Lars watched the sun fall hot into the far horizon.  The badlands and Bighorns that backed him were turned a pale collection of reds.  The farm’s barren furrows were lit up row to row.  Gray.  Gold.  Gray.  Gold. They stretched away from him as did the creeping shadows dropped from the budding cottonwoods.  Some ran out of sight and Lars imagined their only interruption would be the peaks to the east.  Beartooth or Bomber Mountain.  Places Lars had heard about and not seen but for their hazy shapes on the skyline.  There too a man could be free.  Free like that he was enjoying with the spring sun setting in his face and the winter falling behind.  His hands were dirty and so too his clothes.  He’d worked through a pair of gloves and now another and the hat he’d adopted carried a rusty ring where his labors showed.  The winter was on its wane and with the spring’s budding something else grew anew.  That solid pain in his gut was overrun by a foreign optimism and Lars watched the sunset for the first time in a way that seemed pleasant.  Not just another day tolled, another day turned for one weighted and awkward man but a day peeled in favor of an impossible future.  Now the possibility of a future.  Lars didn’t breathe the words though they were planted in his chest, planted in his chest where they swallowed the discomfort of history.

The sun set itself and Lars lingered still before he turned back to his trailer and walked down from the tracks where he’d watched the day’s end.  He looked over the gray-blue land that he’d owned for effort, the corral firm and the fences in tight lines.  The plot where the hay was stacked was empty but for three bales.  The river that circled the farm rolled slowly in the waning light, the geese took to the field—did so still—and the air was silent except for his feet over the rocky slope.

The calves and cows were stretched across the farm by now, from the river bottom out over the barren furrows.  All but a few had calved.  And the calves that birthed first, almost two months by now, were showing broad backs and loaded hips.  They were shedding their playful appearance and gaining in the stature of dirty, shit-covered cows—sucking still from cows’ teats but chewing on the few grasses that were rising and cutting their teeth on the oat hay and alfalfa that Lars set out.  Lars had tagged them all, castrated almost half with the tight rubber bands, and learned with Dennis to feed pills or antibiotic drenches with plastic tubes forced down their throats.  He watched their ass-ends for signs of scours and their stomachs for bloat and on one cold morning carried one calf into the trailer and held it on the floor near the heater to warm and live.

Lars walked from the hill’s base and climbed the metal gate that let into the field where the geese roosted and the cows milled between ends.  The darkness was gaining and the black shapes that filled the farm and moved slowly in one direction or another took on the appearance of shifting mists, their hides blending with the aging darkness so that their movements grew transparent.  The farm was silent, and the cows took steps away from Lars as they heard his approach or raised their heads in curiosity.  He walked through the field, stumbling east across the furrows, keeping his eyes on the growing black and the blue rounded shapes that defined the start of the badlands.  Halfway through the field the furrows ended where a dirt road cut across the work and a ditch ran its side.  Over the ditch the furrows started anew and were ended eventually where another road and barbwire fence surrounded the farm.  There the trees that lined the river and followed its course stood between the water and fence.  Across the river the hills jumped quickly, barren in their own way and crisscrossed with the game trails used by antelope and deer as they came to drink the river’s waters.

When Lars reached the fence the darkness prevailed and the black shapes he’d passed were a part of the space that stood between him and the trailer’s lighted windows.  White stars blossomed overhead, one after another, and the late rising moon meant darkness pure.  A lone bellow from the world in between assured Lars that the cows were still there, a splash in the water below insisted life beyond.  Lars could see only a few yards in either direction, had nearly tripped in the ditch that ran along the acres’ outer edge and stumbled upon the flatness that described the dirt road and fence at its border. 

He turned right and made his way along the fence’s edge, stepping over the flatness the road offered and letting his eyes further adjust to the blackness.  The sky was filling quickly with the stars that showed its start and finish on each horizon, the Milky Way stretched overhead like a haze-white band of universe.  He walked along the road, making its soft turns around the river and farm’s edge, occasionally passing by the shapes of cows and hearing their belching.  Though the day had been warm, the evening brought a winter’s chill and not the breezy warmth of spring.  He walked with his hands in his pockets and buttoned the flannel shirt he wore straight to the neck and flared its collar.  He walked slowly, taking steps in the darkness that were trusting.

