Cheatgrass

by Bart Paul

  “Mustangs.”

  We looked through the limbs across the snow. There was a small band of wild horses only two hundred or so feet away. All but one were palomino pintos, white with gold patches and no dark hair on any of them. I’d never seen a wild bunch colored so similar like that. There were five or six in the group with a lead mare, some standing alert and some trying to paw and graze through the fresh snow. If there were new foals I didn’t see them, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. I saw a stallion, a dark liver chestnut with a flaxy mane and tail standing apart from the others like they do, watching our four horses on the picket line and ready to herd his band out of there at the first hint of trouble or fight a rival for his mares. When a whiff of wind would stir up the snow, the mustangs would almost vanish and all I could make out were the shapes of the pale patches on their hides just floating out there in all that whiteness, and not any horses at all, as if they’d bred themselves that color to blend into the winter like snowshoe rabbits. Of course they hadn’t done any such thing, and it wasn’t winter at all, just a freak spring snow and freeze. Across the ground I could see a low spot where water must have run. I saw two different horses drop their heads, one at a time at the same place. I knew there must be fresh ice thick on a shallow ditch or spring, and guessed they’d made a smooth round hole in the ice with their breath and the warmth of their noses so they could get to the water underneath. As we watched, it was like Sarah and I’d forgot to even breathe. Mustangs are sometimes common as flies in that country and can be a nuisance. I remember when I was little, my dad telling me about a big helicopter roundup he saw in these same canyons. But this was different. Where I had been the past few years, the only wild things were the people. I’d forgot how much I missed all this and was glad these horses were still here to remind me of how it was. Maybe this wasn’t different. Maybe the only thing different was me.

  Sarah talked to me in a whisper. “That stud has nice color, but he only looks decent from a distance. Up close he’s common as mud. This band grazes the meadow down to dirt, then the BLM hard-asses Dad about overgrazing. He wanted to shoot ’em all.” She smiled. “They’re still cool to look at, though.”

  We’d just started back when the horses quivered on the picket line and the sound of a motor exploded over our heads. Before I could move, a red single-engine plane blasted over the hill behind us and over our camp only thirty feet above, grazing the top of the juniper and shaking the sky. The dun pranced in place more than ever and looked ready to uncork as prop wash blew the snow off the juniper boughs. The plane was gone before our horses had a chance to really raise hell, but the wild band was gone in a blink.

  “Holy shit,” Sarah said. “You think he saw us?”

  “If he comes back, then he saw us. But the ridge might’ve hid us till he passed.” I brushed the snow off her hair. “We’re pretty much covered up.”

  “Could you see who it was?” she said.

  “I think so. The stout little guy with the chin beard.”

  “Delroy.”

  We waited by the bedroll and listened for the plane. I didn’t want to feed and water the horses and leave big rows of tracks you could see from hundreds of feet up. The plane made another pass, this time down the center of the meadow about a quarter of a mile away. Again, the snow and juniper tree gave us camouflage. The sound of the plane seemed like it faded off even though I couldn’t see it. I hurried to the picket line and led two of the horses out in the open to the frozen ditch. I crushed the ice with my boot heel so they could drink. Now out in the meadow a couple hundred yards off, instead of wild horses, that red plane just sat with its engine off like it was waiting for us. I looked through my riflescope. Muddy furrows cut through the snow behind it from the rough landing. Tan clay and black mud caked the wheels and was splattered on the red paint.

  I cussed to myself and walked those horses quiet as could be back to the picket line.

  “Old Delroy is parked out in the meadow.”

  “Did he see you?” Sarah said.

  “Probably.”

  “Should we saddle up and get the hell out?” she said.

  “We better take him on right here. That was the plan.”

  “We should get saddled anyway,” she said, “so we’re ready to scoot if things go south.”

  “Okay. I’ll water these other two and keep my scope on him. See what he’s up to.”

