Forging Fire

by Lisa Preston

  A good stock dog has to watch his person, has to have access.

  One or two fellows checked out Charley and me. Eager to show my dog’s skill, I strolled over and asked the most relevant question of the day to a fellow leaving the check-in booth. “When’re dogs working?”

  “You got something to exhibit, little lady?” His lopsided grin gave way to a leer. Flirt Boy seemed to have an idea that he was all kinds of charming, which didn’t exactly sugar my grits.

  “Maybe so.” I spoke gruff enough that he’d rethink whether I was meaning my words, like him, in extra ways. I’m average-plus height or more and made out of trim muscles, nothing little about me.

  “Then you’re up.” He jerked a thumb over his left shoulder to the main arena and pressed a button on his radio to tell someone to release six steers to let a demo run before the official program started.

  That’s more like it. Ready to run my dog in this thunderdome, I whistled. Flying yellow fur bailed out Ol’ Blue’s driver’s window, and we slipped into the ginormous arena, first of the day.

  The Kelpie that was officially entered downed at the gate with a word from his handler in that way we call honoring. The dog wanted to work but was going to honor Charley and me.

  At the far end of the arena, a gate clanged, admitting a half dozen rowdy cattle. They snorted, stamped, and scattered. Near me, two green metal fence panels were set up with a ten-foot gap between them. Charley would have to drive the cattle between the panels.

  “Away to me,” I told Charley.

  Distinctive in his work, my Charley is. Plenty of eye, confident, with a knack of knowing when to use which kind of manipulation to make cattle stop or move where needed. Younger dogs have faster out runs, sure, but Charley possesses the wisdom of experience. He ran to the end of the arena and gave the milling steers the benefit of his glare. They pretty well gathered up and began to move down the long line of the fence. Charley would have to force the loose steers toward me through the panels, then around again and out a gate at the far end.

  One crusty half-breed steer decided he liked the original end of the arena better. He whipped around and charged my dog.

  Feinting, Charley whirled and told the steer to get back, told it he wasn’t giving up ground. In two seconds of stubborn, Charley further explained that he was fine with either one of them dying over the issue of whether that steer should move along peaceably and join the others.

  It went like that. These rough cattle didn’t cotton to being herded at all, but Charley wasn’t intimidated.

  Without a wave of my hand, I verbally directed Charley to bring the stock through the panels. Charley bossed them right and proper, until he could deliver them again to the end of the arena where we re-penned the lot.

  The nods we got, well, we’d earned ’em.

  “That’ll do, Charley,” I told my old fellow.

  Both our hearts were brimming with pride and love. We thought we were pretty much the coolest thing on the planet. I’d run my dog, my Charley, at the Black Bluff bull sale’s first run of the day. Bucket-list life item, check.

  It’s a herding-dog thing. Maybe everyone wouldn’t understand.

  A microphone clicked on with a squeal. They were ready to get started with the day’s official program. An announcer asked my name, my dog’s name, and where we were from. He repeated it all over the loudspeaker to clapping and cheering from the hundred or so early spectators, and he welcomed everybody to the last day of this year’s Black Bluff bull sale.

  They released more burly cattle, rough enough, barely dog-broke. The first official man up gave me a considered, congratulatory nod, then sent his Kelpie, who spent a lot of air yipping. The tough little dog would need that energy for the extra out-runs he’d have to do when his stock scattered. And now Charley had to honor the Kelpie, ignore the fresh steers he wanted to work.

  A big fellow across the way looked above the crowd to eye me and mine. Seemed like too much attention. Another feller—this one smaller and dark-skinned with straight black hair and no hat—eyed the one eyeing me and then stared at me way too long. He edged my way and paused, then faded back, ’til I lost him in the milling crowd.

  Then I saw him again. I’m not all that given to the heebie-jeebies, but that dark-haired wiry man moved toward us in a way that made me not want to turn my back.

