The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo

by Ian Stansel

  Frank grinned. “It’s okay. I know it was you. That almost put us under.” Frank leaned forward, elbows on knees, and looked at Silas for what seemed like the first time. “This is what it’s all been aiming toward, brother. All these years, all that shit. You do this and it’s over, and you get to win.”

  Frank stood, swigged his glass of wine, and said, “If I see it coming from too far off I’m liable to try and stop it. That’s just animal instincts, I’d guess. So let me know if you’re not going to do it. Otherwise, don’t tell me shit.” He took a few steps toward his truck, then turned. He said, “I thought maybe you were going to ask me for my hat. Like that night. Test me, see how much I meant it.”

  Silas said, “I got my own fuckin’ hat.”

  Frank smiled in the firelight and walked to his car and drove off into the deep darkness of the night.

  ⟱

  Silas rode on, hungry, tired, his legs and ass aching, his shoulders and neck stiff from the wretched cold, his head throbbing from dehydration and the lingering effects of the whiskey he’d taken off the boys and continued to drink until the bottle was empty. Pushing forward, Silas thought of what he’d said to that Maggie woman back at the llama outfit. They’d been nothing but kind to him and he’d repaid them with an attack. And a stupid one at that. He’d rather have left a gentleman, maybe even something like a friend. He didn’t have many of those, and he’d forgotten the feeling of camaraderie. These thoughts occurred to him with a coloring of amusement, that in his life this was what he felt bad about. Being rude to a stranger. In one way or another, he could justify most everything he’d done over the years—even shooting the boy’s thigh just hours before. What he’d said to Maggie, though, had been an act of simple meanness, and he did not want to think of himself as that brand of man. But perhaps that was exactly the man he was.

  He rode on until the jagged mountains morphed into easy-rolling hills, until the sun was just peeking over those hills behind him, until he spied the coastal fog bank hanging squat in the distant sky, until he could smell the fishy wind and hear the aberrant whooshing of cars down 101. When he got to the road, holding Disco back in the trees, out of sight, the traffic struck him as a sort of pollution. Behind him was a great swath of forest, and not far ahead was the sea, but between the two was this toxic, lethal strip. He waited for a quartet of vehicles to pass from the left, then urged Disco forward, and she trotted across the pavement and down the embankment on the other side. When they finally found something like a trail that seemed to meander westward, when the noise of the cars was fading and he thought he might hear the first elemental crash of waves in the distance, Silas said to his horse, “All right. Let’s get there already.”

  Sixteen

  Lena knew something was wrong. Jesus, of course she knew. She also knew Frank was keeping it from her. She saw him in the evenings moving gingerly from room to room, exhausted beyond what would be acceptable for a healthy man of his age. One night he made a blathering excuse to head out to the barn in the dark of the post-twilight. Checking the farrier’s job on one of the school horses. Nothing that couldn’t wait till morning. And then she watched him double over halfway across the field. Coughing. That goddamn incessant cough that he waved off as a chest cold, allergies, anything. “It’s nothing,” he’d say, and she’d accepted that for far too long, wanting it to be the truth.

  Why hadn’t she said anything? Pressed the issue? Anger, she would understand later, an anger born the night she spoke to Silas at the bar in San Rafael, one that lingered long after. A fog of resentment so impenetrable that it wouldn’t allow her mind to acknowledge what was right in front of her. But she finally found the limits of her self-delusion. One evening just past dusk. Dinner table. It was nothing in particular, just the nagging, undeniable knowledge that he was truly sick and that the past was nothing but prologue to the present. And in the present, she loved her husband.

  She told him, “I don’t know if I’d rather you’ve been to the doctor and don’t want to tell me what he said or you’re so dense you can’t recognize this as a doctor-worthy ailment.”

  “It’s nothing,” he said, eyes on his plate, though he’d eaten little.

  She said, “There might be a fool in this room, husband, but it isn’t me.”

