The Best in the West

by Kathleen Walker

  She was eighteen when he first took her to the ranch up north. The land was empty, cold and hard, no green valley like those of the surrounding ranches. Still, it was his and paid for with the years of sweat and bloodied hands on his father’s place. He started his ranch with thirty head, nowhere near enough to survive but enough to begin their life together.

  They lived in a root cellar dug into the side of a hill. The small pane of glass in the door let them watch the snow grow high around their hole in the hill. Joan had her first baby ten months after they married, barely making it into Española and the doctor. She came back to a trailer Bobby hauled in for her and the baby. For the next year, she carried Bob Junior on her hip or on her back and worked the ranch with Bobby McBain.

  They took their baths from a bucket. They spent their days riding the land, building fences, barbed wire cutting through tough leather gloves. She said nothing of her fear of the rattlers she knew waited for her between the rocks and under the brush. She set her mouth in a grim line and worked.

  At night, even in sleet or rain, she would stand outside cooking the steaks he loved so much on an open fire. She learned to use that same fire for the stews and biscuits that made him smile. And, in the morning, she made his thick black coffee.

  “That’s good, honey,” he’d say about everything she put on his plate or in his mug. “Real good.”

  After two years, with Ronnie in her belly, she had to go. She could smell the future dribbling away with the cold and the cut hands and the flash floods and the calves they nursed in that dugout where they spent their first winter.

  “I gotta have this baby in a big hospital,” she told him. “I don’t want to take any chances with this one.”

  He took her to the city. She never left. Within a few months she began stocking the feed-and-tack store using the money from the sale of their cattle. He went back to his father’s ranch east of Roswell. He came into the city on weekends, driving the three hours after five days on the back of a horse, fifteen hours a day.

  He’d pull in late Friday night and grab his big wife. He never questioned her decision to build the store, never questioned that the money she needed to keep it going would have to come from breaking his back on his dad’s place. He would do that for Joan McBain.

  Bob Junior, Ronnie, Sara, and Phillip grew up in the sand of the north valley and the dust of the feed store. As their childhood passed, Bobby McBain grew old. The muscle began to turn to fat, two hundred and forty pounds on his six foot two inches. At fifty, he was half-owner, with his brother Joseph, of his father’s ranch and half-owner with Joan of the feed store in Albuquerque. He still held on to the ranch up north. The dugout rotted back into the hillside.

  For the last five years of his life he had a town woman in Roswell. She was good to talk to, to share a drink with and a home-cooked meal. She didn’t matter, though, not the way Joan did. He made that drive over to Albuquerque almost every weekend and now stretched those weekends out to three days, sometimes four.

  Right up to the day he died, Joan McBain could still make him moan with those big, firm breasts and hard thighs.

  “Joan McBain,” he would say, “you are one gorgeous little heifer.”

  He did warn her about those quarter horses with their big muscles and too short legs.

  “Smartest damn horse ever was,” he’d say. “But you never gonna make the money on them those Arab people do.”

  “I wouldn’t have none of those pin-headed jackasses on my land,” she’d say.

  “Talking horses or people?” he’d ask and they would laugh.

  He heard the figures, people spending thirty or forty thousand on one of those Arabians, even more. Those stories would bring roars of laughter over beers in a Roswell bar or a confused, frustrated bout of head shaking. Shit, forty thousand for a horse that wasn’t winning no races. Shit. And now they were hearing stories of Arabs selling for a hundred thousand and more. The world had definitely gone bug nuts.

  Bobby McBain never had a chance that night he left that bar in Roswell. He was pulling that extra fifty pounds and riding the land or the truck twelve hours a day, finishing off with a two-hour ride on a barstool. He was dead by the time he hit the frozen ground of the parking lot. His last thoughts before the red-hot pain were about how cold the night was. It could get awful cold in Roswell, New Mexico.

  “Hell, there ain’t no money to be made in raising and training these horses,” he told Joan McBain. “Not big money.”

