Lang Downs

by Ariel Tachna

  Caine tried on the boots, finding a pair that fit comfortably if a little tight around the ankles. He figured that would stretch as he broke them in, though. When he was done, Paul already had a pile of socks added to his growing stack. “Here,” Macklin said. “This one should be about right.”

  Caine tried on the oilskin coat, finding it stiff and cold and not at all comfortable. “Are you sure this is the right size?” he asked. “It d-d-doesn’t seem to fit right.”

  “Wear it around for a few minutes,” Macklin advised. “It has to warm up to you. Once it does, it’ll feel like a second skin.”

  Caine was somewhat dubious, but he left the coat on as he looked around the store for anything else he might need. He hadn’t gotten an answer about how far Boorowa was from Lang Downs, so he didn’t know how practical it would be to return to town for other necessities. He’d added a fresh tube of toothpaste and some other basic toiletries to his pile when he realized the coat had softened. He stretched experimentally, feeling it move with him instead of impeding his movement as it had done before. “Wow, this is pretty cool,” he said, looking back at Macklin.

  “Blow-in,” Paul chuckled, but his kind expression took the sting from his words. “Stick with Macklin here. He won’t guide you wrong.”

  “Anything else I need?” Caine asked Macklin.

  “I don’t think so, pup. Let’s get this all packed up and then we can find a place to sleep tonight. I want you to see Lang Downs for the first time in the daylight.”

  Caine slid the coat off and paid for his new gear, blanching a little at the total, but it was an entire new wardrobe, and he wouldn’t have expenses once he got out to the station. Even so, he’d maybe spread his spring spending out over a couple of trips instead of doing it all at once.

  “So how far is it to Lang Downs from here?” Caine asked as they walked back out to the Jeep.

  “It’s only about an hour until we leave the main roads,” Macklin said, “but then we have to cross Taylor Peak, and that’s on dirt roads, and several hundred clicks. Once we get onto Lang Downs, it’s another several hundred clicks to the main station, again on dirt roads. Not the best for driving at night unless there isn’t another choice. It’ll take four or five hours total, so we’ll do better to leave after breakfast.”

  “Taylor Peak?” Caine asked. “Is that the neighboring station?”

  “Yes,” Macklin said. “Devlin Taylor owns it. We won’t stop and say hello tomorrow, but I’m sure you’ll meet him soon.”

  Four

  THE BOOROWA Hotel, an actual hotel this time as opposed to the one in Yass that had just been a pub, stood a couple of blocks south of what Caine had come to think of as the center of town. He had no idea if that was accurate since Macklin hadn’t exactly given him a tour, but the courthouse and the big church were close together a few streets away, so Caine figured that was the heart of the area. Two stories tall and painted a fantastic butter yellow, the building was obviously maintained or restored from the late 1800s, giving it a rustic charm Caine appreciated. He kept his thoughts to himself, not wanting Macklin to think he was looking down on the elegant simplicity of the building. He did feel safe commenting on the lattice that surrounded the second-story balcony. “That’s amazing work on the balcony,” he said. “You don’t see detail like that very often.”

  “It dates from the turn of the twentieth century,” Macklin said. “The owners are very proud of it.”

  “And so they should be,” Caine agreed.

  Macklin got them two singles, much to Caine’s relief. He could have shared a double if Macklin had insisted, but this way he would have his own space to retreat to at the end of the evening, especially if his jet lag caught up with him again and he wanted to go to bed early. Caine set his backpack on the bed and sorted through his new clothes. He would wear his new boots and jeans the next day, but he’d save the work shirts for once they got out to the station. It wasn’t quite that cool yet, at least not during the day, and a sweater would be fine for driving if he needed more than a T-shirt. He put everything else back in the bags. He had no idea if Macklin would wear his hat down to dinner or around town, but Caine wasn’t comfortable doing that yet. He’d do his best to fit in on the station, but he’d feel better in his own clothes while they were still in town. For tonight, though, he’d deal with being a “blow-in” because, really, that’s what he was. He hoped someday he’d get past that label and be accepted as part of the local scene, even if not exactly a local, but that would take time and patience on his part. “This is what I want,” he said softly as he grabbed his wallet to meet Macklin for dinner.

