In the days since, Lars found himself moving from thought to thought with a whim and fancy that was new and real.  Always looking—though never looking—for just that place where nothing could get to him the way a person could get to him.  Staring at the body, the imperfect body like some sore and frightening thing.  Staring at the man, the weighted man and the hefts he dragged.  The burdens.  Like reasons for his family’s unhappiness.  Like a cause for his stumbling way.  Wyoming was a new place still, a place making promises.  Here a man could work and be appreciated and respected and inconspicuous.  Here a man could be slender and move in a way that was free and lissome.  Ease was all it was and when he couldn’t find himself out in that belief it was one that made him sick in the stomach.  In the days since, Lars had found that and found other things too.

Eventually he found Laura and warmed to her in a way he’d never known.  And though they didn’t talk of the thing that happened it pained him little, was relieved just to see the face of the person that was so ingrained within.

He was excited and he said so.  He didn’t remember ever telling anyone that before and he said it again.  Said to Laura how he was excited, this would be a good thing, he said.  A chance for us to spend some time together.  Something I haven’t done, he said, a place I’ve wanted to go.  He was rambling.  He said he’d watched the Bighorns from his perch on the farm for too long now, wanted to take a drive there and he thought to himself how much better it was to be driving there with Laura.  Laura smiled.

He’d filled the truck with gas and picked Laura up and drove south from Basin and then east towards the canyon that cut into the southern end of the range.  East of Ten Sleep the road banked left and right around pastures and was flanked on either side by a herd of Angus.  The two lanes slipped over the creek that cut the canyon ahead and climbed slowly into the sandstone universe that led to the mountain’s summit.  Switchbacks gave the road its climb and Lars drove over the new ground with a curious smile.  Laura watched the canyon’s base below, the water where it rushed, and the forests of pine and new-leaf aspen.  The sky that backed the yellow walls was a perfect blue and in the rearview mirror Lars watched the Wyoming plain come into and out of focus as the canyon showed its end and then hid it around another turn.  At the canyon’s top the road’s climb became gradual and even and the mountain’s aged peaks rose slowly away and were reached in some places by the thick timber.  Where the mountain continued higher it did so without the forest, the tree line defining itself against the remaining summit. 

They followed the road slowly, the Chevy working itself up the grade, and passed an empty lodge and gravel roads that led into the forests and away from the highway.  Lars swallowed the scene with a rare energy, excited by the thought that this new place was his too—was he that was driving this truck and this person into the spring mountain, was he that was taking a step too and he that was defining his circumstance.  Lars had felt that his world had little of his own making to it.  His life followed his work and his work had always been determined by the man offering and so too the geography.  Lately he moved in a sphere of his choosing.  And a new independence if not self-reliance blossomed and made a budding confidence—even arrogance—possible. 

After a time the road leveled and swung wide around an azure lake that was bordered by grassy slopes and bends where the timber ran to its edge.  The highway wrapped around its northeastern edge and then turned straightaway from its southern end and returned to climbing until it traveled above the tree line and angled back and forth until it reached the mountain’s highpoint and the slope turned downhill.

“Where we going?” Laura asked, breaking the monotonous effort of the truck.  Lars said just up the road and she said oh.  Beautiful, he said, don’t you think it’s beautiful in Wyoming?  Laura said yes it was and said that she grew up with it and always took pleasure in it no matter what her mother may say.

“What would she say?”

“That I never was pleased with even the things I had right in front of me.”

“Is that a bad thing?”  Lars asked.  “I think not being content with the things in front of you is maybe good.” 

“You don’t exactly seem like a person bent on goals.”

Lars agreed.  “I guess I’ve always thought the way I had it was the way it was going to be.  Never considered I could make a difference with that.”

“You never wanted more than you got?”

“I didn’t say that.  I mean that I was born into some things that I couldn’t change and I figured always that it was the way it was.  There was no changing the fact that I wasn’t,” he stopped.

“Wasn’t what?”

Lars was silent still and watched the pine blur past and the patches of snow that clung where the woods were shaded.

