Interlude: Cavatina

by Bauer, Tal

  His dad would have kept the place going, too.

  Where were the others? Marion said she couldn’t find the other hands that had been around. It was the nature of the business. Hands moved from ranch to ranch, state to state, even. Cattle driving in winter, taking herds of beef cattle to California to fatten over the winter months. Moving back with another herd, to a busier ranch in Idaho or the Dakotas. Following the money and the work. Long-term hands like his father, working and living on one ranch for his entire life, were almost unheard of.

  He gave Jack the nickel tour, describing the ranch and its grandeurs before the dust and cobwebs had settled in. Before the gloom and the drapes over the furniture and the cold cutting through the window panes. The power was off, and he led Jack back to the kitchen, where the blinds were open and the windows overlooking the back range flooded the room with dull gray light.

  Three boxes rested on the kitchen island, marked Reichenbach.

  Old dust and leather hit him first, the smells of age. Tobacco and pipe smoke. Cedar and a hint of must, clothes packed away for a long time. He’d unpacked his dad’s trailer after he passed, boxed everything up, donated most everything he had. There was a box in the back of Ethan’s closet, taped shut and never opened, labeled “Dad’s Things”.

  What was all this?

  A horse blanket lay on top of the first box. No, two. Ethan fingered the fabric, sifting through memories for the pattern. It hit him sideways, like he’d been thrown from the saddle. His first ride. Back then, he wasn’t riding a horse, not when he was four. This was the saddle blanket under his first pony, his first mule ride. Tucked into the blanket was a tiny leather lead, almost brittle and crumbling.

  “‘We found these boxes in the tack shed’,” Jack read. He had a piece of paper in his hand, Marion’s scrawling handwriting looping across the page. “‘He must have kept them when the ranch bought all new supplies and tossed the old equipment. Your dad was the ranch manager for his last fifteen years. The tack shed was his office.’”

  Ethan moved to the second box. When he’d buried his dad, he hadn’t gone to the tack shed. He’d cleaned out his dad’s trailer and hit the road. It had hurt too much to linger.

  Right on top, folded carefully, was his dad’s old flannel jacket.

  Eighteen years of memories punched him at once. Morning rides in fall and spring, the air so crisp and sharp it seemed like his breath would shatter it. Clouds billowing in front of their faces, frost forming and striking their cheeks. Coffee and cigarettes, those damn cigarettes that would kill his dad one day. His dad’s smile as they watched the sun rise over the herd, over the ranch. A thousand mornings, him and his dad, him always following these broad, flannel-covered shoulders.

  He buried his face in the fabric and closed his eyes. He could smell everything, the morning dew, the horses’ hides, their sweat after racing. Pine and grassland, old wood and clean water, the spring babbling by on the left. The first snow on the wind, and the arrival of spring, a warmth curling through the air. He was there, right back there, and if he raised his head, opened his eyes, his dad would be there—

  Jack’s hand rested on his back. Ethan shuddered, and his throat closed, and though he fought it, the tears bubbled up and poured down his cheeks, soaking into his dad’s flannel. Jack kept stroking his back, a silent warmth by his side.

  He turned into Jack’s touch, burying his tear-soaked face in Jack’s shoulder. “Thank you.”

  “Always.” Jack’s voice warbled. He held Ethan for a long time.

  Ethan pulled his dad’s jacket out and slid into it. He and his dad were similar sizes, his adult frame an echo of his dad’s. The jacket fit like it was his own, like it had been made for him. He pulled it tight, smelled the lapel, turned up the collar. Worn fuzz from the lining tickled his throat. His dad’s scent enveloped him. He closed his eyes.

  Jack reached past him, into the box. “Ethan,” he breathed. “Look.”

  Photos. Dozens and dozens of photos taken through the years. Snapshots of his life, of his dad’s life that he’d never seen. His dad as an old man, posing in front of the barn, the tack shop. Candid shots on the ranch, his dad training new hands, breaking in new horses, helping to feed the foals. Laughing around a campfire with Mr. Hollis and Betsy. When his dad had gotten sick, they had paid for his entire treatment. They’d intercepted his dad’s bills, opened them up and paid for everything. His dad tried to work extra to cover the time he took driving to Casper and then Cheyenne for his treatments. They told him to relax, to sit on the porch swing. Ride when he felt like it and no more.

