Last Chance Llama Ranch

by Hilary Fields

  The llamas had already gone with Studly Sam by the time we got out there, off to rendezvous with some tourists for a trek in the mountains. So it was just us and the alpacas, which suited me fine.

  Because alpacas are The. Bomb.

  Imagine you shrink a llama down mini, about, say, waist high to most women—or hip high on a Merry. (This is not including its ridiculously long neck, which makes it about shoulder height when it stretches to the fullest. Shorten its nose, make its ears stick out a bit more to the sides, and then you blow-dry the everlasting shit out of the critter until it turns into an Ewok/camel/sheep/Shmoo that is so foofy it can barely see out of its own woolly face.

  I died. Like thirty times. One for each alpaca, I’m pretty sure.

  And if that weren’t adorable enough, get this: Dolly theme names all her beasties. Each year’s “crop” of babies gets named after whatever idea takes her fancy—last year, since all the offspring happened to be female, it was Tough Women in History, so in addition to Boudicca, she’s also got Anne Bonny, Catherine the Great (Cathy for short), and Hillary Clinton. The llamas and goats get their own themes too, I’m told.

  Now, get ready for some research, kids. I looked a buncha this stuff up before I arrived, and Dolly filled in some blanks as we took our tour, strolling the pastures and getting the lay of the land. It’s actually interesting stuff—shut up, it is! So let’s get to it:

  Both alpacas and llamas are classified as camelids, along with the vicuna and something called a guanaco that only abides in South America. While regular, humpy camels (like the one that nearly ran off with me that time in Abu Simbel) died out in the Americas umpty-bump millennia ago, these hardy, astoundingly useful critters have been domesticated by indigenous peoples for centuries—llamas primarily as pack animals, while alpacas are prized for their fantastic fleece.

  Like its larger cousin, the alpaca has no upper teeth (and a good thing too, as one cannot resist feeding the importunate little mooshy-moos when they turn their pleading eyes up to you, and one doesn’t want to get nipped). Instead, as Dolly showed me, they and their llama buddies have this weird bite plate for a palate and squarish bottom teeth that keep growing continually and sometimes—eek!—have to be filed down. Like, with a power tool. Anyhow, enough about their dental drama. Fact is, they’re cute enough to bring tears to your eyes, set your maternal instincts kicking, and they’re soft enough to sink your arm halfway up to the elbow in their fleece when you pet them. Their wool is much coveted for the yarn trade, about which I’m to learn quite a lot in the coming days, as my hostess assures me.

  Best of all, I’m not even allergic.

  You’ve no idea how annoying it was to be a winter sportsperson when you’re allergic to most of the clothing you need. With the kindest of motives, people were always handing me woolen hats, woolen scarves, woolen socks, sweaters, and ski masks. They’ve no notion they were essentially handing me hives. Wool and I, you might say, have a contentious relationship. This caused me a certain degree of trepidation when first you folks voted for this mission, but the heavens have heard my entreaties, and, miraculously, it turns out that alpacas are hypoallergenic. You can wear their wool all day long, and, due to the distinct lack of lanolin and impressively long “staple length” that characterizes their fiber (you caught me; I’ve no idea what “staple length” means), you’ll experience only the pleasure of excellent insulation and superior softness.

  Salutary animals, indeed.

  Under Dolly’s direction, I discovered the joys of hefting hay bales (each can weigh anywhere from forty to seventy or eighty pounds, so I think I can safely let my gym membership lapse) and pumping spring water into troughs for the fluffies to slurp (they can’t live on coffee alone). As part of my introduction to my new duties, we walked much of the perimeter of the farm today, visiting with Boudicca’s buddies and inspecting them for everything from burrs to birthmarks. Dolly tells me she has a sort of sense for when an alpaca’s “feeling poorly,” but when she can’t figure out what ails them, she calls on her friend Jane, who is—I shit you not—a holistic vet. I’ll be meeting her soon, as it’s “cria season” and she’ll be on hand to help with the births.

