Quiet autumn of despair, silent rage of solitude.  Rolling into my mid-teens, vocabulary would ride in soon, my personal cavalry of salvation.

Train came by on regular basis early in the morning in Carbon County, nicknamed by locals “Carbine County” for our plethora of hunters.  Dad, as usual, differed, doing so factually.

Ought to be re-named “Carburetor County.”  More cars kill deer and antelope around here than carbines.

Late in the afternoon, right after the bus rolled away or the school bell released teeming pre-teens and teenagers from Pronghorn Junior High and High School, depending on time of day, around the lip came the Union Pacific.  This one was the shorter coal train.  In the daylight, cars wouldn’t stretch around the bend where the road disappeared ribboning its way to Laramie.  Average, if my calculations were correct, would run 57 cars, the mode coming closer to 53.

School bus disturbed dust around 4pm.  Now, when most of the cottonwoods rid themselves of their pesky leaves, broad and multi-pointed, 4pm was coming closer to dusk than summer when 4pm arrived with a clear blue sky and dry heat.

photo by Daniel Agee. All rights reserved.

I was, so I was led to believe, christened Henry Daniel Aardamoos.  These days I considered myself a reader, lover of old literature, new humor and, being a voracious thinker, consumed with curiosity, guile and guilt by association.

Reeeeeeetard!

Dummmmmmmmmmmmb-asssssss!

Voices, barreling by at 70 miles-per-hour, never matched up with their mouths.  It was like I was living in my own Saturday afternoon Japanese nuclear disaster monster film where no audio ever synced, minus the monster.  I felt there were no monsters, no enemies of value.

Usually there were only two on the Union Pacific, right up front in the engine. My imagination always had them in standard light blue-striped overalls with the oversize hat. Friendly, like Captain Kangaroo. Never witnessed it, morning or afternoon.  These engineers had trucker’s hats, large-billed baseball caps greased and gunked over where logos deluded their shimmer.  The man I saw whip by most had a John Deere.  Yes, I could tell from this distance, watching its dingy yellow logo fighting through axle grease.

Schoooooooooooooooool loooooooooooooooserrrr!

Go screwwwwww yer sheeeeeeeeeep!

I thought, as I sat sketching, pondering and/or reading depending upon the season
Did they yell all the time?  How did they know they are, or ever were, heard?

Common phrases designed to insult and hurt never bother me.  Sticks and stones my dad would tell me on a semi-continual basis.  Most days he’d continue, elaborating with poignancy. He’d go off on an adjacent path, speechifying

Long as they weren’t plunking you with anything of a harmful nature, and at their speed it would be two-fold – a) the timing for them to actually hit you would have to be perfect and as such impressive and, b) even if you were hit by something as innocuous as a banana, the force behind it coming from a 70+ miles-per-hour locomotive, it could do some serious damage.

You have to understand about Dad.  Once his locomotive left the roundabout to start working its way through the yard, it churned until formulation found an analogy of perfect symmetry.

Imagine, Henry, just imagine something as seemingly harmless as a banana stem could catch your eyeball and

At this juncture Dad would stick his right forefinger into his mouth, tighten his cheeks, scrape the finger against his left cheek wall and “pop” it out.

Your damn eye would be completely out of the orbital bone hanging on for dear life by your optic nerve.  Dangling.  Dangling like, hell… like a liquid-filled wrecking ball.

Dad would talk a lot to the stove.  Not that he wasn’t an eye-to-eye man, just felt eye-to-eye was reserved for talks of a serious nature.  Despite the spate of insults tossed around by the train conductors as if they were clowns tossing candy to children on a parade route, this, to him, was not terribly serious.  Wasn’t even serious enough for him to reach for his Ticonderoga nestled against his left temple.  Subjects of deep thought required lead tap-tap-tapping out a soft beat on a hard surface.

Those boys, and I do mean boys for men wouldn’t resort to such infantile behavior, are, for lack of a better vocabulary, asswipes in a desperate search for a sound beating.

Nothing needed to be uttered by me.  I knew enough about dad, or Chan as he preferred most of the time even from me, never a negative comment was spat out without a positive remark following as its caboose.

Be that as it may, there has to be some intuitive talent and skill to operate a train or else no one would have tagged the occupation as “engineer.”  Most likely they get paid well. Here.

