Jimmy cleared a tack room for Buster to bunk. His shack—it wasn’t quite accurate to call it a house—was erected in 1883, as the date on the newspapers used as insulation inside the walls could attest. There was no foundation, just four piles of rubble under each corner. The front of the place was constructed with split logs, but the sides and back were a hodgepodge of materials that looked like the original builder had panicked—with winter quickly approaching—and nailed up anything he could find to have a roof over his head by first snow. The ruin owed its structural integrity to a century-old Peking Cotoneaster shrub that had grown into a thicket surrounding the tumbledown’s perimeter—holding its warped and rotting bits in place like a soiled dove’s corset.
There was telephone and electricity at the shack, but Jimmy had only paid for their initial installation and never a penny more. In his mind, the power and telephone companies had traversed his land, so in exchange for that, his fee would be free service and telephone for the rest of his life. What utility company would agree to a deal like that, you wonder? A utility company that wasn’t just a recorded voice on the phone, but an actual person sitting in an office in town—who knew very well what a Morgan was capable of doing when crossed.
Jimmy was like no other person Buster had ever known. He never saw Jimmy put anything in his mouth besides coffee and cigarettes. The only food in the cabin all winter was a fifty-pound bag of flour and a fifty-pound bag of Anasazi beans. Jimmy supplemented their diet with deer that he shot in any season—not feeling he had to hew to game laws dictated by the state. When Buster complained about eating the same thing every night, Jimmy went out and rammed one of Stumplehorst’s Angus with his truck. Buster was mortified and called Jimmy out to explain himself.
“Ol’ Stumplehorst had it comin’…firin’ you jes b’cause you poked his daughter.”
“What if they find out? They might think ah did it!”
“Nobody’s gonna find out. Ah removed the ah-lids and the gani-tayla to make it look like an alien moot-il-ayshun.”
For several weeks after the beating Buster received, at the now eight-fingered hands of Cookie Dominguez, Buster walked hunched over like an old man. His pummeled kidneys produced an alarming cabernet-colored pee. He couldn’t ride his horse for fear of puncturing a lung with his broken ribs. His teeth were tender and loose. Repeated blows to his skull gave him unexpected dizzy spells—forcing him to suddenly grab the nearest object to stay upright. Jimmy didn’t like it when that object was him.
“Brisk up!” he’d say, and push Buster off.
Jimmy couldn’t abide a freeloader, so Buster helped out when he could with simple domestic chores. Jimmy had lived alone in the shack all these years and had probably never swept, washed, or fixed anything. A wet, soapy rag, when wiped across any surface, yielded the tacky burnt sienna of thousands—if not hundreds of thousands—of cigarettes. Buster, well trained by Edita Dominguez, scrubbed and swept every inch of the place. A normal person would have welcomed the new hygiene of his surroundings, but not Jimmy. It rankled him when he saw Buster cleaning.
“What the goddamn hell’re you doin’? That’s what we got Messicans for!”
Of course, Jimmy would never think of actually hiring anyone to do the cleaning, he just didn’t want to miss the opportunity to take a racist shot. And when he caught Buster doing his washing, he really hit the roof. Buster had taken it upon himself to drag out an old washtub and washboard. Jimmy only had two changes—work jeans, work shirt, newer jeans, and an Indian-patterned western shirt for Saturday night at the High Grade. There were some other items whose purpose to Buster seemed mysterious—a couple yards of cotton swaddling and some Ace bandages. Jimmy happened to come outside while he was examining them and angrily threw his cigarette in the wash water.
“What in Christ’s name!”
“Thought ah’d do some warshin’.”
“Don’t you unnerstan? Men don’t do laundry. That’s what we got chinks for!”
Jimmy hurried the soapy pile back into the privacy of his room. What was all that about?
The answer came two weeks before the ranch’s Memorial Day opener. While prying up a crumbling piece of planking on the front porch, a sizeable sliver found its way into Buster’s finger and broke off when he tried to remove it. Minor surgery was called for. He looked around for some disinfectant to sterilize his penknife. There was a closet outside Jimmy’s door that he postulated might hold such a thing. As he was perusing the shelves—cluttered with prescription medicine bottles and oxygen equipment—he was surprised to discover the same kind of device that Jimmy had once identified for him at the Puster auction. A douche bag. What was Jimmy doing with that, he wondered? And then he came across box of Tampax sanitary napkins. Had Jimmy once shared this cabin with a lady friend? In all the time he’d known him—unlike other cowboys—Buster had never heard Jimmy brag about his female conquests, but here was now evidence of a past relationship. Buster smiled at Jimmy’s caginess and thought he’d call him on it. Jimmy was in his room when Buster burst in excitedly with the incriminating Tampax box.