  It’s always a sign when I start to think ill of others that someone around here needs a nap. And I was hungry, having not so much as a stale half-box of Milk Duds to munch on since I’d left the Buckeye. I’d done my road trip in hard hours. If I caught a few more winks, I could maybe unofficially run Charley again during one of the program breaks, take a gawk around, then hit the road. I just needed a small corner of the world, some open space at the end of the sale property. I fired up Ol’ Blue and cranked the wheel hard, rumbling slowly through the less traveled parts of the ground to gain a patch.

  Shady, without such long grass that the bugs would have me for breakfast, and quiet, way back from the hollers and truck sounds and stock smells of the mighty sale, this was a spot where a gal could catch herself ten or twenty winks before she turned her sweet self around and rolled north again.

  I slid out of Ol’ Blue then turned to ask Charley for an opinion on where we should rest, the grass or the cab.

  Crack! Something smacked the back of my skull.

  Chapter 2

  FAINT SOUNDS FILTERED IN AS I fell face-first on the grass. There was a clanging sound and a diesel engine fired up. Footsteps rushed around.

  Someone helped me up. Then, under the comforting rumble of a loud engine and the rocking of a truck’s stiff suspension, I took that nap I’d been wanting.

  ***

  Panic whispered at the back of my brain. A pair of legs in dark jeans loomed at my side. Wishing for better circumstances, I squeezed my eyeballs shut.

  Opened them to a man squatting in front of a white car.

  “Are you all right?” the man said.

  I registered the gist that someone was asking a question, but before my brain cells could assemble a response, the quiz kept coming, about one question every five seconds.

  “Can you see me?”

  “Can you talk?”

  “Do you need an ambulance?”

  I wished I wasn’t on a game show on a road shoulder with the worst headache ever recorded in human history. I posed one bonus question to the dark, blurry head leaning over my body. “Did you hit me?”

  Blurry Head shook, like an ocean roller from my perspective, but I was on the far side of woozy.

  “You need help.” The accented voice reminded me a bit of Manuel’s, but it echoed from a distant tunnel. Seemed to belong to the dark blue legs with the floaty head on top.

  I closed my eyes again. Better, less ooh-I’m-gonna-barf, which was the way I’d felt when the truck stopped moving and I’d stumbled onto the road shoulder of dead grass. Yeah, I’d been glad when we’d stopped moving.

  What truck? I sucked in a breath, ready to throw up like Guy’s cat if that’s what it took, ’cause what was I doing here, and where was here, and who was the man leaning over me?

  I looked around and had no earthly idea of where I was, though I knew I had been at the Black Bluff bull sale all the way down in California. Yeah, I’d finally made it to the big sale and managed to unofficially run my dog on cattle in the Black Bluff arena. But I wasn’t at the sale now. An expanse of brown, slightly hilly, undeveloped land pocked with manzanita and a few oak trees lay beyond the little two-lane road at my heels. The only vehicle in sight was an odd white car behind the man kneeling beside me. The car was a Jeep Compass, which is what happens when a small car—like the tiny thing Guy has—gets carnal knowledge of an adult Jeep. It’s got southern-bad breeding written all over it. Under-powered, undersized, and white is an ugly car color, too.

  I gave the just-sometimes blurry fellow a wave intended to convey all my questions.

  He tilted his head. “Sabino Arriaga.�
��

  That was his favorite sentence, I guess, because he said it a couple more times. And the way he said it seemed like I was supposed to know a whole lot of people named Arriaga, and he was merely helping me understand which one he was. Then he turned to study my face in a way that made me wince.

  “I’m Sabino Arriaga.”

  “I’m not,” I said, my voice croaking. I groped around, realized I was on my butt in the dirt.

  “You know the ranch?” He pointed a fence that stretched both ways from a white metal gate. Rolling hills of scrub and occasional oak trees swallowed up the wire fence lines separating the land from the road. I assumed the border continued beyond those hills.

  I shook my swimming head. “I’m not from here. I live in Oregon. Who are you?”

  “My name is Arriaga. That is my family name.”

  “And?” I prompted. “And I am the one who is helping you.”

