THE STARDUST COWBOY

by Anne McAllister

  And then she told him about the night of the meat loaf dinner.

  "If you'd seen his face when my father said we could sell the ranch and start a new line of breakfast cereals. I couldn't let him take Jake's dreams and destroy them." She lifted her gaze and met Riley's desperately, blinking fiercely against the tears that had been threatening to fall ever since she'd determined to leave Livingston.

  "I couldn't sell. I had to give him a chance, don't you see?"

  Riley saw.

  He didn't want to, but he did.

  He stood in the yard outside the bunkhouse in the darkness and stared out at the sky and tried to muster up a reasonable argument that would refute everything Dori Malone had said.

  But he couldn't—because he understood.

  He understood desperation. He understood dreams.

  He remembered having had his own share as a child. He'd had more as a young man.

  When he was a boy he'd dreamed of cowboying, too. Then of owning his own ranch—this ranch—along with Chris, and following in the footsteps of his dad. When he was a young man, Chris had already opted out, but Riley had kept his basic dream and added to it. He'd found the woman he wanted to marry then. And he'd dreamed of bringing her back—of marrying her and growing old with her and passing on the ranch to their sons who would have grown up by his side.

  Oh, yeah, he'd had dreams. Just like Jake did.

  And then his father had been hurt, and Riley had come home to take over. Tricia had stayed at college. "I'm going to college to get out of there," she'd told him.

  He'd thought she would change her mind. They'd been going together for years. He'd loved her forever.

  The following year she had married Jeff.

  "Jeff's in law school," she'd said when she'd announced her engagement to the son of Jim Cannon, the Stratton family's lawyer. "He's got plans. He isn't going to be any two-bit rancher for the rest of his life."

  "I thought you loved me," Riley had argued.

  "I do love you," Tricia had told him. "I just hate the ranch. Leave the ranch and I'll marry you."

  But he couldn't leave. He couldn't leave the old man in the lurch. He didn't want to leave, anyway. "I thought you understood. You always knew I wanted to come back."

  "And you always knew I didn't."

  Maybe he had. Maybe he'd just never thought she meant it. Maybe the ranch had mattered so much to him that he'd just assumed she'd come to feel the same way.

  "Please, Tricia," he'd begged. "I love you."

  She'd kissed him.

  But she'd still married Jeff.

  Sometimes Riley thought he'd got the last laugh when, six years ago Jim Cannon had had a stroke and had asked his son to move home from Denver and take over the practice.

  The knowledge that Tricia had had to come back pleased the tiny wellspring of bitterness that lurked in the back of his mind. Serves her right, he'd thought when he heard.

  She'd crushed his dreams. Now hers had been crushed, too.

  It was a sentiment he was ashamed of, one that he certainly wouldn't admit to anyone. And one that he quickly came to regret.

  For if Tricia had suffered for the past six years, so had he. He'd done all right putting her out of his mind while she was hundreds of miles away down in Denver and he saw her only once in six years.

  Now he saw her several times a month. Now when he called Jeff at home, she answered the phone. He got to hear her voice. It still teased him, tempted him, taunted him.

  Now he reckoned God had the last laugh on both of them.

  Fair enough. But what the hell was God doing bringing Jake and Dori Malone into his life?

  Giving Jake half the ranch when he legally wasn't required to was supposed to be his good deed—the fair and honorable thing to do. The deed that would let him sleep nights and grow old and go to heaven when his time came, even if he turned out to be a crotchety old bachelor whose name was used to scare the local kids.

  It wasn't supposed to bring them to his doorstep.

  It wasn't supposed to send him off to sleep in the bunkhouse.

  "You don't have to do that!" Dori had said half an hour ago, sounding scandalized when he said that's where he was going.

  "No place to sleep in here. You can have my room," he'd told her.

  "I'll sleep in with Jake."

  But he'd just pointed her toward the clean linens and grabbed a sleeping bag for himself. "I've got to be up and out early. I'd wake you."

  "We didn't come to put you out of your house!"

  But he hadn't listened. He'd left.