  In the end, Betsy and Mr. Hollis drove him to his treatments themselves. When Ethan arrived for the last week, his dad was living in their ranch house in their guest bedroom under the care of a live-in nurse the Hollises paid for.

  Photos from earlier. Ethan, young and gangly, a rangy teenager wearing tight Wrangler jeans and his button-down plaid, big cowboy hat on his head. Jack beamed, tracing Ethan’s lopsided smile with his finger. Ethan on his horse. A younger Ethan trying, and failing, to rope a broken fence post. Ethan covered in mud from head to toe, grinning like an idiot. Ethan and his dad, side by side on horseback, the ranch in front of them, like the future spread out across the plains.

  Ethan as a child. Memories he didn’t have, not really. Him tiny and toddling on the farm. Him gazing up at a horse, wide eyed and wondrous. Him on his dad’s shoulders, his dad holding his fat little legs as he beamed for the camera. Him as a baby, wearing a diaper and his dad’s cowboy hat and nothing else. He held the brim of the hat up with both hands, smiling from underneath it with all the mischievousness he could summon.

  “My God, Ethan,” Jack whispered. “This is amazing.”

  He wrapped his arms around Jack’s waist and started talking. Story after story after story, each one that went with a photo, a moment in his life. His voice grew hoarse, and he pressed his tear-streaked face to Jack’s more than once. Jack held his hand over his stomach, lacing their fingers together.

  Finally, the stories ran out, and every photo was lovingly stacked to the side. In the bottom of the box, odds and ends from his dad rattled back and forth. Trinkets from his office, souvenirs other hands had given him on their travels to California, Montana, Idaho, the Dakotas.

  A postcard from Washington DC, curled with age. Hello from my new home, it said on the back. I start my job next week. Wish me luck! On the front, a picture of the White House.

  “You ever think about all the choices we make in life?” Ethan asked. His thumb drifted over the postcard, over the manicured lawn of the White House. “How we end up where we are?”

  “All the time,” Jack whispered. “And all the time, I count my lucky stars that all of my choices led me to you.”

  Ethan kissed Jack gently. He nuzzled their foreheads, their noses. “Even though I’m jus’ some good ole’ hick from upcountry?” He poured as much Wyoming, as much drawl, as he could into those words, lengthening them each to the width of a summer’s day, as long as a slow horse’s ride, a honey drip-drop of afternoons with nowhere to be.

  Jack laughed. “You’re going to have to start speaking like that more often. I like it.”

  “Do ya now?”

  “Oh yeah. Yeah.”

  He kissed Jack again, soft and sweet, and then pulled back. “Let’s get this to the truck. There’s one more place I want to show you.”

  Ethan wore his dad’s jacket as they locked up. He slid the key beneath the flower pot as Jack climbed back into the truck.

  They turned west, driving through Powder River country, the basin between the Bighorn Mountains and the Black Hills. Oil derricks lazily churned in dots far off the two-lane road. A few lonely trucks passed them, but other than that, they were alone.

  Ethan turned off at Saddlepoint and took Highway 16, winding up into the Bighorn Mountains. Snow on the ground turned from a dusting to drifts, feet deep piled on the embankments. Snowpack covered the road, firm enough to drive o
n, and he shifted into second as they climbed and dropped through the small passes. Finally, he turned off the highway on an unmarked exit, a lonely mile marker and a snowy road. Jack tensed beside him, gripping the truck’s door handle.

  “It’s all right, love. I’ve been driving in this kind of stuff since I was fourteen.” He reached for Jack’s knee and squeezed, then pushed the truck through the drift at the turnoff. The snowpack on the turnoff was deeper, but the truck’s tires chewed through the powder, and he rumbled up the mountain road and into the forest.

