Ground Money

by Rex Burns

  “Help must be pretty expensive, too.”

  “Hell yes! When you can get it. And decent help you might as well forget about. Even the damned Mexicans are starting to ask minimum wage.” He glanced at Wager. “Of course, I don’t mind paying them—they know what a day’s work is. But by God now the government wants me to start checking birth certificates or something. All I want to know is if a man can do the job. If he can, I’ll hire him, and to hell with those people back in Washington.”

  “You don’t have any hands working now?”

  “Two. They’re good boys, and I keep them on most of the year: old Henry and Joaquin. But come roundup, you take whatever you can get and you’re happy to do it.”

  “Do most of the ranches do that? Hire a few hands full-time?”

  Rusty nodded. “Unless they have enough family to do the work. Dee and I haven’t got started in that line yet.”

  “How many ranches are around here?”

  “Oh, six in this end of the valley. Another five up north. Not as many as there used to be.”

  “Is the T Bar M nearby?”

  “Sure is. About twenty, twenty-five miles by the highway; a lot closer by horse. It’s down on the Dolores below Rimrock. That’s one of those that’s give up and sold out.”

  “The ranch is sold?”

  “A couple years ago. Somebody named Watkins bought it. Old Tyler McGraw, he just said to hell with it and sold out. Can’t blame him. I’m not going to if I can help it, but I sure can’t blame anybody who does.”

  “It’s a cattle ranch?”

  “Not much else to do with this land. Sure as hell can’t grow anything on it. And with beef prices what they are …” He shook his head. “There’s no way out—you hang on and starve or you give up.” His eyes, too, went to the kitchen window and the open, empty land beyond. “I’m not giving up.”

  “But somebody bought McGraw’s ranch.”

  “Yep. And I guess they’re sweating and cussing with the rest of us now.”

  “Have you heard anything about the ranch since Watkins bought it?”

  “Heard anything? Like what?”

  Wager shrugged. “How they’re doing. What they’re doing.”

  “No. Never met Watkins. Dee and I drove over a month or so after we heard the ranch was sold—went over to introduce ourselves to the new neighbors. But the only one there was the cook. He said everybody else was out on the range. We left our telephone number, but they never called back. That doesn’t seem very friendly, but with a new ranch and all, they were probably real busy.” He sipped his coffee and eyed Wager. “You seem pretty interested in them.”

  “A friend of mine has a couple of sons working there. I thought I’d go by and say hello while I was over this way.”

  “Oh. Well, as far as I know, they’re doing about as good as the rest of us. If you want to, you can take the horses over—makes a nice day’s ride. You just cut over to White Creek Draw about ten miles north; it’s a good trail.”

  Wager smiled. “That’s worth thinking about.”

  Jo and Dee came in still laughing about someone they remembered from barrel-racing days. Dee was a short, blond woman whose face was starting to get taut and dry like her husband’s; she still had an athletic body, and her hands always seemed to touch someone on the shoulder or arm or back. It had been obvious since they drove up how happy she was to see Jo, and that pleasure included Wager even if, on occasion, she didn’t quite know what to say to a big-city detective.

  In the moment of silence before she thought of something, a gust of hot wind from the Utah desert whistled emptily against the window screens. “Let me get you some linens and blankets.” She patted Wager on the shoulder and disappeared again.

  Jo, excited and happy, started talking with Rusty about which horses they could use. Wager half listened and nodded when he was supposed to and thought about the Sanchez boys and the autopsy report in the glove compartment of his car. Max had called yesterday evening to say it was in, and Wager picked it up on their way out of town this morning. Its form differed from the DPD style, but it gave him a clear picture of Tom’s body and the cause of death: brain injury resulting from two blows at the back of the head, both of which fractured the skull and depressed it enough to indicate a cylindrical weapon about two inches in diameter—like a piece of pipe. A long list of scars and healed injuries was sketched in until the doctor got tired of detailing them and simply started saying “previous injury” and the general location. The most interesting part of the report to Wager was the indication of fresh scrapes and cuts along the knuckles and fingers: Tom had used his fists. There were new bruises on his forearms, too, which indicated defense wounds—the kind a man got when he fended off an attack with his bare hands. Additional abrasions on the elbows and shoulders and back indicated that he had been thrown or dragged across a rough surface like a road bed. Those last wounds still had dirt traces in them and probably came when he was shoved from the moving vehicle. Whether or not he was still fighting when he was thrown out, the autopsy couldn’t say; but from the lack of grit and dirt in the cuts on his hands Wager guessed the man was already knocked out and no longer a threat to whoever was with him in the car. If they wanted to, they could have stopped and dumped him; but they didn’t, and they got what they were after, a dead man.

