Redeeming the Rancher

by Leslie North

  Daniel’s early letters might as well have been Wes: trying to be strong, chronicling other young men so different from those he was used to, going on about new experiences while the subtext read what the fuck have I gotten myself into?

  The middle of the stack was his summer in Close Call. Wes laughed until tears sprouted at the stories Daniel told his sister, stories Wes had forgotten. He drank a cold soda from the cooler he had filled on his drive in and toasted the crashing waves, an ever-present reminder of how life cycled and how each day, each moment, was a carbon copy, if allowed.

  In the later letters, Daniel fought his inner demons—hiding his sexuality, wrestling with the purest form of love Wes could imagine. Not one of stolen glances or incidental touch—those were there, too, though it was like reading about someone else being the subject of an infatuation, not him—but a connection so powerful, Daniel confessed that, for the first time since he started spouting the military ooh-rah about brotherhood and sacrifice, he felt like he would gladly lay down his life for another human being. Wes.

  I know he loves, but not in the same way. He’d be good for you, Liv. His strength comes from his past, where he came from, who he loves. Not all of life should be lived in sadness.

  Wes bundled the letters and placed them on the passenger seat. Olive’s seat. He stripped to his underwear and walked into the Atlantic, allowing one wave of salty water to wash away another. And when he had screamed at the boats in the distance and was spent, he called home to tell everyone he loved them and that he was okay, then hit the open road with the sole intention of forgetting Olive Blake.

  * * *

  Wes spent the next four months in pursuit of the freedom for which he fought so hard as a Marine. After high school graduation, when most kids headed to Tull’s Teabags or secluded pastures with more bottles of alcohol than livestock, Wes had bummed a ride to Austin, to the nearest recruiter office, and signed up. No gap summer. No joyriding. No vision quest to discover the kind of man he would be before the military broke him down and reshaped him for their purposes. Now Wes convinced himself it was high time for a rootless trek.

  He just hadn’t counted on the trek leading him back to Olive, time and again.

  At the Rocky sculpture in Philly, he found a kindred spirit, arms up, and he wondered for the first time what the Marine in Olive’s bronze held above his head.

  Inside New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, he spent an entire day sitting on a padded bench, lost in the childish and unnatural colors of a Matisse painting simply because it contained trees that may—or may not—have been olive trees.

  In Chicago, he stood at George Langley’s grave and paid his respects.

  And in front of a jukebox in a greasy, late-night dive in Kentucky, he dropped in a dollar’s worth of quarters to hear Hank Williams, Jr., profess to not give a damn.

  Except he did.

  Wes, not Hank.

  When Wes ran low on cash, he signed up for a six-man crew that did prescribed burns in the pine forests of Florida. Long hours hiking on foot in dry heat seemed a fitting penance for the mistakes he had made with the ones he loved. On a strip-head fire one week into the job, Wes looked up to find himself in a grassy field with five dark figures, his crew, in various stages of smoke cover. In two months, he had put nearly two thousand miles on his classic truck, but he was right back in that bookstore in Close Call, aching to kiss the woman beside him.

  Wind shifted against Wes’s face. The fire climbed, migrated, intensified. Radio frequency went dead. He looked for the crew chief, but lost him in the surreal mix of filtered sunlight and billowing smoke. A wall of flames spiked and twisted like lava poured from the sky. The fire sounded like an M1 Abrams tank chewing the land at top speed.

  Someone yelled. More shouts. Wes spun around, disoriented. Two men had flanked his left, one his right. Every one of them was vapor to him now.

  At his feet, a body fell. Fire engulfed the man’s forearm and torso. Callihan-something. Hell, Wes didn’t even know. He was in a goddamned field, fighting battles that weren’t his with people who didn’t know his name any more than he knew theirs.

  Never had he felt more alone.

  He stripped off his heat-protection jacket and pummeled the flames from flesh as another member of the crew filled the space beside him. The whites of the burned guy’s eyes swallowed everything else in Wes’s line of sight.

  Wes crouched beside him and screamed above the roar, “We’re going to get you out.”