  Twenty minutes later, he parked in a tiny clearing set back from the winding road, almost three quarters of the way up the mountain in a turn off surrounded by pine trees and silence. There was one other set of tire tracks, but light snow had filled in their tread. Maybe a hunter, a few days back.

  He helped Jack out of the truck. The snow drifts came up to their shins, and they pushed through to the tree line where the forest cover overhead meant there was less powder to push through, less snow on the ground. Ethan led, holding Jack’s hand as he guided him into the trees.

  “My dad and I came here every year. In fall, we’d come out for a long weekend to fish. Spring, same thing. Every summer, we’d bring a few horses out and ride through the mountains, camp under the stars. Hunt and fish for what we’d need. I know these woods. Every tree and rock.”

  “If you left me here, I’d die in ten minutes.”

  “I’d never leave you anywhere.”

  They kept going, pushing through the snow and shifting course, passing by trees that Ethan stopped at and put his palm on, closing his eyes. Jack probably thought he was communing with nature or following some kind of trail. No, he was following his memories. Years and years of memories exploded like fireworks in his mind.

  At the very end of his trek down memory lane, there was one last moment, one final memory he tried never to return to. He was leading Jack there.

  His breath hitched. They arrived.

  The clearing he and his dad camped at every summer was now covered ankle-deep in snow. The last time he’d been there, powder like soft spun sugar had coated the ground. A decade had passed since he’d last stood between the pines, breathed the air of his summers and his childhood.

  But he could still see everything, the images superimposed over his eyes as if he were standing in that moment, reliving that day. His dad, thin and waxing, his strength ebbing from his frame, his body losing the fight against the cancer that ate him alive. Two packs of cigarettes a day led to one outcome. When his dad had called with the news, Ethan had known how it would end. He’d always known.

  They’d had their last week together, camping in the mountains where they had spent their happiest days. He’d kept his father warm, stayed up to watch the stars and the sunrise, and had talked to him for hours, telling him stories about the Army and the White House and the world.

  When his dad told him all he wanted was for Ethan to be happy, just be happy, he’d smiled and promised that he would be. He held his dad’s hand at the end, when it came.

  He brought his dad’s body back down the mountains, and then returned with his ashes. His dad was here, in this grove.

  “Dad,” he whispered. “I’m happy. I’m married to the love of my life. He said yes, Dad. I found him, and I proposed, and he said yes. Fuck, I wish you could have met him, Dad.” Eyes closed, he curled forward, tucking his face into his dad’s jacket.

  Jack wrapped his arms around him as the tears fell. Ethan kissed Jack’s forehead and spun him, holding him from behind. “Jack… I scattered his ashes here. He’s here.”

  “It’s beautiful. This is a perfect place for him.”

  “It’s beautiful all year long. Winter, it’s private, and quiet. Pristine. In Spring, the flowers bloom, and there are bees and deer and foxes. Summer, the meadows come to life, and you can see for miles, the whole forest, Powder Valley and the basin right through those trees. And then in autumn, half the forest changes color and everything gets soft and the animals start bedding down. This was his favorite spot.” He tucked his face in Jack’s neck, his wet nose pushing against Jack’s warm skin, his pulse. “I wish you could have known him. I wish we’d had a few more years, a little bit longer. So he’d know. He’d see how happy I am with you. And, you could see what kind of man he was. You’d have liked him. He was the strong, silent type. Your type.” Ethan chuckled.

  Jack laughed, but it faded fast. “Ethan.” He turned in Ethan’s hold, cupping his face. “I already know that I love your father. I’ve known that forever. The best parts of your father are in you, Ethan. The man that you are, the man you became, the man I love to the end of the Earth and beyond. I know who shaped that man. I know who I have to thank for you.” He smiled and kissed Ethan gently. “Your dad made the best man I’ve ever known.”

  Ethan pressed his forehead to Jack and held on, held on as the memories rained down. Jack caressed his face and kissed him until Ethan tasted Jack’s tears.

  Jack pulled back first. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a photo of him and Ethan, arms wrapped around each other as they beamed mile-wide smiles. It was a selfie they’d taken in Washington DC in front of their new house. They were laughing, totally in love. “Is there a place where we can leave this for him?”