Chicken and something.  Most of the time that’s what we’d eat.  Occasionally we’d get mutton, but mutton was only from the infirm, elderly or barren culled from the herd.  Provided, of course, local coyotes or wandering cougars didn’t get them first.  Mutton dinners were few and far between.  Dad wasn’t much for killing coyotes, though they were not aware of that. Cougars? He rarely bore witness.

Les Poulet, as Dad would call our chickens, were raised by the both of us.  I was feed spreader and egg collector while Dad tended to them as veterinarian, carpenter and janitor. This night’s fowl, fried in the same vat of grease from last night’s chicken liver and heart meal Dad dubbed Country Paté, sat alongside hash browns carrying one coat of gravy, and once-frozen now-steaming green beans taken from the garden last June.

Of course, Henry, you could always put a dime on the tracks and send that train flying.

Metal feet rubbed linoleum the wrong way, providing a soundtrack of protest as dad pulled his chair out to sit.  Annoying screech temporarily bled out the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street.  Actually a self-made compilation, Dad burned Exile, adding a few rare tracks for good seasoning. High Heeled Sneakers started its slow build-up as Dad continued.

Naturally, you’re too smart to know a single dime could never possibly derail a heavy coal train.  Hell, for that matter, an empty line of rail cars.  Dime is not going to do it.

Coal trains, a good 87 out of 100 carried coal in open cars.  I had spent a whole two months keeping tabs to get the exact figure.  Dragging out the Western Adirondack to our front property, carrying pencil and note pad, I spent worthwhile time sketching nature and plus-sized women in the chest arena waiting to drop another hash mark counting trains.

Where did it go?  Cheyenne.  Denver.  Split no doubt 25/75.  And it came from? A natural question needing to be answered, Dad told me

Hell, Not that difficult to figure out, right?  Let’s be Indian scouts, follow the train trail backwards.

I took dad’s interest in learning.  Someone had to do it.  Having way too much to do day-to-day, I swore if I stayed still enough and the fog came in at the right angle, I could see wasted brain waves leaking out of his skull like steam off a knit cap.  He was a learned man, most of it out of pure curiosity.

If you’re not interested in learning it, you won’t.  Doesn’t matter how many times a person can get something drilled in their head, doesn’t mean someone’s going to come around and cap the hole.

Butter and sugar sandwiches, thick slices of butter generously sprinkled with raw sugar and trapped by slices of cracked wheat bread, were packed in old Tupperware amongst seedless green grapes. Our slate blue Chevy S-10 filled with gas and remnants of floating alfalfa hay, followed the Union Pacific tracks going mostly west, slightly south.

Dad had told me often some people don’t have any appreciation for food since they have no idea where it originates.  Our butter and other dairy came straight from Clover Dairy five miles west of our place and Medicine Bow. Same ignorance could apply for anything really, including heat.  Dad had fashioned a solar heating system of sorts.  It worked well enough to reduce the reliance on “outside sources,” including coal from as far as 75 miles away.

Made me more appreciative of his efforts when we got to the source, the Jim Bridger Mine outside of Point of Rocks.  This monstrous mine bore the scars of both underground and surface mining. The Wyoming landscape looked as if someone took a three layer cake, scraped off the first two layers, topsoil and rock, tossing them away as useless fodder to get to the frosting layer cementing two cake layers together aka the coal seam. Deeper down sat more coal.  I thought of the miners.  What were the risks of a collapse?

Could they be scooped up like my army men, tossed aside like debris?

If you’re talking the miners, I expect unions have made precautions on a contractual basis so surface mining does not exist above underground work.

I stared at it wondering if a herd of Pronghorn ever loped across the prairie only to fall right into the massive pit.  Then I lost it.  Just as quick as the antelope flipped off the horizon, I lost it. Coal scraped off the Wyoming landscape suddenly reminded me of the time dad, morning dizzy no doubt from winter ammonia building up in the sheep shed, ran the strap razor across his right cheek, tearing off 5 of the 7 layers.  Took nearly six weeks for dad to heal.  The high mesa in Wyoming would take a tad longer.

What did we learn today?

