Tall, Dark and Cowboy

by Joanne Kennedy

  But as he spun the wheel to turn into the dirt road that led home, the lowing was anything but distant. He slammed on the brakes and fishtailed the pickup’s back end to avoid a red heifer that stood in the middle of the road, staring at the skidding pickup with mild, curious eyes as if wondering what kind of critter slid sideways like that. Beyond her, about a tenth of his herd was milling around in the road; a few had even crossed it and were yanking up what little grass grew on his neighbor’s parched and overgrazed land.

  So much for his life of leisure. Fletcher Galt didn’t take kindly to having his grass cropped by cattle other than his own. Fletcher Galt didn’t take kindly to anything.

  He wasn’t a kind man.

  Chase eased through the herd, jerking the pickup to a stop five hundred feet from the ranch gate where a tangle of downed barbed wire and a path beaten in the grass marked the spot where the herd had breached the fence. A calf lay on her side nearby, moaning more than mooing, her mother watching over her with wary, frightened eyes. Chase was on the ground in seconds, struggling to keep his motions slow and easy.

  “It’s okay, Lulabelle.”

  All the heifers were Lulabelle to him, and all the steers were Ernie. He didn’t know why; he just had to call them something, and those names seemed to fit.

  He talked softly to Lulabelle the umpteenth as he gently examined her wounds. He’d expected to find jagged gashes from the barbed wire; instead, she was pockmarked with wounds clearly inflicted by birdshot.

  “Fletcher Galt.” The name was satisfyingly explosive, like a swear word—a perfect fit for the man himself. Chase had put up with Galt’s insults—the ones the man said to his face and the ones he delivered behind his back in town. He dealt with the man’s hostility when they encountered each other at meetings and functions.

  But there was no need for Galt to take out his resentment on an innocent animal. Chase bit back a curse and tilted his face to the sky, taking a ten-count. He clenched his fists once, then released the tension and stroked the calf, soothing her in slow, easy tones.

  “S’okay, Lula.” He patted her neck. “S’okay, girl.”

  He wrapped the wire around the post and smacked his hat on his thigh, but the cattle simply turned and stared at him, wearing their usual mournful, uncomprehending expressions. The mother stayed by her baby. She hadn’t escaped unscathed herself; a few pellets had grazed her haunch, leaving a bald trail in her thick hide.

  Climbing back in the pickup, he headed for the house. He had Jimbo saddled in seconds, and he spun the fresh, feisty quarter horse gelding twice before goading him down the road. The barely contained energy of the horse beneath him and the sound of hooves thudding out an irregular beat was better than that beer he’d been looking forward to anyway.

  This was the real Chase Caldwell—the man he was meant to be. It was like he hung up his life every time he went to town, as surely as he hung his Stetson on the hook by the door. Then he slipped his true self back on when he got home.

  He remembered his father’s farm—the one cooperative but ancient mutt of a horse he’d had, the few goats and sheep his father had let him keep on an acre of pasture, and the miles and miles of hay and corn he’d had to till and plant and harvest. Losing the farm had led him here, and now he was working from horseback instead of suffocating in a tractor cab. He was better off now, even if he did have to sell cars all day to make it work.

  Quashing the thought, he concentrated on the horse. He’d loved his dad. Loved the farm. It had been his life, and thoughts like that were disloyal and wrong.

  Once they reached the cattle, Jimbo didn’t need much direction. The horse was cow-savvy and quick, dodging from side to side, plunging forward and spinning back to urge the cattle through the break in the fence and steer them back to pasture.

  But little Lulabelle still lay on the far side of the road, her mama watching him with wild white-rimmed eyes. Giving the horse an appreciative pat, Chase swung down from the saddle and knelt beside her, biting back a swear word. Some of the shot had raked her skin, leaving long scratches he’d need to stitch up; others had lodged in her side and would need to be eased out, the wounds cleaned. He stood up and rifled through his saddlebags, pulling out a vet kit rolled in a strip of canvas and some sterile wipes. He’d learned long ago to do his own injections and vet work. Otherwise he’d have gone broke before he’d even gotten started.

