The Clincher

by Lisa Preston

  “Look, I know your dad said you’re leaving tonight.”

  He chuffed. “My dad is making a mistake with his heart pills tonight.”

  My mouth opened, but my tongue came up with nothing to say. Turned out he had another chore for me anyways.

  “Start writing. Use some of the paper in the back of this thing.” He threw my appointment book at me along with a pen from his shirt pocket. I waited like a little secretary ready for the boss man’s dictation.

  As if.

  “Write that you’re sorry you killed her, you didn’t mean for it to happen, things just got out of hand and now you’re going to make things right by . . .” He licked his lips, wily poetry failing, his brains steaming to come up with choice words. “Write that, write what I said so far.”

  So I was to be offing myself? I nodded and just about couldn’t stand the irony. Ten years ago, I’d wanted to do it, but didn’t come up with a purpose and plan and poise and—

  “Write it!”

  I got to writing, held up the pad with the half-finished sentence for him to see.

  “Good. That’s good,” Junior said. “Write that you’re making things right now. Scratch out ‘by’ and write ‘now.’”

  I did it and sat there looking at my supposed suicide note.

  Huh.

  Ten years I’d been waiting for inspiration or a lightning bolt to come strike me down, since I never had the gumption or initiative or nerve to take care of things myself. I wasn’t ready to believe Junior was any sort of divine intervention, but it was a bit comical that I was only now going to be getting around to what I’d sworn I’d do back when I was thirteen and fourteen.

  Broken promises are the sorriest kind of troubled thought.

  The three rules I’d come up with as a way to run my life afterwards weren’t figuring on redemption, just on knowing I ought to try.

  I’m a teetotaler. I don’t partake because I was drunk when I . . . that time. I got tough and grew quite a mouth on me next, couldn’t hardly form a sentence without saying fuc—. Oops. Anyways, it’s true. I used bad language everywhere, as a compliment, as a verb, an adjective, an interjection, just every way to speak we were ever taught. I used it as a way to be as ugly as I felt. I was poisonous. And I knew it. So, slowly, after I got off the streets, got in and out of a really bad idea of a marriage, saw my way clear to shoeing school, got a dream, I tried to Turn Over a New Leaf. Rule two, I quit being a potty mouth.

  But most important, I didn’t need anyone and for damn sure—I mean for sure and for certain—I didn’t want anyone needing me. Ever.

  “Get up on that stump.”

  Once, it had been a decent tree. Not a skyscraper, but respectable, with a trunk that was a couple feet across. A big maple tree had taken over the nearby light after this evergreen was cut. The three-foot-high stump was right under a terrific maple limb.

  Junior took my mecate and pitched the beautiful horsehair reins of my handmade hackamore across the limb, flipping them to get them hanging closer to the pedestal he wanted me on.

  He set my note on the ground and weighted it with a fist-sized rock.

  He pulled my do-all from his pocket and threw it on the ground.

  He cocked his revolver’s hammer back and touched it to my nose.

  There really didn’t seem to be a lot of options. Get up on that stump or get shot in the face.

  I climbed up on my pedestal sick with a realization.

  I would never, ever be able to make things right if I died now.

  I got it then, why I’d never done myself in. It would have taken away any future chance to fix the past. Even though I’d long figured it couldn’t be fixed, there was the chance to try, to make an effort, but if I died, that chance was snuffed.

  Red, Red, Red. Why did I . . .

  Nope, now I’d never have a chance to make amends.

  Hope was the biggest thing Junior or anyone else could have taken away from me.

  When he snugged the noose around my neck, I couldn’t stop my hands from grabbing the mecate. A slow strangling from a horsehair rope is a bad feeling.

  He hauled on his end of the line and I took a breath like I was jumping off a bridge into a river. Now I was on my tippy toes, the rough mecate pressing hard into the sides of my neck, tilting my chin up high as it pushed on my jugulars. I could only see the early stars. I heard Junior tying off the other end of the mecate, then his little Samurai started up and motored down the shortcut to the Harper place.

