by Arlene James
The volunteer returned then, hauling a med kit with both hands. Rye waved people out of the way. The guy was red in the face from lugging that enormous kit. He dropped down beside George and opened up the metal box. “Nasty break you got there, cowboy. How you feeling otherwise?”
“I’ll live.”
“Doc says to check for shock,” Julia announced.
The deputy was looking under George’s eyelids. “Pupils are normal.” He felt for George’s pulse.
“Any abdominal or back pain?”
George shook his head. “Naw, I landed on my head and elbow.”
“Pulse is good.” The deputy took out a stethoscope and a blood pressure cuff.
“What happened. George?” Rye asked.
“I don’t know. Some kids were chasing around the edge of the crowd and I was going over to warn them not to do that when the cattle started into the valley, but I never got there. Saddle seemed to just let go.”
Julia Cantu laid a hand on Rye’s shoulder and handed back his phone, saying, “Doc’s calling the ambulance himself. He’s on the way.” The deputy was piling pads of gauze over the wound to keep it clean. “Let’s take a look at that saddle,” she said to Rye.
Rye nodded and patted George’s shoulder. “You just lie there.” Rye stood and let Cantu lead him toward the saddle. A group of men were crouched down beside it, talking softly among themselves. As they drew near, one of them looked up and said apologetically, “We turned it over, ma’am, before you got here.”
Julia went down on her knees. The girth, composed of several rows of soft, tightly braided cotton cording, lay on the ground, telling an eloquent story. Julia Cantu looked at Rye. He didn’t need her to say that it had been cut. The slice had been made straight across on the underside, almost all the way through, leaving the weakened strands to fray and eventually come apart.
“Your saboteur,” Cantu said flatly.
Rye grit his teeth. “I want a word with my wrangler.”
“Fine,” Cantu said. “Soon as I’m done with him. Where is he?”
“Helping make lunch.”
“You stay with your man for now,” she told him. “I tend to do better on my own.” She batted her thick black eyelashes at him, saying, “After all, who would be intimidated by little old me?”
One of the men listening snickered. Cantu cut him a deadly glance. “Sorry, Chief,” he said, “but nobody around here believes that anymore.”
“He’s not from around here,” Cantu reminded him coolly.
Someone else said, “Doc’s coming.”
Rye turned and spotted a young, balding, athletically fit man making his way through the crowd, the ubiquitous black bag in tow.
“You stay with your friend,” Cantu said again. “We’ll chat after.”
Rye agreed reluctantly and went back to George. The doctor shook Rye’s hand briefly then got down to business, doing again all the things the deputy had done while calmly questioning George. “The ambulance is on its way,” he said finally. “We’ll want an X ray of that break before we set it.” He lifted away the gauze pads. “Don’t think it’ll require surgery, but I’ll know more later. Right now, I just want to make you comfortable before we attempt to move you.” He questioned George about allergies to medications and removed a syringe from his black bag. When he’d injected George in the upper arm, he again covered the wound and requested an isolation board, which the deputy already had waiting.
“They’re coming!” somebody shouted.
Rye looked up. “The herd or the ambulance?”
“Both!”
At almost that same moment, he heard the wail of an ambulance in the distance and the low bawling of a cow. Great, that’s all he needed. “George, I’ve got to ride out and warn the herd.”
George smiled. “Don’t worry ’bout me.” Obviously he was feeling better already.
“We’ll be taking him in to the hospital,” the doctor said. “He’ll be there at least four or five hours, but I don’t think he’ll have to stay the night.”
“I’ll get there soon as I can,” Rye told George.
“Don’t worry ’bout me,” George said again, seeming a little drunk.
Rye smiled. “Okay, buddy. Take it easy.”
“Don’t worry ’bout me,” George said once more, and then he added with something very near a giggle, “Wanda’s gonna be happy to have me home early anyhow.”
Rye went off feeling both relief and slow, intense rage. He didn’t have much time to dwell on this latest catastrophe, however, with everything happening at once like this. He had all he could do for the whole afternoon, and he did it at top speed, wanting to get the herd onto his family’s ranch as quickly as possible so he could see his son and get to the hospital for George.
Cantu questioned Bord Harris and several others, but nothing definite came of it. George had both put away his gear the night before and saddled his own horse today, but Bord admitted checking everything out before he turned in for the night. The other guys recalled George putting away his saddle, and one or two of them had seen Bord checking everything over, but there was nothing suspicious about that as he was the wrangler. No one had seen anything else that might shed light on the situation. All had seemed quiet and normal the evening before. Other than having two extra pairs of hands and an audience when they’d headed out that morning, nothing out of the ordinary had taken place at all. Rye wanted to beat someone until he told all, clearing up every nagging doubt and suspicion, but he had no object for his rage.
So instead, he drove the herd and the entire crew harder than he ever had before. As a result they still had plenty of daylight left when they met Jess at the gate on the western edge of the Wagner property. As the crow flew, the distance between the noon camp and the Wagner ranch was negligible, but traveling over open country was another story. It had been necessary to swing the herd around the worst of the rough, rocky outcroppings that comprised the foothills of the Rockies, adding miles to the trip. Jess was clearly disturbed by the latest news, but he maintained that affable, disarming manner of his, making Rye feel all the more like a grouchy bear roused too early from an uneasy hibernation.
