Cooksin

by Rick Alan Rice

  "To this pasture land right here," Frank said.

  "Stop a second, will you?" the Sheriff asked, and Frank brought the car to a stop.

  Ben looked out into the pasture, gazing toward the draw, the uppermost parts of which were visible in the distance. He was acting as if he were thinking, and as if he had never seen the place before. "This is fenced pasture?" he asked, and Frank nodded that it was. "Is there another way in and out?"

  "Well, yeah – this runs right up to the back of the ranch," Frank explained. "It meets up with a trap we've set up just south of the barn there." He pointed off in the direction of his buildings. "You can probably see it there. See that bare dirt, this side of the barn? That's the trap. You can enter there, and there's another fence gate about fifty yards on west of that, which is right off the equipment yard. I don't think you can see that one from here."

  "And that's it?" Ben asked. "Just this gate here and the two over at the ranch?" "That's right."

  "So . . . I'm just thinkin' out loud here . . ." Ben Miller furled his brow as he tested his scenario. "A fella could gain access to this backroad by driving across this pasture here, but the only way into the pasture is through your yard?"

  "That's right – and that didn't happen, because I was home and would have heard it," Frank said. Again, his attitude betrayed nothing. Ben Miller watched and listened, but as far as he could see, Frank was telling the truth.

  Ben Miller didn't say it, but there was one other possible alternative: the only one that made sense, given the circumstances. It had to do with the field truck, hidden away in the ravine, among the trees. He tried to find a way to introduce the vehicle into the conversation. "So, when you come out here to fix fence, or whatever, you enter right from the ranch yard?"

  Frank didn't understand what Ben was getting at, but he answered – "Yeah, that's right. Usually we ride this pasture, because it's pretty rough in spots. I keep an old field truck down in the ravine there for hauling things."

  "How far is that from the house?" Ben asked. "About a mile," Frank said. "Why do you ask?"

  "Just thinkin’," Ben said. He looked out across the pasture and at the distance between the Walker Ranch buildings and the tops of the trees, barely visible from the ravine where the field truck was kept. "You wouldn't be able to hear that, would you? I mean, if somebody came out here and started that truck at night, you wouldn't hear it from the house, would you?"

  Frank nodded, frowning. "No, I doubt it."

  "Hmmm . . ." Ben stroked his chin, ruminating on the utility of this information. "What are you getting at, Ben?"

  "Who has access to that truck? Are the keys left in it?"

  Frank shook his head. "Yeah – we leave the keys in it. Everybody on the ranch has access to it, I guess. We've got trucks scattered all over at various locations, just to make things easy. I still don't get what you're saying."

  "Oh, probably nothing," Ben said, but then he asked – "You don't have anyone in your employ that would have any reason to do this, do you?"

  "To shoot Pete Parker's animal? Hell no!" Frank said, with certainty. "You'd be hard pressed to find a person in Weld County who would have anything against Pete Parker."

  "There's one out here someplace," Ben said cryptically.

  * * * * *

  As Ben Miller drove away from Walker Ranch he was thinking about his conversation with Frank, and about what he had seen on that back road. His sense was that Frank was telling him the truth: that he knew nothing about the incident. Ben hadn't really been able to conceive of Frank doing such a thing. It just didn't add up, not given Frank's financial and political influence. He didn't have to resort to such tactics to get what he wanted. It was common knowledge that what Frank wanted from Pete Parker was his pasture land. Frank was far more likely to just keep upping his offer, until finally Pete could no longer say no. Frank bought people, he didn't shoot them, figuratively or otherwise. Still, as the Sheriff drove back toward Longmont, he couldn't stop thinking about the logistics of the crime. Somebody had moved at least two miles through the darkness of night. It seemed unlikely to Ben that they had done it on foot, and that brought him back to that truck parked in the trees, in the bottom of that ravine, far from Frank's house. Ben couldn't stop thinking that somehow that truck had figured in to what had happened. In his heart he felt that the killer was among those who knew that truck was out there, that the keys were in it, and that in the dead of night, no one would hear its engine. The crime was just over twelve hours old, and already Ben Miller sensed that he had a lasso around his perpetrator. Next was the hard part: cutting the killer from the herd and dragging him to justice.

