by Clark Hays
“Do you find me so uninteresting?” She rested her chin on the back of her hand.
“No. Nothing like that.”
“They’re shy,” Desard mimicked in a falsetto, turning back around to rejoin the attempted conversation. “New recruits, my dear.”
Elita meticulously stacked five sugar packets atop one another and pinched a corner between two carefully lacquered nails, peeling the ends away. She dumped the contents into her coffee and stirred, her spoon clinking against the sides of the cup, the only sound in the otherwise deserted diner. “So, how old are you?”
“I’m, uh seventy,” one said.
“And you?” Her gaze rested on the quieter of the two near mutes.
“Eighty-eight.”
“Why, you’re just children.”
“Told you so,” Desard said.
“Tell me, I’m just dying to know,” Elita said. “Why did Julius turn you? You obviously must have some redeeming qualities. Did you spend time in jail? Kill someone, perhaps? Rape? Telemarketing scam? Oh, never mind, I’m sure Julius had his reasons.” She bit her bottom lip gently. “I do love younger men.”
Desard rolled his eyes and his thin shoulders shook with mirthless laughter. “It’s so good to know that there are eternals in life, such as your insatiability. May I make a suggestion? Instead of catering to it just now, perhaps we should turn our attention toward finding our charge and getting out of the Middle Ages as quickly as possible.” He swept his hand at the window and the emptiness behind it.
“So practical, Desard. Always so practical.” She sat her empty cup down and regarded it impatiently for thirty seconds. “And practical is so boring. Oh, very well, let’s put our heads together.” She looked up, “What’s this?”
A group of three cowboys entered, obviously suffering from the influence of alcohol. They stopped in the doorway, shaking rain from their hats. At the sight of Elita, they bumped together and stared openmouthed at her slender legs crossed at the knee, the expanse of creamy skin revealed by her sleeveless shirt and the ruby glow of her pursed lips.
“Goddamn,” one of them whispered, “look at her.” They stumbled their way to a table across the room, arguing about who had to sit on the inside, thereby losing the view.
“What are the odds that one of those gentlemen knows our mysterious Tucker?” Elita asked.
“In this town, judging by the limited amount of available women,” Desard said, flashing an eye toward Hazel, “chances are they’re all related to him.”
She traced the tip of her tongue around the edge of her lips and stood, sniffing across at the still-riveted cowboys. “Oh, I adore those hats.”
“Yippi-Ki-Yay,” Desard whispered under his breath as Elita walked over to the other table.
SEVEN
The next morning, I woke at sunrise and sat in the doorway watching the sun come up with one eye and watching Lizzie sleep with the other.
Pretty soon I got bored thinking about how peaceful she looked and how beautiful and all that sort of thing so I put on some coffee as loudly as possible and a pot of oatmeal and laid some bread down to toast on the stove top. Eventually, between the noise and the smell of food, she opened her eyes. It was amazing to me how someone who looked like an angel asleep could wake so damn cranky, but after a cup of coffee and a smoke she was almost human. I just kept smiling and didn’t let on that half the day was already wasted, although I might have mentioned it in the most offhand way, to which she reminded me that we were here to relax and to forget about the bad things happening around her.
After breakfast, I generously invited her to take a splash with me in the creek, which I cautioned might be cool but should feel quite invigorating. I went first, and as it turned out it was so invigorating that my testicles damn near shrank away to nothing, but I didn’t let on or holler out and told her it was just fine and to come on in, which she did with a jump and quickly found out the lie.
She let out a blood-curdling shriek and sprinted buck naked for the house, narrowly missing Dad’s truck as he clattered up over the hill. If she was embarrassed, she chose not to show it, just kept on running until she hit the cabin and slammed the door closed behind her.
Dad got out and hitched up his belt. “Bet that water’s cold,” he said.
I pulled on my pants and boots and nodded. “Yep. What the hell are you doing up here?”
“Tucker, I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” he said, “but your trailer burned down.”
“What? Are you sure?”