Dad always wanted to know what, if anything, new I had absorbed.  The coal seam was a given.  Didn’t talk very much at all the two-hour drive back flat across the plains before doing a few dips into a few hills, settling back on the bluff above the track and highway.  Dad muttered a musical under his breath, having a duet with Willie, quietly adding background to Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.

Unlike the rare occasion such as the coal seam field trip, he’d ask every day, including Saturdays and Sundays.  As farmers, weekends were merely known as end of the week, not time for a break.  Animals have no sense of weekends, although Dad swore when we had pigs they’d get nervous Sundays in the fall when the TV illuminated out living room with Broncos.

Well, let me see, Dad.  I took a good look at the sage.

Dad pushed a hash brown forkful past his teeth.  Chewing, he let out a small

And?

Seems the sage, while soft on the top, has a base and roots that are very rigid.

Why do you suppose that is?

Thought about that.  Then the wind came up…

Today wasn’t much for wind at all.

No, but enough to pull my hat clean off…

Right off…

I tightened my lips.  I looked at this man, Chad, really looked at him. Eyes of green, mostly kind, could harden when it became a necessity.  Nothing was a necessity now, only learning.

Don’t say “clean off.”  Makes you sound like an ignoramous.  Go on.

Hat was pulled right off.  So, I thought well hell…

Henry…

Heck, the sage has to have roots and base so hard to keep it in the ground with the winds we get. And those roots look like chicken claws.

Yep.

Then I thought, the softness of its leaves must be to catch and hold rain.

Good thought.

But wouldn’t that be attractive for an animal to eat?  I looked around and not one of our sage bushes had chewed-on leaves.  Not one.

Dad helped himself to another piece of chicken.  An expert cutter, you could tell what piece was what when he plucked and carved up a hen.  Clearly, this one was a back.

Interesting.

So I tasted one.  It was awful, and my timing was bad.

Why?  No sugar to sweeten it up?

It was right around the time for the afternoon coal roll.

Dad had thrown the moniker “coal roll” onto the train.  I liked the sound of it, so I had picked it up.  A few of my green bean strings fell into the gravy.  Dad’s gravy made pretty much everything better, except cauliflower.  Nothing helped cauliflower but a decent burial.

Freeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaak!

Moooooooooooooooooooron!

Still rang in my ears like that damned train whistle those gentlemen would pull right as they got to the house, making prairie dogs dive and sheep scurry.  But, there was no use talking to dad about it.  He was right, just words.

Dad and I eke out a living sheering sheep and raising rack of lamb, but I guess you might have figured that out already.  Precisely though, organic lamb. Dad won’t feed sheep anything but pure grain, alfalfa hay he threshes off nearby rented acreage.  Pesticides are a work of the devil, so Dad says.  Not that he’s a religious man, he’s a

Man of the earth, Henry.  As you are. No point in poisoning the homestead.

Organic came to being way after Dad was doing it.  Just put a tag on it, that’s all.  As for the sheep, their wool was prized for sure.  Not so the meat. Why is it sheep are not eaten nearly as much as lamb, but cows are so much more than calves?  Personally, it’s my opinion lambs are far cuter and, given the chance, city dwellers would much rather opt for a calf than a lamb.

But I’ve been told, not that I had to be, sheep are not nearly as revered as cattle.  Even as late into this century as it is, when we venture to Medicine Bow for vitals it’s best we remember to scrub up well.  One whiff of sheep, people part like the Red Sea and don’t come back in on the next wave to help you.

Back in the wild frontier days when land grabs were as common as cattle rustling, cattle wars meant double-barreled shotguns in ranch-to-ranch showdowns.  Sheep?  Call a sheepherder a rancher you’d most likely get punched.  Historically, range and water wars sheep-to-sheep were rare. Cow-to-sheep? Short-lived… for the sheepherder.

I awoke thinking of mother.  Nothing unusual.  She wasn’t far from my mind, but not on the front of it like a dangling carrot making a mule cross-eyed. Banging pots and smells of sizzling bacon and toast said hello.

Lack of social stature was not a catalyst for mother’s decision.  While possibly a minute part of it, being a sheepherder from a family line of sheepherders was not a good enough reason.  Occasionally, her decision would come up.  As I got older, when it did, I brought it up as a gentle inquiring like I was a television trial lawyer leading on a potentially hostile witness.

