by Bart Paul
I guess Mom caught me looking and began to chatter, as if that would keep me from thinking of Sarah and Dave and my dad, and all the rest that was gone.
“It’s only a matter of time until this looks as horrible as Hoffstatler’s,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean Dave was planning on selling his water rights, too,” she said.
I couldn’t think of a thing to say to that.
“Burt’s kept your old Dodge Ram in good order,” Mom said. She sounded happy to be talking about him. “He starts it up every week or so, and he changed the oil when he heard you were coming home.”
“It’s not exactly home.”
“Well, it’s the best I can do right now,” she said, sort of snappish.
“Okay. I’m sorry. Thank Burt for me.”
“You can thank him yourself,” she said. “Be nice, Tommy. He’s a good guy, and he wants to be your friend.”
“I know. We knew each other when he was packing out of the Summers Lake outfit when I was in high school and I packed for Harvey. Before Burt went back into the service. He’s okay.”
By now Cathcart’s was behind us. She was quiet for about as long as she could stand.
“I try not to compare Burt to your dad,” she said. “He’s a fine man, but he’s not Leland Smith.”
“Who the hell is?”
We drove farther south toward Rickey Junction until I saw a cluster of apartments and cars on a bench above the highway on the right. Mom slowed down and pulled up the access road to the Marine housing complex. It just depressed the crap out of me.
“It’s funny,” she said, “but the last two months is the first time in my life I haven’t lived on a ranch.”
We got out of the car and went inside their place to meet Burt. He was a big, curly-headed Irishman in black-rimmed glasses who, from his years in the saddle and all the times he got tossed out of one, carried himself more like a packer than a Marine. We said hi and drank iced tea and BS’ed about folks we knew and about my latest little hoo-rah with a Taliban IED, and what my plans were now that I could get out of the service again if I wanted. Burt had been in Desert Storm and got himself a Purple Heart while he was there, so I wasn’t telling him much he didn’t already know. He was trying too hard, but he was doing it for Mom so I couldn’t complain. I figured he might be a few years younger than her. He called her Deb and she called him Hon and she looked girlish around him and happier than she had in years, so I guess her smile was because of more than just the damn car. I sure as hell hadn’t made her happy since I got back from my second tour—before I re-upped for the third.
After a while I told them I best be getting on down the road to see Sarah. Burt told me my truck was topped off with diesel and ready to go. I thanked him and we shook, and I gave Mom a squeeze and said I’d call when I knew my supper plans. My old Dodge Ram hadn’t really got any better looking with age and appeared pretty shabby parked next to Burt’s immaculate F-250. I’d had that Dodge about ten years, give or take, since I was seventeen, and it was plenty used when I got it. It needed a paint job and probably new tires from all the sitting around, but it was so familiar I could hardly stand it.
I sort of poked around in it before I fired it up. The dash was dusty and cracked, and there was a dirty pair of Ray-Bans hanging from the mirror that had belonged to my partner Lester Wendover who’d got killed almost two summers before, and a topo map of the Toiyabe National Forest under the visor. Behind the seat I found a Filson’s catalogue, a copy of Range magazine with a Kurt Markus photo of a Nevada cavvy on the cover, some wire pliers, jumper cables, and a mostly empty box of Remington .270 soft points for my dad’s old deer rifle, plus a red silk wild rag of Lester’s that made me think of Captain Cruz’s toenail polish. The wild rag had been folded so it wasn’t as dusty as you’d think. I shook it out, three foot square, then folded it crossways, wrapped it once and a half around my neck and tied it on. I caught a look at myself in the driver’s side window glass and almost choked, it reminded me of Lester so. But if you couldn’t see me hobble about and didn’t know any better, you’d almost think I’d never left that country. I fired up the pickup, put on my own Ray-Bans, and drove off to see Sarah Cathcart.
