by Lisa Preston
See, the measuring thing is lost on Guy. He just doesn’t get it and sort of wings everything like he’s throwing spices into a soup pot. His fancy new tape measure was going to end up being a paperweight, I bet.
“You left it in the kitchen,” I said.
He headed in, happily muttering about how I’d read his mind.
When he came back outside, he was packing the measuring tape plus a notepad and said, “Oh, you had a pile of calls earlier. Owen Weatherby called twice but didn’t leave a message or phone number, just said to tell you he’d called. He’s one of your clients, right?”
“Kind of.” My nod got chased off by a frown as my right hand found the base of my ponytail. I took to twisting it hard enough to make a stick of hair. Weatherby, Weatherby, I pondered.
A sick feeling iced my skull as I remembered a forgotten chore. If Owen Weatherby had been testing me, I’d failed.
Chapter 16
OH, GUY WAS FULL OF MESSAGES. A regular secretary.
“A man called and asked for you but he hung up when I said you were out. And someone called a few times but hung up when the voice mail picked up. Why do people do that? If they wait long enough for the machine to come on, then why not leave a message? Also, a Mr. Merrick wants to reschedule his next shoeing because his wife’s got a doctor’s appointment that day. And someone named Linda Cless called and said one of her horses threw a shoe. She said you’d know which hoof and, yes, she found the shoe.”
That youngster of Linda’s has some kind of shoe bulimia thing going on, hurfing up his front right shoe a couple weeks after I put it on. Bobby’s full of vinegar and every time he gets to getting rowdy, there’s a good chance Linda will be out in her pasture looking for a front shoe and I’ll be squeezing her into my schedule to tack it back on him. We joke about screwing them to him or else fixing the problem with a two-by-four applied between his ears. But really, even though I lose time on that account, her big silly Bobby-horse makes me smile. He’s just a happy, playful boy and he will grow up.
No, I don’t charge for putting a thrown shoe back on and yeah, I know lots of shoers do. I’m not trying to steal business from other shoers, no matter what Dixon Talbot mouths around town. It’s just that when I was a little kid living with my daddy and our shoer came out for a thrown shoe, he never charged for the favor, so I grew up thinking that’s the way things ought to be: thrown shoes get tacked back on for free.
After rescheduling with Merrick and finding a time to squeeze in Linda’s youngster, I flipped to the back of my appointment book to get Weatherby’s number. I thought about him calling but only leaving his name, like I was supposed to know the message.
Damn. Oops, and darn it.
Before returning Weatherby’s call, I checked Ol’ Blue’s glove box, more upset with myself by the minute. No reason why the bute wouldn’t still be waiting there, but I sweated at the thought that I’d lost Weatherby’s drugs.
Turns out, I hadn’t and I was blamed glad the baggie of white tablets and syringes of paste was still there.
The detective’s questions about drugs came back to me.
Yep, Suit Fellow had definitely said something about money and drugs.
Did horse drugs count? Phenylbutazone, common bute as paste in syringes or tablets or white powder, is what us horse people use for our critters’ pain. Maybe vets get it where it can be injected in veins or muscles, but it’s basically our horse aspirin. And I was holding some for Owen Weatherby that I’d been sent to carry over to Felix Schram.
If Weatherby or Schram had been considering using me as a regular shoer, they’d no doubt now be figuring I wasn’t responsible. I wanted to run Ol’ Blue over to Schram’s right away and give him the bute Weatherby’d promised to deliver through me.
I wanted to have done it days ago, when I was supposed to have done it.
What I didn’t want was what I had to do, suck it up and get Weatherby on the phone.
It wasn’t a good call.
“It’s Rainy. I’m realizing I forgot to give that bute to Felix Schram for you. Do you want I should do that right now?”
“Nah. Bring it back to me.” Weatherby’s phone voice was slow.
My throat was tight as I yessirred him.
Then he told me, “Can you come by my place now? Everyone’s here.”
That sounded like one of Weatherby’s roping, tale-telling, Friday night potlucks. I’d never been invited and didn’t exactly feel I was welcomed into his inner fold now. More like, I’d been summoned to a public dressing down and would have to try to be a good sport. My stomach made knots, while my mind wondered on what the conversation between Schram and Weatherby had been like and if they truly got to bad-mouthing me.
