The Best in the West

by Kathleen Walker

  She nodded, still confused.

  “And I don’t want any dirt in this station.”

  “Please,” she begged, “I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “What I’m talking about, sweetie, is some talk about you making a mistake in your personal life, one that affects this station. Is that true?”

  Oh no, he knew about Jason and the abortion. What else did he know? Did he know about the doctor and the group and her breakdown? How could he know? Who would tell him that? Who? Ellen? Clifford? Who else did they tell? They must all know, everyone must know what she was and what she had done.

  She stared at him, her face white with fear.

  He smiled. She was scared. This one was scared.

  “If there is something dirty going on, you clean it up,” he ordered. “I don’t want to know about it and I don’t want to hear anything else about it.” He tapped his fingers on the desk. “But, you get this and you get it right.” He pointed both index fingers at her. “Everything you do reflects on the rest of us. You are always on the job. Always. And, from what I’ve been hearing, you better shape up, young lady, and that means your work too.” Yeah, she should be scared. “I had my doubts about you right from the beginning. I didn’t think you were ready for us but….”

  She jumped to her feet, cutting off his words.

  “You are a vile, evil, old man, and you’re lying!” she shouted. “You don’t know anything about me. Nothing. I have to get out of here!” she yelled as she ran from his office.

  He jumped after her, yelling from his doorway, “You get back in here, young lady. I’m not finished with you. You get back in here now.”

  She was grabbing things off her desk. Tapes fell to the floor, coins and lipstick fell from her purse.

  “No, no, no,” she was crying as she scooped everything back into her bag.

  “Listen here, missy,” Carter was marching toward her, “you better get yourself under control.”

  “No, no, no!” It was a scream of terror as she ran toward him.

  Kim came around the corner of the row of cubicles, her eyes wide with excitement.

  “No!” Debbie screamed again as Carter reached out as though to stop her. She pushed him aside. “No more.” she cried.

  Throughout the room, across the desks, the early morning phones rang and rang.

  *

  Dr. Stanley Waddell puffed on his cigarette. He took another drag and checked his address book for her number. She missed her appointment yesterday.

  Predictable, he nodded to himself. She was upset over the group session. Well, he was upset too and he had a right to be. She risked months of work with Terry, months.

  All right, perhaps he had been a little hard on her, but he expected more from her. She was strong, much stronger than Terry. This could set Terry back months, he puffed, months.

  The group worked better before Debbie came. Yes, it did. It certainly had been a more pleasant weekly experience. Now, no one wanted to come. It was too intense. People got too upset. That’s what they told him in their individual sessions.

  Oh, they explained it in different ways, of course. They claimed it was financial, that they had to choose between private sessions and group. That was Carol.

  Bob said he couldn’t make either the private session or the group, using his job as an excuse. Jane said she had shift change at the hospital and couldn’t make the group sessions. He wondered if she hadn’t made the shift change herself, if there even was a shift change.

  Maynell called and said she would rather not come to group anymore but would if he wanted her to. Terry said he would never come back. He said he wouldn’t talk about it and didn’t want him to bring it up again.

  He reached for the phone.

  Of course, she could have forgotten about yesterday’s appointment. Sometimes, as the great man pointed out, a cigar is only a cigar. He crumpled the empty cigarette pack.

  45

  If only there was someone to talk to, someone who could tell her she was all right, that everything would be be fine, that she wasn’t crazy. She could never go back to the station, never. They talked about her, laughed about her. Yes, they did. She was just one of their stories. Even Ellen, she thought, even Ellen.

  And the group? The thought made her stomach turn. If she went back to them and that horrible room she would have to stay there forever. They didn’t want her. There was no one to call and no place left to go.

  She went into the kitchen and began to clean. She could not call her father. What could he say, come home? She couldn’t do that again. She couldn’t start over again.

  She ran a dust cloth across her grandmother’s hutch. She licked her finger and wiped at a spot on the dining room table. She looked in the bathroom. The towels hung straight on the rack. In the bedroom, she dusted the top of the dresser and moved her father’s picture slightly forward. She picked up her mother’s picture and rubbed her finger across the glass.

  “Oh, Mommy,” she whispered. “Oh, Mommy.”

  In front of the dresser mirror, she brushed her hair. It was long now, blond and full to her shoulders. She pulled it back into a small ponytail. She found a pink ribbon in the top drawer and tied a bow around the curl of hair.

  She stopped in the kitchen and took an apple from the basket on the counter. She rubbed the apple hard on her jeaned thigh. Today she was going to do something she had never done before. She was going to climb a mountain.

  46

  Juan Moya waved as Ellen came up the long driveway. Joan McBain watched from her kitchen desk.

  “So,” she said to Ellen after the mugs had been filled, “you thinking about coming back here?”

  “I have thought about it,” Ellen said with a nod.

  “I thought you liked it over there.”

  “No, not really. As a matter of fact, I don’t know if I ever liked it. I have to get out of there and soon.”

  “Well, it’s your life and you better enjoy it while you can,” Joan McBain commented. “Although, I don’t know if coming back here is the answer. It wouldn’t have to do with Ronnie, would it?”