  Sarah started working fast, shaking the snow and ice off the pack tarp, brushing horses and saddling. She was saving the bedroll for last, as rolling that up would leave a big dark rectangle on the white ground. If we lived we could always come back for it. I took the two unwatered horses back to the ditch, carrying my rifle. While they drank, I looked Delroy over through the scope. He was sitting in the cockpit pouring coffee from a thermos and eating donuts. I could have taken him out right then, but it would have been hard to explain in court. I walked the horses back to the picket line and tied them with the two Sarah was saddling up. She’d laid out hay, so if we had a long chase they’d have something in their bellies. I looked back to the meadow and could see the color of the plane through the juniper. Even that little bit of walking around had trampled the fresh snow. What would happen next depended on what move Delroy made, and there was the outside chance he’d never seen us at all.

  “I figure a little fire wouldn’t show too much this early, so how ’bout some coffee?”

  “Look at you,” she said. “You want to make sure he knows we’re here.”

  “No point in being bashful.”

  I got a nice fire started with pudding-cup cardboard plus dried duff and juniper twigs from under the tarp. Then I threw on anything that would burn. I brushed the snow off the bedroll and laid the Remington down. We sat on the canvas waiting for the water to boil, then drank our coffee and ate yesterday’s sandwiches for breakfast. The sun had just crested the hills. It was a real pretty morning, but still cold.

  “You make a big enough circle, you might get to the cattle guard without being seen. Get there about the same time Mitch and the rest of your crew shows up. You’ll be safe with them and Kip will be in a squeeze.”

  She didn’t say anything, just watched the smoke rise. “I think we should stick together.”

  She was dousing the fire with snow and I was squaring my saddle on Dave’s roan when we heard the plane fire up. I circled far to one side of our camp and told Sarah to do the same on the other. I watched the plane lug across that snowy meadow heading away from us with the engine rattling. Then I saw it slow down and turn to face us, and stop. It was all the way across the meadow now. I put the scope on Delroy. He was fiddling with his controls, his ballcap on backwards. He didn’t seem to be paying us any mind. I knew he was, though. He looked up toward the juniper and seemed like he was looking right through it, like he was looking me in the eye through that scope. He pushed on something in the cockpit and the motor revved. I saw him shove a magazine into what looked like an AK-47.

  I heard Sarah yell, “He’s getting a running start at us.”

  The red plane started slow. It looked like any other airplane trying to take off, but there was a slow-motion feel. Maybe it was only because it was heading straight at us and the distance was foreshortened or something. Then I realized the plane really was going slower than it should. It hit an icy patch and skidded to the side, then overcorrected and straightened itself out. Delroy pushed it until the motor screamed and the prop roared as it closed the gap from the top of the meadow in the direction of the juniper. I could see he was running out of room. I took a quick look at Sarah and held the .270 up to my shoulder, safety off but not quite sighting yet. The nose of the red plane reared back, and it left the ground with mud spinning off the wheels. It still looked like it was going too slow, even when it was airborne. One wing dipped and the plane lurched in the air, half hidden by the top of the juniper. It was flying that low. The wing clipped a branch and the plane wheeled to the right, tearing sideways through the
treetop heading in our direction, but now totally out of control. I heard Sarah shout and saw her dive for cover but couldn’t hear what she said. As the plane tore over the horses it finished flipping upside down and swapping ends, pinwheeling and just howling over us as it smashed tail first into the hill only fifty feet past our camp.

  The horses went nuts. All four pulled back, then plunged forward. The dun pulled hard enough to somehow slip her halter but the picket line held. I turned from the plane to the horses and saw the dun blast off across the snow and disappear. When I turned back to the plane I could see Delroy hanging upside down, his ballcap fallen off, facing me in a rage, wiggling and trying to get out. I looked through the scope and kept the reticle right on his face, but he was just too close. I lowered the rifle without firing. Then I heard a sort of whoosh, a rushing sound like the air sucking out of something. It could have been the vapor in a fuel tank or the life in Delroy’s lungs. Then the red plane was covered with yellow flame and Delroy jerked one way and then the other before he was still. I might have heard him scream, but that might have just been the shriek of twisting metal. The fuselage looked like it was curling and melting into the snowy hillside with the shape of Delroy’s big torso shriveling into a sort of crouch.

