Bum Steer

by Nancy Pickard

  “I can’t,” I told him. “Because if I’m right, if I’ve guessed correctly, then that ranch doesn’t belong to us, and it never did.”

  But I had suffered a miscarriage shortly after my return from Kansas, and Geof claimed that my obsession with the ranch was a sublimation of my feelings about that. It was that pregnancy, an accident, that had caused my bouts with nausea during my journeys. I accused Geof of refusing to acknowledge the validity of my suspicions as a way of sublimating his own denial of the death of a child he wanted. And so, alas, we spun psychological circles around each other, growing simultaneously more superficial and sophisticated, tossing jargon at each other, but never touching our hearts. We had wounds we didn’t close that winter, and so they couldn’t heal.

  A Lone Cowhand

  In my opinion, the Atlantic Ocean up north where we live is never warm enough for swimming. Even Geof puts on a wet suit until the end of June. So on the first of June, he was in the water, clad all in black rubber, but I was seated on the shore, watching him cavort like a dolphin.

  “Who is that masked man?” I said to myself and smiled, though he wasn’t watching and couldn’t have seen the smile even if he were. I turned to my best friend, who sat in a full lotus next to me, and said, “Watch him for me, will you, Marsha, I’m going back to the house to see if the mail’s come yet.”

  “Om um,” she said.

  I stood up, brushed myself off, and waved at him.

  He happened to be glancing our way and waved back.

  Then I picked my way over the rocks back up to our cottage, pausing to savor how gorgeous it looked when I approached from this direction. God, it was lovely. The yard was so green, the rhododendrons so pink, the roses so red. I felt as if, after a long, sterile winter, happiness was budding along with the spring flowers.

  I got in my car and drove down our private road to the mailbox, opening it and reaching into it from inside my car. Three bills, two flyers, a letter from my stepmother in Palm Springs, and a letter-sized envelope with a typed address, a Utah postmark, and no return address.

  Curious, expecting one of those computer-generated direct-mail pieces, I opened it:

  Dear Jenny Cain from Massachusetts,

  Well, there’s nobody likes to tell a story like an old cowboy, so just sit back for a spell and let this one spin you a yarn….

  Once, in what seems like another century, there were these three cowboys, Cat, Carl, and Slight by name. Cat was the boss, or at least he had the money that paid the other two, so they let him pretend to be boss. Well, these cowboys had known each other a good many years, and drunk a good many beers together, and knew each other pretty damned well, when one night they maybe drank one too many whiskeys, and made one too many big plans, and decided to pull one too many jokes on the rest of the world.

  “Lord, I’m sick of it all,” Cat said that night.

  “What are you sick of, boss?” Slight wanted to know.

  “I’m sick of the responsibility, and the money, and the relatives waiting for me to die so they can get the rest of the money.”

  “Poor ole polecat,” Slight mocked him.

  Carl just kept on drinking.

  “What if I could give them all their money now?” Cat said, looking sly. “What if I could get out from under all this load of responsibility before it puts me eight feet under the ground?”

  “What are you dribblin’ about?” Slight said.

  Carl just kept on drinking.

  “I’m talking about the fact that you’re dying of cancer, and what good’s that going to do any of us? It ought to be me that’s dying. That’d make everybody happy, maybe including me.”

  “You’re full of shit, boss” Slight observed, but he winced with pain when he pulled the tab off a fresh beer can.

  “Possibly, but that wouldn’t be anything new, would it? Carl, are you listening to me, or are you already dead?”

  Carl grunted, and kept on drinking.

  “Well, what if we moved someplace where nobody knew us, and nobody gave a shit about the legendary Barons of Bushwhack.”

  Slight chuckled into his beer can. “Montana?”

  “Hell, no, think of their winters.”

  “Arizona?”

  “Too much like west Texas.”

  “Where then?” Slight asked, still chuckling.

  “Kansas,” Cat said, and he let them digest that, and then he gave them a few more morsels to chew on. “They got good cattle country in the Flint Hills, good grass, there’s at least a couple of weeks a year when the sun don’t broil you and the cold don’t freeze you, and it even rains now and then. You remember rain: it’s that stuff we saw comin’ down outside of Seattle that time.”

  Cat saw that Slight was beginning to get an inkling that he might be serious.

  So he continued: “What if we bought us a new place, one last ranch, and I sold everything else off. And what if we put you in a hospital in another state and we called you … me,”

  Slight sat up straighter, but it hurt him to do it.

  Carl stopped drinking long enough to stare at Cat.

  “Say,” Cat continued, “just say we set up a will that gave Quentin Harlan and Carl Everett lifetime employment on this new ranch. And say we set things up so nobody who knew us could get to us.”

  “Could a person do that?” Slight asked.

  “I expect so,” Cat told him.

  “But you got relatives in Kansas City.”

  “They won’t know a thing until—”

  “It’s over,” Slight finished the thought, and coughed again.

