Chapter Twenty-four
By the time I made it back to the barn with Dumpling’s tack, Archer had driven the Pierce-Arrow to Reno with Emily and Portia at his side. Nina, true to her word, never came back to the ranch at all, flying from the gopher field to the Reno airport, and from there to parts unknown. She did at least call Sam from the airport to let him know she’d send his clothes back, and to ask that her books be shipped to her parents’ house in St. Louis. I don’t know if either of those things came to pass because I was gone from the Flying Leap myself before the next day was out. That’s the end of my story, more or less.
All right, yes. There was a little more. Not much. But some.
It was black dark by the time I got back to the barn. Dinner had long since been served and the dishes washed and put away without any help from me. I went straight to the bunkhouse and fell onto my bed, fully clothed. I felt a hard lump underneath my spine, fished around, and found Nina’s revolver tucked under the spread.
I checked the chambers to make sure the gun was empty. Yes.
I slept.
The next morning I forked the last of the old straw out of Dumpling’s stall and lay down fresh. Then I washed up and went into the house to help with breakfast. Margaret didn’t mention my absence the night before—nobody did—and I didn’t bring it up.
After the breakfast dishes had been taken care of I sat on the kitchen stoop watching buzzards’ distant spiral over the gopher field. Margaret came out, sat beside me, and put an arm around my shoulder. “I know you loved him,” she said. “He was such a good horse.”
I didn’t trust myself to answer that. “I need to borrow the ranch wagon this morning,” I said at last.
“What for?”
“To go into town. I need new boots.”
“Finally.” Margaret hefted herself to her feet. When she returned she was holding the keys to the Chevrolet and Bottom’s battered head. “While you’re at it, please do something with this wretched thing. It gives me the heebie-jeebies. Its eyes have been following me around all morning.”
“What do you want me to do with it?” I asked.
“Your call,” she said. “I trust your judgment.” Then, briefly, she rested her hand on my head in a sort of benediction and went back inside to pluck some chickens.
I pocketed the car keys and cradled that abused and abandoned noggin in my arms while I considered what to do with it. I could have taken it back to the college, but I didn’t like the idea of trying to explain how I came to have it. Leaving the head on the doorstep of the drama department seemed a sad and undignified choice, particularly since it seemed likely they’d take one look at its sorry state and toss it unceremoniously.
So I decided to put it and me out of our misery. I took Bottom’s top out back of the barn and dropped it in the metal barrel we burned trash in. I dug my uncle’s letter out of my pocket, read it over a few more times, and then twisted it into a wick to light the funeral pyre. As I watched the papier-mâché go up in smoke I remember thinking that was the beauty of an old-school cremation, getting a visual of the spirit taking flight. I did get a little ease from that small commemoration of Dumpling’s passing, and with it also, unexpectedly, my parents’.
After I was sure the fire was completely out I drove into Reno. I didn’t have a solid plan laid out. All I knew was that I had to talk to Emily before she got away from me. At the very least I had to know whether Nina had been lying to me, or if I’d been lying to myself.
I lucked upon the Pierce-Arrow parked outside a casino over by the train depot. I realized it was more likely I’d find Archer inside since Emily professed to dislike gambling, but nevertheless I pulled the Chevrolet in alongside the convertible, took a seat on a bench outside the casino, and waited.
Even though it wasn’t time for lunch yet, the joint was packed, its frontage of tall glass doors all thrown open to the sidewalk to let the breeze in and the cigarette smoke and noise out. It was quite the racket: shouts of victory and defeat erupting around gaming tables, bells of slot machines binging, the roulette tables whirring as they spun the little balls that bounced and rattled into slots. My patience was paid off when I saw Emily come out of the bank across the street and walk toward the convertible. She was dressed more conservatively than was usual for her, in a way we used to call “Sunday-go-to-meeting,” in a peachy outfit I’d never seen before plus high-heeled pumps and a purse tucked in at her elbow.
