The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo

by Ian Stansel

  Frank clanked his glass against Lena’s. “To the hounds,” he said.

  “To the hounds,” Lena said.

  Silas reached in. “The hounds.”

  “Now,” the priest continued, “if the riders will approach.” And all of them, red- and black-coated, created a formless mass like a checkerboard gone to chaos, and all removed their helmets and smoothed their hair and knelt before the priest, who hung around each neck a medallion of Saint Hubert. After he’d garnished every rider, he said, “A good hunt to you, and a good day, and I’ll see you at the bar.” Which got a generous chuckle and a hearty cheer.

  The huntsman sounded the horn and the ride began with a leisurely trot. Conversation and laughs. Lena and Frank and Silas knew nearly every one of the others from shows or their own barn stalls, and a good number of them made their way up near the front where the threesome rode and came alongside and bade good mornings. At this point the Van Loy brothers—of which Lena was practically one, as far as most of the other riders there were concerned—had established themselves among the leading trainers in the region, maybe the state. Their students didn’t just go to shows; they went to nationals. One had made alternate on the Olympic squad. Theirs was no bullshit boot camp, and if a person was serious and driven and had a modicum of talent, they could mold that individual into something special. “A damn horseman,” as the boys might say, even though the vast majority of their boarders and students were women.

  They crossed the creek and made the rise on the far side, the hounds leading the way, barking their music, frantic but focused fully on the scent. On the descent, they ran and the riders pressed their mounts to cantering and the cold, wet morning air slicked their skin. The hilltoppers cut long ways, while Lena and Frank and Silas and the rest of the jumpers went straight at the fences and hedges and walls, their horses leaping over, the whole pack of them, led by the hounds and the field master, moving like a wave. Lena’s body buzzed with caffeine and vodka and the thrill of the ride. For Lena, this was the high point of the year. This was Christmas two months early. Sweat dripped down her neck and chilled in the dewy wind. Luckygirl relished the sprint and the commotions and rode smoothly across the ecru fields. Though Lena had lived in this area nearly her whole life, it could still feel strange and beautiful, especially on mornings like this when the fog settled in from the coast and the air was filled with the pounding of hooves.

  It took just over two hours to follow the scent to its end. The riders cheered as the hounds circled and yelped furiously at the drag, tracked and found hanging from the branches of a wide, vulture-like oak. The hunt hushed briefly as the huntsman issued the mournful “gone home” from his bugle. But the quiet did not last. Chatter and laughs took to the air. Lena and her boys started back with the group at a mild pace, until Lena stole one more look around at the open fields—how often did she ride outside the arena, in nature?—and said, “Man, fuck this,” and broke off across the meadows at the full gallop. Frank and Silas followed—Lena heard them behind her. She knew the rest of the riders were watching, smiling and shaking their heads at those darn Van Loy boys, no taming them, even though she, Lena, for once led the pack.

  They rode up Indian Hill Road and finally cut west and Lena took them all the way to the coast. Their horses lurched into the silky, hot sand of the dunes. The white and gray water burst against the land, and the sun flashed from behind a bank of coastal clouds. Frank said, “Damn right,” and leaped from his ride, landed in the sand with a muffled impact. He absently handed his reins to Lena and marched forward to the water, fell backward onto his ass, and tugged off his boots. Britches pulled up just north of his knees, he waded into the froth. Lena and Silas smirked and watched, leaning forward onto the pommels of their saddles. Lena luxuriated in the bracing salt breeze off the water. Frank yelled “Goddamn!” and his wife smiled widely and his brother nodded.

  Silas said, “You ever think that we’re farther west than the west?” Lena looked at him. He chewed at his bottom lip as if working out nerves, and it only then occurred to Lena that he might be anxious being alone with her. Frank was always right there keeping an eye on everything. But now, though they watched the elder brother there staring down at the water lapping at his ankles, they experienced an awkward intimacy.

  “Run that by me again?”

  “Like, there’s the west, and then past all that there’s California. Or at least Marin.”

  Lena said nothing, but she thought she might’ve understood him.

  He went on, “I’ve had people say I should be somewhere else. Wyoming or Colorado. Real cowboy country. But I can’t imagine being away from this.”

