Close Range by Annie Proulx

Author:Annie Proulx
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2007-12-01T05:00:00+00:00

THE BOX HAMMERHANDLE

Directly south of the Coffeepot lay the Box Hammerhandle—Sutton and Inez Muddyman’s place. Sutton Muddyman, of bunchy muscle and oily black curl, claimed dude ranching was hard work made harder by the need for intense and unremitting cheeriness, and although he and Inez weren’t suited to the constant company of urban strangers it paid the bills and brought them more Christmas cards than they could open. Their daughter Kerri was a pastry chef in Oregon and living with a reformed gambler of whom they wanted no news. They kept thirty or so horses on the ranch, a small band of sheep, pack llamas and a pirate’s crew of dogs constantly in trouble with skunks and porcupines, once with the bobcats who gave them lasting memories of a trespass in the hoodoos.

Scrawny and redheaded, a little savage with an early change of life, Inez Muddyman had been one of the Bibby girls and raised, as she said, on a horse from breakfast to bed; it was she who took the dudes up into the mountains where tilted slopes of wild iris aroused in them emotional displays and some altitude sickness. She had been a good barrel racer and roper as a girl, made a few points and a little cash on the weekend circuit but hung that up when she married Muddyman. Off a horse she was awkward and stave-legged, dressed always in jeans and plain round-collared cotton blouses stained light brown from the iron water. Her elbows were rough, and above her amorphous face frizzed bright hair. She didn’t own a pair of sunglasses, squinted through faded eyelashes. In the bathroom cabinet next to Sutton’s kidney pills stood a single tube of lipstick desiccated to chalk in the arid climate.

Three routes connected the Coffeepot and the Hammerhandle: a plank bridge over Bad Girl Creek—the joint property line—but that way involved opening and closing fourteen gates; a water crossing useable only in early spring and late summer; and the five-mile highway trip, one that Scrope avoided because of bad memories as it was at the highway bridge he had nearly killed his wife and broken so many of his own bones that he was now held together with dozens of steel pins, metal plates and lag screws.

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