The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo

by Ian Stansel

She nodded. Why she’d lied about this, and why she continued to, she did not fully understand. She’d talked to Silas just weeks before.

  Ortquist said, “We never said anything about finding his trailer. How’d you know he’s on horseback?”

  “So you knew all along?”

  “We did. How did you?”

  Lena sighed. “A friend saw him. Told me. But I would have figured it out eventually anyway.”

  “What’s your friend’s name?”

  “Carly.”

  “Carly Nichols,” Ortquist said.

  “She called you, then.”

  “You didn’t think to tell your contact at the department?”

  Lena said nothing. One of the police outside, the one who’d stopped her and Rain in the first place, lit a cigarette. Lena pressed the window button, but it did nothing. “Open this window, please,” she said to Ortquist, and he waited a moment before unlocking the mechanism and then nodding once. She lowered the window and leaned out. “Do not smoke near those horses, sir,” she called out. She pointed. “Put that out. Those animals don’t need to breathe in that poison.” The cop hesitated, then stepped into the road, took one last drag, and stomped the butt out into the concrete.

  Ortquist said, “Your son has been out looking for you. Half out of his mind with worry.”

  Lena continued to watch the cop outside. She said to Ortquist, “What is that idiot thinking? Never mind the animals—there’s been something of a drought in these parts going on thirty years.”

  “Mrs. Van Loy.”

  “Best and brightest, huh.”

  “I could bring you in for interfering with an investigation. Do you understand that? It would be for your own good.”

  “We haven’t interfered with a thing. You wouldn’t even know I was here if that moron hadn’t happened upon us.”

  Ortquist said, “Tell me about the girl.”

  “Rain.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  “She works for us.”

  “How’d she end up out here with you?”

  “She needed a long ride. Someone she knew well was murdered.”

  Ortquist watched Lena. She didn’t look at him but she could tell. The way he breathed, she could hear him looking.

  She said, “I told her to stay back.”

  Ortquist said, “Excuse me, but this is a big pile of shit, and you know it. You being out here. This is a big fucking mess for me.”

  “I imagine it would be.”

  He consulted documents in a manila folder and on a tablet. Without looking up, he said, “Let’s talk about the horses that died a few years back. Four of them, is that right?”

  “What is there to talk about?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Silas killed them.”

  The incident had almost done their business in, snuffed it out completely. It had taken five years, but they’d finally gotten past the whispers of the shooting, which had been nearly constant until then. Lena took a more central role in the training and acted as the public liaison for the operation, and with Frank in the background, they healed their bruised reputation and filled the fifteen stalls of the new stable. They held Pony Club camps all summer and ran clinics through the spring and fall. In winter they maintained their small band of boarders and planned for the next season.

  Ortquist said, “How did they die again?”

  “Blister beetles.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A bug. Toxic to horses. They were in the grain.”

  “You found them?”

  “Bits and pieces. Not enough to prove anything, but that’s what happened all the same.”

  “Silas wasn’t charged.”

  Lena said, “No, he wasn’t. Like I said, we didn’t find enough.”

  “But you’re convinced.”

  Lena said nothing.

  Ortquist took out his cell phone, muttered something to him­self about the reception as he dialed a number off a business card. While he waited for an answer he handed Lena his own card, which she slipped into her pocket absently. He said into the phone, “Yes, it’s Detective Ortquist. Yes.” He held the phone over the Chevy’s center console.

  Lena said, “What’s this?”

  “Your son.”

  “You told on me?” She set the phone, hot from Ortquist’s pocket, against her ear, said, “Hi, Riley.”

  Riley said, “Mom—Jesus fucking Christ.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “Don’t give me nice. I’ve been going crazy here. We’re all going crazy. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. We’ve been riding.”

  “You’ve been riding,” he said. “You and Rain.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she okay? Her parents are out of their minds.”

  Lena felt a knot of remorse throb in her gut. “She’s fine. We’re both fine.”

  He said, “What were you thinking?” She would not have tolerated the paternalistic tone from her son but for the fact that she knew he was at least a bit justified. She was sure he had been sick with worry. Rain’s parents as well. They were all decent people, all well meaning, and none of them, she was certain, had the capacity to understand what she was doing.

  “I’m coming to get you,” Riley said in response to her silence. “You’re going to get yourself killed out there and I’m not losing another parent this week. Put the cop back on the phone.”

  Ortquist told Riley where they were as best he could, given that they seemed to be slightly north of nowhere. Lena and Ort­quist sat in silence for a good minute. Then Lena said, “I haven’t done anything wrong. I haven’t broken any laws. I am a free citizen traveling through public land. You have no right to keep me here.”

  “Your son says he’s bringing a trailer for the horses.”

  “I’m not trailering my horse.”

  Ortquist said quietly, “Your husband’s funeral is tomorrow. Go home. Go say goodbye.”

  Her resolve had flagged on the phone with Riley, but it rebounded at the thought of going home to bury Frank without having found his brother. She was not done yet.

  “You open this door right now,” she said.

  Ortquist breathed, said, “All right.”

