Earth Colors Read online

  The sun was well up now, and the day was perceptibly warming. Thin traces of snow lurked in the shadows behind the nearest mound of stripes. “This is a desert,” I told Sloane, picking up our one-sided conversation where I had last left off. “That means it doesn’t rain or snow much here. In fact, the snow you see hiding in that shadow over there is probably the only snow that actually fell from the sky this winter. The rest of the time, it’s just the same stuff blowing back and forth. And it never really melts. It just finally wears out.”

  Sloane Renee leaned toward my left ear, making a noise like a miniature steam engine. So much for telling tall tales to an infant.

  I stooped to pick up a dark gray cobble about the size of a small cantaloupe. “See this? As the ol’ Stinking Water River cut down from Yellerstone Plateau, she left me some nice chunks o’ basalt and rhyolite. Any higher up into the Willwood we won’t find these, so I’m a-gonna walk us on around the hill here, just following the curve like a cow does. Got it?”

  Sloane’s little gurgling noise now filled my right ear.

  I turned to the right to see why Sloane had turned her head. Along the road, right next to where I had parked, was another car, and its driver was just stepping out. The driver was a man, and the car looked like a midsized rental, all shiny gray and blandly medium. He stood and stared at us for a moment, then he began to walk toward us, picking his way though the cacti. He took his time, stopping repeatedly to look around at the scenery.

  Tourist, I thought. Can’t figure out what to do with himself, so he’s going to ask what I’m looking at. I stood and waited, a subtle tension rising within me. The openness of the western landscape was my solace and my refuge, but, having grown up on a ranch, I had always greeted the arrival of another person in that openness as a rare chance for a little socialization. My father had taught me that it was good luck to run into a neighbor: What if I’d fallen off my horse, or had a broken axle in a truck? But this time something didn’t feel right. There was something about this man I didn’t like. And this time, I had a tiny soul to protect. This time, I was carrying Sloane Renee.

  I scanned the terrain, checking for the clearest route between the man and the cars should I need to run. There was only one obvious path, and the man was on it. I glanced left and right, trying to choose an alternative. To my left, the ground rose to a crumbly slope of clay; not good. To my right lay a long downslope leading to a sharp drop-off, and I knew the same topography wrapped around behind me. I stood my ground, wondering why this man had stopped his car here and what he wanted with us. I kept a good grip on my cobble, in case I needed to hurl it at him.

  The man wore an expensive jacket, and, with the hood up and his head bowed slightly so that he could carefully read the terrain, I couldn’t see his face. He was within fifty feet of me before I realized that I had seen him before, and where. It was the gray-eyed man. He closed to within ten feet of me, still taking his time, now gazing here and there as if appraising the landscape as a subject for a photograph, studying it, occasionally squinting his eyes and furrowing his brow in concentration, as if I had nothing better to do in the world but wait for him. This presumption added annoyance to my list of emotions stirred in me by his approach.

  “Hello again,” I said, when he was so close that something had to be said.

  He stopped and leaned his head backwards, hands in pockets, back arched, and looked at the high reach of the sky. Finally he looked at me, and smiled. “Beautiful here.”

  “Yes,” I replied, wondering, Why did you stop? Remote places like the badlands have no pathways through them, no burger stands or hardware stores to which one might be on one’s way, so the idea that this guy thought he could make it look like he was “just happening by” simply did not wash. But the situation was even more confusing than that: Most tenderfoots—and this guy certainly wasn’t from around here—find the badlands an oddity at best, if not downright forbidding. They floor the gas pedal as they head up this road, not wanting to tarry an extra moment for fear they will wind up like the faked mummified corpses of prospectors on the postcards labeled BUSHWHACKED. But this man appeared to be drinking in the scenery like a fine wine.

  Sloane Renee wriggled in her backpack and gurgled coquettishly at him.

  He shifted his focus to her ever so briefly, just long enough to send her a silent kiss, a quick pucker of his lips. Then he fixed his eyes on me. “What are you doing out here?” he inquired. Belatedly, he chased the question with a smile.

