Inertia in dim, comfortable light

Justy Arnica lives in a strange and wonderful place. But the arrival of a note from the publisher to which she’s submitted her novel may wind up changing her whole life.

Albany, Wyoming, a settlement on the old Wyoming-Colorado spur of the Union Pacific, had ceased to receive regular mail delivery when the trains stopped running to the sawmill at Fox Park and on into the Routt National Forest in the mid-1960s. Jimmy Radcliff’s father Hunk had made enough money to start the store with an adze and a maul and hammer cutting ties from burned pine in the forests above Albany to start the store in his garage and live what he considered a life of luxury as a retail merchant.

“Screw cuttin’, dammit. It’s time to make money offa alla dese ol’ drunks,” he had said. He opened the doors of his store without fanfare and robbed tie hacks and loggers for unmentionably over-priced liquor and cigarettes, and pricey snack items and staples. Within a few months, he had gained enough trade to attract grocery and dry goods salesmen to the settlement. Liquor deliverymen fronted and dusted the bottles. Potato chip salesmen rotated his stock and took away his trash. The dairy supplier brought and hooked up a cooler and a freezer, then kept it full of delicious products straight from the from the udders of dairy cattle all over the west. Hunk prided himself on the fact that he could watch other men mark his orders on clipboards and clean and stock his shelves.

With great determination, Hunk sat behind the cash register and labored each summer through, tending to the hard work of taking people's money from early morning to late night. He had been, after all, he told his customers, a man with an idea. A man with an idea at the right time. At the right place. The men, who had come far and wide because there was work no place else, anted up their pay for their spare sacks of goods. And they wanted his wealth, his position, his status. They envied him and wished he were dead.

Winters, Hunk left his stool at the counter and shot the large ungulates that stood about grazing on the nearby hillsides, and then had his son and a few trusted laborers, gut and skin the animals. Sitting on his snowmachine or in his jeep, whiskey flask in hand, he never ceased to relish the work of watching an elk, deer, or moose turn from a single large, hoofed mammal into many useful, salable products. Between the store and this illegal trade in venison, deer hide, and elk and moose antlers, he made a better living than most anyone who wasn’t in cattle, oil, or coal in Southeastern Wyoming.

Besides his occupations as merchant and poacher, Hunk earned “real money” in a trade he called “retailing leisure.” Several times a summer, he took delivery of bricks of ditchweed from the Union Pacific fireman who had an uncle with a farm in California. While it wasn’t the best marijuana in Wyoming, it was the only weed between Sinclair and Pine Bluffs. When the delivery came in, Hunk put out the word that the “shrubbery” had arrived. Soon, streams of loggers and tie hacks came down from the mountain. They drove in jeeps and on motorcycles from Jelm and Mountain Home, Fox Park, Centennial, and Keystone—even as far as, Encampment, Walden, and Saratoga. Sawyers in mills that dotted the Snowy Range clocked out early if they could. Miners left the dark recesses of their trade, and prospectors emptied their sluices. Trappers left their swampy freshets, and old mountain men and women who had holed up in that curious corner of Wyoming. They and tromped down National Forest roads to Hunk's place to stock their larders and the dark niches in the chinks of logs behind their stoves.

Hunk made his last sale of marijuana and closed the store to go hunting on Nov. 12, 1967. Since he often left his wife and son alone in the tiny house behind the garage-turned-store for months at a time in the winter, no one knew exactly when Hunk disappeared. All anyone knew was that sometime between closing the store and July 17, 1968, he ran into a drift and broke his neck while drinking whiskey and shooting at elk from his snow machine.

The man who found Hunk in the remnant of snow bank was Nathan Petty of Chugwater, Wyoming. Petty had received his draft notice in May and had gone up to mountains, determined to stay. But, being unfamiliar with wilderness survival, he soon starved and had resorted to setting snares (in violation of Wyoming hunting codes) for the wiry jackrabbits that appeared on the mountain in the late spring. He ran across Hunk near Keystone while checking his snares. Hunk was laid back over the seat of the snowmachine. His orange hunting hat was stained reddish brown. The black tatters of what was left of his face, which had obviously thawed a while before the rest of him, had curled up off the bone. There was a bottle of Evan Williams between his legs. His skeletal hands were wrapped around a lever-action Remington .308, whose muzzle had broken the tachometer.

Petty left his snares and walked down to the Albany General Store and told Jimmy Radcliff, who was just 12, that he had found a dead man. He said where the dead man could be found, and then walked the 25 miles into Laramie and turned himself in, figuring he had seen about everything he was going to see in Vietnam, but he would be better fed. (After a stay in jail, he went to Vietnam and, indeed, saw just about everything he had expected. He gained weight and become a strapping young man. He ceased to grow or to see anything while scratching his trenchfoot in a foxhole that turned out to cup the explosion of a trashcan bomb just perfectly. All anyone ever found of him was a boot with one foot left in it.)

Jimmy Radcliff had grown up, gone to high school in Centennial, and, after, only left the counter of the Albany General Store once a week to drive into Laramie. There, he made the rounds of the grocery wholesaler, the post office, and the liquor store with his pickup. From there, he occasionally met one of Laramie’s three hookers and then picked up a porn magazine that the man at Alibi Liquors ordered special for him.