  “No money in feed stores either,” she reminded him with a smile of how he felt all those years ago when she told him her idea for a business.

  “You watch,” she said of both the store and the horses.

  He did and then he hit the frozen ground of the bar parking lot.

  His half of the family ranch near Roswell went to her. Bob Junior joined his uncle Joseph in working the ranch. Big, like his father, muscled, able to work all day and part of the night, Bob Junior made those same weekend trips his father had, back to Joan. She would find him late on a Friday night sitting in her kitchen, nodding over a cup of coffee.

  He was the quiet one. Sara was the runt. That’s what the boys called her. Like Joan, she wanted the city life. She loved her job in the clean, bright office at the museum.

  Phillip didn’t have the height or the power of his father. What he did have that country friendliness. He loved people right down to bear hugs.

  Joan McBain loved them all but she knew she favored Ronnie. He took over the feed store and left her free for her horses. He liked the store, the customers and the salesmen. He worked hard but made sure get home home for dinner. Every few months he would take off and head to the ranch up north.

  “Bobby used to go up there every so often,” she told Ellen. “We leased the land to one of the neighbors but he kept his eyes on things. That ranch is where he got his feet on the ground, proved he could make it through those winters. Good Lord, it was miserable but we made it and it proved something to both of us. It proved to me I wanted a business.” She laughed.

  “It wasn’t all bad,” she admitted, her voice softened with the memory of the skinny bed and the long cold nights when lovemaking was the only way to pass the time.

  “Ronnie’s a lot like him, you know,” she said, and used her scarlet nails to pluck up another cigarette.

  *

  He was tall, like his father, ruggedly handsome but lean, not thick with muscle. He walked with a slow, ambling gait. He wore cowboy boots, jeans, Western shirts. They were working clothes, not shiny, new and fake like the ones Ellen saw on shop owners in Old Town.

  Only a few years away from New York, they wore cowboy boots with too high heels and iron-pressed Sergio jeans. They held on to their carefully groomed beards and their neatly brushed hair. Ellen would snort whenever she came across one.

  “I love it here,” was a line they would include in the first four sentences they spoke to anyone who entered their shops.

  “Yeah,” they would drawl, chewing a bit on the inside of their lower lip as though playing with a wad of Skoal, “been here, oh, ‘bout five years now.”

  “Almost a native,” you were expected to gush, and most visitors to their shops did.

  On Ronnie the boots and the Western-cut shirts with the snapped-to-the-cuff buttons and the faded jeans were honestly worn. Ellen couldn’t help herself. She was looking at Gary Cooper.

  “I mean, we’re talking cowboy here,” she told the women in the newsroom. “We’re talking down-home, back-forty, shit-kicking cowboy.”

  Since almost no one in the newsroom was native to the state or the Southwest, they were equally fascinated with Ellen’s cowboy.

  This was no tie-wearing PR grinner, no Paris affair, good for a year and nothing else, no boy to be charmed by Brooklynese. This man had family and a family history and a ranch and a love of the land. And, by the end of the second month, this man had something to say.

  “Ellen, I think I need to tell you somethi
ng and I know it’s gonna seem a bit sudden.”

  He stood with one foot resting on the bottom rail of the white fence surrounding his mother’s front two acres.

  “Go ahead.”

  “I never said this to anybody before, Ellen, not really, but I think I’m in love with you.”

  She stared in shock and then burst into a laugh of pure happiness. She didn’t tell him this was the first time anyone, man or boy, had said that to her. What she did say was a little less honest.

  “I love you too. I do. I wanted to tell you, but I was afraid.” She moved tight to his side.

  “You don’t have to say that,” he said, putting his arms around her. “You don’t have to say anything.”

  “It’s true,” she said, her arms around his waist. “It is.”

  It wasn’t, not then.