Chapter Two
Whatever it was that Sarah thought I could do to find her father, I didn’t think I was the one to do it. We had gotten so close and then so crossways after Lester was killed and I told her I was reenlisting that I didn’t see a way to mend what was pretty much all my doing. Me feeling sorry as hell didn’t make the world over.
I turned off the northbound Reno Highway onto the gravel lane about ten minutes later. I was just creeping along, figuring what I would say and wondering why I hadn’t stayed at Fort Benning. I pulled up under the cottonwoods before driving on to the house and just took it all in. It was a really fine spring day, and I’d forgotten what a nice clean place this ranch was, small and well-kept, and how much I’d missed this country—the look of the horses in the corrals, the sound of a calf bawling and a dog barking, the breeze off the mountains, all that crap. I remembered the text on my phone that said it was from Cruz, Ofelia. All she’d written was, Where are you, Lover? I texted back, Home. I tried not to look at old messages, especially the one from Sarah that brought me here.
At the far end of the ranchyard just past the barn I could see a new doublewide mobile home that wasn’t there two years before. Probably newlywed central. Sarah’s Silverado pickup was parked alongside, and I gave that end of the yard a wary eye. Behind an open-walled shed at the near end of the yard I saw a ratty travel trailer that I didn’t remember either, and a beat-up Chevy Blazer parked next to it. It wasn’t like Dave to have such junky-looking equipment on his place. Two men stepped out of the trailer and looked me over as they walked out to the open shed. I started to laugh. The two were pumping iron. They had a whole weight set in the shed—bench press, heavy bag, tower, and the works, and these boys were huffing and grunting through their reps in the early afternoon like they had nothing better to do. I laughed because on most ranches a guy would be working that time of day—digging a posthole, bucking some bales, running some cattle through the chutes, cleaning out an irrigation ditch, welding a backhoe bucket, or maybe shoeing a horse. Some damn thing. Anything. There’s too many ways to break a sweat on a ranch that a guy doesn’t have to look very far, so these two just struck me funny.
One was short and shaved-headed with a goatee hanging off his chin as long and skinny as a hot dog. The other was taller and scowly like he thought he was something out of an action comic. Neither one was Sarah’s new husband as I remembered him, but then I’d only seen that guy once or twice. These two looked up sort of unpleasant-like as I drove by and parked over at the house that Dave had vanished from. I could see torn pieces of yellow police tape blowing along the porch that no one had bothered to take down.
I got out and stood in the cottonwood shade in a warm breeze. Then the shade seemed to flutter and shift, and I heard a slapping, flapping sound. I looked up and saw half a dozen buzzards at the very top of the tree. One was spreading its wings, and the rest sat silent, looking down. The wingspan looked to be at least five feet, and it gave me the fantods. Buzzards are common in that country, with their red bald heads and featherless necks, and they’ll take over a cottonwood and after a time they’ll kill it with their droppings. But these weren’t like anything I’d ever seen. Their heads were as black as their bodies so you couldn’t see their eyes, and they looked like shadows against the sky.
There was a chain-link kennel alongside the porch with a half-grown blue merle Aussie wagging his stump at me. I let him out and he ran past me and jumped the steps to examine a bowl by the front door. He licked the empty bowl, then he watched me as I climbed the steps. I sat down on the top one, facing the yard, and let the pup crawl over my lap while I waited for Sarah to get home from work.
She pulled up in her sheriff’s SUV about twenty minutes later. She didn
’t get out of the car right away. I couldn’t tell if she was on her radio or phone or only postponing the inevitable. She finally got out and just stood there in her deputy uniform and sunglasses. Her hair was pinned up and she looked grim-faced, but she still fairly took my breath away. When I came down the steps, she walked up and hugged me and started to cry. Then she pulled back and slugged me in the chest as hard as she could. The punch like to knock me down.
I had to catch my wind before I could say a word. “I’m here, just like you asked.”
“I know,” she said. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “I know there are some things I can always count on you for. A couple, anyway.”
We stood there and looked each other over, just as awkward as could be. I don’t really know what I expected.
