Sweet Return

by Anna Jeffrey

  He handed her the shirt and a new pair of leather work gloves. “Maybe these will keep your arms and hands from getting cut up.”

  He had a point. She was wearing a T-shirt.

  Soon they were in the work pickup, creeping across the pasture toward the broken fence, saying little. Finally he said, “Mom told me it was her idea about the chickens. So I guess you weren’t lying.”

  “And of course you thought I was. Of course you thought I befriended a lonely older woman so I could steal your inheritance.”

  His eyes were hidden by his sunglasses, but a hint of a smile played over his lips. “I’m not worried about a fu—about a damned inheritance. This place doesn’t mean shit to me.”

  At hearing him stop himself at the F word a second time, she shot him a quick glance, feeling as if she had won a battle. And at the same time she wondered if it were true that the Lazy P meant nothing to him.

  “But it was a helluva shock,” he said, “seeing all those goddamn chickens inhabiting the pasture we used to reserve for our prime cows.”

  She didn’t like hearing “goddamn,” either, but she satisfied herself with a small victory.

  A few more seconds later, he said, “Mom told me you don’t pay any rent.”

  Joanna winced inside, though she had known all along that sooner or later her free use of the land would come up. “Clova gets something out of this,” she said, feeling the need for a defense. “The chicken droppings make great fertilizer. She uses it in her garden and—”

  “So you’re telling me you’re paying my mom off in chicken shit?”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Tell me something else. All that home-canned food in Mom’s pantry. All of that grew in chicken shit?”

  “Manure is manure. What’s the difference if it comes from horses or cows or chickens? It’s all organic.”

  “You know, in the old days, the cowmen fought wars with the sheepmen who brought in their herds of sheep and squatted on the land. If there had been chicken herds back then, what do you suppose a cowman would’ve done about that?”

  Joanna thought she heard teasing in his tone. She gave him an impish grin. “Probably would have been hard-nosed and narrow-minded. Like you.”

  He cocked his head and looked at her. “You know, you’re pretty when you smile.”

  She couldn’t keep from smiling again. Good Lord, she couldn’t help herself, especially since the compliment sent a little zing right to her center. God help her, she was having fun. She was worse than a silly teenager. “Listen, Hollywood, after all the bad things you’ve said about my hens, it’ll take more than flattery to get on my good side.”

  This time, one side of his mouth lifted into that knee-weakening half grin. “Then I guess I’ll have to think of what that is.”

  He brought the pickup to an abrupt halt, then eased the truck into a slow roll as they crept over a deep gully. Sometimes she had a hard time understanding how such a landscape could be good for grazing livestock. “You want to know something? I never did figure out why the cattle ranchers hated the sheep so much.”

  “’Cause all sheep do is eat and shit.”

  “That’s what all animals do.”

  “But sheep shit’s repulsive to cows. They won’t graze where sheep have lived. And sheep chomp the grass down to nothing.”

  “Is that the truth? Or are you just telling me that?”

  “That’s the truth.”

  A new argument came to her and she gave him another grin. “Then I guess you don’t have anything to worry about with my hens. Your mom and I have strung chicken droppings all over these pastures and I haven’t seen a single cow refuse to eat. But I have seen the grass look a whole lot better where we’ve put it.”

  His head jerked in her direction. “You set me up for that.”

  This time she didn’t grin; she laughed.

  To Dalton’s frustration, it was now late morning and the sun had already climbed high and heated the day. He wanted to get most of the fencing done today so he could get into town to go to the bank tomorrow, then to see his old high school friend whose family had been in the oil business.

  Knowing the work would go faster with some help had prompted him to accept Joanna’s offer, though male assistance would be better. He’d had misgivings about what he could be letting himself in for, but to his surprise, she turned out to be a steady worker and a smart helper. Without being told, she managed to be where he needed her to be all of the time, and she followed his orders without argument. And she had more energy and more physical ability than any woman he knew.

  Now it was well past noon. He’d had nothing but coffee all day, and he had driven two dozen posts into the ground with a handheld post driver and strung feet and feet of barbed wire. His energy level had depleted; hunger pangs gnawed at his stomach. “You hungry yet?”