Lars reached the farm’s end, where the road he walked curled back around the farm’s western edge or climbed the hill and crossed the tracks on its way to the highway, to Basin or south to the towns there.  He stopped where a metal conduit was buried to carry water from one side of the road to the other, where it could be stopped or let flow depending on the field’s irrigation.  He’d put distance between himself and the cows and the night’s silence was broken only by the slow trickle of water.  The air calmed and the grasses that lined the road’s one side—the few budding trees on the slope to the tracks—were silent too.  Lars watched the darkness and the silhouetted shapes of the hills immediately around.  The lighted windows of the trailer were square beacons north of him and the stars overhead gathered in strength.  On the black eastern horizon there was a faint glow.  The moon was rising.

* * * The silent farm was a new one for Lars.  The darkness that night was separate from previous.  Though others too were quiet the empty acres that surrounded the trailer were as if some reserve action had been spent and only stillness remained in the wake.  Lars stood in the corral’s center, the lights out but for the trailer’s and the many stars.  The moon was late still.

The span of his stay seemed momentary.  In the turn of some months he’d come to this place, arrived at this new shore, and his passage was laid out in the physical shape of new fences and the silence of a moved herd.  He was caught by the thinking that his time was ending—must be ending—and just as it had begun.  And as the possibility of a future had once stretched its head so now its impossibility gasped.  Sprung to life as a new and uncertain fear and looking round him, that thing in his gut renewed its pledge.  He was caught off guard, never had his anxiety swelled without the gaze of some other.  Here, in this silent dark world he grew uncomfortable only with the thought that his time was short, that he’d fail in his expression and fault in his gaining trust.

Inside the trailer he couldn’t sleep.  The chill that blew in before the move lingered still.  He watched the span of light thrown outside the trailer, sat quietly on the couch with his hands showing palms.  In the dim yellow light snow began to fall, sleet and rain first until the flakes took hold.  Nothing moved.  No stir.  And Lars felt himself an island unlike any.  The solitude he’d first sought became a slight and fear.  And where the trailer’s pale glow ended a black world began that his eyes nor thoughts nor imagination could pierce.  Lonely for the first time.  Scared.  Searching the black for some friend, some reason, some memory or possibility.  The silence for which he’d always searched was granted in a grudging way and here it was that nature joked about the scrawny, quiet man with the so living guilt, frustration, anxiety like a rock in an empty stomach.

He shifted in his seat and stared longer into the snow filled light.  Stared passed.  He stood, opened the door to lean through.  Beyond his sight there was a shape, must be a shape.  The black on black moved and he called hello.  Silence.  Snow falling and melting.

He stepped into the night again, the trailer door listing shut, and walked to the light’s edge and listened.  The Chevy.  The bales remaining.  A fence stretching to nothingness and a silent barn, corral.  There were three cows still on the farm though there was no knowing their place.  Lars stepped again, reaching beyond the ambient glow and waiting for his eyes to train.  He stepped until he found the gate, feeling along the road, and climbed over it in the darkness.  He settled and again called hello.  Nothing.  And he shivered against the quiet, the cold.

Nights before Lars walked in the Wyoming darkness, explored the world around the farm, was buffeted by the milling, belching cows.  The silence now made the road an untraveled one.  The darkness now made the night a frightening one, a lonely one.  The chill shook him from his base and the thing in his gut turned and morphed.

“Hello,” he said louder and still no thing answered.  Farther in the darkness another change, the black’s texture an outline of something and he stepped again.  Stumbled.  And then flatness, the black without a shape and the trailer behind an abstract collection of lit squares in a wilderness.

He chased the line to where the black last moved, gaining as he went a perception of the silence and a trust in his steps.  He could not catch the shape though soon he was running in the dark that now swallowed him whole. 

He sprinted, his feet finding their way down the road and his eyes looking for the image he chased.  And as he ran he recognized the world beneath him, knew this road though he could not see it, knew his place though he only sensed it.  He ran, and left off his rush for the thing ahead of him.  He ran, and swallowed the jutted shape in his trunk and felt the slim nature of reality rush past.  He shouted, shattering the quiet as if a world crushed by his weight.  He closed his eyes, felt the flakes on his cheeks and the chill air and moved as if by easy memory.  He veered with the road and climbed the hill with it and stopped at its top.  His chest burned and his breaths were labored, he sweated with the flakes that clung to his cheeks.

