by Don Winslow
This was a tactical error, because it left her right rear leg free. Not a calf to miss an opportunity, she hauled off and gave him a Bruce Lee to the diaphragm. Neal got a grip on the hoof implanted in his chest and managed to flip the calf over onto his lap, discovering that a baby cow weighs a lot more than the baby person he’d probably never be able to have, judging by the sudden pain in his crotch. But he held on to the calf.
He could hear Steve happily singing along to some tune on the radio about a mother not letting her babies grow up to be cowboys or something, which Neal didn’t think was very funny. But the calf must have liked it, because she let out a big sigh and relaxed in his lap. She felt so relaxed she let loose the contents of her bowels on those parts of his pant legs that she’d missed soaking with urine. Neal kind of wished that Steve had remembered that rope, but he held on to the calf, stroked her neck, and cooed soothing endearments. He hurt like crazy from the earlier beating, but he held on to the calf.
Steve stopped the truck by the back of the Mills’ house, got out, and took a look at Neal and the calf.
“She piss and shit on you?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, they’ll do that. Do you two want to snuggle some more or shall we introduce her to her new mama?”
He dropped the back gate and the calf scrambled out the back end. Steve opened a rickety wood and wire gate and shooed her into the small corral behind the barn.
Neal stepped in behind him. The sun was getting low and the sky was turning a soft salmon pink. The air was crisp and cool. Neal could see how you could fall in love with all of this and never want to leave.
“Now the fun begins,” Steve said.
“I don’t know if I can stand any more fun.”
“See, Eleanor has a calf of her own and she’s too dumb to figure out we’re trying to help her by bringing in this young interloper. So even though she needs another calf to suck on those udders, she’s going to resist. She’ll try to kick that calf, and if I know Eleanor like I do know Eleanor, she’ll try to kick it square in the head.”
No, Neal thought. She’s not going to kill that calf. I have two broken knees, a purple chest, I’m covered with shit and soaked with piss, and I’ve become kind of possessive of that calf.
“So what do we do?” Neal asked.
“Well, we do a number of things. See, these are range cattle. They’re about half-wild anyway, and long about dusk they hide their calves in the brush on the lower slope. So first we have to find Eleanor’s calf before the lions or the coyotes do—”
“Lions?”
“Mountain lions—and then drive the little thing back to the barn. Eleanor’ll follow even though she already suspects an ambush. Then we finagle Eleanor into a stanchion, sneak around her backside, and tie a rope around her hips so it pinches a nerve and hurts if she tries to kick. Then we introduce the new calf to its new lunch counter, which won’t be difficult because a calf will just naturally go for it, if you know what I mean. After the new calf sucks for a while, Eleanor’ll forget it ain’t really hers and then she’ll take care of it.”
“Lions?”
“They’re scared of people.”
Oh, good.
“However,” Steve said, “I’m going to bring the rifle along, just in case.”
“In case of what?”
“In case we run across a psychotic one or some goofball survivalist who figures that taking my calves is cheaper and easier than raising his own. I could use your help. Two is a lot better than one when you’re trying to drive cows on foot, and it would save me the trouble of saddling up a horse. Besides which, the doctor told me I should take a daily constitutional.”
“Sure.” I would never pass up a chance for a sundown confrontation with a lion and/or goofball survivalist rustler, Neal thought.
They walked back to the house and Steve took a 30.06 lever-action rifle off a rack in the kitchen. Then they hiked for about ten minutes down through the sagebrush toward the base of the mountain. They came to the tree line Neal had seen from the window, and sure enough, it screened a shallow creek that ran at the bottom of a deep gully. Sandbars flanked the creek on both sides and it was easy to cross the stream by stepping on rocks and then jumping onto the sand.
They walked a couple more minutes and reached the bottom of the big spur of the mountain.
“The mountains themselves are government land,” Steve said. “The spur here is the southern boundary of my land and Hansen’s.”
