Bum Steer

by Nancy Pickard

  For the next hour, we flew on instruments at 8,000 feet over landscape that all looked the same to me when I got glimpses of it through the clouds: flat, gray, and wet. But then the weather and the land both began to change: we passed the back edge of the front, so to speak, and the sun appeared, shining down on rolling terrain. On top of the hills, there were gray circles that looked like salt on the rim of enormous margaritas. When I asked the pilot what they were, he said, “Limestone.” Ah. Gray rocks. As in Flint Hills. I saw brown dots that I assumed to be cows. No trees. Or, practically no trees. Water holes. In fact, lots of water standing in pastures where the rain had passed through. A barn here and there. Even fewer houses. As we descended, I saw long, long fence lines.

  It looked like no country I’d ever seen before.

  Suddenly, I felt as if I were flying into another century, the one with sod houses, covered wagons, and cowboys.

  We landed in a pasture and rolled bumpily down a dirt strip to a stop a few yards from a barbed-wire fence. I breathed again and looked around. Straight ahead was a metal airplane hangar with a tin roof. Farther left, there was a green pickup truck with a cowboy standing beside it, and to our right were a few red cows. That was it.

  Welcome to the real Kansas, I thought.

  Also: What am I doing here?

  The pilot got me unharnessed and unloaded. By the time I started trudging across the damp grass toward the truck, the plane was already rolling back down the dirt strip for takeoff. I put down my bags long enough to wave when he lifted off, and he waggled his wings in reply.

  My heels were sinking into mud, but I didn’t care, and it wasn’t because my red leather heels were already ruined. I felt exhilarated. Maybe it was the simple rush of joy at being alive, maybe it was the country air that smelled so fresh, so pungent after the rain. At any rate, it was with some vigor that I trudged on toward the truck. The cowboy—a real one in boots, blue jeans, a checkered shirt, a yellow slicker, and a cowboy hat—met me halfway there.

  PART II

  Home on the Range

  8

  Hi, there.” The cowboy stuck out his left hand for my bags and his right hand for me to shake. The hand was hard and callused, the handshake firm.

  “Hello. I’m Jenny Cain.”

  “Well, I hope so.” He grinned, producing a faceful of deep lines in his tanned skin. “I’d be mighty surprised if you weren’t. I’m Quentin Harlan. Pleased to meet you, Ms. Cain. This all you brought with you?”

  “Yes, that’s all, I won’t be staying long.”

  “Our loss.”

  “I guess you’ve heard from the hospital?”

  “Got a call from a detective name of Canales.”

  Like the detective himself, Harlan gave the name its rich Mexican pronunciation: Cahnahlays. Thank goodness he knows, I thought, so I won’t have to break the news to him. “I’m sorry about your boss.”

  “Thanks. The son of a bitch who killed him is going to be a hell of a lot sorrier.”

  Harlan hoisted my suit bag and briefcase and casually tossed them over the side into the bed of the pickup truck. I winced, although I didn’t hear the expensive leather come to any harm.

  “Smooth flight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, but this half-ton limo ain’t likely to give you such a nice ride.” He opened the door of the truck for me and I did my best to climb in without hiking my skirt up to my waist. One of the first things I was going to have to do now that I was officially in the country, I decided, was to change my clothes. As Quentin Harlan settled himself behind the wheel, he asked me, “Ever been to Kansas before?”

  “No, although I’ve flown over it many times on my way to somewhere else.”

  He started the truck. “It may surprise you.”

  I gazed out at the rugged, rocky landscape and admitted, “It already has.” There was so much open land, so much sky. I’d been here five minutes, and already I felt a world away from Kansas City and an entire dimension in time away from Massachusetts. “Please, call me Jenny.”

  “All right, I will. You can call me Slight, if you want to; it’s an old nickname.”