  Ellen shook her head.

  “I haven’t talked to Ronnie in two years. This doesn’t have anything to do with him.”

  “Just as well,” Joan McBain said with a sigh. She looked to the wide window. “I don’t think that would be a good reason for coming back here. There’s a lot going on in his life.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, he’s doing real well. He’s talking about buying a second feed store over in Bernalillo and he’s looking to buy a house.”

  Ellen sipped at her coffee.

  “He’s also been seeing this girl Linda for a couple of months now. She’s got a good job with the city. Comes from a local family. She’s a nice girl and I’ve got a feeling they might get married.” The words were delivered as though of little importance.

  Ellen sat frozen in shock.

  “I believe marriage would be good for him,” Joan McBain continued as she poured more coffee. “You two ever talk about it?”

  “I’m sorry,” Ellen said faintly. “I didn’t hear you.”

  “Did you two ever talk about getting married?”

  “Not really,” Ellen said. “I would have liked it.”

  “No,” came the emphatic response. “No, I don’t think so. You two were too different. You know that, Ellen, when you think about it.”

  “Sometimes different works.”

  “Not often, honey. You gotta have something in common, something big.”

  But they did, Ellen thought. They had this place, this kitchen and the mornings drinking coffee and the window to the fields and the horses. They had this woman in common and Sarah and Bob Junior and young Phillip. They had the ranch, the big sky, rolling ranchland up north.

  She wanted to see the ranch again, to see the cabin as she first saw it from the road, small and waiting. She wanted to see the red ridge of the mountains and to
see him, tall and lean, walking the land.

  “How’s the ranch?” she asked.

  “Up north?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “I think we’ve finally got somebody interested and it’s about time.”

  “Interested how?” Ellen asked.

  “In buying it, honey. We’ve been trying to sell the dang thing for years,” Joan McBain said, lighting a cigarette

  Ellen stared in surprise. “You’re selling it? What does Ronnie think about that?”

  “He’s the one who wants to sell it the most. We’ll both be sorry to see it go, sure, but land needs to be worked. You can’t let it sit idle for too long. And Ronnie sure as hell ain’t going to work it. The other boys don’t care one way or the other.”

  “But I thought Ronnie loved the ranch.”

  “He likes to get up there every so often but Ronnie ain’t no rancher. You know that.” She laughed.

  “But all the work he did up there,” Ellen insisted. “The fences, the cabin.”

  “He didn’t do all that, Ellen. It was Bobby that built the place and kept it up while he was alive. Sure, Ronnie helped his dad but no, it was Bobby. Ronnie’s a town boy, honey, like his mama.”

  Ellen rubbed her face with her both hands.

  It hadn’t been him at all. It hadn’t been her cowboy who looked so right in his jeans and boots. She made it all up.

  “You weren’t thinking about you two getting back together, were you?” Joan McBain asked, a worried note in her voice.

  Ellen shrugged.

  “You know what your problem is, honey?”

  “You tell me,” Ellen said, her voice suddenly cold. “You’re afraid of success. Oh yes, you are,” Joan McBain said to Ellen’s grimace.

  “You’re damn good. I used to watch you. You were the best thing going in this town. You’d be good anywhere.”

  Ellen stared up at the ceiling.

  “Instead, you spend your time going from one rinky-dink town to another and now you’re thinking of coming back here? Honey, you should be going to a big city, not back here. Nothin’ here for you. Nothin’.” She paused for a pull on her cigarette.

  “You plan to see Ronnie while you’re here?” she asked with a smoky exhale.

  “I don’t know.”

  “He’d love to see you, Ellen. I know that. He’s down at the store. You could catch him there.”

  What was she supposed to do, walk into the store and wait until neither of them had anything left to say or until it was time for him to leave to be with this new woman, the nice girl, the one he was going to marry? That wasn’t the way she pictured it on the long drive up.

  She had pictured how she would walk into Joan McBain’s kitchen and he would be there and she would smile at him. He would lift her up the way he used to and say, “Hell, what do you weigh, girl?”

  He’d put her down and pick her up again by the loops of her jeans.

  “You don’t weigh as much as a sack of feed,” he’d say.

  That is the way she wanted it to be by the time she reached Gallup, the way she knew it would be by the time she passed Grants.

  “I really care for him, you know,” she said softly.

  “I know, honey. He is easy to love. Hey, look at that little sweetie.” Ellen followed her gaze.

  “She’s my prize, my little princess.”

  Outside in the pasture the spindle-legged foal bounced after the mare.

  “Cute baby, isn’t she? She’s going to be somethin’ great.”

  Before she got into her car, Ellen stopped and took a deep breath. There was a biting chill in the air. There might be snow tonight. She looked up at the clear, cloud-free sky. No, not tonight, but maybe tomorrow.

  It would be a day to sit and read and watch the snow and the Sandias as they turned black-green with a dusting of white. Or, if she got lucky, the mountains would disappear in thick gray clouds that would billow close to the ground like sails.

  “How are you, Elena?” Juan Moya moved to her side.

  “Lo mismo, the same,” she said. “You think it will snow tonight?”

  “I think tomorrow,” he said.

