it's just something we do now and then

1.

His brother Jimmy was coming home for the summer, and so Lloyd turned his thoughts to the ripening of rose hips. He figured Jimmy would last until right about the time they turned red. That was how long he expected have to put up with things. It wasn’t a prediction, it was a plan.

Jimmy’d be fresh from dropping out of something or other, looking to find the next thing to not finish. Lloyd loved the summer, the hours of chasing cows in the high country and fixing fence, going sun up to sun down. He liked to do this, the same thing every year. His brother made him agitated. Before long he would probably stop coming back around. Lloyd felt settled in at twenty-five, and that suited him okay.

He’d had his own wild years. They consisted mostly of going to football keggers and, on occasion, up to the treeplanter parties at the old Bruce place. It was fine for awhile, puffing on a joint at the edge of the campfire or sucking on a Silo cup of warm beer. Especially when the hippy girls or the cheerleaders came out, but not the young ones. It wasn’t like that.

The afternoon Lloyd graduated from Baker High School, the wind whipped around a purple banner with a motto stitched in gold that he preferred to forget. He sat through the ceremony, got his piece of paper, flipped the tassel thingy around, and felt no different. All of that supposed work to get this thing that everyone knew was worthless? He felt scammed and went back to the ranch more or less for good. 

His brother graduated two years later, chased the empty promise as far up the food chain as he could. Dropping in and out of one college or another, confident that if he could find the right way into the water, he could slip into stream that guided his friends along. Eventually, he forgot where he was trying to go but kept looking for new ways to get there. Guiding kayak trips for a broke outfitter, canvasing for critters, building rickety furniture out of shipping pallets. Lloyd paid no attention anymore when his mother called to tell him about it. Jimmy talked of these things in terms of what they might become if he worked the right angle, turned the right corner. But he gave up quickly.

Lloyd watched for the rose hips to start swelling. So he could grudge them the days it took to widen and darken in color. He knew this was sarcastic, but it gave him a chuckle. 

And then, there was a white plastic tent in the lower meadow. It had a plexiglass eye at the apex of the roof and it looked like a giant white pimple grown next to a perfectly serviceable old board and batten cabin.

2.

It was mostly just Lloyd and the ranch manager, a few hired Mexican hands, around the main house in the summer since his parents had moved closer to town. The morning after the plastic yurt appeared, Lloyd decided to go to Baker for groceries. He would offer to pick up some things for his brother. He drove down through the lower gate, over the creek and pulled in beside his brother’s Toyota. No one answered his greeting, but a few seconds later, two dazed faces poked through the door flap. 

His brother, still loose-limbed and ranch strong, and a skinny blonde woman with the ashram look. Jimmy broke into a smile, gave his brother a hug, and without saying a word, bent to his knee and flung his arms out at his companion like a carnival barker. He pulled a pad of paper and a pen from his baggy pockets and wrote: Heather. They all nodded and smiled like tourists with no common tongue.

His brother went back to the pen and paper and wrote: We’re being silent today. It’s just something we do now and then. It looked frustrating, writing that all out. It looked like Jimmy had a new tattoo. When he held the pad up, both he and Heather shrugged. 

Lloyd poked his head through the flap, a doorway for which they had no door, and cast his eyes around. A jumble of sleeping mattresses and rolls of bubblex insulation. The smell of the PVC off-gassing from the yurt walls stung his eyes. It would be like living in a fort made of new bath mats, twenty four seven.

He forgot to ask about groceries, and his brother mouthed the words tomorrow or the next day and pointed up to the ranch house. Lloyd waved as he backed out. The image stayed in his mind, the two of them there on the porch, his brother waving back with his note pad and Heather bowing to the waist, the cottonwoods and birches budding out behind them. 

3.

Heather got a seasonal job with the Forest Service, and Jimmy did things. At first these things might include changing the tire on the four wheeler or clearing the dead row poplar for firewood. But soon he did these things out of sight or off the ranch. Eventually he came up with a job maintaining HVAC systems that kept him on the road, in a company car, all over the northwest. 