  It seemed a funny one for a tall and well-built man, but then I had once known a dour woman named Sunny and a skinny man named Fats. I sneaked glances at him as we started off across the pasture. He didn’t exactly look like the Marlboro Man, but Quentin Harlan, occupation cowboy, had that same air of rugged attractiveness about him. I couldn’t place his age with any confidence. His skin was so weather-beaten it could have belonged to a man of seventy, but he moved with the easy grace of a much younger man. His deep tan made his eyes look almost unnaturally blue. Under his big hat, I glimpsed graying brown hair, but it was very thick. Was he in his fifties, maybe? Older than that? Younger? I couldn’t tell. It mattered, too, because this was one of the men we were supposed to employ for the rest of his natural-born life, however much longer that might last. So far, it didn’t seem like such a bad idea.

  “Slight, about Mr. Benet’s death—”

  “If you don’t mind, I don’t feel much like talkin’ about it yet.”

  “Oh. Sure. You bet.”

  We drove for twenty minutes through a world painted russet: red cattle, red autumn grass, and nearly everything else blended to deep rust by the long shadows cast by the flat, pewter clouds in the enormous expanse of sky.

  “So what do you think of these wide-open spaces … Jenny?”

  He had lit a cigarette and rolled down his window to let the smoke escape. The air blew chilly around my legs in their thin hosiery.

  “Well, it’s so enormous and empty it makes me think of an ocean. And this color! ’Red sky at morning, sailor’s warning; red sky at night, sailor’s delight.’ I suspect a person could feel pretty small and inconsequential out here, just like at sea.”

  “Funny you’d say that.” His smile curved around the cigarette in his mouth, but then he removed the cigarette to talk. “This part of the country used to be called the Inland Sea. Those were the days when the native grasses grew higher than a horse’s head and when the wind blew the grass looked like waves rolling on a sea.” He looked a little embarrassed at his own flight of poetry. “There’s some folks, mostly city folks, of course, who want to turn all this into a national park.” He smiled. “Guess they think the tourists’ll come out to watch the grass grow. Now there’s a thrill for you. Hell, there’s nothin’ to do out here if you ain’t workin’ cattle. Besides, the prairie frightens a lot of people. Just scares the p—hell—out of ’em. Don’t know why. I guess it’s all these miles of nothing. I see them driving by, staring out of their cars, and their windows are all rolled up and their doors are locked. I don’t know what they think’s goin’ to get them out here, coyotes maybe. Indians.” He flicked the ash off his cigarette and laughed.

  “Aw, you’re just trying to scare a city girl.”

  He laughed again and turned left toward a padlocked gate that bore a wrought-iron sign that said CROSSBONES RANCH. Below that was a wooden sign that said POSTED: NO HUNTING, and below that a painted metal sign that warned trespassers they would be prosecuted … “Or Shot,” somebody had spray-painted in red letters over that.

  Slight got out of the truck, unlocked the gate, came back to the truck, drove through the gate, got back out of the truck, locked the gate again, and returned to the truck.

  I began to think they could keep the relatives out.

  He drove down the slope of a bowl and then straight ahead toward a cluster of buildings and fences. Just before the sun disappeared, I got a good look at the ranch headquarters, which was composed of a house, a barn, a long, low wooden structure that stretched out to the west of the house, and three smaller wooden buildings. The house was a two-story rectangle constructed of huge stones, without even a porch to soften its stark lines. The barn was a masterpiece of masonry, a magnificent four-story structure built from the same quarry as the house, with a huge “front door” that gaped like
an open mouth.

  “Here we are,” Slight announced. “You can stay in the main house or the bunkhouse, it’s up to you.”

  The buildings gave me the creeps. With their stones as big as tombstones and of a similar dead-gray color, they irresistibly raised images in my mind of spiders hiding between rocks, of dirt and moss, of witches. There was something a little run-down and neglected and lonely-looking about the place. I tried to tell myself I was only disturbed because the scene implied expenses to the foundation, but it was more than that. It was a feeling of dread. I didn’t want to go into those buildings. The chill running down my spine was just like the one that stuffed cat had produced in me. I didn’t want to spend the night anywhere on this property.

  “I have reservations at a motel, Slight.”

  I saw from the look he gave me that he understood perfectly well that I didn’t want to stay here alone with him and the other man.

  “Dwight Brady arranged it,” I said quickly. “Besides, I wouldn’t want to get in your way.”

  “You’re not likely to.”