“That you couldn’t mean anything to anybody?” Laura asked.  “That’s what you said t’other day.”

“I guess so.”

“Why.” 

“Because I never found myself thinking I could be worth the time for someone else and that keeping to myself was best for all.”

“Why’d you come to Wyoming?”

Lars looked at her.  Her hair was tossing lightly in the window’s breeze and she had a look on her face that was forgiving, like a look he hadn’t seen.

“Why’d you bring me up here then?” she asked.

“Because.”  He stopped and thought about the answer.  It wasn’t anything he’d ever felt before and the idea of it, on his tongue for the first time, dried his mouth and lips. 

“Dennis tell you about Herman?” 

Lars looked at her again and said yes.

“Did he tell you it was me?”

“Yes.  Why didn’t you?”  The two were still with the mountain running past.  Lars waiting for an answer and then asking for one.

“People have stories, Lars.  Some people don’t want them told and some people are just busting at the seams trying to tell ‘em.  You, you’re bursting to tell me something.  I know.  Me, I’ve got things about me I don’t want told.”

“Who else knows?”

“Not my mother.  Not Coy.  Maybe not Shannon and after that nobody but Herman.”

“Coy doesn’t know?”

“No.”

“Why are you telling me?”

“Because I had a feeling Dennis told you.”

“But why wouldn’t you tell me before?  And where were you the last week or so?  Where were you after that night at the trailer?”

Laura looked out the window as Lars turned off the highway and onto a dirt road that led through a brief pasture and over a rise.  He followed the rutted way slowly, looking first at Laura and then the road and then the mountain flowers that were sprouting beneath the heavy sage.  Indian paintbrush and lupine and wild rose swept in an uneven texture from the road’s edge to the forest.  The smell of sagebrush wafted through the truck’s cab with the soft taste and scent of mountain dust, earth.  Lars drove the truck onto a second dirt road that led to the forest’s start and parked where the road ended in a small dirt lot.  Pine needles and cones littered the ground; the light that filtered onto the forest floor did so as if through a mesh.

Lars said let’s get out and cut the engine.  They stepped into the air and the settling dust the truck dragged up and looked back the way they came.  Down the valley the gray highway stretched from one end of the meadow to the next and disappeared into the forests and terrain that ran farther east to the mountain’s summit.  A few cows were spread through the sagebrush, their black and brown bodies moving amid the spring meadow in lazy fashion.  One gave a breathless low and the others stayed at their feeding. 

“Dennis told me to come here the first time I go to the mountain,” Lars said.  “Said there’s an old fire station at the top of this walk.”

“There is,” Laura said. 

“You want to go up there?”

“That’s fine.”

The two started up the trail, hiking silently through the shaded woods and staring into the denseness that surrounded them.  Where the sun couldn’t reach the winter snow remained.  Steps along the way were wet with the runoff and the smell of green pine followed them as they moved.  Lars walked behind Laura, thinking to himself about the anxieties he carried or whether Laura would have something to say or should it be him. 

They made a slow ascent, following the trail through split boulders and over felled trees to where wooden steps were sunk into the trail for the final climb.  At the mountain’s top they stepped through a fence that was anchored into the rock and surrounded a small cabin squared on stilts.  Without talking they climbed a ladder to the deck that ran all four sides of the station. The place was painted a rusty brown and the windows were boarded so the two peeked briefly through a crack then turned to gaze over the world around.  A cool breeze blew over the top of them though the sun on their backs was warming.  Below them they could see the stirring cows and the highway and around them different peaks scratched at the sky or fell away in rock and tree.  Patches of snow showed a cool blue in the shaded stands of pine and aspen or on the flanks of near peaks.

“I never found this in Montana.”

“It’s there,” Laura said.

Lars looked at her and said not this—this isn’t there.  Never found it in Idaho either, never found it until Wyoming.  “I suppose I’ve never looked until now.”

Laura looked at him and leaned onto the railing and then looked at the rock below her.  Lars watched her some more and then turned and looked again at the boarded cabin and leaned against it and peered inside.