“I think I know what a burnt trailer looks like.”
“Everything?” I asked, and he nodded. “Way it was raining up here last night, hard to think of anything burning,” I said.
“That’s the curious thing about it,” Dad said. “Went up like a firework stand even in that downpour.” He hitched his pants up. “I wish to hell you’d get yourself a cell phone. Would’ve saved me a long drive.”
“Sorry things are so inconvenient for you right now,” I said as we walked to the cabin. “Besides, it’s good for you to get out of the house.”
We found Lizzie inside, fully dressed, wrapped in a blanket and sitting by the fire holding a cup of coffee.
She looked at me hard. “You said it wasn’t cold. Jump in, you said. Invigorating, you said.”
“Tucker always did have a strange sense of humor,” Dad said, pouring himself a cup of coffee as I pulled on a flannel shirt.
“I wonder who I got that from?” I asked.
“Your mom, likely.” He looked at Lizzie. “Tucker’s trailer burned down.”
“What?” Lizzie asked.
“Am I that hard to understand? It burned down. Ain’t nothing left. Coffee’s a tad bitter.”
“That’s the only coffee I got. Did Roy come out?” Roy was the fire chief in LonePine. He was also the brand inspector, justice of the peace and sold vitamins mail order. Dad nodded.
“What’d he say?” I asked.
“He said it looked like your trailer burned down.”
Lizzie snorted.
“I figured that much. Did he say what might have caused it?”
“Probably the wiring,” Dad said. “I never did trust that wiring.”
“Dad, for Chrissakes, you wired my trailer.”
“I know, and I never did trust it.” He put his cup down. “I gotta head back down.”
“I hate to belabor the obvious, but all my clothes?” Lizzie asked.
“Gone.” He stopped at the door. “But if it’s worth anything, you look fine without ’em.” She blushed.
“I reckon we’ll stay up here another night,” I called after him. “Head back down tomorrow. Maybe run over to Jackson and get Lizzie some stuff. Can we stay with you?”
“I guess,” he said, without looking back.
“You guess? Where else would we stay?”
“At the Sleep-O-Rama, I reckon,” Dad said.
“You said I could stay with you any time I wanted.”
“That was before you didn’t have no place to stay.”
I started to say something else, but he raised his hand. “Forget it. Stay with me. What’s family for?” He climbed in his truck and hollered through the window “If I ain’t home, I’ll leave the door unlocked.”
We watched him pull out of sight. “I’m really sorry about your stuff,” I said to Lizzie.
“They’re just clothes. I can get more.”
“Well, if it means anything, you look better in jeans and one of my shirts than in that drugstore cowgirl getup you had last time.”
“Cut me a little slack, I’d never been to Wyoming,” she said. “I’m learning. Sorry about your trailer, though.”
“I can get another.”
“I don’t suppose you have insurance?”
I just smiled. “Come on, let’s go for a ride.”
We walked down to the corral and I filled up a bucket of oats and handed it to her. She looked at it and back at me. “I told you already I don�
��t eat breakfast.”
“It’s for the horses,” I said, leaning on the fence and giving a whistle. “Get on in there and catch them.”
One of the simplest pleasures in life is watching horses come in for a treat. Even though they know they’re about to get ridden, the call of the oats cannot be resisted. Even Snort, wiser than most horses I know, is still an absolute fool when it comes to the stuff. With Lizzie, as usual, he first played hard to get, rolling his eyes and stamping his feet and skittering this way and that, but by the third whistle he came galloping up in a cloud of frosty breath and appetite, with Dakota close behind him. He thrust his head into the bucket so hard it almost fell out of Lizzie’s hands, but she grabbed on strong and propped it on her knee, laughing.
“Easy, Snort, let Dakota in too,” she said, pushing on his forehead.
He stepped back slobbering and chomping, oats falling out of his lips, as Dakota took her turn.
It was a peaceful sight watching that, especially after the run of bad luck we’d been having. “Don’t forget, you’re supposed to be catching them,” I said, slipping her some twine over the fence.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” she asked
“Catch them around the neck.”
