The Cedar Tree
The Cedar Tree
Danni McGriffith
The characters in this novel are fictional, creations of the author's imagination only. So, all y'all keep your drawers on if you think you recognize yourself somewhere in this tale.
2 Edition
Copyright © 2012 Danni McGriffith
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13: 978-1469903712
To the Lord Jesus, my First Love, and to Keith, my other first love.
And to Taz, faithful friend, wherever God sends good
horses, I hope you're in belly deep grass
Chapter One
The little Mustang GT hurtled down the winding canyon road, its headlights swinging across the black emptiness on the right side of the car then glaring off the rocky walls on the other. It took a curve in the road with a squall of tires.
"You're not going to do this to me and then dump me like a piece of trash, Gil Howard," Darlene said, her voice shrill. The knuckles of her small hands gripping the steering wheel shone white in the glow from the dash-lights. Tears caused her mascara to run unchecked down her cheeks.
Gil eyed the speedometer uneasily. "Slow down, Darlene."
She glared narrowly at him. Her large, tawny eyes, set far apart on her small face had always reminded him of a spooky horse, but now they just looked crazy.
"I won't let you treat me like a piece of trash," she said between her teeth.
"Darlene, look out," he yelled.
He grabbed for the steering wheel and jerked it just in time to avoid the headlights in the other lane. The car passed with a long blare from its horn, but Darlene only pushed her foot harder on the accelerator, fishtailing around another curve.
She looked at him again, the easy, sloppy tears of that stage of her drunkenness running from her eyes. He had seen it before. Too many times.
"I have loved you," she cried.
His lips twisted. Him and at least half a dozen other guys. Her bright red mouth stretched down her face at his expression. Combined with the arrows of black mascara beneath her eyes, she reminded him of a clown. He looked away.
"I'll kill you first."
The tone in her voice had changed from hysteria to icy control. He jerked around his head. Her clown mouth turned up at the corners in a chilling imitation of a smile.
"You won't dump me because I'll kill us both," she said.
Then she hauled the wheel to the right.
***
"Hang on there a minute, Tiger."
The overpowering smell of gasoline infiltrated Gil's consciousness, almost masking the smell of crushed pine needles. And blood. He opened his eyes to a blinding light. Blinking, he tried to sit up, but someone stopped him. He pushed aside the flashlight.
"What's goin' on?" he mumbled. "What happened?"
"You've been in an accident." The face behind the flashlight leaned closer. "Been drinkin' a little, Gil?"
Suddenly remembering Darlene, Gil sat up, gingerly fingering a stinging cut on his head. The slow revolutions of red lights lit the rocky walls of the canyon with garish brilliance, illuminating blood on his hand, too. He wiped it on the carpet of pine needles beneath him. Shivering in the breeze blowing down the canyon, he clenched his teeth to keep them from chattering. Someone wrapped a rough wool blanket around his shoulders.
"Darlene all right?" he asked the face.
The man with the light squatted next to him. "She Don Carpenter's sister?"
"Yeah."
The man leaned closer. He recognized the county sheriff.
"You two just about run me off the road a few miles back." The sheriff studied him then shook his head, his mouth grim beneath his grey mustache. "I don't know how come you want to be like your old man. Ain't one drunk in the family enough for you?"
He rubbed his bloody hand over his face. "I wasn't drivin'."
"I know, but I could find a way to put you away for this, anyway. I ought to." The sheriff rose. His knee popped. "As to Miss Carpenter, she's got a steerin' wheel in her chest."
He jerked up his head.
The sheriff met his eyes with unveiled disgust. "She's dead. And I have to say I'll never understand how you got out of that car alive."
***
Darlene's powder blue Mustang had wrapped around the four foot trunk of an old pine, but the tree stood unfazed by the terrific impact except for a few broken branches. The paramedics treated Gil for minor abrasions, and someone found his black Stetson. He shoved it on his head and braced his lanky frame against a boulder, shivering beneath the brown blanket. Firemen moved unhurriedly about, preparing to cut Darlene out of the wreckage.