  “Be nice to see snow.”

  “It don’t snow down there where you are, does it?”

  “It’s already hot,” she laughed. “You like it?”

  “Not much.”

  “I was there once. It is a big city, no? And it was hot. I remember that.” He shook his head sadly.

  “It hasn’t changed.”

  “You like it better here?” he asked.

  “I think I do.”

  “You come back, Elena?” he asked with a shy smile.

  She could go by the store. She could see him, say hello. She could call him tomorrow and tell him she was in town. He would know. Joan McBain would tell him and he would know she was at Dale’s. If he wanted to see her, to talk to her, he would know where to find her.

  Ellen knew how this night would go. She would wait for the sound of his truck. She would wait through the wine and Dale’s stories and the station gossip. She would wait and jump if the phone rang, which it would, but not for her. She knew that too.

  “You should come back,” Juan Moya said strongly. “I never liked that city. Too hot.”

  There was that wooly wet smell in the air, that catch of breath in her throat, the moving sense of a hard change coming. Yes, it might snow tonight.

  “We’ll see,” she said.

  She got into her car without glancing back to see if Joan McBain watched. She didn’t want to know.

  47

  Nancy Patterson faced another weekend without news and she didn’t care. Between sick photographers, bored and surly reporters, out-of-commission vans, interviews who canceled or never showed up, she didn’t care. She would use what she had. That was the job of a weekend producer, to use what you had or could find. She had two newscasts today. She’d be out of the station, home free, really home free, in about ten hours.

  She counted her possibilities. Two crews were out. That meant three stories, four if she was lucky. She could pull a few stories from the network feed. She had wire copy to rewrite and a package she could pull of the hold sheet. Add sports and weather and she had her newscasts. She opened the morning paper. She only needed two minutes of state news, tops.

  As she read, the scanners clicked and chattered away. If something out of the ordinary came across she would hear it whether she was reading, writing or answering a phone. She could be in the bathroom and hear something that would make her run, if no one was looking, or walk quickly if someone was.

  They all did that, reporters, photographers, producers. They heard the fire call, the shooting report, over the chaos of a working newsroom five screaming minutes before a newscast. They were tuned in that way, waiting for the big story.

  Like Ellen would tell non-news people, “On slow days we sit there and pray for a plane crash.”

  Nancy wasn’t praying for any tragedy today, not when she was alone with the scanners and the phones and the two crews who didn’t want to be wherever they were. She didn’t want anything to ruin a slow and simple day.

  “Let me get through these two newscasts,” is what she prayed. “Let it be smooth.”

  The call for Brian Rafferty, the helicopter pilot from Across the Street, came at three o’clock. She would remember that. She looked up at the clock thinking it was time to start rewriting the wire copy when she heard his name on the scanner. The Department of Public Safety wanted him.

  DPS called him first for the rescues and the searches. Rafferty would fly upside down to get a story or a body. Reporters at The Best said Rafferty should wear a badge. That’s how tight he was with the cops. The Best’s pilot, Ken Davis, was lucky to be second on the scene, if at all.

  The two-way on her desk buzzed.

  “Nan, heard a call for Rafferty. Might want to check it out.” Cappy’s voice was emotionless.

  “Yeah, I heard it. What’s your ETA?”
/>   “Ten minutes. Rodriguez is on his way in. He got his own car. Over and out.”

  “Ten-four,” she said to the dead mike. Crap. If DPS wanted Rafferty there was a problem and that meant she might have to find someone to cover it.

  “Some problem up on Padre Peak,” the DPS dispatcher told her.

  “Somebody lost or fell? What?”

  “That’s all we got.”

  “Come on,” Nancy insisted.

  “We don’t have any information. Call back in a few minutes. We might have more then.”

  Damn it. Rafferty was already up. She heard him clicking his own messages across the scanners while she was talking with the dispatcher. She would have to find Ken Davis.

  She tried his pager and his home phone. No answer.

  “News Base to Sky Eye. Base to Sky Eye. Ken?” she called on the helicopter radio.

  Oh Lord, this would blow the whole day.

  Cappy was back on the two-way.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Something on Padre Peak.”

  “Want me to swing by? I’m right there.”

  “Yes, do that. I can’t find Ken. Let me know what’s happening.”

  Charles Adkins and Steve slammed into the newsroom. Adkins carried bags of hamburgers and French fries.

  “What’s up?” he asked. “We heard a call for Rafferty.”

  “Something on Padre.”

  “Ken up?”

  “Can’t find him.”

  “Shit,” Adkins said before turning to his hamburger and the sports section, “that guy is unbelievable.”

  “This is News Base to Sky Eye. Base to Eye,” she tried again.

  “Any problem?” asked Jim Brown over the two-way. His voice was soft, disinterested.

  “Some sort of rescue or something on Padre. Trying to reach Ken.”

  “Rafferty up?”

  “Yup.”

  “Have you tried Ken at home?”

  “Yup.”

  “Try the airport. You’ve got the number for the hangar?”

  She flipped through the first of the Rolodexes. Cards fell out, yellow with age and blue and black with penned notations.

  “Let me know what goes on.” Brown clicked off.