Blue Rodeo

by Jo-Ann Mapson

  “That’s a shame. Your son get involved in drugs?”

  She bristled. “Of course not. He’s just away at school. That’s all. I’m keeping the dog. This is all temporary.” She took a bite of the eggs. “I can’t believe you made these so quick. They’re wonderful.”

  He accepted her compliment in silence, watching her eat, noting how she seemed to release the tension of his question with every measured breath. Boarding school meant money or a decent settlement. Temporary could also mean custody battle. But why run all the way to a hole-in-the-wall like Blue Dog? His dog liked her before he brought out the eggs, and eggs were Hope’s weakness, though he preferred them raw. He sat down next to her and felt the distance between them vibrate with interest. “Well,” he said. “Draw a line down the middle and leave half, Margaret. I’m hungry, too.”

  4

  RELUCTANTLY MARGARET HANDED OWEN BACK THE PLATE WITH his half of the omelette—perhaps her newfound appetite came from helping to load the old green pickup truck with flakes of hay, or from watching Owen hotfoot it back to the safety of the truck while a dozen nervous brown horses charged across a field to their belated breakfasts. She could get fat eating like this, but did that matter if there was no one left to stay thin for and food made this comfortable a Band-Aid? Owen Garrett, she noticed, ate his eggs like a gentleman, small bites, chewing with a closed mouth, blotting his lips with a napkin. She loved the painting on the wall inside his house: If someone mined far-off Salvation Armies and found a gallery willing to take a chance, thrift-store art would make a wonderful retrospective.

  “Watch,” he said, and set the plate down on the truck bed, holding a forkful of omelette out toward his three-legged dog. The dog stayed put, mesmerized. Owen set the egg down on the dog’s nose, balancing it on the long snout. For one long minute, it seemed as if the dog’s eyes would cross permanently as he studied that egg.

  “Go on, Hope,” Owen said, and with a quick snapping motion, the egg disappeared into the dog’s mouth and was on the way to his stomach.

  Margaret laughed. “Does he even taste it?”

  “He might catch a whiff on the way down, but I won’t swear to it.”

  “You couldn’t get Echo to do that. She’s the only canine I’ve ever met who actually picks at her food.”

  “That’s rare in a dog.”

  “Tricks are beneath her dignity, I’m afraid. She spends most of her time sleeping in the laundry basket.”

  “Well, don’t write her off yet. We have a lot of down time here in the north when it gets to be winter. Maybe she’ll change. Come November, Hope starts getting a little like a posthole that ain’t been filled up. If food’s available, he’d climb trees to get to it.”

  “You’re selling him short. That dog could go on David Letterman. The only thing mine would do on command is mess on the rug.”

  “Dave Letterman?”

  “You know, that late-night talk-show guy.”

  “Afraid not. Don’t get much chance to watch television when you’re working sheep.”

  “Well, you’re not missing much. But once he had a border collie herd sheep into a New York City taxi.”

  “That I’d have liked to see. Don’t be so hard on your dog, Margaret. She’s got four legs, and she’ll fit in your lap.”

  “How did Hopeful lose his leg again?”

  “Nerve damage when a car clipped him. Cured him of that desire in a hurry. He went around with a limp for a month, then started looking so poor I took him to the vet. Even tried a chiropractor, anything anybody could think of to save it. Look how well he gets on without it, though. Now that’s about his best trick.”

  They were quiet a moment. Margaret considered telling him the story of Echo’s singular accomplishment. But to speak of that, she had to explain about Peter—relive the weeks he lay in the hospital, where he was now, why he wasn’t with her, offer the reasons she’d left California. The last thing she wanted was to revive her tired-out life story with all its disappointing curves and dead ends for a stranger. But it was rude not to make conversation when someone went to the trouble of making you breakfast.

  “Echo’s been in the newspaper.”

  “Which part? Not the Police Log, I hope.”

  She smiled. “No. I think they call it ‘human interest.’ The story even got picked up by the wire service and was syndicated across the country. Her brief fifteen minutes of fame. Not bad for a mutt.”

  “Well, I’ll bite. Fill me in.”