  The toxicology section showed no trace of alcohol, which wasn’t surprising since he had been in a coma for days before he died. Nor was there much else in the report that seemed to be of help. What it boiled down to was that Tom went willingly with some people, then fought with them, then was clubbed unconscious, searched, and thrown from the moving vehicle. What was not indicated was a planned homicide—when a murderer plans the death of a victim, he doesn’t give him the chance to fight back. It also indicated more than one person: a driver and one or more to thump on Tom. He was old, but he was tough and quick and wiry, and whoever he lit on had his hands full until he—or an accomplice—landed a couple of blows to the back of Tom’s head. If the driver alone had done all that, the car would have been parked and Tom wouldn’t have bounced and rolled off the pavement and onto the road’s shoulder.

  Dee came back with a stack of sheets and towels and blankets, handing them to Wager to take out to the Trans-Am. She also gave him instructions about how to turn on the gas at the propane tank and where the master switch was for the electricity.

  “There’s no TV down there, but we have a dish and the reception’s real good. If you want to come up this evening and watch, we’ll be real glad to have you.”

  Jo asked if they wanted the rent now, and Dee hesitated, then nodded firmly. Rusty looked away as Wager counted the bills into her hand. She shoved them quickly into the hip pocket of her jeans.

  “I’ll be down later to see how you’re getting along,” she said; and Wager eased the Trans-Am along the sandy ruts that wound out of sight between the knobby, tree-dotted hills.

  It had taken them about an hour to unload groceries from the car and to stock the refrigerator and cupboards, Jo happy with the sense of domesticating the place and even Wager shared the feeling that it was somehow theirs. They emptied their suitcases into the squeaky drawers of one of the old dressers, and Jo found a large blue coffeepot for heating and pumped up a stream of icy well water and filled it. Wager, nosing around the back of the cabin, followed a dim trail down to the creekside. A fringe of high weeds lined the stream bank, and his approach scared a large heron from a wide pool that formed against an overhanging cliff of sandstone. He watched the bird rise swiftly and then glide to gain speed and escape by skimming near the roiling water. Then he climbed a low rise where the sparse grass thinned to a crumbling shelf of wind-sculpted rock that lifted higher than the piñons about it. From here he could see the distant glimmer of snow on a bulge of mountains to the west—the La Sal range over in Utah. And to the south a single mountain rose out of a level, hazy plain: North Peak with its own coating of snow. Beyond that, by fifty or a hundred mil
es, were the broken eruptions of the San Juans, fourteeners whose snow showed the crumpled blue of sheer faces and knifelike ridges. To the east, gradually rising to form a long, wavering line across the sky, timbered ridges and cliffs lifted into the snowfields of the distant Uncompaghre Plateau; and closer lay a flat, treeless valley where sagebrush darkened the gray soil in broad, pale shadows. North, like sentinels facing each other over miles of windy space, receding thrusts of mesas showed the earth’s old crust where the ancient river that was now the Dolores had carved its way toward the Colorado. Over it all was a cloudless blue sky as large as any Wager had ever seen—as large and as empty, and it dwarfed even the wide span of empty land that spread between the distant shining peaks.

  Between the high plateau of the east and the purple canyons where the Dolores and its feeder streams twisted out of sight to the west were mesas and fingers of rocky earth and sudden, thousand-foot-high escarpments of red-and-yellow stone cut by gulches and draws and valleys. Covered with the piñon and juniper that grew wherever a root could anchor itself against the wind, the draws and canyons formed isolated worlds guarded by steep walls. It was down into them that hunters went for desert sheep and deer, for elk and turkey and bear. But that was a sport that no longer interested Wager; he had not shot animals since he left the Marine Corps. Nor did he want to, anymore.