  “I don’t know.” She wiped sweat and dirt off her face with her shirtsleeve.

  Dalton felt a shred of guilt. He had pushed her hard.

  She looked up at him with a dirty face and a one-eyed squint. “Every time I thought of that gourmet lunch you brought, it sort of squelched my desire for food.”

  He let the smart-ass quip pass without a comeback. He, too, pulled off his cap and wiped his sweat-drenched face with his shirttail. “Let’s stop and eat.”

  “Okay, you’re the boss.”

  Yeah, right. He wondered if this wiseass woman had ever had a real boss. Again he didn’t see the necessity of replying. He walked toward the truck, carrying the post driver. She tagged along beside him, her cap set low over her eyes, the shirt—his shirt he had loaned her to wear—hanging to her knees. She looked cute, quickstepping to keep up with his long stride.

  “When I was a kid,” he said, “I used to drive posts all day long with a sixteen-pound maul. I’d drive the tractor out and stand on the back tire to get leverage.”

  “No kidding? That must’ve been killing work. They didn’t have that post-driving thingey back then?”

  They reached the truck and he clunked the post-driving tool into the bed. “I’m sure they did. But my stepdad, not being a man who intended to do the work himself, didn’t have much interest in labor-saving devices. It didn’t matter. By the time I learned there was a smarter way to do it, I was already on my way out of town.”

  “You seem to know a lot about ranching. You’ve never thought about coming back here and helping your mom?”

  He snorted. “Not even when I was hunkered down in a fighting hole with a bunch of unwashed marines taking mortar fire.”

  He opened the passenger door and dragged out the sack that held the lunch he had thrown together. He pulled a faded bandanna from his back pocket, spread it on the tailgate and laid out the cheese and bread. She gave both the handkerchief and him a dubious look. “It’s clean,” he told her.

  She raised on her tiptoes and scooted her butt onto the tailgate as he lifted bottles of water from the sack. “I brought a surprise,” he said and pulled out an apple he had found in the kitchen.

  She smiled. “Oh, wow. Imagine that. Dessert.”

  He paused for a moment, looking into her face as he swallowed her sass. She did have the prettiest smile. Nice kissable lips and perfect white teeth. “I found only one. I’ll split it with you.”

  He dug out his pocketknife and opened it. Holding it between his thumb and finger, he showed it to her. “It’s clean, too.”

  She grinned. “I’ll bet. You’ve probably been using it to gut fish.”

  “Nope. Never learned to fish. All I do with water is drink it and swim in it.” As he sliced the apple into halves, the Adam and Eve story came to him. He handed a half to her. “This is backward, you know. The way the story goes, it’s you who’s supposed to be giving me an apple.”

  Her brow arched, but she took the apple half with a grimy hand and bit into it. He liked that she didn’t make a big deal out of having dirty hands. Now he knew she had been razzing him about the handkerchie
f and the pocketknife.

  “Since a serpent isn’t involved in this scenario,” she said, “it probably doesn’t matter.”

  He used the pocketknife to slice off two pieces of cheese and tore off two hunks of the bread with his hand. “You know, I don’t have a lot of memories from Hatlow worth keeping, but one thing I do remember was that Mom always baked fresh bread. I’d come home from school and the house would be filled with those cooking smells.”

  He, too, hiked his butt up onto the tailgate and dug in to the lunch. “You’re a good worker, but you must have other things to do. Why did you volunteer to help me?”

  She finished off the apple half. “You remember Bart Wilbanks?”

  He had shoved most Hatlow citizens so far out of his mind, there was no recalling them. Chewing, he shook his head. “Can’t say that I do.”

  “You must know him. He’s an old-timer. His place is out on the canyon.”

  A vague smattering of memory passed through Dalton’s mind. “Yeah? So?”

  “Back in the summer, he was working on his fence all by himself and he got so tangled in new barbed wire he couldn’t get loose. He panicked and cut himself all to pieces on the barbs, trying to get free.”

  “Whoa. How the hell did he do that?”

