She thinks it an unpleasant thing for him to have said. She’s spent so much of her life trying to unknow that very thing.
The old woman has two fat, ancient horses in her two-and-a-half-acre backyard. One of the reasons Gil took this job, one of the reasons they moved here, was in the hope that Fletch could come to stay. But the woman is concerned about an extra horse wearing down her tree roots, and she is zoned for only one horse per acre; old as they are, neither horse seems likely to pass away any time soon.
As Diane throws two big flakes of hay over the fence for the morning feeding, she hears a beefy truck engine. She turns to see Cowboy pull up in front of the house. A surprise, because he never has before. He has hay lashed onto the back of the flatbed, about ten bales. He sticks his head out the window.
“Want some free hay?”
What she wants is for him to call before he invades her home space, but she doesn’t say that. “Since when do you give anything away?”
“It’ll go to waste. Started to mold a little, but if you pick through it…. Don’t feed the outsides of the bales. It’ll be okay. Not that I wouldn’t feed it to my horses. I got twenty more bales just like ‘em at home, and I plan to. But there’s only just so much I can use before it goes bad.” He climbs down from the truck and begins to undo the canvas lashings.
Gil comes out and stands on the balcony, looking down to see who has arrived. His chest seems a bit sunken in that shirt, a poor choice of shirt, really.
“Gil, this is Derek, the guy who boards Fletch; Derek, Gil.”
Cowboy tips his cowboy hat, an absurdly stereotypical gesture. “Heard a lot about you,” he calls up, in a voice that sounds weighted, not entirely pleasant. Gil seems to catch that; in fact, he seems to have been expecting it.
“Thanks for the hay,” Gil says, but he doesn’t sound grateful. Just then, Bob the cat saunters through the open door to see what gives. Gil wisely scoops him up, and they both disappear inside. Diane is not sure if Cowboy saw.
“That’s Gil?” he says, rolling the straps around one hand.
“Meaning what?”
“I dunno. Just seems like he’s maybe….”
“What?” But she knows what.
“A little old for you?”
“And this is your business because….”
“It’s not. Sorry.” He throws both hands up in a gesture of surrender, dropping the coiled straps in the dirt.
“Why in God’s name does everybody feel so goddamned free to comment on a thing like that?”
“Sorry to offend,” Cowboy says.
He picks up the straps and jumps back in his truck. He hits the gas hard, spilling the bales off into the old woman’s front yard as he drives away. Good, she thinks. He’s halfway afraid of me, too. That’s good.
Not ten minutes later, Gil is out on the back acre, plinking cans off the fence. The scary part is that he’s getting good. And she still can’t feature it on him, because he hates guns, hates violence, hates for anything to be killed. Gil is practicing for his class in hunter safety, so he can get a hunting license. So he can join the lion lottery in hopes of winning one of the twenty sought-after permits. So he can not use it.
She wonders if the timing is significant. That Gil got a look at Cowboy and then wanted to shoot something.
That night in bed, she thinks Gil is asleep, until he speaks.
He says, “You think I’m right. Right?”
“About what?”
“You know damn well about what.”
“And you know I think you’re right.”
“I might have known, at one time. Now I’m not sure. Maybe your new friend has been putting ideas in your head.”
“I’m capable of having my own ideas. And he’s not my friend. He just boards Fletch.”
Bob jumps up on the bed with them. Lies between them, purring, and Diane rubs him behind the ears.
Gil says, “I made an appointment with the vet for tomorrow. While he’s got Bob under, checking that thing out, I told him to go ahead and neuter him.”
“I don’t know if—”
“I don’t care. It doesn’t matter what Derek wants. Because we’re not giving Bob back.”
Diane leads Fletch into the biggest ring. Closes the welded-pipe gate. She has to lift the gate to get it latched. Everything on the ranch is old and sags a little. Except Cowboy.
She unclips Fletch’s lead rope. A shot startles them both. Fletch throws his head high and takes off, spraying her with sand and gravel mixture. He streaks for the far rail so fast that he fails to make the turn. He falls onto one haunch, sliding and struggling. Then he swings to his feet and gallops on.