  “Cria?” you cry? Yes, cria. That’s what you call the even more unbearably adorable offspring of alpacas. I haven’t been able to determine who’s pregnant or not due to the extreme fluffiness of the animals (I mean, they’re just about spherical, barring limbs, neck, and head), but Dolly says there’s a surefire way to tell. “How?” you howl? Well, they call it the “spit test.” Apparently all you have to do is put a male in with a female. If they canoodle…not preggers. If she spits a wad at the poor randy fella, she’s had quite enough, thank you. Seeing as she’ll stay pregnant for almost a full year, I can see where she might be a mite irascible when Daddy comes looking for seconds.

  Well, it’s about time I wind down my tale for the day. And speaking of winding, Dolly promises me I’m to learn all about fiber before my mission ends. Fleecy fun, my friends! She’s got a shop full of fancy yarn she spins herself, and she’s even threatened to teach me to crochet. So stay tuned for tangled times.

  Anyhow, that was Day One of “DDWID,” Farmer Merry edition. Haulin’ hay, sayin’ howdy-do to the world’s awesomest animals.

  How was yours?

  Thanks for being so patient with me today, Mrs. Cassidy,” Merry said as they made it to the little cabin. It was going on five o’clock and the sun was still game to keep shining another few hours, but her hostess had decreed they’d done enough for the day. Merry couldn’t help agreeing, if only privately. “I hope I haven’t been more trouble than help,” she said, swiping the back of one filthy hand across her sweat-stained forehead.

  “How many times do I have to tell you to call me Dolly? And you did just fine, child,” said Dolly, removing her gargantuan hat to ruffle the hair compressed within. “Just fine,” she repeated, looking her new employee up and down with some concern. “Hope we ain’t wearing you out. You look a bit peaked. How about I fix you some supper, then you can wash up and hit the sack.”

  “Thanks, Mrs.—sorry, Dolly—but I’ve really got to get to work.”

  Dolly’s forehead wrinkled a bit with confusion. “Ain’t that what we’ve been doing since sunup? I know you’re gung ho and all, but you’ve got nothing to prove. You pulled your weight today, child.”

  Even through her haze of exhaustion, the compliment warmed Merry. “I meant for the magazine,” she explained. “My editor’s expecting me to publish my first pieces, like, yesterday, so I’ve got to get to that Internet café you mentioned and send them out. I figured I’d eat there and save you the trouble, though I would like to wash up before I go.”

  “I hear you,” Dolly said, giving Merry a pat on the back as she propelled her gently toward the door of the cabin. “I could use a hose-down myself. Let yourself in through the mudroom when you’re ready, and help yourself to the guest bath. Oh, you might see my nephew over at the café, since he eats there most nights. If you do see him, tell him we got two for the morning tour. I’ll send you out to give him a hand with it tomorrow since the feed we laid down will keep the ’packies happy for a day or two.”

  Crap. More Sam? Merry wasn’t up to sparring with that ogre again. Not after the day she’d had. And God knew gallivanting about with him in the wilderness all day would surely be a nightmare. But she just smiled and wished Dolly good evening.

  Merry hung on to that smile for dear life as she watched Dolly depart. As soon as the door shut behind her, however, she let it, along with her screamingly sore body, slide down until it hit the floor with a thunk.

  “Fuck,” she swore.

  It seemed to help, so she swore it some more.

  “Fuck,” she told her aching arms. “Fuck-fuck,” she informed her abs. “Fuck, fuck, fuckity-fuck with a fuck on top,” she told her spasming back.

  To her leg, she merely said, “You are dead to me.”

  And then she cried, as qui
etly as she could manage.

  There were many kinds of pain, and Merry had known most of them. There was strain-pain, where your muscles protested your inconsiderate overuse. And squishy, bruisy pain, that arrived when you decided to make acquaintance with solid objects better left to their own devices. Stabby pain, and thumpy pain, and even my-boyfriend-forgot-our-anniversary pain. But there was one kind of pain Merry wished she’d never met. And that was damage pain. The kind that said, You ain’t comin’ back from this, sistah.

  The kind of pain she’d been married to since the day of the accident, and couldn’t seem to walk out on, no matter how badly she wanted a divorce.

  I can barely walk at all, she thought, digging her dirty fingernails into the rough pine floorboards as a wave of agony swept from the tip of her big toe all the way up to the third moon of Jupiter.

