Richard Ford - Rock Springs

My wife had just gone out West with a groom from the local dog track, and I was waiting around the house for things to clear up, thinking about catching the train to Florida to change my luck. I already had my ticket in my wallet.

It was the day before Thanksgiving, and all week long there had been hunters parked down at the gate: pickups and a couple of old Chevys sitting empty all day — mostly with out-of-state tags — occasionally, two men standing beside their car doors drinking coffee and talking. I hadn’t given them any thought. Gainsborough — who I was thinking at that time of stiffing for the rent — had said not to antagonize them, and let them hunt unless they shot near the house, and then to call the state police and let them handle it. No one had shot near the house, though I had heard shooting back in the woods and had seen one of the Chevys drive off fast with a deer on top, but I didn’t think there would be any trouble.

I wanted to get out before it began to snow and before the electricity bills started coming. Since my wife had sold our car before she left, getting my business settled wasn’t easy, and I hadn’t had time to pay much attention.

Just after ten o’clock in the morning there was a knock on the front door. Standing out in the frozen grass were two fat women with a dead deer.

“Where’s Gainsborough?” the one fat woman said. They were both dressed like hunters. One had on a red plaid lumberjack’s jacket and the other a green camouflage suit. Both of them had the little orange cushions that hang from your back belt loops and get hot when you sit on them. Both of them had guns.

“He’s not here,” I said. “He’s gone back to England. Some trouble with the government. I don’t know about it.”

Both women were staring at me as if they were trying to get me in better focus. They had green-and-black camouflage paste on their faces and looked like they had something on their minds. I still had on my bathrobe.

“We wanted to give Gainsborough a deer steak,” said the one who was wearing the red lumberjack’s jacket and who had spoken first. She turned and looked at the dead deer, whose tongue was out the side of his mouth and whose eyes looked like a stuffed deer’s eyes. “He lets us hunt, and we wanted to thank him in that way,” she said.

“You could give me a deer steak,” I said. “I could keep it for him.”

“I suppose we could do that,” the one who was doing the talking said. But the other one, who was wearing the camouflage suit, gave her a look that said she knew Gainsborough would never see the steak if it got in my hands.

“Why don’t you come in,” I said. “I’ll make some coffee and you can warm up.”

“We are pretty cold,” the one in the plaid jacket said and patted her hands together. “If Phyllis wouldn’t mind.”

Phyllis said she didn’t mind at all, though it was clear that accepting an invitation to have coffee had nothing to do with giving away a deer steak.

“Phyllis is the one who actually brought him down,” the pleasant fat woman said when diey had their coffee and were holding their mugs cupped between their fat hands, sitting on the davenport. She said her name was Bonnie and that they were from across the state line. They were big women, in their forties with fat faces, and their clothes made them look like all their parts were sized too big. Both of them were jolly, though — even Phyllis, when she forgot about the deer steaks and got some color back in her cheeks. They seemed to fill up the house and make it feel jolly. “He ran sixty yards after she hit him, and went down when he jumped the fence,” Bonnie said authoritatively. “It was a heart shot, and sometimes those take time to take effect.”

“He ran like a scalded dog,” Phyllis said, “and dropped like a load of shit.” Phyllis had short blond hair and a hard mouth that seemed to want to say hard things.

“We saw a wounded doe, too,” Bonnie said and looked aggravated about it. “That really makes you mad.”

“The man may have tracked it, though,” I said. “It may have been a mistake. You can’t tell about those things.”

“That’s true enough,” Bonnie said and looked at Phyllis hopefully, but Phyllis didn’t look up. I tried to imagine the two of them dragging a dead deer out of the woods, and it was easy.

I went out to the kitchen to get a coffee cake I had put in the oven, and they were whispering to each other when I came back in. The whispering, though, seemed good-natured, and I gave them the coffee cake without mentioning it. I was happy they were here. My wife is a slender, petite woman who bought all her clothes in the children’s sections of department stores and said they were the best clothes you could buy because they were made for hard wearing. But she didn’t have much presence in the house; there just wasn’t enough of her to occupy the space — not that the house was so big. In /act it was very small — a prefab Gainsborough had had pulled in on a trailer. But these women seemed to fill everything and to make it seem like Thanksgiving was already here. Being that big never seemed to have a good side before, but now it did.

“Do you ever go to the dogs?” Phyllis asked with part of her coffee cake in her mouth and part floating in her mug.

“I do,” I said. “How did you know that?”

“Phyllis says she thinks she’s seen you at the dogs a few times,” Bonnie said and smiled.

“I just bet the quinellas,” Phyllis said. “But Bon will bet anything, won’t you, Bon? Trifectas, daily doubles, anything at all. She doesn’t care.”

“I sure will.” Bon smiled again and moved her orange hot-seat cushion from under her seat so that it was on top of the davenport arm. “Phyllis said she thought she saw you with a woman there once, a little, tiny woman who was pretty.”

“Could be,” I said.

“Who was she ?” Phyllis said gruffly.

“My wife,” I said.

“Is she here now?” Bon asked, looking pleasantly around the room as if someone was hiding behind a chair.

“No,” I said. “She’s on a trip. She’s gone out West.”

“What happened?” said Phyllis in an unfriendly way. “Did you blow all your money on the dogs and have her bolt?”

“No.” I didn’t like Phyllis nearly as well as Bon, though in a way Phyllis seemed more reliable if it ever came to that, and I didn’t think it ever could. But I didn’t like it that Phyllis knew so much, even if the particulars were not right on the money. We had, my wife and I, moved up from the city. I had some ideas about selling advertising for the dog track in the local restaurants and gas stations, and arranging coupon discounts for evenings out at the dogs that would make everybody some money. I had spent a lot of time, used up my capital. And now I had a basement full of coupon boxes that nobody wanted, and they weren’t paid for. My wife came in laughing one day and said my ideas wouldn’t make a Coke fizz in Denver, and the next day she left in the car and didn’t come back. Later, a fellow had called to ask if I had the service records on the car — which I didn’t — and that’s how I knew it was sold, and who she’d left with.

Phyllis took a little plastic flask out from under her camouflage coat, unscrewed the top, and handed it across the coffee table to me. It was early in the day but, I thought, what the hell. Thanksgiving was tomorrow. I was alone and about to jump the lease on Gainsborough. It wouldn’t make any difference.

“This place is a mess.” Phyllis took back the flask and looked at how much I’d had of it. “It looks like an animal starved in here.”