  “You know how it is when you stretch out a strand of new barbed wire off a roll? How it wants to roll itself back up? Somehow he got caught in it. It wrapped all the way around him. He laid out in the sun all tied up and bleeding almost all day before his wife found him. They had to put him in the hospital.”

  Dalton chuckled, munching on his chunk of bread and savoring the homemade taste. “You made that up, right?” He washed the bread down with a long swig of water.

  Joanna tilted her head back and chugalugged a long drink, rivulets of water running from the corners of her mouth down onto her breasts. Dalton couldn’t keep from staring. She had good breasts. He had sneaked enough glances at them to determine they weren’t phony. She lowered the bottle and wiped her mouth and chin on her shirtsleeve. “True story.”

  “And did you say Bart’s a little on the dim side?”

  “I don’t know about that. He’s smart enough not to go out working on a barbed-wire fence all by himself anymore. That’s why I said I’d help you. I didn’t want to have to drive out here later and rescue you.” She popped her last bite of cheese into her mouth.

  He paused, his water bottle poised in the air. He thought he saw a hint of a smirk on her lips as she chewed. She was pulling his leg again. He was sure of it. “Babe, the day will never come when you have to rescue me. Now, it might go the other way around, though. I might have to rescue you. You might get attacked by some damn horny rooster that just can’t stand the thought of all those virgin hens all in one place.”

  Her mouth flatlined. “I’m not worried. But if you think there’s a danger, maybe I should keep my shotgun handy. It’d make short work of an aggressive rooster.”

  His eyes widened. A shotgun-wielding woman wasn’t his idea of a good time. He had been around any number of armed females in the military. He hadn’t been all that comfortable with that, either. “You’ve got a shotgun?”

  “I certainly do. It’s a twelve-gauge.”

  Good God. A twelve-gauge shotgun was an elephant gun, with a kick like a mule. “The hell you say. A twelve-gauge. And you can shoot it and remain standing?”

  Her chin lifted as if he had insulted her. “I shoot at the chicken hawks if they come flying over.”

  A visual came into his mind and he suppressed a laugh. “You ever hit any?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do.”

  He could no longer keep from chuckling. “And where is this cannon?”

  “I keep it beside the sink in the egg-washing room.”

  “At least I’ve been warned.”

  “When my dad was alive, he went bird hunting. Sometimes he took my sister and me with him. He taught both of us to shoot.”

  “Darlin’, I don’t know what kind of birds your dad hunted, but a twelve-gauge would blow the small birds that live around here to smithereens. You’d be lucky to find a feather, much less end up with meat to eat. Most people use a twelve-gauge to hunt geese or something big.”

  A frown formed between her brows. “Oh. Well, maybe it isn’t a twelve-gauge.” She flopped her wrist in dismissal. “Well, whatever it is, it works.”

  “Don’t you ever buy shells for it? You have to know the gauge to buy shells.”

  “No. I got all of my dad’s after he passed on. My mom and sister didn’t want his gun or the shells, either.”

  “Your dad’s gone, huh?”

  “He died, oh, ten years ago. He was too young to die. He had cancer.”

  “How old was too young?”

  “Fifty-five. It was hard on all of us, especially my mom.”

  Remembering that Earl Cherry had been fifty-four at his death, also ten years ago, an unexpected guilt nagged at Dalton. He hadn’t returned to Hatlow for the burial. Out of the Marine Corps only a couple of years, he had just started his freelance photography business. He couldn’t recall thinking that Cherry’s death might have been hard on anybody.

  “You said you were in a jungle in Thailand,” Joanna said, disrupting his trip through the halls of his memory. “Were you taking pictures?”

  He nodded. “Flowers. Rare orchids that grow wild. I was helping a guy. He wanted to show how they look in their natural habitat. He thought it was important to have a pictorial record because smuggling is about to wipe some of them out.”

  “Really? People smuggle flowers?”

  “Yep.”

  “Huh. I guess there’s someone somewhere who’ll steal anything.” She sat there, her ankles crossed, swinging her feet. “I’ve never seen a real orchid more than once or twice in my whole life. Why would people smuggle them? If they want them so bad, why don’t they just grow them?”