This time, however, Radcliff only picked up the porn magazine after the rest of the inventory for his store. Justy Arnica, who had been living in a cabin in Keystone, a tiny gathering of log and clapboard cabins perched above Lake Creek, had received a note from Personally Recommended Press. Since he loved Arnica more than he love hookers, he raced west out of town and along the long curves of the state highways back to his store. There, he gathered up Arnica’s groceries and raised a cloud of dust up Forest Road 210 to the Lake Creek Road and then up the steep hill to the tiny red cabin built from scrap wood and lodgepole pine.

Arnica was splitting wood in the yellow light of the late afternoon when Jimmy skidded to a stop just at the small porch. She planted the ax in the stump she used as a base and rubbed her large hands together.

“Fire, Jimmy?” she said, smacking bits of bark from her sweater and jeans. “You’re here earlier than usual.”

“No, no fire. Not today, tank God. I got a letter for ya from dat Personally Recommended.”

“Well, let’s see.” She took the letter from Jimmy and held it up into the spots of sunlight falling though the pines. She towered over Jimmy, who was just about as average as a man could be. He looked up at her like a puppy, and instantly, he imagined Justy being overwhelmed by the news in the letter. She would grab him, he thought, take him into the cabin, and show him the wonders of her giant, strong body as he had always dreamed.

As it was, she put the letter into her back pocket.

“Ain’t you gonna op’n it? I mean, it could be good news.”

“Not now, Jimmy. If I open it now, I’m gonna stop choppin’ wood, either cause I’m happy or cause I’m sad. And I don’t really want to stop choppin wood.”

Jimmy was dejected but did his best to keep a smile. He unloaded Arnica’s goods into the back door of the one-room cabin and stacked potatoes and onions in a box under the floor near the woodbin. He looked through the back door to watch Justy a minute. She was wearing a denim shirt, tucked into her jeans. He admired the curve of her leg, the strength and torque in her back as she brought the ax down again and again. He imagined from the curve of her breast that showed through her shirt, the way in which her breasts would swing free should he ever have pleasure of the sight of them. Satisfied she wasn’t looking, ran his hand over the knitted spread on her bed. He reveled a minute in thinking of her smooth, strong, naked body in the bed at night, but broke from his trance when he remembered it was the same bed Hunk and his wraith of a mother had slept in when he was conceived. Antiques, he thought, never strayed far from home in God’s country.

Half of a log flew off the stump and whacked the back of the cabin. He started and nervously hopped out of the back of the cabin. Coming up to Justy, he pulled a piece of paper from his back pocket and used the opportunity to look at her exposed neck and chest, sweat slicked and bark-spotted. Justy signed her tab, conscious of the fact that Jimmy was taking a peek and that she had not paid Jimmy for groceries for at least three and a half months. She took a deep breath and poked her breasts out at him when she handed the paper and pen back to him. Jimmy was in love, thank God, and had been in love with her since she arrived from Goodland, Kansas, ten years before. She had all the time in the world to pay him back.

She split wood a while after Jimmy left, enjoying the heft of the ax with a head as big and heavy as a five-pound maul, the rhythm of the motion, and the sound of the wood as it split. She worked until she was forced to move only slowly, her muscles exhausted and numb. Then she bent over between breaths to pick up the pieces of wood several at a time and pile them under the shelter she had built to keep the wood free of rain and snow.

The sun had begun to set behind the mountains to the West and the chill of the evening settled quickly. Taking a few pieces of wood, Justy started a fire in the stove and poured water from a five-gallon plastic water bucket into a porcelain-lined metal bowl on the stove. While she waited for it to warm, she sat down at a small writing table, and in the light of an oil lamp. She breathed deeply, enjoying the feeling of being depleted and the slow return of energy into her exhausted body. She looked again at the envelope. She fingered the Royal manual at the end of the table and remembered all the work that had gone into Incidents. She had typed an hour or two at a time, tired, in a trance at the end of a day but had written from the time she woke, working out scenarios, characters, settings in her head while cut trees with her chainsaw, hauled them out of the woods in the old International pickup, and then split the wood at the back of the cabin. Five publishers and two agencies had rejected Incidents already, a few many rejections. She pulled her reject file from a shelf on the wall next to the table and set it on the red-and-white checked oilcloth. Two rubber bands bound together its thick center. Bits of paper hung from the sides. The letters on the front of it spelled, “I’ll show them.”

She had only ever had one poem and one short story published, both in the Casper Star-Tribune. She flittered through the paper inside the folder and listened to the rustling of the paper. Taking a deep breath, she clicked the blade of her knife into place and slipped the point into open end of the flap of the enveloped from Personally Recommended. With her eyes closed she pushed the knife through he paper, pulled the letter out, and unfolded it. She looked at the red light that came through her eyelids, watched the light pulse as the wick of the lamp flickered a second.

She leaned forward and rested her forearms on the table and thought a minute. She had been writing at that table since she bought the cabin from a drunk and wild mountain man who decided it was time to show those people in Cheyenne what was what.

When she opened her eyes, she took in the general look of the letter. It was longer than a rejection. And there were real signatures on the bottom, unlike the unsigned or photocopied notes that filled the folder. She read carefully, and slowly a smile widened across her wide face. Her teeth, white and straight, sparkled with her eyes in the light of the lamp.

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