At the base of the spur, almost dug into the north slope, was a small log cabin.
“Whose is that?” Neal asked.
“It’s ours,” Steve answered. “It was here before I was. Probably an old miner’s place. You’ll find abandoned shafts all over these hills. Or it was a station for the cowboys to sleep in when they came to get the cattle down from the hills for the winter. We’ve had a couple of hired hands stay in it from time to time.”
They didn ’t run across any mountain lions or beef-crazed survivalists. They did find Eleanor, an enormous black-and-white cow, who promptly led them in the wrong direction.
Or tried to, anyway.
“Eleanor’s getting predictable in her middle years,” Steve said. “If she heads east you can be damn sure that junior’s lying under a bush somewhere to the west.”
He was. A cute, big-eyed little squirt who looked a little grateful to have the game of hide-and-go-seek end so quickly. He got up on shaky legs as Eleanor trotted over protectively. Steve gave her a poke on the flanks with the rifle butt.
“To the barn, dumb ol’ Eleanor.”
It took about forty minutes to drive the cows back and another twenty to lure Eleanor’s head into the stanchion by putting a big handful of aromatic alfalfa into the trough. Eleanor took the bait and Steve slammed the stanchion shut, just getting his hand out of the way before Eleanor swung her head in a violent effort to crush his fingers.
“We’re both getting a little slower, old girl,” Steve said without any bitterness Neal could detect. Then Steve snuck around her backside, dodged her kick, tossed a rope over her hips, grabbed it behind her udder, and pulled it tight. He tied it off on a post and stood back. She started to give a kick, suddenly changed her mind, and gave an aggravated bellow instead. Then she settled down and started chewing on the hay. Her calf instantly slid in and started to suck.
“Go get the new one, will you?” Steve asked. He took a quick look around, reached behind another stanchion, and pulled out a pack of Luckys.
Neal walked out into the corral, found his calf huddled up against the fence, and shooed it into the barn. It took one look at Eleanor’s swollen udder and nuzzled up. She tried another feeble kick, gave up, and apparently decided that she was the mother of twins as the calves happily nudged, pushed, and nuzzled against her.
Steve took a contented drag on his cigarette as he watched the scene.
“I love this country,” he said.
He had loved it from the moment he saw it, he told Neal over dinner, twenty-odd years ago when he and Peggy had given up the ghost trying to grow lettuce in California. They had packed what little they owned into their “Fix or Repair Daily” and headed east to Reno, where Steve drew a ten to a king down. This started a streak that Peggy capped off with a hot hand and three straight dice rolls that each added up to seven.
They thought they might treat themselves to a little vacation and headed east out of Reno, finally ending up in the Reese River valley. She loved it too, so they ended their vacation early, bought this chunk of land, got a good deal on an old trailer, and settled in.
Steve got a job driving a mining truck over on Round Mountain and Peggy waited tables at the one diner in town. They used their spare hours to clear enough land for a corral and a barn.
Peggy started the garden, lost most of it to bugs and rabbits, and then started it again behind a wire fence that represented about a month of tip money. Steve joined a few of their new friends on some jack-lighting expeditions
and put a winter’s worth of venison in the freezer he’d bought fourth-hand from Brogan’s place in town.
They lived in the trailer for two years before they saved enough money for a house. Two years of his wrestling trucks around treacherous switchbacks. Two years of her pouring coffee, flipping burgers, and putting down whispered remarks about her “neat little rear” with a withering glance, and once twisting the arm half off a trucker who gave her neat little rear a pat. Two years of saving every penny except for their twice-a-month expedition into town—twenty miles away—to drink a few beers and dance a few dances at Phil and Margie’s Country Cabaret to the country tunes of New Red and the Mountain Men. (Old Red having been caught with half an acre of marijuana behind his house and the Mountain Men being composed of two men and two women.)
