The Legend of Colton H Bryant

  Praise for The Legend of Colton H. Bryant

  ‘If you ever doubted that there are still heroic, big-hearted men in the world, look no further than Colton H. Bryant’ The Times

  ‘With the force of an emotional novel, this dramatised biography is a polemic against the energy industry’s spoilation of the high plains of Wyoming and the dangerous exploitation of the men who drill there for oil and gas…Having got to know Colton so well in this colourfully written case history, the reader will deplore any industrial attempt to dismiss him as a mere statistic’ The Spectator

  ‘I found this book in some ways hard to read, because I had a lump in my throat almost the entire way through. It is very effectively written and it reminds me, in terms of the polemic, of Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn, which is a polemic against slavery but it doesn’t ever say that up front: it tells the story of someone with whom you feel such intense sympathy’ Start the Week, Phillip Bobbit, author of Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century

  ‘The life story of this soulful, blue-eyed boy with a gentle heart inspired this moving, poignant tale that explores big themes such as hardship, friendship, prejudice and the sad lot of the misfit. If you fancy a change from your usual holiday reads, this will lend some much-needed colour’ Glamour

  ‘The Legend of Colton H. Bryant tells of the life and death of Colton, a sweet-natured kid from Wyoming whose inherent goodness overcomes the withering taunts thrown at him because of his learning difficulties. He lives a short, kind life, and dies a preventable death on one of the oil rigs that are disfiguring Wyoming’s pristine wilderness. It reads like a brilliant novel but it’s all true’ Herald

  ‘This modern Western is a true story…But The Legend of Colton H. Bryant must be read as fiction. The pain of this story–and especially of its beautifully executed ending–is best told as a traditional Western, where it and its landscape can be given some sort of reassuring order’ Times Literary Supplement

  ‘Fuller makes us feel as if at first hand the fragility of bodies pitched against Wyoming’s fearful winters and the hellish drills and derricks of the oil fields’ Evening Standard

  ‘Through long interviews with Colton’s family and friends, Fuller has created a version of his life. It’s tough but lyrical, personal but anthropological, in the tradition of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood’ Daily Telegraph

  ‘Alexandra Fuller’s wonderful biography The Legend of Colton H. Bryant tells how Colton started work as a drill on a rig, despite his young wife begging him to quit–but all the big heart in the world can’t save him from the new unkind greed that has possessed Wyoming during this latest mineral boom…A poignant tribute to one of the world’s good people’ Belfast Telegraph

  ALSO BY ALEXANDRA FULLER

  Scribbling the Cat:

  Travels with an African Soldier

  Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight:

  An African Childhood

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2008

  This edition first published by Pocket Books, 2009

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © 2008 by Alexandra Fuller

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Alexandra Fuller to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  1st Floor

  222 Gray’s Inn Road

  London WC1X 8HB

  www.simonsays.co.uk

  Simon & Schuster Australia

  Sydney

  Excerpt from “Feed Jake” by Danny Bear Mayo. © 1990 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, Tennessee 37203.

  All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  A CIP catalogue for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84739-869-7

  ISBN-10: 1-84739-869-3

  For Dakota and Nathanial

  Because of C.H.B.

  From Justice to Forgiveness

  Feed Jake

  I’m standing at the crossroads in life, and I don’t know where to go.

  You know you’ve got my heart babe, but my music’s got my soul.

  Let me play it one more time, I’ll tell the truth and make it rhyme,

  And hope they understand me.

  Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

  If I die before I wake, feed Jake, he’s been a good dog,

  My best friend right through it all, if I die before I wake,

  Feed Jake.

  Now Broadway’s like a sewer, bums and hookers everywhere.

  Winos passed out on the sidewalk, doesn’t anybody care?

  Some say he’s worthless, just let him be.

  But I for one would have to disagree.

  And so would his mama.

  Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

  If I die before I wake, feed Jake, he’s been a good dog,

  My best friend right through it all, if I die before I wake,

  Feed Jake.

  If you get an ear pierced, some will call you gay.

  But if you drive a pickup, they’ll say “No, he must be straight.”

  What we are and what we ain’t, what we can and what we can’t,

  Does it really matter?

  Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

  If I die before I wake, feed Jake, he’s been a good dog,

  My best friend right through it all, if I die before I wake,

  Feed Jake.

  If I die before I wake, feed Jake.