She looped one piece over Dakota and passed her to me, then caught Snort and set the bucket down. He jerked his head up and back and the twine slipped free. Disappointment clouded her face as he backed up a step, but I caught his eye and shook my head. He was so ashamed that he caused Lizzie any sort of discomfort that he stepped back up, still dangling the string around his neck to let her fasten it around him.
“What a good boy,” she said, stroking his neck, and he lifted his head over her to grin broadly at me. I gave him a nod of approval.
I cinched the saddles on and Lizzie groaned as her sore ass hit the leather. We rode up into the mountains, into the rough country where just being a tree was a struggle. It was cold up high so we were in thick jackets and leaned heavily on the warmth of the horses and the heat they gave off. Maybe it was the thin mountain air or the hunger I’d worked up from the ride, or maybe it was that she looked so damn beautiful and vulnerable perched on top of Dakota and looking solemnly out across the bony backs of the mountain peaks. Whatever it was I nudged Snort up close and took Lizzie’s hand. She smiled and looked out into the emptiness below.
“My God, it’s beautiful up here,” she said. “All this granite and solitude.” She swept her free hand about us. “Reminds me of the church I used to go to with my mother. The Church of the Holy Trinity. It was where my father’s funeral was. I still go there. It’s so quiet, so serene. It makes me feel like now, like I’m up high somewhere looking down.”
Her words trailed off and it was then, listening to her, that those words which I’d found so hard to say before came right to me, and I realized they had been there all along. Not in my brain, but instead laying low in my heart, and now they came out of their own volition. “Listen, Lizzie. Look at me a minute, you need to know something. I love you.”
“I know,” she said. She sat silent in the saddle and looked down below. Finally she twisted around in the saddle. “What does that mean to you?”
That threw me for a loop. I hadn’t never really thought about it that much. I always figured that love was just love, easy enough to recognize as such and what else needed to be said? “I don’t exactly know. A longing, I suspect. A longing that don’t never stop, even after you get what you want.”
“Like maybe the way you love this place?” she said.
“Yeah, though I reckon I’ve taken it for granted. But if I ever had to leave, I’d still love it.”
“And that’s the way you feel about me?”
“Yeah.” That didn’t seem like quite enough so I added, “Now that I have you here, I can’t imagine you ever leaving, but when you do, I still, I don’t know.”
“Finish it,” she demanded.
“It’s just that I don’t think I’d ever get tired of being with you.”
I took her hand and squeezed it and she squeezed back, and even though we was both wearing gloves it was like I could feel her heart beating all the way through. There wasn’t much else to say, so I nudged Snort around and started back, and heard her do the same to Dakota.
We rode in silence, other than an occasional “watch out for that rock” or “mind that branch.” Occasionally, I’d twist around to look, just marveling at the sight of her in that oversized jacket with her hair blowing in the wind, all full of the setting sun and looking like someone from the movies.
EIGHT
That night we spent in the cabin, talked out from not saying nothing all afternoon. It got colder and a wind came up from the valley, bringing storm clouds full of lightning and grumbling thunder.
“Looks like rain,” I said as the first deluge hit like someone was standing outside throwing buckets of water at the window. Lightning lit up the dark and flashed in her eyes, revealing a love like I hadn’t never believed in before but now seemed so natural. She smiled and, though it disappeared quickly into the shadows, I knew she was seeing the same thing as I was. Even in the dark I could feel that smile.
It was like her whole body was smiling and it got deep inside me and grew longer and harder and warmer as I pulled her close and felt the softness of her pressing into my chest, traced the curve of her hips and left my hands resting on either side of her waist. Her breath was sweet and she ran her fingers through what was left of my hair, twining it this way and that.
In the roar of it, in the flash and crackle, we got a little lost in ourselves. We made love, coming together and hanging like the last leaf on a tree in the darkness. It was a love of no little sadness, a love that had more to do with longing and the realization that it is not better to be alone, not stronger, nor freer, just more alone. That in fact we did need someone, desperately, daily, to make life even worth living at all. And that everything up to this point had been worthless, and between the two of us there had been a whole mess of worthless living.