Slowly the silence was broken again, a low rumble first and then the hard sound of a machine wrenching nature.  In the distance behind a train made its approach, still out of sight where the tracks made their bend.  Lars stood at the hill’s top, facing the farm that somewhere beneath him, nestled in the blackness.

Lars kept his back to the train, his eyes trained on the dark spaces below, the dark spaces around.  The voice behind him grew, its mechanical timbre gaining easy levels as it neared until it fell atop his shoulders and spilled over him.  The lead of the thing made the turn and in a slow even way threw its headlights over Lars and across the world beneath him.  In an even pass the fields were alit from south to north end.  The world flowered before him as the heavy click of steel on steel offered the scene’s cadence.  Again the farm was dark though the train’s body continued its pass.  The image of the farm’s whole lay burned in his mind.  The thing before him was his again, and in the darkness the furrows, the trees, the landscape were again accountable.  And a new thought surged, a new power birthed in him and swelled as the train slipped farther north.  The returned silence he could mold, so too the blackness, and he walked the way he came with a certain stride.

* * * “You sure?”

“I’m not sure about anything.  Never was.”

Lars pulled the pressure and let the gasping Chevy stir forward for boredom.  He applied the break with the clutch and the truck held its ground.  The streetlight was still a glow of red, bright as the wipers cleared the falling snow from his view and dulled between their pass.

“You’re starting to sound like them.”

“Them who?”

“Dennis and Coy and the rest of the boys you’re working with.”

Lars smiled.  “There ain’t no place like Wyoming,” Lars said after a short pause.  “I’m sure of that.”

“You’re finding that?  Most people find that though they never admit to it.  Might be why so many don’t leave and those that do end up coming back.”

“Your mom says those that leave never come back.”  Lars watched the wipers work.  “I’m finding other things too.”

“Like what?”

“Like the way I never meant anything to anybody before Wyoming.”

“And who you meaning something to now?”  Laura asked with a smile, glancing in the side mirror at the green light glowing to yellow behind them.

Lars smiled.  The fan blowing engine air hummed, turning his stomach to a rattle.  Now good and warm the radio kicked on its static.  The spring snow stopped its fall.

They spent the evening staring at each other and talking some.  Laura admitting she didn’t know what was what and Lars wanting to say the same.  He let her lead and that night they made love for the first time in a clumsy way that brought Lars an ache in his head down.  They lay together for a long time, she sleeping in a hard way against his shoulder and him thinking things out so that he couldn’t sleep.  Maybe this was the one, like they talked about you finding the one.  Her stiff breathing rattled the soft hairs at the base of his neck and his belly rose and fell with the tides of hunger or thought.  In the quiet night he could hear the base gurgles of indecision ebb and when the silence finally won over his head, he slept long and late.

She wasn’t there when he woke and he didn’t mind though he missed her.  There was no sound in the small trailer and he knew she wasn’t in the other room or even outside in late morning.  His truck was there still and he figured she walked the short distance back to town and the places she was used to being.  The previous day’s light snow was gone and the morning was warm again with spring sunshine. 

He made coffee and sat with patience at the small table in the trailer’s main room.  After three pieces of toast and some more coffee he sat in the outhouse with the door swung wide to the day, the few cows left in the river bottom pasture, and the thought that he’d love her again that night if she’d allow.  He maintained that the cows still on the farm didn’t need feeding proper, that they’d manage on the rising alfalfa and river grass and so he lazed the day beneath a cottonwood and its spring leaves. 

He ate nothing through the afternoon though he was hungry and in the early evening he thought he’d find out Laura in town and talk her into some food.  But she wasn’t at her home and her neighbor who was taking groceries from the back of his truck hadn’t seen her throughout the day.  Lars drove through the downtown, passed the Rendezvous and Basin’s only chophouse but most everything was quiet for it being a Sunday evening. 

