Cheatgrass

by Bart Paul

  “Do you know if he talked to anybody else?”

  “Couldn’t tell you,” he said.

  “You still have those texts on your phone?”

  “Sure, I guess.”

  “Can I see ’em?”

  “Don’t see why not,” he said. “What for?”

  “To see if somebody was scamming you.”

  This notion seemed to trouble him. He fiddled with his phone and finally handed it to me.

  “Take care of these messages, Hoyt. The FBI will want to see ’em.”

  “Well, shit,” he said. “If you say so.”

  “Did Dave ever get any money?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “If he ain’t dead, once he sends in the paperwork, it’s a process. You’re thinking like maybe Dave went ‘poof’ before that text got sent?”

  Out of nowhere Hoyt started telling me about a deer hunting trip he, Dave, and my dad took in the Ruby Mountains before I was born. I’d heard that story before, too. We were still sitting on the tailgate, and he was right at the part of the story where the mountain lion sauntered out of the range teepee. Then Hoyt’s mind meandered back to wondering what happened to his missing creek.

  I looked over my shoulder at the four-wheeler. “Looks like you’re planning on tracking it to the source.”

  “I don’t guess I got any choice,” he said. “You wanna give me a hand unloading that sumbitch? It weighs a young ton.”

  He had a pair of two-by-twelves he used as a ramp. We anchored them and winched the four-wheeler down with a come-along he kept in the cab. He said the truck belonged to the government, but the four-wheeler and the come-along were all his.

  We got it out on the dead grass and he fired it up. He checked his spare gas can while I stowed his two-by-twelves. He throttled down and pointed to a ridge off to the southeast.

  “See that green V of the canyon mouth with the yellowish burned-off mountain behind it?” he said. “That’s False Spring Canyon.” He secured a coat and more water bottles and jerky on the four-wheeler. “I might get back late, but I’ll call you in the morning. You don’t hear from me, send in the cavalry.”

  “You worried?”

  “Don’t laugh. Hell, folks say I’m the kiss of death for ranching properties, and don’t I know it. Lucky somebody hasn’t plugged me by now.” He sounded jokey, but he looked dead serious. “Still, it’s a job-a’-work and if I don’t get to it, somebody else will.”

  “I don’t hear from you, the cavalry it is.”

  “Good to see you, kid. Say hi to your mom.”

  He revved that sucker and bounced out across the dead field going about eight miles an hour. I sat the roan and watched him clear the pasture and start climbing through the sagebrush. At the rate he was going, I wondered if he would even make it to the mouth of the canyon before dark. While I watched, I texted Kip Isringhausen. I told him that I could meet him at the Sporting Goods in Piute Meadows in an hour and a half. Then Dave’s horse and I rattled our hocks back to the ranch.

  I was trotting easy toward the barn and saw a car parked in front of the ironpumpers’ trailer. It was an old American sedan with more primer than paint—from a distance maybe a sixties muscle car. Maybe a GTO. A guy came out of the trailer, a big muscled-up guy bending low. He was shaved-headed with a stubble goatee and a bright white tee shirt and prison tattoos on his arms and neck. When I rode closer, I saw that the car was a GTO. The guy saw me and grinned. His teeth were white as his tee shirt.

  “Goddamn Tommy Smith,” he said. He spoke soft, but I heard him across the yard.

  “How’s it hanging, Jedediah, you old peckerwood?”

  “Can’t complain,” he said. “I heard you were back. Young Tommy Smith, back from the wars.”

  “What brings you here?”

  “Looking for the two assbites who live here,” he said.

  “They owe you money?”

  “Something like that.” He laughed. Then he nodded north. “See you huddling with old Hoyt out there in the tall grass.”

  “You know how it is. When you been away, you got to say hi to everybody once you come back or they get their feelings hurt. Like you when you got back from Soledad.”

  “Tell me about it,” he said. “Everybody wants a piece of you.”

  “They want to share those good times.”