Told me one day she was going into the city, that’s all Henry.

The city?  Rawlins?

Doubtful that’s what she meant.

For years, I accepted it and would move on to whatever enthralled my grey matter that particular day.  Often it was my bag of green army men, mostly gray-green from staying out in the sun too long or wintering in the front yard quilted together with Kentucky Bluegrass, clumps of crab and herds of sage.   Yucca dotted the front as well.  From my bedroom window on the second story, I could squint and see the Yucca.  While seemingly chaotic from the ground, it had grown as the Big Dipper, each plant occupying a star’s position.  Army men placed on the sill became astronauts.

Dad?

He was at the table, blading a Russet.  I knew full well concentration lead Dad into such a deep focus coming in from his back side could get you a paring knife in your midsection.  As such, I loudly approached from the front.

Was it really Rawlins?

At this time, with me rapidly approaching 15, any conversation about mother did not have to start from point A.  Point C was fine.

Henry, told you.  Don’t know.  City is all she said.

Didn’t you ever want to find her?  What if she was murdered?

This partial of topic had never been unsealed.  Could have been.  Dad could have opened it long ago.  He rose up, calmly stuck the blade into the next Russet in line for skinning and left the kitchen.

Where are you going?

The city.

Dad?

Echoing boots announced his return.

That was a joke, just not a lifelong laugher like your mother’s.  Here.

The envelope, yellowed by years of decay and what looked to be barbecue-stained fingerprints, was opened.  The flap nearly torn off, it looked to have been scanned a multitude of times.

I scooted in my Avocado green vinyl seat chair.  I chose the green.  Dad’s was Robin’s egg blue, both were picked up from a housing development 30 miles to the west where people curbed perfectly useful items.  Table, its haphazard craggy lined pattern, brown on white looking to Henry like Giraffes conducting an orgy on the Veldt, came with it.  Only thing matching for the set were metal legs and circular feet.

I read it three times, silence only broken by a Russet’s scream as dad sliced off its skin.  Reading comprehension had always been one of my strong suits, so it wasn’t necessary to triplicate my effort in order to understand.  There just wasn’t much to it.

Dearest Chan – now why if you had no intention of coming back would you start it off with “dearest” boggled the mind.  Doris, my mother’s name which I had known for a decade, went on to explain how the Wyoming prairie, despite softly rolling hills in this part, were not to her liking.  They “suffocated” her.  Must have been purely mental, for suffocation was nearly impossible in this wide-open area unless you were a stranded sheep in a blizzard.  She desperately needed culture (this instantly wiped Rawlins as her destination right out of my mind) and vibrancy. Her life was “destined to be colored with the arts” as she put it.  I ran through a few cities, but settled on San Francisco.

Lastly, she told Chan how wonderful a father he was going to be to little Elijah.

Elijah?

Wondering when that was coming up.

Is that my first name?

First as in that was the name you were named first, yes.

You changed my name?

After she left, yes.

Why?

Hated Elijah.

I leaned back into my chair.  City, vibrancy, color.  Maybe it wasn’t San Francisco. But it certainly wasn’t Cheyenne.  Denver? Possibly.  Could have just as easily been Steamboat Springs far as Dad or I knew.

Henry?

My father’s name.

Now you’re going to tell me I have a grandfather?  Where is he?

An hour drive, 35 miles straight north as the crow flies.

That close?!  Suppose he has some big old ranch too.

No. Lying on the northeast side of Casper.

Dad.  Really?

He’s not exactly welcoming guests.

We’re not guests, we’re family.

He’s six feet down.

Dead?

By now, I sure hope so.  Been there since before you were born.

The final Russet, skinned and quartered, joined his amigos on their kamikaze path, diving into the water-filled pot.  Chan grabbed the pot by its ears and walked it over to meet the stove.  Blue-flamed gas licked up the pot’s edge before Dad turned it to medium.

That’s it for questions?

