Cowboys Don't Quit

by Anne McAllister

  But everything he did seemed in slow motion. He felt numb. He caught her horse and even debated briefly about whether he ought to ride down with her. He decided against it.

  He wanted it over, didn't he?

  He got the horse saddled and bridled, then led it back to the cabin. Jill was waiting on the porch.

  She had the clothes she'd brought packed in her saddlebags. He took them from her and slung them over the back of the horse and tied them on. Then he handed her the reins.

  They faced each other. The wind lifted her hair, trailing strands across her cheek. Unconsciously she tucked them back behind her ear. Overhead Luke could hear a jay scolding. He could hear his own breath whistling lightly between barely parted lips.

  He started to move them, to force "goodbye" past them with all the indifference he could manage.

  But before he could, she took a step toward him. She lifted her hand and brushed light fingers over his battered forehead, then let them linger for just a moment on his cheek.

  He held himself rigid. Then she leaned forward. Her lips brushed a fleeting kiss across his and just as quickly were gone again.

  But not so quickly that his fists didn't clench at his sides. Not so quickly that he didn't have all he could do not to reach for her, not to grab her and hang on, not to take the kiss he really wanted.

  He held himself tightly in check, stiff as a fence post, not even breathing, as she gave him one last, wistful smile. Then she turned and swung up into the saddle.

  "Goodbye, Luke," she whispered.

  And was it only the breeze or did he hear the whispered words I love you, as she rode away?

  He didn't stay to watch her leave.

  As she rode off, he turned and strode toward the shed. He moved quickly, grabbing his own saddle and tack, then whistling for his horses. He saddled the buckskin, his movements swift and jerky.

  The horse whinnied and shifted, aware of Luke's agitation, unaware of what was causing it, yet becoming agitated himself as Luke swung into the saddle and kicked him into a trot up the mountainside.

  He was a snuffy horse, big and strong and hard to control. Exactly the challenge Luke needed now. He would have liked to have galloped flat out. Too bad he had more sense. Otherwise he could have broken his fool neck and been done with all the pain. But like as not he'd have broken the horse's, too, so he didn't. He just rode. And rode. And rode.

  He didn't let himself think about Jill riding down the mountain. He didn't let himself imagine her saying goodbye to Jimmy and Annette. He didn't envision her giving Jimmy, Jr. a bear hug and dropping a gentle kiss on baby Julie's head. He turned his mind away from the thought of her getting into her little red rental car and driving out onto the highway, heading for the airport, heading for the plane that would take her to Denver and then to Los Angeles.

  Or he tried to stop thinking about her, anyway.

  The ground was wet from all the rain. The branches that slapped him as he rode showered him again and again. And when he could ride no longer, he stopped by the trees where he and Keith had sat that autumn day almost two years ago.

  He thought about things he wished he could change. He thought about Keith. He thought about Jill. He scrubbed at his eyes with the back of his hand. Damn branches, shaking water down that way.

  His horse shifted beneath him. He patted her neck. "Let's go then," he said, and tugged his hat down and rode west, down the mountain, into one of God's most spectacular sunsets.

  If there was an irony to the way his life was turning out, he wasn't in the mood to appreciate it.

  He'd lived in the cabin by himself for more than a year. It had never really bothered him before.

  It was lonely now. He told himself that was nonsense. Mere days of Jill's presence could hardly have made that much difference.

  But when he lit the lamp, the first sight that met his eyes was the bed where they'd made love. The sleeping bag was still rumpled. On the pillow, close together, were the depressions where two heads had lain. Muttering under his breath, Luke plumped the pillow and shook out the sleeping bag, then spread it out again.

  There. Now it was as if she'd never been here.

  Except there was a pile of paper sitting on the table.

  He frowned. What the...?

  He crossed the room and picked it up, and knew even as he did so exactly what he would find.

  Luke's fingers clenched around the manuscript, then he dropped it and turned away. He didn't want to read it, damn it. She knew that.

  So why had she...?