  We both laughed at that. It was pretty common knowledge he’d had a bad time in Soledad.

  “You should watch it, brother,” Jedediah said. “Old Hoyt’s not very popular. You may not want to be seen with bad companions.”

  “Little late for that. What’s wrong with Hoyt?”

  “Why, he’s the devil,” Jedediah said. “Tempting honest ranch folk with easy money, then sucking the life out of their land like some water vampire.”

  “Your concern for the traditional life is touching as hell.”

  “The old ways are the best,” he said. “That’s why I stick to selling weed. I’m just an old-fashioned guy.”

  “Right. Weed. And guns and meth and stolen cars.”

  He laughed in spite of himself. “Been a couple of years since I saw you. Sorry to hear about Lester. He was hella fun to fight with.”

  “He could take either one of us.”

  “And did,” Jedediah said. “Repeatedly.” He got a cagey look. “So what brings you here? Still sniffing after that hot Sarah C?”

  “Old habits.”

  “You staying here at her place?” he said. “Just you and her—and that new husband?”

  “Nope. Only checking cows for her. I’m staying at my mom’s just up the road.”

  “The Marine housing unit,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “That Sarah,” he said. “A righteously fine piece.” He gave me a real cocky look. “Or so I hear.”

  “Watch it.”

  He walked over to the GTO and opened the door. “Take it easy, brother. You don’t have Lester to back you the way you did in high school.” He gave me a little salute and started to get in the car.

  “Yo, Jed.”

  He stopped halfway in.

  “Give my best to Randy Ragazino.”

  Jedediah turned slow with his mouth open, almost like he was panting. Then he tried to turn it into a smile. “So, soldier boy. You think you can take me?”

  “I guess we’ll see.”

  He semi-laughed. Then he got behind the wheel of the GTO, fired that monster up, and stuck his head out the window. “I guess we will, Tommy. I guess we surely will.”

  I unsaddled the roan and turned him into the corral, then got in my truck and drove down to Piute Meadows.

  Chapter Nine

  I was looking at a long text from Captain Cruz. I barely got it read before I lost service in the canyon. She said that a boy from Three Rivers, Michigan, just back to Benning from Kandahar had a meltdown and shot his wife and her tennis friend on the base before taking himself out. She ended with, Girl played with fire and got burned. Stories like that always depressed the hell out of me, and I wondered why someone who had seen what Ofelia had seen would even talk about such stuff. All I texted back was, How’s my car?

  I beat Kip to the Sporting Goods by half an hour and bought a box of .45 Remington Long Colts, a cheap cooler, and some ice and beer from Nick’s cute niece. Even with the text from Captain Cruz, I hadn’t given a single thought to smooth olive skin since I saw Sarah cooking fajitas in her shorts two days before.

  I was learning that Kip was one of the always-late people. Finally, the bell over the door jingled and in he came like now the party could start. Today he was decked out as Mister Buckaroo, with good quality boots, wild rag, vest, and palm leaf hat. He carried a zippered bag that I figured held all the stuff for his SIG.

  “Where to?” he said.

  “The point of the hill out towards Summers Creek.”

  “I’ll drive,” he said.

  “I got to stop in at Becky Tyree’s after, so why don’t you just follow me.” That was sort of th
e truth, but I could tell it didn’t make him happy.

  “Good enough,” he said. “I gotta make it short, too, ’cause I’m meeting that babe at the courthouse to cancel the colt gentling clinic. I think the first time I met you was at one of those clinics right before you went back into the army.”

  “Might have been somebody else.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “You’re a memorable character.”

  I climbed into my truck and headed out the Summers Lake road with Kip on my tail. I didn’t much like being a memorable character, leastwise not to him. He seemed to know too much about me already. A mile west of the Bonner & Tyree lane, I turned off the pavement onto a wagon road at the base of a sagebrush hill. I got the gate and pulled up and waited for him to close it. We drove out for half a mile till we got to an old dump against the slope. Kip looked at the scrap lumber, bits of broken equipment and rusty cans.