  “It’s the kind of thing that happens once in a lifetime, I guess. There isn’t a day goes by I don’t feel grateful down to my heart. She deserves a medal, really. My son got very ill and lapsed into a coma. For weeks he just lay there, not getting better and no one knew why. After the doctors had pretty much given up, Echo was the one who brought him back.”

  Owen turned to look at her face. No smirk of disbelief, no feigned interest there; he was listening. “Is that so?”

  Saying the words caused the memories to surface in Margaret’s chest. One after another, the pictures of Peter’s illness clicked into view, the accompanying emotions as sharp and astringent as the smell of new paint. The physical therapist rotating his wrists and ankles, for all the good mobile joints did Peter. The IVs in his arms keeping her son hydrated and seminourished, but they hadn’t kept his hair from falling out. Three different monitors spewing out sophisticated information hourly, none of them explaining why this boy slept on so long after his fever was gone. That night at home after surely the longest day ever humanly endured, she lay tossing in her bed. The dog had come down the hallway to her, toenails clicking on the tile floor. Tentatively a tongue licked Margaret’s hand, seeking who it was she should transfer her affection to. Echo, barely out of puppyhood, missed Peter as much as she did. What she’d done by sneaking the dog into Peter’s room inside a straw beach bag she’d bought at Albertson’s had been an act of desperation. She hadn’t taken the time to weigh the ramifications. Screw their rules, the sterile procedures that kept Peter antiseptic but comatose. Stripped of hope, nearly as angry as she was afraid, she’d deposited the dog on Peter’s bed just after dawn. She remembered the dog’s excited squeals of recognition, the tail wagging a hundred miles an hour, almost as if she were saying, “So that’s where you’ve been!” and Peter’s grunts, the vocalizations she no longer got excited over or took for anything more than incidental noise he made in the coma. Then, as the dog nuzzled his face, licked inside his ears, he spoke the first words he’d said in weeks: “Go ’way.”

  On your basic miracle scale, what started out as a three, in the space of a week, worked into the perfect ten. Peter came back. It was so. He was awake and he was with them, but he was never going to be the same. Finally she answered Owen’s question. “Yes.”

  Owen put his right cowboy boot on the rusting chrome bumper of the truck. “Margaret, now, I realize we don’t know each other too well, and you might find it hard to trust a stranger, even one who’s your egg-cooking neighbor, but you can’t just drop a bead of information like that and not follow up. Be fair. This might have to last me until Thursday night.”

  “What happens on Thursday night?”

  “Seven o’clock I’m picking you up for the opening ceremonies of Blue Dog Days.”

  “You are not ‘picking me up.’”

  “Oh yes I am. Might even sweep out my truck if I’m feeling ambitious.”

  “Thanks for the thought, but I’m not much for parties or parades, Owen. I think you’d better take someone else.”

  “You’ll like this. I promise. Folks dress up, turn all out for the Blue Dog. Good food, dancing, even a rodeo.”

  “I gave every dress I had to the Goodwill back in California.”

  “Then wear your bathrobe if you like. People are tolerant in this town.” He picked up the plate and fork and took them into the bunkhouse.

  Margaret followed, lining up all her good reasons for saying no. She stood by the sink as he scrubbed the plate a
nd utensils. With his hat tilted forward, shadowing his face from the thinly bridged nose to the fine whiskers he hadn’t yet had a chance to shave, he was hardly more than a mysterious profile, forearm-deep in sudsy dishwater. She couldn’t go out with this man—not with any man. He filled the frying pan with hot water to let it soak, then he dried his hands on a plain white towel and turned to face her.

  “When are you going to tell me about your son?”

  She looked down at the cement floor, swept so clean it was hard to believe a man who worked with livestock lived here. Atop the scarred pine table sat a blue enamel sugar bowl, its white dunes of sweetness pure and undisturbed. Everything was neatly in place—worn white dishtowel folded over the drawer handle, a deck of Bicycle playing cards stacked next to a pad with a long tally of penciled-in points. On his night table, which doubled as a plastic milk crate turned sideways, there was a battered Larry McMurtry paperback. Next to the book, a pair of wire-frame reading glasses comically magnified half the title. “I can’t talk about all of it.”

  “I’m not asking you to. Tell me a little of what you can talk about.”

