Only Flesh and Bones

by Sarah Andrews

  Po paused in his efforts to straighten up his unkempt bachelor lair to offer me some breakfast. “Got some eggs and bacon, real easy …”

  “No thanks,” I lied, as my stomach rumbled to the tune of frying bacon. I didn’t want to get any cozier with this man out here where there wasn’t a Henry Clough to watch out for me.

  “Let’s go, then,” he said, stepping into his boots and shrugging on his western-cut down jacket. “We can take my truck.”

  “Thanks anyway,” I answered smoothly, “but I’ll just follow you. That way, I can head straight on out from there to my next appointment.” I was proud of this little subterfuge: if Po did prove to be a wrong-o, it supplied me with my own way off the premises, one I could use as a two-ton weapon if need be, and at the same time gave him the impression I was expected somewhere else at a known time later that morning, so he would think twice about detaining me by force.

  He smiled and nodded in reply. Everything in creation seemed just fine with Po Bradley.

  We headed back down the road toward town and a mile or so later turned onto the dirt road that lead to the old homestead of the ranch. Ours were the first tracks in the newly fallen snow for a quarter mile. We turned in under another arch, this one formed of lodgepole timbers turned gray with age. The track bent around the flank of a step in the river terrace, then opened up to a fabulous view: sweeping vistas of the north end of the Laramie Range, beautifully tended irrigated hay fields, a winding line of cottonwoods and willows marking a perennial tributary to La Prele Creek, and, tucked in there among the trees, a fine old log homestead complete with barns and corrals. I got out of my truck in front of the low chain-link fence that separated the dooryard from the open range and gaped. The contrast between this well-kept spread and Po’s overgrazed acres was stunning. “Beautiful,” I cooed.

  Po raised his shoulders and dropped them. “Oh, I suppose.”

  “The grass is sure—” I caught myself, quickly before I could say what was on my mind: You sure take better care of this place than up around your new house. “You keep this part just for the hay? I don’t see any livestock here.”

  Po put a hand on each hip and arched his back, working out a kink. “Sister Annie inherited this little part here when our folks passed on, and she won’t let me put no cows on it.”

  “She live here, then?” I asked, looking about to see if there was a second structure where the not so shy Annie might be hiding.

  “No, she moved to Denver couple years ago. Had to be near her doctors.” He shrugged. “Don’t know whether she’s grateful or not that I found her a tenant.” He shrugged again. “Course, the tenant gone and got herself killed, poor lady.” He shook his head.

  I regarded him askance. Was this an act for my benefit? “But you got the main part of the ranch.” And your wife lives in town … ?

  He sighed. “Yeah, I got it okay.”

  I began to drool, even as I acknowledged that eighty acres, even irrigated, were not enough to support a separate ranching operation in the arid lands of Wyoming. “She looking to sell this place?”

  “House and eighty, yours for the low low price of four hundred thousand.”

  “Oh, then she doesn’t want to sell.”

  “Hey, that’s all irrigated land. You could have a fine little horse-breeding operation here, or build on and make her a bed-and-breakfast.”

  “Sure, if I had enough capital going in to buy some breeding stock, nurse the mortgage, and eat for five or six years while I came up to spend. Then I got to pray the price of beef comes out of the cellar.”

  Po looked at me appraisingly. “You understand this stuff.”

  “Ranch-bred myself, remember?” I said with some heat. There are few things more obnoxious to me than a man who thinks all women incompetent. The judgment just has a way of bouncing off womankind and sticking to the man like glue. Reigning in my temper, I changed the subject back to his sister’s spread. “Still, she’s not exactly giving it away.”

  “Folks from Hollywood seem to feel differently.”