  “What’s this?” he said.

  “You said targets, but bottles and beer cans are more fun. You hit something, it jumps.”

  “Suits me,” he said. “From what I heard a couple of years ago, Tommy Smith hits something, it dies.”

  “Don’t believe everything you hear. I don’t.”

  He set his bag on a board and took out his gear. He had a slick little nylon holster for the 9mm, camo earmuffs from Cabelas, and a pricey pair of shooting glasses. I watched him Velcro the holster to his belt. He pulled a full magazine out of the bag, dropped it in his vest pocket, then took an empty magazine and loaded it with the nickel-plated rounds he’d bought from Nick. I got us a couple of Coors from my truck and handed him one. He opened it and scrunched his face.

  “How can you drink this fish piss?” he said.

  “Suits me.”

  I guzzled some as I took the cloth bag off the truck seat and pulled out the gun rig. I had to laugh at the look on his face when I broke out the box of .45s, flicked open the loading gate, and slipped five of those fat suckers into the cylinder, leaving the hammer on the empty chamber. I’d cleaned and oiled the Colt at Mom’s the night before, so I was good to go.

  “Where the hell did you find that relic?” he said.

  “Around.”

  “I can’t believe I brought my state-of-the-art Navy SEAL piece out to a real live dump,” he said.

  “Once upon a time this bad-boy was state of the art for the Army.” I took my skinning knife off my belt and slipped the sheath on the holster belt so everything would ride easier. Kip studied every move.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Custer’s army.”

  I buckled the gun rig on.

  “Can I see the knife?” he said.

  I held it out to him. He turned it over in his hand, reading the etched writing on the blade.

  “Puma Trail Guide. Bone handle—very cool,” he said. “Where’d you get it?”

  “Indian guy I packed with. Been to Vietnam. When I signed up he gave it to me for luck. And the handle? Stag, not bone.”

  “Whatever. The Indian ever kill a gook with it?”

  “I expect.”

  “You stick any towelheads?”

  “Nope.”

  “Come on,” he said. “Bet you did.”

  I could see him getting excited. I took the knife back. He shoved the fresh magazine into the SIG with the heel of his hand and patted his vest where he’d slipped the other, then set his beer on the hood of his truck and started rooting around in his bag again. I finished my beer and climbed up through the junk and lumber, setting bottles and cans and bits of tin up as targets once I was about twenty yards upslope. When I looked back, Kip was putting his earmuffs on, still watching everything I did. When I got a bit further on he shouted up at me.

  “What exactly did Sarah say to get you back here?”

  “She just asked, is all.”

  “I think you heard she’d moved out,” he said, “and you thought you were gonna come out here and snatch her right up.”

  “She’s back with you now.”

  “Hold that thought, dude,” he said.

  I was watching my footing on the old lumber then I heard boards rattle. I looked back. He’d pried out a section of rusted iron wagon-wheel rim. It was curved and about four feet long. Kip gripped the ends and pushed his hands together, bending the iron. He didn’t look to be straining much. He saw me looking and grinned, tossing the bent rim out in the sand. I turned back, making my way up through the piles of old boards. I heard him rack the slide on his SIG but I didn’t look up. I didn’t want to let him think he could get to me. He shouted again.

  “You could drill somebody out here and the corpse might not get found for years.”

  “Nice thought.”

  I just kept climbing. I was glad we had both our trucks with us. He might manage to shoot me, but he couldn’t drive both trucks out of there. I got to the front end of a red-rusted postwar Chevy when I heard the pop and ping of him glancing a round off the car fender. It was about six feet to my left, and the deflected bullet could’ve cut me down kneehigh. That’s when I did look up.

  “The hell?”

  Kip just looked curious. “What?” he said.

  “You know what, city boy. Shooting at somebody’s not very smart.”

  He pulled down his earmuffs. “What? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You just skimmed a round off that fender.”

  “No I didn’t,” he said.

