“Hey, Jamie. I guess this is getting to be our regular meeting place.”
She could barely pull herself together in the face of his cheery smile, and her only response was a curt nod, barely acknowledging him. She didn’t want to talk to any member of the Cal Cameron clan. Especially not tonight.
Of course, Harvey noted the red-rimmed eyes and the chilly manner. “Something wrong, Jamie?”
She brushed her hair back from her cheek, turning her head away from him. “I’m not much in the mood for talking tonight, Harvey.” She paid for the coffee and took the thermos from the clerk. “I just ran into my ex over in Butcher’s Fork. It’s a real bummer.”
Without another word, she walked out of the store, returned to her car, and drove away, leaving Harvey to stare thoughtfully after her.
Chapter Fifteen
Cal ran the water as hot as he could stand it and then let himself down slowly into the tub. He’d already iced the knee for a full twenty minutes and now, for another twenty, he kept a thin stream of scalding water trickling into the bath while he soaked and massaged his leg, easing the pain and, at the same time, softening up all the other accumulated muscle tensions. In the old days, he could have spent days in the saddle without needing any recovery time at all, but from now on, for the rest of his life, he’d have to take good care of that knee. The doctor had said it would get better, some, but the leg would never be as it had been before the injury. Cal was still fighting the bitterness in is heart.
“So that’s how it turns out,” he said to himself. “Cal Cameron isn’t quite as special as thought he’d be, different from all the other rodeo riders. Turns out he isn’t made out of three parts good luck and the rest all steel, like he thought he was. Turns out it’s all over for him a lot sooner that he expected. And a hell of a lot sooner than he wanted.”
Well, maybe not totally all over. Sometimes, like now when he was soaking in the hot water, and he felt a little loosened up, he’d get the idea that maybe he could bring it all back. Maybe, with the right exercise program, get a real good trainer, some real hard work, he might have another season in him. Maybe even two.
Then he’d remember what the doc in Vail said after the surgery, best man in the country. Sat there in that fancy office of his with all the wood panels and the diplomas on the wall and the pictures of his kids on the desk. “Cal,” he told him, leaning back in his chair, “the real work ahead of you isn’t the post-op stuff. I know you’ll do the exercises and I know the pain won’t stop you. You’ll use the brace and you’ll strengthen the knee on the passive-flex machine, eight hours every day, the first eight weeks, like the therapist showed you. It’ll be months of real bad pain but I know you can take it. No, that’s not the hard part.”
Here, the doctor had paused and held his fancy letter-opener poised between the fingertips of both hands while he stared thoughtfully at his patient.
“For you, Cal,” he said, finally, “the hard part is going to be the growing up. Your kid days are over, Cal. You’ll be able to ride, but not in competition. I’m telling it to you straight and I hope you’re hearing what I’m saying. You get some of that rough stock between your legs just once, and that mean sonofabitch makes his first turn in the air, and I promise you, you’ll never walk right again.”
Cal repeated those words to himself again, for the thousandth time.
You’ll never walk right again.
“Ah, shit!” The ugly word seemed to echo off the tile walls, his private horror chamber, and he had to wait a long time till he felt the silence again.
Well, you’re a grown man, Cameron, and a grown man doesn’t cry. He just gets mad. But you asked for it. This is what you wanted. You always knew you’d get broken bones out of it. Isn’t a rodeoer in the world isn’t all broke up. And only if you were a hundred percent lucky it wouldn’t get worse than that.
He flexed his arms, legs, shoulders, checking for pain, calibrating the stiffness and tension. He watched the water run in little rivers through the hair on his legs as he raised them experimentally out of the water. Most of his moving parts seemed to be back in normal operation, so he figured he’d soaked long enough.
Ellie must have dinner about ready. Come on, Cal. Time to join civilization.
