Tempting the Rancher

by Leslie North

  “He needed someone to sing to her?”

  Mona’s burst of jovial laughter nearly toppled the pin box from her hand. “Lord, no. Didn’t want her running out into traffic from that caterwauling.”

  January bristled. “Ouch.”

  “You know I tease. Mostly.” Mona settled close, face to face, the deadpan way she used to when January got in trouble as a teenager. “Nat asked you for help because you have those strong instincts and you never focus on what could go wrong. He was worried sick, and he needed your optimism, that way you always seem to work yourself out of a pickle, that healthy balance you carry between fear and hope.”

  “It could never work. We’re so different.”

  “Way I see it, you both want the same things. You just disagree on where those things should happen. Purely geographical. Who needs maps and pins and borders when you’re already each other’s whole world?”

  January blinked against the moisture filling her vision. A tear cantered down her cheek.

  Mona swiped it free.

  “Now you get yourself gussied up for tonight, and I’ll head over to the northwest field to make sure everything’s ready.” Her mother unwrapped the towel from her head and tracked to her makeup table at the rear of the trailer. Mona and Mary Kay went together like chips and queso.

  January picked up the plain envelope and turned it in her grasp. How easy it would be to grab her pack on the way out, leave her mother a voicemail message once she got to Houston. Her palms itched to flee hard choices. She glanced at the map, closed her eyes, and tried to sort instinct from habit.

  * * *

  Nat’s pasture was a true parking lot. Like Houston’s 610/59 interchange at rush hour. This eclectic crowd, however, broke out their classic convertibles, tractors, golf carts, red wagons, horses, and flatbed trailers loaded with hay bales and blankets to enjoy a cool night under the stars with their neighbors.

  The movie this year was one of Clem’s favorites: The Gunfighter. Aside from Gregory Peck’s hall-of-fame-worthy moustache—“Not every man can grow a beaut like that,” Clem had been known to comment—the film about a guy who tries to leave bad choices in his past to be with his true sweetheart stirred something deeper in Nat than nostalgia. If the notorious gunfighter Jimmy Ringo could chase repentance, so too could Nat.

  Nat and the guys had arrived home from the auction to find Willie, who long ago set a tradition of shining the crew’s dress boots while they hauled and sold the herd each year, at the kitchen table going to town on Wes’s boots—so slightly used they didn’t need a shine. No one ever said a word to Willie, though. Nat opened a beer for Willie and one for himself. A quiet clink of the longnecks, just the two of them, was the way Nat liked it. No pomp and circumstance. Simply another year on this land to do what Nat loved. After Willie said how proud Clem would have been, he told Nat about an envelope January had dropped off earlier. ‘Mysterious’ Willie described it.

  Mysterious didn’t begin to cover it.

  Magnanimous, baffling, extravagant…A hundred other adjectives couldn’t cover the contents of that envelope. He had to find January. Tell her he couldn’t accept her leaving money. Then, maybe, he’d find the courage to make it through a repeat of her goodbye.

  Nat scanned the crowd. Opening credits rolled after dark, making the search harder than locating a sober individual at Close Call’s annual Pluot Jamboree—the most raucous celebration of hybrid plums and apricots, and the wine made thereof, this side of the Mason-Dixon line.

  Behind him, a smarmy, familiar voice called his name.

  Austin ka-ching Pickford.

  Nat closed his eyes, considered for a half second that getting hit in the junk with a wrecking ball might be more enticing than the conversation to come, then turned and extended his hand and courtesy, as Clem had taught him. Austin already had Nat’s repayment, in full—Nat made sure the bank was his first stop back in town. As if his modest fortune hadn’t been enough, now the guy wanted to siphon his precious time before January went wheels-up.

  Austin pumped his hand a little too long, a little too hard. A dick measuring contest, no doubt.

  “Great doing business with you this year,” he said. “I must admit, I had my doubts, but Community Trust is pleased to underwrite the Meier family for years to come.”

  Or at least until Austin’s trust-fund trips to Aruba were threatened.