  31

  It was the trip to the ranch up north that made her question all the decisions she had made about her life and her future. Up until that trip, she wanted to travel light. She didn’t want the problems of possessions or relationships. She wanted the freedom to leave whenever she chose.

  The next move, from Albuquerque to somewhere else, was close. She figured it would happen within the next six months. Love or not, this thing with Ronnie McBain could only last until the move. That’s what she thought before the trip to the ranch.

  “It’s an easy ride,” he told her. “About three hours.”

  They passed though a handful of towns where the main streets were a quarter-mile long with a few houses and maybe a store or a post office. Between the towns, the land was empty, free of people and their places.

  “I used to go out there,” Ronnie said, nodding to the seemingly endless expanse. “I’d camp and think about things for a week or so.”

  Ellen gave the statement a small smile. The emptiness was beginning to make her nervous.

  Ronnie’s twang seemed to deepen as he drove the white Ford pickup deeper into the country. He pushed his cowboy hat far back on his head.

  “It sure is pretty,” he commented to himself. He reached to pat her on the thigh.

  “It really is,” she agreed and wondered how it was that they passed only two cars in what must have been an hour since the last town. The few pickups they did pass earned a touch of his hat brim in greeting. They got the same pseudo-tip in return.

  “Not too many people up here,” he told her. “You got to depend on your neighbors.”

  My God, she thought, trying to accept the strangeness of this day and this land, this really is the West. That is what the West is all about. Those New York morons with their clipped beards and their fat behinds in new blue jeans and look what I have, she told herself, look what I can learn.

  “It is beautiful,” she stated firmly, wanting to believe it.

  “Over that range is Pedernal,” he told her with a nod to the east. “It’s a flat-top mountain. You see it in a lot of paintings by those artists who lived in Taos back in the Twenties and Thirties. It’s like a symbol.”

  She stared out at the red line of mountains and the purple shadows beyond them.

  “There’s a lake up here we can go to if you want. I’ve been going up there since I was a boy. There’s another one too, but I don’t like it. Too many people from the city. Looks like this big old pond.”

  She nodded her agreement.

  “There it is,” he said, pointing to a cabin on a rise. “That’s the house.”

  The small cabin faced the valley that stretched to the distant red mountains. The kitchen area had a hotplate, a single shelf, and a plastic ice chest. There was a double bed with a tarnished metal headboard in the tiny bedroom. In the main room, a card table had been placed in front of the large front window. They could sit there and watch the storms as they rolled over the red mountains and into the valley of the neighboring ranch.

  “Watch,” he said that night as the storms moved in.

  The purple and deep black-blue clouds rolled low across the valley. Bolts of lightning, like the limbs of bare winter trees, slashed down to the earth and sliced the black sky with their thin white lines.

  “Tomorrow I’ll get some horses,” he told her. “Johnny Shorter will let us have a couple. We can do some riding. We’ll take a look at the dugout. Boy, my folks had it rough.”

  They stayed four days. They walked and rode the land. They met other ranchers at the bar with the massive hand-carved wood door. They searched for Indian arrowheads, cooked over a fire, listened to the transistor radio and the bible thumping out of Texas. And, they made love.

  She said little those days. She didn’t know what he wanted to hear and she didn’t know how she could change herself so that she could stay here with this cowboy. How could she change to want nothing in her life but this?

  He wanted this life, built it with his own hands, and she wanted to be part of it. For the first time in her life, she wanted to be part of something that did not move her on, something that stayed put for years, lifetimes. That’s what she told herself.

  “How much would it take to get this place working?” she asked, with a new drawl in her own voice.

  “An awful lot,” he said and shook his head. “The stock alone would cost and with the price of beef where it is, it would hardly be worth going into ranching right now. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done, the fences, the cabin. It’s miserable in the winter. At least we have electricity, but I tell you, walking out to the shithouse in the middle of January ain’t no picnic and it can snow right through to June.”