  I tried to untie the noose, but his knot was iron hard, and there was no slack to speak of.

  It would be tough, but surely I was strong enough to climb a rope, right? So I climbed right away, before I got weak, pulling myself up the rope arm over arm, then realized of course there was no way for me to hold on with the hand I was swinging from while untying the knot at my neck with the other hand.

  The effort used me up. I barely got my toes back to the stump. My face was cold where the tears—stress, I suppose—washed down.

  After who knows how long, I’d get tired and not be able to stay on my tiptoes. I’d slip down off my pedestal.

  I was going to die that night, I could see that plain enough and I didn’t have too awful many regrets. One wish screamed, though, just screamed. The thought I took with me as I started graying out, was sorry. So, so, sorry. I wished I’d been better, done everything better. Wished I’d tried to fix things and say how sorry I was.

  If I could have had one thing, I would have wanted to know that he knew he was loved. I hoped beyond everything that he was all right, he’d somehow landed on his feet.

  I just wanted to know my son was okay.

  Chapter 27

  GUY WAS PANTING AND SWEATING LIKE he’d been used up for the night.

  Guess he could see me for a good half-mile or more as he ran up the hill. I was on the far side of woozy, sagging on my noose. Dim awareness of Guy grabbing me, picking me up to get my weight off the rope, filtered in as I got my first good breath in a while. He held me with one arm while using the other hand to try untying the mecate, but there was no untying that knot with one hand.

  Zing! We were airborne. Guy’s new plan, apparently, was that our combined weight would break the branch. The second time he kicked us off the stump, we twirled around until the limb gave with a crack. We dropped into the dust and the big maple branch slammed to the ground at our feet, bouncing the mecate still tied around my neck.

  I rolled to my side, a better position for puking. It was mostly dry heaves but disgusting all the same. The urge to purge had been with me so long, years and years, but tamped down. Let loose, I gagged and spread my jaws for an almighty retch.

  Guy reached for me. We stared at each other for a minute. I’d never felt so caught. It was time to confess.

  “I never even tried to make it right.”

  “God, I saw you silhouetted there as I came up the hill,” Guy said. “I can’t believe what you did. Are you all right? I just want you to be all right.”

  The blackest of thoughts gummed up my mind. For so long, I’d tamped this thing down, but it burned in my brain as I strangled and begged to know if my little boy was okay. And worse, much worse, was my shame at not tracking him down, not checking on him ever, not getting him back.

  Because I had done all that for my horse.

  I didn’t mean to cry, and I know my face looked all twisted. As twisted as my priorities. My cheeks and mouth were so scrunched up, I could hardly shriek. What I managed was a whimper.

  “I couldn’t tell you. I just couldn’t.”

  “What?” Guy asked.

  “I’m sorry. I’m just so sorry.”

  “What? What are you not telling me? What’s happened?” Guy sounded a little panicky.

  “It was ‘domestic infant.’” I winced, feeling a smidgen better for the ugly truth to be out. “‘Closed.’”

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

  “I gave away my baby.�
� I bawled like I was going to die. “And then . . .”

  Mewling for the better part of five minutes didn’t accomplish anything other than getting Guy’s shirtfront all wet. I tried to push myself back from his chest, but my stomach clenched up and my nose faucet turned on and hey, who wants her guy to see her face like that?

  Guy kept stroking my back and kissing my hair. “You had a baby? And you put it up for adoption? When? When did this happen?”

  “Ten years ago. He’s ten now.” And that set me off for another good while of making animal-type squalls, my shoulders shaking. I would make Guy see how bad I am. Guy deserved to know, to get it. “I . . . I went looking for Red. Found Charley on my way.”

  Guy was soft, letting out his breath. I could hear him doing the math in his head. Rainy gave away her baby when she was fourteen. So she was thirteen when she got pregnant. That wasn’t the worst of it.

  The worst of it made me howl. “I got my horse back. I never did a thing for my baby.”

