Love/Imperfect

Last Frontier

Last Frontier Standing by the sink at the window, Gogan could see the truck winding the last mile over the plain. It came slowly, raising little dust, finally gathering speed to make the hill. Watching it, so lonely and small in the bright spring morning, it was odd to think that beyond the next rise and the groves of the next shallow valley was the freeway and, a mile farther, the tattered edges of the city. One day, Gogan knew as he stood there, rinsing his breakfast dishes, his uncle’s truck would appear in the distance, and then behind it there would be a house, then another and another. His uncle would rev the motor and fly down the curving road, but the houses would tumble after him, and the truck would disappear behind a laundromat and a Taco Bell. The wave would roll up the hill unspent, crash past the trailer, knock Gogan to the ground. . . . And when he stood again, in all directions there would be nothing but houses and people and stores. There would be no mustard bloom- 138 · christopher t. leland ing nor roadrunners, no poppies or coyotes, and the sun would shine pink from smog. Wiping his hands as he stepped outdoors, Gogan heard the engine on the grade. He squinted in the sunlight. His head ached. The night before had lasted too late, with Toby and Willis there to play cards. The truck pulled up, and his uncle clambered out. In the back was a bale of barbed wire and a bundle of fence posts. Gogan nodded. “Where’s the break?” “Big one ’bout halfway to Toby’s.” His uncle scuffed the gravel. “‘nother where lightning struck Tuesday and down by the pond. Lookee here.” He reached into the cab, past the gun rack, and pulled out a mud-caked shirt. “We got hippies again.” Gogan laughed. “How many times I got to tell you? Ain’t no such thing as hippies no more.” “Hippies. Punks. Assholes. I don’t know what you call ’em. Little turds get so socked smokin’ or snortin’ or whatever they do, they can’t even put their goddamn clothes on. One of these days, Gogan, I’m gonna get me one of ’em.” He walked to the incinerator and shoved the shirt inside. “All the trash from the house out?” He lit the papers in a half-dozen places, stepping back as the pile flared. The muddy shirt melted in the flames. “Go get the hatchet and a couple hammers. We gotta get fencin’.” Gogan opened the screen. “Hey, Gogan . . .” His uncle’s words turned him around to face the smile. “How you feelin’?” “Not bad, Uncle Buck.” Gogan grinned despite the hangover. “Not bad at all.”° ° ° Buck McMurtry stood six-foot three in his stocking feet and spoke last frontier · 139 with something between a twang and a drawl. He came from Oklahoma . His father was a purebred hillbilly out of West Virginia; his mother, a homesick Cajun. From him, Buck inherited a taste for liquor, a difficulty with words, an abiding belief in violence, and a Pentacostal faith made of equal parts ecstasy and shame. To the tiny, wide-eyed woman who had borne him, he claimed he owed only one thing: his real name, Antoine, which only three or four people knew to call him by the time he reached eighteen. He left home one Christmas after an ugly row with his father, thumbing down 66 with two shirts and an extra pair of jeans, all the way to California. A stint at city life left him lonely and more than a little scared, so he drifted—sometime ditchdigger, orange-picker, roughneck, and cowboy—until he found a job as a ranch hand and caretaker for the Merritt family. They hired him, assigned him, and forgot him, as over the years their interests moved from cattle and goats and horses to the contracts and board meetings that gradually transformed much of the ranch to cash, to subdivisions and shopping centers, and then to bonds and stocks and commodity futures. After his wife left him, for reasons he never discussed, Buck lived alone. Then he received a letter from Dallas, from a sister who asked that he take her child of a love now also dead, and so Gogan on Greyhound came to live with his Uncle Buck. At first, it was...