  He was quick with a syringe, and the calf lay still as he worked, only her rolling eye showing she was still conscious and scared. He tried to make quick work of the sutures, numbing the area with lidocaine and stitching quickly and neatly. He’d just knotted the last thread when she started to wake and struggle to her feet.

  She stood a moment, swaying and staring blankly at him, then the road. Her mother let out a mildly hysterical moo that broke into a weird falsetto at the end and the calf swung her head to look at Chase and took a step backward, almost falling. He stepped toward her and shoved at her shoulder to point her in the right direction, then slapped her flank and watched her trot off with her mother to join the herd.

  He watched a while, stroking Jimbo’s neck absentmindedly while he made sure the calf was steady on her feet. He hadn’t made any money at the car lot today, and an innocent animal had paid for his absence in pain and suffering. If he could find a trustworthy salesperson, he could spend more time at the ranch and keep these things from happening. Krystal sold a lot of cars, but the woman had no moral compass whatsoever. Just the other day, he’d caught her telling one of his neighbors that the battered Oldsmobile Cutlass at the back of the lot was a one-of-a-kind collector car, when really it was a sad survivor of the local demolition derby. And she’d told a local teenager that a Datsun B-210 had an eight-cylinder engine. He had a reputation to maintain, and she wasn’t helping any.

  Swinging up into the saddle, headed for home as the herd moved away. The heifer seemed to have forgotten all about her ordeal, but the picture of her lying in the grass suffering would stay with Chase a long time.

  Chapter 7

  Once Jimbo was unsaddled and munching on his evening ration of hay, Chase climbed back in the pickup and headed down the drive. He turned right onto the county road, drove a few hundred feet, and took a left toward Galt’s. He could see the tumbledown barn looming at the end of the drive and an ancient trailer tilting beside it. The two buildings both listed toward the west from a century of prairie wind. Even an old cottonwood in the yard leaned left, its branches reaching toward the hills like a beseeching bride beckoning her groom.

  He pulled the truck to a stop at the edge of the faint remnants of a turnout that scarred the scant grass of the yard. The old man hadn’t bothered to skirt the trailer; it was perched on stacks of cinder blocks, and Chase wondered how long it would be before the prevailing winds pushed it off its makeshift foundation.

  He stepped up onto a front porch sloppily hammered together with mismatched two-by-fours and scrap lumber and rapped on the door.

  “Go home,” said a surly voice from within. “Leave me alone.”

  “No,” Chase said to the door. “We need to talk.”

  “Don’t have anything to talk about.”

  “You’re right. We don’t.” Chase turned the knob and let the door swing open to reveal the tawdry interior of the trailer. The tweedy brown carpet had been designed to hide dirt but only looked hopelessly soiled, and there was hardly any furniture—just an ancient TV set furnished with rabbit ears in one corner and a rocker/recliner upholstered in garish blue velvet positioned with its back to the door. All Chase could see of the occupant was a bald head cresting the back of the chair, with two or three strands of gray hair spanning an expanse of pale, mottled skin. “We don’t have a damn thing to talk about. I’m just here to tell you that if you hurt one of my animals again, I’ll come over here and do the same to you.”

  The bald head turned, revealing a pair of beady eyes set deep over a hawklike nose. “You threatening me?”

 
“Mr. Galt, you shot my heifer.”

  “Wasn’t trying to. Damn animals broke through the fence, were eating my grass. All I did was shoot in their general direction to scare ’em off. It’s my right. Says so in the Constitution.”

  Chase gritted his teeth. It was all he could do not to lunge into the house and drag the old man out of his chair. He reminded himself that Galt had suffered, that he was barely lucid since the death of his son. That he’d lost everything that mattered to him and let the rest go downhill until he was left with a parched patch of overgrazed, mismanaged rangeland and a bunch of mutt cattle he’d had to sell for pennies on the dollar. He’d been forced to sell half his ranch to Chase, and apparently he lived on social security and dedicated his once robust life to watching game shows and drinking.