It was too bad about her car. Her dad had given her the new 1982 Mustang for her college graduation. She had loved only one thing more than the car—her rangy Appaloosa barrel racing horse. Her dad probably wouldn't keep the horse around now.
The roar of a generator powering a Jaws of Life shattered the muffled sounds of the night, reverberating from the canyon walls, drowning out the rush of mountain water in the creek at the bottom. The machine slowly separated the roof of the car from the window frame with a groan of stressed metal and popping bolts, and then a final sickening sound as the rest of the windshield splintered.
The generator suddenly cut off, and he rubbed his hand through his hair. His ears still roared from the noise and he had a headache, but he didn't feel anything else. Darlene had told him he was as shallow as a mud puddle. She must have been right. He should be feeling something.
She had just died trying to kill him, after all.
He rode back to town with the sheriff. Heavy jaw set, mustache bristling, the sheriff never said a word the whole way until he parked at the Boise County Sheriff's Department.
"Am I supposed to tell her dad, or will you?" Gil asked.
The sheriff's eyes, almost buried in a maze of weathered laugh lines, narrowed grimly. "I'd oughta make you do it." His mouth twitched beneath his mustache into a humorless smile. "In fact, that's a good idea. Yeah, you do it."
He followed the sheriff’s wide back, ramrod stiff, into the building, picturing Darlene's stocky little father, his greying hair slicked back, cigarettes rolled in his tee shirt sleeve, his mechanic's fingers stained black with grease. Her father stayed broke to keep Darlene rodeoing, but he called her Baby and made every rodeo she'd ever competed in—he was going to take this hard.
The sheriff stood waiting at his telephone. Gil looked at him and then reluctantly reached for the phone. Satisfied, the sheriff left the room.
He sat in the chair and dialed Darlene's brother, waking him. "Hey, Don. Can you come to the sheriff's department and pick me up?"
"Where?"
"Sheriff's department."
"You in jail?"
"No." He dropped his head to one hand and rubbed it through his black hair falling into his eyes. "And I need you to call your dad first and tell him somethin'."
He didn't tell Don what had really happened, but Darlene's brother didn't take it very well anyway. It took a few minutes before he could hang up the phone.
"That didn't sound like Dad," said the sheriff behind him.
He stiffened then swiveled around in the sheriff's chair to face him. "He wasn't home."
"Bullcrap."
He coolly met the older man's disgusted gaze.
"What's wrong, Gil? Can't figure out how to joke your way out of this one?"
He didn't say anything.
"That young girl is dead, her life ended—" The sheriff's meaty hand chopped down. "Just like that. All over. Least you could do is take enough responsibility to break it to her old man." The sheriff eyed him though
tfully. "I'd oughta lock you up."
He shrugged. "Knock yourself out, Sheriff."
The sheriff’s gaze hardened at his tone. "You got a lotta potential, Gil. Before you got hurt ridin' that bronc last year, I said to myself, this boy could get to the top with this. Then, when you couldn't rodeo anymore, I said to myself, this is just as well. He can settle down, quit runnin' with that hard drinkin' crowd. It'll keep him from turnin' out like Roy. You're just as good as your dad with horses, maybe better. You could do somethin' with it still, but you ain't one bit smarter than your old man. Get outta my chair."
He rose.
"You need a change of scenery." The sheriff moved toward him until he stood close, his eyes leveled. "You understand me?"
"You bet."
"That'd be, you bet, Sir."
He gave the other man a cocky grin. "You bet," he said. He settled his Stetson on his head and walked out of the room.
***
A few days later, the sign for the towering, glass fronted church in Boise rose from a perfectly groomed emerald lawn. Gil turned his pickup into the parking lot, surprised. This was about the last place he'd have expected to find any of Darlene's family. He parked next to Don's truck, suddenly remembering Don's Christian girlfriend.
