Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2

“Number three knocked up,” said Georgina. “You pay for the other abortions?”

“Yeah. You know, I’m her father and all. She counts on me.” “I can see that.”

“All she needs is a job. She gets a job she’ll straighten out pretty fast. She’s a good girl.”

Georgina thought Linny was more of a ripe young slut, but she said nothing.

“Hey,” said Charlie Parrott. “Come on over here.” And he reached for her, his callused hands catching on the silk of her nightgown.

Georgina experienced a quick memory of the aging Sage Brawls trying to twist down and put his right hand on the floor behind his left heel.

A few days later Georgina cornered Linny at noon. The girl, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and sagging, blood-spotted briefs, was at the counter, fixing her breakfast, a plate of tortillas and beans with huge amounts of fiery salsa. Fighting a hangover, Georgina suspected. Doreen was kneading bread, shooting glances at Linny. Georgina waved her out into the garden, then, as Linny sat at the table, Georgina swung her bony behind onto a stool near the counter. Her rough heels scraped the rungs.

“Got a proposition for you. There’s this buildin down in Casper belonged to Mr. Brawls—the Brawls Commercial. They owned it for years and years. Now I get this notice that the city wants a condemn it, tear it down. They’ll pay somethin for it, but that’s not the point—they want it gone. Casper’s upgradin. So, we got a few weeks, a month, clean out the buildin. I went down there yesterday and took a look. The structure’s in bad shape. And there’s file cabinets full a papers, boxes a papers, rooms a boxes. Some a this paper might be important. The Brawlses had their hand in a lot a things. I talked to some a the State Archives people. They would like to know what’s there. They’ll probly take most of it off our hands. But I don’t just want a turn it over without knowin what we got. So, I need for somebody go through those boxes. Keep a eye out for letters from George Warshinton or whatever. See what turns up, make some kind a list. You want the job?”

“How’s the pay?”

She named a good figure, enough money for Linny to pack her suitcases and head for California or Phoenix and lead her own life when the job was done.

“Works for me,” said the girl, sticking out her hot, dry hand.

“We’ll go down this afternoon, look it over, make you a key. And you might want a change your underwear.”

“O.K. if I came in now?” said Doreen at the door in an aggrieved voice. “I got to get that bread goin.”

The Brawls Commercial building stood slumped and weary, its foundation breached. The interior stank. Even though it was downtown it smelled as if several skunks had got under the floor and died. The plaster, wet and dried for years from a growing leak in the roof, added its own tongue-curling flavor. Dust, peeling wallpaper, dry rot, and rodent tenants gave off an effluvium that made Linny retch.

“It’s worse than it was yesterday,” Georgina said. “If that’s possible. We’ll get some windows open. Bring some room freshener in. The electricity don’t work so a fan don’t work neither.”

Upstairs Linny heaved at the windows, finally got a crossdraft whose hot, dry air began sucking the stink away. Sage Brawls’ desk was still littered with his brittle papers. The dust that lay on the arms and back of his chair like fur strips shuddered in the fresh breeze.

“God knows what the clients did. He didn’t have so many there at the end, I guess.”

Linny went into the next room, pulling open wooden filing cabinet drawers that stuck and squalled like wildcats when forced. She opened a closet and saw boxes of more papers. None of the boxes were labeled beyond small Roman numerals in the lower left hand corners.

“They are sort of numbered,” said Linny. “How much is IIC? I hate those old Roman numerals. How did they ever multiply or divide?”

“Who knows?” said Georgina, who had dropped out of school early and to whom “Latin” meant Tito Puente and margaritas.

Georgina wanted to stay and watch Linny, tell her what to do, but throttled the urge to control.

“O.K.,” she said. “I’ll leave you to it.”

Late that afternoon the old Land Rover rolled in. Charlie Parrott was just closing the tack room door and looked over at his daughter.

“What the hell you been doin?” he said. “Christ, look at you.” The girl was streaked with sweat-runneled dirt and dust. Her damp hair straggled. There were cuts on her arms, and she sneezed.

“Dust.” She wept. “Cleanin up the old Brawls files for Georgina. That fuckin buildin’s got more dust and rat turds in it and dead moths and mice glued onto the floor than Nevada’s got sand.”

“She payin you?”

“You bet. Good pay, but a stinkin job.”

“She didn’t say nothing a me about it.” He moved his jaw from side to side, pushed up on his glasses. “What’s them cuts on your arms? Look like hunderd and elevens.”

“From those old file folders. They’re all dried out and sharp on the edges. What’s hundred and elevens?”

