by Ron Hevener
Juanita stood there, waiting for him. Trusting him. “Set me free,” she seemed to think to him… “It’s biting my leg.”
Out of breath and witnessing the sight ahead, Arden, Sarah and Kenny’s mother stopped halfway across the meadow. “Let him go,” Arden said, holding back Kenny’s mother.
“He’s not scared,” she said. “Look at him. He’s thrilled. My boy’s thrilled!”
Sarah, knowing how little any of us really know what we can do sometimes, only smiled. Kenny had proven himself. He had faced his fear and she knew he would be back for more lessons. Like the saying goes, wild horses couldn’t stop him now.
And so it went for the rest of the day’s lessons, never knowing who was teaching who, or what anybody was really supposed to learn. Arden was right. Teaching was an adventure.
Their lessons finally over, the parking lot was empty now, except for his station wagon and Sarah’s rusty, green pickup with a few hay bales in back. She always helped herself to a few bales on weekends like this; it was just a perk for the kind of work they both knew probably wouldn’t make her a millionaire. She was a great kid, but unless she broke out of this, she’d never get anywhere. He’d go to the barn now. She’d have the gelding tacked up and ready to ride. Looking at the stack of late notices from bill collectors piling up on his desk, he finished his grape juice and didn’t feel so brave as he went outside to the barn.
“How’s he look?” Sarah asked, hopping into the saddle and breaking his train of thought.
Arden nodded. The horse looked good and so did she.
She laughed knowingly and trotted for a while before pulling up beside him, asking, “So, what do you really think?”
“I think…if we get him to the Mason-Dixon show, we might get an offer,” he said.
“Don’t even say that, Arden,” she countered. “He’s our best horse.”
Thinking of the feed bill in his pocket, he said, “We might not have a choice. And even then, it probably won’t be enough.”
She went blank. What was he talking about?
“Sarah” he confessed. “I don’t know if I can hang on to this place.”
“But…she hardly knew what to say. “Things are picking up. We have all the students we can handle.”
“I know,” he said. “But everybody’s after me. The feed store. Phone. The vet. Once you get behind and can’t pay your bills, there ain’t no secrets in a town like this.” The curtain was closing before the show was over and winter was coming fast. Was there time to do anything? Could they get more students? Sell off part of the farm? He had thought of everything. How can you do anything in time when the wolves are snapping at your door?
Sarah’s arms went numb. She started getting off the horse and her face showed everything.
“Back in that saddle,” Arden said to her. “We don’t give up around here. You finish working that horse. You’re gonna ride him in the Hunter class and you’re gonna make him a champion, Sarah. You have to. Let me worry about this other stuff.” Let me take care of the wolves.
Evening was in the air as he kissed Sarah good-night and she got into the old pickup truck taking her into an uncertain future. “I snitched a couple from the barn,” she said, explaining the hay bales in the truck bed. “For my goats.”
“I know,” he said, kissing her more. “I think I’m one of ’em. Only a whole lot older! Wanna pull my beard? I’ll eat anything, you know.” She had been his since she was sixteen and he hoped it would never end, he thought, slightly distracted by another car driving past.
Sarah noticed, too. “You know, that makes twelve?” she said. “I’ve seen them before around here, too.”
“Maybe they’re watching us,” he teased in a low, sexy voice. “Those cars look like money,” he said. “Maybe it’s mafia. And they’re comin’ to get ya!”
“See you tomorrow,” she smiled, kissing him one more time and pinching his nipple before she drove off.
There’s a saying about “roads less traveled,” but its meaning didn’t apply to the dirt road Arden lived on—or to his life, for that matter. Arden knew where the cars were going. Just like they did every month or so, they were headed for the abandoned Fenstamacher place a few miles down the road. Just like they had done ever since the night he caught Ezra Hoover changing the destiny of everybody he knew.
Whether it was the nipple pinch or the fancy cars that gave him the idea now, it didn’t matter. If destiny had been changed once, he reasoned, why couldn’t it happen twice?
Maybe it was time for him to see Ezra Hoover again.