  And Daniel was looking up at him, his eyes pleading for help.

  Wes froze. His ears felt singed. The stench that crowded his nostrils was unholy.

  “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” Another voice. A shout in his ear, loud enough to deafen but far enough away that it seemed meant for someone else.

  He glanced up at the burning horizon, like a distant planet, his very own infinite now filled with carbon copy moments that didn’t have to be.

  Not one more day.

  Wes slid one hand beneath the guy’s thigh, grabbed his free arm, and hauled him into a fireman carry while the other crewman draped the protective jacket over them as a heat shield. Wes’s boots pounded the singed earth, jolting his legs inward to his body cavity with each running step. They were in a blazing vacuum where nothing else existed. The adrenaline saturating his blood stream was the kind of controlled and thoughtful panic the Marines had programed into him.

  He followed a break in the orange and black to a trickle of blue so very much like the childish colors of Matisse. Sky. A voice in his head, maybe Daniel, maybe his own freaked out soul, told him to go toward the blue. And when blue balanced the more intense colors and the sky cooled, Wes broke free of the flame wall and into the waiting arms of emergency personnel. He set the man on the ground. Medics swarmed the burned man. Dry, hiccupping gulps of air rushed into Wes windpipe, but he still ran. Wes stripped off his helmet and surged through the cries of men telling him that everything was okay, that he had saved someone, tossing around the word hero like hot ashes, incendiary and dangerous. He barreled past the second crew line. A scream ripped from his lungs.

  A hand reached out, gripped his chest gear, snagged his progress. Wes’s gaze saw little but the mesmerizing, reflective strips on the guy’s jacket. Full-on firefighter. The man looked him in the eye.

  “What’re you runnin’ from, son?” he shouted.

  Wes collapsed in his arms. “I don’t know anymore.”

  The man’s flushed cheeks reshaped. His frown subsided.

  “I want to go home,” Wes confessed.

  The stranger sat Wes in the grass. Someone handed him water.

  Wes took greedy, drowning gulps and mumbled, “It’s time to go home.”

  * * *

  Wes had been right.

  Pluots probably should have factored into Livie’s decision to stay last fall. At Close Call’s annual Pluot Festival, where she was the honorary guest judge of the pluot baking competition, she was pretty sure the hybrid fruit came a close second to being exceptionally kissed.

  After the statue’s ceremonial ribbon cutting, the high school’s wind ensemble played a song that sounded like someone had pranked their instruments. The mayor gave a poignant speech about how the bronze, entitled Gulverson and the Company of Giants, would be an important cultural and economic draw for generations to come. Willie’s artist introduction flattened Livie and left her unable to say more than a few words of thanks. Beyond all that, Livie spent the better part of the afternoon beneath the shade of her bronze and an impressive oak. She shook hands, took photos with townspeople in front of the statue, autographed the special edition of the Close Caller-Times when asked, and hugged Willie when it all overwhelmed. All those months finalizing the piece in Dallas and a quick trip back to New York made her forget just how many people she knew here—Mona, January, Harvey, Clyde Hammond, Chet, every single ranch hand that made the Meiers’ operation the biggest for a hundred miles. Bess Scandy circled a few
times until Livie’s friendly wave sent the buxom woman scrambling away on her decidedly non-festival stilettos. Even Chase rearranged a few appearances to return home for the day.

  Had Wes been present, the day would have surpassed her happiest final days on the Amsterdam estate with Daniel.

  Not seeing Wes for months had left a crater-sized hole in her that not even art could fill. It was true that her pain sharpened her focus and funneled her into a zone of perfectionist craftsmanship that was unparalleled for her. The finished product was immaculate. Livie, however, was tarnished.

  A late-day tap on her shoulder drew her attention. She turned to find a man who looked vaguely familiar holding an expensive and massive digital camera.

  “Miss Blake?”

  “Yes?”

  “Jake Sweeting, Houston Chronicle. I interviewed you for your piece in front of the Colonial National Oil and Gas headquarters last year.”