  “You’re helping me?” I was about to spew that the usual form of help involved wading in when the fight began or fetching the police or taking the victim to a hospital or—

  “A man helped you out of a truck and then drove away. I was too far away to see him well.” He pulled a little pair of binoculars out from under his shirt, scanned the countryside across the road.

  “You were watching through binoculars?” The morning glare made me squint, accelerating the headache. I wanted my sunglasses, which should be tucked in Ol’ Blue’s visor.

  “I am searching for my uncle. He used to work on that ranch but he disappeared.”

  After some time, I realized I hadn’t responded and started thinking about what might be a good response, which made me try to remember what he’d said.

  Then both of my working brain cells grab on to the idea that I’d been robbed—Ol’ Blue was stolen when Charley was in the truck. I’d lost Charley. Charley, my good sweet old found dog who’d slept within arm’s length of me every night for two years. Charley was with me the night I refound my horse, Red, the night I met Guy. Charley loves Guy as much as I do. Charley’s been to hundreds of Oregon shoeing jobs with me. All my clients know him. Charley holds my heart.

  Charley and I had even run cattle together at the Black Bluff bull sale in California. Oh, yeah, I was in California, not Oregon. I’d gotten rid of Dragoon, Donna’s killer bull. Why was my mind stuck in replay mode? Focus.

  My Charley was gone, ’cause someone had taken my truck with Charley in it.

  Now I remembered the clanging sound when I got hit. That would have been Charley jumping from Ol’ Blue’s cab through the slider window into the bed, banging over all my tools and gear. He never jumps into the bed from the cab. I felt sick. Plus, losing Ol’ Blue means not just the truck but also my tools. My newer, better tools, my anvil and stand, the propane bottle, my bar stock and shoe inventory, my old backup tools. My clean shirts and fly spray and lead ropes. In the cab I’d had my day planner, the one Guy gave me and wrote all my clients into, my cell, a bottle of lotion, and a canteen of drinking water. Ol’ Blue’s my livelihood. It’s my truck, and I’m the one who organized everything and mounted my crappy forge into the bed on a swing-out arm.

  Me losing Ol’ Blue, well, that’s like other folks who love their jobs losing the building they work in plus all the stuff in it after having had to buy that workplace plus the forge and anvil and shoes and all the tools it contains.

  It’s everything.

  I swung my right arm to the butt of my skull and winced so hard tears dribbled out my eyeball corners. My knees drew up to my chest of their own accord.

  “Charley! Come to me, boy. Charley—”

  The man looked over his shoulder and hissed at me, drawing one finger across his throat. “Quiet.”

  There was absolutely no reason to be quiet. No one was around, and we were in an unknown remote corner of California.

  I inhaled a lungful and bellowed from my sitting position. “Charley! Come, Charley!”

  The man put a finger on his lips to shush me. I yelled until my headache made me stop. He winced and rubbed two fingers on his forehead, but at least he didn’t give me any more orders. Instead, he asked, “Should I look at your head?”

  “It’s right where I left it.” I didn’t want to shake my noggin to tell him no, ’cause moving my skull around felt like a really bad plan. No one should move my head again, ever.

  “My uncle, Vicente Arriaga. Do you know—”

  I cut both hands across my body to shut him up. After I’d thought and thought of how to respond, I offered, “Both my folks were only children. I got no aunts or uncles.”

  He pulled a photograph from his back pocket and faced it to me.

  With less than a glimpse, I raised one hand and squinted. I wanted to get to my feet but wasn’t sure if I’d fall over trying. “Stop. Just stop it. Where am I? How did I get here? Where’s my truck?”

  There was something about him that reeked of suspicion, the way he measured his words and watched me too much. The way he’d been handy enough to see my attacker—or claim to, anyways—but not so handy he could actually do a daggummed thing about it.

  He waved at a white metal gate in the fencing across the road. “A man dropped you off and then drove that way, onto the ranch.”

