Bum Steer

  “No.” But it came out softly. I cleared my throat and tried again. “No. I’m going in.”

  He didn’t move back to allow me to walk by him, and so I had to brush heavily against him on my way out the door. I felt as if my body were metal to his magnet, and I had literally to pull away from him. Once past him, I looked back. He was still there, gazing down the two steps at me.

  “No,” I said more clearly.

  I turned and started back to the house.

  His footfalls sounded behind me. I wasn’t sure I could step away from him again, not while I still ached from pulling away from him the first time.

  But when he caught up with me, he didn’t touch me.

  “I can take care of Carl, Jenny.”

  I didn’t look at him. “My guess is that you and Cat have been taking care of Carl for quite some time.”

  For once, he was without words.

  We were nearly to the kitchen door when I said, “We could try to get him into some kind of recovery program, Slight. There must be something around here—”

  “No.”

  “But—”

  “No.” We were approaching the kitchen steps. He said in a louder voice, “So what’s it going to be for supper tonight, Jenny? You want Tater Tots and pork chops or black-eyed peas and corn bread. Carl? You in there? You start supper yet? We still got that frozen peach pie we could heat up for dessert?” He opened the kitchen door for me.

  “If your new jeans weren’t tight when you bought ’em, they will be by the time you leave here, Jenny.”

  His grin looked hard and forced.

  I went directly upstairs after supper, peeled off my clothes, fell onto the old mattress, and rolled into the valley in the middle of it. I pulled the covers up and then lay there like the dead, like a mummy enveloped in swaddling, too tired even to find a more comfortable position for my aching body. I dreamed I heard a jingling in my room that night, a crisp, high-pitched musical rattle, like wind chimes tingling in a breeze.

  20

  Sunday, I awoke warm and desirous of my husband, a feeling that lasted all of about ten seconds—when the rest of my body woke up. It didn’t ache as much as it had the night before, it ached more. The smell of coffee was tugging me downstairs, but when I moved my legs to attempt to swing myself out of the valley in the middle of the mattress, my inner thighs screamed in protest. They felt as if somebody had flogged them black and blue—or forced them to straddle for too long a large, moving animal. I could only be grateful that Geof was fifteen hundred miles away from me. I sank back into the mattress again.

  “Oh, groan.”

  Would I ever walk again?

  “Ouch, ouch, damn and groan.”

  I gave up the idea of movement below the waist and spread out my arms on the pillows beside me. It didn’t hurt to do that. Well, good, if I had to live in a wheelchair for the rest of my life, at least I would still have upper-body mobility. The problem was, when I spread out my arms like that, one of my hands came to rest on something cold, hard, and sharp. I didn’t recall there being any such thing on the pillow when I went to sleep.

  I willed myself to remain calm, then I turned my head to look.

  “Very funny,” I said to Slight and Carl when I crept downstairs to breakfast a little later, after a long, hot bath. “Real cute.”

  Carl looked at me strangely, and Slight said, “What?”

  “I had a ghost in my room last night, fellows,” I informed them dryly. “He must have slept with his head at the foot of the bed and his boots on the pillow, because he left these next to me.”

  I tossed onto the table a pair of silver spurs.

  “You’re kidding,” Slight said.

  I sat down—slowly and carefully—and reached for the box of cornflakes.

  “Guess it was Cat,” I continued, “since he dearly loved his practical jokes. You think it was Cat?”

  “Come on,” Slight said, grinning at me. He passed a quart of milk my way. “You didn’t find these in your bed. They were in the closet with his old boots.”

  I glanced at Carl, who was concentrating on his cereal.

  “I guess Slight’s saying he didn’t do it, Carl. I guess it must have been you, then.”

  But when he raised his head, he looked confused and, I could have sworn, frightened. He looked at Slight and muttered, “That’s not funny. You shouldn’t ought to do that. It ain’t funny at all.”

  Slight spread his arms wide and pulled a look of wounded innocence. But that only made Carl throw his napkin down and get up and stalk out. I was startled to see that he looked truly upset.

