Rhino Ranch

by Larry McMurtry

  “Wait a minute,” K.K. said. “Lucas is an internationally recognized sculptor. Why are they mobilizing against him?”

  Lena sighed.

  “It’s really you they’re mobilizing against,” Duane said. “It’s been coming and now it’s here.”

  “The courthouse is public property,” Lena said. “I think they might have accepted a John Wayne–like sculture of Hondo, but a skinny statue by Floydada’s most deadly placekicker is not going to fly.

  “The fact is Hondo Honda was not that well liked, either,” Lena added.

  “And didn’t care,” Duane said.

  “No—but where Lucas is concerned I think you ought to remember that this is the land of metal art. Calves, longhorns, cutting horses. That kind of thing. Thanks for the pasta, K.K.”

  Lucas didn’t seem surprised or particularly nonplussed.

  “There went my loft in Brooklyn,” he said.

  “Maybe not,” Duane said. “I know of a fine place you could put your sculptures. And Moore Drilling owns it. It’s a section with a nice little bluff across the road from the Rhino Ranch. You could have statues on one side of the road and rhinos on the other.”

  Willy slouched in about that time, with his paperback Descartes in one hand.

  “Do you mean it?” Lucas asked.

  “Grandpa always means it,” Willy said.

  K.K. Slater did not say a word. After a few more minutes she got up and left the table.

  “Cogito ergo pissed,” Willy said.

  56

  THE NEXT MORNING both boys slept till noon. Duane, long accustomed to the nocturnal habits of the young, just let them sleep.

  He called K.K. several times during the morning but only got her machine. No doubt she was angry about the town’s decision not to permit the statue. So was he—but there might be ways to fight the decision if she wanted to.

  When the jeunesse dorée finally got up they ate a lunch consisting mostly of French toast. When they were finished he drove them to the site he had in mind, the little section with the nice bluff that K.K.’s men had tried to buy back when things began to get a little topsy-turvy in Thalia.

  They parked and walked around the little piece of bottom land before climbing the bluff. In the distance, across the road, they could see three rhinos grazing.

  Lucas Hawkins had been very polite but reserved, until he saw the rhinos. Then his face lit up.

  “Oh wow!” he said. “Somehow the notion that there were really rhinos in my part of the country didn’t seem quite real, until now.”

  Lucas walked off and stood by himself at the edge of the little bluff, looking at the rhinos in the distance. Then he sat down and just looked, and looked some more.

  “Don’t be impatient with him, Grandpa,” Willy said. “He has to look and look before he knows what he might want to build. He may sit and look at those rhinos for two hours.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Just leave him—he can walk to town if he wants to. I thought we might go to Mike and Tommy’s.”

  Before they left Lucas came back to the pickup.

  “Can I get closer to the rhinos?” he asked.

  “Probably,” Duane said. “But I’m not sure. Since Bobby Lee quit his job with Rhino Enterprises I’m not that clear what the rules are.”

  All Duane knew for sure is that the sturdy pipe fences had been put up, after which no rhinos were spotted near Amarillo, or anywhere else except Thalia.

  The only person he knew who might know what the rules were—other than the present team, again Australian—was K.K. This time when he called she answered.

  “The young sculptor is interested in the rhinos,” he told her. “Can you make a call and get us on the preserve?”

  “Better yet, I’ll come take you on,” she said.

  “Might just be Lucas—Willy and I might go to Mike and Tommy’s.”

  “Fine, I was going to try and lose you two anyway—or at least lose you,” she said. “Then I’d have the little darlings all to myself.

  “And if I can have young Lucas to myself for an hour, so much the better.”

  “You sound like you’re going to eat him.”

  “I might,” K.K. said.

  57

  “LUCAS IS REALLY at ease with rich women,” Willy pointed out. They were returning from a good light meal at Mike and Tommy’s.

  “I suppose it’s a handy trait,” Duane said.

  “Sure is—who do you think buys the work of young artists? Mainly rich women.”