  He muttered an expletive under his breath and banged back outside to sit on the steps. But there was no relief. It was there, taunting him, beckoning to him. He swatted a deerfly, then another. Slapping and muttering more, he banged back inside again.

  And saw the manuscript.

  He wasn't going to read it. He wasn't! His eyes hurt. His face was still swollen. Even if he wanted to—which he didn't—he was in no shape to read.

  So he ignored it. He picked up the rope he'd been braiding before Jill had invaded his life. It seemed like aeons ago. He needed to get back to it, needed to get his bearings. He dropped down on the bed, tugged off his boots, stretched out, leaned against the wall and started to work once more on the rope.

  But he could see the manuscript out of the corner of his eye even when he concentrated on the rope.

  He looked away.

  What had Jill used of what he'd given her? he wondered. Which, if any, of his stories had she told? What did she say about his friendship with Keith? What, if anything, had she said about what had existed between the three of them?

  Damn it, nothing had existed.

  She had said that, hadn't she?

  He turned and looked at the manuscript, then turned away again and tried to concentrate on the rope. Usually he could braid automatically. Tonight he got knots. He cursed, started again, turned his head and looked at the manuscript once more.

  Was Keith there between those pages? The Keith he remembered?

  Was the Keith he remembered the same man that she knew?

  "Aw, hell." He tossed the rope aside and stood up, got the manuscript and sat down with it on the bunk.

  He shut his eyes. His fists, resting atop the paper, tightened briefly. Then he drew a breath, opened his eyes and moved his hands away.

  He started to read.

  He didn't really know what he expected. Something dry and two-dimensional, perhaps. Something sad and schmaltzy, maybe. Certainly a mere facsimile of the vital, vibrant man Keith Mallory had been.

  It wasn't what he got. What he got was the Keith he knew and loved—his best friend of all time—and another Keith—many other Keiths—that he had never known at all.

  From the start Luke and Keith had taken each other at face value. They had never poked and probed into each other's past. Keith had known of Luke's brothers. He had known Luke's parents were dead.

  But Luke had never entertained him with stories of his growing-up years. He had never confessed the fear and pain he'd felt when his mother had died, when he was only five. He had never admitted the desperation, the panic he'd felt at sixteen when his father had been killed in a riding accident. He'd never talked about his subsequent scrapes and brushes with "authority," nor about the times his older brother had had to bail him out. He had certainly never told Keith about feeling responsible for his brother's marriage going wrong. What was past was past. He didn't talk about it.

  And Keith had never really talked about his past, either.

  So Luke had never known about Keith's parents. Keith had never mentioned them. Not to him, anyway.

  But they were here because Jill knew about them. Probably, Luke realized, Keith hadn't opened up to her, either. Not at first. But Jill had persisted. She'd asked. She'd cared. Luke could see that right away. This was no dry, objective study. This was a labor of love.

  And what she hadn't learned from Keith, she'd learned after his death, by talking to those who'd known h
im as a child. She couldn't ask his mother, because she'd died when Keith was twenty-two.

  But she had found his father, a hard-edged Los Angeles businessman with little time for anyone, a man who was in fact reluctant to admit that film idol Keith Mallory was his son.

  "He lived a frivolous life," Ronald Mallory had told Jill in the brief interview he'd granted her.

  But from the way Jill showed Keith—and the way Luke remembered him—his life was anything but frivolous. It was a celebration.

  But it was a celebration, Luke discovered, that had grown out of confronting pain and moving beyond it. As he read of Keith's relationship with his parents, he understood him far better than he had when he was living with him day by day.

  He met Keith the child, bright, yet shy, and almost pathetically eager to please. He saw Keith the only son, seeking his father's approval desperately, yet willing to fight that father whenever he felt his mother was threatened.

  And threatened she'd apparently been—though that was something else Keith had never told Luke.

  Luke was shaken by what he read. The Keith he'd known had seemed golden, blessed, the possessor of talent, looks, brains and charm. He had trouble imagining at first a Keith for whom things had sometimes been uncertain, bleak and even frightening.