  “Well, thanks, but I’ll keep the motel room, if it’s not too much trouble.” Of course it would be more trouble for him to drive back and forth to fetch me.

  He shrugged. “You’re the boss.”

  Slight parked the truck on the grass in the front yard of the house, beside an old black Cadillac. I grabbed my purse. When we got out of the truck, he hauled my luggage and briefcase out of the back.

  “I’ll take this in,” he drawled, “in case you need anything before I drive you into town.”

  I felt I had been somehow outmaneuvered.

  Slight carried the bags inside the house, with me reluctantly following him.

  “Carl!”

  He yelled the name in a loud, deep voice as he set my bag on the floor near the front door. It was dark and cool in the stone house, like walking into a cellar, though it didn’t smell like one. It smelled like an old brewery, as if the stones were steeped in beer. Still, I felt better about the house once I was inside it. I decided it only seemed spooky from the outside, because of the way it stood tall and stark and lonely against a prairie that seemed endless. Inside, where we were surrounded by solid walls, the world felt smaller, safer, more manageable. The rooms I could see—the living room where we stood, a dining room beyond that, a bit of the kitchen, a hall, and the first three steps of a stairway going up—were sparsely furnished. In the front room, there was a divan, a coffee table, a floor-model cabinet TV set, a couple of end tables with reading lamps, and two brown leather rocking chairs of the reclining type. There was a pile of books by one of the rockers, and a mess of newspapers and magazines by the other. A massive dark-wood table and three mismatched dark-wood chairs nearly filled the dining room. That was it. There were no carpets, no pictures, not even a calendar on any of the painted white walls. It was grim. There was, however, a spray can of furniture polish and a gray rag on top of the television cabinet. Somebody had made an effort to dust the place for company.

  “So, how do you like it?” Slight inquired.

  Disconcerted, I looked over at him and discovered that he was squinting at me in an amused kind of way.

  “It’s lovely,” I said, straight-faced.

  He laughed, then made me jump again by yelling, “Carl, goddammit!” In a normal tone of voice he said, “I suppose you’re thinkin’ this is what you get when you got men livin’ without women.” That had been exactly what I was thinking, but I didn’t say so. He went on, “It ain’t that I wouldn’t like to make it pretty. I don’t know, what do you think? Flowers, maybe, and curtains? Hell, I haven’t got the first idea and Cat never did and Girl ain’t either. We’ve just been three-fourths of a barbershop quartet peckin’ in the dirt. I hope you can stand us for a day or two.”

  “I probably can manage,” I said in a dry tone to match his. “But don’t expect me to crochet any doilies for you.”

  He squinted his amused smile at me again in a way I was beginning to recognize as characteristic of him. I suspected he was putting me on about his alleged male incompetency. I suspected that whatever he gave a damn about looked just fine, as the fields had seemed to, and the cattle, at least as far as I could tell.

  “Now don’t tell me you know what doilies are,” he said. “You’re too young to know that.”

  “Not so young.”

  He gazed at me a second longer than was perhaps necessary. I felt as if he’d received a message I hadn’t sent. Or had I? Slight Harlan, with his snug jeans, his creased, tanned face, his amused blue eyes, and his sly sense of humor, would have been an attractive man at any age. I didn’t look away from him, but I shifted my feet. And the subject.

  “How long have you worked for Mr. Benet?”

  “Thirty-two years this August, and Carl a little longer than that.” He walked into the dining room, peered up the stairs, then into the kitchen. “Don’t know where he is, probably out talkin’ to his horse. You remember those movie cowboys who’d rather kiss a horse than a woman? Well, you’re gonna meet one, Jenny. He’s the goddamest fool you ever met. If you want to get on the good side of Carl Everett, just take along a carrot to feed him, maybe a couple of sugar cubes—”

  “Talk about your goddamn fools.”

  I turned, to see that a second man had come in the front door behind us. He swept off his cowboy hat and took the hand I offered to him to shake.

  “Glad to meet you, ma’am,” he mumbled.

  “That’s Carl,” Slight said unnecessarily. “This is a lady, Carl. Try to remember to spit outside.”