  “How’d you get to be so self-possessed?” Duane asked, changing the subject.

  “It could be that you just see me in my self-possessed moments,” Willy said. “Or maybe being with you makes me seem more self-possessed than I really am.”

  “I don’t know if that’s true,” Duane said.

  “I’m trying to be a philosopher, remember?” Willy said. “Trying to figure out what—if anything—is true is what I do.”

  “Would you admit that you’re more poised than most people your age?”

  “Oh sure, but that’s because I grew up in a family of nut cases,” Willy said. “I decided to be the sane, calm one, and I decided that on the day you stopped your pickup and began your walks—I think you were really just walking away from everybody and I didn’t know that you’d be back.”

  “It seemed like the most reasonable thing I could do at the time,” Duane told him. “And besides that, I was tired of being in pickups.

  “I saw it as a revolt against the pickup,” he added. “In the short term I won but in the long term I lost.”

  “Which is proven by the fact that it’s a pickup we’re riding in,” Willy said.

  58

  LUCAS HAWKINS AND K.K. Slater spent the afternoon and all the next day looking at rhinos.

  In the afternoon Willy became bored with Thalia and drove back to Dallas. Soon he would be flying back to England.

  “Is Lucas a good hitchhiker?” Duane asked.

  “No but he’s resourceful,” Willy said. “I’m his friend, not his keeper. K.K. likes him and she can just summon a car or a plane to take him wherever he needs to go.”

  As usual, Duane felt a little droop in spirit when Willy left. He was also a little disappointed that Lucas seemed more interested in rhinos than he was in scattering sculptures on Moore Drilling’s property, though he hadn’t formally ruled it out.

  Lucas made it clear that he was nothing if not independent. He liked K.K., but did not solicit her opinion, or Duane’s.

  “He can be haughty, Lucas,” Willy had said, and he was right. Lucas was haughty and yet he was friendly as well.

  “It’s just that I have to find the spot and decide what I think should go on it,” he explained to Duane.

  “I like that bluff, though,” he added. “If you’ll give me a year to think about it I bet I can do something.”

  “The bluff has got a year,” Duane said.

  “I’ll be back from time to time—next time I’ll bring a camera,” Lucas promised.

  Then he called himself a car from Wichita Falls and was quietly driven away.

  59

  IN THE ABSENCE of any pressing duties—Duane would not see that he would ever have pressing duties again—he began to spend more and more time on his boat, now officially named the Bobby Lee, mostly just drifting around the muddy waters of Lake Kickapoo. On the weekends Bobby Lee often joined him, but during the week his wife, Sheriff Lena Loftis, often drafted him as an unofficial deputy. If there was a car wreck on one of the county highways—and few days passed without at least one car wreck—Bobby Lee was forced to put on an orange vest and get out cones, and direct traffic around the crash scene. He didn’t like these duties and was often testy with any driver who did not immediately obey his instructions.

  Once and once only K.K. Slater came on the boat with Duane. She brought some brandy and drank it as they drifted here and there.

  “I guess it’s time to face th
e fact that things didn’t really work out for me here,” she said. “You’re about the only local who likes me and sometimes I’m not so sure about you.”

  “I like you fine,” Duane said. “But you aren’t really going to stay here, are you?”

  “No, but I thought I would, at first,” she told him. “I do like the rhinos and I do think it’s a valuable program. But when you start something like this, and invest your time and energy in it, pretty soon you discover that you’re just a bureaucrat, running a bureaucracy, directing people who come to know more about the project than you do. I’m not like Miriam Rothschild, who really is a world-renowned expert on the flea.”

  She sighed.

  “I’m finally just a rich dilettante,” she said, draining her brandy.

  “Well,” Duane said, but went no farther. K.K. was right about herself and he couldn’t think of a thing to say that might cheer her up.

  “After all I did actually marry Hondo. What does that say about me?”

  She drained her brandy.

  “Sometimes I wish you’d shown some interest, Duane,” she said.