I neatly folded up the letter and slid it back into its stained hold.  Getting up, my feet aimed for the side room.  Probably was supposed to be a dining room, but with only the two of us, Dad had turned it into a side room complete with TV and two rust-colored recliners picked up from another curb.  That was a gold-letter day.  I was twelve when we stumbled upon the chairs in the early morning as the fog enveloped the Whispering Pines subdivision outside Rawlins.  It was the same day we got the microwave and toaster oven.  You can’t duplicate 24-hours like that.  Didn’t attempt it, and never had.

I sort of understood the microwave and toaster oven tossing.  They didn’t match and one thing Dad had taught me was women did not like things that didn’t blend with one another like their sheep.  They liked what Dad called “flaccid consistency,” everything the same and nothing all that exciting.

I gasped when I saw the chairs.  I looked at dad.  His eyes were nearly tearing up and it was too late for the pollen season.  Once we got them into the bed of the old reliable S-10, Dad arched his back, dropped the truck into gear and said

Leather.  Only reason these precious babies were curbed.

I always sit in the recliner furthest from the kitchen where you could look out towards the road.  The road sat a good 10 feet below the level of the house, the railroad tracks another 40 feet beyond the road and no less than 5 feet further down the slope. From here I can see trains, but not the entire thing, either horizontally or vertically.

Done with it?

Guess.

Let me put it away then.

Dad fingered the envelope as he went behind me.  Grabbing a book, he opened it to the back and slipped in the envelope.  Chan walked back to the kitchen.  Making chicken and noodle with mashed potatoes, he needed to start rolling out the dough for the egg noodles.  Didn’t take much time, but labor never waited.  He raised his voice enough for me to hear.

Want to know here it is?

Nothing returned. I am fairly confident for a second Dad must’ve thought me to be as callous as mother.  Perhaps he’d flee too, find a reason to head in whatever direction.  But I am also pretty sure in Chan’s mind, soon as he thought of me taking flight, remembered being 14.  Struggling through adolescence, watching girls grow up twice as fast, dividing time between figuring out how to conquer the world yet saving time for turning two-by-fours into temporary pirate swords. I was no different and his silence spoke much more than indifference.

It’s in the Hemingway.

A tickle in my nose caused my right hand to involuntarily itch my bridge.  Behind me, over my left shoulder against the wall above the desk was our bookshelf.  Dad made it in his workshop.  Pine, stained light, three shelves high, books were lined up by author’s last name (with the exception of Ayn Rand who Dad initially thought Rand was a cool first name, so she stayed in the “A” position).  The H’s were second shelf.  Two Hawthorne’s and the Sun Also Rises.

Dad settled back down.  I guess settled is not the exact description.  He was never really unsettled talking about mother.  To him, bringing her name up was no different than talking about tomorrow’s weather.

While mother was an interesting topic, it was an exhaustive one for me.  Younger, my curiosity of a permanently absent parent got the best of me. As I grew up, my questions dove deeper, but answers tread shallow.

Nothing got my mind’s vortex swirling more than the sense of smell.  Not necessarily the best either.  My memory bore scars of some of the most God-awful smells one could whiff.  The sheep barn, dirty, was a tear-inducer.  Once cleaned, it was no different.  Ammonia.  Dad had tried once to clean it with a Lemon Zest ammonia, but it turned sour and smelled like a million lemons left out in arid Wyoming July heat to rot. Great smells are short-lived, bad ones can frozen Etch-a-Sketch in one’s memory.

Dad had made a pie, apple with raisins.  Not a lot of raisins, just a few.  While Dad and I had our share of fruit, mostly peaches off the two procreating cohabitating-in-sin trees in the back near the corral’s northern edge, we didn’t have what the government would call our recommended daily share.

The pie, again, was good.  Dad was a good cook, but this night he outdid himself.  We ate it.  The whole circumference.  About an hour later, we started up, trading flatulence back and forth as if our colons were having their own private conversation.

If the Wal-Mart crowd could smell us now.

Probably help us, Henry.  Doesn’t exactly smell sheepish.

Nothing sheepish about it.

Doesn’t exactly emit the smell of a fresh-baked apple pie either.

Why is that, Dad?

Think about it Henry.  It had raisins… and we also had broccoli.  It’s like a major military battle and our intestinal system is getting pounded from air and ground forces.

We’re sure getting it from the air.

Try to keep your sheets clean.  Good night.

The next day I started my scientific gyroscope of thinking, right after breakfast when dad was explaining to me why he set the rams where he did.

