Cooksin

by Rick Alan Rice

  "We've known each other our whole lives, and we've never had problems," Pete said. "Hell, we've been workin' neighbors, and I don't know what it is you got against me now."

  "I don't have anything 'against you,"' Frank said. "I just want your God damned property! That's all!"

  "Well you ain't gettin' it!" Pete said firmly. "Now get it outta your head! Christ, I ain't no competition for you. You already got twenty times what I got in land and property. But I'll tell you one thing, I aim to do the best I can with what I got – and I won't have you gettin' in the way of it!"

  Pete seemed to have gotten out of his system what he had to say and he ducked back in behind the wheel. Frank realized that Pete was about to charge off and he quickly opened the fence gate between them and hurried out to Pete's truck. "Wait a minute,

  God-damn it Pete!" He hurried to the driver's side and reached across Pete, who was reaching to turn the ignition key, stopping him from starting the truck. Pete looked at Frank, surprised at his audacity. For a moment it looked like he and Frank might be getting into something physical, but Frank intercepted the thought. "Just hold on a second, Pete. You come chargin' all the way over here to say what you got on your mind. Now it seems like you ought to give me a chance to say something too." Frank looked at Pete in a way that deflected concern and seemed to beg a moment of understanding. "Come on," Frank said, "just walk with me for a moment."

  Pete looked at Frank suspiciously, and then glanced around at the cowboys, standing in sets around the yard. He gave a quick nod to Frank, and then got back out of the pickup. The two men began walking slowly together, headed across the yard toward the huge red hay barn, the architectural centerpiece of the Walker homestead.

  Frank led the conversation. "Pete, I want you to know I'm sorry for what happened. And I want you to please believe me that I just happened upon the scene – it sure wasn't anything anybody planned. My boy Jarvis, he's a little headstrong, not to mature . . . I've had a talk with him and set him straight on a few things, but he's not in real good shape himself."

  "You better rein him in, Frank," Pete said. "He's a big boy, and apparently not too smart. He's likely to get himself in trouble, and you with him."

  "I know, I know . . ." Frank seemed to accept the advice, perhaps because doing so seemed to have a controlling effect on the conversation. Pete seemed to calm a bit. "I appreciate what you’re saying and I know it's true," Frank said.

  "I think you encourage him with your God-damned smokers, and everything else you do around here," Pete said, pulling no punches. "You keep an awful lot of young studs on your payroll."

  Frank remained conciliatory. "Maybe you're right, Pete. Maybe I've let things get out of hand."

  "You never used to be that way," Pete said.

  Frank raised his eyebrows and half-grinned. "I've never been old before." He gestured in a way that seemed surrendering. "I think the young cowboys, and all that energy – I don't know, I feed off of it in some way. I certainly didn't ever intend for it to come to anything like what happened yesterday. I mean that, Pete, and I want you to believe me."

  "Well, I want you to believe me when I tell you that I ain't backin' off on bringing my operation back," Pete said. "It means a lot to me, maybe for the same reasons. I'm older than you are, and I need something to get excited about."

  "You are really fucking serious, aren't you? I mean about goin' back to work."

  "Serious as death," Pete said. "I got me a world class stud bull and I plan on bringing in some top of the line beef cattle."

  Frank shook his head. "I don't resent you any for that, and I sure as hell don’t want to reignite a feud, but I'm tellin' you I ain't alone when it comes to trouble with ranch-hands."

  Pete turned and looked Frank in the eyes. "I want you to know that I talked with Jake about what you said. He told me all about his past – told me straight, and I believe him. He's a good hand. It's unbelievable what he's done in a short time to get Parker Ranch back in shape, and I owe him a fair shot. There's no reason for you and him to have anything to do with each other, so I want you to leave him alone. And I'll tell you another thing. If any one of your boys ever again lays a hand on Py Mulvane, I'll be over here to see them – and I'll be the one carrying the board."

  Frank could see that there was no sense rebutting Pete's position. He just stood there, not knowing what to say. Old Pete was a fool, and he didn't know what to think about it. He watched as the old guy turned and went back to his truck, the cowboys parting to let him through. Then Pete cranked the engine and drove back out of the yard, heading back across the field road toward Parker Ranch.