  What am I doing? Digging around in my mental knapsack for a suitably abrupt rejoinder, I chose the obvious and said, “Collecting rocks.”

  He peered at my cobble, austerely keeping his hands in his pockets. “You are a geologist,” he said.

  “Yes.” Did it show? Was he being funny? Or was this more of his condescension?

  “What’s your speciality? Oil and gas? Mining?”

  “Oil and gas.”

  He said, “I hear there’s a lot of oil production from this area.”

  My arm ached to throw the rock at him. I began to ease around him, instinctively keeping up the chitchat so he wouldn’t know how nervous he was making me. “Well, yeah … right over there behind you, maybe a couple miles south, is Oregon Basin Field. Then, farther south, Little Buffalo Basin Field. To the east, Elk Basin. Torchlight. Manderson. There’s bunches of them.”

  “Have you worked in the oil fields?” He took a few steps, once again positioning himself between the cars and me.

  I stopped, assessing my options.

  He opened a pocket, took out a packet of dried fruit and nuts, offered me some. When I shook my head, he took a nibble himself. “Did you go out on the oil derricks?” he inquired.

  Drill rigs, I wanted to say, but this wasn’t the moment to be correcting his jargon. “Not anymore,” I said, stepping around him and now resolutely strolling toward the cars. “Oil and gas kind of cratered. It’s hard to find work.”

  He nodded and fell into step beside me. “Not much work in petroleum back where I come from either.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Pennsylvania.”

  I had been right: He was from the East. Somehow this was comforting. A man who put me ill at ease might pop up in the middle of nowhere, but I had at least gauged him accurately. “Been awhile since Pennsylvania was much of a threat for oil or gas.” We were now halfway back to the cars.

  He stopped and stretched and stared back out across the badlands, taking in the high dance of the Absarokas. “Or coal. Or any other geological resource.”

  “You got other resources back there?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “Pennsylvania had a little bit of everything, if not a lot. It was once the mineral resource capital of our budding nation.” His tone was ironic, but also nostalgic, even longing.

  Why was I continuing the conversation? This was the type of chat I had with strangers at parties, when men got stuck making small talk with me and found out that I worked in a so-called “man’s profession.” The exchange usually continued through two or three more volleys before they suddenly spotted someone they needed to talk to on the other side of the room. But this was no chat-filled room, and I was carrying something far more precious than a gin-and-tonic. I moved closer to Faye’s car.

  The man tipped his head to one side, as if this was what everybody did on early mornings in the middle of nowhere. He said, “But you don’t go out on oil derricks anymore. What do you do now?”

  I was still trying to assess what I did not like about this man. He was part of an elite of which I had never felt a part, and even after all these years, I still reacted to the sense of alienation such specimens raised in me. The countersnob within reared up and I answered his question with a statement meant to intimidate him right back: “I have a ranch.”

  “Oh?” He didn’t smile. He fixed a probing look on me, as if testing for something.

  I wondered if he didn’t believe me. It was not precisely true that I owned t
he ranch. I had been raised there, and I expected to inherit it one day, so, in a manner of speaking, it was mine. But I had not been there in years, and the rash act of speaking these words out loud, here in the open lands that were so beautiful to me, was like tugging at a self-inflicted wound. “I—I grew up there. Mostly I work as a geologist.” I realized that I was getting rattled, so I corrected that. “Sometimes I work as a forensic geologist.”

  This seemed to sharpen his interest.

  “Oh? What does that involve?”

  I had arrived at Faye’s car now, and I stood with my hand on the door handle. I hadn’t locked it. I had only to open it now, duck inside, and drive away, except that to do so would be difficult with the baby on my back. I couldn’t imagine why this man was asking me all these questions, or why I was answering them, but I didn’t feel I could stop without signaling that I was getting uncomfortable. Slipping into “cool” mode, I said, “I do the Sherlock Holmes thing; you know, dig dirt out of people’s shoes and analyze where they’ve been. But also, it’s more a matter of understanding the world of geology. What geologists do, if the murder involves a death within a professional community. What geologists search for, if it involves how geologic resources are used or abused.”