  “Slight,” I chided him, “a joke’s a joke, but don’t you think maybe this was too soon after Cat’s death to be funny? In the final accounting, I don’t know that St. Peter will record this as your most sensitive moment …”

  I trailed off. He wasn’t listening to me. Slight had picked up one of the spurs and was rolling them with his fingertips, gazing at them with a pensive and sad expression. I looked away from him. Suddenly, not feeling very hungry anymore, I got up and quietly cleared the breakfast dishes from the table. On my second trip back into the dining room, to pick up the milk and sugar, I saw that Slight was gone, and that he’d taken the pair of silver spurs with him.

  Left alone, I used the solitude to wash the dishes and then to use the telephone. The stone house held on to the cool of the night; the natural light that filtered through the windows was pleasant to sit in, and there was just enough of it in the living room to enable me to use the phone without turning on a lamp. It being Sunday, I dialed Dwight Brady at his home number.

  “Hello, Jenny,” Dwight said in his flat, midwestern voice. “How are you getting along down there?”

  “All right. How’s Lilly Ann, Dwight?”

  After a moment’s hesitation he said, “Fine, as far as I know.”

  “That was you, wasn’t it, along with Alice and Margaret who came and got her yesterday?”

  “Well, yes, it was.”

  “Are they clients of yours now?”

  “I suppose you might say so. They requested my help in this small matter, since I was familiar with that area.”

  “How did you know where she was?”

  “You might say I deduced it.”

  “How—”

  “Did she go onto the ranch, Jenny?”

  “No.”

  “She is an impetuous young woman,” he said in tones of the strongest disapproval.

  “That is redundant, Dwight.”

  “What is?”

  “Young and impetuous.” Why did I get into these stupid conversations with him? This one was going nowhere. “I’m curious, Dwight, how did the three of you get from the Rock Creek Airport to the motel?”

  “Mr. Everett picked us up.”

  “And how did he know to do that?”

  “I called and requested it.”

  “I’m going to need a ride out of here myself if I’m going to make that flight in the morning.”

  “I’ll send the plane tonight if you like.”

  “No, make it early tomorrow. Really early, like five-thirty, all right?”

  “Fine.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Good-bye, Dwight.”

  “Good-bye.”

  That Dwight, I thought as I replaced the receiver, such a chatterbox, such a gossip. I was getting ready to redial, to reconfirm my airline reservations, when Slight called my name from the kitchen.

  “Jenny.”

  I started. From where I sat, he was just visible at the kitchen sink. I heard water running in a heavy, noisy stream.

  “Why don’t you call him back, Jenny? Get him to have that pilot come back for you this afternoon. I’ll drive you over to the runway anytime you say.”

  I eased myself out of the chair and walked toward him. I had come downstairs in my stocking feet to avoid having to cram my sore arches into the new cowboy boots again. Now I
noticed only small twinges of pain as I walked the bare boards of the floors.

  “Trying to get rid of me, Slight?” I said in the dining room. I moved a few steps closer, then I finally got a good look at him. What I saw caused me to run the remaining distance between us. “Oh, my God, Slight, what happened to you? Here, let me do that—”

  He was covered with blood.

  “I’m okay—”

  There was blood in his hair, on his face, covering the front of his shirt, his shirtsleeves, his blue jeans, even the tops of his boots. I felt ill and panicked at the very sight of him, but I grabbed the towel that he was holding and I started frantically wiping him off, looking for the wounds that had produced this appalling flood, this cataract of blood.

  “I’m not hurt, Jenny.”

  But when he stuck his hands under the water running from the tap, the flow turned red and soon the sink bubbled with blood as well as with water. With his wet, washed hands he began to unbutton his shirt. I dabbed at the blood on his head, still looking for wounds. I couldn’t believe that he could be covered with so much blood and not be mortally wounded somewhere.