I stood up and called out, “Ahoy, Em.” The words were hardly past my lips when I noticed the envelope she carried, Ward written on it in block letters big enough for me to read from where I stood. I knew for certain then that we were done for.
She’d been digging in the purse for her keys. Her head snapped around when she heard my voice. “Oh. It’s you,” she said. “This is a surprise.” She seemed about as happy to see me as she would have been to find a live scorpion curled up on her pillow. She cast a longing look at her automobile and jingled the car keys in her right hand.
“What you got there?” I asked, gesturing at the envelope, not quite ready to surrender yet.
“This?” she said. She hesitated, then held the packet out to me. “I might as well give it to you now. I was going to drop it by the ranch on our way out of town.”
I didn’t take it. “Where you headed?”
She took a deep breath and then let it go. “San Francisco.”
Even though I knew there was no point, I said, sounding like a broken record, “You know, if you leave Nevada now you’ll have to start divorce proceedings all over again.”
“About that, Ward—” That was as far as she got before I interrupted. Somehow I thought it might hurt less if I came out with it first.
“Let me guess. You’re going back to Archer.”
She didn’t answer, which was an answer.
“You don’t think I’m good enough for you,” I said. My voice cracking just enough to make me wish the earth under me would do the same and swallow me whole.
She pulled herself together. “I never said that.”
“You didn’t have to.”
After a freighted pause Emily said, “We were just pretending, weren’t we? Like actors do in movies.”
“I wasn’t pretending,” I said.
“Sure you were, Ward. Don’t kid yourself. You knew it couldn’t work. What would happen in ten years, when Portia’s your age now, you’re the age I am, and I’m just—old?”
“That wouldn’t matter,” I said. “I’d still love you.”
“If you believe that,” Emily said, “maybe you are as stupid as you look.”
We stared each other down after that, angry, mute, and frozen, for a good long while. We might still be standing there today if a gambler hadn’t shouldered between us in his hurry to get into the casino. Emily remembered herself and the envelope then and thrust it at me. I stepped back and raised my hands over my head so I wouldn’t have to take it. She reached around me and stuffed the envelope into my back pocket. After that she ran for the Pierce-Arrow, climbed into the driver’s seat, and watched me through the windshield while she fumbled the key into the ignition and started the engine. The envelope fell from my pocket and I picked it up. It bulged rectangularly, in a way that could only mean it was full of money.
“Emily,” I said. “I don’t deserve this.”
“Sure you do,” she said, and threw the car into gear. “You gave good service. It’s your tip.” She pressed down on the gas without checking her rearview mirror and very nearly backed into a passing taxi. Then she was gone.
I slumped onto the bench and opened the envelope. A sheaf of hundred-dollar bills, a handful of twenties. Probably about the same fraction of her net worth as the buffalo nickel I’d given the gangly kid at the airport weeks earlier. At the bottom of all that I saw my mother’s wedding band. I shoved the cash into my pocket to get it out of the way and shook the ring out onto my palm. There was something off about it. Miss Pam’s wedding band had bee
n more rose-gold, like the one you’re wearing, whereas this one was a Goldilocks yellow. Though its surface had the tiny nicks and scratches that come with years of wear, same as my mother’s, it didn’t have the inscription running around its inside: HSB to PKH, 3/12/12. I’d be lost without you.
This wasn’t Miss Pam’s ring.
I’ll tell you how I felt about that. I was irate, imagining Emily in such a rush to get away from me and Reno that she confused the ring she’d taken from me with the one Archer had given her.
Back at the ranch I informed Max that I’d just learned my parents were unwell and not expected to recover so I had to leave for Tennessee immediately. A believable white lie in the days before widespread vaccinations, when whole families might be wiped out over the course of a few days by some plague or another. My excuse was not exactly true but true enough. I hadn’t known my parents were dead for very long and there wasn’t much likelihood of them getting any less dead than they were.
