Shameless

by Tara Janzen

  “You bastard.” He couldn’t kill him. He couldn’t even hurt him in a way that would count, a way that would last. Bull had taken his blood that night. He couldn’t return the favor. “You friggin’ bastard.”

  He slammed into Bull again, stunning him before he turned and staggered away from the man, away from the whip and past, wishing he could just as easily walk away from the hate.

  Sarah had lost them, and saw nothing until she spotted Colt walking away from her father’s truck. She heard nothing except what her father cried out at the younger man’s back. The violence of the obscenity riveted her to a standstill, and was matched only by the violence of Colt’s reaction.

  He whirled with a closed hand, backhanding her father and creating a frightening connection of fist and jaw. Bull crumpled to a heap in a slow-motion collapse, his body curving away from the truck to land in the dirt.

  Sarah didn’t move. Her mind told her to, but her feet didn’t get the command. Her gaze went from her father to Colt. He was walking toward her, not looking back to see what damage he had done. He stopped a few feet away.

  “You better go check on him. I think I hurt him.” His voice was low and steady, and he met her eyes only once before walking on.

  She took a step toward her father, then turned quickly to watch Colt a moment longer. A groan forced her attention back to the parking lot.

  She knelt by Bull’s prone figure, checking him quickly and carefully for major trauma. She found none. He was breathing without too much trouble, and he was pushing himself to all fours, starting to bitch and moan.

  “Shut up, Bull,” she said. “I don’t think he hurt you near as badly as he scared you.”

  “He broke something in my face. I can feel it.” Each of Bull’s words came padded on both sides with a thick layer of cursing. It made it damn near impossible for Sarah to understand what he said, but when she did, she gave her own orders.

  “Lie back down and stay put.” She stood up and checked a couple of pickup beds until she found a horse blanket. She threw it over her father and admonished him one more time to stay put until she could get help. She met Guy Hill halfway back to the bar, and he told her they’d already called Doc Tanner.

  The next few hours were awful. Colt had thankfully disappeared—her father didn’t have nearly enough fight knocked out of him for Colt to have been anything but a hindrance—and everyone assumed she’d be the one taking care of her father, driving him out to Doc Tanner’s and all. Of course, she did it. There didn’t seem to be another option, other than letting him rot in the parking lot, which she’d considered more than once while listening to him gripe and swear himself a blue streak.

  Doc Tanner tallied up Bull’s injuries as two lost teeth and a hairline fracture to the jaw, then sent him home with two prescriptions. Sarah, of course, had to stop at the drugstore to fill them.

  By the time she got home, she was a wreck, but the jeep in her driveway and the light in her living room window was all she needed to feel better. She was going to tease him about being right: They should have stayed home.

  Maybe later she would ask him what had happened out in the parking lot. She planned on reassuring him that her father wasn’t hurt any worse than he had been after other bar fights. She wanted to check Colt’s hand, too, make sure he wasn’t hurt.

  Her good feeling didn’t last much beyond the opening of the door, though. Colt stood when she entered, dressed in his uniform, his hat in his hands, his bag packed and at his feet.

  Sarah knew what she was seeing, and there was nothing left inside for her to say, nothing left for her to do. She stood silent while he explained about leaving, about how he thought it was for the best, even about how he’d come back if he could—but she didn’t really hear him. Her heart was breaking too loudly, like a calving glacier, and all the inner sound and turmoil made it impossible to concentrate on his words.

  She made herself nod once or twice, giving the illusion of acceptance. That, yes, it was all so reasonable, so understandable. In truth, she didn’t understand one damn word he was saying.

  Her face hurt with the effort it took to keep her muscles in place. Her brow was furrowed in concentration—she couldn’t help that—but the rest of her face was a frozen, blank slate, and it hurt. She’d loved him with everything she had. There was nothing else she could do.

  The brass buttons on his double-breasted coat were very bright. She knew she would remember that. And she’d forgotten to ask him how he got his shoes so shiny.