  “Still, if you love it and you thought you wanted to make it a home, it would be worth it,” she half-questioned, half-stated.

  “Yeah,” he said, gazing over the land the way his mother looked over her front two acres.

  That he did this all himself, that is what so stunned Ellen, the fences, the cabin, building the shelves for the few paperbacks he kept there. He told her how he would finish the kitchen and how it would be with a sink, a stove and running water.

  “Could be fine,” he said. “Real fine.”

  “It would be fantastic,” she pronounced.

  She felt only a little bored after the four days and when they left she told him, “God, I want to stay.”

  “It is a good place,” he said.

  Now, she was in love. She was in love with Ronnie McBain, with his family, with his ranch, and with all of New Mexico. He showed her the New Mexico she never wanted to see. They rode the tram to the top of the Sandias. They camped in the Jemez Mountains and swam naked in a hot springs he found there years before.

  “Up there, way up there,” he nodded to the surrounding cliffs, “I found a kiva, you know, where the Indians had their ceremonies. I damn near fell into it. It was a cave up there.” He pointed up to the mountain behind them.

  “Everything was intact, pots, everything. I rode in three days and stumbled into it. Nobody else had been there and nobody else would ever find it, not for a long time. These pots,” he stretched his hands wide and round, “they were like this. Not broken, all painted. Unbelievable.”

  “Could you find it again?” She was excited by the thought of seeing such a place.

  “It would take pack mules and a couple of days and even then it wouldn’t be easy. The land looks different now with all the logging going on. New roads, that sort of thing. But, yeah, I could find it again.”

  “Let’s,” she said. “Let’s go up there and find it.”

  She wanted to see the Indian bowls with their black geometric patterns. She wanted to find the kiva, the room where they did their secret things. She wanted to spend the days riding with Ronnie McBain.

  “Leave it be,” he said.

  “Why? It would be fun.”

  “I don’t want to,” he said and she heard a hint of anger in his voice. “Let’s leave it alone.”

  No. That meant someday somebody else would find it, stumble into it. They would take the pots and sell them or keep them and she would never be there t
o see the secret place, to be the first reporter there, the one who could tell the story. She would not be able to have one of those black patterned pots, those priceless pots.

  “How come?” she pushed.

  “Forget it, Ellen. There are some things you have to learn to leave alone.”

  He took her to the state fair, to the Indian dances, to the pueblos.

  “I love this place,” he would sigh on their trips. “I surely do.”

  So did she, she told him but she knew what she really loved was Ronnie McBain, the cowboy who would build a good, safe, Western world around her.

  “You’d go crazy living on some ranch out in the middle of nowhere,” her mother told her on their once-a-week call. “Yes, you would, Ellen. You’d be bored to death in a month.”

  “I don’t think so,” she responded. “This is different.”

  “You were made for love,” he told her as they lay together. “You make me understand what it means to be willing to die for someone you love. Because I would, Ellen. I would die for you.”

  She knew she had finally found the man she could trust, a man she could love forever.

  “You could come here and live with me,” he said from the guesthouse bed.

  “It might be a little crowded,” she said.

  She didn’t want the guesthouse. She wanted an adobe house in town with red chilies hanging by the door at Christmas. She wanted a garden and a pickup truck. She wanted to work in the feed store with the farmers and the horse people. She wanted to talk about the ranch, her ranch. She wanted to learn how to fix fences. She wanted to be so busy with a new life, his life, that she would never have to worry about being bored.

  “It sure is miserable up there in the winter,” Joan McBain commented. Ellen said nothing. She knew how warm it could be in that bed with Ronnie.

  “You’re a sweet thing,” he said. “Such a sweet thing. Little skitty sometimes,” he drawled, and she melted. “And, I do like that in a girl. Good for breeding too,” he said as he ran one rough hand across her belly and her hips. “Wide and strong.”

  The first time she steeled herself and brought up their need to talk about the future, he turned from her and shook his head.