  “I’m no flower expert, but according to this guy who was, the nursery-raised flowers don’t have the same aura and mystery as the wild ones. Now, me? I thought they all looked alike.” He screwed the lid onto his empty bottle and dropped it into the grocery sack. “This guy said avid collectors think growing them is too expensive and time-consuming. Some of the damned things take ten years to bloom.”

  She finished off her water, too, and handed him the bottle. “You have to know a lot about a lot of different things to do what you do, don’t you?”

  “Not especially. But if I have time, I usually study up on what I’m gonna shoot. It makes the job a little easier if I’m not totally stupid. Now, combat. I don’t have to study that. It’s elemental.”

  “You’re working on a new book now?”

  “Yep. My last trip to the Middle East.”

  “It’s a book of pictures?”

  “Small amount of narrative. I’m not exactly a great writer. But, babe, I’m a damn fantastic photographer.”

  “Where’d you learn how to take pictures?”

  “The Marine Corps. The Marine Corps taught me everything. About everything.”

  “Clova has all of your books. I’ve only looked at the one about the mountains. I’ve always wanted to go to the mountains. Those skiing pictures were so good.”

  “Hey, thanks. Some of those were for National Geographic. I did a piece on extreme skiing.” Thinking back on that adventure, he snorted. “I damn near killed myself on that shoot. I don’t ski and I don’t understand those who do. Especially that wild shit on those steep slopes. It’s dangerous as hell.”

  “It looks to me like you’ve done a lot of things more dangerous than skiing.”

  He lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “Matter of perspective, babe. Matter of perspective.” He slid off the tailgate and gathered up their lunch leavings. “How about it? You ready to go at it again?”

  “Sure am.”

  She hopped off the tailgate a little too enthusiastically. He suspected she was faking. He also suspected she’d had enough, but unless sh
e cried uncle, he couldn’t afford to give her a reprieve. He had to get this fence job finished, get his mom healed up and see a man about an oil well. And now he had to look into the situation with his little brother’s bastard child. He couldn’t return to LA with a clear conscience without accomplishing all of that.

  Beyond that, he didn’t know why, but he liked having Joanna Walsh for a work companion, and her help was making the job go faster.

  Late afternoon came and the orange sun hung in the west, turning the landscape to a red-gold haze. He declared the fence-building job finished. On the way back to the ranch house, they bumped along in the work truck in silence until she said, “I heard you were in Iraq. There’s three people from Hatlow in Iraq. Roy Elkins and Truman Johnson’s boys and Bill Morgan’s daughter. She’s a nurse.”

  The names meant nothing to Dalton. “Bad place to be. But most of those folks believe in what they’re doing. They’re more worried about getting screwed over by the politicians over here than about getting killed over there. I want to honor all of them with my book.”

  “How many wars have you taken pictures of?”

  “More than I care to recall. There’s a war going on somewhere all the time. Being an objective witness to just how fu—how savage human beings can be is an onerous task for one small man.”

  He was proud of himself for catching himself on the F word. He didn’t want to see her ears bleed.

  “I can’t imagine the kind of life you have,” she said, “going all over the world to take pictures. I couldn’t even get along living in Lubbock. That’s why I’m here.”

  “I’ve never regretted the path I took. I’m never bored.”

  “Then I guess that makes you one of the lucky ones.”

  Once he had thought that. Lately, he wondered. After his last trip, he felt weary, worn and not enthusiastic to return. “Why? Do you have regrets?”

  “No. I’m happy where I am. But I know a lot of people who aren’t.”

  They reached the ranch and he brought the work truck to a stop behind the dually.

  “Are you going to see your mom?” she asked.

  “After I get cleaned up and get something to eat.” He slid out of the truck with every joint and muscle protesting. Back in LA, besides swimming every day, he sometimes worked out in a health club, but he couldn’t remember the last time he had done so much strenuous work for a sustained period. Just one more reminder that he was getting old and he hadn’t taken very good care of himself. Just one more fact that made him wonder if it was time to change directions.