“It’s good to see you,” she said. “You don’t look any the worse. In those clothes it looks like you never left.”
“Yeah, well. I’m so sorry, Sarah. Tell me what you want me to do.”
She didn’t say anything, just walked past me up the steps and into the house, and I followed. I never was very good at sitting in somebody’s living room making bullshit small talk and this was the second time I was trying it in an hour, camped on the edge of Dave’s recliner with my hat on my knee, drinking coffee that Sarah’d made and feeling awkward as hell. I listened as she told me firsthand about the morning Dave disappeared.
“I’d just come off a graveyard shift,” she said. “It was my turn in the rotation. Dad had said he’d have breakfast waiting when I got home. Since his heart attack, I check on him every day as soon as I get off work, no matter what time. But after I got married, I …” She looked around the room. “I didn’t live here anymore. Kip and I got that new mobile home. For a fresh start. Anyway, when I came in, I saw Dad had breakfast ready. Biscuits in the oven, gravy in the pan, coffee poured and hot. But Dad was gone. Just … gone. His heart meds weren’t touched. I looked and looked, and then I finally saw a single drop of blood in the kitchen.” She took a breath. “It tested out as the dog’s, but I didn’t know that. I thought it must be Dad’s.” She looked over at me just as clear-eyed as can be. “I drink too much coffee. You want a beer, instead?”
“Sure.”
She got up and took my cup into the kitchen. I remembered this room from when I was in high school and I’d offer to help at Dave’s brandings because I knew that Sarah would be home from college. She and her dad and some neighbors and Lester and me, all smelling like burned hair and hide, blood, sweat, and manure, all eating the lunch that Sarah had cooked the night before, sitting here, talking over the bawling of the cattle with our plates on our knees, like Sarah and I had just been doing.
She handed me a beer and plopped back down on the couch across from me. The beer was Sierra Nevada. That would be an upgrade for Dave.
“I called our office in Piute Meadows right away, then I waited outside,” she said. “I couldn’t stand to be in the house alone. It seemed to take Mitch and Jack Harney forever to get here from Piute Meadows. They worked up a missing person’s file and Jack contacted the FBI field office in Sacto.” She was picking up speed. “They offered any assistance we asked for, like cell-phone tracking, forensic accounting, and kidnapping protocols if it turns out to be that. And they had a Nevada guy from the South Lake Tahoe office here by the afternoon since those guys were closer. Mitch isn’t exactly the poster boy for interagency cooperation, but the Feds were kinda reassuring to me, so I was glad to have them on board. Since I’m law enforcement, they were super helpful. The guy from Tahoe even knows who you are, and that you and I … you know. Anyway, by then I’d got hold of Kip, so he was back from Reno.”
I must’ve given her a funny look.
“He’d spent the night up there at some nutritional supplement convention,” she said. “He’s into bodybuilding big-time. That’s why he moved those two guys in a couple of days ago to be like security guards here at the ranch in case we’re dealing with foul play or … god knows what.”
“Okay.”
“Quit the Mister Inscrutable crap,” she said. “Kip figured as long as I was working graveyard, I wouldn’t miss him.”
“Did you?”
“Don’t make me sorry I asked you to come.”
“So why did you?”
“I haven’t felt safe from that moment I knew Dad was gone till I saw you sitting on the porch just now,” she said. “It’s not rational, but there you have it.”
“Fair enough.”
“You have a certain reputation,” she said. “You scare people.” She looked at me over the top of her beer and took a sip. “That can be a good thing. Even the FBI agent said so.”
“You got the whole county sheriff’s department behind you. Plus all these ironpumpers and the FBI. You don’t need me.”
She got up from the couch.
“Fine,” she said. “I don’t need you, and you don’t want to be needed. You think you can trouble yourself to help me tag some calves, then?”
“Okay.”
“Since Monday, I’m already behind on cow work,” she said.
“This time of year I don’t doubt it.”
“Even after his heart attack, Dad still put in a day’s work. Just let me change my clothes.”