  She let out a long breath. There were a thousand miles between this simple room and the PICU floor of the Presbyterian hospital with the piped-in air flooding the ultraclean hallways, but sometimes she could swear it was all only a step away, through the next door into knee-shaking fear. “He got sick overnight. A fever of a hundred and three. The next morning I found him passed out on the bathroom floor. Deeter and I—a family friend—we took him to the hospital. At first they said it was nothing, just a virus. But it wasn’t that simple. The fever went down, but Peter kept on sleeping. My sister…” Her voice grew thick.

  Owen started to move toward her but stopped himself, keeping the distance between them clear and distinct.

  “To make a long story short, I came up with this last-ditch idea that maybe his dog could wake him up. They had…” She cleared her throat, staring down at the droplets of dishwater that had fallen from Owen’s hands to the cement floor. Even if it meant telling the rest of this story through clenched teeth, she was not going to cry. “A special kind of friendship. He rescued her from that junkie outside the health food store, and then…” she crossed her arms and looked out the window toward the truck parked outside, its pale green doors sanded down to primer in places. In her old California neighborhood her neighbors would write down the license plate, call the police, if that car so much as parked on the street. “It was kind of like she rescued him back.”

  “And it worked?”

  “Yes. Not right away, but eventually. We got lucky.”

  Owen whistled.

  Pride and pain trembled inside her. “It seemed like the first good idea I had in about seventeen years.”

  Owen rubbed his stubbled chin, waited a moment. “Had yourself a second one?”

  “Well, I moved here.”

  His deep laughter drew her in. She hadn’t laughed in months, and at first the sound came out harsh with the effort at letting go. Apparently it was this man’s way to chuckle through difficult times and to leave the judgment making to others. With her thumbs she swiped at the tears that had gathered in her eyes.

  Out by the barn, he showed her where he stacked the firewood. “I’ll be cutting another couple of cords the next month or so. If you like, we can split the cost. It should just about cover us if we wear sweaters and don’t overdo the cozy fires.”

  “I’m sure I have enough wood to get me through the winter. There’s a huge pile near the house.”

  He laughed again. “Trust me, that’s not enough to get you through Thanksgiving. I’ll haul a load up in a week or two and stack it near the back porch. You finding the Starr place comfortable?”

  “It’s like stepping back in time forty years. I love the kitchen and the fireplace—those smooth river rocks. I’m only using two rooms upstairs—the bedroom on the west corner and the smaller room for a studio.” Where Mrs. Starr expected to raise her babies. All the babies God never saw fit to give her…. Lulu Mantooth’s words came back to her each time she opened the door.

  “What kind of studio would that be?”

  She blew out a breath. If he didn’t think she was pretentious before, surely this would clinch it. “Someday soon I’m hoping to get up my nerve to start painting again. A long time ago I was…” Halfway decent, she wanted to say, but something stopped her. How could she explain to this cowboy that since then she’d forgotten which end of the brush to dip? That the plan was to dink around with watercolor, gouache, maybe try some acrylic, terms that wouldn’t mean anything to him? “Right now, I’m just filling up sketch pads with scribbling that would shame a kindergartner. Listen, I’d better let you go on to work.”

  His hazel eyes held her fast. The left one, tucked into the scar tissue at the temple, seemed permanently amused. “That’s the thing about work, isn’t it? It’ll be there in five or ten more minutes.” She pulled a tough stalk from a hay bale and dragged it through the packed-earth barn floor, making a jagged line between them. “Draw me something,” he said.

  “I don’t carry my drawing things with me.”

  “Here, in this dirt.”

  She laughed nervously. “In the dirt?”

  “Sure. Just use the stick.”

  What could it hurt—one scuff of her tennis shoe toe and it would be earth again. She drew the outline of his dog. It was pretty terrible. Probably the dog could have done his own portrait with more finesse.

  Owen looked up at her. “Well, that’s…” His voice trailed off as he dropped his bait, trying unsuccessfully to get a compliment to bite. She made it easy on him. “The thing is, I usually use a fine-point stick.”

  He smiled. “I won’t pretend I know anything about art.”

  “Animals are difficult! Everything is when you’ve been out of it as long as I have. I do better on paper, honest. Give me a few months and I’ll try it again.” She added some detail to the ears, a few strokes to indicate hair.