Before I left that afternoon Margaret fixed a sandwich for me to eat on the train. Salami and cheese, my favorite. I must have looked more distressed than grateful when she handed me that waxed-paper bundle, because she took my chin between her thumb and finger for the last time ever. “Oh, honey,” she said. “Oh, my boy, my sweetheart, my Ward, I’m so sorry. Good luck to you.” Then she kissed me on the forehead and sent me packing.
Sam drove me to Reno. He was headed to Ted Baker’s livery stable to engage an understudy for Dumpling until he and Max acquired the gelding’s permanent replacement. No animal was in the class with the old boy, of course, but they’d find a pale imitation pretty easily and for very little money. A horse you might have gotten hung for stealing fifty years earlier was all but being given away in 1938.
At the train station Sam got out of the Chevrolet long enough to hug my neck. “I will miss you, friend,” he said. “Won’t be the same round here without you.”
“I expect Max and Margaret will replace me right quick,” I said.
“Can’t be did,” Sam said. “Simply cannot be did.”
I never saw Sam again. That man was a prince. An oasis in the desert. Ever since, I’ve always tried to be as calm and philosophical and as accepting of all comers as my buddy on the ranch. Margaret told me once she and Max had hired Sam not so much for his looks as for the answer he gave when they asked him to list his skills. “Well,” he said, “I can fix most anything you got that’s broke.” If fixing broken things isn’t the very definition of doctoring, I don’t know what is.
So you see what I mean about me not taking anything for the lessons I learned working at the ranch. I’m not sure I would have amounted to a hill of beans if I hadn’t done my time there first.
When I’d arrived in Reno years earlier, I’d toted my few civilian clothes in an old suitcase I’d bought at a thrift store over in Ripley before setting out for my job at the Boulder Dam. The day I left I packed my cowboy duds in that same bag and ditched the thing in the men’s room at the train depot. I figured whoever found it would have better use for dungarees than I did. After I left I swore I’d never wear a pair of blue jeans again. Back when everybody and his dog started wearing denim in the 1960s, the nurse who worked in my office, Hannah—yes, Hannah of Hannah and Judy, those tough little girls who rode their pony bareback all over Whistler—had tried to talk me into buying myself a pair. I would have none of that. When she asked what I had against blue jeans I drew myself upright and said, “I hate the way dungarees squeeze all the blood out of my lower half every time I sit down.” Yes, yes, it was a joke of sorts. As you can see, with age I went to bone rather than to flesh. The Zeppelin was right about that, you know. Favoring five pounds of potatoes shifting around inside a rumpled ten-pound sack does make a person look older.
At the train depot that day in Reno I removed a few things from the bag before I abandoned it. Margaret’s sandwich. My malodorous boots. Nina’s gun. My copy of your photograph. I left the sandwich I had no stomach for on a bench in the waiting room where I hoped somebody hungry would find it. The cowboy boots I dropped into a garbage can outside the station where anybody who wanted them could help themselves but at the same time be forewarned about their sad condition. After that I wandered over to the Virginia Street Bridge and threw the revolver into the river, along with the wedding band that wasn’t Miss Pam’s.
I stood there on the Bridge of Sighs for what felt like a long time after that, staring at my copy of that photograph of yours and feeling like God’s own fool. Finally I folded the photo in half, in a way I hoped would separate me cleanly from Emily while leaving Margaret and Sam and Max and Nina in the picture with me. But see how close Emily is snuggled up here? When I tore the thing along the fold my face came away with the wrong half of the photo. So I ripped the whole thing to shreds, tossed it over the railing and watched the pieces bob down that glittering, chuckling stream until they sank and disappeared.
Emily’s tip I kept.
Chapter Twenty-five
I arrived in Whistler from Nevada rumpled, exhausted, and heartsick, but despite that I walked straight from the train depot to the cemetery.
At first I was distressed because I couldn’t find a headstone with my parents’ names on it. Finally it dawned on me that the fresh double mound without an inscribed slab must have belonged to them. I got the confirmation I needed from the little metal marker with a typed label stuck into the ground at its head. Also from a woman roughly Nina’s age, planting a rosebush alongside a headstone a few graves away.