That night, hiding in the boxwood bushes and shadows outside the old, stone Fenstamacher house like he had done before—and so many times since—Arden looked through the window once more. Only this time, maybe because the light was different somehow, or a cloud drifted past the moon in just the right way; maybe even because rules have a way of changing and even prices for silence become too high, what he saw didn’t matter.
*
Like a lot of people in those days, Jake Zimmerman with his eight kids didn’t know he needed a lawyer. What he needed—and what he’d do anything for—was a farm. The inconvenient fact that somebody else already owned the land he wanted didn’t make much difference to Jake, who, as the father of all those kids knew time has a way of changing things. For now, he reasoned, the rotting tenant house would allow him to keep his hand on the place while he and the boys did the farming, and a few side jobs to make extra money. His wife, Sadie, and the girls could sew buttons and patch trousers. Money was always short, but it was short for everybody, and when a hard-working man wants something, that’s exactly what most people think he should have.
“What property are you looking at?” Ezra wanted to know, as he scanned the shabby loan application.
“Miller’s.”
Ezra put down his pen and paused. Without looking at the man’s face, he said, “I didn’t know he was selling the farm.”
“He don’t, either,” came the reply with a laugh. “But from what they say around town, it won’t be long.”
“Oh?” Ezra asked. “Why is that?”
“You should know,” Jake said, holding his hat in both hands and rocking forward. “You know what everybody owes in this town. And what they don’t have to work with.” For the first time, Ezra noticed tobacco stains at Jake’s mouth.
He could act like he didn’t know the farm, but he did.
He could act like he didn’t know Arden Miller, but he did.
He could act like his stomach wasn’t burping a thousand times a minute right now, but it was.
“Why did the loan manager send you to my office?” Ezra asked.
“I asked her to,” Jake said, staring in a way that made Ezra uneasy.
“OK,” Ezra said, deciding to treat this like an application the regular loan officer couldn’t finish. “Well, what are you putting down?” he heard himself saying, in a force of habit from so many such interviews he had given on his tangled journey to president.
“Collateral.” It was a big word for a man like Jake, but showed he was determined to be business-like. “What the hell for?” the man laughed. “You know Miller can’t pay his bills. I’m the one who does his farming. I should know. I know what he makes and I know he don’t bring in near what it takes to pay for everything.” The look on Jake’s face was…almost…accusing. “Look,” he said, trying to appear modest when everything about him screamed of distain. “I’m just an average man,” he said. “Tryin’ to make a livin’. Every time I start gettin’ somewhere, along comes a war. Or a doctor bill. Or, somethin’ breaks down and I got to pull money out of my ass and fix it. I ain’t getting’ any younger, Mr.…” he wasn’t sure what to say and decided on “Hoover.” He went on. “Who the hell can buy anything right now, anyhow? The bank’s stuck with paper an’ all it can do is wipe its ass. Same as everybody else.”
He’s leading up to something, Ezra told himself. “Collateral helps,” he decided to say. �
��It puts a little skin in the game.”
“Skin!” Jake laughed. “Well, I don’t know about skin. Except it covers a hell of a lot of shit.” Was he delighting in this profanity and crudeness, Ezra wondered? “But I could throw in some old rifles. Sadie’s got an old clock. She’d give it up for this,” he decided without asking. “An’ we always got the produce stand at market every Tuesday.”
“Where you sell what you raise on Arden Miller’s farm,” Ezra said, challenging him.
“Cash,” Jake said, looking directly at Ezra when he said it. “An’…if you or the bank got any odd jobs, me an’ the boys could do?”
“Like what?” Ezra said, not liking the feeling in the room now.
“Like…maybe what Arden’s been doin’ all this time to keep you guys from takin’ his farm.” Was that an accusation in the man’s eyes? A question? Or, just a guess.
“I don’t think I follow…” Ezra said, testing him, and glancing at the door. Should he call his secretary for coffee? He looked at his watch instead.