She hadn't lasted long, just that one date, but he remembered the small girl sitting stiff and out of place on the ratty couch in Don's trailer. Her doe-like eyes had been earnest as she made a valiant effort at small talk. He had been wondering what was wrong with her that she had consented to a date with Don when she turned her soft gaze to him where he sprawled in a lopsided recliner across the room.
"What church do you go to, Gil?" She had a soft voice, too.
Don gave a loud guffaw.
He stared at her in surprise, and then gave a sheepish grin. "I haven't been to church since I was about six years old."
The girl turned to Don. "How about you?"
Don's freckled face flushed. "I go to church some. I'm a…Baptist…I think. Hey, Darlene," he yelled into the kitchen, "are we Baptists, or what?"
"I think so," Darlene had yelled back.
Apparently Darlene hadn't known what she was, either, because the church wasn't a Baptist church.
He stepped out of his truck. The late morning sun on the fresh asphalt released a hot, oily smell into the air as he walked across the parking lot trying to remember what he had ever seen in Darlene. She had been pretty, no doubt about that, but her image in his mind remained as lifeless as the college rodeo poster of her from last year. A curvy girl posed on a horse with a sparkling tiara around the headband of her white Stetson, a dusting of freckles across her nose and shoulder-length brown hair.
Everybody thought he was cut up about her, but the poster hadn't shown the clingy, emotional neediness spilling from her eyes and the instant craziness at any refusal to feed that insatiable need. He frowned. If Darlene was alive today, he'd still break up with her.
He joined the other five pallbearers in the foyer then filed into the hushed stillness of the church after them. They lined up on the front pew in front of Darlene's flower covered, pink casket with a framed picture of her on the lid. An old lady with blue hair began to play the organ behind the preacher.
He shifted on the pew, unobtrusively studying the uneasy row of sun-browned faces beside him for signs any of them were cut up about Darlene. They all looked like they were getting over hangovers more than anything else, except for wiry little Carlos, who kept crossing himself every time he looked at the casket. At least he knew he was a Catholic.
The six of them on the pew probably appeared much the same—hair flattened to each pale forehead by the headband of a Stetson removed before entering the sanctuary, white shirts, sun-browned, rough hands fidgeting at the knees of their best jeans, each pair of boots showing wear from rubbing against stirrups. They had other things in common, too. They'd all been friends since high school, they'd all been on the same rodeo team in college, and Darlene had slept with them all, except for her brother, Don.
But…he didn't fit with them anymore.
He shifted uncomfortably. That couldn't be right.
Turning, he fastened his attention on the minister over the top of Darlene's pink casket. The soft-looking man spoke of Jesus and heaven in a perfectly modulated voice, but he kept running his hand over his faultless hair and glancing at his watch as if he had a tee time…and he called the deceased Donna. In all fairness, this guy had probably never met Darlene, but that didn't seem right.
For a while, he hoped something the preacher said would make sense of the weird sensation he'd had for the past several days this whole thing had happened to someone else. Someone he didn't know. The words remained meaningless.
He turned his gaze back to the casket, studying the ornate brass fittings on the side-rails. At least Darlene wouldn't be heavy for him and the other guys to carry. Now, if it had been him stretched out in a box he would've made them all grunt. He grinned a little, but his grin slowly faded. His gaze fixed.
Why hadn't it been him?
Shifting uneasily, he looked up at the preacher again, his soft hands clasping and unclasping as he talked. The man's image disappeared in a sudden vivid recollection of his grandfather's lanky frame behind a wooden pulpit, his work hardened hands gripping the edges of it while his booming voice filled a crowded room.
He hadn't seen his grandfather since his childhood, but Gene Howard wouldn't have preached a funeral like that. If it had been him speaking of Jesus and heaven, his words would have rolled through the room with the certainty of thunder…and he would have known the deceased's name.