“Ward Bennett,” she said. “That’s you, isn’t it? Look how grown up you are! I wouldn’t have recognized you if you weren’t the spitting image of your sweet father. Tell me, how is school?”
“School?” I asked.
“Aren’t you in medical school?”
“Oh,” I said. “No. I’m taking a break from school right now.”
She brushed her hands on the seat of her britches and held one out to me. “I’m Hannah Gretz. You probably don’t remember me. I think you were in the first grade when I was in the fifth. I came down from Memphis for the day—I’m a nurse at St. Joseph’s over there now—to plant this bush for Mama. I rooted it from a rose at our old house. The people who bought the place were kind enough to let me take a cutting.”
“Your mother died?” I asked. “I’m sorry.” I could see that grass had grown over her grave and the mound of it had flattened, so it couldn’t have been very recently.
“So am I,” she said, her face reddening and her eyes filling a little, as if it had only just happened and she could hardly keep it together. She fanned herself and expelled a puff of breath. “I can’t get used to it,” she said. “She’s been gone awhile now, but I still miss her every day.”
I didn’t press her for further details. The last thing I wanted was to get both of us tuned up to cry. “How’s your sister Judy?” I asked. “Is she still in Whistler?”
Hannah laughed. “Heck, no. Judy couldn’t wait to get out. Ran off to Hollywood to be a movie star.”
“How’s that going for her?” I asked.
“Who knows?” she said. “I haven’t seen her in any movies yet. Have you?”
Somehow I managed not to come apart when Hannah offered me her condolences for my own losses as she walked me to Schaefer’s Funeral Home on her way to the depot to catch her train to Memphis. That’s one of the nice things about small towns that were laid out before the automobile: All the most important places are within shouting distance of each other. Train station to town square, church to pool hall, hospital to cemetery. Many years later, when I moved back to Whistler after my medical residency and Hannah came to work for me, she found us office space just across the street from the hospital, a handy location tucked between a grocery store and the funeral home and just down the street from Whistler’s graveyard. One-stop shopping, we used to say. If a patient died on us, we could borrow a grocery cart from the store and wheel the deceased to the mortuary, thereby saving
the family the twenty bucks the ambulance would charge to transport the body half a block.
That day walking back from the cemetery to Schaefer’s, Hannah explained that it was normal for a grave to be marked the way my parents’ was until the headstone got delivered. It had taken something like six months for her mother’s to be carved and placed after she had ordered it. “You’d think the thing was made of gold, it cost so much,” she said. “I made payments on it for years. It must have been nice not to have to pay over time for your parents’ headstone, like you were buying them a Frigidaire.”
She thought the Bennetts were still rich, I realized. I didn’t see how this could be possible. “Remind me how long ago you left Whistler?” I asked, as casually as I was able.
“I left before Mama died,” she said. “That was, let me see, coming up on six years ago now, so I’ve been gone for seven. Judy left for California the year before. I should have realized Mama was sick, but I was pretty hot to get out of here myself. I didn’t come to visit near as often as I should have. I’ve had such a hard time letting go of how guilty that makes me feel.”
I counted back in my head and realized I’d been at the Boulder Dam by the time Hannah’s mother shuffled off the coil. “I was away when your mother died,” I said. “Nobody told me.”
Hannah shrugged. “Mama didn’t exactly run in the same circles your people did. Even though my mother and your mama were related. Third cousins twice removed. My mother’s maiden name was Horn.”
“I had no idea,” I said.
“I bet not,” Hannah said. “I believe among the relatives my father was considered a disappointment.”
“I wish I’d known we were cousins,” I said, even as I admired her mother for resisting the urge to gossip with her about how her snooty third cousin twice removed had fallen on hard times. “Think of all the fun we missed when we were children.”
Better Luck Next Time Page 21