  He grinned this terrific grin through that little beard, and I wanted to shoot him right then and get it over with. I settled for stepping over the broken boards to the fender. I ran my finger along the shiny crease in the old steel that 9mm round had made and held it up, covered with rust.

  “Right here, smartass.”

  “Oh,” Kip said. “That fender.” He pulled a bottle of Maker’s Mark from his bag and guzzled some. When he was done, he grinned up at me.

  “Had’ya going,” he said.

  This was either the most confident son of a bitch I’d ever met outside of combat or just flat batshit crazy. I wiped the rust on my jeans and started back across the boards. Then Kip put another round right through that fender about a foot from the first hit. The bullet made that steel ring. I finally turned and looked down at him.

  He was all fake surprise like he didn’t mean to do it, but he’d pulled the earmuffs back up over his ears and was grinning like he couldn’t wait to try it a third time. I jumped off the lumber into the sand and pulled the Colt, thumbing back the hammer as I raised that beast.

  “Safety one-oh-one, dipshit.”

  I squeezed one off at eye level, just showing off. The .45 made a louder, hollower bang than his 9mm, and it skittered that Coors can on his truck hood over the fence into the pasture, but not before Kip got a nice little beer mist. We stared at each other with our pistols in our hands, and I was half expecting him to up the ante. My god, he looked ready, rocking the SIG in his hand like dying would be all part of the game. Everything Sarah said about him at breakfast made sense. He grinned like it was all a huge joke—or like he was reading my mind.

  “You shoot that thing pretty good,” he said.

  “I was way off. I was aiming at your head.”

  “You’re a funny guy, Sergeant,” he said.

  When it seemed like we were done testing each other and he was back on planet Earth, I walked toward him. He pulled the Maker’s Mark from his bag and offered it to me. I took a drink and handed it back, then he took another. I told him that once he emptied each magazine we could compare the casings to see if there was any difference in the scoring between brass and nickel. I was just bullshitting. I had no clue if we could tell a bit of difference, but I wanted to see how far I could string him along.

  He reset his ear gear and stepped into a pretty fair combat stance with his hands in just the right position and took three quick shots. He hit one bottle twice, breaking it down to nothing and looking pleased.

  I turned sideways and sighted down that seven-and-a-half
inch barrel. This time I nicked my own empty Coors can and it flew off into the sagebrush. He took two more shots then waited for me, and we fell into a back-and-forth rhythm, him taking two to my one. Like we had been gun buddies since we were kids. Like each of us didn’t at least have the notion of blowing the other guy’s brains into the sand.

  Shooting pretty quick, he’d hit something seven times out of eleven, which wasn’t bad for somebody whose business wasn’t shooting. I’d got four out of five, just goofing, squeezing them off gunfighter style.

  “You do pretty good for a guy whose wife said he didn’t even own a firearm.”

  “Our women don’t know everything about us,” he said, “do they, Tom?”

  He popped off his last couple of rounds fast into the woodpile, not really aiming at anything, just watching the splinters fly. He pulled down the earmuffs again, casual as could be.

  “You don’t ever use these?”

  “Nah. Your hearing is another weapon. Best not disable it.”

  “You learn that in the army?”

  “Deer hunting.”

  “Christ, are you hardcore.” He pulled the bourbon from his bag and took another swallow. “I can almost see why Sarah had a thing for you.” He didn’t offer me any. “Almost.” He looked at me just standing there after I opened myself another beer.

  “How long will it take you to reload that thing?” he said. “It’ll be dark in another eight hours.” He popped out his empty magazine and rooted in his vest pocket for the other one.

  I was half turned away from him, holding the Colt by the frame with the barrel pointing straight to heaven. It took me maybe three seconds to flick that ejector rod five times through the turning cylinder and shuck my spent brass, and not much longer to drop five more live ones through the loading gate and snap it shut.

  Kip was still talking as he racked his slide again. He about jumped when I spanged one off the bent wagon wheel rim while he was still finding his footing.