  “That drawing might seem like nothing special to you, but to me the whole thing’s a kind of magic. I can’t hardly manage a stick figure.”

  She backed awkwardly into the barn siding, the rippled metal warm against her back. Behind her bridles and halters jangled, and she threw out her hands to get her balance.

  “Careful now,” Owen said, catching her by the upper arms and steadying her. “Don’t want you to knock yourself out before the powwow.”

  He was still holding on to her, those capable hands holding her steady, his warm flesh against her own. She looked up from scrutinizing her shoes to catch Owen’s friendly smile. He let go, straightened his hat, and looked away, politely giving her time to collect herself. As she regained her footing, she wondered what he was really about, this quiet man living in a bunkhouse off a barn, tending other people’s animals, not having a beer alongside everyone else in the café, making do with ice water and the cheapest items on the menu. Her upper arms retained hot phantom impressions where his hands had been, and she was suddenly aware of him as a man, a sexual being, of their close proximity, their nearest neighbors nearly a mile away across a river. Despite well-intended resolutions, anything might happen. A man could kiss you in an instant.

  Then Hopeful came flying into the barn, knocked over a toolbox, and fled to the top bale in a stack three bales high, leaving a scrabble of footprints in her dirt-drawing.

  “Critics,” she said, breaking the tension. “They’re everywhere.”

  Owen sighed. “That dog’ll choose his moments to go insane.”

  “It’s only dirt. What do you suppose spooked him?”

  “God knows. Sometimes he goes as crazy as a woman’s watch. My friend Joe will tell you it’s because animals aren’t deaf to the rhythms of the earth, and nine out of ten times something’ll happen to prove him right. Big rainstorm, thunderstorm, hail once, size of tennis balls. Hope takes weather personally.”

  Atop the hay bale the dog trembled, his stum
py tail tucked down as low as it could possibly go between his back legs, his pointed ears pinned to his head like wilted leaves of lettuce. “Speaking of dogs, I’d better get back and check on mine.”

  “Thursday night,” Owen said, walking her out into the New Mexico sunshine. “Keep your fingers crossed for good weather. I might even wash the dog and clip all twelve of his toenails.”

  She spent the rest of the morning filling her newsprint pads with struggling sketches—Hopeful begging eggs from the bed of Owen’s pickup, Echo asleep in a pile of clean towels just in from the dryer. Alone beneath the cottonwoods’ soughing branches, she felt at home, but in town she bumped along like a fly caught between panes of glass. No way could she go to Blue Dog Days, whatever they were. When she next looked up, one entire sketch pad was filled, and she kept flipping back to two particular pages, which held drawings that looked suspiciously like their subjects. Afternoon light painted the pine floor the color of clover honey. Her stomach rumbled. It was three-thirty; she’d missed lunch, forgotten to go into town for the quart of milk and the paper towels she needed. She ate cold leftover macaroni and cheese from a Tupperware container while leaning over the kitchen sink. Still she was hungry—something in her just wouldn’t fill up. “Come on,” she called out to the dog, who was hidden in the nest of towels except for the tip of her nose and one ear. “We both need the exercise.”

  They took their time meandering down to the oversize mailbox at the end of the gravel road, exploring rustles in the rabbitbrush, Margaret doing her best to avoid the stickerweed, each intriguing clump suddenly so irresistible to Echo she had to stalk in and pounce on nothing, resulting in a time-out for both as Margaret patiently removed brambles. There was no need to fire up the car to hike a half mile. No reason to hurry. Her mail could have waited until the weekend, but maybe there would be something from Peter. All other personal mail she routed through the attorney in California. She was paying him enough; let him deal with Nori and Ray. When the last brown envelope had arrived, Deeter’s letter and check among the bills, she’d had a bad moment when she felt her resolve to stay anonymous weaken. Maggie, where the hell are you? When I said take off, I didn’t expect you’d take me so literally…. It wasn’t fair to punish the man who once was her friend with silence and distance. But if she spoke to him, Nori would weasel her address out of him and come after her, armed with all her sensible reasons for taking Deeter to bed and accusations coupled with more questions than Margaret could or, at this point, cared to answer.