Cheatgrass

by Bart Paul

  “I don’t see how,” she said. “He didn’t have it yet.”

  We heard a noise outside and she leaned toward the window to look, as twitchy and watchful as Ofelia Cruz. It was getting dusky and she flipped on the yard light.

  “Any word from the husband?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Worried?”

  “Not really, but since Monday …”

  “Kip armed?”

  “No,” she said, like that was some crazy notion. “He’s in awesome shape. I don’t think he’s ever even touched a gun since his discharge.” She looked like she was trying hard not to cry.

  “Tommy, I feel so helpless.”

  She kept staring out the window. It was just the two gym rats riding back from their circle through the steers.

  “You want me to make sure that pair of top hands get their horses squared away?”

  “That would be great,” she said. “I’m full of sand and need a shower. We can talk more at dinner, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  I watched her unpin her hair and shake it out as she moseyed down the hall. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t wish I was following her. She began unbuttoning her cowboy shirt before she disappeared into the bedroom. I went outside with my beer and sat on the steps watching the weightlifters unsaddle and lead their horses to the corral gate.

  “Some guys think they’re pretty damn funny,” one said.

  “Some asshole,” said the other one.

  They’d passed me at a distance so I didn’t know who said what, not that I cared. They looked like they had things handled, but I waited a long while out on the steps just enjoying the evening and how it smelled, and the sounds of those two horses running across the empty corral on their way out to the pasture to join their pals. I was a long way from Georgia and glad of it—for now. I texted Mom that I was having dinner at Sarah’s, though she’d probably figured that out hours ago.

  A new black GMC pickup with a destroyed tailgate pulled into the yard and two big cowboys got out, joking with the two ironpumpers. The cowboys looked either Indian or Hawaiian. It was hard to tell from a distance. They were semi-drunk, and the gunsels would have a ways to go to catch up. The buzzards in the treetop were just dark shadows against the last of the light, but the slamming of a truck door made the shadows shift and sway in the branches. The tailgate of the cowboys’ truck was bent in half at the middle like somebody had tried to unhook a gooseneck trailer and floored the GMC forward without lowering the tailgate first. Could happen to anybody, I suppose. Finally I went back inside.

  “I thought you’d got cold feet again and headed for the airport,” Sarah said. She was standing at the stove in shorts and a tee shirt and wet hair, whipping up some fajitas and not looking at me. The shower seemed to have perked her up.

  “I’m not going anywhere, Sarah.”

  She finally turned and looked me over.

  “God, Tommy,” she said. “How long’s it been since you slept?”

  “I slept on the plane this morning.”

  “In the fluorescent light you look all gray,” she said.

  “I figured getting here quick was more important than a week’s sleep.”

  She gave me kind of a sweet look then and dug at the skillet with a spatula, moving the food around in the oil and looking out the window into the yard from time to time. She set plates on the table with tortillas and salsa and hot sauce, limes and guacamole, then brought out two more beers and we sat down.

  “Surprised?” she said.

  “At what?”

  “Dinner,” she said. “I know what you and Lester used to say. That I’d better marry some camp-cookin’ cowboy like one of you two young rascals or I’d starve to death, I was such a lazy hand in the kitchen.”

  “I never said any such thing.”

  She looked happy for about half a second.

  “Well I’m glad to hear you never said that to my wife, Tom.” It was Kip Isringhausen, standing just inside the front door watching us eat.

  Chapter Four

  He was shorter than I remembered. There was no telling how long he’d been standing there. Sarah got up and gave him a kiss. He still had that brushed back goatee and mustache like some serious young buckaroo, but he wore a business suit with gator-hide Luccheses and looked prosperous as hell. They talked for a minute between themselves while I fiddled with a tortilla. When I looked back, she had her hand on his chest the way wives and husbands do. Then Kip came over and shook my hand like we were old saddle pals.

  “It’s sure good to see you back safe, Tom,” he said. “I know Sarah was one worried girl when she heard you were wounded again, right, doll?”

  Sarah brought out a third plate then sat down without looking at us. “Yup,” she said.

  “Sarah said you were in town,” he said. “So what brings you home?”

  “I was visiting my mom. She just moved into a new place at the Marine housing unit a couple of miles from here.”