  Sarah trotted over from the far side of the juniper, snow on her knees.

  “He looks like a little bat,” she said, “hanging upside down.” She stepped closer, short of breath. I watched her face staring at Delroy as he looked more and more like the burned body in the truck at the pot farm. Then I watched her turn away.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “You made sure he knew we were here. That was our plan. Get ’em out in unfamiliar territory. I know.”

  “Yeah, well. Watching him taxi, I could see the ground was too soft and mucky to get up enough speed for takeoff. I figured he’d have trouble.”

  “I wasn’t complaining,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “Tommy …”

  My phone chirped. It was Jack, and I put it on speaker.

  “Can you hear me, Tommy? Sarah?” he said. “Somebody left something really creepy for Becky. She found an envelope stuck on her screendoor early this morning. Dogs didn’t bark or nothing. It was an old newspaper clipping from the Daily Bodie Standard in 1905. The headline talked about a ranch hand and part-time prospector who’d fallen into an abandoned mineshaft out at the Monte Cristo mine two years before. He’d been exploring by himself and hadn’t told nobody where he was going. Every day he waited to die, he’d write a note to his family about the bad fix he was in with a busted leg, no water, no food, and freezing nights down in that shaft with no way out. Minutes went by like hours—that sort of stuff. Wrote them with a piece of pencil on catalogue scraps. The newspaper printed all of the notes he scribbled along with the story. Some cowhands hunting strays found the guy’s skeleton a couple of years later with the eight days of notes he’d written before he’d finally died. So both me and Becky think maybe this was meant for you, Sarah. And that maybe it was from Kip.”

  “Did he do this to Dad?” she said. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  “It’s kind of sick,” Jack said. “He could just be messing with you. Or he could’ve done it—dropped your dad into that old mineshaft to let him die of thirst or exposure or something. It’s pretty grim, but I wanted you to know. So maybe there’s a chance Dave could still be alive.”

  “Oh my god,” was all she could say.

  I took her by the shoulders. She felt stiff as a board.

  “If he is,” Jack said, “the sooner we get out of here the better. Becky used to run cattle up in that Monte Cristo country maybe ten years ago. Her and Dan are going to pick me up and we’re gonna four-wheel up to the mine right now. We’ll let you know what we find. And I’ve given Fuchs the heads-up.”

  Sarah thanked him and Jack signed off. She was whipsawed but more hopeful than she’d been in days.

  “You should probably make that circle now, Sarah. Get out of here quick. There’ll be more of these boys coming, but you can meet Mitch below the cabin.”

  “I completely forgot to ask Jack when Mitch expected to get here,” she said.

  “He should be coming up behind Kip directly. Then you can be closer and hear if they find something at the mine.”

  A blast of heat from a fuel tank exploding made her jerk her head back. She trotted to the picket line, bridled her mare, untied the sorrel, and got on. I swung up on her dad’s roan.

  “You know these meadows. If you stick to the trees and circle down past the cowcamp you can spot Mitch on the way up.”

  “What’ll you be doing?” she said.

  “I’ll be coming straight down the road right where they’ll be expecting us.”

  She spun the mare around and rode close. “You be careful. I don’t want to find Dad just to lose you.”

  She kissed me, then goosed the mare and got out of there, leading the sorrel across the meadow and into the trees. I loped off in the other direction toward the road. I could hear little pops as whatever ammo Delroy had in the cockpit exploded right along with him. We both knew that it could have been us, and that the day was just getting started.