He turned on the shower, stood up carefully in the tub, and lathered up thick swirls of suds over his whole body, all along the hard curves of his shoulders and arms and down his torso, massaging as he went and loosening the sand and dust that had worked in under his clothes. After three days out on the range, a man accumulates a lot of grit along with the smell of sweat and leather. He soaped up his thick black hair, rubbing at his scalp to clean out all the sand. A shaving mirror hung over the shower head, and while the water ran out of the tub, he lathered up and removed the stubble of the last three days.
Getting cleaned up makes a man feel better, and by the time he was rinsing the shaving cream from his face, Cal was even singing softly to himself while the hot shower stream washed away all the lather, the sand, and the pain in rivulets of sudsy water running down the muscles of his body.
So he was smooth and gleaming, smelling of soap and aftershave and dressed in clean jeans and a soft pale blue shirt when he came to the dinner table, hungry as a bear and feeling good. The whole family saw the change in his mood and figured the days on the range must have cleared up whatever had been bothering him. Dinner was lamb stew and fresh corn from Ellie’s garden, and as soon as Harvey had said the blessing, he started to fill up the plates.
“Good to have you back, Cal,” he said. “There’s more fence down at the corral to take care of. And young A.J. here says he’s waiting for you to teach him some roping.” He passed the first plate to Ellie and then started to ladle stew onto Cal’s plate. “There’s something else. I ran into that cute girl of yours a couple times while you were away, and I guess she’ll be glad to see you.” He paused for a moment, stew ladle in mid-air. “Though, to tell you the truth,” he added, “I saw her on my way home tonight, when I stopped to get gas. And that girl didn’t look too glad about anything. Fact is, she looked to me like she’d been crying and she wouldn’t even stop to pass the time of day.” He handed Cal’s plate to him. “Just grabbed her thermos of coffee and ran out.”
Cal’s face had darkened at Harvey’s words. He felt as though a fist had hit him hard, square on his chest. “She didn’t say anything at all, Harv?”
“Not really. Only that she’d just run into her ex over in Butcher’s Fork. Said it was a real bummer. Must have been, too. She sure looked awful.”
Cal was up instantly, almost knocking his chair over. It teetered slowly and he grabbed at it, setting it straight on its legs.
“I’m sorry, Ellie. Dinner looks great, but I’m going to have to take a rain check. Don’t be mad. I’ll make breakfast for us in the morning or something. But I’ve got to go now.”
“But Cal, you must be starving. Just stop long enough to have something.” For almost thirty years Ellie had been trying make her kid brother behave, but she hadn’t been successful since he was five. Now here he was, looking like fire and brimstone all of a sudden, not even waiting to eat. She knew it was useless to try to stop him.
He grabbed his fork, scooped up a quick mouthful of stew, and took a biscuit from the basket on the table.
“This’ll do me,” he said, his mouth full. He already had his hat off the peg on the wall.
Harvey was concerned. He hadn’t had a chance yet to find out if Cal had checked the water pipes they’d laid out in the desert. And, while he didn’t want to pry, he sure would like to know what the hell was up with him these last few days. Cal was acting like a man possessed.
“She didn’t tell me where she was going,” he called after Cal who was already out the door.
“That’s okay, Harv. I know where she is,” Cal called back as the screen door closed behind him.
* * *
To the east, the remnants of the afternoon storm still hung mena
cingly over the mountains, its streaks of lightning slashing at the peaks like an angry animal, retreating temporarily, but waiting to make its next attack, its rumbles of distant thunder snarling a warning. And to the west, more flashes of approaching lightning, in sudden washes of thin light, made a yet-distant announcement that the next wave of storm was on its way. Directly above, breaks in the cloud cover let the brilliant moonlight come and go, making the fields on either side of the highway glow wetly in the moving patches of light.
The tires of Cal’s truck screamed along the road as he raced to the canyon where he was sure Jamie would be.
Something’s happened. That sonofabitch must have done something to her. Harv said she’d been crying and wouldn’t even talk to him. Just ran off like that. Only one place she’d go, up to that clearing in the canyon.
