Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3. Annie Proulx

find combined features of the world’s worst air terminals, Hongqiao in Shanghai the ideal, complete with petty officials, sadomasochistic staffers, consecutive security checks of increasing harshness, rapidly fluctuating gate changes and departure times and, finally, a twenty-seven-hour trip in an antiquated and overcrowded bucket flying through typhoons while rivets popped against the fuselage.

      On the climb up to Dis the Devil had noticed a cluster of scorched bowlegged men lollygagging near a boiling water hole. This area was posted as a reserve for Italian Renaissance politicians. Trespassing was forbidden.

      “I’ll be damned,” he said. “That’s Butch Cassidy and some of his old gang. Cheeky bastards. Let’s plan something good for all the old rustlers and cowboys who have made it over the winding trail. I think we’ll give them a taste of their own medicine. Let’s get the Four Horsemen and some of our assistant imp riders and start herding those cowboys into bunches, cutting them out and moving them into pens. We’ll rope and throw them, castrate, vaccinate and brand them with my big Pitchfork iron. Oh, there’ll be plenty of dust and bawling and pleas. They’ll try to break away. They will screech and gibber. In the end we’ll turn them in to a sand pasture full of cheatgrass, goat-heads, cockleburs and ticks. They can ride the bicycles discarded by the tour racers and listen to Slim Whitman doing ‘Indian Love Call’ over the loudspeaker.”

      “Ranchers, too?” asked Duane Fork.

      “Nah. Nothing here would bother them.” He thought a moment and then said, “Wait! Better yet, give the ranchers herds of irritable minotaurs. And headstrong centaurs for mounts. Which reminds me, order one roasted for my dinner.”

      “Which, minotaur, centaur or ranchaur?”

      “Whatever’s easiest. Medium rare.”

      As they drew abreast of the loungers the Devil called, “Hey, Butch, fucked any mules lately? Ha ha ha ha. Shake that wooden leg.”

      Annoyed by the polyglot babbling of Dis, the Devil decided to standardize. “I think we’ll make the Khoisan language of the Bushmen the official language of Hell,” he said in a fluent stipple of dental, palatal, alveolar, lateral and bilabial clicks. Duane Fork whooshed agreement.

      “Your accent is getting better, Duane, but it is still not crisp enough.” The Devil looked around at the mud and black trona-water fountains. “I don’t see any nettles or leafy spurge or mille-foil or crabgrass or water hyacinth. Let’s get a few of those USDA hacks to work—get some devil’s club in here.”

      The Devil’s thoughts kept turning back to bicycle racers and he called the guard tower and ordered all the Junior Satan Scouts who patrolled the approach to the city to helpfully point racers toward projecting street furniture, pylons, potholes and drop-offs. Now that he was tuned in to something he was mentally calling “Sports of Hell,” the ideas flew like lekking mayflies. Duane Fork’s pencil ripped across the pages, skidding at the end of each line. Soccer alone sprouted eleven hundred improvements, and from soccer it was an easy leap to cricket and caber tossing and on to special arrangements for rental chefs, insecticide manufacturers, world leaders, snowplow drivers.

      “Construction workers!” the Devil shouted. “Their hard hats will melt, their scaffolds collapse unceasingly. Ice cream truck vendors? A hot coal in each scoop of vanilla. Goat turds in the chocolate—I’ll make them myself.” He seized two fire cones from the roadside dispenser for refreshment. Then a glimpse of roasting moneylenders in the distance made him think of banks and loans, bills and taxes.

      “Canada Revenue! We’ll let them play hockey, their national sport, down on Circle Nine’s ice.”

      “Wouldn’t the IRS be better? More infamous?”

      “Duane, the IRS is a babe in the woods compared to Canada Revenue. There is no agency on earth as contumacious, bureaucratized, power-obsessed, backhanded, gouging, red-taped, cavernous and carnivorous as Canada Revenue.”

      “But if hockey is their national sport, won’t they take pleasure in playing it?”

      “I think not. The blades will be inside the skates. And those blades will be warm.”

      But the idea of a tenth circle haunted him. He might do it. It would have to be something utterly unexpected, a stunning surprise, a coup. As he steered the golf cart it came to him—an art museum. Not just a collection of works earthly museum directors wished to consign to Hell but depictions of himself through the millennia in every guise from monstrous yellow-eyed goats to satin-winged bats, the fabulous compartments of the Nether Regions and, of course, a catalog of human vices and evils, of plummeting sinners.

      His ideas tumbled out. In one of the museum’s galleries he would set up the Musical Inferno which Hieronymus Bosch had painted so cleverly. He would have all of Goya’s witches and his stinking hordes, toothless, pierced, howling, wracked and terrified. He would have every piece of Satanic art even though many showed him as humbled by upward-gazing saints; he always had the last laugh there. Venusti showed a fatuous Saint Bernard holding him chained, but a moment later the chain had melted. The painter had not dared to show that. Michael Pacher had given him a fabulous frog-green skin, but the deer antlers and the buttocks-face were overdone. Gerard David’s portrait was finer. A special room for Gustave Doré, whose inventiveness he cherished. Very pleasant as well were the many harvest pictures where he tossed damned souls into his fireproof gunnysack. He would crowd the museum with all the Last Judgments, the damned dropping into the inferno like ripe figs from a tree. Signorelli—he couldn’t understand how Signorelli had known to give his demons green and grey and violet skins—a lucky guess perhaps. And surely one of Signorelli’s demons was Duane Fork biting at a man’s head? He might ask the painter— if he could find him. They had to start compiling a database of the damned and their particular niches; it was impossible to find anyone in Hell.

      Still on the idea of the art museum, he planned a solitary room with no other paintings where he thought he would hang William Blake’s Satan Instigating the Rebel Angels, which showed him as the most beautiful angel of all, more handsome than any Greek god, before the rebellion failed and he was cast down and out. But thinking of that time made him morose and he decided to eschew the Blake; he’d have Rubens instead and Tiepolo. As he made his mental list of the paintings and sculptures he intended to gather, he realized what a terrific labor it would be to pry them away from the Prado, the Duomo, the Louvre, the Beaux-Arts, various art institutes and bibliothèques, private collections and monasteries, cathedrals and churches. The plan abruptly crashed. Well, well, there was the rub; he was not going into any monasteries or churches. And there the renovation plans stopped. His one-track mind could not get past the monasteries, cathedrals and churches.

      He ought to have plucked some professional art thieves from their fiery labors and sent them up to do the job, but the story says nothing about that.

       Them Old Cowboy Songs

      There is a belief that pioneers came into the country, homesteaded, lived tough, raised a shoeless brood and founded ranch dynasties. Some did. But many more had short runs and were quickly forgotten.

      ARCHIE & ROSE, 1885

      Archie and Rose McLaverty staked out a homestead where the Little Weed comes rattling down from the Sierra Madre, water named not for miniature and obnoxious flora but for P.H. Weed, a gold seeker who had starved near its source. Archie had a face as smooth as a skinned aspen, his lips barely incised on the surface as though scratched in with a knife. All his natural decoration was in his red cheeks and the springy waves of auburn hair that seemed charged with voltage. He usually lied about his age to anyone who asked—he was not twenty-one but sixteen. The first summer they lived in a tent while Archie worked on a small cabin. It took him a month of rounding up stray cows for Bunk Peck before he could afford two glass windows. The cabin was snug, built with eight-foot squared-off logs tenoned on the ends and dropped into mortised uprights, a size Archie could handle