Behind him, Diane looks halfway across the cattle pasture and sees Cowboy with his .22 rifle, picking off ground squirrels.
Fletch gallops the fence with his tail raised like a flag, his neck stiff and high. He sweeps around in a big, wild circle, flashes between her and Cowboy again. Diane feels drawn to watch them both. Fletch is a stunning horse. Polish Arabian with long legs, a classic dish face, a mane that touches the ground when he grazes. Diane stands in the center of the ring, turning around and around to watch him, dizzied by the blur of background, which seems to rush by the horse, rather than vice versa.
She knows now that she bought Fletch because he’s so handsome. She halfway knew it at the time, only not out loud. She fell in love with the image of him, never stopped to consider practical matters. Could she handle him. Would she like him. Was he the right horse to buy.
She sees Cowboy leaning on the rail, watching. She halts her spinning abruptly, and a wave of vertigo comes and then gradually goes again.
Cowboy says, “Just tell me this one thing.” He has his rifle up across one shoulder. Fletch winds down to a flashy, extended trot. “Do you agree with Gil? After everything you’ve seen out here? The Barbary sheep I’ve lost, and those calves got brought down? You still think I got no right to shoot one?”
Fletch stops short and stands with his head down, blowing through wide nostrils; she turns her attention away from him. As soon as she does, he pokes his head through the pipe railings and nibbles at the grass outside.
“You raise the calves to eat. Why can’t you understand if somebody else wants to eat them?”
“They’re my calves.”
“We all belong to anything fast enough to bring us down.”
“So you agree with him.”
“Yeah.”
“Figures.” He has one hip cocked; his jeans are tight, his short sleeves rolled to expose tanned muscles. It irks her when men are frustrating and attractive at the same time. It’s tiring, being drawn to men she doesn’t like or trust. It drains her. “The way I hear it, you stand by that guy no matter what fool stunt he pulls. And you’re not even married to him. I figure, if you were sure about him, you’d’ve gotten married after all these years.”
She doesn’t want to do this, and he can’t make her. She crosses the arena, pushing hard into the resistance of deep sand, clips the lead rope back on Fletch, and leads him to the gate.
Cowboy says, “I hear he talks a better game than he plays. I hear he shoots his mouth off about this cruelty to animals thing a lot. I hear he started a fight in the city over some shit like this and then chickened out and moved.”
“No. The other guy chickened out.”
“That’s not what I hear.”
Truth is, both men chickened out. Diane was set to go along for backup, for protection. To wait in the car, run for help in case it wasn’t a fair fight. In case Gil’s opponent brought backup of his own. Terrifyingly against her nature but out of loyalty to Gil, she volunteered to do it. And intended to. But the whole mess fell down around everyone, and she was the only one left standing, left to face the truth: Only she had the guts to follow through. And it wasn’t even her fight.
She opens the gate.
As she heads back to the barn, she hears Cowboy call after her. “And another thing. I want my damn cat back.�
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She stops, turns. “You don’t care about that cat.”
“The hell I don’t. I like that cat. He’s the only one of his litter left alive. Bad enough I got to worry about lions and coyotes getting my cats; now I got you to contend with.”
“You’ll have to take it up with Gil.” The words sting a little on their way out, like a rope that snaps back and whips her as she tries to swing it away. Because she’s always liked to think of this rivalry between Gil and Cowboy—begun long before they met—as an unfortunate accident, something she never intended to promote.
When she leads Fletch into the barn, Cowboy’s already there. He must have run all the way and come in through the back. His mood has changed. He’s smiling.
“Just in a bad mood over the damned squirrels,” he says. “Overrun with ‘em. Undermine the whole landscape. Dangerous having all those holes around horses. Anyway. I’m sorry.”
She puts her horse away.
He comes up behind and circles her waist with his arms. She sinks back into him just as she wills herself not to.
“Come ‘ere,” he says. “Something in the tack room I want to show you.”