Steve and Peggy built the house themselves after Kermit Wolff had put in the foundation. They started in May and had the roof party in mid-September, about half of north central Nevada showing up to help them raise the damn thing and polish off the beers chilling in ice in the horse trough. They had one hell of a party, and Peggy shed a few tears when the young Shoshone from down by lone hauled off the old trailer. Steve got real busy finishing the house when Peggy came home from Fallon with the news that she’d done in a rabbit with something other than her pellet gun.
Shelly was born in the middle of winter. There were problems with the birth and weren’t going to be any more babies. Peggy was pretty down about that, but Steve didn’t care because he loved that little girl positively to distraction.
Neal could see why just as soon as Shelly came bursting in the door a good minute before dinner hit the table.
She had her father’s eyes and smile and her mother’s strong features. Her chestnut hair was shoulder length and thick—Peggy swore that she had broken scissors trying to trim it once. She dug into her steak and baked potato with the voracious appetite of the young, guileless, and guiltless.
She was a junior in high school. Biology and chemistry were her best subjects, English and history her worst, meaning that she had to work for her A’s in them. She wanted to go to the University of Nevada and then on to either med school or vet school, because she couldn’t decide which she wanted to help more, people or animals. She had succumbed to classmates’ pressure and become a cheerleader, although she thought it was pretty boring and a little silly. She’d rather have spent the time with one of the horses, or helping out on the place, or taking long rides with Jory up on the trails in the mountains.
She was a secure kid from a secure home. She knew her parents loved her and each other, and she loved them back.
She also loved Jory Hansen. They planned to go to Reno together and get married after they established their careers, she a medico of some type, he a crusading district attorney. Her parents didn’t disabuse her of her plans by telling her all of the things that usually happened to a relationship on the long trek through college. She was a level-headed kid and she’d take it all in stride.
She had clearly been told by her mother to suppress her natural curiosity about their house guest, and for the first twenty minutes avoided asking Neal the three thousand questions she had about the world outside of Austin.
“How was your afternoon with Jory?” Peggy asked her between bites of cherry pie, by way of rescuing Neal.
“Fine,” she answered.
Peggy picked up on it. For her exuberant daughter, “fine” was a barely positive description.
“Why? What’s wrong?” Peggy asked.
“I don’t know. He’s been a little quiet lately.”
“Jory Hansen’s never been exactly a chatterbox,” Peggy said.
Shelly hesitated. “He seems angry,” she said.
“Honey, I think he’s been a little angry since his mother died,” Peggy answered.
Peggy knew how he felt. She was angry too. Barb Hansen had been one of her closest friends. They had raised their babies together, helped each other through all of the childhood illnesses and injuries, sipped on a little wine together when the men were up in the hills cutting timber or hunting. They had spent long summer afternoons down at the creek, watching their kids splash around in the water and trading notes on marriage, business, cooking, ranching, and just plain stuff. She missed Barb Hansen too.
And Jory—short for Jordan—was such a sensitive kid. Much more like his mom than his dad. It was a hard loss for him.
“That’s three years, Mom.”
“I know.”
“He talks strange lately.”
“Strangely,” Peggy corrected, “and what do you mean?”
“I don’t know. Politics. How the country’s changing. He talks like a right-wing Republican or something.”
“I knew there was a reason I liked that boy,” Steve observed.
“He just seems angry,” Shelly repeated. “It scares me a little.”
“Maybe you ought to go out with other boys,” Steve suggested, ducking his head closer to his pie to avoid his daughter’s sharp eye.
“What other boys? Jory’s the only one around here who thinks that there might be more to life than roping cows,” Shelly answered. “Besides, I love him.”
“There’s always that,” Steve answered and the conversation turned to the local economy, politics, and the usual topics that people discuss when they’re getting to know one another.
And then the conversation turned to Neal.
He pretty much made the cover story up as he went along, letting it out little by little, playing at being shy and embarrassed but always observing the number-one rule of a good cover: stay as close to the truth as you can.