“People that worked here must have been lonely,” he said.

“They say the same about people that live in trailers with a bunch of cows.”

Lars smiled and Laura giggled and said she was kidding.  Lars said he knew but that it was true. 

“Dennis came to Lysite,” he said, “and said he needed someone to work the calving season and I said yes I’d do it.”  Said he knew he’d be alone and he was used to being alone, sought the chances to be alone.  Lars studied Laura’s face, her nose and the freckles and the way her hair was long and hung over her shoulders as she leaned forward.  “I’ve always been alone.”

“Lonely?”

“I guess I’ve been lonely too,” he said.  “But I never spent much time thinking it could be different.  Being lonely became being alone and sooner or later I didn’t know the difference.  I don’t know what happened.  Or why.  I let myself be open here, I guess.”

“What made you decide that?”

Lars said he didn’t know.  Still didn’t know everything that had happened and everything he’d felt, or everything he’d felt changed in him.  Laura asked are you going to stay and Lars said he thought so.  Will you work for Dennis she asked and Lars said he hoped so.

“I been thinking about working full time again,” Laura said.

“Where.”

“The school.  Used to work there as an aid and I can do it again.”

“Shannon going back next year?”

“He’s got other things in his blood,” Laura said.  “He’s a ranch kid, needs to be outside.  He’s more like Dennis than he admits.”

“What’s in your blood?”

Laura smiled and said, “You ask people in town they’ll tell you it’s crazy what it is.”

“I’m asking you though.”

“Lars.”

“It used to be I wouldn’t talk.  The things inside me would ball up and take over and I’d prefer silence and being alone,” he said.  “Why won’t you tell me things?”  Lars felt himself a bursting individual, like all things in his life had spilled to this moment and from here could burst forth and he wanted it to.  He wanted to let it happen.  As if he’d not had things to say until this point, this Wyoming point.  As if he’d not had thoughts to share.  Or maybe those thoughts and things weren’t worth the sharing.

“Let’s walk back down,” she said.

“I’d rather stay.”

Laura said let’s go in a quiet way, and took Lars’s hand and squeezed it once as she passed him on the overlook and climbed down the ladder.  He followed her, watching her hands as they passed from rung to rung and stepping down in his turn.  She waited at the bottom of the ladder, her arms akimbo, the light on her back. 

“When we went to your trailer that night did you know?”

“Know what?”

“That we would sleep together.”  Laura was grinning and so Lars smiled shyly.

Lars said no and asked did you.  She said no but she thought so, wasn’t her aim though.  Hadn’t been and never would be.  Lars said oh and thought she was telling him the thing he hated most to hear.  Not saying that, she said, not saying I’m against you. 

“Lars, you’re the first person I’d been with since Herman.”

“Since Herman?”

“Do you think Dennis just happened to come along the right time that day?”

“I don’t know.”

“It wasn’t the first time.”

“It wasn’t the first time he’d done that?”

“It wasn’t the first time he’d done that and it wasn’t the first time I’d been with him.”

Lars was confused and blamed himself for not being smarter, not being tuned to what he should have known or sensed.  He wondered why nobody said anything to him or why Laura hadn’t or even why Herman hadn’t come around. 

“Were you ever going to tell me?”

“I’m telling you now.”

Lars went silent and turned down the path where the wooden blocks were bedded for steps.  Laura followed him as he went, asking him for an answer.  Lars asked to what and she said say something. 

“I’ve never let myself like anybody like I like you,” he said, still stepping down the stretch of mountain.  Lars went on, not looking at Laura, talking to the steps and the breeze and pausing between words and thoughts.  He said that people said she was this or that and he knew she wanted them saying it.  And he didn’t understand, didn’t understand there were people wanting other people to see them that way.  All his life, he said, seeing the world as the thing against him and not wanting people to know it, know it affected him or how he wished it wouldn’t.  Here was this person playing with the way the world looked at them and for what reason.  And then this.  Why would you let yourself be with a person like that and why wouldn’t you let yourself be the person you are? 

