American Masculine Read Free Page B

didn’t look away.
    Her sincerity broke him. His voice failed. She stared at him.
    “I’m not with someone else,” he said.
    IN MONTANA on the high steppe below the great mountains the birds called raptors fly long and far, and with their translucent predatory eyes they see for miles. The Blackfeet called it the backbone of the world. Once he watched two golden eagles sweeping from the pinnacled heights, the great stone towers. He was three hours from Billings, west past Bozeman. The day was crisp, the sky free of clouds, the sun solitary and white at the zenith. Hunting whitetail he sat on his heels, his rifle slung across his back as he glassed the edge of coulees and the brush that lined the fields. He used the binoculars with focused precision, looking for the crowns of bucks that would be lying down, hiding. But it was up high to his right, along the granite ridge of the nearest mountain, where he’d seen movement.
    He recognized the birds and set the glasses on them and saw distinctly their upward arc far above the ridgeline. He followed them as they reached an impossibly high apex where they turned and drew near each other and with a quick strike locked talons and fell. The mystery, he thought, simple as that, the bright majesty of all things. They gripped one another and whirled downward, cumbersome and powerful and elegant. He followed them all the way down and at last the ground came near and they broke and seemed suddenly to open themselves and catch the wind again and lift. Their wings cleaved the air as they climbed steadily until at last they opened wide and caught the warm thermals that sent them with great speed arcing above the mountain. There they dipped for a moment, then rose again on vigorous wingbeats all the way to the top of the sky where they met one another and held each other fiercely and started all over, falling and falling.

—for Charlie Calf Robe, Honey Davis, and James Welch

THE GREAT DIVIDE
    The train moves west on the Hi-Line outside Browning, tight-bound in an upward arc along the sidewall of tremendous mountains, the movement of metal and muscle working above the treeline, chugging out black smoke. Smoke, black first against the grayish rock, the granite face of the mountain, then higher and farther back black into the keen blue of sky without clouds.
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    THE BOY five years old and big, bull child his father calls him, and bulls he rides, starting at six on the gray old man his father owns, then at nine years and ten in the open fields of neighboring ranches. He enters his first real rodeo at thirteen in Glasgow and on from there, three broken fingers, a broken ankle, broken clavicle, and a cracked wrist bone. Otherwise unharmed, he knows the taste of blood, fights men twice his age while going to bars with his father. When he loses, his father grows quiet, cusses him when they get home, beats him. When he wins, his father praises him.
    Work, his father says, because you ain’t getting nothing. People are takers. As well shoot you as look at you.
    At school he has high marks. He desires to please his mother.
    Home, he smells the gun cleaning, the oil, the parts in neat rows on the kitchen table. The table is long and rectangular, of rough-hewn wood she drapes in white cloth. He sees the elongated pipe cleaner, the blackened rags, the sheen of rifle barrel, the worn wood of stock. He hears the word
Winchester
and the way his father speaks it, feels his father’s look downturned, his father’s eyes shadowed, submerged in the bones, the flesh of the face. The family inhabits a one-room ranch house, mother, father, son. There is a plankwood floor, an eating space, a bed space, cook stove. A small slant-roofed barn stands east of the house where the livestock gather in the cold. Mother is in bed saying, Don’t make a mess. The boy’s father, meticulous at the table, says, Quiet woman. Outside, the flat of the high plains arcs toward Canada. To the south the wild wind blows snow from