At the cemetery, the sun in the deep blue of spring sky made the pallbearers sweat, but he had been right—Darlene didn't make any of them grunt when they lifted her casket to the stand over her grave. And her father did take it hard. The tough little man stood alone and bawled like a baby.
Standing on the spongy, emerald turf in the line of pallbearers, hats in hands, Gil shifted his boots and turned his eyes away from Darlene's father. When the minister said 'amen,' he turned and walked away.
He drove to Don's trailer to change clothes. In the bathroom, Darlene's beer bottle had cracked the mirror all the way across, but none of the glass had fallen from the frame. The crack distorted his reflection so one of his eyes looked higher than the other as he carefully probed the cut on the side of his face. He ripped open the snaps of his white shirt and shrugged out of it. Then he turned on the tap to splash water over his face and head. He braced his hands on the counter and stood with his hair dripping in his eyes and into the sink.
Finally, he reached for a towel and dried his hair, raising his gaze to his reflection. Sun-browned, lean-jawed face and dark lashed gaze reminded him of his father, but the anguish in his eyes as he really looked into them for the first time…completely unfamiliar.
Ain't one drunk in the family enough, Gil?
He stared at himself as the sheriff's words rolled through his thoughts. He hadn't felt the need since he'd been a kid, but…maybe he needed to talk to somebody.
He tossed away the towel and gathered his shaving gear from the counter beside the sink. Finding his duffel bag under the couch that had been doubling as his bed, he stuffed the rest of his belongings into it. He slung it over his shoulder then hesitated at the door. Probably he should leave a note for Don. He shrugged.
Hoisting his saddle with one hand and his guitar case with the other, he left without a backward glance.
***
Heat reflected from the sun-lit bricks of the convenience store on the highway where a wiry-haired yellow mongrel trotted in a businesslike way along the sidewalk. The dog stopped suddenly to lift its leg on the phonebook dangling from a chain beneath the payphone then flopped down, panting, in the small patch of shade to the north of the phone.
Gil approached, digging in his pocket for a quarter. "Beat it, mutt."
He dialed his sister, Dee. The phone rang twenty times while th
e dog sat up, ears cocked with every appearance of interest.
"I don't think she's home, Pooch." He leaned over and scratched the mongrel behind the ear.
"Hey, Gilberto! Is that you, man?"
He turned at the shout then grinned widely, hung up the receiver, and stepped off the curb. "Armando! Hey, como estás, dude?"
Armando's brown face stretched with a wide, white grin. "I am always doing good."
He approached Armando's car. Eyeing the glossy shine of metallic flaked gold paint, polished tires and a small Mexican flag fluttering from the radio antennae, he whistled. "How'd you score this nice ride, dude?"
Armando's grin widened and his black eyes danced with laughter. "I am the Mexican National boss of all those illegals out at the farm of potatoes."
He laughed. "How's that goin'?"
"They love me, man." Armando threw back his head, roaring with laughter. "What you doing now? Still riding those bucking horses?"
He shook his head, sobering a little. "Naw. Came off one last summer and blew out my knee." He shrugged. "Just been doin' this and that. Playin' my guitar at the bar mostly."
"Aw, man. You ain' even going to be able to play ball at the college no more, neither?"
"Naw," he said with a wry grin. "They pulled the plug on me before that ever happened."
"Aw, man. You was a good hitter, too. Going to the playoffs and everything, you know? So you going to work for your ol' man out at the ranch for the res' of your life, now?"
He swore and gave a derisive snort. "Hardly."
Armando studied him for a moment. "Uncle Antonio heading back to Mexico pretty soon since he los' his job with you ol' man."
"I wondered what he'd do. Poor ol' dude. He's been with Dad since we came to Idaho. Seventeen years, I guess."
Armando nodded. "He tell me once only reason he stay after your ol' man start drinking so much is because of you an' Dee. An' your mama." His gaze sharpened. "He tol' me the bank selling your ol' man out."
The Cedar Tree (Love Is Not Enough) Page 1