He turned back to the trailer before dark and hungry as ever, found the only substance of his groceries frozen to white and nothing thawed.  In the fridge he poked through basics and in the end ate bread and pickles till the sour taste was too much and he finished the evening with a beer that made the bitter taste in his mouth worsen.  He felt alone again as he lay down in bed and dreamt that he chased everywhere to know the thing swelling inside him, and at every turn was led farther from his hopes by some ghost or other.  Once he thought he grabbed hold of the thing and turning it over in his hands it burned his palms to blisters and the puffy flesh made it impossible to grip.  He tried again but the pain was intense and he woke with a sense that he’d lose his hands altogether to get at the thing.

He was icy cold in bed though his sheets were wet with perspiration.  The air held a blue stillness.  Lars rubbed the burn from his hands and kicked the sheets off him.  He stood in the blackness and felt his way to the trailer door which he opened to the night.  A light snow was falling but turned to wetness as it reached the spring earth.  Lars leaned against the door’s frame and made to urinate into the dark but was conscious of a coming sickness.  The weakness in his knees made him shudder and he reached for the door that swung in the open air for something else to lean with.  The quiet wind that toppled through the cottonwood branches received his retching and his boozy dinner mingled with the moisture on the ground. 

* * * In the morning there was snow on the ground and the air was silent.  A gray sky worked hard to keep the quiet in.  The sun was left to a simple brightness behind the blanket that covered the basin and the Bighorns in the distance were blue shadows in the dullness that gripped the day.  Lars woke still shivering and hungry for substance and something warm.  He felt groggy and lonely and foolish for the sickness that kept him in discomfort throughout the night.  In all, he’d retched four or five times into the night’s blackness, the last of which produced only a pain in the chest and stomach.  He’d had nothing left in his gut to send out.  His mouth was dry and tasted of acid.

He ran water into the sink to wash out his mouth and face and ignored the smell of antifreeze that lingered when the water turned hot.  He brewed coffee, pulled on his blue jeans and an extra flannel shirt and sat on a folding chair.  The rug was dirty and cold under his feet so he put on two pairs of socks and boots.  He was still cold.

He couldn’t understand the new pit in his stomach and how it didn’t relax even after he’d offered it coffee and toast and jam.  There were no more pickles and he was glad for that, they made him sick just thinking about them.  He knew he had work to do but wanted most to lie back down in the wool blankets that topped his bed.  He needed groceries and sleep and to see Laura but he had work to do even if there were only a few cows left on the farm.  They needed a bale of oat hay to be sure they’d have food in this new snow and there was still the fences behind the barn to fix.  He stood up and pulled a package of frozen hamburger from the freezer to thaw.  It would take all day.

The space heater on the floor began to rattle, it’s metal coils glowing hot red-orange behind an aluminum grate.  Lars put his feet near it to warm his lower legs and take the stiffness out of his cold boots.  He leaned into his chair and put his chin on his chest and shut his eyes.  Sleep found him easily and the trailer warmed.

He woke after nine o’clock in a hot sweat, the toes of his boots crisped and dried and smelling of cooked leather.  The trailer’s cabin smelled of it too.  His back ached with the discomfort of the folding chair and he stretched it hard as he stood up.  He kicked the heater’s plug from the socket, pulled on his coat despite his sweats and stepped into the day.  After starting the Chevy he left it to warm and walked to the trough behind the barn to see that its water level was right and that the cows weren’t in need of anything but the oat hay.

Dennis was driving up the road as Lars walked back around the barn, his wheels turning over the fresh snow and marking the day’s first tracks.  He’d know Lars hadn’t been out.

“Cows are gonna need some feed today,” he said through his window as he drove through the gate Lars had opened.  Dennis stopped just through the gate and waited for Lars to shut it and climb into the cab.  “Let’s go ‘round the back side, down the river bottom.  I wanna see if them that’s left has been moving ‘round or just sticking to that early grove where the scours are.”

“Where’s Coy?”

“He’s up in Billings at the sale there.  Got some relatives up there’s havin’ some family trouble so he’s stickin’ round a bit.”

Lars got out of the truck and opened the gate that let them into the acreage behind the barn.  The grayness in the sky was breaking, beyond it lay blue sky and a spring warmth.  The snow wouldn’t last though it would turn the farm to a rugged mess and the road a sloppy trail.