  Cat nodded. “And say I got me a lawyer who didn’t know you from me, and say we found us an owner, like maybe some foundation, who didn’t know squat about ranching, and who’d have to rely entirely on the wisdom of their lifetime employees….”

  “Quentin Harlan,” Slight said slowly. “And Carlton Everett, town drunk.”

  “Fool,” Carl said, and drank some more.

  “So when you died,” Cat summarized, leaning back in his chair in absolute drunken satisfaction at this brilliant plan of his, “we’d both be free.”

  “What about me?” Carl inquired.

  “What do you care?” Cat asked him.

  “Guess I don’t.” Carl shrugged. “Long as you take care of my boy, Laddy, like you said you would.”

  Cat and Slight eyed each other over their beers.

  “He said he would, didn’t he?” Slight said.

  “I will,” Cat assured both men.

  And so they did it, those cowboys.

  Cat thought he’d be free, you see, and live out the rest of his days easy, like the plain old cowboy he always thought he wanted to be.

  But I’m not free, am I, Jenny?

  I didn’t count on Slight’s having a fatal attack of guilt and telling Carl that Laddy wasn’t really his boy, that he was really Slight’s boy. And I didn’t count on Carl’s being so brain-rotted drunken crazy that he’d kill his former best friend and his former wife and try to kill me. And I didn’t count on Laddy, my own nephew, coming to me and forcing me into the position of lying to him, claiming to be Slight Harlan, his real father. And I didn’t count on meeting up with my own granddaughter, and loving her like my own.

  Hell, she is my own. And that’s why Carl, in his drunken rage, wanted to take her away from me. We had stolen his son, now he was taking my granddaughter. It still scares me, just to write it down.”

  I’m a fool, Jenny, and now I’m a “free” one.

  So, what are you going to do with this letter, sweet woman from Massachusetts? If you can use it to prove I’m alive, you can get the ranch off your hands, and you’d like to do that, wouldn’t you?

  By the way, I’m sorry about scaring you with the rattler, like some damned fool adolescent boy with snakes and snails and puppy dog tails. I’d had a fight with Carl that morning—remember all the blood?—and he’d as much as come out and admitted he knew the truth about Laddy. I was scared of
keeping you around there, scared of what you might learn, or even of what might happen to you. So I pulled the old dead rattler trick on you, and Carl played along because he wasn’t so crazy about having you there, either. But it wasn’t me who laid those spurs on your pillow, that was Carl. He was drunk and didn’t even remember doing it the next morning. After that airplane “accident,” and then when my sister got killed on a night when Carl just happened to be gone from the ranch, I had to face facts. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive him. Or maybe to forgive us all, especially yours truly.

  I apologize. I didn’t mean to land a woman like you in all this trouble. Hell. I landed a lot of people in trouble in my lifetime, more than a few of them women, and I never thought I meant to do it.

  Anyway, as far as your getting rid of my ranch, I don’t think this letter will do the trick for you. Sorry, but if you want to have me declared alive, you’re going to have to find me first.

  Sometimes, well, some lonely times, I think I’d like that. I like to lie awake thinking of your coming for me. And if you don’t ever? Then maybe I’ll have to find you. I’d cause a stir, wouldn’t I, riding into Massachusetts on Buck?

  There rides the last free man, they’d say.

  Ain’t nothing free, I’d tell them.

  The signature was typed:

  Cat

  I read the letter three times.

  How like him to not quite think things through.

  On the basis of that letter, I could probably get Canales to have the real Slight Harlan’s body exhumed and prove Cat Benet wasn’t dead. Then we could unload the ranch, and maybe Lilly Ann Lawrence could buy it in partnership with her cousin Laddy….

  But do that and I’d cheat the Railing twins, Mark and Suanna, out of their “inheritances.” And their mother out of hers. And Marvalene and Freddie Sue. Do that and I’d horribly complicate the lives of the heirs who were already several months into spending or investing “their” money. If I turned over the letter to the authorities, they might start looking for the real Cat Benet, who might just end up in jail. On the other hand, Lilly and Ladd, who had lost their inheritances by going to the ranch, would get their own back one day.

  “Slight,” I said aloud, for I had a hard time thinking of him as anything else, “I could kill you for this.”

  Except that he had an uncanny knack for coming back to life when you least expected him.

  I shoved the letter under the car seat, in about the same place where his gun had been hidden in his truck, and I started back down the drive. All the way to the house I was convinced I was going to leave his letter there.

  Then I saw our cabin, and I woke up.

  It was all a dream, a dream of freedom in a wild man’s head, and maybe for a while in mine, and now it was time for me to extricate myself from his dream. These were decisions I didn’t have to make, decisions that were not even mine to make.

  I parked the car, pulled out the letter, and stared for a while at the postmark. Then I walked down to the beach, making a wager with myself: If there happens to be a cop swimming in the ocean today, I’ll turn over this letter to him; if there’s not, I won’t.