“I’ll bet.” But against her will, she is smiling. She knows what he’s doing. He tried to win her allegiance one way and failed; now he’s going with a more tested method. She sees this, but her body has already begun to react to him, so she goes.
Later, as she’s putting her jeans back on, Cowboy says, “I really do miss that cat.”
She looks into his eyes, but it’s a mistake. Because she learns that Cowboy really does miss that cat.
On the eve of the lion lottery, Diane arrives home from her fourth transgression with Cowboy to find Gil sitting at the kitchen table. His shotgun lies on the table beside him; his head is sprawled across one arm, his eyes open. Staring, blank. His hair has grown out just to the borderline of seedy. In this brief moment, she sees both aspects of Gil, both sides. That charming, boyish thing that made it easy to love him in the first place, and all the changes that make it hard.
Before she can even ask, he says, “I never meant to hurt him. Last thing I ever wanted was to shoot anybody.” Diane sits at the table beside him, not to be near him so much, but because her legs have gone cold and trembly. “I was out back plinking cans. He jumped up on the fence just as I was squeezing off a shot. Just out of nowhere, he was there. I buried him in the garden.”
“Who, Gil? Who jumped up on the fence?”
“Bob.” He says it roughly, as if he blames her for making him spell it out. “I shot Bob.”
Diane draws breath, briefly wondering when she last breathed. First she feels relief, that it was just Bob. Then a pang of loss, because it was Bob. “It was just an accident.”
“Yeah. One of those accidents that only happen when people start playing with guns.”
It hits her then. “Gil, the lottery is tomorrow. You have your license already. Why were you still practicing?”
He folds his arms on the table. Before he lays his face in that cradle, he says, “Just blowing off steam, I guess.”
She decides to bathe and retire without saying more. She knows to leave him alone with this thing. She can’t help him. Even if he would let her, she couldn’t.
She hears his voice follow her into the bathroom. “He trusted me. That’s the worst part. His mistake. Humans can’t be trusted. Cats can be trusted.”
Unless you’re a mouse, she thinks. But she doesn’t say it.
Now it’s her fifth time with Cowboy, and Diane respects the addictive nature of a fifth time. This time, her body knows what it needs, knows on the first touch, jumps from zero to a hundred percent without permission. She likens a fifth time, with a man she shouldn’t have had once, to a double lungful of nicotine-laden smoke when you quit quitting after two or three days. Or you can wait four days for the same sensation, but if you’re going to give in, why? What does waiting accomplish?
They have gone to the trouble of removing all of their clothing, and they are already done. Sprawled on three or four scattered saddle blankets on the concrete tack-room floor. Cowboy’s fingers are entwined with hers, moving. Playing almost. A game in the air above their spent bodies. It smacks of something like affection, something that was never scheduled.
The thoughts that have distracted her all day return, and she needs to ruin this moment by asking. Or maybe she just needs to ruin this moment. “I know I said I didn’t want to talk about it. But tell me. Did you get one?”
“A permit? No. Did Gil?”
“No.”
“Any of his lion-loving buddies?”
“No. So that’s that, then. We lose twenty lions, but you don’t get to take one out by hand. You can live with that, right?” After all, his calves are just as safe.
“Actually, no. I can’t. But it turns out I can buy one off a guy whose name got drawn. Seven hundred dollars.”
“For seven hundred dollars, you could replace every animal ever killed on your ranch.”
“It’s the principal of the thing by now.”
They dress in silence, and she goes off to feed the orphans.
The three calves are standing at the far corners of their pens. She shows them the bottles. “Come on guys, go into your dance.” They eye her with heads down.
The air has gone warm and strange, charged. The clouds have darkened, their fat black bellies close to the ground. For a moment, she thinks the calves are reacting to the electric forecast of this change in weather.
Then she sees. Tags in each left ear, cauterized-looking circles at the base of what might have been horns someday soon. The two males stand with legs slightly apart, traces of blood on their rear hocks and hooves.