  And now he stood outside the bunkhouse, his sleeping bag under his arm, and looked up at the stars.

  There were a passel of them out here where no city lights reached. He was used to them, saw them so often he didn't pay much attention anymore. Now he did. They were scattered across the heavens … like Stardust.

  His gaze dropped, seeking the upstairs window of his old bedroom—the bedroom where Jake now slept. He noticed that the curtain had been pulled back.

  Was that Jake in the window?

  Jake. In his mind's eye Riley saw the boy's infectious grin, his Chrislike eyes, his cowlicky hair. In his heart he knew Jake's dreams. He didn't blame Jake's mother for wanting to preserve them for him.

  But would the ranch do it? Or would the ranch turn his dreams into a reality he wanted no part of?

  Well, if it did—that was life.

  They thought he was asleep, but he wasn't.

  Sure, he was tired. Anybody would be tired when they'd spent all day helping sort and pack an apartment full of stuff and load it all into a trailer, then got up five times last night to look out the window just to be sure the trailer was still there.

  His mom had told him she'd changed her mind. He'd heard her tell his grandfather that they were going to keep Jake's share of the ranch after all. And it wasn't that he didn't believe her. But he'd seen the way she'd looked when she did it, the way her knuckles were white as she'd knotted her fists at her sides, and the way her voice sounded sort of thick and achy, like her throat was sore.

  He'd seen, too, the look on his grandfather's face.

  Mom and Aunt Milly sometimes called Grandpa "Old Grumpy." But Jake had never seen it until that night.

  "I'm quitting the store," his mom had told Grandpa. "We're keeping the ranch. I want Jake to have a chance."

  And Grandpa's face had gone white, then red, and he'd stared at her like she'd done something terrible, like she'd shot his best horse. Just the look had made Jake's fists clench and his stomach hurt. He'd wanted to stop it.

  "Mom, we don't have—" he'd begun.

  But she'd stepped between him and his grandfather. "Yes, we do," she'd said. Her voice had been quiet, but her words had been firm.

  Still Jake hadn't been able to imagine it happening.

  So he'd got up again and again, to check and see if the trailer was still there, needing to make sure it was really going to happen. And every time he did, he'd looked at the scattering of stars in the sky and thought of the Stardust cowboy, then he'd closed his eyes and prayed with all his might.

  Now he leaned his chin on his fist on the windowsill and looked at those same stars. They were bigger, he thought, and brighter here than they ever looked in Livingston because it was so dark out here. There were no streetlights here, no headlights, no neon signs. No lights at all except the one behind the curtains at the front of the house.

  They were here. At the ranch.

  If he turned his head and looked around the bedroom, he could see outlines of pictures that he knew were of his father as a gap-toothed boy no bigger than him.

  Outside, if he looked down he could see the outline of his uncle Riley, big and tall and strong as his dad would have been, standing in the yard looking up at the stars.

  Jake remembered the first time his mother had taken him outside to look at the stars. It wasn't nearly as dark as this, and there hadn't been as many stars—but the ones that were,
she told him, were powerful. They connected people.

  "What's c'nnected?" he'd asked her.

  She'd linked her fingers with his. "It's like this," she'd told him. "You and I are connected because our fingers are hooked together. Stars can hook people together, too, because we can each see them from so far away. Like now," she said, "your daddy's in Texas, but he can see those same stars."

  "He can?" Jake hadn't known how far away Texas was in those days, but just the sound was foreign.

  "Mmm," his mother had murmured. "I just got this story in the mail. A … friend wrote it. Let me read it to you. It's about a Stardust cowboy."

  And that was how it had begun. She'd taken him inside and had read him the story—about the cowboy, about the Stardust, about adventures. Later, much later, she'd told him his father had written it.

  Jake could remember the end of it now. Always look out in the sky at night and know he's there. He comes when you least expect him, to sweep you up into life's most wonderful adventures.

  Jake's lips moved silently as he said the words to himself now. His dad had written it to him, his mom had told him later.

  "He wants you to think of him," she'd said. "And to know he's thinking of you. You're connected by the stars, you see."

