Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West by Bryce Andrews Read Free Book Online

borrowed a frayed Carhartt from Jeremy. The canvas was almost worn out, and in some places had rubbed away to reveal insulation, but I wore it every morning until summer got going.
    I had no rope, so James dug out an old lariat and showed me how to coil and throw it. Jeremy pulled a saddle from the dusty innards of the barn, bought a new cinch for it, and helped me adjust the stirrups to the length of my legs. I found a pair of chaps that almost fit me in a corner of the tack room and begged a crumpled straw hat off my dad when he stopped by to visit and fish the Madison. Even with a ream of paper stuffed in the brim, that hat refused to stay with me on a loping horse. When I looked in the mirror, the overall effect was less than impressive.
    I made $1,650 a month at the Sun Ranch and spent most of it on food, drink, and gear. In short order I returned James’s old twelve gauge and bought myself a pump-action. I replaced the ill-fitting chaps with a pair of custom chinks from the leather shop on the edge of Ennis, switched from Levi’s 501s to Wranglers, bought a palm-leaf hat with a leather band, and came home from a weekend trip to Sheridan, Wyoming, carrying a thirty-five-foot lariat with a left-handed twist. The transformation was slow and subtle enough to go unnoticed until one day I rode my horse past a window and saw a cowboy reflected.
    I made a remark to that effect the next time I saw Jeremy, and he grimaced.
    “I don’t like the word cowboy, except as a verb,” he said. I wished I hadn’t mentioned it.

    I drove into Ennis on a Saturday night for dinner and ended up drinking at the Silver Dollar, a knock-around place with elk racks on the walls, video poker machines in the corner, and a handful of regulars getting serious at the bar. I ordered a Pendleton whiskey and sat close enough to listen.
    At first, the conversation revolved around the arrival of the year’s first big batch of tourists. Spring was thawing into summer, and fly fishermen across the world knew it. Each morning brought a new wave of them through town, and their vehicles dotted the twists and turns of the Madison. From the hills above, those cars looked like beer cans strewn along the river.
    From time to time I caught snatches of more interesting conversation. Down at the far end of the line of drinkers, a thick, spectacled man in a grubby black Stetson was holding forth to a handful of listeners. I strained to hear him over the low din of other talk. The man, I gathered, was a longtime resident of Virginia City, a defunct mining town just over the pass from Ennis, near the Ruby River.
    “Guy named Bud Otis,” the man began, “his daddy built VC up in the thirties. I shot his dog. Woke up to the sound of sheep crashing into the walls of my house, grabbed my rifle, and wounded the goddamn thing. It went up to Bud’s and died.”
    One of the man’s listeners mumbled something, but I couldn’t catch it.
    “ ’Course I went to see him,” the Stetson guy replied. “I wasn’t no chickenshit. I went and he challenged me to a knife fight. Butcher knives, he said. Bud was in a wheelchair and I declined to fight him. Later, he was waiting for me outside the Bale of Hay with a pistol. Wanted to shoot me. I jumped behind an ore car and got to yelling: ‘Bud, you couldn’t hit shit, you son of a bitch!’ Best part of it is I was right in front of my mother-in-law’s place. She was some kind of witch—a real bitch, I mean. I kept hollering for Bud to shoot, hoping he’d break one of her windows and she’d be on him like stink on shit, but finally Jim came out and told Bud to put his gun away and go home.”
    I sipped my drink, trying to decide how much of what I heard was bull, until one of the two guys nearest to me, a nail keg of a man, leaned in toward the other, dropped his voice, and asked:
    “What did you see up Squaw Creek?”
    The questioner’s close-cropped gray hair was tucked into a baseball cap with a flame paint job on