  When I got to the fork in the road, I headed away from the cowcamp to look for Kip’s sign around Sarah’s rig. Her truck and trailer were right where we’d left them, but now there were tracks all around, both horse and human, so I could see where Kip had been scouting after us just like I hoped he would. I didn’t linger. I headed back down-canyon. I could travel fast on the hard road, rattling on the snowy tracks Kip’s guys had made. I rounded a hill and came within sight of the cowcamp and saw a rider heading my direction about a third of a mile away. He was bigger than Kip and on a horse I didn’t recognize, so I thought it might be Delroy’s ironpumping partner coming to check on the smoke. Whoever it was rode better than those two gunsels and was wearing an orange hoodie. He might as well have worn a sign that said “Shoot Me Now.” As far away as he was, he rode hunched over like he was cold. I turned in the saddle. I could still see the black smoke from the plane.

  I pulled off my right glove and put it in my coat pocket as I rode into a shallow sandy wash filled with a foot of snow. I reached for the rifle in the scabbard. I’d been keeping my eye on the rider, but I glanced down at the .270 for no more than a second. The roan flinched and was halfway down before I heard the rifle shot. It was still ringing when he fell hard on his right side, landing on my leg and trapping me in the wash.

  The horse didn’t fight or thrash so I figured he was dead when he hit. I squirmed and scrambled to get out from under him, but he had me pinned from hip to boot heel. I had to push to even raise my head, and I’d lost my hat. I could see the rider coming, his horse in a jiggy sort of walk. I was too far away to see if he had a rifle out, but he must have. There had only been the one shot. If this was Delroy’s partner, he was a better marksman than I gave him credit for. But then maybe he’d been aiming for me and not the roan at all. Even that would’ve been good shooting for a city boy off the back of a horse.

  My scabbard was way down under my leg, under the full weight of that poor roan. I’d need a hay squeeze to hoist him enough to get the Remington out. I raised up enough to see the rider. He had already closed the gap some. I tried to pull the .45, but my hip was pressing right on it. I started to dig with my right hand. The ground was sandy, but I could only scoop out little grabs at a time. I looked up, and the guy had stopped to watch. It wasn’t Delroy’s partner. It looked like one of the Miller brothers. When he saw what I was doing, he over-and-undered his horse and came on fast.

  The ground tore up my fingers, but the snow numbed them just as quick. I must have looked frantic scraping handfuls of sand, because when he was only a hundred yards away the guy stopped again. It was one of the Millers all right. I could hear him laugh. He came forward slow now and I could see he carried an AR-15 just like Burt’s. I clawed faster. I could’ve used Burt right a
bout now. I squirmed and tried to reach the .45. When I squirmed too hard the sand filled back in like loose dirt in a posthole.

  He was less than a hundred yards now. I kept my eyes on the patch of orange, hauling myself up as much as I could with my left hand pulling on the roan’s mane as I dug with my right. I could feel the pistol grip now and move it a bit, but it still wouldn’t pull. I set to dig some more. He was about twenty yards off when he stopped and studied my situation. I could see it tickled him. He leveled the AR at me, and that’s when I saw Sarah top a ridge a couple of hundred yards behind us. I pulled hard on the roan’s mane to ease his weight off me one last time and thumbed back the hammer of the Colt as I slid it free.

  “Well, asshole,” the Miller brother said, “I guess you weren’t as—”

  I shot him with the revolver resting on the dead roan’s shoulder, not aiming, just pointing at the blotch of orange. That .45 hit hard. The guy started to fall, and his horse caught him out of the corner of his eye and shied. It looked like he would fall clear but one foot hung up in a stirrup. He flopped around on his back and that spooked the horse more. The animal flew out of there with the guy grunting and bouncing under the hooves, the horse running to escape him as he made a furrow in the snowy road. If my shot didn’t kill him, then the dragging through the rocks probably did. The grunting turned to screaming, then the screaming stopped and all I could hear were hooves clattering and then that faded to nothing as well.

  Chapter Twenty

  My leg was still pinned but I lay back and rested, watching Sarah come down off the ridge and hit the level ground on that big mare in a long-strided gallop with the sorrel just behind. She swung off when she got to me and took a knee.