Up ahead was the clump of cedar trees where the dirt road turned off to Jamie’s house and as he neared the trees, he saw that lightning had slashed one of the cedars in two, leaving one part bent downward, reaching out toward the road, and the other half still standing, naked, with great slivers of riven wood fanning out in jagged spikes. Cal had to fight off the spooked feeling they gave him.
She’s all right. She’s got to be all right.
He grasped at the reassuring straws to calm himself.
Been a couple of hours since that storm went through here. She must be out there somewhere, maybe scared and not being careful.
A distant light wavered momentarily in the sky. He didn’t like the way he was feeling.
Maybe she didn’t even go to the canyon. Maybe she’s at home. She could be sleeping or something and the house could be set on fire and that father of hers wouldn’t even know it.
A nightmare image flashed through his mind, of Jamie struggling to drag the unconscious man from the flames, screaming at him, helpless to save him. Helpless to save herself. Her hair, that beautiful hair, itself a bright light, flying about her face, her clothes catching fire—or she could be asleep upstairs while the smoke rose—a drunk like that is dangerous to live with, doesn’t need any help from nature’s random violence . . .
If anything’s happened to her . . .
In the dark, the farm house was ahead of him. No smoke rising from it. No flames licking up the sides. In another sweep of the clouds, the moon showed through, revealing the house, quiet, ordinary, at no immediate risk. In the front room, the silvery, familiar light of the TV flickered. And her car wasn’t there.
He looked up briefly, toward the roiling heavens. “Thank you,” he whispered.
He realized his fingers had locked rigidly on the steering wheel; he lifted first one hand, then the other, stretching the muscles to relax them.
The heavy electric air filled once more with the pale aura of the distant lightning and Cal realized that if anything happened to Jamie, there’d be no pieces of him left to pick up. No knees, or arms, or legs, or head, or heart.
He hadn’t known that until this moment. The anger of these last days, the humiliation, the frustration, all poured out of him and he was filled with a clarity of understanding.
The lightning flashed again, and in the glow that lit up the vast desert around him, Cal saw that he’d been wandering, like a lost kid, looking for the only thing in the whole world that really mattered.
He felt his heart twist inside of him and he prayed aloud.
“Please let her be all right.”
Chapter Sixteen
The mug of coffee had long ago grown cold in her hand and still she sat staring into the valley far below, frozen into the helplessness that came of her combined fury and panic. She had already cycled through the inevitable fantasies—impossible, every one of them—of murdering Ray, of kidnapping Mandy—even of killing herself. Now she waited for rational thought to return. She was oblivious to the wind rising in the treetops, sending an ominous whisper through the aspens. She didn’t see the enormous forks of lightning that slashed at the mountain tops across the valley. She had no thought for the approaching storm.
It was the sound of the truck turning off the road that broke into her isolation, and before she could think—who could be coming up here?—the truck’s lights lit up the trees and the rocks around her. It was moving fast and it pulled into the space next to her Civic with a grinding of rubber against the earth. In almost the same instant the engine was cut, the lights doused, and she saw Cal coming toward her across the open space.
And in that moment, Jamie felt the earth shift on its axis. In a single moment, her terror-filled reality turned rational.
He’s come back!
All her efforts to put him out of her life collapsed like a child’s fortress of sand.
Why has he come? What does it mean?
“What are you doing here?” She couldn’t help the challenge in her voice.
He was determined that this time he’d be careful; this time he wasn’t going to scare her away. He sat down on the rock, careful not to get too close.
“Harvey told me he saw you. Said you’d been crying.” He saw her raise her chin defiantly. “Why don’t you tell me what happened.” He kept the question casual—and as gentle as he could.
Her heart was racing but she only shrugged, trying to pretend it was no big deal. “It was Ray. He just came out of nowhere. I was over in Butcher’s Fork, at the Big Buy. I wasn’t prepared. Just all of a sudden, there he was.” Hearing herself tell it, aloud, brought the memory back in all its ugliness and terror, and her brave pretense crumbled. She could feel her lip trembling and she looked up toward the treetops, trying to control the tears that were beginning to come. “He just came up behind me and he got me totally by surprise. Like one minute I was looking at dish towels, and the next minute there’s this sneering big sonofabitch right next to me. Making fun of me. Laughing at me.” She brushed her hair away from her forehead, trying to steady herself. “Laughing about what he was going to do to me.”