  And so he told her, came clean, and the news came down like a crushing weight atop her. For a moment she thought he was exaggerating the diagnosis until she remembered that this was Frank, who seemed never to have exaggerated a thing in his life. Understated everything, that man.

  “You’ll get whatever you need. Second opinions. These doctors aren’t gods. They don’t know everything. And you’ll get all the treatments.”

  “Treatments,” he said.

  “Don’t, Frank. Don’t give me the stoic business. None of that cowboy shit. This isn’t just about you.”

  “And yet they’re my lungs.”

  “And they’re inside my husband. Riley’s father. The twins’ grandpa. This is what we pay insurance for. And if they fuck us over, we’ll sell the horses. We’ll sell the barn.”

  “We’re not selling the barn.”

  “And I’m not losing you. Not for nothing. And you’re done with those cigarettes right now. I can’t believe you’ve still been at that. You’ll get on the treatments. Whatever the doctors say. I’ll take over your students. That way you know you’ll get them back when you’re better. You’ll rest. I don’t care. Jesus Christ, Frank, how could you not tell me? How could you not let me help you?”

  He took a drink of water, said, “Okay. But I’m having one last smoke.” He got up and headed to the door. Lena watched him through the window, burning his Marlboro down to the filter and eyeing the darkened barn across the way.

  They decided not to tell any of their friends or business acquaintances until they understood the prognosis better. And after they’d seen a second doctor, then a third, they continued in secrecy for no other reason than to tell the world would have been to confirm the disease they wanted so badly to deny. They’d set a date to tell Riley, but thanks to Silas, Frank did not make it that long.

  The morning of his death, Frank insisted on driving up to Sebastopol to see a horse, cancer be damned. Lena had argued against the plan, but she had other tasks to handle that day. A pair of stalls had been empty for two months already, and that had taken a toll on their business and budget. Now a couple of potential boarders were set to come by that afternoon to check out the stable. That income was crucial and no disease changed the fact that the feed supplier needed to be paid, along with AT&T, PG&E, and the rest of them.

  The sun still slept below the horizon. Lena was just rising, but Frank had been up for a while, had showered and dressed. He stood silhouetted by the light of the bathroom, his figure distorted further by the sleep lingering in Lena’s eyes. They restated what each already knew, that these boarders would be great for the stable, that the money would relieve certain financial tensions. Then Frank muttered, “All right,” his customary signal that he’d said all he needed to say. Later, as she rode and rode with nothing to do but remember, Lena thought with regret of the banality of the dialogue. She wondered if the particulars of their last exchange would drift from her memory. She supposed that the conversation was still fresh in her mind in part because, despite the horrible event that closely followed it and this journey of hers as a result, she knew that she still needed to fill those stalls. The world does not stop.

  Did Frank’s short time left on the earth change the nature of the crime committed against him? Did it change anything when the murdered man was in the process of dying anyway? She asked herself the question once, at the hospital, just after confirming that her husband was in fact gone, and then decided easily that, no, it didn’t change a goddamn thing.

  ⟱

  She slept the night alone. At dawn she ate a granola bar and drank a small ration of water. Pepper got some June grass in his belly and Lena apologized as she once again set the saddle on hi
s back. She didn’t know how much longer either she or her horse could go on.

  She came upon Highway 101, with its rush of cars, the violence of which Lena seemed to understand in that moment as she never had before. The road curved severely in both directions and she took Pepper north, hoping to find a safer spot to cross. The clouds here by the coast were low and gray as ash. The land and the pavement were wet, so different from the hundreds of miles of dry dirt and brittle brush she’d just navigated.

  Up a ways, she pulled Pepper to a halt. In front of her a hundred yards was an orange VW Bug stopped at the side of the road. A young woman, maybe thirty, with brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, sat propped up against the fender. Lena watched for a moment, then the woman turned her head and spotted Lena and Pepper. She stood up from the side of the car and raised her hand in a shy wave. Lena urged Pepper on up the road.