  I wasn’t sure exactly why I was lying. But then I still wasn’t sure exactly what Sarah had said to him about the old boyfriend thing either.

  “Well, I know you and your folks were like family to Sarah and Dave,” he said. “I bet you’ve got your own opinion on this whole sad mess.”

  “Sarah was just filling me in.”

  He went over to the kitchen and built himself a Maker’s Mark on the rocks. He held up the bottle and I nodded yeah.

  “I thought you were having dinner up at Adele’s, hon,” Sarah said.

  “Senator Edmunds got stuck in conference,” he said. He studied me for a minute. “I’m working with a guy I know in the Nevada legislature trying to fund a bi-state jobs program for returning vets here in the Reno-Bishop corridor. I got a lot of serious inquiries on my website.” He handed me the whiskey and sat down with us at the table. Then he held his glass up in my direction. “It’s the least I can do.”

  “Kip got a medical discharge from the Marines nine years ago,” Sarah said, “He was trapped in a fire during a training exercise at Parris Island.”

  “Must have been bad.”

  Kip waved it off. “None of that seems very important on account of the past few days.”

  Still, he yanked off his tie and opened his shirt so we could see some nasty burn scars across his six-pack. I just sipped my whiskey. I wasn’t about to drop my Wranglers and show him mine.

  “Well, you made it to Afghanistan for the both of us,” he said.

  I drank some more bourbon and just nodded while he tucked in his shirt. I hated crap like that.

  Sarah said she wanted to talk about something nice during dinner, which pretty much left out war or pain or death. We settled in to her fajita burritos. She was always a good cook, no matter what she said. We talked about basic training and water rights and different whiskies and where I bought the white cowboy shirt I was wearing until the food was about gone. Unlike most folks in that country, Kip didn’t talk at all about horses. When Sarah brought up the young sorrel I’d ridden that afternoon, he acted bored. He was clueless that the horse had been something between the two of us, and she was only mentioning it to let me know she was still pissed I’d left. He asked if I wanted my drink freshened and I said sure.

  “So when are you guys going to gather your cows off your desert permit?”

  “That’s Sarah’s deal,” Kip said. “I think it’s coming up fast though, right, doll?”

  “We have to have them off the permit by the end of the month,” she said.

  “Like I said,” Kip said, “coming up fast.”

  “If I’m still around then, I’ll give you a hand. I always wanted to ride that country.”

  Kip looked at me like he never figured he’d ever have to see me again, much less have me hanging around for a week or two. He took a plastic bowl from me and spooned out more guacamole, though I saw he hadn’t eaten much of anything. He started talking again about Dave and what the options were, whether Sarah wanted him t
o or not. He was definitely a guy who liked to talk.

  “Since there’s no sign of struggle and nothing Sarah can find that was taken,” he said, “the FBI guy said we can probably rule out what he called a crime of opportunity.” He sipped his bourbon but kept semi-ignoring his fajitas. “You know, home invasion, a burglary gone wrong, that kind of thing.”

  “But somebody took Dad’s new truck,” Sarah said.

  “Well,” Kip said. “Maybe. They said it might turn up if he got forgetful and wondered off.”

  “Truck could’ve been taken even if his disappearance had been a planned thing.”

  “You could be right, I guess,” he said.

  “So if it was for anger or hate, did he have any enemies? And if it was for money, who stands to gain?”

  “Dave Cathcart had nothing but friends,” Kip said.

  “Tommy was wondering if Dad wanting to sell his water rights had anything to do with all this,” Sarah said.

  “Nobody kills someone over water,” Kip said.

  “In ranch country it used to be considered a leading cause of death. Right up there with fighting over women.”

  Kip was stone quiet for a second, wondering if he’d been insulted. Then he laughed and looked at the two of us like he’d caught us flirting. “I’d rather fight over a woman any day. How ’bout you, Tom?”

  “That would be way past my pay grade.”

  Sarah got up looking tense and started clearing the plates.

  “Well, I still think Dave just wandered off,” Kip said.

  “If he had,” Sarah said, “the vultures would let us know.”

  “So, what’s the deal with those ugly suckers?”

