deadly accident. Oh, and you're on the train, too. But you're also watching from outside the tracks. You want to scream, to try to warn the operators of the train of the devastation that's about to come. But it's a nightmare, and your voice is squeezed and squelched and nothing comes out. And you're powerless to stop it.

I wanted to leave; I wanted out of there so badly. It's not as if my parents' difficulties manifested themselves in dish throwing or screaming or slamming doors or loud, unpleasant histrionics. No, instead it was hushed conversations, tense expressions, ashen faces, and, occasionally, tired, puffy eyes. The screaming might actually have been better; this slow, excruciating death was agonizing to watch. Every time I passed through the house and felt the stifling tension in the air, all I wanted was to be somewhere else. I wanted to pack my bags, withdraw all my cash from the bank, and bolt.

But I was stuck—stuck in a delicious, glorious, beautiful, inescapable La Brea tar pit of romance with a rough, rugged, impossibly tender cowboy. As soon as I'd have any thoughts of escaping to Chicago to avoid my parents' problems, within seconds I'd shoot myself down. Something major would have to happen to pry me out of his arms.

Marlboro Man filled my daydreams, filled my thoughts, my time, my heart, my mind. When I was with him, I was able to forget about my parents' marital problems. On our drives together, preparing our dinners, watching our VHS action movies, all of those unhappy things disappeared from view. This became a crutch for me, an addictive drug of escape. Ten seconds in Marlboro Man's pickup, and I saw only goodness and light. And the occasional bra-and-panty-wearing grandma mowing her yard.

Further complicating matters was the passion and lust I felt for Marlboro Man; it was stronger than anything I'd felt in my life. And sometimes I worried about it, in the same way a heavy drinker might occasionally
question his second, third, or fourth pour of whiskey. This couldn't be good for me, could it?

But deep, deep down, I didn't care. And even if I did care, there wasn't a thing on earth I could do about it. If Marlboro Man were moonshine during Prohibition, I'd smuggle crates of it across state lines and guzzle it on the journey; if he were a street drug, I'd sell my hair to score a fix; if he were standing below a cliff, I'd jump off to be with him.

If Marlboro Man was wrong, I didn't want to be right.

Where would all of this lead? At times I asked myself and wondered. Despite having put my plans for Chicago on hold, despite my knowledge that trying to go one day without seeing Marlboro Man was futile, despite how desperately in love I knew I was, I still at times thought this might all just be a temporary glitch in my plans, a wild hair I needed to work out of my system before getting on with the rest of my life. Like I was at Romance Camp for a long, hot summer, playing the part of the cowgirl.

The time was drawing near, however, when Marlboro Man would take the bull by the horns and answer that question for me, once and for all.

 

O
NE DAY
Marlboro Man invited my sister, Betsy, and me to the ranch to work cattle. She was home from college and bored, and Marlboro Man wanted Tim to meet another member of my family.

“Working cattle” is the term used to describe the process of pushing cattle, one by one, through a working chute, during which time they are branded, dehorned, ear tagged, and “doctored” (temperature taken, injections given). The idea is to get all the trauma and mess over with in one fell swoop so the animals can spend their days grazing peacefully in the pasture.

When Betsy and I pulled up and parked, Tim greeted us at the chute and immediately assigned us our duties. He handed my sister a hot shot, which is used to gently zap the animal's behind to get it to move through the chute.

It's considered the easy job.

“You'll be pushing 'em through,” Tim told Betsy. She dutifully took the hot shot, studying the oddly shaped object in her hands.

Next, Tim handed me an eight-inch-long, thick-gauge probe with some kind of electronic device attached. “You'll be taking their temperature,” Tim informed me.

Easy enough,
I thought.
But how does this thing fit into its ear? Or does it slide under its arm somehow? Perhaps I insert it under the tongue? Will the cows be okay with this?

Tim showed me to my location—at the hind end of the chute. “You just wait till the steer gets locked in the chute,” Tim directed. “Then you push the stick all the way in and wait till I tell you to take it out.”

Come again?
The bottom fell out of my stomach as my sister shot me a worried look, and I suddenly wished I'd eaten something before we came. I felt weak. I didn't dare question the brother of the man who made my heart go pitter-pat, but…
in the bottom? Up the bottom? Seriously
?

Before I knew it, the first animal had entered the chute. Various cowboys were at different positions around the animal and began carrying out their respective duties. Tim looked at me and yelled, “Stick it in!” With utter trepidation, I slid the wand deep into the steer's rectum. This wasn't natural. This wasn't normal. At least it wasn't for me. This was definitely against God's plan.

I was supposed to check the monitor and announce if the temperature was above ninety-nine degrees. The first one was fine. But before I had a chance to remove the probe, Tim set the hot branding iron against the steer's left hip. The animal let out a guttural
Mooooooooooooo!,
and as he did, the contents of its large intestine emptied all over my hand and forearm.

Tim said, “Okay, Ree, you can take it out now.” I did. I didn't know what to do. My arm was covered in runny, stinky cow crap. Was this supposed to happen? Should I say anything? I glanced at my sister, who was looking at me, completely horrified.

The second animal entered the chute. The routine began again. I stuck it in. Tim branded. The steer bellowed. The crap squirted out. I was amazed at how consistent and predictable the whole nasty process was, and how nonchalant everyone—excluding my sister—was acting. But then slowly…surely…I began to notice something.

On about the twentieth animal, I began inserting the thermometer. Tim removed his branding iron from the fire and brought it toward the steer's hip. At the last second, however, I fumbled with my device and had to stop for a moment. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that when I paused, Tim did, too. It appeared he was actually waiting until I had the thermometer fully inserted before he branded the animal, ensuring that I'd be right in the line of fire when everything came pouring out. He had planned this all along, the dirty dog.

Seventy-eight steers later, we were finished. I was a sight. Layer upon layer of manure covered my arm. I'm sure I was pale and in shock. The cowboys grinned politely. Tim directed me to an outdoor faucet where I could clean my arm. Marlboro Man watched as he gathered up the tools and the gear…and he chuckled.

 

A
S MY
sister and I pulled away in the car later that day, she could only say, “Oh. My. God.” She made me promise never to return to that awful place.

I didn't know it at the time, but I'd found out later that this, from Tim's perspective, was my initiation. It was his sick, twisted way of measuring my worth.