The Last Ranch

by Michael McGarrity

  The chilly night had Mary about ready to leave for the warmth of a hotel room when a car stopped in front of the house. A woman slammed the door on the driver’s side and came around the front of the vehicle, her heels clacking on the pavement. In the pale light of a rising half-moon Mary recognized Erma and called out to her.

  “Thank God you’re here,” Erma replied, relief flooding her voice as she rushed up the walkway. “I’m so sorry I wasn’t there to get you.”

  “Not to worry,” Mary said as she hugged Erma. “What happened?”

  “It’s just a big mess,” Erma said, the words spilling out of her as she broke away. “Come inside.”

  A half a dozen boxes were on the floor in the front room, some packed, some empty, and the walls were bare. Erma threw her purse and keys on a lamp table next to a saggy upholstered armchair and stepped toward a galley kitchen that contained a small table and two folding chairs jammed in a nook under a window. “I’ll make some coffee and we’ll talk.”

  Mary followed her and stood in the kitchen archway. Erma, who was always a bundle of energy but calm by nature, seemed uncharacteristically agitated. Slender and five-foot-two, her long brown hair was pinned up carelessly, strands cascading haphazardly down her neck, and her pretty face with her wide-set eyes, arched eyebrows, and thin lips looked haggard and pained.

  “What’s wrong?” Mary asked.

  At the sink, Erma filled the coffeepot with water. She turned, pot in hand, eyes hard and angry, and bit her lip. “That son of a bitch husband of mine has been screwing some girl in his acting class for the last three months. I only found out about it last week.”

  “The coffee can wait.” Mary took the pot from Erma’s hand and put it on the countertop. “Let’s talk.” She marched her friend into the front room, and sat with her on the sofa. “Tell me everything.”

  “I should have known something was up,” she replied, shaking her head at her own stupidity.

  She had trusted Hank completely, believing when he came home late he it was because he was rehearsing scenes with members of his acting classes, or at an open audition at one of the semiprofessional theater companies, or he was working as a studio extra to earn money for his private voice lessons. On certain nights, when he needed the car to go to his twice-weekly improvisation class, he’d pick her up after work. But recently he’d kept her waiting for almost an hour, claiming he’d been cajoled to stay late to help a fellow student with an audition scene she was preparing for a screen test at a major studio’s new talent department. A week earlier, when he failed to come for her, she took a cab home and found all his clothes gone and a note on the kitchen counter saying he’d moved out, wanted a divorce, and was keeping the car because he needed it more than she did.

  Erma stopped to catch her breath. Mary gave her a moment before prodding her for more information.

  “I darn sure wasn’t going to let him take my car just like that.” Erma snapped her fingers for emphasis. “I bought and paid for it with my own money. I didn’t think he’d be hard to find, but he’d dropped out of all his acting classes, stopped going for his voice lessons, and wasn’t hanging out with any of his usual drinking buddies. Everybody I talked to knew I was looking for him and why, but it was only this afternoon that I learned where he was shacked up with the bimbo from his acting class. I went there, but nobody was home and the car was gone. So I waited, hoping they’d be back in time for me to get to Union Station before you arrived, but they didn’t turn up until an hour ago. After they went inside, I jumped in the car and drove straight home hoping to find you here.”

  Erma paused, took a deep breath, squeezed Mary’s hand, smiled and said, “And I’m so glad you are.”

  “Me too,” Mary replied. “But why are you packing to move?”

  Erma pushed hair away from her forehead and laughed harshly. “It’s just been one thing after another this week. My boss decided since my husband had left me I was fair game, so when he put his hands on me I quit. With next month’s rent due at the end of the week, I can’t afford to stay here. Besides, I hate this dump and don’t ever want to see that SOB again. The place stinks of him.”

  Mary nodded sympathetically. The heavy odor of cigarettes hung in the air and Erma didn’t smoke. “Where will you go?”

  Erma shrugged. “I don’t care. Anywhere away from L.A. will do for a start, and I really need to get going. Knowing Hank, he’ll be here soon demanding the car back.”