  CHAPTER 31 – Loss

  The next day started poorly for Pete. He awoke at his usual time – 6:30 a.m. – and he set about his usual routine. First he went out behind the house, wearing only his union suit, to undergo his customary dowsing. He had started most every day this way since Tory had returned home.

  Pete had suspended a tank eight feet up on the backside of the house, which filled with water drawn by windmill power from the main well. A yank on the chain triggered an instantaneous release of all seven and one-half gallons of water that the tank held when it was full. It was bone chilling cold and, though the others had each tried it – once – Pete was the only one who used it regularly. He found that it shocked out of mind any tendencies to focus on anything but the most immediate concerns, and late in life he had discovered it was a way of thinking that he should have been working at all along. He had even poured a small slab of cement beneath the tank, grading it so that the water washed away into the grass in the yard. He had considered improving the delivery system, filtering the falling water into the form of a nice shower, but he decided to discard the idea. He spent at least an hour a day soaking in the tank, and sometimes took a bath at night, so he had no need to prolong the experience by expanding its purpose. It wasn't about getting clean, it was about getting focused. This morning, however, it didn't work.

  Pete positioned himself under the tank and pulled the chain. The trap door above him opened and the water washed down over him in a single wave, drenching him head to foot. But somehow, this day, it wasn't enough. Pete stood there, his straggly gray hair plastered down over his head, his union suit weighted to bagginess from the soaking, but nothing had changed. Usually Pete took his dowsing, then dried himself off as best he could and proceeded on to the kitchen for breakfast. This morning he just stood there, dripping water, his hair down in his eyes. He seemed locked in a stare, fixed on the some point in eternity that held nothing, other than his attention. Perhaps it was disappointment, realization that the normal routine was not working this time. He had taken his shock treatment, but instead of finding himself vitalized or refreshed, he found himself in despair. It hit him like a second wave after the water, and a terror rose up in him such as he had not felt in a long time, not since he'd had Tory home again. He just stood there, devastated by its realization. All he could think was that there was no reason to continue. He had taken his water bath and now . . . now there was nothing else to do. All the usual things – feeding the pigs, the chickens, checking the stock, joining the others for breakfast – seemed not so much routine as horrible hoax. It didn't seem to matter now, for somehow the excitement and joy had gone out of the normal fare. He stood there soaked, wondering what there had ever been in it that had given him peace and contentment. The mundane mocked him, and he found himself not wanting to face it. All that he felt was despair.

  Pete patted himself dry with a towel he had carried with him from his room, and slowly made his way around the side of the house and to the back door. In the kitchen he found Jake and Py, already at the kitchen table, and Tory already starting to fry up a breakfast of bacon and eggs. They seemed to know the minute they saw him that something was wrong. Jake and Py said nothing, looking at him like a couple children rendered silent by their father's odd behavior, and by a sense of inadequacy to deal with torment in one whose usual
role was to assuage their own.

  "Good morning, Dad," Tory said, from her place at the stove. Pete stood just inside the back door, giving them all an unconvincing and atypically slight smile, saying nothing. "Pete," Jake finally said, by way of a salutation. "I'll have some bacon and eggs for you pretty quick," Tory said. She was still in her nightgown and housecoat.

  Pete used both hands to push his still wet hair back straight over his head, so that the long straggles curled into ringlets behind his ears and at the back of his neck. He started to go on into the kitchen, to take his customary seat at the table, but for some reason he couldn't. He looked at Py, looking like a frightened little boy, and at Jake, who glumly sipped at a cup of black coffee. Pete wanted to step forward, to address their obvious gloom and tell them that there was no need for feeling so bad, that all they had to do was charge positively onward into the day. But in Tory's face he could see that she was feeling some loss that felt to him far greater than just the sorrow over what had happened to Cooksin. She glanced at him only fleetingly, trying to affect a smile, but then went back to moving bacon around in her skillet. Pete could handle a lot of blues, but not that which he saw in his daughter. Somehow, head bowed over the bacon grease, she seemed a slave to despair. She hadn't brushed out her hair this morning, which was usually something she awoke early for, a ritual grooming that started her every day. Pete noticed and he knew she hadn't the heart to do it. Instead, her dark waves fell without form down upon her shoulders and veiled her eyes from those around, as if somehow it was better that way for her today. He noticed the tip of her nose, and how it seemed red and raw from wiping, and her chin, which somehow seemed to have lost its line and receded in its profile.