  Outside, Ortquist caught up to her. “Tell me this one thing and you can go. Why now? If it was Silas, why did he do it now?”

  Lena stopped. “I don’t know,” she said. And she wasn’t lying. She didn’t know why now, after all these years. If the occasion arose, she would ask him, demand an explanation. She wanted that. She wanted to understand. But if it came to it, she’d just shoot the son of a bitch.

  She stepped toward Rain and said, “Mount up, girl. We’re riding.”

  Eleven

  He’d gotten little sleep out there in the cold by the time the sun lightened the early-morning sky to the east. He did his best to shake off the exhaustion that filled his body like marbles and chided himself for momentarily indulging in a half measure of despair over all he’d lost in the past few days—his stable, his money, his bed, the woman he’d been seeing. And in this state of weariness, he allowed himself to admit, for the first time, that he despaired over losing Frank. He attempted to shake this thought loose from the moorings of his consciousness. He stood. He ran a hand over Disco’s neck and she let go a long breath of sad resignation. Silas said, “Sorry, girl.”

  He tucked his pistol into his boot and led Disco through the dark to the field for her meager breakfast, then back to the fire road for some easy walking, the whole while keeping eyes and ears on the sky, waiting for the return of the chopper.

  It didn’t take long. The sun was up now and they’d made it a few miles, maybe five, when the machine’s whirring sent them back under the cover of the trees, at which point movement slowed. But even though they were closer than Silas would have liked, the police still seemed to underestimate how much ground a horse could manage, and the helicopter stayed in tight circles, not venturing too far out from
where they’d been the day before. Meanwhile, Silas and his horse inched away, quietly, invisibly.

  By midday he could not hear the helicopters at all, nor any sirens. Trees towered above and crowded out the sky. This was true wild. Every once in a while, a break in the timber would open up a vista so magnificent that Silas was temporarily distracted from his hunger and exhaustion. There was still beauty in this world, no doubt about that, and it almost seemed unfair to have so much of it in California.

  Silas steered Disco around a bend, and through the bower he spied a clearing in the basin below. Not just a clearing—a road. His eyes followed the road to a larger gap in the woods. Buildings. At least three of them. Four or five, maybe. He dismounted and knelt in the dirt and watched. After a few minutes, during which he detected exactly no movement, he went to his pack, retrieved the last apple, ate half of it in three greedy bites and gave the other half to Disco, then walked farther down the road to another breach in the wood. He knelt and watched a while longer. He could see six buildings now—two brick, the others wood. Disco dozed. Silas’s stomach appealed for more food, but there was nothing left. For a half hour he watched. When he finally rose up off his knees, he needed the assistance of a pine trunk. On stiff legs he walked Disco down a trail to the dusty town.

  Approaching, he understood what he was seeing, though to use the words that sprang to his mind—ghost town—would have felt too dramatic. This small, abandoned outcropping of buildings would likely never have grown into a town. But they were here nonetheless, the remnants of the hope and work of some cluster of people long gone. Silas and Disco strode down the main road. The three wooden structures seemed to be homes. One of the brick buildings—only half built—might have been the start of a store, and the last was what looked to be a simple storage shed. Silas tossed the reins over the dilapidated banister of a house and ascended the creaking steps to a narrow, soft-floored porch. The door was busted and partly ajar, but he peered in through the window first anyway, then went in. The place was empty save for a couple broken chairs collapsed in one corner and the tattered curtains hanging from the windows. Everything wore a coating of dust—no footprints or finger marks. He went to the kitchen and opened the cabinets, but found nothing. He continued the investigation in the next two houses, which were much the same as the first in vacancy and ruin. Still, these were walls and roofs, and had it been later in the day—and a bit farther from the commotion of police—he might have stayed and tried to sleep through his hunger. He discovered a tin of smoked sardines, but the can rattled as he lifted it and he knew its contents were ancient and desiccated.

  There in that deserted non-place, Silas once again heard the words What are you doing, brother? The despair he’d managed to toss off in the frigid predawn air just hours before now welled in him uncontrollably. He was saturated in it. He swallowed the stone in his throat. The fingers of his right hand, hanging at his side, stretched out, downward toward the boot where his gun pressed cruelly against his calf. Here was a simple solution to the problem that, up until this moment, he hadn’t let his mind address directly. He’d gone years without exchanging a single word with his brother, but Frank had always been there. And now he wasn’t. Silas’s mind was hurled back to the days when he and Frank would ride through the great, wet, fern-strewn woods of the San Geronimo Valley, passing hours upon hours of their childhood traversing trails and trotting across streams and chucking rocks and generally being boys and brothers, trusting each other instinctually, loving each other implicitly. It was here that they would shoot their father’s old revolver at trees. Silas was always the superior marksman, blowing saplings into toothpicks with single shots, while Frank had to be satisfied with pockmarking the big old redwoods, the rounds becoming lost in the thick, dense timber. In those days Silas’s whole existence could be divided down the middle: on one side was Frank, on the other everything else.

  Nothing ever changed in this goddamn world.