  Recognition locked into place. She shook his offered hand. “I remember, Mr. Sweeting. Good to see you again.”

  “Do you have some time for a photo and a few questions?”

  “Sure.”

  He crouched to snap the photo, a perspective that, no doubt, gave the statue a heightened perception, a greater degree of importance. They settled on a bench and began the interview with the basics—dimensions, materials, process, date of completion. Jake didn’t stop there.

  “This is a departure from the surrealist tone of your other works. With it bringing two largely exclusive themes of patriotism and segregation together and the hidden, themed elements of light and dark in the shadows it casts at different intervals during the day, critics are even saying it could be the most iconic bronze of this generation. The work that brings people back to art.”

  “Iconic?” she repeated lamely.

  “What J.K. Rowling did for the stagnant children’s literature market. How did you come up with the idea for the play of light and dark—essentially, an interactive experience with the viewer?”

  Livie thought of the dish soap bubbles at the ranch, the porch light against Willie’s face, rodeo lights she could configure countless ways, the artificial light that squeezed beneath the door of The Gritty Somewhere and the natural light of a volcanic sunset on the ranch, the fire from her past and the fire within that came from loving someone. The truth was, she owed the idea to Wes. In every day and from all angles, he was a light to her dark. But he wanted no mention, no association, so she dug deep and crafted a substitute truth.

  “I was inspired by George Langley’s work. Specifically, The Infinite Nows. His experimental, almost reckless contrast in light and dark, his reminder that art should be an intimate experience, artist to viewer.” If she couldn’t be honest, at least Langley’s legacy and family could benefit from the publicity.

  “You do realize what this will do for this unknown town,” he said, more a statement than a question on the record.

  She didn’t. She hadn’t. But in that moment, she glanced up and saw the passers-by pointing, dancing through the late-day shadows cast on Main, parents reading Augusta and Mildred’s story to their children so that not one more dark day would set on this town as it did in 1966, and the tears surfaced.

  Jake Sweeting gave a slight smile. He squirmed inside the moment but kept it professional.

  “Thank you for the interview, Miss Blake. I look forward to hearing great things about you in the years to come.”

  Livie might have thanked him, shook his hand, smiled as he left. She couldn’t be sure. Every truth she had ever believed had just slipped from its axis. Iconic. Her work was iconic. A little like Atlas dropping the world.

  Willie took Jake’s place on the bench.

  “Seems like he just blew your happiness theory to shit.”

  In the perfect show of life’s synchronicity, a tear galloped down Livie’s cheek at the same moment she burst out laughing.

  14

  Wes drove into Close Call just before midnight. Stopping was not his intention, but he saw the festival banner stretched across Main and confetti littering the streets, and he knew he had missed something special. Nat had mentioned something about the unveiling, but Wes had been half-asleep when they last spoke. He supposed he timed it, subconsciously, so that he could see the statue alone for the first time.

  He wanted to hate the statue. Lit as it was in the amber-yellow glow of a fancy spotlight, he let it flow through him without blocking it with emotions that had nothing to do with the hunk of bronze.

  The Marine held a flag up, spanning both hands, tangled on a gust of something—wind, adversity, something. He charged ahead of two skipping girls—African-American by the style of their hair—sheltering them, protecting them, championing them, his face down, concealed, any one of them who served from Close Call—Wes, Daniel, Clem, Russel Drummond—and Gully and all of those who served beyond the streets of this town.

  The longer he studied, the more he saw: the angle of the train trestle in the flag’s canopy; the tiny rowboat toy, tipped over in the hand of one girl, a nod to someone they both loved and the past that Wes cherished and would defend until the end; holes carved in the other girl’s pillbox hat.

  Wes drew close and focused on the Marine’s coat, the lapel of the slanted front pockets, his family name that had driven a monumental wedge between him and the woman he loved. But it wasn’t his family name at all. It simply read Nemo Residio.

  None left behind.

  Olive had kept her word.

  Had she not, he would have continued loving her, all the same.

  He wanted to hate the statue, but he couldn’t. Not in a million years.