  Jake didn't know if his dad could still see stars from where he was in heaven, but it seemed like a pretty good bet. He lifted his gaze to the scatter of Stardust that seemed brighter than ever tonight. In the distance he heard a horse whinny and he heard Uncle Riley's boots go up the bunkhouse steps.

  "I'm here," he said quietly. "At your ranch. In your old room. An' if you're listening," he said to his dad, "I just want to say thanks."

  * * *

  Five

  « ^ »

  He thought they'd get fed up.

  Certainly there was nothing much fun or romantic or inspiring about mending fence or doctoring cattle or baling hay. The hours were long, the sun was hot, the cattle were stubborn, the haying was a necessary evil. Riley detested it. Jake seemed to thrive.

  He was up bright and early every morning, raring to go.

  The first morning Riley had expected it. He'd been prepared—although relatively red-eyed and sleep-deprived from his night on the moldy mattress in the bunkhouse. He'd been determined to give Jake a good day's work—not to overdo things, but to let the kid get an honest sense of what he was in for.

  "A partner's gotta pull his weight," he'd told Jake when showing him how to saddle the horse Riley had chosen for him.

  "I'm ready," Jake said. "Let's go."

  "Are you sure you want him tagging along all day?" Dori had asked. She'd been up, too, fixing them a breakfast like Riley had only dreamed about since his mother had died fifteen years ago.

  "I'm sure. It's his ranch, too."

  Something had passed between them then—an acknowledgment on Dori's part of what he was doing—not making it easy for Jake, but making it real. Not trampling the boy's dreams, but letting him test them against the reality of the ranch.

  "Have a good day," she'd said.

  They did. In spite of the fact that Jake slowed him down, got in his way and dropped things, Riley found he liked having the kid around.

  The boy was endlessly curious. He asked a thousand questions, but he didn't chatter idly. When Riley answered, he went silent, digesting what he'd been told. Only when he had another questioned he speak again—or when he had an observation to make.

  It was the observations that Riley enjoyed even more than the questions. The questions allowed him to explain what he knew. The observations allowed him a glimpse into his nephew's eager mind.

  "Grandpa says he likes his steaks better in the butcher's case than on the hoof," he told Riley that first day. "Not me." He'd lifted his face to the sun and smiled. "I like 'em out here where the wind is blowin' and I feel free."

  "Me, too," Riley agreed. He had never understood Tricia's fascination with cities. They smothered him, made him crazy. He liked space. He liked to be able to see the horizon, to go a long, long time without seeing people.

  Except he didn't mind seeing Jake.

  In Jake he saw bits of Chris—the Chris that Chris had always been determined not to be. He wondered that the boy was so much more like his uncle than like his father. He wondered if Chris would have been irritated that the boy liked the ranch. Probably Chris would have been amused.

  "Reckon he's a throwback," he would most likely have said, and then he would have fixed Riley with a devilish grin. "Like you."

  Riley knew that in Chris's eyes he had always been something of an anachronism—"a nineteenth-century cowboy trying to make it in a twentieth- and twenty-first-century world." And learning about the computer was his way of trying to straddle both. But he couldn't help being pleased that Chris's son seemed to feel the same way he did.

  The kid worked as hard as he did, too.

  Riley kept a close eye on him, wanting him to experience how much there was to do, but at the same time, wanting to be sure the kid didn't drop from exhaustion.

  He shouldn't have worried.

  Jake was a go-er, a worker, a doer. He'd been stiff and sore and sunburned when he staggered out to meet Riley the second morning. But when Riley said, "You want to give it a miss?" the kid shook his head emphatically.

  "I'm a partner, aren't I?"

  He was that.

  They spent a week together—almost every daylight hour—now. And Jake was not just hanging in there any longer, he was getting stronger, harder, tougher, smarter. He didn't need Riley's help as much. He could saddle his own horse, muck out stalls, throw a rope and, sometimes at least, catch something. He could drive the pickup, if Riley put a pillow on the seat so he could see, and he knew enough to leave the open gates open and keep the closed gates shut.

