Black and White
by Bridget Weiss
T
hey did not speak the same lan-
guage. When Cook arrived at
Chuy’s ranch to work a hunting
lease, he approached her with the stiff
gait of the many-times broken cow-
hand whose age it was impossible to
guess. He had no real need to greet a
new hire, a white girl in Birkenstocks
who drove a Euro minivan. He
acknowledged her out of courtesy.
Cook doubted they would become
friends. But ranch headquarters were
40 miles off the paved road, and it
wasn’t hard to imagine that at some
point she would need his help whether
he liked her or not.
“He’s invaluable to me but not
everyone who comes here likes him,”
the ranch manager said. “You have to
get to know him. If you feed him, why
he’ll be like a jacket you can’t shrug out
of.” She walked back to the barn.
Cook unloaded.
The sun set with no moon to follow.
The darkness was a solid, tangible mass
that sealed the edges of visibility. Cook
carefully lifted her feet on the walk back
to her casita and wished for a flashlight.
The wind picked up force in the night,
and drove itself through cracks in the
windows with punitive insistence.
Cook pulled a pillow over her head to
deafen the monologue, and turned the
space heater to high. The wind died in
the early morning and she slept.
The first days on the job, Cook
didn’t want to patronize Chuy. She
offered him leftover cookies and tacos.
He seemed to be routinely walking by
the kitchen window when she was
working. Surely he smelled the food
cooking, and through the windows of
the bunkhouse saw the hunters eating
and drinking, and her alone cleaning
up after service. Chuy eschewed eggs,
cheese, and most vegetables, and would
not eat in the kitchen. She catalogued
what was left on his plate, and stopped
testing his parameters. He ate meat,
potatoes and tortillas, and nodded his
thanks. Cook felt less alone.
She began to leave small plates for
him on the kitchen windowsill, some-
times late at night to hope that he was
20
Cenizo
still awake too, that together they were
tired but almost done. Her need for
him grew quickly. In his absence she
formulated a friendship based solely
upon wishing. She thought of ways she
could show him that they were not so
dissimilar; surely they saw things the
same way, they were both at work.
Their casitas were 20 yards apart; he
would hear if she called in panic. His
presence even in the absence of accept-
ance herded her primitive fears into
quietude. Cook calmed her interpreta-
tion of the wind; it was only a force of
the world and had no drive to wreck
her. She walked the thousand yards
home in the impenetrable dark when
the hunters were fast asleep. She knew
the return path to the kitchen in the
early morning without the moon.
Chuy didn’t have to like her so long
as he was close by.
It was Cook’s position to not overly
engage the clients. Interactions subsist-
ed of warm but polite phrases. Thank
you, it is my pleasure. What may I
bring you? You are kind, I’m glad you
enjoyed it.
The hunters left for the day with
field lunches. Cook washed the break-
fast dishes. It would not be light out for
another hour. She put a plate of bacon
and potatoes on the windowsill in case
Chuy came by unseen in the dark.
The first season, Cook did not
understand hunting as a trophy sport -
tracking with the requisite of a guide to
gift the shot. The trophy bucks were in
rut and their muscle was shot through
with adrenaline, making them unpleas-
ant to eat.
The ranch manager stopped into
the kitchen. “Predator v. prey balance
is part of range management, and the
leases do bring a small profit. Some
deer have to be culled every season to
maintain a healthy herd. Every season
the balance is different depending on
rainfall and temperature extremes,”
she said.
Cook saw the guides return the
beheaded, skinned carcasses to the land,
a boon for predators and scavengers.
The ranch was vast, and the owners
Fourth Quarter 2015
intentionally declined the introduction
of telephone and internet service.
Their sanctuary, leased once a year to
hunters, was steeped ten thousand
years deep in unnamed lives. The
ranch manager taught Cook to look for
flakes of flint, chert and jasper shining
and backlit by the sun. They licked the
unmistakable flavor of the ash of old
hearths from their hands.
“Hurrah!” Cook shouted out loud
on her solo hikes home. She carried
bits of tool flake in her pockets to show
the ranch manager. Someone else had
done more with less. She was never
alone.
And so while the clients were not
curious about the food or about Cook,
she anthropomorphized the strata that
settle through centuries: eroded creek
beds showing one thousand years of
cooking sites built one upon each other,
or servers repeatedly providing food on
electric stoves. She was one in a line of
cooks and she would not be the last.
Limited interactions between Cook
and the hunters drove time free of
affection and normalcy. After a few
days, the hunters wanted to show Cook
pictures of their children and wives,
and to say who they were. When the
clock struck lonely, Cook was more
included in conversation. While it was
not what any of them really needed, it
should have bridged a gap rather than
defining the edges of isolation.
Together they grappled the gift of
severe topographical beauty. One by
one, they left out on the last mornings,
all of them by that time simply seeking
home.
Chuy and Cook employed minimal
social or artificial graces with one
another. Devoid of finesse, their rela-
tionship provided comfort to Cook.
There was sincerity in silence. And so
while he never spoke, she felt valued for
her kindnesses and willingness to take
him for who he was. He began to
occasionally pass through the kitchen.
Cook pulled a dining chair from the
breakfast table after the hunters left and
put it by the stove. Chuy accepted the
invitation but seemed diminished and
out of place. He watched her work.
When a hunter returned unexpectedly,
Cook looked at Chuy to see if he would
stay and visit but silently he departed
with the screen door slamming.
He knew his place. She remem-
bered hers. Then the kitchen echoed
the absence of one. Cook stirred the
carne guisada, and felt herself becom-
ing smaller and smaller as the ranch
grew and rose around her as if to erase
or swallow her whole. She wished he
would come back.
Cook imagined that Chuy did not
readily find joy on the ranch. Austerity
and the natural world seemed to criti-
cally define his character. She left the
kitchen early one morning to see him
with a stick chasing a tumbleweed
through the wind. The sun rose behind
him and lit his silhouette. His move-
ments appeared more like ritual dance
than careless play - this his private rela-
tionship with the elements and dead
grasses. He was agile, fast and many
years younger. In kind, the tumble-
weed hurtled through the air and
bounced off the dust. Chuy performed,
thinking he was alone. Cook went back
inside and closed the screen door care-
fully behind her. She was ashamed
that she had accidentally espied his
spirit. It had not been offered for her to
see.
December was cold. The bucks
were in rut, they were standing up and
easy for the guides to find for the
hunters to shoot. For three days the
high temperature hit 18 degrees and
the winds gusted to 45 miles an hour.
The water lines froze and had to be
repaired. It was difficult to stay warm
even in the kitchen, and the hunters
returned with chapped faces and stiff
hands. Cook expressed concern about
Chuy in his nineteenth-century adobe
casita with no heat. “He’s so accus-
tomed to it, don’t worry about him,”
the ranch manager said. “He doesn’t
even use the blankets I buy and leave
for him.”
The next morning most of the
hunters left early for home and Cook
had a few hours away before the next