  “We lost a calf. Had to pull her from her mama, and we got there too late. Calf was dead by the time we got her out, suffocated, I guess. Nice little heifer, too. And the mama lost so much blood, we’re probably going to lose her. Shit. I mean that, Jenny. Cowshit and blood, that’s all this goddamn business is some days. Let go of me, you’re going to ruin that pretty new shirt of yours.”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  I helped him pull his bloody shirt off, then I tossed it into the sink. The blood had soaked through the material, coating his skin beneath. I ran the dish towel under the water until it was good and wet, wrung it, then began to wipe the blood from his chest and shoulders. Slight worked at his boots, kicking at the heel of one with the toe of the other until he pried them off and stood in his stocking feet. He unclasped his belt buckle, unzipped his bloody jeans, took them off, and tossed them into the sink on top of his shirt. Meanwhile, I washed him down, rinsing the towel, wringing it, washing him down again, and every now and then taking a swipe at the horrid mess on the floor, as well. As the blood came off, I uncovered a red, swollen welt on the front of his left shoulder and another one at the edge of his jaw.

  “Did the cow kick you, Slight?”

  “What?”

  I touched the welts gently, but he winced anyway.

  “You’ve been struck.”

  “Yeah.” He broke away from me to plunge both of his hands under the water and then to splash his face. “She got me good a couple of times.”

  Standing close to him as I was, looking at his bare, bent back, I suddenly became acutely aware that he was stripped down to his underwear. Jockey shorts. Thick cotton socks. The back of his neck was deeply and permanently tanned, as were his hands and his face, but the rest of his hard, lean body was pale. The contrast might have been repulsive; the paler skin might have looked pasty on another man. But Slight’s natural complexion was a deeper color than mine would have been after a week in the sun, so the contrast wasn’t as great as it might have been on a lighter-skinned man, and it certainly wasn’t unattractive. The hair on his chest was curly and almost entirely dark brown, with a few gray hairs. There was only the slightest hint of age in the loosening of his skin under his upper arm muscles, around his waist, and under his jaw. His clothes didn’t hide an old man’s body, but one that looked nearly as young as my husband’s, even though I felt that Slight could be as much as twenty years older than Geof. I clenched my hands into fists to keep them from touching the ridge of his backbone where it emerged from the elastic of his shorts. But my hands felt as if they had a life of their own; they ached to run my fingernails lightly up that ridge, to massage the muscles bunched in those shoulders as he bent over the sink, to slide around that tight waist …

  He straightened and grabbed blindly for the towel I held. After I handed it to him, I opened my hands at my sides and spread and stretched my fingers, trying to release the tension in them.

  “How old are you, Slight?”

  He rubbed his face vigorously, and then his hands, before he said, with a glance at me, “Old enough to know better, and young enough not to care.”

  “Come on, really.”

  “I thought age was supposed to be irrelevant, Jenny.”

  “I suppose it is if you haven’t got much of it.”

  He smiled and draped the towel over the faucet.

  “How old are you, Jenny?”

  “Older than some, younger than others.”

  “Touché.” He looked me over. “Thanks. I’m sorry about your new clothes. Maybe you’d better hit the road before we’ve got you down to skivvies and socks, like me.”

  I looked down at myself and discovered that I was speckled with blood. When I looked up, I discovered that he was starting to peel off his socks. Oh, shit, were his shorts coming off next, right there in front of me?

  “I think I’ll go change clothes,” I said quickly.

  I turned heel and fled the kitchen, fully expecting to hear the sound of his laughter following me. When it didn’t, I had this very clear thought: What’s wrong? Was he simply upset about losing the calf, or was there more to it than that, and was he really trying to get rid of me?

  The phone rang as I climbed the stairs, but he let the machine pick it up.

  As I changed clothes in the spare bedroom, I chided myself for being paranoid, not to mention self-centered. I was in the way here. This was a working ranch, after all. The men couldn’t devote whole days at a time to giving personal tours to dudes from back east, even if the dude was an owner. It was time for me to leave, and yet I was reluctant to go for reasons having nothing to do with Slight: I wanted to see the light change over the prairie one more afternoon and evening, I wanted to lean out of my bedroom window to listen for a coyote howling under the moon. I wouldn’t mind a walk down by the stream, or even another horseback ride if my legs would agree to go with me.

  I suddenly stood still, loose sock dangling from my hand.