She took the empties to the kitchen, circling me, keeping her distance, then headed out to the doublewide. I waited in the yard. When she came back, we walked out to the corrals with the ironpumpers watching us. It was midafternoon by now, breezy and nice. We walked amongst the milling horses, and she pointed out her Dad’s old roan rope-horse for me to ride as she caught hers, a classy bay mare I didn’t remember from before. I stopped to look at a big ratty-maned sorrel colt that was watching me walk through the bunch. Sarah stopped what she was doing to glare at me.
The sorrel was a five-year-old gelding out of Idaho I’d started for Sarah’s dad before I left. It had been his surprise for Sarah. The horse looked like his winter coat hadn’t quite shed out or felt the touch of a brush in a while, and he was unshod and rough-footed. Sarah watched me looking him over as he and I got reacquainted.
“I quit riding him, okay?” she said. “A while ago, actually.”
“Mind if I use him instead of Dave’s roan?”
“Do what you want,” she said. “I haven’t touched him in over a year. How long has it been since you’ve been horseback?”
“Over a year.”
“You’ll be quite the pair,” she said. “He might just be a tad fresh. You might get yourself piled.”
“If you want, I’ll trim these feet before we go.”
“Suit yourself,” she said.
This whole homecoming deal was going along great. I haltered the sorrel and followed Sarah out of the corral. I gypped him around a bit waiting for her to find me nippers and a rasp before I tied him in the barn. It just took ten or so minutes to even up his hooves and take off the flares as Sarah saddled up, not saying a word. That horse had always been good about his feet. I looked up and saw those weightlifters still watching us from the shed. When I had the sorrel squared away I poked around in the saddle room for the rig I’d left there but couldn’t find it. I hoped the husband or these two honyockers hadn’t borrowed it or hocked it or something worse. I did see a brand-new basket-stamped Wade from Tip’s in Winnemucca on a saddle rack. The letters KIP were tooled into the cantle leather, and it didn’t look the slightest bit used.
“You can use Kip’s rig if you like it so much,” Sarah said.
“I’d rather use my dad’s if it’s still here.”
“It’s in the house—in my old bedroom,” she said. “It’ll take me a minute to load the tagging bag if you think you need to go get it.”
I hustled over to the house. I knew right where her room was but I’d never set foot in it, though I’d imagined doing just that a thousand times. It was spare and no nonsense, but next to a desk was my dad’s old saddle with the Visalia tree sitting on a wooden rack, as clean and well
-oiled as the day it arrived from the maker in Oregon and my dad picked it up at the Greyhound desk in Piute Meadows back when I was probably still trying to pedal my Hot Wheels across a rocky barnyard. And my chinks were hanging off the saddlehorn like I’d just left them there myself. I stood there taking it all in, looking at her stuff, and afraid to wonder why she kept my rig in here with it. She had ordinary things, like a poster from the Elko Cowboy Poetry Gathering a few years back and a few framed pictures and ribbons on the wall. College rodeo stuff. She kicked ass in the barrels and had the pictures to prove it. A couple of years back, I’d given her a pair of teamroping buckles for safekeeping that Dad and I’d won at a Fourth of July jackpot when I was thirteen. I looked around for those, but I didn’t see a trace.
There were two photographs on the desk. One was of her mom Lorena, who died over twenty years before when Sarah was little. You could see where Sarah got her looks, and why Dave had never remarried. The other picture was of Sarah, Lester Wendover, and me with some friends at the Deer Hunters’ Dance in Piute Meadows the fall Lester and I graduated high school. I don’t remember even being in any picture, but there we were. Lester is standing between Sarah and me wearing his big hat and a plaid shirt and the red wild rag I was wearing now. Sarah’s boyfriend that month is standing next to her. He was a ski instructor and French, and we all hated him on sight. Everyone is laughing at the camera except Sarah and me. We’re both looking past Lester and the boyfriend at each other, like there was nobody else in the picture, like nobody else existed.