  But the more he read, the more it made sense. It clarified Keith's sometimes-desperate competitiveness. It made his sheer exuberance and childlike delight at simple joys much more understandable. It made his gentleness with women and children far clearer.

  It made Luke pause for thought.

  He thought he'd made pretty vast changes in his life with his move from rural Colorado to fast-lane L.A., but he saw that geography and lifestyle weren't the only sorts of changes a man could make.

  He read on. He met Keith the brother. Another revelation. He'd never even known Keith had sisters. He had. Two of them, both younger.

  Jill had found them. Maybe she'd even met them before Keith's death. Maybe Keith had shared them with her. In any case, both had related stories that showed Keith to be equally protective of them.

  In subsequent chapters Luke met other Keiths—the schoolboy, the swimmer, the striver. Mischievous and competitive. Dogged and determined, yet always ready for a laugh. The coach's dream, the athlete who was always ready to go one better, to fight just a little harder, to take on one more challenge. These were Keiths he knew, and yet they, too, were clearer now.

  And then there was the Keith who acted, the Keith who became all things in one man, who did whatever the script demanded. Luke knew him almost as well as he knew himself. But Jill had known him better. Better, probably, then Keith even knew himself.

  Luke found the stories he'd told Jill. The catacombs story, the skateboard story, the ones that showed Keith off the set to be as zany and likable and charming as the scripts made him out to be in the roles he played.

  They were exactly as he had told them—and yet, reading them, seeing them happening in his mind's eye as they had once happened in reality, Luke understood them better, too. They made him smile. They made his throat tighten and his eyes sting. He blinked a few times, then read on.

  He met the Keith Jill knew.

  The Keith he'd never known, for all that they had been best friends.

  Jill's Keith was the man who'd stood behind the man the public met, the man who'd laughed and joked and roughnecked with Luke. This was the Keith who had lived with pain and uncertainty and fear. This was the Keith who knew his limitations all too well. Or feared he did.

  He was afraid of marriage, Jill wrote. Luke stared at the words, astonished. He'd never heard Keith claim any such thing. But even as he read the words and doubted them, he sensed that they were true.

  He remembered wondering over the almost two years Jill and Keith were an item why they didn't get married. He even remembered asking once or twice. Jokingly, of course. Not seriously. Certainly not as if he cared.

  Both times Keith had brushed him off, had said something vague about doubting if Jill would have him, which at the time Luke had thought was the biggest crock in the world. But now, knowing what he knew, he supposed maybe Keith had meant what he'd said.

  Certainly that was what he'd told Jill. His own parents' marriage had been so bad, he'd been terrified at the thought of trying it himself.

  "You should have children," Jill wrote that she'd told him once when they were walking along the beach and a couple of little boys had nagged him into building a sand castle with them. He'd done it willingly, eagerly. "Don't you want children?" she had asked him.

  Keith had said that he did. "A lot. I love kids," he'd told her. "They have such promise."

  Luke could remember him saying that, too.

  "I'd like to have children, too," Jill had told Keith wistfully. "With you," she'd added, in case he didn't get it.

  "You mean marry me?" Keith had asked her. There had been what seemed an eternal pause, a pause long enough for Jill to wish she'd never made any hints at all, to wish that she were fifty feet underground or fifty states away, to regret her presumption a thousand times over.

  And then he'd asked, "What if I'm like my old man?"

  His hesitation hadn't had anything to do with her at all. She'd been amazed.

  "You're not," she'd told him. But he'd looked doubtful. And finally she'd said, "I don't believe you are. Not for a minute." Then she'd looked him straight in the eyes and said, "I'm willing to risk it. I'm willing to do whatever it takes. Are you?"

  And because he was Keith, and because he loved her, he'd said yes. He took the risk. He made up his mind to try.

  That was the best part of Keith, Jill wrote at the very end of her book. He was never afraid to put his hopes— his future—on the line.