Pretty likely, I thought.
Did Schram let on he’d been grabby and I’d prepared to carve him up?
Pretty unlikely.
Did Weatherby and Schram talk about the quality of my shoeing, mentioned I’d been fast and good, or just that I forgot to give Schram the bute? Twirling my ponytail, I was bugged by the idea that I’d done an awful lot of forgetting, which is truly ironic as there’s some stuff I’d love to forget but can’t.
I’d likely blown my chances for Weatherby and Schram to employ me again. Probably other shoers rope and ride with those guys anyhoo. Dixon Talbot might and he wouldn’t be best pleased to see me at the Rocking B outfit with my shoeing rig.
The thought of Talbot gave me pause. Lately, the business cards I put at the feed co-op, hardware store, and grocery store bulletin boards where everyone puts up business cards and notices for lawn service and litters of pups and the like . . . well, my cards are disappearing. And I’m not getting as many calls from new clients as all those missing cards would seem to suggest.
Probably someone takes my cards and files them in the garbage.
Who that someone might be, well, I had an idea. Only makes sense that it’s a shoer who doesn’t want to see me getting any more business. For what shouldn’t have been the first time, I wondered who’d shod for the Harpers before I came to town.
* * *
“We-elll, what’re ya doin’?” Guy has this goofy Texas drawl that’s more for show and he only breaks it out when he thinks he’s being charming. Sometimes it’s a thing to smile at and sometimes it gets under my skin no end.
It’s far more likely to dig me like a chigger when I have to hustle.
“Making chili for this thing at Weatherby’s right away.” My stash of supermarket brand cans of bean bombs rolled on the counter, a couple going sideways.
Guy caught one before it hit the floor and wrinkled his nose, obviously unimpressed with the quality of my offering for the potluck. “You know, Rainy,” Guy said, “you can ask for help.”
Mercy’s sake, no I can’t. Guy shouldn’t need this explained. I’ve been under his roof coming a year now, didn’t he have me the least little bit figured?
“Well, fine.” Guy got out his super fancy Euro can opener, set it right on the counter next to my cans of chili, and left the kitchen.
He acts like I can’t even make a bowl of Cap’n Crunch, but it’s not true. Sometimes I pour Apple Jacks instead, for a little variety. And even if I do spill the milk now and then, the point is, I can make my way around a kitchen all right, maybe not like Guy but to suit my purposes. Besides, let him try to shoe a horse and then just wait for a vet and ambulance to be needed.
Even if I’m not in danger of winning a cooking contest, I can run a hand-operated can opener as well as the next person. I cranked six cans open and found a big plastic bowl to dump it all into, then checked the directions. If it’s two minutes for one can, would it take twelve minutes for a half dozen? I twisted my hair around, considering, then settled on eight minutes of microwaving on high for starters.
While that was in the works, I planned how to deal with Weatherby when I saw him, trying to imagine the right amount of respect without being too whipped about forgetting to give Schram the bute. I wi
shed again that Weatherby’d never asked me to carry it in the first place. I’m no one’s errand girl.
The beans started bursting before the microwave timer dinged.
It looked like a quick little old murder had happened in the microwave. No one should have to see this kind of gore, bean bits everywhere, the sides and top of the little plastic oven all red.
Guy came in looking a smidge alarmed and actually spooked when he followed my stare for a look-see in the microwave.
“I’ll clean it up,” I said. Of course, I’d clean up my own mess. I just didn’t itch to hear Guy go on about how I’d made a mess of things.
I know I’ve made messes. I know.
He took a deep breath, but no sad sigh came out. Instead, Guy said, “I have some beans ready to go, actually, for a cassoulet I was going to try.”
“Huh? This is chili, not a casserole.”
