The Agony of Victory by Steve Friedman

Author:Steve Friedman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61145-492-5
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2011-08-12T16:00:00+00:00

Dorothy Rossignol is seventy-six years old, a “nosy neighbor” by her own account. Others in Moab call her a “piece of work,” a “little old lady,” and “the busybody of the neighborhood.” She is childless, a widow since 1990. She loves mining, and if there is a town in the American West that ever produced a significant amount of any valuable mineral, whether gold, silver, or lead, she can name the town along with its mineral. Chances are she lived there with her husband, who mined it. “My husband would rather mine than eat,” she says. They first came through Moab in 1957, a young bride and her husband, a miner looking for work during the uranium boom. They returned in 1969 and settled there for good. Moab was something in the boom years. “Parties you wouldn’t believe,” she says, “… dancing girls from Spain.”

Life is slower now, nights quieter, days longer. She volunteers at the Dan O’Laurie Museum of Moab, eats lunch four days a week at the Moab senior center (“I’d eat there five days, but they’re closed on Thursdays”), tends to the five peachcot (peach trees with apricot fruit grafted on) trees in her front yard, which have been growing for sixty years and whose fruit she still enjoys. She likes to talk about the boom years and the cultivation of her peachcot trees and all the movies that used to be filmed in Moab, “especially the ones with John Wayne.”

Rossignol liked the young woman who moved next door five years ago, which is saying a lot. “I don’t rush over to meet new neighbors right away, because you don’t know what kind of people they are.”

But the young woman seemed nice, and quiet, and she bought a puppy who jumped over the little metal fence separating the yards so often and scratched at the widow’s door so relentlessly that she finally gave up and bought a bag of dog biscuits. Every day Taz would come over, and every day Rossignol would give the mutt two biscuits. He’d eat one there and take the other one home. Ballengee was gone a lot — “training for one of those adventure things” — so Rossignol fetched her mail, made sure her pipes didn’t freeze in the winter when she was traveling.

They would do yard work together and chat “about everything in general and nothing in particular.” As nice as Ballengee was, she wasn’t so great on following leash laws. “So when I see the police or the dog catcher,” Rossignol says, “I tie him up.”

Taz didn’t come to visit on Wednesday, December 13, and that night Rossignol looked through her window and saw that Ballengee’s truck wasn’t there. She also saw that Ballengee had left her drapes open, her lights on. She saw Ballengee’s computer, also open. She knew that Ballengee was a free spirit, that when she wasn’t training or visiting her parents in Evergreen, Colorado, she sometimes left to visit friends. She knew that Ballengee sometimes didn’t tell anyone where she was going.

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