  Approaching, Lena said, “Trouble?”

  “It just stopped. And my phone’s dead. Do you have one I can borrow? I don’t even know if there’s a signal here.”

  Lena retrieved her phone from a saddlebag and turned it on and held the two sides out gingerly to the woman. She had a narrow face and white, square teeth.

  “Looks like you have some messages,” the woman said.

  Lena said, “I suspected I might.”

  “Not ones you want to hear, I guess?”

  “Not particularly.”

  The woman smiled kindly, said, “I’ll be quick,” and took the phone carefully.

  Lena let Pepper wander the roadside, the horse taking languid, loping steps in no particular direction. She allowed the horse to graze, something she wouldn’t ordinarily do, not with her in the saddle and the bit in his mouth—that kind of permissiveness led to undisciplined horses. But this time, this day, she did not care. She was struck right then, for no reason she could discern, with a blast of grief. The impact centered on her stomach and sent waves thrashing in all directions, numbing her extremities just as it convulsed her heart and made her head light. She set a hand on Pepper’s neck to steady herself. This was not a feeling she’d known four days prior. She remembered being away from Riley for more than a few hours, early on in his childhood. His absence, while often a relief at first, soon manifested itself as a sort of sickness. She’d once described it to Frank as being like a vitamin deficiency—something she felt in her skin, her throat. Something essential missing. But at the same time it felt completely natural, the slow separation of mother and child that would ultimately allow for the perpetuation of the species.

  And she recalled her mother’s passing, which came to her as a great sadness, of course—the greatest sadness she’d ever felt up until then and for a good while after—but it also carried with it a deep gratitude for the years they’d had together. Sandra went fairly quickly, but with time enough for Lena to make peace with the eventuality, and for the two women to talk, for Lena to read her passages from Wordsworth, for them to watch bad television and listen to Marvin Gaye together. Aside from Frank, Lena had never felt as close to anyone in the world. And even with Frank in the mix, there were moments over the years when Lena felt that it might not have been her husband but rather her mother who was the one great love of her life.

  But this—this was altogether different. Frank’s death was a cheat. It was unspeakably unnatural. Frank’s death felt to Lena more like a burst organ, a hemorrhaging, a devastation so internal that no one could see it or understand its impact.

  The woman called, “All done.”

  Lena pulled an annoyed Pepper away from the patch of clover he was tearing at and went back to the VW. She had a sudden flash of the woman who’d given her a ride to the police station that night after the fox hunt, when she had to bail her husband out of jail and when the terrible spiraling war between the Van Loy boys began in earnest. That woman had done Lena a kindness, and she never forgot it. Is that how this young woman here would remember Lena? Oh yeah, she would say to friends a decade later, over drinks, a meal, my car broke down and there was a woman, a woman on a horse, a fucking horse, she came out of nowhere and she let me use her phone. I never even knew her name . . .

  “Another call came in,” the woman said. “I’m sorry. I was on hold and it just rang twice. I was going to tell to you, but then it stopped.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I thought maybe because of the missed-calls thing you wouldn’t mind.”

  “You were right.” Lena took the phone. “Where you headed?”

  The woman leaned back against the car. “Seattle.”

  “That where you live?”

  “Yeah. I just came down to San Francisco to visit my brother. You from around here?”

  “Near San Francisco.”

  “What a city.”

  “I like it.”

  “What are you doing out here? Looks like you’re packed up for a trip.”

  Lena ran her fingers through Pepper’s mane. “I am,” she said.

  “Camping?”

  The woman seemed to be one of those people who concealed nothing, who spoke their minds and asked questions when it was necessary. Of course, this was all in Lena’s imagination. She did not know the woman or what might or might not be lurking inside her head. Lena saw what she wanted to see, and in this woman she saw an honest person. She liked this woman’s face, liked the airiness of her voice, but she felt a tremor of unjustifiable resentment. The woman knew nothing of Lena’s limitless grief. She knew nothing of the decades-long war between Frank and Silas. She knew nothing of what Lena had come all this way to do.