  At the end of that first week, they circled up to check on the cattle near the area where Riley and Chris used to swim when they were kids. It was a kind of natural bend in the river that had been cut off when a new channel cut a shorter loop. The swimming hole left behind was where their dad said he'd swum, too, as a boy.

  Jake's eyes got wide when Riley suggested a swim. "You mean it?" He was off his horse in a flash, sitting on the ground and tugging at his boots, eager to jump in. Then his face fell when he realized he didn't have any swimming trunks.

  "It's what underwear is for, didn't you know that?" Riley said. "So you've always got a swimmin' suit when you need it."

  "Is that what you're gonna do?"

  "Of course." Riley didn't mention the times he'd gone skinny-dipping here with Tricia when they were in college.

  Some things a guy needed to grow up and figure out for himself.

  "Last one in's a rotten egg!" Jake shouted and streaked toward the water. He plowed in, shrieking when he encountered what was little warmer than snow-melt. But it didn't deter him. He dove under and came up sputtering. "Come on, Uncle Riley. What're you waitin' for?"

  Riley kicked off his own boots, shirt and jeans, and dove after Jake.

  They splashed and played and laughed until Jake's lips were blue and Riley's teeth were chattering. Then they scrambled out and Jake wondered what they were going to do about towels, so Riley showed him another use for a good sturdy shirt.

  "It's all wet then," Jake grumbled when he finally had to put it back on.

  "Well, I reckon if it bothers you, you won't be wanting to come back anymore," Riley said with a grin.

  Jake looked at him, astonished. "Not come? Of course I'm comin'. I'll just keep a towel in my saddlebag from now on. Next time can we bring Mom?"

  "Er." Riley's mouth went suddenly dry at the thought.

  As much time as he happily spent with Jake, he spent as much time avoiding Jake's mother.

  Not that he didn't like her. He had no reason not to like her. She was up every morning before he was, putting together both breakfast and lunch so they'd have something "to start them out," as she'd told Jake, and something "to keep them going," as she'd sa
id when she'd handed Riley packets of sandwiches and fruit and home-baked cookies that she said were "not all for Jake."

  "I'll share," Jake had said, offended. And he'd made sure he did, though Riley had protested that he didn't need any cookies.

  "You don't like 'em?"

  "I didn't say I didn't like 'em," Riley muttered, backed into a corner. He didn't lie. He just didn't want to be beholden.

  "You gotta eat 'em then, or she'll think you don't," Jake advised. "It would hurt her feelings."

  So Riley ate them. Well, hell, he couldn't hurt her feelings.

  She had dinner on the table every evening, too. Wonderful dinners. Roast chicken. Steak. Stuffed pork chops. Green chili stew. Salads with fresh vegetables Riley had never met before—at least not in that form.

  "That's spinach?" he'd said doubtfully when she'd identified the dark green leafy vegetable mixed with the slices of red onion, mushrooms and chunks of hard-boiled egg. "I thought spinach came in a can."

  After that she called him Popeye with a teasing light in her eye that for some reason made his neck feel warm and his face flush.

  "You don't have to feed me so much," he'd told her gruffly when the meals came day after day. "My jeans are gettin' tight."

  At the waist, he meant. The waist!

  But when she'd looked at him and her gaze dropped, it hadn't seemed to stop at his belt buckle!

  Cripes! Riley turned and beat a retreat toward the bunkhouse as fast as his legs would carry him.

  "I got work to do," he'd said over his shoulder. "I got to mend some tack."

  He'd done his best to stay out of her way after that—making up excuses not to watch the television program in the evening that Jake wanted him to watch—"all of us together." He didn't read that sort of togetherness.

  Didn't want it.

  It would remind him all too forcefully of what he'd once hoped to have with Tricia. He did his best not to let himself think about that.

  So he told Jake, "I got work to do," a lot, too. And if he didn't hightail it out to the bunkhouse or the corral to work on the horse he was gentling, he holed up in the alcove and tried to make sense of the damned computer.