  Wes sat on the bench. The silence of his small town enveloped him. He had found his peace, but had he ever truly lost it at all? Not until he pushed her away.

  “Welcome home.”

  The familiar, feminine voice seeped through his skin and flooded his heart, liquid warmth behind an attack on his pulse.

  He shot to his feet.

  Olive stood beside a street lamp, hands clasped.

  “What are you doing here?” Dumbest question he could have asked. She was here for the unveiling.

  Apparently, she found the question amusing. A lazy smile stretched her lips.

  “I meant Main Street. At midnight.”

  “I couldn’t sleep. The Walker, Texas Ranger room isn’t really conducive to rest with all the photos of Chuck Norris kicking people’s asses. And it’s entirely unbalanced. There’s hardly evidence of the love interest at all.”

  Wes laughed. He had missed her dry Yankee wit, the way she poked fun at his world but had, so seamlessly, became part of it. Hell, he’d missed her.

  “You should have stayed at the house.”

  “It wouldn’t feel right.”

  “What would?” He closed the gap between them a few measured steps. “Make it feel right?”

  “For us to go back to being honest.”

  “All right.” He rearranged a few confetti squares with the toe of his boot, caught himself. “Remember when I told you about being seventeen, beneath the trestle bridge? That I saw the image of someone I didn’t recognize? That I had forgotten about her until that night on the water?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It was you. Long dark hair, pale skin, those eyes that haunted me every single time I tried to outrun them with physical labor and monumental stretches of loneliness and the occasional drink. It’s always been you, and I was too stubborn to admit it. I thought I was staying in control, keeping balanced, but that’s the funny thing about running. You take everything with you.”

  She moved toward him, fresh steps, still out of reach.

  “Wes, I’m sorry about your name on the sculpture. I never intended to keep it that way. It was just my crazy creative way to be in the moment. If the bronze hadn’t been one particular service member, it couldn’t have been all service members.”

  His gaze drifted to the statue. Tremendous. How he’d describe it for Daniel
on those nights he continued their conversations. “I can’t believe I sang Hank Williams, Jr., with a genius.”

  She scrunched up her nose. Her eyeglasses wiggled.

  The invasion was on, both fronts encroaching.

  “And posed for a genius,” she said.

  He leaned, all-in, and coaxed her mouth into action. His lips brushed hers as he spoke. “And kissed a genius.”

  She eased into a long, velvety-wet kiss hot enough to melt bronze.

  Breathless, she added, “And was loved by a genius.”

  “Was?”

  “Is.”

  He pulled her close. Against the wispy strands across her forehead, he whispered, “Stay. Marry me. Be my future. Let me prove to you that happiness isn’t fleeting.”

  “You already have.”

  This time, their kiss devolved into something for which the Missionary Baptist Church might organize a takedown.

  “Wes?”

  With speech occupying her lips, Wes took liberties at her neck. “Hmm?”

  “I’ll need the barn for my studio.”

  “All yours.”

  Wait, what had he agreed to? His brain took leave because of an alarming lack of blood flow.

  “And you’ll need to pose for me again,” she negotiated. “Models are a little hard to come by in the middle of nowhere, Texas.”

  “Sure.” His lips laid siege to the area just below her ear where shock and awe happened.

  She moaned.

  “My next commission is a nude.”

  Wes hesitated then fell back into formation. “Call it Midnight in the Company of a Giant and you’re on.” Wes’s subordinate recruit saluted the idea.

  Olive laughed and bit her lip. “There’s one more thing.”

  “Anything.”

  “I want to drive your truck.”

  Wes reached for his keys and handed them to her.

  Olive seized his arm and ran toward the 1939 Ford. She scooted behind the steering wheel and adjusted the tiny, oval-shaped rearview mirror as if there were a parade behind her and she wanted to take a good look at the fanfare. A smile stretched beneath the flush of her cheeks, raised her glasses just so. She pretended to light up a cigarette and use the ashtray. Her quiet theatrics made him want to protect her plane of creation for the rest of his days.