See Henry, it’s like this.  I know you are not too young to understand the importance of smell.  When the ewes start going into heat…  do I need to explain that?

Nope.

I was very observant.  Plus, it didn’t take a whole lot of cerebral action to know what a ram was doing riding a ewe, pinning her down from the back.

OK.  Well, I place them where they can smell the ewes, but not see them.  Gets their blood boiling with lust.  I do mean lust.  There’s no wooing, no love between ram and ewe.  Therefore, I make an abutment, a solid fence between them.  After a day or so, I let them out to frolic in the field.  Like a damn Roman orgy out there, if you pardon my French.

I knew French.  That was no French.  What Dad had not taught me I picked up from a textbook collecting dust in my room supposedly left behind by mother.  At least she left me Paris.

Abutment.  A good word.  Got me thinking and put me to work.

Months before, on a whim (as candy was always purchased by dad), he had picked up some Tic-Tacs, orange ones.  He liked to try new experiences, but hated this one.

Goddamn if they should ever put this stuff next to real candy.

Dad, they’re mints.

For whose breath?  A horse’s?  This stuff wouldn’t kill bad breath if all I did was drink a cup of good coffee.  Like Hell, they are.

Not one to throw anything away, Dad had set them in junk drawer II, located in the part of the kitchen were drawers were rarely opened.  Out of sight, you know.  I took the rest of the tics and tacs out of their clear package.

Thought about taping them together, but realized any tape was not going to work with the exception of duct tape and duct tape was not going to be useful for this particular project.  I needed them together, but I had to do some strategizing.  First, to go find Dad.

Found him knee deep in sheep.  Not the animals, mind you.  As typical, the barn smelled to high heaven, however I had gained certain numbness to it plus excelled at talking without breathing in through my nose.  As luck would have it, although we had more wood than luck, there was a perfectly useless piece of lumber leaning against the side split rail near the barn.  I picked it up while asking Chan

Dad, where’s the Swiss Army?

Planning on offing yourself?

With a five-inch blade?

Given the correct spot, would only take one stab.  Unless you hit breastplate.

Not today.

Desk drawer on the left.  As you face it, on the left.

Multi-tooled, the Swiss Army had everything you would need to survive in the Wyoming wilderness be it the harsh central plains or stuck on a celebrity’s ranch near Jackson Hole. Still, I couldn’t figure out what the point was having a toothpick.  Scratching my head over that one for no more than a few seconds, I grabbed the chunk of two-by-four as I heard the warning whistle.

Didn’t matter.  Whistle or not, front yard or not, they yelled.  Two syllables generally their maximum capability

Assssssssssssssssssssssssshoooooooooole!

Spppppppppppppppppppppppped!

They’d scream it as if they were town criers shouting the news of the day.  I often wondered if one day their collective vocal cords might snap off like hamstrings.  Once I realized no one would miss their useless voices and in fact may rejoice the collective detachment of both boors, I bore down and dug a mold.

Both tics and tacs took longer to de-frag than I thought.  I cooked slowly so as to not lose their ability to odorize in a pleasant manner.  Once liquefied, the concoction oozed into the desired spot.  Hinges cried, linoleum took boots’ beating as I waited.

Science experiment?

Sort of.

Aha.  Any questions?

Not right now.  If I do?

Oh, I’ll be mending fence, west side.

West side fence was downhill from the house, as was the south.  Both directions sort of sloped off with a small ridge in the middle.  I figured from the angle of a plane 30 to 45 degrees off the horizon to the south, the front of our land could resemble the corner of a square lozenge. However, it sloped so much down the west side barbed wire was in order.  Not only to poke the sheep so they knew any break-out would be met with some pain but if they lost their footing and rolled out of control down the slope, the barbed wire would catch them, gripping on as if they were worsted wool to Velcro.

An hour.  All it took for it to set.  It looked good.  Shiny as a new tic-tac, although with mottled candy shell, the newly formed mint had set solid.   I turned the board upside down and shook.  Nothing.  Thing was stuck as if I set it in cement.

Back to the drawing board.  Another carving with Swiss Army.  More melting.  This time before commencing the pour, I dabbed my pinky into cow salve, rubbed in a thin layer, no more than if I was to lightly stain the wood.

