I couldn’t take my eyes off the deal. It was amazing, this live thing crawling out of another live thing. I kept thinking about the baby in Maurey, was he in puss, would his feet come out first, would he have eyeballs. Estelle didn’t look in much pain. The whites around her pupils bugged some, and cords in her neck tightened. Once she moved her front legs like she wanted to stand up, but Maurey soothed her back down.
Then her crotch made a slurp sound and the foal slid right out—
Buddy smiled at Maurey. “You want to name it?”
Maurey had a hand on her own stomach. I guess she was thinking of the baby too. Her eyes were glisteny. “How about Dad?”
Buddy looked from her to me and back, then down at the foal. “If you call it for oats, I might come.”
“Dad’s my choice. What sex is it?”
Buddy did a cowboy-type inspection. “Female. Whoever heard of a female named Dad?”
“I did,” Maurey said.
Estelle’s front feet kicked and she made it upright. The gunk hung from her crotch like she was losing guts. One back leg came up two or three times until she managed to step on the gunk, then she walked forward pulling the stuff out; same technique as when you come out of the John with toilet paper stuck on your shoe and you try to scrape it off before anyone sees.
Maurey scratched her horse on the ridge of his nose. “So how’d Frostbite winter so far?”
Buddy glanced at Frostbite, then his eyes followed Estelle as she nuzzled the colt. “He’s a mean bastard, worse than his daddy ever was. Kicked Simon yesterday, like to broke his neck. Petey get over his cold?”
“Petey never had a cold. He was faking to skip school.”
Buddy stood with his big hands on his hips. I thought he was about to say something, but he didn’t. He looked over at the shiny Tetons for a few seconds, then down at the foal named Dad.
“Who’s Simon?” I asked.
“Dog.” Buddy’s hand went to his beard. “You kids want to come up to the house, have some lemonade?”
“I think we’ll walk up Miner Creek a ways. Sam’s never seen a beaver dam.”
The pasture was all horse turds so you had to look where you stepped. As we walked toward the creek, Hank drove by on the gravel highway. One arm came out of the driver’s window in a wave. I waved back, glad to see him and wishing he’d pull over and talk, but he didn’t.
“What’s Hank doing?” I asked.
“He found irrigation work up at the Bar Double R. They’re laying pipe in from the river. He ever start coming around again?”
I shook my head no. “Took a week to put the cabin together and get Les back on the wall. Lydia won’t allow his name said in her presence.”
Maurey knelt to pick a yellow flower. “Hank didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I know and so does Lydia, but admitting she screwed up is beyond her scope.”
“Lot of things are beyond Lydia’s scope.”
“We’ll never mess up stuff like our parents did.”
The beavers had built three dams, each one upstream bigger than the last. They were solid, too. I’d have bet dynamite wouldn’t put a hole in any of the dams, except maybe the littlest, bottom one. Maurey said dynamite would cut a hole, but the beavers would only chew down more aspen trees and fix it overnight, so there was no use blowing holes in dams.
“Only way to get rid of a beaver is to kill it,” she said.
“Why would you want to get rid of a beaver?”
“They kill trees.”
We sat on a log next to the biggest pond, watching the beaver lodge and waiting for one to pop up.
“Beavers mate for life,” Maurey said. “If you trap the female, the male will die from sadness.”
“People aren’t like that,” I said.
“People will find someone else to screw. That’s why there’s more of us than them.”
She told me the names of all the flowers around the pond and up the hill behind us—larkspur, balsamroot, cinquefoil, bear-berry. Maurey knew what to call everything she saw. I really envied her for that. I hardly ever knew the name of anything I was looking at, and that wasn’t just because I came from North Carolina and didn’t know Wyoming. I hadn’t known what anything was in Greensboro either. We must have had ten or twelve kinds of trees in our backyard at the manor house, and the only one I knew was post oak and Caspar had a Negro cut it down. It would be such an advantage to know what things are.
“Let’s go.” Maurey stood up and held out her hand. I tried to hug her, but she didn’t buy it. She turned sideways, which left me hugging a shoulder and feeling like a squirrel. The butt on my jeans was wet too, from sitting on the log. Hers wasn’t wet and she’d sat right next to me.
“Do you think the baby knows it exists?” she asked.
“How should I know.”
“I don’t remember anything before I was three, so maybe I didn’t know I existed then.”
“I knew I existed the first time Lydia blamed me because she couldn’t get a date.”
“I want to show you a nice place,” Maurey said.
“Like a secret spot?”
She nodded and started upstream.
“Have you shown this spot to Dothan?”
She stopped and looked back at me in blue-eyed exasperation. “You never know when to shut up, do you?”
“I guess not.”
“There’s a time to give me crap and a time to keep your mouth shut and this is a time to keep your mouth shut.”
She headed up the trail. I wondered how I was supposed to know which was which. Girls—Chuckette, Maurey, and Lydia anyway—always knew what I was supposed to be doing, and they expected me to know also. Didn’t seem fair.
We came to this log across a ravine kind of thing. The log was big around as my waist, with loose bark on the sides and a few drops of water from spray off the rocks below. Maurey hopped on the log and walked across like it was a sidewalk.
She turned back to me. “This nice place is over here.”
The creek went fast, white, and noisy through the ravine. It was only eight or nine feet below the log; I probably wouldn’t break my neck on the rocks below, but cracked ribs or a concussion seemed way possible.
“How about if I slide down the bank and wade across?”
“The water will freeze your feet off.” She put her hands on her hips—same position as Buddy standing over Estelle. “Come on, Sam. Don’t be a chicken.”
Chicken, squirrel, every time I turned around she was calling me another animal. Peer pressure is a weird thing. It’ll make even a normal kid like me risk his damn neck over something stupid.
“You can do it, Sam,” she called. “The nice thing about this nice place is we take our clothes off.”
That was interesting. I stood on the log with my hands out for balance. If the log had been on the ground, we’d of had a no-sweat deal, but up high there was a risk involved and risk isn’t something I’m comfortable with. I did it right foot forward all the way across. Slide the right foot up a few inches, drag the left foot behind it. Slide the right, drag the left. Took frigging forever.
About three feet from the far side, Maurey held out her hand. I couldn’t make my arm reach out and I felt myself going over, so I jumped. Hit the bank and would have fallen backward into the creek if she hadn’t caught me.
“That was easy, wasn’t it?”