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  1. A WESTERN

  2. COLTON AND THE KMART COWBOYS

  Evanston, Wyoming

  3. PRESTON AND COLTON, HUNTING

  4. BILL’S PHILOSOPHY OF HORSE BREAKING

  Evanston, Wyoming

  5. BILL AND COLTON

  Evanston, Wyoming

  6. IN THE BEGINNING

  Wyoming and the West

  7. CATTLE DRIVE

  Near Evanston

  8. GOOSE HUNTING WITH JAKE, COLTON, AND CODY

  Near Evanston

  9. JAKE

  Utah

  10. JAKE

  Evanston, Wyoming

  11. JAKE AND COLTON

  Evanston, Wyoming

  12. RUNNING FREE

  Near Evanston

  13. BILL’S PHILOSOPHY OF HUNTING

  14. LOOKING FOR COCOA

  15. FIREWOOD

  16. COCOA

  June

  17. GRADUATION

  18. BULL RIDING

  All Over the West

  19. PARADISE ROAD

  Upper Green River Valley

  20. DRILLING ON THE RIGS

  Utah

  21. ANATOMY OF AN OIL PATCH

  Upper Green River Valley

  22. FLOW TESTING

  Upper Green River Valley

  23. THE ASTRO LOUNGE

  Rock Springs

  24. TRAIN STOPPING

  25. COLTON AND CHASE

  Winter

  26. KAYLEE’S PHILOSOPHY OF DRUGS

  27. FIREWORKS

  Evanston, Wyoming

  28. DRIVING ALL DAY

  Wyoming/Utah/Arizona

  29. PATTERSON-UTI DRILLING

  Upper Green River Valley

  30. DRIVING ALL DAY AND NIGHT

 
; Wyoming/Utah/Arizona

  31. MARRIED

  Evanston, Wyoming

  32. DRILLING

  33. THANKSGIVING

  Evanston/Rawlins

  34. A SERIOUS LIFE

  35. MARRIAGE AND ROUGHNECKING

  Evanston, Wyoming

  36. THE DEATH OF LEROY FRIED

  Upper Green River Valley

  37. DAKOTA JUSTUS BRYANT

  38. COLTON QUITS

  39. COLTON WORKS IN EVANSTON

  40. MINUS THIRTY-FIVE

  PART TWO

  41. THE DAY BEFORE VALENTINE’S DAY

  Evanston, Wyoming

  42. CUMBERLAND CEMETERY

  43. VALENTINE’S EVENING

  Jake and Tonya

  44. FREE FALL

  45. JAKE DRIVING ALL DAY

  46. PATTERSON-UTI DRILLING

  47.

  TOUGH ANGEL

  48. RAINBOW

  Upper Green River Valley

  49. A MILLION-DOLLAR PERSONALITY

  50. EVANSTON CEMETERY

  Evanston, Wyoming

  51. COLT

  52. JAKE AND COLTON

  Afterwards

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Colton H. Bryant—Wyoming boy

  Melissa—Colton’s wife

  Nathanial—Melissa and Colton’s son

  Dakota Justus—Melissa and Colton’s son

  William Justus Bryant (Bill)—Colton’s father

  Kaylee Bryant—Colton’s mother

  Preston—Colton’s older brother

  Mandi—Preston’s wife

  Tabby—Colton’s older sister

  Tony—Tabby’s husband

  Merinda—Colton’s younger sister

  Shad—Merinda’s boyfriend

  Jake—Colton’s best friend

  Tonya—Jake’s wife

  Cocoa—Colton’s horse

  THE LEGEND OF COLTON H. BRYANT

  PART ONE

  1

  A WESTERN

  This is the story of Colton H. Bryant and of the land that grew him. And since this is Wyoming, this story is a Western with a full cast of gun-toting boy heroes from the outskirts of town and city-shoddy villains from head office. There is a runaway mustang and crafty broncos. There are men worn as driftwood and salted women and broken-hearted oil rigs. And in this story, the wind is more or less incessant and the light is distilled to its final brightness because of all the hundreds of miles it must cross to hit the great high plains. And the great high plains themselves, dry as the grave in these drought years, give more of an impression of open sea than of anything you could dig a spade into. A beautiful drowning dryness of oil.

  But like all Westerns, this story is a tragedy before it even starts because there was never a way for anyone to win against all the odds out here. There’s no denying that like the high seas, the high plains of Wyoming make for a hungry place, meanly guarding life, carelessly taking it back. No crosses count. Ground blizzards in the winter and dust storms and wildfire smoke in the summer, everything turning into a sameness of grey so that between the edge of the road and the rest of Wyoming, between earth and sky—there are times a person has no way to tell the difference.

  And in this story…Well, someone is always dying to make room for the next wave of people who are trying to find a way to get rich on all this impression of endlessness out here. Therefore, in this story there is death. Which is nothing new or old in Wyoming and eventually we too—the storytellers and storytold—will go the way of the Indians, the buffalo, the cowboys, and the oil men. We too will make room for someone or something new. An unpeopled silence, perhaps.

  2

  COLTON AND THE KMART COWBOYS

  Evanston, Wyoming

  Here is Colton H. Bryant at eight years old pedaling so pitiful fast through the streets of Evanston, Wyoming, that his legs look like eggbeaters. He has white-blond hair and he’s tanned the color of stained pine and even at this speed—even at a distance—you can see the color of those eyes. They’re such a stunning shade of blue that they register as an absence, like a washed, empty sky. But right now there are tears flooding from those eyes and streaking down Colton’s cheeks as he leaps curbs and ducks into side streets, his heart going like a piston, like it would keep beating even if it were torn out of his chest and left alone in all these wide, high plains.

  “Retard!”