  CHAPTER 23 – The Bomb

  "Jake, do you think we should've dropped that bomb?" Py had been worried about it all morning, ever since noticing an article in the Readers Digest on the subject. "I mean on those Japanese people."

  Jake examined the horizon for an answer. Nothing. "Well, they weren't going to quit, Py. It was just gonna go on and on. A lot more people would've died," he said quietly.

  "A lot of people did die," Py said. The Readers Digest said over one hundred thousand. And most of 'em weren't even soldiers." Py paused for a moment, struck by a thought. "The article said it was...psy...psy..."

  "Psychological," Jake said. He had read the same article. "I guess it's pretty hard to want to fight if it's getting your families killed back home."

  Py shook his head, and for a moment he looked sick. "It just seems so awful."

  Jake looked sympathetic. "The thing is, you've got to do something to make a war end – usually something awful. It has to stop the fighting or else it just goes on and on. Hell, there was one that went on for three hundred years. There may even be one starting right now that'll go on forever, unless something stops it." He looked down to the ground for a moment, bowed by thought. "Tell you one thing, there's a lot of bad feelings left from this last one."

  Pete and Tory were gone to town, the condition of their two ranch hands disqualifying them from the regular regimen of errands and chores. Tory, who hated doing the grocery shopping – she felt as odd among the gray-topped pygmies as Jake did – acquiesced for just this one time. She didn't say as much to Jake or Py, but she didn't exactly relish the gossip that was bound to ensue from either one of them showing up in town, given their conditions. It was better to bite the bullet, handle a few unpleasant tasks herself, with the help of her dad, and let the storm clouds pass. Relatively few people had witnessed the altercation at the feed store, and while news of it was bound to have already spread throughout town, the fire didn't need to be stoked. Tory knew the rhythms of Longmont social circles, and understood that if nothing happened to prolong talk about the incident it would soon be abandoned for some fresher topic. Most of the "press" would go to Frank Walker and his behavior, which had become a staple of local gossip anyway. To Tory's way of thinking there was no sense shifting the focus away from Frank and his own myriad personal difficulties.

  As the day wore on, Py became bored sitting around the house, reading, and he wandered off to the windbreak to do God-knows-what. He went thinking that perhaps the stray tom would be around today, which would lend purpose to his life – coaxing the animal into domesticity. Py's youth seemed to be serving him well, and he was healing more quickly than was Jake, who seemed more stiff and sore today than he had yesterday. He was somewhat more inclined to cool his heals around the house, though by two o'clock in the afternoon he, too, was feeling a need for sunshine and fresh air. He decided to stroll out to the bull pen to see how Cooksin was doing, and maybe check his water supply and throw a little fresh hay into his feeder.

  With late-summer temperatures hovering in the nineties, the big Charolais had become lethargic. He spent most of his time lying in the shade of the barn, leisurely chewing cud and staying generally quiet. He would occasionally let out a deep bellow, that seemed somehow mournful, as if something was missing from his bull's life. It was seemingly prompted by, and targeted at, nothing, but was
rather like a general, personal complaint, that sneaked out when it got to where he couldn't hold it any longer. Cooksin just seemed to have an occasional need to give voice to his loneliness, and about every ten or fifteen minutes throughout the day he did just that.

  Jake crawled over the fence and walked over to the bull, who lay with his legs tucked up beneath him, seemingly unconcerned over the intrusion. Jake checked the water tank and found it full of clear, fresh water, pumped up from the aquifer by a windmill that turned slowly in the light breeze, mechanically groaning with about as much purpose as did Cooksin. Jake scratched the curly hairs on the bull's forehead, even as Pete's admonitions to avoid such intimacies sounded at the back of his mind. "You don't want to be petting a bull on the head, even if he'll let you," Pete had been overhead saying to Py. "It just teaches a bull to use his head, and you don't want him doing that.

  I've seen 'em lift farm equipment right up off their tires." To Jake it seemed like strange advice, especially from Pete, who was all the time scratching Cooksin's forehead.