  He nodded. “The big picture.”

  I began to feel oddly naked. He seemed to be recording me inch by inch, collecting words to go with the image he had mapped the day before. “Sure,” I said. “The big picture.”

  He said, “And you do analytical work as well.”

  “Yes …”

  “I might have a job for you. Are you discreet?”

  I gave him a dirty look. Who was he to question my integrity?

  He turned his gaze on the badlands hills. “These are ochers, I suppose.”

  “Huh?”

  “Earth colors.” He made a gesture toward them, as if painting them with a sensuous brush. “The colors of the hills there.”

  I stared at the multicolored bands of mud. “I suppose … .”

  “You see, I am an art dealer. I handle very valuable work, and sometimes there is question as to its authenticity.”

  “Forgeries.”

  His gaze probed deeper. “This is work that has to be handled in the strictest confidence, so it would be convenient to have an analyst who isn’t even connected to the rest of the art world.”

  “Well, I …”

  “How’s your color sense?”

  Sloane was beginning to twist around in the backpack. I said, “I’m not color-blind, if that’s what you mean.”

  “The question for the artist is how to portray these colors. What would Remington have used?”

  “I’m sure I have no idea.”

  “You saw his paintings yesterday. He would have played the warms against the cools to show the harshness of the land.”

  I said nothing.

  He said, “He had magic on the tip of his brush. The Academicians never understood him; they thought his colors inharmonious. Imagine: They must never have seen the Western lands. Vivid, his effects of light and shadow. Contrast him, for example, with Catlin, whose landscapes are barely more than cartoons by comparison. Dead, naïve renderings of color. But Catlin’s portraits on the other hand …”

  Sloane made a screech right in my ear.

  I said, “If you’ll excuse me, I need to take my little friend here back to town.”

  He pointed sharply at a middle band of color. “That purple: How would you paint that, do you think? It’s like the war paint in Catlin’s portraits.” Turning back to the west, he held out his hands, as if to wrestle the far peaks of the Absarokas. His face hardened with frustration. “How would he portray those colors?”

  Ever so casually, I began to load the baby the car. When I had put her safely into her seat and climbed in and locked the door, I turned and looked back.

  The strange man was still there, lost in contemplation of the Western mountains.

  4

  Bone black is a pigment made by the charring of bones in closed retorts. It is blue-black in color and fairly smooth in texture.

  —from the files of Fred Petridge

  WARMTH HAD FOUND ITS WAY SLOWLY TO THE FARM THAT MORNING, and Deirdre’s hands were cold. She rubbed them against each other, cursing the dead numbness of her fingers. It did not suit her that she could no longer feel them. They and her feet were almost entirely without sensation now. But the lack of feeling had nothing to do with the temperature of the air. She made a clicking sound at the corner of her mouth. Foolish doctor couldn’t diagnose her problem, a fact which both enraged and pleased her. He called her symptoms “idiopathic,” probably thinking the term would impress her. Did he also think that she couldn’t read a dictionary? Idiopathic was just a five-dollar way of saying that they did not know what was causing it.

  She looked around the room. Same tables and chairs she had known all her fifty years. Same books on the shelves, save for a few recent additions. The woodstove crackled as a log rolled, spitting sparks. She’d have to remonstrate her son for bringing in green wood again.

  At dawn, she had sat in this same chair with a cup of coffee, watching the darkness beyond the windows change into the vague notion of trees at the foot of the lawn, and from that into a tracery of black lace, the leafless winter branches backed first by an icy indigo, then briefly a fiery red before the clouds swept in and closed the landscape into another harsh winter day. It was a cold winter, the worst in recent memory for Pennsylvania. Now, at the foot of the lawn by the trees, the mists rose off the spring into dispirited gray air. A duck took off briefly and landed again, deciding to tarry in the perpetual warmth of the limestone-fed waters.