  “They’re migratory,” she said, “so they’re on their way north. But they’re way, way further north than they should be. I looked them up. They’re black vultures—Coragyps atratus.”

  “Never heard of them.”

  “None of us had,” Kip said.

  “They range as far south as Chile or Tierra del Fuego,” Sarah said, “but traditionally no further north than, say, Nogales.”

  “What the hell are they doing up here?”

  “It’s crazy,” she said. “It has something to do with droughts, flooding in Arizona, winter habitat and all that.” She looked out the kitchen window. “We’d seen them once before. More than twenty years ago when I was just a kid. Then two days before Dad … before he disappeared, they show up again.” Her voice got faint. “They landed in the same tree they took over all those years ago. Like they’d only been gone an hour.” Then she couldn’t talk any more.

  Kip didn’t seem to notice. “They give me the creeps,” he said. “I wanted to take a shotgun and clean them out, but Sarah wouldn’t let me. She says there’s some law says you can’t kill ’em. Isn’t that so goddamn typical?”

  “Federal law. 1918.”

  “Go, Tom,” Kip said. Then he got an edge in his voice like maybe I was messing with him. “How the hell would you know that?”

  “You pack in deer hunters, you got to remind them that some scavengers are off limits.”

  Sarah stood up. She looked like she was going to cry.

  “I shouldn’t have brought it up,” she said. “I’ll be right back.” She disappeared down the hall.

  Kip tossed down the rest of his drink. We could hear Sarah crying then a door shutting.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” he said.

  That sort of surprised me.

  “I worry about her,” he said. “I mean, how do you handle it if there was someone out there who hated your father enough to do him harm? I can’t imagine losing a father.”

  “Yeah. Gotta be hard.”

  “But she’s tough,” he said. “I can’t tell you how tough that girl is.”

  He freshened his drink and held up the bottle, and I shook my head no. Sarah came back in, her face bright like she’d doused it with ice water.

  “Tom and me were talking about his deployment as a sniper,” Kip said.

  “Which one?” Sarah said. “He’s had so many.”

  “Dave said you were big stuff as a sniper,” he said. “Some kind of hero. He sounded real proud of you.”

  “Just a job.”

  “I’m trying to picture you in your ghillie suit,” Kip said, “lying still for hours till you made your shot.”

  “Ghillie suit?” Sarah said.

  “Yeah,” Kip said. “It’s a super camouflage outfit. Sticks and rags and native foliage so Tom here would look like that scarecrow from the Oz movie—except with an M-one-ten. That about right?”

  “Actually I always thought guys wearing them looked like an old hay bale popped open and left out in the weather.” I was surprised he was so up on all the sniper stuff. “And I like the old bolt-action M-twenty-four myself.”

  “Why the hell?”

  “More like my deer rifle.”

  “You’re a crazy bastard,” he said. “Did you make your own camouflage suit?” he said. “I read some guys make their own.”

  “Maybe should’ve, but I never used one. Some places you’d have to make one out of sand.”

  “You two are pathetic,” Sarah said. “Like a couple of little boys.” She went back to rinsing plates in the kitchen.

  “Any chance of a redeploy when you get back to Benning?” he said.

  “Not unless I begged for it.”

  Sarah clanked a dish so hard on the sink I thought she’d busted it. Kip looked clueless. He pointed to my empty glass.

  “So how do you like that?” he said. “The Maker’s Mark?”

  “It’s good. Tastes sort of like Wild Turkey.”

  “I told Sarah the exact same thing,” he said, “but even smoother. And I like it totally better than that gnarly old Jack Daniel’s.”

  “Oh, Uncle Jack and I go way back. That and Crown Royal. Sour mash, Canadian, it’s all good.”

  “But this is ninety proof,” he said. “More bang for the buck.”

  “One way to look at it.”

  “So what did you drink in Kabul?” he said.

  “Blood of my enemies, mostly.”

  He was pretty sure I was trifling with him then.

  “Okay, smart guy,” he said. “You were deployed in both places. What’s the biggest difference between the terrain in Iraq and Afghanistan?”

  “Afghanistan’s taller. Mountains look just like Lone Pine.”