Jake Zimmerman wouldn’t be pushed by something so small as looking at a watch. “Sure you do,” he pushed. “Me an’ the boys could probably get it out of Miller ourselves. But I don’t have to do that…to know he got somethin’ on you.” He went quiet now, like a rattle snake waiting for a stupid chicken to come along.
“What’s your point, friend?” Ezra said.
“Nothin’,” Jake said, growing more sure of himself by the minute. “I just think…Miller knows somethin’. Or, maybe…you know somethin’. Or, somebody you know…maybe…did somethin’. I can smell these things. I’m out there, plantin’ corn and sellin’ apples from that old orchard of his. An’ I can smell it. What I’m doin’ don’t come nowheres near enough to pay for all them horses he’s got and a mortgage, too. It never did.”
“Well, like we’re talking here,” Ezra said, “that depends on how big his down payment was, doesn’t it?” Ezra said, looking Jake in the eye.
Jake straightened up and didn’t say anything. But he was sure now. “Must have been a mighty big down payment,” he said.
In this town, Ezra knew everybody. He knew their hopes, their dreams and their chances of getting there, and he knew—without something like what he had figured out—Zimmerman would never come close. Like it or not, the farmer was right. Arden Miller had real collateral.
Ezra stared at this man called Jake Zimmerman now and felt himself crossing a line not of his own making; a line that in his mind separated his principles from other men in his circumstances. This was a big, simple man waiting for an answer—waiting for a scrap of hope, anything—to change his life and make something better happen. Looking at this man, Ezra saw a survivor. A schemer. A farmer on the outside and a plotter inside that wide-faced, tobacco-chewing face of his, waiting for an answer.
One could only imagine what somebody like Jake Zimmerman thought about all day, plowing the fields on his tractor, cutting hay when there was any, fixing fences and kids squirming all over the place like worms in the rotten apples Sadie cooked into sauce and jelly for market. Maybe Ezra didn’t like this man. Maybe he couldn’t trust him. But trust in a man’s nature could be a sure bet when you knew he wouldn’t ever change, when you knew you could count on him to know the sinister side when you, yourself, preferred the light no matter how much of a struggle it sometimes was.
Jake Zimmerman was a bully. The town knew it. The town knew a man like Jake would always be a bully and they’d let him be that way. Sometimes bullies were no more than a way of getting things done.
Ezra scribbled money trees on a notepad and thought now of the business, never far from his mind. Things were growing. Guys like Arden Miller wouldn’t be the only problem as time went by. Security would be needed and it would take the right kind of people for that. How much would a man do for something he wanted? Maybe, whether he liked the consequences or not, it was time to find out.
Zimmerman’s face turned red at the sentence he felt coming, and which he had heard too much of all his life. Without a word, he stood to his full height, put on his hat to leave and then stopped for one last word: “You let me go on like a fool,” he said with contempt.
“No,” Ezra said, with a contempt of his own. “You’re not a fool. Most men would never say what you did. You want another man’s property and accuse me of being dishonest? I listen very carefully when people talk, Mr. Zimmerman,” he said, taking a paper from his desk and beginning to write. “You don’t think I missed it when you threw those ‘odd jobs’ at me. Do you?”
Sure of his skill at hearing what people really meant when they spoke behind the closed doors of his office, Ezra pushed the paper toward the biggest bully in town. “Go to him,” he said. “See if you and the boys can make an arrangement.”
On the paper, he had scribbled, “Theodore Trimble.”
*
One kid is sweet and another isn’t. One is nice, but the other is more honest. “I want a lawyer,” is what Arden said in the office of Theodore Trimble, Esq. now.
“Oh? Well how can I help you, Mr. Miller?” Theodore asked.
“I want to sell something,” Arden said.
“Well, I’m not in real estate or anything, but how can I help you do that?” Theodore asked, fascinated like a kid pulling the wings off a butterfly.
“I want to sell information,” Arden said, doing his best to appear confident. “Things I believe you don’t want to get out.”
“Well now,” said Theodore coldly and very sure of Arden’s drift. “That must be some very important…information you have,” he said. “But I’m afraid you came to the wrong buyer.”