  Nodding, Ethan led him to a tree at the edge of the clearing. A pile of rocks squatted at the base, half covered in snow. He brushed the snow off. A cairn rested there, moss-covered in places, but the stones had stayed in their balanced stack, even after ten years. Not many came out to their clearing. “I built this for him. There’s some of his ashes at the base.”

  Jack lifted one of the stones near the bottom, slightly. He slid the photo between the stones, tucking it deep into the cairn. The edges of the photo poked out, bits of color from their life vibrantly set against the white snow and gray stone. “Mr. Reichenbach,” Jack breathed. “Thank you for your son. He’s the absolute best part of my life.”

  A gentle breeze rose, ruffling the pine boughs overhead and flicking through the branches. Somewhere, a bird twittered, a call that echoed down the mountain. The skies were dull and overcast throughout the day, but that moment the clouds split, a break appearing, and a ray of sunlight landed on the snowy grove. The light stretched toward the rock cairn.

  “Dad,” Ethan whispered, smiling. “Meet Jack. My husband.”

  * * *

  16

  President’s Day

  Their first year, they’d kept Valentine’s Day a quiet affair.

  It seemed that every cable news channel, television reporter, radio announcer, DJ, and talk show host wanted to know about the president’s Valentine’s Day plans with his new lover. The trouble was, Jack was in Washington DC and Ethan was in Iowa, and there wasn’t a good reason to fly out for one day and back. They celebrated the next weekend instead, champagne in front of the fire and a long, slow night.

  Ethan grumbled about Valentine’s Day being overly commercialized, a holiday for greeting card companies and chocolatiers, to say nothing of the thousand percent uptick in rose prices. “I could buy you roses every other month of the year and they’d be only twenty dollars. This month? One hundred dollars or more.”

  “I don’t need roses,” Jack had said, laughing. “I only need you.”

  A month later, Ethan moved into the White House. Six months later, they were out of the White House, looking back on scandal and war and madmen and attempted coups.

  They rebuilt their lives slowly. Buying a house together in DC. Visiting Jack’s family for holidays and long weekends. Building their new company. Signing contracts with Elizabeth, black contracts that went into sealed, Top Secret-Eyes Only folders. Only three people knew about their plans.

  They had a year to get up and running.

  In the middle of building SR Consultants—coordinating training for both him and Jack, building their supplies, their network of leads and informants, information funnels, both overt and covert, and liaising with the
government agencies they’d need to work with, an alphabet soup of three-letter words—Valentine’s Day came again. Jack was in London and Ethan was in North Carolina at Fort Bragg, and they blew each other kisses over a video call before going to sleep. “Happy Expensive Roses Day,” Jack said, chuckling. “I’ll see you Monday when I get home.”

  Jack took an early morning flight out of London and landed at Dulles almost the same time he left, thanks to the time change. Groggy, he slid out of the private jet and stumbled to the waiting SUV. As the former first family, he and Ethan had Secret Service agents on call for their protection. Most of the time, they didn’t want agents to sit at their curb or watch them eat lunch or listen as Ethan tried to fuck Jack through their mattress while Jack screamed his name and held on to the bucking headboard slamming into the wall. But when they traveled, having the extra protection was worthwhile.

  He thanked Melissa, an agent winding down her last two years in the Secret Service and heading toward retirement, when she dropped him off at their house. She’d spent a career in investigations and had an impressive record of arrests and prosecutions under her belt. She’d retrained for executive protections and looked after several of the formerly-serving administration officials who received extended protection after their tenures. Presidents, vice presidents, some agency and administration bigwigs who’d held key positions. Jack liked Melissa, and he gave her a box of chocolate he’d bought in London. “Thank you, Ms. Wheatland.”

  “Anytime, Mr. President.” She escorted him through their locked gate and to the front door, and then tipped her head and left him as he slipped inside.

  The house was silent. “Hello, love! I’m home!”

  He dropped his bag and jacket next to the door and turned—

  An envelope rested on the ground a few feet in from the door. Jack, it read on the front in Ethan’s blocky, bold handwriting.