  “We’re on my fishing boat, about to watch a beautiful sunset,” he said. “I know it’s just scenery, but scenery’s mostly what I have to offer, these days.”

  “I suspect you’re too modest,” K.K. said.

  60

  “I NEED YOU, DUANE! I need you bad,” Annie said—it was late at night. Duane was on his boat. He had invited Bobby Lee, but Bobby was, as he put it, on a short leash; his wife the sheriff had caught him watching porn on her computer.

  “Seems like this issue has come up before in your life,” Duane recalled.

  “Yeah, but then my wife was doing the porn,” Bobby Lee said. “I blame all this on my penile implant.”

  So Duane was alone on his boat when Annie called.

  “Where are you and what’s wrong?” he asked.

  “I’m in Wickenburg, Arizona, in rehab for meth addiction, and I don’t think I can stand it,” Annie said. “I was addicted before I even married you—though I shook it off for a while. In Arizona I got it from that carpenter we had. You didn’t even notice when I was high.”

  Actually Duane had noticed a few times, but he had failed to peg her highs to meth. He had blamed it on pot, or maybe cocaine, even her angers and fits, which were frequent.

  “How long have you been in?”

  “Three days, don’t ask questions, just come and get me.”

  Duane knew a good bit about rehab, since all his children and some of his grandchildren had been in at least once—not to mention maybe a score of his employees. He knew for sure that a person in rehab for meth needed to stay longer than three days.

  “Annie, if it’s meth, three days is not much of a try,” he said.

  “I don’t give a fuck—come and get me out.”

  “Did you commit yourself, or did someone commit you?”

  “Why is that any of your business?” Annie asked. “You’re the only one who ever really loved me—why do you have to ask questions when I’m desperate! This is me, Duane, your sweetie—just come get me out.

  “Don’t sit there in that rat hole and think about stuff—just come!”

  He remembered that Honor Carmichael had mentioned that she thought Annie had remarried.

  “Did your husband commit you?” he asked, finally.

  “Go to hell, you fucking prick!” Annie said, and hung up.

  61

  SOON ENOUGH, DUANE’S conscience began to bother him. He had loved Annie deeply once—perhaps at some level he still did love her. She had her failings but also her virtues. She had been very sweet to him, many times. Perhaps he should go to Wickenburg. He had no intention of helping her escape or anything, but perhaps he should go see her.

  K.K. was still in town. A very cute baby rhino had been born a few days earlier—the little rhino was female, and the staff wanted to name her K.K., so K.K. stayed for the christening and good photo ops were had by all.

  There was a large crowd in the little grandstand that had been built as a viewing station. Many in the crowd came to see the baby but a solid group of tourists came in the belief that Double Aught was still alive and would come trotting back someday.

  So high was Double Aught’s popularity among those who had mainly never seen him that another movie was planned, also to be called The Legend of Double Aught—but the production kept being postponed.

  It was evening before he got a moment with K.K.—she had brought in some Kobe beef and cooked it herself. It was over dinner that he told her about Annie.

  “I think I see your pattern, Duane,” K.K. said. “Honor Carmichael is dead, so you’re asking me what you would have asked her, which is basically whether to go to Wickenburg or not to go.

  “You know what happens to meth addicts—just look down the street. Whoever threw that rock at us was probably doing meth.”

  Duane looked and saw several teenagers sitting on the courthouse lawn, smoking. One, now jobless, had been a fine high school quarterback. Now, like most of his companions, he was a meth head.

  “I guess I better go,” Duane said. “I know I probably can’t help her, but I might always regret it if I don’t try.”

  “That’s right,” K.K. said. “That’s exactly right.”

  62

  I WAS AT A rodeo once, in Wickenburg,” Bobby Lee said. “That event occurred many years ago.”

  Bobby Lee had invited himself on the long car trip to Arizona. Lena had agreed to this plan, the emotional temperature being still rather high at their house.