  But he was lucid enough to go out and take potshots at Chase’s cattle when they breached the fence. Chase scanned the kitchen, noting the streaked, stained counters. A dog food dish on the floor overflowed with kibble, but there was no sign of human food. A grubby plastic trash bin was filled with empty beer bottles. Not even Fletcher Galt should have to live like this. Somebody ought to check on him.

  Chase would talk to his sister about it. She’d see to it.

  “Goddamn out-of-towner,” Galt bit his words off hard. Talking to him always made Chase uncomfortably aware of his own slow speech, the drawl that exposed his Southern roots. He was an out-of-towner, it was true, but that didn’t give the man a right to shoot his livestock. He’d bought half of Galt’s ranch fair and square.

  The old man eased the chair a quarter-turn toward the door.

  “Didn’t kill it, did I?”

  “Not quite.”

  Galt was quiet for a while, and Chase thought he’d lost him to Bob Barker’s rhapsody over a washer-dryer combo, but then the chair swiveled another quarter-turn toward him. The normally hard planes of the old man’s face seemed to droop, and the look in his eyes bore a hint of worry behind the hate.

  “Was it hurt bad?”

  “Pretty bad. You do it again, and I’ll call the cops.”

  “Cops won’t arrest me.”

  “No, but they’ll take the gun away.”

  The creases deepened, and the hard glint came back to the old man’s eyes. “I’ll shoot ’em first.”

  Chase drove home, frustration simmering in his gut. He’d headed out angry and he was going home the same way, with nothing resolved and nothing changed. Galt would take any opportunity to avenge what he saw as Chase’s unforgivable crime of nurturing the land the old man had planned to pass on to his boy. It wasn’t Chase’s fault the kid had killed himself in a car wreck, but Fletcher had to blame somebody, and Chase was right next door.

  He was just pulling off his boots in the mudroom when he heard the slam of the front door. Padding out to the kitchen, he caught Krystal draping her purse over the back of a kitchen chair and setting a plastic grocery sack on the table.

  Shit.

  “Hi.” She tossed him a perky smile and headed for the sink to wash her hands, making herself right at home. “You didn’t say what you wanted for dinner, so I got rib eyes.” She narrowed her eyes and smiled like a cat eyeing a hapless sparrow. “I figure real men eat steaks, and you are definitely a real man.”

  “Krystal, go home,” he said. “We’re not getting married.”

  “Oh, I know.” She swatted his arm like a teasing kid sister. “But you really ought to think about it.” She spread her hands and spun in a sweeping circle to indicate his kitchen, reminding him of the game show hostess on Fletcher Galt’s TV. “And this place needs a woman.”

  He didn’t see why. The kitchen was tidy and stocked with everything he needed. There weren’t a lot of froufrou decorations or anything, but that was the way he liked it.

  “I don’t need a woman,” he said. “Especially not a high-maintenance one that wants to come out here and change everything.”

  She set her fists on her shapely hips and gazed around the room like she owned it. “I wouldn’t change much. I’d put up some curtains, those real cute ones with the ruffles, and maybe paint the walls yellow. Like sunshine.” She grabbed two beers out of the fridge, heading for the sliding door off the dining room “I thought we’d eat on the deck.”

  The deck. Right. What Krystal called the deck was his back step, a crumbling concrete pad at the back door. Chase had fitted it out with a gas grill and a cheap redwood picnic table so he could cook steak and drink beer out there in the evenings, and ponder the future of the ranch while he watched the herd grazing in the distance.

  Krystal set to work covering the perfectly adequate table with a tacky vinyl tablecloth decorated with garish flowers. At least she’d brought him a beer. She didn’t seem to notice his abstraction while she settled onto the bench across from him and gabbed, skewering various townspeople and promoting her ideas for his future, which included a glass-walled showroom and a Toyota dealership. He ignored her campaign to turn him from a rancher into a deskbound businessman, and he managed to ignore the way she wiggled to make her breasts bobble while she shifted her butt on the bench. He’d never been to a so-called gentleman’s club, but he had a feeling Krystal’s lap-dancing skills rivaled those of any stripper in the business.