“Hope everything’s all right,” Lars said when he climbed in the truck, kicking the stuck snow from his boots.  The dash was blowing hot, dusty air and the hidden fans were squeaking with their spin.

“With what?”

“With Coy’s family.  You said he’s having trouble.”

“He’s not having the trouble.  His brother’s an asshole that beats his wife and Coy’s gone up to get’m outa jail.  Been there a week.”

“Oh.”

“No place—don’t care who you are.”

Dennis wheeled the truck right and down the road that followed the fence on the northern edge of the farm.  On the other side of the fence, the mess of willows and cottonwoods gave way to the river.  The water was beginning its spring swell, edging at the banks which showed its history in the shape and height of previous year’s watermarks. 

“I don’t understand ‘em,” Dennis said as he pulled the truck to a stop.

“Who’s that?  Coy’s brother?”

“The cows,” he said, looking through the windshield at the three.  They stared back and one lowed and the others chewed cud.  The three were the only cows that hadn’t calved, the only cows they left on the farm and didn’t send to the pastures for summer range.

Dennis was in a surly way and Lars could sense there wasn’t a subject that would be friendly and so he stayed quiet as he normally did.  Dennis sat for a moment and shut the truck’s heater off and then the radio too.  The cab fell to silence and the sun, now showing itself in streaks, broke through the windshield and stretched itself over the two men’s chests.

“You’re spending time with Laura now?” Dennis asked.  “Heard you been around with her a bit.”

Lars said yes and they’d become friends.  Saying so dropped from his tongue in an unfamiliar way.  Dennis said you take care of her if so and then quieted and continued to look at the three cows as they turned or put their heads back into the stirring alfalfa that was spotting the river bottom green.  Lars watched too and looked out the window to his right as a train ran past on the hill above the farm.  Empty cars rotated with cars carrying lumber or steel or ones for gas or oil.  At the train’s tale two engines followed, their giant parts spinning in reverse.

“She tell you about Herman?”

“What I’ve heard,” Lars said carefully, “is that you found him hurting some girl and you beat him unconscious.  That you fired him.”

“That ain’t all true.  She tell you it was her was being hurt?”

Lars said no after a moment and looked again to the cows. 

“She tell you any of that?  Lars, that girl had it tough for some time now and I find out you hurt her I’ll do the same I did to Herman.  I say that ‘cause I know you won’t.  I know you’re not Herman and I know you’re better ‘an that and for whatever reason I’m not worried about it.  But so you know.  And so you know, I don’t know what folks have been saying to you, but Herman ain’t nothing to worry about.  He’s gone by now anyways, if he was.  Will be soon.”

The cows bowed their heads and loped hoof to hoof down the fence away from Dennis and Lars.  One looked over its shoulder and stopped to urinate. 

* * * Dennis rode east on the Mesquite Rim.  He tripped past the sage and conifers, all filling his nose with the sweet nonsense of nature and splendor and things untouchable.  Most of this he ignored.  He was not one to think in terms that were romantic or unconventional in the least, and so he kept his mind on the wind’s meaning or the snow’s melting.  A breeze off the southern slopes would mean a storm’s approach, this despite the sky.  The snow gone from all but northern leans would mean a wetness not worth passing in the canyons below. 

Shadow, a gray and aged blue heeler trailed at a distance.  Sniffing out the still burrowed badgers or the lazy calves that rested in the deep sage in the absence of their mothers.  The herd was strung out between the canyon’s slow runs and the forests that edged the rims farther in the distance. 

Dennis rode in the saddle the way he was born to.  His heels low and his back rising and setting with a meter all its own.  Strapped to his seat were water and food for the day, his coat and spare rope and in his saddlebags were fencing pliers and any number of other things.  He smoked as he rode—cheap cigars or menthols—and thought often about the few numbers he’d hoped to find, like the number of calves suffering still from scours or the number of cows gone missing.  A mountain lion had made meals of the cows in pasture the last summer and there was little he could do but hope it’d found the deer population on the rise and the taste of beef unpleasant.