  “The coast? I didn’t know you felt any way about it.”

  “Shoo,” Silas said. “This place is it for me. You can dump my ashes here at high tide when I’m gone. Better yet, someplace north of here, out in the wild. Some little cove. Shake me out of whatever can you all got me in and let me get eaten up by the fish a bit at a time. You’ll do that for me?”

  “Me?”

  “You. Frank. I ain’t likely to have anyone else willing.”

  “Poor Silas.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Poor me.” He watched the water and his brother dance in it. “I come out here by myself and just look out there,” he said. “Just sit here for a while.”

  “By yourself, huh.”

  Silas grinned into the wind. “Sometimes I bring a friend.”

  “Your stable of ladies.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “I can just see it, some young thing coming out here with you not knowing that she’s about to fall victim to the Van Loy cowboy charm.”

  “That what happened with you and Frank?”

  She said, “Something like that, I suppose.”

  Silas said, “Woman, nobody’s gonna buy you as a victim.”

  A gull flew low to the ground, fighting a gust of wind, nearly stationary.

  Lena said, “Maybe you should learn to surf. Grow your hair long.”

  “I can’t imagine having time for anything like that. Anyhow, you only get to be good at one thing in this life.”

  Frank turned to check on his wife and brother, then started back toward them.

  Lena said to Silas, “Do you need to be good at something to enjoy it?”

  Silas laughed. “How the hell would I know? I’ve only ever done but one thing.”

  Frank got to them, boots in hand, his feet socked with sand. He sat down and began slapping at his toes, cleaning them off. “Jesus,” he said. “Water that cold, you shouldn’t be allowed to call it a beach.” He stood and took his horse’s reins from Lena’s hand. “Well, I could use a drink. How about you, wife, can I buy you a drink?”

  They got to the bar an hour later and tied their mounts, alongside a dozen others, to the sawhorses set up outside. Inside, they joined the rest of the riders, who’d already been there for a round or three. Silas shimmied to the bar first and brought back three whiskeys. After the next round, Lena could see which way the day was going. She left the bar—not even knowing if her husband noticed, so caught up was he in the tossing back of whiskey and the recounting of the hunt and the networking and angling for new students and boarders—and rode her horse to the trailer, drove the trailer to where the boys’ horses were tied outside the saloon, and brought the whole lot back to the Van Loy stable.

  By the time she returned to the bar, the boys were well pickled. Lena would remember that someone had loaded the juke with Fleetwood Mac and that her entrance was soundtracked by the contradiction of “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow” and “What makes you think you’re the one who can live without dying?” Frank and Silas were holding court, surrounded by familiar faces, people laughing and nodding and occasionally interjecting but mostly listening to the boys tell their stories, rapt, or at least pretending to be, in due deference to the young men who had, through force of will and innate talent with creatures of the equine persuasion, gained entr�
�e to that world to which they’d not been naturally born. Lena took her place with them. Frank put his arm around her. The others nodded at her. Frank raised a glass and said, “To the hounds!” and the revelers encircling them lifted their own and echoed the pronouncement. Lena pulled Frank’s face down to hers and, there in the midst of all the names of the Marin County horse world, planted a kiss on his lips that would flip the pennies from a dead man’s lids. Minutes later they were in the john of that dusty bar doing what it was their God-given right to do, being the upstanding married people they were.

  By dusk most of the riders were gone, and Frank and Silas and Lena had shed their red coats. They’d staked their claim at the bar. Lena and Frank sat while Silas stood, still bobbing with excitement and weaving with drink. He was recalling all the horses he’d had, the way some men recounted their sexual conquests. These were the ones he’d tamed and trained, the ones he’d loved.

  “Ace is up there,” he said of the horse he’d been riding that day. A fine, strong bay with four socks and bright, alert eyes. “He’s a hell of a horse. I can put any of my students on him, any of them, and they’ll learn more from him in one ride than they would from most horses in ten. There’s some horses you get on and it’s a one-way conversation. You tell ’em what to do and they do it or they don’t. But that Ace, boy, he’ll talk back. You get it with him, that it’s a partnership. No fucking around, he’s one of the best I’ve ridden ever.” He leaned in to Lena and held up one finger as if to indicate a special point. “Ever. And I’ve ridden some goddamn horses.”