  There was apparently no point in telling her he didn’t want her there. She’d just pout and ignore him. When she went in to get the steaks, he fired up the grill, then slouched back down against the far side of the picnic table with his back to the house so he could watch dusk settle over the land.

  She pranced out of the kitchen bearing a plate of steaks and that same perky smile.

  “What’s the matter, Chase?”

  He took a long draught of his beer and surprised himself by telling her.

  “Galt shot one of my cows.”

  “What?” She seemed appropriately outraged.

  “They got through the fence somehow, and he took a shot. Hit a calf. I found her on the way home.” He took another gulp of beer and set the bottle down, resting his elbows on the table behind him and stretching out his legs.

  “That’s terrible,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “How much was it worth?”

  He ignored the question, staring off across the pasture. “Poor thing suffered all day before I got home and found her.”

  “And now the meat’s probably gone bad. Really, you should make him pay for it.”

  “The meat?” He stared at her. It took him a minute to realize what she was saying. She wasn’t upset that the animal had suffered; she was worried about the money.

  “Krystal, the cow’s not dead. She’s going to be all right.”

  “Oh. Well, no big deal then, right?”

  “I said she suffered all day.”

  She nodded sagely. “Pain and suffering. He should pay for that, then.”

  He stared off across the pasture, resisting the urge to argue. Nobody ever got anywhere arguing with Krystal. She was immune to sarcasm, logic, and clear-cut facts. He might as well change the subject. “We didn’t sell a single car today.”

  “I like the way you say ‘we.’”

  He suddenly had a notion of how the cows felt, hemmed in by barbed wire. No wonder they’d stormed the fence. “Krystal, I told you…”

  “I was thinking we might get more business if we stayed open later,” she said. “People get off work at five.”

  “I have to be here.” He nodded toward the pasture. “I’m gone too long as it is. I told you, that heifer…”

  “I know,” she interrupted. “This place is a lot of work for you.” She came over and sat beside him. He edged aside to give her space, but she scooted right along with him. “I could work late the next couple of nights. See if I could sell anything to people in the evenings.”

  He turned to look at her, surprised. Krystal had never done more than the bare minimum of work around the dealership. She’d never volunteered for anything.

  “Thanks,” he said. “That would r
eally help.”

  “We’re a team.”

  He shifted away. “Krystal, we’re not…”

  She didn’t give him a chance to finish. “Don’t worry. One of these days, it’ll get a lot easier.” She gave a perky nod. “I figure once we get that Toyota dealership, you won’t have to raise cows anymore and you can get a place in town.” She hopped up and headed over to the grill to flip the steaks. “Then all you’ll have to do is mow the lawn, ’cause I never mind cooking.”

  If he hadn’t already known the two of them didn’t have a future, he’d know it now. Giving up his dream would be moving up to her. She wasn’t the least bit interested in sharing anything but his checkbook. He looked at her spiky manicured fingernails and remembered Lacey’s pink-painted toenails.

  She was probably the same way.

  Chapter 8

  Lacey picked her way over the pitted sidewalk in her high-heeled sandals, lagging behind the suddenly energetic Sinclair as the sky beyond the brick buildings on Main Street blushed pink with morning light. The dog checked out every post and parking meter, sniffing delicately as a wine connoisseur and cocking his leg to mark his progress. She had no idea how a creature so small could hold such a seemingly inexhaustible supply of pee.

  “Good boy, Sinclair,” she said. “Keep it up. You’re going to own this town.”

  As she passed a dark shop window, Lacey glanced at her reflection. She still looked like the woman who’d left Tennessee five days ago—poised and perfectly coiffed, with fashionable clothes and the mincing walk demanded by her pretty but totally impractical shoes. No one would ever guess the woman in the window had plummeted from trophy wife to transient in the space of six months.

  She knew she ought to feel discouraged. Hell, she ought to feel suicidal. She was stuck in the middle of Wyoming with no money, no transportation, and the ugliest dog in the universe. The town was a backwater, with half a dozen boarded-up buildings interspersed with a few mom-and-pop businesses—a discount clothing store, a gift shop, and a Quick Lube oil change garage.