Cutting

After I got out, I had trouble finding work, a lot of trouble.

I had this seven-year-wide hole in my resume that I couldn't talk about.  The more I couldn't talk about it, the more frustrated I got as opportunity after opportunity slipped away.  

I'd often as not get the interview only to get tripped up on the questions about my work history.  I knew they were coming.  I'd even practice possible responses, but anything I could come up with sounded like exactly what it was, an evasion.

I'd have been better off having them think I was an ex-con, but my pride kept getting in the way. 

It's a hard turn to make: going from being the sharp end of the sword to being something scraped off people's shoes.  I had so many skills and so much experience and I couldn't talk about any of it, much less show it.  If I tipped my mitt just a little, there would be the questions, followed by the silence, followed by the door.

Every so often, when I was working, I'd catch an episode of "The Fugitive" on the tube.  You know, the one about the doctor accused of killing his wife?  Every week, he'd be in a different town, dealing with a different life and trying to stay one step ahead of the law.  

It was entertaining at the time; it was my life later on.

In those first years after the cake, I moved a lot. I needed a job and I didn't want to have to talk too much.

For a time, I ended up on a ranch in Idaho.  I know, but there are no beaten paths anywhere in that state.

I had no business doing that kind of work, but I needed the check and they knew enough not to challenge me about whether I could ride a horse.  I was a gym rat, not a barn owl, but they didn't need to know that.

I was there for a whole season and, by the end, I would almost have called myself a rider.  Thanks to equal parts luck and timing, I was given enough time to convince my mount that I could be trusted and she took good care of me whenever my luck turned and my timing was off.

For a time, I was paired up with this guy--swear to God, his name was "Dusty"--and we worked a cutting crew.

It was our job to separate a cow from the herd and drive it off for whatever they needed.  Sometimes it was for shots, other times for branding and castration.

Dusty did the cutting.  

His horse, "Lefty," had uncanny cow sense.  It was like she knew what the cow was going to do before it did. The two of them would work a cow to the edge of the herd and then shear it off like a car taking a highway off-ramp.

It was my job to block the lines of retreat, stay in the cow's eyeline on the opposite side from where we wanted it to go.  With Dusty on its ass and me on its side, the cow couldn't help but go where we wanted it to go.

In the beginning, it was exhilarating:  like after the first time you work with C-4 and can still count to ten without taking off your shoes and socks.  The challenge for each of us--Dusty, Lefty, me, my horse and the cow--was to translate thought into action and to do it faster than the others.  It was a game.  Sometimes we'd win, sometimes the cow and, I hate to admit, sometimes I'd end up in the dirt having zigged while my horse zagged.

But we got better.  I got better.  And pretty soon, we were a real team.  We got to a point where could peel off cows like a Vegas dealer peels cards.

It was hard work: the kind that, by the end of the day, made your bed roll look like the Presidential Suite at the Ritz.  Equal parts mental and physical.

I didn't have any trouble with the physical, but the mental part of that work took its toll on me.  You think too much about the cattle you're cutting and what's going to happen to them and suddenly you can't do the job.  It becomes like trying to walk across the platform in a Tokyo train station without running into anyone:  not going to happen.

Cows are social creatures:  they eat together, sleep together and even run amok together.  You cut one out and suddenly the cow gets nervous, skittish, dangerous.

And what were we going to do to that already nervous cow?  Burn it, stick it, or cut its balls off.

It got so I was identifying more and more with the cows.  I would wake up some nights in a sweat.  I had one recurring nightmare where I would be running from Dusty and from some other person whose face I couldn't quite make out.  They were chasing me toward a group of guys who were standing around a campfire looking at me.

I know, sign me up for Doctor Phil.

And when I wasn't the one being cut, I would see faces from the past, from my work life.  Faces of people whose lives we had changed, ruined, ended.  All in the name of "truth, justice and the American way."

I got off the cutting crew.  I had to.  

I did manage to make it to the end of the season, like I said, but as part of the chuck wagon team.  

Turns out, everyone liked my coffee.  I didn't think it was that good, but they all raved about it--the whole crew. Nothing to it really:  boil water, insert beans, serve when ready.  

So easy to do, I could make it with one hand tied behind my back.