The sun in October was an anomaly.  Bigger than life, it set over the range as if someone lit a blood orange on fire. Yet, nights were cool.  Dad came ambling in, carrying needle-nose pliers, dried blood under his nostrils and a smirk.

You OK, dad?

Fine.  Slipped pinching wire, fell into the fence.  Slope you know.  Wasn’t the fence or the earth’s fault, unless you count gravity.  How’s the experiment?

We’ll see.

Aha.  Thought of dinner?

Thought of it.

Thought?

Burritos.

I don’t know if we…

We do.  I checked.  Got enough.  Cheese we can grate up.  Refrieds.  Onion.

Red?

Yep.  Got a bit of sour cream too… and tortillas.

Alright.  Go to it.

It wasn’t fancy.  Didn’t take a genius to put together, but I figured giving dad a rest was a decent idea.  Two burritos each, filled to the point of bursting through tortillas made thinner than a Chinese pancake by steaming then stretching, put both dad and I in lounge mode.

Wyoming Cowboys were playing pre-season basketball against Athletes in Action, the roving band of athletes playing competitively in the name of the Lord Almighty.  Apparently The Lord’s scouting department was far better than the University of Wyoming’s.  Halftime had AIA in front 43-27.

We put the fear of God in your squad.

What was that, Dad?

Ah, nuthin.  Thinking of a motto for the AIA.  What’s something is what’s brewing.  Know what I mean?

With you.

Out they came. A sonata in the seat.  Fragrant, dad’s ample odor brought the house down.  Mine lifted it back up.

Henry, did you buy one of those goddamn room fresheners?

Nope.

Dad took a big sniff.

Damned if I don’t smell oranges.  Rotten ones, or sort of rotten.  But oranges.  Yeah, that’s it.

It’s my science project.

Is it burning?  Smells like it’s burning.

Not really.  May need some work.

Jesus, Joseph, Mary and Moses!  Damn, Henry.  Let it go like that again, you’ll wake the sheep!

Sorry.

There’s that orangy-ish smell again.  Where is it?  I know you bought one.

Dad, it’s my science project.

Where?

Dad and I don’t have anything to hide.  If I want to talk to him about vaginas, I just out and said it.  He’s not one for vulgarity, so it’s matter-of-fact speaking, but there are no secrets.  I stood up, pulled my pants down, dug into the back of my shorts and pulled it out.

What in the sam hell…?

You got me going.

But…

Butt is right, Dad.  It’s a new invention for those inclined to have fatalistic flatuation.  It’s a butt mint.

A butt mint?

Yep.  Sits right next to your butt.

How?

With a special patent pending pocket panty.

Maybe I ought to send you to school.

Dad, listen.  I worked this out.  You see, you have someone make underwear, men’s and women’s, with a special pocket located just above the anus.  A fart, hot air, travels upward and catches the butt mint, producing a pleasant smell.

Dad laid back in his Lazy Boy, eyelids staring at the ceiling, kicking up the ottoman section.  Legs stretched, he let out an elongated crop duster, as if he was spraying nature’s pesticide on an alfalfa field size of a Ted Turner ranch.

You are mending fence tomorrow.

Fine, Dad.  But…

Butt.  How did you keep it…  I don’t really want to…

In my crevice.

Crev-ass?

I made a wedge-shaped mold designed to keep the mint in place.

Henry.  Henry.

It’s a surefire seller.

Henry… Jesus.

Sheep had to be up now.  If not for my continual gas explosion, for his laugh.  Chan’s laugh, when properly triggered, made Coyotes howl, Pronghorn leap.  Sufficiently triggered by A Butt Mint, tears were rolling.

Have you… Jesus, Henry… have you… have you thought of scents?  Oh God!

Off he went on another running chortle.  This was either going to make his night or kill him.

Orange Citrus you have been smelling, Cinnamon, umm… spearmint…

And tooty fruity?

Sheep were bleating.  Rams, smelling pheromones, began kicking at the abutment.  They wouldn’t be able to get through and if they did, no harm was to come of nature.  Dad wasn’t worried, so neither was I.  How could he be?  He was laughing so hard, he couldn’t possibly hear anything except his own wind-breaking.