  She allowed herself a small sigh for her missed opportunity; it was a release, a safety valve, for the misery welling up inside her.

  He reached for her on his way out the door, half a gesture, but she moved aside, shielding herself from his touch with a scant twelve inches of space.

  There was nothing else she could do.

  * * *

  Being a responsible person was such hell. “Ruby? What do you think?” Sarah asked, holding up a beaded sweater.

  The flame-haired beautician glanced up from Amanda’s dresser drawers. Her prettily plump face was lined with fifty years’ worth of Wyoming weather and hard work. She’d been a rancher’s wife before she became a beautician.

  “Oh yes, my. Peach was such a good color on her. Your dad bought that for her in Reno—Now, honey, don’t go—Oh, shoot.” She gave up as Sarah dropped the sweater in the church box. “You’re probably right. Colt won’t be wanting anything Bull bought her, no matter how expensive.”

  Ruby didn’t bother to hide her exasperation, and Sarah didn’t hide her grin, slight as it was. She’d promised Ruby she’d help, and not even the desertion of a nameless person could make her go back on her word. Though as far as she could tell, doing the right thing or doing the wrong thing didn’t make a hill of beans’ difference in how her life turned out. It was still empty.

  She’d started her period a week ago, and after breaking every damn thing in the Atlas knick knack aisle, and causing enough commotion that Al had come over from the garage to make sure she was okay . . . Well, after that, she’d made some decisions.

  “What I wouldn’t give to be forty pounds lighter,” Ruby murmured, holding up a pair of brand new white jeans.

  “Cathy Kaye’s oldest girl will look great in those. Why don’t you set them aside.”

  “Seems like we’re setting everything aside,” Ruby said, looking around at the separate piles and boxes of clothes filling the trailer’s main bedroom.

  “Amanda had a lot of nice things.”

  “She was a good woman, such a good friend.”

  Sarah heard the underlying sniffle and braced herself for another sad interlude. The afternoon had been full of them. She and Ruby were both miserable, and truth be known, Sarah was starting to agree with a nameless person. Nobody needed the closets, so why did they have to be out there at the trailer, wasting an otherwise bearable day?

  She turned back to the shoe boxes in the bottom of the closet, opening one after the other and almost automatically stacking them in one of the larger boxes destined for the church clothing bank. The last box felt light, and she suspected it held another pair of sandals. She opened it anyway—she didn’t want to be giving away sandals and find out somebody had received photographs or love letters—and was surprised to find the box stuffed with strips of cloth.

  Broad stripes of blue and black were jumbled together like somebody was making quilt pieces. She pulled the strips out and realized they were connected by a few odd seams and that the colors overlapped on the individual pieces. Curious, she spread the material on the bed and found cuffs and a collar. It was a shirt, a badly damaged, vaguely familiar shirt.

  She held it up. “Ruby? What’s this?”

  Ruby reached across the corner of the bed and fingered the material. “Looks like a rag, honey. Maybe she used it to polish her shoes.”

  There were a lot of brown stains on the fabric, mostly coloring the edges of the strips, but they weren’t stiff and greasy-feeling
like polish. The shirt had been laundered, and Sarah didn’t think anybody laundered their shoe-polish rags.

  She set the shirt aside and went back to work, but her gaze kept straying to the bed. After a moment, she leaned over and picked up the shirt again. The collar had almost been torn off, but the tag was intact. It was a man’s shirt, much too large for Amanda and much too stylish for her father. It must have been Colt’s.

  Satisfied at least as to why it seemed familiar, she put it back on the bed.

  She’d just finished packing Amanda’s blouses when Ruby spoke up.

  “Let me see that rag again, will you honey?”

  Sarah obliged by pushing the shirt toward Ruby. The older woman picked it up.

  “I do remember this,” she said, shaking her head and giving out a tsk tsk. “Amanda was so mad. She bought this shirt for Colt’s twentieth birthday. She’d spent more than she really had, but the boy wanted it, and you know how mothers are. Then the next thing you know, the shirt shows up in our Dumpster out behind the shop. That was when Colt left for his uncle’s out in California. You remember, Sarah. You were dating him that summer.”