  “Good,” Frank said, staring down into his glass of Tullamore Dew.

  “Better than good,” Silas said.

  “No, I mean it’s good he’s good. Means I made a square deal with Hoskins.”

  “What deal?”

  “Ace,” Frank said. “I sold him to Sam Hoskins yesterday. Got twelve grand for him.”

  Silas stared at his brother with a mix of astonishment and hurt. “The fuck you say.”

  “Good deal on both sides, brother,” Frank said.

  “Frank,” Lena said. She hadn’t known about this sale. If she had, she would have argued against it. This night wasn’t the first time she’d heard Silas speak highly of Ace.

  “That’s my horse,” Silas said.

  “That’s the stable’s horse.”

  “I ride that horse, Frank,” Silas said, anger rising. “You know this. I broke that fucker.”

  “For the stable. For the business. These aren’t pets, Silas.”

  “Christ, Frank,” Lena said just before Silas’s first punch slammed into Frank’s jaw. Lena’s husband fell, knocking into the man next to him, falling farther, getting tangled in the legs of the stool.

  Silas’s boot got Frank once in the gut, but the second kick was intercepted by the stool legs and Frank got a hold and used Silas’s leg as leverage to get up and he sent Silas backward into a table of three women, one of whom hit the deck, a full glass of chardonnay across her blouse. And from there it got bad. Frank tagged his brother twice in the ribs before Silas recovered the upper hand, straddled his brother’s torso, and laid fist after fist into his face and head and shoulders. All the while cursing him in every fashion one could imagine. People screamed. The bartender was on the phone. Frank managed to get out from under Silas and issue two sickening blows to his face before a posse of men took hold of the two of them from behind, pulled them apart. Both men were wet with blood and saliva and sweat. Both chests heaved with hatred. They fought against the men holding them, but as tough as the boys were, they couldn’t shrug off four men apiece. The police were there in no time. Cuffed the both of them. Asked a few questions of the other patrons. Hauled the boys off in separate cars.

  Lena, dazed and now suddenly alone, tipped back onto her stool. The people who’d been leveled by the boys’ brawl were tended to. The woman cried and pulled her doused shirt away from her chest, and her friends led her to the restroom. A man massaged his ankle. The ones who’d held the boys apart remained in a cluster, not yet ready to break their new bond. Everyone in the bar—or at least it seemed to Lena at the time—took turns watching her. After a moment, a woman came over.

  “Are you with those men?” the woman said.

  “Yes,” Lena said, hardly looking up. “One is my husband. I need to bail them out, I guess.”

  “Is that what you want to do?”

  “Yes,” Lena said. “I need to get them.”

  “Do you want a ride?”

  “I have a car,” Lena said, but just then a dizziness took over her head and she had to place a hand on the bar. She stared at the finger of whiskey pooled at the bottom of her glass.

  Out front, Lena got into a beige sedan. The woman started it up. She was probably a bit older than Lena, a thin, tidy brunette. Lena did not recognize her from Marin’s horse world. She realized then that none of the people she did know back at the bar—and there were more than a handful, perhaps a dozen, people who not long before had been laughing at the boys’ antics—none of them had come to Lena after Frank and Silas were hauled off.

  “They’re just like that with each other,” Lena said.

  “They’re friends?”

  “Brothers.”

  “Oh. God.” The woman headed south down Nicasio Valley Road. “Never with you, though,” she said.

  “Sorry?”

  “He doesn’t do that with you? Hitting?”

  “Oh. No,” Lena said. “No, this is between them.” Her mouth curled into a sad grin as she eyed the faint shine of her boots in the dark of the car. “It’s always about them.”

  The woman took Lena to a bank where she guessed at how much bail might be set at for the two of them and to be safe took out all the money the machine would allow, and then they headed to the police station. Lena told the woman that she’d get a cab back and that there was no need for her to inconvenience herself further. The woman pursed her lips and wished Lena good luck and drove off. Lena never saw her again. In her own drunkenness and befuddlement at the situation, Lena would not even remember what the woman looked like—only that she’d been there, that she’d existed and had given Lena a lift.