  Mona’s big hair moved through the crowd like the tawny wave on a prairie ocean. Nat had never been so happy to see her.

  “Would you excuse me, Austin?”

  He might have answered.

  “Mona,” Nat called.

  She turned toward his voice. Her face lit like a sparkler.

  “Am I glad to see you.” Hand at the glittery outline of Texas riding high on her bosom, she produced a folded piece of paper from her pocket and handed it to Nat. “From January.”

  His first thought: the goodbye letter he told her would have made it better the first time. A lie.

  His second thought: a goodbye letter meant progress.

  “Where is she?”

  “She promised she’d be here, but you know her.” Mona laid a hand atop his forearm and gave it a sweet pat. “Said she had her most important place ahead of her.”

  “Nepal.”

  “For as long as she’s travelled, Nat, she’s dreamed of that place. Sounds god-awful to me, what with the brown water and all the rules about feet. I tried. Said my piece. I’m sorry.”

  January’s void smarted like a bruised rib from a flying hoof, dead-center in Nat’s chest. In a dry, dusty, three-acre sea filled with nearly a thousand people, he was adrift. He jostled his way around packs of teenaged girls, old-timers lighting up their cheroots, and crowded pockets of women’s auxiliary members exchanging salacious town gossip, all to the tune of the gunfighter Jimmy Ringo saying, “Well, I didn’t get it. It just kinda came over me. The way gettin’ older comes over ya. All of a sudden, you look at things different than the way ya did five years ago. All of a sudden, I knew this was the only thing in the world I wanted.”

  In the solitude of his stable, Nat opened the paper that wasn’t really a paper at all. It was a piece ripped from January’s map—the one in Mona’s trailer. Backlit by the yellow bulb strings lining the stalls, the places January had been illuminated the page like constellations. He turned the western hemisphere over to find no words, no goodbye, just a hand-drawn map labeled “Meier Land.”

  A bad map, at that. No compass directions. No key. But he recognized a broken fence near a highway, a dotted line to a stick-drawn house structure and an eyelash-heavy animal that looked more like a dachshund than a donkey. Across the bottom, the words: “Claim the space, claim me.”

  Adrenaline whipped him. Full-on assault of the senses: fresh manure smelled more pungent, hay dust coated the exposed surfaces inside his mouth, a low nicker from Poe pulsated against his eardrums. One minute, Nat believed he held a goodbye letter. The next minute, January Rose dangled herself like a carrot before a horse.

  He bent forward, hands on his knees, and leaned against a stall door. Wind punched from his lungs in uneven spurts. Guy gets what he wants after ten years of pining, takes him a bit to reconcile it in his mind.

  Part of him—the yearling part January had awakened inside him, the one that swam by moonlight and wrote the last scene of his book sitting on a roof and made love with absolutely no forethought but the instinct riding shotgun in his gut—wanted to mount Poe and thunder across his land to claim a destiny with the woman he loved. The other part—the dependable, overly cautious, overly sensitive part that had ruled him since Clem took him fishing at age six and he watched his first catch fling itself on the dry canoe bottom and plead, with gaping mouth and straining gills, for Nat to toss him back into his element—that most substantial part of Nat that put others before self, knew January would forever be like that brown trout.

  Now that he had a chance to have her, the thought of his tiny slice of t
he world changing her terrified him.

  For as long as she’s travelled, she’s dreamed of that place.

  Today, Nat’s dreams delivered on him.

  Tomorrow, January’s dreams should do the same for her.

  He shows, I stay.

  January hadn’t spoken the plan aloud, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t run it through every cell in her body for approval. The fact that she had a plan was evidence that Nat had rubbed off on her.

  Unable to remain calm, she paced the cabin’s interior. She felt sure the sprucing-up stayed true to how Clem envisioned it for his bride all those years ago: gossamer window curtains, knotted at the base, hung from a spare branding iron rod Willie found in storage—the initials C and M scrolled in a fancy, purposeful style; where a saddle once sat, an old attic bed piled high with white eyelet linens; pine quarters stacked at the stove; mason jars crowding the shelves with non-perishables; holes in the log walls patched to seal off the space from the world; a special crate repurposed into a bedside table; and a desk, stockpiled with everything a budding novelist could ever need and a few things—like a pitcher of wildflowers and a bottle of whiskey—that he didn’t.