  Sarah shifted on the floor, suddenly feeling uncomfortable. No wonder the shreds of material had looked so familiar. She remembered Colt’s twentieth birthday, and the shirt, and the whole damn summer that had followed. Those months after he’d left had been the worst time of her life, barring the present, and she didn’t want to drag it all out again now. She didn’t need or want ten-year-old memories of Colton Haines and his birthday shirt.

  “Colt just left,” Ruby continued, dropping the shirt on the bed. “You must remember that. Didn’t even say good-bye to his own mother.”

  Damn shirt, Sarah thought, staring at it. Colt had worn it practically every day for two solid weeks after his birthday.

  “. . . getting tangled up in barbed wire, and then after Amanda realized Colt wasn’t coming back, it didn’t seem so important. About the shirt, I mean.”

  “What?” Sarah asked, her head snapping up. “What did you say?”

  “Daniel, honey,” Ruby repeated. “Daniel Calhoun was the one who told Amanda the story about him and Colt getting drunk and then getting tangled up in the barbed wire. The shirt was such a mess when we found it, all torn up and bloody.”

  Sarah looked at the shirt again, and with a frightening swiftness put together an unimaginable sequence of events. Just as swiftly she dismissed it all as impossible, because the thoughts trying to form in her mind were impossible.

  “Funny, isn’t it?” Ruby rattled on. “What a mother will keep.”

  Chiding herself for her unease, Sarah leaned over the bed and picked up the shirt. Her father was a bully, not a sadist. The strips of material slid down her fingers, making them tremble. Colt’s blood had stained the frayed edges of the fabric. He’d been wearing the shirt the day they’d made love by the river. She was sure of it. He could have gotten drunk and tangled up in barbed wire, but she’d never seen barbed wire shred a shirt from top to bottom. No, the damage looked like it had been caused by something else.

  A sick feeling started in the pit of her stomach. Her father liked intimidation. He liked snapping his whip at stray cats, nervous chickens, and tin cans. But Colt had scars on his body, long marks crossing him front to back. Her father had hit her mother, sometimes more than once, especially when he was in a beating mood, or when a bar fight went bad. He didn’t like losing.

  Ruby kept talking, mentioning a present she’d bought for one of her boys one time, and how he hadn’t taken care of it, either.

  Sarah spread the shirt out, quickly, but taking care to lay every strip in place and to keep the back separate from the front. She knew what she was looking for; she remembered how tightly the shirt had fit him. She remembered the beautiful body of the boy she’d loved and of the man she would never stop loving. How his skin was California tan, silky and golden, except for the scars on his chest and back.

  When the shirt was arranged, she traced the slash marks with her fingers, seeing exactly which enemy had taken him by surprise and hurt him so badly, and why. Rage and disbelief built to unbearable degrees inside her as her hand slipped down the worn fabric, following her memories of Colt’s torso. It was impossible. No man would do that to another.

  She remembered then Colt’s second leaving, what she’d seen and heard in the parking lot of the Sagebrush. The hatred between the two men had been tangible, a living presence. And suddenly she knew it was true: Her father had whipped Colt that night so long ago, whipped him and left him for his friend to find, a friend who would lie for Colt and never tell. Not even the boy’s mother would know.

  A drop of moisture hit her hand, then another. She wiped at her cheeks, smearing the angry tears with her fist. She didn’t want to believe anything as horrible as the truth in her hands.

  “Honey, are you okay?” Ruby asked, but Sarah couldn’t answer.

  How did Bull live with himself, knowing what he’d done? And how could she live with him? Rock Creek was too small to pretend he didn’t exist. How would she get through the days without seeing him and wanting to hurt him as badly as he’d hurt Colt?

  She slowly drew the shirt toward her and buried her face in the bold stripes and frayed edges. How would she ever stop crying for Colton Haines?