  "How you doin' today, big fella? You like that?" Jake carried on a conversation with the animal as he petted him. A horsefly buzzed around them, trying a couple times to find a place to light on the bull's neck, but Jake swatted him away. Cooksin tossed his huge head, and then angled it back as far as he could to lick a couple times at his back. "You got an itch, Cookie?" Jake scratched in the area the animal seemed to be trying to reach, and Cooksin lay quietly, obliging him his samaritanship.

  "You look real natural there, Jakey-boy."

  Jake hadn't been aware of another presence, and he quickly spun in the direction from which the voice had come. There, standing on the bottom rail of the big fence, hanging over the top, was the stranger he spoke to in town a few days earlier – Pico's emissary.

  "I had no idea you were such a nature boy," he said, grinning delusively.

  Jake stood up from his squat position and turned in the direction of the stranger.

  He asked, inimically – "What are you doing here?"

  "I saw your sweetie in town, with her daddy." He held a toothpick in his teeth as he talked, giving his intonation a strangely disrespectful edge, like a street punk's. Then his expression turned apologetic. "Oh, sorry – I guess for you I've got to be a little more specific. I'm talking about . . . what's her name? Tory? Is that it? Anyway, that's the sweetie I'm talking about. Her and her dad, not the other one."

  Jake slowly started walking over toward his visitor. "So you didn't answer my question. What are you doing here?"

  "Well, like I say, I saw your sweetie and her pop in town, so I thought it might be an opportunity for me to touch bases with you – alone."

  Jake just kept coming toward him, walking purposefully. "This is private property and you ain't wanted here."

  The stranger let the mock grin melt from his face, and he seemed momentarily hurt by Jake's discourtesy. "Gosh, Jake, I just come to see how you was
  As Jake reached the fence the stranger let himself fall away from it and he stepped back a few feet. Jake didn't even break his stride, leaping up onto the fence, wrapping one leg over the top rail, and then pulling himself over, landing on the ground on the other side hard on both feet. He started toward the stranger, who was still backing away from him, but he didn't get within six feet before the visitor pulled a handgun from the small of his back and pointed it, straight-armed, at Jake's head.

  "Stop right there, Jakey-boy," he said. "I'm sure, if I could see it, I wouldn't like the look in your eye. So you just hold it right there while we have a little talk."

  Jake held his hands up before him, an automatic response to seeing the weapon. "I talked with Pico," the stranger said. "I told him about our little conversation the other day – and how you were saying you didn't plan on holding up your end of the deal." He shook his head piteously. "He didn't like that at all."

  In the distance, Py stood in the shadows of the windbreak, out of sight, watching the drama taking place in the yard. He could only hear parts of what was being said, but could see the stranger, standing like a duelist, holding his arm out straight at shoulder level, keeping the barrel of the gun pointed at Jake's face. And he could see Jake, his palms up before him, as if he could deflect a shot, and he could see that Jake looked scared. Py didn't know what to do. There was a good fifty yards of open space between he and the gunmen, who stood out in the middle of the ranch yard. Rushing him was out of the question. Waiting for a better idea, he stood silently in the shadows, praying to himself that, whoever this guy was, he wouldn't pull the trigger.

  "Can't you see that it's in Pico's best interest that we call this whole thing off," Jake said. "Especially now, with what's happened. Does he know about the fight?"

  The stranger shook his head. "Oh no, but he will. There's so much that happens with you, it's just hard to keep up with it all. But he'll find out soon enough."

  "He'd be a fool to want to go through with it now," Jake said. "It's all over town, the feud between me and Frank. I'll be the first person they'll want to talk to."

  "That could be, Jakey-boy, but you kinda did that to yourself, didn't you?"

  "I suppose I did," Jake said, "but it's done now. There's nothing to be gained.

  We'll all end up in jail."

  "Well I'd say that's optimistic, on your part," the stranger said, still chewing on his toothpick. "Hell, you'll think jail looks good, if something goes wrong with this job. You'll be cryin' out for incarceration."

  "What are you sayin'?"

  "That you're a dead man, Jakey-boy. You screw up this hit, you're dead. You ain't goin' to prison – you don’t have to worry about that. You'll be dinin' with grub worms before that ever happens."