Afterwards, exhausted, I fought the urge to sleep as it is a well-known fact women like to talk afterwards. “Goddamn,” I said at last.
“What?” she asked sweetly.
“Nothing. Just goddamn.” And then I might have dozed off.
Rex sensed them first.
I hadn’t been asleep for all that very long when he got up, agitated, and stood by the door growling, his hackles up.
Lizzie stirred and mumbled as he let out a bark. “What is it, Tucker?”
“Probably nothing. Coyotes, I reckon. Rex, come lay down.” His growls got deeper and he started to bark. “All right, all right. I’m up. Go on out there if you want.” I held the door open with one hand. Rain was striking so hard it bounced and the air was thick with it. Rex decided he didn’t want out so bad after all but backed up instead, barking furiously. Lizzie sat up and clutched the blanket around her.
“I can’t see nothing,” I said, peering out, then saw something dark slip sideways from shadow to deeper shadow down by the corral. I banged the door shut. “There’s something out there.”
“What?” Her eyes were wide and dark.
“Can’t tell. By the way Rex is acting it could be a bear.” It sounded reassuring, but no bear was as tall and skinny as what I thought I’d seen moving. Of course in that downpour, it could’ve been an elephant dancing a jig and I wouldn’t have seen it clear.
“Sit tight. I better go take a look.”
I pulled on my pants, stuck my feet down into my boots without socks and pulled on my battered old Stetson. Then I shouldered on my jacket and rummaged around in the saddlebags until I found my Colt python, a .357 with rosewood handles.
Lizzie watched wide-eyed from the bed as I checked the cylinder to make sure it was loaded. “Do you really think that’s necessary?” she asked.
“Couldn’t hurt,” I said, slipping the gun into my waistband.
“Be careful.”
I n
odded. “Come on, Rex.” Reluctantly, he entered the downpour in front of me, hackles high and casting his head about. It was raining so hard I couldn’t see two feet in front of me and followed Rex, trying to keep my balance in the mud. The wind was howling, pushing the trees sideways and eventually we stopped and stood, me looking at him and him looking nervously back at me.
“What is it, you dumb dog?” I hollered at him, his unease settling down in me far enough to warrant pulling the pistol out and thumbing the hammer back. We slipped and staggered our way toward the creek so I could check on the horses. Lightning flashed through the darkness and a shadow broke away from the fence.
“What the hell?” I broke into a run with Rex howling beside me. I couldn’t see Snort or Dakota, though I could barely make out my own hand in front of me. I unlatched the gate and stepped through, whistling for Snort, the wind carrying it away before it even left my lips. Rain was streaming down my face and I was cursing it, the darkness and Snort for not answering, when I tripped over something hard like a log and went sprawling down to my knees.
Another flash of lightning tore across the sky and, with its brief illumination, I found myself looking right into the wide-open eyes of Snort, laid out stiff and dead. It was his foreleg I’d fallen over and his neck was dark and open where something had savaged the flesh away.
By the time thunder cracked behind the lightning, I was already up and running for the cabin, screaming at the top of my lungs for Lizzie to for God’s sake lock the door, and then a man was standing before me where a moment before had been only rain.
He was soaked through, but smiling a cold and toothy smile. Rex lunged insane at him and I never even hesitated, just fired point blank into his chest, twice and twice again. The muzzle blast lit up his thin face and he staggered and went down to one knee, his bony hand spread across the wounds as I lunged past.
But then he reached out and clamped his hand around my arm, spinning me back as easily as a child. He was still smiling and my mouth was hanging slack at the sight of this man with four holes through him now standing. He hit me so hard it took a second or two to realize how hurt I was and that blood was streaming from my nose and eyes and that I was falling backwards. I lay in the mud, ears ringing, vaguely aware that there were more people around me and also that I had lost the pistol and that Rex was yelping in pain.