  It seemed like they’d just eaten lunch, but when they took a table in the Marsden Café there in the hotel, the delicious smell of dinner brought Caine’s appetite back full force. They ordered, Macklin getting a beer, so Caine did the same, then sat back to wait for their meals to arrive.

  “Tell me more about my uncle,” Caine asked into the silence between them. “I knew him from letters, and everything I read fascinated me, but I never met him.”

  “Michael Lang was one of a kind,” Macklin said with such a fond smile that Caine’s worries fell away for the moment. Whatever Macklin might think of Caine, that didn’t carry over to Caine’s uncle. “I was a kid when I showed up on Lang Downs, hungry and dirty and desperate for work of any kind. I figured he’d toss me off the station like everyone else had done, but he didn’t. He had the cook feed me dinner and then asked me where I was from. I gave him some made-up bit of nonsense about not being from anywhere. He raised one eyebrow at me, told me if I’d tell him the truth, I could stay, and then waited me out. That was twenty-five years ago.”

  “So what was the truth?” Caine asked impulsively.

  “If I tell you, I can stay?” Macklin retorted mockingly.

  “I d-d-didn’t mean it that way,” Caine said. “I’m s-sorry. It’s n-none of my b-business.”

  “No, it’s not,” Macklin said, his face as hard as Caine had seen it since they met, making him wonder what nerve he had hit by mistake. He resigned himself to another confrontation. “I’ve proven myself as Lang Downs’s foreman, so you can either accept that or fire me and hope you find someone else with a fraction of my experience who won’t rob you blind.”

  “I t-told you already I n-need your help,” Caine reminded him. “I don’t know how else to p-prove it to you. You have a p-place at Lang Downs as l-long as you want it.”

  “I’m sorry,” Macklin said again, scrubbing at his sun-darkened cheeks with his hands. “It’s been a rough few months, not knowing what was going on with the station and then hearing it went to a relative so far away…. Everyone was worried about what would happen, and you not knowing anything about sheep doesn’t help. You could make any decisions you want, and we’d have no choice but to go along, even if they were bad ones.”

  “I get that,” Caine said. He wanted to reach for Macklin’s hand, to somehow impress his sincerity upon the older man, but he doubted that would be well-received. “I really do, but you have to give me a chance to prove that isn’t my intention. If you toss my inexperience in my face every time I ask a question, how am I going to learn? If every question is met with the surety that I’m going to change something or make some bad decision, how will we ever find if there are ways we could be doing even better? I’m not saying I have any answers, because I don’t, but I want to learn, and when I do, I might have something to add eventually. I want us to be a team, once I get to the point I can pull my own weight.” I want to get to the point that “pup” doesn’t fit me anymore.

  “You can ask any questions about the station you want,” Macklin said. “You’ve the right to do that, I suppose, but that doesn’t carry over to people’s personal lives. Those are still personal and that trust doesn’t come just because you’re the new owner’s son.”

  “Uncle Michael always wrote about working on the station,” Caine said, choosing to change the subject back to the one topic
they seemed to be able to discuss without arguing, “but he was my mother’s uncle, which means he would have been nearly ninety when he died. Did he still work with everyone?”

  “Not as much the last few years,” Macklin said, “and he complained about every minute he couldn’t be out in the paddock. He hated paperwork, although he’d never let anyone else do it either until he couldn’t write clearly anymore. He said working with the animals and the jackaroos kept him young.”

  “If he was still working the station in his eighties, I’d say he was right,” Caine replied. “It’s such a different life here from what I’m used to. Not just the sizes or the seasons. Intellectually I knew to expect those. It’s the independence, I guess. All of my parents’ friends are retired, and they’re twenty years younger than Uncle Michael. They may still be active, but not like he was. And the idea of living out on a station, four or five hours drive from the nearest town, with power that could go out in a storm and everything else you’ve described to me… it just doesn’t even connect to my experiences.”

  “Don’t take this wrong, but if that’s the case, why are you here?” Macklin asked.