  Who does that? Takes better care of a horse than a human? I did a bad, bad thing, getting Red back.

  I just wanted to be twelve again, in Texas, dreaming about riding Red, my young horse. But then Daddy sent me to Mama in California for another switch-off year.

  Guy caressed my face. “Do you know anything else about your child?”

  I shook my head.

  “It wasn’t an open adoption?”

  “That’s where you call up a number out of an ad in the personals,” I muttered. Oh, I’d seen those ads. Read a lot of them. Loving couple would cherish your child, expenses paid, call collect. Professional dad and stay-at-home mom will give your baby blah blah, consideration given, call anytime. I choked and couldn’t help being bitter as I said the rest. “And you sell him to some couple, right?”

  “Well . . .”

  “I didn’t do that. I didn’t take money for him.”

  Fear has a taste and a texture if it’s bad enough, which it was by the time I was nine months pregnant. I’d been plenty scared before. When I got drunk, when I did it with Jesse, when my period was late, when I fessed up to the folks and when they packed me off to the home in Oklahoma for girls in trouble. And when the strangers finally pushed me into a delivery room.

  By then, fear was oozing in my pores and crudding up my mouth. I couldn’t get clean of it and just hoped against hope that I’d be purged when the baby was out. By delivery time, I was breathing like a smoker on account of the weight pressing on my belly. Hardly able to see my feet ’cause a seven-pound human being was inside me kicking whenever he felt like it.

  It was, and still is, the most scared I’d ever been in my life.

  I’d been sure the baby knew all about me and hated me for everything. I’d been horrible to him so far and was going to get worse. And of course, I couldn’t get away from him, I had to wait him out, let him kick me and hurt me.

  And that namby-pamby counselor the clinic sent in for five seconds, she was a piece of work. Felt called to say that a lot of teenage girls have babies so they’ll have someone who loves them.

  As if I needed someone to love me.

  “I think what you did was very brave,” Guy said, after my story was out. “Maybe I’ll go look up this Jesse character and speak to him about responsibility.”

  “But I was responsible for what I did, for my irresponsibility.”

  “Have you been flogging yourself for a decade? When were you going to stop and say whatever you needed to say so you could go on? You’re here now. You’re with me now—”

  “But I got my horse back, made things right with him. I didn’t do anything for my real baby. What kind of a person—”

  “A good person.”

  “I tracked Red down for months, for over a thousand miles, across half the western states.”

  “You did a good thing.”

  Could it be okay that I got my horse back? I’d wanted Red back so bad. It had felt so good to find him at last, to touch him and hear his nicker. Good, but guilty. I sniffed. “Guess I’m alive thanks to you.”

  “God, Rainy, I can’t believe how close you came to taking yourself away, away from me and our life.”

  “The heck I did.” I stood up but a headache banged away inside my skull. Guy looked confussed as he rose with me. I didn’t want him making my throbber any worse, asking idiotic questions. Besides, I had a question of my own. “What are you doing here?”

  “Helping you. I came to help you search for the horse.” He looked past my shoulder. “I see you found her. But then you . . . We’ll get you help.”

  “Did you play the measuring tape recorder thingy?”

  “Huh?”

  He sounded just like me! It was yelling time. “I didn’t hang myself. Harper Junior strung me up.”

  A more confussed face never was made. How can a man with such an honest face be any good at poker? Guy pulled my arms as I tried to hug myself, inserted himself into the embrace and slid his arms behind my back again, squeezing me against his chest.

  Thump, thump, thump, went his heart. It’s the noise I always imagine Charley’s fluffy stub tail would make hitting the walls and floor if it wasn’t a two-incher. Guy’s heart’s no stubby model. It pounded his face crimson when I told him about Junior trying to kill me.

  “Harper Junior is trying to make it look like I killed Patsy-Lynn and then killed myself. He put cash and a bloody handkerchief in Ol’ Blue’s glovebox and he put Patsy-Lynn’s jacket in our kitchen.” I could see Guy’s paying attention, six kinds of shock tromping over his face as I explained. “I think his daddy told him to leave town tonight, for good. A big part of Mr. Harper realizes Junior had something to do with Patsy-Lynn’s death, but no part of him realizes his kid’s going to mess with his meds tonight. Junior’s setting up his old man to die.”