Since they expected to spend one, maybe two days here, the cattle were taken to a lush, forty-acre pasture near the house. Jess had brought in water troughs and filled them. Rye ordered the cattle hayed in an effort to save as much of the dry, brittle fall grass as possible and rode off to greet his parents, who had driven the half mile or so from the house.
He dismounted, feeling the pull in his groin after only two and a half days out of the saddle, and led the horse forward, opening his arms. His parents rushed forward. “Mom! Dad!”
“You’re too thin, Rye!” were his mother’s first words as she hugged him. He just laughed.
“I have it on good authority there were no fat cowboys on the trail. How are you?”
His petite mother’s slate gray hair and gnarled hands told their own story. His dad didn’t look much different than he had eight months ago, still hale and hearty, but his sweet mother was aging rapidly. It brought a lump to Rye’s throat. Sarah Wagner denied that her arthritis had significantly worsened, but the troubled look in Haney’s indulgent eye put the lie to it.
“I been telling her to go to Denver to the arthritis clinic there, but she don’t pay me no more mind than she ever did,” he complained good-naturedly.
“And who would take care of you two?” Sarah demanded. It was obviously an old argument.
“I can cook,” Jesse said defensively.
Sarah snorted at that, saying to Rye, “He can cook anything that comes in a can.”
Rye chuckled. “Now don’t get me in the middle of this. I’ve got all the battle I can handle at the moment.” Seeing his mother’s troubled eyes, he immediately softened that by asking, “Where’s Champ? I know you’ve been spoiling him rotten and he’s loved every minute of it, but I sure have missed him.”
That brought nothing but ten
se silence. Haney backed off and put his hands in his pockets, bowing his head. Sarah tightened the arm she still had wrapped about her younger son’s waist but said nothing. It was Jesse who finally cleared his throat, took a deep breath and put the cap on the day.
“Champ is with his mother.”
Chapter Fourteen
Kara leaned her forearms against the weathered wood that was the top rung of the fence that ran around the homey Wagner ranch house and inhaled the soft, cool morning air. “I understand what you’re feeling, Rye. I really do. But I’m sure Jesse and your parents wouldn’t have agreed to take Champ to the reservation if they didn’t believe wholeheartedly that it was the best thing to do for everyone.”
“The best thing!” he exclaimed, throwing up his hands, completely forgetting that he’d intended to do the same thing himself. “How can it be the best thing? He hates his mother! Even he knows what she is, what she did to us!”
“But she is his mother,” Kara pointed out patiently. “You said yourself that he needs her, that he has to start learning to forgive and love her, to accept her love in return.”
Rye scowled. “I didn’t say that...exactly.”
“But it’s what you meant.”
Rye muttered, “They should have consulted me first. It was my decision to make.”
“Yes, it was, and you’d already made it, really, so why expend all this energy being angry now?”
“He’s been out there with her for two days and two nights, Kara,” Rye said hoarsely. “What if he wants to come home? What if he’s thinking I abandoned him like she did? What if he’s more angry instead of less?”
Kara held back a sigh, feeling wholly inadequate to help him with this but very much needing to, especially as both his brother and his mother had suggested that she give it a try. Neither of them had had much hick getting through to him last night. The evening had turned into outright hostility followed by simmering resentment. Rye had refused his family’s invitation to spend the night in his old room, but neither had he come anywhere near her. She had lain awake late into the night, trying to reach out to him with her heart, only to find that his resentment had solidified by morning and was tinged now with the scent of fear. Suddenly she realized that he was most afraid of losing his son.
“Even if he is upset,” Kara told him reasonably, “he won’t blame you, Rye. You weren’t even here when the matter arose.”
“I’m his father, Kara,” he retorted derisively, implying that she couldn’t possibly know what Champ would think or do. “Of course he’ll blame me.”
Kara ignored the twinge of pain his tone produced, saying softly. “I’m not a parent, it’s true, but I was a kid, Rye, just like everyone else, and I remember how I felt and what I thought. Champ can’t be that different.”
“Your mother didn’t sleep with half of Arizona. Your parents didn’t scream and yell every time they happened to be in the same room. Your father never threw you and your things into a truck and drove away while your mother screamed filthy names at him.”
She winced. “No, the screaming matches in my family were generally between my father and his brother, and they sometimes didn’t leave it at that. We had more than one family holiday ruined by bare-knuckled brawls. And then there would be these long, frozen silences after my mother tried to reason with my father. There are no perfect families, Rye. We all have to learn to deal with strife and disappointment. Just give Champ a little credit, will you? Seems to me he’s a bright, sensitive boy. He’ll listen, eventually, to whatever you have to say to help him understand why he needs to know his mother.”
Rye lifted a hand to the back of his neck. The brim of his hat shadowed his eyes. “I hope so. But there’s one other aspect of this that you haven’t considered. If Champ has been less than receptive to his mother’s overtures, then Di’wana just might be petty enough to try to get her father to influence the tribal council to deny us permission to cross the reservation.”