  Keith Mallory died far too young. He died in an accident that needn't have happened, but he died in circumstances that he himself chose. He made his life, and himself, what he wanted them to be. He always tried to be the best Keith Mallory he could be. Ultimately, his legacy to us is not a list of films he made or the parts he played. His legacy is his life, the example he gave to those of us privileged to know him.

  That night Luke had the dream again. They were bodysurfing, he and Keith. Jill was standing on the pier, watching, waving, smiling, pointing out the wave of the day. They caught it, the two of them. It swept them high and fast, then flung them over. They crashed, struggled, tangled, parted, reached. Their fingers touched just for a moment. An instant, no more.

  It was the same, except the end. This time Keith made it to shore.

  It was Luke who slipped away....

  "What happened to your face?"

  Luke sat bolt upright, stunned and shaking. He stared around wildly, trying to get his bearings, still drowning, floundering up to find Paco standing at the end of his bunk.

  The boy was looking at him, concerned. "Somebody hit your face? That why you were yelling?"

  Luke lifted a hand and touched his face gently, wincing. He scowled. "Wasn't yelling," he muttered. He eyed Paco narrowly through the swelling. "What the hell are you doing here?"

  "Was so yelling," Paco said stoutly. "Thought somebody was killin' you. It's why I came in. Jill sent me," he added.

  Luke's head snapped up. "What?"

  Paco shrugged narrow shoulders. "She said you needed help. She said to come."

  "Well, you can just damn well go home again!" Luke hauled himself to his feet. The manuscript, which had been lying on his lap, cascaded to the floor, scattering papers all over. "Damn."

  "What's that?" Paco said, bending to start picking all of it up.

  "Jill's book."

  The boy's eyes widened. "The one about Keith? Can I read it?"

  "I don't know, can you?" Luke started to duck down to help Paco pick up papers, but his head hurt when he bent over. He straightened up again, grimacing.

  Paco didn't notice. "I can try," he said eagerly as he straightened the pages. "Will you help me with the words I don't know?"

&
nbsp; "No." Luke turned away, raking a hand through his hair, then stopped and sighed. "Oh, hell, I guess."

  Paco beamed. "Thanks. I'll finish picking this up while you make coffee. Then we can get to work. An' tonight I can read."

  "I don't need—" Any help, Luke started to say, but he didn't finish, because the fact of the matter was, he did. Jill, damn her, was right. She knew him, like she'd known Keith, even better than he knew himself.

  Until the swelling in his face went down, until he could see better, he did need someone. Even someone as little as Paco. Well, fine. He'd agree. As long as it wasn't her.

  "Yeah, awright. Just lemme get some coffee and we'll go."

  He turned his back on the boy and the manuscript, grabbing the pot and heading out the door. When he got back, having fetched the water and dunked his head in the creek, Paco was reading the book. He didn't even look up.

  Luke made the coffee, then changed his shirt, dragged a comb through his hair and sort of made up his bunk. By the time he finished, the coffee was ready. He poured himself a mug, then glanced at Paco, still reading.

  "Want some?" he asked.

  Paco didn't even look up. Obviously Jill had captured another reader. Luke pulled a wry face and took a long, scalding swallow from the mug.

  "She's gone then?" he asked, without even realizing he was going to.

  "Huh?" Paco looked up as if he were coming back from a long way away, then realized what Luke was asking him. "Oh, Jill? Yeah, she left last night."

  That surprised him. She'd only left him last night. "Planes go out that late now?"

  Paco shook his head. "She drove to Albuquerque." He said this last as if it ought to have been obvious and bent his head over the book once more.

  Luke supposed it was if he gave it any thought. She could hardly want to hang around. Hell, he couldn't blame her. He finished off his coffee and clanked the mug down into the dishpan. "Come on. Let's get going."

  "Can't I just finish the first—"

  "Later." And Luke strode out the door and clumped down the steps without looking back. Behind him he could hear Paco scrambling to catch up.