Then he did sigh, a painful-sounding sad blow of air. “Cassoulet. I was going to do a non-traditional cassoulet, red beans instead of white. It normally takes quite a bit of lead time to do beans in a dish like chili, but I have hydrated beans in the fridge and I have browned stew meat because I was going to make—”
“Something fancy?” I didn’t want to hear his three-dollar name for whatever concoction he’d planned. Guy suffered my insult in silence, so I became the width of a size 5 nail nicer and asked, “Wouldn’t chili be a little lowbrow for you?”
“I would be happy to make you a wonderful batch to take to your . . . evening engagement. I won’t even sweat the presentation.”
We’ve gone around a few times on what he calls presentation, which means adding bits of weeds on the side and dripping sauces in lines and zigzags over the plate or bowl. He says presentation makes the meal. I say a fork does.
“Wonderful? It doesn’t have to be wonderful.” I waved my hands. How could I make him see it was just a bunch of ropers getting together and special food was lost on them?
“It will have chocolate in it.” Guy sounded smug. He knows I love chocolate. Love it and have myself on a rationing program.
“Chocolate, no. That’s just too high-bred. I don’t want to stand out with some fancy pants miss of a dish when all anyone wants is a mouthful of beans and beef.”
He waved me away. “Just trust me.”
* * *
The Rocking B was packed, a couple dozen rigs, most visitors ready or saddling up for roping, bugs flicking by the big arena lights. The outfit used to be owned by Weatherby’s folks and some partner, but I guess the other man sold out years ago and Owen and his family have put everything they do into breeding cowhorses ever since. Mostly ropers, some cutters. His stud has covered a lot of mares, but Weatherby’s not been greedy about it, hadn’t overbred. Doc is a real built horse, solid and all that without throwing problem babies and he’s made a real good reputation for the Rocking B.
The ranch had a regular little old hootenanny going on, set to last late. Folks from near everywhere were standing around jaw jacking, some mounted up and swinging loops, plenty of wives and kids there, too. Across the lawn, a boom box blared a ballad about trucks and dogs and whiskey. Several couples were shaking their legs.
Not wanting the bute tablets to turn to powder in my pocket, I left the baggie in Ol’ Blue’s glovebox for now and went up to the tables of food with Guy’s chili crock.
“There’s beer here. Whiskey, too,” one good old boy said between swigs on a brown bottle as he leaned toward me.
What an offer. And so beautifully presented. Yeah, he was quite the ladies’ man.
“I don’t partake.” I turned away only to run smack into another skinny guy in jeans and snap front shirt, his boot heels cowboy cut.
“How about it, Miss?” The cowpoke with a well-plastered grin looked set to dance. “Do you only swing with the one who brung ya?”
“I brung my own self,” I told him and turned away before he could get to thinking that my being alone meant I was up for grabs. Thoughts of Guy’s surprised—maybe hurt—expression when I headed out here without him rose. I pushed the memory away.
Past the long table of grub were the ice chests of beer and soda. I cracked open a can of diet pop. Since my other hand needed something to do, I got a paper plate, blended into the line that formed up, and got a couple biscuits with gravy.
When did food, real honest food like country gravy, get so bad? Worse than used spit, this was. And the biscuits? These things were like bran muffins without the pesky flavor.
If I didn’t like it, then this food was bad. Might have killed Guy. But everyone was going at the chow like a bunch of, well, a bunch of scrawny cowboys and pudgy starved people. A lot of those belt buckles were tipped over from the bulge bearing down. Either that or they were thin enough to live in southern California without being an eyesore. Still, I liked these folk. Cattlemen are a good kind of people to bide time with.
But I was antsy, on account of the reason I was there.
Weatherby strolled over just as the announcer at the ring called ten minutes to the first steer going in the chute. Someone at the far end of the tables started going on about how good some pot of chili was and someone else scurried up to the boss and said his heeler just half tore off a front shoe.
“Dale will fix it,” Weatherby said, then turned away to spit tobacco juice.
When I get referred to by my last name, am I one of them? I was trying to decide if he was giving me an order or paying me a compliment.
Turns out, I was the only shoer there. Anyways, the cowpoke, Andy Somebody-or-other, just looked at Weatherby, wanting his horse’s messed up shoe on so that he could rope. Andy was lanky and agitated and didn’t believe what his host was saying.