  I placed my eyelids under orders to open all the way and stay there to study the shoulder of the ranch’s nearest low hill dotted with occasional oaks. That’s pretty much all the eyeball was offered. Beyond the fence line, another dirt road like the one we were on cut a curving brown line through the earth, making the only relief to what appeared to be faint green rangeland. It looked from afar like land that could support thousands of cattle, but I knew better. It was land like under my knees, nearly desert from overuse, the grass thin and weak as the soil.

  It looked like I felt.

  Fire season’s long past where I live, but it could strike any time in this part of California.

  I stood, feet planted wide, straightening my knees and back slowly, keeping some flex in them. The hill on my left dipped and straightened. A pounding recommenced in the back of my head like someone was beating down a door.

  My mood was ready to beat down a door. “If my truck went that way, then that’s the way I’m going.”

  He shook his head. “They say I will be arrested if I go onto the ranch again.”

  “Who says?”

  “The people with the ranch.” He waved his hand toward dusty hills that might be hiding Ol’ Blue.

  “You know who took my truck?”

  We stared at each other and I started getting a whole ’nother raging case of the creeps.

  Then he said, “I know your truck went through the gate, but I cannot go there.”

  I finished this for him, just to prove my headache was a little better and I’d been paying attention. “Because they say you’ll be arrested if you go there.”

  He nodded but looked like a man with a glimmer of an idea. Speaking slowly, he pointed to his car and muttered, “But they don’t know this car. Maybe I could give you a ride.”

  Getting into a strange car with a strange man is usually a dumb idea for anyone, but especially for a young woman who’s been attacked and now doesn’t know where she is except she’s on an abandoned dirt road, un-assed of her own truck, and in too bad a mood to watch her language.

  No two ways about it, getting in that car was a bad idea.

  I got in.

  It gave me a minute while he went around to the driver’s side.

  Why I reached for the glove box and turned the knob, I have no earthly idea, but I did. And the rental contract looked at me and I looked at it and then at this what’s-his-face fellow, who looked away.

  “Look, um …”

  “Sab. Sabino Arriaga.”

  Yep, the rental contract was issued to Sabino Arriaga, from Hertz.

  He blinked openmouthed at the open glove box and looked at me, a question in his eyes. “I was going to give you a ride, remember?”

  I’d man
aged to get into a car. I could manage walking. Mama and Daddy didn’t raise a brilliant girl, but I was smart enough to pass on this offer of a ride. I opened the passenger door and pushed myself back out and to my feet, staggering my sick self in the direction of the ranch gate. He didn’t come after me, didn’t call out. I kept going. That’s what I do.

  Standard No Trespassing signs hung on the wire fence at regular intervals. I passed three of them before reaching the white metal pole gate. In the middle of the gate hung a sign.

  TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT. SURVIVORS WILL BE SHOT AGAIN.

  Chapter 3

  I SLIPPED THROUGH THE RANCH GATE, past more NO TRESPASSING signs, and walked up the ranch’s snaking two-track road. It rose up to meet me, which is not a good thing, because the exertion in the slight climb made my stomach turn and my head pound. Bile seeped into my mouth. I called for Charley, called and cried, called and got mad, tamped down the threatening puke-fest.

  Beyond the little hill, on the side of the ranch road in the distance, sat Ol’ Blue.

  Minutes was all it would take to reach my truck. From the little rise I’d climbed, I spied that white rental car on the public road beyond the ranch. I’d lose sight of that fellow—and forget his name, whatever it was—by the time I descended to Ol’ Blue. I was aware enough to see a four-wheeler paralleling me on a hill to the north, deeper into the ranch. He motored along barely above idle, slow enough that he didn’t raise dust.

  Then the four-wheeler cut switchbacks down the hill toward the two-track that was taking me to Ol’ Blue. I saw the rider plain—a man in a cowboy hat, western shirt, and faded jeans. Saw that he’d reach Ol’ Blue before me.

  The four-wheeler’s dust cloud boiled at my truck. The man stopped hard, dismounted, walked around Ol’ Blue with his hands cupped around his eyes as he peered in the cab and the topper windows. He tried the passenger door but didn’t open it. I couldn’t see if he also tried the door on the driver’s side.