  So. He could blow his own brains out. The cops would find him and the search would be called off. An ending not altogether satisfying for those following along at home, but an ending nonetheless. Or they wouldn’t find him, and his body would break down, its liquids staining the floorboards, and what remained would dry and shrink until he was little different from one of the shriveled and hardened sardines clanging thunderously in the tin he held. And the mystery of Silas Van Loy would grow like a balloon before slipping the moorings of popular attention and floating up, away, out of sight. Forgotten. He wouldn’t be around to give a damn.

  But, he thought, why end here? What was this place to him? The cops would catch up to him eventually regardless of where he stood. Of this he had no doubt. And if it didn’t matter which way he moved, he decided, he would go where he wanted to be. He would go to the coast.

  He turned and, through the glassless window frame, saw Disco, whose black eyes blinked in the high sun. He clenched his empty hand and with the other tossed the sardine tin to the floor. Outside, he hoisted himself once again atop his mare and rode past the last two buildings to where the road unceremoniously petered out, and then on into the grass and weeds and stones of the flats surrounding the failed hamlet, and then on into the woods, where in his punchy state he felt himself dissolving into this land undefined by man or industry.

  Twelve

  On some level, she figured it didn’t matter. That was how she justified not telling the police that she’d seen Silas more recently. Yet at the same time it seemed utterly crucial to her instinctual understanding of the man she was hunting. Over the past decade, they’d run across one another, of course, at shows and the odd social gathering, but they kept to their own sides of the room or arena. It got to where, after an initial registering of his presence, she could fairly well forget he was nearby. None of them—not Lena, Frank, or Silas—ever attempted contact, and this was why it was such a gut punch when, one night at Positively Fourth Street in San Rafael, he said to her, “Hello, Lena.”

  Two of her boarders sat across the table from her. They’d been riding all afternoon; Lena’s legs and butt ached nicely, and all three women wore a pungent combination of sweat and dust and horsehair. Lena glanced up and attempted to mask the jolt of near terror that shot through her. Without a word she turned back to her friends, who tried not to let their eyes dart up to the man still standing over them.

  He said, “When was the last time we talked?”

  She ignored him, took a drink of her wine. She figured—as well as she could figure in this moment of disorienting anxiety—that Silas was drunk and that this was simply a new way to fuck with Frank. After all those years to now approach her and attempt a chat. Perhaps this was prelude to some novel strike. Or perhaps, she thought, the pathetic man was just that lonely.

  “I guess we aren’t going to be friends, then.”

  Lena faced him and, in a burst of uncontrollable anger and exasperation, said, “You tell me this. You tell me what the hell it is with you two. What makes you idiots so dead set on destroying each other?” It was the first time—she would realize later—that she had ever implicated Frank equally in the boys’ war.

  Silas watched her, his face falling, as if he was really, honestly considering the question. Then, finally, he said, “We’re just brothers, I guess.”And with that Lena understood something that had eluded her through the years of the two men’s feuding: that it really was all based on nothing. There had been moments—the night with the hat, the selling of Ace, the shooting, the blister beetles, as well as whatever had been done without her knowing, both before and after she’d entered the world of the Van Loys—but none of those occasions, not even when added together, fully explained the war between the brothers. Their hostility had little to do with the specifics of their past together and everything to do with bullheadedness and stupidity, with some innate male urge toward violence. Her life had been tossed about and nearly ruined too many times to count for the simple reason that she’d cleaved herself to these two ragi
ng egos. She welled with anger toward the both of them. After Silas walked away, Lena couldn’t stomach another sip of her drink, and over the next few months—up to and beyond the moment of Frank’s death—she had to work to tamp down a rising regret at ever having met her husband and his brother.

  Thirteen

  Eventually he found a path, a nice wide one, a hiking trail heading westward through the pines and thicket. It was good riding in the cool of the trees’ shade but his hunger and fatigue could not be ignored. Nor could he escape the knowledge that Disco could not go on much longer without something substantial to fill her belly. They came by a cold stream, which abated their thirst for the moment. Silas dipped a sock in the cold water and pressed it gently against his nose, which still throbbed from where it had connected with the top of Disco’s head. As they moved on, every now and again the woods opened up into a decent field of grass for the horse to eat.

  Around dusk he curved a bend in the trail and was startled by the sight of a small edifice. It was square and brown and completely open on one side. He took Disco closer and soon understood it to be a hikers’ shelter. Peering inside he spied two bunk-style cots and a table with three chairs. He came down from the horse and went in. The beds had no mattresses but tightly woven tarpaulins strung taut between the frames. He went back to his horse and untacked her, hung her saddle on a sturdy low branch. They found a nearby patch of grass and Silas sat while she chewed. Silas knelt and rubbed the horse’s legs, trying to work out the worst of the cramping she was almost certainly enduring.

  Back at the shelter, he unfurled his sleeping bag and his body fell to the surface of the bed as if drawn magnetically. He was asleep before he could consider the fact of it. In his slumber, he did not dream. Nor did his body stir from the position where it had landed, with one booted foot in mid-drag on the wood-planked floor. He slept deeply, as if drugged, and did not wake until the world was dark with night, and the sound of voices above him snapped him back to consciousness.