Lars added in his head the reasons for being the way he was.  He tried adding her reasons too, the reasons he knew of.  He made himself think of the simplicity of it all, the ridiculous nature of being weighted and weighted for no reason.  Why would people born sleek and slender not stay that way?  Why would people born with a heft like he not want to fight it every step?  And when they did fight it, why in such ways?

“You’ve never been a fighter, Lars.  You’ve said yourself.”

He said I know and thought it was changing.  Wyoming changed it.  I’m thinking now, he said, that the world may be mine to shape or mold and to hell with those that don’t.  Even Coy knows that, he said.  Even Coy goes down, sees something in that girl, Amy, and knows he’s better there than anywhere. 

“I saw it on his face and he knows I saw it,” he continued.

“That ain’t love.”

“Then what is it?”

“It isn’t love.  I know that.”

“Well if it isn’t I want to know what it is because it makes Coy a different person than he is usually.”

“Why would you want to be different?”

“It’s not about being different,” Lars said, arguing with the rocks as he passed them, the timbre of his voice flaring.  He said it’s about being happy and not always being alone and knowing that company is sometimes better than all that.  That company doesn’t have to mean someone staring at you for your ignorances or the way you do things. 

“Company?”

Lars continued that for some reason being alone wasn’t what he hoped any longer.  For the first time he was spending his days thinking about the prospect of something better or bigger.  The possibility of friendship maybe, or love even.  Laura said life was not a fairy tale and Lars said it’s not a drama either and that maybe we could be happy. 

“Together?”

Lars said he didn’t know, just knew he didn’t want what he’d always been after.  Didn’t want to be hiding any longer and not being excited about the things in front of him or the things he could do and learn.  Dennis gave him a chance and he took it not knowing why but he knew it now.

“You’re not a cowboy, Lars.”

“I know that,” he said.  “But I also know I’m not worthless or helpless and that places I go or I’ve been, I can be more than I think.” 

He stopped where he was and looked at Laura who was following.  He said you believe me, or you know it or you feel it too.  What makes you think so, she asked, and she stopped just short of him.  Because of Herman, he said.  You wouldn’t have spent time with that man if you weren’t after something.  If he hurt you and you went back it’s for something.

“What for?” he asked.  “Why’d you go back?  Why’d you let it be more than once that he could do that?”

Laura was quiet and said she didn’t know.  She said nobody except them outside Basin ever paid attention to her because of the way her dad went and then her brother and the way she reacted.  Said Herman didn’t know better and would drink when she needed a drink and so it started.  Them being together after leaving the Rendezvous and then him hurting her when he was drunk.  She told Dennis one day, told him Herman was scaring her though nobody really knew what was happening.  And Dennis didn’t find us one way or another, she went on, Dennis came down and found Herman on his own. 

“I wasn’t even there,” she said.  “But he beat Herman and fired him and said he touch me again he’d do more than beat him.”

Lars didn’t say anything but turned and walked down the trail leaving Laura standing where she’d stopped.  He reached the truck ahead of her and felt himself spent.  The climb up and then back did it, or the way he talked like he hadn’t talked before.  Maybe it was the way he was still bursting to say things and know things he never had.   Or maybe it was so simple as the life spent fat and wound and that unraveling the things around him would be exhausting.

They drove down the mountain in silence, Lars content having said the things on his mind, Laura watching the trees strip past and then the canyons. They were in new places, each of them.  Lars felt himself at the fore of some emotion he’d never felt, eager for the chance to sit and rest and consider the day.  He thought so regardless of Laura sitting next to him, was in fact anxious to be alone again.  But alone by different standards, alone for the thinking he’d do, would do.

Laura said she was sorry at one point and Lars asked for what.  She didn’t know, she said.  Lars was quiet and she thought she must have done something or said something, hurt him in some way.  He said no, he was fine, good actually.  Excited for tomorrow or the next day or the next day after that.  All things seemed stripped clear, all uncertainties and vanities.  There were no edges to his surroundings and all palettes became soft. 

