hello or pulls a gun. Couple of nice conversations that way, real give-and-take. One guy even stops for a minute. Douggie is aware that the behavior could appear somewhat eccentric, from the outside. But it’s Idaho, and when you spend all your hours with horses, your soul expands a bit until the ways of men reveal themselves to be no more than a costume party you’d be well advised not to take at face value.
In fact, it’s Douggie’s growing conviction that the greatest flaw of the species is its overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth. Single biggest influence on what a body will or won’t believe is what nearby bodies broadcast over the public band. Get three people in the room and they’ll decide that the law of gravity is evil and should be rescinded because one of their uncles got shit-faced and fell off the roof.
He has tried this idea out on others, without much success. But a bit of steel floating near his L4 vertebra, a small war chest of kiss-off pension, an Air Force Cross (pawned), a belated Purple Heart the back of which reminds him of a toilet seat, and the ability to make things with his hands all entitle him to strong opinions.
He still limps a bit, as he swings the hammer. His face has grown long and horsey, in unconscious imitation of the animals he tends. He lives by himself for seven months out of the year while the ranch’s elderly owners make the circuit of their other hobbies and houses. Mountains hem him in on three sides. The only TV reception he can get is the ant races. And still a part of him wants to know if his few and private thoughts might in fact be ratified by someone, somewhere. The confirmation of others: a sickness the entire race will die of. And still he spends the second Saturday of October working the road in front of the house, hoping a good-sized pothole will slow folks down.
He’s about to bag the checkpoint for the day and head back to the barn to talk Nietzsche with Chief Plenty Coups, the Belgian draft horse, when a red Dodge Dart crests the rise at somewhere near the speed of sound. Seeing the stretch of craters, the car slams into an admirably controlled skid. Douggie and the dog start their lope. The window is down by the time they come up alongside. A substantially redheaded woman leans out. They have much to talk about, Douglas sees. Destined to become friends. “Why is the road so messed up, just here?”
“Insurgents,” Douglas explains.
She rolls up her window and speeds off, axles be damned. Not even a look. Game over. It takes something out of Douglas. Yet another last straw. Not even enough élan vital left over to read the next bit of Zarathustra to the horse.
That night the temperature drops into the teens, with sandpapery snowflakes scouring his face like the whole great outdoors has turned into a California exfoliation parlor. He heads to Blackfoot, where he lays in a month’s worth of fruit cocktail, in case the drifts come early. He ends up at the billiards bar, dispensing silver dollars like they’re aluminum extrusion slugs.
“You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame,” he tells a fair chunk of the clientele. Thus speaks former prisoner 571, who will forever have to say that he didn’t give his blanket to a fellow inmate when he should have. He comes home after eighteen rounds of eight ball with more money than he left with. Buries the cash in the north pasture, alongside the rest of the nest egg, before the ground gets too cold to dig.
Winter here is longer than civilization’s running tab. He whittles. He builds things out of his pile of antlers: a lamp, a coat rack, a chair. He thinks about the redhead and her glorious, unattainable kind. He listens to the animals doing calisthenics in the attic. He makes it through The Portable Nietzsche and continues with The Complete Nostradamus, burning it page by page in the woodstove as he finishes each one. He grooms the hell out of the horses, rides them daily by rotation in the indoor ring, and reads them Paradise Lost, since Nostradamus is too upsetting.
In the spring, he takes a .22 out into the brush. But he can’t pull the trigger, even on a lame hare. There’s something wrong with him, he is aware. When his employers