Redeeming the Rancher

by Leslie North

  Meier.

  His heart jolted into his throat. He dropped his phone.

  12

  Wes’s cell phone clattered to the platform, made a noise louder than the one that had woken him. Didn’t fucking matter. The blue glow blinded him. He snatched it back into his hands.

  Beyond the partition, she called his name.

  “Wes?”

  It can’t be me, Olive. Promise me.

  She promised. She fucking promised.

  Hot tears gathered in his eyes and stung his nose. He had known this would happen, believed it from word one. She’d remind him of his past, all right. Every time he drove his truck down Main and saw himself bronzed, every time someone came up to him in the feed store and shook his hand as if he were John Glenn and had been to the moon instead of leading his best friend to his untimely death, every goddamned time some hero-worshipping kid wanted an autograph. He had known this would happen.

  Wes backed away from the sculpture, let the cloth fall back into place. But the fabric hung up on itself and Olive rounded the hay bales in time to see him doubled over, mildly nauseous, as if he’d been kicked in the nuts, the evidence of all he had seen, exposed.

  “What did you do?” She asked, wrapped in a blanket, her voice thick with accusations and slumber.

  “What did I do?” His voice charged out like an air raid siren. “That’s rich, Olive. I tell you I’ll pose, even though putting on that uniform was the last goddamned thing I wanted to do, and you promised…” His voice hung up, went gravelly and weak and shit, so he cleared it and forged ahead, “You promised it wouldn’t be me.”

  Fingertips from both hands spanned her open lips but it was no longer endearing or sensual. It was the mask of someone who had been caught in a betrayal.

  “It isn’t what you think—” she stammered.

  “It’s my fucking name, Olive. There’s nothing else to think.”

  Wes stormed past her, toward the barn door. He bucked her hand free when she reached for him. Through strangled cries he heard a few twisted words, apologies, excuses, reminders that he violated her rules, but his pulse roared in his ears, and his vision had not recovered yet from being flashlight-blinded.

  He rifled the doors open and fished the master key to Clem’s truck from his toolbox. Wes had fired her engine exactly twice. He wasn’t even sure it would hold a charge; he simply knew he couldn’t be there in his barn—their barn—one minute more.

  The truck started, first try.

  He threw the transmission into reverse, harder than he ever would have had adrenaline not dictated his movements, and backed out in a violent arc.

  A plea on her voice reached through the window.

  A light clicked on inside the house.

  Wes shifted into first and gunned it. The last thing he saw in the tiny oval of his rearview mirror, was Olive, still wrapped in a blanket, collapse to the barn floor.

  * * *

  For two weeks, Wes disappeared.

  Livie couldn’t say where he went, though Mona and January assured her it was totally out of his character to run to Bess Scandy or any of the dozens of other eligible Close Call women who would bed him in a heartbeat. The men on the ranch knew more—she could tell by the way they avoided eye contact with her—but they weren’t divulging anything. So Livie roamed the empty barn, moved hay bales to the periphery so there was no longer a partition, and handled old truck parts when her eyes misted over to the point where painting a final outer-jacket coating to give her rubber molds structure proved impossible. And she rehearsed all the things Wes didn’t give her a chance to say.

  She roamed the cavernous space and talked to Wes as if he were living and breathing in the fantasy world in her head then blamed her delusions on the chemical fumes from mold-making. The process reached the end of what she could do without an ironworks. And on this, her last night in Close Call, she boxed the pieces into special containers. Tomorrow, a highly-trained team would load the shipping containers, and she would follow them to a foundry in Dallas where a wax replica could be made from the molds.

  Livie was double-checking the metal rigging inside the packing crates when Willie visited. Her pulse leapt.

  He stood where Clem’s truck had been parked all those months—years, in fact. And though Willie shuffled, his three-point walk unsteady, holding his badass cane with the stallion grip, his ever-present companion away from the house, he made a grand effort to come toward her voice and give her a hug.

  “How are you?”

  She gripped his fancy shirt, all parading elephants and India-inspired tents and fuchsia silk, wholly impractical for a dude who still shoved his hand into the exit chute of sizeable ranch animals. Moisture brimmed her eyelids. She allowed the open display she showed no one else because Willie would be none the wiser. Intentionally, she kept her words bright.

  “Busy. Takes a lot of prep to move this operation.”

  “I didn’t ask about the statue, Olive.”

  He had taken to calling her by her given name because Wes had. The reminder deflated her attempt at masking the storm inside.

  “I’m relieved. It’s time to move on.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We’re sure goin’ to miss you around here. Elevatin’ the discussion to a more cultured level. Before you, it was all bathroom humor and teenage pranks.”

  “What about Mona and January?”

  “Who I’m talkin’ ‘bout.” Willie laughed, a gurgling, full-bodied release, contagious in nature.

  Livie sampled a smile, for perhaps the first time in weeks. It felt strange, like something other people did.

  “Where is this Renaissance piece comin’ to our little town?”

  Livie had been minutes away from unscrewing the clamps, releasing the pipe fittings on the armature, and breaking down the sections for transport. Now, she was glad for her morose delay. She took Willie’s hand and led him to her sculpture.