  Pete started to take another step toward the kitchen table, but he couldn't.

  Somehow he didn't want to be with them this morning – not with them or anyone. He didn't trust himself to hold up his end of the conversation, or to do the things only he could do to protect their spirits.

  Tory noticed that he was standing oddly distant, as if for some reason he had become an outsider in their presence. "What's wrong, dad?" she said. "Come on in and I'll pour you some coffee." But Pete couldn't move. He could only look at them, from one to the next, and somehow it seemed to overwhelm him. Despair seemed to radiate off of them in waves so noxious that it confused him and made him unwilling to trust his own intuition. He wondered if it wasn't his own depression that was affecting them, and the thought made him want to excise himself from their presence, to spare them his deleterious influence. He tried to conjure up some voice that wouldn't betray him, to find some vocal ruse that would deflect attention so that he wouldn't have to explain why the standard routine wasn't what he wanted this morning. "You know, honey – I don't believe I want any breakfast this morning," he said, but the crack in his voice gave him away, revealing that his was no desultory variance from the norm, but was, instead, avoidance.

  Tory picked up on it immediately and looked up from what she was doing. "Dad – are you okay?" she asked, with apparent concern.

  Again, Pete tried to wedge in a smile, but it was not convincing. "I'm fine," he said. "I'll just get some clothes on and start in on chores."

  As Pete went on to his room to dress in his standard work clothes, Tory and Jake exchanged a long, meaningful look. Py watched the two, needing no translation of the information carried in the exchange. They were both concerned, as was Py himself. Pete's good humor was the one constant on Parker Ranch. Tory, Jake – they both had their dark periods when they were best left to themselves. Even Py needed his own kind of solitude, usually spent in service to his stray tom, and his ongoing effort to domesticate the untamable. But Pete was always happy, at least for the most part. He had the occasional grumpiness of a father, grown impatient with his unruly brood, but unhappiness was something else again, and neither Py nor Jake had ever witnessed it in him. Even Tory, who had known him her whole life, could not recall her father being sad – worried, even without hope, but never sad. He had always loved life too much to feel that way for any prolonged period of time. Seeing the sadness in him now was unsettling to them all, and they had no real notion of what to do about it.

  When Pete re-emerged from his room, dressed in his standard cotton work shirt and jeans, Tory went over to him and gave him a hug. "I love you, Dad," she said, but it only seemed to fluster him, drawing unwanted attention to his failed deception. "Oh! No sense gettin' all mushed-up and everything," he complained, separating himself from her overture. "Just 'cause I ain't having breakfast . . ." He let the thought rest, then awkwardly excused himself and went back outside, leaving by the back door.

  Somehow everything seemed weathered and gray. Pete looked at the barn, at Cooksin's now empty pen, and the high timbers surrounding it, and he thought how dilapidated every now seemed. It was as if overnight the place had lost its luster, and now the thought of restoring it to what it had once been seemed daunting, perhaps implausible. Had he been fooling himself? Had he been seeing Parker Ranch through some sort of absurd lens of delusion? Who was he, anyway, at his age thinking that somehow he could once again breathe life into this old run-down, ramshackle of a spread? The windmill moaned and creaked with a weariness he had not heard before. He looked at the house, and all the improvements Tory had made to the yard, and he wondered – why? It seemed to him she could work for another ten years on it, and have Jake and Py help her the whole way, and still all she'd have was an old dump on a ranch that wasn’t good for anything. Now the holes in the outside walls and the roof of the barn, which hadn't before seemed worth the trouble to fix, looked like a cancer on his possessions, like time had chewed huge holes in this part of the fabric of his life, and now nothing could be done to put it right. Pete's two pigs hurried over to see him and in their enthusiasm they darted into his path, almost tripping him, and Pete cursed and kicked at them. Damned pigs, anyway, he thought. What does a person need with them, anyway? Maybe he ought to just stop feeding them. Maybe they'd realize they weren't wanted on Parker Ranch anymore and go off and scrounge off somebody else, probably someone with enough sense to turn them into bacon. Old Crooner, Pete's privileged red rooster, puffed out his chest and let out a hearty crow, which Pete responded to by picking up a small rock and bouncing it off the bird's side, sending it into a dignity-diffusing turmoil of flying feathers and alarmed chicken-squawks. "Keep your damned beak shut," Pete grumped, as the rooster collected itself, re-gathering its composure. "You ain't too damned old to eat, you know," Pete told him, as he walked on across the yard to the barn.