  She’d hidden it from Dolly, she was pretty sure. They’d hoofed it what felt like miles circumnavigating the ranch, visiting each pen and pasture, getting to know the animals and their needs. She’d fed them, watered them, petted them, and been thoroughly gunked on by the smelly, if otherwise rather winning animals. She’d even managed to stay apace with her hostess, who, despite her claims of getting “past it,” was admirably spry. She’d picked cactus off the hocks of patient alpacas, broken open ginormous bales of hay to feed them, even helped mend a fence or two. And all while walking what had to be miles under a sun that, though not blazing hot, was brighter and certainly burn-ier than most she’d encountered. Thank God Dolly had loaned her an old hat—one of her deadbeat husband’s, as it turned out, but far more reliable than he’d turned out to be. She’d actually felt less silly than she’d expected in the brown, broad-brimmed cowboy chapeau, though she wouldn’t be posting selfies anytime soon.

  All in all, working the Last Chance had been pretty cool—for about the first half of the day.

  Then her muscles had begun to sing German opera. And by the end of the day, there’d been Carmina Burana competing with the “Ride of the Valkyries” to express their thundering disapproval of Merry’s unaccustomed activity. She couldn’t imagine hiking in the mountains for hours tomorrow, trying to keep up with Sam Cassidy, who would surely brook no laggards.

  For a moment, Merry was tempted to slink out to her car and head for the nearest airport. But then she pictured the look on Jimby’s face, should he ever catch her committing such a colossal act of wussery.

  Jim Beardsley, her former coach and dear friend, would never have let her get away with that kind of cowardice, neither before nor after the accident. Merry hadn’t forgotten the gentle schooling he’d given her, when, months after she’d been discharged from the rehab facility, she still hadn’t started returning phone calls, or, for that matter, bothering to brush her hair or put on anything snazzier than the moth-eaten bathrobe a previous tenant had left in the back of her condo’s closet.

  Merry had been lolling on her sofa, listlessly watching an old rerun of Hoarders on TV when Jimby rang her doorbell. Then pounded on the door itself, for a solid five minutes. Then yelled that he was going to call the gas company to report a leak if she didn’t open up.

  So Merry opened up. An inch, then a couple more when her eyes couldn’t quite take in what she was seeing. Her coach, she saw with a dull sort of surprise, was struggling under the weight of an enormous rectangular package wrapped in what looked to be Hanukkah paper.

  “It was all I could find at the store,” he said, gesturing at the dreidel-adorned wrapping. He hitched the burden up gingerly with his leg to rest on one hip in a motion that clearly said, “Um, this ain’t getting any lighter, here.”

  “Hey Jimby,” she said, moving only reluctantly to allow him inside her condo, and then only after it became apparent he wasn’t going to take a hint and bugger off. “I didn’t realize you were in town. If I’d known you were coming, I would have tidied up the place.”

  Jim’s gaze skidded over the living room, taking in the coffee table strewn with pizza boxes, ice cream cartons, and crumpled cans of Diet Coke, the floor festooned with wadded-up tissues and candy wrappers. His nose crinkled at the funk Merry had grown so accustomed to she no longer could smell herself. “If you’d pick up the phone once in a while, you’d have known I was coming,” he pointed out. “I’ve been leaving you messages for days.”

  Merry’s phone had died of lack-of-charge-itis some days earlier and been jettisoned under the very sofa she was longing to get back to now. “Sorry, Jimby,” she muttered. “Did you need something?”

  “I need a landing place for this big-ass present I brought you, for starters.”

  The manners her mother had so painstakingly instilled in her kicked in. Merry ditched the roll of raw cookie dough she was holding in one sticky paw and limped over to help Jim set the package on her coffee table. Together they sat staring at it, while Merry maintained a sullen silence. She was not in the mood for one of Jim’s chipper pep talks, and she had a feeling that was what this was. I’m not going to ask. I’m not going to ask.

  Okay, fuck it, I’ll ask.

  “Alright, Jim. What is this?”

  “Unwrap it and see.”

  Merry sighed and shredded Hanukkah paper.

  “A turtle?”

  “He’s a metaphor,” Jim said, hooking a strand of Merry’s lank hair back behind her ear as they stared into the terrarium at the terrapin it contained. There was no hint of head, no tip of tail, nary a limb in sight. Just a shell.