“Hey, you ol’ cayuse. You never tole me…”
But he never got to the end of the sentence. There, standing in the middle of the room was Jimmy—wrapping the Ace bandage around his chest, binding and flattening her unmistakabe women’s breasts. Jimmy quickly covered up.
“Get out!”
Buster shut the door in a panic and tried to close his gaping mouth. How could it be? The swearing, spitting, threatening Jimmy? The Jimmy at the auction, sitting on the fence like a man, cowboy boot hooked on the bottom rail firing up a smoke? The crotch-grabbing, gun-toting Jimmy—riding full blast down a sixty degree canyon wall? That was no woman. That had to be a man. But Jimmy Bayles Morgan was not, in fact, a man—although everyone on the mesa treated her as one.
In Buster’s defense, Jimmy didn’t make it easy for people to identify her gender. A dress had never graced her boyish figure, not even when she was a little girl. She had always preferred rodeo-cut jeans and cowboy shirts neatly rolled to firm biceps. Her once blonde hair was worn in a fifties flat top—cut by a barber in Naturita. He had a faded style chart on the wall of his shop from which his customers—most of whom couldn’t speak English—picked what they wanted. Jimmy always chose the “Lee Marvin.” She slicked it with butch wax and toughened up the look with dark Ray Ban Aviators. Tomboys of Jimmy’s stripe were not uncommon in these parts. Girls with given names like Maureen often shortened them to “Mo,” Josephine to “Jo”, Wilhelmina to “Billy”—especially if they came from families where boys predominated. In Jimmy’s case, she was an only child. When she was four, her parents, raging alcoholics, left her to be raised by her grandfather, the Sheriff James Morgan. Before the advent of day care, Jimmy was forced to spend the entire day in her grandfather’s patrol cruiser—a front seat witness to untold acts of sadism and brutality. Jimmy emerged from adolescence as a swaggering, violent, bowed-legged, profaning, cigarette smoking copy of her grandfather and near proof of the Konrad Lorenz theory of social imprinting. But that still didn’t change the fact that she was a woman.
What was he to do? Jimmy would be coming out of her room soon. Red-faced with embarrassment, the little boy in Buster was urging him to run away, saddle a horse, gallop a few miles, and scream. But after pacing in the kitchen a bit, he decided against that. He decided to sit down, drum his thumbs on the table and act like nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
The door to Jimmy’s room opened. Jimmy cast a quick look at Buster then went around behind him to the cupboard. She uncorked a pint of Crazy Crow then splashed three fingers into a dirty enameled coffee cup. She stood there looking at the back of Buster’s head—he remaining motionless, looking straight ahead.
“Ah don’t know how it was with them fuckin’ Dominguezes, the Svendergards, or them fuckin’ Boyles, but ’round here…we don’t go bargin’ inta other folks’s rooms without knockin’. Got that, pard?”
“Yes, sss…uh…ma’am.”
“Jimmy,” she said quietly.
“Jimmy.”
Jimmy poured him a slug of whiskey and handed it to him. He quickly gulped it.
“Ah’m awful sorry.”
Jimmy refilled his cup and slipped into the chair facing him.
“We don’t ev’r haveta menchun this ag’in,” she said, lighting a cigarette.
“That’d be jes fahn by me,” Buster said. And they sat at the table in silence, not leaving until the whiskey was finished.
b
In the weeks and months that were to follow, Buster’s familiarity with this strange character began to breed a litter of contempt between both of them. Buster never considered Jimmy’s gangrene material about Mexicans, Afro-Americans, the Jews, and the government funny, but at first, he let it slide. Maybe something had happened to her to make her like this. Whatever it was, he figured her enmity was the fire in her belly that kept her alive. If that had been true, it was failing her now. Jimmy’s skin stubbornly remained gray—no matter how much time she spent with the horses under the blazing sun. Buster didn’t have to be a doctor to know she was sick, something serious. But whenever he asked her about it, she wouldn’t give him a straight answer. All he knew was she took a lot of medicine and drove to the hospital two times a month for treatments. Exposure to her toxic pronouncements about people—people with whom she had no first hand knowledge—began to weaken Buster—as if he was the one having the hospital treatments, not her. No dummy, she could tell from the sour expression on Buster’s face that he didn’t approve of her, but she persisted anyway. Buster began to suspect that her slurs were really meant for him—finger pokes at a softness in him she could not abide.
By the end of May, he dreaded every evening with her. There were only two ways to escape her company—a well-worn muddy path to the corral to feed the horses and the well-worn muddy path to the putrid outhouse. His room was not an option for sanctuary—it being only six by nine. That left the workshop—where they both converged every night.