  In the distance, his yearling stock bawled stupidly and without purpose, and Pete resented them, murmuring under his breath as he made his way toward the building where he kept their feed.

  Pete opened the barn door, stepped inside the dark, cavernous structure, and closed it behind him. The air inside was cool, smelling of musty hay and dust, accented with the deep, rich odor of cow manure. The only light was that which came as rays of sun that poured through the dilapidated sections of the structure. They were enough to allow Pete to find his way to the backside of the main room, where Pete kept his veterinary supplies and burlap sacks of grain sorghum, salt licks, and alfalfa hay, some baled and some loose. None of those things were what Pete was after. That was secreted in a small, hidden compartment behind the medicine chest. He went to this place, reached far back into the wall, and felt for that which he had concealed there. A tiny gray-brown field mouse, hiding among others in that wall space, ran up Pete's arm and he non-chalantly knocked it off onto the ground, where it landed and scurried for safety. In the loft overhead there were the sounds of other tiny, scampering feet, as well as the chirping of baby swallows, alerted to a presence that they hoped might be delivering a meal.

  Pete finally felt the object for which he reached and, unlodging it from its secret mooring, pulled it from the wall. It was a fifth of Old Granddad bourbon whiskey, the seal broken, but the bottle still mostly full. He examined it, holdi
ng it up before him, then blew the dust off it and wiped it clean against the front of his shirt. Then he uncapped it and threw back a big slug, shaking his head as the liquor warmed his esophagus and flamed-up in his stomach. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, took another admiring look at the contents of the bottle, and then tipped it up once more. The libation jolted him in just the way his water dowsing had failed to do earlier, his larger fears and concerns beginning to give way to the experience of the moment. Pete looked around the barn, as if checking to make certain that he was still alone. Finding that he was, he crawled back up onto a pile of hay in the dark corner of the barn, and he took another drink. All he could think was that he didn't want Tory catching him at it this early. It wasn't even 7:30 a.m. yet. He took another drink. Of course, it wouldn't matter, soon, whether she caught him or not. By 8:00 a.m. he wouldn't know one way or the other.

  * * * * *

  "Dad . . . Dad . . . wake up, Pop."

  Tory nudged her father, trying to bring him to, but it wasn't working. Pete had fallen to sleep between two stacks of bales, and as she prodded him he looked at her with one bleary eye open, the other sealed shut with sebaceous residue.

  "Dad – are you okay?" Tory asked, her voice reflecting deep concern. "He's okay," Jake said, he and Py looking over her shoulder and down on their

  prostrate old friend. "He's just drunk."

  Py found the empty bottle of Old Granddad and picked it up, examining the evidence. "Holy Moses," he said, "was this full?"

  Tory shook her head. "I don't even know where it came from." She had systematically ridded the ranch of bottles, save for those she kept locked up in a liquor cabinet in the living room. It had been one of her first projects upon returning from California. It seemed her father had taken to stashing them all over the property, so he was never far away from a shot – or two. Pete had been so embarrassed by the whole thing that he hadn't put up any resistance, in some ways grateful that his daughter cared enough about him to save him from himself. There was a time when Pete had been fairly critical of some of the other drunks he knew, all of whom had a proclivity for stashing bottles at numerous secret locations. That he had become one of them . . . well, it wasn't something he had been proud of. Tory thought he had been honest with her when he supplied his list of locations. Now it was apparent that he had not been completely forthcoming.