  At dawn Frank was released to his wife. Silas, however, refused her bail, as well as any visitors. Lena and Frank went home and Frank slept for thirteen hours. Neither of them saw Silas for two more days, when he showed up back at the barn to trailer the horses he felt he had claim to. “Sue me for them” were the only words he spoke. Frank leaned against a stall door halfway down the aisle.

  “You ain’t taking Ace,” Frank said. “He’s already been paid for.”

  Silas didn’t make a move toward Ace. But a week later, after Silas was gone and Sam Hoskins had taken possession, the horse in question turned up lame with a nasty cracked hoof that took six weeks to fuse. Frank had to give a thousand back as well as cover the vet bills just to keep the man from starting talk of lawyers.

  ⟱

  It came over the scanner. Police in pursuit. Suspect on horseback. Both women stopped their steeds in unison, and Rain raised the phone’s volume as high as it would go, held it out between them. They listened and heard where the police were heading. Rain typed in the name of the town: Garberville.

  “About twenty miles,” Rain said.

  Lena said, “Jesus.”

  Rain said, “Close.”

  Lena nodded.

  “You sure you want to go ahead?”

  Lena said, “We’re not going to catch up to him today.”

  “Not likely.”

  “Sure he knows they’re onto him. He’ll be moving at a fast clip now.”

  Rain said, “And there’s—” She stopped.

  “What?”

  “The funeral.”

  The words made Lena want to collapse off her horse and dissolve into the earth. “They’ll wait for me. Even if they don’t, this is more important.” She steadied her breathing. She said, “You’ve been out here long enough.”

&nbs
p; “I’m not going back if you’re not going back.”

  “I’m not going back.”

  “Then that’s that.”

  “This isn’t your thing.”

  Rain said, “You’re my people.”

  “I wish you would go back.” Lena looked around her at the smattering of oaks and firs. Her mind went to the coast, where she’d rather have been. She said, “If we get to him, you stay back. You don’t get near him. You ride the other way. Promise me.”

  “Okay.”

  “Promise me.”

  “I promise.”

  Lena took off her helmet, brushed the bangs off her forehead, replaced the helmet, fastened the strap. “Which way?” she said. Rain consulted her phone and pointed northeast.

  They broke into canters and didn’t talk for two hours, at which point they spotted a roadside sign announcing the entry to the Mendocino National Forest. The trees loomed tall and dense. “We’ll skirt it,” Lena said, and she led her compatriot north along the western edge of the forest at a trot. The scanner had police focusing a good ten miles farther up. Lena took a swig of water; she didn’t have much left. At a creek they stopped and let the horses drink. The women stretched their backs and necks and shook out their legs. Then they rode on, following the creek northward five or so miles until it cut west. They kept north into the wood.

  At a two-lane highway they climbed the embankment, and the horses’ shoes clanked against the pavement. Lena heard the rush of a car just before a police siren bleated once, twice.

  “Fuck,” Rain said.

  Lena said, “Go,” and maneuvered Pepper down the far side of the embankment, into a denser wood. The siren sounded again and Lena could hear the car cut onto the shoulder just a few dozen feet behind them.

  A voice called through a speaker, “You two on the horses, stop.” Two doors shut. Other, fainter sirens in the distance. Lena sighed and eased Pepper to a halt. “Okay,” she said to herself and to Rain and to their horses and to Frank and to no one.

  Nine

  Under the cover of the deep woods, Silas slowed Disco to a walk. He caught glimpses of the sun through the bower and oriented himself. His heart thumped away as if it might burst. He ducked low branches and panned the woods with his eyes, absent-mindedly stroking Disco’s neck all the while. The ground was carpeted in soft needles and softer dirt and was relatively quiet to move across, but each of the horse’s footfalls sounded to Silas like an explosion. Sirens wailed in the distance, but they didn’t seem to be getting any closer. He reached back and pulled a button-down shirt from his saddlebag and wriggled into it. Tried to steady his breathing. Of course they knew he was heading north by now, so he steered the horse eastward, away from the noise of the sirens and deeper into the forest.