  This was Nat’s space. Nat’s dream. She had claimed for him what he couldn’t claim in himself. And if things on the ranch ever took a turn, Nat could rent it out as a rustic guest cottage. Plenty of city folks would plunk down cash for the chance to escape the grind and frontier it up for a night. Make some memories and some love. Carry on a Meier tradition that had nothing to do with livestock.

  January sat in the repaired rocker. Fresh runners grazed the polished hardwood. She checked the time on her phone. Mona would have given Nat the map more than an hour ago. The movie would be over soon. Willie said Nat never stayed for the whole thing—that the auction usually took the best out of him by nightfall, which left her with the possibility that he wasn’t coming.

  And she became him.

  All those years back, stretched out in the bed of Clem’s classic truck, headlamps piercing an otherwise dark night, country music trickling out the open windows. All those years back, she had watched from the bushes—first, as he sat high with confidence, then as he paced circles in the field, and then the moment he crawled into the cab, forehead to the wheel, shoulders shaking uncontrollably.

  It wasn’t retribution. Nat didn’t have a payback bone in his body.

  At eighteen, she had lacked courage; at twenty-eight, more than ten years into the most exhilarating love she had ever known, Nat had enough courage for them both.

  January rocked until she could breathe again, until the body-wracking kind of anguish subsided, until her eyes squeezed out the last drizzles of hope. Half an hour on, she slid her pack over her shoulder.

  He shows, I stay.

  So much for plans. Never been much for them, anyway.

  January made a mark in the open journal on his desk then took one final look around. She liked it here. There would be nothing like it in Nepal. There would be nothing like it anywhere. That was what happened when the home inside your head finally picked up and settled somewhere.

  She lifted the antique kerosene lantern from Nat’s desk—where he would write about trains and cyborg cowboys and a spirited heroine who happened to share a birthmark in precisely the same intimate spot—and left the cabin in darkness. Outside, she extinguished the lamp and hung it from an old, rusty car part she had nailed beside the door. After she paced circles in the field, she made her way to the fence and the highway that would carry her away from here, shoulders shaking uncontrollably.

  * * *

  A bale of hay sat where the back, left wheel of Clem’s 1939 truck used to be. The exhaust valve was charred, a crack split the engine block, and a family of barn rats had taken up residence inside the seats, but Nat needed the old heap to rescue him more than it needed rescuing. He reclined against the bed’s weathered wood planks, roped stars in his mind, and made plans to finally restore a piece of Meier family history.

  The summer after Nat lost Clem’s truck on a fool’s bet, he drove down a country road on a steer-purchasing trip and spotted the abandoned truck in a thicket. Upon closer inspection, the truck had the unmistakable hourglass pattern of patina and rust on the quarter panel—two fish bumpin’ uglies—Clem used to say. Nat made a fool’s trade to get it back. Willie said it was the world, evening itself up for Nat carrying his brains in his back pocket.

  Nat hoped his decision to let January go wasn’t another brains-in-the-back-pocket moment.

  Up at the house, the screen door slammed. Lazy feet rearranged gravel and dirt. Nat knew it was Wes before he opened his mouth. Never did pick up his feet all the way. Must make marching a bitch.

  “The fuck you doing here, man?” said Wes. “Guys and I all had bets on when you’d come back from the cabin. Mack had the quickest—tomorrow morning. I gave it a good week.”

  “You knew?”

  “Hell, yeah. Damned near every one of us pitched in to help.”

  “Wait…” Nat’s thoughts clouded. He sat up. “Help with what?”

  Wes frowned. “January’s surprise. What are you talking about?”

  The cabin. She’d done something with the cabin. Now he knew why his ranch hands had been so secretive the past few days. Why Willie acted so strange when Nat had caught him sanding a block of wood. God, he felt even more like an ass, if that was possible.