  I sighed. This was the problem: the weekend hobby ranchers with their passing whims and lack of economic imperative were running the price of land up out of reach of young hopefuls like me. What I couldn’t afford to get started with was a tax write-off to them. There were three economic realities that rode on the backs of the true ranchers: the need to nurse debt (the mortgage), pay operating costs (equipment purchases and upkeep, feed supplements, and wages to the hired help), and make a living (profit). The way things were, on a given year a typical rancher could hope to meet two out of three. The older family ranches often did the best, as there was less debt and the multigenerational intimate knowledge of the spread and its climatic environment made for the most efficient management of resources; but in those cases, the family’s wealth was tied up in the land, and if a rancher wanted to retire or withdraw capital to nurse declining health, the grim reality of debt came back to haunt him, and he had less to leave his offspring. It was ironic that the central part of the ranch I’d grown up on had been purchased with money inherited from my mother’s father, a banker back east. Even with that leg up, my dad had had to beg more help from my mother’s family in the lean years, a constant source of friction among the disapproving easterners, my rebellious mother, and my embarrassed father.

  I gazed out across the eighty beautiful acres of irrigated hay fields that lay before me. It was an easy guess that the Broken Spoke Ranch had originally been comprised of at least six to ten square miles of grazing lands, with long-term leases to additional grazing on extensive Bureau of Land Management acreage, as well. It was typical in local society that the son or sons inherited the bulk of the lands, but this choice little bit with the original homestead had been left to the daughter. An odd arrangement. And then Annie Oakley Bradley had moved down to Denver to be near her doctors. Declining health or a chronic condition? “How long ago did your folks pass away, Po?” I asked.

  “Oh, four years or more.”

  I shook my head in empathy. Even with the one time tax exemptions allowed with inheritance, the current appraised value of the Broken Spoke Ranch would have made the U.S. government his 40 percent partner. Mortgage time again, just to buy out the inheritance taxes. Was that why Po was grazing his grass down to a nub? I thought a while, trying to come up with a polite way to ask, and as I thought, I remembered that he was driving a brand-new truck and that his wife lived in a house in town. Not small capital expenditures. “Times are tough, aren’t they?” I finally said, as suggestively as I could. I gave him a winsome smile.

  Po tipped his head to one side. “Oh, I’m doing okay,” he replied. And then, snapping up my bait, he added, “Course, I’ll be doing even better when the oil well’s drilled.”

  “Oil?” I said, appalled. Everyone knew the chance of hitting oil south of the Platte River in this county was like trying to find ice in hell. Or at least every oil geologist knew that. Ranchers still hankered after the dream. It was a cash crop they didn’t even have to tend, if they held the mineral rights to their own lands. All they had to do was cuss out the degradation of their land as the pump jacks went in, then cash the checks.

  Po assumed a knowing stance, jaw slightly thrust out. “Yeah, I got a deal going with an oil company out of Denver. Gonna drill a well over that way a couple sections, over beyond where the shoulder of that hill comes around.” He gestured toward the west. “Got the tin shed in and graded themselves a road and everything. Just a little holdup on the schedule.”

  “Shed?”

  “Where they store the drilling mud.”

  “They built a shed for the drilling mud?” I asked.

  Po turned his look of appraisal back on me. “You know something about drilling?”

  I thought a moment. It wouldn’t do to show off and give him my full résumé as a petroleum geologist; that might make him quiet up on me. Instead, I opted for the more blue-collar part of my background: “I used to sit wells as a mudl
ogger,” I said. “You know, the monkey that stays out at the well and pulls the drill cuttings out of the return mud and samples the works for oil and gas.”

  Po gave me a vague look, but nodded his head. “Well, then you know how they use that mud to drill the well. It’s real important.”

  “Oh, yeah. Real important,” I agreed, wondering just what in hell an oil company was doing grading a location and building a special shed just to store the sacks of unmixed mud. It came powdered, in hundred-pound bags, like unmixed Portland cement. The roughnecks add water and toss it into the system as needed. Every few feet deeper into the hole takes another sack of mud. It’s pumped continuously down the hole through the drill pipe, out the center of the bit, back up the annular space between the outside of the pipe and the borehole walls, and into a storage pit beside the rig. The stuff lubricates the drilling, flushes the drilling cuttings to surface, and counterpressures any gas or oil that might want to come up to see you out of control. The sacks of dried powdered mud—bentonite, a swelling clay, to be exact—are brought onto the site on a flatbed truck, then stored in a little portable shed that the drilling contractor brings out with the massive rig. And sometimes, the mud is brought out premixed, in a big truck. From companies like Wyoming Mud, just an hour’s drive away in Casper. So why build a special shed? I wondered. “So they built you a nice tin shed,” I said, like I was really impressed.