  A screen door slammed at the cabin, and Wager raised a hand to show Jo where he stood. She joined him and also gazed out across the wide sweep of ridges and valley and headlands of ancient caprock. “It’s not the kind of scenery most tourists would like, is it?” she asked. “It has grandeur … but it’s lonesome. Even the sunlight seems lonesome.”

  “So does your friend Dee.”

  “She says she’s not.” Jo shook her head. “But I think she is and doesn’t know it. She keeps talking about having children.”

  “They don’t want any yet?”

  “They’ve tried, but I guess they can’t. I didn’t ask what the problem was.”

  Overhead, an eagle angled sharply across the blue toward a mesa’s craggy face. There was so much earth and sky that the trees looked stunted, and every mark of humanity seemed limited and temporary as if it, too, could be swallowed. Carried on the wind like a distant moan, a cow’s call drifted toward them.

  Jo was right. It wasn’t the kind of territory most tourists would flock to—no lakes or nearby mountains, no ski runs or plastic villages, no national monuments or striking rock formations. Without much tourism, with most of the mines long played out, only farming and ranching were left. If a man didn’t make a living connected in some way with ranch life, he moved on. And from what Rusty said, even that was threatened.

  “It’s an empty country,” said Wager. “I like it.”

  “So do I,” said Jo. Then she poked his ribs with a thumb. “It’s good horse country, too.”

  It took Wager a couple of days to begin riding with some of the ease and smoothness that Jo had. The new corral and barn behind the Volkers’ ranch house were painted dull red and trimmed neatly in white, and the corral fences had been whitewashed to give the ranch a well-kept feeling.

  A few carefully tended trees, fenced with chicken wire against the horses’ teeth, were planted to bring shade for the next generation of Volkers, but for now the sun baked the sandy corral and horse droppings into a rich odor that nonetheless smelled clean. Sheltered against a wind-pocked ledge, two mobile homes rested on cinder blocks. One was empty; the other was shared by the two ranch hands: Henry with his silver hair and whiskey-red nose, and young Joaquin, who smiled whitely and spoke little English.

  “Dee said we can use the old corral down near the cabin. Rusty’s sending a couple bales of hay down tonight,” Jo said. “That way we won’t have to walk so far for the horses in the mornings.”

  Wager eyed one of the stubby brown animals, which cocked its ears at him. “I don’t mind walking.”

  “Come on—I’ll show you how to saddle one.”

  Jo and the horses liked each other, but Wager couldn’t say the same for himself. It was, she said, because he wasn’t familiar with the equipment and the animals—he was uneasy, and so they were. But down at the old corral and away from the amused glances of the hired hands, Wager learned to curry and wipe, to talk gently while he worked around the animals—“They like that”—to search the saddle blanket for burrs before lifting it over the horse’s back, to free the blanket of any wrinkles that might chafe. He still had some trouble putting the bit into his horse’s mouth in the mornings when the gelding was feisty and tossed his head, but Jo showed him how to run his thumb back along the animal’s gum, and the mouth opened obediently.

  “Don’t get your thumb between his teeth.”

  “I’m not about to!”

  Even on the first day’s ride, a few hours out and back, Wager found himself easing into trust with the animal, and—with good advice from Jo—he learned how to adjust the rhythm of his body to that of the horse. At least on a walk or a gallop. With a trot, he still seemed to go down when the saddle came up, and more than once the jar knocked his straw cowboy hat down over his ears. He was careful not to push the horse to a trot when Henry or Joaquin was around.