  "You're makin' it pretty hard for me to feel much loyalty to Pico," Jake said.

  The stranger looked to the heavens and laughed out loud, never ceasing to point the revolver at Jake's forehead. "You do make me laugh," he said. "Loyalty you say? This ain't got nothing to do with loyalty. This has to do with a debt – a debt that you owe Lorenz Pico. And it has to do with a deal you made – one that you will keep, or else you are going to get more fucked up that you are right now. And man, you look pretty bad."

  "What about the police?" Jake said. "What's to prevent me from going to the cops and turning you all in?"

  "Including yourself?" "Including myself," Jake said.

  "Well, let's say that brings this conversation around full circle – back to your sweeties. Remember when we were talking about that?"

  Jake nodded. "What about it?"

  "You see, Jake – you go to the cops, you get some people arrested. But you don't get everybody, Jakey-boy, because you don't know who everybody is. It's vast, man. It's bigger than you can imagine, the web you're tangled in. And if you craw1in there and start shaking it, you are going to see spiders comin' from places you never imagined – spiders that hurt people. You know what I'm saying, Jake? There's nothing you can do about it. You fuck up, the spider bites. All those people you care about? The little blonde girl, the one who lives here, and the young boy . . ." He pulled the trigger and there was a deafening report.

  Jake started and ducked away as the bullet whizzed past his ear and exploded into one of the heavy oak cross-rails of the corral. Watching from the windrow, Py jumped at the sound of the shot and his jaw dropped. Eyes wide, his heart suddenly pounding like a mallet, he saw Jake stagger back away from the gunman, and was relieved to see that he didn't fall, that he had not been shot. Py fell back further into the shadows, scared at what may happen next, and helpless to know how to help Jake.

  "You're dead, Jake. That's my point," said the stranger. "You screw this up, and you and everyone you care about – all dead." />
  Jake stood far back from the gunman, straightening up but still holding his palms up before him.

  "You do what you said you were going to do now, okay?" said the stranger. He began to back away, still holding the gun out at arm's length, moving toward his pickup, which was parked out on the county road, away from the house. "You remember now, okay?" he said.

  Jake slowly dropped his hands as the gunman backed further and further away, until he reached his truck. Then he quickly ducked inside, started the engine, and made a fast get away, disappearing up the road in a cloud of dust.

  "Jake! Jake! Are you okay?" Py came running from his hiding place. "I saw the whole thing, Jake. Are you alright?"

  Jake's heart was beating like a bass drum, but he appeared outwardly calm. "I'm okay," he said, as Py reached him on a dead run.

  "Who was that?" Py asked. "Was that the same guy we saw up on the road the other day?"

  Jake walked, distracted, toward the road, watching as the stranger's pickup disappeared in the distance.

  "Who was it, Jake?" Py asked again.

  "I don't know," Jake said. "But I'm glad he's gone."

  CHAPTER 24 – Marksmanship

  "I hope you feel up to riding. I was just going to go out and shoot some prairie dogs. I was hoping maybe you'd like to come along."

  Frank Walker was holding a Winchester rifle, a lever action 30-30, that was a replica of the model its creator had developed for the U.S. Cavalry back in the 1870s. It was one of his proudest possessions and he loved to shoot with it. Every winter he spent a week in a hunter's cabin up in the Rockies, around the town of Rifle, hunting deer.

  During the warmer months he perfected his marksmanship on the flats around Walker Ranch, which were heavily populated with burrowing squirrels. The little animals bred prodigiously, while undermining the countryside with contiguous underground channels. Besides destroying whole sections of land, and attracting huge populations of rodent hungry rattlesnakes, the hundreds of holes dug the dogs rendered terrains treacherous for cattle and horses. It was not rare for an animal to suffer a leg break, stepping into one of those holes, or having undermined earth collapse under their weight. Farmers and ranchers tried everything from poisons to gasoline to exterminate the barking populations, some spending whole weeks at the task, dropping cyanides into their tunnels, and then covering the openings with dirt. A really concerted program of eradication could usually keep the land owner slightly ahead of the breeding curve. Frank Walker, on the other hand, wasn't a proponent of "land poisoning," and preferred instead to use the offending beasts for target practice.