  “Yep. Brought a ’dozer in, made ’emselves a nice road, and built me a shed.”

  “When they doing to spud?”

  “Spud?”

  “Start drilling.”

  Po frowned. “Well, like I said, there’s been a slight delay. But they’re gonna do it. Already brought the mud in and everything.”

  “Oh.”

  “Where’s your folks’ ranch?” Po asked, pointedly changing the subject.

  “Oh, down by Chugwater.”

  Po’s eyebrows shot up with interest. “Your brother running the place, then?” he asked slyly. “I hear your pa passed on last summer. Dreadful sorry.”

  “Ma’s running it,” I said simply, thinking that would end discussion of that uncomfortable topic. I knew he would refrain from asking about the size of her holdings, just as I would never ask why in hell he was overgrazing his; either question would be unspeakably rude. One simply did not ask the size of a rancher’s spread; it was like asking how much money a person had in the bank. “So. How long this place been in your family?”

  “My granddaddy homesteaded here back in 1888. Built the front room, wintered over, then went back to Illinois and got hisself a wife. She raised him a good brood, and they added on to the back. Got to be so many, they built a nice big Victorian house over on that rise, but that burned down when I was a kid, and my folks moved us back in here, put a big LP gas furnace in the living room. Suited me fine until my wife got to natterin’ at me ’bout needin’ a little privacy. So we moved up the way here to the other house.”

  And then she outright left you, you lascivious old fool, I wanted to add. And where’d you dig up the money for the mortgage on your wife’s house in town, and a nice new truck? I glanced at his hands, which looked used, but not any too recently. The callouses were clean and none too thick, and there was a fineness to them I don’t generally see in the hands of a man who’s just come from bucking bales and digging holes for fence posts.

  Po opened the gate in the dooryard fence and let me in, then preceded me to the front door of the house, which he unlocked with a key he kept on a chain in his pocket. The inside of the house was as nice as the outside. The original small room, which now served as an open hall closet and mudroom, gave onto a nice-sized living room, with kitchen to the left and bedrooms beyond. The living room was cozy yet spacious, graced with old-fashioned log furniture and even an antler chair, and the kitchen, while not exactly modern, was well equipped with gas range, a large refrigerator-freezer, and even a dishwasher, for heaven’s sake.

  Po stood staring fixedly at the left-hand door of three that led off the back of the living room. “That’s where it happened?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  I took a breath, paused, then marched resolutely across the room and opened the door.

  Death is a mysterious ending to something as noteworthy as life. I’m not satisfied as to what happens next, if anything, but when some people die, they do seem to linger for a while around the portal through which they made their exit. Not so Miriam. She was simply gone.

  When I pushed open that door, I saw nothing but a bare bed frame, a bureau, an open armoire, and a bedside table. Her clothes and all personal objects were gone from the hangers and bureau just like she’d checked out of a hotel, taking every scrap of habitation with her. No last exhaled breath, no comb, no loose hair, not even a slip of paper in a wastebasket waited in that room.

  “Why no mattress?” I asked.

  When I got no answer, I turned and looked at Po, who was hovering in the doorway, trying to settle himself against the frame as if for moral support. He glanced nervously at the bed frame and thrust his left hand into the pocket of his jeans as if to anchor it, but his right hand kept moving, touching his head, the back of his neck, his upper chest, the opposite arm. “There was … you know, a mess.”

  “Oh.”

  Po’s voice came out tiny, tightened by embarrassment and grief. “Sheriff said they needed it for evidence.”