  “Has he hurt you?”

  “It hasn’t gotten that far yet.”

  Mary looked at the boxes and furniture in the front room. There was probably a lot more in the bedroom. “Are you planning to take everything?”

  “I was, but now it doesn’t matter. Every stick of furniture we own I bought secondhand to save money. The dishes, pots, and pans too—even the cheap movie posters I hung on the walls. It can all stay behind.”

  “Then let’s finish getting you packed, and go,” Mary said.

  “Go where?”

  “Can your car make it to San Diego?”

  Erma laughed. “Are you kidding me? My Olds is such a honey of a car even my mechanic offered to buy it. It will take us cross-country if we want. What are we going to do in San Diego?”

  “We’ll sit on a beach for a couple of days, eat, drink margaritas, and hatch a plan.”

  Erma grinned, reached over, gave Mary a quick hug, and stood. “I’m game until my money runs out. Let’s get out of here before that jerk shows up.”

  In less than an hour, they had the trunk and backseat of the coupe filled with everything Erma wanted to take with her, mostly shoes, clothes, jewelry, cosmetics, personal mementos, and important documents. They quickly tidied up the apartment and put the trash in the garbage cans behind the house. Erma dropped the door key on the kitchen counter and scribbled a note to Hank. It read:

  Hey, Jerk,

  Help yourself to anything you want, just don’t try to find me.

  At the front door, Erma took one last look around, sighed, shook her head, and laughed. “What a dump. I think that two-timing bastard has done me a big favor. He has sure cured me of the marriage bug. I’m taking my maiden name back. Do you think you’ll ever get married?”

  Brian’s face drifted through Mary’s mind. A recipient of the Navy Cross for bravery on Iwo Jima, he was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. There would never be another like him. “It’s starting to feel iffy,” she replied as they walked to the car. “Have you got a bathing suit?”

  “I need a new one,” Erma slipped behind the wheel of the Olds and cranked the engine.

  “Me too,” Mary said.

  Erma made a U-turn and headed for Hollywood Boulevard. “Maybe we should go shopping tomorrow. That will make me feel better.”

  Mary laughed over the throaty sound of the engine. “That’s the spirit.”

  ***

  After midnight they arrived in the San Diego neighborhood of Pacific Beach and found a decent motel a short walk from the ocean. It was a single-story, Spanish Mission–style building with exterior brick walls painted white and a sloped red-tile roof topped by a fake bell tower above an arched portico. A Vacancy sign flashed in the window of the motel office. The room was clean, the linens fresh, and the twin beds were comfortable.

  In the morning, after breakfast at a nearby diner, they drove downtown and roamed the streets window-shopping until the stores opened. It took diligent searching through the swimwear selections at four stores to find just the right suits. Erma picked a red maillot with a wraparound skirt, and Mary bought a strapless one-piece in black. After lunch at a Pacific Beach restaurant that served up a decent chef’s salad, they hit the beach under a warm sun, where the whisper of a pleasant breeze and the sound of the ocean lapping peacefully at the shore lulled them into a languid daze. Occasionally, a group of noisy kids walked by, but mostly it was just the
two of them on an empty stretch of sand.

  Neither did much talking. Mary could tell Erma was smarting about being treated so shabbily by Hank, although she put up a tough front to hide it. She held back questioning Erma and let the quiet reign. Two pleasant hours passed, and when the clouds rolled in and cooled the day, they took a walk down the beach looking for seashells, went back to the motel, showered, changed, and found a friendly neighborhood drinking establishment several blocks from the motel populated by a few old men at the bar who were inclined to leave them alone. They settled into a back booth, ordered scotch straight with water chasers, and clinked glasses when the drinks came.

  “Here’s to new beginnings,” Mary said.

  Erma raised her glass high. “Amen to that, sister.” She took a sip. “One of these is all I can manage.” She glanced around the dimly lit, smoky, run-down bar. “Maybe I could get a job here waiting tables and mixing drinks. Think it’s far enough away from L.A. and the jerk?”