“You’re really a shoer?” he asked me with eyebrows hauled up to his hatband.
“Yep.” I headed for my truck, asking where the horse was, so I could get positioned to work, and was soon down to business getting his horse’s shoe back on. Things went quick and uncomplicated until the stinker pulled hard and I went to the ground hanging onto him.
I have a rule about horses pulling. They shouldn’t. And I didn’t want this gelding to win the foot from me. So I took a good dusting, then got his foot back on my stand and finished. If Andy was appreciative, he forgot to say, what and all with this apparently being his first time watching a sheila shoer.
“You a lesbo?”
Hard to know what to say to someone who’s so beneath-bullshot stupid. In the end, I came up with, “You ever been wrong before or is this your first time?”
He twisted away a bit and slanted his hips as he shifted his weight. I figured he was trying to hide some wood. But what is it with guys and lesbians? He was getting a stiffie just thinking about girls going at it. For mercy’s sake, he had trouble settling into the saddle as his partner—not a wink-wink type partner, but the header to his heeling—called that they were next up. I’d fixed his horse just in time.
Emergency shoeing done, I went and found Weatherby again for the other repair.
He didn’t make me bring up the waiting subject, just said for me to put the bute in his trailer. So I set the baggie inside the trailer’s tack room where Weatherby couldn’t miss it and went back to watch the roping.
The spectators were talking about all things, the way it happens when a bunch of cowboys and cowmen get together. There was the muttering about the newspapers scaring the public about mad cow disease. We all know it’s not in the muscle or milk anyways, so let’s calm down, huh? The upshot of the media hysteria in the cattle-raising counties of Oregon—Butte, Baker, Douglas, Grant, and Union—is that it’s led to mad cowboy disease.
When they’d chewed up that subject, they gossiped about who’d been up to Hermiston lately to buy horses and who was going to whip who at roping tonight. And someone with careful English, his hat’s retainer string making a slash across his neck, mentioned that really good chili again.
“Don’t be farting in the truck on the way home,” a
man I knew from somewhere said. He grinned at me. Oh, yeah, Patsy-Lynn’s barn-help, Ted, who got kind of creepy and weird as I was leaving the funeral. I turned away, then noticed that cowpoke Andy doing the same. I turned back and studied Ted and the smaller man with the careful language and manners and hat retainer string making a black line across his throat who’d mentioned the chili. Manuel Smith? Ted looked like he’d let something slip. Andy didn’t like them, shot them dark looks and kept his distance. Some of the other ropers ignored it all. Trying to figure out what I’d missed, I realized the Smith fellow was Ted’s . . . boyfriend. I thought about lies told, someone saying he’d been at the Cascade Kitchen when Guy or someone else at the diner said it wasn’t true. And I knew Ted had been with Patsy-Lynn when I left the Flying Cross.
A loud whoop from the arena drew everyone’s attention that way and we scattered to watch. The team up had just nailed a steer in double-quick time, were going to win the night’s jackpot unless a roping miracle happened. Harper Junior racked a boot on the nearest panel of the arena fence and griped about the live-foal guarantee coming back to bite him on a few breedings last year. I guess they’d hoped to push Spartacus pretty hard as a super stud. Weatherby cleared his throat hard at that and stepped away. My jaw twisted as I considered the two men, their two studs. Weatherby’s stallion had never had fertility problems, but Spartacus was apparently having trouble delivering the goods in the baby-making department. It’s easy to see why people given to muscular stallions would have been sold on Patsy-Lynn’s baby. Her husband’s baby, Junior, looked too sun-blond and tan for Oregon. I spend about as much time outdoors as can be spent, but I don’t get that much sunshine.
Junior grinned when that Andy character told some folks I was a horseshoer.
“She’s our shoer,” Junior said good and loud, nodding at me. “Flying Cross.”
I loved the endorsement, loved it. Now there was a guy who had no heartache with the idea of a woman shoer. Good for him.
Weatherby’s dog was called to cut and bring up another steer. I moved over to watch the boy work. Everyone knows about this dog. Story is Weatherby traded acres and acres of pasture for him, got him from the neighbor who raises sheep and sheepdogs.