  “Um, stains.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Po, how did she die?”

  He didn’t say anything for a while, then: “They said … well, they found she’d had some kind of poison.”

  Poison? “Any way it was suicide?”

  “No, that was the funny thing. It was some kind of dose, but I saw the boys lookin’ about. They couldn’t find the bottle it come in.”

  I knit my brow. “She die quietly, Po?”

  “Oh, no … well, no. There were … signs of a struggle, and, well …” “What?”

  Po’s face tightened into a wince as he continued to stare at the bed frame. “Well, don’t you suppose that you would kind of writhe around a bit if something like a poison was takin’ you? I mean, come on …”

  I moved Po Bradley off my mental list of possible murderers. No way a man that squeamish over death could have caused it. Unless, of course, he was one hell of an actor. “Po, can I ask you a personal question?”

  “Sure.”

  “You and the sheriff not get along or something?”

  “Huh?”

  To distract him from feeling self-conscious, I moved farther into the room, eyed the old black telephone sitting on a bedside table, began pulling out the drawers of a bureau that stood under a window that looked south toward the mountains. In the months since Miriam’s death, spiders had built great fortresses between the curtains and the window frame, and the yellow dust kicked up from the road and pastures beyond had settled on the top of the dresser. There was nothing in the drawers. “Well, I saw the sheriff yesterday, and-”

  “What’re you lookin’ for?” Po asked.

  “Books,” I said, without considering my words.

  “Like that one she used to write in?”

  I turned. “Yes. Black, with a marbly white pattern on the cover, like they’re pretending to be leather.”

  Po smiled into the internal space of memory. “Yeah, she had one of them. I’d find her settin’ out on the front porch writin’. Real serious she was about all that. Wore her glasses for it, and always snapped it shut when anyone approached.” The smile grew even warmer, wider, as he remembered. “I’d tease her I was going to sneak up one day and read over her shoulder, but she said, ‘Po Bradley, you stay out of a woman’s business.’ Feisty, she was.”

  “You liked her.”

  “What wasn’t there to like?” Po’s eyes shifted onto me with a gleam, his social appetites suddenly rekindled and ready to shift into the present tense.

  “Good dancer?” I asked slyly.

  “Great dancer. H
ow that woman could move.”

  I decided that it was time to get the hell out of the bedroom, mattress or no. I had to brush past his shoulder to get out, as this man of fancy manners did not move to give me room.

  Taking a deep breath, I strode around to the second door, opened it, only leaned rather than taking a step inside, so I wouldn’t get cornered again. I found myself looking into a bathroom. Next door gave onto a short hallway with two other doors. I sprinted down and opened one, then the other. Both were bedrooms. “Which one was Cecelia’s?” I asked, my voice coming out half a pitch high. I told myself to calm down, not let this man worry me, reminded myself that he was a rake who preferred to ooze into position and let his charm and the heat of his body do the work for him, rather than force his luck. Vain old rooster that he was.

  I turned and found him once again leaning against the door frame behind me, this time lounging, his posture clearly seductive. “Room on the right,” he said. “Bed’s still made in there … .”

  I took a perfunctory glance, noted the position of the bed, the armoire, the telephone, and the bureau, said, “How nice,” slammed the door, and bustled back past him. And through the living room. And out the door into the yard. And was in my truck buckling the seat belt before he caught up to me, somehow managing to look like he hadn’t sped up the rate of his saunter. “Well, thanks, Mr. Bradley,” I said abruptly, closing the door and rolling down the window, rather than having to leave the door open to talk to him. Nothing like a quarter inch of steel to limit a man’s ability to grope.

  “Po. You can call me Po, you know that.”

  “Sure. Well, gotta get to that next appointment of mine.”

  “Sure, sweetie.” He reached in through the open window and grasped my near hand.

  I narrowed my eyes and stared, fury leaping into my heart. “Mr. Bradley, sir, I’m not being feisty; I’m just plain not interested.”