The sun was setting in front of them, throwing amber light on the badlands and through the windshield so that Lars held a hand to shade his eyes.  Laura still watched the roadside’s blur.  Without looking she searched the seat in between for his hand.  Lars put the visor down and took the wheel in his left hand and gave her his right.  She squeezed again though this time held to it as they went. 

* * * Lars woke with a clear certainty.  The world around him was one built, not granted.  The environment he knew as his own was one buffeted by his role in it, not his relation to it.  Chance favored, sure, but self-determination made the man a power and a presence one.

He lay with the covers thrown, alone but for the steady sound of spring quiet.  A light breeze muffled and the few trees swayed.  Curtains over the single window were a canvass on which the shifting shadows of a limb and leaves showed life outside.  The sound of the Cottonwood’s bending signaled age, another season’s dawn.  And this dawn in the man so that thoughts of Dennis and Dennis’s accident were independent of doubt.  No fault nor blame shared the room.

It was days later and still the blackened crease in his chest—the gate caught him square—was sore to the touch.  He rose slowly with the pain of new breaths and sat at the bed’s edge.  The trailer’s stale air bore the warmth of a sun rising.  The brick of light stretched from the floor to the covered window highlighted shifting, swinging dust.

He coughed and stood and walked with ginger steps to the sink where he spat.  His hands braced against the counter’s edge.  His arms stiff and bare, their slow curves and few sinews dark with exposure.  His fingers white knuckled over the gray metal basin.  His nails black at the cusp.  Sharp.

The water ran hot, the heavy smell of antifreeze wafting with the trace steam.  His callused hands cupped water for washing and the first splash dripped from his nose and chin.  His sandy hair matted in spots, stood on end too and when he ran his hands through it the dust and dirt from his scalp sifted through the air beneath him.  His bare feet were warm against the bit linoleum in the trailer’s center.  He wiped his face dry and dressed.  His pants crisp in their use, a clean shirt from the drawer.  Socks clean too—pulled high and his boots worked on with effort. 

He urinated into the grass behind the trailer, stretching in the morning.  He thought nothing.  He thought nothing of his waking, nothing of his washing, dressing or pissing into the short green blades and clover.  The spring leaves he didn’t notice.  Didn’t notice the shifting breeze or the alfalfa growing richly in the fields between him and the river.  The river bottom too was green—broken still by period Cottonwood.  The corral was empty, its gates open.  The gates along the road were wide too and the small plot where bails once stacked marked a greater vacancy.

He thought nothing of the things, the many things outside himself.  No, he thought only of the things within.  Dennis would heal.  These fields would see harvest and harvest again.  These leaves would bud, would yellow, would fade and fall away.  But the man inside, no cycle there.  These were a new bedrock.  He would not be going back.  He would not need replanting.

Lars walked back round the trailer, stepped through the tin door with its screen panel and stood in the entrance.  The smell of a man living met him and his eyes took stock.  The dirt piled in a tidy square where it had been swept and the broom that swept it.  A wool jacket on a hook.  A greased pan in the sink.  A chair leaned against one short wall and another pulled out from a small table.  A cut of rope with knots.  A fold of bills and change.  Weathered hat.  Leather gloves.  Boots.

Lars stretched where he stood and groaned.  He reached his arms, bracing flat and stable palms against the low ceiling.  His back arced and his body took the shape of one looking skyward.

* * * Sitting in the trailer at day’s end, streaks of white and gray worked themselves down from the splints that divided the rear windows into four.  Through their warped view, the mountains tracing into the badlands and the badlands to the river basin swayed and the glowing clouds that raced across the scene partnered with a lingering fog.  In an instant the rose overhead was gone and all was turned blue.  There were no lights in the distance to suggest he was anything but alone.  If he held his breath he could hear the wind knock itself against the door and if he shuffled he heard only the thunder of one man in the middle of a single emptiness.

©2003 Adam Sopko