“Old-timers used a call the spur marks on a hard-rode horse ‘hunderd and elevens.’” He drew the marks /// in the dust to illustrate. “Well, hell, why not bring the vacuum cleaner down there and get rid a that dirt? If you’re goin a do this? Simple enough.”

“No electricity. Buildin’s dead. They’re gettin ready a tear it down. Pretty soon.”

“Baby girl, they invented a thing called a generator. Tomorrow mornin I’ll come down and set up a genny for you. Get that dust out anyway. We’ll take the Shop-Vac, not upset the household arrangements. What all is down there anyhow?”

“Dad, those old Brawlses never threw a thing away. It is letters of all kinds to about ever person in the world, court stuff, law books. Hard a know where to begin. Mr. Gay Brawls. What a name!”

“It didn’t use to mean what it means now. Plenty were named Gay. Even in Nevada. Was old Gay Pitch had a gas station in Winnemucca. Nobody thought nothin about it and he raised a railroad car a kids. So, O.K., tomorrow morning I’ll drop in.”

Whatever it was, they were in it together.

The next day they spent the forenoon vacuuming and cleaning. Charlie Parrott lugged several pails of water up the stairs and sloshed them over the floor to lay the dust. It was another day before Linny got at the closet where Gay G. Brawls’ working life was stored.

Georgina had seen Charlie loading the generator into the truck and, when he said he had to go to town, immediately guessed its purpose. She telephoned Decker Mell.

“He’s takin the generator down to town. Bet you he is goin a clean up all the dust in that building for her. She come home yesterday some mess a dirt.”

“That seems kind a sensible,” said Decker. “What’s the problem?”

“Oh, no problem yet, but he didn’t say nothin about it to me. You’d think he’d a mentioned it. He babies that girl too much.”

But that night at dinner Charlie remarked in his offhand way that he had cleaned up the dust for Linny and that she was ripping through the old papers with a sense of determination that amazed him.

“She’s a good kid,” he said, and the parent and daughter smiled at each other.

“You ought a told me she was doin this job,” he said in an offhand way to Georgina, who did not reply but cut savagely at the meat on her plate.

Linny opened another of Gay G. Brawls’ boxes. Inside she found a sheaf of letters, many from someone who signed himself “Bill,” and at the bottom of the box, half a dozen cans of film marked with Roman numerals. What, she wondered, was the appeal of Roman numerals to those old dead lawyers? She read several letters, one dated October 1913 from “Wounded Knee Battlefield.” The writer, whose name she could not make out, had a spiky black hand, and addressed lawyer Brawls as “Gay.”

We left Chicago 13 days ago and are here to reproduce the battle of Wounded Knee for the moving picture machine. It is Col. Cody’s big project and he has high hopes that it will relieve him of debt. I am a little concerned about this as Messers. Bonfils and Tammen are backing the affair which will be filmed and produced by Essanay—the Chicago film company—and the Colonel seems only to fall behind in these partnerships. We must hope for the best. He will do other battles—Summit Springs, the Mission, last stand of the Cheyennes, etc. We are surrounded by Indians and their teepees and the soldiers of the 7th Cav. from Fort Robinson. The Indians are always here with an interpreter powwowing about the rations they are to get or the acting pay or something or other. It’s been really cold.

Another letter, in the same handwriting:

General Miles, who is the advisor, is very fussy about accuracy, insisted that as there were 11,000 U.S. troops under his command back then, that many must be shown. It was amusing that while Col. Cody agreed to this, the same 300 troops marched around and around until 11,000 were shown! The moving picture machine had no film in it!

There was a yellowed newspaper clipping, so dry and weak the edges crumbled when she touched it. She laid it on a chair and read the remaining portions of a rave review headlined: “Great Audience Held in Tense Wonder by Indian War Pictures.”

The reviewer wrote that the pictures were “very wonderful in their realism. It is quite impossible to describe them. They are something we can never see again.” On and on the review went, conjuring flying snow, the barking of the machine guns, dying Indians, drifting smoke. Finally, wrote the deeply moved reporter,

… we were recalled to the fact that we were sitting in the Tabor Opera house looking at the moving picture reproduction of the last fight of the Indians of North America against the army of the United States. Hillsides, the plains, the moving troops, the dying Indians, the coughing Hotchkiss were no more. Instead there were the lights of the theatre and the white screen and a thousand people awaking to the realization of having witnessed the most wonderful spectacle ever produced since moving pictures were invented…. Nothing like this has ever been done before. Nothing to equal it will perhaps, ever be done again.