The cows had been on the Rim for about a week.  Pushed onto the summer range at the base of the mountain, it took them three weeks to get this high once the snow started its melting.  There were 75,000 acres for them to run on, though it too was cut into sections and Dennis determined each spring what herds went where.  The few reservoirs made it that the cows were never too far from a water source but also made it so that water was a concern each spring and summer. If the winter had been easy, the runoff that accounted for most of the water supply would make the summer a hard one.

Dennis was one that had seen a number of things in his life though he rarely went so far as to travel beyond Montana or south to Colorado.  He’d been to Chicago when he was younger.  He’d driven there in a solidly built Ford, most always drove Fords, and stayed at a hotel on the northern end of a city that stretched and stretched the way the prairie did.  He didn’t take to the city so much as the quietness in Wyoming or the comfort of pushing beasts through chutes and trucking them to trains or cars where they’d travel then to slaughter.  You could count on things differently in Wyoming.  Things made more sense because most things were products of your hands’ mix with nature.  In Chicago, even Billings or Casper or Denver, things were products of unnecessary hustle.  Buildings were built ground up, sure, but buildings were built and no end was figured and the land that Dennis knew so intimately was turned a land you couldn’t know.  Streets ran to streets ran to more streets and the buildings that jutted at the sky served only to block the real world from the senses. 

Dennis was one that had seen a number of things and Dennis was one that knew a number of things too.  Dennis knew how his horse felt or when a cow would birth its calf and he knew that relying on anybody but himself was most often folly.  He was quiet usually, though talked smoothly and at length when there was a suitable listener.  He was smart too, and smart enough to hold his tongue when it mattered.  Dennis was tall and lean and silver-haired and creases ran the length of his face and his neck and looked like folded leather.  He rode east on the Mesquite Rim and counted the cows there with rough estimates and he counted himself lucky for still being in the middle of a place that he could control. 

Dennis had told Lars that he could stay on until the end of the spring, that he would try to find him work through the summer.  That if it didn’t get too hot on the farm maybe he could stay there until the fall when the cows came back down for the winter and calving season. 

“Won’t charge your rent or anything, you want to stay,” he said.  “But it may end up too hot in that trailer.”  Lars nodded and said he appreciated that, would like to stay in Basin for a time.  Was feeling comfortable, he said.  Dennis said good and thought it probably had something to do with Laura and thought that was good too.  ‘Bout time she leave her mother to her mother’s things, he thought.  ‘Bout time she gets on being a lady again.

The winter had been an easy one and the reservoirs on the Rim were low.  The cows would push up the range to get at all the water sources, knowing that they wouldn’t all feed from a single pond with the winter being slight, the spring short and the summer hot.  They were already spread thin.  Dennis thought to himself that the winter may have been an easy one and the summer on the verge a hot one, but the calving season had been a good one because of it.  The calves were big and strong and were spending more time eating from the pasture’s grasses than sucking from the cows’ teats.  He turned in his saddle and pulled the reins to stop the trotting mare and looked back the way he’d come.  Shadow followed at his pace through the thick sage.  Dennis listened to the periodic bellows of the cows and calves and lit a cigarette and exhaled into the May air. 

* * * Lars worked into the day and before he realized the light was on its wane.  Geese had filled the fields and his two lanky friends had made their way up the river to roost for the night.  He spent the day building a section of fence that would replace a rotting one.  He spent the day thinking that it was Laura who had been hurt by that man Herman.  He spent the day wondering why in hell she didn’t say.  Lars wondered would she ever if he didn’t.

He hadn’t seen Laura since the night they made love though he tried the day after and the day after that.  He thought maybe it was him she was figuring against.  He thought again that his was a lot that wouldn’t love.  He thought again that that the bulge would win, had won and that the life he’d lead would be one like he’d lived before Wyoming. 

He grilled food to eat after showering away his filth and sat in the trailer’s main room and read through a book he’d found.  He couldn’t read line after line without thinking about Laura or the mistakes he’d made or the silence she kept now.  And after a time he sat with the book resting in his lap and his chest heaving and his eyes staring at the bed down the hall where he’d slept with Laura naked next to him and felt comfortable with his body touching hers.

©2003 Adam Sopko