Laugh any harder dad and you’ll derail a train.

Take the wedge down to the tracks and derail it yourself.  A butt mint.  Oh man!  Now that is sure one to sleep on.  Lordy!

Rays would beat any rooster, no different next morning.  This time of year, there was no slow build-up.  If Dad ever needed me to keep post, I would be up before dawn.  I swear some days if I closed my eyes for a second, it went from dark to bright.

I had decided to wedge the track.  It had to work.  No physics needed or wanted, the wedge sat on a rail, waiting patiently for my coal train.

The angle Mister Sun was sitting, a raven could mistake it for a shiny trinket, a ram could seemingly squash it like a pill bug, pheasant ran over it as if it was a hot quarter.  Trucks, semis mostly, would get it right off their chrome grills, boomeranging lasers right back toward the house.  Owls turned heads 180 avoiding temporary blindness.  Horses pawed dirt, tossing their manes over bulging eyes.  Antelope?  Pronghorn bounced along their path getting caught.

They kept bouncing, blindness be damned.  Not known for intelligence, Pronghorn Antelope had been easily killed by hunters since the Spanish left horses for Indians.  Curiosity.  Simple as that.  Indians would wave a colorful flag at them.  Eventually, curiosity got the best of them.  They had to inspect.  Now close range, one arrow was all it took.

The herd was quite large for the late stages of the 20th century.  27 in all, they sent scouts ahead to determine safe passage.  If they were true scouts they would have never received a merit badge for bravery.  Stupidity, maybe.

Both scouts slipped by me.  Can’t say why I didn’t see them, but deeper thinking later had logic stampeding over fantasy.  They hit the track a few seconds before the train, fifteen feet from the wedge.  My friend the engineer didn’t bother to honk.  You can’t when you’re half-asleep.  The train hit the scouts.  Mangled carcasses slid between the rails and the wheels.  Traction nonexistent on a single side, the engine turned out of the rail.  Coal cars, 73 of them, turned every which way.  Dad said later as he saw it on Cheyenne TV news from a bird-s eye view

Damn thing looks like a broken centipede, if in fact a centipede had a spine.  Which, as we know, it does not.

I was used to blood.  Not from lambs. Lambs, for my sake I guess, were sent to an organic slaughterhouse.  But adult sheep? I guess dad figured their lack of cuteness bode a better lesson in life, or not so shocking of one.  Can’t slaughter any animal without a lot of blood.  Sheep, fluffy as they were, seemed to bleed forever.

Goddamn.

The engineer’s assistant did not. Flipped off like a rookie on a high wire, he had rolled thirty feet or so from the track only to get ginsu’d in two by coal car number three as if he was a ripe hydroponic tomato.  Color drained from him faster than an ugly guy’s face on a first date with a beautiful woman and a missing wallet, as Dad would tell Cheyenne TV reporters.

The reporters?  They asked a lot of questions.  Guilt nearly consumed me, but Dad informed them, repeatedly, about the antelope.  Never said a word about his organic lamb.  Later he told me

Shouldn’t profit from someone else’s misery.

Not that it mattered.  We did anyway.  Reporters have a way of spreading the word without you doing much of anything.  Dad called it mindless blather to fill time and sell ads. A couple of them poked around a bit, talking up Dad and his strict adherence to organic feed.  Farm didn’t do more or get bigger, just rose lamb price-per-pound as restaurants far away as Omaha rose the demand.

Anyhow, I got to the engine faster than I have ever run only to slow to nearly nothing as Dad yelled at me not to touch anything and get the hell away from it.  Even on a cool morning, the heat was horrible.  I wanted to leave, but I saw him.  Throat torn off the front as if someone took a serrated knife and wedged it out like hollowing out a half a cantaloupe, he couldn’t speak.  Didn’t take a professional lip reader to figure out he was lipping

Help me.  Help me.

He couldn’t tell what had happened to him.  Couldn’t see one leg was neatly severed at the knee, the other torn out of the hip socket, both running with blood.  I wanted to run. I couldn’t.  He started choking, blood coming out of his ears and nose.

No insults.  Nothing disparaging uttered.  Guess that’s what you go through when dying.  I took a good look into his eyes before his light flickered off.

Elijah forgives you.