By the time the rose hips were good and well formed, it was often mostly he and Heather at the ranch. Not that he saw her much, it was what he heard of her. Anne Whitcomb from the Forest Service said that Heather had, upon arrival in the office, informed most of the men, all of the men really, that she “did not believe in monogamy”. It should be said that she was easy on the eyes, strong and willowy and new to the dusty, windy world of the Baker valley. The men, said his informant, had lined up.

There were other things, but that was the gist of it and he figured the other stories just embroidered on the main thing. He figured Anne Whitcomb might have her own boyfriend in the mix and could possibly have added yeast to the starter. He felt a little proud, really, to be living out at the source of the river of gossip running through town. But didn’t really believe the story, because he told himself surely she would have visited her policy upon Lloyd himself.

Heather did have this policy, though, about honesty. He could see that and didn’t care for it. This included saying strange, blank things at any time whatsoever. Little honesties that ought really not be spoken of. One time, drinking some greenish tea and sitting on the floor of the yurt, she told Lloyd, “You know, Jimmy doesn’t like you either.” Or she would say, “I have to fart.”, before doing the deed, usually with gusto. It made Lloyd go a little red in the face and find an excuse to be moving on. It just made no sense to waste people’s attention with such things. 

They fell into a rhythm of the comings and going of vehicles, half-hearted porch waves, a cup of pond scum tea every few days, when Jimmy was on the road. Lloyd kind of forgot about the smiling woman giving him a mock salute as she sped up the driveway in Jimmy’s truck, on the way to work. But he kept an ear out for the more mysterious, can-you-believe-she-did-that woman who lived in town behind a desk. That woman was possibly the same as the one who lived in the plastic tent, he couldn’t be sure. Didn’t want to be. 

4.

A warm August evening, the wind starting to die down, Jimmy and Heather stopped at the mailbox in separate vehicles. She asks him, as he is looking over the new catalogs, whether he might cook her a steak. “Is that,” he asks, “a trick question?”

“I eat meat. When it’s local. I could really go for a big barely cooked steak right now.” Lloyd ponders this, whether there is some hidden meaning to it. But Heather just looks at him, suppressing a friendly giggle. “I know, shocking, right? But I need a fix.”

The next day, Lloyd thaws two steaks. He can’t be sure they have come from his family’s cows save for the purple ink stamp on the white freezer paper. Milton’s Mobile Butchery. Milton the meat guy, his bloody apron and comb-over hair blowing in the wind, that’s what he thinks of when he thinks of steak. He wonders if that makes it local. 

“My job’s going to be cut early.” says Heather. “Gotta celebrate that.” She opens a beer from the six pack she has brought. Lloyd doesn’t really believe in hops, but he sips his and celebrates too. No more Jimmy and Heather. But really, his brother is gone already. It is going to happen before the rose hips are ready to pick.

The air sizzles and pops with the steaks frying on the old stove, the smell of it through the house. “So what now,” Lloyd asks, “you and Jimmy?” His brother hasn’t even stuck around long enough to become a ghost when he leaves this time.

Heather waves her hand at Jimmy’s name. “He’s going to Alaska. He wants to go climbing. Me, I don’t know yet.” She rubs her eyes. “But I think I want to stay around here.”

Lloyd is surprised and not. He puts the steaks out and Heather makes a salad of greens and little round tomatoes. She attacks her steak, holding her fork down like a kid and sawing at it with her knife. Lloyd likes watching her work. Then she gets up, in obvious distress, and walks around the kitchen. “It’s nothing,” she says, “I just have a bladder infection and I can’t sit still for long. From all the sex I’ve been having.” 

A lump forms in Lloyd’s throat. He isn’t sure what he is hearing. It doesn’t sound like a proposition, but maybe it is, beneath a ruse. He fumbles for words, but she is doing some sort of stretch, knees bent and one arm thrust forward like a fencer, back toward him. Not a proposition. 

She sits back down and recommences to sawing on her steak. “This is so good. This is just what I needed,” she says. 

4.

Jimmy went to Alaska and almost climbed Mt. Chamberlin, up in the Brooks Range. But he couldn’t raise enough money for the bush flight. And then he got a job in Fairbanks.

Heather and her cousin bought a property higher up toward Eagle Creek, in the woods with the summer people. They moved the plastic pimple and the gossip up there with them. They were good neighbors, really, and they mashed the rose hips he picked into jam. He liked them fine, but not like that.