  “It has about five layers of latex rubber and a plaster resin for protection painted on. Some of the detailing will be lost,” she explained, “But you’ll get the idea.”

  Willie extended his shaky hand. At less than a meter away from the serviceman’s arm, he made gentle contact with the splay of his fingers then bumped and glided them along in several directions before his other hand joined the excavation. She appreciated the contrast of his hands to the cream-colored mold, dark to light, grizzled to smooth.

  Livie sat on a nearby hay bale. She wanted to give him space and time. Remarkable how very much alike they were in technique and curiosity. Every so often, he asked a question, rhetorical in nature.

  “Well, now, what the hell is this?”

  “Marines don’t wear patches on their combat uniform?”

  “What’re you trying to say here, girl?”

  “Ah, this fella’s got some size on him.”

  Some weren’t even true questions, but they were welcome, all the same. It was like having a live mic attached to the finished statue and picking up sound byes and reactions from passers-by. At the back piece, Willie lingered, paying special tactile attention to two little girls parading behind the Marine, under the canopy of the Stars and Stripes.

  “Children,” he said. “Girls.”

  “Yes. Their story will be included on a plaque from the Historical Society. My gift to the town.”

  Willie pulled his hands away from the sculpture, close to his heart, and squeezed them closed. He grew strangely silent.

  Livie’s heart leapt from her chest. She bolted to his side. “Willie? Are you okay?”

  He didn’t answer. His face was stone, his eyes glazed and distant. Horrible scenarios flashed through her brain: heart attack, stroke, temporary dementia.

  “Willie, speak to me.”

  His chin trembled. “Their names?”

  Livie reeled herself back from thinking the worst. His color was good. He stood tall. And, quite possibly, he was crying.

  S
he glanced at the two girls as if seeing them with new eyes. Her brain did the math. Willie was seventy-six. In the 1960s, he would have been a young man the right age to have…

  “Oh my God,” Livie said, more to herself. Black men were not a dime a dozen in Close Call, Texas. All this time, she had been as blind as he. “Augusta and Mildred were your daughters.”

  It’s a family marker from the days of segregation. Two beautiful girls’ lives cut short simply because they wanted a drink of water on a hot Texas afternoon. Darkest day in Close Call’s history.

  She waited for confirmation, unable to draw air.

  Willie nodded, his movement barely perceptible.

  “I didn’t know…” How would she, unless she had let Wes see her sketches or unless the Meiers brought up Willie’s history? Resurrecting pain from the past was something people like her did to exploit and manufacture human emotion, not something that those who considered him family would have done. “Oh, God, Willie…if I had known…”

  “You what? Wouldn’ta honored their memory?” Willie said. “It’s a fine thing you did.”

  Be nice to see this spot replaced with something positive. Something that resembles the future.

  He took more time with the sculpture. Art was, after all, deeply personal. Livie knew Willie’s interpretation would not be hers. She couldn’t possibly know his pain. On some level, she hoped it was provocative enough to transcend her message of patriotism and tolerance and the caring that was so important to Wes.

  After a time, she stood beside Willie and brought her arm around his shoulders. “It’s a fine thing we did. The base you made is impeccable. Thank you. For everything.”

  “Wes is stayin’ at the auto repair shop out on the highway, south of town,” said Willie.

  Livie kissed the old man’s cheek.

  * * *

  Hammering out dents in an eighty-year-old truck was therapeutic. Until it wasn’t.

  At some point, imperfections become a memory and all you’re left with are distant reminders of the way it used to be and the realization that restoring the blemishes of a human life in the way a mallet and dolly restore steel can never happen. Will never happen. And that maybe, just maybe, the blemishes were what drew you in all along.

  Wes stood before Clem’s fully-restored 1939 Ford V8 farm truck: computer-matched Bright Coach Maroon beneath a finish as striking as a newly-minted penny; custom-stitched, hand-dyed caramel-colored calfskin seats; chestnut-stained boards running the length of the bed that warmed the back profile enough to make the ficklest homebody consider roaming the country and sleeping out under the stars.

  He knew; he was one of them.

  Pride didn’t begin to cover his satisfaction with the hard work he had put into restoring Clem’s first set of wheels, bought when his boots landed stateside after World War II. The feeling was second only to standing beside his brothers in arms, to fight, and his brothers on the ranch, to keep the place thriving and viable. Wes’s only regret was that he hadn’t seen the rust spots and scars for what they represented before he erased them. The goal should never have been to go back. The notion was absurd, really. The goal, all along, should have been to look back on a truck well-used and well-loved. Part of him wanted to unscrew the shiny chrome bumper and replace it with a plank of raw wood, maybe write fuck the bumper on it. But that was probably just his isolation talking.

  His friend, who specialized in body work and paint, had long since gone. He left Wes the keys to the place, his family’s auto shop that had fallen into disrepair after his old man ran a hose from the tailpipe into the closed interior of his Challenger where he sat with a note some five years ago. Somewhere along the way, his father had served with honor—Navy in the Pacific theater. In the quiet nights since the truck’s shell was complete, Wes felt the weight of the father’s terminal diagnosis, hell-bent on going out on his terms, and wished the legacy of Lezario’s Collision and Repair could have been more than a headline in the Close Caller-Times and a faded for-sale sign fallen down beside the highway.