  Easy living for you, duck, Deirdre thought, and gave a humorless grunt. She would have had to admit a certain jealousy toward the bird if such insights were within her nature.

  The clock in the kitchen struck ten, reminding her that it was time to heave herself onto the remoteness of her feet and mount the stairs, grasping the creaking banister with her dying hands, and head toward the room where her mother lay sleeping the residue of her life away. Time to deliver medicines and make her drink. Listen to the old woman sigh, and ask again where William was. Precious William. Well, she’d tell her again that she didn’t know. The feckless drifter had gone off somewhere with his dreams again, and God knew when he’d show his face around here once more. He got away with murder, that boy.

  Boy. He was almost forty now, and making plenty of money, judging by the car he drove, but Mother always gave him pocket money and begged him to make her another picture. His fantasies in paint were all over the walls in Mother’s room. Another failed artist in the family. Deirdre felt her stomach lurch with anger at the thought. She had been so sure he’d amount to nothing, but it seemed he was doing just fine with his damned business dealings. He was out there swinging deals while she stayed behind and looked after the ancients.

  She swilled the last gulp of her coffee, grasped the arms of her chair, and pulled herself resolutely to a standing position. One foot in front of the other. Keep busy. Life goes on. Too much to do anyway. The running of the farm took a full twelve hours most days, between feeding and watering the animals, doing the books, and caring for her mother. And feeding her own brood. Getting them off to work. It made her blood boil that they did so little to help out around the place, but screaming at them seemed to get no results these days. They just crammed their breakfast in their mouths, hopped in their cars, and headed out into the bloody world each day. But she’d make quite certain that they were not as spoiled as precious William. Now that they were of age, she made them pay rent, and they ate their lunches and dinners away from home. Which was a filthy waste of money. They could pay her to pack their lunches and come home for dinner, and save thousands of dollars each year!

  The old wooden stairs creaked with her weight as Deirdre worked her way up to the second floor. At the upper landing, she found the black dog curled up on the braided rug with his nose s
tuffed under his tail. The animal looked up at her as she passed, raising his canine eyebrows in a quick display of submission. She considered kicking it, but did not; she might injure her toes, and with the numbness, wouldn’t even know it. Instead, Deirdre continued down the hall to her mother’s room and pushed open the door. The scent of illness hung in the unstirred air. “Mother?” she said. “Time for your meds.”

  “William?”

  Deirdre sighed angrily. “No, Mother, it’s me. William is out entertaining himself. I am here. Me. Your idiot daughter Deirdre.”

  “Oh. Deirdre, sweetie. How nice of you to come by and see your old mama.”

  “I didn’t come by, Mother. I live here.”

  “Oh. Oh, of course. Silly me. I was just thinking of other things, I suppose. Will William be here for dinner?”

  “How would I know, Mother? He hasn’t come by for weeks now, and I don’t suppose he’d condescend to tell me what his plans are. Come on, sit up and take your pills.”

  “Certainly, dear.” The old woman did not move.

  Deirdre leaned over and pulled the frail body of her mother up off the pillows, plumped them up, and settled her down again. It was a motion she had made countless times in the months since her mother had taken to her bed, and she was good at it. She took satisfaction in her expertise at care-taking, even though she’d been trained for better, more interesting work in her years at the university. But she reveled in effort, in the accomplishment of any task. The brute, forward motion of each day was integral to her self-definition.

  And, in these moments, she felt a closeness to her mother that was all hers to enjoy. No one else had a piece of it, and it was real. She had earned it. She gently touched the corona of soft, thin hair above the old woman’s scalp and smoothed it back. “Here, Mother,” she said, putting the little cup that had the blue and yellow pills in it and the half-filled water glass into her mother’s fragile hands. “Knock it back, gag them down. That’s the ticket.” She watched to make sure she didn’t drop them or spit one out. Then she took another vial out of her apron pocket and shook out a gelatin capsule. “And here’s your vitamins.”