  “There’s some pretty fair scenery in New Mexico and Arizona,” Lena said, when she handed Bobby over. “It might take my husband’s mind off his penile implant for a while.”

  Starting from Thalia, it took them a full day to hit the good scenery. Duane had always wanted to cross the Rockies, so they went to Denver and crossed on I-70, which took them so high that Bobby Lee’s ears popped. Then they coasted down toward southwestern Colorado and stayed north of Phoenix and on to Wickenburg.

  “How’d you do in the rodeo here?” Duane asked.

  “Oh, I just rode in the Grand Entry,” Bobby said. “Other than that, I don’t rodeo.”

  Duane left Bobby Lee in the motel room when he went out to the famous rehab facility, where many movie stars had been treated for a variety of addictions.

  When he told the recepionist that he had once been Annie Cameron’s husband, and wanted to visit if possible, the woman behind the reception desk looked stricken.

  “I’m sorry to be the one to have to tell you this,” she said, “but Annie Cameron is dead. It was in the local paper yesterday.”

  Duane felt a droop or a catch in his breastbone, but he did not really feel surprised—not really.

  “I guess you had a long drive for nothing,” the receptionist said.

  “Not for nothing—but could you tell me what happened?”

  “It was kinda like Thelma and Louise,” the receptionist said. “Miss Cameron got out somehow and stole a car. She got somewhere up on the Hopi Reservation and, I guess, picked up a hitchhiker. I guess they went north until they were pretty high up and then ran off one of the mesas—I think it was Second Mesa.”

  “Neither of them lived?”

  “Neither of them lived—I guess her family came and got her. The funeral was yesterday, in California.”

  Later Duane checked his messages to see if anyone in the family had called him.

  No one had.

  63

  THAT’S TWO WOMEN you’ve lost to car wrecks—why are we going this way?” Bobby Lee asked. They were going north, on a very lonely road, toward the great mesas of Hopi.

  “I’d like to see where she died—I’ll put up a cross.”

  They were in a part of the West where death on the highway was so common that they even sold roadside crosses at the convenience stores. There was quite a variety.

  They did find the place where Annie and her
hitchhiker friend went off the road—it was near a Hopi village. They had not sailed off the mesa the way Thelma and Louise sailed into the Grand Canyon—but they had driven, apparently at high speed, into a narrow arroyo near the cliff’s edge. Duane put up two crosses, one for Annie and one for her passenger. The paper said the passenger was an Inuit, a tribe from the Arctic. What he was doing on the lonely road south of Hopi nobody knew, though it was learned that he had been released from the Gallup jail only a few days before his fatal meeting with Annie.

  Duane had kept a tiny picture of Annie in his wallet for many years—he took it out and pinned it to the cross with a cactus needle.

  “This is about the saddest place I’ve ever been,” Bobby Lee said. “There’s nothing but a big empty here. Would there be any town I could fly home from? I sure miss my Lena.”

  Duane saw that Bobby Lee was genuinely distressed—he was trembling, in fact. Duane drove straight to Flagstaff and flew Bobby home.

  “Ain’t you coming?” Bobby asked.

  “Not today,” Duane said. “I feel like wandering a bit.”

  64

  WHEN DUANE LEFT the Flagstaff airport he had no firm idea about what he was going to do. He was in his pickup—it was not a rental car he could just turn in. He could easily have found a driveaway company in Phoenix and turned it over to them, but he and Annie had once gone to Phoenix for a wedding and Duane hated the place so that he never wanted to go back.

  What he did know was that he didn’t want to be in Thalia for a while. He had his fishing equipment with him, but had not fished; he had always meant to learn fly-fishing someday and had an expensive rod and some lures—but he did not feel like learning fly-fishing just then.

  He couldn’t get Annie’s pointless death off his mind. For some reason he felt like staying close to where she met her end. Why this was he didn’t know, but it was the one clear feeling he had. For three nights he stayed in a motel in Tuba City, driving back to the death site every day.