  Guy looked purely agitated in all matters. I lurched to start Ol’ Blue. I was going to stop that bully.

  No, I wasn’t.

  Never leave an old diesel’s headlights on, especially if it already has old batteries. Turning the key in the ignition only produced the clicking sound that means the truck’s a three-quarter-ton doorstop. Ol’ Blue didn’t have enough juice to warm the glow plugs.

  “Guy, how’d you get here?” There were a lot of holes I had to fill in.

  He looked like his brain cogs were whirling, too.

  “Rode up on my scooter, but got a flat down the road. I saw you silhouetted, hanging, and I just ran.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder and his mouth did a wry twist. “These forest roads are murder.”

  I holstered my do-all even as Guy hovered protectively over me.

  “Say,” I asked, bright-like, feeling good enough for a quick taunt, “’fore you came after me here, did you do something real intelligent, like call the po-lice?”

  Guy wiped his forehead. “I didn’t tell anyone I was coming here. I just rode up because it was the only place I could think of. Dry Valley, the end of the first spur road. You said you were coming here to look for a missing horse. That horse, I suppose?”

  Guy pointed at Misty, who stared back.

  “No one else has paid much attention to this mare being stolen,” I said, “the whole idea of her being missing, I mean.”

  I gave her attention now, went to her, murmured and rubbed her swiveling ears.

  “Pretty little thing,” Guy said. “Why’s she tied up out here?”

  “Long story.” I shook my head. “Look, for sure and for certain, Junior’s skedaddling on this shortcut for home, then messing with his old man’s pills, then leaving town with Patsy-Lynn’s blood in Ol’ Blue.”

  “And her jacket at the house?” said Guy, paling up as he got it. “It really will look like you killed her.”

  Would the police believe me when I told them Junior had planted that stuff? Did I handle that recording tape measure right?

  Was Mr. Harper already dead from some foul-up with his heart pills, all arranged tonight by his son?

 
; Would Mr. Harper still let his son spirit out of the country if he knew all his kid had done? Would he battle us if he knew that Guy and I were going after Junior? Because we were. I could feel the notion burning.

  Guy checked his cell phone, but had no reception, which was par for this backcountry. He paced, his jaw set.

  Using my teeth, I unknotted my mecate.

  The mare and Guy both looked interested in my doings when I slipped the bosal on her. Ol’ Blue was dead and Guy’s scooter had a flat, blast these rocks. We were a good twenty miles or more from help in town unless we chanced on someone coming down from the Buckeye ranch. But if we went straight north on the Jeep trail, we were probably only a few miles from the Harper house.

  Walking was put away when horses were invented. Too many folks gave up riding after Henry Ford came along. Besides, these boots were not made for walking, I don’t care what that song says.

  And Guy’s a sprinter.

  There’s exactly one fast way to move two people with one horse, but those two people have to be awfully motivated. Lighting a fire under Guy about anything but cooking has always been a challenge.

  I explained this sport little Abby’s wild about.

  “The way it works is two people leapfrog each other on a trail, taking turns riding and running.” It’s the original hitch-and-hiking, ’cause the person ahead on the horse ties the pony up after a piece then commences to go afoot. Once the other runner gets to the tied-up horse, he rides all the way up to and past the first runner, then ties the horse up and hikes or runs more. I guess folks can move at track speeds in the wilderness this way.

  Guy was so good looking, listening to me there in the low light, his face, the way his jaw and cheekbones almost kiss out of his skin. And the lanky build thing he’s got going. He is one nicely put-together fella, he really is. He’s a runner, a Thoroughbred. I gulped as he reached for me and had to lean back a little to not get swallowed up in a hug that could lead to all sorts of mischief.

  “It’s called Ride and Tie,” I told him.