  Twelve

  Colt walked across the front porch of Sarah’s house, going from window to window and looking inside. All he saw was a whole lot of empty space. There wasn’t any soft whiteness at her windows. The flowered curtains in her bedroom were gone. There was nothing left of her washer and dryer in the laundry room off the kitchen except a faucet and a 220 plug. There wasn’t any furniture.

  He knew what it meant. He’d had his first suspicion when he’d stopped at Atlas Drugs and seen the “Closed” sign out in the middle of the morning.

  The rest of the town was bustling. He’d walked through an employment line outside a building that had been empty earlier in the spring. People were lining up for jobs at the big feedlot coming to Rock Creek. The going joke was that the feedlot should find plenty of skilled labor, since there wasn’t a man or woman in the whole town who didn’t know how to shovel muck. Maybe someday, they said, they’d even get their own packing plant. Suddenly nothing was impossible. Word had it they were even going to elect the new mayor, Peter Barton, king of the whole damn county. So far, he’d done a fine job of developing Rock Creek’s potential.

  But Atlas Drugs was closed and Sarah’s house was empty. Colt ran a hand through his hair and stared out at the Great Plains. The land was parched to the horizon. The spring wildflowers had come and gone, leaving the prairie to grass and the rare blossom. After a good, wet start, the season had gone bone dry. Summer was moving over southeastern Wyoming with heat and sunlight so bright it hurt to look out at the country too long.

  He turned back to the house for one last glance, then stepped off the porch and headed for his truck. Ruby would know where she’d gone.

  * * *

  Sarah jammed her feet into her boots and grabbed her jacket with her free hand. Rodeos always started with the bareback-bronc riding, and if she didn’t get a move on, she would miss Hank’s ride. The Laramie River Rodeo had been his first big win, and he made a point of coming back at least once every year. He was expecting his good-luck charm to be stomping in the stands, cheering him on. The man was in the money, ranked seventh in the world and heading for the jackpot in Las Vegas, the National Finals, with prize money over two million dollars and growing every year.

  She checked her purse to make sure she had money to eat. That was city life; a person had to be prepared. In Rock Creek she had run a tab at the cafe. Karla had always known she was good for it. Or most often, she would take money out of her own till and put in an IOU. There had been days when all she’d had in the drawer were her own IOUs.

  Now she got a paycheck, a real paycheck, and she liked it. Working as a pharmacist for a grocery store chain had a lot of benefits
, like health insurance, paid vacations, sick days, business days, personal days. The list was endless in comparison to her years as one of the struggling self-employed. But the fast-food hamburger stands in Laramie didn’t take IOU’s, and neither did the concession out at the rodeo arena.

  She had twenty dollars, plenty of money to buy herself a hamburger and Hank a beer, if he hung around long enough to drink one. The higher he’d gone in the standings, the more serious he’d become. Last year’s world champion bareback rider was only four hundred dollars ahead of him. In professional rodeo, the rankings all came down to money, and the top fifteen money winners in each event went to the National Finals in December.

  Hank was determined to get there. Some weekends he barely got off one bronc before he was heading down the road to get on another. He’d had eight years of being wild, and at twenty-six he’d decided it wasn’t too late to change, to bear down and claim a place for himself in the record books. The cowboy had a lot of try, and Sarah was pulling for him.

  She got almost to the door, when she remembered her earrings. With a groan of pure frustration, she ran back to her bedroom to get her “good luck” earrings. Hank had given them to her as a housewarming present when she’d first moved to Laramie at the end of May. He hadn’t had time to deliver them personally, so he’d mailed them. She wanted to show her appreciation by wearing them, and also to share their luck.

  Juggling her purse and her jacket, she held the little gold bears to her ears and tried to get the posts in. They weren’t teddy bears, but full-grown grizzly bears, done by a goldsmith up in South Dakota, according to Hank’s note. They were beautiful, fourteen karat, and made her feel special.

  When her doorbell rang, she couldn’t believe her luck, or her lack of it. Whoever it was could talk to her on her way to her car. She was out of time.