  “Because my life in Philadelphia was going nowhere,” Caine admitted. Macklin might not want to talk about his past, and Caine would respect that, but maybe if he shared some of his own story, Macklin would come to see how serious he was about his commitment to Lang Downs. “You’ve heard me talk. When I get nervous, I stutter. I’ve been passed over for promotions at least once a year since I took the job straight out of college.”

  “Why didn’t you go to a different company?” Macklin asked. “Or do something that didn’t require you to talk a lot?”

  “I was good in school, except for the speaking stuff,” Caine explained. “Everyone assured me I’d outgrow the stutter or learn to cope with it or that it wouldn’t be a problem. I believed them, and with the speech plan I had, I graduated near the top of my class and got a decent scholarship. College was a little harder since there was no speech plan at that level, but the professors were mostly willing to work with me. It never occurred to me I’d have a problem having a career, so I never learned a trade I could do instead. It’s hard to get a job in construction if you don’t know one end of a hammer from the other.”

  “I can see that being a problem,” Macklin said, failing to hide his amusement completely. Caine didn’t take offense. It was humorous unless you were the one living with the situation.

  “The job I had paid the bills,” Caine said. “It wasn’t horrible, but it wasn’t going anywhere. I wasn’t ever going to get a raise or move up to a better standard of living. I had my own place, but I had to have a housemate to afford it, and since my housemate moved out a week before I found out about Uncle Michael, it just all seemed like a sign, a chance to learn something different, do something different, and maybe get out of the rut my life had become.”

  “No Sheila to keep you there?” Macklin asked. “A nice-looking guy like you, surely you had a girlfriend.”

  Caine laughed so hard he nearly choked on his beer. “No girlfriends,” he said with a shake of his head. “A boyfriend, but he’s the one who moved out. I’m apparently as bad in bed as I am in interviews.”

  An odd look crossed Macklin’s face, too fleeting for Caine to pin down what it might have meant, but then he smiled. “Maybe that was the boyfriend’s fault, not yours.”

  Caine rolled his eyes. “I appreciate the support, but I’m not getting my hopes up. So there you have it. My life in a nutshell. I moved out of my condo in Philadelphia and sold most of my furniture. My parents are keeping a few family pieces, but pretty much everything I own is sitting in that hotel room upstairs right now or in a box on the way here by mail. I don’t know how else to convince you that I’m committed to this path, but there’s no going back because there’s nothing to go back to.”

  “Bloody hell, pup,” Macklin said with a shake of his head. “You don’t do things halfway, do you?”

  “There wouldn’t be much point in that, would there?” Caine retorted, but he relaxed under the approving tone of Macklin’s voice. “Uncle Michael never talked about life in England in his letters, but I remember my grandmother talking about things and what they were like between the wars and then after World War II. My grandmother had it easy in a way because she married my granddad and moved to the US that way. She had him to rely on for shelter, food, and all. Uncle Michael didn’t have any of that. He sold everything and took the ship to Australia, hoping it would lead to a better life. It did for him. I thought maybe taking a page from his book would be good for me too.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Macklin said. “I really do.”

  The fact that the entire station would suffer if it turned out to be the wrong choice was understood, but Caine appreciated Macklin’s tact in not saying it aloud.

  ALONE IN his hotel room after dinner, Caine took a quick shower and flopped down on the bed, brushing his hair out of his face. He’d meant to get a haircut before he left Philadelphia, but he’d run out of time. After having spent dinner trying not to stare at Macklin too hard and failing miserably, he wondered if he ought to ask about finding a barber in the morning before they left. He didn’t relish a five-hour drive back into town just to get a haircut, and he didn’t want to end up looking quite as shaggy as Macklin did. The foreman could pull it off. On Caine, it would just look silly.

