Beyond Tits Up

E. Annie Proulx's story "Tits Up in a Ditch," which appears in the June 9-16 New Yorker, might be subtitled "When Bad Things Happen to Good People." Though, truthfully, you don't learn enough about the protagonist, a young woman named Dakotah, to know if she's really good. The things that happen to her, though, are really, really bad.

[SPOILER ALERT HERE]

Briefly, Dakotah is abandoned as a baby by her mother, raised on a bleak ranch in the bleak state of Wyoming by her mother's parents, a couple who make the one in American Gothic look like Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig in "A Christmas Carol." They dress her, grudgingly, in off-brands. Nobody hugs her or kisses her. Her grandfather drowns her kitten.

It goes on: Sneering schoolmates, a feckless boy who knocks her up and then skips for the army, though at least he marries her. At her grandfather's urging, Dakotah joins the army herself, leaving her baby in his and her grandmother's care. At the story's end, Dakotah has lost an arm and the only person she ever loved, the baby has fallen out of grandpa's pickup and been crushed beneath the wheels, and her husband, who is still alive after having been essentially blown in half in Iraq, is passed into her care.

This is when Dakotah realizes that she is, in grandpa's expression, "tits up in a ditch."

Proulx has become such a specialist in writing about unfortunate events in Wyoming that you daily expect to hear that the state's board of tourism has filed a lawsuit against her.

But for her next story, she will write about a happy Wyoming-ite. In January 2009, Dick and Lynn Cheney move back to their home state, laden with official souvenirs and sacks of gold. Cheney spends his declining years running coins through his fingers and surveying the vistas out his windows: the scoured prairies, the oil pumps leaking sludge into the water table and poisoning elk and prairie dogs, the refineries pumping noxious effluents into the big sky, the ranch families dispossessed by soaring fuel prices and Eastern speculators, the families of illegals driven from town to town, the empty food banks, the overcrowded emergency rooms, and smiling grimly, seeing that it is good.

My preferred title would be "Balls Down on the Pot," but I'm open to suggestions.