He was right; she hadn’t considered that, but then, her priorities seemed to have shifted somewhat. She filled her lungs with clean, shining air. “Well, if that happens we’ll...we’ll just have to think of something else.”
“What else? We can’t pay the fees set by the Navajos and the Utes.”
“We’ll go north and drop down through the Jicarilla Apache reservation.”
“North? Are you nuts? Those mountains are vicious. They’ll cost us time we don’t have, that’s if they don’t swallow up the whole damned herd!”
“Then we’ll fail,” Kara said gently. “That’s been a possibility from the beginning.”
Rye was appalled. It showed clearly in every line of his posture, in the set of his mouth and the hands that rose slowly to plant themselves on either side of his slender hips.
Kara smiled apologetically. “I know,” she told him, “but I do realize now that the ranch isn’t everything. At any rate, we can’t cross a bridge until we come to it, and I refuse to anticipate failure. It will have to be forced on me.”
Rye seemed to ponder that, left hand tugging at his earlobe again.
Kara laughed softly. “You’re going to wind up looking like those African tribesmen who stretch their earlobes so they hang down onto their shoulders. Only you’re going to have one dangling lobe instead of two.”
He actually smiled at that and dropped his hand. “Old habit.”
“I noticed. Now then, do you think I could go with you to the reservation? I do have quite a large stake in this, as you’ve pointed out.”
She could tell that he didn’t want her to go, but he finally nodded. “Okay. We leave in fifteen minutes. I’m going to go borrow my brother’s truck keys.”
“I’ll let Mom know and be sure Pogo hays the cattle.”
Nodding again, he walked away. Kara turned and hung her elbows on the top of the fence, watching him. He was the most beautiful man. If only he would let go of his pain and allow himself to trust again, if only he would allow himself to love her, open himself to her love. She didn’t say it would happen, didn’t promise herself the moon when she had already touched the stars, but it couldn’t hurt to hope. It was what came after hope was gone that she dreaded.
The radio blared a rocking country tune that made Kara’s head ache and seemed to set Rye’s nerves on edge, but she knew that he wasn’t going to turn down the volume. He kept the volume cranked in order to prevent conversation, not that she had anything to say. She had come along strictly to get a look at Di’wana, but she wasn’t going to tell him that.
They drove southeast and then due south. Within forty minutes they came to the first No Trespassing sign. Nearly an hour more passed before they topped a low rise and descended again into a leafy vale that held four small, rough buildings, each placed in the corner of a low mud-wall square. Built of flat stones tightly stacked and fitted together, each boasted a single door covered with heavy, brightly colored rugs woven by hand into precise geometric patterns. The roof of each perfectly square hut was constructed of long, knobby tree branches, stripped of leaves and fitted together as tightly as the stone walls they topped. The knobby poles overhung the front of each house, creating a sheltered place to sit and watch the sun rise and descend. In the center of the space created by the huts and wall stood a delicate looking shelter, open on all four sides and roofed with the knobby poles. Beneath it sat a communal adobe oven and a fire pit rimmed with rock. Mats and rugs were placed around the perimeter, and the bare ground around them had been raked in careful lines and patterns.
Kara knew that everything held spiritual significance for the Chako, from the placement and shape of each hut to that of the cooking center, the height of the enclosure wall and the patterns raked into the ground and woven into the colorful mats and rugs. The Chako believed that everything existent, what might roughly be called the universe, consisted of four equally important and strong elements: all life (animal and human), the skies, the earth, and all death. Each element was ruled by myriads of capr
icious spirits varying in size, capabilities and personalities. In addition, they believed that life and death were doorways through which all temporal spirits moved into and out of numerous realities, some lovely and compelling, some hideous and torturous. Traditional Chako life was governed by the appeasement and/or cultivation of the spirits that controlled the elements of existence.
Around the residential square, a circle had been drawn with a chalky red powder. Rye drew the pickup to a halt outside the circle, turned down the radio and put the transmission in Park.
“Now what?” Kara asked after a few seconds.
“We wait,” Rye said tersely.
Eventually a tall, stooped figure pushed aside the door covering and stepped outside. He paused beneath the overhang, made a sign with his hands, then came slowly forward. Despite the vivid white of his long hair, he was a strong man with broad shoulders, long limbs and a wide, solid body clothed in a long-sleeved tunic in a faded print, softly belted at the waist over baggy, dark-colored leggings. On his feet he wore tall, fringed moccasins laced all the way to the knee. He walked in long, rolling strides, coming to a stop just inside the rim of the red circle. He peered into the truck, seemed to satisfy himself on some question and nodded.
Raising a hand in greeting, he said, “Ryeland Wagner, welcome, and your woman as well.”
Only then did Rye kill the engine and reach for the door handle. “Stay behind me,” he said to Kara. “Be sure to step over the ceremonial circle in the same place I do, and don’t speak unless you’re spoken to. We can’t afford to offend anyone.”
She nodded, fully aware that the more traditional Chako were governed by a complex variety of social rules. Rye got out of the truck and stood across from the other man. Kara walked around the rear of the truck to stand directly behind him.