  Like me, Merry thought.

  “It looks like a turtle to me, Jimby.”

  “Think more literary, less literal.”

  Merry shook her head. “I’m a jock, remember? Not an English professor.”

  “Please,” Jim scoffed. “The girl who read James Joyce between time trials? The one who quoted Keats and Shelley on the plane to lull her teammates to sleep—”

  “Clearly a useful hobby—”

  “Merry, the rest of us always admired how you spent your downtime studying when you could have been goofing off. You think Annika Schimmerman reads Kafka on her off-hours? Sure’s shit Mikaela Shiffren can’t quote War and Peace, but I bet you can.”

  Merry could, but she couldn’t see the relevance.

  “Fine. I’m halfway literate. But I’m still totally clueless here. I give up. What’s it mean?”

  “Think Ancient Greeks.”

  “The unturtled life is not worth living?” Merry examined the greenish beast. “He doesn’t look like a Plato to me.”

  “Hellooooo…Aesop?”

  Merry drew a blank. Maybe it was all the cookie dough, or the crap reality TV, but her brain wasn’t firing on all cylinders. “Aesop might make a cute name for it, but…”

  “Slow and steady wins the race,” Jim said, throwing his hands out in a “ta-da” gesture.

  “Ba-dum-pssh,” Merry said tonelessly. And then, to her great shame, her eyes had welled up.

  She hadn’t cried since it happened. Champions didn’t cry. But Merry wasn’t a champ anymore. She was just a big, gawky cripple with cookie dough on her bathrobe and no conceivable future. Her voice broke. “Fuck, Jimby. What am I gonna do?”

  “Oh, honey. It’ll get better.” He’d kissed her cheek and wrapped his arm around her. “You’ll get better. And like this little guy, you’ve got plenty of hidden chutzpah under your shell. You’ll find your way, sooner or later.”

  He’d sat there patiently and held Merry’s shaking, sobbing form, while on TV, they watched people with messier problems than hers slowly dismantle the defenses of a lifetime. And ever since, Jim had been a comforting presence, just as his gift, which they’d named Cleese after their favorite Python, had turned out to be.

  Shit. Cleese. Merry looked around the cabin until she recalled where she’d put his travel terrarium. He had to be hungry by now.

  Must. Get. Up. Must. Be. Responsible. Turtle. Mama.

  Seven and a half minutes later, Merry had scraped herself off the floor, fed and cosseted her pet, and m
anaged to find her strongest antibacterial soap.

  Five long minutes after that, she made it to Dolly’s place to degunk. Twenty more and, freshly scrubbed, she crossed the thirty feet to her car, ready to find that Internet café.

  Please, God, let them have burritos.

  Deadheads, rejoice! I have news. Your spiritual leader, much like Elvis, lives on. I know, for I have this very day met Jerry himself. He lives out his life quietly, modestly, in a wisp of a New Mexico mountain town. He swears his name is Needlepoint Bob.

  And he makes a mean latte.

  * * *

  Bob’s café was part fifties diner, part general store, and all tongue-in-cheek. Merry glanced at the sign stenciled in flaking paint above the low adobe lintel. “Café Con Kvetch?” she murmured incredulously. “This I gotta see.”

  She ducked a net of draggling Christmas lights and headed inside what looked to be the only public building in Aguas Milagros that was actually open. “Town” was a generous description for the dusty streak of slightly less desolate high desert she’d nearly missed on her way in yesterday due to her need to blink once in a while. If she hadn’t spotted the single faded sign for Aguas Milagros at the last second, practically obscured by a clump of cottonwood trees that lined the two-lane access road, she’d have cruised on by—all the way to Colorado, probably. From what she’d seen so far—primarily shacks that ran the gamut from “almost falling down” to “Blair Witch Project”—it seemed as if the town might dry up and blow away like a tumbleweed any second. The tiny library-cum-visitors’ center a few yards down had a sign promising to “Be Back in 5,” but judging by the curling, yellowed corners of said sign, “5” was more likely decades than minutes. A feed store looked lean and hungry across the dusty street, and a defunct dollar store down the way didn’t make any cents.