  Wes had just finished polishing the headlamp glass when he realized he wasn’t alone. Silhouetted against the morning light, the visitor wore a dark-colored duster that lifted on the breeze. It took his mind one breath to realize it was Olive. His heart turned over in his chest in a fraction of that time.

  He straightened, shoved the rag in his back pocket. There were no barriers here to hide behind. His restless legs didn’t know where to stand, how to be, but every other part of him knew with absolute certainty that simply standing beside her, being in her gravity, had brought out his best.

  And worst.

  “Hey,” she said.

  The simplicity of the word when there was so much left to be said—namely I’m sorry—underwhelmed him. She carried something in her hand he couldn’t make out.

  “Who told you I was here?” he asked.

  “Willie.”

  Wes nodded. “Guy could talk a door off its hinges.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me Augusta and Mildred were his girls?”

  His thoughts raced, tried to grab a handhold. What did Willie’s girls have to do with her being there? “Never came up, I guess. Some things are best left in the past.”

  “And some things are best replaced with something positive. Something that resembles the future.”

  He hated it when people threw his own words back in his face. Context was different. Everything about life when he’d said that had been different. He was different.

  “Why are you here?” Wes placed added importance on buffing out smudges on the headlamp casing, hoping his dismissive tone hid the hitch in his voice and his absolute conviction that if she came to him, right now, he would fold like lawn chair, make love to her on the chestnut-stained boards then suggest they take the Ford to Maryland, follow the same route Clem traveled all those years back. Worked out for him, for the family in general, since future generations had depended on Clem’s ability to seal the deal with Wes’s grandmother.

  “I’m leaving today. Movers just left with the pieces. The rest has to happen at a foundry—the wax chasing, the casting and pouring. Then there’s the break-out and sandblasting of the bronze…”

  She caught herself, going on about things he didn’t know in order to avoid the honesty they had promised each other. Even in goodbye, that promise was less substantial than her precious clay.

  “I wanted to give you these.” Olive stepped forward, into the garage’s shadows, and placed a small bundle of papers on the truck bed. In truth, it was the only flat surface in the whole place, but that real estate represented so much more to him, to his memories, to his fantasies of a future with her that would never come.

  She didn’t believe in happiness; his ambitions would go the way of Lezario if he didn’t chase happiness every moment.

  It was only when she backed away that he realized they were letters.

  Fuck me.

  Wes remembered a long-ago conversation with Daniel.

  “Why you fucking write longhand?” Wes asked. “Email’s faster.”

  Daniel had looked at him with that stupid charismatic grin and said, “She’s got no photos, nothing left to save. Girls like that stuff.”

  Until now, until he knew about the fire, Wes had no idea what Daniel meant. Probably didn’t give a half-second thought one way or the other past teasing his buddy about how dedicated he was to writing his sister like she was his girlfriend back home. Another of Wes’s prick moments to add to the lot.

  “You should keep them.”

  “And you should read them.”

  No…no, he didn’t want to read them. They were back to the same place—her pushing, him pretending he was tough guy enough to handle whatever mind-fuck was inside those envelopes she felt like he needed. Ooh-rah and G.I. Joe and all that shit.

  “Is that all?”

  This time, he nailed dismissive. Her features crumbled behind her wall of glass, so beautiful, so withdrawn inside hers
elf and her world, that eye contact became an open wound for them both.

  Olive nodded.

  Heart-shaped lips that he once believed his duty to cherish pressed together as if she longed to say more, but her stone-like, statuesque exterior would not allow such a crack.

  “Goodbye, Wes.”

  She didn’t wait for a response. Her white and black ribbon-laced combat boots tracked across the garage floor, the gravel outside, at a clip faster than his heart could combat his determination to let her go. She climbed into her car, a rental by look of the front plate, and backed away. Around the tires, dust rose, suspended, waiting to push her out onto the highway, the reflection of the sun a small fire on her windshield.

  Wes put down his rag. His feet itched inside his boots. Nat’s voice roared back against his eardrums: Until you can get inside the pen of that memory, ask her to stay. He felt like fucking crying, nothing close to the hero she believed him to be.

  Her engine sounded. Tires punched. Before the dust cleared, she was gone.

  Wes doubled over. He reached for a grip, something to stabilize him while his stomach battled his heart for chest space and his ribs separated as collateral damage. He glanced at the roof’s underside, remembering the time he filled the conversation with words so he wouldn’t kiss her.

  Used to have handles here for the farm workers to hold onto.

  So, it’ll have handles again.

  Right.

  Wes had forgotten the handles, part of what drew him in all along, a not-so-distant reminder of the way it used to be. And that would be it. The only other blemish he would allow, save one. Wes reached for the three-quarter wrench and a rag to unfasten the chrome bumper.

  By nightfall, he was on the road to Maryland.

  13

  Wes didn’t read the letters until the horizon met the ocean. He found a place along the beach, counted two bonfires in the distance, and lay in the back of the truck. Just enough light stretched the sky for him to make out the words on the page.