  “I’m tracking down my husband’s murderer,” Lena said.

  The woman stared, waiting for the joke to be revealed.

  Lena continued, “I had a friend with me, but I lost her, so now it’s just me.”

  The woman said, “Your husband was really murdered?”

  “Just a few days ago.”

  “Jesus. I’m sorry. And you know who did it?”

  “I do.”

  “Can’t you just call the cops?”

  “They’re after him too. Got helicopters and everything. The whole bit.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I’m just trying to get there first.”

  “To do what?”

  “Kill him.”

  “That’s what I was scared you were going to say.”

  The woman looked around her and fiddled with the door handle, which seemed to be loose. She said, “I got someone coming out to give me a jump or tow it. I appreciate the use of your phone. But to be honest, I’m pretty freaked out right now and I wouldn’t mind if you moved on.”

  Lena said, “Of course,” and she turned Pepper northward. She got maybe fifty yards before the woman called out, “Hey,” and Lena found her coming up at a jog.

  When she got there, the woman said, “I don’t know if you’re bullshitting me or what, but I’d rather risk looking like an idiot than not say something.” She paused, glanced up at the trees for a moment, as if what she had to say was nested somewhere high. Then she again set her eyes on Lena and said, “You don’t have to do this. You really don’t. If what you said is true, then you’re not thinking right. I’ve lost people—not a husband and not in this kind of way, but I’ve lost people and I know how my thoughts got crazy. You should go home. You should listen to whatever those voicemails are and you should go home.”

  “Maybe I should.”

  An RV rumbled past them, and Lena thought about that old clichéd dream of retiring and hitting the open road. But Lena would not grow old with Frank. This understanding had come to her with regularity over the course of the days since his death. It settled on her consciousness like a bird landing again and again on a high perch. The woman in the VW was well intentioned, and in the abstract, yes, of course Lena should go home, say goodbye to her husband—whatever that meant—and in time attempt to reconstruct something like a life. But in the reality of this moment, she knew she had to continue on.

  Seven
teen

  He thought about little else for a week. He reckoned it was all a ruse, some twisted ploy. Yet at the same time he plotted to get the thing done. He couldn’t keep from it. Sitting in the chair outside his trailer, the chair in which Frank had set his bones just a few nights prior, or riding atop any one of his half-dozen horses—circling the arena, or loping and galloping across the trails cutting across his land—he tried to work out the specifics of a murder. Gun. Knife. Explosives. Poison. Push him off a cliff. Push him off a boat. How the fuck was he supposed to get him on a boat? Make it look like suicide. Make it look random, a robbery. Do it himself. Outsource it. Pin it on some other sorry son of a bitch. Plenty of folks Silas wouldn’t mind getting rid of, as long as he was at it. Other trainers. Stable owners. Fuckers who mistakenly thought they were better than Silas Van Loy.

  He amused himself, took things to extremes, burned the whole goddamn county down, cut the tension, had a laugh, poured another glass.

  Then one night, five, six days after his talk with Frank, Silas ran into Lena. Positively Fourth Street. Maybe seven o’clock, the sun lingering over the western hills, back there settling imperceptibly down toward the Pacific. He’d seen his sister-in-law often that summer, as he always did. Show season. Unavoidable. They were in the same world. But they hadn’t spoken in years, and like a chronic pain, he had long since learned to ignore her and Frank’s presence. But now, in such proximity to her, so soon after Frank’s visit, he was left breathless. There the woman was, happy, or relatively happy, sipping a glass of wine, not knowing that her husband was dying or that he’d enlisted his brother-cum-rival to help him dispense with the ensuing unpleasantries.

  Or perhaps she was in on the whole sham.

  Silas approached from behind, not to sneak up on the woman but—selfishly—to avoid seeing the look of dread and revulsion overtake her face as she saw him and understood that he was coming to her. He could see it well enough in his mind.