  He was bone tired, but sleep proved elusive as he tried to make sense of Macklin’s odd behavior over the course of the day. Caine could understand the foreman’s concerns. If Caine had come in with an agenda or big plans for changing everything without knowing what he was doing, he could have ruined everything Uncle Michael had spent seventy years building. Caine would never be so self-involved as to do that, but Macklin had no way of knowing that. Furthermore, from the sound of it, Uncle Michael had ranked somewhere between grandfather and demigod on Macklin’s list of people to be adored, not that Caine had a problem with that, but it probably rankled that Caine had gotten everything and Macklin had gotten nothing. Or maybe not nothing, since Caine had no idea what personal bequests Uncle Michael might have left, but certainly not the station.

  “This would have been so much easier if you were still alive, Uncle Michael,” Caine said to the empty room. He didn’t get an answer, of course, but he hadn’t expected one. It made him feel better to talk through his problems, though, and he felt a little less ridiculous talking to his dead uncle than he would have felt talking to himself. “You’d welcome me properly instead of making me feel like a blow-in, and you’d take me under your wing and teach me what I need to know, and maybe you’d even explain what the hell Macklin Armstrong’s problem is.”

  He sighed and thumped his head against the pillow. “I need him to work with me, Uncle Michael. He doesn’t have to like me, although it would help if he did, but I need him to accept me and teach me. If he doesn’t, I’ve pulled up roots for nothing, and I’ll have to go slinking back home to find another dead-end job and hopefully another place to live so I don’t end up mooching off Mom and Dad for the rest of my life. It would almost be easier if he just hated me.”

  He closed his eyes and tried to put some order to his thoughts, as if he were really laying out the facts of the case to his uncle. “He was surprised to hear from me, I’m sure, when I sent him the first e-mail soon after Mom got the news about the station. I’m even surer he never expected me to move to Lang Downs. That’s fine. I get that, but I’m here now. If he hated me plain and simple, I could probably even live with that because it wouldn’t be confusing. But then he calls me pup and makes nice or funny comments, and I don’t know what to do again.”

  He flushed slightly as he remembered Macklin’s comment at dinner. “Is he gay?” he asked impulsively. “If I were at home and someone made a comment like the one he made about the bedroom stuff being John’s fault rather than mine, I’d swear it was a pick-up line, but he can’t seriously be thinking like that about me, c
an he?” If he were, Caine would be over the moon, but that wouldn’t be realistic. A man like Macklin, all self-assurance and physical mastery, wouldn’t want anything to do with plain, bookish Caine Neiheisel, who couldn’t string a sentence together without stuttering half the time and didn’t know what to do with his hands and feet the rest of the time.

  Five

  MACKLIN POUNDED on Caine’s door at what Caine considered an absolutely ungodly hour, but Caine figured the man was used to getting up with the sun. He only hoped that meant they slept a little later in the winter. He wasn’t going to hold his breath, though.

  He put on his new jeans and boots along with a T-shirt and light sweater, stuffing the rest of his gear in his backpack and stumbling down to breakfast in the same café where they’d eaten the night before. Fortunately the coffee was strong and fresh, which helped perk Caine up a bit.

  Macklin didn’t try to make conversation, much to Caine’s relief. He doubted he could have strung together a complete sentence anyway. When they finished eating, Macklin pointed toward the door. “I’ll meet you in the car park in fifteen minutes. Will that give you enough time?”

  “That’s fine,” Caine said with another yawn, wishing he had a travel mug so he could get a cup of coffee to go. He should have picked up a thermos or something at the store, but he hadn’t thought about it. Maybe there would be an extra one at the station.

  “Go on, pup,” Macklin said, giving Caine a little shove in the direction of his room. “Get your kit so we can get on our way.”

  Caine nodded vaguely and climbed the stairs again, feeling even more worn out today than he had the day before. He thought the jet lag was supposed to get easier, but it only seemed to be getting worse, not a propitious start to his tenure in Australia. He checked the bathroom once more to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything and lugged his backpack and shopping bags down the stairs. Macklin took one of the bags from him without speaking, leading Caine back to the parking area and the Jeep. The silence stretched as they tossed Caine’s belongings in the back next to Macklin’s one small rucksack. Caine wondered if he should be embarrassed by the sheer quantity of his things next to Macklin’s, but he reminded himself Macklin had only packed for a night, whereas Caine had packed—and purchased—for a lifetime.