  The object of his needling had a wide, fleshy face with a large nose that flushed purple at Slight’s gibe. Carl Everett looked to be in his sixties, a big man who looked as if he might be heavily muscled beneath his checked shirt and blue jeans. Some of the muscle had turned to paunch that bulged over his silver belt buckle. He glanced at Slight and then shook his head, turning his mouth down at the corners in a look that might have been mock or real disgust.

  “I’m glad to meet you, too,” I said.

  “Well,” Carl mumbled.

  He nodded at me again, then headed back out the front door he’d just come in. He reminded me of an overgrown adolescent, eager to get back to the boys, uneasy around the girls. I had the impression that he’d bolt in a panic if I ever tried to get past “hello” with him. I had no such impression of his old friend Slight, however. I suspected that one would abandon the boys in a minute at the first whiff of perfume. He and Benet must have been quite a pair of tomcats at one time.

  “Cowboys come in two varieties, Jenny.”

  I looked back at him.

  “There’s silent,” he said, grinning, “and there’s gabby.”

  “Let me guess which one you are.”

  He chuckled as he bent down to pick up my luggage again. The phone rang on the wall right beside him, but he ignored it, which was just fine with me, since I was afraid of being summoned back to Kansas City by Canales. “You don’t want to let Carl talk your arm off.” The phone rang a second time as he started up the stairs. I saw then that they had an answering machine, which took the call. “You might like to get out of those city clothes. I’ll put your stuff in the spare room.”

  “But Slight—”

  He disappeared from my view.

  Well, he was right, I did want to change clothes. But I waited until he had come back down again before I went upstairs to do it.

  9

  Supper that evening (I called it dinner, but Slight corrected me: “It’s supper in these parts. Dinner’s what you eat at noon.”) was broiled steak, pinto beans, and Tater Tots served at the big table in the dining room of the old stone house. Carl, who was one beer into a six-pack by the time he set the pack on the table, had done the cooking. The steaks—T-bones—were charred on the outside, nearly bloody inside, and more tender than any beef I’d ever tasted. It was “ranch beef,” they told me. I resolved to send some back for my trustees; good steaks m
ight console them for all the trouble this bequest was going to be.

  I’d never eaten pinto beans before, and after the first bite I was certain I never would again. Carl had cooked the light-brown, oval beans with chunks of jalapeño peppers that set my tongue on fire. As for the Tater Tots, I had known they lived in the freezer sections of supermarkets, but the idea of buying them had appealed to me about as much as buying frozen French toast. Now I discovered that I kind of liked the fat, crunchy pegs of reconstituted potatoes—proof, as if any were needed, that I was not, and never would be, a gourmet. The steak knives were bone-handled, the dinner plates were wood with metal inserts. I drank my beer from a tall glass with “Hacker’s Amoco” printed on it, which was what Carl offered me in place of drinking from the can. I would have preferred the can, but Carl seemed to be trying to play gentleman to my “lady,” and I didn’t want to spoil that for him.

  I decided we had to talk about it.

  “I was at the hospital today,” I said.

  Slight glanced up at me; Carl didn’t, but he did stop eating and lay his utensils on his plate.

  “I had an appointment to see Mr. Benet at the hospital this morning. He was killed before I got there.”

  Neither of them said anything.

  The phone rang, and they let the machine get it.

  For a few minutes we sat in total silence. Then Slight started eating again, but slowly, as if he were forcing himself to do it. Carl picked up his beer can and drained it, though he didn’t eat any more of his dinner. It seemed an eternity before Slight finally said, in a slow, calm drawl, “Well, he had an awful time dyin’, but he had a good life. Good, I mean, if you can take the droughts and the blizzards and all the rest of the bullroar that goes with ranching. Good if you like the smell of cow manure.” He glanced at Carl and laughed, briefly. “Good if you like ownin’ land, and if you like havin’ money. Old Cat kinda liked the green stuff, right, Carl? On the ground and in the wallet, both. So I guess he was happy. I’ll bet he had in his lifetime probably a half a million cows and a couple hundred horses and four wives and a passel of children. Don’t know what more a man could ask for, right, Carl?”