“And just what does he think he’s going to do to you?”
“He says he can take Mandy away from me.” The words were strangled in her throat and now she couldn’t stop the tears. “He said he can even have her put away—into a foster home. He said he can take her away from me for good. And oh, God, he would do it, too. I knew it, right then, I knew Ray would do it, just for the fun of it. Just for the sheer, goddamned, fun of it!” She dug her hand into her hair, clutching at it mindlessly. “I know how rotten that man can be and I feel so helpless. He kept laughing about what the judge had written about me and how the whole town thinks I’m no good because of what Orrin did. He made me feel like a stupid piece of dirt! I don’t know what to do. It seems like every time I think I’m ready to take him on, turns out that bastard is a couple of steps ahead of me. I just don’t know what I can do.”
She felt hopelessly, helplessly muddled. On top of Ray’s repeated assaults on her self-esteem, her life-long, lonely habit of independence had smashed up against her desperate need for help. Cal’s arrival only added to her confusion.
“I’m in real trouble, Cal.” The words, so hard to say, were choking her. She stared bleakly into the distance. “I feel like I’m all coming apart.”
She was in some terrible, lonely place of her own and didn’t see that Cal reached a hand toward her, and she also didn’t see that he thought better of it and held back. She said nothing for a long time, and when she finally spoke, her words were barely a whisper.
“All my life, for as long as I can remember, I’ve known it was up to me to take care of myself. Other kids had families, maybe big brothers, or a grandfather, someone who kept an eye out for them, someone they could go to. When I was a kid, the only family I had was that tanked-up bastard who practically never even knows if it’s day or night. The town drunk, that’s who I have for a father. It’s the same with that house down the road.” She gestured toward the valley. “It used to be a nice place once, I’ve seen old photos of it. That decrepit farmhouse, the whole town calls it a disgrace to the com
munity, that’s my home. That’s what I grew up with.”
Still looking away from Cal, she brushed at her cheek, as though trying not to acknowledge the tears. “Listen to me. Like I don’t have enough to worry about! But he’s my father, for God’s sake! I used to love him once, when I was a kid. I used to try to do things to make him be better. I’d try to cook for him, get a whole nice dinner ready, I thought if I made it look like the pictures I saw in the magazines, with soup and mashed potatoes and little pats of butter—it was all so useless. I tried so damned hard and I was just a kid, I didn’t know you can’t cure a drunk with mashed potatoes.
“And tonight, as I was coming up here, I saw that damned TV light in the front room and I knew he was home, and you know what I wished. I wished lightning would strike the place and burn it all up, with him in it. It’s come to where I wish my own father was dead! And it really is a wonder it hasn’t happened yet, him setting the place on fire. It wouldn’t surprise me. And the damned thing is, what pisses me off most, I know I’d try to save him. Just like I used to try to make dinner for him, I’d still try to pull him out of the fire. Like he deserves to be saved! I hate feeling like this!”
“You and I both know,” Cal said quietly, “that isn’t what you want for your dad. He’s got a stinking, rotten problem, and that problem has hurt you terribly, but no one deserves to die in a fire.”
She sighed wearily. “I know. The drinking is his problem—not mine.” She took a long, deep breath. “Cal, I don’t have the strength to deal with this. There isn’t a damned thing anyone can do to turn a drunk around. Only he can do that. And maybe he will, and maybe he won’t. Much as it hurts, and much as it drives me crazy, that’s the way it is. My problem is to live my life. And I’ve got Mandy to think about.”
Suddenly, on a perverse impulse, as a comic thought zigzagged through her pain, she added, “And hey, so what if he is the town drunk? Every town has to have one. Like a mayor or a dog catcher.”
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