  “Is that what you want to do? Work in a place like this?”

  “Heavens no, but San Diego seems like an okay town.” Erma paused. “But maybe not. Being around a lot of sailors and marines might not be a smart thing for me to do. I was a sucker for a guy in uniform once. I don’t need to make that mistake again.”

  “Where will you go?”

  Erma sipped her scotch and sighed. “I know where I’m not going: back to Nebraska, where everything on the farm smelled like pigs, fertilizer, and manure; or to Des Moines, where I had a crummy job slinging hash until I enlisted.”

  “How about driving me to New Mexico?” Mary suggested.

  Erma leaned back, considered the idea, and slowly grinned. “Why the hell not? You were always talking about how wonderful and beautiful it is, and boy do I deserve a vacation.”

  “Great!” Mary lifted her empty glass. “Shall we seal it with another?”

  “Only if you agree to drive us to dinner, if I get too drunk.”

  They ordered another drink and made plans. Mary would cash in the unused portion of her train ticket to cover their gas and expenses. Erma insisted that they share all the costs fifty-fifty. They’d get a service-station road map on their way to dinner and look for interesting places to stop along the way. Both agreed that a side trip to the Grand Canyon would be a necessity, since neither had seen it.

  At a busy, loud Italian restaurant inside a converted beachside cottage, Erma ordered veal scaloppini, Mary chose the spaghetti, and they shared a bottle of red wine with their meal. Over coffee, they studied the road map and discussed places to see. Erma wanted to visit the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest. Mary thought Tucson, with a detour to the border town of Nogales, might be fun.

  An impatient, hovering waiter with the bill interrupted their road-trip scheming. They continued their planning in the motel room until, sleepy from the booze and wine, they decided to chuck the whole notion of an itinerary and just roam wherever the spirit took them before heading to Las Cruces.

  With the window open and the smell of the ocean gently coursing through the room, Mary snuggled into bed. Although completely sympathetic about the end of Erma’s disastrous marriage to her despicable husband, she was truly delighted to have gained her company.

  ***

  Over the next ten days, Mary and Erma crisscrossed the desert southwest. In Arizona they peered into the immense beauty and astonishing vistas of the Grand Canyon. They wandered along dirt roads in the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest before traveling south to the pretty town of Prescott, tucked into a mountain range, where Erma admired the cowboys and allowed that she might be tempted someday to wrangle one for herself.

  After an overnight stay at a historic downtown hotel, they dipped south to Tucson for a few days and visited a nearby Indian reservation to tour an old adobe church before taking a day trip to Nogales, where they crossed into Mexico and meandered in and out of shops along the colorful main street. Mary haggled in Spanish with a merchant in a dry-goods store and came away with a lovely hand-tooled leather wallet, and then bargained on Erma’s behalf for a coin purse she’d spotted that was etched with delicate dragonflies.

  They drove on a dusty state road through rolling, grassy hills to the dilapidated village of Tombstone and on to Bisbee, a mining town filled with historic old buildings and charming Victorian houses. They spent the night in Douglas at an inexpensive motor inn and walked the streets of the Mexican border town of Agua Prieta the next morning before crossing through thickly forested mountains into the New Mexico Bootheel, a vast expanse of grassland valleys with distant, shimmering mountains caressing the sky.

  The landscape fired Erma’s imagination and for the first time in years she began thinking about the personal dreams she’d put on hold for the sake of Hank’s career. She wondered aloud if the college in Las Cruces had an art department. Mary didn’t know. Erma figured it didn’t matter; she’d been drawing and sketching since childhood and could learn on her own if need be. Suddenly, the unhappiness that had tied her stomach in knots over the past few weeks loosened and she felt a giddy rush of optimism.

  They veered north on a gravel road past sprawling ranches and through tiny settlements until they reached the railroad town of Lordsburg. From there it would be a straight shot on a paved, two-lane highway to their destination.