  He sat quiet for a minute clenching his jaw and looking at his phone. Then he gulped down the last of his whiskey and hopped out of his chair. “Wow, buckaroos and buckarettes. How’d it get so damn late? I gotta get a jump on tomorrow.” He went to the sink and grabbed Sarah’s hand. “So, Tom, can you let yourself out?”

  Sarah looked poleaxed. He just pulled her out of that kitchen right past me, heading for the hallway.

  “Make sure you come see us before you head back east.” He looked all happy again. Then he led Sarah off down the hall and that was that.

  I stood there a second feeling like a prize tool. Then I got the hell out of that place.

  I walked toward Dave’s dark ranch house in the yard light’s cottonwood shadows. On a bare limb at the top of the one cottonwood I could see a single vulture silhouetted against the sky. I went up the steps to Dave’s porch and pulled off the scraps of yellow police tape draped over the rail, just mad as hell. I was wishing I’d helped Sarah clear the damn table and not knowing why I didn’t, and wishing I’d stayed in Georgia and was damned sure why I hadn’t. And that “buckarette” bullshit was something Lester used to say that Kip must’ve heard from Sarah, so that just galled the crap out of me, too.

  Parked next to my old Dodge there was a new Diesel Ram 3500 Dually. They were pretty much the exact same truck, with barely twenty-five years and fifty-five thousand dollars separating them. Kip might have parked so far from his doublewide so we wouldn’t hear him drive up and he could slip in quiet the way he did—like he wanted to see if Sarah was up to something with me. Or he might
have wanted to show me that his was bigger and more pricey than mine. Or, maybe he was as good a guy as everybody said he was. Maybe he was just stopping by to make sure his weightlifting pals were squared away, all tucked in for the night. Maybe it was me that was acting like an asshole.

  Either way, he’d had the last word, and I still didn’t have a clue what I could do to help Sarah find her dad. I shoved the bunches of police tape in my truckbed under the spare. As I drove off I noticed that the pickup of the two Indian cowboys was gone.

  Chapter Five

  Fifteen minutes later I pulled into the Marine housing unit, creeping up a little drive and finding a place to park close to Burt’s apartment. It wasn’t yet ten and the place was quieting down fast, with lights going out all around me. Mom had given me her keys so I could let myself in. Their place was on the ground floor, facing back toward the main road. I turned a couple of keys before I found the right one. I don’t think she’d ever lived in a place before where she locked her doors.

  I stretched out on the bed she’d made up for me on the couch in the spare bedroom they used as an office and stared at the ceiling. I must have slept a bit because when I woke up it was after two. I got up and explored the little room but didn’t see many traces of what used to be my life. In the closet I found my dad’s old Remington .270 that he’d given me before he died. I turned off the light and set the rifle on the rug next to the couch so I could reach down and touch it if I felt like it. I looked at my phone to see if I’d missed a text from Captain Cruz. There was a message, but it was from Sarah from about eleven thirty that night. She said, Breakfast MT about 7? That would be the Mark Twain Café in Piute Meadows about forty miles south. I spelled out Affirmative and tried to get back to sleep without looking at the message from her that brought me there, and without thinking of Sarah and Kip behind that closed door. I had about as much success as you’d figure.

  I was up early for coffee with Mom and Burt. A young Marine packer with a shaved head and tattooed sleeves named Eddie showed up to carpool Burt to the base, and I could see folks in uniform outside starting their cars in the predawn. Even after we talked mules over more coffee for a bit, I was still on the road by six. Forty-five minutes later I’d passed through Rickey Junction on my way out of Shoshone Valley, wound through West Frémont Canyon, passed the Sonora turnoff leading to the Marine base, cruised down the slope from Hell Gate Pass through the Basque sheep outfit, and then rolled out into Piute Meadows. I could see the headquarters of Dominion Land & Cattle straight ahead, and the old 1860s house under the poplars where the highway took a hard turn to the left. I got closer and could see the new tin roof on the fresh-painted house. Before Dominion bought the place from John Wesley Allison’s widow, the house was where Allison’s ranch foreman lived. From four years before I was born until I was almost nineteen and he died, the foreman had been my dad, and that house was the only home I ever knew. It was behind me in a flash as I made the turn and headed straight across the pastures into Piute Meadows two miles ahead.