Close Range: Brokeback Mountain and other stories. Annie Proulx
Читать онлайн.| Название | Close Range: Brokeback Mountain and other stories |
|---|---|
| Автор произведения | Annie Proulx |
| Жанр | Вестерны |
| Серия | |
| Издательство | Вестерны |
| Год выпуска | 0 |
| isbn | 9780007368815 |
ANNIE PROULX
Close Range:Brokeback Mountain and Other Stories
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF
This edition published 2010
First published in Great Britain as Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Fourth Estate in 1999
Copyright © Dead Line, Ltd. 1999
‘Brokeback Mountain’, ‘The Mud Below’, ‘The Blood Bay’ and ‘The Bunchgrass Edge of the World’ originally appeared in The New Yorker; ‘The Half-Skinned Steer’ appeared in The Atlantic; ‘People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water’ appeared in GQ.
Annie Proulx asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © MAY 2012 ISBN 9780007368815
Version 2016-06-13
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These stories are for my children
Muffy
Jon
Gillis
Morgan
“Reality’s never been of much use out here.”
—Retired Wyoming rancher
Contents
People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water
The Bunchgrass Edge of the World
IN THE LONG UNFURLING OF HIS LIFE, FROM TIGHT-wound kid hustler in a wool suit riding the train out of Cheyenne to geriatric limper in this spooled-out year, Mero had kicked down thoughts of the place where he began, a so-called ranch on strange ground at the south hinge of the Big Horns. He’d got himself out of there in 1936, had gone to a war and come back, married and married again (and again), made money in boilers and air-duct cleaning and smart investments, retired, got into local politics and out again without scandal, never circled back to see the old man and Rollo bankrupt and ruined because he knew they were.
They called it a ranch and it had been, but one day the old man said it was impossible to run cows in such tough country where they fell off cliffs, disappeared into sinkholes, gave up large numbers of calves to marauding lions, where hay couldn’t grow but leafy spurge and Canada thistle throve, and the wind packed enough sand to scour windshields opaque. The old man wangled a job delivering mail, but looked guilty fumbling bills into his neighbors’ mailboxes.
Mero and Rollo saw the mail route as a defection from the work of the ranch, work that fell on them. The breeding herd was down to eighty-two and a cow wasn’t worth more than fifteen dollars, but