“Okay, guys,” she says, covering, for their benefit, the fact that she is slightly shaken, too. “It’s only me. You know me. I don’t cut little calves. I just feed them. Come on, guys.”
But the guys do not come. Today, they choose hunger.
She hears Cowboy’s voice behind her. “What’sa matter, kids, was I mean to you?” Then, more to Diane, “I told ‘em to enjoy them while they could.”
Diane turns, wanting him not to look the same as he did a moment ago on the tack-room floor. It works. He looks ungentle, unappealing. A man who would never weave his fingers through hers and play games with them in the air, nor would she want him to. She throws the big plastic bottles down on the dirt; one bounces, loses its nipple. Formula splashes onto Cowboy’s battered boots. He looks up at her with darkening surprise.
“It’s not so damn funny,” she says.
She walks away before he can answer. She wants to look back, to see him standing under heavy clouds, watching her go, his face a blank canvas unable to paint itself with comprehension. But she doesn’t look back. She has crossed a line that needed crossing. She has seen Cowboy as undesirable. And she knows those lines can be uncrossed just as easily, so she never wants to see him again.
She walks back to the barn and saddles Fletch for a ride. She doesn’t want to stay here, but she doesn’t want to go home. And she hasn’t ridden Fletch in weeks. And she wants Cowboy to see that she’s not afraid. She wants everybody, including herself, to see that she has the guts to ride this beast. Even if she has to find the guts and paste them on.
Fletch jitters and dances his way up the hill. She squeezes tightly with her legs to stay with him, but he reacts to that, absorbing her edginess. Or maybe it’s the painted, buzzing air, the webs of lightning crackling at the horizon. Or maybe he just hasn’t been ridden enough. She steers him kitty-corner across the pasture to the uphill trail, worried about squirrel holes in the blowing rattlesnake grass. Knowing he may bolt at some point, wanting him to at least do it on the packed trail.
He does not bolt. Just skitters up the hill trail toward the ridge road. Diane holds the reins too tightly with one hand, the saddle horn with the other. She looks over her shoulder into the valley and sees Cowboy walking down the paved road toward his double-w
ide-trailer home. He is too far away to look ugly or appealing, callous or kind.
She allows Fletch to break into a long, extended trot and turns him onto the ridge road, into pine and scrub oak, causing the image of Cowboy to disappear. She relaxes into the horse’s gait. It feels strangely smooth for a trot, easy to sit.
Then Fletch stops so sharply that she falls forward against his neck. She corrects just in time. Fletch’s head tosses suddenly and violently; it would have broken her nose or split her lip if she hadn’t pulled back when she did. His muscles feel like concrete between her legs, and his head is so high, she can see the panicky flare of his nostrils. He rears, drawing high onto his hindquarters, and almost in the same motion, he leaps.
The ground smacks up to meet her. She lies on her back on the dirt road for a second or two, disoriented and possibly injured, hearing and feeling the pounding of Fletch’s hooves as he runs off and leaves her. The sky over her head is black; the rain will let go soon. Fletch will run all the way back to the barn. Maybe Cowboy will see him run back riderless. Maybe he’ll come out to rescue her from a long and wet and painful walk back.
She shouts after the horse, though he’s long out of earshot. “Goddamn you, Fletch. What was it this time?”
She rolls to her left side to rise, and she sees.
He is the color of wheat, the color of the grass in which he crouches. A near-perfect camouflage. Except grass doesn’t have gold eyes with vertical black pupils, a broad, almost Roman nose, stiff, alert ears. Not tufted ears, but smooth and short and rounded. Not a bobcat but a full-grown mountain lion. She is staring into his eyes. He is staring into hers. His sharp shoulder blades rise up to frame his back. He is crouched, watching. She knows there is a right and wrong thing to do; she has been told. But her mind spins, and the information won’t come around. Only her own words: We all belong to anything fast enough to bring us down. Easy words, quickly thrown. Then she remembers: Stand up. Look strong and big. No sudden moves.
Always Chloe and Other Stories Page 14