So he told them he’d been in graduate school in New York, that he’d fallen in love with a woman who broke his heart, and how all of a sudden life didn’t make any sense anymore and he just needed to get away to think.
So by the time he was into the second piece of pie and the third cup of coffee he was telling them how he’d flown to the West Coast, hadn’t found what he was looking for there, and decided to buy a cheap car and work his way back east.
All of which was technically true in its parts and a complete lie in its whole. The essence of a good cover story.
After dinner they repaired into the living room. Shelly went upstairs to take a shower and go to bed early.
Neal sank into the sofa and took the glass of scotch that Steve handed him. It smelled a little like the smoke from the charcoal fires in the monastery kitchen. He took a sip and let it linger in his mouth a moment before he swallowed it. It felt like a blanket wrapping around him.
“You look like you’ve been rode hard and put up wet,” Steve said to him.
Neal had no idea what he meant but nodded anyway. He took another swallow of the whiskey and drew the blanket a little tighter around himself.
Peggy came in from the kitchen. She had a drink in her hand and a serious look on her face. She sat down next to Neal on the sofa.
“Steve and I were thinking,” she said. “Steve could use a little help around the place. Winter will be here before we know it and we have a lot of hay to put up, that sort of thing. We’d probably need to hire someone anyway, and as long as you’re here …”
“We couldn’t pay much,” Steve said. “But you can have the spare bedroom here, and the food is great.”
And so is the location, Neal thought.
“How about if I lived in that cabin up on the spur?” he asked.
The Mills laughed.
“You don’t want to live out there,” Peggy said. “It’s filthy, for one thing. It’s cold, it’s isolated …”
Well, I’m not going to be here long enough for it to get cold, Mrs. Mills, and isolation is just what I need to conduct my little search for Harley and Cody McCall.
“Neal might want some privacy, Peggy,” said Steve.
“There’s not even any electricity. Just that old wood stove.”
“I’ll be fine,” Neal said. “And I’ll work for the rent on th
e place and a few supplies to get me started. I have a little money in the bank at home I can have sent out.”
“Are you sure?” Peggy asked.
“I think this is what I’ve been looking for,” Neal said.
Or it’s damn close, anyway.
4
The next morning Steve and Neal drove into town to get supplies.
They didn’t have to do a lot of walking around; the town had one store. It didn’t have a name—people just called it “the store.” Even Evelyn Phillips called it “the store,” and she had owned it for thirty years. She figured that if another store ever came to town, then she’d give her store a name, although Steve allowed that if that unlikely situation ever came to pass, people would probably still call Evelyn’s store “the store” and call the other store “the other store.”
Evelyn also owned the town’s one restaurant across the street. It even had a name: Wong’s. Wong’s had red paper lanterns, Chinese fans on the walls, and a big dragon textile inside the front door and it didn’t serve a smidgen of Chinese food. Hadn’t since Wong died back in 1968 and Wong’s wife and children eagerly moved back to San Francisco. Evelyn bought the restaurant and, at the prompting of grateful customers, changed the menu. Everyone had always liked the decor, though, so that stayed.
“Worst Chinese food in the West,” Evelyn told Neal.
“God awful,” Steve agreed.
She hadn’t gone in much for decorations in the store, though. People didn’t come in to browse, they came in to pick up things they needed. The men who came in just wanted to get their stuff and get back to work—or steal an hour at Brogan’s. The women had already memorized the inventory, so they spent their time in the store talking—exchanging news and gossip. Most of the places outside of town didn’t have telephones yet, so the store was the place for a catch-up with the neighbors.
With Steve’s advice, Neal picked out a couple of pairs of heavy jeans, three denim work shirts, a pair of work boots, and a hat. Steve had cajoled him into trying on a cowboy hat, but Neal looked so embarrassed—with good reason, Steve agreed—that they settled for an Allis-Chalmers ball cap. Then they picked out some canned goods, cooking stuff, frozen meat, and that sort of thing.