Arden stared back at him, unsure of what to say next.
“You see,” Theodore added, “I don’t have anything to lose in this town.”
“Yeah?” was all Arden could think of to say.
Theodore leaned forward from his desk just a bit. “Nobody can blackmail me.”
“Blackmail?” Arden sounded surprised. He had never thought of it that way.
Theodore looked Arden in the eye. “I’m not from around here…Mr. Miller…but Ezra told me about you. And exactly where you live.”
Wolves or no wolves, Sarah did make Arden look good at the Mason-Dixon show, but not even the offer for a champion Arabian show horse was enough to pay off the debts bothering Arden so much he couldn’t sleep anymore. For him, there had always been a way to get by. There had always been horses to train, lessons to give, horses to live for. Money had always taken care of itself for a man like Arden Miller. But not this time.
One frosty Saturday morning, before classes that weren’t quite paying the bills anymore, Arden Miller was found lying in the pasture with an overdue vet bill stuck in his pocket, a feed bill in his wallet and a nasty late notice from the phone company in his hand. Wrapped around his broken neck was a familiar lunge line, with its snap fastened to the halter of his shaking, sweaty mare, none other than Juanita.
If scientists are right, and Nature abhors a vacuum, then removing an atom means another atom takes its place, ad infinitum, until, by bumping into another imbalance, both forces merge. But Sarah Mattison at twenty-four, thick red hair, breasts filling out a man’s shirt and wearing blue jeans wandering up her butt, didn’t care about the immutable laws of chemistry. It was Arden’s will that bothered her. It only made sense for Arden’s farm to be hers—debt or no debt. He’d always said it would go to her if she could swing the mortgage and with his insurance policy she could finally pay it off. So why was the place rushed to public auction before she had the insurance money to save it? Life wasn’t always what you hoped it would be, she thought to herself, accepting the insurance check now that would have made all the difference in the world just a few months before. She surveyed Theodore Trimble’s office.
Small and efficient, it was practical for an out-of-town man, master of foreclosures, collections and all the dirty business nobody else in town wanted to do. A man like this could explain Ard
en’s will to her and how it all happened so fast. He’d know what really happened to Arden—laughing, confident, blonde Arden, teaching her how to ride and turning her from a love-struck teenager into a Class-A horsewoman.
“If you think for one minute I believe Arden Miller got his neck caught in that rope by accident,” she said, “somebody’s in for a damn big fight around here!”
Calmly, the lawyer remained seated. “Well, if it wasn’t an accident” he said, “then, would I be handing you this insurance money? Insurance companies don’t pay for suicide, and with bills in his pocket like that…” his voice wandered off. “Well, they did a lot of asking around before paying up, Sarah, and some of your own riding students and their parents said it’s pretty easy to get tangled up in those ropes. It was an accident. Just take the money.”
“You don’t believe that shit,” she squared off. “Arden wasn’t an idiot.”
“It’s a nice check, Sarah. For Christ’s sake, how many people see that much money these days? Think what you can do with it.”
“I don’t give a damn!”
“Easy to say, when you can do anything you want now. Listen. If you can’t take this town, leave! Nobody’s chainin’ you down. Pack your bags and go to Mexico. They like cowgirls there.”
“You got a problem with cowgirls?” she asked.
He pushed it. “Horses? Pickup trucks? The walk? The tough mouth? You’re a cowgirl, all right.” He smirked and his eyes fell on her like one who can’t have what he wants and scorns it.
“Creep,” she said.
“Creep? No, Sarah. Attorney. A damn good one. I do stuff nobody else wants to, and I get paid for it—one way or another. Are you gonna take this check or am I?”
“Oh, I’m taking it, Mr. Trimble.” She straightened up to her full height and felt his gaze hitting her chest. “I’m taking it right across the street to Ezra Hoover. And he’s gonna spend it on everything me and Arden wanted.”
Insurance money or not, she could feel it right through her fingers and into her toes: It wasn’t an accident that day. Arden Miller—her risky lover, her teacher, her crazy-assed friend—didn’t kill himself. He was murdered.