  Jo, of course, rode well; the happiness that showed in her face and voice was contagious, and he heard himself yelping as he galloped after her down one of the twisting trails that plunged through the scattered piñons. As Wager learned more, he gained appreciation for how good a horsewoman she was. It was a pleasure to watch her, on a morning ride after man and beast had warmed up a bit, as she clucked her horse into an easy gallop along one of the sandy tracks. Her weight moved forward over the withers and her head and back made a smooth, even line above the horse’s bobbing torso. Wager, feeling his awkwardness in comparison, gave his horse its head and lumbered after, trying not to grab the pommel as the lunging weight between his legs swayed sharply this way and that over the rough ground in a futile effort to catch up.

  “You did fine! You did great!” Jo reined to a short trot, then to a walk as the horses snorted and cooled in the wind along this ridge of high earth.

  “Right,” said Wager. His horse looked back at him, and in the large, moist eye Wager saw a touch of disgust. “But I don’t think Old Paint believes you.”

  She leaned close to give him a kiss, the saddles creaking beneath them. “His name’s Major. And he’s not disgusted at all. He just likes to win—like someone else I know.”

  They followed the ridge out to a point of rock where the cliffs dropped away in steep, treeless shale and a tangle of fallen caprock. In the distance, a dark streak broken by foaming white patterns, the Dolores River made a tight bend against a five-hundred-foot wall of smoothly sheared sandstone. Beards of dark stain washed down the red wall where eons of seeping waters left mineral deposits, and from the top of the cliff, the piñon forest began again. In the arc of the river’s bend lay a startlingly green triangle of growth, and Wager made out a mowing machine as it chewed its way across the level point and spit out tiny dots of hay bales. There weren’t many places to grow fodder in this country; it was either too dry or too steep or both. Wager guessed that all the bottom land had been searched out and fenced off from the roving cattle so the precious winter feed could be harvested.

  “Is that a town over there?” He pointed to a cluster of dark rectangles gathered around a froth of green. The thread of a highway bridge crossed the river, where the wink of sun on a windshield came like a distant, cold spark.

  “That must be Rimrock. And that”—she pointed to the pale horizon downriver—“must be Utah, on the other side of that notch.”

  The glimpse through the wide V of the ancient river’s course showed the mottled red and yellow of volcanic sands and the purple of distance.

  “The T Bar M is upriver from Rimrock, isn’t it?”

  Jo glanced at him. “You still want to go over there?”

  “That’s the reason I came. One of the reasons,” he added.
r />   “I thought you enjoyed the last few days.”

  “I have. I didn’t think I would, but I have. But I came up here to do more than fish or ride horses.”

  “I know that.” She studied something far down in the valley.

  Wager felt as if he had clumsily broken something, and he had a pretty good idea what it was. He had felt it too in the last few days, the sloughing off of the concern with death, a slow discovery of what it meant to have hours and even days without cleaning up someone else’s mess. But Jo knew why he’d agreed to this trip. And she’d agreed to his reasons. “So what’s the matter?”

  “I’d hoped that … well, Denver’s a long way off. I’d hoped that maybe for a little while you could forget you’re a cop.”

  “Why?”

  “So I could know some part of you that’s not connected with the police—and maybe find some part of myself, too, that’s not just cop.”

  Wager questioned her use of “just”; if, for him, these last few days had been fine, they were still a vacation, an interruption of what he really did: police work. “We’re only visiting here, Jo. The real world for us is back in Denver. That’s the world we both go back to.”

  Beneath them the horses shifted, wanting to move on. “I was hoping we wouldn’t bring it with us. Not so soon, anyway.”

  “I guess it’s always with us.”

  “I guess it is.”

  She turned her horse and spurred it, startling it into a hard gallop back along the ridge. Wager’s horse followed, and he half-consciously imitated Jo, leaning forward to clear the saddle. But an ill-focused anger at himself for shattering the moment so carelessly, and at her for being so vulnerable, loomed in his mind so that his legs worked by themselves to cushion the thrust of the grunting horse. Slowly the gap between them narrowed, and Wager, spitting sand from the hooves in front, found his anger tip into a kind of savage joy at the chase, and he lifted himself higher up the horse’s shoulders. It responded with a greater lunge that suddenly matched Wager’s rhythm, and he felt the lightness and ease and exhilaration that came with the wind and sound and motion and the knowledge that he and the horse were one.