  Colton rides with more sense of panic than direction. He is sawing back and forth across town, past the Dairy Queen and the Taco Bell, up Sage Street, down Summit, over the patch of sunburned grass behind the old railway station. But everywhere he goes is cluttered with its quota of bored little Kmart cowboys, so called because maybe they docked a lamb’s tail for 4-H once a year and maybe they’ll grow up to wreck a groin muscle riding the odd bull at a small-time rodeo, but these boys aren’t cowboys now and they won’t grow up to be cowboys either. You have to have a heart for that, and these boys are bred heartless and made more heartless by the poverty of their imaginations.

  “Retard!” they call him because Colton’s in special ed and that’s on account of the way his brain works, like a saddle bronc, fired up for eight seconds maximum and then bolting around the rails looking for a way out of the arena. Even on Ritalin, Colton has a way of tearing out of the chute, firing with all hooves at once. Colton doesn’t have the gear between flat out and stopped. He doesn’t have speed perception—the way other people feel alarmed when they’re going too fast, Colton feels alarmed when he isn’t moving fast enough.

  Colton puts his hand up in class one day.

  “Yes, Colton?” says his teacher. “You have a question?”

  “No, ma’am,” says Colton. “It’s more of a suggestion.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, ma’am, I was just wondering if you could talk twice as fast and then we’ll get ’er done twice as quick and then we can get out of here in half the time.”

  And all the other kids start laughing and Colton looks around. “What? What’d I say?”

  And the teacher says, “Colton H. Bryant, would you take a deep breath and count to ten and hold your horses?”

  Colton keeps pedaling.

  “You’re a retard!” comes the shout from a lookout post near the laundry where Colton’s dad takes his greasers when he comes back every other week off the rigs so he doesn’t clog up the machine at home with all the mud and oil from work. And for a moment Colton pictures Bill at the door of the laundry, all immovable in his broad black cowboy hat, and a lump hurts the front of Colton’s throat, but then the light shifts and the image of Bill shifts too, taking with it all that rough Wyoming justice.

  “Retard!”

  Colton takes one hand off the handlebars long enough to wipe his nose. Evanston is getting kind of blurry. He starts to weave his way recklessly in and out of the streetlights like they were barrels to clear, leaping the curb right in front of cars. Horns blow and in an hour Kaylee will get another phone call from a neighbor telling her that Colton was seen riding recklessly through town. But Colton doesn’t care.

  “What a freakin’ retard!” is what he hears.

  Colton’s chest fills up with something—he’s not sure what it is—because he isn’t angry and he’s beyond feeling sad and he’s too young to know what forgiveness feels like. Then suddenly, “It’s okay,” he shouts over his shoulder, his voice all high and broken with tears. “Mind over matter. I don’t mind so it don’t matter.” Colton heard that somewhere once, on television maybe, and he likes the magical ring of it. It’s like an invisible cloak, the power of not minding anything. Colton’s legs whip around and around, “Mind-over-matter; mind-over-matter; mind-over-matter” is the rhythm.

  He soars below the underpass and up into the part of town where the hooty-tooty-almighty folk live. His pockets are full of knuckle-sized rocks painted by Merinda and Tabby. Colton is supposed to be selling them for a quarter each, fifty cents i
f the folk look rich enough. A buck if they seem really stinkin’, rollin’, filthy. But now his sisters are gonna give him a hard time for not selling rocks and his brother, Preston, is probably just gonna plain give him a beating with no good excuse. “I’m dead,” thinks Colton and when he thinks about being dead that makes him think of cowboys and when he thinks of cowboys his mind skips straight to mustangs, which is part of the beauty of Colton’s mind. It hardly ever sticks around in one place long enough to get too sad or stay too mad.

  “Whee-haw,” says Colton, letting his bike have her head. “The Injuns are coming! The Injuns are coming!” he yells, scaring himself for real a little bit at the thought of all those bloodthirsty braves on his tail. And now, under his very seat, the bike transforms itself into a mustang, barely broke, stretching her head across the prairie faster than any other horse in the whole wide West and no one can catch Colton now, not Injuns, not Kmart cowboys, not Merinda and Tabby, not Preston, not anybody. “Come on girl,” Colton tells his bike, “let’s get outta here.”

  3

  PRESTON AND COLTON, HUNTING

  So when they were young—Preston was five years older than Colton—Preston could do any amount of damage to Colton and Colton just smiled right on through it. For example, Preston threw Colton down the stairs with a cushion tied to his waist and Colton laughed all the way down and came running back up for more. Another time, a couple of years later, Preston roped Colton and dragged him all over the yard until the seat of his pants was worn clear through to his boxers and all the time Colton giggling, “He-he-he!” And he was still laughing after Kaylee came home and gave them both a whupping for ruining new clothes. “I got two tons of trouble,” she used to say. “Prest-ton and Colt-ton.” And every year after Christmas lunch, Bill would pull his boys with ropes behind the pickup on an icy road so that they could ski on the heels of their cowboy boots, and that was always funny, although Preston was trying to trip up his brother. And even when a fight would get out of control and result in a broken nose, Colton’s reaction was always the same. “Mind over matter,” he said, his eyes swollen shut and his nose all wrapped in gauze.