  Nat pulled the map piece from his pocket and handed it to his brother.

  Wes held the paper up so the lights from the house lit the page.

  “I couldn’t do it,” said Nat. “I couldn’t ask her to be anyone but who she is.”

  “You didn’t ask. She offered.” Wes’s tone was amped, mired in confusion.

  “She wouldn’t be happy here, man. We’d get five, ten, twenty-two years in, and she’d tell our kids that she has to go ‘find herself,’ just like Mom.”

  “You’re an idiot,” said Wes. “You’re not doing this for January. You’re doing it to protect yourself from being hurt again.”

  The mere suggestion that Nat was being selfish about this made him want to tackle Wes to the dirt, the way they used to solve problems when they were kids. “You weren’t here. You don’t know.”

  Wes choked out a laugh, bitter to the bone. “Right. I can’t possibly understand what it’s like to lose someone I care about.”

  Nine months ago, his team was ambushed in urban warfare. Bomb vest on a young woman he had befriended. Wes was the only one who made it out alive.

  “Get over yourself, Nat. Why invite pain when there’s a whole fucking world of it out there? I guess you wouldn’t know that because you stay here, year after year, inside these fences. Even Grandad ran alongside Sherman tanks in the invasion of Wernberg and sparred against Joe Louis and went after the girl he loved, right at the top of the Ferris wheel at the State Fair while she was in a seat with that mama’s boy from Oklahoma. Grandad lived, man. Will you be able to say the same?”

  Nat couldn’t take this ambush lying or sitting. He slid off the truck bed and paced to the opposite side of the truck. “That’s great, Wes. While you and Chance were out living, someone had to keep this place in the family.”

  “I get that. And I appreciate it—having a place to call home when things are going to pot over there. But the time’s come for Chance and me to step up and for you to stop shouldering all the responsibility.”

  “Does this mean you’re here for good?” Nat asked.

  “Means I’m weighing my options.” Wes sat on the tailgate, his shoulders rounded, a slight hint of defeat in his voice.

  Weighing his options was the closest they’d come to having him back before they lost him for good. His last tour had been Hell. Wes needed family and plans that didn’t involve the potential for casualties.

  Nat rounded the bumper to sit beside him. A truce of sorts.

  The truck frame creaked in protest.

  “January’s always going to want that freedom, Nat
, but there’s no reason you can’t go with her. Travel every so often. Write about those places in a book someday.”

  “I don’t know.” Translation: Nat was scared as all get out.

  “I do. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in all my deployments, it’s that for all that we train and drill and plan, life hands you moments when all the preparation in the world won’t make a damn bit of difference. Those are the moments that define you.” Wes glanced at Nat. “What do you want this moment to say about you, brother?

  “That the Meier legacy is about more than land.” It was brave men, doing what they had to do, claiming their dreams, unwilling to accept defeat. It was about love. Love given and love received, in all forms. And it was about admitting when you were wrong. Wrong to sell an old truck. Wrong to re-up for another tour. Wrong to let the love of your life slip through your fingers.

  “I have to hurry,” said Nat.

  Wes grinned, ear to ear. “Then you’d better let me drive.”

  10

  The cabin was black, no sign anyone had been there but the faint scent of January Rose.

  Time stopped. Nat was here, at Clem’s cabin, but she wasn’t. Somehow, impossibly, Wes was here and January wasn’t.

  Wes reached for the lantern by the door. “Glass is warm.”

  They glanced around. Nat’s truck headlights punched through the darkness, two solitary beams that exposed little of their surroundings.

  “Maybe she’s gone back to Mona’s,” said Nat.

  “Mona was up at the house after the movie. Said January took her pack with her.”

  Light from the headlamps refracted against him and shattered into a thousand pieces. Wes’s voice was muffled, distant. Nat processed the noises closest to him—his flat and lifeless inhales, a heart that beat double time and crowded his head with rushing, for all the good it did.

  Wes found matches wedged between the metal tines and the housing of the lantern’s base. He struck one, set the oiled wick ablaze, and handed the light to Nat.