  “I’ll be damned,” I said out loud.

  I liked it here. Who’d have thought it?

  I finished changing my clothes, then I ran downstairs to tell Slight that I would be leaving, but not until the next day.

  But he wasn’t there. Gone again. Where he’d obtained fresh clothes without going upstairs, I couldn’t imagine, but he’d done it. He’d left me a note, however: “Jenny, would you feed the calf this afternoon? There’s a bottle already mixed in the fridge. Thanks.” I laid the note down and ran to the kitchen door and opened it, just in time to see him ride out of the barn on big, golden Buck. They took off at a fast trot, but by the time they hit the dirt road, they were galloping, as if both horse and man had nervous energy they needed to get out of their systems.

  I stepped onto the back porch to watch them go.

  Well. Now I could take that walk by the stream, although a run would be better for shaking loose the tension that burned in me. Then I’d come back and rustle up (Stop that, I thought when I heard myself) some lunch for anybody who happened to be around. Maybe by then my rear end wouldn’t object too strenuously to another ride on Molly. I smiled at the lone prairie and breathed in deeply of the cool, clean air of “my” ranch.

  21

  Neither of the men came back to the house for lunch, so I ate a bologna sandwich and a Coke by myself. Then I grabbed the huge plastic feeding bottle, which had the most enormous nipple I had ever seen, out of the fridge and headed for the barn to feed the orphaned bull calf. The liquid in the bottle looked white and foamy, like regular milk, but I guessed it was a formula of some kind, so I shook it as I walked. I was more nervous about this assignment than I ever was before a foundation board meeting, but I was looking forward to it, too. The little calf was so sweet. Maybe he wouldn’t kick me. Or bite me. Or pee on me.

  But before I reached the barn, I heard the sound of tires on gravel and tur
ned to see Sheriff Pat Taylor pulling up in a red Wagoneer.

  “Hi!” she called through her open window.

  I waved with my free hand and waited for her.

  She came striding up with both thumbs hooked into her gun belt.

  “That your official sheriffs car?” I inquired.

  “Nope.” She grinned. “I’ve got to run car pool today, carry some of the football team over to Newton for a game, and I don’t like to use the taxpayers’ money to do it. How you doin’? I had a visit from a couple of Kansas City cops yesterday, askin’ about you all.”

  She didn’t say “y’all,” she said “you all.”

  “I told ’em I’d never had any trouble with anybody out here,” she continued. “They seemed a mite disappointed to hear it. But I told them I’d get back to them about this shooting accident, if it turned out to be something else. Want to show me where it happened?”

  “I wish I could, but I’m embarrassed to tell you I have no idea where we were at the time. I’m still at the stage where all the pastures look alike.” I pointed to the corrals beside the barn. “That’s Carl Everett over there, he could tell you.”

  “Thanks, I’ll ask him.”

  She strode off, leaving me with the feeling that Hood County, Kansas, was in honest, if overworked, hands when it came to law enforcement.

  With the afternoon sun behind it, the stone barn cast an enormous shadow in my direction. Off to the side of it, Carl had stopped whatever he was doing with a few cattle and was watching the sheriffs approach. I waved halfheartedly, but he either didn’t see me or he ignored me. I walked up the graveled grade to the gaping mouth of the barn and peered into its dim, cool, vast interior. It seemed a monster craw into which hors d’oeuvres the size of Clydesdales and oxen teams might disappear forever. I felt dwarfed by it, not only in size, but in spirit, as well.

  A tangerine cat slipped in ahead of me.

  This barn was too big for mere mortals and our puny pets, I thought. The horse stalls were empty, except for Molly and for a big roan horse that must have been Carl’s. And the one that held the calf, of course. There were huge round bales of hay scattered about. Straw covered the floor like a loosely woven carpet of hemp. Spiderwebs glistened in the stray snatches of sunlight that filtered down through cracks in the wooden roof four stories up and through chinks in the stones of the walls. I heard a light, quick rustling, as of cat’s feet through straw, or maybe rat’s feet. One of the horses snuffled, but all else was silent as I walked in.