Jimmy wasn’t lazy; he could say that for her. She always had a project. Those projects unfortunately involved the killing or maiming of poor animals that had managed to get on her bad side. She referred to these hapless “critters”—skunks, weasels, opossums, raccoons, beavers—as “needin’ fixin’”—as if she was graciously filling a request, by the animals themselves, for their own mutilation or demise. She would patiently explain to Buster that these animals couldn’t help being the way they were. They couldn’t be talked out of stinking under the shack. They couldn’t be convinced to stop chewing down her trees. They couldn’t be cajoled out of slaughtering her chickens. And so, she was left with no other choice than to “fix” these immutable defects in the animal’s very nature. Confusing Buster’s silence with acceptance, she cannily presented him with the logical follow up.
“People ain’t much diff’rint, ya know.”
“How ya mean?” asked Buster.
“Off’n times there’s a prollem with a feller’s very nature.”
“Not much you can do ’bout that,” Buster said.
“Maybe. Maybe not,” was all Jimmy said, as she completed a wire noose made from fishhooks for the weasel living under the loafing shed. She dangled it proudly for Buster to see, but was chagrined to find him, once again, scribbling away in a child’s spiral notebook—his tongue stuck out in concentration. She took a deep drag on her cigarette, the smoke forcing its way through gummy alveoli.
“Thought ’bout whatcher gonna do ’bout Cookie Dominguez?”
“Ah ain’t gonna do nothin’.”
“Why not?”
“Cause ah ain’t.”
“Ah b’lieve that sonofabitch is gettin’ up a head a steam to kill you.”
“Ol’ Cookie’s allus been like that. He’s jes unhappy with the way he looks. That’s what Momma Dominguez used to say.”
“That’s right. An he won’t be happy ’til he sees you dead.”
Buster laughed.
“Next yor gonna tell me he needs fixin’, too.”
Jimmy swelled with expectation. The fabled horse had been led to water. Buster looked up from his notebook.
“Hey…that’s what you are sayin.’”
“Nev’r say nothin’ that can be used agin’ ya in a courta law,” she cackled proudly while liberating some bloody lung matter that she spat into a shop rag. “Ah jes hope yer not makin’ notes of this conversation!” she said, when she caught her breath.
“I’m writin’ Destiny a letter.”
“Not ’nother goddamn letter!” Jimmy just threw her head back and laughed. “You weak godamn tittie!”
This would be Buster’s thirty-fifth letter. The previous thirty-four were written with the conceit that he was still in Utah pursuing his bona fide ancestry—even though a Vanadium postal stamp would have indicated otherwise. Those early letters, while he recuperated, were written in the style of a foreign correspondent’s reportage: what it was like inside the Mormon Tabernacle, how the Chinese buffet restaurants charge by the age of Mormon kids in a “combined” family, how a teenage Mormon girl snuck up to him at a gas station in Colorado City and asked that he help her escape from her polygamous marriage and how those folks stopped his truck and had Buster arrested for interfering with a minor—and all the interesting people he met in jail! How he had run out of money and what lizards and roadrunners taste like. Things like that. Some of the letters asked for news of home. How was Maple’s foal and if she would like him to train it when he got back? How he missed her pancakes. How were her parents? How were Doc and Ned Gigglehorn? Things like that. But letter number thirty-five was a full-blown love letter.
In this letter, he came clean and admitted that he’d been in Vanadium all this time and that he’d been in a fight and didn’t want her to see what he looked like until his face healed. He told her that, wherever he had been, he thought of her every day and every night before he went to sleep and how he wished he could hold her in his arms. He told her how he remembered every detail of their lovemaking. He told her he imagined touching her and kissing her all over her body and shyly asked if she thought of him that way. He congratulated her on her new profession and told her to keep an eye out for a piece of land that he could buy for raising their family one day. He ended the letter by pledging his undying love for her and including a piece of the catgut from his face—a poetic gesture, he thought, to say that their two hearts would be stitched together as one. Maybe including a bloody piece of string wasn’t such a good idea, but he’d already licked the envelope closed.
“Woodja mail’er fer me?”
Buster held out the envelope.
“Why don’t you jes give it to her yorsef, ya damn pussy?”
“Ah don’t wanner to see me lookin’ like this.”
“If you en-sest on it,” she said, sourly taking possession of it.
“Don’t read it, though,” Buster said.
“Why the hell would ah?”
That night, after reading it, Jimmy burned number thirty-five in the same oil drum she had burned all previous thirty-four.