  The long drive through the heat of the day had left them thirsty, dusty, and weary. They got a room with a double bed at a small motel that fronted the main street and the train tracks, showered, went to a diner that served up a decent chicken-fried-steak dinner, and fell asleep early, serenaded by the sound of the passing freight trains.

  Morning found them driving into a rising sun at dawn, the desert golden in the early light of day, the air swirling through the open windows, tasting dry and gritty. They had their first flat tire outside Deming, and after emptying all of the boxes Erma had crammed into the trunk, they were jacking up the car when two young cowboys in a pickup truck stopped and offered to lend a hand. Once the tire was changed they stuffed everything back into the trunk, smiled, doffed their cowboy hats, and drove off with Erma throwing them kisses.

  Back on the highway, she glanced at Mary, grinned, and said, “I’m thinking cowboys are much more interesting than the Nebraska farm boys of my youth. We should have asked those two if they had eligible, handsome older brothers.”

  Mary shook her head in amusement. “You sound like you’re well on the road to recovery.”

  “Is that where we’re going?” Erma asked, feigning ignorance. “I thought it was Las Cruces. Although Recovery, New Mexico, does have a nice ring to it.”

  Mary’s giggle soon had them both laughing and the joke kept their spirits high all the way to Las Cruces, where the spires of the Organ Mountains, the green ribbon of the Rio Grande bosque against the brown desert valley floor, and the towering white clouds in the turquoise sky took Erma’s breath away. She started visualizing a palette of colors to capture the landscape; a vivid blue-green for the river, a bright-pink underbelly in the clouds, and deep charcoal for the cascading shadows across the nearby mountains that hugged the Rio Grande. The notion that she could paint the world in front of her eyes grabbed her like a vise.

  “We’re home,” Mary said as the highway turned into Main Street.

  “Yes, I think so,” Erma replied softly.

  They rented a room in the Park Hotel just off Main Street, which overlooked the cool oasis of a lush city park shaded by mature, stately trees. They freshened up, had a quick lunch at a Mexican café, drove to the college on the outskirts of town, and walked around the campus. The view was spectacular, with the Organ Mountains dominating the horizon to the east and the desert valley beyond the Rio Grande stretching as far as the eye could see to the west, promising mysterious peaks and promontories. A hodgepodge of old and new buildings dominated a horseshoe-shaped drive inside the main entrance, and within a short wal
king distance down a gentle incline stood neat rows of surplus military buildings that served as married-student housing.

  In the administration building they collected information about degree programs and learned to Erma’s dismay that there was no organized fine-arts program as yet, just a smattering of classes such as mechanical drawing and art appreciation that might fit her needs. Mary had already decided to explore degree programs in animal science and teacher education, and picked up a copy of the fall-semester class schedules to study. Enrollment started in six weeks.

  At the student housing office they learned that the crush of adult students made off-campus housing almost impossible to find, to the point that older students were getting on waiting lists for dormitory rooms.

  Outside, Mary turned to Erma. “I am not living in a college dormitory.”

  “Me neither.”

  “You’re staying?”

  Erma nodded. “I like it here.”

  Mary gave her an excited squeeze. “Oh, good. Let’s start looking.”

  ***

  For two days they searched, driving by dilapidated farmhouses on the bosque, peering in the windows of tiny apartments converted from woodsheds and stables by homeowners eager for rental income. Several nice, large houses were available near the country club on the east side of town, but college students weren’t welcome and the rents were excessive. Ten miles farther east in the tiny village of Organ, they toured a cabin several blocks in from the highway that came complete with a stinky outhouse and a kitchen with no running water.

  On the third day at breakfast they looked through the daily edition of the local newspaper hoping for new listings in the classifieds. They found an advertisement for a new apartment building near the campus but when they got there all the units had been rented. Back at the hotel, they sat on the front steps debating whether to keep looking or simply give up and move on to another city, preferably one with a college or university.

  A mailman on his rounds approached the hotel entrance, and Mary got the sudden idea that he was just the person who would know of any vacancies in the neighborhood. When he reached the porch steps, she stood and asked if he knew if there was anything for rent.